comments, complaints, quandries, curses
Baxter: Oh no it’s going to rain!
Me: No, I think it’ll just be cloudy in the morning.
Amelia: The word that Mama is looking for is “overcast.”
Amelia: What’s the hippo in Tinga Tinga called?
Me: Is it Hippo?
Amelia: No.
Me: Harriet?
Amelia: No.
Me: Hortense?
Amelia: No.
Me: Hilda?
Amelia: No. I think it’s Hippo.
Amelia: Mama. Yesterday, all of the people at camp, well, some of the people, well, one person…
This piece in Ms Magazine on the feminist scifi comic Bitch Planet was so interesting!
Basically, Bitch Planet is a feminist sci-fi nerd’s Holy Grail. Adding to what is already a stacked lineup of feminist fist-pump-worthy moments, the end of each issue includes a feminist guest essay and the back page is filled with retro-style ads for humorous and ironic mail-order merchandise (that you can actually order!) My favorites include NC temporary tattoos for girls who want “that sexy, his-blood-in-a-bottle-around-your-neck CRAZY CHICK mystique…PUT IT ON YOUR FACE” and X-Ray Specs to see through a man’s intentions.
Find Bitch Planet comics here.
Peach is angry and looking forward. Like angry that you can’t have a treat, and looking forward to your birthday party.
Tom: How was amelia this morning?
Andrea: calm. apologized for yelling last night
Andrea: I want to have a calm discussion of all the begging we’ve had lately
Andrea: but it needs to be when no one’s already mad about something else
For the record, this does not seem likely to happen anytime very soon; it feels like at least one of the kids is pretty much irate or sobbing nearly all the time these days. Either that, or one of the adults is snappish and short-tempered. Parenting a 6.5y and a 3.5y is kicking my ass lately. I don’t know how parents with more than two kids even deal; I’d be She-Hulk or Judge Judy all day long.
Hack: Amelia is reluctant to read aloud to me/us. Today she brought me her 18″ doll Bella and asked me to brush Bella’s hair. (Amelia isn’t persistent and careful enough to do a good job and brushing hair is one of the few things I ever liked about playing with dolls.) I told her I’d brush it as long as Amelia read to me while I worked. She read me a whole picture book and the time passed very happily for the both of us. 
Hack: A family we’re friends with taught us about “the tickle button,” an undefined spot on your body, which if “On,” means you are interested in being tickled, and if “Off,” means you do not want to be tickled. This has helped with Baxter’s mania for tickling people without asking first, yay!
It’s also spawned other questions, like “Is your snuggle button on?” and “Is your hugging button on?” In case you were wondering, Baxter’s snuggle button is always on.
Luck: I told Amelia we might ask her to take a nap today because she’s been getting to bed so late he last couple of nights. She decided to “play” rest time in the morning — I think in order to get out of taking a nap — and played it so convincingly that she fell asleep and napped for almost 90m, a good 30m longer than I would have asked her to stay in bed. Naps without fights? I’ll take two!
Got this at the used bookstore yesterday, hoping to read it to Amelia. It’s set in Texas in 1899, and the protagonist is a girl who identifies herself as a naturalist despite her school teaching her:
Reading, Spelling, Arithmetic, and Penmanship. oh, and Deportment. I got an ‘acceptable’ for Posture but an ‘unsatisfactory’ for Use of Hankie and Thimble.
Her granddaddy is horrified by this, and starts allowing her to shadow him in his own experiments and (local) expeditions.
If she tolerates it, I think this would be a fun book to read with Amelia. It does deal with topics of racism on top of sexism, but I think we could talk about both constructively. I’ll read through to the end before I lay it on her 6yo brain, though. Liking it a lot so far.
“Instead of focusing on what we’re saying, we’re distracted by anxieties about the way we sound to others. ‘Am I being too apologetic?’ and ‘Is my voice too high?’ are linguistic analogues of ‘is my nail polish chipped?’ and ‘do I look fat in this?’”
This article about critiques of women’s speech was highly insightful.
This week everyone’s been talking about an article in the Economist explaining how men’s use of language undermines their authority. According to the author, a senior manager at Microsoft, men have a bad habit of punctuating everything they say with sentence adverbs like ‘actually’, ‘obviously’, ‘seriously’ and ‘frankly’. This verbal tic makes them sound like pompous bullshitters, so that people switch off and stop listening to what they’re saying. If they want to be successful, this is something men need to address.
OK, people haven’t been talking about that article—mainly because I made it up. No one writes articles telling men how they’re damaging their career prospects by using the wrong words. With women, on the other hand, it’s a regular occurrence. This post was inspired by a case in point: a piece published last month in Business Insider, in which a former Google executive named Ellen Petry Leanse…
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I was in enough of a hurry to serve and eat this one that I forgot to take a picture before we cut into it. 🙂 And as you can see, it was quite popular; from the America’s Test Kitchen Family Baking Book. I’ve done a lot of baking lately! I don’t think we’ll have much time for that during the rest of July, so maybe it’s good that I got it out of my system a bit.
The Thing With The Stuff 