The Doctor's Outfit Debate

Is your blood boiling? Are you enraged? Does it offend you?

I just finished reading a blog post about how a mother was looking for some doctor dress-up costumes for her boys and noticed that there weren't any in the girls section, only in the boys section. In the girls section they only had nurses outfits. The blog post author wrote "Is it only me who finds that offensive?". Well, no, probably not. In fact there was a commenter who said that this sort of thing "makes her blood boil".

It doesn't make my blood boil. In fact it doesn't bother me at all. I consider doctor's outfits to be unisex and if all the dress-up isn't in the one section then do you know what? It has to go somewhere. And where some merchandiser, or some shop worker has placed it doesn't actually make me angry or offended. So if it's split into male and female and you have a pile of doctors costumes in one hand and a pile of nurses dresses in the other then chances are you are going to make the same split. Or else you are really thinking about it a wee bit too much. Does it really matter? If my daughter wants a doctors outfit I know where to find them - same if she wants a pirate outfit or a racing car driver outfit.

But as I said in my comment, perhaps the offensive blood-boiling point should no longer be that we are surmising that girls can only be nurses and boys are naturally doctors, but rather that boys cannot dress up as nurses. How many male nurse outfits do you come across?

The way I see it is that nowadays girls can be anything they want. Especially in our culture. Of course there are still places in the world where women don't have the right to be equal to a man, but let's be honest, if my daughter wants to go to university and study medicine, engineering, or whatever, it's all there for her. What can't she do?

But maybe you think that with these gender stereotypes being laid out in childhood, that she is being pre-conditioned to think 'hmm....maybe I'm not meant to be a doctor. Damn, I'll have to speak to my school careers advisor about where I find openings for princesses'. Well, for me, I think that confidence in thinking you can be whatever you want comes from home. By being told by your parents that you can try and be anything you want (presumably, brain-power and determination permitting).

Of course I understand the perspective of the these women. It's the "Have we not moved on?" viewpoint. It's the stand that says "it's things like this that prevent women in society earning the same as their male peers". I could go on about how lucky then I have been to always get paid a salary I am happy with and build a career where I have been paid equally (and probably better than my male counterparts). But.

What I don't understand is why people aren't outraged that there aren't male nurse costumes for boys or why their blood isn't boiling that they simply cannot find any princess costumes for their son in the boys dress up section. Ok, so I am making fun, but surely, there should be the same anger that boys aren't being offered the same breadth of career choice. That their options are limited. No?

Is that because it's ok to reinforce masculinity on to boys. That in actual fact the norm seems to be to encourage boys to be, well, more boyish? Pretty much all the girls I know are able (because they have them) to play with diggers, and dinosaurs, train sets, and cars. There's no issue. But I know an awful lot of boys who aren't allowed to play with baby dolls, little pushchairs, or play with anything pink. Amongst my friends, when they would come round for coffee often the boys would go straight for the pushchair and race around the house with it, ramming it into the doors or doing races, or just taking a teddy for a walk. All perfectly normal, and good for encouraging caring behaviour. But also amongst my friends are those who just can't bear their sons to be seen pushing a little pushchair. Often they would say "Thank God his father can't see him doing that!"

Oh, and especially if it's pink. Pink of course is just a colour. It really makes no odds. It means no more to your toddler child than green or blue or yellow. You can buy blue baby clothes for girls. But most people like to dress their baby in the appropriate gender colour. I mostly put this down to not wanting your baby mistaken for the opposite sex, because usually when they are really young well, sometimes it can be a bit hard to tell.

When Hamish was a baby I still had an awful lot of bibs from when Orla was a baby. Technically, she really still was, and given they both suffered massively from reflux, well, you can imagine, we had a lot of bibs. A friend was round for lunch one day and saw me (once again) sticking one of Orla's old bibs on Hamish. "I'm going to buy you blue bibs" she said. "You can't put him in girls bibs". Why not? We were in my own home, nobody else could see him. He certainly didn't care, and I didn't care, so did it matter?

So my question is, why are we all busy 'boying' up our boys and narrowing their options, when to make our girls girly is now seen as a negative. (I'll put money on one of the things that makes the 'blood-boiling' commenters blood boil is the proliference of candy pink toys). Is it really that we want our girls to have it all, preferably in boyish hues as well, but really none of us can really get our heads around our boys being a little more effeminate? And what's wrong with boys being girly? Because surely girls can be anything they like, which is more than you can say for boys!

