Baby Pictures at Last

We have been very artisticc here lately.  Here is a picture (with ears) that Miss Boo drew on the magnadoodle:

We've also been drawing with markers...

...which Buddy isn't allowed to touch, a fact he knows very well.

Sometimes he thinks if he's cute enough I'll let him eat the markers like he wants to.  I don't.

Miss Boo actually uses the markets to draw with.  She works hard.

This is a rocket ship.  Pretty good, huh?

She also paints, while I give Buddy snacks at the other end of the table.  So far not a lot of recognizable forms, but great color combinations.

"How come all I get is snacks and no paint?"

Because, even Miss Boo tends to go to spattering after a bit.

"Oh."

Cheers,

Breanna

Is it Just Me...

... or is this a really stupid idea?

Granted Fox Business might not be the most disinterested party here, but if the basic fact--the SEC can't be required to give information under FOIA--is true, then, my friends, we have done a bad, bad thing.

I promise I'll get some cute baby pictures up soon.  Really.  It's just been too hot around here to dig up the camera.

On the cute baby front, Miss Boo told me this morning, "Mama, Buddy cracks me!", pointed at her brother, and laughed.

Cheers,

Breanna

A Weekend Suggestion

I wasn't so much — I was disgusted, but I was not surprised because I've always judged Obama and others by what they've done, not by what they've said. And judging by his past as a community organizer, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

-- Thomas Sowell, speaking in an interview with Sean Hannity

Now, this isn't going to be just an anti-PBO rant.

It started out that way.  I was irritated this week looking at the USDA and Korea.  More irritated looking around my local area and seeing all the wasted "stimulus" and all the people and businesses moving away.

You all probably can guess what I think about the recent developments, which show him (again) acting hastily and without enough information--I mean the unfair firing of Shirley Sherrod (a dumb lady, but apparently not a racist) and the dodgy way the Justice Dept. has decided to dismiss a case involving voter intimidation and the New Black Panther Party, an organization with the same credibility as, say, the Freemen.

Blah blah, I think the racial stuff at the moment, while pathetic, is a distraction.
Glenn Beck thinks the distracting with health care and racial stuff is on purpose; I don't go as far as that.

So really, what I'm thinking about today is an issue of past behavior being the best predictor of future behavior.  Has the government, either under W or PBO, shown that they're any good at responding to crises, keeping the economy from collapsing, or distributing aid in an efficient manner?

NO.

I do think things in this country show no signs of getting better before they get worse--unemployment keeps rising (and lots of people have simply given up looking for work).  The houses in my neighborhood keep going up for sale; I see more garage sales as folks are trying to make a little extra cash; and it's going to be hard, under the new health care laws, for employers and physicians to stay in my county.

It's going to be up to people in local neighborhoods to utilize resources and take care of each other.  That's you and me, chums.

Just given that, even if you don't think anything too bad is going to happen, I have a few mental exercises for you.

1. Write down every food item your family consumes for a week, multiply it by 2, and then check and see if you have that much food or the equivalent in the house.  This is what FEMA says you should have in the house in case of natural disaster, civil disruption, or zombie attacks. :)

("Or equivalent" means things like, we go through 3 gallons of milk per week, so you could get either powdered milk or that UHT milk in boxes--in the baking aisle--to equal 3 gallons.  Or you could freeze 3 gallons in your chest freezer, but better not to depend on the electricity.)

2. Think about what you could do if you weren't doing what you're doing now.  This sounds confusing, but what I mean is, do you have any skills that you could use to make money or otherwise meet your needs (I mean barter, etc.) if your current job went away?  Even state and government jobs are not terribly secure.  (That is, you may still be *working* for the State of California, but they might be paying you in IOUs before long.)

For instance, would you be able to swap something you make or grow for something you need?  Can you do freelance bookeeping for local businesses?  Can you sing at a farmer's market?  Can you mend people's clothes?  Can you refinish furniture?  Put up drywall?  Fix computers?  Garden?

You get the idea.  It's worthwhile to just think about it.  And don't get panicky and think, "I'd starve!"  You wouldn't.  Probably someone in your extended family will still have a job, and maybe they will need a cook and housekeeper or a child-minder or a weed-puller.  I think we're all going to be getting more domestic as the world develops in the next few years.

3. Read a bit.  Just, if you like, for curiosity's sake.  Try something like The Encyclopedia of Country Living or even just some urban homesteading blogs.  Having the knowledge in your head can be the first step toward *gasp!* making your own yogurt or bread, and from there it might snowball.

