Light and Momentary

Seven Quick Takes: Tempus Fugit Edition

1. Tomorrow, friends, I am posting my BIG list (that's the Butt-In-Gear list -- things I am going to do before I turn 40). I created it on the 19th of March and I've been procrastinating about posting its whereabouts. It's like once I post it on the internet, I have to do it or else look silly.

I hate looking silly. One could argue that it is worse to be silly, whether or not the internet knows it, than to look silly to a bunch of mostly strangers on the internet, but LA LA LA I'm not going to think about that right now.

2. Elizabeth Foss just posted that she never wastes time. Oh, I wish I never wasted time. Why I am I more willing to get behind on folding laundry than to get behind on RSS feeds?

I think one of the tasks on my list needs to be to teach my children to fold laundry to my specifications. Cheerfully. I need to get better at delegating.

3. Today there is no school and I am going to recruit my children to help with some cleaning and organizing. Goals: finish the reorganization of the dining room and the play room. Also, make some progress on the grant I am writing. Also, do some prep work for the two parties we're having this weekend. And write some thank-you notes and work on finishing up some Cub Scout stuff. And maybe warp the space-time continuum because I have trouble with manageable to-do lists.

4. The baby is in a really needy stage. Really really really needy: sick, teething, taking off her diaper at every opportunity. She is a triple handful this week and I only have two hands.

Maybe I could get an extra hand or two grafted on.

Or maybe I could accept that I'm not going to get a whole lot done until that last molar is through and the green snot faucet dries up.

5. I think the RSVP is a lost art. For the two parties this weekend I've received a total of six RSVPs, including two from the grandparents. I have no idea how many gift bags to make up for tomorrow. We might have two guests or we might have twelve.

6. The second party is for Joe's First Communion. Darling Joe -- I keep thinking about the day he was born. He keeps reminding me that he wants to go to confession tomorrow. "I want my soul and my body to be clean for my First Communion," he says. Can do, sweetie. He's come a long way -- here are two posts from the old blog about taking Joe to Mass as a 2- and 3-year-old. He was an octuple handful in those days. (That deacon's homily was probably my most embarrassing moment as a mother. So far, at least.)

7. Baby just climbed into my lap and fell asleep. How about that? Time to get to work.

More quick takes here.

Thoughts on why

Thanks, everybody, for the supportive comments.

Celeste asked why I thought these two women reacted the way they did, and I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that even in a neighborhood where kids can roam a bit, there will be variation in how the neighbors view the roaming. We're all going to have different ideas about how much freedom kids should have. It makes sense that a neighbor who is more cautious about letting a kid play unsupervised would be the one to approach an unsupervised kid.

I also think that it's hard for people to back down. If you've taken a stand with a kid -- "you shouldn't be out here alone" -- you might prefer to hold your ground rather than say something like, "Well, it sounds like you do things differently in your family." I remember feeling baffled about how to re-negotiate boundaries when my oldest son was little. Wouldn't it erode my authority if I changed my mind? (It was a pleasant surprise to discover that a general willingness to negotiate made it easier for him to hear "That's not negotiable" when I needed to say it.) I think many adults feel that if they tell a kid something they need to stick with it.

Two years ago when the police showed up I resolved to be the calmest, most rational version of myself that I could be. And I was -- waves of calm emanated from me and nearby birds ceased fluttering because I had sucked them into my Vortex of Tranquility. It worked in the moment: the cop agreed with every point I made and he filed a report that called it a harmless misunderstanding.

But I think it also backfired on me. Have you ever been in a conversation where the other person gets calmer and calmer and you find yourself feeling crazier and crazier? I think if you leave the other person holding the bag o' crazy, it might come back to bite you. I think if you call the cops and they tell you your concerns are unwarranted, you might go looking for someone else to tell: this kid was only 6 years old and his mother drove away while he ran across the street without watching for cars. That's my best guess about what happened in '08.

On Monday I hardly talked to the neighbor at all. Pete was so upset that I was focused on him, and I wanted to be certain that I understood what had happened before I told the neighbor I was unhappy about the way she handled it.

