buter's BABY blog

Yeah, so you all know by now that I'm hanging around on FaceBook for no good reason that I can think of. I've had fun trawling the lists of groups though, like If You Can't Differentiate Between "Your" and "You're" You Deserve To Die and if 9039230293 people join this group it will still be lame.

But now I can relax, because according to an article in today's SMH,

"Facebook is becoming increasingly trendy ... It's where more of the thought leaders and influentials go."

So that's sorted then. It's good to be reminded that I'm an influential thought leader ... :)

Now, all those other thought leaders out there on Facebook, it's time to unite and take over the world, or something. One lame interest group at a time ...

You may have heard that the Australian Government in all its wisdom, provides a non-means-tested baby bonus payment of about $4000 for a newborn. They even go so far as to ensure 16-year-old mothers get the payment in a form of pension rather than a lump sum to make sure it's spent on the baby and not on booze or drugs or stolen by non-well-meaning relatives. Personally, I think it's a way for the Government to assuage its guilt over not creating better industrial relations provisions for parental leave.

It's a very sad thing that Australia's population growth from birth is so low. A sociologist I heard on the radio once said you can directly correlate the declining population growth with the rise in female education. It makes sense too, as potential mums are spending more time getting educated and starting careers, than starting families. But what's not being acknowledged by the Government is that those potential mothers are sticking to their careers for longer before having children because they need to save up money to be able to raise said kids, because once they leave to have the baby they are suddenly bereft of income. Then the Government wails about cost of childcare, and how they can't provide enough subsidised places for all the kids we're having, but mums have little choice but to go back to work so they can pay for the mortgage and all the bills as well as paying for childcare. It's rotten.

Some more enlightened nations have legislated parental benefits. Like, up to 2 years' paid leave from work - you can have your children, and still cover your mortgage repayments, and what's more you can choose when to go back to work, with the benefit that your child has had the chance to grow up a bit with at least one parent at home all the time, you're not entirely broke, and you can still go back to the same job you had before. Don't get me wrong, some employers here do offer a period of paid parental leave, in fact there are some very good places in that regard, but most only offer the minimum required by law. Which is, 12 months' leave. Unpaid. 12 months in total, that is, so if you happen to have some annual leave available and you choose to take that instead of unpaid leave, you still can't have more than 12 months away from your job. So in our case, I've had 1 month annual leave - before Peanut arrived - and I get 11 months with her before I lose my entitlement to go back to the same job. 11 months with no income, that is. Just to be clear, I wouldn't give up Peanut for anything, and I definitely wouldn't want to be back at work right now with her only 11 weeks old.

Oh, and the baby bonus? That went towards our private medical bills - we avoided the public hospital system for a reason.

So, I finally gave in to peer pressure, or something, and signed myself up to facebook. I mean, what else do you do when the baby's gone to sleep? I'm counting this as my "me" time!

D™ threatened to disown me, but I said I'd take the baby if he did so he desisted for now. I think it's still potential though ... But I must say it's kind of fun trawling through finding people and seeing how they present themselves to the world... I've found most of my high school chums on there (they weren't exactly pressuring me, more like "don't join facebook, it's such a time sucker") and also friends from primary school as well as ex-colleagues and family. So it's kind of fun.

One set of pals started a scrabulous game with me, because I was dissing facebook and online scrabble so much. The starting word was "CURN".


I'm familiar with the word "KERN" as a term used in publishing, something about the spacing between letters, but what on earth is a CURN?

I asked the scrabulous dictionary and here's what I got:


Uh-huh. So it's like, a real word? And on a triple word score and everything!

I guess I shouldn't trust a dictionary written by someone who made up the word "scrabulous", right?