Gus woke early and excited. This was due in part because JJ was home, when normally he would be at work before Gus wakes. However, early for Gus is not too early, between 7:30 and 8am. JJ had gotten up in the night and placed the camcorder at hand, so Gus’ day started with JJ singing him Happy Birthday and recording it. We got ready, fed Gus and headed out the door around 10am to drive to Enchanted Forest, a fairytale-themed amusement park about 45 minutes away, outside of Salem. The hope was that Gus would nap on the way there, as he usually sleeps well in the car and he was ready for his morning nap by the time we left the house. No such luck – he whined a bit but would not go to sleep – I’ve never seen him so determined to stay awake. After a quick stop for me and JJ to grab some really bad amusement park food, we were off! We visited the Medieval Village where we saw a creepy animatronic Pinocchio, and a water show with music, lights, and water fountains that spray in time with the music and which ultimately made Gus cry (probably because it was dark in the room and the music was really loud). From there we went to a fun and bawdy kids play in the outdoor amphitheatre called Snow White and the Seven Dorks, where Gus was more interested in playing in the dirt between the seats than in the action on stage. It was a good show – JJ and I both liked it! Since we don’t get to see much theatre nowadays – Gus isn’t ready to sit through a show yet – we were excited to see the show and it was actually very funny! Next we all jumped on a little miniature train – including JJ, who had to squeeze in and hunker down in order to fit. Gus was not enjoying it at first, but as soon as the train got rolling he had fun and perked right up. We ended with a walk through Western Town – bought souvenirs at the dry goods store: a magnet, a pennant and a toy flute - and wandered through the actual “Enchanted Forest” part of the place, where all the big fairy tales are represented with little statues and houses and the like. Gus enjoyed this last bit, I think because it was all tucked away in the woods and he loves the forest – he gets all excited about trees. As we expected, Gus conked out immediately in the car on the drive home, and slept the whole way. Good thing, too, ‘cause that was the only nap he took all day! At home, Gus got more presents – Grandma B’s package of birthday goodies! He had fun all afternoon playing with his new stacking cups and chewing on the tags to his new PJ’s. We took it easy in the evening, not wanting to exhaust him, Gus and I stayed home while JJ went to Footy practice. Gus was asleep before Dad even got home! In keeping with the excitement of the day, however, Gus woke us up around 1:00am (he normally sleeps through the night) – he was wide awake and ready to go! So, JJ dragged his Daddy self out of bed and wore him down by rocking him for about a half hour, then we switched off and I got him right back to sleep, thanks be! To be continued....
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Here we go. It's the toddler years...oh boy! It's such a tumultuous time watching my little guy's development accelerate so that he is displaying new skills literally every day, and also challenging us more and more each day as he asserts his will and desire for independence. It's a roller coaster - one minute he is my sweet baby, needing Mommy to hold and soothe him, and the next he is a pissed off kid, throwing himself backwards in fury because I will not allow him to chew on the computer cords. Oy! One thing I know - Gus makes me think about my own behavior and the consequences of my actions more than I ever have. And he makes me want to be a better person. Motherhood has a way of exposing cracks in the the armor of self-assurance and competence that many of us have built around us. The challenge of raising a child provides me with lots of opportunities to doubt and question my knowledge and my abilities, something I don't do often in my other roles. It's humbling. But in the end, as often as I am unsure of the proper response to his behavior, or whether I am doing enough to stimulate his imagination and intellect - in the end, when I see Gus cheer, smile and clap in anticipation of a favorite story or video, or because he accomplished a new feat like putting his plastic shapes into the matching slot, or when he gently pets the cat rather than smacking her in the face and yanking her tail - that is when I breathe a sigh of relief and feel a moment of validation, of pride and of joy that I imagine most parents cherish as much as I.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Hot Fun in the City
While the heat outside has been breaking records, Gus and I have been staying cool and having fun indoors this week. We cannot wait to get back outside to the park, the library, the zoo or just take a neighborhood walkabout. Tomorrow will be the day, especially since JJ will be home and we have plans to go here http://www.krugersfarm.com/ for a concert and picnic dinner. How fun!
