Repetition

“When a Child Wants to Read the Same Book Again and Again.”

Again, Again!

[00:00:00] Welcome to episode six of The Ladies Fixing the World, season two. I am here today again with Sandra Dodd. Welcome. Hi.

Hi, thank you.

And Sue Elvis.

Hi, Cecilia and Sandra. I'm excited about this topic today.

I was on Sue's site and I saw an article called “When a Child Wants to Read the Same Book Again and Again.” And she was writing about her thoughts when one of her children wanted to repeat a book and she wasn't getting it. She wasn't finding a good way to justify that. And then Sue herself got really interested in drawing and became, as she said, obsessed with it.

And she was drawing the same things a lot. And I think a lot of parents have come to discussions and asked, is it okay? My kid is watching this movie over and over. Or my kid only wants to watch the same TV show all the time. And then I, my generally, my general first rhetorical question to them was, uh what's your [00:01:00] favorite album? Who’re your favorite musical artists? What's your favorite song?

And by the time they think about that, they know that there's something they've listened to 16 or 100 times, and it calms them down. But I think it's learning. It's part of learning. And it's also comfort.

Another thing I've said is some of your days should be all new and exciting and novel, and some should be same old, same old comfortable home.

Yeah, I agree. It's funny because I think when I meet that question, is it okay they watch the same movie over and over, or, you know, the repetition thing, it's often about things maybe the parents are not truly happy with to begin with. You know, would you stop them reading the same Shakespeare play over and over and complain about that?

Would you stop them rehearsing the same [00:02:00] complex something Mozart on the grand piano, would that be a problem?

Would you stop them drawing hands? They draw hands over and over and over, the drawing kids. They draw hands because it takes forever to learn to draw hands. So there's also often a judgment about the actual thing. Did you want your child to watch that Barbie movie to begin with? I think I've seen, I've seen in one, was it your post Sandra?

Jo Isaac, maybe, someone, someone wrote it. Someone said… reasons to watch the Barbie movies over and over.

Yeah, is that okay?

It depends whether they have any classical music in them and then… I'm joking.

My kids all, my girls all loved watching the Barbie movies over and over again. When I was writing that post, I remember that was quite a long time ago. It wasn't that I didn't [00:03:00] value the book that the child wanted to read. I think that I didn't value it for myself. That I got fed up with it. I wanted something new. But it wasn't about the reading. It was about the child.

Right, because you were the one reading it.

Yeah, I was reading it out loud and I got tired of reading it the same book out loud. I wanted a bit more excitement, you know, reading out loud times, not. Understanding that my child must have been getting something out of it again and again and again, even if it was just enjoyment and comfort, because I don't believe kids do things…they've got active minds. They're curious. They're not satisfied with doing boring stuff over and over again. There must be more to it than that.

And as you said, Sandra, I started drawing and I'm not an artist. And yeah, my drawing was rather secret. Um, well, I showed [00:04:00] my kids that was, uh, That was my, I got the courage up to show my kids at one stage, but I just, I don't know why I just wanted to draw cats and I drew them over and over and over again, and I got better as my skills got better, but then I started to want to draw different types of cats or different cats in different poses. So it's sort of, um, was never ending. But then I kept thinking, but I want to draw birds as well, and elephants and dogs, and I should be moving on to something else. So I expand my repertoire, but I kept coming back to cats. Somehow I got stuck, well I say stuck on cats, I hadn't finished with cats.

And then one day it occurred to me that all I was learning by drawing cats, I could take forward with me when I wanted to draw a dog or even a bird. I would be a lot more skilled at drawing. It didn't matter what I moved on to next, I would [00:05:00] take those skills with me. And then I thought, well, that's probably happening with our kids, with books and things.

As you said, Cecilia. If it had been a Shakespeare play that they were wanting to read over and over again, I would have instantly understood that because I like doing that. It's so complex. There's so much in it, so rich, maybe that's the word, rich, that you can only absorb so much at a time. And then you go back and you notice different things the second time round and the third time round.

But also, you notice those quotes, those words that really delighted you. You hear them for the second time, or the third time, or the fourth time, and they delight you each time. It's not like you got tired of them. We all look at each other and we grin and we think, oh wow, we've, yeah, and we all start to say them.

And I think that's like your family language is when you start to quote [00:06:00] stuff and especially when you start to quote stuff from say Shakespeare or another if you go the other way what about that book picture book—we're going on a bear hunt we're going on a bear hunt um I can't even remember where it's been.

There's a song, like a little clicking song too, Girl Scouts, yeah.

Yeah, and then we use those words in other situations, like if we're getting ready to go on a picnic, we'll say, we're going on a bear hunt, or we're going on a picnic, and they're useful for other situations, or we'll quote, Shakespeare in a totally different situation, or we pick up things, absorb things when we spend a lot of time with them, and then they become part of us and our families, and part of our family language.

And I don't think you get that unless you really absorb immerse yourself into something for a number of times.

I think you're, you're talking about [00:07:00] community and family and sharing this repetition and, and that's a very valid point. That you're creating a shared reality by sharing your immersion in whatever it is.

You can build a garden together, or you can read a play together, or you can go for a walk together or whatever you do together. You have some shared experiences. You have some stories that you can tell together as a family. Next time you go to a wedding or a bigger event, you know, you share your stories and you have some stories that are shared stories of your family.

So that's one. reason to go back to the same things over and over with our kids. Sometimes they do it on their own. I didn't watch the Barbie movies 50 times. My kids did. Especially, funny enough, my oldest son. He was very, very fond of the Barbie movies.

They had some good music.

Oh, it was great. I'm not against it. But what I'm saying is…

I mean, I'm saying that's [00:08:00] why boys might have liked it if they were musicians, especially

I think they like the fancy dresses. Why wouldn't they? They're pretty. I mean, it's shiny. And the stories were interesting enough to keep them interested for a while. They needed to understand the dynamics.

And they still… they don't talk about the Barbie movies except for laughing a little bit now that they are teenagers. They say, “Oh, remember when we watched the Barbie movies all the time,” but it happens to be something, a lot of the kids, they know the teenagers, they know, they talk about when they were younger.

And they talk about when they watched the Barbie movies over and over. So apparently there's something in the Barbie movies to absorb—something that makes them want to see it again and again, which is not bad.

It's very, very clever because they've taken two different ideas and meshed them together, like the classical music and the animation and a toy. And they've put it all together. I think that's why, [00:09:00] people—musicians like the piano guys—really appeals, because they've done something similar with their music. They've taken classical music and they're doing something different with it so that it's fresh and new. But it's also comforting because we like that music or we like the animation.

We hear something familiar in the Barbie movies that we haven't heard in that context before, but we've heard it. Playing it on our CD players or at a concert or we played it ourselves, and now to watch Barbie, uh, dancing to it on the screen, it's a whole new way of experiencing it.

But also I wanted to say that there is great value in things we dive into together that creates that shared language and shared stories. I just wanted to say that as I see it[00:10:00] equally when they do it alone. If they want to do something over and over, watch the same movie over and over, and I can't be interested, I think it's my job as a parent to.. I don't know how to even say it. I mean, the word “allow” almost comes out of my mouth.

To leave them alone?

To leave them alone. Yeah. And not be afraid of it. To be like, yeah, whatever. If what you want to do is watch that, then do it. And if, if you want to watch that same movie again and again, I'm not here to offer you 200 other movies because Netflix does that very efficiently already. And I don't… I trust that if you're watching that there's something in it for you.

I think I told this story in an earlier episode, but when my daughter Holly was 3 or 4, every day she watched [00:11:00] Stand By Me, a movie about adolescent boys, pre-adolescent boys, and it was an adventure movie, and every day she wanted to watch it.

One day Marty got up before Holly did and he ran into the room because he knew she was already awake and he said, “Mom, please don't let Holly watch Stand By Me today.” So it was, it was a constant thing and she was so young for it, but she would talk about it. She would tell, she was seeing a lot of different things in it. She wasn't going for the same thing. She sort of would live in there. And she was very analytical about the dog, about the relationships among the boys, about what does it mean “storming the beach at Normandy”? All these things were coming up for her. And when she first read, the first real reading she did was the Stephen King original that that movie's based on. So for her, it was a long-range study. And the fact that that particular movie is not usually the subject of university study, maybe, I suppose, unless people are studying filmmaking or Stephen King. So I take it back. [00:12:00] People do.

I could see the value in it all along, because I was so good, so relaxed about unschooling. I didn't worry about it. If she didn't want to watch it, she wouldn't. Nobody was making her watch it. Nobody was quizzing her. Nobody was saying, if you start it, you have to finish it. None of that, you know. So I think what some people think of as “repeat”, they're thinking of repeat in a school sort of situation where all of the kids would be expected to cooperate and be quiet and to the end. I don't think a lot of people, I think the people who complain about it are new to unschooling and they haven't deschooled enough to know, to remember that if a child chooses to turn on a Barbie movie, they can also just as well choose to turn it off. And that by itself is a difference.

That article on your website, Sandra, about repetition and [00:13:00] learning, I think If I read something there about time, that you read a book, you watch a movie, listen to some music at one particular time, and then you might want to come back to it a little bit later. Maybe you've grown a little, you've changed a bit, or something has happened in your life, and you see that movie, that book, or that music in a different way. So you want to revisit it and then you get different things out of it the second time around that you didn't actually see the first time. And I guess that is repetition over a period of time, unless of course, lots of different things happen to you very quickly, but I always find it's very interesting to come back to things later on.

And I was thinking about books, how sometimes you just go to the library, you borrow a book, you don't make it part of your collection. But if you do buy books and put them on the bookshelf, and then somebody says to you, well, look, [00:14:00] why don't you send all those to the charity shop? You've read them. And you think, well, I never know if I want to come back and read that one again.

And how you, we can, we all, well, most of us—maybe people that are a bit minimalist inclined, wouldn't do this—but I do collect music, collect movies, collect books, collect all sorts of things. And I was thinking this morning about how the way things are structured online these days, it doesn't encourage that. We're encouraged to direct stream our movies. to borrow ebooks from the library, to listen to direct streaming music, and they're not ours. We don't build up a collection. We don't. And if you stop your subscription, you lose it all. And how there's value in having your own collection, which you put together, that’s part of you. And you know, you can go back to that [00:15:00] anytime and also share those things with our kids as well.

