Where NOT to go to pass the time

A collective sigh of relief goes up across the world this week, as, after several weeks of captivity, parents are finally being set free. Yes, school holidays have once again come to an end, and children everywhere are gathering up their pencil cases and musty lunch bags and being packed off back to their classrooms.

Of course lots of parent do relish these special weeks spent at home, re-bonding over the craft box and cooking up a cupcake storm. Other parents however, particularly those who aren’t naturally programmed to moulding papier-mâché and making their own play dough, sometimes find these long periods of time a little bit tricky to fill.

Once the novelty of an alarm clock free morning and a sandwich-making free evening has worn off, and you’ve spent several days watching your creative child stick tissue paper and glitter directly onto the dining table and build a cubby in every single room, it’s likely you might start thinking of other places to spend the day.

‘Other places’ that aren’t at home, to be more precise. Places that won’t involve you having to vacuum up afterwards, and require the odd bit of plastering and repainting when the playing goes wrong.

If and when the weather doesn’t cooperate and rain pours down day after day, soft play centres – the sort with swinging ladders, tunnels, slides and multi-coloured balls – are a tempting refuge. It’s true that spending a day at such a place is likely to knock at least a year off your lifespan and leave you with a nasty chest infection, but at least you are safe in the knowledge that, short of the odd friction burn and heat exhaustion, your children can knock themselves out without actually coming to any real harm.

The downside of these play centres is of course the entry fee. It’s generally on par with a central London mortgage repayment. And to add insult to overpriced injury, the parent is also charged just for the privilege of sitting, watching and breathing in the rancid air.

After you’ve set foot through the door and all shoes have been removed and stored in a pile under the counter, you will of course remember that the obligatory socks are still sitting at home in your child’s drawer. So your wallet is forced to come back out again and a new neon-coloured nylon pair (Easyjet style, Harrods prices) are passed over the counter to your child’s outstretched little paw. They of course will claim to love these new socks more than life itself. You will consider them hideous, and likely deposit them in the bin on the way out.

Finally the door (or gateway to hell, depending how you look at it) is opened, and your newly socked child is set free, static sparks flying in all direction as they run across the matching nylon carpeted floor. Reluctantly you follow suit and enter the room. Your ears are met with the thunderous sound of a hundred children all screaming, yelping and hollering in delight.

Just audible beneath this din, is a distinctive white noise. The low-level humming of a gaggle of mothers, all rocking backwards and forwards on their plastic seating in a desperate, shared pain.

Moving forward into hell, you spot the only beacon of hope in the entire place – a café at the end of the room. As you draw closer, the ‘café’ takes the form of a scratched up old counter and a chiller cabinet stocked full of last weeks’ salmonella and botulism experiments. Located somewhere beyond the coffee maker and the enormous display of food colouring and MSG is the kitchen, with it’s impressive line up of deep fat fryers spitting out grease all over the floor.

Unsure about which of the food would kill you and which would just make you sick, you settle on a hot chocolate and a purple coloured muffin. How wrong can you go with hot chocolate? It’s made inside the machine and spat out into the mug below. The muffin, which admittedly does look slightly solid around the edges, at least claims to contain a type of fruit.

The unwashed looking child behind the cash register takes the remainder of your money and hands you a numbered baton. You’d much rather just stand and wait for your order, but apparently loitering around the counter is not allowed. You must go to your table and wait to vibrate.

Not particularly keen to strike up a conversation with anyone in sight, you are forced to walk the length of the room in search of a table free of rubbish and off-putting inhabitants. You hurry past mothers dressed head-to-toe in stone washed denim and others dressed head-to-toe in fleece. You rush past those on day release from the local young offenders institute, and scuttle past those who obviously favour hemp on a stick to soap on a rope.

