Five Months Old

Or, what I do with my spare time (see above).

On Becoming A SAHM

So after three finals this week, attending graduation on Saturday and (lest I forget) grading those finals, I will embark, officially, on my next personal adventure (albeit one with a defined horizon): Stay At Home Momdom.

Aside: I'm still fairly uncomfortable with the "mom" label and was even regretting labelling this blog with that title. Maybe it should be Diary of a Lesbian Step-Father?

As in "Father Knows Best?"

Oh. . . . "Father" is even more problemmatic.

Dad?

As in "Whose your Daddy?" Okay that's just gross. Reserved for middled aged men in their fling-stage.

SAHM (pronounced "Sam")?

I've seen other lesbians each use a variante of "Mom", like "Mama" and "Mommy", but we're in the process of trying that and I just get confused.

"Mommy?"

No response.

"MOMMY"

No response.

"Oh, do you mean me?"

Or, "Let's go to the front door! Mama, I mean Mommy, I mean Mom is coming home!"

I've also seen other lesbian couples create really fun terms like "Baba."

I like this better on its face, but I can't help but giggle every time I try to get the SYO to call me something funny. I think its because I regularly introduce myself to her friends with really weird titles like "GooneyGooGoo" or something.

So far "Mamoo" is sticking. But again, I end up calling BioMom that as often as not.

Honestly, these are the first labels in my life with which I've had this much trouble.

We've got to come up with a new collective term for the Non-Biological Lesbian Partner-Parent. How about NBL-Double-P pronounced: "Enn-Be-ell-double P"? As in "NBL double P? CAN I HAVE SOME MORE ICE CREAM? . . . WHY NOT? WHEN?"

Somehow what they call me in this context seems of secondary importance.

Anyway, I am excited and terrified all at once. I am on FMLA in the fall and teaching part time at Macalester in the spring. A true break from working - if you call what I do "work" (I am a labor economist, so, because I receive such little disutility from the activities associated with my job, it's hard to really call it work -- certainly in the Marxian sense -- which, ironically nearly all Neoclassical economists have adopted(.

Of course, a break sounds lovely.

And I've got a reading list that's through the roof.

Oh, and those paper ideas to finish up.

And that book idea I've always had.

But what is wonderful and impossible about this particular break is that none of that is entirely possible.

Well, maybe if I were brilliantly efficient and could really accomplish something in the hour-ish chunks he gives us.

So its this strange place of just being. Taking care of the now five (!) month old, his sister and BioMom. Feeling itchy that I SHOULD be getting more done but unable to effectively jam in little chunks of time.

So yeah. I'm terrified.

But also thrilled.

Oh What People Will Say When They Don't Have to Identify Themselves

A colleague of mine brought in an interesting speaker a few weeks ago that set off a firestorm in the local rag.

Check out an article about the event and the discussion that ensued here. Note: the discussion moves from bottom up.

It is easy to forget that there are people out there that think this way.

B(u)y The Book

Today the SYO and I went to a local bookstore to hear Kate Dicamillo speak.

Grandma had given her The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, which was a lovely little story. Grandma sent her postcards along the way (as we read the book) that depicted the rabbit's journey.

We took her copy in to have it signed and I encouraged the SYO to, if she felt comfortable, ask the author anything that she was curious about, regarding the book. To be honest, we hadn't done much research. Sure, we watched the movie Winn-Dixie and we had read the Edward Tulane book, but that was really it. And, I didn't really brief her about such an event. But she seemed interested, so we went.

We got there a little late and she maneuvered her way to the front only to come running back to me:

Someone else has a book just like mine!

Clearly, she had missed the point. There were HUNDREDS of copies of ALL of the author's books conveniently on hand for purchase.

Surprisingly, she got a question in in the general Q and A:

So, how'd you come up with the idea?

The author seemed nonplussed:

Let's cut to the chase then, why don't we?

Another book of interest was just published and contains an essay by The Other Mother. Check out Confessions of the Other Mother : Non-Biological Lesbian Mothers Tell All.

New Dog, New Tricks

So Long To A Great One

John Kenneth Galbraith, 97, Dies; Economist Held a Mirror to Society

Today Show Gender Antics

This morning on The Today Show, they had a segment where the husband traded places with his wife. It is such a ridiculous premise, but of course, I should not be surprised that Today would stoop to such lows. Not to mention, jumping the shark.

The story usually starts with some, poor husband/father/breadwinner who has somehow relegated his stay at home wife to the worthless and taken-advantage of category. She is furious that he doesn't get how hard it is to be her. He doesn't appreciate her, blah blah blah.

