New Posts to Artipot: Home and Family Articles on Aug 24, 2013:
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1) Cast Stone Freestanding Bath - Add Class To Your Bathroom (Babak Tavakoli)
http://www.artipot.com/articles/1633216/cast-stone-freestanding-bath-add-class-to-your-bathroom.htm
Your bathroom ought to be a place where you can relax after a long day's work. There is nothing as good as a rejuvenating soak in a deep tub. A cast stone freestanding bath makes a good addition to your bathroom, giving it a splash of class and elegance. Freestanding tubs come in different designs to suit every buyer. Whether you want an economic stone bath or a high-end one, you can easily get a bath that fits your budget. The fact that there is a wide variety to choose from can be confusing for many customers. The following are some important factors that you need to consider when choosing the ideal freestanding stone bath.Size of the bathroomMany hold the notion that freestanding tubs are only designed for large bathrooms. However, with the myriad of sizes and shapes that have now pervaded the market, you can easily find a bath tub to fit your bathroom regardless of size. You can [...]
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2) Bathtubs Undermount Installation - Add Style To Your Bathroom (Babak Tavakoli)
http://www.artipot.com/articles/1633215/bathtubs-undermount-installation-add-style-to-your-bathroom.htm
A long, relaxing and hot soak in the tub is one of the best ways to deal with muscle and body aches after a long day's work. You even get to wash your pets in them. With a wide array of styles to choose from, bathtubs undermount installation is what your bathroom needs. Undermount bathtubs come in different shapes and sizes. Your choice will depend on your personal preference and several other factors. Any bathtub installation requires an investment and you should ensure that it is done right the first time, because replacing bathtubs is expensive especially those made of stone or cast iron. You need to ask yourself several questions which will guide you on the tub to select.How often will the bathtub be in use?If it is a family tub, you need to get one made from strong and resilient material. The same applies for bathtubs that are used often. If it is intended for children, it cannot [...]
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2013年8月21日 星期三
family genealogy ,home and family, home family ,homes family, modern family homes
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2013年8月19日 星期一
family genealogy ,home and family, home family ,homes family, modern family homes
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2013年8月18日 星期日
family genealogy ,home and family, home family ,homes family, modern family homes
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Nigel Planer: My family values
Nigel Planer, right, with brothers Geoffrey, left, and Roger: 'I was a dramatic kid – I'd make my parents watch puppet shows I put on in the kitchen.'I grew up around Mortlake in west London. It was a very suburban family life. I was a day boy at Westminster and got the train to school everyday. I have two brothers and was very much defined by being in the middle. I was a dramatic kid and demanded attention, making my parents watch puppet shows I put on in the kitchen.
I shot up quickly and ended up larger than everyone. I am 6ft 3in and towered over my mum and dad. I was a greedy guts and a bit of a fatty at school. Even now at work they say "just come through this little trap door" or "put on this", and I am always too big for everything.
We were a family of scientists on my dad's side. He developed high-level medical technology and my older brother, Geoffrey, still runs the family?business. I was bad at maths and?science.
My mum was the one who got me into the arts and I started going to the theatre with her when I was about eight, although the first thing I saw on a big scale was when my dad took me to see Bizet's Carmen at Sadler's Wells. I also saw Laurence Olivier in Othello at the Old Vic, which was amazing.
It was tough for my mum in an all-male household. It wasn't physically macho but there was a lot of loud talking all the time. Very sadly, she died 10 years ago, so now it's just us four men. I still see my dad a lot, and my brothers. I'd be happier seeing more of them, but that's the nature of my work.
I went to Sussex University where I did African and Asian Studies but I only lasted a year. There were accommodation issues but there was no excuse really. I came from a very intense, high-pressured school and got frustrated at the lack of creativity. I was just wasting my time. My character Neil in The Young Ones was pretty much based on me. I dropped out, finally realised what an idiot I was being and went to drama school. I had always been in school plays and amateur productions and decided to do the only thing anyone said I was any?good at, and followed my love of the theatre.
