Cecilie Conrad: 0:14

Welcome to episode six of the Ladies Fixing the World, season two. I am here today again with Sandra Dodd. Welcome Hi. Thank you, Hi and Sue Elvis.

Sue Elvis: 0:27

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

Sandra Dodd: 0:31

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 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 my general, first rhetorical question to them was what's your favorite album?

Sandra Dodd: 1:16

Who's 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 be same old, same old, comfortable home yeah, I agree.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:46

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. 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 complex, something Mozart on the grand piano? Would that 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 in one. Was it your post, sandra? Joe Isaac.

Sandra Dodd: 2:49

Someone wrote a reasons to watch the Barbie movies over and over.

Cecilie Conrad: 2:53

Yeah, Is that okay?

Sue Elvis: 2:57

It depends whether they have any classical music in them. I'm joking. My kids, or 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 value the book that the child wanted to read. I think that I didn't value it for myself, that I, I, I, I got fed up with it. I wanted something new, but it wasn't about the child.

Sandra Dodd: 3:27

Yeah, right, because you're the one yeah.

Sue Elvis: 3:31

I was reading it out loud and I got tired of reading 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. Uh, 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.

Sue Elvis: 4:06

And as you said, sandra, I started drawing, and I'm not an artist and, yeah, my drawing was rather secret. Well, I showed my kids, I got the courage up to show my kids at one stage, but I just thought 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, my skills got better. But then I started to want to draw different types of cats or different cats in different poses, so it it sort of 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 expanded 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, didn't matter what I moved on to next. I would take those skills with me. And then I thought, well, that's probably happening with our kids with books and things.

Sue Elvis: 5:20

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 have understood that, because I like doing that. It's so complex, it'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 around and the third time around. 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, yeah, and we all start to say them and I think that's a like your family language is when you start to quote 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. I can't even remember the words.

Sandra Dodd: 6:28

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

Sue Elvis: 6:32

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 yeah, 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 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 immerse yourself into something for a number of times.

Cecilie Conrad: 7:12

I think you're talking about community and family and sharing this repetition, 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.

Sandra Dodd: 8:11

It was great. I'm not against it. But what I'm saying is, I mean, I'm saying that's why boys might have liked it if they were musicians. I think they liked the fancy dresses.

Cecilie Conrad: 8:19

boys might have liked it if they were musicians. 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 Bobby 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 Bobby movies over and over. So apparently there's something in the Bobby movies to absorb, something that makes them want to see it again and again, which is not bad.

Sue Elvis: 9:00

It's 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 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 dancing to it on the screen, it's a whole new way of experiencing it a whole new way of experiencing it.

Cecilie Conrad: 10:07

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, 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 to. I don't 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 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.

Sandra Dodd: 11:08

And I think I told this story in an earlier episode. But when, when my daughter Holly was three or four, every day she watched 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. And one day marty got up before holly didn't. 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. And so it was.

Sandra Dodd: 11:33

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 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.

Sandra Dodd: 11:54

And when she first read, the first real reading she did was the Stephen King original that that movie is 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. People do, people do.

Sandra Dodd: 12:17

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. So I think what some people think of as repeat they're thinking of repeat in a 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 de-schooled 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.

Cecilie Conrad: 13:06

And that by itself is a difference.

Sue Elvis: 13:09

That article on your website, sandra, about repetition and learning. I think I read something there about about time that you read a book, you watch a movie, um listens 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 move, that, 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, 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 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, who's part of you and you know you can go back to that any time and also share those things with our kids as well.

Sue Elvis: 15:18

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 she could try this or try that. And she came back after reading a couple and said have you got any more like that, mum? 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.

Sue Elvis: 15:58

We, we want it's, as you said earlier, sandra, it's very comforting, it's familiar, it's. Uh, 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 a word and just have coffee and it. Um, they're all good experiences, aren't they? We're not being pushed along. You know, it's that 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.

Sandra Dodd: 16:30

Go out there, 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 expensive Wi-Fi 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 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, but she watched it two and a half times. Yesterday she said she was sick at home and was watching that. So that's interesting to me too.

Sandra Dodd: 17:51

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 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. They'll have some collectible things, but it's just not what I expected. I have a granddaughter who wears costumes from movies she likes. She came over the other day in a costume from incanto, and so that's. That's nice. It's her, her carrying around her memories of that movie that she likes, and I I about the perspective that one gets from watching something. Later.