4. Think about where you could cut back on expenses now, while you don't have to, and pick a place to do it.  I don't care what it is--maybe you need to keep eating out for your mental health, but realize that the five-year-old doesn't really need a cell phone.  Or maybe you desperately feel the five-year-old DOES need a cell phone, but nobody's home during the day and so the cable TV is largely a waste.  Or you can live without manicures, or you never go to the gym anyway so why keep the membership.  I don't care.  Cut one thing, take the money that was going into that, and begin putting it away.  (Either in a bank or in a fire safe in your house or in the form of food and tools.  Again, I don't care, whichever makes you feel safter, savings accounts give negligible interest anyway.)

Remember, past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.  If crises in the past made you panic and act hastily, then start changing now so that when something really bad happens, you'll emerge on the other side mostly okay.

That's the real CHANGE we need.

Cheers,

Breanna

A Book Review - Sort Of

So, I finally ordered the book Radical Homemakers by Shannon Hayes, after reading about it for a while online and waiting for it to become available at my library.  It didn't, so I had to order it.  I'm about halfway through it now, so consider this a "sort of" book review.

You know how it is--there are people who "review" things, either on Amazon or elsewhere online, and reading their review it becomes quickly apparent that they read about 25 pages of the book and then gave up in disgust.  You can tell when, for instance, they whine that the book doesn't address something that it in fact spends a whole chapter (late in the book) on.  We distance ourselves from trolls like that; you shouldn't write a review of something, especially not a scathing one, that you didn't finish.

However the ideas from this book have been boiling around in my head, so I thought I'd write a semi-review, and then add to it later if it seems necessary.

The first half of the book is the theory of domesticity, if you will; the Why of what Hayes calls Radical Homemaking.  The Why goes like this:

1. Each household should strive to be as free as possible.  Part of being free is the freedom to dispose of your own time and energy in ways that you think are good.  To that extent, having to purchase things from corporations or having to work for different corporations to earn money to purchase things makes you less free.

2. One way (I might even dare say Hayes contends the only way) to become more free is to engage in Radical Homemaking, which might be summed up as: The household tries to meet as many of its own needs as possible without purchasing goods and services.

All of which is well and good.  The things I don't go along with are Hayes's insistence that corporations are necessarily evil.

(In case you are wondering, a corporation can't be evil because a corporation is not alive and has no soul.  It is just a tool.  It would be like calling a shovel evil because someone used it to hit their brother.  People can be evil, but not corporations.)

Hayes is also, rather surprisingly considering how pessimistic she is about corporations (made up of people, remember), very optimistic about the goodness of people.

If you can get over the idea that everyone would be good, healthy, kind, and wise if only we shared things equitably and had a cash-free economy, you can dig into what I think is the valuable part of the book--the idea that the labor a stay-at-home parent (or person) does is not trivial and valuless.  This is not, of course, a new idea, although Hayes might be uniquely sucessful at packaging the idea for a liberal, crunchy, trendy culture.  (For the record I don't think Hayes is particularly trendy, but I think her treatment of the "stay-at-home women have value" will be more palatable for a mainline culture than, say, The Monstrous Regiment of Women.)*

This is something I've been trying to formulate for a long time, and Hayes pretty well hits it when she makes the point that domestic work never goes away.  What, in fact, happens when privileged women decide not to do domestic work is that the work gets pushed onto someone else.

A simple way to look at this is scrubbing toilets.  We all have to use toilets.  There's no way around it.  And toilets have to be cleaned, or we'll get cholera and die.  I happen to clean my own toilets, but let's pretend like I decide I have to go back to work.  That doesn't mean that now, magically, the toilets no longer need cleaning (even if I have a soul above such things).  Either I have to clean the toilets after I get off work, the Husband has to clean the toilets, or we have to hire someone to clean our toilets.

We would try to pay the person who scrubbed our toilets fairly, but as an industry house cleaners don't make a ton of money.  We certainly couldn't afford to give our toilet scrubber benefits, the way the government thinks we should.  Odds are that the scrubber would be middle aged, female, and (speaking in national statistics, here) nonwhite.

Added to this dubious ethical stew is the above idea--that I have a soul above toilet cleaning, and so I don't need to do it.  This idea, because toilets still need to be cleaned, implies that some people do not have a soul above toilet cleaning.  It reinforces classism, because if soulishness gives me a pass on cleaning up messes I make, obviously the people who are cleaning toilets must not be quite as... je ne sai quoi as me, right?  Not as smart, or sensitive, or wide-souled.

Dangerous territory, that.