Said SAHM gets wisked off to the Caman islands where said neglectful wage-worker takes care of the screaming, diapered brood at home. ALONE.

Initially, all is good. He speaks happly into the confessional "real-world" camera that everything is going smoothly and he was right all along.

Things quickly go downhill. He has to (gasp) change diapers, and kids run wild as if in a stupid movie.

Fast forward to the end of the segment (who has time or an interest in watching the real world daddy day care?): Dad ends up respecting mom, they start having sex again, he goes back to the peace and quiet of his office, and everyone is happy (except for the mom who came back from vacation to diapers and kids gone wild).

Why not do a really innovative story that talks about how the partners share the drugery of diapers AND the pressure of bringing home the bacon?

More Milestones: Eureka!

So, Mr. Big (ahem) discovered himself today.

Between watching this happen, mid diaper change and again later during his bath, (it looked like he must have been hurting himself!), reading Why Gender Matters, and my most recent discovery via the New York Times (yeah, I'm out of the loop) TukerMax.com, I am learning a lot about men.

I finally finished Why Gender Matters last week. It was fascinating and I recommend it to anyone who deals with kids in any way. He is definitely an advocate of treating kids differently based on their sex because he believes that "gender" is far from socially constructed. One important consequence of the "gender-neutral" pedagogy of the last 20 or 30 years has been, in his opinion, a relaxing of a cultural understanding of what it means to be men and women as adults (he has a very developed explanation for this which I recommend but cannot reiterate here). We have few areas in which boys are ever at male-only events or vice versa because we have put faith in the notion of a gender-neutral society. He feels we have severely failed kids in this way. Boys are never in a male-only arena and thus, don't learn from their elders in a way that used to be common in our society (and vice versa). As a result, kids grow up not knowing how to behave like "real" men and women. So, they attempt to approximate it in, as it turns out, perverse ways. In the book, Sax documents the increasing regularity of teenage sex at ever younger years. He discusses studies which have documented a change in teenage culture in which kids no longer "date" but hook up and/or consider oral sex to be what "first base" once was.

Couple this with TuckerMax (who, by the way, I read voraciously this past weekend). His exploits describe the perverse alpha male that Sax warns us about. I am not taking a stance on TuckerMax here. He is smart, lives by his own rules, writes decently (however repetitive his antics become) and although he says he doesn't hate women, I can't quite figure out what he's doing or what he's looking for (although he states it quite bluntly: nonmonogamy whilst bearing at least five children with a 'four-star' woman who is willing to breast feed as it boosts IQ points by 10-15). What I'm concerned about is, how realistic is his MTV-hyped world and is this the world we're sending our kids into?

Spring Cleaning

A Tale of Two Cousins

I've got two cousins in the public eye right now.

One, is still on Survivor, despite all of the odds.

The other is in a rather heated legislative battle in Nebraska regarding race and educational districts. He was recently quoted on CNN and in the New York Times. He an his wife, also, had a baby two days ago! Congratulations Brother of Cousin (who is regularly referred to in this blog)!

Four Months, One Day

The Boy Is As High As An Elephant's Eye

And it looks like he's climbing right into the sky!!!

Today ZeYo/Mr. Big is four months old.








What a four months it has been! I've been told by at least one reader that the blog's been a little short on text lately. Its not for material. Its just that usually when I sit down to blog I'm also holding the young man as he's napping. Typing with one hand is just not, well, its just not satisfying.

Anyway.

I think we've finally figured him out. Four months later. Putting my feminist roots aside, I've been engrossed in the book Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences by Leonard Sax. Let me preface this discussion by saying that my understanding of child development is quite slim, and I have not even finished this book let alone any of its critiques. So far, however, I am quite enjoying its explicit critique of the politically correct notion (one that I have believed whole heartedly) that gender is entirely socially constructed.

Basically, the author is putting forth the scientific evidence that boys and girls are simply hard-wired differently from our brains to the cells in our eyes. It is fascinating. I'm taking it to heart, too, making more efforts to wear the boy out every day with long walks and lots of play.

Let me also say that I'm not becoming a Lawrence Summers fan after reading this. I'd like to see a melding of the two theories, and, again, I'm not far enough in the book to say, but the author does not seem to condone sex(ist) stereotypes. He, for example discusses the concept of 'learned helplessness' which basically argues that we don't give our girls enough challenges so when they are faced with some they give up too easily. He just seems to be providing us information about biology and how we can deal with that as parents and teachers. For example, rather than trying to push away (some) boy's need for action and agression, we need to figure out creative ways to feed those desires.

