You're listening to a Muma Mea podcast.

Mumma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land and waters that this podcast is recorded.

On Hello and welcome to Parenting Out Loud.

I am Jesse Stevens, and I am joined by Amelia Lester Hi Jesse, Hello, and MoMA MEA's deputy editor Stacy Here.

Hello, to talk about some of the stories that dominated the week.

Because if parents are thinking about it, we're talking about it on today's show.

Sleep separation could be the secret to a better quality of life.

And one of us is a very early adopter.

Plus, why don't men RSVP to party invitations?

It's time to get into the hopeless dad's debate and good night to the bedtime story.

What happens when parents stop reading to kids.

We're starting to see.

But first in case you, mister post pardon just got a glow up.

Perhaps you're like me and you remember that time as a difficult one.

Mesh undies, laundry piles, occasional abouts of crying on the bathroom or kitchen floor anymorey, yes, hand is up, but no no, there are these things called postpartum retreats popping up.

They are for mothers to be mothered and for those who can afford them.

A writer for US Vogue wrote about one at a Waldorf astoria in California.

She spent two nights there two weeks after giving birth, and she enjoyed all sorts of marvelous things, round the clock baby care with duelers on demand.

She seriously just had an iPad and she could just be like, I need someone right now, facials, fresh meals, massages, no crying on the kitchen floor.

There are others across the United States, and they're now also in Australia.

There's one in Sydney's Double Bay, and there is one in Melbourne.

These don't come cheap, however, the one in Melbourne is fifty two hundred dollars for four nights.

Ooh.

Now, we should say that the postpart of retreat is not a new idea.

There are many cultures of the world that do recognize the importance of giving women a break after childbirth.

So, for instance, in South Korea, the tradition is called Sanu Jewelry one and it refers to care centers when new mothers check in and then they get these nourishing broths and they get really taken care of for weeks, often even months after birth.

And there's actually a similar tradition in China where a postpart and parent rests for a month in a kind of confinement and family members attend to the housework and to the older kids.

I wish the Western take on this idea, which is brilliant, was accessible to more people.

I mean, I'm sure in Scandinavia they probably have some kind of government funded program where everyone gets it.

And I think it's really important these days because you and new moms are able to live near family members, and for me in particular, it's a really important corrective to a trend that I have experienced firsthand in the US.

So my first baby I gave birth to in a so called baby friendly hospital.

This is a new think in hospitals across America.

What this basically amounts to is there's no crash, there's no formula, you have to breastfeed, and there's no assistance at night because the baby has to sleep with you the whole time.

So it's baby friendly, but it is not mother friendly.

And I'm here for the focus on mothers a little more.

Jesse, would you want to go to one of these.

I don't know.

I'm not sure if I would.

I have read a lot about these.

I read one article that kind of said, is it I really like all the supportant terms of food and you know, even lactation consultants and that kind of stuff is great, but the broth, the broth broth.

But one kind of criticism was saying, women don't need a baby robe embroidered with initials, like we've just there are some things that are probably a little too far.

Yeah, that's what the Vogue rider got at the Waldorf Hotel in California.

Yeah.

So what this essentially is, as you alluded to, is what Trevor Noah has talked about this among you know, lots of researchers, which is we all like lost our community and now we have to pay to get them back, exactly.

And so in an ideal world, you wouldn't have to pay for this kind of service, it would just be on offer.

And as someone in I have such privilege when it comes to family and support, and so I think I felt like I sort of got this, like I was able to rely on people who could bring meals and if I needed someone to hold the baby, I could ask them.

But I do worry about the disparity here and what class has access to this type of thing, because postpartum depression has so much to do with the environment following birth, and I worry that if it's like, oh, you pay for this, you pay for this, you pay for this, it means that our standard of basic care kind of goes, oh, well, that's all outsourced.

Ideally hospitals would do a little bit more of this, maybe.

Yeah, as opposed to a kick in the pants and some MESHONDI is exactly right, they see what about you.

I don't know if it's a result of having a baby who was in special care.

So I was in hospital for longer than a lot of new mums are.

But how long were you in hospital?

I was in for three weeks before I had my daughter, and then about ten days after she was born.

That is a long it's a long time.

I knew the meal rotation of that hospital like the back of my friend.

I got to have a whole month's.

Worth a bet, but I basically had to be dragged out of that place, Like I felt very anxious when I was away from the nurses and the heart rate monitors and all of the things, and so I think if something like this had been within my financial reach, I absolutely would have taken it, because it felt like whipplash to go home and to have almost no one around because I'd been in hospital for so long.