For the record, I don't think employing a cleaning lady is unethical, if you can pay her fairly ("fairly" will vary from area to area, but it should be on the books and in accordance with the law, for starters) and if you have thought through the implications.  Likewise buying vs. making your own bread, or employing a babysitter, or having a dual-income household.  You just need to be sure you are not blindly believing the message of the culture.

Are you sure that the things you are doing are important enough for you to give away that much of your income--to lose that much of your household freedom?  What do you believe in?  Does the second income really help you achieve those goals (religious education for your children, healthy food, cozy home, financial security) or does it, insidiously, chip away at it?

Even if you don't want to become a Radical Homemaker (I'm a fail so far today, because I bought produce from an evil corporation instead of waiting until tomorrow and the farmer's market--though I'm still going to the market and I did make yogurt), it pays to think about domestic labor as valuable.  It helps you take a pride in what you do, if you're a stay-at-home mom, and it also makes you think before spending blindly or foolishly (even on something "green" or "natural").  When you consider how many hours of labor went to earn the money for the purchase... is it worth it?


Cheers,

Breanna
*Note: do I need to say that I'd like to see that documentary, but in a watching-a-car-wreck sort of way?  People saying the right things in drastically wrong ways has that effect on me.

The Thing Is...

...unless you've been at home, unrelieved until the Husband arrives home from work and maybe not relieved even then, depending on what kind of a day he's had, you have no concept of what caring for little children for seventeen hours straight is like.  (And then going to bed still on call, and probably waking up twice or more in the night.)

For instance, yesterday.  We:

-Did four loads of laundry and hung it on the clothesline.
-Picked strawberries.
-Correction.  I picked strawberries.  The little 'uns discovered the pile of grass clippings and stuffed them into each other's hair and diapers.
-Picked grass clippings off of each other's persons.
-Did our German homework (watched a Muzzy video).
-Cleaned up an accident that required stripping and washing a slipcover.
-Ate crayons.
-Ate chalk.
-Washed out the mouth of the kid who ate crayons and chalk.
-Applied ointment to a mysterious chin rash and a still more mysterious infected fingernail on the kid who likes to chew off bandaids.  (Three guesses whether he's the same one who eats chalk.)
-Got so hot we took off all our clothes.  (Well, not me.  I have some civilization left in me.)
-Nagged the naked people to put on their clothes before we went outside.
-Made dinner.
-Gave two baths, during which we.
-Broke the toilet seat.
-Nursed a sweating, teething baby to sleep.
-Collapsed into bed.

You can understand why, although I know I am blessed to be home with my chicks, and although I love my children so much I'd gladly wrestle a morlock for them, and although I wouldn't go to work even if the opportunity presented itself, some days I want to lock myself into a closet with a pillow and a blanket and not come out for a very long time.

Really, all jobs have that, don't they?  I just finished the Stay-At-Home Mom's Survival Guide, in which I found the following comparison useful:

"Dads, imagine that you are not allowed to leave your workplace.  At all.  Or if you do leave, your boss, coworkers, and employees all come with you everywhere you go.  Horrifying, isn't it?"

Today was better.  We got out and about (to buy the toilet seat!) but I figured I must have still looked frazzled because no fewer than five Home Depot employees came up to me with concerned looks and asked if they could help me find anything, reach me something, or move something so I could get by.  I'm not terribly visibly pregnant yet, though getting there, so I hope this was due to the fact I was pushing a huge ungangly kiddie cart (the kind with the Nascar number on it) and not to my girth.

Granted, I had two frenzied drivers frantically twisting their steering wheels, and I was shopping for items as diverse as a toilet seat, a doorknob, and a toolbox, but after a while all the concern started to get to me.  You start thinking things like, do my shoes match?  I am wearing my shirt right-side-out, aren't I?

The toolbox was to corral the kiddie art supplies.  In a wild fit of optimism I bought Miss Boo some glitter pens.

Mistake.

But the box was a good idea.

Sigh.

Breanna

Potty Training

It's enough, really, to make you long for the days of hunter-gatherer yore, when presumably you could just take the youngling out of the papoose, point them in the direction of the bushes, and not give them a loincloth for a couple years until they got the hang of it.

In some ways it's this illusive dream, hovering on the horizon: imagine if there was only one set of diapers to change!  Hurrah!  Maybe you could stop using disposable dipes so much... maybe you would go back to the blissful time when you couldn't accurately describe two other people's digestion... maybe you could ask only one person at a time "are you poopy? are you sure?"

But oy veh.  How do you handle a kid who is opposite what the books say?  ("Most children achieve daytime dryness before nighttime continence."  My kid is paranoid about peeing in a diaper in bed, but doesn't stop to go during the day.)

