guilty: gendering your kid

I’m fairly attuned to the perils of forcing my child to fit a preconceived gender paradigm, down to the clothes she wears. T-Bop gets labeled a boy on average three times a week (and we don’t go out that much) for no other reason than that she doesn’t wear pink. Red, blue, green, yellow but unless your baby girl wears pink, you might as well paste a football on her shirt and sew some cargo pockets on those husky jeans.

Frankly, nothing could concern me less. I figure the more chances she has to not be treated like a fragile princess, the better. Sometimes, most of the time, I don’t even correct the mistaken party. Which is why it was surprising that I was guilty of the divide mentioned in Lise Eliot’s Pink Brain, Blue Brain. I didn’t want T-Rex to get dirty.

I realized that every time we played outside I was taking the baby out of the way of everything that might get her or her clothes dirty. I was worried about the clothes (which is weird in itself) but mostly something deep inside was telling me my daughter shouldn’t be dirty. I started to wonder if I would be treating a boy the same way. I remembered my friend Seeca telling me about her son’s love for mud and sand, playing in leaves and rolling around on the ground. So what was my deal?

It was easy to correct my anti-dirty issue. But it did make me realize how difficult it is to not hinder who our kids are going to become through our actions. One of the examples in the article (about the book) is how mamas underestimated the slope that their 11 month olds could crawl. The boys were expected to be adventerous and tough (more slope) while little girls are being trained to be cautious (less slope). The nurture affect is so deep that the reason boys may develop slower is that we expect them to develop at a different rate. Crazy!

Eliot also talks about making sure little girls have jigsaw puzzles, legos, and computer games that set them up for good math and science skills. Even more important is allowing little boys to show emotions and to be involved in art and music. Here’s a great quote from the end:

“Whatever you do is what your brain will be ‘wired’ for,” says Eliot. “So anytime we see an obvious difference between men and women, or boys and girls, ask yourself: how did they spend their time over the past thirty years to make their brains so good — or bad — at certain skills?”

Makes you pause, eh?

a low meat week

There are a lot of good reasons to cut back on your meat consumption. Meat’s expensive, it’s bad for your health, and it can even be dangerous. The more meat you eat, the shorter your life span will be. Meat also calls into question a lot of tough ethical issues when it comes to the treatment of animals, the use of our land, and the way meat production occurs.

But we’re also not anti-meat. In fact, when we were at Polyface a few weeks ago we brought back a big old hunk of cow for a pot roast. It was awesome. That was also about all we could handle in terms of meat for a little while. We opted for a low meat week following our roast. Here’s our menu:

Monday – Pumpkin-Peanut Curry (we stopped at the part where shrimp is introduced)

Tuesday – Caramelized Onion-Pear Pizza

Wednesday – Shrimp Etouffee (this does have shrimp in it, but we only added 1/2 a lb)

Thursday – Borscht (1/2 lb of stew beef)

Friday – Vegetarian Jambalaya

Vegetarian can be great! Try your own low/no-meat week.

joy

annoying boys in seminary

It’s good to know that the horde of white Wheaton students who came to your seminary to become pastors and decide half way through their first class that they are way too smart for that career track are not only bugging the crap out of you. They are also infuriating their teachers:

James and John McZebedee matriculated at my seminary again this fall. The “Sons of Entitlement,” I call them. They are usually—but not always—young and white in addition to being male. They have typically grown up in the church, attended Christian colleges and majored in religion. They like to refer to their mental index of Theologians Worth Reading and readily scoff at those theologians they have not read (and so are not worth reading). They patronize second-career students, female students, minority students and those ministerial students who are without apparent academic ambitions. Their fathers are frequently pastors. It is possible, these Sons of Entitlement piously concede in candid moments, that God may be calling them to become professors or bishops. They are rather easy to dislike.

This from Stephen B Chapman, who year after year subjects himself to the self-righteous first year students who are forced to take not one but an unseemly two semesters of Hebrew Bible. God bless that man.

This struck a special nerve for me as I am hoping/wishing/praying/thinking about returning to graduate school as an older, second-career student on the mommy track who would like to use her degree to be better at washing the back sides of L’Arche community members. Reading this short piece I was awash in the memory of annoyance with the young know-it-alls who used every one of the Hebrew classes I precepted to try and upend me.