The other day I was going through my books. My daughter wanted something to read and I was going through my novels and I said, well, perhaps you could try this or try that. And she came back after reading a couple and said, have you got any more like that, mom? And I thought, Oh, wow. I'm glad I didn't just throw those into the recycling or I'm glad I actually bought a physical copy because yeah, now she's reading what I was enjoying.

And I was thinking about how, when we revisit movies, books, whatever, it's like spending time with an old friend—that we enjoy their company. We, we want—it's, as you said earlier, Sandra, it's very comforting. It's familiar. We never get tired of our good friends. We always find something extra to talk about, something extra to appreciate, or we just relax in their company, don't say [00:16:00] a word and just have coffee.

They're all good experiences, aren't they? We're not being pushed along. Is it time you made some more friends there? I mean, those two or three you talk to every week. They're not, they're not enough. Go out there and make more friends.

Let's dump these friends. Let's forget these things that you like. That's not good. My daughter has been, my daughter moved. She lives in a house by herself and her cat. Not very far. We were there a couple of days ago. And she doesn't have Wi Fi. She has chosen not to have the expense of Wi Fi. And she also has been collecting from older friends of hers. They've been giving her things, and she has a VHS player. She's been watching tapes that she gets at thrift stores. And it's really interesting because if it's not on a VHS tape, she's not going to watch it very currently. She did dog-sit for some people who went to Morocco. So she was in another house for over a week and they had Wi Fi. She caught up on some things.

And she can [00:17:00] come to our house. She can go to Starbucks. It's not like Wi Fi doesn't exist for her. But just kind of as a temporary state of life. She's depending on tapes. It's really interesting. And she said, I want to watch. Blazing Saddles. So if you see Blazing Saddles on tape… but I don't hike through thrift stores anymore much. I can't walk that far that fast. So I said I can, you know, I was ready to get her one on Amazon. She said, but I don't want it. I don't want it expensive. I want it for a dollar. And somebody gave her one. She asked around otherwise and somebody gave her one. But she watched it two and a half times yesterday, she said. She was sick. She was sick at home, and was watching that.

So that's interesting to me too. And when VHS tapes first arose in the world, I would go to people's houses and look at their tapes. I would look at their bookshelves. And that's how I got to know what else we might have in common. I think it was very standard for people to come to somebody else's house—people still come to my house and look at our board games, and our jigsaw puzzles, because they're curious about what we have, what [00:18:00] of all the things in the world have you chosen to put on your shelves and keep?

And that may be being lost, except I've seen with younger people, they will get action figures from, movies or games or plays or whatever that they like or programs from plays or they'll have some collectible things But it's just not what I expected.

I have a granddaughter who wears costumes from movies.She came over the other day in a costume from Encanto. And so that's nice. It's her carrying around her memories of that movie that she likes. And I—about the perspective that one gets from watching something later—I was thinking recently about the Beatles.

The Beatles came around when I was 10 or so. And I loved the Beatles and I had some albums and I would listen to them over and over, partly because I didn't have other things. But in those days I thought “these grown men are really good musicians. I love the songs these grown men are singing.”[00:19:00]

And now that I'm 71, I still listen to the Beatles sometimes and I think “they were boys, they were tiny. George Harrison wasn't grown yet.” That was fantastic for people as young as they were. So now I'm thinking, these boys were great. I changed. And I, and I see it from a different perspective.

The first hard novel, I guess I read that wasn't aimed at children was Oliver Twist. So I read Oliver Twist when I was about the age Oliver Twist was supposed to be in the book. And I thought, what a rough life. This poor kid, there ought to be laws, you know, which is kind of the point of the book, but there ought to be a law. And, and I read it as a horror show of what terrible thing could happen to people my age, without thinking, yeah, it was 100 years before that, more than 100 years, I don't know, um, 100, 170 now, 150 now, I don't know, not good with math.

So, but the thing is, I read it as a kid, reading about a kid. I read it again as an adult. I thought, okay, [00:20:00] that's different. I read it after I had kids, after I was a parent, and it was like a whole different story. The character that you identify with, or the perspective from which you see this whole unfolding—how could a kid be sent away from home like that? How could this? How could that? It's so different.

And so it's not like I made a study of that book. It's just once in a while, because I remembered enjoying it, I would read it again and it changed. That book changed because I was looking at it as a different person.

Talking about Stephen King reminds me of when Andy, my husband, and I were, I don't know, early twenties, maybe—uni. We got a collection. I got a collection of Stephen King novels. And my husband got a collection of heavy metal record albums, and we displayed them all in our home. You know, my bookshelf was full of all the latest Stephen King.

And then we were quite [00:21:00] happy until we had children. And then we made new friends and we invited people around for dinner and they went and had a look at our collections. And then it was “uhhh…” and I could see people standing back and talking about this isn't a very good influence for children. Is there something terrible in this heavy metal music? Is there something terrible in the Stephen King horror novels?

And it wasn't that I disagree, uh, that I agreed with the opinions of these friends, but we got rid of all of those record albums. We got rid of all my books because we wanted to be accepted. We had no confidence as new parents. And we didn't want the other parents to think that our children weren't good company for their children. So we tossed out all the things that might be controversial.

And, you know, I look [00:22:00] back and I think, how could I have done that? That was Andy's heavy metal collection. It had value to him. I don't know if I would have read my Stephen King novels again, but it represented an era in my life that I really enjoyed—all those associations. And I did it not because I thought that there was anything wrong with the things we had on our shelves. It was just pure lack of confidence and worrying about what other people thought of us and wanting to create an environment where my kids were accepted by other families—not that we did it all the time, because in the end we stopped doing that and we became secret Barbie doll players and secret this and secret that and I used to just tell my kids, go read that book, but don't lend it to anybody, don't tell anybody you're reading it, because Yeah, it was just easier to do what we really wanted to do, but to do it in quiet, [00:23:00] and then nobody, nobody knew. It didn't upset anybody. But yeah, to think about collections, that collections are important.

We had some little kids’ videos. When my kids were little, and one of them was a probably CGI cartoon of some race car drivers, and I hadn't really watched it carefully, but it was squealy and noisy and loud and, you know, it was like little cartoonish race car drivers.

And one day we were having another family visit, and they had a little girl, a very soft, quiet little girl, and they said, well, what should we play with her? What should we do with her? And I said, well don't show her race car drivers from robot hell. And that wasn't the name of it. But I just said that, and they immediately recognized which video I meant. And I didn't mind them having it, but I didn't want them to show it to this little girl.

When the South Park movie came out, my boys were probably 10ish, 12, I don't know. They were not really old enough to go, but they could go with a parent. And I said, if you go to this movie, do not quote [00:24:00] from it. Don't brag to your friends that I took you—to the homeschooling group. I was afraid of what the homeschooling group would say. So they said okay, okay.

Well, it turns out it was a musical and my kids were really good at learning songs. But I said, don't quote it, don't quote it. That's the condition of going to this movie when it's new.

So then their dad was living in Minneapolis at the time. It's a long way off. And they didn't tell him about it either on phone calls or anything. I wouldn't have minded them telling him, but he didn't. He finally went to it and he said, you didn't tell me it was a musical. And I said, we were all sworn to silence.

But later on I had the CD and I had it on loud in the kitchen one day while I was cleaning and another family came over, a Christian family that my kids really liked and I didn't even notice that it was on and Marty sort of sidles over to it and turns the volume down gradually.

So he knew. I just had forgotten. So yes, we did do some censoring of things that we were into repetition of, but I'm, [00:25:00] … I know your story was already sad, Sue, but about the heavy metal and the Stephen King, you also didn't know yet to expect that your kids might want those someday to listen to them on vinyl or whatever all it was.

You're right. But we've introduced our kids to all that on, well, the music on direct streaming sites, like Apple Music, but they're not interested. They've got their own things and they probably have their own collections. But what was really interesting, we went on a road trip, maybe two, two and a half years ago, my youngest daughter and my fourth child.

So, um, my youngest daughter's just turned 21. So my fourth child. And we were driving north to visit a son and the journey took us something like eight or nine hours. And we had like Spotify playlists playing all the time while we were [00:26:00] traveling. And we kept discussing the music and which ones we wanted to play.

And we got into some really old stuff. And I kept saying, Oh, I know this one. Um, and I would tell them the story behind the music, where we were when we listened to it, why we liked it, all this. And they were really interested. And we got talking a lot about our lives and then they would play something they liked and they would tell me about it.

But yeah, we, I would say we learned a lot about each other. My kids learned a lot about Andy and I when we were their age and the world at the time, because we went to the disco and I used to wear my little gold boots and we loved dancing to this music and every time it came on, you know, we had to go down and we had to dance to that one.

And it was such a good way of sharing with our kids through music that we'd listened to so many times that we knew the words [00:27:00] without looking. We could just sing along with them. Um, yeah, really good.

Is eight or nine hours north of you, northern Queensland? Did you go to the coast?

No, no. It's a little… Australia's big. We didn't even get near the border.

Oh, not even to Queensland at all?

No. Uh, we live south of Sydney, maybe an hour and a half south of Sydney. So, uh, eight or nine, well, I would say it's eight hours now because they've put a new tunnel in which cuts some of the journey off. It's eight hours and we've still got a long way to get to the border because my son, when he goes to Queensland, that's a big hike for him. That's another long journey to get up to the Queensland border, where I used to live as a child. But, um, yeah, the state is huge. I think

Where I live, it's big too. We can go five hours in any direction and, and maybe be out of the state, barely.

[00:28:00] know, if you did it from my country, you would be in a different country.

You might still be in Germany though. You could drive that far and still be in Germany, maybe.

Yeah, but I mean, if you start in Copenhagen and you drive five hours, if you go east, you go to Sweden. If you keep going, you might make it to Finland. If you take a left, you end up in Norway. If you go south, you end up in Poland. You'd need a ferry boat, uh, or Germany. If you go west, you'd end up in England. If you go north in the other direction, it would be Faroe Islands. Iceland. Yeah. That's different.

How far is it going to be? You're driving to Spain next, right? That's your next trip?

Well, we're, we're only driving to France as a first stop. So we're driving 2,300, I think, [00:29:00] kilometers. I think we can do it in two days. It's 20 hours of driving.

That's repetition for you right there. That's when actually the music comes into the picture. We've been doing a lot of the Beatles because we spend so much time in England and my daughter was lucky enough to get a ticket for the Paul McCartney concert in London.

Yeah, the one where he brought out Ringo Starr. So she's actually seen everyone who's still alive, of the Beatle, perform together. That was a big deal.

That's nice.

Yeah, it was really nice.