I have two sons, now aged 24 and 13, by different mothers and over the years have been every kind of parent, including a stepfather twice, and a single parent. They are all different. Step-parenting is very hard as so many things come into play, and there are the other parents to think about too. I was a single parent for a year or two and that's not easy.
When I had my first son I wrote a book called A Good Enough Dad [published in 1992]. There were a lot of parenting books around then but nothing about being a dad. I was hands-on, much more than my dad was. In his day it was a different brief. Dads were pretty distant, a bit like Mad Men. They might?have a picture of the kids on their desk but they'd never clean up after them. Nowadays there's paternity leave and men can push pushchairs without embarrassment.
Theatre is not great for family life but?my kids are used to it.
I look forward to being a grandad though I am a step-grandad seven times over already, so it's not such a big leap.
‧ Nigel Planer stars in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Box Office: 0844 858 8877, charlieandthechocolatefactory.co.uk
Family life: Nan in Goa, Culture Club and Dad's breakfast bundles
Alex Sinclair-Lack's nan, Doreen, being given a lift by a kind stranger at the end of a long day's adventure in Goa, Christmas 2006. This photograph is of our nan, Doreen, in Goa in 2006. She raised her family in Calcutta and since then has been to every corner of the world. Her whole life was full of adventure right up until her late 70s when she was in our local newspaper for hiking the Himalayas. In the last 10 years, Nan has been with family to Thailand, the Caribbean, Malaysia, Jordan and India and before that travelled just as often alone. Since then her health has deteriorated a lot. She needs a wheelchair or a stick and an arm to hold when she walks.
Nan is 90 now and has dementia. She lives alone but has multiple carers and at least one family visit per day. Conversation, naturally, tends to be a bit repetitive. I get asked: "Do you have a girlfriend?" "No, Nan." "Boyfriend then?" every time I visit, without fail. But the question she will be sure to ask every visitor is "When are we going on holiday next?"
She can be hard to hold a conversation with now. Or so we thought until her 90th birthday party, when she left us all in shock by reading out a speech she'd written, full of cherished memories of meeting our long-passed grandfather during the war. This spurred us on and a fellowship of her grandchildren, daughters and in-laws took her off on holiday to sub-Saharan Africa.
Everyone we met was incredibly helpful and she was treated like the Queen. "This is many blessing upon you" was a phrase we heard many times in the town of Diani, south of Mombasa, where we stayed in Kenya, nearly every time we told anyone how old Nan was.
At first, we thought the trip might have been too much for her. We were having dinner on a tropical beach, eating spiced fish dishes and being served by a large number of African waiters, and she mused, "You always find a nice new spot around every corner in Penzance, don't you?" This was met with furrowed brows, and our suspicions that she thought she was in Cornwall were confirmed when she added, "And what lovely weather we're having!"
But she soon settled into things and we swam with her, took her to the beach and even went on a mini-safari for a few days, where she had to fend off hungry bushbabies with her walking stick when she was trying to eat her Swahili stew by a watering hole. No more confusion about Penzance!
By the end of the week, Nan was a changed woman. Rarely with a smile off her face, she was noticeably far more physically capable – getting up and dressing herself, walking without her stick and even having a little dance. More impressive still was Nan's mental improvement – she was so much more aware of her surroundings, even making conversation with Anthony, the taxi driver, on the way back to Penzance, who couldn't quite believe how much the years seemed to have rolled back.
Since we've been home, Nan has a new vigour for life, something we haven't seen for maybe 10 years. She asks me a new question when I visit her now: "Where to next?"
Alex Sinclair-Lack
Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.Do You Really Want to Hurt Me by Culture Club
"Give me time / To realise my crime / Let me love and steal / I have danced inside your eyes / How can I be real?"
