A bucket full of flavours and fun

Creating hand-in-hand

Today I started my weekend with an exchange of WhatsApp messages between Little Princess, who is no longer so little, and a lady who works in the offices of our Association.

This social-media encounter was all about cooking and food, conductive living and learning.

Little Princess wanted me to send her all the photographs that I have of her cooking. and the lady in the office, Gudrun, wanted to hear all about what we cook and how the cognitive, reading skills and fine-motor skills and more, are all improving so much because the children can help themselves from the weekly grocery supply and create something for us all to eat. Which we off course do, with gusto!

Little Princess had a few new goals at the beginning of the year; one of them was to learn to cook.

Snippety-snip, chop-chop!

Gudrun's role is that every week she sends us a selection of fruit and vegetables that the Association is given.

The supermarket in the row of shops below our central offices usually throws out all the past-best green groceries on Monday morning. That was until our Association stepped in and now Gudrun goes downstairs and brings a shopping trolley full of food back with her. She sorts it before distributing it between the different departments who can put it to good use. The cook gets a share, the InBestForm inclusive cookery group for elderly clients gets a share, and we get some sent out to us in a big black bucket!   

My colleague Évi puts aside as much as she needs for the Conductive Cookery Group on Wednesday evening, this saves her a lot of money and time and also often determines what the group will cook as a side dish or dessert to accompany their chosen main course.

A rather full-of-apple apple-strudel

There is always a lot left for our children’s groups to use. Bananas are always popular as they form the base for many wonderful milk shakes and smoothies that the children love to mix and drink. This week there was a papaya in our bucket, a fruit that none of us had ever tasted before. We all tested a small piece before agreeing that it was delicious. Little Princess used the rest to mix the most delicious drink for us that she has ever made. She added a couple of strawberries and a banana, some milk and yoghurt and some flavouring. The taste of the papaya was the strongest coming through the slight vanilla taste from the vanilla sugar. The recipes all remain a secret until her milk-shake book is published. Her homework, and now also creative-cooking assistant, Annika, will be the co-author and editor, and I will translate it into English, maybe we can persuade Évi to translate it into Hungarian too.

Saving the successful recipe

Any of the bucket-full of produce that is left over at the end of the week is either frozen, pureed or put in the soup-maker.

After work on Friday Évi spent a peaceful ten minutes chopping beans and herbs to put into the freezer. While doing this we made plans for the following week coming up with ideas for the cooking group and for fine-motor programmes for all the children’s groups.

I hope that our lovely lady in the office, Gudrun, realises how much her care and attention to our greengrocery bucket influences the success of our work, how it eases our planning and saves us money, and how it motivates our children and adults to learn, to develop skills, to be creative and to learn about healthy eating.

I send Gudrun photographs and this morning explained to her some of the reasons we appreciate her time and consideration for organises our ‘bucket’.

Little Princess is going to cook her a meal one day soon to say thank you! 

It is so hot on the Continent this summer

There are few ‘pastures green’ on the Continent at the moment

Although it is almost a quarter of a century since I left England and its pleasant pastures green, to live ‘on the Continent’ I still find it difficult to function properly when the temperature rises steadily in the direction of forty degrees Celsius.

It is lovely to cycle every day in the sun and feel the warmth seeping through my skin right through to the bones but for a fair-skinned English person like me it is sometimes a bit too much. I sometimes find it necessary to hide away in the coolness of my flat and go out only in the cooler (by a couple of degrees) hours of the evening. That is what I did last weekend when I had concerts and opera visits on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings but for most of Friday and all day Saturday and Sunday I hid away in my sandstone flat. Indoor temperatures unusually rose higher than the outdoor temperature by Sunday, but luckily in the evening a short rain storm, accompanied by a fresh breeze, cooled the air and the flat.

My tree-shaded balcony

I slept outside on my balcony last weekend, for as long as the hardness of a deckchair with its foot-rest allowed. I managed about four hours in the fresh air and it was lovely – the first cool sleep for weeks. 

The cushion reads - 'Cats sleep anywhere'

I slept out there again last night and realized that, although the collared doves have left their nest in the tree that surrounds my balcony, I still have neighbours; there were blackbirds fluttering around above me chirping in the darkness as I tried to sleep – now I know why there was a shiny, greenish-black feather lying on my chair during the week.

Candle light

Mad dogs and Englishwomen!

Yesterday in the noon-day sun I cycled a round-trip of 25 kilometres in order to welcome another conductor and her family to our fold. The team of Magyar men had already completed the unloading when I arrived, just in time for cooling drinks, pizza and tri-lingual conversations.

Oh how I love my conductive lifestyle

I cannot imagine anymore what it was like to live in just one culture, with only one language ringing in my ears. At work with the children we add Dutch, Turkish, Russian, French, and Spanish, to the German, English and Hungarian of my conversation yesterday.

Keeping a cool head

The temperatures were already up in the mid-thirties when I woke this morning so today I will stay-put in my coolish living room where I will carry on with my presentation-writing for the WCCE 2013.

Notes

England’s pleasant pastures/mountains green – And did those feet in ancient time a poem by William Blake from his epic Milton a Poem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_did_those_feet_in_ancient_time

Working with adults

This is the first picture that I have been given that depicts conductive action. That is me on the right with grey hair holding on to a plinth. The picture was produced by three siblings, one of them has a motor disorder and has attended our groups for seven of his tens years. 

Joy in my soul

I realised at the weekend that my arm is getting better. Then I realised this morning how much I love my work, especially when I come back to life again after having felt poorly for a while.

