We’re back!  After more than two months silence, we dragged out the microphones and recorded an episode, picking up exactly from where we left off.  Today’s topic of discussion: Who watches the kids when Mom and Dad have to selfishly turn away for a moment to answer a phone, or go to work, or visit a sick relative in hospital?  Also, absolutely no mention of why we’ve been quiet for so long. Not even an apology! (Okay so here it is: it’s all work’s fault. Allen has been finishing a major project which had him working six to seven days a week for over two months, and Cathrine has been watching five kids all by herself, and juggling deadlines with her editors while Allen was away.  We wanted to record more episodes for you, dear reader, we really did, but every time we set up the recording gear, one of us would pass out before we could begin.  We’re very sorry about that.)  So who watches the kids? So what do you do?  Hire a sitter? Ask a neighbour to just keep an eye out for a few hours? These days we’re all so much more aware of risks and dangers that we sometimes shy away from these options.  And in our modern world, we don’t live as close to our extended families as we once did, and it’s becoming more usual for all adults in a household to have to work a full time job if the bills are going to be paid.  Our own arrangement means that at least one parent is at home more often than not, but our distance from the city means that even a simple shopping run to get bread and milk would leave the kids unsupervised for up to an hour. So if you use the player below, or if you’ve subscribed to us through your favourite podcatcher, you’ll hear us grapple with this problem.  We discuss what we’ve tried over the years, what’s gone wrong and what’s worked.  We don’t promise answers that will fit your life, because there is no such thing as a universal solution for everybody’s unique circumstances, but maybe you’ll get some ideas from a couple of old pro’s! And as always, if you like the show, please tell a friend, share the episode on your favourite social media, click the likes, hearts and stars, and maybe even consider leaving us a review on iTunes.  We’d really appreciate it!  And if you have your own thoughts on the topic, or would like to tell us who watches the kids in your own home, leave a comment below!  

Better late than never, here is the eleventh episode of the Now Look Here! parenting podcast.  After a long, sticky, but all round peaceful Easter weekend, we return to discuss the never ending struggle to find some alone time for yourself. Specifically, we talk about how we manage it, how other parents seem to do it, and why it’s so important (spoiler: If you don’t find a little time away from your responsibilities as a parent, you might very well lose your mind.) Whether it’s swapping duties with your partner, roping in a babysitter or taking time in increments, we try and wrap our heads around ways to take small breaks (and essentially stay sane).   You may have noticed… We did not review any television or movies this week.  Sorry about that but we simply haven’t managed to find any alone time to watch anything this week, which is one reason why we chose this week’s topic! However, we recently got our hands on Elementary, a modern take on Sherlock Holmes from a few years back.  We’re slowly working our way through season one, and will be returning to our usual format next episode to let you know what we think! We’v been playing around with our recording equipment, trying out a few knobs we hadn’t pressed before, and we think we’ve managed to improve our audio quality somewhat.  Let us know in the comments if we’re easier to hear!

We’re back! Things have been so unsettled that we had to record this episode (How to Transport a Family) in two separate sessions, and then still took extra days to edit it and produce the recording you’re about to listen to.  But we made an extra effort to be a little more interesting than usual, as our way of making it up to you for keeping you waiting. In this episode we talk about transport, and the unique problems of moving a large family around when your school, place of work, and home, are all far apart.  Big cars are the obvious answer, but there are many reasons why you might not want to go that route – they’re expensive to buy, expensive to fuel, and are hard on the environment.  We found another solution which, while not as luxurious or even comfortable as we might have liked, has turned out to be unexpectedly practical – it’s a good compromise between the transport needs of a family of seven, and those of the individual adults going to work.  Listen to the podcast to find out what it is! And on a different note We’ve also recently worked our way through a brand new science fiction TV series called The Expanse.  It’s not just good, it’s amazingly good, and we are more excited about the still-to-be-filmed 2nd season than we’ve been about any media in a very long time.  We give our best effort at a pretty decent review, without any spoilers – let us know if we got it right in the comments!  Or you know, whether you agree with us or not, if you have anything to add, or whatever.  Comment!