In 1982, I passed my A-levels and took up a place at Leeds University. I lived in a huge hall of residence – Bodington?Hall, home to almost 1,000 students a few miles out of the city centre. It had its own bar and there were discos and parties almost every night. I was a shy, studious girl from a sheltered background: it was quite a revelation. Do You Really Want To Hurt?Me was No 1 for three weeks in October that year and was played constantly.
The lyrics – about the pain of losing love – meant nothing to me then and I was still a long way from any future heartache. I'd just spent two lonely years working hard for my exams. All my friends from school had left after O-levels and were out enjoying themselves at weekends, while I'd been stuck inside at my desk. "Your turn will come," Mum promised me.
She was right. Whenever I hear Do You Really Want to Hurt Me now, I'm 18 again, singing my head off, whirling around the dance floor of the Bod Bar with my new friends – I'd been set free.
Helen Yendall
Penny Ward's dad's breakfast bundles. Ingredients
Bacon
Eggs
Tomato
Bread
Oil the pan, and crisp up the bacon. Chuck in tomatoes and then the egg. If feeling foolhardy, wipe up the grease from the pan with the bread.
We four kids never questioned having cornflakes for breakfast while my dad had bacon and eggs. If I was nearby when Dad had his breakfast, he would give me a bundle – a bit of bread dipped in grease, with a bit of bacon, egg and tomato – like my photograph. It filled my wee mouth and tasted so good. I would bolt it down and, like a baby bird, with open mouth beg for another.
Fifty years on, bacon and egg is for weekends and somehow when I remember back, I appreciate even more Dad's kindness. Would I share my last mouthful? As I said, there were four of us and if it wasn't me, it would one of the others. Serve with hot tea and the newspaper, and enjoy every mouthful as if it was the only one you'd get!
Penny Ward
We will pay ￡25 for every Letter to, Playlist, Snapshot or We love to eat we publish. Write to Family Life, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU or email family@theguardian.com. Please include your address and phone number
2013年8月17日 星期六
My in-laws undermine my parenting techniques
My in-laws are a large, warm, humorous bunch who are close and would do anything for each other. However, they are quick to anger and to judge, and do not listen to each other, which leads to misunderstandings and dramas. Since having my children four?years ago, these tendencies have become unbearable because they lead?to unacceptable interference in the way my husband and I parent.
On more than one occasion, when either of my children has been crying because of tiredness, they have been pulled out of our arms and put down forcibly in another room or another area of the room. All the family seem to think this is the appropriate response to a crying child. They also seem to think there is nothing wrong with overriding/undermining us in this way (if questioned, I think they would say they were helping). They say we are making our children needy if we pick them up when they are upset. The irony, of course, is that, by meeting their needs, we are making them secure.
It doesn't matter who is right or wrong about parenting techniques, what upsets me is their opinions are pushed on me in an aggressive way. If you try to argue with them, you are met with anger and defensiveness. So I have to somehow swallow my anger and remain on good terms with them all. I am disempowered.
My partner struggles to talk about my anger and upset relating to this. He argues with them, but it falls on deaf ears. What can I do? I am in it for life now and have to find a way to manage this situation.
M, via email
The key phrase in your letter is that you have tried to argue with your in-laws. Especially in issues of parenting, arguing only leads to each party entrenching themselves, defending their own position. Then, no?one listens to the other because they are too busy justifying their own way of doing things. I will give you a?technique to help you with this.
There was a phrase in your original, longer letter, about feeling like the "geek" in the playground that made me?and psychotherapist Sherilyn Thompson (itsgoodtotalk.org.uk) wonder if you have been here before – in other words, you are used to swallowing how you feel and being "different" and feeling you don't fit in. There is nothing wrong with this, but it may mean you behave in a way that you are familiar with, even if, ultimately, it makes you uncomfortable.
So what can you do? You won't change this warm, argumentative family that feels it knows better. But your children are your children and you have to stand up for them. Humour would be the best policy, rather than combat. But when you feel as angry as you do, it is hard to laugh something off.
