Don't take your girls to Victoria's Secret Via the Mothering forums and friends who go there: There's a nurse-in at your local Victoria's Secret July 1 at 1 pm.

Apparently two nursing mothers got kicked out by employees for breastfeeding there. "You can use the bathroom outside the store." Well, yes. And you could also take all the tables out of the food court and have everybody eat their Panda Express in the bathroom, but chances are the customers won't like that.

Me, I'm just never shopping there ever, ever again. The reasons are myriad. You know the virgin wood pulp in their catalogs? Maybe you can use the 4,381 catalogs they send every month to fan yourself as the glaciers melt. (Recycled pulp works just fine for spanking material. I know this.) And I'm still convinced the company did something to Bob Dylan. Something sinister. More than money. And they don't carry sizes for the big girls.

And now they're hating on the moms. You want to talk about killing the goose that lays the golden egg? Run lactating women out of Victoria's Secret. That's really smart. You know what happens when you nurse a baby? You. Need. Bras. You need lots of bras. I'm not even talking about nursing bras. I'm talking about cantilevered things with a patented design to hold you in place so parts of your body don't fly around and hit innocent bystanders. Some women have to replace all their bras. Nothing from my pre-pregnancy years fit me after nursing, not even my sports bras. You have a customer for life in a nursing mom. Skinny chicks with tiny nipples can buy a bra anywhere. We need coverage and lift and shit. Those of us with means will drop mad cash on a bra that fits right. Making us unwelcome is bad business.

Seriously, what's a mother to do? Here on the one hand you have public officials telling mothers that not breastfeeding is dangerous to your baby. But then when you do breastfeed you're some kind of pariah. Who's behind all this--the Taliban? You want us all on house arrest? We're supposed to shop from home and never try things on, never feel if the fabric or the tag might be itchy?

I'm telling you: It's nursecution.

fuckin' a I get to moderate a badass panel at BlogHer Con.

I love panels. It's like Hollywood Squares without Madam and Wayland Flowers.

Juke Jam I have recently become the proud owner of a Polaroid Juke Jam.

The Juke Jam is possibly the most vilified portable audio device on the planet. Even Aunt K. is skeptical. "Marrit," she said. "You know Polaroid makes cameras, right?"

"Oh, I know," I said. "Polaroid doesn't even support it anymore. Neither does the third party to whom Polaroid sold its rights." That's right, there is no product support available. If it breaks you might as well just do your will: take it behind the house and shoot it with a .22 rifle, make it an art installation, whatever. The good news is that it cost me $99 and has 40G of space, so I can load it up with all my crappy music files of questionable origin and rock the fuck out for two, maybe three months.

I have all sorts of bad music. I have good music, too, but I feel compelled to confess my bad music. Chuck Pendrak polkas, the Ozark Mountain Devils. I have lots of Peter Sellers mp3s, which you'd think would be genius (and they are), but do you really want to listen to them driving? I have several different versions of "Popcorn." There are artifacts of my Dr. Demento period, my Wurlitzer organ period ("Fascination" is a favorite), my bhangra period, and my glee-club "singers" period (Swingles, New Christy Minstrels, the Four Lads). Every noise uttered by Richard Cheese is present. I've got Planet P and Asia.

I'm going to have to put on Thomas's Trackside Tunes. But I also get to have Rockpile and the Ohio Express, Roman Holiday, The Grays, The Producers, and lots and lots of teeth-rotting power pop. I've got plenty of Supertramp. ELO? Check. Bad Pennywise covers? Got em. I've got Rainbow and April Wine. And yes, I really did just add Ratt, the pride of San Diego.

I don't want some cute little mp3 player that tops out with a playlist for jogging. I want a big goofy brick that can hold everything that's ever caught my fancy musically. I want Red Sovine and Jerry Reed on there with Crunt. I'm going to be really sad when I have to rebuild my database repeatedly, but it's working for now.

anosmia in our world I reviewed Twelve and Holding today. It kind of hit me in some tender places as a surviving only child and as someone who can't smell. There's an anosmic kid in the movie, and another has a brother die. I liked it, though. I like Michael Cuesta.

blogging bedtime I think my son is trying to break the land speed record for bedtime struggles. Whoever that asshole is who just rang my doorbell had better watch his or her ass because now the child will never sleep. J. and I are taking turns putting him back to bed.

