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I’ve come to accept that I’ll never be wordless and I’ll never manage a true Wordless Wednesday post, so I’ve introduced my Wednesday Window posts instead. Wednesday Window offers a little snapshot of life in our house this week. The post contains a photo or photos taken this week and a sentence or three about it! If you have a Wednesday Window of your own that you’d like to share, be sure to leave a link in the comments below.

The app presents six mini-games:

• Match the City of Friends characters in a memory game
• Put the medical equipment into the right spots in the medical case
• Help Max fly the helicopter and pick up post
• Do some fire-fighting with Ellie
• Play with the emergency vehicles
• Collect enough stars to unlock video snippets from the TV show

Choose from one of six activities

I wasn’t sure if we’d get much use out of this app, because Little Man is not familiar with the characters. But the app icon design features colourful characters that attracted his attention straight away, and so he soon discovered the app. He had no trouble figuring out how to play the various games, because they are very similar to the games in the Fireman Sam and Postman Pat apps that he plays regularly.

Can you put out the fire?!

There are different levels of difficulty for each mini-game. The level of difficulty you choose determines the number of stars that you can win. These stars can then be used to unlock clips from the TV show – for every three stars you can unlock one clip. The only problem with this is that the game is designed for 2-6 year olds, and for younger children like Little Man, they may play many of the games on the easy level, which of course means they only win one star for each game they win. So it takes quite a while to unlock a few of the videos. In the end, I played a few games myself to earn enough stars to unlock a few of the videos.

Have you unlocked all of the videos?

That’s not to say that all of the games are too hard for toddlers – not at all. Little Man loves the matching pairs game and the shape-sorting medical instruments game.

Match the medical instruments

He also loves playing with the different vehicles – the fire engine in particular. Nee-nah!!

Check out the fire engine!

For any fans of the TV show, or toddlers with a love of fire engines, this app is a lot of fun: City of Friends

Disclaimer
I received a free copy of City of Friends for review, but I did not receive any other compensation. As always, my opinions are honest and my own.

You will need:

• Two empty plastic juice bottles
• Duct tape
• Silver acrylic paint
• Yellow and red tissue paper

Making the rocket pack couldn’t be easier. Paint the juice bottles silver and leave them to dry.

Then tape them together using duct tape.

To create each strap for the backpack lay two long pieces of duct tape one on top of the other, with the sticky sides together. This gives you a nice smooth surface on each side of the strap. Create a loop with the strap and tape it in place on the backpack. Repeat for the other side.

Then scrunch up some yellow and red tissue paper and stick them in the open bottle ends to make the flames.

And that’s all there is to it. We did make one minor adjustment after a test run. We wrapped some duct tape around each strap to create a 3-4 inch loop at the end of the strap. This was to give Little Man something to hold on to while the rocket pack propelled him around the room!

I think it’s a great example of how good baby led weaning is for promoting dexterity in babies. Just check out the determination to pick up that pea! And the satisfaction at the end! I love it!

But then I heard Minister Joan Burton being interviewed about the issue and she said approximately 4000 children a year are registered with no father’s name on the birth certificate. Reading the commentary online today, there were quite a few arguments defending this practice citing abusive partners and rape cases. Fine…but 4000 of them a year??? If those are really the main reasons for refusing to name the father on the birth certificate then we have a far bigger problem than this legislation on our hands, because clearly we have a national epidemic of abuse cases. I’d like the see the statistics to back that up, because I just don’t believe those are the true motivations for most women who choose not to register the father’s name.

It seems to me – and here I’m going on stories I’ve personally heard or cases I’ve encountered – that there are other more likely reasons for this refusal to register a father’s name. The most controversial reason of course is a fear of losing an entitlement to Lone Parents’ Allowance. That’s probably worth a blog post in its own right, but briefly, I refuse to accept this as a sufficient reason for denying your child the right to their father’s name on their birth certificate, and denying a man his right to be acknowledged as the father of his own child. You’re either entitled to Lone Parent’s Allowance or you’re not, and recognizing the name of the child’s father shouldn’t change that.

I would also imagine there are cases where the mother chooses not to name the father on the birth certificate because she doesn’t want him to be involved – perhaps they’re no longer together, or she didn’t know him very well, or it was a brief fling that she regrets and she doesn’t want to be tied to him for the next 18 years, or maybe she wanted a baby but not an interfering father. Who knows? Maybe she did want the father involved, but he denied the paternity of the baby when she told him and she doesn’t see why he should be named if he won’t even acknowledge the child. Or of course she may not know who he is at all.

In many cases, the concerns of the mother may be perfectly valid. But I would argue that these concerns are not sufficient to deny a child the right to know who his or her biological father is. This legislation is about the child after all. A birth certificate is a legal document and the only reason Unknown should ever be recorded in place of the father’s name is when the father is truly unknown and a serious effort has been made to determine his identity. I know every so often an ad shows up online or in a newspaper from a woman looking to get in touch with a man she met on such a night in such a club or at such a house party. At least she’s trying to find the father and inform him he has a child (or an STD – but that’s another story…).

I don’t think this legislation should be introduced without the inclusion of a provision for paternity tests, however. If a woman names a man as the father of a child, and he denies or doubts her word, he should be entitled to a paternity test to confirm. Likewise, if a man claims a child is his, but the mother denies it, he should be entitled to a test. And if it’s positive, he should be entitled to have his name added to the birth certificate retrospectively.

