Wandering Scientist

Weekend Reading: The Achieving Equality Edition

2012-02-10T21:30:00.000-08:00

I have a follow up to my last post in mind, discussing how hard it is to discuss being happy with my life (and particularly with being a work-outside-the-home mother) without offending women who have made different choices, why I think that is, and a couple of misconceptions about work-life balance for working parents that drive me absolutely batty... but I don't have the energy to write that post tonight. It has been a tough week, and I'm tired. So look for that post early next week.

Besides- it is Friday, so it is time for a weekend reading post! I will keep roughly in theme, though, because this week's post has a bunch of links that each in their own way remind us women that we still have a way to go before society really sees us as equal to men.

First, Ginger over at Ramble, Ramble wrote an eloquent plea for people to stop saying that someone else is raising our kids when we work. No one says that fathers aren't really parents if they work, but if mothers work- well, to some people, we're not really mothers. We're letting our nannies or the teachers at our day care raise our kids. Obviously, I think that is nonsense. Her rant was about how annoying it is when other working mothers say this- presumably as a self-deprecating joke. I agree, that joke is always going to fall flat. I would extend the rant to cover the other people who say this sort of thing, too.

Next, I believe that I found this awesome post about a lecture in which a woman scientist systematically dismisses the standard explanations for the gender gap using data in science via fiainros' twitter stream. If you are at all interested in the gender gap in science (and what we can do about it), go read that post. And follow @fiainros- she tweets good links!

I have no idea where I found this article from Forbes about how the response to Madonna's halftime show is ageist. Full disclosure- I didn't see the halftime show. We are rugby fans here, and don't watch much football. I went grocery shopping during the big game. But, I'm going to hazard a guess, based on the fact that people reacted so differently to Madonna than they did to the older male musicians who have performed in the past, and say that the reaction is probably a bit sexist, too. Aging still means something different to women than it means to men. For women whose careers are in performing arts, it must be so frustrating to see actors like Harrison Ford still getting cast as leading men while they are relegated to playing bit parts. It has been gratifying to watch actresses like Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep start to break through that barrier, but we still have a long way to go. Hey, Hollywood- I don't see many movies. Maybe that would change if you made the roles played by women I can identify with a little more interesting.

Of course, men and women get different reactions from the press and the public even before they are old. I really liked this article in the Atlantic discussing how annoying it is that Sheryl Sandberg is being characterized as "lucky" instead of just damn good at what she does. I haven't read that much about Sandberg, so I don't know how pervasive this characterization of her success is. But I liked her Barnard commencement address- a post about it was the trigger for the "don't lean back ahead of time" rant post that brought some of you to my blog. There was a link in that Atlantic article to an earlier Atlantic article summarizing her advice to ambitious young women, and I think it is good advice, particularly the bit about making sure your partner is a true partner. I've said very similar things, and have ranted about how having a true partner is indeed possible. I'd add one more thing to her advice- don't fall into the guilt trap.

One of Sandberg's key pieces of advice is not to "lean back ahead of time"- i.e., don't scale back your career ambitions in anticipation of the time when you will have kids. I have noticed that when I go to career events for college students, graduate students, and post-docs, it is only the women who ask me about how I achieve work-life balance, and many of the women asking this have no partner, let alone kids. So it was interesting to read a post from The Mama Bee about an expectant father who was also considering "leaning back"- or more accurately, opting out. I can sympathize with that man, and of course he should do whatever is right for his family. But I can also sympathize with the Mama Bee's wish that he'd stay and help fight to make work places more hospitable to people who have children- or any other interest outside of work. I have ranted on this before, too, but I'm too lazy to find the link- work-life balance isn't just for mothers. We won't make progress on this issue without getting support and involvement from everyone in the work place- mothers, fathers, and people without any dependents at all. We all deserve a life that encompasses more than work.

That's enough ranting for tonight. It is almost time for Friday Night Beers!

In other news, I glanced at my stats this evening and thought "wow! Where did all those people come from?" It turns out that Gretchen over at the Happiness Project linked to my blog, which is pretty cool. Thanks to Gretchen for linking, and Laura Vanderkam for referring her. And hello, all you Happiness Project readers! Welcome to my blog. There is a guided tour up there that might give you and idea of the various things I write about. At the end of last year I wrote a year in review post that highlighted some of my favorite and most popular posts of 2011, which would also be a good starting place if you want to explore my blog.

Also, in all the stress of this week, I forgot to draw a new winner for the Discovery of Jeanne Baret give away, since my first winner, Jen never sent me contact info. This is why I don't do many giveaways. I suck at them. But I'll rectify the situation soon, and contact the new winner. Jen- if you happen to read this, I guess you have one last chance to claim your book!

Happy weekend, everyone.

On "Big Careers" and Work-Life Balance

2012-02-08T22:27:00.000-08:00

Something happened today that has finally made me decide to write about a work-life balance topic that has been languishing in my "posts to write" list for a long time. Let me apologize up front- it has been a hard day, I'm having a beer, and this post is going to be a bit stream of conscious-y. Those three things are probably related.