Sandra Dodd: 18:53

I was thinking recently about the beatles when I was. 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 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.

Sandra Dodd: 19:41

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 as a as a horror show of what terrible thing could happen to people my age without thinking, yeah, it was a hundred years before that, more than a hundred years, I don't know, 170 now, 150 now I don't know. Not good with math, but the thing is I read it as a kid, reading about a kid. I read it again as an adult. I thought, okay, that's different.

Sandra Dodd: 20:16

I read it after I had kids. 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 from as a different person.

Sue Elvis: 20:46

I have been talking about. Yes, Stephen King reminds me of when Andy, my husband and I were I don't know early 20s, maybe uni. We 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 the latest Stephen King and then we were quite happy until we had children.

Sue Elvis: 21:17

And then we invited, made new friends, and we invited people around for dinner and they went and had a look at our collections. And then it was, oh, and I could see people standing back and talking about this isn't a 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 disagreed with the opinions of these friends, but we got rid of all 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 I look back and I think how could I have done that? That was Andy's heavy metal collection. It had value to him.

Sue Elvis: 22:22

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 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 to read that book but don't lend it to anybody, don't tell anybody you're reading it. Because it was just easier to do what we really wanted to do, but to do it in quiet and then nobody nobody knew today they didn't upset anybody. But yeah, just thinking about collections, that collections are important.

Sandra Dodd: 23:24

We had some little kids' videos when my kids were little and one of them was probably a 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.

Sandra Dodd: 23:41

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, that, and they immediately recognized which video I meant and I didn't mind them having it, but I didn't want them to write this little girl. When the South Park movie came out, my boys were probably 10-ish, 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 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.

Sandra Dodd: 24:33

So then their dad was living in Minneapolis at the time, it was a long way off. He 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're 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 noticed 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 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.

Sue Elvis: 25:30

You're right, but we've introduced our kids to all that on. Well, the music on direct streaming sites like Apple.

Sue Elvis: 25:37

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 my youngest daughter has just turned 21,. So my fourth child, so my youngest daughter's, just turned 21.

Sue Elvis: 26:01

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 traveling and we kept discussing the music and which ones we wanted to play and got into some really old stuff and I kept saying, oh, I know this one 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.

Sue Elvis: 26:42

Uh, 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 you know, we went to the disco and we 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 without looking. We could just sing along with them. Yeah, it was really good.

Sandra Dodd: 27:23

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

Sue Elvis: 27:27

No, no, australia's big. We didn't even get near the border, not even to Queensland at all. No, we live south of Sydney, maybe an hour and a half south of Sydney, so eight a night. 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, he, 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 yeah, the state is huge.

Sandra Dodd: 28:07

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

Cecilie Conrad: 28:15

As you know, if you did it from my country, you would be in a different country.

Sandra Dodd: 28:20

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

Cecilie Conrad: 28:25

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 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.

Sandra Dodd: 28:59

Yeah that's different. How far is it going to be? You're driving to Spain next. Right, that's your next trip.

Cecilie Conrad: 29:05

Well, we're only driving to France as a first stop, so we're driving 2,300, I think 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, yeah, the one where he brought out Ringo Starr, so she's actually seen everyone who's still a lot of Beatles perform together. That was a big deal. That's nice.

Sandra Dodd: 30:34

Yeah, it was really nice one thing that came up in repetition discussions and there's a little bit of that on my page that I 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, 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, 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.

Cecilie Conrad: 31:08

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

Sandra Dodd: 31:19

That must be a somewhat favorite painting. Hopefully I don't hear anybody saying let's change the painting every month.

Sue Elvis: 31:22

Exactly, yeah well, we were doing that at one time. Uh, we, my kids and I, we, we love, uh, watching things like art, heist movies and forgery movies and anything to do documentaries to do with art. Uh, or the one we really loved was fake or fortune, the British show. Is this artwork fake or is it? Is it genuine? And then we used to watch a lot about the stories behind painting. So what's the story behind the Mona Lisa, for example?

