Rural Dreams

Moving Day

We are moving into the new house today. There is still not really a kitchen, but the stairs are painted and the old carpeting debris has been moved out to the garage. It has been hard on all of us having Steve go up for a few days at a time while Aidan and I wait here. Steve begins to feel overwhelmed and Aidan and I are getting stir crazy, so we're going to just go.

I don't have a phone or internet access up there yet, so I might be scarce here for a short while. A friend of mine has offered to let me hook up to the DSL in his office, so I might be checking in from there.

We think there is someone squatting there, but if so, they leave no evidence except for turning on lights. The house has been vacant and unlocked since September, so it wouldn't be out of the question. It's just that everytime Steve leaves, he is sure that he turns all of the lights off, and everytime he returns, there are lights on. Last weekend, he and his twin brother were up there, talking in the garage. His brother is saying to get rid of the garage windows and Steve is saying - no, that he likes them because if he's doing carpentry or painting work in there, he can open them and get some air. The windows were shut because it was, of course, bitterly cold. The next morning when they got up, the windows had been opened. So what do you think, ghost or squatter?

Painted Like A Spirit Horse

I am so grateful that Steve and I can both be more delighted than upset when Aidan emerges from quiet play in the next room with his face, "painted like a Spirit horse."

Birthing Large Babies

Somewhere in all of my reading about childbirth before Aidan was born, I came across an anthropological study of Pygmy women, who birth enormous babies compared to the mother's small size. I just did a google search for it and came across this article by Gloria LeMay, which has lots of other goodies in it too. I was trying to find a non-midwife source for the information, but had no luck, just an article from UNICEF saying how tragic it is that the Pygmies don't have doctors to birth their babies. Okay, in all fairness, the article means to address inequities in Congolese society, and childbirth issue is just one of many things mentioned.

Sonogram

I got a sonogram on Thursday. It was my first. This fact often sends well meaning people into fits. Like babies need sonograms. I only had one very early on with Aidan, because he was conceived after a miscarriage, and I had no period to set a due date by. So it was strictly for dating and he was like a little peanut and the whole thing was totally unimpressive, rather unpleasant, and short.

This sonogram was just lovely. The technician was a friendly, gentle woman who was happy to answer my questions about what she was looking at. The lights were out and there was just the light whirring of the sono machine as it sort of massaged my belly. Head, kidneys, cross section of the umbilical cord, placenta, heart, brain, amniotic fluid - it went on for at least half an hour.

At one point she said she can tell the sex of the baby, trying to tempt me. I assured her that I didn't want to know.

I could see the femur right up where it is poking me all the time at the top left of my belly.

It was all very sort of like biology class and not very emotional, but then she got a profile. Who does it look like, she asked me? "It has big lips", I said. I remember thinking that Aidan had beautiful lips, but not big lips. Steve doesn't have big lips. The technician looked at me, "do you have big lips?" I puffed them out for her. Not particularly.

Then she got the face which blew my mind. I cried on the way home looking at the face. With both pregnancies, I've felt pretty disconnected from the baby until it is born. Seeing the face really set my mind going. "Does it look like a boy or a girl?", she asked, teasing me.

I asked her all of the questions that I knew would be important for the birth and got reassuring answers for all of them. The head is down, the placenta is on top, butt toward the front of me. There is a little more fluid than they would expect. The baby is so big that the averages generated by the machine sets my due date to Feb 3rd. (It's actually Feb 15th, and there is no doubt that that date is accurate because my last period was on Mother's Day.) I am not put off by this at all. I am so big that I thought I might be carrying twins. Aidan was 10lbs. and I am bigger than I was with him. I loved that he was big, he was fabulously healthy and although I had a terrible labor, I had no trouble delivering him. I only pushed for about 20 minutes.

