Is bullying always bullying?

I have no doubts: bullying is a bad thing.

But, kids are mean. Kids don’t know how to deal with the other kid who is ‘different’, and ‘different’ kids get picked on. 

Understand where I’m coming from. I grew up as the ‘different’ kid: a bit socially-awkward, a bit un-sporty, a lot nerdy. Low fruit for mean kids, and for the kids who need to make themselves look good by making others look worse. But, the only time I’ve ever considered myself ‘bullied’ is in the workplace, as an adult.  Many other kids probably had a similar experience to me through school, and learnt that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words leave deep scars, making you question your worth well into adulthood when the things that once made you ‘weird’ now may even make you the envy of the ‘normal’. 

Here is my question: is there a difference between bullying and kids being mean? 

If there is, what’s the difference? If we label all acts of kids being mean as bullying, do some kids end up more victimised: not only are they taunted by their peers, they are now labeled as ‘bullied’ by the grown ups.  But if we blanket say that most ‘bullying’ is just kids being mean, then do the genuine bullies - the ones that seek out weak kids to make fun of - get away with it more easily.  And if we say that kids are just mean, are we implying that it’s okay, it’s just a part of growing up, and ignore the kids on the receiving end?

If there is a difference - and I think there probably is - we need a different approach to dealing with the bully as we do with dealing with the kids who are mean. And whether there is a difference or not, dealing with bullying can’t be just left up to the schools. It needs to start at home. We need to teach our children to be resilient, confident and respectful of differences. (I also like to remind my son that he doesn’t have to be friends with the dominant personalities that like to call the shots, often at his expense: there’s plenty of nice kids at school to play with!)  Not that schools have no responsibility, but, like most things, schools, parents and students need to work together to make it work. 

What do you think?  (Feel free to disagree!) 

Eat the packet, throw away the chocolate

The Husband brought home some chocolate recently.  This wasn’t a huge surprise, given that in our house chocolate is one of five food groups. 

But this chocolate was different. 

It was natural and sugar-free chocolate.

Now, I have been to the Cadbury Chocolate Factory in Dunedin and I saw them making chocolate with cocoa beans, milk and sugar. What on earth is in sugar-free chocolate? Cocoa beans and milk?

Actually, it had a natural sweetener - Stevia - which isn’t sugar.  It has a lot less calories than cane sugar: it’s a lot sweeter, so you can use a lot less. But, it’s not cane sugar, and it tastes different.  

I tried a sample of Stevia in my coffee recently.  I could taste the difference, but The Husband couldn’t. But, then, he also thought the natural, sugar-free chocolate wasn’t too bad.

He was wrong.

It was awful. 

He said it’s because it was dark chocolate and I don’t normally eat dark chocolate. I say it’s the polydextrose and erythirol and isomalt they had to use in order to give it the same texture as dark chocolate! 

Here’s what I think: forget low-fat or low-sugar versions of foods. It’s the fat and the sugar that make them taste good. Eat the bad-for-you foods. Just don’t eat them all the time. Treat them as treat foods. 

Give me decent chocolate any day… just not every day. 

The Cult of Motherhood: Part One - Idolising the Perfect Mother

A typical day for a mother of the full-time variety (whatever that may mean) might look like this:

Mum gets up and puts on a pot of coffee and a load of washing. She prepares the children their breakfast, then the whole family eats breakfast together. Dad heads off to work, and the children play while Mum does the housework, carefully marking off each chore on her Master Schedule. She helps the children cook something delicious for morning tea, and after they have finished eating she sets up their craft activity. Once the craft is hung on the wall, and the mess cleaned up, Mum heads out with the kids do errands, and usually they’ll stop at the playground on the way home where she’ll push the kids on the swings, or chat with one of the other Typical Mothers.  After lunch, Mum might allow her children a half-hour of television so that she might have a well-earned break. Though it can hardly be called a break, when most of the time is spent online paying bills or reading Important Articles on the Latest Research on Child Development. She cleans up promptly after lunch, does a quick tidy around the house, and puts the children down for their rest time.  Rest time is very valuable to a mother: if she is lucky she is able to pursue a hobby or earn an income at home during this time, but usually it’s the first chance she’s had all day to get any housework done or have a break.  But after the children wake up, Mum spends precious time playing with her children.  They build cubby houses, have tea parties, read stories, sing songs, dance, imagine.  But, sadly, this time each day must come to an end, as Mum has to follow her Meal Plan so it’s off to the kitchen.  If Dad is home by this time, the children will play with him, but if he’s not yet she might resort to another half-hour of quality television. They eat, the children bathe and go to bed, and she pours herself a glass of wine and gets to work on her latest craft project, probably something that she’s seen on Pinterest, before heading to bed herself. 

