OmegaMom

Reminder--New site!

2007-04-09T22:38:00.000-07:00

Hey, all--just sending out a hello to anyone who's dropping by to say come visit me at the new OmegaMom site. Update your browser bookmarks and the links on your blogrolls, and c'mon over!

Moving Day!

2007-03-31T21:26:00.000-07:00

Well. I finally did it...my itty bitty ad paid for a year's hosting at SiteGround, and I've fiddled with my CSS for the theme, and imported all my Blogger posts and comments, soooo...

Change your bookmarks to the New OmegaMom!

Woohoo!

Old OmegaMom posts will still be here; I have to figure out how to have them redirect to the new site, bleah. And I have to go and change all my blog aggregators to point to the new site, bleah. Which means my Technorati ranking will go all to hell. Bleah.

But it's way cool! Come and see!

We interrupt this interview...

2007-03-31T09:28:00.000-07:00

...to direct all my readers to this post by Journeywoman. If you read nothing else all weekend, read this.

Making lists

2007-03-30T20:20:00.000-07:00

When OmegaMom and soon-to-be-Mr.-OmegaMom were courting long distance, me in the S.F. Bay Area and he in Lubbock, we would rack up huge phone bills talking about everything under the sun. (Somewhere in this blog is the memory of how we got officially engaged at the end of a conversation that started, "Have you ever wondered how they make potato chips??") We're talking 7-hour long phone conversations, folks.

(I remember when my cousin K. was courting J., he ended up with similar huge phone bills. At the time, I couldn't understand it--I was only 18 or thereabouts; it seemed pretty odd that anyone could find that much to talk about with someone. Live and learn.)

One of our topics of conversation was a pair of lists about our future children: first, there was our list of Things We Wanted A Child Of Ours To Learn, and then there was our list of Characteristics We Thought Were Important.

As this was all done way back in the mists of time, circa 1994, my memory is somewhat faded...but, when I think about the general gist of those lists, I realize that we've held pretty steady on our ideas.

I tried to consult Mr. OmegaMom on this, because I thought maybe he might remember more than I did. It wasn't very helpful. He thought I might have written them down--and I might have, but we'd never be able to find them!

Under Things To Learn, we included: how to swim, how to dance, how to ride a bicycle, how to canoe, how to ride horses, a foreign language, how to ice or roller skate, how to cook, how to handle money, how to play a musical instrument.

Pretty basic stuff. The canoe and horses were from OmegaDad, based on his childhood. The cooking was because I could remember a friend (male) who went off to college and didn't know one thing about cooking--he had to call his mom from college to ask her how to cook a steak. I always found baking a relaxation, and OmegaDad's very most favorite hobby is to putter around in the kitchen cooking up a storm. The money handling is because both of us are not very good at it.

We're working on these things, bit by bit. OmegaDotter is, as readers know, enrolled in ballet and ice skating classes. We're teaching her dribs and drabs of Mandarin, but I'd also like her to really know French, Spanish, or German. The canoeing and horseback riding are coming. The horses, of course...honestly, we wanted her to learn, we didn't think we were going to end up with a child who was obsessed with them. And she's got a bicycle and the training wheels are gonna come off this summer if it kills me and the dotter doing it.

As for cooking--well, OmegaDad has bent his iron-clad rule of NO PEOPLE IN MY KITCHEN WHILE I'M COOKING!!! (Dammit!) to allow the dotter into the kitchen with him. She's learning all sorts of basic stuff right now, and helps both of us in various ways in the kitchen. We hope to have her doing some easy dinners by the time she's eight. (I will admit here that I'm somewhat jealous of the dotter in this respect; OmegaDad rarely bends that rule for me!)

The instrument will have to wait; Suzuki instruction intrigues us, but there's only so much time in a week, and part of me feels that children need to get a good grounding in just listening first. Plus there's the question of when one's fine-motor skills are advanced enough to handle it.

Money? Right now, she's busy saving up quarters for various Good Deeds and stuffing them into a plastic bottle, with plans for daddy to build her a playhouse with the proceeds. And we got her to trade her second

Under Characteristics, we included: Integrity, curiosity, kindness, bravery, honesty, self-confidence, joy, a love of learning, a love of science, a love of reading, a love of music.

These are much harder to quantify. How do you ensure that a child is learning these types of things? The only thing you can do is teach by example and hope to goodness it sticks. I fully expect a few years of parental angst when the dotter is in her mid to late teens, but hope that a good grounding in What The Family Thinks Is Right will provide an anchor or touchpoint for those turbulent years.

(Thanks to SBird, whose question was "What traits DO you want her to pick up?" I'm just amazed that I could remember most of them!)

Technorati: Parenting, values

The quality of mercy is not strain'd

2007-03-29T20:57:00.000-07:00

Good on ya, mates, you came through quite nicely! Plenty of ideas to tide me over until something in the news piques my interest.

Now to figure out where to start. Where to start, where to start...

Dirk asks:

Hey, that's what AmFam just did... is this national "ask the blogger a question" week?

Yup, I shamelessly stole the "Ask me some questions! Please! I'm desperate!" directly from AmFam; it worked for her, so it had to work for me a bit, too.

Why do you use blogger and not one of the other blogging tools?

Because I'm lazy and cheap. And because, when all my internet buds leaped on the blogging bandwagon, and I, lemming-like, followed them, they were all on Blogger. So I went there. It was quick, it was easy, it was painless, and I could concentrate on writing.

When I started posting on a regular basis, I soon realized that Blogger was, at best, a flawed tool. But it was still cheap--in other words, free! And there were all these free templates, and I could fiddle with the HTML to customize the templates. When I looked at other freebies, I either didn't like them enough, or I discovered, as at WordPress.com, that they strictly limited any fiddling, they only had six templates, and they didn't allow any other templates. Bah.

Then there was wind of BloggerBeta, and I waited, and waited, and waited to get an invite to switch over so I could take advantage of labeling and a few other things they claimed would be there. Then I got the invite, and tried to switch over.

Bahahahaha!

Let me just say that my blog is too complex (har!) for BloggerBeta. I was stuck in Blogger-to-BloggerBeta limbo for quite a while. Any time I logged in, it prompted me to switch over. I'd try to switch over and would get an error message saying that I had tried previously, and there was an error, and they'd let me know when it was time to switch over. I'd log in again, and there would be that same "switch to Blogger Beta" message. Over and over and over again.

Many people in that same situation have been unable to post at all.

I, however, overcame both some of the limitations of Blogger and got around the limbo by using LiveWriter. It's basic, but it has some nice features: I can blog offline; I can have a WYSIWYG view of my blogging as I write--in other words, it has grabbed my css and layout, and when I write a post, it looks almost exactly what it will look like when I publish and get online (yay!); and it lets me do bold and italic and underlining and ~~strikethrough~~ and colored fonts and numbered or unnumbered lists and blockquotes and weblinks (SBird, here's how!) with a click of the button; AND it let me post to my limbo-ized blog until I could finally figure out how to get the attention of someone in Blogger support who un-limboized me.

That said, I dearly want to move over to a hosted solution, with my Very Own Domain. I've found a good place, and am planning to move over, using WordPress, with my own personalized template which I am very comfy with.

Why do you post so few pictures?

Well. Hm. Sometimes I do a picture post, usually after the dotter and I have gone somewhere and I've gotten lots of pics. But I have some reservations.

First off, there are Weird Folks on the web. Some of the WFs take little girls' pictures and w@nk off to them, the idea of which just creeps me out. Of course, there's nothing I can do about it, and there may be, for all I know, folks who have already downloaded her pics and are--right now!--"doing it". Ew. I have decided not to post a few pics of her especially because of this issue, some very cute pictures, that I just don't want creeps messing with.

Then there are the WFs who like to take other people's pictures (and posts, and sometimes entire blogs!) and pass them off as their own. WTF? So far, when I search on phrases from my blog, I haven't found them. But I do know of a few cases where someone's entire blog was plaigiarized.

Doing pics is a pain sometimes. You have to download them from the camera. You have to crop them and resize them. You have to upload them to a photo-hosting service (or your website if you're on a hosted site). Then...then...you can put them into your blog.

I waffle on the privacy issue. Somewhere along the line, OmegaDotter will turn into a teenager, and be all bristly and touchy about odd things. She may decide that my blog is okay so long as I disguise stuff...she may think it's okay to post pics of her, she may not...

And then there's the fact that sometimes I'm writing about stuff that I don't have pictures of...like, say, cute little four-celled embryos. I could always "borrow" them, but if I do, I like to give full credit--a link to the giving site, a person's name if I can find it. Sometimes I forget. Eeek!

More later. See how easy it is for me to spew words out if there's a focus? You guys have generously given me days--maybe weeks!--worth of posts. Yay!

Technorati: Q&A, Blogger, Live Writer, pictures

Mercy me!

2007-03-28T19:56:00.000-07:00

I am throwing myself upon my readers' mercy. My brain is a blank, and has been for days. Ask me some questions. Suggest a topic. Help!

Brainwashing my child

2007-03-27T01:14:00.000-07:00

While OmegaDotter has, with help, discovered that she can sleep through the night, and night terrors and tantrums are a thing of the past, she has been developing a no-doubt age-appropriate Fear Of Things.

Y'know--the Things That Lurk In Shadows in dark rooms and hallways.

I remember this fear, so I try to be gentle with her. But, this, coupled with her generalized fear of being alone, has led her to requiring OmegaDad or me to stand outside the bathroom when she visits the toilet. And required her to follow me or OmegaDad around the house rather than staying in a room by herself at night.

This evening, we were preparing for her bedtime. I was about ready to do our nighttime lotion (the southwest aridity just sucks the moisture out of her skin, much worse than it does mine) when I realized that I hadn't done my preparation (aka a visit to the john and a switch into my comfy sweats and t-shirt, sans bra).

It would only take a minute or two, I knew.

I also knew she would want to come with me, and, geez, guys, I just wanted to pee! And change clothes!

So I announced I was going to just quickly get my sweats on. As I expected, her eyes widened, she clutched her blankie, and she said, "Can I come with you?"

(Geez, guys, I just wanted to pee! And change clothes!)

In desperation, I said, "Now, I just want you to stay here--"

The head shake began.

"--and snuggle with your blankie, and say to yourself, 'I am brave and strong."

Silence.

I said, "Can you say that?"

She repeated, softly, "I am brave and strong."

Then I said, "And I want you to say, 'There is nothing in mommy's bedroom to frighten me.'"

Silence.

I cupped my ear, and she repeated, softly, "There is nothing in mommy's bedroom to frighten me."

I said, "Now, I'm just going to dash into the bathroom--right across the hall--and go potty and get my sweats on. Do you think you can sit here while I do that?"

She said, quietly, "Can I stay by the door?"

"Okay," and we slid off the bed to the doorway. I held her shoulders and crouched down to look her in the eyes, and said, "Now, what do you say?"

"I am brave and strong."

"And?"

"There is nothing in mommy's bedroom to frighten me."

She didn't sound convinced.

"I'll be right back."

I dashed into the bathroom, and started changing clothes.

I heard a voice in the hallway saying, "I am brave and strong! There's nothing in mommy's bedroom to frighten me!"

I finished changing clothes, and sat on the toilet.

"I am brave and strong and there's nothing in mommy's bedroom to frighten me!"

I flushed. She repeated it. I came back into the hallway, where she was sitting in the doorway with the blankie. She looked up at me and smiled.

For a moment, I felt like I had bullied her into doing it. (I still do, sort of.) But then she said, with a bounce, "I'm practicing being brave!"

That's my girl.

And she did it when I had to go into the kitchen (just down the hallway) to get her nighttime milk and the book I was going to read to her. (Bartholomew and the Oobleck, by Dr. Seuss.) And then we snuggled, and we read together, and she sounded out "Bartholomew" and was very excited to realize that if you run the sounds together, it matched the letters, and then she told me all about how the school had gotten new Barbies and she and K. had built a whole house with a desk and a computer and kitchen and everything.

Brave girl.

So. Did I do okay? Dither, dither, dither...what do more experienced moms say?

Technorati: Bravery

Scattershot

2007-03-26T19:33:00.000-07:00

The dotter, having had a quick bout with the cold, handed it off to me. Thus, I spent the weekend id a haze ob bizery. OmegaDad, having lured the Geography Gals to our house for a Sunday evening birthday dinner, spent the weekend alternately patting me on the head, thrusting various cold nostrums my way, cleaning house in a frenzy, and dealing with the dotter. By the time the GGs showed up, Banana Split Birthday Cake (a decadent, cholesterol-laden delight from, I am sure, the '50s or '60s) in hand, I was at least alert enough to socialize and eat some of the cake.

In the meantime, OmegaGranny had evilly emailed me a link to The ESP Game, which randomly partners you with someone else (never seen, heard, or named), randomly tosses up a bunch of thumbnail pics, and asks you to label them. So, while I was dealig wid de code ad de stuffiness, I whiled away away a few hours mindlessly typing in descriptors of pictures. It's something to do with Carnegie Mellon University and labeling unlabeled pics on the web, supposedly...Anyway, I soon found that even though I could neither see, hear, nor talk to my partners, I got some definite likes and dislikes very quickly. Some partners were worthless. Some--wow! It was like we would zing*pow*zap get the same descriptors over and over again.

What can I say? I found it addictive. Bad, bad OmegaGranny!

In the news, we had a Texas legislator whipping up some ill-thought-out plan to pay women $500 to decide to adopt their children out rather than have abortions. He did, at least, make sure to include verbiage that would keep anyone who did so from being charged for selling babies...No word on fathers, of course. No procedure for getting the kiddo into foster care, or finding agencies, or anything like that. Not a word about prenatal care. Nothing about coercion. Just *bam*, sign this paperwork (available only at abortion clinics, by the way) within one month after the birth of the kiddo, and voila, 500 smackeroos. I can't collect the words to properly describe how idiotic I think this is. I hope this is the kind of throw-away legislation that never makes it out of committee, like the legislation that some of our own state legis-critters have produced.

No great thoughts here, alas. I'b sdill drying do ged by doze do clear up.

Fun

2007-03-24T00:33:00.000-07:00

But there were many categories where the just perfect pic didn't show up...

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

Technorati: Visual DNA

PWNED!

2007-03-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

At ten to noon, I get a phone call at the office from OmegaDad. OmegaDotter's teacher had called him, saying OD didn't feel well and was running a low fever.

The dotter was sick yesterday, in that horrid, cranky, whiny way that kids who are somewhat sick are, as compared to the deep, quiet misery of kids who are really sick. We stayed home yesterday. This morning, though, no fever, no cranky whinies, pretty much normal kiddo, so I took her in.

So I pack it in and head off to preschool--no big surprise that her fever is back.

When I arrive there's the dotter sitting at the table, bouncing and smiling. My mommy radar goes off. Miss M., her teacher, says in a dubious voice, "Well, she was sick yesterday, and she hasn't been feeling good, and she does have a low fever..."

How low is low? 99-something. Hmmm.

On the way home, she's smiling and singing and dancing and giggling and happy.

Let me tell you, this child is not sick.

Half of me is laughing, the other half is going, "Grrrr." I have made it quite clear that this is not to happen again (you can tell she knows I know she isn't sick). I lectured her about what Mean Mommies do in this situation, about how next time this happens, she will be put to bed pronto, since she's so sick. I made her take ibuprofen (ewww!).

OmegaDad, like me, was halfway laughing, halfway not, when I called him to tell him we had all been played. "That little shit!" were his exact words.

That little shit, indeed.

Lest anyone take the "little shit" to heart and decide I'm a Bad Mother, I would like to include a disclaimer: OmegaDotter is our joy and our heart, and "little shit" is meant in affectionately joshing tones. And, if anyone wonders why on earth I'm bothering to include this little disclaimer, just head on over to AmFam to get an idea of the humorless and self-righteous folk who populate the world. (Further disclaimer: AmFam is not humorless and self-righteous.)

Technorati: Parenting

"Terrible mistake"

2007-03-22T10:30:00.000-07:00

"While we love Baby Jessica as our own, we are reminded of this terrible mistake each and every time we look at her."

A couple is suing a fertility clinic for using the wrong sperm in their successful IVF treatment.

The "terrible mistake" is obvious because the child is...well..."darker" than her parents.

I can understand being upset at getting the "wrong sperm". Usually, when you're deep in the throes of IF treatment, you're stuck on that unique-and-beautiful-mix of you and your spouse.

But...dayum..."terrible mistake"?

They look at their daughter and think "terrible mistake"?

Or, more likely, they let their lawyer put those words down on paper to make it a better case, rather than actually thinking it each time they look at her. I hope.

Let's hope they win enough money to pay for Jessica's therapy when she's an angst-filled teen who knows that everyone in the world knows that her parents thought she was the result of a "terrible mistake".

Maybe fertility clinics should just start putting a "you git what you git and you don't throw a fit" clause into their service contracts...

Technorati: IVF

Small white wildflower

2007-03-21T20:13:00.000-07:00

In an effort to remove a few of the pounds that my Frappucino habit has put on (ack!), and just generally tone up and feel better, I've been walking at lunchtime.

Today's jaunt was along the (harharhar!) "urban" trail from near my office over to the other side of Local Community College. Lots of ups and downs. A distressing tendency to be too close to Pine Tree Drive. But, here and there, it dipped into the woods, and so I soaked in small doses of springtime.

One dose: mountain bluebirds. Ahhh. You have no idea how blue a bird can be until you've seen one of these little fellas--think of your most vivid deep royal blue Polartec fuzzy--that blue. With a lovely rosy breast beneath to provide a bit of contrast. Folks hereabouts know springtime is coming when these birds show up (you also know summer is well along when the bronze hummingbirds arrive, and you know it's autumn when the orioles peer in your birdfeeders).

Whilst walking, I kept seeing little bits and fluffs of white. Being cynical and snarky, my first thought was that a UPS box filled with snerds had exploded on the road and scattered plastic popcorn hither and yon. But, upon closer examination, it was yet another harbinger of spring: small white wildflowers.

Um.

Yeah, yeah, yeah--I know I know the names of these things. They look kinda like alyssum, see? In fact, my second thought, after damning the manufacturers of plastic snerds, was that someone had wandered along the "urban" trail with a seed packet of allysum. But then, I realized, no, not allysum, but...that other white springtime flower.

What's its name? Yeah, whatsisname. That's it.

I wandered up and down hill for a while, admiring the oh-so-cleverly-placed penstemon tufts near Local Community College, which almost look natural, reached the entrance to Extremely Expensive Golfing Community With Humongous Houses, turned around, and it hit me:

Candytuft!

Ah hah, I say to myself, I will have to google it when I get back, to be sure.

Huffing and puffing as I sat at my desk, I reached for the encyclopedia...

Okay, I placed fingers on keyboard. These days, the internet acts, for me, like encyclopedias used to. I can wander from topic to topic quite easily, browsing like a butterfly on information, and the internet is the most glorious flower for browsing.

I googled "candytuft". I found Backyard Gardener's entry. It had a link to pictures. So I clicked on that link, which actually does a google image search on "iberis".

The pics were close. Very close. But they all looked very...garden-y and not wildflower-y.

And there, in the midst of all the flower pics, was a pic that led me to Chalet Iberis.

:drool:

So I stayed a while and drooled, then sighed, and returned to the image search to search on candytuft. I found: wedding dresses. Fairies galore--pictures, pillows, stained glass, music boxes, jewelry, statues, pewter figurines, candy... (Apparently, there is a particular taxon of fairy, the "candytuft fairy", that crouches on flowers with its knees up and arms around its knees. You've seen it. I've seen it. It's a cliché. It has a name. Good golly.) Tarot cards. Cats. Yarn. A horse named "Candytuft" (of course). A whole slew of pictures of other flowers, linked, by some odd chance, to the word "candytuft": echinacea? Bleeding heart? Lilies? California poppies? Hmmm.

Then, in amongst all the images, I found some mention of "wild candytuft", and images or names linked to the Southwest mountains. And then I found the motherlode (which I'm sure my mom has passed on to me previously): NAZ Flora's entry on thlaspi montanum, known as Fender's Pennycress or Wild Candytuft, with lots of pictures looking almost exactly like the pretty little white wildflowers I had seen during my walk.

There you have it: a walk through the odd connections the internet can provide you, and an entry to a very handy resource (NAZ Flora) for anyone who lives in the Southwestern mountains of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado.

(For those who are giving me the hairy eyeball about doing this while working, I plead queries that take a long time to process, so while they were processing, I was flitting from flower to flower. My query window would flash when it was done, so I'd bop over there, frown, open up the design window, fiddle with the parameters, set the query running again, and bop back to my flower search.)

Technorati: Springtime, wildflowers, Candytuft

Scared

2007-03-20T20:09:00.000-07:00

JenEx wrote a post today that zapped straight to the center of my being, about being an outsider at school.

The dotter is about to move into another phase of life, moving from a nice small school where everyone knows her into a (biggish) public school that has three kindergarten classes. Then, after that, it's first grade, then sixth, then high school.

Right now, she walks in the door to her classroom, and she's greeted like Norm on Cheers: "OmegaDotter!" "Yay! O's here!" "OD, come here, look at this!"

But already we have a small social issue popping up. OmegaDotter will sigh and say, "Everyone laughs at me," every now and then when talking about school and her friends. OmegaDad and I know that one reason everyone laughs at her is because she cultivates it; she is a clown. She has her mother's overexaggerated expressions and reactions down, and it is funny. She does it deliberately, waiting for our reaction, and damn, it's hard not to laugh all the time.

As a result, OmegaDad and I try to let her know that she doesn't have to be "on" all the time, that we love her just as she is and she doesn't need to clown around. And we have mentioned, in passing, that maybe part of the reason everyone laughs at her is because she encourages it...

She's smart. She's damned smart. She's cute. She's artistic (or so I have been told). And she clowns around.

I was smart, damned smart. (I wasn't so cute.) I was a bookworm and Thought About Things. And I didn't fit in, at all; never part of the popular crowd, always sort of hanging around on the edges. I was the person who other people asked to copy off of. Most of my time in school I felt lonely, which expanded to a big hole of loneliness in high school. I was awkward, shy, bookish, got good grades, didn't do anything athletic, and lived far away from school. I went off in my own direction lots of times, and that didn't go over very well, either. It didn't help that sometimes my teachers were the ones who were poking fun at me, either (I remember one time in sixth grade, when we were supposed to write a story, and I got involved in designing the backstory, a la Genesis, a whole page worth of "So-and-so married such-and-such and had two children, blah-de-blah and something-or-other." The teacher demanded I turn in whatever I had written...and then, a day later, read it out loud to the class as a prime example of what "not to do".).

My parents were smart, damned smart. And they report that they were always the odd ones out at school, as well.

We all managed; we all found our little niches. But it wasn't necessarily easy, and it wasn't necessarily fun, and there were lots of times when other kids were just plain mean.

So. I admit that part of the reason I'm taking OmegaDotter to ballet and to ice skating, and plan to for a long time, is so that she will have a certain physicality that I lacked. I'm going to dump her into soccer next year. I'm going to make an effort to keep her in touch with her buddies from preschool, so she has a solid "group" to fall back on. And we're going to keep emphasizing that what makes a person nice is that person's actions and inner self, not the outer stuff.

But I know that the Queen Bees are out there, and maybe the Dotter will be one, maybe she won't. No matter--there will be times when she will be hurt by other kids, and I can't protect her from that, and there will be times when she does the hurting.

And it makes me scared.

Technorati: School, differences

The out-of-synch mom

2007-03-18T19:34:00.000-07:00

Lately, OmegaMom has been on the dotter's general shit list.

There are two reasons for this: number one, mommy just isn't fun, the way daddy is. Mommy takes OmegaDotter for a walk, or out to the playground, and sort of expects the dotter to...well...walk, or play (but not necessarily with mommy). And then mommy is considered Mean Mommy in general.

For example: mommy, when confronted with the dotter crashing someone else's birthday party at the park, and the crashees (very nicely!) offering some cake (whenever they were going to have the cake) before mommy could intercept the offer, shortly before mommy was planning to take the dotter home from the park anyway...well, mommy pretty much said, "Sorry, kiddo, it's time to go home."

This didn't go over very well.

Then, there's the fact that the dotter is suddenly not taking her naps.

So dotter is grumpy, and mommy gets grumpy in return, and dotter gets frowny-faced and whiny, and mommy gets eye-rolling going, and the whole thing turns into a horrible feedback loop where dotter pouts (out loud) that she wants daddy and mommy pouts (silently) that nothing she does makes the dotter happy.

So, moms out there. Reassure me. Tell me that you, too, have periods (of multiple days in a row) where you and the child just don't seem to be in synch, and no-one's happy and no-one's having any fun.

Grump.

Any piano player will agree...

2007-03-17T17:27:00.000-07:00

Rachmaninoff had big hands:

Har.

Technorati: Piano, Rachmaninoff, comedy

Star light, star bright

2007-03-17T14:58:00.000-07:00

Oh, wow.

I wandered over to eBay to check out Dance Dance Revolution packages (yeah, right), and there on the front page was...

"Bid on chance to fly zero G with Stephen Hawking".

Proceeds will benefit the Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation.

I do love the internet era.

Technorati: eBay, Starlight Starbright Foundation

A comet is coming! A comet is coming!

2007-03-16T18:19:00.000-07:00

Miss Snark, the literary agent, says--multiple times--"Show me, don't tell me," when she's talking about partials on manuscripts she might be interested in representing.

I've been thinking of this while struggling mightily to "get into" a particular SF series (The Saga of Seven Suns) that OmegaGranny pressed upon me during one of my recent visits.

Perhaps part of the problem is that I started with book two, A Forest of Stars. Perhaps. But he's constantly telling, not showing, in a very awkward manner, shoehorning bits and pieces of backstory in in odd places, and it leaves me cold. His ideas are certainly grand, with a wild intergalactic sweep--space opera with vile evil alien villains, mysterious machinations, killer robots trying to weasel their way into the humans' graces (but why are they not also weaseling into the "good" alien race's graces, as well?) preparatory to genociding them.

But if the vile evil aliens are so vile and evil--show it, don't tell me by saying, "the vile hydrogues were swooping down upon the EDF ships blah blah blah". I'm reading the story, and so far, the hydrogues don't seem vile and evil to me--they seem cold, mysterious, unfathomable. They perform horrific acts--that should be enough to make them unpleasant characters; you don't have to hit me on the head with adjectives modifying the race name to make me realize these are The Villains.

(I'm not even going to talk about the scene where some folks are working on a fiery planet, and alarms go off, and it turns out that--omigod--a comet is heading towards them. And this comet will [maybe] hit them in...a week. Okay, I am. Folks, lissen up. If a comet is heading towards you, you've got months to deal with it, not just a week. And even if you've got just a week, why the hell would you sound alarms?! Aren't alarms usually used for something that's going to occur, like, right now?! The scene is just tossed in there for drama, and it's stupid drama. The book is littered with stuff like that. Oh, yeah, and travel between worlds in some parts of the book seems to happen really quickly, whereas in other parts of the book, it takes a long time. Yeesh.)

