helena handbasket

I did. Roughly ?23,000 in fact. Paid it off in 8 years on a very modest salary. Don't tell me how hard life can be. Meld, not much directed at you at all. Yes affordable housing is a serious issue, but not one that will be solved by claiming a house that has clearly not been abandoned. I think I have a better sense of the injustices of the world than you are suggesting: I work with refugee families who are at the same time coping with the loss of family members through hideous brutality, dealing with their own medical issues from brutality (missing limbs, eyes etc. and that's just the physical stuff) and adapting to a new life in a new culture. THAT'S a serious issue to me. Not quite the Daily Mail magnolia walled villain you were hoping for. A bunch of able bodied young people bitching about the cost of living as if they were the first people to have to consider packing 10 people into a small flat ......... are you kidding me? Get back in my box? You need to get some perspective and grow up. FUNNY enough, I was behind the concept of squatting until I started to read this thread ............

Meld Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Huguenot Wrote: > -------------------------------------------------- > ----- > > > > It wasn't designed to allow freeloading > students > > not pay the same bills everyone else has to. > > > > There is no such thing as ?the same bills as > everyone else? when it comes to housing in this > country, though is there? There is no parity, what > we actually have is a market that discriminates > against anyone born after about a certain date by > forcing them to pay more and more ridiculously > inflated sums whether for home ownership or a > rental property, all the while selling them the > line that high prices are because of a shortage of > housing. > > I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of > people who are getting so worked up about this > issue are probably property owners who realise > that they are part of the giant ponzi scheme that > is the British housing market, and that they > literally cannot afford for younger generations to > refuse to play the game. > > To have more than 5k empty homes in one borough > alone is both immoral and insane. Nice guess but nope, much smarter with my hard earned money than that. Way to generalize about anyone over 25 though. The point about the parity of bills is pointless because I for one am talking about proportion of income that goes to covering your most basic living expenses. So....... if a student has "X" amount of money to live on and living costs "x+1" then it doesn't really matter what place or time one is talking about. A poor student is a poor student. Living in a sh*thole and eating cheap food because that's all you can afford is a part of student life for loads of people. Blaming everyone older than you for the problems of the world isn't exactly original. I don't know what I was supposed to learn by reading the squatter's posts since they just keep saying that squatting is legal yada yada yada. Enlighten me........ I don't think I'm the the only one confused by what exactly you stand for. I'm sure it's all very serious and deep. I'm on the edge of my seat........

Interesting interpretation.......

You must be heavy sleepers. Maybe having small children is the factor; if you sleep on high alert anyway because children tend to train your brain that way, then probably more sensitive to sound. I can tell you that some of the planes around 5 am are huge, with roaring engines, so loud that I feel like I'm sleeping on the runway at Heathrow ....... many mornings I've cursed them. And they are really frequent too. Did I not read somewhere that two flight paths basically connect at a point somewhere around here (I'm pretty sure it's over my house). Oh the luck of those who sleep without hearing them.

goosegreenteam Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > You have got us all wrong. We are not free-loading > posh kids, studying law and we are certainly not > of a violent nature. > > We don't have too justify why we are squatting too > anyone because what we are doing is completely > legal, we just felt that we should just let the > forum know what we are doing. A lot of assumptions > have been made about us, most of the assumptions > made about us are wrong, you don't know us, and > until you meet us don't make assumptions about who > we are and what we stand for. > > This will be our last post on the forum because we > don't want too take part in the predictability of > the EDF any longer. > > Thanks to all of the people who support what we > are doing and hopefully we can stick around for a > while. > The Goose Green Squatters. What do YOU know about the predictability of the EDF? You've only just come on, hoping to drum up support for your little charade, and now you can't believe that everyone in ED isn't a 20 year old anarchist! You didn't do your homework, kids, because I think most of the fine people in this neighborhood work hard and most have not had a free ride. This is a very generous community; if anyone needs anything people will rally around to make it happen. I'll bet a lot of people around here have clocked more VOLUNTEER hours than some people have probably worked. They are not coming to your "ideological" rescue because a lot of them work and volunteer in the public sector and know what actual need looks like. Need shouldn't be confused with greed.

