Light and Momentary

It's a...

...chicken!

One egg hatched, the one that first cracked open while I was writing that last post. The one that started hatching last night is still working on it -- making headway, visibly breathing, chirping frequently but having a tough time with that shell. I am having to sit on my hands to keep from playing Jamie Gladly, Chicken Midwife. Alicia would probably say being a good midwife means sitting on your hands when that's best for your patient.

We are keeping the chicks until Friday, when they will go back to the extension office and from there to area poultry farmers to live long and prosper. (They are egg-laying chickens, not meaty chickens.)

The boys were kicking around name ideas at dinner and one suggestion was Aerosmith. "We could name them all for different bands!" said Alex. "And if any of them don't hatch, they can be the Grateful Dead."

Push! Push!

Three weeks ago we picked up a dozen eggs from the county extension office and put them in an incubator. Every day since then we've turned them and checked the temperature and the water level. It's been the focus of our science lessons -- what's going on in there? What can we see if we candle them?

I pulled out the picture from Marty's sono, almost seven years ago. At the time I was unhappy because it only shows his spine. Now it's a handy illustration of the fact that people are vertebrates too. It's been fun.

But I was starting to get worried -- what if none of the eggs hatched? We were supposed to turn them three times a day, but it only happened twice (and a couple of days only once). Last night my husband was sitting in this spot and he called out, "Something just chirped!"

Sure enough, there was a hole in one of the eggs. I could see wet feathers and a hard little beak working away in there. "Come on, buddy!" I cheered. "You can do it! Come on out of there."

I may, actually, have said some other stuff along the lines of, "What a smart chicky! I'm so proud of you! You're so strong!" Something caused my husband to laugh pretty hard and say, "That's a strong maternal instinct you've got going there."

But still we only have holey eggs (two of them now) and no chicks. I have cranked up the humidity in hopes of softening the shells. I have called the extension office guy for a little handholding. "Don't help the hatching chicks," all the materials say.

So here I sit, listening to little cheeps and taps and wishing for a little teeny chicken vacuum extractor. I picked one of them up (very gently, but still probably not recommended) and felt the movement within. It's pretty amazing. I just wish I could do something.

Ethics and Family Size

I like Randy Cohen's column, usually.  He writes "The Ethicist" for the NYT Magazine on Sundays, if his name doesn't ring a bell, and he strikes me as smart, funny, and frequently on target.  Recently he responded to a woman who wrote in saying, "I want to have three children, instead of the optimal one or two, because I am intelligent and from a desirable class stratum.  May I?" (Paraphrased, of course, and unfortunately while this was hanging out in my drafts folder the Feb.12 column got old enough that now you have to pay to read it.) 

Cohen provided the jocose smackdown that this woman had coming, but he didn't stop there.  He went on to list ethical family size choices: zero children, one child, two children, or occasionally three children.

Ahem, says this mother of four.

Let me be frank about the limits of my knowledge of population issues:  I am not an ecologist, not a sociologist, not a populologist (or whatever one would call a person who studies the impact of population change).  I have found the population debate to be so polarized along political lines that it's difficult to find accurate information.  But I do not think I am unusually ignorant; I think most people are in the same boat.

I do know that Malthus was not a prophet. There is an upper bound for sustainable population somewhere, but it is far higher than he estimated.  The UN is now saying that underpopulation is a serious concern.  Why can't we leave the 70s ZPG rhetoric in the 70s and have a real conversation about what's at stake?

One piece of information usually missing from the debate is this: resource consumption matters more than straight numbers in determining population's impact.  A family of three living in the exurbs in a 3400 square-foot house, with two Yukons in the garage and a pantry full of foods from far-flung places, will have a far larger ecological footprint than a family of ten in rural Namibia.  And yet when the NYT wrote about a struggling large family in Malawi, the first batch of responses said unanimously:  Get those people some contraceptives.  That's the problem here -- all those kids.

If we see kids as a drain on the planet's limited resources, if we deny the truth that children enrich the world, ugliness ensues.  When I used to think that we were in imminent danger from overpopulation, I would feel a secret surge of relief at news of terrible natural disasters.  At least that earthquake means 40,000 fewer people sucking up our natural resources!

Yikes.

Catholic teaching on family size is often misconstrued as a not-so-secret bid for heedless global hegemony.  But Catholic couples are not instructed to crank out as many babies as possible; they are called to balance generosity and prudence, to say Yes to the chance of another baby unless good reasons ("iustis causis," CCC 2368) lead them to say Probably Not.  Even before they have children, this teaching can help couples make a positive difference in the world.

