Hmmmmm

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. ranks dead last on breastfeeding support policies. We're also the only developed country with no maternity leave policy.

So, let's see. We put out magazine covers with provocative breastfeeding images with captions asking us if we're mom enough. We create commercials terrorizing women into thinking that formula feeding is akin to riding a mechanical bull while pregnant. We have the slogan "breast is best", and we have La Leche League. And we also have no paid parental leave policy and no paid nursing breaks for new mothers.

So as far as I can figure, we're making it extremely difficult for most working mothers to breastfeed (and in many jobs, it's impossible) while simultaneously creating a culture in which you are definitely a second-class mother if you don't breastfeed. Now I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I just have to wonder about this cultural obsession with breastfeeding. It just happens to be the one thing you can't do easily while working many jobs. Seems to me that if policy makers really cared about breastfeeding, they'd enact policies to actually support mothers' abilities to do so. Instead we've got this strong pressure to breastfeed without the supports in place to help mothers do it...unless, of course, they quit their jobs. Then it becomes a lot easier.

It makes a person wonder.

When I was pregnant and trying to figure out how I'd ever manage to breastfeed twins, I discovered that there was a LLL multiples meeting. I was encouraged to attend before I delivered, so that I could make some connections, get some help and advice, etc. So I called up the leader to find out when and where the meetings were. Well, they met once a week. At 10:00 a.m. On a Tuesday.

I was like, "Uh, I teach then. Do you have any evening or weekend meetings that I could attend?" No. They did not. So who gets the benefit of these supports? Not working women.

I personally had it lucky. It's much easier to keep breastfeeding when you have a super flexible job, a private office for pumping, and enough saved sick leave to use the FMLA to at least stay home for a couple of months after delivery. But my job is not the norm. How exactly are women who work less flexible or hourly jobs supposed to do it? I don't think we really care, as a nation, about the health and well being of babies and kids. If we cared, we'd change our policies. I think we're more interested in profit margins and the economy.

Three I Guess

1. A while back I was in the shower and noticed a lump on my ribcage about an inch in diameter. Jake was worried about it, because he's a hypochondriac (especially on my behalf), but I wasn't worried. The ribcage doesn't seem like much of a worrisome place to find something like that. Nevertheless, I called the doctor and long story short got scheduled to see the surgeon today to check it out. Well, the surgeon said that it is just a harmless fibroma, so nothing to worry about. That's good news.

2. My new goal is to be in bed by 10:30 at night and turn out the light by 11. So that I can try to not feel so tired all the time. But wait. It's 10:55 now. Why am I so bad at going to bed? I just don't feel tired at the right times.

Also, night time is my only time to myself. It's hard to give that up. But maybe it'd be easier if I started having an easier time getting up when I hear Milo's door open.

3. Nora has started sleeping in. Some mornings, on school days, I end up waking her up a full hour after Milo's already up, and she is cranky. This seems pretty cruel, that I'm starting to get a sleeping-in kid but the other kid is decidedly a morning person. Who wants his breakfast pronto, thank you very much.

4. Wait. I don't have four things.

Snapshots of Today

This morning we spent the whole morning planting flowers and herbs. Here are my herbs all nice in a row in our cedar planter. How will they do? Only time will tell.

After the kids went to nap I made a summer pasta salad with cherry tomatoes, avocados, basil, lemon, garlic, capers, and green onions, but I forgot the green onions! So I strolled down to the neighborhood market to pick up some green onions. The grocer said "Hey, green onions" and then started singing "green onions" by Booker T. and the MG's. On the walk home I looked at all of the recall signs. Pretty much every other house looks like this:

In the afternoon we went to a party downtown. Our friends have a condo right near the capitol and they have this awesome set up where they've got this huge terrace, bigger than our own patio, and then the terrace connects to this big grassy area and another set of gardens. It's like the best of both worlds, living right downtown in a modern condo and also having outdoor space right outside your back door. 

I'm So Tired

Tonight just as I was literally exiting through the door to go out to dinner (of course) Milo fell off his chair and gashed his eyelid, causing a lot of bleeding all over the place. It's a small (1 cm) but deep cut. That kid is going to have so many scars by the time he gets to college.

The kids' classroom has a sister school in Liberia. They've been sending packages back and forth, pictures, notes, etc. between the two schools. There is currently a book drive to send a bunch of books to the Liberian school. Milo and Nora chose some books to donate.

Meanwhile, Nora has been gathering random pennies throughout the house and she now has a cup full of pennies. She wants to go to the book store with me and use her money to buy a book for the kids in Liberia. She's been pretty insistent on it, so I'll take her this weekend if we can squeeze it in. This is the first time that Nora has demonstrated any sense that money is something you use to buy things. Pretty awesome.

That Time Magazine Cover Everybody's Talking About

Boy howdy am I glad that my kids are older and I now get to rely on my brain, rather than my stupid messed up body, to parent. THANK GOD.

The kids are so awesome and entertaining now. Tonight I tossed Milo's face cloth at him as he was goofing around, and it smacked him in the face and then fell through his arms. Instead of being annoyed, he said, "Good job, you made a basket!"

Nora explained to me that she has something she is going to bring home tomorrow for me for Mother's Day. It's a flower! Maria has been helping her make it! She has absolutely no concept of keeping something a secret. Nora also motioned towards her pants pocket. She was wearing purple and white checked capris, with two zippered pockets. One was zipped closed. She said, "I have something in my pocket for you for Mother's Day too. But I have to keep it in my pocket until then. Well...you can peek. (Opens the pocket about half a centimeter). Okay, that's enough of a peek." I hope whatever is in that pocket wasn't alive.

Lawn Mower Accident

One time, a long long long time ago, I was having dinner with a friend. We were out of town at the time, with a bunch of other friends as well, but this one night just this one friend and I were having dinner. Anyway, at that time, he had this big secret he wanted to tell me. And as he was hemming and hawing and delaying and giving little hints about this terrible secret, my mind started constructing these hypothetical scenarios about what the secret might be.

Meanwhile, tonight I was chatting with another friend and this friend asked if I ever hear from that other friend, the one with the secret. So I was sharing what I know (our lives pleasantly diverged long ago) and then I had this sudden memory. I suddenly remembered that this old friend had experienced a terrible accident, I think involving a lawn mower, in which a very delicate body part had been partially severed!

Isn't that awful? I thought to myself, "How could I have forgotten that?" I felt sad for a bit, remembering that terrible detail about this person.

But then I realized, oh wait a sec. Waaaait a sec. No. There was never any lawn mower accident. That was actually just one of the hypothetical scenarios I had constructed way back when, during the time when he was equivocating about telling me his terrible secret! I can remember where we were sitting in the restaurant at dinner, I remember him being very embarrassed about his secret, and I remember imagining what it could be, including that scenario. (Which is a really dumb thing to imagine. Who mows the lawn naked?) His actual secret was much more benign.

What is really creepy about this (aside from the fact that I had ever imagined such a bizarre scenario to begin with) is that I just barely caught myself in the false memory. Something about the illogic of it made me catch myself and remember what truly happened. But I'm sure there are other times when I don't catch myself. It's truly creepy to me, how our memories are constructed. We construct our memories, totally unreliably, and therefore we construct our past. And our reality. What is real? What is not? There is no way to know. Our sense that what we remember is what happened is totally an illusion.

I have another experience like this. It involves the last time a huge conference I attended was in San Francisco. This was in 2006. I have two memories of staying in a hotel in SF. In the first memory, I am staying in a very large, dark room. There is a table between the bed and the window. The bathroom is between the bedroom and the door. I sat at the table when I talked to my cousin on the phone, telling her a story about a horrible session I'd had in which the discussant had been a jackass.

Then there is a different hotel room I stayed in. It is extremely bright and white, and it is small. There was an armchair next to the bed. The bathroom was behind the bed. The layout of this room was completely different. The chair is where I sat when a friend visited me. My friend sat on the bed and showed me a sculpture he had made.

