"Thanks again! See you next year!"

Act 1 Solstice
scene 1, they arrive 15 minutes early
Great Grandma: Here's a Christmas book for E and presents for everyone else.
Islander: That's real nice of you Grandma, but we're setting up for the solstice party right now. I'm going to put these away for later, OK?
Great Grandma: Let me hold the baby and you better let her keep that Christmas book!
Islander: I'd rather not. She's quiet and I'm trying to get her down for a nap right now, Grandma. She is really overdue for a nap and I'd like her to get to sleep before the party begins otherwise she'll fuss all evening.
Great Grandma: She should get used to it. [G.Grandma gets right in E's face, no more than 2 inches nose to nose.] Hullo Miss E! [10 decibels]
[E begins to cry loudly]

scene 2, the thick of solstice [approx 30 people mill about, conversing. Rowbear and Tine, islander's siblings are chatting with G.Grandma and G.Grandpa]
Rowbear: So, don't you think this Solstice event was a great idea?
Great Grandpa: No! I'm an American. We don't have solstice. We have Christmas goddammit. And why isn't the TV on? [turns to islander's spouse] Turn on the game, woulddya?
Spouse: No, Grandpa. The TV is put away for the party. Why don't you go into the kitchen and help yourself to a beer and a bowl of soup?
Great Grandpa: All the soups are vegetable soups, that's why! And you don't have any Miller! Goddamn smart-alecky college kids drinking wine!

scene 3, winding down [grandma is holding E, who is crying]
Grandma: I know, they are so mean to you, aren't they. But don't worry. Grandma will make it all better. We'll have a big Christmas tree and lots of presents for you.
[curtain falls]

Act 2 Christmas Lunch

scene 1 [over lunch]
Grandma: You didn't eat enough! You should eat more.
Islander: You said the beans, bread and cheese are vegetarian so that's what I'm eating.
Grandma: That's not enough make yourself a sandwich on the ham roll.
Islander: OK. Do you have any tomatoes and lettuce?
Grandma: No.
Islander: Oh... well I guess I'll just stick with what I've got.
[Islander continues to eat. She is holding a quiet E over her shoulder]
Grandpa: Merry Christmas, E! [Grandpa jovially and loudly approaches E, coming nose to nose. E buries her face in her mother's shoulder and then turns in the opposite direction. Undeterred, Grandpa walks to the other side to be in her sightline and grabs her hand.] I said Merry Christmas!
[E begins to cry loudly]
Grandpa: Hey, no fussing! [spoken sternly, as a reprimand]
[E begins to scream.]
Great Grandma: What a stinker! She's too fussy. Why don't you give her a pacifier?
Islander: We used one for a while, only to help her sleep, though, and we've already taken her off it.
Great Grandma: [horrified gasp] Why?
Islander: It didn't help her sleep and pacifiers increase the risk of ear infection.
Great Grandma: Oh, baloney! You should give her one.
[silence]
Great Grandma: I guess it's time you started her on solids then.
Islander: We've been over this already. Not 'til about 6 months.
Great Grandma: But she's too big! You need to start them now!
Islander: She's fine. Starting before 6 months increases her chance of food allergies.
Great Grandma: I told you before stop reading!
Islander: Look, I'm doing the best I can. When I want your advice I'll ask for it, OK?
[stony silence. islander is simultaneously horrified that she spoke to an elder in such a manner and proud that she put a stop to the criticism, at least in the short term]

Adventures in Parenting, part I, or getting off the intervention train

Both my spouse and I are adverse to the pacifier for a host of reasons including:
1. If you introduce it, you've got to remove it at some point
2. They're always getting lost or falling on the floor and then you've got frantic kids and parents who have moved the ability to soothe to an object that is unavailable.
3. Children who use pacifiers are more likely to suffer from ear infections than children who don't.

So, we were both set against the pacifier (neither used them ourselves) but then we ended up swaddling E at night - beginning at about 3 weeks of age because she didn't really have good control of her arms and kept waking herself up. Once we started swaddling her she didn't have access to her hands to satisfy her desire to suckle. People (mostly my pediatrician and doula) made me feel awful that I would deny her the opportunity to satisfy that desire. Thus, we introduced the pacifier.

Now at 4 months E is about done with swaddling. She protests being swaddled and frequently frees herself from her "baby straight jacket" straight away. The problem with this is, she has come to see the pacifier as crucial to her sleep (we don't let her have it except at sleep-times). She gets her hands loose and then proceeds to knock the pacifier out of her mouth. Then she gets upset because her motor skills aren't developed enough to get it back in. Lately she has also taken to waking up when she drops the pacifier in her sleep and one of us has got to run in to her room and shove it back in her mouth.

So, her sleep habits, instead of improving, have declined in the last 4 weeks - she is now up at least 3 times a night not even including the fact that she is up once or twice in the first hour after being put to bed (which is also relatively new) while she used to be up once or twice TOTAL. I was hoping that she would be sleeping really successfully without being swaddled before I removed the pacifier but now I see that I won't know how well she can sleep unswaddled until the pacifier is gone.

So, yesterday we took the plunge and took them away. I had to wrestle her down for every nap and last night she was up at least every hour and refused to sleep at all between 4:15 and 5 a.m. Today has been a little better but mostly because she fell asleep in the stroller and slept for nearly 2 hours. I just finished spending 45 minutes getting her down for her late afternoon nap. We don't let her cry in her crib so that means we are holding her and trying to comfort her as she cries inconsolably about the loss of her pacifier.

