Xmas!

We owe the blog some love, and we DO have things to say. But for today, just a few pictures.

Let's talk about a word

The word is "sustainable."

The Times magazine had a great little piece this weekend about the idea of "sustainability," and particularly about how as an idea it's almost become neutralized. No one is opposed to sustainability. Everyone thinks its great! And because of that, you get big agricultural and pharmaceutical companies saying, Sure, we care about sustainability! I'm sure they do. But the problem is that everyone is in favor of sustaining what they do--and no one really wants to learn about how what they do might not be sustainable. That would be, as Gore says, an inconvenient sort of truth.

The times article is about two things that have been shown in the last year to not be sustainable. One of them is the widespread use of antibiotics in farming. This article grabbed my interest, because one side-effect of growing up with a close relative dying of AIDS, as I did, is that you acquire a real sensitivity early on to the importance and fragility of antibiotic care.

Consider this:

For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria. It’s Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. [AND MY UNCLE JEFF!] But a new and even more virulent strain — called “community-acquired MRSA” — is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but [experts suspect]... another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.

This paragraph is basically like a big neon arrow pointing directly at me. It says to me: remember how your Uncle Jeff died partly because of hospital based MRSA's? Ah! Okay, well now your son, your son Elliot Jeffrey, is vulnerable to community-acquired MRSAs.

He is vulnerable because you want cheap pork-chops (and oh, how I love my pork chops!), and in order for cheap pork-chops to be produced, farmers must misuse and overuse antibiotics in a way we all know is not sustainable.

As for independent public-health researchers, they say they can’t study the problem without the cooperation of the livestock industry, which, not surprisingly, has not been forthcoming. For what if these researchers should find proof that one of the hidden costs of cheap meat is an epidemic of drug-resistant infection among young people? There would be calls to revolutionize the way we produce meat in this country. This is not something that the meat and the pharmaceutical industries or their respective regulatory “watchdogs” — the Department of Agriculture and F.D.A. — are in any rush to see happen.

Anyway, I don't expect all of you--you, who do not have my particular history with antibiotics--to find this little article to be the sort of emotional call to arms that it is to me. Probably you all will never have the sort of gut fear of misused antibiotics that I do.

Instead it is just to say that this article is one of several happenings in my life over the last week--conversations, readings, etc--that have managed to bring my vague feelings about environmental sustainability to a head. Friends, I am worried. I am worried about sustaining this world I am making for my son.

Since I am not an apocalyptic person by nature, it feels awkward to me to be writing a post like this. Mostly, I think life turns out okay, regardless. And I am not sure how to make my own feelings about sustainability into something meaningful and active, rather than just vague and self-congratulatory.

So don't consider this a battle-cry, folks. It's just to say: I am thinking. I am becoming more willing to acknowledge some of the inconvenient truths of my life. And lord, I am willing to buy more expensive pork chops, and fewer of them, if that is the small small price of leaving a better world for my boy.

About Juanna

Juanna Buchanan Migliore died peacefully on a beautiful and sunny late fall morning in her hometown of Price. Juanna was born to June and John Miller in Helper in 1914 and, with the exception of seven years back East, lived her life in Price.

Juanna eloped in 1933 to marry her beau Francesco Antonio Migliore (Doc to his friends and patients) in Washington, DC. They lived there and in Chicago until 1940 before returning to their roots in Price where Doc used his Chiropractic skills to support his family including Michael and Launa (Harvey). Doc died in 1983 and Michael in 1994 as a later-life consequence of service to his country in Vietnam. Juanna also mourned the loss of her sister Bertha (Spratling) and brothers Harry and Robert (Buck).

Juanna was an exceptional seamstress who made beautiful clothes for Launa, many friends in Price, and costumes for her grandchildren Brandon and Megan. This interest led her to work for many years selling materials and sewing notions in Price Trading where her skills and outgoing personality gained her many friends. Juanna and family spent happy times at the cabin Doc built in Scofield, a magical place now used by her children, grandchildren, and great grandson Elliot.

