Becoming SuperMommy

Thank Heavens for Little Girls

2012-01-26T17:11:00.000-06:00

Since rediscovering Gigi as a teenager, I've found this song somewhat... disturbing.

It is much more so in the movie- the lead up to the song is Maurice Chevalier ogling mature women, younger women, barely pubescent girls, and then a small child. At which point he breaks into this song.

The meaning is pretty clear. Little girls are awesome, because they turn into sex objects.

But where the line is between "little girls get bigger every day" and "I'd like to hit that" gets blurred more and more and more. I write this now, not just because I recently read and very much enjoyed a post about the ridiculous over sexualization of small children by their own parents, but because an old friend of mine posted a video of a group of seven year olds in a dance competition to facebook.

I know, I'm hormonal and pregnant-crazy right now, but this video GENUINELY upset me.

Take a peek.

God, I wish it wouldn't immediately suggest equally disturbing child dance routines.

Let's skip right past the part where we talk about how impressive it is that all of these girls are such good dancers. Because yes, they perform very well. Let's skip past the part where lip-synching to the inappropriate lyrics is the problem we want to talk about. ("Pull me into your arms, say I'm the one you OWN?" Sorry, I said we'd skip that bit...)

Let's just talk about what we're telling these girls about the value of female sexuality. Because that's a puzzler, right there.

On the one hand, this is a song that, don't ask me why, is frequently touted as an anthem of modern feminism. This song is, in fact, about using your sexuality to get back at a man who didn't marry you in order to validate you sexuality. And to a parent that didn't actually bother to actually listen to the song, you might assume that this girl-power kind of mega-hit might be a good thing for your seven year olds to dance to.

But who the hell approved those moves?

And who on EARTH justified those costumes? Because what they're wearing is basically the same thing that this model is showing off for Frederick's of Hollywood. I found this image by going to the Frederick's website, clicking the category "Ultra Sexy," and then downloading one of the first images that popped up. All it's missing are the fishnet stockings.

I suppose I should just be grateful those girls weren't also in garter belts.

It's one thing to have little girls dressed up in lingerie. I get little girls- for seven year old girls, dress up clothess are pretty much dress up clothes. But that isn't what was happening here. This was something different.

This was putting seven year old children into lingerie, having them bump and grind to lyrics about adult men humping them on the dance floor, and then having them perform those actions in front of a screaming crowd.

That is giving little girls a complete message, intentional or not. And that message is, "You are a sex object."

Not, "When you grow up you will be a sex object."

Not, "Your worth will be tied up in your success as a sex object... when you're a grown up."

Maybe I'm old fashioned. Maybe I'm hyper-protective as a mother of small girls. Maybe those children won't hit high school, determined to be the most risque dancer at the Prom, or obsessed with how many boys want to see them with their clothes off.

So, as I asked before, what are these children learning about the VALUE of their sexuality? Because let's be frank, female sexuality is valuable.

Female sexuality is the basis for conflicts world over. Female sexuality is a constant concern for both women and men here, in the developed world, where women enjoy nearly equal rights with men.

It is something that can be used against women by men, and by other women. It is something that our culture tries very hard to get women to use against each other.

"All the Single Ladies" has always bothered me because it insinuates that the only use for female sexuality is to attract a husband. And I have a huge problem with that. It's the flip side of the problem I have with abstinence only education- it ignores an entire world of sexual experience and empowerment.

What this dance routine teaches the girls about the value of their sexuality is that it only has value if it is displayed, and that it already exists. That, despite being seven years old, those girls are sexual beings. And that their sexuality is something to be constantly shown off- proven.

These children are learning that they hold power over adults, adults who scream and swoon and clap and cheer for them, because they are all sexual beings.

And as horrifying as it is, they DO hold that power over adults, because those adults might actually consider the seven year old girls in lingerie to BE sexual beings.

And no seven year old girl, despite how cute she might find Justin Bieber, should hold that kind of sway over somebody who has achieved conscious sexuality. Those are the lessons that validate every Humbert Humbert, every adult who believes that children lead sexual lives and are capable of consenting to sexual acts.

So in some sick way, this dance routine may have empowered those girls to protect themselves from the pedophiles of the world. To disarm the Humberts and reject them as adults, conscious of the sexual nature of their interactions.

But that's about power, not value. And when somebody uses their sexuality as a weapon, they aren't acting as though they value it.

And how can you value your sexuality as an adult, when from the age of seven you used it for petty gain, and without regard to your own real needs and wants. What happens when they attempt to maintain an emotional relationship that involves sex, and cannot separate sex as an expression of love and sex as an expression of power?

CAN they ever learn to see sex as an expression of love? Are they then doomed to use their sexuality as Beyonce encourages, just to make men jealous of each other so that one will eventually "put a ring on it" and then "own" her?

The two moves in the dance routine that bother me the most come at the beginning and at the end. At the beginning, the girls strut with their hands to their chest, as though pushing forward their completely non-existent breasts. It is an acknowledgement that they just are not physically mature enough to properly represent all of the sexuality of their routine.

At the end of the routine, the girls shake their hips in a humping motion at the very front edge of the stage, with looks of defiance and anger on their faces.

They seem to be actually taunting the imaginary subject of the song- "THIS is what I'm going to give to somebody else, just to get back at you."

What bothers me the most about that moment is how they must have been coached. What their coach MUST have had to say to them to get the results they wanted. How at least one of those girls had to have asked why they needed to make angry faces. What message that tells them about sex.

What it tells me is that you USE sex to punish people. And that is just plain unhealthy for anyone. No matter how old or young.

But this is their induction into the world of sex. This is their framework. When they do start becoming sexual beings, as adolescents or adults, the world of sex will be to them one of a constant battle for power. Of vindictiveness and ulterior motives and above all, a need for attention.

I don't believe in lying to my children. I won't be telling them that sex is something that only mommies and daddies do, or that it's a magical thing that happens when two people love each other. I plan on telling them the truth, that people does it because it feels good, but that it means MORE than that. And that you should never treat your sexuality as a weapon, or as a burden. That your sexuality is simply a part of who you are, and you don't need to show it off to know it's there... but that you can do what YOU WANT to do with it, that nobody else can or should dictate what you do with it. Even if they're just implying, or pressuring you to do something with it. It's yours, it's your private property. And if it is your wish to display it, you must do so respectfully and consentually. That when you use your sexuality as a weapon, it IS an act of aggression against another human being. That there's a difference between games and an attack. And that whenever you use something beautiful to hurt another person, you damage that thing irreparably.

That's a lesson for boys and girls alike. Regardless of sexual orientation.

But the girls in the above dance routine may never understand that. They may never understand that they have power over their OWN bodies, instead of their bodies simply holding power over others.

I am sad for those girls. I am furious at those girls' parents.

I'm sad for women everywhere, who nobody ever taught to honor and respect and treasure what their bodies can do for THEM, to own their sexuality and take pride in it, and VALUE it.

And, for the love of God, not to impose it in this way on children far too young to understand.

Top Ten Pregnancy Offenses

2012-01-25T15:39:00.001-06:00

This being my second time down the pregnancy trail, I've learned a great deal about the power of selective memory.

That, and how drastically my own pregnancies can differ from those of other women.

This pregnancy, my SPD and my heartburn are MUCH better than last time around. But I am SO MUCH MORE TIRED! This time, I've had more friends go through pregnancy, and I've been up close and personal with a lot of other women dealing with the kind of crap that pregnant ladies have to go through.

Every pregnancy is different, even for a single person who gets pregnant on different occasions.

But there are some universal pregnancy facts- nay, warnings. There are things that, no matter what, you should never ever ever say or do to pregnant women. And here, for your enjoyment and in no particular order, are the worst of them.

"You look great!"

1. Do not comment on a pregnant woman's size. Period. No, "Oh, you're barely showing!" Or, "You're so big!" Or God help you, "Are you having twins?!?" Nine times out of ten, regardless of your intention, you're going to be being an ass. I cannot STAND it when people tell me I'm barely showing. Yes, I know to you it looks like there's not much bump there, but it IS- it's just cleverly camouflaged by my rapidly swelling breasts. Yet another thing I do not need you to comment on. So while I merely look like I've put on a bunch of weight everywhere, I haven't. It's all right in the front- in those female parts that get bigger when there's a baby on board. There is, in fact, only one thing you should EVER say to a pregnant woman about her appearance. "You look great." Whether or not it's true. Whether or not you have any idea what she looked like before. "You look great," or a similar variation thereof, is ALWAYS a compliment. But it is more than a compliment, it is also a validation that despite probably being exhausted and probably having vomited recently and probably feeling entirely un-cute in her pregnancy- and not necessarily MATERNITY- clothing, she looks great. So that is what you say. Period.

2. Never touch without being first invited to do so. There are some implicit invitations. If you are invited to the baby shower, and you are AT the baby shower, you may touch the belly. It is relevant. If you are doctor who is likely to be attending the birth of the baby inside of the belly, you may go ahead and touch the belly. If you are absolutely anybody else- you MUST get permission before attempting to touch the belly. Lucky me, this was never a concern. No strangers ever ran up to rub my belly. Perhaps this was because I always looked so angry and irritable and ready to eat lone strangers that they avoided me. And if they had put a hand on me without my permission, they would have lost it. No matter how well you know a pregnant lady, ASK before you touch the belly.

3. Never make a negative comment about a name. No matter how dreadful you think it is. It is just not any of your business what somebody names their child- so unless you have something nice to say you just keep it to yourself. I could be planning on naming my child Wadsworth Daffodil Bumbledum, and you have no business telling me that it is in any way a bad idea. MY child, MY reasons, MY preferences. Yours just plain do not matter. Do not tell me that my preferences for names are to "ethnic." I'M ethnic. Do not tell me that my choices for names are too old-fashioned. They are probably the names of deceased loved ones, who thankfully, died in their old age. Of COURSE they're old fashioned. Do not tell me that you once knew somebody by that name and they were a big jerk. I forgot, everybody named Caitlin or Matthew is an enormous d-bag. I'll change my selection immediately to suit you. Do not tell me that my child's name is "weird," I promise you that I think there are weirder names out there. Do not tell me I should change the spelling, or use a similar name from a different language. I have not just pulled a name out of a hat. I have put thought into this, and you are criticizing something with a lot of personal meaning and import. And for the love of all that is decent, do not tell me that my other child/ren have beautiful names, and it would be a shame for only one to have a horrid ugly name. Not. your. place.

4. Do not make fun of pregnant ladies for their flatulence, frequent urination, heartburn, or acne. If the pregnant lady in question is a friend of yours, and SHE makes fun of HERSELF, that is one thing. But do not instigate these jokes. She is undoubtedly sensitive about how awkward it is to be pregnant. Like being a teenager. Only pregnant. And without the stamina. Give her a break.

5. Do not smile knowingly while she complains about how miserable she is. If she is telling you that she is in pain, or that she is uncomfortable, or that she is unhappy, don't patronize her and tell her to enjoy herself. She knows that pregnancy is temporary. She also knows that she is NOT ENJOYING IT. That is precisely what she is telling you. If she tells you that she is having a bad time, SYMPATHIZE, tell her that when it's all over it will so worth it, and then move on. Don't act like you know better than she does how "precious" this time is. She knows. She also knows that her heartburn is peeling the enamel off of her teeth and that she has stretch marks that will forever keep her out of a bikini. She's an adult, not a kid who didn't get the flavor ice cream she wanted. Wipe that smirk off your face and tell her she looks great.

6. Don't make blanket statements about the possible appearance of her baby. No, "Oh, wouldn't it be a shame if it had your hair," or, "If it has it's grandma's nose, it better be a boy." First of all, there is no doubt she has her own preferences in this department. She probably has all sorts of her own issues with her appearance, and she doesn't need you reinforcing them. Second of all, nobody can control what the baby will look like. And even if the baby comes out with six eyes, nine legs, ambiguous genitalia on both of its feet and an extra mouth in the middle of its stomach, you will be obligated to tell the parents how cute it is. And that will be much harder if you have to eat your words. Pretend it's already here, and however it looks is adorable.

7. Do not smirk at the other children of the pregnant lady in question, and remark, "Looks like you're going to have your hands full!" As anybody with ONE child knows, she's already got her hands full. As any woman pregnant with her first child knows, she is about to have full hands as well. Every woman knows that a baby is a lot of work, none better than a woman who has had a few already. And reminding her that things are about to get much more complicated for her family- which as you stand there smirking already consists of several children who are covering themselves in their lunches and running amok in the grocery store- is just not nice. If you must say anything, tell her that it seems she really has a handle on her incredibly well behaved children, and the next one will be a breeze. Lie, if you must.

8. Do not criticize her parenting choices when it comes to the new baby. If she's having it at home, don't tell her that she's stupid. If she's planning to formula feed, don't tell her she's abusive. If she's planning on starting it in music classes when it's four months old, don't tell her that she's crazy. No matter how much you disagree with her, do not tell her that she is doing the whole parenting thing wrong. We all go into this blind. If she's trying to do anything genuinely nuts, she'll figure it out soon enough. And if not, you're just making things harder for her by criticizing her in advance. Lay off.

9. Never regale her with tales of births gone wrong. She doesn't need to hear all about your friend's aunt who died because she couldn't deliver the placenta, or your mother's cousin's great-niece, who got septic from delivery and lost three of her limbs, or your dentist's brother's daughter-in-law who's baby got stuck in the birth canal and is now blind and has some sort of palsy. I promise you, she already has enough birth related anxiety. If there is ANYTHING AT ALL that she is actually in danger of suffering, her medical provider and personal medical history will have warned her. You do not need to make birth terrifying. For most pregnant women, it already is. Just keep your mouth shut.

10. Do not ask her when she'll be getting pregnant again. Just let her get through this one, and when she's ready to talk about starting the whole magical show all over again, she'll let you know. If she wants to. Because once again, this is just not any of your business.

Now, me and all the other pregnant ladies can go crawl back under our rocks.

Pregnant- again.

Potty Training the Becoming SuperMommy Way

2012-01-24T11:38:00.002-06:00

Warning: This post is all about poo and pee.

"Potty Time with Abby" and "Everyone Poops"

It finally happened. The morning sickness and fatigue mostly passed, the anxieties over travel and the holidays faded, and I buckled down.

It was time to *really* potty train my children.

Almost a year ago, I made the same decision. They were walking, they were kind of sort of talking, and they were holding in their bodily functions until massive outpourings occurred. The time seemed ripe.

We potty trained for a week. During that week, both girls peed in the potty. A few times.

And then stuff started happening again, and we sort of gave it up. But the potties have remained out, objects of occasional curiosity, playtime, or even inspiration.

So twelve days ago, I took the plunge. I called the diaper service and told them to cut our diaper order by two thirds. I bought a bag of conversation hearts (the girls love hearts and they love candy) as bribes and rewards, and I got a new Swiffer.

The time was nigh.

Who wouldn't void their bladder for one of these?

On MLK Day, rather than work to benefit my neighborhood, country, or planet, I undertook the great community service of potty training my children. (Yeah, that's a total cop out. I was just happy to have a whole day where I was free to stay home.)

How does potty training work? I have no idea. I have no clue how most people do this. I only know what made the most sense to me, and that was why I had put it off so long. I figured that the best way, perhaps the only way, to potty train my children was to keep them naked.

That way, if they peed or pooed, they would KNOW IT. That way, if I said, "Run to the potty! Go go go go go!" They wouldn't need to worry about the whole pants issue. That way, they would figure out pretty darn quick how many advantages there are to going in the potty, rather than in a diaper. Or... you know... on the floor.

Our first morning was utter chaos. We marched straight away to the bathroom. For nearly an hour, we sat. Me on a stool, the girls on their potties. We sat, we read an entire library of potty-themed books, and we drank chocolate milk while we waited.

Eventually, both children peed in the potty.

SUCCESS! thought I.

I relocated the children to their highchairs-cushions removed and replaced with Sham-Wows- to *finally* eat breakfast.

SI finished the meal by declaring in a state of panic that she needed a clean diaper. I plopped her onto the floor and told her to go to the potty, now! And I checked the disaster that she must have left in her chair.

The cause for much celebration.

There was none.

As I was confusedly marveling at the entirely mundane sight of a dry Sham-Wow, SI returned from the bathroom, ecstatic.

"Mommy! I make yellow poo!"

"...what?"

"I make yellow poo!"

"...you did what?????"

I followed her into the bathroom, and lo and behold, my child had gone to the potty.

There was much celebration. Hugs. High fives everywhere. Candy hearts. A ticker tape parade. Skywriting. It was epic.

DD wanted in on this. She sat on the potty. For what felt like the rest of the morning, she sat. When I finally freed her, she immediately peed on the floor. And burst into tears.

I tried to tell her that it was okay, and that mistakes happen, and that was okay because learning to use the potty takes time. SI promptly used the potty again, and began her refrain of, "I make yellow poo!"

DD rallied to congratulate SI, and eventually calmed down.

And then she peed on the floor again.

SI began to take outrageous delight in announcing, "Debbah poo on the floor!"

This whole pee/poo distinction obviously needed some work. But every time SI mentioned it, DD would begin to cry again.

It was not quite time for lunch. I had planned on skipping lunch, opting instead for a constant availability of beverages and salty snacks, mostly goldfish crackers. They weren't hungry. And just as I was wondering if, without lunch, it might be nap time, SI ran away. A few moments later, she came back into the room, whining as though something very upsetting had happened. My heart dropped. "What's wrong? Did you have an accident?" She nodded and whined, and grabbed my hand to lead me to... the bathroom.

Where sitting in her potty was a gigantic turd.

Paper on the floor- good for puppies and toddlers.

I was beyond ecstatic. I threw her in the air, hugged her, high fived, everything I could think of, while I chanted, "You pooed in the potty! You pooed in the potty!"

...parenting is so dignified.

Once SI figured out that the thing that had just happened to her was not, in fact, a sign that her ability to make "yellow poo" had somehow transformed into something sinister, she joined me in my jubilation.

DD promptly peed on the floor again, setting off her next bout of woe and misery.

By the time the day had ended, SI had one- just one- accident outside of the potty. And it was in her chair. DD had four, but managed to pee into the potty twice.

And so it continued for another three days. SI peeing and pooing in the potty like she'd been doing it forever, and DD peeing over and over on the floor. Each time, she obviously felt humiliated and wronged, and at the same time very, very guilty.

Dear readers, I never- NEVER- told her that it was a bad thing to pee on the floor. Never. I tried and tried to tell her that it was okay. That we all make mistakes. That it would get easier, and that she was learning.

She didn't believe me.

I started putting big sheets of newsprint on the floor. I figure, hey, it works with puppies! It was SO MUCH EASIER to clean up those messes when they were already being absorbed, and the girls were happy to spend all day playing with crayon on the "big paper." It was, I feel, a stroke of potty training genius. I still wish I had considered how many pairs of socks we might go through in this process, though. It turns out, a lot.

And then the turnaround day came. Only one accident, and halfway through, she stopped, ran to the potty, and sat down.

It's hard to be grateful for steps like that when it means you have to wash the hallway rug, but still.

This child is seriously pleased with herself.

And since then? No accidents. None.

She still won't just up and go to the potty in the middle of playing. She still needs to be reminded, and occasionally argued with in order to make her stop playing with crayons and sit down on the potty for a while. But once she's there, she knows what to do. It takes her a little time, but she does it. And then she gets SO EXCITED! She gets SO PROUD! She pumps her little fists in the air, high fives everyone a hundred times, and then demands a treat.

It's a nice change.

Tomorrow, we switch to training pants. An obstacle between the bodily functions and the potty.

But after training pants come underwear, and after underwear? My children get to wear clothes again. They are SO EXCITED about underpants, you'd think I bought them some made of gold.

We're still using diapers at nap time and at night, and those are the ONLY times that DD will poo. She must be so backed up! I don't know how long it's going to take to get through that, but I'm confident that it won't be too long. Perhaps we timed potty training with a growth spurt- she never really poops a lot during a growth spurt.

And me? My pregnant legs are KILLING me! All those hours, crouched on a stool in the bathroom. The pregnancy leg cramps have been a problem. And what with the constant availability of salty (and, sadly, fatty) snacks all over the house, I have been eating badly. My poor gall bladder is furious.

But I haven't had to change more than six diapers a day in over a week.

It's amazing.

Hopefully, we'll be out of diapers entirely, or at least during the whole day, before Baby X gets here. The girls have almost six months to get good at this, so I'm pretty confident.

I've never had only one child in diapers. I wonder what that's like...

A note: I had been considering writing this post all week, as it was happening, but I just couldn't decide about whether or not putting pantsless pictures of my kids on the internet was a good idea. So... more pictures once we're in training pants or underpants. Until then, cute naked butt pictures are staying offline and family-only. I may dedicate an entire wall to pictures of the girls with no pants.

Probably when they're about 15. :)

On Losing My Husband's Grandfather

2012-01-23T16:23:00.000-06:00

DeLloyd with his great granddaughters

On Friday morning, my husband's grandfather passed away at 77 years old.

It was remarkably unexpected. He had been in ill health, but through several surgeries had been improving greatly. Thanks to the doctors at the Mayo Clinic, he had saved his legs and, it seemed, his heart from the ravages of diabetes. However, there was "hibernating" tissue in his heart that put him at very high risk for cardiac arrest, or rather, if he HAD a heart attack he was not likely to survive it. And so the plan was made to schedule him for a surgery to reawaken the hibernating tissue.

It wan't open heart surgery, it was as non-invasive as heart surgery gets.

They put him under anesthesia and inserted the catheters with their scopes for performing the surgery, but before they could even begin the procedure his blood pressure tanked, and his heart stopped beating.

The entire family is in shock.

It's not just that it is hard to lose a loved one. It's that this came during what seemed to many of us to be his recovery. He did not look or, so far as I know, feel ill. However, he let those family members that went with him to his final procedure know that should anything happen to him, he was completely at peace with the outcome of that.

My husband's grandfather was a pastor.

The first time I was to be introduced to him, I must confess that I was terrified. Here I was, the Jewish girlfriend, being introduced to the family patriarch, the Reverend. Although M tried to comfort me with the idea that his family was just having your run-of-the-mill Christmas party, I shouldn't worry about people trying to talk about Jesus to me. When one branch of the family arrived wearing, "Put the Christ back in Christmas" t-shirts, my nerves heightened and I became, if possible, more skeptical and frightened of what might happen.

DeLloyd administering the sheva bruchot

But DeLloyd was never the sort to intimidate, or to behave in any way that might be seen as frightening or imposing. He looked to me like Santa Claus with a Van Dyke beard rather than the full Grizzly Adams. He was kind, he was sweet, and he immediately made me feel welcome and even loved.

I have almost never felt less than welcomed by M's family. As much as I might feel occasionally foreign or exotic to the clan of Minnesota Lutherans, I feel at the same time loved and respected for my differences, as well as for what we share. And I believe that much of that has to do with the family having DeLloyd for a patriarch.

When M and I were married, he didn't officiate our wedding. Rather, he assisted by performing a traditional part of the Jewish ceremony- the sheva bruchot. Our asking him to do this was something that he found not at all odd, or offensive. He was delighted to do it, and did so without any hint of disrespect towards us or our friend who had been ordained online for the purposes of officiating the majority of the ceremony.

