The latest in a long line

 Simon is not the first child to "help" his parents unload the dish washer.










Today he curiously surveyed the dishwasher and then removed this pot.
















He hollered and laughed.
















He likes participating in daily life. After months of a helpless infant who lived only according to his needs, only on his own schedule, it's really marvelous to see him finding his way into our rhythm.







He seems to like it too.

Dear Simon, This month has been such an exciting one, really. You have blossomed into an eater and a mover. I finally feel really like a mother, instead of a fraud, or like I'm playing house, or... I'm not sure how I felt before. The other day, though, when you started crying when I left you with JB and I knew it was because I'm your mama and you didn't want me to go? THEN I felt like your mama in a whole new way. Here are some pictures of your moving, visiting your buddies Dalton and Cayden, and eating.

Dear Simon at 5 months

Dear Simon at 5 months,

I meant to do this earlier. I sat there, on November 13th, while you slept on your little cosleeper in the middle of our big bed, staring at the screen, thinking about a future version of yourself reading the blog I was about to write. (No pressure, though!) An electronic record seemed too cheap, I couldn't imagine that I could type anything that would approximate how I was feeling about you and about your father, that could describe how fascinating I found your every sigh and hiccup. I gave up after about 3 sentences (when you awoke). This blog has always been about me and a way for me to think about things and share them with the people I love, so it seems a little strange to record your life here. I couldn't begin, on November 13th, or on December, or January 13th, to talk intelligently about how it felt to become a mother, to watch Z become a father, to watch as you showed us little glimpses of who you are.

This month, as you nap away. I feel totally ready. You are this incredible person, and you now have anecdotes. (A newborn's anecdotes, let's face it, are pretty dull.) I know more about who you are. You are intensely interested in everything around you, especially living things. (Luckily, people find you intensely interesting too. I have to add an extra 10 minutes to my grocery store trips to account for strangers who want to talk to you and admire you.)

You are becoming more physically capable every day. You can roll over from front to back and back to front, and you can finally hold onto your feet these days (though you can't get them to your mouth). You can wiggle and lurch your way in a circle, and get two or three feet from where we put you (although you don't have a lot of directional control at this point). Every day your father or I sees the potential for crawling. You are socially aware; helping us to change your clothes and watching us when we talk to you. You spend time on your own with your toys on the floor, and enjoy "helping" me cook from the comfort of your ergo. You recently became interested in reading board books, and you watch your father and I when we sign to you. (Who am I kidding? You are interested in EVERYTHING.

Here is the story I really want to tell that sums up your life right now:

Last Saturday, I made a fart noise at you and you laughed. I was so delighted. (The first time I heard you really laugh (you frequently chuckle one or two syllables at a time) I tickled your belly with my nose (this still works)about a month ago. But on Saturday, I made a noise (and a face) and you cracked up! I called your papa in to see. He believes fart noises are universally funny, and was unsurprised (bullshit) but I wondered what about this sound was funny for you. The next day, it no longer worked. (You smiled for the sound, but didn't laugh.) by the end of the day, you would spit and I would reflexively make a fart noise for you. I soon realized that I had accidentally reinforced spitting and brought this up with Z. I thought I should stop, but he said "What's the harm, really?" compared to the powerful experience of you being able to order up a fart noise when ever you want one. (COMMUNICATION!)

Then, your nanny, JB was here on Monday and saw you spit this way. He apologized to Z and took responsibility. He explained that when you are sad, he beatboxes for you! So, you were laughing at me (perhaps) because I don't usually beatbox, JB does! And you were ordering up more! So, now YOU have basically trained your caregivers to beatbox to you. It clearly gives you joy to make this spitting sound (which started as aspirated drool on Sunday, and is already a vibrating lip "motor boat" action) and get the people you love to beatbox for you. (I'm not Rahzel, or anything, but I do my best.)

So, that's where we are 5 months into this adventure, my little darling.

Until next month!
-Mama

Things I love about not being pregnant

This list has been running through my head for awhile now. I loved being pregnant, and not being pregnant has opened me up to enjoying things I never thought much about before.

Taking the stairs not the escalator

rediscovering the waist belt on my backpack

walking between tables in a crowded restaurant

tackling small children/picking them up/general rough-housing

eating spicy food and then lying down right away without heartburn. In fact, tomorrow I think I'll eat some spicy food WHILE lying down.

standing on a crowded train without hating every able-bodied looking person sitting in one of those seats that are supposedly reserved for the disabled, aged... and pregnant.

Smelling fumes/Standing near a microwave/feeling angry without a feeling of dread that I'm ruining my offspring

Demim

Hugging people without having to reach over myself to get at them

Sleeping/Reading on my stomach

Not talking to strangers about my condition (although, admittedly, I missed this for the first few weeks)

Tying my shoes with nary a care in the world (although my pregnant shoe-tying skills are very helpful when I'm carrying Simon in the Moby)

Not having to ask Zak for help with really silly things

Urdva Danurasana (Although with my rotator cuff issues, that was a short-lived love affair... but that's another post entirely.)

