The Commune Child

2010-03-26T23:55:00.000-04:00

Another night of bedtime FAIL! Tonight featured Mommy (Em) for the first period, then I nursed him for a second time, then Mommy again, then she took him for a walk in the Ergo in sheer desperation from 9:20pm to around 9:50pm, tried to put him in the crib once he was down, his leg got caught, then the cats were ridiculous and I had to try again and a third round of nursing and rocking and he finally went down at 10:25pm. My only hope is that this was a full 20 minutes earlier than last night, so if we keep up this trend, in just a short 9 days, we'll be back to east coast time. Sigh...

Coming back from the West Coast is such a disaster for children's sleep.

Is too much, let me sum up*

2010-03-25T22:02:00.004-04:00

I am currently exiled to the bedroom because the first two times I tried to put the baby to bed this evening ended in such failure. This is try number two for Em and we have been trying for a collective 3 hours. I have decided to blame bedtime tonight on having arrived on a red eye from California yesterday morning and my kid believing it is 7pm right now and not 10pm.

Except for the above, I would say that bedtime and naps have been going really quite well, except for the whole Traffic Game problem, which means I can never ever say that.
X finally got around to learning to walk at 14.5 months, after 7 months of cruising. He apparently just didn't see any point in walking when he could get around just fine. Now at 17 months, he walks well, is trying to figure out running, climbs big people stairs only holding on to the railing with one hand, plays basketball (okay, so all he really does is throw a ball in a toddler basketball hoop, but he does it 20 to 30 times in a row and applauds himself after each shot), and is a big fan of downward facing dog.
He has acquired an obsession with balls (a.k.a. ballp. We have no idea why he has decided there is a p on the end. He is perfectly capable of saying ball without a p, he just chooses not to do so.) He has five or six different types of balls in the living room at any given moment and loves throwing them to us again and again. He also enjoys throwing them past the baby gate toward the kitchen and then begging us to retrieve them for him.
Which leads us to the next point, he has learned to say please. He has also discovered that smiling and tilting his head to the side while doing so gets an even better response. His first multi-word phrase was "ball please get". Now we are working on thank you once we get the ball for him.
My mother (Nana) taught him another important word/concept when we were visiting last month. I love her dearly but she will never be on time to anything in her entire life. After twenty minutes of us telling him that we would go to the museum as soon as Nana was ready, he proceeded to stand at her front door in his coat and boots, holding on to the knob, yelling "GO GO GO!" A new word for X, a familiar experience for his Mama.
He loves books. We are so happy. Our family of bookworms welcomes a new member. He brings books to us when he wants us to read to him. He also will pick up a book, sit down with it and turn the pages while talking to himself quietly (he's "reading" it to himself, just like his mommies). Last month, he fell asleep "reading" to himself for the first time. Cutest thing ever:

He is also obsessed with ducks, or "qacks" as he is wont to call them. He loves all images of ducks and all books about ducks. He is also willing to accept substitutions as long as they are close.
....I return after my third and finally (!) successful attempt to put X to sleep. To sum up tonight's bedtime, five moms (Kate, Em, Kate, Em, Kate), four hours=sleeping child and bone tired moms. There is much else to say to sum up the last four months, but for now, this will have to suffice because it is 11pm and we haven't had dinner yet.

*title borrowed from The Princess Bride, by way of the awesome ladies at Two Hot Mamas

Birthrights of Many Kinds

2009-11-14T21:39:00.004-05:00

My mom was raised Methodist and my dad Jewish. When they had kids, my mom's mom (Grand Nana) said, "I don't care what you raise them, just raise them something." This was actually remarkably open of Grand Nana, a woman born in 1916 in southern Virginia, who to this day sometimes says things so not politically correct that all her children and grandchildren wince at the same time. My parents went with no religion until I (the older child) was in fourth grade. My brother and I had been attending a Quaker school (Religious Society of Friends) since Pre-K and my parents finally decided to take the leap and become Quaker, my father's comment being that it was the only non-organized religion he had encountered and that worked for him. My brother informed his first grade teacher that he was "signing up to be Quaker." This was actually fairly accurate, as we each were given the right to choose whether we thought this was the right choice for us. Quakers sit in silent worship, believing that God speaks directly to each person and there is no need for the intercession of a priest or minister.

Emily was raised Catholic. She was passionate about her Catholicism, the way she is passionate about pretty much everything in her life. She memorized the prayers, the psalms, the ritual. She very much wanted to be a priest when she grew up. She says that this was clearly the beginning of the end for her as a Catholic. She continued to become more disillusioned with the church over the years. When we met in high school, I began taking her to meeting (what Quakers call church). By college, she had chosen to be a convinced Quaker. I love that instead of "converting" to Quakerism, one is "convinced". Before we were married under the care of Brook.lyn Meet.ing, I transferred my membership and she became a member. X, as the son of two members in good standing of the Religious Society of Friends, is what is called a "birthright Quaker". The first in either of our families.

I have very little understanding of the Catholic ritual, so Emily tends to explain bits of it when we attend services. Today, at Great Aunt C.'s funeral, we sat in the sound proofed children's room in the church (an interesting invention, allowing babies to have fits and not bother the other parishioners) and Emily told X, "Look, honey, now the priest in going to do magic." And to our birthright Quaker son, I think that must be what the Catholic service looks like, magic. A man in a robe sings and waves his hand and waves smoke making machines in the air and informs people he has changed water to wine and bread to flesh. But Catholicism is X's heritage, just as much as Judaism is, so I had better start learning about it, so I can help teach our son his past so that it can inform his future.

You Show Up

2009-11-13T23:08:00.002-05:00

We are away from home. For the second time in two weeks, we have driven upstate to be with members of Emily's family. Two weeks ago, we drove up to visit her Great Aunt C., who had been doing poorly. The day we went up, Em's mom called and told us that she had gone to the hospital, so we visited her for two days in the hospital before going home. The hospital staff let X onto the critical care ward, which they probably shouldn't have done, but we greatly appreciated them letting us bring him to visit. He cheered up Great Aunt C., who told Emily that he was beautiful and looked smart (the highest compliment).

Sadly, we are back this weekend to attend Great Aunt C.'s wake and funeral. She died early on Wednesday morning. We rented a car from the same garage and are staying at the same motor lodge (10 rooms down) but life is very different. She was a great lady, so smart and opinionated and passionate. I only knew her a few years, but I miss her a great deal. She and her husband didn't have children, so she was very close to her sister's children, especially Emily's mother. Grandma (Emily's mom) was able to be with her this past few days, which I hope was a comfort, although it was very hard for Grandma.

X doesn't understand what it going on, but brings a smile to everyone's face when he enters the room, which is a very good service he is providing. He slept for about half the wake this afternoon and was then quite content to have Grandpa carry him around the funeral home (which his Great Grandpa used to own) and discuss everything they saw. He has gotten to meet the last of his great aunts and uncles whom he had not yet met, which has been nice. We have tossed his schedule to the wind in the evenings, because it is really impossible to walk away from family early enough to start bedtime at an hour when everyone else is just starting to eat dinner. He is coping admirably and we will get back on the bedtime schedule horse when we get home on Sunday.

Everyone keeps saying how wonderful and thoughtful we are for coming to visit Great Aunt C. as often as we did (which really wasn't that often, just twice in the last year). And Emily and I just keep saying, "But that's just what you do. You show up." I really hope this is a lesson that X learns from us. When it's family (blood or chosen), you show up. It's an over four hour drive and we're broke and renting a car costs a lot, but that isn't the point. You show up.

Strange Goo.gle Searches

2009-11-09T19:03:00.002-05:00

This past February, when I was in the middle of my first nursing crisis, I wrote a post about my lovely mother-in-law and her helpfulness in calming me down and sending me off in the right direction in order to address the supply problem I was having. Without even thinking about it, I called this post "Grand.ma and Bo.obs" except without the dots. This became relevant last night, when I checked out the report from Goo.gle Ana.lytics for the first time in many months and discovered that, in one form or another, "Grand.ma Bo.obs" was the most common Goo.gle search that lead someone to our blog. Two hundred and fifty-two times, random people searched for what I can only assume was slightly bizarre po.rn and found our blog instead. I think I'm going to go change the title of that blog post now.

Hark, There Be Wild Things

2009-11-08T21:51:00.002-05:00

Emily informed me a few minutes ago that I should write about the movie we went to see this afternoon. So, here I am, writing about the movie we went to see this afternoon. I'm a very obedient wife!

Uncle very kindly took the baby for the afternoon, so we could have some time to regain the parts of our sanity lost over the last week of sick, cranky baby. We took a long walk, lay down in the park on our coats and stared at the sky (well, I stared at the sky, she read Foucault) and went to see "Where the Wild Things Are".

First off, it is not a kids movie, it is a movie about childhood. I really don't think I would take a child much younger than late elementary, early middle school to this movie. It has lots of scary bits. However, I highly recommend it to the older set. It is beautifully made and so well written. To be fair, I've had a bit of a love affair with Dave Eggers since I read "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", so I was prepared to like the writing. I don't want to ruin the movie for those who haven't seen it yet, so I will just say it is definitely worth your time to go see it. Emily reflected at the end on the poor PA who had to vacuum the muppets during the shoot. I reflected on how I viewed it differently as a parent than I think I would have before X was born.

One Year Molar for the WIN!

2009-11-07T23:55:00.000-05:00

And just to make life interesting, Emily called down the hall this morning while changing his diaper. Guess who just had their first one year molar break through during the night? The poor baby, his entire head hurts.

We have an answer (well actually two answers)

2009-11-06T23:55:00.000-05:00

X was running a fever of 102 when we checked this morning, so we were off to the pediatrician again for the second sick visit this week. We waited 45 minutes to be seen, but as soon as they took his temp and it was 102.6, everyone was very helpful. We were given tylenol to give him (which made me a bit anxious as it was 20 minutes early and he's on both tylenol and ibuprofen, but oh well). The nurse tried to give it to us in a suppository, and we were like, "we are not putting anything up his butt that we don't have too, please can we have the liquid", and she gave us the liquid in a cup, and we had to ask for a syringe, because our twelve month old is seriously not going to drink medicine from a cup, even if he is the best baby ever at taking his meds.

Then we saw our doctor, without even seeing the resident first. And it was so great that we got to see Dr. A, because for the first time all week, X didn't scream the entire time he was being examined. He was quiet and let her poke him and check his ears without even turning his head away and even gave her a tentative smile. I love our pediatrician, she makes my sick baby smile. She smiled as soon as she checked his first ear and said, "We have an answer" and then checked his second ear and said, "Actually we have two answers." Yup, poor X has a raging double ear infection. Poor baby. He is now on anti-biotics and should be feeling better in the next day or two. Thank heavens for an answer that doesn't involve the word flu.

Baby continues to be ill

2009-11-05T23:55:00.000-05:00

We are slogging through. He remains feverish, whiny, clearly in pain. We'll head to the doctor tomorrow if he hasn't improved. I really hadn't realized on a practical level how pleasant and lovely it is to have a well child until the last two weeks. No one is getting enough sleep and everyone is cranky. To remind us all that there is a happy, smiley baby in there somewhere, here is X on a happier day:

There is no place in the Baby Book for "Baby's First ER visit"

2009-11-04T23:55:00.000-05:00

Well, we have survived X's first (and last, at least for a long time, I hope) trip to the Emergency Room. Chalk the trip up to first time parents and a child who has breathing trouble even before he has a fever of 101.3 for two days and heavy congestion.

We ended up going because his fever wasn't getting any better and after waking up from his afternoon nap, he seemed to be in worse distress and his breathing rate was increasing and so we called his doctor and she said to take him in because she couldn't tell if he was getting sicker and better safe than sorry. We rented one of the two Zip.cars in the garage a block and a half from the house (yay, I love Zip.car) and drove to the hospital where he was born, home of the local pediatric ER. It was actually a very positive ER trip. Everyone was kind and good with X and he was seen quickly and we were reassured and not told that we were crazy first time parents (which we were kind of expecting to happen). And we got him home in an hour and a half and only an hour late for bedtime.

The funniest thing to come of "Baby's First ER Trip" was this: The first sentence in his discharge papers: "Your son has been diagnosed with a viral syndrome, also know as a 'cold.'" When we saw this we couldn't stop laughing. The entirety of the discharge paperwork was so clearly written by someone insanely frustrated by constant ER visits for silly things. This is totally going in his baby book (if I ever get to filling it out!)

My baby is sick

2009-11-03T23:55:00.001-05:00

My baby is sick. We were blessed in X's first year with a child who pretty much was never sick. I mean he has his breathing issue (a separate post to come), but no particular illness. But now at 12 months and two weeks, he is making up for lost time. He's had the family cold for the last few days (tired, achy, congested, seriously runny nose) but seemed to be doing a little better. He hasn't needed to swim breathe in order to nurse in a day and he can suck his fingers (the middle and fourth finger of his left hand are his best friends) without choking and having to suck in air through his mouth.

He's been feeling antsy and he was looking better so I took him to the first class session of Baby Boogie at the YMCA (we just joined two weeks ago) this morning. He enjoyed the first part of class, playing with the kids his age (playing = crawling over and attempting to play with the same toys they are already using) and then he suddenly started melting. We were in the middle of doing the "meet another baby" segment of class and he started crying and clinging to me. So I excused myself and sat down to nurse to see if that helped. He hadn't had his morning nap and Em and I had agreed that if he got tired at class, I'd just pack him up and come home. Nursing didn't help and he had started wailing in a way that he has done so rarely that I started getting worried. I strapped him into the Ergo and walked to the bus, took the bus home and walked to the house. He sobbed the entire time. He collapsed into sleep five minutes before I got to the house, but woke as soon as I got inside, beginning to scream, the scream he only does if he is in pain.

He felt hot, so Em and I took his temperature and it was 100.8. We called the doctor and were told to bring him in. We packed him up and took the subway to the clinic while X finally slept for 30 minutes. Em checked us in. She told the office staff we were here for a sick visit, they asked if he had a fever, we said yes, they said don't even sit down, we'll put you in a room and we were ushered right in. They are clearly pulling all potential flu cases out of circulation, which is really smart. He woke up and started crying again and continued to for the full hour we were there, except for five minutes where Em lay on the exam table and held him. The poor baby doc (intern/first year resident, he didn't say) was so scared of him. He found it impossible to listen to X's lungs or check his ears because he wouldn't stop screaming. Babies are like dogs, they can smell fear. The intern finally said he just go get the doctor and fled the room.

I love our pediatric practice. There are four doctors and I like all of them. The doctor we saw today was the only one I hadn't met yet and he was great. Friendly, good with X, and very informative, explaining everything really well. We are really lucky that the practice we had with our awesome insurance pre-job loss is also the practice that runs the peds clinic at the hospital X was born in and takes Medicaid. Dr. G checked his lungs and ears and declared them clear. X's fever had gotten to 101.3 by the time we got to the office. We are to give him tylenol and ibuprofen in rotation to bring down his fever and watch him closely. We took him home and he nursed and fell asleep for an hour and when he woke up, he was much more like the baby we know. Tired and hot, but friendly and smiling and playing some. He went down around an hour early for bed and I am hoping will sleep through the night and feel less dreadful in the morning.

We have too much money to be as poor as we are...

2009-11-02T23:53:00.003-05:00

Turns out I was wrong about that whole qualifying for food stamps when my unemployment runs out in January thing. There is an asset test I was unaware of and we have just a bit too much saved. So there goes that small bit of help, although I suppose I should view it as a positive that we have money saved, which I do, but still...

There is legislation in the Senate right now that I thought would help us. It will extend another 20 weeks of unemployment insurance to those losing coverage. Except...it will cover those who lose their coverage by December 31, 2009. Guess when I lose coverage? Yup, second week in January 2010. Awesome. There is some talk of getting the date extended as soon as this extension passes, but at the moment, no 20 weeks for us.

There are unemployment advocacy groups looking for people to speak to the media about the need for the extension to cover those losing their benefits after December. I am thinking about saying I would do it, because I think I have a sympathetic story, but I don't really like public speaking. But at the same time, I have a good story: I lost my job six days back from maternity leave with a three month old baby and a graduate student wife who I was helping put through school. Now X is on Medicaid and WIC and I got fired 10 days too late to keep getting unemployment past January. Would it have killed my former employer to downsize me 11 days earlier? Oh wait, it would have, because I would have still been on maternity leave and it would have been illegal. Sigh.

Returning to Blogging

2009-11-01T21:29:00.006-05:00

I went away from blogging. I think it had a lot to do with the level of denial needed to get through our life at the moment. Well, at least denial about the financial part of our life. I have this beautiful, amazing, funny child and a loving, wonderful wife and we have a roof over our head. Most days this is what I focus on and I let a lot of the little details of how our life has changed in the last nine month slip away. Writing concentrates the mind on the details and I've been taking a holiday of sorts. However, I think it may be time to stop with the holiday. So I'm back and we'll see how this goes.

A great deal has happened in the last year. X has grown from a tiny newborn baby
to a big one year old.

I went back to work for six days before being laid off in the middle of February. I have been a SAHM for X's first year, although this was not a choice I made but just how life happened. I would not trade this year home with him for anything, but I would trade the way I got there.

Emily has officially entered the academic job market, applying for quite a few jobs. It is exciting, yet nerve wracking, waiting to hear if/where we will be moving this coming school year. This job hunt has the effect of putting aspects of our lives on hold. I look forward to being able to move forward decisively at some point.

We are recipients of multiply types of state aid. X is on Medicaid and he and I are on WIC (because according to the state, I am a single mother), although now that he just turned a year, WIC is now just for him. I have been receiving unemployment benefits since February which are due to run out in the middle of January. When that happens our family will suddenly qualify for food stamps and more free health care, which is good because the COBRA subsidy for my health insurance runs out December 1st and I REALLY can't afford the COBRA insurance without it.

So this is our life right now. Well, at least a small portion of it.

Broke and Poor

2009-04-20T12:12:00.003-04:00

All my life, I've made the distinction between broke and poor. You're broke if you don't have a lot of cash to spend around, if you don't have endless reserves somewhere, but, fundamentally, you're not deprived. You're poor if the lack of money is consistent, structural, and leads to deprivations for your family. Kate and I have chosen to be broke for this stretch of our lives; she chose a career in the nonprofit sector, which doesn't pay well, and I'm a grad student with barely any income at all. We've been clear that this is, in some ways, a moral choice for us, an attempt not to live high on the hog, not to live in a destructive manner. But we've always been broke, not poor.

I wonder if the day you find out you're eligible for WIC is the day you become poor.

Kate was laid off in February, which explains a lot of the radio silence from around here. It was fucked up, and it sucked, and we're dealing with the emotional fallout as best we can. But what's hitting us most, obviously, is the economic fallout. I don't have any research funding right now, and I'm not teaching this semester. Our plan was for me to take care of X in conjunction with Uncle, and to work on my dissertation this semester, while Kate worked. Well, that plan's fucked now.

