Parenting

That's Thing 1 playing Daddy with my doll Camilla in a Baby Bjorn. Thing 2 looks on from a pram.

Run to the Anti-Racist Parent blog and read Mamita Mala's take on the parenting fad known as 'babywearing'in The Racial and Economic Politics of Babywearing :

Many, if not most indigenous and people of color communities around the globe wear their babies. From the continents of Asia, the Americas and Africa, indigenous women from ancient times wore their babies, mostly so that they could get back to the daily chores of life while taking care of their young. Babywearing was practical. So practical in fact, that on those continents, it is considered an act of the lower, poor classes. After all, wealthy women had people to do their chores for them, including carrying and taking care of their babies.

And it’s that fact that makes the whole babywearing movement in the U.S. so interesting. The babywearing community is mostly white and upper middle class to upper class and they better be. Wearing your baby doesn’t come cheap. Simple pouches can run 70 dollars and up. “Asian” style carriers are in the 80 dollar range and wraps, long pieces of cloth , are 100 dollars plus. On web boards and at meetings, mama’s show off their stashes of different kinds of babywearing gear, which includes special coats, vests, covers and leg-warmers for wearing your baby in the winter.

I have been meaning to write this one for a while now, but it's not just my blogADD that has kept me away from this discussion. I just so get emotionally pissed off about this subject that it becomes unbearable to try to write everything that comes shooting by my brain. Yet Nance here point to a post by Amanda Marcotte that has pissed me off so royally that I have to respond to it.

In the comments Amanda insists that she allegedly has no problems with either stay at home mothers or homeschoolers; yet in her writing she betrays herself. When she opens up her post with and I quote, "This interview in Newsweek with Laura Derrick, the president of the National Home Educator’s Network, was even fluffier than I expected it would be when I opened the link", you know that her expectation was to see a piece excoriating the "different path" of homeschooling.

It goes downhill from there because she conflates her contempt for xian fundamentalists with homeschooling:

I didn’t expect the interviewer to hammer at Derrick about the issue of whether or not it’s wise for people to homeschool their kids if they are doing so with the intention of teaching them that Noah had a pet dinosaur or that Jesus founded America (and therefore feed them into upper echelon jobs in the Justice Department), but I figured it would at least come up. No luck, though.

In the next paragraph her cluelessness about homeschooling shows with flying color when she claims to know that homeschooling is gaining steam in the left. Ahh ... hmmm ... see ... no!

Homeschooling has never been an either/or proposition for people in the left or right. It has been always a proposition for radicals; especially radicals who have a strong libertarian political background. There's conservative libertarians, Christian libertarians and then people like me, who Chris Nolan has most famously described as Social/Progressive Libertarians.

The problem is that christian fundamentalist homeschoolers in this country have had a well funded public relations machine. That's it. That's all.

The HSDLA was the pet project of Michael Farris, one of the signers of the Manifesto for a Christian Church; which really should be read as a manifesto for a extremist American theocracy.

But you already suspected as much.

I'm writing this on Mother's Day, a day that is filled with joy and also bittersweet for this year my grandsons and granddaughter have been given their freedom, the freedom to live without fear, without danger, without verbal or physical abuse, without the scourge that drugs bring into a home, without hunger or wanting of a different life, a better life, a secure and safe life, a home to call their own, a bedroom in which to lay their heads at night and know the nightmare is over, that they are wrapped up in the bosom of the love of a family who will do everything in our power to show them it doesn't have to be the way it has been for so many years, that peace and freedom are theirs now, that they have a future they only dreamed of, that it has finally come, the day of liberation for them, a glorious day.

My son has been in a custody fight for his children for several months, it's been a difficult time but has come to a happy ending but it brings with it the pain of a mother who has lost her way and hope by those who have watched that she finds a better way.

I say bittersweet in the title because this Mother's Day is a day of hope and wonder, the hope of dreams lost coming true, the hope that we can turn away from drugs and alcohol, the hope that we will find it in us to reach further than a glass pipe or a bottle, the hope that we have it in us to do better for our children, the hope that we can save ourselves and thus save our children. That the we that once was my son and me becomes the we for my daughter-in-law as well.

I WAS WAITING FOR MY SANDWICH at Subway®, and I heard a woman on the phone with her daughter. I knew it was her daughter because she was on the phone from the time my bread was cut in half to the time it was slid into a wax paper bag. It was all I could do to keep from interrupting her and telling her how to raise her daughter. But I have found in the past that people are not always happy to get this kind of input. And I was unsure as to whether my message would get through to her at all, given our differences in class and race. So I bit my tongue and listened to another child being slowly murdered with the toxic sweetness of a parents' insecurities.

