Amelia was 19 months old when Henry was born in November. In other words, my husband, Dave, and I are parenting two under two. Sure, this isn’t as hard as parenting twins or triplets or having more than two children, but it’s new for us. In this episode, we discuss what life has been like the last three months. Why are the children spaced so closely together? What has been hardest? Easiest? What advice can we give, and, more importantly, what advice do we want?

Random Reference to Another Podcast (Slate)

Two Under Two

I’m mixing things up by writing the podpost before releasing the relevant podcast episode. This is the podpost for Podcast Episode 37: Two Under Two. The episode is still in post-production, a fancy way of saying we recorded it, but I haven’t edited it yet. Dave and I talk about life as parents with two kids under two years of age. Henry is three months old, so we are still extremely new at the two kid thing, but the learning curve for any child is steep, and three months can seem like three years in parenting time.

What have I learned about parenting two under two? First, a person can function off remarkably little sleep, a lesson I thought I had learned with Amelia, but I didn’t realize then how much sleep I was really getting since I could nap while she napped. Henry’s sleep seemed to be improving, until it wasn’t (that phrase is what Dave likes to call a Meredithism). He now, again, wakes every two hours. I end up bringing him into bed around 3am and he usually continues nursing for like an hour as I contort my body in weird positions, or he gets gas and pummels me. Needless to say, this set up isn’t working for me. I might knock on the sleep consultant’s door once again because sleep is not optional, at least not for me.

Second, logistics matter. Have you ever wondered how you take a walk with two kids, one of whom obviously can’t walk and the other who can not only walk but run away very very quickly? I assumed I’d plop H in the Ergo, leaving my hands free to chase after A, a plan that would have been perfect if H for some reason actually liked the Ergo and didn’t scream bloody murder the whole time he is in it. For such a chill child, this is one inconvenient unchill preference. He likes to be held ALL THE TIME.  I attempted one laissez-faire walk around the block during which I held H and let A roam free. It all fell apart when H had a blow out and A didn’t want to head home and ran away down the street. We now reserve walks to family time so that daddy can help, and we liberally use our Phil and Ted Double Stroller. Most of the time, Amelia helps me push the empty stroller while Dave holds Henry, but I like having the carting option. Don’t even get me started on how to shower with two kids around. If anyone knows how to do this easily, let me know. In the meantime, if Dave isn’t here, I let my stink flag fly.

Recently, I came across a blog called Baby Bunching. The authors have compiled some tips and truths about life with young children so close in age. Two of my favorite tips include forgetting about the structured activities (amen) and carving out alone time, as in being all alone without having to respond to anybody at all (oh yes please). Amelia went to baby sign language classes, music classes, swim lessons, all before she was one. Even as I was doing this with her, I noticed the only second children in the classes came with nannies. They’ll both do swim again because I’m all about safety, but the others aren’t really necessary. As for alone time, right now I demand long weekend showers or evening baths or no one else allowed walks, but eventually I’m going to lobby for a massage membership. Since I’m typing this with one hand while nursing my second under two, I’ll bid adieu, but if you have any tips for Dave and me, let us know!

ModestMomz Sadie Cover

Are you a Hooter Hider? Do you Cover your Udders? Or have you gone Bebe Au Lait (no clever, slightly insulting pun with that brand)? I myself was a Hooter Hider gal at one point, but found myself using the Hider to shield baby Amelia from the sun rather than hide my supposed naughty bits. However, I’m still not comfortable nursing in public sans some sort of boob shield. The annoyingly named nursing covers on the market always seemed to act as billboards for MOM NURSING. I don’t have a problem breastfeeding when others are around, but I want to be covered, mostly because people get so uncomfortable that I’m made uncomfortable by their inability to look in my direction or hold a conversation with me.

A long time ago, I stumbled across something called the ModestMomz 5 in 1 Nursing Poncho. At 40 bucks, this poncho cost at least 3x the average nursing cover, so I had a hard time justifying its purchase, but a hard time isn’t an impossible time and I’m the Queen of online impulse buys, so I bought it.

I have loved this nursing cover. I’m sewing challenged, so if you are crafty you could probably make your own for much cheaper, but I can’t, so I didn’t. And I will say I get tons of compliments on this cover (by other bfing moms of course).

Why do I proclaim the ModestMomz the best nursing cover ever? It covers my back, a major plus. It doesn’t look like a typical nursing cover, therefore preventing the Hooter Hider nursing billboard effect. It is soft enough to act as a blanket for Henry when I forget a blanket (which is all the time). And it still covers the car seat when I need some extra shade or privacy for my babe, the only aspect of the other covers I actually liked. The ModestMomz website also claims it is a fashion accessory. It’s cute enough, but I’m not sure I’d go that far. At least I’m not embarrassed when I wear mine. I own the “Sadie,” the light cream colored version, and it has wonderfully hidden all the spit up stains a newborn likes to leave around. Henry is almost three months. I think that means he is no longer a newborn. Either way, he spits up like a champ.

To non-nursing mothers (or to the moms who bare all), obsessing over a nursing cover probably seems a bit silly, but I feed this kid every two hours, so nursing is a time consuming part of my life. I’m willing to pay for a simple product that makes me less self-conscious and more comfortable when taking my clothes off in public, an act I never thought I’d do so much without the influence of wine.

The happy threesome. Where did it go wrong?

I hate dogs. That didn’t feel loud enough. Let me say it again. I HATE DOGS! This is a fairly new aspect of my personality. You know how some people are cat people or dog people. I’ve always been a dog person. I grew up with a beloved mutt named Lucy who lived for 13 years. We got her when she was five weeks old. I was ten and so excited to finally get a puppy that I walked around our neighborhood literally holding Lucy above my head to show her off. I was in grad school when she finally had to be put down and it was a sad sad day.

This is why when I started dating my lovely husband Dave, I was excited that he had a lovable German Shepherd. Oh Kaiya, you sweet, hyperactive, crazy pup. Although I found her barking slightly annoying when we lived childless in Virginia, I considered her part of the family. On Easter we hid dog treats, rather than eggs, and had her search for them. In retrospect that might have been my desire for kids coming through and not my great love for Kaiya; either way, I didn’t mind her, dog hair and all. In fact, I surprised Dave on our wedding day with a custom made cake topper featuring Dave, myself, AND Kaiya.

When we started looking for rentals in San Diego. I discovered Kaiya was becoming a bit of a liability. No one wanted to rent to big dogs, but she was part of the family and we held firm, eventually convincing the owner of our current residence that she was the best, most well-behaved German Shepherd to ever walk the earth. She’s not by the way.

When I found out I was pregnant, all of two weeks after moving to San Diego, I turned Kaiya into my test baby, cuddling with her in bed when Dave was flying late. I did have an inkling about the difficulty of dog plus baby, so I made Dave invest in some dog training, which worked for a bit…until it didn’t. And yes we read all the Dog Whisperer books as well…also not that helpful since I never mastered the calm assertive energy stuff.

As my due date approached, I started to like Kaiya less and less. She sheds. She smells. She barks at nothing, loudly. She needs to be walked twice a day because we are without yard and I cannot walk her because she becomes psychotic on a leash (she pulled me over when I was seven or eight months pregnant and I vowed never to walk her again, but I did, and after she pulled me over while Amelia was in a front carrier, I vowed never to walk her again, and I haven’t for the most part).

Kaiya is an awesome big sister to Amelia. Never do I worry that Kaiya will hurt Amelia (or Henry). I once saw our crawling baby climb right on top of Kaiya and pretend to ride her. All Kaiya did was sit there calmly. But Kaiya still found her way lower on the totem pole. Why? Because she sheds. She smells. She barks at nothing, loudly. This barking and barking and barking woke woke woke up my fussy daughter. Ugghh. I complained, but put up with it.

Then I got pregnant again. After Henry was born Kaiya found her way to the very very bottom of the totem pole. I can’t stand her. She sheds. She smells. She barks at nothing, loudly. This barking and barking and barking and barking wakes wakes wakes wakes up my fussy daughter and my mellow son and ME. I spend my days yelling at Kaiya to SHUT UP. I lock her in our bedroom where she spends most of the day so she doesn’t wake up the babies. Then I feel bad about keeping her in the bedroom (a bedroom that always smells like dog). I self-flagellate: Why am I yelling at and locking away our dog? I’m a dog person after all! Amelia has taken to copying mommy and yelling at Kaiya to SHUT UP. What is going on? I’m a dog person! I’m a dog person! Or am I?

Dave wants me to get all Marley and Me with Kaiya. Isn’t she lovable because she is annoying? Isn’t she part of the family? Just look at her cute puppy dog eyes, how can you resist? I resist.

We tried a compromise and signed her up for doggie daycare. Not the best solution because it is expensive, and therefore temporary, and Dave must leave early for work to take her. The days she is gone, I breathe easier. My heart rate goes comfortably down. Dave wants me to miss her. I don’t. Let’s be clear. I feel bad for her. She’s a dog and can’t help her personality, but I feel bad for me too. I’m a stay at home mom. Therefore, the home is my office. How would he like an annoying, barking, trying to steal Amelia’s food, smelly, incontinent dog at his office all day?

I know I’m setting myself up for criticism by admitting the depth of my dog despair. I’m supposed to love Kaiya. And in a way I do love her. I love her enough to know being around a crazed mom who yells SHUT UP all day isn’t really living what Oprah would call your best dog life. Whoever did the research into dogs lowering blood pressure must not have been around moms with babies and manic German Shepherds. It gets worse when we go to my parents’ house where they have two Dachshunds and my brother’s Lab as barking companions for Kaiya. I HATE DOGS.

It has been suggested, I use the passive on purpose to leave the suggester nameless, that my building Kaiya annoyance is an emotional scapegoat. Perhaps the stress of having two under two is manifesting itself as dog dislike. Perhaps I yell at Kaiya because I can’t bring myself to yell at my own kids. Maybe, but this argument completely overlooks the extra stress having a dog places on the whole mothering two under two situation. As I said, when Kaiya is gone I’m calmer. I yell less. Two under two is stressful, but two under two plus dog is too stressful (a two tongue twister). We are at a hairy, smelly, barking crossroads. I’m not sure what we will do, but in the meantime I’m unapologetically seeking a dog divorce. It’s no one’s fault. The kids aren’t to be blamed. We’ve both made mistakes, but sometimes when mommy and doggy grow apart, they need to live separately…. There, that was my Dooce confessional post.

Are you overthinking parenting? An economist explains why this might be a waste of time.

As you may have noticed, I’ve cut down on my posts to roughly two a week. I was contemplating just doing away with the Newsroom category altogether, but then I remembered that while my production has decreased my internet consumption has not. I’m crediting my insatiable appetite for knowledge and not my poor parenting skills for this constancy (but to be fair, I am at my parents’ house and have someone else to amuse Amelia, so it’s not like I’m neglecting her. Do you hear that Dad? I’m not neglecting her. This is my vacation). Anyway, enough inappropriate insights into my family dynamics and on to the cool stuff I’ve found online.

I have an undergraduate degree in English and History and a graduate degree in English, oh so helpful degrees for my current line of work as a stay at home mom, so of course I’m now wishing I had become a behavioral economist (or a biomechanist, but I’ll save that for another post). I can’t redo my entire education, but I can listen to the Freakonomics podcasts. I never read the book and only accidentally stumbled across the podcasts when doing an iTunes search in preparation for the long drive up to Sacramento. Now I listen to the Stephens every day as I go for a walk.

