This time last year, there were a flurry of stories about my daughter and I published around the world. A US writer spotted an angle for a “sweet article about (my) daughter’s outfits”, and that got noticed by the likes of The Independent & Metro in UK, Buzzfeed and ABC News in US, and then various outlets across the globe. Radio and TV appearances followed. Perhaps you are reading this because you started following my blog after coming across one of those.
The premise was basically I was an at-home parent letting my (then) 3-year-old daughter choose what she wears every morning. And the outfits were kinda cool and not traditionally ‘girly’.
When I asked, the writers of those articles told me the same thing – what made this story ‘a story’ was the fact that I was a dad of a daughter.
While it was nice to bask in the mostly supportive comments (US conservatives aside – yikes), the fact people were reacting strongly to it highlighted an issue we have with parenting.
Cooking up a Mother’s Day family feast for the mum in your life is easy with this delicious slow cooked pulled pork recipe.
I don’t cook pork that often. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of cooked pig in my diet – it’s just usually in ham, bacon, or sausage form. And I don’t know why I don’t as I quite like pork. So I was glad when I was asked to make a special roast pork Mother’s Day feast.
We were sent a lovely hamper of ingredients – amusingly presented to me as a ‘Mums Day Off’ pack. My wife is the breadwinner of the house, and is more likely to spend a day off in the kitchen, while I – a stay-at-home parent – am the one who wouldn’t mind a ‘day off’ from normal cooking and other domestic/family duties.
But engaging with the spirit of the task, I happily set about creating a Pulled Pork Mother’s Day family feast. If you’re hipster parents (or children) this dish is perfect – slow cooked pulled pork is seemingly the only way trendy youngsters eat pork these days. So given I don’t know how to cook pulled pork, I was glad of the challenge.
I was pretty happy with my first attempt at making slow cooked pulled pork. The prep was pretty minimal, the cooking a suitably laid back affair, and while the final timings took a little mental arithmetic to get right, it was no big deal to do so.
While my wife liked it, my daughter was the biggest fan. As well as the spicy pulled pork, my daughter loved the griddled plums, couldn’t get enough of the fruit compote (with everything), and most miraculously of all these potatoes broke her lifelong disgust of them (at age 4).
We’ve come back for leftovers on subsequent days, and I also found myself picking at the pork (and the crackling) throughout the next few days. We also made pulled pork sandwiches, refried with rice, and even with beans on toast!
The joint really went a long way, so it is great for a family meal.
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Sweet Spiced Slow Cooked Pulled Pork, with Plum Compote
Don’t know how to cook pulled pork? Read on…
Serves 6, with leftovers
Cooking time: 6+ hours
Ingredients
1.6kg (3lb 4oz) shoulder of pork (remove the rind and set aside)
2 tsp each salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 tsp each ground cinnamon and ginger
11/2 tbsp dark brown sugar
For the compote:
175g plums, stoned and chopped
175g cooking apples, cored, peeled and chopped
25g (1oz) butter
25g (1oz) light brown sugar
To serve:
1kg (2lb 4oz) new potatoes
2 tbsp olive oil, plus extra to drizzle
12 plums, halved
500g (1lb 2 oz) purple sprouting broccoli
A knob of butter
1. Preheat your oven to 220°C (fan 200°C), Gas Mark 7. Line a roasting tin with foil, large enough to cover the pork later. Remove the string from the pork, and carefully trim the rind from the joint (*see crackling tip, below). Set aside. Unroll the pork joint and pat dry with kitchen paper. Place in the roasting tin.
2. Mix the salt, pepper, cinnamon, ginger and sugar together in a bowl. Rub all over the pork and put it in the oven for 30 minutes so the pork brown beautifully. Reduce the oven to 150°C (fan 130°C), Gas Mark 2. Pour 300ml (1/2 pint) hot water into the foil, then wrap the foil around the joint and seal tightly.
NB: Instead of wrapping in foil, I used a cast iron dish with a lid – I covered the pork with foil, then more foil on the top of the pan placing the lid on top of that to seal it in.
Cook for at least 5 hours or until tender. (Your cooked pork joint will eventually be sitting in a vat of liquid – mostly fat!)
3. Increase the oven to 220°C (fan 200°C), Gas Mark 7. Uncover the pork then put it back in the oven to crisp for 10 minutes. Take it out of the oven, cover with foil and rest for 30 minutes. Then shred with two forks.
NB: There are a lot of timings to get right for serving the finished meal. Read through the below, and work back from your intended serving time.
4. At least 40 minutes before the pork is ready, parboil the potatoes. Drain well. Drizzle the olive oil into a roasting tin, then add the potatoes and season well. Roast for the remaining time the pork is in the oven, first on the low temperature then on the high temperature until they’re golden.