Sue Elvis: 31:56

And at one time I was printing off a different painting every two or three weeks and I had a frame and I'd put it on the wall and I'd put it at the kid's 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, mum, 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 all that. Oh well, the, is it the artist who did a girl with a Pearl Earring? Is that Vermeer? Yes, I think so. Yeah, we didn't change the painting after that one. We liked it and we just kept it for a long time and we stopped exploring, looking for other things, because I suppose that one was a favourite. And I do remember seeing a famous I think it was a fake or fortune episode where there was a forge or is it a forgery one, with an artist forged that painting while 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.

Sue Elvis: 33:27

Like you hear somebody say a Shakespeare passage, for example, and kids we all just jump up and down. And I just remember one day we were at church and we were listening to the homily and our priest quoted 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. Did you? Father knows Shakespeare, mom? And they just felt it was ours and he was sharing it. He knew it too. He was our Shakespeare friend from that moment on.

Sue Elvis: 34:03

But 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. It's 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 you hear about other people coming to terms with that. As you were saying about Barbie movies and things.

Cecilie Conrad: 35:07

It's funny how it's really tied down to values. If we hear ourselves or anyone else talk about kids having you know, know, they repeat 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 the window for 10 minutes. Every day they do that. They keep doing it. But that's another category.

Sandra Dodd: 35:45

That's chores, that's service to the family. But these are entertainment. You don't need to repeat entertainment. It's part of that whole. Let's categorize things so that we can keep them separate. If I had a kid who 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.

Sandra Dodd: 36:27

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 bicycle and wrecked his bike, and a woman in the nearby house saw him and took him into her house it was, you know kept him overnight, told him stories and from her he learned about the Dutch East India Company and being in.

Sandra Dodd: 37:12

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. There's not I don't think there's a wall on Girl with the Pearl Earring, but a lot of his 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?

Sandra Dodd: 38:09

What did it represent? That there was a big wall-sized map in the Netherlands in those days. And so it goes into the age of exploration, international trade when did the silver come from to buy things that came like beaver pelts, that were buying from North America, from the French traders that they were making 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 geek for connections and culture and stuff. It was wonderful, vermeer's hat.

Cecilie Conrad: 38:43

I'm putting it in the show notes oh, yeah, it's an odd and great book.

Sandra Dodd: 38:50

It's on Audible audible too. I listened to it the last time I I consumed it.

Sue Elvis: 38:53

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 um 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 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. 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.

Sue Elvis: 40:16

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 and I stood there and I stood there and I stood there and I stood there and I didn't want to go. I just I could see the value in Picasso by actually standing in front of it. It was absolutely magnificent and I, 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 the book out and I started flicking through it and this real feeling of disappointment just flooded through me.

Sue Elvis: 41:16

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 like that Picasso on my wall I would have looked at it again. You know, 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. Oh, picasso's strange and I think maybe I was on that had that opinion as well for a while. Sort of some of them were 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 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.

Sandra Dodd: 42:15

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 US and paint a scene around on big canvas and they would paint like a 360, and then they would take it to the east eastern US 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, 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, that the 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, and so I think that when people are judgmental about collections or museums or art or whatever, they might want to consider that too.

Sandra Dodd: 43:35

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 so such an interesting 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, very recently.

Sandra Dodd: 44:43

So there's that sort of playing with art or playing with music, like I loved PDQ Bach. The man who did that, uh, was named Schickley. He's not around anymore, but he 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 um, that's pretty easy to find PDQ Bach and that's pretty easy to find PDQ Buck. 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 parody. And it's the same with PDQ Buck.

Cecilie Conrad: 45:22

I need a repetition of the second guy. Who was that Weird Al Yankovic.

Sandra Dodd: 45:28

I can send you a link. Yeah, do it, do it. Yeah, he does. 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. There's some of the best concerts I've ever ever seen.

Sue Elvis: 45:43

He's getting old now but um yeah, I was just thinking, thinking that that reminds me about concerts is 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 our children, I always felt like I would enjoy a concert more if I was familiar with the songs. It wasn't that I was going to go there and hear something new and that was the aim of it. I really wanted to go and already know the songs, a bit like going to watch Shakespeare, but already knowing the plot, so that you can absorb the full enjoyment out of it. Otherwise you have to come back and watch it again or 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.

Cecilie Conrad: 46:59

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 this repetitive behavior is bad, or we don't understand it in our children, but it's, 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.

