So, I’ve been knitting since I was about 4 or 5 – my Nana taught me when I was very young – and I’ve always prided myself on being damned good at it until last Monday! To illustrate, I’ll show you a photograph of a part-knitted sock.

It’s inside out! I’ve been knitting in the round for years and I’ve been doing it wrong all this time. A couple of the knitters at last week’s class looked on in bewilderment before managing to show me how I should have been doing it all these years. What an eejit. But it goes to show that it doesn’t matter how well you’re doing things, sometimes you can still be doing it wrong!

This one features a Young Persons Worker talking about how his role makes a difference.

and this one was filmed as a group of young people and supporting adults headed off from Who Cares? Scotland’s head office to trek in Nepal.

Some of the Who Cares? Scotland staff members are running the Glasgow 10k today and they are 83% of the way to their fundraising target so if you’d like to support not a good cause, but a vital cause then clickety click here and pledge a few bob.

I feel like I owe you all an apology. It has been weeks since my last update and I don’t see me getting much time to update more before the weekend so you’re getting a short and snappy one today. I have a couple of giveaways to organise, some product reviews, updates on where we are just now with the shop and of course stories of my wonderful children to come.

Just bear with me a few more days

Have you entered the giveaway on my other blog?

Why am I telling you this?

Nairn tells me I’m beautiful all the time. He tells me that he loves Greer but not Erica because Erica annoys him, steals his toys and hurts him, until I tell him that it makes me sad that he doesn’t love his sister then he changes his perspective to make me happy. When I’m grumpy, he calls my name until I look at him and then he flashes his amazing big grin, winks and blows me a kiss. He asked me a few months ago what planet my brother lives on and I laughed so hard that now if he thinks I’m upset he asks me again, to make me laugh. He is so loving and so conscientious.

But last week I read this article and sat with my mouth agape, a brick plummeting slowly from my breast to the pit of my stomach as I identified Nairn’s behaviour in every word written by another Mother. Some of you might remember that around the time of my breakdown Nairn’s issues were so bad that I’d called in Social Services to help us. Their solution was to fire us onto a positive parenting class that I was extremely reticent about. I was so against the idea of Nairn’s issues being down to our parenting that I went along, certain they’d tell me nothing I didn’t already know but I was very pleasantly surprised. Armed with new tactics, we set about challenging Nairn’s tantrums with reward charts and different reactions and to a point it worked. We thought we’d solved our issues until his assessment for early entry to school.

In Scotland if a child turns five years old by February 28th they start school the preceding August. January & February babies can defer entry for a year, March-July birthdays can apply for early admission but the child must complete a test to see if they are ready. One of the tests Nairn had to do was to sort a number of building blocks by colour – a task I know he could do with his eyes shut – but as it was such a boring task, he elected instead to build a rather impressive transformer with his blocks. Let me remind you again here that Nairn turned four years old in March. Lego is his ‘thing’ and it amazes me the grasp he clearly has on engineering. Nairn is a little Lego professor and that scares me.

With Bob being diagnosed as severely dyslexic (which he writes about under this tag, work from the bottom up) – the second top ‘band’ of dyslexia – we were made aware that our children could have a genetic predisposition towards it. Dyslexia is a spectrum disorder.

I have fought and lost when it comes to having Nairn assessed because I am as certain as I can be that something is not quite right with the way he processes his feelings. He simply cannot relate to other people on an emotional level and hence the tantrums and certainty that he is hated whenever he has a falling out with a friend or sibling.

I wish I knew what to do. With Bob having fallen through the cracks in such a spectacular manner I am quite terrified that Nairn will be written off as a child with a neurotic mother rather than a child with possible support requirements.