In a time and a place when Christianity is frequently used as a platform for condemnation and even hatred, DeLloyd always represented, to me, the very best that any Christian can be. He did not cast the first stone, he seemed to constantly exude an aura of love for everyone around him, he listened and he smiled and he acted as though he knew that God had a plan, albeit mysterious, and that the plan was fundamentally good.

In short, he was a wonderful man. I always looked forward to seeing him. I never again felt anxious about what he might say, or even think.

What I learned about him since our first meeting only proved all of what I initially felt about him. He dedicated most of his life to a school in a downtrodden part of St. Paul. He didn't believe that it was the Lutheran school's job to proselytize the African American and Latino children, to impose any trappings of his own faith into the school. Rather, he believed it was the job of the school to educate them, and hopefully to encourage their own love of learning.

SI, DeLloyd, DD, and DeLloyd's wife Barb

I think the moment that he and I shared that showed me how incredibly sensitive he could be, how incredibly kind and understanding, was the day after M's brain surgery. We had all just learned of M's diagnosis, and had stood quietly by while the doctor explained it to M, still confused and woozy from the painkillers and anesthesia. DeLloyd offered to lead us in a prayer.

He did not directly ask me to join him. He did not ask if it would make me uncomfortable. He simply did what it was that he did- which was to pray for his grandson's recovery. And in that moment, when I could have felt very much isolated from M's family, he mentioned me in his prayer. He asked that God look after not only M, but after me as well- newly engaged to his ill grandson. And he did this without any hint of unhappiness that I did not share his faith- he did it simply with the understanding that I had completely tied my life to M, and that I would be there with him and for him no matter what. I wish I could remember the exact words that he used. They were filled with love, not just for M, and for God, but for me. The future granddaughter-in-law that he had only met a handful of times.

DeLloyd was the first person who, it seemed, really understood how much M and I meant to each other. And I cried. Not because I too prayed that God would protect my future husband, but because here- on this earth- a human being understood what I was going through at that moment. And that human being was DeLloyd.

When I heard the news of his death, I went into shock. It had only just happened, and Grandma called me in tears. She didn't even have to say what had happened. I spent a few moments utterly numb- completely unable to figure out how to do anything. Once the shock wore off, I pushed my grocery cart the fifteen feet towards the flower section of the grocery store that I had *just* stepped into, and I prayed. I closed my eyes, and standing over my empty cart, I recited the Mourner's Kaddish. I tore the hem of my skirt, and I went into the store to pick up my groceries. What should have been a ten minute trip took me an hour and a half. I just kept circling the store, unable to figure out what to do. My impulse was to buy all the food I could think of. Because people have to eat. Because I needed to cook. My impulse was to just sit down with the grapefruit and be as alone with my thoughts as one can be in the produce section of Whole Foods. I bought a ridiculous amount of food. I went home. I baked a cheesecake and a chocolate cream pie, which was on the agenda anyway, I talked myself out of cooking a steak for M, I scrubbed but didn't bake a whole sack of potatoes, and I rearranged the refrigerator.

DeLloyd, SI, Barb, M, and DD

We all mourn differently.

As M's aunts and uncles post facebook messages remembering DeLloyd, I can't help but find myself thinking about all that he, as a man I did not know nearly well enough, had meant to me. And in M's sadness, and their sadness, and my sadness, I find some comforts.

It comforts me that he died completely at peace, knowing that he would go to heaven. We should all be so fortunate.
It comforts me that he would have understood the sadness caused by his death, and known what to say to make everyone feel more at ease in their grief.
And it comforts me to know that his legacy is one of love. That he taught forgiveness and acceptance rather than condemnation and fear. And those lessons are like seeds, that once planted grow and continue to spread.

M has quoted scripture to me that he says describes his grandfather's teachings, and everything I ever knew of DeLloyd echoed those words. "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

The last thing that I can't help thinking of, as I mourn for DeLloyd, are the words of Dumbledore. I know, my obsession with Harry Potter knows no bounds, but there you have it. As Dumbledore said, "Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love."

It is a sentiment that I am sure DeLloyd would share.

Rev. DeLloyd Wippich, 1934-2012

Marijuana as Medicine and Illegal Parenting

2012-01-22T18:50:00.000-06:00

I'm linking up again with Secret Sunday- this time for my End of the Month Controversy!

What feels like an extremely long time ago, I wrote a post about women's health issues and marijuana.

I didn't write that post because I'm some sort of enormous pot head. I didn't write it because I had been looking for an excuse to be stoned my whole pregnancy with the girls. I wrote it because the information I found about cannabis as medicine was utterly fascinating. And learning all about something that could have REALLY helped me get through a very difficult pregnancy made me very, very angry.

Every time a major study has been done to look for all the bad things that marijuana is supposed to do to people, it finds the opposite results. Yet it is still illegal in most of the United States, and in states where it IS legal the judicial branch of the government is doing everything in their power to keep people from having access to it.

I think about hyperemesis gravidarum, which can kill the women suffering through it, and knowing that something as simple as a gram of marijuana a week can practically cure their symptoms makes me so angry.

I think about women at risk for pre-term labor, and the fact that maternal use of marijuana helps a fetus develop its lungs- the last organs to completely form before birth- seems incredibly important and helpful. How many preemies might get out of the NICU sooner, or avoid it all together, is they had properly developed lungs?

And then I think about myself, and all the pregnant women I know.

Women who are unable to keep food down, or who can't maintain their appetites.
Women in constant pain, who are unwilling to take narcotics that have been proven time and time again to be dangerous to a fetus.
Women who are trying to deal with depression and fear, and who can't use traditional anti-depressants or anxiety medications.

And I would like very much for all of us to be able to smoke a bowl and feel better.

Sadly, that isn't going to happen.

Despite the fact that pregnancy lasts for nearly a year, it's just not considered a "chronic condition" like cancer, or MS. So even in states where medical marijuana is legal (and more importantly- SAFE), no doctors will prescribe it to a pregnant woman.

Despite the fact that studies done of childbirth in pro-cannabis cultures show that infants have a higher survival rate when the nursing mother uses cannabis (which stimulates the infant's suck reflex and as a result causes them to nurse more effectively), doctors in medical marijuana states will not prescribe nursing mothers cannabis either.

Still, doctors prescribe drugs to pregnant women that are NOT safe. Antibiotics that can build up immunities in the fetus, pain killers that can cause addiction, and even Tylenol has been proven less that harmless. (For those of you unaware, several years ago research concluded that showed Tylenol use in pregnancy can cause infertility in male fetuses. While that might not be directly dangerous, I would certainly say that being infertile as an adult may have a serious impact on happiness and quality of life- so no thank you, I'd rather not risk it.)

I'm pregnant, and the fact of the matter is that I am just plain dreadful at pregnancy. Between the constant pain of my symphasis pubis dysfunction, the appetite and nausea problems caused by my pregnancy-induced gall bladder disease, and the incredible stress of simply being pregnant while taking care of two toddlers and going to school- not to mention the continual melanoma related anxiety- is enough to make anybody truly miserable.

And having read those studies, all those carefully monitored and vetted and peer reviewed articles, after spending years seeing the news of new things they've learned that THC can do to heal human bodies...

It makes me angry that there is SAFE* medicine that I can't access.

That even if I lived in a state where medical marijuana was available, nobody would give it to me. Although it's probably the safest and healthiest medicine I could possibly use during a pregnancy.

...

I have always believed that people are generally best at governing themselves. That there are some good laws, but that the majority of them are simply in place because groups of people- not people on an individual level- are idiots. Speed limits are set because people feel the need to compete on some absurd level on the highway. Most people by themselves are responsible drivers who know when a car is going as fast as it safely can or should go. In fact, almost every public safety law pretty much conforms to that idea.

But drug use is sort of different. There ARE drugs that people can't self-regulate. And, sadly, some of those are the legal ones. Alcohol is deadly in large doses, tobacco is deadly in much smaller doses, and caffeine has hosts of health problems it can cause or exacerbate. Prescription drugs, so easy to legally obtain, can be even worse. And frequently are.

Among the illegal drugs in this country, there are some that are indisputably bad. There is no single person on this planet that can responsibly use crack cocaine. And the likelihood that somebody can actually self regulate the use of powder cocaine or heroin is borderline laughable.

But marijuana? Marijuana can kill people, yes, if you bludgeon them over the head with a bong or choke them on a plastic baggie. But the plant itself literally cannot. The human body only has THC receptors in places that do not effect critical function- you can only react to THC with parts of your brain that have no relation to your autonomic nervous system, and your uterus.

Seriously, if you haven't you should read my review of Women and Cannabis.

So we continue to lock people away for years and years for using a substance that is, in fact, harmless.

Not just less harmful than alcohol, HARMLESS.

Yes, I would very much like to be stoned through much of my pregnancy. I would like that. I would like to be using a medicine that allowed me to function pain free and relieved my anxiety and restored my appetite.

But if I deliver a baby, and I or the baby test positive for marijuana?

Then I go to jail, not just for having used it, but for child endangerment. And that, as absurd as it is, is something I am simply not going to risk.

I have always said, the things that you do to make yourself a good parent are GOOD PARENTING. But what if those things are illegal? What if in order to get through my day, to take care of my children while M is at work and then at school, I must break the law?

Is it better for me to be a good parent, or to make sure that I am with them rather than in jail?

And what kind of example am I setting, obeying a wrong and arbitrary rule when all fact and evidence and necessity prove that the rule is wrong?

I don't know. I don't know if it's better to be hungry and in pain and angry when my potty training children are peeing on the floor, or to smoke two hits of pot and get down on the floor to clean up those puddles without crying or swearing when the consequences are that severe.

But the laws against marijuana as medicine are bad laws. And the ideas we have about using marijuana as treatment for chronic conditions need to include conditions, like SPD, that last 8-10 months. Or like hyperemesis gravidarum, that lasts the entire duration of a pregnancy.

When studies show that day old mice with their THC receptors blocked die 100% of the time, it's time to consider that maybe we have those THC receptors for a reason.

And when studies show that THC can not only alleviate the symptoms associated with cancer, but can actually CURE cancer, we have to start thinking differently about marijuana as a "drug" versus marijuana as a "medicine."

I would like to treat my medical condition, pregnancy, and the very unpleasant conditions associated with it with this kind of medicine. But I can't.

And that is simply ridiculous.

*The only negative effects found in children of women who smoke during pregnancy were that with VERY heavy users- approximately 30 grams (an ounce) each day- the children of those pregnancies were approx. 30% more likely to develop ADHD.

Two Happy Things

2012-01-19T09:22:00.000-06:00

...and here are two more happy things. :)

Thank you all for the outpouring of support over my last post. As I said, the internet is amazing the sort of connectedness is provides to us as human beings.

In order to ensure that today is a somewhat cheerier day, an anecdote and a dose of adorableness.

The other night, I was having some trouble sleeping. Baby X is most active right after I stop being vertical for the day. Active, but not aggressive. Seriously, this is the most laid back fetus I've ever had the pleasure of gestating.

Regardless, having somebody roll over inside of your uterus in order to find a more comfortable position (I imagine Baby X is sort of like a dog that has to turn around three times before flopping over) is just not something it's easy to ignore in order to sleep. On top of that, I was mentally going over notes for my first test of the semester. M was exhausted. He had worked all day, gone to class, and then to the grocery store. Yet, he tried his hardest to stay awake for a while to keep me company. I was sure he was asleep. In a desperate attempt to get comfortable, I started to roll over. This made him shuffle over a bit as well. Perfectly clearly, he said to me, "I love you so much." I was totally touched- here I was, waking him up in the middle of the night, and all he could think to say was how great he thought I was.

Had he been laying awake? Thinking about how hard our last few years had been, and how much we had depended on each other? Had he been thinking about how exciting the new chapter of our lives with Baby X was going to be? Was he actually laying awake at night because he was just contemplating how important I was to him? I choked up. "I love you. I would do every single day, the whole thing, all over again," I said. Because I meant it. M's response?

"That's a lot of cookbooks."

And then he resumed snoring- for probably the third time, my husband had been talking to me in his sleep.

I nearly woke hip up again by laughing. But it's nice to know that he dreams about being in love with me. :)

And here's your daily dose of adorable:

Yeah, those are videos of my kids singing while on the potty. They're going to be THRILLED about that when they're teenagers, no?

With all the love and cuteness around here, Baby X is going to have a whole lot to live up to. :)

Grief, Condolences, and My Worst Fears

2012-01-18T08:04:00.001-06:00

The internet is a many splendored thing. But for all the good that it does, I believe that none is greater than the incredible connectedness it facilitates between people.

Not just random people, but people you know.

I'm fortunate to have sort of reconnected with most of my old Girl Scout troop, thanks to Facebook. The girls who were my closest friends when I was in third or fourth grade are amazing women these days, and I know this not because we've kept in touch, but because we have the ability to simply check in on each other. We don't need to keep track of addresses, or phone numbers... we don't need to even really communicate.

One of those girls, who filmed a short biopic of William Penn with me for an elementary school class, writes a feminist entertainment blog that I find myself referring my "IRL" friends to on a fairly regular basis (she's The Funny Feminist).

It's not just people I know a long time ago, either. It's friends who have moved away. Or friends who I have moved away from. I know all about the illnesses of children of my friends in Michigan, I get to see birth announcements, and nursing pictures from JS and her brand new baby girl. I can joke with my friend stationed in Texas about Star Trek and Firefly. I can let friends who just live on the opposite side of the city, which is much harder to get to than it sounds, know when I've seen an episode of Yo Gabba Gabba that reminds me of them. With minimal effort, I can maintain contact. Through blogs, through facebook, through twitter, and yes- even through email.

And let's face it, effort is hard to come by a lot of the time. It's hard to muster up the time and energy to sit down and write a letter, address it, and stick it in the mail. It's hard to find the time to have a real telephone conversation. There are a million distractions, between the children and the homework and the housework and keeping up with your family and maintaining the more active friendships you keep with people you get to see on a regular basis. And there are times when you do have a moment, and you just want to stop and BREATHE and not be inundated with any kind of stimuli for a few blessed seconds.

And so the internet allows you to be a better friend, and a worse friend, by letting you get away with a lot of friendly stalking in lieu of more conventional communication.

And I don't know if it's just my generation, or if it's a new standard... but for the most part it seems that we're very happy with this. It's great to know that my art school buddy is doing such amazing things with her photography- particularly her food pictures. It's amazing to hear when a friend I haven't seen in literally a decade finishes a novel. I'm thrilled to know when my distant friends are pregnant. I love seeing what their kids dressed as for Halloween. I feel connected to them, even if I don't let them know every time I think that some development in their lives is fantastic. Or even interesting.

At any rate, I have been particularly lucky to be connected to my friends in this manner for a very long time. I was an early adopter of the stalking-instead-of-communicating friendship style, as the majority of my old friends are techies. System admins, designers, internet entrepreneurs, that's what the bulk of the people I began stalking/keeping distantly in touch with did.

One of those friends, and once upon a time more than a friend, moved to Texas some years ago. Via the wonders of the internet, we sort of followed up on each other for that whole period. When he'd come to visit, occasionally he'd crash on my couch. In fact, it was him that introduced me to almost all of the people I now consider close friends. Sort of. He was much braver about making friends from the internet than I was at that time. He taught me a lot about judging (and not judging) character from a photo and answers to a lot of mundane questions.

I supported him morally, as much as I could, through his custody battles over his son. I held my own little internal celebrations over his successes. When he got married, I was so genuinely happy for him.

When his wife got breast cancer, I offered my support. I knew what that felt like- going through the chemotherapy, the wondering, the fear... M and I had already moved onto our post-chemo, time-to-start-a-family phase of life.

And she got better. And they decided to have a baby.

"Lanes," from XKCD

...and then she got worse.

Despite not having ever met her, or exchanged any words- digital or otherwise- with her, I followed her progress as much as I could. She blogged about it, and I confess I read infrequently. I just couldn't process all of what I was seeing.

I was reading my own worst fears.

This past weekend, Reesa, my old friend's wife and the wife of their eight month old daughter, lost her battle with cancer.

Even typing it has me in tears.

I imagine what my friend is going through. What all of their family is going through. I couldn't help myself vividly imagining that situation over and over throughout my pregnancy with the girls, M finally being through chemo and still... wondering...

And through this pregnancy thus far, it has been a recurring fear again- only for myself. What if I missed some mole somewhere, and there's melanoma growing unchecked?

I never used to fear death, but these days I do. Not because of what it holds for me, but because of what I would have to leave behind. What it would be like for M, raising our children without me. What it would mean for our girls, to grow up without a mom.

It keeps me up at night sometimes, it truly does.

I'm not so self-absorbed that I believe that they wouldn't function at all, I know that they would find a new normal... but what? How?

And dear lord, how much pain would it take to reach that?

My heart breaks for my friend, for his children. I ache to just hug him and tell him how sorry I am and how deeply, how very deeply I wish I could somehow fix it. Somehow. I would do almost anything to make it untrue. Or to make it in any way better.

I remember clearly every single moment that made up M's treatment. I remember the moment, the day after we had gotten engaged, that his coworker called me to tell me that he'd been taken to the hospital. I remember the look in his eyes- a combination of terror and pure relief- when I stepped into his little nook at the ER fifteen minutes later, already wearing my pajamas for the night. I remember five days later, almost six days to the moment after I told him I would marry him, that his surgeon told me he had less than eighteen months to live. And I remember the day that, confident that he had beaten those odds, and that he was as "cured" as he was going to be, that we decided to have a baby.

It's the most natural thing in the world- this post-cancer family building. You spend so much of your energy making sure that you have a future... and suddenly, you do. But you're already an adult, and your dice are mostly cast. Most of the 20-something-and-cancer-survivor set that I know, and it's a remarkably large group, go directly from news of remission to starting a family. You've already paired up- you've already made the decision that you WANT to have a family. And now, every day is a gift. You get to do what you want to do, and you have the sense that there just might not be very much time. That it isn't a matter of "some time in the next decade I want to have kids," it's a matter of, "If the cancer comes back, how much time do I want to have SPENT with my kids?" And the answer is utterly simple. "Every single moment I can."

You don't know how long you're going to have. You have this nagging voice in the back of your head that doesn't say "if" the cancer comes back, it says "when."

And as the spouse of the survivor, you are right on board. You also want to give your spouse everything in life that they want, help them to make the most of each minute. When that means starting a family, it means that you are one hundred percent invested- committed. And that is terrifying. I have spent more hours than I care to count contemplating the life I might lead- widowed, with two (now three) children to support without M. Maybe without having completed my degree. And my choice has always been the same- the older my children are, the better. I want them to have KNOWN their father. To have meaningful memories to comfort them if he should die. To carry on in his footsteps, KNOWING that he would be proud.

I understand what my friend must be going through right now. I don't know, but I completely understand. I understand the choices that he and his wife made. I understand their choice to have a child when they did. I understand the constant second guessing and worry that accompanied a pregnancy. I understand all of the post-partum choices that they had to start making as soon as their daughter was born. I understand what the news that while she had been pregnant, the cancer had metastasized in her spine meant to them.

I haven't seen him in about three years. I had never met Reesa. But I grieve for her. I grieve for the months that my friend spent without sharing the news of her progress, that she didn't blog about it. When I thought all was well and I was wrong. I grieve for every moment that my friend's family spent in the hospital. I grieve for every day they have spent since Reesa passed, wondering and blaming themselves and feeling alone.

As much as I want to say otherwise, I know that my friend must feel alone. Despite the outpouring of support of all of his friends and family, despite no doubt having planned for this awful time before Reesa passed... despite all of that, there is no doubt that there is nobody on this earth who can truly share his pain, because there is nobody else on this earth who could have loved his wife the way that he did, and who shared the deepest parts of his soul.

And all the friendly internet stalking in the world can't convey that.

If temujin9 is reading this, I love you. I will always love you. And you will get through this somehow. And I am so, so, so sorry. And I wish there was anything I could do.

And I pray that you find peace with what has happened.

And if there was any way to send a shoulder across the interwebs for you to cry on, it would be there for you now.

RIP Reesa Brown

Unintended Boob Job (And other mundane pregnant breast details)

2012-01-17T10:05:00.003-06:00

Last week, I had that pesky spitz nevus removed.

They took off a nice big chunk of my chest. Well, not THAT big. But big enough to have a few definitely unintended side effects.

1.) I look like I have survived an ill-planned attempt to stab me through the heart. Ill-planned because the would-be assassin stabbed me on the wrong side. The stitches are gnarly, and healing really badly as that whole "don't lift more than 20 pounds" thing is impossible when you have two toddlers who weigh more than twenty pounds apiece. Never mind that they just LOVE poking at your bandage and declaring, "Mommy have band-aid! Got hurt underneath!" And then tug at any bit of the sutures they can reach.

2.) I seem to have gotten a breast lift.

Note, that's not TWO breast lifts. Just one. Yeah, that's right. My right boob is now definitely higher than the left boob.

No, I'm not going to put up an illustrative picture. You'll just have to deal with that.

Okay, fine.

Of course, this is incredibly obnoxious.

I've been planning on getting a boob job for twelve years. You see, I have very... ample... proportions when it comes to my upper body. Starting when I was fifteen, my doctors began recommending that I get a breast reduction. At that time, I was graduating into an F cup.

That was a long time ago.

I decided not to for two very important reasons. One, I wanted to wait until I know what my "normal" was going to be. At fifteen, with my breasts still growing and growing and growing, I worried that if I got a boob job they would simply grow back again.

The other reason was that breast reduction surgery- ANY breast surgery, for that matter- can cause all manners of complications when it comes to breast feeding. And for my entire life I've known I wanted to have kids. (Someday maybe I'll ask Poppa or Grandmommy to write a gust post on how he thought my preschool was brainwashing me on this topic.) And for as long as I've considered such things, I knew I wanted to nurse them.

I also figured, selfishly, that after having and nursing several kids, I might use the excuse of a reduction to also have a bit of a REAL lift done. Because... hey... I'm sure I could use that, right?

I imagined having the surgery once, and having it all be for naught. Then I imagined being in my 30s, done with weaning, and with a nice pair of post-lift, post-reduction breasts- I'd look amazing! So, I decided to wait. I would wait until I was all done having babies, nursing babies, and weaning babies to get work done on my insanely sizable bosom.

So I waited. And they kept growing. I finally leveled out- hit an established size that was *my size*, and hovered there until my first pregnancy.

Allow me to share with you a blog post (from my old livejournal) from that time:

Just bought a new bra. My third new bra since my boobs have reached *truly* epic proportions.

It's a 34J. For those of you who have never conceived of such an excessive size, this is how bra sizing works:

The number is the circumference of your rib cage, BELOW the boobs, in inches. The letter is determined by measuring your boobs at the largest point to get the circumference around your body above the rib cage. Each increase in one inch relates to a step up in bra letter. Unfortunately, the bra letters are not so simple as just reciting the alphabet. Lots of double letters are standard, because after you hit about a D cup, the bigger they are the worse it really is for you. On top of that, different brands make bras differently, so frequently you might be one size in one brand but a different size in another- PARTICULARLY in larger sizes where one inch really doesn't seem to make nearly so much of a difference. Cup sizes increase in this order:

A B C D DD DDD DDDD E F FF G GG H HH I J JJ K L M MM N O OO

I have not been able to locate ANY bras- period- larger than a OO. For those of you not so quick at math, my breasts are now 16" larger around in circumference than my rib cage. I can wear this bra as a hat- and it comes down to my nose.