I'd also love to see what anyone else thinks out there.

I just took the boy around the lake in the lovely 65 degree sunshine. He didn't sleep a wink while we were on the walk -- too much to see. But he's out cold now snoozing in the familiar.

Don't Need To Be Coy, Roy

Yesterday the SYO and I were making dinner together and listening to a little Simon and Garfunkle provided to us by the lovely, Cousin, when they started playing "Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover."

I could almost hear the wheels creaking in her brain.

Who is YOUR lover? She asked.

I try to avoid all romantic questions and contexts with her, feeling that her imagination is already such a powerful motivator in her life. Why encourage some parts of it?

Once in a while in her make-believe world, she'll say Okay. You be my boyfiend, Eric. She's too naive to know what being one's boyfriend or girlfriend actually means. It's just that she's aware of some cultural significance attached to the label. I usually respond with the I'm uncomfortable pretending to be your boyfriend. No need for the obvious qualifiers: a) I am not a boy, b) I am 30 years older than you and c) I am your parent. Anway, I wanted to avoid this particular question for fear that she'll include it in any future play: Okay, you be my LOVER, Eric.

As an aside, (and I bring this up only to point out how seemless our transition has been to the new, Catholic school) we were walking into school the other day and she read a sign on the billboard advertising the Girl Scout's Father-Daughter Square Dance. She asked if I'd go with her. I simply pointed out that she wasn't a Girl Scout.

Whew. I don't know how much longer I'm going to be able to avoid having that square dancing conversation with her. . .

What, exactly, does that song mean? She asked.

Um. I think its about when a girlfriend and boyfriend break up. When they decide to stop dating, I responded.

Oh. Why would a boyfriend and girlfriend break up?

I dunno. Maybe they just don't get along anymore.

Is it okay to break up after you're married.

Well. It happens, but you really only WANT to get married once. That's why you want to really get to know someone. See if you like them. Oh, AND be thirty years old. AT LEAST. Okay?

Will you help me find someone nice?

Absolutely.

All The President's Plumbing

The New York Times reported yesterday that the President APPROVED the intelligence leak.


Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff testified that he was authorized by President Bush, through Mr. Cheney, in July 2003 to disclose key parts of what until then was a classified prewar intelligence estimate on Iraq, according to a new court filing.

The testimony by the former official, I. Lewis Libby Jr., cited in a court filing by the government made late Wednesday, provides an indication that Mr. Bush, who has long criticized leaks of secret information as a threat to national security, may have played a direct role in authorizing disclosure of the intelligence report on Iraq.

Immigration

My colleague over at A Random Walk just published a counterpoint to a point on immigration in our local rag. You can check it out here.

My only critique is that it wasn't long enough to make even more of a case for opening up immigration. For example, he didn't point out the exact degree of the miniscule wage premium that low wage earners have received over the last few decades through limiting immigration (less than 8 percent). Or that immigrants more than make up for any increase in social expenditures by the contribution they make to GDP (and therefore taxes). Or that most Americans think that we should let illegal immigrants become legal once they've set roots in a community.

My grandpa came from Ireland and I've directly reaped the benefits of his willingness to take that risk. Why should we think differently about this issue now that most immigrants are no longer white or less educated?

Too Much Information

I've added a quick link to Mr. Big's vitals through Trixie Tracker.

Not vitals exactly, but you can tell if he is currently awake or sleeping.

Unexpected Consequences: Saddam and Women

I got this from colleague:

Published on Thursday, March 30, 2006 by Inter Press Service

Saddam Better for Women
by Sanjay Suri

LONDON - Women were far better off under former Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein, a women's group has found after an extensive survey in Iraq.

''Under the previous dictator regime, the basic rights for women were enshrined in the constitution,'' Houzan Mahmoud from the Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq told IPS in an interview. The group is a sister organization of MADRE, an international women's rights group.

Under Saddam, she said, ''women could go out to work, university and get married or divorced in civil courts. But at the moment women have lost almost all their rights and are being pushed back into the corner of their house.''

The recent constitution which was written under the U.S. government's supervision is ''very backward and anti-women,'' Mahmoud said. ''They make Islam the source for law making, and the main official religion of the country. This in itself means Islamic Sharia law and according to this women will be considered second-class citizens and will have no power in deciding over their lives.''

The whole of Iraqi society has been subjected to ''chaos and brutalisation,'' she said. ''Security is absent, all basic services, and above all the protection for women's rights is in no way on the agenda of any of the political parties who have been hand-picked by the U.S. administration in the installed so-called parliament.''