This week we take on the thorny problem of the boundaries that we need to build to protect our family lives.  Getting the other adults in your life to take your kids seriously can be hard.  Not the children themselves, as individual human beings, but their needs and the responsibilities they give you as parents.  Popular film and TV like to perpetuate the idea that when a friend gets married, you’ve lost that friend forever.  But substitute “Having kids” for “Getting married”, and it actually becomes kinda true.  We change when we become parents, and it affects our relationships and our priorities.  The people we leave behind don’t always understand what’s changed, and expect you to continue giving them the same amount of time and affection as before. In this episode, Allen and Cathrine talk about some of the problems this causes, both socially and professionally. We don’t have a lot to offer by way of solutions, but since you’ve probably been made to feel like a bad friend, or been told to be more of a “team player” by your boss, perhaps it will help to learn that you’re not alone! Postscript Every now and then you’ll hear a baby grumbling in the background.  We apologise for this because we know how distracting background noises can be in an audio recording, but since we’ve just been talking about how our kids are top priority, we thought you’d understand if we kept the baby near by while we recorded! Cathrine mentions Meatball Night.  She’s referring to the modern tradition of Friday Night Meatballs, and one day when we move back to civilization, we are definitely and absolutely going to make it our own.  Good food, socialising with adults, meeting new people AND not needing babysitters.  I can’t imagine anything better!  

Head lice. Yuck, right? But there are a few things we want you to know about these little parasites:  They’re far more common than you think, you could be infested without realising it and they present absolutely no health risk at all.  But, they’re undeniably gross.  So what do you do when your kids come home with lice in their hair?  What do you say when the school calls to say that they’ve found nits, or lice eggs, in your kid’s hair and you must fetch them immediately, to avoid infecting other children? The fact is, they’re difficult to remove successfully.  You need your child to sit still while the fine-toothed comb tugs at their hair for up to an hour, and then you need to repeat this process every few days for as long as it takes to catch all of the newly hatched louse nymphs, and it only takes one louse from another child’s head to re-infect the head you’ve worked so hard to clear.  In the podcast we discuss how infection happens, what the medical risk is, and the immense frustration of watching your freshly cleared children get re-infected minutes later when they play with a friend! Corrections: Stuff we got wrong about lice To answer some questions we asked ourselves while recording: Yes, lice are insects, and no they are not hermaphrodites – you get male and female lice.  I also stated that live eggs are flat against the scalp, but this is only half-true.  They are laid and attached to a single hair, flush with the scalp, but as the hair grows, the egg moves up with it.  Since eggs take up to nine days to hatch, they could be as far as 6mm from the scalp and still not have hatched yet.  The newly hatched louse is about the size of a pinhead and quite hard to see.  They molt a few times, before reaching adult size (a little bigger than a sesame seed) after seven days.  They live another 30 days before dying of old age, but can lay up to eight eggs per day.  Incidentally, they cannot live off of your head: they need your body heat and your blood – a louse left on a pillow or in clothing will die of starvation within a day or two, and probably be pretty torpid for most of that time.

In which we discuss The Terrible Two’s Our first full episode of the new year!  We’re trying out something new with formatting, so please leave a comment and tell us what you think?  We’ve decided to narrow our focus on parenting and what better place to start than the hugely frustrating Terrible Two’s – that stage of a child’s life which begins sometime near their second birthday and ends when they get their driver’s license.  We look at what’s going on in your screaming little angel’s mind that makes them act like this, and how adjusting your own attitude can make things easier for everybody. You’ll notice that this is one of our shortest recordings, and this is a deliberate decision.  Hour-long podcasts seem to be the standard, but who has the time or attention-span to listen to such long recordings in a single session?  A shorter recording is easier to listen to and forces us to work harder at cutting the chaff and staying on topic.  We’re pretty happy with the results, and hope that you like it too! Postscript So you’ve listened to the whole thing and are pulling your hair out in frustration at our struggle to name the actor whom we mentioned at one point. The one who did NOT voice Simba in The Lion King 2.  He starred in Ferris Buehler’s Day Off, and played Mouse in Willow. Well you can relax: It came to us about five minutes after we turned off the recorder: Matthew Broderick!

This is not a regular episode of the Now Look Here podcast.  It’s only a few minutes long, and it’s just me talking, but it has an important message that I felt needed saying. Don’t worry though, it’s nothing too dramatic or unpleasant.  Rather, it’s our first attempt at responding to feedback and improving the show.  Short version:  We’re tightening our focus on the issues we’re going to talk about, and will be returning to a regular recording schedule. Incidentally, if you have been listening and would like to hear us talk about something specific, please use the comments section below to let us know, or just email us at [email protected].  We read every single message and, for now at least, will acknowledge and discuss all communications in the podcast. Thank you for your support so far, and we promise that 2016 will bring you a much better show!

