pregnancy collides with feminist movement?

Wendy W. Williams, a strong legal advocate the gender equality, wrote in The Equality Crisis: Some Reflections on Culture, Courts, and Feminism, 


"[F]eminists who seek special recognition for pregnancy are starting from the same basic assumption, namely, that women have a special place in the scheme of human existence when it comes to maternity. . . . The special treatment model has great costs. . . . [T]he reality [is] that conceptualizing pregnancy as a special case permits unfavorable as well as favorable treatment of pregnancy. Our history provides too many illustrations of the former. . . ."

We used this quote yesterday to generate discussion on the matter of pregnancy in the workplace, the Equal Pay Act, the Pregnancy Disability Act, and how this all plays into feminists' efforts to close the gender gap. Williams represents one camp that feels any special treatment of women, pregnant or otherwise, results in further contribution to the harmful female stereotype. At first, I was a little outraged at her sentiments; I thought, "Surely, she doesn't expect women to give birth one day and return to work the next." Personally, I firmly believe women can be feminine, maternal, and feminist and I think Williams does, too. This is just an excerpt that slightly skews her intended message.

All too often, onlookers believe feminists equate equality with becoming like a man. In my Law and Gender class, we brought up Hollywood's fad surrogacy practice–Nicole Kidman and Sarah Jessica Parker recently welcomed biological children incubated in a surrogate mother. My professor's comment was, "That makes the women like the men." And it's comments like these that tend to communicate a mistaken message that the goal of the feminist movement is to be a man or like a man. Unfortunately, rather than helping the feminist movement, this threatens to play into the superior, dominant masculine fallacy. And if this was what the feminist movement was truly seeking, we'd have a problem, but I don't honestly think feminists are saying they want women to be like men. What they mean to communicate is a desire to attain the same status as men, but in doing such, we are forced to reconcile distinctly feminine roles, such as pregnancy, and workplace and societal roles.

Current legislation, such as the Pregnancy Disability Act (PDA), despite its name, treats pregnancy like any other disability, thus allowing women to take necessary medical leave without fear of losing her job. As far as the employer is concerned, the difference is not pregnant and non-pregnant employees, but disabled and non-disabled employees. That latter classification completely removes any gender classification, thus eliminating the "unfavorable" costs to which Williams refers. Now before you people get your panties in a bunch, I'm not saying it's at all nice to call pregnancy a disability; it's not a disability. It's a great joy, a miracle, and one the most amazing experiences of my life, but that doesn't change the fact that pregnancy comes with some disabling symptoms: vomiting, nausea, bloating, constipation, a beach ball-sized belly, frequent urination, child birth, contractions, and miserable, miserable back and pelvic pain, just to name a few. And for the sake of keeping things gender-neutral, it seems less-harmful to refer to pregnancy as a disability, at least for legislative purposes, rather than create a special pregnancy provision that would, as Williams argues, come at great cost to women.

Too often people see special pregnancy policies as a means of promoting lesser qualified women and giving women special privileges as opposed to what it really is, medical leave. Now I realize this is really just a semantics argument, but in this case, "maternity leave" and "medical leave" carry two distinct sets of stereotypes/ideas/stigmas. "Maternity leave" conjures images of a woman sweating and screaming in a hospital bed and then later cuddling with a cooing infant and folding tiny onesies. "Medical leave," on the other hand, at least in my mind, brings about a much more gender neutral image involving surgery or some medical procedure and much-needed post-procedure rest and recovery. The latter is much more favorable to the feminist movement in that it works to detach feminine stereotypes.

And now, before I lose the attention of my audience, I'm going to end this post here, to be continued at some later date (I know; kind of an awkward place to end, but I'm getting ready to hop on a bus to the airport to get on a plane that will take us back to sunny Florida for a few days–yay!). Gender issues are a personal favorite and they will certainly be a frequent topic of future blog posts. My hope for these posts, and all others for that matter, is that they will generate discussion and inspire my readers to think in more depth about these issues.

vegetables.

