If you had a six-year-old child, and institutional schooling had never existed, how would you go about preparing them for adult life? In the next few posts on unschooling, I want to tease out a few different issues and discuss them separately. Today it’s the different social experiences schooled and unschooled (or homeschooled) kids have. […]
I had a nightmare recently, where my husband and I were both sent to prison – separate prisons. I don’t remember what we were convicted of or whether we’d done it. I just remember the horror of realising that our punishment was the break-up of our family. How appalling. I did a criminology paper at […]
Indulge me in a little linky celebrating. This is the 200th post on Sacraparental, and I’m sitting in Bristol feeling pretty good about that. Thank you, all. A gaggle of guest writers, a civility of commenters and a quietness of readers (like my collective nouns?) combine to make a welcoming lounge conversation. If you’re a […]
Poor wee boy. SBJ has vomited in the car several times in the last month. We all had a nasty tummy bug at one point, but now it seems that was a red herring and he actually just gets carsick. Not only on long trips, either, and not only on windy roads. My husband and […]
At number one on the toddler playlist this week is ‘Beans! Beans! Beans!’ – Weezer’s geek-pop anthem ‘Pork and Beans‘. Including pop culture pieces like this in our kids’ lives doesn’t exactly provide media balance – the tide of body hatred is too overwhelming – but it can open conversation and give a theme tune […]
‘That’s going straight to the blog!’ Miriam predicted as we walked out of the church service on Sunday. We had the lucky experience of hanging out at Archbishop Justin‘s place this weekend, staying with SBJ’s English godfather, who lives in Canterbury. It’s a pretty nice church. Since the first, self-conscious time I breastfed […]
Is it fair to say we all want our kids to have better, healthier, happier feelings about their bodies than we have about ours? How can we avoid passing on our own insecurities? Alex linked recently to this bawl-inducing letter Kasey Edwards writes to her mother in ‘Passing on Body Hatred,’ excerpted from […]
‘All I ever needed to know I learned in the mental hospital,’ says Glennon Doyle Melton, from the Momastery blog, in her recent TEDx Talk. It’s sort of Glennon 101, an introduction to the big themes of her mission to live in the open, be a shameless truth-teller, and help everyone else to feel ok […]
Two things I’ve stopped counting: the number of beds SBJ has slept in and the number of planes he’s been on (#humblebrag). Our enjoyably nomadic life continues, and we have just arrived in the United Kingdom, via Ras al-Khaimah, for a couple of months with family here. We haven’t been travelling with a small person […]