vacation part 1

Ack! So long since blogging. We took what is becoming an annual trip to the shore this past week, one of us went to a family wedding, and P finished up the months-long saga of his (most excellent) show. Now we have four relaxing days at home before heading off again to Michigan. I plan to relax by doing what I often do in the summer when September seems uncomfortably close for comfort—course redesign and planning.

In short, there may not be much blogging, but as I often do to make up for writing, here are some pictures of j as worthy substitutes. We had a great time at the shore. j loves running into the ocean with no fear (except for that of his parents). He also loves lemon water ice, which he was reluctant to share. One night after he finished some water ice walking down the boardwalk, I looked down to see that he began to gnaw on the cup itself.

people in your neighborhood

Today all three of us were home—such a treat, since P’s been rehearsing in the city a lot. P took j for a grocery store run and a quick visit to the lake (as captured here on P’s phone) while I began to attack the horror that is the basement. I like to think of it as decluttering, but once we started moving things around down there, I realized it was unpacking. We’d never really recovered from two moves in a year and then renovating the kitchen immediately after the move... so we had stuff in kitchen boxes that we’d packed over a year ago and never opened until today. There are other things in the basement that have been moved from each of our six (!) homes in the past five years.

After today, my immediate goal has changed from throwing out 80% of what we own to just being able to walk easily through the basement. I actually took pictures of this godforsakenbasementmess that I will post only when I have some beautiful “after” shots with which to contrast them. But I’m happy with today’s progress, if only because I yanked down the curtain in the laundry area that must have been there for at least 40 years and replaced it with a curtain we had lying around. Things are getting there.

This evening, after a relatively calm dinner, we decided to take j for a walk in his tricycle (we push from behind as he hasn’t yet mastered pedaling) to get some ice cream at the shop closest to our house, which is about a 5 minute walk. This short walk turned into a 90 minute journey, however, since j ran into a little boy his age with whom he’s swapped tricycles a few times. After some fun playtime, we got our ice cream, then ran into j’s buddy again on the way home, along with a few other kids and parents on the block. Everyone was incredibly friendly and I was so happy to actually be outside, (gasp!) talking to people.

j’s buddy is large for his age, too, though he’s about 6 months older. The little girl who lives down the street (a year older than j) is also large for her age. This is comforting: her mother and I mused that on this street, at least, all three of them can feel completely “normal.” I think we’ll be ok here.

colbert and cookie monster

Stephen Colbert blames Cookie Monster for fruit usurping the cookie's rightful place as the number one snack for children under six. Favorite line delivery? CM calls Elmo's car fuel-efficient because it runs on "imagination."



I like the Colbert/Sesame Street combination. j went through a whole phase last year during which Z was his favorite letter because of Colbert's appearance on this DVD.

your groove i do deeply dig

We've been working on art and generally airing out the basement room the last few days. Also, there's been a whole lotta dancing. I created "j's Dance Playlist" on my MP3 player and apparently it is now the only music suitable for j to dance to. I hope to add more songs in and delete some so the adults in the house don't get bored. His favorite song right now is "Good Morning Starshine" from Hair, which he sings loudly in a scary sort of growl:

gliddy glub gloopy nibby nabby noopy
la la la - lo lo
sabba sibbi sabba nooby aba naba
lee lee - lo lo
tooby ooby wala
nooby aba naba
early morning singing song

He'll dance to this at home, but he'll also growl it loudly, rocker-style, in the grocery store, prompting mostly startled looks. The only way I have so far discovered to get him to settle a bit is to sing the song to him softly. If I sing with him he'll sing it sans growl.

The other song he loves is "Groove is in the Heart," which does indeed include the line "Horton Hears a Who" (see, P?).

wearable feedbags

Love this video...


New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less

art & letters (& shoes)

P finished painting and I finished arranging the artroom today. Hooray! If I can get locate some batteries, I can take some pictures. It isn’t completely finished yet (I’m trying to figure out a way to drape cloth over the ceiling beams), but j and I have had a good time already making paintings and play-dough “salads.” I may have to remove the gigantic letter puzzle that we have on one corner of the floor (it was a holiday present we hadn’t yet gotten around to unpacking). The letters are great, but their presence means he is easily distracted from all the art. The man loves his letters.