I cringed when I saw a title of an episode called “The Economists Guide to Parenting.”  I’m so sick of someone telling me how to parent, but the episode was actually pretty awesome. That’s the nice thing about economists. They crunch the numbers and leave the moralizing to a minimum. They also prove numbers are only part of the parenting equation. Even economists can’t help but do things they know have no quantifiable parenting effect (proving that not everything needs to be quantifiable to be important). Some of the more interesting tidbits include the following:

That baby sign language you are teaching little Johnnie won’t make him any smarter, but the fact that you are the type of person that would even bother with baby sign language will help him in life.

If you smoke and drink to excess, count on kids who do the same. Kicking bad habits is way more important than trying to make your kids smarter.

Be kind. Kids remember that kind of thing.

They talk about a lot more, which is why you should listen to the podcast and then subscribe to it so that I’m not the only annoying person constantly saying “I heard on the Freakonomics podcast…”

Original movie poster, taken from Wikipedia

Amelia has recently taken to wearing only dresses. To be more specific, only pretty dresses. In the morning before thinking about peeing or eating or even leaving her crib, she points to the closet, commanding that I or daddy get her the party dress, not the cute summer dress (even though it is February), not the cute play dress, but THE dress, the one with red flowers on non-machine washable fabric covering three layers of tulle petticoat.

I purposely didn’t bring THE dress to Sacramento and she has managed to survive without it, but she still insists on wearing a dress every day. She is not a fashionista because of me. If I put on jeans I consider myself dressed up. If I wear the sweatshirt with the ruffly front, I’m ready for a night on the town. If I adorn my feet with TOMS rather than with nothing, I’m living large that day. No, Amelia is not fashion forward because of her dear mother. She has gone toddlers and tiaras on me because of Ann Margret. To be more specific, Ann Margret as Kim from Bye Bye Birdie.

I wrote about Amelia’s girl crush before (you can read is HERE) and instead of dissipating, this girl crush has morphed into a dress obsession, precipitated by both the movie and a trip to the Corvette Diner in San Diego (think of a Diner on speed and you are close to imagining the Corvette).

Prepare yourself for a shocking parenting statement. Are you ready? I, Miss Overthinking Mom, let my not yet two year old daughter watch the movie Bye Bye Birdie EVERY SINGLE DAY. Most days we don’t get through the whole thing, but at least once a day she watches part of it. That’s right. EVERY SINGLE DAY. At first I thought it was a harmless love. But now Miss Only Wears Dresses dances, snaps, and even screams like the over-acting characters in this annoying musical. Fine. I can live with that. However, have you ever really listened to the lyrics of “How Lovely to be a Woman”? Well, I have. Many many times. For those of you not as intimately familiar with every second of Bye Bye Birdie, I’ll give you a snippet:

“How lovely to be a woman,
The wait was well worth while;
How lovely to wear mascara
And smile a woman’s smile.
How lovely to have a figure,
That’s round instead of flat;
Whenever you hear boys whistle,
You’re what they’re whistling at.
It’s wonderful to feel
The way a woman feels;
It gives you such a glow just to know
You’re wearing lipstick and heels!
How lovely to be a woman
And have one job to do;
To pick out a boy and train him
And then when you are through,
You’ve made him the man you want him to be!”

Okay, so let’s disregard the heels problem (cause my girlie ain’t wearing those) and the wearing mascara (I’m okay with that), how am I supposed to deconstruct the happy guys are whistling at me and pick out a boy and train them lines for a two year old? Sure, the song has its tongue firmly planted in its cheek, but toddlers don’t get that. The movie has other obvious gender problems that you don’t even want to get me started on, so I could stop her from watching the movie or try and explain some stuff, but frankly the reason she watches it every day is my exhaustion. I’m tired. She likes the movie. It calms her before bed. But Ann Margret, I ask you, am I screwing up my kid? Probably.

I’m reviving Stuff I Love because now that Amelia is officially a toddler (no longer a pre-toddler), I’m discovering a whole new crop of essentials. Enter into this category the Door Monkey as a tool to stop toddler entering. We have four of them, that’s how much I love this gem. With two kids, I can’t spend my time chasing Amelia around the house, so we child-proofed like crazy (seriously, like crazy…I went a little overboard when pregnant).

I need to know the house is safe and let her explore and play and occasionally (every two hours) leave me in peace to breastfeed without worrying she is unrolling all the toilet paper, again, or chowing down on Kaiya’s cuisine. We bought a bulky door lock thingy that was a pain to attach permanently to the guest bathroom after A discovered the joy of trying to empty her cloth diaper pail, but we have other rooms in the house that we’d like to keep temporarily off limits without messing with permanent screws and sticky tape. The Door Monkey was created by a parenting genius just for this purpose. We even keep one next to the portable timer as an easy time-out solution; we put Amelia in her room and quickly attach the Door Monkey to her door for the two minute don’t hit your brother or mommy time (she usually plays and has started putting herself in timeout by standing next to the wall. I’m guessing she learned this in daycare and for that I am thankful.) Still, the Door Monkey is helpful in keeping Amelia out of Henry’s room when he is napping; I should probably mention she can open all the doors in the house, hence the need for these Monkeys.

This lock leaves a little gap, good for airing out the laundry room without allowing her in to eat the dog food. My only complaint is that the lock doesn’t fit the doors in my parents’ house. I assume this is because their house is from 1947. I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure the portable locks fit most doors. Amelia hasn’t figured them out and I put them high enough (you can put it where you want) that there really is no way for her to get past the Monkey. They cost about 13 dollars each, but I’d have paid much much much more for the number of “No. Don’t go in there”s left unuttered.

Driving 500 miles with a two month old, a 21 month old, and a German Shepherd is about as much fun as a root canal. I think. I’ve never had a root canal (and hope not to), but I’m sticking with the cliched saying despite my dental inexperience. My parents live in Sacramento. We live in San Diego. Sacramento seems close because we used to live on the East coast, but every time we make the drive up North I’m reminded that eight to ten hours in a car is actually a really long time, and when you factor in breastfeeding, diaper changes, screaming children, and a smelly dog, the trip can seem like an eternity.

But we had a bright idea, a genius way around this nightmare. We would simply drive at night, the time when the kids usually sleep, and they would rest peacefully in their car seats. We’d stop for bathroom breaks and night-time feedings, but Henry can go 3, sometimes 4, hours at night between feedings, as opposed to the 2 hour day-time schedule. Meanwhile, Dave and I would quietly listen to podcasts and congratulate ourselves on our picture perfect all-American family.

We really were that naive. About half-way through the trip, as Amelia and Henry alternated screams, and Dave tried to keep his eyes from falling shut, we admitted that this was a failed experiment. Let me break down all the break downs. Yes, the kids were tired and did fall asleep in their car seats, but they did not go quietly. Amelia has been sleeping through the night since she was 9 months old, recently had a early morning set back, but after some sleep consulting, is now again sleeping from roughly 6:30pm to 6am most nights. Why did we mess with that!? She let out tired why are you making me sleep in this car seat screams for much of the trip. Meanwhile, Henry, wee little baby, hated being in the car seat, not a hatred we could make go away all together, but poor guy got his typical evening gas and didn’t have either one of us to help him out.

Okay, so dealing with screaming tired babies was bad, but we also overlooked one giant flaw in our experiment. Driving at night meant we would also be staying up. We = very tired parents who can use all the sleep we can get. Plus, Dave had a night flight before this and my ability to see in the dark is bad, very bad, to say the least (and I am saying the least). As we stopped for coffee at midnight, this flaw dawned on us for the first time. Why oh why were we driving at night? We should be sleeping, not sitting in a shady gas station as I nursed an upset Henry underneath a giant billboard advertising a bare elegance strip club (classy, I’m sure). Whipping out a boob in the middle of the night in a not so nice LA neighborhood is not something I recommend.

We got here safely a few days ago. The kids have caught up on their sleep (although I quickly put the kibosh on my parents’ plan to transition Amelia to a big girl bed. Did I mention I don’t want to mess with a good thing?). We are still tired parents, but tired parents who now get help and can enjoy a hot tub, so all in all, a successful trip despite our poor prior planning. Now if I could only do something about all the annoying dogs here….

This is a podpost for Podcast Episode 36. Does having children make people less happy than those without? Short answer, yes. Long answer, it depends on how many children you have, whether you are a man or woman, how happiness is defined, and whether any of these studies that attempt to quantify happiness can be taken seriously.

Disregarding the general merits of studies that have people express their level of happiness in multiple choice form, the findings that children do not necessarily make people happy should not be shocking to any new parent (and I happen to be one). Babies scream a lot. They poop a lot. They NEED NEED NEED all the time and all they can give is the occasional super cute coo and cuddle. Toddlers scream a lot. They poop a lot (not always in a diaper). They NEED NEED NEED all the time and all they can give in return is the occasional hug, kiss, and super cute ballerina twirl.

In the last week, I’ve ushered a screaming toddler into timeout, while my boob leaked all over the carpet because the reason for said timeout was this toddler’s choice to hit both mommy and baby brother while mommy was feeding baby brother. She screamed. He screamed. I wanted to scream. If some researcher had called me at that moment and asked if I was happier now that I had kids, I’d think back to the days when I could shower in peace, go to a coffee shop and read a book, or have a decent conversation with my husband and I’d say “NO!”

But of course that would be a lie because if that same researcher asked me if I’d trade my children for anything in the world, including those pre-baby peaceful moments, I’d laugh in his face. In fact the thought of losing my two babies is enough to make me upset over the hypothetical. This is a long way of saying, happiness studies are probably stupid.

Even if they are stupid, I’m still intrigued by the findings and by our collective cultural fascination with measuring something as vague as happiness. New York Magazine ran a pretty good summary article in 2010, the same year I became a parent, deconstructing some of these studies. The article points out that the most oft-cited study is that of the Nobel prize winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman who surveyed over 900 Texan women and discovered they didn’t find childcare to be all that fun. Is it just me or does the profession of behavioral economist sound totally awesome?

The article notes “As a rule, most studies show that mothers are less happy than fathers, that single parents are less happy still, that babies and toddlers are the hardest, and that each successive child produces diminishing returns. But some of the studies are grimmer than others. Robin Simon, a sociologist at Wake Forest University, says parents are more depressed than non-parents no matter what their circumstances—whether they’re single or married, whether they have one child or four.”

Senior, the article’s author, tries to figure out why parenting is so darn miserable. She suggests parenting has changed over the last century, especially for the middle and upper middle classes, wherein children have become our bosses; they are no longer needed as family labor and have turned into family projects. This means we spend more time with our kids, but always think we aren’t doing enough for our kids. What a guilt-inducing paradox.

Senior seems to fall into the camp that more social programs for moms would make us happier parents (of both genders), and maybe a little less meta-analysis of parenting would help as well. However, Senior admits “More generous government policies, a sounder economy, a less pressured culture that values good rather than perfect kids—all of these would certainly make parents happier. But even under the most favorable circumstances, parenting is an extraordinary activity, in both senses of the word extra: beyond ordinary and especially ordinary. While children deepen your emotional life, they shrink your outer world to the size of a teacup, at least for a while.”

