Purple Mountains Majesty

Taggert, over at A Random Walk provides a better, more nuanced version of the old red state/blue state saw:

". . . a better visualization would shade the areas based not upon who won the state, but by the degree to which they won the state. And the states themselves shouldn't be represented as a function of their geographic size, but rather the size of their population. Here we have just such a picture, and its clear, we are all purple now."

Yes He Can

Overheard in Minneapolis

I was enjoying a quiet cuppa coffee the other day while grading a few papers when I overheard a woman say something to the effect of the following:

"I've never given to a candidate outside of my district before now!"

If you're from around here, there's no doubt what she was talking about.

GO TINKLENBERG!

Here's a tidbit from his Wikipedia page regarding the Bachman debacle (highlight mine):

On the evening of October 17, 2008, Tinklenberg's opponent, Bachmann, appeared on Hardball with Chris Matthews. She said she was "very concerned that [Obama] may have anti-American views," and called for the news media to "do a penetrating expose" on "the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America?" Her statements about liberalism and anti-American views were quickly spread around liberal blogs such as The Daily Kos, Democratic Underground and The Huffington Post and the mainstream media. Outrage at Bachmann's comments led to nearly $440,000 in donations to Tinklenberg's campaign in less than 24 hours and over $750,000 in 72 hours. In response, Tinklenberg wrote, "The last few hours have been nothing short of astounding. Since Congresswoman Michele Bachmann appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball earlier tonight, there’s been a deluge of support unlike anything we have seen." His total fundraising before the Bachmann appearance was approximately $1 million, under $720,000 of which was from individuals.

Vote No on Prop 8!

Check out Looky Daddy's nifty advertisements promoting gay marriage.

A Tale of Two Brothers

So I have two brothers. Twins.

They couldn't be more different.

One is gay, gregarious, effusive, and a democrat. The other is straight, somewhat stoic, undemonstrative and, republican.

I have genuine appreciation for both of them, but of course, being that I lean to the left, well, I suppose I have a bit more in common with the aforementioned gay one.

The other day I caught the other one on the phone and we, tentatively, began talking politics. Usually this is a mistake, but I came prepared and careful.

Let's face it, if you have a modicum of intelligence, you can't support a Palin Vice Presidency, regardless of the role you played in Vietnam (he is a Vietnam vet) or your long history in the U.S. Navy (he's a retired Lt. Commander) or your extraordinary success as a small businessman. As you can see, he has an excellent republican voter's resume. So much so that I'm not sure which came first, the resume or the political stance.

That is all to say that he does have a modicum of intelligence and I have a healthy respect for POW's as well as for libertarianism (in theory), so we have some overlapping ground on which to base a conversation.

So after a few Palin-digs, he says to me something to the effect of being okay with Obama until he mentioned "redistributing the wealth".

Ugh.

Of all the over-used, misunderstood notions in American history. . .

I responded that ALL politicians redistribute wealth. It's just a matter of whether you get Peter to pay Paul or vice versa. And, of course, whether you, yourself are Peter or Paul.

I wish I had read this week's New Yorker article by Steve Coll prior to this conversation.

It talks about Obama's interaction with Joe the Plumber in which he said:

I do believe that for folks like me who've worked hard but frankly also been lucky, I don't mind paying just a little bit more than the waitress who I just met over there....She can barely make the rent....And I think that when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody.

"The principle that Obama evinced, which most economists would regard as unexceptionable, can be traced to Adam Smith. In 'The Wealth of Nations' (1776), his seminal treatise on capitalism, Smith wrote: The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor....The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess....It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.'"

Dear brother, let's focus on the real issues at hand. The real issues that might actually IMPROVE the economy for EVERYONE (not just saving a few bucks for just a few of us to use to buy more iPods, G1's, or kitchen makeovers -- I say that as we both are doing so--the kitchen makeover--and I am dreaming of the new G1, just to point out that I am not immune to greed).

Instead, and again quoting from The New Yorker:

". . . . [S]uch as what sort of economic stimulus plan to enact, and in what stages; which policies might keep the most families in their houses at the least cost; how to restructure market regulation to bring credit-default swaps and other derivatives under government oversight; and how to coordinate global reform of financial and trade imbalances."

Anatomy of a Costume in an Economic Downturn

So given the 25-to-30 percent fall in the value of my 403b, we're focusing on retrenchment at the moment.

Translation: No "CONSUME FOR YOUR COUNTRY," patriotism in the form of a consumeristic economic plan here at the BioMom/Blogauthor household.