Meanwhile, Gus has been developing new talents on what seems like an hourly basis. I am fairly confident that a lot of this is due to the Baby Einstein First Signs video we watch once or twice a day together. He LOVES it and has begun using his hands a lot more in just the past few days. A few days ago he discovered pointing - now he points at everything he is interested in, including us, which is cute. We have lots of ET moments.
Just yesterday he began to clap his hands - really well, I might add - and now he does that all day, at whatever he thinks is fun, or just to express himself, I suppose. When he does this, he usually yells something like "nine, nine, nine!" or "aaahhhhhh!" Not sure what those mean.
He hasn't actually begun signing yet - but we think we caught him in some attempts - he does a thing with his chest that looks kind of like the sign for "bath" and a couple of times he looked like he was signing "ball" - but he could have been half-heartedly clapping. Either way - I can see the progress, so I am excited to keep signing with him.
Also in the past week - we got him some bubbles in a container that also doubles as a whistle - so he learned to blow the whistle. Then, I thought he needed to apply that skill to other things - so we broke out JJ's harmonica and he started playing that until Big Mama howled too much (because she always howls to the harmonica) and he got scared and cried. Next up - a kazoo - which we will be picking up tomorrow when we are out and about on JJ's day off. Since Gus already plays the keyboard every day and guitar regularly (not to mention listening to Pandora and dancing with Dad and Mom), I think we are meeting our goal of introducing him to music early.
On another note (teehee), everyone who knows Gus knows he loves books...but he's always been content to read a bit and move on. Not anymore. He has begun to demand the repeat read. This is how it goes: 1. He gets out his Rolie Polie Olie book that I got for him at a children's consignment store, 2. We read it to him while he absorbedly watches our fingers track the words, 3. We reach the end and close the book, 4. He cries until we begin reading it over again. This goes on until he is good and ready to be done...about 6-8 read-throughs.
So, that's what our little man is up to these days. We are having a blast. He is just about ready to start walking - which will require it's own post - I believe. In fact, I would argue that he already took his first steps - but JJ insists it was too much of a "shuffle" to count. He did that last night and then again this morning - standing and stepping side to side, then scooting one foot forward and falling on his butt.
Isn't that just like life sometimes?
Friday, July 17, 2009
Weaning on My Mind
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
On the Move...
Friday, February 13, 2009
Ok, I know this is simply a way for me to procrastinate yet again in getting any real work done....but here I go. Actually I logged on to retrieve some of my previous posts on the books I am reading for my paper so that I could include them in my latest draft, but then I felt the need to write. So, I have been watching American Idol...online. I know many people think reality TV is trash, but I personally get a lot out of it. I love the stories of real people, even if edited for manipulative effect, better than made-up people. And I love singing...so American Idol is great for me. In any case, as I was watching I started thinking about what the show, and certain elements of it, could tell us about American culture. I think this about pretty much everything, since that's my thing. It occurred to me that Paula Abdul is a single women "of a certain age," meaning she's about middle age now, and she is constantly made fun of and demeaned on the show and off. Now, I have seen her do some crazy shit, don't get me wrong. And I saw some of her show, "Hey Paula" (or something like that). So, i know she does some cooky stuff. However...i think a lot of the reason people pick on her is because she is a single, childless, older woman....and as such she is devalued in our culture. First of all, you can't tell me there are not a LOT of stupid men out there doing and saying embarrassing things on TV, but how often do we see them? Except on the Daily Show. Every time Paula says or does anything a little off, it is front page news. Now - a lot of that is because the producers and publicists for AI MAKE SURE it is front page news. They use her to get ratings. However...this "stupid female" trend is all over in the media - think Brooke Hogan, the Miss Teen USA contestant, Sarah Palin...need I say more? You just don't see men's deficient intellects broadcast far and wide the way you do with women. People take such pleasure in women saying "dumb" things. Men, on the other hand, are often seen exercising bad judgement - think Blagojevich and Craig - but rarely blatant silly stupidity. This is NOT because men are never stupid and vacuous....the positioning of females in this light, and near exclusion of men from the same, is deliberate and tells us a lot about people's attitudes and anxieties. If this were Puritan times, Paula Abdul would be exactly the type of woman targeted as a witch...and probably executed. She violates much of what our cultures values in women - motherhood, marriage and homemaking, youth, subltety, and submission in the face of "strong" men. Paula is loud, enthusiastic, brazen, not afraid of her sexuality, strong, even pushy, and tenatious. She is a wild and crazy lady - also driven and ambitious. Some of the things that got Martha Stewart caged while men doing the same or worse than she are never punished. Just some thoughts to chew on about one of the biggest message making artifacts of our present culture, AI, and it's contribution to gender role development.
