Parks, sunscreen, strollers, sandboxes, ice cream cones, library storytime, swings and lots of mommy time are combining to give Jayne quite the idyllic summer so far. Me too. Really. Except I’m getting lots of Jayne time; my mom will only be here for a week in July.
Thing is, I can’t quite squelch the part of me that is going absolutely bonkers being her primary caregiver when I have other important things to do as well. I manage to squelch it most of the time (because the situation, it’s the best we can do right now), but it will pop back up. I probably can’t address this topic without coming off like some sort of whiny, self-centered, spoiled “W”AHM/perpetual graduate student but I’m going to be honest and admit that I’ve drunk enough of the academic kool-aid that I get itchy when I don’t get a chance to give my brain an academic fix. Motherhood and academia don’t have to be antithetical, dammit. They don’t. Even when you’re affiliated with a university on the other side of the Atlantic and you can’t stay put for more than a few months at a time.
I could hash out why and wherefore I’m not getting much work time now, but, meh. We’re in the midst of a two-week accustoming period with an excellent “nursery” that had a part-time summer opening so I have an increase in work hours on the horizon (a whole two full days a week coming soon to a dissertation near me!). I get to spend Saturdays at the British Library. And I can use the internet to access a LOT of academic literature during naps and after bedtime. Oh wait. I can’t do that last part.
What’s really frying me right now is not having a good internet connection.
We’re in the middle of freaking London. Why can we only get a stone age internet connection? WHY?
I’ll tell you why. It’s the system. Nomads just can’t get reliable broadband. We couldn’t bring our broadband with us to London because utilities are included in a short lease. Our name isn’t on the utility bills here. Thus, we can’t sign a contract to get broadband (and, admittedly, wouldn’t sign a long-term contract for a 10 week lease) even though, wait for it—we already have an 18 month broadband contract we’re paying for. Garrr. Smash. UGH. In short, our only option for the summer is to (a) pirate wifi whenever we can and (b) get a USB dongle modem.
Yep. A dongle. It’s like dial-up. Only less reliable. Size of a pen drive, plugs into a USB slot. Can be “topped up” by the day, week, or month. Comes with a three-foot extension wire to aid in picking up a signal.
To even check our email at home we have to push a chair up to the window and stick the stupid thing up in the air like an old rabbit-ears antenna. It’s ridiculous. But we do it. Because we’re ridiculously internet-addicted. You’d do it, too.
Dongles don’t work for streaming anything. NPR.com? xmradio.com? Pffft. Video? Don’t make me laugh. Jayne can’t watch Chuggington on bbc.co.uk while I do things like shower and make lunch. Dongles really don’t work even for news and weather—we could be all retro and walk to the corner store and back for a newspaper in the time it takes to load cnn.com’s homepage. Dongles don’t work for downloading academic articles, or, heck, digital scrapbook supplies. Dongles don’t work for Skype. Poor Jaynie keeps trying to “show” things to her grandparents when we go all old school and use a mobile phone to call the states. An electronic device with only one function? Does. Not. Compute.
If I had been more ambitious in my note-taking the last time I taught the
Inferno I could probably hazard an analogy between a circle of hell and using an internet dongle. But I didn’t, and darn if I’m not going to spend my time in internet purgatory googling it up.
So. No internet, no radio, no tv means Jayne and I are out and about a LOT. Which is generally a great thing. Just not when I have a list of articles I need to read. The public library with the free wifi loves to see us coming, oh yeah. Jayne gets to amok the kids section while I alternately get to madly download a batch of articles and read aloud whatever books that catch her fancy. She’s a good kid, but she’s only two—there’s only so much patience a two-year-old can have while mommy’s tapping on her laptop and praying for another article to just download already so mommy has some resources for re-framing her chapters.
Why don’t I leave her with Ben in the evenings and head for a coffee shop with wifi? I do when I can, but the wifi bit. Oh, Ha. Ha ha. The libraries and the majority of the coffee shops in our area (Pimlico) keep pretty much to business hours. Score one point for Manchester on this front: Manchester caters to student hours as well as to London 9-to-5ers. The long-distance dissertating, short-term resident Mama crowd is a bit of a niche market.
So, for Jayne, Mommy time can mean playing with your toys while she takes forever to check her email. Sometimes it means coloring quietly at the library’s coloring table. It means not always being dressed quite right for the weather. It means new parks, and bus rides and subway trains. It means museums. It means a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It means a lot of time in the stroller. And sunscreen. And iced lollies. And sandboxes. And slides. And sometimes needing to make sure Mama is watching you slide down the slide for that all-important 37th time rather than peeking at her book. Sometimes it means blowing bubbles while Mama sits on the front stoop with a book and a pencil. Sometimes it means grabbing a Dr. Seuss and sitting down next to her.
And parenting Jaynie means having discussions about the difference between library books and our books, scribbling in books vs. annotating them. Yesterday, we annotated our copy of
One Fish, Two Fish.

This one has a
little big silver star.