A Late Appearance

The Mad Math Society apologises for the last minute substitution in yesterday's Monday Mission. Our Hippo is having an identity crisis and was unwilling unable to appear yesterday. We have now persuaded him to return to duty.

Monday Mission - Math

But Maypole, I don't DO Math! You'll have to take my word for it.

Running Deer

Playing with the new camera; got this by accident. Whee. Wait until I get the book read. And get an angle that does not include the satellite dish. Oh, well.

Sauce for the Gander

Afghan Shi'ite Muslim demonstrate Wednesday in favor of a new law that would require Shi'ite women to get their husband's permission before leaving the house and would legitimize marital rape. A smaller group of Afghan women staged a rival demonstration opposing the law.

Omar Sobhani/Reuters

(Copied this from the Christian Science Monitor)

When I started this blog, I promised myself that I would not write about sex. Lots of people doing that, I reasoned. No need for a wrinkly to get into it.

I have just changed my mind, after reading about women in Afghanistan protesting the proposed law that would, among other things, require Shiite women to agree to sex with their husbands every fourth day.

Every fourth day? Could it be that this requirement is set up for a man with four wives, as I believe is allowed under Shiite law?

Pierre Trudeau famously said that the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation. That covers it for me as far as adopting Sharia law as the law of the land; obey the tenets of your religion by all means, but do not enshrine these tenets in the secular laws designed to make the state a place of law and order for all. Frankly, I feel the same about any law enacted to enforce the tenets of any religion, the 'Close on Sundays' laws that until a few years ago forbade shopkeepers of any faith to open on Christian Sunday being a case in point.

When I was married, I took vows that I feel honour bound to keep. These promises I understand to include the right of each partner to have sex with the other one. Implicit, but there. With no three days off, either. And I recall, vaguely, reading that in Orthodox Jewish law a man is required to have sex with his wife once a week. Not sure of the detail, but the way I remember it would see that requirement as being for the wife's benefit.

And as I was doing housework this morning and thinking about it, I started speculating what would happen if the proposed Afghanistan legislation was an enjoinder on both sexes, a requirement for both a man and a woman to agree to sex once every fourth day. If a man had four wives, that would work out to sex every day for the man. Do you think that the men in the legislature in Afghanistan would rise to the occasion and pass such a law?

Because I don't.

Wordless Wednesday - Thump!

It is my birthday today and I got a Nikon 990 with an18-200 lens. After I read the manual and get a bit of a grip on this thoroughbred (maybe in a couple of months, she said with a hollow laugh) the quality of WW and Photo Fridays should increase. At the moment, I am reading the Quick Guide and breathing through my mouth. I could do this once, long ago. Surely I can remember the SLR lore. Gulp.

An Old Wife's Tale about Breastfeeding

In September of 1967 we decided to visit the Centennial Expo in Montreal; our younger daughter was two months old, a sturdy, easy, breastfed baby. In all of that huge site there was one (1!) 'changing station' for babies. The YD was a happy little lump in her knapsack, packed in with diapers, until she got hungry. Once she decided she needed feeding, she became very noisy. So she got nursed in some peculiar places.

One day at noon our best option seemed to be a huge cafeteria beside the Russian Pavilion; it was almost empty and we could all eat while she did. So I established myself at a table, unbuttoned my jacket and blouse and fed her. My husband and his parents went through the cafeteria line and brought the food over, giving me a carton of milk, with a straw. Just then the YD, who was very hungry indeed, gulped some air, air-locked and shrieked. As I hoisted her up onto my shoulder to try and get the bubble out a waiter came over to see what was up and, looking at the milk in the carton, cleared his throat and asked if he could warm up the baby's milk. My husband and FIL, a wonderful guy with a big sense of humour, both grinned widely. And then the poor waiter must have realized what was going on because he turned a fine shade of scarlet and slunk away. My FIL told the story for years.

I'm not sure why I decided to breastfeed my kids. It was not common to do that in 1966. I had some problems nursing the firstborn and ended up switching her to a bottle at about five months. My doctor advised me to feed her rice cereal before I nursed her and spread the feedings out to every four hours; you can imagine how well that worked. But the next baby I took successfully to drinking from a cup. Mind you, she was what was called an 'enthusiastic nurser' then. Industrial level vacuum system was more like it. And, in the sixties, the received wisdom was to start solids with rice cereal at six weeks, adding fruit and vegetables starting about three months. With all that in their little tummies, I think babies in the sixties slept more and longer. We won't talk about the diapers, please.