Today was the second session with a new client.

He has a degenerative nerve disorder that is extremely rare. It has been diagnosed for several years but it is only now that he has sought us out, now that the symptoms are worrying him, causing him to have a heavy soul. He is concerned about the future and wishes to change something.

He had phoned me several months ago. We had a long chat on the phone and I sent him some information on conductive pedagogy. I also sent him the dates of the next adult's groups and, as he is working full time and has a young family I then left it to him to contact me when he had decided whether he wished to take part in any sessions with us.

Chatting on trains

Finding out about Conductive Education is never easy, but if you are Hungarian perhaps it is easier than for others. Although often, whatever nationality you are, discovering CE is accidental.

This was also the case for my client. His wife is Hungarian. She was on a train from or to Hungary when she just happened to strike up a conversation with a conductor who had been working in the conductive centre Würzburg where I have often worked myself. It is not many miles away from Nürnberg, my client’s, and my, home town.

I do not know how long ago that conversation between the conductor and the wife had taken place, perhaps as much as a year. My client told me that he decided to pick up the phone and call me when some symptoms, for example losing balance when putting on his shoes, began to have a significant influence on his everyday life.

Individual sessions

As I always say, we offer our clients what we consider best for them, what they consider best for themselves but, also what we can offer at that given moment in time.

Yes, it is a coincidence that there is no group available to offer this client a group session on the day of the week when he has time, but it has turned out to be a lucky coincidence.

I realised today, at our second individual meeting, that I could not do this work so well if this client were part of a group.

The symptoms that my client has are significant enough to have an effect on his life, but the movement disorders that cause the symptoms are so small that I wonder whether I would spot them if I was working with him in a group of six other clients. My observation skills have been put to the test today and I have been delighted by the success of our work together.

Together we go through a range of movements correcting them and trying to make them as exact as possible. Often, almost in the same breath, we both then describe the symptom that the errors of movement could cause.

My client then immediately adjusts his movements and tries again, and the transformation is immediate, not just in his movement but also in his face. He is beginning to understand what is happening within his body that could cause the difficulties he has experienced and he is learning, at what seems like lightning speed, what to do so that he has control once again over his own body.

We discuss all the opportunities during his day when he can be more aware of each of the things we have practised. He already has a very busy day so he is happy that a conductive lifestyle means adjusting and transforming daily living and not a two-hour daily exercise programme.

Now, as he kneels down to play with his three-year-old daughter on the floor, he does so with more conscious awareness of what it is that had previously caused him to fall. He does the same when standing up again. When he cleans his teeth, now with his left hand, walks to the car, sits or stands at the office, he is conscious of each and every movement, from the muscles moving under his feet as he attempts to stand on one foot to put on his shoes, to the tilt of his head as he takes a step sideways. He now knows that there are many aspects of his posture and his movements that can all affect his balance.

Making the transformations

My client walked in the room today with a smile on his face, and his first sentence was –

‘I am walking much better since last week.’ 

Then he went on to tell me why. 

There was joy in his soul as he told me and most important was the fact that he realised that he has the opportunity to take some control over what is happening to his body, he just has to learn how to make this transformation.

There was not just joy in my client’s soul today, but there was joy in mine too. 

I told him how much I am enjoying this work with him. I find it so challenging observing the smallest changes in movement and abilities, and suggesting and trying out ideas with him. Best of all I love to watch as he quickly transforms his movements from movements that had disabled him into movements that enable him. 

Enable him to carry on enjoying life, at work and at home.   

I look forward very much to next Monday morning.

What a gentleman and what an independent lady!

Help is at hand when you need it! 

Last week our Little Princess was offered help twice, and twice she politely turned it down! 

It was not help from her Mum or Dad, from her Grandma or Granddad, or from a conductor. The help was being offered to her from her friend.

It was lovely to observe from afar the following, gently caring exchange of words:

‘Shall I help you with your coat, F.?’ asked Jolly Prof., as they arrived together from school.

‘No thanks ’, she replied, ‘I will try to do it on my own.’  

After lunch it was time to wash hands and Little Princess was off, on her bike as usual, to the bathroom:

‘Shall I open the door for you, F?’ asked her friend again.

I waited expectantly for the reply. This was a difficult problem to solve as our bathroom has a huge outward-opening door, but I had seen it done successfully once before and I wondered what the answer would be this time. 

Sure enough, the reply came loud and clear once more:

‘No thanks, I can do it on my own.’

And she did. It took a bit of manoeuvring, opening first the sliding door to her right to make space, but in went Little Princess under her own steam to wash her hands and even shut the door behind her!

Watching Little Princess on her walking-bike, negotiating tight corners and small spaces, I believe she could be right when she says that one day she will drive a car. She is brilliant, she knows not only the position of her own body in the space around her but also, down to the last millimetre, the space that her bike needs too.

Little Princess also knows how to refuse the help that her friend offers her, politely, so that she knows that he will continue to ask. She knows quite well that one day she may be very glad that she has a special friend beside her, and one that is such a gentleman too!

Learning to live after a stroke

In English and in German

Thank you to the people out there in the conductive world who have advertised my latest publication. I have already received a couple of enquiries through these postings.


Thanks go to Gill Maguire and to the Verein für Menschen mit Körperbeinderungen e.V. for plugging the book that I edited and published with Frau Waltraud Heußinger.

http://www.gillian-maguire.info/2012/03/new-book-about-conductive-education.html

http://www.konduktive-nuernberg.de/aktuelles/aktuelles.html

Orders can be made through me at small66711@aol.com .