You learn something new every day...

[SoupDragon]

Another lighthearted thread here This is what I've just learnt:

Disposable Nappies Do Not Wash Well.

Have just accidentally picked up a pair of (clean!) pullups with the laundry and put them through the washing machine. The mess is indescribable...

Honeybunny!
Sooo lovely. Will you marry me? I could do the macrame, though only in beige

I just want to say how nice it is to have a male perspective on things.

You're very brave SimonHoward to be the only male among all us females...or are there any others lurking out there???

Lil - re baby stepping.

Our local maternity unit (soon to close ) encourages this and I did it with 2nd ds. He was placed straight onto my tummy at delivery and once the cord was cut the midwives left the room. DH and I spent a wonderful hour and a half binding with our beautiful bundle whilst he 'stepped' his way to his first feed.

I had a difficult ventouse delivery with first ds and didn't hold him until he was nearly 2 hrs old so the difference 2nd time around was amazing.

Simon, you mentioned you found mumsnet looking for fathering tips without much success - I did a search on stay at home dad and found lots! Not trying to get rid of you of course , but have you looked at fathersdirect.com (a UK site btw) which I thought seemed pretty good. The other UK site I found was geocities.com/homedaduk. The others are all US sites but they are: slowlane.com, fatherhood.about.com, fatherville.com, stayathomefathers.com, and itsadadthing.com! Of course you may already frequent some of these sites, but I HTH anyway! Still hope to see you on the boards here, please don't abandon us to go and chat with "your own kind" instead!

Snugs - me too! Except I didn't get my hands on DS1 until 4 hours later (I'll just say "repair work" and leave it at that). I did get to hold DS2 immediately but wish I'd known about this "stepping" thing.

Not prepared to have another just to try it though!

oxocube-LOL!

Mollipops

I had seen fathersdirect.com but when I visited it the discussion boards seemed to be very rarely added to and to be totally honest most of what I wanted to know it is easier to ask a mother about than a father usually. And the Mumsnet crowd seemed to be such a nice group (and you are).

DW is currently in bed after following her daughters example and throwing up what she had eaten so I am getting to discover the joys of exceedingly dirty nappies currently.

Any tips on how to change them without gagging?

Poor you Simon (and poor Mrs Howard)...I suggest either holding your breath (only advisable if you can change a nappy within 30 seconds), a peg on your nose (which can be painful and may leave an impression so to speak), or hold a rose or other sweet-smelling flower between your teeth (latin american style) making sure you have removed the thorns first of course... The latter might not work, of course, but it does make me smile to picture it! Hope your day goes okay...good luck!

Mollipops

Thanks for the ideas.

DW is feeling better now so I can resume my rightful place of not being around when the exceedingly nasty nappies need doing, I hear the call of the shed and must answer it.

I take my hat off to all you ladies that deal with it on a daily basis, you have strong stomachs and a commitment to your children that I am envious of.

Simonhoward, you do realise that being the one man amongst a whole group of women puts you at risk of a certain amount of sexual harrassment don't you? We used to have a dad at our toddler group (also called Simon BTW) and he copped for some right mickey taking, but I think he enjoyed the attention.

Whatever happened to the other guy who occasionally posted on Mumsnet? Are you still out there? Or has the pressure of being surrounded (virtually!!) by so many gorgeous women finally taken its toll

simon did you consider adopting a female alias on mumsnet?

I got rather scared recently when I found an e-mail addressed to DH from Mumsnet in the in-box recently. By the looks of it he has signed up to Mumsnet, haven't seen him posting mind you. I suppose I need to behave myself now!

PamT

I have asked women at every job I have ever done if I could be sexually harrassed but got turned down everytime (no one loved me, sniff, luckily DW loves me) so if anyone wants to do that here please feel free. I do have to say though that having seen the odd bit of sexual harrassment that the chances of me actually being harrassed by it is very very small.

Jasper

I didn't even think about taking on any alias let alone a female one. I would have eventually made a mistake somewhere that identified me as male if I had tried though so I'd rather proclaim my difference to the majority here then skulk and hide.

SimonHoward, if you did take on an alias and talked about DP and she or her in the same sentence you would have to be either male or lesbian so I think someone would cotton on sooner or later. Does DW know that you spend so much time on here and does she ever read it or post her own messages? Sorry, I'm being a nosey cow again - I might change my name to nosey cow, it would be appropriate My DH knows that I come on here quite often but I don't think he realises just how much and I don't know if he reads any of it, I refrained from adding to the useless husbands thread just in case

SimonHoward, if you did take on an alias and talked about DP and she or her in the same sentence you would have to be either male or lesbian so I think someone would cotton on sooner or later. Does DW know that you spend so much time on here and does she ever read it or post her own messages? Sorry, I'm being a nosey cow again - I might change my name to nosey cow, it would be appropriate My DH knows that I come on here quite often but I don't think he realises just how much and I don't know if he reads any of it, I refrained from adding to the useless husbands thread just in case

I don't know how that happened - Spooky!

PamT

DW knows I come on here for advice and to learn, which she thinks is a good thing.

I don't know if she reads the message boards here, she does know about the site but as she has broken my PC 3 times now (2 of those times rather badly) she tends to be a bit wary of doing too much on it.

Errm, Simon - HOW did she break it? Just curious as ours seems indestructable...

I don't think that I have broken ours yet, its usually due to dodgy software or viruses which arrive via email (so glad that we now have daily updates from Nortons AV). I tend not to play though and only do things that I know won't do any damage.

MandyD

The first time she really broke it she managed to blow all the main circuit breaker in the house and destroyed 10% of my hard disk.

Luckily I had done a full backup 30 minutes before hand otherwise I could have lost a database with over 11000 records in it. As it was i still had to wipe the PC and reload everything.

She managed to do something, and I have no idea what that caused the PC to just crash and it took me a while to recover it. Again I needed to wipe the PC and reload it.

The last time she somehow managed to pull the keyboard connector out of the PC even though it normally needs me pulling it in the opposite was to the way she pulled it to get it out. Again I have no idea how she does it.

I work with PCs all day long and my DW is one of the most accident prone people with a PC that I have ever met.

She has now restricted herself to using it for the odd website visit and e-mail. When I get a new one I will set up my old one with the most limited amount of software on it for her to use.

I can't believe the first one was her fault! Unless she spilt a drink down the back...

Soupdragon

Unfortunately we had a slight problem with too many bits of kitchen and cleaning equipment on one circuit at the time and it was a standing rule in the house never to turn the washing machine, dishwaher and tumble dryer all on at the same time. If you did it tripped the circuit breaker.

She was going out and turned all 3 on.

10 minutes later I was staring at a black screen and was fuming.

How's a woman supposed to do the work if she can't plug the machines in? Come on, you can't blame her for that one, get yourself some more sockets sorted out.