Tuesday Treats

Hello!

I’m back online and feeling very refreshed after a couple of weeks with minimal Facebooking, Tweeting, blogging and general web based faffing around! Thank you to all my excellent guest posters for keeping things busy over here.

What better way to get back into things than with Tuesday Treats – the weekly roundup of great reads from blogland, as chosen by myself, Chris at Thinly Spread, Becky at Baby Budgeting, and Lizzie at Me and My Shadow.

As ever, I’ve been spoilt for choice, but here are some of my top reads from recent weeks. I’ve tried to make it a good mixture of parenting, politics and general ramblings, but if you feel like I should be including a broader range of posts, please do let me know in the comments. Continue reading

Humility, and other liberations

Today’s super-duper awesome guest post is from an old university friend, Marina. Last time Marina wrote on DorkyMum – a brilliant piece called The Pot Plant Analogy – it turned into one of the most popular posts on the blog ever. I hope this piece on humility works a similar magic…

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Motherhood, for me, is an exercise in humility. And patience. And fortitude. And a lot of other virtues that would sound oppressive and downright creepy if they were being demanded by something less cute than a baby, or an enthusiastic nearly-three-year-old. But mainly, humility. The humility of admitting to myself just how much is outwith my control.

First pregnancy I read all the books, took hypnobirthing classes, and ended up with a 22 hour induction, epidural, and eventual 2 hours of pushing to deliver a 9lb baby boy who I was too exhausted to hold, let alone breastfeed in an aura of serene maternity.

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Maternal and Newborn Health is a Feminist Issue

Today’s hugely important guest post is from one of the loveliest bloggers around – Kylie Hodges, who you can find over at Not Even A Bag of Sugar.

The Partnership for Maternal, Child and Newborn Health is a division of the World Health Organisation and they have asked me to shout far and wide about the Newborn 2013 conference. Continue reading

The Living Wage

Today’s guest post is from Jax, who blogs at Making It Up and tweets as @liveotherwise. She describes herself as “a home educating mother of four, working from home around the children on wordpress websites for small businesses and spending far too much time blogging, and ranting on twitter about inequality.” 

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There’s been an awful lot written the last few days about benefit cuts and how it’s the only way to make work pay. On top of that there’s been some suggestion that the government is thinking of cutting the minimum wage. This seems to me bizarre – surely the best way to make work pay is to actually make it pay a decent amount. A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work or some such. Something like perhaps the living wage? Continue reading

Things We Love!

It’s time for another one of our wee roundups, talking about some of the things that are making us happy at the moment. Most are these are things I’ve just stumbled on or heard about. There is a disclosure statement at the bottom of the post to cover anything that has been sent to me as a review item.

Slinkachu Dead Leaves

Slinkachu: I did a post a few weeks ago about how much I love street art. Slinkachu’s Little People Project is one of my very favourites examples, combining street art installation projects and photography. I challenge you to look through the galleries of Slinkachu’s tiny little people and not have a wee giggle before you fall completely in love with them. The photo above is called Dead Leaves, from January 2012. For lots more like this check out the Slinkachu website and blog (linked previously) or like the Slinkachu page on Facebook.

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