Yesterday was my youngest daughters birthday!

Posted on | June 30, 2009 | 1 Comment

Which means it’s the 5th anniversary of her birth, which got me thinking…
The birth story of Gwyneth Kai

The night before my kids birthday, I have a tradition of laying in bed with them and re-telling the story of their birth (a version for kids, without all the gory details ;o) Over the years the stories have become sort of mystical, my eldest daughter’s birth includes the ‘hottest day ever!’, the tornado 3 days later, and that she was bald and pink. My next daughter’s birth includes the 5 attendants (not including me and my family) the night blooming flower and its lavish scent, and the toes that seemed to curl in inappropriate ways. So, on Sunday night I was telling G her birthstory and I told it like this…Once upon a time there was a beautiful woman named Heather, she was married to a wonderful man named…
G was amazed, eyes wide, she couldn’t for the life of her get over the fact that the people in the story had the same names as her parents and her sister, and the day of the baby’s birth was on her birthday! Wow! There were moments in the telling that I stumbled and said “I” but I would correct myself and carry on, it never ruined it for her, she was entranced. She knew it was her story, but the wording changed it just enough to make it magical. It was a nice gift for her to give me ;o)

Her story by the way includes being born into a pool of water covered in fishies, sisters who slept through the whole birth even though they were only a room away, and a scrunched up forehead that made her look like an elderly, angry, asian man.

If you have a second, please take a moment and visit my sponsor ;o)
xox,
Heather

Category: talk talk talk

Amazing Things!

Posted on | June 25, 2009 | No Comments

This comic is related to this post…inspiring people!

If you’d like to print this comic (to put lovingly on your refrigerator), it’s only .99!

Category: 2009, comic

Show Offs!

Posted on | June 22, 2009 | No Comments

This comic is related to this post…inspiring people!

If you’d like to print this comic (to put lovingly on your refrigerator), it’s only .99!

Category: 2009, comic, idle-ism

Inspiring People

Posted on | June 22, 2009 | 16 Comments

For some reason, I’m feeling inspired by the multitude of people who have been pushing themselves to accomplish great things. These are a few of them:
Crossing the ocean using muscle and paddleboard
Zac Sunderland
Sister Madonna Buder

Oh, and my dh who paddled from Catalina Island to Palos Verdes Peninsula this weekend, 22 miles in about 5 hours ;o)

There’s nothing like watching other people exercise ;o)

xox,Heather

Category: talk talk talk

Is News!

Posted on | June 18, 2009 | 1 Comment

This comic is related to this post…2 years of attachment makes a happy baby

If you’d like to print this comic (to put lovingly on your refrigerator), it’s only .99!

Category: 2009, attachment-parenting

2 years of Attachment makes a happy baby!

Posted on | June 18, 2009 | 12 Comments

This just in: Don’t go back to work for two years – if you want a happy baby. It’s obvious that someone else wrote the title, because Dr. Yehudi Gordon’s point was more, “Don’t seperate from your baby too soon, if you want a happy person.” Maybe when my last child is 20 and I’m ready to seperate I can get a job as a title-er.

Also, we, my dears, broke my google. They cancelled my account, dismantled me, shut me out, and told me off. Apparently they liked me much better when no one clicked on my ads. So, alas, there it is. But hey, the good news is they mostly sucked anyway! They clogged up my site with unsightly and often inappropriate ads and only ever made me $10 a month, and that was on a good month. So good riddance, I say.

And finally, I’ve added a new button to the bottom of the latest comic, which says ‘buy now’! Which means you can buy this beautiful and astonishingly funny comic for just .99 and print it out on your home computer and put it right up on the refrigerator. Right now. It’s the same price as a music download, and just as wondrous! Please help support your favorite cartoonist by buying comics soon and often. (also, please let me know if there are any bugs, this is all new!)

Love,
Heather

Category: talk talk talk

Redact

Posted on | June 14, 2009 | No Comments

Category: 2009, comic, do it yourself, idle-ism

Idle Parenting

Posted on | June 10, 2009 | No Comments

Category: comic, idle-ism

The Idle Parent by Tom Hodgkinson (book Review)

Posted on | June 10, 2009 | 16 Comments

As you all know I’ve been a fan of Tom Hodgkinson for a while. I loved his Freedom Manifesto and told everyone that I knew that ‘you HAVE to read this BOOK’! I especially appreciated that when he briefly spoke about parenting and family life, he didn’t upset my sensibilities, and those of you that know me will understand that I have some very entrenched sensibilities about mothering (heck, I’ve been pretending to be a goddess of motherhood for almost 6 years!) Sure, some of my ideas about the way the world works were challenged by The Freedom Manifesto, but not my ideas about parenting. I was grateful that I could recommend his book without caveats.