Riding my bicycle FAST and without being a spectacle.

Mama said knock you out

I don't know why I stopped blogging, and I'm not sure why I might start again...
I intend to only spend a moment on this topic, but a couple of things stand out to me as I read this blog.
1. I've waited so long to change the banner pic at the top that it's relevant again.
2. I "promised" to reflect on being pregnant, and never did.

I think that when one is pregnant (like when one is an adolescent or when one is in love) one's life becomes a big cliche. It's a cliche because certain things are universal, and so they sound cliche when we talk about them. So, it was weird to write about being pregnant in the same way that it was weird to write about how important my thoughts and feelings were when I was 16. Also, I had a really pleasant pregnancy. Yes, I had hormonal ups and downs, yes, I had heartburn, but really, I had a great time. It can be hard to talk about things that are going well,especially if you have reason to be supersticious and fear "jinxing it". So, I didn't write much about how awesome it was to think about a new person inside my body, how connected to Zak I felt as we moved into this new stage blah de blah de blah. Now that my son has arrived and he is his own person, we are still firmly in the land of cliche ("Every day is an adventure." "He's so tiny and perfect." "I see a whole new side of my husband when I watch him with the baby." etc. etc. etc. BUT it is SO interesting to me that I'll risk it.

Finally, I've just gotten back into the habit of writing and reflecting on a more regular basis in part because I bought Nikki Mclure's First 1000 Days
. (she's a fantastic artist from the old PNW.) I really wanted to write to S about what his infancy is like, and what our transition to parenthood has been like, but I had no time in those first weeks to sit down and think, and it was a little overwhelming to decide which completely new and different details to include and which to leave out. I couldn't prioritize. This journal (which is beautiful in every way) is small, and has two pages for each month. There are other pages later in the book to record things like "songs we sing" or "how you express yourself, words you use" etc. but basically, I have to write succinctly and at the end of the month I have a few small paragraphs that more or less tell the story of that four weeks. This is a relief and an excellent reminder to myself. (I totally recommend Mclure's book as a new baby gift to any family who likes to write or remember. I am loving it.)

Resolution Shmesolution
I was inspired by my friend Jessie a few years ago to choose an intention for the whole year. Last year my intention was "follow through". This is kind of funny, since I didn't blog very much, but hey, I didn't say I'd follow through on my blog, just... in general. Today I spent an hour filing and recycling papers from my "crapalanche" on my desk. This is one kind of the follow-through I was talking about. I do have a few projects I could have finished from this year, but more or less I think I lived up to this intention. I definitely thought a lot about what I was taking on and whether I could finish it up. The sheer effort of doing things while pregnant and meant I had to set more limits than usual and maybe say no (realistically) where I might have said yes (optimistically) in the past. This was an unintended consequence of my commitment to follow through.

2012's intention grows out of this idea of limiting my efforts. This year is all about simplification. Watching a new baby human, and tending to his every need makes it really clear that we really don't need much. We're also getting ready to move (upstairs) and that always brings on some reordering and sloughing off. My work on my desk is also part of simplifying. I'm thinking a lot, too, about my wardrobe. For the last 6 or 8 months, I've pretty much worn 20 items from a bag I got from a friend. (I've worn more clothes in the last three months or so, but really I mostly wear maternity shirts still for nursing ease.) We'll see how I'll do with FOLLOWING THROUGH on this intention this year.

Funny things.

I swear a million funny, poignant things are happening to me every day, and I can't hold onto them long enough to type them here. (Sleep deprivation has done a number on my already shitty short term memory.) Suffice it to say that I'm back to blogging (I think.) and I'll have many deep and witty things to share... wicked soon. But not tonight.

I am enjoying the fact that I am now eligible to be the butt of silly "Your mom" jokes. I guess whichever way I can begin to integrate this new identity is helpful, right?

Baby update

He slept from 11:30 until 5:30 last night. When Zak brought him to me (they slept in the guest room so that I could get some solid rest) I was so confused by the clock that I just stared at them, unsure of what was going on, of what planet I was on even. He's continued to sleep almost all day, waking only twice briefly to play and eat. I believe that he will wake up fully an inch longer tomorrow after a day like this.

Also, I was going to title this post "Don't Call it a Comeback" until I Google Imaged that phrase and found that the top clips were actually from bloggers who were coming back to their blog after some time off. So I didn't do that. However, whenever S gets out of the bath and looks out at us from under his droopy hooded towel neither Z or I can keep ourselves from singing it to him. At some point that will get old, but at this moment everything is so new and so fun.

Free Minds, Free People

This blog post is mostly a place for me to process my thoughts and preserve some resources for later. Feel free to skip it. I promise I'll write more about the joys of pregnancy soon.

I just got back from the Free Minds, Free People conference.
(To be honest, there are a lot of hard core educators for liberation there today, organizing and making plans, but I am exhausted after three long days and need a real break before I go back to work tomorrow, so I've written myself a preggo note and will be staying home and going to the beach,and napping today). And processing.