I think I need to go read my potty books again.  Sigh.  And perhaps dedicate a day or two to really working on this.

Cheers,

Breanna

The Yellowstone Adventure

Welcome to the very long, very pictorial, chronicle of our adventures.  Here we go:

Here is Miss Boo, the way she was for much of the trip, on Daddy's back.  We took one of the days before we went to the park and went to a local recreation area near Grandma's house.

A pretty recreation area, with a lake and picnic tables.  Gave us some practice, although we had an incident in one of the bathrooms...

...there was a phantom pooper who neither aimed nor apparently tried to aim, but just went au naturel in the middle of the outhouse floor.  Hope the state park people have caught him by now...

Luckily the Poo Phantom couldn't befoul the outdoors.  It was a gorgeous day.

Some of us did some fishing (those of us with licenses).

Others just enjoyed the scenery.

Another little hike in the vicinity of Grandma's house, this one started off next to a pasture full of Angus cattle.  I mooed at them for the entertainment of the Husband's 12-year-old cousin, and they mooed back, to her delight.  By the end of the trip she would learn I can bleat like a goat, too.

Here is how Brother rode most of the time.  (Actually, since Miss Boo has decided his new official nickname is Buddy, we'll call him Buddy from now on, ok?)

I include this picture, which was actually meant to be a picture of the party, because some of you reading the blog may not be as innured to pictures of mountains as I am.  Those are real; we saw them all the time.  Pretty, aren't they?  At this point we were still only around 4800 ft. above sea level; by the end of the trip we'd be at 10,000 ft above sea level.

Same mountains, just a picture of the cow pasture.

Miss Boo fell asleep alot.

This is Yellowstone, near the thermal features, aka puddles of pretty-colored, steaming water that can boil your skin off if you fall in.  (Really.  People die from being par-boiled in there and there are warning signs all over the place telling you to KEEP ON THE PATH, for THE LOVE OF PETE, KEEP ON THE EVER-LOVIN' PATH, THAT'S WHY WE PUT THE PATH THERE!!!!)

You can kinda see a thermal feature in the distance here, that bluish thing to the left middle of the picture.  I think there might be one near the 12-year-old cousin, there, too, the alkali dirt.

We all got gravel in our shoes, from carefully keeping on the path.

Opa, Grandma, and the other cousin, with a thermal feature in the upper left-hand-corner.  That thermal feature trickles out across the path, but there are stepping-stone sort of dealies and apparently it's not so hot by the time the trickle reaches the path.  You hope.

Me and Buddy (asleep) with a thermal feature (steaming) in the background.  It was a hot day.

I didn't take a picture of Old Faithful, perhaps the most famous thermal feature, because anyone can see pictures of Old Faithful with the help of Google.  Instead, here is a picture of Miss Boo and Grandma inside Old Faithful Lodge, looking up at the clock.  Yes, the fireplace really is that big.  (I don't know whose leg that is.  We didn't know him.  I was sitting down.)

Miss Boo loved the Lodge.

She walked around and around the fireplace with Grandma, a welcome change from being either in a carseat or a backpack...

...and even made it look so fun that random kids kept wandering up to be near her.

I had one of my pregnancy-related sinking spells in the Lodge, and had to have an icy Coke or I would have melted into a puddle of goo.  So, although I had to pay $2.10 for a fountain pop (plus tax) that probably cost the soda counter all of 23 cents, I did get an icy drink and I did get to watch Old Faithful erupt from the balcony at the Lodge, instead of schlepping around the walkway at the foot of the geyser.  So it all worked out.

That night we stayed at Grant Village.  The mosquitoes were breeding in a happy frenzy on the lake and swarmed us every time we went outside, so we stayed inside until dinner time and let the kids try on our hats.  Miss Boo is a hat person.

So is Buddy, to a somewhat lesser extent.

We had lots of toys and snacks in the backseat.  I started off the vacation with a clean car.

It was not clean by the end of the vacation.  This is Buddy's reaction to having to wait in the car while Daddy gets the keys to the hotel room.  Not.  Cool.

We got this little paper when we stopped, telling us the history of Grant Village.  Actually we got a little paper everywhere we stopped in the park, all of which were informational and historical and all.  If you examine this page:

you will find a sentence which claims that the National Parks system was "the best idea America ever had" which sort of gave me pause.  Really?  Better than, like, ending slavery, or giving the vote to women, or the Bill of Rights?  Better than the airplane?  Better than the light bulb and electricity?

But there it is, in black and white.  Hm.