My day looks nothing like that, except maybe the ‘puts on a pot of coffee’ part.  I’d be hard pressed to do all of those things just once in a week.  Usually my day involves a sink never empty of dirty dishes, dirty nappies, too much time online, my kids watching too much TV while I read a book, whatever I scrape together for lunch. It involves yelling, impatience, laziness, frustration. It involves beating myself up over not doing a good enough job with my kids.  Every so often it involves craft, cubby houses, or a trip to a playground. There’s plenty of coffee involved.  While I’m typing, my middle child is colouring himself in with a felt pen.  And there’s laughing and cuddles, games, lego constructions, lightsaber battles and books. 

The Typical Mother* isn’t typical.  She’s phenomenal, but she’s fictional. (Or possibly a liar.) And yet, I think many of us have got in our head that The Typical Mother actually exists. She does: she’s online.  She writes a blog (sometimes more than one), and others pin her creations on Pinterest. She updates us about her day on Facebook or Twitter.  She gives opinion and advice and kind words on parenting forums.  

These mothers are real women, and they may well be brilliant women. But the online world can only give you a certain image of reality. Anyone who posts something online is constructing an image of themselves, whether intentional or not.  We tend to post only our successes, rarely our failings.  If we do post our failings, it’s not often out of honesty, but rather for attention, or for someone to say ‘oh, you stuffed up, but you’re still a good mum’, or to give an appearance of integrity (that’s what I was doing up there, when I pointed out my own inadequacies).  And sometimes those failings aren’t even legitimate failings: we just haven’t measured up to the Perfect Mother image.  Online, we don't see what these women aren't doing. 

If you are a mother of little kids and your day looks nothing like my opening description, but you think it should: stop beating yourself up over it. 

Stop assuming that other mothers are doing those things.  

Get offline.  

Stop reading other mothers’ comments on forums.  

Stop reading blogs by mothers, especially the ones where they wax lyrical about their daily schedules and their ah-mazing children.  

Stop comparing yourself to your friends based on their Facebook statuses and photo streams. 

Stop browsing Pinterest for lists of 101 Easter Crafts for Kids and birthday cakes that would take a normal person 56 hours to create.  

We cry out against magazines creating unrealistic expectations for girls and body image, but need to see that we are doing the same with motherhood.  We’re looking at airbrushed images of mothers and comparing our messy, unstyled houses, our meal plans (or lack thereof), our kids who draw on the furniture, our hair that doesn’t quite sit right, our craft projects that never quite end up looking like the photo. It's okay that people publish their seemingly perfect lives online - who wants to look at photos of messy houses? - but remember that a lot of the time it is just staged. 

Use the Internet to connect and find inspiration, but don't let it be a source of discontent with your own life and circumstances.  

You don’t have to be The Typical Mother. You don’t have to be The Perfect Mother. You just have to be Your Children’s Mother.  BUT…I’ll write and post Part Two, um, sometime. There isn’t enough coffee or episodes of The Octonauts for me to guarantee when the next post will materialise. 

Leave me a comment, feel free to tell me I’m the only person in the world who has this problem, or that you are indeed a Typical Mother. 

* Maybe it’s just what I read, but ‘mothers’ always seem to be ‘mothers of under-6s’. Except around Mother’s Day, when all mothers have grown up children. That could just be my warped view, so feel free to ignore this statement. 