I have two sons and two daughters. I spend a significant amount of my parenting time assuring my amazing children that they can be anything they choose to be even though the Fawcett Society has highlighted that women working full-time still face being paid 17% less than their male counterparts on an hourly basis – a figure that rises to 20% if that woman happens to be from an ethnic minority, 36% if she works part-time and 45% if she both works part-time and works in London. Doesn’t that disgust you? It appalls me and I don’t think it matters if you’re a feminist or not, this pay gap affects every single working person out there. It’s revolting that in this day and age where we’re all supposed to be forward-thinking, liberal and equal that it’s acceptable for the pay gap to still be tangible.

With that in mind, it’s not like I expect the toy companies to pick up the slack for the pay gap but – and this is a big but – this kind of gender stereotyping begins at such an early age and the Early Learning Centre’s marketing is just one admittedly major example of this. Let me show you a webpage from the ELC’s retail site (click for embiggenisation):

Just in case you’re a complete thicket, I’ve highlighted the relevant parts and following the ELC’s lead I’ve even used the appropriate colours. Quite simply, if you have a daughter she’s clearly a princess who aspires to be a nurse or a ballerina. If you have a son, he can be a doctor because of course it’s a man’s job. Right from pre-school levels our children are being segregated into traditional gender roles before they really have a concept of gender constructs themselves.

You know what else pisses me off? And these are simply examples from presents our kids have been bought – a pink shopping till and basket because obviously only women do the shopping or work in retail. A blue multistorey garage since only boys like cars. They even have a pink GLOBE just in case our daughters are too female to look at a regular one. Heaven forbid, eh?

In the interests of fairness, I emailed the ELC yesterday saying:

I have to be honest straight off the bat and say that my post is going to be criticising the shift over the last 10 years in the ELC’s product range. I have personally avoided ELC since giving birth to my daughter 3 years ago as I realised how heavily gender stereotyped ELC chooses to be and the final straw for me today was seeing this page which tells me that my daughter can be a nurse but only my son can be a doctor.
The product range reinforces traditional gender roles – pink microwaves, dolls prams and kitchen sets for girls, dinosaurs and train sets for boys which contradicts the UK educational system’s approach to free play and I would greatly appreciate a statement with regards to this concern.

Their spokesperson responded today with this:

‘Come down to Early learning Centre and see for yourself the huge range of toys in an assortment of colours. Customers can choose a red kitchen, a blue kitchen, a blue cash register, a yellow dolls house or a gorgeous farm

Our photography features boys ironing, girls playing with space aliens, boys playing with dolls, boys cooking and pushing buggies, girls building and playing with remote control insects. We offer anyone who wants to buy toys so much to choose from that no one should feel disappointed when they walk into our stores.

which comprehensively answered my query. Or not.

I’m interested to know how other parents feel about it. Do you identify as feminist? Do you agree with what I’m saying or do you think I’m overreacting?

Way back in November I posted this entry explaining that due to a massive cock-up by my then employers, my maternity pay had been stopped three months early and I was being told to repay the entirety of my allegedly overpaid maternity pay. Because it had taken six months to discover this error, I subsequently was not entitled to claim maternity allowance from the state and thus this error put us out financially by somewhere in the region of £10,000.

Not content with that, the little doom fairies arranged for Bob to be made redundant from his job on Hogmanay, then me from mine at the end of March. Did I mention I had a complete nervous breakdown? We decided that since things were the lowest we could possibly imagine them to be, there was nothing to stop us pursuing our dream and thus The Life Craft was born.

Our website is now up and running and this week we will sign the lease on our gorgeous premises in the West End of Glasgow. We are going to be paying more per year in rent than I have ever earned and we are responsible now for five members of staff as well as ourselves. I probably shouldn’t be sharing this but what the hell – if the business fails, we will lose everything. We will have nothing except each other. And do you know what? I think I’m okay with that now. We’ve been through so much together that we can make it through any other bump in the road.

SO! In order to celebrate our future success, we’ve got a competition on the blog which I’d love you to enter. You can pick your prize from a selection of the amazing stock we have in store and share your crafty stories.

Bonne Chance!