What are you getting your kids for whatever absurdly commercialized "Religious" holiday you are celebrating this year?

Ho Ho Ho

Yay!! My long awaited Scrooge post!  You knew it was coming, didn't the five of you?

Ahh, this year I felt my first REAL bitter taste of the commercialized nonsense of the Holidays.  Oh. Man.  With a three year old who is preoccupied with getting "things", as in, it's hard, I mean, really hard, to go to places like Target without a Level 6 meltdown over some plastic nonsense that he wants and that I won't buy.  I realize this is a huge parental failing on my part, combined with the natural inclinations of a three year old, so I'm not trying to suggest I have no idea why this happens.

Anyway... Christmas.  Since November 1st, my son has been proclaiming a deep and profound desire for a "Storm Trooper" and "Scary Guy".  (Read: Captain Rex and General Grievous from Star Wars).  Yeah yeah kid, I get it, you want this.  Well, literally, for almost two months, he would chirp about these two annoyingly plastic and electronic noisemaking, likely will break within four minutes pieces of crap.

But I bought them.

Yes.  "Scary Guy" entered our family home today.  I'm such an awesome mom.  I mean, I figure that if the two things he asks for of all the things he could possibly want, that he's been harping about for the last six weeks were not delivered... then there might be hell to pay.

Let's take a trip down memory lane and let me share with you the mother I had planned on being prior to the birth of the fetus that would become my current three year old son.  We would have:

-Lots and lots of books.  (yes, we have a virtual Barnes and Noble, so I'm kind of okay with our books)
-No plastic.  ( HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH!!! - um, yeah, that died as soon as little baby Ronan was          
SO over the Haba rattles)
-No Happy Meal toys (see above).
-A wonderful Waldorf inspired abode.

Okay, that didn't work out as planned.  Actually, his first birthday was when the shit really entered our lives.  Up until then, he was pretty content with the little basket of toys he had that we kept in his room of our tiny shoebox condo.  His first birthday party, while a modest affair (as I tend to like birthday parties to be) brought in our first taste of the blinky, battery powered, action packed, brightly colored, toys that I vowed we'd never buy, or own.

Whatever.  Okay.  Fine.

Now, we live in a pretty huge house with a play room that is FILLED TO THE GILLS with plastic crap manufactured in ever major Asian country, and every time I see "made in China" written on the back of some action figure's ass, I wonder to myself, "what must the person who put this together think of us and our tastes in toys?"  Then I think about Japan and the weird shit they like and I feel a lot better about it.  (Hello Kitty and her friends notwithstanding)  But I digress.  (as usual)

This Christmas, my husband and I decided that we were going to tone it down and keep it natural - excluding "Storm Trooper" and "Scary Guy" of course.  We wanted to keep the massive paper ripping frenzy and overloaded get get get to a minimum.  I will have to say, I'm pretty sure I've failed miserably. Oh yes, we did get the uber-pricey heirloom quality Waldorf inspired Angels and Elves use-your-own-imagination-dollhouse and a few rooms of unpainted furniture and an "ethnically ambiguous" family of four (hey, we're liberals yo!).  This was my big exciting idea for getting the children something beautiful and sturdy that would inspire their imaginations.  Yay yay yay!  I'm so crunchy!

Then, I freaking wander into Toys R' Us, and walk out with about half a dozen other plasticy pieces of crap that a) my children don't need and b) they will likely forget about in four seconds after ripping off the carefully applied paper.

I am a hypocrite.  I accept this.

So.  I've bared my soul.  Once again I am disappointed in my parenting, falling prey to the siren song of the consumerism driven culture in which I live.  I bought my kids a lot of useless crap (and a few beautiful things, which I guarantee WILL be the things that they enjoy a lot longer than batter operated plastic pieces of junk) for Christmas and, to be quite honest, I will enjoy watching them open them and be thrilled - even for those few fleeting days or so- with their gets.

My idealistic mind hopes that I will stick to my New Year's resolution and clean out the play room, donate what isn't being played with, streamline the toy selection to things that are useful, creative, and beautiful (and of course, keeping the things that they love, regardless of how I feel about them - I'm not a total jerk) and pay better attention to what enters the house in the future.

If you want to read the article that inspired this guilt ridden tirade, check it HERE.

What are your rights?