Eventually, several trips past scattered prams and regurgitating babies later, and you are finally settled into your plastic seat. You’re sitting just about near enough to the rope cage to see your child fly past, but not so close you can smell the feet. You finally have your ‘refreshments’ and enough dog-eared celebrity magazines to help pass the time, while you wait for your child’s colour-coded wristband to expire.

An hour passes and your child shows no signs of tiredness or even the slightest willingness to leave. The litre bottle of water you’ve just washed down the muffin with leaves you with little choice. You must leave the safety of your seat and brave the bathrooms.

The smell hits before you’ve even pushed open the door. The floor is swimming with something and none of the cubicles have locks, let alone anything resembling a loo roll. Hopping from dry patch to dry patch, you mentally calculate if you’re still covered by the tetanus jab you had for your holidays last year. Emerging from your cubicle you find a small crying child stood opposite your door. His trousers are around his ankles and his Thomas pants are full of something they shouldn’t be.

You briefly cast your eyes back to the liquid matter on the floor.

Now you’re faced with something of a social dilemma. Do you make a hasty escape and hope the soggy child’s mother is about to appear, or do you take possession of the said soggy child and go off in hunt of the careless owner? It’s not that you’re necessarily an uncaring cow with a heart of stone, but clearing up your own child’s accidents is one thing – sorting out the mess of a child with a shaved head and a cubic zirconia in one ear is quite another.

Luckily for you, the mother of ‘mini thug’ swoops in on him and drags him back out into the room, his Thomas pants still dripping across the floor.

Emerging back into the fresh air (the word ‘fresh’ becomes relative in a place like this), you decide that your senses have taken enough of a beating for one day. You spot your fuchsia-coloured child refuelling at the table and seize the opportunity to grab them and make a beeline for the door.

On the way home your exhausted child in the backseat tells you that it was worth all the pain. But it’s only taken 2 hours up of the day, and now you’re emotionally drained and financially crippled. To cap it off, the bottom of your jeans look slightly damp and the car now smells suspiciously of wee.

 

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Shut up and push

dgd

Here are some recent ramblings of an enlightened male, that will no doubt make mothers everywhere grind their teeth in annoyance.

According to Michael Odent – a medical expert and ‘childbirth specialist’ – fathers-to-be should no longer be present at the birth of their children, and should be banned from the delivery room. Apparently they make our time in labour longer, more painful and more stressful.

Oh, what a load of crap.

I believe it’s the trying to push and pass out something the size of a bloody melon that is the cause of all the pain and stress, not having the father sat beside us in the room. Something that Mr Odent would know if he was to give it a go. Oh that’s right, he can’t, he’s a man.

Now I can only speak for myself, and the 22 hours in total I’ve spent in labour, but having my husband in the room helped, not hindered the situation. He made the time go faster by talking to me, making me laugh and occasionally laughing at me (as he winched me on and off the birthing ball). He fetched me reading material and fluids, and let me wrap my fingernails so snugly around the bones in his arm I left scars, without making so much as a whimper.

For me, high as a kite on gas and air, the time actually passed quite quickly. For him, unable to escape from my vice gripe long enough to even let the blood flow back into his fingertips, the time must have practically stood still.

His one very stupid idea of offering me a Jaffa cake half way through a contraction aside, my husband was an absolute god send, and made an otherwise traumatic occasion much more bearable. The thought of having had to go through that without him there doesn’t even bear thinking about.

So I really don’t care if Mr Odent has been ‘involved for more than 50 years in childbirth’. He hasn’t been there. Or got the t-shirt, weakened bladder or stretch marks to prove it.  So with all due respect, he should butt out and stop trying to fix something that isn’t broken. Recommending that a woman should give birth with only a silent midwife in the room is like suggesting an operation should be done without the general anesthetic – just because it might speed up the recovery time. Would Mr Odent particularly like to be sliced and diced whilst awake I wonder?

