rivka

We went to the fair yesterday and had a great time.

Unlike last year, we weren't lucky enough to see a birth in the birthing center. We did get to see chicks hatching and day-old piglets nursing, and we got to pet a piglet and a chick. Once again, they had a milking booth set up and Alex got to milk a cow for a minute or so. They had a sandbox filled with soybeans and dried corn, and Alex had a lot of fun playing there. While she did that, I browsed the agricultural displays nearby, which included a glossy free book explaining that organic food is worthless and that agribusiness makes our food ever so much cleaner.

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Michael's company offered discount fair tickets this year, including an all day ride wristband for $15. That turned out to be a fantastic deal. It was great to be able to tell Alex she could ride any ride she wanted, as often as she wanted. They had about ten different little-kid rides that she went on, plus she and Michael rode the 100-foot Ferris wheel.



I had a really delicious softshell crab sandwich for lunch, with a pile of homegrown tomatoes on the side. Alex insisted that for lunch she wanted "chicken on the bone." By which she meant the giant smoked turkey legs. We told her that she wouldn't really eat one. She swore that she would. So finally we bought it for her... and damned if she didn't make an impressive dent in it. She couldn't eat the whole thing, of course - she split it with Michael, and even he couldn't finish it - but she ate a lot for a four-year-old.



This year I got to spend a lot more time in the Home Arts building. I have to say that I wasn't very impressed with most of the baked goods on display. Most of the cookies looked dry, drab, colorless. I'm thinking that next year I may enter my oatmeal raisin cookies. I had thought that you could only enter recipes you developed yourself, but it turns out that as long as you bake from scratch it doesn't matter if you use an established recipe. (And my oatmeal raisin cookies are from a recipe I modified, anyway.)

The fabric arts sections were just beautiful. And I had a nice conversation with a woman in the preserved food section, who told me all about the jelly she made from violet petals.

It was a lovely day. Tiring, but lovely.

I did something dumb.

I missed my Prozac a couple of days in a row. That was careless. This is the dumb part: then I decided that since I hadn't had a bad reaction to missing a couple of days, maybe I could just come off it.

Yes, I can sense the look you're all giving your computer screens right now. Michael delivered the same look in person, trust me.

Today I finally realized that, um, being off the Prozac might have something to do with how short my fuse is these days, and how much current life events are filling me with dread.

Yeah, that ol' Ph.D. in clinical psychology is serving me really well.

I wasn't going to say anything in my LJ about it, but I am trying to be publicly honest about this whole process in case it can help someone else.

This morning I walked into the Institute and was not met by the customary blast of cold air in the lobby.

The air conditioning is out. So is the water. We have no working bathrooms and no cooling. It is August in Baltimore. This is a research facility in which people need to be able to, at a minimum, wash their hands.

Have they closed the Institute? No, of course not. Why would you think that? "Please use the restrooms in the Allied Health building."

I could go spend the morning in the library, and then the afternoon in the clinic. Except that I have to pump three times a day. When I'm at the clinic I pump in the room we use to see research subjects, which opens on to the waiting room and has no lock for the door. I put up a bunch of "do not enter" signs and pray, and I try not to have to pump there more than once a day. There's no private place to pump in the library, except maybe a bathroom stall. If bathroom stalls even have electrical outlets.

If I go home, I won't get anything done, because the kids will be there. I'd either have to pay the nanny and send her home (it wouldn't be fair to ask her to lose a day of pay without warning), or have her stay and try to keep the kids away from me while I hole up in my bedroom. pumping while she gives Colin bottles. That makes no sense.

Wait, okay, while I was typing this an e-mail came through from the COO:

As you all know, we have no water to the building. Campus Facilities is now saying that it will likely be back on in an hour. Meanwhile, one thing that is clear is that there is no safety water pressure in the labs. Therefore until further notice, please suspend all lab work that could possibly require safety water in an emergency.

We are still assessing overall building impact based on Campus Facilities repair predictions and will send more communications re: that soon – please let me know if you have any questions.

Okay, an hour. That's not so bad. I am crossing my fingers and hoping that the air conditioning will come back when the water does.

boxofdelights' 16-year-old daughter, who goes by Nixie in boxofdelights' LJ and should probably do the same here, has been staying with us since July 28. She wanted to go to science camp this summer and it didn't work out, so instead she's attending Camp Rivka. She goes to work with me to observe a behavioral scientist in her natural habitat. On the days I'm home with the kids, I've arranged various field trips for her: she went to NASA Goddard and the National Wildlife Visitor Center with wcg, she visited the developmental psychology lab at Johns Hopkins because Colin was in a study there, and she's going to visit a lab that works on developing and testing new HIV tests. Today she has taken the train into DC to visit the Smithsonian.