What I like the most about this article is that Senior ends my calling into question the very importance of moment-to-moment happiness. Existential rewards are not the same as coffee breaks. Having fun is not even the same as being happy. She points to the study by Tom Gilovich in which he followed up with men and women from the 1921 Terman study. What did he discover? No one regretted having children, but ten people regretted not having children.

What do I take from all this? Having kids probably won’t make you happier in the short term, maybe not even in the long term, if happiness is only defined in terms of discrete joy, yet you’ll be hard-pressed to find a mother or father who sincerely regrets having children. Raising another human being is hard work, even in the days before our parenting manuals and overthinking blogs (I don’t know about you, but working on a farm while having ten kids doesn’t sound like a clear path to our definition of happiness either).

Baby number two is here and I’m….happy? Obviously, I’m excited by the birth of my lovely son, but am I happier than I was when I had one child or no children? In my first podcast back after a long long hiatus I examine some of the studies purporting to show a decline in happiness as people have children. What can we make of these studies? Can happiness be defined or measured? When will I sleep through the night again (sadly, that last question isn’t answered)?

Sources:

“One baby or two? Study looks at effect of having second child” by Judy Hill

“All Joy and No Fun” by Jennifer Senior

Having Children Makes You Miserable

I took a long long hiatus from this blog and almost stopped paying my liquid web fee because I had no time, energy, or inclination to talk about myself and motherhood. I started this blog because it was fun and it stopped being fun, what with the morning sickness, the transition to toddlerhood, the difficult delivery and birth of my luckily not as difficult as Amelia baby boy, and the NO SLEEP that comes with having a two month old. I have no illusions of blog grandeur and figured my online echo chamber could disappear forever, but the blog bug bit me at 2 in the morning (because I’m up at 2 in the morning on a regular basis. Did I mention I don’t sleep? I told Dave my only fantasy is to check into a hotel room by myself, eat cheesecake, and sleep until I can’t sleep anymore). This isn’t a viral blog, so like a good diet (ahem eating plan), I shouldn’t fall prey to the all or nothing syndrome. Just because I fell off the posting and recording wagon, doesn’t mean I’m gone forever.

The biggest, and I mean BIGGEST, event, not counting my expanding feet, since last posting was the birth of Henry, all 10 pounds 7 ounces of him. Take a moment to be amazed. He was the largest baby my midwife had ever delivered and no, I didn’t have a c-section (but was told by even the most earthy crunchy of the midwives that any future children would need to come via a section due to their “trending upward” weight. I am not a large woman and Henry had some difficulty after coming out.) All went mostly well after the initial Henry not crying and almost being taken to the NICU drama. For the record, despite my hippie tendencies, I will never ever ever speak ill of epidurals. In two cases, they prevented a c-section and I pushed for less than a half hour, so there.

I’m living in a tired cloud right now. This has been said before by I don’t know whom, probably by everyone, that having two babies is not doubly difficult, but rather exponentially more difficult. This is true and this is why Amelia frequents a lovely daycare twice a week.

I don’t know a lot about motherhood, but a second baby does teach you just how much personality is part of our God-given DNA. Nurture matters, but wow, nature is ingrained. I feel a little foolish about my past attempts to explain or qualify Amelia’s behavior based solely on what I was or was not doing as a mother. Henry has taught me that some personality traits just are. Knowing this has taken a lot of the pressure off me, yet somehow has not stalled my incessant reading about parenthood, but that is for another post.

Amelia switched rather ungracefully from two naps to one around 16 months. Her first nap was becoming really short and I knew, based on too much research, that the average child will switch to one nap around 15-18 months. I figured getting the transition out of the way before Baby Number 2 arrives was a good idea, and it has been…mostly.

The only major problem I have had with this transition is shower time, as in, mommy like needs to shower before noon and baby can’t be trusted alone in the house while I am out of commission. This is the plight of the stay at home mom, and probably the working mom as well, a plight I imagine gets more complicated the more kids you have. How does one actually shower with a toddler around?

After asking around when preparing for this inevitability, I discovered moms all have different ways of coping. Some just stick their kids in a baby-proofed room, others still put a toddler in a pack n play, others shower at night, and the truly brave shower with their babes. When Amelia was a wee thing, I’d plop her in a bouncy seat and put it in the bathroom. She’d scream, but at least she couldn’t move. Now all she does is move and I can’t leave her alone because a baby-proofed room still makes me nervous, especially because yesterday she bit her tongue after running into the wall for no particular reason. I don’t think an Amelia-proofed room actually exists. As for a pack n play, she can climb out of those.

My solution has been extensive baby-proofing of the master bath, a yoga mat, and a kiddie laptop. I now remove the toilet paper and garbage can after an impressive TPing incident (doesn’t bode well for high school). We have a see through glass door on the shower, so she spends most of the time banging on it and yelling at me for daring to do something without her. When that doesn’t work, she ignores the play computer I so diligently researched and instead tries on my bra, as a hat or necklace. Then she screams some more and climbs on the toilet. Afterwards, as I try to get dressed, she fights with me for the towel and finds great amusement in poking me where the sun doesn’t shine.

I would shower at night, but have you ever heard the kid’s song by Andy Mason called “My Hair Had a Party Last Night”? If you haven’t, listen to it and you’ll understand why it is the rare curly headed girl who can shower in the evening. So I am left with a not too peaceful but at least functional shower time. This must be the situation for many, if not most, moms. And don’t even get me started on the other bathroom activities moms cannot experience in peace.

Sure, daily showers are a fairly modern convenience and I should be grateful for my water supply, but I can’t help but complain about this little talked about mommy issue. 17 months ago I completely took for granted personal time, so at least this time around I understand what motherhood truly means. It means giving birth to the greatest loves of your life who also happen to be tumors on any private time, but what lovely tumors they are.

Potty training. Yuck. My brain is about to explode. I literally just read a 50 page evidence report called “The Effectiveness of Different Methods of Toilet Training for Bowel and Bladder Control” done by The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. It was about as exciting as it sounds.

Why was I reading an evidence report, the kind of literature that includes lots of abstracts and objectives and executive summaries? I’m starting to not trust anything about toilet training and it’s driving me crazy. Some people claim we Americans are waiting too long  (white Americans I should say) by pushing toilet training to 2.5, 3, or even beyond years. Others suggest we make like our forebears and Europeans and force the issue before 18 months. Still others are all about elimination communication, the practice of toilet training from birth. Some say do it all in a day. Others say wait for the kid to decide. The American Academy of Pediatrics and Mayo Clinic support the child readiness approach, as does the Canadian version of the AAP, but Google toilet training and you will find a plethora of opinions, most of which have very little actual research to back them up, which means like with so many other parenting topics, no one really knows what is best.

What is an overthinking girl to do? Look up dry reports that analyze the limited studies that have been done. This evidence report from 2006 notes that healthy children will be potty trained by most methods, but that when comparing the Azrin-Foxx method to the child-oriented approach, the Azrin-Foxx achieves results faster with as good if not better follow up results. Still, overall, the difference between the two isn’t that great. In other words, both will work. Okay, then I want the one that works better. Azrin-Foxx it is.

But what exactly is that method. I found their 1970s book on Amazon advertising to potty train your kid in one day. I guess it can work, as long as you wait until your kid is showing at least some signs of readiness. For the record, my almost 16 month old is not showing the signs. However, despite mostly positive reviews, a couple negative reviews of the book noted it can be harsh, e.g. marching your kid in wet undies to the toilet 10 x and telling him how upset people will be that he wet his pants, although, to be fair, a lot of positive reinforcement is also required. You also have to somehow get your child to sit for 10 minutes on the potty. As one reviewer noted, how exactly does one do that? Hmmm. Maybe this approach, although effective, isn’t going to work with my personality. I like things to be done fast, but I really can’t see Amelia sitting still and I just imagine a really stressful day that may or may not result in some level of toilet training.

Elimination communication is also out because I already missed that boat and I think having to read all the bathroom cues is a little overwhelming and not very practical for anything other than a first child, meaning baby #2 ain’t gonna do that method either.

I found some books advertising a three day version of the Azrin-Foxx method, a version that can be started even sooner than that one, yet requires three months of a diaper free baby. I’ve already learned the joys of steam cleaning our rental carpet and the last thing I want to do is watch a diaper less baby in the house while also caring for a newborn, so I suppose that method is out as well.

This leaves the most common and lengthy child-led approach. According to the evidence report, if you start potty training around 18 months (as in introducing the concept), your child should be consistently going without accidents 10 months later. Wow. I had no idea it could take so long. This is the approach that involves getting your child used to the potty, putting her on it every once and a while, then moving to training pants, etc…  If you wait too long you can have a very obstinate child who refuses to poop in the toilet and if you try too early, you will frustrate yourself. Now I see why the other early toilet training methods, although labor intensive, are appealing to people. I really really really hate changing Amelia’s diaper. She screams and wriggles around and makes life generally miserable. At the same time, the thought of being locked in the kitchen with her for one day or three makes me cringe.

I guess I’ll go with the gradual approach even if none of them seem appealing. I told Dave I would do the “normal” thing for this one parenting topic, realizing as I said this that “normal” is relative. What is normal in America isn’t normal in other countries. What is normal for white Americans apparently isn’t as normal for black Americans (I had no idea). Instead, we’ll do the approach that fits both Amelia’s and my personalities. That kid hates to be forced to do anything and I love order and schedules. Not a great combo. In my mind, I start potty training her at 18 months by slowly introducing the concept and we magically reach a conclusion in a few months. However, I absolutely know that won’t work. All the methods have one thing in common. They recommend not starting the process when another baby is arriving. Amelia will be 19 months when baby #2 makes his grand entrance. She has already gotten jealous of the little doll we are pretending is the new baby. Even if early toilet training is preferable for some, I can’t see it working out logistically for Amelia or me.  Plus, who said anything old and European has to be superior? The history of potty training is not a straight line from wonderful early training to wussy child led training. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe in 8 months I will be locked in a kitchen with Amelia after all, pumping her full of liquids and begging her to sit on the potty.

Image: ntwowe / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I have a problem, but not one I’m willing to solve any time soon. I read too many parenting books, hardly a surprise (the blog is called overthinking mom after all). I read a ton before Amelia was born and then revolted against these books by doing a podcast on the history of mothering manuals, revealing the changing and contradictory advice peddled to make moms feel guilty throughout the centuries (information I got from reading a book about this history). I stopped reading for a while (maybe a couple months), but then Amelia had colic, so I read about that. Now, at 15 months, my precious non-colicky new toddler is super spirited, which I actually love about her, but I’m exhausted. What do I do when exhausted? I read.

The first time around I was overwhelmed by the contradictory advice. Now I’m a bit more confident in my parenting choices and have learned what to toss aside and what to take to heart, not that the advice I’m tossing aside is garbage, but at some point you have to decide if you are a crib mom or a co-sleeper, a cry it out or an attachment parent, a time outer or a connector, etc…

I’ve also learned that you don’t have to pick a clear side, as in I will follow the teachings of any one so called expert and no one else. You’d be surprised how many people pick Sears or the Babywise people or Weissbluth or Ferber or Karp or Kurcinka or Love and Logicers or even the Nanny 911 lady and model all their parenting choices off of that person’s philosophy. And then there is the rest of the non-yuppie non- stay at home mom world that just gets on with it and leaves the books alone. Oh, how I wish I was one of those “get on with it” moms, but that’s not my nature. I know that isn’t my nature because I read about my nature in a book (Kurcinka’s, the current selection on my kindle).

