girl with flat hat

Proof

2010-09-12T22:30:00.002-04:00

I ran a 5k last week. Finished in 38:29, which means I am slow, but I finished and I had fun. (Picture credit: North Street Studios.)

The mosque thing

2010-08-23T16:56:00.002-04:00

Yeah, I disappear for two months and then come back and write a political post, which is always a mistake. Oh well. This is half to share good links and half to expound my typically wishy-washy opinion.

First, links. They're better than what I have to say anyway. First, an article by the boss of a sort of second-degree friend on why the mosque actually helps us, national security-wise. The National Security Mosque.

Also: a comment from a National Review Online writer (dissenting from the majority view on NRO) that blocking the mosque would violate all kinds of conservative principles. A Very Long Post on Cordoba House (but read it all).

Salient paragraph from the latter: "Part of supporting limited government is understanding that sometimes, things you don’t like will happen, and the government (especially the federal government) won’t do anything about it. Getting to do what you want comes at the price of other people getting to do what they want—including build mosques where you’d prefer they didn’t." This is basically where I come down. The First Amendment means nothing if it doesn't mean that acts of speech and religious worship that offend or disturb someone aren't protected. You have a constitutional right to freedom of expression; you don't have a constitutional right not to be offended. As a Christian, and especially in my younger days when I participated in a high school Bible study that the school district decided to kick off campus for a year because they thought they had the legal right and/or obligation to do so, and as a descendant of all kinds of religious minorities who weren't always welcomed with open arms but found religious freedom in spite of nativist impulses (I mean Jews and Catholics, and also I'm descended from Quakers who got the heck out of England for similar reasons), I value my religious freedom. It would be hypocritical of me to deny it to anyone else.

This doesn't mean I'm totally comfortable with the idea of a Muslim religious center in that location (I am not proud to say this, but it makes me a bit uneasy), or that other people who live in New York or were more personally affected by 9/11 than I was don't have the right to voice their own grievances - their feelings may not be entirely rational, but they don't have to be rational to be legitimate. I often feel the strain between my desire to accept Muslims fully - and I've taught classes or sections of classes about Islam and had Muslim students and colleagues; I'm in a position that tolerance is important and necessary - and my anger at the violence Muslim extremists have committed. I also acknowledge that if the purpose of Cordoba House is to build bridges, it's a purpose that's clearly not being fulfilled. This is not really fair, since they can't determine how other people will receive them, but there's no way to begin public relations other than with the public's perception of you.

That aside, though, I'm becoming rather appalled at where public perception stands. I was not a big Bush fan and on the whole he probably did more harm than good in terms of winning the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide, but he did set the tone right after 9/11 of distinguishing a radical fringe of Muslim extremists from the vast majority of American Muslims who are good people and live in harmony with people of other faiths. We've regressed in the last nine years to the point that few people feel even the need to make that distinction, whether in sincerity or as a politically correct veneer (which perhaps it always was for many people). I don't know where this is leading, but probably nowhere good.

Last day of spring

2010-06-21T11:44:00.003-04:00

These were taken yesterday. Summer begins today. Here in Connecticut it's felt like summer for about a month. Seattle, I'm told, is still having what is typical winter weather. So never mind where the earth's axis is leaning.

These were taken with my new (to me, but used) digital SLR which I just got to replace the one whose fussy autofocus has annoyed me for the past four years. We have a trip coming up and I figured this was as good a time as any to upgrade. More on that soon.

Graduation

2010-06-11T22:54:00.002-04:00

This is about three weeks late. And I never got all the pictures up on Smugmug, due to technical issues, but most of them are there. They're all on Facebook, and most of my blog readers are on Facebook now, so I have been really lazy about posting them, but then I remembered Justin's mom might not even have seen them and there is something wrong with that. So here's one. More here. I am mostly over the relief since we're moving on to the next half dozen stressful things we have to deal with (including now we have to pay off the loans or at least go through the hoops to get Yale to do it for a while), but YAY YAY YAY YAY YAY.

Antics

2010-04-20T20:29:00.004-04:00

First of all, for those of you who have not seen my new Facebook profile picture: LAW PROM. Very exciting for a girl who didn't go to her senior prom.

We got a babysitter and a hotel room for the night. Apparently the hotel room was the subject of much gossip. To which: 1. Is it what you're thinking? OF COURSE it's what you're thinking. Duh. Like that stops when you have kids. (I was wondering if people really believe this when I discovered how stroller-unfriendly the nearest Victoria's Secret is. I'm pushing a toddler in a stroller; what need would I have to see the lingerie? I've mostly given up on VS for other reasons, to be summed up in two letters and two numbers: 34DD. Contrary to what you'd expect, not a very suitable establishment for the well endowed. Anyway.) 2. Think about it: do we really want to come home from a dance with an OPEN BAR at 2 AM and drive home the babysitter? No, we do not. Thus, we got a hotel room. And it was worth every penny. Justin also got me a corsage, a red rose, chocolate, took off my coat and opened the doors at all the right times, etc. Way better than that senior prom I didn't go to.

* * *

Auletta has been hiding garlic and shallots under her pillow. "Why?" I asked. "Because," she replied. Vampires? I don't know.

* * *

I have begun running, or alternating walking with very slow jogging, according to this plan. I always thought I hated running. I don't know that I like running exactly, but I now draw a distinction between a. running and b. seventh-grade gym teachers taking their class outside one day and telling them to run a mile and then giving bad grades to the wheezy dorks who couldn't do it.

* * *

Annoying things my child has been saying:

"OH! MY! GOD! OH! MY! GOD! OH! MY! GOD! OH! MY! GOD! OH! MY! GOD! OH! MY! GOD!"

That things are "stupid."

"But MOMMY!" in an extremely whiny voice.

First two: do not say things you do not want to say your kids to say. It is true. The last one? Since I have not ever whined "But MOMMY!" in my child's hearing, she figured that one out for herself.

* * *

Graduation: May 24. 34 days. I know my friend Anne has been counting down the days her husband graduates from law school since he began. I can now count the days until Justin graduates without the use of complex calculations, astrolabes, etc. Also, we are beginning to receive gentle notes from student lenders reminding us that we will have to repay them. Yale actually has a loan repayment program for graduates earning below a certain amount, which will apply to us. The income threshold is the same for married couples, so this gives me incentive not to work, or not too much. Isn't that odd? I thought Yale would be more progressive about this, or maybe they're encouraging the husbands of their female graduates to stay at home with the kids. Yes, I'm sure that's it.

Spring

2010-04-08T20:59:00.002-04:00

The cherry trees in Wooster Square bloomed this week - Tuesday, to be exact.

I suspect they'll be well past their prime by the time the Cherry Blossom Festival rolls around next weekend, so I went out yesterday to take pictures with Auletta. It was in the mid 70s. My fingers are crossed this warmth wave won't be the last we'll see of summer till July, like last year.

Auletta will be two and a half on Saturday, so pretend I'm still taking pictures on significant baby birthdays the way I used to.

More pictures here.

Gay marriage in DC

2010-03-03T15:24:00.002-05:00

Legal today. Chief Justice Roberts denied a petition for a stay to prevent the law from going into effect. As someone on Volokh commented, "This is just another extremist right wing ruling from the most extreme of right wing...Oh, wait a minute..."

I am feeling S-M-R-T from my law knowledge by osmosis (fifty thousand dollars a year, I might as well learn something too) that I know what it means for Roberts to act as circuit justice for DC, which seems to be confusing some people on twitter (HE'S NOT A CIRCUIT JUDGE YOU IDIOT! well duh). Isn't the judicial system neat? I am looking forward to our little inside angle next year.

Christmas 2009

2010-01-05T14:52:00.003-05:00

Some pictures, finally.

Auletta: not really getting the milk-for-Santa routine.

Signing a note for Santa.

Success! The haul:

Somehow we can never get a family Christmas picture where Auletta doesn't look extremely annoyed to be related to us, but here's the best we could do:

Auletta at Swedish Breakfast (see here for further info about the things we eat, or try to avoid eating--what's funny about this is I didn't know that despite the fact neither Justin nor I has found an almond since we got married, I was pregnant with Auletta when I wrote this post):

Whitney looks very dubious about the God Jul pudding, which he shouldn't be, because he found the almond in about two seconds flat.

More here.

2010 eve

2009-12-31T22:09:00.002-05:00

I already know that 2010 will be the year of A Lot of Stuff Happening, so I don't really know what else to say about that. My resolutions mainly have to do with food, and the cooking and eating of it. And so it goes. I am eagerly anticipating the coming year, not just because of the changes I know are coming, but because 365 days from now we will have a better idea of what will be coming in 2011. And now that I think of it, at the beginning of the year three years ago I had no idea I'd be a mother by the end of it, so this year could be filled with surprises too. Good ones, I hope. Happy new year to all of you and may it be filled with good surprises.

Sigh.

2009-12-16T21:34:00.004-05:00

From xkcd.

I'm very busy these days, not saying anything online. Look at me not saying anything! (By the way, if you're reading this, it's probably not about you, unless you followed me over here from the one blog where I did kind of say something but not really.)

UPDATE: Fell off the wagon. Oh well.

A B C B E B B, next time what you ARE!

2009-12-11T16:11:00.004-05:00

Or something like that. Was I worried earlier this year about how little Auletta was talking? Well, I'm over that.

When Auletta's pediatrician asked at her two-year checkup how many words she knew (vs. like three at 18 months), I said, "More than I can count." Which is about right. And every day she surprises one of us with a new word she knows. Yesterday, we were at the library and she came across a toy elephant and said "Ellphant!" Did not know she knew that.

She counts to ten, sometimes, although for a while she did not recognize the existence of five.

She knows the names of everyone in Justin's family. Thanksgiving was the first time she could name everyone. On every trip to Ithaca for the previous few months she'd pick up one or two names, not necessarily in proportion to how much she adores the person in question--e.g. she learned Soren before Harry, even though she is mad about Harry. But even in Seattle she would just spontaneously be riding along in the car and start chanting HARRY HARRY HARRY HARRY. Despite her love for Harry, she is less exclusive now and no longer spurns her Granny or Papa most of her aunts and uncles. And on my side she loves everyone as well, especially Katie and Gompa. Yes, she continued the family tradition of calling her grandfather Gompa, except on my side rather than Justin's. She also calls his Gompa Gompa. Fortunately the two sides of the family rarely meet, so there's little opportunity for confusion. What is more confusing is when she calls random men over fifty Papa or Gompa, but we're working on that.

And I finally let her watch TV, with predictable results. First BARNEY (ugh) then ELMO then CAILLOU CAILLOU CAILLOU, then PUZZY (Sponge Bob, who is on a puzzle she has), then SIMSIMS, from our DVD collection, and we're hoping she doesn't discover FAMILY GUY or SOUTH PARK. She still simultaneously loves Caillou, Puzzy, and Simsims. Oh, and VeggieTales (TALES).

WATCH

2009-11-17T18:04:00.002-05:00

Because Rainn Wilson, my fellow Shorecrest alum, told you to. And because it's a catchy song. And because this is all one continuous shot!

NYLA 2009: My first library conference!

2009-10-16T19:54:00.003-04:00

This week I spent about a day, or two half-days, at the 2009 New York Library Association conference in Niagara Falls. The theme of the conference was "Libraries: Peace, Love & Freedom," and many of the vendors and NYLA division booths were decked with tie-dye, lava lamps, peace signs, and other hippie paraphernalia. There were also some sessions on intellectual freedom in libraries and other relevant issues, although I only made it to two panels due to time constraints. I must poke gentle fun at the theme, having lived a bit too long in Berkeley, but it was a colorful theme and I got a neat pair and a half of socks!

I volunteered at the iSchool booth when I first arrived, chatting with prospective students and alumni. I also attended two conference sessions. One was a panel of representatives from library schools around the state, talking about what's going on in their programs. Megan Oakleaf, my professor for 605, represented Syracuse and discussed the cooperative projects between students and libraries in IST 613, Library Planning, Marketing, & Assessment, which I'll be taking next semester. I'm glad I went to that, because it got me thinking about what I might do for my project. I also went to a session on Living History Through Social Networking, which discussed the use of social networking tools to teach information literacy. See the wiki here. I learned a lot about Twitter especially that I didn't already know, and now I have a better idea of how to use it both personally and professionally.

The best part of the conference was the SU reception for students, faculty, and alumni on Thursday night. Not just because of the wine! but also because I got to meet alumni and other students. As a distance student, it's easy to feel isolated from other people, so I really enjoyed interacting with people in person, and especially meeting students who began the program this fall on campus and are in roughly the same place that I am. It's also interesting to hear perspectives on how courses are taught in person vs. online.

It also occurred to me that conferences are like the gateway week in the summer (or maybe it's the other way around!) - you can get away from the distractions of daily life for a few days (and I've discovered as I go on how many distractions we distance students have, especially jobs, families, and kids) and dive head first into the exciting world of librarianship. It's really invigorating; as I did after IST 511, I came home full of ideas and enthusiasm for the path I'm headed down. I also discovered that sections of NYLA such as ASLS (academic and special libraries) have their own little conferences, and the ASLS is having theirs in my husband's hometown of Ithaca next June, so I have a lot more of these to look forward to!

I poop on your holiday!

2009-10-12T15:03:00.003-04:00

So today is Columbus Day, a.k.a. Columbus Cold Murdered All the Indigenous Peoples Day. The Ithaca paper had a front-page story about how schools are shockingly teaching all about the Dark Side of Columbus, which is not so shocking to me since my progressive schools were teaching me all about the Dark Side of Columbus and Other Europeans 25 years ago.

What did shock me was when I moved to Wooster Square and found out there were still people who considered Columbus Day a holiday, not just a day off but a festive holiday i.e. Italians, i.e. my people, or a quarter of my people. In 1892, before Columbus became un-PC, the Italian immigrants of New Haven erected a statue of Columbus in Wooster Square which stands to this day, and on this very day I can tell you (though I am not there) that it is festooned with all sorts of flowers and banners donated by the continually present Italian community of New Haven. Also the Knights of Columbus is headquartered in New Haven. So Columbus is kind of a big deelio.

Why? Well, because Columbus was, very broadly speaking, the first Italian-American, and while it might be more appropriate for our people to celebrate Mother Cabrini, this was before her canonization or even her death, so...there you go. And there is something to celebrate, after all, about being Italian in America, which is pretty cool, especially for southern Italians (such as my great-grandparents) who, like many immigrants, came here to escape poverty and provide their descendants with opportunities they didn't have in their native land. Italians are one of the American success stories, maintaining their identity, their traditions, and sometimes (to my surprise as I wander around Wooster) their language, while becoming at the same time fully acculturated Americans. Columbus Day is the day when Italian-Americans celebrate being Italian and American--which, not having grown up in a place with a critical mass of Italians, I never realized they had a day for until I moved to Wooster Square.

Which is not to negate the very real historical consequences of Columbus, the murder and often annihilation of entire native cultures by war, massacre, smallpox, and the like, and the herding of remaining peoples onto tiny reservations on land nobody else wanted. Italians have had it pretty good; we don't really need a holiday. But I wonder if this is a zero-sum game, if on this day our collective conscience must so outweigh any other consideration that there is not a sliver of space for us to celebrate what was good in what came after, which considering how good pizza is, you'd think maybe there would be, just a little. So I can pass on to my one-eighth Italian daughter with the Italian surname for a first name and the birthday that will often fall on Columbus Day weekend, or what is left of it after all the significance has been wrung out of it and we're left with guilt and no mail--sorry, that was a long sentence, but so I can pass on to her a little tiny bit of pride in being Italian-American, which whatever our ancestral sins is still a neat thing to be.

Auletta is two!

2009-10-12T14:59:00.001-04:00

She turned two on Saturday. And I would totally have pictures, except I stayed in Ithaca and sent Justin home with the computer that has the photo editing software on it. So, no pictures for another week, unless I snag a trial version of Photoshop Elements on my new baby computer, which by the way I love because it is RED and it is MINE and it does not have dozens of vertical LINES running down its dull screen after its three-year warranty has EXPIRED.