boosboss Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Blah, blah, blah.... So much hand > wringing......... Is the bitterness now worth the > struggles of the past? LOVE this! What's so comforting about the EDF is how predictable it is.

goosegreenteam Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > The house is rotting around the windows quite a > lot, causing some problems by making the house > really cold. The house is in a state but we are > using our DIY skills to bring the house back to > life. We feel like we've been cleaning forever. Sounds like the last house I rented.......... for ?450 a week. Reality. > We have gained internet by using a modern tactic, > mobile 'dongle' broadband. Computers sure are expensive aren't they? I would have loved to have one in uni instead of all those late nights using the ones at the library.

goosegreenteam Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Yes, we know who the owner is. > > It is quite cheeky but i get your point. the > majority of us are studying full time and are > pretty much broke and currently all our funds are > being drained by the resources we need to make the > house liveable. > > We will have to see how we are approached by the > owners, if they are forceful and aggressive then > we will be more reluctant to cooperate. > > We have quite alot of rights, if you are intersted > and want to read up more about squatting visit: > http://www.squatter.org.uk/ > > Thanks for your interest > The Goose Green Sqautters. x There is a big difference between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law. Being legal doesn't make it morally just. This is NOT a vulnerable group. It sounds more like a bunch of first year politics students doing what young and smug people do when missing a clue. This offends me on so many levels I can't even tell you! Plenty of us have been starving students! Do you know how I kept a roof over my head while putting myself through university? I worked my ar$e off! Most evenings and every weekend for many years, and every summer a full AND a part time job. It was incredibly hard but I didn't complain and I didn't STEAL, I just got on with it. And once I paid my for rent, tuition, and ghastly textbooks there wasn't much left but do you know what it DID buy me? ........ PRIDE and SELF RESPECT because I didn't have to defend myself for taking something that wasn't mine. I understand (and approve of) some cases where a building has been left empty for years and needs attention and the owner can only be traced to some holdings company in a distant country, but it certainly doesn't smell that way in this case. As someone who has saved every penny to gather enough eggs to buy a fixer upper and then spend hours, years of scraping, patching, painting, planning, to get a home that was created with my own hands, my own earnings, all I can tell you is that it is NOT the same thing to just help yourself to someone else's, whatever philosophy you leach onto to justify it. I am currently in the process of buying a house overseas as we are leaving the UK, and the house sale has dragged out to three months now for various reasons. We still won't be in it for a few months. I won't tell you where it is or I'm afraid you might just help yourselves!

Honestly the planes make me crazy! I first noticed when we moved to London and my son started to wake at..... you guessed it! 4:20. It was a shock, and also heartbreaking because I had just had six blissful post-sleep training months and was not ready to lose that success. Because of the mommy insomnia I still sometimes get, have found that even if I do manage to get junior back to sleep I lie awake listening to the roar of the jets, sometimes every 30 seconds! It sounds so close and loud that I sometimes feel they might land on our roof! I'm surprised at how many people manage to sleep through it. And then you spend a weekend somewhere else and realize just how big a difference it makes (although in the country it's those bloody wood pigeons at the crack of dawn!) It seems to be much worse by season, or maybe it just seems worse to wake that early and it's light out as well.

Thanks for that, I've been meaning to get around to reading it and am now heading onto Amazon. I'm intrigued by the negative response she had to that book; I recently read an interview of her and thought she was incredibly honest and accurate. I have a friend who actually sometimes says: "Don't you just love being a mom? I haven't had a bad day yet." Um, sure. I would much rather hear from the mother who loves her child but is in a daily struggle to get it right, like most of us I think. She summed up that first year of nights better than I've ever been able to.

We still have one from my son's first birthday and he's 3 1/2! Weird, yes, but it has barely lost any air! And now I can't bear to part with it......... Those things will last a looooooong time.

