Pansy: September 2006 Archives

I would comment in an email to Rachel, but I really something to blog about. This is something that comes up a lot in Catholic circles, and I actually find it interesting why it becomes so heated. Very often I find it is used as one of those "good Catholic" litmus tests, i.e. "You allow your kids to watch Disney? We never!"

I actually do not believe that the few people who stop buying mega products like General Mills cereal, or stop buying Disney tapes do much economic harm to a company. I do feel, however, if you know a certain company strongly backs a view you find contrary to your beliefs, you certainly don't have to give your hard-earned money to that company. That's your prerogative.

I think it gets sticky when people start expecting others to start rejecting Cheerios or Stoneyfield yogurt with them. It is hard to find the exact companies that give to Planned Parenthood for example, and start abandoning them all. Not impossible. Just to me, it takes much energy that I really need for other things.

But I have nothing. Everyone else has clever things to say about current event issues and I have nothing of great intelligence to add.

This is the only thing on my mind lately:

Fastolph: Moooo---oooooom! Posco called me Stupid Feet!

Me:Excuse me?

Fastolph:He...called...me...Stupid Feet!

Me: Um, wow. I am very sorry he called you Stupid Feet. (Trying to comprehend exactly what that means. He didn't say Posco "said I have have stupid feet," but he called him stupid feet. So far it sounds like the dumbest insult in the history of the world.)

Fastolph:Oh, so what? You think it's OK for him to call me Stupid Feet? You agree with him?

Me:No, of course not. But Fastolph, can you tell me what that means?

Fastolph: puts his head down and shrugs shoulders I don't know.

As far as the cancer treatment goes, my father seems to be doing quite well, but he is still in a great deal of pain. His bone scan last week revealed 2 slipped discs and a number of fractured ribs, and other small fractures throughout his bones-hence the pain. A few prayers would be most helpful. Thanks.

I had an OB/Gyn check-up yesterday, and all looks well. I still have not gained any weight, which I am cooler with than my doctor. I mean if I cannot eat chocolate, is there anything to eat in life? Let me think about that a sec...No. Nope, I don't think so.

My finger stick numbers have still been really good, but they are starting to creep up. This morning I really, really wanted oatmeal. A few weeks ago, the same recipe of oatmeal had me around 119 after an hour, today it was 156. Oops. (For the gestationally diabetic illiterate, one hour finger sticks are supposed to range from 90-130). So I may need a bit of insulin towards the end. I don't mind because it allows me to eat. (And I also get a strange enjoyment out of grossing my family out by sticking needles in my stomach before dinner.) Before I was on insulin when I was pregnant with Fredregar, a quarter cup of brown rice sent my sugars on a tail spin.

I also have dreadful insomnia. Our house never really shuts down at night. There are always bathroom trips, people sleep walking, babies getting up, and whenever there is a disturbance, I am up. I don't want to be up, but there I am-up.

Health issues aside (which are very good, Deo Gratias), I am getting big. I went to Tar-zhey to look at some maternity clothes. I have none. I packed them all away in a special maternity clothes been for the next time around, and I think my husband mistook it for a different bin and shipped it to the Salvation Army. So someone is enjoying my cute, black maternity halter dress at an economical price. I think maternity clothes are the biggest rip off in the history of the world. You wear them for a few months and that's it. But you need them because you don't want to go through life in your husband's sweat shirts. So you know what I bought today? A set of sweats. I almost cried spending money on a friggin' set of maternity sweats. I needed something casual to do my morning run, er morning walk, morning waddle in. And just to be around the house. Everything else was really, really nice, but a bit too nice for homeschooling and peanut butter sandwiches.

I have to get on the phone and call my midwife so I can get the birth plans in order.

This is what I get from the last messages. People are often stronger than they know, bigger, more gallant than they'd guess. And this: We're all lucky to be here today and able to say what deserves saying, and if you say it a lot, it won't make it common and so unheard, but known and absorbed.

HT:Curt Jester

Yesterday I got the opportunity to meet Alicia and her husband, John. We met them for Mass at Auriesville, and then we went out to breakfast at a local diner (I think an argument can be made that it is the only diner in Amsterdam). I have to say they are genuinely nice people. Not that I thought otherwise, but you spend so much time running into grumpy person, to grumpy person, nice people are a stark contrast.

