It’s been a while since I’ve posted pictures. Here’s two that I took in my garden. The first one just screams “that’s life…” to me.
First published on Parent24.com:
When depression spoils the dream
Trying to keep it all together led this stay-at-home mom of 3 to an emotional crash.
For the last 2 years I’ve been a stay-at-home mom (SAHM). Financially we’re coping well although we did cut down on certain luxuries. I’ve got help in the house and in the garden. I’ve got freelance projects that keep me busy while the kids are in school.
I’m there to pick up my kids and spend the afternoon with them. And this is the dream life that most working moms crave today.
Except that I wasn’t happy. I found myself resenting the things I had to do. Making dinner was the ultimate hate job. Dinner turned into whatever was the easiest to accomplish in the least amount of time.
My kids suffered from neglect and my irritability. The moment I didn’t have to do anything for them I would carry on doing whatever I was busy with on my laptop. Or I would hide behind my book in the evening and let my husband take over the parenting duties while I would just ignore them. At the same time feeling crippling guilt about what a terrible mother I am.
And then I crashed. I wasn’t coping anymore and I didn’t know why. Diagnosed with Atypical Depression, I finally understand why the dream life was my hell. Although I’ve had depression episodes since my teenage years, I never realised that the craving I had for company wasn’t just because I was a social creature.
Faces of atypical depression
According to Psychology Today, atypical depression may manifest itself in a variety of symptoms.
• feeling better in response to good things, eg. after receiving good news or being with
friends, but this is only temporary.
• increased appetite and weight gain, through regular overeating and often binging
• sleeping excessively
• feeling heavy in the arms and legs, including overwhelming fatigue
• sensitivity to rejection. I still get panic attacks at the thought of a job interview or
people accepting me in a professional manner.
Isolated at home
The reality of a stay-at-home mom was part of the reason for my severe depression. With the current economic conditions, most women work, so the SAHM is in effect isolated most of the time. My social interactions were limited to talking to a few moms during drop-off in the morning, at pickup in the afternoon and the rugby practice get-togethers twice a week.
Each weekend my husband would be tired and fed up with a 4-hour commute every day, so his ideal weekend was to stay at home and rest. While I just wanted to get out and visit friends and family.
For the SAHM there are no colleagues that you can chat to during mid morning coffee break or in open plan offices while you’re working. I used to work in a national company where I was interacting with people from countrywide offices on a daily basis. Now I was stuck at home, with retail therapy only a very rare option. My closest SAHM friend lives 10km from me, making a quick visit a planned action and online friendships only take you so far.
No, I won’t be changing my SAHM status, because it still is the best thing for my kids. Being a SAHM isn’t the cause of my depression, only the final straw that broke the camel’s back.
However, with my husband’s help I’m implementing other lifestyle changes. Nurturing supportive friendships, therapy, exercise, healthy eating plus certain supplements, getting involved in charity work that will let me be surrounded by people on a more regular basis and knowing when to admit that I need more help in the form of antidepressants. I owe this to myself and my family.
First published on Parent24.com:
Why do kids shows have to be so mean, asks this mom of 3.
My children are the youth of tomorrow, so I read the article by Rhoda Kadalie (The dumbing down of our youth) with shock, horror and interest. Although her stance squarely blames the post-apartheid regime for the atrocious drop out rate of high school pupils and university students, I believe that we parents also need to take a look at our favourite babysitter.
Peter Gabriel once said it so well: ‘Just sometimes, you think about our composition, what we’re made up of. It used to be said, that we are what we eat. And then the people, they’d be a little more fashion conscious, would say, no you are what you wear. Or you are what you read, but we would say in this millennium, you are what you watch.’
This rang true for me. I’ve always been fairly lenient in what I’ve let my kids watch. Barney has been a huge favourite in our house for almost 6 years now. There are a lot of Barney haters out there, but I’ve found the values and songs informative and fun.
Although the older kids have moved on to Ben10 and Bakugan, Barney still gets a lot of attention from the little one. We own almost every Disney movie ever brought out on DVD, including some of the old classics that I used to watch as a kid. The Secret of N.I.M.H is still one of my favourite movies of all time.