Auletta is super duper cute, and very opinionated, and I'll write more about her maybe sometime after I write my next post.

In Which Girl With Flat Hat is Outed, or Where Do I Live Again?

2009-10-07T16:28:00.004-04:00

I googled "girl with flat hat" today for the first time in, oh, ever, and wow maybe I should do that more often. I am on the DC Blogs blog feed because I used to live kind of near D.C., I mean a lot closer than I do now, and they feature a few posts every day in DC Blogs Noted. I had no idea, but Guess what our baby has two of? and When two toddlers meet in the night were both featured. I think they go for the catchy titles.

Also Girl With Flat Hat is listed on the NY blogroll of Net Right Nation, Your Unique Portal to the Conservative Blogosphere. So I guess it's true what you already suspected, that my pretensions to (how do you state a negative?) moderate-ness (moderation), unaffiliation, centrism, etc. are lies, all lies! Well, actually I just scanned the blogroll and there is a blog called BOLDLY LIBERAL on there, which is, so maybe it's just really easy to fool them.

Where do I live? Not New York or D.C., at least not at the moment.

In far more important news (TODDLER STAT ALERT!): Auletta had her two-year checkup today. She is 31 3/4" tall, 22 lb. 11 oz., and has a 49 cm head. 10/10/80 on the percentiles. Two flu shots and a clean bill of health. Feel the love.

Ahead: Upstate

2009-09-23T21:40:00.002-04:00

So I feel like writing a more reflective post, now that I am past my initial state of shock and crazy happiness. I mean I burst into happy tears when Justin got off the phone with the judge Friday morning. I complain about New Haven, which rivals Berkeley for my least favorite place I've ever lived (for different reasons, mostly), but it is an awesome thing to get into Yale Law School, and an awesome thing to clerk for an appellate judge. Everyone who gets to do these things is qualified, but not everyone who is qualified gets to do them, so it is all a mix of luck and timing and fitting someone's idea of what they want their entering class/group of clerks to look like. So we are really fortunate. I keep saying "we" when of course Justin's doing these things and I am here because he's here, while doing most of the caretaking for Auletta and my own studies, but obviously what he does affects me, and I can't tell you how glad I am that he will be clerking for a federal judge, who is really just all around a great person and a good fit for Justin professionally and personally, and in Geneseo, which is 1. not here and 2. in upstate New York, where as you've probably noticed we spend a lot of time already.

Now, I totally stole this map off the Internetz and modified it so those of you who aren't familiar with upstate NY could get an idea of where we are headed and where it is in relation to the other places we go upstate. I placed green dots over the towns of Ithaca, Geneseo, and Syracuse, and also over the approximate location of New Haven over in Connecticut.

As you can see, Ithaca is in south-central New York, on the southern end of Cayuga Lake, which is one of the Finger Lakes. Syracuse, where I'm doing my MSLIS and where I'm spending some time physically even though it's a distance program, is about an hour northeast of Ithaca. Geneseo's not much farther in a northwestern direction from Ithaca physically, but since there are a bunch of lakes in the way, it takes about two hours to drive there. And a little under two hours from Geneseo to Syracuse. Geneseo is a town of about 9,000 people with a SUNY school, so it's small but it's a college town, which is the kind of place we like (except it's really small, even compared to Ithaca, so maybe we don't know what we're getting into). That's about all I can tell you about it. Also it's about 45 minutes from Rochester, where I have some family and where we'll fly in and out of when we fly places. No more I-95 to get everywhere, thank goodness (the worst part of being here is getting out).

Now, going places. The Second Circuit's seat is in New York City, so the judges hear arguments there for a week each month and the clerks go along. That means I'll be alone with Auletta in Geneseo for a week each month, or we'll hang out in Ithaca, or maybe I can come along...but this all depends on what I'm doing--I might take a class each semester at Syracuse (feasible if it meets once a week), and I will probably do an internship in/near Geneseo at some point. But this, on top of the fact that a Job is much less flexible, schedule-wise, than law school, means daily life will change a lot, so it will take some getting used to.

Also it will be cold, the full import of which I have not yet realized, although winter here hasn't been a picnic either.

But I am so excited! We are really both small-town people, or at least suburb-type people. I loved Charlottesville to pieces, although it was the sort of place that drove some people crazy because it wasn't a very big city and it was a couple hours from the nearest metropolis. I think this next year will be great for us, and I'm just hoping we like wherever we're headed after that as much.

YAY!

2009-09-18T11:48:00.003-04:00

Justin will be clerking for an federal appeals judge in Geneseo, NY in 2010-2011. This job is so perfect for us in so many ways that we are ridiculously excited and thrilled and everything and just wow. Yay.

Tense

2009-09-10T21:13:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow at 10:00 AM, federal judges can officially begin contacting 3L applicants to clerkships to schedule interviews. ACK.

30 Years of Awesome

2009-09-05T15:48:00.002-04:00

Happy birthday, sweetie!

I take most of the pictures, so I'm not in any of the good ones, but here are a bunch of pictures of the best daddy ever and the cutest baby ever.

Political Views: For more information regarding this space, please contact the owner

2009-09-03T20:40:00.004-04:00

I have been trying to think of a replacement for the current description of my political views on my Facebook profile ("Philippe for America. He is five." which is a reference to Achewood), one that would be accurate, pithy, and inoffensive to potential future employers or other people who are easily offended, so good luck with that I guess. Back when you had to choose your political views from a pull-down menu, I wanted to say something like "I refuse to conform to your arbitrary categories!" Because if you see "Republican" or "Democrat" in that space, you're going to think you know what I think, right? Even if I say "moderate," it might be the case that (as Stephen Carter described himself) I have extreme positions on both the left and right ends of the spectrum.

I mean, take for example, that I'm pro-life (or anti-abortion, I guess, with a million caveats, which already makes me uncategorizable). Do you now think

1. I am pro-death penalty
2. I am anti-gay marriage

?

Because I'm not. You might have assumed so. But why? What do those things have to do with each other, or with other political positions on economics, foreign policy, and so on? I mean, there is the religious explanation, except that there are religious views on both sides of all those issues, and in fact there are certainly religious institutions that agree with me on the first point and at least one if not both of the latter two, like hello the one with which I and 20-25% of this country's population are affiliated (if you read the Catholic Church's position on the death penalty as opposed in most if not all circumstances, which is my understanding from my Catholic moral theology class). And gosh, it would be nice if either major party represented the whole of Catholic political theology, wouldn't it? But neither one does, which accounts for some but not all of my dilemma.

I believe political parties are necessary for people to affiliate broadly in order to elect representatives who share similar views and for those representatives to cooperate to get things done. I think their utility ends, however, when we start pigeonholing people into one of two categories, with a few outliers in third parties (none of which really represent my views, either).

The sad thing is, so many people do fall into those categories, and we get so used to being able to predict one person's entire set of views based on their position on one issue (because honestly, a lot of people regularly fail to surprise me) that our brains explode when we meet some weirdo who doesn't conform to our expectations. I am guilty of this too. But this is what it means to think for yourself, isn't it, that nobody else is going to be able to guess what you think?

(And conveniently, I'm writing this two days before the thirtieth birthday of my favorite unpredictable thinker!)

Cute shoes (well, kind of) for ugly shoe people

2009-09-01T10:44:00.010-04:00

Let's talk about shoes. Like any other female, I love shoes, but my shoe collection is not as big as my other accessory collections--in fact, I have more scarves than shoes, even though you don't need scarves to leave the house. (Well, maybe in New England in the winter you do.) Why? I have awful feet. They're wide, if not double-wide, like little mobile homes, and they have high arches and insteps, so while I may covet cute shoes in the abstract, these are out:

These are "Something Blue" Manolo Blahniks, and they're more expensive than my wedding dress. I can live without those anyway. I also walk a lot, a couple miles a day on average, and I supinate, so the outside heel of my shoes always wears out first. Thus I need shoes with thick soles that I can comfortably walk in for a long time. So these are out too (and unlike Blahniks, I would really love to wear these--of course, they also cost about as much as my wedding dress):

Ah, Lanvins, you are lovely but your soles are about a millimeter thick. Also you cost a lot, and that's before heel taps.

So I wear ugly shoes. Here are some of my favorites:

These are a few seasons old, but I LOVE these Keen St. Barts slides. I have issues with flip-flops, too, by the way (can't stand having the thong between my toes), so these are great because they don't have the thong, they're slides, they're waterproof, and the blue is really pretty. Also, the toe guards are great for people who tend to walk into things a lot. And like all Keens, they're super comfy--just buy half a size up. Their Newport and Venice styles have ankle straps, which is nice for longer walks. I have my eye on these purple ones. (I'm obsessed with purple lately. I'm not into pink, but my love for purple proves I really am a girl.)

I have a black pair of Keen Seattles (discontinued now, I think, but how could I resist those?) that I wear in cooler weather. But they are a few years old and starting to look not so black. So for this fall I got a pair of Privo Jerries.

I was biased against Clarks for a long time (Privo is a subdivision of Clarks) because I went to a wedding in England conveniently located near a huge Clarks outlet, and when I went there I could hardly find anything that worked for me--just a pair of boots I later got rid of because they weren't really that comfortable. But Privos seem to work for me, although I wish they did extra-wide sizes. I really like these so far.

Other brands I like include Rockport, Walking Cradles, Merrell (although they don't do enough wide sizes), and Hush Puppies. Danskos are okay, but I seem to be squarely in between sizes 37 and 38, and I also find my ankles wobble in them a lot (did I mention I have weak ankles?), although gosh those are an easy way to gain an extra couple of inches of height.

And what about these guys?

I am like the only Schwab who does not regularly wear Crocs (this includes my daughter). I do have a pair, but I love my Keens best. But why all the haterade for Crocs? They are great for ugly-shoe-needing people (Justin wears them because he has problem feet too, although mostly the opposite problems of mine), and they come in all kinds of fun colors, and they're comfortable and durable and...what's wrong with that? Seriously? When I hate shoes it's because they hurt my feet (and my whole body depends on my feet!), not because they're fugly. Hating ugly shoes is a luxury for people with normal feet. Crocs make a lot of people's feet happy. Don't hate.

Now on Twitter

2009-08-28T18:39:00.002-04:00

I'm girlwithflathat on twitter. Twitter is one of those things that everyone uses of which I'm not exactly sure what the point is yet, and maybe everyone else who uses it just uses it because they think they should. Now I am too. So if you're one of the...I mean, the one person I know who's not on Facebook (ahem, Deanna) and therefore can't see my status updates, now you can read my mindless blurts as tweets. I am bad at texting and can never fit anything I want to say into 140 characters, but maybe I need practice being concise.

Auletta's great-grandparents Auletta

2009-08-14T22:30:00.003-04:00

I didn't post about this earlier, but a couple of weeks ago we took the ferry to Long Island to visit my mom's parents, Martha and Victor Auletta, from whose side of the family their great-granddaughter takes her name. Auletta was not all about sitting still long enough to have her picture taken with both of them.

But she did interact with both of them.

And she really liked playing the game of Bringing You Stuff with Grandpa.

Best of all, there was cake.

And other adventures.

A few observations on politics

2009-08-14T16:23:00.003-04:00

And then I will shut up again, really. This is neither an endorsement nor a criticism of Obamacare. I think I've mentioned before that I don't think our current health care system is tenable and a solely employer-based system is unrealistic when people change jobs so often, so I'm in favor of reform done well. Take that as you will.

1. "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism" apparently only applies when you agree with the dissent.

2. Apparently there is such a thing as illegitimate, manufactured, Astroturfy dissent. I don't know what the difference is between real dissent and fake dissent, except I guess see #1 above. Also if the other side is illegitimate, you don't have to make an argument, and it's clear a lot of people would rather prove the other side wrong than prove themselves right, because proving yourself right involves so little kvetching at the other side, not to mention if your objective is to support your own argument there's no reason to insert the obligatory (old, lame, uncreative, un-demanding of actual thought) dig at Fox News and/or Rush, which by the way, there should be a Godwin's Law for.

3. Democrats control the White House, the House, and the Senate. So if they can't pass a health care plan, isn't it their own fault? In fact, isn't it convenient that these town hall meetings are distracting from the fact that they can't agree on a plan? Yes, I know getting a diverse party to agree on a huge reform plan is hard, but that's their JOB. If you are concerned that health care isn't going to pass, maybe instead of whining about how big evil mean conservatives are pooping all over the Democrats' plan, your time would be better spent writing your representatives and telling them to stop acting like babies and govern. You don't get to play the victim anymore when you're in charge. That's the rub when you win. I don't blame you for complaining from 2001 to 2009, and it's not like Republicans did any better with immigration reform, social security, etc. when they were in charge, but CHANGE would involve doing better, wouldn't it? I am bored by partisan chatter. Want my vote next time around? Lead.

More beach pictures

2009-08-13T14:40:00.002-04:00

Auletta finally worked up the nerve to wade a little bit yesterday, although every time a wave came too near her, she would quickly back up, point at the ocean, and yell "No no no no no!" But she was really enthusiastic about the bubbles.

Before I post the cute pics, I want to mention a few other cute things she's been saying:

"Gi-go" for "thank you," and also for "here you go." Sometimes if she wants to give me something she says "GI GO!" very insistently.

Anything she believes is hers, which is most things she gets her hands on, is MYS.

She also sings "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" all the time. Not that all the words are recognizable (I can hear "how I" and "up a"), but she definitely has the tune down, as much as any nearly two-year-old does.

On the beach

2009-08-12T15:03:00.002-04:00

We're in Oak Island, NC, for a week, hanging out on the beach. Auletta has warmed up to the idea of sand but is still skeptical about water. Here are some pictures. I love her little bathing costume, although it's a little big, since I bought it last summer before I knew she would be a tiny toddler.

Syracuse: yay

2009-08-01T14:42:00.002-04:00

If you want to see what I did all last week, read all about it at my library blog, Vivarium.

I had a great time. I am so, so glad I left Auletta with the Schwabs for the week, and my only regret was bringing our car, which turned out to be unnecessary, since I didn't go back to Ithaca. I thought about going back, or having Justin bring her up, during my evening break between my two classes (I had a one-credit course Saturday and Sunday and a three-credit course Monday through Friday), but I figured it would almost be worse to see her and then have to say goodbye, especially because she wouldn't be asleep when I left as she was when I left the day before classes began. So I left her for seven whole days, and she did just fine with all of Justin's family, and I got to concentrate on my classes. It was actually less work than I'd expected, or maybe about as much work but less stressful, I think because I didn't have the distractions of husband/kid/household etc. to worry about.

Auletta is finally fully weaned and sleeping through the night. I nursed her for 21 months, which surpassed my goal of a year and then however long we both felt like it, and while I miss it just a tiny bit, it makes life easier. It is a little weird, physically. I gained weight rather rapidly in the process of weaning her, so I need to do something about that. Fortunately the weather is finally great, so we are getting outside a lot.

More sentences

2009-07-21T15:16:00.002-04:00

I am away from Auletta for a week :( :( :( (I'm at Syracuse, more than that later), but apparently she now stands outside the bathroom and says "I gotta pee." And who knows, maybe she does; she's still in diapers, obviously. "I gotta pee" and "I love fries" are both subject + verb sentences, so that is cool, but bodily functions and fatty foods, hmm.

In which my daughter tries to feng shui me

2009-07-13T21:30:00.002-04:00

Except for a twinge of jealousy I had a few days ago when I found out one of Auletta's friends, who is not quite a year and a half old, is starting to learn the alphabet--Auletta used to think every letter was A, and now thinks every letter is whatever I told her the last letter was--I am more than happy with Auletta's language development now. She has busted out of the world of nouns and is starting to use verbs, such as "walk," "nurse" (soon to become obsolete), "throw," and "move." Auletta's favorite hobby now is demanding that I move to whatever location she has determined appropriate. At the playground, she has me go on the swing and slide while she watches. Also, in anticipation of being left for a week, she insists I carry her everywhere.

