At the parent-teacher conferences this year I heard the same thing three times: your son is very smart and he has terrible handwriting.
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At the parent-teacher conferences this year I heard the same thing three times: your son is very smart and he has terrible handwriting.
Posted at 07:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)
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Pete's birthday sneaked up on me. I said I'd take cake to preschool for snacktime at 9:45, and failed to do the math to figure out what time I'd need to start. I borrowed Alex's fan to cool the cakes, but the cord wouldn't reach the dining room table. That's why they're in the floor.
I set out butter last night so it would be soft for the cakes, but forgot about butter for the frosting. Ten minutes before snacktime I was microwaving frozen butter and then chilling the mixing bowl in a big bowl of ice water so the frosting wouldn't slide off the cake.
I think it turned out all right, though. And when I got there at 9:53, the kids were listening to a story, not lined up with their forks, waiting for me with accusatory looks on their little faces.
Posted at 10:55 AM in Kids | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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More quick takes here.
Posted at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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Remember the mama mourning dove who was nesting in a corner of my porch? Last spring I was a little superstitious about that nest because like the mama dove, I was also spending my days in an uncomfortable attempt to nurture a tiny and invisible new life. (I tell you what, my friends, I am grateful to God every day that I am not spending my days in a miasma of nausea this spring. Wow, that was tough.) I took it personally when the first dove abandoned her nest. I thought, "Hey, come back! We were in this together!" Later that season another dove (or the same one? hard for me to tell) tried again and also bailed, scared away by one of my curious sons.
So I didn't have high hopes for this nest. But! I was wrong! This morning I was waiting for the plumber to come and clear our bathroom sink when I noticed a veritable mourning dove convention on my front porch. I had a moment of grinchiness, in which I thought, "What are they doing on my porch? I hope they don't get bird poop all over the swing." And then I looked a little closer and noticed that two of the birds were fledglings, watching as their mama tried to show them how it's done.
Last spring at this time I was trying desperately to keep all the balls in the air, to finish coursework and a First Communion banner. I was so worried about my baby and so. wretchedly. sick. This spring, though, I have the sweetest chubbiest baby you ever saw. I am still feeling some solidarity with that mama dove as both of us coax our fledglings into flight. But this year it is a happy solidarity -- I am reveling in blooming daffodils and evening light. And I am thinking about how fitting it is for Easter to be a springtime feast, when we celebrate the sovereignty of the one who says, "Behold, I make all things new."
Posted at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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I need a new box.
When I miscarried my first baby, it wrecked me. I gathered up the reminders of her brief life and put them in a little decorative box. The ultrasound pictures ("Look," the midwife had said, "she's waving"). The intercessions from the Mass in her memory. A flower from an arrangement given me by a friend, pressed and dried.
I took the box across the ocean to Scotland, and home again two years later. I took it to the East Coast, and home again a year later. That's where I put the baptismal candles for each boy. Today I was tidying up a bit and tried to put away the candle from Stella's baptism last month.
It won't fit.
The box that was an emblem of emptiness and loss is overflowing now. It has become an emblem of bounty instead. My highest hope is that our whole family will be together one day, joyful and blameless at the wedding feast of the Lamb. That's what I think about now, when I open the box and see the little row of candles, symbols of hope and promise.
At the Holy Thursday liturgy I was thinking about all that's happened over this last year and it seemed like gift piled on gift, grace piled on grace. This afternoon I am taking the big boys and their little sister to celebrate the gift of Divine Mercy. I love this feast. When I picked my own name at confirmation it was chosen in honor of the mercy of God; when I gave my daughter her name it was also chosen in honor of the mercy of God. What a blessing it is to celebrate this day with her.
I do not have a neat ending for this post. I am writing it with the awareness that moments when everything seems like grace are usually followed by moments that threaten my equilibrium. I'm going to post it anyway. My husband has cooked a delicious Sunday brunch and I am going to eat it while it's hot. Yet another gift, gratefully received.
Posted at 01:58 PM in Faith | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
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Excuse the cheesy Jim Croce reference. The purpose of this post is to say that I'm giving up the CJ pseudonym. My name is Jamie.
Almost five years ago I started a different blog, where I poured out more of my heart than I do here. My kids were younger and I wrote more about them and their escapades. I put a lot of time into writing thoughtful essays. I didn't reveal very many identifying details: my first name, my hair color, and the fact that I was an IBCLC. Still, people kept finding me. Every few months I'd get an email saying, "Hey, I know you!" That was kind of weird. After I took it down I found out that even more people from my real life had found the blog, realized it was me, and just never told me that they'd uncovered my little corner of cyberspace. That was even weirder.
That's why I hesitated to use my actual name this time around. When it comes to privacy on the web it's hard to figure out where to draw the lines -- it's inconsistent for me to post a zillion pictures of my kids while using pseudonyms for them, but I do it anyway. I wanted to be able to write about my doctoral program without surfacing in a colleague's Google search. (Maybe if I used a pseudonym she'd think it was one of those other redheads pursuing a PhD in our little field with four -- now five -- children. There must be lots of us, don't you think?)