I expected the doctor to come in and congratulate me about how healthy everything was, but she didn't. She wanted to talk about what a big baby it was and could I deliver a baby that big and there might be trauma in the birth. If I wasn't so well educated on this, she would have scared the shit out of me. I think she would have lined me up for a c-section right there. She prescribed another sono in 2-3 weeks. I quizzed her on this and I can't really see a good reason, unless you believe that there is something inherently dysfunctional and dangerous about big babies. What a fabulous waste of money.

Some Things Never Change

The front page of the Times today prompted Steve to start reciting Gil-Scott Heron's Whitey on the Moon.

Sometimes I imagine Bush's corporate backers IMing each other, seeing who can come up with the most outrageous demands of the President.

-Back out of the Kyoto Protocol and deny global warming in spite of ice caps melting off of Mt. Kilmanjaro and the ironic situation in the arctic tundra where the time available for oil exploration has been cut in half by warming temperatures.

-Invade Iraq and award all redevelopment contracts to American corporations which will then overcharge for the work.

-Build a space station on the moon while the nation is mired in recession, unemployment, and defecit.

Whahahahaha <-- evil laughter

I just bought Whitey on the Moon from the iTunes store - and thought, wouldn't it be cool if it was suddenly on their best seller list? You can hear a sample here.

Update: This is in an email from MoveOn.org, from a speech that Al Gore made last night. "While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors he is a moral coward - so weak that he seldom if ever says 'No' to them on anything - no matter what the public interest might mandate."

House Tour

These aren't totally pure "before" pictures because Steve already has done some work on the house.

This was our first impression of the house. See the cross in the metal burn can? (people use these for burnable garbage in rural NY state where you have to bring the garbage to the dump and pay by the bag.) That marked their dog's grave when we first pulled up to the house. I imagine the dog is still buried there in the right angle between the sheds. I hope he's buried deep or Wes will dig him right up. We have since found dog shit not only in the basement, but quite a bit in a crawl space that is accessed from a bedroom closet. It's a horrible place to keep a dog.

The first time we looked at the house, we never saw the front, which is actually quite charming.

Here's the back door of the house, which is the main door. It's not situated at all for front door use. I'd like to change that somehow, because there is this really nice room just to the right of the front door that I am imagining as a web design office/drum lessons room, and I'd rather have clients/students use the front door. All of that stuff around the door is kitchen cabinets that Steve already ripped out.

Here's a panorama of the kitchen. My new camera has this featre for building panoramic shots, it turned out allright I think. The thing on the left is Tyson dancing. The thing on the right is the inside of the freezer. See how nice and clean it is? I have a wonderful husband. It was horrifying before he cleaned it. Behind the freezer is the back door and mudroom and a wall with a tall window and a radiator. The window that you see in this picture probably used to be long like the other one, but was shortened for modern kitchen appliances: the electric stove was here. It just looks out onto the mudroom now anyway, which was most certainly an addition and not part of the original house design. Steve's mom's kitchen has a pair of long windows like this that she was unwilling to give up and it made re-designing her kitchen very difficult. The houses are probably about the same age - about 100 years. There are two doorways behind Tyson. One goes into a sort of mystery room with no apparent purpose (this doorway was previously blocked by a thin piece of wood and the fridge). The other doorway goes to what has been called the dining room, but it is also the room that has the front door, so I have trouble calling it that. There is a doorway between the mystery room and the dining room. We want to tear down some configuration of these walls - all of them or pieces of them to open up the space on the first floor. It used to be that kitchens were messy, noisy places, and you wanted them separated from the rest of the living space. Modernizing means undoing that. We'd also like to fit a half bath in here somewhere, but that's not at all hashed out yet.

All of the pictures are a little yellow, I didn't use the flash. There is a way to adjust the white balance on the camera, but I haven't figured it out yet.

Some kitchen details. Layers of flooring. The ceiling is plywood with strips of wood to make it look like acoustical tile (why on earth would you want that?) and stickers in the center of each square. This is one of two outside walls after a piece of thin cardbord-ish plywood was pulled off of it. It's sort of interesting to speculate what went on here.