Juanna was a beautiful, independent, friendly, and honest lady who dealt cheerfully with life’s many challenges. Her family would particularly like to thank her neighbor Norma Petrie who helped Juanna achieve her wish to live independently at home in her later years, and the amazing and caring ladies at Hospice especially Jessie who helped make that independence possible. A special thanks also to Drs. Etzel and Boyle. Juanna will be dearly missed by her family and friends.

Funeral services will be held on Saturday Dec 1st at Mitchells Funeral Chapel in Price at 11 am, with a viewing at 10 am. In lieu of flowers please donate to Rocky Mountain Hospice at 60E 100N in Price, or the charity of your choice.

Have I told you?

I'm not sure I've mentioned that Elliot is now very fond of reading. He makes the sign for book and then goes and gets a book and then crawls into my lap to read the book, and then I die from the sublimity, every time.

Friends: we have given unto the world: a new reader. Once I teach him how to swim, I feel that my work as a parent will mostly be done (since, as I've said, I already taught him how to lick batter off a spoon).

So, that's the most important thing to say, except that he's recently been making a word that sounds a lot like "book," too, which is awesome. And then today, two more reading breakthroughs. One is that he knows the part of this one bathtime book he like which is about a shark, and at the appropriate part of the story he actually points to his teeth, in recognition of the discussion of the shark's teeth. And then also, today he was readingOlivia Count with Brandon, and the first thing that Olivia counts, right before "two bows" is "one ball." And when reading, Brandon said "One...????" and Elliot totally said "ball."

The signs of his personhood are coming fast and furious, these days. It is so much fun.

This morning's update

Elliot has recently learned some important skills, namely: unsnapping snaps, and unzipping zippers.

To wit: this morning, I got Elliot dressed in one of my favorite one-piece outfits: it snaps down the front and up both legs. He looked very cute. I went in the kitchen to eat my breakfast. A second later, Elliot came running in not wearing his outfit, but rather waving it triumphantly above his head. I'm not kidding. It was like a flag. I stood staring at him, slack-jawed, while he ran past me to the cupboard with the pots and pans, opened the cupboard, wadded his outfit/victory banner into our soup turreen, turned around, and ran out.

I'm not sure that "clothes removal and rejection" is a normal developmental milestone, but I guess that's where we're at.

Dance Dance Revolution

I like to call this medley "Crank Dat One Year Old."



note: Hold Steady in honor of Kate and Catherine; I recorded that part the morning after the concert ya'll went to.

I am such a good mom.

You know what I did today? I taught Elliot how to lick batter off a spoon. Yep! These are essential skills, people, and you have to start teaching them while their brains are still really highly receptive.

In other news, have we mentioned that Elliot now has, like, 15 teeth? Maybe 16. At his twelve month appointment, he had a mere six. That is 9 or 10 teeth in a mere two and a half months, and when I look at it that way I understand why I've felt so busy.

Have a good weekend, everybody!

Pictures

Sorry we've been wrapped up this fall, and quieter blogwise. But there are some new pictures.

P.S. I am so proud of what he is willing to eat now. I guess "relieved" is the word I'm really looking for, and maybe "proud" is really a common parental euphemism for "relief". "I'm so proud I could burst" is maybe just another way of saying "I was so worried I thought I was going to pop. But now I'm OK."

Being the one who is mainly in charge of breakfast and dinner for most of 2007 -- and there have been many trying dinner hours -- I am still relieved/proud when he eats a good meal at all. Relieveder/prouder still that he is growing: due to having eaten! He is getting a little taller, a little lankier.

He ate a bunch of dried blueberries tonight. (Used to spit em out.) Ate much of a (Trader Joe nitrate-free nitrite-free protein-packed) hot dog. Protein! And breakfast? A bunch of peanut butter (straight off the spoon, chip off the old block), some loose Cheerios, and lots of milk. More protein!

Protein.

(Whew.)

He says four words.

