MSE Parents Club Part 10

Dontknowanymore

Bra's, apparently Bravissimo are good and Debenhams, but also apparently M&S are a bit keech.
I did a thread AGES ago on here, but it was about big boobies! :rotfl:

tiamai_d

Amber had her first proper fun bath tonight, she spent most of it on her tummy (with my arm under her shoulders) so she could splash and was proper giggling. Then DS2 jumped in (socks and tshirt still on) so she thought that was sooo cool and went mental.

I think she may crawl soon, she is really throwing herself around when you hold her sitting on the floor which is just weird. DS1 just did rolling over and over to move about and Christopher didn't do any of that so having a wriggly baby is strange.

Sarah_Joanne

ladybirdintheuk wrote: »

Posh undies shops will do it too - la senza and the like. Does anyone know where else other than mothercare might do nursing bras? I need to get a few more after payday, but I don't know where I can get them from.

I have bought some from M&S yesterday pack of 2 for £25 and they are comdy. Also got 2 for same price from Debenhams - Miriam Stoppard ones - and they are good too. Those ones have 2 layers so even when the cup drops down there is material there covering most of your boob. I will be wearing these ones when I may need to feed in public.

Becles wrote: »

They love each other to bits. She's always kissing and hugging him.

That's so sweet. I was like that with my sister when I was little and so hope that when I have another they will be like that.

csh wrote: »

I would say marks ans sparks over la senza. la senza have the weirdest sizing ever! the only bra i'm a dd in!

I will second that. La Senza sizes are really small.

Dontknowanymore

I'm getting a new car-seat for Ryry when I get me new moat moat and saw an advert for a new one earlier but cant remeber which one it was, anyone else seen the advert?
The seat bit leans forward and the seatbelt straps go behind it.

SusanC_2

emlou2009 wrote: »

Susan and Feelie (and anyone else considering it), may I ask why you would prefer your LO's to be home schooled? I was badly bullied at school, my mum was in a wheelchair, my parents had split up, I wore glasses and was fat, so I didnt exactly get an easy time of it! But I still wouldnt consider home schooling Seth, and I feel that personally I would be depriving him of the interaction skills he would learn there, given that he is an only child and is likely to be until school age (AF is visiting after all this month, thank god!!) Aside from that, I would rather a teacher taught him, as I would think that once he got a bit older I would be lost on trying to teach him things like algebra and stuff, I didnt understand it at school so no way would I be able to teach it! How would you get around that?

Okay, I'll try not to be too long winded.

Social interaction/social skills
The concept of school as socialisation is actually a relatively new idea - it only came about in the last century presumably as a result of universal free provision of education. Many schools in this country were actually set up by churches as a provision for people who were poor and/or illiterate and therefore unable to provide education for their children in any other way and home education was actually the most common form of education before schools took over.

Although there has been a small resurgence in home education, there has not been a lot of research into it but there is evidence to suggest that home educated children benefit socially:

Rothermel has also completed research comparing 4-5 year old home educated children with school educated children's attainment. She concludes that children from lower socio-economic backgrounds scored higher than those from more affluent backgrounds. Home educated children demonstrated high levels of ability and social skills. In particular children benefited from the individual attention their families were able to offer. Home educated children performed above the national mean performance in both reading and mathematics.

Rothermel P "Comparisons of home and school educated children on PIPS baseline assessments." Journal of Early Childhood Research vol2(3) pp273-299 issn: 1476-718x

Also, in school you mostly get to interact just with people your own age whereas in regular every day life you interact with a range of people. In my secondary school, it was socially unacceptable to speak to someone in a higher year unless they gave you express permission so the majority of people I interacted with were my age or younger which is quite different to everyday life. (If you want to read a minor rant of mine on school and socialisation which gives a bit more detail of my own experience, there's one here but do bear in mind it is a rant rather than me writing calmly.)