The problem is, there was only one trip, and only one hotel. And I know I stayed in that big, dark room, and I know I stayed in that small, white room. But I do know for a fact that I only stayed in one hotel on that trip. Which room is the real room? They are totally different rooms in my memory. I mean, nothing even close to the same. If my life depended on it, I could not tell you which room was the real room.

I am pretty sure that these incidents don't mean I'm crazy. I think they just mean I'm able to sometimes, very rarely, catch some grave errors in my mental images and my memories. What I suspect is that these errors are constant occurrences, but I have no way of noticing, or knowing.

Our intuition that we perceive and remember the world in any direct way is an illusion.

Three Petty Things and One Not

Petty Thing #1: Last night Nora asked me how much I weigh. Huh? I said I wasn't sure, since I haven't stepped on a scale in a very long time, and then I gave her an estimate. She said, "Well maybe you could try getting on the scale and then you can let me know." Uh...no? I'm pretty sure Nora has no idea what she weighs, so her sudden interest in what I weigh was pretty surprising.

Petty Thing #2: We have to go to this wedding. I don't want to go, but Jake wants to take the whole family so we're going. It's on a Friday afternoon, at like 3, in a town about 2 hours away. So that means taking the day off work. And having the kids miss their nap. So anyway, it's his cousin who is getting married and I've never met the bride. I've met the groom twice, I think. But recently I got an envelope in the mail (of course addressed to me with Jake's last name) inviting me to this woman's bridal shower. Just me, not Jake.

Okay, wait a sec. I have literally never met her. And she's like 35 and getting married for the second time. And I have never met her. And I'm supposed to go to a bridal shower for her? Are you freaking kidding me?

(Also, the wedding invitation itself included their registry info. Sorry, but...no. I'm no Emily Post, but come on.)

Petty Thing #3: Due to not-worth-getting-into details I am paying $160 to feed my department members lunch. In return for all of those other months when they feed me lunch, and by feed me lunch I mean bring in a tray of limp deli meats and call it a day. Um, can we abolish the communal lunch thing already? I'd rather keep my $160 and take care of my own lunch each month.

Non-Petty Thing: Last night Nora had reflux. And here I had thought, once again, that she had outgrown it. We've been cutting back on her meds. Anyway, I figured she needed to sit upright for a while so I said she could sit with me and watch Deep Space 9 with me and Jake. (It was a quirky episode. The episodes are either stressful or quirky, and this one was quirky, so I knew it wouldn't be scary.) She sat there on my lap for the whole time, and occasionally Nora would look at me with this huge, sweet smile on her face, because it was such a treat to stay up with Mom & Dad and look at the grown-up video they were watching. It totally reminded me of this one time that I took Nora to meet a friend at a coffee shop when she was about 6 months old. And the whole time, sitting on my lap, Nora would look up at me with these giant smiles. My friend said, "Boy does she love you!" And things haven't changed at all. Nora seems so grown up to me most of the time but sometimes I still see the baby in her.

Weekend Notes

Cloudy! Crummy weather! But enough non-rain times yesterday for me and Jake to put together some wood planters, do yard work, and prep our patio for summer.

Dinner: Milo at strawberries wrapped in spinach, cherry tomatoes, rice noodles, a wonton, and cheese. Nora ate...strawberries. And the teeniest tiniest bite of one rice noodle (approximately 0.5 mm thick). LE SIGH.

Jake and I ate homemade hot and sour soup with rice noodles, tomatoes, and spinach. Super awesome recipe. Yum.

But! I successfully made granola bars. I have been struggling with this for a long time because it is hard to get the consistency right. Sometimes it won't set up, and it's granola mush. Other times, it breaks apart and just becomes granola. But now I have succeeded in making actual bars, and the recipe I have is really delicious while still being decent for you (includes stuff like wheat germ, oats, dried cherries, and only has honey for a sweetener!). This is a big score for me because the kids love granola bars but I dislike feeding them what you can buy in the store. Even the healthy organic ones have about 30 ingredients.

Last weekend I went for a run in normal shoes and before the second mile was done my knees were dust. So frustrating. But this weekend I went for a run barefoot style and did 4.5 miles without trouble, so hooray! Part of it might have had to do with the fact that I was going up and down more hills, so it was giving me some relief from relentless flat foot pounding. But then again, this has become the kind of thing where there are about 80 different variables and I always attribute the latest change to whether my knees do well or poorly. It's totally non logical and superstitious and stuff.

More bad work stuff! Last year our chancellor, who has since departed for greener, private pastures, set up a private company to consult with some administrators to come up with a new HR design. They've now released their recommendations, one of them being no more cost of living raises. I mean, not that we've had any since 2006, but that's because there was no money rather than it not being built into the pay structure. Also, compensation would be determined by market analysis. Which means...what? (And how do you do that for everybody on campus, including janitors, secretaries, academic staff, medical personnel, food service workers, science professors, English professors, etc., etc., etc.?) So any raises would be determined by this non-defined market analysis, and by merit as determined by one's peers (which I'm sure would involve no favoritism whatsoever). In addition, these adjustments are supposed to enable a decrease in one's compensation as well as a possible increase. Also, the recommendations include eliminating the separate categories of classified vs. academic staff, which means classified staff (like secretaries and janitors) will lose a bunch of benefits that they've accrued separately due to collective bargaining action in the past.

How much will it take until faculty vote with their feet en masse? Things are really out of control!

Adventurous and Picky

When Milo came downstairs after his nap, I asked if he was ready for a snack. He said, "Yes. I'd like a bunch of spinach with a strawberry on top, please."

??? Where did this kid come from? I didn't happen to have either spinach or strawberries. I offered him some arugula but he wasn't interested. Instead, Milo ate about 3/4 of a red bell pepper. As he ate it, he said, "How are these so good?"

Lest this is too annoying to read about, I have the other child. Things she used to eat have now switched camps into the "cannot be eaten" category. This includes french toast, sausage, and applesauce. Seriously, applesauce? What has applesauce ever done to you, Nora? So now Nora will basically eat pancakes, peanut butter and honey sandwiches, and fruit. I exaggerate, but not by much.

Land of Milk and Honey

1. Last night I was walking home from the gym and marveling at how fabulous everything is when the weather warms up. It was after 6 when I left and now I can walk home on the bike path again, instead of through the neighborhood streets, because it's still plenty light out. It was warm. I could smell the lingering scent of lilacs. Everything is blooming. The birds are loud. Everything about our little spot on the planet is just completely pleasant right now.

I know I wouldn't be enjoying it this much if I weren't contrasting it with other walks home from the gym, walks that happen in the pitch black, boots crunching on snow, hood pulled over my head, gloves on. But, is it worth it? I mean, yes, the sweetness of the warm months is all the more sweet thanks to winter, but I suspect that at this point in my life I could definitely enjoy this kind of weather year round.

2. In my continued "don't be a slob" life campaign, I'm tackling one new cleaning / organizing project a week on top of the normal maintenance stuff. Today it was the hall linen closet. Now our towels, sheets, and blankets are all organized, take that, closet! I subsequently discovered about 200 little packets of alcohol wipes and about a hundred packets of gauze. I think our alcohol wipe / gauze needs are fulfilled at least until the kids go to college.

3. This is a sign of how bad things are with my brain: I have started a "where things are" file on my computer. Every time I put something somewhere special or weird, I add it to the file. So maybe in 6 months when I can't figure out what happened to my white gloves or the Halloween decorations, I'll be able to find it thanks to the file.

4. This morning we went to the children's museum and spent 45 minutes building a giant house out of giant building materials. The kids could stand up in it. I figured out how to make a window and a door. It was definitely super fun.