My sandwich was delicious. But I did not enjoy it.

"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared," he said. "... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."

I have had several interesting discussions around here about global warming. Of course we get the foolish denial lobby drones who yammer “it’s a myth” despite the overwhelming scientific evidence, and I merely deal with them with a slap down, fools that they are. But there also is the legitimate discussions of what can we do—as a society, as individuals. We have a 10 year window according to top scientific and economic experts coming at the question from different angles. We have a 10 year window.

I have expressed how one of my main motivators for personal action is my son. I would say my step-daughter as well, and that is also true. By my son is 2…and completely dependent on my for everything, so the need for me to care and act based on that care is so striking with my baby. So I look at my son and feel a huge responsibility. I consider the 10 year window to MITIGATE global warming’s effect on my son’s world. It is already too late to stop the effects. We would have to have acted when scientists first were telling us we should act. But we didn’t. So we now have a 10 year window to mitigate.

The analogy I use is I consider my great-grandparents and grand parents who worked hard so their children would have a better life. I feel I must work hard to give my children a life that isn’t significantly worse than mine. That is where we are, starkly and realistically. There are huge hurdles, but also huge opportunities.

No, not on the edge as in excitement and fun. More on the edge of sleep about 24 hours a day. Never really awake, never really able to sleep well. Living with a baby, and the brain suffers.

So there we were, ready to get ready to dress up to go to the special reception to meet John and Teresa Heinz Kerry on their book tour. We had told our son, Jacob, that we were meeting John Kerry and he was excited. He has no idea who Kerry is, but he remembers meeting Bill Clinton and he LOVED that. So he was excited. "We are go-ing to meet John Ker-ry...going to take a TRAIN." Yeah, taking a train was also part of the excitement.

So we were all ready to meet Kerry.

Until I saw Michael Bouldin's diary describing the very event we were about to go to...which actually happened yesterday.

D'oh! Only that is the polite version of what I said upon realizing I had gotten the day wrong.

Sleep deprevation is par for the course when you have a baby. And sleep deprevation is cumulative. It has been well over 2 years since I routinely got a good night's sleep and the cumulative effects show...memory declines, motivation declines. About the only thing that can get us to Manhattan in the evenings these days is Bill Clinton or John Kerry. I can assure you Hillary or Chuck wouldn't be enough to inspire us to make the trek and give up even a small amount of sleep.

As someone who not only suffered as a child the trauma of a bad marriage but also the trauma of my parents awful divorce, my heart goes out to Andrew Giuliani. In an interview this past weekend, the always candid son of the Rudester, talked about the strained relationship he has with his father :

New York Daily News - Politics - Rudy's son: 'I got my values from my mother':

"I got my values from my mother," 21-year-old Andrew Giuliani told ABC in an interview quoted on "Good Morning America" yesterday, the same day the Daily News spotlighted the rift between the former mayor and his only son.

"She's a strong influence in my life," Andrew Giuliani said of his mother, Donna Hanover, seemingly drawing a contrast between her and Rudy Giuliani. "She's a strong woman."

As The NY Times aptly points out, Giuliani's children are nowhere mentioned on his campaign site, an omission that has not been missed by GOP contenders like Mitt Romney, who is vying for the conservative-est of them all.

But Giuliani, in trying to be hip has just declared to news wires that it's just a normal problem facing blended families : "I believe that these problems with blended families, you know, are challenges — sometimes they are," he said. "The more privacy I can have for my family, the better we are going to be able to deal with all these difficulties."

Yeaaaaaah. Riiiiiight.

I, Liza Michelle Sabater-Tirado, am the father of Anna Nicole Smith's daughter, Dannielynn.

It was a freak accident of telepathic autogenesis that made me the father of Anna's daugher. Seriously. Since the father of my children doesn't want more kids, I was using all my mental abilities to immaculately conceive the baby girl I want so much. Unfortunately my powers got transferred to Anna Nicole.

We've gone to town with the news of Mary Cheney's pregnancy. We are so full of cheer we went ahead and created a whole cornucopia of baby shower gifts for the happy mom, her out-of-law wife and their baby to be.

There's more stuff at our Mary Cheney Baby store, but it's just a start. Would you like to add to the fun? Then go to town with your photoshop!

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