Anyway, if I can’t follow the teachings of one person and I can’t bring myself to stop reading altogether, especially because Amelia’s spirited nature has left me a bit befuddled about the best way to parent her in the particular high pitched emotional moments, I’m left with a pile of books through which I’m sorting. This is pregnancy nesting gone to the extreme. I literally just bought a 20% off notebook from poor defunct Borders (and by the way, I expected a bigger discount, poor defunct Borders) for the sole purpose of synthesizing the tidbits of info from each book that make the most sense to me. Instead of fuming about how all the books differ, I’m looking for cross over.

What have I found? The code phrase for the 2000s is “emotional intelligence.” If you are worried about IQ, that was so last century, so you can totally get over it. I’ve even read books about how I need to stop worrying and should read fewer books. I kinda love that irony. To be honest, I’m not even that worried and all this reading reveals less about my parenting anxiety than it does about my scholastic temperament. When I was in school, I was always the girl who did way too much research. I wasn’t looking for the solution to any problem, but rather believed and believe that reading in moderation is more dangerous than not reading at all. What do I mean by this? I mean picking just one book leaves you easily convinced about that advice and doesn’t leave much room for differences of opinion. It’s like only watching Fox News. It can make you sanctimonious about your parenting choices. And that is annoying.

Unfortunately for my husband and anyone who knows me, reading anything and everything has made me annoying in a different way. It has turned me into a bookish know it all. For his sake, I will admit I absolutely don’t know it all about parenting, and although reading all these books has taught me a lot about the parenting book genre, I have to keep on reminding myself that parenting and parenting books are two completely different beasts. Every time I try a piece of advice from a book and it doesn’t “work” on my daughter, I’m reminded reading is a lovely hobby, but not even close to the actual parenting experience. That said, a post-academic has to research something, so why not the being that came out of my womb. Or maybe I should just join a book club or take up a crafty hobby like other normal people.

Image: thephotoholic / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Have you heard of Justin Roberts? If you answered yes to this question you must have a toddler or perhaps just G rated taste in music. I’m bringing back my Stuff I Love posts and am starting with a music selection. As much as I wish to be the type of person who doesn’t buy stuff and could live in the woods without anything other than a stick to amuse myself and my child, I’m not that type of mom. Therefore, I have a long backlog of stuff I love, most of which is courtesy of the Amazon prime subscription Dave insists he will never get again because I order way too much, but this selection is actually an iTunes find (also an easy online addiction).

I’ve only purchased a handful of specific toddler/baby albums for Amelia. When she was really little, I would play whatever music I liked, but as she gets older and seems to understand more language, I’ve decided to increase our toddler specific music collection. I can only listen to The Beatles so many times and I’m discovering Arcade Fire or Phoenix just aren’t super appropriate or dance-able. Oh, and if I have to listen to a musical version of a nursery rhyme one more time, I’m going to have my own great fall from which I will never be put back together.

Since I research everything, I spent over an hour in the iTunes library listening to toddler tune samples and reading reviews. Nothing really appealed to me, so I finally gave up and bought the album with a million great reviews: Meltdown! This is a 2006 album by nominated for a lot of awards singer-songwriter Justin Roberts. I’ve since purchased his most recent album as well. I like the new album, but Meltdown! is still a fave. It’s not necessarily the type of music to which I’d drink a Pabst Blue Ribbon (pretending I like it) in a Boston club, but it sure beats a lot of the other stuff marketed to kids. I find myself dancing along with Amelia when I play the music during lunch, and I’ve listened to it at least two dozen times at this point without going crazy. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a ringing endorsement.

Again, anyone who is more experienced at this toddler raising thing will surely have heard of this guy, but Amelia is just entering the toddler world. The songs are catchy, have clever lyrics, and don’t make you feel like you have erased your entire adult musical identity. I’m starting to realize writing children’s music is an art form that doesn’t get enough credit. Anyone can write a mopey emo lyric, but only a true artist can appeal to both children and their parents. On that note (pun intended), if anyone else has other albums they would recommend, let me know. Meltdown! is great, but no album can be repeated infinitely.

After a long podcasting hiatus, I’m finally releasing an episode I recorded a couple months ago. My current pregnancy has been about as much fun as my first (code for no fun), so I apologize to Amy for the late release. I talked with her about the process of adopting her son from Colombia when he was 13 months old. We discussed the ins and outs of the adoption process, as well as the emotional and financial realities of adoption.

Many people think of adoption as something you can “just” do if you have trouble conceiving naturally, but my interview with Amy reveals that it is not always an easy, quick process, perhaps not usually. That said, it’s not all doom and gloom either and, of course, you do get a lovely child at the end of the long journey!

Adoption

I’ve noticed a few differences between a first and second pregnancy. These differences undoubtedly are obvious to anyone with more than one kid, but like with all things kids and kid making related, they have to be learned anew by each not so new mom.

With my first pregnancy, I blogged the entire thing to my family (starting at 11 weeks), morning sickness and all. As anyone who still reads this outgrowth of my inaugural blog might have noticed, this isn’t happening so readily with number two. Baby number one is the obvious cause of this plummeting word count, combined with sporadic morning sickness that has lessened, but doesn’t seem to want to disappear for good.

Speaking of morning sickness, you wretched bane of my existence, my current experience started out extremely similar to the puking horrors of ’09, leading many to believe I was having another girl ( side note: extreme morning sickness with girls is actually an old wive’s tale with some merit in science, with a 56% versus 44% ratio of girl to boy births). But I’m not. I’m having a boy and although I suspected this a little– I had a 50/50 chance of being correct after all– for the first 17 weeks of the pregnancy I could not tell a single difference between my ’09 horror and the ’11 variation.

That is, until the morning sickness went away. Oh blissful week of thinking I was free a full five weeks earlier than with my baby girl. Oh week of eating Indian food and Chinese and anything else that tested my gastrointestinal tract. That week made me food cocky. One night I made a veggie lasagna and, congratulating myself on my rare culinary achievement, I had a second piece, then suggested we all walk to get frozen yogurt. A neighbor’s lawn bore the marks of my ill-guided fro-yo journey (and still might since we don’t get much rain here). Since then, luckily, I’ve been getting better, but many nights I still tell Dave to tell me never to eat lettuce again. Ever. Stupid lettuce.

My nesting is different this time around as well. With Amelia I organized and labeled everything, so much so that Dave has actually banned me from setting foot into The Container Store. The feminist in me recoils at a husband banning a wife from shopping, but the realist in me recognizes I may just have a problem, so I don’t go back.

Problem or not, plastic bins and labels were the least of Dave’s nesting woes. This pregnancy I’m all about projects, big I need it done now I’m going to attempt what I can’t do I will not rest, except when I have collapsed in exhaustion and need you to take over, projects. I just finished sanding and priming some old Target bookshelves I have always hated in the hopes of turning them into cheap white jewels. I’ve never primed anything or successfully painted laminate and my prime job looks pretty awful, so this project may mean more money spent in the long run. We are also getting a yard even though we rent, but I refuse to look at weedy mulch any longer. I refuse I say! Oh, and I want to redo the kitchen and add to Amelia’s room, not to mention the nursery and our bedroom and….. Somehow all the things that haven’t bothered me for two years are now like little needles in my brain. We don’t plan on having many, if any, more kids, but those women who have 8 or 10 probably have accomplished the most amazing feats whilst pregnant.

Ultimately, the biggest difference this time around is my energy level. Yes, morning sickness saps all energy and last time I had anemia, even collapsing at the mall around 15 weeks, but a toddler, a spirited toddler, changes the energy zapping ball game entirely. I’ve been making frequent and long trips up to Sacramento so my parents can take care of Amelia (and let’s be honest, me).

Having a kid outside the womb means no playing music to the belly babe via giant headphones, no reading What to Expect and other ridiculously long parenting diatribes, no fretting about my parenting philosophy. I played in the womb Amelia Irish lullabies for months and she never recognized them nor calmed down because of them. Reading all the pregnancy books were helpful, but a bit overwhelming and obviously not adequate preparation for the real thing, and my I need to do everything the Sears way approach I thought I would have with Amelia totally didn’t happen, and I don’t feel bad about it at all. Basically, I’m a project crazed, tired and moody, yet more mellow, months away but still scary close mom take two. Paradoxical? Yes. Paradoxes are lovely that way. They can make no sense and still be true.

Oh, and one last difference. I’m eating cheese. All kinds of cheese now. Apparently America pasteurizes everything. Good to know.

As for the podcast that I have let slip away. I have an episode soon to be released that was recorded months ago. I apologize to Amy, who I interviewed about adoption, for taking so darn long.

I’m pregnant. Yes, this is exciting news, but a messy morning sickness sieve is currently leaking all over this excitement. Marveling at the human body’s ability to grow another human body has been replaced by amazement at the human body’s ability to produce Niagara size pukes on a regular basis. To put it another way, I AM MISERABLE.

I’m past the first trimester morning sickness line of demarcation (15 weeks-ish) and my relief knight is not coming to save me. This isn’t surprising. I had severe morning sickness with my now 13 month old daughter and baby number #2 obviously doesn’t want to be outdone.

Any pregnancy condition will illicit tons of advice, and although I sincerely appreciate all the advice I’ve received, none of it has done me any good. This is why I’ve decided to compile some morning sickness myths. These myths are specific to my experience, which admittedly falls outside the morning sickness norm, but if nothing has worked for me, I’m willing to bet other women have been or are in the same puke filled boat.

Myth #1: It will go away around 12 or 13 weeks. With my last pregnancy I counted the weeks until the end of the first trimester, hoping and believing my all day vomit fest would magically end. It didn’t. Guess what? It’s not ending now either. Sure, my vomit records of a few weeks ago aren’t being matched anymore (did you know someone could puke massive amounts 8 or 9 times a day?), but even though I only regurgitate my meals 2 to 3 times a day, I still feel nauseous all the time. I don’t think my misery came through loud enough. ALL THE TIME.

Myth #2: You feel bad because you are letting yourself feel bad. I particularly dislike this myth for obvious reasons. Nausea (other than the sound and splatter of vomiting) is difficult for others to see, so when it continues for weeks and months, some well meaning people start to question if perhaps a little mind over matter action would help. Maybe if you decide to feel well, you will feel well. This is like saying, “Sure, you broke your arm and half of the bone is sticking through, but maybe if you decide your arm isn’t broken, the pain will go away.”

Myth #3: If you really don’t want to puke, you won’t. This is similar to myth #2 in that it involves the power of the mind, but unlike that myth it doesn’t relate to morning sickness as a whole, but simply to the dehydrating getting sick part. [Fitting that I had to pause writing about this myth to go say goodbye to my breakfast.] A few fellow past morning sickness sufferers expressed empathy for my plight and mentioned they had been lucky enough to never actually throw up because they had a vomit phobia and therefore wouldn’t let themselves get sick. I believe they believe this ,but I don’t believe this is why they didn’t get sick. I tested out this theory the other night. When I started to feel particularly sick, I resisted the urge to run to the bathroom. Maybe if I just refused to get sick, I wouldn’t. The result: Major grossness running down my hands as I belatedly beelined for the loo. Sure, vomit can be postponed, but it can’t be avoided completely. If you didn’t puke with your morning sickness, it’s because you didn’t have to. Consider yourself lucky, not the Queen of will power.