5. I have an angry screed to share, but I'll save it for later since the great weather and organizing projects are making me so content. Somebody once said something about how I'm always angry, or something like that, based on this blog. Hopefully that isn't how everybody sees me, but I think my writing can skew that way at times because I use the space to work out issues or to communicate more passionately than I would actually feel allowed to do in real life. Mostly I go around pretty happy.

6. When the firefighters ask for donations I always give. I think I'll be doing this for life after what they did for all of the other state workers last year.

7. We launched rockets and played in the sand today. Welcome back, spring!

Transitive Property

Logic begins to develop:

Kids: Are trees taller than people?
Me: Yes, usually.
Milo: And skyscrapers are taller than trees. Are skyscrapers taller than trees?
Me: For the most part, yes, skyscrapers are taller than trees.
Nora: So that means skyscrapers are taller than people!

Odds and Ends

This afternoon we went on a family bike ride on the bike path in the 40 degree weather. 40 degrees! Brrrr! It was cloudy and had rained all morning, so the bright side is that there weren't many people on the bike path to potentially run into the kids, who are still learning the concept of the right lane. They went on their balance bikes and Jake walked and I practiced the art of riding my bike so slowly that I was almost standing still. The kids aren't in love with their balance bikes, and keep asking us for bikes with pedals. I want to get a couple of tagalongs so we can go on real bike rides together as a family.

Tonight at dinner:

Me: Look behind you Milo, there's a chipmunk on the deck!
Milo: Look, it's trying to eat that little shovel. Stupid chipmunk! I like to call it a "shitmunk".

No. That's not really an appropriate thing to call a chipmunk...

Milo has a giant goose egg on his temple, and a cut in the center of it. It looks pretty bad. When I was out of town, a classmate of his bashed him on the head with a rock. Actually, Milo clarified that it was maybe an old piece of cement. Anyway, his friend bashed him on the side of the head with a rock or a piece of cement. The school was very solicitous of Jake. I think they were worried about how Jake would handle it. The kid who did it is actually one of Milo's best friends and it's not clear to me whether this was a game gone wrong or not. I think it's more a sign that their after-school teachers aren't as good as their normal school-day teachers at closely monitoring them and distracting the kids when things get a little too riled up.

I have to say, in absence of a really serious injury requiring a doctor, that I'm much more comfortable with my kids being the bashee than the basher. It stinks to get bashed with a rock, but I'd probably feel a lot worse if my kids were going around bashing other people with rocks.

Nora actually ate a piece of chicken tonight! And liked it! That's because it was breaded, basically the fancy version of a chicken nugget. Still. Little steps. Meanwhile Milo was happily eating his chicken, his black bean chili, and his raw strips of red pepper, one of his favorite snacks.

Speaking of meat, did you know there's a place in Philly that makes vegan cheesesteaks? It didn't taste like a cheesesteak, but whatever they used for the "cheese" tasted amazingly like cheese. It was actually pretty darn good, as long as you didn't expect it to be a cheesesteak. It's been 3 months without meat now for us, and it's fine except occasionally a little inconvenient at restaurants.

Conference

So why do I do things like stay up until 2 a.m. when I know I have to get up at 6:30? Ugh...

I have had a super packed conference and it's been really fun and stimulating, like conferences are supposed to be - it's got me energized for returning to certain intellectual endeavors. I was also pulled in a lot of directions because in addition to trying to fit in seeing friends and meeting up with colleagues to talk about work and attend sessions I also had a number of non-field people to see: a friend who lives in Philly, my sister, my Dad, my cousin and his family, and a bunch of my Dad's old friends. Which was fun, for the most part (other than the old family friend who kept trying to badger me into a political conversation that I didn't want to have -- if you're a millionaire from a lifetime of private business enterprises don't try to mask your conservative agenda to enact top-down accountability measures onto teachers through some faux "concern" about their work opportunities when really, you just hate the idea of unions. I was rolling my eyes so hard I thought they'd lodge in the back of my head). But other than that, fun if hectic.

Two sweet things. One was this other old friend who knew my mom when she was expecting me and knew me as a baby. He really wanted to try to explain that I mattered to them and was a big part of their lives. That touched me. It is cool to have an alternate perspective from the one I'm more accustomed to having.

The other is something I observed in a talk. I was sitting behind Very Famous Guy who is one of my idols (and who I turned down a job with last year, which is still a little hard/awkward), and he was sitting next to Extremely Famous Guy, who was his advisor waaaaaaaaaaay back in the day. And during the talk, the speaker referred to VFG as somebody whose ideas informed his thinking and sparked what became the research project he was reporting on. And then I saw VFG's old advisor, EFG, write a note on the back of his program book to VFG. EFG wrote, "You did a good job!" I don't know. I just thought it was so cool that VFG, who is super senior and established and stuff, still get that kind of affirmation from his advisor.

It's Fixed Now

Wow, I just had a giant tantrum over my iPhone screwing up. I updated it to iOS 5.1, which was a huge mistake. First because it took 3 hours to download and update, so that was really really annoying, and second because then it caused my phone to think it had no SIM card. So the update basically broke my phone. Then, when I followed the online advice to restore the phone to factory settings, that just made it even worse because it wouldn't restore properly due to thinking it had no SIM card. So I no longer even had my home screen or anything, I just had a phone with no data on it and a repeating error message that it couldn't complete the restore because it had no SIM card. And I was freaking out because I need to get on a plane tomorrow and somehow, the idea of traveling without my phone is absolutely fucking unthinkable, despite the fact that I did it regularly, like, a year ago.

So I called the Apple help line and had to talk to the automated computer guy, who really wasn't helping at all because after I'd given him my name and the type of phone I have, he wanted my phone's serial number. And for this to make sense you need to know that I was already in a state of being really, really mad by the time I called the help line.

Automated computer guy: What is your phone's serial number?

Me: Uh, I don't know! God!

Automated computer guy: You can say, "I don't have one", or "Tell me how to find it."

Me: Tell me how to find it.

Automated computer guy: You can say, "Find it on my home screen" or "Find it in iTunes."

Me: Uh...(home screen won't work, I don't have a home screen anymore)...find it in iTunes.

Automated compter guy: At any time you can say, "repeat", or "continue". Open itunes.

Me: ...

Automated computer guy: ...

Me: Continue.

Automated computer guy: Look on the sidebar under devices. Click on your iPhone device.

Me: Continue.

Automated computer guy: At the top of the device screen --

Me: No. That's not going to work. My device screen just has an error message because my phone thinks it has no SIM card.

Automated computer guy: I didn't catch that. Please state your request again.

Me: That's not going to work. I CAN'T GET MY SERIAL NUMBER.

Automated computer guy: I didn't catch that. Please state your request again.

Me: SERIOUSLY OMG DON'T MAKE ME GIVE YOU MY SERIAL NUMBER JUST TO TALK TO A REAL PERSON. GIVE ME A REAL PERSON GOD FUCKING DAMN IT. GOD DAMN IT! FUCK!

Automated computer guy: I --

Me: OH NO YOU DON'T JUST GIVE ME A GOD DAMN HELP PERSON! AAAAUGGGHHHHHHHH!

Automated computer guy: I am transferring you to our next available agent.

And then while the help music was playing I took an old plastic drumstick of the kids that belongs to a now-gone drum, one I've been meaning to throw out, and I took that thing and bent it over my knee so I could snap that motherfucker in half. Except it was fucking plastic, so it didn't snap at all. It just bent. So then I had an L-shaped plastic drumstick, which is way less satisfying than snapping it in half, so I threw it down the stairs. Because that's the mature way to handle things.

Seriously, when it comes to phone problems, computer glitches, and help lines, I can really lose my shit.

Alles Neu

The whole family is obsessed with this song by Peter Fox and the Cold Steel Drumline (it's worth watching all the way through to the end to see some shots of the drumline):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD0A2plMSVA

Last night the kids made me play it about 16 times in a row. Tonight Milo wanted to do the same thing, but we cut him off after about 5. Then he wanted to watch the video over and over again.