Cecilie Conrad: 47:45

I just had a fun little coaching situation with a mother who texted me. I think my son is almost addicted to watching movies, watching little videos. The kid is young, so he's 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.

Cecilie Conrad: 48:16

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. 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 and the sun 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 son? It was not fair.

Sandra Dodd: 49:06

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.

Cecilie Conrad: 49:17

Yeah, she had already tried that before she texted me and she was frustrated. I get that, I understand. I understand because a five year old has not spent 30 years in the cold Nordic, because a five-year-old has not spent 30 years in the cold Nordic.

Sandra Dodd: 49:29

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 as he was wrong, yeah, she got to that point.

Cecilie Conrad: 49:40

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 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.

Sandra Dodd: 50:06

Yeah, oh, sue, you said that if you're, if 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, 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.

Sandra Dodd: 50:46

Like Les Mis, I did not want to listen to it because it's confusing, and 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?

Sue Elvis: 51:19

What about going to different productions of the same musical?

Sandra Dodd: 51:26

That's fun as well.

Sue Elvis: 51:27

But you want to go see how some this production team uh portrayed the musical or the ballet or whatever that?

Sue Elvis: 51:36

there is a lot of enjoyment in, or especially Shakespeare, seeing so many different um versions of it that it's familiar in one way. But there's it's. 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 yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 52:29

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 100. 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 a small group who came to hear each other sing. We would go around circle and I learned from that that the first time I would learn a ballad.

Sandra Dodd: 53:01

I think this is it, this is the way. It is aware that these 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 and 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. 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 with. The cure for that was to find a third and a fourth.

Cecilie Conrad: 53:41

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?

Sue Elvis: 53:53

Does that make sense?

Sandra Dodd: 53:55

No, because unless the person has changed, it's the same painting or the same song, 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 and 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.

Sandra Dodd: 54:26

So if you see a whole lot of productions of Hamlet, they're all going to be different but they're all going to be the same in a way yeah 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.

Sandra Dodd: 55:44

There are writings about famous Shakespearean actors in different times, from Shakespeare's time, 19th century. There will 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 videotape and so now we can watch videotapes of actors who are no longer around. I I think it's wonderful.

Sandra Dodd: 56:14

So I, yeah, I agree when 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 it, to watch videotapes 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 got to discuss this.

Cecilie Conrad: 56:50

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, there will be no tears. We, we cannot do it If someone gives us.

Sandra Dodd: 57:13

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 and I, like in a heartbeat, bought it because I wanted my, my son marty the same one to watch it and I wanted to watch it again. So I 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 theatre, it's not expensive.

Sue Elvis: 57:54

But sometimes, if you can, it's worth spending the money on a live production. I just got a story that it was maybe March 2024. West Side Story was showing on Sydney Harbour. West Side Story was showing 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 perform regardless of the weather. The only time they uh cancel the show is if there's a storm and it's electrically dangerous. And so what? My? I took my daughter up to Sydney.

Sue Elvis: 58:43

We had, um, 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 oh, 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 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, 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. Well, you get it between your family members at home, but to be part of the bigger, uh, like going to a concert it's, and you look around you and you think, wow, we're all enjoying this together, that's, 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.

Sue Elvis: 1:00:28

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 some 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 are harder for her, some things are easier. It just balances out.

Sue Elvis: 1:00:57

But yeah, just that camaraderie, just we had that same sort of feeling when my girls ran in a few 5k, 5k and 10k runs 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 and 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, oh, you've heard that once doing it. That. They're not sort of saying, oh, you've heard that once, that album 10 times, can we change it?

Sandra Dodd: 1:01:53

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 while you're looking at it, that would be communication with you, and I think it's similar with concerts. It's even at the movie theater.

Sandra Dodd: 1:02:12

When I was in my late teens I went and saw the Exorcist. When it was new and I didn't know what was going to 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 30irties. It'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.

Sandra Dodd: 1:02:33

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, right, but because everyone in the theater was scared, we were all like spooked. But I've heard stories of people with that when they went, 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. But we were all close, surrounded by people who were like oh no, oh no.

Sue Elvis: 1:03:14

Do you remember what was in that article, sandra, about how repetition helps us, and especially our children, deal with scary, horrific situations?