To top it all off, the "good" aliens aren't really that "alien"; they're like human beings with some sort of species-wide telepathic bond and tentacular hair, who pretty much act just like humans would act in almost every situation.

Now, I admit that sometimes "showing" can be overwhelming. One of my favorite SF writers is CJ Cherryh. Cherryh's typical M.O. is to toss you right into the middle of some byzantine political setup on page one, and you spend a lot of time while reading the rest of the book trying to figure out who's on what side, what the sides are all about, and how the hero(ine) is going to get out of this mess. It can be hard to cope with, but the "showing" is rushing you along, driving the story.

And, my word, but Cherryh can do some awesome, weird aliens, with weird, alien motivations. By the end of one of her books, if you stick with it, you'll find yourself almost thinking like the aliens.

Her fantasies are equally byzantine and engrossing, and nothing like typical Tolkein knock-offs.

So, anyway, I'm slogging through this book, and find myself thinking that I should just find an OCR, scan the damned thing into the computer, and re-write it, it's that irritating. Mind you, it's not bad enough that I'm going to toss the book entirely. It's fine for a chapter or two while the dotter is slipping off to sleep, and usually sends me to sleep, too.

Harrumph.

Technorati: Science fiction, book review, Saga of Seven Suns, CJ Cherryh

NCLB - No Child Learns Bupkiss

2007-03-16T00:44:00.000-07:00

The dotter has been at her preschool, selected mainly for convenient location and because a buddy of mine had her kid there and liked it, since two months after she came home with us. It's a touchstone for her, an achor, because she's been there so long. Oh, her teachers come and go, but we keep in touch with some of them, and her friends come and go, but we keep in touch with them, too. One of the things I worry about (hey, it's me, I've got to have something to worry about, eh?) is how things are going to change this year.

She's going to be going into kindergarten.

Real school. "Big kids' school", as she puts it.

We've already enrolled her in summer day camp--mornings in one portion, afternoons in the swim camp. I'm sure she'll have fun...but...but...it's a big change.

While the preschool was, as said above, chosen mainly for convenience, it has turned into a good learning experience. Right now, they're learning sounds to go with letters, sight words, the months, the seasons, and, to top it all off, a goodly dollop of religion. Aside from one teacher who I thought sucked, all her teachers are good teachers--interested in the kids, involving them, nurturing them, letting them learn at a relaxed pace that fits their needs.

What's "big school" going to be like?

My various buddies on lists and blogs who are teachers, or who have kids in school, or who are both, regularly rant about the current atmosphere in public schools--the "teach to the test" approach that has been the inevitable spin-off of NCLB.

The parents of first-graders say that their kids are already aware of the tests, and the need to do well on the test--and it's making their kids (first-graders!) anxious.

The parents of older kids say that their kids are regularly switched out from regular lessons into weeks of practice tests before The Test.

The teachers grit their teeth and complain about school administrators futzing with curricula...all in the name of "passing The Test". About how in certain grades, the social sciences go poof, because they're not on The Test. About how music and art and PE are ditched, because they're not on The Test. About how they're not allowed to do what works with this group of kids, because it's not "proven" to work for The Test. And The Test is the be-all and end-all for funding for the school...

Teachers and parents report on rah-rah pep sessions before The Test that emphasize to the kids just how important it is for the school that they pass.

Hell's bells--this sort of talk just freaks me out. The dotter is in that stage of learning at her own pace, just beginning to realize that letters can add up to words, beginning to fiddle with the notion of how, if you take the number six, it's two more than four, and isn't that kind of neat?

I don't want have the dotter's interest in learning things turned into an anxiety-provoking grind. I don't want her to learn test-taking skills. I want her to learn stuff. Science. Math. Art. History. Geography. How to play soccer. I want her to make volcanoes. I want her to build model French forts out of popsicle sticks, or Spanish missions out of sugar cubes, or whatever the standard build-a-historic-building theme is here in our state. I want her to learn that reading is fun, rather than a chore.

Apparently, enough parents have had enough of the Testing that they have put pressure on their congresscritters to Do Something About NCLB. NCLB is up for re-authorization this year, and Republicans and Democrats are joining together to try to work some changes into the reauthorization.

Standards are great. Standards are good. We need standards. But from what I've heard from folks on the ground is that the standards approach that is fostered by the current NCLB structure isn't working. That it's making things worse, rather than better.

I have a very vested interest in seeing how this all plays out.

Technorati: NCLB, teaching to the test

Metal night

2007-03-14T01:27:00.000-07:00

Ahhh. OmegaDad is out in the field, the dotter is asleep. It's time to rock out on YouTube. (Go away, Mom, this isn't your style.)

Another Rainy Night, Queensryche:

Rock You Like a Hurricane, Scorpions (I always thought that was "Raunchy Like a Hurricane"):

White Wedding, Billy Idol:

Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), the Eurythmics:

I Love Rock & Roll, Joan Jett & the BlackHearts:

Livin' on a Prayer, Bon Jovi:

Twilight Zone, Golden Earring:

Catch 'em while they're hot; Viacom already has had some things pulled (I couldn't find Dear God by XTC, for instance, grrr).

Every once in a while, the dotter sits on my lap while I drench her with rock videos for a few hours (though it's clear that I'm going to have to start censoring my sharing with her a bit more--nothing worse than, say, having to suddenly STOP!!! the video to Relax, ahem, and quickly hit the back button!). It's a nice break from watching week 6 of last season's ITV "Dancing on Ice" feeeeturing Bonnie & Matt dancing to Madonna's Material Girl. One. More. Time. (Agggghhh!)

Mud. Check. Algae. Check. Rock'n'roll. Check. Ahhhh. Being a parent is wonderful sometimes!

Technorati: YouTube

To tell the tooth

2007-03-13T16:46:00.000-07:00

I heart the dotter's dentist. Into the office, out in, oh, 45 minutes, happy dotter, shiny new "princess tooth".

But first, there was the valium.

The dentist had sent us home last time with a cute little envelope with one cute little pink valium pill.

It was lost (or so I thought) when OmegaDad cleaned the car preparatory to our weekend of frivolity. So, when OmegaDad took off from work yesterday and dropped by my office to swap cars, I sent him haring off to the dentist's office to get another cute little pink valium pill. Then, last night, I found the first one. Then I lost it again, having carefully placed it in a place where I knew I would remember it. Hah.

This morning, an hour prior to the dentist's appointment, I duly got two spoons and some yogurt out, crushed the valium in the big spoon, and dolloped spoonsful of (yummy!) strawberry yogurt on top.

Then I beckoned to the dotter.

She eyeballed the spoon dubiously, knowing there was Medicine there. "Eww. What's that orange stuff?" quoth she.

"Medicine. Take it," I said, in my best you-do-it-or-there-will-be-dire-consequences voice, thrusting the spoon vaguely in the direction of her mouth.

"No, no! I'll do it! Let me do it!"

Hm. Okay, so I handed the spoon over to her. And I warned her not to spill it. She began counting three. She eyed the spoon. She stopped. She started again. She covered her mouth with her other hand.

THEN...then, she swooped the spoon overhead. And spilled it.

A great big glop of strawberry yogurt mixed with crushed valium landed on the floor.

A mother envisioning a dotter writhing in pain on the dentist's chair lost it entirely, and shrieked, "GODDAMMIT, Dotter, I TOLD you not to spill it!"

Not a shining mommy moment, to be sure.

Then she spilled the remaining yogurt.

I fumed, I fussed, I called the dentist's office to make alternative arrangements, I stomped around...and then I found the (twice lost, once found) other valium pill. Lather, rinse, repeat, sans the spillage. The dotter was quite valiant with the valium, taking repeated glops of yogurt until we got the entire dose down, even though it tasty funny and was crunchy.

And then...fifteen minutes later...the valium struck.

Oh, my.

Long-time readers may recall the mocha birthday cake with chocolate-covered espresso beans. We have dosed the child up with mood- or mind-altering drugs twice (by accident) prior to today, to wit: large amounts of caffeine in concentrated doses. I hate to admit, but it was truly funny.

This was the first time I have dosed her up on purpose. Last night, I realized what I was going to do, and a frisson of worry trickled down my spine. Valium. Favored drug for abuse by bored middle-aged housewives. Gateway drug to bigger and better things. Eww, in a mommy's mind. Really. It kind of gave me the willies to be dosing her up with the stuff, even though it was In A Good Cause.

The dotter on caffeine is hilarious (and tiring). The dotter on valium is, alas, also hilarious, though much less work to keep up with.

In the car on the way to the dentist's office, she spewed a stream of consciousness happy crooning of silly stuff. It was when she recited the "God is Great" prayer--as the prelude to the "snack" at "school"--in a high-pitched chipmunk voice and then followed up with, "I'm the helper! I'm passing out the napkins! Here, have one! Oooh, I'm going to throw them all up in the air! Wheee! Catch!" that I started snickering to myself.

On the way into the dentist's office, she staggered a tiny bit from one side to the other and announced, "Oooh. I'm all wobbly."

And afterwards, as we began the nap drive that I knew was inevitable, she proudly proclaimed, "I'm not going to go to sleep, I'll just do a few things first..." and then fell fast asleep in the next breath.

So now she has a "princess tooth" (the crown, you see) which she is very proud of, has had her first well-controlled dose of mood-altering drugs, is sort of dozy, and has a very good dental experience safely under her belt. No scary dentist visits for her, thank heavens.

It's been a toothy week for the OmegaFamily; I had a filling put in last week, the dotter got her crown, and OmegaDad...sigh...

OmegaDad, whom I have been hounding to go to the dentist for years (what is it with guys and "toughing it out"?)...

A tooth split. It happened to split just as every single dentist in town was heading out of town to go to the state dental convention. I found out about this amazing convention when I tried to get him an urgent appointment at my dentist. No go. OmegaDad, when informed, toughed it out some more. (Imagine a deep, gut-level Marine "Hnnnh!" grunt.)

By late Sunday afternoon, it was too much. He was in pain, excruciating pain (he had been distracted during our expedition to the river). I made record time back up the hill from Former State Capital back to Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods, worried that he was either going to pass out or going to smash his head into the dashboard to stop the pain. It was not a fun drive; the only consolation was that the dotter, exhausted from sun and fun, was fast asleep and didn't get totally frantic.

Luckily, the gods smiled on us on Monday morning; as I was talking to the dentist's office staff, someone cancelled their 9 a.m. appointment, and OmegaDad was swiftly taken care of.

Hopefully, this is all the dental drama we will deal with for quite a while.

Technorati: Dentists, valium

A three-blogger day, or How The Dotter Learned To Love Algae

2007-03-12T00:47:00.000-07:00

In the springtime, we like to venture down to the desert to one of our favorite little spots of perennially running water, the Yet Another Saint River.

This weekend, we swept up OmegaGranny (in lightweight camo pants) for the trip into the desert, and managed to hook up with Singing Bird and her husband as well (pre-arranged). We met up at SBird's house, where I spent most of my time ogling her artwork. I wanted to abscond with it all, though OmegaDad said to me, defensively, "Well, we have artwork! We just don't have it on the walls!"--sad but true. We have artwork that is in drawers, or rolled in tubes, most unframed, none on the walls. Sigh. Anyway, SBird's house is lovely and filled with eclectic artwork and light, so I am envious. OmegaDad, the chef chez OmegaFamily, merely lusted over the kitchen, wisting after all the counter space.

We loaded up the various picnic accoutrements, the Birds loaded up their (handsome and friendly) dogs, we all drove down through the lava flows and mesas, canyons and heaps of granite, and made it to the river. This year, unfortunately, we have had little precipitation, so the river was mostly rivulets. But there was enough to provide us with wet sand for sandcastles, plenty for itty-bitty little fishies to skitter through, and lots for the algae to bloom. Some of the algae collected in luxurious clumps that looked like prehistoric trilobites, or maybe alien lifeforms come to colonize the earth...the rest floated sinuously down the swiftly flowing river in small fluffs and streamers.

The never-ending chant of the five-year-old: "Ewww!" Whenever a clump of algae slid down the river towards her, she would scream and run away, arcs of sparkling water droplets spraying behind her. SBird and I took to calling out Algae Alerts for the sheer fun of watching her.

But one of SBird's dogs has an interesting quirk: Fiona loves algae. Really, really loves algae, especially when it is thrown for her to chase. A charming small dog that likes to steal algae from your hands is a recipe for getting a resistant five-year-old to decide algae is O-Kay.

The end result: the Dotter started collecting an amazing green lump of algae, sharing bits and pieces with Fiona. She culminated the experience by plastering the huge collection of algae on her head, like a crown or an odd fuzzy green toupee.

OmegaDad muttered to me that putting it on the blog would be enough to cause any right-thinking parent out in blogland to call us unfit parents and sic child welfare services upon us. Har. Git yer dialin' fingers ready, folks:

So I have managed, somehow, someway, to get the dotter to delight in squishing through mud, and now in playing with oodles of algae. Soon to come: bugs and worms.

It was a lovely day, and it was grand meeting SBird and her husband.

Technorati: Desert rivers, blogger meetings

A gift of horses

2007-03-10T20:42:00.000-07:00

OmegaGranny saw an ad in her local paper, and brought it to my attention. Do you think, she asked, OmegaDotter might like to see the Lippizaner stallions?

Is the Pope Catholic? Does the sun rise in the east?

In other words, yes.

We told her we were going to go see "dancing horses". She was thrilled. The show was grand. Here are some pics (I'd do a better job, but I'm not using my standard blogging tool):

Then we headed back to OmegaGranny's, and off to dinner at the Raven. Good eats, and live music, with live musicians. The dotter fell immediately in love with the guitar player, and flirted with him endlessly. When we left, she informed us, "I like that boy." OmegaGranny wanted to know how he compared to One and Only True Love, and wanted to know OOTL's name...I answered, "C.", and OmegaDotter, irked, said, "No! His name is Ben, and he's a big boy."

So, Ben, if you're out there, you have a fan. A quite enchanted fan.

(Sorry for the layout, folks!)

Contrary magic

2007-03-09T19:20:00.000-07:00

Contrary magic is when you have a picnic planned and, just to be sure, you have a rain date.

Or, say you have the picnic planned, and don't have a rain date. Then it is sure to rain cats and dogs (at least, this is what happens in the Midwest).

So, imagine there's a blogger. This blogger goes on a long, lyrical description of how adoption issues are just a small part of life, and mostly it's just background that you have to think about now and then.

Of course, as soon as that blogger hits "publish" on that particular post, the Gods, in all their wisdom and snarky humor, start tossing out adoption issues. Oh, nothing major, mind you. Just something to keep that blogger, filled with hubris, on her toes.

The OmegaFamily has a routine on weekday mornings. OmegaDad, who has to be at work at 7:30 and has a boss who gives him the hairy eyeball if he's five minutes late, wakes up, dashes into the bathroom, and Does His Stuff. Ever a man who goes against the flow, he doesn't follow the typical pattern for male showering. In other words, he stays in there a long time.

Then he dashes out, cajoles a hug and kiss from the dotter, gets a hug and kiss from me, and dashes out the front door.

This leaves me doing most of the morning stuff with the dotter.

Our routine has developed into mommy selects dotter's clothes for the day. Mommy puts them in a pile. Mommy places the pile on the dining table in the living room. Mommy informs dotter that the clothes are there. Mommy goes to get her own clothes. Mommy goes into the bathroom. Mommy plops her clothes on the toilet seat, brushes her teeth, declothes, and gets into the shower.

At this point, dotter barrels into the bathroom with her clothes heap, announces, "May I go potty, Mommy?!", mommy coaches dotter (for the umpteenth time) to remove her (mommy's) clothes from the toilet seat, and for Gawd's sake, just pee. This is a daily routine. Honestly. By now, you'd think she'd realize (especially since I tell her) that she doesn't need to ask my permission, and that, to pee, she just has to move my clothes. I've stopped asking why she won't use Daddy's bathroom (maybe because I wouldn't use Daddy's bathroom, either...).

This morning, while mommy was dousing her hair with shampoo and dotter was on the pot, dotter asks, "Was I in your tummy, Mommy?"

Blink. Talk about deja vu. Wasn't I just mentioning this in one of my blog posts? Like, say, yesterday?

"No, sweetie, you grew in your Chinese mommy's tummy." (I wasn't in the mood to go into the long explanation about uteri again.)

"Oh. What's her name?"

"I don't know, sweetie."

"Is she nice?"

"I don't know, sweetie. I think so."

"Can we go see her?"

"Someday, baby, we'll go back to China. I don't think you can see her, because we don't know where she is."

"Was I a nice baby, Mommy?"

At which point, I open the shower door, poke my head out, smile at her, and say, "You were an awesome baby, sweetie!"

She grinned at me.

It all went by fast. No audible angst, just conversation. But I thought it was a very interesting connection--talk about birthmother, then question about what kind of baby she was. Sort of a little subtext going on there.

Okay, Gods, I give. Stop whapping me over the head. I get the point. Sheesh.

Technorati: Adoption (again)

Okay, so I left something out

2007-03-08T19:56:00.000-07:00

And it reared up its head and roared at me today.

The dotter was puttering around, and somehow, in the midst of her puttering, she was talking about brown skin, and how all the kids at school would go, "Ewwww!" about brown skin.

Sigh. Time for another talk with Miss Ruth about some diversity emphasis at school.

So, yeah, there's more than sunshine & soft-focus fun.

But, still, being prepared keeps you from feeling quite like someone has punched you in the gut when your daughter just casually tosses a little bombshell like that into conversation.

Yes, with transracial adoption, there are additional issues that, actually, you think about and breathe and live almost every day.

There's the "You have pink skin and mine looks kind of dirty" commentary.

There's the worry about discrimination and differences, and when they'll show up, and how to prepare your child to be strong and capable and able to believe, within themselves, that brown skin isn't something to go "Ewwww!" about.

There's the question of having an entry in your calendar at work ready to blare at you that it's TIME TO REGISTER FOR CULTURE CAMP!!! And knowing you have, at most, one hour before registration fills up. (Okay, today it took two minutes. TWO MINUTES. I was registered, and by the time I got OmegaDad into the shopping basket [what an intriguing image that is!], he was on the wait list. Yes. TWO MINUTES.) And then the planning to take time off from work so you can drive out there, and hoping you get some info ahead of time of what the H(e)art Talk will be about for kindergarteners. And realizing that you're likely to have a few weeks of emotional upheaval when you get home. And realizing that it's all worth it, because the dotter needs it.

But even so, it becomes just part of the tapestry of your life. It's not overwhelming. (Okay, some days it is.) It's not constant. It weaves in and out. It's something you need to keep in mind when it comes time to register for school (which is more important: diversity? Academics? Arts? The school where One and Only True Love is going to attend?). You become dreadfully aware of just how white a tried-and-true memory from childhood, Pat The Bunny, really is. (Oh, yeah, and sexist, to boot.)

You think of ways to encourage her to think of her heritage as something to be proud of.

You look for kids' books that aren't all white, that are, equally importantly, not PC mush and are fun.

You cringe at old cartoons, which, while they're full of much more innocent fun than today's, are also full of much more blatant stereotypes.

You try contacting Small Mountain University's accelerated English learning program, because you know that SMU has managed to wangle a "cultural exchange" with a bunch of Chinese universities.

You keep up with FCC activities, even though they are a lick and a swipe, because a lick and a swipe is better than nothing, and it's a venue where your daughter isn't the Token Asian.

You stumble along trying to learn a little bit of Mandarin--knowing, even so, that it may not be her birthparents' language.

Pluses and minuses. But there is, all the time, a lot of joy. And a helluva lot of time being just ordinary parents, struggling with ordinary parenting things.

Technorati: Adoption, adoption issues

A limited-time engagement

2007-03-07T23:18:00.000-07:00

Connie Stevens, eat your heart out.

Technorati: Cuteness

Joy

2007-03-07T20:30:00.000-07:00

A noted infertility blogger just went off to a weekend-long agency introduction to adoption; an adoption extravaganza, as it were. It sounded pretty intense. There were folks at all stages in the adoption triad--birthmothers, adoptive parents, adult adoptees, potential adoptive parents, teenage adoptees. Lots of crying.

Some commenters thought it sounded like a graduate studies "intro" course--where the prof's idea is to overwhelm the students, and the small percentage who lasted through the entire course were the ones who were committed.

Some commenters thought it sounded like all they focused on was the Bad Stuff.

So. The Bad Stuff does exist, certainly. I've written about various aspects here on this blog. Unethical adoptions. Potential birthmothers who feel coerced. Adoptive parents who aren't told all the gory details about this particular adoption situation. Adult adoptees who feel like neither fish nor fowl; not fully part of their adoptive families (or culture), not fully part of their birthfamilies (or culture).

Lots of stuff to think about.

Yes, it's good to get an idea of the Bad Stuff. To go in With Eyes Wide Open. It's like being a Boy Scout: be prepared. That way, when the Bad Stuff happens, it's not a surprise.

But y'know what? Most of adoptive parenting is just...being a parent, dealing with the standard stuff of parenting.

Am I doing a good job? What on earth is that thing that just went up my dotter's nose?! How soon can I get a doctor's appointment? What's the best school to put the child into? How do I know when the crying means something serious is happening, versus just "I'm angry and I really, really want you to know it!!"? Why is my child putting all her toys on the floor where I'm going to step on them in the middle of the night?

Ice cream cones. Jumping in mud puddles. Snow angels. Learning to draw hearts. Bedtime stories. Playdates. Ballet lessons. Best friends forever. Bicycles. Artwork on the refrigerator.

Adoptive parenting has some extra stuff: No, you didn't grow in my tummy; I wish you had. I don't know where your birthmother is. Yes, you look different than me. We'll go to China someday so you can see where you were born.

Maybe some attachment issues. Maybe some sensory issues. Maybe some unexpected genetic problems. Maybe.

But if there are issues, they're not insurmountable. It's not continuous. It's not a day-in, day-out dirge of "oh-you-poor-thing-you-were-adopted-and-you-will-forever-be-hurting". It's definitely not an endless feeling of not being entitled to be a parent to this child! It is, now and then, a wistful wondering of what the birthparents were like...what the reasons were that this child was abandoned...where she got her musical ability...did her parents have eyebrows that fly up like hers?

As your child gets older, you find yourself cramming more and more activities into your life. Ballet lessons. Ice skating. Birthday parties. Doctor and dentist appointments. Registration for this, that, and the other. You get swept along on the tide of life, and realize, suddenly, that your little baby is no longer a baby, but definitely a little girl, who is charging forward into life with zest and interest. Maybe with a little adjustment here and there to accommodate things you never thought you'd have to accommodate--a "Metcha Day"...a fear of being alone...an ungodly love of horses...

But it's life. It sweeps along. You run along with it, leading your child behind you, until one day you realize your child is leading you, dashing headlong forward into the future, and you realize that one day...one day you will have to let go of her hand, let her ride the bicycle of life without your steadying hand holding her upright.

And there is Joy. Sparkling laughter. Dancing in the living room. Discovering new things. Explaining what a volcano is. Hugs. Kisses.

Joy.

Technorati: Adoption

A walk in the snow

2007-03-05T19:40:00.000-07:00

It was another glorious almost-springlike day on Sunday, and OmegaDad, buried under his Ethnic Studies coursework, wanted to Be Alone. So I hauled OmegaDotter out hiking in the woods at the bottom of Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods. The plan was to follow the old railroad grade out southward, but the dotter had other ideas, and struck out cross-country very shortly after we hit the grade.

So we wandered along, walking on old patches of snow that had crusty tops, clambering over piles of old branches, peering at lichen-covered rocks, eyeballing the (very few) little plants that were poking out and thinking that maybe, just maybe, it was time to think of growing.

I persuaded the dotter to take a picture of me. The first, alas, was just my bottom half, but we laughed, she took the camera back, and aimed again. The result: I didn't crop the picture at all!

While the dotter was poking at the snow, and scooping up crystalline clumps of ice, I was finding things to look at, myself. The bold black and grey stumps standing out against the snow are the result of long-ago logging in this area; before HDEW was a vacation home spot, it was a logging camp (that is also the reason there's an old railroad grade).

A few of the tree trunks were looking the way they would look in summertime--bright yellow bark plates surrounded by black edges. In the summertime, in the heat, in the midst of the sound of bees buzzing and breezes sighing through the needles, if you press your nose against the bark of these old trees, and take a deep breath through your nose, you are overwhelmed by an aroma of eggnog: nutmeg, vanilla, other scents blend together into a heady pronouncement of the season. I was lured by the vision of the bark into taking a whiff; alas, it wasn't warm enough to produce that special Ponderosa Pine fragrance.

In spots, there were areas of very thin ice, which had rumped--maybe by the winds, maybe from the action of melting and freezing again. They made very satisfying crackling crunches when you stepped on them, but they were so beautiful in the sunlight that I had to stop the dotter from doing that more than once or twice!

After a while, OmegaDotter said that she had had enough. "This is a long walk!" she pronounced. I find it wonderful that she has reached the point where she knows she's gone too long, and knows that we will need to take just as much to get back--and this point is reached ever-so-slightly further each time we go out. Ahhh. Someday, we'll be doing real hikes!

So we turned around and climbed back up to the bottom of HDEW, to get into the car and head into town for lunch. We were both very hungry by this point!

We got all the way into town before I realized (oops!) that I had left my wallet (including--gasp!--driver's license) at home. We drove back home, drove back into town, ate, hit the road for a nap ride, and then headed off to the mall, so the dotter could play at the mall playground.

Then we went to Clare's. Ahem. It is the epitome of girly-girl places. And OmegaDotter is just now beginning to really get into girly-girlishness. There were hair doo-dads--the dotter decided she wanted the kitty-cat with the basketball and the basketball ribbon (?). As the cashier was ringing it up, she asked if we were interested in the "surprise bags", a buck apiece. Oh, my. How could I resist? I grabbed one, we paid, we left, we whisked past all the stores closing up their doorways, and in the car, the dotter sank into a glory of bright blue charm bracelets, her very own chapstick, a little pot of blue glitter dust, and, to top it all off, little faux diamond earrings that fasten with magnets!

Alas, the spring weather has brought other harbingers of things to come: the state had its first red flag warning of the season this week, and this morning, on the way to preschool, we passed the area forest service office which was swarmed with Wildland Fire Fighting trucks. We've had a very dry winter, with only half the normal amount of snow. This means my loyal readers will be hearing more moaning and groaning about fire season very soon...

Technorati: Springtime

Tap, tap, tap...Is this thing on, here?