Thompson's observations are that you felt you had no choice but that, in fact, you do have a choice. She says: "For you to help yourself, you need to see what choices you have, and those choices are either to carry on as you are, or set boundaries. At the moment your in-laws do think they are helping because you haven't told them otherwise. They don't realise they are undermining you because you haven't told them they are." As long as you are passive, Thompson explains, nothing will change.
You can, of course, do nothing. But I?fear that way will lie greater angst and resentment until one day you will explode. So you need to find a way of saying "this is the way we do things" without feeling uncomfortable with your difference (by the way, the we is key). As I say so often in circumstances like this, you need to get your husband on board. Talk to him about how you feel. Don't couch it as "I'm angry", more: "How can we deal with this so I'm not left feeling XYZ." Work together, not against his family but on your own path.
One technique I use where there is a?conflict with parenting issues is to not defend my actions, but gently get the other person to explain theirs. The moment you defend what you are doing, you have established that their way is correct and your way needs justification. In your situation, I would take my child back, smile, and say: "Did you find putting X [name of their child] in a room when they were tired worked for you?" This almost always means they start talking about their parenting experiences. Make it about them, not you. It is not a magic bullet but it can diffuse a situation until you feel more confident in standing your ground. Small steps.
The other thing to remember is that?this stage won't last. Your children will grow up and won't be so easily pulled about.
Contact Annalisa Barbieri, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU or email annalisa.barbieri@mac.com. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence.
Follow Annalisa on Twitter @AnnalisaB
Parents, back off and give your kids some space | Barbara Ellen
Lurk in the background when children are playing. Don't insist on playing too. Photograph: Martin Godwin/guardian.co.ukYou know it is summer when everyone starts worrying about children not playing outside unsupervised anymore. A report from the Future Foundation says that the average amount for eight- to 10-year-olds playing unsupervised in the summer holidays has fallen from 55 "occasions" in the 1950s and 1960s to 24 now. Cue parental nostalgia for their own unsupervised summer holidays.
I'm amazed by those figures. Who is letting their eight- to 10-year-olds go out alone 24 times during summer? And when would it be convenient to send the social services around?
I had those textbook childhood summers: running around, picking berries, making dens. Think Famous Five, only without the money or the casual racism. All of us went out in the morning and weren't expected back until … well, you just weren't expected back, except when driven home by hunger. Some would call it priceless formative freedom, others outright neglect; it didn't matter because everyone did it.
But that was then and this is now. Children now have far less freedom and much more supervision. The Future Foundation cites reasons such as decline in safe outdoor spaces and the huge rise in traffic. There is also the Fear, looming omnipresent in parental life, which defies all logic. Is children's loss of freedom a concern? Of course it is. However, children also get more trips and treats, with parents heading for cinemas, pools, theme parks, booking summer camps, or letting them play in the garden, if they have one. Much of this takes money, but still it's hardly the gloomy childhood gulag of popular lore. Moreover, often it is not the supervision that is the problem – it is the parents.
Whenever people trot out their lists of what children need (security, self-expression, discipline etc), there's never mention of one of the most important – privacy. Basically, there's too much parental ego flying around. Modern parents need to learn that it is not all about them, centre-stage, being great hands-on parents. Sometimes, it is about parents butting out. If you're one of these parents endlessly being "fun", pathologically making cupcakes, kicking footballs or naffly sitting on the next swing to your child, there's no polite way to say this – you're old and boring, increasingly superfluous to playing requirements and your children urgently need you to do one.
My childhood friends and I would have been mortified if one of our parents had turned up at a den patting their knees, saying: "This looks fun! Can I play too?" To reproduce anything close to the freedom children used to enjoy, modern parents need to back off.