True, the receptionists are nice enough. But I felt that they could not have cared less about my son, at every level. Maybe it was because he wasn't born in the UK, don't know, but when we moved to a new surgery and he finally had a visit from an HV at almost THREE YEARS OLD she was absolutely gobsmacked and very apologetic. She worked very hard to finally get him a red book, updated records, and referrals on a few concerns I had been trying to pursue for almost two years. Every time I went to the Gardens I left feeling like I had let my son down. I think they've lost the plot. And don't even get me started on the lack of interest shown towards my own health concerns.

Can't say I'd recommend the Gardens. Fine if you never ever need a doctor and don't mind falling through the cracks I guess....

I have had the same experience as the previous post...... it's more of a muscular ache in the general area (at least in my case). I've had scans etc and there is nothing there, but it could be to do with scarring and or how the muscles there have healed. It doesn't bother me, but for a while I also thought maybe I'd damaged something by not resting enough in the beginning. I could be REALLY wrong, but I thing they have to sometimes move things around a bit once they get in there, so I have sometimes wondered if maybe things got a bit wonky from shifting or something? I know, so medically technical.....

I can add a padlock? Hmmmmmmm Not sure I see the aggression you are referring to; seems that we get that it's illegal (in this country) but are discussing the validity of why, as parents are clearly finding this to be unsafe. If it was a safety issue rather than a legal one I wonder why Britax would then make a five-point version for the North American market. Either they believe it is unsafe and continue to make them elsewhere, or they believe they are safe and are bound by European law. Which is fine, I can deal with that. I speak for myself only, but my annoyance is then having Britax suggest that rather than find a way to improve design (which is the business they are in) they suggest that I should be turning to deal with the child in the backseat, who should be safely restrained, instead of safely keeping my eyes on the road ahead and mind on driving. Also as Molly pointed out, things can quickly go very wrong. That is the whole POINT of having a child safely restrained.

L-O-V-E the Southbank and RFH for little ones. Everything about it works well...... easy bus, easy food, lots of space and stairs to wear them out. There's also a playground behind the London eye; I may very well be the last mom in London who noticed it but in case I'm not there's one more reason to head down there.

I don't get it....... our chest clasp is one hand release so I KNOW they make one. It just happens to be awkward enough for him to reach and grasp that our otherwise feisty son hasn't bothered. Now I'm curious about what ancient British "carriage" laws prohibit this. Yet it appears to be perfectly acceptable to have a baby seat in the front seat. I see it every day. In Canada they would lock you up and throw away the key if a child was in the front seat, if you survived being tarred and feathered by anyone who witnessed it that is. edited to add: I see the folly in my reasoning....... you can only have one clasp here. Hmmmmm, that seems like removing the smoke detectors from your house because the noise might cause ear damage! I wonder how they did their risk assessment!

What a condescending load of beans! Rather than acknowledge that they need to improve their product, they give you a list of ideas that every parent already knows about, and suggest that you explain to your toddler why they are strapped in? What toddler cares about or understands what that means? I realize they are working under the confines of the law but that puts the onus on them to design solutions, not throw their hands in the air and suggest a bit of creativity on your part. Are you supposed to be teaching them the finer points of being restrained while you are in the front seat driving? I'm chuckling to myself about how annoyed I am by that response!:) Sure I've taught my son about the hot oven door, but not while I'm trying to bloody drive in the front seat of a car! We have a Britax that has honestly been the absolute best baby purchase of all of them, three years later and my huge son is still comfortably in it, but it's a North American model so does have the chest harness and I'm now thankful for that! Basically it's a five-point harness....... last I heard that was a GOOD thing. I guess that makes it illegal but I think it's a lot safer than trying to wrestle a strong child back into his car seat while I'm trying to drive. Bonkers I say!

We go to Port Lympne quite a bit, we were actually there last week and it's fantastic. Really easy drive from London. Not sure you would want to go with one parent and two little ones though, it's huge and mostly steep and hilly and we find that two parents with one three year old plus old faithful buggy for backup is plenty of work. If the baby could be in a sling it might work well. That said, they do a safari tour in one of those giant land rovers that you could easily manage on your own. It takes about an hour and you just have to sit back and enjoy the amazing views and it gets you pretty close to the animals...... a giraffe popped his head in our window to say hello! Pretty great. They also have a big play area and a cafe with awful over-priced food (bring a sandwich). And as usual, exit through a huge gift shop. It costs a fortune to go but if your little ones are both under three I think they get in for free.