NFPing women are not excreting synthetic hormones into the water supply. Couples may be willing to live more simply if they are challenged to focus on generosity as well as prudence.  For my own part, I would never have thought about having a baby while my husband was a grad student without the example of other Catholic couples; I know I would not have studied Amy Dacyczyn's books with such alacrity, nor would I have learned so many ways with lentils.  Most of the time, a frugal lifestyle is an environmentally friendly lifestyle.

Often large families are more efficient than small families.  If you have one boy and one girl and their clothing and gear are all purchased new, your family's footprint just got a lot bigger. If you're buying secondhand and passing down, your resource consumption in that area is smaller even though the number of consumers is larger. Large families may also be more likely to make choices like home-laundering cloth diapers, because they expect the up-front cost to be amortized over many more months of use.

Large families may also be more efficient when it comes to food: less waste, more beans.  I know I throw out a lot less food than I used to -- in part because I have more practice using it up, but also because I have more mouths eating it.  We ate low on the food chain out of necessity for a while, and necessity became habit.

There are also intangible benefits to living in a larger family.  In most large families, it's obvious that the pie can only be cut into so many slices.  Kids see that selfishness has consequences.  I am doing my best to raise generous children, who see the importance of sharing the pie even though it means smaller slices for them.  I am doing my best to caution them against a feeling of entitlement, an attitude that says, "Maybe air conditioning is bad for the environment, but I'm far too hot to keep the thermostat at 82.  Let someone else sweat instead."

I am raising four sons who think it is normal for 6 people to share 1750 square feet, who prefer not to hop in the car for every outing. One day last year when I told them we were going to drive the half-mile to the library, they said, "Are you crazy?"  "Mom has lost her mind," one said to another, "she's driving to the library."

In writing this post I have wondered about the long-term effects of our choices.  Will they grow up to think McMansions seem lonely and odd?  Will they be eager for more space?  I expect they will grow up to disagree with me about many things.  I hope we can always agree on this:  an unexamined conviction is not worth holding.

And yet it is a given in many circles that large families are environmentally irresponsible.  Despite the fact that environmental impact does not increase in a linear fashion with increasing family size, despite the buzz about the many (and costly) needs of the aging Boomers, despite the consequences of underpopulation -- it's aphoristic for many Americans that having fewer kids is the optimal choice.

I'm not telling anyone else to have a large family.  I'm only asking that those who prefer small families bear in mind that the questions are complex, and that their idea of "supporting reproductive choice" ought to mean leaving room for women who want to continue having babies.

Before I end, may I encourage you to be charitable in your comments?  There are women with six and seven children who read this blog; there are women with one child or no children.  There are lots of different political convictions rattling around.  We all agree that children consume resources and that some resources are non-renewable.  But here's the thing:  I would have more money in the bank, probably, if I had fewer children.  I would also be immeasurably poorer.

"I Am Eating Placenta"

Actually, I am not eating placenta.  But Friday was our little homeschool co-op, in which I teach Latin and another woman teaches art, and that's a quote from our Latin lesson.  I am taking the same tack with these kids that I did with Alex:  we work on the Ave Maria, and we work on the idea that -m equals direct object and that -o and -t mean "I" and "he/she/it" respectively.

Three weeks ago I took cut-up fruit and napkins and drinks, and we practiced "I want..." along with "I am eating..." and "I have...."  I thought I'd follow up yesterday -- same verbs, new object.  I decided I'd bake a cake.  A placenta, according to my Cassell's Latin dictionary.  I checked online and found a few alternatives, but I also thought about what would be easiest for the other moms to remember since they don't know Latin.  And who could forget a lesson in which her kid asks sweetly for a slice of placenta?

In classical Latin "c" is hard, so I taught them to say, "Plakentam edo!"  It wasn't until I got home that I snorted with laughter at my ill-advised lesson plan.  I want placenta, Mrs. Gladly!  I am eating placenta!  Is there more placenta?

Maybe I should have stuck with the fruit.

Speaking of placentas, though:  remember when I posted about Pete's freezer-burned placenta?  Sometimes posting here about my foibles prompts me to do something about them.  After I wrote that post I pulled the placenta out of the freezer.  I tossed it in the outside garbage with brisk dispatch and washed my 8-inch square pan carefully.  Much better, I thought to myself.