My husband had to go back to work a couple of weeks after I got home, and it did feel very much like you're alone, and so I and I think there's a certain level of guilt.

Not everyone feels, but I felt very bad if I asked anyone to help me with anything, even if you know, and I think a lot of women feel that they don't want to be a burden.

They're like, why am I finding this harder than the average person, So you don't want to reach out.

And it almost feels like if you could pay for this, obviously not that amount of money, because that's not achievable for most of us, but if you could pay, it almost takes the guilt away from that, like it's a service, it's transactional.

You're helping me and I'm getting something from that.

Yeah, I remember thinking that if I asked.

There were instances where I probably would have liked to help, but I didn't want to look like I thought, your narrative goes so funny.

You go, they'll think I don't want to spend time with my baby exactly like they'll think they'll think I had this, that there would be judgment towards me more than an imposition on them.

Yeah.

But I want to table one criticism that I heard from a midwife about this kind of thing, and it's that with too too much help.

I don't know if I agree with this, but I was interviewing her about these kind of providers, and she was saying, when you're in a situation where you are overwhelmed with expertise, whether that be this is how you swaddle, this is nappy, this is breastfeeding, it can undermine the instincts of the parents a little bit.

And I know that a lot of people poo pooh the idea of instincts.

I think that a lot of us actually just need to learn how to do things.

But she said, you shouldn't feel as though you need a university degree before you leave the hospital with a baby, Like, we've got to make sure that we're not telling parents that this is so hard and so complicated that you need to do twelve classes a day in order to cope.

Going and working it out is kind of part of the experience.

Yeah, and that's it.

I feel like we are so overly prepared now, like we do courses.

People here who are pregnant, we kind of are saying to them, well, you've got two jobs now, because you've got to keep up with all of the appointments and the lessons and all of the things.

So maybe it does get in the way of your instincts and just well, I've just got to get through this rough patch and then we'll be fine.

An article about the benefits of getting asleep to of caught my eye this week, and I need everyone to know about it.

Writing for The Conversation, Monash University's psychology fellow, Alex Malaw explored the many reasons otherwise perfectly happy couples might choose to sleep separately, and how it can actually lead to a better night's sleep.

She said, well, many people say they prefer to sleep or sleep better next to their partner when scientists measure sleep objectively, such as through an electro in cephalogram, and yes, I did practice saying that ten times before we hit record.

When they use the egs to assess brain waves.

The data actually showed poor asleep quality when co sleeping, so some reasons obviously that people might choose to be in separate beds is conflicting sleep schedules.

One person snores or has sleep apnea, or insomnia, sleep talking.

The list goes on.

But the other main catalyst for a sleep divorce can be when kids come into the mix and suddenly sleep is the most precious but often hard to achieve commodity in your life.

And now I have something to confess.

I have been happily sleep divorced for five years, not actually divorced, five years nearly, which is right around the time I started getting pregnancy insomnia, and I'm just never going back.

So would either of you consider this?

I'm so interested.

I have questions for you.

First, please, pregnancy and somnia starts.

Yes, I was in exactly the same position, and I would go I was like, I can't be up and down, I can't worry about you.

Yes, so I have it to separate myself often when the baby comes.

If you're going to go, all right, let's take shifts so that we're both not losing sleep.

Tell me about the next stage where you're going.

You know what I actually like having my own space with a Now how old your daughter for.

Yeah, four five years talked to me about that.

Well, that's the thing.

It was survival mode at the start.

It was it was I needed to sleep, he needed to sleep, and so we would take turns with the monitor.

Someone would take a shift, and then it was kind of like, look at this bed with the nice linen and I've put on it, and look how dark I can have the room when you like to wake up with the sun.

And look at how no one stole my quilt in the middle of the night, and it just snowball to the point where we both were sleeping so much better by sleeping separately, that we both went I think we just have to do that all the time now.

And the most urgent question, I mean, how many bloody bedrooms do you have?

This is the thing, This is a big privilege to be able to do.

Is I live in the western suburbs of Sydney, so we are very lucky to have three bedrooms.

But this is why we can only have one child.

There's no more bedrooms available.

I'm not willing to give mine up.

I need to keep it so those kids would be sharing, but it's just worked out so much better.

And I have to say, like, I love my husband, but I love him a lot more when I can't hear his snoring or experience the wwe like body slams that he manages to do every time he turns over.

So this is definitely a good solution if you're experiencing that.

Okay, I went deep on this after you mentioned it.

I was really curious about when the double bed custom came about, because when you watch old movies and TV shows, the married couples do go to sleep into single beds.

So it turns out that it's very recently that we decided that couples have to sleep in the same bed, and we're talking the sixties.

