Picture Update

Finally, a picture update. I spent some time archiving last year's pictures during this update, and you can find a link to this archive (as well as the current year's image) on the Images page.

February's update include pictures from Grand-Daddo and Grandma Jackie's visit earlier this month, as well as some fun with shaving cream ... and Aidan dressed as a knight.

You can check out the February pictures here and you can check out the new yearly archive page (which only goes back to 2003 at this point) here.

Cosmicomics

It's been a while since I've been able to read a book. I've been listening to a lot of audio books on my commute back and forth to work (and I may soon be doing reviews of those books). However, I recently was able to sit down with a short, relatively easy read that has a round-about connection to a couple of other books I've mentioned in some of my other book reviews, so I couldn't resist writing about it here.

A while back, I read a book entitled Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman. At the time, I was a little frustrated with that book, as it seemed to be trying to emulate the writing style of Italo Calvino and was missing the mark. Don't get me wrong, Lightman did a fairly good job with his subject matter. But it did make me long for a similar story by Calvino. It seemd like it would be right up his alley.

As it turns out, Calvino did write a book on a similar subject. Calvino's book, Cosmicomics, tells the story of the evolution of the universe through an entity narrartor (who goes by the name Qfwfq) who floats through the stories — sometimes as a disembodied consciousness; other times as a mollusk and everything in betwee. Somehow Calvino makes it work.

This collection of short stories does have its dull moments, but the gems really shine. For example, one story shares with us what it was like to be in the universe right before the "Big Bang." All of the consciousness of the universe was there, every entity. but it all existed in one point. Think of the gossip (which was all blamed on the housekeeper, who really didn't have much to do, since dust couldn't really enter the singular point).

In this particular story, Qfwfq has a crush on this one particular "woman" entity ... and so did all of the other guys. She was beautiful, but also generous and made each one feel special, so there was no jealousy among the group.

We got along so well all together, so well that something extraordinary was bound to happen. It was enough for her to say, at a certian moment: "Oh, if I only had some room, how I'd like to make some noodles for you boys!" And in that moment we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy, moving backward and forward with the rolling pin over the dough, her bossom leaning over the great mound of flour and eggs which cluttered the wide board while her ams kneaded and kneaded, white and shiny with oil up to the elbows; we thought of the space that the flour would occupy, and the wheat for the flour, and the fields to raise the wheat, and the mountains from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields, and the grazing lands for the herds of calves that would give their meat for the sauce; of the space it would take for the Sun to arrive with its rays, to ripen the wheat; of the space for the Sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gasses and burn; of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet . . .

Calvio does a wonderful job throughout the book of not only bringing in the ideas of science, but humanity; maybe more accurately: the psychology of the universe. Everything is humanized and everything is brought about in such a way that the origins of the universe is not only poignant and interesting, but also funny — and at times sad.

This book will probably not help teach you much of astro-physics. But it is a wonderfully written tale that can teach us a lot about taking different perspectives to understanding even the most remote and outlandish ideas.

Grade: A-

Facts are Facts, Except When They Change

I was recently listening to A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn and in it he reflected on how some people feel that our kids are no longer being taught "facts" in school.

Zinn interprets the lack of "facts" in our schools as being a reflection of the times; that we has new perceptions and understandings of what have happened and are able to look at things in completely new ways, much as the article by Anna Quindlen (posted yesterday) indicated. Sometimes, what was once accepted as fact is now understood in a new light and that former "truth" is a fallacy.

For example, once upon a time, Christopher Columbus was a hero to be hailed by all red-blooded Americans. Eventually we were able to take another percpetive of the events, one that revealed a completely different aspect of his "discovery" of the New World.

History isn't the only thing that gets revised. For quite some time (my research shows that this started in 1991), there's been a campaign to encourage Americans to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables per day. "They" (the government, I think) have done fairly well with this campaign. So well, in fact, that most people in my age group pretty much accept "five-a-day" as a "fact."

Well, this fact has now been revised. It's now nine servings a day. Actually, men are supposed to "shoot for 9," while women are encouraged to "aim for 7."

One might wonder where they get any of these numbers to begin with. Why was five servings considered enough at one time, but inadequate at another time? I have some theories, most of which involve the government cowing to certain well-endowed lobbyists (pun intended). Why was "five" revised to nine or seven? Good question. Will it be revised again in the future? Another good question....

The Good Enough Mother

Renee found this article, written by Anna Quindlen of Newsweek (found in the Feb. 21 issue):

Forget about day camp or mandatory Gymboree. What's the point of raising kids if we don't have a good time and a few laughs?

There was a kind of carelessness to my childhood. I wandered away from time to time, rode my bike too far from home, took the trolley to nowhere in particular and back again. If you had asked my mother at any given time where I was, she would likely have paused from spooning Gerber's peas into a baby's mouth or ironing our school uniforms and replied, "She's around here somewhere."

