Monday Paintblogging

I’m feeling way too sick to write anything much (stupid lungs), so I bring you – more kid art.
Chroma Kidz washable paint on Reflex A4.

Filed under: Life, family, fun

Friday fun: A day at home

The lad’s not quite 100% today, and we’ve kicked back at home with some movies, popcorn, and a box of drawing tools. He decided to draw a pageful of “monsters”. And here it is.

Caption by the lad:

“A scary monster with long Grinchy claws,
An eleven-legged spider with a red back,
A mummy. The kind that is wrapped in bandages, not you,
A three-eyed horse bee,
A tiny mouse-creature. Whenever a mouse sees him, he gets scared and he runs away. And that little spot in him is his bones,
And a ghost.”

Detail (with a little photomanipulation):

I like them all, but it’s hard to escape the fact that the mummy is particularly awesome.

[ETA] Two more from this morning, this time in acrylic paints. (click for larger version)

A tiger

A walrus on a beach

Filed under: Life, family, fun

Where the wild political parodies are

My ISP hates me and I can’t hardly browse anything at the moment. Luckily I have siblings with computers who also have kids whose cuteness is second only to mine own sprogs’ cuteness who can be blogged about.

Image credit: originally uploaded by tigitogs

I uploaded this photo from my sister’s extensive collection of sprogshots, taken yesterday in the Enmore/Newtown area. Does anyone recognise the new head on the Wild Thing’s shoulders? If it is Teddy Roosevelt, why?

And speaking of favourite books for kids, what do your littlies like best at bedtime reading? Mine, alas, think they’re too old for bedtime stories now, at least for mum and dad reading them anyway. I used to love storytime.

Filed under: family

Work/Life/Family Balance in NSW

On a day dominated by the media attempting to beat up a story about NSW Premier Morris Iemma taking time off to spend the school holidays with his young children, another story got hardly any traction. Both stories tie into Guest Hoyden Helen’s post from last week on the “Real World” of time-management around school holidays not being perceived as a male i.e. “real” issue.

Call for curbs on unsocial work hours

ALL fathers should receive two weeks’ paid paternity leave, and unsocial work hours should be restricted to preserve family life, a group of academics says.

Increased retention rates and lower absenteeism would be just two of the benefits to employers, while for employees it would mean more control over their work arrangements and being able to accommodate family and caring responsibilities, they said. The Benchmarks for Work and Family Policies report, taken from the latest Australian and international research, pushes against the trend towards excessive work hours.

Of course, it’s exactly those excessive work hours that Mr Iemma is being slammed for not performing, the accusation that “he lacks the commitment to lead NSW” being made most forcefully by Liberal leaders former ex-Premier of NSW Nick Greiner and ex-Federal Opposition Leader John Hewson, with fellow Liberal ex-Premier of Victoria Jeff Kennett reported as joining this criticism even though the only quotes from Kennett that I can find sound wistful about his own failure to spend the time with his own family that Iemma is insisting upon, noting that Kennett’s wife actually left him for six months because he was failing to share family duties, before getting onto the obligatory denunciation of NSW as a “basket case”.

Another Liberal ex-leader in NSW, former Opposition Leader Kerry Chikarovski, sounded reluctantly yet staunchly supportive of Iemma’s prioritisation of his family,

Filed under: Media, culture wars, family

Talking about acting childish,

I finally downloaded some pics from my cameraphone, and here are the tiglets.

Tigling is 12, and togster is 14, but they still sometimes act like they’re 5. Good on ‘em.

Filed under: family, photoblog

“Acting childish” – from Feministe

There’s a long and involved thread on Feministe right now about the much-bandied-about phrase “I hate children!” The guest blogger, Roy, wonders why open hate speech against children is perfectly ok, when it’s not generally acceptable against other group of disempowered and victimised people. For varying values of “not generally acceptable”, anyhow; much bigotry against women, against fat people, against old people, against poor people, against people with disabilities, against immigrants, and against some other groups seems to be still perfectly acceptable in many circles, or at least winked at.