Before then, it was actually seen as healthier and more modern for a married couple or a partnered couple to sleep in separate beds.

And I love this detail, which is that Victorian doctors said that the weaker sleeper would drain all the vitality from the stronger person.

That's exactly what happened.

And so it's a very recent thing and it kind of reminds me.

I find it a bit confronting.

I won't lie when you told me about it.

There is a kind of instinctive idea of like, is there something wrong with their relationship, because it's so ingrained in us that married couples sleep in the same bed.

But then I got thinking about it and I remember that Esther Perell's big thing is that we keep expect one person to be everything, to fulfill all functions, including to be sleep compatible.

And this is just taking a little bit of the pressure off.

Now that said, I do not have an extra bedroom for people in my situation, I would recommend mouth tape.

We have a like a day bed in Luna's room, so it's like if you sleep separately, yeap, you go and you sleep and it's tiny, like you roll off and break it arm.

But we did that for the first six months.

Luke has slept in the nursery on the day bed and Luna and I were in the big room with the big bed.

But it was interesting the moment we decided to come back and I was like, I don't get to sprawl, I don't a blanket like this.

Is so did you consider ever keeping you.

See other bed was more comfortable.

I have time for it.

And then I was having a think about what the stigma.

Is, right, And there is a stigma.

There is stigma, and it's to do with intimacy.

And I also think that it's a suggestion that it will absolutely kill yourself life, right, because come on, you've got to sleep the same bed.

Absolutely, that is the number one question I get asked.

We won't ask you.

What's funny about that, right, is that it's like how many people are rolling over at two am and being like, now that I can feel you there, we should have spontaneous two am sex and that keeps our relationships strong.

Like, no, you wake up at two am, you hit the other person in the face.

I do it all the time.

To Luca exactly, he mumbles, sleep talk, we fight, and then in the morning we're shitty at each other, like any sort of intimacy is not happening.

No, I think you are much more likely to want to be intimate with your partner if you don't want to kill them.

Yeah, exactly.

And some of the studies she cited in this piece spoke about how clients reported that sleeping alone can alleviate some of the anxiety they have around sleep, because if they're the person who's disturbing the other person.

If they're the snorer, then they're having less quality sleep because they're worried about waking the other person.

So they've actually found that people sleeping separately means that there's not that stress as they're going to sleep themselves.

I also find that when I've gone through periods of insomnia, having someone beside you who's asleep is really distressing.

Yeah, it's like it's real because.

You go wish, Oh, you're furious, You're absolutely.

Curious, angry.

And it also means I've a partner who goes to bed a lot earlier than me, and that's bedtime in our house, so I have to go to bed.

And if I fall into the habit of then scrolling on my phone for the two hours where he's asleep and I'm not ready to go to sleep yet, terrible for your brain.

So it's like I've had to start to do like the Kindle or whatever.

You can't you can't read a print book.

Can you.

This also reminded me of I used to live in Japan, and when you travel around Japan you go to traditional inns.

They often have a tatarmi matte arrangement where whole families will sleep in one room onto Tarmi.

So it just was a reminder that the thing that we think is the default is not the default for a lot of people around the world and through human he is.

It a really big space where the family will sleep play.

Not especially big, but it feels like it's a very different way of sleeping because instead of being given this prescribed rectangle to sleep on, Yeah, there's a sense of like you've got more latitude to move around because you're all just sleeping however you like and in whatever shape you like in this room.

So cool.

I want to talk about a particular type of person who I think we all know, who we may even have in our lives.

Right now, let me back up and say why I started thinking about this.

A Shanty, the singer A Shanty, and the rapper Nelly recently had a baby together, which is lovely and Nellie seems very happy about it.

But in a recent interview, a joint interview, he was sitting beside a Shanty and he said to her baby, I'll give you the world, but I just ain't changing no diaper, and as Shanty responded, the only way women from Millennia have responded to such a statement, which was with an eye roll.

A similar display of this was evident in an interview that Nick Cannon did recently.

The singer who you may know, has twelve children, and the interview.

For some reason, this interview was taking place on pilates mats.

But I don't know why that is.

But the interviewer asked Nick to run through his twelve children's names, and let's just listen to what happened next.

What are their names?

You want?

You want all twelve twelve names?

This is where I usually get in trouble.

Why because you don't know all of that.

I know all of them, but like I o L last night, you see keep me, keep me honest.

There's rock Roll, Golden, Powerful, Rise, Onyx, Legendary, Zion, illion Zin And just see this as where I who.

Many you're missing too?

I'm missing.

Yeah, it's a little awkward.

That's where a hut's off.

