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I don't remember ever being punished for swearing. My mother responded to even mild profanity with a calm, but firm, "I don't like that kind of language." My recollection is she said this instead of, not in addition to, responding to the content of what we were upset or complaining about, so eventually we figured out that swearing can derail communication.

My father used mild profanity in front of us, and did not object to hearing it when my mother or other potentially offendable people weren't around. Lesson #2 learned: different language for different contexts.

But there are two incidents in my childhood that really stand out, in which my parents taught me extremely valuable lessons about swearing.

Incident #1: We were on vacation. My father took my 11-year-old brother and another boy out on our little Day Sailer, and without warning the mast snapped. When they got back to the dock, the boys reported, awed, that when the mast broke my father uttered only two words: "Oh, dear."

Lesson learned: Sometimes the most impressive thing is the profanity you don't use.

Incident #2: One year my father absent-mindedly forgot to sign up at work for his vacation weeks. This was a huuuge deal, because we had already reserved and put a deposit on a rental cottage, and there was a chance that we'd just miss our vacation, while paying the deposit fee, if Dad didn't secure the right to take the proper weeks off. (Turns had to be taken, so he couldn't take just any week.)

My mother, who never swore and never tolerated the use of words like "hell" in her presence, discovered Dad's lapse in the middle of family dinner. There was a silence. Then she turned to him and said, "You asshole!"

I remember nothing that happened after that, because the moment itself was so apocalyptic in my mind. But I'll bet you that every single member of my family remembers when she said it, and why. And you damn betcha my father fixed the vacation thing and never ever repeated that mistake. I have never heard her utter another curse word ever again.

Lesson learned: If you are known to never swear, people will pay attention if you do. If you swear regularly, the words don't have that power.

Alex brought home a card she'd made at school. Her handprint is on the front in fuchsia paint.

"Mom," she said earnestly, "our hands are on there so you'll always remember when we were three or four, how cute we were."

Obviously that came from a teacher explaining the craft at school. But then Alex took it a step further. She ducked under my arm and gazed up into my face.

"Mom, when I'm a really really big grownup and you don't ever see me again, you'll always remember how cute I was."

"You don't think you'll visit me when you're a grownup?"

"Maybe not."

Every snarling, angry teenager screaming obscenities at her mother was once a three- or four-year-old presenting a handmade Mother's Day card. Every adult distant and alienated from his parents was once a cute, loving preschooler.

If you read things written by parents who don't have good relationships with their teenage or adult children, there's always an overpowering sense of bewilderment. How did the sweet, trusting little kid grow into the angry, resentful adult? Before, reading, I always thought that there must be something they'd done wrong and weren't mentioning. But now I think that a lot of the time parents just don't know. They think they're doing well enough. Not perfect, right, but adequate.

I called Alex in to me just now. "Honey, even when you're a really big grownup, I hope you'll always want to see me and be with me sometimes."

"Mmm," she said sympathetically. She let me hug her. Then she twirled away from me to tell Michael something about a plastic egg she'd filled with coins.

On the evening of her second day of employment, our nanny called to tell us that a relative has offered her a full-time job. She's giving us two weeks' notice.

I am devastated.

She was great. Totally competent and professional and warm and a nice person. The other person we interviewed who seemed good and competent wasn't legal to work in the US, which is something I'm not willing to deal with.

Now we have to start over. I can't believe we have to start over. Can I just slit my wrists instead?

We may have to try an agency this time, but I'm afraid that will be too expensive. But that may be our only fast-enough turnaround. I'm also going to e-mail around to our friends, see if anyone has a recommendation. And re-run the Craigslist ad, I guess.

I HATE THIS SO MUCH.

I go back to work on Wednesday. I'll be working three days a week; that represents a 20% reduction in official hours plus eight hours a week working from home.

We've hired a nanny, a 30-year-old psych major named Beth who seems very nice, gets glowing reviews, appears to get our parenting style, and has 11 years of experience. Starting in June, Alex will come home from school at lunchtime and be with Colin and the nanny (or Colin and me, on Fridays) in the afternoons. She'll still have her Wednesdays entirely at home.

This part is really hard. What makes it even harder with Colin than it was four years ago with Alex is the whole nursing-and-pumping issue. I don't know if I'll be able to pump enough milk. I don't know what "enough" is, even, because although Colin has practiced drinking from a bottle he has never had a full feeding that way, so I don't know how much he'll take or how long it will last him.

Fun times.

