Arwen/Elizabeth

The Tie Belongs to Her Cousin

Bring on the doldrums, because Christmas is officially over.  Epiphany happened this past weekend and now it is just plain old dull boring January.

I've always thought January is the most depressing month.  November (Thanksgiving, which I love) and December (Christmas, ditto) are over, but spring is still months away (here in Michigan, anyway).  Nothing happens in January except taking down the Christmas decorations and moping about the fact that it's either (a) gray and ugly outside, or (b) snowing yet again, can we not get a BREAK?

Yes, I am impossible to please, why do you ask?

My sister Rosie pointed out that January is depressing to me because I let it be depressing to me, and she is probably right.  With that in mind I told Bryan that we should try to brighten the month with activities, so we planned a weekend trip to DC two weeks from now.  This weekend I'm going shopping with my sister, sans toddler-clingsters, and next weekend we've got Bryan's work holiday party (they do it in January instead of December, how inspired is that?) which means a night to ourselves, praise heaven, and then it's our DC trip and then it will be February.  So hey!  Maybe January won't be as bad this year.

Today, though, I have to take down the tree and the other Christmas decorations, and I don't want to.  Why is it that a Christmas tree on December 9th is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but a Christmas tree on January 9th looks sad and glaringly wrong?  It's as if an enormous bedraggled pink cat were suddenly sitting in my living room.

Either I'm charmingly indulgent or just lazy and foolish, but this morning I've been letting Milla take the shatterproof ornaments off the tree and deposit them in a small plastic bin.  After more than a month of "No, Camilla, don't touch the tree!" this delights her as much as you'd imagine.  I think it might be a bad idea, undermining my discipline and all that, but heck.  I've already started letting her do it and if I renege now I'll be even more inconsistent than I already am. 

If I look hard enough, I can usually find an excuse for taking the path of least resistance.  Not that I'm proud of it.

Speaking of the path of least resistance (but not in a deriding way this time - the good old POLR is not always bad), I'm sort of intrigued to find that I've become an "extended" breastfeeder by default.  I planned before Milla was born to try my hardest to nurse her, and when it turned out to be amazingly easy for us, I set a goal of nursing for at least a year and didn't give it much more thought than that.  I've always been open to the idea of nursing a toddler, and the idea of child-led weaning makes sense to me. But I'd heard from some people that their children self-weaned before or around a year old, and I had no idea how I myself would feel about the way nursing was going at twelve months, so I figured there was no point in crossing the bridge before I came to it.

What I couldn't have predicted was that my child would not even come close to self-weaning (although I've since learned that the whole "self-weaning before a year" concept is sketchy anyway), and in fact would be a slow starter on solids and still be getting most of her nutrition from breast milk at a year, and that there would be no question of weaning her at that age unless we started giving her formula, which would be silly for us since it's more expensive and less convenient.  Fortunately, I found that at twelve months I was still loving nursing her.  I loved it even more after we night-weaned her (because loving nursing is not the same as loving waking up multiple times per night) and I didn't feel so stretched and could enjoy our nursing time.

Anyway, to make a long story short (ha!) I have a nursing toddler, and I have no idea when she will stop nursing.  Perhaps one of these days I'll start to get tired of it and will gradually encourage Milla to taper off the nursing.  Maybe she'll begin to eschew it of her own accord.   I don't know, and I'm not really concerned about it.  She's certainly not going to go off to college still nursing, and between now and then we'll find the right solution for us.

However, I am curious about something, and maybe those of you who have also done "extended" nursing can weigh in.  (Sorry about the quotation marks on "extended" - nursing a fourteen-month-old who only has six teeth doesn't seem to me that it should be out of the ordinary, and I have trouble accepting the fact that it is.)  When people started asking if you were "still" nursing - however politely or impolitely they did it - what did you say?  I can't decide whether to simply answer, "Yes," because it's none of their business, or to try to educate by talking about the WHO recommendation and the benefits of nursing a toddler.  Currently I alternate between the two options depending on the person I'm talking to; I like the idea of sharing information but I'm not sure how fruitful it would be in some cases.  If you nursed a toddler, how did you respond to the questions?  And how did people respond to your responses?