On top of those things, we've crammed in extra science-related opportunities where we can. She and Michael went to a public lecture at the Space Telescope Science Institute. We all went to the Maryland Science Center. And during a brief flyby visit by my grad school friend David, who is a developmental psychologist, we put Alex through some of the classic Piagetian tasks and demonstrated that she hasn't managed to work out the details of conservation yet.

It will not shock anyone who knows boxofdelights to hear that Nixie is very, very smart. I'm enjoying her sharp analytical mind, and I'm impressed that in such a short visit I've been able to give her work on my study that calls for thought and judgment. In addition to being smart, she's also charming, poised, and easygoing. She's been great company. The kids adore her. I do worry that she's not having as good a time being here as we are having her here, although she certainly seems to be happy.

In a fun coincidence, she told me her first day here that she hopes to go to Reed. boxofdelights either didn't tell her or didn't know that I went to Reed myself. I think Nixie is exactly what Reed is looking for, and I've offered to write a recommendation letter telling them so. (I don't think our contact will be long enough to make me a useful recommender to other colleges, but I think that Reed will value an alumna opinion.)

Nixie will be here until Wednesday. After that my normal life should more-or-less resume, and you'll probably see more of me on LJ. In the meantime, I am reading your posts, but not doing much else.

We spent most of last Saturday packing for SUUSI. Things got seriously derailed when I LOST MY PACKING LIST, which still hasn't resurfaced, and spent too long looking for it instead of just starting over with a new list. But eventually we got the car loaded up with stuff and kids and headed out around 8:15.

Our entertainment for the first part of the drive was driving through downtown Baltimore right past the Otakon hotel. (Alex: "When I grow up, I want to be an Otakon person.") Then we drove off into the sunset, west around DC and out I-66. The kids dropped off somewhere around Fairfax. My hope had been that they'd sleep solidly until we got to Radford, but instead they took turns waking a little and whimpering. I discovered that I can actually nurse Colin in the carseat without taking off my seatbelt, but it's not what you would call "comfortable."

By the time we hit Roanoke, just before 1am, we figured we'd gone as far as was practical. We checked into a Days Inn. Of course once the car stopped both kids woke up and cried in earnest, but they settled down quickly once we were in the motel room. In the morning we drove the rest of the way to SUUSI, arriving at 10:30. Wow is check-in simpler when you get there that early. We flew on through, paid the balance of our bill, got our pictures taken for the Mugbook, signed in with youth programming and the childcare co-op, and managed not to notice the workshop leaders' sign-in table. Oops. We unloaded the car and got our room put to rights fairly quickly, had a really bad dining hall lunch because they hadn't switched over to their SUUSI menus yet, and just hung out with the kids and our friends, being mellow. Laura, Michael's birthmother, showed up in midafternoon and Michael helped her get settled in.

This year, for the first time, Alex was really old enough to run with the pack of SUUSI kids. Any time we were in our room she wanted to go out in the hall or outside in the quad, where she'd run around and play with a big mob of other 3- to 7-year-olds. Several times, she and her friends even established "kids' tables" in the dining hall where they ate separately from us. It was really fun to see her dive into a peer group like that, with no shyness or drama.

We went to dinner with Laura (an official SUUSI meal, so the quality was 1000% improved) and then got our banner for Ingathering. Laura made herself a "First Unitarian Church of Oakland" sign on posterboard. The banner parade was organized to loop around the campus in an inefficient pattern, I guess so that there would be more of a march. It was tiring. As always, I loved the part where, after everyone was seated in the auditorium, the banner carriers paraded in accompanied by drums. I ditched Ingathering early because Alex got tired and cranky and Colin kept startling every time there was applause, so I can't really comment on the program content.

Afterward came Opening Circle. The thousand-odd SUUSIgoers formed two giant rings, facing each other. The circles were broken at one place and the inner and outer rings joined at the break, so that as we circled around we passed from the outer to the inner ring and came face-to-face with every other attendee. It was fun to see folks we hadn't seen in a year.

Then I took the kids back to the dorm for bedtime. It was late, and when we'd gotten our room together beforehand we hadn't fixed the beds. (Radford has unnaturally high beds, and I wanted my mattress on the floor so that I could co-sleep with Colin, which meant putting my bedframe on top of Michael's bedframe to get it out of the way.) I waited and waited for Michael to come back to the room. It turns out that a person who has never raised kids or had much to do with them (i.e., Laura) has very little idea of the powder-keg nature of a delayed bedtime; she had recruited Michael to do some stuff for her, and it took a long time. Fortunately, once he returned, he and the Wild Women had our beds set up properly in about ten seconds.