As I did when I first left Alex with a nanny, I've made up a short field guide to my kids - one page per kid, plus extras about Alex's diet. Boy, it's all a lot more complicated when there's a 4-year-old involved. It's posted under the cut in case you're curious or have feedback. ( Read more... )

New pictures are up on Flickr. Here's a preview:

We got back from Montreal Sunday night, dirty and exhausted but reasonably pleased. It was a good trip.

As far as the ostensible reason for our trip, the Society of Behavioral Medicine conference, the thing that will pay for my plane ticket and the hotel room and a fair bit of the food: it went surprisingly well. My talk was well-attended and well-received; there were more questions during the question period than I had time to answer, and some people stayed to ask me questions afterward or even approached me later in the exhibit hall. I think I did a good job writing the talk and delivering it, especially considering the circumstances.

Last year I didn't enjoy the SBM program very much. This year, I managed to make it to several great program items. It seemed like there were more interesting options and better HIV representation. I particularly enjoyed a symposium on novel strategies for accessing populations of ethnic-minority men ("So it turns out, in our part of North Carolina, you reach African-American men through the churches, but Latino men, no. And then we found out about the soccer league!"), and a keynote address on using marketing and mass communications to disseminate valid scientific information.

The only thing that's bugging me about SBM right now is that it seems like every year there is more and more of an "obesity epidemic" focus. I was never interested in that topic era to begin with, but now that I've read so much that debunks dieting and obesity panic, I find it irritating. I'm fine with the program items about increasing activity level and consumption of healthy foods, because I think those things have independent health benefits, but I kind of want to go to the weight loss intervention panels and ask politely what the follow-up data looks like five years out.

I managed to see three-quarters of most of the sessions I attended. They were mostly scheduled to be 90 minutes long, and somewhere around the 70-minute mark Colin would start to wake up or make sounds. I was hypersensitive to every noise he made, because at a professional conference Colin is not part of the community and has no independent right to be there. So at the second coo or gurgle we were out the door. We got nothing but friendly looks, though.

The non-conference portions of the trip were just excellent. papersky always provides visitors with quality entertainment. One major highlight was a free-flying butterflies exhibit at the botanical gardens. Picture a big plant-filled atrium with thousands and thousands of butterflies swarming about - not just common ones, either, but massive South American specimens. I mean, just walking along you'd find yourself flinching away from the most spectacular butterfly you'd ever seen, trying to keep it from flying right into your face. (Also at the Jardin Botanique, a really neat greenhouse filled with "economic" tropical plants - foods, dyes, etc. I never knew what a black pepper plant looked like. Or the source of the ubiquitous xanthan gum. Alex loved that room.)

The other big highlight was a picnic on an island, on the unexpectedly warm and lovely Saturday. We spread blankets under some pines for the shade and found ourselves in the center of an active flock of red-winged blackbirds. A woodchuck ambled back and forth, sometimes as little as twenty feet away. After a delicious lunch, we went into the Biosphere (not to be confused with the Biodome) - a small museum housed in the frame of a giant geodesic dome. The only great exhibit was a water activity room, but that one was really great, so that was just fine. Plus admission was free for Earth Day. Alex had a wonderful time making rivers and pools and channels and sailing boats and walking across water on pontoons and otherwise getting very damp indeed.

Of course, as is the case any time one visits papersky, we had excellent food. Highlights for me were a Chinese feast the first night, an incredible dim sum spread on Sunday morning, and - oddly enough - the shish kebob dinners we ordered delivered to our hotel room the night that papersky and rysmiel had a dinner party to attend. But really, there was only one meal I thought was just so-so, and that time it was clear that I had ordered the wrong thing.

So that was our trip. I think I'll probably write another post about traveling with both kids later.

We leave for Montreal in the morning. Packing is making me slightly insane. But we have our passports, my presentation, and a bunch of burp cloths. The rest is just details, right?

Here's how tired I am today:

- I went to a meeting at the church, left my diaper bag there, and didn't even notice that I didn't have it until someone called to tell me so.

- I decided to pump breastmilk while Colin napped. I connected all the tubing, turned the pump on, and hooked myself up. It took a good 30 seconds for me to realize that I hadn't attached any bottles to hold the milk.

Clearly I should not be trusted with anything of importance, except that I need to write the talk I'm giving on Friday in Montreal.

(Did I really go a week without updating my LJ?! What happened?)

Happy birthday to Alexandra Calvert Wald!

Below the cut, the now-traditional birthday montage. Marvel with me at her grown-up big-kidness!

( Read more... )

I'm writing back to nanny job applicants.

There just isn't any way of saying "I'm sorry, but we're really not looking for someone with wholesome family values to take care of our children", is there?