5. For the compote, put all the ingredients into a pan with 25ml (1oz) water, cover with a lid and bring to a simmer. Turn the heat down low and cook for around 5 minutes until the fruit has cooked down and softened. Season with a pinch of salt and give everything a good stir.
6. Brush the plum halves with oil and griddle the cut-side only.
7. Steam the broccoli until just tender, drain then toss with butter and season.
8. Serve the pork, potatoes, griddled plums, buttered broccoli with the compote.
*For the crackling
Place the rind in a shallow roasting tin and pour over boiling water. Leave for a few minutes, then pour off the water and pat dry with kitchen paper. Rub with a little oil and salt. Cook in a hot oven for 30 or so minutes until crackled. Roughly chop the crackling into small pieces to serve.
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For this and more slow cooked pulled pork recipes, please head to the Love Pork website. This is a sponsored post.
The brilliant Rory’s Story Cubes: Batman is a set of 9 custom six-sided dice, with 54 Batman icons, that you roll out and make up a story with.
I love the stories my daughter comes up with. Whether it’s Princess Leia and Cinderella teaming up to kill Jabba the Hutt (turns out Jabba was ‘The Prince’), or Peppa Pig and Mog’s misadventures in looking after George (“Don’t feed him ham!”), her inventiveness and ability to remix story elements into a brand new (and engaging) narratives always makes me smile.
We’ve discovered great way to stimulate this creativity with a deceptively simple product called Rory’s Story Cubes. We were shown them at the recent London Toy Fair, and fell in love with them straight away.
While there are a number of themes and formats to choose from, knowing our love of superheroes we were presented with the Batman cubes. These are a set of nine dice, with each face featuring a different storytelling element from Batman and action storytelling, for a total 54 different icons from characters, vehicles, locales, actions, and more.
The ‘rules’ (more on that later) are that you roll out the dice, and whatever 9 icons land face up you re-order and use as story prompts. I’ll leave the math up to others, but apparently this means there are over a MILLION story combinations.
This is similar to a long running game my daughter likes to do with our Star Wars Top Trumps, where she pulls a selection of cards out, puts them in an order, and then asks me to make up a story about them.
There are a number of nice elements about these cubes. They are solidly made, with the simple line drawn icons embossed in black on the white die; The tactile nature of handling and rolling the die add a nice physical element to the storytelling process; It encourages social interaction – whether telling one or more people the story, or taking turns in a group to add to it; and these dice use Batman iconography very well (mostly).
In terms of female characters while there is no Batgirl (boo!) there is Catwoman and Harley Quinn (yay!), as well as a gallery of Gotham icons including Commissioner Gordon, other villains including Joker, Two-Face, and Riddler, and Batman iconography such as the Batmobile, Bat signal, Batarang, Batwing, etc.
Bat sadly, while there is Robin, there is no actual Batman image (other than his fist). While I guess the assumption is that it is an unnecessary story element to include – a Batman story must have Batman in it anyway – it is a shame an image of the dark knight is missing.
My daughter is familiar with Batman via the 60s TV show and the 90s animated series, so she is well versed in the world of Batman. I applaud anything that encourages children to engage with the media they are exposed to. This takes the passive consumption of Batman stories, and inspires children to interact and create. The stated age is 6+, but my 4-year-old daughter is using these well, and I reckon she would have done so when she was 3 too. She loves us playing with them together, but is also happy sitting there alone coming up with stories.
While we have the Batman cubes, there are a number of different sets available either now or soon – including Doctor Who, Looney Tunes, Moomins, and Scooby-Doo! There are also the original non-licensed sets with themes including Action, Voyages, and many more.
The set also comes with a handy fold-out guide to all the icons, as well as a useful little plastic box to store/carry the cubes in.
A note on the ‘rules’ – there are no rules. These cubes are there to fire creativity, and while they have been designed with particular formats of play in mind, any way they promote creativity is encouraged.
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Disclosure: We were given these Rory’s Story Cubes: Batman free of charge for the purposes of this review.
These Batman Unlimited toys are from Mattel, and feature Batman characters with updated futuristic looks and gadgets. The first thing I noticed were the key differences to the classic depiction of the three characters.
Batman and Robin look broadly similar to what we’re used to, but their outfits are more like hi-tech armour than a costume. Robin also has a hood, which makes him appear more mysterious – just like Batman.
But appropriately, the weirdest one was the Joker. His look has been completely revamped from the purple suit wearing clown to become a muscled up thug with a crew cut and a sash of bullets draped over him. While he is clearly the Joker – with his green hair, white face, red lips, and magical yellow toothed grin – it took my daughter a while to feel confident in identifying it was him.
These are pretty sturdy looking figures, with Batman & Robin’s fabric & vinyl capes being the only potential weak link. Anatomically, it’s fair to say these are somewhat stylised. For instance, they have lower legs that are 2-3 times longer than their thighs.
