Where have we been?

Sick!!!  Again!!  I went to a lovely GP who said that 5-6 colds a year for an adult is normal, and I seemed to have all of them over this winter.  10-11 colds is normal for toddlers and small kids!  Kinda makes me feel better to get an average like that, TBH.  I have been feeling we are TOO sick lately, but this does put it in perspective.  With Lolly and I going to more and more group things with other toddlers and young children, and Snail at special school, we get exposed to so many germs, and with our immune systems a little down, aren't fighting things off as well as we might.  So we've all had terrible viruses, this last one was a doozy and still has us coughing and bleary eyed.  Poor Lolly has such gummy eyes of a morning that she asks "Mummy, lights on! Help me!" which is just so heart wrenching, poor lovely girl.  She is MUCH improved today after several days of low fever, terrible coughing, and conjuncitivitis.  I had such a terrible throat that I have been on anti-biotics, for the first time in AGES!  We caved and gave Lolly a dose of Nurofen to give her a break last night, and she had a good sleep all night and seems very much improved this morning.

So, after my sick-y whinging, I have spent most of the last few days on the couch watching toddler TV and surfing the web (at painfully slow speeds as we are shaped til tomorrow, FFS!) reading about Montessori, mostly.  It's been a good opportunity to soak in knowledge, that I don't usually get as we are quite busy, normally.  So I've been doing the (slow loading) rounds of Montessori blogs and websites, getting some book recommendations together, bookmarking blogs I've enjoyed, and gathering some materials for basic practical life and sensorial activities to do with her here at home, to reinforce our NIDO time, which is going to be a focus for us for the rest of the year.

I've noticed a fair few of the Montessori blogs are homeschoolers, and a lot are Catholic, which is just a bit different from my own more than secular perspective.  I have been trying to look past daily catchisms when reading them - lol.  It is also often quite structured during the day, with specific "school" times, and structured stuff throughout.  But, that said, there are some amazingly lovely blogs out there with some simply awesome schoolrooms in them.  Just wow!  Try - What DID we do all day?  And Wildflowers and Marbles school room!  :o  That is one amazing space!  Now, this is not the kind of thing most of us are going to set up.  And it does encourage the idea of "school" as separate from everyday life, and I am much more into the unschooling - all is life learning - idea than that of set times, especially at home.  But these are wonderful spaces, and inspiring to read about what these children are doing there.  Lots of ideas for adapting to our own home.

I love the practical explanations and ideas you can find at MontessoriMom, at the inspiring My Montessori Journey, and here at The Montessori Child at Home.  The links found and organised by What DID we do all day? - linked above - are just amazing, you can spend days here reading and bookmarking and adding to readers :D

I'll add some pictures of work Lolly is enjoying once our Interwebs resets!  Check out the links, there are great ideas for kids there even if you are not Montessori, or if you unschool, or school!  :D  And yes, I know the irony of watching kids TV while researching Montessori :p

The Carnival of Feminist Parenting

The Fourth Carnival is up at Mother's for Women's Lib. Thanks heaps to Anji for all the work that goes into these. It's some great reading.

Linkfest

Some links from my blogular travels of the past couple of weeks:

- on the "mum" issue: Arwyn at Raising My Boychick.

- for the Doctor Who fans, a nice peice on Ace from Chally guest posting at the Hoydens About Town: Ace.

- on abortion arguments, how to defeat, from Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy.

- Bene on Dollhouse, I've been reading reacitons to the show with interest (as a Joss fan thus far, with some high hopes for Dollhouse that are yet to be fulfilled). See Lauredhel at the Hoydens on this here. And qeerty on the show here. The Hoydens thread has more links, it's an interesting debate, one I might write more on once I've seen more of the show.

- I loikes the Post Logical Parenting Conference cartoons at Mama is... start here.

- I read with interest the feminism blogosphere as digital colonialism that started with the What if peice at Professor, What If? here. Many many links and responses there in the comments.

