Manufacturer's stamp

The "no meds" plan lasted all of two hours: she had a fever when I picked her up from daycare that day, started pulling on both ears by Saturday so we visited a doctor and were handed another cocktail of prescriptions, and came home early to avoid another sleepless night in Montpellier in our portapotty (but very friendly) hotel. Thankfully the 7th tooth came out and we may be in the clear now - until the 8th and 9th tooth and on it goes.

If I do therapy one day, instead of discussing dreams, I think I'll discuss the tunes I hum. I hum to the little one in the evenings to get her to fall asleep, and while it always starts inconspicuously as a random set of notes, it generally unconsciously evolves into a well known tune. Care to guess which has been recurrently hummed in this household recently? Anyone put their money on

"There's a place for us,
Somewhere a place for us" (West Side Story)?

My brain's got a pretty good sense of humour.

Recently the odds of life have been unkind to friends and family, with broken hearts and deaths. I accept the oppportunity to focus on something else besides my own little universe, and to be there for others. I don't know how to explain though while keeping the right perspective that although it is nothing as dramatic, I am feeling very vulnerable at the moment. But my thoughts are muddled so no more on this at this time.

Among my very greatest of friends is a particularly striking woman whose beauty has driven young boys and grown men silly. But this friend is suffering from poor body image at the present - convinced that she needs to lose many pounds. I know that our appreciation for our bodies is all internal-based and cannot be gathered from externally looking at us. There is little (no?) correlation between appearance and body confidence.
I look at a picture of the finish line of the Danskin triathlon, and all I can think of is "my thighs look fat, especially compared to my friend's".
Actually I thought I'd resolved all my issues with the birth of the little one - I was reconciled with my body now that I'd seen it function so beautifully and bring life.
But I was getting winter clothes out of their hideaway spot on Monday, and came upon a very old pair of jeans - bleached, too short, pretty ugly and with a tumultuous history. I rarely wear them except to paint, but they've been my reference pair. (I'm sure you've got one too - the one that tells you which size you are currently.) They were big on me. I should've rejoiced - yay, postpartum and extra room in my reference jeans. Instead I thought "oh I should wash them, they must've been stretched out over time", closely followed by "but I have no muscle, it's all fat right now; I need to start working out again".

I look at the little one's body. I take fake bites out of her Buddha belly, I massage her legs gently, I bury my nose in the folds of her neck. I even marvel at the preciousness of the tiny birthmark on top of her right foot - the one her pediatrician calls her "manufacturer's stamp". Her body is perfect. I only hope she'll know it too.

Montpellier

The week off is over. I feel like I've crawled out of a cave. Better able to focus now that I'm rested, that's for sure.

I've almost completed my first scrapbook for a longtime friend, which has immunized me for some time against the notion of doing another - too damn much work.

We're setting off tomorrow for a four-day weekend to Montpellier. We'll be checking out an international school, the real estate market, and assessing the like-mindedness of folks - in short we're out to find out in under 96 hours whether we click or not with that city.

Ironically in the last two weeks we have just started meeting friendly internationals here. Who knows what will happen; for once I'm not planning ahead.

The little one's cold and cough and runny nose have not ended. We've tried a variety of drugs and sleep positions, and at this point we're going to try no meds at all.

Dare I say she's at the top of her game in charmingness? She's venturing with many a drunken steps on her own and air kisses. Rumor has it, there's even a video of her first steps posted on the web somewhere, but email me to find out whether that's true or not.

Till next week then.

---
In the news recently: mamas on the effect of blogging on their identity as mothers, their need(?) for alcohol, and another award of sorts for the US.

Until it's here, you really don't know how dehumanizing and ugly parenting can be sometimes. The blog's a place where all that stuff can go. If you only went by what the magazines and parenting books said or what your relatives told you, you'd think you were a neurotic freak who was doing everything wrong. Blogging makes parents more relaxed.

They love their children, they're happy to be mothers, but they would like their world to be larger than a Little Tikes mini-kitchen... They are looking for a small break from the conventions of mommy-hood — a way to hold on to a part of their lives that existed before they had children and to bond over a shared disdain for the almost sadistically stressful world of modern parenting.