Anyway, it all started when I got mad at work- mad enough to need to get up and leave a meeting. A meeting that I was running. Now, this is rare. Really rare. So rare that no one in the room had ever seen me mad before, and there were people in the room who have worked with me for years, including my boss, who worried that I was about to quit and insisted on taking me out for tea to give me a chance to decompress and apologize for creating the conditions that made me mad.

So, you know, good times. Particularly since I, like many women, get teary-eyed when I get mad. I am over feeling bad about that- I agree with this quote from Tina Fey, in Bossypants:

"Some people say 'Never let them see you cry.' I say, if you're so mad you could just cry, then cry. It terrifies everyone."

But I felt bad about disrupting my meeting. And I felt bad about the fact that the hour or so I spent having tea with my boss just made me even more behind on the work that needs to get done. In short, I wasn't in the best of moods when I got an email from my husband saying he needed to run an errand tonight.

I wrote back that he could, but not during bathtime, because I needed him to do bath (it was his turn) so that I could get the kids' rooms ready for the cleaner, who is coming tomorrow. And I told him I'd just melted down in a meeting, and clearly needed to get some stress out of my life.

Being a good husband, he wrote back to ask me to lunch. On the way to lunch, he was trying to come up with how we could make more time for me to work. I told him that I did not, in fact, want or need more time to work. I am operating at my work limit. What I need is more mental space for work. I have a lot going on at work right now, and I need the mental space to think about it, and not think about, for instance, the fact that he had left his credit card (on a joint account) at a restaurant on Saturday and still not called them or gone to retrieve it. Or that Petunia needs new shoes. Or any number of other mundane things that I keep in my head or on my "home" to do list. I want him to step up and take on some more of the household memory tasks. He may or may not be able to do this- he's recently been promoted into management at work, and I suspect he also needs more mental space for work right now. So we'll probably solve this problem by optimizing our home processes a bit more. But that's not the point. The point is that his response to this made it blindingly obvious that he has no idea how much I'm juggling at work right now. He made a suggestion about how he keeps track of all the things he needs to do at work. I pointed out that (1) I'm already doing that, and (2) I'm keeping track of what 10-15 people need to do, on 5 or 6 projects.

And his jaw dropped. Literally. He had no idea that I had that many people working for me. But I do: I only have three direct reports and one "staff augmentation" type contractor (i.e., she's essentially a direct report), but I have roughly 10 other contractors working for me right now, many of them at full time or close to it. We have a lot going on. Of those 5 or 6 projects, at least two of them are very big, very high profile- as in, pretty much everyone in the company, right up to the CEO, will notice whether or not they succeed.

So what does all of this have to do with work-life balance? Well, it made me think about the fact that most people really have no idea what a big operation I run. I think that is because I downplay what I do. I should stop doing that for many reasons, one of which is that it makes people take my opinions about work-life balance less seriously.

I care deeply about work-life balance issues. I am passionate on the point that it is possible- enjoyable, even- to have a "big career" and also have a good home life and feel like a fully involved parent. Sometimes I wonder if my career is maybe not "big" enough to qualify me as an example of that. I am not running a company. I am not a tenure track professor. I am not a high-powered consultant or lawyer, charging hundreds of dollars for my time (although, if I were a consultant, a fair rate for my time would be somewhere between $150 and $200 an hour).

But I am running my group, building the enterprise informatics infrastructure for a biotech company that now has ~150 people. I have multiple databases (many of which I've designed) and a portfolio of enterprise software to manage. I manage relations with vendors and other departments. As I mentioned above, at any given time, I have a team of 10-15 people who look to me to set priorities and balance timelines so that we can deliver projects on time. My department's budget is over $1 million, and I decide how to allocate that money in order to best meet our goals- which I set. And yes, sometimes I am the final arbiter scientific and/or technical decisions, although I prefer to build consensus within my team rather than issue edicts.

And I do all of this while working a 40-50 hour week- and while ensuring that my team can also work reasonable hours. We work weekend hours sometimes, because we are in IT, and we often need to do our work when the scientists we support are not working. But I explicitly tell my team to take comp time, and I will always rearrange our schedule around someone's home schedule. To me, that is just good management.

The point of writing all of this isn't to brag. It is to make the point that we are sometimes a bit too narrow in our focus when we talk about work-life balance and "big careers". No, I'm not Sheryl Sandberg - but most men aren't Mark Zuckerberg, and I am not someone without responsibility and authority. I am also most certainly not alone. There are lots and lots of middle managers like me out there, in a wide variety of industries. Do our careers count as "big"? Does it matter? Why are we so invested in saying that there are some careers that are incompatible with having a family, and trying to find that subset of "big" careers that just won't work for mothers? I've heard people say that my schedule is all well and good for the sort of work that I do, but it wouldn't fly at a start up (shhh... don't tell, but I've worked at start ups, too, and kept essentially the same hours), or in XYZ industry.

