Daily Archives: November 23, 2008

Holiday Gifts for Children: How Much Is Too Much?

Posted on by
14

The holidays are upon us, along with the rampant materialism that seems to consume our culture.  If we are not careful and vigilant, the holidays become more about fulfilling what is on someone’s  wish list than any meditative, contemplative act regarding truths and light in the darkness of winter.

I invite you this holiday season to slow down.  In many of the countries that celebrate Christmas, the season of Advent is a time to slow down, be at home and enjoy making crafts and decorations for the home and baking.  It is not a time to run out and spend 500 dollars on one person at Christmas.

Unfortunately, in our society, the person(s) many families are most likely to spend the most money on are their children.  Whew.  I invite you to make yourself a cup of tea, and have your husband take your kids to the park for a few hours.  Now go into their rooms and the playroom and look at the amount of stuff that is there.  Seriously.  Count the number of puzzles they have, the number of pairs of shoes, how many bags and boxes of craft supplies there are. How many board games do they have?  How many dress up clothes?

The first step is always the hardest.  I invite you to think about purging at least a third or more of your toys this holiday season.  If you cannot purge them all, or you do purge all the junky made in China plastic toys and have some nice open ended toys to keep, here is a thought for you.  Some families pack up toys and  put them away somewhere.  Then they rotate the toys so only a few things are down at a time.  The toys can be changed out either monthly or seasonally.

If you are stumped as to how many toys a child really needs to have or how many clothes/outfits a child needs, I can offer these guidelines that I have read from other sources.  Marsha Johnson, Master Waldorf teacher and moderator of the wonderful Yahoo!Group waldorfhomeeducators has this great article in her FILES section of that group entitled, “The Issue of Toys, Children and Materialism.”  She wrote it in December of 2004 and I think it should be required reading for parents when a baby is born!  Seriously!

She writes on the matter of clothes, “Examine wardrobes and put together fourteen outfits for your children, enough for two weeks without laundry, for each season, and donate the rest.  Buy good quality wool, cotton and natural fiber clothes that will last through several children, practice the fine art of hand me downs, and gather a group of other families to have a twice a year “share” time where you all bring extra clothes and parcel them out.  You will be shocked at how this is so very freeing although you will spend a bit more time doing laundry on your new schedule.”

Yup, fourteen outfits.  And probably not nearly as many shoes as your child currently has in his or her closet either!

For the matter of what toys a child really needs, I turned to the pages of a Waldorf classic entitled, “Toymaking With Children” by Freya Jaffke.  I so love this little book.

At any rate, for the child’s  first year of life, Freya suggests a small soft cloth to play with, a cradle doll and a wooden doll. (There are instructions on how to make these dolls in her book).  She also gives an honorable mention to a felt ball, an embroidered ball, a wooden spoon, blocks of wood that are sanded until they are very smooth with no bark on them, a strong basket, an empty box with a lid and small cloths.   Again, there are instructions on how to make nearly all of these things in her little book.

For other toys for the one to three year old, Freya suggests  knotted dolls, carts, a simple basket “pram” (stroller), a basket of building bricks, a carved wooden spoon, a basket of chestnuts and a rocking horse.

For the three to five year old, Freya suggests toys be grouped into categories such as building toys for a large scale, building on the floor or on tables, the Doll’s Corner and the Play Store.  There are pictures of these play areas throughout this book and they are magnificent in their simplicity and imaginative value.

For example, in the building on a large scale section, Freya has wooden playstands (if you do not know what these are, they are wooden stands you can drape a cloth over  and can be many different things – google for a picture), playstand cloths, dress-up cloths (dyed silks), sandbags, wooden clothespins, little wool rugs, wooden building logs and finger-knitted or crocheted headbands.  This all sounds like a lot, but it can tuck away neatly in baskets, it is all open ended, and all of it you can make yourself.

Everything is very open-ended in the other play scenarios as well. A basket in the doll corner, for example, could be a baby’s bathtub or if flipped over, could be a stove.

Freya recommends baskets full of natural items such as shells, stones, bark, feathers, pine cones and unspun sheep’s wool, a bunting bed for a doll, a doll’s spoon, a hammock for the dolls, play pillows, a footstool, wool carpets and fleece, outdoor toys and a wheelbarrow.  She also mentions for quiet time a tumbling man (instructions are in the book), a Russian doll (the kind you open up and there is a smaller doll inside and you open that doll and there is an even smaller doll inside), a few good picture books.

Marsha Johnson has slightly different suggestions for each age group, but similar in imaginative value and open ended play.  For the one year old, she says infants under one year really need no toys at all, but if you must, consider one rattle, a soft ball, 2 or 3 silks to play peek a boo with, an animal or shape to chew on, a special blanket for naptimes and a nature table to look at.

For the 1 to three year old, the list is a bit longer but adds such things as a wooden stacking toy, a small truck or car and 6 small board books.

For the four to seven year old, Marsha adds  such items as dress up capes and crowns, simple musical instruments, outdoor riding toys, no more than two dozen small books on a shelf at a time.  She also has suggestions for the eight to 12 year old child.  This article is really invaluable, and she has many other wonderful articles in that FILES section.  I suggest if you have any interest in Waldorf at all, join her group and read through all of her fantastic articles.  The things she says really resonate with me personally and I am glad the Waldorf homeschooling community has her!