One thing that came up in competition, repetition, discussions, and there's a little bit of that on my page, I will send you a link.

Oh, I did. I sent you those two links to Sue's page and mine. Can you put those in the notes? Yeah, I've got a whole list here. People talked about paintings, about having favorite paintings, that they will go back to that museum to stand in front of that painting again. [00:30:00] And I think a lot of people have a favorite painting. And some have never seen it, they just look at it again and again in books, or in posters, or whatever—prints.

People have paintings on their walls that they look at every day.

Right.

That must be a somewhat favorite painting, hopefully.

I don't hear anybody saying, let's change the painting every month.

Exactly.

We were doing that at one time. Uh, we, my kids and I, we love watching things like art heist movies and forgery movies and anything to do, documentaries to do with art. The one we really loved was “Fake or Fortune?”, the British show—is this artwork fake or is it genuine? And then we used to watch a lot about the stories behind paintings—so what's the story behind The Mona Lisa, for example.

And at one time I was printing [00:31:00] off a different painting every two or three weeks. And I had a frame and I'd put it on the wall and we'd, I'd put it at the kids’ eye level and they'd walk by, have a look. And it generated so many conversations because it was just there, nobody said a word, it was just there to look at.

And I wasn't saying, did you notice this? Did you notice that? They would just look at it and then say, Hey mom, did you notice this? And, uh, can we go and find out more about that? But I did notice after a while we got stuck on, oh, the artist who did girl with the pearl earring? Uh, is that Vermeer?

Yes, I think so.

Yeah. We got that, that we didn't change the painting after that one. We sort of got, we liked it. And we just kept it for a long time and we stopped, uh, exploring, looking for other things because I suppose that one was a favorite. [00:32:00] And I do remember seeing I think it was a “Fake or Fortune?” episode where there was a forgery one where an artist forged that painting, or he tried to forge it, and I remember my kids going, Oh, mom, remember, remember when we were looking at that, we had that on our wall, remember, and the memories and that association with things that become ours. Like you hear somebody say a Shakespeare passage, for example, and kids will just jump up and down.

And I just remember one day we were at church. And we're listening to the homily and our priest quoteed something out of Shakespeare and the whole pew of kids all turned to each other and said did you hear that? Did you hear that? And they got so excited about it. And when we got home we had to talk about it.

Father knows Shakespeare, mom! And I just felt it was ours and he was sharing it. He knew it ,too. [00:33:00] He was our Shakespeare friend from that moment on. And I think that if we're talking about repetition, you don't get that familiar with something until you have immersed yourself in it for a while.

But as you were saying, Cecilia, nobody would, um, complain about kids watching Shakespeare all the time, would they? Because as adults, we can appreciate how complex Shakespeare is and how we need to immerse ourselves in it multiple times. There's always something new to extract from it. That's not so much the problem, it's other things.

Were you saying, Cecilia, about the value of things? If we as a parent don't value it, then there's more of a problem. I'm not saying that I don't value what my kids do, but it's something that either you have to face at one point, or [00:34:00] you hear about other people coming to terms with that. As you were saying about Barbie movies and things.

It's funny how it's really tied down to values, if we hear ourselves or anyone else talk about kids having, you know, they repeat, you know, why do they keep doing that? Would we say—would we get worried if they kept cleaning their room every day? Every day they make their bed in the morning. Every day they take out their laundry and put it in the basket.

Every day they organize the table and put the chair really nicely, open a window for ten minutes. Every day they do that. They keep doing it.

But that's another category. That's chores. That's service to the family. But these are entertainment. You don't need to repeat entertainment. You know, it's, it's part of that whole, uh, let's categorize things so that we can keep them separate.

If I had a kid who [00:35:00] could make great pizza and make pizza every week, I wouldn't complain about that. And there are things I cook over and over. I made chicken and dumplings yesterday because my daughter was sick. I just make it now. I don't need a recipe. I just make it because I've made it a lot.

And people don't see that as being a little like the Barbie movie. Only with the chicken and dumplings it's serviceable. It's like the housework. It's not me learning. Something new. About Vermeer, that just got mentioned, up in the corner of the top of that bookshelf above the cookbooks is The Milkmaid, but it's behind another painting that a friend of mine did of a local movie theater.

So there's a local movie theater called the Lobo, and I bought one from a painter friend, and behind that is a miniature not much smaller than the original, which isn't giant, by Vermeer.

There's a book called Vermeer’s Hat. I don't know how I came across it, but I love it. I love it. It's about connections, but it's about a guy in the Netherlands who was riding a [00:36:00] bicycle and wrecked his bike, and a woman in the nearby house saw him and took him into her house, kept him overnight, told him stories. And from her, he learned about the Dutch East India Company, and being in, I don't think he was from the Netherlands, but he just started exploring more and more and more about the history of the Netherlands. And he comes to all of Vermeer's paintings and talks about what the things are on the walls.

I don't think there's a wall on Girl of the Pearl Earring, but a lot of his paintings paintings are done in his studio. It's the same window, same wall, but he'll put something else on the wall—a map or a piece of cloth, tapestry or something. So the guy was saying, where did those come from? What did it represent that there was a big wall size map in the Netherlands in those days? And so it goes into the age of exploration, international trade, where did the silver come from to buy things that came like beaver pelts? They were buying from, from North America, from the French traders, that they were making [00:37:00] hats in Europe.

And it was so cool, because he just followed these trails, and brought those trails back. All the connections are just, it's so, yeah, for me, because I'm a I'm a geek for connections and culture and stuff. It was wonderful. Vermeer's Hat.

I'm putting it in the show notes.

Yeah, it's an odd and great book. It's on Audible too, I listened to it the last time I consumed it. I read it a couple of times and I let somebody else read it to me.

There's a, I have no idea the name of this artist, but there's a, I say modern day artist, I don't know when he did these paintings, but he did his own take on Vermeer's paintings.

So some people might say, Oh look, he's ruined them or he should paint something of his own. But I liked how he took something and gave his own spin on it. And it didn't for me. decrease [00:38:00] the enjoyment of the originals. It actually, it's like seeing it somewhere else and I thought, Oh wow. It's like also there's novels and things where these paintings are featured and we already have that connection. So we enjoy them more, but yeah, there's a lot of rabbit trails you can go on just from one painting that you've immersed yourself in.

The artist I was referring to was George Deem. georgedeem.org

But the other thing I was thinking about, Sandra, when you said about going and seeing a painting, the same painting in an art gallery, I didn't really understand that until some Picasso paintings came to Sydney, and my daughter and I made the special trip up to see them. There were other impressionist artists part of the exhibition. And I stood in front of one of Picasso's, it was a huge painting of a woman. And it was all in brown tones. [00:39:00] And I stood there and I stood there and I stood there and I didn't want to go. I could see the value in Picasso by actually standing in front of it. It was absolutely magnificent.

And if I could have stood the whole, whatever, many hours we were there, two or three hours in front of that one painting, I wouldn't have absorbed everything that I wanted from it.

And I thought on my way out I'll buy the book of the exhibition because they always have a guide and I'll take it home and I'll enjoy that painting again and again. And I was on the train going back and I got my book out and I started flicking through it and this real feeling of disappointment just flooded through me.

The images in the book were nothing compared to the real thing. You had to stand there. I didn't want to look at all these images over and over again. But if I could have had a painting [00:40:00] like that Picasso on my wall, I would have looked at it again—all the time. I probably wouldn't have got much else done, just stood there.

But I think some people say they don't appreciate Picasso, or Picasso’s strange. And I think maybe I was on that, I had that opinion as well for a while. Some of them are all right, but I didn't realize you have to stand there and you have to see the real thing. And once you've done that, I can see why people keep going back to an art gallery.

That painting is no longer in Sydney, so I can't go back and look at it. But if it came back again, I'd be, yeah, pay the money, go up there and have another look because it was certainly worth it. I didn't get the whole experience by just seeing it once.

I don't know the name for these, and I don't even know if a single one still exists, but in the 19th century, artists would come to the western U.S. and paint a scene around [00:41:00] on big canvas, and they would paint like, like a 360, and then they would take it to the east, eastern U. S., and put it on display. They would build a big building for it, so that all of those were mounted on the wall, so that you could stand in the middle and look around, and it would be mountains, and maybe a river, and maybe bison, whatever, trees. And people would pay, I think a dime, which in those days was, you know, like a few dollars now, and they go in for some limited time and look around. And that's an interesting thought too—the change in the availability of things to see. Because now you can look at videos.

People complain about zoos, but in the days that zoos were created, there was no way to see those animals in any other way.And now you can see video of giraffes running where they naturally live. [00:42:00] And so I think that when people are judgmental about collections or museums or art or whatever, they might want to consider that, too. It was hard to maintain those giant canvases. You roll them up, you fold them up, what? They're not going to last 150 years. So I don't think there's a single one intact, but there are some—people drew pictures or paintings or whatever of people looking at them, which is interesting too.

There's a thing that, I think it started on TikTok, I'm not sure, but there's a photo somebody put online. Her mother had painted an egret, she said. It was her mother's second painting ever and she said nobody will like this. Another artist painted the mother holding that another artist painted that person's picture of him and it kept going where it's this artist who says I painted a picture of this woman's mother and her painting of the egret and it went and went and went and that was such an interesting [00:43:00] use of current internet but they were real artists painting real oil probably oil or acrylic paintings of this image of someone holding a picture.

And that's something that couldn't have been done until the other day, you know, very recently. So there's that sort of playing with art or playing with music. Like I loved PDQ Bach, the man who did that was named [Peter] Schickele. He's not around anymore, but he would do comedy routines with classical music and it involved a lot of classical musicians. You had to have enough of them to do these pieces, but they were humor and that's pretty easy to find—PDQ Bach.

And then I love Weird Al Yankovic for the same reason. If you know the original song, then you can get all of the humor of the of the parody, and it's the same with PDQ Bach.

I need a repetition of the second guy. Who was that?

Weird Al Yankovic [00:44:00] I can send you a link

Listen, yeah, do it. Do it.

Yeah, he does parodies of popular current music. He's been doing it since the 70s I guess maybe early 80s and he's still doing it. I've been to two of his concerts They’re some of the best concerts I've ever seen. He's getting old now, but yeah, I was just thinking ...

That reminds me about concerts. I don't go to concerts anymore, but listen to concerts on direct streaming and YouTube.

