Alternative Building Techniques - Our Succa!

We had great fun making our succa (the temporary dwelling we eat in during the Jewish Sukkot holiday).

Our neighbours helped out by providing us with corn stalks which we used for part of the walls and the roof. You can check out a video clip of how we made and decorated it on Lielle's Blog: www.liellesblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/succot.html

Helping with the corn - continued: Video Clip

A Chance to Lend a Helping Hand

Our neighbours here in the village are so helpful and generous - it felt really good over the last few days to be able to help them in return. There are many jobs to be done at the end of the summer, getting the harvest in before the wetter, colder weather begins. Here you can see how we helped a little with the corn. It's wonderful to see how the whole plant is used: the cobs themselves are to be ground into chicken feed and some of the stalks and leaves get chopped up for cattle fodder.

Here everybody helps everybody, and while that is so refreshing for us, here it is just the norm - it's just what you do. I'm not really sure whose corn it was we were picking but one person got the stalks for his cows, another got the cobs for their chickens. A woman down the road was getting the husks to weave into mats, and our neighbour drove back to the field with a trailer especially to bring us back some stalks for building our succa. Everybody around was helping, old and young, singing, laughing and joking all the while. Although there was plenty of hard work to be done it was done with fun and a sense of community spirit.

I remember my Dad telling me of holidays he spent as a child, hop-picking in Kent. For his parents it was a working holiday but he remembers the time very fondly - and now I think I can really appreciate why.

Here's a short video (more to come later).

Home-made Grape Juice

Dani recently decided to make his own grape juice from the vines growing in our garden. It's absolutely delicious and we shall be using it for kiddush over the holidays and Shabbat. On Lielle's blog you can check out a video we made of the whole process .... and also some out-takes of something we didn't expect to happen....

Check them out here:

www.liellesblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/making-grape-juice.html

www.liellesblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/out-takes.html

Harvesting Sweetcorn Video - Part Two

OK - I think I may have this video upload thing sussed out now. I realize that the problem was with the size of the file, and I have finally fathomed out how to compress files to take out less room. As you can see - the whole family are on a learning curve here! Hopefully I shan't have to keep cutting my video clips into pieces from now on!

Harvesting Sweetcorn Video - Part One

I had a bit of a problem again uploading this short video - so it's been split into two parts. It's interesting that most of the sweetcorn grown here is for animal food and is only picked when it's really ripe and all the sugars have converted to starch. Nothing is wasted here... the strong stalks are used for various purposes (maybe more about that later when we find out what exactly they do do with them) and even the empty cobs (the part that's left when the corn has been taken off) are burnt in the wood stoves to help get the fire started.

Homeschooling Update

Both Dani and I are continuing to thoroughly enjoy our role as Lielle's new teachers.... and Lielle seems to be a very motivated student! The system we have adopted is a semi-structured one where we give Lielle a range of subjects to choose from and she organizes her time-table each evening for the next day. Hot favorites are still English and Cookery, but she is also regularly choosing Geography, Science and Nature Studies. Maths is incorporated into the time-table with ongoing games throughout the day and her writing and reading skills are merged into the other subjects that she chooses. Without even trying she is learning more and more Bulgarian every day too.

We try to connect all the various subjects to each other so that everything has relevence. Today was a great example: Yesterday we noticed our neighbour working hard in her garden cutting maize (sweetcorn) and we offered to help her. At 9 o'clock this morning we turned up for work (but she wouldn't let us start until we had eaten some home-made bread and plum jam!) We spent a good couple of hours helping out. It was great physical exercise for Lielle, as well as a real fun and hands-on way of learning about how corn grows and what it is used for. When we came home we gave her a page of questions to answer relating to what she had learnt that morning and she also wrote a short account of what we did there and how much she enjoyed it. We finished off the days' studies with some artwork using paint and corncobs and leaves - all in beautiful autumn colors.

At the moment we are spending around 3 hours each day on homeschooling, but our aim is for Lielle to become a more independent pupil as she masters reading and writing, enabling us to spend less time one-on-one with her as she gets on with many of the tasks by herself.

