Okay, Let's Think of a New Way to Market Toys

My daughter is tall. She's always going to be tall. I wouldn't be shocked if she was the tallest person in her class for the rest of her life. That's person, and not just tallest girl. I know this will cause her some moments of pain, but there's always something.

I don't want to be too egotistical here, either, but I have an inkling she's going to be one of the "smart kids", and will catch some flack for that over her academic career.

She's going to be different in enough ways that might cause her some trouble over the course of her life. Given that, I really wish we could start this evolution away from being so stuck in our ways as far as gender typing is concerned.

It's time for us to let go of all those primitive preconceptions, relax, and let our kids explore the whole world with fewer needless labels. Nothing they play with when they're three or five or seven is going to make them anything other than what they intrinsically are and will be no matter what.

I am so sick of this obsession with "boy toys" and "girl toys". Yes, I understand that there is a phase that most kids go through when they first begin to understand gender and they become either hyper-feminine or hyper-masculine while they try to wrap their brains around this new idea and what effect that has on their place in the world. I just don't understand why we take this one phase of child development and blow it out of proportion. Kids are obsessed with gender roles for a year or so. Their parents, many times, are obsessed with them from the moment they discover the gender of their baby until, oh, ever.

Here is just one manifestation of this phenomenon:

First, here's something subtle you might not have noticed. There is one more item in the "boy" list than the "girl" list. This tells me that things left off of the girl's list were left off on purpose and not due to space constraints.

Also, this graphic (taken from a major online retailer) appears on their 3-4 year old toy guide page. At ages 3 and 4, many, many kids are not this gender specific. Their parents might be, pushing cars on little Johnny even though he might be asking for a doll (a perfectly normal form of pretend play, especially if he has a younger sibling) and putting princess hats on their daughters who might be more interested in trains or blocks. The fact that they're pushing such baldly obvious gender typing on kids in an age group that predates the typical age range where awareness of gender roles comes into play just shows how much of the gender differences and gender gap is nurture and not nature.

Further, the very idea that the only toy that boys and girls can agree on is "music" and that universal things like "building sets and blocks" are the exclusive playground of boys is frankly, offensive.

There's an expression I hate that says, "Boys will be boys and girls will be either." In other words, boys play with boy toys and girls play with girl and boy toys. Maybe you think that this means that girls are able to look at their world from more different and varied points of view, but I think it's more true that the toys seen as exclusively for girls exist in a sort of "not good enough for a boy" gulag, looked down on by the boys who play with the sort of toys that introduce them to a more realistic version of the world (compare playing with cars and trains during imaginative play and playing princesses, and then consider which one is more likely to prepare them for the world we live in.)

When you further consider that the foundations for interest in math and science are laid in play with blocks and interest in things like dinosaurs (which spark trips to natural history museums and the like) and trains (which can be turned into an interest in mechanical engineering as they grow older and want to know how things work), labeling those things "for boys" is a disservice in every way to our young girls.

I was once kept out of an algebra class in the eighth grade by a male math department head, despite the fact that I had the highest score in my grade on the test used to place us in the "right" math class. His excuse was that he "thought I'd want to be with my little friends." The principal backed him.

My friends were guys. I didn't know a single person in the eighth grade pre-algebra class I took, which bored me so much that it's the closest I've ever come to getting trouble for spacing out in class and not paying attention. My friends were boys, by the way, because they didn't seem as affronted by my interest in math and science as the girls were.

Maybe it was because the girls were brainwashed by gender stereotyping, and my insistence on ignoring the boundaries made them uneasy. Maybe we would never have gotten along anyway, and it was immaterial.

But you know what? As long as we keep brainwashing our kids to stay safely in their assigned gender roles, we're never gonna know.

Blech

Why are my glasses getting so schmutzy lately? I don't remember cleaning them this often before, and finding so much crap on them each time I clean them.

Is it the altitude? Am I messier than I used to be? Am I fussier than I used to be? Did something else change?

I just don't get it.

Crap

I took the B to a "pick your own" farm today, where I was nervous the entire time we were in the flower patch picking flowers (none of the good veg is in season yet, I guess, and the only fruit you could pick yourself were pie cherries, and the last thing I need is cherry pie) that she would get stung by a bee or a hornet. We made it out of there okay, got some beans (they had yellow, green, and purple) and checked out.

On the way out to the car, we walked across a little bridge thingie with hollow piping used as railing, and when we got to the far side, the B must have patted the piping or something and a swarm of hornets flew out. One of them was on her hand before I could react, and she started crying. I looked at her hand and there was a little bloody spot on it with the skin around it starting to swell.

Crap.