Well, to be blunt, I think that is bullshit. If people have work limits, then they will have interests outside of work. Why should it matter so much if those interests are children? I do acknowledge that some companies and industries have cultures that do not accept that people have work limits- but I think that is short-sighted and frankly counter-productive. And there is nothing inevitable about those cultures. They are not dictated by some sort of natural law, like gravity. People made those cultures. We could change them if we wanted to, and I suspect that if we did, we'd actually get more done. So why don't we want to?

Something Lost, Something Gained

2012-02-06T18:50:00.000-08:00

In a recent Weekend Reading post, I wrote a bit about the fact that motherhood for me has been a trade off between things I've gained and things I've lost. I've been thinking more lately about what, exactly, I've lost and what I've gained. Here are the lists I've come up with:

What I miss from my pre-kids life:

Sleep, or more specifically, the casual attitude I used to have towards sleep, when being tired meant that I would just go to bed earlier, sleep in later, or take a nap. Now, being tired often means that I'll just be tired.
Travel, or more specifically, the casual attitude I used to have towards travel, when if I wanted to go somewhere I just needed to convince Hubby he did, too (easy!) and save up the time off from work. Now, we think about whether or not the trip would work well with kids, and saving up time off from work is much, much harder since we spend so many days off with sick kids.
Going out to eat, or more specifically, the casual attitude I used to have towards going out to eat, when I could just decide that I wanted to eat at X restaurant, rally Hubby to the cause, and go. Now, we have to worry about wait times and kid-friendliness, and if we decide to go, the preparation involves assembling distractions for the kids, snacks in case the wait is unexpectedly long, diapers, wipes, etc., etc.
Reading, or more specifically, getting lost in a book and reading as much as I want to without regards to bedtimes, dinner preparation, or anything else.
Quiet. Enough said.
The ability to rest and feel sorry for myself when I get sick. These days, I still have kids to take care of, and unless I'm really, really, sick, I usually need to work, too (although I will try to work from home to keep the germs to myself whenever possible)- see the point above about how hard it is to save up time off work.

What I've gained since having kids:

The best hugs. Seriously, kids give hugs with all their being. It never fails to make me feel better to get a hug from one of my kids- even if I'm already feeling pretty good.
Baby and toddler laughs. These may be the only thing better than the hugs. Or maybe it is a tie. And you know what? Preschooler laughs are pretty good, too.
Enthusiastic bye-byes when I go to the shower in the morning. I don't remember how this started, but both kids yell and wave bye-bye when I finish breakfast and head to the shower.
Being happy to get caught by the train. Who can worry about the time lost when there is a toddler in the back seat yelling "Choo-choo!" and signing train?
A more Zen approach to life. Both of my kids have been trying to teach me to just take life as it comes since they were born. I'm a slow learner, and have a long way to go before I'd say I truly have the Zen thing down... but I'm A LOT better now than I was before Pumpkin was born.
Sharing books with my kids (yes, even the books that I've read so many times I know by heart- maybe especially those). Also, watching my daughter learn how to read. I have always loved to read. But my kids have reminded me of how magical it is.
A front row seat to watch human development in action. Development is fascinating, even if sometimes I get so caught up in the day to day struggles that I forget what's going on developmentally. I wrote my baby development cheat sheet in an attempt to do better at "following along" the second time around. It helped. A bit. But those milestones go by so fast!
Along those same lines, from a slightly different point of view... teaching my kids about the world, and getting to rediscover how wonderful it can be. Did you know that finding a snail slime trail is amazing good luck? Or that coming across a kitty cat resting under a car is something you should stop and appreciate?
Watching my husband be a father. He is a great father. Honestly, it has made me love him even more. (Awwww.)
Watching my kids be sisters to each other. They haven't really started fighting yet, so this is mostly just cute and wonderful.
More empathy. I can't really explain this one, but it is true.
A greater sense of my own emotional strength. I've pushed on past what I was sure was my breaking point many times, and here I am on the other side.
More patience at work. I can't fully explain this one, either, but it is true. My best guess is that I've gained a little more perspective.
A greater appreciation for my parents. There is nothing like having kids to make you realize what you put your own parents through. Pumpkin didn't sleep through the night until she was two. Neither, apparently, did I. Her picky eating? Yep, I did that, too. As I navigate the decisions that come with parenting, I realize that my parents were pretty amazing. They still are, actually. And they are wonderful grandparents, too.
A renewed appreciation for Halloween. Also, for Christmas.
Toddler pajamas. A toddler in pajamas is pretty much the cutest thing on the planet. I would never have known this if I hadn't had kids.

Clearly, this is an intensely personal list. Different mothers will have different items on their lists. Many people who don't have kids find their way to items on my post-kids list, such as having a more Zen approach to life. The point isn't to try to write a universal list about the pluses and minuses of parenthood, but rather to give a snapshot of what it has meant in my life. Feel free to play along in the comments!

Quotable: Different Perspectives

2012-02-05T07:00:00.000-08:00

"Cleopatra was every bit Ceaser's equal as a coolheaded, clear-eyed pragmatist, though what passed on his part as strategy would be remembered on hers as manipulation."