Academic side/ability to teach all subjects to an appropriate level
I'm fairly confident that I can teach all the subjects at Primary level to the standard that would be expected in a school. (But obviously it is worth bearing in mind that I did do a Primary PGCE.) At Secondary level it would depend on the subject as to how far I would be able to take it. For any subject, I would need to read up and prepare well to be able to teach it (and I wouldn't even expect to be able to teach Y7 chemistry without reading up even though I have a degree in it) so to a certain extent my current knowledge would just affect how much reading/preparation I needed to do. Also in most subjects, I would expect that by the time we got to a level where I didn't feel able to teach it myself, a certain amount of self study would be possible. Other ways of dealing with weaker subjects which I would consider are getting together with other home-educating families (so for example I might teach their children a subject I am better and they are weaker at and vice versa), correspondence courses and tutors. My friend had a cleaner who's daughter was home educated at Secondary level because she hated school when she went to Secondary School and she was taught more or less exclusively by tutors (which she said cost her an arm and a leg but was worth it).

Reasons for wanting to home educate
Education can (particularly earlier on) be integrated into everyday life and be less formal than in a school setting. So for example instead of having a maths lesson about weight where the children weigh random objects in the classroom just for the sake of doing weighing, at home I can teach about weight every time I do baking. It fits naturally into real everyday life and has a purpose other than just weighing in order to learn about it and because it is a real life situation rather than a made up one it makes the concept less abstract, easier to understand and more meaningful. The same with money - I already often get Alice to pay for things in shops which means she is learning about money and how it works (and incidentally gettng interaction with people).

With home education you have a lot more flexibility than you typically have in school. If your child is interested in a particular topic, you have the flexibility to study it in more depth. You can adjust the pace to their ability in each subject so that they do not waste their time with things which are too easy or too hard or only appropriate to someone else. You have the freedom to go on lots of school trips and you can be flexible about what day you go so you can choose a day with appropriate weather for what you are doing. If it snows, you can take time out to play in the snow and take the opportunity to study snow at the same time (e.g. bring some inside and insulate using different methods and see how long they take to melt, study the crystl structure and compare it with that of ice, look at how long the snow takes to melt on different surfaces and discuss why, discuss why we put salt on the roads and what it does and possibly do realted experiments), if it is a lovely day you can go on a nature walk etc. etc.

Also with home education, the education part does not take up a lot of time relative to the amount of time a child would spend at school (because you don't have all the time consuming things like all trooping in and out, going to assembly, classroom management - just general time which is wasted due to there being a large number of children) which frees up time for more real everyday life stuff which is of just as much value as the academic part.

Another issue is the kind of things that children are likely to be taught about these days particularly in state schools. I would not want to expose my child to some of the things suggested in the PGCE but as new teachers come through and the old ones gradually retire they are going to become more prevalant. The government is increasingly trying to control what is being taught in schools and trying to remove parental control over those aspects where they do still have some. Only this week there was debate (I forget whether it was the Lords or the Commons) over a Bill which could potentially require faith schools to teach things which go against their beliefs.

I think that I can give Alice (and any other children we have) a much better and more well rounded education at home than they could get if we sent them to school. This doesn't mean I think teachers do a bad job - it is partly an inevitability of mass-education (in my opinion) that it is not as good and partly the government dictates so much that teachers aren't free to do their jobs as well as they could without interference.

Of course, just because I think it it the best for us does not mean I think it is the best for everyone or that everyone should do it.

If you (or anyone else) have any more questions, feel free to ask.

tiamai_d

Think its britax?

this one?

http://www.britax.co.uk/car-seats/king-plus-tv

searching_me

sorry disappeared to do my weights ...

ive gone from an over flowing D to i think a C at least as theres just too much space ... so M&S and debs are my best bet then? x

tiamai_d

off to asda *big sigh*

Mazcabs

Sorry just had to say my tea just consisted of lightly dusted lemon sole, chips and peas followed by Homemade apple & Blackberry pie :drool:... yum yum


BTW.... not really MSE but is is worth getting a Wii to help lose the baby weight?

searching_me

Mazcabs wrote: »

Sorry just had to say my tea just consisted of lightly dusted lemon sole, chips and peas followed by Homemade apple & Blackberry pie :drool:... yum yum


BTW.... not really MSE but is is worth getting a Wii to help lose the baby weight?

first of all YUMMMMM!!! ...

second of all .. it helped me but i was very strict with my diet so that helped as well (ony 1500 cals a day i know i said i wasnt going to cal count but i did ) x