|
recent posts
----------
Policy
Side-Effects
Looking Over the Hedge
And the Flowers Are Still Standing!
Independence... Or Something Larger
Lobby Labors
Stop Yelling
The Other Side of the Pancake
A is for...
The Age of Anxiety
archive
----------
March 2005
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
December 2005
January 2006
February 2006
March 2006
April 2006
May 2006
June 2006
July 2006
August 2006
September 2006
October 2006
November 2006
December 2006
January 2007
February 2007
March 2007
April 2007
May 2007
June 2007
July 2007
August 2007
September 2007
October 2007
November 2007
December 2007
January 2008
February 2008
March 2008
April 2008
May 2008
|
 |
You've got questions, she's got answers. Be among the first to read Elise Mac Adam's new etiquette guide.
Pre-order from:
- Simon & Schuster
- Amazon
- Barnes & Noble
Why Buy It?
So I know I've been going around saying that people are free to spend money like lunatics and who am I to tell people what to do. And I don't really spend most of my time contemplating consumerism anyway...
But this week has revealed some things that are beyond everything- beyond, even the unpleasant "crowning head earrings."
A few weeks ago, I got tarted up and went down the hall to a cocktail party (the one that left me feeling like something of an underachiever) and was reveling when I noticed a distinctive flapping gesture across the room. "Oh look!" My conversation partner (someone who put the whipped cream and cherry on top of my underachiever-feeling sundae) noticed it too. "An ultrasound picture!"
I hadn't seen one socially in a while, but a small crowd of people I never wound up meeting was indeed crowded around one of those unmistakable, shiny, black and white square pages. I have a small clutch of them myself.
The ultrasound image is a strange thing. It is obviously completely unique, as unique as each set of parents and each kid; but it is also often generic. In fact, ideally, it will be generic. Perhaps I say this because I don't have the trained artist's eye needed to make sense of what I'm seeing. (At the anatomy scan that is generally performed at around the 20t h week of pregnancy, I faked being able to recognize anything the ultrasound technician pointed out to me until finally we got to the feet which even a dolt like me could identify.) But I think, apart from how novel and reassuring sonograms are, and how emotionally compelling they truly can be, one hopes they are not unique. You want them to conform to a standard set of statistics. When I look at the murky weather map images of Felix in utero, I know they are pictures of my kid, but they look like pictures of Everychild.
Oh, but I wandered off. I'm back. Forgive my digression, because I did have a point and my point is that these pictures hold emotional resonance to the parents-to-be and their families and are largely curiosities to everyone else. But one thing they really aren't, is APPETIZING.
Which leads me to consumer folly #1, the Picture This White Chocolate Box of Ultrasound Cookies. (I must give credit where it is due; I found this on Daddy Types today.) Why one would find these appealing is mysterious. I suppose there is something Mutter Museum-esque about bringing the anatomical images into dessert items, but it really isn't cute or charming. In fact, the whole business is loopily fetishistic if not cannibalistic. Or maybe it's the red bow that makes it all seem so lurid.
I was less amused when I received this Washington Post article about the Club Libby Lu chain. This has made the rounds, and I was quite late to hear about these stores that host princess parties for (presumably exclusively, but who knows) little girls and encourage them to demand that their parents buy them sexy clothes and makeup. The article itself, while a bit purple in its choice of vernacular, makes most of my points about how sinister it is to try to make little girls in to pre-teenage sexpots, how the language of "makeover" is ridiculous when it is leveled at a six-year-old who shouldn't have to feel that one is necessary, and questions the wisdom of spoon feeding "princess" attitude without irony or skepticism into receptive brains.
So I'll just say that I find it strange that we live in times where women's reproductive rights and choices are being threatened- in part, I think, as a way to punish women for being sexually active- while places like Club Libby Lu are mushrooming everywhere that educate little girls through play that it is their job to act sexy, walk on little catwalks and be obsessed with their bodies. In an article full of depressing tidbits, the one that made my heart sink the most was the assertion by the company's "Princess of Royal Relations" that Club Libby Lu suffers from "feminist backlash."