While they offer 8 points of articulation (POA), additional movement in the legs would’ve been welcome – there’s no knee joint for instance, which really limits how these figures can be posed by a child. They can’t even sit properly. My daughter sometimes likes her figures to have a rest, enjoys a tea party, or go to the loo!
Actually, The Joker isn’t the weirdest of these Batman Unlimited Toys in this set. It also includes what appears to be a Robot Batdog. It has no limb or head movement. It does have a removable tail, which the characters can also hold as some kind of sword/club/furry duster. Robo-batdog (as we call it) isn’t even named on the packaging. It feels like this part of the set is a toy they had left over from another line.
My daughter even asked “What is that dog doing there?”. Not knowing how to answer, a visit to BatmanUnlimited.com (as the packaging suggests) indicates it may be one of The Penguin’s robotic Cyber Animals. Who knows? Anyway, while it feels out of place in this set, and is little more than an immovable toy dog, it does look kind of cool.
Overall, my daughter loves that these figures are of Batman, Robin, and The Joker, and they are funky and colourfully designed. But I feel the lack of movement in the legs in particular will be a big drawback for her long term, as she is unable to pose them in a way that she does other figures of this size (about 15 cm high). And the inclusion of robo-batdog is a mystery worthy of investigation by the Batman.
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UPDATE: Batman Unlimited Toys Vehicles
Turns out the Batman figure fits a random Bat Jet I bought my daughter second hand for 80p, so there’s life in these figures yet.
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Disclosure: We received these Batman Unlimited toys as part of the Toys R Us Toyologist programme. They send us toys in exchange for honest reviews. You can read the original post here.
When is the right time to begin sex education for kids to begin?
We all know how babies are made, right? When a woman is ready to become a mother, a Stork flies down and delivers a new baby to the family.
Peddling this myth to my daughter has never occurred to me, and with the number of pregnant women we see in everyday life, I have no idea how you’d hide the reality of where babies come from – or why you’d want to do so in the first place. Of course, this can lead to the trickier follow up question of ‘How did the baby get in there?”
My parents never really spoke to me about sex. The one time my mother tried, I was 14 and she was driving me home from school, and started awkwardly talking about how I shouldn’t worry if I found a white mess in my pants (I think she was hinting at wet dreams). I shut that conversation down as soon as I realised.
Sex education in school had started when I was 11, but even by then, playground innuendo had already established itself, and sex was something secretive and naughty to giggle at.
Given these childhood experiences, as a parent I feel I sex education for kids should begin early. But in the UK, the Conservative government has refused to make Sex & Relationship Education (SRE) statutory in schools. Under the national curriculum, SRE is compulsory from age 11 – prior to that it is up to individual heads whether to teach sex education in schools or not.
In this digital age, 11 is far too late to leave sex education for kids. So if we want to make sure our kids are learning about sex earlier – before being exposed to playground gossip or the first kid who realises how easy it is to access porn – it’s probably up to us parents.
My first sex talk with my daughter happened far earlier than anticipated. When she was 3-years-old, she asked about a pregnant friend of ours, when she asked the question – ‘But how did the baby get in her belly?’. I explained that a seed from the daddy joins and egg from the mummy, which grows into a baby. “But how does the seed get in there?”
Momentarily pondering the directness of this question, and my mantra of never knowingly lying to my daughter, I rather aptly though ‘Fuck it’, and I told her. So we had our very first sex talk, involving men and women, and how they use their genitalia to reproduce. It was all pretty matter of fact, and having her curiosity satisfied, the conversation ended.
There was of course lots missing from our first sex education talk. Reproduction and sex are two different things. Reproduction regularly happens artificially, and many children are conceived this way. Being a parent isn’t necessarily about your biological relationship to the child.
Other key aspects I feel need to be addressed include same sex relationships, the importance of safe sex, issues around consent, and simply the pleasure of sexuality.
We haven’t specifically gone into those aspects yet, but the ideas behind them have. Kids understand pretty well the pleasure of doing something because you enjoy it. General hygiene is often discussed and the need to prevent the spread of germs and viruses.
Recently, my daughter professed she wanted to marry her best girl friend when she grows up. I said that’s fine as long as her friend wants to as well – covering same sex relationships and consent in one go.
To answer the question posed in the title of this post, I guess the answer is when they are ready. And perhaps that is when your child asks. I’m happy for this topic to remain child led for now. If she asks questions, we’ll answer them. But there are looming deadlines. There is clearly a need for children to know before they hit puberty, and that isn’t as far away as we might think.
But even sooner than that, all it takes is another child with internet access to show yours explicit material. It’s in no one’s best interests for that to be your child’s first sexual experience. I feel the sooner we educate our kids about sex the better, before some kid with a smartphone gets there first.
When did you talk to your child about sex? Was it too soon or do you wish you waited? Or what age do you think you will talk to them about sex – if at all? When should sex education for kids begin? Please comment below.