Also, since we're in information-collecting mode anyway, I'm curious about something else: teething and willingness to eat solids.  I've got this hypothesis that kids who teethe late (and Milla wasn't really late since she got her first tooth at seven months, but she's now almost fifteen months and only has six teeth) tend to be less willing to eat solids early and often than their many-teethed peers.  What think you?  What has your experience been?

As I've been writing this, Milla's been playing with a set of cards that we've designated "kid cards."  They're from a casino and have a hole punched through the deck, and she keeps taking a card and sticking her finger through the hold in the middle, then yelling for me to come rescue her from the evil card that is eating her hand.  Kids.  They're so darn helpless.

Good thing they are cute to make up for it.

Personal Misperceptions

This comment on my guilty pleasures post reminded me of something a friend of my sister Maggie's said to me almost a year ago.  The friend (who sometimes leaves comments here, but I'll let her reveal her own identity if she so chooses rather than outing her myself) had known about my blog and been reading it for a while before she came to visit our family and met me in person.  And this is what she said to me: "You should let your goofy side show more in your writing.  I expected you to be a lot more serious than you are."  I was surprised, to say the least.

I also recall recently seeing in a forum somewhere a link to my blog, attached to which was a description that called me intellectual.  Intellectual!  Again, I was surprised.

I read and reread everything I post (I am obsessive about typos and spelling errors, not that I ever make the latter, hee) so I've got a pretty good idea what goes up here.  And although I'm aware that my writing can be over-earnest and serious at times, I generally feel it gives a pretty good picture of who I am.  But then I hear that people think I am serious and intellectual and the kind of person who wouldn't be interested in Project Runway (the search for the next big fashion designer!  What's not to love?) and I start to wonder.

Would you all be shocked to learn that I am actually quite a goofball, and enjoy telling stories that make people laugh, complete with funny voices and facial expressions?  That I love plenty of books and movies and music that have little to no artistic value whatsoever, simply because they make me feel good?  That on countless occasions (fewer as I've gotten older, thankfully) I've pretended not to know the answer to something because I didn't want people to think I was too smart?   That some of my friends used to joke that I couldn't chew gum and walk? 

(They were wrong about that, by the way.  Chewing gum and rollerblading, on the other hand...)

This is an awfully narcissistic thing to ask, but personal-journal blogging is one of the penultimate narcissisms anyway, so what the heck.  I'm curious: what's your perception of me based on what I write here?  Are you surprised that I'm as frivolous as I claim to be?  What else would you be surprised to learn is true about me?  (If anyone stumbles upon a secret truth about me, I promise to own up, no matter what.)

And in the interest of preserving some semblance of the illusion that it's not all about me (even though it totally is): Have you ever been in a situation where you discovered that someone had a perception of you that didn't match the reality?  What did they think and how were they wrong?  And what (if anything) did you do about it?

Not That Thirty-Five Is Elderly in Any Way

Due to a wireless-network-related snafu, I'm currently without the technology to give you a picture-loaded this-is-our-vacation post.  (Are hyphens a good substitute for pictures?)  We're currently staying in New Hampshire with relatives and we fly home on Monday; look for a picture post sometime next week.

On Sunday, Camilla turns one.  Wow.  More about that after the fact.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking about something else.

A few of you guessed, correctly, that the friends whom we were visiting earlier this week were the family of the inimitable Jen, to whom I can't link because her blog is retired.  We had a fabulous time, which was to be expected.

Jen and I "met" when she emailed me almost two years ago after stumbling across my blog.  Since then, we've had any number of phone conversations, sent countless emails, and met in person three times.  I can't name a friend with whom I made a connection more quickly than I did with her.  And yes, that was partly as a result of our circumstances at the time, but I think we'd be friends anyway.  And the funny thing is, she's about a decade older than I am.

This is an inconsequential fact, so inconsequential that I hardly ever think about it.  But on Tuesday I happened to mention to Jen how exciting it is to be able to drive the rental car now that I'm twenty-five, and she laughed.  "I forget how young you are."