Despite my attempts at avoiding cute diminutives, we say "cuppy," "uppy," and "doggy." But the word acquisition continues apace, so I can't complain. Except she calls the ceiling fan "fries" for some reason. Maybe because she likes it. We were pretty convinced she was repeatedly saying "I love fries" when we were at the Greater Schwabs a week or so ago and, um, feeding her fries. She knows "apple," "cheese," and "Cheerio," too, so we're not just feeding her junk food.

But surely you are here for the pictures!

This is with my Aunt Gloria. I am posting this one just so you don't miss Auletta sticking her finger up her nose.

Five years!

2009-07-06T21:57:00.003-04:00

I am a little late to post this, because I was celebrating my anniversary on my anniversary instead of blogging, but last Friday, July 3, was our fifth anniversary. We went to La Tourelle Resort and Spa outside of Ithaca (where our beloved John Thomas Steakhouse is also located), had various relaxing spa treatments, ate some great food, watched the fireworks at Ithaca College from our balcony, and got a night away from Auletta, who stayed with the greater Schwabs. It was a blissful 24 hours, and now that we've left Auletta overnight, I'm much less anxious about leaving her for a week later this month, and I'm thinking we should do this every year.

Then we went with the family to Lehman's baseball tournament in Perry, New York. Justin and I let Auletta ride with the rest of the family and meandered our way through the Finger Lakes, stopping for dinner at Glenora Wine Cellars.

We watched baseball over the weekend and went up to Rochester to visit my Aunt Gloria, my cousins Kim and James, and their families, and that's where this picture was taken, about as close to our fifth anniversary as you'll get.

Five years, and may there be fifty more!

And now for something completely different

2009-06-18T20:40:00.003-04:00

So I might have mentioned back in November or December that I was busy with some other project, and you might have been wondering what project I could have besides raising my daughter. I was studying for the GRE--again; I took it back on November 1, 1997, and the reason I can tell you the exact day is that our neighbors had a freaking loud Halloween party until 3 AM the night before, so after three hours of sleep I drove half an hour to Bothell, which was not my first choice of testing site, to take one of the last regular paper administrations of the GRE, because I am old-fashioned like that. And they gave me three analytic sections, the bastards, which fried my brain. But somehow I did fine and a couple of grad schools let me go there and the rest is history.

Then ten years later I took the GRE on a computer (and found out my verbal and math scores immediately--nice!), with a writing section instead of a brain-thrashing logic section (YAY because if I cannot write an essay on a test after teaching students how to write essays on tests, then I should be shot), and I did better overall, especially on the verbal section (YAY because if I do not have an awesome vocabulary after teaching students Greek and Latin roots, then I should be shot). So, yes, that was two paragraphs of me talking about how great I am at taking standardized tests, which I realize is completely obnoxious, but I've spent so much of my life honing that one basically useless-in-real-life skill that I am going to do those two paragraphs and I've got it out of my system now, thanks.

Oh, but why on earth did I take the GRE again?

Well, back when I was in college I applied to library school, got in, and decided not to go, instead working in an office for a year and then going to grad school in religious studies. Which, all in all, I would not take back for the world because it got me 1. Virginia 2. Justin 3. Auletta, not necessarily in order of importance, plus a lot of great educational experience, travels, new friends, and who knows what all else would have been different from staying in Seattle, which I would have if I'd gone to library school. But in the last couple of years, a few things have been nudging at me: 1. if I can check a zillion books out of the library but barely write a page of my dissertation, maybe research is not what I should be doing so much as helping other people research, 2. anyone who knows me, including, well, me, knows I am the sort of person you would have expected to be a librarian since birth, and 3. having a masters in library science would be a good way to get a job, if not my dream job as an academic librarian, anywhere we end up, and probably a much more humane job for a mom of one or more children than whatever teaching job I can procure in a shaky market in some proximity to whatever Justin's doing. So I applied to library science programs, and if you don't have a PhD yet (ahem) you have to take the GRE to do that.

Obviously there is a catch here, which is that we're in New Haven for the next year and who knows where after that, and the MLS is usually a two-year program. Actually another thing that planted this idea in my mind is that Southern Connecticut State University, which was even closer than Yale to our original carriage-house home in Woodbridge, has a library science program, but it's not ranked and I figured I could get into a top-ranked school. Now the best library science programs, weirdly, aren't at Ivy League schools or anything. Yale doesn't even have one, which is a shame because it has an awesome library system with two Gutenberg Bibles even, in case they need a spare. Here are the top for library science programs:

1. University of Illinois
1. (tied) University of North Carolina
3. Syracuse University
4. University of Washington

Count them: there are three schools there out of four to which I have some kind of geographical or familial connection. Of those four, all but UNC have some sort of distance-learning program. ! I decided Illinois was out because their online program requires a residency every term and what the heck am I going to do in Urbana, but the other three were possibilities: if nothing else I could depend on the kindness of Justin's extensive family in Chapel Hill to get me through the first year of their program and long-distance marriage, except in the end I decided that was crazy.

So ultimately I decided to go to Syracuse because 1. I got in 2. with a little funding 3. to a school that's an hour from Ithaca and only requires a one-week residency this summer, although I can take courses on campus whenever I want and 4. third is not that much lower than tied for first when I don't have to rearrange my life around third. Also when I visited everyone seemed really nice and happy, and one thing I've learned in my many, many years of grad school is that being a happy student among happy students is a really important consideration.

Thus, next month I am leaving Auletta with Justin and the greater Schwabs for a week while I do an intensive residency in Syracuse, and that will be the beginning of approximately two years of study (various moves, present and possibly future children, etc. permitting) leading to a master's in library science and, with any luck, a position as an academic librarian, ideally in a seminary or div school (I've talked to a couple of librarians at YDS about my prospects and I think I'll be well prepared) but we'll see where we end up.

I started a blog called Vivarium a couple of months ago because it seems like library blogging is The Thing to Do, and, not surprisingly, creating a blog is one of my first assignments. Looks like I'm on top of that. I will be using it a lot for class assignments, so those of you who read GWFH might find it excruciatingly boring, but you can follow along if you like. I am debating whether to keep it on Blogger because blogger is (pro) free but (con) has kind of lame layout options, and also I'm not sure I want my professional profile to be connected to my occasionally political-ranting, tortured-sentence-writing, mommy-blogger profile, but since I'm sure all these universes will collide on Facebook in a matter of moments there is probably no use trying to untangle all the weird strands of my life.

Auletta among the alumni

2009-06-08T19:08:00.003-04:00

Auletta had a nice visit to the Cornell Law School alumni barbecue on Saturday. There was another occasion on Saturday, but we won't mention that. (Deanna, thanks for the card, and it should be noted that I am never too drunk to read, although I have been drunk enough to think I can read Persian.) By the way, everyone, we drank the Luckystone Red last night. It is awesome and if we were the sort of people who had a table wine, that would be it.

Wine

2009-06-02T18:22:00.002-04:00

To lighten things up, maybe I should discuss why I wrote a post last night about why we can't all just get along and love each other and stuff--I had a lot of wine yesterday! We're visiting Justin's family in Ithaca, as you've probably noticed we often do. As an early birthday celebration, Justin and I borrowed his sister Weatherly for the day as a designated driver and toured wineries along Cayuga Lake. For future reference, since otherwise I'm sure I'll forget, here are the highlights of those we visited:

Swedish Hill Winery: Riesling! (they all have great Rieslings, but this is the only place we bought any) and I think one called Just Peachy! that Justin really liked (it wasn't one of the wines I tried) and we brought home because I thought it smelled good even though I didn't taste it. I also thought their Reserve Chardonnay was lovely, and their Svetska Red is good for a sweeter red (usually not to my taste because sweet reds remind me of communion wine).

Goose Watch Winery: My favorites were their Chambourcin (which in this case I tried but Justin didn't) and their pear wine. It's on a hill overlooking the lake and has frontage, so you can get their by boat. A group of half a dozen college-age guys and girls called from the lakefront and wanted someone to pick them up, but seeing as the only person there was the one server, they didn't get a ride, and they were complaining about it when they came up, despite their appearance of robust health and the fact that it couldn't possibly have been that bad. Or rather, the guys were complaining. Anyway, the server was underage--I think this was the case at another winery, which seems kind of weird, but then there are a ton of wineries in a sparsely populated area so it must be hard to find employees, and it was a Monday, and she was really nice--we did buy more at the wineries where the servers were old enough to drink and thus to tell us what the wines were like.

Thirsty Owl Wine Company: This was the only place that really blew us away with their reds (although of course they had a good Riesling too). We took home bottles of their Syrah and Cab/Syrah/Malbec blend, and had both of them plus their Pinot Noir shipped to Dad. I think the overall quality of the wines was highest here, at least to my unsophisticated palate.

Hosmer Winery: Somehow we managed to bust out of here just with a bottle of Estate Red, a pleasant table wine.

Finally we staggered to Sheldrake Point Vineyard, which has an enormous selection of wines. We really liked the Gewuerztraminer and the Luckystone Red, another nice blend. Then we ate dinner at the winery's restaurant, Simply Red, where Monday nights are Southern night--cornbread, beans, and ribs, yum!

Not a bad way to spend a summer day, all in all.

My only pro-life thought for the moment

2009-06-01T20:12:00.005-04:00

I know if I shoot my mouth (fingers?) off now or ever I'll regret it, so I'm just going to say this, and I've said essentially the same thing before:

Be motivated by love.

Because a lot of people aren't. It's obviously when they have a gun in their hand. It's not as obvious when they have a keyboard. I see a lot of people on both sides of every issue who are clearly more driven by anger than they are by love. This is not in response really even to the assassination of George Tiller (though that is the catalyst), but to everything I've been observing from reading blogs and books and articles about politics lately. I think both sides of most debates are driven by anger right now--Republicans more so than they once were, and the Democrats less, but both more than I in good conscience can claim any identity with. I think party affiliation is probably necessary for some people in order for parties to exist and in order for our government to function, but I can't be a part of it. That doesn't mean I don't vote, obviously, it just means I can't be a part of the machinery that drives the system. Some people can. More power to them. But that in the end is why I feel political involvement is un-Christian--not because any particular position of either party is antithetical to my beliefs (though some of both parties are), but because I don't think I could be a member of either one and still fulfill the commandment to love. At times I am not sure if anyone else can either. I am not sure how anyone can claim any political affiliation and be active in a political party or political movement and still fulfill the qualifications of love not to keep a record of wrongs or to rejoice in evil (the evil of the other side being necessary to fuel the rhetoric of one's own, it seems). To say nothing of words like hatred, rage, and hell (specifically, that certain people should go there) that are thrown about with no regard to how arrogant and toxic those words are.

Even such extreme rhetoric aside, is there any room for the kind of love Jesus and Paul talk about in partisan politics? Is there any way around this dilemma? And understand, as always, I'm not saying I'm an exemplary person, spiritually or otherwise, and this may merely be an excuse for my political indifference at the moment, but the more I think about it, the truer it seems. When I get into political debates, I don't feel any better--in fact, I feel horrible about myself, even if I'm convinced I'm right--and it makes me a crankier person toward those in my life whom I love, let alone the people I'm debating. So I have to hold myself back. And I wonder if other people should too. Because if Jesus is right and the commandment not to kill extends to the anger we have toward others, then aren't we all left holding the gun?

Words!

2009-05-25T20:32:00.002-04:00

Auletta is starting to use more recognizable English words. Yay! Here is what we have so far:

-Ball, cup, baby, and boo! as previously established (cup has morphed into "cuppy," maybe a conflation of cup and sippy?)
-Eye
-Toe
-"Bo-bo" or something like that for "belly button," to which we sometimes refer as "bee-bo" as per The Belly Button Book, which you must read
-Nose (pronounced "no," usually)
-Phone (pronounced "po")
-A fricative "ch" sound for "duck" (her version of "quack")
-In answer to "What does a lion say?": Roh!
-In answer to "What does a bee say?": Bizz
-Uh-oh! (which she learned from one of her toddler friends)
-Some approximation of "up," "down," "dog," "bird," and probably others I don't recognize yet

She also refers to every letter of the alphabet as "A!" I went to much effort to teach her to say A and eye, both of which she first pronounced as "eee," which is understandable because A and eye are both diphthongs and probably harder to pronounce. Now she pronounces both with great precision. Lacking subtlety, she also pokes us in the eye a lot.

A selection of pictures from your blog hostess, who for once has been busier taking pictures than blogging

2009-05-03T14:33:00.004-04:00

For some reason I went for a while taking fewer pictures and being less into photography than I was for a while. Maybe it's because winter in New Haven is so nasty (especially this last one) that there really wasn't much light or opportunity. Anyway, we are having a real spring now, and I am excited because I thought I had lost my flash for a month there, but fortunately I had left it somewhere and they still had it, so I am not flash-less, not that I need a flash now so much. Anyway, here is cute kid overload for you, in several parts.

I. The beach. We went last weekend with Justin's brother Whitney and some other students from the law school. Auletta brought her BALL, a new one her granny & co. got her.

II. Hanging out at the Ithaca Farmer's Market with Kate and Dylan from Bleisenblog.

III. Selling lemonade with her uncles.

More pictures on SmugMug. By the way, some anonymous person used my referral to open an account and saved me $10 on my upcoming renewal, so whoever you are, if you're reading this, thank you!

Bumper stickers I have known

2009-04-23T20:48:00.003-04:00

I was at the Toyota dealership today (long story, but to summarize: Driveway 3, Schwabs 0), and I saw a Prius with a couple of bumper stickers: "Republicans for Voldemort," natch, and "Draft SUV Drivers First." Isn't the second one kind of piling on? I mean, you're already driving a Prius, which along with Apple ownership (um, yeah, my other computer is a MacBook) carries a reputation of smug superiority. (Not to knock hybrids; if someone just up and gave me a hybrid Camry, I'd be totally stoked. My dream car used to be a Civic hybrid, but I'm starting to realize that a compact car like our Corolla is not necessarily the best choice if you have more than one carseat, which we might someday--not making any promises or breaking any news in the near future, just saying.)

Oh, and man, I just remembered it was a green Prius. Really I think those bumper stickers are pretty redundant and you might as well save space on your bumper for "My cat didn't make the honor roll" which is much more clever anyhow (my favorite bumper sticker ever, at least before I had a kid who I am certain is Above Average).

A couple of days ago I saw an oldish-looking bumper sticker that said "I'm a Real Democrat!" which I'm assuming is some kind of Ned Lamont thing, but I wasn't here for that so I'm not sure. Real Democrats propose, the general electorate disposes. We strategically planned our residency in Connecticut so we won't vote in a senatorial election, unless for some reason I do not wish to contemplate we stay in this state past the summer of 2010, so y'all real Democrats can figure out what you want to do with Chris Dodd. Don't envy you that one.

Cherry Blossom Festival

2009-04-20T07:53:00.002-04:00

We're coming up on one year living in New Haven's Wooster Square neighborhood, which I was reminded of because we just went to our second Cherry Blossom Festival in the square. This time last year we had started the lease on our new place but hadn't moved in yet. Justin was busy with law school stuff, but Auletta and I went, ate pizza, and walked around the square.

She wore appropriate shoes for the occasion.

I thought I had posted pictures from when we went last year, but I checked my archives and I was wrong. So here you go.

Cup cup cup cup cup cup CUP cup cup

2009-04-17T22:10:00.004-04:00

Can you tell Auletta has a new word? She still likes to say "ball" too. We were at the playground the other day and a mom showed up with two kids, each with a BALL, which the mom kindly made them share. At that point I decided I should get Auletta her own ball, since it is pretty much the cheapest toy you can possibly buy, so now she has her $1.99 BALL and we are all happy. Except this morning when she woke up and I took her into the study where I knew the BALL was and as soon as she saw it, she burst into tears. Dude, toddlers.

