my dad is overwhelmed by facebook.

(Bonnie's caption) "Dad says he likes black shirts because they're slimming."

OK, fair enough, not the nicest picture he’s ever taken, but he looks darn good for his age and doesn’t need his ego patted any more than it already is. And he is famous for the gusto with which he wears the various crazy items of clothing we bring home from trips to other countries.  Or goodwill.  Or the bizarre items of clothing Grandma gave him over the years.  Like the Fedora, or the Russian Comrade Fur Hat, or the Intrepid Explorer Vest.  Or the Yemeni Man-Skirt.  The list is extensive.

So, the following conversation ensued today on the phone:  I asked him casually if he’d been reading my blog.  He was apologetic, saying he’d been busy.  He went on to clarify that he’d been sort of occupied with all his new friends on Facebook.  Actually what he said is, “I’m on Facebook, and I’m totally overwhelmed.  I have over 40 friends!”  He has been “reconnecting” with a lot of old friends from Texas, old camp people, etc… I laughed like a hyena for about 10 minutes.  My parents’ adventures with technology over the years have been epic and an interesting exercise in role-reversal as they have learned most of what they know from their kids.  My mom still talks about “getting on the email”, not grasping that email can be a thing sent or a verb, but not a place you go to.  And they called me recently when they were experimenting with Skype… my cellphone rang at work, I answered, and was excitedly asked by my mom if I could see them.  They could see themselves on the computer screen, but forgot that they’d called my cellphone…  I laughed for a good long time over that one.

Sorry to lampoon them a little bit, but given that we were raised in a house with no TV or internet, and that they still live in the world of dial-up and land lines, all this skyping and facebooking is both admirable and amusing.  I’m glad they’ve finally gotten on the train.

japanese baby and other life updates

what cora might look like if I don’t lay off the sushi.

sooo, I talked to my mom on the phone yesterday and she informed me that she was sitting on the back porch swing (which is one of my favorite places… the back deck at their house looks straight out into old-growth douglas firs… it feels like a treehouse) knitting a cardigan for the baby from the same yarn that she used to make my very adorable knit tank top from last fall.  I hope you people are grasping that my mom is something of the original domestic goddess.  sigh.  I feel guilty because I have not knitted a damn thing (and yes, I do know how)… all I seem to do is surf the internet and eat and lay around on the couch when I’m not at work.  I think this is probably justfiable on some level seeing how I am working over 40 hours a week, but still.  I could be considerably more productive than I am.

So I got out the knitting books and resolved to get started on the above project… I love this picture.  I’ve had this bizarre fantasy that the ethnic food you eat while pregnant could somehow affect the ethnicity of your child, and if this is true, Cora will be Japanese.  I have not managed to stop the sushi, and am just trying to stay within mercury quotas, etc… I love fish so much… especially fish of the raw sushi bar variety.  And, in my defense (and Cora’s– who might not be so much Japanese as retarded when all is said and done) there is just as much literature suggesting that the lipids in fish will make your child brilliant.  So I’m trying not to worry too much about it and just enjoy my sushi when I feel like it.

Also, admittedly, I am a little smitten with the idea of the United Colors of Benetton Family (a la brangelina) and would be fine eating only african food for a whole pregnancy if I thought it would give me something other than a pale skinned caucasian baby.

Henry, as usual, thinks I’m a little crazy, and has been going about his usual business (cooking and brewing beer with his friend Omar):

Henry and his ribs

clean recycled bottles.

and Iran so far away…

I read a really interesting article in the paper this weekend about Iranian dissident Ahmad Batebi who just survived a harrowing escape from Iran, through Iraq, and finally made it the US.  That’s him on the cover of the Economist after a peaceful student protest back in the late nineties was met with violence by the Iranian government… he spent 8 years in jail, in and out of solitary confinement and was tortured in horrible ways.  He is one of the brave few that are willing to fight for change in an incredibly oppressive government.  It is amazing to me how blithely we go on about our lives here in the land of the free without thinking much about how hard it is everywhere else.  Trips to places like Cuba are good reminders for me, but the truth is most of the time I take life here for granted.  (not that Cuba even comes close to what Iran is like, but you catch my drift.)