Of course midwives do a great job – my last one was lovely, if my somewhat hazy memory serves me right – but they can’t give you what you need while your pelvis splits in half and your pain levels go off the Richter scale. At a time when all dignity has left the room and you’re freaked out and panicking, you don’t need polite chit-chat with a strange woman between your legs, as she grapples with a slippery crowning head. You need a familiar face and the reassurance of the person who got you into this painful bloody mess in the first place.

The other, even more laughable observation made by Mr Odent, is that watching your wife give birth can ultimately lead to divorce. I’m sorry. Is this man for real? What he’s really saying is if a man is subjected to seeing his wife laid out on a table like a birthing cow, then he will ultimately be put off having sex with her again, and as a result, have no choice but to throw in the towel and his wedding ring.

Now THAT is the saddest excuse in the history of marriages for a man being forced to leave his wife. It’s actually justifying why a man can jump ship and run off with a younger, un-stretched, child-free model. If there’s a Mrs Odent out there, you must be so proud – and so very paranoid.

Generally speaking, the man who gets you pregnant already knows (or should already know) you inside out. If, after the birth, he literally knows you inside out, then that, unfortunately, is one of the side effects of procreation.

To say that men can’t stomach the sight of their wife in labour or that they will ‘stop feeling a sexual attraction towards them’, is an insult to husbands everywhere. It’s certainly an insult to woman to say that we’re no longer seen as anything other than a piece of reproducing meat after the birth.

If woman had their way, Mr Odent, we wouldn’t be forced to watch our husbands belch, scratch, itch and fart beside us on the sofa every night. None of these manly qualities really puts us ‘in the mood’ you know, but you don’t see us all rushing to file for divorce and citing these disgusting habits on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour.

Really, fancy telling us we should be giving birth in silence and on our own. Are you recruiting for the Church of Scientology by any chance? Next you’ll be saying that pain relief is illegal and Enya is no longer a suitable birthing artist.

For a father to be made to miss out on seeing his child born would be a terrible thing. Not only because he wouldn’t get to experience the incredible rush of euphoria when meeting your 5 second old offspring for the first time, but because for the rest of his life he would be forever reminded by his wife, that not only did she have to do all of the work, but that he wasn’t even there to hold her hand at the end.

And that, Mr Odent, is the part you seem to have forgotten. Woman want their men there with them at this time. Not just to offer them support and a back rub, but so that they can see first hand just how much pain childbirth involves. This way, regardless of how many bins are put out or paychecks earned, the man will always know that he owes something to his wife that can never be repaid.

Call it an unfair advantage in the guilt stakes, but childbirth is the one bit of power we woman still hold in this world. Don’t you dare try and take that away from us.

Day care dilemmas

Few things make me really mad, but this morning I was fuming. I had a run in with a business who tried to take my money without actually offering anything in return. Foolish people, they had no idea the lengths this family will go to, for the sake of $20.

Let me explain. Earlier in the year, after agonising about whether cutting the apron strings would stunt my son’s future development, and catapult him into therapy, I decided to put him into nursery for a few days every week and get back to work. Of course once the decision was made, despite knowing my daughter had gone into day care and survived to live another day, I was racked with guilt.

Guilt aimed at myself – over my obvious selfishness, and the guilt that comes from those silent accusations, radiating out from judgemental ‘earth’ mother types. You know the the sort. The mum’s who are happy to schedule their every waking minute around baby groups, Jolly Jingle music classes and ‘Beginners Russian for Babies’. They appear to spend every single day painting with scraps of string, making animals out of paper mache and mass producing trays of multi-coloured cup cakes.

These are the mother’s who make you feel like an unmaternal monster for daring to enjoy your life before children, and incredibly selfish for even suggesting you want one after. Hats off to you if you are built this way, but please, enough with the comments and tutting. To these people, I say why don’t you concentrate on your own finger painting children, and leave the welfare of my children to me.