Every now and then I’d come across a kids show that I would refuse to let my kids watch. Teletubbies ranked number 1 on that list. For me one of the criteria for a kids show was something that I could watch with my child and also enjoy. Believe me there is absolutely no fun in watching Teletubies. I don’t believe that kiddie shows have to be educational, but I also don’t want the show to only teach my child ‘lala’ or ‘po’.
Included in this lot are most of the new locally produced Afrikaans kids shows. For some reason it seems as if the producers think that kids need to be talked down to. Boy, are they wrong!
No red demons for us
Another one of my criteria is that it has to be wholesome. Scratch Cow and Chicken. For me the idea of a red demon being the instigator/protagonist for most of the episodes was firmly set against my beliefs. Unfortunately the same applies to quite a few other shows. Ed, Edd and Eddy promoting bullying, the violence in Power Puff Girls and the absolute stupidity of George in the Jungle. The movie is a firm favourite in our house, but the animation show is horrifying. George is a complete moron that doesn’t know how to scratch his own head.
That seems to be a firm favourite of the animation shows these days. Someone has to be stupid, be done in, made fun of or embarrassed for the show to be considered a success. Why do we need all this meanness?
There’s no more TV in our house. The money saved goes towards the DVDs that we buy. No more dumbing down, no more unacceptable values taught, plus the series we do let them watch, like Fosters home for imaginary pets are all available on DVD.
First published on Parent24.com:
Is your phone revealing too much?
Could geotagging be telling the world too much about your child?
I’ve been drooling about the thought of the new Samsung smartphone, mostly because it has a built in application for reading ebooks. It’s also got all the other bells and whistles, including the GPS and camera.
Then I came across this article in the New York Times: Web photos that reveal secrets, like where you live. This was the first time I had heard of geotagging.
So what is geotagging?
All files have some data hidden inside the file. Most of it has to do with what type of file it is, what program was used to create it and who is the author.
In the case of image files, the hidden information that can be stored is extensive. The camera can record the settings, the photographer and also the location. Adding the location, or geotagging, automatically is at the moment confined to smartphones and the higher scale digital SLR cameras.
Want to know what info you’re sharing on the web? Right click on your image file, go to properties and click on the details tab. Scroll down and see what info is imbedded in your image.
Why is it dangerous?
The danger in geotagging lies in whether you are aware of it or not. Take a picture of your child’s outfit for the day in front of the school with your smartphone and load it directly on to your blog, Twitter or Facebook. If your geotagging wasn’t disabled you’ve just told everyone exactly where your kid goes to school.
Does this really work?
I’m fairly sceptical about doom and gloom type stuff, so I did a little test of my own. It took me roughly 10 minutes to google and install an extension to my web browser that easily allowed me to read ‘exif’ data – the part of the image file that contained the hidden information.
Next I tried four of my fellow mommy bloggers to see if I could get any info out of their images. I didn’t manage to find their addresses, but I did find out that one had used a Blackberry 9700 to take the pictures. Some of the images were stripped of the ‘exif’ data, others had just basic info available. But I only tried four.
Gerald Friedland and Robin Sommer researched the availability of location information imbedded in photos. Their findings showed that although less than 5% of the images and videos they sampled contained locations, the information was available. It was also very accurate.Their test showed the location within 1m.
How do I stop sharing my location?
This is the easy part. You can either disable the geotagging function on your smartphone or you can strip the information from the file after you’ve downloaded the file to your computer.
To disable the function on your phone you can have a look at the following website that has step-by-step instructions for some of the popular smartphones or you can contact the manufacturer of your phone.
If you prefer to strip the information from the file after you’ve downloaded you have two choices. You can download and buy an application like ‘ExifCleaner‘ that allows you to clean many files at once, or you can do it one-by-one with Windows Explorer. Right click on the image file, go to properties and click on the details tab. You’ll see a link at the bottom that reads ‘Remove Properties and Personal Information’. This will open a new window where you can follow the prompts to remove the information you don’t want to share.