But Milo isn't the only one. I love all of the contrasts in this song. To my ear, German is a challenging-to-hear language (sorry, German speakers). It sounds harsh and guttural, bordering on but not quite reaching ugly. It is a very masculine language. So here is this guy singing in an aggressive way in this masculine, staccato language, but his voice and tone are melodic. This mirrors the contrast I hear between the heart-thumping drum beat and the strings, both which provide an ongoing wall of sound behind the lyrics. It's just the sexiest song.

It's like the song itself is a juxtaposition of flowing and hair-raising. This song reminds me of Jake, who double-majored in German and spent a year in Austria as an exchange student. But it's not Jake as a German speaker that I think of, it's Jake the person, who is also a study in contrasts. Jake's voice, angularity, jaw line, and movements through space are so strongly masculine, but his slight frame, gentle tones, and mild-mannered nature are not. It is these inherent contrasts that continue to fascinate me about Jake, and watching him walk, sit, and move is like watching a perfectly orchestrated dance. I guess I mean to say that the way this song fascinates me is a minor reflection of the way that Jake fascinates me.

Nora's Photo Story

Nora took some photos one day when I was out of the house. Based on her series, my guess is that she watched Milo goofing around on the stairs, and then some sort of accident occurred, culminating in Milo needing some comfort.

Guilt is this traveling mom's drink of choice

Here's a story about moms who have to travel for work.

It's pretty relevant to my life right now because next week I'll be out of town and tonight the twin whisperer kinda screwed us over. Ages ago we'd arranged for her to watch the kids on Wednesday next week when I'm out of town, but she's taken a better gig for next week which leaves Jake in the lurch. He'll have to take a vacation day to watch the kids. And I feel bad for Jake because I know this is going to be exhausting. He'll have to take the kids to school (and getting them fed, dressed, and out the door each morning is a major hassle), he'll have to pick them up every afternoon, he'll have to take a day off to watch them on Wednesday, and he'll have to basically do everything by himself for 4 days which I know is going to be tiring. Poor guy!

When the kids were first born I turned down all travel requests. I traveled the first time when they were 10.5 months old. For the first few years I accepted about half of the travel requests I got. Last year, I tried to accept most of them, as I was gearing up for tenure and trying to be visible and stuff like that. Not that it mattered in the end. (My letter writers didn't care if I'd gone to whatever conference, or given some invited talk or whatnot). I probably accept about 2/3 of my travel opportunities now.

I enjoy traveling for work and would do more if I didn't have a family. There are two big conferences in our field that usually happen about a week apart and I used to always go to both. Now I never go to both. I do miss it, especially when everybody else in the world is posting about how awesome it is.

I feel guilty when I travel. I think the kids are largely fine at this point, but I know it burdens Jake. It is hard to deal with them both alone for several days. Lots of times my parents or his parents will help out when I'm gone. But sometimes, like for next week's trip, Jake is on his own and I know how much work it'll be.

Also, I miss them when I'm gone.

It's kind of an interesting set of choices that I'm reflecting on now that I have these choices to make. I choose to work less than I could or naturally want to. When I am engrossed in something I would prefer to stay at the office and stay engrossed in it. But I stop it and go home. I would love to travel to some of the international conferences to work with some researchers who I've been reading for years. But that's too long to be gone. So basically I'm making a deliberate set of decisions to be less influential in my career and less well known so that I can spend more time with my family.

I mostly feel okay about this. The times when I feel weird are when I observe my colleagues making different choices and it makes me second-guess myself. I have other colleagues with preschool-aged kids who work around the clock and travel all the time. I mean, like, 3 times as much as I do. So then I worry about how I'm deliberately relegating myself to being kind of podunk and small time, because I'm unwilling to put in the hours and the miles to make it big.

I think the key is to just try to be purposely okay with that. I mean, this is a choice. I could be choosing the other way, and I'm not. I like being around my family. I want to keep Jake happy. I want to be a big part of M&N's lives. I didn't go ahead and have kids so I could work around the clock, right? And the bigger issue is that I'm just not that important. I mean, I have a colleague who commutes between here and DC, so she sees her kids only on weekends, but frankly, she's, like, way way more important than I'll ever be. Her decision makes sense for her life because what she's doing really matters. What I'm doing is not in that league.

This is all pretty gendered, of course. Lots of men don't worry much when they travel. They know their wives will take care of things. They don't think of turning down opportunities. I do, and I constantly think about what's fair to Jake and how much he can handle. But, it is pretty encouraging to see signs of change, too. There's a former student of ours who is now a professor and we skype each week to collaborate on a project. Last week I asked him if he was going to the upcoming conference, and he said, "No, I'd like to stay married." They have a new baby. It's cool to see men taking on more responsibility at home like that, and it'll make things more even at work, too.

Once upon a time Milo and Nora would cry and cry every time I left the house. Now, thank God, they give a cheerful wave and chirp, "Goodbye!" and everything is just fine. So I know they'll be okay, but man, I feel for Jake.

Milo

Milo did well with his tubes procedure. It was really fast (like 10 minutes). When he woke up, he felt sick from the anesthesia, so that was a bit rough but an hour later he was mostly back to normal.

Milo was so stoic at the hospital. He'd barely talk to anybody, and he had a strange frown on his face, but that was the extent to which Milo would reveal his discomfort. Then a few hours later at lunch, I could barely shut him up.

This morning I took the kids to the library to pick out a new crop of books, and then we walked next door to the coffee shop for our morning snack. It was quite a special treat. It's pretty cool that now I can take the kids to the coffee shop, by myself, and they can both sit in normal chairs and eat a snack, and remark on the artwork in the coffee shop, and it's all generally pleasant rather than stressful. My conclusion: babies and toddlers are hard, especially in pairs. But once they get to be actual kids, they rock.

Outpatient

Milo has to be at the hospital tomorrow morning at 6:15 a.m. for a 7:15 a.m. tubes surgery. Why so early, ugh. Worse, it interferes with taking Nora to school so one of us has to stay and take Nora to school, and the other can be with Milo. I was so sure Milo would want Jake with him, but no. He wants me. Must be because of the 6:15 a.m. thing. He knows what a great morning person I am.

April Sunday

Thunderstorms. Why do they happen at night 90% of the time? You know what happens when there's thunder at night? We end up with two kids in our bed and a certain mother gets no sleep.

This evening Nora decided that she wanted to write a card to Grandmom Lee & Papa Greg. We got a card out for her and she carefully wrote her name in it. Then she dictated to me precisely the things she wanted me to write down in the card on her behalf. We'll send it off tomorrow.

It always makes me wary when Jake declares, "I think I'll use the drill." But today he finally fixed our non-latching door, so I'm happy about the outcome.

Milo brought home the mystery box from school. He gets to choose something to put into it, and then share 3 clues with the other kids who try to guess what is in the box. His clues are:

1) We use these to work outside in the dirt.

2) We need two of them.

3) They keep our hands clean.

There are 12 chicks in the kids' room at school. A week ago, there were 12 eggs. Now there are 12 chicks. Sometimes it boggles my mind that school starts off with chicks and finger painting and somehow ends up a decade later with tediously dull worksheets.

Slugger

Here's Milo at the plate! It's so cute how he takes off running whenever he gets a hit, and doesn't exactly know where to go.

Milo spent all morning playing baseball and soccer. I realized we should, like, find some baseball games on you tube so he can see what they actually look like. Then this afternoon Milo and Jake went back out to the park to hit some more balls, and the neighborhood kid and his friend joined in. These kids were 7 and 8, and they were so nice to Milo. It was so cute. They were totally patient with him, letting him bat and pitch and Milo did an amazing job. Even though he's half their age he had just as many hits as they did. Then he'd just take off like a shot towards the outfield, since he doesn't really get the concept of going to 1st base. It was also so cute to watch Milo playing with these bigger kids, using a lower voice with them, trying to fit in.

