Happy birthday, Baldo

At moments like this the mommyblogger is supposed to bust out some painful but ultimately heartwarming truths that will be e-mailed and linked.

But at moments like this the mommyblogger is tired, and her pre-Chuck E. Cheese Ativan is starting to kick in.

You know the birthday is its own present, right? Survival? Yeah, you knew that.

oh, crap The Juke Jam just died. At last.

Call it.

Still, not bad for 40G and $99.

micro-smurf Y'all remember the part of Microserfs where the dude won't come out of his office and people have to feed him flat food that fits under the door? That's me. I have my Fisher-Price mp3 player full o'bhangra; I have a bowl of Quaker Oatmeal Squares.

I covered SXSW before I was a parent, when I had a regular daytime office job with a coffeepot and contributions to my Social Security tax. I would stay out or up until 3:00 or so in the morning, sleep for two hours, and get up and do it all over again.

Having a child? Harder.

You said "beaver." Beaver spotted in New York City for first time in 200 years.

Huh huh huh huh.

You did it too, didn't you? You went, "Huh huh huh huh," too.

200 years is a long time.

Holy crap! Hey, did you see that Whole Foods bought Wild Oats?

Hundreds of gluten-free people are biting their nails with worry; the worry causes them to need valerian and Oregon chai latte. Moreover, are nails gluten-free? Yes, but not vegan?

In some small way I feel vindicated for when Wild Oats bought Sun Harvest and all those other regional stores. Big monster eaten by bigger monster! AHM-mmm-mmm-mmm! Still cannot afford produce.

omigod you guys In the headlines at the moment are three items: (1) Condi is in Baghdad; (2) 18,000 kids die from hunger and its complications each year, according to the United Nations, and (3) Britney spears shaved her head and got a tattoo.

I am going to talk about the third thing, which apparently ranks alongside the other two in importance.

Woman radically alters her hairstyle and gets a cheesy impulse tattoo after two kids in two years (or was it three?) and a brief marriage to Kevin Federline! Film at eleven! Gosh, I've done worse things to my hair for less. (I think Brit looks hot bald, maybe because she's a little queer.)

Having two kids in two years while married to Kevin Federline is Every Woman's Nightmare. We all have our K-Feds, honey. Every woman has an embarrassing ex, somebody her friends warned her about, but she didn't listen because she was a child celebrity with no control over her own life. (Okay, here I'm kind of extrapolating.) At least every woman has narrowly-dodged bullets, those guys who front well but turn out to be human pork chops, just sitting there slowly turning rancid at room temperature while they wait around for you to cook them.

Sometimes she doesn't dodge the bullet in time. You just get back up. And maybe shave your hair off. In other words, it's normal to go a little crazy.

Don't eat the fish! Wait, eat the fish! Y'all remember the scene from Up in Smoke where Cheech is freaking out and Chong gives him a handful of pills to bring him down? Cheech gulps them down eagerly for relief. Then Chong says, "Hey, wait, man. Don't take those." Cheech has taken about eight hits of acid. "I hope you're not planning on doing anything for the next couple of months."

In other words, "the advisory inadvertently causes the harm that it was intended to prevent."

Putting food in your mouth while you're pregnant is like that nowadays. You are no longer a person who eats a relatively varied and overall nutritious diet (unless you're in the Third World), you are a soldier defending your fetus from certain harm. The enemy is everywhere. What, you ate brie? Is this juice pasteurized? There's salmonella in my peanut butter? The food you buy has so much other food in it now that you don't even know what you're eating anyway. How does salmonella get into peanuts? Through the chicken?

Now if you're pregnant you can eat the fish again. In fact, you better eat that fish again. Your kids are going to have to be pretty smart to get us out of Iraq. Or Iran. Or Afghanistan. Who knows where we'll be or not be by then? Who knows where a million Iraqi refugees go? In our benevolence, the U.S. has agreed to take 7,000.

Anyhow, the articles about the study don't really go beyond the shoulds and shouldn'ts of pregnancy. Scaring pregnant women is a pretty incomplete solution to the problem of what we're doing to our food supply with industrial pollution. These fetuses are going to keep eating mercury after they're born, and so is everybody else. Yet if we really gave a shit about public health--instead of pushing it back on individual women with alarming and conflicting recommendations--our administration would cap mercury pollution instead of lying about it with junk science. Mercury from power plants? No way! Hey, but didn't you hear that fish is good for babies after all? It's not a necessary evil; it's a boon, like Baby Einstein. Einstein was a smart guy, right? How much fish did his mother eat?

Yeah, see? And you know what else? I fucking hate chocolate-covered strawberries. I like chocolate and strawberries. Just keep them separate. I also like liver and strawberries, but you can keep them separate, too.

