A two-year-old watches the final four

A ball. He missed it. Fall down. Bounce up. Red guys and White guys. I like both. I like both. Red and White. Black isn’t playing today.  He made it!  Numbers. Numbers. Numbers on shirt. Red and white. Red and white. Guy running. The red one running. Playing catch. (Clap, clap.)

 

West of Southby…

I’m too far West this year to complain about all the hipsters crowding our regular East Austin hang-outs (1,2,3) during the wonderful madness that is SXSW.  There’s something great about living in a place that turns into a cultural mecca for a week or two out of the year and feeling like part of that – even if you’re not particularly musical and you feel a bit exhausted by all the hipster-ness. Phoenix isn’t a mecca for anything but anti-immigration sentiment. So I’m spending Sunday morning listening to the My Morning Jacket concert podcast on NPR, “writing letters” with CJC,  nursing LEC, and cleaning bathrooms. Vicarious living. Who said I’m not cool?

 

Political wives

Is there some air-tight legal contract political wives sign when their husbands assume office? Something obligating them to stand there and “support” no matter how egregious his offense? I know it might be easier said than done, but these boots were made for walking. Why is it that so many political wives decline to say: “Face the press and the public yourself. I’m having lunch with my lawyer today”?

Here’s Ann Applebaum’s take on why the “stand by your man” approach might be the path of least resistance for political wives: it’s all over quickly. I only sort-of buy that. At least Bill had the good sese to face the nation solo. Or maybe that was Hillary’s call…

 

Technology in action

Hours after LEC’s birth 2 weeks ago, I had the best “technology in action” experience ever. LEC was born at 4 am on Sunday. Not quite ready to venture up out of the bed to my computer, I picked up my cell phone and sent a text message announcing LEC’s arrival to people in my “inner circle” at about 7 am. My youngest brother (MJT) was in LA – about to head to the airport to catch a flight back to Nashville. MJT gets to the airport at noon, shows the airline person at the check-in desk the text message and asks if he can get routed through Phoenix and add a stop. They sigh (everyone likes babies and MJT is a really personable guy) and facilitate his request to the tune of about $50. He reschedules his Monday morning appointments, and sends me a text message “Be there at 3:15 or so. Will take a cab to your house.” MJT meets his niece less than 12 hours after she was born, hangs out with us for a few hours before heading out to crash elsewhere, and catches a 6 am flight back to Nashville the next day, arriving in time to make his afternoon appointments. I think this would make a great commercial – either for some airline’s claim to excellent customer service or for some text-messaging service with a “bringing people together” tagline. Sweet, eh?

 

Underrated

We welcomed another girl (LEC) into our family at 4 am sharp on February 10th. There’s simply nothing original to say about the joy a new baby brings, so in the interest of sparing you a laundry-list of cliches, I’ll just say that things here are great and post a short list of grossly underrated new baby stuff.

- Homebirth (ask me about it some time!)
- Little pre-cry grunting noises that don’t ever get the chance to turn into a full-on cry
- Two year-olds who proclaim everything “little” to be “cute” and really mean it
- Two year-olds so excited to hug and kiss their new sibling that they forget to say goodnight to their mom
- A house-call from your health-care provider (a first in my 30 years)
- Fielding congratulations phone calls and emails from around the globe
- That newborn smell
- Taking stock

 

Watch Santa Outfit!

This is CJC’s go-to request lately. She’s obsessed with it. I really don’t have anything to say about it – just sharing.

 

Boundaries

During my last visit to the midwife she asked me if I was still working, to which I replied “yes.” I’ve been going to campus less and less frequently but have been trying to get manuscripts out and clear my desk (and calendar) as completely as possible for at least the next six weeks. “You’ll have this baby when you stop working,” she told me. That didn’t really sink in until now – now that I’ve passed my EDD*, am ready to post an eviction notice, and am lacking any sign that this baby’s arrival really is imminent. Now I’m realizing that what she may have been saying is: “You’re NOT going to have this baby UNTIL you stop working, and this is something you should take seriously.”