I have a feeling that if we can all get together this summer, Milo is going to have a blast playing ball with his cousins!

Highs and Lows

What a week! It started with my chair reprimanding me on behalf of the dean for carrying out a plan that my own faculty suggested that I do in a faculty meeting. The dean disapproved of the recommended action and because she is too important to talk to me directly, she instead called my chair and told him to have a talk with me to convey her disapproval. The whole situation is a long and messy story but I have learned some important management lessons here about how not to behave when in a position of power. Not that I'll ever likely be a chair or a dean, but I can still make use of these lessons in terms of the people I do direct who work on my projects (grad students, post docs, secretaries).

And then at the end of the week, I found a vase of fresh flowers on my desk, courtesy of one of my grad students. I haven't really done anything to merit something like that from her, but she said "think of it as the world (and me, as a complicated grad student), saying 'thanks for being you'." OMG. How sweet is that? I almost feel guilty because I don't want any grad students on our paltry stipends ever spending any money on me! It should be the other way around, as often as possible.

Anyway, this has been an interesting contrast in the things that are bad and good about my job. The bad stuff (budget problems, departmental politics, bad management practices on behalf of my dean and chair) is mostly stuff that doesn't directly intersect with my day-to-day life. The good stuff? The faculty with whom I directly work in my area and on my cross-disciplinary grants. They're all great people. The students. All of our grad students - I like every one of them and I love our Friday seminar discussions together. The students on my projects are really outstanding. The post docs on my projects are also super awesome. Basically, the people I directly interact with on a daily basis are all wonderful colleagues; smart, dedicated, thoughtful, open minded. It's good to step back and be grateful for those things that matter a lot.

Tonight I sat down with the kids and wrote down words for them to try to read: Bat, Dog, Fun, Nod, Sit, etc. And Nora was able to sound out each and every one and figure out what they were. It's like something has just started to click with her. It's amazing to watch. Reading has been such an incredible pleasure and joy throughout my life that I'm excited to see it beginning for her. Milo isn't there at all at this point. He's in a different place, focusing on different skills right now, which is just fine. Over spring break he practiced learning his head stand and now he can hold a bona fide head stand for 30 seconds.

On Tuesday Milo is getting tubes put into his ears. The hope is that this will solve his hearing problem.

Now of course the thing I'd really like them to learn is to how to co-exist for more than 5 minutes without bickering...

War on Women

Hilary Rosen got in a mess of hot water when she said about Ann Romney "His wife has actually never worked a day in her life." Now Romney and his wife are looking sympathetic, because she can defend her choice to stay home and raise her kids, a choice that tons of families really relate to.

The issue, though, is that her wealth gave her that choice. That's how Hilary Rosen should have framed it. Romney was using his wife to show that he knows about the economic situations of women. When in reality, they are an uber-wealthy family who has never, ever had to face the kinds of situations that middle class and working class families grapple with every day. The thing is, Ann Romney had a choice. And that's great, making a choice that was probably a good one for their family, and can be great for many families. The point is, though, that many American women do not have that choice. They must raise their children and work for pay, or else their kids won't eat.

I want our national conversation to focus on what we can do for people who don't get to choose.

It has been a super rough time at work, like, wake up at 4 and never go back to sleep type of rough. So I'm thinking a little bit about ways to focus on more positive things in life and let go of stuff, like work, that ultimately doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. Things like:

• Bike riding! I hope I'll continue to enjoy that as summer approaches. One thing that's pleasant about riding around here is that it is easy to get out of the city quickly and then ride on dedicated bike paths through beautiful countryside. I like being on a separate path rather than on the road.
• Gardening! I've found that there's nothing more enjoyable and conducive to flow than activities that use your hands and your body as well as your mind. It's always satisfying to get pots ready for summer, to plant, to weed, and otherwise take care of our little plot of land in the city.
• Home improvement! Sadly I'm not the fix-the-plumbing / put-up-tile kind of person, although I'd like to be some day and learn those skills, but I do get a lot of satisfaction out of the little things I can do to maintain our surroundings through my own work. This spring I need to paint the trim in our bedroom, and I've got a fence to stain. The time just flies by when I'm engaged in those types of projects.
• Cooking! Always a good activity, and it's something I seldom tire of. I'm looking forward to fresh vegetable season. I wonder how many vegan meals I can make this summer?
• Outings with the kids! Now that the weather is nicer and we don't have to put on 18 layers of stuff to leave the house, it feels like less of a production to get out. I'm looking forward to more trips to the zoo, the children's museum, the library, the capitol, and this summer let's not forget the pool and the splash park. A good lesson for me on our morning outings is to slow down and enjoy the experience at their pace, not mine.

It's great to think that in just a month, the semester will be over.

Sausage

I have a troll on G+! What a drag.

Milo kept opening his mouth to reveal the disgusting half-chewed sausage he was eating, basically to annoy Nora. So she ran around complaining, "Milo keeps showing me his sausage! Milo's showing me his sausage!"

Nora is sick and last night at the end of dinner she coughed so hard that she threw up. Milo was so disgusted at the sight that he immediately threw up as well.

Next up: I think I'll write a defense of the 40-hour (or less) work week. I think it's inaccurate one-up-manship when people brag about working 60 or 80 hours a week. I mean, yes, some people do that. But it doesn't appear to be a good idea for anybody, not even for job productivity, and something is really wrong if you're bragging about voluntarily working 80 hours a week and never seeing your family. Is that really something we want to promote and foster?

Time and Flexibility

Things are getting a little weird blogging wise because I'm shifting over a fair amount of what I say, at least professionally, to G+. Most of it's limited to my circles but I'm starting to share some things publicly here and there. Here's a draft of something I'm going to put on Google+ soon.

Recently a colleague of mine wrote a post on Facebook expressing some exasperation with the fact that her department was nearly empty at 4:15 on a weekday. This led to a fairly long series of comments, and I decided to write about it in a more extended manner here rather than clutter up her wall with my opinions.

So, the exasperation was born of the belief that appearances matter, that public perception is important, and that there is a need for expensive university building to look open on weekdays. My colleague remarked "being present more often on campus is likely a coming requirement if we want more compensation."

Now that I have tenure I'm going to go ahead and be honest and open about my working hours and my beliefs about how much we professors are working and should be working.

The exasperation was perhaps born of a belief that the university building should be filled with professors in their offices during the normal working hours of 9 to 5, or something like that. This colleague is not in my own department. But in my department, things do look somewhat different. For instance:

-- Many of us are in our offices up until 7, 8, and 9 p.m. because we teach afternoon and evening courses that working graduate students can take after their normal work day is completed.

-- Many of us are in our offices on the weekend. I go in every Sunday, which I will talk about more in a moment, but the place isn't deserted on those Sundays. I have one colleague who I hear walking down the hall to and from her office each Sunday. I have another colleague in my own area who is often in our shared suite on Sunday.

-- Many of us are also in our offices before the typical work day starts. The head of my area is often in the office before 8. He comes in after he drops his son off from school, and on certain days he leaves early (around 2:30) to pick his son up from school.

-- Many of my departmental colleagues are not in the offices much because they are off giving talks, keynotes, and plenaries, going to conferences, serving on review panels and advisory panel meetings, receiving honorary doctorates, and otherwise engaging in very public forms of scholarship around the country and the world. This does not appear to have harmed our department's reputation. In fact, it seems to have helped it.

I feel lucky that my department has always been supportive of the work we do, caring much more about our productivity rather than the appearance of productivity, or face time. We have a huge amount of autonomy in terms of when and where we work. All of us work long hours. I don't personally happen to know anybody in my department who works fewer than 40 hours a week. But many of those hours do not necessarily occur in our offices. They occur in the classroom, in the field when we're collecting data, on the airplane, and, yes, at our homes. Sometimes at 10 p.m., or midnight, or 5 a.m.