Why spend money at these places? Why support an industry that would prefer- as evidenced in the language used by Princess of Royal Relations- to keep little girls from being critical of the pink princess stereotype? Resistance is not futile.
And finally, on the South Dakota front, where there is little hope, there is an interesting fight being fought with humor and energy.
posted by Elise at 10:54 AM
22 Comments
Towers to the Sky
I don't know if spring is here or not, or if I can point to it as a cause, but the sleep schedule around here has gone straight to Hell.
With a soft mind, I hang out with Felix as he entertains himself at ungodly morning hours and to keep myself awake, I build enormous towers with his Lego Quatro blocks. (For those not familiar with the intricacies of the Lego universe, Quatro is Lego for children aged one to three. The blocks are eight times larger than the blocks for children aged two to five, which are called Duplo. After that it is all plain Lego.) This is one of those "minute to learn, lifetime to master" projects where I try to use up all 95 of his blocks (recent birthday) before he sees how much progress I've made and destroys my creation. The delicate balance is made more complicated by having to make sure that while I'm building, he hasn't decided to pull a plant down on his head or spread baking soda around (because he learned how to open the pantry door).
But I've fallen for Lego. It has a terrific formalism- limited colors, even fewer shapes than regular Lego offers. If you combine that with a groggy yearning to return to a dream state, you can build some inviting structures. Lately, I've been trying to see how unstable a base I can have that will still all of soaring towers.
Lego has a particularly protracted history. The little Danish blocks were first released in 1949 (as "Automatic Binding Blocks") then released with improved stability and improved name in 1958. Since then there has been the obvious explosion of Lego products including Harry Potter Lego, Lego Jewelry kits for girls "Clikits" (misguided, I suspect), Lego "Bionacles"- which are "constraction" toys- a combination of construction toy and action figure (I hate words like that), and the long-anticipated Lego Mindstorm robot toys.
This is where I always get stuck. Here I am smitten with Lego, and pleased that the Felix is learning how to assemble as well as smash towers. But that is not enough. These blocks are not enough. There must be electronics and robotica and I really should prepare myself to get on board and enjoy serious construction that actually has to work. This worries me, since I lack discipline in the toy department, and in the construction department for that matter.
But perhaps by the time he's ready for advanced Lego, Felix will have come up with a more reasonable sleep schedule, since I don't think I'm in any condition to operate heavy machinery right now, or put anything together so that it functions, and I'm only staying lively through a constant influx of pre-Easter malt ball treats and coffee.
posted by Elise at 1:22 PM
2 Comments
My Baby My Billboard
An interview that Felix and I did for CNN for a segment called "Blinging Up Baby" aired this morning and apart from thinking that I really need a haircut and different glasses or contact lenses, I thought it went quite well, though I was surprised. I did not know that Barneys Department Store even had a children's department, and I really had no idea that Gucci makes a $685 Baby Bjorn-type carrier.
I actually don't have too much trouble with excess in theory. It's kind of a free country. There's even something almost Wilde-esque about the sartorial decadence for the non-speaking set, though keep in mind that the same man who wrote "Nothing succeeds like excess" is the same fellow who remarked: "Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months". (That said, it would be nice to know that in addition to $400 toddler dresses, consumers could see clear to donating to a charity or two. In a part of the interview not used, I was asked if I thought people were jealous of the folks who could afford the expensive duds, and I said that I thought that people were jealous of the fact that there are parts of the population who aren't anxious about money in the horrible way that having a child can make you insane with financial worry- who can buy a crazy-expensive dress and still have money for health insurance.)
Beyond the obvious issues of capitalism, I also wonder about making children into tiny adults- squat, out-of-proportion versions of their parents. On the one hand, that's is inevitable anyway, and that's why so many psychotherapists, psychiatrists, life counselors, "healers" and "teachers" have jobs when the little ones realize what was done to them. But on the other, it seems that parents are themselves looking to be proud when their kids exhibit the "right" kind of sensibilities.
