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My Friend Andee brought up a very valuable question in her (fabulous) Blog:

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

She asks THE question:

It brings up this question: In a day and age with no Little Yellow Birds and no Expectations of behavior, do I continue to try and instill these old-fashioned values in my kids, or do I throw in the towel and give them a fighting chance amongst peers who have no respect for others, much less, themselves?

And this brings me to a topic that is eating at me since some time now (since it happened, actually). Here is the story [rant on]:

I have the same problem. Here is our personal conundrum:

We have 5 sets of direct neighbors (as we are in the middle of a settling). One family has one kid, Mark, who is 4. The other family has two kids. Their smallest, Alice, 5, plays with Mark. Their older boy, Peter, 8, plays, well, not with many kids, it seems. (Btw, I changed the names. They’re not their real names).

I cannot say I initially disliked them. They are very different than we are, rather uptight and closed. But I remained friendly and did all the necessary neighbor stuff: Invited them to garden parties, wrote them Christmas cards, gave them an Easter basket and so on (although none of this was ever reciprocated, but these are things I do not measure, so I don’t care).

The kids are EXTREMELY well behaved. As far as mute counts as well behaved. You seldom hear them talk at all, and surely not in the presence of adults. But. I am continuously finding out they are… mean. Just evil. I mean it. (more…)

Today, one of the heroes of my youth (and of my whole life) would have been 100, had she lived to see the day.

Astrid Lindgren.

The woman who invented Pippi Longstocking and Emil, Lotta, Mardie, the Tomten and the children of the noisy village. She won the German Publishing Peace Prize for her creation and engagement, and even that was, imho, not enough honor.

She was an exceptional writer who chose to dedicate all her talent to children. She wrote about a little anarchical rebel girl at a time where children were still beaten at schools. She wrote a whole book about the long voyage after death – a book so revolutionary that the Swedish parliament discussed censoring it. She wrote for children, but she touched all of us to an extent that changed her time, her world, her century.

I read everything she wrote, every single line, and I still do. Her books accompanied me through my childhood, and she has influenced my life almost as much as my parents did. I still read and re-read what she wrote, and some of her books grow with time, and open to a depth of wisdom few people ever achieve.

I won’t recount you her life here, or list the books she wrote, this information can be found everywhere. I cannot find words enough to say how much I loved her, and still love her.

Thank you, thank you so much, Astrid Anna Emilia Lindgren.

Sometimes, I feel sore and desperate? from the children’s? pain and sorrow.

Yes, it’s that topic again; it is touching my life from every possible angle right now, and I don’t really know how to cope, yet.

I talked to a kid some days ago. A teenage kid, an intelligent, talented, nice kid, who had to spill out his heart to someone, and that someone happened to be me. He told me that in a quarrel, his mother had told him she wished she had never had him. (more…)

I called the police today.

I was visiting a friend yesterday, and she told me some stuff about her neighbors. They are both alcoholics and junkies, and they’re got 2 kids: A boy aged 2, and a little baby, 6 months old.

They do not care about the kids at all. Every second or so night, the guy demolates the whole flat, kicks in doors and such, and they both beat up each other. They use the baby buggy for transporting beer bottles rather than their baby. And by the middle of the month, they’re totally out of money (which is social welfare money anyways).

My friend called the youth care dep. twice, but they didn’t do anything, obviously. And she won’t call again: The guy is threatening her. Being a single mom, she has to protect her kids, she sais.

So I went to the police. (more…)

Subtitle: Sometimes I just cannot believe how uptight and stupid some people really are…

What comes to mind when you read the title of this entry? Hardcore porn? Wrong! Read on, and you’ll learn about the depths of idiocy.

Here is the story: A little magazine, a freebie giveaway you can find at Baby’s supply stores, features a cover photo with a baby suckling on its mother’s breast. This is according to the title story, “why women don’t nurse longer”. Have a look at the picture:

Look at it real hard.

What you can see on the picture is a really cute little baby’s head. What you also can see on the picture is the curve of its mother’s breast, as the wee one is currently being fed. What you can NOT see is anything even remotely reminding us of porn. Why, there’s not even a nipple! At least none to be seen.

But what happened in the US of A, the land of the brave and free, when they saw the title of this little magazine? An uproar! Shocked and hurt phonecalls and emails!

“I was shocked to see a huge breast on the cover of a magazine”, a woman from Kansas writes, “I feel offended by it, and my husband felt very awkward when he saw the magazine in our livingroom”. (more…)