That antiadoption grrl

That must be what Caleb and Micah were thinking as they sat at Cardio Barre this morning, as I was trying to make it through leg lifts. Micah usually accompanies me, but this morning Micah and Caleb went with me. It's no secret that I absolutely love this class, despite the occasional grimace. :)

Although all the teachers that I've had there have been good, Richard is my favorite, partly because he is a guy and partly because he pushes us so very hard. He manages to say things that apply not only to exercise, but to life in general. So, with your ballet-based workout, you hear such things as "The purpose in life is for life to have purpose." In one class, a few months ago, he talked about what a tough town L.A. is and how that you have to be really strong to make it here. His classes focus not only on physical strength but on mental strength. Sure, it's not quite the Sunday morning church service that I grew up with, and still attend when we're in North Carolina, but it's certainly inspirational. And somehow, even though Cardio Barre seems unrelated, I really think that it helps my comedy and writing.

And this final note on Richard: He's one of the few people, doctors included, who knows how to tell people to "lie down." So many people, doctors included, say "lay down" when they're asking you to lie down. This grammatical error tends to drive me crazy! :)

Here's a picture of Micah and me, taken on his birthday earlier this year, after a Cardio-Barre class.

I saw this on (I think) the BBC news website the other day. It was used for what was suppose to be a positive article on the Pope, but the image cracked me up. I figure someone with more creativity than me would enjoy it.

Now you can say the Pope really is just a toy! :O

My baby

St Denis Fun Fair in Havertown

This pic of Becca on the lady bug ride just melts my heart. I think she looks like a baby elf.

Pretend that there is no donor milk in the world. It's all gone. ("But that would never happen," you say. This is where the word pretend comes in.) In the following situations, would you rather that a woman breastfeed or formula feed in the following situations where the mother:

: is an alcoholic
: puts herself at risk for diseases by having indiscriminate and possibly unsafe sex with a variety of men in a short period of time (think prostitute, but without the pay)
: is clinically depressed but managing with the right drug, which was found after many years of trial and error, that happens to be labeled as unsafe during breastfeeding
: is undergoing chemotherapy

So, we hear a lot of strife around these intarwebs about women whose partners/husbands/babies' daddies disagree with their parenting choices. Here on the booj, we talk a lot about the tension between parents and the circumstances under which one parent may or may not have greater say in decision making.

So, today I ask you, did you discuss this stuff before you decided to make a baby together? I know that many pregnancies are a surprise, but when dating, did you casually mention or discuss hot-button topics like corporal punishment, religion, titty milk, etc? Do you think people who don't hash these issues out when choosing a partner are dumb, dumb, dumb, or do you think it's creepy for a non-parent like me to talk about this stuff with her slices of man-meat? In your dating/parenting experience, do these issues shake out along other lines, for instance, are blue-collar or military people more likely to CIO, and are sensitive hipsters more likely to celebrate your womyn-power when you breastfeed until college?

Hi Everyone,

I just joined this group and this is my first post. I'm a former teenage mom, now with a 12 year old and a 2 year old - both sons! I'm not only an anarcho-parent, but a lot of people might consider me a political anarchist as well! :)

I've been an organizer for social justice my entire adult life. My main inspiration has always been my children. What I found as I landed one *paid organizing job after the other, whether as a community or union organizer, was that the very two people that have inspired me to be a great, passionate, effective organizer were people I was unreasonably asked to abandon for "the cause," over and over again. This is problematic, but it is made even more so by another experience. I have simultaneously  volunteered in my community as an organizer, and in those *volunteer experiences I was not only more effective than in the paid work, but I actually worked less, and my children were an asset, not a liability. This raises some questions about how exactly “the cause” benefits from denying paid organizers the ability to be full parents.

This has agitated me for a long time. I have observed this as a phenomenon among organizers, as opposed to something I alone have experienced. As a result, I took a huge leap of faith this year and founded an organization to help organizers find balance in their lives: Services for Inspired Propinquity. The website is inspiredpropinquity.com.

We've got a survey for organizers going strong this month if anyone here is a paid or volunteer organizer that wants to talk about their experiences as parents and organizers. You can find it on the homepage. Please do pass it on. It's anonymous, by the way.