He’s also become obsessed with shoes the last few weeks. Usually this means he wants to put shoes on you. He will bring you your shoes and say Mama, a-shoes? Or Daddy, want-a shoes? Sometimes he will put on other people’s shoes and walk around. In today’s case, it was both shoes (my sandals) and gardening gloves. Nice look.

shall we rant?

I think I may just turn this blog into a big old rant against perfect parenting. We’re trying out some new techniques to get j to sleep on his own. Though I am a big supporter of co-sleeping babies, j has slept in his own bed and room for a while. However, we still usually read him to sleep (or simply pass out in bed at the same time he does, until I wake P up or vice versa). A friend suggested putting him down and closing the door repeatedly until he drifts off. I think P is having some success with this at night, but my attempt to do this yesterday went like this:

I place j in bed. He pulls up the covers. I say “Have a good sleep.” He says, “Good night, Mama.” I leave the room. Five seconds later, I hear him get out of bed and play with toys. I enter the room. He runs into bed, and then says, “Bye, bye, Mama: see-uh later!” and before I get out the door, he is inching out of bed. I open the door again, and repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

Another suggestion she had was staying in the room doing something really boring, like knitting, while he drifts off. I like this image of the calm mother and docile child. So I pulled in my knitting, hoping it would mesmerize him. Instead, he jumped up and started grabbing the ball, pulling the yarn around, and quickly got so tangled we couldn’t stop laughing.

Then, I heard back from a local parenting group that I was interested in joining through Meetup.Com. I had been in a fantastic Meetup group when we lived in the apartment last year, and am desperate to meet some other people with kids--or, frankly, anyone--around here in this new place.

So I get the response. There is a waitlist, and would I like to be on it?

A waitlist! I asked how long the waitlist was, and haven’t yet heard back. I would love to ask this vigilant-moderator-lady if she can give me the names of the other people on the waitlist so I can start my own Meetup with the overflow. And it’ll be super awesome, and all the cool people will want to come over to my house for milk and cookies. What am I, in second grade?

I just re-read this. Ok, so the rant idea for the blog really blows. I will write a more positive blog entry next time. I will, I will, I will.

artroom

The basement artroom area is primed (thanks, P!) and ready to be painted tomorrow morning; I hope to get a bit of it set up tomorrow afternoon. Then I can stock it with supplies we have and a few we don't.

We have a ridiculous amount of crap in the (rest of the) basement. I often blame the excessive moving of the last few years, but it's embarassing nevertheless. I Freecycled one thing this week, but I think I need to average one Freecyle thing a day if I plan to ever give the full house tour to friends who come to visit. The good news is that with so much stuff, we have plenty of furniture we can use in the artroom.

I've found a favorite blog to inspire: The Artful Parent. She has some beautiful ideas, and there are lots of pictures. Of course, like many blogs of this ilk, it inspires at the same time it makes me feel like a worthless parent for not being as prepared, organized, and clean.

I'm determined to stay positive and accept my many imperfections. This is one of the things professional organizer Peter Walsh encourages in his latest book, Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat? (Side note: I requested it from the local library ages ago; when it finally came in this week, the librarian couldn't stop laughing at the title.) I've been skimming it--sorry, Peter, but it's not terribly profound and somewhat repetitive--but it's a motivating read to get things in order. However, his previous book, It's All Too Much, is a much better reference (fyi).

Ok, ok, so the quality of my reading material has declined significantly in the last month. But when all you've read for the past year are books on pedagogy and discourse and revised dissertation chapters, I say you deserve a break. :)

sentence, mill, mowers

After all my venting of the last post, I feel I may have done j a disservice. I am trying to focus on the positive things right now. This morning j said, "Mama, j want-a applesauce" when he woke up. I was only too happy to oblige. Real, actual sentences with nouns and verbs: they are so wonderful to hear. I give credit to the applesauce; it is very--in j's words--"mmm, tasty!". P makes it himself, and it's much easier with the food mill he just bought last month. The man loves his food mill.

Today I went to work in the morning. When I returned P was ripping down the ceiling paneling in what we hope will be the basement playroom... in the 95 degree heat. Yikes. Hopefully the garbage people will take the bags of this stuff tomorrow, though it just stormed tonight so I'm sure it's a nasty mess. If they do take the stuff, tomorrow we shall treat the room to some serious shop-vaccing.

