Cold Spaghetti

Thanks, Lucy, for this!

My five… More Lima Beans, The Painted Maypole, Janna Bee, The Journey, and Adventures in the 32-Aker Wood.

Thanks, Tina, for this!

Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person that has granted the award and his or her blog link. And pass the award to blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgment.

My five… The Albemarle Sound, More Lima Beans, Collecting Tokens, Wheels on the Bus, and MadHatter Mommy.

Where were we before school madness, the pressure of three projects, summer camps, donor fatigue, and worrying about my Mom?

Right.  Disney.

On Day two of our 3 days in The World and it’s orbiting moons, we took a day off from parks and went to Downtown Disney.  Once Upon A Time, this was simply called Lake Buena Vista.  You could rent paddle boats and feed ducks.  There were a bunch of little specialty shops and tiny boutiques.  Now it’s pretty much Disney oriented, with a performance stage (think: cheesy high school jazz choirs), a few cheap and free kid-oriented attractions, and stores.  It’s actually a nice place to spend the morning.

Kate and I rode the carousel.

By the way, any horse that Kate rides is christened with the name “Lucky” by The Patootie Herself.

Copious amount of cute pictures with Winnie the Pooh.  Paul kept saying that it looked like Pooh’s hand was cut off and oozing.

Paul joined the kids for a photo.  Not that Kate initially approved.

The LEGO store has some fantastic displays.  I love the waves in this pirate display.   (That’s Will, checking it out in the corner of the picture.)  I also like the kid in the background.  I think she’s freaking out about the half-of-a-guy in the water.  Did the nearby shark get the rest?

Outside of the LEGO stores are a good dozen tables for little builders, as well as a racing table for trying out self-made cars.

The windows are portholes to famous cities.  This one is Paris.  Will LOVES to see anything with the Eiffel Tower on it and is quick to point out that “that pictures speaks French.”  Of course it does.

Here’s London.  I told them that Aunt Lee was moving here just as soon as she gets her visa.

One of the toy stores had a huge build-your-own Potato Head table.  We built fairy, mermaid, storm trooper, and Han Solo potato heads.  Then we went to explore more of the store and stumbled into a “Make Your Own Light Saber” table.  Uh-oh.  We broke down and bought the kid a light saber, something that not even Santa Claus was willing to do.  Upside?  He was able to defend Cinderella.

Okay.  Now is where I should spill about the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique.  It’s actually happening in the window behind Cinderella.  There is a child in that window whose parents have paid $200 bucks or so to have their kid made up (hair, makeup, glitter, tiara) with full costume (clickity-shoes, dress, prom court sash) to be their favorite princess.  I’m not joking.  It’s very… um… well, it’s very Jon Benet… a cute idea taken to the point where it’s just sorta creepy.  I think I’d be better with it if it went a little further to be more inclusive. If they are “making dreams come true” then why not dress up girls to be pirates, or Minnie Mouse, or spooky ghosts, or astronauts?  Aren’t those dreams, too?  And more inclusive for boys, for that matter (I hear that there is a ‘prince’ package for boys, but I think most parents understand that this would not be worth their child’s future therapy bills.)

Really, though, shouldn’t girls get to imagine being more than just princesses?  And when you get right down to it, consider how downright DULL some of those princesses are.  Aurora from Sleeping Beauty is such a wuss that a tiny prick of blood sends her into a coma… who’d want to be that boring??  Especially when you consider the other female lead in the story, Maleficent, is so bad-ass that she can turn into a dragon and summon up all the powers of hell.  Ask a 4-year old what they’d rather pretend to be — a sleeping lump of boring or a fierce and powerful dragon?  — and it’s no contest.  So seriously Disney.  Re-think the oversexualization of preschoolers boo-tique, please.

Speaking of cool dragons, LEGO has one in Buena Vista Lake.  Notice the change in blocks on it’s neck?  That’s because a hurricane (Charley, maybe?) took off it’s head when it rolled over Orlando.

We learned that tidbit from my friend, Jennae, who works for Disney and met us for dinner.   Jennae has worked for Disney since college and worked in just about every place one can work — including donning those famous ears to be The Boss, himself.  She said that being Mickey is by far the hardest job in the park, as the heartbreak of hearing the stories from parents, children, and just random visitors — and not being able to say anything from inside that costume! — is difficult over time.  There’s a niche job to get with Disney… being the therapist for Mickey actors!

Now Jennae gets paid to accompany families on Disney vacations.  She plays the travel “host” and gets to see the world in Disney four-star luxury.  And gets paid for it.