Oh- and my boobs keep getting bigger. They're likely to keep growing slowly all though this and the last trimester. Then when I'm ready to pop, all my milk ducts will flood with grubling juice and my boobs will swell up to an additional three sizes more. I am now expecting that when I am in need of a nursing bra, I'll be looking for a size N at least. Not to mention all the trouble I'm having trying to find a bathing suit for this summer.

They're deceptively enormous,

Lucky me, after the initial post-partum swelling, my breasts returned to that J cup. And since weaning the girls, they shrunk down a bit more. I've been rocking H and I cups since the girls stopped nursing.

Well, here I am again- back into those old nursing bras.

This time around, my chest has been KILLING me! I didn't get painful and sore and miserable last time around, when I gained even more size. But this time? I feel like each night I get beaten across my bust with tennis rackets, or something like that.

So I have these wacky, gigantic, swollen breasts... and now one of them is about an inch higher than the other.

Go ahead and laugh. It's pretty darn comical. I do. With my top off, I look like a cartoon by a hormonally charged and slightly cockeyed preteen boy.

...except also pregnant.

I don't know why M keeps acting like he thinks I'm cute. It's absurd.

When I'm wearing a bra, I'm sure nobody can tell about my boob job. But I know.

And now, so do you.

It'll all be worth it, in the end!

Pregnancy is glorious, isn't it?

Whole People

2012-01-16T14:30:00.001-06:00

One thing they do have in common is how much I love them.

I really wanted to do this last night, but I was far too busy helping M put together our massive new collection of bookshelves and editing a new header for this blog (my babies are big girls now!).

I've been following PostSecret since I discovered the concept in Found Magazine. I think that was probably nine or ten years ago now. I anxiously waited until Sunday to check the livejournal feed every week, and there are secrets from the beginning that still haunt me. I remember one, written on an unfilled prescription slip, by a person who couldn't find a way to tell his wife she was going to die.

PostSecret, 2005

And then there are some, like this Hitler secret, that still crack me up.

Living in the Central time zone is great, because it means that a lot of weeks, I actually get to read the secrets on Saturday night. It feels like cheating, but it's something I still look forward to constantly. I can't tell you how close I've been to sending in dozens of secrets, but each time I realize that my secret is something that shouldn't be a secret. That I have people I care about that I can confide in, and that it's a healthy thing to do for me to take advantage of that. I know how lucky I am. I know how isolated and alone I felt back when I did lead a life full of secrets, and mostly secret pain.

I think that PostSecret isn't just an incredible art project, it's a public service.

At any rate, yesterday I discovered Mad Jackie's weekly event, Secret Sunday. It's a weekly link-up and writing exercise. You go through the week's secrets, pick one, and use it as a writing prompt.

I also freakin' love a good writing prompt.

Unfortunately, this week yielded a surprisingly small collection of secrets. I think that's because Frank Warren, the creator/administrator/curator of PostSecret is still posting secrets from the short-lived iPhone app. So I went back a bit, I'm not sure how far, and picked out this one. As it sort of speaks to something that I frequently find myself internally drafting diatribes about.

People feeling the need to label my twins.

www.postsecret.com

I don't feel like in my family we split up "pretty" and "smart" genes. We split up "crazy," "smart," "funny," and "creative."

Lucky us, there are more "crazy" genes than anything else.

But people really are determined to label children as soon as possible.

When they were newborns, and M and I would take them somewhere- say, to a restaurant or a hospital waiting room- bystanders would ask me, "Which one is the quiet one?" "Which one is the social one?"

It's constant, and it has never stopped.

Because there are two of them, they must represent different traits. One must be smart, one must be pretty. One must be quiet, one must be troublesome. One must be a good sleeper, while one must be a good eater.

I don't see people do this as much with singletons, but it still happens. And the fact is, it's so pervasive that children do it to themselves.

My children aren't simply aspects of a person that opposes a different aspect. My children are people. That means that they have moods, they have funks, they have passing whims. Yes, right now SI constantly asks for help. That doesn't make her "the needy one," that means that she's figured out that when she says, "Help, mommy!" I might do something for her that she thinks is a little too much trouble.

DD is picking up whole phrases and using them in context right now, that doesn't make her "the verbal one."

They're both people.

They're people with preferences and quirks.

Just like anyone else.

Aunt Something Funny, me, and Aunt Genocide

I think they get it worse as twins, but this was the case with my sisters and I. I always considered Aunt Something Funny to be "the smart one." I always considered Aunt Genocide to be "the funny one." At different times in my life, I was intensely jealous of them for that. I tried very hard to present myself as "the creative one."

But Aunt Something Funny isn't "the smart one." She's one of three girls, born within about three years, who are all very, very smart. She was the best at telling adults when they were wrong, she did have the best ability to recall impressive vocabulary, or identify specific dinosaurs. She got good at Scrabble first. She was also the oldest.

Aunt Genocide isn't "the funny one." She's one of three girls, very close in age, who are all very, very funny. She was the best at clowning around for a crowd, she was the best with a biting comeback, or a hilarious one-liner. She also felt from a very early age that there was no way she would ever be "as smart" as her older sisters. Which is a belief that, I'm sorry to say, Aunt Something Funny and I encouraged.

I wasn't "the creative one." I was one of three sisters right behind each other in school who had a variety of talents. I might have had the most drive to perform, I might have had the most art supplies in my rooms, I might have listened to the most progressive music, but I certainly didn't monopolize creativity. Aunt Something Funny is a brilliant writer. Truly brilliant. I've reread one issue of her zine, published about a decade ago, more than almost any other book I own. Aunt Genocide is an amazing photographer. Really. Even if she's decided that her passion lies more with her "smart" pursuits in academia.

Not "the boisterous one."

And we're all crazy. And yeah, we all have our opinions on who is the craziest. But frankly, there are enough kinds of crazy going around that we can all have our own.

The idea of teaching my children that they are whole people, not defined by their similarities or differences to each other, has been important to me since I first learned I was having twins. I see so many other multiples- and their parents insist on dressing them identically. What does that say about them? That they exist only as reflections of each other? That in fact, they are only one social entity?

How would I have felt if I constantly matched my sisters?

I would have felt even more that I needed to identify myself- to be "the creative one." Because aside from that, I would have had no other distinctions. I would have been simply part in a collective person.

I wouldn't be Lea the individual, I would be Lea of "The Borenstein Girls."

Just as DD and SI wouldn't be DD and SI, they would be, "The Twins."

They'll probably never get away from being, "The Twins." No matter what I do, it's going to happen. Just as I was lumped into the unit of my sisters, they'll be lumped into the unit of their twindom.

And yes, I've been guilty of dressing them alike. Or as complements to each other. But only as a special occasion thing- only for a picture, or for a big family event. For something that they will understand as "not the way things normally are." But each time I do it I feel ashamed. Because being a twin isn't just a cool trick they can do. It's a facet of who they are. And I have no right to make a spectacle of that without their consent.

No, she's not "the sweet one."

I'm sure that it will be easier for them to actualize as individuals being as visually different than each other than it would be if they were identical twins. But they're not- no more than I am identical to MY sisters. They just happened to be born at the same time. And that means that they are automatically perceived as being part of a set- incomplete without each other.

I just wish that the rest of the world would stop treating it as some sort of novelty act. One person, with traits divided between two bodies.

They are TWO people. In some ways similar, in others, not at all alike.

Just as any two people in the world might be.

...and for those of you reading through a platform that doesn't actually show you my blog- the new header:

"Becoming SuperMommy!"

Ask a Toddler- Daddy for President

2012-01-12T13:03:00.000-06:00

I am happy to announce the return of our "Ask a Toddler" series!

Yes, after much renewed interest and a host of requests (okay, after two requests) we have brought together all of our resources in order to once again, Ask A Toddler.

Today, SI and DD answer questions about burning political issues.

I hope they manage to shed a little light on them for you.

...a disclaimer- DD does this thing when she's a little overexcited where she just stops making any sense. The presence of markers is enough to make her reach that level of overexcitement. Carry on.

Don't Panic

2012-01-10T00:10:00.000-06:00

With thanks to Douglas Adams

This is advice I don't often need.

You see, I am VERY good in a genuinely bad situation. I panic in Ikea, sure, but that's different. You should have seen me the night that M was diagnosed with brain cancer. When bad things happen, I shut them down. That simple. You have to be in control, on top of your game. You have to be ready to make hard decisions and to do what needs to be done.

This is probably why my friends without insurance come to me to give them stitches and lance their MRSA abscesses. But those are stories for another time.

At any rate, I am pretty good at keeping cool in the face of disaster.

Or so I thought.

You see, this weekend DD decided that it would be a good idea to test my mommy zen. To find out how flappable I can be. It turns out, very flappable.

M was busy assembling our new Ikea furniture (pictures to come, it's just wonderful!). To distract the children from the unimaginable amount of mayhem they could create, I brought them into our room to enjoy our new television- another holiday gift from my doting husband. As we watched Yo Gabba Gabba for hours on end, I had to keep coming up with additional distractions. One of which was jewelry.

My little girls love playing with jewelry. And I have a lot more than you might imagine for somebody who doesn't wear it terribly often, feels uncomfortable wearing much in the way of jewelry, and has allergies to most metals. So I dumped out all my shinies onto the bed, and we played dress up with it for a while.

Finally, the girls were having no more of this. They wanted to go figure out where Daddy was and what all that banging was about. I made them put the pretties back on the bed, but DD was determined to take a few with her.

The jewelry she could not leave behind were three glass bangles. The only glass bangles I have ever had, to my knowledge. They were forged in Israel, at a rediscovered Greek facility some 2300 years old. Which is pretty darn neat.

Apparentely, DD thought so. She found them much more interesting than the necklaces, the beads, the wooden pendants... all of that. So when she got off the bed, she insisted on taking the glass bracelets wither her. I told her she had to put them back on the bed. So instead, she removed them from her arm, clutched them in her tiny fist, and ran away as fast as she could. Naturally, my very clumsy little girl tripped.

And as if in slow motion, I watched her fall.

Arms held in front of her.

Fingers splayed.

Giant peices of fucking glass clutched in her tiny, tiny little fist.

And completely unable to stop what was happening, I screamed. "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

But it was too late. My little girls crashed, beautiful glass first, into the floor.

The bracelets shattered. Shards of colored glass everywhere.

And blood... God there was just so much damned blood...

Then her screaming began. She sat up before I could reach her, shards of glass still sticking out of her hand. There was blood on her face... on her clothes... and it was all over the floor.

M came running as I screamed for help. First he hoisted her off the floor, making himself a bloody mess in the process. I grabbed SI before she could run through the broken glass now covering the floor. In an agonizing rush, I traded children with M and dashed DD to the bathroom to begin the process of de-glassing her.

Now picture it bleeding copiously.

I had no idea what to expect. All I know is that I was PANICKING. I was utterly terrified. Would we need to rush to a hospital? Was there glass embedded deeply somewhere? I had no clue.

As I washed her hands, she screamed and screamed and screamed. I know how much cleaning out a cut hurts, and there were REALLY NASTY cuts all over her hand. But I became more and more confident that she was okay, that she wouldn't need to go to a hospital, and that I could take care of it.

As it turned out, the only really bad cuts were one on her index finger, and one cutting a crescent around what you would call her mound of Jupiter. While they both bled like mad, neither seemed to be particularly deep. She calmed down significantly as soon as I began talking about band-aids, and another five minutes later she was sitting on my lap, breath hitching but no longer screaming or crying, watching intently as I fixed up her little mitt.

Once she was properly patched up, I asked her if she wanted a hug.

We spent the next half an hour sitting on the stool in the bathroom, hugging. I told her how brave she was, and how sorry I was that she got hurt, and how glad I was that she was okay, and how much I loved her. And I told her that THAT was why Mommy wanted her to put down the bracelets, and that Mommy means it when she doesn't let her do things, because there is a reason.

She babbled occasionally, saying things like, "Thank you, mommy." And, "I sorry, mommy." And, "Me no sad, mommy make me happy." And, "I love you."

And I don't know how much she needed that, but I sure has hell did. I could have sat in that bathroom clutching her all freakin' week.

My heart was racing for hours. As lucky as she was, and that kid was INSANELY lucky, so much worse could have happened. With those shards of glass in her hand, she could have touched her eyes. Or one of those shards could have cut her wrist. Or it could have gone really deeply into her hand. She was so lucky.

So lucky.

Which makes me SO lucky.

And if there was anything I could do to keep anything like this from happening again... I'd like to say that I would. My gut impulse is to make sure that every possible danger is out of the way, that there is absolutely nothing in her environment that could cause her pain.

But I've already made my parenting decisions here. I don't want her to grow up in a bubble. I want her to experience some pain, some anger, some misery. In short, I want her to experience life. I don't want her to grow up with no understanding of danger, or having had the whole world handed to her in a safe, easy way. No matter how much I love her.

No matter how much watching her bleed and scream was one of the most awful and terrifying experiences of my life.

I want her to grow up.

And a lot of that involves experiences that suck.

So I'm not going to keep her from ever playing with something potentially dangerous again.

But I can't promise that if something goes horribly wrong, I'm not going to panic.

Robo-Daddy

2012-01-06T14:19:00.001-06:00

SI's robot seems to have staying power

As you might recall, yesterday I lamented briefly about the speed with which SI adored and then abandoned her pet robot. Well, as she always manages to do, SI has made me eat my words.

Daddy provides all sorts of entertainment

You see, last night we had a small family celebration. For those of you unaware, M hates his job. He's very very good at it, and after a year of unemployment he certainly wasn't about to give up a steady job with regular overtime that allowed him to finish his Master's degree. So, he's been very quiet for the most part about his daily miseries.

At any rate, in gearing up for his last semester of grad school, he updated his resume and put it back out there. And he's gotten lots of calls, mostly leading nowhere, and more each week. It's exciting for both of us, and with the semester starting up again on Monday we had a bit of an "almost there" party. Which is to say, M and I sat down in front of a whole pizza with our children and together had a very festive meal.

Tired daddies need kisses

M pretended, at the girls' request, to be "Daddy Robot" for most of the meal, "initiating pizza retrieval," cramming unholy amounts of pizza into his gullet at once, and generally making the children as happy as little girls presented with pizza and their ridiculous father can be. Particularly children who are obsessed with robots. And M had a blast. When M "does the robot," it is utterly incapable of entertaining an adult for more than a few condescending seconds. But put him in front of a crowd of small children? He was in performer's paradise.

A bath, a decent night's sleep, and a dawn later, I awoke to the regular sounds of DD sneaking into SI's bed in order to achieve some feat of mischief. And what I heard was this, "No Debbah! MY robot! MY robot!"

Nurse Daddy helps Dr. DD with a sick doll

For Channukah, I had actually gotten the girls a sum total of three robots- SI's "Blue Robot" and one really neat robot finger puppet each. I gave DD a robot that looks like Plex from Yo Gabba Gabba, and I gave SI a blue robot. One that is *actually* blue.

At any rate, when I finally got in there and made sure that everybody had their own robots, SI proceeded to explain to me that "Blue Robot" was now "Daddy Robot." And that her blue robot finger puppet was now "Baby Robot."

And Daddy Robot spent nearly all of the day gently cradling Baby Robot, reading it books, cooing it it quietly, and occasionally singing it the Alphabet Song.

Baby Robot and Daddy Robot

DD ran around and jumped up and down and did her usual gigantic ball of energy routine. SI just pulled me to the floor, lay down in my lap, and showed me how much Daddy Robot loves Baby Robot, and how Daddy Robot gives Baby Robot kisses, and picks up Baby Robot, and oh so gently pats Baby Robot on the back.

It's not very often that I find myself wishing that M was home, still unemployed but always here to play with his children.

And it's not very often that their imagination play doesn't involve a Mommy figure. In fact, I'd say it's a first. It's always, "Daddy duck, Mommy duck, baby duck!" Or, "Daddy bear, Mommy bear!" "Daddy" and "Mommy" are adjectives that apply to differently sized or shaped blocks. They definitely see us as a team.

This is what Daddy Robots do. <3

But Daddy Robot is something special. And I don't know that she's ever looked at another toy with so much love and tenderness on her face.

My husband, the most wonderful man I have ever known, the most amazing father I could ever have imagined for my children... Even when he's not here, he's here. Because my kids know what daddies do.

Daddies give hugs and kisses and read books and play.

When they talk about Daddy during the day, they say things like, "Daddy at work. Poor Daddy." And when he comes home, he gets dragged into whatever game is happening- or forced to lay down on the floor in order to become their own personal jungle gym.

My daughters know what daddies are. Daddies are the best robots ever.

Holiday Recap, or, Unintended Consequences of Birthing Favorite (i.e. "only") Grandchildren

2012-01-05T16:53:00.001-06:00

The last night of Channukah

I have spent a great deal of the day thus far making plans for M and I to take the weekend essentially away from our children, in order to undertake The Great Ikea Adventure.

First of all, you must understand... I don't do so well at stores like Ikea. I get agoraphobia on occasion, and nothing like a big box store will kick that in. And no store is bigger, more filled with people and stuff, and more designed to totally overwhelm your senses than Ikea. Add to that my rapidly increasing levels of nesting hormones, my obsessive need to plan, and my inability to walk for any meaningful length of time without a cane (yay SPD!), and it all adds up to a gigantic disaster waiting to happen. Thankfully, sans grublings.

So why on earth are we doing this? What could possibly have inspired us to go through the process of trucking ourselves out to the burbs to go through a process that will most likely result in at least one of us crying in public? (The only Ikea trip that left M in tears was more due to manly shame than anything else- his pregnant wife was climbing all over the car using her mad knot tying skillz to attach far too many oddly proportioned boxes to the roof of our Kia. Girl Scouts taught me well.)

How I decorate for the Holidays

We are going to Ikea in order to find a way to accommodate the innumerable presents that were heaped upon our children by their doting relatives.

This is not a complaint, but I'm just saying... I don't remember EVER having as many toys as my kids have right now. I just stole away and entire box of toys that as Executive Parental Unit I deemed "outgrown," and their toybox STILL doesn't close.

So what on earth was involved in this veritable orgy of gift giving? I couldn't even begin to catalog it. But I can tell you without a doubt what the favored gifts have been, and I am extremely pleased to say that I am behind at least three of them. Go SuperMommy!

(If you don't care about the details of the toys, skip to the picture of the man in the fancy pants for the heartwarming ending.)

SI and her new train

We had three distinct gift giving events. First, our own small family Channukah celebration. It was the first night of Channukah, and the girls opened presents sent from extended family members, from me and M, and from a few friends.

This night yielded two big wins for the kids. First, their Melissa and Doug toy train set and toy truck and car set. I'd just like to say, my girls LOVE cars and trains. I think the idea that toys like this are so heavily gendered is truly unfair. And I love that the first person to get them their own trucks- a great toy dump truck and fishing boat set- was my Granny- hereafter known as Great-Grandmommy. She delivered them to the girls last summer with the announcement that SOMEBODY had to get our little girls their "boy toys," because those are better toys anyway. Great-Grandmommy, you rock. The train and truck came from her sister, my great aunt Minda Rae. They have been underfoot ever since. It's kind of glorious.

Wearing their Channukah dresses from Great-Grandmommy

The next big toy excitement was over their "big" presents from Mommy and Daddy- that is, me and M. As SI has been obsessed with robots for months now, we found her a super cute stuffed robot. Despite the obvious reasons not to, she immediately named it "Blue Robot," and it became her very best friend. For DD, we got an owl. Now, this was a little trickier. She has a serious case of the "me toos" when it comes to expressing her opinions. So I simply filed a way a list of things that she announced she loved that morning while getting dressed, and when I found what was to be HER stuffed toy, her little voice announcing, "I love owls!" jumped back from my memory. As it turns out, she loves this owl, too.

SI and Aunt Engineer play with the elephant bank

The next day, it was off to Minnesota for Christmas.

Yes, the very next day.

I can't even begin to recount all the gifts they received. M's family utterly showered them with love and toys and all manner of things that little children absolutely adore. It was five days of nonstop madness.

Aunt and Uncle Engineer got the children stuffed animal piggie banks. Well, a piggie bank and an elephant bank. They make noise and move around each time you put in a coin.

This was more excitement than my children could handle. Cookies were abandoned. All games forgotten. Nothing was important anymore. Not now that there were... pig and elephant.

DD insisted on posing with "her family" at least 100 times

The children spent much of the trip putting coins into the banks as fast as they possibly could. It is due to this that they quickly learned that the coins that made the pig and elephant come to life were called "money," and from there it was only a few quick leaps of thought to the repeated squeal, "I love money!" Adorable, yes. My grandfather probably rolled in his grave a little bit. :)

The girls were each given a gift by their cousins (we have a one-to-one gift giving ratio for kids, as there are SO MANY of them in M's family!), and I have to say... those cousins have spectacular taste! It's amazing. The girls only get to see most of M's family a few times a year, but M's aunts in charge of gift gathering for grublings seemed to read the girls' minds across the span of three states. DD got what she has since called "my family," which is two little girl dolls, a mommy doll, and a daddy doll. She carries them with her everywhere.

Yup, same zipper as on the show...

Then came the coup de grace, Muno and Brobee. You see, my kids are OBSESSED with Yo Gabba Gabba. For a whole month, the only way I knew to get SI to smile for the camera was to ask her if Muno had bumps, or one big eye. The answer to both of those questions is "yes." I searched EVERYWHERE, within a few pre-set limitations, for Yo Gabba Gabba toys. I finally dug up some stuffed backpacks from Spencer's Gifts, of all places. DD was immediately in love. SI wasn't so sure. She spent about five minutes looking Muno over, as if asking him, "Are you really who you say you are?" Finally, she accepted that he might not be THE Muno, but he was at least HER Muno. And just like that, Blue Robot was forgotten. Possibly forever.

Future American Idol?

I actually feel bad for that toy. To be loved intensely for five days and then tossed aside? But I digress...

The other huge Christmas hits were microphones and flashlights. The microphones, sadly, do not have adjustable volumes. But they have wrought a huge change in my daily life. As many of our friends and family know, our children HATE singing. The reason for this is that they love being sung to sleep, so much that they associate all singing with bedtime. So unless they are not tired, not laying down, or have no wish to sleep, they feel they are being tricked when somebody strikes up a tune. However, the microphones play the tunes to a few songs that I know, and I now frequently find myself with two microphones shoved in my face as I sing endless verses of "Old MacDonald Had A Farm."

The flashlights have been turned into SI's new favorite game of all time. She calls it, "Light in the Dark." It sounds religious, but actually it's quite literal. I turn off the hallway lights, and then she runs around with her flashlight (a tiger that roars when his mouth opens to emit a beam of light) squealing with delight, roaring with the tiger, and announcing, "Make light in the dark!"

Grandma made that purple dress!

Then it was back to Chicago for the last night of Channukah, and immediately off to Guppy Lake for the SuperMommy family shindig and New Year's Eve.

Again, total present overload. My mother went absolutely nuts getting stuff for the girls. But the most beloved items of the trip were the following...

