Imagining 6000 people virtually naked

So I moderated a panel today on our ebook project in an online web conference for Library Journal.  I did this from my bedroom with our baby in the living room, and J on standby in case she freaked out and needed to be taken for a walk.  My new home office isn't heated yet, and it's chilly outside, so I was in the bedroom.  The computer was on the dresser, which is a good standing height for me.  I put on real clothes, and even some make up...being dressed in real clothes made me feel a little bit more professional than being in my pj's would have. Over 6000 people had registered, which made me really nervous, so I pretended that they really inflated the numbers and there were only 80 people listening to me, max.  From the twitter feed, I think I may have underestimated it a teeny bit, but it got me through the 40 minute time slot, and that's what was necessary.

My mommy-brain only reared its ugly head once at the very beginning, which probably had more to do with me being nervous than actual mommy-braindom, but it's easy and useful to blame everything on either hormones or being tired.

Yesterday was Pregnancy Loss Remembrance Day, and we went to the lake with Hannah and put some of Baby T's ashes near "his" bench (where I used to sit when I was preggo with him).  We lost him on October 12, 2010, so every year we have that anniversary followed immediately by the remembrance day and all the walks and ceremonies that people have around this time of year.  It's like a week or so that is heavily devoted to Baby T, and I like that.  Sometimes I feel like the Mustard Seed Baby misses out because we don't remember her as much (I think it was a her).  But when I say Baby T I kind of lump them both together, and we had TMSB for such a short time, I'm sure she understands.

One thing I've been happily surprised by is how much time I still have to read books.  I had expected all book-reading to go out the window when I had a baby.  But she spends so much time sleeping now, even when she's sleeping in my arms I can read on my kindle easily enough.  I don't get deep reading periods of, say, an hour or two uninterrupted - the same way I don't get deep periods of uninterrupted sleep - but it's enough to keep me happy.  I'm almost done with the JK Rowling mystery, The Cuckoo's Calling.  I will admit to reading it just because it's JK Rowling.  I've never been a big mystery reader.  But I think after this I'm going to have to try some good mystery writers now because I'm totally addicted.  It's all starting to become clear now, and I'm on pins and needles waiting to see who the killer is.  I sure hope Hannah is quiet tonight because I need some good reading time.

7 more working days until I start back full time.  I'm exhausted, but I'm going to enjoy using my brain a little bit more each day.  

I'm on a roll with taking Hannah to the lake, too.  I still get hella scared each time, but I can't live my life in fear of her freakouts.  The more I do it, the easier it will become.  On Friday I'm taking her to a hospital 45 minutes away for a breastfeeding clinic.  I'm petrified at the thought of her wailing in the car for the entire time, but then I remember that the 80's station is a great resource for dealing with screaming babies.  She can scream, I can sing along to Duran Duran, and eventually she'll stop, and so will I, and all will be well again.

Mundane and Getting-Old Angst

I wish I had something to write about besides the regularity with which my Hannah has a wailing fit; mostly because that would mean I had other stuff going on in my life, other than being a feeding and diaper-changing machine.  Alas, the highlight of my days right now are Tummy Time, and playing with the Fisher Price Piano Gym (which is really super fun - don't knock it till you've tried it).  

That's going to be changing here in a few weeks when I go back to work full time, starting off with going to Internet Librarian and then the following week, the California Library Association conferences.  I'm speaking at both, which means that I need to start digging through my closet for a Professional Outfit.  I've been wearing yoga pants and maternity jeans almost exclusively for the past 7-8 months.  

I did have fun Me Time on Saturday when I went to the mall by myself and bought new non-elasticated jeans.  

Is this seriously what my life is?  Getting excited by going to the mall by myself?  

The other thing that has me really excited is the new Bridget Jones book that came out today.  It appeared on my kindle when I turned it on this morning; and when I started reading it, I was suddenly 24 again, riding the Northern Line to work, exhausted (and possibly hung over).  For about three weeks I picked up smoking, and being a nonsmoker I didn't know what brand to get, so I bought Silk Cut because that's the kind Bridget smoked.  Like Bridget I obsessively logged units of alcohol logged, and carbohydrates consumed.  