Otherwise, I'm just interested in starting a conversation here about what it is like to love your kids and love the world. It seems to me like our kids are a huge investment in this place.

Best to All,
Windy
 

The last time that we were kicked out of a group of busybody moms who have little better to do than act like they're still in eighth grade, they lied about me. One specific lie was that someone in that group gave us a train table; in reality, I paid $30 for it--cash. This time, there were also some blatent lies told about me. You think I'd learn. :)

I don't know whether to write more about this situation and address these lies or to let a sleeping dog lie, so to speak. I need to do some thinking about it. But I am quite grateful that the truth about some or all of these folks came out. There is a part of me, of course, that really regrets inviting some of these people to my house. Some of them may have even peed in my toilet. I trusted them a bit too much. Well, I've learned to be a bit more careful these days about the people that I let in to my house. And for that lesson, I am indeed thankful.

Fortunately, I have real friends, among them: a very wonderful Mr. Comic Mom and our three wonderful sons, who love me no matter what and these friends and my family were there for me today--Thanks! I've said it before and I'll say it again: I LOVE my children and I love being a mother, but I can't stand most other moms. When I trust people who aren't trustworthy, as we did in this group, the "other moms" that I can't stand increase greatly and I end up distancing myself from even more mothers. I certainly will be much more careful about whom I trust from now on. We've only been a part of this group for less than a year; so, I'm very, very thankful that we didn't invest more time with these bearers of false witness. I don't know how many in the group were actually bearers and gossipers; perhaps not all of them were, but it doesn't really matter: I'm thankful that we're out!

You know, it's funny how I absolutely love being a mom, but didn't realize that so many of these so-called mommy groups are really cliques left over from eighth grade. There's as much exclusion going on in some of these groups as there is at a country club. The woman that I babysat for in Raleigh told me once that a lot of these stay-at-home type moms were not working for the first time and they throw all their working energy into the stay-at-home stuff. I'm finding her words to be extremely true: These moms who find themselves idle seem to have way too much time on their hands. They use that time, often, to act like eighth graders. When people ask me how I do so much (although I really don't do that much :) with comedy and writing, I do so much because I don't gossip with moms all day, trying to figure out whom I like and whom I don't or trying to figure out which theory du jour to use on my child or lying about people. My time is spent with my husband, my children, my home, and my work. Conversations that I have with true friends don't usually include much gossip and I don't spend time trying to oust people from anything; I also give people the benefit of the doubt and I confront people that I have questions about. I notice that my working mommy friends, especially my single mom friend in North Carolina, don't have time for all this cliquish crap that goes, often, with being in a mommy group. But those who have too much time on their hands as mothers seem not to use it wisely. There's a part of me, of course, that seeing freedoms almost fly down the toilet and wondering why these moms are busy gossiping and excluding instead of writing letters, for instance, against the Real I.D. Somehow time-wasting, cliquish mothers don't seem to be what our Founding Fathers were fighting for, nor the suffregettes.

Time wasting seems to be what happened in this particular group and it's a real shame. Mr. Comic Mom can't believe what I have to go through during the day, not with my children, but with other moms. He's awfully glad to have a job and with groups like the one that most recently gave us the proverbial boot, I can see why he likes being away from this crap.

Give me a group of comics over a group of moms any day.

Here's a picture of me and the boys at the Mother's Day brunch:

I was wondering if anyone else has seen kids entirely misinterpret a sermon, or have done so themselves as kids. I was raised atheist, but attended a couple church services as a kid either for holidays or with family friends. The attention span of a child is not very long, and we were hearing the story of Jesus on Christmas or something. So, since they do not go into any detail about the youth of Jesus, one minute he's the baby and Mary and Joseph are running to protect him, the wise men come, all that, and suddenly he is making sermons and getting crucified. So, as a kid, I didn't understand the time difference.

After the sermon, we were driving past the church and I pointed at the cross on the steeple and told my dad, "Dad, they hang little kids on those things." "What?" "They killed the baby Jesus on the cross."

Rather funny I think, and a good argument against teaching kids religion. I was about 3-5. I kind of wonder if any other kids have made that mistake.

So, any other interesting stories along a similar vein?

My Tastefully Simple order arrived yesterday and I already made the almond pound cake I bought for a pot luck tomorrow. It smells pretty good, if that's any indication of how it will taste.