But in the days when Andy and I used to go to concerts before children, I always felt like I would enjoy a concert more if I was familiar with the songs. It wasn't that I was gonna go there and hear something new and that was the aim of it. I really wanted to be, go and already know the songs, a bit like going to watch Shakespeare, but already knowing the plot so that you can [00:45:00] absorb the full enjoyment out of it. Otherwise you have to come back and watch it again or, uh, hopefully go to the concert again and again, which we couldn't do.

But yeah, I used to listen to the music ahead of time, make myself familiar with it, and it actually enhanced the enjoyment of the concert because I had spent that time with the music beforehand. I didn't need it to be fresh. I wanted it to be mine, to be familiar.

And so that's when repetition works for us adults who claim ourselves to be mindful of what we're doing and not wasting our time maybe. We actually do repetition on purpose to prepare ourselves for an event. So we know. And yet, it's a common thing. Maybe not us three as much would think that [00:46:00] this repetitive behavior is bad or we don't understand it in our children. But it's a quite normal thing that parents say. Why, why do they keep going? It's a little bit like when there's this new word around, you know, they're addicted to this or that or the other.

I just had a fun little coaching situation with a mother who texted me. I think my son is, he's almost addicted to watching movies, watching little videos. The kid is young, so he is five. …so watching little movies on the iPad and I just can't make him stop. It drives me insane.

And so I was like, why is it driving you insane?

Because the sun is shining. We should go outside.

So context, she's in Denmark. The sun shines about two hours in January. So when the sun shines, it's a big thing. And the adults usually are very, very, [00:47:00] we have the… experience? We know it might be another three weeks until you see the sun. So maybe you should run out in this exact moment because maybe you have a window of 15 minutes of real sunlight.

So of course, she's eager. She wants the sunlight. She wants it right now. Um, and the son would not put down the iPad. And I said to her, you know, he's not addicted. He's in the middle of doing something. And you see a shiny object and you're running after it like an idiot. And you want that right now. Are you addicted to the sun? It was not fair. Of course…

There might be a way to advise the mom to find a sweet way to invite him out or to carry him out laughing with a promise of, as soon as we get back, you can watch this video again. Look, I'm saving it.

Yeah. She had already tried that before she texted me and she was frustrated.

I get that. I understand. I understand. Because a 5-year-old has not spent 30 years in the cold [00:48:00] northern, Nordic…

I know. But by your story, it doesn't sound like she promised him that she would make sure he could watch it again when he came out. If she was seeing it as an addiction and, and as he was wrong.

She got to that point. I don't want to call her out. She's a nice girl. She was just annoyed. But I think it still is, you know, we have this top-down idea and it's not even that bad for Scandinavians, but still, you know, I know what's the right thing to do and the thing I want to do right now. I can claim that. But the children, if they have a thing they want to do right now, we can judge it.

Yeah. Oh, Sue, you said that you wanted to go to concerts where you recognize the songs and people who do concerts know that doing a new song that no one ever heard doesn't go over well. It's better to do things that are familiar. But I've discovered as an adult that for musical theater, I didn't want to know, I didn't want to hear the songs first and then go. [00:49:00] Because what would happen is I would imagine wrongly what was happening if I had the CD of the music.

So I would hold out until I could see the show, then I'd get the CD, immediately listen to it a lot, very happily, because then I have the context for the songs. I know who's singing them, why, to who. Like Les Mis, I did not want to listen to it because it's confusing. I got to see it in London, I was really happy with that, and after that, the music makes so much sense, but without the in-between parts that are never on the CD of a musical, it's nonsense.

So that's my special exception. I wouldn't want to go to a concert of music I didn't know at all, but I wouldn't want to go to a musical where I've already heard the music just is disorienting to me because I was wrong.

And what about going to different productions of the same musical that's, that's fun as well, that [00:50:00] you want to go see how some of this production team portrayed the musical or the ballet or whatever, that there is a lot of enjoyment in, or especially Shakespeare, seeing so many different versions of it that it's familiar in one way, but there is still something new about it, especially from that angle of critiquing it. Did we like this version? Did we like who they chose? Did we… the bits they left out, did we like that or did we like the setting? There's so much more to talk about every time you see a Shakespeare play, however familiar you are with it, if it's a different production, it just adds that extra spark.

But saying that, we've watched Kenneth Branagh's productions—of anything, over and over and over again, because we just love them. And [00:51:00] yeah.

When I was a teenager, I was learning traditional ballads. I just loved traditional songs and especially ballads because I liked the storytelling aspect of it.

So by the time I was in college, I knew probably 20. By the time I got out of college, I probably knew a hundred. And I played guitar and so I performed and…I didn't perform for audiences, but in groups. I would sing those a lot of times, just, you know, for a small group who came to hear each other sing, we would go around in a circle.

And I learned from that that the first time I would learn a ballad, I think, “This is it, this is the way it is.” I mean, I knew, I was aware that these were, were three, four hundred years old sometimes, and could be found all over the British Isles, all over North America. You'd find it in Western Canada, you'd find it in, you know, South Carolina.

I knew that. Intellectually, I knew that. But I would learn one tune in one set of words. And when I heard a second one, it was wrong! You know, I felt like that's not right. The way I learned it, [00:52:00] I have worked on knowing all these words and knowing this tune exactly, being very careful to reproduce the tune as it was collected. And then I find another one. But the cure for that was to find a third and a fourth.

Ah, yeah, of course. But isn't that also what happens when we go back to things, that we see a third or fourth perspective? Does that make sense?

No. Because it's, because unless the person has changed, it's the same painting or the same song and the same recording. But with this, I got to… it became a set of things. It became the range of it.

And I'm listening to a memoir by a Scottish actor named Alan Cumming. He is talking about Hamlet. He had played Hamlet and he said roles that are really good, really good character, you can—every actor who does it, does it a little differently and that adds to the richness of Hamlet. Like, so if you see a whole lot of [00:53:00] productions of Hamlet, they're all going to be different, but they're all going to be the same in a way.

And I just, that was interesting because I just heard that yesterday, and now it has come up about re-watching Shakespeare or different versions of Shakespeare, which we can do now. You can live in the boonies, you can live in New Mexico and still see Shakespeare plays, which was hard to do for a long time, unless a high school did one or, you know, a college did one and you happen to be close enough to that place that day when they're only going to do it once for a small audience.

Videotapes saved us. Videotapes let us watch different ones, and by actors who are dead. There, there are writings about famous Shakespearean actors, different, in different times from Shakespeare's time, 19th century. You know, there'll be newspaper reviews or people will have written in a textbook for Shakespeare scholars. "This guy was the best Shakespearean actor and you should have seen him do King Lear. And he was great." But we can't see it. But we know there was a guy that we wish we had that [00:54:00] videotape. And so now we can watch videotapes of actors who are no longer around. I think it's wonderful. So I, yeah,

I agree.

I have a kid who understands Shakespeare the first time, my middle kid, Marty, he's so good at following those stories and getting it. And it was fun to watch shows with him, to watch video tapes with him, because we could stop it and go get some food, we could stop it and come back to it tomorrow.

And when we stopped it, he would tell me what he'd seen or ask me questions, and it was wonderful to be able to pause. You can't do that at the theater. You can't say, stop, guys, wait, we gotta discuss this. Stand there.

Another thing is you have, I mean, affordable. I don't know in your countries, but I can't afford a ticket to the theater in my country.

And the more kids I got, the worse it got. It was one of the things where we had to say, okay, if we're having four kids and I'm not working, [00:55:00]there will be no theaters. We cannot do it. If someone gives us…

Even the movies anymore. Holly and I went to see a movie and we didn't even buy popcorn or a soda and it was expensive.

So later on I wanted to buy that movie when it came out on Amazon that you could buy and have it available to you. It was 25 dollars and I like in a heartbeat bought it because I wanted my son Marty, the same one, to watch it and I wanted to watch it again. I knew we had just paid that much for two people to see it.

So there's that too, about even if you buy things online and they seem expensive if you compare it to the price of movie theaters or, yeah, even much worse of live theater. It's not expensive.

Sometimes, uh, if you can, it's worth spending the money on a live production. I just, I got a story that it was maybe March, 2024, uh, West Side Story was showing [00:56:00] on Sydney Harbour. They have a permanent stage and seating on the edge of the harbour, by the Botanic Gardens. And I think it's called Handa Opera and they do a particular production for so long and then change. And it's an outdoor setting, obviously. And they, they perform regardless of the weather. The only time they cancel the show is if there's a storm and it's electrically dangerous.

And so when I took my daughter up to Sydney, we had I think a couple of nights in Sydney in a hotel and the highlight of the trip was going to see West Side Story.

And we just had so much fun because we were very familiar with West Side Story and it was a new setting. And fortunately, it didn't rain, but we heard afterwards, after we'd seen the stage, that there's [00:57:00] no cover, that there's no cover for the audience, and there isn't any cover for the musicians, the dancers, the actors. They all do it in the rain, so it wasn't as if the audience had to sit in the rain and while the performance went on in the dry. Everybody would be in the rain.

And I don't know what that experience would be like. And I'm thinking to myself, I probably got to go and experience that now, just because I wonder if you get a lot of everybody sitting there in their plastic poncho that they've just bought for 5 dollars, whether you get a sense of companionship, camaraderie with all the other people, because you're enduring something difficult because you love the music, you love the performance, that it's worth it.

And so I wonder if that would happen—that you're there with all these other passionate people. And you don't get that, or you get it between your family members at home, but to be part of the bigger like going to a concert. [00:58:00] It's… and you look around you and you think, wow, we're all enjoying this together, and we're coming away and you're listening to people's comments. And there's an added depth to your enjoyment because of that. “We were there on the night” when you talk about it later on. And so that for us was really worth spending the money on.

But admittedly, my daughter is the eighth child and that was the first time we'd gone to Sydney to watch a performance. We couldn't afford it before then. But I guess there's advantages in getting older and getting to your last child. She's doing all sorts of things that we couldn't afford to do for the previous ones. Sort of, it's a bit of this, a bit of that.

Some things, harder for her, some things are easier, it just balances out. But yeah, just that camaraderie, it just, we had that same sort of feeling when my girls ran in a few 5k, 5k and 10k runs [00:59:00] and just being part of that lineup before they shoot the gun and let you go running and to be there with all that atmosphere with all these other people who are passionate about what you do.

It's like finding your tribe and everybody understands why you're there. There's something really magical about that, about sharing something with somebody else. I'm bringing it back to repetition. There's something wonderful about watching something or listening to something over and over again with somebody who understands why you're doing it. They're not saying, you've heard that one, that album, 10 times. Can we change it? But you're sitting there and they understand, they get it.

