Keris Stainton's Blog, page 18

How Harry knows boys are better than girls

This happened ages ago and I saved it in drafts, but kept putting off posting it. I don’t really know why. I think maybe because I felt I should expand it with explanations of the damage being done to both boys and girls by the gender imbalance in TV and film, but I think you probably all know about that already (if not, check out the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media).

Out for a walk the other day, I decided to ask Harry and Joe whether they thought boys were better than girls. You know, just as a conversation-starter. We’re really careful around gender issues at home and Harry picks up on a lot of things himself – just the other day, we were shopping and he said, “The boys clothes are all dark and dinosaurs and adventure and the girls are pink and sparkly and hearts. Why?” – so I was half expecting him to say “They’re both great!” or even “Boys are better at some things and girls are better at others” but no. He said, “Of course they are!”

Um. Pardon me?

“What makes you think that?” I asked, through gritted teeth.

“Er. Everything! Only hundreds of TV shows and films. And everything else!”

A-ha. “Like what? I mean, what on TV and in films makes you think that boys are better?”

“Well boys – or males – are always the main character. Like Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Harry Potter. It’s always males! Some shows have girls, but the main character’s always male!”

It’s as simple as that.

“What are YOU doing reading an article about education?”

The title of this post is a reply to this comment on the home ed article I wrote for Parentdish:

“I bet they dont get out off bed till 10am then its bitty time. its not right anyway the boy will turn out to be a pansy potter.”

It is such an appalling comment that it made me laugh out loud. The ‘bitty time’ I actually get – I was recently talking to someone about how home ed still has a stigma, how people have an image of home educating families and ‘kids who are breastfed into their teens’ was one of the examples we came up with.

But ‘I bet they don’t get out of bed till 10am’? Well, what if we didn’t? Harry actually gets up at 6 at the latest and I don’t think I’m ever in bed past 8, but if we did stay in bed til 10, why would that bother the commenter so much?

But ‘the boy will turn out to be a pansy potter’… well. Where to even begin? I guess I’ll begin with ‘pansy potter’. Um, WTF? If you mean ‘gay’, why not say ‘gay’? If Harry does turn out to be gay, that’s fine with me, but this commenter seems to think that it would be as a result of spending too much time with his mother, which is both ignorant and misogynistic. In fact, it’s pretty good going for such a short comment.

When I was thinking about home ed, I did actually worry that it may make Harry and I too close. But now I’m not convinced there is such a thing as too close. Since he’s been at home we talk more, arguments are resolved more easily, we know each other better and – and this has been a surprise to me – we don’t seem to get sick of each other. How can that be a negative thing?

(Me and David do joke that Harry may end up like that kid in Sixteen Candles who, when his parents drop him off at the dance, shouts “I want to stay with you guys!”)

This Amy Poehler interview with Ellaraino is wonderful

I love this Smart Girls series. I love Amy Poehler.

“By the time she was 85 she put her foot down and said ‘It’s my time.’”

Ready to live

“We are always getting ready to live but never living.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

This has always been a big thing for me. I was always just trying to get organised. Trying to get myself sorted. When I had enough money. When I had enough time. Then I would get on with things. Properly.

But lately I’ve been thinking a lot about life. And how short it is. You know, I’ve been thinking about death. And how it’s coming. Yes, I am a riot at parties. (I did actually talk to my cousin about this at my sister’s 40th. No wonder she was drinking.) I don’t exactly feel morbid about it, I just feel like I wasted a lot of time (not lately, but certainly in my 20s and early 30s) and I don’t want to waste any more.

I’m lucky that my life is lovely right now. I love having the boys home. I love writing. Even David’s job has worked out so that he can have extra time at home. I’ve decluttered. I’m good to go.

And it’s given me a slight sense of unease. Not just that writing the above seems like I’m just willing something to go wrong* (I want to say ‘touch wood’ but I’m not superstitious), but because ‘if I can just get organised’ has been in the background, sucking my energy, for so long, that I feel a bit lost without it. Before I write for the day, I look around for something to do, but it’s done.** Or I read a chapter and think, “I’ll just…” What?

It’s most odd. But I’m getting used to it.

* This is where I get properly morbid. We’ll be driving along in the car, laughing, singing, and I’ll think “If this was a film we’d be mowed down by a truck about now.” Or I think that someone will be reading this blog post and thinking “She was so happy… and now she’s dead.”