I even passed on my dream of having professional lights installed on our big pine tree outside.

So we've decided to help pass this value on to the kids in the form of "old-school" Halloween costumes.

What follows:
Diaper box: $0.00 (except for the emotional cost that I endured when Eight exclaimed that she was "saving that box for something" despite the fact that she did not know it existed 10 minutes prior to that moment).
Paints: $4.00 (with lots leftover for more easy-to-clean-up fun!)
Twine: $0.00 (found in the garage)
My time (opportunity cost): grading papers = -$500.00 (you did me a favor, Big, and saved my brain from going to mush!)
Being able to pretend you're a car, drive around and crash into things? Priceless.

Introducing Patek Palin!

Many of you inquired about the new dog popping up on the blog. He is FRM#1's new pet French Bulldog (here seen imitating Palin's Newsweek macro shot).

When she first sent pictures of him, I thought "WTF?" But when you meet him, well, let's say he had me at "SNORT!"

Nothing But Sincerity as Far as the Eye Can See

No Great Pumpkin there. We've got to move on to a new patch, in preparation for our annual neighborhood pumpkin-carving party. This year's theme: Carve For Obama! All blog readers are welcome, BYOP!

This patch clearly imported all of their stock.

"AAAARRRGGHH!"

The Showdown at 34 Months

Big is 34 months today. For those of you not good with math, let's just call it three, although I think Big'd be furious that he missed his birthday cake and presents, but that's a different story.

He is soft and lovable, funny and diligent, stubborn and wild. When you ask him about his day, he invariably says "We went to the Dells" referring to a trip we took in August for the grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary. He enjoys wearing "tony pails" in his hair, and wants a pink bike for his birthday.


And we had a HUGE showdown the other night.


I have a feeling that he and I will have to bump antlers once in a while just to release some tension.


Anyway, I've shifted my cooking toward the vegetarian as he still refuses meat and I'm sick of him eating only cheese, cottage cheese, fruit, beans and yogurt.

After a couple of especially made vegetarian meals with him simply refusing to eat,we got the book about dinosaurs and what they eat, and have spent some time on the page that shows the dino trying little bites of everything.

And then I made some delicious potato soup.

Still no eating.

Because I felt insulted* I decided that potato-night was the night that he had to be like the Stegosaurus and taste a tiny bit of his food. The potato soup.

We don't force our kids to do much. In fact, I have a deep belief that you really can't force your kids to do anything (try forcing your eight year old to NEVER have an accident or to not put too much sour cream on her burrito when you're not looking or etc. etc. etc. ). In true Alfie Kohn style, we try to get the preferred behavior to come from within them, so to speak.

So I'm not exactly sure where this came from other than that I was just SURE he'd love the soup if he just put a bit in his mouth!

Who wouldn't? It was just creamy, cheesy potato-y goodness!

Oh and salt. Salty goodness too.

I'm getting hungry even as I write this.

But no. He dug in his heels.

And I dug in mine.**

I resorted to positive reinforcement, tantalizing him with exquisite rewards: a family bike ride in the gloaming after dinner?

No.

A back rub?

No.

A bubble bath?

FINE: A banana split with whip cream and a cherry on top? All for one stinking lousy bite!!!???!!!

He would not eat it on a boat, with a fox or in the rain. He would not try that 'tato soup, oh what a PAIN!

Nothing. No, not nothing. I take that back. A bite in, and immediately out, squirting all over his face, shirt, table and floor.***

I resorted to the threat: No bike ride. . . . . An early bed time.

Nothing.

Finally, FINALLY, as I'm carrying him up the stairs to bed**** he relents, rushes back to the table, takes a bite and it's over. Sweet relief, we all hug and its off to the bike as though nothing had transpired between us at all.

I'll let you know how the Eggplant Parmesan goes.




*Note to self: this is never a good place from which to start disciplining your child.

**Second note to self: heel-digging is not the precursor to a good parenting moment. At least not post-1953.

***Thanks to Jane Yolen for giving him the idea with that ridiculous dinosaur and his half-chewed broccoli!

****Last and final note to self, carrying a child against his will is DEFINITELY NOT in the Alfie Kohn repertoire.

Gender, Revisited and Reversed

In our house, we're all smitten with Amy Poehler (SNL comedian said to be the Carol Burnett of our time).

No, the kid's aren't watching SNL, they (and I) are huge fans of The Mighty B!

I bring this up because this is (almost literally) the only television that Big watches that has commercials. And we TiVo through most of them.