- ETA - more on the digital colonialism storm, the author's apology here. And in the comments there, a link to this post by Portly Dyke on how to fuck up which is well worth a read.

"Sweet" or not?

I love the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks, and last week we saw a great example at our local fruit and veg place! DinnerDad took this photo (and yes we did send it in to the blog) :).

A Photo a Day Challenge - 365 Photos for 2009

I am doing this Challenge, where you commit to taking a photo a day for the whole year. I got the idea from Anaed at her lovely blog, words. And her photos so far are simply lovely. Well, I actually only decided to do it on the 5th of January, so will have to go a few days into 2010 to get the full "year"!

Here is my first photo (which I happened to take on the first of January!):


See my Album here. I'll post them on the blog when I can, too.

In family news, Lolly is, we think, teething, and has had rough nights all week. She had a fever early in the week, and a couple of unhappy spews, too, poor love. It is a kidlet week, and we've been relaxing a lot. We did manage the Art Gallery yesterday, and some lunch and shopping today. DinnerDad is off work for 3 weeks, which is fab!

And check out our new family blogs! DinnerDad and Games R Me

Here is yesterday's photo, I couldn't resist the yoghurt-y face!


I am taking a lot of portrait shots at the moment, my third shot is of Smash (not a good one, but needed a shot for that day!), and I photograph Lolly all the time. Am loving my new Canon EOS 40D. Loving it a lot!

Gotta go, bub crying and hopefully she's off to sleep soon!

Link-fest, or, on things I read about while holding my in-arms baby

I've been following a few blogs and sites around the traps and thought I'd collect some links here for the interested (oh yeah, coz my blog is so popular and has millions of readers!).

On the US election and Sarah Palin, the quandary's of the current election saga, (which I've been following in public in this thread in the Online Feminist Workshop at Joyous Birth) I liked the Women's Media Centre piece by Robin Morgan: When Sisterhood is Suicide, her other great piece is Goodbye to All That #2, both some wonderful insightful commentary on the state of the union, and the state of feminism generally.

"Goodbye to some young women eager to win male approval by showing they’re not feminists (at least not the kind who actually threaten thestatus quo), who can’t identify with a woman candidate because she is unafraid of eeueweeeu yucky power, who fear their boyfriends might look at them funny if they say something good about her. Goodbye to women of any age again feeling unworthy, sulking “what if she’s not electable?” or “maybe it’s post-feminism and whoooosh we’re already free.” Let a statement by the magnificent Harriet Tubman stand as reply. When asked how she managed to save hundreds of enslaved African Americans via the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, she replied bitterly, “I could have saved thousands—if only I’d been able to convince them they were slaves.”" (Morgan's Goodbye to All that)

I wish Hilary had been chosen too. I feel completely ripped off that she wasn't. Obama should have waited his turn. But given the choice they've got over there, women should remember (from Morgan's Sisterhood piece):

"Bottom line: Obama’s book title: Dreams from My Father. McCain’s book title: Faith of My Fathers. Patriarchy? You think? Neither one gets it. BUT. One doesn’t not get it much more than the other."

*sigh*

Echidne of the Snakes has some great election posts, I appreciated the October 8 entry Politics in Pictures: A Feminist Essay.

"Not being "the other" has some great advantages. For instance, when John McCain or Joe Biden do something stupid they only affect their own reputations, because white men are not "the other". They are individuals. When Barack Obama or Sarah Palin do something stupid they affect the reputations of African-Americans or women respectively (at least among all racists and sexists). They serve as embodiments of the groups they represent. This is the case as long as Firsts are necessary, as long as we only have a handful of individuals on which to base our group assessments.

On some level most women, for example, know this. Thus, when I look at the pictures in this post I can see them as making fun of Sarah Palin but my stomach thinks differently. It suspects that the pictures also make fun of me."

Too true.