- Stacy Shiff, in Cleopatra: A Life

Reading Cleopatra, I found myself wondering often about how much history would have changed if Cleopatra and Marc Antony had won instead of Octavian. Cleopatra came from a tradition in which women openly played an active role in public discourse. In Rome, on the other hand, the only way for a woman to be powerful was through the men in her life.

Of course, there were negative sides to Cleopatra's culture, too, so it is not clear that we would be better off if she'd won. But I can't help but wonder....

Weekend Reading: The New and Out of Date Edition

2012-02-03T14:43:00.000-08:00

Before I start: Jen? Are you out there? You won the free copy of The Discovery of Jeanne Baret... but I don't have your email address! Get it to me by Tuesday, Feb. 7, or I'll have to draw another winner, which would make me sad.

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In honor of Facebook's upcoming IPO, I'm finally getting around to posting some links I've gathered about the "new economy" and other related techie things. But, since they have been languishing in my upcoming posts list for quite awhile now, they are already all out of date. Still, there is some good reading here.

First of all, Jeff Atwood writes on Coding Horror about why you shouldn't buy a tech book- even the one he helped write. In fact, he argues that you shouldn't write one, either. I found his post really thought-provoking, particularly in thinking about what content does best online. I agree that tech content is one area that really works best online- but how to pay people for producing it? That is always the problem with these new economy issues, isn't it? How to get people to pay for the value they are getting from your work.

(Incidentally, Jeff (@codinghorror) and his wife Betsy (@betsyphd) are now the proud parents of twins. I have never met either of them in real life. I follow @codinghorror, but have never conversed, and I know @betsyphd only through Twitter- and we "met" completely independent of the fact that I follow her husband's blog and twitterstream. But I am so happy for them! Jeff wrote a great post on parenthood, which I featured in an earlier weekend reading post. And I've been following along on twitter as @betsyphd ended up on bedrest. So heartfelt congratulations on the arrival of the twins!)

One model that is often promoted as the solution for the "but how do you make any money off of that?" problem is the "freemium" model, in which your site or content is free for most, but premium users (i.e., people who pay) get something more. Pandora comes to mind as a website that seems to be making that work. But here's a post from someone who had a different experience. I think this just highlights how hard it is to make money online- models that work for some sites fail entirely for others. There is no guaranteed formula, not just for getting rich, but even for for getting any return on the time you've invested. I know, I know... this is true in the "old economy," too. But it seems like there is more guidance available for how to run a successful old-style business. Maybe that's just because the new-style business models are all so, well, new.

Wired had an interesting piece that touches on the fact that now is a time in which people are experimenting with business models. It was primarily about the Amazon vs. your local independent bookstore flap that blew up back before Christmas. I particularly like this line:

"Amazon didn’t happen to your local independent bookstore; America happened to your local bookstore, from television to Waldenbooks."

It really underscores the fact that the technology is just part of the equation in figuring out how to keep any business afloat these days. The technology is changing what is possible, but it (and other forces) are also changing what people want. No wonder it is so hard for people to figure it out. Maybe you really do just have to get lucky.

Or, already be famous. Remember back when we were all talking about how Louis C.K. decided to make a download-only comedy special (nevermind the potential pirates) and made $500,000 selling it, with no middleman? Well, last I checked, he's made over $1 million. This clearly demonstrates that the content distribution world is changing. But I wonder how much of his experience translates to people who don't already have his name recognition? I would guess not much, even with sites like Kickstarter helping out.

And of course, there are heavyweight middlemen in the new economy, too. I was intrigued to see Amazon start to sign up authors directly. I wonder where that will lead?

Phew. That turned out to be longer than I thought it would be. I guess that's what happens when I let links pile up for months. Tell me what you think about all of this in the comments. And/or tell me whether you think I should sign up for GoodReads, LibraryThing, both, or neither. I'm uncharacteristically on the fence about this, and have been for a long time. But I love books and I love lists, so it seems I should be on one or the other site. Should I? Which one? Help get me off the fence!

Ch-ch-choices

2012-02-01T22:14:00.000-08:00

This week, I will fill out our school choice form. As I explained in my earlier post on school choice, we're interested in having our daughters learn a foreign language, and are therefore considering magnet schools with language programs as well as our neighborhood school.

When I last wrote, we had visited a Spanish immersion magnet two blocks from our house (that we have at best a 50% chance of getting a spot at) and a Spanish enrichment magnet that is in a different neighborhood, but not horribly out of the way for our daily commutes.

This week, we visited two more schools- a Chinese immersion magnet in a different neighborhood that is a bit out of our way, and our neighborhood school (i.e., the school we'll have a spot at if we can't get into any of the magnets).

And I'm happy to say, we now have a plan.

We were really impressed with the Chinese magnet. They have a great program, and a really dynamic, enthusiastic principal who has done a great job of finding creative ways to get resources for his school despite the grim budget environment. They are also slated to move to a new location in the next couple of years- and all three of the possible locations work well for us. Really, the only downside of that school would be that it has a very early start time. It starts at 7:30, due to bus schedule constraints. That gave us pause- but then we realized that since our daughter has lower than average sleep needs and the early start would mean that we wouldn't have to worry about traffic, we'd only have to move her bedtime back by an hour, at most. Her lights currently go out at 9, and she is up before 7 every day. If we move lights out back to 8, she'd probably be up before 6, and we could easily make it out of the house by 7, which would give us plenty of time to get to school on time. We're not thrilled about the change, but we think the program would be worth it.