2007-03-04T10:03:00.000-07:00

::blows on microphone::

::skwee of feedback::

Ahem. OmegaMom is blushing.

AtypicalBrat (or is that ATypicalBrat? Interesting how changing one letter reverses the meaning...), of Nonsensical Text, nominated me for a Thinking Blogger Award, specifically citing one of my adoption posts. Furthermore, she says my posts are always thought-provoking to her.

ATypical also awarded Jouette, one of my long-time buds, for her writing so beautifully about her love for her husband and children. Two more of my long-time buds have also been tagged with the Thinking Blogger Award: Julie, at Ravin' Picture Maven, and C., over at Blogs Are Stupid. I have my issues with C., but when she ditches the four-syllable words and writes from the heart, she's very good.

Man! This is going to be hard to live up to! I'm supposed to tag five other blogs, but I want to think about this for a while.

In addition, the splendid Miss Cellania has kindly nominated me for the 2006 Best of Blogs award under the category "Best Adoption/Fertility Blog". One of the qualifications is that the blogs must be small, getting less than 100 unique hits per day--some days, I go over that 100 hits, but right now, I'm averaging about 88/89 per day. You should check out some of the other nominees; Stirrup Queens looks like it would get my own vote. If the category were broken out between adoption and infertility, I'd be much more willing to toot my own horn, but I tend to think they're very separate issues, and think there's more need for a good IF blog. Once one moves to adoption, or has adopted, there's a whole slew of other aspects to discover, but the gut-wrenching emotional need for support or being able to work through the issues is a lot more immediate with infertility (IMO).

Anyway, I'd like to thank my mom, my late dad, my husband, my dotter, and all my friends and lovers and teachers in the past for helping me become thoughtful enough to qualify. I'd also like to thank the Academy, the press, the designer of my splendid ballgown, and my makeup artist for making me presentable.

Thanks, guys!

NEWS ROUNDUP:

Did anyone see the lunar eclipse? I forgot about it! (Hanging head in shame.) We wouldn't have been able to see the really cool effect of the moon turning red, because the moon is rising early here these days, and the eclipse was on while the sun was up. But I was interested in seeing what it would look like during daylight.

A former Canadian defense minister says that we need to use UFO technology to combat global warming.

Switzerland invades Lichtenstein!

Hilary Clinton's graduate thesis was ordered sealed by the Clinton administration, but has since been unsealed. Reading the story, I'm not quite sure what the reasoning was behind having it sealed, as it sounds pretty tame to this semi-liberal-libertarianish person. It's an examination of the theory and tactics behind a one-time famous Chicago rabble-rouser. I suppose they thought conservatives would foam at the mouth about it?

Ann Coulter very carefully doesn't call John Edwards a faggot. Bah. Whether one supports Edwards or not, that was icky. But then, she tends to the icky side.

New cars and warehouse scooters that run on compressed air.

Next up: God, belief, and evolution. Should be fun!

Technorati: Thinking Blogger, Best of Blogs 2006, news roundup

WordPress server hacked

2007-03-03T10:10:00.000-07:00

Wow.

I know some of my readers use WordPress, so I thought I'd pass this on:

"If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately."

Seems that someone busted into the server, altered the files so that any WordPress installs of that version were easily hijacked to run malicious code.

Most of you probably won't be affected, but there are folks who regularly update their software to take advantage of bug fixes and new features. If you know anyone who's running WordPress, pass the word on.

Technorati: WordPress hack

Sleepless in New York

2007-03-02T21:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the New York Times tossed a story onto the front of their living section, "Whose Bed Is It Anyway?", featuring chic and privileged New York couples who are struggling with their children encroaching on their bed space.

Oh, I so sympathize. The article, however, doesn't. Nor do lots of people commenting on the article.

The article talks about "sleep specialists", who charge a pretty hefty fee to see parents and their children. The article proclaims: "Ms. Kunhardt and others suggest that parents, stung by the sometimes arbitrary boundaries set by their own parents, are concerned to a fault with the emotional well-being of their children." Another says, "Mostly the origin of the problem is the difficulty parents have in setting appropriate limits", and then blames the fact that parents just can't say "No."

Many of the comments are the same: "It's easy...don't put them there in the first place!" "Why hire a sleep specialist when all you need to do is set limits? It's just basic Parenting 101." "...all these stories of kids who just won't go to bed until midnight, and so forth, drive me crazy. Come on, people, parenting is not a democracy. It's *your* job to teach your children behaviors that will help them be successful adults, not just to be their best buddies..." "Let 'em sleep on the floor!" "In addition to ensuring nobody sleeps well, the family bed just screams major codependency issues." "BABIES DO NOT BELONG IN YOUR BED." "...either the parent trains the child, or the child trains the parent..in this case, it looks like the children are winning the battle..." "Another disasterous example of insecure, weak willed, and incompetent parenting!"

The implication--or even outright statement--is that any parent who does this is unable to say "No" to their child at all, that their children have no limits, that their children will be forever psychologically scarred by having them in bed with the parents, yadda, yadda, yadda.

My only wish is that each and every one of these people has a child like OmegaDotter.

We weren't trying to "be her buddy". We weren't codependent. Our dotter wasn't "winning the battle"--hell, no. She was losing the battle. She was terrified. We're not talking a child who cries quietly for 8, 10 minutes, then sniffles herself to sleep--we're talking a child who went into full-fledged, terrified hysterics at being left alone. Period. Who did the same thing if she woke up alone after a nap. Who did the same thing if she woke up in some place different than where she fell asleep. The times we tried the standard advice of putting child to bed, going in at 5 minutes, then after 10 more minutes, then after 15 more minutes--by the time we reached the third go-round, she was hysterical enough so that none of us got any sleep at all those nights. And it didn't change, night after night after night of this. The nights that she did go to sleep, she would wake up two hours later (you could set your clock by that) in night terrors.

Sorry, all you parenting experts out there. We weren't going to let our child scream herself into hysterics night after night after night forever.

One comment I read was from a child development psychologist who said that kids needing to sleep with their parents was a sign of anxious attachment--hear, hear. Then, he ruined it by stating categorically that it was the parents' fault that the child had the anxious attachment, and, once again, that parents who do this are setting the child up for Damaging Psychological Problems as adults.

B.S.

Y'know, some kids are just born like that. Some kids are premies who spent the first few weeks of their lives in incubators, separated from their parents. Some kids are fine up until they reach a certain age. Some kids need it for just a while, while they're going through transitions. Some kids are dealing with childhood trauma (like our dotter). Some kids need a long, long, slow, gentle process. And some kids do just fine sleeping on their own from the very beginning, and actively resist sleeping with their parents.

OmegaDotter sleeps in a nest by our bed. It's not perfect. But she has started talking about wanting to sleep in her bedroom--a little bit. We're not going to push it this time--the nest is okay with us. We get to sleep together, without the writhing, squirming, arms-akimbo, foot-kneading child in bed with us, and we sleep the night through; she sleeps all night through and is a happier, healthier child as a result.

OmegaMom wanders off, grumbling about interolerance...

Technorati: Co-sleeping

A fleeting sign of spring to come

2007-02-28T18:50:00.000-07:00

Today, as I was leaving the office and walking down the sidewalk/hill to the parking lot, I heard a sound I haven't heard in years.

Honk! Honk!

No, not car horns, though it is, indeed, very rare to hear car horns here in Small Mountain University Town. Nicely laid-back, the drivers here are.

Geese.

I looked up, scanned the skies, and saw them--a pair of geese, necks outstretched and wings spread, soaring southwest.

Lubbock, Texas, has its problems. But every spring, and every fall, for weeks on end, we would wake up in the pre-dawn darkness to the sound of geese honking. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Gearing up to head on to their next stop in their migration; heading northward in the spring, southward in the fall.

During the daylight, the skies were filled with them. Flock after flock, arrowing in the proper direction, all gathered together in black clouds across the sky.

Lubbock was perfectly positioned in the migratory flyway for this bi-annual display (biennial?). There were days when we'd just stand in the back yard of our little duplex, surrounded by flowers, OmegaDad's arm around me, our heads tilted back, just watching them soar across in overlapping v-formations.

We loved it.

Today's sound was a sweet flashback to our first year together, rousing nostalgic emotions.

Then, as I continued down the sidewalk, I glanced at the mountains, and saw a layer cake: grey clouds scudding across the sky, snow-covered mountain peeping out beneath them, and then grey-white clouds, with banners of snow, flitting before the mountain, and a row of pine trees framing the bottom. I so wished I had a camera; it was breathtaking.

(I also wished I could get that same view without the power lines crossing my visual field...alas, as I moved down the hill, while the power lines moved so that they were no longer criss-crossing the mountain and cloud layers, the angle on the pine trees shifted, the clouds moved in, and the mountain disappeared behind a wall of gray and green.)

So Julie, over at the Ravin' Picture Maven, tagged me with this meme, whereby I'm supposed to give five reasons I blog.

One reason is so that I can write down snippets, snapshots, flashes of life like the one above. The blog is the modern counterpart of the Victorial journal, with the addition of An Audience (potentially). And maybe some conversation. Being able to snatch these fleeting moments, and actually write them out, makes them more permanent.

It's also a way to document the dotter's childhood. In this manner, it's akin to those "My First Days" books that crowd the shelves in Hallmark stores or Michael's stores.

I could do both of those by hand, of course. I could keep a journal, just like all those Victorian ladies, in which I carefully wrote down each of these vignettes, with maybe a pressed flower or two. I could actually buy one of those "My First Days" books, and carefully fill in the scripted blanks on the pages, dutifully decking the scrapbook-style layouts with photos. But I find typing much quicker and easier and more efficient at capturing my thoughts, with the added touch of not giving me writer's cramp.

I like to write essay-like musings about current events. I have always had a slight wist after a daily column in the local newspaper, doing exactly that. Using a blog, I can not only muse about them, but I can link to the original article, or to other peoples' musings on the same subject. In this way, it becomes a tapestry of thoughts, and it gives me a glimpse into how other people see the same thing. A kaleidoscope, an electronic version of the tale of the elephant: we all see the elephant, but we describe it differently. And, if I miss the trunk, well, someone else out there, in the link trail, will have seen the trunk, and discussed it, and I can go back and re-view the original story or event with an additional facet exposed.

Then there's the conversation. I started out on email lists, newsgroups, and message boards. The conversation moves quickly there, with fast give-and-take, but the conversation on a blog moves a bit more slowly (or, at least on this blog!). There seems to be less of a tendency to blurt out one-liners or let the flames take over (at least on this blog!). The essay-style seems to prompt respondents to take a little more time, and craft a little bit more of a thought-out response. I like that.

And then there's the multi-media aspect. I can link to pictures, without having to cut them out, or arrange them just so, or worry about things like acid-free paper. I can plop in, if I so desire, a snatch of music. Or, as I did yesterday, drop in a clip from YouTube, or a video of my own, or a slideshow. It's very versatile in that manner, though I don't take advantage of it as much as others do.

Now I'm supposed to tag five other bloggers. Hmmmm...I'll go for:

Singing Bird
OmegaGranny
Boomerific (hey, check out her recent series on adoption in a "perfect world"--lots of good comments, lots of good thoughts)
Miss Snark (she won't do it--she doesn't even know I exist! But I thought it might be fun if she ever did catch wind of it.)
Homesick Home

(I would tag Johnny, but he wouldn't do it. Pout. I'd really be interested in hearing his answers. So this is an unofficial tagging, Johnny--if you feel like doing it, go for it!)

Technorati: Geese, springtime, why blog?

Ching-Chong

2007-02-27T00:10:00.000-07:00

Beau Sia: Art. Poetry. Commentary. Kewl. (A wee tad pretentious and MTV-esque, but he hits the spot.)

I'm waiting for the day the dotter returns home from school in confusion at having kids--maybe even her friends--chant "Ching-chong Chinaman" at her. Or pull their eyelids up. Or have someone tell her to "go home" and laugh snidely when she says, "I can't go home until Mommy or Daddy picks me up."

The commentary on the YouTube page runs the gamut.

Technorati: Beau Sia, ching-chong, Rosie O'Donnell

When momma ain't happy...

2007-02-25T19:43:00.000-07:00

...ain't nobody happy.

There's a lot of stuff going on at work.

There was the Great Illness of 2007.

There's OmegaDad being out in the field A Lot.

There's an unending leakage of money.

There's the fact that Mommy spent an hour yesterday cleaning up the living room and the kitchen and the bedroom while dad and dotter were out of the house, only to have the stuff strewn across the living room and other rooms within half an hour of dad and dotter returning home.

There's OmegaDad taking a bitch of a graduate-level course this semester, which eats at all his free time.

Then there's the arthritis flare-up that went into overdrive this weekend, so that I kept waking up whimpering through the night. The flare-up that doses of aspirin and ibuprofen (my love!) didn't do much of anything to combat.

So when I arrived back home from the office today and found that the strewage had multiplied, rather than consolidated...the arthritis hadn't cooled down...and OmegaDad had made cake as an activity, rather than taking the dotter out into the Lovely Sunlight to Play, then announced that He Had Had No Chance To Study in a put-upon tone...and Momma went into her bathroom only to discover that strewage had intruded there, as well...

Momma went into a Deep Funk. Momma sat down on the floor of the bathroom in the dark and cried. And cried. And cried. And wisted for a few nights away from home at a hotel, where there would be no strewage, no kiddie videos playing, no husband feeling put-upon for not being able to study, only to realize that we don't have the funds to allow for such a much-yearned-for retreat.

Then, when OmegaDad knocked on the door forty-five minutes later and asked, "Are you all right?" and Momma sobbed, "Nooooo!" and responded with "I'm miserable!", OmegaDad went away...!

Momma curled up on the floor and cried and cried and cried some more.

OmegaDad returned forty-five minutes later, knocked again, and this time came in, and Momma collapsed in his arms in tears, sobbing out an incoherent account of everything that was going wrong.

(It turns out that OmegaDad hadn't heard my "I'm miserable!" response...so my resentment of and misery at being ignored was misplaced.)

And then the dotter, who was curious, heard Mommy crying, which set the dotter off, too. Ooba-dooba. The dotter can't stand it when Mommy or Daddy is really upset. I mean, she melts into a horrified mewling mess.

Unfortunately, Momma was in no mood for OmegaDad to split his attentions...so report me to DHS. I'm afraid that OmegaDotter in a sorrowful heap leaking tears, rather than attracting sympathy and assistance from me, only elicited a gut-level, immature, childish, "God damn it! I just want to be hugged and loved on by OmegaDad for a while--is that too much to ask?!?!"

After which little hissy fit, OmegaDad took the dotter off and Talked With Her, the end result of which was:

She and OmegaDad cleaned the living room.

She cleaned her room all by herself.

Momma feels somewhat better.

The arthritis flare-up is still there. I'm still bone-tired. We still don't have a magical infusion of cash (which we shouldn't need). OmegaDad is still going to be out in the field, and is still enrolled in his bitch of a graduate class.

But at least there's no strewage all over the house.

Small steps.

Technorati: Mommy breakdowns

A dream deferred

2007-02-24T09:24:00.000-07:00

Back when OmegaMom was larking around in college for the last time, working like a dawg to finish off her computer science degree, the clarion call that lured her onward was artificial intelligence.

Neural networks. Complex systems. Evolutionary algorithms. Mark Tilden, the inventor of BEAM robotics, robots built from the simplest of circuits that navigate the natural world via simple one or two-step rules--Tilden had a swarm of bug insects in his home that would skitter around, find "food" (electricity), climb over things, all autonomously.

When I sent in my application for the Science and Engineering Research Semester, I specifically said that artificial intelligence was where I wanted to work...and I got a job with a guy who was playing with neural networks. I got to go to the Santa Fe Institute for a few seminars. I actually met Mark Tilden and his cohorts.

Sigh.

At the same time, I met OmegaDad. A torrent of emotions swept pure intellectual curiosity into the mental dustbin. A plan to wangle the appointment to SERS into a full-time job at Los Alamos and then go to Stanford or MIT for a graduate degree went *poof*, and my life changed in a drastic fashion. Just like those old clichés, you find love when you're least looking for it--I had my life planned out, as did soon-to-be-Mr.-OmegaMom (he was planning to use his soil science in mine remediation and restoration), and falling in love just wasn't in those plans. At all.

I also was overcome, at various times, by ideas for science fiction novels and stories. One of these was a splendid creation wherein a team of artificial intelligence researchers would build a robot jam-packed with neural networks, a few simple rules (a la Tilden's approach), attach it to input sensors (cameras, microphones, pressure sensors) and output devices, turn it on, and hand it over to a woman to "bring up baby". The idea being--stuff it full of input, talk to it the way you talk to a baby, help it "learn" to propel itself, "learn" to distinguish various objects at a distance and recognize them, "learn" to talk, "learn" emotions, yadda, yadda, yadda.

(There was a plot of some sort attached to this idea--I think it revolved around people not part of the research team discovering about the baby 'bot and going ballistic, fears of robot hordes being parlayed into paranoia, and the lady scientist having to go into hiding with her "child" to escape the burners...at this point, however, I don't remember the plot as well as the driving idea.)

Actually, not only was it an idea for an SF novel, but my daydreams included getting a team together to actually do it.

This was long ago and far away. Rather than being a researcher in AI, living in northern New Mexico, I am a quiet systems analyst at Small Mountain University, dealing with accounting systems rather than with artificial intelligence, wife to OmegaDad, and mom to OmegaDotter rather than a baby research robot. Quite a different result!

What brings this all up? This story, about a group of researchers who are doing...just what I describe up above. They are using neural networks and simple robotics rules to teach robots to recognize human emotions and use those emotions to modify how they behave around humans.

Way cool.

There are times--few and far between; I'm too busy just living life--when those old daydreams rise to the forefront and make me sigh wistfully. This is one of those times. I would so want to be part of that research team. So very, very much.

Technorati: Artificial intelligence, robotics, neural networks, robots learning, daydreams

Culture clash

2007-02-23T19:32:00.000-07:00

One of the big fears in domestic adoption, for potential adoptive parents, is that their child is going to be taken away years later and returned to the birthparents. This fear is fueled, mostly, by stories that have made it into the press, with images of sobbing children being forcefully removed from the people with whom they have lived for years.

Every PAP out there can imagine the heartache, the tears, the misery such a ruling would cause them. The reportage generally makes one think that this happens out of the blue, that the adoptive parents are kind, loving folk who were blindsided by the biological parents and the courts.

Of course, years' worth of court filings don't make such wonderfully gut-wrenching TV, and that sort of thing just gets glossed over.

On January 23, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Anne Mae He should be returned to her biological parents, Shaoquiang (Jack) and Qin Luo (Casey) He.

The case is difficult for Americans to comprehend. When Anna Mae was newly born, Jack and Casey, facing money and legal problems, sought foster care for her.

Here in the States, that's a big red flag. What?! Don't those parents love their children?! Who would just dump their child like that, especially a newborn?! It's just Not Done.

However, in China, it's quite typical for Chinese parents to foster their young children out for a year or two, typically to a family member. Young adults, searching for good jobs, move to the city, work long, hard hours. When they have a child (or children), they send them back to the grandparents, so they can concentrate on their jobs without having to worry how the long hours impact their children.

So we have two different cultures, two different viewpoints. The facts are, the Hes sought someone to foster their daughter until they pulled out of what they expected to be a temporary situation, and thought they had found someone in the Bakers. The Bakers, seeing it from the eyes of Americans, thought that the Bakers were wanting to relinquish the child for adoption.

Things got worse from there. There were accusations that the Hes were unfit parents (but, "unfit" as they were, DHS never tried to take custody of the next two children the Hes had). There were accusations that Casey He was overemotional and hysterical (what would you do if people to whom you had entrusted your child--temporarily as you thought--called the cops on you and insisted you no longer visit?). There were sexual harassment charges against Jack He, which he was acquitted of. And on and on. At each step, both sets of parents fought long and hard for what they believed in.

There are official chronologies of the case all over the internet. The Bakers and the Hes have been in court over this situation for years now. It's not a case of biological parents deciding, years later, that they had made a mistake--it's a case of a long-term court battle. Just as it was in the case of "Baby Richard", and other well-known cases.

The Tennessee courts are requiring social worker counseling for both families in an attempt to ease the transition. It will be a difficult transition--Anna has been raised all-American. For the last few years, she has only seen the Hes as adversaries. The Bakers have promised to continue the battle.

I have no doubt the Bakers really, truly believed that the Hes were relinquishing Anna for adoption. I also have no doubt that the Hes really, truly believed it was a temporary situation. I hope that both sets of parents can let go of any bitterness and work together to make this as smooth as possible for Anna.

And I also hope that, whenever potential adoptive parents bring this case up as one of those horrible cases where an adoptive child is ripped from his or her adoptive parents arms, someone who knows the facts and chronology can speak up and reassure them.

This situation is one reason why we decided we couldn't adopt domestically--because we simply couldn't figure out when we would stop feeling the biological parents had a right to rescind their relinquishment, and when we would feel fully, ethically able to fight like wildcats for our child. I can't imagine having OmegaDotter taken from us. But at the same time, I can't imagine spending years and years dragging it through the courts when it was obvious the biological parents, from the beginning, didn't think it was a "real" adoption.

Wikipedia information is always to be regarded with a somewhat jaundiced eye--people can edit anything they want. But since I have been following the case for many years, I can say that the Wikipedia article about the Anna Mae He case lays things out pretty clearly the way they happened since I've been keeping track.

Technorati: Anna Mae He

Milestones

2007-02-22T18:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening, OmegaDotter came dashing in to ask me, "Is this right?" She showed me some writing.

P...N...Y

It was, of course, "pony". I was busting a gut, I was so proud! So, okay, there's a little "o" missing, but, hey. Steps.

She has taken to going to bed with books. I read her something, then she snuggles down in her little nest, opens up a book, and "reads" it. Either she recites as much as she can remember from memory, or she whispers a story she is making up.

We went in for her first dentist's visit this morning. Yes, yes, I know, wisdom is that three years old is the time for that first visit. But the dotter has issues about her mouth, and even trying for last year would have been a disaster, and left her with a miserable feeling about dentists in general. Either due to maturing or due to OT or due to goodness-knows-what, though, she is now at a stage when doctors and dentists can poke around in her mouth and she won't throw a conniption fit.

(Trust me: this child has had a mouth issue since she arrived. Getting her to open her mouth so you can look take a quick look, or--god forbid--brush her teeth has been an ordeal for years.)

Unfortunately, that extra year may be the reason she now has a big honking cavity on top of one of her molars. The x-ray implies, and the dentist says, that her adult tooth in that area won't come in for five to seven years.

When the dentist showed me, my first thought was, "How did I miss that?!" My second thought was, "Kate, you didn't miss that. But every time you saw it was right after she ate chocolate or oreos, and you just figured it was food." I am now officially V-8 bopping my head.

Soooo. My poor darling girl is going to have to have a crown.

Yes, a crown. Sigh.

The good news is that she has only two other cavities, and they're in her front teeth, which the dentist says are very likely to fall out within the year, so we're not going to do anything about them except keep an eye on them.

The other bad news is that dotter's lovely teeth--they really are!--are too close together, and she has a small jaw/mouth (we knew that one), and she will very definitely need orthodontics at about mid-point in getting her adult teeth.

Sigh. We knew that, but it's no fun to actually hear it.

Our little Chinese New Year celebration was a success, though I think the lady who owns the restaurant never wants to see us again as a group.

M-m-m-m-money (and memory)

2007-02-21T20:51:00.000-07:00

When OmegaDad and I met at Los Alamos, I was familiar with the old-fashioned internet. UseNet was my hangout, Lynx was my "browser" of choice. While doing my computer programming homework, waiting for programs to compile, I would switch over to another (wow!) window and read alt.callahans, which I was addicted to.

One day, while not-yet-Mr.-OmegaMom and I were hanging out in the teeny little studio I shared with a sweet young thing from rural Utah, a bunch of folk showed up on our doorstep. SYT was going to go out with the crowd, not-yet-Mr.-OmegaMom and I were going to go exploring. Up the greenway swept Alec, his eyes blazing with enthusiasm.

"I have seen the future!" he proclaimed. (He really did!) And then he went on an excited rant about something (a program) called Mosaic, and graphics, and documents, and oooh, oooh, oooh! We all halfway listened and sort of wrote him off--he was known for sudden enthusiasms--and went on our merry ways.

Mosaic was, of course, the precursor to Netscape. A year later, and I was no longer using Lynx, but surfing joyously on my oh-so-fast 12KB dialup connection in the front office of our duplex in Lubbock.

A few years later, there were all these dot-com schemes popping up, one called "AllAdvantage". The idea was you'd sign up, you'd get a specially configured browser which would display ads, and you'd get paid to use that as your browser, based on how long you surfed and how many ads you "saw". I signed up, but found the browser too resource-intensive on our slow connection (now up to--woohoo!--52KB!), and stuck to my regular Netscape. (At one point, when we were very poor, I signed up for Juno email so I could get my email infertility support group fix.)

Then the dot-com boom busted, and AllAdvantage went down in flames, owing far too much money and taking in far too little to cover it.

Today, I was browsing some new blogs and came across something that caught my eye. "AGLOCO--Get paid to surf the net!" it trumpeted. Hunh. That rang a bell, so I followed the link. Lo & behold, it's the folks from AllAdvantage rising again, phoenix-like, from the ashes. They've tightened some things up--the pay rate is going to be variable, based on the income, as opposed to AllAdvantage, which had a set pay scale, and they've got a time limit of five paid hours per month. They've got a toolbar instead of a dedicated browser. And they've got this cute scheme whereby you sign up, do your browsing and get paid to view ads (and search Google/Yahoo/what-have-you, via corporate affiliations) and you get others to sign up and get a percentage based on the time they spend on surfing, etc. You get small ads on the toolbar targeted to you based on your surfing habits, and they've got Grand Plans and Schemes for affiliations and special offers and what-not.

They claim that the toolbar and its associated programming is easy to uninstall, so you're not trapped forever in a maze of spyware. (Of course, since one has to agree to it, and download it, and run it deliberately, it can't be called "spyware".)

So, yeah.

I signed up.

They're not ready for primetime yet--their "viewbar" is still in beta, slated for release in March.

I figure I can handle a toolbar with targeted ads for five hours a month. I don't mind being part of summary data for advertisers--the "discount cards" we use at Albertson's and Safeway and PetSmart are essentially the same things. So long as it's open and aboveboard, I don't have a problem.

So. Ahem. (Eep!) If you're at all interested, go to the link above and check them out. Read all their privacy policies and "how it works" stuff, etc. Then, if you think you'd like to give it a whirl, be a good fella and come back here, and use this link to sign up, so I get a "referral" for your sign-up. Some folks using AllAdvantage got nice checks each month...we could, too!

