Reasons to be Cheerful: I am back online!! #R2BC

The wonderful Jo over at Ojo's World has been hosting as I haven't been online at home since the start of June! All that is now behind me and I am back again. So here are my reasons to be cheerful this week:

1) Internet

Not having home broadband has been so frustrating and its been a comedy of errors. In the end my mum had to email the CEO of BT to get me sorted! Today at 3:20 I was finally reactivated after being switched off on June 1st. We have all systems back online and that includes TV which is a relief. It shows how much our family and student life relied on being able to connect to the world wide web.

2) Fun in the sun

Today to celebrate great academic reports from both children we headed to the park in the village and the children were all cooling off in the river. It didn't seem to matter that my two didn't have swimming gear:

3) House move

Well I haven't been able to blog about the progress in the house since we moved but today a major step happened when builders ripped out the dodgy walls in my son's room and started to make it a safe room for him to sleep in:

Hopefully now I am back online and coming to end of my teacher training I will be back blog on a regular basis again! 

Reasons to be Cheerful: Back to me for July! #R2BC

My first week a host back from the lovely Jo for June. Hope you will stick with me for July! Here are the things that made me cheerful this week:

1) An hour of non-stop running

I finally completed the 10 km runner training programme on Friday by running for an hour non-stop! So I may not be super speedy but I can do it! Just hope it stands me in good stead on Saturday..

2) Baby teeth

Its been a long wait but my son finally had is first baby tooth fall out this weekend:

The "Now" Generation

Whilst watching the Star Wars trilogy on video (yes I do mean tape!) with my children this week it made me realise how things have changed since I was their age. They found it hard to wait for the videos to rewind when the movie had finished and not being able to skip to the menu and miss out all the adverts! Did those of us born in the 20th century have to learn more patience than those born in the 21st century?


Here are a few ways that things have changed in my lifetime growing up in the 1970s and 80s:


Television:


Not only was TV quite often still in black and white but children's TV was restricted as to when it was on. I remember that we had our after school slot on the BBC but then "grown up" TV came on with documentaries, quizzes etc. Yes at the weekend we had a full morning of programmes such as Tiswas and the Saturday Swap Shop, but the majority of output on the 3 channels was aimed at the adults. Even adult television was cut off at the end of the evening with the National Anthem heralding the end of the broadcast.


These days children have their own dedicated channels some of which even run 24 hours a day. They can watch their favourite programmes at anytime due to both On Demand services and services such as Sky Plus and BT Vision recordings. They can even use the Internet to download them onto the computer or games console.

Photographs of children

Where do you stand on putting photographs of children online? This is a thorny debate with lots of different views of which mine are probably somewhere in the middle!


On my blog, twitter and blipfoto (as they are very public) I hardly ever put a recent photo of my children on with their full faces showing. You never know who will be browsing through those photos. So you will get something like this:

 

I also avoid showing other people's children if I can.

On Facebook you can adjust the privacy settings on each album so I hardly ever let anyone not on my Friends list see photos of my children. Some albums I restrict to just family and very close friends. This way you can share photos of your children with family from far and wide without everyone seeing them.

I got a rapped knuckle from another parent last night as I uploaded photos of her daughter's birthday party and she does not like photos of her children appearing on the Internet. I had restricted access to Friends & their friends as this mum isn't on my list but has mutual friends. As soon as she asked me to take them off I did so and changed album access to friends only. Another mum at the party had taken photos of her children on my phone and she knew I would put them on FB so she could see them. 

I know the simplest way around the dilemma of not knowing another parent's views on Internet photos is to not post anything with anyone but your kids on but sometimes that means you can't share fabulous photos with close family. So is it right to post photos to private, restricted albums when you haven't got permission from their parents? In the olden days the traditional printed photos could be shared to anyone are we too paranoid in this modern era of digital images and the Internet?

Please share your thoughts whichever side of the debate they are from!