Archive for the ‘Blogsitter’ Category:
A Very Princess Christmas
If you have daughters, it’s quite likely that you have plenty of princess movies, books, dolls, clothes, posters, cups, plates, utensils, rugs, robes, lamps. . . you get the idea, princess EVERYTHING around the house. With two daughters under the age of seven, in our house, there is plenty of princess paraphernalia. There is much said these days about these princesses and their so called “fairy tales” that always feature a damsel in distress needing to be saved by a handsome prince.
As mothers we watch our daughters playing with Barbie and Princess dolls or worse (we all know what I’m talking about as you’ve all heard Izzy’s rants) and know that we did the same things. We turned out o.k., right? No one talked about Barbie’s waist proportions or her ample bust back when I was a kid. If they did I wasn’t aware of it. I was too busy driving my Barbie dolls in their super mega camper to get to the Barbie pool. But for years now, there have been debates. There have been people comparing “The Spice Girls” to Barbie, and the list goes on.
A little while ago I picked up a copy of the book “Growing a Girl: Seven Strategies for Raising a Strong, Spirited Daughter” by Dr. Barbara Mackoff. I haven’t even finished the book yet, but feel I’ve already been fairly successful in this area. We’ve got “spirited” pretty much down, at least for the early years. You should see my daughters snap kick. Seriously.
One of the things that really caught my attention in the book was the couple paragraphs about “Sleeping Beauty.” In the book, the author’s daughter chooses to read this particular book frequently. The author, thinking it’s a fairly annoying and trite story of the damsel in distress being saved by the prince in the end, offers up some alternative ideas to her daughter.
“‘You know what bothers me about this story, Han?’ Hannah shook her head, only slightly interested. ‘It’s that when Sleeping Beauty goes to sleep, she doesn’t even try to wake herself up; she waits for the prince to come and do it.”
The author decides that she’ll allow these princess stories, but she’s always going to be there to provide some alternative commentary. I decided to try it myself with my daughter. While watching Cinderella get locked in her room, I paused the movie and asked my daughter how she would get out if she didn’t have any mice to help her. We had quite an interesting conversation, which included thrust kicking the door down as just one of our creative options. For obvious reasons, we also enjoy watching Mulan. That is one kick-some-serious-butt Disney girl, and she definitely makes real karate girls proud.
This holiday season, I wanted to offer up a suggestion for those of you with daughters, nieces, or other little girls in your lives (actually big girls might get quite a kick out of it too), maybe as an accompaniment to a Barbie or Princess doll. Although many of you may have already heard of “The Paper Bag Princess” by Robert Munsch, it’s worth mentioning again.
If you don’t own it, go get it. If it’s hiding out on a dusty book shelf, dust it off. It’s a fabulous fairy tale where the roles are reversed and the princess has the role of savior. What she finds is that what she thought was worth it, isn’t so much worth saving after all. It’s a staple in our house of girls, and you’ll thank me for making it a staple in your house as well.
BBM writes at Black Belt Mama, and The BBM Review. She also accepts birth stories at Birth Story (and could use some desperately). Thanks for letting me blogsit Izzy. Sorry for the state of your fridge. Oh, and when I got your mail and was checking our your local store advertisements, I ripped out all the Bratz ads to spare you the trauma. You’re welcome.
Are they real or are they fake?
This is a guest post written by me: Angie at www.AllAdither.com
I am a “Real Christmas Tree” kind of girl. When I was a wee child, my family would, more often than not, trek out to a tree farm, in three feet of snow, to hack down a Douglas Fir.
Now that I’m married with two very young children, my husband, the littles and I scurry to Home Depot, grab the cheapest shrub we can find (yeah, I’m not paying $80 for a dead Noble Fir), toss it in the back of our truck and race home before kids start screaming for juice boxes and string cheese.
Still, despite our decidedly unfestive method of obtaining our tree, I like the smell, the sensation of a real live (well, only recently deceased) evergreen in our living room.
Recently, though, J. and I have discussed buying a fake, pre-lit poseur. Our four-year-old son is pushing for it. He wants to erect our tree the day after Thanksgiving like all his faux-tree owning friends.
And, even I have to admit, there are certain aspects of a wannabe tree that are appealing: less mess, no watering, you get to keep the plastic thing (can you sense my disdain by now?) up from October through February, if you so desire, without any concern of the branches spontaneously combusting and burning down your house.
J. and I consider ourselves somewhat environmentally progressive (which basically means we recycle and mull global warming without necessarily owning a Prius or remembering to utilize our reusable shopping bags). So we decided to look into the environmental effects of Real Christmas Trees versus Artificial.
I found, in my research, that faux trees are made with PVC. Otherwise known as vinyl. Otherwise known as: Really Bad for the planet and possibly for our health too. And according to Umbra Fisk at Grist.org, lead is often used to stabilize PVC.
Fisk goes on to suggest that live, potted Christmas trees, an attractive option for those with the money and desire to treat Mother Earth kindly, isn’t an ideal option either if you lack the land or climate necessary to grow them.