(I feel cheesy doing this. But, hey, I'm not twisting anyone's arm. I thought it seemed interesting, and if it brings in $5 to $25 a month, that's $5 to $25 a month that I can put to, say, ballet lessons or horse-riding lessons for the dotter. [Watch OmegaMom pluck those heartstrings!])

It's interesting how much things have changed in the past 12 years. What was once an almost incomprehensible babble from Alec has turned into a daily resource. I regularly shop on the internet, looking for the best prices, and have a ball with places like eBay and Amazon wishlists. I book my air travel and hotels and rental cars there. I locate local merchants and check out local event calendars using the internet. And, as a programmer and web worker, I find the resources for code help invaluable, starting with the computing newsgroups, then on to DejaNews, and now Google News.

And, of course, there are the support groups. First, misc.kids.pregnancy, back when I was eager and naive and we were ready to "get pregnant". Then alt.infertility. Then the ONNA mailing list. Then adoption support groups. Then APC and its associated lists...and now adoptive parent groups and blogs.

To me--and many others, I suspect--the internet has become a "utility", similar to having running water, and it was one of the first things I set up for us when we moved into Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods.

I can easily spend five hours per month with an itty-bitty toolbar at the bottom of my browser. And, so long as I don't get ads for infertility treatment or targeted at expectant moms considering adoption, I'll be happy.

We'll see. I'm skeptical, but it's interesting, at the very least.

Technorati: AGLOCO, internet history, pyramid schemes?

Muddying the waters

2007-02-19T13:40:00.000-07:00

Spring sprang for a short while this weekend, and I decided to haul the dotter out to wander in the woods. There are certain signs that spring is thinking of edging our way: The mountain bluebirds suddenly reappear in the forests, swooping with vivid blue flashes from tree branch to tree stump and across the meadows, flirting their wings and singing their songs. Sunlight suddenly lasts longer; in the past few weeks, we've gone from sunset-at-5:30 to sunset-at-6:30. The angle of the light changes. Oh, probably it was changing all along, but suddenly it becomes noticeable. And the wind begins. Spring in Small Mountain University Town is a time of wind, blowing from the west. It's not quite as extreme as it was when we lived in Lubbock, when you had winds that gathered speed and momentum from falling down the sides of mountain ranges then traversing hundreds of miles of flat plains. But it's there. I love the wind--it makes me want to run and dance and twirl around, heart pounding, as if the sap were rising in my body. So, anyway, there it was: quite springlike. After a day spent cozening my swollen chipmunk chin, and a night in bed with hot compresses (bleah), I had to get out. So the dotter and I loaded ourselves into the Little Green Car and headed to the back side of Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods. My first thought was to hang a right at the road-going-over-the-ridge, stop by the fence in Whatever-its-name-is Wash, and hike along the bottom of the decaying limestone bluffs. We reached the intersection with RGOTR, and saw that it was a solid mass of water and slurgy clayey mud. Peering up the road, I could see that it was slurgy clayey mud and slushy snow, with gigantic ruts in the road, all the way up. Hmmm. Bad idea. I motored on to the next option, the intersection with OmegaDad's-favorite-cross-country-skiing-road. There, too, was a large mass of water and mud, on both sides of the cattle guard, but eyeballing the road further up, it looked okay. So I gunned the Little Green Car through the open gateway, across the cattle guard, through the water and mud, and slewed to a stop by the side of the road in an area where the car didn't look like it would sink. Too deep. When I came around the car and opened her door, OmegaDotter peered out of the open door at the mud and uttered the sound of disgust of preschoolers around the world: "Ewwwwww! It's muddy! Yuck!" Little did she know. Bwahaha! I directed her to stand on the tufts of grass and duff, and walk from one to the other like stepping stones, over to the road. "Ewwwww!" "Mud!" "Yuck!" Ahem. We had heard this song and dance already. She insisted on holding my hand, which made navigating the drier spots a bit more difficult--as they needed to be wider. Finally, I persuaded her to let go of my hand, and we headed on up the hill. I listened to birdsong and felt the wind lifting my hair, and coached the dotter on avoiding the slurgy mud spots, and soon...soon, she was running across the crusty old snow alongside the drowned spots in the road, and dipping her sneaker-clad toes into the water delicately, then with less delicacy. Quickly, she learned to tell the difference between the slurgy mud--where your shoes sink in, and any attempt to walk a straight line results in your feet slipping and sliding and making great big "Ssspppllllrrrch!" sounds as the sneaker emerges from the mud--and the wet-but-hard sandy mud spots. We reached an area where there was a small stream of water steadily running down the road, and I stopped to peer at it, urging the dotter to take notice of how fast the water was running. We had actually climbed up fairly high, but it was a gentle slope uphill, so we didn't realize it until we saw the water, and looked back whence we had come. It was time to build dams. We built a dam of little rocks on the tiny roadway stream. The dotter quickly got into the spirit of things, digging out little and big rocks and bringing them over. We watched as the water collected behind the rocks, then found pathways between the bigger rocks and over the smaller rocks and around the entire dam, and the collected water quickly swirled downstream again. A little further on, we built a dam of "stuff"--pinecones and sticks and mud. This one didn't work as well. A little further on, we found a spot where the little stream had carved a canyon about a foot deep in the road, and this time we made a dam of rocks and sticks and pinecones and lots of mud (by caving in the sides of the canyon. This one worked beautifully, filling up to three or four inches deep, drying out the tiny streambed below, and then, when the water reached a certain depth, suddenly breaking through in a flurry of small waterfalls. Then it was time to turn around and head back to the car. OmegaDotter ran in front of the gusty breeze, dancing and laughing and waving her arms. She splashed in and out of varying kinds of muds. She grabbed sticks and drew in the dirt. Not an "Ewwwwww!" was uttered until we were back to the car, and she took a look at her shoes, socks, and the cuffs of her jeans. All went well until I tried driving back out. Um. It's a lot easier to drive through muck and mud when starting from a nice dry dirt road. The car surged and bucked, wheels spun, mud splattered through the air...the car aimed squarely at the solid fence post that delineated the edge of the gateway, and it was only by some really fancy wheel spinning and brake-work that I managed to get the car through the opening, instead of stuck in the mud or smashed into the fence post. Once we arrived back in our driveway, the dotter ooohed and ahhhed over the mud covering the Little Green Car, took off her blackened shoes and socks on the porch, and darted into the house to insist that OmegaDad come out and see ("No, no, no, don't tell!"--she waved demanding hands at me as she commanded this). A few hours later, she was daintily dressed up in her fancy black and red party dress, white tights and black patent leather shoes, her hair smoothed back into mom's favorite ponytail creation, ready for our little FCC Chinese New Year party.

Scrotum. Scrotum. Scrotum.

2007-02-18T10:47:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, an Atlantic Beach theatre company received a complaint about their marquee. Seems they were playing "The Vagina Monologues", and some mom drove by with her ten-year-old, who asked, "Mom, what's a 'vagina'?" The mom, righteously indignant, called and complained.

The theatre company, in a fit of sardonic amusement, immediately changed the marquee to read "The Hoohaa Monologues".

(They did change it back a few days later, having made their point.)

Segue into the most recent news. The American Library Association's listserv has been plunged into ripe controversy. A discussion of the "10 most banned books"? Complaints about parental interference? Gossip about what happened at the Library Association meeting?

No. Librarians taking a stand. A strong, uncompromising stand. Against a book.

We can't have a child's book that mentions "scrotum" on the first page!

O, the horror!

OmegaDotter, cover your shell-like eyeballs, for fear that you will be corrupted by the eeeevul influences of the wuuurld!

Kozmik All forbid that your innocent child should be subjected to the word "vagina" while driving down the road. Or "scrotum" when opening the latest Newberry Award winning book.

Is "uterus" okay? I've been telling OD that babies grow in mommies' uteruses (uteri?). We do use play words--"dangly bits" are for boys, for instance. But we've slipped a "penis" in here and there. I'm afraid she's ruined for life now.

One of the things that bothers me most about this is that some librarians--those keepers of the gates against censorship--are refusing to buy this book (when librarians typically automatically order two copies of any Newberry book) for fear of complaints from parents. Because of one word. The story itself doesn't seem to be about anything too terribly controversial--a young girl is growing up and figuring out how to face the world. But these staunch preservers of liberty of the written word are flinching from hordes of imaginary angry parents before they even manifest themselves.

This is sad.

Are they worn down, tired of fighting? Are they just afraid? Will they refuse to answer a kid who comes up to the reference desk and asks about the word "scrotum"? What about "breast"?

And those angry parents--who, I am sure, will appear--Does having a knowledge of certain words act like gateway drugs? Knowing the word "scrotum" is going to lead, inevitably, to horrendous things like (gasp!) teh sex? Is there a magic age at which it's okay to know the word "scrotum"?

The funny thing is that, in context, I know exactly what this author is talking about:

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

It does sound medical...and secret...and important. It's not a sound that you encounter in the English language very often, which makes it even more interesting. It's just a neat word, plain and simple.

But, obviously, it's terribly, terribly dangerous in the hands of 10-year-olds.

Technorati: Scrotum, uterus, librarians

Gangin' a-gley

2007-02-17T16:25:00.000-07:00

We had Plans for this weekend.

We were going to motor down to OmegaGranny's en famille on Friday, spend the night, and then go down to the Valley of Death for the authentic Chinese New Year Festival. We were all excited. Lion dance! Dim sum! Meeting up with X.L., a volunteer that OmegaDad has worked with! Fan dancing ladies! A visit to Ranch 99 to stock up on intriguing noodles and frozen buns!

I had even been organized enough to call the petsitter.

So, first, we decided we didn't really need Nancy to petsit on Friday--we'd go home, pack, and head down the hill after work. So, a call to Nancy to cancel Friday evening's visit.

Then, toward late Friday afternoon, OmegaDad calls me and announces in a croaky voice that he's feeling rotten and doesn't want to expose OmegaGranny to anything that might make her sick.

So, another call to Nancy to cancel the Saturday visit.

In the meantime, yours truly had, on Thursday night, a pea-sized hard swelling under the jaw. I thought it might be from a tooth, though no tooth hurt.

By Friday afternoon, it was marble-sized, and painful. If OmegaDad hadn't wussed out, I was ready to stay home myself.

But OmegaDotter really wanted to do CNY...So she and I drove down the hill to granny's house.

By this morning, the swelling was golf-ball sized. And more painful. Think "chipmunk chin". I had had to dope myself with ibuprofen and aspirin in the middle of the night. The thought of dealing with crowds and excited child and driving hither and yon for hundreds of miles while dealing with this ever-growing wen just didn't float my boat.

It was my turn to wuss out. We drove back up the hill, I dumped the dotter with the dad (who was feeling much better), and headed over to the Doc-in-the-Box.

The end result: something called sialadenitis, an infection of the salivary gland. Think an infected pimple producing a great big honking huge painful sty--except bigger and more honking huge and more painful. Apparently, you can get a blocked salivary gland outlet...and when that happens, all the leetle bacteria floating around your mouth just set up shop inside the gland, with all the backed up saliva, start doing the cha-cha-cha and breeding like bunnies. The antibiotic I was on for the bronchitis doesn't touch this stuff, so now I'm on Augmentin. Hot compresses, massaging the damned thing (OW!!), and lots of fluids.

The doc knew what it was right away--says she sees about three cases of it per year.

Nothing major compared to the rest of the world's ills, just a bloody pain and nuisance. But at least I'm not dealing with the misery by shaving my head and getting a tattoo. (That poor kid. Seriously. She needs a break.)

We have one last chance for a CNY-ish do, with the FCC gang her in Small Mountain University Town. The way things have been going, it seems doomed already, but I still hold out hope...

Technorati: Sialadenitis

All shook up

2007-02-14T19:06:00.000-07:00

When I get really, really angry, I cry.

It's very embarrassing when it happens at work.

My mom (OmegaGranny) does, too.

I always figured it was a weakness, a failing, one of those weird things that was a personal quirk.

So when I glimpsed "When is it all right to cry?" as the header for a post at Cognitive Daily, I clicked through, read the post, and read the other posts that led to it--a bunch of female scientists and grad students discussing the times they cry in a professional situation, and how they, too, find that they cry when they get angry and frustrated, and they, too, feel that it leaves them at a disadvantage.

After all, crying is a sign of weakness. An attempt to manipulate. It's "inappropriate" to cry in a professional situation.

Or so we are socialized to believe.

I also cry at schmaltzy commercials and movies, too--but it's "appropriate" to cry at those times. (Well, sorta.) And at weddings. And funerals. And probably on the day OmegaDotter graduates from high school.

There are a lot of interesting comments to those posts--men admitting that they, too, cry--but in private. Men saying that they've had co-workers cry around them, and they feel at a loss as to what to do. Some discussion about the socialization process. Some discussion about inherent differences between men and women. Go check them out.

In the "Neener, neener, I'm so much better than you!" department, there's this study on differences between adoptive and biological parents. Sociologists studied data from 13,000 households with first-graders, 161 of whom were adoptive families. The study concluded that the adoptive parents spent more money, more time, read together more, ate together more, and talked to their children about their problems more than biological parents.

The researchers concluded that adoptive parents were more invested in becoming parents, and more likely to be trying to compensate for a society that regards adoption as "second best", and then compared these results to an expectation of what type of parents gays and lesbians might be.

Um.

Now, while I'm all down with the idea of being seen as "better", I've got to say that spending more money doesn't mean diddley in the world of parenting. I've known plenty of parents who threw money at their kids in an effort to prove affection, in an effort to solve problems, in some weird way thinking that money equals love.

In addition, as Dawn points out in her discussion of the study, adoptive parents could be seen as "helicopter parents", and the publicity about the study seems to focus more on adoptive parents than the fact that gays and lesbians can do quite a nice job on their own, thankyewverramuch.

In the end, the whole write-up leaves me squeamish. It's akin to the whole "adoptive parents are saints" mythology, the "Oh, you're doing such a Good Thing!" gushing that one gets from new acquaintances. That sort of thing makes me feel like they're implying, in a weird sort of way, that it takes a mighty special person to even want my darling dotter. Harrumph. To me...well, she's my daughter, and I love her, and I find it hard to wrap my mind around the concept of it being difficult to love someone who isn't "your own".

I'm sure that the journalists have mangled the results of the study in some way, picking some point to emphasize that really wasn't the point the researchers were wanting to get across. I'd be interested to know if the study controlled for income, social status, number of children in the family, etc. Perhaps the correlation that is trumpeted here is more one of monetary influence: parents who can afford to adopt might have more discretionary income to spend on their kids; they might have a higher socioeconomic level that promotes focus on reading and family time--goodness only knows.

And I find it simply appalling that the article says "The researchers said their findings call into question the long-standing argument that children are best off with their biological parents." Oh, goodness, what a can of worms that opens up--what a splendid validation for all those adoption agencies who subtly (or not-so-subtly) coerce young unwed moms into placing for adoption because "the child will be so much better off in a two-parent family!"

Technorati: Crying, adoption

Valenstienstine Day Cards

2007-02-13T23:51:00.000-07:00

Emerging from the House of Illness, the dotter and I discovered that tomorrow is Valentine's Day.

No problem-o, just haul butt over to the local Target and buy a bunch of kiddie cards, right?

Well...there were the hundreds of emails to go through...the voice mails to reply to...the FMLA forms to fill out by me...OmegaDad's prescriptions to pick up...the FMLA forms to take to the pediatrician to fill out...the website updates...the space planning database query that needed to be done today...the project status database entry that needed fixing so it didn't show up twice on the monthly report...the test facilities maintenance database to load...the two-inches-an-hour bout of snow that required very slow driving on the highway...

The end result was that we arrived home without cards.

So, being internets-savvy, I started searching the web. There were Nintendo valentine's cards, some cute, most risqué. There were artsy cards (very pretty!). There were more erotic cards. This set of cards that was recommended by one of my regular blog-stops. And then I found these calico cards.

Aw! So cute!

So I whipped out some sayings in Word, printed pages out, and the dotter and I sat down with scissors and tape and glue sticks, and started having fun.

The dotter, of course, got tired after making about six, so I completed the task.

We have heart mice (two versions!), heart puppies, heart birds, and something that the dotter declared was a bear. Of course, the first one made was for the dotter's One And Only True Love, C., and I included the insides of that card for funsies:

Tomorrow a.m., I will have to sit down with the dotter and have her sign her name to the remaining cards. Have I mentioned that there are 17 kids in her preschool class?! Gads.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Technorati: Valentine

We don't need no education - reprise

2007-02-12T08:36:00.000-07:00

(I know I've done something with this title before...)

At one point during her peripatetic wanderings, OmegaMom had a job teaching at a "business college" for a year. They hired me after a one-hour interview, right on the spot. Told me I'd start teaching that night. !! There was no curriculum. No teaching materials except for a text. No nuttin'--just "Have at it!"

I taught word processing, databases, spreadsheets, typing, and business English.

The students were motivated and sincere. They had been told they could get financial aid, that they'd get a job and a computer immediately after "graduating". They wanted to better themselves, get good office jobs, work their way up through the world.

A nearby sewing factory had closed up shop, and the "college" got a sweet deal with the county economic security department--re-educate all the sewing factory workers so they could get new jobs.

I liked working there. I liked the students. I tried to teach them something...but some of them simply weren't "office worker" material. I became convinced that the "college" was a sham, just a method of milking government programs for profit, and to the devil with the students.

That said, there are students who will do well with a little bit of help and structure, no matter what the motivation of those who provide the education. Which leads me to this, an article about the University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit online education university in the U.S.

UOP has been growing by leaps and bounds. They cater to a particular audience: employed people who want to get a degree, but either can't get to a university nearby or who want it fast or find the online coursework more convenient. There's a boatload of people out there who recognize the value of a degree but who find the traditional college/university environment unwelcoming.

Most colleges and universities don't really consider the working person. Courses are offered during business hours, with a few being offered at night. But usually, core courses aren't amongst those night time courses, or you have to wait many semesters for one to be available. So online courses fit the bill for many working folks. UOP recognized this early on, jumped on the boat (and online) and started growing.

A number of "regular" colleges/universities have recognized this trend by now and are offering coursework and even full degree programs online. Online courses can be quite rigorous and difficult--I worked with a woman who was teaching educational courses online, and hers definitely sounded hard, and it was obvious she was putting a lot of work into them. They can also be throwaways. If I were an online student, I would be "milking" my fellow students for all the information about different instructors that I could (realizing, all the time, that what I would consider a "good" instructor might be anethema to someone else), and trying to get the instructors who made a course "meaty".

I myself attended (let me count...) four different colleges/universities, with a variety of different intended majors. I started off at Fancy Episcopalian Private University, straight out of high school. The plan was to study history and language, and become a freakin' well-paid historical romance writer. But I went from being an intellectual Big Fish in a Small Pond to being just one of many at FEPU (at New Student Orientation Day, I sat next to a PSAT scholarship winner; I had only been a semi-finalist and didn't know that you actually had to do something further to be considered for the full scholarships). What came as easy as breathing to me in high school suddenly required this odd thing called studying, which was foreign to me. So, after a year floundering around, I dropped out. A few years later, I started taking night classes at Fancy Catholic Private University, with a plan to do pre-law and go to law school (a stint at jury duty with a horrendously cute prosecutor prompted this; thus the shallowness of an early-20s OmegaMom). Then, with a push from family issues, I moved out to the Southwest to be around mom and dad...and, ever the student (it's like heroin to me), I signed up for some music courses at the local community college. Amazingly enough, it was the most rigorous and difficult coursework I had encountered yet--Music Theory kicks butt. And then, chased out of the region by lack of jobs, I moved out to bee-yoo-tiful San Francisco, and finished up a degree in computer science at CalState.

Each of these institutes of higher learning had their pluses and minuses. But what I took from them had a lot to do with what I put into them. The conclusion, after all this bloviation: It doesn't really matter what institute of higher learning you attend (so long as you avoid "business colleges"). Any college student can get a worthwhile degree from almost any college out there, so long as the student puts in the work needed to locate the good courses and the good instructors, and puts his/her heart into the schoolwork.

If OmegaDotter would rather attend a local public university, rather than some fancy-schmancy Ivy League School, bully for her. Because if she puts her all into it, no matter where she gets a degree, it will be worth it. And, conversely, if she doesn't want to go to college at all, but wants some type of vocational training (horses play into this thought...), that's all well and good, too--so long as she believes in it and works hard.

Technorati: Higher education, business college, education

Back home

2007-02-11T21:25:00.000-07:00

As advertised, the dotter was sprung from the hospital yesterday afternoon. We now have an oxygen machine for her for nighttime usage, which the Demented Cat thinks is a toy for him. We have a puffer (albuterol inhaler) which, if she's feeling happy, she does without a complaint, but if she's feeling tired/grumpy, she squalls like a cat and does the all-four-legs-outstretched cat dance.

I'm sick with bronchitis and on antibiotics.

OmegaDad is sick and going to the doc tomorrow.

OmegaDotter has an appointment tomorrow, and hopefully will be given the go-ahead to go back to school on Tuesday. (Fingers crossed!)

It's snaining--rain mixed with snow.

I've been noticing lots of birds singing lately. Spring is coming?! Yay!

Calling in the pros

2007-02-10T13:07:00.000-07:00

When the fever is running high, but the hands and feet are icy cold, you know what the doc is going to say. And, sure enough, he cocked an eyebrow at me and said, "You know what we're going to do, right?"

Unfortunately, it wasn't as easy as all that. While the idea was to toss the dotter into the hospital right then and there, there was no room at the inn. This is THE season. The "sick waiting room" at the doc's office was filled with listless children coughing their heads off, and so, too, was the pediatric ward; the doc tried wangling, he offered to release one or two of his kids who were doing better (but there was this horde of pediatricians waiting to swoop down on any empty beds), he tried negotiating with the Emergency Department to have her stashed in their "observation room" while we waited for an open bed, but...Alas, the ER has A Procedure. The Procedure requires that you check in, go through the normal ER routine, and wait there for a bed.

We got into the ER at 11 in the morning. At 8:15 p.m., we were moved into a room in the pediatric unit. In the meantime, the dotter was hooked up to everything in sight, given antibiotics via IV, fluids via IV, oxygen via the tubes, and by the time we were moved into the bed, she was doing pretty good. She will probably be sprung this evening.

Calling in the pros makes a weary mom feel oh-so-much better. Fifty kazillion nurses and respiratory techs asking the dotter to lean forward so they could listen to her lungs and take her temp and feed her (yet more) antibiotics, while mom and dad just slumped in the chairs and let them Do Their Thing. It's very reassuring to have professionals.

Let me sing the praises of the modern health care industry: they know their stuff. They've got it down to a routine (and have been practicing that routine like crazy lately--like I said, the whole ped ward is filled with kids in similar circumstances).

More praises: I heart ibuprofen. I think acetominophin is okay, but I heart ibuprofen with a passion. While all this was going on, I kept thinking of what this whole scene would be like a hundred years ago, without the fever meds, and didn't like that thought. Imagine having to constantly bathe the child in tepid water, and cope with cool washcloths on the skin of a child who shrieks (shreiks?) at your touch!

The whole high-fever-plus-icy-hands-and-feet gave me the willies, and having the dotter with glazed eyes and languid, limp body was heartbreaking. Normally, she's so vivid and vivacious that having her so listless and miserable was a startling contrast.

But, she's on the mend, very much so. Yay! OmegaDad is at the hospital with her, and I'm getting a break. Time to go check my blogroll and the news and weather--see what's going on in the Wide World. Thanks again for all the pats on the head, reassurances, and good thoughts!

Pee-new-mon-yah

2007-02-08T17:57:00.000-07:00

The dotter was better yesterday. The fever, at its highest in the morning, was around 101.5. She was bouncy and chipper and happy, and I was gladly imaginging returning to the office today.

Then 4 p.m. hit.

And her temp spiked up to 106F again.

And we spent yet another night dosing her up with ibuprofen (the tylenol substitute is worthless. Worthless.).

And there was this gargly cough.

So we trekked off to the pediatrician again today, and sure enough, she has pneumonia. The doc toyed with the idea of tossing her in the hospital, but decided she was "too happy" to be hospitalized. (I knew what he meant, but he should have seen her an hour previously, before the ibuprofen started kicking in.)

So we have zithromax--carefully flavored with orange creamsicle, not orange oil. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter, dotter thinks it's gross.

I have an irrational fear of pneumonia. My maternal grandfather died of it relatively early, and every time my mom comes down with it, I panic internally. The dotter had pneumonia and was thrown in the hospital when she was home only a month, and we were all miserable.

No heading down to the Valley of Death for the FCC Chinese New Year this weekend, after all. But we will be going next weekend for the official Chinese Cultural Center celebration...

Just a quick thank-you to everyone for the good thoughts on the illness, and the great commentary on my various posts. I'd do my usual portmanteau comment response, but...right now, my mind is kind of blank and I'm feeling worn down. Just...thanks. Y'all are a good bunch.

On the futon

2007-02-07T09:34:00.000-07:00

OmegaDad snuck this picture last night. The dotter snuggled up on me on the futon and promptly fell fast asleep...then I fell asleep. And there we stayed, with a break at 11 and at 3 for medicine.

The bug, and something bugging me

2007-02-06T18:31:00.000-07:00

So the dotter has what, for all intents and purposes, is the flu. Oh, the pediatrician waved his hands at the fact that she had had the flu shot, but the sudden onset, the high high fever, the headaches--all said "flu".

Not something easy to take care of, like strep throat. Bah. You can give a shot to a kid with strep throat and haul her off to preschool the next day. But with a virus...sigh...you wait it out. You alternate the ibuprofen and the Tylenol. You sneak as many fluids in as possible. You snuggle on the futon.

(You banish from your mind the reality that neither you nor your hubby have had flu shots. You decide they wouldn't have done any good anyway, because it looks like the dotter has it, and she did have the flu shot, and so it must be a different strain of flu.)

It does give one a chance to actually read some books, though.

Let's talk judgmentalism. Specifically, taking info from someone's China adoption blog, deciding they're Doing Something Bad, and going to the agency about it.

Oh, yeah, it's been done.

Apparently there's someone who calls herself a "minister" who makes a habit of tattling to adoption agencies whenever someone blogs about something that she decides is Bad.

A specific example is a China adoptive-mom-to-be who became publicly sober via Alcoholics Anonymous on her blog; this "minister" decided to get more specific information from the blogger under the guise of "helping her" and "reaching out to her", then promptly marched off to her agency with the information and got her drummed out of the adoption corps.

Apparently this woman has done something similar to a number of people. I knew about the example above many months ago (was appalled then and am appalled now)...then this past week, the China adoption blogs were full of it; somehow the "minister" got outed.

Any way you look at it, it's a cautionary tale. The words "be careful out there" spring to mind.