In these supervised times, this is a problem, for which I have developed my patented "there but not there" technique for the six to 12 age range, or thereabouts. It involves lots of "play dates", then taking the children out to the park and just lurking nearby, faraway enough for them not to register you, but close enough for all emergencies, from ice cream demands to broken bones, abduction and certain death (see "the Fear"). At the cinema, sit a little away from them. When you're walking, walk behind. Basically, let them at least feel "alone" as much as possible. At home, completely ignore them, to the point where you're faintly surprised to see a child in your house ("GET OUT! … Oh sorry").
All parents know that a successful play date is when the kids are barely aware you're there. It's all about invisible supervision, the passive parental presence. This ensures that your child gets on with their peers – not just with you. It also gives them at least a semblance of the old childhood freedoms – as good as it is going to get these days. In this era of heavy supervision, children still need "space". If you're canny (or just lazy), you can find ways of giving it to them.
What was behind the posh-bashing of anti-fracking protesters at Lower Stumble, near Balcombe in West Sussex? As someone partial to (non-violent) posh-bashing, even I was taken aback at how many times it required mentioning that Chrissie Hynde and Ray Davies's daughter, Natalie, was there, supergluing herself to her boyfriend. Then there was a former model and another man who used to be a university lecturer, but now protests full time. No ordinary local Sussex people were present. Oh sorry, that should read no ordinary local Sussex people were mentioned as being present.
The impression given was that of well-off types with too much time on their hands getting into a tizzy about the horrid drills ruining their dog walks, crushing their wild flowers and undermining their house prices.
What they were actually protesting about was fracking – the process of drilling underground and blasting liquid at shale rock to release gases. The protesters were also alarmed that Balcombe was unlikely to be the only Sussex site affected.
Elsewhere, Lord Howell apologised for saying that the "desolate" north-east would be a good area for fracking, by explaining that he had meant "unloved" Lancashire. But never mind all that – isn't Natalie Hynde the spit of her mum?
In a way, "outing" protesters as famous or privileged helps keep causes in the news. However, it's also a way of slyly implanting the idea that the protest in question is merely an elitist concern – nothing for the masses to worry about. It's a neat ploy to undermine protesters and distance them from public support, while keeping debate to a bare minimum. It's basically a way of silencing people, posh or not, and we should be all protesting about that.
One shouldn't laugh at the Simon Cowell/Lauren Silverman "surprise baby" development. Whatever the truth is, we must remember that there is an innocent mite at the centre of all this. No, not the baby – Cowell himself.
Cowell is said to be "freaked out" and who could blame him? There he was, lying alone in bed, with just a bundle of One Direction merchandising receipts for company, when Silverman flew in through the window, flapping her vampire wings and stole his sperm (if, indeed, it is his sperm). How else could it have happened?
Looking on the bright side, Cowell needed something to divert his attention away from the Botox – his face was starting to look so frozen that Birds Eye was poised to make a public statement denying responsibility. Still, what a palaver. The best bit was when Cowell's erstwhile paramour, Sinitta, wailed: "It should have been me!" Yes, Sinitta, that would definitely have helped to de-crazy the situation.
As it is, we're going to have to endure a summer of endless shots of Cowell, Silverman et al, posing on various boring yachts. Suddenly, the idea of a strawberry Mivvi on Cleethorpes beach seems like a far more glamorous option.
If single mothers are denied social housing will anyone benefit?
Nichola Edwards, a 25-year-old mother of two young children, is living temporarily in a hostel that offers refuge to desperate cases such as hers. Banned from all social housing as a single mother, she faces a bleak choice: move back in with her mother, who is too ill with renal failure to take her in, or go to the homeless hostel. This, at least, is the choice that Nichola would have faced in 1949. She is one of five applicants for social housing taking part in a reality-TV time-travel experiment to be broadcast on Monday.
The three-part Channel 4 documentary series, Benefits Britain 1949, transports Nichola back for one week to the way things were in the dole offices in the newly-formed welfare state. "It shocked me to be told that I don't deserve a council place because I'm not with the father of my children," says Nichola, who felt she had no choice but to end a difficult relationship with her daughters' father.