The old fashioned, real, trees, he surmises are the earth’s best bet. Especially if you get yours from a sustainable, small scale grower (ie not Home Depot).
Hanukkah has its own version of Going Green, with a handful of environmental activists proposing that Jewish households light one less candle this year to curtail the (tiny amount of) carbon dioxide each candle emits. While I applaud these activists’ lofty efforts, I think they should concern themselves with mountains of crumpled wrapping paper tossed in landfills and houses lit up like mini constellations. Not these tiny flames.
Because I’m nice and because I’m excited to be IzzyMom’s blog-nanny for the day, I’ve included photographic evidence of MY idea for a Green Christmas: constructing Holiday Trees out of common household items:
This until someone starts making Christmas trees from recycled soda bottles and old tires.
Angie at www.AllAdither.com
Sperm Donors And Child Support
Normally, when a woman blog-sits for another woman, they talk about rummaging through their host’s fridge and dresser drawers, looking for “dirt” or things to make fun of them for. However, being a man, I don’t want to do that, because I know that with my luck the one drawer I open will be the one with bras and/or panties, and all of a sudden I become that guy. And I have no interest in being that guy, thankyouverymuch. So, all I am going to do is make sure I take off my boots (there’s a lot of snow where I am) and sit on the couch and watch football (this is America - there’s always a game on somewhere). Oh, and hope I don’t block the toilet. That’s basically all men do when they visit anywhere.
When Izzy put out the call for guest bloggers, I practically tripped over myself to offer my services. She’s a blogger after my own heart, who often writes in the “original” blogging style of taking a news piece, linking to it, and then going to town on the subject. Hell, she even started Moms Speak Up, which is all about news commentary. So, with that in mind, I bring you today’s post.
In the past week, two separate rulings have come down from courts, one in the U.S. and the other overseas in the U.K., ordering men to pay child support for children fathered via sperm donation. Both were cases of private sperm donation to a lesbian couple, and neither circumstance had any legal documentation that absolved the man of parental responsibility.The easy thing to do here is put on our blinders, trust our gut reactions, and say that because the men contributed sperm they are technically a father, and therefore bear responsibility for the child or children. However, I feel that would be trivializing the issue, and also would lead us down a slippery slope I am not comfortable with.
Before I continue, I would like to state, unequivocally, that I am in favour of all people being able to have children by any legal means available to them (i.e. I’m not cool with baby stealing, but pretty much anything else is on the table, from petri dishes to turkey basters). This includes same-sex couples, single men and women, or any other concept of a family.
Dealing with my trivialization comment first, I ask the following question: should a sperm donor be allowed to file for custody of a child conceived with his genetic material? Consider the following hypothetical: a young man donates sperm to his lesbian friend so that she and her partner may enjoy parenthood. Fast forward a few years, and this man has now married and discovered that his spouse is infertile. They talk, and conclude that it would be preferable to raise his child than to adopt or seek a surrogate. Knowing the court’s tendency to favour heterosexual couples, they would likely end up with the child. I would suspect that the majority of people (who are not opposed to same-sex marriage and/or same-sex couples raising children) would agree this is unfair to the mother. However, to say the father cannot seek custody but is still financially responsible is a double standard.
With regards to the slippery slope I identified, if these cases result with the fathers having to pay child support, how much of an impact will it have on the likelihood of sperm donation in the future? Will men be willing to offer their genetic material to lesbian couples, or even couples who cannot conceive for that matter, if there is a chance that their donation may land them a monthly support payment? Realistically, that end is somewhat far off, because the most likely evolution of the story will be that more and more fathers will be forced to pay support, which will lead to a run of legal “absolution” documents being conceived and signed, which will lead to one of these documents being challenged in court, which will lead to the document being overturned, which will leave us where we are today: sperm donors on the financial hook. In the end, I suspect that sperm donation will become too great a financial risk, and subsequently lesbian couples and those unable to conceive will have a dramatically more difficult time having a baby.
Rhetoric and hypothetical situations are all well and good, but it’s important I take a position in the discussion. While my instincts as a dad push me towards the “a father is a father” side of the argument, I cannot, in good conscience, restrict people from having a family because of legal pitfalls. To this end, my suggestion would be to formally legislate a means for a man to renounce rights to a child, and in so doing, absolve him of any responsibility in the future. To make this reasonable, the renunciation would have to be supported by the child’s mother (otherwise, every man who had a one night stand that resulted in a pregnancy would take this route). I feel that this offers the best of what is a complicated situation: men will feel free to donate sperm without fearing long-term financial burdens, and couples who otherwise would be childless have a better chance to have a baby.
We are now at a crossroads, and depending on what direction the courts take, we could be at the precipice of a dramatic change in alternative methods for how families are created. From where I’m standing, I hope they make the right choice.
You can read more SciFi Dad at his personal blog called Tales From The Dad Side and also at his commentary column called Daditorial.
