Posts by Isabel Hitchings
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Danielle,
Seriously. Finding out when you’re ovulating is quite a complex business even for people who have regular periods.
I found pinpointing ovulation quite easy...after carefully reading a very thick book and practicing for several months whilst paying great attention to detail and being totally unsqueamish about closely examining bodily fluids. Not exactly stuff i could have managed as a horny and impulsive young adult.
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Moz,
do you mislead about how ovulation works so that it looks as though women are fertile more of the time, or do you just hope that kids don’t put the picture together?
Given that sperm can live almost a week, that ovulation can be hard to spot and that libido is directly tied to fertility for a lot of women an act of unprotected sex has a waaaay bigger than 1/28 chance of leading to pregnancy therefore the advice to use contraception for every act of PIV sex still holds up.
I think that advice about the downsides of condoms (and other contraceptives) should be solution based so that instead of saying "condoms suck" you are saying "here are some things to try to improve your condom-using experience".
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I don't recall it ever being a big deal to ask a guy to use a condom and though one or two guys weren't total fans I never noticed any cause for complaint once we got it on. As far as teenagers go I would have thought that anyone whose Mum washes their sheets or who borrows their Dad's car might well appreciate the mess containment that condoms can provide.
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Martin Roberts,
a niece is stressing about having to attend some icky class next year.
Thinking talking about it is icky is probably a good sign she's not ready to be having sex yet but that's good - you should be learning about sex long before you do it, that way, when you do need to talk to a real, live potential sexual partner about it, you've had plenty of time to mentally rehearse the conversation.
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Emma Hart,
That and fancying David Bowie in Labyrinth, it's like carbon-dating.
Fancying David Bowie led to reading biographies of David Bowie which was quite the education (especially if one stumbled on the more salacious ones at an impressionable age).
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The study, reported in the journal Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, found that two years later, 33.5 per cent of abstinence-only students admitted having had sex, against 49 per cent of each of the other three groups.
I can't help but think that "admitted" is probably the key word here, Mr George.
I find it really strange that people are expecting reproduction to be the focus of sex-ed for kids who are over twelve. For our family that's something we begin to discuss in the preschool years. I think my favourite conversation starting book is Babette Cole's "Mummy Laid an Egg" mostly because the pictures of "how Mummies and Daddies fit together" are so utterly joyful. (Sex on a moonhopper? Why not?)
I do feel much more awkward discussing sex as recreation with my kids than I do the reproductive angle but my approach of drip feeding information as it becomes relevant and half-encouraging eaves-dropping seems to be doing ok so far. I tend to judge what they are ready for by noticing when things stop going over their heads - in my experience kids mostly discount ideas they are not ready to grasp unless they impact upon their lives in major ways. I really, really don't want to be the sole source of information for my kids though. For one things there's a heap of stuff that I don't know much about that they may need to know and, for another, there are some conversations it's just easier to have with people outside your family - I want them to know all about orgasms but I don't need them to know about mine and I definitely don't need to hear about theirs.
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One of the big problems with breastfeeding is that the very same people who are piling on the pressure are handing out crappy-arse advice or over-looking the bleeding obvious. The anecdata I've collected is full of stories of women who (for example) have raw bleeding nipples, midwife looks at baby's latch and declares all to be fine so Mum has choice to suck it up or wean. Later (and often after the boat has sailed) baby is diagnosed with a tongue-tie which, had it been snipped in a timely fashion, could have saved both the breastfeeding relationship and the mother's nipples.
Pressure to breastfeed all seems to occur in the first few month and once the baby is bigger the pressure to wean, or at least breastfeed less, comes on in force. It may have changed in the intervening years (my "baby" is six now) but standard Plunket advice about the introduction of solids assumed that full weaning around the first birthday was the goal. I once made the mistake of asking my Plunket nurse why their literature at the time made no mention of the WHO's recommendation of a minimum of two years breastfeeding and was treated to a remarkable display of pissyness.
Often, with regards to childbirth/breastfeeding/parenting, we seem to want to hand out one-size-fits-all advice and tell women what to do rather than arming them with information so as to be able to make good choices for themselves and their individual circumstance.
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So Fitzie is implying that flannelette PJs are an aid to abstinence. Turns out I've either been doing the sex or the pyjama wearing wrong all these years.
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I always found the logburner comforting because it would work in a power cut and was therefore better in case of emergency. Imagine my surprise in September when the chimneys came tumbling but the power was out for just a few hours!
ETA: The moral of the story is that you should probably have both kinds of heating appliance.
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Hard News: When the Weather is the News, in reply to Che Tibby,
Che Tibby, in reply to Isabel Hitchings, about 2 hours ago
Twitter
we put in a wood burner last year.
at the time it was way more money that i was happy with. but now? i would gladly spend every cent all over again if needed.
i was smug fit to burst sunday/monday.
anyone able to afford the cost should do the same.
Duuude! On September 3rd I had a logburner. It was in the dining room and heated every room except the lounge. Last August we put in a heatpump so all our rooms could be warm at once. I have had much cause to be thankful for spending the money as our chimney fell down in the September quake. Last month some guys from Fletchers finally removed the chimney remnants and our dining room now contains an alcove where a bigger and better logburner will eventually go (but probably not this winter).