did we talk to our kids today?

serious question: is it a good/bad sign when one frequently finds oneself nodding one's head in agreement with India Knight?

''It's a depressing world when people need to be told to speak with their kids''
Researchers from the London-based Institute of Education studied the way parents interacted with their children and how this affected the way the children grew up. In their report, academics said a home stuffed with toys, books and so on stimulated children up to a point when they were very young, but the effects did not last. Preschool computers and electronic activity boards, which teach toddlers numbers, shapes, colours and language, are among the fastest selling gadgets for young children, but researchers found they were largely unnecessary and said that what children craved above all was personal attention.
(I find these toys weird. Why get a computer to teach your child her alphabet, so that she learns it from a disembodied voice with a US twang?)

Dr Leslie Gutman, the report’s lead author, said: “Toys and books have their place and do help children develop, but what is important is having the parents interact with the child. To have parents read to their children is much more important than having 100 books – that’s great, but if you are not reading to your child, that is not engaging with the child.”

I was reading all of this and thinking, “Well yes, obviously”, but then it occurred to me that it’s not that obvious at all. The middle-class version of parenting was praised in the report, which found that better educated, richer mothers interact better with their children, and called on the government to help less educated, poorer mothers to raise their children “properly”. But I don’t think that this is always true. For a start, middle-class parenting relies heavily on farming the children out, to au pairs or nannies or nurseries, which scores a big fat zero on the parental interaction front.

It also relies, stemming from what is usually a combination of guilt and affluence, on bombarding the child with “educational” toys from those transparently aspirational (and gag-making) Baby Einstein DVDs when they are very small to the aforementioned laptops for toddlers when they are a bit older.

How I wish a toy manufacturer would just produce toys for distinctly average children, which is what most children are, regardless of their parents’ boring, ungrateful ambitions. And how I wish that when you looked around schools, someone would come and club those women who loudly ask what provision there is for “gifted” children, when theirs are not even two yet and from what you can observe are about as “gifted” as my big toe. Still, if you want to get away from them, I can recommend asking loudly about special needs provision; you’ll find they recoil in horror and go and stand as far away from you as they can.

Middle-class mothers tend not to view ordinary life – the shops, the park, the launderette, the cafe – as being sufficiently educational and are likely to raise their children in self-created little ghettos of rarefied so-called excellence, where no day is complete without exposure to Sanskrit, baby yoga or violin (I’m not exaggerating: I know several toddlers who do all three, and then some). They mean well, certainly, but again none of this is particularly impressive on the interaction front, and nor is it likely to help children to develop adequate social skills.

I’d go further and argue that a substantial proportion of middle-class mothers are to all intents and purposes completely detached from their children. There are always a couple of them in the playground near where I live, having given the nanny an hour off, flicking their highlights and chatting on their mobiles from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave, while their child hovers shyly around the edges of the sandpit, or runs around biting other children, or falls off the edge of the tall slide and gets a nosebleed that it takes their mother minutes to notice.

So we should all have a little think before patting ourselves on the back and feeling delighted at being middle-class parents. We may not stuff Turkey Twizzlers down their throats, and I expect it’s true that we read more to our children, which is a good thing, but I have the feeling that it’s also true that we don’t actually hang out with them in the way that non-middle-class parents do, or encourage them to exist in the real world.

We compensate by buying them expensive toys that are pretty much merit-free, or by taking them on expensive holidays when a bit of English beach and a couple of donkeys would probably be much more to their taste. There’s nothing terribly wrong with this – but there’s nothing terribly right about it either. There are all sorts of ways of not talking to your children and of not interacting with them. Talking over them with a fag and a rum and Coke is one way. But sitting them on the sofa with an organic snack and a toddler laptop while you listen to the Today programme is another.

no more baba and baby-log

R-R are discussing something very interesting on 'Sisters in Faith': their most and least favourite domestic duties (I don't want to call it chore b/z it rhymes with the word 'bore').

