So proud of our bumblebee bum

Jayne wanted to lounge in her crib the other day after her nap; I went in to get her when she awoke but learned that she didn't want to get up yet, she wanted to chat for a while. We talked about the Pooh design on one of her blankets for a while, which includes honeypots with bumblebees buzzing around them. Eventually (as I could tell that she had filled her naptime diaper) I told her it was time to get up. We needed to change her into her big girl pants so her skin wouldn't get irritated.

She thought for a minute and then announced "I have bumblebees in my bum!"

We're deep in toddler country now, oh my land. Toddler logic and malapropisms are such a hoot. When you walk in the door you might be greeted by a cheery "Congratulations!". When you wake up in the morning, you might get a "I'm so proud of you!". Anyway, the Jayneisms are burgeoning. I thought I'd share a few.

In the endearingly cute category:
See you ma-tow! (tomorrow)
Riddit! Riddit! (what frogs say)
Boop boop doop! (sung "Skinnamarkink" style at random)
What time is it? no.. it's twenty-one. And twenty-six and twenty-five.
I have a stinky poop. It's behind my bum.
I broke it all by myself.

In the sometimes-I-wish-I-could-strike-these-from-her-vocabulary category:
I broke it all by myself!
No!
I do it!
I do it myself!
I do it!
No.
I no ride in stroder (stroller).
I don wan ride in stroder!
No!
I DO it! I do it! I DOOOooooooo it!
I can do it!
No!

take off

I tell you, that girl.

She can fly.

ps. I'm updating my blog roll and cutting links to blogs that have been inactive for a month or more. Affected friends, sorry. I'm still subscribed to your blogs in my reader and will know to update here if/when you start updating again.

a conversation about being "Stunned"

If you haven’t clicked over there already, I wanted to alert you to a conversation about feminist motherhood going on over at blue milk. We’re discussing an excerpt from Karen Bridson’s new book Stunned: The New Generation of Women Having Babies, Getting Angry, and Creating a Mothers’ Movement. Bridson will be joining us as well, but we excerpt readers are getting the ball rolling. I left a hefty comment over there and am reproducing it here, with some further expansions.

Here goes:

I’m glad to see a book devoted to opening up a conversation about feminism and motherhood in my generation, born in the late 70s, early 80s. There were several moments during my reading of Bridson’s first chapter (“Why Moms Are Mad”) where I caught myself nodding vigorously. I’m an academic feminist who has done a lot of thinking about the meaning and effects of childbearing and have a feminist partner and I was STILL “stunned” to find myself in the days and weeks after I birthed our daughter to be the first adult to awaken and the last one to bed each night because the days’ work was just not yet done. I resented every extra second of sleep Ben got than I did because I understood it to mean that he had gotten his daily “to dos” done and not ensured that I had the same chance to get mine done. So, in that respect, my and Bridson’s micro-experiences of being “stunned” by the effects of motherhood on what had been a privileged (white, heteronormative, middle-class), equal opportunity life experience and life partnership are quite similar. Equally shared parenting is hard to achieve. On the other hand, as an academic who has always identified as a feminist, Bridson’s born-again feminist narrative frustrates me in various ways. I have had that conversation about the “f-word” label that scares many, many university students (and others) and think that the exercise becomes a stumbling block to getting at more substantive issues. I’ll grant that while I’m sympathetic to the conversation Bridson is initiating, I’m not exactly Bridson’s target audience. I’d like to see more substance and outright engagement with the patriarchal (heterosexist, classist, white, etc.) status quo.

For example, Bridson says she is

“convinced…that most men’s motives are not driven by the belief that women should have to do more, but rather a matter of simple laziness and a tendency toward letting someone else do the crummy jobs. My husband says he doesn’t do certain cleaning jobs around the house because he knows I will. Pretty interesting” (12).

I agree that it’s pretty interesting, and wish Bridson would push this much, much further. The disjunction in our society between giving women equal opportunity and doing the harder work of actually following through on that “belief” by giving mothers actual support that “stunned” Bridson into writing this book needs further interrogation. Patriarchy might not be an openly held “belief” nowadays, but it’s still the default. Excusing this “tendency” largely reserved to men as mere laziness seriously weakens Bridson’s position. Women don’t have the same privilege to tend toward “simple laziness,” particularly with the crummy jobs. That’s just not fair. And the micro-issues reflect the macro, I'd say.