Rosey Posey was working, so we just had the boys. The two youngest boys behaved like barbarians. They were terrible. I think Fredegar woke up too early. He didn't even giggle at the site of pancakes. My poor husband aspend a lot of time "taking them out". John and Alicia just would pick them up, and tell their horror stories and adventures of raising six kids. They actually enjoyed picking up my boys and pretended they were cute kids. I was impressed that John seemed to love the babies as much as Alicia (I also found it funny that he drove the mini-van and she drove the PT Cruiser).

A reader wrote in:

This Back to Sleep stuff drives me nuts.  I don't know why it is safer, but it can be really hard to get some babies to sleep on their backs.  I have two daughters, 3 and 2 1/2 weeks, who both refuse to sleep on their backs.  Both will sleep for 3 hours or so (and have since birth) if laid on their stomachs, and both could, from birth, lift up their heads enough to switch the cheek that is on the mattress.  When, as a brand new mom, I tried to get my oldest to sleep on her back, I would put her down, and immediately she would throw her little fists up in the air, scrunch up her face, and let that newborn "you're hurting me!" scream go.  After one tearful and sleepless night, my husband and I acquiesced to her desire to sleep on her stomach and have had no sleep problems with her since. 

So the question is, what do educators and parental counselors or whatever do with a baby like this?  According to both my mother and my mother-in-law, my husband, I, and our siblings were all this way.  I imagine that things like this are underrepresented in studies because we parents are often made to feel like bad parents when we can't get our children to do this.  It just frustrates me to read these things when I know that it is just not possible sometimes.

Pamela Pilch's reply from her pediatrician:

All this stuff is really hard because we are talking about statistics and not individual kids.  The way I think about it is like this:

All of us who were babies in the 60's, 70's and 80's slept on our bellies.  For those of us born in the 60's and 70's, our parents also never put us in car seats.  Car seats do save lives, because you will never know (heaven forbid) if you will get in a car crash.  "Back to Sleep" has also saved lives.  We now tell people to put their babies
down on their backs, because we can never know if their kid is going to be the one in a million who will have this faulty "wake up cause you don't have enough oxygen!" control center in their brain.  Of course there are known risk factors for SIDS...but even if you are a wealthy/non smoking/breastfeeding family, there are still SIDS cases in
those situations.

I never, ever, ever had a baby who slept on their back. Ever. I hate sleeping on my back. I feel like I'm suffocating, hence why I am up at 11PM, 3 AM, 4 AM blogging: because it is hard to lie on your stomach pregnant and sleep.

When my brothers were born in '83, '85, '87, and my son in '89, the trend was stomach sleeping. When my daughter was born in '93, the trend was side or back, but not stomach. I suppose that is still accurate. If you had the opportunity to take care of babies consistently for like 20 years, you will notice trends start out, get refuted as "bad mothering", and come back into the mainstream. I am not so stupid that I don't understand that there is more evidence supporting the "back to sleep" thing as opposed to what Grandma says versus what her granddaughter claims. But I also question if this research looks at parenting a baby as a whole.

I mentioned, I rarely had a child who sleeps on their back. But I also never had a baby who would allow me to put them down for the first year. Naps have always been in my arms. We don't even own a crib. I had two plus an Arm's Reach Co-Sleeper. They became stuffed animal bins. Not one child of mine allowed me to put them in a crib. I started co-sleeping with my first not because I wanted to take a hardline AP political stance, but because I had a colicky child who left me incredibly sleep deprived, and this was the only way to get any kind of sleep. If I do get 20 minutes with a baby napping out of my arms, they wake up when I am not in their vicinty, especially if I am not in the same room. So yes, occasionally, if the planets are aligned correctly, and if no one else in the house breathes too hard, I might be able to put my child down, and if the breezes are especially non-turbulent, maybe on their back.

I am wondering how prone to SIDS a baby is that spends 85% (at least) of their time if not in their mother's arms, someone's arms? This as opposed to a child who is in daycare, for example?

Pamela's last words on this entry:

I also think there is another issue here - not specifically brought up by my reader, but a concern to many parents.  What if parents are so sleep-deprived that they NEED their infant to sleep more so they don't go nuts?  The reason belly-sleeping was initiated in the first place was because babies DO sleep longer and more deeply that way.  It's just that babies are not necessarily supposed to sleep that long and deeply.  But parents are exhausted.  What do we do about that?

20 minutes every couple of weeks...