Just for kicks, I checked my blogroll and there's not a single blogger on there who's younger than I am.  Some of them are just a wee bit older, but still, they're all older.  This is inconsequential as well - thankfully, this is a corner of cyberspace where age actually doesn't matter - but I find it interesting anyway.

All through grade school and high school and college, my friends were people close in age to me, with generally not more than a two-year age gap.  It made sense; we shared life circumstances and interests and activities and it worked.  Now, most of my real-life friends are still near my age, but I've made some awesome friends online who are older, and many of them, like Jen and another Jen, have turned from online friends into real-life friends.

I think it's awesome to have close friends who are older than me, not least because it makes me feel grown up.  (Hey, I'm an adult now!  Age is not so important!)  I'd have more of them if I could figure out how to get them to hang out with me.  Also younger friends, although I think it'd be a bit weird if they weren't out of high school yet.

(I am considering, however, asking any more people I meet named Jennifer if they'd mind if I referred to them by their middle names.  All these Jens makes it very confusing for my poor husband.)

Do you have friends who are more than a couple years older or younger than you?  How'd you meet, and what keeps the friendship together?

Just to Prove This Blog Is Not Yet Actually Defunct

I've recently learned that it's considered rude to apologize for not posting on one's blog; you are instead supposed to act humbly as if you believe that no one cares a whit if you post.  I'm not sure how I feel about this; I blog to share my life with other people and have a share in theirs, so pretending that we don't really give a flying whatever about each other seems odd.  However, now that I've learned of the rule I'm loath to openly defy it and give the appearance of rudeness, thereby causing people to think my mama didn't raise me right, when she most certainly did.  So apologizing for not posting is out.  On the other hand, once I've gone for nearly two weeks without posting, beginning a new post without an apology feels weird and wrong, like entering a room while speaking the middle of a sentence.  Result: impasse.

Happily, Tracy has saved me from the to-apologize-or-not dilemma by asking if I am okay.  I can now post without giving anyone cause to cast aspersions on my parents for raising me to be A) conceited or B) rude; I am merely answering the question of a friend.  I must post!  I have no choice!  Neat, huh?

There are roughly one million things I've not mentioned here that have happened fairly recently.  Due to the baby's unexpected and INSANE state of awakefulness between three o'clock and six o'clock this morning, I have lost the brain power to give any sort of organization or coherency to my listing of these things.  In random order:

1.  Camilla learned how to crawl.  This happened exactly one month ago yesterday, when we were up north at Bryan's parents' condo.  (Also, incidentally, the place where Daniel first crawled.)  She'd been working on it for a while, flailing on her stomach and scooting backward into walls and furniture, but on that particular morning we cleared a space for her, put Bryan's watch (shiny! also waterproof!) on the floor a few feet from her, and watched as she hesitantly coordinated the movements to get herself over to it.  A month later she is a master crawler, and now pulls herself up on things as well, although she hasn't figured out how to sit back down gracefully and gets unhappy every time she plops awkwardly onto her bottom. 

The bottom in question

We are currently conducting an experiment on exactly how little babyproofing we can get away with and still have A) a living child, and B) an intact house when Milla starts kindergarten.

2.  I have figured out how to nurse Camilla in the car without pulling over and taking her out of her car seat.  Yes, that's right, I can now nurse her while she is firmly buckled in and I am also buckled in, albeit a little less firmly because the act requires some terrific torso twisting.  (It goes without saying that I can only do this if Bryan is driving and I'm sitting in the back seat of the car; if I ever figure out how to nurse from the driver's seat I will be applying for a Nobel Prize.)  I'm not sure why - the achievement not being particularly notable - but I am extremely proud of this.  Giving birth, eh.  Keeping a child alive for almost ten months, eh.  But nursing in transit?  I'm ready to give myself a medal.  Parenthood is weird.


Also weird is the fact that we appear to have spawned a lizard child

3.  My brother is home from the Coast Guard!  After seven months in California learning to be an electronic technician, he's got a few weeks of leave before he leaves for his station in the far north.  It's great having him here, and we've been getting in as much family time as possible.  (Not that I'm making excuses - just kidding, I totally am - but this has contributed greatly to my lack of posting.)  I have the best family ever.