** Honestly, it’s not all done. There is LOADS to do in the house. But it’s all big stuff, not the ‘organise filing, sort out books, get rid of old paint cans’ stuff that bothered me for years.

Fat, family and photos

A little while ago I read this amazing blog post: So you’re feeling too fat to be photographed. I loved this bit in particular:

And if you’re thinking that high school friend on Facebook will say to herself (“wow she has gained weight”) then . . . newsflash you DID. You gained weight. Shed a tear. Read a book. Drink a Sweet Tea. Watch Oprah. Whatever it takes. Accept this reality . . . YOU GAINED WEIGHT. The truth is you’ve gained a lot of other things too (a career, a family, some kids, a house, a love for travel, the ability to coordinate your separetes . . . ) and that girl from high school is going to spend a lot more time hating on those things then she ever will on your double chin.

Because that’s exactly what I do think, mainly thanks to Facebook, but god, who cares?!

So here are some photos that I meant to post here at the time my amazing friend Sam (Wyldshots) took them, but I held back because I look fatter than I like to think I look (also, I was horribly in need of a haircut). They’re gorgeous though, aren’t they?

[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]

Review: iPad Bluetooth keyboard from Groupon

A few weeks ago I was contacted by someone from Groupon, the website for online shopping deals, offering me something of my choice (from their site, obv.) to review.

I went for a Bluetooth keyboard for the iPad. Harry and I saw the pilot was using one when we went up to the flight deck on the way back from our hols last year and we’ve been after one ever since.

You connect it to the computer by USB to charge it up,  connect it with the iPad via Bluetooth, and then you’re good to go.

The keyboard also acts as a stand for the iPad, turning it into a sort of slapdash laptop. It’s fine for typing on for emails, etc., but I wouldn’t want to write a novel on it. Not least because the position of the shift key means I keep touching the up arrow instead and hopping up a line in my document, which is INCREDIBLY annoying. But that’s probably something I’d get used to if I used it a lot.

You can also use it as a protective case, but when I did this, it took me forever to separate the case and the iPad (perhaps there’s a knack) and I got quite stressed (and scraped all the varnish off my thumbnails), so I won’t be using it for that (I’m happy enough fitting them together loosely when they’re in my bag).

All in all, it’s a really useful addition to the iPad, I just wish they’d shift that shift key.

Happy Home Ed: Learning all the time

“I do not teach anyone. I only provide the environment in which they can learn.” Albert Einstein

Since we started home ed, I think about the above quote often. I thought about it last weekend when I walked home from the park with Joe (David and Harry had gone on ahead to get on with lunch). As we left the park, Joe asked about the electrical cables and pipes running along the road, and the steps down to the river where, for the last few months, a huge water tank has been installed. He pointed out different car colours and asked, “How many cars are black?”

He’d brought two sticks from the park (he’s mad about sticks) and, as he walked he tapped them together and kept stopping to drum with them on the floor. He rubbed them together and asked me how to make fire then he held them in an A shape and said, “How do you make a tent with sticks like this, Mama?”

He pointed out the pipes running down the side of a local factory and asked what they were and where they went. As we looked at the drain, he spotted a tiny spider dropping on a thread and asked where it was going and how it was doing that. It went up, it went down.

Almost home, he saw two big industrial bins and recognised our local council’s logo, asking me where he’d seen it before (fire station visit) and what it meant. He asked why there was some rubbish on the floor next to the bin and why there were two bins, different colours. As we walked on – me saying, “We’ll have missed lunch and dinner at this rate!” he said, “I thought you were going to stay in the bin, Mama. Cos you’re rubbish!” When I laughed, it echoed between the buildings and Joe said, “Why can I hear your voice?”

This was all in a half hour walk back from the park (the park is actually five minutes away, but it takes half an hour to walk back with Joe).

I recently read Learning All the Time by John Holt and I love this quote:

Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places. They learn much more from things, natural or made, that are real and significant in the world in their wn right and not just made in order to help children learn; in other words, they are more interested in the objects and tools we use in our regular lives than in almost any special learning materials made for them. We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions – if they have any – and helping them explore the things they are most interested in. In short, what we need to know to help children learn is not obscure, technical or complicated, and the materials we can use to help them lie ready to hand all around us.

And that is why we’re loving home ed.

