Miracle Blanket Giveaway!

Look out. I’m entering the big bad world of bloggy giveaways.

A few weeks ago, in an effort to lend a hand to all soon to be first time parent friends out there, I listed some of my must-have baby things. The Miracle Blanket from Miracle Industries was among them. Turns out the people at MB use people like me as their primary vehicle for advertising. Which is fine by me because it is actually a miracle. T-Rex is 7 1/2 months old and after a few difficult weeks of short naps due to teething, we’ve start putting her back in the MB (it’s recommended that you don’t swaddle your baby after 4 months but I figure for an hour long nap it can’t be that bad).

Scout used to be swaddled all the time. We had a variety of blankets before we learned about the MB. The main issue is that, in order to get our strong baby tied down, we had to wrap her in a lot of layers. Then we had to do the “bat swaddle.” She got heat rash; she still escaped the swaddle. We were miserable.

Then someone at our new parent’s group told us about the Miracle Blanket. The secret is that the bat swaddle is built into the blanket and the blanket itself is really light. And it is unescapable as you can wrap it around the babe three times.  See the hilarious video on the front page of the MB website. I would like to know what drugs they gave that kid to lay so still. And I would like to purchase some.

Slowly we were able to wean her off of it (here she is in the one arm out mode). And like I said, we still put her in it during particularly attrocious teething time.

So that’s my pitch! The good people at Miracle Blanket are giving me a free blanket to give away on this here blah-g. I was thinking about giving it as a gift to one of my trillion pregnant friends, but some of ya’ll won’t need this item. A few rare babies (I have heard) go to sleep on their own without weeping and gnashing of teeth. If you are the parent of this child, I hate you.

If you are like the rest of us, swaddling your baby to the tune of rushing water, walking around for an hour, jiggling your baby on her side as she tries to escape your grasp, this one’s for you.

Add a comment below and I’ll announce the winner on, oh say, Monday when we get back from Durham. I won’t make you leave your email address. I’ll just ask the winner to email me and we can work it out from there. Apparently you get to choose the color blanket you want. Wow.

Look at my blog. So grown up. Tear….

you say you want a revolution (paid family leave)

I’m thinking about going to the mattresses.

Like most of us, I work at a place that very often institutes policies and programs which I find extremely problematic. Part of this is simply living in a capitalist system where upper level administrators get paid six times what housekeepers make. Part of it is that we have federal policies in place that make it seem like what we’re doing is just like everybody else and is therefore okay.

So you have to pick your battles. One that I am contemplating is family leave policy.

Here’s the scoop. Federal law requires employers to provide 12 weeks of unpaid leave to their employees. The key word here is unpaid. The university where I work abides by this policy except that you are allowed to cobble together sick leave and vacation to get paid after you have a baby.

Unfortunately there’s a double standard. Typically, although not a written policy, faculty members (I’m not sure if male and female) receive a full semester (3 months) of fully paid leave. Plus faculty already get summers off and the university breaks when class is not in session. Staff have neither of these things. For me, when The Babe is born, if I took my cobbled maternity leave all at one time, our kid would be in child care at 8 weeks. As it is now, Jacob will work from home one day a week, me for two and I’ll use one “sick day” a week for a semester. I’ll get three weeks off before I head back to the office.

As you can imagine, I have problems with this. First, the staff policy means I can never get sick because my goal is to bank my days. Should I get cancer, have a really sick family member, I am screwed. And since vacation doesn’t roll over year to year, I get only those two weeks per year on top of whatever I can save up on sick leave. Also, too bad if you have an unplanned pregnancy or two kids close together. Since I’ve already used up my banked time, my child can never get sick because I won’t have any more days I can take off of work.

The real absurdity is the very idea of unpaid leave, particularly for people earning low income with multi-generational family commitments. We might make it work for my family (barely), but what about housekeeping, food services or physical plant workers. I am guessing many of those families couldn’t survive on one income for three full months.

Here’s the rub: my school’s policy is considered generous. This is the norm at most places and they mark this as “paid leave.” I feel like it’s going to be hard to express to my administration how barbaric this policy really is when they’re considered the best that we get in the US (most other Western countries provide one to two full years of paid family leave).

The most damning part of all is that only 4 or 5 women at my school get pregnant every year. Covering their salaries I would guess would cost approximately one half of one percent of two, maybe three upper-level administrators yearly salaries. Think I can talk someone into voluntarily contributing to the fund?

So what do you think? And what the heck do I do? What’s my case? How do I garner support?

Do any of you have experience with this in your own work places? Am I being ridiculous to try and fight against this when it is the gold standard? What’s the general experience of family leave our there?

hi, I’m your baby.

Yesterday we got our first shots of baby Flo-Bix. It was pretty amazing to see that something was actually going on inside me and that I am indeed not just getting fat. It looks like we have a little yogi. I was able to identify “downward facing dog” (above) and “child’s pose.” We also got a great thumbs up letting us know that all was well inside.

Baby is now 11 oz and looks to be a week further along than we expected. We seem to be closer to 20 weeks than 18! The new date for baby’s arrival is August 17.

Lately we’ve been intrigued by the variety of responses we get when asked if we’re finding out the sex. When we say we’re waiting for the birth, most people say, “oh that’s great! What a wonderful surprise!” A few people though have given us the death stare. We’re not exactly sure why.

It certainly is an unusual choice. Some of our student nurses from the Alaska trip were telling me that they had only one woman who didn’t know the sex coming in to delivery and that was in a 3 month rotation per student.

We’re excited to find out the moment of. My friend Natalie sent me this great quote from Madeline L’Engle about her experience waiting to hear the gender of her baby announced. I thought this was so beautiful. I hope it will be like this for us.

A Glimpse of Kairos

In the heart and spirit we are less restricted by time. We are given glimpses of kairos in our own living, moments that break free of time and simply are. It is fascinating that music is so bound up with time and yet some of the greatest moments of music are the silences between notes. We all have moments of kairos, though we seldom recognize them till afterwards. One such glimpse that I remember with particular delight came after a long and very difficult labour when my doctor and friend dropped a small wet creature between my breasts, saying, “Here’s your son, Madeleine.” And I heard the angels sing.