Best and goofiest

4.  I finished Harry Potter!  It took me about three weeks to read all seven books, and I was in agonies waiting to read the last one, especially after it arrived in the mail.  But I'm so glad I read them as a set; I think I got a lot more out of it that way.  I loved the ending; I thought the plotting was brilliant and there were just enough surprises.  I really liked CJ's post on it, and this review by Orson Scott Card is awesome too.

Maybe now that she's done with those books, my mother will start paying attention to me again

5.  After nine months of feeling pretty good about how much sleep we were getting around here, I've finally hit a breaking point.  I've never expected the girl to sleep twelve consecutive hours per night - and still don't anticipate that she will for many months - but the number of night wakings seems to be increasing rather than decreasing, lately.  I can handle three or four or even five, but eight or ten has me really dragging the next day.  So we're working on it.  I've read The No-Cry Sleep Solution and we're using some of Pantley's ideas and some of our own to gently encourage Camilla to sleep for longer stretches without needing to nurse back to sleep every time she wakes.  We'll see how it works.  We feel pretty strongly that the cry-it-out method and those kinds of "sleep training" are not for us, so I'm really hoping we're successful because this is kind of our only option.  At any rate, she won't always be a baby and she will eventually sleep through the night, so no matter how rough this is, it's not permanent.  Right?

If worst comes to worst, I'm planning to petition Bryan to become a full-time baby mattress

I'd love to hear about any get-the-baby-to-sleep ideas that worked for your family.

This will become an endless entry if I don't watch out.  More later, I promise.  (Uh, not that you care.  I'm not by any means suggesting that you care.)

You should care that my parents dress me like a street urchin, though.  Sheesh.

Bathtub Confessional

Camilla and baths got off to a rough start.  Her umbilical cord stump didn't fall off until she was almost six weeks old, which meant she had to endure a lot of sponge baths at the start of her life.  I haven't had a sponge bath since I was an infant, but I've bathed (if you can call it that) with buckets of water on the
deck of a sailboat, and I can only imagine sponge baths feel equally unpleasant: water never warm enough and evaporating off your skin to make you feel chilly and exposed.

You can imagine how much Milla loved them, and since we love her and didn't want her to suffer, we developed an OWAN bath policy: Only When Absolutely Necessary.  This meant she got bathed when there was a messy bodily-fluids incident or when the crud between her toes built up to unbearable levels.  Otherwise, not-so-much with the bathing.

After five and a half weeks (roughly forty days - coincidence? I think not) the cord stump finally fell off and we were allowed to give the baby a real bath.  We didn't have a little baby tub, but my sister and BIL had managed well putting a towel in the bottom of the regular tub and bathing Daniel on that, so we did the same.  I don't know why I was surprised that the Billa hated this nearly as much as she hated the sponge baths.  I guess I'd figured that being slightly submerged in water was better than not being submerged at all?  It sounds silly now that I am writing it, although it made sense at the time, but the fact remains that she definitely hated the bath.

If I very carefully did not break eye contact with her from the first moment I started undressing her for the bath, if I made no sudden movements or loud noises, and if I talked to her in a steady sing-song voice for the entire time I was bathing her, she could tolerate it and would not scream the whole time.  Otherwise, no dice, and I grew to hate bath time like nothing else.

This being the case (and here is the "confessional" part of today's post) during the first six months of her life Camilla had a bath a little less than once per week.  It was a little less than weekly because we tried to bath her every seven days, but ended up having numerous conversations that went like this:

"When did she last have a bath?"

"Let's see, we'd gone to Mass that day... it was Sunday afternoon, and today's only Tuesday.  So we're good."

"Look at her.  She's grungy.  It can't possibly have been two days ago that we bathed her."

"Oh my gosh, it was last Sunday.  She's nine days dirty."

"Don't tell anyone."

"We have got to give her a bath right this minute."

It's a good thing there are no Baby Cleanliness Police, because they would have been knocking down our door.

I've heard that there are some people who bath their infants every single day.  Assuming that this is true and not just a nasty rumor, I'm flabbergasted by it.  Do these people have babies who like baths?  (Is there such a thing?)  Are their babies much smellier than average, and need daily baths just to break even?  Perhaps there is another factor I'm not considering that motivates these people?