MADRE is calling for the deployment of a United Nations-led peacekeeping force and an immediate end to the U.S. occupation. As the crisis in Iraq intensifies, the group says women and their families in Iraq face an urgent need for security, functional government, and the provision of basic services within a human rights framework.

Over three years of occupation, the situation is becoming more dangerous and bleak with the presence of the occupying forces, and ''the more violence and terrorism is in function in Iraq the more women will fall victims of such climate,'' she said.

''The rape, abduction, abuse in prisons by prison guards, and killing of women is widespread,'' she said. ''The lack of security and proper protection for women is a major issue and no one, neither the occupying forces nor the local police of the puppet regime. is doing anything about it.''

But the position of women does vary within Iraq, she said. ''In the Kurdish part the situation of women is slightly better because Iraqi Kurdistan was out of the hands of the Ba'ath regime from 1991, so it was not part of the U.S. military attacks in 2003. But the attitude towards women is not progressive there.''

Beyond any dangers from the political situation, ''a lot of so- called 'honour killings' are still taking place, and the Kurdish authorities are not doing much to prevent it from happening.''

But the south is directly under daily military occupation ''and the presence of various Islamic armed militias who are terrorising women has made their situation worse,'' Mahmoud said. ''Also, the so-called parliament is divided on the bases of religious sects and ethnic backgrounds, so the majority of Shiittes who are in power are institutionalising women's oppression and are systematically forcing Islamification on Iraq.''

Women are 60 percent of the population of Iraq but they are not being consulted on any political issues and are being deprived of this right, she said.

The presence of a few women should not mislead people on the situation of women, she said. ''The U.S. administration has handpicked a few women and imposed them on people in the so-called parliament,'' she said. ''These women are very unknown to Iraqi women. Most of them belong to the reactionary right wing parties in power and they follow their agenda, which is discriminatory against women.''

Women would first like to see ''an end to the military occupation which has created chaos and destruction of Iraqi society and also resulted in the daily mass killing of ordinary Iraqis.''

Women particularly would ''want to see security restored so at least they can go out freely without being attacked, kidnapped or having acid thrown on their face,'' Mahmoud said. ''In addition, women want equality, freedom and their rights to be recognised in the constitution, and above all to be treated as equal human beings.''

© 2006 IPS - Inter Press Service

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Let's Roll

Today Mr. Big is beginning to roll over from his back to his front!

Broken Records

As of last Friday, Mr. Big was 18 lbs 3 0z, at 15 weeks, that growth indicates a 97% increase since 9 December. At the time of writing this post, he is taking his morning nap (it began at 8:22 a.m.) after sleeping a record 11 hours straight last night without a peep (from 8 p.m. to 6:47 a.m.)!

Stats 101

Any advice on how to explain to SYO that it is not statistically possible for Sidekick to ALWAYS get the bigger cookie/roll/brownie/piece of cake etc. etc. is sought.

Chinese Seeking Identity In America

Here is a nice New York Times piece for all of you out there in the process
(or have gone through the process) of adopting from China via the Freakonomics Blog.

Some snippets:

As the oldest of the adopted children move through their teenage years, they are beginning - independently and with a mix of enthusiasm and trepidation - to explore their identities. Their experiences offer hints at journeys yet to come for thousands of Chinese children who are now becoming part of American families each year.

Those experiences are influenced by factors like the level of diversity in their neighborhoods and schools, and how their parents expose them to their heritage.

"We're unique," Qiu Meng said.
. . .
Jane Brown, a social worker and adoptive parent who conducts workshops for adopted children and their families, says the families should directly confront issues of loss and rejection, which the children often face when they begin to understand the social and gender politics that caused their families in China to abandon them.

Working Girls

Taggert over at A Random Walk tipped me off to this recent article, "Working Girls" in Prospect, by Alison Wolf.

Her main point:

[F]or the first time, women, at least in developed societies, have virtually no career or occupation barred to them.

This marks a rupture in human history. It is one that has brought enormous benefits to many people, and to many women in particular. But its repercussions are not all positive, either for society as a whole, or for all women. We are no more likely to return to the old patterns than we are to subsistence agriculture, so we need to understand what the new female labour market means for all our lives.

Three consequences get far less attention than they deserve.

The first is the death of sisterhood: an end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than did their men.

The second is the erosion of "female altruism," the service ethos which has been profoundly important to modern industrial societies—particularly in the education of their young, and the care of their old and sick.

