Child's Play

Just a quick blog today as I pack my bags and head for Tbilisi, Georgia for the week. Yesterday was my daughter’s birthday party and we had it in the house. 13 crazy children running around and trashing the place and making tons of noise in the way that only pre-teens can. It took me 3 hours to clear up in the evening. They are all such a confident bunch and as I watched them I revised my list of things that all children should learn to do by the age of ten to make them confident adults. I came up with the following:

Swim
Speak another language
Ride a bike
Ride a horse
Play a musical instrument

The first three cost almost nothing but most children can probably only ride a bike. Speaking a foreign language opens up a part of the mind at a young age that I think helps young children to see the world in a much more open-minded way. It is puzzling me why our schoolchildren (in the UK and France) are not learning Chinese at the age of 5. They would love drawing all of those little pictures. Make it fun for them. Age 10 or 11 is just too late for this sort of thing.

I also appalled myself as I watched these children by dividing them mentally into the ones I do like and the ones I don’t. Only natural I suppose but I have to report that the 2 english ones there (apart from my own) were by far the worst behaved.

Over the next two weeks my blogs are likely to be less frequent but I hope to report ‘live from Tbilisi’. A mad place. But a great place.

Song of the day: Natalia – Van Morrision