One of the hazards of living near a college campus is that we get occasional cars zooming down the street at 45 mph -- driven, almost always, by 19yo guys. She said, "This is Crazy Corner here. They take out that streetlight once a year." (I think this is a wild exaggeration. I have never seen any damage to that streetlight, ever, but I do live on the other side of the block.) She's right that an out-of-control car could hurt my son. I think the risk is minimal at 1:30 on a Monday afternoon. I think my son, who has been going for walks in this neighborhood since he was less than 24 hours old, understands that we need to listen for cars going too fast. Because her kids are grown she probably hasn't thought much about how to teach kids to avoid that hazard -- only that it's a hazard.

I'm optimistic about our follow-up conversation. I will tell her that Pete is small for his age, but that he's heading to kindergarten in the fall and I want him to feel competent navigating our neighborhood. Not cocky, of course. But I also want to say that I think we do kids a disservice when we teach them to be too fearful. I'm going to ask her to help me strike a good balance when she sees my kids outside. I'll let you know how it goes.

"She shouldn't have done that"

Do y'all remember when I got investigated by CPS in the summer of '08? I blogged the whole saga, but the nutshell version is that a neighbor thought my 6yo son shouldn't have been told to walk home by himself from a quarter-mile away and drama ensued.

A little necessary background: we live in a quiet pedestrian-friendly neighborhood on the edge of a college campus. We walk a lot. Yesterday Pete and Stella and I enjoyed a rambly walk home from preschool, detouring to collect a handful of last season's battered walnuts and horse chestnuts in a neighbor's yard, and stopping by the creek to admire an underwater worm. (A suspiciously still underwater worm, but I kept my suspicions to myself.)

When we got to our house Pete asked me, for the first time ever, if he could walk around the block once by himself. He's 5. Our block is tiny. I said yes.

I stopped in the house for about three minutes, and then I started around the block clockwise to meet up with Pete. He was on the sidewalk with a neighbor, who said, "Is he yours?"

She had stopped him and said, "Where's your mom?" He told her, "Over there," pointing to our house -- clearly visible from where they were standing. (For perspective, this picture shows a chunk of our little block. Pete was standing to the left of that gray house.) He told her, "My mom said I could walk around one time by myself."

And the neighbor said, "She shouldn't have done that."

She said, "Maybe we should walk around together to find your mom," but then she just stood there with him, telling him how dangerous the street is. (For perspective, our side of the block sees ~3 cars per hour during the day and theirs is similar.) That's when I arrived.

"Is he yours?" she asked me, and proceeded to tell me a story that made me think he had lost his mind and run out in front of a car without looking. In reality, he was walking peaceably on the sidewalk and paused to look across the street at her and her dog -- a story I had to work at extracting from her. While she was talking, I saw Pete's little face working as he tried to hold back tears that wouldn't be held back. He crumpled onto the grass and sobbed.

"You didn't do anything wrong," I told him quietly. "You had my permission to walk here. I'm glad you're a brave guy."

It didn't help. He sobbed for a long time while I sat beside him and rubbed his back. His lovely big-guy idea had soured, and he was crushed. Unapologetic, the neighbor kept saying, "I was just trying to keep you from getting hit by a car." (While you were standing on the sidewalk. In the middle of the block. With no cars in sight.)

So this is twice now, that a neighbor has been so determined to keep my child safe that she prevents him from getting home as instructed. This time, I need to have another conversation with the woman in question. I see her often; we regularly exchange pleasantries while she's walking her dog. She can't make my 5yo son cry because he is on the sidewalk 50 yards away from me, having spent four minutes out of my sight with my permission.

I'm feeling puzzled here. There seems to be this crazy divide in my neighborhood: there are the parents who think it's a reasonably safe place for kids to explore, and there are the residents waiting for the CSI Gladlyville team to start excavating the dead bodies of children whose mothers failed to swathe them in bubble wrap while they sat safely indoors watching television.

This is a battle I am willing to fight, because I believe it is important. I have thought a lot about my children's abilities and their limitations, and I continue to monitor the safety of the neighborhood -- keeping an eye out for changes in traffic, changes in the sex offender registry, changes in nearby rental housing.

I just don't understand why it has to be a battle.

