ZOMG. Dramz follow-up

How could anyone not want another one of these?

OMG. After spending 2 mid-July days freaking out about January, I think we're okay. We got a spot (2 spots, actually!) for Harry at the adorable Unitarian church preschool we have wanted him to go to for 2 years but never were high enough on their wait-list to attend. He actually can go there a whole bunch of times a week, which is freaking awesome for him. AND Jack can probably go there next year, too (fall of 2010), which is beyond awesome. Not a huge help in the childcare quest, but we think that might be closer to being worked out, too. Phew.

On a baby #3 note: I am a psycho. One minute, we are touring a daycare center, and I am welling up with tears because I realize that I think Jack is too young for a place like that, and I could never pack up an infant and send him (with a tupperware full of his own clothes, pacis, and blankies) to hang out in a classroom all day with people who aren't me, so I might as well not have any more babies. The next minute, the childcare crisis has been resolved in a very flextime/both parents share the work/ part time SAH kind of way, and I think, "No problem! I can just sling #3 to my body and take him to work again!" One minute, I am at Kohl's buying Harry all manner of licensed character underwear and delighting in the fact that half of my chlidren can toilet themselves**, and thinking how nice it will be to be done with all the baby stuff. The next minute, still at Kohl's, I am loading my cart with Carter's one-piece snap-crotch outfits for Jack because he is still a baby damnit, and I love babies and their sweet little baby clothes and this cannot be the last time I buy somebody clothing measured in months.

** This self toileting thing? Not the dream I thought it would be. Harry literally woke up dry 2 days ago, ripped his night time Pull-Up from his chubby little body, and asked for Spiderman big boy pants. Then he demanded his privacy, sprayed the bathroom with urine, and asked to be helped onto his Diego potty seat to complete his business. And that was it. Bam! Toilet trained. When I picked him up at school, he said "I need to go peepee, but I can do it myself," and he ran into the men's room, peed (I'm not sure where exactly-- walls, floor, toilet base, urinal?) flushed the toilet, hauled a stool to the sink, and came out cheerfully drying his hands. I was totally speechless. We started to walk out of the building, and I noticed that his pants were still pulled down a little bit, and his penis was visible poking out under his shirt tail. Hahahahahaha.

But really, I am still wiping his butt, and there is pee EVERYWHERE all the time (and yes, he aims at Cheerios, the problem is he doesn't want to use a stool to help him reach the toilet-- he just sort of gets really close and lets it rip, but he's really short. Also, he wants his privacy at all times in the bathroom-- I just get to go in when he's done and mop things up).

I am feeling very smug and vindicated about the whole thing though. He's been wearing PullUps for at least 6 months and peeing and occasionally pooping with limited success and lots of prodding. We took it slow and followed his lead and let him decide on his own timeline, and then suddenly, he woke up potty trained. Score one for the lazy parents!
I love how much this kid loves cheesecake

Good thing he likes it rough.

Jack, that is. He loves to be pummeled by Harry, is just grateful for the attention.


Ben took Harry to work this morning, and I swear to you, Jack has been lost without him, even though he has free reign over all the toys and can drink his milk without fear of reparations The first thing he did was put on Harry's Spiderman mask and laugh and laugh. Then he pulled the little arm chair that says Harry in front of the TV and plopped down to poop and watch Elmo (judge not! we didn't used to let J watch TV, but then we realized that Harry, who could sing the Elmo's world theme song when he was around Jack's age, had a lot more words. Maybe he got them from the TV? so, yeah. it's educational).

Speaking of preschool on TV, Noggin might be our only babysitter option for the spring if Jamie moves away after she graduates. So, we're freaking the freak out to put it mildly. The problem is that all the "good" places have been full since March. There are a few oddly timed part time preschool options for H (who is already enrolled in preschool, but there have been some really awful staffing changes, and we're not sure if we're staying there) and ONE fulltime spot for J. We're checking that out today. Not only is it twice our mortgage (!), it's 40 hours a week, which we do not want or need. And the place closes a half hour before my class is done, meaning Ben would actually have to work LESS hours even though we'd have MORE childcare. Clearly not ideal. There are a couple of places we could enroll Harry, hoping that his enrollment now would be enough to secure a part time place for Jack in the spring, but that's touchy, too, because our schedule for fall is set and perfect-- these new places for Harry would cause lots of stress August-December and maybe not help us at all in the spring. So, blah. Any suggestions besides praying Jamie stays with us through the end of the school year? (and I cannot quit my job-- the health insurance is a dream).