I am not militantly anti-back-sleeper or anything. I just think some of these hard fast rules about what good mothers do are very difficult to translate into practical terms. Personally, I think parenting decisions have to make sense. I don't believe Grandma's advice is always best becasue that is how they have been doing it for years. Breast over bottle, in my opinion, is more sensical-it is cheaper, less work, and stimulates a bond with the baby. If you have to work, it may not be more practical. Cloth diapering is cheaper, but it may be more work if you have 4 kids in diapers. Car seats always make sense, because first and foremost, the alternative is illegal. Past that, I am not even sure the subject needs to be pursued. If you have a term baby from a healthy pregnancy that is in a non-smoking home, with no history of SIDS that absolutely will not sleep on their backs-what does common sense say? Or more to the point, what are mothers going to do in that situation?

I know I should not even read because it is never anything good.

Sep. 07 (CWNews.com) - The office of Catholic Charities in Albany, New York, is pursuing a lawsuit challenging regulations that require insurance coverage for contraception.

"We're being forced to pay for something that represents what we teach against and what we think is sinful," said Michael Costello, a lawyer for Catholic Charities.

To date, the suit has been unsuccessful. Two New York courts have ruled that Catholic Charities does not qualify for an exemption from the law because it is not a religious employer. The courts have noted that Catholic Charities hires and serves people of all faiths.

So if I got a job sweeping the floors at a Hallal Meat Market, and I wanted him to sell me pork chops, can I sue him? I love pork and I'm not Muslim.

Why do people who have such disdain for the Church and Church policies even seek out jobs at places called "Catholic Charities"? My analogy above isn't the best, but the point is, I would not seek employment from a place with a religious affiliation whose rules cannot be reconciled with my lifestyle.

By requiring CC to provide birth control, it is not enforcing a sense of separation of Church and state, it is simply choosing one religion (secular humanism) to override another. I thought the reason why Europeans came to the New World so long ago was to live in a place where that could be avoided.

HT: Curt Jester

People are just incapable of seeing a lovely baby and getting all warm and gushy inside like the rest of us. They have to come up with stupid crap like this to spoil it for everyone.

HT again: Angry Zen Master

Ohmygosh! Suri Cruise is so cute!

Update: The Superficial has a picture of Optimus up. I don't know. What's up with his feet? They look like metal ET feet.

Lots to say over at Angry Zen Master blog on this very pressing subject! Warning: the language is kind of profane.
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It is not looking good for The Transformers movie.

Exhibit A:
Megatron looks really stupid.
I am going have to say the Superficial's interpretation of how he looks may be vulgar, but quite accurate.

Exhibit B:
The tidbits in this Shia LeBouf interview starting with:

There's a lot of stuff... you know, there's new robots that he'll create. Or he'll take something like Soundwave and turn it into Soundbyte and it'll become something else.

I don't care, set the movie back in the 80s and make it retro. Please don't do what you did to Megatron to Soundwave. Please...

There are certain things, like Megatron wasn't a jet, you know?

Yes I know! Any self-respecting, self-claimed, geeky Transformers fan knows Megatron ain't no dang jet! I read somewhere (can't find it) that they decided to make him a jet because when the toy comes out they are afraid the gun will influence kids to play with guns or something. I grew up on Transformers, I never shot anybody.

A few years ago, my husband bought a reissued Megatron toy directly from Japan (they didn't make them here). It took like three months to get here partly because of customs problems because it looks like a real handgun; in a package with a plastic front and cartoon drawings (that is how guns nuts buy guns-from Japan don't you know). It is so cool. Gosh, I hope he still has it and my mother-in-law's boyfriend didn't steal it and sell it for .50 cents for crack money.

But back to the "kids with Gun-Megatron" thing, you know, I don't even think that whole line of thought deserves any credence. You don't like warring giant robots for your kids, the stay away from the Transformers. But don't torture the rest of us by changing Megatron. Characters like Megatron, Galvatron, Shockwave are big shooty things. Thundercracker, Starscream, Skyfire are cool jet guys (although, isn't Skyfire afraid of heights?). Transformer history was changed when Megatron sucker shot Optimus killing him and initiating the horrible chain of events that gave us Rotimus Prime. (But that is OK because there was not a sweeter moment then when Optimus came back to life, and Rotimus handed the Matrix back). So what, is he going to fly over him in this movie?

"Ooh Optimus, I can fly and you can just drive around!" Wow. Entertaining.

Exhibit C:

I don't even have to comment on this, the corn is so self-explanatory:

QUINT: You know... I sat down with Bay before shooting and he told me that the whole hook for him with this project wasn't the robots or the action. He said it was the human story, specifically your story, what he called the All-American story of a kid getting his first car.