Granted, Camilla was not a very leaky newborn (she made up for it with the screaming) and perhaps I would have felt differently about this issue if she'd been spitting up constantly, but still.  My modus operandi for dealing with most of the fluids issues that we did have was to take a swipe at her with a damp washcloth; I can't imagine how bad it would've had to have been to motivate me to go through the ordeal of The Bath every single day.  Ehhhh.

Fortunately when the Billa was about six months I discovered that I could get in the bath with her and she would actually enjoy it, so that's what we've been doing since then, and she gets bathed every other day, every third day at the most.  (I'm covering myself in case there actually are Baby Cleanliness Police - they can't catch me now!)

Enlighten me about your own baby-bathing preferences and habits.

In Which I Perform a Vital Civic Duty

Yesterday morning I got up earlier than usual and drove twenty minutes to the county courthouse to perform that proud civic function I learned about so many years ago in government class.

Yes, that's right: jury duty.

Ironically, Bryan had a jury duty summons about a month ago but ended up not having to go at all because there were no trials the week he was called, I'm guessing because it was prime vacation time and the judges were all out of town with their families.

But I had to go.  I've never had jury duty before but I've heard stories of people getting excused for practically no reason at all, so I figured the powers that be wouldn't be interested in a woman with an advanced case of pregnancy.  I pictured walking in and having them take one look at me and send me home.

No such luck, unfortunately.  Perhaps this is a case where carrying smaller is a disadvantage - I'm not in the waddling, one-hand-on-the-small-of-my-back stage yet; I don't look like labor is imminent, so people aren't alarmed by me.

(Incidentally, I doubt labor is imminent - I have a sinking premonition that this baby is going to be late, as both his parents were - but if by some freak chance he's born at the same gestational age as his cousin, we've got less than two weeks until zero hour.  That is a scary thought.)

Anyway, I quickly realized that they weren't going to just send me home.  You have to get seated on a jury in order to actually be dismissed, otherwise you wait it out and hope they don't call your name.  As soon as the jury clerk told us how things work, I calculated that there was a fairly good chance of avoiding having to serve a trial: there were 300+ potential jurors in the assembly room, out of which they needed to seat seven twelve-person juries.  Approximately three-quarters of us would get to go home free.

So naturally, my name was in the first group of forty-five they sent to a courtroom.  Still pretty good odds, since they only needed twelve from that group. 

Again naturally, I was the third person sent into the jury box.  I tried to waddle and look like I was about to go into labor at any minute (just kidding! I'd feel totally ridiculous doing that) but no one seemed particularly alarmed or inclined to dismiss me because of my pregnancy.  And in fact, one of the first questions they asked was if anyone had a medical condition that would make serving on the jury a genuine hardship.  I was under oath to tell the whole truth, so after the judge assured me that there would be frequent breaks, and that I was free to stand up and move around in the jury box if necessary, and that the court would even take a break for my sake if I really needed it, I couldn't honestly claim to be unable to do it.  So pregnancy did not get me excused from the jury.  But eventually, after lots more questioning, I got off anyway.

It was a criminal trial.  The defendant was being charged with one serious offense and two relatively lesser ones; she was pleading guilty to the latter two but innocent to the biggie.  The judge, and then the prosecuting attorney, questioned all of us to find out if we had any experiences or knowledge of the matter relating to the case that would cause us to be biased.  I, having less life experience than most, didn't have anything to relate in those instances.  (I was the youngest person on the jury - in some cases, by my estimate, younger by several decades.  Go figure.) 

Then the defense attorney got up to question us.  He was basically just interested in finding out if any of us had formed a bias against his client that would cause us to find her guilty preemptively even though she's innocent until proven otherwise. 

That's where he got me: the charges to which she was pleading guilty were things I consider seriously dishonest, and I had to confess that the knowledge that she had admitted to doing them clouded my assessment of her character somewhat.  But I said that I understood the concept of innocent until proven guilty, and that I would do my best to set aside any instinctive judgements and make a decision based on the evidence alone. 

