Yoblog - Musings of a Church Youth Officer

The floor of my Church of Scotland colleague after our meeting.  A good time had by all present!

When all childcare options fail, the benefits of a job related to children is that it should be possible to take them along too.  This shall be tested tomorrow by taking my youngest along and may involve lots of chocolate coated raisins.  I tend to go out with a bag with many compartments with various degrees of bribery, starting with dried fruit, through the scale of biscuits to hardcore chocolate and crisps for emergency and guaranteed silence. 

Top tip - don’t give a toddler hula hoops at a funeral.  The crunch is deafening!

I’m still puzzling about how to explain death to my three year old without frightening or confusing him too much or leaving with a hospital phobia.  He has lost a great friend and a great grandmother in the past 3 months and still asks after them both in the present tense.

I guess it is not a problem?

So far, I’ve heard young children being told that “somebody is with baby Jesus”, “is hiding behind the clouds and the stars”, or has simply “gone somewhere where they can’t come back from”.  I have fuzzy memories of being told that you could get to heaven on a flying carpet when I was little!  All a bit confusing!

 At the same time, he does know that over enthusiastic playing with bugs in the garden results in them not moving any more and being “broken”.

I think I’ll let it rest..he’ll learn as part of growing up and childhood innocence is so short.

Saw a great programme on German TV last night involving single German farmers quite simply looking for a wife, mainly to help out on the farm, cook, clean and have children. 

It was compulsive viewing, more so because of how straight talking and down to earth the farmers were.  No beating around the bush or looking out for the pasty, dumpy girl’s feelings.  And most of the farmers were no oil painting either.  It was refreshing to see their honesty and directness so that no time was wasted just for the sake of it.  Mind you, when they found a lady that they liked, they weren’t wasting any time in getting in there either!

Hellooooo……would you like to see my piglets??!!

http://www.rtl.de/singles/singles_942352.php

Just when you think you have got into a good routine the school holidays creep along and it all goes to pot.  Thank goodness for CBeebies, decent weather today and Mill Farm in Livingston.  We’ll tire out the children at the Farm this morning and then they should sleep most of the afternoon and I can fine tune the Youth presentation for next weeks Synod.  The challenge will be to try and make it interesting enough that the attendees will mention it to their youth and children’s workers and won’t just remain asleep!

It’s always a bit frightening making a drastic career change, but today it all felt right. 

I tried to get my head around my new mobile phone/life organiser (Nokia E61i if you’re interested) and start some planning and organising.   

Lots of people have slightly different ideas of what the Diocese of Edinburgh’s Youth and Children’s Officer is going to be doing! Watch this space.