Monday, February 2, 2009
I have to blog now, before I find a reason to put off writing one more day. I have spent a couple of weeks wrapped up in The Tender Bar, a memoir by J.R. Moehringer. Well, that and the readings for my classes....but those are not yet capturing my imagination. Moehringer, or "M," as I will call him here, is a master storyteller. His memoir gave me all kinds of juicy bits for my paper. He was obsessed with the idea of how to become a man. growing up without a father, he turned to the many men around him who were primarily those associated with a local bar at which his uncle bartended. He tried to learn form these men, and I suppose he did, but he ends his book concluding that his mother held the characteristics he had always associated with manhood, and was a better "man" than any "real" men he had known. I found this same observation in Datcher's book. Yet, these men still yearn for their fathers. They are still heartbroken over the lack of men in their lives. It breaks my heart to read about their raw need for their fathers' love and their constant sense of inadequacy because they do not feel they can achieve manhood without some symbolic fatherly act to bestow it upon them.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Becoming
Saturday, January 17, 2009
The Silence of American Immigrants
I just finished reviewing Luis Rodriguez's "Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A." It got me thinking about the fact that so many of the stories I am reading have the thread of immigrant parents who do not communicate well with their American born children. This is always commented upon and seems more prevalent among the fathers than mothers. The fathers are referred to as "a man of few words," and "stoic," and almost universally do not offer much in the way of advice or even bother to speak much to their children. There is the obvious language barrier in some cases, as with Ben Fong-Torres' Chinese parents and the Spanish speaking parents of both Luis and Richard Rodriguez. However, even in the households of immigrants for whom English is not a problem, communication with children still seems to be lacking. This bears more investigation.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Life is what happens when you are making other plans...
I am thinking of the saying, "Life is what happens when you are making other plans." How true that is. OK, that's quite an obvious statement, but it really is so true. I just watched Marley and Me, which is about a man and his dog, and it inspired me to wonder aloud why men (at least all the men I've known) have such a hard time accepting and being happy with life when it deters from the plan they made for themselves. So many men I have spoken to have a vision for what they want their life to be - and, of course, reality rarely matches that dream. I never understood why young men seemed so reluctant to be "sidetracked" from their goals - as if life was a sidetrack and would prevent them from accomplishing something else. JJ suggested that it is because men are taught that they must have a plan from a very young age, so it is difficult to let go of that when life happens. This makes great sense to me. Of course, the same can be true for women, but not to the extent that these sorts of expectations are placed on men in our patriarchal culture. Men are taught they must achieve, be something...which really means they must achieve monetary or professional "success." Women, on the other hand, are freer to let life happen - now that we have won our freedom after centuries of being the second sex. So, yes, we still fight for full equality, but on the other hand we are not pressured to achieve the way men are. I guess what I'm saying is that boys are pressured too much while girls have very little expectations placed on them - both situations can be equally harmful. I hope to raise my son (and if I were to have a girl the same would be true) with the notion that he can and probably will "be" several different people throughout his lifetime. That a career does not define him. That money is only a necessity in our culture, not something to be coveted or bragged about. That he is free to love whom he chooses when he chooses - regardless of whether the timing or the person is "right." That his father and I will be his biggest supporters whatever he does. That happiness is possible, and he deserves it. That the world is hard, but life does not have to be. That love is more important than anything else in the universe, and the more you put out there, the more you get back.