Here's the thing: there are ways in which we are, now, officially poor. Our total monthly income comes from our two unemployment checks; together, they just about cover rent, utilities, and groceries, which means anything above that--new clothes for X, plane tickets to academic conferences, dinners out with friends, baby gates to keep our kid out of the kitchen--has to come from our savings or go on credit. We couldn't afford to continue COBRA coverage for all three of us, so I had to quickly jump onto my school's insurance, which is pricey but cheaper, and X is now on Medicaid; we can afford Kate's insurance alone, after the stimulus cut, but we did consider letting her go uninsured. We qualify for WIC because we qualify for Medicaid, which we are actually kind of glad of; the food benefits we'll get will substantially cut our food costs, which will be a big savings for us. Our combined credit card debt is around $19K, most of which is hangover from our wedding and the year-long illness of our now-deceased cat, and which we are now unable to keep paying down. Our student debt is higher.

But we aren't poor in some significant ways. We've collectively got quite a chunk of money in a brokerage account; it's the remains of Kate's college fund, and my inheritance from my grandmother. Our regular savings account has another, much smaller, but not insignificant chunk. The deprivations we've done have been minor: we've both cut back on how often we go to the chiropractor. I've blown off my allergist. I've negotiated with my therapist to a lower rate. Neither of us has an unlimited MetroCard, and we don't really ever leave the neighborhood unless we have a specific appointment somewhere else. We're canceling non-essential trips that we'd have to rent cars for. We couldn't go to a recent family event that was pretty major, but was scheduled last minute in a different state, and we couldn't afford plane tickets. We haven't cut off our cable yet; we haven't canceled our home phone, though we've talked about it. Between our unemployment, the money in our regular savings account, and these sorts of frugalities, we can get through until the fall, at least, if Kate doesn't find work in that time.

But: are we just "not quite poor" yet because we still think of ourselves as broke, not poor? The reason we don't think about our investment money as real money to use is because we both think of it as the down payment on a house, once I get a PhD and a real job. But should we start thinking about it more as money we can live on? I'm scheduled to teach in the fall and spring of next academic year, but should I be looking for work--even work unrelated to my field--right now, just to be bringing in money? Should I be putting my dissertation on hold to support my family? I don't want to do any of these things. I want to keep being broke, even while being objectively poor.

________

Then there's the psychological feeling attached to entering into the welfare state. Now, we around the Commune, we are commie pinko bastards; we believe that the government has an essential role to play in supporting people. We believe in socialized medicine and governments assuring a basic standard of living for all. We believe in paying our taxes when we're earning money and getting it back in the form of assistance when we aren't. But we have been, our whole lives, the people paying it out. Every April 15, we say, I'm glad I paid my taxes, for the part of it that means someone got health care, someone got a job, someone got services they needed. But we've never needed them. We have internalized that it is good to give to others. But we have also internalized that classic middle class feeling that it is shameful to rely on others. Kate has talked about feeling as if she's lost her reason for being in the family: she is the breadwinner. She supports me and X. She can't do that anymore. (Don't worry, honey, I say. Your unemployment check is three times mine. You're still the breadwinner. There's just less bread.) She didn't like that she had to fill out the application for state health insurance, putting together the paperwork for it. She shouldn't have to do this. She's the one who gets it for us as a family.

When we went in to be interviewed for health insurance, we were unsure what we'd get. We walked the ten blocks to the local Medicaid enroller's office, in a neighborhood quite demographically different from ours, but where we actually used to live. The office was in the basement of a medical plaza, and a nice older man, who everybody called Mr. M-----, took us into our office. First he decided I didn't count as part of X's family, since our adoption isn't completed yet. Then he realized Kate had filled out the wrong form, and went and got the right one. Then he told her she had brought the wrong paperwork from the Unemployment Office. But he was kind, and listened to some of the terrible details of Kate's firing, and told a horrible story of his own of getting laid off.

We went down the paperwork. "Do you want to apply for WIC?" he asked.

"No," Kate said, "we're fine."

"How does it work?" I asked. I'd heard it was a really restrictive program, lots of hoops to jump through.

"You get food for the baby," he explained.

Kate and I shared a look.

"You paid for it. Baby food gets expensive," he said.

We paid for it. We nodded to each other. "Yes, OK," Kate said.

________

I joined a LiveJournal community for families on WIC, since I had heard people complain about the weird food you got. The posts confused me. I never can figure out how to use the eggs, women said. Ugh, it's too many beans. I don't drink that much milk.

We are never going to have this problem.

WIC in New York state is very pro-breastfeeding. (Very: the table on what food benefits you get lists your child as receiving, and I quote: "YOUR PRICELESS BREASTMILK!!!" Yes, the government busted out the triple quotation marks, for real.) For fully-breastfeeding mothers of children under one, you get per month:

Two 18 ounce boxes cereal
1 pound whole wheat bread
$10 cash voucher for veggies/ fruits
Three 12 ounce cans frozen juice
6 gallons of non-fat (skim) or low-fat (1%) milk
1 pound cheese
1 pound dry beans
18 ounces peanut butter
30 ounces canned fish
2 dozen eggs

Let's see. Kate drinks at least a gallon of milk a week; we eat beans, usually cooked up from dried beans, at least three times a week; we go through a pound of peanut butter a week; often we run out of our carton of eggs before the end of the week. Granted, we probably eat $10 of produce per week. That's a hell of a lot of canned tuna, so I see a bunch of tuna sandwiches and tuna casserole in Kate's future (probably while I snarf peanut butter in the background.) Kate can't eat the bread, and probably not the cereal, but they might be able to swap out coupons for rice or something instead.

Why does this work so well for us?

Because the WIC program subsidizes a very specific category of food: inexpensive sources of protein, iron, and calcium. In essence, they subsidize a vegetarian, low-on-the-food-chain diet. That's what we've always eaten, as long as I've been cooking for us, because that's what I eat, so that's what I cook. A lot of Americans don't eat like that; they don't know what to do with eggs besides have them for breakfast (quiche; souffle; spanish tortilla, scrambled eggs with cheese; added to stir fry; egg salad.) They've never cooked from dried beans (you soak them and then boil) and don't know how you eat them (a thousand kinds of soup; tacos; rice and beans; veggie burgers). Peanut butter goes in sandwiches and not much else (with apples; with celery; on crackers; in soup with coconut milk and limes; peanut butter granola bars). If you haven't cooked like this, WIC could be a pain in the ass. It's a bit paternalistic (you must eat these healthy foods! not other ones!), but it's not badly intentioned or poorly designed.

_______

This isn't a very coherent post. But all of these thoughts are mixed up with us all the time. Can we afford to go to our friend's bridal shower? Have you checked with the Medicaid office about our paperwork getting there? Are there any jobs posted on idealist that Kate qualifies for? Can we use our WIC checks at the Food Co-op? Is the nonprofit temp agency taking resumes?

Hopefully we'll be coming back to blogging now. It's been a rough couple of months.

X is Four Months Old

2009-02-22T12:54:00.001-05:00

Dear X,
You are four months old now. I can't even believe it. We went to your four month check-up on Monday and you are 13 lbs 7 oz and 25 inches long. Such a big boy. Okay, actually, you are a long, skinny guy just like your mama. But so much bigger than when you arrived only four months ago.

In the last two months you have done so many new things and gone so many new places and met so many new people. Here are a few highlights:

In December you went with me and Mommy on a visit to several of your oldest relatives. We went to upstate New York and visited your Great Aunt C, your Grandma's aunt. She was so delighted to meet you. She held you and you were particularly enchanted by the bird pin on her sweater. We then went to eastern Massachusetts and stayed with your Grand Nana (Nana's Mom), Pop-Pop (Nana's Dad) and Great Aunt B (Nana's younger sister). They could not have loved you more. You loved being held by your Grand Nana and you and she talked and laughed and enjoyed each other so much! You thought your Pop-pop was wonderful, and enjoyed many good cuddles and he gave you bottles and you took long naps on his chest. Your Great Aunt B. had bought you many new clothes for Christmas and they all looked very cute on you. While in New England, we also drove up to Boston and visited with your Auntie E (mama's friend from college). Although not very experienced with small babies, she thought you were very cool and was very happy to meet you.

In January, you took your first trip on a plane when we went to Florida to visit your Pops. You were very good on your first trip and didn't cry almost at all. You slept a lot on the plane and everyone commented on what a good baby you were. You had a good time in Florida and met many new people. We stayed with Pops and his girlfriend, J and drove to Northern Florida to visit with your Aunt I (mama's friend from college) who was so amazingly happy to meet you that she almost couldn't stand it. You also met your Aunt I's mom and sister. When we returned to Pop's house, your Great Uncle A (Pop's older brother) came to meet you and was enchanted. He took a LOT of pictures with you and held you a lot. While we were in Florida, you also went on your first boat and were a very good little sailor.

In February, we went to DC to meet with other members of the IVP. You got to meet lots of other kids; babies, toddlers and big kids. You laid on the floor with the other three little babies at the gathering and laughed. I think that seeing the other older babies inspired you, because the day we left the gathering and went to our vacation house in Rehoboth Beach, you rolled over from your tummy to your back for the first time. We had a great time in Rehoboth and showed you all the places that your Mommy and I love visiting when we are at the beach.

In the last two months, you have learned how to do many new things. As I mentioned above, you learned how to roll from tummy to back at the beginning of February. Two days before you turned four months, you learned how to roll from your back to your tummy. This is your favorite trick and you do it almost any time we put you on your back. You get frustrated once you are on your tummy, because you seem to have forgotten that you can roll over to your back again. I'm sure you'll figure that out soon. You continue to stand when we balance you any time you can get us to help you. You've started being able to push from a squat to a stand by yourself, although sitting eludes you completely.

You laugh all the time, finding Mommy to be particularly funny and are becoming more tickle-ish. In the last few days, you've started discovering kisses and have made a game of trying to kiss us before we can kiss you. You've started to express excitement when you realize we are about to nurse. You grin with your mouth open. You have discovered the joy of shreiking, exploring your voice and learning new sounds. The concept of "indoor voice" eludes you completely. You are absolutely enchanting.

Much love,
Mama

The Great Rolling Over Experience

2009-02-08T23:39:00.000-05:00

We just arrived in Rehoboth Beach after a wonderful weekend in DC (much to be said on DC later, but tonight's post is on a different topic). Over the weekend, X got to play (ie. stare at other babies and toddlers while they played, he was the second youngest) with many children and had a wonderful time.

Perhaps inspired by the antics of all the other children, he did the most amazing thing at 8pm this evening. He rolled over for the first time! It was so cool. We were giving him naked tummy in the middle of a diaper change and we were talking about what soft skin he still has and we weren't even paying that much attention to what he was up to, and boom, he rolled over! We put his diaper on and then he rolled over two more times! For the sake of posterity, I will note that he is fifteen weeks old now.

Many thanks to the many children who inspired him over the weekend to go where he had not before!

A full Year of X

2009-02-04T23:47:00.000-05:00

Today is the day. X has been present in our lives in one form or another for one full year. Yes, that's correct, today is the day our little baby was conceived (although there is some argument it might actually be tomorrow). It's amazing to think about a full year of X. Even as a tiny fetus he had so much personality. And looking at him now, he's the same little being he was long before he was an outdoor baby. On my way out the door to work today he gave me a sloppy, almost kiss and proved to me that all the work is worth it for a loving, happy baby who is always excited to see me.

In other news, my workplace is pretty much collapsing around my ears, but that is a thought for another day.

Grand.ma and Bo.obs

2009-02-03T23:39:00.001-05:00

Something I never expected to mind useful and in fact reassuring when I was in high school and college was a conversation with my mother-in-law, let alone a conversation about my breasts. And yet, this evening, I had a very pleasant conversation with my MIL (hereafter to be known at Grandma) about my nursing concerns. She was a breastfeeding counselor when Emily was little and hence knows more than some, and being Grandma, is quite willing to make it up when she doesn't actually know the answer. We lovingly refer to answering a question authoritatively and intelligently without actually knowing the correct answer as pulling a "Grandma's first name".

At the end of the conversation, I felt a bit more confident and certainly a little less nuts about the issue, so thanks Grandma!

Things to say Later

2009-02-02T11:45:00.001-05:00

Things I want to blog about when I don't need to have been in bed hours ago:

1) why nursing is making me crazy at the moment

2) how crazy my milk supply appearing to disappear due to one freaking illness is making me

3) how upset my mother made me on the phone tonight

4) how pleased I am to have completed Emily's taxes and discovered that the government owes her approximately $1,000

5) how frustrated I am at the fact that I should apparently be calling my uncle (my mother's brother, not my dad's) to apologize for the fact that HE didn't call ME back

Florida from Brooklyn

2009-01-31T23:22:00.001-05:00

I find it a bit sad, but I'm declaring an amnesty again, so that I don't stop writing because I missed a few days. I tend to miss one day and then feel guilty and keep skipping and that's how I didn't blog for months and months the last time. So...

Florida was actually pretty awesome. Seeing my dad happy was really pretty cool. He held X a total of three times, all of them instigated by J or me, but he talked about how cool a kid he was and what a good baby all the time and mentioned several times that he thought I was a wonderful mother. I've had a difficult relationship with my father over my teenage years and beyond and it is nice to be slowly digging out and starting over.

We spent two days in Jacksonville during the trip visiting my college friend and our former commune member I, who was so excited about X. It was really sweet to see her interact with X. She really is the perfect Auntie. Every kid needs someone who thinks they are miraculous and special (who isn't Mom!) On the way to Jacksonville, we recreated part of our honeymoon trip up the east coast of Florida. We stopped in Meibourne and Daytona Beach.

X coped very well, all things considered. We were on the road from 10am to 8pm, and although we stopped frequently, that was really asking a lot of him. At the end of the trip at 7pm, we ran out of bottle (on car trips, we bring bottles of expressed breast milk, so he can eat while I drive) in the middle of his snack and he started screaming so loudly that we couldn't hear each other talk. I had to pull off the highway, park at the gas station and nurse him in the back seat of the car in order to calm him down and get him to stop screaming. But he did stop screaming and fall asleep for the night, so it ended well.

X also got to meet his Great Uncle A, my father's brother, who was in Florida at the same time we were. He lives in Michigan, on one of the great lakes, so this is his yearly retreat from the cold weather. He was enchanted with X and held him many times and wanted to take infinite pictures.

We flew back to Brooklyn tonight and got in a few hours ago. I don't like flying and we had to circle JFK for 45 minutes before landing, which I was not thrilled with, but now I don't have to fly again until August when we do our west coast trip. I need to work on the flying thing before X notices my anxiety. Ah, more things to work on.

Second Day in Florida

2009-01-26T23:39:00.000-05:00

Today was a good day, mostly. I got up early with X (7am, sigh) and we read and sang and visited with Pops and then Em got up and did a dissertation interview over the phone and then we ate lunch on the back porch. We split up for the afternoon and Em and X went with J (Pop's girlfriend) to the Salvador Dali museum in St. Petersburg and Pops and I went to the marina, rented a boat and took it out to the Gulf of Mexico.

It was a gorgeous day and a lovely boat, which I got to drive once we were out of the difficult bits and in the open Gulf. According to my father, I did quite well driving the boat. Being out on the boat with my dad was interesting. I had wondered when he suggested earlier today that we split up and do this for the day if he wanted to talk to me by myself, and in fact, that may have been why he suggested it, but being my father, he is remarkably incapable of speaking about emotional or difficult things. Sad considering the man is a psychologist. My mother always spoke about this problem as the shoe makers children having no shoes. He's good with other people's emotions, just not his or ours.

According to Em, the museum was nice, although X was largely unimpresssed and needed a lot of attention in order not to have a small meltdown on the guided tour. We attempted to have dinner around 6:30pm, but X was totally done for the day and cried whenever we tried to sit him or ourselves down. He screamed and fought when I tried to nurse him, so I made the radically assumption that he wasn't hungry and was annoyed that I'd tried to silence him with food. Em walked him while I ate and then half way through dinner, he went insane and I left the table to try nursing again, and this time it worked and Em sat down for dinner and I fed him and we reheated my meal after he was done. He continued to be sad and whiny until we finally got him down after another nurse at 9pm. I think that this trip has been hard on him with all of the new things. Although he almost rolled over today, which was awesome. Another day, I'll tell you about how my child doesn't like sunshine.

First Day in Florida

2009-01-25T23:45:00.000-05:00

First full day in Florida went okay. We ate lunch on the patio, Emily went kayaking in the backyard. I'm not actually kidding, my dad's place has a dock facing the intercoastal waterway and a kayak. She had a good time. We had dinner at one of our favorite places to eat in Florida, Sweet Tomatoes, a vegetarian buffet place. We ate with Dad and Jen and her daughter, who I have met once before about two years ago at the beginning of the whole divorce mess. Yes, my parents have been in the process of divorcing for over two years. It's been fun. Spending this much time with my father is interesting. It's the first time I've spent more than five or six hours with him since I lived at home the summer before my senior year in college and the times spent home for the holidays before October 2006. It's very weird to see him be happy and affectionate with someone not my mother, but to be honest he never was happy or affectionate with my mother that I remember, so maybe that's why it's weird.

More to come later. Night.

Flying and Florida

2009-01-24T22:30:00.002-05:00

I may not have mentioned this before, but I really don't like flying. I avoid it. For our honeymoon we went to Florida, and to honor my dislike of flying, we took the train from NYC to Miami. Lovely and romantic, but a little insane to take a 27 hour long train ride when the flight is 3 hours. Now, my solution used to be valium. Sleeping on Em's lap for the entire take-off and early flight (the part that makes me craziest) works well. During pregnancy that didn't work, so I suffered through.

Flying with X is an entirely different challenge, because I have to be strong for him and not freak out all that visibly. I nursed him while we waited for the plane to take-off and, get this, he slept through the entire take-off. Strike that, the entire flight. He was amazing. And I coped decently well, only holding him very tight against me and clinging to his little hand as he slept through it all. And once we were up in the air, I listened to my ipod and held him sleeping on my lap and it wasn't so bad. And I don't have to do it again until next Saturday, so that's good.

Florida is nice so far. We are staying outside Tampa with my dad and his girlfriend, which is interesting. Their house is nice, but appears to have no heat and although it is Florida, it is also January and I wish they had more blankets. We have so far had dinner, gone to the CVS for diapers and snacks (they have no food in their house, I swear, but that is a comment for another day) and watched a British mystery on the TV, with my father falling asleep 20 minutes in and snoring, which actually was kinda nice, as it reminded me so strongly of my childhood, where that happened pretty much every night.