Elwood was less pleased.  The garbage truck guys wouldn't want to deal with placenta, he said.  They'd be worried about blood-borne pathogens.  I don't have hepatitis B or HIV, I said.  They don't know that, he pointed out.  I fretted.  He was right.  But I didn't want to go fish that placenta out of the big garbage bin after it had spent a warm October day ripening there.  It's all wrapped up, I said.  He said, Still double-bagged? I guess that's all right then.

Trash day:  it turns out that double-bagging doesn't quite do the trick.  When I go to return the upturned bin to its home beside the garage, there is blood on the sidewalk.  Oh, no, I think.  I am reading a book by the retired Rockland County medical examiner, in which he says that blood is remarkably persistent.  You can wash it/bleach it/scrub it/sand it/dynamite it/spray it/pelt it with mini-hydrogen bombs from Acme Roadrunner Extermination Supply -- and there will still be traces of blood present.  Out damned spot indeed.

I am also remembering our 1999 visit to Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, where Mary Queen of Scots witnessed the murder of her secretary Rizzio.  (She was six months pregnant (with James VI) when it happened; I was six months pregnant (with Marty) when we took the tour.  I remember being skeptical about the attendant's claim that the murder was supposed to frighten her so badly that her baby would die.) More than four hundred years later a stain remains on the floor where Rizzio was stabbed.  Is that blood? I asked my mother-in-law.  She said, I'm sure it is.  Nothing gets bloodstains out.

Suddenly I know that our sidewalk is doomed to become a landmark in the neighborhood:  The Walk of Gore.  When we sell our house in ten years, we will have to explain away the bloodstained sidewalk to potential buyers.  A sanguineous cloud will arise from the sidewalk and say, in big drippy letters:  "We got your freaky homebirthers right here, folks!"

I go inside for the hydrogen peroxide and dump it on the bloodstain.  It foams up thickly, like the head on a pint of Guinness. Placenta Guinness.  Let's not dwell on that thought.

I have foam, and foam, and more foam.  I have so much foam that Aphrodite could arise anew from my sidewalk, formed from freezer-burned placenta instead of severed genitals.

I reflect that there could have been an ancient Greek cult of Aphrodite of the Freezer-Burned Placenta.  Perhaps a little-known Botticelli as well.

We live on a quiet little street, which is good.  I don't want anyone to walk by because I am a pathologically honest person.  I just am not capable of saying, "Oh, it dripped out of a package of ribs that got nasty in the fridge."  If I have time to think of an evasion, I might be able to evade.  ("Oh, yeah, it's kind of a mess, isn't it?") Caught unprepared I will blurt out, as sure as shooting, that it's placenta juice.

Suddenly, though, things are hopping on my quiet little street.  My across-the-street bachelor neighbor crosses to my side of the street.  My next-door bachelor neighbor comes out of his house.  They are chatting a few yards away from the foamfest.  I paste on a "TRA LA LA nothing to see here just move along folks" expression and pray God that they don't notice anything unusual.  What could possibly be unusual about vats of discolored foam hissing and seething on the sidewalk?  What could be suspicious about the woman whose face is twitching back and forth between "TRA LA LA" and "Oh, no, what was I thinking having a baby without an incinerator on hand for the afterbirth?"?

I run for the hose.  I spray and spray.  Is peroxide bad for the grass?  Is the municipality of PCT going to object to my dispersing foamy placenta juice across the neighborhood?  The peroxide is killing all the viruses I didn't have in the first place, right?

I decide to think about that later.  The grumpy neighbor lady, the one who recently told the kids from up the street "get off my property," comes out to admire her garden.  Wonder what she would say to a little placenta juice on her property?

With my first homebirth I didn't have this problem.  Elwood and the doctor bundled up the placenta with the Chux pads and the soggy newspapers right after Joe was born, I presume.  But things are different with a midwife -- almost entirely in a good way, but I have to admit that in this brief crazed moment I am seeing a weeny little downside to homebirth.

 

***

 

Why did I just tell you this silly story, four months after the fact?  I am not entirely sure.  But I hope it makes you laugh, because it makes me laugh.  If ever you come to visit my house, you may notice a small faded stain on the sidewalk out front.  It is not nearly as suggestive as the stain in the chambers of Mary Queen of Scots.  But perhaps it is a fitting marker for the home of Jamie, Queen of Drama.