In this week's issue of New York Magazine, in a piece about how adults act like children (and how they dress their children to reflect their coolness), the ubiquitous and irritating Neal Pollack who has apparently written a memoir about the "Struggle to Raise a Cool Kid in America," describes how important it is to let his child know when the things he likes are awful: "And there's no shame, when your kid's watching a show, and you don't like it, in telling him it sucks. . . If you start telling him it sucks, maybe he might develop an aesthetic." Now, my parents sort of did this with me (Batman was good, Brady Bunch was bad. Hanna-Barbera Cartoons discouraged, Looney Tunes revered. Star Trek, always acceptable), but I think this had more to do with what they could stand to listen to than with a sense that my "bad taste" would reflect poorly on them.
Is this one of those things that has always been there suddenly becoming extraordinarily obvious and horrible, or are parents really in a new era where they aggressively want their children to be "Mini-Mes"?
The whole business seems so silly when the kid is just going to smear cookie all over a carefully selected sweater (which the dog will then shred), or roll in something disgusting. I actually find it amusing that my child will dance to anything- the weather jingle on NY1 or "grown up" music. I have a lot of concerns, but whether his tastes universally jibe with mine is not really taking up much space in my worry hopper.
posted by Elise at 11:45 AM
5 Comments
Books & Boys
One of the ways in which I completely romanticize my childhood is through the books I read and loved and remember so vividly still.
Of course this powerful sentiment is even sweeter because it is impossible for me to taint my young reading life with my jaundiced grown-up eyes. It is easy for me to contemplate so many incidents and think that I must have been one annoying kid, but the books were always bliss.
And because these memories are so fine and it is so pleasing to spread pleasure around, I think about what books my kid will read one day. (And of course I've already talked about his cinematic education, which I plot almost daily.)
Such plans are bound to end in tears, mine I suspect. Everyone cautions mothers of boys that boys develop more slowly, don’t talk as early, don't read so soon, can be clingy, are slow to potty train. And once they do know how to read, they'd rather not. This is a drag for someone who loves fobbing text off on people. (My husband is used to my sticking books and articles on his nightstand. My father has become actively competitive with his book recommendations so that by the time I suggest he read the sequel to something I gave him a week ago, he will already have acquired every book the writer has even poked at- including young adult novellas and the complete series of comic books the writer dabbled in.) It would be most sad if reading became a struggle.
But there is hope. Emily Bazelon wrote a really interesting piece for Slate about boys and books in which she suggests that boys are just being misdirected. Their brains tend to like different material than what they are usually offered, what we think they will like, what we think they want. Boys apparently like procedure, instructions and diagrams in their stories- which is why Bazelon is so pleased to see that Little House in the Big Woods is recommended for boys- so many descriptions of how to survive in the woods, so much discussion of Pa's firearms.
All of this is quite a long way off for me (because, as everyone tells me, boys develop slowly), but it is reassuring to have some resources on hand. Bazelon cites the really great Guys Read web site, and I'm pleased to say I'm already armed with a few books that should appeal to Felix (Richard Scary's Cars that Go and Things that Go and Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad books).
Looming in the future is something quite different. The March 12 New York Times Book Review ran a piece by Naomi Wolf, a writer I don't tend to agree with particularly often, about rather sinister trends in young adult literature for girls. If Wolf's account of these books is at all accurate, these books are to be avoided at all costs if for no other reason than they are so wildly stupid. I think, if I had a daughter, I'd rather have her read anthologies of eternally unfunny Garfield comics than the "Clique" or "Gossip Girl" series, which seem to be mostly engineered to introduce impressionable minds to the joys of brand names and astonishingly lame descriptions of sexual encounters. (This is not to say that teen texts have cornered the market on bad sex. Here you can read about the UK's Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, 2005, and here are the dismal scenes in question.) If you can find Wolf's article, read it and rage.