The best thing about parenting at SUUSI this year is that Alex never protested being put to bed. She stayed up very late looking at books most of the nights, but she didn't come out of our room and rarely called us, so I didn't mind. Michael and I just hung out on camp chairs in the hallway, drinking wine and chatting with our friends. Colin nursed like a nursing thing, got passed around for admiration, and eventually fell asleep in my lap.

All in all, the first day at SUUSI was much, much more pleasant than it usually is. I think we're going to try to drive the night before from now on.

I'VE LOST MY PACKING LIST.

Alex had an epic tantrum tonight. As has been the pattern lately, it happened because - gasp! - I dared to impose some discipline.

She likes to help me cook. Rule #1 for being in the kitchen when I'm cooking is that she has to do what I say. This is in part a safety rule (hot pans, knives, etc.) and in part a protect-the-menu-from-random-additions rule. It's been in place for a long time. Violation means banishment from the kitchen.

Well, tonight I found her holding the refrigerator door wide open. "What are you doing?" "I'm letting the cold air out." I told her to close it. Once. Twice. It wasn't until I walked towards her that she closed it and scampered away.

I reminded her of the rule and expelled her from the kitchen. She stood in the dining room door and started to cry. I reminded her of the rule again. And then, oh, the variety of tactics that she tried...

Bargaining: "I'm going to listen to what you say! I really am! I'm telling the truth!"

Self-justification: "I was cooling off the house! I was doing something good!"

Blame: "You're not being very nice to me!"

Guilt, Part I: "I was having a good day, until you made me have a tantrum!"

Excuse: "But I didn't HEAR you tell me to shut the fridge!"

Rage: She went into the living room, stood about two feet away from Michael, who was holding a sleeping Colin, and screamed.

Guilt, Part II: Back in the kitchen doorway, she informed me, "You even made COLIN cry!" "Colin didn't cry because you yelled and woke him up?" "No! Colin is crying because you made ME cry!"

Atonement: "I'm really sorry! I'm really really ashamed of what I did!"

Shame: "YOU should feel ashamed of what you did!"

Guilt, Part III: "Well, you're not ACTING like you love me!"

Piteousness: When I asked if she wanted to wipe down the table, "That's a really big job for just one little girl!"

Eventually she calmed down. I had her come out to the garden and help me pick herbs for dinner, and that seemed to help. I spent some time cuddling her and holding her on my lap... outside the kitchen.

She wasn't totally done, though. After dinner she picked a leaflet off the bookshelf and handed it to Michael. "Dad, let's read this." It was a children's brochure from church, and it included a children's version of the Seven Principles. After he read that part, she marched over to me.

"Mom, did you hear that? 'All people should be treated fairly and with kindness!'" she lectured.

"Did you have something you wanted to say to me about that?"

"You didn't treat me kindly!"

I told her that there are times that I don't treat her kindly - that I yell or lose my temper, that I shouldn't do that, and that I try not to. And then I explained, carefully, that the application of mild and reasonable discipline does not constitute unkind treatment. I'm not sure she bought it.

But... wow. She remembered what was in that leaflet and arranged to have it read aloud in my hearing as an object lesson. So that I would remember to apply the Seven Principles to my treatment of her. If you put aside the ridiculous drama, that's... actually a remarkably sophisticated way of addressing the situation.

We are so doomed, you guys.

I got e-mail from someone about one of my old, old pictures on Flickr.

I'm working on a baby accessory line and would like to use
your photo "airplane baby" ... on my hang tag and possibly
on my website. May I have permission to do this? If you
agree, I'd like to get a release form from you. Please let
me know.

I've gotten a request like this one before, but that was from someone putting together a nonprofit educational website. If someone wants to use one of my pictures in a commercial venture, I feel that I should ask for some money. But how much is reasonable? It's just a snapshot. (Albeit a cute one!)

Anyone up on their Norse mythology and willing to answer some questions for Alex? We read a story about Loki and Baldur, and she has questions I don't know the answers to.

Here are her questions:
If Baldur was the god of light, was it dark all the time after he was killed?
Why did Loki want to kill Baldur?
Why was Loki so mean?

Edited to add: If you want to have a try at some more of her questions that are stumping me this morning, here you go:

Why did the Romans want to have more money and power than other people?

and

Did Mr. McCain disagree with Jesus?

I swear to God I did nothing to elicit that last comparison.