The third is the impact of employment change on childbearing. We are familiar with the prospect of demographic decline, yet we ignore, sometimes wilfully, the extent to which educated women face disincentives to bear children.

I can't decide if this is an article that says something to the effect of, for all that change, we are really still the same, or whether or not it points to really interesting shifts in our culture. See below (my bolds).


One could interpret today's feminist assumptions as reflecting the appetite of global capitalism for all talent, female and male, at the expense of the family. Certainly our current economic arrangements offer precious little support to family formation. On the contrary, they erect major barriers in its way. We all know by now that in most developed countries, birth rates are well below replacement level. Less recognised is the massive change in incentives to have children. In the past, adults had no tax-financed welfare state to depend on. Their families were their social insurance policies: children paid. Today, they expect the state to take care of their financial and health needs when ill or retired, regardless of whether they have six children or none. The benefits we get are completely unrelated to whether or not we contribute a future productive member to the economy.

Moreover, our labour market, with its greater gender equality, makes childbearing a very expensive prospect for successful professionals. Rearing a healthy, balanced child requires intensive attention and large amounts of time, and is not something that technical progress is going to alter. The price of that time is especially high for high-earning, busy elite parents—female or male. If they give up or cut down on work, the opportunity cost in terms of income forgone and careers stalled is far greater than for an unskilled 16-year-old school-leaver. In addition, elite children are expensive. Children are dependent for longer, high-quality childcare is costly and formal education has become increasingly important as the route to success. Parents know this, and it explains why the professional classes devote so much money and attention to their children's schooling.
. . .
The hard economics tells us that professional women will have to give up most if they have children, and so will be least inclined to do so. Highly educated women overwhelmingly stay in work and so pay little or no earnings penalty when they have children. But more and more of them in the developed world have no children at all. "The rich get richer and the poor have children" still applies; but this time around, it is women specifically that we are talking about. About 30 per cent of graduate women born in the early 1960s entered their forties childless. For graduate women born in 1970 (a substantially larger group) the expected figure is 40 per cent.

Unlike professional graduates, childbearing is a rational career choice for academically failing girls and one that a good many duly select, especially in countries where they are supported by the state.

The Lame Duck?

Check out this great Washington Post article.

More on The Phenomenon of Women Choosing to Have Children Sans Men

There has been a recent flurry of attention paid to the apparently growing number of women having children (by choice) without men. This includes both heterosexual and lesbian women, and the statistics attempt to exclude accidental out-of-wedlock births.

The latest installment is from Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Wanted: A Few Good Sperm
by Jennifer Egan which focuses on a few women who are choosing to conceive without husbands, boyfriends, or even prospects of partners.

One hopes to join a population of women that everyone agrees is expanding, although by how much is hard to pin down because single mothers by choice (or choice mothers), as they are sometimes called, aren't separated statistically from, say, babies born to unwed teenagers. Between 1999 and 2003 there was an almost 17 percent jump in the number of babies born to unmarried women between ages 30 and 44 in America, according to the National Center for Human Statistics, while the number born to unmarried women between 15 and 24 actually decreased by nearly 6 percent. Single Mothers by Choice, a 25-year-old support group, took in nearly double the number of new members in 2005 as it did 10 years ago, and its roughly 4,000 current members include women in Israel, Australia and Switzerland. The California Cryobank, the largest sperm bank in the country, owed a third of its business to single women in 2005, shipping them 9,600 vials of sperm, each good for one insemination.

Most of these articles focus on changing social norms:

As recently as the early 60's, a "respectable" woman needed to be married just to have sex, not to speak of children; a child born out of wedlock was a source of deepest shame. Yet this radical social change feels strangely inevitable; nearly a third of American households are headed by women alone, many of whom not only raise their children on their own but also support them. All that remains is conception, and it is small wonder that women have begun chipping away at needing a man for that — especially after Sylvia Ann Hewlett's controversial 2002 book, "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," sounded alarms about declining fertility rates in women over 35.

. . .

In the 25 years since she founded Single Mothers by Choice after becoming pregnant by accident, Jane Mattes, now 62, has seen her group's membership conceiving at younger ages (the median age among members is 36) and more often having second children. But the biggest change, Mattes says, is that the stigma attached to this form of single motherhood has largely faded. "People used to come into our meetings literally afraid to walk in," she told me. "We don't see that as much anymore. Everyone seems to know somebody who did it, which wasn't the case even 10 years ago."


