Milk Break
Interesting article in today's NYTimes: On the Job, Nursing Mothers Find a 2-Class System. Something I'd never thought about, either while I was nursing or after. My current company has lactation rooms—I used one to nurse the Beaner in when I was visiting in March 2005—and since I worked from home part-time while I was nursing, I could nurse him with one hand while typing with the other. Luckily, I never had to pump on a daily basis.
While we middle- and upper-class working women are out picketing for lactation rights, we should give a thought to the women who don't have breaks long enough in which to pump, who have no place to pump, or who can't even afford a breast pump. As the article notes, "It is a particularly literal case of how well-being tends to beget further well-being, and disadvantage tends to create disadvantage — passed down in a mother’s milk, or lack thereof." It's a cruel irony that it's mothers with the lowest-paying jobs who have to pay the most to feed their babies (formula ain't cheap!).
My Turn
I know I haven't blogged since a week ago Friday; consequently, I have a bunch of stuff I want to talk about clogging up my brain... and keeping me from blogging. (Funny how that works.) Since I'm writing from the car on Al's Blackberry, I'll probably limit my remarks to what happened most recently—which also happens to be the cure for blogclog writer's block (i.e., start from where you are, not from the beginning).
We are traveling to State College, PA this weekend, and last night we stayed at a Homewood Suites in Mechanicsburg. The room smelled like there was a dead body stashed under the couch (I am NOT exaggerating!), but otherwise, it was OK. The Beaner spent all but 5 minutes of our time in Mechanicsburg (ok, now I'm exaggerating) whining "my turn! my turn! my turn!" and occasionally bursting into tears. We couldn't figure out why he was trying to pull the suitcases off the luggage cart as he yelled "my turn!"... until we passed an empty luggage cart in the hallway, and he climbed up on it and yelled "MY TURN!" triumphantly. Yep, he wanted a ride.
Remain Calm... And Do Not Leave the Building
There's a fire alarm going off in my husband's building. An announcement over the PA has indicated that the alarm is on the 35th floor, and that the Fire Department has arrived to investigate... but in the meantime, employees are not to use the elevators or the fire stairs. In other words, remain at your desks. Do not leave the building. Everything's fine.
Sound familiar?
Yeah, to me, too. The last time I knew of where employees were told to ignore the fire alarms and remain at their desks was five years ago today. The people who obeyed that directive are all dead now, buried in the rubble of the Twin Towers.
This alarm is probably nothing; I heard no roar of jet engines over the city minutes ago, and my husband says this sort of false alarm happens at his building a few times a year. Still, because of the date, because of this most frightening of anniversaries, I am nervous.
Update, 11:48am ~ Everything's fine; it was a false alarm, and they're resetting the building's alarm system. I still have a tightness in my chest, though...
For Josie: Further Proof That It's Not All Bad
This audio clip should require no captions. It's enough to know that the name of the file is "giggleboy".
Letters and Numbers
Today's adventures in audio include the Beaner singing the alphabet song with me and following my lead as I count to ten, and the Beaner and I pretending to talk to each other on the phone. That's how I ended up getting a pretty good recording of his speech: I started out by trying to record him chatting on the hotel phone (he picked it up and started gabbling away while we were in the sitting area of the hotel suite), but when he saw me approach with my cell phone held out, he hung up the hotel phone and reached for the cell. He motioned for me to pick up the hotel phone, and we pretended to have a conversation—while the cell phone was still recording. He was talking directly into the mouthpiece, which is more than I could have hoped for. The alphabet is the second conversation. (The photos were taken at home, last night.)
What's Going On
I have a little list of things I've been wanting to write about, but which I haven't had time to address as of yet (and yes, I'm still behind on my e-mail—if I owe you one, hopefully you'll hear from me soon). Part of the problem—which isn't really a problem at all, given that usually we're homebodies who don't do much of anything—is that we're too busy DOING THINGS and HAVING FUN for me to keep up with, well, writing about the things we're doing.
