The home lifecycle: laundry, cooking and cleaning

- doing the pie crusts and freezing the extras while brushing my teeth and checking on the eldest who's in the long process of falling asleep
- sweeping the upstairs while the chunky mini E is in the baby sling to try to get her to nap despite Awful Horrible teething
- menu planning on a scrap of paper on the fridge mess, based on current fridge contents and current cravings, to keep ahead when dinner time rolls around and not have to start staring at the contents of the crisper to find a source of inspiration
- meal cooking in the mornings so that at night when I am working from home and trying to hide from the youngsters who are under the care of the nanny no unfortunate encounter and total loss of productive time occurs
- putting the purple school library bag by the garage door on sunday nights, loaded with the school library books, and emptying the back of the car to make room for carpool boy and carseat
- running a laundry of diapers on the way out to school in the mornings
...

Whether it's labelled multi-tasking, domesticity or hard working, what I wonder is this

When did we forget that it's a learning process? Not only are we not born with the ability to know what laundry schedule works best in a given home (mostly Mondays and Friday here, plus washable diapers whenever), but we don't even learn it while growing up anymore - so busy are we with thrilling homework and busy afterschool activities and, well, tv.
We spend a bunch of years getting a degree in school; do we honestly expect to know how to run a home with any number of people and any amount of loss of sleep without trial and error?

I pompously declare the importance of relearning this. And being humbled by the experience.

visual dictionary

So very cool : a mosaic visualization of all nouns in the English language

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The news come in from around the world - 3 friends miscarry in the last month. The enormous grief, for them, for me also - for the past-, for the knowledge of the weight they'll carry forward.
And yet several others of my dear friends are happily expecting.

Reconciling that, holding both in my heart side by side, without making one count less or more because of or despite of the other.

Talk to me, Doc

Welcome back.

If you want to maintain your faith in medecine, I do not recommend moving to a different country. If doctors knew what they were doing, then how can their methods and treatments be entirely different from, and incompatible with those of their counterparts across an ocean? And how come the treatments in a country seamlessly integrate with the pharma industry's offerings in that country?

Simple case in point: no.1 most ingested drug by infants and children in the US? Tylenol. Readily available -- in every grocery store, in fact -- in the U.S. but not in France.
No.1 most ingested drug by infants and children in France? Doliprane (also a fever and pain reducer). Not available in the US.

And you'll also find yourself trying to arbitrate between recommendations and drug treatment A - prescribed in say, France, for 3 months to try to curb your child's endless bouts with ear infections - (nota bene: the definition for ear infections is actually not the same in both places); and treatment B, also known as nada, prescribed in say, the US.

Additionally, how can the list of supposed aggravating factors for, oh, ear infections, in the US have nothing in common with the list of aggravating factors in France, except for smoking, which is a non-issue because I gave that up years ago?

It'd be all ironic and I'd be able to laugh along with Alanis if my girls' ears and pains and sleepless nights (and my sleepless nights) and their ability to hear and speak properly weren't in the balance .

Can you sense the frustration? ;)