Posts for category ‘babies’

It’s a day off from uni-blogging and a day on for randomness. So: writer Joelle Anthony had me over to her blog for a fun Q&A. And, The Well-Read Child gives Once Was Lost a nice review here. Thank you Joelle and TWRC.

Moving on…

Via The Curator, I came across this Guardian article about the “stuff-a-lanche” most of us are now living under. The article is spot-on for me (though I’m not sure I want a government employee to pick my book of the month…maybe an awesome librarian). This in particular made me laugh:

…Scenes From a Marriage and The Seventh Seal – two well-regarded Ingmar Bergman films I bought during a short-lived fit of self-improvement. I should have thrown them in a bin on my way home from the shop. It’s hard enough to choose between the two: am I in the mood for a lyrical 92-minute meditation on death, or an unflinching three-hour portrayal of a dysfunctional relationship? Neither, as it turns out. They’d only be interrupted by emails and texts anyway.

Meanwhile, my Netflix envelope full of Babette’s Feast has been sitting on my DVD player for a month. It’s one of those movies that, when I mention I haven’t seen it, makes all my friends go bug-eyed and clutch their throats in horror. I’m sorry! I mean to watch it! But I also have half a season of 30 Rock to catch up on!

(While I’m apologizing to my friends and while a fourteen-minute Jeff Buckley song is playing on KRCL I would like to add: I do not like Jeff Buckley.)

Next…

I was in line at the Dollar Tree yesterday, as I often seem to be lately, when I struck up a conversation with two high school girls in front of me whose cart was full of baby dolls. “That’s a lot of babies,” I said. It turns out that they and some of their friends were independently launching a month of awareness of the importance of comprehensive sex education in high school. Utah, which has adhered to the abstinence only model, recently decided that parents can choose between abstinence only and comprehensive (actually, the teens can “choose” but can only do comprehensive with parental consent).

Now, don’t get me wrong. Abstinence has some great stuff going for it. It works for preventing pregnancy and disease, if you do it, and greatly uncomplicates your emotional and possibly spiritual life during a time that is already complicated enough, and there is a lot to be said for putting off decisions about your sex life until after you become an adult. I mean, really and truly, I recommend it. But if as a society we want to reduce unwanted pregnancies, abortion, STDs, and poverty, every single post-puberty human should know how to use a condom, and understand the difference between myth and fact when it comes to pregnancy and disease. So to the girls from West High with their cart full of babies who are doing their part, I say kudos.

Remember last year when Crash won the best picture Oscar and everyone who thought it would be Brokeback Mountain was in an uproar? At that time, I’d seen neither and figured the controversy was overblown. Last night I watched Crash, and even without having seen Brokeback yet, I can begin to understand why this was all a big deal. Crash, while technically very well-made and the performances are great and all that, is basically a sermon, not a movie. I didn’t care about the storylines or characters in and of themselves. It’s hard to care when they merely exist to deliver a message—over and over and over and over again. There were some moving moments and I really do think the performances were all-around superior, but overall…meh. Not a Best Picture.

In other news, I got to hang with Stella for awhile while Mom was getting a checkup. At one point she saw me taking a Kleenex out of the box to wipe her nose, then grabbed my fingers and moved them toward the box so that I’d do it again. I did, and then she figured it out, and you can guess what happened next. Or watch the video.

(It’s funny – after posting this to YouTube, I discovered that there’s like an entire genus of YouTube videos involving babies about Stella’s age pulling tissue out of boxes. G. said, “Why doesn’t anyone stop them?” Well, I know why. It’s very entertaining and the babies are very focused and don’t seem to lose interest at all. You keep bringing them tissue boxes, they’ll keep pulling them out. It must be something developmentally that makes it so interesting to them at this age.)

I love Wikipedia and use it at least ten times a day, but I guess I don’t really understand the way of the wiki. There are all these other wikis that focus on more specific topics, and I thought they were all connected somehow, that an internal link on a sub- or other-wiki would all eventually lead to the big wiki. Apparently that is not the case. Since I backed up and e-mailed myself the wrong file yesterday and couldn’t work on my WIP here at home (I can’t work non-linearly…I just can’t), I spent my working hours on publicity and online stuff, including making entries for myself and my book at the ChildLit Wiki. (I know – they are sparse and boring now. I’ll edit them when things get more exciting.) It takes a certain amount of computer savvy and therefore some time. I thought it all talked to the big wiki, but it doesn’t, so I guess if I should make entries over there, too. Anyway, if you can explain the connection or non-connection of the wiki to me in language I’ll understand, go for it. (Like, should I even be using the word “wiki” as a generic term, or am I violating some trademark or something?)

And now, a little book update: I read Tanya Lee Stone’s A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl, which is a YA novel in verse. Loved it. It’s written in three distinct voices and really draws out the complicated circumstances and emotions around Boys and Girls Together. Pretty hot in places, too. Not for the little kiddies. Also, in my ongoing quest for third-person YA, I read Brent Hartinger’s Grand & Humble. Brent wrote this story in alternating third-person narration—always a good way to build suspense, and build suspense he did. A real page-turner; see if you can figure out the mystery! Doo-doo-doo-doo. Lastly, I’m re-reading Paul Mariani’s Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius. I just love that guy. Since I’ve met him a few times, not only do I hear his voice in my head reading it to me in that great native New Yorker voice, I also picture him in the monastery and on the long walks he describes, and writing the book in his journal in his little retreatant cell. If you’re not into the memoir-ish kind of thing or his poetry, Paul has also written these incredible biographies of William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane, and is working on one of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

But enough about boring old books and reading! It’s almost time for me to go watch Project Runway with Sarah! (And don’t you dare tell me what happened yesterday.)

And oh yeah – we delivered another meal tonight for a different couple who just had a baby. No pictures this time, sad to say, but take my word for it when I say she is a living doll. That and the cool weather gave me an excuse to bake butterscotch brownies!

So G. and I are not major baby people. I mean, that may be a little obvious since we’ve been married 16 years with no offspring, but it isn’t every day your good friends issue progeny so we found ourselves moved and excited in spite or ourselves. “Baby C” (who now has an actual name – Mara) came into the world Friday morning. Tonight we got to see her up close and hold her, and we got G. to do it for an entire couple of minutes! So here are my handsome husband (blue shirt), Mara, and papa Tyler:

We just had a superawesometastic evening summer storm with giant flashes of lightning and scary thunder and power surges. I love summer storms! As a bonus, it brought the temperature down a blessed 10 degrees. I spent the majority of today languishing with womanly malaise, and I sense that I’m going to wake up tomorrow with energy to burn.

Here are Sarah and Stella, who came over last night (with Jonathan) to see their summer home. As you can see, Stella is at that sort of dangerously cute age and if I spend much more time around her, I should probably keep that extra pregnancy test handy. I’ve given Jonathan permission to play with our Charles Dickens and Jane Austen action figures (on TV in background). As long as he doesn’t make them do anything dirty.

*Whenever I hear the song “Knock on Wood” I think of the classic eighties movie  Satisfaction, in which Mallory Keaton and Julia Roberts are in a band, and Trini Alvarado is a tomboy, and Liam Neeson is the inappropriately older man. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve managed to see this movie. There was a time in the mid-nineties when you could not turn on the TV without this movie on 8 out of 10 channels.

Sideshow comes home tomorrow, and then it is packing packing and more packing until our departure for NM!