This is also why it’s great to remember that these young brothers are, in fact, my brothers, that they would be my precept students and how it’s my job to help redirect that ambition towards the cross. I should start praying now that, if the opportunity should arise, that the goal of our education is to ask “Are you able to relinquish / Purple dreams of power and fame / To go down into the garden / Or to die a death of shame?”

But it’s also to know that someone empathizes.

high school

Earlier this week the baby and I joined my dad for lunch at a Manassas institution – Tony’s NY Style Pizza. In the last nine months that we’ve been in Manassas, we’ve eaten here a few times. Each time the place brings back a surge of memories. Tony’s was the place people would go after soccer games or for dinner on the weekends, especially the “cool kids.” So it was weirdly reminiscent to walk in and find five of these type of Osbourn students, three from my class, ordering at the counter.

Memory is a strange, strange thing and seeing these guys managed to trigger several from almost eleven years ago. We were cordial, they asked about the baby, I asked about the wedding of Reid, who the others were here to see. But at the same time I was remembering how important it was to be on the good side of these guys, to have them think you were as snarky and dismissive as they were, and how hard it was to pull that off. I found myself wishing this has been the one day I had decided to change out of my stay-at-home-mom uniform. Weird.

The thing about memory, though, is that it can be unbelievably inaccurate. Whenever I watched those high school movies (a la “Ten Thing I Hate About You”) my high school seemed like a perfect resemblance. Jocks, mean girls, cheerleaders, Goths, smart Asian kids, band geeks. Every stereotype perfectly matched by a fictional equivalent. But is that correct? If you asked Reid, Jake or Kevin would they say that everyone at school was basically friends and that we didn’t have any cliques? Would Matt say I got him all wrong, that underneath it all he really longed for the freedom of the band geeks who didn’t seemed to care what he thinks? Would they have thought their snide remarks affected anyone? Would they even recognize themselves as the “cool kids”?

But just when my self-righteous furor reaches it’s pitch I think, how did people see me? Was I any better? I had a revelatory conversation with a friend from elementary school when I was in college. She told me a lot of things about myself that I didn’t like. It was hard to hear but at the same time I sometimes wish I could hear more leveling of this kind. Of course, it goes both ways. I recently ran into a friend who told me that my asking him to youth group had a significant impact on his choice to become a Christian, something of which I was completely unaware.

Memory is tough when it comes to high school, a time already marked by insecurity and personal discovery. As faulty as it can be, that rush of emotions, feeling left out and at the same time wanting desperately not to care was so powerful. It’s hard to know how to put it all together.

unconditional high chair eating

I have to admit, I’m a little wary of “parenting methods,” you know, those books that read like an NFL playbook. If it works for you, great. For us, that felt very restricting. It’s true that eventually you one day realize, “hey, we’re kind of doing attachment parenting.” But we rarely say that we’re living by any particular rules.

In the same way, I don’t want to say that we’ve totally bought into Unconditional Parenting, but the experience of reading the book, along with Emily’s helpful pointing to the follow-up post to the article I mentioned earlier, has helped me to get into a new frame of mind with The Wild One.

Wild One is a high chair thrower. While it started off with the normal developmental step of checking out cause and effect (“ohh! Gravity!”) it’s progressed into whipping food across the room. At first I thought this was a stage she would grow out of. Progressively, I found that I was getting angry about it. Without even realizing it, I was starting to do something I pledged I never would: use food as a reward or punishment. My take was “Once the throwing started, the meal ended.”

Reasoned logic, you may be thinking. That will show her. In reality that didn’t translate. T doesn’t really like to eat as it is, and I’ve been aware, although not concerned, that her weight has dropped from 90% to 80% to 65% to 50% at her last well-child exam.

So I took a page out of the Kohn book (sort of). First, recognize my own feelings. Was this really something to be angry about? Probably not. Second, develop some empathy. What must it be like to not be able to tell someone that you like or dislike something? Or not to be able to ask for food you do want? My guess is that it’s very frustrating.