Here are the stairs and again. Steve ripped off carpeting from them and is going to paint them because the paint on them is likely to be lead. Why do you think there is that unpainted stripe down the middle? Steve thinks there was a strip of carpet there and someone painted around it. Very odd. We want to retread them in the future, but it's not high on our priority list. It bothered us at first that the stairs are all enclosed like this, and we talked a bit about opening them up somehow, but we're not minding them as much now. They just need a railing. The upstairs is not all that interesting - so I just have one picture of our bedroom. It's a nice room. The previous owners had redone the whole upstairs when they bought the house five years ago, so Steve has just had to rip out the dog pee soaked carpeting and he put down plywood. We'll put wood flooring down over the plywood as we can afford it. He's priming the whole upstairs and we decided we'll paint when the weather is warmer and we can have the windows open. Aidan knew he wanted a light blue room, so his room got a coat of paint. Upstairs is two bedrooms, a bathroom and a short, wide hallway.

I've spent way too much time at the computer this morning so qhickly three more pics. A panorama of the front room aka "dining room". You can see the doorway to the mystery room on the right. See all of the stuff around the top of the wall? Those are all individual little stickers. The house is full of them - it's like a little kid lived there.

Here's a shot of the mudroom that makes it look very charming and farmy. It's not really all that charming. It's slated for domolition and reconstruction. That paint might be lead, we'll have to test it.

Here's the view out the backdoor. There's the detatched garage (I hate it when garages are attatched) and a nice tree. Oh and here are the garage doors. They need some help, but I love them. For an old outbuilding, the garage is in remarkably good shape. It looks plumb and square and it has electricity which will come in handy because we discovered this past week that we are going to have to keep the engine on Steve's truck warm in some way in the winter. We couldn't start it for three days because of the cold.

Baby Wish List

That's a Christy's eye view. I think that that stripe is the only thing that I really like about my pregnant body. It was much darker with Aidan, maybe because it was the summertime. There is a mole on each side of it. We don't have a lot of mirrors, so this is mostly what I see of myself.

I made a wish list for the baby. I have all of Aidan's infant stuff still so I should be all set for newborn clothes. I'll probably add to this as I think of things and if anyone has a suggestion, leave a comment. The diapering stuff is mindboggling to pick out, so any advice on that is appreciated too. I'm assuming that this will be another big baby.

Home, But Still Transients

The whole family (minus Wes) has been upstate since Wednesday, and we're going back tomorrow. I was only going to stay for a couple of days, but then was reminded that I had promised to watch a friend's daughter over the weekend. It's turned out really good, we're camped out at our friends' house. They actually also live with their mom, but she's very easy and is out of town for the week besides.

The girl we're hanging out with today is a year older than Aidan, but they get along really well. Their play is really funny - she goes to a Waldorf kindergaren, so there is a combination of super heroes-swords-guns and elements that I know come from the Waldorf influence - berry picking, a "trusty steed", magic wands and songs from her Three Kings Day play. They really adore each other, so it's a nice way to spend the day.

It's good to have a few days here with a home base too. Yesterday I called a local midwife that delivered a friend's child. I've been flummoxed by the fact that I can't do this legally here, and only just gave up on trying to find a Certified Nurse Midwife with hospital backup which NY State law says you have to have. All of the surrounding states, including Massachussettes and Connecticut, both which are very close to here, allow "direct entry" midwives.

I've been anticipating that finding any midwife at all who would be available on such short notice would involve a lot of calling and visiting and negotiating. I was thrilled yesterday when the first person that I called is available and could actually see me that afternoon. After talking to her a bit, I am excited to work with this kind of midwife, in spite of the damned law. It was so easy and she lives about 20 minutes from our house. She works with a group of midwives and she said that there are always two attending each birth so that one is always fresh and rested. I'll still have Medicaid, so if there is an emergency, I'll be covered. Resolving this is a huge relief and it was so much easier than I thought it would be.