The Great Benefits of E-Books

I don't have an e-reader*.  I've read one e-book on the Kindle for Mac App, but I'm not in a hurry to read another one.  I have more than enough physical books on my bookshelves and on the library's bookshelves to get through before I can justify buying an e-reader and buying books for said e-reader.  Call me a luddite, if you will, but really I just haven't needed an e-reader.  I enjoy physical books, and find I tend to skim-read anything on a screen. At the moment I don't read enough, mostly just too much screen skim-reading.  And I'm not blaming having kids: it's pure laziness on my behalf.

Oh, I know there are Great Benefits to e-readers, and I will concede that an e-reader would help when travelling with reading material to locations where it would be too difficult to swap your last read at a book exchange or drop into an op shop.  (My holidays always are filled with good intentions to read, but it rarely happens, though I never travel on my own.)  I guess some e-readers would weigh less than some books, too, and maybe are smaller, which could be handy if you were carrying a book to read with you a lot.   Though, if I'm going to take a book with me to read somewhere, I take something small and lightweight. I know. Crazy. 

One Great Benefit that is often touted in discussions on e-books is that you can store THOUSANDS of books on your e-reader. Think how much SPACE you can save by not having to store all those books in your house.   Logic tells me this: if you read one book a day, it would take three years to get through just ONE thousand books, let alone however many more thousands of books are stored on your Super Duper e-reader.  If you only read one book a week, and I seriously doubt many working outside of an English Literature related field would read any more than this, it will take TWENTY YEARS to get through a thousand books. (Meanwhile, I'm culling my books and letting the libraries and secondhand bookstores store my reading material.) Digital storage doesn't make less clutter, it just makes digital clutter.

A more contentious Great Benefit to e-readers is the environmental benefit. I remain skeptical. No trees are cut down to make e-readers, but an e-reader isn't going to last as long as a paper book, it needs to be charged regularly, and the servers where the e-books are stored before being purchased need to be run on electricity.  I have well-read books on my bookshelves that are older than me. I'd like to see an e-reader still in use into its thirties.  Digital has its own environmental footprint. Just because it is stored on a hard drive doesn't mean it uses no resources.

One final note.  An article I read this week said this: 

"Fiction is moving to e-book more quickly than non-fiction, especially romance and crime; in fact sales of romance novels have dramatically increased. This stands to reason by the way: I tend to buy crime fiction on my tablet and serious non-fiction in print, although that may change in future.The biggest market for e-books is women over 45 and whereas the split between female and male print book consumers is 60-40, in digital form it's 70-30."

I'm not certain what to make of this.  People who tend to read literary fiction are slower to transition to new technologies? People who read non-fiction would prefer to make notes on the text? E-readers are an easier way to hide the fact that you are reading Mills and Boon? (Are they still publishing those, or do I just sound old/ignorant?) Maybe I'm just not old enough to get into the whole e-reader thing, given that I'm still well off 45. 

Go ahead, enjoy your e-reader. One day I might convert. I sincerely hope the digital publishing world takes off. That writers are paid well for their work. But I equally hope that ease of digital publishing doesn't diminish the standards of books and reading, because a good book is a marvellous thing. Oh, and I hope real books hang around a little longer yet. There are literally thousands of books in my local library, and I haven't read them all yet. 


*The terms e-reader and e-book give me the giggles.  Remember when new words were taken from other languages, like French or Latin. Okay, neither do I, but I've read about it happening a long time. ago.  These days, you just whack a vowel in front of a word and voila! a new word! 

Is hiating the present tense verb of hiatus?

I've been on a bit of a hiatus. Please don't tell me you haven't noticed!  

I've been busy: having a baby, getting the house ready to sell, Battleship and Payday, travelling, Angry Birds Star Wars.

I've been busy.

But I'm looking forward to a bit of blogging again in the coming months.  

A steady diet of good books.

Ah, home readers.  Those small books of questionable literary merit that come home each week for you to hear your child read and improve their literacy.  I know they are of good value, but they are tedious.  But this week we had a chuckle at a non-PC little book called Mum’s Diet. 

“I’m too fat,” said Mum.

“No, you’re not,” we said.

“You’re only saying that,” said Mum.  “Look at me! I’m far too fat and I’m going on a diet.”

We all moaned and groaned.  When Mum when on a diet, we went on a diet too.

