Pride (In the Name of Love)

There are a lot of reasons not to like Pride.  I've heard it described as too corporate, too focused on partying, too boring, not political enough, too political, unrepresentative, and too sexual.  My big gripes are crowds, blazing sun, and a general lack of the things that I really enjoy.  If Pride was a moderately attended microbrew festival with amazing food trucks (Thai street food perhaps, maybe some Korean barbeque?) and a band playing country hits, Badger and I would be there every weekend.

Despite the fact that hanging out with some thousands of my closest friends on a blazing Baltimore summer afternoon is really not my idea of a good time, we are planning to go to Pride this year-mostly because of Ladybug.   I want LB to grow up knowing that there are lots of gay people in the world, but more than that, having LB has made me much more aware of how much we need each other as gay people.

Queer people/gay people don't necessarily have much in common with each other.  Besides defining ourselves as something-other-than-straight and a shared history of being oppressed and marginalized, what do we share?  We live everywhere, and are of every race, creed, and religion.  That diversity can be a weakness or a strength.  It's a weakness if we aren't willing to know each other and don't care about each other.  Those differences can be very hard to bridge in the real world, for example, what do I have in common with the young trans sex workers I see on the streets not that far from my house?  As a teenager living in a difficult situation, one not particularly related to my sexuality, I found gay adults to be a fairly useless lot.  In retrospect, they had a lot to lose from being overly friendly with a gay teen, and they probably knew better than I did that very little they could say or do would make my life better at that point.

Even if we can't solve all the problems of other gay people, our generosity and compassion is our strength.  We have a long fight ahead and we need each other for that fight.  We can't let the pettiness of "I hate techno" (which I do), and "I would never wear hotpants in public" (which I would not) divide us.  So we'll take LB to Pride, and hopefully we can enjoy some pit beef and snowballs while we raise a glass (of something which is sure to make Badger rail bitterly against the swill that is mass produced beer) to our proud forefathers and foremothers who partied like their lives depended on it.

Vacation Land

On the ferry

We just got home from a lovely Memorial Day trip to visit my family in Maine.  It was 65 and rainy when we left this morning and 91 when we landed in Baltimore.  It was so nice to see friends and family, and we got to do all kinds of fun stuff including visits to four bakeries.  I also went to the local very small Memorial Day ceremony and parade with my parents.  LB is at a good age to hang out with her grandparents, which is nice, because they are so happy to spend time with LB that they don't mind if Badger and I do our own thing.  Our own thing involved a fancy dinner, some lunches, and some drinks out.

Vacationlanding Badger

Badger tells me that we tried at least eleven mostly local beers.  We also got to take lots of walk and go to the beach.  As a kid, I swam in the ocean from May to October, but as a grown up the water felt awfully cold.

On the beach

LB wasn't quite sure about the beach.  She likes watching the water, but dislikes new walking surfaces including beach sand.  All in all a glorious time.

Speechifying

Ladybug had her speech evaluation.  At first the therapist said she was just below the 25% delay cutoff and would qualify for services, but she rechecked her numbers and LB came out slightly over the cutoff. At 18 months actual her skills are at a 14 month level, and she would need to be at a 13.5 month level to qualify. I had accepted the reality of doing speech therapy, so it was hard to adjust to the idea of not doing it, but I think we are okay with the way things turned out.  Given that LB's adjusted age is 15.5 months, and her hearing loss (reminder: make appointment with ENT), and the fact that her language has really been increasing in the past few weeks, I think it's fine to wait and see for a few months.  And I am glad that we don't have to try to jam another appointment into our weekly schedule.

We have NICU follow up clinic at the end of May, so we'll see what they have to say.  Hopefully LB will get to be advanced in something besides tantrums and cuteness.  She excels at those like they are her job.

Sick Baby Blues

Poor Ladybug has been sick this week with a slight fever, cough, and an unsettling raspy wheeze in the mornings.  Thursday night was worst, with coughing leading to projectile vomiting and multiple clothes changes for all.  Badger and I took turns sleeping on the floor of LB's room for fear she would choke on her own vomit and at one point around 3:30am we were down to our last clean crib sheet.  Fortunately, she seems to feel better today and is definitely less fussy.  I think I feel most like a mother when I'm rocking a feverish, listless little baby who brings out that mix of tenderness and worry.  However, when LB has been awake and inconsolable, it has been very hard to be patient.

Motherhood has been unexpected in its sublime and excruciating moments.  Who knew I would love to hold a sick baby, but hate to push a swing in the park (so boring).  Before LB, I couldn't know how quickly she would change and that I would have to change as well.  At around nine months LB when from being a sweet, cuddly babe in arms to a curious explorer (even though she could only get places by rolling), it was hard to have our quite post work cuddle replaced by a kicking, straining, pinching race to get out of mama's arms.  But, one night as I was rocking LB I was struck by the understanding that she was not part of me, that she was her own person with her own wants and her own agenda.  It was so weird to realize that I had still been thinking her as an extension of herself, and just that realization made it so much easier to accept the new explorer LB.

It can be hard to be all things as a mother-the mother who will sleep on a baby's floor and listen to her breathe, and the mother who will let a baby do her own thing.  Today I really wanted to get some pictures of LB in a little cap made by one of my mother's friends.  It is part of a beautiful layette and I know LB won't be able to wear it for much longer.  Of course, the pictures were a fail and I tried to remember how lucky we are to have an independent little fighter.