Others on the technology and economics of it all:

The Internet is also a factor; as well as holding meetings through local chapters around the country, Single Mothers by Choice hosts 11 Listservs, each addressing a different aspect of single motherhood. Women around the world pore over these lists, exchanging tips and information, selling one another leftover vials of sperm. (Once sperm has shipped, it can't be returned to the bank.) Karyn found both her sperm bank and reproductive endocrinologist on these Listservs. Three-quarters of the members of Single Mothers by Choice choose to conceive with donor sperm, as lesbian couples have been doing for many years — adoption is costly, slow-moving and often biased against single people. Buying sperm over the Internet, on the other hand, is not much different from buying shoes.

Still others concentrate on the no-man part of the story. I'd put this article in that camp. Here are a few snippets:

Now, as we sat outside, she said: "There's nothing I'd like more in life than to have the whole picture and to share it all. To have the baby, to have the miniwagon, to have the husband, morning soccer games and P.T.A. — he's out manning the grill, and I'm mixing the margaritas. But I think if I had to choose today between becoming a mom or finding the perfect man and I could only have one today, I would choose becoming a mom. And hope that I have my lifetime to find the other."

"Maybe in six months or a year I'll have more insight about it, but something radical is going on in my brain about my relationships with men. O.K., so I'm not going to keep trying to have this picket-fence-y life. I'm waving the white flag. And now I have permission to directly pursue what I want. It's a very curious and ambivalent liberation, because I would rather not be single. It's not my first choice."


Glossary:

"proven fertility": meaning that at least one woman conceived using his sperm

"identity-release donor" (also called an "open donor" or a "yes donor"); a growing and extremely popular category of sperm donors who are willing to be contacted by any offspring who reach the age of 18.

Why Wisconsin Is Good

Even if you don't care about the packers:

Check out this article from the Washington Post: Wisconsin Voters Prepare to Weigh In On the War in Iraq

From Baraboo and Monona to Madison and La Crosse, antiwar activists invoked a 1911 state law to schedule a bring-the-troops-home referendum designed to send a message to Congress and the White House that the war is costing too many lives and too much money.

I Have To Admit, It's Gettin' Better! It's Gettin' Better All the Time

Thank God for adreneline.

The below images are probability distributions of sleep for ZeYo for a) 0-1 month, b) the first month, c) the second month and d) the third month.

The interpretation is this: black = probability of 1 that he is asleep and white = probability of 1 that he is awake.

Here is the description from the (genius) programmer:

The number of gray scale values depends on the number of days in your chart. If you have two days in your chart, then there will be three colors: black, 50% gray and white. The reason is that the different possibilities for being asleep at a given time for the two days would be:
2/2 (100% - asleep both days at a given time),
1/2 (50% - asleep one day, not the other at a given time) and
0/2 (0% - asleep neither day at a given time).

The more days in your sample, the more possible gray scale values. So if you have a months worth of data (31 days max), there will be 32 shades of gray:
(0/31 through 31/31). This would be approximately 0% black, 3% black, 6% black, 10% black, etc...


It's no wonder new parents are exhausted.






To get this data, I participate in the beta version of some very fun software that I recommend to new parents. Check out Trixie Tracker which just launched last week!

I found the "telemetries" as they are called, to be invaluable, especially in the first month. We were able to keep track of inputs and outputs, sleep, medicine, nursing, etc. At this point, we have devolved down to basically just sleep. During the second month you'll notice that I have less data. I made the terrible, self-esteem crushing choice to go on the job market this year and that was during the time of the on-campus interview. (I'll blog about that when the experience becomes more of a distant memory). I got caught up in the drama of it all and had no energy left over to document ZeYo's details.

You can see over the course of the months, however, that he's getting on Central Standard Time and abandoning the ranks of the living dead and . . . So are we!

Snowman

Without Hue

Through the Looking Glass

The Inadvertent Snow Angel

I am currently on spring break, but technically, only half of that is true. We got about two feet of snow on Monday and are expecting another 4-8 inches tomorrow!

More Interesting Gender Phenomena

Gender is another pet subject of mine. I am simply fascinated by the cultural transmission and expression of gender in different societies, its nature and nurture dimensions, and the crossovers between gender, sex, and sexuality.

Tonight was a first for me.

At a friend's house we met a young girl who, essentially, liked to cross-dress.

I know this sounds strange in our world as we know it. I mean, women wear pants, etc.

But clothes are coded very differently for young girls than they are for older girls and particularly vis-a-vis women [I can dress in a very non-gender-specific way and noone cares or notices. Look at Ellen as an example]. And they are extremely gender-specific.

I posted about the prevalence of young boys in our lives that do this back in December of 2004.