The vintage stuffed My Little Ponies made the top of the list. I'm still patting myself on the back. And intensely relieved. If the girls hadn't liked them, I'd be playing with them myself out of pure determined pride. Aunt Genocide was pretty floored when she saw them. They're creatures of our own childhood, and it is a little strange to see them brought back to life, as it were.

DD lighting the wooden candles

Grandmommy got the girls a toy Menorah. That was an enormous hit. The girls took turns lighting candles all weekend long. They even came to accept more singing- the Channukah shema in a variety of tunes. So long as they were lighting the candles, singing was totally allowed. It was pretty cool.

And then there were the books. So many books!

The girls favorite two were, without a doubt, "It Happened in Pinsk," and "The Carrot Seed." Although the Nutshell Library and the incredible pop-up book from Grandmommy are also instant favorites.

"It Happened In Pinsk"

It's odd. I noticed as I was picking out books for my kids (like "It Happened in Pinsk') that really, I was passing along my own favorite books. But the more books I got for the girls (they got a book apiece every night of Channukah), the more I realized that I wasn't passing along MY favorite books, I was passing along my mother's favorite books (Maurice Sendak's Nutshell Library) that had been passed to me. And more than that, I was passing along Great-Grandmommy's favorite books ("Harry the Dirty Dog" and "Blueberries for Sal") that had been passed first to my mother and then to me.

It's amazing to realize that children's books, GOOD children's books, are so incredibly universal that they transcend era. That it doesn't strike my kids as at all odd that somebody would deliver coal, or that Sal's mommy's kitchen would have a wood burning stove, or that Pierre's mother wears an elaborately feathered hat. It doesn't strike them as strange that the big brother in "The Carrot Seed" would wear knickerbockers, or that Irv Irving's telephone would have separate parts for the mouth and ear pieces.

Reading "Harry the Dirty Dog" with Grandma

A good story, with good illustrations, is basically immortal. And that's pretty cool.

So the girls need about a bazillion feet of shelf space for all their new books, they need a new, more organized system in which to store their increasingly complicated toys, and I need about a month and a half to recover from the insanity that was December.

I suppose that if there's a moral here, it's Don't Have the First Grandchildren Unless You Have Tons Of Space.

Or, you know, do. Because there are few joys greater than giving a gift that is well loved.

M and his swag

And truly, gift giving is my favorite part of the season. I love to give presents. I love finding things that tell the people I care about, "I KNOW you. And I love you. And in order to show you that, I have a physical object that you will love because it reflects something about you that can only be known by those who DO love and know you."

I got Grandmommy a super weird CD. I got Aunt Genocide TMNT tumblers. I got M a laptop skin that looks like a vintage boom box and a hoodie from his alma mater. I got Aunt Engineer a beautiful upcycled sweater.

I love to give gifts. Because when somebody opens the gift, and sees something that they really like, it's not about what that thing is. It's about being loved.

So I am glad that my children are so crazy about all their new stuff. Not because they needed a single piece of it (which they did- the dresses and the socks. THANK YOU!). Not because now they have all sorts of new distractions that give me a little more time. I am glad because they are so thoroughly loved by their family- by their aunts and uncles and grandparents and greatgrandparents... by friends they didn't know that they had.

Watching them play together is always pretty amazing.

My heart was warmed every single time DD grinned and said Thank You to another person. I grinned seeing now only how happy my children were, but how happy their relatives were, seeing that they had succeeded in showing something simple like love to my children.

I love the holidays. I love presents. While I don't care what I get (although I ADORE the perfume M got me!), I care very much what I give. And I really hope to instill those sorts of gift giving values to my kids.

New Year, New Neuroses, and the Best Pictures of 2011

2012-01-04T17:01:00.002-06:00

Goodbye, 2011! Hello, Photo Spam!

For those of you who haven't been following me for over a year, I have a tendency to take my New Year's Resolutions... very seriously. I set myself an annual list of goals, and then I take notes every day of whether or not I succeeded. Sound insane? It is.

And I have to confess, it kind of works.

It doesn't work on a daily basis. It sort of works on a weekly basis. But it DEFINITELY works on an annual basis. Each year, I take a few hours to tally up my results, and to find out where I really need improvement, and where I have achieved my greatest successes.

My 2012 checklist hardly varies at all from my 2011 checklist. In 2011, I aimed to do the following:

Write every day
Cook a meal every day
Finish my homework every day
Leave the house every day
Eat at least two meals every day
Perform basic maintenance on my body every day (Yeah, I resolved to shower OR brush my teeth OR wash my face. You try being a new mom of twins and tell me how you manage that one.)
Exercise for at least 20 min three days a week
Observe the Sabbath (that's once a week)
Finish two books each month
Make art twice a month

It was a nice round list. And now I know how I did.

Wrote Daily
I wrote, either here, on my ideasforwomen.com blog, at one of my livejournals, or in my real world paper journal on 321 days. On a great many of those days, I did several, and soemtimes all of the above. For example, today I've written in my paper journal and scheduled two more posts at ideasforwomen.com. So although I will have completed 4 separate writing activities, I only get to check off the box for one day. And that's how it was for much of last year. That means that on 43 days I did not write at all. That's almost a month and a half in which I didn't even pick up a pen. I must confess, I'm pretty ashamed of myself. Even though I had specified to myself that I would write "at least seventeen syllables," I only wrote 11 haiku all year long! Next year, I am sure I can do better. I'm willing to give myself a little leeway- 10 days. After all, we do enough traveling and whatnot, it seems really rude not to give myself the excuse of just plain being too busy being a guest or host or something. And I probably won't be writing my first day with Baby X. (Who am I kidding? You'll probably be the first to know when Baby X is here!) But the goal number for this year is 355. I think I can do it.

DD is going to make banana bread.

Cooked Daily

I really nailed this one. I cooked on 335 days. Some of those days, all three meals. This one has been made much easier as a result of a few changes- First, that the girls actually require a cooked breakfast. No cold cereal for them. We tend to go between four regular breakfasts a week, "green eggs," which is essentially an egg scramble with zucchini or spinach and smoked Gouda cheese, waffles, oatmeal with some fruit mixed in (preferably "purple" oatmeal with blueberries- my kids love them some color coded food!), and french toast. It's frequently their healthiest meal of the day. So every morning I'm home with the kids, I make breakfast at least. Then there's dinners. For Christmas last year, Grandma got me a bread machine. Between the bread machine and the slow cooker, home cooked meals have NEVER been easier. I can set the bread to time itself to finish right with the slow cooker, and then for dinner we have hot soup or stew and fresh bread. Is it cheating? Hell yes. But it works! And I love it! That one month worth of days that I didn't cook can easily be explained by travel and my occasional illness. I am totally comfortable with this number. So satisfied, in fact, that it has come off of my 2012 list!

Completed Homework Daily
Not surprisingly, I kind of screwed this one up. Last semester particularly. I only completed my homework on 244 days. For nearly a third of the year, I just plain didn't finish my homework every night, and that sucks. That said, I still turned it in on time- when you have class on Monday and you don't do your homework on Friday or Saturday, that doesn't mean that it doesn't get finished before it's due. So I don't feel that this one is necessarily as bad as it looks. The fact of the matter is that when your homework depends on a totally dysfunctional group, there's no use stressing yourself out over this kind of thing. It stays on the list for this year, of course, but I can basically forget it halfway through the year. Because I'll FINALLY be graduating. Oh, sweet joy of joys. :) And yes, if I had no homework to do, I counted it as done. Might as well be kind to myself once in a while!

Even a trip to the yard is a good idea!

Left the House Daily
I did better this year than in 2010. In 2010, I managed to get out of the house 269 days. In 2011, it was up to 301. I feel pretty good about that. It helps to have kids who can get up and down three flights of stairs on their own steam! Still, for basically two entire months of the year I never left the house. And that's ridiculous. My goal for this year is to keep it at least as high. After all, with a newborn AND two toddlers I should cut myself some slack if we have vegging out days on a regular basis. I'm sure three kids are more than a handful out in public. That said, with the girls *hopefully* going to preschool, I'll be leaving five days a week to drop them off and pick them up. And that will certainly help!

Maintained Hygiene on a Daily Basis
Okay, this is where I come clean (ha ha ha) about how crappy I can be to myself. You see, when the first thing you hear every morning is the screaming of a miserable toddler, or you're dragging yourself out of bed after a long night of two kids with runny noses, or you just plain can't bear to see the sun until you absolutely have to, morning showers sort of stop happening. And I don't know about you, but I hate showering at night. It makes my hair weird. So, I resolved to *at least* wash my face OR brush my teeth every day. No exceptions. This is without a doubt my biggest failure. If you can handle learning how incredibly disgusting I am, here it goes... I only did the bare minimum to care for my own body on 251 days in 2011. You read that right. For over 100 days last year, I was un-bathed, un-washed, and my teeth were un-brushed. And that is just plain gross. This year, I am DETERMINED to do better. And in order to do better, Grandma and M both got me presents that are going to help. M got me a WaterPic flosser- SO COOL! It's fun, it's effective, and every time I see it I'm like, "Ooh! I can floss my teeth!" Just not in front of the kids. They get very jealous, and they make an unholy mess with the thing. Grandma got me a telescoping, wall mounted, lighted shaving mirror. Let me tell you, NOTHING will motivate you to keep your face clean like looking at it every day in 700% magnification. You have no idea how many blackheads you actually have until you're compulsively squishing your nose at every angle. Amazing, and disgusting. That's what I call motivation!

Grubling yoga!

Exercised At Least 20 Minutes Three Times a Week
For those of you not so quick with the math, that means my goal was to get some exercise 156 times. At least. I got darn close. My total for the year was 143, only 13 shy of my goal! That's just not so bad! I must confess, my "exercise" was frequently a lot of walking, or having sex with M. Which, to be fair, is pretty darn aerobic. (M? Are you blushing yet?) But I do count it, and I will continue to as frequently as possible. (M? Are you blushing again?) And honestly, if all the exercise I got was doing the horizontal tango with my main squeeze just shy of three times a week... well... I'm pretty darn happy with that, too. I just can't keep my gross little hands off of my studmuffin of a husband. (M? You're definitely blushing, aren't you?) I guess that's why our family is getting a bit bigger in 2012.

Observed the Sabbath Every Week
I totally bombed this one again. You see, I cheated. I counted attending shul for things like the High Holy days as "observing," even if it was a different religious obligation. So if you count all of my religious observances (not counting going to Church with my in-laws- wrong religious observances!), I "observed" on 41 occasions. There are 52 Sabbaths in a given year. So, I did WAY better than in 2010, when I only observed Shabbat 10 times (probably including Yom Kippur). But I can do better, and I will. Again, I will excuse myself for lighting candles when we're out on a Friday night. I can be realistic about this one- if M and I head out on a date I'm not going to bring the candles to dinner OR light them at home with a sitter. Unless the girls ask me to. So if I manage the same number, NOT counting other religious observances, I think I'll be pretty pleased with my improvement.

SI and DD reading with Poppa

Finished Two Books a Month
This one I did an okay job of accomplishing. But only for two reasons- First, I averaged out my success across the whole year, even though I finished three or four a week in a few months, and second... I counted every graphic novel I read. Including trade paperbacks of the Walking Dead. This meant that since I started off the year by basically spending two weeks sick in bed (yay gall bladder!), and then repeated that feat in the fall, I managed to read a whopping 28 books this year. Honestly, I'm pretty happy with the amount I read. I'm pretty pleased to have read the things that I did. But I would like to read more. That said, I'm going to keep giving myself the break of counting things like trade paperback collections of comic series, like Walking Dead and Fables... my two current favorites. I think I just need to up my monthly quota. So in 2012, rather than average two books per month, I'll be aiming to finish three books a month. Top of the list are the Phillip K. Dick book I'm in the middle of, "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest," "Summerland," which Poppa can't seem to stop recommending, and then something more substantial. I haven't read the Brothers Karamozov in about eight years, might be time to go back to it again. Of course, new trades of Walking Dead AND Fables came out last month... so...

Made Art Twice a Month

They had a better track record on art than me last year.

I succeeded. BARELY. I only counted completing a work as "making art," which I feel the right to grumble about because I have three currently unfinished paintings in my studio. All three are wedding portraits for friends who got married in 2011. So in addition to being a lazy artist, I am a bad friend. But they will be GOOD paintings, and all six of the subjects are going to absolutely love them, I'm sure. I just have to FINISH them. That said, I completed 24 works of art last year, including my holiday cards, the girls' birthday cake, and the girls' toy kitchen. I also counted each completed Becoming SuperMommy comic- of which there are probably half a dozen you haven't seen. I'm so sorry I haven't scanned and shared them yet. But you can rest assured, there will be more Becoming SuperMommy comics in the near future! I've even come up with a whole theme, DD always has a big dot on her clothes, and SI always has a single stripe. Get it? DD= dot, SI=stripe? That's how I used to handle it at family events when people wouldn't be able to tell them apart. :)

And that is what I accomplished in 2011. My list for 2012 has hardly changed, I've just removed my cooking requirement (it's officially a given) and upped the ante for my reading. I'm feeling pretty darn confident.

I have two more abstract goals for the year. The first is to actually edit more of my posts. (Yes, Poppa, you've officially shamed me.) I can't really quantify this one, because I know that my writing time is limited (which is why it's the 4th and I haven't written this yet), and my windows in which to write are short (generally the length of a nap- which means any minute now my window closes). Still, I'm keeping that one in the back of my head. Now that I have a growing number of subscribers who get my posts immediately via email, this seems more and more important. To those dedicated readers, I am so sorry you get every single typo emailed to you. I will try to do better.

All things considered, I'm kind of awesome.

My second abstract goal is to be less judgmental of myself. I have no idea how to do this, but I would like to stop acting as though I have somehow failed because there is always a heap of laundry to do AND to put away, because the living room STILL hasn't been swept, or because the kids have eaten PB&J for lunch every day in a given week. I know, fundamentally, that I'm doing a darn good job. I need to stop acting like I've somehow shamed all the mothers that have come before me. Again, no idea how to quantify it. I'm just going to try to remember. I'm a busy lady, not a failure. They're actually kind of the opposite, right?

As I feel I set a good precedent last year, I will reward you for sitting through my ridiculous self evaluation with the best pictures of my children from the entire year. Enjoy!

January: My children begin the year by learning to be mischievous, thus setting the tone for 2011.

February: Two little towel-monsters. :)

March: DD is such an enormous ham. This might be the cutest picture of her ever.

April: my little angels in their Passover dresses at Aunt Genocide's house

May: with the spring, my little loves donned their overalls and began to enjoy the outdoors properly.

June: a tie! Snapped by Michael Courrier at the Chicago Slutwalk.

June: a tie! Regular playtime in the back yard with a kiddie pool, sprinkler, and of course a red wagon.

July: No matter what else happened that month, this was going to be my favorite picture. :)

August: another tie. My bathing beauties playing on the beach at Lake Huron.

August: another tie. My gorgeous flower girls.

September: the girls start helping me out in the kitchen. Cake is the gateway baked good. :)

October: a three way tie, the month was just too much fun for one photo!

October: Just after the girls turn TWO, we take our first real family outing. Just the four of us.
...Yes, I was already pregnant.

October: The girls go Trick or Treating for the first time dressed as fairies.

November: SI and DD snuggling at bedtime.

December: another tie. Maybe my favorite shot of SI ever.

December: the girls in their holiday dresses playing the piano at Grandma's house.

So that was my 2011! I have no doubt that 2012 is going to be an even better year. Things just keep looking up for our little family, and I can't imagine that Baby X will change that at all. Hope to see you all again and again this year! Hooray 2012!

Looking Back to Look Forward

2011-12-28T12:38:00.000-06:00

It's been a good year.

This year's holiday card

We're getting ready to head off on our last holiday journey for the year. Packing (rather, laundering and re-packing), cleaning up after the Christmas and Channukah toy explosions, and cramming in as many last minute important appointments as possible. Which means that this is the last you'll hear from me for the year.

As I think back on 2011, I have a hard time distinguishing it from pretty much the entire length of time that my children have been here- out of the womb and in the world. I know that will pass, that eventually time will return to something resembling the progression I knew in my pre-SuperMommy era. But in order to get a handle on the year, I went back and reviewed everything I wrote here, in this blog, over the course of 2011.

So today, rather than an expose on my incredible OCD tendencies (which I promise I will subject you to as soon as we return from Michigan), I will instead share with you again the eight posts from the year that I think best summed up my 2011, with a little introduction explaining why they mean so much to me.

This year's holiday card- inside

I know, I could have thrown in announcing my pregnancy or my thoughts on the tenth anniversary of September 11th to round it to a nice solid 10 posts, but neither of those meant as much to my year as individual events as the general feeling of the other eight to explain the whole effect of my 2011. So please excuse the random number, and instead take them for what they're worth- the entirety of a year in the life of Yours Truly.

I hope you enjoy them as much the second time around as I did.

Glaciers and Caterpillars
I don't know how it happens. They just keep growing up. Every once in a while M comments that he SWEARS that when he went to work the previous day, they didn't know half the words they did when he came home again. Some days, he seems to be right. This post really summed up those feelings for me.

One of our Holiday Pics

Teacher's Helper, or, Childcare Disaster Zone
This post sums up two very important aspects of my life- the first, how incredibly difficult it can be to be a parent AND a college student. Seriously. The second aspect of my life it illustrates is how absolutely VITAL it is to keep a sense of humor. Seriously again. If you have days like this and you CAN'T laugh it off, you will lose your mind. And not in a good way.

Aunie Lea's Home for Wayward Orphans
I've spent a lot of the year looking towards the future. Maybe it's because I'm finally narrowing in on my degree, maybe it's because we decided to have another baby, maybe it's because of some other reason bubbling up from my subconscious. Whatever the case, this post is very much about what I want from (or for) the future.

The Pitter Patter THUMP of Little Lubricated Feet
This is, quite simply, the funniest thing I think I've ever written. And I'm proud of that.

It Wasn't My Fault

A wonderful moment, caught by a stranger.

This post is another thing that I've been very proud of this year. It was hard to write, and it's hard for me to read. But it helps me, and I really do like to think that it might have helped somebody else. It became almost immediately my top-read post, and I doubt that any other post will ever take its place. If this was my five minutes of internet fame, than I can be truly proud of that. And if not, I can always hope that I'll get noticed for writing something funny instead.

The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of its Parts
One of many posts this year waxing rhapsodic about my father's philosophical approach to parenting. More than that, this post sums up my beliefs about parenting as activism, and the vital importance of constantly setting an example. I'm sorry to say that I haven't been able to donate blood again since this post, as when I was next both eligible and available, I was also pregnant. For some probably extremely good reason, pregnant ladies aren't allowed to donate blood. But you can bet that I'll be bringing my nursling along to a blood drive sometime late next summer.

Another of our Holiday Pics

SuperMommy and the Potty
This post represents all of my failures. Yes, there are lots of them. Many of which I haven't shared with you. I keep coming up with excuses for why we haven't just gritted our teeth and freakin' potty trained properly. I've been sick. I've been pregnant. We've been traveling. I am officially out of excuses, and I am determined to have the girls OUT of diapers before Baby X arrives and is IN them. So, you can bet that this one is back on the resolution list for this year. And of course, this post is also utterly hilarious.

Pouring My Heart Out
Last but not least, the most important person in my life... M. I always have a hard time giving friends advice on their own marriages, because I think that mine is fundamentally different. Not because of some Princess Bride-esque "true love" reason, but simply because we know every day how lucky we are to have each other. Because M might not have lived for us to have this time together. That's what this post is about.

I love this man more than anything in the whole world.

Here's to a wonderful 2012, filled with new life, new love, and new adventures.

2011 has been one of the best years of my life. I've grown, I've changed, and I really like the person I'm becoming. Perhaps it's because I like all of the changes I've seen in my children, and in my husband. Perhaps it's that I've reached a point in my life where I'm done with the petty drama that used to be so much of my life before kids (I can already hear my parents laughing at that one). I don't know.

But whatever it is, I can't imagine that the New Year will bring anything less than the best. M and I will finish our degrees, Baby X will join our little family, and DD and SI will continue to grow and change and blow my mind continuously. And hopefully, I'll manage to keep you all more up to date and in the loop than I have this year.

Kisses from SI and DD

All my love, lovely readers. Thank you for spending the year with me. :)

Post-Mid-Holiday Insanity Update

2011-12-27T14:28:00.000-06:00

With thanks to the artist.

Just a quick check in with you, lovely readers, to wish you again Happy Holidays and to share a few highlights of our chaotic season so far:

SI loves nothing more about the holidays than lighting the candles. To the point where, if she is not able to light the candles, the sight of them will throw her into a fit.
After a nice first-night discussion with M about the story of Channukah, new family traditions have been established. The most important of which is the Ceremonial Watching of the orginial Star Wars Trilogy. More on that later.
My children are officially obsessed with Muppets. No, we still haven't seen the new movie.
Our trip to Minnesota did not involve any major car troubles, not did it involve a great deal of misery. The worst things that happened were my children picking up really nasty colds from Grandpa, and me not being able to eat junk food in a house utterly filled to the brim with Grandma's indescribably amazing Christmas sweets.
Thanks to Aunt Engineer's gifts, my children are now able to jump up and down and shout, "I LOVE MONEY!" My inner socialist pinko is weeping.

It's the last night of Channukah tonight, and after another round of candles and gelt and dreidle (and maybe even latkes) we get prepared for our trip to the east- up to Guppy Lake for a belated Channukah and a New Year's celebration with Aunt Genocide, Poppa, and Grandmommy.

And then I promise you a ton of photo spam that will melt you into puddles of, "OMG such cute monkeys with their little slippers and microphones and pretty dresses and what on earth is THAT?"

And just in case you haven't been subjected to enough holiday cheer, a super-fun Channukah song, my FAVORITE Channukah song, and one of my favorite artists singing my favorite Christmas carol.

See you on the other side of the New Year!

Spitz Nevus/Melanoma

2011-12-21T12:28:00.000-06:00

In case you missed the note, when I'm pregnant, I get skin cancer.

Last time around, M noticed the new weird thing on my skin when I was about seven months pregnant. It took about a month before I saw a dermatologist, and it was that same day that he biopsied it and discovered it was cancerous. It wasn't really a big deal- just a basal cell carcinoma. As soon as I delivered the girls, they cut off all the surrounding tissue, and declared me "cured." I have kept going back for skin checks a few times a year, though. And twice they've removed moles that looked pre-cancerous.

Having my temple anesthetized let me raise one eyebrow!

Well, as I've mentioned, this time around the pregnancy trail my very first symptom was that a mole started getting odd. I was scheduled for one of my regular skin checks less than a month later, so I just brought it up then.

When I say odd, I mean that this very small mole had started changing colors to an orange shade from its previous light brown, and its borders had become a little fuzzy. By the time I got to the skin check, it had also become raised, and a dark spot had appeared in the middle. It was probably less than 2 millimeters in diameter.

The intern doing the skin check thought it looked strange. Something about "globules." They scheduled me to come in and have it excised once I was out of my first trimester. That appointment was Friday. In the time between my first appointment and my last, it grew a little more, its borders became a little stranger, and a second- barely visible- dark spot appeared. It was still probably less than 2 millimeters in diameter.