I think it is safe to say that I am not such a mother. I never have been, and no amount of intensive craft training or raised eyebrows are going to turn me into one. I did the whole baby group thing the first time around, so when my son came along I was reluctant to go back. Those dreaded weekly meets became all about graphic stories of ruptured placentas, lengthily labours and a fiercely fought battle over who had prepared the best spread of food on the day. Chinese water torture has nothing on a baby group.

Not wanting to starve my son of any joy in his life, we did give Gymbaroo a go. Being much younger than the other performing toddlers in the class, he refused to jump through the hoops or even go up to cuddle teddy. He actually spent much of the time fighting to get of my lap and out of the door. By the end of the term, as I sat with gritted teeth through all the songs, I had to agree with his gut instinct. We made our bid for freedom, sadly never to return.

Of course I love to play with my son. We happily spend many hours building train tracks, re-potting tubs of play dough and reading the same book, over and over and over again. Mealtimes I could do without, but the rest I would never want to miss. But as much as I value this time, I also need to keep my brain ticking over. I need to have a few days where I’m not covered in cracker crumbs and knee deep in sand. I also have to earn a living and pay the bills.

Anyway, back to that guilt.

Eventually my paranoid state subsided and common sense prevailed. Helped along by a timely reminder about the importance of social skills, as my son attempted to scalp an unsuspecting friend who came to play.

With a decision made, I set around finding somewhere that he could go. I naturally went to the nursery with the best reputation, a family run business with a queue for places that ran out of the door. 3 months I was told, 4 at the tops. Fair enough I thought, if there are no places then it must be good. So I handed over the $20 registration fee and resigned myself to the wait.

Trouble is, patience isn’t really my thing though, so after a few days I thought I’d give the other nursery a go. This one didn’t have such a good reputation. ABC Learning Centre is a chain, with 1000′s of centres around the world, and an army of staff who probably aren’t all great. But with an open mind and the need to work looming over me,  I went along for a look. I was impressed with the reception my son and I received and he was given a place starting a few days later. As I said, patience just isn’t my thing.

Along we went on the first day, with teddy stuffed into a Bob the Builder bag so big, my son could have used it for a cot. Yes, he was a little bit teary at first, but not nearly as bad as me. I walked away that day, with my forked tail tucked into my jeans, went home and did nothing. I sat and worried, imagined the worst and then called 3 times before picking him up to bring him home for lunch. The next day was better, and by the 3rd he was fine. By the 5th day I was fine too, so decided I’d better stop calling up to check he wasn’t still howling at the gate for me. As if. All tears stopped when I walked away.

That was nearly 8 months ago now, and I have to say my son has never been happier. He helps pack his bag, climbs into the car and runs to go into the toddler room. His speaking has improved, he plays rather than ambushes and has even learned to sit still for more than 30 seconds at a time. He also sleeps better at night. Bingo!

Now back to the reason for my climbing blood pressure. In all this time, I have never heard so much as a peep from the other nursery, the one with the ‘excellent’ reputation and a waiting list longer than an IKEA store. Not once have they called to say there are still no spots or even to apologise for the delay. Nothing. So armed with the knowledge that other children have since been taken in, I went along today to ask for my $20 back. I saw no reason why they should keep my money simply for filing a piece of paper.

The owner, after admitting to already being asked the same thing by somebody else that day, said “No, the money was non-refundable.”

I don’t think so. If my son’s promised place had materialised, or I had even had a call, then yes, I would have agreed. But there wasn’t and they didn’t, and $20 is after all, still $20.

“Circumstances change” she tried to claim, “and we do have the best reputation in the area.”

“Well my circumstance didn’t change”, I replied, ” and I wouldn’t have paid and waited for a place that was never going to be there”.

“Fine”, she snapped back, slapping the $20 that she was for some reason holding, into my hand. “Take that then, and good luck to you.” She indicated to the door and I left, fuming. I can only presume that she thought I would need the good luck in finding another nursery who would take my son.