Sara's dress rehearsal was tonight, she was so cute. She's was so focused the entire time, it was a hoot to watch her perform. She looks so little on that big stage.

We got Becca a toddler bed last week and eh, so far it's not going so well. You see, the crib belonged to a friend of mine who is due with a new baby in July so we had to give it back. I didn't want to buy a new crib so we decided what the hell and bought a toddler bed. Not that she ever was a great sleeper in her crib but sleeping in the bed has not been working as I'd hoped. I keep telling myself...like all things, this too shall pass. I thought Sara would be in our bed forever but now she sleeps like a champ. One day Becca will too.

Poor baby.

This is a busy weekend, Sara has her last ballet class tomorrow, then we have a potluck in the afternoon. Her recital is noon on Sunday and right after that we're going to the Israeli Independence Day parade. We're going to miss the actual parade but will be there for the rest of the activities. I hope the weather holds out because I want to get my falafel.

Hooray for Whitney on Top Model, I was glad to see she won. She's beautiful.

Today while I was in the mall with my nineteen month old daughter, three ladies and little girl (maybe four?) walked by. My daughter waved to the little girl, who immediately came up and touched my daughter's hand. Since my daughter was born asplenic, she doesn't have an immune system to speak of. She's on antibiotics all the time, and while that does giver her some semblance of protection, it can't really stop sicknesses spread from contact. I smiled at the little girl and said politely, "Hi! Please don't touch her hands."

The ladies with the little girl (I assume one of them was her mother) looked at me as though I'd bitch slapped the kid. They walked away throwing angry glares over their shoulders and I was left reeling. I understand that she ran up, so the mom couldn't have stopped her. That's why I was polite about it, and directed my request to the little girl. She did stop when I asked her, but that was partially because her flock of ladies was pulling her away from us.

So it got me thinking.

1) Do you teach your kids not to touch strangers, even if they're cute and little?
2) Do you teach them that if they don't like being touched, they can say "Please don't touch me or I'll kick you in the shin"? (You have to admit, that'd be pretty effective.)
3) Do you let other people touch your kids?
4) How would you handle the situation I was in?
5) How would you have reacted if you had been the other parent?

I'll throw down my answer in the comments.

from cbc.ca:
Einstein letter dismissing God sells for $330,000 US

“It beats the world record for an Einstein letter by about four times,"

amazing.

How do you classify children's age ranges? That is, when does newborn give way to infant give way to toddler to blah blah? Go as high up as you like.

I can't stop referring to my nearly three year old as a baby. I just can't. HE'S A BABY! :)
Newborn is birth to about 6 weeks. Once they hit two or three months they're firmly in infant territory. Toddler, I think, starts at about 18 months to 2 years. I'm unclear how long they remain toddlers. Is my three year old still a toddler? If not, what is he? Preschooler? And then when he gets to be school aged he's just a child until he's an adolescent or a teenager?

Keith Olberman FTW
 

Children love to ask for what they want and, sometimes, their reason for what they want is no better than "because I want it."

Here's the hypothetical:
Your kid wants a widget. For as much as you provide your child, you've clearly decided that your child should not have a widget. Your kid will ask multiple times and even raise their voice and throw a tantrum to express their interest in having this widget because they are kids and kids want what they want.

Here are the questions:
How many times do you say, "No."? Each time you provide a reason, counts as 1 time. Each time you just say, "No", counts as 1. Each time you resort to, "Because I said so.", counts as 1.

Is there a warning and punishment you will issue for too many repetitive requests after they have received an adequate answer?

Would a temper tantrum escalate the situation into receiving a punishment if the child wasn't already slated for punishment?

Do you ever give in?

Here's my answer:
( Read more... )

Here is the article.
ETA: Here's another link to the story.

What should happen to the teacher? What would you do if your child was voted "most likely to get pregnant" or "most likely to be poor?" Is this a good wake-up call for at-risk students?

( A sixth-grade science teacher at Chastain Middle School could face disciplinary action for forcing a class to list the students most likely to die before 19 and most likely to get pregnant before they graduate from high school. )

This is just for some (very) light fun....meet iGod.

( Here's the conversation I had with iGod...the conclusion we come to is pretty fabulous, doncha think? )