They were asking me what were my favourite jobs around the house when I was their age, which led to some cringe-inducing confessions...[/censored]

There was a portion of the article that I posted below that really struck me:
''Raising women's self-esteem, as a first step to liberating them from the confines of the home, was one of feminism's earliest and most vital tasks.''

My experience is just the opposite: I've found that one's self-esteem is inextricably linked to how in-control/on top of things one feels around the house... housework constitutes valuable life-skills, it's not just time-wasting techniques ....and I have the research to prove it:

Involving children in household tasks: Is it worth the effort?

Parents of the world, take note: You can make a big difference in your children's future by asking them to take out the trash. And do the laundry, wash the dishes, make the beds, put away the toys
Research by Marty Rossmann, emeritus associate professor of family education, shows that involving children in household tasks at an early age can have a positive impact later in life. By involving children in tasks, parents teach their children a sense of responsibility, competence, self-reliance, and self-worth that stays with them throughout their lives.

What the research shows: Using measures of individual's success such as completion of education, getting started on a career path, IQ, relationships with family and friends, and not using drugs, and examining a child's involvement in household tasks at all three earlier time, Rossmann determined that the best predictor of young adults' success in their mid-20s was that they participated in household tasks when they were three or four. However, if they did not begin participating until they were 15 or 16, the participation backfired and those subjects were less "successful." The assumption is that responsibility learned via household tasks is best when learned young.

How the tasks are presented also influences children's abilities to become well-adjusted adults. The tasks should not be too overwhelming, parents should present the tasks in a way that fits the child's preferred learning style, and children should be involved in determining the tasks they will complete, through family meeting and methods such a weekly chore chart. They should not be made to do the tasks for an allowance. The earlier parents begin getting children to take an active role in the household, the easier it will be to get them involved as teens...

To get back to the topic...my favourite domestic duty is:

because it has a beginning and an end, and at the end one can actually see results.

My least favourite duty is:

because it's never ending...which is why I try and recruit R-R to do it for me!

The Pearl of Allah

The largest pearl [14 pounds or 6.4 kg] known was found by an anonymous Muslim Filipino diver off the island of Palawan in 1934. It was first called the Pearl of Allah and is now officially named the Pearl of Lao-tze. In 1936 Wilbur Dowell Cobb was given this pearl as a gift by a chieftain of Palawan for having saved the life of his son. In 1980, Cobb's heirs sold it to a jeweler in Beverly Hills, California, for $200,000. It is now estimated to be worth upwards of $40,000,000!

source: pic and info

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subhaanallaah!

let them learn!

I liked this article: 'Why a woman's place is in the kitchen'...it traces the history of how the feminist founder-editor of Spare Rib (a woman's magazine) went from insisting women shouldn't waste their time in the kitchen to wondering (now) if they went too far...interesting, anecdotal, insightful read.

excerpts:

Today Britain has the dubious distinction of being the largest consumer of ready meals in Europe - everything from Pot Noodles to sophisticated concoctions such as duck à l'orange and chicken à la king. Not only has home cooking declined, but in many households these pre-assembled dishes are consumed individually, all over the house, when and where family members want. Food - once something that brought adults and children together around the kitchen table - is now yet another way to avoid family life.

[...]

My mother was unusual among her peers in her dislike of things domestic, though in 1956, when Constance Spry published her 1,200-page magnum opus of recipes and cooking tips, she noted: "It is strange how low the subject ranks in the estimation of many academically minded people ... There is still a tendency to consider the subject suitable primarily either for girls who cannot make the grade for a university or for those who intend to become teachers."
My mother, university-educated but frustrated by her subsequent life as a housewife, was clearly one of those who ranked cooking as a lowly pursuit, and she passed her lack of interest (and her attitude) on to me. In my turn, I furthered the belief that cooking was a demeaning pursuit for women who wanted to get on in a man's world.
In 1972, when I was 21, I co-founded Spare Rib magazine with an Australian friend called Marsha Rowe. The newly emerging feminist movement wanted to get women out of the typing pools and away from the kitchen sinks and into the boardrooms of the land. I remember being particularly adamant that the way to get ahead was to refuse to learn to type and to spend as little time as possible in the kitchen. As an early subscription offer for the magazine, we printed a purple dish cloth, which, though tattered and a bit torn, is still in use in our home today. Written on it are the words: "First you sink into his arms, then your arms end up in his sink."