Others have clearly and eloquently discussed the fact that what you see on a person's blog is a snapshot, not the whole person, so I won't really address that.

I think the "minister" claimed that this person lied in her homestudy, and maybe even believed it. The problem is that alcoholics (or depressives or people with psychological problems or addiction problems or a vague worry that turns out to be cancer) quite often don't see it themselves. So they happily go through the homestudy, the social worker signs off on it, and then, months down the line (or years) they realize they have A Problem.

Is this lying? Not in my mind. People with problems like this are very good at disguising it from themselves. People who live with people with problems like this are very good at not recognizing the problems, hiding from them. Twenty-twenty hindsight allows everyone involved to say, "Oh, yeah. Oh, man, this has been a problem for a long time. Why didn't I see it?!" But at the time...it's invisible.

Has the person become a worse person, less a "good parent", than he or she was prior to becoming sober (or medicated for depression, or counseling for the psychological problems or what-have-you)? I don't think so.

I have discussed, off and on here on the blog, the sturm und drang in the OmegaFamily's lives a few years ago. I'm never specific about it because of rumors of people like this "minister", and for reasons of privacy. It is, however, something that knocks us out of the China adoption program. The thing is, it was a problem before we adopted OmegaDotter (unrecognized and unaddressed, simmering in the background). Now it is recognized, addressed, and things are (in my opinion) much better off. But if we had glossed it over, ignored it, let it simmer more, or just flat-out lied--well, we'd be parents of two kids by now, or real close to it.

Now, China has every right to structure their program whatever way they want. But it's damned frustrating that there are plenty of people who are adopting kids from China with the very same problem as, say, the original blogger mentioned in this post--but they don't realize it. One could argue that a person who has actually taken steps to resolve big life problems--like alcoholism, depression, cancer, etc.--is a much better bet.

We all make judgments. Some are harsher than others. Some are more clear-cut than others. It's easy enough when you see, say, someone beating on a dog with a two-by-four in the middle of a highway. But someone calls the cops, the cops figure out the crime scene, and the judging and sentencing gets left up to a jury. Of course, even juries can screw it up royally (see my post below), but at least you've got impartial folks separated from the original "crime". There's a process which is humanity's frail attempt to ensure justice.

Taking it upon yourself to be judge, jury, and executioner is...well, it's a bit of hubris to me.

Hmm. I don't know where I'm going with this post; it's kind of a mish-mash. But I'm going to hit publish anyway.

Just another brick in The Wall

2007-02-05T18:22:00.000-07:00

I spent the day today with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Dotter is sick (again! Oh, how I yearn for warmer weather, when the preschool has open windows, and the kids are outside a lot, and there's less germ-sharing going on!). When the fever medication kicked in, she was all charm and dancing and laughing and playing dress-up and enjoying a long, leisurely lunch with mommy where we held "races" eating our food, one bite at a time. When the fever medication wore off, she was all, "Don't TOUCH me!! NOOOOOO!!! Ow, ow, OW!!!", weeping, alternating between shivering and being way too hot, and--in her instances of less misery--telling me I mustn't touch her because "You don't want to be this sick, Mommy!"

A throw-away line or two at the end of the birthday party post read: "...she's hitting that subconscious wall related to her birth and abandonment. (Yeah, yeah, scoff all you want, but she goes into a tailspin right around now for a few weeks every year.)"

There was no scoffing. SBird, however, asked me to discuss my impressions of The Wall, so here goes.

There's a lady named Nancy Verrier, author of The Primal Wound. Her thesis is that any child who is adopted has a gaping psychological hole left by being abandoned by or ripped untimely from the birthmother. I've never read the book, myself, but have read many recaps, summaries, references, etc. Her premise seems to mire the adopted person in this psychological swamp that s/he can never escape (remember, though, I've never read the book).

There are people who have taken this idea and run with it, claiming that adoption is a horrible thing and should be outlawed. Just google "anti-adoption", and you'll find them.

I don't agree with the implications--that everything "wrong" with an adopted child is the result of that original separation from the birthmother.

However.

However. There's plenty of evidence that those nine months in the womb produce some very strong bonds. Infants recognize their mother's voices, smells, heart rhythms within hours after birth.

Imagine you are in the womb, warm and comfy and cozy. Then, in a sudden flurry of pain and pressure and strangeness, you are thrust out of that warm coccoon into blinding light, piercing sounds, smells you've never smelled before. But there is one thing out there (hopefully) that is familiar: the body that you spent those nine months growing and developing in. So you turn to the familiar, you cling to it as a foundation for exploring this strange new world. You turn to it for food, for caressing sensations, for warmth, for that familiar sound, that familiar heartbeat. It's a touchstone that you learn very quickly to rely on as your senses are bombarded and your neurons struggle to organize everything.

Now imagine that, one week after that traumatic experience (which everyone experiences), you wake from a sound sleep. Your touchstone has disappeared. The sounds, scents, touches that have been your whole world for the past week--your entire life outside the womb--are gone, replaced by...? You search for it, you cry for it, but it's not there, and never comes back.

How can this not be traumatizing?

You don't have conscious memories of this--it's also well-established that the network of neurons making up conscious memory don't really firm up until about six months of life outside the womb. But there's a helluva lot more going on in the human brain than conscious memories. All of us have had moments where a momentary scent, sliding down the breeze, unlocks a complete snapshot of memory--emotions, pictures, "been-here-before" feelings. Light can do this, too, at least for me--I can suddenly be transfixed by a particular angle of light, and know that the light was just this way at a certain time, and the emotions of that time wash through me.

There are environmental cues to all the seasons, cues that we consciously learn, but that we also unconsciously pick up on. So it's not an arbitrary manmade calendar that brings things up--it's a whole-body memory, linked deep in that primitive emotional center of our brain.

I was dubious reading about parents who adopted from China saying that their children always had emotional upsets around the time of their birth and/or abandonment. "Oh, yeah. Un-hunh. We'll see."

But every year, right around the end of January/beginning of February, our dotter has...tantrums...night terrors..."issues".

She always talks in her sleep, but usually it's the typical pre-schooler type angst. "Mine!" and "No, you can't have it!" show up from time to time (har!). But the sleep-talking she does right around now, and the tantrums she has right around now, center more on things like "Dadddddyyyy! No! Don't go!" and "Mommy, mommy, don't leave me!"

They pass. I'd say two weeks? She's not crippled. She's her normal self, with some stuff busting through. And it's not something that will send her into a tailspin as an adult, unable to navigate her way through normal human relationships (like some people claim). But I wouldn't be surprised if she has problems around this time of year for a long, long time.

Perhaps I was primed to think this. Perhaps I subconsciously passed this priming onto OmegaDad. Perhaps, for all I know, I influence OmegaDotter to behave this way, because I expect her to. But he notices it, too.

Technorati: Primal Wound, adoption, subconscious memories

Pop-up hell

2007-02-05T08:27:00.000-07:00

All of us on Windoze machines have encountered it: you spy an interesting ad on some website, hit the link, and suddenly pop-ups are blossoming like a million flowers on your screen. You click and click and click, and, like a hydra, one window dispatched launches two new ones, until your screen is littered.

If you're lucky, you'll have hit a gambling pop-up link. If you're unlucky, you'll hit a p0rn pop-up loop. Your screen will fill with leetle images of leetle women with their legs asprawl, close-ups of men's dangly bits, tongues licking lips and other things. Even an old lady like myself can be...um...shocked and awed by the array.

I've had it happen once or twice myself; I'm a tech-savvy person who growls, hits Ctl-Alt-Del, and kills whichever browser it is that has spawned the window hell. (These days, of course, I've got pop-up killers running, so that if I want to see any pop-ups, I have to explicitly say so.)

I've also worked on a computer help desk for a medium-sized university. There are people all across campus who are whizzes with Word, but when told to change their password haven't got the vaguest idea of how to do it. There are people who can take electronic equipment apart in their sleep, but who, when faced with a computer, freak out.

There's a whole herd of folks out in the world who, when confronted with pop-up hell, freeze.

Imagine you're someone who is a professional in the world, but who still needs help from your significant other to access your email and your favorite websites. Imagine you're at your workplace. Imagine you click an innocent-looking link to something like hairstyles.com. Imagine your horror when it spawns fifty kazillion p0rnographic images.

Now imagine you're a substitute teacher, you're using the regular teacher's login, you've been told not to turn the computer off or log off, you were checking your email on your classroom computer, and there's a whole herd of 7th graders who are sitting on the other side of the computer from you. You don't know what to do. You dash off to the teacher's lounge to get help. No-one will help you.

Then imagine that two days later, you're fired.

Then imagine that the police show up at your doorstep to arrest you for showing p0rnography to your students.

Then imagine you're tried. Your forensics expert's testimony is severely curtailed due to a legal technicality. You're convicted. Imagine that you face up to 40 years in prison for this fiasco, and you've lost your license to teach.

Sounds crazy? Sounds like the script for a satire?

Yeah.

Talk to Julie Amero.

Technorati: Julie Amero, malware, high-tech justice

Survived and thrived

2007-02-03T21:02:00.000-07:00

So, aside from the fact that I had "help" cleaning and setting up, which meant things took longer than expected, so that the dotter was still in the bathtub when the first guests arrived (!!), all went well, no-one sneered at my house and housekeeping, and the kids had enough fun so that one of them melted into tears at the thought of leaving.

Everything was horsie--the signage taped to various stop signs and street poles to help people navigate through Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods, the decor, the goodie boxes, the goodies inside the goodie boxes, the cake, and the Dotter scored a whole herd of plastic horsies as gifts, including a second Tawny.

I have yet to figure out baking up here. Even with pre-heating, setting the oven temperature higher, and adding extra flour, whatever I bake requires an inordinately long time to cook. But the recipe I used turned out nicely. The original plan was to produce this, but we had neither the time nor the extra frosting to do the mane, so we had a bald horse head as the cake.

I cleaned the house. The dotter and I talked and talked and talked about how she needed to have the house clean and her room clean for her friends to play in. So first she schlepped all her living room detritus into her bedroom. Then I got a look at it...everything was in a heap in the doorway. So, with great zen-like patience, I coached her into cleaning things up.

It was clean. Honestly. It was clean--really clean--before the guests showed up. However, within fifteen minutes, the horrendous scene to the left is what remained of our herculean task. The various kiddos arrived, there was thundering through the house, interspersed with screams of glee and dramatic fallings down. Our bedroom, which was supposed to be off-limits, was breached within minutes, on a quest for The Cat. The Cat was then carted around the house by various children, in various carry poses. Quite soon, The Cat disappeared. Smart animal.

A game of pin-the-tail-on-the-horse was followed by cake and ice cream.

Then, of course, it was time for presents.

Five-year-olds at a party with presents are an interesting group. The presents seem to become a communal item to open and enjoy.

However, there was, of course, OmegaDotter's One And Only True Love at the party, and he had outdone himself. This young man and OmegaDotter have been joined at the hip since they were, oh, two-and-a-half. There was, of course, a horse. There was a horse calendar. There was a bag of potpourri (yes, really!). But the piece de resistance was...

Flowers. Oh, not real flowers, but a lovely group of silk flowers from Michael's.

OAOTL is well on his way to being a suave smoothy with the ladies. Take a look at her expression. (Kindly do not take this gift as some weird commentary on C's masculinity--he is all boy, trust me.)

She, of course, immediately started running around, saying, "C! C! We can get married now!"

When asked to pose with C and his gifts, she swooned against his side. Just look at that expression.

OmegaDad and I, and C's mom, are all rather befuddled by this long-term romance.

All the kids played with all the horses, with OmegaDotter's "carmonica" (which everyone says she actually plays rather well), and then ended up on the futon watching Wallace & Gromit in A Grand Day Out. Since it ended up looking eerily reminiscent of the clichéd Red Couch photos that everyone who adopts from China has to have, this last pic is for all my buds who have adopted from China:

All in all, it went well. I survived. OmegaDad, beset by a horrid sinus infection and feeling like shit, ran away to his office, fearing to contaminate seven little kids. The Dawg stayed shut up in the office, barked his head off once in a while, and generally behaved himself.

I'm tired. OmegaDad is tired. The Dotter is tired. Too much excitement for her, I think, and also she's hitting that subconscious wall related to her birth and abandonment. (Yeah, yeah, scoff all you want, but she goes into a tailspin right around now for a few weeks every year.)

Less angst...

2007-02-02T21:09:00.000-07:00

More frantic-ness.

ACK!

I'm wigging out.

But, we now have, confirmed, the curly haired moppets A and B, the One and Only True Love, one of the K's, S, and Miss R., her former teacher. We may or may not get M. I'm actually quite pleased that I've heard from all these folks.

Perhaps a post after the whole shebang is over and done with.

Birthday angst

2007-02-01T08:39:00.000-07:00

I haven't been posting because I am wrapped up in: 1. Figuring out if any of the (few) kids invited to the dotter's first birthday party will show up. (One has called to say they're coming.) 2. Worrying that the dotter will be in A Mood, won't share, will be grabby and me-me-me, and the other kids won't have fun and the other mothers will think I'm raising her to be a barbarian. 3. Worrying about the horsie cake. 4. Worrying about having STRANGERS!!! In the HOUSE!!! People who probably have clean houses. People who will walk in the door and immediately notice all the spots on the (oh-what-a-bad-idea) cream-colored carpet and the dawg and cat hair all over the place and the greasespots on the kitchen cabinets and and and...and chalk me up as one of those women--the lousy housekeepers. And, by extension, lousy wives, mothers, and members of society. 5. Worrying that the Dawg will go insane with all those kids, bite someone, and it will be a horrible scene. Ahem. This party is keying into every single one of my angsts about hosting things, the state of the house (I don't want to talk about it), my social skills, my husband's social skills, my dotter's social skills. I don't host things. We host family and long long term friends. We've never had a party. Never. Picture me quaking in my boots. I promise I'll post about Molly Ivins; Momtinis, the Today Show, and the Mommy Wars; the wedding hair wigout video; and other important (and not-so-important) things after this entire ordeal is over with. ::whimper::

Cee aitch eye en eh and Justice

2007-01-29T19:26:00.000-07:00

No, OmegaMom is not about to go on a rant about civil rights violations.

OmegaDotter, having reached the mature age of five, has suddenly evincined an interest in Mandarin. And China in general. And Justice--as viewed by a five-year-old.

We purchased the Follow Jade and MeiMei's Play and Learn Chinese videos a long time ago. The dotter has watched them off and on for years and recited, by rote, some of the songs and words. But a few weeks ago, it was as if a light bulb went off in her head: This is another language! You can say things this way, and it means that!

She hears the words better than OmegaDad and I, and can sing the songs all the way through now. She hears the tones, and corrects OmegaDad all the time (not to pat myself on the back, but I can hear those tones, too, and can imitate them halfway decently). And she delights in saying "peee-goo!" and giggling wildly, just like she likes to say "butt" and "fart" and "booger" and other things that her dad just eggs on.

She decided she wanted to learn to spell "China". Having learned it, she went off to her coloring tools, and drew this, all by herself:

She went to bed with a fancy computer printout of the word, hung it on the wall next to her little bed, and as she was drifting off to sleep, she was muttering, "Cee...aitch...eye...en...eh."

(I use "eh", because the conventional "aye" is always pronounced, by me at least, as "eye".)

When we encountered Janet, one of the moms at the dance studio, OmegaDotter (being delightfully free of the social constraints that had kept me from asking the same question) asked her, "Are you Chinese?" No; it turns out that Janet was adopted from Korea.

The dotter is thrilled to be going to the FCC Chinese New Year celebration in a few weeks.

So "cee aitch eye en eh" has become quite important to her all of a sudden.

Then there's "justice". The dotter has not quite grasped that her wishes aren't paramount, and she's connected that particular (not very pleasant aspect) of childhood with "right" and "wrong" and "not nice".

So...for example...she wants to play at "camping" in the living room. This requires the light to be turned off. At the same time, OmegaDad wants the light on so he can see while he's cooking. OmegaDad informs the dotter that he has to turn the light on.

Oh, NO! Tragedy! Misery! Oh, the injustice of it all! Y'see, she had been "camping" before Daddy wanted to cook. She was first. It's not nice of Daddy to turn the light on.

Or, she has been whiny. Mommy or Daddy snaps at her. (Not nice, I know.) This translates into injustice. And we get a tearful lecture about how not nice we are being, and how it's not fair. Complete with a pout and a flounce and a stomped foot.

So now we have to work on her learning to view the household as a commons; things that need to get done must get done, whether they inconvenience her or not. And the black-and-white world of fair/not-fair, right/wrong will have to encompass the reality of the world: if you're whiny and bitchy to other people, they will usually end up being bitchy right back at you. The Golden Rule, as it were, reversed. I try to always ask her, "Would you like it if I did x to you?"

(This has worked a bit for me with whiny or bossy tones; now, if we are alone and she starts on whining or bossiness, I can say, "Tone!" and she usually stops. Does this work with Daddy? Oh, no. Why? Because he is a spineless jellyfish where she is concerned. I love him dearly, but. But, but, but. She can make a frustrated "Nngggghh!" and he will come running. I, on the other hand, being a Mean Mommy, won't budge. There's an awful lot less "Nngggghh"-ing when Daddy is out in the field, and Mommy is playing at being a Single Mom. Just sayin'.)

Technorati: Heritage, China, Justice

Boosterism

2007-01-27T19:37:00.000-07:00

The much-anticipated booster seat arrived yesterday, and today was its day of deflowering. The dotter was ecstatic, because it's so much like a Big Person's seat.

This afternoon, Chef OmegaDad did his weekendly cooking-with-dad bout; he and the dotter made "pudding"--aka Chocolate Mousse. Shortly before the cooking session, he cornered me and begged me to take the dotter for a drive after the mousse was made, to which I readily agreed. She was in that I'm-so-tired-I'm-bitchy-and-fussy mode, and the slightest frustration (one of her dolls not sitting properly at the coffee table for the picnic, her little kitchen stepladder not moving where she wanted it, you name it) was sending her into flounces and almost-tantrums.

So after the grand concoction was complete, I harried her around the house, collecting socks (Polartec fuzzies just arrived yesterday as well!) and shoes and coat, buckled her into the booster seat in the Little Green Car, and headed out at 4:15.

After a whiny "Where are we gooooing, Mommy?" or two, she fell into a deep sleep, and I motored up the highway and over to Three Lakes Road.

For a few months, the drive has been The Road Around The Peaks (very pretty), and I had forgotten how much I love Three Lakes Road. But last week, that was the nap drive we took, and same today.

The road winds through the trees, then along the edge of the two man-made lakes and then through more trees, then along the bluff on the east edge of the natural lake. Last week, the road was icy, but today it was clear. The sun was edging toward the horizon behind me. The lakes were covered with ice and snow.

As we drove on, the sun slid further and further down, and the lone set of cirrus clouds to the southwest, peeping over the trees lining the other side of the lakes, started out with a rosy glow. Then the glow deepened, and the eastern edge of the clouds turned a garish orange-pink, framed by the deep gray of the lower-lying, closer puffs, and trailing into pink-purple, then purple, then gray.

This drive was a refuge for me a few years ago, a place of solace and peace. OmegaDad and I were going through an extremely rough time, and I found the drive through the woods and along the lakes settling and centering, an escape so profound that turning around and heading back to the main highway, and back to our house, was painful and wrenching. It is such a blessing to have it no longer be merely a momentary release that drains away so quickly.

At first, as I drove along in the peaceful late afternoon light, I glanced back at the dotter. Alas, the fancy new booster seat, with "wings" on either side of the head and cupholders (yes! cupholders!) was not designed to hold the dotter upright. She becomes boneless when she sleeps, slumping and drooping--and the booster seat couldn't confine her. She was slumped over to the left, bent at the waist, snoring away. But later, as the light faded, she sighed, and stretched, and lifted her body, and turned her head to face the other way.

I wished I had a camera. The peaceful dotter, sleeping in her brand new "big kid's" booster seat. The stunning orange-pink banner of clouds hovering over the trees. But there's no way you can capture that serenity, that peaceful feeling, that surrounds you. If I could, I would.

Technorati: Serenity, booster seats

Global climate change? We confess.

2007-01-25T19:01:00.000-07:00

Things are warming up in the Southwest. And the OmegaFamily is to blame. We guarantee that there will be no more miserable below-zero freezing spells in the next few years.

It's not because of global climate change, which I covered in a post about the National Arbor Day Foundation coming out with a new hardiness zone map, a post which further included various and sundry links to animations and kewl graphics and news articles to support global warming.

You see, I left something out of that post.

It's our fault.

More specifically, in the past few years, it was OmegaDad's fault.

And I wince to admit it, but it will be my fault for the next few years.

About three years ago, OmegaDad went to a ski sale in Small Mountain University Town. While there, he found a wicked pair of SNS-binding cross-country skis, complete with poles, for an absurd price...the reason being that they were last year's cutting-edge skis, and thus obsolete.

He caved. He purchased them.

And immediately, our awesome winters disappeared. He has gotten to use those skis twice since he purchased them. See? It was his fault!

Then came some recent snows and the icy cold snap. I had forgotten the dreadful OmegaFamily Curse that was laid upon the global climate system, and was much more concerned by the fact that OmegaDotter didn't have warm gloves, gaiters, warm socks, and other good winter paraphernalia to keep her from having icy cold hands after a few hours of playing in the snow.

So I got online and purchased said paraphernalia.

They've started arriving. Some very nice cozy kids' Polartec gloves were delivered to our porch yesterday.

The problem? Well, it's that dad-gummed curse. See, as soon as I sat down at the computer with my debit card in hand, the weather gods took notice. And now it's positively balmy. And it's going to stay balmy until OmegaDotter outgrows every single piece of winter equipment we have for her.

This is an excellent example of something called "magical thinking", which the New York Times recently wrote about, also known in my family as "contrary magic". Other examples are making sure you have a rain date for any picnic you plan (because the planning will surely cause it to rain on the picnic day unless you have a fallback date), never wishing ill upon someone else because "the karma always bounces back!", and knowing that the reason the xerox machine broke down is because you have a Very Important Meeting to attend, where you must give 25 people copies of your Very Important Paper. (Copy machines know these things, y'know. That's why you have to treat them nicely; if you don't, when crunch time comes, that copy machine will remember you, and get you.)

According to the article, "magical thinking" is much more pervasive and easy-to-provoke than one would think. Even in this hyper-technical age, a recent Harvard study showed that people could be induced to believe that their bad thoughts about a fellow research participant was what was causing (fake) pain.

But...even so...I must confess that the OmegaFamily is at fault for the recent warm, dry winters in the southwest. (And, by extension, the weird weather everywhere else, because global climate dynamics being what they are, you have to have weird weather elsewhere to ensure our balmy winters.) Please don't lynch us.

And please do leave me a comment with your most gnawing "magical thinking"...so I know we're not alone!

Technorati: Magical thinking

It's creepy

2007-01-24T21:57:00.000-07:00

To the left is Tawny.

Tawny is Barbie's horse.

Tawny is also OmegaDotter's horse as of last night.

(Tawny was not too expensive.)

Tawny walks.

Tawny makes galloping noises.

Tawny whinnies.

Tawny's walking and gallopy noises and whinnying are kind of creepy.

Tawny really walks. All by herself. Very nicely on the linoleum floor in the kitchen and hallway. Badly on the carpet in the living room.

But it's still kind of creepy.

OmegaDotter, of course, adores her.

OmegaDotter, who also got a pink rodeo roping rope, has been practicing roping Tawny in the living room, with instruction from OmegaDad. OmegaDad's report from the feed store is that the guy there told him, in a quiet aside, that the only people he has ever seen purchasing the pink rodeo roping rope are guys. Guys with daughters. Har.

Technorati: Tawny

Five

2007-01-23T09:51:00.000-07:00

The Dotter turns five today. (We think. We know it's very close.)

This year, she really understands it. She counted down the days, ending last night with, "I'll be FIVE tomorrow!"

What a difference a little more than four years brings. Sunday night, OmegaDad made one of our favorite fun dinners: fluffy sour-cream pancakes (originally a waffle recipe, but our waffle iron is funkified, so it has turned into pancakes), sausages, and whipped cream--lots of whipped cream. Yum.

I have a preferred method for my pancakes: I like defrosted frozen blueberries, dripping with blueberry juice, spread on my pancakes, then covered with the aforementioned whipped cream.

This time, OmegaDad forgot to buy the frozen blueberries. Oh. My. Gawd. It was the end of the world! (Not.)

But...OmegaDotter, displaying her new-found empathy, came up behind me, wrapped her arms around me, patted me, and crooned, "I'm soooo sorry, Mommy! No blueberries...", which trailed off in a mournful tone.

The empathy is definitely a development between ages four and five. Oh, she had flashes before, but now it's full-blown. Daddy or Mommy gets an owie, and she's right on top of it, kissing it and telling us earnestly, "It's okay! It'll get better!" She's internalizing societal rules for "right" and "wrong", so that now, if I park in the Wrong Spot ("Teacher of the Year", because there's no other spot available what with all the snow piled up) while picking up OmegaDad from his class, she spends five minutes going, "Oh, no! Oh, this is not good. Not good at all! Will we get a ticket?! Will the police come get us?!"

Her One and Only True Love, C., gave her a handful of horse, unicorn, and pegasus stickers for her birthday. Now she is insistent that we write him a thank-you note.

Of course, she's internalizing some other things. This morning, on the way to school, she started chattering about the Holy Spirit. "It's invisible! It's all around us! We get to take the Holy Spirit home with us, Mommy!"

Secular school, here we come!

Happy birthday, lovie.

Technorati: Five, birthday

Book meme

2007-01-21T14:03:00.000-07:00

Singing Bird has tagged me for the "Book Meme":

1) Find the nearest book
2) Open to page 123
3) Type lines 6-8 of said book
4) Tag three others

Hers was so topical and beautiful, and mine is rather mundane! I have to admit that the nearest book was really the Atlas & Gazeteer for Arizona, which doesn't have 123 pages, and wouldn't have "lines 6-8". So I grabbed the next nearest book, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Exile's Song.

"...the eyes. All she saw was a rather good-looking man somewhere between forty and fifty, with light-colored hair and deep lines along his mouth, as if he had suffered..."

(While getting the link for the book, I found this movie, Song of the Exile, which sounds rather interesting.)

Oops! Forgot to tag three others!

I think I'll toss in a gratuitous pic:

The dotter dancing around in one of my eBay scores for the Christmas dress-up box, with dangly earrings courtesy of Great-Grandma. (The odd white spots are reflections from the sequins.) Feather boas are now on my shit list, because they shed. And shed. And shed. The only good thing that has come out of the shedding is a rather marvelous "parrot" which the dotter created all on her own.