Paper-work loving Crazy Lady

2009-01-23T22:14:00.000-05:00

My second day back at work wasn't as difficult. To be fair to my first day at work, it also wasn't difficult, just very frustrating at the very end. My second day back proved that I was correct in assuming that it is going to take me most of my part-time easing back to the office to catch up the insane amount of paperwork that I got handed yesterday.

I discovered today the level to which my co-worker who covered this part of my job has bailed over the last month. Also, that I am very anal retentive and can't cope with other people's inability to aim when placing labels on file folders (seriously, if the label is at an angle and below the tab, what is the point of the freaking label?), bad handwriting on folders that everyone has to read and his refusal to put the freaking year when he dates his work on each folder (yes, I am writing the year on each folder as I go, but what of the many he already filed?). Yes, I am a crazy paperwork-loving nut, but seriously, this is a business, be neat!

I also learned that the pipe-dream I had of not doing the tech support part of my job until I'm back full-time (as my supervisor had agreed to) just isn't going to work. People don't understand technology and they are used to coming to me for help, and are so happy that I'm back to fix all their problems. I spent half of today dealing with lack of phone service. But what can you do. Off to Florida in the morning!

First Day Back

2009-01-22T23:55:00.000-05:00

Today was my first day back at work. It was also the day that Emily finally became the third person in our home to come down with the Death. I was really worried that would happen, but hey, what can you do?

We got up at 8am, X and I sang songs together, Emily got him changed and dressed and we went in the living room and we put together my working supplies (breast pump, bottles to pump and store, freezer bag with ice packs, snacks). Then I sat down and nursed him and we cuddled for a few minutes and in no time, it was 9:10am and I had to leave. I cried...a lot. I tried to smile and wave and leave and not upset him, but I just couldn't pull it off. I actually don't think I upset him but he got pretty wet.

I got to work a few minutes early and the first part of my work day went well. I got handed a remarkable pile of paper and I started sorting through the chaos. For the time I am part-time (until March) I am only doing one of my jobs, the crazy details, infinite paper part. Em had a dissertation interview in the city, so Uncle watched X and took him shopping and to the library for Spanish board books (discussion of trying to raise X bilingual coming some day soon). Uncle, X and Em met at my office to trade baby and have lunch. It was great to see him and we cuddled and he got held by half my office and we nursed and then Em was feeling like death, so Uncle rearranged his scheduled and went home with them and stayed with them until I got home.

The second half of my day was also fine, until the last 5 minutes, when I got called into a tech crisis that I should not have been in charge of, even if demanding a problem be fixed 5 minutes before the end of the day was appropriate. Twenty minutes later, I couldn't fix it and had called our back-up tech guy with a desperate plea to come in the morning to help. I then packed up and ran to the subway, already 15 minutes later than I said I would be and with a sick wife, a sad, non-napping baby, and an uncle who had to be at work pretty much yesterday waiting at home. And then life went downhill.

I waited for 40 minutes on the downtown platform waiting for a frakking F train. In those 40 minutes 3 V trains came, so not helpful, and 4 F trains, all so full that I could not even try to fit on. Finally at 7pm, fifteen minutes after I am already supposed to be home, I get on an F and START my trip. I didn't get home until 7:45pm, at which point, Uncle kissed and ran and I went on duty with the baby and looking after Em.

X was sweet and happy to see me and we hung out and cuddled and played with his new bouncy seat that Uncle had bought him while they were shopping. He LOVES the toys that dangle in front of him. This is the first time he's really noticed toys on a toy bar, so this is entertaining. This bouncy seat converts to a toddler rocking chair when he's older and goes to 40 pounds, so that's cool. I changed and dressed him for bed at 9pm and we nursed and he went down at 9:30pm. I ran to the gas station on the corner (yes, we sometimes shop at the Mini-Market at the gas station when it's late and we don't have other options) and got Em Vitamin Water and then we watched some TV and now we are going to bed.

It has been a very long first day back at work, but I will focus on the fact that I survived it. Oh, also, X turned 3 months old today! His monthly review will come as soon as I find time in my life to write it in the next few days between work and flying to Florida on Saturday.

Off to work in the morning

2009-01-21T23:58:00.000-05:00

Well, I managed to hold down food for the better part of today and the aching has slightly improved, so I am going to work tomorrow. Man, I could really skip that, but food and health insurance are just kinda essential. Wish me luck in the morning. I'm pretty sure there will be a pretty weepy Kate walking to the subway.

Unwell

2009-01-20T23:45:00.001-05:00

I am still unwell, not vomiting, but aching all over and unable to sleep comfortably. Emily has (wisely, but it still makes me sad and anxious) told me to stop breastfeeding when I am feeling this unwell. Wisely because when I tried nursing him after watching the inauguration on TV (OMG! No more Bush! Obama!) he hit me and cried and refused to stay latched and I couldn't do anything but hold him and cry myself. He picks up on my unwellness and feeds right back into it, so I'm pumping and Emily's giving him bottles until at least tomorrow morning. I believe it's the right decision, but it makes me even more anxious about going back to work on Thursday. Have I mentioned I'm supposed to start working part time on Thursday, and I feel like Death on a Stick?

But we have a new president and I will focus on that and my beautiful boy and get over this stupid flu.

Half Anniversary

2009-01-19T23:55:00.001-05:00

The depressing thing about having the Death (you know, besides having the Death) is that yesterday was our half anniversary. Yes, we've always celebrated our half anniverary. There is a reason for that. We met at a high school choir picnic and started dating at nerd summer camp. The day we counted as our anniversary for almost 10 years (we got married in May 2007 and therefore the date sorta reset, although we still honor our first half anniversary) was July 18. July 18 is also Emily's birthday. Having an anniversary and a birthday is complicated, especially in the first few years when we weren't out to our parents and try explaining why you need a lot of "alone" time to your parents on your birthday. Hence, January 18 became the day we celebrated. And this is our first half anniversary since X's birth and I was horizontal on the couch or vomitting. So, that's kind of depressing.

That having been said, I love you more than I could have imagined 11.5 years ago and can't wait to begin the next 11.5. See you when we're the parents of an 11 year old! I love you, Emily, happy 11.5!

I have the Death

2009-01-18T23:55:00.000-05:00

I woke up at 6am this morning with an irresistable need to vomit. This sensation has not gone away all day. Unfortunately, this has given Emily a crash course in staying home with the baby all day by yourself, as I have been barfing or sleeping all day. Adding to the problem is that X has just started a growth spurt and this makes him not nap almost at all and need to eat every hour. Boob mama not being available due to vomit, we had to dip into our freezer stash. Sigh. I guess a dry run of what the end of the week when I back at work will look like isn't a bad thing, but I could have skippped it, honestly.

I can, however, add a new impressive breastfeeding moment to my list. The first vomit of the morning was done into a bowl over X's head as he nursed. Yes, you read that correctly, I nursed him and threw up at the same time. I even impress myself.

Nana Comes Calling

2009-01-17T23:45:00.001-05:00

My mother, X's Nana, came up to visit for part of the weekend. We first heard of this visit on Wednesday night, when she called to ask if we had plans or could she come up for the day on Saturday. This was later extended to include driving up Friday night (and I do mean night as she did not leave her house until 10pm.) I do like that my mother feels comfortable showing up for a day, sleeping on our inflatable mattress, sleeping until 12pm, playing with the baby, going out to a late lunch and dessert (we highly recommend the Chocolate Room), and then coming back to the house, playing with the baby a little more and then driving home. I get along well with my mother; she is one of my close friends, which has been true for most of my life.

What I find particularly nice is that Em feels comfortable with her showing up and staying over randomly. She does not get stressed about her mother-in-law showing up largely unannounced and does not feel the need to perform as she would to a house guest, except for helping feed her and giving her a bed as she would any person in our house.

Now I can only hope that we feel as comfortable when we are at my father and his girlfriend's house in Tampa for a week at the end of the month. We've never stayed at a place he has lived with his girlfriend, since he and my mother separated over two years ago. We will have to see how that goes. Look for many posts during the trip!

OMG, OMG, OMG, BSG!

2009-01-16T23:58:00.002-05:00

Emily has spoken in a previous post about our love of Battlestar Galactica. When BSG was last running new episodes this past summer, we got hooked. As the last episode of season 4.0 was playing, we talked about how weird it was that when season 4.5 aired, X would be 3 months old.

X will be three months old this Thursday, and BSG is back. And I know so many people won't have gotten to see it for so many reasons, so I won't go into plot points and specifics, but I couldn't let this evening pass without at least screaming quietly on the internet about how frakking amazing the start of the second half of season four is, and how I can't comprehend how they are going to wrap up the entire show in nine more episodes.

Let me say again, FRAKKING amazing!

Best Mama Moment

2009-01-15T23:45:00.000-05:00

I had one of my best moments as a Mom tonight. It was a fleeting moment, blink and you would miss it. X had been down for the night for about an hour and he was getting restless, crying in his sleep. This happens once or twice in the first few hours he's asleep, so one of us will get us and sit in front of him in his bouncy chair, where he sleeps until we all go to bed, and talks him back to sleep, just repeatedly telling him he's okay, that he's not alone and he settles back down.

Tonight, I crouched down in front of him, telling him that he was safe and Mama was there, and he stopped moaning, opened his eyes slowly, his eyes focused, he saw me, he smiled a sweet little smile and closed his eyes and went back to sleep. Just seeing me and hearing my voice let him feel safe and loved. It is so all worth it.

No More Newborn

2009-01-14T23:55:00.000-05:00

X is 12 weeks old today. When we took our newborn care class (yes we took childbirth class, breastfeeding class and newborn care class: we are education nerds) the teacher told us that the first 12 weeks were the trial by fire, do whatever you need to to survive weeks. They were the newborn weeks.

I guess that means that I am no longer the mother of a newborn. I have become the mother of an infant. An infant who smiles and squeals with glea when we sit down to do our morning sing. An infant who discovered today that he can use his arms to push himself up very high indeed when he is on his belly, yelling and grunting the whole time, because he was putting so much effort in, but refusing to stop. An infant who still falls off the breast, milk rolling down his chin. I will miss my newborn, but this infant thing is awesome!

New York State is Awesome

2009-01-13T23:59:00.002-05:00

Emily taught her first college class this fall. She also TA'd her first class. She LOVED doing it. I was always sure that she would do well and enjoy teaching, but it was great to see it for real. Her kids loved her and learned a lot. For the class she taught, she had them do final presentation on the last Friday of the semester and brought food and they invited X and I to come watch. It was awesome.

And now she is spending the spring and summer semesters doing field work and writing her dissertation and staying home with X, as I believe I have mentioned before. And we are going to be so broke, because this is her fourth year of grad school and only the first three had a stipend and she got paid for teaching, but no teaching again until the fall (and that's only if she gets the job she applied for; we find out next Friday), so no paycheck.

For the last week, we've been kind of jokingly kicking around the idea of her applying for unemployment. We weren't seriously considering it, because the idea that the state would pay her to be a stay at home graduate student mom just didn't seem possible. And then, she sat down tonight and went online and it turns out that she actually qualifies for unemployment and she will receive a packet in the mail and after a week waiting period, next week she can file for her first check. I cannot begin to say how amazing it will be to get any money at all for the next seven months while she stays home with X and does field work. We had just planned on being even more broke then usually and I have no idea how much money she qualifies for, but even $50 a week would be amazing!

Breast Milk and Me

2009-01-12T23:38:00.001-05:00

My confession for the evening:

I spend WAY too much time obsessing about whether I have enough breastmilk in the freezer for when I go back to work. I actually had to explain to Emily a few weeks ago why I was crazy about using bottles of ebm if we start them and NEVER dumping bottles if they were still good (to the point of giving him the second half of a bottle before I nurse him at a feeding if there is a bottle sitting in the fridge that would have to be tossed otherwise). I just can't stand seeing breast milk go to waste. I worry so much about X not having enough food when I'm working and coming home to him hungry and crying. Logically, I know this is not likely to happen, but emotionally, I just can't handle it. It is probably just my way of expressing my sadness about leaving him and going back to work, but it is just a bit crazy making.

Off to pump.

Handedness

2009-01-11T23:19:00.000-05:00

A very quick thought tonight before I head back to the sad, moan-y baby in the living room:

So Em and I thought of the question we forgot from the random question post the other day:

X is showing a very distinct preference for one hand over the other and we're wondering if we are hallucinating or if he really is already left-handed? I guess it makes sense that if he's left-handed there is no reason that he wouldn't already be grabbing more with the left and sucking his left fingers in preference to his right, I had just never thought about it before. Hmm...

More about sleep

2009-01-10T23:00:00.001-05:00

I've decided that any schedule X appears to be following is irrelevant for the moment, as he appears to still have the tail end of the cold he's had the last week. I thought he was over it a few days ago, but considering the remarkable amount of snot we've been pulling out of his nose and the slight cough, I'm thinking I was wrong.

He has good mornings with cheerfulness and a long nap (1.5 to 2 hours) and then his afternoons feature very short naps from which he wakes up crying hysterically and not stopping until he is held close and reassured that his moms haven't disappeared while he was sleeping. It's kind of amazing, he truly seems to wake up with the fear of being alone and all you do to calm him down is keep telling him that Mama or Mommy is here and he's not by himself and he starts winding down again. His congestion isn't helping the naps at all, either.

I never imagined when I started this blog that it would feature quite this much discussion of my son's sleep, but I suppose that's just because I didn't know any better. Sleep is REALLY important. I go back to work part time in less than two weeks and I really want him to be on as good a footing as possible before I do. Sigh.

Random Questions

2009-01-09T22:42:00.000-05:00

So today's post is a series of random questions that Em and I have been wondering about. We have several books, but they don't all agree and we also are a little to crazy busy to read them at the moment (which is weird because we are both crazy readers usually).

When did your children start teething? X seems to be heading in that direction, but it seems really early and I think he may just be loving his new found hands.

At what age did your children grow out of their infant carseat? We're starting to shop for our convertible carseat and big boy (or at least not stroller frame with carseat) stroller and are wondering about time frame. He appears to be long and skinny, so may length out of his Snugride before he weighs out.

Well, I thought we had more, but now that I'm writing, we can't remember the other questions, so that's it for now.

On the sleep front, he woke up at 8am, we sang and read books, he took a two hour nap, woke up at 11:30am, took a second 30 minute nap, woke up at 1:30pm, we went to the library, we came home and he was up the rest of the afternoon and evening, except for a few micro naps of less than 15 minutes and was whiny and sad for the last two hours of his day before going to sleep after nursing at 10pm. So it was a good day, he just seemed as if another nap or two would have been good, but he couldn't settle. Oh well, we seem to be managing. Thanks for the advice on the sleep front.

Oh, the Tired

2009-01-08T12:21:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about this "going back to work" thing, a lot. And until today, all this thinking has been about the emotions of it all. How I'm going to miss my baby and my time spent being with him and my day being all about him and so on and so forth. And then today happened. We took the bus to the "bourgie" neighborhood up one from ours and had Indian food for lunch and then walked the 16 blocks to the Coop and did our weekly grocery shop and then carried all $136 of groceries home in three handled bags on the bus and then walked the rest of the way home (while Emily carried the child in the Ergo) and we walked in the door and I walked to the basement and put in laundry and then came up the stairs and finished putting away the groceries and sat down for a minute, and COULD NOT GET UP.

So I have a new way of thinking about going back to work. I got used to being tired all the time physically when I was pregnant and working and I've gotten used to being tired all the time and staying home with the baby, but my goodness, I can't quite imagine how I'm going to handle being tired all the time while working and having the baby at home. I'm officially not thinking about that again for a few more days.

On a different note: We ended up not waking X up at 9:30am as planned, because we were too tired to get up then. He woke up at 10am by himself, although we gently encouraged him to stay awake and today wasn't a disaster. He slept for an hour before we went out for the day and then dozed in the Ergo pretty much the entire time we were out (2 hours) and then was pleasant for the rest of the afternoon and evening and went to sleep at 10pm and has been down since. So, it's official, we are NEVER waking him in the morning before he wants to be awake unless we absolutely have to.

A Difficult Day

2009-01-07T22:36:00.001-05:00

Today was another difficult day here in the Commune. Today we tried a new theory of morning and woke him up at 10:30am, thinking that if we started the day earlier, he might nap and/or go to bed at a better hour. Instead, we got two hours of happy sunny baby who smiled and gurgled and enjoyed our Mama/Baby sing-along (our repertoire includes Head Shoulders Knees and Toes, Gonk Gonk Went the Froggy, The Birdy Song, and X's favorite, Little Bunny FooFoo) and then an entire rest of the day of sadness and crying and refusing to nap until he finally collapsed for an hour and a half at 5pm (but only if Mama held him and rocked the ENTIRE TIME) and then was upset for the rest of the evening until nursing to sleep at 10:15pm. We are going to try waking him at around 9:30am tomorrow and if we have another meltdown day, we'll have learned our lesson and discontinue any plan to change his wake-up time from whenever the heck he wants to get up, except on those days when we don't have a choice.

Does anyone who has already done this beginning of establishing a sleep/wake routine have any thoughts?

Raising the Commune Child

2009-01-06T23:55:00.001-05:00

Over the last eleven weeks, I have found mothering to not come as naturally as some say it does. I love my son, I think he is wonderful, but I have had some difficulty always putting his needs first, especially at first when I felt lousy from the very difficult labor and was really sleep deprived. Em talks about how she realized as a child that parenting meant always giving the child the biggest slice of cake and never having it yourself and I think that is a good description.

However, as time has progressed and he had become more of a baby and less of a lump (yes I called my child a lump and I am sticking to it) I am finding myself a great deal more at ease with this always putting X first, even when I'm so tired all I want to do is take a nap.

And then there are moments that remind me why I got into this motherhood business. X has had a cold for a few days and this has led to sleeping more at night (yay!), less or not at all during the day (boo!) and being cranky and overwhelmed a great deal. So late this afternoon he was fussing and whining and generally being sad and I had tried feeding and diaper-changing and walking up and down the hall and I could not figure out what to do next and I looked down at my child and really looked at him and thought, "He's just so tired, he doesn't know how to sleep." So I held him very close to my chest and just told him again and again in a soft voice that I knew that he was so tired and overwhelmed and didn't know what to do, but not to worry because Mama knew and she would fix it. And he stopped sobbing and his head fell back against my arm and he fell asleep on my chest, all warm and soft and loose and this is how you are a parent and give them the biggest slice of cake. You just slow down and look at them and realize that sometimes Mama really does know how to fix it.

Of course, there are those moments like the one a few hours later in the day when he screams at you without end and nothing you do works and the cuddle trick doesn't work and when you try to nurse him back to calmness, he screams at your breast and tries to bite you (even though he doesn't have teeth yet) and only Uncle can calm him down and you want to go in the other room and scream but you have to be the grown up... and then Mommy takes over and you pass the child back and forth until nursing is acceptable and he finally falls asleep and you thank God that there is a Mama, a Mommy and an Uncle in this house and this is your Commune Child.

