One from the archives for all those sleep deprived parents with teething babies prompted by this tweet by @eske.
Sometimes I look at the human race and I despair. Is this really the result of millions of years of evolution?
Charles Darwin must have got something fundamentally wrong when he came up with his “survival of the fittest” theory. Homo sapiens is perhaps the biggest pro-creationist argument anyone could ever make… because surely a process like natural selection couldn’t get something this wrong!
We wouldn’t even have made it out of the trees way back when if we’d been relying on natural selection. How can I possibly know this? I’ve got a new baby in the house, that’s how.Adorable as they are human babies are pretty feckless.
They can’t feed themselves, they can’t walk for a year or more, they are so fragile that without constant attention from their parents they wouldn’t last five minutes. Compare that with, say, an alligator… fully functional right out of the egg: swimming, hunting its own food and generally getting on with it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning: with childbirth. I recently witnessed a completely natural home-birth… no drugs, no gas and air, nothing but a pool of warm water, my wife, the midwife, and myself. Now while I can certainly vouch for the fact that birth in all its natural glory is a wondrous and humbling thing to experience, it’s neither a quick nor quiet process.
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A couple of wildlife shots pulled out of the archive… the first, a lacewing, was shot on my old, old 3.2 Megapixel Nikon Coolpix 990 back in August 2003 – amazing for Macro work, and still going strong to this day.
The macro is something I miss on my Nikon D90 – and a decent macro lens is on the wish list.
The next was taken the weekend I got the D90, on a shopping trip to Cheshire Oaks outlet village. I was outside playing with my camera while my wife hit the shops. There were some starlings picking at bits of food discarded by passing shoppers.
While they aren’t everyone’s favourite bird, starlings have some amazingly iridescent plumage, and the detail is amazing.
Guster the wood pigeon was dead. There were no two ways about it… this was an ex-pigeon, a pigeon that had ceased to be.
The girls were sad… especially the little one. In the twenty minutes or so since they’d met (and named) Guster they’d grown quite attached to him.
When we found him Guster was in pretty bad shape. He was flapping about in the shallows of an inlet just off the path at Rineen Woods near Unionhall. He’d been attacked by a predator, probably a fox, and had feathers missing from his back and shoulders to reveal bare skin and some nasty looking puncture wounds. Floundering helplessly in the water, struggling to keep his head above the surface, he was a forlorn sight.
I sized up the situation as the girls pleaded with me to save him.
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I’ve been reading a lot lately about the hand-wringing and guilt parents go through when considering whether they should take children out of school to accommodate a family trip or holiday.
An article in the Times last month claimed that in the UK some 1.5 million school-days were taken for family holidays last year, 325,821 of them without the appropriate authorisation from schools.
Those are pretty big numbers… but I don’t necessarily buy the assertion that this is such a big problem.
Who, these days, can afford to take their family holiday during the school breaks… when prices for flights, ferries, accommodation, attractions and practically everything else are inflated to the max? Not to mention the fact that, if you travel in peak season (i.e. the school holidays) wherever you’re heading is bound to be crammed with throngs of tourists. Thanks but no thanks!
I can see how children bunking school without the school or their parents’ consent is a crucial issue that needs to be tackled head on, and how missing a stint during the latter years of secondary school, with exams looming, might not be the best idea in the world. But seriously, if a child is out for a week here or there during primary or early secondary school, what are they really going to miss?
Not a lot, I’d venture… and think about how much they have to gain.
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I don’t often post product offers here… but I got a newsletter full of special offers from Pixmania this morning, and a couple of them were too good not to share!
Portable computing for less
First, they’ve cut the price of the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 netbook, with 1GB RAM and a 160GB hard disk, by 20% to just €239 including VAT.
Sounds like a bargain to me!
It’s the perfect “Back to College” netbook for students who wants to travel light, packing a lot of punch in a neat, elegant package. There’s everything a student, office worker… or writer, come to that… could needs for productive working on the go. WiFi, communications and more as standard!
Backup and Storage aplenty
The other offer that really caught my eye was this 2 TB Iomega external hard drive that’s a lot of photos, audio and video… not to mention space to backup your valuable data… all for the remarkable 30% reduced price of €139.
You’ll find other great offers on the Pixmania Home Page.
These two stood out for me, which is why I thought I’d share them here… but you’ll have to be quick… the sale ends in 5 days!.
A weekend away in Paris, a beautiful meal for two, or just curling up together on the sofa in front of an old classic film… these are all things that we’ve done, in the past, to mark the passing of our wedding anniversary.