Technorati: Book meme, dress-up

Silver lining

2007-01-20T09:40:00.000-07:00

Eight years ago, when we first purchased our pile o' logs, it was heated by electric baseboard heat. OmegaDad took one look and said, "That has to go!", and we dickered with the sellers to get the money to cover installation of central heating.

We got bids. We went with the folks who were smack in the center of the bid pile. We ended up being extremely unhappy with them (so unhappy that OmegaDad ended up fighting with them about the additional $800 that they wanted to charge us). (In their defense, the time delays were due to a glitch with the county.)

So we had nice warm toasty central heat. In the front of the house. My office--the first room off the furnace--was the hottest room in the house. No matter what happened, from day one the back of the house was chilly in the wintertime. Eh, we figured, it's the lousy ductwork configuration the heating folks left us with, we grumbled even more about the company that put it in, and we made sure that we always went with a different contractor to fiddle with the furnace.

As my (vast hordes of) readers know, we had a frozen pipe burst this week.

A side effect was that we had cold air blowing into the back bedroom.

After the plumber left, OmegaDad gritted his teeth, dressed up in his special khaki maintenance-man suit and work boots, and went under the house to check the damage.

While he was under there he fixed the ductwork that had broken loose due to the burst pipe. Since he was there, he decided to look around. The end result: He also fixed three other areas where the ductwork was not properly attached. We're talking six-inch gaps. He says the crawlspace was nice and toasty.

Suddenly, the back of the house is not chilly. At all.

Suddenly, the office is at a much closer temperature to the rest of the house.

Suddenly, the furnace is clicking on a lot less. A lot less.

Suddenly, the heat coming out of the vent in the kitchen is not just "nicely warm", but positively hot.

I am having visions of much lower gas bills.

Technorati: Silver lining

The Great Popcorn Conspiracy

2007-01-19T18:22:00.000-07:00

Deep in the bowels of a grim windowless building in the industrial area of Denver, lab workers scurry about at the behest of Herr Doktor Popcorn.

Their mission: To develop The World's Most Irresistable Popcorn Smell, so that Herr Doktor Popcorn can conquer the world, one business site at a time.

Once everyone in the world is lured into popping his (variously disguised) bags of popcorn and thus become addicted, he will orchestrate a worldwide popcorn shortage...and lure certain specific people into his devious clutches by promising them glorious bags of freshly popped popcorn.

Bwahahaha!

Of course, there's a gorgeous female journalist out there who is going to find clues, and she will meet a ruggedly handsome (yet secretly sensitive) secret agent who she thinks is part of the conspiracy; they will join forces and Warn The World of Herr Doktor Popcorn's horrible plan. There will be car chases, jet airplane crashes, a few tidbits of discreet sex. The secret agent will be disowned by his agency. The journalist will be the laughing stock of her colleagues. But, at the end, they will prevail and Save The World from the nefarious Herr Doktor Popcorn.

Really. This is the Kozmik All's Honest Truth I am telling you.

It must be.

I am an addict. It's a joke around my office. I have to have my bag of Butter Lover's Act II popcorn. Every day. If I'm foolish enough to not have my bag, someone else in the office will jumpstart my addiction by popping a bag themselves. The aroma sifts through the office, luring me into the break room, where I am brought down--once again--by my addiction.

I truly believe that there are hordes of food scientists employed by all the various popcorn companies whose sole job is to develop better, more aromatic, and stronger popcorn fumes, designed to entice people into reaching for a little flat package of microwaveable popcorn and march, zombielike, towards the nearest microwave to nuke that puppy. These people must be paid very well, because they do very good work.

Technorati: Popcorn, world domination

What the hell is a "Non-Ethnic Baby"?

2007-01-18T18:52:00.000-07:00

I snoop my Sitemeter referrals, checking out people's blogs, eyeballing the (often weird) search terms that bring people here (my all-time winner is "How to make sugar cookies", which is searched on an incredible number of times), and just being nosy.

So...there have been a bunch of hits from a place called BuzzFeed, on a page with the decidedly awkward title "Adopting Non-Ethnic Babies".

What's a "Non-Ethnic Baby"? Somebody please tell me.

Isn't everyone of some ethnicity?

There's something so ethnocentric and borderline racist in that title that I was afraid to go check it out. I've seen some nasty sites, white-suprem@cy sites, that infuriate me with their commentary. I figured this was one of those horrid places and tip-toed in, to discover my post grouped with a few other posts about the new Chinese rules and about Jennifer Aniston deciding to adopt domestically...all under a grotesque tag: "We all know what this is leading up to: Adopting designer half-breed babies."

(What's a "designer half-breed baby"? Wouldn't a "half-breed" automatically be a...gasp..."ethnic baby"?)

Sooo...the gist is, I guess, that because China is tightening up its rules, someone posts about the media awareness of issues in Africa, and how it grew during 2006, and Jennifer Aniston is reputed to be investigating domestic adoption, my little screed on domestic adoption myths (very misleadingly tagged "Adoption Abroad Can Be Just As Expensive", which, though true, was not my point, my point being that adopting domestically can be just as inexpensive as adopting from China, grr) was included as part of a "trend".

Y'know, I like my racism nice and clean and obvious, so I can feel quite happy about bashing (neo-N@zi sites, for example). Nasty little jibes ("Non-ethnic babies" and "half-breed babies") set my teeth on edge. If the BuzzFeeders truly think there's a sudden "buzz" or "trend" towards domestic adoption, perhaps they should use that term. And if the BuzzFeeders don't understand what's so offensive about the whole, maybe they should sit down and examine their navels for a while.

(I'm not the only one who feels this way; in the comments on one of the posts listed, someone else got hot under the collar about "non-ethnic babies", which wasn't used in the post being commented on at all...)

But then, all the lead-in tags on the front page are "hip" and "edgy". Maybe they thought it was "hip" and "edgy" to use those terms? That would fit in very nicely with Alas, A Blog's list.

UPDATE: It seems that sarcasm and irony are BuzzFeed's well-known schtick (just shows how out of it I am). Kind of a la Onion. Which leads to a question: am I just being uptight and humorless? Does the use of such terms when done with knowing irony excuse the offense?

Technorati: yuck, adoption, veiled racism

If you got a problem, YO, I'll solve it!

2007-01-18T12:17:00.000-07:00

OmegaMom is a happy camper this afternoon.

At first, it did not seem good. The plumber (recommended by the folks at work) was still working on Monday's calls late into last night. Small Mountain University Town is, apparently, filled to the brim with burst pipes.

The thought of another night sans H20 thrust fear deep into my comfortable, all-American, upper-middle-class heart. Ack!

And the cold air rising from the heating vent in the back bedroom gave me visions of ripped or torn or ice-encased heating ductwork.

Then the plumber called back. Ah, blessed event! Two cancellations! So the plumber was coming in this morning!

He arrived. He investigated. He found the burst pipe. He replaced it. It cost $95.

Life is good.

The OmegaFamily has water now.

There's still the question of heating ductwork and water damage. Sigh.

Technorati: Frozen pipes, Ice, Ice, Baby!

Breaking a few pipes

2007-01-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

Ah, the joyous life of a homeowner. The equity! The pride of ownership!

The great big gaping bust pipe underneath the back bedroom closet, which burst due to the -16F weather we had this morning. The one which is gushing water loudly enough that I can hear it like radio static here in the office. The one which requires that Hippy Dippy Utility Company come out and shut off our water at the water meter. The one which will require a call to the insurance company, plus lots of calls to plumbers.

Sigh.

Ah. HDUC's emergency guys showed up. The water is off. Oh, joy.

The morning began inauspiciously. When I headed out to start the car to warm it up while OmegaDotter was getting socks and shoes on, the car wouldn't start. The starter went "rrruh!....rrrruh!....rrrr...uuuu...hhhh." I stopped. I looked at the official lizard temp on the front porch. -16F. I went back inside and called the office. We waited until the sun really came up and warmed things up--at which point the car started easily.

I dropped the dotter off at preschool, then went and purchased a new car battery.

After work, I picked the dotter up to take her to her skating lesson. The nice fluff-head who was supposed to be teaching her decided to take her back to SnowPlow Sam I. Luckily, K. was there, and K. grabbed the dotter after her official lesson was over, and said, "Dotter! C'mon!" and included her in the next lesson. When I cornered K. afterwards, she told me to just bring the dotter half an hour later, as she was going to teach her, because there was no way she should be back in SnowPlow Sam I.

So we headed home, filled with glee at how well things were going with ice-skating. Only to hear The Dreadful Noise once we got home.

Argh. Ups and big downs today--just like the temperature, which actually got up to 30F during the afternoon.

Technorati: Frozen pipes, pride of ownership (bah!)

Breaking a few eggs

2007-01-16T13:22:00.000-07:00

Let's talk embryos.

On this side, we have Jennalee Ryan. She's in the news because she has become the proprietor of the world's first frozen embryo bank. She recruits women to provide donated eggs; she recruits men for sperm; she puts the two together, and hey, presto! Embryos. Lots of them.

On the other side, we have hordes of infertile women who desperately want children. And there we have the embryos, no fuss, no muss, no bother, just plunk down ~~$2,500~~ $5,000 for a pair of embryos, have 'em shipped to your RE, prepare your body for an embryo transfer, and gestate happily for eight months.

Of course, it's not quite as simple as that, but still, pretty painless compared to shopping for an egg donor, paying for her cycle and your cycle, and offering a "gratuity" for the ability to use those precious, precious eggs.

Jennalee has applied the Henry Ford principle to the whole process--do it in bulk, divide up the costs amongst multiple customers, amortize those egg donors' costs, and give happy, deserving infertile couples the boon of their lives, a child.

I am in the middle, gaping in horror. And thinking about my objections to this whole enterprise has solidified a few beliefs in my muddled brain.

What's wrong with buying ready-made embryos? asks Julie, over at A Little Pregnant. I sat there staring at the blog entry, trying to figure out what I wanted to say. And thinking. And thinking. Finally, I closed the browser window, continued on with our weekend plans, and kept thinking.

What is wrong with it? Why do I feel much less compunction in a couple doing it all on their own, using advertising and recruitment tactics to find a suitable donor, checking the sperm banks for donor sperm, getting their RE to do the work, than I do in this situation?

Well, for one thing, it's the attitude of the businesswoman in question. She's upset that infertile couples have to "prove they will be good enough" to adopt or to accept a donor embryo from another infertile family who happens to have some leftover. You can "avoid the discomfort of involving the biological parents". You don't have to "sell yourself" to or "kiss the butt" of interested birthparents.

Oh, those messy biological parents. Oh, those messy biological ties. *Poof*, wave a magic technological wand, and whoosh, away on the wind they blow.

So I thought and thought and thought, and realized...it's not about the infertile couples. Sorry, folks, I know it's a helluva bitch when you're in the midst of the IF struggle, but...y'know what? It's not about you. This is about the chiiiillldruuun.

Really.

This woman's business is codifying anonymous donation to the max. She's marketing the whole concept of free-and-clear, no bio parents to worry about.

No bio parents for the infertile couple to worry about, that is.

Not a single mention of the kids.

Not one.

In thinking about this, I realized just how very much anonymous donation bothers me. Donation of any type--sperm, eggs, embryos. Because, while it's oh-so-comforting to the people who are going to raise these kids, amazingly enough, the result of all this anonymous manipulation is...a human being.

Gasp! Yes! A real, live human being. Someone with thoughts, dreams, emotions, desires, a personality all their very own.

I'm having visions of teens, filled with normal adolescent angst, finding out through old family files (you didn't go through old family files when you were a teen? I did.) that their parents had bought them from a baby bank. Shades of late-discovery adoptees!

How very easy it would be. Just plunk down ~~$2,500~~ $5,000--hey, you can put it on a Visa card, y'know! It's so very tempting. Really, truly tempting. (Of course, there's that newborn thang to deal with--I really liked having an almost-toddler much better than I think I'd like having a newborn. Sue me. I'm weird.)

But...what if I were a psychotic creep, or OmegaDad was, or we both were? Hopefully, those pesky homestudies mentioned above would weed us out early on. Where's the oversight here? These are real, live human beings we're talking about. Would you hand your darling child off to a total stranger with absolutely no idea of what they're like?

Just because you're IF doesn't make you a Good Person. Just because you're IF doesn't mean you have a right to a baby. This is entitlement to the max.

I am so close to starting to lobby for a state law requiring all egg and sperm donations be info-release-required.

(Edited to fix a link because I'm so fumble-fingered. Duh. Edited again, because I can't read. Duh.)

Technorati: Embryo bank

Mythconceptions all around

2007-01-15T20:36:00.000-07:00

A recent kerfuffle in the Chinese adoption world, wherein those who have adopted from China felt that all Chinese adopters were smeared with misconceptions, produced some commentary around the blogosphere and various lists.

Interestingly enough, there were plenty of misconceptions from people who have adopted from China about domestic adoption, and I feel compelled to address some of the myths.

A common thread amongst people who adopt internationally is how difficult it is to adopt from foster care/the state.

Did you know that in 2004, 59% of all U.S. adoptions were done via foster care? Yes, the children are older than many adoptive parents are looking for--the average age of children adopted from foster care in 1998 was 7 years old--but in the same year, 44% of the children adopted from foster care were between 1 and 5 years old. There are plenty of people in the blogosphere who have adopted via the foster care system, and they are just as happy with their families as we are with ours. It may not be for you, but it's definitely do-able.

Then there's the belief that private domestic adoption is wildly expensive, and that you must pay a specific potential birthmother's expenses.

Yes, it can be horribly expensive, but domestic adoption does not necessarily cost more than international adoption. Our local domestic adoption agency charges a sliding scale fee based on the potential adoptive parents' previous year's income. At the time we started our journey towards adoption, the cap on their fees was $11,000; when we looked last year, their cap was $14,000. This is an all-inclusive fee that covers one adoption; the fees are spread out across the potential birthparent group to cover medical fees, counseling, assistance of various sorts. There is no financial risk to potential adoptive parents: once they have signed the contract, the agency will find them a child to adopt. Now, granted, it may take a while; our local agency told us that the longest anyone had to wait with them was two years, which is about how long our adoption took from start to finish. Just as with international agencies, there are agencies that are more expensive and less so; potential adoptive parents should do their research. (And for the Kozmik All's sake, please be ultra-careful about adoption facilitators! They aren't necessarily regulated; some states have laws against them; and lots of times they're the most expensive path to adoption.)

Then there's the fear of birthparents revoking adoption consent days, months, or years after relinquishment.

Contrary to popular belief, it is not common for birthparents to revoke their relinquishment (Solangel Maldonado, one of the panelists on Paula Zahn's first show, cites a figure of less than 1%; Christine Adamec, author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Adoption, got figures of .4%, 1.4%, .5%, and 2%). What is more common is for potential birthparents to change their minds before relinquishing. Of course, in either case, it's wrenching for the potential adoptive parents, and is definitely a fear cited by people who adopt internationally (including yours truly and many of the others in the "Why China" discussion). But it's not a rampant problem--it's just a well-publicized and highly feared problem.

Some people believe that it's impossible for Caucasian parents to adopt an African-American baby, mainly due to the position statement of the National Association of Black Social Workers (originally published in 1972).

Tell that to my former boss, who adopted an adorable AA baby boy through private domestic adoption (and it took her less than six months, from start of homestudy to completion of adoption). The NABSW's main focus was on keeping families together. They also advocate national marketing to recruit AA adoptive parents. Their position is quite similar to that of most people who discuss the politics of international adoption--the first, and best, family is the family of birth. The next preference is adoption within the culture/community, then looking at adoption outside the culture or nation. This is, actually, what the Central Chinese Adoption Authority says is behind their new regulations: the desire to find the best adoptive parents for the children in their orphanages--and they are actively promoting adoption within China as a first preference.

There are some people who have been actively discouraged by their agencies from adopting an African-American or biracial child. But there are plenty of other agencies out there; if you don't like the attitude or policies of one agency, you can always choose another.

Some express disbelief that adopting an African-American baby can be less expensive than adopting that cherished healthy white infant (HWI).

Much though I hate the practice, and find it distressing that there is, amongst certain agencies, a differential level of costs depending on the racial makeup of the child, it does exist. The reasons? They range from lower socio-economic status of the potential birthmothers, allowing them to qualify for state insurance programs, to supply-and-demand marketing principles. Some agencies use the more expensive programs (HWI) to subsidize the others.

Now. While it makes me grumpy to find people perpetuating these myths, for the most part, people I have encountered online or in person who have adopted have researched the various avenues, and made a conscious choice to follow the path they followed. I'm not knocking anyone's adoption choice; I am knocking not doing your homework, not making a well-informed decision based upon your comfort levels. Far too many people out there make snap judgments based on hearsay.

For what it's worth...

Technorati: Adoption, domestic adoption, adoption myths

Snowplay

2007-01-14T16:59:00.000-07:00

It warmed up to 17 above zero by noon (one of the lovely things about living in the Southwest--in Chicago, if it's -18 at 8:30 a.m., it's likely to be a toasty -8 as a high for the day). We loaded up the skis and the sled, and headed out the back end of Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods to play in the snow.

OmegaDotter had her skis on for all of five minutes, then decided she didn't want to ski, but to be pulled in the sled. To the left, OmegaDad as beast of burden.

We skied up the hill, found a nice dry stock tank with steepish slopes, and proceeded to make a good sledding run.

Mom and the Dotter at the top of the sled run, to the right:

Mom heading down the sled run, to the left.

OmegaDotter on her way down:

Mother-Dotter snow angels.

We had a grand time. The skiing was, as always, excellent exercise, and the sled run--though essentially a bunny run--was steep enough so we picked up some speed on the way down. The Dotter enjoyed the snowplay, but by the time we headed back, her little knit gloves were iced up, her pants were soaked through and had huge lumps of packed snow on the hems, and she was tired and cold and just wanting to be home.

So OmegaMom has a shopping list for the dotter: the previously mentioned silk long johns, some polartec gloves and socks, and gaiters. If El Nino actually keeps up, we may have more snowplay in the future!

Technorati: Snow

Below zero

2007-01-14T09:21:00.000-07:00

Snow. Beautiful, white, glistening, clean snow. Lots of it.

We ended up with, oh, about 15 inches total. Yay! Plenty of breaks so that the grader could come by and plow the road, so we're not stuck in any way.

So I want to go out and play. OmegaDotter wants to go out and play. (OmegaDad, the poopyhead, wants to finish up sanding, wood-puttying, and painting the ceiling beams in the living room.)

There's only one problem with this gleaming, glistening day, with the sprays of powdery snow puffing off the pine needles every now and then and glittering in the sunlight like fairy dust.

It's 9 below zero Fahrenheit at the official weather station, but the "official lizard temperature" on our front porch is -14. At 8:30 a.m. (On our other outdoor thermometer, it's -18.)

Dayum, that's cold!

OmegaDad and I have silk long johns; we've had them forever and they're soft and shapeless, but oh-so-warm. Great for cross-country skiing and playing in the snow. We also have polartec gloves--also great for cross-country skiing and playing in the snow.

OmegaDotter, alas, has little knit gloves and no silk longjohns. I've been off-and-on searching for kiddie longjohns, but not with any urgency. Apparently, silkies aren't big on modern parenting lists.

Today's frigidity prompted me to google "silk longjohns kids". And today, wonder of wonders, I found some. Unfortunately, even with the most magical of shipping, there's no way to get them today. Which is when we need them.

So maybe we'll check again in the afternoon, see if that brilliant sunlight has warmed things up any.

Technorati: Below zero

shhhhhh

2007-01-13T09:30:00.000-07:00

In 10 days, the dotter will be (gasp!) five years old.

Five.

Where did the time go?!

(Oh-so-cliché, but oh-so-true.)

Anyway. We are planning a party. Sigh. Yes, we have reached the age/point wherein birthday parties are Da Bomb.

I'm seeking horse-themed party invites. Spirit themed party invites would be best, but, alas, as in all things marketing, Spirit is a thing of the past. I can find "Cars"-themed invites. "Bratz". "Backyardigans".

So far, the invitees are all the "K"-sounding kids plus one or two outliers. C, her One And Only True Love. K, her BFF. K, another almost BFF. A and B, the twins, who I adore--not only are they disgustingly cute little blonde-haired-blue-eyed mopheads, but they are always sunny and cheery. Always. Think Stepford Twins. And maybe M and A. All girls, except for the hapless C.

On the gift agenda is purchasing a car booster seat, to replace our long-suffering Britax Roundabout.

And then there's the item to which "shhhhhh" applies.

Down the road to the highway, you turn right onto Old Hills Highway, rather than follow the paved road left. Cross over the very beginnings of Way Cool Creek Canyon (up here, it's Wellhouse Wash). Drive up a hill. Take a left onto a well-hidden dirt driveway. Drive the winding driveway about three-quarters of the way towards the highway. There's a barn.

It's a horse boarding facility.

They have horseback riding lessons.

The lesson provider may--may--take OmegaDotter. Depending on how mature she is, and how well she behaves.

So I was thinking, a test-lesson. For her birthday.

Shhhhhh.

(There will also be, of course, other gifties. I'm leaving it up to OmegaDad--all I have to do is keep reminding him to keep it light. Otherwise, he'll drown the girlchild in stuff.)

So I'm enlisting my (vast hordes) of readers to keep me on the straight and narrow. I need a nag. Not a horse-type nag, a human-type nag. The horse-lesson provider is available all days except Tuesdays and Thursdays. Email me at omegamom_01 at yahoo dot com this Friday to make sure I have contacted said provider and made arrangements. Please.

Technorati: Birthday

Delurker round-up

2007-01-12T16:52:00.000-07:00

Amanda can't stand sidewalk chalk. Amanda, meet Julie, who also can't stand sidewalk chalk! I personally can't handle the sound of chalk on chalkboards, but that's just me showing my age, as these days chalkboards are passé, replaced by whiteboards.

Kris...I know The Secret. Nyah, nyah, nyah! (One of my related weird thoughts at one point in my life was that everyone else was telepathic. Except me.)

Kate (such a good name) insists that her computer programs be opened in a specific order. Kate also has a blog full of really beautiful photos she has taken; you should take a look. I know, I purchased a print. Well, I haven't "purchased" it yet, as I have been seriously remiss in remitting the check. I'll do that this weekend, Kate, I promise!

Miss C. shares my distaste for shellfish, though she branches out and applies it to all seafood. Miss C. also has a fun blog, filled with jokes, bad puns, weird links and more.

Jozet, of Halushki fame, fears empty swimming pools. She also writes hilarious posts, and can make bat bites into keyboard-spraying comedy.

SpaceMom worries about her house burning to the ground. She obviously isn't afflicted with stuff the way the OmegaHousehold is, and doesn't secretly dream of torching the mess to get rid of it. SpaceMom is also a Real Live Rocket Scientist.

Jen, though a vegetarian, likes Campbell's chicken broth. She also has a lovely daughter adopted from China, a lovely biobabe born last year, and a teen boy.

Lizard likes bunched up sheets and blankies, so she can get her feet out. She can also bend the tips of her fingers at the last joint. Now, Liz, you know I love you, so I have to share that one can get one's feet out from under the blankies when they're nice & smooth & tucked in at the bottom; I know this because I do it every night when I'm starting a hot flash. I can't do the finger-joint thing, but I've got really loosey-goosey joints so that when I stretch my arms, they bend backwards. This always grossed out the boys at school. Check out the "Grumpy Old Bitches" blog, which she shares with Miss C. and a few other ladies I know. 'Bout time you started blogging a wee tad, Lizard.

AtypicalBrat (or is that ATypicalBrat?) took the ball & ran with it, onto her blog, where she posted about the terrors of table saws, toast, tantalizing itches, and that favorite pastime of us all, complete mental conversations with the person who has upset her...I thought we all did that? Though I must say, usually I do that at 2 a.m. that night, and the conversation is full of zingers, none of which I remember the next morning.

Welcome, one & all! And thanks for delurking!

Zoning out

2007-01-11T20:35:00.000-07:00

I grew up with gardeners; I live with a gardener. Great Grandma won accolades for her flowers in the gardening club in Jacksonville; I can still remember her hydrangea gardens, the shrimp plant, the honeysuckle, the roses. My mom had a different approach to gardening; her gardens have always been much more on the wild side. At one point, someone in our neighborhood called the city on my folks, because OmegaGranny's approach to the lawn was to let the grass grow as much as possible then go to seed, because it was much more natural.

OmegaDad, who at one point made a living as a landscaper, with his own (huge!) greenhouse, has taken each and every one of our living places and turned it into beauty. I still remember the beautiful garden he made in our house in Prescott Valley--we had the world's best collection of plant-napped penstemon which bloomed with great abundance in the heat of summer.

So I'm very familiar with hardiness zone maps. Take a look at this one, developed by the USDA and published in 1990:

In the midst of all the holiday chaos, there was a bit of news that didn't gather much attention. The National Arbor Day Foundation released a new hardiness zone map in mid-December. I found out about this one due to a link from one of my GoodBlogs sites (see the little GoodBlogs widget in the right-hand column). Unfortunately, I don't remember which one, sorry! Anyway, this is the new map:

Here's a kewl animation of the shifting of the zones, if you want to see it, and here's a map of the differences. Note the cool striping effect; this is because all the shifting took place (of course) at the edges of the zones. There were a very few small spots, mostly in the western U.S., that showed colder zonage.

(My husband reports that the USDA published a new map about a year ago, but his commentary is that "It's bogus. It's the same map as 1990, just more detail. Another Bush Administration map.")

This week, there was reportage that the head economist of Chrysler Corporation pooh-poohed global warming. He was, at least, speaking only of the economic effects; I surely hope he wasn't speaking of the scientific validity, because I don't think an economist would be a very good judge of that.

At the same time, NOAA reported that 2006 was the warmest year in 112 years of U.S. recordkeeping.

The Ayles Ice Shelf, one of the six largest ice shelfs in the Canadian Arctic, broke off entirely last August, an event powerful enough to register on seismometers 150 miles away.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research recently produced a climactic model that accurately reproduced the expansion and contraction of ice over the Arctic Ocean for the 20th century (based on recordkeeping). When they pushed it further out, they found that this model showed the summer minimum of Arctic ice vanishing to just about nothing by 2049. (Here's the large size animation.)

A recent article (which I can't find) attributed the higher urgency level about global warming in Europe versus the United States to the fact that most of Europe shares a common climate--flooding in, say, Germany, is likely to affect Poland and Austria as well--whereas the U.S. is so large that it encompasses many different climate regions--so disastrously warm weather in one area may be balanced out by equally disastrous cold weather in another. So, any changes that are occurring occur to multiple nations in Europe, whereas there's no consensus in the U.S.

It could always be a natural cycle. But given the data on human-caused changes to the atmosphere, would it not be likely that, if it is a natural cycle, we are enhancing/increasing it?

