iBeth

Emma's Tricycle

Emma is finally big enough to pedal her tricycle without needing help from a grownup.  (Maybe we should have bought her a more adjustable model, but the classic red trikes are so darned cute!)  She has outgrown her bike helmet just when she is going fast enough that she might need one!  Guess I should add helmets to the girls' Christmas lists.  I wonder if any local stores will not only sell but also fit the helmets?  Fitting Emma with her last one was a pain.

Having It All

Profgrrl raises the issue of whether academic women can really have it all: career, family, happiness.   And articles like the one in Academe  certainly make it seem as though lives like mine are aberrant.  Consider:

Only one in three women who takes a fast-track university job before having a child ever becomes a mother. Women who achieve tenure are more than twice as likely as their male counterparts to be single twelve years after earning the PhD (see figure 3). And . . .      indicates, women who are married when they begin their faculty careers are much more likely than men in the same position to divorce or separate from their spouses.

I've noticed this myself. At my university, most women I know are divorced (particularly "full" professors, not that many women have achieved that rank) or never married; fewer still have children.  More than once while on the tenure track, I looked around and wondered if divorce would be in my future, too.  Now that I am tenured, I  wonder if I will ever manage to be promoted past associate professor.  Or if I even want to work that hard on "academic" stuff, knowing the sacrifice of time away from family that it would require.

So while profgrrl hears these articles saying, "See, you loser. You're not doing what you really should be doing with your life. You can't have it all,"  I hear them saying, "You'd better watch out--there's a price to pay.  You can't possibly be this lucky."

CityMama Is Right: Learning to Use the Potty

CityMama writes about learning to trust her instinct after some silly person told her that she had "missed the boat" on toilet training.  CityMama, you are so right!  I was going to tell you this in your own comments, but my response got so long that I moved it over here (rather than take over your blog).

First of all, to whoever said that she had missed her opportunity to toilet train--now come on.  As every parent hears ad infinitem, children do not start kindergarten in diapers.  There is no fast-closing "window of opportunity."  Good grief.  That's as illogical as people who worry that they will miss the window of  opportunity to feed their kids solid foods.  At BoobyJuice I learned that there's a condition some babies get called "oral aversion," but I find it hard to believe that condition is anything but rare.  After all, you don't see any adults subsisting on breastmilk or baby formula.  At some point, babies grow up, no matter what we do.  (*sigh*)

Girl Presents II

I listed some gift ideas (click that link to see them) earlier, but forgot to provide clothes sizes.  Here they are:

Emma
clothes: 5 (these will be a little big, but her 4Ts are getting small; she refuses to wear all pants/shorts unless they are stretchy leggings-type because she "can't climb" in the regular fabric kind; she especially loathes blue jeans)
shoes: 8 1/2 W (you can tell sock size from this, right?  She needs socks!)
undies: S 4-6 (that's what the label says)
height: 40"
weight: 37 lbs.

Amelia
clothes: 2T (these will be a little big, but her 18mo are getting small; dresses should have some kind of panty because otherwise she takes off her diaper and leaves it lying around, with disastrous consequences)
shoes: 5 1/2 W (again, I hope this is enough of a clue to her sock size, since she needs socks)
height: 33"
weight: 25 lbs.

Where do babies come from?

For months, now, maybe even a year, Emma has indulged in a unique post-shower ritual: she curls up on the floor, underneath her towel, and pretends to be born.  She pushes her way out of the terrycloth womb as I pretend to push and I call out encouragement and then congratulations: "Happy birthday, my darling baby!  I am so happy you are here!  I love you!"  Then she makes little baby cooing sounds and crawls over to me. 

I've figured that this is Emmy's way of working through the fact that Amelia is the "new" baby while Emma is growing up (so fast! too fast!) into a big kid.  Although "baby" is the deadliest insult her preschool friends hurl at each other, I think Emma also feels nostalgic for the days when she was a baby and had none of the pressures or responsibilities of being four.

Banana Guard

A glow-in-the-dark banana guard would be the perfect gift for the exchange at work . . .  if only they were for sale near me!  I don't think I could get one in time for Friday's party, at least not without paying exhorbitant shipping fees.  Maybe next year.  (Thanks to Boingboing for the link.)

Firefox Fan

I'm not a techie, not even generally an early adopter; witness how long it took for me to start a blog, even though I'd been thinking about starting one for more than a year.  That's why I'm one of the last people in the universe (or at least the blogiverse) to post a link to the new Firefox browser.   

I Love You

Amelia has learned to say "I love you."  It sounds like "Ah luvva yoo."  Very cute!  I'll try to get a sound clip for posterity.

Update: Now it sounds like, "Luvvoo!"  Of course I've been asking her over and over, "Amelia, can you say 'I love you?'"  so she is getting lots of practice.

Trees!

We have trees!  In the photo, Emma and Amelia play near our new cypress tree, planted as part of a neighborhood project.

Some of you may know that for months, now, I've been working hard for our subdivision to get these trees through a  county grant.  We live in one of those newer production-home subdivisions where the developer scrapes the earth clean, scoops out retention ponds, and uses the dredged earth as fill for postage-stamp-sized treeless lots. 

Why did we buy here? It was within our price range and close to work.  We were tempted by another community which is supposedly designed like an affordable Celebration. However, that community wasn't affordable enough to make up for the longer commute; it's also much closer to a working landfill and coal-burning power plant, and while I hadn't yet read Sandra Steingraber's Having Faith, we were both concerned about raising small children so close to active pollutors.  The home we finally purchased is built across the street from an inactive landfill, for which the records were lost in a fire, so no one is quite sure what's down there; however, annual water testing has failed to turn up any malign influences.  But I digress.

The point is, our subdivision desperately needs trees.  The developer put only two trees by each home, one plopped in the center of the front yard, one plopped in the center of the back yard.  I suspect the trees were not watered until homeowners moved in; in any event, many died, including one of ours, and we did water.  As a result, little shades our homes from the rather brutal sun, and drivers speed down our streets like they're still on the nearby expressway. Occasionally bewildered wild creatures such as cranes or turtles wander through our streets, wondering where their habitat went.  It's terrible.

Thanksgiving Day

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday (because it resists commercialization), and this year was no exception.  We watched news stories about crowded airports and highways with a smile, because our trip to the family dinner was a mere walk across the street.  I'm SO glad that David's parents moved so close to us.  Wish my other relatives lived that close, too.