When the doctor came in to remove the mole, he took one look at it and said, "That little thing? We're taking that off? Really?" And then left to check the notes from my skin check to be sure there was any point. He seemed to think that it was ridiculous to take off something that, to him, looked so obviously benign.

Today I got the call with the results. I figured that since I hadn't heard back, no news was good news, and I should forget all about it. I was wrong.

Turns out that this time around, it's not quite skin cancer. Turns out it's basically stage 0 melanoma.

Melanoma. That's a pretty freakin' scary word.

I have to go back right after the holidays and have the area around the mole removed, biopsied, etc. Instead of my nice, tiny, one-stitch scar, I'll get a much bigger cut. Not that that's my primary concern,

My primary concern is the cancerous aspect. My dermatologist is going to be referring me to a specialist- not an oncologist, somebody who specializes in these just-barely-not-cancer situations, does more frequent skin checks, and decides if and when to refer me for chemotherapy.


Googled this pic of "early stage melanoma"- looks like mine.

Because melanoma is, unfortunately, VERY malignant.

The reason they're most concerned is that, of course, pregnancy can make you much more susceptible to things like... well... cancer. And if this mole was just a few months from being full blown melanoma, from requiring chemotherapy- possible every year for my whole life. Under most circumstances, they'd consider this incredibly lucky and just keep me going back for regular checks with my dermatologist. Under most circumstances, they'd cut off all the extra dangerous cells, and that would be that- again.

Instead, because I'm pregnant, it's more dangerous. And the fact of the matter is, no matter how much they tell me not to worry and that I don't really have a very dangerous form of skin cancer yet, I am not so distracted as to catch all the subtext. The warning that two cancerous (or just barely not) moles of a variety of strains before I'm thirty doesn't particularly bode well.

I'd just like to say, as obviously freaked out as I am, I am also incredibly relieved.

I am so relieved that I found the mole right away. I am so relieved it was somewhere so visible that I could notice its minor changes. I am so relieved I was able to have it looked at and removed quickly.

If I had waited until after the baby was born, I would have melanoma. I would be facing a newborn baby AND chemotherapy, I would be in a much much much more frightening situation.

I am so relieved to have had an intern who was really looking for something interesting in my mole. If it had been that doctor looking instead of the intern, I'd be in a lot of trouble.

I am so grateful.

More things I'm grateful for.

I am grateful that I probably won't be faced with a choice of breastfeeding or taking chemotherapy.

I am incredibly grateful that it didn't grow more during that first trimester.

I am SO grateful that in a few short weeks I'll be able to put this unpleasantness behind me again. For the most part.

For now, I just need to focus on eating well, not usetting my gall bladder, and keeping Baby X happy and safe inside my belly box. (On that front, DD and SI have taken to carrying around ultrasound pictures and telling me how happy the baby in mommy's tummy is.)

Happy Channukah to you and yours! May your holidays be filled with as much joy and little sadness as ours, and may all of your travels be uneventful. :)

The Wit and Wisdom of My Husband (In Text Messages)

2011-12-19T14:57:00.003-06:00

I married to this weirdo. The one on the right.

Today, I am writing from the waiting room of the MRI center. We've reached this point in our year again... every-so-many-monthly MRI and update with M's neuro-oncologist.

I much prefer thinking about this sort of M related stuff

In case you're not aware, in which case I'm surprised, M is recovering from a very malignant form of brain cancer.

A few times a year, and less and less frequently, M gets a bunch of pictures taken of his brain.

I hate these visits. I do a remarkably good job of not thinking about what might be going on in there, in a very physical sense, pretty much all the time. But while I spend an hour plus sitting in a waiting room, wondering what they might see... I'm kind of a wreck.

My dad used to be really amazing about talking me through these visits. They invariably took place at 6am, and as my parents live a time zone up, it was almost a reasonable hour there. I would call and talk to my dad while I waited and waited and waited. And then, invariably, we would meet with M's neurological team and hear all sorts of good news.

When M switched jobs, he switched MRI times as well. Now they come as close to the end of the work day as possible. And I've gotten better at not spending the hour or two that it takes desperately trying to distract myself by talking to another person.

And we got a laptop.

So because I love my husband, and because I know that everything is going to be fine, no matter what nightmare scenarios might be running around in my head, I'm going to share some personal details about the man in the cramped MRI tube.

My husband generally thinks that he's very funny.

And yes, I generally agree.

I keep over 50 text messages saved on my phone- almost all from M.

And here, for your amusement and other assorted emotions, are the occasional thoughts of my ridiculous husband. And just so you know, he's been calling me "Panda Bear" for pretty much as long as we've been involved. Yeah, I have a silly nickname for him, too. It's "Gorilla Bear," because those are two animals he reminds me of.

Here you are- my husband's text messages:

"Prof just drew a penis without knowing it."

"LovloveloveloveloveHELLOlovelovelove"

"AH! THE MOTHERLAND!"

"I have, just now, discovered that I have been wearing my underwear inside out all day." (sent at 4:36pm)

"I love you a whole bunch. Not half a bunch, not five eighths of a bunch. I love you a whole, entire bunch!"

"Don't forget the pretzels for the gas jets!"

"Yo P-Bear, can I get the address of your Doogie Howser?"

"You've been building a grubling. And that's hard, with all those finnicky parts."

"I am having a fantastic beard day."

"Damn, what a sweet trash can."

"Hands up! Hands up! Shake your little belly!"

"You didn't land on UIC, UIC landed on you!"

"Oh Derby Berr, der peeps der peeps der herby derr."

"Does Panda Bear have to smack a bitch?"

I love that wacky, crazy, hilarious dude. <3

Yes... even after this. <3

Santa on Sunday, Menorahs on Tuesday

2011-12-19T11:37:00.000-06:00

The girls meet Santa

I've frequently found myself realizing that parenthood is a series of lessons about how you are just plain not the most important person in your life.

Yes, marriage is a similar series of lessons. But nothing compares to parenthood in this respect.

And it's not just about your own nuclear family. It's about your larger family- your friends, the people you surround yourself with.

Santa with a scotch and a stogie

I suppose what I'm getting at is that very few of our friends have children. And, like many adults in their mid-20s, our friends have largely made the choice either not to have children at all or to wait until later to get started.

But that doesn't mean that there are parts of having kids around that they don't really want to get in on.

Take Santa, for example. When M and I were first married, our friends B&K offered to be our kids' personal Santa and Mrs. Claus. I had every intention of making them keep their words.

Apparently, so did they. Last year the girls were still too young to have any sort of idea what was happening, but this year they were deemed old enough.

B&K became BK&K Inc. (this is another story for another time). B&K's resident elf made the costumes (including her own elf costume) and the three of them came over yesterday to introduce the girls to Santa Claus.

As you can imagine, the girls were initially terrified. But unlike those awkward mall Santa moments, our kids had the fortune of being the ONLY children present. What's more, they were home. Santa, Mrs. Claus, and the elf knew what they liked and had presents for them. And most importantly, Mommy and Daddy were obviously friends of these weirdos in costume.

It took about an hour, but by the end of it SI and DD were totally crazy about Santa and Mrs. Claus. It only took about ten minutes for them to decide the elf was awesome.

BK&K

I had a blast.

I know, I'm a bad Jew, right? But the fact of the matter is that M is Christian, and the girls are going to grow up with Christmas, as well as Easter, as important annual events. I don't think that having annual traditions for things like Santa Claus is exactly going to undermine the lessons of Hebrew school or Sabbath on Friday nights.

And even more important than that, some of our best friends in the whole world want to do this for our kids. They want to spend the next two decades dressing up, visiting with our family, and treating our children like the most important people in the world.

And they have competition. Our friends D&A, who plan on never having children of their own, also want to take turns playing Santa and Mrs. Claus. It looks like we might even have dueling Santas a few years, which is fine with me. BK&K and D&A are some of our favorite people, and they're around as much as we can have them. It won't be long before SI and DD (and also Baby X) figure out that Santa is a game that grown-ups like to play, and that really they're doing US a favor by playing along. Which, frankly, seems to me like pretty much the healthiest way I can think of to keep them from the heartbreak of being lied to about something as important as Christmas.

SI and Santa

So now they're pretty excited about Santa. They don't think he's going to bring them presents, they think he's the awesome bearded dude who hands out candy canes and likes his scotch neat. They think Mrs. Claus reads picture books, and that they elves play fun games with sleigh bells.

As occasionally anti-Christmas as I can be (I'm no Scrooge, but I do think that no 1 day holiday deserves a full three months of saturation), I can't deny how much my heart melted when SI asked Santa to help her put her own sleigh bell on the tree.

Santa for the weekend, and now Channukah starts tomorrow. As they absolutely LOVE candles, I'm optimistic that they'll be at least as enthusiastic about Channukah as they are about Christmas. This year, anyway.

And more than anything else, they have a better bead on these holidays than anyone else I know. Yes, they love opening presents. They love the snowflake stocking hooks on the mantle, they love the stockings, they love watching "The Grinch," and exclaiming over the "pretty lights" on the Christmas tree. They love the Channukah gelt, they love the menorahs, which we've gone ahead and lit candles on a few times.

DD and Santa

But ever since we started talking about Christmas and Channukah, they've started every morning the same way. "See Grandma? See Grandpa? See Grandmommy? See Poppa?"

"Yes, my sweet little monkeys. We'll see Grandma and Grandpa this week for Christmas. We'll see Grandmommy and Poppa next week for Channukah."

"Yay! Too much fun!"

Indeed. Too much fun. :)

Revenge of the Big Girl Beds

2011-12-15T13:34:00.000-06:00

Say, "Awkward!"

In order to enact some small revenge, I am illustrating this post with the worst of the worst outtakes from the girls' photo shoot for our holiday cards. Don't judge me just yet- when they were newborns M would punish them for puking on cute clothes by putting them in the ugliest clothes that we owned. So, now my goofy pictures don't seem so mean, do they?

As you may recall, we recently made the switch to "Big Girl Beds" with a little... well.. pain and suffering. Grandmommy, rock star that she is, got us these bed rails. They make it VERY DIFFICULT to accidentally roll out of the bed.

That was helpful. For a while. But there is no irresistible force that can match an mischievous toddler.

An odd thing began to happen. During the routine fourth or fifth round of, "Get Back Into Bed Now Or I'll Do Something You Won't Like,"DD began magically appearing in SI's bed. This didn't particularly bother me. In fact, I had considered SI the greater threat to naptime or bedtime harmony- after all, SI would wait until DD was almost asleep, and then begin shouting at top volume, "Debba! Wake up!"

But no, this concerted effort to stop her sister from sleeping was not the worst to come.

In recent days, naptime has devolved into seemingly endless hours of constant screaming. So how on earth has this happened? What could have transpired to utterly ruin my afternoons?

Allow me to illustrate.

Imagine that you've put your kids to bed for a nap. You have cleverly parked yourself in the rocking chair in the corner of their room, so they can't get up. At all. No goofy antics. No giggling. No shouting. Nothing. Just peaceful drowsiness and then blessed, blessed unconsciousness.

Or so it seems.

The moment you leave the room, everything changes.

DD pops her eyes open, and begins her evildoing.

She slowly, silently, creeps from her bed. Ever so carefully, she sneaks into SI's bed. And with as much force as her little toddler arms can muster, she pushes SI OVER THE RAIL and out of the bed. SI hits the floor with an astounding thud, and DD lays her head on her sisters pillow to go to sleep.

SI, naturally, wails in misery and horror. Her nap has been interrupted a mere half hour into its course, and VERY rudely. I of course rush into the room to mete out comfort and punishment, and then things get a little... out of hand.

DD wails at being forced back into her own bed. SI wails about her injury, repeating "Debba push me! Debbah push me!" until too exhausted to proceed. At that point, DD begins wailing again, anxious to get attention for her own misery now that SI is evidently "cured."

SI, without fail, allows me to place her back into her bed in order to comfort DD, who of course has no real memory of the cause of her current angst. And once DD is peaceful, quiet, and sleepy... I attempt to leave the room.

Up to this point, SI is decidedly the victim. DD is the bad guy. Pretty clear.

At this point, however, the roles change. I become the victim, and SI becomes my cruel tormentor. I am no longer allowed to leave the room. I am no longer allowed to simply sit. I must hold her, rock her, soothe her, until... when? She certainly refuses to sleep again, but she's so tired she can't do anything but. So I spend the next as-long-as-I-can-stand-it rocking SI while DD peers at me gloomily, occasionally whimpering or crying which sets SI off again as well. Any attempt to even stroke DD's hair while rocking SI results in SI screaming bloody murder.

When my need to do ANYTHING ELSE becomes too strong, I place SI back in the bed, and retreat.

For as long as I can stand the blood curdling shrieks coming from both of my children. And it begins again.

For two hours or so. Or as long as it takes to erase all memory I might have had of a life before the screaming began.

I think I've managed to make it pretty clear to DD that it is NOT okay to push SI out of her bed. But I just can't get it through SI's head that holding me hostage when she just needs to close her damned eyes and be still is in her best interest.

You win this time, Big Girl Beds. But I'll have the last laugh.

Eventually.

I hope.

...dear lord, I hope.

Complicating Factors- Or, My New Widget

2011-12-09T16:35:00.002-06:00

Tummies are Awesome!

As I mentioned recently, I've been having some... rather complicated health problems.

The gall bladder thing, skin cancer, catching every little bug that goes around...

If you follow me on Twitter, you've probably noticed routine complaints that I am either hungry or tired. Or nauseated.

There's a reason for all of that.

I'll tell you the same way I told all my friends on Facebook...

That's right! I'm pregnant!

I found a super cool widget for the blog- it has a rendering of my new grubling floating around in what is supposed to be my extremely spacious uterus.

I can't telly you how excited we all are about it. The girls are absolutely thrilled about the idea of the baby in mommy's tummy. SI is insistent that she wants a brother, while DD refuses to acknowledge that there could be any acceptable outcome but a baby sister.

M is pulling for a boy, which isn't a surprise. I'm totally on the fence. I feel like I'm kind of awesome at raising girls, and I don't really know if boys would be different. At the same time, I would love to have a little boy as well. So either way, I'm going to be thrilled.

The day I found out I was pregnant was a pretty amazing day. I had noticed a mole that had gone all... funny. You see, when I'm pregnant I get skin cancer. It's kind of terrifying, but there's really nothing I can do about it. So when I saw that mole changing, I thought to myself, "I should take a pregnancy test." I wasn't due to start my period for another two days, easily, but I went ahead and tested.

I went into shock. I took the test as soon as I got home, so our new sitter was still there. I called her the bathroom with me (she obviously thought she had started working in a crazy house- the look on my face must have been terrifying) and asked her if I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. She flipped out. She kept saying the line was a little faint, so maybe I wasn't pregnant and I should stay calm. I thought I was a lot calmer than her, so I told her to go home and started trying to put my thoughts in order.

This is an impossible task in a house filled with active toddlers. So, I took them into the back yard. The back yard had a few surprises in it for me.

First, there was the GIGANTIC katydid. The girls LOVED it. And I couldn't help myself but smile. Katydids are a symbol of fertility and luck. There's a an old Chinese blessing, "May you have as many children as the katydid." I helped the gigantic insect escape from my children by promising them we could look for another "big bug."

We found one.

It was a GIGANTIC grasshopper. Another luck symbol. And another Chinese omen- it's supposed to be a harbinger of a baby boy.

It seemed kind of impossible. Those first few weeks, I seemed to be followed everywhere by katydids and grasshoppers, reminding me that even if the only difference I could physically feel was mutating skin cells, I was going to have another baby.

And seriously, I was practically being stalked by katydids. On my walk from my car to class. Sitting on the wall outside the pharmacy. Hanging out on trees near my friends' houses.

Katydids everywhere.

We've passed through all the scary things well enough so far. It turns out that I'm a carrier for a really terrifying looking genetic disorder. But after a few weeks of fretting and worrying, it turns out that M isn't, so that's a huge load off my mind.

I'm due at the beginning of June, after graduation but before my last summer class. That is going to be a HUGE challenge.

But M will be done with school. We'll both be graduating. We'll be free of that huge weight, that huge responsibility, and free to get better jobs- that give us more resources and more time. And that's a gigantic relief.

We'll have our whole summer with the new baby. All of us together. And then... then the girls will go to preschool, and for the first time I'll find myself alone with just one baby.

Ideally, for the first time I'll find myself with only one child in diapers, too.

Of course I kind of suck at pregnancy. Through the whole first trimester- this time as well as the last- I was just so darn ill that I actually lost quite a bit of weight. And once again, I'm having SPD problems. (For those of you unfamiliar- it means my hips have prematurely loosened to make way for a baby that just isn't really there yet.)

Just try figuring out a way to get enough calories when you are a)constantly puking, b)have no appetite, c)restricted from eating fat or meat or dairy or eggs, and d)chasing two toddlers with hips that keep threatening to dislocate.

It makes me nervous, but it doesn't bother my doctors.

One of the best parts of this new pregnancy is that we didn't use fertility assistance. We got the all clear that M is fully recovered from his chemotherapy (he was on chemo from August of 2007 until February of 2009), and so... we just went off of birth control.

And a few months later...

Well...

It looks like we're going to have to find a way to fit another person into our little condo.

Family Vacation Disasters- Thanksgiving Edition

2011-12-03T17:06:00.002-06:00

The only truly peaceful moment of the trip- right before M was pulled over for speeding and they both woke up.

Doesn't look like much, but trust me it was.

We don't always have the best luck with our family vacations.

Take our very first family trip. The girls weren't even three months old. We hit the road early on December 22nd as the snow was falling. A few hours later, we spun out on some black ice, miraculously spun through three lanes of busy traffic untouched, and then slammed at 65mph into the cement barrier between east and westbound traffic.

The car was totaled. I had a concussion. The girls were fine.

We made it the rest of the way to Minnesota in a rental car that M couldn't quite fit in to drive properly- have I mentioned that I'm married to a giant?- and then home again in Grandpa's car. And that was our very first family vacation.

Cold and wet in August

Take our last vacation as another example. We went to Michigan to visit my childhood paradise for a week. A week in the middle of summer, where it rained continuously and temperatures fell below fifty degrees.

Nobody was injured, but the day M went home (we followed a day and a half later) the sun came out, and the temperature climbed at least twenty degrees. It was a huge bummer to have M miss out on the best part of the vacation.

There was our very first experience going somewhere without the girls. We went to M's cousin's wedding, and left the girls (who were about 8 months old) at a hotel with M's sister-in-law. A few hours into the reception, a tornado was sighted basically between us and the hotel. I spent a very tense evening listening to tornado sirens and praying that everything would be fine. It was, but it's not a night I'll soon forget.

Am I morbid for photographing this?

That same summer, while we were visiting Grandma and Grandpa a neighbor's house was struck by lightning and burned to the ground.

Basically, each time we traveled that summer we were followed by tornadoes, hailstorms, and all manner of acts of God. I think I heard more tornado sirens that summer than I did marriage vows, and we went to at least five weddings.

Then there was our last quick trip to Michigan- when DD nearly took her eye out in the process of falling off a couch. I still get chills when I think about what would have happened if her face had been turned just a few millimeters to the left.

It was quite a shiner.

And this started before the girls were even born. On the second to last day of our honeymoon, M devoured one of the most amazing sandwiches I've ever seen- you would not BELIEVE what people put on hamburgers in New Zealand!- and found himself dramatically ill until well after we had made our way from Doubtless Bay to Auckland by car, from Auckland to Los Angeles by plane, slept a night, and then flown from LA to Chicago and finally made our way home.

So our family vacations are a bit... dangerous. For us and for anybody near us. And at the very best, they're just interrupted by inclement weather.

I got M an LA an Oscar because even though the only
part of Hollywood he saw was the bathroom, he was still
absolutely the "Best Husband."

When we decided to take off for Thanksgiving. we were already too busy with current disasters to worry much about this. I have been extremely ill, and had spent the previous week in bed. Which meant that I hadn't looked into a certain matter... the tire on the car that had been a little low. We just hit the road.

We drove to that lovely Bed and Breakfast. We had a nice spacious room, we had a ton of privacy, and we had a very nice night. And in the morning, while our host baked us some wonderful pecan and peanut rolls, an older gentleman walked up to us and announced that we had a flat.

We were optimistic that we could make it the rest of the way on the spare- but there was a problem. As M soon discovered, we did not have a spare. We had a huge rusted out spot on the undercarriage where once there had been hardware to mount a spare, but the hardware, the apparatus, and the tire were completely gone. It was Thanksgiving day. We were in a tiny, isolated town with a population close to 0, and we were miles from the freeway.

That's the whole town. The big red building is the B&B.
Everything else was closed.

We had no AAA. We didn't have our checkbook. We had no cash. The only bank in town (just past the Town Hall which was annexed to the gas station) had no ATM. The gas station had no air pump.

The owner of the Bed and Breakfast called a friend of a friend of a friend of some sort, and after a few hours he came by to assess the situation. Another three hours and more drama than I care to relate later, he had taken our tire to his shop, filled it with air, and returned it.

This cost us $150. And a home made pumpkin pie from our cooler (it had been destined for dinner at my in-laws, thankfully I had brought two) that I had given him in thanks for taking time on Thanksgiving to help a stranded family.

Grumbling and frustrated, we hit the road. We had just enough time to make it before the meal started.

The girls loved dessert- big surprise!

M got overenthusiastic and began speeding to make up for lost time. He forgot that he was in Wisconsin, driving a car with out of state plates. Not too surprisingly, he managed to rack up a $275 speeding ticket about an hour later.

Dinner was lovely. The company was excellent. We had a wonderful time with our family. But I'm afraid the woe doesn't end there.

The day after Thanksgiving, I became violently ill. I nearly had M take me to the hospital in the middle of the night, but decided against it and spent much of the night in the bathroom having a gall bladder attack instead. (For those of you who haven't been following closely or long, I've been having gall bladder issues off and on since I was pregnant with the girls.)

I called my doctor the next day, and stayed off of solid food for as long as I could take it. I thought things were looking up.

Maybe this picture of the girls playing will help distract you
from the imagined pain.

And then, bizarrely, inexplicably, I got a small piece of broken glass lodged under my big toenail.

I'll let you think about what that must feel like for a minute before I go on.

...

Worse than that. Try again.

...

Yeah, there you go. I managed to get the thing out a few days later, by which time we'd already made it home. By which time I had been yelled at by not one, but two doctors for not going to an ER when I had my gall bladder attack. By which time I had managed to crack the rim on the flat tire (oh yeah, we made it back on the same stupid tire) by basically rolling it the four blocks to a gas station where I could put enough air back in the tire to get me to my gall bladder ultrasound.

That little green thing is the cause of my current woes.

And now? Now I've had a doctor's appointment approximately every other day since the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. I'm on a SERIOUSLY restricted diet, and I'm consulting with a surgeon next week who is most likely about to remove my gall bladder.

Which I am not thrilled about, to say the least.

There is a complicating factor in all of this, one which I'm not ready to talk about (it's always hard to know what medical information is pertinent and what is best kept to ones self) but I'll probably get to that once a little more is known.

So in short, yet another family vacation where somebody was injured, where our car was damaged, and where illness played a significant role. Part of me is actually relieved that I was the one to take the brunt of our travel curse.