Some of the things on my list:
- This one I don't need more than a bullet point to write about: I've been considering moving my about town and about town II photoblogs to Flickr for a long time because it's getting to be too much of a pain to edit and post the photos separately. (Consequently, the photosteams on the avocado8 home page—and the blogs themselves—are hopelessly out of date.) The only thing that's been holding me back is the thought of trying to find all the originals on backup CDs so I can upload those, rather than the medium-sized versions I've posted to the blogs. Now that Flickr has geotagging, though, I've finally decided to just bite the bullet, upload the medium-sized images, and move forward. I started the process yesterday and have uploaded about 20-30 photos from about town II (Philadelphia); obviously there are a TON more to get through, and I haven't done the geotagging yet, but eventually Flickr sets will replace the two about town blogs. (And if you're wondering why my photostream suddenly has a bunch of photos from 2003 in it, now you know.)
- Running toward the street. This is something I want to write about for PhillyMoms, but I'll probably cross-post it here. It's about how I've been acutely aware lately that we are raising a kid in the city.
- College towns: favorite haunts After our trip to State College (home of Penn State) last weekend, I've had college towns on the brain. Hopefully I'll get a chance to share my thoughts (and ask you to share yours, too)!
- Labor Day Weekend Yes, I'm aware that this happened almost three weeks ago now, but it sort of epitomized the busy-ness we're experiencing around here. On Friday Al, the Beaner, and I drove down to my parents' house in Westminster, MD so they could see and play with the Beaner, and I could ride with them up to Rochester, NY, for my Aunt Anna's 90th birthday open house on Saturday. Mom, Dad, and I left at 5:30am on Saturday, and Al and the Beaner drove back to Philadelphia a few hours later. Mom and Dad dropped me off in Philly on Sunday afternoon, about an hour before Al's brother, sister-in-law, and nephew arrived. We went to the Franklin Institute on Sunday afternoon, and Al and Carl played golf on Monday morning while Tris, Henry, the Beaner, and I went to Schuylkill River playground (something else I want to write about for PhillyMoms—the playground has been renovated) and picked up lunch. All in all, a crazy, wonderful weekend.
- And finally, we freecycled the high chair last week. The Beaner will still sit in high chairs in restaurants (occasionally), but he'd long ago started stiffening when we tried to force him into the one at home. He now eats at his little table for breakfast and lunch, and he sits in a regular chair at the dining room table when we eat dinner together. We looked for a booster seat a couple months ago, but we never found one we liked, and he seems happy to just sit in the chair, so that's the routine now.
- Oh, right, one more thing: Our morning routine has changed AGAIN. For a while there the Beaner was waking up between 6am and 7am and snuggling in bed with us until Al was ready to get up (often until I returned from my morning walk), but this week he's started demanding that Al get up and take him downstairs after only a few minutes of snuggling. In other words, we've returned to the routine of a few months ago. We're also experimenting with naps (no nap at all / changing the time / waking him up after an hour) and bedtimes to try to come up with a magic formula that will get him to go down quickly and sleep past 7am. Oh, how much better our mornings are when he sleeps past 7am!
List of Demands
This morning when I heard The Beaner howl, I poked Al, as I normally do, and mumbled, "he's up." Al responded with dreadful news: "It's 1:30."
Now, normally if The Beaner wakes screaming in the middle of the night, we let him cry it out. Occasionally, if it sounds like he's screaming BLOODY MURDER and the entire earth might split in two, one of us (Al) will go up and see if he's OK, and maybe even bring him down to sleep with us. The middle-of-the night screaming bouts are rare, however, and the ones that end up with him sleeping with us even rarer. I fully expected The Beaner to go back to sleep on his own.
That's when the screams turned into a list of demands, delivered while crying.
"Mommy!"
"Daddy!"
"Mommy, up!"
"Mommy, up!"
"Daddy!"
"Daddy, gooooo dooooowwwwwn staaaaairs!"