I am facebook friends with some of my departmental colleagues who have tenure, who voted on my own tenure case. If one of them had posted something in exasperation about not seeing more faculty in the office at 4:15 p.m. on a Wednesday, that would have had a chilling effect on me pre-tenure. It would have scared me, and made me worry that I need to be showing up at the office more, regardless of how much actual work I would have been getting done. It would have suggested to me that it's more important to physically be in my office (maybe even goofing off and surfing the web) than to be at home writing a paper or analyzing data.

So, I have to say, I'm really glad my departmental culture is different. Because let me be honest here. As a professor, I have worked a lot of hours, more hours than were healthy or appropriate leading up to tenure. I did it for a salary that is quite low considering my education and background. I did it for benefits that have been slashed, and take-home pay that has been reduced dramatically each month. I'm in a state where professors in particular and state workers in general have been attacked and denigrated. I don't get prestige, I don't get respect, I don't get a fabulous salary, but what I do get is an amazing degree of autonomy in how I do my work. And this autonomy, this flexibility, is what makes this job worth it for me.

I love my work. I love the research I do and I love teaching and interacting with students at all levels. The thing that makes my type of job a dream job is that I get to work on what I choose, and I get to do it how and when I choose. This is the one major perk of my profession. I'm lucky enough to be in a department that strongly believes in the autonomy of its faculty members. Our culture is such that we believe we are a group of talented, committed people, so it is important to allow us the freedom to do our work as we see fit. What matters to my departmental colleagues is what we produce. The work we do. Nobody cares when or where we do it. If there was some rule about me having to be on campus until 5 p.m. every weekday, that would be incredibly limiting. It would also be insulting. It wouldn't take into account the work I do every Sunday, the work I do in the evenings, the work I do when I fly to and from conferences.

Why do I go into work every Sunday? I do this because I stay at home with my kids every Wednesday. At first, I did this because I could not afford to have my kids in full-time, 5-day a week care. I am the primary wage earner in my family. My salary wasn't high enough to cover the cost of full-time care when we are already paying more per year to send our kids to preschool than we'd be paying to send them both to U.W.

In the past year my income went up and now, although it wouldn't be easy, I could afford to send my kids to preschool and after-school care, full time, 5 days a week. But you know what? This wouldn't be as good for my kids. They are 4, and they get exhausted from being in school. They really relish that day off in the middle of the week. It lets them recharge. It is good for them, and it is good for me to provide it for them. In a year and a half they'll be in kindergarten. This time I have when they are small is so fleeting, so I enjoy spending Wednesdays with them. In exchange, I go into work every Sunday while they stay home with my husband. The fact that I am able to do this is what makes my low salary and diminished benefits worth it.

I am really grateful that the head of my area set a precedent for this type of flexible schedule by leaving early to pick his son up from school. This sent the message that our families matter, our outside lives matter, and it's okay to be more than just a brain on a stick. I'm glad nobody in my department has communicated the attitude that it's face time in the office that matters more than other things, things like the quality of work I produce.

Because the thing is, as soon as you start chastising people for not being in at a certain time of day, that means we all have to agree on what those acceptable times are. Is it going to be M-F, 9-5? M-F, 7-3? What about those teaching evening classes? What about those who run weekend workshops? What about those who have labs with experiments that need to be checked 24/7? What about winter break or spring break? Technically, we faculty do not get any vacation days during our 9-month contract. So anybody who is going to chastise people for not being in the office at 4:15 on a Wednesday had better not take a vacation during spring break. If public perception matters, that perception shouldn't be of us off drinking wine in Napa when we should be on campus earning our keep. Are we really willing to go down that road? I'm not.

Socks

This morning Milo put on some very nice argyle socks and was proud to show them off. Then later, he realized that Grandmom Lee & Papa Greg aren't coming today, they're coming tomorrow. I just heard him tell Jake, "Tomorrow, I want to wear nice socks for Grandmom Lee & Papa Greg." Ah, so those socks this morning weren't just for the heck of it. Come to think of it, his nice argyle socks do complement his sweatpants and pirate shirt.

Folks

Milo: Milo has a cough and a 102 degree fever. Also, he needs to get tubes in his ears. He still has a hearing loss, especially in the lower range. But this appears to be a very minor procedure, so that's good news.

Milo wants to be Spiderman when he grows up. He loves to climb these days and is very brave about heights. He'll go far beyond what Nora is willing to tackle. Milo is pretty adventurous.

Milo is really picky about what he'll wear. He won't wear any pants that aren't sweat pants. He also rejects about 90% of his shorts for reasons that are mysterious and do not seem to be guided by any set of coherent rules that I can determine.

Nora: Nora wants to be an astronaut and Spiderwoman when she grows up. I haven't had the heart to explain the current state of our space program to her.

Last night Nora learned how to cheat the iPad addition program. She was getting the answers far too fast for her to really be counting up the sums. She explained that when there are a lot of things to add, she just picks the biggest number.

Nora is also really picky about what she'll wear. Recently her favorite friend at school gave her a bunch of hand me downs, so now Nora is into wearing dresses. But she only wants to wear sleeveless ones, not the long-sleeved or short-sleeved dresses. So I make her put the sleeveless dress over a shirt since it's not, you know, 90 degrees out. And then she always looks funky. It's funny how both kids are so picky about what they'll wear but not in a way that actually results in them looking halfway decent.

Spring: Has retreated into chilly, rainy days. Boo. It's spring break so the kids have 10 days off school.

Jake: Jake needs to have a corneal transplant. But this is a complicated surgery that is going to require several weeks of recovery time, so it won't be easy to schedule. He needs to time schedule that much time off of work in a row. Apparently summer is the best time to get a corneal transplant. Lots of motorcycle accidents means lots of available corneas. This isn't a surgery that needs to happen immediately, so he has time, but it's still a drag, that's for sure.

Rainy Friday

THANK GOD it's spring break. It's 2:55 p.m. in the office here right now and only my untenured colleague is still around. She's writing up a storm.

Mentor and I had an interesting talk today. First, he offered me a co-authorship on a very visible project. The people who get offered this sort of thing are typically people who are much more senior and famous than even Mentor is. I'm psyched to have a chance to be involved through him, which is the only way I'd ever get a chance at doing something like this. So that is exciting.

The thing is, though, it's really been a bad couple of weeks work wise. There are structural problems in our department that, it is clear to me, are not going to go away. We are both too ambitious and both too frustrated to be content with this situation. So that means looking around at other possibilities. Today we talked about whether it'd be possible to engineer some sort of dual hire situation so that we could go to the same place and continue collaborating. There are spousal hires, but we're not spouses, we're academic collaborators. I wonder if you can make a case for an academic spouse, so to speak. Hard to say. Especially hard for me because if I did that, I'd also want to try to engineer some sort of real spousal hire for Jake as well. I don't have anywhere near enough seniority or cache to try to pull something like that off, despite the nature of our small field. Who knows...just brainstorming.

The truth is that there are only a small number of institutions I'd want to go to that would also work for Jake and our family. There is one fairly close to my current location geographically. There is another in the bay area. Just food for thought, I suppose.

For the moment I need to just let go of work-related frustration and enjoy the fact that next week will be quieter, fewer meetings, more chances to write and do the things I really enjoy when it comes to work.

Edited to add: This doesn't really convey how depressed and trapped I feel; how betrayed I feel by my department's insanity and my dean's lack of support. This has never been just a job for me. It has been, in a sense, a love affair with the place and the university and the job and the history of my field here. I want to love it here and stay forever. I don't want to start over somewhere. But I don't want to feel trapped in a dwindling, dying area due to crazy politics while our area is being explicitly supported and aggressively grown at other universities across the country. I don't want to leave. But it's starting to feel like I can't stay without it ultimately becoming a slow career death.