Memoir as a New Form
One of the secondary sources I am consulting, Memoir and Memoirist, posits that memoir, as it exists now, is a relatively new form of autobiography. He explains that only since the 1980's has it become common to focus on one particular part of one's life, or one experience, and write a whole book on it. Prior to that time, autobiographies were primarily a life story, beginning to end (time written). Other than that, there were autobiographical essays, which were close to memoirs. Another common book form was the confessional or religious autobiography, which was a life story that focused on the internal rather than the external. This is another key that distinguishes memoir from traditional autobiography - the focus on the internal. The who and why and how, versus the what and when. Thus, when I look at the seeming increase in memoirs or "internal stories" written by men in the late twentieth century - it could be more of a general shift in the literary form, rather than a shift in the way men write in general. Or, it could be, and likely is, a combination of both. With the societal shifts that took place after the 60s - the civil rights movement, second wave feminism, and Vietnam - men became more introspective. They began to wonder whether, like women, they too should look at their lives and ask whether they were happy, whether they had other options - or were they simply doing what they thought they should? The result was that a great many men, those that determined the dominant ideology, were able to reject many forms of masculinity that required them to privilege the outer over the inner self.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Famous Builder
So, I am now in the midst of Famous Builder, a memoir by Paul Lisicky. In many ways it is similar to The Bill From My Father, so it came as no surprise that Lisicky is friends with Bernard Cooper (that book's author). It looks, from the acknowledgements and author notes, that they both taught at Antioch in LA. I will have to do more research on each of them if I include their books in my final paper. I am sure to include at least Cooper's. While similar, I find Lisicky's narrative interesting for the way it depicts not only his own relationship with his father, but his father's relationship with his older brother, who "raised" him after their father died. As with many of the memoirs I have read, the issue of first-generation American children dealing with immigrant parents is prevalent and a significant factor in shaping Paul's father and his life choices. In Famous Builder, the elder Lisicky is the first generation American, and deals with the pressure of separating (psychologically) from his family and their working-class, immigrant ways as he makes his way through college, earns two graduate degrees, and becomes a middle-class, suburban professional. In the book, a neighborhood of row houses Philadelphia represents the working-class, immigrant existence -a development in New Jersey called Cherry Hill represents the middle class life Paul's father achieved. Even though he gained the "American Dream" through hard work and know-how, traits normally held in high esteem in the US, the Lisickys, especially the older brother who took on the father role at a young age, are resentful of Paul's father. At least, that is how Paul perceives it. Of course, it is impossible to know how the family really thought or felt - we can only know what the author tells us (this is the tricky part of analyzing memoir). This part of the story is more of a class issue than one of cultural inheritance. It is not uncommon for families to resent the child who "makes good," even if that was their goal all along.
Monday, January 12, 2009
The Bill From My Father
So, I have not actually posted on here yet, since the first day, because I have not had time. I am currently working on a paper and occupied with various activities associated with being a mom and a student. It just occurred to me, though, while I was doing some business in the bathroom, that I could use this blog as a way to explore some of my thoughts on the paper I am writing...sort of a public rough draft - in pieces. This will hopefully inspire me to 1) write on my blog, and 2) actually get some good work done on my paper (I am a master procrastinator). I can find a million things to do in order to avoid writing a paper, even though I love the process...there's just something about the pressure of a deadline that gets my juices going, and since this paper is technically not due until May, I am inclined to put it off. The reason I cannot afford to do that this time is because I will shortly be starting school again and will have another research paper along with a TA position in which I will have to grade assignments and prepare a lecture at the end of the semester. So, I really need to get this paper done! Gus, the baby boy living in my house, takes up enough time that I only have short spurts in which to write, so it's imperative that I get crackin! That said, here I go....I am re-reading The Bill From My Father, by Bernard Cooper, which I read last summer, but on which I took no notes at the time. This time, I am reading it for inclusion in my paper on memoirs written by American men at the turn of the 21st century (approx 1988-present). Preliminarily, I find Cooper's style to be self-effacing, almost apologetic. He is clearly wary of his father - even scared of him at times. His father is a demanding, eccentric, hard-headed ex-lawyer. Cooper is supposed to be writing a book about his father's life, but he winds up writing about his relationship with his father - which is good for me as that is the topic I am addressing in my paper - men's relationships with their fathers as told in their memoirs. Cooper is sort of in awe of his father, and longs for his father's approval, which is more of a common theme than anything else in the stories I am reading. However, he doesn't really like his dad that much, His dad is not really a good guy. He's selfish,philandering, conniving, and narcissistic. The guy has some major personality issues. Cooper wants badly to understand his father, but he doesn't get very far. His dad withholds the deepest, most real parts of himself from his son. It is not clear to me why this is so, but it is also one of the most common elements of these memoirs. I will keep exploring. Gus is calling, so ttfn!