"Gooooo dooooowwwwwn staaaaairs!"
"Wal-KING!"
"Wal-KING!"
"WAAAAL-KING!"
For pete's sake, kid, be reasonable. And also? Start smaller. You could have stuck with just "Mommy!" and "Daddy!" for your first time yelling actual words from behind the closed door of your upstairs bedroom, and you would have broken our hearts. The demand to go for a walk was just over the top.
Heath Hubris
Whatever could have possessed me to brag to my allergist that I hadn't used my rescue inhaler more than twice since I'd last seen him (3 months before), and that I'd stopped taking the Advair entirely—especially on the eve of the fall allergy season? Not two days after that visit, I started having trouble breathing, even though I followed his suggestion to start up the Advair again. Al thought it might be *because* of the Advair, which seemed a plausible theory, though it could just as easily have been the huge stalks of ragweed growing in our vegetable pots on the back deck.
About two weeks ago I caught a cold, and that's when the difficulty breathing *really* set in. The cold's mostly cleared up now, and my bronchi have finally loosened their grip on the clear goo they excreted in a panic during the first few days of the malady, but of course that means I still have to cough the shit out. And cough I have. The last two mornings I've been awakened by tight-chested coughing and wheezing fits that have had me fumbling in my nightstand for my inhaler just so I can breathe deeply enough to go back to sleep.
I love fall—it's definitely my favorite season—but this asthma and allergy stuff totally sucks. I hate being on medication, I hate being sick, and most of all, I hate the feeling that I am drowning or being strangled or sat upon. God, I hope The Beaner doesn't inherit my asthma. He started showing signs of seasonal allergies about a year ago (despite the fact that our pediatrician says that he's too young for them), and he's been rubbing his eyes and sneezing for a couple weeks now (though he doesn't have a cold). Please, please don't let him be doomed to twice-yearly guaranteed bouts of bronchitis or pneumonia. I promise I'll be good next time, and not brag about my ability to take a deep, medication-free breath.
On Protecting The Beaner's Privacy
I have become very conscious lately that The Beaner is growing up and becoming a real person, a person who deserves privacy. Something Heather Armstrong said at a BlogHer panel on this subject really struck me, and I've been mulling it over ever since. She said, in reply to a question about whether she worried about her daughter hating her later, when Leta realized how much of her life was on the Internet, "I've already begun censoring what I say about Leta in order to protect her privacy. For the first two years, her story was the same as every other baby's, so I didn't feel like I was invading her privacy by sharing it." [Although I used quotes here, this is a paraphrase; it looks like the podcast for the session hasn't been posted yet, but I would have been too lazy to download and listen to get the words exactly right anyway. It's the gist I'm concerned with.] This quote struck me for two reasons:
1. I'd never thought about it before, but she's absolutely right: for the first two years, every baby's story is essentially the same. There are variations, obviously, but the developmental milestones and parental angst are pretty universal—and it's this universality that probably makes reading other parents' blogs so enjoyable for me. The majority of my blogroll is made up of blogs that make me feel like I'm not the only one out there feeling the way I'm feeling or doing the things I'm doing, that I am not alone.
2. I've been worrying and waffling over The Beaner's privacy since a couple days after he was born. At first I refused to post photos of him on Flickr, because it seemed too public (I had a password-protected site for family that I used for the first six months or so), even though I knew Flickr had privacy controls. (I didn't use them mainly because my family members aren't particularly Internet-savvy, and having them set up accounts anywhere is still pretty painful.) I wasn't sure how much of our experiences to share, which is probably surprising, given how much I *have* shared. (Believe it or not, there are still many things that have gone unsaid.) And now that The Beaner's approaching age two and making it more and more obvious that he is going to remember what we say about him now, I worry even more that I will embarrass him, open him up to ridicule, or make him a target of an unsavory admirer (a much more remote but very scary possibility).
