Tuesday 4 March 2008

Tuesday 4th March 08

A better day although both feeling wobbly still after yesterday's horrible-ness. There was some anger before going to school but as there was a school visit to a stadium starting at 9am, there was only a bit of misbehaviour,as more would have resulted in missing this.

We went to visit Gill's GP about the stress caused by what we are going through, and his advice was to make sure we had a 'unified front' as any differences in parenting style would be easy for the child to push apart and get between. He also suggested working out a 'long term strategy' with the people who are helping us with this issue. No short-term fixes, got to just get through it and hope he grows out of the phase...

After this I went to visit Pauline to chop some wood for her, then popped in to the Council office to pick up some Planning Panel stuff, and on the way home popped into St Nicks to pick up some posters/flyers advertising the CRAG meeting on the 15th on carbon offsetting.

Home for lunch, made a leek/tomato/bean stew for tonight's tea. During this, got several Fiddlesticks enquiries and a phone call from Oxfam saying I had won the Carbon Footprint competition and they were inviting me down to London to meet up with MPs about the issue... wow oh WOW! Amazing!

When I went to get the children, Julia who has started the Green Thumbs gardening project rushed up to me and thanked me for putting her in touch with Melody, my friend who works for CVS as a funding information person; she has told Julia that it will be easy to get a grant of about £1000 for the project, and Julia was delighted and very complimentary.

Had a good evening, including a good TV programme by Kristina Murrin, about reducing road traffic. The programme this week was about Boston, where car use is high and so is obesity. She had a tough time trying to persuade people to give up their cars, even for one day. But I respect her approach and admire her.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

John, do your kids show an interest and get involved in your activities - all the stuff you do vis a vis composting etc?

just wondering if your eldest is rebelling?

Compost John said...

Hello 'anonymous'...
my children do not show much interest in my green activities, but this is ok, as it's my agenda and I try not to force this on others. If I did try to get them into it, they'd have much more reason to rebel.

Gill and I have never prevented them playing with toy cars or suchlike, and we've talked to them about them being allowed to try meat if they wanted to, and no-one else in the family uses my compost toilet, just me. So we don't feel that there's any rebellion going on.

A friend has sent me some very useful stuff about anger in children which shows we are not alone:
http://www.medhelp.org/HealthTopics/Anger.html
is the site and if you click on some of the 'my child angry' links, you'll see it is pretty common and there are many possible causes.

But thank you for your concern.
John