Sandra Dodd: 1:03:25

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

Sue Elvis: 1:03:31

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

Sandra Dodd: 1:03:53

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

Sue Elvis: 1:03:59

Yeah, no, I think it was somebody else, but it got me thinking about how, yeah, about it's the same with movies like Jaws. 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, of course you realize because the uh 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 you were, we were scared, uh, but you learn to deal with that. I guess that the next time we watched it, we were almost prepared. It wasn't such a trauma to watch and we noticed other things about it until 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 to eat somebody. You're sitting there wondering, 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?

Sandra Dodd: 1:05:16

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.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:05:34

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, it's we're back into the, to the community thing. It's like the family having the shared story. Now you have a shared story with a group of people, whereas some of them you don't even know, but you hold this emotion and you see that other people also hold it. That's, that's evolving your like capability of handling an emotion. So I think it's. I think 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 or or they feels dangerous, or feels conflicted or confusing.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:06:34

I think when we have these, we we've been talking a lot about art in this past, whatever time we spend, 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 Bobby movies or whatever movies we've been watching over and over, or even songs that we sing over and over, they are 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 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 read the Stephen King novels, we know the stories of Shakespeare.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:07:41

All of these story bits, I think we break them up in our psyche 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 I want to see the same movie over and over or read the same book or same play or 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.

Sandra Dodd: 1:08:28

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 common motifs in art and stories that all humans understand. And that's an interesting way to look at it. 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.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:08:53

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 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. 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 the language you don't speak. I didn't speak English at the time. Even if I did, I have, you know most of it, a lot of it.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:09:42

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. It was a very early animation, computer animation, 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.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:10:24

But we swear a lot in our language. It's not. We don't have christianity in the way you have it in the us. It's. It's very different, our religion. So we can swear, no one really care. Maybe don't do it in the church, but you can swear at home. We say that word all the time, all the time, and no one really cares. It's, 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 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, laughing, crying. My generation and people who were slightly younger I was in, I was about 30 at the time um, 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, and we had this little girl.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:11:29

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 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 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 on the grocery cart.

Sandra Dodd: 1:12:42

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 it, touch it, touch me. I want to feel dirty from rocky horror picture show.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:13:09

Rocky Horror Picture Show 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.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:13:55

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 you know. So she sits and she reads and she writes and she looks like studying. And my oldest son he's into started to going 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? But really he's studying.

Sue Elvis: 1:14:55

Lately. I Sorry, sorry, sandra, you go ahead. No, I was, I was gonna jump away. Oh, remember what it was. I'll be quick.

Sue Elvis: 1:14:58

I just thinking about, um, when I was playing this computer game called monsters expedition 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. 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 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, and I was thinking about how, if that had been chess, if you'd 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 was it was still thinking skills, but in the foundation of it all was. It was still thinking skills, and I came back to my game and 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. I 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 seeing if I could think my way through it.

Sue Elvis: 1:16:37

And it just looked like I was well, you just played that game, go and play this new one, or go do something, go outside and run or do something useful. And I think I played the game three times and I still couldn't get through it all 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. 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 um, my viewing time for watching things on YouTube, but also my abilities, and and that's all I wanted to say.

Sandra Dodd: 1:17:44

Sandra, hope you're remembering what you were going to say Mine's very related to what you just said. I was going to confess that I have 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 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 don't, I'm not interested. They have a bluey game, that's like that, and I'm like this is not, this is a playhouse. Playhouses are okay. We have a playhouse here, but it like a dollhouse. It's like bluey the dollhouse and then they have a peppa pig. That's not really puzzles, it's not really, uh, 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.

Sandra Dodd: 1:19:02

Not that these kids are unschooled, but they all go to preschool or school. But the thing is that when I see one that I know a lot of other people would go, that'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.

Sandra Dodd: 1:19:38

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, no-transcript 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 build-up of gathering those things one by one and that.

Sandra Dodd: 1:20:26

But that's a siege tower game. But 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, plants, and it's it's humor, it's cartoony, but uh, 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 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.

Sandra Dodd: 1:20:53

Aww so that's the kinds of games that are out. Might look like something stupid about zombies, but really they're 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. 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 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.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:21:51

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, it's probably there. I don't think my kids are stupid 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.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:22:21

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.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:22:40

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.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:22:58

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 unhealthy in some way, if I think it's threatening them or if I get any like really distorted feeling, well, I talk to them about that feeling and 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 interest and do the thing or something similar in a way that that makes more sense I, I my middle marty.

