I’m in two minds about how the rain has finally stopped.
It’s wonderful not having to leave the house with an umbrella and it’s positively glorious not being slightly damp from the parts of you the umbrella didn’t protect but our dams!
The downpours barely made a difference on that particularly soggy day I checked in with ‘dam cam‘. 50.4%!?!?! Only?!?! Wiser people than I pointed out that it was going to take days for run off from other areas to reach the dam. I checked again just then and the number hasn’t budged. But then again, patience was not what I was supposed to be bringing to the table…
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| via Google images |
I had the privilege of attending a talk by Steve Biddulph, the noted Australian psychologist, author and activist on Tuesday night. I am so glad I braved the rain (in my gumboots) to attend. The two-hour talk was thought-provoking, confronting and also (for me at least) emotionally moving.
Steve’s topic was linked in to his book ‘Raising Boys’ and I learned a great deal about how boys mature in different ways to girls, the pressures and issues relating to be a young man in Australia right now and also what it means to be a parent of any child. What I admire most about Steve’s approach is that he was there to present his research and his opinions. The onus on us, as his audience, was to listen, think and decide for ourselves how we might change our parenting style (or not, as the case may be).
There was so much useful information weaved in between Steve’s very moving anecdotes. These are the points that stuck with me:
- the consequences of how modern society isolates nuclear families which leaves children without daily interaction with ‘mentors’ of the same gender which would have traditionally been uncles, brothers, sisters or aunts
- that women have, for thousands of years, been able and continue to raise well-adjusted boys on their own (one for the single mothers amongst us)
- that time is the greatest resource we can bring to parenthood
- giving each other our full attention is something the modern world is determined to steal from us with the distractions of smartphones and the allure of busyness and material success
- that we can and should teach our boys from a young age not to hurt each other and also to respect women – by our actions and our words
- that your memories of your childhood will be something you carry with you until your final moments on this earth.
As a general philosophy on life, these words of Steve’s also stuck in my mind…
LEARN AND GROW TO LOVE WHAT YOU’VE GOT
Words to live by, don’t you think?
Speaking of love…
I’m still loving good old Coke No Sugar a bit too hard at the moment.
The tail end of winter heading into spring always finds me in a bit of an energy deficit. Which translates into my having to find myself an extra caffeine hit each day at around 3pm. Come summer, I find the sun seems to do the trick in keeping my energy levels up to last until the end of the day. Come summer, I’m also promising myself that I will address my caffeine issue more aggressively. In the meantime, I’m eternally grateful to the work ice chip machine for helping make my afternoon Coke icier.
There’s been a flurry of school events and activities as we head into the final week of term. So I’ve been a few of those short work days where you have to cram a day’s work into 4 hours. Today I ended up ahead of schedule so treated myself to a fancy lunch in the car.