P.S. The CPS investigation was traumatic for me, and it is still a tender spot. If you disagree with me, please be kind.

Chuckles

10yo: Mom, do you think the van could go at the speed of light?

13yo: Catholics can never go at the speed of light. [beat] Because they have Mass.

***

Conversation while rearranging books: I might put the parenting books with the drama and poetry, but that's kind of weird.

Reply: Oh, I don't know -- I think parenting brings plenty of drama and poetry.

Still bad at detachment but no longer writhing with anxiety

In my email:

Dear Jamie:

I am pleased to inform you that your Dissertation has been officially deposited with the Thesis Office on April 22, 2010. Congratulations on completing this important degree requirement!

The painters' boss is coming by tomorrow morning at 8 "so we can get on your same page." He's a good guy and we've worked with him before, so I'm optimistic that we'll work it out.

Off to scrub windowsills.

Patient endurance attaineth to all things

One of the not-quite-completed tasks on my April list was to finish Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence, a book I've been meaning to read for more than 15 years. It is kind of a crazy little book. A good kind of crazy, but I am just not there yet on the kind of radical surrender it describes.

I've been trying to practice it while I've been reading, and I expect to blog more about the attempt in the future. This week I have had some particular opportunities to cultivate the spirit of yieldedness that the book describes. Opportunity #1: we are having the paint on our house cleaned up, and this crew is not as careful about wet-scraping and clean-up as I would like them to be. I am trying to be vigilant but not flipped out about the lead hazard.

Opportunity #2: I have to deposit my dissertation this week to graduate next month, and it is pushing a particular button of mine. I have this bureaucratophobia -- an unreasonable fear about situations that require an application to be approved. I get worried that some minor hiccup is going to create chaos and the person wielding the rubber stamps is going to smack my paperwork with the FAIL stamp.

I had hoped that this evening I'd be done with the yuckiness: the painters said yesterday that they'd be finished this afternoon and I was going to campus to submit my deposit paperwork. I was looking forward to a nice relaxing day of HEPA-filter vacuuming and windowsill scrubbing and toy washing tomorrow. (They did some work on our windows and got lead-contaminated paint chips and dust inside the room where the toys live. They could see perfectly well what was in there, and I was home. How I wish they had given me a heads-up so I could have moved the toys to another part of the house.)

Instead, both the painting and the deposit process are lingering. The painters didn't finish, or at least they didn't finish by my definition of finish. My wonderful fabulous advisor forgot to have the department head sign a necessary form, and now the head is out of town until Monday.

Neither problem is a big deal in the scheme of things. If the painters flaked out, I'm sure the company owner will tell them to get their butts back here when I let him know what it looks like. If the associate head can't sign the form on the head's behalf, then I'll graduate in August instead of May.

I am hoping that the painters show up at 8am ready to get to work, and that the guy in charge of dissertations is accommodating. At the same time, I'm trying to practice detachment about the outcome. God is sovereign. I am not. God is good. Worry is fruitless.

I am bad at detachment.

I might need to move my birthday.

I am turning 40 on July 19, 90 days from today. I have a list of things to do between now and then:

1. Graduate.
2. Get in shape.
3. Declutter my house.
4. Finish the novels of Dickens.
5. Get all of the pictures into albums.

There are miscellaneous other things on my list as well. I am going to make each of the kids a pair of socks, for instance. I made myself a Typepad page with goals broken down by month.

I didn't hit all of the "by April 19" goals. I got a lot done and I'm pretty close, but I'm not all the way there. I'm thinking this doesn't augur well for the rest of my plan.

My brother's birthday is July 22. Maybe he would trade birthdays with me this year.

And she lived to tell the tale

I made the pizza without any further misadventures. Hurray! I baked it at 450 rather than 500, just in case.

Sarah asked me if I had a recipe for spinach souffle, and I do: it's another post from my old blog. These days I use eight eggs along with slightly augmented quantities of the other ingredients, and bake it for 45 minutes. While I was poking around in the food category archives I also re-published a recipe for a favorite summertime salad and a post with a few different recipes for green veggies which, while they do not cause my children to burst forth into shouts of acclaim, also do not cause them to wail in protest. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, huh? But the grownups like them and, almost five years later, the big kids are much more flexible eaters.