anyone who has a kid knows that getting her to eat vegetables is a near impossibility. i mean, seriously; try convincing a baby that vegetables, even though they taste like grass, are really, really good for her. she's not going to buy your reasoning. trust me; i've tried. instead of tossing them down her gullet like the rest of us health-conscious eaters, she casually flings them to the floor, or spreads them around her tray to make it look like she ate a few, OR, and this is my favorite, she eats one and then gags and coughs like she just ate a sardine covered in cayenne pepper. vegetables were a constant frustration for my husband and i, until a friend of mine posted on facebook a genius solution to vegetables: fruit smoothies. this woman deserves a nobel prize in my opinion; she's brilliant. thanks to her suggestion, our baby eats her vegetables and sometimes even begs for more. 

so here's how you do it: pick one or two vegetables, like peas, spinach, or squash and steam them until they are soft and can be easily pureed. next, pick a couple fruits, like banana, mango, peach, or blueberries and dump them in with the steamed veggies. finally, add some plain or vanilla yogurt (preferably organic--stoneyfield is a good brand) and puree. it's so easy and there are so many combinations you can come up with. you can even substitute yogurt for coconut milk or juice or milk (again, choose organic milk). because our baby doesn't grasp the concept of a straw or cup all that well, we add a little bit of gerber oatmeal cereal to thicken the puree and spoon feed it to her. also, i like to make a bunch of purees ahead of time and freeze them so i have a variety to choose from whenever i need them. this evening, i spent 20 minutes or so making a couple trays of purees. for one of the mixtures, i combined spinach, banana, blueberry and vanilla yogurt. it came out looking like tar, but tasting like marshmallow fluff (according to my husband). the frozen smoothy cubes make nice snacks, too. we put the cubes in a munchkin "fresh food feeder" and let her go to town. it's also a miracle treat for teething. 

satisfied customer.

perhaps needless to say, i totally recommend giving it a try. according to my child, anything tastes good when it's mixed with banana. 

p.s. i don't know about anyone else, but we can't always afford organic alternatives. rather than break the bank, we investigated which foods we should try to buy organic and which foods are fine to buy non-organic. the general rule for fruits and vegetables is if it has a thick peel or husk, don't buy organic, but there are a couple exceptions to the rule. here's the official list we came up with (i keep this list handy so that i can consult it when making my grocery lists): 

BUY ORGANIC

milk             eggs

potatoes       spinach

grapes          pears

apples          peaches

celery          cherries

nectarines    poultry

beef             bell peppers 

pork             strawberries 

carrots 

BUY NON-ORGANIC

asparagus      sweet peas

avocado        cauliflower

corn               kiwi

bananas         broccoli

mangoes

papaya

onions

pineapples

cloth diapers, people!

i'm stepping up on my soap box for this post. i think every parent should seriously consider using cloth diapers. my parents used cloth. my husband's parents used cloth. i'm going to hazard a guess that a lot of kids born before 1990 wore cloth. it was just the way of things in those days. my mom said disposables existed, but she didn't trust them to hold a minute's worth of mouse pee let alone the gallons of pee my sister and i managed to expel each hour. and just because disposable diapers exist now and are relatively leak proof doesn't mean we're obligated to use them. sure, they're easy. they're convenient. they're no hassle. and 80% of american families use them. but we're also a lazy, lazy generation. our computers pay our bills for us. our mail comes to our laptops, so we don't even need to walk out to the mailbox at the end of the driveway. remote starters on our cars, electric toothbrushes, and retractable dog leashes have pretty much eliminated the need for physical movement throughout our daily lives. the reason we use disposable diapers is not because they're leak proof, but because we have it in our minds that cloth diapers are too much work. so clear away all your preconceptions and read the facts:


ENVIRONMENT
disposable diapers are terrible for the environment. they sit in land fills for 500 years and release chemicals into the soil. our kid goes through ~7 diapers a day, 49 per week, 196 per month, 2,548 per year, and 7,644 by the time she achieves potty-trained status. that is a ton of diapers that would sit in a landfill for 500 years. you may argue it takes energy (water and electricity) to wash cloth diapers, but the energy required for washing cloth diapers is a fraction of the energy and resources needed for disposable diapers. each year, manufacture of disposables requires 1 million metric tons of wood pulp and 75,000 metric tons of plastic. 