Still, we loved the Spanish immersion magnet's program, too, and they have a more civilized start time two blocks from our house. So that program will be our first choice, and the Chinese magnet will be our second choice. Given the fact that last year they had twice as many applicants as they had slots... this probably means that all the mental energy we used considering the impact of that 7:30 start time was completely wasted. Our chances of getting in as a second choice are exceedingly slim. There is no harm in trying, though.

The only questions left were whether or not we'd put the Spanish enrichment program as our third choice, and whether or not we'd consider a private school.

Those questions were answered when we visited our neighborhood school. It is a good school. We liked the principal's attitude and approach, and we were impressed by what we saw in the kindergarten classes. They do not currently have any language offerings at all, not even after school. However, when we asked the principal if we could set one up, she was very positive about that possibility. At first, she hedged, saying that while she thought learning a foreign language was important, given the budget cuts, she didn't think they'd have the budget. But then we said that we intended to fund the class ourselves... and she was thrilled with our idea. Overjoyed, in fact. I suspect that we'd get at least a few other interested kids, so we would not end up paying for the entire class. Even if we did have to pay for the whole thing, though, my research indicates that it would be cheaper than private school. A LOT cheaper.

We had also asked a friend whose kids attend the local private school that does a French immersion program how much it cost. She said it currently costs $11,000, and has been going up at 1-2% each year. Now, $11,000 is a lot better than the $23,000 the "premier" private school in our area costs. But setting up an after school Spanish class would cost a fraction of that.

An after school Spanish class would also provide as much (if not more!) Spanish instruction as what is offered by the Spanish enrichment magnet we visited. From what we could tell, if we wanted into the Spanish enrichment program, we would probably get in. However, if we wrote it as our third choice, were offered a spot in it, and accepted that, we would be out of the running for any spots that opened up at our first two choices (the immersion magnets) due to parents changing their minds. We would also be out of the running if we turned down a spot at our third choice school.

We've decided that it isn't worth taking that risk. The advice we received was to only write choices on our form that we like as much as the first choice- because once you are offered a choice, you are done, regardless of whether or not you accept it. Your only options are to accept that choice or go to your neighborhood school.

And so, we have a plan. We will write the Spanish and Chinese immersion magnets as our first two choices. If we don't get one of those choices, we'll go to our neighborhood school and set up an after school Spanish class, while also continuing our weekend Chinese lessons as long as Pumpkin is interested in them.

It feels great to have this sorted out. Now, we just have to wait and see how lucky we get.

LEGO Friends: Feminist Friend or Foe?

2012-01-30T21:50:00.000-08:00

I've decided to do a follow up post about the LEGO Friends sets I wrote about in December, now that the sets are actually out. Apparently, the uproar over these sets continues- there is now a Facebook petition against them. As I wrote in December, I'm no huge fan of our super-gendered toy environment, but I also don't think that these new LEGO sets are the surefire ticket to stereotypical gender roles that their detractors make them out to be. And I suspect I have one significant advantage over a lot of the people who are up in arms about these sets: I have actually seen one. In fact, I've bought one, and watched my daughter play with it. I can even compare how she plays with it to how she plays with her other two sets- a house and a castle (spoiler alert: she plays with all of the sets in exactly the same way).

I am fairly confident that many people who have written angry diatribes against the LEGO Friends sets have never seen one for two reasons: many of those angry diatribes were written before the sets actually came out, and many of them are full of misinformation. So let me clear some things up:

The sets are not pre-built. They consist of a bunch of little blocks and special pieces, which are assembled following instructions. In other words, they are just like every other LEGO set in this regard.
The sets are not entirely pink and purple. There are some pink, purple, and pastel blocks. But there are also other color blocks in the sets, and once built, the result is not a sickening confection of pink. (Unlike, for instance, the Hello Kitty Megabloks sets I've seen, which have somehow escaped the wrath that is now raining down on the LEGO Friends sets.)
The sets do not consist entirely of vignettes of girl figurines doing gender stereotypical things. There is a house set (last I checked, some men live in houses, too), sets representing various possible activities (some, but not all, of which could be considered "girl" activities), a treehouse set (not exactly a stereotypically girl thing, right?), and a car (again, men drive those, too).