The conference was beautiful, AND I had a strange feeling of it being almost perfect, but not quite. (Which just means I'll have to get more involved next year.)

I'm basically blogging here to preserve some of the cool resources and organizations I encountered at the conference.

http://www.beyondmedia.org/index.html Beyond Media Education are a group of youth who make videos teaching other youth about really important issues. I didn't get to see any, but would like to.

The Learning Community. This is a charter school working to give charters a good name in Central Falls. I'd heard about them from my friends at Blackstone Academy, and was blown away by the statistics about how they support the larger school system, work with ELL's and children with special rights, and partner with families. I attended a panel all about charters, and the director of the Learning Community was... Sarah Friedman, a woman I worked at Coffee Exchange with. (Ah, Rhode Island!). I definitely want to go visit them in the fall, and see what they're doing.

Institute for Humane Education. Not sure how I feel about these folks. They might be cool... or not. They had a horrifying game about Darfur to build compassion in young people. Yuck.

http://getoutma.org/ This is a fledgling organization designed to get as many middle and high school students out onto farms for short visits. Their goal is quantity, and to allow as many children and youth to have the life-changing experience of digging in dirt and seeing food on the vine.

I was really impressed with the FMFP "Guidelines for Healthy Dialogues". One of the women in my reflective group at the end still felt like she found white people taking up too much space, which is a problem. But I would like to hang on to the guidelines because they addressed a lot of things. I really liked "WAIT" (Why Am I Talking).

I made some connections, but mostly that benefited other people. :( I met a cool theater teacher from NY who was excited about Reggio Emilia because he is Italian and always looking for Italian thinkers to inform his pedagogy. I met a young teacher who may apply for the atelierista position at our school (she sounds a little raw, and is unfamiliar with Reggio, but she has an art degree and worked with infants and toddlers). I met a cool early childhood teacher who lives in JP and is interested in visiting our school. The people who seemed further along in their journeys were a little harder for me to access, caught up in their existing circles. I remembered a Hilltop conference where we all stuck together and then tried to consciously make space for everyone else. I also remembered our first Day of Learning when people really weren't able to mix together.

I have to say I didn't learn a lot that was new. I learned a little more about the term "Neo-liberalism" (I need to learn more). I really enjoyed hearing from the teachers who were featured in the plan book for social justice teachers, both on the first day as a panel, and the second day at lunch. I'm incredibly inspired by the teachers who are continuing to teach Chicano studies even though AZ recently passed an unjust law making the class illegal (for building ethnic solidarity and encouraging overthrow of the government). I was impressed at how Sam Coleman, a union rep in NYC, and Kathy Young and Stephanie Schneider, two protesting teachers from WI cast a critical eye at their unions, while working for change outside of them.

I had a conversation with Dr. Vincent Harding (although I only knew him as Vincent, at that moment). In telling him and the people at my table what I do, I mentioned anti-bias curriculum. He said "Whenever I hear someone say that they're anti-something, I ask them 'What is it that you are for?'". I gave this a lot of thought. I love the phrase "education for liberation" but I feel as thought it's important for a community of mostly-white mostly-middle class teachers to think hard about bias, and our encounters with it. I feel as though it is at the very least a first step to look squarely at bias and talk about it. After the last year of working with staff to think about questions of difference and bias, I feel like if we had posed our work more positively we would not have awakened staff to the truth of our culture. In fact, I wish that we had spent more time looking at systemic and institutionalized racism. Even though I feel very comfortable with "Education for liberation", I don't know that it would be the right thing to start with. I guess I worry that people who have been protected from the ugliness of racism and other bias need to be faced with it, including "anti-" type language. At the same time, I was very grateful to Vincent for raising this issue, and I'll have to think more about it.

Chemicals

"Besides, I like chemicals!"

My landlady's boyfriend ("Harold") said this as I walked away from him down the street.

A local grocery chain sold out to Whole Foods this month and it's been a really big deal in our neighborhood because the chain store has a HUGE section of Latin American and Caribbean foods that you really can't find anywhere else. Also, of course because of WF's symbolism in the process of gentrification. There was a flyer in our mailboxes this morning that said "Whose Foods?" that Harold was commenting upon.

He was talking about how expensive WF could be, and I'd said noncommittally, "Oh, you know they carry a lot of expensive items, but you can shop there inexpensively too." When he countered with "Besides, I like chemicals. No really... Chemicals are way better for you than biology. That's something environmentalists always forget; biology can kill you. Microbes cause more deaths than chemicals 100 to 1!"

It's interesting to me... the more I think about things the more they tend to become closer together; lines get fuzzier and I see lots of connections. I love the idea of this guy and the clarity of his delineations; of a camp supporting the biological and the chemical, especially in light of this very difficult neighborhood dispute all about the inter-connected issues of empowerment, identity, community and access. Go Biology! Go!