Full of Possibility

It's really interesting to me how hard it can be to predict how things will work out. The problems that crop up and need to be solved are seldom the ones that I was able to anticipate ahead of time. The things that become important are often things that began small, and didn't seem so significant in the moment.

A few years ago I took a trip to Ann Arbor to attend a training about implementing a particular assessment measure. It was a mundane, 36-hour trip. The training ended up being useless. But the trip totally changed my career. Somehow when I was there I came up with a new idea for the career grant I was planning to write. I knew the idea I currently had wasn't working that well, and I wasn't totally excited about it. But something that day sparked a brand new idea and as soon as I had it, I knew it was the right one. All the pieces fit together just right, and it was the perfect conglomeration of everything I had done so far and wanted to do moving forward. So I ended up using the 8-hour useless training session to outline my grant idea. By the time I returned home, I had the whole grant mentally laid out, and I was prepared to get started writing on it. And, in the end, the grant was funded and has profoundly influenced my research direction and my career choices.

I don't know, who would have thought something like that would come out of a short training trip?

And of course, lots of other short training trips end up being nothing more than short training trips.

This sense of possibility is always with me when I prepare to go to another conference or do something new. Who knows what unexpected thing might happen that'll change everything from here on out? Who knows what conversation I'll have that'll spark a new idea for a collaboration or an article? Who knows what brand new person I'll meet who will actually end up becoming a really important person in my life? It's all so unpredictable.

Morning at the Museum

Yup, that's really as high as it looks.

Figuring Out Their World

This morning the kids had an extended conversation with each other about how things will be when they're grown up and can do whatever they want. They decided they're going to live in their own house (not living together didn't appear to occur to them) and paint the walls whatever colors they want! Milo is going to paint the walls black, red, and white. Nora is going to paint the walls all colors. Later, on the way to school, they asked about how they're going to get this house.

Nora: We'll need help building it.

Me: Well, you could just buy a house that has already been built.

Nora: But then we would need help lifting it.

Me: Why would you lift the house?

Nora: ...? Well, if we don't lift it, we'd need help moving it.

Me: ...? Why would you move the house? (I had no idea what she was talking about.)

Nora: We need to drag it home! So we can put it where we want.

Oh! Right. Her conception of the order of the world is based off our home, which is her home base, so I guess it makes sense that even if she had her own house, it'd be "at home", next to our house.

Milo was more concerned about how he was going to be busy doing whatever he wanted.

Milo: Where are we going to have all the toys? The big kid toys.

Me: Well, you can buy toys at the store. With money.

Milo: But how are we going to get all the paint?

Me: You'll have to buy that at the store with money too.

Milo: But how are we going to get the pets?

Me: At the store.

Milo: But how will we get the pets?

Me: You can buy them at the pet store.

Milo: I'm going to buy lots of parrots to talk to me!

Nora: Yeah!

So it's decided. They'll live in their own house so they can do whatever they want, which consists of painting the walls whatever colors they want, and having lots of parrots.

Pet Peeve

Somebody posted on FB today about how they never thought they'd have a job as a waitress or a short order cook, but now that's changed since they've had kids.

This line of reasoning really irritates me. You know, the "I'm a Mommy! That means I'm a chef, a chauffeur, a housekeeper, a personal organizer, and a personal shopper." Funny how you never hear them also claim the job of prostitute.

Because you know what? Cooking and cleaning for your kids is not the same as doing it for paid labor. And claiming that it does denigrates the hard work involved in doing that stuff for a living.

I worked in the kitchen of a restaurant for one short summer. It was a seafood restaurant and I cut and cooked fish all day. For 8 hours a day. I was in college, and it was a good job for a young person because it is exhausting to stand in a hot kitchen cooking fish all day. My entire body hurt at the end of each day, especially my arms and shoulders because the counters were too tall for me. I smelled of seafood by the time I got home, and it felt like I could never really wash that smell away. I counted down the minutes to my two 15-minute breaks because I would spend those 15 minutes with my arms straight down, resting them.

I'm not even going to pretend to know what it's like to do a job like that for years or decades. I was a spoiled college kid who basically spent the summer learning to appreciate how decadent it is to go back to school and sit in classes all day.

On the days that I'm home with the kids, I do a crapload of cooking and cleaning. I'm pretty much on my feet all day long. I make french toast, omelettes, or pancakes for breakfast. I prepare a mid-morning snack. I make pasta or sandwiches for lunch. I prepare a mid-afternoon snack. I make a homemade dinner every night. On Wednesdays I also bake something like scones or muffins or bread. It's a lot of cooking, but it is not the same as being a short order cook. Give me a break. I make what I want for the kids. I'm in the comfort of my own home. I take a break when I want to. I do it because I choose to do it. Yes, it's busy and it's tiring, but no, it's not anything close to what actual cooks do. I mean, come on.

You can make the same argument for any of those other "jobs" if you spend about half a second thinking about it or even trying to have an ounce of empathy for people who do those jobs. Being a mom is hard. Yes, it's a ton of work, and yes, it's physically exhausting. There are plenty of things worth discussing about what it feels like to do all of those tasks for your family, and what it can be like to not get much appreciation, or to face the fact that you have to re-do everything every single day, or the fact that you pretty much don't ever get to just be sick and stay in bed, because even if you're sick, there are kids to take care of. All of that stuff is super labor intensive. But it is not the same as being, say, a maid who cleans other people's toilets for a living. And I find it insulting to pretend that it is.

Vulgar Phonics

Tonight Nora wanted me to "teach her how to read", so I started writing down some words she knows and then replacing the first letter with different letters to see if she could sound them out. Like, she knows CAT:

CAT

SAT

MAT

FAT

By the way this technique totally doesn't work yet. Neither kid understands the concept of replacing the first letter with something else and just keeping the rest of the word the same. I thought it'd work, because they're so into making rhymes, but it doesn't. So Nora just has to re-sound out every new word to figure out what it is. She is, however, starting to figure out out how to do this so that she can read new words, which is pretty cool to watch.

Anyway, we were working on FAT and Milo had joined us, so I asked, what's the first letter?

Milo: F!

Me: What sound does F make?

Nora: Uf uf uf...no...

Milo: What?

Me: What sound does F make?

Milo: ...Fuck!

And then Jake and I try not to laugh, and basically fail. (Then Jake suggests that I start with the next word being "yuck").

Drizzly Saturday

I can tell how good a friend is by how much I feel like I need to clean the house before they come over. Whether they have kids matters, too. If they've got a couple of preschoolers I'm less worried about it, because I know their house will be just as messy as ours and plus ours will be a disaster by the time the visit is over anyway.

I love having our friends-with-baby over. They come over so much that we don't really feel like we need to go crazy with housecleaning. They'll understand. The kids love playing with the baby.

Tonight we've got new people without kids coming over. Major cleaning. They wouldn't understand the child-related detritus.

Portrait of a Twin

This morning Nora said, "Mommy, do you know that I can talk a lot?" Yes. Yes I do.

Lately Nora has become interested in what letters words start with. When she hears a word, she can usually figure out what it starts with. Like Frances, which starts with F, and her sister Gloria, which starts with G. Apparently somebody has been talking about doubling at school, too, because Nora likes to rattle off "2 + 2 is 4, and 4 + 4 is 8, and 5 + 5 is 10!" She has no idea what this really means, she's just memorized it. But she loves showing off the stuff she knows. I have a feeling that Nora is going to enjoy the game of school. She likes things with structure and rules.

Meanwhile, when Nora draws a picture of Milo, I think she is behind on some sort of milestone because she is still drawing a picture of a giant circle with arms and legs that come out of the circle. Nora likes to draw Milo. She'll draw his face, and hair coming out of the top of his head, and legs coming out of the bottom of his head. Like this (this is not Nora's drawing, but her drawings sort of look like this).

