When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race

What I'm reading now: When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race

When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race



Synopsis from Barnes & Noble:

During the worst years of official racism in South Africa, the story of one young girl gripped the nation and came to symbolize the injustice, corruption, and arbitrary nature of apartheid. Born in 1955 to a pro-apartheid Afrikaner couple, Sandra Laing was officially registered and raised as a white child. But when she was sent to a boarding school for whites, she was mercilessly persecuted because of her dark skin and frizzy hair. Her parents attributed Sandra’s appearance to an interracial union far back in history; they swore Sandra was their child. Their neighbors, however, thought Mrs. Laing had committed adultery with a black man. The family was shunned. And when Sandra was ten, she was removed from school by the police and reclassified as “coloured.”

As a teenager, Sandra eloped with a black man, and her parents disowned her. The young woman, who had only known the privileged world of the whites, chose to begin again in a poor, rural, all-black township, where life was a desperate, day-to-day struggle against poverty, illness, and a legal system designed to enslave.

I also just finished rereading the Twilight series in pre-movie anticipation and I have to say, as much as I loved reading the series, if you are a human who finds herself in a relationship like Edward and Bellas, SEEK HELP. All romance aside, your boyfriend should not be treating you like an adorable moron and holding you hostage, okay? Some other, more thoughtful, critiques here in an amazon review and here in Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to Read Stephenie Meyer.

Great News for Midwifery in Alberta!

It's taken about 25 years of labour pains, but Alberta moms who want to use a midwife during childbirth will soon have the process covered by their provincial health insurance.

Facing questions on the subject from all three parties in the legislature, Health Minister Ron Liepert said midwifery will play an important role in the new prescription for the health system he's charged with unveiling over the next nine months.

"What we want to do is ensure that we integrate midwifery services into our delivery model, that it becomes no cost to the patient. But we want to do that in a way that fits our total health delivery system," said Liepert.

The change of direction will likely shock the midwifery industry, which has had trouble surviving in Alberta, the last province to not cover the service. Other jurisdictions began doing so because years of studies have shown midwife births to be safe and much cheaper to the system than using a doctor.

In fact, former NDP MLA Ray Martin, defeated in the recent provincial election, once commented to Sun Media that he had spent 25 years trying to get it covered.

And it was that type of pressure that brought the issue to the fore again this week. Commenting on Monday being the International Day of the Midwife, Alberta Liberal House Leader Laurie Blakeman seemed aghast that Alberta still didn't cover the procedure.

"We have decreasing capacity in the obstetrics field, we have increased demand with a surge in babies being born, but the government has dithered and studied and fought for almost 20 years, and no core funding for midwifery," she said.

"Let's remember that childbirth is not a disease. It is not poor health. It is a natural process. Most births are uncomplicated and do not require medical intervention."

Rookie NDP MLA Rachel Notley called it a blatantly "two-tiered, only the rich can choose model of health-care services for women and their babies."

That's absurd, said Liepert. "I acknowledge that we need to do a better job of integrating it into the system but unlike our friends in the opposition we're going to do this in an orderly manner, rather than just making a decision on the spot."

You can read the article here.

Twilight Trailer

Twilight in HD


I'll admit it. I'm excited.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is out in November too, so I'm already ready for the holiday movies.

Space Shirts

My lovely friend A sent me some sublime stitching patterns and I put them to good use. The bottom t-shirt was for Blackbird Jr and the top one was for a friend who turned 3 years old. Blackbird Jr has made me promise to make him a yellow rocketship one as well though.





The robot originally had blank eyes and a straight mouth but Blackbird Jr proclaimed it "too scary" so I made him a bit friendlier-looking.

Research shows husbands create an extra seven hours a week of housework for wives.

Original text found here.

Husbands create an extra seven hours a week of housework for wives, according to a new study. But wives save husbands from about an hour of housework a week.

Based on a representative sample of all U.S. families, the study of housework trends was released April 3 by the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as part of the world's longest running study on income dynamics.

"There's still a significant reallocation of labor that occurs at marriage," says economist Frank Stafford, who directs the study. "Men tend to work more outside the home, while women take on more of the household labor. Certainly there are all kinds of individual differences here, but in general, this is what happens after marriage."

Conducted since 1968 by the university's Institute for Social Research, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It's a long-term, nationally representative study that collects data on the economic, health and social behavior of the same, nearly 8,000 U.S. families year after year.

"The PSID is the only instrument that lets us look at income mobility, people moving in and out of poverty, across three generations," says Dan Newlon, project manager for NSF. "The data allows us to look at the mid- to long-term socioeconomics of household dynamics."

Based on 2005 data, which have been compared to those from national time diaries, the research shows women, of all ages with no children, on average do 10 hours of housework a week before marriage and 17 hours of housework a week after marriage. Men of all ages with no children, on the other hand, do eight hours before marriage and seven hours afterwards.

"The situation gets worse for women when they have children," says Stafford.

Married women with more than three kids recorded an average of about 28 hours of housework a week, while married men with more than three kids logged only about 10 hours of housework a week.

According to the study, housework was defined as "core chores," or routine housework that people generally do not enjoy doing such as washing dishes, laundry, vacuuming floors and dusting.

"Routine housework, like cooking dinner or making beds, was captured in diaries, the primary tool used for the study of time allocation," says Stafford. Researchers supplemented the diaries with data from questionnaires asking both men and women to recall how much time they spent on basic chores in an average week.

Other activities such as home repairs, mowing the lawn, and shoveling snow were not in the study. "Items such as gardening are usually viewed as more enjoyable; the focus here is on core housework," says Stafford.

He says the fact that people generally do not enjoy core housework may explain the reason for so-called 'chore wars' between men and women. It may also explain the long steady decline in total core housework per week accomplished by both sexes.

Overall, U.S. women do considerably less housework today than in 1976, while the amount of housework men do has increased. In 1976, women did an average of 26 hours of housework a week, compared with about 17 hours in 2005. Men did about six hours of housework a week in 1976, compared with about 13 hours in 2005.

Single women, in 2005, who were in their 20s and 30s, did the least housework--about 12 hours a week on average, while married women in their 60s and 70s did the most--about 21 hours a week. The pattern for men was different. Older men did more housework than younger men, but single men did more in all age groups than married men.

"There has been an extraordinary increase in the number of women working outside the home over the last 30 years," says Newlon. "This study shows with men and women working, men still lag women in housework."
-- Bobbie Mixon, National Science Foundation


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A bit flawed, as most Canadians would vehemently deny that snow shoveling is a chore they enjoy, and it doesn't appear to take into account how many hours the wife works out of the home compared to the husband, but still interesting and unsurprising.

Starting to Get Ready for It

Anyone else thinking about camping already?

Crafting Catch Up

A bunch of craft stuff I've done recently.

Two more pink jumpers. I was playing with increasing the pattern size by hand.





Another Rabbit Moon embroidery, this one with pink flowers and details.





Sunhats and Pajamas










I also did an embroidery piece last weekend for a craft swap but forgot to take photos before I mailed it off.

By the way, know what is suck? this is suck:

The worst spring snowstorm in decades continued to wallop Northern Alberta Monday, making the morning commute miserable and forcing road crews to haul out snowplows and graders that have been parked for months.

By the morning rush hour, Edmonton had received about 15 centimetres of wet snow, while areas north and east had received about 25 centimetres. High winds, gusting to 50 km/h, caused whiteouts in many rural areas, and generated wind chills that felt like –20 C.

It *was* Spring here a couple weeks ago and 20 C above. Ugh.