SHIA LABEOUF: When I met with him he said the same thing. That's why I was into it. I mean, yes it was TRANSFORMERS and oh shit! You're taking me to meet with Michael Bay, but then he was like, "It's a coming of age story."

That is what The Transformers was always and we didn't know it-a coming of age story. I thought it was about giant robots in a war and coming to earth disguised as earth vehicles.

I just stumbled on this blog Wake Up Black America.

I was particularly appreciative of his entry on Bill Cosby's latest speech.

A few months ago, I posted about about a horrific child abuse story involving a mother, the child of course and paramour. No I am not some kind of strange child-abuse junkie (totally swore off late night Discovery Channel), but whenever I sit down at breakfast, open the front page of the paper, here are these stories.Years ago it seemed you would hear about one of these stories every ten years, now it is every ten weeks. Whenever I read them, I feel like someone hits me in the chest with a sledgehammer, and I walk around with that "ummph" feeling for a couple of days. Then I wonder if there is something I can do...

In our local paper on Saturday, we were graced with another front-page story about a 16-year old and her boyfriend abusing their (or her? they do not specify, but simply refer to him as "boyfriend") child. Again, to summarize without having to read the gory details, the boyfriend is in custody, the baby is recovering in the hospital, and they are looking at prosecuting the mother as well.

The reason why I wanted to blog this is because I found the end of the aricle interesting:

The case is one in a rash of child abuse around the Capital Region by inexperienced, young parents and their companions.

"We have to break this cycle earlier," said Albany Police Chief James Tuffey, who blames parents for ignoring their teenage children.

"There's a serious problem," Tuffey said. "We as a society have gone soft and we have to return the envelope, in particular, to parents and say 'postage due.' My parents knew where I was at 9 p.m."

Without my usual "family values" tirade, I am sure you can guess what I am thinking.

Fredegar had his first dental appointment yesterday. It was actually quite cute because he refused to open his mouth. The cute wasn't the non-mouth opening, it was that typical baby confusion when confronted with something completely new. I never get tired of that. He didn't fuss or complain, and the dental hygenist gave him a new toothbrush and tried very hard to get him to open, and he did for a few seconds under protest.

I watched him knowing what was going through his little mind. He was ticked off. First I woke him up early (the appointment was at 8 AM), and he, like RoseyPosey and my husband are not morning people. So that annoyed him. Then he had these weird people trying to see his teeth. The situation looked a lot like when the vet tries to look at a dog's teeth, and all you get is a glimpse of a canine and a gum because all the dog will allow is the vet to lift up his lip, and pull their head away.

Before going into the office, I had to fill out all that fun paperwork, you know, medical history, insurance info, the really exciting stuff. Part of one of their many three-page questionnaires was "What is your ethnicity? (circle one)". Then it went one to list races, not ethnicities: caucasian, hispanic, asian, native american, or black. I hate this question because I find it useless and devisive. I hate that they are too stupid to know the difference between a race and ethnicity, and I hate that after they have the nerve to ask, then they tell you to "circle one". So according to them, I have to decide if my mother's, or husband's, or father's blood is more important, and I have to do so to make them more comfortable with what I am. If that is the case, then they should ask "What is your race?" and have one choice: "human". Wow, imagine that, we will all pick the same thing! So, sometimes I pick "other", but there is usually a disclosure that says if I refuse to pick, then whoever takes the paperwork will make a judgement on what I look like and pick for me, so I circled everything except "native american".

The next question was "what is your primary language?" Okay, I can see the fairness of this. There is a large Hispanic community here, the Amish community is not that far, so if they need a translator, this knowledge might be of some service. I chose English because that is the right answer. But the next question annoyed me again: "what is your secondary language?" How is this pertinent to my son's dental care? It's not. If I can communicate and understand "brush everyday and no fruit snacks" with ease, who cares? So I thought of writing "ecclesiastical Latin" in the "other" box, but decided against it because despite trying to teach it in our homeschool for years now and attending Latin mass, it just isn't very good. So that would be a bit misleading. My husband was dissappointed that I didn't.

Next are they going to ask "what kind of ethnic food do you like to eat," and have the choices "curry and roti", "beans and rice", "lasagna" and I would write "pancakes, sausage and maple syrup" in the "other" category because although it seems like basic American food, it is ethnic American food. Trying to find a place that serves pancakes for breakfast in many other countries is like trying to find Pat Thai in the middle of the country roads of upstate NY.

I was just very grateful my husband was not with me so she could state the usual "your boyfriend can come in too" when she announced they were ready for Fredegar's appointment.