Leaving the Baby (Coming Soon)

2009-01-05T22:20:00.000-05:00

A few nights ago I had my first bad dream about going back to work. I won't call it a nightmare because it wasn't terrifying and it didn't cause me to wake up screaming. But it was disturbing and I remembered after I woke up, which I do not usually do.

I am very fortunate in my workplace's current maternity leave policy and when I planned out my maternity leave this summer, I also had an awesome boss (Uncle D for those who have read previous posts) who helped me get the most time without losing all leave for the rest of my year (which ends at the end of October, yay for random ways of doing staff leave, which I can comment on, as I'm the one who keeps all staff leave records for my office). But even having a great leave policy (12 weeks plus whatever other time earned one wants to use, all paid) I have to go back at some point (I am the primary breadwinner in our family, and carry the insurance for all three of us) and that point is coming soon. I've arranged with one of my supervisors (Uncle D having now departed to the West Coast) to go back 2 days a week starting January 22nd and then up to 3 days a week mid February and then full time in March, which is also really great because it allows for a gradual start to going back to work and leave X. And yet...

I don't want to leave my baby. I'm just getting to know him and he starting to seem as if he knows me and when I'm at work I'll get to see him a few hours a day and weekends, which stinks. And yet again, I have to acknowledge that I am so very lucky because I don't have to leave him with strangers, or daycare. He's staying home with his Mommy (Em) and that's amazing that we can do that. In fact, we managed to trade full-time mom status for his first year, with Em teaching his first three months and then when I go back to work she's taking off the spring and summer semesters and dissertating and being with X. And although this leads us to be even more broke then we already are (oy) it is totally worth it and works for Em's schedule with her quest to PhD and I will get over my bad dreams and we will make it work. But I am still sad at the thought of leaving him at home every day.

What a Diffence a Year Makes

2009-01-04T22:48:00.000-05:00

Many other people on many other blogs do this interesting thing where they take the first sentence from the first blog post of each month and post them to reflect on the previous year. And I was all, I can't do that, I totally bailed on the blog and then I realized that except for November, I actually can. So why not:

January: A most unconventional household and its adventures in the babyverse. (the intro post of this blog, which we began January 2, 2008.)

February: This is my first Photo Friday. (this one is pretty obvious. it's a picture of our two cats.)

March: So, it's been almost two weeks since the internets have heard from us. (this was an apology for being absent from the blog and recounting our recent adventures)

April: As heard last night on How I Met Your Mother (which is basically one of two sitcoms I actually like, the other being Scrubs, and HIMYM is better now than Scrubs is) last night: (this was a post about our wedding and our Quaker marriage certificate.)

May: Told Kate's grandparents. (also pretty self-evident. grandparents were happy, although not nearly as happy as when they met X this past week.)

June: I took these tests yesterday. (Em talks about masculinity and motherhood.)

July: It's official. Willa's a he. (X is a boy! This post includes a clip from Scrubs featuring "The Safety Dance".)

August: Incidentally, the title of this post should be said to the rhythm of "Hitler never played Risk as a kid" from this clip. (Em expounds on why Dana Scully is a bad mother.)

September: We got a bunch of baby clothes at X's second shower last weekend. (Em talks about the lack of baby clothes with Mama or Uncle on them.)

October: Input: Thirty-six hours of labor after rupture of membranes (birth announcement)

November: (Not so much, please note new baby)

December: Dear X, Today you turned 2 months old. (the first of my X month reviews.)

Having done this exercise, all I can do is marvel at all that can happen in a year. And I can't even begin to imagine what will happen in the next.

Baby loves to Dance!

2009-01-03T22:29:00.002-05:00

X loves music. One of his many great aunts (he has five on Em's side and two on mine) gave him a collection of baby classical music CDs that her girls had outgrown (generations are fun in Em's family) and every time he listens to Tchaikovsky he relaxes and smiles.

Uncle is a professional dancer and this holiday season he is performing in a show that plays a great deal of Tchaikovsky and has bright shiny lights and colorful costumes. So our two month old baby went to the ballet today. Granted it was a matinee, but I was still impressed at his ability to cope. He smiled and cooed and stood up and swung his hands around and didn't have to be removed once from the theater. I strongly suspect that X will like dancing when he is old enough. That or he will want to play music.

Amazing Child

2009-01-02T22:21:00.000-05:00

I am constantly looking at X and thinking, "I did that." I grew this child and brought him into this world (and let me tell you, he fought that arrival kicking and screaming, Mr. Sunnyside up, neck flexed, hand trying to come through my cervix at the same time as his head, so stuck the suction cup came off his head twice). He weighs 11 pounds now and is 23 inches long. He is over four pounds heavier and 3.5 inches longer than when he arrived and he is amazing.

The Confession

2009-01-01T12:51:00.000-05:00

So I disappeared for most of my pregnancy. I kept meaning to post but it never quite happened. Emily gamely attempted to keep the blog alive but I was so tired and strangely, I found that having posted constantly about trying to get pregnant, having achieved that state, I didn't know what to say. And every day that I didn't blog, I added a little more guilt to the pile and a little more reason to not get to it the next day.

It's January 1st and I am declaring an amnesty for myself and starting again. I've cheated a bit and back dated X's birth announcement and the first of the monthly reviews that I am hoping to write for him. We'll have to see if this amnesty works. I hope so.

Happy New Year to you all.

2 months old

2008-12-22T12:23:00.004-05:00

Dear X,

Today you turned 2 months old. I can hardly believe you have been our outdoor baby for two whole months. At the same time, it seems as if you've been with us forever; I can't imagine my life without you. Your mommy and I have been so busy with you and our crazy lives that I missed writing down details of your first month, so this note will have to serve for the first two months of your life. Since your birth, you have changed so much I'm not sure where to begin. Perhaps I'll just mention all the amazing things you can now do, with notes about when you started doing them if I can remember.

At two months old, you are working very hard on figuring out how to roll over. You lie down on your tummy on Clancy mat and think really hard for a few minutes and then push really hard and try to make it, but you aren't quite there yet. At about six weeks old, you finally got chubby enough to be able to wear your cloth diapers, which you look really cute in! In the last two weeks, you've starting smiling at us and are now spending parts of each day practicing your winning grin out on all your family. Today, when Aunt C, Uncle D and Cousin S were kissing you goodbye as they begin their trip to their new home across the country, you smiled sweetly at each of them, making them feel loved as they started a difficult new journey.

You are such a sweet, easy child, but you are starting to show us that you have a stubborn streak. You have needs and you want us to know about them right now! You've gotten more talkative in general, and your favorite sounds seem to be "nguu," "kkkk," "aaaaa," and "maaa." In the past week, you've started opening your hands and holding on to things if we give them to you. You particularly like touching your black Sheepie from your Aunt E because it is so soft. You really enjoy standing up when we hold you and push really hard with your legs and lock your knees. Your favorite toy, from what Mommy and I can guess, seems to be Clancy, your stuffed lion that hangs from your play gym. You like it so much that we bought you Baby Clancy, so that you can have a Clancy to take on trips with you.

In your first two months, you have already become a frequent traveler. We went to Washington, DC with Uncle when you were 5 weeks old, and you got to see Mommy give a conference paper at an academic conference. We went to our hometown for Thanksgiving and stayed with your Nana and had Thanksgiving dinner with Nana, Grandma, Grandpa and Uncle T. This past weekend, we went back to the town where your Mommy and I grew up and you had your theatrical debut as the Baby Jesus in the Christmas Pagent at the meeting that I grew up in. You did a wonderful job, no crying at all.

We take you around NYC all the time and you are already used to taking the subway and buses. You went to your first movie in a movie theater last week when Mommy and I took you to my work's Holiday staff gathering. You are charming with all the new people you meet and don't seem to worry about other people holding you. Everyone who meets you can't stop talking about what a lovely baby you are.

Many more thoughts to come next month,
Much Love,
Mama

Good Morning, Son

2008-10-24T12:36:00.004-04:00

Input:

Thirty-six hours of labor after rupture of membranes
One round of Stadol
Twenty hours of Pitocin
One epidural
Three hours of pushing
Three applications of the vacuum extractor
One hour of post-birth suturing
No cesaerian section

Output:

X
Born 10/22/2008, 4:42 AM
Six Pounds, Ten Ounces
Nineteen and a Half Inches Long

X was born at 4:42 AM, after 36 hours of serious, hardcore labor. He had been presenting funny, which made the labor very difficult. In part because of the difficulty and length of the labor, he had to go down to the neonatal intensive care unit for a while. This photo was taken right before he and I left Kate to get stitched up.

X was on CPAP (not a ventilator, but lung support) for a while.

Then they moved him from a warmer to an incubator, and took out all his tubes but the IV. (He eventually took out his own IV, because he is a badass little baby.) He got transferred to our room late last night, and we were all discharged this afternoon.

Market Failure

2008-09-25T16:56:00.006-04:00

We got a bunch of baby clothes at X's second shower last weekend. In fact, we've totally avoided buying clothes, since we knew people would buy them for him, and we're saving our money for things that people won't think of. (Although now Kate's aunt and uncle are buying us a breast pump. Who knew people were that awesome?)

There have been several failures in this process.

The first is that we've gotten a lot of clothes that scream OH HAI I'M A BOY. Now, that we got a lot of blue is not a problem. Frankly, we would have picked out a lot of blue clothes ourselves. Puppies? Totally fine. Trucks? Um. OK. He can like trucks if he wants. Athletics? They do realize that he's more likely to be a ballet dancer than a football player, given his family conditioning, right? A full-scale cowboy outfit, complete with matching hat and boots?

Well, OK. That one's a little awesome.

In any case, we got clothes that came from the boy side of the store. Now, I object pretty much on principle to having a boy side of the store, and to the assumptions made in how clothes get assigned to that side. But, we'll live.

But there's another thing.

X has a onesie that says "Mommy loves me." Actually, I think he has two. And he's got a third that says "Favorite things: Mommy. Hugs. Kisses." They are tremendously cute. I love them.

Of course I do. I'm Mommy.

In most families, these outfits are countered with "My dad is my hero." (Yes, I saw that one at Babies R Us today. Seriously.) "I love my daddy." "Daddy's little man." (I may be making that one up.) But we don't have a Daddy. We have a Mommy and a Mama and an Uncle, and only one of us is getting served by the onesie industry here.

I almost want to write on the "Mommy loves me" onesie with a Sharpie: "Mama, on the other hand, is a little sick of me by this point."

Uncle's vote is that we're shopping at mainstream/white stores; white people say Mommy, while black and Latino people say Mama, so if we headed out of the mainstream and into stores particularly targeting communities of color, we might be able to find Mama-themed attire. Or, at least, Mamá. He might be right; I'll start digging.

But, in a quest to fix things, I went on makeaonesie.com today and ordered these:

(Extra points if you get why the butterflies on the Uncle one are funny.)

I know there are much bigger lacks we'll be experiencing as queer parents. But this is the sort of silly little area where accommodation of different family styles could be useful. Not all mothers are Mommy. And if someone wrote that on a fucking onesie, I'd buy it.

Dana Scully Never Took Newborn Care Class...

2008-08-26T21:11:00.008-04:00

Incidentally, the title of this post should be said to the rhythm of "Hitler never played Risk as a kid" from this clip.

Dana. Can I call you Dana? Apparently everyone else in Season 9 gets to, including Mulder for fuck's sake, and since I am suffering through these episodes, I think I'd like to claim that right.

So anyway. Dana. I know your baby, who you are unable to remember to call by his name, apparently, is in terrible risk from Teh Evilz, in whatever form Teh Evilz are taking at this point in the conspiracy, which I realize none of us know or will ever understand.

But I'm a little more worried about you killing your baby at this point. Honestly, woman, have you read nothing on infant safety, SIDS prevention, and newborn development?

Let's start with this:

Notice how William's face is turned into the blankets? This is prime territory for rebreathing, which eventually causes suffocation. Soft bedding in the bassinet is a definite no-no.

Even though he appears to survive it.

Your mother has the right idea; she's clearly attempting a swaddle here. However, her technique is off; with his arms free to wave around, and the blankets behind his head, he could very quickly undo the swaddle and, again, get into smothering territory. In addition, the looseness of this swaddle doesn't provide the psychological comfort factor that swaddling should provide. So, good attempt from Maggie Scully, but it simply does not pass muster.

Plus: when the hell is this kid born that he needs to have so many blankets on him? Not that time seems to travel at the same pace in the X-Files 'verse as the rest of the universe, but it was not the dead of winter when he was born, which was apparently 48 hours ago; ~~Xena~~ ~~D'Anna~~ Shannon McMahon wore a cute slutty dress in a convertible and didn't appear to be freezing in the teaser. Overheating is another prime SIDS risk factor. Get the kid some of those cute bag things, already.

Hmph. By the internal timeline, William is...four to five days old here, depending on how many days elapse during the events of Nothing Important Happened Today I and II. Pacifiers are not recommended until two months of age because 1) newborns will try to nurse the pacifier and drop it 2) if newborns want to suck they need to be eating, due to their extremely small stomach size 3) nipple confusion and problems establishing breastfeeding if pacifiers are used too early.

None of this is to mention the fact that you gave birth less than a week ago and you are running around looking fabulous and fighting Evilz. You have brushed, washed hair, a shirt without milk stains on it, and literally the hottest coat you have ever worn in the entire series. AND, your whoever-he-is just departed for points unknown, so you are a single parent for the moment. WHY ARE YOU NOT HAVING A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN? Are you superhuman? (Oh. Possibly you are.)

So anyway, Dana, I know things are very stressful. I feel you, I really do. But can I put together a reading list for you? Sit down and have a little talk about baby safety? Please? For William's sake? That is his name, right?

(Screencaps from Chris Nu's site.)

(This nitpicking brought to you by Realbirth's class package: take 5 childbirth classes, and add breastfeeding class and newborn care class for SuperCheap! They're actually really great, NYC-ers; we highly recommend them, especially Erica Lyon, the founder who taught one of our childbirth classes and our newborn care class, and Jeremi, our teacher for regular class.)

(Also brought to you by my lovely wife's screaming at the TV last night, obviously.)

A Trip to the Beach

2008-07-23T22:33:00.007-04:00

This weekend, X went to the beach.

His family can be pretty boring at the beach. Especially when they have the new issue of Buffy Season 8. (Best. Comic. EVAR.)

Mama got a new bikini for the occasion. (Mommy thinks she married a hottie.)

X got to swim in a pool for the first time! He really liked it.

Then he went to his first funeral: his moms and uncle buried their kitty, Vodka, who died a year ago.

Then he came home. He likes the beach. He's going back next weekend.

He can dance if he wants to.

2008-07-03T16:55:00.003-04:00

It's official. Willa's a he.

And he likes kicking himself in the head. My mother suggested the Simpson Gene. Our donor had hair, though.

At 22 weeks, he weighed 1 pound, 2 ounces. And his legs were measuring two weeks ahead of date. Ha!

While we could keep calling him Willa, we've started calling him by his outside name, and it would be nice to be consistent. So, for Intarwebs purposes, he'll be called X.

No, we won't tell you what it stands for. But, well, you know us. Guess.

Fatherhood

2008-06-10T12:13:00.004-04:00

I took these tests yesterday.

As a 1930s wife, I am
Poor

Take the test!

As a 1930s husband, I am
Very Superior

Take the test!

I have to say, I'm a little surprised. Folks who know me in real life know that I pull off a credible pre-feminist housewife routine, though with a heavy layer of snark on the side. I can my own pickles and put up local produce. I throw dinner parties with the nice china (although lately we've been too lazy to dig out the dinner table so we've been having them on the living room couch). I care about other people's emotions more than my own, I craft, and I like there to be flowers on the table.

It's been a long standing joke about Kate and my relationship that I really, really want to be the butch one, but I fail miserably at it. The best example was our previous roommate calling me the butch one while I sat, legs neatly crossed, doing needlepoint with something in the oven, while Kate sat at the other end of the room, legs splayed, hand down her pants. All it was missing was the beer, folks.

But the thing is, with the baby on the way, I'm sensing something happening. It's not that I'm getting butcher, it's that I'm starting to feel like...a father. I didn't believe this would happen before--I was firmly convinced that my experience was going to be of mothering, just one that didn't include the experience of birth. But I'm not feeling nurturing; I'm feeling protective. I'm not feeling like caring; I'm feeling like providing. (Which is singularly ironic, given that I make about $25K less a year than the wife.) I wonder how much of this package of emotions comes with not being the one carrying the kid around: I can't care for or nurture Willa right now. What I can do is feed Kate, run lotion on her belly, pick out her clothes, make her lunch. When Willa is kicking her in the bladder at bedtime, I can lean my head on her stomach and sing REM songs until she falls asleep, or kicks me in the nose. What I can do now is protect and care for my family, which our culture assigns as a task to fathers.

Maybe some of it is watching the process of growing a kid at a distance, being second to feel the kicks, being the one next to the one going through it. I wonder what is structural, what is cultural, and what is personal in all of this. (And to what extent I feel like a father because I overidentify with a certain fictional character.)

So, readers: do you feel like a father?

(And feel free to share your scores on the tests above. A friend of mine got a -9 on the wife test, which I thought was a little awesome.)

Basketball

2008-05-29T22:54:00.002-04:00

We hate the Lakers.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Their terrible color combination. That they were so mean to the Sixers in that first finals we ever watched. Because no group of professional athletes should have such a poor free-throw percentage. That they seem so culturally and athletically dominant. (I also hate the Cowboys. If I managed to care about baseball, I might even dislike the Yankees, though I'm not sure of that, entirely.) Anyway. We hate the Lakers. A lot.

I started this. I saw it was the conference finals, and somehow now we've got five hours of ball a night on the TiVo, which is seriously screwing with my three-week X-Files backlog. (It's season 6. That is, it's the shippiest season until season 7. And then season 8, which wins the shippy awards because, you know, they have a baby.) I just had to watch three whole episodes on fast forward (stopping only for "Dear Diary, today my heart leapt" and "I lack your feminine wiles" and assorted other goodness) and delete this week's Top Chef (which reruns three times in the next 24 hours, so I'm not anxious) in order to see the Lakers not win tonight. WHICH WILL HAPPEN. BECAUSE WE HATE THE LAKERS.