[...]

Indeed, the whole area of housework was a fraught area that women were just starting to examine. We felt that the lack of childcare, and women's inequality in the work place, created an enormous pressure on women to be good housewives, to become psychologically dependent on housework. I well remember some of the early letters that told stories of these "kitchen-sink blues". Housework - unpaid, lowly and trivial - was, in those days, a woman's only job, and in the social pecking order it was right down there at the bottom.
Raising women's self-esteem, as a first step to liberating them from the confines of the home, was one of feminism's earliest and most vital tasks. Much of that was achieved through consciousness-raising groups in which women shared their stories and gained confidence from each other. Just by admitting that their lives were frustrating and often downright miserable, women were able to gain confidence. Cooking, which we all knew could be a creative activity, was all too often very different - because husbands and children demanded meals on tap. The very act of shopping, preparing and serving up food was, for many (like my mother, I suspect), another shackle of a dependent life.
To drive home our point, we frequently analysed adverts that depicted women in "household" roles. One, for a can of Heinz toddler food, showed a woman squashed between her laden kitchen sink and the open door of her washing machine, with the words, "The puddings taste so nice you might forget who you bought them for." What was unwritten was that this was woman's natural home, between the washing machine and the cooking utensils. At her feet, her two children are pulling on the skirts of her apron, sending the powerful message that "Children need their mummy and home. She is the only provider of all their nourishment." The children look as if they are about to have a fight, so a further message goes out to say that if mummy wasn't there, those two would be committing fratricide on each other. On the drying rack are four plates - clearly the man of the house, the fourth member of the nuclear family, is on his way. Heinz was giving us the stereotyped pattern - dad at work, mum at home with the kids, and that was how things should stay.

As it was, food preparation was so entwined with the role of the housewife that we consigned it to the bin of history, alongside the short stories that promised you would "live happily ever after" once he had popped the question.

[...]

By the mid-1970s, more than half of all British households were equipped with the first wave of labour-saving electrical appliances: fridge-freezers, Kenwood mixers, non-stick pans and dishwashers. (Ours was an exception: till the end of her life, my mother always refused to have a dishwasher on the grounds that it was a waste of money. She would often start washing up a meal before everyone had finished eating - a habit that, on occasions, I sadly find myself repeating.) Supermarkets such as Sainsbury's had begun to fulfil the demand for convenience frozen foods, peas, pastry, pies and complete packaged meals.
Liberated from domestic slavery by these modern miracles, women were, in theory, no longer required to devote all their time to household chores. My generation of women wholeheartedly embraced the workplace - which was just as well, since two incomes were certainly better than one when it came to paying for the new technology.
By the 1980s - the decade of the superwoman who could work full time, bring up children, run a home and knock up a mid-week dinner party for eight - about a third of households owned microwaves, the ultimate gadget to minimise cooking time. The writing was on the wall for cookery in British homes.
In 2005, the Guardian analysed the contents of some of Britain's most popular ready meals: Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Luxury Shepherd's Pie, "based on the Ivy restaurant's recipe" and sold to the public as a healthy meal that you could have made at home if you'd only had the time, contained 69 separate ingredients, including a large range of chemical flavourings and preservatives. When I make shepherd's pie, I use just six: mince, onions, tomatoes, potatoes, Worcester sauce and beef stock.
Today, cook books dominate the bestseller lists: most of them are destined to lie, unused, on kitchen shelves. Schools no longer teach cooking per se, just variants on subjects such as home technology, in which teachers explain to children how microwaves heat up food. Meanwhile, sales of ready meals continue to climb hand in hand with teenage obesity. It may be fanciful to lay the blame for this at the feet of the early feminists, but, without a doubt, our struggle to free women from the sheer drudgery of housework was a small link in the chain.

bzzzzzzzzzy (reprise)

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PS: planning on posting last Friday's khutbah '20 points for a Muslim family', and this Friday's on schedule in shaa Allaah...may Allaah put barakah in everyone's time!!

sad stats..