Anniversary’s are a handy way to remind you how special and and significant your relationship is. While romance is characterised by spontaneity, and probably shouldn’t hover around a specific date on the calendar, when you have children tying things to a designated date definitely has its advantages. It’s hard to introduce spontaneous romance into proceedings when you’re busy surviving the rigours of everyday parenting. At least an anniversary gives you something to aim for, helps focus your mind and prompts you to make that extra bit of effort.
Except of course it doesn’t always work out that way.
Our latest anniversary was last Sunday. The plan was to head out for a semi-romantic family picnic at one of West Cork‘s many beauty spots, but, predictably, that notion was scuppered by the West Cork weather. With no sign of the Indian Summer so many people had been predicting, we decided it would be wiser to stay in!
Just like every other aspect of our lives, our anniversary has become as much about the girls as it is about us and our relationship. I’m not sure that’s necessarily a healthy thing, but its the way it is. To the children our anniversary is akin to a birthday… something for us all to celebrate together as a family. In a way I guess they’re dead right: our relationship is the hub of the family unit, the bond that holds everything else together. It is every bit as important to them as it is to us.
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Spotted this sign attached to the gate at the dock on Sherkin Island recently:
Wonder what the equality ombudsman or whoever looks after that sort of malarkey would make of it… 
? Not so much a glass ceiling, more a glass windscreen, I suspect!
Column for 02/09/09
I woke up early. Outside the rain, which has been such a prominent part of this summer, pounded on the window and I decided that another five minutes under the duvet wouldn’t hurt.
When I finally surfaced the weather hadn’t improved; resigned to the fact I plodded down to the kitchen for my compulsory caffeine fix before putting the girls’ school lunches together. The mind-numbing routine of school mornings was upon us once again.
The rain kept falling as the girls had their breakfast and we checked and double checked that they had all the bags, books, pencil cases, lunches, water bottles and other paraphernalia that a new school year demands. So much for my recent prediction that the start of school would bring some long overdue sunshine. If anything it just started to rain harder.
After one last check to make sure they had everything we headed out of the house to find a flood forming outside our front gate. Just as the bus pulled up I grabbed my wellies and ferried the girls across the pooling rainwater so they could climb aboard with dry feet. I waved them a hasty goodbye and ran back indoors to dry out.
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Column for 26/08
It’s getting darker noticeably earlier in the evenings again.
This is proper dark — not the "light obscured by banks of horrible black cloud" that has been the hallmark of a summer that simply never happened. We had one week of nice weather towards the end of June, and then the heavens opened. I know Ireland’s famous for being green, but this summer has been ridiculous.
No wonder the travel agents are seeing a surge in business. It’s enough to make anyone want to hop on a plane.
But back to the darkness…. it’s getting properly dark much earlier. Yet another reminder that we’re running out of summer with just the occasional glimpse of sunshine.
Perched out beyond the western edge of the time zone we tend to enjoy a little bit more light than our neighbours to the east (when the clouds don’t obscure it, that is). In midsummer I can be outside at 11pm and there’s still a glow in the sky to the west. It’s not light, but it’s not quite dark either — more of an elongated twilight. But despite a daylight extension courtesy of our peripheral geography, the nights are definitely starting to draw in.
Like everything else that life throws up this presents yet another dilemma for parents. With the school term literally around the corner, do you start to re-establish school-time routine and get the kids to bed earlier, or do you let them stay up later to wring every ounce of potential out of the rapidly evaporating holidays?
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Column from 19/08/09
House martins whirl and swoop overhead, making the most of a brief spell of sunshine to feed themselves up before the long journey ahead. They’re gathering now in large numbers, preparing for a migration that will take them across Europe to sub-Saharan Africa for the winter. After the summer we’ve had I wish I could join them.
Soon the swallows will follow suit, the hedgehogs will intensify their hedgerow foraging before settling down to hibernate, squirrels will horde caches of food, blackberries will ripen…. It can all mean only one thing: summer is already drawing to a close.
But nature isn’t the only thing telling us that things are about to change. Parents the length and breadth of the nation will have noticed other signs. As the new school term approaches the kids start getting restless, realising that their long weeks of freedom are coming to an end. It affects parents too: conscious that there’s not much of the holidays left, we rush to cram in all the things we’ve been putting off over the summer break.
Last week, for example, we found ourselves on Sherkin Island putting up the tent in weather that was, let’s face it, marginal at best. It was certainly a far-cry from camping nirvana, but we’d promised the girls, and after letting much of the summer slip by waiting for a break in the weather we suddenly realised that time was running out. We panicked, packed and headed for Baltimore.
Sitting on the ferry watching tendrils of mist settling over Sherkin, I couldn’t help wondering what on earth we were playing at.
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