(A bit ranty and serious for me, I know. Normal service will be resumed shortly). Oh and of course, this is only my opinion. I know hee-haw about feminism, didn't live in a time/place where women didn't have the same opportunities as men, and of course can only talk about what I have experienced or observed. But reading about women getting offended about stupid kids costumes seems to make my blood boil! Ha!ha!)

You just don't know it yet, but you need a banner

I have come home and discovered my Facebook inbox and my email inbox full of good news. Good news of commissions. Yippee! I recently did some illustration work for my friend Sarah who has opened up a DaWanda shop called Millicent's Closet selling vintage-style jewellery.

We agreed to do a skills exchange where I would do the illustration work for the site and her business cards and so on, and she would take some nice photos of my kids (and I have another request I haven't yet told her about!).

In the time that it took to do the work, it turned out that someone nipped in and opened an Etsy shop, a Facebook Fanpage, and a blog also using the name 'Millicent's Closet'. Ugh. So Sarah is trying to think of another name but has opened her DaWanda shop up in the meantime.

Meanwhile I posted the image above on my Facebook page (in actual, fact I find Facebook a brilliant way of being able to show someone work) and very nearly put a comment on along the lines of "I know now you've seen this, you'll all want one". Well, there you go, turns out to my surprise that there are quite a few people out there with banner needs. Yippee!

Now if you find yourself suddenly with strange urges to have your own illustrated banner, of course feel free to get in touch with me by email. (gray_fiona@hotmail.com). Or if you just want to go "Ooh!" and "Ah!", fill up the comments box below and make me feel marvellously talented!

Baby books I read and loved

Tame this Dr Christopher Green.

My friend at WorkingBerlinMum is looking for birth and childcare book recommendations.

Way back at the beginning of last year before we ever made the move to Berlin, I started clearing out some stuff I didn't need and discovered that I had around 22 baby books. As in, a little mountain of books on the topic of pregnancy, birth, babies, and toddlers. I utterly loved them. I especially loved the pregnancy books that tell you what's happening month by month - when you baby is the size of the Giant Snickers you just ate, which month you can teach it to love listening to the Sugababes, so that you have at least 1 person who understands you. You know, that sort of thing.

My pregnancies weren't exactly typical as such. As a diabetic things are a little bit different. You have more frequent scans - which is lovely because I have about a dozen scan pictures of each of my two, but the flip side is that you have a lot more to worry about. I would go to one scan and at the end of it the sonographer would say "Ok, well at your next scan we're going to be looking for heart problems and so on, as the children of diabetics tend to have heart defects" which would give you something new to mull over for the next 4 weeks and have you worrying yourself to death. Every scan there would be something new to 'look forward' to. So poerhaps these books provided me with a window into a nice, fluffy, normal pregnancy.

My favourite pregnancy books were:

The Best Friend's Guide to Pregnancy - funny and informative, and down to earth.

The Rough Guide to Pregnancy & Birth - a week by week guide and very funny to boot following the authors pregnancy.

What to Expect When You're Expecting - month by month, and serious in tone, but it's indispensible and answers most questions you might have or worries that are niggling you.

Expecting - by Anna McGrail & Daphne Maitland - I really liked this book. I found it one of the most informative and covered a lot of ground and dealt with health issues well. Can't remember much more about it though now, just remember I looked at it quite a lot!

Minus 9 to 1: Jools Oliver's book telling her story of problems conceiving and her journey through pregnancy to having a new baby. A nice insight for those who haven't had a baby before.

Birth. I was/am terrified of giving birth, and dreamed of being knocked out and coming round after the caesarian scar had healed. I had expected to have a c-section as I am diabetic, and that's what I wanted, but I am also desperately scared of surgery and being 'awake' during an operation was not high on my list of things I wanted to do in 2007 and 2008. But then I found this book:

Stand & Deliver by Emma Mahony. It's lots and lots of individual stories about birth and all the different experiences women can have. I read this book, and I swear I felt confident and far less scared than I could ever have imagined. This would be THE book I would recommend for anyone who is at all frightened about giving birth. It's excellent.

My favourite baby books were (oh, and I'd advise reading these prior to having a baby as you don't get any time to do so afterwards):

What to Expect: The First Year - great if you have problems. It's got an answer for everything.