I'm also appreciating our house more and more. Driving around, I see all of the kinds of places that people are living and it makes me realize how well this house suits us. I'm actually feeling a little silly about how dissatisfied I have felt about it. In so many ways, it is exactly what we wanted: it's modest, it's old, it's got good bones and most of the work that it needs is cosmetic. The high temperature here today is 10 degrees and when we woke up this morning it was minus 11F. It will be an easy house to keep warm.

Gendered II

Maia's comment prompted me to write more about this - I never seem to get into words quite as much as is in my head.

The reason this gender thing is hard is because I've made my parenting choices up to this point based on NOT being dictatorial and trusting that a child knows how to play best without my interference (I know Maia and I both read the same book). I am actually suspecting that kids who identify strongly with their gender in this way are fulfilling a real need - and maybe it's healthy.

So, I won't trash the Barbie any more than I trash the gun play. But it will be just as hard to stomach - and the harder thing is that I don't think that I would be able to relate to it.

Part of why I am thinking about this lately is because Aidan has been making a lot of comments about what boys/men/girls/women do and like. Girls like pink. Men fix computers. I feel like I'm doing a lot of damage control, but not feeling like I'm getting anywhere with it.

While my niece was here I asked her if she has any blocks or legos. She doesn't have them at home, though she has them in school. But she informs me that only the boys play with blocks. "What do the girls play with?", I ask. She tells me the girls play "housekeeping". When I mention this to her mom later (if only because I wasn't sure that I heard her right), I am told that there is a kitchen / house kind of area with various cooking and cleaning toys and they call that area "housekeeping".

I could also look at it in a bigger context - Aidan is trying to classify a lot of things right now. He always wants to know if someone is a good guy or a bad guy - and there's not much room for shades of grey for him. Maybe it's just a stage of development. I find child development books too tiresome to try to research this.

Aidan's really into superheroes right now and my brother got him a set of action figures: The Women of Gotham City. Today he pointed to Bat Girl's bullet breasts and asked me what they were. This is a boy who nursed until only a few months ago. I said they were her breasts. He asked why she had them. I said, because she's a woman. He said, "No she's not, she's a girl. She's Bat Girl." It's a good thing that he notices that something's wrong here.

Gendered

My 3 1/2 year old niece was just here for ten days and she is completely consumed with BarbieDisneyPrincessesBallerinasandthecolorpink. Aidan is also into much more "boy" stuff than I imagined possible for a child of mine. I spend a lot of time puzzling over nurture vs. nature with these things.

There is a clear desire for each of them to create an identity with their sex. Aidan's behavior with fighting and gun play took some time for me to understand, and has been hard for me to swallow, but I try to make a distinction between the child's world and mine, and trust that he knows how to play better than I do. My niece's gender stuff is almost more bewildering because I'm not used to it and because it's more personal for me, sharing a gender with her and all.

I rejected a lot of girl stuff at a young age, though maybe my memory begins when I was older than her. At the same time, I don't think that I participated in the kind of imaginative play that Aidan does and that I remember my brother doing. I think that I felt sort of lonely, not having a strong gender identity, though I never, ever wanted to be a boy. So I'm sort of torn between finding my niece's behavior objectionable and thinking that maybe it's really healthy.

And the whole thing has made me a little nervous that I might have a girl and she might crave Barbies the way that Aidan craves violence in his play. Kids have a way of smashing apart your reality, and I'm not confident that I would handle that as gracefully with a girl as I have with a boy. It's funny, everybody assumes that I'm just praying for a girl baby, and I always say that I don't care, I just want a healthy baby, but there's a little (perhaps scared) part of me that's rooting for another boy. I've already made peace with the shooting, but princesses? Pink? Barbie? I don't know if I can do it.