Myth #4: Sea Bands. Move over Charlie Sheen. Momma’s on her own Truth Tour. No cream or ointment, no matter how expensive, will prevent or repair stretch marks. Gripe water will not cure colic. Sea Bands will not relieve morning sickness. And Santa Claus doesn’t exist. You’re welcome.

Myth #5: If all else fails, medication will help. For many woman this is true. Zofran has become the gold standard of maternity anti-nausea meds. It doesn’t work for me. Didn’t with Amelia, isn’t with this one. I took it for a couple months last time, about two weeks this time. It did cut down on the vomiting a bit (think 5 or 6x a day rather than 8 during the peak, but I decided that slight decrease wasn’t worth the side effects). I’ve also tried Unisom for about a week, Reglan for a couple days (that one didn’t agree with me), and Compazine, a drug I will never ever take again due to a very strange and very horrible allergic reaction. Unfortunately, Compazine was the only drug that stopped the vomiting, but going crazy didn’t seem like a good alternative.

Myth #6: Forget medication, go all natural with vitamin B6 and B12. I really wanted this one to work. Unlike the meds, these vitamins have no side effects and some studies I found online suggest they work better than a placebo. I took a combination of the two for about three weeks straight (and yes, I took the recommended dosing for morning sickness and not just for supplementation). I thought they were helping. I really did, but then I forgot to take them for a couple days and realized I felt pretty much the same. My puke count went down while taking them, but I’ve been off the vitamins for about three weeks and now realize the vitamins probably didn’t do it for me.

Myth #7: Try ginger or peppermint or saltines or coconut water or etc… No morning sickness myth countdown would be complete without mentioning ginger. I am so sick of ginger. I have tried ginger tea (both commercial and brewed with fresh ginger), candied ginger for keeping in your mouth, pickled ginger, ginger snaps (no one suggested this one, but I thought, why not?), and ginger ale. Ditto for peppermint variations. I can see how they would help with mild morning sickness. Real ginger ale does settle the stomach and peppermint candies have provided a distraction from my nausea. Coconut water is supposed to be nature’s gatorade, but I found the taste so repulsive I can’t really comment on its effectiveness yet. All I know, none of these things will actually stop the sickness. They might provide very temporary relief, or, in my case, a strange twitch whenever someone utters the word ginger.

The last remedy I have yet to try is acupuncture. The problem with this suggestion is not only the cost but the time and energy needed to get to a practitioner. When you are dehydrated, exhausted, and nauseous, when taking a shower is an accomplishment, driving all over town doesn’t seem worth the effort, even if it could possibly provide temporary relief. People say you won’t know if it is working until you’ve had about five sessions, five sessions that insurance doesn’t cover. When I was at my worst, I couldn’t even muster the energy to have someone else take me to the ER so I could get an IV. I thought collapsing in bed was a preferable alternative and, in retrospect, I realize that was not the best decision. But I’m tired and weak and any remedy I try needs to come to me at this point.

Oh, and the last myth buster that should go without saying, but should be reiterated for anyone who hasn’t been pregnant is “morning sickness” is a cruel misnomer. Puke doesn’t wear a watch.

I interviewed Adrienne of the popular blog No Points for Style about her special needs son Carter; this interview affected me more than most and may change the way you look at or even judge other parents in circumstances different than your own.

Adrienne talks about the difficulty in getting a single diagnosis and in coming to terms with likely never getting one. She talks about the way parenting Carter has affected her other children and she explains what parents shouldn’t say to someone struggling with a special needs child. Hint: Don’t invoke video games and leave the word exorcism out of your vocabulary.

Raising Special Needs

This week’s Podpost for Podcast Episode 33 is courtesy of Melitsa Avila who is part of an Air Force military family. She is busy raising three smiley active boys, one bouncy dog, and lots of dust bunnies currently in the UK. She writes about everyday play activities for the under 5′s and is the host of an Early Years radio show about Raising Playful Tots.

We’ve moved a few times as a military family. We’re in our ninth home. We love to travel but not to move. Who would? When you switch continents you have all your electricals that work in one country and now won’t work in another. Furniture is meant for your living room or outside porch and not wrapped, taped, shipped and taken thousands of miles. They won’t all make it and won’t necessarily fit in your new home.

You’re life is packed up along with your memories and sanity. You hope and pray that most stay intact at the other end. There are lots of military spouses at home with their little ones doing their best while their partners are serving their country away from home on a deployment or remote tour.

We’re in the trenches, but in a different way.

Learning to value

Perspective is a wonderful thing and having listened to a recent military edition episode of This American Life, I could totally understand the young wife’s perspective. It’s crystal clear why military members stick together in groups for support, as we understand each other. What struck me about her story and the other stories is the need (as military spouses) to tell our stories to a wider community.

Helping the children

This is what we’ve tried to do with our children as we moved them around with us.

• Take pictures of everyday actions in your home before you move. Photographs tell stories, especially for those too little to remember and with time we all forget.

• Enjoy maps- make placemats of maps and areas where you live, have lived, and where family live. Distance is much shorter when you can see it on a map.

• Play. Use everyday objects and find an opportunity to play. Post it notes and paper you’ll always find and can use.

• Reminders: photograph screen savers of times past serve as a reminder of the good, the funny, and the serious.

• Remember your rituals and routines and keep as many of them as possible. It grounds everyone when you’re in that (new) stressful mode.

• Know your story. Children didn’t have to say their city or explain where they lived in quite the same way when they lived in the previous country or place. But now that insignificant town or major city means different things. They’ll be telling their story a lot in the beginning so help them fashion it into something easy and clearly understood by adult or child.

• Invite over new playmates from playgroups, nursery, daycare, school, church as soon as possible. None of us feel like we belong in a new place until we can tell you the names of our new friends.

Our impressions matter to our children. Our positive outlook and take on the situation impacts how they see themselves and this new place. This will mean we have to be honest with ourselves and prepare our relationships and attitudes before we leave and adjust as we arrive. It means we maintain relationships and friendships from the past as well as look to new ones.

If you know of a military spouses in your community, especially if their partners are deployed or on a remote tour, reach out to them. They may be a long way from home and they would probably love to tell you their story.

In Episode 25 I talked with Amy, mother to a toddler and wife of a deployed Navy officer, about her experiences dealing with deployment. I got quite a few responses to that episode, so I decided to turn it into a three part series. This is Part II of the series and this time I talk with Melitsa, mother of three boys, whose husband is on a one year remote tour. She is half way through this tour, so I asked her about how she prepared her boys, how she handles the day to day stressors, and how this long of an absence has affected her marriage.

This interview left me encouraged about any future deployment I may experience as a mother. Although stressful, Melitsa points out that the deployment can also act a sort of marriage and family reset button. I love that term. Melitsa is a fellow podcaster, so check out her sites raisingplayfultots.com and play-activities.com.

Dealing with Deployment Part II

A few weeks ago I heard Lea Goldman on NPR’s Talk of the Nation discussing moms who voluntarily give up custody of their kids, sometimes moving across the country or to a different country entirely to pursue dreams, other relationships, or education. Goldman discusses her Marie Claire article called “What Kind of Mother Leaves Her Kids” and defends the three moms she profiles (the article itself is kinda bland, but her interview highlights what she believes is the moral of these stories).

Despite my stay at home mom and military wife status, I’m not super traditional and, before listening to the segment, was ready to reserve judgment about these women. I wondered if these moms had drug problems and gave up custody for safety reasons. Then, when I realized they did it for self-fulfillment personal reasons, I was still ready to accept that moms who choose to give up their kids should not be judged more harshly than ex-husbands who do just that all the time.

However, Goldman is incredibly unconvincing. She overstates her case by trying to make these moms some sort of trailblazing heroines and by stating over and over again that dads who do this are not judged, something I don’t really think is true.

Goldman admits moms giving up custody of their kids is actually incredibly rare. A lot of moms lose custody, but that is different from relinquishing said custody. Given that this is rare, Goldman’s attempt to make this about women’s liberation en masse rings hollow. I think she is trying to eke some sort of overarching meaning out of her brief profile of three women’s life choices.

One mom wanted to become a lawyer and knew taking care of her kids would make that impossible. True, but plenty of mom lawyers exist, as do working moms, so giving up custody doesn’t make you some motherhood martyr. Another mom tragically lost a child and gave up custody of her kids to become an author, even writing a book about losing that child. I don’t really judge these moms as much as I judge Goldman for valorizing them. Sure, people make choices for different reasons, but let’s be honest, choosing to have kids and then choosing to give them up to work on your own education or to marry a guy across the pond or to become a lawyer is, frankly, selfish. Sometimes moms need to be selfish, sometimes moms should be selfish, sometimes selfish isn’t bad, but call it what it is and stop pretending these actions are noble.

Moms (and dads) can have rooms of their own without giving up the children they chose to bring into this world. They can be authors and lawyers and can remarry and do a myriad of jobs without saying bye bye to the kiddos. Is it difficult? I imagine so. But Goldman, seriously, these women aren’t trailblazers. They are moms who gave up their kids for selfish reasons, just like many dads do, and they do not represent a growing trend, something you admit on NPR, yet the Marie Claire article still boasts the misleading subtitle “Divorcing dads give up custody every day. Increasingly, so do moms. So why are they judged more harshly for it.”

I suppose this Newsroom post is less an endorsement or critique of this particular article than a commentary on sloppy reporting and misguided editorial framing. Maybe this is why I don’t subscribe to Marie Claire anymore and maybe this is why I shouldn’t write blog posts when my husband, child, dog, and I are simultaneously sick. I get cranky.

Technically, Amelia is not yet one, but “11 1/2 months is the cutest number” didn’t have the right ring. I’ve stumbled upon the cutest age ever, and I’m gladly committing the horrible mommy blog sin of writing about the cuteness of my own child, which is okay, because at least I’m not writing about how I love one child over another (Yes, I only have one child, but, seriously, did you hear about that Babble post? Wait, don’t read it until I’m done telling you about my oh so adorable babe).

What makes one any cuter than one month or two years or eleven years? I can’t speak to 2 or 11, but I’m pretty sure the awkward preteens don’t hold a candle to the first birthday, nor do the terrible twos. Of course, your child is still cute, but I’m talking peak cuteness here. As for one month versus one year cuteness, no match. No neck control and inability to toddle up to mommy and hug her put newborns out of the cute running.

Within a short week Amelia has learned how to walk with amazing proficiency. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is cuter than a newly walking baby. Add in the cloth diaper bubble butt and her big blue eyes and its almost too much to handle. She roams the house, toy purse hanging off her arm, just walking up and down the hall, occasionally baby mumbling to herself or laughing at what I can only imagine is her imaginary friend.

Sure, she pulls the books off the shelves and has ripped the pages from both Invisible Man and Malcolm X’s Autobiography, prompting Dave to worry about possible brewing racism, but even this literary destruction cannot dampen her cute aura. All she has to do when I say “Oh, Amelia, stop that” is slowly toddle up to me and throw her arms around my neck. Yes, Amelia is not yet one, but she can work the cute like she’s on a mini baby catwalk.

Yesterday, she spit up all over my pants and inside her play purse and continued on her merry way, unperturbed by the baby drool dripping from her onesie. Even in this state of mess, any stranger would still ooh and ahh at her cuteness. I know this is true because this is what people do. When a newborn she often got compliments because of her big eyes and baby compexion, but now she turns her charm on and off like a switch. Surrounded by possible admirers? Stare them down and then giggle when they look over. Works every time.