Anyway, it's been a wonderful week of basketball. Every evening, my wife will come over to the couch, and we'll sit curled up under a blanket, her leaning against me, both of us holding onto Willa, who kicks along happily. Kate feels her all the time; I've felt her, but I get distracted by Kate's pulse, which is close to the surface along her belly. I explain to Willa what I know about basketball, all of which was learned from watching the game. I'm still not certain what the rules are for various fouls, in particular why it's not a foul every time someone gets shoved around. (I think I came up with a good moral lesson in the structure of fouls: "Every time you foul somebody, it's wrong. But sometimes, you do it anyway, because it'll make something else better. Still, you have to take your punishment, because it's still a wrong thing.") We've decided we need to actually know the rules of the game before she comes out, so this time next year, when she's sitting on my lap for real, I can explain it to her. And she'll sit there, in her tiny little New York Liberty shirt, and learn to hate the Lakers. Because, really, she should.

Things We Have Done in the Past Month

2008-05-20T22:59:00.004-04:00

Told Kate's grandparents. Upon hearing one of our girl names--which happens to be the name she and Kate's mom share--she said that's what we were calling the baby. Regardless of sex. OK, Nana.
Told my great-aunt. She thinks we're awfully young to be having children. And it's too close to the wedding. But she's happy. (I love my great-aunt.)
Told the first of our friends. They're all freaking out appropriately, given that we're one of first among our friends to have kids. (The other kid came eight years ago, right out of high school.)
Heard Willa's little heartbeat for the first time. She sounds like a horsey. We heard it for the second time today.
Willa has become visible to the outside world.

Kate felt the first kick. Last night, when she woke up at 3:30 AM. And a bunch more today. We have bought her soccer shoes already.
Kate's also had gas so bad she's thrown up. Twice.
Incidentally, I've been writing like a demon. I'm about 7 pages from being done my last semester of coursework, and being able to start in on my dissertation. Whoo-hoo!
We've been on the road more than we've been off it. Visits to our families, going to a conference and staying with family while there. Thursday we leave for Kate's five-year college reunion. I'm considering making her a t-shirt that says "Yep, it's a bump."
And I really cannot tell you how many times I've watched this. Or this. Or this.

More detailed posts to come. But we wanted to touch base.

In Which The Commune Has A New Favorite TV Show

2008-04-13T22:38:00.003-04:00

Why, oh why, fuck why did I not start watching Battlestar Galactica until now? Holy shit. HOLY SHIT. People, it's good. So good. It's actually better than Buffy, and that is something.

Plus, BSG and The X-Files share so many elements that it's blowing my mind. Like hot hot hot women named Starbuck? Badass redheads with a cancer problem? Major male characters who see ghosts, and later are set up as Jesus figures? A major pairing full of not necessarily resolved sexual tension but a lot of cuddly goodness? Teh Evils stealing people's ovaries? Half-human babies as the key to everything? Clones with superpowers? So much awesome there is in this show, people.

So we've watched the entirety of the first three seasons in the past week. As I write this, we are watching Friday's episode. We're going to have to start actually waiting a week between episodes. We may die.

So, anyway. Anyone want to talk about BSG? Please?

Also, I hereby publicly tag the wife to write about our weekend shopping.

Hello there, Teh Intarwebs!

2008-04-11T22:26:00.003-04:00

Hi, everybody. My name is Willa.

This photo was taken when I was 11 weeks and 3 days old. My mama went for an Ultrascreen test at the hospital where I'm going to be born (with my mommy for moral support). From what they say, we all went into a little room, and Mama lay down on the table. The nice technician had really good aim, so that the moment she put the sonogram wand on Mama's belly I popped right into view. Mommy immediately started crying. (She's like that. Funny, she's not even pregnant.) I put on a nice show for them all, kicking my long legs, patting my face, and jumping up and down. Actually I put on such a nice show that I gave myself the hiccups.

After a little while, Mama and Mommy got annoyed, because the technician said I wasn't in the right position. I got called recalcitrant, and ordered to move in the right position. Then Mama coughed a lot, which was really annoying, and so I stayed because they were annoying. So Mama and Mommy went for a walk, and Mama even jumped up and down, which was fun. Apparently the tech liked where I was this time, so they were able to get the photo for the test.

Mama and Mommy have been running around being silly since they got the pictures. They keep calling me by my outside-world name, and crying, and emailing these pictures to my grandparents. They even have photos on their cell phones. Silly moms.

Anyway. They just wanted me to say hi. So hi!

When TV speaks the Truth

2008-04-01T10:09:00.005-04:00

As heard last night on How I Met Your Mother (which is basically one of two sitcoms I actually like, the other being Scrubs, and HIMYM is better now than Scrubs is) last night:

Ted (to Barney): Dude, do not pretend you're not a guy who keeps a list of all the girls he's slept with.
Marshall: I have one. It's called my marriage license. (He and Lily high-five.)

Me (to Kate): Hey, we have one of those! And our parents signed it, too!

My mom and brother's hands and our marriage certificate.

Every so often, Kate and I find ourselves talking about this time last year, when we were six week from our wedding. Every day it was an insane jumble of callingtherestaurantcallingtheloftcallingtheseamstresscallingourmothers that never seemed to end. We both have dreams, every now and then, that we're having another wedding, and we wake up and clutch each others hands. "I dreamt we were getting married again," we say. "Oh, God, let's never do that. Never ever."

But the wedding itself? Perfect, for the value of perfect that includes needing insane stories to tell about it. And now, look at us, eleven months later, settled and happy with a baby on the way. God damn, we're conventional. And we never have to have another wedding again.

More wedding photos here if you want them.

Reading the X-Files: Mulder and Scully's "Partnership" and the Question of Queer Marriage, Empedocles (8X17)

2008-03-25T00:19:00.000-04:00

(I'm going to be doing a few of these as I'm studying the show closely for a paper I'm writing; they're close readings of intellectually compelling moments in specific episodes. For the blog, I'm going to stick to moments about pregnancy, fertility/infertility, parenting, and queer stuff. Hopefully you'll find them interesting.)

There are a million things I love about the X Files:

The incredible hotness of the protagonists.
The gonzo way nothing ever makes good sense but somehow it is always AWESOME.
That there are spaceships and hot girls with guns .
That the government simultaneously is evil and full of good people who want to save the world.
Did I mention the hotness? Oh, I did? Let me say it again. THE HOTNESS.

Tell me you don't kinda want to make out with at least one of these people.

But what I really love is the relationship between Mulder and Scully. Here we have a smokin' hot vibe between two gorgeous people who are totally devoted to each other, which is simultaenously not a standard heterosexual love story. Despite the fact that we get teased about it plenty, we don't get any mushyness until nearly the end of the serious--the first kiss comes in season 7, and it's not even unambiguous that they're involved until season 8, and then just barely. Instead, we see the World's Longest, Smartest Seduction, consisting of moments of comfort and protection as the world is ending, a never-ending procession of banter and flirtation, and a lot of time spent in hospital beds. They reverse typical gender performances: Scully is the scientist, the rationalist, the hard-edged one, while Mulder is all feelings, hunches, instinct. They are equally likely to do caring work for each other, as well; this is a relationship built on equality and cooperation, at work and (presumably) outside of it.

And it gets really interesting when they're having a kid.

The expectant parents and a large pizza.

(OK, ten-second recap: Scully's infertile due to alien abduction, Mulder stole her eggs from the humans who work with the aliens, they try to conceive via IVF and fail, she *magically* gets pregnant with a baby that may or may not be an alien hybrid implanted by the bad guys and simultaneously he gets abducted by aliens, he is returned dead and they bury him, then they dig him up and he's not dead anymore. There's no explicit proof within show canon that they've ever slept together up to the point we're talking about, but there are significant hints, and there has been no definitive statement about the parentage of the baby. Does that make sense? No? Go with it, Scully, as Mulder would say. Just remember the writers were probably high at the time.)

The episode I'm talking about here is Empedocles (TWoP recap; Episode Transcript). This is the second episode after Mulder has come back to life. In the previous episode (Three Words), he has said he feels cut off, out of place, doesn't know where he fits in, and it's clear he means with with regard to Scully and her pregnancy. There is no on-camera discussion of the paternity of the child, although a minor character later asks him about his possible involvement, which results in a Serious Mulder-Scully Mutual Look (if you've ever seen the show, you know what I mean). By my reading, they seem to be on the same page, and that page is that Mulder is most definitely 'involved.' However, his exact relationship to Scully and the baby is left purposely unclear, in part because of doubt that the baby is really human. Three Words ended with Scully driving getaway vehicle for Mulder's bust into a federal data facility: that is, everything normal except for the Scully Waistline Situation (she's at about 7 months, and looks fantastic, as Gillian Anderson always does, even in the early, puffy-hair-and-white-tights phase, and the strange, long-hair-and-sad-looks Season 9 thing).

The scenes from Empedocles that I want to analyze here are 3 and 4 in the transcript. Mulder shows up on Scully's doorstep unexpectedly. They engage in supercute banter: Rational!Scully has an attack of pregnancy brain, Mulder posits the pizza delivery boy as a possible father for the baby, there is a significant double entendre around the phrase "nice package," etc. The attitude is light, lighter than usual for them; the vibe is definitely more couple than friends, but, as with everything on this show, it's not perfectly clear.

There is this exchange:

SCULLY: I feel like I'm stuck in an episode of Mad About You.
MULDER: Well, uh, yeah, but small technicality. Mad About You was about a married couple and we just work together.
SCULLY: Yeah, well, you know what I'm talking about.
MULDER: I do, I do.

This is the show's greatest fiction: they "just work together." People, these folks are in six kinds of lurve. They've called each other best friend, soulmate, touchstone, only person I can trust, and a million other things. He was the executor of her living will as early as season 2. They tried to have a kid together, and then succeeded (I believe). When his body was discovered and then again at his funeral, she was treated as a widow. These people? Are. So. Totally. Together.

But what they are isn't named. The only word they ever use to describe who they are to each other to the outside world is 'partner.' The word was given to them by the FBI, but, of course, it has a double meaning: it's what most queer folks, and a growing contingent of radical folks in heterosexual relationships call their significant others. Mulder and Scully aren't married; in fact, it's meant to be unclear if they are even in a romantic or sexual relationship. (But they so totally are.) The name they have for it is ambiguous: they "just work together." But when Scully says, "You know what I mean," look what he says: "I do, I do." I don't think it's irrelevant that he responds to her assertion (that they've become a quipping sitcom couple, complete with bad pizza man jokes) with marriage words. In that moment, whatever the world thinks, the solidity and commitment of their relationship is established. They're partners. Just the type for whom the word means forever.

Then, crisis. Scully doubles over in pain, clutching her belly. Mulder rushes to her side, orders the pizza guy to call 911. We cut to Scully being rushed into the hospital on a guerney, Mulder holding her hand, the nurse knowing her name. (It's been a dramatic pregnancy.) Mulder corrects the nurse on the gender of Scully's OB-GYN, and we get this exchange.

ER NURSE: Who are you? The husband?
MULDER: No.
ER NURSE: Then you wait outside.

Scully is whisked away, and Mulder is left alone, looking desperate. My beloved wife, at this point in the episode, said "Come on. Everyone knows the right answer to that question is yes." And we know this, because we know if we were ever somewhere without our legal paperwork, the question would be "Are you her sister?" and the answer would be "yes," without a doubt, because there is no way we would be separated. Scully and Mulder, partners-which-means-everything, are separated here becasue they don't have the magic words. Partnership, that safe word that can mean "we just work together" or can mean "we aren't telling the government we're fucking" or "we disagree about the structural utility of the institution of marriage" or "we are too busy saving the world to pick out a china pattern" is here shown to be socially less, to be entirely insufficient at the moment of crisis. He can't do anything but stand there.

Although it isn't explicit, I want to read a critique of the dominance of 'marriage' into this moment. No one watching this show has any doubt about the fact that Mulder should have followed Scully into that ER. After all, they seem to spend all their time in ERs together. It's like date night in X-Files-land. Because this is a "personal" crisis (e.g., neither of them has been shot, abducted by aliens or serial killers, or attacked by goo), the badge-flashing routine doesn't work here, so they are forcibly separated. Because their "partnership" does not map on to our conventional notions of how relationships should be patterned, an injustice is done in that waiting room.

What is the solution here? Is it for Mulder and Scully to get married? Emphatically, no, at least in my opinion. (OK, if they show up in the movie that's coming out this summer wearing wedding rings, I'm not going to be upset. In fact, I'ma squee like the crazy mushy fangirl I am. Not that it's gonna happen.) They don't need to be married. No one needs to be married. Mulder and Scully don't need the approval of God and the District of Columbia to establish who they are to each other. All they need is a Crown Victoria, a pair of Sig Sauers, and an alien invasion to fight.

The solution I would articulate would be to allow people to determine their own words and practices. The question would be "Are you the next of kin?" The metaphysical state of marriage would be reserved for those who desired it (like myself, which I should talk about sometime). The legal state of becoming a family would be available to any arrangement of individuals who agreed to care for each other, regardless of whether their relationships were romantic, sexual, or biological. Mulder and Scully can just be Mulder and Scully (and potentially extraterrestrial fetus makes three). But in a world of compulsory heterosexuality and the sanctity of marriage, Mulder stands on the wrong side of the ER doors, waiting with the pizza men of the world for something to change.

Notes on California

2008-03-19T20:53:00.004-04:00

I've never in my life lived anywhere but the northeastern US. Frankly, I doubt the rest of the country exists most of the time. So it says something Deep and Significant that, within 24 hours of getting off the plane, I was picking out real estate. I really freakin' love the Bay Area. North Bay more than South Bay, but, really, the whole thing. I'd move here in a hot second.
We spent a subtle chunk of our time here checking out potential places for me to teach eventually, in a sneaky way. Today's trip to Palo Alto to wander around Stanford got canceled once we saw how long it would take on the train, but we did get to see both UC Santa Cruz and San José State. The Verdicts: Santa Cruz looks a little bit like if you went to college in a summer camp. I would be worried about possible bear attacks as I walked between classes. That much nature intimidates my urban self. San José is cute, and there is a decent used book store that is apparently run by people who like to make a ruckus--they got arrested trying to pass out fliers at the main campus bookstore.
I've always said I want to raise my kids in a city, mainly to protect against the white-middle-class hegemony of the suburbs, as I experienced them, in addition to my deep loathing of sprawl. But what we've been seeing out here aren't the suburban-sprawl monstrosities of my youth, precisely; they're nice small towns, with walkable centers and functional public transportation systems, located along the outer edges of cities. None of the towns I've seen out here have been entirely car-unnecessary, but they are more car-optional than the town we grew up in; while one might want a car, it wouldn't be necessary for trips to the weekend farmer's market, or the book store, or going out to dinner, if one picked where to live with an eye towards walkability. In addition, Santa Clara County (where we are staying) is roughly 30% Asian and a quarter Latina/o; the suburban town where our friends live is 14% Asian and 13% Latina/o. By comparison, the county where we grew up (which includes one majority-black small city that is geographically and socially isolated from the upper-middle-class suburbs) is 18% black, 4% Asian, and 2% Latina/o. So, is living in ethnically diverse suburbs that are not patterned around sprawl ethically distinct from living in other sorts of suburbs? Is what I want urbanity, or do I just want not to need a car and to raise my kids away from monolithic whiteness?
It's spring out here. It's tortuous how beautiful it is. And both strawberries AND asparagus are in season already. Seriously, have I mentioned I would move here in a heartbeat yet?

Willa By The Bay

2008-03-16T01:05:00.004-04:00

Escape From New York Pizza,
at the intersection of Castro and 18th, San Francisco, CA

We decided to celebrate Willa graduating from embryo to fetus by taking her to California for the week.

OK, so it's my spring break, and it was our turn to visit some friends who live in Silicon Valley. Kate survived her first pregnant flight quite well--and without her usual Valium fix to conquer her fear of take off and landing, or even a Benedryl to put her to sleep. Turns out Continental serves palatable gluten-free meals, although their vegan meal left something to be desired (a truly uninspiring veggie burger).

Willa and her mothers are faring well in the lovely Bay Area sunshine, enjoying time with our friends, the brilliance that is the Ferry Terminal Market, and three hours of time change. I'd say blogging might be spotty...but we're staying in the most techno-dense house I've ever been in, so we're probably going to be blogging just as much, because why not?

Also I have a post mostly written about the X-Files. So that'll be coming soon.

Sympathy: A Guessing Game

2008-03-09T23:05:00.002-04:00

OK, folks, it's a game. Guess which of these women is pregnant, and which one is merely copying, based on this list of symptoms.

Wife #1:

Nausea
Involuntary Napping
Cravings for Hearts of Romaine (no other lettuce will do)
Aversion to Bananas and Coffee
Fuzzy Brain
Sore Breasts

Wife #2:

Insomnia
Cravings for Chocolate (especially Mounds Bars)
Mood Swings
Compulsive Cleaning/Nesting
Inability to Focus or Complete Regular Tasks

Guess correctly, and you will win...applause? Internet applause?

OK, it's probably not that hard to tell, but I'm finding it amusing. My sympathetic pregnancy is in full swing, y'all.

On fathers and pants

2008-03-08T21:38:00.004-05:00

So, it's been almost two weeks since the internets have heard from us. We're fine, our lives are just crazy and getting used to this pregnancy thing is really weird. Over the last two weeks, both our fathers have been in the hospital (different ones, although they are within ten miles of each other) for various serious ailments. We went home this past weekend to be helpful and it made us so tired that I'm not entirely sure that either of us has recovered. Of course, there is the physical tired (which my newly pregnant self isn't coping with well, considering the level of exhaustion I've been experiencing to begin with) and there is the emotional tired, which is more difficult to address but after dealing with our families in crisis is always pretty damn high.

On a non-family of origin note, a few weeks ago, Emily had made a RSS feed on craigslist for maternity clothes and discovered a women from the next neighborhood over given away for free two bags of maternity clothes. At the time we laughed about taking in these clothes SO early, tempting the Gods, etc. And yet, my pants I wear to work have been getting quite snug by the end of the day, causing me to put on pajama pants the moment I get home (many thanks to my mother-in-law, who bought me two new pairs for Christmas.) In a bout of cleaning this afternoon, Emily made me take off my pants so that she could wash them. A very good thing for all involved, but it left me pantsless, which caused me to do something that I've been putting off for a while, trying on all my pants to see which ones still fit. It was kind of sad, two pairs I cannot button, three pairs are quite snug, two pairs will be good for a little while and that's all the pants I own. Laughing at my exertions, Emily suggested that I try the maternity pants in the bag we got. Figuring why not, I went to the dining room and tried them on...and they felt comfortable and fit. This has completely knocked me for a loop. I was kidding when I tried them on. I'm not quite seven weeks pregnant. I have gained 1 pound. Why do maternity jeans fit more comfortably than any other pants? This is feeding into my slight paranoia that I'm having twins. My grandfather was a twin, so I'm not completely making this fear up. My first midwife appointment is until I'm 9w3d, so I have a long two and a half weeks before I get this question answered. Oh my.

