Be Excellent To Each Other

Never noticed that before, but now that's something I'm never going to be able to unsee.

Except of course they don't. Kids graduate from school into summer holidays, which at that age last years.

People with stupid opinions. My annoyance is usually reserved for people who make no effort to inform themselves of any facts before spouting a load of complete nonsense.

Sometimes they're the most annoying people to have a discussion with because they're so ignorant, that they need to have complete, unwavering conviction in what they're saying so are impossible to reason with.

It's not necessarily people who don't agree with me. And generally, it does no harm at all but it annoys the life out of me.

Yeah but it is the parents that view it as a new chapter,

That was sorta my point. Only the parents care.

Which is ironic, given it could be down to some outrageously poor kerning.

It's taken me a long time to realise you name your wife after an infectious disease.

Oh man, I had my last kid 16 years ago and the level of shit parents have to "care" about now is unreal. I sit there with my friends, who all have little kids under 5, unable to even comprehend the handfuls of money they throw at stuff. Stuff I wouldn't even dream existed, that they do because a Facebook group said so, or an online parenting thing. Just get off the internet, put it down.

Yeah, thinking about it, parents annoy me.

YANBU.

Sorry, yes, I should clarify. 20% of parents care and the others are forced to as a result.

Is she possibly checking them for dents ?

(I only say this as i'm conscious I must pick up 5 tins in the supermarket because each of the first 4 has a dent in it somewhere)

I'm fairly sure dented tins haven't mattered for about twenty years.

Yeah, their early stuff was ground-breaking back in the day.

My two year old’s Nursery has a ‘graduation’ ceremony coming up. I don’t care but I also don’t feel pressured into caring. That may partly be because Darwin still has two and a half years of Nursery left. Man, that feels like a LONG time. Will I care at the time? Not sure. Does he get to dress up in some kind of mini mortarboard? That could be cute.

But I don’t know what kind of things parents are supppsed to care about now that weren’t like that 15 years ago, and I’d be really interested in what you have seen the biggest changes in, Flis. I don’t like the way children have to have every aspect of their personalities weighed and measured from 2 months old. My friend’s son hasn’t got many words yet and so was referred to speech therapy. Fine, if they perceive a problem and can help, then ok. Except they said no, they just do an assessment now at 2-3 years but they won’t actually provide any therapy until five. So, they give no help, just a label.

I misread that as 'motherboard'.

SON !

Cows. I hate cows. Cows are made of stupidity and malice. Every other animal does what cows do better. Mediocrity is a life goal of a cow. They only exist to be eaten and even then thete is better tasting animal.

Both of mine had a graduation thing from nursery where they wore a mortarboard. It was cute, but utterly bollocks really. I only went to Olly's because he asked me too. I am not very good at that part of parenting though

People who tell me what the thread I created is for.

You're only allowed to drink it after tai chi.

Girls have proms, boys have balls.

Voles. They are just fat doormice.

Crocodiles. Thin alligators , the lot of them.

Here are some of the things that have annoyed me today:

My ex
Small cars that drive in the middle of the road
Men at the gym who sound like they're going to jizz their load every rep
Household chores
DOMS
The fact that Gaz took a letter that needs posting with him today but not my parcel (even though it's my fault because I told him I'd take it)
My peeling sunburn
That I don't have a completion date yet
"I want to guest post on your blog" emails from people who've clearly never read my blog

Flamingos. Hate it when you are pissed up in the pub and you get outside and it is raining and try to open your umbrella and it's a stupid pink bird.

Never change.

This one really did make me

But I'm sure voles and dormice have cultural differences.

Don't you mean Jordan?

What if he begins to smell?

‘Begins to’?

I smell of victory

Dangerous to be pissed up in Jordan. I think consumption of alcohol is illegal there.

I'd just like to say how very pleased I am about how quickly this thread has 'escalated' (although another thing that does annoy me that probably shouldn't is when people put single quotes around things that aren't really quotes, and also parentheses around clauses that could just have been separated by a comma).

0/

Dangerous to be 'In' and 'with,' I should think, and both together would be doubly so.

It annoys me that I can't spell nuisence or resteraunt. But these things SHOULD annoy me, so please expunge them from the list.

But what are alligators allegations? Are they all annoyed about things that they shouldn't be?

I think the whole culture surrounding parenting and babies has changed. Perhaps that is limited solely to my experience of it - My first baby was born in 1999, the internet wasn't really a thing you relied on every day for information in the way you do now. It was basically glorified Ceefax with Yahoo chat or MSN thrown in. You got your information from the health visitor, your mum, your friends who had babies, books and magazines. When I had the second one, I'd been through it once so didn't really feel the same need to find information.

Now, everyone can comment on everything, instantly. There is a huge amount of guilt available at your finger-tips and you don't even need to go looking for it - someone will barge into your thread or group chat or wall or whatever and tell you you're doing it wrong. That's the level of stuff I'm talking about - the things you do that never occurred to you to care about and you're not that bothered about but someone said you had to be. Changing your car to a huge SUV because you have one tiny baby to drive around, the £1000 pushchairs, attachment parenting, the 1st birthday cake smash, the casts of their hands and feet, newborn photo-shoots, the 100% organic snacks, toddler harness things so it can't ever fall over, rear-facing car seats until they're 4 because if you don't it's like wanting your kid to die, breastfeeding, a special seat to hold them in a certain way that they out-grow after 4 months, baby led weaning, 2 or 3 different accessories just to wash them, naming ceremonies, baby showers...

