scareyt

An aside - the sexist content in Octonauts, Treefu Tom & Andy's Dinosaur adventures makes me so angry coming from the BBC. The toy companies just want to sell us twice as much crap as we need, which they can do by convincing kids that boys and girls must like and want completely different things from each other. At least you can understand their motivations. But from the BBC, it's just laziness and the result of having people in charge who have never thought this stuff through. It's enraging.

Pickle Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > At the risk of sounding callous, I can't help > thinking there is an awful lot of over thinking > going on here. > > They are kids. Kids will play with whatever takes > their fancy in that particular 5 minutes of their > day. When my son chooses to play with a doll he > is not making a conscious decision to break down > male gender stereotypes, when my daughter plays > with trucks/mud/bugs she's not sticking two > fingers up at the world and celebrating her > feminist beliefs. > > As a parent, I'm confident that reading Cinderella > to my daughter is not going to result in her > getting into a relationship when she's older where > she is controlled and does what she's told at all > times. > > Let them be children. The trouble is that from these all toys and stories they are absorbing genuine beliefs that will shape their thinking, their ambitions and their prejudices long term. My son is 5, obsessed by Lego Ninjago, and I am now starting to hear him say that girls are boring. He's learnt first from Octonautes, then Andy's Dinosaur Adventures and Treefu Tom, and now Ninjago and Star Wars, that boys get to do most of the cool exciting fun stuff, with the occasional girl joining in sometimes but even then mostly just cheering on the boys. And he's too little to make the leap that that's because this all stuff is all being written by people who are rehashing and repeating the unexamined cultural beliefs that they absorbed when they were little, he just thinks it must be because girls are boring.

bodsier Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > These old classics didn't just misrepresent women, > they underrepresented cultural/racial differences. > Discussion about gender issues ought not be > discussed in isolation IMO. > There is a huge discrepancy between children's > story books exported from the uk which is huge > compared to those imported from around the world. > Pippi longstocking was one of the few because it > won awards in Sweden. Perhaps it's more likely to > change if we request books we would like to read > from Independent book shops and less likely to > happen via Amazon which is well known for its > exploitative practices? Yes! I was horrified to notice, for the very first time, all the sexism and racism in the Narnia books which I completely utterly loved as a child, when I started reading them to my son. It was there all along, we just didn't used to notice it.

I have two spare tippitoes ones that we don't need any more if you would like them.

Hi all, I now live in a Ninjago-obsessed house and the almost total lack of girls in this imaginary world really bothers me. So I wrote a letter to the people behind it - published here if anyone want to read and/or share it. Thanks! https://medium.com/@Sarahjflip/dear-dan-and-kevin-an-open-letter-to-the-hageman-brothers-writers-of-the-lego-ninjag-series-839b76e84be9?source=tw-2273c7ec3be9-1444298290429

Loads of good recipes for fussy kids here: www.sneakyveg.com

Hi, I just saw this press release and thought it might be of interest. It looks like this is going to be a genuine option for anyone who wants it. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/summer-born-children-to-get-the-right-to-start-school-later

Thanks everyone. Dean a that sounds like a horrible memory. He drinks plenty of water during the day so I don't think it's that. He's been out of pull ups for over a year and seems to go brought phases of being dry and phases of just sleeping through it. We'll try pyjama pants for a while and see how we get on.

Has anyone tried one of these? My 5yo frequently wets the bed, we've tried reminding him to have a big drink at 4pm and limiting drinks after that but it doesn't seem to make any difference. It doesn't seem to bother him and the alarms sound quite brutal / weird / uncomfortable but I would like to solve the problem before it starts upsetting him. I don't really want to put him in those pyjama pull ups but I'm currently washing his sheets every day and I don't want it to drag on. Has anyone tried an alarm? Or have any other ideas? Thanks!

My son's BCG jab site went quite gross and took months to heal. When I took him to the GP he said that often happens and also said that he thought the BCG is unnecessary and also quite ineffective as vaccinations go and he wouldn't recommend doing it. Which was annoying to hear after we had had it done. I'm not at all against immunisations but I probably wouldn't have had it done if I'd known.

Posh bread that's gone hard makes lovely French toast. I'm happy to buy my own compost bags as long as they keep the libraries open. Southwark are great compared to Lambeth.