On the first day of Mum’s diet they all eat lettuce and tomatoes.  On the second day they eat parsley and carrots.  (What sort of diet is this?)

We said to Mum, “You have carrots and parsley and we’ll have spaghetti.”

“No,” cried Mum. “I’m not sitting here watching you two gobble down spaghetti.”

“You could close your eyes” we said. 

The next day they go to Dad’s house and try to raid his fridge.

“Don’t tell me,” said Dad. “Your mother’s on another diet.”

Mum weighs herself every morning, and cries that she is still fat.  

But then one day the kids come home to a fantastic smell:  spaghetti and doughnuts!  Mum has given up on the diet.

Or maybe it’s not politically incorrect.  They have ticked other boxes of inclusivity: a dark skinned family and a single mother.  Maybe the book is indeed educational, about the importance of self acceptance and the dangers of yo-yo dieting.  It finishes like this:

We hugged Mum. 

“You’re a cuddly mother.  We like you just as you are.”

“I think I like me too,” laughed Mum, and she had another doughnut.   

Or maybe it’s time to cull this book from the collection. 

Decluttering Conversations

I’ll clean out the spare stationery draw today.  

Oh, good.  There’s a lot of stuff in there you don’t need.

Yeah, yeah.  But I’m sure most of it is useful!

How many spare display folders does one need?

Okay.  Not that many.  But I’ll keep all these manilla folders.  They are definitely useful.

Hmm. You’re less than halfway through that box of 100.  Did you buy that box when you were still at uni?  That’s at least ten years.  You usually just recycle a manilla folder when you need one.

Of course I do!  I don’t want to waste them! 

And all these refill pages for display folders. There’s an unopened packet of 100!  Plus the rest…

I used to use them in folders for my sheet music.  

But a packet of 100?  Why did you even buy that in the first place?

In case I needed them.  

In case you needed them?  Why not just wait until you actually needed them?

Yes, okay, okay.  Can we move on?  What will I do with all these envelopes?  

That’s a lot of envelopes.

I know.  But I when I needed envelopes I could only buy a box of 100.  And I use those four different sizes.  Just not very often.

Fair enough.  That letter paper?

But what if I need to write a-

You don’t write letters.  Ever.  Some of that you’ve had since you were ten.  Bin! 

What if I need this graph paper?

Have you needed graph paper in the last fifteen years?

But what if I NEED some?

You can get more.  Get rid of it.  

Right.  That’s done.  Yes, I’ve kept a little more than I probably need to.  But this is my first stationery cull.  I think I’ve done okay. It looks tidy.  There’s less unnecessary stuff in the drawer. I’m happy with that. 

Repairing the burst seams in my wardrobe

I have over 100 items of clothing in my wardrobe.   

This doesn’t even include underwear, swimwear, or my maternity clothing.  

More than one hundred.  I counted them after I did a cull recently. 

Please don’t laugh.  Or judge.   (Especially not before you’ve counted the items of clothing in your own wardrobe.)   

I know I own far too many clothes.  It’s more than I can reasonably wear (there ARE only seven days a week, and I wash on at least two of those).   My whole adult life I have had too many clothes.  Conventional decluttering wisdom says if you haven’t worn it in a year, get rid of it.  Yeah, but I’ve got clothes that I have only worn once in the last year, but I still love them.  Or, worse, I haven’t worn them in over a year because I have more clothes than I could have worn in that amount of time.

Here’s the surprising thing:  almost one-fifth of my wardrobe has been introduced in the last year-and-a-half, while I’ve been trying to gain control over my impulse shopping.   Only about 10% is over six or seven years old.  And given that I’ve either given away or worn out a large number of items of clothing, it means that I’ve bought or sewn a lot of clothes over the last five or six years.  

This is the alternative decluttering wisdom that I need to hear: stop buying more clothes.  Wear the clothes you already own.  Don’t even bother looking at the shops if you have plenty already.   Just because it’s on sale doesn’t mean you need another shirt: there will be another sale.  

I would like to get down to just 30-odd items of clothing - a third of what I own now.   Does that sound crazy?  Sure.  But I don’t think it is unreasonable, either.   Have you heard it said that we wear 20% of our clothes 80% of the time?  Looking at the clothes I have, and the clothes I wear, I would say that it’s true enough of me.   It means potentially buying nothing new for a year.  Or four.  But it also means that when I do need to buy more clothes I need to be more intentional.    