Like Bridget I was a klutz (I regularly came dangerously close to getting caught in escalators) and would make overly-dramatic gestures (I was nursing a broken heart, and one of my favorite things was to walk along Old Compton Street in Soho in the rain, hugging my chest, feeling the rain on my face and then standing outside Patisserie Valerie's where I had once eaten quiche with the boy who caused the aforementioned broken heart, looking in through the wet glass at all the happy people eating cake, and thinking that I really would be perfect in a Dido video).

So it's weird reading an older Bridget, who is still a lovable klutzy narcissist, and wondering where the past 13 years have gone.  I feel old.  I blame hormones (I blame most things on hormones these days).  But I don't like it.  I'm looking forward to getting back out into the world, having a reason to wear makeup and nice clothes, and exercising with regularity again.

But to end on a happy note; Babygirl and I went to the lake yesterday, just the two of us, and for the first time it didn't end in wailing.  She woke up midway through our walk, and quietly rode and made faces at me.  A definite improvement over the last time I tried, a few weeks ago, when halfway through our walk she decided she needed to be held or else she'd scream bloody murder; so I wound up pushing the empty stroller with one hand and carrying her with the other the rest of the way.  Maybe it's more confidence, or maybe it's me not caring as much as I did at first, but I'm becoming ok with her screaming.  I don't like it, and I always try to soothe her, and hold her, but sometimes it seems like she just needs to scream, and really, there are times when I do too, and I didn't just go through the traumatic experience that she did.  Even a week or so ago, I was held hostage at home because I was afraid that I'd set off her wailing when we went out.  But I'm becoming more ok with it now.  And I think that as I become ok with it, and become more confident taking her places, she'll be ok with it too, and maybe not wail so much. 

Here's hoping.  Because as much as I'm a homebody, I'm really not hip with spending this much time at home.

3am feeds just got a lot cooler

Two pieces of awesome happened to make nighttime feeds a lot cooler (which isn't actually saying as much as I'd like, considering nighttime feeds aren't very cool to begin with).  So here's where I'm at with feeding:

Hannah won't breastfeed.

My girl likes to eat (she's like her mom that way).  And she likes to eat a lot very quickly.  You could say she scarfs down her milk.  In the NICU when she wasn't even 48 hours old, they were already changing her to the slow-flow bottles because she ate so damn fast and kept spitting up.  Plus, speaking of the NICU, she got hooked on bottles and pacifiers there.  So then, when I tried to feed her, she was all, "hey, this is more work, and it's slower, and I'm not a fan of more work and slower when I can get more faster for less work."  She's clever and into efficiency like that.

So I'm pumping.  8 weeks tomorrow of pumping 7 times a day for 15-20 minutes at a shot so I can give my girl my milk and not have to give her formula.  And it's not because I'm preachy about breastmilk.  I'm not a Boob Nazi like some of the lactation ladies at the hospital.  No, I'm just cheap.  Have you seen the price of formula lately?  They keep that shit locked up in stores because it gets stolen so much.  At my breastfeeding class they said that the average formula fed baby costs their parents $3000 the first year.  We've got a wedding in Sweden to go to next year - ain't no way I'm spending $3000 on food when my boobs make it for free.  Plus, it apparently burns 20 calories an ounce.  30 ounces a day = 600 calories = pass the cheesecake.

But I digress.

The point is, nighttime feedings are a bit tricky because when babygirl cries (her sweet little "ah-waeh! ah-waeh!") I gotsta feed her with a bottle first (I always keep an extra one out - I've read all kinds of stats about how long you can keep breastmilk out, ranging from 4-10 hours.  I average somewhere in the 5-6 hour range personally).  So babygirl eats.  Then babygirl burps.  