Seven Quick Takes: Burning Down The House Edition

1. We had lamb for Easter. It's always lamb; this time we did a slow braise with a leg of lamb on top of small white beans and veggies. The only pan big enough to accommodate everything was a foil pan that wasn't very sturdy.

It was sturdy enough for me to get it in there, but later in the day I moved it lower in the oven so I could bake a chocolate-raspberry cake on the top rack. It wasn't sturdy enough for that, and winy bean broth with minced onions sloshed onto the oven floor. Rather a lot of bean broth, which soon became charred bean broth. The house got smoky and we turned on the fans. No problem.

2. On Wednesday of last week I cranked up the oven. I was going to bake sweet potatoes and roast asparagus, so I wanted it pretty hot. I slipped in my tray of sweet potatoes and went to play in the yard with the toddler. (She wants to be outside ALL the time these days.) "What's that beeping noise?" I thought to myself a few minutes later.

As you will doubtless have guessed, the beeping noise was the smoke alarm. It's much quieter in the yard, but after a few minutes the light dawned and I went inside to see what the deal was. It was quite smoky and getting smokier. I peeked inside the oven--

--and saw flames. "Hm," I said to myself, "that's not good." I shut off the oven, thinking that the combination of no gas and a closed oven door would quickly put out the fire. Except it didn't-- when I peeked again a little later the flames were higher. "Hm," I said to myself, "that's really not good." How not-good was it? Fire extinguisher not-good? Fire department not-good? Just wait and see not-good? The doorbell rang.

3. Pete had been playing at a friend's house and the mom had just brought him home. "Hi," I said, "could he stay on the porch for a minute with you? There's a fire in my oven."

Somehow saying it aloud made it much more real and I started to feel a little trembly: I had started a fire in my oven and it wasn't just going out like I had hoped.

Mercifully the friend's mom was not at all trembly. She said, "Oh, do you have a fire extinguisher?" We got the fire extinguisher and she was poised to spray. She said, "Are you sure you want me to do this? It's going to make a mess."

I wasn't sure. It was SO helpful -- providentially helpful -- to have someone there thinking along the same lines without the emotional baggage of "all my kids are in this house and I seem to have started a fire a fire a fire a fire in my house my house my house my house."

4. [WAIT! We interrupt this post with an AHA! moment. There's been this irksome low buzzing-humming noise in my house for the past couple of days. Was it a computer? Was it the turtle tank filter in need of attention? I just figured it out: it was the speaker. The toddler turned the volume knob for that speaker all the way to 11 and that was the problem. She gets around, that Stella does.]

5. We peeked again and the flames were lower. We agreed that we could give it another few minutes without risking a fearsome conflagration.

The fire went out, leaving the house full of haze and me very wobbly with adrenaline.

At the other mom's suggestion I sent the kids outside. The middle boys were playing in the room over the porch where the Legos live, and didn't hear me calling from downstairs. I stormed upstairs. "I am summoning you outside URGENTLY because we had a FIRE in our kitchen, and you are playing with Legos as if it doesn't matter to you!" They both got a little panicky ("We couldn't hear you! a fire? A FIRE?") and I felt dreadful.

I ordered a pizza from the front yard and piled them in the van. When we got downtown I said to my husband (who had come home from the bus stop as we were leaving), "Wait, I'm having a moment of panic that something is still smoldering in there and it's going to ignite while we're out eating pizza." I ran back home to check. It was fine, of course. But it shook me up to see flames in my oven, flames that grew when I cut off the gas.

6. I cleaned off the plate that goes over the igniter, and I haven't had any further trouble. (Though you'd better believe I was watching like a hawk the first time I turned it on again.) I've been using it a lot this week because we had a crazy surfeit of eggs: broccoli quiches on Tuesday, spinach souffle on Wednesday, spaghetti pie last night.

But.

The boys asked me for homemade pizza tonight and I agreed. Only later did I remember that you're supposed to bake pizza crust at 500 degrees.

Do I dare?

7. I'll let you know what happens.

More quick takes here.