But this agreeable baby,

has become this feisty toddler who won't wear a hat.

Farmer's Market

I finally made it to the farmer's market this weekend.  We needed two tomato starts, which led to four quarts of strawberries and assorted other stuff (the tomatoes are from California).  Today was strawberry shortcake and tomorrow will be strawberry rhubarb pie.  Most years I regret not making full use of berry season, but this year will be different.

Two Books about Preemies

When Ladybug was in the NICU, I did no reading about preemies.  In terms of preemie parents, I was probably on the extreme side of not wanting to know any medical details.  I wanted to hear that LB was good, and if that wasn't true, I wanted to know that she wasn't going to die, and I didn't really want to hear the details.  With the rise in the number of M.D.s from Google University, I think most people want to hear what a doctor has to say and then they want to go check it out themselves.  In the NICU, we were given a lot of information, which for me involved listening to excruciating lectures with my eyes glazed over.  The NICUs focus on statistical risk always seemed useless to me as a parent.  Of course for a neonatologist, statistical risk is a useful tool, but as a parent I really don't care how 10,000 babies respond to a particular treatment, I care about my Ladybug.  From the neo's point of view, I guess statistics give them something to say.  Without the numbers they are just left with the truth of "I don't know," or "I have a hunch."

I've always like medical non-fiction, and now that I'm further away from LBs preemie days, I've started reading about preemies.

I recently read Adam Wolfberg's Fragile Beginnings: Discoveries and Triumphs in the Newborn ICU (2012) and I found it to be, not a bad book, but an odd book.  Wolfberg is a doctor and a medical researcher, but in the book he uses the experience of his own daughter, who was born premature, as a framing device.  Reading the book, I got the sense that either Wolfberg and his editor has very different ideas about the book, and/or that Wolfberg was uncomfortable sharing his families' experience.  I suspect that the author wanted to write a more scholarly book, and the editor wanted a book that would appeal to the broad audience of people who might be interested in the personal story of a preemie's survival.  The result of this tension is a series of interesting juxtapositions, a somewhat cold vignette about the author's daughter, following the story of a woman choosing to get an abortion at 23w 4ds, or a graphic descriptions of medical experiments on animals.  This back and forth gives the book a jumpy feeling.  Overall, this book was interesting and I don't regret reading it; however, if you know a family who has recently had a preemie and are wondering if this book is an appropriate gift, it is not!  Do not buy this book for anyone who has had a preemie!

I prefer Geoffrey Miller's Extreme Prematurity: Practice, Bioethics, and the Law (2007) and this preference is partly due to the fact that I find Miller's emphasis on ethics more interesting than Wolfberg's emphasis on brain plasticity.  Extreme Prematurity is a short book with a large amount of information.  The book contains sections on medical issues, bioethics, practices in different countries, and laws in different countries.  The author manages to be evenhanded, even when discussing controversial theories like utilitarianism.  I found the comparisons between the United States and other countries particularly interesting.  I definitely recommend this book for anyone interested in prematurity and bioethics, and I wish Miller would right an expanded version with additional detail.  Once again, this book is not one that I would recommend for families with babies in the NICU, but Miller has given the book a boring enough title that I can't imagine anyone mistakenly giving it as a gift.

Stuff

LB's PT is currently a major enabler of our baby-related consumption.  She doesn't push us to buy things, but when we bring up something like a riding toy she will tell us what skills it will help LB build.  Who can resist that pitch?  Enter the Wheelie Bug.  We love the Wheelie Bug, but unfortunately it seems to be part of the slippery slope to this:

[Edit-Badger says that I must specify to the internets that this picture is our BASEMENT, not a room in our house.] What you see here is a slurry of sports stuff, crafting stuff, beer making stuff, and a drum set, but mostly lots and lots of baby gear and clothes (and if you look very closely, one little baby).  I think we could easily outfit triplet girls in any season.  And this picture was taken after I gave several large boxes of stuff away on Craigslist (goodbye "Daddy's little princess" onesies), returned stuff we had borrowed, and gave and lent stuff to friends.  Lest you think we have a serious shopping addiction, we don't buy much, but we are given a lot-both new and used.

When did this happen?  Most people I know don't have a lot of money, but we all have a lot of stuff.  Materially, my growing up in the 1970s was more like the 1930s than like anything LB will experience.  I got two new pairs of shoes every year (school shoes and summer sandals) and two new outfits (one for the first day of school and one for Easter/birthday). When I look at pictures of the house in which I grew up, it looks almost empty.  My very frugal mom buys most of LBs clothes.  She takes her coupons down to the outlet stores whenever they have a big sale and buys a pile of clothes, and always tells me that it's almost as cheap as the thrift store.  LB never seems to get one outfit or one pair of shoes, it always a box of barely worn outfits, or five pairs of shoes.  I am very thankful that we don't have to buy everything LB needs, and that she has nice things, but it is all overwhelming.  It makes people happy to buy stuff for a baby, and I know my mom in particular loves her trips to buy LB's clothes.  But how do raise a child who still has the pleasure of wanting things in the midst of so much?  And how do you keep from turning into a hoarder house?  Is it just gross to have so much?

I hope that we can teach LB not to distract herself with shiny, pretty things, but that seems like a lofty goal.  The important stuff (education, healthcare, retirement) costs so much, and the stuff that doesn't matter is so cheap. Given the state of our economy, enjoying it while we can seems a sadly rational choice.