They'd explained to us beforehand that we could be dismissed from the jury one of two ways: by the judge if he found a valid reason we were unqualified to serve, or by one of the attorneys, each of whom has the right to dismiss a certain number of jurors without giving a reason.  The defense attorney (who, incidentally, I thought was kind of a putz) was trying to get the judge to dismiss me on the grounds that I was unable to be fair and unbiased.  But the judge overruled him!  (I like to think the judge believed I am intelligent enough to consider evidence and make a decision without letting my feelings get in the way, which, DUDE, I totally am.) 

So the defense attorney had to use one of his get-out-of-jail-free cards to boot me.  And I got the best of both worlds: I didn't have to serve on the jury, but I didn't look like a jerk either (unlike the woman who'd gotten herself dismissed by the judge much earlier because she kept mentioning, in this obnoxiously loud voice, that she considered the offenses in question "despicable" and she herself was very "obstinate" and would absolutely not be able to make an unbiased decision). 

Since the trial was expected to run through Thursday or Friday, I'm very glad about not having to be on the jury.  I was especially glad this morning, when my alarm didn't go off at 7:00 the way it did yesterday.  But hey, I'm a jury duty veteran now!  I've had more boring experiences, and more painful ways of earning $12.50, the amount they paid me for the morning.  All in all, not the worst thing I've ever done.

What are your jury duty experiences?

On Being a Young Mom

Today a guy came to the door selling all-purpose household cleaner.  We have a horrible front door for avoiding solicitors - the top half is glass, so by the time you've seen them, they've seen you.  Polite solicitors, I feel certain, would ring the doorbell and then look away so I'd have a chance to hide from them, but no, they peer into my living room and give me absolutely no chance to pretend I don't exist.  Every time a new one comes I curse the fact that I've once again forgotten to put up a "No Soliciting" sign, and then I go answer the door, because I have no choice.

But anyway, today's household-cleaner peddler was young, probably younger than I am.  And yet the first thing he said to me when I opened the door was "Are Mom and Dad home?"  Sort of a funny way to ask the question, I thought: as if we were siblings and it was our shared parents he was seeking.  It occurred to me afterward that I should have told him they weren't (although he probably would have come back later) but I stupidly said, "Uh, I guess that's me," whereupon he proceeded to demonstrate the amazing powers of the cleanser on various items on my front porch, while I tried frantically to think of ways to get rid of him.  Which I eventually did, just by being overwhelmingly unenthusiastic about his product.

Since then I've been thinking (and this is the point of this post; sorry if I've confused any of you) about what he said.  The part where he thought I was a child of the house instead of a person whose name is on the title.  And what's occurred to me is: he's surely not the only one.  A door-to-door salesman has never before asked me if my parents are home, but some of them may have considered it.  Maybe people have even seen me in the grocery store and thought I was a knocked-up teenager, horror of horrors!  (Especially since if all had gone according to our original plan, I'd be two years younger right now.) 

What I'm curious about is: is being this young going to make a difference?  I'll be twenty-four in a few weeks, and I've always imagined that twenty-four is a fairly mature age at which to have your first child, but maybe other people don't see it that way.   

So, are there challenges associated specifically with being a younger mother?  (Obviously having the guy at the door mistake you for a teenager doesn't count as a challenge; I'm talking about real stuff.)  If you are or have been a young mom, I'd love to know what you experienced.  If you're an older mom, how do you view young moms?  Especially if you started out as one, and are now on the other side (not that there's a line between "young" and "no longer young" - you understand what I mean here, right?)  I'd love to know what your thoughts are. 

Meanwhile, I'm going to go find Bryan and see if he'll make me lunch.  That's not normally his job, but I think he might if I remind him that as my dad, it's his duty.  Mom is too lazy to do it today.

Help!

Tomorrow I will be twenty-three weeks pregnant.  This past Saturday marked four months to go until my due date of October 24.

Emily (whose blog you should be reading, because it is hilarious) is also pregnant, and due three days before me.  In her latest entry, she shows off some (pretty darn cool) onesies that she decorated herself. 