Oh heck, let's just look at all the sets. I'll put direct links to the LEGO site here, but also links to the Amazon page in case you are won over by the sight of the actual sets and want to buy one:

A cafe (On Amazon)
A treehouse (On Amazon)
A convertible (On Amazon)
A beauty shop (On Amazon)
A vet's office (On Amazon)
A house (On Amazon)
A bakery (On Amazon)
A pool (On Amazon) (You've probably already seen a picture of this one- it was a favorite of people writing posts critical of these sets before they came out.)
A stage/music studio (On Amazon)
An inventor's workshop (On Amazon)
A puppy house (On Amazon)
An ATV-like vehicle for the "pet patrol" (On Amazon)
A fashion design studio (On Amazon)
A dog show (On Amazon)

Now, I will agree that the majority of the activities represent things that are typically associated with girls- the inventor's workshop being a notable exception. However, I think we should remember several things:

It is hard to make toys out of most jobs. I suspect a LEGO cube-farm or server room would sell really well to techies trapped working in such places, but I doubt those sets would appeal much to children of either gender.
The LEGO figurines in the Friends sets are meant to be girls, not grown women. I base this on the fact that the house set seems to include a Mom and a Dad figurine.
Many grown women like to bake cupcakes, go to beauty salons, have pets, lounge by the pool, and follow fashion while at the same time pursuing challenging and rewarding careers in a variety of fields. Interests in baking, fashion, animals, and pool lounging are not incompatible with interests in, say, science and engineering.
No one thinks that the pirate LEGO sets are going to turn the kids who play with them into pirates.

Don't get me wrong: I think LEGO could do better with the activities- maybe adding something sports-related and another less stereotypically female career-type activity (although I struggle with what it should be- see point 1, above). I also do not want to trivialize the concerns people have raised: play is a very important part of how our children learn the skills they will need in life. It is fair to be concerned that the toys we provide give all of our children a fair shot at future success. But I think many of LEGO's critics are making a mistake in focusing too much on interests and too little on skills. Interests can change on a dime. Skills build upon each other, with skills acquired early providing a foundation upon which later skills can build. On the skills front, LEGO did everything right. They did not dumb down these sets, and they made them interoperate with their other sets, so that they can serve as a gateway to more complicated sets.

In this sense, I almost think that the LEGO Friends sets are subverting gender stereotypes rather than reinforcing them. There is something to be said for having these sets appeal to little girls who are only interested in "girly" things and to the adults who buy toys for little girls and will only buy "girly" things. (For the record, I think there are more people in the latter category than the former. Far more. Even the most princess obsessed four year olds I know have other interests, too.) LEGO sets are really, really good at encouraging some important skills: spatial reasoning, a "feel" for building things, and problem-solving abilities. All of these skills are critical for careers in engineering, computers, and science. These are good, high-paying careers, and not many women pursue them. I think part of the reason for this is that a lot of little girls do not get a chance to develop important foundational skills early enough. If LEGO has to bring out "girl-specific" sets in purple boxes in order to reach more girls... well, I can live with that. Maybe they'll win some more girls over to ~~the dark side~~ engineering and science.

So, what do we here at Chez Cloud actually think of our LEGO Friends set? Well, it gets mixed reviews. Pumpkin chose the inventor's workshop. (I didn't push her to choose that one, I swear!) She loves it. She came home from the store and built it right away, essentially by herself. She has now started mixing the pieces from that set in with her other sets, creating, among other things, this city scene:

(Those are skyscrapers with a big billboard on them.)

And this airplane/science lab/wheelbarrow:

Hubby, on the other hand, is not a fan. He doesn't like all the special pieces, and he was disappointed that it lacked a base piece on which to build the set. However, these problems are not unique to the Friends sets at all- many of the "boy" sets also suffer from them. I think he is remembering the LEGO of his youth (he was, and is, a huge LEGO fan), and is finding the modern sets a bit disappointing in comparison. He is a bit of a LEGO purist.

And me? I am just glad they come with girl figurines.

A few weeks after we bought the LEGO Friends set, we decided that Pumpkin needed more blocks, so we bought her the castle set we'd considered for her at Christmas time before settling on the starter house set instead. Pumpkin was really excited when that castle set came in the mail. She got me to open the box right away, and dump the pieces onto the cookie sheet my husband had previously appropriated for her LEGO building purposes. She spread out the pieces to inspect them, and then looked up at me and said:

"Mommy, there is no princess in this castle. But that's OK! The girl from the workshop can be the princess!"

This reaction is so exactly what I predicted it would be, that I am afraid you won't believe me- but it is true. I will refrain from writing any snarky comments on anyone else's posts saying "nah, nah, I told you so." But I can't help but feel completely vindicated in my original reaction to this entire topic.

Zenbit: Reflected Rock

2012-01-29T13:18:00.000-08:00

Location: Morro Bay, California, USA

Date: September 24, 2011

Weekend Reading: Too Good Not To Read Edition

2012-01-27T19:23:00.000-08:00

I had a completely different weekend reading post lined up, but it will have to wait, because damn there were some good posts on the internet this week. I couldn't not share them with you, particularly since they come from disparate segments of the blogosphere, so I suspect none of my readers will have seen all of them. It was like the entire blogosphere was on fire this week, while I was posting fluff about my workout. (And also a review of a really cool book, which includes a giveaway that is still open... so if you missed that post take a look and see if you want to try to win the free copy. And I did rather like my post about the secret to happiness, so that's something.)

Anyway, to the links:

First up, Parisienne Mais Presque had a beautiful piece about bread. It makes me wish I had a decent bakery on my way home... But I do not, so the grownups do without most nights, while the kids eat toasted bread that we make in our breadmaker, slice, and freeze.