Anyway. As I eagerly await the first Big Snow of the year (supposedly. But we do have a Real Live Snow and Blowing Snow Advisory for 12 p.m. tonight to 12 p.m. tomorrow, woohoo!), it's the little things that get me. Like that change in hardiness zones.

Technorati: Global warming, climate change, hardiness zones

Six

2007-01-10T19:29:00.000-07:00

I have been tagged by the lovely and warm-hearted Julie to talk about six weird things about me.

1. I fold my underwear after it's laundered. I do not fold OmegaDad's.

2. Like the gentle Kaliroz (also tagged), I cannot sleep in a bed with bunched up sheets and blankets. So, every night, before I get into bed...I make the bed. That's because I am too lazy and have too little time in the mornings to make it...and don't think about it. But when it comes time to lie down in bed, it just drives me utterly bonkers to have the sheets and blankets and quilts all scrunched up. I want it smooth and sleek, with the bloody sheets tucked in at the bottom (can you tell this is An Issue at the Omega House?).

3. When I was about 13, I took to sucking the inside of my elbow. I discovered that if I did it long enough, it got really kewl looking, with lots of little bitty pinpoint red spots. Much, much later, I learned that I was giving myself hickies.

4. For many years, I had to read the last page of any book before I bought it.

5. I can't eat shellfish. I am not allergic, I just cannot stand the texture and the sound they make when you're eating them. Squeak...squeak...squeak. Bleah.

6. For a few years when I was a child, I thought I had a twin sister who lived up in the attic. My parents would go up there to visit her at night time. (It was much better than the period of time that I thought there were ghosts in the attic, especially because the trapdoor to the attic was right above my bed.)

Now, since it's National Delurking Week, anyone who reads this is invited to post one weird thing about themselves as a comment. And/or consider themselves tagged.

Technorati: Six weird things

Sisters

2007-01-09T18:41:00.000-07:00

When OmegaDotter was freshly home, she contracted pneumonia and got tossed in the hospital for three days. While we were there, a candy-striper came by and offered her a selection of teddy bears to choose from. We chose the biggest, squishiest teddy bear, one that was almost as big as she was. When all was well with the dotter, we happily returned home, bear in hands.

Bear was named "Big Bear", which morphed into "BB", which changed to "Bubby". Bubby is a well-loved companion; he has matted hair here and there, and has journeyed on vacations with us.

Recently, Bubby has been christened something else.

Bubby is now "Sister".

Sister has to be dressed in the morning, in one of the dotter's shirts.

Sister has to sit at her own little table, with lots of dinner accoutrements, when we eat dinner.

Sister has to be taken to school in the car (though Sister, luckily enough, goes to a different school, and mom "drops her off" after dropping OmegaDotter off at preschool, and "picks her up" before picking up OmegaDotter in the evenings.

The dotter and Sis go everywhere. When OD wants to help with something, Sis has to be carefully placed somewhere to watch. When mom plays Candyland with OD, Sis gets to play, too.

Sis and OD play at going to bed and being woken up.

It took quite a bit to persuade the dotter that Sis didn't go in the bathtub with her, but had a special way to take a bath, in the washing machine.

When I ask the dotter a question, Sis usually has to be included.

It's all very charming.

The dotter called me a "numbskull" this evening. It was well-deserved: I was a Bad Mommy. Today was the first day of ballet after the winter break. Today was also the day I had to upload files to our financial system. Today's file had to include a bunch of missed transactions. Every time I ran the program, I found one last, little thing that needed to be fixed. Next thing I knew, it was 5:50 p.m. Dotter's ballet class starts at...sigh...6:00. It takes me ten minutes to get to Dotter's preschool. It takes her ten minutes to dress up for ballet. It takes us ten minutes to get to ballet.

*Poof* went ballet tonight. Mommy is wracked with guilt. The dotter, amazingly enough, aside from calling me a "numbskull", is in high spirits.

Technorati: Pretend Friends

HR Puff...and stuff...and stuff...and stuff...

2007-01-07T12:56:00.000-07:00

We have too much stuff.

It migrates through the house.

It congregates on the kitchen counter, the dining table, all over my office, the dotter's bedroom.

It provides an excellent hiding place for growing dustbunnies.

It provides endless entertainment for the monster kitten.

(We are still finding Christmas ornaments. When MK starts batting something around the kitchen we discover it's one of the ornaments. Having had one of MK's accidental discoveries explode when he whapped it into a door, leaving billyuns and billyuns of teeny tiny glittery bits of glass in the carpet, I don't want any more. Please.)

My darling OmegaDad has a sad tendency to help accumulate more stuff. He likes to bring the dotter little cheap-o gifties from the gift shops when he's out in the field. As a result, we have more stuff.

The dotter brings home immense loads of artwork from preschool. As a result, we have more stuff.

I am so sick of stuff.

I have this burning (har) desire to toss a Molotov Cocktail into the front door as I leave for work one morning. Then, when the firemen called, I could say with horrified surprise: "OH, NO!" Then come back to a nice, clean, charred shell of a log home and contemplate...

NO MORE STUFF.

Ahhhh.

Then the insurance company (having magically missed the evidence of the Molotov Cocktail) would put us up in a swanky rental townhome while contractors swarmed like bees through the husk, redoing all the insides.

And we would return to all-new kitchen cabinets, appliances, closets (oh, Kozmik All, what I wouldn't give for closets!!!), and...

NO MORE STUFF.

The sad reality, though, is that as soon as the lovely newly refurbished innards were available to us, we would...collect more stuff. Sigh.

An intervention is in order.

Technorati: Clutter

Now that I've calmed down...

2007-01-06T19:37:00.000-07:00

...I'm still peeved with Paula Zahn and her crew.

The China adoption segment was embedded in a series about racial/discrimination issues in the U.S. It started out with a lady who has written about weight discrimination, and seemed like it was originally planned to be a discussion about the new rules and how they are discriminatory.

Well. Hmm. Yeah, they are.

But y'know what? Most international adoption regulations are discriminatory in one way or another. Hell, most domestic adoption regulations are somewhat discriminatory, too. They must be; if you were handing out children to replacement parents, don't you think you'd be a wee tad discriminatory about whom you handed those kids to? If I were relinquishing a child to another set of parents, you can believe that I would want to be sure those people had been vetted to within an inch of their lives.

But, dayum. Zahn et al. missed an excellent opportunity to actually discuss something that few people outside the Asian/Pacific Islander population actually think about: discrimination against APIs and the myth of the model minority.

OmegaDotter is a pretty smart kiddo. But I don't want people to insist to me that she should be an obvious candidate for violin-playing or the math club, just because she's Asian. I want people to judge her for who she is, and what her interests and talents are.

OmegaDotter is a pretty good-looking kiddo. But I don't want males to look at her (when she's adult) and think "exotic and submissive" because those are the pervasive myths about Asian females. I want men to look at her and think she's attractive because her eyes sparkle and her face is so expressive and because she's intelligent and interesting.

Did you know there were states where people of Chinese descent were not allowed to own property until the end of the 1950s? There are people still angry that Japan has "destroyed" the U.S. automobile industry; any person of API descent is "fair game" to them.

Gook. Jap. Chink. "Ching chong Chinaman, sitting on a fence". People pulling their eyelids back. People asking APIs born and raised in the U.S. "Where do you really come from?" People telling APIs to "go back where you came from!" Offensively stereotyping T-shirts from Ambercrombie & Fitch. Rosie O'Donnell doing "Ching chong" gibberish on national TV in an attempt to be funny.

Zahn & Co. could have had an intelligent discussion about some of these issues--and one of the panelists actually tried to talk about the "hard-working" Asian stereotype as the result of culture, rather than being a racial characteristic. But, no, it was much more fun and easy to talk about how people who want to adopt from China are looking for a beautiful child who will grow up to be a doctor. Instead of discussing actual racial issues, they went with uninformed blather. Bah.

Technorati: Paula Zahn, Chinese adoption, "Jane, you ignorant slut!"

Jaw dropped...

2007-01-05T21:44:00.000-07:00

The OmegaFamily has been happily TV-free for eight years now.

Well, I should qualify that. We have a TV, and we watch plenty of videos. But, due to the fact that our pile of logs is surrounded by pine trees and there are a few hills in the way, any TV reception we get is mostly snow. When we moved in, cable TV was on our list, but pretty far down. We kept meaning to get it...

And here we are, eight years later, with no TV reception.

When people talk about Lost, or about Grey's Anatomy, or the (new!) Battlestar Gallactica, I yearn to have TV reception so that I can stand around the water cooler (or the blogosphere) and chit-chat with the best of them.

But then again, I come across something like this, and decide I'm better off without it. You have to search on the phrase "So how would you feel if someone told you you couldn't adopt a baby because you're not thin enough, not rich enough, nor attractive enough?" and start reading to get the full effect.

Those in the Chinese adoption community already know what I'm talking about: Paula Zahn's segment on the new Chinese adoption rules on "Paula Zahn Now", which aired tonight.

I am so glad that I didn't have to watch this piece of idiocy masquerading as thoughtful investigation of issues.

It started out okay, then degenerated into the following:

People adopt from China because they want "smart" babies
People adopt from China because they want "porcelain dolls"
People adopt from China because they're racist
Why aren't people adopting Muslim kids? They won't because they think the kid will grow up to be violent. (Yes. Really. Someone said this. I suspect it was meant to be sardonic. Perhaps.)
The tired old, "There are so many baaayyybeeees here in the U.S."
Only celebrities adopt from Africa, and Angelina Jolie is someone to be emulated ("The Queen of Africa, Angelina Jolie"--probably also meant to be sardonic. Perhaps.)

I was cross-eyed trying to read that transcript.

Then I just got cross.

Look, Paula, do us all a favor. If you're going to talk Chinese adoption, maybe (just maybe) you should ask, oh, folks who are involved in Chinese adoption? Like perhaps some Chinese adoption agencies? Or parents of adopted Chinese children? As someone who has never watched your show, I can assure you I will never now watch your show, because it's obvious you (or your program manager) don't do your homework on the topics being discussed.

If you (generic "you") want to know why people choose to adopt from China, may I recommend Johnny's excellent "blog-trail", "Why China" as a place to start?

Technorati: Paula Zahn, Chinese adoption, "Jane, you ignorant slut!"

Boiled eyeballs

2007-01-04T14:04:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, I thought rather seriously about getting a degree in international relations. Then, I figured, I could get hired by the CIA or the State Department, and have a grand old time traveling the world, seeing vibrant other cultures, and being on the outskirts of the movers and shakers. A glamorous life called!

But there was this thing I had heard about the Middle East.

That they considered boiled sheep's eyeballs a delicacy. And that if you were invited to partake of them, it was considered a huge compliment, and you must ingest said boiled sheep's eyeballs.

Ahem.

Ewww.

My grand plan for choosing a career path at the time depended upon me passing pre-Calculus without flailing about. Three choices: graphic design, international relations, computers. Flunking pre-Calculus would rule out computers; then I'd move on to the other branch of the choice tree.

I passed pre-Calc, then moved on to Calc, and it was decided: the degree would be in computer science.

Bye, bye, boiled sheep's eyeballs.

I have boiled eyeballs right now.

I am on Zithromax and albuterol. The doc at Small Mountain University Health Center muttered about walking pneumonia, decided I don't have it, though I have a horrid cough and low ability to do the puffer-that-measures-your-breathing-ability thing. She decided that the ZPak wouldn't hurt and probably would help.

I actually went in to work today...then, after about two hours of foggily staring at my computer monitors, and barely being able to complete some pretty mindless tasks, I decided "Screw it", got the appointment (as requested by both OmegaDad and OmegaGranny), and then came home. Now I'm staring foggily at the computer monitor at home.

Bed calls me.

(OmegaDotter has said goodbye to the fever, thankfully, and is left only with the cough.)

Technorati: Boiled sheep's eyeballs

Pure contentment

2007-01-02T21:29:00.000-07:00

While in the midst of the marathon attempt at cleaning house ("attempt" because every time I cleaned, someone in the house would drop something, move something, accrete something, and the "cleaning" would be, once again, messed up), I found a bag.

The bag contained books from OmegaBro & family, leftover from when their kids were toddlers/preschoolers. I rummaged through the bag, realized what a trove it was, went through the books, and placed most of them on OmegaDotter's bookshelf.

One, however, I kept aside.

Titled "Little Star", it's the tale of a young Indian girl, Little Star, who (whaddasurprise) loves horses. She is given a beaded necklace by her grandmother, a necklace that will grant her one wish. She encounters numerous situations where she wants to use her wish, but finally uses it to help save a mare in foal...and her father gives her the foal, which has a star upon its forehead.

Well, of course I had to pull it out for OmegaDotter. Much more to her tastes than, say, "Big Dinosaurs of the World" (from the nephew's collection). (Though she'll like that, too, but not half as much.)

I snuck it beneath her brand new "Raggedy Ann" book by our bedside.

When bedtime came about, OmegaDotter went to get "Raggedy Ann"...and found "Little Star" just beneath it. She took in a breath...she leafed through it...she demanded we read it for her bedtime story.

She snuggled down beside me, handed me the book, and said, "Whose book is this?"

I told her the story of the bag of books, and said, "It's yours, lovey."

"Mine...?!" she breathed.

"Yours."

"You saved it for me?"

"Of course, lovey."

She had such a smile of shining, trusting joy on her face. It's hard to describe, but it was the essence of "you saved this special book just for me, and it's so exciting, and I love you so very much for knowing I would like it." She kept sneaking little sparkling sideways looks at me with that special smile of joy while I read the story. Then, when she snuggled down in her little bed besides ours, she still had that smile on her face.

Man. That was just...well, if I could bottle that special moment up, I would, so I could take it out again on cold, grey, drizzly days, just to feel all warm and wiggly inside again. One of the shining moments of motherhood, that's for sure.

Technorati: Motherhood

Pottery, willow, leather

2007-01-01T13:24:00.000-07:00

The end of 1997 was going well. After a year's worth of attempting to find a job worth having in Prescott, and working as a temp at Small County Justice Court, entering traffic ticket information into the computer system, I finally broke down, contacted a technical contracting firm, and immediately got a job down in Phoenix.

This led to some interesting logistics: OmegaDad was going one way every Monday morning until Friday afternoon, and I was driving the other way. I spent the weeks down in Sun City with my grandmother; he spent his weeks out in the field. We joined together on the weekends.

The money was munificent. When mid-November rolled around, we eyeballed our bank account and realized we could take A Vacation! Woot!

We decided we'd head out to California to see my horde of fun relatives at Lake Tahoe for New Year.

As we discussed it, a light bulb went off in my head. Just like all those cartoon strips. Really!

Or more like those Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movies, the ones where one or the other says, out of the blue, "I know! Let's put on a show!"

In this case, the lightbulb moment was, "Hey! OmegaDad! Let's get married while we're there!"

We had originally planned to get married five months after I moved in with him, in May 1995. But two months before the wedding, spurred by a call from my eldest brother (do not ask me how it happened!), I blurted out on the phone, "We're cancelling the wedding." Something the bro had said somehow keyed in to all the angst I was feeling about the whole idea then, and my fears surged to the fore, and boom the wedding was cancelled, just like that.

We're talking I had the wedding gown made already, we had rented chairs and tents and stuff, and were on the verge of getting invitations sent out.

Um.

What can I say? I took marriage very seriously, and was still freaked out that I was living with someone, let alone planning a wedding. And, being an immature twit, I was still resentful of being stuck in (boooring!) Lubbock, TX, instead of living in (beee-yoo-tiful) San Francisco. Mostly, though, it was Fear, with a capital F, of committing myself to this weird, scrawny Okie who had stolen my heart.

Somehow or other, OmegaDad was amazingly calm and understanding about the whole affair.

Anyway, fast forward those two years...and there I was with this lightbulb going off in my brain:

"I know! Let's put on a wedding!"

OmegaDad, no dullard, seized the moment and said, "You betcha!", or words to that effect.

I arranged everything on the internet: the wedding chapel, the plane tickets, the officiant, the flowers, the cake. By the end of the week, we had called all & sundry and informed them.

Unfortunately, since we realized that it would be difficult for folks to get plane tickets and lodging and suchlike, we couched our phone calls in a "If you can't make it, we'll understand" manner. This translated to a bunch of folks as "We don't want you there." I am forever horrified by this miscommunication and saddened that, as a result, many people who we would have been delighted to have join us didn't come.

But. In the end, our very small wedding went off without a hitch (except for my maid of honor not being able to make it, and never contacting me again). We flew out to Reno, drove to South Lake Tahoe, met up with aunt and uncle and myriad cousins, got dressed up, signed the papers, had a lovely little reception in a nice restaurant at the lakefront, and greeted the first night of 1998 as Mr. and Mrs. OmegaDad.

Happy anniversary, OmegaDad! It's been an amazing nine years!

Technorati: Anniversary

Happy New Year!...?

2006-12-31T17:38:00.000-07:00

OmegaMom has been wallowing in not having to do anything at all. Small Mountain University is officially "closed" between Christmas and New Year's, though there are lots of folks who just ignore the fact, because either you take it off without pay or use up vacation days.

This year, I took the vacation days. Did I do anything useful? No. I vegged out. My brain rotted. I ate bon-bons. I read science fiction. I laundered immense amounts of clothes. I cleaned house, only to have it trashed within 24 hours. I thought about blogging--honest, I did. But the brain was stuck in neutral.

We had days' worth of alluring storm clouds, which left us with hardly any snow to speak of--the storm decided to dump three feet in northern New Mexico and Colorado instead. Bah. The dotter and I went out and made an itty-bitty snowman yesterday, out of what snow we had.

The OmegaFamily is starting the New Year in its normal way: with a sick dotter and a sick mother and a sick grandmother. Dotter is running a 105F fever when the ibuprofen wears off, OmegaMom has a scratchy throat, OmegaGranny was diagnosed this week with mild (damn well better be!) pneumonia. Fun, fun, fun.

The end result is that, rather than requesting a dinner out for my anniversary tomorrow, I am about to beg OmegaDad for a day of him taking care of both his ladies.

So, anyways, dear readers (those of you who are left after a practically blogless week or those who are returning from vacations), here are my wishes for all of us to have a happy, healthy 2007, and I leave you with a collage of 2006:

Snippets

2006-12-27T08:54:00.000-07:00

OmegaGranny has posted "Some Assembly Required", with lots of pics. Be gentle--I look like a fashion disaster, but, boy, I sure was comfy!

PZ Myers loved his father. A poignant post, with many comments filled with equally loving memories of parents or grandparents. (Plus a disemvoweled troll or two, but that's par for the course.)

Twice the Rice notes that Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, an adoptee and a possible candidate for president, has suddenly been presented with information on where he was born. Many adult adoptees are adamant that searching for birthparents is something that should be left to them, and them alone--but in this case, I'm sure some "helpful" member of the media will be haring off after that clue and doing the search for him.

When I peruse the "science fiction" section at our local bookstores (chain stores, all, alas), the majority of the books are fantasy or books related to TV or movie series. OmegaGranny has a knack, however, for finding new SF. When done with her books, she forwards them to me. Right now, I am deep in Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "Retrieval Artist" series, SF police procedurals with a twist. In this world, humans and aliens live together in a delicate dance guaranteed by a variety of treaties that allow aliens to charge, convict, and punish humans for crimes that seem--to humans--to be incredibly arcane or ridiculous. Miles Flint, a former police officer, has become a Retrieval Artist--someone who finds people who "disappeared" to avoid punishment for one of these alien-mandated "crimes". He doesn't find them to drag them to execution--that's the job of "Trackers"; he finds them at the behest of friends or relatives. Great fun and interesting stories.

RIP, Gerald Ford. The Watergate scandal was my first foray into real political awareness; I can still remember my dad watching the Watergate Hearings obsessively. I can also remember Chevy Chase playing the bumbling, tumbling President Ford as a caricature. Jerry Ford put a close to the Watergate mess by pardoning Nixon, and lost any chance at re-election as a result.

The pinks and the primaries

2006-12-26T08:21:00.000-07:00

One of the gifts that OmegaDotter received was a box full of fluffy, feminine, second-hand dance recital costumes, carefully garnered from eBay. OmegaMom, on a quest, popped into her email on a regular basis, checking for the "Your watched item is closing soon!" messages from the mystic computer, then eyeballing the clock and scheduling a time to sit down, log in, and swoop in for the kill at the last possible minute, scoring spangled tutus and flippy skirts for much less than--as I now know--the cost of those costumes when new. (The dance studio requested the deposit for the costume for the May dance recital shortly before Christmas...OmegaMom choked when she saw the price, then wrote a check.)

OmegaDotter happily seized on the white, flowing recital costume and pronounced it a bride's dress, then insisted on overlaying it with the flippy silver lamé skirt edged with black. She opened presents in this costume, she played with her beloved horsies in the new barn and corral in this costume, and, later on, kept demanding a promise that she could sleep in this costume.

She was in Dress-Up Heaven.

Today, while cruising BlogPulse's top news stories, I came across a highly linked story titled "What's Wrong With Cinderalla?", in which a feminist mom with a three-year-old daughter confronts, and researches, the all-encompassing "Princess" trend--the Disney packaging of all the big heroines into one group, the Club Libby Lu phenomenon ("It's a Girl Thing!"), the Barbie princess brigade--and tries to figure out what it all means.

Is it an unconscious reaction by women raised in the 60s, 70s, and 80s against the dour feminism of the time? Are girls today becoming more conditioned to the feminine, passive female archetype? Is this a good thing, a bad thing, or simply natural? And--as many moms have asked--what the hell is it with the pink girl's aisle of toys and the primary boys' toys?

As a feminist, perhaps I should be ashamed of myself for getting the dotter that box of fluff. Maybe I am setting her up for a lifetime of passivity, an all-encompassing, subconscious belief that girls should be fluffy and flirty and beautiful and submissive, seeking the approval of Prince Charming, rather than being assertive, intelligent, and self-fulfilled.

On the other hand...

Well, hell, girls like to play dress-up. My mom did it. I did it. All my nieces and my cousins' little girls have done it. A few feather boas, some glitter and spangles aren't going to swallow my dotter into the maw of submissive femininity forever.

What I don't like about the Disney, Barbie, and LibbyLu paraphernalia is that it's so...so...set in stone. If you're going to play Cinderella, Disney proclaims, you have to dress this way, and no other; play this way, and no other.

Um, hell no. Sorry, guys. My princess will dress up in a mish-mosh of unmatched glamor, thankyewverramuch. See, real dress-up requires creativity and imagination, not prescriptiveness and scripted play. OmegaDotter spent a half-hour Christmas morning demanding I announce yet another dancer or ice skater (with a preference for the name "Sasha", after numerous viewings of YouTube clips of Sasha Cohen's 2002 Olympics long program). Then she'd sashay out from behind the Christmas tree, do a half-minute dance (usually featuring the dancer falling down at least once, just like in Cohen's program), and retreat behind the tree, motioning me to announce her yet again.

The princess paradigm may, indeed, condemn some girls to a particular worldview. But in this house, the frills combine with neighing, the fluff with faux karate kicks from Mulan, and the outside propaganda with some pretty strong parental counterpropaganda. In the end, the princess will be who she wants to be, taking some from both sides. Here's hoping there's a whole horde of girls who have that balance as they grow up.

Technorati: Cinderella, dress-up

Christmas notes

2006-12-25T10:08:00.000-07:00

"Some assembly required."

Those are the most fearsome words that a parent can hear, sending a frisson of fear down the spine. OmegaGranny is going to have a lovely pictorial of "some assembly required".

The Barbie Jammin' Jeep ("some assembly required") has a radio. The radio, when turned on, was tuned to NPR. That is a Christmas miracle!

Children of a "certain age" will not wait until mom and dad really want to wake up to dash out into the living room to see what Santa brought. Santa brought OmegaDotter a wooden Breyer barn ("some assembly required").

It did not bring the same squeal that the BJJ did, but Spirit is now climbing on the roof of the barn, accompanied by a paint and many neighs, plus the sounds of Morning Edition.

Santa brought me a bunch of 60-minute massages. Santa was very good! (NO assembly required, woohoo!)

Merry Christmas to all.

2006-12-24T17:37:00.000-07:00

From the Omega Family.

OmegaDotter Overdrive

2006-12-23T19:13:00.000-07:00

Ice skating is on break until the week of January 9.

Ballet is on break until the week of January 9.

We've had snow & icky weather, so the kids are stuck inside at preschool.

Christmas is coming.

All of this adds up to an OmegaDotter on overdrive, with none of her usual outlets for her need to bounce, whack, jump, feel her body moving.

She "helped" me with the Christmas cards this morning, until I chased her off, because she had revved up to the point where her "help" was no help at all.

She talked non-stop all morning.

She bounced off the wall in the shower.

We drove down the hill to haul OmegaGranny back, and--THANK the Kozmik All--she fell asleep on the way there. (She has reached a point where the daytime nap is phasing out.)

On the way back, she chattered. She talked. She sang. She counted to 110 (with only a tiny bit of help). She orchestrated a rhyming game. She played "say a sound, then say a word that starts with that sound". She sang some more. She chattered.

Finally I persuaded her to be quiet, because "Mommy's ears and Grandma J's ears need a break."

I can't describe it quite well enough, but it's obvious she's on overdrive. Luckily, it's a good overdrive. Miss Louise, her occupational therapist, noticed on Thursday. It's hard not to notice. It's like she's on speed.

It wears me to the bone. It makes me realize just how much she needs those outlets, and how much the OT has helped.

Kitten + Christmas Tree = Harried Humans

2006-12-21T17:04:00.000-07:00

We finally put up our Christmas tree yesterday evening.

Our kitten immediately discovered the tree and its associated low-hanging danglies. Hey, we have a five-year-old in the house. This means we have lots of low-hanging danglies, all clustered together.

All within very tempting reach of our monstrous, lovable kitten.

So the poor kitten is banished to the bedroom during the daytime and when everyone's asleep, and is only allowed out while people are out and about the living room.

What we need is a SuperSoaker. Or CatScram. Or a helluva lot more patience.

As soon as I arrived home & released the problem child from the bedroom, he made a beeline for the tree. He doesn't climb it--thank heavens for small favors--but those ornaments at the bottom are like fresh wildebeest to a starving lion.

Anyway, here are the fruits of our efforts. Note the clumping of ornaments within easy reach of OmegaDotter.

The Christmas spirit is just barely beginning to stir in OmegaMom's cold, stony heart. The local law enforcement toy drive, lacking its normal pack-'em-up auditorium space, talked with the director of our department, who offered our cavernous hallways as an alternative. So the past few days, we have been inundated in festive music, happy volunteers, and large heaps and mounds of donated Christmas toys. While there's a certain amount of discomfort associated with this--making your way through cops and kids to get to the ladies' room, for instance--it just makes me feel all warm-n-fuzzy.