...and in two and a half weeks we'll do it again.

On second thought, maybe I should just sit that one out.

Despite it all we still had fun. And no, I won't be sitting out vising Minnesota again for Christmas. Or visiting Michigan again for New Years and belated Channukah. I promise.

A Bedtime Story

2011-12-01T22:38:00.000-06:00

Sometimes, bedtime is the best time.

Tonight, as on most nights, putting my children in their beds didn't even come close to putting them to sleep. Eventually, I went back into their room to do a final settle down, and was greeted by both girls begging me to, "Read book! Read book!"

Instead, I told them a bedtime story.

Once upon a time, there were two little girls. They loved to run and play, and to eat their dinners, and to take a bath. One day they had played so much and had so much fun, they could hardly keep their eyes open. So their mommy tucked them in, kissed them on the cheek, and on the nose, and told them how much she loved them. And the little girls went to sleep. And the next day, they did it all over again. The end.

As I told them the story, I tucked them in. I kissed them on the cheeks and on the nose. And then I told them I loved them, said goodnight, and left the room.

They haven't made a peep since.

My fabled angels

...best story ever. :)

College and Parenthood

2011-11-30T11:09:00.002-06:00

I'd like to say, just for the record, that being a parent at the same time as being a student is hard.

Really, REALLY hard.

No matter how much I complain about the falling standards in academia, the fact remains that being a student takes time. And time is the one thing that parenthood completely takes away from you.

M asked me what I wanted for Channukah or Christmas. I told him I wanted a week, Somewhere right around... now. A week where I could work on my final projects and presentations, a week where I could catch up on all the reading I've missed over the semester, a week where I could just sort of not be a mom for a bit.

Which is, of course, impossible. You never get to stop being a mom. You never actually WANT to stop being a mom. Just as I know M never wants to stop being a dad, even for a minute,

Do you understand a word of this?

M definitely has it harder than me. He's working full time, he's in twice as many classes, and his classes are just plain harder. I look at his homework and the only thing I understand on it is the date. The math for advanced concrete structural dynamics? Is that even what the subject is called? It's impossible.

And somehow, M has to find the time to do his homework. To take his online classes. To study before his tests. Somehow, he has to find the energy to be up and out of the house at five in the morning, work all day, and be at class at five o'clock that evening. And then stay on campus until late at night working on homework for the next class. Some weeks, M goes from Sunday night until Friday night without seeing his children awake once.

And me? My school work is completely different.

I have to find time to do fieldwork, interviewing grocery store owners about the changing demographics of their clients. Visiting markets and roadside trucks full of fruit to gauge the availability and price of produce for the residents of Chicago neighborhoods. Touring abandoned warehouses that are being reinvented as breweries and bakeries. And I can't do that with my kids.

Then I have to go home, and make sense of that information. Turn it into cohesive papers, presentations, notes...

It's still a lot of work. It's still incredibly difficult. And I have to do it while I'm outnumbered by small people who desperately want my attention. Who want nothing more in their lives than to spend their day playing with me.

And I, of course, want nothing more than to play with them.

I want to spend my days taking them to playgrounds, to museums, to playdates. Instead, I put on cartoons so I can sit at my computer and manipulate powerpoint presentations.

M and I are students, we can't afford the sort of childcare that would let us do all the studying we require. We can't afford the time to have things like a clean and tidy home, we just plain don't have the time. And still, we try our damndest to make sure that we still get to spend time as a family.

Days like this are a huge educational sacrifice.

Whole days, where we abandon our homework in favor of taking our kids somewhere fun, somewhere that we can share a new and exciting experience with them.

Or even just to a restaurant to get ice cream.

Because children take more time than anything else. And any time you take away from them feels like time that you have absolutely lost. Time that you can never get back. Time that you have somehow wasted.

It's not time wasted, it's time invested. And we know that. We know that once we're finally done with school, once M has his Master's in Engineering and FINALLY have my Bachelor's degree, we'll be able to have a better life. One where we can actually take family time. One where we get sick days, and decent insurance, and a whole two weeks to go on a real vacation. A life where we can afford to give our kids the sort of life that we knew growing up.

That's why we're in school. That's what we tell ourselves every day. "This is a means to an end. This will be over soon. And our lives will be so much better."

Last night, M had his first final of the semester. He thinks it went pretty well.

Next week, we'll finally be on break. We'll have a few blessed weeks in which we live like "normal" people. People who aren't trying to live two lives at once.

Where I would always rather be.

And next semester we'll do it again.

And over the summer, I'll do it again.

And then? Then we'll be done.

And our lives will be so much better for having put in all that hard work. For losing all that time with our children.

We'll be able to give our children the lives they deserve. Lives where we are free to be with them.

End of the Month Controversy: Abortion

2011-11-30T10:22:00.003-06:00

I started my End of the Month Controversy series so that I could talk about issues that are important to me, as a person, a woman, and a parent, regardless of whether they came up naturally in the course of writing about my family. As a general rule, I try to keep politics out of this blog, but the fact of the matter is that parenting and politics go together. So much of what you what you want for your children is tied to what you want for your country. Or at least, I've found that to be true for myself.

You knew it was coming. So here it is. This month, I'm going to talk about abortion.

I am, as you have probably guessed if you follow me on Twitter or like me on Facebook, pro-Choice.

I don't believe that an embryo is a person. I don't believe that a fertilized egg is a person. I don't believe that zygote is a person. I believe that life starts in the womb, but "life" means a lot of things. A bacteria is "alive." A tulip is "alive." Yogurt cultures are "alive." Cows and pigs and sheep and deer and chickens (all of which the majority of Americans eat, pro-"life" or not) are "alive."

I don't think that life is sacred- to the extent that some opponents of abortion do. Yes, I'm a vegetarian. But I'm also a pragmatist. I don't oppose killing animals to eat them, I oppose the business of killing animals to eat them. I believe that life should be dignified, and the lives of animals being raised for slaughter are pretty much never dignified. They're awful. And so many go to waste- the number of animals raised for slaughter in this country that live in conditions that render them totally inedible... it's horrific. Undignified.

And it's my outrage in a lack of dignity in life that makes me pro-Choice. I'll get back to that.

Let's talk about that word- choice. Women have been choosing whether or not to maintain pregnancies since time immemorial. 150 years ago, most women knew which herbs were abortifacients. Not just women out in the sticks either- city folk. Women with book learnin'. Upper class women in tiny hats who played the flute and painted with watercolors. But also country women. Women who had to sew all their children's clothing, who had to work in fields with their babies strapped to their backs. They knew how to avoid getting pregnant in the first place. And they knew ways to naturally terminate a pregnancy.

Men didn't talk about it much, but they knew that women knew. Men just didn't think it was their place to be involved. They weren't involved in childbirth, they weren't involved with "women's work," and they sure weren't involved in discussions about women's reproductive health or autonomy. There's a reason that abortion isn't mentioned in the Bible too directly- it was totally accepted. Sometimes, women did what they needed to do. And that continued for a long, long time. Shortly after Charlotte Bronte died from hyperemesis gravidarum- a not entirely uncommon pregnancy complication, a friend of hers wrote that had she known the "cause" of Charlotte's illness, she herself would have administered the herbs to end the pregnancy. That was 150 years ago. But as the science of medicine grew both in effectiveness and in the public esteem, "old wives tales" and folk knowledge were replaced- midwives found themselves evicted from delivery rooms. Slowly, the universality of the knowledge of controlling women's fertility dwindled.

And then the pill came along. So much easier. And then the D and C- our modern day abortion.

Now women have the ability to abort a pregnancy more safely than every before, but they can't do it on their own. They can't go into their gardens, cut the right herb, make a tea that makes them horribly ill and induces a miscarriage. They don't know how. Instead, they can go to a doctor who can cleanly remove an embryo without the illness or medical risks. And that really freaks people out. It's so clinical, so cold. People picture an abortionist as their worst childhood nightmares of the doctor- a man who cuts mommies so he can kill babies.

Now abortion is safer, but so much more public.

I'm not saying that it was ever an easy choice for a woman to make- it wasn't. But we live in a different time. 150 years ago, life was so much HARDER. You could be essentially married off against your will, you had no protection against a husband who beat you, you had no property of your own, the law didn't protect you at all. You couldn't vote. You had to have child after child, regardless of whether any of them had food to eat. And you had to work, in the fields or in a sweat shop. There was no middle class. Not until the 20th century.

So yes, that's all history. But it's important to understand how new the public outcry against abortion really is.

It's not just new, it's confused and misguided. So much of it is religiously based- the idea that abortion is murder and, "Thou Shalt Not Kill."

I don't think abortion is murder. And neither does the Bible. The Bible mentions abortion one time- and not by name. Exodus 21-22: "If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no mischief follows: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine." Incidentally, it's the same punishment as if a man cuts off the woman's arm. Causing a woman to miscarry- that is, inducing an abortion- the husband gets to beat him up, and he owes the husband a fine.

I believe Genesis 9:6 covers that punishment for murder- "Whoso sheddeth a man's blood, by man shall his blood by shed."

God and I are firmly on the same side of the personhood issue. If anything, I'm more pro-life than He is. I believe that at some point, a fetus IS a human being. I think that time comes around the same time that you can measure brain activity- about 20 weeks gestational age. If the thing dreams, it's pretty close to human. And most hospitals with good NICUs in this country have extremely good odds (over 90%) of keeping a 26 week preemie alive. They even have 10% odds of keeping a 22 week micropreemie alive. Micropreemies can have a whole host of lifetime disorders and medical problems as a result of not developing fully, but I would definitely call that fetus a person. The Bible doesn't.

Keep in mind, nearly all abortions occur well before that point. The vast majority of abortions occur within six weeks of conception. At six weeks, we're still talking about embryos. We haven't even reached the fetus discussion. Let alone the argument of whether or not it's a child.

I often I hear people say things like, "It's a child, not a choice," and, "If the CHILD could choose, it would choose to live!"

The idea of the child choosing seems pretty loaded to me. You see, an embryo isn't a child- it's a potential child. The same way that an unfertilized egg isn't a child- it's a potential child. They are no more capable of making a choice about their lives than a potato. They simply are not sentient.

If we're going to say that every embryo would "choose" life, then we should also posit that every egg would "choose" life, which would mean that a woman who didn't get pregnant at every single opportunity was denying her "children" a right to life.

But let's avoid that for now... let's just say that we're only talking embryos. What if every single embryo was grown into a human child? First of all, it would be a miracle to women who want to have babies everywhere- one in three pregnancies end in early miscarriage. Making many abortions pretty much a non-issue, as most women who have them get them within the fist six weeks- the time most likely to miscarry and also the fastest time frame possible. And most of those women, the vast majority of them, are poor. As a few notorious anti-Choice groups keep reminding us Chicagoans, poor black women in particular are the most likely to seek an abortion.

The strain on society of providing for those children is massive. There's their educational costs, their childcare costs, their medical costs... and if a woman is already poor? I got advice from a teacher once- he recommended all his students marry rich people. He said, "You don't need any help being poor." Well, nobody will help you be poor more than a child. And we as a society have an obligation (particularly as a self-proclaimed Christian society- but that's an entirely different controversy) to take care of the poor. One that we utterly fail at.

Then there are the more complicated choice issues. What if the woman already made a choice NOT to get pregnant? Let's say that she was already taking birth control. Birth control is only 99% effective. People still get pregnant when they're taking it. What if she was raped? What if she's mentally ill, or addicted to drugs? What if she is in some way completely incapable of caring for a child? What if she's in some way incapable of MAKING a choice? Many of those children (and remember, mentally ill women, poor women, and minority women are at higher risk for rape as well), if not most, go into the foster care system.

It's sad to say, but most children that go into foster care never come out. Most families looking to adopt are looking to adopt healthy, NORMAL babies. Not the babies of crack addicts, not babies with serious health problems, not babies born addicted to heroin. Those children go into the foster system, and they rot there. They get involved in crime, they go to jail, they get killed. It's horrible.

And people who want to adopt babies? They mostly adopt abroad- for good reasons. The US laws regarding adoption put so many protections in place for the birth parents that at almost any time, a family can simply loose their adopted child. After years. Did the mom clean up and get a job? Did a grandparent come forward? And so on. International adoptions are much safer for adoptive parents, and so more and more frequently they pick children from other countries. Countries that have made a business out of adoption, ruining families in the process.

And it's not just that, it's the cost. A domestic adoption frequently costs eight to ten times what it takes for adoptive parents to fly to another country, adopt a child there, and return home. A domestic adoption can often cost upwards of $40,000, most of which is the fees involved in making sure that the birth mother gives up all of her legal rights to the child.

Perhaps most importantly, people want to adopt children as young as possible. Most domestic adoptions occur through agencies that deal with pregnant women- not with children already in need. Most families looking to adopt are looking to go to the hospital when the baby is born, and leave with it. They're not looking to rescue a child who's already been through years of potential abuse or neglect. They don't want a child that might have "issues." They want to be there from day one, not seventeen months or six years later.

There are lots of other reason that people don't want to adopt via foster care. Half of the kids in foster care have siblings in foster care. Nobody wants to split them apart, and the most adoptive parents aren't looking to take a bunch of kids at once. More than half of the children in foster care have their parents come to retrieve them- at least once. This is a huge fear of any parent looking to adopt. And a large and growing proportion of children in foster care were actually placed there by their parents to help them get care for mental illnesses.

In short, we have a problem taking care of children in this country.

People do still adopt out of foster care. And my hat is off to those people. Truly. There are people who make a gigantic difference in those kids' lives. And if you've been reading my blog for a while, you know that it's in our plans to adopt. Someday. But that's not what I'm talking about today.

I say, until we as a society actually take care of the children- ALL of the children- that we already have... until all of the breathing, needy children who go hungry every day, who suffer violence every day, who commit crimes and live entire childhoods without once hearing the words "I love you..." Until we as a society do our part to care for those children, we have absolutely no business telling anybody that they MUST bring another child into the world.

Last of all, I firmly believe that being pregnant just isn't for everyone. Some women like being pregnant, but for some women it is awful. Spending nine months being sick and miserable can actually ruin your life. Only about half of the women in this country work jobs where they can take maternity leave. What happens to you if you can't work because you haven't stopped puking in three days? Or if you can't work because your SPD is so bad that you can't stand up? Or if you can't work because you're just too damn tired to be awake more than four or five hours at a stretch? Pregnancy is like that for a lot of women. A lot of women don't have the opportunity to have both a pregnancy and a productive economic life. Should a woman have to lose her job, her livelihood, her security, so she can make another person dependent on her? How much should she have to give up because she's gotten pregnant?

Pregnancy doesn't just create a baby. It hijacks a woman's body- literally makes it not her own. Women who have been pregnant, whether intended or not, whether desired or not, know this. Every move that you make, every thought in your head, every physical sensation you experience, somehow these are effected, altered. Sometimes drastically so. I could not have been a chef and pregnant simultaneously. Not when chocolate tasted like fish food.

There are women who simply cannot be pregnant and healthy at the same time. I think here of a friend of mine with a degenerative back condition. If she were to become (and stay) pregnant, she would need to spend her entire pregnancy in bed. She would be unable to carry a child to term, or have a natural delivery. And after the baby was born, she would be facing years of physical therapy and probably surgery to try to undo the damage to her spine.

I think about women who become preeclampsic, or who have hyperemesis gravidarum. Women who, whether or not they want to have a baby, suffer through a pregnancy.

I think about women like me, who's first symptom of pregnancy- even before a missed period- is cancer.

Should women for whom pregnancy might not prove fatal, but would certainly prove dangerous or permanently life altering in the matters of their own health, be expected to get or stay pregnant?

Included in the number of women who could afford to have a baby, who might become good parents, but who would probably choose to terminate rather than remain pregnant are also women for whom their career is both high pressured and quickly rising. The fact remains that women receive fewer promotions, fewer raises, less money for any given job than a man. Part of this is the fear that the company will "lose her" to a baby at some point in time. If a man arrives at work and tells his boss that he's going to be a father, he gets a pat on the back, congratulations, a great deal of joy is shared. But if a woman goes into work and announces to her boss that she's going to be a mother, she loses much of her opportunity. Exciting or important jobs, cases, and assignments pass her by. Promotions pass her by. She is suddenly seen as a liability. This isn't only true in business, it is true in academia as well. Imagine working on your Ph.D. and being pregnant. Imagine working in a lab where you deal with diseases, or doing fieldwork in a country without adequate prenatal care, or in a hospital where you are constantly on call and exposed to sick people day in and day out. Is that a safe environment in which to be pregnant? And should you give it all up in order to have a baby?

And if a woman is working so hard at her job in order to reach a point where she can provide for a child in the manner she sees fit? Where she makes enough to pay for good childcare, for good health care, for a home in which her children can be safe and comfortable? Should she have to have a baby that could derail her hopes and plans for a future family life?

A lot of people say that if you don't want to have a baby, you shouldn't have sex. But that is nonsense. Sex is a fundamental, basic need of most adults. A need to be physically close to another person, a need for the emotional release, a need for the connection between the partners- whether committed in marriage or otherwise- to to express their love for each other.

I think abortion sucks, quite simply. I think it's sad, but mostly, for the women who must make that incredibly painful decision. But I don't think it's the worst thing that can happen.

I don't think it's nearly as bad as what I've seen happen to the children living in urban poverty. Pregnant 11 year olds who were raped by foster brothers, seven year old boys running drugs for a gang that provides the only sense of family they've ever known, malnourished kids who can't concentrate on getting their reading skills up to grade level because they're too hungry to focus on learning to conjugate their verbs.

I don't think it's nearly as bad as women leaving the sciences, the corner offices, and the board rooms of the country because they must cede their own ambitions.

I say, if you're going to fight against abortion, start by fighting for the kids who really need you. And the sooner that having an unwanted baby doesn't carry the risks that its life will be like the lives of the unwanted children among us today, the sooner women will make the choice to have the baby instead of aborting it.

And fight for gender equality. When a pregnancy doesn't mean losing your financial independence, losing your upward momentum, losing hope for the life you wanted to build, more of those women will chose to have the baby rather than aborting it as well.

You can't start by eradicating the effect. You have to go to the causes. And the cause of abortion isn't women who, like me, just don't believe that an embryo is a person. The causes of abortion are a society where it is extremely damaging to let that embryo become a person. Give pregnant women the support they need, give children the care they need, give women the equality they deserve, and you will find fewer and fewer abortions performed.

Into The Great Blue Yonder

2011-11-23T12:06:00.000-06:00

DD, snuggled up for a long trip

The suitcases are packed and in the car.

The cooler is filled with oven-ready Three Sisters and a plethora of pies.

Our traditional road trip themed mix CD has been burned, and along with the weeks medications is tucked snugly into my purse.

The diaper bags are fully stocked, it feels like every bib in the house is in one Mental Floss tote.

My children have been thoroughly fed- actually, they haven't stopped eating yet today.

The diaper service has been put on hold for the weekend.

The dishes are clean. (!!!!)

Our Mary Poppins is pre-paid, has functional keys, and is planning on watching a few movies with our disturbed cat while we're away.

The car is filled with blankets, spare sweaters, tissues, etc.

We're ready to gorge ourselves on the bounty of Pilgrims and Natives, to celebrate our gratitude, and to spend several days in a food induced coma.

In short, all systems are go. Out to the breach once more. It's time to hit the road.

...as soon as M gets home. He'll lug the cooler and the diaper bags out to the car, and then?

Minnesota, ho!

SI, happily distracted and ready to road trip

In case you're wondering, I'll have my laptop with me, and continue my daily NoBloPoMo blogging. Between the four blogs (two public, two private- sorry if you won't see them all!) and the end of the semester, we'll hardly be off the grid.

So... no worries! You'll hardly miss me!

...I'm so addicted to the internet.

How SuperMommy Does Thanksgiving

2011-11-22T15:45:00.001-06:00

Last year's Thanksgiving Dinner at Casa SuperMommy: Turkey (my first whole bird!), sweet potatoes, more turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing, gravy, green bean casserole, risotto, veganized risotto, Three Sisters, and a basket of biscuits and corn bread. And of course a bottle of wine.

Truth be told, I'm sad that we're not going to be with my side of the family for Thanksgiving.

Don't get me wrong, I love my in-laws. I truly do. I enjoy their company, I have a ton of fun, and of course it's always good for the girls to see their grandparents- either side. It's just that...

Everybody has their own family traditions. Everyone has "the way that you do things."

My husband's family is, in many ways, very traditional. They're about as midwestern American as they come. Friendly, heartland people. Meat-and-potatoes people.

And my family?

My mom was writing a world cuisine, completely vegetarian cookbook for most of my childhood. Thanksgiving was her opportunity to showcase everything that she knew about American Food.

And by "American Food," I don't mean burgers and fries and deep fried butter. The way my family, led by my mother, has always done Thanksgiving is to cook foods that could have been made by American natives. That the non-Pilgrims would have brought to the feast. Assuming that those natives were vegetarians.

Nothing on the table isn't indigenous to the USA (well, there are cheeses who's cultures originated abroad). There's succotash with lima beans and corn, there's sprouts with chestnuts and maple, there's homemade corn bread crumbled into stuffing, wild rice, cranberry sauce and spinach stews, there's roasted sweet potatoes, butternut squash risotto, pecan pies, pumpkin pies, apple pies... and then there's the Three Sisters.

The legend of the Three Sisters is that they are vegetables that care for each other. Unlike European farmers, Native Americans farmed by planting all of their crops together, very densely, in small plots. One acre would provide a plethora of vegetables, in a gigantic mass as opposed to nice, tidy rows. The three sisters are squash, corn, and beans. You see, the corn stalks provide poles for the beans to climb. The squash keeps the ground clear, allowing the corn to remain spaced and get enough sun (and the squash crowds out some bean-hating weeds). The three together even keep from excessively draining the soil of nutrients like nitrogen.

So we have something we just call, "Three Sisters." Beans, corn, and squash. The way I cook it, it's a day and a half long affair. I makes the house smell alternately savory and sweet, and then just plain like Thanksgiving.

For my first Thanksgiving with my in-laws, I'm making the Three Sisters and pumpkin pies. Out of pumpkins. Not that canned nonsense.

I honestly don't know what to anticipate for dinner. If it's anything like Christmas, I expect a turkey, some potatoes, corn bread, and gravy. And cranberry sauce, I'm sure. But I'm not expecting a lot of vegetarian fare. And what vegetarian fare there is, I'm not expecting it to be... well.. anything like my mother's.

The fact that my mother isn't cooking a Thanksgiving dinner at all this year isn't a lot of comfort. I was kind of hoping she could bring me leftovers.

So here, for your family's enjoyment, are two of my favorite Thanksgiving recipes. Three Sisters, the way I make it, and Butternut Squash Risotto.

Three Sisters

Day One:
4c dried beans- assorted
2-4 quarts water
1.5 tsp salt
14 black peppercorns, whole
2 cloves garlic
1 large onion- halved
2 carrots
2 stalks celery- leaves attached

Rinse the beans carefully, discarding any stones. Place in large stock pot with 2 quarts of water while you prepare the vegetables. Discard any beans that rise quickly to the surface.

Bring pot, with all ingredients, to a boil. Boil for one hour, adding water as needed to keep beans covered. Stir occasionally. At the end of the hour, turn off the burner, cover tightly, and allow to sit 8 hours or overnight.