The harsh treatment of single mothers in the postwar period is not something stuck in the annals of history, however. A few weeks ago, the 40 Group, a collection of Tory MPs from the 40 most marginal Conservative constituencies, called for Britain's youngest single mothers to be denied social housing as part of a new drive to reduce teen pregnancy. This, despite the fact that teen pregnancies are at a record low. The report was welcomed by David Cameron; the proposals suggesting that benefits be removed from teenage mothers unless they live with their parents, or in supervised hostel accommodation.
According to Gingerbread, single parents – of whom the vast majority are women – form two-thirds of all households affected by the government's new benefits cap. Under the new universal credit system that is gradually replacing income support, housing benefit and jobseeker's allowance, 900,000 single parents are?already worse off .
"Children from single-parent families are now twice as likely to live in poverty as those from couple families," says Gingerbread's chief executive Fiona Weir. Because of my own family history, I was asked to take part in the documentary and tell Nichola on camera what life was like for my mother back in 1951 when, after being abandoned by my father, she gave birth to me in an austere hostel for unmarried mothers. It's the kind of place that will once more corral and stigmatise today's teenage mums if the 40 Group ever gets its way. I told her that the experience emotionally damaged my mother for ever: she never really recovered from the shame of having to give birth in a hostel that made the mothers pray for forgiveness every day for their "sins', and march to church like children twice on Sundays. Instead?of being a place of refuge, the hostel was known locally as "the home for naughty girls".
In Channel 4's TV experiment, not only does Nichola lose her 2013 two-bedroom council house, she is grilled by an actor playing a prejudiced 1949 moral welfare officer who tells her that her mixed-race children, Tiarna, four, and Sienna, two, "stick out like a sore thumb" and will get "picked on". Little wonder that Nichola says she found the week's filming "an emotional ordeal. It had a real impact on my life; I'm even more clingy with my daughters now."
Nichola spent time in care as a child because of problems with both her parents, so it's easy to see why preserving the sanctity of her own family unit is so important to her. Before having children, she was doing well at work with a silver-service waitressing award from London's Hilton Hotel, and feels strongly that single mothers "should be praised, rather than blamed – because it's such a hard job to raise children on your own."
Executive producer Stef Wagstaffe explains that when benefit rules were first introduced, "it was all about conforming. The state had no moral imperative to house single mothers, who would have been judged as unsuitable. They were expected to throw themselves on the mercy of their family or rely on charity from religious organisations. A lot of their children were then whisked away into care and then into adoption by nice middle-class childless couples."
These days, our atomised lives throw up much more complex needs than in those postwar years, when the extended family usually lived nearby to help out the lone mother. It is a fundamental change in our society that politicians conveniently ignore as they seek to impose a one-size-fits-all system on benefits claimants.
Wagstaffe's researchers found that in some areas the government provided 160,000 free childcare places to get mothers back to work, whereas now for working mothers the cost of childcare is the highest in Europe. "We worked out that in 2013, Nichola gets ￡7.40 an hour on benefits and the minimum wage is ￡6.80. Then she's got?to pay for childcare in order to work," explains Wagstaffe. "Her cheapest local childcare is ￡3 an hour for two kids, so all of a sudden you understand the benefits trap for so many single mothers."
I ask Wagstaffe, herself a single mother, if she was worried her programme might even give ideas to the government costcutters. She admits that she was concerned, until she realised that the coalition government was already ahead of the documentary, in denying unsupported teenage mums social housing.
"The benefit reforms rolled out months before we hit the screen. They?are dialling backwards," she says. "With all this new talk of deserving and undeserving poor, it's a hangover from Victorian morality. What next for people and, in particular, single mothers? A?return to the poorhouse?"
Benefits Britain 1949 will be screened on Monday at 9pm on Channel 4
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