Makes you feel like a heel...

E's photo of the month: nearly 4 months old

Homecoming

The landscape was reminiscent of Soviet Moscow - prefab concrete slabs surrounded by not much - which also reminds me of much of Fairbanks, AK.

But if you think it was a humdrum trip, you are mightily wrong. No sooner had we pulled up to the resort entrance when our van-ola was charged by this bizarre and aggressive rhino that seems to have acclimated to single digit temperatures (it was about 8 degrees).
Once the danger had passed, we entered the Kalahari and donned our pith helmets. We hadn't been in there more than a minute before this mad elephant charged by. As you can see, E was terrified.It took us some time to escape that rampaging pachyderm but at last we found ourselves in the company of a very small pair of those gentle giants of the savanna and in shouting distance of a well-stocked oasis.

All the aboriginal art, all the tropical drinks! After my trip to the Kalahari, I know that I will never have to visit Africa, the South Pacific, Mexico or Central and South America because

I HAVE ALREADY BEEN THERE.

the vacation that I never imagined I would take much less eagerly anticipate...

I informed my partner that this was the year to get me on a cruise or to some cheesy resort. Only with a baby in tow does it seem like 3 days of this will be absolute paradise! I am so looking forward to being indoors out of the winter for a few days that I hardly know what to pack! And then there is this, expensive I know, but well-deserved, and I'll skimp - just 50 minutes of straight-up Swedish if you please!

what a little solstice can do!

Campy or no, we decided to push ahead with our solstice planning. The result was a fairly good cache for a local school*:

11 rubber playground balls
10 jump ropes
6 basketballs
4 soccer balls
4 footballs
3 frisbees
2 portable DVD players
3 CD boomboxes
4 computers
98 Sharpie (or equivalent) pens
268 markers
630 ballpoint pens
over 4800 stickers
2 puzzles
and cash donations

*gifts were based upon a wish list prepared by the school principal

free association

So... when I was quite young my dad began to get into genealogy. Through his research he learned that we are descended from Comte something-or-other V---- D'Argenson, keeper of seals for Louis XIV. Being a girl of 8 or 9 at the time I was notified of our illustrious family connections (all, of course, before we were exiled to Canada for evasion of the salt tax), I was quite impressed to learn that an ancestor was in charge of the seals in the King's zoo.

Although now in my dotage and long disabused of my first image of "keeper of seals," when we visited Versailles I did get a chuckle out of imagining where it was that the seal exhibit was housed.

heretofore* unconsidered vocation

Sealer of Weights and Measures

*i debated the use of heretofore and erstwhile. i initially typed heretofore, but then, while i was brushing my teeth to get ready for bed, it occurred to me erstwhile might be a better choice. what do you think? i stuck with my instincts. erstwhile seems to me to be more retrospective (more of a "formerly" without any interest in contemporary or future developments) while heretofore feels a bit more prospective (more of a "previously" with an eye to pending action) and, of course, i do fully intend to contemplate sealer of weights and measures as a potential vocation from this point onward.

a way with words: The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

This is the best book that I've read in years (probably since Sebald's Vertigo). A short and simple story of one old detective's search for a missing parrot, the pet of a child orphaned during the Holocaust, The Final Solution is much more of a novella than a novel but, man, the prose is absolutely stunning. Based upon The Final Solution, I put Michael Chabon right up there with Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and Arundhati Roy when it comes to elegance in the use of the English language. Here, an excerpt:

...The old man stood, shrugging. With the consciousness of failure, a gray shadow seemed to steal over his senses as if, steady as a cloud, a great obstructing satellite were scudding across the face of the sun. Meaning drained from the world like light fleeing the operation of an eclipse. The vast body of experience and lore, of corollaries and observed results, of which he felt himself master, was at a stroke rendered useless. The world around him was a page of alien text. A row of white cubes from which there escaped a mysterious drone of lamentation. A boy in a glowing miasma of threads, his staring face flat and edged with shadow as if cut from paper and pasted against the sky. A breeze drawing rippling portraits of emptiness in the pale green tips of the grass.

My brother is always talking about Chabon's book, The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay. I am certainly going to give it a try after this one.

[untitled]

Hello?
Hi, Islander. How are you these days?
Good and you?
Good. I have some interesting news. I was recently invited to a communist Christmas party.
Interesting. Who's throwing it?
You are, idiot.
Well, actually, ours is a SOLSTICE party.
Whatever, commie.

[untitled]

So, did you take E's picture with Santa yet?
Um... no.
We're going over to Mayfair tomorrow. You want to come with us?
No, thanks. We're not planning to do a photo with Santa.
Really, why?
We don't celebrate Christmas.
Oh, sorry. I didn't realize you were Jewish.
Unitarian, actually, and my spouse is beginning to believe that he is a secular humanist.
Oh...[3 second pause] What did you think of the artichoke dip that Lori brought? Wasn't it fabulous?

Get the answer to that question you've always had...

What is the MEATRIX?

hiatus

Dearest Readers:

I am feeling particularly "over" this blog at the current time so I think it advisable that I take a break. My siblings and I have a family blog and these days most of my posts seem to belong over there. Perhaps when I get back into the swing of things in January (I'll be teaching, working on a couple of papers for submission and preparing a couple of presentations), I'll want this outlet and feel the desire to stay connected to my largely imagined audience. Until then, however, adieu!

that is, of course, unless I feel like posting before that, in which case, until THEN, adieu.

E's Photo of the Week: 3 months