Which is a lot. Relatively speaking. It's way, way more than zero.

I suppose we were expecting a big moment when Elliot said his "first word", but that didn't really happen. He's been using some extremely reasonable-sounding syllables (e.g. mamamamama) for months and months. But he's been using them in pretty unreasonable ways. You couldn't let yourself get too excited about how he used amamamamama when Sarah arrived, because he would also talk in very similar terms about a blanket, a paper bag, or some applesauce.

But he's been improving his aim. amamaomamama usually means Sarah, though sometimes it means me. K'hhh and kiiii and k'uh indicate key. (Or toy, or object.) Da might mean me, though it's vague. It sometimes means Ada. The crown jewel, though is tuuf, which he says while pointing to his teeth (which hurt him right now, a lot).

Right now Elliot is standing in my shoes, trying to wear them.

Parenting is Hard-Core

I'm just a font of things to read, lately! Here's more. Kate, you'll appreciate this.

I consider this essay in today's Times to be one of the best things about parenting I've read in a while, and I'm not even really a Ramones fan. But as a compelling and understated argument about how parenting makes us realize so much about the difference between principles and the social markers usually associated with those principles, I think this is just about perfect.

Ironically, my one small quibble is with his laugh line about how parenting changes your relationship to vomit, which it does, and which did make me laugh. But I don't think it totally fits here, right? Because if there was ever an aesthetic movement that seems like it would have prepared you to "catch a handful of vomit, mid-air," it was the late 70's hardcore punk scene. Just saying.

This, I Agree With

My mom sent me this story today. It's an essay for the NPR series "This I Believe," and it says something I also believe, which is that admitting that you feel badly about something is often a good thing to do, and is not the same thing as blowing your bad feeling way out of proportion.

The author doesn't mention parenthood in the essay, but I think it's a particularly good lesson for parents to remember. I mean, really. To reiterate my example from my earlier post--I am grateful that Elliot isn't puking up a worm* but that doesn't mean I can't be crabby about the fact that he spilled a box of wheat thins all over the kitchen floor this morning right as I was trying to leave the house and then sobbed and smeared snot all over my sweater while I tried to tear the wheat thin box out of his clutching fist. That was irritating! It was! And it's okay if I feel irritated about it. It's just not okay if I take out my irritation on other people in unfair ways; it's not their fault my favorite sweater is now smeared with crumbs and Elliot snot.

The good news, though, is that Elliot slept much better last night, so I am less irritated than I might be. Yay! Happy outlook restored.




*People keep asking about that worm story! You'll be happy to know that the daughter who puked up the worm was totally fine. Her name was Julia, and she grew up fine and happy and had a happy marriage and several kids, and after the Civil War she (along with lots of other southerners, who knew?) moved to Brazil where she helped set up a town where dispossed southerners could continue to hold slaves free from the meddling of yankees and carpet baggers. I don't think she herself actually owned slaves, though. A few years later she moved back to Alabama and wrote a book about it, which you yourself can read if you go to the UNC Southern Manuscripts archive; they are very nice there and can help you find it even though it's not in the folder with the other Hentz family papers, just fyi.

More on sleep; or, we are our demographic, part 729

Whitney sent me this.


My Mom and Niko both suggested immediately that Elliot could wear two layers of pajamas, which would be warmer than just one. Which I have to admit--never say I don't tell all!--hadn't even occured to me.

It had occured to me that I should put Elliot to sleep in his coat, but I'd rejected that as a somewhat cumbersome idea.

Remember how I said sleep was important?

I know, because we are not getting enough of it. Elliot has always been a really good sleeper--not award winning, maybe, but nothing to complain about. He's slept from about 8 until about 6 for months. So complacent had we become about Elliot's sleep habits that I offered to give away my copy of Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child because I figured it should go to someone who, you know, needed it. Someone whose child did not have healthy sleep habits.