I’m surprised some Hollywood celebrity hasn’t capitalized on the inherent cuteness of the unsure baby walk. The faux pigeon toe stance seems to be dying down a bit, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if in an effort to recapture their youth, twenty something starlets start toddling rather than walking.

All I can say in closing is…. my baby is just so darn cute (and yes, I tried to think of adjectives other than cute, but none fit the descriptive bill). There. I said it. No deep dark secrets or mom confessions here, just a banal ode to my particular baby’s cutie-pieness.

image from www.thelaundress.com

I love love love (enough loves for you, love?) The Laundress. I discovered this yummy smelly detergent right before my wedding in 2009. When I went to a speciality bra shop, searching for the perfect strapless bra that never existed, the posh clerk kindly asked me if I needed any detergent for my delicates. I thanked her and said “Nah, I have a ton of Woolite at home.” She looked like she was going to throw up in her perfectly painted mouth. She calmly and sternly replied “Woolite can ruin bras by disintegrating the elastic over time.” Huh. I had no idea.

She recommended an expensive alternative called The Laundress. I picked up the Delicate Wash in the Lady scent, thinking I had been suckered into an unnecessary purchase outside my means (16 ounces cost 19 dollars), but as soon as I hand-washed my lovely lady undergarments in this magical cream detergent, I was in love. Besides smelling great, it is non-toxic, biodegradable, and allergen free, a necessity for someone like me who has freakishly sensitive skin.

I wanted to wash all our clothes in it, but I practiced budget restraint and reserved it for hand-washables and the occasional sheet set, restraint that managed to prolong that bottle’s life until last week. I couldn’t find the Delicate Wash in the local stores and picked up the Baby Wash as a replacement, which smells okay, but does not match the pure bliss I got from the lovely Lady.

A quick check of their website shows a whole range of products I didn’t know existed. They have regular detergent, whites and darks detergent, baby wash, delicate wash, wool and cashmere detergent, swimware care, denim wash, and more, not to mention the cleaning products they sell. I must say the sheer breadth of detergents they have managed to create reveals a certain marketing genius. I can’t imagine one needs separate denim detergent, but since I loved their Delicate Wash so much, I’m willing to believe anything they make is fab.

I also think whoever designed their packaging deserves a marketing award. They’ve made cleaning products look super chic. This is the only detergent line I’m actually considering as a future baby shower or bridal shower gift. I can’t imagine The Laundress is on a lot of registries, so it would be a nice unique and useful gift. Writing this post (and smelling my not so lovely scented dog next to me) has convinced me I need to go online and buy some more of that Delicate Wash and maybe even try out some of the other detergents. This is a smell luxury my nose (and bra elastic) deserves.

In Podcast Episode 32: Feeding Your Toddler, my cousin Abby and I wax on about our feeding philosophies. We aren’t experts, but we are mothers of a toddler and, in my case, a pre-toddler. Although I’d like to think personal experience counts for a lot, I know it isn’t everything (which perhaps is something too many parents forget). Here are some of the sources Abby and I reference in the episode so that you can make your own informed decision about how you plan on feeding your toddler. If I have learned anything from the reaction to my Mamapedia post about Vitamin D, it has been that nutrition is a hot button issue in the mommy world. Moms don’t like their routines and philosophies questioned. For that reason, I’m shelving my opinion for a moment (yes, this is rare) and just pointing you to other people’s ideas, in no particular order.

• Baby Led Weaning by Gill Rapley: This is the approach that I’ve used with Amelia since she was 6 months old. For us, it has worked great and I do recommend it to people, but realize that it might be too out there for many. Unlike some BLWers, I don’t believe purees will actually hinder your child’s love of eating, but in our case, purees just weren’t necessary.

• The Sneaky Chef by Missy Chase Lapine: Abby read this one, so I can’t comment insightfully about it. From what I can tell, it explains how to hide good nutritious foods inside of other foods your child will actually eat. On the surface, this seems like the opposite of Baby Led Weaning, but when I think about it, they have similar philosophies, i.e. encouraging your child to like what he/she eats. Perhaps hiding veggies in mac and cheese isn’t the best way to introduce healthier options all the time, but I imagine it’s a fun means of nutritionalizing foods while you also offer veggies in more recognizable forms. Anything that makes food fun gets my vote.

• “Poor Diet May Lower Children’s IQ” in The Guardian: Abby sent me this article. I do think mothers can go a little overboard in worrying about what they are feeding their children; however, as this article points out, what you feed your kid DOES make a difference, not just physically, but mentally (My Philosophy 101 class taught me physical is mental. I got an A, so I must have eaten my veggies growing up).

• “To Win Toddler Food Battles, Take a Softer Approach” by Sarah Varney of NPR: This is the short NPR segment that provided a starting point for a lot of my research. I thank my friend Melanie for sending me the link. The title pretty much sums up the segment’s gist.

• Ellyn Satter: She has an entire website devoted to helping you feed your child. I reference her site in the podcast, and I’m still mulling over some of her ideas, but overall, I found her information pretty convincing.

Okay, so I can’t actually end a podpost without inserting my opinion. No matter how you feed your toddler or older child, just remember that passing along healthy eating habits is impossible until you’ve come to terms with your own relationship with food. I’m looking at you moms who count every calorie, spend all your days worrying about being fat, obsess over every bad thing you eat, and yet somehow expect your children, especially your daughters, to have a functional relationship with what they eat. Nobody’s perfect and I myself am not living the functional food relationship dream (Oh Oreos, how I love you), but I do recognize that food is something with which we engage every day, so it might as well be good for us and we might as well enjoy this good food without beating ourselves up over the occasional sweet or unhealthy treat. Happy eating.

Image: Michelle Meiklejohn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This Newsroom post is for all you pregnant and future pregnant women out there. I pushed for almost three hours when giving birth. It sucked. The doctors gave me oxygen because I was so exhausted by the process, and the physical repercussions weren’t pretty. I learned two things from this experience: the body has an amazing ability to heal, and I don’t want to test out those particular healing powers again. I can’t change the past, but maybe I can help other women change their futures.

I recently came across a post “When Push Comes to Shove” on the blog Katy Says. Since I took three months of Bradley classes, I thought I knew a lot about natural birth (even with not having one). But I didn’t.

This is what I learned from Katy’s post:

• Stop wearing high heels. Now. It totally screws up your alignment and bad alignment is bad for pushing.

• Stand more. Work at your computer at a standing work station (I literally just put my laptop on the dresser in the middle of that sentence. I’m so guilty of sitting too much.)

• Walk a few miles EVERY DAY.

• Don’t tuck and thrust your pelvis. I’m confused about how not to do that, but check out her blog to read a description of proper alignment.

• Release your gut.

Katy does a great job of explaining the bare mechanics of pushing out a baby. I had no idea that the myometrium-the uterine muscle-is actually the strongest muscle in the body. To be honest, I hadn’t even heard of the myometrium. I think it might be my new favorite word.

Although the myometrium is the strongest muscle in the body, it needs to be trained, and, no, not through those kegels. You need to stop carrying tension in your pelvic floor muscles. I’m starting to think I overdid the kegels and contributed to more tension rather than to toned muscles before giving birth. Katy explains that the uterus is strong, but can’t work harder than it is biologically programmed. I think that means you can’t do uterine exercises. She explains, “It can only generate the force it generates, which means the more relaxed and stretched your muscles are before you get to the maternity ward or your backyard birth tub, the more effective your natural process can be.”

Something I did know before reading this article, but I am happy she emphasizes, is the totally unnatural position of most hospital births. The force of the uterus works with the force of gravity (and with the force of your baby’s head on the uterine opening) to get that baby out. As soon as you position yourself horizontally, you are making life, and pushing out someone else’s life, more difficult than it needs to be. It’s probably like trying to drink water upside down.

Epidurals numb you and totally limit your ability to get vertical. I had an epidural and I don’t really buy the arguments about the epidural itself causing harm to your baby, but I do believe it can slow down labor and slow down pushing.

Do I regret getting the epidural? No! I admire women who can have inductions sans epidurals, but I’m aware I’m not made of that kind of stock. Still, I recognize that optimal pushing requires women having use of their legs. If I hadn’t had an epidural, my pushing phase would have been shorter, Amelia likely would not have gotten stuck, and my recovery would have been easier…I think. What if-ing the past is an imprecise sport. The moral of my confusing story? I don’t regret the epidural in my particular situation, but it sure made pushing out a giant baby more difficult than it needed to be.

The uterus is a crazy strong muscle and gravity is an incredibly effective pushing helper. If I had to break down Katy’s advice into two easy steps, they would be the following: a) Walk with proper alignment before giving birth and b) push with contractions while getting gravity to help you out (or, should I say help the baby out?). She provides a lot more detail about the “expulsion phase” and the pelvic floor, so if interested, check out her entire post. Happy pushing.

Dave and I had a half hour debate over whether or not the term “pre-toddler” is real or just something I made up. I insisted it was a made up term to describe a very real phase, like tween or preteen. Turns out, I’m not the first to use the word. A 1995 Babywise book has the title Parenting Your Pre-Toddler Five to Fifteen Months. I haven’t read the book, but the time frame of the title isn’t really what I mean by “pre-toddler.” In my (admittedly muddled) mind, I imagine the pre-toddler as roughly a one year old, not a baby, not yet a toddler.

Dave says a “not yet a toddler” is a baby. I disagree, hence the ridiculous time wastage that was our debate. While we argued, our baby/pre-toddler/not yet a toddler happily played with some blocks, unaware that she had to fit any made up definition at all.

Why the term “pre-toddler”? For one, I like to make up terms, even if they have already been used in the title of a 16 year old book. I’m unintentionally unoriginal. I also think Amelia is so different from the baby she was 11 months ago that calling her a baby doesn’t accurately describe her state, yet most people wouldn’t call her a toddler. She just started toddling a few days ago, but not enough to give the other toddling toddlers a run for their money (or sandbox).

I still call her “my baby”; however, I imagine I’ll be doing this when she’s 2 or 22. I think some daycares use the term “pre-toddler” as a way to differentiate the nursery from the play-areas, but is that a distinction between baby and toddler or infant and pre-todder? I’m definitely overthinking this linguistic demarcation.

Whatever she’s called, Amelia has entered a new phase of mobility. Not only has she started taking steps, enough to call her walking, but her crawling has moved into warp speed. If she sees something she wants, she’s off like a baby bolt. I’ve had people come up to me in the park and express amazement at her sheer speed. This speed is awesome to watch, but has brought out her devilish personality, which is why I can see a toddler peeking through. When I call her name because she’s heading towards something dangerous or because she has grabbed a particularly menacing stick or rock, she looks back, smiles at me, and takes off! Why that little stinker. The toddler years are going to be fun and frightening.

This week’s Stuff I Love is another yuppie mom find. Yes, I’m a “yuppie mom.” In case you haven’t heard, this is the not so new mommy slam supplanting “hipster” as the ultimate cultural critique. What did you expect? I live in San Diego, cloth diaper, and blog. I’m embracing this yuppie mom label and offering a reusable bag find to stay on theme. Oh, and did you note the hint of irony in that intro? Irony is so yuppie mom and pointing out that irony is even more yuppie mom; wait, I’m confusing yuppie moms and hipsters. Anyway, I think I’m going to coin the abbreviation YUM from here on out.