She had her 18-month appointment yesterday, a bit after her actual 18-month birthday because they weren't scheduling appointments far enough ahead at her last regular checkup and then a month later when I was able to schedule it they were already booked for the week of her birthday. (And forget about booking her two-year appointment until July!) But as it turned out it was the first possible day that she could get her Hep A shot, so now she is all done with shots (except for flu shots) until kindergarten. She remains consistently large-headed at around the 80th percentile for head size, and consistently small at around 10th percentile for height and, um, under the 3rd percentile for weight. Her weight is the only thing I actually got a numerical measurement for, and she's still just shy of 20 pounds. (Which, like, this probably makes me an awful parent, but I turned around her carseat weeks ago because I just assumed she had grown since her last appointment. I mean she did, but she only gained half a pound. Boy are car trips easier, though.) Her pediatrician isn't really concerned because she's been consistently tiny and apparently toddlers often don't gain weight very rapidly at this age because they're moving around so much. But I do wonder whether I feed her enough. And then she throws her macaroni and cheese on the floor and that puts an end to my wondering.

This is not an 18-month picture either, but here is Auletta hosting a tea party (thanks to Granny for the awesome new table and chairs and tea set). It's hard to see, but Raggedy Ann is wearing a Tar Heels jersey, as well as the Robeez Auletta has finally outgrown. Be careful, Auletta thinks it's appropriate to drink from the teapot.

Eighteen months!

2009-04-10T19:33:00.006-04:00

No new pictures yet. I will try to get around to it this weekend.

We were in Ithaca this past weekend to watch the Tar Heels win the national championship. !!!! Hey, if my own alma mater can't have national championship sports teams, or even a decent football team anymore (they were good back when I was an undergrad, anyway), I might as well adopt my in-laws' team. I am just Tar Heel wed, but Auletta is Tar Heel born, yay. (Fairly recent picture below.)

Auletta's development usually leaps when we go to Ithaca (maybe that's one reason we go so often?). She is now (finally!) using words to refer to objects, at least a little bit. She now definitively says ball, referring to balls and other things that are round or appear to be round, and baby. Actually she was saying baby earlier, but we didn't know if she was talking about herself, or imaginary babies, or what. Now she uses it to refer to a baby doll she adopted in Mama Goose in Ithaca and which Granny kindly bought for her so as to make it legal, as well as to a Beanie Baby baby bear and a couple of other pink anthropomorphized baby-like stuffed animals she came about somehow--not from me, because I almost never buy her pink things, but she will occasionally insist on pink, so she's in touch with her inner girliness that her mean mommy tries to suppress.

Other than that, hmm. Lately instead of waving at faraway people who can't see her, she's starting to wave at people we pass on the street, which is very cute. Also she came very close to sleeping through the night before we went to Ithaca, but now we're back to square one as far as acting like an infant. Auletta never did that trick some babies too of sleeping through the night at some wildly early age and scamming their parents into thinking they have an exceptionally easy baby until suddenly they start teething or whatever and then there is, yet again, no sleep. She just never slept through the night to begin with. The up side is that 1. she just nurses and goes back to sleep--she's never kept us up fussing or anything, and 2. if I ever had any difficulty with insomnia or falling back asleep, boy am I over that now. And of course I'm sure if she had her own room (she sleep in our walk-in closet), things would be a lot different. But still, I'm hoping we can get her back to sleeping more or less through the night, because eight hours in a row of sleep would be AWESOME, and that is the one question everyone asks that I dread (in fact they've probably stopped asking because they just assume any child should be sleeping through the night by now, but really, it's kind of like "How is that dissertation going?" DON'T ASK.), and the one thing keeping her from being basically a very easygoing and awesome kid, which she is in every other respect.

The other thing, I guess, is that I am not even close to weaning her, although leaving her with other people for extended periods of time always goes well enough (as far as anyone tells me) that I wonder why I don't do it more often. Justin and I had a very nice few hours together sans baby walking around Cornell and then going to dinner at John Thomas on a date. A date! But still, for various reasons, I think I'm going to try to wean her over the next few months, at least to the point where she's not at all dependent on nursing, even if she still does occasionally. I just haven't had much reason yet, but on the other hand it would make life easier and she is approaching the age (I mean, for me; for other people maybe she's well past it, but whatever) where nursing her all the time is getting a little weird. I have no problem with extended nursing, and it's going as well as ever, but I think I'm getting to where I would like to be doing a lot less of it.

More getting out of the house

2009-03-30T18:45:00.002-04:00

These are from Friday, when nice weather coincided with neither of us feeling terrible. I took these using an 85mm lens that I've had for a while but is finally fun now that Auletta is moving around and I can take pictures at some distance from her. As you can see, her favorite thing to collect is sticks, and her favorite activity is doing stuff with leaves and dirt.

The Eric Carle Museum, or getting out of the house

2009-03-27T19:43:00.002-04:00

Auletta came down with a cold this week that Justin and I have also picked up. So despite being back in town, I've had to hold Auletta back from our usual toddler activities, which I hate to do because it's so nice to have something to structure our schedule around. (I forgot until yesterday that storytime was canceled this week anyway, so at least we weren't missing that.) But yesterday the three of us made a field trip to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, MA, about an hour and a half away. I don't know if Auletta appreciated the pictures, but there's a large open area at the entrance that she loved to explore while checking out the few other kids who were there, and their bookstore is amazing. It's not a huge museum, so it's a good place to take someone with a short attention span, like an 18-month-old, or her mom (I have been to a lot of museums but I always tire of them before I've seen everything).

A photo taken in the museum, with reluctance on a certain person's part:

Outside the museum, with (I think) scenic Hampshire College student housing in the background:

Why I argue

2009-03-26T19:20:00.004-04:00

As I'm sure everyone who knows me outside this blog knows, I am not a confrontational or argumentative person. I am shy. I like everyone to like me, so I try to anticipate and smooth over any possible conflict (which might be a positive spin on a passive-aggressive tendency that drives Justin insane, but fortunately for the rest of you, nobody else is married to me). I try to be nice, if only because I like people to be nice to me back.

On the other hand, I like to write, I like to craft arguments (much more for extracurricular topics than for papers, go figure), and therefore I like to go onto other people's blogs and argue with them. I don't go to the Democratic Underground (or for that matter Free Republic, to argue about whatever I disagree with them about, like illegal immigration or Obama being the antichrist, I haven't checked lately), because that would be an exercise in futility. I go to blogs by people who disagree with me but who might listen to what I say (or the commenters on those blogs, if they're there for the political debate and not just because they're friends with the blogger, in which case it seems to me to be crass to debate them. I mean, I don't want strangers picking fights with any of my friends who might post controversial comments on my blog, so I imagine the same would go for other bloggers, right?).

Today I read something on one of those blogs that made me wonder if the blogger had really been paying attention to anything I'd said, because it was such a mischaracterization of a belief I hold and have debated at length on that blog, making that generalization about everyone with whom that blogger disagrees. So I composed an elaborate response, which I had planned to email. But right now it's moldering in the purgatory of draftdom, because I'm wondering, why do I argue?

I'm not going to change anyone's mind. I think everyone who argues, or writes anything provocative, is certain their mind is not going to be changed substantially. I know I don't expect mine to be. So the point is either 1. to pick at each other without changing anyone's mind, which is the tone of political discourse currently (and probably always has been) and may be cathartic but in the end is basically pointless, a masturbatory sort of pleasure at best, or 2. to persuade your opponent not necessarily to agree with you, which is unlikely, but at least to understand why you believe what you believe. For example, I am opposed to abortion (in a moral if not in a legal sense) because of my deeply held beliefs about what life is and when it begins, not because I want to oppress women or have been bamboozled by the patriarchy into a false consciousness that makes me want to oppress women. Now it is possible, I suppose, that the latter reason really is why I oppose abortion, but it's condescending to assume that when I have given other reasons for my beliefs, not to mention that I resent the whole false consciousness business, which I think is just other women trying to replace the patriarchy with their own particular matriarchy whose terms they (conveniently) dictate, but never mind that. I won't beat one of my favorite dead horses right now.

In short: my point in arguing is to communicate clearly what I think and to convince them that I mean it. The point of doing so, I like to point out, is that however easy it may be to argue against what you would like your opponent's opinions and motivations to be, your argument will be a lot stronger, and more likely to persuade, if you argue against what those opinions and motives actually are.

But then, is it disingenuous of me to claim that I want my opponent's arguments to be stronger? Then they might win. The result, actually, is that I and my side will have to develop stronger arguments in response. And so on, ad infinitum? There is something about an infinite dialectic that appeals to me intellectually, like the infinite glosses and commentaries on scripture in Judaism and Christianity, but sometimes it would be nice for the subject to be closed. As with abortion. It would be really nice (from my perspective) if there were no more abortions, which would come about (but quite imperfectly, which ultimately is why I am reluctantly pro-choice in a pragmatic sense) if abortion were illegal, or if there were a way to persuade every woman with an unexpected pregnancy to carry to term and to provide homes for those infants (there are already homes for, um, healthy white infants, which nods at another one of my bugaboos), or if, hey, every woman had the self-confidence and self-control not to sleep with anyone who didn't want and trust to be the father of her children, and if every man knew the same expectation and the same sense of shame (shame is not always a bad thing!) that every women who is pregnant and alone undergoes, and had to account for what happened to his sperm after it left his body--an expectation to which they are rarely held, even by feminists, who long ago relinquished any sexual accountability they might have expected from men (yet again, another post) as long as that sex is consensual. Wow, there's a wild idea?

But you can gather from my sarcasm, and (I'll admit) the judgmental tone that now I am veering into territory where maybe I do in fact want to control people, in that I have a sexual ethic which is pretty narrow by today's standards, and my justification for it--that, religion aside, people in general and especially women would be a lot happier and better off if they followed it--probably depends at least somewhat on my own sense of self-righteousness. That's a fault to which religious people are prone, but so is everyone else, I've noticed. I have gotten by in life by behaving pretty well, being pretty intelligent, and being fairly decent to people, but those things usually come easily to me, which is not to brag, only to say that I can't really take credit for them, or expect everyone to do as I do.

But where was I? Before becoming distracted, I claimed that my objective in arguing was to strengthen my opponent's arguments, which I might or might not want in a direct sense, but it has the effect of 1. elevating the debate, one hopes, to a more refined and possibly productive level, at least angling toward closure even if we never reach it and 2. imprinting on the other side, and I hope also on mine, the belief that individuals, no matter how much we may disagree with them, have innate human dignity (you may guess I use this phrase for the same reason I hold my other beliefs) which demands that we listen to them and respond to what they are saying, not what we would like them to be saying, in which case we do not treat them as humans but merely foils to our own pontifications. Which is tempting to do anyway; I am always more interested in what I have to say than in listening to what the other side has to say. I devote much of my thought process to formulating what I am about to say in response to what I am not devoting as much attention to. (At least when you write, you can listen, then think; when you're debating in person you don't have that luxury. That's one reason marriage is hard.)

And in all this I haven't even mentioned the problems that plague most arguing on the Internet--the namecalling, ad hominem (ad mulierem?) attacks, et cetera. I would like to think I don't go there, but on occasion I'm sure I do, because I am always doing it in my head. About 90% of what I type never gets posted, because I am always editing out the inappropriate parts, and there are a lot of them. They tend to fall into the trap I've already discussed, convenient psychoanalyses of the person I'm debating, who would only say or believe such things because of various pathologies that, you know, I'm obviously not qualified to diagnose because 1. I'm not a psychiatrist and 2. I don't know them.

Every person is a mystery. I also don't think it's just religious people who are prone to dogmatism and absolute conviction of their beliefs that force the rest of the world to conform to the narrative they've already written, so that the person with whom you argue is no more than a character in your solipsistic universe. I mean, I have arguments in my mind with people who haven't even started them yet! But, but, but. Every person is a mystery. I discuss all these topics with Justin, whom I've known intimately for nearly seven years, and he still says things that surprise me. How do any of us know anyone else we only know through inflectionless words in 10 point Courier?

And perhaps I should end there. I haven't really come to a conclusion yet. I think I might just need to take a break from arguing for a while.

The bluest skies, sometimes

2009-03-18T16:29:00.002-04:00

For reasons I won't go into here, I always have really mixed feelings about visiting Seattle, which I do about twice a year. I moved at the right time in my life and don't expect to move back, although that is always a possibility. I miss certain things about it, not least my family and friends, but at the same time living here again, like visiting, would be good with a generous dollop of weird.

I took Auletta to Northgate Mall--which has changed so much! And Alderwood--virtually unrecognizable. But, anyway, Auletta threw a tantrum, fortunately just as the mall was opening and the only people there were seniors getting their exercise where it was dry, and no doubt many of them have had their own children who had public tantrums, as two ladies assured me. I'm sure I did. And it's possible my dad did too, since he was a toddler when Northgate opened. Does this make me feel old, or young?

I went into work with my sister today so I could take her car for the day. Auletta fell asleep in the car, so I sat for a while after we got home. Listened to the birds. How there is a symphony of Northwestern birds (nondescript brown things when you look at them) that makes this place sound different from anywhere else I've ever lived, where bugs shout in summer and winters are eerily silent.

It snowed early one morning and the flakes were enormous. I have never seen them that big, but here it happens often, with the temperature barely freezing. Snowflakes roll together into little cotton balls in the sky and drift downward, making snowfall appear more substantial in the air than on the warm ground, although this winter there was a lot of snow.

The P-I printed its final paper. What will happen to the globe? So little history here, and yet we cling to these pieces of it, the R on the Rainier Brewery, the glue pot that started the fire. I remember the Bubblator; someone's using it as a greenhouse now.

Every time we drive past the Ida Culver house on Greenwood, where my grandmother spent the last few years of her life, I feel like we should stop. My life in this city lacks something at its center, with my grandparents gone. I looked up their house on Google Earth and got down to street level; it's been entirely renovated and looks nothing like the retro-but-modern 1949 building my great-aunt designed. Seattle came of age at an awkward stage for the country in general, but something in me loves the Space Needle and my grandparents' house and other things that seem quaintly non-postmodern modern now. Modernity without the sense of irony that I cultivated growing up in Seattle a couple of decades later.

My great-great-grandfather moved to the Northwest in the late nineteenth century, which means my ancestors have lived here for most of the time that there have been whites here at all. My great-grandmother was the first of four generations in our family to attend the university. When the campus on Montlake was first established, the bookstore was in a coat closet in Denny Hall. The bookstore! I went there with Justin for the first time in years. I have gone there for as long as I can remember. I remember I used to peel the glue off the price tags and roll it into sticky little balls. Hmm, I was kind of a gross kid. You can't do that with price tags they've used at least since I was in college; I've tried. I haven't ventured on campus, I mean east of 15th, on this trip. I'm afraid my head would explode. I don't know how I can spend a total of seven years, plus lots of childhood excursions, in that place, and never go now. But I don't know how I can spend the first 26 years of my life in a city that I now visit so rarely.

Well at least there is a place for her on Sproul Plaza

2009-03-03T20:23:00.002-05:00

Perhaps she has another word. Whether intentionally or not, Auletta's been chanting what sounds like "happy, happy, happy" for the past few days, in a tone of voice that indicates she is, more or less. Which reminds me of this guy:

If she becomes a Hare Krishna then I will have no reason at all to miss Berkeley.

More about Auletta

2009-03-01T19:25:00.003-05:00

So it's the beginning of March and we're bracing for what will probably be the worst snowstorm of the winter. Blargh. After this, two winters down and one to go (and don't even suggest that we could end up living in the Northeast after Justin finishes law school or I'll cry).