So I asked her, what are those lines (pointing to the legs coming out of the bottom of his head). She said, those are his legs. Then I asked, why are his legs coming out of his head? Nora looked at me like I was crazy. She said, "Mommy, that's not his head. That's his body!" I asked, "Oh. Where's his head?" Nora pointed to the top part of the giant circle, and said "That's his head!" And suddenly I realized, oh. To Nora, that giant circle isn't Milo's head, which is how I always thought of it. It's his head and his body. I saw legs and arms coming out of Milo's head. Nora sees legs and arms coming out of Milo's body.

Just goes to show how perception determines reality. And how their perception is so different from mine, in ways that constantly fascinate me.

Tipping Point

God, what a shitty day. I work with some insane assholes.

But then others are really great, so...I don't know.

Mentor was asked today to apply for a chair's position in London. They're hiring 9 (NINE) people in our area to build up their program. This is happening at universities across the country and world, whereas today I sat in a faculty meeting and listened to a colleague gripe that the department should never approve any more positions in my area because we already have plenty of people (we have 4, which puts us as one of the smallest in the country).

I kind of feel the tides changing sometimes, like maybe I'm not going to be here forever. My area colleagues and I were talking about how pissed off we are about department/university bullshit but how much we like our town. Sometimes I think it's just going to be a matter of when, not if, each of us reaches the tipping point and bails.

Switch to Biking?

My running is better when I'm barefoot. My knees hold out for longer. This weekend I felt pretty great. My knees were doing well, and I did some good sprints at the end.

Then later that night I noticed a strange pain in the top of my foot, but I forgot about it and went to bed.

Then the next morning I walked to work, and a few minutes into my walk my foot started hurting a lot. By the time I got to work it was really bad. I googled "pain on top of foot" and a bunch of barefoot running sites came up. Hmmm.

Now it's 2 days after my run and my foot hurts just as much. I was about to walk in to work again today but given the pain I have decided to take the bus, because I imagine something needs to heal. And now I feel pissed off that I'm not getting my daily hour's walk to and from work. I don't know what on earth I did. My foot didn't hurt at all while I was actually running. I've never had foot pain from running before in my life.

If it's not my knee, it's my foot...am I just not cut out for running? Every year I get a little more frustrated and contemplate giving it up for something else, and then things get a little better and I stick it out, and it's this cycle of better, worse, better, worse. The cycle has beeng going on since 2003, so that's kind of a long time to stick with something that keeps aggravating various injuries. But it is so heartbreaking to think about giving something up that I love so much!

Maybe this stubbornness of mine is just dumb, and I can come to love biking just as much as running. Maybe this weekend I'll get on my bike and spend an hour doing that and see how it feels.

My graduate student and my post doc are training together for a marathon this May. I actually feel physically jealous when they talk about it. Like, my stomach hurts because I feel so bummed out that I can't do what they're doing. This is silly. It is time to let go, maybe. It's just running. It's not that big of a deal. I bet biking can be fun too, right?

Crack Up

Nora asked me to explain what happens to food after it's been in our stomach. So we were talking about that tonight at dinner, and of course the conversation wandered to waste products. And, the kids like to say the word "poop".

Me: You know, there's a grown-up term for poop.

Nora: What?

Me: Feces.

Jake: I prefer the term excrement.

Nora: I prefer the term kant.

Jake: Kant, as in, Immanuel Kant?

Nora: Yeah.

(We all contemplate that in silence for a moment, then Milo speaks up)

Milo: I prefer the term turd!

Our Bodies

Today was a day of sleeping in until almost 9, for me. The kids were quiet this morning with Jake, which was really something. They were already heading outside by the time I got up. It was a day of sunshine, shorts, bubbles, watering cans, basketball dribbling, and trips to the park.

This evening I went for a run while Jake made cold soba noodles with a peanut and spinach sauce. Cold noodles is a very refreshing, satisfying dish to eat after a run in the hot air.

Going to the gym twice a week in the evenings and running on the weekends means that my exercise habits are highly visible to the kids. And kids emulate their parents. Milo is has incredible balance and coordination; he can even do a hand stand. Both kids like to pretend to lift weights.

I feel like I need to be very careful about how I approach health and fitness when it comes to modeling something for the kids. Here is what I do do: When they ask why I go to the gym, I say that I do it because it is fun, makes me feel good, and I like to be strong. Here is what I don't do: I don't ever talk about my weight. I don't ever skip meals (even if I'm not hungry at the time; I want the kids to see that we all eat normal meals, every single time). I don't ever talk about how I shouldn't eat this or that, or engage in any kind of "oh, I shouldn't, but I guess one bite" kind of talk that women sometimes engage in when they indulge in treats. I don't ever talk in negative ways about my own body, or about anybody else's body. I don't ever, ever use the word diet, or fat.

This afternoon our cat, Caspian, lunged himself into a grocery bag as I was unloading the groceries. He always does this and then looks hilarious as his hind quarters and twitching tail sticks out of the bag. Caspian is a huge cat. He's big and tall and fat all at the same time. Jake starting laughing at him, and said, "Caspian, you're such a fat cat sticking out of that bag!" Milo immediately picked that up, saying "Fat cat! Fat cat! Ha ha ha, Caspian's a fat cat!"

Stuff like that is why I feel like we need to be very, very careful about how we talk about stuff. A shocking degree of 6-year old girls are on diets. At age six. What I want to model is healthy attitudes towards our bodies. Love and acceptance and pride in what our bodies can do. I compliment my own strength in front of the kids. I do handstands to entertain Milo and talk about how we need to practice to get better at things. This weekend he's been practicing and practicing at dribbling. I talk about how, when I was his age, I couldn't dribble a ball, but then I practiced a lot and learned how to dribble.

I don't want the kids to get the idea that I exercise to try to be thin, or look a certain way. I don't want to promote looking any sort of way. I want to promote having fun with athletics and celebrating the great things our bodies can do. I know that this isn't going to do much to stem the onslaught of harmful, degrading images and messages the kids are going to get about appearance and weight as they get older. Especially Nora. I hate thinking about that, about how that will infiltrate their current natural childlike state of simple acceptance of who they are. But at least that shit is not going to come from home.

Ides of March

Twelve days ago, on March 3, Jake took this picture:

Today, I took this one. A few days ago we were cleaning out our garage and I noticed something. Every fall I put many of our pots from the back patio into the garage so that the snow and ice doesn't crack them over the winter. Some of these pots have perennials. Then in April I take them back out again. But this week I noticed some of the plants were already growing, so I took some of the pots out of the dark garage and set them outside. And today, on March 15, this one is already blooming:

And our lilac bush has buds on it. In March!

Yesterday as the kids played outside I cleared away a lot of dead leaves and plant remains from some of our flower beds. Once I did this, I saw the tiniest bit of green poking out from the ground, wowed at how our perennials are coming up already. But then this afternoon I walked around and looked again, and there was literally an inch and a half of plants showing through the ground. They grew an inch overnight. Is that even possible? I feel like I could crouch down and stare, and if I watched closely enough, I'd see them wiggling their way towards the sun, like in a sped-up film.

Today I walked to gym class (16 minutes, my ipod told me) in shorts and a t-shirt. I walked back home an hour later, and it was still warm even though it was dinner time. As I reached my street I congratulated our neighbor, who just got tenure this afternoon. He was sitting on his front porch in bare feet, with a well-deserved beer in his hand.

I really love living here. Living with seasons suits my personality very well. A perverse part of me knows that I relish spring and summer so deeply because of its contrast to winter. By the time October comes, I'm ready for the romantic feeling of autumn. I enjoy feeling the highs and the lows, and the changing seasons is just one manifestation of that.