My YUM find is for storing your yummy healthy treats without having to buy those stupid plastic sandwich bags anymore. At a recent playdate I pulled out a Velcro bag housing my daughter’s non-organic Cheerios and another mom asked where I had found it. I then realized not every mom shops at the totally awesome online store reuseit.com.

Everyone and their mother has reusable grocery bags, but sandwich and snack bags are a little more difficult to find in the average grocery store. I bought ours (we have four) three years ago, before baby. Dave was skeptical and wasn’t convinced $8.95 plus shipping for one little bag was worth the money. Now, reusable bags are such a part of his psyche, he gets confused when I buy the occasional box of zip-lock bags for things like storing left over onion pieces, etc.. (I probably could get around that as well, but sometimes my reusable imagination takes a break).

We bought a couple different kinds of bags, but my favorite has been the reuseit (former Acme) brand bags. They are made in the USA, come in four different colors and two different sizes (sandwich and snack), clean easily, and take a beating. They are made from lightweight nylon and look like they will last for years to come.

Still not convinced? The website says ”reuseit.com products are made from sustainable, high-performance materials and in accordance with fair labor / fair wage practices. Each one is also backed by a 100% Lifetime Guarantee against defects in materials or construction.” Ah, so it’s an ethical reusable bag. I’ll admit I didn’t notice the Lifetime Guarantee or the sustainability or the fair wage fine print, but now I feel even better about buying overpriced sandwich bags. I haven’t added up how much money we’ve saved so far, but I imagine its not insignificant.

The only downside of reuseit bags? You might get mad at your husband (then fiance) when he loses his sandwich bag. This only happened once, but I’ve never forgotten it. Wait, did he lose it or did I? Hmmm. I might owe someone a three year old apology. Either way, plastic sandwich bags are so 20th century. They belong next to the VHS tapes, Compact Discs, and Blockbuster memberships of yesteryear. Bring on the new nylon.

When trying to think of a Podpost topic for Podcast Episode 31: The Duchess, I considered writing about child custody in the 18th century or divorce or women in politics or motherhood, but ultimately decided the best way to put ourselves in Georgiana’s shoes is to literally look at her shoes. Here are some pictures of Georgiana, the Duke (no, not John Wayne), and Bess. Disclaimer: I’ve tried to find blogsafe photos, but I apologize if I’m stepping on anyone’s copyright toes.

The Duchess of Devonshire (Georgiana)

The Duke of Devonshire

Bess, the third member of the Devonshire marriage

The press criticizing Georgiana

An example of the muslin dress popularized by Georgiana at the end of the century.

Keira Knightly as Georgiana in the movie The Duchess.

If you think your life is complicated, imagine having your husband father two children with your best friend, a friend who lives with you and your husband. Imagine being forced to give up your daughter and lover to stay with your other three children. Imagine being exiled from your children for two years.

These are just a few of the facts about Duchess Georgiana Devonshire’s life. She lived from 1757-1806, served as the female figurehead of the Whig Party, and represented the highly elite “ton” of English society. This is the woman who made hairstyles involving ships stylish. 

Amanda Foreman’s great history book, aptly titled The Duchess and on which the movie with the same name is based, serves as the source material for this episode. Sure, history may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I couldn’t stop myself from talking about this fascinating woman and mother.

The Duchess

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You’ve probably heard about the arrest of 18 men and boys for (gang) raping an 11 year old girl in Cleveland, Texas. More men are thought to have been involved than the initial 18 arrested. The suspects range in age from middle schoolers to 27 years old. At a town hall meeting in Cleveland, supporters of the men blamed the girl for her own attack. A New York Times piece (that received much criticism and tens of thousands of emails and for which the Times recently issued a sorta apology) dwelled on quotes about how this incident would affect the futures of the men and why the mother wasn’t there. Others have said the girl dressed like a twenty year old. Some of the attackers claim they thought she was older than 11. A defense attorney used the term “willing participant” in reference to the young girl. And others have questioned the racial motives behind the prosecutions (the young girl is Hispanic and the accused men are mostly black). The attack was recorded on a cellphone and circulated at an elementary school. These are the facts.

And this is my opinion:

YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!

DO NOT BLAME A 6TH GRADER FOR HER OWN GANG RAPE!

DO NOT BLAME THE MOTHER!

DO NOT MAKE THIS ABOUT RACE!

EVEN IF THEY THOUGHT THE GIRL WAS OLDER, WHICH I DOUBT, RAPING ANYONE IS STILL WRONG!

BLAME THE 18 (MAYBE AS MANY AS 28) MEN AND BOYS WHO ALL DECIDED THIS WAS OKAY!

I’m not a violent person. I won’t even let Dave bring a gun into this house, but if that was my daughter and I came across any of the guys who raped her, the news story would be “Mother Arrested for Murdering with her Bare Hands.”

I was going to stay away from well-publicized stories in these weekly Newsroom posts. My modest blog is not meant to be a place for breaking news, and I usually don’t have much to add if a zillion other blogs have broached the same topic. I also don’t want each of these weekly posts to descend into rants, but I can’t stop myself this time. I’m livid with rage and I hope most other moms are as well.

This was a disgusting crime that was publicized through sub-par media coverage. The rapists have received support in their own community because of how this may ruin their lives. Let their lives be ruined. The reactions to the incident did not jump from sorrow for the girl and her family to complicated questions about how this could have happened. No, they started with “she was a willing participant” (She was physically threatened and forced to have sex, so I suppose we have different definitions of “willing”) and “Where was her mother?” and “What was her mother thinking?”  and “How can you have an 11-year-old child missing down in the Quarters?” Those last few quotes were from the mentioned NYT article and by a Ms. Harrison. The Times reporter was obviously not the one speaking, but by deciding to include these quotes as the first opinions in the article, he was making a judgment on what source material should be valued, and this is why the NYT recently issued a statement about imbalanced reporting. It was imbalanced and it only took 40,000 petitioners to make them see that.

As a country, we obviously aren’t good at talking about sexual assault, and I don’t think we are any better at talking about race. However, this particular story isn’t about race.The history of racial violence, the stereotypes against black men, the image of the non-white seductress are still disgracefully simmering in our culture. I understand that. However, instead of taking this moment to talk about violence against women, many took this moment to talk about prejudice against black men. That is shameful. I completely agree with a recent Jezebel post about the issue of race and rape: “Even in the most heinous of circumstances, people are managing to redefine who the true victim is.”

I understand the need to analyze social tragedies. I understand race and gender issues all play roles in many complicated situations, BUT this situation isn’t a complicated warning about race in America, or about poverty in America, or about single motherhood in America, or about the sexualization of young girls in America. It is a decidedly uncomplicated story about violence against women. Women are not valued as highly as men are. There. I said it.

What do I mean by “women are not valued as highly as men are”? I don’t mean that all men devalue women or that everybody is to blame for this devaluation or that men don’t also occasionally get the short end of the stick in public discourse or that men are even the ones doing most of the devaluing. I do mean that a huge subtext of reporting about rape and sexual assault against women is that the women somehow brought this upon themselves or that they are exaggerating (e.g. the Lara Logan story) or that their standards of behavior somehow account for the violent actions of the men around them or that mothers are supposed to be the ultimate guardians of morality and what should we expect from young men anyway?

The reaction to this gang rape is an extreme example of this pothole in public discussion about gendered violence, but it is not the only. Has anyone wondered why all the conversations about Charlie Sheen only brush on his history of domestic violence? It’s like this part of his screwed up story is an add on because he’s only abusing bimbos. Something is very wrong about the way the media has talked about him.

This value problem isn’t limited to poor, minority, racially charged communities. Rich frat boys can also devalue women or make light of rape. Check out this confiscated email (proven to be real) from a USC frat. Women are supposed temptresses, even the youngest of us. Women, even when the victim, are somehow still the cause of their own victimization. This story of victim blaming is so old I want to scream at the inability of journalists and community members and commenters to get it. Yes, I would have killed those guys with my bare hands (and to state the obvious, no, I don’t think murder is actually in my constitution), but in writing this I now realize my anger isn’t only directed at the rapists. I’m angry that in 2011 we can turn an 11 year old girl or an 18 year old woman or a 38 year old woman or an 88 year old woman into the cause of her own disgusting victimization.

I’m quickly crossing that imaginary, but real, line between newbie parent and old hat. When I look back at 11 month ago Meredith, the one who changed her baby’s diaper at every single night waking, who read scores of books to teach her how to do things like burp a baby, who sanitized anything and everything her daughter touched, I want to laugh at that Meredith.

In retrospect, changing a diaper every couple hours during the night just made the midnight feedings more painful. Dave and I sometimes swapped out a dry diaper for a new one. Poor rookies. Burping a baby? Not all that hard. Plus, I haven’t burped Amelia since she was a couple months old. I discovered she does a pretty good job of expelling the air (and now takes great delight in it…I blame her father). I still sanitize a bit and wash her toys once a week, but my germ phobia is drifting away.

I’ve embraced my new dirt friendly attitude and even let Amelia eat dirt today, right in front of my apathetic eyes. We were play-dating at a park and, as usual, Amelia was the only baby crawling away from the group to explore. Explore for babies is code for put anything and everything in my mouth to see what happens.

Usually, I follow her around, removing every twig, leaf, or cigarette butt she finds (Smokers, please don’t throw cigs on the ground in a playground. As if). But today I thought “oh forget it.” She’s almost 11 months old and as far as I’m concerned, if she likes the taste of dirt, more power to her. It’s official. I give up. I let my daughter dine on dirt and I don’t even feel guilty. I wonder if the dirt acceptance or the guilt riddance is the sign of my transformation from “Nervous Nelly” to “Whatever” mama.

Image: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This week’s Stuff I Love is about the one magazine to which I still subscribe on purpose. The Internet has made monthly advertisement packed glossy paper wasting magazines superfluous. Even my beloved Real Simple didn’t get my renewal notice. However, despite my decision to shun paper periodicals, I still eagerly await one magazine: Clean Eating.

I’m not a foodie. I’m not a health nut. But I do like to eat good food and I like it to be not horrible for me. Clean Eating was a last minute add on to a thoughtful bridal shower gift from my maid of honor back in 2009. She got me a breakfast in bed set up with some magazines for gift garnish. I had never heard of Clean Eating, and I don’t think she had either, but when I perused it a few weeks after the wedding, I realized it was pretty awesome.

Admittedly, I was initially turned off my the kinda annoying name. I expected a lot of tofu recipes or vegan fare, not that I universally dislike tofu or vegan meals, but I don’t want to eat them all the time. Their website defines the term “clean eating” as “consuming whole food in its most natural state, or as close to it as possible.” I like that definition. After all, I’m one of the hordes of yuppies who enjoyed The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Although Clean Eating does include the occasional meatless and tofu dish, it really shines as a magazine with simple, yummy, mostly healthy recipes, meat and all. They also provide a two week meal plan for the truly lazy or food OCD. I don’t follow the meal plans, but I do clip out at least five or six recipes from every issue and add them to my recipe binder.

I’m allergic to difficult recipes. I’m also allergic to easy recipes that rely on a lot of processed pre-ingredients or boxed foods. The Clean Eating dishes find a happy middle ground. For example, one of our regular family meals is a simple dish of sauteed chicken atop a bed of fresh spinach, warm baked sweet potato fries, and cooked onion, with a little lemon or lime juice for flavor, a surprisingly light and satisfying, and most importantly, easy meal.