Most of the gifts are either purchased or delivered or on their way. One hopes they aren't "on their way" routed through Denver. When we arrived home from tree shopping last night, some quick maneuvers on my part and OmegaDad's part distracted the dotter from the huge box standing by our front door which had "Barbie Jammin' Jeep", with pictures, displayed all over it. OmegaDad managed to sneak said large (did I mention it's humongous?) box into the garage after the dotter went to bed.

The last picture, while unflattering to me (I think I'm sticking a grim jaw out while deciding where to place an ornament, the comfy-but-unfashionable turtleneck is actually one of OmegaDad's, so is very large on me, and that butt...sigh), shows--very vividly--the bottom-heaviness of the decor.

So very, very tempting to a small cat...

Technorati: Christmas tree

I drank the Kool-Aid long ago

2006-12-19T20:50:00.000-07:00

I ran across this article in The Washington Post on This Woman's Work and The Daily Bastardette. Marly (Bastardette) kindly linked to the comments to the original article.

The gist: titled "My Father Was An Anonymous Sperm Donor", the article is written by a young lady who is at Gaulledet University. She describes--rather clearly, in my opinion--what it was like for her growing up with absolutely no connection to her father. No stories. No memories. No family history. Nothing. The commentary...well, it runs the gamut, from folks saying, "Wow! Great article, Katrina!" to professionals (!!) saying, "My goodness, I'd never thought of that!" to other sperm donor offspring saying, "I certainly never felt like that!" (with the implication--or outright accusation--that Katrina was WRONG for feeling the way she felt) to people using her story to condemn lesbian and gay marriage, unmarried women having children, abortion, liberals, conservatives, and The Decline And Fall Of The Western World.

Read 'em, then come back.

It's interesting to see the point of view of The Man On The Street. I read the article and said to myself, "Hunh. Well-written, somewhat affecting. Nice to see another donor offspring writing this up."

But it seems that the whole concept of donor offspring--and adoptees--having (gasp!) feelings for themselves about the way they came into the world and/or came into their families is...somewhat upsetting to the outside world.

Kozmik All forbid that an adoptee should want to find his or her biological family. Why, that automatically means that the adoptee is: bitter, ungrateful, raised by bad parents, unloving, unloved, angry, rejecting his or her "real" family, immature, psychologically damaged in some way, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I read the commentary from the "outside world" and am flummoxed.

This child we were blessed to be able to raise is a full and complete human being on her own. She didn't spring, fully formed, from Zeus's forehead. We didn't find her in a cabbage patch. She wasn't delivered by the stork.

She has lots of my mannerisms. She has lots of OmegaDad's mannerisms. But there's yet another part of her that is always endlessly new and unfamiliar, which comes from her genetic makeup.

It will not be a commentary on my parenting or OmegaDad's parenting if she decides, at a later age, that she wants to try to find her biological parents. It won't mean she hates us. It won't mean she's immature or bitter or damaged or rejecting. To be fair, I have to say it could mean those things. But I've read enough commentary from adult adoptees and adult donor offspring to know that there's a very natural and very deep urge for people to want to know where they come from, what their roots are.

I grew up knowing where the notch in the back of my head came from--my dad had it, my brothers both had it, some cousins on that side of the family have it, too. I know I look almost exactly like my Aunt. I know that my mother's friends all said I looked like her, while my father's friends all said I looked like him. I know that the practical, pragmatic part of my personality echoes many women on my mother's side. I know that depression and diabetes run in my father's family. I know that uterine cancer runs on my mother's side. These are all pieces of my background that I grew up knowing...it's all part of my "place" in the world.

Love is not tied to biology--most people find someone (or multiple someones) to love in their lives who are not tied to them in any way biologically. You can love a child wildly and deeply even though you have no "blood ties".

But I had the luxury of knowing that "place" in the world, that set of physical, emotional, biological traits that are so comfortable they fit like an old shoe. Why should having my dotter want to find someone who fills in some of those gaps make me--or others--feel that she doesn't love me? That the natural urge to fill in some missing pieces means that she's bitter or angry?

I dunno. Like I say in the title, I drank the Kool-Aid long ago. None of this is new to me, none of it is shocking. But apparently it is to people who see adoption and donor conception from the outside looking in and are introduced to these concepts for the first time.

Technorati: Adoption issues

Feels like the first time

2006-12-18T20:53:00.000-07:00

Ah, snow. Yay! We had our first halfway decent snow today (4 inches at our house, with more forecast); OmegaDad, who leaves work at 4, got home with the dotter long before I did. So, as I slowly drove up the hill, what should my wondering eyes should appear, but:

A happy girl on her "trainer" cross-country skis, getting her first taste of skiing.

OmegaDad had filled up his (chip-less) digicam with just enough pics for us to get a look at some Good Form, and OmegaDotter raising victorious ski poles in glee.

Alas, OmegaMom (that would be me) was in no mood to slap on the skis and join in the fun; while leaving the office, I had tromped merrily down the sidewalk to the parking lot only to have one foot slip out from under me in just the right way to land right smack dab on my left knee-cap. So I have spent the past few hours with an ice pack draped over the knee, contemplating my once-per-year snow/ice accident with grim amusement and fatalistic resignation.

We are supposedly due for another 4 to 8 inches. Hah. I'll believe it when we wake up tomorrow morning with all that snow. So far, our snow season has been a dud; people in Seattle, fer gosh' sake, have gotten our normal amount of snow. By now, we should have had up to 24 inches of snow. We've had 3.5 inches of snow since September 1.

For those who are missing the snow the same way I am, here's your very own snowflake maker.

Who co-opted whom?

2006-12-17T09:53:00.000-07:00

Lately, OmegaDotter has been serenading me in the car as we whiz around from place to place. On the way down the hill to see the Nutcracker with OmegaGranny, she favored me with an array of Christmas carols (Jingle Bells, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Joy to the World, Rudolph the Rez-Nosed Reindeer--yes, he's "rez-nosed", not "red-nosed"), then the old standbys (Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, I'm Looking at a Little Bumblebee, the Alphabet Song), and then segued into her latest: I may never MARCH with the infantry RIDE with the cavalry SHOOT with the artillery I may never FLY over the enemy But I'm in the Lord's ar-MEEE! Ahem. When I was growing up, I learned this song as: Great green gobs of Greasy, grimy gopher guts! Mutilated monkey meat! Little dirty birdie's feet! Great green gobs of Greasy, grimy gopher guts! Gee, ma, I want some more! Setting aside the insidious earworm-ishness of the song being applied to religious propaganda, my question is: Who co-opted whom? Was the "Lord's Army" first? Or "Greasy, grimy gopher guts"? These are the questions that occupy my mind while driving down the highway. The Nutcracker was splendid. We were surrounded by fifty kazillion little girls in gorgeous holiday dresses. Most of them red in one way or another. The dancing was beautiful, the music fun. OmegaDotter lasted through the entire performance, though her commentary at the end was, "It was too long!" There were scary parts. Bangs and booms as Herr Drosselmeyer played his magic tricks. A phalanx of creepy red rats' eyes beamed onto the walls via magical theatre lighting. The sword fight with the rat king (though this choreography had Clara doing in the rat king with a giant mousetrap, hurrah for feminism!). OmegaDotter hid her head in my shoulder during these events, and continues to comment on the scary rats' eyes today. Today is Great Grandma's 103rd birthday party. She's still going strong, though her short-term memory is now dribbling away, and we find ourselves responding to the same questions and comments many times during a visit. But she's still sharp as a tack otherwise, plays Scrabble with OmegaGranny, dresses up for Halloween (and wins prizes for creativity!), and looks like we might actually be able to celebrate her 104th next year, after all.

How can something be so glorious and so sad at once?

2006-12-16T10:06:00.000-07:00

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

In New York City, a building that has been a street art landscape for two decades is going to be converted to million-dollar condos. (New York Times; I think it requires a login.)

The developer, as a tribute, invited street artists to come do their artwork inside the building--with the proviso that the artwork would be covered over, cleaned off, torn out, painted, etc. once the construction workers moved in and development of the condos started.

This weekend is the grand event. The building, at 11 Spring Street, is open for public viewing of the artwork for three days (it started Friday, and goes through Sunday).

Sic transit gloria artifex.

Technorati: 11 Spring Street

Being different - schools

2006-12-15T17:07:00.000-07:00

The OmegaFamily is--in a slacker kind of way--investigating schools for kindergarten next year. (OMG. How on earth did my child become old enough for me to be writing these words??)

There's the issue of what the school atmosphere is like. Do they make learning fun, or is it going to be a case where school extinguishes the desire to learn? This is one of OmegaDad's bugbears; one of his favorite phrases is "children are born knowing everything; we teach it out of them." He doesn't mean it in a sardonic way (as in, "those darned kids think they know everything!"), but means that children are born with that innate desire to learn.

He tells tales of his childhood that indicate that, except for a very few teachers, the majority of his time spent in public school was mainly...marking time. He was...different. In high school he spent a year wearing a serape and sombrero to school every day, to make a statement. He remembers his high school English teacher to this day, because she nourished his love of poetry and writing and literature, so much so that he entered college determined to get a major in American literature.

(Then he discovered that college lit majors are litarary snobs. He dropped out. When he returned to college many years later, he got himself an ag degree, then a master's in soil science.)

I was sent to private schools. I don't know whether that made much of a difference, but we did have some outstanding teachers who didn't fit the "teacher mold". Even so, I found myself marching to a different drummer; in history classes, I wrote mini-romance novels, and in English I experimented a lot.

I was "different"--different parents (Bohemians, quasi-hippies), not stylish, interested in learning and playing with words, and intelligent. The years of seventh grade through junior in high school weren't really fun; I didn't fit in, I didn't have many friends, I wasn't popular.

I learned, looking back, somewhat "in spite of" being taught.

So that's one consideration.

The other consideration, of course, is the diversity factor.

The problem is that the two don't necessarily mesh. The school that sounds most interesting is one of the less diverse schools; the public school that we'd be assigned to is one of the most diverse, but has the worst academic reputation.

What to do, what to do...

(There's also the newly added factor that OmegaDotter's very most favorite teacher in the whole wide world, who is leaving next Friday to start student teaching, will be student teaching kindergarten at--the public school she'd be assigned to.)

In an interesting convergence, schools and teaching have been subjects on one of the boards where I hang out; they have also come up in some other areas (notably, Clicked, a kind of round-up of what's popping up in the blogosphere, which I read religiously).

There's the story of the mother who found out, from one of her older sons (who discovered it by accident), that her youngest, in kindergarten, was being forced to sit at a desk all alone, right next to the teacher, for a month. She hadn't been informed. Her youngest thought it was because he was "bad". His schoolmates thought so, too, and were ostracizing him at recess and lunch. An urgent conference with the vice principal and the teacher in question revealed that the teacher had done it because it "helped him focus".

There's Paul Graham's essay, "Why nerds are unpopular", which rings a big bell with me. One of the points he makes is that kids make choices about what's important to them, though they may do it unconsciously. Nerds aren't interested enough in being popular to put in the work that being popular requires. They're more interested in reading, playing with computers, doing experiments, taking apart machines, that kind of stuff. Another of his theses is that school is mostly about keeping kids away from the real world, in comparison to earlier years, when apprenticeships made kids part of the real world.

There's Steve Olsen's "How the public school system crushes souls". His wife spent a year during high school sitting in a bathroom stall during every lunch hour, because she couldn't handle the way she was mocked and made fun of for not having friends to sit with at lunch hour.

There's Josh Shaine talking about "Underachievement from the inside out", where he describes a constant litany of "if you only applied yourself/if you only did your homework/if you only..." to the point where he assumed something was very wrong with him.

There's a blogger who is close to graduating from college (she's waiting on her very most final grades), who cried upon her father's shoulder when returning to college, because she was so afraid she wasn't "intelligent enough" to do it.

OmegaGranny was a nerd. Uncle Grump (her husband) was an uber-nerd, if ever there was one. OmegaBro was a nerd. All of OmegaDotter's teachers tell me how strikingly smart she is...and I worry: is she destined for "nerdship"? Or will she become the girl who hides how smart she is, so that she can be popular?

Stuff

2006-12-13T22:24:00.000-07:00

A quick question--I've noticed on my sitemeter that some folks are trying to leave comments, but when I go check on my comments, nothing new has shown up. If you're having problems leaving comments, could you let me know by emailing me at omegamom_01 at yahoo dot com? Blogger has been having problems lately (like, say, migrating my blog over to the new version, which still isn't happening), and I'm getting grumpy about it. Dawn, over at This Woman's Work, passed me a coupon for her hosting site, and I'm thinking of splurging on a new site...

Maybe it'll help with my blogger's block. I've come across a few things I want to write about, but then I sit down at the computer and look at the blank screen, and nothing comes out.

While I don't respond that often to comments--in fact, I'm horribly bad about it--I really do appreciate them. For instance, it made me feel all warm and fuzzy when I got all the commentary on my "four years" post. I'm just so glad we've discovered this way to capture that smile on the dotter's face, because that's what we see so often, but it's so hard to catch. She is so beautiful to us, and I like to share it.

Aside from that, like I said, blogger's block. Bah.

Some snippets:

A short stroll in a Chinese National Park. Don't click if you've got a problem with heights.

A not-so-safe-for-work chocolate Santa.

Did you catch the Geminids meteor shower? How was it in your area? So far, my peeks haven't produced a single meteor. Bah.

I'm joining the folks who aren't feeling the holiday spirit. You'd think, with an almost-five-year-old in the house, I'd be chock-a-block full of Christmas cheer. Nope. Dunno why, but it's just not happening.

"...Something strange happened..."

2006-12-12T22:50:00.000-07:00

We were driving to the grocery store from ballet class; OmegaDotter had a small scrapbook of photos from one of her grandmothers. It being too dark for her to see it, she declared, "Now. Pretend I'm Miss Bethany, and I'm reading a story."

"Okay! Tell a story!"

"Once upon a time there was a little mouse, who didn't have a hole to live in..."

"Oh, no! Poor mousie!"

"No hole. So she went looking for a hole. She found a mitten. She crawled in and cleaned it up and it was clean and nice and she lived there. Then there was a frog, who didn't have a hole, so he went looking for one. He found the mitten, too, and he went in to live there. But the mousie got angry. "You're mean and bad! You didn't knock on the door or ring the doorbell! You go away!' Then he began to cry--"

"The froggie?" (Mom is confused.)

"No! The mousie. Then..."

Silence.

"FIRE!!!"

(Mom almost yanks the car off the road, then realizes it's still the story.)

"Oh, no! The mitten was on fire! The fire was getting bigger and bigger! But then it went away."

"Whew!"

"Theeeennn...something strange happened..."

"Oh, my! What?"

"A big, bad storm! Mommy, what's a 'storm'?"

"It's a lot of wind and rain and thunder and lightning." (Mommy turns onto the expressway.)

"Oh. Well, the storm blew away! And theeennnn...something strange happened..."

"What?"

"A giant! He tried to catch the mousie and the frog!"

"Oh, no!"

"Yes! But they got away. Theeennnn...something strange happened..."

"Hmmm. What now? Poor mousie and froggie! They're having a very bad day. Can't they go to sleep or something, and stop having horrible things happen?!"

"A truck ran over them and they were squashed flat!"

"Um. Oh, dear."

"Theennnnn...something strange happened..."

"MORE?! They're already squashed flat!"

"Shhh! A fly was flying around their heads, and the frog caught it and ate it, and they weren't squashed flat any more."

The End.

I will survive!

2006-12-10T21:12:00.000-07:00

After watching "Ice Princess" this evening, and eating homemade beef-barley soup, the dotter and OmegaDad are boogy-ing around the living room to Gloria Gaynor, having already done some guy-slings-girl around moves aping the movie.

While my formative years were spent listening to classic rock and soul and folk, I reached the dancing years during the Disco Era.

I have, therefore, a sad, sad fondness for disco.

A cherished memory is when I was working in the Small Mountain University IT department support team...one year, during the slow period after the end of winter semester, someone started blasting "Stayin' Alive" from their computer. A whole slew of late-30s and early-40s IT support staff appalled and astonished our more modern student workers by disco-ing down the hallway.

What can I say? We were tainted at an early age.

"Ice Princess" is a bubble-gum movie, all about a young physics whiz (female, of course) who, to wangle a scholarship to the Harvard physics department, takes to digitizing the local (extremely good) ice skaters and working out the phsyics of ice skating. Then, of course, she discovers an innate and awesome talent for skating, stops wearing her glasses, puts on some makeup, becomes a hottie, and comes in second in the regional competition.

Oh, yeah.

At least she retains her nerdly habit of babbling physics equations when she's nervous, thus turning off the hockey jock and retaining a small modicum of geekiness.

She does, however, give up her Harvard scholarship for her dream of ice skating competitively.

The subtext of the movie is moms who make their kids live their dreams. The protagonist becomes buddies with the daughter of the local ice skating coach, who, though being coached intensely by her mom, doesn't really want to skate. The protagonist is being raised by a die-hard feminist single mom who ridicules ice skaters' slinky costumes as yet another way women let The Man keep them down. In the end, the ice skating coach's daughter rebels, giving up skating, and the uber-feminist college professor sneaks into the regional competition to watch her daughter score.

So, while it's couched in adolescent rebellion, there's a semi-valuable lesson behind the movie. I am all too aware that what I like to do, the dotter may not. So here's my pledge: I will always try to be aware of whether I am pushing something on my dotter that, in reality, I want to do.

If she wants to go to law school, cool beans. If she wants to be an auto mechanic, equally cool beans. Just so long as she's the best lawyer she can be, or the best auto mechanic she can be--and that she enjoys what she's doing.

That's the important thing.

(My Technorati tag add-in is still wonky. Grr.)

Four years

2006-12-08T00:07:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe that it's been four years since we first met OmegaDotter. So much has changed, in her life and in ours.

Nanning, China, 12/8/02. A little 10-1/2 month old girl. Scared, quiet, determined. A 43-year-old woman. Scared, trying not to cry, overjoyed. A 41-year-old man. Fascinated, overjoyed, thrilled...scared.

We've done a lot of growing, all of us. Through teething, learning to walk, learning to talk, tantrums, giggle-fests, quiet night talks, beboppin' in the living room, visiting museums, going to school.

What will the next four years hold for us all? Who knows. It's always an adventure.

Tonight, at dinner, we were talking a teeny-tiny bit about China (Mulan has been featured the past few nights Chez OmegaFamily). She said, "I didn't have a family..." I told her the whiz-bang digest of how we met her. She finally said, "I chose you."

We chose each other, Lovey.

Then:

Now:

Happy "Metcha" Day, OmegaDotter.

Last year's "Metcha" Day post.

Technorati: Adoption

A puppet, a princess, a pawn

2006-12-07T18:43:00.000-07:00

At OmegaDotter's school, Miss Melody introduced the kids to Ima Hillbilly, her handmade puppet used to read stories to the children and draw them into the stories.

Then, Miss Melody had the kids make their own story-telling puppets, using whatever they wanted to decorate them.

This beautiful girl is the result.

Her hair is pink feathers. Her hands and feet are bright yellow felt starbursts. Her body is black fur. Her eyes are pink buttons. And in the midst of the abdominal decor is a fish--no doubt just eaten.

Beautiful Girl's arms wave delightfully when you jiggle her.

I am in love.

I have also broken my Technorati tag plug-in in Live Writer. Aargghh!

Heat death

2006-12-07T09:45:00.000-07:00

We cranked up the wood stove last night, to avoid another frigid night on the home front. Since the air intake for the central heating system is in the living room, and the blower system worked just fine, this produced plenty of nice warmth to circulate through the house.

The furnace dude has come and gone. After twiddling and fiddling, he determined that the pressure regulator on the carbon monixide venting system was on the fritz. He fixed it temporarily and is ordering a new switch. Anyway, now we have nice hot air coming out of the heating vents, woohoo!

For some reason, this makes me think of James Kim. Of course, I've been thinking of him and his family for a week now. Hereabouts we get families that get stuck in the snow on a regular basis--once a year, once every two years. Usually they're found before anyone dies.

But Kim's story has struck me more closely--a father, a mother, a four-year-old daughter, a baby--stuck in the snow, trying to figure out what to do. Except for the baby, that could be us. I first encountered the story in Blogging Baby...then I kept hitting bloggers mentioning the story, some of whom actually knew the Kims. It makes it more personal then.

The question I have is: is the "stay with your car" the best advice? Kim stayed with the car for a week before setting out on foot. Already weakened by cold, lack of food, stress...I don't know.

Technorati: Furnace, heat, wood stoves, James Kim

Baby, it's cold INSIDE

2006-12-06T09:58:00.000-07:00

Grrr. After arranging to be home this morning, no furnace repairman showed up. I called. It turns out that the dude who rescheduled me rescheduled me for tomorrow morning. And told me "Wednesday". Today is Wednesday, isn't it? (I'm losing track of the days.)

The residual heat in the house is seeping out, bit by bit. It was 5F last night. Now the furnace is struggling (mightily) to keep the house at 60F.

I'm grumpy.

And cold.

Technorati: Furnace woes

Spilt milk

2006-12-05T22:22:00.000-07:00

It's one of those days.

Or two days.

Let's see:

The furnace is acting wonky. It heats...sort of. We get almost up to 67F, with the furnace cycling on and off like crazy. We've had this happen before; it was something to do with the doodads that inject the gas into the burners. The furnace folk are supposed to show up tomorrow morning.

The fish in our aquaria are dying. We had fifty kazillion guppies. Now we have twenty-five kazillion guppies, and they're dropping like flies. "Dropping" is the operative word here--most fish, when they die, float up to the top; these fish are sinking to the bottom. We've got some fancy full spectrum fish-water treatment stuff that the folks at the pet store recommended for all sorts of fish diseases (like "hole-in-the-head" disease). Our fire-bellied newt, who we have had for years now, is behaving like he, too, is affected.

Then last night, in the middle of the night, while Mr. OmegaMom was removing dead guppies from one of the fish tanks, OmegaDotter comes crying hysterically out of the bedroom.

It seems that our monster kitten (grrr!) had knocked over the half-filled cup of milk sitting on the bedside table right on top of OmegaDotter's head.

So we had to strip beds and calm a miserable and frantic dotter in the middle of the night. (Well, hell, I'd be hysterical if I were awakened by a torrent of milk splashing all over my head!)

So this morning I had to haul her into the shower with me...after consideration, I had figured that a shower would be quicker (infinitesimally so) than bathing her, then showering myself.

We did, in the midst of all this, get to see the dotter and various adorable kidlets perform Christmas carols at the school pageant last night. Pics to come.

Addendum: While I was putting the dotter to bed, the monster kitten came and laid on my laptop keyboard. This resulted in the monitor being switched to minimum resolution. Easy enough to fix, though a pain. But now I find that if I want to comment on someone's blog, the following keys aren't working: c,v,h, and n. ARGH! They work fine in Live Writer, Notepad, TextPad...

I hate computers. I hate cats. Grrrr.

Technorati: Spilt milk, HITH, furnace problems, bad day

Thinking, doing--theory and practice

2006-12-02T20:58:00.000-07:00

Richard Querin has a post up discussing the balance between "thinking"--the theory side--and "doing"--the practical side, when it comes to university educations. Taking a stand, he comes squarely down in the middle (as do I).

It seems that the view of universities as commercial enterprises, with a "customer" to satisfy--the student--is not limited to Small Mountain University. There's a certain amount of grumpage amongst the professorati at SMU about the current approach; they feel that the students are being catered to by dumbing down curricula, by snazzing and jazzing up the core courses, and that the view of education as a goal in and of itself is disappearing. Nowadays, the education is marketed as a means to an end: that lucrative job, be it in business or genetic engineering or construction.

Richard points out that the year he spent working in construction was much more valuable to him, as an engineer, than most of his degree work.

Yet, at the same time, I have to sing the praise of the theoretical.

My degree from Cal State Hayward was in computer science, not computer information systems. Typically, a CIS degree comes from the business school at a college or university, while the CS degree comes from the math department. So the CS degree includes an awful lot more theoretical courses, while the CIS degree focuses on real-world applications and includes (ugh!) economics and accounting.

Currently, I wist after some background in accounting; I am working on interfaces with our accounting system, and when the accountants talk I am lost in a jungle of double-entry bookkeeping, trying to figure out which bucket which dollars should be dumped into.

On the other hand, shortly after leaving school with my brand-new degree still hot off the press, I discovered the value of some of that "theoretical" stuff I had been learning.

I was on a small team working on a (then) very cutting-edge on-line backup system. One member of our team was a guy who had worked for many years in an auto manufacturer's IT department, programming their accounting system. Unsatisfied with the money he was making in our little company, he moved on, and I took over some of the user interface he had been working on.

One piece was a listing of files that had been uploaded, sorted alphabetically by name. Previous programmer had tested it out and all worked hunky-dory--until we started working with hundreds of filenames. Then, suddenly, the screen started working slower and slower and slower.

What on earth was going on?

I delved into it. Carefully stepping through the code, I found that the place where it bogged down was in the sorting routine. So I took a look.

Now, I'm not going to bore you with techie talk here, but the least efficient type of computer code to sort anything is called a "bubble sort". It's also the most obvious, and also extremely easy to code. There it was, turning that display screen slow as molasses. Oh, it worked just fine on 10 lines of test data...but when confronted with more, it got progressively slower and slower.

In one of my theoretical courses, we spent eight weeks examining different sorting algorithms. Our professors beat "don't use 'bubble sort'!" into our heads.

So there I was, fresh out of college, faced with code that someone who had been working for 20+ years had written, and realizing that--ohmigosh--that theoretical hooey actually meant something, and was useful.

I pulled out my textbook with the four chapters on sorting algorithms (yes!) and mathematical discussions of the efficiency of each one, dived in, selected one that had a much higher efficiency rating, coded it in, and suddenly that screen--that had bogged down on a mere one hundred items to sort--ran lickity-split on thousands of items.

At the same time, I've learned many things on the job that were never covered in my courses.

So, like Richard, I come down squarely in favor of both thinking and doing, theoretical and practical when it comes to college coursework. But how do you convince students--who see themselves as "customers"--that, yes, the boring theoretical stuff can also be important? Because they've been sold on the idea that Biology Is Fun--so much so that it's hard to realize that you need to learn the basics, boring as they are, first.

While talking with one of the other moms waiting outside the ballet class, she and I heard some kid talking about math homework. She turned to me and said, "Y'know, I always heard people asking, 'What good is this stuff? Am I ever going to use it?' And I just think--I use it. Every. Day."

I do too. But it's hard to say how, when it's woven into what I do all the time so much that it becomes unconscious. The same with my theoretical courses--I realize that I use bits and pieces from them all the time in my everyday work.

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