Some things

[lnr]

Item: Wedding. John and Heather got married on Saturday at Clevedon Hall in Bristol and lo it was lovely. Congratulations to them both!

Item: Bike got a puncture yesterday, but I managed to fix it without too much trouble (apart from running out of rubber cement and having to borrow Mike's) - must remember to buy a new repair kit!

Item: Sexism. Found a rather good image online indicating how to tell whether a toy is for boys or for girls:

Item: Walking and Cycling guidance from NICE (see their PDF). I definitely welcome anything which encourages not just people to walk and cycle more where appropriate but also encourages workplaces, councils, road schemes and so on to work together to make it better and easier for people to do so and has specific suggestions. I don't welcome articles about the guidance which emphasise obesity rather than activity and lead with photos of headless fatties (see this one in the Guardian). Being fat doesn't stop you exercising, and exercising doesn't stop being good for you even if you are fat, and won't necessarily magically make you thin anyway. Rant over.

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

I love the guide to deciding what gender a toy is suitable for :)

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

Toy guide: brilliant!

I am finding it rather depressing at the moment how my sons (especially the eldest, just turned 7) are beginning to buy into the gender-segregation of toys and other things, under the influence mainly of their schoolmates rather than any adults they interact with (though I'm sure to some extent the adults the *classmates* interact with are a factor.) El has several times recently told me, or told me that other children have told him, things such as "fairies are for girls". He still loves to have his nails painted, but now only at weekends as he gets teased about it at school (I have given him some counter examples of male nail-polish wearers to respond to them.) And he continues to maintain that his favourite colour is pink, but I strongly suspect he would not say this at school :-( There is a lot of concern, quite rightly, that girls are getting a rough deal in terms of the toys/interests deemed appropriate for them (and I do try to encourage El to feel that his current main interests of dinosaurs and space are things that girls - such as me! - may also find interesting) but of course boys also suffer from this sort of gender-segregation :-(

(sorry, didn't intend to go on so long! But apparently that struck a nerve for me at the moment...)

[lnr]

Oh god no need to apologise for length.

I *do* think it's just as insidious for boys as it is for girls, though perhaps less obviously so. Clothes very much as well as toys. It's one of the reasons I don't want to know whether I'm expecting a boy or girl until he/she actually arrives! I'll be doing my best to encourage them to enjoy all sorts of toys and games and colours. I definitely fear it's got worse since we were children.