But this is the eternal problem I suppose. You want them to read, but you want them to read the right things. You want them to eat, but not so much the crap. It is all easy now when everything I hand Felix is fascinating. It will be rather sad when I'll have to become more cunning.
posted by Elise at 5:14 AM
2 Comments
Not a Cartoon
Quickly. Feministing.com linked to this page from Good Housekeeping, 1955 and I remembered someone forwarded it to me on Valentine's Day about two years ago. (It was making the rounds at the office.)
Reading it- and of course, it is very very funny and very very silly- I was somewhat chilled because it sounds so very very much like Caitlin Flanagan, about whom I have had some words.
That 1955 page could be taken as camp if it weren't created in all sincerity, and this is what troubles me about the strong revival of this language. Cloaked in "common sense" and prescriptive practicality, and made to seem so wise, this advice is really about endless disembling and disguise. A half wit would know that relationships are happier when both parties talk to and listen to each other. And, by extension, a half wit would understand that both parties should get to talk and listen equally.
So it's all funny ha-ha, but Caitlin Flanagan is tapping away at her word processor, waiting until we double over with laughter to bite us on the ass.
posted by Elise at 12:44 PM
3 Comments
Go Ahead, Cry!
"Don't cry, Felix. Don't cry!" This is a little chant my mother does when Felix is losing it. I'm sure you will be shocked to hear that he doesn't tend to let this sort of coaching have any effect on his state of mind.
This drives me crazy. It shouldn't. It's just another useless unfollowable tidbit being lobbed at my kid who doesn't know what she's talking about anyway. I'm used to this. In New York it is physically impossible to avoid being offered these tips unless one is a deaf, blind shut-in. And even then. . .
But "Don't cry" makes me want to crawl out of my skin and I have no idea why. She's been saying it since he was a few days old. He'd be bleating away and she'd keep telling him in a preoccupied tone to stop crying and while they had no complaints with this situation, my blood pressure would spike.
If a telephone was ringing, ringing, ringing and I wandered through my parents' house, blandly repeating "Someone's calling. Someone's calling. Someone's calling" over and over, interrupting all conversation that hoped to be happening around the incessant ringing, someone would surely scream or pop me one. But I can't really say anything to my mother. It's been going on for 13 months and I can't conjure a gentle way to say: "knock it off." And my problem with it (weak protests over the months) inevitably gets read as my lacking something in the humor department anyway. (I suspect part of the reason this makes me insane is a physiological prickliness induced by the sound of his crying, but knowing that should make me less inclined to violence, not more.)
Over the weekend there was a "Don't cry" incident on the street and I offered up a whiney, witless rejoinder when I couldn't control myself any longer. I said "Mom!" in a rather peevish tone. That single word made my mother stop speaking to me. She bounced comments off my husband while we continued to poke our heads into a few art galleries and then when it was time to go, she literally ran down the street to get away and has not been heard from since.
I don't know how I offended so deeply. My mother has impressively thick skin that I have admired for decades. This is a woman who is impervious to my sibling's shrieks of agony and threads of self-immolation if she picks a tidbit of something tasty off his plate to sample. But something about my protest was deeply offensive.
Now that I'm a parent, I know that I have a still latent superpower. I will be able to cause my child more embarrassment and frustration than anyone else on earth, except perhaps his father (unlikely, though). I can only hope that I can master my abilities and use them for good and not just to endlessly baffle and confuse my kid.
posted by Elise at 11:24 AM
0 Comments
Flanagan Rant-again
So Elle magazine is showing some teeth. The April issue has an article about the unpleasant non-phenomenon that is Caitlin Flanagan. Flanagan, about whom I ranted in passing in the opening essay to this blog, is a conservative writer whose standard lines read something like this: feminism is bad for marriage, feminism is bad for children, women with children shouldn't work.
Since she writes for the Atlantic Monthly and sadly, the New Yorker, Flanagan has a wide audience and her bold statements and jokey, consumable style seem to be just the thing to get her quoted everywhere and get everyone's dander up. Don't misunderstand me, she is awful (though an Atlantic piece she wrote called The Wedding Merchants wasn't miserable), but what I find more awful than her awful opinions and excessive sentimentality is how stupid the world is to shove her into the limelight to spout her platitudes.
