Another excellent day here at Stratton House. The Mural works carried on yesterday , some of it into the early evening as Tai seemed unable to stop working on his masterpiece, while the others played on the new lawn or sat meditating infront of my Buddha painting.

And today was a mix of continued work on the Murals, cheerful play, including great fun with some plastercine; given by our friends Li Li and Ally , who popped in for a visit; and some more serious garden work on yet more vegetable plots.

Its been a good weekend for some ‘family discussion’ and getting the kids to understand why we ask them to work. It is important to us that the children here understand the ways of life, including needing to work for what you want out of life. This weekend they asked me why I asked them to clear weeds ready for the growing plots. They pointed out how much quicker I am able to work. So I explained that I would do them no favours by doing everything for them. The plots are to grow food for us all to eat and they need to learn that this all takes effort. The work also, hopefully, brings the rising self esteem from being able to say ‘we did this’.

Today we had a delivery of a truck load of soil which now waits to be distributed to the new plots. For now it is a bit of a playground, which brought forward another disucussion about learning to think ‘safety’. One of the kids called me to proudly declare that they had dug a great tunnel in the soil pile. Past horror stories about children playing in unsupervised building sites flashed through my mind.

So using a plastic bottle as a demonstration ‘child’, I got all the kids gathered round and showed them what could happen if a playful child decided to enter the tunnel, unaware of how fragile the soil was.

Some of them had been keen to run up the pile jumping and dancing at the top and running down the sides. Great fun, but none had thought to put away the wheelbarrow and shovels that sat close to the pile.

“Is it safe?” I asked.

“Yessss!!!” came the reply.

So being careful to keep good hold of him, I demonstrated the likely trajectory of Jack happening to trip and fall down the far side of the pile, and how his head would likely collide with the edge of the wheelbarrow.

After putting all the garden tools away properly, the children played carefully for a while longer, in safety.