There are many meanders and subthreads and analogies, but I’m just going to pluck out this comment by EG, as one of the ones that made me think. Following a discussion of “childish” behaviour and its putative unpleasantness and discourtesy:

We wouldn’t describe that behavior as “acting like a kid” if it wasn’t how kids acted.

Really? Right, because folk wisdom is always so very accurate. Does “act childish” mean “express enthusiasm and interest in the world,” “sit quietly by yourself and cut out paper dolls for two hours” or “learn everything there is to know about sharks”? No, it doesn’t. “Act like an adult”- does that mean harrass women on the street, drink too much, talk very loudly on cell phones in public places, talk very loudly right behind me when I’m at the movies, and commit murder? Because the overwhelming majority of perpetrators of such lousy behavior are adults. No. “Act like an adult” means “be on your best behavior.” So what does that mean? It means that adults control the discourse.

Filed under: bigotry, family, interblog

Three, four, five, look at him jive

The simplest ideas, eh? A chap, Juergen, got to wondering what his cat, Mr Lee, got up to all day. So he rigged up a collar-cam and sent him off. The result? Strangely enthralling shots of a day in the life of a cat.

In the forum, a viewer asked about the striking lack of people in the shots. Juergen responds: “I have never seen people on the CatCam photos. I guess one reason is the location. We are living in the USA. Here it is not usual to walk around. If people move then by car… “. I don’t know how accurate that is. The last time I stayed in the States for any length of time was in 1990-1991, in Durham NC, and I do remember very few people walking around though. At the time I thought perhaps it was a little chilly for some.

Filed under: fun, pets

Consumerism and children (and parents)

Lauren is guest-blogging this week at Feministe. Her review of a book about marketing to children, and her discursion about her own rules for buying toys for her son, is a cracker of a post.

Filed under: Read 'ems, consumerism, family

Bragging on the offspring

The tigling just received a HD+ for her first long narrative assignment in English this year, a story about old age. I think I have a parent-crush on her teacher for writing this evaluation:

Beautiful work [tigling]. Mrs Wentworth is a vivid, fully realised character who instills a sense of curiosity in the reader. I like the way the “schemie” defies her so tension is maintained. Do you think one more sentence would make your ending more balanced? It comes a little abruptly. Great work nevertheless. Would you type this up to submit for the school magazine?
P.S. Your control over sentence structure is very sophisticated for Year 7.

The tigling’s story is Nac Mac Feegle fanfic by the way. I didn’t get to read it before she handed it in.

Filed under: education, family

Another one for the social crime list: Parenting While Disabled

A few days ago, I talked a bit about invisible disability and the access issues that people seem to just not think about. Today I’ve been reading the Blogging Against Disablism Day posts at Diary of a Goldfish. Tokah has a post up at From Where I’m Sitting:“Universal Design… not!”. Her rant shouldn’t be revelatory, but it is.

Tokah parents a six month old girl, and has been unable to find childcare equipment that has been designed with wheelchair accessibility in mind. Change tables are an exercise in pain, highchairs are unusable, strollers are useless, and cots:

If the side is up, I can’t reach over it. If its down, it blocks me from getting close enough to reach into the crib.

I poked around the web a little. It returned few pages, mostly from the UK, talking about childcare assessments for parents with disabilities. Almost all of the equipment links I followed led to equipment for parents with sensory disabilities, like baby monitors for Deaf parents. did find this one off-the-shelf wheelchair babycarrier. Just one.

It seems most parents are left to either try to adapt themselves to clunky, inaccessible equipment, or to get someone to custom-make items like this accessible cot. (How many adapted items meet written national safety standards, I wonder?)

This is a problem that should be trivially solvable. But it just hasn’t occurred to manufacturers that a person who uses a wheelchair might be a parent. Or that a parent might just be someone who uses a wheelchair. Or it has, but they can’t spin enough cash from it. Sheesh.

Check out the rest of the BADD posts, and keep a watch on the Gimp Parade for tomorrow’s Disability Blog Carnival #14.

Filed under: disability, family