Remember the incident with the dogs in the park? Right after that, there was a rash of dog attacks in New Zealand, including a horrific one in which a "friendly" family dog mauled a three year old. (I read the New Zealand news- I can't really explain why, since my husband, who is the New Zealander in the family, doesn't. But I do.) And a woman who had been mauled by her neighbor's dog here in San Diego died, not directly from the attack, but her family says she never really recovered. So, not being a dog person, I've been struggling to remember how much joy dogs bring to some people. And then I read this post about a boy and dogs... and well, you should just go read it. It has restored my faith in dogs. And, a little bit, in people, too.

Next up, a powerful post from Zuska about fighting her own internalized sexism. This really resonated with me, because no matter how often it happens that I realize some woman doesn't take me seriously because my hair is blonde or because she judges me to be too pretty to be smart, it always surprises me. I naively expect more sisterhood, I guess. This has happened less and less frequently as I've aged- when I was in college I was frequently written off as an intellectual lightweight by men and women alike. In fact, this probably contributed to the break up of my first college relationship. The guy I was dating had been taken by the surface attributes and wasn't prepared for me to be better at chemistry than he was. It continued in grad school, where some of the other women nicknamed me Barbie. To some of the other women, it was just a little good-natured ribbing. But to some of them, it was something darker, and came with the implication that I didn't really belong there. It even continued into my early career. At my first job, a visiting investor stopped me as I was walking through the lobby and asked for coffee, assuming I wa sthe administrative assistant. That investor was a woman. Now, though, I don't get this reaction from other women. That is one of the hidden benefits of aging, I suppose.

And speaking of the hidden benefits of aging... Alice at Finslippy had an amazing post about how now that she is older, men don't treat her like an object anymore. This line really really caught me:

"Maybe my gray hair pushed me over the edge into a new world, one where I'm considered worthy of respect. Or, more likely, I'm not considered at all."

Yes, that. I do not have gray hair (a hidden benefit of being blonde?), but I, too, have largely disappeared from the leering attention of strangers on the street, and like Alice, I am fine with that. More than fine, even. Glad.

Her post is a wonderful construction of controlled and directed rage, and you should go read it. The only downside of reading that post was that it made me realize what crap my daughters are in for when they get older, and that was a bit depressing.

Liz at Mom-101 was inspired by Alice's post to write an equally amazing post about her experience with acquaintance rape, and what it was like to have her rapist attempt to friend her on Facebook. The mind boggles at the idea of a man who forced himself on a young woman back in high school trying to friend her on Facebook now. As I said in my comment over there, I suspect that means he remembers the encounter very differently, and that is a sad, sad comment on the state of our culture, that someone can be a rapist and not even realize it.

She also writes about the power of blogging about these and other difficult experiences. I agree with her on that point- one of the best things about the internet and the blogosphere is the fact that you can discover that you aren't as alone in your feelings and experiences as you thought you were. But it takes people brave enough to write their authentic stories for that to happen.

And last, but most certainly not least, Dr. Crazy at Reassigned Time has a brilliant post about how its not that she's "forgotten" to have a baby, its that she has other priorities now- and maybe always. You really should go read the post, and read all the way to the end- the last two paragraphs are brilliant. My thoughts on this topic are a jumbled mess, so apologies if what I write doesn't make a lot of sense. First of all, even though I come from the other side of the artificial mother/not mother divide, I am in complete agreement with her statement that "It’s not about “forgetting” to have a baby, and it’s not about not “really” wanting one. It’s about the fact that I want many things, that I am many things." I have written about this from the motherhood side a couple of times- first, in frustration at the fact that our culture seems to require women to declare that "first and foremost, I am a mother", and later in my post on being a feminist mother, in which I assert that motherhood grew my life in such a way that I have found room for the demands of motherhood without losing the room for "me". As I said in that post, it took me a long time to adjust to motherhood and get to this place, but here I am.

That said, there is no denying that something is given up to have kids- but something is gained, too. For me, overall the "gained" side comes out ahead, but some days, it does not. And we are rarely honest about that. We talk vaguely about the joy of motherhood like some strange cult trying to attract new members. Yes, the joys are many- but so are the sacrifices, and we usually gloss over those. So I do not find it surprising at all that some women look at the truth of what motherhood really is and say "no, thanks." Or "not now- I want to do X first." Really, it is more surprising to me that more of us don't opt out, given the fact that the joys of motherhood are so hard to express. Well, anyway, anytime I try to express them I fail miserably.

With all of that said, I still think there is too much emphasis on the fact that kids impact women's careers. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that the assumption that your career will suffer lasting harm from having kids is too generally accepted. This is not at all a comment on Dr. Crazy's post, which is about her specific situation and decisions. But I feel like I have to say this again, for any young woman who wants kids and is freaking out about combining motherhood and career: it is possible to do it. And be happy while doing it. I have more to write on this topic, and I'm still trying to formulate my answer to FeMOMhist's question about how, exactly, I made my life expand to accommodate motherhood and "me"- but I do not think this post is the place to do that. I'll come back to it, soonish.