That's when Mama should be going back to bed.  But no.  Mama hooks her boobs up to a machine looking like it could have come from an episode of the Jestons, and sits in the dark for 15 minutes feeling like a cow getting milked (moooo).  Then Mama goes out to the kitchen to wash her pumping crap (though I recently got smart and now I have three sets of pumping crap so I don't have to wash overnight - I just store it all in a ziplock in the fridge), and then makes a fresh bottle to have on hand in another two hours when babygirl wakes up hungry.

The whole process takes about 45 minutes.

We live in a small house, and our bedroom doesn't have a lot of extra space, so up until now we've been sitting on the bed when we feed her, and when I pump,  This is horribly uncomfortable, forces us to slouch, and is generally an inelegant solution.

First bit of awesome: an amazingly comfortable upholstered rocking chair with stool we bought at an antique place in town over the weekend.  It's in the room that will become the nursery, so when babygirl cries, we just take her in there, sit down in back-and-arm-supported comfort, and rock away.

During my 15-20 minutes of pumping I can do whatever thanks to the hands free pumping bra I bought when I realized that this could very well be my life for the next few months (we still try breastfeeding regularly - my lactation consultant - yeah, I have one of those - thinks that as she gets older and her muscles get stronger, we might have success).  So I've been reading a lot.  15 minutes at a shot, 7 times a day is a lot of reading.

I have two apps on my ipad that are getting a ton of time right now.  The first is NextIssue, which is kind of like Spotify for magazines.  I have about 20 magazines in regular circulation there.  Some are intelligent ones like the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. But there's also Us Weekly with some Oprah, Real Simple, and Rachel Ray thrown in for good measure.

The other one is also like Spotify, but for ebooks.  Oyster just launched, and is only in an iphone app right now (which I use on my ipad) and they don't have a ton of publishers yet, but they seem to be a good effort in how to solve the problem of granting people unlimited reading at a price point they can stomach ($9.99/month).  Yeah, the library is free, but as we all know (me especially from our ebook project at work) the hold times on the popular titles are ginormous, and if this works, they will have a much bigger selection.  Right now the biggest publisher they have is HarperCollins (the only one of the Big 5 I believe they have), and they have a bunch of midsize ones like Houghton Mifflin, Workman, etc.  So they have a bunch of great titles.

The reader is pretty crap - instead of using one that's freely available (ie Bluefire) they went with building a dedicated one.  You scroll up to turn the page.  That's just weird.  They also don't have a ton of flexibility with changing the fonts and colors.  For example, there's a font I really like, but the nighttime setting has its own font, so I can't use the font I like with the nighttime setting, which seems stupid.  Let me pick the font, and the background.  The searching and browsing isn't great, but it's designed to be an app to use on your phone, so I can see why they are trying to keep it simple.  You can search on their website and add titles to your reading list online, so that makes it easier, I guess.

Anyway, on an average night I'm reading on my Oyster app at least twice, and I can definitely see it being worth the money for power readers.  It's available only through invitation right now, but if you sign up requesting one, it doesn't take long for it to arrive.

So between Oyster and the rocking chair, 3am is looking a lot less intimidating these days.  It's funny, the things that have become important to me.

The Birth of Hannah Zen

So.  I gave birth.  To a living baby.  6 weeks ago.  Without an epidural.  But with forceps.  After 6 hours of hard purple pushing and 25 hours of labor.  Yeah, I'm tough like that.

Anyway, here's Hannah Zen, looking all cute and sweet and stuff.

Her birth wasn't really what was in my birth plan, but it was still completely perfect.  To start with, I was induced when she failed a non-stress-test at my 38 week checkup.  At the NST they look for a baseline heartrate, and then accelerations.  She showed a baseline and decelerations.  They did a biophysical ultrasound, which she also failed - lack of limb extensions.  So they sent me to L&D for prolonged monitoring, and my doctor, who just happened to be the head guy in L&D that week, mentioned the I-Word.  This had me really freaked out because I had always heard that induced labors were worse than natural ones; it's forcing your body to do something that it isn't ready to do.  More epidurals and C-sections supposedly come out of induced labors.  