Latin for Little Kids

Why Latin and German? someone asked me after I posted our homeschooling schedule.  Here's why:

I think American schools do foreign languages badly.  I don't know a ton about second-language learning; I'm not prepared to debate the extent of brain plasticity in adolescents.  But I know of a study that looked at six-month-old babies in Sweden and in the US and found that they pricked up their ears when they heard an unfamiliar vowel.  And I know that in my college German class we could not -- not a one of us -- distinguish the German vowel /ø/ from the English vowel /ʊ/, as in "put."  We simply could not hear what the six-month-old babies could hear:  these two sounds are related but distinct.  I want to provide my kids with an early and pleasant introduction to other sounds and syntactic structures.

I believe we are unusual here in the US, with our contented monoglottony (I can't find a noun form of monoglot so I'm just going to have to make my own).  I would guess (does anybody know?) that most people, for most of human history, have needed to have a handle on at least one other language, even if only for occasional interaction. From Babel onward, people have been forced to communicate with others who don't talk the same way they do.

Now I have not conducted an exhaustive survey of approaches to foreign-language pedagogy in American schools.  I have not conducted any surveys, actually, but my casual observations tell me that most elementary schoolers get little to no language instruction.  Most high schools offer language classes taught by non-native speakers.  And most veterans of those high school programs say, "Yeah, I took [whatever language] in high school, but I don't remember any of it."

I think foreign language instruction is an excellent back-door means of teaching English grammar.  I think it enhances English vocabulary, and challenges students to consider the semantic limitations of their native language ("be" vs. estar/ser, "know" vs. savoir/connaître).  I think it also keeps me humble, keeps me mindful that there's a big wide world out there and I only inhabit a tiny corner of it.  I also happen to love languages (thus my highly impractical comp lit degree), and I hope to share that love with my kids.

Here's what we've done:  I started low-key Latin lessons with my oldest son in kindergarten, because he asked me to.  In first grade I attempted to add Spanish, thinking I'd like to learn more Spanish myself.  The learning-together approach didn't work very well, so last year we switched to German.

Several people have asked me about teaching Latin and I am afraid I don't have a readily reproducible plan.  Latin is the language I learned most thoroughly, and so it's easy for me to make it up as we go along.  We started with two things:  first, subject and verb are squashed together into a single word in Latin; second, a direct object is marked not by its position in a sentence but by the /m/ that appears (usually) at its end. 

I spun it as a secret code.  If I say "Draconem puer edit," does the boy eat the dragon or does the dragon eat the boy?  Just listen for the /m/ and it will tell you, I told him.  He loved it.

He doesn't always love it these days, but I try to keep it fun.  If you are interested in teaching Latin, I hope I can encourage you to do the same.  The Well-Trained Mind authors recommend the study of Latin, but I have some concerns about their approach to the language. They are dismissive in general of a whole-to-parts learning style (breaking down the big picture into smaller pieces), much preferring parts-to-whole instruction (where you start with the small pieces). 

The problem I see, the big, staring problem with that plan, is that most people on the planet learn a language going from whole to parts -- hearing, in infancy, the messy confusing blur that is adult language and sorting out where all the pieces go.  Parts-to-whole language instruction, as discussed above, doesn't seem to be a good strategy for long-term retention.  Pedagogical philosophy aside, there'd be a mutiny at my house if I reduced Latin to vocabulary drills and recitation of is-ea-id.

Instead we nibble at it from both ends.  We learn the prayers of the Church in Latin (whole to parts).  We do some parts-to-whole work, chanting the perfect endings together with cheerleader arm motions.  ("I - ISTI - IT!  IMUS - ISTIS - ERUNT!")  You can't get comfortable with the language, I don't think, unless the basics are automatic.  And we do a lot of English-to-Latin translation, because I found in my own classics courses that translating into the language -- even if it's dead and I will never in my real life need to say, "Amabo te, phoenicem assum cum allio et hippocampum concoctum in vino volo"* -- made it much easier to parse the prose of Pliny or Plato or whomever. 

*I want a phoenix roasted with garlic, please, and a hippocampus boiled in wine.

For the curious:  in kindergarten we just focused on present tense and accusative case.  In first grade, I taught about the imperfect and future tenses along with a few adjectives and personal pronouns. In second grade, we talked about perfect tense, infinitives, and the functions of the remaining cases.  This year I have introduced more written work (I only did oral Latin lessons until he had a firm grasp on English phonics), and he is practicing declining nouns.  Actually, we are doing a bunch of stuff this year and I will tell you more if you want to know.  I am worried this is boring, though.