I was thinking about your Picasso, the Brown Picasso painting that you were looking at. If someone else walks up and goes [sharp intake of breath] while you're looking at it, that would be communication with you. [01:00:00]

Yeah, and, and I think it's similar with concerts. It's even at the movie theater.

When I was at in my late teens, I went and saw The Exorcist when it was new and I didn't know what was gonna happen. It was just really a new movie. We were scared to death. The theater was really crowded and the parking lot was in the back. It was one of those old theaters from the 30s that's really tall, has a long wall with no windows, and a sidewalk, and a dark road, and everybody had to file down there to the parking lot in the back, and old people, I mean, we're walking, and we were all 19, 18, and we're walking along, but families with grown men, the dads are scared, and it's, it was a movie, right?

But because everyone in the theater was scared, we were all like spooked, but I've heard stories of people that when they went, the audience laughed. So that sort of broke the spell. It kept it from being horrifying or, you know, terrifying because people went, Oh yeah, right. It's a movie. There were a whole bunch of sound men and cameramen and it's pea soup, you know, to have that perspective.

[01:01:00] But we were all close up surrounded by people were like, Oh no, Oh no.

Do you remember what you. What you said, what was in that article, Sandra, about how repetition helps us, and especially our children, deal with scary, horrific situations.

There's a graphic that I picked up from somewhere. Maybe that was it?

It was just words.

Oh, I'm not sure

It might have, there might've been a link to something else, but it was that you're scared the first time, but then you realize, I guess, that you've come out the other end and what, what you've might've thought the worst was going to happen, it doesn't. And then you go back and you process a little bit more.

I didn't write it, but maybe… there are other people quoted there. I just have collected things that would fit on that page.

Yeah, no, I don't, I think it was somebody else, but it got me thinking about how it's the same with movies like Jaws. [01:02:00] My husband and my youngest daughter have been watching all the old movies together, like Jaws.

And I remember how scary they felt years ago. And after seeing them a number of times, you, like, of course you realize because the special effects have changed, you realize how they did all these special effects, but just like you were saying about going to see the movie with all these other people that we were scared, but you learn to deal with that, I guess that the next time we watched it. We were almost prepared, and it wasn't such a trauma to watch, and we noticed other things about it. Till the very… we get down the track, and you're watching out for how they actually did the special effects, rather than waiting for the shark, wasn't it—the shark to eat somebody. [01:03:00] You're just sitting there wondering, how on earth did they do that? And then you start to think about, how would they do that today? How would they improve that?

There's a perspective problem on Jaws too, because people who were swimmers or surfers or who lived by the ocean were a lot more afraid of it than people in Albuquerque. We're 800 miles from an ocean. A shark is not going to get us as long as we stay out of the water.

I think these, there's. Oh, my brain is getting in the way of itself. So these shared experiences of being afraid with other people in the theater and walking out and having the same emotion, we're back to the community thing. It's like the family having the shared story. Now you have a shared story with a group of people where some of them you don't even know, but you hold this emotion and you see that other people also hold it. That's evolving your capability of handling emotion.[01:04:00]

So I think it's… did you ask, Sue, just before, how repeating things could help children to, or humans, to be able to handle situations that are scary or feels dangerous or feels conflicted or confusing. I think when we have these, we've been talking a lot about art in this past whatever-time-we-spent and a lot about movies and stories and songs.

And I think we hold our worldview based on stories. And I think one of the reasons if we go back to the Barbie movies or whatever movies we've been watching over and over, or even songs that we sing over and over, they are [01:05:00] little narratives or big narratives. And I think we see the world through these narratives. We see, we understand dynamics between people and we understand how, what is my role and how could this possibly unfold? Will there be a happy ending? What are my options? What is that kind of person over there?

All these things we understand because we have these narratives installed. We know the fairy tales. We know the Barbie movies. We've read the Stephen King novels. We know the stories of Shakespeare. All of these story bits, I think we break them up in our psyche and, and use them as a kind of filter to understand everything around us. And I think that's the reason the kids want to hear the same story over and over until it's there. It's ready. Okay, now I've got these characters. I know them now.

And we want to—I want to—see the same movie over and over. Or read the same book, or same play, or watch, [01:06:00] look at the same painting. Because I need something from it. It needs to be clear now. And the more complex the art is, The more time I personally need to spend with it, I can browse over something random, but I have to really go back to that same cathedral over and over until I really understand it, or whatever painting, whatever it is.

Carl Jung says the story was already in you.

Yeah, true.

Characters were already in you and maybe the art was already in you, that there are, there are common motifs in art and stories that, that all humans understand. And that's an interesting way to look at it. I don't, you know, we can't prove one way or the other, but he had some pretty good explanations for why the same imagery and stories come up in different cultures, very different cultures.

But we still can talk about it. Because we can say Cinderella, or Little Red Riding Hood, or whatever, because I've read that story, and so have you, so we have this shared [01:07:00] language, like we talked about the local shared language in the family, and we can have a shared language in our culture, and we can even globally now, because things are getting so big, have a shared, somewhat shared, global culture. We've watched a lot of the same movies.

Now, it's funny, when you started talking about movies you saw when you were younger, and really young, I felt I couldn't contribute, because you haven't seen the ones I've seen, obviously, because they are in a language you don't speak. I didn't speak English at the time, or even if I did, I have, you know, most of it, a lot of it. My story about secrecy was from when my first child started kindergarten, so she must have been about five, something like that. And there was this movie that came out. It was a big deal. Everybody was watching it in Danish. Um, it was a very early animation, computer animation, [01:08:00] like cartoonish style thing.

And it was made by one guy. And he just did this social critique, but it was still a story for children. And the language was so much over the top, there was so much swearing, it was so bad, but we swear a lot in our language. And we don't have Christianity in the way you have it in the U. S. It's very different, our religion.

So we can swear, no one really cares. Maybe, don't do it in the church, but you can swear at home. We say the F word all the time. All the time. And no one really cares. It's not the same here. So that, but he made it over the top to the extreme and he took old children's rhymes and mixed them up. And, and it was about, you know, how you would mock children to the point of suicide in schools and how the teachers were these old hippies that would always bring out their guitars.

And, you know, we were just laughing, [01:09:00] crying. My generation and people who were slightly younger, I was in, I was about 30 at the time. And some of the lines, my husband and I kept saying to each other and there was a lot of, you know, motherfucking and, you know, really, really hard swearing in the lines, the quotes.

And we had this little girl, we didn't think about it until one day we had to talk with the kindergarten teacher, because she was quoting this and they said, have you let her, it's quite violent, the movie even, but it's made in this really funny way. And if you're 10, I would say you can safely watch it. No problem at all. Well, at least I think so.

She hadn't seen the movie. She had just heard us quote it all the time and sing the songs. So she would [01:10:00] sing the songs and quote the movie and it would be swear words to an extent. We still have that story. She will still quote,that movie and we will all laugh a lot because yeah, it was, it was a misstep that was somewhat not a misstep.

So when you were sharing about the things you saw, when you were really young, I was thinking about this.

Yeah,

I don't think

My daughter Holly was maybe three—three or four—and she was sitting in the little seat on the grocery cart. I don't know if you have those same kind of grocery carts where a little kid can sit facing the parent who's pushing.

So she's sitting in there and I walked a little way away from her. You know, a few yards to get something off the shelf. She's holding the bar. She's kicking her feet and singing. “Touch-a touch-a touch-a, touch me. I want to feel dirty” from Rocky Horror Picture Show. [01:11:00]

Oh God. Yeah, that's really funny.

But it becomes our shared stories and then it becomes very valuable. I was thinking also about—it's as if the coffee is kicking in now and I can finally speak—about this judgment of things. If we're circling back to the unschooling perspective, we have recently been not a lot, but more than other phases of our life.

We've been sitting around a table and the kids have been doing things that looks like studying. It is studying, but a lot of things are studying, but this is more like structured. One of them has started, I don't know, like a year one university level. art history thing on Khan Academy with a friend and being very focused.

And, [01:12:00] you know, so she sits and she reads and she writes and she looks like studying.

And my oldest son, he's into starting to go through some math things. So he's also, it looks like studying.

And my youngest son, he is deep into, he's like, he's going into Minecraft. Like there was nothing else. He's doing the redstone thing, trying to figure that out.

So he's studying. And I think in a lot of families, they would say that two of them were studying. And one was wasting his time. Right. Because why is he playing Minecraft all the time? Is he addicted? Hmm. But really, he's studying.

Lately, I might speak.

Sorry, Sandra, you go ahead. Go ahead,

Sue. No, I was, I was gonna jump right in.

Oh, remember what it was. I'll be quick. I was just thinking about when I was playing this computer game called Monsters Expedition, [01:13:00] and it's an open world game, beautiful animation, lovely little cute monster that you had to solve all these puzzles to get it through the world, to visit all the places.

And I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it was a puzzle game and it was challenging at points and I found myself sitting on YouTube watching other people play the game so that I could work out, uh, their thought process. And I was amazed, some people just looked at the screen, they would know instantly what moves to make, where I would be sitting there trying things out, I couldn't see the answer straight away.

And I was thinking about how, if that had been chess, if you've been playing chess on YouTube, parents might have actually boasted, “My child is playing chess. They're watching somebody who's a brilliant thinker play chess and they're picking up all these new thinking skills.” But because it was a game, but in the foundation of it all [01:14:00] was, it was still thinking skills and I came back to my game and I had, I could see how to solve the puzzle and then I'd use those skills to solve another one.

And then another challenge would come up and I think, well, this is different. And I would try it by myself for a while and think, no, I'm going to go watch this video.

Got to the end of the game, which was a long game. And the first thing I wanted to do was start the game all over again and do it this time by myself and see if I could think my way through it and it just looked like I was “well you've just played that game. Go and play this new one or go do some, go outside and run or do something useful.”

“Go outside.”

And I think I played the game three times. And I still couldn't get through it all with without any help, but it was so satisfying and that those thinking skills I could apply to other things. I found myself when I had a problem, my mind was going like I was playing the game. [01:15:00]

Now I look around. Think about the different steps. Think about what you've got there. Think about how you want to get what the problem is. And my mind started to follow those patterns regardless of what the problem was. And it was just such a great experience.

But I couldn't let go of the idea that if I'd been playing chess, people might have been a little bit more impressed with my viewing time for watching things on YouTube, but also my abilities. And, and that's all I wanted to say, Sandra, hope you remember what you were going to say.