Also, I was alone during this time.  J always left my NST's to go to Trader Joe's because they were boring for him to just sit there, and this way he could get groceries.  When I first realized that the test was going to go long, I texted him to tell him that he should take the groceries home so the frozen stuff didn't melt, and then come back for me.  At first the ultrasound nurse said that they'd probably send me down to the cafeteria to eat something, and then have me redo the test.  She even offered me peanut butter crackers, which I wanted because I was really hungry, but I stupidly went to the bathroom first.  My OB showed up to look at the test while she was handing me the pack of crackers, and when he mentioned that I might need to be induced, she yanked those crackers back so fast.  It broke my heart a little because I knew I wasn't going to be able to eat for a long time if I was induced, and dang, I was really hungry and those crackers looked really good.

So anyway, J takes the groceries home, I go to L&D, and proceed to get checked in.  At some point the doctor came in and said I probably was going to need to be induced..  I text J and start sending him my requests of things I need - laptop and charger, birth ball (deflated - I'd been bouncing on it the entire previous weekend trying to get labor to start naturally), my essential oils, etc etc etc.  He was at home running around like a mad man, completely freaked out thinking they were going to start it without him there and he was going to miss everything.

  

Eventually he comes back to the hospital, carrying my labor bag.  The OB confirms that they are going to induce because something had fundamentally changed with Hannah's heartrate, and while it wasn't an emergency yet, he didn't want it to turn into one.  I call work, J calls his parents, and we're all set to go.  Then we wait for the orders to come in to start the pitocin.  And we wait some more.  And a little longer.  

Eventually the pitocin drip starts at 3:15.  I'm having a great time.  Seriously.  I'd been studying self-hypnosis through hypnobabies, and I'm peaceful and chilled out, and I don't even think we need to call our doula.  We're doing fine on our own.  I'm crampy, but hey, it's labor, who isn't, right?  I get a lovely dinner of 3 kinds of juice and broth and jello, and life is pretty darn good.  Even into the night; I'm tired, my back hurts, but hey, it's labor, right?  J really wanted to get the doula in, if for no other reason than to support him, and so she comes around 1:30.  His mom is there, and we're watching funny cat videos on youtube.  I call my best friend in London, Sandor, who is on holiday in Sweden, and we chat for a while.  I'm thinking that this is cake.  

And then they broke my water.

All of a sudden the world started spinning.  My pelvis was being yanked out of my big toe.  There was a wrecking ball trying to come out of my ass.  This was serious. fucking. pain.

I screamed.  I grunted.  I begged for it to stop.  I said I couldn't do it anymore.  I squeezed J's hand so hard I nearly broke his fingers.  When my doula kept forcing me to drink water I thought she was crazy because how the hell was I supposed to have the energy to drink in between these ridiculous contractions?

I begged for an epidural.  Doula and J tried to talk me out of it.  I said I really wanted it.  My eyes were closed and I screamed, "I don't hear anyone doing anything."  So J went and ordered the epidural.  I was 4th in line.  By the time the Traveling Anesthesiologists with their rolling cart of numbing goodness arrived, I was fully dilated and it was too late.

Oh, a burst of energy!  It's time to push!  I'm dilated!  Yippeeee!  It's going to happen soon!

At some point I don't remember they brought in a cart with all the baby tools on it, and sat it in front of my bed.  It was supposed to give me strength or something.  They turned on the lamp on the table where the baby would be weighed, and started heating up blankets.

Sadly, they had plenty of time.  I pushed hard for like 6 hours.  Purple pushing, counting to 10, take a breath, do it again, in sets of 3 during each contraction.  I was apparently really tough.  Nurses kept saying what an awesome job I was doing, and what a trooper I was, and how amazing it was that I was pushing for so long. I don't remember any of it.  Apparently midway through my IV stopped working and they had to set up a new one, and my veins were so bad it took three nurses multiple tries till they found a good spot.  I had bandaids down my entire arm, and J said it was the most painful thing to watch them doing it during my 30 second rest breaks from each contraction.  I just barely remember someone poking me.  They wanted me to move from my side to my knees, leaning on the back of the bed, and I can't even begin to explain the herculean effort it took to get rolled over and up on my knees because of the pain.  It was really awful.