So look, these two men seem like nice people, but they are what I would call hopeless dads.

And these are dads.

They're not deeply problematic in any way, but they're just kind of hopeless when it comes to the task of raising children.

So now that I've named this phenomenon and described this type of person, I suspect you're going to have a lot of examples for me and the newsletter writer Melinda Wehnemoya, who has a great parenting newsletter, had one recently.

She asked, do dads know how to RSVP?

She wrote, I'd love to know what goes through dad's minds when they receive kid party invitations.

I don't mean this in a snarky way.

I am truly curious and want to understand do they think not my department or eh, my partner must be on this invite and they'll take care of it.

So I can really relate to that.

I just was planning a kid's birthday party, and as a little social experiment, I did send half the invitations to the dads on the parent contact list and have the invitations to the mums.

And what did you find?

Well, it was a little predictable.

The women responded and the men did not.

So I just started sending the men extremely passive, aggressive, polite messages saying, Hey, any chance that you know whether you can make it to this kid's birthday party.

Some of them just never responded to me.

And then showed up at the party.

So at this point I need to make clear that this is obviously not all men.

I'm not doing that eye rolling at all men comedy routine that's almost become a cliche at this point.

But the question I want to ask you both is do we deal with the hopeless dads just by kind of shrugging our shoulders and figuring that's how men are.

Or are these hopeless dads actually creating very real domestic labor imbalances and kind of getting away with it under the guys of being hopeless.

They are, and part of it is weaponized in competence in terms of it just gets too hard to have them do the task, so you know, women step in, and that leads to serious inequality and I think resentment within a relationship.

But there was such a fantastic point in this newsletter that I think really highlighted why some dad's about an rsvping, and it's that if you have never organized a kid's birthday party, you don't understand how important rsvping is.

And so the reality is that mostly it's mother's doing it.

Having done it, they're going I should let them know asap so that they can book it, whereas dads are going, what does it matter if I show up or I don't.

And the reason why it matters is because if you do not have enough goodie bags, yeah, all hell will break.

Loose, exactly right, and I'll be your kid crying.

And women know that, not because it is innate to women, but because it has been so practiced, and.

They don't teach us that the POSTPARTU and retreat the importance of having enough goodie bag.

We just have to learn that we learn.

And I think that's an important mantra, right because even cooking, I didn't cook before and I still can't cook, but guess what, there has to be something on a plate, right, So you set up systems, you set up processes, you do trial and error, you work it out.

And the idea that you've got to let dads fail a bit and work it out and make mistakes, I think is just a really important one.

Like if it's that they don't RSVP and then they show up, and.

Are you able to do that and step back?

And I also a related question to this is I think correct me if I'm wrong.

You have used the fair play playing cards?

Can you explain what those are and what your experience was with them.

Yeah, the fair play cards.

I just so recommend them to everyone and they have every Have you heard of them, Stacy?

Yes?

Yeah.

So it has everything that happens in a household, from like who sorts out the house Internet to who does dental kids dental, to who does clothes, all that kind of stuff, and we sorted it out and most of the lunar stuff was on me.

And I laugh with friends that it's like there's never a discussion that clothes are on you, that when you go away, packing is on you.

Yet somehow it is, and you know, Luca does take it.

Turns out there a few thinks he's doing like CIMS or whatever, which I would say sometimes I'm quite happy with that.

I will also say this is still a massive issue, and I think those examples highlight that.

But I reckon that we're watching a shift.

In real time.

Like I was thinking about the nineties and your Homo Simpson and your Ray Romano, and like the stereotypical bumbling fool dad who didn't know how to do anything and just set a funny joke every now and then.

You're going to work right in front of me, or I can keep an eye on you.

You got that?

Who do you think you're dealing with?

You?

I may seem, but that's just to get your mother to mad asked me to do stuff.

And then I was looking into this research that said that in the nineteen eighties, forty three percent of fathers said they'd never changed a nappy.

This in the US, forty three percent of fathers had never changed a nappy.

Now that number has dropped to just three percents.

That's enormous.

And so even like from in an Australian context, you've got how other dad's dad, like Hamish Blake's podcast, You've got two doting dads with Maddy j dadding, and fatherhood is becoming a verb in a way that motherhood.

Okay it has been, but I need to confess something.

Yeah, I get annoyed at the dad's dadding as well.

Yeah, tell me, tell me it's just like it.

Am I just setting that up to fail because I'm annoyed at the hopeless dads And then when the dads start talking about dadding, I'm sort of annoyed at them too.

I see, I really like it, I really welcome it, and I listened to a series of How the Dad's Dad when I was pregnant, and it actually gave me so many tips and insights into parenting from fathers.