Anyway, so, I had never seen a girl like this. Well, I shouldn't say that. Of course, I've seen girls like this before -- essentially I am one of them. Let me clarify: I have never seen a five-year-old girl like this before.

She was wearing a short sleeve t-shirt over the top of a long sleeve t-shirt that said, in block letters B-A-S-E-B-A-L-L!, and pants that her mom called "skater pants" which seemed to be kahki's that looked to me like pants one would get at REI for hiking.

She was beautiful!

I commented wistfully to her mom about it, pointing out that our SYO would never wear such clothes and she started telling me how this girl had become extremely aware of gender over the last two years and has very attuned antenae about gendered cues in clothes and manners.

It was like hearing myself describe the SYO, but in reverse, somehow. Like the negative. It was like that episode of Seinfeld where they met 'bizarro Jerry'.

Apparently this girl notices all of the slight differences in girl-wear--the tiny stitching around the edges of t-shirts, capped sleeves, larger necks, etc.--and refuses to wear them!

She's obsessed with spiderman paraphernalia.

She was wearing skater pants!

And, to top it all off, her mom showed me that she was wearing little boy undies: Ninja Turtles!

Wow!

The mom of this rock star and I had a great conversation about gender and how it plays out with these young girls. For the girls of our SYO's variety, the marketers inundate them with these princess and barbie images which one cannot help but think will have a negative impact on their self-esteem and body image. This is not even including the misogynistic disney films that portray evil women antagonists (who are described as "ugly" to boot!) and beautiful and wealthy women protagonists who, ultimately, are saved by some (usually dapper) prince.

I won't even go into the Barbie debate.

I told her some of the myriad manifestations of this in our SYO including her expression to become a "bride" when she grows up.

I suggested to her, too, that such an extreme expression of gender (one way or another, really) has no direct connection to sexuality, although I have my suspicions for this spry one.

Surrepticiously, I did the "finger test" to see if it would match my suspicions. I mention this test in this post as it related to Chemistry.com's personality test. What I did not mention in that post, is that lesbians are more likely than heterosexual women to exhibit the same pattern of finger length as heterosexual men. See this link for details of the study.

Anyway, needless to say, this girl's finger's were a lot more akin to mine and BioMom's than they were to our own hyper-feminine SYO's.

Brotherly Birthday Wishes

Congrats to Sidekick and Her Folks!

They got their referral yesterday from China!!! They are getting a little two year old girl in May!

Another little one in our lives!

I Must Be Doing Something Right

Or really wrong. . .

Tomorrow is our midterm for Intermediate Microeconomic Theory.

Between yesterday and today 10 percent of the class has dropped.

The New York Times Weighs In On SIPP Funding

A few days ago I posted this petition regarding the President's decision to discontinue funding for the longitudinal SIPP data set.

I worked with the data set when I was a research fellow at the Institute for Women's Policy Research where we studied the effects of changing what was then our "welfare" system to a set of block grants to states. Specifically, we looked at the link between people's use of AFCD and food stamps predicting that once people were forced off of AFDC, they would not use food stamps even if they qualified for them. This research contributed to this report.

The point is, this data set allows researchers of all stripes to answer many extremely important questions and make legitimate predictions about the consequences of any policy change.

I can only assume that Bush (as he has shown in the past on other important decisions) does not value credible "intelligence".

On March 4th, the New York Times weighed in on the subject. Here is the article:

The White House has a sorry history of withholding information that the public and Congress need to make informed policy judgments. A proposal in President Bush's new budget would take that damaging tendency one step further by eliminating a government survey that captures the real-world impact of welfare reform, Medicaid, child-support enforcement and many other policies and programs.

Started by the Census Bureau in 1984, this study, called the Survey of Income and Program Participation, questions thousands of the same people every four months for two to four years and gathers details about their lives, including their use of government aid. It is particularly valuable for the way it uncovers the actual effects of government programs and the way people move in and out of them. Most other polls simply capture data at a given point in time.

Take welfare reform, for example. Rather than evaluating it simply by the number of people on welfare before and after, researchers using the survey have isolated the factors — social, economic and personal — that have allowed some men and women to successfully leave welfare for work and the factors that caused others to fall into deeper poverty. Such information is vital to build on what works, to amend what doesn't and to allocate scarce government resources accordingly.

Getting rid of the survey this year, as the new budget proposes, would make it very difficult to study the fallout from deep cuts in food stamps, child care, Medicaid and other programs for the poor that Congress passed and Mr. Bush signed last month. That would be great for politicians who don't want to be held accountable. But it would be a big loss for anyone who wants government to work well.