I've been told that if my OB hadn't been the doctor in charge, they would have called an emergency C-section from all my pushing.  But my doctor knew how much I wanted to be as natural as possible, and how important that was, and he let me push as long as I could.  During the peak of it I was contracting every 2 minutes and each one lasted 90 seconds.  So I had about 30 seconds off.  That went on for hours.  And hours.  And hours.

They kept telling me they could see the head.  If you can see the head, why can't someone just reach up and pull her out, I wondered aloud.  I was really serious.  How hard could that be?

Eventually my OB finished up another delivery and came in to check on me, and saw that I really was reaching the end of my rope.  He asked the Traveling Anesthesiologists with their rolling cart of goodness to come back in and give me something called a saddle block, which basically numbs all your parts that would sit in a saddle for 2 hours.  It's designed to give you a break to rest before you gear back up to push again.  It was only supposed to take 10 minutes to administer it, but because of all the pain I was in I couldn't sit still, and it wound up taking closer to 45 minutes (my doula stayed with me, and apparently J was having a fit sitting outside freaking out thinking that something horrible had happened because it was taking so long).  But when it took, it was awesome.  Life was good again.  The sun was out.  I felt human again.

The nurses told me to rest after my ordeal of the past 8 hours.  But the doctor ixnayed that idea.  He wanted me to push more.  He was confident that we had 2 hours to work with, and he thought for sure that since I was relaxed and out of pain, I'd be able to push her out.  So he repositioned her and back to pushing I went, this time in sets of 4.  We did that for an hour, and still no baby.  She was just well and truly stuck in there.

So after 25 hours, it all ended quickly with forceps.  The room became a flurry of activity; suddenly there were nurses, assisting doctors; I swear some of the cleaning crew stopped by just to watch too.  But after all that, I got my babygirl, a giant 8 pound 11 ounce ball covered in goop,  crying and gasping, placed on my chest.

After being stuck behind my bone for all that time, and being pushed up against it, she was blue and looked like she'd just fought Mike Tyson and lost, and so she was taken to the NICU where they discovered a little infection (which is probably what made me fail the NST).  So she stayed there for a week getting antibiotics, and we brought her home on August 14.  While she went to the NICU I ate dinner.  I was hungrier than I've ever been in my entire life.  I could have eaten an army of horses.  Food was really awesome after that.  J went to the cafeteria and brought me cartons and cartons of lovely hot food, which I relished.

So that's my birth story, which, like I said, for being completely not my birth plan, was still awesome.  I avoided a C-Section that probably would have been ordered if my OB hadn't been the one in L&D that week.  I didn't get an epidural, even with 6 hours of pushing and an induced labor.   I got a healthy girl.  I had interventions, but they were medically necessary, and I am grateful because if I'd been going through that a hundred years ago, it would not have ended so well, that's for sure. I got to test myself and see how tough I really was, and I know now that I am one tough cookie.  If I can do that, I can pretty much do anything, right?

Shakespeare's Richard III - aka The Victors Get to Write The Story

Still working on my Shameful Shakespeare Catch-up (shameful because it's shameful that so much of my life has gone by without me reading any Shakespeare at all - it's been since college, which, sadly, was fifteen years ago) and today I read Richard III.  I've been so offended with Shakespeare recently, I was thinking I might go for A Midsummer Night's Dream, thinking there would be less to be offended with in that, but I'm due for a history play, and I just watched the documentary on how they found Richard III's skeleton in a car park in Leicester, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

I expected Tudor propaganda simply because everyone thinks Richard was such a terrible person, and there wasn't any lengthy biography of him written before Shakespeare wrote his play, so that must be where the impression of him came from.  I don't blame them; certainly Richard was a ruthless man, and they would have wanted to cement the basis of Henry VII's rule as something guided by God, rather than a lucky Welshman who happened to be able to collect a lot of people who didn't like the unpopular king, and was able to kill him on Bosworth Field.