And I think that making those communities, like we're talking about the postpartum retreats, right, You then go to a mother's group and there is all this shared knowledge and wisdom that goes between women.

And in defense of some of those fathers, they have no equivalent.

There's no kind of fathers all sitting down and working out how they're going to do this.

I think there is some isolags.

I lost that idea for them, me too.

So here's how you replied to what'sapp message is at a party exactly.

But there are some things that they have just probably never done in their entire life, particularly when it's a father with the daughter.

Like realize that my husband has never tied a hair elastic in his entire life, because why would he.

So that was a steep lon girl that he needed to go on and practice on my hair, so he wasn't doing it on a moving target to know how to do that.

And I think there are some things like that, yeah, will have just never come across their desk.

But there are other things like rsvping tool party that aren't really forgivable, and they should know, and it is good to see that the pendulum swinging back the other way.

I also think that when it comes to talking about hopeless dads, what we're really saying is is it okay to let them?

Like back to that idea, So, for instance, a dad I know, who shall remain nameless, is not great at matching the kid's clothes to the Weatherly.

A hypothetical is that dad good at matching his own clothes to the weather, because I know a lot of men who are not.

For example, my own father would be in short.

Great point, it's a really great point.

And the question becomes do I let them?

Meaning do I let the children go out without jumpers on and let this hypothetical father allow that to happen, or do I interv and say this is going to lead to misery and can we not just put the jumper on before we leave the house.

And that can set the heart of a lot of these questions, because it's like, do I just let them?

Do I just let them go?

I'm cold, I'm team let them, because you know what'll happen.

They'll get to the park, or they'll get outside and they'll start change and they'll say I'm very cold, and then probably you'll get a call saying yes, can you please.

But you know what the other thing is too, which is really annoying.

Sometimes it works out for them, and that's even more irritating because you'll fret about something like that, about your child going out without their jumper, and then they'll come back incident free, nothing's been said.

And so really the dads are just working smarter, not harder, and worrying less about those things and getting away with it.

So maybe we need to take a leaf out of their ball.

Good Night to the bedtime story.

Lauren Ironmonger wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald last weekend that the number of parents reading aloud to their children is at an all time low.

This research comes from HarperCollins UK, which found that less than half of parents of kids under thirteen said reading aloud to children was fun for me.

And can I just say on this, I think it's a very different question saying do you read to your kids?

Do you think it's fun for me?

Those two things are not the same.

I think reading the very hungry cadopillar for the fifteenth time.

I wouldn't describe it as fun.

I'd describe it as something, but fun would not be in Australian data found that many parents can't fit in daily reading with their kids, and just quickly this article goes into why it's even important.

First, it's massive for literacy skills, but it also strengthens the parent child bond.

It sends a message to your child that at the end of the day, they are the most important thing.

Amelia.

Do you think culturally we've started to see reading as something that a child does at preschool or school, and therefore it doesn't have to be done at home.

We've outsourced it a.

I think that's such a good question, and I think, very sadly, the answer is pretty clearly yes.

And it dawned on me recently that I am very much part of the problem here.

I take my kids to swimming practice on a Sunday and I sit there and I doom scroll on my phone and feel my anxiety spiral and instead I should be reading a book.

So last week I took along Stephen King's Misery, which I've never read.

I was like this, Stephen King it's good author.

He's actually writing.

And then I realized I was role modeling for my children, who I'm always sort of flinging books at and telling them to read.

That reading can be fun.

That's so true.

And did you was it a paper copy, like a yeah, paperback with.

A really like spooky looking cover that my kids were obsessed with, because, by the way, physical books are kind of intriguing.

You remember that idea, like, yeah, a cover of a book is meant to entice you into it.

And so when I was reading this book, they're like, misery, what's that book about?

And it was just an occasioned a great conversation that said, this is a work in progress.

For me too, I am exhausted at the end of the day, and sometimes it is easier for me to throw on an audiobook on the Bluetooth speaker and then I can go and stack the dishwasher while they're falling asleep.

And I haven't felt too guilty about that, because literacy experts do say that listening to an audiobook can build all sorts of really important literacy skills, such as comprehension and vocabulary, and they're often read by fantastic actors, and so they're getting this really entertaining story read to them, probably better.

It's better read by Emma Thompson than it is by me, for instance, because we were reading Matilda on audiobook.

So yeah, I haven't felt too guilty about that, but that was until I read this article and it made that really important point that you reference Jesse, that you're not just reading to them to teach them how to read.

You're reading to them to show them that actually the dishwasher is less important than us spending some time together.

And you know, okay, I'm just adding that to another list of things I'm doing.