45% of Saudi children suffer physical and psychological abuse
Gulf News

Riyadh: About 45 per cent of Saudi children suffer from some kind of abuse, according to a recent official study.
Psychological abuse is the most common the children suffer constituting 36 per cent, followed by physical abuse 26 per cent, the study said.
The study, conducted by the Anti-crime Centre at the Saudi Ministry of Interior, noted that primary school children are the ones mostly subject to psychological abuse, followed by those in secondary schools and then intermediate school students.
"As many as 36.4 per cent of primary school students were subject to psychological abuse, while 36 per cent in secondary school pupils face this type of abuse and 30 per cent of intermediate school pupils encounter psychological abuse," the study pointed out.
The study said that orphans were most likely to be abused, adding that 70 per cent of orphans in Saudi Arabia have faced at least one kind of abuse. As many as 58 per cent of children of divorced couples are also victims of abuse.

the purpose of language: identification/classification, inclusion/exclusion

The 'papers I read are all awash with details of "the split", with the media digging into every detail with customary relish.

It seems all fingers are pointing to the fatal and irreparable 'middleclass-ness' of the bride-to-be's Mum, demonstrated by her incriminating use of "pleased to meet you"instead of "Hello Ma'am" when introduced to the Queen, followed by a question on the whereabouts of the "toilet" as opposed to the more genteel "lavatory".

I find it interesting (and intensely irritating) when people use language to classify/identify people and box them in convenient niches in their mind.

I've lost count of the number of times I've come across people who speak a particular dialect of a language, dissing others who speak the same language in a different dialect, for their pronunciation, syntax...their obvious "not-like-us-ness."

When I was growing up, learning/speaking one's native tongue in public was considered extremely declasse and people would openly sneer "verrrrrrrrrrrn" (short for vernacular) at those who didn't know better. Kids were fined (a trifle, Re. 1) for speaking native from the moment they got onto the school bus "for your own good", to encourage fluency and a posh pronunciation.

In a kind of inverse snobbery, when I went to college where most people came from a non-English speaking background, seniors would rag one mercilessly if they caught one speaking in English!

Looking back, I realise that each group was trying to make language a tool of forced homogeneity, of identity; of class; of inclusion and exclusion; an extension of their own limited comfort zone.

I'm still exposed to this mental sorting out process, I've been asked numerous times what my "first language" is...meaning did I always speak in English, in preference to my "native" tongue? People express a nasty kind of amazement when my children speak in English and Arabic ...I'm often told: "you've made strangers of your children"...never mind if these same people would willingly pay tutors to teach them the same languages!

Language is a tool of communication/connection...turning it into a tool of contention (my lingo can beat your lingo, my accent is better than your accent!) is abusing it...I often think of the infinite Mercy in the permissibility to recite the Qur'aan in seven ways (qira'at) and its revelation in seven modes (ahruf).

If differences of dialect are good enough for Allaah's Words, why aren't they good enough for the rest of us?

not again!

