February 2007

Liam eating applesauce. It’s a bit tart for his taste - what a face! You can see the long version here.

Liam has really gotten the hang of the rolling thing. We used to be able to just leave him on the floor and walk away, come back and he’d be in the same spot, but not anymore. He manages to get around by continuously rolling over (in fact he rolled into my laptop when I was taking this clip).

His other new thing…mini tantrums. If he’s playing with a toy and accidently throws it to where he can’t reach it, or if I take it away from him to feed him, or if we’re just plain not paying attention to him enough, he gets reeaal angry.

I just want to draw everyone’s attention to the two new pages you can see to the right. These are a couple “Self-Improvement” pages we’ve set up with the idea that if we make public our little flaws, we can gain the support of the online community in improving those flaws. Case in point: me and Carleen have potty mouths.

Ssssh! Don’t tell her, but Carleen cusses like a sailor!

So we have… the Swear Jar.

I am a bit of a lazy, computer glutton, Gamer. I need to excercise. So, I’ll be keeping track of my running progress (# of steps taken and amount of time ran) on the Running Page. We would both appreciate everyone’s encouragement to help us be better people. Support us when we succeed and push us when we falter.

I read a MySpace profile once of a guy who I guess had been in the Navy for much of his young adult years. Under HOMETOWN he simply put “people have these?”. I couldn’t help but snicker because it sounded like a perfect response for a question that Mitch and I have been plagued with much of our lives (the dreaded, “so, where are you from?”). I think we used to consider ourselves unique when it came to our “global” upbringing but the truth is, our generation and especially the one coming after us, are much more globally aware and experienced then our predecessor’s were.

I can remember Mitch refering to himself and others like us as global nomads. I always thought this was just a term him and his friends had come up with but after coming across this site while doing research at work the other day, I gather it’s actually universally used. It’s a pretty old site but it was interesting to read through, especially her section on Rootlessness/Restlessness, something which I can attest to. We didn’t move around near as much as many of our friends did (really just four times and we never ventured all that far, Norway, Scotland, Norway, B’ville), but our “global exposure” was still very strong simply because our parents were of two different cultures and we went to private international schools with other kids who had lived all over the place. I can remember by dad commenting that he thought I was a little more of a homebody, taking after my mother, wheras Mitch was more like him and liked to travel. Frankly, this is simply not true. I tend to deal with the rootlessness/restlessness problem on a daily basis and I have to admitt that sometimes it can get very hard. But I learned long ago that it didn’t matter where I went, what state or country, it wouldn’t take long before I started thinking about the “next place”. In fact, I’m not sure any global nomad is entirely happy unless they’re sitting on a plane mid-transit between two continents. That moment of transistion can be very exciting for us, however, once we’re there it’s difficult for the experience to maintain its lustre.

Being a global nomad can teach you many things, one of which is the fine art of detachment/reatachment, a skill which eventually blossoms into a kind of bizarre social metamorphism. The survival tactic tends to take two forms. You either learn how to make friends quickly and easily, or you figure out how to be a loner without being too lonely. Some of us don’t quite make it, and I’ve met a few people with a global nomad background who have struggled from some serious social skill problems. It can be really difficult because the whole misfit thing is a given, especially when you’re constantly having to acclimate yourself to a different culture and community. But all in all, I value the experience, despite the tough times. I never thought I would grow up to live in the same little town I graduated highschool from, but staying in one place for more than a few years is slowly teaching me how to appreciate all the nooks and crannies of a community. For instance, I’ve lived here thirteen years and I still haven’t gone to a rodeo. Maybe I should go to a rodeo. I might just get a kick out of watching some fool of a cowboy trying to maintain his sitting balance on a wild bull who obviously doesn’t want to be sat on in the first place.

When out to Tulsa this weekend for a little family outing. We had great fun - I know Liam enjoyed all the attention he got. Going out to a busy, “big-city” mall is vastly different with a child, in ways I never would have thought of. First off, due to the fact that Liam needs to be in a stroller still, we’re barred from using the escalators. Which means we were forced to use the one and only elevator in the mall. You want to know who the ONLY people to use this elevator are? Parents with strollers. We had to wait in line while, three at a time, strollers went up and strollers went down. You feel both discriminated against and, oddly, you feel a sort of kinship with an entirely new sect of people. It became ok to have to ride the elevator since we weren’t alone with our band of brothers and sisters. We all suffered together.

Let’s not forget the insane amount of trouble pushing a stroller through a crowded mall is. I felt like apoligizing to everyone I passed. Turning around because you went the wrong way? Fuhgetaboutit. Just keep on going and circle around. And no matter where you park the thing while you peruse merchandise, you’re going to be in somebody’s way. I finally realized I had to move, much like a shark, at all times.