So, let's say you are pregs.  You're going to have a baby.  YOU are going to have a baby.  A baby who will become YOUR child that YOU are going to take care of, feed, clothe, respect, love, cherish, coo over, mistily gaze upon from time to time in story circle at the library because, "omigosh, I can't believe that is my precious peanut clapping and laughing with the other kids.  Mine. Thankyousomuchforgivingmethisgift!" - uh, I digress...  Where was I?  Okay, yeah, you're going to get to the point where said babums is going to exit the womb.  Now.  Is the HOW your child exits your choice?  Or not.  Well, I recently stumbled upon, then tweeted the shit out of, this nugget o' outrage, regarding a woman who gave birth to her daughter at home (homebirth!! OMG!), then had her removed from her custody and placed into foster care (and eventually her mother's care) because she refused to have the recommended c-section due to her daughter's breech presentation.  (just like me!!! except I rolled over and signed the consent forms in my "I can't believe this is what is happening ativan-infused haze").  So, this family has their daughter taken away from them when they took her into the emergency room a few hours after birth because she seemed particularly fussy.  Apparently during the birth, her shoulder's became stuck for a bit causing a mild shoulder distocia and some nerve damage that now seems to have completely healed according to medical tests.  So.  Okay, I'm not going to go into specifics about breech birth, is it safe to do at home, or vaginally, or not, whatever.  I know of some people who have successfully and without issue homebirthed, and hospital birthed breech babies, as well as several who have, like me!, had a scheduled cesarean for breech.  I also have a friend of a family member who recently lost her baby trying to deliver breech at home.  But I also know of some people who have lost a baby trying to deliver normally, in the hospital, with no idea why things went wrong.  Everyone has a story and everyone knows someone (or knows someone who knows someone) to whom the worst imaginable happened.  It happens.  Is that fair?  No.  But is that life?  Yes.  Would I be so blase if it happened to me, or a family member or friend?  No.  But trust me, I'm not blase about it at all.  Being all up on this mother thing, I'm confronted with stories of pregnancy, birth and child loss on a daily basis, and trust me, I cry.  I feel it and when I was pregnant, I worried, 'would that be me, too?'...  And, like every other mother out there, I worry still... "will I lose them someday in some freak accident?  A terrible disease?  How can I make sure 100% that they will grow up, live a long life, grow old, be healthy and happy and love and laugh for years and years and years and years long after I'm gone?!" I cannot.  Nothing is 100%  No birth is 100% "safe".
What am I getting at here?  Where am I going with this?  Ah, in a nutshell, I think how you give birth should be YOUR choice.  And, if you dig even slightly, by dig, I mean, "google", you can find lots of cases where parents have had their child taken from them for refusing a c-section, only to give birth just fine to a healthy baby.  What is that?  A pissed off power play?  Taking away your choices makes a pregnant woman not much more than cattle.  What if her daughter had not been breech and she was born at home and suffered a cord accident; would that be her fault as well?  What if no one knew the baby was breech?  What if ultrasounds become mandatory?  What if you choose to give birth to a baby you know has profound physical defects and you refuse to submit the child to "possible life saving surgeries" that carry more risks than benefits?  Once you get on this slippery slope of chipping away at how and where a woman can birth, you are really opening the door to a maelstrom of problems. It seems like as women are slowly having their eyes opened to the benefits of a more natural and gentle birth experience, the medical establishment is fighting hard to counter women and beat them down to submit to their mystical and all-knowing ways.  Why this struggle?  How did we get here to where we are so easily coerced into huge decisions by virtual strangers like baa baa sheep?  And of course, this doesn't just apply to childbirth, but to many facets of our lives.  I mean, women have been able to vote for less than 100 years in this country.  Um, excuse me?  We still make less money for equal work than men.  We MAKE PEOPLE and yet, we are still considered ill equipped to decide whether or not we want to trust our bodies to bring them forth without a myriad of interventions.

Sure now, I realize there are lots and lots and lots of lifesaving technologies that have saved hundreds of thousands of women and children over the years.  It is to the incredible skill of some physicians that a sweet girl I know is alive today, with her triplets, because complete previa and placenta acreta rendered it completely impossible for her to deliver naturally.  I'm not raising the flag of "burn down the hospitals!  birth all babies at home!" (Um remember, I've got not one but TWO scheduled c-sections under my belt - literally, bwahhahahah) I am suggesting that we women aren't stupid.  Proper prenatal care should be a cooperative effort and the birth decision should ultimately be the mother's if she is of sound mind.  Vaginal breech birth is not some crazy myth that never happens.  It's just a crazy myth here.  In the USA.  And if you happen to deliver a healthy baby (breech or not!) at home with no problems, then you (are crazy! lolololol) and just got lucky.  OMG, you are SO lucky.  Like, you totally dodged the inevitable death bullet that was heading your way when you took that on!  Whew!  Are you like, totally relieved and thinking, "I'd never do THAT again!"?