What else happened to me lately? Oh, I got a flat tire and spent hours at the dealership yesterday with Jack, who only wanted to run up and down the halls pounding on walls and screaming, despite the toy room filled with toys, snacks, womb chairs, and TV, only to learn that the tire could not be repaired, and I get to come back today (with both kids) to get a new one. Also, I totally love the new Highlander.

Mostly, though, I have been cleaning up after these guys. Which? Full time job.




These pictures do not do justice to the AMOUNT of mac n cheese and veggies all over the place, or the amount of baking pans, cutting boards, and tupperware strewn about the downstairs. Harry told me that veggies in mac n cheese made it "ruined" and that he and Jack like it "plain." Except he said "wuined" and "pwain," which took the sting out of the criticism.

Look how doughy they are


We have been cooped up inside all week because of yucky weather. I've pulled out all the big guns: tunnel, Caillou, baking crap I can't eat, making smoothies in the blender. Today, I have fingerpaints and butcher paper for after the car dealer. Fun times.

And I'll probably have to get out the tunnel again. For Ben.

Untitled from sarah on Vimeo.

Baby Number 3

No, no, no-- I am sooooo not pregnant. That was one of our New Year's resolutions--no making or having babies in 2009. Also, I just got a fabulous job, and I really think if I had ANOTHER kid, my coworkers would be all, "WTF ever, Octomom." And we are seriously out of room in this house. Not to mention, I am on a diet, and I have lost 9 pounds!

But other than that, we might actually maybe someday want to have baby number 3. This is a shocking development in or lives because Ben has been adamantly no-baby for a long time, and when Jack was zitty, colicky, mess, I thought he was probably going to be baby number last. And he still might be. Lest we forget this ridiculousness. But, he might be the neglected middle child someday instead of the adored baby.

The thing is, Jack is an absolute delight. 23 pounds of solid toddling, drooling, smiling, kissing delight with the fattest little foot slabs you've ever seen (so fat that his Keens were 2 sizes too small, something we discovered when they kept pooping off his feet, and we had to make an emergency Des Moines mall stop for some flipper-like Nikes). It's hard to imagine that this will be our last encounter with a toddler, you now? Also, Ben, Harry, and Jack all like rides, and I don't. We need another person for Disney World ride purposes (4 to a car and all), and I can stand there holding everybody's crap and taking pictures.

These are not good reasons for or against, huh?

But babies are so cute!

When they drink beer!


When Harry was Jack's age-ish, we conceived Jack because the bay fever! It was eating me up. I NEEDED more baby. This time, I'd LIKE more baby, but I am resisting. It makes me wonder, is this a biological imperative to reproduce or just hegemonic notions of family, motherhood, and the American dream intruding on my consciousness? Intruding is the wrong word. Hegemonic notions ARE my consciousness, right? I mean, that's what makes hegemony so, uh, hegemonic. To separate the biological and the social is impossible because we must speak of the biological, and language robs the body of its, um, I don't know, objectivity? (Whatev. Read Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex-- he explains it better than I do).

All I know is this: I went to the car dealership to get a new tire today and ended up checking out vehicles that can fit 3 car seats.

Have you ever gone to visit family and not taken any pictures of them?

Because that is what I did over the 4th of July.

We went to Des Moines to see my grandparents and my Aunt Leslie and cousin Molly-- my mom came and my brother Ben, too, and I only took pictures of my kids and anyone who happened to be standing close enough to my kids to get in the picture.

Sorry guys-- no photographic evidence of a really fun weekend!

I planned to post these pictures (of me, Ben and our kids-- no one else because we're jerks) sooner, but Michael Jackson! The memorial! The constant talking about the memorial! All the documentaries that are always on MSNBC! I could not look away.

One cool thing I learned from the MJ memorial (please don't roll your eyes at me if this sounds both selfish and naive)-- I have got to stop passing time from one milestone to the next and just realize that this? Is it. My whole life. It's loooong afternoons and rushed mornings and sleepy bedtimes and potty accidents and diaper rash and date nights and loving my first cup of coffee of the day and finally reading some Jodi Picoult novels. I waited and wished and hoped for my dissertation to be done, and my life has not been magically transformed by the experience the way I thought it might be. Same life, less research. I imagine this will be true for other things I've been waiting for, and if I'm not careful, these days will be over, and I'll be older and still have the same life and possibly some regrets.