Mine's very related to what you just said. I was going to confess that I have, I have four, one teenage grandchild who's 15 and then four who are at the moment, four, five, six, and seven. And they come over in various combos and [01:16:00] play video games on iPads and other little, you know, little devices. And I've… It may be just that that's what I'm willing to do, but if they just want to play a game that's like touch little characters to make a move to this bed or that chair, that seems boring to me.I'm not interested.

They have a bluey game. It's like that. And I'm like, this is not a game. This is a playhouse. Playhouses are okay. We have a playhouse here, but it’s a dollhouse, it's like Bluey in a doll house. And then they have a Peppa pig that's not really puzzles. It's not really something interesting to figure out.

Maybe not interesting to me, but when they play things like bird on a limb, where they're sorting birds to get them to fly away, or water sort, where you have to put colors here and there until the little tubes fill up. That I see the value in because it's totally deductive reasoning. It's totally, visibly math.

And so now I feel guilty, not that these kids are unschooled, but they all go to preschool or [01:17:00] school, but the thing is that when I see one that I know a lot of other people would go, “Oh, tthat's a good use of time right there. And that child is doing very well for a five year old,” I feel a little, more successful or useful in it.

If they were unschooled kids that were going to be around in this house all day and night for 18 years, I wouldn't have that feeling. But I think because they're in school, because they have those witnesses, if their teachers or their parents are going to say, what have you been doing at grandma's? And they show them the game, it might be better.

But a game that all four of them now are interested in playing with me is Plants vs. Zombies, but I have older iPads. I'm an older person, so I have older versions than you can get now. They can't get it. They can get a version now that has advertisements. Do you want to earn a watering can by watching an advertisement?

But I have older ones, and on one of the iPads, I have the game I've been playing for years, and it has over two million points, right? You can buy… everything's already bought. [01:18:00] Tommy tried to start a new game. On her own name, from the beginning, and it was pretty fun at the beginning. But then she's like, I don't have a hammer. I don't have a chomper. I don't have this. I don't even have, I don't have a zen garden. The zombies aren't giving me anything. And I said, well they will when you have a garden.

So she didn't have to suffer the buildup of gathering those things one by one. And that, but that's a siege tower game. Or tower siege. Tower siege is the genre of game where you're defending the house with plants. You put out plants in your yard that will stop zombies. Zombies eat plants. And it's, it's humor, it's cartoony. But, the youngest had a nightmare one night because of it. So now she wants to play it with the sound off. The music stayed with her and she had a dream and that music was in there, I guess.

So, that's, uh, the kinds of, the kinds of games that might look like something stupid about zombies, but really, they're, [01:19:00] different zombies. One has a road cone on his head, one has a football helmet, things like that. They have to get hit a different number of times or with a different kind of plant. So gradually and gradually the kids figure out what combinations of plants will take out what kinds of zombies.

And there's one game in there where you play as the zombies. So now you're the zombie, you get to pick which row of plants to go down, and that is almost like formal debate. Where, unless you understand both sides really well, you don't know the subject.

And so when you've played as the zombies and you've played as the plants, you can get really good at the subtleties of how to, which row to avoid and which row will get you. And that just seems to me to be valuable in all kinds of logical ways.

Well, obviously. But even if it wasn't, I think that's, to me at least, it's a question I make sure to ask myself frequently, even if I don't see the logic, even if I don't see the value, [01:20:00] it's probably there.

I don't think my kids are stupid. If they, if they want to do something over and over, if they find themselves attracted to something and it's really interesting for them, well, there's probably something in there. Maybe I just can't see it. I'm blind to it. Could be my personality. There are some things I'm not interested in. I really cannot get myself to be interested in, let's say, cars. I don't care. I'm not interested in motors. I'm not interested in any sports. I don't care.

But I know other people care and I respect that they care and I'm sure it's important to them. And I know there's a lot of interesting stuff to know about it.

It's just not my thing. And it's the same thing with some of the things my kids spend a lot of time doing. I don't see the point, but I don't have to see it. I'm not the one doing it. If it makes me worried, if I think it's unhealthy in some way, if I think it's [01:21:00] threatening them, or if I get any like really distorted feeling, well I talk to them about that feeling and I invite them to explain to me.

“Can you help me? Because I'm not in a good place right now. This thing you're doing is making me feel strange.”

Usually they can. Sometimes they can't. Sometimes, not very often, I'm right. There's something going on that's not good for them. And then we talk about that. And how they can dive into their interests and do the thing, or something similar, in a way that makes more sense.

My middle, Marty, when he was middle teens, he was probably 14. He was listening to a lot of rap music. And I said one day, I don't understand it. I just hope it doesn't make you steal cars. You know, I was making a joke and I was also [01:22:00] expressing my -uh- my irritation with hearing it, partly, but he was good about keeping things in his room, but it was, it was my way to say “a concern has arisen, but nevermind” all at the same time, he said something cute and funny back like “I don't think it will, but I'll let you know” you know, something [something].

But you did mention a piano, practicing piano, but we didn't even touch on the things that kids who, as Howard Gardner's— love Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences, and he talks about kinetic intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, which is dance, sport, probably yoga, you know, all those sort of things that involve muscles, body, body awareness.

And those kids, God knows, a kid who builds a ramp for a bicycle is not going to jump it once or five times. They're going to jump it hundreds of times. at different speeds, at different angles, different position on the seat, or standing up, or [01:23:00] whatever, until they really know it. But then if you see the bicycle stunt guys that, I don't know where you might see them, but we see them at the state fair, maybe, there used to be, they would have a big barrel, they would ride around like that, and could do all kinds of jumps and flips.

They don't learn that by doing it a little bit. And any sport, I saw someone who was doing tricks with, a football—your football, our soccer ball. Um, she was doing tricks where she could keep it up in the air just with her feet, like she would be doing gymnastics and keeping that ball up.

And things like that, I don't personally, I mean, I'm impressed when I see it, but I don't have the mind to even think of how much time it took for them to do what it takes.

So I appreciate music in ways that people who don't, don't. I see a lot of, of like, I've already mentioned several examples today that were about music. So that's where my mind first goes. But I want to acknowledge that too, that people whose kids are physical, some, in some families and in some [01:24:00] ways, they will see the value in that soon.

If the kid is running, jumping, jumping rope, doing repetitive things, ice skating, figure skating, they'll see that and they'll value that and they'll pay money for somebody to help them do it more. And then there are some other things that they may not value, but you know, if a girl's doing, I shouldn't have said that, that was a sexist thing I said.

If a child of any gender, they're usually girls, is doing ballet, as a little girl, everybody gets excited. Everybody gets really excited about that. Oh, how sweet, because ballet is like chess. It's traditional, it's formal, people make money at it. It's not like a video game.

There's another aspect to repetition that we can admire in kids. For example, years ago—we have a tennis court down the road in the park, and my kids decided they wanted to learn to play tennis. [01:25:00] And they went up to the village store and got the key and paid their money and got the key to the gate and came back.

And they said, Mom, you used to play tennis when you were younger, didn't you? And I said, Yes, because I had a lot of lessons. And they said, well, mom, we want to learn how to serve. So I said, all right, I'll come down and show you. So we're all there with all these balls and all these kids and rackets. And I'd forgotten how to serve.

I mean, I knew how to do it, but my skills, I hadn't served for so many years that my skills were really rusty and all my serves went into the net. And I kept saying, Oh, I'll get the next one. I'll get the next one. Or, Oh, it's been a while. It's been a while. And I kept making excuses. And in the end I said, I think I'll go home and I'll make the lunch. You continue playing.

And I got embarrassed because people were watching and there were people walking by and there's mum trying to do a serve. And mum said she could play tennis. And it turns out that mum's lost all her [01:26:00] skills. And my kids, they stood there for hours. Practicing. And I thought afterwards I wrote about it. They'll learn how to serve. I'll never regain that skill. Because I'm not willing to stand there, put in the time, and not worry what everybody else is thinking about me. I'm too embarrassed. I'll go home.

And so I did. And I have never gone on the tennis court since, but my kids have been down there enjoying themselves because I think kids don't worry so much about other people's possible criticism.

And we're a lot more touchy about that. Well, I was, I thought I wanted, if I'm standing here, I want to perform. I want people to say, wow, she's good. I don't want them to think, Oh, wow, what does she think she's doing? Trying to teach those kids how to serve. She can't serve. And I sort of crept on home.

And like that, if kids get really interested in something, excited, passionate about it, they don't care [01:27:00] what people are thinking around them. They just get on and do it. and we sort of lose that as we get older. Um, yeah, anyway, that was another thought I had about that.

They probably learned still though, weren't you talking through it as you were showing them?

Because even if they saw that you weren't serving as cleanly or as well as you used to, you still showed them the position, the way to hold it, you know, what, what the idea was. So that probably helped when they practiced on their own.

Yeah, no, I certainly passed on that. Um, But I missed out cause I, if I stood there with them and just kept on practicing and practicing, I might have then played with them and regained that enjoyment of the game.

Whereas I, you know, I didn't want to play anymore because I wasn't good at it anymore.

I'm sorry that you got embarrassed, but you need, they did need food. So there. There's to defend you, [01:28:00] but aren't there coaches and dance teachers who can't themselves do it? Well, anymore, but they still, they have, they see what the person's doing wrong and can help them.

True. I was just thinking about, you know, that how adults learn as compared to children and how we pick up some very bad habits along the way. We're not quite as open and curious and willing to give things a go as we were when we were younger, probably because of what other people have said to us, or the experiences we've had along the way haven't been quite as positive as maybe our children.

And then I suppose if we're going to talk about why complain about our kids doing such things as video games, maybe at the back of their mind, regardless of whether they play them, they're always going to think this isn't really valued. But if we do the opposite [01:29:00] and encourage them… I was really interested to find out that the computer industry, video game industry, is the biggest entertainment industry of all of them. Music, dance, books, anything. Video games is the biggest industry. And then when parents say things like, Oh, you'll never get a job in the video game because playing video games. You'll never get a job if you're just playing video games.

And I think it's about time we stopped saying, well, I don't say it, but I don't have any young children anymore anyway, but it's time that parents stopped saying that because there are so many opportunities because it's such a huge industry.

And not just playing. The first… My kids all had jobs from when they were teens because of the laws in New Mexico and because they were in a city and because, it just happened, they were all invited to have these jobs, um, but my oldest worked in a gaming shop from the time he was 14 till [01:30:00] 18, and it wasn't video games, it was board games and table games.

