Three

9:07 am. 4 8oz jars of strawberry jam made. Sprinkler is on the plants; two roses cut and in a bud vase. Breakfast is finished and so is this poster. It’s been a great morning after a rough start for Snowden. She often wakes in a good mood only to collapse into tears within 15 mins. I think the key is to get food into her immediately and hopefully this fun project, that she collaborated on, will provide happy attitude inspriation. My favorite ideas of Snowden’s: daddy comes home, play frisbee, put a pony tail in (which is what the tears were over this am.)

In the January 19th issue of the New Yorker Jill Lepore writes an article about the role breast pumps play in the current trend to nurse babies longer in spite of very short maternity leaves. Any article about parenting in the New Yorker is going to grab my immediate attention and this article, which I’ve read twice now, continues to be on my mind. What I found most interesting in this look at nursing trends both current and historical is an observation Lepore makes, “all this is so new that people are making up the rules as they go along.” She goes on to examine the role of wet nurses, the advent of formula from cow milk, and the proportion of U.S. women that breastfeed their babies “at initiation” meaning, while still in the hospital. The underlying cultural perspective in America, that determines the hows and whys of nursing today, is that human milk is a healthy medicinal fluid for babies. The human breast comes off looking like an inconvenient source of this food; our biology gets in the way of our careers and the economic reality of two incomes necessary for the contemporary family. Enter the breast pump.

The article gets very interesting as Lepore starts to ask the questions we may be too afraid to ask. She writes “Non-bathroom lactation rooms are such a paltry substitute for maternity leave, you might think that the craze for pumps, especially pressing them on poor women while giving tax breaks to big businesses–would be met with skepticism in some quarters. Not so. The National Organization for Women wants more pumps at work: NOW’s president, Kim Gandy, complains that ‘only one-third of mega-corporations provide a safe and private location for women to pump breast milk for their babies’. (When did ‘women’s rights’ turn into ‘the right to work’)”

And later, “No one seems especially worried about women whose risk assessment looks like this: “Should I take three twenty-minute pumping ‘breaks’ during my workday, or use formula and get home to my baby an hour earlier?’ Pumps can be handy; they’re also a handy way to avoid privately agonizing and publicly unpalatable questions: is it the mother, or her milk, that matters more to the baby?”

I’m not working outside of the home right now so on one hand, I feel shy about entering a dialog about nursing and pumping while working. However, supporting families needs to be all of our business if we want any change in the national attitude towards women’s ability to fluidly enter and leave the workplace as suits her family.

I hope everyone reading this post reads the article–your comments would be much appreciated as I try to work out how I feel on this topic and weigh the options in my mind of where we can go from here, nationally.

Happy second birthday to our beloved daughter!

How we celebrated:

a trip to the zoo to see the Go-lillas

first haircut– three inches off

dinner of grandma’s mac&cheese, beef tenderloin kebabs, broccoli, marinated sun dried tomatos

homemade brown sugar yogurt ice cream/meringue cake with cranberry sauce and raspberries

How we know you’re two:

you are very busy engaged in “meanigfull work” all day long, such as washing dishes, sweeping, putting things in the garbage, helping to fold laundry, unloading the dishwasher, cracking eggs and stirring when we cook.

you make up songs about what we are doing and have begun to tell us very interesting imaginary stories, such as you saw a hippo, a big one (!), on snowshoes wearing a t-shirt with words on it that said “aaabadaba da dooda ba” last time we went skiing.

you often say “Snowden have a no like it” and yesterday you said “little bean-y saying no” when I asked you about something.

What I enjoy about spending my day with you:

the way you look at me thoughtfully when I talk to you

how you want to be with me and participate in whatever I’m working on; that gives meaning to what could be tedius chores

your running commentary about the world outside our window such as “flicker in the tree . . . see racoon in the yard . . . one, two, three cars zooming . . . Snowden have a junk yard outside (yes you do, but we’ll get that cleaned up by spring!); it’s good company.

how you run with a concept when you seem to “get it” such as your insistence on closing the bathroom door now for me when I go in , to “give you privacy”; these actions always bring a smile to my face.

Handmade note: I made Snowden a pair of corduroy cropped pants (she likes them!) and an apron (she has a no like it!) for her birthday from this Japanese sewing book: ISBN978-4-579-11194-7. Snowden is size 2 right now, or 90cm in Euro sizes, but she can wear the 100cm size in these patterns with the seam allowance added to the pattern, just for reference since I’ve experimented with sizing quite a bit.