My son is four now and logically comprehends the importance of sleep. Our friend V., who is studying to become a nurse practitioner, told him about how when you sleep your T cells secrete human growth hormone. It made an impression; sometimes we encounter a person, occasionally even a stranger, and Baldo informs that person that his T cells are making him grow.

J. just came back. "I totally had him, and then the doorbell rang." He worked out a deal where Baldo could have all of his treasured Community Helpers in bed. I know that sounds like ribald fun but actually involves a series of plastic painted figures from the Family Connections toy library. There's a librarian, a firefighter, a postal worker, a surgeon, a painter, a farmer, a construction worker, a naval officer, a police officer, and a doctor. And a business executive, which Baldo always calls "business excutive," as if it the work is making excuses--I had to go through three layoffs before I figured that out. These Community Helpers are the center of his universe and thus the center of mine, as well. Today we put a blanket on my bed and rumpled it up to make it look like water, and the Community Helpers went for a swim in their imaginary pool. We did this all afternoon. Baldo and I took turns sitting on a pillow being the lifeguard. We'd blow the whistle and switch. Sometimes the farmer's pig made a mess in the pool (the farmer figure is holding a small piglet) and I'd have to blow the whistle and make all the others sit out while the pool got cleaned. I'm completely terrified that I'm going to lose or destroy these Community Helpers because it would be like the Death of God to him. I'm really hoping we're going to roll with returning them to the toybrary, as we call it. I'm hoping it won't be a repeat of when we had to give back Franklin's Neighborhood. That got ugly.

Okay, I'm back. Now hiding in a darkened room. I am Interdictor and Baldo is my Katrina. So far so good. We finally seem to have made it out of the nightly stage in which my son becomes Harry Dean Stanton, wizened and slurring. My son has become Harry Dean Stanton for some small period of every day since he gave up his nap when he was two and a half. Back then he'd take a nosedive around 5:00 and sleep for twelve hours. The duration of his sleep is lovely once we get started but he's always beastly when tired. He's worse than me. Churlish and swaggering. Then we go through the frantic phase, which is when all the anxieties a four-year-old can have about personal safety emerge and are dealt with using loving but appropriately brief parental guidance. You try to get it into a couple of sentences. It's a cutline. Sometimes I make reference to Officer Buckle and Gloria, which is our preferred book this week, with I Am a Truck running a close second.

So I got us to the final phase--the acceptance of the inevitability of sleep. We're both totally worked. Then we get to the fun part, the washing of dishes on tiptoe.

Tell 'em, Carmella! Morgan Freeman will always be Easy Reader to me.

And Johnny Cash sings "Egg-Sucking Dog" on the Muppet show.

word tiles are fun! My friend Karen plays with word tiles:


Yes, America. Your children are safe with us!

toofers You can tell them and tell them about jumping on the couch. You can do time-outs if that's your flavor (as it is mine). You can pick them up and put them on the floor and distract them and run them around in the yard with a Batman Hop-A-Roo, but if your kid is determined to jump on the furniture, nothing--NOTHING--sinks in like a bloody lip injury and a dead tooth.

I myself was a languid and nerdy child, and I sustained very few kid injuries growing up. I think I stepped on a nail once, and it penetrated my flip-flop. J. has a reconstructed "butt" chin from swinging on something unswingable, and Baldo hews more closely to this model of pediatric risk. Thus one of his front teeth is full of necrotic pulp and must be either (1) reconstructed or (2) removed. We've voting for removal, as it is a 100% effective way of getting out necrotic pulp, and it's a baby tooth anyway. So there you have it.

If you play your cards right you can possibly find a pedi dentist as wonderful as ours. I want to be a patient there. There's a train table in the waiting room, and when you're all done getting scraped and scaled or whatever hellish thing, you get a trip to the Toy Tower. I'd gladly recline on a chair, drunk on Versed, watching Spongebob Squarepants's "Jellyfish Jam." Shit, that sounds like a pretty good Saturday night to me. The boy? Not so much.

"I can't keep my daughter from jumping on the couch, either," the hygenist said. "She goes to time-out, she loses toys. She doesn't care. She doesn't even care," she added quietly, "if she gets a spanking. It's worth it to her to jump on the couch even once, whatever the consequences." Yeah, that.

