The last post was at the end of November so I have a fair bit to catch up on I guess. Hopefully it won’t be too epic though…
We haven’t been up to much trip wise. December was spent with Bodra working in other countries- Rome, Sardinia, Stuttgart & Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. I read up on the Victorian Age as I’d have to teach it in History at The Abbey. I also studied Active Birth in preparation for Module 1 in my Active Birth Foundation Professional Training. Just last week I completed the first module. I came away feeling like I have a good grounding for more learning about Active Birth & I am quite keen to promote it. But I’ve only scratched the surface & I’m looking forward to learning more. In the beginning of April I will do the second module which will focus on Yoga for Pregnancy.
Christmas was spent in London. We went to Helena & Rueben’s for lunch & then back to Ez & Kim’s for dinner. We had a great feast in both homes. On Boxing Day Bodra & I had a go at ice-skating around Hyde Park, well, a tiny iced area there with dozens of other families. They had a Christmas Market there but it was pretty basic compared to the one we went to in Brussels. We also saw ‘I Am Legend’ which was really exciting.
For our second anniversary we didn’t get up to too much. We had both been coming down with a cold so we rested, although I had planned an active day for us both on the 29th. We hired a car & went out to Milton Keynes which is nearly an hour North of Reading. They have this sports centre there & I’d organised for Bodra to have a go at indoor sky-diving. We also saw Tim Burton’s animated movie ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ in 3D. I didn’t realise that this was mostly a musical but it was quirky enough to entertain us. After the movie we had a rest in the car, and then we had a go at climbing one of those rock-face-like walls. This was really challenging, pulling ourselves up with muscles that never get used in this way- we were in heaps of pain afterwards.
The sky-diving wasn’t as awesome as it is outdoors. You walk into this chamber with high wind coming from beneath you & you let your body fall into the chamber. They crank the air pressure up so that you remain suspended in the air, then it is just down to you being able to hold your body correctly so that you don’t fall. We didn’t have much freedom to move around but it was a good environment to get the feeling of sky diving.
For New Years we went to Brazier’s Park in Oxfordshire to take part in a Sweat Lodge. Our friend Sally went with us. Basically there was maybe a couple dozen of us, we met around a bonfire & introduced ourselves & were told what was going to happen during the Lodge. They had built this cavern like tent which we were going to sweat in. After we changed into our sweat clothes the men all went into the tent then the womyn followed. Then the Grandfather stones were brought into the centre- stones that had been heating up in the bonfire. Our leader, Mike Chirobokow, would put some herbs onto the stones & we’d wave the smoke over our bodies. Then he would give us something to focus on, like our hopes for the New Year & we’d share our thoughts. Finally, Mike would begin chanting & we would all join in, & he’d put a few cups of water on the stones & release steam. It was pretty hot but definitely bearable. You can lay down on the Earth if it gets uncomfortable. This cools you down.
We did five rounds of going into the lodge, lasting maybe half an hour or less each time. During the fourth session we could hear fireworks going on outside so we knew it was 2008. At the end of the night we all gathered in the Granary which I guess must have been where Grain was once stored. It was a very basic barn like room with a centre table & chairs around the walls. Each of us had brought some food to share. We were all pretty zonked & thoughtful.
Mum & Dad have found Jimi- a rescue dog from the local pound. He’s keeping them active with lots of walks & cuddles.
Teaching at the Abbey was great. The girls were so well-mannered & could understand me easily. They really showed how much they enjoyed my company so I was always happy to go & teach there. I didn’t have any hassles behaviour-wise there, just a few very chatty girls! Generally the atmosphere was productive & friendly. I saw my first Pantomime “Sleeping Beauty” during my first week of teaching. I didn’t get much of a chance to spend time with the other teachers, but the interactions that I did have were very comforting & supportive. I went to the Parent’s Evening on two nights & I also attended a Mother’s Lunch just last Monday, & received lots of positive feedback.
It was approximately a 2 mile walk to get to the school so I’d leave just after 7:15am while it was still fairly dark. Most mornings it was a pleasant enough walk, listening to my MP3 player & not being bothered by the traffic. There were only a couple mornings where it was quite windy or rainy, but I have a great heavy duty umbrella & an extremely warm long jacket so it was never a problem. Some mornings I would just listen to the birds waking up in song & was invigorated by the pink spreading out in the sky. The evening walks weren’t too bad either- a walk towards happy home always gives me a spring in my step!
