HAVE A BABY? TODDLER? PRESCHOOLER?
You’ve come to the right place. Let me do more than just support you as a busy parent. Let me guide, inspire and nourish you as your child’s first teacher. All parents want to make a difference in their child’s life.
I’ve put my heart and soul into this little project called Baby Bear’s Chair. I want it to express the values that are central to how I wish to live and work for ever more: simplicity, community, sustainable. After 4 decades in the classroom educating children in their first year at school, I felt an urgency to communicate my passion for teaching reading and the environment to parents with babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers. This creative early years project feeds my soul, ignites my spirit and makes my heart sing and dance with joy.
This is the original inspiration, BABY BEAR’S CHAIR gifted in 1997
Inspired by the small wooden chair that our daughter and son loved as infants, and affectionately called, baby bear’s chair and the realisation that a chair has a place, not just because it is sustainable but because it links us to our story and is treasured for multiple reasons. It is my hope our small locally made wooden chairs become much more than just a chair.
I am certainly motivated by an intergenerational mindset and its power to connect. I’m committed to the integrity of social responsibility, championing the circulation of pre-loved storybooks and books on loan from libraries. “There is something special about having storybooks, toys and clothes passed down from older cousins, siblings and friends. These belongings carry their own stories and memories, and this makes them meaningful in the way that new is not.”
Today, I’m exploring new ideas on building regenerative communities and cultures that we have perhaps begun to lose; Baby Bear’s Chair is just one way to be a part of this global movement. Good parenting is about moving beyond the empty consumption of junk and towards being more human.
My early years philosophy and, if you like, my manifesto about what I cherish: the books, the courses and presentations we prepare at Baby Bear’s Chair are my way of sharing my social, cultural and environmental goals for harmony, engagement and participation in ecology. It feels so important to connect babies to nature and their environment and to dissuade the over use of screens in the early years of a child’s life.
Baby Bear’s Chair is an expression of my heritage. My unique early experiences and deep connection to the rainforest and the sea were wired into my DNA as an inheritance passed down in my family, from one generation to the next. It’s an inheritance that tells the story of my relationship of life, identity, family, community, culture and the love of the natural world.
As always, Baby Bear’s Chair will be an expression of my faith in the rewards of working with parents and grandparents, like a close-knit intergenerational team. All of them, becoming like members of my extended family who brought their love and desire to make the ordinary little moments count – in other words: to be wise, to go mindfully and to find their rhythm. They are all part of the Baby Bear’s Chair Story.
Alison and her husband Terry, live in Earlville with their large rescue pup, Pearl, in a house with 43 steps! Within this rainforest setting, Alison is creating a series of stunning photographic books on sustainable, nature play for young children and their parents, grandparents, great grandparents and extended families.