The first three months are the hardest - Pah!

JUST after I had my daughter some bright spark told me that the first three months of a baby are the hardest! What a bloody joke.

That was obviously the opinion of a man who had little to do in reality with their own child hence the absolutely ridiculous and untrue statement.

Let me put you straight, the first three months are a dawdle, an absolute dream. Your new baby smells wonderful, mostly, and only needs fed, changed and loved to be happy.

No the first 13 or so years are the easiest, then they become a monster. And any parent who tells you otherwise is definitely luckier than they could ever realise, or are lying through gritted teeth.

The thought of another couple of years of things as they are withers me.

In our household, the ongoing saga of the room continues. I could not believe my eyes when I went into it this morning; it is a filthy hovel! I should probably threaten her with posting pictures of it online identifying her. But I don’t think she would even worry, let alone do something to change it.


Not the room but not far off, photo borrowed from www.fotosearch.com

After all the room is in this state and I do believe she would bring pals into this hole with no thought or concern of what they would think.

Teenagers have no shame.

The fact is that since I did her room last month, leaving her only a few things to sort out which to date have not been done.

I’ve had all sorts of advice from all sorts of corners, one gem being ‘close the room door’.

Unfortunately the door doesn’t close properly and as you enter our flat, the first thing you are confronted with is the room. (Bear in mind our flat is the flat that Jack built and there is no lock or catch on the door.)



But in fairness, closing the door just isn’t a real option or indeed a solution. Because it is a small flat it feels like the mess from the young wan’s room pervades like a bad smell throughout the flat.

It’s been a tough week, nothing to do with the room, it has more to do with all the other mischief she has been engaged in and I am looking for a one-way ticket for one person to somewhere, anywhere.

Think I'll head west!



Technorati tags: redmum irishblogs teenagers messy bedroom teenage monster

The Sunday Indo, Liam Lawlor and the backlash

I HAVE been a little bit bemused by the Liam Lawlor/Sunday Independent/Sindo debacle over the last number of days and I am not going to go on and on about it but a number of things have struck me.

Of course it goes without saying I do feel huge sympathy for Lawlor’s family who had a lot of awful stuff to deal with as it was without all the hooker allegations on top of it.

That aside the things that have struck me this week has concerned the Sunday Independent backlash and the outpourings of horror from the general public. It appeared to gain momentum on Monday after being dealt with on the radio stations as well as being spread all over the dailys and internet.

The first thing I find mad is the hands thrown up to face in shock at the Independent for publishing the story at all. It is as if people are saying they are not really interested in that type of piece and I have to say I have my doubts there. Hey didn’t they buy the paper with that thrust all over the front.

While I know many people would not have realised the full content and wrong information in the piece, people are mad for stuff like that.

The commentary at it has passed bears more than a passing resemblance between this and the mass hysteria and aggressiveness to the media following Diana's death in Britain.

People poured scorn on the tabloids as well as the unhealthy public interest in so-called celebrities – it didn’t really last that long.

How many years on from that are we and just look at the magazine stands at Heat, OK, Hello, etc etc.

There are more magazines than ever and certainly more titles than then. You have magazines where 'celebs' sell themselves to the gossipy ones where paparazzi provide the juicy photographs, the magazine stands are packed full of them.

I do believe in the integrity of the vast majority of our journalists, I know someone can be libelled even if the story is true (tough obviously I am not talking about Liam Lawlor here, honest don’t sue me) and I know that you cannot libel the dead. And I would loath it if our media went down the tabloid salacious route entirely (okay I know it has its moments, sometimes often) but as I said I do believe in the integrity of journalists. Getting it right is the cornerstone of the vast majority of journalists’ ethos.

In saying that, serious errors and bad judgements were made over the weekend which brings me to the other thing that I find bizarre about this whole thing and that is Liam Lawlor is swiftly becoming a saint. Mmmhhh absolutely bizarre.

This will hit the Indo hard, for how long – who knows? It will be interesting to watch how this goes on, for how long and how hard.

Cynically I have a sneaking suspicion that Irish people forget a lot of things.