To understand why the Tudors wanted Henry VII to be seen as the start of this Godly dynasty, you have to go back and have some understanding of the Wars of the Roses.  If you really want to get picky about it, you go back to Agincourt, the high point of England's successes in France.  Henry V seemed unstoppable in France, and it seemed as if the Norman Conquest of 1066 might finally be avenged 350 years later.  Had Henry not died when he did, maybe the French would all be speaking English and would have bad teeth nowdays.

But Henry V died, and his son Henry VI was a minor.  He wasn't a strong guy, and he got pulled in lots of directions, depending on who was talking to him at the moment.  He wound up losing most of the gains of his father (by the time of the Tudors, 60 years later, all that remained of the great dream of England taking France was Calais, a little fort directly across the English channel).

So Henry VI marries Margaret of Anjou. She's a willful high strung French girl who really doesn't like England, and doesn't care who knows about it.  So here's this really powerful woman (who may or may not have had her son via adultery) married to this simpering dolt of an idiot husband who has spells of insanity, is losing land left and right, and is more interested in praying than being a husband to her.  She's been Queen Consort since she was 15 years old, she's stuck in a country she hates, and she's rash and takes way too many chances.

Given her husband's incompetence, some people start talking about rebelling.  One of those people is Richard, Duke of York.  He talks openly.  In fact, he has Henry VI declared insane, and he gets himself named the Lord Protector.  He even had an agreement drawn up saying that he would become King after Henry VI died.  But then he himself died before he had any chance of pressing his case.  Interestingly enough, he's the father of Richard III.  So, you know, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.  

Ok, so all of this winds up leading to the Wars of the Roses, whereby the House of Lancaster (Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI, their family) fight the house of York (Richard, Duke of York, and his family).  There weren't really a lot of battles, most notably Tewkesbury and Barnet, but it did consume people for a generation, and England's economy continued to fail while all the nobles were busy killing each other.

So the Tudors come out of this from left field.  Way back when Henry V dies, his widow, Catherine of Valois, marries a squire in her court, Owen Tudor.  This is Henry VII's grandfather and the great Queen Elizabeth I's great great grandfather - a squire at court.  Catherine and Owen had more children together; half-siblings of the house of Lancaster.  Henry VI had them recognized as legitimate as an act of kindness to them, and tried to bring the blended family together.  So the Tudors get their royal lineage on their mother's side, and it's fairly tenuous as well, but they start to rise through the ranks of the nobility, and by the time of Richard III, Henry Tudor was seen as a real threat to the Yorkist, and was hiding in the Netherlands or Brittany or somewhere across the Channel.

Richard III was the brother of Edward IV, who was Richard Duke of York's son (and Richard III's brother).  He wound up winning the title of King by fighting for it, and had the Lord Mayor of London proclaim him King while Henry VI was far away from the city.  The whole thing was really messy.  

Edward dies suddenly in 1483 and all hell breaks loose.  His children are still minors, and his brother, the future Richard III, is supposed to protect them until they reach the age of majority.  Instead, they disappear and Richard becomes King.  Yeah, he probably murdered them.  It was so much more convenient than simply asking them nicely to step aside.  

Richard III becomes King, no one really bats too many eyelashes at the missing Princes (except for their mother, of course), and life seems to go on as normal.  But then in 1485, Henry Tudor, not content to let Richard pull this charade, decides that he's going to be King, and he sails from wherever it was he was hiding (Brittany, France, Luxembourg, somewhere) with an army he raised, and he lands in Wales, gathering support as he moves through the countryside.  A bunch of Richard's allies, fed up with his hubris, and smart enough to see which way the wind is blowing, switch sides.