Your mother might well have breast fed you and your siblings but when I decided to breastfeed I did not know one woman who had successfully done so. Women in my family swore by bottles. My friends with kids? All using bottles and regarding me with a very sceptical eye. Between my first, born in April '66, and the second in July '67 (yes, the second pregnancy was planned. Did I ever say I have any common sense?) a La Leche league formed in the city where I lived and I at least had some peer support. And, thanks in part to things like La Leche, by the early '70s breast feeding was much more common. By the '80's many, many women were breastfeeding successfully. As my peer group left their bearing years behind, though, I stopped paying attention.

When my granddaughter was born and I started to be interested again, I found that the landscape had changed. There were all sorts of gizmos and gadgets, lactation consultants, support groups, books and pamphlets. And there was the Internet and mommybloggers. Advice, support and success stories on all sides. It was a steep learning curve for me. How do you offer advice on 'a good latch' when you have never heard of the term? I watched the ED popping the baby off the nipple and reattaching her with unbelieving eyes. The nurse who handed me the ED just simply checked to make sure I wasn't going to drop her and trotted away.

I have been reading mommy blogs, including the nursing mothers' posts, for two years now. Nursing stories are thick on the ground, as are opinions about the value, spiritual and physical, of breast milk and bonding. I have learned a huge amount about the things that can go wrong, the sheer intense sleepless labour of raising a baby for six months on breat milk alone, the tricks and travails. Some things are still the same. I can trade bitten nipple stories with anyone. But....but...it all seems so complicated now. So much to learn, so many things to watch for. So much to do! So many voices raised in praise and sometimes overdone advocacy. So much shame if nursing doesn't work out.

The only thing that bothers me about having switched the ED to formula is that I got bad advice. Some of the mothers of today, however, sound so desolate, so shamed, if they can't nurse their babies successfully. They believe that they aren't good mothers. I think that's sad.

Breast feeding is cheap, convenient and if it goes well, very rewarding for both mother and baby. But in my observation you can be just as good a mother holding a bottle. And your baby will do well.

This post appeared first at Canada Moms Blog, where I am on the roster of contributors. I would like to direct you to the post there. However, probably because the site is still under construction, I cannot seem to access an archive and find that post. And so I am repeating it here.

Hop over to GNM Parents

I've got a guest blog up over at GNM Parents, replacing Slouching Mom who is frying other fish for a few weeks. It's a cri de coeur about second language learning -- about first language learning as well, I guess -- so hop on over if you are interested.
And then you can join the legion of my friends and fellow workers in rolling your eyes and muttering 'Old English Teachers never die'.

A Sad Little Story

I went to get my hair cut at one of those walk-in places last week and ran into a situation that just made my heart ache.

There was a family group ahead of me composed of a woman in her late forties, at a guess, her married daughter, the daughter's husband and toddler and a second daughter, at least eight, whom the mother referred to as 'my youngest'. When I got there the toddler's father was having his hair cut and the young mother was trying to persuade the little guy to have his done also. Toddler was having none of it, screaming 'No, NOOO!' and trying to pry the door open to escape. The little girl was next, before me, and she was acting so much like the toddler that it was hard to tell the difference. Her mother was trying to persuade her that she should have her hair layered and trimmed but she had selected a very extreme cut from a magazine and wanted nothing but that.

As her mother tried to persuade her, she hauled open the door and stormed out. Her mother shrugged and asked the hairdresser to hold her place while she tried to persuade her. So, we waited.

After a bit, little miss came storming back in with mother, still arguing. She refused to get in the chair. By this time other customers had come in. The poor, beleaguered hairdresser signalled for me to sit down and started cutting my hair. Little miss demanded to have hers cut; her mother said that her bad behaviour had caused her to miss her turn and that she would have to wait. While my hair was cut, the argument continued, with little miss now thumbing through the sample books looking for another style and mother insisting that she was to have 'layers and a trim'. Another hairdresser finished a client; little miss refused to have her do the cutting.

Little miss was also consuming a steady stream of the suckers that children get after their hair is cut, taking them out of the box on the counter herself, in spite of her mother's orders that she stop.

Mother did not enforce her orders. She did not try to stem the behaviour. She seemed to be uninvolved emotionally. In fact, she chatted with her other daughter and with us while this was going on, but without referring to the girl's actions, other than to say that she, herself, was a hairdresser but preferred not to cut the girl's hair herself as it was 'too much trouble.'

When I got out of the chair, mother directed little miss to climb in. Little miss refused and continued to look at the books and magazines. Mother then said that since the girl was not ready, they would leave. Little miss screamed, stamped and banged the books around. Her mother stood with the door open, saying that they were leaving, and went out. The girl stood in the doorway and screamed at the top of her lungs. Just a series of shrieks.