So collectible card games, Magic the Gathering, things like D&D, they sold little figures and the paints for them and stuff like that. So it was that kind of game shop. So he learned everything about all those things.

But when he was older he went to work at a pizza shop for a while, that was unusual, and then that's where he learned cursive writing, because he could only print before that and slowly, but he needed to go faster because he was taking orders at the pizza shop window, or on the phone, phone orders. So he had to write it down quickly and legibly so that the pizza could be made. That was nice. You know, it wasn't planned, but that made his handwriting quick.

And then the next job he got was being a game master for World of Warcraft. So when people are in the game and they want to ask a question or complain about something or report a problem, they talk to someone, and he was one of those. And it was a [01:31:00] contract deal, he worked out of an office in town, but then the company, Blizzard Entertainment, that owned World of Warcraft, decided to build a facility in Austin where a lot of the game masters would be in one place. instead of contractors here and there. They had some in some other places too, some in Ireland, I'm not sure where else.

This place in Austin, they were hiring and he ended up being a supervisor of 25 people. Some of them had college degrees. You know, I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't about, you couldn't, you couldn't train for that. It wasn't the kind of job that you could prepare for in school. The best way you could do it was to have played that game quite a bit. And in his case, he had also taught kids karate, but that wasn't necessarily a factor in them hiring him, but it was a factor in him being better at seeing that here's a large group of people who need to be cheered up, happy, getting along. So he was that kind of manager. He wasn't the hiring and firing manager.

There were, there was [01:32:00] a team of two. One of them was the person who said, you need to come on time. You need to do this. You need to do that. And maybe you're not going to get a raise. Kirby was never involved in any of that, as far as I know.

He was involved in the, I'm so glad you're here. This is, this is what's new. Let's talk about what's new in the game. And you, you did a good job there. If you need help, ask.

And he did that for a few years, several years. And I thought it was wonderful. It wasn't for playing the game. And some people liked the game masters to be kind of in character, to be pretending to be in the game some, and some didn't.And that was interesting, too.

And after he'd been there a while, he went up one more level, sort of, where, interestingly, this is something that no one could prepare for, and you might be interested, Cecilia. They, have ways to note if someone seems suicidal. If a player might be in psychological danger, then there's a procedure. [01:33:00] And one of the clues is they start giving away their stuff. They give away their armor and horse to other people. And it's very interesting. So they will contact those …

I've heard about it before. Yeah. And how, how the gaming, the big gaming communities have actually saved people's lives and in the game of, what is it Grand Theft Auto? Isn't it called that? There's been a lot of supporting each other through winter crisis or seasonal affective disorder. It's just interesting how, I mean, I don't game, so I don't know unless I'm curious. And, well, I am. I feel I need to know because my boys game. So I've tried to understand and I've tried to dive in and I've tried to play the games. I just don't get hooked.

It's, it's all puzzle games, maybe sometimes, but it's, it's not for me. And, which is fine. We don't have to all be the same, [01:34:00] but I've heard that thing before that there's also a community of watching, you know, looking out for each other in the big multiplayer games tha

t we were very afraid of and very much against in the beginning, my husband and I, Yeah, for a reason. It's just, it was interesting to see the depth and the breadth of what's involved in that. It's not just helping people.

And also he said there were, when the Chinese New Year came, Everything got quiet and peaceful. That in China, there are places where adults hire kids to come and play the game and get the gold. They pay them by the hour. It's not their game. And then they sell that, which is illegal within the game, and it can cause some problems. And sometimes, he said, if somebody sells you gold, you give them real, real American money, and they give you game gold. You've just given them access to your game, and sometimes they, not every time, they would steal some of your stuff.

I don't know what all is in there, I'm going to say armor and horses, but there are swords and things that you earn along the way. [01:35:00] And they would steal those from your character like you had given them away. So the, so the game masters are always saying, don't buy gold, don't, it's not a good idea. But when Chinese New Year's came, all of those shops closed.

And that's, so then the people at Blizzard could plan around that. And they would use those days for maintenance or doing other things because they knew that for a few days, the Chinese gold farmers were stopped. Because they're having a vacation. That was interesting to me too. So that's very international trivia and finance and crime.

It has, like everything, a lot of spirals out. But if we're talking about the element, to the extent we're talking about how these things, adults sometimes, see as waste of time in children and young adults’ lives. You have a story, a very one to one story playing the game, got him a job. And I think the first critique, the [01:36:00] first question we will get is, “Well, not everybody will go from playing the game to getting a job within the game,” which is true. Uh, sometimes that happens, but I think my logical steps are no one likes to be bored. We don't like to be bored. We don't like to look at the wall while the paint dries, is what we say in Danish.

No one likes to do that. So if we're doing something, we're not bored. If we're voluntarily doing something, we're doing it not being bored. So we might repeat it, but it's not boring, which means that logically must be something more in it to absorb or to enjoy for any of the many reasons we've talked about by now.

So this means we're absorbing something. That would be equal to learning something, right?

Right. Brain, stimulated brain.

So if we're doing something that we're [01:37:00] voluntarily doing, we are learning something. We're growing somehow. And now the question is, is there anything we can learn in vain that wasn't worth learning? And can we always predict how that will come in handy?

No, except that everything is a hook to hang something else on. So if you learn something and you never “used it”— meaning you never produced a quilt or made a meal or got a job, still, that knowledge that you have makes your other knowledge richer and deeper. You understand things better. And I wasn't saying that, that I encouraged him to play a game so he could get a job. It was absolutely unexpected, even for him.

And so, because you don't know what's going to happen, there's no sense pretending you do. You know, a lot of parents say you need to study chemistry because you need to be a doctor or whatever. Maybe they will become a chemist. Maybe they'll [01:38:00] just have chemistry as a thing that they learned in vain, in a way, but they'll also be better at doing their laundry and cooking and storing things because they're aware of basic chemistry.

Well, even things we learn not voluntarily. will probably come in handy or be a hook, as you say, on the wall. When we talk about unschooling, we just talk about things we learn voluntarily. I have another, I like your hook that we can hang things on. I sometimes, you know these I'm not sure I know the English term, you know these puzzles where you have little dots with numbers and you have to draw lines between them?

They call it dot-to-dot.

Oh, easy. Dot-to-dot. Okay, so in my, when we talk about these things, we kind of remove the numbers and we say, okay, now I have two dots. Can I draw a line? Can I see the connection? So sometimes there's just this [01:39:00] lonely dot and no one ever drew a line to it, but you still have the dot. And one day there's another dot and you see, Oh my God, these two. And then if those are connected, well then all of this is connected. And then suddenly this is relevant. The dots are always, they always hold a value like the hooks to hang something on.

Sue, I should not have said in English they call it dot-to-dot. What do they call it in Australia?

Dot-to-dot.

Oh, yay.

Yeah, well, I'm sorry, is it wrong to say English about everything?

No, no, it's just that I know that there's terminology between England and the United States that doesn't match. Things that got named after we split, we made up, we, we made up whatever words we wanted and so did the Brits.

So I don't know where, if Australia, probably, Australia probably has some other words that came along. Like trucks, those little [01:40:00] pickups in Australia, they call them something, what do they call those?

Utes?

Utes. Yeah.

Short for utility vehicles, but we know we always call them Utes.

I thought that was cool that they have—that they have a word because pickups came along after all those countries were way separated.

So what I was gonna say about dot-to-dot is I used to have an exercise that I would do at conferences years ago and I still have some of the papers. Holly and printed with a little screen printer we had. It said, connect the dots in like rainbow color, sort of, and then there were two dots of two different colors, usually, I don't know, on some really nice paper made out of cotton.

So this cotton bond paper that we happened to have, left over from a friend's print shop, we printed these, cut the papers in half, so we gave everybody at the conference this thing that said "connect the dots", and I said there's one rule: can't be a straight line.

And we got some of the coolest things back. And we would put them on the wall, like tape them to the wall. And, but I bring them all home.

Somebody was sitting by a plant that [01:41:00] was some sort of a cactusy thing, but it had spines and they got one of those and stuck it through, and stuck it through, and folded the paper.

Karen James drew somebody holding their eyes like this, the dots were the eyeballs, and so it's this whole picture I think is like that, or glasses or something, this whole picture, and that was the connection that they were eyes. So it wasn't even aligned to dot-to-dot.

The creativity of the way people connected two dots was so wonderful. And just seeing how other people had done it, that was enough. I didn't have to be talking while they were doing it, because it's just, the idea of connecting two things is about infinite.

And some people went around the back of the paper. Some people rolled the paper until the dots were physically touching, or folded it.

Yeah, yeah. Does the line have to be straight? I'm gonna have to ask the kids tomorrow.

Even if people all go [01:42:00] to the same movie or read the same book or listen to the same music, they've all heard it differently that day.

Because they had their own set of things to connect it to. Oh, what that sounds like this other group I know. Or that looks like a Picasso or those greens and blues are the same paint that I've seen in this other stuff. The same colors. And I think that's wonderful. And I think that parents who think about that, who remember that, or figure it out for the first time will be much more patient with what their children are interested in.

They must be. It must be that when you remember how you learned something as compared to how a friend of yours learned it, or how you felt about learning it, that you would be more compassionate about your children's preferences and specialties, their own skills, or, um, what, what are good words for that? That you have a talent, uh, or a [01:43:00] special affinity for some subject, or art, or something.

I've been thinking over this conversation about how we've talked a lot about when older children, let's say age plus five, six, something like that. When they repetitively do something and then when teenagers do it. And, but if small children keep doing something, they take the three blocks and they put them on top of each other and then they let them fall and then they do it again, and then they let them fall and they do it again.

They can do that over and over and over. No one gets worried, really. Would anyone say about an, I don't know, how old are they when they stack little

Two.

Two. Yeah. Would anyone say about a two-year-old that he or she is wasting their time?

Only, only if the parent is involved and they're stacking them on, say, the high chair, and then they throw them off the high chair and the parent has to keep picking them up and giving them [01:44:00] back.

But then that is when people start to complain.

So if you have to be involved, one of the stories I've been thinking about from my life is when I was a young mother, 23 years old, I was single and I had this little girl, so I must have been 25 as she was walking. Um, and we were walking along, we have some lakes in Copenhagen city center there, it's a nice place to go for a walk.

It was summer, and I had this idea we're going for a walk, but I did also have the ability to question my own ideas at the time. So she found some stairs that she could run up, they were really low, long stairs, and she could run up and pause and then run all the way down. And it was like this long, flat slope thing and she did it a few times and I started saying, Okay, let's go, let's move on.