It appears she has no bee sting allergy, which is good. I cleaned it out well at the car (with the doors closed, thankyouverymuch) and drove home, where I put insect sting/itchy skin cream on it and then gave her the band-aid she kept asking me for in the car. (We put them on her mosquito bites after the 4th to keep her from scratching, so she knows what they're for.)

I know there's nothing I could have done to prevent it. Even someone with my level of persistent paranoia couldn't have imagined the pipes were housing a hornet's nest, and the sting happened so fast after I realized they were there that I couldn't have done anything about it anyway.

Still, seeing her little swollen hand and the band-aid makes me sad.

Children of Men

No, this is not a "bad movies I like" post. This is a good movie that I had trouble watching.

I love Cuaron, learning his visual style from Harry Potter: Prisoner of Azkaban, but then finding his other stuff afterward. I'd heard great stuff about Children of Men, so we NetFlixed it.

It was great, but it's the sort of thing I have trouble making room for to let any of it in. I've been sitting here with my laptop on my lap looking at pictures of the B as a sort of inoculation to make it through. I almost went up to grab her out of her crib and hug her, but when you're the parent and not the kid, you have to control impulses like that.

In all fairness, I knew the general subject matter of the film, and I had an idea how unrelentingly dark it was. Gosh, though, I had no idea how realistic it would seem in the big picture stuff as well as the small picture stuff. This is really more of a horror movie for me, now, than some slasher pic with no plot.

Seriously, if you are made of stronger stuff than the Jell-O that having a baby has turned me into, I highly recommend the movie. It was troubling and disturbing, but only in that, "Yeah, we've got that in us, all right" sort of way. It was really hard to watch without looking away, but I mean that in a good way.

Tax Man

Tonight at 6:00, I met with a charming man with an MBA on his wall. He took the planner he'd emailed me that I printed and filled out (which he makes easy to do as long as you keep the tax papers that arrive in the mail) along with a few pieces of paper from me. He made small talk as he typed, asking about the B while his wife chided me from the outer office for not bringing her with me.

(Mind you, I'd only been there once before, about a year ago, to have our taxes done last year. They are smart businesspeople, to have such information at their fingertips, the sort of stuff that makes people feel at home there.)

After a story about his four year-old grandson, I heard the printer start printing. He got up, telling me that the B would grow up faster that I could imagine, and came back with our completed tax forms. He got us what I'm sure is the largest amount we could possibly be entitled to on the up-and-up back as a refund. He continued the small talk as he used two self-inking stamps to address my federal and state return envelopes, then went nuts with a stapler, attaching the mister's W-2 to both.

I glanced at the clock on his wall. It said 6:12. I was already writing out his check, and he told me the fee amount as he handed over the envelopes to me. It was an embarrassingly tiny percentage of the money he'd just gotten us back on our taxes. I filled the figure in on the check and handed it over to him.

He shook my hand and we got up, moving back to the outer office, where I was made to promise that the baby would come with me the next time.

Holy frickin' heck, I love finding a place where I know I'm getting a good deal, where I feel better leaving the joint than I did when I walked in. I was stressing hard about the taxes last year when I found this place. I stressed again this year that it would be an awful ordeal, even though this place worked out so well last year.

I am so glad to have been wrong. One weight, gone from my shoulders.

Battlestar

I have been slowly tiptoeing toward coming back to BSG, as someone clued me in that the "parent's worst nightmare" storylines might have come to a point of resolution where I could go back to watching the show.

So I've been turning it on while I am mostly concentrated on doing something else for the past two weeks, and decided to just watch this last episode.

Imagine my (spoilers)







initial regret when I saw that poor little baby (who is growing at the rate of a snail...is it really that recent that they were all on New Caprica? that baby is no more than five or six months old!) might be orphaned.

I stuck through until the end, to the happy resolution, and I felt better.

(But I might now be one of those crazy parents who insists, if we ever take a plane flight without the B, that the mister and I take separate planes so we won't be together on a crashed flight to leave her alone.)

(And yes, I know that driving in a car together without her presents more danger, statistically speaking. Try telling that to my subconscious.)

See This Vase?

It's nicer in person than it looks in this picture, I promise you. It is sort of irregularly shaped, but deliberately so. The colors are much more vibrant when they aren't under the harsh light of the flash.

However, my taste isn't the point here. This vase is notable for another reason.

You see, a year ago last April (is that how you say that, if I mean April of 2005?) LWC and I went to the Spring Craft Market. It was a carefree Saturday afternoon without the boys. There were a lot of things that were already set in motion at that moment that I didn't know about yet.