So there you go. Reputations are not all they are cracked up to be. If someone runs a child care centre like a cash register, and takes money from everyone who walks through the door, why would you ever want to entrust your child to such tender fleecing care. I think I’d rather spend every day covered in bits of sticky back plastic and smothered in PVA glue.

Finally, to all those mother’s who are made to feel like sending your child to day care is on a par with pushing them into a lions den, smothered in Bovril. I would say ignore what other people say. Just because you need to have a few days to yourself, whether to work, or think, or even sleep, it doesn’t mean you don’t love your child, care about their development or even enjoy spending time with them. It just means you need some time… to work, or think, or even sleep.

If that isn’t a good enough reason, then a recent study estimated that children who go to day care cut their risk of the most common type of childhood leukaemia by around 30%. Something to do with them building up their immunity to the small stuff, after spending their first year with a constant streaming nose and a face encrusted with snot.

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Fighting Flies

Having spent the entire day armed with an aerosol can and stalking flies around the house like a mad woman with a nervous tick, I have decided that enough is enough. Having already lost the last 3 months of my life to the debilitating effects of vertigo, there is no way on God’s earth that I am now going to put up with a constant buzzing in my ear that I can do something about.

So tonight I brought out the big guns. Envirosafe traps, ($10 from Bunnings). A quick and easy (just add water to the powder and shake sort of easy) way of catching the little buggers as they buzz in the kitchen door and head straight for my clean work top.  Their presence might be slightly more tolerable if not for the fact that right before they trample their mucky little feet across whatever it is that I happen to be eating at the time, they have been out in the garden and feasting on a buffet of the dogs finest deposits.

Strangely enough the idea of the dogs last dinner ending up smeared across my plate is an incredibly unappetising one.

After last year’s endless battle against these airborne pests, I am determined that this year I will be ready for them. If it’s the last thing I manage this spring, it will be winning the war against the world’s most pointless and annoying insect and hopefully coaxing as many of them as possible into the various watery graves hung around the house.

I am aware that this may make me sound like a blood thirsty insect murderer, and a slightly possessed one at that, but in my defense this is the effect that an endless buzzing drone in ones ear can have on an otherwise peace loving girl.

It may be ridiculous to let something so small wind me up so much, but they do. They really do. They are almost impossible to catch, swat or squash and can literally drive you up the wall when trying to coax one back out through an open window. I suppose their ‘you’ll never catch me’ razor sharp reactions have something to do with those 2 large compound eyes that let them see in all directions without even needing to move.

These eyes mean that unfortunately it is pointless trying to sneak up slowly on a fly from behind. It will watch you, laugh at you and then nip across the room and land on your half eaten sandwich before you have even lifted up the newspaper to swat it.

Strangely enough although flies have these clever, swiveling eyes to help prevent themselves from being flattened against the wall, they don’t actually have any eyelids to protect them. So although they spend much of their time tiptoeing through rubbish, rotting meat and dog do-do, they then have to rub their own eyes with their dirty feet to keep them clean. I wonder if this is natures way of enforcing karma?

Flies come from the Diptera family (Greek: di = two, and pteron = wing), which includes all those annoying insects with wings (namely flies, mosquitoes and midges) whose sole purpose in life seems to be to carry germs, spread diseases, chow down on unsavory things on the ground and generally ruin any attempt to ever sit and relax outside or eat the food you have just charcoal-ed on the BBQ.

Apparently there are 30 000 species of Diptera that live in Australia alone. At a rough estimate I would say for a handful of weeks in the year at least half of these species seem to dwell in our back garden.

I was aware that Perth had something of a fly problem before I came, (the fly screens on all of the doors and windows were a subtle clue) but when it comes to forces of nature, seeing is definitely believing. All I can say is I am very glad that I didn’t arrive right in the middle of the ‘fly’ season last year, otherwise I might just have packed up my bags and returned to the UK. That last statement is a real indication of how bad they can get, as nothing would make me want to go back to a country that is disappearing down the toilet.

