Hands

I recently bought some preloved cast iron pans, at a bargain price, in a local charity shop.  I absolutely love them and cannot believe I haven't tried this type of pan before.  They are great for children to use as they are nearly impossible to knock over sat on a hob, so they don't require being held whilst stirring something that is not easy to do when you are little.  They have a handy spout to make pouring the contents easier, if you are right handed.

Would you consider yourself to be right handed to left handed?  I never know how to answer this question.  Usually it is the hand you write with, in my case my right, that drives the answer and for most people this is the hand that they do everything else with, not me.  I might write right handed and use a knife, scissors and needles but everything else I do left handed.  So pouring the contents of a pan with your left hand means tipping it the 'wrong' way and spilling most of what you are trying to pour, I get the same result trying to do it with my right hand........

We had a telephone when I was a child that was mounted on the wall, it had a long curly cable connecting the handset to the part on the wall.  My parents always knew when I had been on the phone as, despite having a left handed brother he never used the phone, you could tell from how the handset had been out down whether it was done so by the left or right hand.  I never had that problem that my colleagues had at work of having to hold your phone between you ear and shoulder to free up your hand to write.

I can write very legibly and fairly fast with my left hand, if I broke my right hand I would be ok but I am not planning on doing that anytime soon.  I have always wondered whether I should have been a left handed writer like my brother.  It is possible as a parent to influence which hand your child writes with and I have often wondered, along with my father, whether this is what happened to me especially as I have a left handed sibling.  As a mother myself I have been very conscious of not trying to influence my own children.  My eldest showed a dominance for his right hand from around the age of five, my youngest who will turn five at the end of this month is still not showing a dominance.  I  thought long and hard about sending my youngest to school or to home educate, despite my eldest being home educated, but if there is one reason that I am glad I didn't I would pick this.  If she had been sent to school she is most likely to have become a right handed writer as we live in a world dominated by right handed people, but she has been given the time to discover this at her own pace.

But perhaps I am just ambidextrous, I was always going to do things with both hands, if you google ambidextrous test you can find out for yourself what you you are.  I am hopeless at telling my left from my right I have to really think about and even then usually get it wrong.  On the rare occasions I have set foot in an exercise class I am the one crashing in to the person next to them.  I don't have a problem with this but it's funny how so many people do and furthermore don't get it or think I can learn it or really should have done by now.  Nope it isn't going to happen, I am never going to know my left from my right its part of who I am along with the long list of things I can competently do left handed.

What about you?  Hopeless with right and left?  Which hand dominates?

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Those are my and the children's hands in the picture.  My children do not have enormous hands, mine are just small!