Back from an unplanned hiatus, we’re back with episode six of the Now Look Here podcast! This week, after sharing another story about how tough it is to be the parent of five kids, we launch boldly into a spirited discussion about how the sexes seem to aim right past each other when looking for love. We don’t go very deep, though.  We accuse women of trying to make themselves more attractive to men by acting in very unattractive ways, and we accuse guys of believing in the friend zone.  Basically, everybody’s an idiot when it comes to dating. Stepping back a bit, we feel like we dodged a bit of a bullet here.  We recorded this over three weeks ago, and we simply haven’t found the time or energy to edit it, or record any new material.  We’re so very sorry about that, but hey!  We’ve go five kids, it’s the end of the year, and we’ve been busy handling school holidays, preparing for long journeys, buying christmas presents.  Cathrine has been working extended night shifts, and I’ve been babysitting our entire brood through the evening.  But the good news is that within a few days we’ll be back onto a more normal schedule.  I’ll be back at work, the kid will be back at school, and we’ll once more have a few hours after midnight onces a week to record. And thank you!  Thank you for bearing with us, for listening to our show and for telling you friends about it.  We like to believe that we’re getting better with each episode, and knowing that somebody is out there taking the time to listen is all the motivation we need to keep doing it and keep improving! PS: If you believe that the friend zone is real, because you’re in it, hang in there.  She is never going to suddenly wake up to you, dump her boyfriend and sweep you off your feet, but you are almost certainly going to wake up one day and realise that life is too short for this garbage.  And when that day comes, you will become a happier and more well-rounded human being.

It took a while to get it out the door, but the fifth episode of the Now Look Here podcast is finally out! The fact that it is almost a full week late is ironic, and you may now begin laughing, because Cathrine leads us on a discussion about ways of getting things done.  Scheduling, procrastination, multi-taking, these are things we consider, discard, and eventually recommend! The problem we all have with our busy modern schedule and non-traditional means of employment is common enough: How to organise and discipline ourselves so that we’re not just drawing up lists and accumulating tasks, but we also actually make some progress in getting things done.  Task lists should get shorter, and progress needs to happen, otherwise we’re just pretending to work.  But how do easily bored people like ourselves deal with chronic demotivation and persuade ourselves to get back to our desks and produce quality output?  Listen below for some of the things we’ve tried! Oh, at some point Cathrine mentions the “Two Minute Rule” — click the link to learn more about it. We’re hoping to get back to our original schedule so hopefully the next episode should come out within only  few days.  Feel free to bleat about it in the comments if it doesn’t!  Perhaps we could try out some of our own advice, see if it works!

Sometimes you find yourself forced to make a leap of faith.  Two of the most obvious challenges facing parents of many kids, like Cath and I, are time and money.  As we touched on in the previous episode, each child requires a certain amount of attention, as well as feeding, schooling, clothing, educating, medicating, and a myriad other things that all cost money.  Six years ago we realised that we were running short on both. I had (and still do have) a full time job, while Cathrine was in that uncomfortable limbo of trying to restart a career after raising children.  We were both putting in many hours away from home, and nor bringing in enough money to meet expenses.  It was time to try and find a better way.  I created an astronomy website, to share one of my passions, and loaded it with Google Adsense to try and make a bit of cash.  Cathrine began writing, starting novels and short stories, and taking temporary jobs writing ad copy, copy-editing self-help books, and proof-reading. Although Cathrine’s work brought in valuable income, my website didn’t (despite it being, so far as I can tell, one of the most popular astronomy websites in South Africa).  While she has continued to grow a reputation as a freelancer and heavy-weight copywriter, I’ve started blogs, this podcast, and a cloud-based hosting company. In this episode, we discuss some of the options for people who want to take that leap of faith and find some other way to pay the bills that is not on the traditional route of formal employment.  We speak from experience (or in a few undisclosed cases, the experiences of family members) about how these different options can play out, and we try to work out the best way to bring in an income without submitting to the will of a boss.  In an office. Unfortunately, we’re still working out this independence thing, so there will have to be follow-up episodes in the near future while we figure this out and find that magic recipe.  But until then, if you have any advice, or simply want to let us know what you thought, please leave a comment below and give us a rating on iTunes!