For dinner, we went to the T-REX restaurant, which is more an entertainment venue than place to eat. It’s filled with impressive robotic dinosaurs… including a roaring T-Rex that meets you at the door. We ate in an ice cave that changed colors, under a HUGE dinosaur skeleton “frozen” in the ice above us. The kids were ga-ga the entire time. It’s was incredibly over-stimulating, but thankfully the kids waited until the after dinner walk to the car to completely melt down. It was our only Disney-related melt-down and completely understandable, considering the stress they had of keeping track of 50 different dinosaurs while they ate. And because they didn’t want to leave Jennae once they learned that if they travel with her, they can stick to places with running, potable water and regular electricity service. The sort of stuff that is not necessarily guaranteed when I am your tour guide.

But back to the Dragon, whose job at Disney is not quite so glamorous.

Without a doubt, the best thing I have ever done for my career was have children.

Going completely against the words of my advisers (“no one will ever take you seriously if you have a baby while you do a PhD”) and in contrast to my departmental peers (almost all of whom are not only childless but single) — I got married and had babies.

And it was the best thing I have ever done, or could ever have done, for my career.

I work in Public Health, specifically in International Health, where I study things like poverty, development, gender, migration, and disparity.  In terms of methodology, I am a big believer in qualitative research in health; that we need people who actually unpack what all those health numbers mean so that we can be most effective in how we address health.  So when I walked into a rustic birthing facility with my visibly bulging 6 month pregnant belly to hold the hand of a young mother and help her labor — that woman gripped my hand and trusted me.  A year later, when Will crawled around the cement floor with other babies in the community meeting, women easily opened up to share stories of how they feed their children.  People approached me in buses and street corners, pushing Will in his stroller through the streets of Lima.  When I brought Kate into homes of newly arrived immigrants after Katrina, I compared nursing techniques with new Mothers struggling to figure out how to do it on their own.

What does it mean to be a Mother and work in International Health?  It means everything.  Being a Mother just breaks through all the differences that culture, faith, ideology, geography, wealth, and language build between us — although they may shape how we are Mothers, the visceral experience of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and simply having a child is universal.

So there are no better people in the world to speak about issues like social justice, responsibility, activism, and the work of creating a better world.

You know what light bulb brought me to this conclusion?  Reading Jenny’s line about seeing Alejna and baby Theo for lunch, during which the baby “audibly soiled his diaper.”  The universality of the experience struck me — how that could have happened anywhere with any group of women and all the Mothers in the room would know the sound and share the response.  It reduces us all to the most fundamental of our qualities, that which makes us human: our ability and responsibility to care for each other.

To me, Jen and Mad‘s Just Posts are the internet representation of the important and relevant words of regular folks — and particularly of Mommy bloggers, who are routinely maligned and discounted as unimportant.  I know that writing about my family is important.  The personal is political — and the work I do living here, in this wounded city, is as important as any news about town, if not more.  Seeing similar experiences, thoughts, and challenges from others through Just Posts helps me see those same personal and political actions in so many other communities.  Finding them was a gift and has become something that I look forward to for inspiration.

So that is why Alejna and I, with the gracious blessings of Jen and Mad (and also Su), have teamed up to carry their legacy.  We sincerely hope that people will continue to send us recommended reading from bloggers throughout the world who have written something that makes us all more aware, more committed, more involved.

Will and I lifted the spoons at the same time, but I retched first.  He bolted to the bathroom sink, I to the kitchen sink further away.  Both of us sputtering and coughing and tearing the taste from our tongues.  All the while screaming to Kate, DON’T EAT YOUR CEREAL!  No worries, Paul had given her cereal yesterday… so she already knew the milk was bad.  She just didn’t know how to tell us, besides asking instead for goldfish and cheese for breakfast.

Then there was the dishwasher exploding, filter clogged up with calcium from our hard water.

And then there was the park, our highlight of the day, which started to look crummy as we pulled and tugged cooler, bike, scooter, helmets, and kids across the grass… pausing only when Kate decided to stop directly on a red ant hill.  At least she was cool and calm as Will and I danced around her, striking ants from her shoes and legs.  For a second, I threatened leaving the scooter and going on to play without it, nearly launching Will into a panicked cry.  I was reaching a limit.

It looked like the start of one of those days, the kind of day early in the year that makes you wary and maybe threatening.  Like, 2009, if you’re going to behave like this, then I am so totally not inviting you to my birthday party!

But Emmy came over and helped us carry our beaten selves to the flagpole, where friends and kids awaited.  No big commotion.  It’s normal people that I care about, with kids I care about, just being who they are.  After awhile my head settles down and I’m natural again, chatting and chasing kids.  I suddenly feel how relaxed I am, and get that it IS okay and it’s just fine that I can’t be perfect every second.  It’s okay that although I can completely get the big picture, sometimes it’s hard to take a step back and remember it.