Normally, reading a post like Emily's, I'd just think "wow, those are cool" and move on.  But today it occurred to me - she has onesies!  3-6-month onesies, even!  And she is due a mere three days before me!  I do not have onesies!  This cannot be good!

I ran a quick mental inventory of the baby gear we currently possess:
1) One Kelty Kangaroo carrier (Bryan's Father's Day gift from his parents)
2) One fleecy pajama bag, yellow, with giraffe applique (purchased by my mother-in-law the weekend we told them we were expecting)
3) Three rubber-backed cloth pads (for burping or maybe changing diapers on, purchased by my mom)
4) Three pairs tiny socks (also from my mom).

Now, I've never been a parent before, but I'm guessing that this is Not Enough Stuff to enable us to care full-time for a newborn.  Even if we never left the house, we'd need more stuff than that.  And we do plan on leaving the house. 

I'm thinking we're not totally UCNP (popular family abbreviation; clean way to say "screwed"; short for "Up Creek No Paddle") yet because we do still have four months.  Practically every detail of our wedding was planned in less time than that, for heaven's sake.  But as I've started to research baby stuff, especially the big things like stroller/carseat/co-sleeper/crib, my head's begun to spin.  There is so much variety out there!  It's mind-blowing.

Since I know how much fun it is to give advice on the Internet (I know this because of how excited I get when someone actually solicits advice, even if it's a topic I know nothing about), I'm asking for advice now.  Bring it on!  Give me everything you've got on the topic of baby stuff.  Products you loved, products you hated, products you never used, products you couldn't have lived without.  I want to know!

And there, now I feel like I've done something toward this whole Baby Project today, and I can go have a cocktail.  Or at least a cocktail onion.

Narnia, Verbal and Visual

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about the world which the Pevensie children first enter through an old wardrobe. (If you’ve read the rest of the Narnia Chronicles, you know that they and others also enter it through other portals at other times.) In fact, I even remember a time when the fact that Narnia is a fantasy world didn’t enter my head. I was so young that it was perfectly plausible to me that Narnia existed. I hadn’t yet developed that awful skepticism for which the Professor chides Peter and Susan, that skepticism which assumes that things like Narnia are impossible when really they are nothing of the sort.

When I was a child my dad read us the Narnia Chronicles and the Little House books. He’d read one series and then the other, and then go back to the first. It was a long time ago so I don’t remember the specifics too well, but I think he read to us a few nights a week, one chapter a night or two if we begged hard. My dad has a wonderful reading voice (so does Mom, actually) and we would curl up around him to hear him read. It’s one of my favorite childhood memories.

(Tangent story: Mom tells about how, when she was pregnant with Rosie, she spent a lot of time lying on the couch. I was a little over a year old at the time. About every hour, which was how often she would agree to read to me, I’d bring her a book and say “Book me!” That was my way of saying I wanted to be read to. Totally cute – if I do say so myself, and shouldn’t.)

So anyway, Narnia seemed just as real to me as Laura and Mary’s world (and frankly, not all that much more exciting – I couldn’t decide if it would be scarier to face the white witch or the long winter, and more thrilling to be crowned a queen or to ride in a buggy behind two wild horses with a man who was in love with you). Even though Narnia is not “true” the way the Ingalls family’s story is, there is much truth in it, and as a child I instinctively knew that.

I think it’s funny that Tolkien – whom I have to love because he created my name, but would love even if my name were Mary – hated the Narnia Chronicles even though Lewis was his dear friend. He called them Lewis’s “bully pulpit” and thought them horribly obvious allegory. (If you’ve read The Lord of the Rings, you know that Tolkien is no stranger to allegory, but he was very scornful of strict allegory. His is much more subtle.)

I must admit that from a scholarly standpoint, the Chronicles are not Lewis’s best work, or even his best fiction. The Space Trilogy is better; Till We Have Faces is far better. The Chronicles are laced with gaps and inconsistencies. They’re sometimes preachy. And, although I hate to grant it to His Grumpiness Mr. Tolkien, the allegory is often really, really obvious.