The Baby Whisperer - I never had the proper full-on 'Baby Whisperer' book, but I did have one called 'The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems' or was it sleep problems?? I can't remember because my mind was so addled from lack of sleep. Anyway, I bought it for sleep problems, and I quite liked it. This author strikes a halfway point between Gina Ford and someone who doesn't give a crap. Perfect! I remember it did work, but I was never good at not caving in after a week or two and brining them back into my bed. Hence the reason I have a 2 and a half year old cuddling into me most nights.

The Best Friend's Guide to Surviving the First Year of Motherhood - it's all there in the title. I'm saying no more.

The Baby Book: How to Enjoy Year One by Rachel Waddilove. This is a great book and really practical. But I've never heard anyone else talking about it that I know of. It's an excellent book for first time mums. Oh and it's got a foreword by Gwyneth Paltrow as the author helped her out when she had Apple.

The Rough Guide to Babies - Miranda Levy - good, but not as good as the Rough Guide to Pregnancy & Birth. Different author, but I see now that there's another book by Kaz Cooke the author of the RG to Pregnancy about babies - so it might be good.

I don't have favourite Toddler books as such - I kind of gave up - the novelty was over ha, ha! Plus, by the time I had a toddler I already had another baby, and my problems surpassed those that even Tracey Hogg herself could solve. But, I did have, and would recommend:

The Best Friend's Guide to Toddlers - excellent as per the other books and I might actually have a look at it again, if I can find it under the mess.

What to Expect: The Toddler Years - great if you want to give yourself a complex about what your child can't achieve, or give yourself a pat on the back because they are over-achieving! Otherwise, pretty pointless, unless you are really stuggling with your toddler, or don't have the confidence yet to trust your instincts. Having said that - I still bought it.

Toddler Taming - Dr. Christopher Green. This outlines all the problems you are likely to come up against with your toddler. Easy to read too. I only had a quick read of this before a friend asked to borrow it and never gave it back, so it must be really good. Though not that good that I felt compelled to ask for it back.

So that's my list of recommendations. Other pregnancy, birth, baby & toddler books are available. I know. I've read pretty much all of them.

Ausländer Anonymous

I've just found a better name for my blog - 'The Trailing Spouse'. I really like that. Damn, missed a trick. I suppose I could still change it... hmm..I'll mull it over.

Anyway, we have a new student in our midst, from Japan, though she's been living in Boston for quite a while. Her husband is German and has decided that they will stay here in Berlin for the next 22 years, until he retires. She is feeling unbelievably homesick. I can't blame her. I've always thought that it's so much easier to adapt to a country and live in it if you can keep in your head that it's just temporary.

Two years doesn't seem like so long a time, especially now we've done more than a quarter of it. In fact, if anything, I wonder if we'll be able to fit in all the things we want to do and see in the time that we have left. In some ways, yes, it is just like a big, long holiday. But of course, when I'm not thinking of all the nice places I want to visit, and all the great things we can get out and do and see when the weather is good, then it's not like a holiday; it's just like normal everyday life with strange things and a foreign language thrown in.

I can't really imagine what it's like to move say, to Australia, for good. I think that must be really hard. So I'm rather lucky really. When this woman opened her heart to me today it got me thinking back to our pre-assignment briefing and all the tings we were warned to expect.

The honeymoon period where (supposedly) you do all the touristy things and eat out loads and go drinking and dancing and generally have loads of fun and treat it like a holiday. I never really felt like I had a honeymoon period very much as it was my job from the off to get us settled and do all the practical things like registering the car for a parking permit and seeking out half a dozen doctors and looking for schools and Kitas, and struggling with the language.

The next phase is a trough phase where you start to miss things from home, even things you wouldn't normally miss or want when you were at home. This is the point at which you have to start coping with the realities of actually living there. It's fun, fun, fun.

After this phase you hit the 'rubber wall', where you come up against things you consider illogical and unreasonable and you want to kick against it. Stevie thinks I 'hit the wall' about a day after we arrived here. I'm good that way: I like to fast track to the crappy bits.

Finally, in the last phase you can go one of 4 ways. You either continue on a decline and feel a bit depressed about the whole thing and eventually make the decision to return home, or you just continue with struggling with all the problems you feel you are encountering. The third path is more positive and you recover and discover that life abroad really isn't that bad and your life is just as good as at home, and finally 40 - 45% of people discover themselves on the path where they feel their lives are positively enriched by the experience.

I'm thinking of inviting this woman round to my house with her 1 year old baby. I don't know that it'll make her feel much better, but I'm not sure what else I can do to make her feel better about living here. If you have any 'homesickness' remedies please let me know.