Hijab row resurfaces at Tae Kwon Do event
AP
Montreal: First soccer, then Tae Kwon Do. A team of mainly Muslim girls had to pull out of a Tae Kwon Do tournament on Sunday because members refused to remove their hijabs.
Tournament organisers told team officials the girls could not compete because the head scarves posed a safety risk.
It is the second ban of hijabs in Quebec sports in recent months, part of a larger debate in the province about accommodations for cultural and religious minorities.
International referee Stephane Menard said the decision was made at a referees' meeting earlier in the day.
"The equipment that is allowed under the world Tae Kwon Do federation rules doesn't include the hijab," Menard said on Sunday. "We applied the rules to the letter."
In February, an 11-year-old Muslim girl from Ontario participating in a soccer tournament in Quebec was pulled from the field after she refused the referee's request to remove her head scarf. The move was supported by soccer associations, citing security concerns.
The Tae Kwon Do team, made up of girls between eight and 12 years old, is affiliated with a Muslim community centre in Montreal. Five of the team's six players wear a hijab but have been allowed to participate in similar tournaments around Quebec.
The Muslim centre's boys club pulled out of the tournament in an act of solidarity.
"I'm very upset," said Bissan Mansour, one of the players. "We made so many efforts and practiced harder than usual to be here."

what's the real cost of eating out?

not meaning to sound alarmist or anything, but sometimes tragedies like these force us to focus on issues that we tend to ignore/brush off as unimportant...innaa lillaahi wa innaa ilayhi raaji'oon..

Eating out is pretty much a way of life now ... it's fast, makes a nice change from predictable home-made fare and is so very convenient that we tend to underplay the health hazards, even to ourselves. I personally know of people who've suffered from mild to acute food poisoning (although none as severe as this) from eating out, even at reputed restaurants...the Ministry of Health here had this entire campaign sometime back on the hazards of eating the ever-popular shwarma, because the combination of undercooked meat and the summer heat is deadly...

just something to keep in mind.. please spare a prayer for the little girl who passed away and her family (her father and sister are still in a critical condition)...stay safe!

we're all set!

erm...I mean, here's solid proof that as one grows older, one gets *set* in one's habits: after a weekend of tweaking and teasing widgets on this template, I decided that the new look was just *too* new for me...it didn't feel/look/act familiar at all...so it was decided all round that only a new blog would satisfy the youngsters' yearning for a "non-fuddy duddy/non kiddy-kitschy" template...

so here it is: Sisters in Faith, Rasha-Rida's cool new virtual room on the net...

PS: I'll continue posting on this old blog, just for old times' (and timers') sake
PPS from R-R: We might contribute too!!

timeout

no waste, no want; know waste, know want

Recently there was this article in the Arab News on how one man's garbage is another man's gain...where garbage collectors talk about finding all sorts of barely used, valuable articles -- from money to wedding dresses -- dumped in the trash.

The callousness/carelessness with which people squander all sorts of ni'aam (favours) is appalling ...barely touched fast-food meals, juices, shakes and fizzy drinks are routinely dumped in bins or on roadsides, dirty clothes are often thrown in the trash rather than in the laundry basket, at meal-times there's food enough for 10 people at a table for four... at the end of the school term *books* are thrown in the wastepaper basket and Abu-RR recently picked up a pamphlet by Sh. 'Aa'idh al-Qarni from the parking lot that was ironically, on israaf (excess).

I battle (and have battles) over waste in my own house too...in a house full of kids with fluctuating and finicky appetites, I have a kitchen and 'fridge brimming with leftovers, half-eaten biscuits and sandwiches, discarded tumblers of milk and juice, pencils and notebooks ...the list seems endless. Alhamdulillaah for the people at the local chapter of Islamic Relief here: they accept old clothes, sort them out and ship them out to places where they're needed around the world, so that's not much of a worry.

But I do worry about wasting perishables...and as Abu RR often reminds me, I'm responsible and answerable to Allaah for the things that go waste around the house ...it's a scary and uncomfortable thought...

blog stats

*very* interesting article on the history of blogs, as blogging comes of age 10 years after the birth of the first blog, 'Scripting News', with 120,000 blogs and 1.5 m posts being written worldwide everyday.

*very* interesting reviews on the phenomenon by journalists and entrepreneurs that range from the laudatory: "Blogging and other kinds of conversational media are the early tools of a truly read-write web," said Dan Gillmor, author of citizen journalism bible We The Media. "They've helped turn media consumers into creators, and creators into collaborators - a shift whose impact we're just beginning to feel, much less understand."