HEALTH

beyond the environmental impact, researchers don't really know what effect the dyes, sodium polyacrylate (the super absorbent gel), and dioxin, which is a by-product of bleaching paper, have on baby's bum. sodium polyacrylate has been linked to toxic shock syndrome (TSS) and allergic reactions. dyes and dioxin can damage the central nervous system, kidneys and liver. diaper rash is way more common with disposables, but this varies according to skin sensitivity. studies show that the gas emissions from one disposable diaper caused asthma-like symptoms in mice. tolune, xylene, ethylbenzene, styrene, and isopropylbenzene are chemicals that produce gas emissions from disposable diapers. i have no idea what any of these chemicals are, but i know they're not in my daughter's cotton diapers.  

MONEY

everyone likes to save money. if the environment and health arguments weren't persuasive, maybe money will sway you. cloth diapers are an up front investment. diaper covers are about $8-12 each (we own 8 or 9, but really we could get away with 4-6). the actual prefold diapers cost us approximately $20 per dozen. if you go the all-in-one or pocket diaper route, you could pay anywhere from $12-$25 per diaper and you'd need about 18. so like i said, it's an investment up front. but after you buy the diapers, you don't have to worry about buying any more. no more midnight runs to the grocery for a $10 pack of diapers. no more budgeting each month for $100 worth of diapers and wipes. studies vary on the exact numbers, but all agree using cloth diapers, laundered at home, is significantly cheaper than purchasing disposables. you can even drop costs even more by eliminating the use of a dryer and hanging them on a line; cloth diapers last longer that way, too. 

SO EASY!

if you don't believe me, watch this cbs news video segment: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7131550n

we've been cloth diapering for 12 months and it is so easy. we have a variety of cloth diapers, but, for the most part, we stick to prefolds and inserts during the day and fuzzibuns at night. we stack the diapers after washing and have them ready to grab when we need a clean one; it's just as easy as grabbing a disposable. and washing is a piece of cake, too. we just dump the pal in the washer and run it through 2 full cycles (one with detergent) and then pop them in the dryer. occasionally, we'll add vinegar and baking soda to the load to eliminate any residual odors. 

POOP

most people i talk to are most concerned about poop. they don't want to touch poop. they don't want poop in their washing machine. they don't want to wash diapers in a toilet. etc. but let me put it to you this way, do you put your poo in your trash can? do you store your poo in a diaper genie? my guess is no and if you do, the health department might have something to say about it. poo belongs in the toilet, not stinking up your baby's nursery or sitting in your kitchen garbage bin. poo also does not belong in landfills, where it can spread bacteria and viruses to scavenging animals and the world at large. poop during the first 6 months of a breast-fed baby's life is a piece of cake. most moms don't even rinse this poop from diapers; there's really no need. and poop post-solid food is smelly and often triggers a gag reflex, but you just shake it out in the toilet, maybe even give it a little dunk in the water or, as we do, use a handy dandy sprayer, and toss it in the pal. and no, your washer isn't going to have skid marks. your subsequently laundered clothes will not come out smelling of poop. the diapers will go through 2-3 hot wash cycles effectively killing any germs and removing any traces of poop from your washer. 

ECO-FRIENDLY ALTERNATIVES

seventh generation, earth's best and gdiapers make eco-friendly alternatives to pampers, huggies and other store brands. these eco-friendly diapers are chlorine and bleach free, made with recycled and renewable resources, and gdiapers are flushable (so no landfills!). a package of these eco-friendly diapers runs about $2 more than pampers or huggies, but if you're going to insist on sticking with disposable, spend the extra $2 to give our environment a fighting chance and keep your baby's bum free of myriad chemicals. 

there is so much more information out there than what i've provided here. please, if you're the parent of a kid in diapers, consider going the cloth route or, at the very least, the eco-friendly route! cloth diapers are not just for hippy parents and the environmentally conscious. 

the corner.