Anyway. Auletta is coming up on 17 months. A lot's been happening the past month or so. We used to think she really liked it when we read to her, and then she started crawling and we realized she had just sat still for books because she couldn't move. Now she is back to sitting still for books, so we read to her a lot more. She often wants to read the same book over and over and over...and it's odd books too, like The Story of Abraham Lincoln and Good Night, Seattle, which aren't the good old Eric Carle and Margaret Wise Brown books we raised her on, back when she didn't have opinions. But I am happy just to have her enjoying books, and she certainly likes to play with them, pile them on top of me and Justin when we're all in bed together, etc.

She is also fascinated with shoes and attempts to put on any shoe she can find, whether it's her size or not. She has a pair of crocs that will fit her perfectly this summer; they're a little big on her right now, and she's very good at putting them on by herself (not always on the right feet, of course). She also finally decided she will consent to wear hats and even have me put hats (yes, plural) on her, so hopefully that means I will no longer be that horrible mother who lets her child go out in the cold or sun without a hat, a topic on which I have received unsolicited advice from strangers in the past.

Her receptive language is also coming along nicely. She follows simple instructions (at least sometimes, and when she feels like it), and she can identify numerous body parts (again, when she feels like it)--nose, ear, hair, hand, fingers, belly button, knees, feet.

We are still a little worried about her speech. She says "yes," "no," "boo" (really more like "ba!"), and that's about it, as far as I can tell. She has a really sophisticated jargon we call Blurt (sounds better than Aulettish), which she often speaks to other babies, although apparently her Blurt and their Blurt are mutually unintelligible. So she has no trouble understanding English, or forming all sorts of phonemes in her own language, but she doesn't really seem interested in imitating English words. Her pediatrician said we could discuss this at her eighteen-month appointment if it continued to be an issue, and that's coming up in mid-April, so hopefully she will be speaking words by then, but if not at least hopefully we can start dealing with whatever speech issues she has (and maybe there isn't really an issue, but Justin and I have high expectations) sooner rather than later.

Cute baby picture to distract you from the fact that I'm not blogging

2009-02-27T20:51:00.003-05:00

For the few people who have not already seen this on Facebook. Facebook has made me really lazy about blogging. My status updates are usually about Auletta, i.e. what games she insists on playing, which book she made me read half a dozen times before bedtime, etc.

Auletta hits the toddler social scene

2009-02-05T11:49:00.003-05:00

So today we are staying home from storytime because it's 16 degrees outside and, while we both have our snow clothes, I am just sick of the cold. But we usually keep busy these days. We've been going to stay 'n' play at the library since June (since Auletta became mobile it's involved less staying and more playing), which occupies our Tuesday and Thursday mornings--used to be Wednesdays, too, but, you know, budget cuts. Then we started a music class at the Neighborhood Music School on Mondays, a Schwab Christmas git to me and Auletta. Then yesterday we went for the first time to Toddler Tunes, a by-donation program at a church up on Whitney. I sort of vaguely knew about it for a while but didn't really look into it until I thought, wait, Auletta loves music, so why aren't we going to this? It also happens Sunday afternoons. We've also been to a playgroup hosted by another mom from storytime. There is a lot of overlap as far as who does what activities: two of her classmates at the music school are kids we've met at the library, and a lot of kids who go to stay 'n' play also go to Toddler Tunes. So after three days of this, I'm exhausted anyway.

Auletta's development has really taken off in the last month or so. She still doesn't say a lot of words, but I know she understands a lot--she'll go get particular toys if I tell her, she knows some of her body parts, etc. She likes to put on shoes--mine and sometimes her own--and shuffle around the house in them, and after months of refusing to wear a hat, she will now consent to wear our hats, or even try to put them on herself, which is fine because her head is so big that they almost fit. We also played "ring around the rosy" last night, although she is still learning when she's supposed to fall down (i.e. on "we all fall down," not before, not after, and certainly not before the song starts--but that's getting better). And, as I said, she loves music. She is still somewhat reserved at all these new musical activities, but she does her junior-high style dance wherein she stands in place, bends her knees, and moves in rhythm to the music. The only difference is whether we're among other toddlers, in which case she dances to "The Wheels on the Bus," or at home, when itjavascript:void(0)'s Talking Heads. Or, um, Sir Mix-a-lot.

15 month update

2009-01-12T19:10:00.003-05:00

Auletta had her 15-month appointment today. She is 28-3/4" tall and 19 lb. 3 oz., with a head circumference of 47.1 cm (maybe a bit off because she was squirmy). This puts her in approximately the tenth percentile for height, fifth for weight, and 75th for head circumference. I don't have a picture, but her disproportionate head size grows increasingly apparent--not that I mind having a child whose incipient brilliance is so obvious, heh. The only problem with her tiny size, which is certainly a blessing when she is clingy and I have to hold her all the time, is that she isn't big enough to sit forward-facing in her carseat, and that would be awfully nice for our frequent trips. Anyway, her pediatrician gave her a clean bill of health, the nurse gave her three shots (tears), and the phlebologist drew her blood (more tears) for a routine blood test. Poor thing with all those needles, but she still rebounds quickly.

I don't really talk about it on this blog because I never went through the hurdles a lot of mothers do, but I've been breastfeeding Auletta since she was born (obviously she eats solids now), and have surpassed my original goal of breastfeeding for a year, after which I figured she and I could do what we wanted. Which appears to be nursing, still. I would take more credit for doing it this long (or doing it at all) if it had not been largely out of laziness from the beginning. Preparing and cleaning bottles? Blah. Pumping? Blah--so I just take Auletta everywhere because it's easier to take her places than to leave her with someone and pump milk (although this is less of an issue now that she sort of takes a cup--I left her with Justin all day a week or so ago). Buying whole milk when Justin and I drink skim? Well, it does make awesome hot chocolate. Lately we've been drinking this, which I love and would almost live in Vermont to be near, if it were not cold. Did I mention I miss the South? Because it's not cold all the time? Right. Anyway, breastfeeding = yay. Extended breastfeeding = why the heck not?

Here

2009-01-08T20:17:00.003-05:00

I know it's been forever since I blogged. It's partly because I've been busy and partly laziness. We went to Chapel Hill for Christmas, as we have every year since we've been engaged. It was blessedly warm for much of the time we were there. Oh, how I miss the South. On the way down we visited friends in Philadelphia, D.C., and Charlottesville. Then, rather than heading straight back up I-95 (yuck), we went to Ithaca for a few days. I believe this might actually have saved us money, if you weigh tolls vs. extra gas. Well, in any case we got a free dinner New Year's Eve at John Thomas Steakhouse. Num, as Auletta would say. Then back home. We managed to miss two snowstorms while we were gone, although the second one also hit Ithaca and the sidewalks here remain icy because it is still COLD. Did I mention I miss the South? Oh, but unlike my fair readers in Seattle, we believe in snowplows and salt here, so it's not that bad.

I can report that Auletta has several words, sort of:
1. "No" but always in multiples, i.e. "no no no!" when anyone besides her Uncle Harry, whom she still loves best, tries to pick her up.
2. "Boo!" or something like it when she plays her version of peekaboo, which involves sticking something that might or might not be larger than her eyes in front of what might or might not be her eyes.
3. She understands (but does not say) "nose" and "ear" in reference to my face, at least, and is happy to demonstrate her knowledge of their locations, repeatedly.

When two toddlers meet in the night

2008-12-14T18:06:00.006-05:00

Auletta and Dylan of Bleisenblog met at Thanksgiving last year, but I'm sure Auletta doesn't remember that because she was six weeks old. Their encounter this year was the first one in which Auletta was fully interactive, and it was an interesting anthropological study of complex toddler meeting rituals.

Auletta explains how it's going to be in the Schwab household. Ha ha.

Note she is holding a small football helmet.

Oh look at the quaint little baby.

I am going to take this please. Thank you.

Auletta is OMGWTFBBQ.

Do you like my hat?

Oh did you want that hat? Here you go.

Really I mean it.

Whatever. Where's the pie?

Lacrimae rerum

2008-12-03T20:37:00.003-05:00

I am rather busy lately, and Auletta has been unusually clingy, so I don't have much time to blog.

Somehow I was unusually affected by events in Mumbai last week, especially this story. Don't click on it if you are prone to crying and don't have time to cry right now. I wept when I first read it and could barely stand to open the link again to put into this post. I think any of us with children would lay down our lives for them without hesitation; it is not heroic or romantic to say that, it just is what it is. And I can't imagine any grief greater than losing my daughter. But I am an adult and have some range of experience, comprehension, and emotional capacity to handle the death of a child; a young child who loses his parents--who, no less, witnesses his own violent orphanification--loses everything that gives his universe meaning, and he has no way to process that experience. It utterly breaks my heart. It's not even something that moves me to anger, or makes me think primarily that this is something I hope to God never happens to Auletta, it just hurts to know that this awful, irrevocable thing happened to this one boy halfway around the world. Why it is this one thing, and not a million other tragedies that happen every day, I don't know, except that I'm sure I wouldn't have reacted this way before I had a child. But there it is.

Farewell, November

2008-11-30T21:53:00.002-05:00

Ah, so much for NaBloPoMo and my grand ideas.

We are finishing up a long and relaxing Thanksgiving weekend in Ithaca. I came down with a cold that I got from Auletta that she (I suspect) got from Erik, so I spent much of the weekend in zombie mode. This morning I had the extreme pleasure of sleeping in, thanks to Justin and other available babysitters, so I feel somewhat better than I had previously. Auletta, having recovered from a sleepy cranky Monday, spent the rest of the week working on her skillz and is now a professional toddler. Another new trick to show off to the librarians at storytime, and another way to evade listening to actual stories.

Auletta was madly in love with Whitney when he visited us a few weeks ago, but now she likes exactly three people: me, Justin, and her nine-year-old uncle Harry. Nobody else can make her happy, not even her granny. Well, we'll just see who's the coolest relative at Christmas.

I have pictures but I've been too sick to edit them, so you'll just have to wait.

Steps

2008-11-25T23:03:00.002-05:00

I am in Ithaca and haven't had much time to blog lately, what with being in transit, and then before that having a rather sick and extremely clingy baby inhibiting normal movement. But when she is not being clingy, Auletta is starting to figure out this walking thing and today walked seven steps on her own at one stretch, plus a few shorter jaunts. So I am going to call this walking at a nice even 13.5 months.

This is also, oddly and unrelatedly, the tenth anniversary of my first kiss. Do the math and that is still about ten years later than most normal people. Oh well. I once imagined writing an oblique, melancholic post about the state of my love life in 1998, but perhaps it is best forgotten. 1998 is the year I have marked in my mental almanac as The Year That Just Sucked, following 1997, The Year That Went Awry, which was not so bad as it was surreally amusing. I stopped naming years after that, although I do have June-August 2002 down as The Best Summer Ever, because Rome + true love = yay.

Civility

2008-11-21T11:50:00.004-05:00

I've been reading Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy by Stephen Carter, slowly--not because the book isn't interesting, but because I keep pausing to think about how everything he says relates to my own life and the lives of people I encounter, especially in this recent election season, and because of the baby and all those other distractions. I think I will try to plow through and read it this weekend. Anyway, I want to quote a couple of paragraphs here.

I suspect it will be possible to treat each other with love only if we are able to conceive doing so as a moral obligation that is absolute, something we owe others because of their personhood, bearing no relation to whether we like them or nor. My wife puts it this way: every encounter with another human being should inspire in us a powerful sense of awe. Why? Because that other human being, whatever his or her strengths, weaknesses, and simple complexities, is also a part of God's creation. We should be struck with awe at the fact that we are face to face with a part of God's work. It is one of those propositions that, once stated, seems like a truth we should have seen all along--but somehow it takes someone of uncommon wisdom to point it out.

To enter into the presence of another human being, then, is to enter the presence of God in a new and different way. We are admonished in the psalm to come into His presence with thanksgiving (Psalm 95:2), not with suspicion, self-seeking, or disrespect. The great theologians Karl Barth and Martin Buber both arrived at this point along their different paths: our obligation is to see God in everyone, not merely as possibility, but as reality. So whenever we mistreat others, we are abusing our relationship with God. And awe alone does not capture what we owe. We should encounter others with a sense of gratitude, for here is a fresh and different corner of God's creation--or, for the secular-minded, a new and different human being. We should be grateful to be traveling where we have not been before.

I'll leave that without comment, except wow that gives me a lot to work on.

I also recommend Stephen Carter's Culture of Disbelief to anyone who is interested in religion and public life. It was published in 1993 (I think) but is still relevant. I think most of my blog readers would find it provocative, even if you don't agree with everything in it. By the way, Carter is a professor at YLS, but I read and appreciated Culture of Disbelief long before we knew where we'd end up (and possibly before I even met Justin, I'm not sure).

Baby builder

2008-11-19T20:55:00.002-05:00

These are old, but here are some pictures of Auletta from when she and I met Madame Meow and Herr Meow at the National Building Museum a couple of weeks ago.

She didn't build this, but let's just pretend she did.

Words, words, words

2008-11-18T09:57:00.003-05:00

I read this in a parenting email I get every week:

Sometimes children with older siblings do things differently from first-borns. Instead of learning words for familiar objects and names of caregivers first and then combining words into sentences, toddlers with older siblings at home may begin their journey into the world of speech by babbling in sentences. They may sound like fluent speakers of a language no one knows. Eventually, more and more real words sprinkle their babbled sentences, until they are speaking the same language as everyone else.

Um, did I have amnesia for a year of my life there around 2005 or so and give birth to an invisible, low-maintenance child whom only Auletta can hear? Or are Justin and I just really large children? Because Auletta's been babbling since, oh, eight months. I am often a little weirded out when I am around other young children by how little formation and enunciation there is to their verbal expression, but apparently they are normal and Auletta is strange.

Still, because Justin and I are both verbally-oriented people with high expectations for our daughter, we are feeling a little concerned about the fact that Auletta doesn't speak English words yet. She is probably the most social and expressive baby I've ever met (not that I've met a lot, I suppose) and is not shy about babbling whenever and wherever she is and whoever she's around. She waves her finger around while delivering orations (the comparison to Mussolini and Hitler has been made) and has the full range of cadences, structure and emotion in her speech, but she is speaking fluent Auletta-ish, or whatever you want to call it. I think I am starting to detect English words in there somewhere, but I'm not sure if I'm just imagining it. She doesn't seem very interested in imitating us. I guess she thinks her own language is sufficient. She has a lovely voice and I want to understand what she's saying.

So, those of you who have children older than Auletta, which I think is nearly everyone who reads this blog, how did your children's speech develop? Is she at a normal place for 13 months? I know it is probably ridiculous to be anxious at this point, but since talking is one of the things I'm excited about her doing (like, she doesn't walk yet but I don't really care about that so much, partly because she is obviously very close to doing it, partly because when she does it'll mean more work for me so why rush it?), I think about it a lot more than I think about where she's at in regard to eating or sleeping or moving or other things.

Cuteness

2008-11-17T20:59:00.001-05:00

I don't have anything to blog about at the moment, but look at this cute picture of my kid on a swing!

At least they are still shiny

2008-11-14T20:04:00.002-05:00

We recently unpacked our stereos (each of us has a moderately nice boombox from our respective B.J. eras), which have been in boxes since May 2007. We haven't missed them. All the music we like is on our iPod, catalogued in iTunes, copied onto our external hard drive, and played whenever we feel like it--either from our lame little computer speakers, or on a pretty decent set of portable iPod speakers, or in our car on road trips. If we want new music, we can get it online. Everything is digitized, and easy to carry around.

Remember your first CD player, the magical machine you bought in the early '90s as a teenager (if you are our age) that even in today's dollars seems ridiculously expensive now? Remember your first CD, how shiny it was, how enjoyable it was simply to play whatever song you wanted, as often as you wanted, without rewinding and fast-forwarding endlessly in order to get at the right spot? I remember having exactly 14 of these thingies when I started college.