Perhaps the little girl was behaviourally challenged in some way; certainly her actions were far more characteristic of a two year old than of an average girl of her age. Her language level and ability to read would indicate, however, that she was of normal intelligence. That would not preclude ADD or autism spectrum disorders. Whatever, her mother was certainly not helping; she was confrontational, uncompromising and seeming uninvolved in and unembarrassed by her daughter's over the top display. If the girl was simply an uncontrolled average kid, her mother was totally at fault, in my estimation. In either case, I think she should have been taken out of the salon when she started to create and, certainly, have never been brought back for a second try.

I felt very sorry for both of them, but my heart really bled for little miss. Judging by the twenty minutes or so during which I watched the action, the girl did not know the boundaries of appropriate behaviour nor have any method of getting what she wanted other than disobedience and screaming. If she was a child with a disability she should not have been handled that way; if she was a normal child she had, very obviously, never been given rules or boundaries. And it seemed to me that her mother did not care.

Kids, I believe, need rules. Boundaries to their behaviours inside which they can feel safe. Techniques (good manners with strange adults, for one) that they can trust to work and to make them likeable. How to bargain for what they want badly. Structure. Support. This poor little kid did not seem to have any of these things. She was angry and, I think, frightened of her own anger. She was frustrated and had no way to express the frustration other than to scream.

There are a lot of children with behavioural problems who need skilled help. She may be one of them. In our province many of these children are presently waiting to be diagnosed at the request of teachers whose access to services is ludicrously small. Even when the children are diagnosed, ever growing numbers of them are on waiting lists because the service providers have no funds to hire staff to deal with them. There are caps in this year of economic downturn on a lot of the programs funded by the Ontario government through the Ministry of Health and Social Services; no money is available even for the programs that are up and running.

There are also a lot of average children whose behaviour is out of control because no one in their life has consistently tried to teach them how to act in a way that will bring them success. No one has helped them learn to govern their tempers, to share, to have patience, to get along with other people. No one has, if you will excuse the plain speaking, civilized them.

Both of these lacks are sickening, because it is the children who suffer in the long term, not the adults who fail to provide the help and support. I ended up wishing that someone would pour a pail of cold water over the head of little miss screamer. And that's horrible. Because I think every adult in the hair cutters' establishment was thinking much the same. While, in fact, she was suffering a lot more than we were, poor thing.

Sproing!

Sunday, in my flower bed.

Monday.
Sunday, a brave little bunch of croci pop out their golden heads.
Just look what that got them.

Weather forecast: Snow still falling, mix of rain and snow predicted for tomorrow and Wednesday.

April fool? That's me.

Monday Mission - When the stream runs dry.

We had sun today - glorious, warm April sun that melted away the inch or so of snow that fell on Saturday evening, snow that fell while the ED and her family were here for the ED's birthday dinner, snowflakes big and wet whirling down while the family went for a walk in the woods behind our house, checking out the newly opened streams and playing with the ED's birthday camera, snow that did not stick on the tarmacked roads and make their drive home slippery and dangerous. I was glad. Dangerous situations for my family are like dams against which the stream of my thoughts piles up, halts and whirls in eddies of worry thick with sticks and reeds of nervous and often unrealistic fears.

I think, in fact, that my thoughts are like the little streams that run in our bush, swollen at times with ideas from books I have read or from newspapers or from reading here in Blog land. When that happens, as when the snow melts away in the spring and the ground thaws, my mind races merrily downhill, swirling the dead leaves of other years, covering the rocks of insecurity and self doubt, bubbling, circling, dancing, carving new chanels sometimes in the soft earth of my mind. And then the spate slows, energy spent, and the things I think are tame and ordinary and quiet within the stream's new carved banks. The tips of the rocks reappear and the stream slows still more until it lies in stagnant pools crawling with larvae and green with water weed, steaming in the burning summer sun.

When there are newly opened croci in my flower bed and the robins start to sing and a swift black cloud of redwing blackbirds races across the kitchen window, you would think that my energy would grow with the spring, from the spring, that new freshets of words and images would leap from the split rocks and flow merrily along. Sometimes it even happens that way but not always, not often enough, not nearly often enough to make me feel confident in this medium I have lately adopted. I feel dry as a desert canyon tonight, dusty and cold under a gibbering moon in a sky from which it seems impossible rain or snow would ever fall. A baked mud stream bed, rocks heaving through the clay like bones, dead reeds rattling in a thin cold wind.

Sitting, fingers slack on the keyboard, hoping that the rains will come again.

This has been a Monday Mission as managed by Painted Maypole. The assignment was to write a 'stream of consciousness' post. And, as usual, I cheated.

Maypole, you think up hard ones. Love you for it!

More News from the Hostage Incident

You will be pleased to know that Mary G was released at noon to-day. Although complaining that she was tortured by being forced to lay on the floor for a long time, she seems to be not much the worse for her ordeal. Which is a good thing.