The Huffington Post offered this perspective on the last presidential debate:

"What John McCain said last night, in front of millions of viewers, was belittling to women. He not only mocked Barack Obama for supporting women's health, he mocked women across the country. The debate last night was just the most vivid example of what we've known all along: John McCain is out of touch on women's health.

Just a couple months back, McCain had the deer-in-the-headlights look, and couldn't answer whether he thought it was fair that insurance companies that cover Viagra should also cover birth control.

And, remember the time when McCain was asked whether he thought contraceptives helped stopped the spread of HIV? McCain's response, "You've stumped me."

And there's more. Let's count the ways that John McCain is out of touch on women's health and women's rights

*He's voted 125 times against women's health.
*He wants to overturn Roe v. Wade.
*He opposes funding to prevent unintended and teen pregnancies.
*He opposes requiring health care plans to cover birth control.
*He opposes equal pay legislation, saying it wouldn't do "anything to help the rights of women."
*He's proposed a health care plan that will be worse for women."

The Hoyden's offered a good summary here.

The Feminist Law Professors (I love this blog, it's sooooo nerdy and I wish I belonged to it!) offer some great pieces on the election, this pictorial was quite the eye opener. I can't beleive what passes for advertising. Do these people not THINK, have they never heard of FEMINISM for fuck's sake! Get annoyed here.

Finally, at Femmessay, a blog I only recently discovered, which I am really enjoying, this post on what Palin means to feminism.

"This entire election cycle has been drifting somewhere between bizarre and fiasco. I am convinced that I am witnessing, in glorious technicolor, the sharp undeniable summary of the loss of decades of progress slipped away inside of a single decade. This is not my beautiful house!

All of it is terrifying and weird, but perhaps I take Palin the most personally. I hate that I do, but there it is. It is bad enough that we have such an inept person sapping up tax dollars at all, but that she is a woman meaning to represent a more “ladylike”… *snarl, wince*… “glide through the glass ceiling” makes the entire thing unbearable. Every male I know, and many I didn’t know before they imposed on me in a rush of trying to find a woman to whack pinata-like with their misogyny sticks, have asked me to account for her, forcing me to constantly have to explain that I am, in point of fact, a completely separate human being who only happens to have a karyotype in common with her. Why the fuck should I explain her?

Oh, but the measure of woman has just resurged in earnest, hasn’t it now? Thanks to the wonder of the Patriarchy, that charming nightmare carousel that you just can’t get off of, every single woman who ever aspires to that office will be instantly tarred with the same brush. Every woman with a “Fargo” accent, every woman with brown hair and glasses, every woman who is attractive to men, or has children, or is Christian, or is running for executive office, or is, well, female… will always and forever invoke the memory of Palin and the world will wonder aloud if she will be as stupid and incompetent because she’s… well, a she.

Thank you, Patriarchs, for rummaging through the list of potential contenders for veep nomination and plucking out the candidate who manages to meet every possible fantasy the Patriarchy has ever had of women in order to play her hamhandedly like a card, crumpling her up under the pressure of serving the interests of a dying political faction comprised largely of people who hate women, and lobbing her at us like so much garbage, then having the cheek to claim sexism when we say that she looks like a crumpled up card of the Patriarchy. This entire series of events revolving around Palin is the most loud and painful display of political carnage that I have ever witnessed against women in my lifetime. We’ll be cleaning this blood off the walls of the White House for years."

I love the misogyny sticks imagery! Hilarious (and sad).

On a lighter note, here is a post at 365 Days of Trash with a Tie fighter made of disposable coffee cups! Awesomely cool! Check out the blog while you're there, it's a good one. I'll have to do a link-fest to some of the urban homesteading and other green (and brown) blogs I like next time.

Go the blog! It's an interesting way for everyone to express themselves, and get their opinions out there. Fascinating stuff really. The academic in me wants to go look up some literature on it right now - lol.

Enjoy the links!