The weekend after my first few days teaching, our friend Dewi took us to a place in Shropshire called Iron Bridge Gorge. She has a friend, Michelle, from her University days living near there in Coalbrookdale, who was celebrating her birthday. Dewi thought we’d quite like the forested surroundings in Iron Bridge, which we did! There is a man-made water course flowing through the village & lots of relics from the Industrial Revolution. The bridge that the town is named after was the first bridge in the world to be built of iron back in 1779. http://www.visitironbridge.co.uk/index.php
We had a good evening Thai for dinner & then a few glasses of wine & some Sing Star singing at Michelle’s. The following day we had a look at a few shops & had a Victorian Portrait Photograph taken.
Waimarama had his 7th birthday on the 17th January. Looks like he had a really delicious cake!
We saw ‘Varekai’ a Cirque du Soleil show with Chantal, her sister Janine & her partner James. Our view was obscured somewhat but we were quite entertained. There were Georgian Dancers, many aerial acts, contortionists, people balancing on their hands & crutches, Icarian Games where human bodies are juggled, acrobatics & trapeze artists. http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/CirqueDuSoleil/en/showstickets/varekai/intro/intro.htm
Ez & Kim visited us the first weekend in February & we had a good 7 mile walk from Bramley to Hook.
Bodra joined in on the Waitangi Day Pub Crawl without me this year. Instead I was attending a weekend workshop on Cranio-Sacral Therapy with Dewi. I’m not too sure if it is a legitimate form of therapy, it was a pretty strange experience. The therapy has a big focus on releasing birth trauma through a very gentle technique of just holding the head. It’s not an energy healing, instead you tune into the cerebral-spinal fluid & you work to open the flow so that it can expand without any restrictions. If you get someone to lie down in front of you, then you place your hands really lightly on their head, eventually you start to feel the Cerebral-Spinal Fluid moving from the Sacrum up to the Cranium, which gives this sensation like your hands are being filled & then emptied of fluid. It is very hard to explain! But I was really surprised to find that when I put my hands on a person lying down, it takes a while but you begin to feel this churning, like there is something trying to get out of the head! It felt like the person was grinding their teeth but instead of the jaw moving something inside their skull was moving, but they were lying so relaxed & still.
So my last day at the Abbey was Valentine’s Day. The previous day we had a school trip to London to see the Lion King Stage production. We were seated right at the top of the Lyceum Theatre & had to use binoculars to see what was going on. The costumes were pretty interesting but I’m not really one for musicals. We also visited the Rural Life Museum which I guess is like a farming exhibition from MOTAT.
When we got back from the Rural Life Museum, the girls sang a song about my leaving to the tune of an Oliver Twist song ‘Food Glorious Food”’ which was really sweet.
“Dear Mrs. Swift, so sorry your leaving,
Please visit us soon, come back in June,
We don’t want you to leave so here is our plead,
Mrs. Swift, glorious Swift, magnificent Swift,
The best teacher ever. Yeah!”
Heh- how big was MY head? ;-D Then Frankie played her guitar, Georgia her recorder, Imogen her Cello & Isobel her Violin. So lovely being serenaded! Jane the Head Teacher gave me a “Good Luck” helium balloon in the morning during the assembly- I’ve never held one of those before so that had me in giggles! She also gave me a bouquet of flowers at lunch. Our living room looks like we’ve had a party, as Kit Kat, Amy, Isobel & Stephanie made me some paper chains too. Celeste & Indira made me a cute jigsaw puzzle of “Mrs. Swift in Fairy Land” which really cracked me up! Indira & Imogen wrote me a poem each too. Lydia, Nikita & Hana from UIMS also had a few goodbye creations for me.
I left the school stacked with appreciation so I ended up getting a taxi home. Bodra had a few surprises for me too- Champagne, chockies & some very pretty lingerie! Thoroughly spoiled!
Dewi came over on the Saturday to teach me how to make Natural Beauty Products. We made a few scrubbie bars, soaps, bath bombs & a hair treatment.
I had a week at home to study up for my first Module in Active Birth. Active Birth is the opposite of the now traditional view of birth which is passive, where the labouring womyn is in a beetle-on-it’s back pose! Instead you stand up so that gravity assists & also to take the pressure off the sacrum. & the womyn is encouraged to moan & be mobile & just do what seems natural to her.
It was a fascinating course, for example, they described this transition phase, just before the baby is ejected, where the labouring womyn starts to scream abuse & say things like “Kill me now! I hate you!” It’s all chemical. Hormones are amazing! So, you can’t fear for the womyn when this happens, instead you get excited because the time is so much closer now.
