Thursday, April 22, 2010

Check ups, conferences, workshops, and milk.


As you can see from the picture above, Jack is still madly in love with Bebe.

Harry still looks like his baby self when he sleeps. Here he is sleeping last night:

Here he is sleeping at 10 months old:


In other news, Jack had his 2 year well-child check up, and it was great. He's great. The doctor could understand everything he said and thinks his speech is completely age appropriate. (Harry was waaaaaaay ahead for his age, so it hard to not see Jack as behind. But he's not. He's great!). The doctor asked Jack how many fingers he has, and Jack held up one hand and said "Five." It was pretty cute. He also counts by saying. "Dew, five, one," in a very sing-songy tone. So, I think he has my math skillz.

Just like when Harry was 2, the doc advised us to switch from whole milk to skim. We ignored that advice with harry because it felt weird. We switched Jack to 2% like H, but now we're wondering about going skim for all (that's what we drink. If by drink you mean sprinkle a few drops in our coffee.) I looked it up, and the AAP recommends skim. What about you? What do you give?

We had a parent-child conference at one of Harry's schools, and it cracked us up. The teachers told us that every.sinlge.day Harry spills his milk at snack. Not because he can't drink out of a cup but because he gets distracted and gestures wildly and dumps it over. This made us laugh because he does the same thing with his water at dinner. Every.sinlge.night. There has been no spill progress at home or at school. But he's really good at cleaning up spills with paper towels...

I attended a workshop on turning a dissertation into a book yesterday that made me almost throw up. It was actually really great; it reinforced a lot of what my advisor has been saying since the beginning of my project (she did a fantastic job of directing my diss with an eye toward future publication). I had a lot of moments of clarity and one crystalizing moment when I could see the path from where my project sits right now to where my book will sit on the shelf at Borders. That's why I wanted to hurl. It's a long path. One of the speakers at the workshop is a series editor for Cambridge University Press, and he was talking about how a dissertation is NOT a book because it's like a driving test for PhDs. He was making fun of the obsessive annotation in humanities dissertations, and I thought of all the nights I'd be working late at my office and I'd come home and Ben would ask me how many pages I wrote, and I'd tell him 8, but they were all endnotes. I realized, too, how incredibly lucky I have been to teach my rhetoric of reproductive rights class this past year. I have been able to wrestle with a lot of theoretical issues and engage in some collaborative thinking with 2 semestersful (that's a new unit of measurement I just invented. Yup, that's Dr. Mommy to you, mister.). of advanced undergraduates. All this time, I thought I have been slacking on my work, but really? It has been part of my consciousness and my teaching everyday. Reframing my own relationship to my project was really, really helpful and healthy. On the other side of writing my dissertation, I can finally see the forrest for the trees, and I better understand the scope of the field I am entering and how I can place my contribution in it. Writing a dissertation is in part about finding your voice as an expert. Writing your first book is about making the dissertation matter for many more people than its original audience of 6 experts. When I am done with my book, I wonder how much it will look like the dissertation that inspired it.

But back to the milk-- what do your kids drink?

14 comments:

  1. We drink skim or 2%. Jeremy's intolerant, so the half gallon lasts us til it goes bad...depends on the mood.

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  2. Julia and I don't drink milk due to its grossness. My pediatrician told me not to worry if she didn't like cow milk (I mean, how could she after the 14 months of glorious mommy milk she chugged?!) and just make sure she gets dairy in another way.

    The girl loves her some cheese.

    Evan and Elisabeth drink skim. When Ebeth was done with formula we went to whole and then when she was 2, I went straight to skim. She loves it. They go through 2 gallons of milk a week. I am not kidding.

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  3. AJU5 still drinks whole mostly. I am not going to switch her to 2% until her weight is more than her height in percentiles.

    We actually talked about it yesterday at lunch (a couple of a friends and I). As a nation, we are so afraid of obesity that we have gone too far in the other direction I think. One mom was told her daughter was fine after the initial weight/height check and then told in the same appoint that no, she actually was loosing too much weight and they needed to do something about it. So, even when AJU5 is done with whole milk, we will only go to 2%. No skim milk here!