LOVE this post! katgod Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > ha. often though the first 6 months with baby were > a bit like Freshers Week at Uni, " Hi I am Katgod, > i used to work at X co, I live at y, my baby is Z > weeks old and sleeps A hours per night and I am > mixed feeding, you seem like a reasobable non > freaky or judgmental type WILL YOU BE MY > FRIEND??" > glad you made contact

Maybe, but what's the point of bothering with "sleep cues" such as bath, story, etc. if they can't learn that it means bedtime? Obviously they exist in mostly states of impulse and id and all that fun Freudian stuff, and they won't learn things like spatial awareness or muscle control until they are developmentally ready, but they certainly do learn that action leads to reaction. When my son was just a few weeks old he could be screaming bloody murder and then the theme to Coronation Street would play (I know, lame) and he would stop dead in his tracks because he knew that meant feeding time........ it was the most basic form of classical conditioning, like Pavlov and his dogs. That is evidence of learning. Babies are so much smarter than we give them credit for.

I have found that if I am missing two hours of sleep a night I can be philosophical about it. If I'm LIVING on two hours of sleep a night ........ not so much. I lived on that every night for almost the first year and I promise you that no amount of "modifying life's expectations" could make that feel like anything but torture. I don't believe for a second that we were designed to adapt to that. I may have survived it, but I am not the same person. I think it was Moos who earlier posted about the effect it had on her enjoyment of the first year and I fully relate to that. It makes me incredibly sad to think about what I missed by being too sleep deprived to really enjoy it. It's heartbreaking to me that I have to watch old videos from that year to see that we weren't just always miserable. In reading the article, I found the bit stating that babies can't be taught a bit odd.......... really? Are they not being taught every second of the day? I can never understand why a baby learning cause (I scream like a lunatic) and affect (mummy comes running) is made to sound like a negative thing. There's no reason why gradually changing the "affect" needs to be damaging.

sillywoman Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > 17 ::o > 23 ::o > > But who did the parenting? Surely two people > couldn't possibly parent that many children > effectively by themselves? Surely a load of the > burden would fall onto the older kids? I really > wouldn't want to do that to my kids. Also how do > you remember all their names ( I have trouble with > 4!) and make them feel like they're special > individuals who are precious & important to you? > Gosh so many, many issues without even touching on > the health issues for the Mum. Oooohh no,no,no - > definitely not for me -money or no money. > Brrrrrrr. Oh I agree, but I think that parenting 23 kids on a farm in the Canadian prairies post depression might have been a slightly different game. Very harsh living, farm families were huge because they needed lots of help on the farm, and realistically some of the kids wouldn't survive....... although all but one of theirs made it to adulthood. These are really tough, sturdy people, if you saw how my friend was built you would get a sense of the sturdy genes involved. Yes the children did raise each other, but it seems normal to them. They are a really tight (and now huge!) family, it's really something to see actually. And my friend is very unique and a lovely person and seems willing and able to take on anything so I think there is something to be said for growing up with all of those "friends" in your house. Can't imagine how her poor old mother was practically pregnant for 21 years straight! Not for me, that's for sure!

There's always Angelina, or Madonna........... A friend of mine is the second youngest of 23, yep you read it right ....... 23 children her parents had! Two sets of twins in there, so 21 births. I thought I wanted two but my wonderful child has put me through my paces, and I'm almost certain two of him would kill me. If money were no object and I could hire a couple more of "me" than I would do it in a second. Anyway, once they're sleeping through the night and potty trained, do you really want to go back? We're just starting to be sort of normal people again, after THREE years!

Bishberro Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Hi - would the transport museum be suitable for an > almost 2 year old or do you think he's a bit too > young? He's obsessed by trains, cars, buses, > trucks... Should be fine, I think that's about the age my son was when we first took him. If he loves trains and buses he'll LOVE this!