I’m no workaholic, but I realize that I truly don’t know how to stop. Saying that out loud sounds so much more, well, sick than I think I really am. But this career is wacky. What counts as “work” is fuzzy, and I’m not the best with my boundaries in the first place. Does returning email count? Do I need to switch out all the academic books and journals from my reading pile for the fun stuff I had hoped to get to over break? Set a May due-date for the manuscript that’s on-deck and a July one for the one that’s in the hole and just stop thinking about both of them?

It’s not just academia that’s like this. My friends who work in other sectors have fuzzy boundaries too (filmmakers, writers, artists, designers, computer programmers, finance gurus, sales people…), so I know that it’s part of a larger shift and not really a sector-specific problem. And the whole thing isn’t news to me – it’s the entire basis of the GTD system and lots of other productivity guidelines I try to follow. But this is the first time I’m facing an external (well, internal) motivation to shut things down professionally in a meaningful way, and I do think academia is a particularly hard area to do this in – if only because there is so much overlap between professional and personal habits like reading and writing routines.

This is a pretty particular set of circumstances, and anybody who doesn’t strongly believe in a body/mind connection would probably just roll their eyes. But the applications of knowing you’re capable of turning things off – if and when you need to – might be much broader. The fact that I don’t really know how to start stopping is alarming me. Suggestions welcome.

* Many of you already know that I don’t believe in due dates but have opted for a 95% confidence interval. I’m not ready to publicize the bounds but will tell you that I’m nearing its right tail. Since I like to think of myself as “perfectly normal in every way,” going past the right bounds will either destroy my faith in statistics or force me to reassess my understanding of self (the latter being the more unlikely of the two possibilities.)

 

Equal parts of excitement and dread

It’s really hard to describe the range of emotions surrounding the impending arrival of a new baby. Excitement? Of course. Anticipation? Can’t wait to meet her. Truly. However there’s also a really strong sense of dread for me, and it has nothing to do with fearing labor, sleepless nights, new expenses, or any of that. It’s this sense that the world is too horrible for my child to have to navigate. Even though I wasn’t keeping any sort of journal at the time, it’s pretty clear to me that we must have felt about the same way when CJC was about to arrive – evidenced by her rather dramatic middle name, which means “born during drought.”

As we learned on Monday, the state of the Union is not particularly strong. Kenya is collapsing into ethnic violence. Our food supply is frighteningly unsafe. A certain presidential hopeful is delivering heartfelt messages of hope and optimism to people like me who are so thirsty for good news they’re willing to act naive enough to go along for the ride – at least for a little while. The world’s too horrible of a place for this kid, but don’t worry. I won’t name her “Dolores;” that’s not even on the short-list.

 

Yeah, Cowgirl

On Monday at about 4 pm, CJC started saying “yeah.” This after several months of your very typical and almost-always-sweet toddler “NOs” to just about everything. She hasn’t said “no” since 4 pm on Monday. In fact, she’s transitioned to using the following euphamisms: “mmmmmm, too late;” “mmmmmm, doing fine;” and “mmmmmm, later.”

In other news, CJC does not want to be called by her name but referred to as “Cowgirl.” If you forget, she will go and put on one of several props – my hat, her pink boots, or a “Nashville Cowgirl” t-shirt from her uncle – to remind you. An illustrated children’s book capturing the phenomenon in all its sweetness is already in progress.

 

A continuum of choices?

Stevens makes some very valid points in her review of Rikki Lake’s new doc The Business of Being Born. But I take issue with her assertion that “there’s a vast continuum of choices that separate über-crunchydom from ultra-technologization.” Birthing options in many states across the US are being limited – systematically. The choices that are being eliminated are those that are somewhere in the middle. Hospital-based birthing centers are closing (not lucrative enough?), free-standing birthing centers are being shut down, and midwives are being prohibited from practicing in hospitals, leaving reasonable women in states like Arizona (where I live) with a single choice to make: hospital birth with all its trappings or homebirth. Women who want to give birth “naturally” in the hospital setting are often discouraged and belittled or by their physicians or merely tolerated but only very rarely encouraged and almost never truly supported. If you had only one choice to make (home or hospital) and knew that your desire to avoid unnecessary interventions wouldn’t be taken seriously in the hospital setting, what would you do?