Oh and on an aside, I was texted the first Lawlor joke last night but I don’t want to post it here and have to do a Sunday Indo and delete it at a later date but it made me laugh hard. Apart from which we all know this is the internet and if it has been posted online, it can be found again, no matter if deleted or not.

redmum Irishblogs Liam Lawlor Lawlor Sunday Independent Sindo media

And in a shameless plug here's a pic I took around 8ish this morning showing the day as it started.

How much is your blog worth?

HOW much is your blog worth? Using the applet at this link from business.opportunities.biz now you can find out.

Here’s my attempt, so as you can imagine I’m keeping the day job.

My blog is worth $0.00.
How much is your blog worth?

irishblogs redmum

Fast food outlets outnumber Churches in Ireland

SO fast-food outlets in Ireland now outnumber Churches, post offices and they surely must be on the way to outnumbering pubs (okay okay SLIGHT exaggeration), according to a report in the Irish Independent today.

The figures reveal that in Dublin alone there are 1,094 takeaways ranging from Chinese to sandwich bars and the article tells us that this is not including McDonalds or Burgerking as these are classified as restaurants because people can sit down to eat. Mmmhh… McDonalds and restaurant – surely that’s an oxymoron.



And in these takeaways the Irish people spend €460m a year on junk food. Fecking hell.

That’s a staggering amount of money and the takeaway of preference is the Chinese, which as you will all know bears little resemblance to the type of food you get in China. For example in the north a real treat is Chinese gravy, gravy chips are as popular as the stable curry chip is in Dublin.

But you would be hard-pushed to find Chinese gravy on a menu in a restaurant in China.

While these little pleasures are fine every now and again, it is clear that for many people this is their stable diet and that’s a worrying trend. It doesn’t take an expert to work out the deadly health problems this will have for the future.

Which brings me to the Jamie Oliver school dinners campaign.

This was a fantastic idea and I have to pat him on the back for the campaign but there were times over the course of the series I found him a patronising, smug git.

I never thought that before about him until watching the programme, well I never really thought about him before in fairness, and his arrogance about people’s diets at times was astounding.

Just because he was brought up in an environment of food, good food where from the age of eight he helped out the chefs in his parents Essex pub, does not mean that other people have had the same privileges and it was a privilege for him.

I’m not going to turn to some financially stretched parent who is trying to make their food budget stretch while providing for picky eaters with food stuffs that maybe some others of us would not have in our cupboards.

One of his yardsticks seemed to have been ‘I wouldn’t feed that to my children’ with the notion that if he could whip up something wonderful and appealing to children that anyone could. As if…
It was a battle for him though. And as I said it was a great campaign and highlighted just how little the British Government is prepared to pay for decent, healthy school meals.

The fact remains that here in Ireland vegetables are expensive, meat is expensive and when someone can fill their freezer, and therefore dinner table with burgers and the like, who am I or indeed Jamie to judge?

However, I know of families where it’s a Chinese takeaway every night and this is just not healthy, never mind more expensive than shopping for fresh natural ingredients. And judging by the Irish Indo report, this is only going to get worse. It is time that we educated people and this is where I thought Jamie Oliver’s campaign was spot on by targeting children.

Thankfully the young wan always had a healthy appetite and very rarely did she turn up her nose at anything. Not like me as a child, I think I was reared mostly on chips; I only really started to eat vegetables while pregnant, I never said I didn’t have my own bratty moments. What would Jamie have made of that? Well it was the 1970s and Smash was a stable part of a lot of people’s dinners, yeuck.


For mash get smash

Technorati tags: redmum junkfood Irishblogs Jamie Oliver

iprod, igod and ipod

I just received this on email from a pal and I laughed heartily.

I was watching The Simpsons last night and Homer walks by an i-god poster which I have also found and posted here too, just to give you a laugh cos it is Monday.





If any of you want a copy, email me and I will send it on.

Technorati tags: ipod iprod igod redmum irishblogs

Rory Carroll released

The morning headlines on October 20



Lunchtime headlines October 20


Evening news October 20


What a relief that Rory Carroll has been released.

Technorati tags: Rory carroll rte irishblogs iraq Redmum kidnap

Forgetfulness and updated blog links

I’VE been meaning to update my blog links for ages now so I did it tonight. And I know that I have probably forgotten others that I have also meant to include, but I will update again soon.

It’s a bit like when you hear an album and think I must remember to get that and the next time you are in HMV or wherever you stand there like a tool thinking ‘now what was it I wanted to get’.

A bit like blogging really, different things happen and at the time I think I must remember to write about that and then promptly forget.

So I bought a small book to carry about to jot down notes on whatever. Guess what?

After carrying it about for a couple of weeks and using two or three pages for blog notes, plus a couple of ripped out ones for phone numbers, shopping lists etc, I ehm keep forgetting to carry it.

Now I am not sure where it even is now. Sigh And yeah yeah I give out about the young wan.

Top 10 design mistakes

Not being a design wizard or anything like it, I have been alerted to a link posted by a number of bloggers about design mistakes and it made me smile.

Jakob Nielsen’s top 10 design mistakes is very interesting stuff indeed and I will try to do more of what I am doing right and less of what I am doing wrong.

However, it is just me or is the design of the web page where you can find these top tips is simply yeuckkkk. It reminds me of the first internet pages I ever saw, very simple and text heavy with long long lines.

I don’t know whether it’s the useit interface or what, as I said tis far from a web wizard I am but the simplicity of it made me smile. Nevertheless it is a very interesting and informative article and well worth a read.

UPDATED (October 20, 11.50pm): *Redmum hangs head in shame* I said I wasn't a web wizard and Jakob Nielsen from what I have gathered on my blog surfings tonight is somewhat of a internet top dog. Hey what the hell do I know about design?

Tax Bono to help the poor

That was the great headline in the Irish Independent today concerning a press conference yesterday where the Conference of Religious In Ireland called for a cap to be placed on the Artists Tax Exemption scheme.



The Artists Exemption Scheme concerns income earned by artists, writers, composers and sculptors from the sale of their works is exempt from tax in Ireland in certain circumstances.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for giving the struggling artist a leg up, a chance to develop and explore their creativity, but I am not for multi-millionaires like Bono escaping paying taxes on their millions.

As Father Healy from CORI said: “The CORI Justice Commission believes there is something profoundly unfair about a tax system in which some millionaires pay no tax while employees on the minimum wage must pay tax”.

Absolutely Fr Healy. Well said.

I recently moved into the higher tax bracket but do not think I am a high earner, HA, far from it and the recent changes to my Pay As You Earn (PAYE) status means that I take home less money than I did four years ago when I earned less. Fantastic.

Oh and I still can’t afford a mortgage, no bank would touch me.

And Bono keeps his tax-free millions.

What is all the more sickening about this is Bono bleating on about Make Poverty History while sitting on a mountain of money. Give me a break.

Take the example of Chris Evans who pledged to give away most of the money he earned from selling the radio station saying that there was no way he would need that amount of money. He kept a substantial sum for himself and gave the vast majority of it away and threw down the gauntlet to Paul McCarthy to do the same.

Well I believe he did, I tried to find out more information on this but drew a blank, so sorry for not providing any links.

I do think it is admirable to campaign on important issues such as this, but there is more than a touch of hypocrisy when a multi-multi millionaire is not paying into their country coffers. Come on Bono, dip into those pockets of yours.

The Artists Exemption Scheme should be retained – it has been very important for many artists BUT there should be a cap for those who are milking the system, eh Bono?

Technorati tags: bono Irishblogs Redmum CORI poverty artists exemption scheme

Save Brian Kerr

FIRST of all I’ll put my hands up and admit that I have not been following Ireland’s football campaign the way nearly everyone else I know has but I want to keep Brian Kerr as Ireland manager.



Given the tone since last week’s match and given the baying for Brian’s blood since then, I realise I am probably on a losing one here.

There is no denying that Kerr is a passionate manager and I was delighted when I learned he was the new Ireland manager more than a year ago.

Like many others I first heard of Brian Kerr on news reports following the fantastic and successful performances of Ireland’s youth teams when he was manager.


Pic from here.

I couldn’t name another youth manager, such was their success. It’s a bit like naming the second person to climb Everest, or walk on the moon, okay okay I know it was Buzz Aldrin but you get what I am saying.