I'm not going to synopsize her articles or pick apart her arguments here. That's actually been done quite well in a fascinating Slate dialogue from February, 2004 in which Sara Mosle and Barbara Ehrenreich do a good job demonstrating how stupid and sloppy her thinking is.
But what I will say are two things that the Elle piece made me think. The first is that Flanagan's attitudes are so convenient for the American right. The idea that women with children simply shouldn't be working solves all the problems that get kicked around so much. Women wouldn't need to fight for subsidized childcare if they'd just stay home. But of course, Flanagan is talking about a dream world where everyone shares her particular ambitions and financial abilities. It is rather easy to be prescriptive when you are assuming everyone is just like you. One of the central tenets of Judith Warner's book Perfect Madness is that as a culture we do not fight to make circumstances easier for women who work because we don't seem to think it is important enough. Flanagan's writing supports all of those who would say that childcare wouldn’t have to be a "problem" if it weren't for crazy, spoiled feminists who ask for too much and don't do what they're supposed to do. These notions are so dim it is hard to understand why such lofty publications put her stuff out there.
Except, of course, that it sells. As Ehrenreich says in the Elle article: "Media executives love the ides of a quote-unquote catfight between the stay-at-home mother and the working mother... The media love a fight and they do anything to pick it, including fielding people like her." As someone who has just started to pick through the just-published essay collection Mommy Wars, I have to agree.
An interview with the Mommy Wars editor revealed none of the essay writers wanted to come out swinging against other women who had made different choices. The book title is misleading, but ensured sales ("If we called it `26 Moms Explain Their Life Stories and How We Should Love and Support Each Other,' no one would buy it.".) The "war," is largely internal and anonymously political. People aren't reaching for their swords. They're looking for their Xanax.
But I think they key to the Flanagan madness is revealed at the end of the Elle piece where Flanagan talks about how, during chemotherapy treatments for breast cancer, her husband had to carry her from her doctor's office to the car. That gesture, she says, is the result of her having "banked" so many hours of being a dedicated wife to her husband. If she hadn't sacrificed some work time to make him hot meals and be the kind of wife she romanticizes based on a 1950's stereotype, she doesn't feel he would have picked her up when she needed it.
What does this say? It says that Flanagan has so little faith in herself that she has to count on years of accumulated guilt to ensure that her husband will help her when she's sick. This comment is tragic. Anyone who is partnered with someone who refuses to help in the face of illness or weakness because there wasn't a decades-long history of timely pot roasts and clean living rooms has chosen a particularly bad mate indeed.
And that is one generalization I can make with great confidence.
posted by Elise at 3:40 AM
6 Comments
PSA
Learn from my negligence!
This applies to parents and non-parents alike (though it won't help you much with pets since you'll be told to RUN don't walk to the Animal Medical Center no matter what): have the phone number of a 24-hour pharmacy at your fingertips.
With no warning at all, I suddenly got what was unmistakably a blocked milk duct and when I got home I began the recommended treatments. Within three hours, I was dizzy and had chills and spent some time on the sofa musing about home remedies.
Somehow it occurred to me that it wasn't actually cold in the house and a thermometer confirmed this, telling me that I had a fever of 101.5. Pregnancy For Dummies says this qualifies as a "high temperature" and told me to call my doctor immediately and report mastitis.
Never mind that when you have a 13-month-old it isn't called "mastitis" any more, but a "breast infection," as I learned from my doctor's answering service (even if I hadn't been feverish, it was Friday night: everyone deserves a good time even emergency operators, why rain on their parade by arguing about semantics?). That's what it is, and hot compresses don't really work anymore.
And then a tiny computer odyssey commenced when my doctor did call back in the middle of a web search for a pharmacy. Eventually we did find one, but not without considerable impatience. It was rather far away, as well.
So, track one down, put the number on your list of emergency contacts and I hope you never have to use it.
