Oh geez this. My parents never let me try out new things if they would be messy or might fail. I wanted a veggie garden, nope. Baking, too messy. Tons of craft things were vetoed for a very long time too. Thankfully as an adult I’ve rekindled these desires, and i have a garden I cultivate and a sourdough starter going (as examples). But I do mourn the learning I could have done as a kid.

I’m determined to let my kid do messy things. Right now the messiest thing she can do is spit up, but when she’s older she can have so much play doh and dirt time and baking time.

(Play doh only if she’s not eating it)

I appreciate the sentiment (it hasn’t gotten better per se yet, but we’ve gotten more used to the… nature of the screams) and also I wanted to apologise for being rather combative in explaining the context— which, yeah, was definitely missing in the original post. Gonna edit that now to make this post less rant, more informative.

Yep this. I’ve been given the advice to step away from my baby when she’s crying if I’m overwhelmed and she’s in a safe place. That’s advice from basically every medical professional I’ve encountered during pregnancy and post partum. Because it is so, so important to not let your nerves get fried in an attempt to be a perfect parent, because letting your nerves get fried will lead to shit you’ll regret down the line. Be that shouting or checking out mentally or way worse stuff.

Ear plugs =/= can’t hear. Loops specifically are designed to allow you to hear but not have hearing damage.

My baby is colicky AF and will scream while we’re in the process of making her a bottle. Or while we’re burping her. Or when we have to pull the bottle away to wipe spit up. Or while we’re in the process of soothing her but not soothed yet.

I’m pretty patient (with children, not judgy parents though) but I’m not perfect. I can parent better and be more present while not massively overwhelmed by a noise designed by evolution to be horrible and intolerable.

I’m so sorry. I almost wanted to downvote this because I want to downvote the circumstance.

But heeeeeey that would sort childcare… woohoo…

The swaddle. My child has learned being awake is fun. Including at night. By the power invested in me by this swaddle blanket, she will learn the beauty of SLEEP.

I grew up such a people pleaser that this would have worked SO well on me. Stop leads to “why?” But my parent being upset, or god forbid dosappointed… those are some words of great power.

I swear my nearly 3 week old is starting to turn her head towards me, and occasionally even try to focus her eyes on me, when I speak to her up close.

She wasn’t even meant to be born for another 12 days! At least going by due dates. But honestly as much as I’ve researched adjusted age for preterm babies, I’m becoming convinced I can ignore all that. I can see her speeding towards the 2 month milestones (the first checkpoint, essentially). She’s not hit them yet, that would be crazy, but I’m seeing early signs like the above.

Also she read Watership Down.

Okay it was an abridged version for kids and I did the reading. But she liked the pictures.

Okay not strictly words, like at all, but the other day I had my baby in my lap and she randomly arched backwards, pursed her lips in an O, and after a dramatic pause let out a long “oooooooooooh”

I knew then I was sleep deprived because I lost my shit laughing.

Tl:dr; “ooooooooh”

If your freshly born newborn doesn’t poop because she’s constipated, well they work surprisingly like toothpaste tubes if you hold their knees to their chest.

I’m sorry for the image. I’ve earned my “grit your teeth and do what you gotta” merit badge at just a week and a half postpartum, so I’m… happy?

I would love a general/weekly discussion post! Currently 8 months pregnant with my first, so I’ll take any chance to connect with other parents once she is here.

I would just like to both validate and challenge your view of the UK. I lived in Torquay (Devon, so the southwest) for a good long while, albeit during the height of lockdowns, and community felt nonexistant. There were some punk-type-folks attempting to get stuff started right when I moved away, but only just then iirc.

I moved to Inverness (Scottish Highlands) and it’s night and day. There’s a queer community doing hella shit, there’s a tool library popping off, lots of good local initiatives are being organised and taking off.

My kneejerk response is to say that Inverness beats the hell outta Torquay. But the thing is, about 4-5 years ago NONE OF THE STUFF I mentioned was going on. The queer meetup was organised by one dude who moved up from London and was gobsmacked that there wasn’t an active community. Now it’s consistently a huge, weekly event. There are even offshoots of quieter meetups that had to be created because the main one is So Successful. But all the local queers will tell you that before this started, they thought they were all alone up here.

And the tool library is only about a year old, but keeping on well.