Henry beats Richard at the Battle of Bosworth Field, and declares himself King.  He marries a Yorkist woman to unite the two rival houses, and he really wants to reign peacefully for a long time.  Unfortunately his first son Arthur dies as a teenager (he was named Arthur after the great legendary King, and it shows how much Henry hoped to start a new golden age) and his younger brother Henry, who'd been studying with monks up until now, suddenly has to be groomed to be King.

And then of course Henry the Younger has lots of marriage problems that go on for decades, and each of his three children take turns with the throne, young Edward a disaster, Mary I an even bigger disaster, and then Elizabeth, who refused to marry because she probably had some pretty deep psychological trust issues given her history.  So she never had an heir, and never named one.  

All in all, when Richard III was written, just after the trouncing of the Spanish Armada, things were looking pretty good for Elizabeth, and the Tudor story.  But everyone also knew that the Tudors were probably going to end with Elizabeth, since she had no children.  So they wanted to showcase just how awesome the Tudors had been, and make a case for their having taken the throne in the first place, so that after Elizabeth, people wouldn't talk shit about the grandchildren of squires being too big for their britches and becoming King illegitimately.  Mostly, they also wanted to avoid another Wars of the Roses, and make everyone remember just how awful some of the monarchs were back then, especially the monarchs who were on the other side of the Tudors.

So given that history, I'm not surprised that in his opening monologue, Richard goes on about how disfigured he is (he wasn't too much, really - his skeleton shows he had scoliosis and had some curvature in his spine, but he was still well enough to wear armor, no small feat, and fight in battle) and how he scares dogs and children.  He proposes to a woman whose husband he had killed.  He does all sorts of nasty things.  I'm pretty sure no one who gets to be King is that publicly ruthless before he's King.  Maybe after, but not before.   

I'm definitely not joining the Richard III society any time soon, and I'm not really a huge Ricardian, but I do see where they're coming from - Richard wasn't any worse than anyone else from the time, and others did the same sorts of things he did.  

Not according to Shakespeare, though.  But that's why the victors get to write the history books.  And the history plays.  

On raising a kick@ss girl

Today I saw an awesome ad for GoldiBlox, a new toy designed to get girls into engineering and building things.  The awesome chick who designed it, Debbie Sterling, is a Stanford engineer herself.  She got discouraged by the low numbers of other women in her engineering programs (something around 11% of engineers are women).  So she spent a year researching why it is that, by middle school, girls aren't into science and math any longer.  Turns out, girls like to read while boys like to build stuff.  Boys are spatial while girls are verbal.  This is why, when J tries to explain something he's building to me, I want him to talk about it, and he wants to draw it.  Also, girls like to know the story behind why something is being built.  Boys just like to build for the heck of it.  This explains why, so often, when J tries to explain mathematical concepts to me, I ask what the point is, and he gets flabbergasted with me, saying there is no point, it's just cool.

So simply making Lincoln Logs pink isn't enough to get girls into wanting to actually build stuff out of them.

Debbie put together a series of books with building tools, with a character called Goldie, an inventor, who loves to build stuff.  As you read along in the books, you get to build the same things that Goldie builds in the stories.  This. Kicks. Ass.

It kicks so much ass that her project was overfunded on Kickstarter in five days last fall.  And GoldiBlox are out and available for parents everywhere to buy now.  They're for children over 3, but I'm still going to order the first set, just to support the movement.

I think about stuff like this because I don't want Hannah to be a Girly Girl.  Well, mostly I want her to be her, but I want her to be really her, and not the her that is influenced by all the pink shit that the stores say she should want.  I want her to be the her who can decide if she loves technology or Lego's, or American Girl Dolls (and maybe love all of the above) without having choices forced on her by marketing people and society.  I want her to feel free to make up her own mind, and if she wants to be an engineer, I want her to feel really free to know that that's an option that's available to her.

I look at 11% of engineers being women, and that worries me.  It worries me because engineers design the products that we all use, and with only 11% o them being women, it means that I'm probably being shoved a bunch of products that marketing people think I want as a woman, rather than things that were actually designed by women.  A big dislike to that.