Now we have several hundred--we haven't counted--and over the past few weeks have ripped the ones we hadn't plunked in iTunes yet, really more for nostalgia than anything else. (I haven't really listened to contemporary Christian music since Rich Mullins died in 1997, so I've got all these old CDs I haven't thought about in a decade but could probably still hum through start to finish if I tried.) What on earth does one do with these things? I assume if a couple of hoarders like us have gotten to the point that we don't want them, nobody else would either. I haven't set foot in a used CD store in years and am not sure they still exist. We managed to hand off a bunch of classical music to a friend of ours, but that still leaves us with a lot. Would Goodwill even want them? What happens to such a technology when it becomes obsolete? Is there any aesthetic advantage to playing a CD vs. playing a digital file, given similar sound systems (not that we have them, but...)?

Will Auletta think of us the way I think of people my parents' age who still play their Rolling Stones LPs on turntables to relive their college years? But an LP and an 8-track (my parents had 8-tracks!) and a cassette and a CD are all objects. Whether your music's on a record or a CD, it takes up space. Music doesn't take up space anymore, or I should say it doesn't take up volume, so it's not a choice between one physical medium and another--it's between having stuff and not having stuff. And people who move as often as we do could use less stuff.

What would you do--or what have you done--with your CDs? Is there someone out there who will love them?

Around Wooster Square, part 3

2008-11-12T20:22:00.002-05:00

I dropped the ball on NaBloPoMo there, didn't I? Oh well. I made it for eight days, anyway.

Today's theme: buildings. Wooster Square reminds me a little of Berkeley, in a good way, with its weekly farmer's market and its interesting architecture. Like this house. I love this house on Chapel Street.

Of course there is St. Michael's. Italian Catholicism up the gazoo.

This used to be part of St. Michael's and I think is now used by a non-Catholic neighborhood school.

This house makes me sad, because it clearly used to be well maintained--it got an award from the New Haven Preservation Trust:

But you can see it's been downhill since then. I noticed it was up for auction a few months ago, so hopefully there's a new owner who will restore it to the beauty it deserves.

Around Wooster Square, part 2

2008-11-08T16:51:00.002-05:00

Things you eat.

Pepe's, the nearest pizzeria. The line is usually long.

Our neighborhood source for cannoli, rum baba, and fudge-filled chocolate chip cookies.

Political pumpkin on Court Street.

How I voted, and why. If you care.

2008-11-07T22:00:00.000-05:00

There will be something in here to piss off everyone, but I feel like getting this all out, and it's NaBloPoMo, so here goes.

I voted for Barack Obama. I did not make that decision, as I said earlier, until shortly before the election, and I hate to think that I fit into some sort of trend, because in the end it was all I could stand to do to analyze my own motives, layer upon layer, until I barely had any idea what I was thinking, so God help anyone else who tries to make sense of it either. I shuddered to watch the pie charts on CNN the next morning--white Catholics did this, conservatives who disapprove of Bush's job performance did this--because I voted as I did for reasons beyond being white, or Catholic, or a conservative who's tired of Bush, and they are probably pettier reasons, but there you go. I have to say, as disappointed as I was in the campaign, I fundamentally admire both McCain and Obama, and my first choice would have been to have them be consuls, with Biden and Palin as tribunes of the plebs, or something like that. But since this is the United States in the 21st century and not the Roman republic, I had to settle for voting for a president and vice president. I guess my second choice would have been to write in "McCain in 2000" for president and Joe Lieberman for vice president, but the write-in space on the ballots was kind of small and the pen was felt-tipped and...I felt this time like I had to decide. Not that it matters in Connecticut, which is discouraging but also kind of liberating. As in 2004, when I wrote in McCain (and I would think better of myself if I'd done the same in 2000), I cast my vote to please myself and not to influence the political process.

Here is why. I hope this makes sense.

1. The main thing--and this is what is petty--is, given that I felt both candidates had about an equal chance of being good or bad presidents, I thought if I had to look back after a disappointing presidency on either side and say I voted for one or the other, I'd rather be disappointed in Obama and say I voted for him than be disappointed in McCain and say I voted for him. Well, let me put that another way, because that doesn't make much sense. I assume Auletta will go through at least one period of liberal idealism in her life, perhaps for her whole life, and I wanted to tell her I voted for the first black president (because it was pretty obvious he would win), which is no insignificant thing. I think it is, as McCain said in his extremely gracious concession speech (and I was really disappointed people booed whenever he mentioned Obama--I wish both candidates' supporters had a fraction of the class they did both during and after the campaign), a historic moment for America no matter where you're coming from, and there is something really wonderful about the fact that we have become the sort of nation that can elect a black man with the middle name of Hussein president. It is not the end, but it is more than a beginning. It improves our standing in the world--not that people who aren't citizens should decide our own elections, but it determines our starting position in foreign policy, and how American citizens abroad are perceived. I don't think McCain is as bad as the rest of the world seems to think he is (I'm sure most non-Americans know less about him than we do and probably view him simply as an extension of Bush, which he's not, but then who can blame them for thinking so?), but our image does improve from this and I think that is good for us and for the rest of the world.

2. I subscribe to the Economist, which I don't always agree with but I think is the most thoughtful weekly news magazine. Also my dad pays for my subscription. If I remember correctly (I'd have to go into the archives to prove this, but I don't think I'd make it up), they endorsed McCain during the 2000 primaries, and they don't usually do primary endorsements. Well, they endorsed Obama this year, and in the weeks leading up to the election it became clear they would. They did a survey of economists on whose economic policies would be better for the country, and even given the partisan bias of the respondents, they favored Obama by a wide margin (although they favored both candidates over Bush). I think my own impulse is 1. to favor free-market principles not just for their own sake but because I think they genuinely make the majority of people better off and 2. to assume that Republicans always have the monopoly on them, but I started questioning both assumptions. Also, I'm generally more liberal on health care than most conservatives; I would not necessarily want government to facilitate health care, but a system in which health care is paid by employers when most people change jobs at least several times within their lifetimes seems unworkable to me, and I don't see a better alternative than some kind of government-run thingy. I think it also needs to be market-driven in some sense to reduce costs--this is another reason I wish McCain and Obama could have been consuls, in order to be forced to combine the best aspects of both their health care plans--but I think you have to start with the government approach and incorporate market-based approaches along the way. Or something. This is way too big for me to grasp entirely, which is why I don't see things in black and white. I can tell you, though, I changed insurance during my pregnancy with Auletta and spent approximately weeks 20 to 35 without coverage at all, and I am pretty darned glad that kid was late rather than early because if she'd been born prematurely, Justin's law school debt would look miniscule compared to our medical bills.

3. I ended up being uncomfortable with McCain's choice of Sarah Palin. (BIG DISCLAIMER TO FOLLOW. If you are liberal, don't gloat because I'm not through with you.) I felt positively about her at first, but one of our friends summed up what bothered me about her, which is not just that she doesn't have foreign policy expertise, she doesn't seem to have the inquisitive nature to want to know about it, or know what kind of questions to ask. It's not really an issue of intelligence, or competence at her current job. It doesn't matter when she's vice president, and I got annoyed when people acted like McCain was on his deathbed just to be all doom and gloom about the prospect of her being president, but it was an issue that concerned me, given McCain's age. To be quite honest, if it had been McCain/Lieberman, there's no question I would have voted for him. Not that picking Lieberman would have been a strategic move--I think I know most of the people in the country who would have preferred him, ours being a very select group, because liberals hate him and conservatives wouldn't trust him to be so close to the presidency. It would, however, have been truer to McCain's own impulses and proven that he remains a maverick, to use an overused word. I think McCain's choice of Palin, aside from what it was in itself, indicated the direction his campaign was heading, and it troubled me, as much as the initial reaction to her, and a lot of the attacks leveled at things that had nothing to do with her suitability for the job, alienated me from the other side. Also, I like Joe Biden. I can't say he added gravitas to the ticket, because he is a big goofball who frequently says utterly bizarre things, but I think he's a good guy and he would be a pretty decent president if (God forbid) it came to that before Obama's term expired.

4. This does not really reflect well on liberals, and please believe I don't have anyone in particular in mind when I write it, so take it as it's meant to be read. I have liberal friends and conservative friends. In my social class--highly educated 20- and 30-somethings--it is general more acceptable to be liberal. Liberals tend to be more vocal. One gets the sense that if one is liberal, one is guaranteed to be accepted, whereas if one is conservative, one might or might not be. I also am the sort of person who really wants people to like me, and I tend to express or suppress my opinions based on how I think they'll be received. Not that this is necessarily a good character quality, but I'm shy to begin with so that's how I work. I can't say that I didn't vote for Obama partly in order to get a little more credibility with my peer group, knowing that my conservative friends and family will still talk to me at the end of the day. (And WHY anyone was ever surprised that exit polls inaccurately skew toward the Democratic candidate is beyond me. It really shouldn't be rocket science to any liberal who has at least a modicum of self-consciousness.)

Obviously I have reservations as well. Here they are.

1. Abortion. My feelings on this are really strong but also really convoluted, so this will just be a separate post.

2. Not unrelated to the previous point is my ambivalence about single-party rule. I voted for the Republican candidate for the House from our district (not that he had any hope of winning, or that I'd even heard of him before I went online to find out about him) for that very reason--unfortunately we had no Senate seats up this year (and even if we did I'm clearly a big Lieberman fan, so that's one senator out of two I wouldn't vote against). If I had my way, the Senate at least would be majority Republican, because I think it's important to have that one check on nominations, judicial and otherwise. Fortunately, this can change in two years, and Democrats don't really have anywhere to go but down at this point, so I hope this will keep them mindful and improve the truly abysmal performance of Congress and particularly their leaders. I'm not sure why an American public that so overwhelmingly disapproves of Congress voted to put even more Democrats into legislative office, except that those candidates rode the tide of Obama's popularity, but they won't share the ballot with him in 2010. Don't forget what happened in 1994, is my advice.

3. I really could not stand a lot of what I saw from certain liberals this election cycle. Let us take Palin, since I told you I wouldn't forget her. The gossipy and hysterical reaction to her nomination was disgraceful. If liberals had been remotely thoughtful about this, they would have realized they had seven weeks to sound out her weaknesses--ones that bore some relevance to her actual qualifications--instead of writing irrational screeds about how she wasn't a real woman, or how she gave them nightmares, or how she reminded them of the evil girl in high school who acted all nice and then stabbed you in the back, but really you were jealous of her (and hated yourself for it) and the boys enjoyed every moment of the torture she inflicted on them and yadda yadda and WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU ALL STILL SIXTEEN OR SOMETHING? Seriously, people, get a grip. Every word written about her from the liberal side said nothing about her, but rather exposed their own insecurities and hypocrisies. And the things other women said about her! We proved once again, we are our own worst enemies. How dare McCain pander to us, liberal women said? Like, get over yourselves, he wasn't talking to you. Obviously McCain was targeting PUMAs (I've never really understood this phenomenon, but apparently it exists) and shoring up evangelicals who have been suspicious of him since the 2000 primaries. Obviously he was not targeting women who were determined to vote for the eventual Democratic candidate, whoever he or she was. So stop being all offended. And the "feminist" attacks on Palin! How can she raise five kids and do her job? (Um, her husband? Day care? Nannies? I don't know, how do working mothers usually do it?) How can her family pass around that poor sick baby of hers at the convention? (Because politicians always bring their families to conventions, and her son is part of her family? Because babies are cute and people like to hold them? And do you even understand what Down syndrome is? No, I don't think you do.) How can she claim her family is like my family when I don't know any families with pregnant teenagers? (I actually saw someone claim they didn't, which I think means either they're in denial or all the teenagers they know who've gotten knocked up have thoughtfully gotten abortions without troubling their parents about it, which is uncharitable of me to say but I can't say I didn't think it. Apparently sex education always works and how your children behave is always a reflection of your parenting skills. I can't believe anyone who has ever raised a teenager, or been one for that matter, could possibly think this.) Most of all, how can she not tow the line on women's issues (read: abortion) and still claim to be a feminist? That was clearly where all this was headed: character assassination for the sake of an ideology. God forbid feminists acknowledge the woman for what she's accomplished thus far, regardless of her qualifications for the office she seeks. And that is why I don't really give a poop about feminism anymore, whatever it is and whatever remains of it, and why I will never register as a Democrat even if the party's interests and my own somehow align. A party that represents that kind of feminism can't represent me.

Ahem. Cough. Anyway.

There is something really heartwarming about how happy people are. I had a huge headache and found it kind of annoying at the time, but people were honking and shouting in DC until three or four in the morning. Little old black ladies who grew up under segregation stood in line for hours to cast their vote for the first black president. A lot of people feel a lot better than they have in recent years, maybe their whole lives. Now I don't think Obama can possibly live up to everyone's expectations, and with the inevitable disappointment will come a lot of bitterness, but I believe for one brief moment this country is being the best it can possibly be. And I hope the collective enthusiasm and hope, and maybe even love, is enough to carry us through the next four years. God bless Barack Obama, and God bless America, this huge and maddening and wonderful country.

Around Wooster Square, part 1

2008-11-06T19:43:00.003-05:00

I like our neighborhood. Ever since we moved here, I've had much more positive feelings about New Haven. This is a great area to have a baby--there are parks to walk around, we're a block or two away from a couple of playgrounds, there's some of the best pizza in the world right down the street--oh, wait, that has nothing to do with the baby. Oh well. I keep thinking I should take a camera along on my walks, so I did a couple of days last week, and I'll post pictures in installments when I don't have anything else to write about.

Today: leaves.

Back home

2008-11-05T21:40:00.002-05:00

I don't know if NaBloPoMo is supposed to consist of a month's worth of short entries that exist just for the sake of fulfilling a quota. Oh well. I am tired again from driving much of the day. I met Madame Meow and young Herr Meow for this first time this morning at the Building Zone in the National Building Museum, which I think is now one of my favorite spots in DC. I told Justin I like DC, and he was surprised because I hate driving there. Which I do. But I love walking there. For a city of its size, it is eminently walkable, being fairly flat--Capitol Hill is barely a hill for a girl from Seattle--and there are all sorts of interesting places to visit, many of them free. I think it's the only major American city I would want to live in just as much as I'd want to live in a small, isolated college town. Well, almost. No, really I'd take the college town. But I can see us living and raising a family in DC much more than I can imagine us living for any length of time in San Francisco, or NYC (gack!). We just couldn't ever drive anywhere. But, yes, I met Madame Meow, which is the first time I've met someone in real life whom I first encountered in the blogosphere, and we had a lovely time, and I think we had the cutest and best-behaved children in the whole place.

Auletta is asleep and Justin specifically gave me this time to blog, but I am SO TIRED that I don't know if I can keep stringing sentences together.

It is finished.

2008-11-04T23:12:00.002-05:00

I'm really tired, so I'm not going to write an elaborate entry. I voted. We drove to DC and watched the election results with friends. There is a lot of exuberant honking and shouting outside. So there you go. I hope this turns out to have been good.

Election eve

2008-11-03T17:06:00.003-05:00

I had ideas of writing an elaborate post about how I arrived at the way I'm going to vote tomorrow, but when it all comes down I don't have time and I don't know if it matters because my thought processes are really the last anyone should take as an example. All I'm going to say is, I'm probably as close a person as you know to an undecided voter. What I've seen written about swing voters casts them as uninformed, single-issue voters, which may well be true in general, but I like to think I'm in the gooey middle because I see both sides of issues and I see everything in shades of gray rather than black and white. Or else I'm waffly. You decide. Well, I, and I think a lot of other people, have been stewing for weeks that in the end are not really relevant to how either of the two candidates would run the country, so I intend to set all that aside and vote for the person who I think is closest to what we need right now. May the best man win. I think it will all be okay either way.

We're headed to DC tomorrow after Justin's class (and, of course, after we vote!) to celebrate the election with other politically-obsessed friends, as we have done every election year since we've been married. I'm baking two flourless chocolate cakes this time instead of one, as I have for previous elections (don't ask what chocolate cake has to do with elections--except that no matter who wins, everyone gets to eat cake!), because we're splitting our time between Democratic and Republican parties. I mean cake-and-booze parties, not (just) political parties. Our group of friends actually has pretty diverse political views, and we keep up a lively and amicable discussion on a group email list, but for various reasons the parties are separate this year. Oh well, I guess I'll serve one cake with blueberries and one with strawberries. Or something? Yay for democracy, and cake.