By the new standards of mothering, my mother was a bust. Given the number of times I got lost when I was young, she might even be termed neglectful. There's only one problem with that conclusion. It's dead wrong. My mother was great at what she did. Don't misunderstand: she didn't sit on the floor and help us build with our Erector sets, didn't haul us from skating rink to piano lessons. She couldn't even drive. But where she was always felt like a safe place.

The idea that that's enough is a tough sell in our current culture, and not simply because if one of my kids had been found wandering far from our home there would have been a caseworker and a cop at the door. We live in a perfection society now, in which it is possible to make our bodies last longer, to manipulate our faces so the lines of laughter and distress are wiped out. We believe in the illusion of control, and nowhere has that become more powerful—and more pernicious—than in the phenomenon of manic motherhood. What the child-care guru D. W. Winnicott once called "the ordinary devoted mother" is no longer good enough. Instead there is an über-mom who bounces from soccer field to school fair to play date until she falls into bed at the end of the day, exhausted, her life somewhere between the Stations of the Cross and a decathlon.

A perfect storm of trends and events contributed to this. One was the teeter-totter scientific argument of nature versus nurture. When my mother was raising kids, there was a sub rosa assumption that they were what they were. The smart one. The sweet one. Even the bad one. There was only so much a mother could do to mold the clay she'd been dealt.

But as I became a mother, all that was changing. Little minds, we learned from researchers, were infinitely malleable, even before birth. Don't get tense: tense moms make tense infants. (That news'll make you tense!) In a prenatal exercise class, I remember lying on the mat working on what was left of my stomach muscles, listening to the instructor repeating, "Now hug your baby." If I had weak abs, did that mean my baby went unhugged? Keeping up with the Joneses turned into keeping up with the Joneses' kids. Whose mothers, by the way, lied. I now refuse to believe in 9-month-olds who speak in full sentences. But I was more credulous, and more vulnerable, when I had a 9-month-old myself.

This craziness sounds improbable in the face of the feminist revolution that transformed the landscape of America during our lifetime. But at some level it is the fruit of that revolution, a comeuppance cleverly disguised as a calling. Every time we take note of the fact that work is not a choice but an economic necessity—"most women have to work, you know"—it's an apology for freedom. How better to circumvent the power of the new woman than with the idea of mothering not as care but as creation? Every moment for children was a teachable moment—and every teachable moment missed was a measure of a lousy mom.

My baby-boomer friends and I were part of the first generation of women who took for granted that we would work throughout our lifetime, and like most pioneers we made it up as we went along. In 1976, Dr. Spock revised his bible of child care to say that it was all right if we worked and had children as well. There was a slapdash approach to melding these disparate roles, usually reflected in the iconic woman at a business meeting with spit-up on her shoulder. My first sitter was the erstwhile manager of a cult punk band. She was a good sitter, too. We got by.

But quicker than you could say nanny cam, books appeared, seminars were held and modern motherhood was codified as a profession. Professionalized for women who didn't work outside the home: if they were giving up such great opportunities, then the tending of kids needed to be made into an all-encompassing job. Professionalized for women who had paying jobs out in the world: to show that their work was not bad for their kids, they had to take child rearing as seriously as dealmaking. (Fathers did not have to justify themselves; after all, no man has ever felt moved to say that most guys have to work, you know.)

It's not just that baking for the bake sale, meeting with the teachers, calling the other mothers about the sleepover and looking at the SAT camp made women of both sorts crazy, turning stress from an occasional noun into an omnipresent verb and adverb. A lot of this was not particularly good for kids. If your mother has been micromanaging your homework since you were 6, it's hard to feel any pride of ownership when you do well. You can't learn from mistakes and disappointments if your childhood is engineered so there aren't any.

So much has been written about how the young people of America seem to stay young longer now, well into the years when their grandparents owned houses and had families. But their grandparents never had a mother calling the teacher to complain about a bad grade. And hair-trigger attention spans may be less a function of PlayStation and more a function of kids who never have a moment's peace. I passed on the weekend roundelay of kiddie-league sports so our three could hang out with one another. I told people I hoped it would cement a bond among them, and it did. But I really wanted to be reading rather than standing on the sidelines pretending my kids were soccer prodigies. Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.

Our oldest child wrestled custody of his life away from me at a fairly early age, perhaps inspired by an epic bout in which I tried to persuade him to rewrite a perfectly good fourth-grade paper to turn it into an eighth-grade paper. Perhaps I'd been addled by the class art projects, some of which looked like the work of a crack graphics design team—and were. I asked the other day about his memories of my mothering. "You sorta freaked out during the college application process," he noted accurately. But then he wrote, "What I remember most: having a good time." You can engrave that on my headstone right this minute.

There's the problem with turning motherhood into martyrdom. There's no way to do it and have a good time. If we create a never-ending spin cycle of have-tos because we're trying to expiate senseless guilt about working or not working, trying to keep up with the woman at school whose kid gets A's because she writes the papers herself, the message we send our children is terrible. By our actions we tell them that being a mom—being their mom—is a drag, powered by fear, self-doubt and conformity, all the things we are supposed to teach them to overcome. It just becomes a gloss on that old joke: Enough about me. What about you? How do you make me feel about myself? The most incandescent memories of my childhood are of making my mother laugh. My kids did the same for me. A good time is what they remember long after toddler programs and art projects are over. The rest is just scheduling.