But that's the thing as well, is that usually now there's in a lot of households, it's two working parents.

You're getting home later sometimes, I mean I get home at six thirty seven o'clock from work to then try an organize dinner, eat together, which we're also doing wrong that we're never eating together now, and get your kids to sleep.

Something has to give, and so I think we are probably guilty of just replacing that, as you say, with I always use sleep stories.

Audiobooks.

We've got like the Yoto player with the little cards that my daughter can listen to and so yeah, we're just kind of unwittingly putting our kids at a disadvantage by not sitting down and doing reading with them in the interest of cutting a bit of time.

I wonder if the story here is more about adults aren't reading, because this research came out as well that the book industry broadly adults aren't going and buying books.

That's absolutely tanked.

And as you say, Amelia, if we're not modeling it, and therefore it does seem like a biggest step.

I always find this with reading, that there's a big block if you haven't done it for a while, and you can feel like it's harder, and then it's a muscle, like reading is genuinely a muscle that gets weak.

And so I was reading about this because it's something I really really worry about.

Us during this event with this academic whose name is Sophie g and she was saying that not reading is worse for you than vaping.

That for the brain, like it is so important for everything from memory to empathy to just all these cognitive skills and the ability especially to read deeply.

That's not innate and we have not evolved to read every single generation has to learn how to read, and in order to learn how to read, it takes like years of deep focus.

Reading is one of you cannot do it while you're doing anything else.

No, and some people never forget that.

Travis Kelsey recently came out and you can't really read.

So that's what I was reading about.

Even the Naplan results came out recently and they said that Ozzie kids have sunk to an all time low in terms of reading and writing skills, and low literacy is an issue among a lot of adults.

And low literacy I found this interesting.

It was saying that actually being able to go, I know what the words on the page mean is one thing, but the step that seems to be missing is then understanding what those words mean, and also the ability do you see the article in the Atlantic recently about college students who had never read a book was so satip The ability to sit down and read a book beginning to end is also a skill that you can lose, and so deep reading is being able to sit with something for a long time, follow it, like go to work the next day, kind of remember where you were, and even though it feels so hard, it's like, you know, we've spoken about pickietas and stuff on this show, and you know how they always say, like on the plate, they're not going to eat the broccoli, but you've got to have broccoli on the plate.

Yeah.

Yeah, she's got to be an option.

It's going to be an option.

It's like having the books in the house.

See before I speak about Kindle, right, because I've gone to that because I'm trying to at night not have a lamp or anything on.

But now I think you should.

Get a sleep divorce.

Then you don't have to worry about because lights on everywhere.

To the age where Luna might be coloring in or something.

And I don't want her to see me constantly on my phone, so I'll go and read.

But it looks like I'm on an iPad or a screen or a device, and I think it's more important she sees me term page, and.

It's also less interesting for her.

She doesn't understand why you're engaged with this kindle as opposed to Stephen King's misery.

Yeah.

She even goes into my room sometimes and when I've got books next to my bed, like she loves to flick through them and like look at the pages.

Yeah, my daughter often now pretend she's the librarian now that they're doing that in school, and then I have to go and borrow books from her.

And it is just such a yeah, like it's a tangible thing.

It's not the same as having it on a device.

This is it.

This is a humble brag.

But Luna was going through our bookcase in our study recently and got a book down and it was one of my books, and she went to the back another picture of me, and she went, Mummy had to explain that is and I mum's an English teacher, so like this is a special interest area.

But like I grew up and there was always a book in the and the way that you would just go on and.

They're so intriguing when you're a kid.

As well, you'd always find a naughty one and you'd go, I will be reading that privately.

Great, absolutely great, you're putting words together.

That's wonderful, or like names that I would see your covers.

I still remember when my parents love books and reading and they have bookshelves all around the house and there was a Joan Diddian book called The White Album.

I just had a completely white cover, and this blew my mind.

How can you have a cover that has nothing on it?

It's so true the physicality of books.

And apparently as well, they're finding that the print book is a totally different experience to read it.

It's just the object of the print book is so and in a world where we have so few objects that are special, because even our photos are on our phone and we don't have DVDs anymore videos, I think that's a portal into reading, yes, is to give kids the opportunity to be mystified by a book with a white cover and the smell.

The smell of a book, Yeah, I love the smells.

Producer Ruth was telling us that the reason we love the smell of old books so much is because they smell as the ink and the paper and everything break down, it smells like vanilla, which is such a homely warm Like I'm thinking, there are a few things to me more comforting than that smell.

And you can get like fragrances or candles or whatever in your house to make it smell like that, which I'm like, I just want to fill my whole house that smell of like an old, old book.