I want Hannah to have role models in any of her chosen fields.  There are plenty of female role models in teaching or librarianship or any number of caregiving and nurturing roles where women fit in easily.  I want more female role models for her if she wants to be an astronaut, a computer engineer, a theoretical mathematician.

And I'm sick of all the pink crap that fills the aisles these days.  This is a new development.  When I was a kid, I had a kitchen set that was orange and brown (ok, it was the 70's - I think everything was orange and brown).  Yeah, it was a kitchen set, which, you know, has its own gender-role issues.  But it wasn't pink.  Check out the graphic below.  The toys are the same, except for the color.  Freaking pink.  I'm going to do my darndest to make sure Hannah's room is a pink-free zone - I feel like that's my duty to her.  When I was a kid my favorite color was turquoise.  This crap is just wrong.  So go GoldiBlox, and I can't wait to see a future generation of girl engineers kicking ass thanks to these toys!  And if Hannah wants to be one of them, then I will applaud her (while wearing purple).

The Shakespeare Project: Why I'm not inviting Will to dinner

I'm 33 weeks preggo tomorrow, which is rather unbelievable to me.  I never really thought I'd get this far, to be honest.  

Trying to read lots of books on my Amazon wishlist.  After reading Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare a few months ago, I decided it was shameful that I hadn't read any Shakespeare since college.  So I've been catching up, reading a play every week or two.  And here's what's challenging: I really don't like him all that much.  Oh, I can see the beauty in his writing, and the wordplay in the comedies is amazing.  I can appreciate why he's so special.  But Donald Trump is special too; doesn't mean I want to have dinner with him.  

So what I do is rent the BBC productions of the plays (they do the full script - no editing down for time) from Amazon Instant Video - generally a $1.99 rental for a week.  Then I get a kindle edition of the play with good notes.  I watch the film while reading the play on my tablet at the same time.  Then the next day I also pull up a Librivox recording to listen while reading and see what I notice that's different - they do free public domain e-audiobooks, and are tolerable for being free.  It's all done by volunteers, so I shouldn't be judgmental since they're doing something awesome, but some of the parts are really challenging - like a female Benedick or a Lear with a Southern accent.  Anyway, I go through the play again just listening.  

And I've decided something:  I like knowing Shakespeare, but only so that I can make conversation about him and feel like I've joined the world of People who Know Shakespeare.  But I don't actually much like the plays themselves.  Taming of the Shrew made me want to puke.  Merchant of Venice made me want to cry for poor Shylock.  Watching King Lear descend into madness while his daughters plotted was just depressing.  

I wonder how much of this Shakespeare actually believed.  I've read a lot about how he hated the idea of marriage since he was forced into it when he got an older Anne Hathaway preggo when he was still a teenager.  And he went off to London and sort of abandoned her.  So I don't think he really appreciated the idea of marriage much.

And he certainly seems to pander to the antisemitism of the time.  Benedick is debating whether or not he should or shouldn't love Beatrice, talking about her charms, and the most brilliant conclusion he can come to is, "If I do not love her, I am a Jew."  Really?  And then there's Shylock.  The man loses everything, is forced to convert to Christianity, his daughter is applauded for running away and taking so much of his money and jewelry, and at the end it's the Christians who are supposed to look magnanimous and forgiving.  For the time period, I suppose they were.  But for someone as forward thinking as Shakespeare was supposed to be, I'd expect better.  I've heard some people say that he was holding a mirror up and making a commentary, but I don't really buy that.  If so, then Jessica would have had some kind of comeuppance.  Somebody would have felt guilty about something.  But nope, they just drag him off to be baptized.  

This hypocrisy bugs the crap out of me, especially because Shakespeare was supposedly a Catholic who had to cover up his religious leanings.  Surely he could have some more empathy for others of a different religion.  But nope, Shylock gets baptized and loses his livelihood and daughter anyway. 

I'm going to keep reading Shakespeare simply because of the language and the words, but I'm going to quit thinking too much about the plot.  Different era, different kind of man, and I don't have to like him to appreciate him.  It sure would be nice if I could, though.