What Latin doesn't look like:  no stress, no rigid timetable, no pressure to perform.  Rachel commented once about John Stuart Mill's father, who expected him to compose Greek poetry before he was out of diapers.  The last thing I want is for my children to have a nervous breakdown about foreign language study.  (I worry enough about inducing breakdowns in English.)  When we're busy or when things are rough, German gets the axe first and Latin is not far behind.

But there is for me, in learning other languages, a welcome feeling of connection with other people in other places, other times.  It was a rush to read the beginning of the Iliad in Greek (together now: Supergeek! Supergeek! She's supergeeky!); fifteen years later I can still recite the opening lines (sing it again, everybody).

Usually when I write about homeschooling I talk to my oldest son about the post, because I want to make sure that my perception is at least in the same neighborhood as his perception.  I asked him about Latin today.  He said, "It's boring while you're learning it but it's cool once you know it."  And he said, "Amo sushi-m" (an attempt at "I love sushi").  "Amo sushi-m" was not what I expected when I started teaching him Latin.  But it looks like he's internalized the early lessons:  first person singular present indicative, along with accusative singular.  With his own twist thrown in, which is my firstborn in a nutshell.

Wednesday Morning Miscellany

Hey, have you noticed the lack of substantive posting around here lately?  Moxie asked me to be the guest expert on breastfeeding for her advice blog, and I have been totally obsessed with one of those posts.  If there were a correlation between time spent on a post and its eventual quality, when you opened that page you would find beams of light streaming down from heaven and quires of angels singing triumphantly.  Alas, not so.  But it's up here, and its predecessor is here, if you're interested.  And if you haven't been reading Moxie's advice, take a look.  Lots of good stuff, especially on sleep.

I have this sense of responsibility whenever I sit down to write about breastfeeding:  how can I be clear about the value of human milk without alienating women who didn't breastfeed?  Last summer I got a really troubling email from a sexual abuse survivor offended by the flippant beginning of this post, and it made me so sad.  It was kind of a crazy email, and when I started to tell Elwood about it he said, "Delete the email, Jamie."  "No, Elwood," I answered with self-mocking earnestness, "I'm going to Save The World.  Through breastfeeding."  He rolled his eyes and said, "Keep breastfeeding.  Delete the email."

I should really listen to my husband more often.

Remember last fall when I was going to speak to that college class about birth?  I never told you how it went, in part because I was a little uneasy about it.  On the plus side, I think everything I said was evidence-based and they seemed genuinely interested.  They laughed a lot (in the right places) and they asked me questions until the bell rang.  In the minus column, I was worried that I had been strident in spots.  And Pete fussed for a bit until he fell asleep in the sling, which was distracting.  Last week the professor called and asked me to speak again this semester, so apparently I was an entertaining kind of strident.

It just takes practice, being emphatic without being shrill.  I have been talking about breastfeeding for long enough that I'm pretty comfortable doing it.  This was the first time I had spoken to a large group about birth, and maybe I should tell my inner perfectionist to settle down.

Okay, enough hand-wringing.  How about a funny story to end on?  While the big boys were at a homeschoolers' class recently I took the little ones to the bank.  Joe wanted a lollipop and I was using that "grant the wish in fantasy" strategy to distract him.  "What flavor would you pick if you could have a lollipop?" I asked him.  The teller interpreted this as "Please give my child a lollipop," and handed him the basket.  He picked one with an "artificial chocolate" label.  "Look!" he said to everyone we saw.  "I have a lollipop!  It is artificial chocolate!"  Every ten minutes he asked me, "Is it after lunch? Can I eat my artificial chocolate lollipop yet?"

Fast forward two hours:  he came to me and said, "Where can I hide?"  I said, "Hm, how about the office closet?"  "No," he said, "it's too dark in there."  "Under your bed?"  He said, "But you can see me under my bed."  "I don't think I would see you under your bed," I told him.

A few minutes later he came back downstairs.  "It's too dark under my bed.  I need a place to hide where it's light, but where you can't see me when I eat my lollipop."

I came in here to write three more sentences while Pete sat eating Os with his older brother.  "Mom!" came the call, two sentences later.  And this is what greeted me in the dining room.  Oops.  That is, in case you can't see, the contents of the box of Os scattered across the carpet, courtesy of the baby who decided to sit on his high chair tray.  Back to work with me.  Note to self:  the 6yo isn't ready to supervise yet.