So we've moved up to the next stage of consequences. I can only hope there's enough Versed for all of us.

happy father's day Love for the papasphere, especially my favorite dads: Andy, Bruce, Dave, Ken, Larry, Tad, Tim, Ray, Nat, and all you other good dudes with straightforward names.

Included in this number (and also with straightforward names) are my own dad, who just drove with my mom to Vegas and endured (1) a four-hour timeshare presentation and (2) Bareback, and J., who is sleeping in this morning. I love you guys.

SAHF An interesting piece from a stay-at-home dad on Alternet. Though I would venture to say that this family is more typical of the trend of parents working flexibly and sharing care in split shifts--which I think people also do more often than we realize.

I like the writer's blog too.

new! New column is up.

today's neologism The word of the day is brought to you by Anne Soffee, who shall receive credit for its invention in perpetuity.

Nursecution: hassling breastfeeding mothers.

There is also fursecution, which has something to do with "furries," and I figure I don't really need to know much about that.

the end times are upon us We've been going to the pool a lot. It's good for us. It's the one thing we can all agree on doing. Vive la pool!

I thought I was sunburned on my shoulders even though I used my friend Berd's spray-on sunblock. Is that the greatest shit ever or what? You can just sneak up behind your kid and blast them with sunscreen, instead of doing this "Okay, look up. Oops, watch your eyes. Okay, turn around. Hey, come back!" thing. You can just spray it in the general direction of your back. And you can get the pump kind if you're worried about the ozone layer (and you should be, because it correlates to the sunburn you're trying to prevent). Anyhow, man. That's some great shit.

When your kid gets a little older and you stop thinking that Those Mothers Not Like You are going to ridicule your snacks, your sleeping arrangement, and your feeding method, you can hang out with a neighborhood segment of the parenting population and just appreciate each other's sunscreen.

Unfortunately I think the end is near for us all because I appear to have something that I think might almost resemble a tan. One not from a bottle, even. That is raining-frogs weird. I don't know what happened but I think I have some melanin. I didn't before. I used to stand with Baldo in a UV chamber three days a week during the Eczema Days of Yore. I had my own pair of protective goggles. They were dope. Did I tan? I did not. I became whiter somehow, as if I'd been Oxycleaned. I'm a white-ass woman. Like, when I buy makeup I get it from Merle Norman. The grandmotherly clerk in a sequined cardigan has to go to the back where the White Lady 001 is stored on ice to keep it stable. I am paler than anyone else in my family, with the possible exception of our one authentic redhead, my great aunt Thyra. Everybody else looks vital and robust; we're those krinkly Texans, like Kris Kristofferson, and we take on a little color as we rake the hay or mow the lawn or play frisbee golf with a beer buzz. I look like I've emerged from some kind of ward after prolonged catatonia.



But today I compared quandrants of my skin like swatches, and I am just barely perceptibly becoming different shades according to my sun exposure.

We spend more time outside than we used to. We're moving forward in the world.

the swim lesson My son the Pisces hasn't always been down with water. He screamed his head off the first time we gave him a bath, and subsequent attempts have not shown improvement. He doesn't like to put his hands under the faucet to wash them (he still has a lot of eczema there, and it hurts), and the first time we tried a kiddie pool he clung to my arms inside of it and shrieked whenever a part of his body got wet. Not a water baby. We laughed ruefully at every suggestion of an oatmeal bath, an olive-oil bath, a bath slightly chlorinated with bleach to ward off staph (I hated the idea, but I tried it anyway). And like an idiot I chose Deep Eddy as his first pool experience; the water is freezing even in triple-digit temperatures.

We very nearly got kicked out of the city pools swim class because Baldo liked to hang out in the pool office and listen to the radio instead of getting in the water. Sometimes we could coax him out to the pool, and he'd sit with his feet in. The teachers awarded us a Starfish patch anyway, probably to get rid of us.

But swimming isn't optional in Texas in the summer. You have to immerse your body in some kind of water, or else you'll cook like a carrot. You can't socialize if you don't swim because everyone is at the neighborhood pool, some of which have free admission. There are lakes and rivers and creeks around, and you figure your child will eventually plunge into one of them, by choice or by accident, so you gotta get those swim skills.