In 2008 I read with trepidation Tom Hodgkinson’s articles on parenting in the Telegraph ( I’m not rich, but I know how to find true wealth and The Idle Parent’s art of doing nothing (a friend, apparently forgetting that I had been begging her to read Tom Hodgkinson’s books, sent me a link to these with the subject-line ‘check this guy out’. For which she was roundly chastised with, “That’s the guy I’ve been telling you about, read his books!”) they seemed to be ideas that I could appreciate and even embrace, and lo and behold I found myself nodding vigorously. There was nothing in them that would upset the sensibilities of an attachment parent (unless you are committed to really hovering) and there was lots within that seemed vaguely Continuum Concept-y (the only book on parenting that I have ever really recommended).

And so when his book was released in the UK I ordered it right away (signed!) and waited breathlessly and all that. I worried though a bit, that he would fall in with the mainstream ‘detachment parenting’ or say something disparaging breastfeeding (actually breastfeeding is absent from his book, which I take to mean, “Of course, it goes without saying and all that.”) or talk about mothers as offal. You know, piss me off. So, now I’ve read the book and I can say that he only pissed me off on 3 pages, all in the Seek not perfection, or Why bad parents are good parents chapter, and because out of nowhere he DOES disparage mothers, first by quoting DH Lawrence saying “babies should invariably be taken away from their modern mothers and given, not to yearning and maternal old maids, but rather to stupid fat women who cant be bothered with them. There should be a league for the prevention of maternal love…” to which I say, ouch. That’s just rude. My friend Kathleen said, “what do you expect from the guy who wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover?” Well, I expected more than repeating that crap from Mr. Hodgkinson. Then a couple of pages later he relates how his wife and a friend left their one year olds with the dads so that they could go on a 10 day vacation. And okay, to each their own, but he holds this up as a grand idea and then even goes so far to say “both children were less whiny than usual…so if you have problems, mothers, with your child’s sleeping, then fight against our sentimental conditioning and take a break. Go away for a week. Drink. Get some sleep. The babies will be fine. In fact, they will benefit from the break.” This is where I threw the book against the wall. And generally swore I wouldn’t read another stupid word. It’s not just that I was offended, but that this clap-trap runs counter to the rest of his book. Which has pearls of wisdom like this:

You are in charge, but you need to create a hierarchy without recourse to authority. As in the old medieval city, the ‘common good’ of the family is paramount. Much of the strife of the motdern household comes because we have a selfish enlightenment view of individuality and freedom in our heads. We see freedom as a matter of asserting our own selfish desire in competition with the selfish desires of others. Enlightenment philosophy has created a nation of self-indulgent egotists, intent on recklessly pursuing every whim…but we are living together and pleasures should be shared and bread broken together.

sort of runs counter to the page that says moms should go on holiday alone, huh?

“Better to be penniless and at home, than rich and absent, certainly during the first three or four years of each child’s life.”

“(mother) needs to combine motherhood with other creative activities and sociability…so (she) does not actually avoid work. On the contrary, like the idle father, she embraces it. Work of her own choosing, that is, independent work, autonomous work, creative work. What she avoids is that terrible, fearful, spirit-sapping invention of the industrial age: the full time job.”

And he says of the Continuum Concept

“The only book on children and babies worth reading; burn the rest because they simply serve the status quo”

So that’s what this book is in my opinion, a practical guide to bringing The Continuum Concept to life (after the in-arms phase, because we all GET the in-arms phase, that part is easy. It’s the later part that is so darn hard to figure out) in this modern world. It will save you from wandering aimlessly crying in the world of child-centeredness, a problem that Jean Liedloff addresses a bit in her essay Who’s in Control, but in practice it’s very hard to be un-child-centered. This book should help.

So, I almost didn’t read another word, but, later I did, and I’m glad I did, because the book had much wisdom and never crosses my line again. I thought he was going to, in the chapter let us sleep when he said “lack of sleep is a terrible thing. I remember when our eldest child was small waking in the night to find him kicking my back. We’d attempted to ‘get him into a routine’ as current childcare orthodoxy suggests, and failed. He was in bed with us again.” uh oh! but then “I wish instead we’d embraced co-sleeping right from the start.” Thank you Tom Hodgkinson! So, I can recommend it mostly, except for pages 28, and 35-36, those kind of suck.

I look forward to hearing from some of you on your impressions of the book.

xox,
Heather

ps. another review:How to bring up children without lifting a finger and Tom Hodgkinson answering some reviews… The Idle Parent

pss. Wanted to mention that I took a break from writing this review to go to the local marina to see a grey whale that is feeding just within the break-wall. We stood on the rocks for an hour or so, just watching him come up for air. So cool.

Category: idle-ism, talk talk talk