And I also want to know that producer Ruth is the best smelling person at Muma.

Man, which is talking about I wonder if it's also that we're a bit more sensitive about what we're reading now and what we're reading to our children now.

The other week, my my daughter brings home a library book every week from pre K and she loves it.

It's like a big event to bring it home in the bag, which is great.

But this week she brought home The Ugly Duckling, and I found myself as I was reading it to her, feeling weird about even using the word ugly.

And I think that's something that's coming up a lot now with books like even Roll Dahl's books a couple of years ago were rewritten to remove the words ugly and fat.

And so I think maybe we're not reading as many of the stories that we loved as kids, worried that they'll be inappropriate, and so we're not enjoying it.

Therefore we're doing It's true.

I have two examples of that from recently.

We have a copy of Role Dal's Revolting Rhymes, which I remember loving.

It's actually my copy, and I was reading it one day to the kids and I just suddenly my eyes lit upon the next word, and the next word was slut.

Oh that's a really hard word to explain meaning to kids, I find.

And then the second example was had a really nice time reading the line the Witch and the Wardrobe was one of my kids.

But gosh, that's a weird book, is it.

There's a lot going on in there.

It's essentially a Christian allegory, which is fine.

I don't mean to say that's weird, but it does raise a lot of questions about what the book is actually trying to say and what the wardrobe is a metaphor for.

And you just find yourself going down some garden paths that maybe you didn't expect that you'd be going down at bedtime.

Yeah, there are some.

My mum brings a lot of classics over that.

Did you ever read There's a Hippopotamus on my roofed?

And cake?

Yeah?

Yeah, yeah, so we're big.

We read that fifty Well, I'm sorry, but that there's one that's like Mummy's on a diet.

She has salad, cheese and I read that every day and I'm like this, this is a bit weird a diet.

But those ones, right are brilliant, they're nonsensical, they're wonderful.

I watch Luna just look at the roof, and I'm like, just think that the hippotamus in there, and I don't made it, but always says that a lot of the newer ones are quite sanitized, and they're trying there, trying to hit you over.

The head girls doing stem Yes.

Exactly right.

And it's like school has done this a little bit too.

They made reading into hard work in terms of reading for knowledge or like reading for moral like lesson instead of just reading for pleasure.

And like, I see the pleasure that Luna gets from hippopotamus, and I'm like, let's just let's learn our colors later, and let's just go to hippopotamus eating.

Okay, on the ugly darkling thing, when I was a kid, I asked my nan if I was pretty.

She lived with us and I was like five or six, and I said, nan, am I pretty?

And she said, you're an ugly darkling?

Oh.

She died before I grew up, and so I still wonder.

I'm like, did I ever turn into this one?

Nan?

You're one.

It's time for our recommendations of the week.

So Jesse do you want to go first?

Sure, on the topic of books, I remembered, don't you find that it's really hard to buy gifts for like grandparents?

And like day comes around and you're like, oh, it's my mom and speaking of hopeless dads, it's their mum.

Whatever.

Don't give me a hand cream, can you?

You can't know?

And what am I like?

I'm not going to get her like a nice blouse.

She's going to be like, this is disgusting.

I always used to get my nana every Christmas a jar of oil of olay, and that smell still takes me back, talking of nostalging.

I won't want that.

She won't want that.

So what I got was I went on Etsy and there are heaps of examples of this, but I went on Etsy and found this company that makes personalized children's books.

So this one is about going to nana's house and you can say, like, when I go to Nana's house, there's a blah and like you can put in all the little details and they've even got like put in three words to describe your nana.

And I'm like, crazy, weird, annoying.

To troll Maya.

But it's all about a day at Nana's house.

So it's and I made one for MEA and I made one for my mum.

And they're just the cutest, most personalized.

It has their names, it has whatever they call their grandmother on the front, and they're just so so sweet.

So this was on Etsy from Lucy and Co.

We have a link in our show notes, but there are heaps and heaps online and they are just a lovely, thoughtful little gift.

My recommendation is something that I have not used in quite a few years, but which I still like to gift to new parents.

And it is a fabulous product that there's a little bit of a story behind.

So I used to do a show on Mom and Mia many years ago with Maya called tell Me It's going to Be Okay.

It was a show which we conceived of and started doing after Donald Trump was elected, and I think the title kind of summarizes where I had spaces that it literally came to a screeching halt about two years in when we really that we could no longer tell each other it was going to be okay.

So and it's never come back hasn't never come back.

But it was a fun experience and we had a small but devoted cadre of listeners, and one of them was a lovely lady who lived in Neutral Bay in Sydney, and she sent me an invention of hers called the baby Oragami Rap.