...to the mildly derogatory: "Andrew Keen, a former dotcom entrepreneur and the author of the forthcoming book Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture, says that though it is enticing to believe that online diaries are empowering, the hype is dangerous.
"It's seductive in the sense that it convinces people to think they have more to say and are more interesting than they really are," he said. "The real issue is whether it adds any more to our culture. Most of it is just so transient and ephemeral."

The story of Yusuf the Second

The Qur'aan calls the story of Yoosuf, 'alayhi salaam, "ahsan al-qasas", the most excellent of stories. It is one of the easiest soorahs of the Qur'aan to memorise and recite, and it is SO interesting because it has all kinds of details.

The story which the Shaykh told us was also about a young man, and the way he narrated it, it was as if we were seeing everything happen before our own eyes.

Anyway, to cut a long story short: Once, there was a young man who did not have any family and he was virtually raised in the masjid, who lived alone in a city far from his own hometown. He attended university there. One day, he was on his way back from class, when he saw a bunch of people trying to force a young girl into a car in a deserted place. He reached there and somehow those people got scared and left the girl alone and went off in their car.

Now this person asked the girl her address and her 'phone number, but apparently she was not from that area and she was too dazed or scared to talk. So he took her to his own room and then went to notify the authorities of the missing girl.

After that, he came back to his room with food etc., and the girl was asleep.
Now, he felt an urge to talk to the girl, to wake her up ...but he knew that it was not proper. So the entire night, he kept awake, distracting himself in one way or the other...remembering Allaah and how He was watching him, in order to stop himself from doing anything wrong.

In the morning, the girl's family had been traced and she was sent back to her own family...when her father came to know that there was this young man who had saved her, he thanked him and asked him if he would like to get married ...

So, they were married, and after some time, they came to visit the Shaykh on a Friday, with their baby son. That was when he narrated the story in the khutbah...isn't it a beautiful one?!
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Ed: What I liked about this story is that it actually happened in the *here and now* . It's so easy to dismiss righteous people/good deeds as being somehow *easy* to do in the past because those were different times, less fitnah etc. etc.

Truth is, the struggle with one's nafs dates back to the time of Aadam 'alayhi salaam...there have been and bi'ithnillaah will always be people who fight with their desires and emerge stronger in their faith...it's up to us to not lower our standards to whatever is the current 'acceptable level' of righteousness, and it's up to us to measure up to the best of examples set by those who passed before us...and of course, all towfeeq is from Allaah...laa quwwata illaa billaah.

(bad) news from the nursery

Nursery may be harming your child, but don't panic
The Guardian

Dropping baby off at nursery has become a standard part of British family life in the past decade. It is now the most popular form of non-parental childcare in this country, providing almost double the number of places offered by childminders. It is estimated that in England more than 800,000 children up to the age of four are in group-based care for at least some of the time - that's nearly a third of the age group.

But over almost exactly the same period, several studies in different countries into the adverse and long-term impact of group-based care on children have reached strikingly similar conclusions. They make uncomfortable reading for parents. Now it's happened again. In the US, the latest tranche of the world's biggest study into the impact of childcare on subsequent development finds that children who have been in group care such as nurseries in their pre-school years are more likely to be aggressive and disruptive once they reach school, and that this persists to the age of 12.

What is most disturbing about this new research is how enduring these negative effects are proving to be.

The more time over 10 hours a week children spend in group care, the more likely teachers are to report that their behaviour is more difficult at school. Even good quality group care has the same impact. The effect is small but significant, and the research team's concern is not that individuals become "axe murderers or rapists", but to discover the cumulative effect of millions of children being slightly more difficult.

[...]
All the research in recent years has pointed in the same direction. These latest findings from the NICHD, which has been tracking 1,300 children since 1991, are in line with research commissioned by the UK government, which has now followed children from three years to seven years and reached similar conclusions. Last year, child expert Penelope Leach published research with Oxford University indicating that yet again there is something about group-based care that makes a child more disruptive later.