But you know what? I love them in spite of it, or perhaps because of it. I love that Lewis, who had far more prestigious things to do, took the time to pen these little stories, things that children can read and understand. I love that they give young people a connection to the kind of adventure that isn’t considered worthwhile anymore. I love that they show the value of honor and truth and goodness and loyalty and sacrifice. I will certainly read them to my own children, probably over and over again. They’re some of the most valuable children’s literature out there, in my opinion.

Naturally, I was thrilled to learn that they were coming out with a movie of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I’ve seen the dorky old cartoon, of course (it actually gave me a phobia of wolves that lasted for several years) but live-action is so much better, and it’s only in the past couple years that the technology has gotten good enough for them to do this well. (I personally have always hated it when they try to mix animation and live action – Disney’s Mary Poppins, anyone?) Of course, there was a lot of of opportunity for them to completely bastardize the story, like Jackson did to some parts of The Lord of the Rings, although I try not to think about that. But I had a good feeling about the Narnia movie, especially after I saw the poster.

My sister Maggie reread The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe right before she saw the movie. She actually finished the book in the theater before the show. And she warned me not to do that; she said that she thought the filmmakers did a pretty good job of capturing the themes of the story even though they changed a few details, but that having just finished the book she got very distracted comparing the details, and it impeded her enjoyment of the film. I took her advice and didn’t reread the book, even though I’d originally planned on it.

I’m glad I didn’t, because I loved the movie, and if rereading the book before I saw it might have tainted my movie-seeing experience, I’m glad I dodged that bullet.

After I mentioned that I loved the movie, someone said she’d like to read my thoughts on it, which is why you have this post in all its rambling. I’ve thought a lot on what to say about the movie. I could tell how I loved the actors they got to play the children, that little Georgie Henley as Lucy pulled off some of the best child acting I’ve ever seen. I could talk about how stunning the film was visually, how the costuming was lovely, how Aslan in body and voice was so much better than I imagined him. I could tell how Bryan loved it too, so much that we’ve seen it three times now at his suggestion. I could tell how I both laughed and cried, at different parts of the movie each time, or how I can’t recall another movie that filled my heart quite so much. That sounds silly, but darn it, I just loved this film.

If I could say something bad about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, that would definitely make my viewpoint seem more balanced. But I’m not cut out to be a critic. As much as I get into nuances when arguing about ideas, I can’t do it with creative works. Novels, movies, paintings, music, poems – my gut tells me that a thing is “good” or “bad” (with “really good” and “really bad” also being options in extreme cases) and I don’t move past that. I also admit that my tastes are not that sophisticated; I’ve loved some ridiculous things and hated some great things and that will probably continue for my whole life. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe happens to be a thing that I love. Every other person in the world could hate it and I’d still feel the way I do. I love it loyally: I’m thrilled that it has beaten King Kong in earnings, even though I’ve never seen King Kong. Now that I love the Narnia movie, I won’t betray it by liking its competitor. If that’s not a nuanced position, oh well. I guess I’ve got enough nuance in my life right now.

I’d love to hear all your thoughts.

To HP or not to HP?

I'm back from Rosie's wedding and working on a post and a photo album, but meanwhile, I've got a question for all you readers. 

What about Harry Potter?

I know that a large range of people from all walks of life, holding all sorts of different religious beliefs, read this site.  I'd love to hear from all of you, even if all you have to say is "I've read Harry Potter, and I think the books are well-written and great fun," or "I've read Harry Potter, and the books made me enormously tempted to practice witchcraft, although I have happily avoided that temptation."

Please note:
1. If you are going to tell me that the Vatican has ruled that Harry Potter is verboten, please do your research.  Individuals connected with the Vatican have spoken out against and for the books, but their opinions (despite the impression given by the media) are not authoritative.  The Vatican has no official position on the books.
2. I'm most interested in hearing from those who have read at least one of the books.  If you have not even checked out one of the books, and are yet refusing to let your children read them, I'd love to hear the reasons why.  (Really, I would.)
3. Please do not say anything derogatory about people who are in favor of the books (because you'd be talking about my parents, family, and many of my friends) or people who are against the books (because you'd be talking about my brother-in-law and many of my friends).

Go to it!  I love a good debate.