A good drink spoiled

In the Workhouse today I was chatting to another regular, enjoying my brownie and peppermint tea, when suddenly the conversation took a chauvinistic turn. It rapidly became misogynist. When it turned to jokes along the lines of "I don't think women should stay at home... all the time," I put the kids in the buggy, paid my bill, and left.

I'm still shaking with anger. I honestly thought this was a pleasant enough man. I said several times that he was verging on offensive, being offensive, and making me uncomfortable, in various ways. He kept going. I can only assume he was deliberately winding me up, which, to me, makes it worse than offending me by accident through ignorance.

That sort of shit is neither original nor funny. It's not even harmless. It's nasty and damaging, and I won't put up with it, and I certainly won't let my daughters see me putting up with it. Linnea has already internalised that little girls aren't as exciting as little boys, that ladies aren't as exciting as men, that the important person in any given book is male unless there's a clear labelling to indicate otherwise - gender neutral defaults to male.

She's not even three.

Baby state update: car seats

I took them to be weighed yesterday. Linnea is almost three years old and weighs a bit over 16kg, or just over 35lb 10oz, dressed except for shoes. Emer is almost eight months old and weighs almost 9kg, or 19lb 6 oz ish, naked.

So Linnea is of an age and a weight that some carseat manufacturers say she could go into a booster seat, which would be handy, but I can't find any unbiased information on their safety and usefulness, really. Her height is tricky to gauge - according to her clothes she's about 104cm. And Emer is still ickle enough to be in all the baby gear.

Wee sleekit timorous beastie

This morning, as I was hanging up the laundry, Emer sitting on the lawn, I spied a mouse on the garden path (incidentally quite close to the blood splatters from Linnea's accident at the weekend), sitting very very still and trembling.

i went in to get Linnea, who came out and looked at it with me. Then Mustard (our largest cat) approached. I grabbed his scruff. Then Charcoal hopped onto the fence to see what was going on. So I picked up the mouse - having told Linnea not to touch him - and had a quick look; no obvious mortal wounds, but possibly something on the abdomen.

I dropped it into the compost bin, where it stayed very still briefly and then moved around a bit. Later I dropped a bit of bread in on top of it, because Emer had already dropped the bread on the ground.

Pointless, of course, since it was probably already seriously injured, but I couldn't let the cats slaughter it in front of Linnea and Emer. I'm not ready for that yet.

Linnea spent a good fifteen minutes later running it a bath in the empty barbecue pan, and then begged me to get it out because it had finished its rest now and needed a be all clean.