What I did before the internet

Copyright obviously belongs to me, Fiona Gray. I don't want to come round to your house for a cup of tea and see this on your coasters.

My laptop is showing lots of signs that it's not going to last much longer. On top of that I can't stay on the internet for more than 10 minutes before it loses the internet connection and the connection is fine it's just that the laptop seems to have become all despondent about surfing the web.

The other night I walked into the living room after putting the kids to bed to find Stevie had it in two pieces (possibly more) on the rug. I nearly keeled over. Stevie's not really the kind of guy you'd trust with diagnosing PC problems. Cast your mind back a month or so to my dad's reaction at Stevie going at his brand new boiler with a butter knife, that's the kind of technical guru he is, so I was alarmed to say the least.

So I had an evening without the internet, and in actual fact it did me the world of good. Instead I used the time to paint a little picture, just something easy and relaxing and that evening I went to bed feeling a lot less stressed than I normally do. I've decided I am going to try and incorporate a bit of painting into every week. No themes in mind, just whatever takes my fancy. I need to get practising anyway if I want to get my drawing back up to scratch and actually start painting and illustrating properly.

The trouble with co-sleeping

This better just be exhaustion and not concussion. Do you snore with concussion?

The trouble with co-sleeping is that it's difficult to know when to stop, and if you leave it too late then it can be very difficult to get out of it without an awful lot of screaming (on your part) and crying (also on your part).

But generally there's some catalyst for change. And ours has come. Every day I wake up tired. Tired as though I haven't been to bed yet. Two nights ago Hamish woke me up at 3:30am thinking it was breakfast time, and to be honest I was so disoriented by tiredness that it might as well have been 7:30am because it didn't feel any different to me.

I've been having a bit of trouble getting the kids to go to bed and stay in it of late - it's non-stop requests, moans, complaints, 'ideas', and so on that in the evening not 2 minutes goes by without one of them at me for something. I'm finding it hard to get anything done. It's impossible to even concentrate on my German homework never mind anything else because I'm just waiting for the next interruption.

Last night Stevie arrived back from Derby at 10pm and both kids were still awake. Orla had decamped into our bed to wait for her dad, and Hamish was claiming he couldn't sleep on his own. So I ended up sleeping with Hamish and 'the guys'. The guys are made up of Tigger, Pooh, and Tiger. They seem to like to sleep with their heads on my pillow and take up a remarkable amount of space.

So we all went to bed tired and woke up tired. Then we got ready for Kita and left the house. Downstairs normally both of my children are lingering around pressing the lift button repeatedly and turning on the light and I open the inner door and call to them to hurry up. Today though I opened the door and Hamish ran full pelt into the edge of it, and bounced backwards off his feet with his head gushing with blood.

After a morning at A&E I've come to the conclusion that we all need our own beds. And I need to become super strict mummy and stop them constantly bombarding me with requests. Maybe when I am less tired I'll be able to work out how to do that.

To see oursels as ithers see us...

Just how is your homeland perceived in other countries? If you had to write a shopping list of foodstuffs that would neatly encapsulate the beloved traditional meals and the nations favourite foods, what would be on it. Chances are you don't see the 'typical' foods of your own country the same way as foreigners do.

The photos above show the American food section of the Ka De We. The Ka De We is essentially the Harrods of Berlin. I love the food department, it's full of interesting stuff at 500 times the normal price. A box of Weetabix for example will cost you in the region of £5. Not that it's that much cheaper in the other supermarkets.

Anyway, one of my particular favourite sections is the American section. It's like they just eat crap! There's not a vegetable in sight. The only fruit that's being boasted about is 'artificial'. Do American's only eat cakes that come from a box or bottle? Do they really have AA meetings for Jim Beam sauce addicts? And what are they doing with all that 'Fluff'? I mentioned the Strawberry Fluff to my American classmate, cause I wasn't sure what you would use it for. Apparently it can be used in sandwiches in conjunction with ...did she honestly say, peanut butter??? Or was it jelly (jam)? Either way, I'm feeling a little nauseous.

Sadly, my photos just miss out the Cheese Zip. I like the name, but the idea of something cheese-based, unrefrigerated, in a plastic bottle slightly turns my stomach. Something tells me it aint 'Bio'!

And if you Brits are sniggering up the back, believe me the British products aren't much better. I'll keep those for another time. Hold on to your Kettle Chips!