Of 168 countries surveyed in the world, only four offer no national maternity-leave program: Lesotho, Swaziland, Papua New Guinea, and the United States of America.

Also, not surprisingly harsher measures don't cut crime, but have the opposite impact. The causes of crime ought to be taken into account - what a concept.

Yeehaay :)

Of course I'm over the moon about the recent political news - not just for women's political participation, not just for dems (or anti-reps), not just for what it could mean for a change in foreign policy, and not even just elated about Rumsfeld: I thought my day could not possibly get any better till I read that Guatemalans may be starting to see some semblance of justice re: the civil war and genocide years: genocide suspects arrested, and Mexico signing the extradition of ex-Prez Portillo - protege and political successor of genocidal monster Rios Montt.

---

Lil one had what we refer to here as a pooplosion or massive poopalation (yes we do get creative), and I was pouring her a bath while making sure she wasn't crashing her skull on the cold bathroom tiles, pulled the toothbrush out of her grip (she does love to chew it), put it in the toothbrush-holding glass, and WHAM! Got hit in the face unexpectantly with this image of three toothbrushes: we're a family of three. I don't know what I was thinking before: A family of 2 and a 1/2? Two parents under the careful control of a 9-month old charmer? Three toothbrushes to mean a family of three. It reminded me of one of the pictures shown as evidence in a mormon polygamy trial: 27 toothbrushes lined up.

Motherhood has a certain way of sneaking up on you like that, like it's just a gradual change, part of a gradient of life. Which it's not. It's a rite of passage, a complete metamorphosis, a jump into a new universe. I realized that recently when I was pondering our organization of our digital pictures. Inside the 2006 folder, next to folders for pics from Cam, and a trip to Rome, was a folder with the lil one's name. Like "hey, we're OOF at the moment, we're taking a short trip to parenthood, but no worries, we'll be back in no time.". Hahahah. Of course, our entire life is in that folder these days.

And I'm enjoying it. She's a real charmer. Learning to dance (well, bend at the knees repeatedly), sing-hum, and gracefully sink to the grounds when she's scared to take one more step on her own. Smiling the whole time. And even batting her eyelashes when the doc was examining her throat last week. (verdict: big bad cold hasn't gone away, has spread to the throat, may turn into an ear infection).

---

I am re-reading the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, in anticipation of a weekend with close girlfriends. The paragraphs on motherhood left me speechless. They had not registered when I read the book years ago. The insanity of Vivi had, but not her depiction of the relentless love-you-my-child/your-relentless-needs-are-driving-me-nuts. How many books ought I to be re-reading, me wonders?

---

And this would not be a normal post if it weren't for me getting on my soap box about the danger of exposure to (barely tested or not tested at all) industrial chemicals to children's brain development.

"In an essay published online in the journal The Lancet, the researchers identified 202 potentially harmful industrial chemicals that may be contributing to dramatic increases in autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and other brain disorders among children.

Roughly half of the chemicals are in common use, but very few have been tested to determine their impact on brain development.

"The bottom line is you only get one chance to develop a brain," Philippe Grandjean, M.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health, tells WebMD. "We have to protect children against chemical pollution because damage to a developing brain is irreversible."

The few substances proven to be toxic to human neurodevelopment should be viewed as the tip of a very large iceberg," they wrote.

Now, go ahead, yawn, while I entertain you with my wild fantasy of one day inhabiting a petroleum-free kitchen. I'll wait.

... And this gives us a perfect opportunity to plug in a book that comes highly recommended on less toxic home cleaning, which I'm looking forward to purchasing on our next venture into the mighty United States.

Africa

Nicaragua: abortion-ban extended to cover all cases (including rape, incest, life-threatening situation to mother), and also US meddled with elections by threatening to block all remittances from Nicaraguans working in the US. "In a last-ditch effort to undermine Ortega, Cong. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), chairman of the House's International Relations Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, sent a letter on October 27 to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Rohrabacher enjoined Chertoff “to prepare in accordance with U.S. law, contingency plans to block any further money remittances from being sent to Nicaragua in the event that the FSLN enters government.”"