I’ve started out by identifying my style: a-line skirts, simple t-shirts or blouses, sandals or mary-janes, a chunky necklace. No tiny prints, no stripes, no ruffles.  A little bit hippy.   If I must buy more clothes, they must fit with my style. 

Then I’ve chosen a colour palette. I only buy clothes in colours that suit me: browns, purples, berries, olivey-greens, creams.    I don’t buy colours that I know to not look good on me, or that I tend not to choose to wear: white, blue, red, yellow, black.  (I used to wear a lot of black, but as I have gotten older it doesn’t look so good on me and is being phased out of my wardrobe.)  

Then I consider my lifestyle.  At this stage in life I spend most of my time home with young kids, and my choice of clothing needs to reflect this.  And given that most of the time it’s too hot to wear long sleeves, so I don’t need to own winter attire. 

Sticking to a style and palette, everything should go together, and with a selection of shoes and accessories, there is still plenty to keep it interesting. 

I’m thinking about putting everything but 30-odd items of clothing away in a box or another wardrobe, and when something needs replacing I’ll go ‘shopping’ in my box first.  

To fix my clothing clutter problem, I need only buy clothes when necessary and be intentional about what I do buy. Don’t just get rid of clothes you don’t wear, break the cycle by not buying them in the first place. 

 What about your wardrobe?  Too many clothes, or just enough?  Do you wear everything you have?  Are you intentional in what clothing you buy?

Reducing Our Car Dependency

We are a one car family, and plan on staying that way for a long time to come.  In fact, we are working towards a point where our car is no longer a necessity for us to function day by day. 

To make it work, I plan my days and weeks.  I only have the car some days a week.  If I need to go anywhere, I go on the days I have the car, and I go there on my way to and from school, rather than coming home and going out again (this saves time and fuel).  We also use the bus.  The bus isn’t the best option in our town, because it’s not overly reliable and takes a lot longer to get anywhere than driving.  But for $2.80 once or twice a week, we don’t care if it takes longer: it’s an awful lot less than a second car would cost us. 

Cars are expensive.  Including insurance, registration, service costs, new tyres and depreciation, our car costs us around $13 a day just to own.  Our fuel costs currently are about $5.40 per day. (That equals just over $6700 a year.)  My estimate is that a second car would cost us between $8 and $12 a day, plus fuel.   

Now that our eldest has started school, at the same school the my husband teaches at, things have become more complicated. They are both at the same school, but if there are meetings on after school, I have to have the car on those days to pick our son up.  Some afternoons we do things after school, some afternoons my husband catches the bus home. But because we live 15 minutes drive from school, and I walk our son in and out of school the days I drop him off and pick him up, it works out as a minimum of 50 minutes for me to do the whole trip.  But a second car would probably only save me an hour or two a week, and we would use roughly the same amount of fuel as we use currently. 

Our solution is to move closer to school.  Not just closer to school, but generally more central.   The area we plan on moving to is within walking/riding distance from school, but also close enough to other schools in the event that we need to change schools in the future.  It is also close to a main bus route, and if I do return to work some day, most of the high schools are accessible by bus.  Being able to walk more places is much better for my health than driving everywhere, and I believe a better use of my time.  There are other reasons for us to move from this house, but if I only took into account moving costs compared to buying a second car, we would break even with the move in 4-6 years.  

We can’t have no car at all.  Public transport in our town is not sophisticated enough to allow us to do that.  And just like we can’t manage without a car, there are plenty of people for whom it is not realistic to live with just one car.  But for some families, it may be an unthought of possibility.  If one person can get to work by public transport (or walking or riding!), and the total yearly cost is less than the cost to own a second car, it may be worth considering ditching one car.  Buses aren’t just for poor people (which seems to be the attitude in regional cities), and half an hour on the train is time you can spend reading rather than concentrating on traffic.    