Later, after a trip to the grocery store and then dinner, I decided to pick up the assorted random things lying about the yard and somehow ended up mowing the lawn for 30 minutes on the mower's way to the garage. Sadly, 30 minutes only does a patch of the yard, in part because we have a good sized yard--but mostly because we use a push mower. We do this to avoid using gas. We are trying to avoid using gas for environmental reasons, but P has told the neighbors when they ask (and they do ask--I think they think we're nuts) that it's because gas is too expensive. I should have been better prepared with this excuse when a man driving down the street literally stopped his car to reminicise about how his grandfather ("not my father, my grandfather--and I'm 58!") used to use one, to ask how much it cost, and to mention how he heard on talk radio how people are now buying them "to be 'green'." I detected a little bit of distaste in the last comment, so I just nodded and continued mowing. But then he kept looking at me expectantly, and before I knew it he had jumped out of his car and was asking if he could try it out. He pushed the thing around in amazement, and then decided that he should tell me how to use it ("let's pull the blade up a little higher" and "be careful of your toes").

our guy

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Things have been a little stressful over here, and I don’t usually post about it, but since the issues with baby-j consume so much of our thoughts, it seems that I will have to refer to them if I ever want to blog again.

j is a wonderful, sweet, energetic child, but he has some issues socializing with other kids and dealing with his emotions. This is not a new phenomenon, but it’s gotten to the point that we have to do something about it. In the last couple months, he’s been looked at by hearing specialists, occupational therapists, a chiropractor, an acupressurist, and a speech pathologist. We have plans to take him to a nutritionist/holistic-minded practioner and probably more evaluations, one of which will be completed by a “team” of child development experts. All this is complicated by the fact that his issues are not severe enough for my insurance to pay for it (so if we pay for it, it’s $400 for each 45 min. session of OT!), so we will have to go through the local school for (probably) new evaluations and therapy.

According to a speech pathologist we've seen, he has a slight speech delay. P and I think that this may be adding to his frustration and the aggression he experiences from time to time. In the last few weeks, the aggression has been constant, though it’s hard to call it “aggression” when he’s so happy as he does it.

j has had a long history of not being able to interact well with other kids. First, it was biting. Now, it's an inability to express his (happy!) feelings towards other kids. He copes by biting his hand extremely hard (bite marks, rashes)... though it’s clear that he wants to get close to kids--to hug really hard, and sometimes to pinch. The hand-biting-coping-mechanism stopped for a few months, but has returned in the last few weeks.

So this morning we decided to take him out of pre-school... for now. He only had three weeks left in the summer anyway, and we still plan on taking him back in fall. Actually, getting him ready for the fall is partly why we’ve decided to take him out for now. Perhaps a little bit more time with us (and opinions from others) will make him better able to handle things next semester.

This was such a tough decision, and I can't really explain how difficult things are right now--not really with j, but with our feelings about it, including my guilt over feeling like I just did something wrong somewhere, like working and going to school. And of course, that feeling completely, well, sucks because it feeds right into the kind of gender expectations I try to resist.

In other--but kind of related--news, we’re working on the house some more. In the last few weeks this has meant painting the bedrooms. This week, we’re focused on the room in the basement that is semi-finished but that we need to clean up some more to make into a playroom for j.

nightmare ticket

I can always count on The Onion for a good laugh.

Obama, Clinton, McCain Join Forces To Form Nightmare Ticket

At the top of the platform is a military strategy calling for the phased withdrawal of .000006 brigades from Iraq and Afghanistan every seven months over the next 350 years. Universal health care would also be provided, taken away on McCain's birthday, and then provided again only to those wealthy enough to afford it. Abortions would be made available on every other even-numbered Friday from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. EST to all women who can prove residency in Alaska or Nevada. And an entirely new immigration policy will be instituted, sources said, as soon as the candidates can stand to be in the same room with one another for more than five minutes.

musical stylings

j has developed a hankerin’ for the breakfast cereal I’ve been eating lately--Kashi GoLean, “a lightly sweetened mix of crunchy fiber twigs, crispy soy protein grahams, and honey-toasted 7 Whole Grains and Sesame Puffs.” Why he likes this stuff I don’t know. I barely like it myself--I eat it mostly for the extra protein. The first few times he ate it, I composed a little ditty:

I like the Kashi, yo;
I’ll never let it go
I like the Kashi, yo;
I’ll never let it go

Mistake. Now we can’t get him to stop singing it at the kitchen table, even when he’s not eating Kashi. Sometimes I can get him to substitute “apple” or “pasta” for “Kashi” when he's eating those things, but then he’ll just start singing about liking the Kashi, yo, and how he’ll never let it go. Then, when eating something else, he remembers how much he likes that Kashi, yo, and he wants to eat Kashi instead of whatever he's eating. Then he’s all like Kashi, please and I’m all like But you’ve had 2 bowls of Kashi already today and it’s not a good scene.

So I guess “I Like the Kashi, Yo” will go down with the other family-created hit songs of j’s youth, which include:


1. “His Name is [baby-j], and He’s a Baby” (sung to the tune of Copacabana),
2. “You Gotta Go Get the Duckies,” which is not to be confused with
3. “You Give Me Duckies,”
4. “Gettin’ in Your Business (A-Business!),” and
5. “Heat Up the Mommy Juice” (his cousin's response to hearing my mom sing this one as she prepared a bottle of my pumped labors? “That’s not mommy juice; that’s milk!”).

graduation!

Yesterday my mom, P, and I headed into the city for graduation. It was great. First, there was the full university commencement in the morning. Between P’s graduations and mine, this was--I think--my fourth time at the morning ceremony. The previous times usually involved rain. At P’s morning commencement, it rained so hard we soaked through several towels (I’m sure my in-laws have fond memories of this). I believe that I also ended up wearing a garbage bag by the end of the day to keep dry. At least, that’s what it looks like in the pictures. Maybe it was just a really cheap poncho. This time, we were prepared. I had heavy-duty ponchos and umbrellas for the three of us.

Despite our preparedness (or perhaps because of it), yesterday morning was beautiful and the rain held off until a few hours after the ceremony. What a relief! However, while we had planned for rain, we hadn’t planned for sun, so P ended up with a bit of a sunburn, despite buying an emergency baseball cap in the campus bookstore.

After the morning commencement, there was time for a quick sandwich and then we were off to the doctoral hooding ceremony that took place in the church. The doctoral ceremony was really lovely, made more so by the fact that my advisor, who has encouraged me for so long, happened to be a part of the ceremony as she introduced one of the college’s honorees. She was on the dais the whole time; I was only a few feet away from her while I got “hooded.”

In the line of graduates, I ran into a friend with whom I had done a project in class several years back, and met some other community college teachers I hadn’t known before. My aunt M was able to get a few hours off work to attend, and our friends D & B also made it through the (pretty long!) ceremony. I felt so lucky to have so much support there.

We had to rush off quickly after the ceremony for a number of reasons, and I was somewhat saddened that it all came to such an abrupt end. I am so happy to have finished finally, but it’s sad knowing such a large part of my life--I started there 11 years ago--is done. It’s not the school itself, really, since I know that I’ll be back regularly to work with my writing group, but this degree has been a goal for so long... I guess I already feel a little lost without it as something to work towards.

mother's day

Happy mother's day to those of you we didn't get to speak to yesterday. We had a pretty nice Mother's Day over here. P, baby-j, my mom and I all went to a local farm that has a really old, beautiful carousel and a train ride which--though we didn't know it until we were on the train--took us past several animals. There were llamas, ponies, and emus. But baby-j's favorite had to be the goats. He does a mean goat impersonation. Seriously: it sounded kind of mean. :) But its accuracy seemed to fool some of the other parents and kids into thinking there was a goat actually on the train with us.


Also, there were ostriches!

the garbage mystery

Someone who shall remain nameless (ok, it was me) accidentally placed a garbage bag of “regular” garbage in the recycling can last week. It went out with the recycling last night when P took it out in anticipation of the Friday morning pick-up.

This morning, the bag was ripped up and lying in our yard, the contents half-eaten. This is not the mystery. Obviously some kind of animal got to it: a raccoon, perhaps, or maybe a really ambitious squirrel. However, what is a mystery is *how* the bag got on our yard, a full 10 feet away from where P placed the garbage, behind a fence, AND--since our yard is raised up from the driveway--elevated 3 feet. Based on the evidence of the crime scene, it appears that the bag was moved prior to being assaulted. So how did this happen?