Speaking of remittances, World Bank reminds "In 2005 migrant workers from Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) sent a total of $48.3 billion back to their home countries. In 2004, remittances represented about 70 percent of foreign direct investment (FDI) in LAC and were 500 percent larger than Official Development Assistance to the region."

Now that the Bush administration has made the US safer since Sept 11, 2001 , it's time to focus on weaponizing space. "October 2006 saw a near-unanimous vote at the General Assembly when 166 nations voted for a resolution to prevent an arms race in outer space. Only one country abstrained, Israel, while only one voted against such a resolution, the United States of America."

Before classes started in Cambridge, our cohort visited the British Parliament. The system had recently been turned on its head as the right of peerage which had been a right inherited from father-on-down for generations, had been swiftly and peacefully replaced by a more meritocratic system. Asked about this, our class director simply answered "it was no longer justifiable".
I was struck by those words. How many things after all do we encounter which are no longer tenable, but only survive as proof of corruption, nefarious heritage, or social injustice?
Somehow these same words came back to mind when I read "Will our system of constitutional democracy survive?" - Fear and Voting in the USA.

AFRICA.
Worldbank's financial Development Indicators show improvement.
Leila Ahmed's biography speaks movingly of the Islam she knows - a women's Islam far different from and holding contempt for the official Islam of the clerics. She also goes back repeatedly over the history of Egypt - when did it become Arab, she asks; why and for which political purposes, she uncovers.

I've been thinking about that wrt Africa. We don't think of Asia as a homogeneous group, nor of any other continent. Then why the liberty to group "Africa" so commonly together?

I am moved by accounts of US descendants of slaves who proudly wear a bracelet in the shape of the African continent, because they know not which region to zoom into to locate their ancestors.
Wikipedia tells me etymologically it shares its root with Nefertiti, and means "good", "beautiful", "perfection" or "noble".
But I cannot shake the thought that the "Africa" grouping is too convenient, and too accepted to be free of political intent. Is it to better cast it aside, and say with ease, "It's all messed up; it's full of corruption; it's AIDS-ridden; there's no hope in Africa"? Who coined the term Africa, and why are we so keen on using it so profusely to refer to realities so dramatically different from one another?

fairly robust waistline

Cheney tries hard, but he can't seem to get off my top 10 list of most love-to-hate people: waterboarding, although even the US Army forbids it (not to mention several international treaties and all sorts of reasonable folks), is of course practiced on suspect detainees, and endorsed by Dick who decided that oh no, it's not torture, it's "a fairly robust interrogation program".

Heard about the insane leap backwards to the 14th century with the pope going for pre-Vatican II Pie I masses in Latin? My favourite commentary is by L'Humanité (in French): afraid of opening up to the world.

The key to a leaner waist: sticking to comedies, single-color M&Ms, and proclaiming your wine to be from South Dakota - duh.

---

The little one was a Queen-to-Bee for Halloween. (Princess is one of her numerous nicknames.)

I have to write these down because I'm sure next week we'll be on to something else: she's been taking a few heedless steps on her own. She continues to point to lights, cats, dogs, people she likes (sometimes, so cute, with both hands). And she's clearly starting to understand a few bilingual words. Fun times, I tell you... Oh and the fact that we can now leave her on her own again in her playpen because although she gets herself up to standing and cruises around, her balance is now good enough that she no longer crashes all the time? fun times too.

My time-off has been postponed by another week and a day, but I'm cool with it. I'll be at home, not knowing what to do with myself after I've caught up on the laundry and vaccuuming and gone swimming and to yoga, and caught up on emails and bills and visits to the local tax office, and doing my accounting, and searching for a good new computer (suggestions?), and a B&B around Montpellier for thanksgiving, and dropping by an orthodontist and getting the car's front airbag checked.

I woke up with a stark realization a few weeks ago - my time off wouldn't be leisurely I realized. Translate that to mean, I would still have a full time job of caring for the little one, while on vacation. I've been meaning to write about this, but have found a much better post than I could put into words here.