The Morning Sickness Cometh

2008-02-25T14:22:00.002-05:00

I've been having these waves of something that isn't quite nausea but isn't quite heartburn. I've gotten used to them and I seem to be able to fix them by eating something small right away. I was hoping that this was the worst it was going to get, but, nope, not so much.

I woke up this morning at 6am(my alarm is at 9am) with a really deep sense of nausea sitting deep in my stomach. It felt like the worst heartburn ever and I couldn't fall asleep again and no position was comfortable. I thought it might be bathroom related so I stumbled down the hall, waking up the kitten as I turned on the bathroom light (for some reason she was sleeping on a pile of dirty clothes on the bathroom floor). The bathroom visit not having resolved the issue, I staggered slightly blind in the early morning dark to my purse where I vaguely remembered having left some peanuts. Peanuts recovered I went back to the bed, spent two minutes shoving peanuts down my throat and then was able to collapse back on my pillow and sleep another three hours. So, apparently protein with salt is my morning sickness solution, at least for the moment. I hope this doesn't get worse.

The Circling Sharks are Howling at the Door

2008-02-21T23:45:00.000-05:00

I feel bad that I seem to have stopped posting in the last week. A lot of it is that I'm REALLY busy at work and I'm so tired that I'm having to take several naps a day and go to bed early. But there is a little bit of me that is kind of scared to write about being pregnant, because then it will get taken away.

So instead, I will take a moment and talk about my co-workers. I have a wonderful group of co-workers who I enjoy working with and have good personal relationships with most of them. They have been pretty involved with the TTC process, including one co-worker who had the day that I was testing this past weekend on her calendar in the office. (Yes, we are all the entwined in each others lives.) Em and I have agreed to tell a very limited number of people IRL about this pregnancy until we get to April and except for my immediate boss, that means that my co-workers are now waiting with no info and a LOT of questions.

Hence the metaphor of the circling sharks howling at the door. Three of my co-workers have flat out asked me what the test said. And I've replied, as per Emily's instructions: "I have no comment at this time." Which they are totally (and rightly) taking as a YES. I really don't know how I'm going to navigate this next two months of them theoretically not knowing, while I go to the bathroom constantly and look ill every time someone makes coffee.

So, any thoughts on how to pull this off?

Photo Friday: Stop and Eat the Roses

2008-02-18T21:00:00.004-05:00

We have a problem with bringing fresh flowers into the house. That problem's name is Wicket. She has a disturbing habit of deciding that, where ever we put those flowers, we clearly intended a cat to be there, because the only purpose that flowers could have would be as a cat snack.

She also feels this way about houseplants.

And leftover Thai food plates.

And water glasses.

So, whenever my lovely wife does something romantic and sweet like finding me fire and ice roses (yes, we have 'our flower,' and I don't care that it makes me a big sissy dork) for Valentine's Day, I get about ten minutes of cooing and burbling about them, and then three days of "WicketgetthefuckoffthediningroomtableIseeyoutheregoddamnit." And when we leave the room, we have to lock the flowers in their own room so we won't come back to shattered glass, electricuted electronics, and one very happy cat with vaguely rose-scented breath.

In fact, she's sitting on the couch staring at them right now.

William The Transsexual Parakeet: A Story (With An Important Payoff)

2008-02-17T20:05:00.007-05:00

Kate and I do this thing. She makes me tell her stories for her. Not just things that happened that we both know about: she makes me tell her childhood stories, her college stories, all of them. I'm the storyteller, which is hilarious if you consider that she's the one who wants us to blog every damn thing. Wants me to blog every damn thing, more like.

But anyway, today I'm the storyteller. And this is her story, but I'm telling it for my own purposes. So make of that what you want.

Anyway, when Kate was seven or so, a shed got delivered to her house. And in that shed was a tiny little parakeet. She and her mother and her little brother (who was about four) spent a good deal of time trying to catch that parakeet. Actually, Kate's mom did most of the work, aided by the ever-well-behaved Kate, and disturbed by the less-well-behaved brother, who desperately wanted to pet the pretty birdy. But, in the end, the bird was captured and brought inside. Kate's mom refused to let the kids name the bird for about six months or so, until she had exhausted every possible avenue for finding its original home. After all hope was lost, the kids named him William.

Several years down the road, William became sick. So he was taken to the vet, for the first time ever. At the vet, it was revealed that William was, in Kate's words, Williamette: they had a lady bird on their hands. William/ette's condition did not improve substantially, and about six months later s/he Flew To The Great Shed In The Sky, so to speak.

So, it is in honor of this bird, who managed to live for a time in both genders, who appeared without warning and shocked everyone by sticking around, that we christen the Non-Hysteri-Keet.

Blogosphere, meet Willa. Willa, meet Blogosphere.

Why Willa, and not William? Well, because we've basically decided that it's too hard to play the gender-neutral pronoun game all the time, and that our personal default pronoun is female, so she should have a vaguely female name. However, we picked Willa in part because it references the chromozonal question mark: Willa might be William might be Williamette, and all is well. We'll know when we know, or we won't, and it's fine.

(Oh, and alternative sources for the name include this and this. Look, the one walked the line between genders and wrote one of my favorite novels, and the other is a mysterious production of parents who shouldn't have been able to procreate AND had magical powers as an infant. Either way, it's good.)

What, you want a real story of yesterday morning's positive? Well, maybe I'll tell you. But not today. Willa's mama is demanding dinner, and her mom has some Guy Debord to read. The world continues turning, but it's one Keet heavier round these parts.

Valentine's Day Massacre (Kind Of)

2008-02-15T19:47:00.001-05:00

Since Em tagged me to talk about the enormous NOT PREGNANT we got Thursday morning on the CBE digital test, I suppose I should actually talk about it.

We knew at 9DPO that it was too early, but wouldn't it have been so cool to find out we were pregnant on Valentine's Day? Oh well, not to be. I make it sound so matter of fact. In actual truth, I went a little nutty for a few hours. I sat on the couch and almost cried and felt like sitting in the corner and not going to work. However, work is crazy and I pretty much can't take days off at the moment and if I take a day off every time a piece of technology tells me I'm not pregnant, I worry I will soon run out of sick days.

Work was also not very pleasant. I called Emily ever hour and told her how I didn't feel well and she was very nice to me. Later in the day, my hysterical symptoms picked up again, which is leading me to wonder if in fact we did just test way too early. We have decided to wait two days and test again on Saturday. So I guess we shall soon see.

Happy Freakin' Valentine's Day

2008-02-14T22:16:00.004-05:00

To quote the renowned C.G.B. Spender:

"Life... is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. You're stuck with this undefinable whipped-mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while, there's a peanut butter cup, or an English toffee. But they're gone too fast, the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits, filled with hardened jelly and teeth-crunching nuts, and if you're desperate enough to eat those, all you've got left is a... is an empty box... filled with useless, brown paper wrappers."

--From "Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man," Episode 4x07, The X-Files

I'd just like to say I bought a good box of chocolates. Mostly caramels and turtles and truffles. Kate appears to be enjoying it.

Oh, and that test this morning? A negative, which at 9 dpo is not shocking. And so drama-causing that I'm tagging the wife to tell y'all about it.

The Hysteri-Keet

2008-02-13T23:45:00.003-05:00

We're calling her the Hysteri-Keet.

HK for short.

No, we don't know yet if Kate's pregnant. We won't know until tomorrow at the earliest; she'll be taking an early pregancy test just because it is the first possible day, and it's Valentine's Day, and how amazing would it be to find out we're having a baby on Valentine's Day? Most likely, we won't know until next week.

But her symptoms have been so pronounced that we've been joking about her hysterical pregnancy since last week. This is an example of the traffic game: we can't talk about her pregnancy, about an actual embryo, until we know we actually have one. So it's a hysterical pregnancy we've got here, and we wanted to be able to talk about it by name.

So we named her. She'll get a new name once we know if she's real or hysterical. Kate's thinking of calling her Gabby or Zoey, after her childhood parakeets.

What have we learned about the Hysteri-Keet in the past week? She likes salads. And pasta. And spice cake. She makes her mama feel positively evil around 9PM every day. She demands naps. And every night, we snuggle up in our bed, which is the one place where we've agreed we won't play the traffic game, and I wrap my arms around my wife and our little hysterical daughter and say goodnight.

I have no brain, so Title Goes Here

2008-02-11T20:40:00.000-05:00

It seems like forever since I last posted. It's actually been a week. I don't have any reason, except I've just been feeling really weird. As Emily note a few days ago, I've been having A LOT of phantom symptoms. The ones that seem to be staying with me are bloating, heartburn and crying jags. I'm having noticeable cramping today, although until today it had been four days or so. I'm 6 or 7 DPO depending on how one counts it, so I don't know what's up with me. Some women may cry at tissue commercials (Em is one), but I'm a bit of a stoic. I don't usually cry until pushed beyond my limits by something actually deeply sad. And here I am, feeling suddenly as if weeping is the only thing to do and then an hour later making jokes about the crazy lady who is clearly taking me over. It's just so odd.

From the beginning, Em has been against POAS before I've missed my period, but today when I was doing one of our many daily phone check-ins, she asked me when the earliest I could test was. We bought a 3-pack on CBE Digital tests from Costco.com when we were ordering our next batch of OPK's, so the first day those early response tests might work is Thursday. Thursday is also Valentine's Day. We don't put much stock in the Hallmark holiday, but it kind of makes me want to go wild and use one just for fun. I guess we shall see.

My closing question: Has anyone else had this many crazy symptoms all at once? Em is starting to get concerned. I'm just bemused.

Photo Friday: Our Commune- An Organization

2008-02-08T23:45:00.001-05:00

Our Commune- An Organization

From the Photo Friday site:

or·gan·i·za·tion

1.
c. A structure through which individuals cooperate systematically to conduct business.
d. The administrative personnel of such a structure.

4. A group of persons organized for a particular purpose; an association: a benevolent organization.

5.
a. A structure through which individuals cooperate systematically to conduct business.
b. The administrative personnel of such a structure.

We may not be organized. But we sure as hell are an organization. We have both cats AND hot shirtless boys. Come on. What more do you want?

Originally uploaded by brooklyn.kittens

Symptoms My Wife Has Had In The Last 3 Days

2008-02-07T20:33:00.000-05:00

Nausea
Dizziness
Heartburn
Bloating
Warm Stomach
Diarrhea
Mood Swings
Cramps

She would like to say that she realizes she's insane.

It Begins

2008-02-06T23:59:00.000-05:00

I came home yesterday, tired. My exam had finished up at 6 on Monday; I had immediately shared celebratory shots of Absolut Citron with Uncle, which did a good job of counteracting the caffeine-and-all-nighter high I was running on. I took a nap, was awakened around 9:45 to knock up the wife, watched some X-Files, went back to sleep. Woke up in the morning around 11, watched more X-Files, rescheduled my chiropractor appointment so I could vote, went to therapy, went to my class (taught by a pleasant, easily distractable old man who really doesn't do anything to direct the discussion), got out early and went to that chiropractor appointment, got dinner at my favorite Mexican place, went to what I thought was the first Arabic class of the semester only to discover that, last week while I was cramming for the exam, they had all met without me. Got out of class at 10, walked exhaustedly to the subway, listed to my Lupe Fiasco/Shakira/Jay-Z playlist of the moment six times (or however many, I didn't pay attention except for mentally choreographing the trailer to the X-Files movie about colonization they're never going to make to the sounds of Hello Goodbye--there's lots of Dana Scully with AK-47s), wandered in the door, dropped my shit, and said hello to my wife.

Who promptly burst into tears.

She didn't feel well. She was having cramps. Her stomach hurt. Everything hurt. She didn't know why she was crying. She didn't know anything. She was just crying.

And as I sat there, holding her hand, saying everything was ok, petting her hair, telling her to call her mother if she wants to, and all of that, I thought: oh, shit. She can't be more than 24 hours pregnant. Honestly, at most there's a little fertilized egg in there trying to figure out whether it wants to implant. And that's if she's pregnant at all. And she's hysterical already.

And all of a sudden I'm realizing precisely what I meant when I told my therapist that I was going to have to deal with her hysterical pregnancies two weeks out of the month from here forward.

She calmed down. I held her and petted her and we laughed about the mood swings and I told her everything was OK. She's still crampy and bloated today, and I swear to God she looks fatter. (My wife, she is the opposite of fat.) Who knows? Maybe these are the best signs every and she's totally pregnant. Maybe her body is reacting to encountering sperm for the first time by screaming in horror. Maybe it's a psychosomatic reaction. But this is how it's going to be from here forward.

I think I'm ready. I hope so, at least.

Calling the Child

2008-02-04T20:18:00.000-05:00

The sperm was finally delivered at 3:45pm on Saturday, after a phone call to FEDEX, being put on hold for ten minutes while they tracked the package down, being told that it was in Erie, NY (7 Hours from our house) and then having it arrive ten minutes later with no explanation to how that was possible or why it was almost four hours late. Sigh.

Having gotten negatives on the two OPK's I took on Saturday, I kept on testing on Sunday. Towards the end of the evening, all my signs were lining up and Em and I agreed we would do the first insemination at midnight after I peed on one last stick. That stick had a very faint line, but we decided to go ahead with the insem because the book I've been reading for months said that the worst thing you can do is wait too long, waiting for an OPK to read positive.

I had readied myself for this first time to be comical and badly done and a complete miss, so I was quite happy to discover that we appear to be good at this. We filled the bedroom with the candles in vases that we had used for the centerpieces for our wedding, brought our Quaker marriage certificate into the room, to represent the loving family and community that we were calling our baby into to and starting the thawing of the spermies. It went well, Emily was really skilled at using the syringe and I rotated like a turkey for an hour afterwards. After the first thirty minutes or so, we opened the bedroom door and let the cats in and told Jesus that he should come visit. And it felt so right, our little commune, the queers and the cats, all together, calling this baby to us.

I was slightly concerned that we had done the first insemination too early but when I tested at 2pm today I got a very strong positive, so I think we got the timing down pretty well. We're going to do our second insemination around 10pm and then we will officially be in our first ever TWW!

Waiting

2008-02-02T13:45:00.000-05:00

Waiting is really the hardest part of ttc at times. At the moment I am waiting for two things. I am waiting to pee. I have to wait until 2pm in order to get an accurate reading on my CBE OPK. This is the first stick of this cycle, this cycle being the first time that isn't practice! The excitement is mounting.

I am also waiting for FEDEX. We paid a lot of money for Saturday delivery before 12pm. And it's 1:45pm and I am sitting here waiting for my box 'o sperm, and reloading the tracking site every few minutes. According to FEDEX, my box has been in a truck in Brooklyn since 9:11am. So where the #@$% is my delivery? Not that I'm obsessing or anything.

Photo Friday: Black & White

2008-02-01T23:45:00.000-05:00

The Girls
Originally uploaded by brooklyn.kittens

This is my first Photo Friday. My girls are black and white to begin with, but I like the added touch of black and white cats in black and white.

What, You think I'm inseminating my cat?

2008-01-31T17:18:00.001-05:00

I did something very exciting earlier this week. I called the sperm bank and asked them to take two vials of sperms out of our storage container and FEDEX them to our house. Due to my cycle this month, it has to be a Saturday delivery, which is more expensive, but you do what you have to do.

It was the next day before I realized that they are shipping us sperm and thawing instructions, but we are responsible for getting the syringes. Em and I met after work and went to a pharmacy nearby in Manhattan. No luck. They had 10ml or 5ml syringes, which don't work for us. We need a 1ml needleless oral syringe. I really didn't think this would be difficult to get at a pharmacy. So we pushed on. We took the train home and went to the local Walgreen. They too only had 10ml and 5ml syringes.

We pushed on to the RiteAid a few blocks down the street. And there is where the story becomes much more entertaining than previously. I walked up to the pharmacy counter and asked if they carried 1ml needleless oral syringes. The woman at the counter thought for a moment and then asked, "Why do you need it?" I wasn't expecting the question, so it took me a moment to reply, "For a home insemination." I tried to pitch my voice towards her so the three people waiting to ask questions weren't involved in my business any more than necessary. She asks, "Who are you inseminating?" And this is where I stood with my mouth hanging slightly open for a second, not quite knowing what she meant. What, I'm inseminating my cat? (Now that is something I would never want to do!) I told her that I was inseminating myself. And she freaked out. She kept saying, "Oh no! Do you have a doctor? Oh no!" I assured her I had a doctor who said that it was completely okay that I do this. "Don't hurt yourself," was her reply. In the end, she and the pharmacist took ten minutes trying to take apart insulin needles and I told them it was very kind of them, but I would look elsewhere.

Emily then brilliantly remembered that our neighbor Sean who runs the local pet store/animal rescue had given us 1ml syringes when we first adopted Sara from him and she needed to be dosed with medicine. So I headed to his pet store. I asked him if he had any 1ml syringes and he said he didn't have any in the store, but he walked thru to the shelter and came out with a handful of syringes. I thanked him and asked him how much I owed him and he said not to worry about it.

So there ends the story of how we got a four months supply of syringes for free after an evening spent trying to purchase them.

A Kitten to Keep You Company Until Content Returns

2008-01-30T23:45:00.000-05:00

But Who Will Teach Her Football?

2008-01-28T23:59:00.000-05:00

Channel-surfing last night, I stumbled upon a basketball game, and settled in to watch. It was Denver vs. Dallas; at first, I paid more attention to Denver, because of my misplaced affection for Allen Iverson (why did I not know the Sixers traded him?) AND because apparently Dikembe Mutumbo plays/played for them at some point, and I have fond memories of him missing a goddamned free throw and sending that first playoff game into overtime WHEN WE COULD HAVE JUST BEAT THE GODDAMNED LAKERS IN REGULAR PLAY. TELL ME WHY AN EIGHT-FOOT TALL ATHLETE MISSES A FREE THROW? I'M FIVE-THREE AND MY FREE THROW PERCENTAGE IS BETTER THAN THAT. However, after about ten minutes, I settled my attentions on the fact that Dallas has a white boy who can play. The problem with watching basketball while trying to ~~waste time on the internet~~ work is that I usually watch ball on mute, so as not to have to deal with play-by-play. Really, ball games should be watched with company, so that you all have your eyes the same direction and are talking about something else. And possibly eating a cheesesteak.

But, being me, I started thinking about masculinity. I don't have any worries about not giving my child a 'male role model.' There will be a bunch of those around: Uncle, another non-bio uncle we have around, my brother, inshallah my dad for a while. However, there are whole universes of things that I simply don't have as cultural capital, because I didn't learn how to be a proper man in contemporary American culture. In fact, my child may not have access to them at all: none of the men mentioned above perform any sort of standard masculinity: gay, sensitive, artistic, mentally ill, not raised in the US, multiple of the above, etc. I don't want my kid to learn about domination and silence about emotions and agression.