As far as I’m aware, oil is a finite resource.  Fuel will continue to get more expensive until eventually it runs out.  Hopefully, alternative options for powering cars will have taken hold well before that day and we will be able to continue driving, but in the mean time I don’t want to have to pay for increasing fuel costs if I don’t need to.   Also, burning fossil fuels has a negative environmental impact.  I don’t just mean global warming, which I appreciate that some of my readers disagree with me about. The pollution that comes from driving cars isn’t such a great thing, really.   So, for me, there are many reasons that I want to reduce my dependency on cars.  

What about you? How reliant are you on your car?  

Six hours a day, with twelve weeks holidays!

You may have heard people say that teacher’s don’t deserve any pay rises, because they only work six hours a day and get twelve weeks holiday.  If they want decent pay they should get a real job.  (Forget the fact that none of those people working in real jobs would have said job without the aid of 10-12 years with their teachers.) But I’m not talking today about pay.   It’s the ‘six hours a day’ issue I want to address. 

I feel qualified to talk about this, because I used to be a teacher (and may yet find myself back in the classroom), and have been married to a teacher for almost eight years.  I do not come from a position of ‘teachers are so hard done by and have the hardest job in the world’.  No, every job has its good and its bad.  And every job has slightly different arrangements.

In Australia, everyone is entitled to four weeks annual leave.  There are also around ten gazetted public holidays, which differ from state to state.  Depending on the year, about half of these fall during the school holidays.    There are twelve weeks of school holidays for students in Queensland public schools, and I will assume most states have roughly the same amount.  The school holidays include about six student free days, where teaching staff are required to be at school either in professional development courses or planning.  

If you have done the maths in the above paragraph you should have concluded:  average Australian = six weeks off work.  (People who are require to work on public holidays are compensated with higher pay rates for those days, and may get an alternative day as their ‘day off’.)  Of the twelve weeks of school holidays, a teacher is entitled to four weeks annual leave, one week’s worth is public holidays, and one week’s worth they aren’t actually on holidays at all.  So they have an extra six weeks of holidays.   Which does seem a bit unfair at face value. 

  Teachers are usually required to be at school from 8:30 to 3:30, which means a teacher’s official work hours are seven hours a day. The school day runs from approximately 9am to 3pm, with about an hour for lunch breaks. In Queensland, the Unions require that primary school teachers have a minimum of two non-contact hours a week, time where their class is with a specialist teacher (e.g physical education, library, music.)  This makes up for the lunch breaks lost to things like detentions, helping students and playground duties. 

For a teacher to work the same amount of time as someone in a ‘nine-to-five’ job they need to work an extra hour a day on top of their ‘official’ hours, as well as six hours a week for the forty weeks of term to make up for the forty hours a week of their extra six weeks holidays (not included lunch breaks!).   So by working from 8-4:30 every day plus a few days at the end of each set of school holidays (I usually count our summer holidays finished 1 ½ weeks before school starts) and maybe a weekend here and there, teachers have already completely made up for their extra six weeks off.  Once you factor in time spent to plan and prepare lessons, mark homework and other assessment, write report cards, conduct both official and unofficial parent teacher interviews, assist in extra-curricular activities (e.g. choir, musicals, debating and other inter-school competitions), attend school camps, attend staff meetings and curriculum planning meetings, participate in outside-school hours events such as fetes and awards nights, and attend professional development seminars, then it isn’t hard to make up that time. No, not all teachers put in this effort.  There are some who will do barely more than seven hours a day for forty weeks.  But these teachers are doing a disservice to their students and should not be teaching.   

  Different jobs have different arrangements.  Yes, teachers have "twelve weeks holidays", but have to take them at the same time as the students.  Some jobs require much longer work hours, but also command a much higher salary.  Some jobs attract overtime rates for hours worked above 40.  Some employees are given time-in-lieu that they are able to cash in or take as extra holidays.  Some employees have rostered days off every fortnight, and work nine hours a day for nine days to have the tenth day off.   The hours beyond 40 hours that salaried employees work - including teachers - to meet expectations is becoming more and more common, and is another issue altogether. 

Do teachers work more than anyone else?  No.  Do teachers have a harder job than everyone else?  No.  Do teachers work for six hours a day and get 12 weeks holidays? No.