Other aspects of the NICHD study are equally demoralising for advocates of quality nursery care as improving children's educational achievements. By age 12, almost all cognitive and academic advantages of daycare evident in the earlier years at school have levelled out, with one exception - good quality daycare is linked to a bigger vocabulary at 12 years.

Intriguingly, the negative effects of other forms of non-parental childcare perceived at earlier ages disappear as the child grows older, but not those of daycare. There is something unique to group-based childcare. But it's not about the quality of care - the researchers eliminated that possibility. Nor is it about the quality of parenting. It could be the scenario of stressed, tired parents picking up children after work, but the study ruled out quality of parenting too.

There are two possible explanations, but they need more research. First, there could be something about the dynamics of peer pressure among small children; a kind of "push and grab" competitiveness which, if not handled correctly, leads to a higher incidence of aggression throughout childhood. Another possibility is that group-based care is inherently stressful and children's cortisol levels are raised.

There's no need for panic responses. There are clearly trade-offs to be made in any circumstances: the benefit a child may experience from no longer living in poverty if his or her single mother is in work may outweigh any risks of group-based care. It's time for a truce in the intermittent so-called "daycare wars" which have raged on both sides of the Atlantic for more than 20 years, so we can clarify what to do, rather than the research being used as a stick to beat women with.

For example, are there ways to mitigate the negative impacts: better staff-children ratios and smaller groups of children perhaps? Are there ways to increase the provision of non-group-based care, such as child-minders? Can't we increase the ability of parents to afford to take more time off work to share the care in the earliest years?

This subject is emotionally inflamed - it tugs at the heartstrings of even the most confident parent - and the research has frequently been hijacked, for example to get at working mothers. Up to now, the government has argued that improving quality of group care would be enough to counter the research - that is no longer tenable.

Stay-at-Home Mums= Nazis??!

Stay-at-home moms called Nazis
BERLIN, April 2 (UPI)
Feminists in Germany say a celebrity author who advocates that women stay at home to raise families is evoking memories of World War II Nazis.
Former television news host Eva Herman, 47, wrote a book filled with letters from women who now wish they had chosen to raise their own families instead of working. Herman also says mothers should be paid $22,000 to $27,500 as "family managers," a Times of London correspondent reported from Berlin.
However, Alice Schwarzer, a feminist campaigner and magazine editor evoked memories of the Nazi era, when women who had more than three children were awarded a medal called the Mother's Cross.
In response, Herman filled in more of the history of wartime motherhood.
"During (that) era mothers were separated from their children. It is absurd to make that link," she said.

the year is 2007...or is it 1984?

I know not many people read or agree with alternative news/opinions, and while it's true that it sometimes borders on hyperbole/exaggeration, but this is just too uncannily accurate...

"Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children."
George Orwell's 1984, page 24

"George knew where it was going. He knew full well... "such organizations" being the schools, the media and peer pressure. "the party" being their herd mentality and its demand to be 'cool' by conforming. "the state" being their myopic little world and its addictions to drugs and 'celebrity' culture... and their adoration of a virtual media of violence...and a bedrock reverence for non-accountability.

And now it IS common for people 'over thirty' (not to mention teachers) to be wary and often frightened of their own and this society's children."
***


"Don't you see that the whole aim of 'Newspeak' is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking, not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

-George Orwell's 1984, Syme, page 46-47

And how many times have we noted the dumbing down of our young people and the deliberate dessication of a once vibrant 'adult' national intellect...euthanized by the ruthlessly brilliant, stealth onslaught of mindless, virtual electro-'entertainment'... The art of reading is on life-support...and is being/has been largely replaced by a servile REactive national psychosis...as if a walk-in alien consciousness has been installed in the masses which feeds upon activism and PROactive life energy. In many ways, that is precisely, exactly what has been done. It's all here NOW, from mind-numbing fluoride and aspartame (now in over 6,000 products) to GM crops with their often fatal laboratory tests...