First, I was pregnant and didn't know it yet. I would actually find out the Friday following the Saturday of the craft show. I remember being sort of tired walking around at the craft show and I couldn't figure out why that would be. I'd ridden my bike that morning with the usual suspects and I'd gotten dropped, also because I was oddly tired.

Next, I'm sure the round of layoffs at That Place were already in motion as LWC and I walked around looking at lovely crafty wares. This vase was the last frivolous thing I bought while we were still carefree and pre-layoff. I remember staring at it, less than two weeks after we discovered we were going to have Brigid, not knowing what would happen or where we would have to move to. God, I felt dumb for buying it. I remembered LWC and I standing in the booth marveling at how inexpensive their vases and other pottery were for how nice they looked. I think I paid $35 for this one. And yeah, you can't do much with $35, but you can buy some groceries. You can buy enough diapers to last a month with that much money. It was easy to fixate on.

But...it wasn't about the money I spent. It was what the vase represented. It represented a lifestyle where we had no debts (other than the mortgage on the house and the loan on my car, but no credit card stuff) and we had enough disposable income that I bought a rather pointless vase just because I liked it.

It always made me wonder: did everyone who got the axe from that company, no matter which wave they were in, have a thing in their house that represented everything this vase did to me?

I stuck it on the mantel in the old house and tried not to look at it. When I unpacked it here, even with the job and the move straightened out, with new health insurance cards in our wallets and some certainty before our lives got turned upside-down by the B, I still felt uneasy looking at it. It represented something we had that we lost, that we'll never get back. An innocence, really, that things were nice and fun, that we had our friends and nothing would ever change. Friday night gaming would always be. My chair at the table, prime heckling position, would always be.

I saw the picture of the bathroom as it was when we looked at this house, considering if we should buy it, when I made my before/after bathroom wallpaper stripping/painting post awhile ago. The previous owners had a fussy flower arrangement in an equally fussy-looking vase on this goofy shelf type thing in the bathroom when they were showing the house, and I thought our newly repainted bathroom might benefit from the Tom and Kathy version of that. So I rescued my poor, maligned vase from the high, dark shelf where I'd stuck it and carried it upstairs. The blues were similar. The scale was about right.

One trip to the craft store later, and I had some strange-looking beige and brown stuff to put in it. Flowers—too fussy. Weird, curly stuff—just about my speed.

I've been getting used to having it around. The shower is glass, so I can see it while I'm showering. I almost don't even notice it anymore. Someday, I suppose I might not even remember where I got it or what the circumstances were soon after.

But I doubt it.

The Dream

Did you ever have someone in your life who you love, but who insists on saying something over and over again that makes you uncomfortable, that you completely disagree with, but you know there's no point in starting the argument about it if you say something in opposition to it?

Well, I do.

Don't worry. If you're reading this, it's not you. This person doesn't even know about the blog, and wouldn't know how to find it even if I gave them the URL.

I had the oddest dream about this last night, though. I looked right at that person and said, "It pains me when you say things like that. I really wish you wouldn't. I can't reconcile that with the person I know you are, deep down," and they smiled.

"Okay," they said, and looked serenely at me. "I understand. I didn't really mean it anyway."

Sometimes I wish real life could be like a dream.

Reflections on Being Pregnant

This is a lot harder than I thought it would be.

I have felt sick, I am not kidding you, about 60% of the time since the hunger for hot wings went away a couple of weeks ago. I can't sleep, both because I'm used to being medicated to do it and because I worry.

All the time.

I realize that's not "good for the baby", but I am a worrier and that's all there is to it. I worry about my family history, and that maybe we shouldn't have told anyone for a few months in case something happens. They warned me this wouldn't be easy for me, and they're right, in spades. It's not easy, in just about any way I can think of to describe it. I worry that I haven't been getting good enough nutrition, but when your body chucks just about everything back, I'm not sure what the alternative is.

Also, you get the most advice from people who either have never been pregnant, or were pregnant but didn't have the side effects that you do.

"Well, I never had morning sickness, but if you'd just eat about twenty ginger snaps as soon as you wake up in the morning, you'd be fine."

"Oh, honey, the worst will be over soon." - From a girl who's never been pregnant.

I know I'm being cranky. I know there are people who would give their left arm to be where I am. Be careful what you wish for. I was once told, many years ago, when I was in much worse health, that it might not be a realistic idea for me to have a baby.

That doesn't exactly help you get to sleep at night.

I'm sure it will all be fine, and even if it's not in the short term, it will be in the long. Or maybe a comet hits the earth tomorrow and none of it will matter. Shrug. Who can say? Not me. Just don't ask me about it at 4:15 in the morning.