Day Two AM:
2-3 acorn squash, halved
2 tbs butter
1/2c brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp powdered ginger

Yesterday's beans
1 onion- halved
2 cloves garlic
1 carrot
1 stalk celery- leaves attached
1.5 tsp salt
2-4 quarts water

Pour out the water from the pot of beans. Remove vegetables. Discard onions, garlic, and celery, but reserve carrots. Place them in the fridge for later.

Rinse, and return to pot. Add vegetables. Bring water to a boil, and simmer for 1 hour. Remove from heat.

Place the acorn squash on a baking sheet. Divide butter, sugar, and spices into squash halves. Bake at 400 degrees F for 30-40 minutes, occasionally brushing butter over the inside of the squash. Remove and allow to cool.

Day Two PM:
Beans from before
Reserved carrots
Cooked squash
2c frozen corn
3 tomatoes, peeled and chopped
1 heirloom tomato, yellow and red if possible- skinned
1+ tbs coarse salt- I prefer black (from Hawaii, so... technically Native American?)
additional brown sugar and cinnamon to taste

Drain and rinse beans again. Reserve carrot, throw out other vegetables. Put in large mixing bowl. Add corn. Add peeled, chopped tomatoes.

Remove squash from rinds. Cut into 1-2" chunks. Add to bean mixture. Mix thoroughly, and add any additional sugar and cinnamon.

Place in large baking/casserole dish.

Cut reserved carrots into thin rounds. Cut tomato into thin slices. Use sliced carrots and tomatoes to decorate top of Three Sisters, with one tomato slice in the middle, and concentric rings of carrots/tomatoes radiating outwards. Take coarse salt, and sprinkle liberally on top.

Bake at 350 for 35 minutes, or until tomatoes have formed almost a crust.

Serves 6-8. And a heck of a lot more on Thanksgiving when plates are overflowing with other goodies.

Butternut Squash Risotto

6-8 c broth
5tbs butter, divided
1 onion, finely chopped
3-4 c butternut squash- balled with melon baller but not yet cooked
2c long grain rice
1c dry white wine
1c grated Parmesan
2 tbs fresh rosemary
salt and white pepper

Heat broth, and keep at a low simmer until required

heat 4 tbs butter in a very big pan. Cook squash and onions and rosemary for 5 min. Add rice, and cook for another two minutes. Add wine, and stir gently until absorbed or evaporated. Add broth, and simmer gently for 20 minutes, uncovered.

Add remaining ingredients and remove rosemary. Add salt and white pepper to taste.

Garnish with Parmesan and a sprig of rosemary.

Sick, sick, sick

2011-11-21T15:11:00.000-06:00

Pretty much what I've been doing.

Hello, lovely readers.

If you've been wondering where I was all weekend (which I'm sure kept you up at night), I can tell you. I'm sick.

I was hiding in bed, alternately sleeping and listening to M take care of the girls.

That's where I am now. Except that M is work, and I'm avoiding getting my children up from their "nap." They didn't sleep anyway.

I am surrounded by a very attractive halo of dirty tissues, empty vitamin water bottles, and sundry medical supplies. I have my thermometer, I have empty bowl of soup (well known important medical tool), hand sanitizer, and antibiotics.

Oh yeah, we reached that point. I've got the antibiotics. Haven't taken them yet. Can't decide if I'm willing to suffer the repercussions. I handle antibiotics about as well as I handle entrenched bacteria. That is to say, I don't.

Of course, I didn't get sick all by myself. You don't get sick in a vacuum. You get sick from having kids.

Filthy, germ infested monsters they are. Giggling in their room, calling my name and jumping on the beds. Covered in snot and just waiting to get me even sicker.

I knew I couldn't afford to be ill this winter, so I got us all flu shots. Nobody in this house will be getting the flu. So that's good.

Unfortunately, there are lots of non-flu viruses that are going around. And this one, call it what you will, is a freakin' DOOZY. Fevers, chills, the runny nose of doom, the aches and pains of a flu, a migraine that just won't quit, every single flu thing but the nausea. And thanks to the post nasal drip I'm getting plenty of that anyway.

My lips are chapped, my face is pimply and gross, I might be getting bed sores... in short, my lovely readers, I am a freakin' MESS. I am grosser than gross.

I've lost five pounds in three days. And after my last eating adventure (damn you, lentil soup!) it looks like that trend might continue.

The laundry situation is dire. The catbox is unclean. Dishes have been unwashed for the better part of a week.

But yet, somehow, life must continue.

Somehow I must climb from my miserable little sick bed, wipe off my kids butts and noses (you caught the part where they were sick too, right?), and park them in front of the TV where we can all be miserable together.

They're holding up better than me. DD seems completely oblivious of the croup that she has... AGAIN. SI got the thing first, so she's pretty much better anyway. M is miraculously unscathed. I think he'll probably start showing symptoms as soon as we get into the car to go to Thanksgiving.

Oh, winter. My old nemesis. You think you've beaten me, but you're wrong.

You think you'll have me laid up through all the snow, through all the storms, through all the ice cold misery you can inflict, and that I'll waste away to nothing before the spring can come.

You are WRONG, winter. WRONG.

I will defeat you. I will get out of this bed, I will clean the damn laundry. I will pack the suitcases. I will make the meanest pumpkin pie you ever freakin' tasted. And I will suck it up and be well until spring comes and my allergies kick in.

...that said, to my lovely readers and my friendly neighbors:
If you happen to find me passed out from fever while my children build megablock towers on my prone form... If you see through the window that my mummified corpse has melded with the couch and is being used as a staging area for a toy feast that the grublings are preparing this holiday... if smell of illness and neglected cat droppings lures into my home just to check that everything is okay... Please...

Just roll me back into bed and start a load of laundry?

Thanks.

Review: Cranberry Red Balloon by Tab Laven

2011-11-18T10:45:00.000-06:00

As I'm sure you recall, I am pretty much obsessed with music. So, naturally, when I got an email offering me a free copy of a CD to review on the blog, I pretty much jumped at the chance. That CD is "Cranberry Red Balloon" by Tab Laven.

Let me start by saying- I hate "music for children." I don't know how some parents do it, pretending not to hear the horrible sounds coming from The Wiggles, or Sharon, Lois, and Bram. I just can't. I'm of the opinion that exposing children to music is like exposing them to food. If you expose them to GOOD music, they'll learn to like good music. If you expose them to GOOD food, they'll learn to like good food.

It's why my kids won't eat American cheese, but they love some Smoked Gouda.

Of course, sometimes it's hard to decide what music is appropriate. After all, as much as DD loved bouncing along to Jay-Z's "99 Problems" when she was six months old, now that she's verbal you can bet we're not rocking out to that so much.

When I was a kid, I listened to a lot of The Beatles, and a mixed back of folk music from the 60s and 70s. My parents, the hippies that they are, were very into groups like Steeleye Span and Simon and Garfunkel. And those were wonderful for a kid, with a few exceptions. (I remember being plainly puzzled by the song "Richard Corey," having no idea what "orgies on his yacht," could possibly mean.)

"Cranberry Red Balloon" is a folk album. Pure and simple. It sounds more like the Kings of Convenience than Simon and Garfunkel, even with Art Garfunkel lending his voice to the title track. Which is to say, this is a quiet, peaceful album of quiet, peaceful, happy little folk songs.

It's music I am totally happy to have playing in the background around my house. It's completely innocuous, unoffensive, and lovely.

That said, there isn't much more to it than that.

What I said about good music leading to a love of good music, that doesn't mean just avoiding bad music. This album is not bad- in no way is this album bad. In some ways, it's poorly conceived. In some ways, it could use a few re-writes (as an adult, I can't help but find the female singer's repeated line in "Lost in a Daydream" about laying on her back and fantasizing less than sexual). But it is not bad.

It's just also not great.

I really wanted to like it more. I really did. But I felt over and over again that Tab Laven was trying too hard to write for kids, and not to write something good. He succeeds in writing something good with a few of the tracks. "Perfect Day" and "Close Your Eyes" are perfectly lovely songs. But the rest are completely forgettable.

"Cranberry Red Balloon" doesn't fall into the category of children's music aimed at toddlers- it's not easy to mimic songs with built in dances, it's not educational. It's not counting games, or animal identification. It's folk music. And I think that's a great idea.

But I think that folk music doesn't specifically need to be targeted to children. Folk music is already ideal for children. It's uncomplicated, it's pretty, and it's generally catchy. But it doesn't need to limit itself to the idea of what children can and might understand.

I was vividly reminded of a CD my parents once bought for their dogs. It included songs like, "Oh you're a good dog!" It was all written in major keys, with lots of words that dogs would recognize, like "good" and "ball" and "I love you."

"Cranberry Red Balloon" did pretty much the same thing, only for small children. Each song was peppered with vocabulary that my own kids would be able to recognize and relate to. Balloon, moon, sky, tree, rain... it's noun heavy, and full of simple concept nouns. To the point that it almost seems forced.

I think of music as being an opportunity. A child hears a lyric they like but don't understand, and they ask about it. While I'm not entirely sure how I would respond to my kids asking me what and orgy was, I'm sure I would respond well to them asking me what, say, and eclipse was. Or what some strange polysyllabic word meant. I don't want music dumbed down to my kids. I want music that achieves its own potential for quality, and that also happens to be child friendly.

In short, this is a lovely CD. But it probably won't become regular listening in our house. We'll stick with music that the grown ups genuinely enjoy, and try to keep the Jay Z to a minimum around the munchkins.

Preschool

2011-11-17T16:59:00.000-06:00

Hard at work.

One of the things I've been doing recently- something that's been absorbing a fantastic amount of time and emotional energy, is checking out preschools.

My children have been put in the unfortunate circumstance of being born precisely one month after the cut-off deadline for most schools. Unless I'm proactive and rather gung-ho, they're going to be pretty much the oldest kids in their class.

I consider this a problem. You see, I have very few goals for my children's education, but they're pretty big. 1.) I want them to be happy to go to school- I want them to run away from me into their classrooms, and not look back. I want them to think that school is great. 2.) I want them to be challenged. I don't want them to think that school is JUST fun, I want them to think of it as... well... educational.

Honestly, I think that these go together. I remember being in school when school was too easy. I didn't try. I didn't bother. I could get by just by being smart.

This is SI's sense of style.

That wasn't the case in the beginning. When I was very young, in a different state, school system, and experiencing a different educational philosophy, l was constantly challenged. And as much as I hated the other children who bullied me, or disliked being compared to my sister, or loathed particular teachers, I learned. And I loved that.

And I feel that this is what's most important. Developing a love of learning early.

So far, I'm doing pretty well with my kids. They LOVE books. Won't go to bed without them. They LOVE singing the alphabet song, identifying letters, counting the stairs in the front hall... they're smart. And they want to know things. And that's great.

But if they fall behind? I have no idea. All I do know is what "behind" is for them. It's a year where they aren't challenged to learn anything new.

Right now, if I had more time and energy and motivation, I would start structured learning with them. I would get them practicing how to draw their letters. I would get them doing some simple addition (SI is already pretty good on this front). I would actually home school a bit. But I'm not that motivated. Not that energized.

So I'm shopping for preschools.

This is DD's sense of style

And it's hard.

The cut off is almost universal- they have to be three years old precisely thirty days before their third birthday.

Nevermind that they are ready NOW. Nevermind that they would LOVE it. None of that matters. All that matters is that there is a cut-off. And my kids will miss it.

With one exception.

There is a preschool in the neighborhood. An AMAZING preschool. A preschool that will take them at two years old (they could be going now), that will mix them up with different age groups, that does learning in a fun, exciting way.

The day I went to visit was a Wednesday. It was devious of the preschool administrators to have parents visit on a Wednesday. You see, on Wednesday, every single class in the school bakes their own snack.

My scrappy little dancer

Each classroom is equipped with a small kitchen. There are approximately five children to each adult supervisor, and under close supervision, the preschoolers (and even kindergartners) bake. Each room smelled like a different amazing baked good. One classroom was making rainbow sprinkle cupcakes (a tie-in with a larger rainbow project), One classroom was making banana muffins. One classroom was making pumpkin bars. Each room, heavenly.

*I* wanted to go there every day.

But it wasn't just that. It was the integrated learning that got me.

The rainbow project classroom was 2-3 year olds. They were learning their colors, the ROYGBIV pattern, playing with glitter, with paints, building block structures in organized color groups... it's what they'd been doing all week. Playing. Just... on a theme.

Such a stylish little monster

A slightly older room had done the same thing with penguins. They'd read books starring penguins, they'd built ice-world dioramas, and they'd drawn a HUGE picture of a penguin, on which the children had written random little things they knew about penguins. ("Penguins eat fish. Penguins like swimming. Penguins live in the South Pole.")

Every Friday they have an art teacher come in to do a specific project.

For a few weeks each semester, they have swimming lessons at the local park.

Each room is equipped with a dress-up bin. Each room had at least two little girls dressed in fancy princess dresses over their regular clothes.

The children were, well, children. It was loud and chaotic, but not in any way disorganized.

It was, in short, amazing.

All of this means, of course, that it costs a bloody fortune. For ONE child. Let alone two of them.

Two hands!

My mother helped me out with the math. IF we were essentially to replace childcare with preschool, and work out a ten month payment plan with the school, we would double our monthly childcare expenses. And then take two months off.

And then do it again.

Of course, for kindergarten they offer financial assistance. As do most of the programs I've talked to. But not preschool. Nobody helps out with preschool.

So I think to myself, is it worth it? Is it worth it to make sure that, early on, our kids learn to LOVE school? Is it worth it, when this school goes up to eighth grade, is in our neighborhood, and will help our kids get grandfathered in to kindergarten a month before they're supposed to be (if they're ready, of course)?

Yes, YES it's worth it.

It's more worth it that putting that money to their college funds. Because if they learn to love school now, they'll be able to write their own ticket. If they learn that education is wonderful, that school is amazing, and that the pride they take in learning something new makes them feel better than already knowing something old, they will rock high school. They'll be able to get into any college they want.

Everyone's a critic.

And having their picks of colleges when they're older is a much better position to be in than simply being able to pay for the only ones that will take them.

Of course I think my kids are brilliant. Of course I think they'll grow up and get big fat scholarships and go to medical school and volunteer with the Peace Corps or Doctors Without Borders. Of course that's what I think- I'm their mom.

But I only think it because I know them, I see their potential. The way that only somebody who has spent basically every day of their lives with them can know them and understand them. And part of that is understanding what they need to be motivated- to be successful.

In this case- it's preschool. And it's gonna hurt. It's going to be a huge hit financially. Huge.

But it's only two years. We'll qualify for aid for kindergarten, I have no doubt. And they'll be somewhere that they'll love. Somewhere that will make them happy.

Of course, I could also spend all day squeezing them.

I'm looking forward to it. I'm excited about the day that I take them to school and leave them there. I'm excited to have them run off to play with their friends, to learn new things without me.

It's still most of a year away, but I'm already preparing myself. And I know when that day is actually here, it's going to be hard. It's going to be hard to leave them somewhere else, even if it's only for five hours a day.

But it's going to be worth it. It's the best thing I can possibly do for them.

And that's all I ever really want to do.

On Recreating Your Own Childhood With Your Kids

2011-11-14T09:47:00.000-06:00

Hint: This is a pony.

Like most people who had a good childhood, I always envisioned parenthood as providing the things for my children that I remembered fondly from my early years.

Yes, there's the obvious- love. Lots and lots of love. Hugs. Family game nights. Family car trips singing goofy songs or playing B for Botticelli. Reading stories together, going camping, singing around the campfire. Family dinners.

But there is more than that. There's the mundane, physical things. There's toys.

I understand that we live in a completely different world today than we did twenty five years ago. A quarter of a century ago, when I was my children's age, things were not what they are now. The internet wasn't piped into everyone's house, reality television basically didn't exist, the idea of a cell phone, or of a tablet computer, or even of a totally ubiquitous home desktop- let alone the multi-laptop family... those were all sci-fi concepts that didn't have much real significance in daily life.

When I was a kid, my dad would tell people they should teach THEIR kids to type, because that would be the most important skill they would need going into adulthood. He had no idea how right and how wrong he was. Yes, we pretty much all know how to type, but we use those skills to dumb down our own language into the shortest number of characters possible so we can rant about Glee and whether or not people will be eating live bugs on the new Fear Factor.

And here we are. Totally connected. Tweeting and texting about the most insipid and culturally devoid elements of our fascinating times.

And what am I using all of this technology to do? How am I creating the childhood I want for my children with the vast telecommunications resources at my fingertips every day?

...I'm recreating my own childhood. Embarrassingly specifically.

Glory of the 80s

I was trying to decide what to get for my kids for Channukah. I'm making them one of their big things, divided into lots of little bits. (More on that another time.) They'll get it over the whole eight days. But it's not the "big" present. There always needs to be a "big" present.

And they're toddlers. "Big" isn't particularly big.

So I got to thinking... what do they like? Well, I didn't want to get them anything TOO big. For their birthday they got so many BIG BIG BIG things that our house still isn't close to accommodating them comfortably. The easel, the kitchen, the mega blocks... it's a mess around here. No, their big present needed to be something emotionally big. Something that spoke to their interests quietly, let them sort of grow into them, and then be around for the rest of their childhood.

Tall order, no?

I started with their interests. What do they like? They like the toy kitchen. Well, that's totally stocked. They like playing with blocks. I don't need to get them any more of those just now. They like drawing. I think we've already covered that for a while. They like Wall-E. I am not getting them a trash compactor.

Then I thought to myself... they like brushing hair. No, they are OBSESSED with brushing hair. I should get them something with hair they can brush.

I thought it over. A toy that they *actually* play with, that they can do a variety of activities with, that they can carry around with them, should they desire, and that they can girly up to the nines if they so chose. Yes, this might be the thing. But what?

I didn't want to get them another doll. They have plenty of dolls. And I was never too into dolls as a kid. What's more, I don't want to get them into a hobby this young that can take thousands of dollars in accessories.

So what?

And then I remembered my own favorite toy. The first toy I remember actually receiving as a gift. It was when I was almost three, most of a year older than the girls will be when they get theirs, but still. basically the same age. I remember it being handed to me for the first time. It was a gift that I was getting for my mother's 30th birthday.

It was a My Little Pony.

Not a plastic My Little Pony. It was a ten inch high, plush, purple My Little Pony with long purple hair and white flowers on her rump. Her name was Blossom.

Dancing with my father at my wedding

I loved that pony. My father used to sing me "Blossom" by James Taylor as a lullabye. I remember asking for that song so many times, that song by the same name as MY favorite toy in the whole wide world. I dragged that pony all over the place. I hummed that song to myself in my father's study, while the dust danced in the beams of sunlight. I danced with my father to "Blossom" at my wedding.

I talk about Blossom as though she's gone, and as an adult that's proper. But it's not true. She's sitting on a shelf overlooking my bed.

Yes, almost twenty five years later. She's been through some rough times. Some hair cuts, a few unfortunate mud related incidents. She can hardly be described as "purple." But I still love her. Every once in a while, giving her a hug just makes me feel... happy.

So I thought to myself... here's a toy that I KNOW holds up to decades of abuse. Here's a toy with long hair that can be brushed, braided, adorned with bows and ribbons. I could give each of my children a stuffed My Little Pony and a hairbrush, and they'd be pretty much the happiest little girls in the world, right?

I sure was.

So I started doing my research. They make big stuffed My Little Ponies. But they have CHANGED. They look nothing like the My Little Ponies of my childhood. They look like anime bastardizations that long ago ceased having any genetic similarities to horses. Their hair is short and unstyleable. And they cost almost $40- an outrageous price for a stuffed animal you can stick under your arm.

So I did the only thing that one can do when looking for a toy that might no longer exist. I went to ebay.

The ponies I knew and loved? They haven't been made in about twenty four years. But lucky lucky me, My Little Ponies are hot collectibles. That means that every obscure My Little Pony product from the eighties is being unearthed, cleaned up with expert care, and resold.

Ebay is flush with vintage plush My Little Ponies Softies.

I had so many to chose from. So many ponies, so many conditions, so many prices. So many options.

The books cost extra

I settled on getting ponies that I didn't know from my own childhood. I thought it was just a little too weird to get my girl the exact ponies that Aunt Genocide and I played with (Blossom and Bow Tie). I instead picked out four ponies- Cherries Jubilee, Posey, Cotton Candy, and Parasol. I figure that at least one pony is going to be vastly worse than their description, so I should have a backup. Parasol is from the last generation of ponies- the mouth open pony. It looks like her legs are a little different. But I'm confident she'll do in a pinch. And if all four ponies are perfect? Well, I can always squirrel the extras away for a rainy day. Or another little girl. After all, in my experience little girls love toy horses to love and squeeze and brush and kiss and occasionally give irreparably bad haircuts to.

And even with buying twice as many ponies, AND paying for shipping, I'm still paying about $15 a pony.

So I'm recreating my most beloved childhood memories for my children. I'm getting them my favorite childhood toy.

Of course, if they don't like the ponies it's just going to break my heart.

Apologies apologies apologies

2011-11-13T21:17:00.000-06:00

I promise you, I've been writing every day. I'm just dividing it between here at ideasforwomen.com (where I have trolls!).

I can also tell you I've been insanely busy, exhausted, and not feeling to great while I put some starter work on a new mystery project. Oh yes, it's a mystery. And it's a project.

And yes, there will be a big dramatic reveal. Because I'm totally into stuff like that.

In the meantime, know that I AM writing and writing and writing... not bothering with the daily prompts, but still writing daily. And very pleased with some of what I've come up with. Is it cheating if my blog post a day is split between four different blogs?

Also, starting either tomorrow or the next day, THE RETURN OF POTTY TRAINING! Yes, I keep putting it on hold. Why? Because of other stuff. Like school. Or illness. Or travel. Or all of it at once.

Other mundane details... my holidays are running forward swimmingly. I'm working up a big long blog post for you all on Thanksgiving (with at least TWO recipes!), I've designed and am getting ready to construct our Holiday Cards (must be capitalized, too much work for lowercase), and that project should be a remarkable amount of work this year. I've also picked out two of this years holiday cookies, decided on two new ones this year, and am considering adding a fifth in the form of a return of my chocolate mint crunch fudge. Yeah, you heard me. Maybe if somebody is super nice they might get a box in the mail. Hint hint.

I hope all of you are well! I'll be back to writing about my amazing children and the amazing things that they're doing all the amazing time before you know it.

Cheers!

Thank You, Mystery Friend!

2011-11-10T08:55:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, we got an odd package in the mail.

It was a poster tube, with no return address. And it was sent not to me, but to my children.

Naturally, I opened it. It was a little complicated, as the contents were DETERMINED not to come out, and we had just had Five Guys for dinner, so we were afraid of touching the contents in case we made them smeary with our gross greasy fingers. But eventually, the contents emerged. And they were wonderful.

From Switcheroo

Four poster sized art prints, of little girls with empowering phrases. I knew I had seen them online before, and a quick Google search brought me to the website.

Lovely readers, these are not cheap. Somebody forked over a huge amount of money to send such beautiful and thoughtful gifts to my children.

From Switcheroo

And I have absolutely no idea who it could have been.