Third, think about the way we are asking, or in this case setting her up to fling. I was putting all her food out at once. Stuff she liked stayed, stuff she didn’t went. Putting a little at a time helped a ton. Fourth, get involved. I was leaving her to eat on her own while I did dishes. Instead, I stuck around and noticed that before food was flung, it was moved to the side. She was letting me know what she didn’t want, I just wasn’t there to respond. Instead of waiting for the throw to say “NO BABY! NO!” I waited for the placement to the side and said, “Wild One, do you not want that? Please hand it to mama.”

And get this, she did it.

I also realized that, based on my short experience of toddler food preferences (that they can change hour to hour), it’s better to hold up avocado and say “want this?” and get a head shake before slicing and dicing.

Our meals are much less exasperating than they were even a week ago. Left to herself, I’m sure T would still fling, but that’s okay. I don’t expect her to get the whole “no food on the floor” thing when she’s eating Cheerios off the ground most of the time (yes, we’re those parents). But we did it without saying “no!” even once, and without any kind of punishment. While I know that the rest of our disciplinarian career can’t have the same ending, I was encouraged by the changes in me as we went through this first experiment.

U2 FedEx Field Reflections

1. Half an hour in line to get into parking. Two hours in line to get into the stadium. Two hours standing in the Red Zone waiting for the show. Two hours for Muse and set change. Standing = 9 hours.

2. When did I become so attracted to Larry Mullen Jr?

3. As Tim would say, this is the only truly Christian music. “I found grace inside a sound. I found grace, that’s all that I found.” “I’ve got a love you can’t defeat.” Mysterious ways: “The spirit moves. The spirit fills me. The spirit guides me.” Vertigo and Christ’s temptation. Magnificent’s Trinitarian reflections. Amazing Grace in chorus. Claiming the victory that Jesus won.

4. What does the flag mean to Bono? Democracy.

5. So close that, if The Edge had my watermelon seed spitting ability, he could have landed one on my forehead. Ten feet from the barrier, twenty feet from the stage.

6. Shiny jacket with red lasers + smoke machine + hanging mic + swinging from hanging mic = major distraction

7. Three songs from Achtung Baby. What more could you ask for? Four songs from Achtung Baby.

8. Worship. Worship. Worship. I’d be a charismatic if U2 was in control of the music.

birthday celebration

Celebrating is an important part of our family tradition. For both Jacob and me experiences and quality time far outweigh the importance of presents. This birthday, the last in the 20s, we headed south for our first weekend away from the baby. What made this weekend even better was that J had no idea what we were up to. I even packed his bag for him.

The first place we went was the Starr Hill Brewery, a microbrewery outside Charlottesville. They have free tastings and tours on Saturdays. The beer was excellent (although as DD I had only a little sip) and we bought a couple six-packs to bring home. From there we went to our primary destination – Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm. This is the farming model featured in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It was a wonderful experience, despite the pouring rain. While there are no tours (unless you want to fork out $500), the whole farm is open to visitors. The transparency of the farm is meant to help keep them accountable for the way they run things.

It was pretty amazing to see a farm like Polyface in action. What struck us the most was the movement of everything. The animals are never in one place; they get moved around and as they peck and graze in different areas, the soil is fertilized by manure, the bugs are eaten by poultry and the soil is aerated. The other thing I appreciated was how their meat isn’t gourmet fair. We bought some sausage and rump steak without breaking the bank. Their meat is meant to be accessible. That makes a big difference.

Of course J was really interested in what types of engines and farm implements they were using. We wandered into machinery sheds, looked at the way they were using solar, discussed whether or not the fences were actually channeling electricity. He was excited to be there.

After that we checked into our Tree Streets Inn in Waynesboro, got cleaned up and went to our dinner reservation at the Stauton Grocery. Not a grocery at all, but a restaurant that locally sources almost everything they serve. They have a large blackboard on the wall showing you where their products come from. We both thought it was possibly the best meal we’ve ever eaten.

After watching Iowa beat Penn and waking up without having to take care of baby (!) we headed out for our hike in the lower Shenandoah. It was a gorgeous day, not too hot with blue skies. We hikes a part of the Riprap Trail and drove along the Skyline Drive north a bit.