So all these pictures of chocolate-covered strawberries that are everywhere because it's Valentine's Day? Yeah, screw that. Especially you, Google Front Page. It's like looking at chocolate-covered weasels, which is actually a bunch-better metaphor for Being with a Person for the Rest of Your Life. (Clean off the chocolate, and you've got yourself a pretty good weasel there.)

There's even a Cuban odd-couple movie called Strawberry and Chocolate--because everyone, even Communists, knows that strawberry and chocolate don't taste good together. Put the chocolate on something else or put some cripsy stuff in it or something.

J. and I had this conversation for many years before we both reached an official accord that I Would Do Anything For Love, But I Won't Put a Chocolate-Covered Strawberry in My Mouth and Pretend to Like It. I just won't. Just bring me something brown in a glass after bedtime, and we're pretty much good. In fact, I like food and you could just about surprise me with anything in the world except for chocolate-covered strawberries.

So of course Baldo's school class is having a fruit-and-chocolate party. We're always the outliers.

Happy Bullshit Holiday, Everyone And be sure to check out this report about the rotavirus vaccine.

Wasn't that romantic?

Well, that was quick Holy crap.

I got all cavalier and shit about the varicella vaccine, and now one of Baldo's school chums has just busted out with chickenpox. Could make things interesting.

It's kind of like when you're thinking about a plate of shrimp, and somebody says "plate of shrimp."

no/show, or ebb/flow I don't blog much here anymore. I'm not even sure if I can explain why. It's much as Curious George taught us this morning: There are some things a dog can't explain to a monkey.

Maybe once the class valentines are done.

great "A new report claims that the Bush administration has suppressed scientists' climate-change work."

one for the books Every evening at bedtime we enter the octagon.

Baldo has two modes: berserker and Drunken Monkey.

I have The Chong. "Hey, wow, man. You're pretty tired. Whoa, there's your bed, man." The Chong is actually a weapon against myself, because Bedtime Bullshit brings out the worst in me, as I suppose it does in us all. I can handle "Why?" and potty accidents, but Bedtime Bullshit is my Achilles heel.

It's fun to exploit his independent reading habits by putting him in bed with a stack of books. Hell, that's what I do--read a book and go to bed. Isn't that what people do? But we're in a weird space of needing bigger-kid books with little-kid topics. Ixnay on the dinosaurs and volcanos and superheroes. We need construction, buddy. Lots of it. Back that chain-bucket dredger up in here. We need I beams and H beams and piledrivers and shit. We've got asynchronous development. Please use as much technical language as possible, but introduce no elements of danger or surprise or suspense. And no dogs. Not even small or friendly ones.

Got it? We need chapter books with no danger, surprise, or suspense. He shares my taste for unmarketable literature.

So earlier this evening he asked J. for "that chapter book with construction in it." Not a whole lot of those exist, but I think we have one, and it's already in his room.

"No, it's one you told him about."

I thought. It was a struggle. And then I remembered mentioning to him that the guy in my book at the time--Affliction--drove a motor grader to plow the street. He likes to see that construction equipment truly is everywhere.

So we gave it to him.

"He won't read it," J. predicted.

I hope not.

my next movie About this time next year, I'll be shooting a short documentary, and I think I'll call it AISD Parking Lot. We'll capture the moment as parents from across the district camp out at the offices of the Austin Independent School District's Office of Student Services at 1111 West 6th Street, hoping to secure a transfer to a different school in the district for their kids.

Every year people do this--sometimes overnight--and the local news covers it the way they cover late filers on Tax Day: with a bemused human-interest approach. I won't do that. I'll let the parents go off. Some of them will be trying to opt out of a neighborhood school with serious problems, and as much as I understand that instinct, if they're racist scumbags, I'll give them enough rope to hang themselves. Others will simply be frustrated people who've bounced their kids from one campus with problems to another--including charters--looking for a home.

We're going to try to get into a school that is actually different among public elementaries: it's all-transfer, there are two classes per grade level, and all the teachers are GT-trained. Are we going to get in there? Hell no. Not for kindergarten. Yet I'm not sure I see the point of trying to get in to just another AISD school, even if it is whiter and richer and has fewer portables, which are evidently desirable qualities.

quelle surprise The United States lags far behind virtually all wealthy countries with regard to family-oriented workplace policies such as maternity leave, paid sick days and support for breast-feeding, a new study by Harvard and McGill University researchers says.

Here's the part that concerns everyone, mother or not: "At least 134 countries have laws setting the maximum length of the work week. The U.S. does not have a maximum work week length or a limit on mandatory overtime per week."

Also: Be sure to note that "business groups" are said to be requesting that the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993 be scaled back pending a review by the Labor Department. You lazy people with your small children, your sick and dying relatives! How dare you deprive your employer of your constant and unlimited labor!