The worst time in Perth is in the Spring, around about now, hence the traps and the war cry. At this point the weather warms up and all those 1000′s of nasty flies wake up ready to do battle. I say wake up because flies can actually remain dormant until their body temperature reaches 18 degrees, they then emerge to begin their hunt for food when the air temperatures goes above 20 degrees.

For that (relatively) short time of the year when they first appear, this place can be a nightmare. Forget the spiders being an issue, the flies are without doubt the single most annoying part of Australia’s wildlife that you need to contend with. They can make going out for a walk a monumental struggle against gravity. The amount of flapping you have to do with your arms and hands is enough to make your feet leave the ground.

This constant flapping about your face and person is known as the ‘Australian Salute’. Having a third hand at this time would be very useful, to push off that one fly that has decided to make you it’s buddy for the day and follow you for hour.

Everywhere you go you can see people walking around in the throes of what looks like a fully fledged epileptic fit. Worse still for those mothers pushing prams. If they use one hand to swat a fly then they run the risk of junior veering off under the wheels of a car, if they keep both hands on the buggy then they are forced to eat fly. Babies are OK, they are all hidden from view under what looks a lot like an Arabic abaya/jilbab. A Factor 50 sunshade that also doubles up as a moving fly screen.

So to save myself the stress brought on by the inevitable aerial attack, this year I have decided that for the worst weeks I will not worry about forcing the kids out for fresh air and exercise. We will instead stick the dog on a treadmill, stay on the safe side of the fly screen and burn calories on the Wii.

I might also invest in one of those famous cork hats. Finally I realise that it might just be worth looking like an extra off ‘Crocodile Dundee’ if it meant that my diet wasn’t supplemented with quite so much unwanted protein.

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Father’s Day

Today I toed the Hallmark line and recognised a day of appreciation for the other side of my children’s gene pool…

I organised card making, lived with the stress of finding a gift and made sure that I got up early enough to have ‘the breakfast’ ready at exactly the right time. Given the length of the lay-in taken by the Father in question, I did at least have plenty of time for that.

All of these duties for the day are of course part of the job requirement and I don’t mind at all.

That is until ‘the day of rest’ idea is milked down to it’s last drop with one too many requests for tea. Then comes the realisation that Father’s Day is only made possible by the MOTHER, so why oh why are we the ones that end up running around like a blue bottomed fly?

That said, Happy Father’s Day to Dads everywhere.

Battle of the baby sexes

Recently I was asked one of those questions that few people dare ask and even fewer wish to answer. A mother (of boys) asked me if it is true that parents of girls look down their noses at noisy little boys and believe them all to be badly behaved and completely undisciplined.

Why ask me? Having learnt that I had one of each, she obviously felt that I would be able to give an unbiased answer. Whether or not she expected an honest one I don’t know, but seeing as she was quite happy to ask a question that put me well and truly on the spot,  I thought she in turn turn deserved the truth.

And the truth is yes, for the most part they probably do.

This unspoken snobbery amongst parents of girls, whilst rarely admitted out loud has always been there. An assumption that their head to toe clad pink princess simply has to be cleaner, smarter, better behaved and without a shadow of a doubt a far nicer child than that unkempt little testosterone fueled terror on the other side of the playground. The one wearing his breakfast and trying to bury his head in the sand.

Deny it if you want all you mothers of Eve, but this is true. I know because up until the arrival of my own son, I also believed that many boys were the root of all undisciplined evil. I admit I could never understand why their parents didn’t just rein them in, shut them up and get them under some sort of control.

And then I had Sam. He learnt to walk, discovered his independence and only looked back when he was laughing at me. Finally it all became clear why girls and boys are so different, and surprisingly it had nothing to do with one being born with a halo and the other with a forked tail.