(so funny/ironic/stupid that I have been typing this sitting at the breakfast table with my back to Harry and Jack who are playing with action figures on the living room rug. Can't enjoy my life when I'm being all meta, you know?)

Jack likes to be held upside down. We get weird looks in pubic, but it changes his little attitude

Luckily, he usually has a pretty good attitude-- unless, you know, I have somewhere to go or something to do

Harry called this ball a bubble, and he and Leslie washed it in the bathtub, which he thought was hilarious. He spent the whole afternoon at my aunt's house all by himself, and he had so much fun playing with Molly's old toys and eating watermelon. She asked if he would want to come over and play, and I had him and his car seat on her driveway in like 42 seconds. In the movie version, she would still be hanging up the phone when the tires would screech outside, signaling his arrival. Molly, Leslie, her partner Jerry, and his son Nathan took Harry to see Ice Age 3, which he has been wanting to see ever since McDonalds started giving Ice Age toys in their Happy Meals and this MOTY started swinging by the golden arches after soccer practice (oh my lord, could I BE more of a stereotype-- I actually told Ben that I'd like to trade my Camry for a Sienna, and the other day, I tied a white cardigan around my shoulders). Harry is usually a fantastic movie-goer, but he fell asleep as soon as he saw a preview for Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. After the movie, he still had most of his ginormous slushie and bag of of popcorn. When Ben asked him what his favorite part was, Harry looked confused and said "There was no movie, Dada."

We had so much fun playing outside-- Ben and I played some ultra competitive badminton, and we played with a bunch of cool toys.

Then the Bens took Harry and Jack back to the hotel to swim and go to bed, and I stayed at Bomma and Jacks for some brats and wine-- and look! A picture of the fam!!

Eff-- yesterday's post was a big fat FAIL, huh?

Okay then.

Here we are at an amusement park where we spent 5 hours because we were having so much sweaty, gravely fun.

We were so stupid, by the way (shock!) because we thought the kiddie rides said 54 inches and up, but OF COURSE they said 54 inches and shorter. So we took Harry on all the scary grown up rides (well, Ben did-- I am a ride wimp), and he LOVED them-- even the really roigh ones like the hot air balloon tippy swings and the octopus-like casino ride. When we realized our error and put him on the kiddie rides, he was really, really bored by them-- far too sophisticated for fire trucks on a track, that's for sure. He did like this, the kiddie version of those scary rides that usually kill people when their hydraulics fail and everyone plunges to the ground in a wave of soon-to-be-severed legs and blood-curdling screams.




We though this place would be such a fun summer job for high schoolers and college kids (let's play carnie! now with less bearded lady!) but then we looked around and realized it was all retirees. Our economy sucks.)

This place was nasty but really funny in that am-I-in-the-hopsital-- no?-- then-why-am-I-eating-effing-jello- and- mashed-potatoes-sort-of-way.


Ben being strong man. And it's not that the 12 year old girl who went after him hit the bell harder, it's that there are different standards for women and girls, so that's why the "winner! winner! winner!" lights lashed for her and not Ben.

That sounds snarky, but really. It's true.

Instead of buying the kids toys, we decided to play all those silly fair games and WIN them some. Because we suck at math.

The teacups scared the pee out of Jack, but he was a good sport.

Jack LOVED sitting on this ride. And then he tried to climb out, and the ride was OVAH. Harry was bored. Hes so cool.

Eff word Friday: What kind of feminist are you?

I ask because I'm still not sure myself.

When I was an earnest doctoral student (not even a candidate yet-- just a course-work slogging wannabe who wore too much make up for the women's studies folks to like me), I really liked the wave metaphor for eras of feminist activism in the United States. I fancied myself a 2nd-waver living in the midst of the 3rd wave, a kind of throwback who embraced grrl culture and the "liberating choice" to dress kind of slutty and spend all my expendable income on grooming products but who still wanted to spell woman with a "y" and kick men out of women's studies classes and tell people who wanted to rename those classes "gender studies" to shove it. I kept my push-up bra on but torched the Beauty Myth, you know?