Sandra Dodd: 1:23:55

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 expressing my irritation with hearing it partly, but he was good about keeping things in his room, but it was my way to say a concern has arisen, but never mind 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. Don't think it will, but I'll let you know you know something.

Sandra Dodd: 1:24:36

But we, you did mention a piano, practicing piano, but we didn't even touch on the things that kids who, as Howard Gardner's I love Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences and he talks about kinetic intelligence, kinesthetic kinesthetic intelligence, which is dance sport, probably yoga 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, on the seat or standing up or whatever, until they really know it. But then if you see the bicycle stunt guys, 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. 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.

Sandra Dodd: 1:25:40

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 their, 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 and and um.

Sandra Dodd: 1:26:01

But I want to acknowledge that too, that people whose kids are physical, some in some families and in some 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, it's not like a video game.

Sue Elvis: 1:26:48

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. 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 then 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 surf. 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 the, I knew the 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 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 mom trying to do a serve. Mom said she could play tennis and it turns out that mum's lost all her 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've never. 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.

Sue Elvis: 1:28:44

Well, I was. I thought I wanted, I want. 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 what people are thinking around them, they just get on and do it. And we sort of lose that as we get older. Yeah, anyway, that was another thought I had about that.

Sandra Dodd: 1:29:17

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 the idea was, so that probably helped when they practiced on their own.

Sue Elvis: 1:29:34

Yeah, no, I certainly passed on that, and there must be teachers. I missed out Because 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 didn't want to play anymore because I wasn't good at it anymore.

Sandra Dodd: 1:30:00

I'm sorry that you got embarrassed, but they did need food, so there's to defend you. 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?

Sue Elvis: 1:30:20

was just thinking about.

Sue Elvis: 1:30:20

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, because, 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.

Sue Elvis: 1:30:46

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 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, 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.

Sandra Dodd: 1:31:49

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. But my oldest worked in a gaming shop from the time he was 14 until 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 in the paints for them and stuff like that. So it was that kind of game shop. So he learned everything about all those things.

Sandra Dodd: 1:32:23

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 window or on the phone phone orders quickly and legibly so that the pizza could be made. That was nice. You know that wasn't planned, but that made his handwriting quick.

Sandra Dodd: 1:32:56

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 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 but this place in Austin they were hiring. Ireland, I'm not sure where else, but his place in Austin they were hiring, and he ended up being a supervisor of 25 people.

Sandra Dodd: 1:33:33

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 had 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.

Sandra Dodd: 1:34:01

So he was that kind of manager. He wasn't the hiring and firing manager. There was 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.

Sandra Dodd: 1:34:16

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. I 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 and one of the clues is they start giving away their stuff.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:35:09

They give away their armor and horse to other people and it's very interesting, so they will I've heard about it before yeah and how, how the gaming, the big gaming communities have actually saved people's lives, and yeah and the game is uh what is it grand Grand Theft Auto, isn't it called that?

Cecilie Conrad: 1:35:35

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. Unless I'm curious and well I am, I feel I need to know because my boy's 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.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:35:58

It's all puzzle games maybe sometimes, but it's not for me, and which is fine. We don't have to all be the same, 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 that we were very afraid of and very much against in the beginning, my husband and I yeah, for reasons it's just it was interesting to see the depth and the breadth of what's involved in that.

Sandra Dodd: 1:36:26

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, 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.

Sandra Dodd: 1:36:58

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 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 do that for a few days the chinese gold farmers were stopped because they 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.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:37:46

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. Job. And I think the first critique, the 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. Sometimes that happens.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:38:17

But I think for my, 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 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 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?

Sandra Dodd: 1:39:22

in handy? No, except that everything is a hook to hang something else on. 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. 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 just have chemistry as a thing that they learned in vain, in a way.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:40:09

but they'll also be better at doing their laundry and cooking and storing things because they're aware of basic chemistry in handy or be a hook, as you say, on the wall when we talk about in schooling 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. 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.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:40:52

So 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 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.

Sandra Dodd: 1:41:32

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.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:41:41

Yeah, well, I'm sorry. Is it wrong to say English about?