A few days ago her day began with Cookery and Sport followed by English and Maths. You can check it out in this video clip on Lielle's Blog www.liellesblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/school-of-life.html

Changing Seasons

Autumn is coming and it is very much felt here. The weather has been glorious these past couple of weeks: the heat of the summer has given way to a softer warmth during the day and a gentle coolness in the evening. A quiet breeze is felt most of the time and two trees down the lane (maybe they are some kind of poplar), rustle their leaves so intensely I can almost hear them from my bedroom window. The autumn colours are everywhere: bright red apples, rosehips and berries and golden orange of the ripe corn being harvested in the fields and gardens together with enormous pumpkins of all shapes and sizes.

This year saw a lot of rain at the beginning of the summer and as a result the lanes and grass verges are still quite green. Some of the leaves are just beginning to fall from the trees, but most are still well-covered although starting to change their hue.

It's not just by looking at the nature around us that we see the first signs of autumn. The imminent change is reflected in the stores and market stalls selling warm socks, wellies, and all sorts of petchka parts to make sure that the wood fires that will soon be burning in every household are in good order. When we go out for walks we make sure to bring back a supply of dry sticks for getting the petchka started on chilly mornings!

Check out Lielle's Blog to see a short video of her and Dani cutting our enormous pumpkin!

www.liellesblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/our-very-own-pumpkin.html

Busy Doing Nothing...

"We're busy doing nothing, working the whole day through ..."

Those opening song lines are ringing in my mind right now as we are trying to adapt to our new lifestyle here. We are busy pretty much every day from the moment we wake up until we finish supper and head off to bed in the early evening .... but what are we so busy with? Work, chores, jobs, having fun?? Well it's all of that - but I'm realizing that I need to do a rethink and redefine things because certain words seem to have certain connotations and perhaps some of this confusion is what has lead us in the past to a lack of satisfaction in our normal rat race lives.

Your 'work' or your 'job' seems to have more prestige in our society as it can be quantified according to how much money you make from it. This attitude relegates other work, that you don't get paid for, such as household chores, to a lesser status, and in turn we tend to feel less value and less satisfaction when we do these 'chores'.

Once we appreciate all the work we do and don't define it's importance by how much money we made from it there seems to be a lot more general satisfaction. Now that we have no income it is easier to realize this distinction. At first I was considering jobs like: mending roof tiles, plastering walls, etc. "work" (as they could be quantified by how much we would have had to pay someone else to do them), and jobs like hand-washing, cooking, cleaning, etc. "chores". Somehow the former seemed to have more value. But the truth is that sometimes the things that really need to get done are the more mundane things - but that's no reason to undervalue ourselves.

For example: with these new thoughts in mind I am really enjoying cooking and trying out new ways with food - in the past getting a meal on the table at the end of a day's "work" most definitely felt like a thankless chore. I've even started making my own bread and cakes - something I never used to enjoy!

Similarly with school-work. Getting Lielle in the past to do her homework could definitely be classified as a 'chore' - something to get over and done with as soon as possible; but now we are homeschooling her, spending several hours each day learning together or in one-on-one study we are appreciating what a delight it is and just what great value it has for all of us.

It's surprisingly not so easy just to let go of our old ways and to appreciate the time we now have available to relish in each and every task - appreciating ourselves and each other more in the process.... but it is happening, slowly and I think we are all very thankful for the opportunity we have now to learn this.

First Day "Back at School"

Lielle has learned so much during these last couple of months since we started our trip, but so far we have just followed her own curiosity and spent time answering her questions and sharing observations. We feel though that we can all benefit from adding a little more structure and routine to our homeschooling and we decided that today - 1st September, when all Lielle's friends in Israel go up to second grade - is a good day to start.

Yesterday we asked Lielle which lessons she would like to begin with and she chose English, Cookery, Reading and Writing. We've all really enjoyed the morning and we are thoroughly looking forward to continuing.

On Lielle's blog you can check it out on a new video clip:

www.liellesblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/back-to-school.html