Well, friends: pride goeth before a fit of screaming at 3 am, because Elliot's sleep habits have become much less healthy. Certainly as a result of Elliot's screaming, my sleep habits are less healthy. So here's the deal: a series of things have conspired all at once to, somehow among them, screw up Elliot's sleep:

*I was gone
*my parents were here, and now are gone
*he's got some teething issues (we seem to be working on eye teeth)
*he kicks off his covers, and then gets cold, because the house is cold at night
*for the first couple of nights of weird sleeping we thought it was just an abberation from his normal, solid sleeper self, and thus indulged him, and thus he LEARNED WE MIGHT INDULGE HIS MIDDLE-OF-THE-NIGHT SOCIAL WHIMS, the sneaky devil.

Anyway, none of these obstacles are insurmountable, but they are a bother, and they do mean that today: I am tired. And I am a little torn about how to handle the cold issue. We have a space heater for Elliot's room, and I guess we'll just start using that, though it seems wasteful. But what else to do for a toddler much too active for a blanket sleeper, but not coordinated enough to cover himsself up with real blankets? If there's an obvious strategy here, and I am too tired to think of it, let me know.

But, lest I wallow in my "only getting five hours of sleep!" misery, let me give a big shout out to two people we know who are getting much much less sleep than me. Our friend's Kelli and Karen both had babies in the last couple of days. Good luck, mamas! You will be tired, but it will be worth it.

My folks were just here

And it was great, for several reasons (one of which of course is that with their help we get more PRECIOUS PRECIOUS SLEEP*), not the least of which is that it gives us a couple of extra people around to whom we can say, "isn't he nice? He's so nice. He's so friendly. Look at him! Isn't he beautiful?" as often as we want, without getting irritating.

It would surprise me that I'm really not over just commenting on Elliot's fantasticness, except that Brandon and I are still that way with our pooch, too. When Brandon and I walk her together we say, "Look at her! She's just trotting along. It's so great how she just trots along."

I think that a big part of parental-type love is just knowing the details of someone so well, and appreciating all the nuances of them being themselves.

*More about how sleep is confusing but definitely awesome in today's Times

Reading Matter

Just if you're interested, here are two pieces of news that came our way this morning.

First, our friend Manda co-wrote this article about birth practices. Here's a teaser:

Many obstetricians have never witnessed a natural birth in its entirety, and today, Eisenstein says, a natural birth in a hospital is "almost nonexistent. It was more likely 25 years ago than today." People ask more questions when they buy a car or a house than they do when they choose the care provider and birth location that will be part of one of the most important experiences in the life of a family. All of the doctors are nice, he says, "but you're not hiring your doctor to like [him], you are hiring [him] to have the safest possible birth."

Now, I realize that not everyone cares about "natural" birth--and I myself find the category "natural" extremely suspicious, obviously. But, that said: it's shocking how few doctors are used to intervention-free labor. My aunt had a baby, epidural-free, in the UVA hospital a few years ago and only one nurse on the staff had ever seen or heard a woman deliver a baby without pain medication. My aunt had a really bad reaction to the epidural during her first delivery and really didn't want one the second time around--and she's lucky that a CPN happened to be on duty the night she gave birth.

Second, there's this piece about the importance of sleep for children and teens. The thesis of the article is that SLEEP IS IMPORTANT.

The effect [of lack of sleep] was indeed measurable—and sizable. The performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the normal gap between a fourth-grader and a sixth-grader. Which is another way of saying that a slightly sleepy sixth-grader will perform in class like a mere fourth-grader. “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development,” Sadeh explains.

This article is specifically about people under the age of 21, and it is extremely convincing (it also features several skillfully art-directed photos of sleeping adolescents, which are kind of hilarious). As one of several articles recently published about the importance of sleep in general, however, we are newly-resolved around here to protect our PRECIOUS PRECIOUS SLEEP. Lack of sleep, studies show, impedes reaction time, judgement, and self-awareness. Our own personal "study" shows that lack of sleep makes you crabby and is bad for relationships. So don't call late, folks. We are heading to bed.