We signed up for a schmancy indoor private program where the parents stay in a glass-walled "observation room" instead of getting in the pool with their kids. I tried not to press myself against the glass like an algae-sucking fish. I sat in a chair, vibrating with anxiety, while my son padded out to the pool and plopped himself down with his teacher and the two other kids in his class. The kids took turns going in with the instructor and sitting on the side. Baldo didn't look back at us once. He appeared to be telling jokes to the other kids, both of whom are girls. J. shot him a big thumbs-up. Then Baldo did all this weird stuff I've never seen, like putting his face in the water for ten seconds and floating on his back with help from the teacher. The other parents were all on cell phones, and I'm pretty sure my apoplexies of joy and pride irritated them.

We got raspas afterward from the hippie raspa cart at the end of our street, and Baldo told everyone how he was learning to swim: the guy making his pink sour lemon, the other people in line, the vanload of people from some kind of residential treatment center, a baby in arms, cars driving by. It was pretty fucking sweet.

get back home, Billy Preston As we pass like ships on the sea of summer (no summer school this year) with Baldo as a particularly clangy buoy between us, J. and I exchange information to which we will react later. I made a stop to read the AP wires, and I read that Billy Preston had died.

Billy Preston was just one of those people who had an effect on you if you were a child in the 1970s. He was just everywhere, even if you didn't consciously realize it because you were rather small and your preferred entertainment was doing gross tricks with your eyelids. I heard a song from his children's album, The Kids and Me, on KOOP one morning, and it became My Holy Grail of Music for Children; sadly it seems out of print. It was one of those rare moments: Holy shit, this is good. And it's written with a kid audience in mind and actually works on that level while being listenable by adults for its musicality. I mean, I do think was really that good, but I was on kind of a high dose of Paxil at the time, so maybe I was just having a giant flipping mood swing in either direction (standard disclaimer for all recollections of that era--sometimes I wonder if being medicated makes you crazier than you were before).

I'm indelibly stamped with the memory of Billy Preston popping up at the end of that dreadful Robert Stigwood Sgt. Pepper movie, which does horrible things to several respectable musical acts (George Burns and Steve Martin are not among them) and was apparently written, directed, and edited after a transorbital lobotomy. It could be the worst movie ever. Except for Billy Preston! Billy Preston is so cheerful and polished and he just gets right up into that stinky movie and does a few cheesy things in an incredibly sporting fashion, and because he has such strong presence the movie is not able to diminish him. It's like watching good triumph over evil. When I saw that movie, I didn't know about Billy Preston's session work or his solo career (though I probably heard and was annoyed by "Will It Go Round in Circles") and I probably had a mouth full of Pop Rocks (which I tried again at a kids' party on Saturday--they're horrible!). I just knew that Billy Preston was a powerful force in the universe and could withstand Robert Stigwood.

terrorism in Iraq Killings on board a bus outside of Baghdad.

When you hear the AP refer to "sectarian tensions," that means "people are murdering students, professors, and utility workers on board a bus."

But Condoleeza Rice is confident that the Iraqi parliament can agree on leadership of its national security in the next few days. Hey, no problem! They'll "get it settled." That's a big relief.

Nowhere does the article say, "Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is sitting in a warm load from fear," but it probably should. Hey, man--here's your democracy...now...go! Eighteen months, dude! Make it happen!

in cars We took Baldo to his first movie today. Cars. I have to review it but for our purposes here I'll just mention that he freakin' loved it. I know people take toddlers to movies, but I just wasn't into that because darkness and loud noises aren't on Baldo's wish list. And he did watch Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill and was briefly obsessed with it, talking about the various parrots, but that was at home.

Today we got the full experience: bag of popcorn, booster seat, two previews (neither of which I can remember), person from the studio refusing to believe that a woman with a child is a movie reviewer. That's entertainment, kids. He sat perched up on his seat and was riveted by the scenes in which Lightning McQueen the racecar tows Bessie, an ancient skip-boom paver. (The skip-boom paver is the Holy Grail for construction-machine kids? Discuss.) He paves a road. That was the high point. "I loved it when he paved that road!" So there you have it.

Midway through the second act, he whispered, "This movie is too long." I'd say he's got a touch of his mother in him; J. was cackling uproariously at the pot and biodiesel jokes associated with the VW bus voiced by George Carlin. It was too long.

At dinner his crumpled up napkin "looked just like Lightning McQueen!" Every night we ask him as we say goodnight what kind of dream he wants to have, and tonight he wanted a dream about Bessie, the ancient skip-boom paver.