On a lighter note, anytime I read news about Iran I think about the SNL short that Andy Samberg did last year… watch it here if you haven’t (or haven’t in a while).  Hilarious.

I sync therefore I am. (subtext: I have created a monster)

This is Henry’s face after 6 hours in the apple store in Miami Beach.

determined and sort of crazy.

When Henry and I got married, he was the frustrated owner of a Sony PC laptop (that admittedly had lived a long and productive life, even by mac standards) and a Verizon customer.  I convinced him that switching to Cingular/AT&T and getting a MacBook would be the better part of valor… this after one of the Ridenour’s Halloween parties which ended with us pitching his dead Sony into the Willamette River at 2 in the morning.  He hates AT&T (with good reason) but dearly loves his Mac and has accessorized the thing to the hilt.  And he was thanking his lucky stars when the iPhone came out last year that he had joined me on AT&T instead of the other way around.  I splurged last year at Christmas and got him the iPhone, which has been glued to his hand ever since…  I’m sure I’ve spent money in better ways, but I doubt I’ve ever spent money that was enjoyed more.

SO, in anticipation of the new 3G iPhone, Henry the WheelerDealer sold his old phone on ebay for $350 and took his supportive and adoring wife down to the Miami Beach Apple Store on Friday morning to wait in line, have a modern pop-culture experience in the 90-degree heat, and get himself a new phone.  It took 4 hours to get into the store, during which time we got to be good friends with the other guys in line (ahem: very few women were out there).  I even got interviewed by the news camera, much to Henry’s chagrin, seeing how he had feigned illness to get out of work that day.  By the time we got inside, I decided I had to have one too.  This was easily and happily accomplished by our little Apple Genius Krysstiann, and then it was Henry’s turn… his old iPhone was deactivated, and we were in the process of turning on and paying for the new one when we ran into an activation error.  We spent some time (ok, several hours) on the phone with AT&T trying to fix it, got sent to lunch and told to come back later…  the sad (and hysterically ironic) outcome after another 3 hours after lunch of trying to fix the problem was that Henry’s old phone didn’t work, his number had almost been lost in the abyss, and we weren’t able to activate the new one.  It made him feel a tiny bit better to read a New York Times article detailing all the other people that were having the same problems before we even left the store.  I felt rather guilty playing with mine for the rest of the evening as he skittered around on the internet.

Anyway, long story made short, he managed to reactivate the old phone that night at the AT&T store, empty the memory, stick the thing in the mail and get his old Samsung phone up and running.  And the next morning he went down to the Apple Store again, got the black 16-gig model he has been pining for, and is now once again happily informing me of interesting tidbits of news from CNET and showing me all the coolest free apps to download instead of looking sad and worried.  My two favorite ones so far are UrbanSpoon (which involves shaking the phone like an 8-ball to get dinner recommendations) and the Pandora Radio (which has startlingly smart taste in music.)

The take-home reflection I have about all of it 3 days later is how different my life is with Henry in it (i.e. I’ve always been a big fan of the crappy free flip-phones they give you and would have considered the purchase of a $300 phone obscene), and on the same token, how much better.  I am glad that there is something out there that makes him so ridiculously happy, and I figure it can’t be worse than what I have been known to spend on jeans and shoes in the past.  Marriage is funny that way… vicarious enjoyment of something through your partner can actually be better than having your own experience.

sorry for the punny title.  it seemed hysterical when I started writing this post on Friday night as my phone was syncing and Henry was sadly dropping his old iPhone in the mailbox.

ok fine.