In non-Liam related pondering, we went into Victoria’s Secret and I noticed this: the less there is to women’s underwear, the more expensive it is. They had a couple of strands of dental floss on the rack — $250. A perfectly average, completely covering nightshirt: $15. I don’t know, married 4 years and still the entire female universe remains a mystery.

And finally I just found out that in about 8 months or so, me and Carleen are going to be an Uncle and Aunt. My sister and her husband Eric are having a baby - they do not know the sex yet, of course, but I will be making regular updates, so stay tuned on that.

I don’t know why but weekends are particularly difficult lately. We can’t seem to keep Liam on a feed/nap schedule. We attempt everything we do during the week but still, it’s as if he knows that the weekend is different, that he should be able to sleep-in and party all day. We’ve also ventured into the world of solid baby food. He’s had sweet potatoes and peas so far. He seems to like it but tends to spit most of it out. It ends up everywhere, of course, all over me, the jacket hanging on the chair next to us, our dogs ear, everywhere.

Although the wackiness in his schedule made Liam pretty fussy over the weekend, Mike and I did manage to spend quite a bit of time together on Saturday. We even went to the mall in Tulsa, with Liam. It was our first real non-rushed “outing” together for god know’s how long. It was rough getting Liam to sleep that night, he was totally wired. But once we did we actually managed to sit down together and watch a movie without falling asleep in the middle of it.

Liam is really taking to the jumper his grandma and grandpa gave him for x-mas. It took awhile for him to get used to it but he seems to have the hang of it now and really goes to town. You can see a clip here.

I’m having a serious swearing problem. I’ve been especially bad lately, partly I think because the book I’m reading is laced with a lot of profanity, the milspeak kind no less, obscene phrases so creatively combined that you can’t help but admire the military’s impressive grasp of the more polluted side of the English language. But to be honest, I’ve been very overly excessive with my language for a while now. Although I’ve used profanity in the past, I was always very careful about who I cussed around and whether the cuss word was appropriate for the situation (if you belong to the profane speaking world then you know what I’m talking about, there are just some situations that necessitate vulgarity). When we found out that we were pregnant with Liam, Mike and I decided that we were going to make an effort to clean up our language. We’re both college graduates, which essentially means that we’re both exercised in the practice of expressing ourselves in a formal, orderly, academic manner. So, not cussing for us should be perfectly possible, right? Well, Mike is doing very well. Every once and awhile he’ll drop a few (usually when trying to fix some sort of home appliance), but all in all he’s turning into the perfect model of the non-cussing citizen. Me on the other hand, not so good. I said the “f” word in front of a kid the other day while I was grocery shopping at Wal-Mart. A few minutes later, I bumped into my old friend Crystal, looking all belly round and beautiful in her last trimester of pregnancy, and said a cuss word in front of her. Crystal and I have known each other since high school and used to hang out a lot back in the day, cruising around in her mustang, smoking Virginia Slims, talking about boys and yes, swearing a whole lot. In the middle of our delightful conversation about babies and nursery storage containers, I told her that we were starting Liam on solids and that my parents got me a new puree blender because the one I had s-cked –ss. Yes, I said that very dirty phrase, out in the open in the diaper section of Wal-mart. I detected a slight shock from Crystal and started thinking you know, maybe I need to just admit that I am now an adult, a responsible adult and in the adult world we don’t use the word –ss anymore, instead we say butt, or if you want to be a cute adult then you say tushy, and most importantly we don’t say s-cked –ss, we simply say “my blender doesn’t work very well”. So, I’m going to make another feeble attempt and cleaning up my language. If you hear me say a bad word, tell me to pay you a dollar. At the rate I’m going, I may make a lot of my friends rich.

I was holding Liam the other day and Mike came along, wrapped his arms around us and gave us both a big hug. All of a sudden he squeezed hard and then let go, stepped back and took a moment. When I asked him what was wrong he said that all of a sudden all he could think about was all the kids in the world who don’t get group hugs from their parents, who grow up abused and unloved. It’s funny how before you become a parent, you hear stories about children who are kidnapped, abused, mistreated and feel really horrible. But when you have your own child stories about abused children touch you very differently. In fact, they don’t just touch you, they literally slice into you and rip your heart out because all you can think about is “what if it were Liam”. This happened to me again today when I came across a news article concerning a hospital in Russia where nurses have been gagging orphan infants with plaster tape to keep them from crying. Apparently a patient managed to get some fotage on her cell cam of a baby moaning through his taped shut mouth. Of course, everyone is in uproar. I can’t help but wonder how long this had already been going on, and whether anything would have ever been done if some random person hadn’t caught it on camera.

Russian shock at gagged babies

Warning: the fotage is a little hard to stomach so…