P seemed to favor the raccoon hypothesis, but that would mean that the hypothetical raccoon would have taken the bag up the five concrete steps it takes to get into our yard and then have had to make a couple left turns with it before the attack. I’m thinking it was either a human who tossed the bag into our yard as a prank (but why would anyone do this and leave the rest of the recycling where it is?) or... I hate to even think this... a bear. (They are not uncommon in this area; see here.) But then, the bear would have had to toss the bag into the yard and eat standing up in our driveway. Or maybe the bear and the raccoon worked as a team: the bear tossing the bag into the yard, high-fiving the raccoon, and then moving on to assist another local animal in its quest for high-quality garbage.

The yard swans that we inherited from the previous owners (pictured here) must have seen it all.

Or were they the culprits?

cover art

Oh, my: I just found this page of "covers" online from The Onion Magazine, featuring the following magazine covers.







In other news, this is my 200th post(!) and I've been keeping this blog for over two years now. I really can't believe it's been that long.

food reading

I received a fascinating email today from a co-worker with images from Hungry Planet: What the World Eats by Peter Menzel. If you haven't seen it, some of the images from this email can be found here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5005952

Apparently, this story ran in November of 2005, so I'm more than a little behind on my reading.

P and I were most interested in--but not surprised by--the amount of processed foods found on the American photo, especially compared to the other countries.

I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle a few months back, which was an inspiring read. So I'll have to add Hungry Planet to my to-read list for this summer, in addition to In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, which I recently discovered but have not yet read. Any other recommendations for my food reading list?

yoga, please

j has taken to grabbing my hand and demanding “yoga, please!” at least seven times a day. We have a routine: first, I stretch out into child’s pose and he runs around me. Then, he demands that I get into cow pose, then cat pose, and then cow pose again so he can climb on top and bounce up and down. Then I do the pose pictured here, only imagine it without the wall, pillow under the back, and cloth over the eyes. And add a giggling two-and-a-half-year-old balanced on top of my feet.

No, this is not the kind of yoga you’d get at a local class, and I wouldn't exactly call it relaxing. But it’s pretty fun for both of us, and it really seems to calm j down at the end of a long hard day at pre-school.

feminist for obama

This post will not be about why I support Barack Obama for president, but rather, why I (and other feminists) should be "allowed" to do so. Though it's a couple months old now, I found this article interesting:

Anti-Hillary Sentiment On The Rise Among Leading Feminists

I especially like this quote:

Eve Ensler, author of "The Vagina Monologues," and Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor of law at UCLA and Columbia, declared that the pro-Clinton feminists "interrogate, chastise, second-guess and even denounce those who escape their encampment and find themselves on Obama terrain. In their hands feminism, like patriotism, is the all-encompassing prism that eliminates discussion, doubt and difference about whom to vote for and why."

I would be happy if either Clinton or Obama were elected; I think both are good candidates. And I am disgusted by the often deplorably sexist treatment of Senator Clinton. But it angers me when I am told I'm "not a good feminist" because I support Obama, as if feminism is this monolithic thing that requires I vote for the female candidate. (That's why in general I prefer "feminism(s)" rather than "feminism," but mainstream media outlets don't have the time, I suppose, to detail all the different kinds of feminisms that exist: radical, Marxist, poststructural, etc.)

Here's the original Ensler/Crenshaw post:

Feminist Ultimatums: Not In Our Name

The feminism we fought so hard for and benefited from was not to make us blind to the complexity, but to help us see beyond simple formulas and body politics.

Ok: now I really need to get back to doing some work.

family portrait

This was my attempt to depict our family. Though it may be hard to believe, it took me a mere 2 minutes to draw (that's pretty much all I have before baby-j wrests the crayons away from me). You'd think that P would have taken such time constraints into consideration when evaluating my work, but no. He took issue with the pointy-ness of the goatee, the curliness of the hair, and the accuracy of the eyes. "Are you criticizing my art?" I asked. "I just question the realism of your interpretation," he replied.

He did make me and baby-j the most fantastic after-school, pre-dissertation-defense snacks last week. I just got the pictures off my camera.

Here's mine:


And here's baby-j's: