Chatterbox Wednesday

Aaaaaaaaarrrggghh

Morning all

I spent last night cleaning and moving stuff from my rented place to my girlfriends in preparation of moving in. Once I had done this I took the dog for a walk and had a beer. Then half watched Creed and fell asleep.

Great story, I know.

Rented, we’ve been talking about moving in for a while so didn’t seem much point looking for somewhere when I moved to Plymouth.

scubar

Keep your cd's separate. Use the guise of "ripping them" and if they're apart it's easier to work out what ones you've done..

You're 30. You probably don't have cd's. Just Spotify & vinyl. Ignore the advice above. By that I mean babys. And by that I mean don't have any.

Good Luck

Morning all!

Boy's first full morning at nursery. He ran in there without looking back - think he'll be fine.

Continued watching the sixth series of Community, courtesy of the dire All4 app on the PS3. When it gets to the intermission advertising break, it then goes right back to the start of the episode. Just wonderful.

Also watched Central Intelligence last night. An enjoyable romp.
4 stars.

Oh, and one of the cats caught a wood pigeon yesterday. Last sight of it was him dragging it off into the bushes. The little sod.

Our nursery recently reported that Baby Babyfark is quite greedy and demands second helpings of main and desert and that he has also became a bit clingy for one of the nursery staff which we later found out was the chef. 

I thought the agreed chatterbox advice for all social dealings was to hit the biggest person in the room?

Congratulations on successfully assembling all your favourite mammals in one place, Scubar. Just remember that the dog is definitely yours when it comes to taking her walkies in the pouring rain.

I can sense some tension on this subject BabyF. Want to open up and let it all out?

I like walking dogs, especially around the nature park with a Walkman. It's the quick before bed walks in the pouring winter rain that start to grind. Our dog died last yesr though, and we work too long hours to get another right now. Maybe one day.

Isn’t one of the issues with household chores that even if the man often does what appears to be a fair share of chores, they leave the household management to the woman? All of the mental effort and head-space that is required to plan the practicalities tends to be the woman’s burden. It’s not an insignificant task and can be stressful.

So, Baby, when you snark that it’s a man’s job to take out the bins, I would suggest even if a man is willing to do chores, they tend to leave the management of those chores to the woman, and don’t actively plan or notice what needs doing, and therefore don’t engage in it until requested to. If a man ignores the fact that the bin is full and never empties it without being asked to, then it is up to the woman to notice and do something about it. If she is engaged in other tasks, then it’s a relatively simple task to try to delegate, even if it is at an inconvenient time from the man’s perspective. The woman is placed in an unenviable position of either accepting the position of household servant by doing the task herself, or actually standing up for herself and taking on the role of nagging wife. To rub salt into the wound, men often don’t even notice that they have been largely responsible for creating this situation.

It’s the reasons why putting the bins out is a cliché in female-male relationships.

I think it’s fair to go on to say that men often also take on tasks that have an element of enjoyment or greater social standing to them. It’s not uncommon for men to cook when there are guests, for example, even if they are much less likely to cook the rest of the time. Cooking, gardening, DIY and car maintenance in particular are all useful helpful activities, but for many people they are as enjoyable as they are chore-like. If men find themselves mainly engaging in those tasks, they probably really aren’t pulling their weight.

It’s easy to under-estimate the mental load of having to manage and plan the household for a couple or family, and to not notice that it very often falls to the woman. It can be a contentious issue, because as with anything that requires managing, two managers don’t really work as effectively as one, and it can even be the case that when men try to help with the managing, they are cut out of it by the woman, or made to feel that they’ve got it wrong because their plans or methods didn’t align with the woman’s plans or methods. Women help to create the situation by sometimes jealously guarding their role as household manager.

The failure to notice the burden of household management (and I do mean the planning, not necessarily the chores themselves) often goes hand in hand with men thinking their jobs and careers are more important than their partner’s job, or require more time, create more stress, or need more prioritisation. One effect of this, of course, is to undermine the woman’s career outside of the home, and to re-emphasise her role as home-manager.

I realise I’m being quite heteronormative as well as speaking in very broad generalisations. Of course, I’m not saying every woman, man or couple is like that.

tl:dr? Sympathy for Baby’s mammal.