All of the above is largely fine and harmless, but should be down to personal preference - the anxiety of some women is unreal and largely unfounded, just because "they need to have the best for the baby". You do your best to raise your baby - that doesn't mean doing everything Instagram mums say you need to do, and if you can't or don't, you shouldn't feel bad about it.

Mimi - is the speech therapy/label thing perhaps something they do early so they have a record of numbers that might been special education or additional support once they start school? I imagine the first day of school isn't the best time to find out you have kids in the group who need that, especially when funding for such things is as fickle as it is. They probably find that putting the effort in now with speech therapy is an unnecessary expense as most cases resolve themselves when the kids are in a school environment. They thought my youngest may have been autistic, and also need speech therapy so they were geared up for further support and assessments when he started school - then it became apparent he's just a contrary little sod. He got an A in his English GCSE at the end of last year so he's doing okay now

Ah, I haven’t found much pressure in many areas. I found the breastfeeding the biggest pressure area. I’m lucky because I wanted to and had a relatively easy time of it, but it’s caused a lot of upset in my friends that weren’t able to, and I’m angry for that. The other things I perhaps haven’t felt much pressure into as I’ve found them largely opt-in. The price of some pushchairs is scary, though.

I don’t think I was perhaps as clear in the speech therapy thing as I should have been. All three of my brothers needed intensive speech therapy. We were actually told that one of the twins may not even talk, and he’d been diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia, too, but as soon as he’d had those diagnosises (as well as my other two brothers) there was a care plan in place and therapy started. They hit the ground running with it. They headed it off as much as possible, and a care team was assigned to tgem both at tge Nuffield centre and for homevisuts and then at nursery.

My problem is just telling parents ‘your child has a problem, but we won’t help for another two and a half years’. I readily admit I’m an anxious person, but it’d sink me thinking that my son had a problem that nobody would even start to support me with for another two or more years.

Actually, I have found a lot of pressure from some areas, but more the interpersonal friends and family ‘oh, I wouldn’t let my child do that’, ‘if we had children we’d be raising them very different to you’ type crap.

I definitely remember my mum & her mates gossiping about other mum mates who were doing XYZ wrong and the judgemental comments about who was or wasn't breastfeeding, who should've not had babies, stuff like that.... I guess the difference is generally speaking that wasn't put out there publicly for all to read / pile on like it is now.

Oh, and speech therapy was brilliant, especially for the twins. The one with the most severe problem when young is a secondary school history teacher. The other is some kind of genius civil engineer.

Oh, I love those people.

"When I have kids, I'll never let them watch TV"

HAHAHAHAHA, fuck off.

As Mimi says, she experienced this from people around her - there's no denying it happens, and always will happen as people will always have an opinion but if you're the kind of person who turns to the internet for help and advice or even just posts a picture of your baby online, then it's not just a handful of people you have face-to-face contact with or people gossiping behind your back. It's everyone and their anonymous opinions.

I wonder if part of the shift is that in days of yore people gossiped behind each other’s backs and little cliques formed but it was mostly snidely things said in private and about, rather than to, each other?

The Internet perhaps means that a) everyone is an expert, and b) the relative distance and anonymity means that there are a large number of people that will straight up tell you you’re a crap parent in very blunt terms? Perhaps the proportion of such people is small, but it’s a small number of a potentially HUGE number of contributors that you might come into contact with on the internet, rather than the much smaller number you’d typically speak to or be spoken to in every day life (that said, a woman made a ridiculous passive-aggressive comment because my little boy was quacking back at the ducks he was feeding yesterday).

On the other hand, i found that some nurses (specially the older ones) in the hospital were very quick to put my daughter on formula, but i agree that the pressure can be overwhelming for the woman who can't breastfeed (specially by those that a friend of my wife calls "The Jihad of Motherhood", who swarm facebook posts with opinions such as that Baby Strollers are bad).

As a curiosity, my sister was born in '75, one year after the revolution, and she wasn't breastfed. My mom says that breastfeeding was seen at the time as something reactionary that shackled woman, and so it was something contemporary feminism disaproved, and women felt empowered by not breastfeeding. I was born in '81 and was just breastfed for a few months. On the whole i feel it's a good think that breastfeeding is seen as something healthy and natural and we've moved on by not having a political stand attached to it.

The person I had that most from didn’t actually specify in what way they’d be raising their future kids differently from my (actual) child, just that ‘suffice to say we’ll be raising our children very different to you’? Good luck to them. There are infinite ways to raise a child. I just try my damned hardest, with love and hard work on good days and bad.

I’m on a new round of medication today and I think it’s making me feel a bit useless and emotional, so just thank you for nice people with good hearts and funny bothers in this thread x

You were posting as I was so I didn’t have time to duck down (pillow) before seeing this, but I think there are strong feelings on both ‘sides’ of the decision (where a mother actually physically has the ability to choose) of whether to breastfeed. My neighbour is a young Muslim mother with family roots in Pakistan. She says that a lot of people in her culture see breastfeeding as unclean and almost ‘animalistic’. She said she was in a very unusual position in that many of her peers and elders ostracised her for even considering it yet her mother gave FULL support, along with her husband, and so that’s what she did. She lost friends, and a couple of aunties fell out with her and her mum, but she is glad she made the choice and had the rare support to do so.

Also, in a lot of cultures it is apparently only seen as being beneficial to ‘poor’ families.

Ok, actually going now!