And she said, I just want more. And okay, and when I said, let's go, let's move on three or four times, I was questioning that. Why [01:45:00] am I saying that? The sun is shining. We're out for a walk. We're not going anywhere. We're not busy. We're not hungry. We don't need a bathroom. We're not far away from home. The sun is still shining. Why can't she just run up and down those stairs? Why do we have to walk along the lake if she's enjoying the stairs? I'm basically out here for her. Maybe I'm out here for both of us, but then she's half of us and she really wants to do that. So I stopped saying, let's move on.

I got a little bored with waiting for the running up and down the stairs. But I was okay, and I started counting, and as I remember it, she ran up and down those stairs 47 times, after I started counting, and then she was done, and we could move on. She said so. Oh, I'm done. Let's go. [01:46:00] And I thought it was such, it really taught me a lesson about repetition in children's lives, and giving them space for it.

I didn't see the point or what she was “learning” or whatever, but did she have the right,basically, to do what she wanted to do, to do what made sense for her to do at the time? She was really enjoying the running. And, and who was I to tell her, Oh, that's not what we're doing. Who was I to define that Sunday afternoon? That wasn't fair.

My grandkids repeat a series of things that, not necessarily in order, but when they come over, anything that they've done before, they want to do again. So if Keith and I want to introduce something new to them, like, oh, we'll show them something they haven't seen before, that just gets added to the list. So the next time they come over, it's like, let's play zombies. Let's play Play Doh. Let's go to grandpa's room. They, he has a little, one of those little exercise [01:47:00] trampolines. Let's go jump on the trampoline. Let's go play the instruments. He has a lot of musical instruments back there. Um, then they want to stop and play the piano on the way back up.

So it's like it's comfort, that's comfort to them. That they know these things are there, they know that they can play them if they want to, and so they want to. Sometimes it lasts 30 seconds or 20 minutes, I don't know. It depends on the kid and the day. But we, we've laughed about that—don't introduce something new, it'll just add it to the list. It doesn't take anything else away. But some things have been taken away over the years. There used to be a green ball that they would roll back and forth with their grandpa. And it's interesting to me to see that. So there, that's almost like repeating a movie, but it's repeating the same actions or game or exercise.

I don't know. It's interesting and I'm glad that we're fine with letting them. We're not complaining about it because it's easy for us to, to know. And we can add to, Play Doh's gotten more, more elaborate over the years. What they, what they know how to do and what we [01:48:00] can show them and add to it.

Rolling pin made a big difference for a while. So it's easier to be patient when it's grandkids than your own kids, I noticed. Partly because we're older and we don't have them 24 hours, seven days a week.

And we're wiser. Hopefully. I'm working on getting there. I have a friend who says basically all this parenting stuff we're doing, we're just getting ready for, for, you know, this is the education to become a good grandmother.

It's a beautiful one. I think, feel that we're kind of leaning into talking about tradition and ritual and habits and familiarity as a navigation system or what role do they, I feel like they are like levels of things that we agree to repeat doing, but maybe that will open up too much of another subject. [01:49:00] I don't know, we've been talking for a while. How do you guys feel?

I thought of something about sharing. Sometimes I do the same thing that I've done before because I have somebody new there. There's a tram that goes up to the top of the mountain here. Our mountain is very steep on one side. And so the tram goes up and when you get up there you can see a long, long way. And it's fun for me to see people see that, especially people who live where there are no mountains. And so I'm willing to do it, and it costs money, but that's the thing I spring on when I have a guest. It's like, let's go up the tram. And it's partly selfish on my part, because I get to see the joy and the surprise.

A few people are afraid of heights and won't go. But people who are willing to go up there are so surprised. I know they will be. But I was surprised, and I'm from here. And when I went to [01:50:00] England the last time, I knew it was going to be my last time, and two of the families I stayed with, and I had stayed with before, with one of them before, I took them to see the Book of Mormon in the West End.

So those tickets were expensive, but I had budgeted for that. Like, this is my last time. Thank you very much for letting me stay at your house. Let's go see The Book of Mormon. So I would buy the tickets online and they knew how to get there. Cause that's what I can't do in London is get from one place to another.

So they were both locals and knew how to take trains and get to the place, train and the tube, get there, get close, how to walk there. I would have been so lost. I would have never found it. And. It was nice with both families. One family, they had been dancers and had been in musicals themselves, so they knew some of the people who were in it. They said they had never paid full price for a musical. They'd only gone to the, like, friends tickets things, and so that was fun that we picked seats, and it's a good, it was, it was a good musical, is kind of a big deal. So they were surprised, and a friend of theirs was in one of the lead parts, and [01:51:00] I was glad to do that, and I was, I had seen it before in Albuquerque, so I was glad to see it at a bigger, more professional theater, and to see it with people who were theater professionals when they were younger, and to see it with this other family, and because it's an American topic, I knew more about the history of Mormons and that stuff than they did, and so it was really fun for me to share that with them.

So, I didn't mind the repetition. I didn't mind seeing it for the second and third time live. But it was, I was helping them see something that I thought was valuable, that I thought was beautiful.

I'm thinking now of stories about if something happens, like that makes a good story, like for us, driving down towards town and a kangaroo hops out onto the road and then we swerved and missed that one and we don't realize a second kangaroo is coming and then we swerved at that and our hearts are beating fast. [01:52:00]

And we miss both of them and the kangaroos make it to the other side of the road. And then I want to tell that story over and over and over again with all the details and how I've felt. And I get to the point where I say, did I tell you this story already? And depending on who it is, they might say, that's all right. I'd like to hear it again. But we like to tell stories over and over again. If we feel that we're connected with them, they're interesting. But after I thought about that, I thought, us three. We're doing a lot of repetitive things. We gather, we're gathering, regularly to have these conversations about unschooling.

We all write blogs. We all speak at other events, other ways, and we're repeating stories and ideas over and over and over again. I've got [01:53:00] to the point now where sometimes I think, did I tell that story in exactly the same words? Is it getting boring? But it just flows off us because we're so familiar with it, but we don't get tired of sharing that with new people.

Someone says, would you like to come and talk on a podcast about repetitive learning. And I think, Oh, wow. Yes, I would. I've got lots of stories. And I've told them all before and I've written about them, but it doesn't stop me wanting to do it again and again and again. And I'm sure that over the last years, we've done that so many times.

And maybe I have got to the point where I think I've said these stories enough. I want to do something else. I've told the story too many times. I'm getting bored. And then, might be just because I'm tired or I meet someone new or whatever and I think “I'm off again!” And I haven't really left it and I don't [01:54:00] really want to go away. I want to keep on telling the stories.

So I just thinking about that as we were talking today that it's almost impossible not to overlap our episodes, because the same stories are applicable in many situations. And then you were saying, Sandra, “I think I told you the story before about Holly and Stephen King.” And I think, but it's applicable here as well. Tell the story.

A different aspect of that story. I would be glad to hear your stories about kangaroos, because I don't have any kangaroos. And when I saw some in Australia, I was thrilled. Some hopped right up to me and stopped close and looked at me and then went on.

How could that happen to a kid from New Mexico? So for me, every kangaroo story is fantastic. If we're going to hit something with a car here, it's going to be a coyote or a deer or a cow. So yeah,

To me, kangaroos are quite exotic as well. Same here. [01:55:00] We don't have them here. So even the fact that it's kangaroos you miss, not deer, which we would hate that.

We had a deer on the side of the road. Apparently we have deer as well, though we don't see them very often. It's more likely to be a kangaroo, a wombat, a wallaby. Or we had a new sign down the road from us that says, it's just gone up at maybe two or three weeks ago. Watch out, koalas about.

Or it could be a turtle.We've had a new sign put out for turtles, caution turtles crossing. And we have, um, duck signs. We've got a lot of ducks, but the other day, my latest story is that we were going down, driving out of our village down towards town and all the traffic had stopped on the road ahead of us and it was a cow, or it was a calf, had escaped from a paddock. And that was, well, wasn't a new one because we've had that happen before, but we haven't had it for a long time. [01:56:00]

So yeah, people's stories are interesting, aren't they? And if people aren't willing to repeat their stories. Then you never get to hear them because there's a lot of people that might like to hear that story.

Sandra Dodd: I was with two biologists on a road trip in Australia and there was a roadkilled echidna and they let me get out and look at it and touch it and that was you know, for me, that's interesting. I had never, ever seen one. Not zoo, not anywhere. Never. Except in photos. And, uh, then we were over by, closer to where you live, Gold Coast.

I was with Skylar and David, and a big monitor lizard was crossing the road. And he wasn't in a hurry. He doesn't go fast. He's just walking as slow as he wants to, and he was as wide as the road. We had to wait for him to finish crossing.

Wow.

And I know there are people in the United States who have seen alligators, but I haven't.

So that's a lot, the alligators are a long way from me. And all of those things, having seen a [01:57:00] cow in the road, then you can imagine what a horse in the road would be like, but still, they're not kangaroos.

We should talk more another time about the value of conversations. We've touched on it today, but how much we learn and how much our kids learn, because I feel that sometimes parents get worried if you're sitting there with coffee and you don't actually look like you've got onto any work, we're just spending our day chatting together over coffee.

And I really think that those are very valuable times.

I'm for it. That's a good topic.

I've written it down. Conversations. And also, even though I always enjoy these conversations, I think we need to find a way to wrap it up as it's after 11 here and we unfortunately have a funeral tomorrow morning, so I have to get everybody up and get dressed for the ritual and, you know.

Well, can I just say that I'm enjoying the repetition of meeting up with you regularly and [01:58:00] talking about unschooling. It's um, thank you so much. Cecilie for hosting our conversations, always look forward to talking with you and Sandra.

Thank you, Sue. I feel very much the same. I'm always looking forward to these evenings. And I think it's, I learn a lot from you two wise women. It's very, very nice to talk with you. And we go through all these, it explodes from a topic out to everything. And then somehow it circles back and becomes this nice little piece.

I like it a lot. Thank you. Yeah, so thank you and thank you also Sandra for sharing all of your stories and wisdom with us today. I think I will wrap it up from here. And then next time we should talk about the value of conversation. We've touched upon it, but it would be nice to do a deep dive. I think it's [01:59:00] comparable, you know, is it a waste of time?

Like watching the Barbie movie over and over? Maybe not. Yeah. So thank you for today.

Thank you. Good night.

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Again, again!
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