Daily, weekly and annual routines

Winter at Boxdorf village pond

It is nice to be reminded just how important our daily, weekly, and even annual routines are. 

An early morning cup of tea on the balcony, a weekly visit to a friend, or the seasonal routines of blowing eggs for Easter, making cards for Christmas meeting for an autumn family walk, all remind us that our world is turning nicely.

At my work the children often remind me how much they depend on their own routines' staying constant when they arrive at the group and ask- ‘Where is Évi?’ or ‘Where is Susie?’ when one of us is ill or working elsewhere.

They always notice when another piece of our new kitchen is installed, and have a hundred questions to ask and need to look through the new cupboards and drawers to make sure that all the old things that they are used to are still there.

When a school assistant is ill, or a new replacement begins, it is the first story we hear before coats are removed.

If Mum or Dad is away at work, if a favourite teacher has left the school, or a sibling has gone off on a skiing trip, these changes are also reported. These changes are often the reasons for differences in children’s moods and the children know, without really knowing, why it is important to report these changes in routine to us and to their friends – we discuss them over lunch, their friends ask questions and we all learn from the situation. We learn how to adapt and learn new ways of coping with what comes along in our paths through life.

Spring at Boxdorf village pond

As conductors we must remember that we also have clients who cannot rush in the room and ask where someone is, tell us that brother is away all week and that he is sorely missed, tell us that Dad has had to fly off on a business trip, or that Grandma is poorly and now in hospital. Many of our children cannot report these routine-changing events to us so we must remember that when a child is sad, does not want to eat, seems restless, unmotivated, agitated or unhappy that perhaps their routine has also changed and perhaps we should ask about it in order to indicate in some way that we understand.

This of course happens positively too. Positive changes in routines also have to be discussed and changes in behaviour noted and often praised.

I am the first person to initially react negatively to change. I have improved as I get older but still my initial reaction to a change in my routine is fear, worry, it can even be panic. This may only last for the few seconds that it takes for me to tell myself everything is fine in its new way, or it can last for days and weeks depending on the degree of change.

I think it is one of the reasons that being a conductor suits me, because although my work is so varied and colourful there is always that underlying routine in it that we need to develop for the clients and it does me good too.

I have work in a new city, a new family, a new group of adults, new colleagues, but when the work starts I have to build into it a routine and this is very calming and reassuring and spreads its influences out onto my personal life.

Summer at Boxdorf village pond

What made me start thinking about routines today?

It was when I sat down to read the newspaper with my early morning cup of tea, the one that always tastes best, and I realised how much I had missed this routine and thought perhaps that this was why I never seemed to get going on Saturdays recently.

At last … my Guardian Weekly had arrived and just in time for Saturday morning breakfast as it always used to.

I cancel it when I go away and it usually starts appearing again the week after I return home.

But after my Christmas and New Year break it did not appear in my letter box – week after week.

At first I did not realise why, I thought I must have told them the wrong start-date, but eventually I wrote an email and was told that they had forgotten to restart delivery. My routine had been disturbed and oh how I had missed it.

Each morning as I got ready for work I took Chekhov or one of my other Christmas books with me, all quite heavy tomes, instead of compactly folding the Weekly into my pocket.

Rotating routines

My new routine starts again on Monday, the one that I have to prepare for with lots of sleep in the preceding weeks because it exhausts me.

For three weeks I have been working with the stroke group in the mornings but next Monday I begin three weeks with the Kindergarten children. This work starts an hour earlier but my day still stretches on well into the evenings as always. I find this work tiring but I have developed this as part of my routine so that despite always catching a cold from the always runny noses, I love it.

The dependable routine of nature always accompanies everything we do and makes its own changes along the way. I am happy to see that when I get up a earlier next week I will now be able to enjoy some daylight before I start work and perhaps in the evenings too, on my way home, if I am lucky to get away on time!

Autumn at Boxdorf village pond

My old much-loved, and much-needed, routine

The snow has almost melted and the days might warm up soon if it does not snow again, then I can begin the other routine that I love so much – cycling to work. 

Despite the massive amount of road-works on my route for the extended tramway I am determined to ride my way into the routine of summer, with nature gazing, picking four-leaved clovers and photographing the sunset all to look forward to!

I am glad that nature with its seasons ring the changes but still keeps to its daily routine.

PS

I chose the photographs published here to illustrate my early morning routine of observing the seasonal changes at our local village pond,  not to illustrate the changing rhythms of nature that also affect our lives, that is something else to be dealt with another time.