Obviously, it was somebody who knows all about my loathing of the Disney Princesses. Obviously, it was somebody who likes me and my kids, and obviously, it was somebody with some means of discovering our address (which sadly, probably isn't very hard to do).

I'm elated about it. I am definitely picking up some frames today, and these are going up in the girls' room immediately.

From Switcheroo (This is M's favorite)

They'll look incredible in there. I love that they encourage a wider variety of imagination play. Little girls can pretend to be ANYTHING they want, not just princesses. They can be knights. They can be monsters. They can be a bottle of shampoo if they so wish. There is no limit to what they can dream, and these posters have REALLY made my day. :)

Whoever you are, PLEASE let me know! We're not creeped out or anything, we just want to thank you properly for your incredible generosity.

From Switcheroo

Thank you. From all of us.

Giving Thanks for my OCD

2011-11-08T15:00:00.001-06:00

And for these incredible little people. <3

For the first time since we've been living together, M and I are going to visit his family for Thanksgiving.

Before you throw your hands in the air, and say Oh, how unfair! there are a few details you should know.

First of all, that's only a five year span. With this being the fifth Thanksgiving.

Such sweet little monkeys!

We've been to see my family twice- once when it was actually visiting my family for Thanksgiving (a drive only two hours shorter than heading to the Twin Cities), and once when Thanksgiving basically overlapped with Channukah, and we were visiting my family for Channukah in Ann Arbor- easily half the distance to the Twin Cities.

And while we decided long ago that Christmas trumps Channukah for important times to be with one's family, Channukah trumps Thanksgiving. (Passover trumps Easter, in case you were wondering.)

The Twin Cities are pretty freakin' far, when you're driving in the snow, or dark, or pregnant, or with babies, or with toddlers. It turns from seven hours to ten hours extremely quickly. Or rather, not quickly at all. At a glacial pace.

Rocking chairs are fun!

Every other year we have actually stayed in Chicago. We stayed in Chicago the year we got married because we were exhausted from the travel involved in the summer that led up to Thanksgiving. We stayed in Chicago the year the girls were born, because we had two six week old babies we didn't want to take anywhere.

But this year? Minnesota, ho!

Due to my newfound obsession with planning ahead as much as possible, I've come up with a great way to make this insanely long car trip with toddlers significantly more pleasant. I've booked us a room, just over halfway there, at a really sweet looking Bed and Breakfast.

Not only will we have a comfortable place to stay, we'll have a REAL breakfast. We'll be on a lovely farm where if we want to exhaust the girls before putting them back into the car, they can run around and play outside. Our room? Actually has two rooms. We'll even sort of have privacy from our own children.

Not usually what you expect from a pit-stop between Chicago and St. Paul.

Any time spent with these two is the best time- even in the car.

We'll take off mid-afternoon, and then drive all the way to the B&B, where we'll eat a picnic dinner.

And in the morning, we'll finish the drive to Grandma and Grandpa's house, refreshed and ready to chow down.

If it goes really well, who knows? Maybe I'll book the place again for our trip back for Christmas.

All in all, I feel pretty darn good about it. :)

Cleaning is an Entirely Futile Effort

2011-11-07T21:45:00.000-06:00

Don't let this fool you- they don't clean.

Today, I realized that it had been weeks since I cleaned my living room.

I now remember why. Cleaning my house is an entirely futile enterprise.

I spend forty minutes picking up toys and putting them away, the girls are in the next room pulling all their picture books off the shelves.

I put books onto the shelves, the girls spend the time dumping their blocks all over the floor where I just picked up all their toys.

I kick the girls out of the living room (to play with their awesome toy kitchen in the dining room) so I can put all the blocks away again and clear off the couch, and every single piece of toy food finds its way onto the dining room floor.

I came in JUST BEFORE that baking soda ended up all over the floor.

It's hopeless. Utterly hopeless.

And that is why I hadn't done it in weeks. Because I was tired of never getting anywhere.

The fact of the matter is that they are faster than me. They have more stamina than me. They have more motivation than me. And I have other crap I've got to do too.

Yes, that's every piece of clothing from their dresser. On the floor. It took less than five minutes.

So rather than wait until they're in bed and then put everything away, I wait until they're in bed, and then I make dinner, eat dinner, do my homework...

Am I a failure? Absolutely not. But I do feel the need to apologize every time somebody comes into my house. And maybe... just maybe... some day they'll learn to pick up their own dumb toys.

"We love you, Mommy, but today is not that day."

I'm a Real Mommy

2011-11-06T10:34:00.000-06:00

I wrote the first part of this post in July and never posted it!

I always knew this day would come. The day that I stood proud, the victor over my children. The day that I could point to my success and say, "See? I MADE the child DO something! I am in charge!"

When they're babies, there isn't so much actual being in charge of the baby. There's a lot of being in charge of what OTHER people do TO the baby, but not the baby itself. Because it doesn't do anything that can truly be controlled. A baby is the ultimate improbability drive. Illusions of control, abandon hope all ye that enter here.

You tell other people what they can and can't feed the baby, or put on the baby, or let the baby play with, or let the baby experience in some way. But you don't say to a baby, "Stop being a baby!" It's uncontrollable.

Children are a different story. Children are people with the ability to reason, to argue, and most importantly, to lose a fight.

Today, DD lost a fight.

Our Mary Poppins was here for dinner with the girls and I (M being at school), and she was refusing to eat her food. How dare I try to feed her spaghetti. With fake meatballs, no less. All she wanted to eat was Gerber's version of cheezy poofs.

When it became clear that SI didn't want her noodles either, I began the bargaining stage of any argument with a child. "Will you eat (something else relatively good for you and simple for me to fetch) instead of this?"

SI agreed readily. "More beets!" she says. Having had beets for dinner the previous night, and having a ready-made tupperware of leftovers in the fridge, I was more than happy to oblige. SI got her plate loaded up with beets, and happily started chowing down.

"How about you, DD? Do you want some beets?"

"No! Poofs!" She pointed at the canister of cheezy poofs.

"You can have a cheezy poof if you eat some of your fake meat ball. Can you take one bite?"

DD agreed, but apparently thought she could outsmart me. Her "one bite" of her fake meat ball (and for those of you who have never tried Linda Loma's "Tender Rounds," you should know that they are awesome and delicious) was actually a lick.

"I saw you, you need to take a bite. Can you put the fake meat ball in your mouth?"

She opened her mouth wide. put the forkful of fake meat inside, and then removed it with a look of mischievous triumph.

"No, you need to put it in your mouth and chew. Can you chew it up and swallow it?"

She repeated the previous ruse, this time following it up by taking a few cursory licks of the contents of her fork.

"No. You need to actually eat a bite. Eat a bite, DD."

The screaming began. I forced the bite into her mouth, and hysterics ensued.

I pulled her chair to the side of the table, got down at her level, and spoke very quietly.

"You need to eat something healthy," I told her. "You can't just have cheezy poofs for dinner. You don't have to have your meat ball, but you have to have something else. Remember, 'a dinosaur tries every new thing, at least one small bite.' Can you try one bite of something for mommy?"

The crying continued, but she nodded. I grabbed the smallest piece of beet off of SI's plate.

"Here is one small bite of beets. Can you try this for mommy?"

Without any hesitation, she took the piece of beet and put it directly into her mouth. She did not pull a face, she did not spit it out. She swallowed it almost instantly.

Our Mary Poppins and I both cheered and clapped our hands. DD was over the moon. She clapped, she smiled, she laughed, and then she said the words I had been longing to hear...

"More beets!"

She ate five more pieces of beets before she remembered to demand her cheezy poofs. Which I happily gave her. She also got some green peas and a gummy vitamin for her trouble.

And me?

I felt like a freakin' rock star. I made my kid eat a vegetable. I made my picky eater eat something that she had no interest in, when she was tired and frustrated and irrationally childlike. And I feel amazing about it.

---

I revisit this today because we've been having food problems in my house. My mother has been here taking care of us while I've been somewhat unwell, and I have to say... grandparents suck at discipline. My children were clean and approximately fed, but the usual rules of the house were completely gone. The children sensed weakness, and as a result turned up the charm, smiled and giggled, and got absolutely everything they wanted. From unlimited milk in their oatmeal to treks through the torrential rain for donuts.

This morning, I managed to get my kids to eat oatmeal- WITHOUT the recent standard unlimited milk and brown sugar (a pinch at a time, but it still gave them the illusion of control). And I won without a real fight. I just stated the rules firmly, distracted the children, and...

Breakfast! For the third day in a row, my kids have actually eaten the breakfast that was set down in front of them, without incident.

There's something odd about having to sort of correct after your parents have been around. After all, they're your model of parenting. It's kind of baffling that somehow, with your kids, they could be so... so much worse at it.

But as my father reminded me, it's not their job to be good at parenting their grandkids. It's MY job. They get to just have as much fun as they want, and then go home. M and I have to stay here, and we have to be the disciplinarians. WE have to be the parents.

And today, we kind of rock at it. :)

A Glimpse Of SuperMommy's Journalling (NaBloPoMo)

2011-11-04T15:20:00.001-05:00

Truth be told, I don't treat this blog like creative writing.

Which is odd, because I've always treated my journaling like creative writing. Which is to say, like a sacrament. Like an art form. My paper journals are stunning.

I don't necessarily mean stunning in that they're pretty. I can't claim that- my handwriting is utterly atrocious. I mean stunning as in looking at or through them can actually sort of stun you. It's jarring. Occasionally beautiful. Sometimes chaotic. Some journals can't close for all the stuff taped in. Some had to be rebuilt as I wrote them. Some have completely fallen apart.

I tend to rotate my paper surfaces. To experiment with colors and media even in such simple things as describing a weird guy on the bus. Writing and sketches and pasted in random stuff all mix together without much of a sense of reason.

And then there's the code.

I made up a secret code in which I write, sometimes. Developed, modified, and pretty much perfected over seven years- even once transcribed into a separate written language. It's even got its own integrated forms of punctuation. It has a 40 character alphabet. When I'm somewhere public and I don't want anyone to know what I'm saying. Or when I don't want anyone leafing through my journal (not that anyone does) to know what it says. So whole stretches are utterly incomprehensible.

I don't treat this blog that way. I treat it like an organized space, almost like a public space. Because it is very much a public space, and my paper journals never were.

Is this a creative outlet? I think so. but my emotional connection to it is completely different.

My children have seen me write here more times than I can possibly count.

They have almost never seen me write in my paper journals. My paper journals are truly private, even from them.

I like the idea that someday, they'll discover that I have all of them. Yes, ALL of them. That they have a personal history of their mother, straight from her own mind, stored in shelves, every book dated. And they will discover the rich emotional and intellectual life I have always lived privately, and they will marvel at the depth of the character of their marvel.

Depth in that they will discover that I am not actually so easily described as, "Mom." Depth in that I had a youth filled with emotional angst, that I went through my battles with depression, with self loathing, with hormonal rages. That I suffered the unfathomable optimism of youth, and that I grew, slowly, from a child with illegible scrawl to an adult with equally illegible scrawl, and that the entire journey is there. From 1993 (the year I turned 9) until the present. On stunning page after stunning page.

Complete with set lists and ticket stubs, candy wrappers and love letters, wrist bands and locks of hair. Poetry, words of the week, phone numbers, the mundane details of my days...

All about the mysteries and inanities of my life. In every humiliating detail. Because those journals are for me.

And this blog is also for me, but it is not the same. This is for me as a public entity- as a mother and a wife and a writer.

And this blog is for them, for my children who I adore and who will love reading the stories of their own childhood.

And this blog is for my readers, who enjoy my rants and my jokes and my stories and my effervescent style.

But my catalog of journals... those are for me. And they are always written by hand.

The House is Alive (With The Sound of Music)

2011-11-03T16:14:00.000-05:00

Listening and dancing to (and making) music is awesome!

Today's NaBloPoMo prompt is... "Can you listen to music and write?"

Oh, NaBloPoMo... you ask nothing but silly questions.

I pretty much can't not listen to music. Music is always playing. It's one of the things that M and I have held in common since the day we met. We are obsessed with music.

That isn't to say that I can listen to just anything while I write. I have to listen to the write things for the writing that I need to do.

For example, when writing for school, or work... when writing evaluations of economic calculations, or details about the policies regarding food insecurity in the Greater Chicago Region, I listen to classical music.

I know, I know, "classical" is a gigantic umbrella. It covers all sorts of music that has absolutely nothing in common, save a general public opinion of superiority or pretension.

My music of choice when doing that variety of writing is classical for one to three instruments. I love listening to soloists like Andres Segovia and Glenn Gould, performing Chopin or Albeniz or Dvorak. It keeps me focused, and energized, and the virtuosity inspires a command of my own voice.

I play blues piano and sing opera. Too bad I get stage fright.

When it comes to every other variety of writing, I tend to go for something that suits my mood. And for that purpose, I have a few pre-selected playlists. "Lea's Happy Music," "Kitchen Music," "Work Work Work," and "Rainy Days." To give you an idea of what those are like, here are the first ten songs from each of those lists- always simply set to random, and lasting anywhere from 6 hours to 6.3 days.

Lea's Happy Music
1. Every Dog Has Its Day - Flogging Molly
2. Live It For Today - DJ Rap
3. I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles - Vera Lynn
4. Clint Eastwood - Gorillaz
5. Hang On Little Tomato - Pink Martini
6. The Problem With Saints - 8in8
7. Me and Bobby McGee - Janis Joplin
8. Ice Cream Man - Jonathan Richman
9. Those Were The Days - Mary Hopkinds
10. As Time Goes By - Vera Lynn & The Roland Shaw Orchestra

Kitchen Music
1. Extraordinary Machine - Fiona Apple
2. The Dolphins Cry - Live
3. One Headlight - The Wallflowers
4. The Mariner's Revenge Song - The Decemberists
5. Holland, 1945 - Neutral Milk Hotel
6. Superhero - Ani Difranco
7. Dust Bowl Dance - Mumford & Sons
8. Not A Crime - Gogol Bordello
9. Dilaudid - The Mountain Goats
10. This Train - Phil Forsyth and the Lone Gun Society

SI rocks the flutaphone

Work Work Work
1. Seven Caged Tigers - Stone Temple Pilots
2. Four Chords That made A Million - Porcupine Tree
3. Blue Orchid - The White Stripes
4. All Falls Down - Kanye West
5. Anyone Can Play Guitar - Radiohead
6. Burning Man - Third Eye Blind
7. House Of The Rising Sun - The Animals
8. Why Can't I Be You? - The Cure
9. Blur the Technicolor - White Zombie
10. So Whatcha Want - Beastie Boys

Rainy Days
1. Wild Is The Wind - Cat Power
2. Woods Part of When - Noe Venable
3. Jockey Full Of Bourbon - Tom Waits
4. Atoms For Peace - Thom Yorke
5. Raining in Baltimore - Counting Crows
6. Cowboys - Portishead
7. November Rain - Guns N' Roses
8. Come Rain Or Come Shine - Billie Holiday
9. Cloud My Tongue - Tori Amos
10. Indigo Boy - Esthero

Right now? Cloud Forest, by Trace Bundy.

This house always has music playing. (Unless I'm listening to Harry Potter on tape- Jim Dale is amazing.) And that's how I have always been- surrounded by music.

DD- my future rock star

Next year the girls are going to start their first music lessons. This will basically entail me buying a piano (or GOOD electric equivalent) and teaching them the basics of scales and arpeggios. And when they're five they'll get to choose an instrument. And they will learn it.

Instead of my house always echoing 99 Problems or Shesmovedon, it will echo the tuneless, joyless refrains of forced musical practice. For a time. And then, it will start sounding like music again.

The music of my brilliant children, on their flutes or violins or what-have-you, playing "The Man On The Flying Trapeze" ad nauseum for weeks. And I will be so proud. And I guarantee you, I'll write to that.

NaBloPoMo Day 2: Last Meal

2011-11-02T15:58:00.000-05:00

I've put quite a bit of thought over the years into what my final meal would be, should I ever find myself on death row.

Not that there is any reason on this earth why I WOULD find myself of death row, mind you.

I've always wondered what I would ask for. My food preferences vary wildly from day to day, so such an important meal?

Would I want a smorgasbord of my restaurant favorites?
Would I want something comforting and reassuring? A remembrance of happier times?
Would I want to go out with a bang- load up on all the exotic delicacies I don't normally get to enjoy?

If it were the first, I can tell you what my smorgasbord would be. French fries from the Oakland Original O, in Pittsburgh PA, the Chopped Veggie Salad from the Cheesecake Factory, a South Carolina Maki roll from the House of Sushi and Noodles in Chicago (make that two rolls), a mudjadara sandwich from Ali Baba's in Ann Arbor, MI, and a gigantic ice cream cone of Mackinaw Island Fudge for dessert.

If I wanted something comforting and reassuring, I would want fake fried chicken (made from Loma Linda's fri-chik), lumpy mashed potatoes- skin on and loaded with butter and horseradish- with mushroom gravy, a mountain of peas, and a salad filled with ripe yellow peppers and avocados. And my own recipe of corn bread- hot and fluffy and right out of the oven, smothered in butter and honey.

But if I were to go all out... to make my last meal absolutely the best meal of my life...

I would want Rick Bayless to make me a twelve course tasting menu. And I would trust him to make it right. "Rick," I would say, "this is my last meal. Make it amazing. Put in some morels and blue potatoes and all the cilantro you can get."

And he's just the sort of guy who would do that, I think.

But honestly, the most important thing I would ask for is the company. Because no meal is worth eating alone. I would want my friends, but most importantly my family to be at the table with me. To pass the dishes around, to talk, to laugh, and enjoy for one last time.

I would let my children mash their potatoes into their hair, or eat all the pickled ginger, or just eat rice. I would smile, because they are so happy- they are always so happy in my mind. And I would cry, because it would be our last meal.

If I ever find out that I'm truly dying- that I have only weeks to live- you can bet that dinners at my house will become a to-do. Every meal treated like it might be my last. Every meal a festival of life, a celebration of friends and company and the successes of living to eat another meal.

Every meal I would bend over backwards, make it the best meal of my life. I would break the bank. I would let out all the stops.

I almost look forward to dying just for that. Just to make every dinner the most wonderful last meal I could imagine. It's how I would want to be remembered. Foisting second and third helpings on everyone, forgetting to share recipes, welcoming all my loved ones to the table.

I think that in that regard, we could all stand to die a little every day. If only to remember what is really important to us when it comes to living.

Halloween, Take One

2011-11-02T11:28:00.000-05:00

DD, Poppa, me, and SI heading home with candy!

I wanted to be the awesome mom that built the coolest homemade costumes. I wanted to be the mom that rocked out dinosaurs and dreidles and panda bears and stalks of broccoli.

The best laid plans of mice and men, right?

I thought I was kind of wimping out this year. This year, I made my children ghost costumes. You see, they LOVE ghosts. They get very excited about ghosts. And they love saying "BOO!" and scaring grown-ups. Or at least, getting grown-ups to pretend they're scared. So, I made them adorable ghost costumes.

Or so I thought.

It turns out that what I made were horrific torture devices, contrived only to torment my helpless children with their ghostly terror.

They wouldn't go within four feet of those costumes without throwing a fit.

Halloween came. Each attempt at turning my adorable children into adorable ghosts failed. M valiantly tried his own technique, "Do you want to go trick-or-treating? You have to wear a costume! Daddy will wear a costume! Let's go get into your costumes!"

Costumes, they were fine with that. But not ghost costumes. While my mother laughed and laughed at my fruitless attempts to wrangle my children into their shrouds, I gave up. I needed to think fast. We had little Flamenco dresses for the girls from my parent's last trip to Spain. "Do you want to be Flamenco dancers?" "NO!" I was surprised, but not yet completely sunk. "Do you want to be ballerinas?" We had tutus that a friend had given them the previous year. "NO!" Well, no type of dancing was to be acceptable. I glanced at the wall- a friend who worked at the Renaissance Fair had given them super cool fairy wings for their birthday. "Do you want to be fairies?" "Yes! Fairies!"

Fine.

So I put my children in poofy dresses, attached wings to their backs, and stuck these adorable (and perfectly matched) caps made by Grandma onto their heads, and thus were the costumes completed.

My daughters were fairies. And they went trick-or-treating for the very first time. And they loved it.

But Halloween isn't over. We've got a big to-do next weekend as well. And now? Now that they've seen lots of other children in Halloween costumes? Now they want to be robots.

How badly do they want to be robots? They're watching Wall-E for the FIFTH TIME in about 24 hours.

Let's see if I can put together some robot costumes in three days. And let's see if they actually wear them.

And now.... pictures!!!

Heading off for some trick-or-treating!

Fairies dancing down the street

SI is one happy fairy!

With DD, that makes TWO happy fairies!

"I just say, 'Trick or Treat,' and they put candy in my bag? Too easy!"

M (Thor for Halloween) and SI

Daddy and DD

NaBloPoMo

2011-11-01T16:08:00.000-05:00

This year, I was seriously considering signing up for NaNoWriMo. And, again, I didn't do it. What with everything else I have going on, it was just too daunting- too big of a commitment. But I felt like a real loser. I've got a novel inside of me... I just need the time to let it out.

Eventually.

And then I discovered NaBloPoMo. Which is, absolutely, a gigantic copout. But it's sure making me feel better about myself.

Instead of writing a novel in a month, I'm going to be writing something based on a prompt every day for a month. It's not exactly cohesive, it's not exactly 50,000 words in 30 days... but it's something. And I'll feel pretty good about it come December.

The first prompt of the month is, "What is your favorite part about writing?"

Convoluted grammar aside, this prompt completely illustrates why I think it's a copout, but here we go anyway.

Some people see writing as a process, as a formula with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I only really see it as one element- an action. To write. The fact that at the end you have a finished product is sort of irrelevant. I do it because I love it, because I love the satisfaction of putting two words together in a unique way, because of the incomparable ability of words to convey something universal and true, or something completely unknown and mysterious.

I love that within the strict limits of language, absolutely anything is possible. All you have to do to make something happen, to make another living, breathing human being believe anything even for a split second is to say it the right way. And there is a right way. There is always perfection.

At least, in literature. Probably not on this blog, but in my mind. In occasional fragments of thoughts, joined into glorious cohesion. Every once in a while, writing yields something beautiful. And that is amazing.

But it's not why I do it. I do it because I love it. I would write even if I whole-heartedly believed that I sucked at it. I would write if there was nobody on earth to read it. I write because words are too important not to use, not to test, and not to experiment with.

My favorite part of writing is writing.

And you're gong to be getting an eyeful of it for the rest of the month.

Pumpkin Patch Pictures

2011-10-31T16:55:00.000-05:00

Happy Autumn, from my family to yours!

Hello, lovely readers!

You might have noticed I've been a bit... absent.

It's getting mighty dusty around here.

My apologies. Things have been, in a word, absolutely insane. But, to tide you over until I can make all my explanations, here are pictures of the girls (and even a few of the whole family!) at a pumpkin patch last weekend.

Happy Halloween!!!

DD picking out a pumpkin

Welcome to the petting zoo!

SI and the biggest pumpkin of them all!

SI was all about the animals, but DD was a little scared.

"Baa!"

Climbing mountain of hay bales

"I am the hay king!"

The whole family on a hay ride