Definitely museum of London, it's great for those ages and much smaller and less overwhelming/crowded than the big South Kensington museums. Also the Docklands museum has a really nice little soft play area, and a proper restaurant next door / attached for a nice lunch. Changing of the guard is fun and you get a good view if you watch them do their thing in the barracks instead of outside the palace. There's lots of marching about and music in the courtyard of the barracks before they go across the road and everyone else waits outside the palace to see it there. I used to have a blog about London days out with a toddler - it's here if you want more tips / ideas. Https://Www.toddlertrips.wordpress.com

The Phoenix sounds great. I came across this kids magazine a while ago and thought it looked good. It's aimed at younger children and is a magazine rather than a comic but is also free from plastic tat, ads and gender-related nonsense. http://www.okido.co.uk/

There is an ice rink in Streatham. It's pretty busy but is mostly families with small kids on Sunday mornings. I think the public session starts at 11:00.

I'll come!

That's weird Buggie. What is their FB page called? I couldn't find it. So if I'm understanding that email correctly, the LAs have been paying just over ?200k a year to Kings for them to provide 4 midwives to run the service, but it was costing Kings more than that to provide them because they have to back-fill those 4 positions using agency staff? And they want to end the secondment arrangement so that 4 permanent roles will be created instead? If that's true it sounds kind of sensible and sounds like we need to be pressuring Lambeth and Southwark instead/as well as Kings? And surely 200k is enough money to pay 4 midwives salaries? I wonder why it got to that point though, why they couldn't have just agreed between Kings & the LAs to create and advertise the permanent roles. Or have I totally missed the point? Sorry for all the questions!

Oh that's so crap. It can't cost very much to run the service and it's such a stupid short-term way of looking at health budgets to bin it when breastfeeding is proven to result in better long-term health outcomes. And it's a horrible example of austerity cuts targeted at women. New mothers are so vulnerable and need all the support they can get. What can we do?

It is insanely complicated.

The main differences are in how places get allocated. For day nurseries, independent pre-schools and 3+ entry to private schools, what matters is putting your child's name down on a waiting list as soon as possible. For reception entry to state schools, what matters is how close you live to the school. (Except DVI which allocates 45 places on distance criteria and 45 places to regular church-goers.) For nurseries attached to state schools places are allocated first to siblings and then based on distance, and as there are generally fewer nursery places than school places you usually have to live incredibly close to the school to get in. For private school entry at reception, what matters is whether or not the school likes your child, based on an informal assessment session held during the year before entry when the children are 3 or 4. Most local private schools are oversubscribed, especially for entry at 4+, so they pick and choose between all kids on their waiting list. So it's worth visiting day nurseries now and putting your name down at any that you like. If you decide to go for a nanny or childminder instead you can wait until nearer the time you will need them. Nellys nursery has a good reputation and notoriously long waiting lists so might be worth checking out first. For schools, unless you are just about to move house anyway, I wouldnt worry about it yet. I don't know anyone locally who is unhappy with their child's school. Edited for clarity(!)

San Francisco could be quite chilly in November, it's often noticably colder than everywhere else nearby because of the fog. Santa Cruz is a lovely laid-back little town on the coast between LA and San Francisco if you fancy somewhere with a beach, great food & coffee and a bit of a hippy vibe in a good way.

Yep! Hm actually late 80s early 90s as I am quite old. Once my friend had a Mills & Boon novel in her bag and ended up reading it out loud as a bedtime story to everyone on the top deck at 3am.

Many happy teenage hours spent on the top deck of night buses home from the Venue in New Cross - often somehow the most random and entertaining part of a night out! Also meant to add - my boyfriend at uni grew up in a chocolate-box village in the Cotswolds and 1/2 his friends & relatives seemed to be working their way through community service orders for getting into fights after closing time with people from the next village. Maybe that was just them though.

Hi we stayed at the Hilton in Bracknell for Legoland, it's about a 20 min drive away but was surprisingly cheap on a Sunday night as part of a package with two days of park tickets. It has a nice pool & saunas which made it a treat. No kids menu for food though so the evening meal in the bar there was quite expensive. But so much nicer than the Legoland food we didn't mind! Having two days in the park was great and we all loved it. Our son was nearly 5 and I'm glad we waited till then to go - I think it would be quite frustrating/tiring for a two year old.

Agree re their terrifying toilet - it's like something from a horror movie.

Bumpy your teen years sound lovely! My sister was really into horses and used to get up at 5am on a Saturday to get three different buses to get to our nearest riding for the disabled centre to volunteer there all day. New Forest life would have suited her much better.