well, sorry it’s been a week or so… I got all hung up on some “research” last week about shared parenting and the history of working moms and feminism and and and… then that segued into a lot more “research” on cloth diapering and how to have a kid in a leave-no-trace kind of way, which led to an argument with a girl at work who just had a baby 4 months ago and told me I’d be crazy to use cloth diapers… the problem is, I get all heated up about this stuff and can’t tell whether or not I’m being rational.  I haven’t been that emotional with this pregnancy, but the volume does seem to be turned up on all my opinions and big ideas.  And I’m trying to be judicious about when to crack that over the blogosphere’s head, and when to just keep it between me and Henry, who, bless his heart, has been extremely long-suffering with my high-volume opinions over the last couple of months.

someone should fine me for the number of run-on sentences I just wrote.  sorry.

In any case, here is a synopsis of my thoughts on the two above-topics:  First, I have been veerrry agravated by the number of people that have asked me the following questions– Do you plan to go back to work after having the baby? and Do you still want to go to med school? and How do you plan to juggle being a doctor and a mom?  Particularly in light of the fact that not a single person has posed those questions to Henry.  He has a doctoral degree, a “big” career, and is just as guilty of creating this little bundle of a new person as I am, but I seem to be the one that is expected to hang it all up and make (at the very least) major changes to my career/extra-familial life.  This is in no small part propagated by the Church at large, and I am frustrated that there seems to be so little literature about godly parenting aimed in the dad-direction.  And I know I’m taking on a whole history of gender roles and Proverbs 31 and whatnot, but I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that maybe parenting should be more intentionally shared between the mom and dad, that the career/family/kid integration changes that have to happen should be expected to happen on both fronts.  And that being a godly mom/wife/citizen of this world is just as important as being a godly dad/husband/etc.  (On a similar note, I really really wonder why American baby showers have to exclude men.  Apparently in Peru the men are expected to be there.) Luckily, Henry is one hundred percent on board with me on this and thought I was crazy to suggest either not going to med school or him not getting to be home some of the time with our kids.  He has been fascinated by the baby registry on amazon, and has done just as much research as me on all the “stuff” we need to get… OK, mainly on the hiking kid-carrier which we won’t even use probably until next summer, but still.  I appreciate his involvement and interest.  He is a peach.

Item number two:  We (actually I– Henry, it turns out, has never changed a diaper and doesn’t know the difference) made the monumental decision to use cloth diapers for a myriad of reasons, cost and environmental concerns being at the top of the list.  My reasons follow:  From a cost perspective, according to consumer reports (and backed up by a lot of anecdotal research), we can expect to spend $1500-$2000 on disposable diapers until Cora is potty trained, whereas cloth diapering her will cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of $500-$700 plus a small bump in our water bill.  Furthermore, each kid diapered in disposables exclusively produces on average 1 ton of garbage that doesn’t biodegrade for about 500 years. I find that staggering, especially considering that the only hills in the Miami area are landfills.  Places like Hawaii are literally out of landfill space… it is just ridiculous.  There is no need to produce that much trash.  The new and improved cloth diapers that are out are incredibly simple and easy to use (i.e. there are no safety pins or plastic drawers to put over the cloth diapers), are made of cotton and not full of the chemical nastiness in disposable diapers that can encourage rashes and uti’s.  It seems so revolutionary to me, this cool new green idea… until I talk to my mom on the phone who laughed and said, well that’s all we used and we managed just fine.  Everything old is new again. (which is what she said after I brought home my cool new Earth shoes last year, and my Clarks Wallabees a few years before that.)

Anyway, if anyone is interested, here are some links to the articles that kept me up at night last week… and the cloth diapering website that I really love.  If anyone is jonesing to buy us diapers, we want the BumGenius 3.0 All-in-ones, mainly in white/pink/blue.

that is all.

NYTimes: When Mom And Dad Share It All,

WashingtonPost: The Feminine Mistake

,

TheAtlantic: I Choose My Choice!,

Slate: The Green Lantern on Cloth Diapers

,

CottonBabies.com