Our food programme

Fun while mixing fruit

I have just been listening to the Food Programme on BBC Radio 4, it was all about soup. It appears that soup has become trendy and the electric soup-maker is the new object to have standing on the kitchen worktop.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0520t3d

As far as I am concerned soup never went out of fashion. In my childhood scotch-broth, thick vegetable and minestrone were my soups of choice for grammar-school-days’ lunches, while my sister invariable took tomato. Mondays, after a Sunday chicken-dinner, were also soup days – Chicken soup with suet dumplings or Norfolk Swimmers, dumplings without suet.

As a vegetarian making veggie-soup became an art in itself especially when I was a art student in a house full of vegetarians. We would see who could make the biggest and tastiest pot-full that lasted the whole week! It was cheap. We always made homemade bread to go with it.

My Dad and I make soups too and using leeks from the garden with a potato to thicken it is the most popular one. My sister has one of the new soup-makers mentioned on Radio 4 so Dad and I can have a go with that when I am next home.

Conductive soups and milk-shakes

A few months ago we received a present of a soup-maker for use mainly in the Conductive Education afternoon group. Knowing that Évi and I do lots of cooking with the afternoon group (it was alphabet pancakes today) our Boss sent us a soup-maker that can also be used for milk-shakes!

The machine gets used for both soup and shakes, but the milk-shakes are the most popular. We receive a donation of fruit and veggies every Monday morning from a local supermarket and the children make a beeline for the fridge as soon as they arrive each lunch time to see what is available. They make their choice of the day, grab the machine and get working on their milk-shake dessert.

Chilli and chocolate preparations

There is often something to go with the milk-shake and this time it was blue waffles!

We have decided to make a cookery book as there have been so many weird and wonderful creations – my favourite being the carrot and banana, and the chilli-chocolate.

'Let me show you how to do it!'

 

This time it was fruit pizzas with paprika,carrot and banana shake!

It was a delight to watch as one child, who did not know how to use the machine, was taught by a child who has made a new flavour milk-shake every week for months, a child who has athetoid cerebral palsy and has very severe difficulties with her speech. It was amazing how they managed, but they did and without any help from me. Just my smiles of praise and approval!

What I find amazing and love to be a part of is when we place ingredients on the table that we know sort of go together and then let the children take their pick and concoct a soup.

Each creation will taste great but will all be very different.

The ingredients that go in to each soup can often depend on the nationality of the cook or sometime  just on what they are used to eating at home – paprika goes in the Hungarian girl’s soup and celery root and parsley in the German’s.

Tasting each other’s soup and giving advice on what to add is an important part of the cooking process, then all the soups get eaten with great relish and they nearly always taste delicious.

Our group of cooks has decided that homemade food, especially their very own homemade food, tastes best because it is full of tender loving care and only contains those ingredients that they like to eat.

Of course we are teaching our teenagers how to fend for themselves in the future but as far as they are concerned they are just having lots of fun and drinking lots of weird and wonderful milk shakes!

Fruit Pizza with paprika/carrot or strawberry/choco milk-shake

PS

The cookery book should be out for Christmas 2015! These are the authors at work -

 

 

András Pető – Gillian Maguire and Andrew Sutton, and many more



'The café on the corner where I read for two hours on Saturday in the sun'

 

I have finished it!

Just as I had set out to do I read my copy of András Pető from cover to cover, front to back – with the exception of a few peeps at the contents pages to find out where things were so that I could re-read them, and a few peeps in the index for the same reason. 

I had been so excited to receive my copy of András Pető on October 2^nd.  I had hoped that I would read a good chunk of it on the five hours that I spent on a train the following day. I was wrong. I got distracted on the train that day, so I abandoned my bike for the rest of the week and got stuck into discovering AP on the way to work, on the tram, on the bus and walking through the now-harvested cornfields.

On Saturday I spent two lovely hours in the autumn sunshine with two cups of coffee and a cake, in the café around the corner, sitting reading András Pető. On Sunday morning I stayed curled up in my warm cosy bed and almost finished it off.

Today, with only thirty pages left to read, I abandoned the bike again! I read the last page in the evening sun as I walked to catch the bus.

Always as I read I had a marker-pen and some multi-coloured Post-its at hand to mark my favourite pieces. As you can see in the photographs my copy of András Pető now resembles my copy of AP’s Unfug in more than just the colour of its cover – both are decorated with colourful streamers all along the edges!

What do I think?