Sandra Dodd: 1:41:47

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 whatever words we wanted, and so did the Brits, so I don't know where if Australia Australia probably has some other words that came along Like trucks, those little pickups. In Australia they call them something. What do they call those?

Sandra Dodd: 1:42:10

utes, utes yeah, it's 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. Um, so what I was going to 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 I 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 happen 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 tip them to the wall, but I bring them all home.

Sandra Dodd: 1:43:03

Somebody was sitting by a plant that was some sort of a cactus-y thing but it had spines and they got one of those and stuck it through and stuck it through the paper and folded the paper and Karen James drew somebody holding their eyes like this. The dots were the eyeballs and so it's this whole picture, I think. 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, and 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.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:43:55

Or folded it. Yeah, yeah. Does the line have to be straight? I'm going to have to ask the kids tomorrow.

Sandra Dodd: 1:44:05

Even if people all go 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, 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, their own skills or what are good words for that? That you have a talent or a special affinity for some subject or art or something.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:45:12

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?

Sue Elvis: 1:45:56

only only if the parent is involved and they're stacking in 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 back.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:46:06

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 for my life is when I was a young mother, 23 years old. I was single and I had this little girl so I must've been 25 as she was walking and we were walking along. We have some lakes in Copenhagen city center. There. It's a nice place to go for a walk.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:46:33

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 OK, let's go, let's move on. And she said I just want more and OK.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:47:02

And when I said let's go, let's move on three or four times, I was questioning that why 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.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:47:43

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. 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 quote-unquote 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 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.

Sandra Dodd: 1:48:43

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 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. Let's go to grandpa's room they, he has a little one of those little exercise 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 that it's like a. 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, it depends on the kid on the day.

Sandra Dodd: 1:49:28

But we we've laughed about that. That don't introduce something new, it'll just add it to the list, 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, 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, it's, 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 can show them and add to it. Rolling pin made a big difference for a while. So it's, 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.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:50:28

Yeah, hopefully I'm. 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, of things that we agree to repeat doing, but maybe that will open up too much of another subject, another conversation, I don't know. We've been talking for a while. How do you guys feel?

Sandra Dodd: 1:51:18

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 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.

Sandra Dodd: 1:52:20

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, because 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 in the tube, get there, get close, how to walk there. I would have been so lost I would have never found it.

Sandra Dodd: 1:52:41

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, um, 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 I was glad to do that and I had seen it before in Albuquerque.

Sandra Dodd: 1:53:10

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, 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 there. I was helping them see something that I thought was valuable, that I thought was beautiful.

Sue Elvis: 1:53:44

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 miss that one and we don't realize the second kangaroo is coming and then we swerve to that and our hearts are beating fast 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 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.

Sue Elvis: 1:54:40

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 to a 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.

Sue Elvis: 1:55:30

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 it 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 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 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.

Sandra Dodd: 1:56:34

A different aspect of that story. I would be glad to hear 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, kangaroos are quite exotic as well.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:57:05

Oh yeah, we don't have them. So even the fact that it's kangaroos you miss, not deer, which is why we would hate that.

Sue Elvis: 1:57:13

Yeah, 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, 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, a caution, turtles crossing. And we have duck signs.

Sue Elvis: 1:57:45

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 wasn't a new one, because we've had that happen before, but we haven't had it for a long time. 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, or we hope.

Sandra Dodd: 1:58:20

I was with two biologists on a road trip in Australia and there was a road-killed echidna and they let me get out and and look at it and touch it. And that was, you know, for that's interesting, I had never, ever seen one, not zoo, not anywhere, never except in photos. And 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, having seen a cow in the road, then you can imagine what a horse in the road would be like.

Sue Elvis: 1:59:10

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 on to any work. We're just spending our day chatting together over coffee and I really think that those are very valuable times.

Sandra Dodd: 1:59:40

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

Cecilie Conrad: 1:59:42

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 talking about unschooling.

Sue Elvis: 2:00:08

Thank you so much, cecilia, for hosting our conversations. I always look forward to talking with you and Sandra.

Cecilie Conrad: 2:00:19

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, 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 comparable. You know, is it a waste of time, like watching the Bobby movie over and over? Maybe not. Yeah, so thank you for today. Thank you, good night.