Back when I saw everything through an unquestioned, unmentioned lens of white middle-class, childless privilege (but before I started writing just awful sentences in my scholarly work about exploring theoretical underpinnings-- blech-- and I am a critic who has only a passing interest in theory, so really, I don't even have any business using the t-word in my work), this is how I saw the tidy waves of feminist activism:

First Wave: Women's suffragists. Rah-rah for the right to vote!
Second Wave: The Feminine Mystique, career moms, abortion rights, the Pill, politicalization of the personal, and sex outside marriage!
Third Wave: Really radical defense of abortion as a natural part of women's reproductive lives, Manifesta, overuse of the consumerist slogan "choice," simultaneous commodification and de-politicalization of the personal, a sustained interest (finally) in transnational activism.

But what about the progressive maternalists who acted out of first wave feminism and in trying to make the country better for women and children, helped to build the paternalist welfare state?

What about essentialism that started in the first wave, and continued into the second with Carol Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow, and washed into the third with Eve Ensler?

What about the unquestioned acceptance of the liberal subject as disembodied, of the ideal worker as childless and masculine, of the notion that women's participation in the public sphere is all that's necessary for equality, that we do not need to remake the public or force it to be concerned with private matters, that women can simply act as men in the public world, and all will be right?

Privileging white women's struggles as all women's struggles? Pitting mom against mom? Vilifying feminism itself?

Because I study reproductive rights, it makes sense that my thoughts about feminism all come down to the problem of "choice." On the one hand, it is a really horrible slogan for a movement-- pro-choice. Really? What the hell does that mean? Choice connotes the kind of marketplace discrimination that assumes we all have a seat at the table, that we all come to this choice with equal access to all available options. And certainly, it obscures important questions of life-- whose life? which life? value of a life?-- ceding the power to define life and answer all moral charges to the other side of the debate.

Beyond questions of abortion rights, however, I think the choice slogan hurts human rights in this country. Childcare, for example, is so much more than a choice. To say that when you have a baby, you either *choose* to stay home or *choose* to work outside the home boils so many lives down to an either-or fallacy and obscures the decisions real people make using their available resources-- and of course, we all reason from different places, with different values, and with access to very different material and spiritual conditions. A glib word like "choice" that assumes so much agency and glosses over so much inequality makes us have cultural conversations about the wrong things. About mommy wars instead of federal dollars for daycare, for example.

I still don't know how to label my kind of feminism. The day Harry was born, it all sort of fell apart for me, all the neat boxes, the carefully delineated waves, the sureness that I'd WOHM without regret, that I knew exactly how to handle an unplanned pregnancy.

Please tell me because I really want to know: what is feminism for you? what is the most important feminist issue facing our generation? where do you see the movement (if we can still call it a movement) going from here?

Most importantly, how has your view of feminism changed since you had kids?

Because for me, these guys (pictured dancing to EELS' Prizefighter) changed everything

Weigh-In Wednesday! Woo-hoo!

Since I started my totally awesome weight loss adventure three weeks ago, I have lost 8 pounds, and I would be more excited about it if I hadn't lost 5 the first week, 1.5 the second week, and 1.5 the third week. I just wanted to pull a bigger number these past 2 weeks (to borrow a turn of phrase from the Biggest Loser).

BUT, I am 2 pounds away from my pre-Jack weight, which is cause for celebration. Only 14-and-a-half months post partum, which means my celebration will be limited to sugar-free fudgesicles because damn! It took me a long time to shed these pounds, and I am not going to screw it up. This week.

In wardrobe casualty news, the shorts I wore to Harry's birthday party are way too big. Can't wait to buy smaller ones, except that the smaller one are too small. Gaucho pants, where are you when I need you?

I am still finding it really hard to resist pigging out while I clean up dinner. Those half-eaten Milano cookies coated with catsup are just too tempting. Anybody have any tips for stopping the post-dinner scavenge? So far the 40-calorie fudgesicle is my best weapon, but it's hard to eat while wiping trays and sponging floors. Maybe I should start smoking again.
Harry and Jack were like totally excited about my shrinking thighs, so they engaged in a celebratory wrestling match:

Okay, so look at this:

and then remember this from last year:

Check out the hair pulling-- yikes

He's young, but he's scrappy

Then Jack bit Harry, and I had to put down the camera and, you know, parent. Such a drag.