We got home in time to spend a few hours with T before bed time. Apparently her weekend didn’t go quite as smoothly as ours. She woke up at 3 am and refused to go back to sleep. She was banging on the door to the basement, where we sleep, and crying bitterly. Eventually, with much backrubbing and after many books read, she went back down, waking up at 7 am like nothing has happened. It sounds like she did fine during the days.

children’s music

Of late, thanks to the ample supply of the public library, I’ve become a connoisseur of children’s music. When T-Money was born, we got some CDs that were down right bad, stuff with a “better not pout, better not cry, Jesus is coming to town” vibe. Yikes! Since then we’ve been introduced to some better stuff. “Better stuff” means music that I actually enjoy listening to as well.

We love many of the Putumayo Playground albums. I think the best are the original Playground, New Orleans, and Animal Playground. We’ve had less success with Cuba.We just took out Hawaiian Playground which I am looking forward to giving a spin.

In terms of churchy stuff I have two recommendations. The first is The Welcome Wagon, a Sujan-y collection of mostly old time church music. It’s great stuff but not a children’s album, per say. It does have easy tunes that sing-a-long well.

Another great one in this category comes from the Butterflyfish band. We were given direction to this great album from Ben Myers. I love the theological complexity that the songs evoke, especially the midrash on Jonah where the catch line is, “there’s nothing you can do to run away from love…. and if there’s one thing we can do is live like love is here to stay.

I should add that some (okay I) may take issue with the doxology’s evocation of “Creator, God, and Holy Ghost.” I’ve never been particularly comfortable replacing a refrain that so beautifully illustrates the economy of persons in the Trinity in favor of gender neutral language. There is a song included with the feminine pronoun used to describe the Holy Spirit that does similar work, only more appropriately.

They Might Be Giant’s “Here Come the 1,2,3s” may be the best children’s album. Ever. I listen to this often even when the T isn’t around and find myself singing “zero, zerooooooo, zero means so much.” Maybe it’s the math GRE starting to influence my musical tastes, but I love the songs on here. It’s a great way to get your kids familiar with numbers and with interesting vocabulary, not to mention quirky turn of phrase.

I’m not one for lullabies. T is in the strong-willed “play hard, crash hard” category, basically wearing herself out until she finally collapses. But when there’s some quieter down time in the house I enjoy Rockabye Baby’s Lullaby Rendition’s of Radiohead. There are several albums in the Rockabye series, including AC/DC and the Beatles. I love Radiohead, but you don’t need to be a fan in order to like this CD. I’m hoping that soon Rockabye Bob Dylan comes to an ITunes store near me.

I should add that these albums should not replace the steady diet of U2 that should be the basis of your child’s musical diet. That being said, enjoy.

Augustine’s breastfeeding references

I mentioned in the previous posts how Augustine’s love for children changed my perception of his theology. Below are a few quotes.

One of the saddest parts of Augustine’s personal biography is the end of his long-term relationship with the woman who bore his son. This happened before his conversion.  Augustine was expected to leave this woman and to settle down into a “real marriage.” Very few early theologians experienced anything close to child rearing, let alone could speak to the intimacy of nursing a baby. That Augustine even had access to a look at child nurturing of this kind tells you something about his relationship to his son.

“My father and mother have abandoned me (Psalm 26:10). The psalmist has made himself a little child in relation to God. He has made God both his father and h is mother. God is our father because he created us, because he calls us, gives orders and rules us; he is our mother because he cherishes us, nourishes us, feeds us with milk, and holds us in his arms” (Exposition 2 of Psalm 26, par. 18).

“I looked for a way to gain the strength I needed to enjoy you, but did not find it until I embraced the mediator between God and humankind, the man Christ Jesus, who also is God, supreme over all things and blessed forever. Not yet had I embraced him, though he called out, proclaiming, I am the Way and Truth and Life, nor had I known him as the food which, though I was not yet strong enough to eat it, he had mingled with our flesh; the Word became flesh so that your wisdom, through whom you created all things, might become for us the milk adapted for our infancy” (Confessions 7.18.24).

That’s right, folks. The Incarnation as breastfeeding. Take that.