St. Nick/St-Nicolas

Clean shoes waiting for St. Nick (a piece of honey cake, some cheese and milk for St. Nick and a carrot for his donkey).

Des souliers propres qui attentent la visite de St-Nicolas (un morceau de gâteau au miel, du fromage et du lait pour St-Nicolas et une carotte pour son âne).



St. Nick's gifts.

Les cadeaux de St-Nicolas.



Si vous cherchez une belle histoire de St-Nicolas, regardez ce livre.

A usual morning... (me knitting in front of my phototherapy lamp and the girls drawing...).

Un matin comme tous les autres... (moi qui tricote devant ma lampe de luminothérapie et les filles qui dessinent...).



Little girls that are VERY interested in learning to knit...

Des petites filles qui SONT très intéressées à apprendre à tricoter...





A tasty roasted squash, prosciutto, arugula and pecorino salad (recipe by Jamie Oliver).

Une délicieuse salade de courge grillée, prosciutto, roquette et fromage pecorino (recette de Jamie Oliver).




Here's a short excerpt from an article by Marshall Rosenberg (non-violent communication) that I really like:

I’ll be forever grateful to my children for educating me about the limitations of the objective of getting other people to do what you want. They taught me that, first of all, I couldn’t make them do what I want. I couldn’t make them do anything. I couldn’t make them put a toy back in the toy box. I couldn’t make them make their bed. I couldn’t make them eat. Now, that was quite a humbling lesson for me as a parent, to learn about my powerless-ness, because somewhere I had gotten it into my mind that it was the job of a parent to make a child behave. And here were these young children teaching me this humbling lesson, that I couldn’t make them do anything. All I could do is make them wish they had.

Here's another:

Since punishment is so frequently used and justified, parents can only imagine that the opposite of punishment is a kind of permissiveness in which we do nothing when children behave in ways that are not in harmony with our values. So therefore parents can think only, “If I don’t punish, then I give up my own values and just allow the child to do whatever he or she wants.” As I’ll be discussing below, there are other approaches besides permissiveness, that is, just letting people do whatever they want to do, or coercive tactics such as punishment. And while I’m at it, I’d like to suggest that reward is just as coercive as punishment. In both cases we are using power over people, controlling the environment in a way that tries to force people to behave in ways that we like. In that respect reward comes out of the same mode of thinking as punishment.

If you want to read more, go here.