[Have you seen my home ed blog, Happy Home Ed? I plan to do most of my home ed posting there, so would love it if you'd follow me there. I will still post here every now and then, I just didn't want to bore anyone who's not interested.]

Mothers’ Day, my mum, and MS

(I couldn’t pick just one photo of my mum, so I’ve used loads. Sorry about that. But it is Mothers’ Day.)

I wanted to write about my mum today. Not just because it’s Mothers’ Day, but also because it’s MS awareness month.

Mum was diagnosed with MS in the mid 80s. I didn’t really know much about it and, at first, it didn’t seem like a huge problem: she had some numbness and pins and needles in her hands and, I think, one leg. At first they’d thought it was a trapped nerve and it took a long time to get a diagnosis because, I think, she was in her mid-40s and, at the time, that was considered old to be developing MS.

She had Primary Progressive MS, rather than the much more common Relapsing Remitting MS, which meant that her symptoms just kept getting worse. And she had some very strange symptoms. Because it’s a neurological condition, she’d experience things like feeling like she’d wet herself or that there was water running down her legs, she woke up one night thinking bugs were crawling all over her legs. I also remember her saying she had a feeling of her legs being wrapped in barbed wire. She started to walk with a stick and, eventually, she was using a wheelchair for any great distance.

One of my worst memories is of her trying to get out of my sister’s car at a shopping centre and not being able to make her legs work at all. I remember her grabbing her trousers (she called them “slacks”) and trying to haul her own leg out through the door, but she couldn’t do it and she burst into tears. Eventually we got her into the wheelchair and the shop, which means it was followed by one of my happiest memories when I pointed at a sign for ‘Extra Thick Baby Wipes’ and said, “That’s not very nice, is it?!” and made her laugh. A lot. (Daft sense of humour runs in our family).

Mum died in 1999. She didn’t actually die of MS – she was diagnosed with leukaemia in November and died the following June – but she’d had multiple sclerosis for fifteen years. She’d had MS since I was 13 so sadly I have more memories of her ill than well.

Having said that, she was my best friend and I never thought I’d be able to go on without her. By the time she died though, she’d been so ill and so disheartened and depressed by everything that it was actually easier to let her go.

Multiple sclerosis affects around 100,000 people in the UK.

Most people are diagnosed between the ages of 20-40, but it can affect younger and older people too.

Almost twice as many women have MS as men.

You can learn more about it here (including ways you can help) and, if you’d like to donate, I’ve finally got around to doing what I’ve been meaning to do for a long time and I’ve started a tribute fund in Mum’s name.

Bullying Bieber

I am not a fan of Justin Bieber. I’ve never knowingly heard one of his songs. I thought keeping the fans waiting for however long it was – 40 minutes? 2 hours? – last week was absolutely appalling. But then last night, I saw a tweet that said

Justin Bieber: “I’ll never come back to the UK”. WE DID IT, BRITAIN.

And it bothered me. Imagine Justin Bieber wasn’t 19, but 9. And it wasn’t Britain, but school. He turned up, full of himself, acting like a twerp (the word Go Fug Yourself decided was the perfect one to describe him). People called him a “fucking cock” and a “fucking moron”. He reacted (wouldn’t you?). He struggled to breathe. He went to hospital. Then he (or rather his parents) decided they’d have to take him out of the school. And the school children said, “WE DID IT!”

I ran this past David and he said, “Yeah, but he was getting paid…” Does that make it okay to call him a “fucking cock/moron” to his face and expect him not to react? Isn’t that still bullying? David said that at school, yeah, it would be, but in this case no. Because he’s a twerp. So it’s okay to bully people you don’t like? People who annoy you? People who are full of themselves? People who don’t live up to their professional responsibilities?

What if, I suggested, it was at work and not school. A 19-year-old turns up, full of himself, acting like a twerp. The next day he’s 40 minutes late. People call him a “fucking cock/moron” and when he reacts they laugh. He goes to hospital. They roll their eyes because, god, he’s only just started work and he’s already off ill? He decides not to come back. And everyone cheers. I’m still not seeing how this isn’t bullying.

Caro Moses wrote a brilliant post for Bea about the “culture of bullying” in relation to Mary Beard. Many people were (rightly) angry about what happened to Beard because she seems lovely and we like her. But it’s fine to bully Bieber right out of the country because he seems like a bit of a git? I’m not convinced.

We’ve all been scared to take the first step…