So basically, I've been struggling with the privacy issue all along, even during the universal parts. It's why I started writing milestones in a little book in my nightstand several months ago—so I'd have a place to record them that wasn't public. Some of what's in that book eventually makes it into this blog, but most doesn't. Last night I ran for that little book moments after a major milestone occurred because I wanted to make sure I recorded it... and as much as I wanted to record it here, where I usually take the time to think about what I want to say and how I want to say it, and where I know some of my close friends and faithful readers will be just as excited about it as I was, I'm just not sure it's something The Beaner would want me to share. If I see you in person, I'll tell you then.
What I will say here is that The Beaner has started to speak in short (but complete) sentences. Yesterday Al and The Beaner surprised me at the Starbucks while I was out on my morning walk, and Al went on from there to work and The Beaner walked home with me. After Al left us and before I totally melted town from having to carry a coffee, a bag of bread, and The Beaner's milk while trying to hurry him along so we could make it to the house before Hannah did, The Beaner said very clearly, "I want Daddy." He's also started saying, "Go walking and looking for Bobs [Saabs]", among other things. I hope the pediatrician is suitably impressed when we go in for our last well-baby visit for a while tomorrow. (We were supposed to go in July, but we missed that appointment due to a scheduling error on the office's part.) She hasn't seen him since April, and I think she's going to be pretty surprised by how much he's grown and how much more verbal he is now. Then again, she probably won't; if our experiences are as universal as Heather suggested, she's seen it all before.
Gasbags
Al and I have noticed that gas prices are dropping in the area, especially in New Jersey (which is a 10-minute drive away). We've actually been kinda dismayed by this news; kinda dismayed, and kinda torn. On the one hand, it's nice that our expenses are dropping, and we recognize that lower oil and gas prices make a huge difference to people with incomes significantly less than our own. On the other hand, both of us think gas prices should be HIGHER. At something like $3 or $4 a gallon, renewables become competitive, and that's better for the environment (and ultimately better for all of us). It might actually be better for the economy, too, as it would encourage companies to innovate and decrease our dependence on foreign oil (a depleting resource, in any case).
No matter which direction gas prices are headed in, however, they seem to bring out the idiot in everyone. As we saw post-Katrina, a slew of college-educated Senators, Congressmen, and other public officials seemed to forget what they'd learned about the law of supply and demand and started screaming about price gouging and prosecutions and our RIGHT as Americans to cheap gas. People were idling in huge lines to save $.05 a gallon. Thought that madness was over? Nope. The idiots are back in force. Witness:
In NJ, Fuel Prices Dip Below $2 A Gallon At Last
by KYW's Mike DeNardo
Back in the summer, you may have thought you'd never see this day. But here it is -- the day you could find gasoline for under two bucks a gallon!
Right off Route 295 in Swedesboro, NJ, gas was selling for $1.98 a gallon on one side of the street, $1.95 a gallon on the other side.
Drivers from all over were taking advantage.
(DeNardo:) "Did you ever in your lifetime think that you would see gasoline below two dollars a gallon again?"
(Driver:) "No I didn't. I thought it was just going to stay up. They're ripping us off!"
(Driver:) "Absolutely not. There's no way. I just hope it stays this way. I just came from Pennsylvania, I work in New Jersey, and every gas station I passed over there was still $2.50."
(Driver:) "I'm from Delaware. So it's still over $2. I come to Jersey to get filled up and go back to Delaware."
(DeNardo:) "And what did you think when you saw gas below $2?"
(Driver:) "Excited!"
With gas prices trending downward, drivers say it's about time.
<sigh>
Scones!
I made the most awesome scones this morning! It was my fourth try fiddling with this recipe, adapted from The Healthy Kitchen by Andrew Weil and Rosie Daley, and while all four batches were good, this one was the best. I ate TWO scones this morning. They're very grainy, which I like (ever since I cut waaaaay back on sugar, I have a hard time eating any carbs that *aren't* whole-grainy), and not too sweet. If you like your scones sweeter, you can sprinkle some sugar on top. If you like them less sweet, leave out the fruit, or use unsweetened dried tart cherries instead.
