Cool Kids Alert!

Resistance = protest, standing up for rights of oppressed, whether male or female, free or slave. 

Authority = institutionalized arbiter of law, religion, custom or culture, i.e., Church and State. 

Resistance to authority = Protesting and standing up to authority perceived as unjust and oppressive.

Games for babies

I don’t think there is anything more fun than a baby that’s just learned how to smile!  But the interesting thing is watching them learn to respond to you.  It would be nice to get some good ideas around how to best encourage your baby to learn new things.  Searching the internet is often fruitless as most websites are trying to sell you something.  So if anyone out there has any good baby stimulation play tips, please let me know.

The best I’ve found so far is on a BBC site so there has to be more out there…

Tips please!

Revolutionary Childcare

Check out this story about community-based childcare in Brooklyn, inspired by experiences in South America. Nice example of what a community can do if they put their heads together and start looking after each other!! I can’t wait to get back to Melbourne and start getting involved in similar communities.

Out of Brooklyn have sprung two inspiring models of community-based radical childcare. The organizers of Regeneración Childcare NYC weave their own experiences and those of Pachamama: the Bushwick Childcare Cooperative into an enchanting tale of communities taking care of each other in their own ways in the shadow of the Architects of Despair.

Story here

P.S. Back to Melbourne tomorrow! Yay flying with an infant, how fun is this going to be?!?

Technorati Tags: childcare,, revolutionary,, Brooklyn,, Regeneracion,, Pachamama,, Bushwick

Scoopit!

Presenting…

May I introduce to you all my lovely new daughter, Tara.

She’s seriously clever and beautiful and adorable and magical and all those other words that parents use (but I mean extra ’cause of course, Tara is that extra wee bit special than all the other babies!)

Tara was born on the 7th of February 2007, weighing 8lb 11oz or 4kg. And she rocks!

Weather warning

Just so y’all know, I’m like, due to have a baby this week. So if I vanish for, let’s say, 5 days or more you can probably safely assume the imminent explosion has arrived.

Maybe even Asher could tell you all. Since he’s supposed to make some kind of blog announcement if I die, maybe I could persuade him to make an announcement if I give birth?

A bit more on parenting

I’ve found some more stuff online which is quite cool. So I’ve started another section down the ol blogroll called Radical Parenting. I urge you to check it out. Some of them are blogs, some are resource pages.

Watch out, I’ve started on this one now…

Anarcho-breeding

Warning: this is a looooong post
An acquaintance of mine was once overheard bemoaning activist women having children because it took them out of the movement. His argument was that there are so few efficient organisers around that it’s a shame when one of them gets ‘taken away’ to have children.

This has to be one of the most anti-women statements I have ever heard. But then look around the movement and see any positive writing about the role of women as mothers and you will notice that there isn’t any. So it’s not very surprising that this attitude exists.

Sure, there is an open acceptance and inclusion of feminist analysis, there are women’s collectives and when we have conferences we (almost) always include childcare in our planning. But the role of motherhood is still sitting on the outside and certainly not seen as a central role of the community. It’s seen as something to accommodate rather than truly seeing the contribution that motherhood brings to political thought.

So why does pregnancy and motherhood take women out of the movement? Because there isn’t room in the movement for them.

Edumacational book for the wee laddies and lassies

Big ups to Stephen DeVoy for his Anarchist Stories for Children book. Share it with your friends (big or small).