Now this saved my life when I had my first baby, because you know how the world is divided into people who are good at oragami and people who aren't.

Yeah, I'm one of the people who's not me or anything.

I think it takes like patience and grace, think.

Neither of those things exactly.

So this is called the baby Oragami Rap because if you've never mastered swaddling, it makes it literally impossible not to correctly swaddle the babies.

So I think Nick Cannon could do with one of these, and I think that Nelly could do with yown.

And I really got a lot of use out of it.

Basically, it's numbered.

It's a sort of a step by step numbered way to swaddle your baby.

And it's super tight, like it does everything you're.

Tight, and it's made a beautiful one hundred percent cotton.

It's really easy to wash, and I just love gifting them to people because swaddling is just so hard it's so hard.

I just never got it.

I never got it.

So it's called the baby o Agami Rap and it is from an Australian company and a friend of the pod.

So thanks for saving my life.

How about you, Stacy, what's your reco Okay?

So I am rubbish at imaginative play.

I'm I'm just not good.

But the one toy I bought for my daughter, I bought it nearly three years ago now and we still play with these every single week, usually multiple times a week.

And they're those colored magnetic tiles.

So I haven't seen these, okay.

So they're just different colors.

You can get like esthetically please pastel ones.

You can get the bright primary colors, whatever you want.

They come in different packs.

You might get like eighty pieces or one hundred pieces, and they're just magnetic squares and triangles and they all kind of you'll get a guide of different things.

You can build with them, or your kid can just stack them up in a row like whatever.

Stage.

It's like Lego, but it doesn't exactly.

They are flat easy to clean up because unlike Lego, they're not.

Like little bits, so it all sticks together.

So they're very handy.

We take them a lot to cafes or pubs or anything because there's no mess, like if you worried about them drawing on a table at a cafe, even when you don't.

Take your kids to the pot.

Yes, I actually find I get quite territorial, and I like move my creation away from my daughter, like, don't mess with my color pattern that I've made.

But you can get like you can get cheap versions of them at Kmart.

But the ones I got, we're on Amazon.

I got them from Steam Studios is one set, and then we got another set from an Aussie startup called Kinetics with an X on the end, and they're just so great and even create puzzles for your kids trace around the outside and then remove the magnets, stick it up on the fridge and then they have to fit in the shapes to the pattern you've given them.

And it takes age, really good distraction.

What age would you say you could start?

So if Luna's just two, yeah, like is this something she could play with?

I bought them for her second birthday and she absolutely loves them.

Still they still do them every week.

I'm going to hijack the recommendation and say I wholeheartedly agree, and recently I picked up the sort of like original brand of the Magnetic Squares has now got a travel tin, which is brilliant because they are sort of big, like you wouldn't want to pack them in a suitcase.

But now with this travel tin with the miniature ones, they're so cute and you can now travel with them too.

I knew I was losing the plot a bit this morning when I was thinking about my recommendation and Luna this morning heard the garbage truck man and we went outside and saw that they all waved at her, and I was like, I should recommend guage truck and came aside, Luna's not well, like she's had a running nose and stuff.

And I found on YouTube garbage truck Man and it's just people emptying bins right, and I had it up on YouTube and it was so meditative.

I was for me.

I was like, I'm not bored, I'm actually really it was so satisfying, and I was like, what a great job to just go and clean stuff up every day, engage with the community.

I was like, this is great.

We should just be watching an iverage truck YouTube.

Cancer instinctively drawn to like some of the best people in our community, people who pick up the rubbish, the postman, the postman, firefighters, paleontologists don't know what's up.

They know where it's at.

They know the actual hierarchy of society.

I explayed to my daughter that those are jobs like about a yoga because I think I realized because my husband and I both writers, that she just thinks like work is keyboard and that's a job.

You could go.

You don't have to be like us, you can do that.

That is all we have time for on parenting out loud today, and you know what my call parents?

Where can I go on a bit of parentally?

Are we going on a baby move?

Well, we should go on a baby.

One of these postnatal retreats.

That's what we're doing.

We're going on a post post natal I hope that's okay.

Do you mean we're all post natal?

We have producer, Ruth has grown up kids, she's postnatal.

She needs a post natal retreat.

We all do.

So we're going to go off there.

And it's been so.

Fun, book centered, candle and just relaxed.

It has been so fun working with both of you, Amelia and Stacy and having all of our listeners join us and we're keeping it open.

We maybe, maybe the three of us can just get together with some magnetic tie, create some things and watch some.

Sounds great.

Let's go now.

Until next time.

Bye,