I liked that Brian Kerr is an out and out no-nonsense Dub and I think it would be a shame if he was pushed out of the job. There’s no one person to blame, a team is bigger than one person.



While it was devastating to be knocked out of the World Cup, can the blame really be laid on one person’s shoulders? I don’t think so, but then I really like Brian Kerr.


Pic from here.

Altogether now ‘WHO DO WE WANT’ ‘BRIAN KERR’.

Technorati tags: ireland soccer World Cup Irishblogs football

Techie people needed to satisfy curiosity

THERE are so many techie people floating around POTB and Irishblogs I was wondering if any of you could satisfy my curiosity concerning something that keeps coming up over the last while in my visitor stats.

I have noticed very recently that some people have been coming to my blog via this kind of route.

http://images.google.com/imgres?
imgurl=http://photos10.flickr.com/14787432_289b19659b.jpg
&imgrefurl=http://redmum.blogspot.com
/2005_05_01_redmum_archi

(The previous are supposed to be one line but I needed to break it up to fit on the page.)

Sometimes when you hit this link its working and other times it isn't and you get the blogger 404 page. But the interesting thing for me is that the page you see is framed and you can click on the link at the top which says ‘show image alone’.

I have been doing this and have seen some of my Harry Potter book launch post pics showing up as well as my forays into Google Earth. They have also come from everywhere and it doesn't seem to be via my flickr account.

But most interesting has been one particular image which has been popping up a lot from this post.

Can anyone enlighten me?

So seeing as how its Friday again like the original post, here it is anyway.





Technorati tags: redmum Irishblogs Friday pictures

Word verification thingiemabobby

DUE to a ridiculous amount of spamming, I have had to turn on the word verification thingiemabobby, which I didnt want to do because I know that some of my visitors do not know their arse from their elbow here and I wanted it to be easy for them to comment.

You know it's true Jordie (who incidentally has the knack of commenting on a blog post on my flickr account and then getting wildly confused about what has happened). In fact Jordie managed one time to email me her comments instead of posting them.

So to those spammers, I do not want a coat for my dog, she has one and neither the young wan or I would be seen dead walking the dog with it on, though we do have great fun and laughs sticking it on her now and again. I am not giving money to the person whose car was repossessed and I am not going to follow a link for tips on adsense. You will all be deleted.



Technorati tags: redmum irishblogs spam word verification

Where are the Mini Pops now?

I WATCHED a very scary programme on Channel 4 last night ‘What ever happened to the Mini Pops?’. Do any of you remember that awful programme?



I was about 10 years old when it was aired and I remember the albums plugged all the time and to a 10-year-old I admit it looked like mighty craic.

However so was Belfast (what we called knock the doors and run away game, ring bell, run fast), doing the backs (where you ran, jumped, climbed and scaled along the backs of everyone on the streets house until you reached the bottom or were caught whichever came first) and kissy-catch, though I still like kissy-catch.

What kid wouldn’t enjoy dressing up and pretending to be a pop star which was the essence of the programme. However it went wildly askew.

The girls were dressed up to look like little mini-women and the words I would use now to describe it include sinister, frightening and disturbing.

Describing the children as little women isn’t actually even going far enough, they couldn’t have been tarted up anymore. But I don’t feel comfortable using the words that spring to mind for children.

However this didn’t stop the viewing public using such words to absolutely lambaste the show that amazingly ran for more than one season. Jaysus the paedophiles must have thought all their birthdays came at once.

The programme researched where the children are now and how they feel about taking part in the programme. None of them had anything bad to say and were bizarrely confused about the reaction they got.


Watching themselves

One, Joanna Fisher, was just mad. I mean Charlie Manson crazy eyes ‘I’ll be back’ mad. She actually said she would be back, from what the abyss of what appears to be crazy plastic surgery (though I could be wrong, but those cheekbones looked like they could have a show of their own).

We saw her sing Karaoke and then were subjected to her singing along with her child-self singing Sheena Easton’s ‘My baby takes the morning train’. Feckin frightening.


Catch yerself on!



To see a child, tarted up, looking into the camera singing ‘slowly we make love’. WHAT!