Multi-grain Scones #4
1 egg
4 T. grapeseed oil
1/4 t. almond extract
1 1/2 c. unbleached white flour
1/4 c. wheat bran
1/2 c. rolled oats (not instant)
3 T. flaxseed meal
2 T. millet
2 T. steel cut (Irish) oats
1/4 t. salt
1/2 c. sugar
1 T. baking powder
2 or 3 dashes of cinnamon
1/2 c. sliced, dry-toasted almonds
1/2 c. chopped dried apricots
1/2 c. milk
Heat oven to 375°. In a large mixing bowl, whisk eggs and oil together until pale. In another bowl, mix the next 12 ingredients (flour through apricots) together with a wooden spoon until thoroughly combined. Add the dry ingredients to the egg mixture a little at a time, stirring well after each addition. When the mixture becomes hard to stir, abandon the spoon and attack it with your hands until you've got a bowl full of well-mixed crumbly bits. Add the milk and stir again with the spoon until thoroughly distributed.
Lightly grease two cookie sheets (or one large sheet pan). Drop the dough by spoonfuls onto the sheets until you have between 8 and 10 mounds. Bake for 12-15 minutes, until scones are lightly browned and dough is dry. Allow to cool 10 minutes, and then SNARF!
The original recipe called for poppy seeds where I used steel cut oats and 5 T. of grapeseed oil where I used 4 T. + 3 T. of flaxseed meal, and it had no nuts or fruit. It also had 1/2 t. of salt and 1/2 t. cinnamon, I think. Oh, and the sugar is technically supposed to go in with the oil and the egg. I accidentally put it in with the dry ingredients in batch #2, however, and I really liked the way that batch came out, so I tried it again. There's something magic in doing that (perhaps because it makes mixing with your hands necessary, and the hands are the magic bit?), so I'll be doing it again next time, too. In none of the 4 tries did I follow the recipe exactly as written, so it's pretty flexible. Enjoy!
Update, Oct. 2: I remembered after I put a second batch using this recipe into the oven last night that I'd put 1/4 t. almond extract in last time. Al says he prefers the scones without the extract (and also with cherries instead of apricots—I made half of each this time), but I prefer them with. Your choice.
Apple Picking!
We've been shouting "APPLE PICKING!" at each other for about a week and a half now. At first it was in anticipation of the event—the first of two we hope to complete this season—which was scheduled for this past Saturday in Stow, MA. Ever since we got back, it's been to remind ourselves what a great time we had, and how many wonderful apples are taking up all the space in our fridge. (By the way, The Beaner learned "apple picking" right away, and he repeats it as often as we do.)
We met my friend Suzanne (from junior high!) and her family at Honey-Pot Hill, where we were amazed to find that the rain had not deterred at least 50 other families from picking apples or going on hayrides. I think if I'd not been away from Massachusetts for so long, or if we hadn't been the only ones picking in a downpour in Pennsylvania last year, I wouldn't have been so surprised. Apple picking is just one of the things you do in the fall in New England; it's as normal and expected as raking leaves or trick or treating.
Suzanne and I hadn't seen each other in over 20 years (though we have corresponded on paper and via e-mail occasionally in that time), so it was really fun to get together. She looked so fabulous, and she was was just as warm and real and fun to be around as I remembered. The Beaner and Suzanne and Tom's son G had an absolute ball chasing each other around the trees while munching apples and feeding the goats near the farm store. I would have taken more photos, but I was busy chatting up a storm (and probably boring Suzanne and Tom to death) and occasionally filling our 20lb. bag with Empires, Macintoshes, Cortlands, and Liberties. We'll probably be eating apples and making applesauce right up 'til Fuji season in late October, when we hope to make another trip to Weaver's with our friends the Otts. Yay, apple picking!
click the photo to launch a slide show of PYO goodness!