Clean Eating’s website is nice, but I prefer the hard copy as something to flip through, hand on my chin, Amelia at her play kitchen, Dave slaving over a hot stove (I can dream, right?). I like not having to search for anything, not having to type in any key words or click on links. All I have to do is turn one page after the other and look at the pictures of mouthwatering “clean” meals that someone like me, a kitchen disaster, can cook.

I’ll admit that my knowledge about infertility was woefully small before talking to Kerry in Podcast Episode 30: Inquiries about Infertility. My knowledge of in vitro was even more scant (scanter?), whereas my knowledge about someone like the Octomom was depressingly vast. This is why this week’s Podpost is simply a look at some facts about infertility, not a digression into the extreme cases of in vitro or a critique of women waiting too long to have babies. Truthfully, the media representation of infertility is not an accurate gauge of the reality.

Here are some of the facts according to the National Women’s Resource Center (via a 2006 article from iVillage and a 2003 Discovery Health article).  Both articles cite the same source, yet have different statistics, highlighting the problem with statistics in general. I cite an approximation of the two sources when they don’t agree.

• Approximately 10% of all childbearing couples have problems conceiving. I don’t know why, but this seemed high to me. 1 in 10 couples have problems! No, tossing Taking Charge of Your Fertility at them (although a totally great book) will not solve most problems.

• One-third of infertility cases are attributed to men, one-third to women, and the rest to both members of a couple. Put another way, 25% of infertile couples have more than one factor contributing to their infertility. I was honestly shocked that the break down was so even. The men to women ratio didn’t surprise me as much as the one third attributed to both parties. I guess I always thought the problem could be specified, e.g. the man’s sperm had some issues or the women’s eggs weren’t working out. Infertility is obviously a more fluid and amorphous issue than I knew. Oh, and its not the “fault” of women most of the time. Good to know.

• Two-thirds of infertility cases are caused by ovulation problems and/or sperm deficiencies.

• 35-70% of women who have a laproscopy are found to have endometriosis. This is when endometrial cells grow in places other than the uterus. It can be very painful. I’m guessing this means ovulatory problems and endometriosis have a huge stronghold on female infertility.

• 85 to 90% of infertility cases are treated with medication or surgery. Only 5-10% involve assisted reproductive technologies like in vitro. Interesting. This is most definitely good news for the infertile couple, but also might point to the prohibitive cost of reproductive technologies, not necessarily to the magic of medication and surgery in 90% of the cases.

• Per month, a 29 year old woman has a 20% chance of getting pregnant, whereas a 39 year old woman has a 7% chance. I said in the intro that infertility isn’t just an issue for women over 35, but biology obviously plays a huge role in those cases and the biological clock isn’t a myth. At some point, your fertility will just run out (I’m pushing 30 and think about that sometimes).

• Pregnancy is possible for more than half of couples pursuing treatment. This is great news and also a little depressing. How much more than half? If only a little more, this means you have a fifty/fifty chance. Those odds are a little scary when thinking about creating a family. Well, I guess they could be inspiring as well and a reason to seek treatment. Glass half full or empty?

If you have struggled with infertility, feel free to comment below or on (Over)Thinking Mom’s facebook page.

Image: Vlado / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Infertility treatment, specifically in vitro, is a hot button issue in the media because of cases like the Octomom or John and Kate Plus 8. It also conjures up images of older women who waited for their fertility window to pass and now spend tens of thousands of dollars on unnatural procedures, thwarting nature.

However, what is the experience of an average couple dealing with infertility? Anywhere from one and ten to one and six couples will confront this issue and their stories are often dissimilar to the extreme media representations. I talk with Kerry of OurStorkGotLost.com who conceived her two toddler twin boys via in vitro fertilization after a three year struggle with infertility. Her story is of course unique to her, but her experience of infertility likely resonates with many other women and couples going through similar measures to create the family they always knew they wanted.

Infertility

As you might have noticed by the title of this “Newsroom” post, it was written in rage. This happens to me sometimes. Okay, a lot. While listening to news or morning television (back when I used to watch television) a seemingly boring story will suddenly take an outlandish turn, sending me into a back-talking tizzy. When I watched television, the most common recipient of my rage was The Today Show. This morning it was a back episode of NPR’s Talk of the Nation.

I love NPR. I call (Over)Thinking Mom MPR as an homage, for goodness sake, but the episode “Have We Grown Too Fond of Technology” just serves to reinforce absolutely ridiculous, stupid, sexist, unsupported, insert angry adjective here, notion that mothers, especially nursing mothers, can make or break their new babies. I’ll back up before getting to my specific rant and look at the most common point of guilt, which is nursing itself, or the lack thereof. I’m a huge fan of breastfeeding and did a podcast episode called The Case Against the Case Against Breastfeeding (in support of breastfeeding if you are confused), so I’m not impartial, but let’s agree that moms who start with formula are not by nature bad mothers.

Okay, so what if you nurse? Society should hail you as earth momma right? Of course not. The nursing mother can still supposedly harm her child by eating the wrong foods. Here’s the truth: Gassy foods don’t make a baby gassy, and only a small minority, a very small minority, have allergies to things like wheat or dairy, so back off our diet. We can eat what we want (other than maybe a generally unhealthy assortment of processed foods, but those things hurt us all).

But now another way for the nursing mother to screw up her kid has materialized. According to Professor Sherry Turkle who wrote the new book Alone Together, nursing mothers, like other degenerates (my term, not hers) of my generation and younger, are unable to disconnect from technology at crucial moments. For example, parents shouldn’t text at the dinner table or text at the playground or while reading a book to their kids. I nodded in agreement as she listed all these technology no-nos, but then she pulled out the big one, the one at which we as listeners were supposed to be aghast: Nursing mothers also text WHILE BREASTFEEDING! Can you believe this?!, so goes the sentiment of Turkle and the host. At a moment that is supposed to be full of primal bonding, mothers are distracted by technology.

Are you kidding me Turkle?! I don’t text. I don’t have a smartphone and have never mastered this form of communication, but if I saw a mother texting while nursing her baby, I wouldn’t think anything of it. Some mothers read books or their kindle, others watch television, or, in my case, listen to podcasts. Has Turkle nursed a newborn? If she has, does she remember how long it can take or how often you must stop what you are doing to feed your baby? Nursing is beautiful and lovely and much of the time I did and do nothing else but cuddle with my baby when feeding her, BUT moms are allowed to multitask. In fact, moms are usually lauded for their ability to multitask. However, if they are multitasking in the pursuit of communication or education or even amusement, this is deemed inappropriate.

And no, Turkle cannot prove texting while nursing will screw up a kid, which is the problem of most of these technology phobic books. They make grand arguments that are actually really old. But I don’t want to get into a close-reading of Luddites, especially because I know I have some Luddite blood flowing through me. I’ll end with my beginning: Nursing mothers will NOT screw up their babies by texting or reading or doing anything else for their amusement while feeding their infants!

Rant over.

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Dave provided technical support for this Life post by spelling K-L-I-N-G-O-N and showing me a picture. I called Amelia a “Klingon” the other day, but to be fair, in my head it was spelled C-L-I-N-G-O-N and I was simply making up a word to describe her new penchant for clinging to my pants’ legs as I try to get stuff done around the house. Dave overhead this new appellation and had a geek fit.

“Don’t call my daughter a Klingon!” he protested. I tried to explain, “She’s clingy. I can’t get anything done. She keeps on pantsing me.” This is why wearing loose fitting pajama bottoms next to an open window when you have a Klingon baby is a bad idea.

Dave looked at me like I had one of those freaky Klingon heads, asking “You really don’t know what a Klingon is?” Oh Dave dear, why would I know what that is? We have many similarities, but I’m afraid a love of science fiction is not one of them (notwithstanding my odd obsession with the 90s TV show Sliders that is on Netflix‘s play instantly).

I harbored a guess. “Is that something from Star Wars, like those tiny bears.” I was wrong on two accounts. Klingons are from Star Trek and they so are not tiny bears, aka Ewoks. I insisted Star Wars or Star Trek or Star whatever, I was still going to call Amelia my made up word. But then Dave showed me a picture and those Klingons are grotesque. Fine, I’ll take the word out of my Amelia vocabulary, but now what will I call her when she pulls my pants down simply because she doesn’t want me to walk to the dishwasher without her?

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Despite The Riley Library, Amelia has little interest in books. Maybe that isn’t true. She has little interest in turning pages or looking at pictures, but she loves eating or ripping apart the pages. I’ve decided she is a literary late bloomer, but to help her journey, I purchased The Cheerios Animal Play Book by Lee Wade.

Each page has pictures of animals doing typical and not so typical activities, such as a bumblebee flying or a monkey juggling (or maybe that is common? I don’t know much about monkeys or jugglers). The pages have pictures of Cheerios and empty circular spaces where your child is supposed to place Cheerios. No, Amelia at ten months cannot deftly place the hyper marketed treats in the little cut-outs, but if I put the Cheerios in the book, she will sit and “read.” If I can’t get my baby to stop eating her books, I might as well make the books edible.

This week’s Podpost for Podcast Episode 29: Fathering the First Year takes a biological and anthropological look at fatherhood. You may have noticed a mini-trend in my posts lately. I spent all of my college and grad school years in liberal arts classes, with the exception of the forced chemistry and earth science semesters, so I might be making up for lost time by diverting my parenting research to the sciences. This week I look at a 2010 article by Gwen Dewar from Parenting Science.

She gives a thorough and interesting run down of the evolution of fatherhood among different species, pointing out that our pop psychology notion of biology that insists fathers gain more by spreading their seed and hence by shunning monogamy is actually untrue. I’m sure you’ve heard somewhere that men by nature prefer promiscuity and that modern culture, not nature, enforces monogamy. Dewar notes that in the animal kingdom this is often true, but not always.

Among other animals, she looks at wolves and apes. Apes and humans are often compared; Gorilla fathers are uninvolved in their offspring’s lives, so some take this to mean human fathers are going against their animal instincts by involving themselves in their children’s lives. Dewar compares Gorillas to wolves and wild dogs who do take an active role in protecting their young. Her conclusion: “When we look for comparative data about behavior, we don’t necessarily find the most instructive parallels amongst our closest living relatives.”

This is interesting, but I’m more intrigued by the biology and activity of human dads than our relationship to the animal kingdom. Dewar explains that anthropology reveals hunter-gatherer men as fairly involved in child care and traditional farming fathers as not. She explains why, so check out her article if this intrigues you.

One of the most important points Dewar makes is that fathering is variable. It varies among animal societies, human societies, and within societies. This means, from what I can gather, that fathering is not necessarily unnatural, as some might assert if they are taking a simplistic view of biology and society.

In fact, hormones actually contribute to the likelihood a dad will stick around. Men involved with the care of young children experience a drop in testosterone and a rise in prolactin (dads with higher prolactin levels respond more to babies than those with lower levels). And the more time dads spend with babies the more their hormones respond and the more likely they are to take an active fathering role.

What I took away from her article is that I need to stop reading pop psychology (I’m a sucker for Psychology Today) and that dads may respond differently to parenting than moms do but that fathering is still natural, despite some protestations to the contrary.

Image: Michelle Meiklejohn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net