And if you think you can't get mastitis (if you will) because your kid is too old . . . there's a reason the word "hubris" was invented.
posted by Elise at 5:42 AM
3 Comments
Not News, Exactly
But Dahlia Lithwick, a writer I admire tremendously, has an interesting article in today's Slate (and apparently tomorrow's Washington Post) about gay parenting and the law... and I am happy to say that what she says is not universally wildly depressing (though her statistics about children waiting to be adopted, children in foster care and the states that prohibit gay people from adopting or fostering kids are miserable). What she says isn't "new" but it is all good to know
posted by Elise at 8:54 AM
0 Comments
Hide Your Eyes
"May I speak to the lady of the house?
"This is she."
"Thank you."
And the line went dead.
This hardly bothered me. I was happy enough not to have to trot out my weary "I'm on the `do not call list'" line and it was nice that the 8:30 AM call was unrelated to the recent hospitalization of a close relative.
It did make me wonder, though, why the man didn't want to talk to this Lady of the House. As it turns out, he had no idea how right he was.
The polite hanger-upper called back last night, also around 8:30, asking for the house's Lady. I told him he was speaking to her and asked what he wanted since he had hung up on me the day before.
The man apologized for that and launched into a little monologue about he represented a non-profit organization interested in family-friendly entertainment that hopes to influence Hollywood to generate safer, less risque, less racy, less "objectionable" fare.
He went on to say that he would read some paragraphs to me and asked if I would not interrupt him because his connection was such that he might not be able to hear me and he wanted to be sure I didn't think he was just talking over me, and that he would ask me some questions after each paragraph.
All right.
As it turns out I only got through the first paragraph. The rant was purely about how Hollywood doesn't make any effort to generate family-friendly movies and how his group was in no way advocating censorship, but they wanted to see a change. They wanted quality, "wholesome" movies and television that everyone could watch together without being offended by language or "anti-family" attitudes or sex or violence. Did I agree that Hollywood avoids making family-friendly movies?
Here was my invitation. I stepped in and said that he was talking to the wrong girl. As far as I am concerned, I genuinely am against censorship and overall policy that pretends not to be censorship but in fact is just as repressive only sneakily so. I think parents should be aware of what is available for their children to watch and should take steps to curate the movies and TV available to the family.
Moreover, and this was the end of me, it seemed to me that Hollywood was hardly shying away from "family friendly" movies, given the recent release of Cheaper by the Dozen, Yours, Mine and Ours, Curious George, Nanny McPhee (not a Hollywood product but still. . .), the upcoming Shaggy Dog, Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (again not Hollywood-generated but Hollywood distributed)... and when I said that I thought he was mistaken, he thanked me and hung up.
This conversation bothered me. I genuinely do think that parents need to be invested not just in censoring what their kids watch but in teaching them about culture. I don't think it is strictly a matter of deciding that the world needs to be "family friendly" and churning out a bunch of bland G-rated pap. Children, I think, can be taught to understand that fiction is just that, and that imaginary worlds do not exist to be imitated.
I went to a gallery recently with Felix where I was looking at a piece by Suzanne McClelland, which is based on "The Princess and the Pea" and got into a conversation about how other examples McClelland's work had been written up as being "controversial" and not "safe" for children because she often uses "foul language" in her images.
This is an ancient argument, but I don't really understand the worry, except as it exists in the lazy, literal mind of someone who doesn't give children enough credit. It is one thing to shield a child from sex and violence and horror, another thing entirely to protect it from language, and even the obvious opportunity to teach that there are some words that are not acceptable in public, but which serve to express things in art. This is a hard concept but not an impossible one, somewhat similar to the "indoor/outdoor voice" duality, it seems to me.
I have dreams of teaching Felix about movies. I can't wait to show him Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood (I bet I've talked about that here before). I'm even looking forward to introducing him to the world of moral ambiguity that is The Maltese Falcon. And I resent that any group would want to suggest that I don't know what I'm doing. I do. It is a privilege and a pleasure and I'd rather struggle to find good stuff than fend off endless amounts of crap.
posted by Elise at 2:53 PM
3 Comments
Rat Race
Of late, I've been wondering if I should start getting those "B6" injections that we heard about in that seminal novel packed with health tips, Valley of the Dolls.