But I want hir* to know what a carburator is. To be able to understand a baseball game. To have the general knowledge that is, in our culture, assigned to men. I've wanted to be butch--I've tried--but then I start knitting, or letting my hair get long which it always is and always has been, or trying on heels, or screaming about mice, or baking, and it all falls apart in a big mess of femme disaster. I can't teach my children the things proper men know, because I get a D in proper masculinity. A D+, tops, and that's just because I like sci-fi. And sports cars. Even though I can't drive.

There's another level that comes to me as I watch sports and think of my child. I don't know how to teach my kid about being a physical being. About running, jumping, climbing trees, as Eddie Izzard says. My reasons for this are not strictly about my poor marks in masculinity. I was a sickly kid. I mean, it started with the premature birth and the borderline-cerebral palsy and the year of intense occupational therapy and then the asthma and then that benign tumor that at fifteen became a cancerous one and then the three years of surgery and crutches and wheelchairs, and somewhere in all of that I skipped enough gym class to be lost at anything resembling physical activity. My surgeons said they wanted me to be able to run for the bus. I can, but three flights of stairs from subway to ground level leaves me a little breathless, and I fail at any task involving getting two parts of my body to act in contradictory fashions. I can't teach my kid to throw a ball. To run. If ze gets hir athletic skills from Kate's side of the family, ze'll be built for motion, and that is nothing I can ever give hir.

I watched the ballgame off and on, between work and non-work. I know the rules of basketball. I can watch a muted football game in a crowded bar and know when to heckle. Baseball is idiotic anyway. My child will learn how to throw a ball from someone else, will maybe learn how to kick hir way across a field like an uncle she never met, will have a running-jumping-climbing-trees childhood, will hopefully at twenty-seven be able to sit in a bar and perform enough masculinity for hir purposes. It's all I've got to give.

We have a date!

2008-01-26T22:45:00.000-05:00

Today, Emily and I sat down and looked at my charts for the last three months, trying to determine when we need the sperm to be in our house. After some back and forth about the semantics of what before and after ovulation means, we have agreed upon a date. That's right folks, we have set a date for delivery. And that date is:

Saturday, February 2nd!

Yes, in less than a week, we will have little frozen spermies in our house. I find that truly bizarre. And quite exciting. When we decided on the date, I felt this sense of calm descend over me. I felt like I was coming off an adrenaline high. Having something about this first try be concrete is just so lovely. Now, I just have to call the sperm bank and figure out the details of delivery.

24 Hours in Pictures

2008-01-25T23:59:00.000-05:00

The Katester informs me that there's this thing? Where you take a photo every hour you're awake of a day? One of the bloggers she reads said we should do it? Yeah, so I did it.

Here is:
FRIDAY, JANUARY 25, IN CRAPPY CAMERAPHONE PHOTOS

MIDNIGHT

We're watching a lot of TV these days that comes on late at night. A Daily Show (not The Daily Show; The Daily Show has writers, A Daily Show has Jon Stewart and Jon Oliver fuckin' around without a script), followed by multiple re-runs of Sex and the City, followed by the midnight Simpsons episode, and by the time we've worked through all of that the 2 AM X-Files is on...It's pretty terrible for us. Plus, Uncle's schedule keeps having him get in around 12:30...so we just stay up to be together. So this is what midnight looks like in our house: my wife, in her fleece pajama pants and robe that my mom got her for Christmas, clutching that remote like her life depends on it.

ONE AM

My comprehensive exams start in a week: Friday the First. For those not in academia, comps are a series of absurd hoops that grad students need to jump through; they ensure that you have a basic grounding in the core texts of your field, and they compel you to spend a whole weekend of your life writing pointless essays. Because of this, I'm spending all my time lately reading articles I don't find particularly interesting, so I can write pointless essays about them in a week's time. 32 pages worth of pointless essays. On the left is an article by Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan about democratic consolodation. On the right is my EndNote entry for said article. On the couch in the background you can see Sara's leg.

TWO AM

Oh, and did I mention our projected insem date is somewhere between Monday the fourth (the last day of my exam) and Wednesday the sixth? So we're a little obsessed. At 2 AM the wife felt the need to read to me about insemination timing.

I coulda done a three AM shot, but it would have been of me in bed in the dark, trying to fall asleep.

EIGHT AM

Kate had to leave for work early, so I got up to see her off, pack her lunch, and generally be wifelike. After she left, I picked up her bathrobe and put it on. I've been doing that a lot lately. This is a bathroom-mirror shot, if you can't tell.

NINE AM

Incidentally, all of the shots from this point forward? Could have been mirrors of the one AM shot. Instead, I photographed other things. There was some sort of Serious Cat Dramatics happening in the house this morning; I think there were more squirrels than usual on the back porch. Both Wicket and Sara kept tearing back and forth between back door and kitchen window with puffy tails. These R Srius Cats.

TEN AM

Because every morning needs some Dana Scully in it. Her hair looks so freakin' good in the ninth season, which is funny because the show is breaking my heart. Why even bother pretending it's the X-Files without some Mulder/Scully longing gazes and witty repartee? And Invisible Mulder? Not cute. I CAN HAS VISIBLE MULDER NOW PLZ. (Funny, I think that's what Scully's thinking the whole season, too.)

ELEVEN AM.

Finally I get around to breakfast. The smoothie of the week is strawberries, blackstrap molasses, maple syrup, soy milk, and plain cow's-milk yogurt. It's not disgusting, and it's healthy. Apparently.

NOON
Time to get dressed. I bought that shirt at the beach last weekend. This is roughly my fashion MO on school-or-other-official-days: ribbed tank top, button down shirt, sweater over top if it's cold enough, cool looking jeans. Hair alternates between up in a bun and clipped, and pulled in a low pony-tail. I like up better, but pony-tail is winning these days because 1) cold=hats=hair should be down and b) my hair is just a little too long and I run a severe risk of a big poof of hair puffing up like a rooster's comb. Need a haircut.

ONE PM

Workin' on the train. A different article this time. Also I kept having to pause in my reading to dance in my seat to "Dirt Off Your Shoulders," which is only recently on my iPod.

TWO PM

And I arrive at 'Snice, a vegetarian/vegan coffee shop in the West Village. I was meeting my exam study group. We are a motley bunch: different regional foci, different theoretical foci, different tastes in caffeinated beverages. You can see the edges of them through the glass. I got the seat by the door. It was cold.

THREE PM

'Snice has the most amazing freakin' cupcakes. They're vegan and covered with icing like I used to eat out of the can that I kept by my bed when I was a kid. We almost had them be the cupcakes at our wedding (for our gluten-eating guests), but the vanilla ones are healthy-looking: you know, they look like they have nutritional value. We didn't want to scare our guests, so we went with Crumbs' less healthy-looking but almost as yummy cupcakes. But I got one today. And a Cuban with soy ham and lots of mustard. And a large hot chocolate, which had entirely too like chocolate in it. Basically, I want liquid chocolate pudding.

FOUR PM

Once something passes two hours in length, unless it has a lot of shiny bells and whistles, I've lost my attention span. This is my "I'm done studying for my exam today" face. Taken in the bathroom at 'Snice. Luckily, we broke up the session about 20 minutes later.

FIVE PM

I got home around 5:30 to a very exciting piece of mail: my very first journal article is published! My copies have arrived! It's a graduate-student women's studies journal; the article is the first published thing I've gotten out of my undergrad thesis. That was my squee of the day.

SIX PM

My evening needed some Dana Scully in it, too. On second thought, those Doggett and Reyes kids are OK. I like there being Mexicans on TV, even when they're played by white girls. And there's a baby around. But still. I CAN HAZ. Etc.

SEVEN PM

Kate gets home from her super-stressful day, and we have to go out tonight (more on that below). Dinner is tomato soup with shredded cheese melted on top. This is a loser's way out of a meal, but she will eat it and it contains vegetables and/or fruit.

EIGHT PM

Our evening was spent at the Park Slope Food Co-op, where we've been members since we moved to the city. It's the largest member-run co-op in the country; there are about 30 paid employees, and 14000 active members, who all work one shift a month (roughly) and do all the major work of the store, from stocking to checkout to designing the newspaper and running the office. Kate's shift started at eight-thirty, but mine didn't start until 9, so I grabbed some much-needed groceries in the break. In this basket: cream cheese, frozen peas, soy milk, tortilla chips, peanut butter, and other necessaries.

NINE PM

Then I took my place at the cash register. Checking out groceries and taking payment are different jobs at the co-op, in order to reduce the number of people who handle cash. I handle cash. We just got a new system, that makes our lives much easier.

TEN PM

Providing plenty of time to do my homework. This is for class, not for exams. It hurt my brain due to the dumb. Sigh.

ELEVEN PM

Then we took the bus home. And came home. And watched TV (not the X-Files: I want her to stay married to me, after all). And ate cheese puffs. And blogged. (Photos not included of that. No one wants to see my in my little brother's red hoodie and blue cotton panties. Not even my wife; she hates this hoodie.)

Kate promises to do this soon...on a day when she won't just be taking photos of what she's watching on TV all day, which is what tomorrow is expected to be.

Revolution

2008-01-23T23:45:00.001-05:00

As we begin this baby adventure, other parts of my life are going completely crazy. There are so many ways in which I can't talk about them on the internet, but suffice it to say, I finally have something to focus on that is taking at least as much of my concentration as the baby project, and that is saying something. So wish me luck on a scary, but ethically and morally correct course of action. At least I'll be able to tell our little Commune Child that they were conceived in the midst of a revolution.

We're off to the races!

2008-01-22T21:02:00.001-05:00

Yesterday was a big day in the world of the Commune Child. It was CD1 of the cycle that we start inseminating. We had been trying to convince my body that it wanted to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday, but Monday was the day and so we go with it. We wanted to push the first possible insemination date a little further past the end of Emily’s Comparative Politics Field Exam, which runs from February 1-February 4. Looking at the year’s worth of data that we have gathered about my cycle, with CD1 on January 21, our possible insemination dates are February 4, 5 or 6. We will just have to hope that this month I go long!

This is all so very exciting and real. When I walked into my chiropractor’s office this evening, Dr. G. said, “Aren’t you just so excited about it!” Em had seen her earlier in the day and had mentioned that my cycle had started yesterday. I do love the interconnectedness of our lives. I think it’s a good environment to bring a child. Now we just need the universe to agree.

Kate on Privilege

2008-01-20T23:59:00.000-05:00

I have always thought that Emily was much more eloquent speaking about class and privilege. I’ve always found it difficult to talk about the privilege inherent in the way I was raised, mostly because at the time I didn’t realize it was there.

I grew up in the same small town as Emily, although we didn’t meet until we attended the same public high school. We had very little in common when we met, same town or not. I grew up in a six-bedroom house on an acre and a half next to a large estate with 30 acres of land. My mother didn’t work outside our home once my parents had me until my brother and I were both almost in middle school. My father was throughout my childhood a clinical psychologist, a stock broker, a personal pilot, part-owner of a minor league baseball team and I had several friends who were certain that he must work for the CIA (this has never been disproven.)

My mother placed great value in books and read to me in both English and French when I was little (she was a French major in college and taught for a while). My father spoke a great deal about books being important, but never read himself. My parents had been big travelers before I was born and when I was born, they brought me along. I got my first passport when I was three months old. By the age of three, I had been to almost every European country.

I attended a private Quaker school from the age of 5 until the end of middle school. I chose a public high school because I wanted something more than I could find with the same twenty kids I’d been going to school with for the last ten years. My first sense of class came from discovering in middle school that one of my friends was on something called a “scholarship”. I was not entirely clear on what that was. In elementary school I took ballet, horseback riding, gymnastics and piano lessons. This was average at my private school.

Looking back at my childhood from a position of much greater understanding of class and privilege than I had for most of my life (although I am aware even the understanding I have now comes from a privileged place), I am struck by how stereotypically white, upper middle-class WASPy suburban my family looks. And from the age of twenty-seven and with significantly more historical context to my family than I used to have, I have to nod my head in appreciation to my father, who made a decision at a young age and did such a good job living up to it that I was in high school before I realized that our last name was recognizable Jewish.

My father was raised in a conservative Jewish household. They attended temple and lived in a mostly Jewish neighborhood. My grandfather was an immigrant from Latvia when he was fifteen. My father’s older brother attended the local public school and was bar mitzvahed. However, my grandfather was a teacher at a private boarding school that was viewed a feeder school for Yale. Unlike my uncle, my father attended the school my grandfather taught at, the only non-Christian, poor, scholarship kid at the school. Although I don’t know this for sure, my guess is that he saw what all his classmates had and how his family lived and decided he wanted to be a WASP too. He somehow convinced his parents that he didn’t want to be bar mitzvahed and then he went on to separate himself as far from his origins as he could manage. He went on athletic scholarship to a very good school (although, ironically, I think, not as good as his father and brother, who both went to Yale). He married a good Methodist girl from a thoroughly English family. He learned the stock market in the early 1980’s and put aside the money he needed to substantiate his new image. He sent his children to a private Quaker school and even went so far as to become Quaker with the rest of our family when I was ten. As Emily said in her post about privilege, he even managed to get himself onto something called the gentleman’s auxilery, the premiere in WASPy credentials in my book.

Emily said in her post, “Class is something you inherit, something that comes to you from your parents, and something you give to your children.” And she is absolutely correct. My father was given a certain class from his parents. And it was this lack of privilege that he rebelled against. He rejected it outright. He chose an entirely new class status for himself and he has forced his life and his circumstances to reflect his choice. He took this new class status and he inculcated this reality he had created into his children. And I am choosing to do the same thing with my children. Our children will know their heritage, where they came from. They will not be in high school when they discover that the first half of their last name is Jewish. We will teach them to celebrate the diversity of their class background, on all sides of their family and then they will have the choice to do with it what they will.

Emily On Privilege

2008-01-19T23:41:00.000-05:00

Here is where I'm coming from.

Kate and I are away for the weekend. (This is relevant, I swear.) When we told people we were headed out of town Friday night, after a late meeting, and they asked us where, it's Kate answered. She named the beach town where we are, and says simply, "Em's folks have a place down there."

I can't say it. I can't say it because it's an admission of something I've never felt. If called upon to account for the free vacation time we spend here, I am a snippy answer: My dad inhereted half a single-wide trailer when his mother died. And, if I really feel like it, I can tell you about the family dramas involved, about the times when my folks have really considered giving the place up because of the monthly payments. Anything. I will tell you anything, to avoid being thought of as a person whose family has a summer house.

I've written some about my personal class history on my other blog: the post is here, and it's a little scattered but I rather like it. In any case, let's have it be enough that I grew up relatively-deprived for where I'm from, one of the only kids I encountered regularly who did not come from easy money. Beyond the general money-tightness, my folks went pretty broke in my teenage years, because I had cancer and we had shitty insurance. So I grew up with a bitterly-honed sense of class resentment, nurtured on merely the difference between being upper-middle-class and being lower-middle-class.

Kate's experience of class was different than mine; I'll let her tell you about it. But class was a problem for us as we started dating, not for any practical reason, but because it was a psychological barrier for me. I didn't like that she knew how to be around money. I didn't like that she knew what brand all her clothes were. I didn't like that she had a car, had a trust fund, had a private school history, had a father who served on something called a gentlemen's auxillary and that neither of her parents appeared to have worked a day in ten years. I couldn't handle it. I've learned how to, now, but it's a skill I resent. I resent privilege. I don't think I'll ever forget how.

------

Here is the first thing about the privilege meme. It is not about what your class status is now; it is about what class status you inherited. Most Americans harbor this notion that you can simply change classes and become someone else, by earning a degree or getting a job or winning the lottery. But you can't. Class is something you inherit, something that comes to you from your parents, and something you give to your children. (This is why I thought it was so powerful when when Bridgett did this meme for herself and her daughter; class can be changed, class can be inherited, class can be passed on all at once.) I think this is why the meme has appeared so frequently in the parenting-and-babies blog circles: we look at our children and we think of what we are giving them. I think about the kids I want to have: how I want to raise them in New York or somewhere similar, so they never think that only white faces are normal and that English is the only language in the world; how I want to teach them about art and music and bad television and good television and cheap boardwalk food and what it tastes like to grow your own dinner. I want them to understand the difference between needing and wanting, to understand about not being able to get everything they want and sometimes not even everything they need, because this is life. This is reality. These are the things I want to teach my kids about money and about class and about privilege: that we are human, that humanity transcends, and that the trappings of creature comfort can be traps, or they can be pleasures. I don't want my kids to have my resentment, and given the material situation Kate and I can predict ourselves being in over the next bit, they probably won't have it; we won't be rich, but we'll be able to keep ourselves together, and they'll be New Yorkers, after all. But I do want them to be aware. I want them to understand what class means, to understand where that resentment comes from. (I wonder if anyone's translated Nietzsche into third-grade-reading-level yet.) I want to give my kids my awareness, without my anxiety. That's why this matters to me.

------

There's another thing I thought about a lot looking over the privilege meme--besides the fact that my internal social scientist could mount an intense and complex refutation of most elements of it. (The cell phone thing? I didn't have one in high school in 1996-2000. My brother, who is a senior now, does have one. What does that mean? Why heating bills and not grocery bills? It was groceries that caused consternation in my house.) But looking over it, there are two different kids of class status being communicated in it. One of them is ownership-status: what does one have? What can one give one's kids? The other is knowledge-status: what sort of information can you convey to other people and your children about yourself. Ownership-status is all the things about summer camp, computers, cars. Those are things we can give, or not give; one can have the money to give one's kids their own computers, but decide not to do it. But knowledge-status is different: it's about giving your kids the assuredness to feel that they are capable of being full and complete members of the world. The actual money involved in reading children's books to your kids, in taking them to museums, or in presenting them with media images that reflect their own images positively. These are the gifts my parents gave me that I respect the most: the books, the museums, the encouragement. Those are gifts that not everyone feels entitled to give to their children; maybe they don't know they're there, maybe they don't know what they can mean, maybe they know but they don't have the time or the energy. And that's where class privilege kills people; that's where it takes away their power. I don't want to give my kids material things that build them up above those around them; it's against my religion, in a very literal way. But I do want to tell them they're worth listening to, worth talking to, worth spending time with. Class is not just about money, not just about what one has; it's about whether one feels entitled to exist. Everyone should feel entitled to exist. That's all I'm saying.

Emily's Privilege

2008-01-18T20:47:00.000-05:00

Here are my answers to the privilege meme. Tomorrow Kate will offer her thoughts on what the meme means, and Sunday I'll do the same.