More than that, I strongly believe that this legislation should only be a starting point. I believe a child should have the right to know both of his or her parents. Right now, we have a bizarre system where a mother has automatic parental rights – but a father has no such rights unless he is married to the mother. Where is the equality in that? Where is the fairness – for the father or for the child?

If the father poses a threat, or if his presence in the child’s life would be detrimental to the child, then apply to have the father’s rights removed. But do not deny those rights by default, and force fathers to have to fight for the most basic of rights like access.

For far too long, it’s been a case of guilty until proven innocent for fathers in this country. If a mother decides to deny a father access to his child, unless he is married to the mother, or has specifically sought guardianship of the child, there is little the father can do. Why is this?

The only reason I can see why we tolerate this situation is that our society undervalues the role of the father in a child’s life. How often do discussions of parenting turn into discussions about motherhood, completely ignoring fatherhood? It’s time we started to recognise that although fathers may parent differently to mothers, their parenting is still valid, it’s still important, and it should still be respected. It’s time that the decision as to whether or not a father should be acknowledged and allowed access to his child was decided based on his relationship with the child, and the benefit to the child of growing that relationship, and not on his relationship with the mother.

And so I was glad to hear of this proposed legislation, and I hope it’s just the first step in recognising that children deserve to know who their father is, and they deserve the opportunity to build a relationship with that father.

Edited to add: A commenter on Facebook has pointed out that I have not accounted for cases where the father refuses to accompany the mother to sign the birth registration form and therefore his name cannot be registered. And because of that I have unfairly put all of the blame on the mother. She is right – I hadn’t considered this situation and I should have. But I hope very much that in this situation the legislation provides support for those women and children and includes a method to deal with registering the father’s name in these cases. Thanks for pointing this out Tanya.

I’ve come to accept that I’ll never be wordless and I’ll never manage a true Wordless Wednesday post, so I’ve introduced my Wednesday Window posts instead. Wednesday Window offers a little snapshot of life in our house this week. The post contains a photo or photos taken this week and a sentence or three about it! If you have a Wednesday Window of your own that you’d like to share, be sure to leave a link in the comments below.

As I mentioned earlier in the week, we’re busy working on a volcano at the moment. So far, it’s been a lot of sticky wallpaper paste-y fun. A little too much, because even today, the inside of the volcano was still tacky to the touch, so it looks like it will be Saturday before we get painting. I don’t know how Little Man feels about it, but I can’t wait!

But I must admit, I’m starting to wonder who we’re really entertaining here. Little Man’s attention lasts about 15 or 20 minutes and then he leaves Mammy and Daddy to it while he wanders off to play with something else! Yesterday as I finished off gluing the newspaper strips to a soon-to-be papier mâché volcano, I couldn’t help but wonder what he was thinking. “Great, that’s the parents occupied for the next half hour or so, now I can play!”

Maybe not though, because the first thing he asked when we got home today was if the volcano was dry yet so we could paint it. Perhaps it’s not all just about keeping Mammy and Daddy entertained!

Incidentally, it wasn’t dry, so we have to wait another day before we can finish it off! I may have overdone it on the wallpaper paste.

You need:

• One empty kitchen roll tube
• Two sheets of coloured felt
• Fabric glue

To make the spyglass, decide which colour felt sheet will form the main colour of the spyglass, and simply apply some fabric glue to that sheet and wrap it around the tube. I trimmed off the excess, but if you wanted to allow it to overlap, I’m sure that would work just fine too!

Then cut two strips of your second colour felt – one thick and one thin. Apply fabric glue to both of them and wrap the thick strip around the very end of the tube, forming the end of the spyglass. Wrap the thin strip about an inch in from the opposite end of the spyglass. And that’s it! Wait for it to dry, and you’re ready to play!

Little Man ripped it open and was delighted to discover a set of Seaside Sidekicks Nesting Pails – brightly coloured buckets numbered 1 to 4. Of course, he immediately wanted to play with them, but it was pouring rain outside, so the beach was out of the question. “Let’s test them in the water,” I suggested, and he happily agreed. So I popped him into a bubble bath with his new buckets, where he had great fun figuring out that if you poured water from the yellow bucket into the red bucket, it overflowed, but water from the blue bucket wouldn’t fill the green bucket to the top.

The weather finally improved enough on Monday for us to take a trip to the beach. Granted, it was a trip in wellies and wet gear, but we still got to play on the beach. We made sandcastles of course! And we were all impressed to see how well the shapes on the top of each bucket came out on our castles. These buckets are an ideal size for a toddler – not too heavy when they’re full, so Little Man was able to turn them over and make castles himself. The only one he needed some help with was the largest yellow bucket.

And when we were finished, we could just stack them all together, ready for home. These brightly coloured buckets feel sturdy and durable, and because they stack, they don’t take up much space in the boot of the car. I’m a big fan of products that encourage learning through play, and these certainly do. They reinforce colours, help teach numbers one to four, and help toddlers learn about sizes. Oh and they make a great sandcastle!

They are available for €12.95 from the VintageKids.ie website: Seaside Sidekicks Nesting Pails And while you’re over on the site checking them out, be sure to check out a few of the other great summer toys that we spotted, like the Seaside Sidekicks Sand Baking Set and the Speck Seahorse Sand Ice Cream Set.

Disclosure
We received the Seaside Sidekicks Nesting Pails free for the purposes of this review. However, I received no other compensation, and my opinions are honest and my own.