It is true, the first four + years of our lives are the most important years. First day home is greeted and shared with loads of love from all the family.
Thinking ‘out of the box’ and daring to be different is a ‘child’s right’ – it’s just great to have parents who knew it was ok for me to ride my tricycle upside down.
I remember this very clearly and as I was too small to reach the pedals I always preferred spinning the front wheel and turning the wheel with my hands on the pedals.
My childhood ‘buddy’ was my sister Rose, we were inseparable, very close in age and travelled through life together on a beautiful journey. Rose was the city girl, she loved all that sparkled, glistened and shined, she loved pretty clothes, pretty things and seriously did not like getting mud on her hands. For me, I was Rose’s opposite, I loved being as close as possible with all that Mother Earth had to offer, I loved the smell and touch of soil in the garden, the excitement of pulling up fresh carrots and digging new potatoes for our dinner. Rose would sit for hours patiently enjoying mum plaiting her hair and listening to mum telling her how pretty she was with her long blonde hair, I spent hours in our home basement building houses out of pieces of chopped fire wood and kindling and imagining building cities with super highways, very tall buildings and special roads and gardens for all the animals. We were opposites, Rose was as blonde as I was dark, but that is the beauty of being sisters – life is a box of chocolates, you just never know which has what flavour.
And this photograph of Rose and me on the planks of wood was a rare time when Rose wore gumboots, and a rare time for me to be either out of gumboots or with bare feet, shoes were seriously not my thing during those early years. Getting over the fence – my parents told me I was determined to climb over the fence, so I dragged the box up to the fence, threw dad’s shoes over it so I would have a reason to climb over, I just couldn’t quite manage it!! The box was turned with the open side up!! 🙂
It is intrinsically important for children to be exposed to animals at a young age and to learn love and respect for animals. My pet cat Lucky and our wild baby pet possum Woolly were always my favourites.
The time we spent with our mother was pretty much every day from our first until we were off to school. There was no Nursery or Kindy, we stayed at home with our mothers until our fifth birthdays then we could start school.
For me, I was desperate and couldn’t wait to get to school, I was home alone with just my mother and I was bored – I remember it all so very well, I know I loudly protested each morning when my older sisters left the house for school and I was left alone. I think because I kicked up such a fuss I started school at the start of the new academic year in January and I turned five years in the May.
The same when I started my Nursing training, not too sure how it happened, but I started on 5 January aged 17 and turned 18 that year on 5 May. (Legally, I was still a child until my 18th birthday). It continued all throughout my schooling and Nursing career – being the youngest in my class. Looking back now, and when parents chat with me about this matter, I can only recall my own personal experiences and advise that being the youngest all the way through, does indeed mean a constant struggle of trying one’s best to keep up. Even at a young age, a six-month difference is an enormous difference – but I made it, and yes it was a struggle because I had to achieve and be as good as all the older ones.
This is mum caring for my sister Rose and me at Nelson Queen’s Gardens, we loved going to the Queens Gardens to feed the ducks, it was probably one of our most special treats.
I can vividly remember every single little part of experiencing my ‘first snow’ on the roadside on the way to Christchurch.
After effects of Positive Parenting remains with us all throughout our lives.
The best part of my early years was being out on the water. Waitata bay fishing with my dad was the best time ever.
I think life was the true meaning of ‘simplicity and eco-friendly’ back then. We didn’t really know what plastic was, everything we used was either made of glass,
metal, ceramic, fabric, leather, tin, enamel, silver, shell, bone, rattan or wood.
All our vegetables were grown in our own backyard vegetable gardens and the little garden patch in this pic was my very first garden.
My mother put in four wooden posts between the rhubarb patch and where she dumped her used flowers from her precious flower vases. (mum’s weekly flower arranging was one of her favourite ‘rituals’) each of us children silently respected mum’s ritual habit of being sure that the house always had beautifully arranged fresh flowers from her garden.
My favourite was when she would pick the spring flowers, especially the bright yellow freesias that grew along the little garden lining the steps that led from in front of the outside tap, under the kitchen windows and down to the basement. If you know freesias and I’m not talking about the imported ones you buy from flower shops but home-grown freesias that have the strongest spring bulb fragrance of all the spring bulbs then for certain you will know just how fabulous it was to have a home filled with this amazing spring experience.
Mum would pick her flowers from her beautiful gardens and carefully arrange in each crystal and ceramic vase – one for the dining room, one for the small three-legged table that stood in the lounge next to the statue of Our Lady, one for the little table that was placed at the end of the passage and sometimes one for the buffet – but the buffet flower arrangement depended upon whether she was in the mood and whether there was actually space for the vase on the buffet. And oh yes, one special vase for the mantelpiece above the ‘wonder-heat’ fire place in the dining room and sometimes during the winter months on the mantelpiece in the lounge.
The little buffet separating the kitchen from the dining room was also a mandatory home for our ‘life-line to the outside world’ fabulous wooden transistor radio and the awkwardly ornate crystal fruit bowl, which incidentally the only fruit it probably ever graciously held were lemons from our lemon tree and sometimes apples, pears, peaches and plums during the ‘fruit season’.
So back to my little garden – close to the rotary clothes line that dad made and on which hung my younger baby sister’s reusable cloth nappies, and further down the garden path past the really big rhubarb patch where during our long cold New Zealand winter months, most nights we would enjoy after dinner hot homemade custard with cooked freshly picked tart rhubarb.
I called it my very own ‘fairy garden’ and if you look close you will see two little white stone fairies. I remember being so grateful and happy to be given a piece of my parents garden that belonged all to me, all through my young years this little garden was my pride and joy and even when I was a teenager and the little garden was gone and forgotten by others I would often stand on the path and just gaze at where it used to be and remember how precious it was to me and how much I loved my two little white stone fairies in my very own garden.
And did you notice my clothes? Something that many parents are now consciously moving back to – to make their own children’s clothes. My jersey was my favourite and I called it ‘coconut-ice’; mum knitted this jersey for me by using up odds ‘n ends of left-over wool. Our needs were probably compared with today’s demands excessively naive and not at all demanding, there was absolutely no such thing as a ‘branded item’ or ‘label’ so the best and the proudest clothes we could ever wear were the clothes that our mother’s made for us.
As I mentioned, Rose and I were inseparable – standing on the hearth of the wonder-heat in the dining room with Mum’s dahlia flowers in her vase on the mantelpiece behind. The little silver jug is also very special, Rose and I have one each, my little silver jug is now kept in a very special and safe place, tucked away with all my special memories.
We loved watching the geese nesting in the paddocks and then flying off out over the bay and gracefully one by one landing on the water to have a swim, but we also really liked catching and eating them!!