He'll be turning three in December and with limited commercial exposure, he's already got a grasp of gender.

While watching Bessy Higgenbottom as The Mighty B, he'll see commercials for what he immediately identifies as boy's toys and girl's toys. "WE NEED THAT!" He'll yell at the energetic commercials for the "shake up" cars and "THAT'S FOR GIRLS!" at commercials for those little pet-shop toys while I gently remind him that he could play with those too if he wants.

Interestingly, he'll choose a pink bike whenever available, and gladly walk around in Eight's old dress-up shoes with little heels, so apparently we've confined the roles to the television.

For him, that is.

This past weekend we went to our church's family camp (don't ask).

BioMom was telling us all about it on the way, how we'd be staying in a cabin with a few other families (!), one of whom had an eight year old girl and a four year old boy (the age of the girl turned out to be a bit of an exaggeration, she was six).

After contemplating in silence in the back seat for a while, Eight says:

I hope she likes me.

This kind of gender expression drives me nuts and I said so. I've always wondered if girls and boys tend to be different along these lines, with boys/men moving through the world wondering what interests them and letting their own preferences guide them. Girls, on the other hand, moving through the world wondering how the world is responding to them, and how to change/adapt/morph to that response.

I suspect I turn into an adult on the Peanuts shows for Eight when I launch into my feminist/parent-of-a-girl mantra.

Mwha wah, mwaa waah wah wa.

Pre-Monthly Newsletter and Catchup on the Daily Tidbits

Big will be turning 34 months next week.

I thought I'd get a headstart on the post as I've neglected not only the monthly newsletters, but also the daily tidbits for quite a while. Big has changed so much, and so has my life, that it's hard to get my head around it at times.

Just the other night, some friends from ECFE came over who met Big when he was just 13 months (as an aside, they're moving back to DC to their delight and our loss). Anyway, one of the mom's noted that Big wasn't as 'wild' as he had been the last few times we'd gotten together.

Since this summer and his attainment of the ability to get out of bed at will, we've been struggling with some sleeping issues with him. He wouldn't go to bed, he'd get up in the middle of the night, etc. The other night I heard him get out of bed and wander down the stairs saying, in a low voice "hi." at regular intervals.

BioMom had this great idea to get him a real "big" bed in his room, rather than the toddler bed we borrowed from Cousin.

It worked. The first night he sacked out, spread comfortably, from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m.

ahhh.

Of course, both he and I have had a transition back to work.

For the most part, as I previously discussed, this has been good for both of us. But in the middle of it, my department had a bit of drama over whether or not to vote to make permanent my part-time schedule. I thought this was going to be a no-brainer, but it turned out to be far from it. Eventually, I hope to write an anonymous article to the Chronicle of Higher Education about it all, but suffice it to say that many people, not least of which myself, are paying dearly for the vote that did, in fact, make it permanent (a 4 to 2 vote). I'll say more later, and maybe post my anonymous letter here for all of you academics out there interested in such mundane politics. Let's just say that I don't expect to ever be promoted again. Alas.

So that's what's held up the posts as of late.

I'm hoping to get more time and creativity in my life now.

Another Barack in La Crosse Pix

I'm the one right behind the teleprompter.

A Metaphor for My Life

After waiting for four hours and then carefully choosing what I thought was a great place to stand, only about 100 feet from the podium. . . They put up his teleprompter.

Alas.

Still though, his voice was completely inspiring.

A Weekend in Washington

I spent last weekend in Washington continually bumping into ghosts of my decade-younger self.

Donate $50 to Obama and get Katha Pollitt's Book!

Katha Pollitt's Obama Fundraising Page

Obarbieama: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

So, the other night Eight and BioMom were gone and I was priming Big for bedtime; bath, snack, teeth, reading, the whole thing.

I was stepping in and out of the bathroom, doing laundry, picking up, etc., when I overheard him saying something to the effect of "I love you, Obama. . . . I love you, Hillary."

And went in, to see this:

Relativity

Economists often attempt to measure the value of a homemaker's services.

The exercise is not unlike measuring the value of any non-market activity such as volunteer hours or leisure time.

Another comparison is any non-market commodity like the environment. Often policy discussions involve attempting to place value on programs in order to perform cost-benefit analysis to project the value of a policy. Or often such exercises are used in court to place present and future value on people's efforts. For example, in a divorce case, the homemaker may need to attempt to value her efforts in order to justify a particular outcome.