Anyway. I'm still planning to be vague about which part of the Midwest I'm in, still planning to keep my kids' names off the blog. But you can call me Jamie. Say hi, won't you?
Posted at 11:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (21) | TrackBack (0)
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I am very late to this party, but I am stopping by anyway. I started this post the day I read Judith Warner's screed, but it takes me forever to write anything non-bullet-point-y. Also, becoming a doctoral candidate has had an unexpected effect on me -- I find myself thinking thoughts like, "Should I really hit publish before I understand how they calculated the area under the curve in the lead study? Do I need to be clearer that neither of the studies I'm talking about can claim to be the last word on the topic?" Which is probably a little silly, so here's the post I wrote.
Judith Warner has jumped on Hanna Rosin's bandwagon, where the tune they're playing goes something like this: "I have zero public health credentials but I'm going to broadcast my ignorance to the widest possible audience anyway." There are already plenty of bloggers reacting to Rosin's piece, so I'm going to focus this on one maddening misperception in both pieces: the idea that breastfeeding has no significant impact on cognition.
Continue reading "Research shows that lead paint is A-OK!" »
Posted at 09:00 AM in Breastfeeding | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)
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Things accomplished this week:
Things not accomplished this week:
A blessed Easter to you!
Posted at 12:45 AM in Daybook | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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I've been thinking about shedding some of my pseudonymity -- using my real first name here and linking to my blog from my Facebook profile. But if I do that, I can't grouse here about students. May I tell you that I would never, in a kazillion years, have emailed a TA to say, "Please hurry up with the grading. I need to know whether I can slack off yet."? Really and truly, that second sentence is almost verbatim.
To heighten my indignation, she's talking about one ungraded online discussion, which is worth less than 1% of her grade.
Posted at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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Did you know that if you knit a hat to fit your newborn, you will have a yarmulke three months later?
I have been thinking about beans lately. I'm still analyzing low-frequency word use, and beans were giving me trouble. A lot of the words in my seldom-used list were useful indicators of vocabulary proficiency -- like "cardiologist." But some words popped up that are acquired early and just didn't appear very often in my corpus -- like "beans."
I discarded a number of unsatisfactory solutions. Other published word-frequency lists weren't quite right for cross-checking. One well-known list looked at conversations among British adults in the 60s. (Nope. They said "bloody" too often.) Another well-known list looked at reading comprehension in fourth-graders. (Nope again. Reading vocabulary is much more sophisticated than spoken vocabulary -- you can read words you'd never use in a casual conversation.) Yesterday I hit on a solution that I'm calling the Rule of 15s: to be included on my list a word must appear ≤15 times in my corpus of 1.1 million words, and cannot be present in the vocabulary of >15% of 2.5-year-olds, as established by a well-regarded set of norms that I'd forgotten about until yesterday. That rule eliminated 61 problem words, meaning the end is in sight for this analysis!
That's probably more than you wanted to know about my dissertation -- those are the dry beans. "Juicy beans" is Pete's name for asparagus, which he likes steamed and drizzled with a little olive oil. We are eating lots of it, enjoying the spring sights and smells. There is a mama mourning dove brooding in the corner of our porch again. Everywhere I look I find myself thinking about where I was a year ago, when a tiny tiny baby Stella was newly ensconced in my womb and I didn't even suspect it.
She's looking pretty different these days.
Our spring break was half fun and half awful. Midway through the week, I found myself unreasonably, unmanageably stressed and just couldn't pull out of it. I was so glad to come home to our snug yellow house, to my own big bed, to our pleasant little walkable neighborhood.
Ramble ramble ramble. Over spring break I thought about how hard I have been pushing myself, solely because I'm afraid that if I don't finish quickly I'll never finish. And I thought, "Maybe I can give myself more credit than that. I am a person who likes to finish things. There is no shame in finishing in the fall of 2010 or the spring of 2011 even if my original plan was to finish in the spring of 2010."
I keep telling myself "I'll slow down when..." -- and the date keeps shifting. I'll slow down when I finish the morpheme analysis. (Wrong.) I'll slow down when I finish those talks for the conference. (Wrong again.) I'll slow down when I finish the word-frequency analysis, or the midterm grading, or...
I see a pattern here.
So maybe I should just slow down now, just give myself permission to go outside with the baby and sing "Alice the Camel" or plant things or knit a sock in the sunshine instead of holing up indoors, hunched in front of the computer. She is changing every day. My transcripts will keep. My baby won't.
Posted at 04:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)
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Welcome to my blog, where I mostly natter on about my life with five kids. Occasionally (not very often, because teenagers keep a person humble) I dispense parenting advice. Occasionally I write about other things, like books. (Those are probably affiliate links in posts about books. If you click through and buy something, Amazon will pay me a little bit of money.) Or faith or food or my secret strategy for dealing with annoying kid behavior or whether I am fit to be a mother. Also: who is the mystery intruder? And: does stay-at-home mothering rot the brain?
If you are worried about slow weight gain in a breastfed baby, this is my most-viewed post — hope it's helpful to you. Want to read more? I have some favorite old posts linked here, or you can find my archives here.
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