In an Active Birth there is no emphasis like, expecting 1 cm dilation every hour. You try to avoid doing things by the clock, & just try to let the womyn take her journey at her own pace. & things like, letting it happen in a darkened room because this stops the stimulation of the neo-cortex, & not asking her questions. You don’t want her thinking at all because it gets in the way of the hormones being able to release properly.
& the ecstasy you can experience is release of this hormone called Oxytocin. They give you synthetic Oxytocin in the hospital, but if you take this it inhibits your own production of it, so you miss the peak which is when you bring the bubba to your breast soon after birth. We also learnt about some acupressure points for pain relief.
During th
I made good use of my evenings in London. On Tuesday I met with Paul & Rachael who came bearing gifts! A can of Maltexo from home & Stitch gloves from Disney in Hong Kong. I also met up with Corey Brown on Wednesday afternoon, but then was harassed by a strange man on the way back to Queens Park. Bodra came into Vauxhall for a meeting on Thursday so I saw him for dinner at Govinda’s on Thursday. Oh!! I felt my first Earth Quake during the early hours of Wednesday morning! Chantal had given me some Melatonin to help me sleep that night, but I woke up during the night as I thought someone was shaking the bed, then realised the whole floor was moving too! I wasn’t fazed though & fell back asleep immediately.
Hemi broke his arm last week Tobogganing down a hill in Auckland with his school. Michelle waited with him at Star Ship Hospital until past 2am- she had to give the staff there a bit of a hurry-up as there were quite a number of kids waiting to be processed into beds.
So this weekend we are hiring a car & driving down to New Forest National Park. We might be able to visit Bournemouth, & we are planning on driving to Brighton to do some much needed clothes shopping for Bodra (I will probably get the most items of clothes though!! Ladies law of shopping!). We will visit Uncle Arthur & Aunty May in Hailsham also. Bodra has a few work-related trips coming up- one to Finland & he went to Amsterdam last Monday.
We’ll be spending Easter in the German Valley- either the Ayr, Rhine or Moselle Valley Area. We’ll travel by coach to Dover or Folkestone and cross the Channel. From France we’ll pass through Belgium en route to Germany, arriving in the beautiful German Valley region in time for dinner.
On our first day there we will have a guided tour of the Burg Eltz, an 850-year-old is a medieval castle, perched on a steep rock in one of the Moselle’s tributaries. It has a subterranean treasure chamber which could be interesting, & it is set right in the middle of a valley so it is really picturesque.
Our second day there we will have a cruise along the river, passing quaint villages, fairytale castles and beneath the legendary Lorelei (where sirens were said to lure unsuspecting sailors to their end) which is just a famous rock. That day we’ll also visit the traditional Rhineland towns of Koblenz and Rudesheim. In Rudesheim we’ll stop at the famous Drosselgasse which is like a city centre I guess, & we’ll try some local wine and ‘Asbach’ brandy. http://www.ruedesheim.de/en/sehenswert_drosselgasse.html
Lastly, we’ll travel through Moselle Valley to Trier - Germany’s oldest city. There we can take in the views from atop the surrounding hills, and discover the Porta Nigra, the Roman city gate, symbol of the city’s 2000-year history.
April has a number of concerts- Portishead, Derren Brown & Bjork. I will also be going to Exmoor with 86 16 year old girls from the Abbey Senior School who will be doing their Duke of Edinburgh award. I’ll be camping with them & walking through the park, but in the evenings we’ll be having a 3 course meal at a restaurant. Pretty funny- definitely not the Kiwi way of doing the award!
May will be fairly quiet, thus far anyway! In June Kenny & Tatiana will be flying to Paris, so Bodra & I should have a trip to France then. I’ll also be visiting Ufton Court with the Abbey Junior School, which is an Elizabethan Manor House with Priest Holes. At the end of June I will see Radiohead at Victoria Park in London & I might be doing Module 4 which is on teaching Active Birth. Then our next plan is to go to Portugal & Spain for two weeks, beginning with Lisbon & the Boom Festival. In the second week, we’d like to hire a van & drive from Lisbon to Barcelona. All with the company of Dan & Liz Kerr!
Quite a number of friends back home & one here are going to be parents soon. Bodra’s friends from his school days will be dads soon, Gareth in August & Bevan will be a dad a little bit later. Jo & Chris will be parents in August too I think. Sarah Waller is expecting her second daughter in June. We’re still kids ourselves over here!!
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