it has been nearly forever since my last post. unfortunately, the blog was relegated to the corner of my mind,  as are most other things that don't expressly involve baby, husband, school, misc. family/friends, and home duties. and these days, even school is banished to that same corner. just the other day, another law school mom and i were talking about parenting in law school with other non-parent students. one student shook her head and said, "i just don't understand how you can do it, law school and a baby. it would just be too much for me." and my fellow law school mom responded, "you quickly discover law school is not the center of the universe. in fact, it's not even remotely close to the center of the universe." and she is so right. law school is pluto; it's not even a planet and it's barely in my radar. my little girl is turning one in t-minus 5 days (holy cow!). time flies with this girl. i'm not going to spend my days analyzing every syllable of my case books when i've got something far more monumental, epic even, with which to fill the hours of my day. so there my school work sits in the corner along with all the other stuff that really isn't uber important, like this blog.  today, though, i'm dusting off the blog because it has been far too long and baby's great granddad requested a new blog post eons ago and i promised it to him.

since august, baby has ditched the plaster pants, thank GOD! what an ordeal and so glad that period of our life is behind us. her hip is one hundred percent fixed and she's crawling and standing and "couch walking" and into EVERYTHING like most kids her age. husband took his comp exams and passed all of them--whoot! whoot!--and now he's just waiting on news about funding before we all pack our bags and move to the great country of mexico for a year. and i am, slowly but surely, plugging away at my classes. one of my classes this semester will hopefully inspire a few blog posts: law and gender. gender roles are a hot topic in our home, especially now that we're trying to raise a daughter liberated from gender stereotypes and prejudices. but this is a topic for another day. so that pretty much brings us up to date in a very brief nutshell. and now it's time for the blog to go back to the corner of my mind for a few days until i have another minute to write. i promise it won't be another six months before i write again.

books breaking the bank

i just bought my books for my two classes this semester and nearly lost my breakfast when i saw the grand total: $200 for 3 books (one book only cost $4)!!! $200!!! we're not lawyers yet! just because we're in law school doesn't mean we magically start rolling in the bank. $200 is still a lot of money, especially when we're paying $1500 per credit hour. i mean, with $200 you can buy a lot of things:

7 boxes of 150-count pampers diapers
100 boxes of gerber rice cereal
10 copies of disney's beauty and the beast, platinum dvd version, of course!
20 copays for doctors' visits
200 boxes of green giant frozen vegetables
40 visits to culver's for concrete ice cream mixers
2 tri-monthly trips to the grocery store
8 haircuts, plus generous tip
7 months worth of membership fees at the local gym

so instead of spending that $200 on all these other worthwhile purchases, i plop all that cash down for a piddly 3 books that i will use for one semester, after which i will try desperately to sell those books at the campus bookstore for a measly $20 only to discover that a NEW version of the book came out and the one i have is now only good for fire kindling. how nice. so in the end, i spend $200 for fire kindling.

academic books are outrageous. i can understand why some books are expensive. take my hubby's dissertation for example: one day this stack of paper may end up getting published. and if hubby's predictions are correct, the book will be a surefire cure for insomnia, but it will likely fall a tad short of the new york times' best seller list. a book like this, in order to turn any profit or really just to break even, must be sold for approximately $50-$100 a copy. no joke. these tryptophan-containing texts are expensive because they never sell more than 10 or 20 copies and those 10 or 20 copies have to pay for themselves. so, while outrageous, it makes sense.

but law books don't really fall into this category. my first year law books ran me about $800 (for 4 classes). each of my classes had well over 100 students in them. someone out there is rolling in some major dough. once a law professor chooses a book, especially those teaching first-year courses, the author of said book is guaranteed 100+ sales of his book. and then the next month, when said author puts out another version of said book, he is guaranteed another 100+ sales. and this is from just one class. in michigan alone there are 6 law schools. illinois has 9 law schools.  new york has 15. there are a ton of law schools all in need of these highly specific course texts. so why in the world are we paying upwards of $150 per book???

i'm not an economics guru, not even close. i can't even balance my own checkbook, let alone begin to understand the complexities of supply and demand and our capitalist economy. but i'm sure the reason for the high cost for these law texts is that publishers know we'll pay the steep prices. sure, some woman will likely complain about it on her blog, but that's really all she's going to do. it would take a nationwide boycott and that's just not going to happen, ever, because i would say a large majority of law students are fresh out of their mothers' wombs and, therefore, they have no concept of money and how much $200 is really worth (other than 200 cans of pabst blue ribbon's finest).

an thus ends my rant about law books, at least until i go to the bookstore to sell them back for pocket change.