Happy Semi-Lustrum to Me

This weekend marked two and a half years that I have been blogging in this space, and I am observing the occasion by putting up some posts from my first blog. It is dead and gone now, the domain name snapped up by someone who seems to be advertising jewelry and lamps, and I like it that way. But I have imported the archives here and re-published a few of the many posts I wrote there.

There is the first post I ever wrote about birth at home, the post I wrote about mice in our apartment (I hate mice), and posts about our homeschooling years. There are a couple of breastfeeding posts -- one about the time I was hassled for nursing on public transportation, and a favorite of mine about why I nurse my children past infancy.

I also wrote a paean to stretch marks and some thoughts on mothers and children and death.

Shoot me an email if there's anything you'd like to see resurrected. It's a little messy in there. I used the replace function in a text editor to update names, so there may be some post-replace goofiness, and there will be broken links and missing images aplenty. But I had a lot of fun writing those posts (well, fun's the wrong word for the mothers/children/death post), and I hope you have some fun looking back at them too.

Breastfeeding makes us stupid

How's that for a title? I do not mean, of course, that breastfeeding makes babies stupid; breastfeeding is important for growing brains. What I mean is that talking about breastfeeding seems to make the grownups stupid. Something about breastfeeding hits the media and the lactivists all say, "Look! Breastfeeding is important!" and the moms who had trouble breastfeeding say, "Don't make me feel guilty!" and perhaps Rebecca Goldin says "I'm a professor of statistics [with an axe to grind] so let me tell you that breastfeeding isn't very important"* and the lactivists say "Yes it is too!" and then somebody says "You only think that because you're a nazi who's planning to demand the right to defecate in public."

And then my head explodes. Again.

Here are two things you might like to know about the study published Monday in Pediatrics. 

1. The authors do not say anywhere that mothers are not trying hard enough. No one needs to read about this study and then run through the reasons why she stopped breastfeeding to make sure they're good enough. You in the pink shirt over there, relax. It's not about whether you suffered enough, not at all.
2. It's all about the fact that modest differences add up to big numbers in large populations. Because of the magnitude of the potential savings, the authors call for improved support and infrastructure for breastfeeding mothers.

Most of the blogosphere buzz about this article has focused on its calculation that six months of exclusive breastfeeding by 90% of mothers would save more than 900 children's lives as well as $13 billion annually. We can't have those kind of breastfeeding rates without paid maternity leave, people are saying, so what's your point, Dr. Bartick?

But they're not just talking about Breastopia in this article. The authors present a range of numbers, and the 90% values have gotten all the press because big numbers make big headlines. No one seems to be talking about the more attainable outcomes: if we could just hit the Healthy People 2010 targets, we would save still save billions annually (billions as in 2.2, but still, billions, plural) and 142 children's lives. Those are reachable goals: they specify that 75% of babies will begin breastfeeding -- a single attempt counts -- and 50% of babies will still be receiving some human milk -- even a tiny fraction of their intake -- at six months old.

We don't need to reform the whole maternity leave system to save lives and dollars. (Not that I'd complain if anyone wanted to tackle the vexed issue of maternity leave in the US.) Here are some things we do need:

1. Increased access to midwifery care. It's not just about birth, though see #2 below. Midwives expect to spend more time with women than OBs do; many midwives (depending on their credentials and their state regulations) can provide care to newborns as well as their mothers. Differential diagnosis of breastfeeding problems takes time, and some problems (thrush, tongue-tie) require coordinated treatment of mother and baby. A woman who calls her OB with a torturous case of thrush may have to work harder at getting what she needs.
2. Increased access to out-of-hospital birth. For a variety of reasons, complicated birth is often followed by complicated breastfeeding, and complicated birth is widespread in the current hospital birth culture. Out-of-hospital birth is not for everyone, but it is a safe option for low-risk women and their singleton vertex babies. (Also, I have never heard of a homebirth midwife shilling for a formula company.)
3. Michael Kramer has shown in a randomized controlled trial that Baby Friendly training for health care providers makes a massive difference for women who want to breastfeed. Remember that .5 SD difference in verbal IQ at school age? We have more than 5800 hospitals in the US.** Guess how many are BFHI-certified. Did you guess 88? Because that's how many. Crazyville, am I right?
4. What if Joint Commission standards addressed lactation consultant staffing? Women need access to board-certified LCs in the immediate postpartum period. RN licensure alone does not equip a person to provide skilled breastfeeding assistance. (Hospital staffing issues are an area in which I have almost zero experience; that's why this one is presented as a question.)
5. We need mandated, hassle-free insurance coverage for outpatient LC services. The cost of an LC visit is roughly equivalent to the cost of one bout of otitis media. Insurance companies should be tripping over themselves to reimburse LCs, because early breastfeeding success will save insurers money both in that first year of life and for a long time afterward.
6. More education. I'm not thinking so much about education for mothers here; I'm thinking about LCs who can go into junior high and high school health classes and talk to kids years before they become those parents facing down an irate baby with a latch problem. LCs who are interested in outreach can talk to college students, RD students, OT students, SLP students, nursing students, medical students. Clearly there's a need for some education among Twin Cities police. Imagine the power of a concise presentation that is rigorously accurate without taking itself too seriously, a presentation that makes students think and makes them laugh and also makes sure they know that most breastfeeding problems are solvable.
7. Last: I think it's important to avoid the echo chamber effect. We do a lot of preaching to the choir in the breastfeeding community, and we don't always notice the women slipping out of the pews even as we crescendo. Sometimes what's billed as a breastfeeding support meeting can become the lactator's equivalent of a pissing contest: I'll see your Birkenstocks and raise you one HBAC and three tandem nurslings. Do we really need to scrutinize each other's choices and second-guess each other's motives? I have come to think that one of the best gifts we mothers can give to each other is the benefit of the doubt.

I put that one last because I want to emphasize it: when a woman who thinks breastfeeding is icky is talking to a woman who waxes rhapsodic about her 4yo's weaning party, it's unlikely that any minds will be changed by the conversation. Each of those women is going to carry on thinking that the other is kind of a wacko. I think what matters here is smaller changes-- when the woman who thought breastfeeding was gross decides to let her second baby try to latch on once or twice. When the woman who was going to wean entirely because her maternity leave was ending decides instead to keep nursing at bedtime. When the woman who thought she'd never breastfeed in public decides to leave the formula at home this time. These incremental changes matter. Breastfeeding duration has been creeping upward, and not because women in America have decided en masse to go granola.

The coolest part of the Bartick and Reinhold article, I thought, was a little table on page 1049. In 1998 when I was first training as a breastfeeding counselor, I remember learning that 6% of US one-year-olds were still nursing. In the early 00s when I first heard about the Healthy People 2010 goals, I remember thinking, "Yeah, good luck with that." But do you know, things are really changing. These days more than 21% of one-year-olds are nursing. Seventy-four percent of mothers initiate breastfeeding; 42% of them are still nursing at least a little bit six months later. That's fabulous news: it means healthier babies, healthier mothers, lower healthcare costs for that segment of the population at a time when cost containment is a pressing issue.

So I think it's important not to let breastfeeding make us stupid. It's easy to lapse into fatalism (it's too hard and it doesn't matter anyway, à la Amy Tuteur) or extremism (lactivists who say "If you weren't willing to work at motherhood, maybe you should have bought a goldfish instead"). Let's not. Let's keep nudging it forward, remembering that there are real dollars and real lives at stake as we do.

_________

*What's up with that social workers comment? Social workers??

**Sorry, I don't know how many of those hospitals have maternity units.

The Herrerasaurus Posts

I'm doing that thing again where I think, "Gee, it's been so long since I posted that I need to post something good." Maybe I will just tell you a funny story instead. My second-grader has been practicing cursive capital letters. He was surprised by the shape of a capital S. "I don't understand why it's so curvy," he said. "Why did they decide it should be so curvy?"

I said, "Oh, sweetie, I don't know why. They decided it a long long long long long time ago."

[brief silence, while I think about the swirling letters in the Declaration of Independence and Joe thinks about his personal definition of "a long long long long time ago."]

"You mean like in the 1980s?"