Introducing... The Six Year Old!

togetherminnesota.org

So, even though I am not a registered Minnesotan, I am promoting this petition. Some right wing nuts want to add insult to injury by putting an amendment to the constitution that prohibits gay marriage on the ballot next fall.

Minnesota already has a DOMA.

WTF?

Anyway, see this website for more information.

Thanks to HFRM#1 for the tip.

JPOD: Three Months

Happy Birthday Cousin

Do Conservatives Spawn Conservatives?

And, if so, if they're doing it faster than liberals, will we be extinct?

In a recent article in Foreign Policy, titled The Return of Patriarchy,Phillip Longman makes the following argument:

Across the globe, people are choosing to have fewer children or none at all. Governments are desperate to halt the trend, but their influence seems to stop at the bedroom door. Are some societies destined to become extinct? Hardly. It's more likely that conservatives will inherit the Earth. Like it or not, a growing proportion of the next generation will be born into families who believe that father knows best.

Here are some exerpts:
Throughout the broad sweep of human history, there are many examples of people, or classes of people, who chose to avoid the costs of parenthood. Indeed, falling fertility is a recurring tendency of human civilization. Why then did humans not become extinct long ago? The short answer is patriarchy.

Patriarchy does not simply mean that men rule. Indeed, it is a particular value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of proper station. It competes with many other male visions of the good life, and for that reason alone is prone to come in cycles. Yet before it degenerates, it is a cultural regime that serves to keep birthrates high among the affluent, while also maximizing parents' investments in their children. No advanced civilization has yet learned how to endure without it.
. . .
Meanwhile, single-child families are prone to extinction. A single child replaces one of his or her parents, but not both. Nor do single-child families contribute much to future population. The 17.4 percent of baby boomer women who had only one child account for a mere 7.8 percent of children born in the next generation. By contrast, nearly a quarter of the children of baby boomers descend from the mere 11 percent of baby boomer women who had four or more children. These circumstances are leading to the emergence of a new society whose members will disproportionately be descended from parents who rejected the social tendencies that once made childlessness and small families the norm. These values include an adherence to traditional, patriarchal religion, and a strong identification with one's own folk or nation.

This dynamic helps explain, for example, the gradual drift of American culture away from secular individualism and toward religious fundamentalism. Among states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility rates are 12 percent higher than in states that voted for Sen. John Kerry. It may also help to explain the increasing popular resistance among rank-and-file Europeans to such crown jewels of secular liberalism as the European Union. It turns out that Europeans who are most likely to identify themselves as "world citizens" are also those least likely to have children.

Does this mean that today's enlightened but slow-breeding societies face extinction? Probably not, but only because they face a dramatic, demographically driven transformation of their cultures. As has happened many times before in history, it is a transformation that occurs as secular and libertarian elements in society fail to reproduce, and as people adhering to more traditional, patriarchal values inherit society by default.

Oh, The Irony

The article Unintended Pregnancy Linked to State Funding Cuts: First-of-Its-Kind Study Cites Impact On Teenage Girls and Poor Women from the Washington Post discusses an idea that I have only recently (!) stumbled upon -- the idea that government intervention in either a) restricting goods or services or b) restricting information about goods and services in the name of protecting the populace from some named evil, often ends up only hurting the young and the poor (or both).

Here are some exerpts:

At a time when policymakers have made reducing unintended pregnancies a national priority, 33 states have made it more difficult or more expensive for poor women and teenagers to obtain contraceptives and related medical services, according to an analysis released yesterday by the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute.

From 1994 to 2001, many states cut funds for family planning, enacted laws restricting access to birth control and placed tight controls on sex education, said the institute, a privately funded research group that focuses on sexual health and family issues.

The statewide trends help explain why more than half of the 6 million pregnancies in the United States each year are unintended and offer clues for tackling problems associated with teenage pregnancy and abortion, said researchers who specialize in the field.
. . .
The problem is particularly acute for the nation's estimated 17 million adolescent girls and low-income women, because a lack of education and money are often barriers to practicing abstinence or effective birth control.

Now the serious irony:
The Guttmacher rankings belie conventional political wisdom. California, New York, South Carolina and Alabama have made the greatest strides in helping low-income women receive health care and contraception, despite the fact that the two coastal states are considered "blue" states that lean to the left politically, while the two southern states are deemed "red" for their conservative tilt.

At the same time, states as different as Nebraska, Ohio and Utah were among the worst when it came to providing access to contraceptives for needy women and teenagers, as well as gynecological exams and information on preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.