If you feel as if your child does not need one more toy, see if you can encourage family members to provide gardening tools, a membership to the nature center where you could go one afternoon a month or a homemade gift certificate for tea time with mom or a park date with dad.

Less really is more.  Think about what you could make for your child this holiday, what your child could give and what you could make for your home together. If we keep on giving our children the large number of gifts, the big parties, the closet full of clothes before they are even five years old what are they going to have to have to top all this when they are 15 or 16 years old?

Just a few thoughts from my little corner of the world.

Steiner’s Grain of the Day

Posted on by
25

A different grain for each day is part of the Waldorf Kindergarten and connected to the cosmic origins of the days of the week.   A different grain a day fits in with the nourishing weekly rhythm the kindergarten thrives on.   The most common listing of grains I have seen is the following, taken from The Waldorf Kindergarten Snack Book:

Sunday (Sun): Wheat

Monday (Moon):  Rice

Tuesday (Mars):  Barley

Wednesday (Mercury);  Millet

Thursday (Jupiter):  Rye

Friday (Venus):  Oats

Saturday (Saturn):  Corn

Waldorf teachers and those who cook with whole grains attribute different properties to different grains.  According to The Waldorf Kindergarten Snack Book, wheat is often seen as a harmonizer of the organ systems, rice is seen as acting on the digestive system, barley is seen as strengthening to the connective ligements due to a high silica content and also seen to be soothing to the mucous membranes of the stomach and intestines, millet is seen to have warming properties, rye nourishes the head and bones, oats loosens stiffness and increases stamina and resistance to disease, and corn stimulates the metabolism in muscles.

People often ask me what grains we work with in our homes, and how we work with them.  We do not work with wheat much at all.  Rice I tend to cook as either cream of rice for breakfast, coconut cinnamon rice with raisins for snack or just plain old rice with dinner.  Barley I enjoy most in a soup or cooked in place of any recipe that calls for rice.  Typically I cook millet as a breakfast porridge in the crockpot overnight with almond milk.  Millet is rather low in calcium and almond milk just seems to go fairly well with the millet to balance it all out.  I have tried rye in bread, but have found it difficult to work with this grain much.  There is a recipe in one of my raw food “un” cookbooks for a long tailed rye salad, so maybe i will try that next.  Oats I tend toward scottish oatmeal, steel-cut oats or making something with oat flour.

Grains can be a touchy thing for many people.  Many of these grains (wheat, barley, rye, cross-contaminated oats) have gluten in them.  There was just an interesting article in the December/January 2009 issue of the  magazine “Living Without: the magazine for people with allergies and food sensitivities”  (see www.LivingWithout.com for further information about this wonderful magazine!).  The magazine interviewed Peter HR Green, MD and director of the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University and author of Celiac Disease, A Hidden Epidemic.  Dr. Green states in the article, “Wheat has only been domesticated in the last 10, 000 years. Our digestive systems can’t fully chop up gluten, the protein in wheat.  We’re left with large molecules of up to 30 amino acids that can be absorbed into the intestinal lining (probably during gastrointestinal infections) and that interact with the immune system, causing celiac disease in genetically predisposed individuals.  We evolved to eat meat.  Our enzymes digest meat protein fully into single amino acids or molecules of 2 to 3 amino acids that are readily absorbed.” (I am so sorry to my vegan friends, these are his words, not mine!)

They asked Dr. Green if he thought everyone should limit gluten consumption and he answered, “No, not necessarily.  But many people who don’t have celiac disease feel better not eating wheat and it may be because it’s poorly digested.”  He adds in answer to a different question, “Some people may feel better on a gluten-free diet.  If they don’t test positive for celiac disease, they may still be gluten sensitive.  They may feel better avoiding gluten, or just wheat.  They may not need as strict a gluten-free diet, just limited.”

But at any rate, I thought it was interesting.  Steiner was so into agriculture and the creation of biodynamic cultivation methods, and I wonder what he would say about today’s surge of folks who are gluten-sensitive and/or celiac disease positive.  I have often joked that The Standard American Diet for many people is Wheat, Soy, Cow and Chicken.  Behind that not so good joke, however, is my wonder at what we are doing to our health by eating such a limited diet.

So, I guess this is the long way of saying I think Steiner’s idea of rotating grains through our diet was a good one.  I seem to have gluten sensitivity and can only eat about a half cup portion or less of a grain each day and still feel good, but I do try and follow Steiner’s rotations.  I love the warming properties of my millet.  The other grain that intrigues me, not one of Steiner’s, is the little Ethiopian grain called teff.  Teff is high in calcium, protein and fiber.  I will let you all know as I experiment with it.

Proponents of Nourishing Traditions will point out that most of these grains, except rice, need to be soaked overnight in order to inactivate the enzyme inhibitors present in grains and inhibit the presence of phytic acid, present in grains and causes the decreased absorption of important minerals.  You can do the soaking of grains just by simply covering the grains with warm water and adding a tablespoon of lemon juice, yogurt, kefir or whey and then rinsing the grains before cooking the next day.

Maybe this will inspire you to try some different whole grains, and to think about the diversity of the things you do eat.

Just a few thoughts from my little corner of the world.