"This market oriented predilection for using prices to measure value not only drives the methods currently used, it is the source of the problems in measuring, and perhaps the source of the courts often reluctance to rely on 'economic' measures of worth. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, economists often know the price of everything, but the value of nothing" (Dr. Allen, http://www.economica.ca/ew09_1p2.htm).

Economists have used two different methods to measure the value of a housewife:
1. the opportunity cost method (what does the household sacrifice by having one individual stay home to work?" and
2. the replacement cost method "how much would it cost to replace the services of the homemaker?".

Both methods have their problems.

I've got a better method.

Spend two years doing 90 percent of the household labor between you and your partner. Take on a leadership position at your kid's parent-teacher association and keep working, but arrange childcare for only the time that you are AT work (for me, less than 16 hours per week), while expecting yourself to do the rest of your work (class prep, grading and researching) while your youngest is napping (1-3 hours per day). Juggle this with lawn-mowing, shoveling, laundry, grocery shopping and the other usual homemaker activities. Have in the back of your mind some research expectations knowing that when you do go back to work, you'll be a bit behind and have nothing in the "pipleline" (i.e. a research project started, initial work done, draft papers and presentations ready, a paper out at a journal for review).

Add to that an extremely active toddler moving into young boyhood. Someone that needs nearly constant supervision and at least two hours outdoors every day in order to both stimulate and wear him out.

After having done this for some respectable amount of time--enough so that you have nearly forgotten what life was like before this schedule--decide to go back to your old schedule.

Last Friday, the end of my first full week back at my "real" job where I have 120 students, 100 percent faculty research requirements, and service duties which started a few days before school did, as well as what turned out to be eight hours of commuting in order to juggle a surprise trip that BioMom had to make for work mid-week, Big and I went to pick up Eight after school.

I ran into a parent-of-four who also happens to be a neighbor of ours.

She looked EXHAUSTED.

It was palpable.

And even she wondered aloud about her condition given that three of the four were now attending school.

In comparison, I felt like a hot-air balloon. Floating. Weightlessly.

Like my duties have been halved.

Like there were now 32 hours in a day instead of 24.

Now THAT is the measure of a housewife.

A Great Welcome Home

I saw this billboard on the way home last night on 494!

A New Era and My 800th Post

Tomorrow starts a new era for our family.

Well, really, it is back to an old era, but only part-time.

Two years ago (two years and three months to be exact) I stopped working at the university 2 hours away and took a leave to be with our then five month old baby boy.

BioMom had started back to work part-time at my spring break that year; I had him on Mondays and Fridays while she had him Tuesdays through Thursdays. After school let out, I took an entire semester off to be home with him, and then worked part-time at a local college. I was given the opportunity to replace a faculty member on sabbatical the following year and worked full-time there last year but it felt like part-time because I didn't have the commute, the service expectation or nearly as many students as I normally have.

I feel like we were able to cobble together a pretty amazing gift for him. Very little childcare (relatively speaking for two people with 'big girl' jobs, and what care we did provide for him was exceptional: Mother-of-Four's undivided attention.

So it feels a bit weird to be going back now, although it is for only one semester (as an aside, I found out that the vote to make that schedule permanent is not the 'done deal' that I thought it would be and occurs on the 12th. While I would very much enjoy doing this forever (i.e. a one-semester per year tenure track position) I am trying to make peace with the fact that it might not work out and that I might have to figure something else out. Alas.). I'm excited to be getting back to my colleagues and have that tune "It's the MOST wonderful time of the year" (via Cousin!) from those Christmas commercials going through my head.

But it's also a little sad.

I don't think Big knows what's up yet. It's a double-blow for him as Eight will be back at school tomorrow too. He and I left MRM#1 and MRM#2's house after dinner last night without BioMom and Eight (they and MRM#1 went to see the American Idol tour believe it or not) and Big was completely distraught to be without her, craning his neck out the back window with the hopes that their car would be following ours.

WHERE IS SHE!!!

He will be turning 33 months this September 9th and I feel like we're turning a corner behavior-wise.

Maybe that is just hopeful thinking.

BioMom is convinced that he's just not getting enough sleep and that that is contributing to it all.

This seems to be true so far.

One last tidbit as to what he's up to lately.

He reminds me of that character of Kristen Wiig's on SNL who always has to one (or many)-up everyone around her ("I own a bigger pool table. . . I INVENTED pool! etc.). Big picks up words from conversations around him and turns them into these huge stories, usually beginning with "when I was a baby. . . ." Everything is bigger and better than whatever anyone around him is saying. And it is hilarious.

Shuffleboard Meets Hopscotch