If your father went to college before you started
If your father finished college before you started
If your mother went to college before you started
If your mother finished college before you started
If you have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
If your family was the same or higher class than your high school teachers
If you had a computer at home when you were growing up
If you had your own computer at home when you were growing up
If you had more than 50 books at home when you were growing up
If you had more than 500 books at home when you were growing up
If were read children’s books by a parent when you were growing up
If you ever had lessons of any kind as a child or a teen
If you had more than two kinds of lessons as a child or a teen
If the people in the media who dress and talk like you were portrayed positively
If you had a credit card with your name on it before college
If you had or will have less than $5000 in student loans when you graduate
If you had or will have no student loans when you graduate
If you went to a private high school
If you went to summer camp
If you had a private tutor
If you have been to Europe more than once as a child or teen
If your family vacations involved staying at hotels rather than KOA or at relatives homes
If all of your clothing has been new
If your parents gave you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
If there was original art in your house as a child or teen
If you had a phone in your room
If your parent owned their own house or apartment when you were a child or teen
If you had your own room as a child or teen
If you participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
If you had your own cell phone in High School
If you had your own TV as a child or teen
If you opened a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
If you have ever flown anywhere on a commercial airline
If you ever went on a cruise with your family
If your parents took you to museums and art galleries as a child or teen
If you were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

Kate's Privilege

2008-01-17T23:09:00.000-05:00

In the next few days, Em and I will both be completing this meme about privilege and then speaking about our different experiences growing up five minutes away from each other in the same small town. I will bold all the things that were true for me. My answers are below:

If your father went to college before you started
If your father finished college before you started
If your mother went to college before you started
If your mother finished college before you started
If you have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
If your family was the same or higher class than your high school teachers
If you had a computer at home when you were growing up
If you had your own computer at home when you were growing up
If you had more than 50 books at home when you were growing up
If you had more than 500 books at home when you were growing up
If were read children’s books by a parent when you were growing up
If you ever had lessons of any kind as a child or a teen
If you had more than two kinds of lessons as a child or a teen
If the people in the media who dress and talk like you were portrayed positively
If you had a credit card with your name on it before college
If you had or will have less than $5000 in student loans when you graduate
If you had or will have no student loans when you graduate
If you went to a private high school
If you went to summer camp
If you had a private tutor
If you have been to Europe more than once as a child or teen
If your family vacations involved staying at hotels rather than KOA or at relatives homes
If all of your clothing has been new
If your parents gave you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
If there was original art in your house as a child or teen
If you had a phone in your room
If your parent owned their own house or apartment when you were a child or teen
If you had your own room as a child or teen
If you participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
If you had your own cell phone in High School
If you had your own TV as a child or teen
If you opened a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
If you have ever flown anywhere on a commercial airline
If you ever went on a cruise with your family
If your parents took you to museums and art galleries as a child or teen
If you were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

Wait, you live in a commune?!?

2008-01-16T22:04:00.000-05:00

People get confused when we say we live in a commune. Who lives in communes these days? No one. It's the year 2008. We're New Yorkers. We have cell phones and are snarky. Communes exist out in the woods with people who don't shower enough and grow their own food and are hopelessly earnest.

Wait a second. I don't shower enough and grow tomatoes and peppers out back. Shit. Bad example.

I admit, it's an unusual commune. There are only three of us; we used to be four, but we lost a member and never replaced her. We knew each other before we moved in together: Uncle and I went to school together, as did Kate and our former member. We don't live on forty acres in the woods, but in a three-bedroom apartment on a nice, quiet Brooklyn block. What we are is a household that is organized around principles of communal living. We are not roommates; we are not three people who happen to inhabit a common space. Although we each have our own belongings, our own lives, our own finances, we are fundamentally one unit, a group of people who have committed ourselves to taking care of each other. A family, to be exact.

We don't organize ourselves around the principle of equality; instead, being good post-Marxists, we go back to the source. From each, according to her ability; to each, according to her need. We juggle rent and grocery percentages, collectively budget for family vacations, and have a massive, never-ending chore chart that divides work by who has what time when and who has what talents and skeeves. (They won't allow me to do laundry, because I believe that it all comes out the same way no matter how you wash it; Kate never has to clean out the drain in the sink.) All together, we manage to piece together a household and a life, and a pretty nice one at that.

As for the baby. Well. We haven't yet sat down and had the major planning conversation yet, but some things are clear. Kate and I are the ones having the baby. However, he is excited; excited enough to read The Ultimate Guide to Lesbian Conception and Pregnancy on the subway, at least. In fact, all three of us are given to random bouts of potential-baby-related squeeing. And once again, it's from each, for each, and we push forward, figuring out where this will take us, knowing that we'll get there together, one way or another.

Things Dana Scully Does While Pregnant That Kate Is Not Allowed To Do

2008-01-16T01:25:00.000-05:00

Pull Guns On People
Wander Through The Desert Alone At Night With a Flashlight
Lift Heavy Trapdoors
Get Strangled By Alien Bounty Hunter
Get Thrown Against A Glass Wall By Alien Bounty Hunter
Be Exposed To Dead Alien Slime
Do Any Of The Above In Three Inch Heels
Look Seriously Dehydrated After Doing All of The Above
End Up Bruised About The Face And In The Hospital
Smell Regurgitated Fingers
Perform Autopsies
Ride In Rowboats (Especially With John Doggett)
Shoot The Ceiling (Actually The Giant Man-Bat On The Roof, But Anyway)
Hunt Man-Bats In General

Items Not On The List:

Save The World. I mean, if duty calls...
Become Pregnant By Fox Mulder. Seriously, if he were willing to be our donor, I'd be all over that shit.

Why, yes, we have been watching the X-Files Season Eight marathon that ran on SciFi today. And, yes, this show seriously blows without Mulder on it. And I think I want to push John Doggett off a cliff. And not an Alien Bounty Hunter John Doggett either.

Get to know us better

2008-01-15T21:35:00.000-05:00

Google Analytics tells me that our blog has had 29 unique visitors. Hello visitors! Special greetings to the two of you who have commented! For all of you, the following:

Because we never really know each other as well as we think, in response to this post I'd like you to ask a question. Anything about which you are curious, anything you feel you ought to know about me. Silly, serious, personal, fannish. Ask away. Then copy this to your own journal, and see what people don't know about you.

Mea Culpa

2008-01-14T20:27:00.000-05:00

There was supposed to be a post yesterday. But I got distracted by...being an idiot. So no post. And it's my fault. And I am officially posting to mention the fact.

And that post I was supposed to write? It's coming.

Sorry, wife.

Emily Returns

2008-01-12T23:45:00.000-05:00

Emily has returned this evening. Please stay tuned until tomorrow when we will return to our regularly scheduled posts.

What I've already sacrificed for this chance of a baby

2008-01-11T23:45:00.000-05:00

I had my appendix out when I was fifteen. Once it was out, the doctors discovered that it was perfectly healthy and had no guess as to what had been wrong with me. At the time, and for many years after, I chalked it up to being absolutely miserable having just transfered from a very small Quaker school where I had been since Pre-K to a large public high school where I knew no one. I believed in psychosomatic illness; I actually still do, I've just gotten new data in recent years.

In the time between my appendectomy when I was fifteen and when I was twenty-four, I had been to many doctors about my intestinal discomfort, distress, love affair with the bathroom, whatever was the polite euphimism of the day. I had been told I was severely lactose intolerant and had Irritable Bowel Syndrome. I believed the doctors because I had found no reason not to. I was uncomfortable and unable to keep food in my body for very long, but I didn't know what to do about it. I've been 5' 7" since I was 11 years old and I fought to stay at 105 pounds. Eating didn't help, so I figured it was just my body type.

When I was twenty-four, I got hired by the same non-profit I work for today. And for the first time in the year and a half since I had graduated from college, I had health insurance. I decided to go crazy and try to address ever single health concern I'd ever had at once. By some wonderful chance, I stumbled across the path of the most lovely rheumotologist. I told him everything that was wrong with me and he said that all these random things that I had told him added up to a potential single disease. He ran some blood tests and sure enough, I was the proud owner of an auto-immune disease that had gone undiagnosed for ten years, my pointless appendectomy being the first outbreak of Celiac Disease.

It explained everything; my inability to gain weight, my love affair with the bathroom, my poor dental hygiene, everything. And the only thing I had to do to cure all my problems was never consume gluten again...

For those of you who don't know, gluten is in EVERYTHING. Gluten is Wheat, Rye, Barley and Oats(by way of always being contaminated). So, no bread, no pasta and pretty much no packaged foods because the American food industry has found that wheat is a wonderful, CHEAP, way to bulk out pretty much any prepared food. I was diagnosed in June of 2005 and I haven't had a Krispy Kreme donut since. I had been a pretty bad junk food addict my entire life and I suddenly lost what I considered to be entire food groups.

But it is worth it. My love affair with the bathroom has stopped being a necessity and is now a choice I get to make. I can finally gain weight; 125 pounds and proud of it. And I don't feel run down and tired all the time. Celiac causes severe cases of vitamin and mineral diffeciences. Emily has stepped up in wonderful ways to help me. She cooks all my food and in recent time has started gluten-free baking in a semi-professional way that involves me actually getting to have home-made cookies and cakes, which is amazing.

Through these past two and a half years, one consideration has kept me on the straight and narrow when very little else would. Women with Celiac Disease that is not under control are at significantly higher risk for miscarriage. Once you are diagnosed, ob/gyns say you have to be gluten-free without any cheating for two years before you should even consider trying to conceive. That's how long it takes your body to really begin to heal fully.

So my desire to get pregnant and bring a baby into our family is what kept me from weeping when I sat down at the conference table this morning at an all-staff celebration of one of my co-worker's promotion within the organization and saw the beautiful box of organic, yeast-risen donuts. It kept me from reaching into the box as time and time again the coworker who had brought the donuts in, explained in loving detail just how wonderful these donuts were. To be fair, my coworkers are great. They go out of their way to accomodate my food intolerances. In fact, they had bought me my own container of diced fruit so I wouldn't feel left out at the meeting.

I sat this morning with my container of fruit in front of me, the donut box being handed across me multiple times so everyone could try each kind and smiled, realizing that after two and a half years of abstaining, in just three weeks, we will start trying for that dream that has kept me from cheating, a healthy baby to love.

The Furry Children

2008-01-10T21:25:00.000-05:00

When I'm at home and I talk about wanting a baby, I always have to pause and say, "I mean a HUMAN baby, princess." Like so many other queer households we are mommies to two beautiful little girl cats. In fact, it's our house motto: Queer Feminists with Cats.

At the moment we have Wicket, a beautiful black and tan tabby cat who will be five years old in April and Sara, a white and black kitten who will be six months old on Monday. While Emily has been away over the last nine days, Sara has become a very needy little girl. Since she came home to us at 8 weeks, she has been a cuddler, a constant source of purrs. But with Emily gone, she's become a clinger also. I am not allowed to sit at the computer without Sara draped on my lap, held craddled in my left arm or draping herself across the back of my neck, contentedly chewing on my hair. If I sit in my blue chair to read or watch TV, she mews plaintively for me to pick her up and then remembers that she can jump now and lands on my lap, feet splayed. She follows me into the bathroom and demands to sit on my lap.

I was instant messaging with a friend the other night and mentioned that I was becoming quite skilled at typing with one hand while cradling a baby cat in the other. I thought that this would be a useful skill when we have a human baby who needs attention all the time. Her response was that I would have to stop cuddling with Sara all the time or she would be jealous of a baby. And I've been thinking about that. Our cats take almost all of our mothering energy right now. I am Mama and Em is Mommy for them. Uncle is...Uncle. I don't think that there is any way that the cats are going to be happy about a little human who gets most of the attention and cries and doesn't pet them nicely. So, any thoughts? I don't want to stop paying attention to my kitty children, but I also want to prepare them for the changes to come and they don't speak English.

Theory and Practice

2008-01-09T21:15:00.001-05:00

I find as the time for the first insemination gets closer and closer that it is more and more difficult for me to focus on anything else. I mean, I get work done and I sleep at night, but this baby thing is really taking over my brain. A year ago, when Em and I were gearing up for our wedding in May, I was just starting to take my BBT and taking prenatal vitamins. Em and I had agreed to not talk in any practical ways about children until after the wedding was over. At the time, even with the wedding on the horizon, I felt like I had baby on the brain all the time. Now, looking back, I clearly had no idea how much more baby on the brain I could get.

I think that the difference between then and now is that then it was all so very theoretical. We didn't really chart yet, we didn't have a donor picked out, we were so new to this whole aspect of our lives. Now, a year later, we have extensive charts for the last nine months, we have sperm in storage, just waiting for a phone call to come winging its way to us. We are just so much more present in the baby-making moment. There is still the aspect of the theoretical in that we aren't actually pregnant yet, but we are starting ttc in less than four weeks. How on earth am I supposed to be focused on anything else at this point?

I See Straight People: Or, How I Learned to Start Worrying and Love Political Science

2008-01-08T23:59:00.000-05:00

I promised the wife I'd post today, so she could have a day off. I had one post planned, but it's not happening. (Aw, hell, it's an anonymous blog, right? I've got what we call "the crazies" round our parts. It involves a lot of not going to sleep, which wears on the braincells. The other post takes thought; this one is stream of consciousness)

I'm away in Arizona, participating in a big academic thing (which is going well, despite the crazies). However, this has been an interesting opportunity to ponder my position within the academy, for a lot of reasons: who do I say who my advisor is? What does it mean that I go to such a crazy school? Is my dissertation actually interesting to anyone?

And, more than anything, why the *fuck* is the discipline of political science so full of straight people?

In computer terms, there's something called 'pinging,' where you send off a signal from one computer to another to make sure the connection is there. (This is probably old hat to most of you, but is a relatively recent discovery for me, Mac user since 1996.) In any case, when I get into a group of people of unknown queerness, I start pinging desperately. I talk about my wife. I talk about queer organizing. I talk about gay bars. God help me, I make tedious sexual innuendo where appropriate. *ping* I say. *queersoverherepleaseletmeknowi'mnotalone*. *ping*

I remember this feeling from Model UN in college; traveling with the team, there was always a strangeness about spending so much time in that straight world. I said at the Model UN banquet my senior year that I appreciated the team for giving me my only consistent contact with straight people, and not only was it the laughline of the evening, it was so resoundingly true that it was a little suprising. And now I'm amidst a bunch of poli sci PhD candidates, including, amazingly enough, a fellow alum of that Model UN team. And I'm pinging. I think I've told more people about our plans to have kids in the last week than I did in the two months before hand. *ppingfuturelesbianmomoverhereping* I've said the words 'my wife' and 'our wedding' at least ten times a day. *pingareyououtthereping* I'm dressing as butchly as I can, which is, unfortuately, not that butch. *pingdykeintanktopoverhereping*

And nothing. NOTHING. I'm pinging like a motherfucker and the closest thing I've gotten to a result is a very nice straight boy with a queer girlfriend (he happens to share my taste in bad TV and sushi, so it's not a total wash). I'm seeing butch girls with short hair and nose rings talk about their husbands, effeminate boys using pool cues as proxies to convince me of something I don't really care about. I'm seeing a huge thunderous mountain of straight people. I'm sick of it.

So, yes, I'm happy there's a growing conversation here about having spouses and kids and how to make academia work while still having a family. And I'm happy that I'm here--there's no way I could not be. But I'm tired of pinging. I'm tired of trying. I am tired of straightness. I want to go home.

Independent Living

2008-01-07T22:12:00.000-05:00

As I said in a previous post, Em and I are a codependent couple. We really enjoy spending the majority of our time together. We usually need a specific reason to go somewhere without each other. So the times when Em travels for her academics have always in the past been times that I put up with, killing time until she gets back.

This is why I am finding myself confused this time to discover that I'm having a perfectly nice time being on my own for these twelve days. Yes, I miss Em and look forward to her return on Saturday night, but I'm being independent and it is going well. It's not so much that I'm surprised by this as that I'm pleased. It's good to know that when she travels again that I can look forward to reading books, knitting the future baby an afghan, watching way to much TV, blogging and playing with the cats. Although I have some question whether my lack of anxiety around her absence has more to do with her only being in Arizona and not Palestine, and not my growing as a human being.

Friends Gossip

2008-01-06T23:14:00.000-05:00

Today was my last day in a position of some noticeable authority at my place of Quaker worship. I'd be more specific but we are trying to maintain some level of anonymity and if I said exactly what I've been doing for the last 13 months, I think that it would be a lot easier to figure out who I am. That having been said, I am both relieved and saddened to be leaving this position. This last year has been difficult, but also rewarding.

Em and I decided this fall that I should step down at the beginning of the new year because the position requires a serious time commitment each month and also requires up to three hours of sitting in one place without moving on wooden benches while being watched by many people, and if, as we are hoping, I get pregnant in the next few months, my ability to do this will be compromised. I felt that it was better to step down at a time when someone new could be relatively easily appointed, as opposed to waiting it out and discovering the problem in the middle of a term of service. It seems more respectful of the meeting community. However, I've enjoyed getting to know the meeting better and being more involved.

In an amusing side note, the members of our meeting are such gossips. I mentioned, I thought discreetly, to one member of our meeting my reasons for not continuing in the position and within a few weeks, five different members of the meeting had either asked me if I were pregnant yet or talked about how exciting it was that Em and I would be "increasing our numbers." We have declared that we are very happy that they are all so excited, but that we will let them know as soon as we feel comfortable sharing a possible pregnancy with them.

The Traffic Game

2008-01-05T19:39:00.000-05:00

We have this game we play. Whenever we are in the car and the traffic is looking really good and we are pleased by our progress, we never say, "Oh, wow, look at how well the traffic is moving, we're making great time." We say instead, "I'm sure that any minute now the traffic will slow down considerably and the trip will take longer than we planned." This is because of a theory that we hold that if you talk about how well something is going and presume to suggest that the future will continue to be good, something bad happens because you tempted the gods. This game doesn't always work, but a lot of the time it does and we can't explain it so we just go with it.

When we started talking seriously about having a baby, we realized that this was another situation where we needed to play the game. We couldn't say, "Of course, Katie will get pregnant really quickly so we need to plan for an October baby." That would just be asking for God to notice us and make it take forever for us to conceive. It's not that I believe in a vengeful God, I'm just really careful about jinxing my life. So we say instead, "We should buy 8 vials of sperm because we will certainly need all of them. We should stock up on OPK's because we are in this for the long haul."

That being said, there is this little bit of me that just keeps thinking about how I will be pregnant in just a few months of trying; about how I will be on maternity leave this time next year. (I will leave for another day the description of how good the benefits are at my job. Seriously, Em jokes that I work in Sweden.) And even as the little, quiet bit of me fantasizes about how big I will get over the next year, another part of me is realistically planning to be in this for the long haul. Because Emily and I have not found life to be easy and without trial. Death and serious illness seem to stalk us. So I try to nurture the little bit of myself that is thinking that this baby thing is going to be easy and straightforward, because deep down, I am so convinced that this is going to be one more thing that is really hard.