the sisterhood of the plaster pants: part i

another thing you must know about is that we are currently grappling with what we like to refer to as the plaster pants. at four months, our daughter was diagnosed with developmental dysplasia of the hip (meaning her hip is perpetually dislocated) and after doing the tango with umpteen different doctors (highlights of this dance to follow), after meeting with a pediatric specialist, we decided to put our baby in a spica cast.

to give you an idea of what this cast looks like, picture one of those russian dancers, you know the ones with the fur hats and black knee-high boots, arms crossed in front of chest and squatting nearly to the ground. baby's cast leaves her looking kind of like that, minus the fur hat and black boots. hubby is convinced she'll be a world famous contortionist after all is said and done. her legs are pushed all the way to the side (looks like she's doing the splits) and then her thighs are casted at a 90 degree perpendicular angle to her body and her knees are at a 90 degree angle to her thighs. (see picture below in case my description is just way too convoluted.) the doctor literally had to cut muscles to position her legs this way, all of which is necessary in order to properly set and hold her hip in place while the hip socket forms around the femural head.

it sounds awful and honestly, it is pretty bad, but it amazes me how well baby has adjusted to all of this. we put her down on her belly and she's like a little break dancer spinning 'round in that cast. before too long, she'll be dragging it around the house like a little snail. so, baby doesn't seem to mind it all that much.

unlike baby, mami and papi are struggling a bit more with the cast, but this has more to do with the literal backache of lugging her now 20-and-a-half pound butt around and changing her gooey poopy diapers. the cast has a 4x10 hole left open for the diaper. this hole is just big enough to stuff a size 1 diaper into. thus far, knock on wood, we've avoided any leaks or major blowouts so after two weeks in this thing, baby still doesn't stink. (apparently, this is quite uncommon--most spica casts can clear a room after just one week.) the pee diaper changes are cake. it's the poo that requires a second set of arms. i need one hand to pull the diaper away, another two to hold wipes at the edge of the cast to prevent poo from oozing along the sides and another to wipe all her pieces-parts. but since i've only got two hands, this usually means poo ends up on the sides (taped expertly with water and poo proof tape), on my hands, on her feet and on the changing pad. it's a mess. and to top it all off, i've got the world's most sensitive gag reflex, so in addition poo oozing its way onto every available surface, there i stand hacking and gagging through the whole process. it's quite a show, i'm sure.

one benefit to all this, my arms have never been so toned.  i would suggest carrying around a 20-pound weight to get an idea of what it's like, but that just wouldn't do our situation justice. maybe if the weight sprouted wiggly arms, a mewling head, and two little feet. we have to be sure we don't knock her feet into door frames when entering rooms and though her cast is as hard and rigid as cement, her torso isn't and she ends up wet noodling around a lot if we're not careful. it's unbelievable the muscles needed to just get her into a good position for nursing--for the first week, my whole body ached.

now, back to the tango that brought us here. this all started out as a "click" and then a "clank." doctors kept saying, "she has a click." or "i can feel a click." or "oh my! now it's a clank." hubby and i began to wonder if we should call on click and clack on car talk rather than these pediatricians and orthopedists. for the longest time, we only knew of this ailment as "the click." we had no idea what it meant or why we were being asked to get ultrasounds and to see specialists. it was maddening. for a while, we were seeing this general orthopedist who was a self-proclaimed idiot when it came to treating infants. my favorite visit with him was an especially brief visit when he provided his final diagnosis of baby. he walked into the room with his trusty caterpillar perched on his top lip, proceeded to jiggle the hip joint on an adult skeleton model and said, "this is what's wrong with her hip." he then exits stage right. okay, so he actually stuck around a minute more to tell us to get a "non-obtrusive-you'll-hardly-notice-it" harness thingy (the harness was actually quite obtrusive and we did notice it because it took 20 minutes to get her into it after each diaper change).