And this was broadcast and even today these people think this was okay.

Though it is quite sad that Joanna had all this fame(!) and popstar-ish status before the age of 10 and it appeared that she is waiting for it to happen.

But she’s not the cutie pie blonde child that she was, so its just not cute anymore.

It was frightening to see her sing along with herself with no reaction to how sexualised it was, and it was.



She hit one of the high notes only for one of the others to remind her that it was actually herself who provided the high note. I laughed heartily.

At one point in another song a little girl wearing a very short skirt is trying to jump up onto a countertop and still the choreographer tried to claim that there was nothing sinister in it.

Even worse was the head of programming who while watching it back now was saying there was nothing wrong.

Toyah Wilcox who was also shown the clips was horrified.


a normal reaction

Apparently the Mini Pops did well touring Canada where there was no such talk of kiddie porn.

The mind boggles. So back to my question, where are the Mini Pops now? Not far enough away from me.

After that programme there was a top ten singles of the year in 1981 with the lovely Suggs, doesn’t he look as great as he always did?



Technorati Tags: redmum irishblogs mini pops channel 4

Things that have happened on the bus

BROWSING around planet of the blogs I came across the wickedly funny twentymajor blog as you do and found this gem in his archives.

As the title says it concerns 10 things that have happened to Twenty Major on a bus and some of them are hilarious, particularly number five and six.

I have had many mad things happen on buses, I suppose that’s the payback for being dependent on public transport – not a good position to be in while living in a city which is suffocated by traffic

A new expression

I HAD to laugh the other week, heartily. One of the first letters home this year from herself’s school concerned the first parent association meeting and among the items of the evening was a lecture on how to help your teenager through the rough teenage years…

Oh plleeaaaseee. It’s not the teenager who needs help, it’s me, I need the bloody help, the young wan is delighted with herself – it’s the mother, okay parent, who needs to have their daughter/son/teenage monster understand what its like to be the parent of a teenager.

Maybe that’s the way forward… No seriously! Ach come on, work with me here!

Joking aside, I applaud the school for doing things like this, its great.

Maybe the lecture would explain why she has recently adopted this maddest expression that she thinks is surprise when asked about a particular thing.

For example my deodorant goes missing. A disaster in this household. I know women are supposed to blush, what can I say! Just that I wouldn’t be hugging people after a day without my deodorant, well who would?

So I ask her ‘where’s my deodorant?’

*blank look slowly turning into a mock-surprise look then comes the look of ahhhh*

‘Ehm whhhat?… OOhhh! Ehm No!’

And so on and so forth… and so on and so bloody forth. At the moment the amateur dramatics occur you know they are guilty. Without a shadow of a doubt.

It’s been a tough week here and one where I have been tested to the hilt and each time I am met with this new expression.

It’s driving me nuts.

So I am thinking of adopting some of my own. Still working on them though so you will have to come back to me on that one, course if you have any suggestions, work away!

Harney Humdinger of the month award goes to...

I DON'T know if any of the Irish passers-by saw The Political Party on TV3 yesterday (Sunday) with Minister for Social and Family Affairs, wee Seamus Brennan, but one of the subjects of the show has hit all the breaking news websites over the day. In fact I am pretty positive it will make the tabloids tomorrow.

It was concerning the Children’s Allowance and Ursuala Hannigan was trying to tease something out of Minister Brennan, who dodged and duck his way out of saying anything than he wanted to.

The crux of it was that Brennan said his department has been looking at modifying the payments to include something extra for the 10-odd per cent of children who despite Ireland’s wealth and prosperity live in poverty.

He said there was no date on it, he didn’t know how it would be done, or how much it would be, he knew little other than he was going to so something to bring children out of this poverty.

Firstly and I must get this out of the way because it is not why I am writing, but I have to say HA to that.

What a joke! Sometimes you watch things like this with a Fianna Failer spouting whatever spin they have been briefed with and you wait and wait for the thunderbolt to come and strike them down there and then.

It never happens.

Many of the 10 per cent (I am not sure of the exact figure) of children are in households headed up by a single parent.