Road trip: Maine, part 2 (Acadia)

2008-11-02T18:40:00.003-05:00

I set out at sunrise to take pictures at Acadia, which was not so unpleasant with the later sunrise and our proximity to the park.

Jordan Pond:

Foliage:

Bubble Pond:

Later in the day, Justin and I drove the loop road around Acadia.

Sand Beach:

Thunder Hole (not the hole part, but on the same part of the shoreline--too many Germans in the way to get a good picture of Thunder Hole itself):

Then we drove along Soames Sound, the only fjord on this side of the Atlantic (! I think, at least in the US), to watch the sunset:

And I love this picture:

The next day, before going home, we returned to the park to drive up Cadillac Mountain, which I described earlier. Here are a few more pictures:

Bar Harbor from the top of the mountain:

And Auletta is tallest of all.

Buy this book!

2008-10-28T19:35:00.002-04:00

Newly released and available on Amazon: The Mental Floss History of the World: An Irreverent Romp Through History's Best Bits, by Erik Sass and Steve Wiegland. Erik is a dear friend of ours and knows much about history. He's the one who can draw detailed world maps from scratch. Justin and I read the book when it was still a lil' baby manuscript. It's really fun and has naughty trivia you didn't learn in tenth grade world history because your teacher would've gotten fired.

And right now it is #70 in books from Amazon! Yay!

Road trip: Maine, part 1 (Not Acadia)

2008-10-26T22:36:00.003-04:00

We spent the second night of our trip at the Chapman Inn, a bed and breakfast in Bethel, Maine. We chose the location based on the Rough Guide's suggestion of Bethel as a cute town and its approximate equidistance from Burlington and Acadia National Park. There are not that many places to stay on Highway 2 between Burlington and Acadia anyway. So this is where we stayed:

I was mostly asleep around 12:30 when we heard whispering in the hallway and what Justin assumed to be drunk people trying to unlock our room with (obviously) the incorrect key, until Justin yelled "This is our room!" and they left. The next morning at breakfast, we found out that the inn is the only certified haunted bed and breakfast in western Maine. So maybe they were ghosts instead of drunk people. Anyway, we loved breakfast, which included pancakes made from fresh blueberries, fresh apple cider, freshly baked bread, and a lot of other fresh things. Yum. Also Auletta was made much of. And I accidentally booked the wrong night but they had space for us anyway. So we enjoyed our stay, ghosts notwithstanding.

And Bethel is pretty! Look at the little town green:

From there we drove eastward and ate lunch in Bangor at the Sea Dog Brewery, which we liked enough that we stopped there on the way home too. More importantly, we drove by Stephen King's house and took a picture of Justin standing in front of it like the creepy stalkers we are. Justin noted he had an Obama-Biden sign and a Stop This Endless War sign, because we are creepy political junkie stalkers.

Then we continued to Bar Harbor, Maine, on Mt. Desert Island, the gateway to Acadia. We're so used to the huge scale of national parks in the west--I got up before 4 AM once to take sunrise pictures in Canyonlands, because it took nearly an hour to get there from Moab--that it's weird to stay in a town a couples of miles away from the park entrance. I kept comparing Mt. Desert Island to Martha's Vineyard. I think Mt. Desert Island wins because 1. you don't have to make reservations eons in advance on an expensive car ferry to get on and off it, 2. it's not insanely crowded (at least in October) and does not have stupid regulations against traffic lights at intersections that are ridiculously unsafe without them, 3. it is cute and not very pretentious (kind of chessy, but that's okay). See that clock? It's cute!

Of course you would be insane to swim in the ocean there, at least in October, but since Auletta is apparently prejudiced against oceans and I'm not a big swimmer, that's fine with me. So we were there at the end of the season--all the shops were having their sales on tourmaline and scrimshaw and whatever else you buy when you're in Maine, affordable accommodations were not hard to find, and the foliage was at its peak. I think it peaked a little late this year (down here at least it seems we've had a mild autumn), so our timing was perfect and I took some lovely pictures. More in the next post.

Road trip: New Hampshire

2008-10-25T20:22:00.004-04:00

We really didn't give enough time to New Hampshire. Since we went north through Vermont and back south through Maine, and New Hampshire is a narrow state, we just passed through the skinny parts going either way. But we did make a point (or I made a point, and Justin tagged along since I was driving) of driving up Mt. Washington. At 6288 feet, it's much lower than many of the passes we've crossed in the west, let alone the mountains we've seen, but it does have the distinction of having the most wretched weather just about anywhere. When we drove up it was clear, about 25 degrees with winds of 20-25 mph (imagine the wind chill under those conditions), which is a good day. This was a week ago. The road is now closed for the winter. We made the good move of going late in the day, so the road was closed to cars going up when we came back down. It's a narrow, winding road with a steep dropoff on one side and often barely enough room for two cars to pass each other, so I was really glad not to have to worry about squeezing by anyone on the way down. We listened to a CD audio tour about the road, which has been there since the mid-19th century. There are some wacky speed records going up. The current record I think is 7 minutes; we did it in about 25. I don't know how people race up there without killing themselves.

This is the view from the top:

You can also take a cog train up. Next time, maybe. It was very cute. (Oddly, the very family friendly CD did not tell us about the tradition of mooning the cog.)

Windblown ice.

This building is literally chained to the mountain.

Here's why.

Attempt at a self-portrait.

Justin and Auletta stayed in the car (perhaps wisely) while I ran around taking pictures and freezing my butt off, but they did step out for a quick picture.

Road trip: Vermont

2008-10-24T22:41:00.008-04:00

I have always thought I would like Vermont, but had never been there until last week. I did like it. We went there first, driving up through western Connecticut and Massachusetts via the Litchfield Hills and the Berkshires. I still haven't clicked with Massachusetts; the Berkshires, like Martha's Vineyard, seem to be very conscious that you are supposed to want to go there. But Vermont is much less so. We worked our way south to north, from Bennington to Middlebury and finally to Burlington, where we spent the night.

Unfortunately I took no pictures of Burlington, which is silly because I really liked it. It is a smallish college town, not unlike Charlottesville and Ithaca. It is near a lake, like Ithaca (Lake Champlain, in this case), and like both towns, it has a downtown pedestrian mall with fun little shops. We went to the Crow Bookshop and of course Lake Champlain Chocolates, where we ordered yummy Aztec hot chocolate. There was a ginormous farmer's market that morning (it was Saturday), and in general it looks like a very engaging, walkable town. The University of Vermont is in Burlington, and it has a law school, so hmm/brr/hmm.

We proceeded eastward through northern Vermont, taking in the leaves...

...and, as always, the political landscape.

Um, yeah. This was obviously not in Burlington.

And then across the bridge over the Connecticut River:

Well, not that bridge necessarily, but it is a neat covered bridge. To New Hampshire! Next entry. See, I told you I would really write multiple posts about this trip.

Fifty nifty

2008-10-22T22:33:00.003-04:00

We went on another road trip, this time a little swing through New England for some leafing, and to check a few more states off our list, which is my latest obsession. Forty-eight down, two to go. The last two are biggies, Alaska and Texas. Well, this might take a while. I am working on pictures. Here is the only family photo from the trip, on top of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park in Maine. Not the best picture in the world (it's kind of fuzzy and I had to crop the heck out of it), but it's kind of my fault for having an insanely pimped camera and then forgetting to turn it on before I handed it to the complete stranger British cruise passenger who kindly took the picture at all, so I should just stop complaining now.

It's weird for a couple that met in Rome, but we haven't been out of the country in more than five years. All our travel has been within the country, and I have to give Justin credit for encouraging me to visit all the glorious places between my comfy coasts. We live in such an amazingly diverse country, in regard to geography, culture, cuisine, accent, politics, religion, everything. I had one of those shouting-at-the-radio moments a few weeks ago...some supposed political satirist suggested that the country would be a much better place if all the red-staters visited Europe for two weeks. And God knows I would not deny anyone a two-week trip to Europe, but I don't think that was his point exactly--anyway (Justin will attest) I responded to Mr.-Political-Satirist-Who-Couldn't-Hear-Me that all the blue staters should visit the red states for two weeks. So there! We who have spent our lives ensconced in our coastal enclaves with our independent bookstores and our espresso and our feisty college towns should know our own country, especially since we are the ones who claim to be all cosmopolitan and open-minded. I include myself in this description because blue-state moderates and conservatives are prone to this sort of parochialism too, and maybe it's worse because we fancy ourselves the champions of middle America but still shudder at the thought of traveling somewhere more than ten minutes away from Starbucks.

Of course there is nowhere more blue than New England these days (not Upper New England so much as our own environs, of course), so this was not exactly the same as venturing into Kansas or what have you, but it was still enjoyable and lovely, and eye-opening in its own way. The foliage was superb in many of the places we visited. I will say this again when I get to more detailed posts on the places we visited (I really intend to do so this time), but VISIT ACADIA right after Columbus Day. It is not insanely crowded and the leaves are still gorgeous. We timed this perfectly--with much thanks to Justin's fall break, of course, but the felicitousness of our scheduling makes up for the fact that I spent last autumn too busy to see all the leaves because I was busy having a baby. Yay.

All I hear is clanging cymbals

2008-10-16T20:06:00.000-04:00

I am not sure whether to publish this post, which I've been editing on and off for a few days, but I guess if I hit the button it'll happen and you can take from it what you will. I am not the best person to be writing this, and I want to emphasize first of all that it is not directed toward anyone who does not identify themselves as Christian (not that the topic of this post, love, is exclusive to Christians, of course, but you will have your own way of talking about love if you are not and I will leave that to you), and that of course even if you do I have no real spiritual authority you need recognize. I am a lazy Catholic with God only knows how many beams in my own eye. But I have spent years of academic and extracurricular thought on what the Catholic part means, so in a way this is what I do. It's also one of the things I started blogging about in the first place, although this has become much more of a mommy blog lately and I'm sure most of my readers find Auletta much more compelling than my attempts at theologizing. Anyway.

* * *

Erratum:

I said in an earlier post that people who hate Sarah Palin are entitled to their hatred. I was wrong. If you're Christian, you're not. This is between you and God, of course, but I'm pretty sure you're not. Same if you hate Obama, or Biden (although personally I find both of them likable even when I disagree with them--so maybe this just comes easier to me, at least this election year when I think all the major candidates are quite personable, and I should not be so judgmental)--you are not entitled to that. You are not entitled to defame them, or to presume you know things about them that you don't in order to score rhetorical points, or to insult them, or to do any of the above to their supporters. Even when they do it to you.

* * *

This gets at something I've been thinking about for a while, which is the weird divide between the religious right and the religious left. I have one foot in each world and sometimes I wonder if there's much else they have in common, besides a name and a book and others like me. I have very conservative Christian friends and very liberal Christian friends, and it seems to me there is strikingly little intercourse between those two groups in real life. (I have more affinity with conservative Christians, I suppose, having come from that background, but over the past several years I've met lots of more liberal Christians, all very good and kind and sincere people, and my own views have changed, for various reasons but of course not least because of the people I've met.) As a result I often feel like I have to downplay my true beliefs, which are somewhere in between. Whatever, that's not a tragedy compared to the wider problem, which is that the church (big C or little c, however you want to talk about it) is supposed to be one body.

If you are of an age, late 20s or early 30s, you probably go to a lot of weddings. And at most of those weddings--church weddings, at least--you probably hear 1 Corinthians 13 as one of the readings (Justin and I were an exception; we selected Romans 12, which is equally apt). Read in context, of course, this passage is not about spouses' love for one another--after all, loving one's spouse is easy about 95% of the time, although the other 5% can be a real doozy--but about love within the church, without which all other gifts, all the other functions of the body of Christ, are meaningless. This is hard. And it's hard when right-wing evangelicals think they have nothing in common with gay pacifist Episcopalians, or liberal Catholics think they have nothing in common with Bible-thumping homophobic fetus-loving fundamentalists. Not to mention, when liberal Catholics think they have nothing in common with conservative Catholics, or vice versa, even when they share the same pews. But actually, we have the most important thing in common, and that thing--that Person--spent most of his time on earth talking about love, and inspired the first generation of his followers to talk about love, which sounds like a terribly difficult thing the way it's described, not at all fuzzy or romantic or easy, and not at all optional.

I will leave the last word to Paul. Remember that this is how you're supposed to love the person you least want to love. And you cannot implement social justice or save the babies if you cannot love your fellow Christian like this--no matter how little you think that person deserves the name; that is not up to you. And I, the worst of sinners, will remember as well.

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

One reason we don't want to stay here

2008-10-15T10:01:00.003-04:00

Justin found a tiny bag of what we presumed to be crack (we didn't try to prove it) on the sidewalk in front of our house. The police's response was, yeah, that happens all the time, and we can't do anything about it because we can't connect it to anyone and if we responded to every report of crack on the sidewalk we'd do nothing else all day. And by the way don't touch it or you could be charged with possession. So that's super. We live in what I would consider one of the few "nice" neighborhoods in New Haven, i.e. the crime rate is low, houses are well maintained, and our immediate neighbors happen to be cops or retired cops. Obviously there is an unfortunate but real racial element involved in this as well, our neighborhood being mostly white (Italian-white, which is cool because I'm getting back to my roots, but obviously we don't just live here for the pizza). It's not what we would have expected, basically. I mean, not that it's a huge deal because it probably just fell out of someone's pocket and it doesn't necessarily mean drug transactions are taking place right outside our front door, but it makes me feel a little less safe here with a baby and a husband who we already both feel needs to take a shuttle or taxi when he comes back from school at night, "night" being anytime after 4:30 for much of the school year at this latitude. I actually liked New Haven in the summer, once we moved into town, but I think the honeymoon is coming to an end.

One year!

2008-10-10T22:34:00.001-04:00

And she is already learning how to fake smile.

Photo essay: Auletta's first chocolate cake

2008-10-09T22:04:00.005-04:00

We're in Ithaca, celebrating Auletta's first birthday with Justin's family. Her birthday is tomorrow, but her party was today for various scheduling reasons, and so I could say I had more fun tonight than I was having the night of October 9, 2007. Justin's mom continued the family tradition of baking a teddy bear cake for each baby's first birthday (this is the ninth one she's done). Somehow I have avoided giving Auletta chocolate until her first birthday. So this is her very first experience of chocolate. The photos are in chronological order, so you can see how she delicately dipped her fingers into the frosting before finally diving in.

Closing in on one year

2008-10-03T11:19:00.003-04:00

Auletta had her twelve month appointment today. Which did not include shots. I remember specifically asking the receptionist when I scheduled the appointment if it was okay for Auletta to get her shots a week before her birthday, and she said it was, but then the pediatrician said it would be best to wait until after her birthday, in case she has a picky school district down the line that doesn't count the shots because she got them too early. Oh well, we'll just go back in a couple weeks.

Here are the stats: Auletta is 18.5 lb. and 28 inches and has a 46.5 cm head circumference. (Somehow I cannot spell circumference today.) That puts her, oh I'd have to look at the chart, but like 85-90th percentile head circumference and maybe 25th percentile height/weight. I asked the pediatrician if her petite size was okay, and she said as long as Auletta's height/weight proportionate, she's fine and she can put that in a personal ad. Just kidding about the last part. So all is well and she gets to be poked another time.

UPDATE: More like 10th percentile height/weight. Anyway. I am a little worried about clothes because I had expected her to outgrow all her 6-12 month stuff around this time, but it all fits except for a few onesies that won't go over her brainy head--and it's all summer clothes, which are rapidly becoming inappropriate, or rather the weather is rapidly becoming inappropriate for them. I need to get out her 12-18 month clothes, most of which I bought last year, since they're winter clothes, but I'm afraid they'll be big on her. I was expecting the fact that she was born around the time the seasons change to work out as far as clothes go, and it did until last spring, but her growth has slowed down since then. That's fine, since she's healthy and that's what matters, but all her cute holiday clothes I bought last year are looking kinda big right now--except for this really cute Fair Isle knit hat, which I think is too small (but it's Gymboree, easy to find on eBay in a larger size).