I must say that Bridson’s almost exclusive focus on girls in her book really bugs me. Here I’m referring to chapter six specifically, (which isn’t in the excerpt but is described in the preface) but also more generally. Why must we talk only about girls when considering what we “should” and “ought” to be teaching the next generation? If we leave boys out of this equation, girls are going to have to spend their time and energy fighting these same fights and raising the consciousnesses of their peers and partners, consciousnesses that can and should be formed differently from a young age. Again, I think Bridson raises important issues I hope will get public airing but the moralizing orientated toward girls only is all-too-familiar. Where’s the discussion of cultural messages to boys? Bridson discusses how the birth of her son motivated this book. I would think Bridson would find opportunity to address the cultural messages being transmitted to boys– I’d like to see some of her insights about how patriarchal defaults are still being conveyed. I’m hoping she addresses this in chapter nine (which wasn’t in the excerpt) which is described as a “wish list of changes.”

It shouldn’t be a wish list. It should be an action list. I guess that’s my point.

So, generally, I have reservations about the scope of her approach to the movement she is advocating, and how it might limit its potential to effect real change. While I think that her research about mothering is really eye-opening and a great starting point, my immediate concern is that framing our culture’s systemic non-support of parenting as a girl-specific and woman-specific issue overlooks the wider social context and perpetuates the collapsing of “parenting” onto “mothering”. It overlooks the progressive parenting actions being undertaken by the fathers and other parents/caregivers of this generation (Bridson’s movement is a heteronormative movement which, obviously, is a problem, but is another issue).

Anyway. That’s my (expanded) opinion about the starting point Bridson offers for a discussion of feminist parenting. Do join us over there (you might still be able to email blue milk for the excerpt as well).

Our Golden Girl, gone.

My parents built and moved into what they still think of as their dream house in 1995, when I was fifteen. That first spring, we got a Golden Retriever puppy we named JewEli Ann Cotton-something-or other. Hmm…I think I’ve forgotten her official registered name, with its references to her maternal line (the “Cotton” part) and her paternal line (the “Eli” part). No matter. I don’t know why I mentioned it. She didn’t care. We just called her Jeweli. She was our first family dog. She’s part of what made home home and it won’t be the same home without her. She ended up living in that house longer than my brother and I did—her whole life. I'm especially sad that home will feel emptier for my parents.

She was the perfect kind of dog to run those 80 acres of theirs. She was a hunting dog and LOVED LOVED LOVED running after and retrieving birds. (*That LOVED LOVED LOVED should be read as if they sound like a dog panting, and with a grin*). She also LOVED LOVED LOVED (*dog panting, grin, etc.*) running up to people once they drove up the long driveway, because, you see, she just LOVED LOVED LOVED people. Loved touching people, being petted, being with people. Jeweli was a classic Golden girl. We weren’t practiced dog trainers with her so we had a bit of a challenge keeping her from running up to people and giving them big happy, jumpy, doggy hugs. That really only declined with the passage of time—the jumping, that is, not the loving.

We LOVED LOVED LOVED her, our Jeweli-dog.

Annotating Dr. Seuss

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.

My Superheroes

Grandma got a new toy.

It's a one-passenger Ultralight. Strictly no toddlers allowed. (whew!)


Her granddaughter will just have to learn to fly by her own power.

Since she takes after her Grandma, she's already working on it.

Big Ben! And Parliament! (you knew I'd go there)

We're going to giggle out impressions of Chevy Chase all summer. "Look kids! It's Big Ben! And Parliament!.... Big Ben, Parliament....Big Ben... Parliament...."

Look, kiddo! It's Big Daddy Ben! And Parliament!

We spent Father's Day traipsing the city, specifically the Tate Britain, the Thames walk, and then the Tate Modern, with lunch at an outdoor riverside cafe sandwiched in-between. Ben declared (not for the first time) that he loves being a dad because it gives him an excuse to be silly. What are they doing in the picture? Blowing out the red lights so we can cross the street.