And it was Fianna Fail who recently implemented a wide range of social welfare changes which will keep many of these people in abject poverty. What the hell, many of them don’t vote anyway, why worry?

Some of these changes include lengthening the time someone has to be signing on before they can start a back to work scheme, there are many, many more. [Google ‘Savage 16’ to see them all.]

Many of these changes if implemented a couple of years ago would have ensured that I would have never got to college, rented a flat, or started work.

Smart move!

The Government is being battered now and rightly so. So wee Brennan tried once again to show the caring face of the Government and spoke of introducing extra somethings for those who need it.

Great but I wouldn’t hold my breath for its introduction. It’s probably just one of those Fianna Fail promises, a bit like leprechaun gold, something of a yearned for myth.

But the main reason why I wanted to post about The Political Party was that apart from the fact that it was Ursula Halligan who kept going on about would the Children’s Allowance be means tested, not wee Brennan, yet that is what the media choose to use as its bite all day.

Did they watch a different programme?

Then at one point Halligan asked him would he be worried the money would be spent in the pub.

Seriously!

Aye that’s like the time I was on the dole, with no money whatsoever, no money for bills, no money for clothes and we lived on stew for the week. Despite all that you would always find me in the pub spending some of that leprechaun gold.

So the Harney Humdinger of the month award goes to Ursuala Halligan.


Spin Harney Minister Harney


Even more Harney

Technorati tags: The Political Party Harney Children's Allowance poverty redmum TV3 Irishblogs

Denying women cancer treatment because of contraceptive clause

I, LIKE many others, was absolutely aghast to hear this morning about patients being denied, or should I say women cancer patients, being denied the chance to try a radical new cancer treatment because they would also have to use contraception.

Out of a dark, distant recess in Ireland’s shameful past came the righteous representatives of hospital ethics committees blocking treatments on ridiculous grounds.

For example, some years ago, let’s say 10ish, if you suffered from an ectopic pregnancy, the chances are your whole fallopian tube would be removed because to remove the foetus alone is abortion and wrong!

I always failed to understand this, I mean I know why it happened but I never agreed. To me it stank of removing an arm because of a lost digit.

While it feels like something that could only happen in Ireland in days gone by, I know this discrimination happens everywhere in different guises.

This is how the Irish Times started its article today:

“A leading cancer specialist has accused two Dublin hospitals of sectarianism for blocking a radical new lung cancer treatment because it involves a recommendation that women patients use contraception.”


Sometimes I hear things that make me want to run away, very fast from those who are hanging onto Ireland’s bad, dark, old days. This is one of them.

The two hospitals, St Vincent’s and the Mater Hospital (name and shame them) deferred decisions on approving the use of Tarceva on patients in hospitals on the grounds that the recommendation that women receiving treatment use contraception was contrary to their Catholic ethos.

Seriously… Did you read that?

The leading cancer specialist who is mentioned in the article, Dr John Crown, described the drug as “possibly lifesaving” and said it was sectarian to deny it to women as the hospitals serve people of all faiths.

I’d go further than that; I’d say this is misogyny, reckless and unbelievably blinkered.

Never mind the fact that in many cases pregnancy can increase the speed of a cancer’s growth, so you would imagine that it would be better where possible to try to encourage women not to get pregnant.

Of course that decision is the woman’s – hopefully with sound advice from her doctor and not the unsound rantings of some archaic, long played out and long overdue for being put to pasture ethics committees’.

I remember hearing about these committees’ years ago and despite what I saw around me in the country at the time, I could not believe these groups existed well in the way that they did.

In the not too distant past, ethics committees were full of men, with not one woman on them, and they would decide whether or not Mrs Smith should have a D&C.

Cos you do know this is a method of abortion as well also a medical procedure for other gynaecological conditions. It’s a wonder people with cancer are allowed chemotherapy at all considering it can render people infertile, surely taking a drug that does this is against some Catholic ethos?

Considering abortion is illegal in Ireland, a D&C could not be used as for termination. So why if Mrs Smith has recently had her baby and through whatever difficulties it is decided that she needs a D&C as part of her treatment, why ever did this have to approved by an ethics committee. But it did.

And now we read this, isn’t this shocking.