Little boys are like the Duracell Bunny, they are known for their unlimited energy and their love of running. Always in the opposite direction to an exhausted parent and often at breakneck speed towards a busy road. They tend to get dirtier faster and are often capable of ruining a complete outfit in 15 seconds flat, with nothing more than a piece of toast and a wet wipe in reaching distance.

They find sticking their hand into the toilet bowl and feeding the loo roll to the dog unbelievably funny. They have a strangely magnetic pull to the contents of every cupboard and drawer, particularly those containing knives, lighters and all deadly and poisonous cleaning fluids. They can take apart and lose the back of any TV remote in less time than it takes to cross the room and can scale any furniture like a seasoned mountaineer. They can increase their body weight to that of a baby elephant when they don’t want to be picked up and contort their limbs into a rigid banana when they don’t want to be pinned into their pram.

Girls on the other hand are often considered to be the quieter of the 2 sexes. Known to sit quietly on your hip and happily play with their toys. Known to help pick out their own clothes and even make an effort to keep them clean and tidy. Known to hold your hand when going out for a walk and if entrusted with a hand held whisk, regard it as a tool for mixing food with Mummy, not as a weapon with which to chase the cat and give it a perm.

Yes indeed, girls are known to be easier to deal with, easier on the ear drums, the energy levels and the nerves. But are they really all things sweetness and light? Does a pound of bacon really fly? Of course they aren’t.

Whether dealing with babies, toddlers or a child old enough to know better, girls and boys can be as bad as each other. Both can screech and scream just for the sake of making noise. Both can single handily depreciate the value of your home in 30 seconds and ruin the upholstery of your car inside of 5 minutes. Both can have such horrific tantrums in the middle of a crowded mall that you could quite easily stuff them head first in the nearest rubbish bin and walk away.

A child regardless of their sex is a complex individual, sometimes believed to be put there purely to test a parent’s sanity and to stretch all boundaries of socially acceptable behaviour. Some are sweet, loving and caring, some are bolshy, stubborn and incredibly sulky. All are a blank canvass, ready to be shaped into the person they will become and to be defined by what they are taught, what they observe and what they experience in the environment in which they grow.

So if all little babies are created and born equal, why are boys so quickly labelled as the nightmare sex and why is society so very quick to to re-enforce these misguided preconceptions?

You only have to look at any range of baby clothes to see that these stereotypes are ingrained into the minds of parents, and no doubt the child as well, from the moment they wear their first outfit.

Buying clothes for little girls is easy. There are always plenty to choose from and they’re always pretty, pink and covered in fairies, flowers and butterflies. Every top, t-shirt or babygro is labelled ‘Princess’, ‘Angel’, ‘Cutie Pie’ or ‘Fairy’.

Now move over to the boys section. Keep going, right to the back of the store, that’s it, those last few rails over there in the corner. The clothes here range from the ever so attractive sludge green to the ever so practical dirty brown. All tops, t-shirt or babygros here are covered in tyre tracks and muddy footprints and are inevitably labelled ‘Rascal’, ‘Trouble’, ‘Little Monkey’ or ‘Monster’.

Now aside from the obvious fact that most little girls I know could easily be described as Rascal, Trouble, Monkey or Monster, does it not seem slightly unfair to encourage and enforce this type of gender pigeon holing at such a young age?

Granted my son is generally always a little bit grubby, usually looking for mischief and always a tad on the destructive side, but it might be nice to occasionally be able to put him in a top that read ‘Well mannered and loves a good book’ or ‘Enjoys vegetables and always kind to animals’.

Babies are babies and children are children and they can all be a royal pain in the backside at some time or other (generally in my experience between 4-6pm). This labelling system seems to me to be an unrealistic and unfair generalisation, After all, very few little girls remain angels by the time their hormones kick in and most little boys have decided to cut worms from their diet and stop rolling in mud by the time they buy their first razor.

If babies are to be branded, then perhaps it’s time that the clothing companies came up with some more more realistic future personality and character traits.

I’ve come up with a few to get the ball rolling…

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