First thoughts

It was lovely to read the first two parts – ‘Memories’ and ‘In his own words’

I also loved to read – ‘Even his friends did not know him’ by Szörényi Róbert who was a fellow-trainee at the Pető Institute in 1989-1993, and a friend

I really loved reading the whole book in one go, not just delving in here and there

I feel reassured somehow that I am doing what AP wanted us to learn and carry out, even though I did not know him

While reading I began to understand even better why my work as a conductor so suits me and my lifestyle, my upbringing and my soul

I feel vitalised, motivated, reassured, and hopeful

Reading Parts One and Two has given me greater confidence. I shall be more able to stand up for myself, to stand by my beliefs, and this reinforces my strength and the will to advocate conductive upbringing for the rest of my conductive life.

I feel very grateful to Gill and Andrew for collecting all of these stories and compiling them to produce this one volume of work that makes things clearer, and easier to find later

Just one dodgy moment

Only once in the whole book did I read something that made me think — ‘Oh dear!’, and made me ask myself whether an author had understood? It was just one paragraph in the article by Rolf Lehnhardt, though as I carried on with my reading the feeling disappeared. I know this article, I have read it before in German so it was no surprise. It did pull me up for a second but I was soon back on course.

New and old

Much of the material in this book I have seen before, some of it, like Lehnhardt’s article, I have in my own collection. Some of what I think of as the more special bits, the bits marked with bright pink Post-its, are new to me.

I was a fellow trainee with Szörényi Róbert and we were also friends, so we often discussed Róbert's recent discoveries, and on a couple of occasions I accompanied him on his investigative trips. Unfortunately I never plucked up the courage to ask whether I could visit the Ákoses with him. He always told me about them as we travelled together on his way to his next meeting but regretfully I always left him at the tram stop and carried on alone on my journey home. It was with pleasure that I discovered here in this book, and read for the first time, his report of Róbert's personal investigations about András Pető.

I was always an avid reader of The Conductor magazine so as I read this book I met other articles that are also familiar to me. I have since met and interviewed Joan Savage a couple of times in her London home, and I have read both Judit Forrai’s and Vera Förster’s books. There were extra snippets in both their contributions that I enjoyed but I think that I can honestly say that Julia Devai’s piece is my absolute favourite part, including the copies of the manuscripts in the Appendices that she contributed from her personal archive..

I have read some of AP’s own writings before. I have ploughed though some of his plays and read some of his poetry, and I have read his books in German. Whenever I meet people who knew him I pick their brains for details from their memories of this man who remains such a mystery figure. In the book András Pető separate snippets become stories and a sort of a picture begins to form, still a more abstract picture, a Picasso rather than a Rembrandt!

Bringing it all together makes a portrait of a lifestyle, if not of the man himself.

Despite having read so much before I received this new book, it is a delight to have it all and much, much more sandwiched between two covers. It is also lovely to have it in the order that it comes in here and a treat to be able to see each piece in relation to the others. One reason that I have enjoyed reading all the items in the book is the sequence that they follow. While reading I have been remembering things, some long forgotten, that I have read before, and at the same time having spaces filled in by new material.

Is it full of surprises?

Yes, there is an element of personal surprise in reading András Pető.

Surprise, or perhaps just opening a door to take a look at all that I have learnt and all that I have practised using the method that was developed by AP. Surprise to be taking a closer look, surprise that I am realising the extent of the knowledge that I have collected over my lifetime, before and after my training, to help my own development, both personal and in my practice. I realised this while reading about AP.

Colour coordinated

The biggest surprise of all came as I opened the parcel last week that contained my three copies of András Pető – they were the same colour as AP’s own book – his Unfug!

How lovely they will look lined up next to each other on my CE shelves, copies of the old and the new. I have a pristine copy of each book that will stand next to a further copy of each both now tatty from use and decorated with rows of multi-coloured Post-its.

Thank you, Gill and Andrew, for the inspiration and the motivation that this read has given me.

I have renewed my motivation to keep on recording my own thoughts on conductive upbringing and to publish notes on my practice, and by doing so my work will continue to develop. As it develops I know that I shall reach out to more and more people and offer them help in learning to learn and learning to live. I know that I will continue exploring, reading and expanding my knowledge in the hope that by enriching my own soul I will store the knowledge that I may one day need to help others in their  journeys in life.

While reading this book I have felt the conviction that I have in my own work’s building, I have felt a growing confidence in the methods of my practice.

I have many interests in my life just as Pető had, and as many of my colleagues have. I have come across similar methods of treatment and rehabilitation to those that AP mentions in his writings while on visits to clinics throughout Germany with clients and friends. I have even tried some of these treatments and methods myself. Through doing so I learn.

There are so many situations in which conductors’ practice can be enriched by delving into what they already know and to what they have already experienced.

I have known that a conductive upbringing encompasses everything, my own everything and my clients’ everything, and that it all spirals upwards and outwards together as lives develop, as personalities grow and souls become healthy. While reading this book I had this confirmed.

I am reassured.