after several visits like this with the orthopedist, residents, and pediatrician, we eventually developed a perpetual stream of steam spouting from our ears and a permanent red hue in our cheeks. we finally insisted that we be referred to a pediatric orthopedist--don't ask why this wasn't done in the first place. but in order to get this referral we had to first face a gauntlet of questioning, first by the referral secretary and then by our pediatrician. (side note: we have since kicked our young, douche bag pediatrician to the curb and he will soon be receiving "fan mail" from us.) we had to actually explain our reasons for wanting a second opinion, as if it isn't a right we're automatically entitled to. and to top it all off, our schmucky pediatrician had the chutzpah to near berate us for not following his every instruction like a love-struck puppy, indicating that as a result of our decisions, baby's dysplasia was now a "2B case as opposed to a 2A case," whatever the hell that means. for four months, we were convinced our daughter was having car trouble based on the jargon we kept hearing; we had no idea what we were actually dealing with. we'd tell doctors and receptionists we were in their office to have a "click" looked at and we'd get looks like "what in the hell did you just smoke? a "click"? are you sure you didn't mean to turn into the car mechanic's next door?" (i make it sound like my nurse mother and doctor father-in-law didn't fill us in on what a "click" actually indicates. we knew all along what was going on and we were making informed decisions throughout the whole process; it's just irritating that we learned none of this from the doctors actually treating our daughter.)

we eventually got that second opinion with a wonderful pediatric orthopedist at one of the top hospitals in the nation. just our luck, she also specialized in infant hip disorders. much to our dismay, the treatment that had been prescribed by schmucky pediatrician and the caterpillar-lipped orthopedist was actually too little too late. the harness we'd been using for two weeks is traditionally used for much younger babies, so our baby, at five months, was too old for this thing. and what really burns my butt is that had we not gotten this second opinion, baby would still be in this harness for the next 3-4 months, which would do her no good and inevitably land us where we are now in the cast. i don't even want to think about the gross motor delays.

anyway, hubby and i made the tough decision to go ahead with the spica cast in hopes that her hip dysplasia would be corrected by the time she's ready to start crawling, standing, walking, etc. we figured the sooner we get this done, the better for our baby. it would be devastating to put her in the cast after she'd already learned to crawl and walk; at least now she doesn't know what she's missing. and like i said, after two weeks in it, baby is still hitting all the usual 5 and 6 month milestones (and she's actually not quite 6 months yet--not until august 11), so we feel quite confident we've made the right decision. there are days, like today, where my heart breaks into a thousand pieces when i clutch my sobbing little girl to my chest while she works through a muscle spasm. but when i think of the pain she would inevitably encounter years down the road without this treatment, it doesn't make her present pain any better, but i at least can rationalize in my head that this is for the best.

artwork courtesy of me--white plaster is just so drab

history, briefly, or as brief as one can be when summarizing her life

i'm sure lots of people say this when they first begin blogging, but i'm going to say it anyway: i never EVER in a thousand years would have thought i would jump on the blogging train. i imagined bloggers as frizzy haired, bespectacled folks holed up in a room with a cat in their lap typing madly away about dust collecting on the coffee table. i guess in a way i sort of fit that profile, except, instead of a cat, i have a six-month-old squirming in my lap and in place of the coffee table, i have a mountain of toys and plush animals littering my floor. oh, and i don't have frizzy hair and i'm one of those people that should wear corrective lenses but because slimy fingers constantly paw them off my face those lenses remain tucked away in a drawer. as a result, little two-year-old boys in church turn around and squint funny-like at me because that's exactly what i'm doing in order to read even 10% of the song lyrics written on the projector screen. so, that's me: squinty-eyed, not-frizzy haired new blogger lady with young baby wiggling in my lap. at the request of a few friends that enjoyed reading weekly email rants from me about my week in review, i succumbed to this blogging fad.

so, what next... oh, right. i'm also a law student and wife to a history phd candidate. both of us are entering our third year of studies. you might be wondering how in the world we are able to manage the fiscal burdens of raising of child on a student's whopping income of zilch, zero, nada and that, i am proud to say, is all thanks to my husband's high iq. the school took one look at him and said "this smart man is so smart we're going to pay him to go to school here." and that's pretty much how it works: the school pays him to stay here and do his research and i get to ride along, taking out small loans (altogether accumulating into very large, coronary failure-inducing loans) to fund my own law school education. we also do cloth diapering exclusively (or we did--more to that story, which i'll tell later), breast feed (because it's free and breast is best!, or so they say), make our own baby food, and rely on the benevolence of one very generous mother-in-law.