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  4. Oh. milk.

    I will comment on the milk because all that fancy schmancy PHD talk made my head twirl around on my neck and my eyes bug out.

    We've been on quite the journey. no issues with #1 or #2. Switched them to whole at a year, then eventually 2%. The Hobbit? Not so. Started whole around a year. That's when we started to notice his issues. (Runny nose, sick for six months straight, crabby as heck...you get the point...)

    switched him to raw milk. Yes, you read that right. As in, straight from the farm. I could NEVER drink this stuff, but the pasteurization of milk is actually kind of controversial among natural types and people who don't shave their legs.

    So, we tried it. No luck. Finally ended up with rice milk. It's what he still drinks. Sometimes I wonder about reintroducing dairy, but I have a feeling he won't like it.

    I'm told rice milk tastes a lot like ice cream.

    i've yet to try it.

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  5. We're all skim milk drinkers (or users of skim milk in our cereal and our baking). Landon switched from whole to 2% at 18 months because he was a milkaholic and would happily drink 8 milk cups and eat no solid food. Then at age 2 we just moved him all the way down to skim (with the ped's approval)- he eats much better and still gets the proteins, etc. that he needs. And I don't need to buy two kinds of milk!

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  6. We all drink whole milk b/c of the baby... who we can no longer call the baby in 4 short months! We do this mostly b/c I got tired of buying half gallons of milk. Allie never took to skim, so we'll probably drop to something like 1% when Taylor is a 2.

    And then we'll all be back on whole when #3 is a year...

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  7. tripod10:58 AM

    HAPPY 50TH BIRTHDAY OF THE BIRTH CONTROL PILL! i just learned that oral contraceptives were initially ony prescribed to married women unless (Shades of your dissertaion) an engaged woman brought a note from her minister that included her planned wedding date!!

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  8. @tripod OMG! That is wild. I had no idea.

    Wes still gets whole, but the rest of us drink skim. It's what we like and it's convenient to buy two kinds and not three. My kids are both very healthy weights, though, no issues there. Wes will be joining us in skim-land when he's two also.

    I am *struggling* with my dissertation publication!! I'm hoping the two nanny days per week I'll have over the summer will motivate me.

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  9. Both J and E drink 1 percent now. Josh and I don't drink milk. But the two kids drink two gallons per week!

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  10. I buy three kinds of milk (four if you include half-n-half).

    Zoe drinks whole milk because she is not two, and Aidan drinks 2%. He is on the skinny side, but we decided to do it since all parts of the body, including the brain, need and use fat throughout development. He would not consume enough fat without having it in his dairy. The kids also only eat whole-milk yogurt (thank you, TJs!!) When Zoe is 2, we will switch her to 2%, but as for switching the kids to skim, we aren't really worrying about it.

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  11. I'm so impressed that you're still passionate about your dissertation. I need a couple seconds to remember what mine was about, and I have absolutely no interest in publishing it. My masters thesis on the other hand is still my baby.

    We drink skim but transitioned from whole to 2% to 1% to skim. It was a process. Now I (and I think he) can't tell the difference.

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  12. 2% for my 4 1/2 year old and when my son turns 2, he will get it as well. I use the milk we keep for cooking or a bowl of cereal for myself, etc. and I can't stand skim.

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  13. Ethan drinks skim milk and always has (although he rarely drinks just a glass of milk). He was also breastfed until 2.5, so I never worried much about how much cow's milk he was consuming....since he's not a baby calf and all....
    :)

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  14. We moved Ethan to 2% when he was 3-ish? The fact that he is almost 4 y/o and is just now solidly in 2Ts has a lot to do with that, obviously. He loved whole milk and I would have kept him on it, but then I was concerned that, ironic as it is, we'd never get his tastes to switch to 2% or skim and one day we'd be faced w/ weight issues b/c of the amount of whole milk he'd drink as he got older/bigger (at least that's what the pediatrician told us).

    I don't drink milk at all, unless it's in my cereal. And that's skim.

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