- Rense

ummm...eureka?

I know some of the more seasoned mums and cooks out there will probably go 'duhhh' when I post this, but this is a real discovery for me...(I guess they don't call me culinarily challenged for nothing): Home-Made Chicken Nuggets

All my children love chicken nuggets (including the eats-no-meat-at-all Rasha) but I've only recently discovered the home-made, additive and chemical free alternative...plus this recipe recommends baking and not frying...try it out!

Also tried and tested, easy to make, taste great without frosting old favourites: Vanilla cupcakes

What you need:

8 ounces butter (1 stick), cut into small pieces
2 cup granulated sugar
4 large eggs, room temperature
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 cups cake flour, stir before measuring
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup whole or 2% milk
What you do:

1. Heat oven to 350°. Grease and flour 24 muffin cups, line with muffin papers, or spray with baking oil.
2. In a large mixing bowl, beat butter on low speed to soften.
3. Increase speed to medium and beat until smooth.
4. Add sugar, about 1 tablespoon at a time. Beat until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs and vanilla; scrape bowl then beat until smooth.
5. Measure the flour, baking powder, and salt into a bowl; sift once.
6. Add the dry ingredients to the first mixture a little at a time, alternating with the milk.
7. Continue beating on medium speed until smooth and well blended, scraping the sides of the bowl once or twice.
8. Fill muffin cups about 2/3 full and bake for about 20 to 25 minutes, until a wooden pick or cake tester comes out clean when inserted in the center of one.

[courtesy: SouthernCuisine ]

My children have been down with awful end-of-season coughs and colds, and they've all become very picky and listless about eating ...but one thing that makes everyone's day (including abu rr, who's a bit of a no-sugar, no-white flour puritan) is cupcakes... soft, sweet, just-like- mummy-made cupcakes...I'm off to make some!

just what the doctor ordered: Muslims with soft centres

All of last week, I kept reminding myself I have to catch up with three sisters -- two of whom were expecting babies any day, (one is a neighbour) and another who was recovering from an operation.

Trouble is, I'd remember this at odd hours of the day -- early mornings, in the afternoons when they were most likely having their siesta, around midnight...the rest of the week passed by in an impossible whirl, so I never did get around to calling them.
Turns out, one sister already had the baby, maa shaa Allaah, a son born on 12th Rabi-ul-Awwal, whom they are going to call Ahmad.

When I called her last evening, she actually sounded happy to hear from me, instead of being cool/annoyed that I hadn't bothered to call earlier...she brushed aside my apologies and went out of the way to make me feel that it was okay, she understood.

subhaanallaah, how little we see of that and how I wish there were more Muslims in the world with soft centres -- benign, smiling creatures, at peace with themselves and the world!
How I wish Allaah makes me and my family one of them!

I don't know how/why we, as a community, have collectively transformed into a grim unsmiling unit, pragmatically seeking our own pound of flesh from life, while keeping a hawk's eye about so that others don't get an extra scoop.

Within the community, we go about demanding our rights gracelessly, imperiously; raging if others fall short of giving us what we feel is our due; while letting those without, walk all over us with impunity.

It's rare to run into a soft-centred Muslim nowadays -- perhaps out of atavistic instincts of self-preservation or as a kind of self-defence against the hurt and angst that sometimes follows 'softness' or perhaps as a survival tactic in the hard, harsh world -- most people cultivate shrewd, butter-won't melt-in-my-mouth exteriors matched by equally tough souls. With 'if I won't look out for me, who will?' as a mantra, most people today have no time for 'sentiments' and other such 'silly soppiness' -- their sole goal, it seems, is getting ahead with their goals.

While I admire people with hard-as-nails attitudes, who are all head and no heart, I just find it completely impossible to get along with them. Which is why I'm grateful for the few soft-centred people I know, they keep me from developing a permanent bitter after-taste from having tasted 'real life.'