we never imagined having our first child under such circumstances. in our dreams, we envisioned a two story blue farmhouse, complete with wrap-around porch, white rocking chairs, porch swing, and a sweaty pitcher of lemonade as the place where we would start a family. also in this dream, birds land on our fingers and bunnies collect at our feet while we sing lovely Disney melodies. the reality is we live in a two bedroom apartment (recently acquired; we were in a one-bedroom for the last 2 years), tucked away in a town no one has heard of because it barely occupies a one-mile radius of land. we have a porch, but it's just big enough to fit my schwinn cruiser and a couple of potted plants. we have birds that frequent our feeders, but they head for the hills every time our baby burps too loud. instead of bunnies we have malicious pot-breaking squirrels. and even if we did have happy little bunnies, we have a 60-pound mutt that, like most red-blooded dogs, chases anything not of the canine species. though this apartment isn't our dream house, we keep it looking nice and find we are very comfortable, though i could do with a sweaty pitcher of lemonade on this 90 degree day...

can't complain too much about the heat here, though. prior to michigan, we lived and florida and, boy howdy!, was it hot and humid. you couldn't tell the difference between the air and a puddle of water. i walked around for two years looking like a wet dog and i probably smelled like one, too. but it was beautiful. we lived in the tampa bay area, right on the water and i have no complaints there. for real, dolphin would breach under our feet while we sat at the seawall and white egrets would putz around in our front yard eating bugs. sounds idyllic, right? it was great. i love florida and some days i wonder what on god's green earth possessed us to pick up and move to michigan, but then i remember weirdo waldo and weirdo crime and then it all makes sense. weirdo waldo was the creepster maintenance man that "maintained" (i use this term totally in jest because he left things more broke than when he started) our craphole rented house that would have caught fire at the smallest spark or blown over should someone have sneezed too close to it. the dude was insane. he never knocked, just walked in. thankfully, our dog, o'malley, lumped him in with non-canine animals and attacked promptly upon uninvited entry. he stole our tools, checked out my behind nearly every visit and once even splayed out on our bed, uninvited, of course. florida had a lot of creepers. hubby worked for a newspaper and the stories that came through on the crime beat were things of nightmares. step sons chopping step mothers up into pieces and tossing them into retention ponds. kids beating grandparents to death with lead pipes. crawling babies getting run over by the ice cream truck. i'm not kidding about any of this. sometimes i thought we lived in some sort of sick alternate universe. we also hated our jobs (i was a special ed teacher at a school under the administration of a bunch of certified idiots and hubby worked second shift hours at a rapidly collapsing newspaper) and always had aspirations of higher education, so we left.

and that's how we ended up here. it was an adjustment, for sure. we went from being the youngest people amongst a sea of blue haired retirees to the oldest amongst a sea of half drunk post-pubescent frat and sorority kids. i was part of a small minority of married law students, which put me at a distinct disadvantage because none of the frat boys wanted anything to do with an old married chick so i couldn't tap into their incredibly insightful notes about pamela's totally sweet bod or gettin' with barbie the night before. and having a kid in law school, well, that just threw me into a uber minority category. i also felt like i had been thrown into the main ring of the big top circus show--walking the halls of the law school, kids stared at me like they'd never before seen a women with child. one girl actually asked me NOT to go into labor during the crim law final exam. no joke. my favorite reaction by far was when i was standing in line at the café, this guy turned around and took one look at me and starts stuttering, "whoa! whoawhoawhoawhoa!" i mean, seriously, what do you say to that?

so the baby. she wasn't planned. i mean we knew we always wanted kids, and after 4 years of marriage my womb was starting to call to me, but we weren't really in the market for progeny yet. we had hoped to finish our educations and settle down somewhere first. but then hubby was awarded a summer scholarship to do pre-dissertation research in mexico for two months and voila! two weeks after he leaves, i video skype the momentous pee-on-stick event. nine months later, we're parents to the world's cutest baby girl with eyes as big as saucers and a smile that sends that tingly feeling down to your toes.

that pretty much brings us up to date. i mean, there are stories in between that i will share eventually, but the purpose of today's blog was to provide an introductory rundown of events thus far. and with that, i must bid you all goodbye before dear baby girl assaults me with her plastic keys for neglecting her too long.