Coffee, Coffee Everywhere!

A study conducted in Japan and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute has suggested that drinking coffee can decrease the risk of certain types of liver cancer.

As Associated Press reporter Randolph E. Schmid writes:

A study of more than 90,000 Japanese found that people who drank coffee daily or nearly every day had half the liver cancer risk of those who never drank coffee. The protective effect occurred in people who drank one to two cups a day and increased at three to four cups.

They found the likely occurrence of liver cancer in people who never or almost never drank coffee was 547.2 cases per 100,000 people over 10 years.

But for people who drank coffee daily the risk was 214.6 cases per 100,000, the researchers report in this week's issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Bad News for Low-Carb Diets

A couple of days ago, I was talking to someone about low-carb diets and how many of the diet plans may not be very wholistic in their approach, thus requiring those that follow the diets to exclude some foods that are good for you, while asking those same people to induldge in other foods that may not be considered so healthful.

Well, here's some more evidence:

According to a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, older women who eat a relatively large amount of protein from red meat or dairy products may have an elevated risk of dying from heart disease.

The investigators found that among more than 29,000 postmenopausal women, those who reported the highest intake of protein from red meat and dairy products had a roughly 40 percent higher risk of dying from heart disease over the next 15 years compared with women with the lowest intake of these foods.

The risk would seem to stem from the protein intake itself, according to lead author Dr. Linda E. Kelemen, because her group considered the subjects' overall diet -- including intake of fat, fiber and total calories -- and factors such as exercise, smoking and body weight.

High-protein and fatty foods are staples of Atkins-style diets that shun carbohydrates such as white bread and pasta. Though these diets have been shown to spur weight loss and dips in blood cholesterol in the short term, many experts worry that if people stick with such a menu over time, it could spell trouble for the blood vessels and heart. [from Reuters - Health]

And, in another study, researchers found that a particular compound in carrots may be a potent cancer fighter, reducing malignancies in rats by a third.

"Perhaps the single most significant implication of this study is that it reaffirms dietary common sense in our era of dietary silliness," said Dr. David L. Katz, an associate clinical professor of public health and director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine.

Katz noted that some of the popular "low-carb" diets actually banish carrots because they have a high glycemic (sugar) index. "[This study] helps reveal the folly of this oversimplified and rigid interpretation of what constitutes good food," he said. [from HealthDay]

Diet Lowers Cholesterol

A diet rich in fiber and vegetables lowered cholesterol just as much as taking a statin drug, Canadian researchers reported on Monday.

David Jenkins of St. Michael's Hospital and the University of Toronto and colleagues created what they called a diet "portfolio" high in soy protein, almonds, and cereal fiber as well as plant sterols — tree-based compounds used in cholesterol-lowering margarines, salad dressing and other products.

Writing in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Jenkins and colleagues said the low-fat diet lowered LDL — the low-density lipoprotein or "bad" cholesterol — by 8.5 percent after a month. Statins lowered LDL by 33 percent and the "portfolio" diet lowered LDL by nearly 30 percent. A quarter of the group, got their lowest LDL levels from being on the portfolio diet.

The portfolio was rich in soy milk, soy burgers, almonds, oats, barley, psyllium seeds, okra and eggplant.

[From Reuters - Health]

Gift from Aidan

We were walking through Academy (a sporting goods store), and Renee and I were a little disctracted as we were looking at a particular item. We looked around and Aidan was gone.

We went our separate ways, spreading out so we could find Aidan quicker. Renee went around the corner and found Aidan looking at some shoes.

"No!" He said. "I'm looking for some shoes for the baby. They'll make the baby soooo happy."

So, we purchased the smallest pair of blue sneakers that we could find, as a gift from Aidan.

Week 19

Today was our "big" doctor's appointment. We're officially 19 weeks into the pregnancy and we scheduled the "big" sonogram for this week. Typically, this would be done after week 20, but we had some visitors (Gran-Daddo and Grandma Jackie), so we re-worked the schedule so they could see the sonogram live and in person.

After everything that we've been through, this sonogram proved to be a wonderful milestone. All the appropriate things were checked and accounted for. We could easily see and count the toes on each of the two feet, as well as well-defined bone structure, a properly angled and divided heart and brain, a full stomach and bladder, 2 kidneys, liver, etc. They checked for and did not see any signs of Downs Syndrome, Spina Bifida, cleft palate, and Hydrocephalus. All of the measurements, femur and head circumference for example, came out to be in the 50th percentile and indicated a gestation of 19 weeks and 1 day; just about as perfect as one can get.

Love Me Later

Renee related this story to me:

We were sitting down having breakfast and I said to Aidan, "I love you." He looked at me and said: "I'm eating cereal now. Love me later."