So on one hand, yeah, I think the UK has a very… independent culture. But once someone identifies a need in a community and fills that need, people tend to show up and appreciate it.

Also, i reckon this is a good time to be an organiser. People are tired of being alone during a pandemic, people are tired of seeing what other communities do via the internet and want their communities to do the same.

Tl;dr be the change! There’s an appetite for it.

What an awesome thing. Reminds me of the Trans Couch Network on tumblr back in the day, I always wondered if there was something else to take its place.

(I have the same concerns as I did then of the potential for abuse, like someone else said, but I don’t have any actionable advice/etc yet. But queer housing is a major Thing to me so I might do some research/thinking on the subject of abuse mitigation, if that’s welcome)

I can see the concern, as a trans and nonbinary person, about the phrasing of the headline. Casual readers will totally think the actual guidance says “if you fuck up a person’s pronouns, you go to jail” or whatever.

But not the guidance itself. We need more protections against intentional, malicious misgendering as verbal harassment. Which is usually less “she said— oops, they said—“ and more stuff like “(female coworker) put has pronouns in her signature? I thought she was a REAL WOMAN”

(The second being a real example from a friends work place. Funny thing is, friend is stealth trans and the coworker being misgendered is cis, but i digress)

But yeah all that aside I think the real context is misgendering when someone needs the bathroom, e.g. “you’re in the wrong bathroom” type comments. Where we really need stronger protections.

I like option 2, I thought I would prefer Option 1 before I saw 2 but it’s executed really well in 2! Also, that illustration is gorgeous, and thank you for sharing the illustrator’s details. I want my next novel to be solarpunk, and I am definitely in the market for a new cover artist…

I need to add this and Murder in the Tool Library to my storygraph. And preorder/buy a copy of both tbh.

This looks like the kind of feeder a small bird would build for itself, and I mean that in the best way. I love it

This makes me so happy because at least half of the things in community sufficiency column are things I see happening in my city. Saw a flier for a fermentation course recently as well as general veg growing, not to mention the community gardening initiative where people plant edible plants in public spaces. I still need to find a day I can help out with that one. Then we have a local mattress store that sells bespoke and/or handmade mattresses for affordable prices, and specifically employs disabled folk so they can be paid a living wage while upskilling. Then there’s the tool library that’s saved many a DIY project of mine…

I live in a chronically underfunded part of Scotland. In the past i lived in an underfunded part of England. Don’t get me wrong, no city should be underfunded to start with, that’s a government crime imo. But the Scottish city took underfunding and went “fuck the government, we have each other” while the English city just kept crumbling.

All of this said not to brag, but because it proves that this shit can work, does work, and is working. And i find that inspiring.

The other morning my dogs woke me up way too damn early, but it meant I got to watch a very fat pigeon on the power line behind my house, and I got to see the finch population rapidly increase around it. (I swear I saw one little bird and by the time I got out of bed there were 5 jetting around. Pigeon did not move.)

I agree that these are luxuries for a lot of people. Some of them can be found with mindset shifts (from “fuck you dogs” to “oh look, pretty birds” for example) but it’s also hard to shift your mindset to positivity when our society tries its damnedest to beat happiness out of you.

A friend literally just gifted me a copy of this because I’ve been feeling so burnt out by capitalism, and let me tell you, I devoured that book. It spoke to my weary soul. And made me want to quit my job (I already was wanting to quit my job)

So a perspective I haven’t seen here yet: in many places, Starbucks is the only suitable third space left. I.e. place that is not work/school or home. I have non-Starbucks cafes nearby, but due to astronomical and increasing rent for all the independent cafes in walking distance, they are in smaller buildings and they can’t afford to have people sitting for hours on laptops using the WiFi/talking to friends/reading a book. I still support my local cafes for food and coffee, or really short meetings with folks, but if I need to get out of the house and spend time in public where I’m not obligated to speedrun my coffee, Starbucks is The Choice.

And that’s why i might be inside of a Starbucks while hating capitalism. Because capitalism made Starbucks the only corporation able to afford proper cafe space.

(There is a library nearby, yes, but not with good space for sitting down and working on a laptop. And even having THAT Is a massive privilege)

(Also I actually do have a MacBook that I do my personal stuff on, because of various bits of software i need that are OS specific, which is annoying as heck but i got used to my work mac anyways and then found a nice one used… so yeah.)