But, if something DID go wrong, it's all your fault, and you should have your baby taken from you because you clearly don't love them enough to birth "the right way".  If you were in the hospital, and something did go wrong (because OH YES IT HAPPENS PEEPS) you would hear nothing but, "Oh my, I'm so sorry, there was nothing that anyone could have done, obviously".  "Tragic, so tragic".  "I'm sure that they did everything they could".  Or, "you'd better SUE THE SHIT OUT OF THEM!"

To summarize with bullet points.
- how a woman births should be decided by she and (if applicable) her partner with guidance by whomever she chooses as a health care provider (midwife, OB, Shamen - kidding)
-Unless pregnant woman is completely mentally unsound to make a decision where it is obvious that the baby is in danger (or mom is in danger) due to complications that are known, then she should be left to decide how to birth her child.
-OB's need to treat their patients like their clients.
-Sad things happen during birth sometime.  Even today in the era of the c-section and ultrasound and all the other medical marvels we have.  Nothing is 100%.
-The more we hear about women having their children taken away because they refused some kind of medical intervention or another, the more dissonance we are going to have between the medical community and patients who ask questions.  This will inevitably lead to laws being passed that completely strip away a woman's rights when it comes to what happens to her body.
-when did we stop trusting ourselves?

Don't Miss next week!  Going to Jail for Miscarrying!  and Birth Rape!

What Sign are You?

Again, babble.com offers yet another topic that I hadn't really given much thought to - baby sign language.

Here's their article

Basically, I like to read these articles so I can get to the comments.  Once you skim past the SEE XXX GIRLS NUDE and ZOLFT PRESCRIPTION 4U!!! spam comments, you get to the actual discussion between parents.  And I found it interesting that there were the "I taught my children to sign and they are super awesome magnificent and why wouldn't you teach your children to do something that would help them?" and then the "Stay off my lawn!  Stop judging me for keeping my kids locked in a closet of ignorance you shrill harpy!"  I really had no idea baby sign language was such a hot topic.

Honestly, I never realized that baby signs was considered a "good parent"/"bad parent" issue.  I mean, sure I one time found some baby sign flash cards on sale somewhere and bought them fully intending on (never) using them when Ronan was still a wee cub.   But, I never did.  (This should not come as a surprise to anyone)  I mean, not really.  Ronan signed "more" a few times, but I just taught him to actually say "more" and today, as a just turned three year old, I can communicate perfectly fine with him.  He speaks as well as many of the college freshmen I had to teach Intro Anthro while slogging through Grad School.  Why didn't I teach it?  Um, well, I guess it's because I'm too lazy.  Sure, I think it looks cute when I see some child doing it.  But, really, I'm just not going to do stress myself out over this kind of thing.  My three year old was pretty much fully verbal just before turning two.  He could communicate everything he wanted to tell us with words and some even in complete sentences.  How much sooner does a sign language speaking child speak?  Is it really worth it?  Inquiring lazy moms want to know!

These are questions I ponder as I listen my fifteen month old baby dipping her toes into the linguistic sea.  She says the usual "Mommy, Daddy, Doggie, Iwandis, Iwandat, Iwandown, ball, nummy, mine, no (or NOOOO complete with head shake)" - I mean, she has the basics covered for what you need to accomplish as a fifteen month old.  Right?  My just turned three year old told me that the "storm clouds were looming" (and they rightly were) - so I'm guessing he's doing okay in the talkie department, too.

Have I done my babies wrong?  Are their language skills going to suffer?  I'm going to go with "no" at this point and harbor no regrets regarding my laziness in this department.  Likely my non-signing children will speak just as mumbly and surly and awkwardly when they are teenagers as those children who were signing their little digits off before they turned two.  Am I wrong?

ControverSunday (Tuesday): Licensed Merchandise (Shared from twomakesfour.com)

I, like I am sure many of you, am constantly struggling with this.  Check out this blog entry from a great blog I check.  What do you guys think?

ControverSunday (Tuesday): Licensed Merchandise

I'd love to hear some opinions on this!

I know, for me, I've gone from "NO PLASTIC EVER!" to much more than I care to admit in the last three years.  My kids have a barrage of toys and other accoutrement rife with easily identified characters.  From BandAids to underpants, we've fallen.  I realize that fighting this is just not very productive for "me".

I'm not sure I get the absolute backlash against Kai Lan, Mickey, and their two dimensional peers. I mean, I completely understand not wanting to perpetuate the cycle of our disposable world and the emptiness and obsession that surrounds stuff and it's acquisition, but isn't instilling the value of experience over things the job of a parent? I'm working on that.

So, as I type this from my iPad, sipping my grande caramel macchiato while simultaneously texting on my iPhone with a woman who's dining table I would like to buy, I say, " really? What's the big deal? I've got it all under control here.".