I've been tired. Work has piled up, and rather worrying family familiness has set in and makes me yearn for the proverbial quick fix.
It doesn't help that no one seems to share my indolence. I went to a cocktail party last week where my hostess, a new mother with a business of her own, entertained 200 and then wrapped up a new product of her own invention which she showed me two days later, while the leftovers were still tasty.
There were no kindred spirits in the general population of the the party either. One woman I chatted up said she moved apartments a few days before her child was born and then went back to a grueling 12 hour-a-day job about two weeks later.
It was embarrassing to remember how I was preening preening over getting back to the keyboard, producing concrete thoughts from home, between naps and such a few days after returning from the hospital. And no, I haven't managed to invent anything. (Though if I can come up with something to prevent Felix from his one-shiner-a-week routine, that wouldn't hurt.)
It's ridiculous to compare all the time, but that's a sad side effect of becoming a mother. Someone is always measuring. Even the stupidest things get evaluated. (Who cares when the kid got teeth, or slept through then night?) And what is the point of all the one-upmanship?
I don't understand it but I sure do buy into it. Why do we compete? How does it help us?
Pardon me for being plaintive, but I'm the girl who is overwhelmed by the little things and I do marvel at the accomplishments of the party people.
For my part, I'm setting small goals in different areas so I can always point in some direction while looking for progress. They are indeed very little:
I am determined to do pull-ups (and the heft of the kid should help with some upper body strengthening).
I must fix the sink. (This has been months of lingering trouble that is too much for a "handy" person to deal with and too small for most "plumbers" to want to take on, but I think there's progress).
I have to complete the professional assignment, and I have about 10 days to do it.
Ready? Set? I'm already going.
posted by Elise at 4:59 AM
3 Comments
Those Crazy Gothamites
So the front page of the New York Times today blasted the news that it is almost impossible to find a spot for one's toddler in New York City's private preschools. The competition is apparently so fierce and hilarious that it has spawned all sorts of industries including:
Private School Consulting Firms
Early Child Care Referral Agencies (there is a distinction to be made here, I'm sure)
And, of course (do I need to say this even?):
Reality Television Programming about lunatic New York City Mothers. The pilot for one series is called "Manhattan Mom."
Why all this competition? What's the deal? What if you are just groping around trying to figure out what happens in playgroups? What if private school isn't your bag for any number of reasons? Is this problem worse in public schools? Are there public pre-schools?
This crisis must be real because I heard about it first this morning from "In the Papers" on New York 1 (local news) where my favorite anchor Pat Kiernan confessed that his daughter has received the much-dreaded wait list letter from her school of choice.
This is not a "poor me" post. Not yet, in any case. I just think this is yet another instance where the crazy craziness of New York is being magnified and caricatured for the rest of the world.
And really, if I'm going to buy into that article, I may as well buy in to this one, which should put my worries to sleep. Toddlers, it says, are actually altruistic. Who knew? If Felix is so hapless as to be denied entry anyplace, all I have to do is wait for some pure-hearted tyke to give up his or her spot. I'm sure it happens all the time.
posted by Elise at 11:43 AM
0 Comments
Labor Laws
Given the recent record for human rights abuses committed by the Unites States government in and around United States prison settings, this is hardly surprising, but that doesn't mean that this isn't hateful and unconscionable.
It is astonishing that in 20 states it is legal- and common- to shackle inmates while they are in labor and delivering their babies. Only five states actively do not permit the shackling- a practice that a halfwit would recognize as being potentially harmful to the mother and the baby. (The New York Times article points out that many women who find themselves pregnant and in prison are high risk for an assortment of reasons ranging from extreme youth to malnutrition.)
I don't exactly know where to begin to discuss how appalling this practice is, but if you want to feed your outrage, here is a list of other sources of information on Metafilter.
It is absolutely shaming, disgusting and would be unspeakable if these reports didn't demand that loud protests be shouted into any ear that is presently pretending to be deaf.
posted by Elise at 8:54 AM
0 Comments
........................................................
|