Ten months!

2008-09-30T21:36:00.002-04:00

Auletta, as you would expect, turned eleven months after she turned ten months, but her mom, as you would expect, took forever to process her ten-month pictures. Ahem. I am afraid I did not do justice to the dress Deanna and family gave her--I might have to break it out again for her first birthday, if it's not too cold by then (we'll be partying in Ithaca). The pictures were tricky because I took the first batch in bright sunlight (always always always a bad idea, no matter how often I forget), so I scooted Auletta to a bench in the shade, but then she was completely distracted by an utterly fascinating flock of PIGEONS and refused to smile at the camera, so she has weird expressions on her face when she's bothering to look at me at all. Okay, but here goes:

Awards!

2008-09-21T21:21:00.005-04:00

The divine Madame Meow at A Daily Dose of Zen Sarcasm, one of my favorite blogs, presented me with two blog awards, and these are the best kind, the kind you pass on. I want to thank Mme. Meow, who honors me more than my sporadic blogging really deserves, but I will use this moment as an inspiration to be good, bloggily speaking.

Brilliant Weblog is a prize given to sites and blogs that are smart and brilliant both in their content and their design. The purpose of the prize is to promote as many blogs as possible in the blogsphere.

First, here are the rules:

1. When you receive the prize you must write a post showing it, together with the name of who has given it to you, and link them back.
2. Choose a minimum of 7 blogs (or even more) that you find brilliant in their content or design.
3. Show their names and links and leave them a comment informing they were prized with ‘Brilliant Weblog'.
4. And then we pass it on!

I don't know if I even read seven blogs these days, since a number of my friends no longer maintain blogs. But this is a good opportunity to mention all the bloggers in my blogroll, in alphabetical order by blog title.

Arrow Through the Sun is a blog by my friend Ben, who is a Christian and a biology professor. He writes book reviews and posts about his (very cute) sons, but the main focus of his blog is about the intersection of science and religion, and he writes the most thoughtful things on that topic I've ever read. I still have to go and read all the way through his Eight Days of Creation, but you should race me to it.

Bleisenblog is a fun, witty, and well-written blog mainly about adventures in raising a two-year-old. It gives me some idea of what life will be like 13 months from now. For example, from today's entry it appears we should not bring our daughter out in public. Well, Justin's 3L should be fun.

Blue Words is a new addition to my blogroll, by a grad-student-turned-law-student (hmm) and a fellow accessory junkie.

Deanna's Corner is by my friend of 15 years and is one of the quintessential mommy blogs. It gives me some idea of what life will be like when I have two of these kid-creatures. Deanna also gets special props for consistency, a quality I notably lack.

De Re Coquinaria doesn't count because it's the long-neglected cooking blog I share with Deanna, but it's on the blogroll and you might wonder why if I didn't mention it.

Pastoral Musings from Rain City is by the pastor of my old church in Seattle. I miss Seattle, and my old church, and Pastor Richard.

Honorable mention to Aufhebung, by Scott Becker, the former assistant pastor at my old church in Seattle, who passed away from cancer last year. The last few posts are amazing, especially "The Madman of West Covina." I guess I have never been close to anyone who died who was not, you know, old and supposed to die rather soon, so it is something to read a blog by someone who is dying and has profound thoughts about what that means (being a pastor and an ethicist, as he was). And honorable mentions also to my friends who no longer have blogs, and others who blog anonymously. You know who you are. And if somehow I forgot someone, I apologize and please do not take it personally that I included people who are not currently blogging and not you.

This one speaks for itself, doesn't it? Since it has no set limit of recipients, and Madame Meow gave it to everyone to whom she gave the Brilliant Weblog award, I will do the same. Because you are all awesome. Yay!

A post that combines politics AND my child!

2008-09-19T20:48:00.002-04:00

I have so much to catch up on. Here is Justin, exploiting our child with this fabulous t-shirt from The Onion store:

Whatever those are.

Where is the love? (One more political post and then I'm for real done)

2008-09-16T09:39:00.004-04:00

For a long time this election was about how much people loved Obama, which if somewhat vapid at times was inspiring and happy-making and fun to watch even from my more conservative standpoint, because honestly as much as I have always admired McCain and have been banging my head against a wall for the past eight years that he wasn't nominated in 2000, I would feel a certain kind of warmth if we were the kind of country that could elect a black person president--not that it would exorcise all our racial demons, but it would be a start. And I admire Obama as a person (his first book especially is splendid) and enjoy listening to him, so even if I disagree with what he says I like hearing it from someone who's a good public speaker. For a long time I thought a campaign between the two people who are the most approved-of members of their respective parties (according to polls that show Bush's approval rating under 30% and Congress' under 10%) would be a decent campaign, one that would not give me the feeling of nails on a chalkboard with every debate, every campaign ad, every soundbite.

Well, that's over.

Now it's about how much people HATE HATE HATE Sarah Palin. And, okay, you are entitled to that. But 1. why use up every possible invective in the first two weeks after she's nominated? You've got seven weeks to go and I don't know what else you can possibly say, although I'm sure you'll think of something. 2. Last time around, you hated the opposing candidate more than you loved your own candidate. And how did that work out for you?

And by the way, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, McCain is not actually dead yet and he's still at the top of the opposing ticket. You can't run against Bush, because I'm not falling for the "McSame" stuff and I don't think a lot of other independents or pseudo-independents like me are either. Suddenly, after all these years of grudging respect, you hate him and equate him with Bush. Equating BUSH with Bush didn't work out that well, so, again, what the heck? Isn't this the definition of insane? Even if it's not insane, it's annoying and I'm tired of it.

I'm sick of politics already in September, and I'm the sort of person who's interested in politics. That's how bad it is.

Democrats, I know you love Obama. Show the love. The hate-side of you isn't that pretty, and if polls are right I'm not the only one who thinks so.

(A post much inspired by Madame Meow.)

Eleven months!

2008-09-11T21:13:00.002-04:00

I did take ten-month pictures, but those are in a black hole along with the reunion pictures, road trip pictures, Vineyard pictures, and Ithaca pictures I haven't processed yet.

This one is not a great picture because she's not looking at the camera, but it is the first picture I have of her STANDING! I put her down on the grass and she just stood there like a real hominid long enough that I managed to take a picture of it.

Her other tricks include playing peek-a-boo (I'm never sure how they define these things, but I mean that she will hide, or do what she thinks is hiding, behind a book or blanket or whatever's handy while I ask, "Where's Auletta?"), clapping, and waving her index finger in the air while delivering orations that have all the cadences and structures of real language, except they're unintelligible. Oh, but probably not for long.

I am gay for Camille Paglia

2008-09-10T09:04:00.002-04:00

Read this.

Somewhere in my family's archives there's a picture of my great-grandmother with my grandfather as a young boy, standing on the porch of their ranch house in Montana, looking fierce, like she could get up before dawn, strap my grandfather to her back, go out into subzero weather, birth a calf, slaughter it, and eat it for breakfast.

By request

2008-09-09T15:04:00.001-04:00

A picture. A recent picture, even. From today. I have two-month-old pictures I haven't processed, but I'll get to those, really.

Truly important news

2008-09-08T18:25:00.002-04:00

In the past few days, Auletta has stood on her own for a second or two at a time on several occasions. She is pulling up on everything she possibly can. She might be walking by her first birthday. I know that's a normal rate of development, but still! Weird!

Sarah Palin rumors

2008-09-08T08:46:00.004-04:00

A roundup. Some are true, some are not. For anyone who stumbles on this, please for the love of God try to get your facts straight before perpetuating rumors. There are enough facts for you to have a field day with.

(Via Instapundit, who is giving me a lot to play with. If you're a liberal and reading this, yes he's conservative, but please give him a chance; he's very sane.)

(Drat, I have turned this into a politics blog. If this "Sambo beat the bitch" thing turns out to be verifiably true I will recant everything.)

Palin and sex education, and the horrors of sex ed, one of the lamest parts of a lame period in my life

2008-09-07T15:43:00.008-04:00

Since I've been reading a number of posts by other bloggers who take it for granted that Palin is opposed to any other sex education than abstinence only (or opposed to sex education completely), even I was surprised to read that she appears to believe in more comprehensive sex education. And that it's not clear that Bristol received abstinence-only education--no surprise considering Palin's only been governor of Alaska for a year and a half and probably hasn't had time to establish autocratic control of public schools, despite snarky comments like "How did that abstinence-only education work out for you, honey?"

See this article in the LA Times (which I gather is a sufficiently unbiased source, no?) and this article in the Detroit Free Press.

In the past week I've conceived the notion that there shouldn't be sex education in schools at all because either it will be taught without any sort of underlying philosophy about what sex means (which I would oppose, because I think sex means something) or it will be taught with some sort of underlying philosophy (which someone will inevitably oppose, possibly including me because I might disagree with what that philosophy of sex is). So I can't run for public office, because I put that out there and now I'm anathema to everyone.

(By the way, what did everyone learn in sex ed? My memories are mostly along the lines of how I was theoretically supposed to learn Washington state history in ninth grade social studies, which I did not. I remember two films: one with giggly teenagers asking questions like "What's an orgasm?" and one that was like Chlamydia: The Untold Story, and meanwhile I was probably the most unsexed ninth-grader ever and thinking, "Well, chlamydia's about eleven thousandth on my list of worries under present circumstances." So there you go.)

On the Vineyard

2008-09-02T22:50:00.002-04:00

Okay, enough politics. This is 2008, which means it's an election year--NO! it means my daughter's growing like a weed and this is a mommy blog, and I have so many pictures to catch up on that you're going to be baby-ed out by the time I'm done.

We spent a week and a half on Martha's Vineyard in August while Justin was doing a research project. Really. So, here is Auletta on the Beach, Take 2. Observe the cute swimsuit from Super-Auntie Dawn.

Chilling on the sand with Dad.

Taking a dip with Mom. Note that she is okay with sand (she was eating it earlier and saying "num," so she must like it) but is not really sure about this ocean thingy.

The ocean is best viewed from Daddy-height.

One political thing and then I'm done.

2008-09-01T18:23:00.004-04:00

This is gross.

Three days after only the second woman ever to be nominated by a major party for the vice presidency of the United States is chosen, and other women--other mothers! are getting into these rumors, as if Republican women don't count or something. Stop it. Just stop. If this is the best we can do, we don't deserve the right to vote we got 88 years ago. Criticize her resume, criticize her political beliefs, but don't scrutinize whether she looks five months pregnant in a photo taken from behind and don't be hypocritical judgmental asshats when her teenage daughter gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby. It is none of your damn business, and just because she's "anti-choice" or evangelical or whatever doesn't mean her womanhood or her family is any less sacred than yours, which you (as I would) would defend with your life and teeth and bare hands.

The long, long trip

2008-07-19T20:14:00.004-04:00

We are driving home from Seattle. Because.

First night: Bozeman, MT
Second night: Medora, ND
Now we're chilling in Denver with friends.

Why are we doing this? I'm not entirely sure. Justin hates flying and loves road trips. This might be the last time Auletta travels so far without extensive complaining (she's been amazingly good, although the problem with lots of sleep during the day in the car is not so much sleep at night when we need to sleep). And this country is hella cool.

Pictures are forthcoming. Will be back by the end of next week (I have a shopping date in NYC! which required a little additional shopping today so I don't look like a hobo when I do the future shopping. At least that is my logic).

Okay, but here is a preview: Sunset at Buck Hill, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota.

Nine months!

2008-07-12T13:12:00.003-04:00

Okay, I wasn't that far off. I took these pictures yesterday, only a day after her nine-month birthday. I'll go back and do reunion pictures soon, Deo volente.

She reminds me a LOT of Grandma Sue when she looks serious like this.

Photos taken in Seattle, where grass dies in the summer.

Westward

2008-07-04T11:27:00.002-04:00

We are headed to the west coast for the second time in four months: to visit my family in Seattle, and to attend Justin's family reunion (his maternal grandmother's side) in Lincoln City, Oregon. Here's hoping Auletta travels as well as she did on her first cross-country trip.

Four years!

2008-07-03T13:03:00.004-04:00

Since the Best Wedding Ever. Okay, I am biased.

Tiaras for weddings: Because some of us were too cool for prom.

Four down and many more to come, God willing. I love you, honeybee.

Tomorrow, by the way, is the sixth anniversary of the Fourth of July party where we started dating-ish. So Justin and his roommates had this party at their flat in Rome attended by most of our Latin class as well as some of his roommate's friends from the Largo Argentina cat shelter--and the pub by the shelter--including this drunken British poet and his dog whose name degenerated from Gypsy to Nootsy over the course of the evening. Someone put a lock on the front gate of the building, so we were all locked in for a while, and I got jealous of this creative writing major from Columbia who stole Justin's attention when he and I were alone in the kitchen obviously having a private conversation, so I retreated into his bedroom, lured him in somehow while everyone was freaking out about not being able to leave except by jumping off the terrace, and then we expressed our mutual affection for one another. And the drunken British poet's kind of scary companion cut the lock, so eventually we all went home. The end. Or the beginning. Good times.

Sleep

2008-06-28T21:40:00.002-04:00

Auletta slept nicely in the co-sleeper next to our bed until she was six months old. Then she went cold turkey after a visit to the Greater Schwabs, and slept in our bed until we set up her crib and Ferberized her into sleeping there. Usually. Most of the night. Sometimes. Not really for naps yet. (Which, like, wouldn't matter, except that she usually doesn't cry when she wakes up from naps, so sometimes I walk in on her and she's awake and sitting on the edge of the bed.)

Naptime:

One night this week I put her down and she just sat there and cried because she didn't think she was ready to go to sleep, even though she was clearly tired. This is how she ended up:

Eight months!

2008-06-10T14:44:00.005-04:00

By some miracle of organization, I took Auletta's eight-month pictures, put them on SmugMug, and am posting them here, all on her actual eight-month birthday! Don't get used to it. It won't happen next month, for reasons to be disclosed.

Anyway, here is the cuteness:

One of those dresses I bought a year ago when I found out I was having a girl. It has turned out to be as cute on her as I'd hoped, and good on sweltering days like today.

I signed Auletta up for a program at the library for 0-3-year-olds and their caregivers, which meets three mornings a week, starting today. I keep calling it storytime, but it actually involves like one story and then various songs, rhymes, games, etc., all with a predictable amount of chaos given the age group. Auletta, if I may say, is one of the best behaved children there, probably because she's still essentially immobile. She is starting to crawl backwards but in such situations seems content to sit and watch the bigger kids crawl and walk, and grab them if they get too close. Storytime is as much for me to meet other moms as it is for Auletta to meet other kids, although she is so rarely around children her own age that I think it will be good for her to start socializing, to the extent that infants socialize. Also I am hoping the time spent in the library will make her additionally nerdy.

Aunties and uncles

2008-06-08T09:04:00.002-04:00

From our trip to Ithaca a couple of weeks ago for Weath's graduation:

Uncle Harry

Uncle Soren

Auntie Weatherly

Uncle Whitney

Super-Auntie Dawn

And that's not even everyone!

Seven months, and a bit

2008-06-06T16:59:00.004-04:00

I didn't get around to taking Auletta's seven-month pictures until around May 15. You'd think now she that she's sitting up on her own she'd be easier to pose, but our apartment is still too unpacked and cluttered to take pictures and the outside can be wet and cold and unmanicured. And the photographer can be lazy. But here are a few from when I finally got outside with a baby and a camera at the same time:

Still hard to keep her looking at the camera with her hands out of her mouth. I suspect she will be a camera hog as soon as she figures out exactly what it is.