OK, so that’s a little previous, in many ways, as a title, given that the tiny daughter will be sixteen months on the first of October, but let’s not be too technical about this, eh? As I mentioned some posts back, we’ve been taking her to a toddler group at the local Steiner school, and this has given me pause for thought in several ways which I didn’t expect (and wouldn’t have believed if you’d told me a few years back what I’d think).*

So, a few words about the group thing, first. To be honest, I went into the Steiner context expecting to really love it, and to start angsting for a good few years about how we might manage to pay the ‘proper school’ fees, which are something like £1000 per term for people in our income bracket. I don’t know very much about the Steiner philosophy; unusually for me, I didn’t spend the usual fourteen days reading everything I could about it and analysing its potential effects on me, the tiny daughter, the cat down the road and so on, preferring instead just to turn up and see what it was like. (Aside: OK – I confess that this approach may have had something to do with being a bit on the groggy side, sleep-wise, and having more lime rendering to get done than any nice person should ever find themselves faced with.) (Ooh. I don’t like that sentence. Nasty preposition moment. And yet I find myself moving on – see aforementioned grogginess.)

Anyhoo.

I rolled up at the start of the summer to try the last session of that term, and was, frankly, rather underwhelmed. There was no structure to the session at all, from what I could tell, and the person running it didn’t introduce herself, or give me an idea of what to expect, but just seemed to think I’d absorb the necessary information from the ether. Songs have words? Meh – I’ll create my own from the flowers and the trees. And of course there is no need to say when these songs will occur – rather, we will drift listlessly seamlessly into them.  You need to move to the table to make the dough? And there is dough? Meh – I’ll bask in the sunshine of the universe instead, while my child gambols happily in the grass; oh no – hold that thought – it seems I need to check the grass for evidence of late-night fox visits, which helpful Ms. Steiner only thought to mention after the children had made a beeline for the outdoors. You get the idea. It wasn’t great, frankly, and all the other children seemed to have colds. (Is it just me, incidentally, who finds it utterly revolting when you see children whose noses seem to be just left to run ALL THE TIME?  I mean, I know children get ill (the tiny daughter is recovering from a cold as we speak), but surely that doesn’t preclude parental intervention in the form of a handkerchief, for the love of all that’s holy?)

In short, it was all a bit wishy-washy, and I don’t really do wishy-washy.** Oh, and also, the group lasts two hours, and that was really on the upper end of the witchling’s tolerance – she was fourteen months at that point, and really spread too thin by the end of the class, so much so that I said we’d need to leave with a good forty minutes still to go, which was a good thing as it prompted the eating of the bread early, so the witchling didn’t miss out on that, at least. She did enjoy bits of it – they had some very nice toys, and she found the other children fascinating, and I liked finding some parents with similar interests (one was renovating a cob house, and a couple of others turned out to be regular readers of a magazine for which I write sometimes) – but I think we both came away with mixed feelings, and I’d gone in there intending to be a complete convert.

I was sort of glad I didn’t go for it wholeheartedly; after all, the idea of finding a spare thousand pounds or so every few weeks seems utterly ludicrous, frankly, when I look at the dubious state of our finances. (Their fees are based on a sliding scale; Christ knows how they reckon someone earning what we earn can summon up that sort of money – we have about £200 a month between us after paying the bills and buying groceries, and that money doesn’t really cover what’s left, i.e. petrol, insurance and so on.) Also, I dislike feeling that I’m a walking cliché, no matter how true that may be… (twitches visibly at this point).

But I did decide to give it another go later in the year, simply because Quercus and I both felt that it would probably be a good time to start offering the witchling the chance to see other little people, and as we look after her between us, rather than using a nursery, normally it’s just the boring old parents who are on offer. Also, in theory, this group could work well – Quercus can bring the witchling around to me after they’re done, meaning he doesn’t have to drive home before going into work for the afternoon, and we’ve even heard rumours of parents eating lunch at the school after the class finishes. (They’re doing it for the first time today; can you tell I’m a little nervous about it?) I took her along to a class the week before last, and she was MUCH more interested, and, as she’s stopped sleeping in the mornings these days, she wasn’t quite so thinly spread as the class finished. Then last week, she went with her grandmama, and apparently had a whale of a time, even going so far as to produce a rather excellent (and brightly-coloured) picture for us. So, she seems much more interested now, and going on a different morning has produced a less insipid individual as a convenor. (I am such a horrible person. They are all lovely, I’m sure, but they just gave me that… mousy… sort of… quietness that is not peace and love and the universe, but rather faded chintz and weak tea.) I want outdoors that includes shouting and jumping in leaves, not just pottering quietly and whispering about birds. I want seasons that include getting covered in blackberry juice and roaring with laughter about sticky mitts, not just felted critters on a shelf inside somewhere. I want celebrations that include stupidly large candles and brightly-coloured bunting, not just… oh. Wait. They’re completely there with me on that one.

Anyway, we’re going for a term of it, and drawing conclusions thereafter.

My feeling at the moment is that the school appears underfunded and rather unloved; the buildings are battered and rather dejected-seeming, despite the nice things housed therein, and the plot itself could do with a thorough re-working. They run a food co-op (though they’re absolutely useless by email, and haven’t replied to an enthusiastic ‘yes please!’ we sent over a week ago; this doesn’t bode well, really, does it?), they have an emphasis on the outdoors, and on seasonal transitions, and on giving children time to just be. All of this is good. So why do I still feel a bit… out of sorts about the whole thing, I wonder?

Later on:

I did just have to pop back to show off this rather lovely work-in-progress with which Quercus presented me when he arrived for the witchling’s shift-change at lunchtime. Isn’t he a clever chap, eh?

* Oh, and the thing that I thought I’d never be even vaguely interested in is the concept of home-schooling. Not that I’m saying we’d definitely do it, because I don’t know if we’ll be in a position which would allow us to, financially, but I’m more and more interested. Despite my utter inability to do anything mathematical without incurring a nosebleed. Oh, and the fact that my scientific knowledge is best summed up as ‘hmm – well, there are scientists out there, you know’. Poor child. Imagine what she’d be in for.

** You know, there’s a whole other post here, really, about the ways in which I find myself either conforming or diverging from the things I ‘expect’ myself to like, as a parent; see, with that whole looking-like-a-vegetarian background (which, I realise, I posted about on my old blog; must revisit that here, as just yesterday three people expressed surprise when they found me eating a cheese sandwich at someone’s leaving party – am I now giving of vegan vibes? Seems doubtful, given my leather shoes…), it seemed only right and proper to me that I would want the tiny daughter to be a Steiner child… just as it’s all too achingly predictable that I tend towards wooden toys, handmade clothes and ridiculously knitted hats.