Here's a little buck deer in velvet.  We'd just entered the animal-heavy part of the park and we were picture happy.

Here's a pretty lake I don't remember the name of, and my hand in the side mirror because I was taking the picture out of the window of a moving car.

Here's a group of very silly tourists from a nation that shall remain nameless but which consumes the most sushi per capita in the world.  They are holding up traffic and ignoring a basic commandment of Yellowstone Park:

When you enter the park, you're given a stack of paper and a little thing to hang on your rear-view mirror, and they all say one thing very clearly in six languages:

"DO NOT APPROACH THE BUFFALO!"

and

"MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN GORED BY BUFFALO!"

and

These warnings are accompanied by a drawing of a guy getting gored in the butt, with a splutch of blood coming out of the goring.  So why were they standing four feet from this big angry buffalo bull, eh?

Catch us standing near the buffalo.  We drove on to the mud volcanoes, pools of hot bubbling mud that nevertheless are frequented by...

...you guessed it, big mean stinky buffalo.  We did not approach them, though they did look very irritable.  It was a hot day.  Can't imagine how hot it would be in a buffalo robe.

Here's the mud volcano.  (Note: not a real volcano, it just shoots mud in the air sometimes.  Presumably it's really a kind of geyser.)

Some more buffalo...

...one in a wallow...

...a whole herd of irritable, hot, cranky, tourist-goring buffalo.

Here's a picture of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, from the next day.  We stayed at Canyon Village that night, a nice little hotel with a lot of winding trails around the rim of the canyon.

A rock mysteriously balanced on a pinacle of rock, which makes you want to blow really hard and try to tip it.  (It didn't work.)

It's hard to feel the scale, but trust me, this was big.

Opa with the canyon in the background, at a place we hiked to see some waterfalls...

The waterfalls..

And me, proving I was up that high and didn't faint or die.

Here's some people walking up and down these itty-bitty stairs on one side of the canyon, trying to get to the brink of the lower falls.  We sensibly took the paved, switch-back trail, the one with benches to stop and rest.  Here is what the brink looked like:

...and I was there, so ha!  I did it, and I didn't faint or die.

Here's the river.  Green, isn't it?

This is a smudge.  But in real life, it was a baby black bear.  Sorry the smudge is all I have.

We went driving one evening and saw a couple of grizzly bears, but Buddy was in a screaming fit in the back seat because he couldn't figure out how to fall asleep, so this is the only picture I took.  I still think sunset in Yellowstone is pretty, even if I didn't get the grizzlies.

Buddy didn't like being woken up in the carrier.

Oma, and...

...Miss Boo and Uncle Deeve all at the brink of the upper falls, the next day.

A bull elk in velvet.

Another bear smudge...

There were two rangers with radios standing beside the road.  We asked them why, and the pointed to this:

A black bear, which looked like a baby to us but which they said was about two.  Apparently it had been released from captivity not long before, or was an orphan, or something.  We weren't entirely clear.  However, for some reason two rangers had to be present to protect a bear.  Maybe the tourists who were bothering the buffalo were lurking in the underbrush.  If their butts had recovered, that is.

Then we hiked around the rim of another canyon, up and up and up a windy trail until we found these mountain goats.  The 12-year-old cousin asked if I could call to the goats, so I raised my nose and bleated plaintively like our milk goats used to.

They listened.

Then I felt it was going to rain so we all booked it down off the mountain, and sure enough wham!  We had just reached the car when big splatting drops started coming down, filling the air with the scent of sage and making us wet.  It was time to drive a bit.

We passed a coyote, which I include merely because we thought, until he stood up and yapped at a fly, that he might have been a wolf.  But standing, he was undoubtedly a coyote.  The only wolves we saw were in a zoo/animal sanctuary in West Yellowstone, of which Miss Boo's favorite part was a concrete "wolf cave" she got to go in and out of.

We drove up, and up, and up, to 10,000 ft. above sealevel, into the Beartooth Mountains, and ended up at a place called Top of the World.  (I think the real top of the world is in the Himalayas, but who's counting."

And here's the happy family (in the wind, my hair doesn't really do that), on our last night in the wilderness.

After all this, we drove via Red Lodge (where we had ice cream) back to Grandma's house, ate at a Mexican restaurant (where Buddy discovered he really likes beans and Miss Boo discovered she really likes maracas), and then made our weary way home, to collect the dog from the vet's.

(He had barked himself hoarse, and couldn't whine without coughing, but we were able to keep him quiet with cookies until his throat got better.)

Yellowstone was exciting, but there's no place like home.

Cheers,

Breanna