I’m starting to feel better.  I am who I am.  It’s okay that I have limits.  It’s okay that somedays, the little things threaten to break me.

Then in the middle of conversation, Will approaches.

“Mom?”

“Yes, Will?”

“Miles and I want to know if you will be Catwoman so that we can be Batman and Robin.”

And now I realize that I am more than okay.  Because clearly, I am also one sexy Momma.

Paul spent the last week in Sierra Vista, Arizona, leaving me as a single mother with two children and no bathtub. Lucky for me, our friendly neighbors were more than willing to let us use their tub. Even luckier for me, Violet spent a few days here during her vacation tour of the Gulf Coast.Violet was our neighbor in Michigan and she and her husband, Millard, are friends and role models. It was a bummer that Paul missed her visit, but frankly, she came at the perfect time. As a research-minded, academy-familiar, professional mother of two, Violet is just about the only person I feel completely comfortable talking to about my professional endeavors because She Gets It. I found out Monday afternoon that my Wenner Gren application did not get advanced, mostly because the reviewer felt it lacked in “theoretical anthropological significance.” Considering my committee chair, a Wenner Gren reviewer for several years, felt it was easily one of the top he’s read, I felt a bit wounded by the letter. But after an evening of licking my wounds, I was able to brush it off and move on.

So Tuesday, I had a meeting with another committee member, who was shocked at Wenner Gren’s decision, but felt it a good thing for two reasons: my focus is so much changed that it may have been worth taking a new funding direction and increase the budget. Current literature on RDS suggests using a Deft (design effect) greater than 2, greatly increasing sample size. That, combined with recent changes in focus, was putting things in a different light. I felt better after discussing all of this with Beth. But I felt even better after talking it over with Violet, who immediately advised brushing it off and going for more. *sigh*

Wednesday, I spent the day with Violet. We went to a local gym, where I oogled the FOUR outdoor pools (two just for kids) and contemplated how many organs I’d have to sell for a summer membership to take the kids to the pool. We enjoyed breakfast at Oak Street Cafe while Charlie entertained in the background. In the afternoon, we toured the 9th ward (particularly the lower 9, downstream from the industrial canal) — my first time in going post-Katrina (more on that in another post). In the evening, we left the kids with favorite babysitter and friend Michelle and had an UH-MAZING dinner at Dick and Jenny’s. And each night, Violet helped me get the kids bathed and in bed. It was wonderful.

Thursday, we took a walk in Audubon Park. We noticed the egrets and ibis (and maybe others?) mating and nesting in the trees at Ochsner Island, passed the violin player practicing under the oaks, and regrouped. Before leaving, Violet came to Abeona to take a few pictures with the kids.
Thanks, Violet, for a wonderful visit!

The last conversation I had with Helen Hill was a friendly hello at Abeona — we both wanted to say more but were overwhelmed with our kids at the time. I had hoped to send the images from Oak Street Cafe to her over the break and we had talked about getting together for New Years, neither of which happened. So, it may sound silly, but it was very important to me to get the images to her family directly. We dropped them off in a sturdy folder with the flowers and cards at their front door. Soon after, Emmy and Renee (friends and Abeona instructors) visited the memorial. They saw the folder and recognized it; wanting to keep it safe, they gave it directly to a family member and showed the photos I took. They were very well received, and were brought directly inside the house to Helen’s family. Media swarmed. Emmy felt they all were piranha-ish… with the exception of one British man who she felt was very respectful and caring. She gave him my phone number.

… And this is how I met Charlie Varley. When we first spoke, I had no idea who he was and acted very suspicious. Photography is a funny medium. It can easily be exploitative and I am very sensitive to this. I consider it a privilege to photograph people and feel that, particularly where children are involved, a photographer needs to be very careful with their work. So at first, I was very unsure how to handle Charlie Varley, who wanted to send some of my work to several news sources that were preparing memorial articles for Helen. By the end of our conversation, I was assured and agreed to send him some images. Then I googled him and realized who he was… when I sent him the photos, I wrote that I felt like I was sending a crayon sketch I made at age 10 to Picasso.

I was surprised to receive a wonderful email response from him. For one, he encouraged me to protect my work by adding a photo credit to the images and made some suggestions in that regard. Before sending them on, he embedded my credit into the image file for me. Second, he said wonderful and encouraging things about what I had done: “very professional and not at all amateur if you ask me.” He went on to say some personal things about being a parent and covering this story. It was, in every regard, a kind and thoughtful message.

Quickly following on the heels of Charlie’s message, came a phone call and email from Schroeder. Another uplifting and friendly bit of light coming unexpectedly.

Yesterday was my birthday. These little pieces of kindness and thoughtfulness were wonderful presents!