But for now- stop reading here and go read the wonderful posts I've linked to. You'll be glad you did.

A Good Workout

2012-01-25T22:44:00.000-08:00

I think I have mentioned the Voltaire quote about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good in an earlier post. It is practically my mantra at work. I've recently discovered that I should have applied it to my workouts, too.

My favorite workout is kickboxing. I took some form of kickboxing class for over five years, going from a style based on Bruce Lee's style, to pure Muay Thai, to a Kenpo Karate-Muay Thai mix. I would dearly love to be taking a kickboxing class now, but I cannot find one that fits my schedule. The weekday ones are all too late in the evening (or in the middle of the work day), Until bedtimes get easier here, there is no way I could miss one bedtime per week. That would just be cruel to my husband. Soloing for bedtimes is HARD. There are a few weekend classes that would theoretically be possible, but none of them are convenient enough to stand a chance of becoming a routine.

So, I've been trying other workouts instead. I've tried running. I don't really enjoy it, and my asthma often kicks in before I can really get my heart rate up. I've tried a workout DVD. I bought a dance workout DVD, thinking that maybe Petunia would dance along with me and thereby allow me to workout when she is in the room. No dice- she still comes over and demands "uppie!" Still, I could do it when she is not around- my husband agreed to pick the kids up one night per week so that I could get a kid free workout. Even with out the toddler impediment, though, I find that I'm too uncoordinated- I'm so busy trying to figure out the steps that I get a mediocre workout. I've looked into other types of workout DVDs, but the ones that look promising (i.e., that don't have the word "dance" in the title) all have reviews saying that they need lots of space... which I don't really have. I will probably pick one to try eventually, but I haven't yet.

Then, my sister and my parents got me a Wavemaster heavy bagfor Christmas. I'd thought about getting one before, but had always talked myself out of it, because I know that I won't get as good of a workout as I would in a class- and I won't improve my skill level as much, either.

It turns out, I was thinking about it all wrong. I was holding out for the perfect workout, when I should have been happy to take a good one. I don't get a workout that is as good as what I would get in a class, but I get a workout that is better than what I get with any other method I've tried since having kids. My skills won't improve much, but I have enough skills to workout safely and effectively, and that's what really matters. I'm not trying to turn myself into a martial arts master, after all. I'm just trying to lose a few pounds, increase my fitness, and make my clothes fit better again.

Oh, and beating the crap out of the heavy bag is excellent stress relief. How had I forgotten about that?

Also, working out in the privacy of my own garage has two distinct advantages over working out in a class: (1) I don't worry at all about what I look like in my workout clothes, and (2) I get to pick my own music.

What music did I pick? Well, since you asked.... Here is my workout playlist. I'll add comments, so it is almost like I'm playing along with the (now out of date) internet meme about listing songs that have been important in your life. But not really, because, as we have already established, I suck at internet memes.

Youth of Today - Amy MacDonald
I found Amy MacDonald via my Sinead Lohan station on Pandora. She's awesome (so is Sinead Lohan, actually). If you think about this song as being about mothers instead of youth, you'll get an idea of why I chose it to start my workout.

I am stretching and setting up my "gym" (rolling out the heavy bag, putting down the mat I boughtso I could do crunches, etc., in between bouts on the bag), putting on my hand wraps, and doing some light warm up while this is playing.

Bittersweet Symphony - The Verve
This song takes me back to Sweden, which I visited or a couple of months in grad school. This was before iPods, and my luggage was overstuffed without lugging along my music collection, so I listened to the local version of MTV a lot. This song was popular on that, and I liked it. I still love the opening string part. I once figured out how to play that violin riff. And then I forgot it. Doh. Not that I play violin much anymore!

I am doing a couple of rounds of shadowboxing while this plays. Shadowboxing is a great warm up, and also lets me think about form. I do crunches and other ab exercises in between rounds. Almost all of the rounds I do are two minutes, with 1-2 minutes in between rounds.

The Metro - Berlin
This song takes my sister back to Paris... but that's her story. It reminds me of high school, in a good way.

I am finishing up shadowboxing and doing a round of slow bag work while this plays. In slow bag work, I focus on form. I'm punching the bag, but going slowly, and trying to make sure I get my form right. I do more ab exercises in between rounds.

Violent - Stellar*
This is a New Zealand band. I've wanted to pound away on a heavy bag while listening to this song ever since I first heard it, because it just seems like the right thing to do when listening to this song. But it is also a romantic song for me. In a roundabout way, this song is responsible for getting me and my husband together. He was a visiting scientist at the company I was working at, and took a fancy to me. I was clueless about this, but I thought he was a fun guy to hang around with, so I did. I was extremely frustrated by one of my coworkers, and that made him think of this song. He had it on a mix CD (again- before iPods), so he lent me that CD. A couple of songs after this one, was the Iva Davies version of All the Way. Listening to that made me realize that the guy I was dating at the time didn't love me "all the way", and eventually I broke up with him and got together with Hubby. And the rest is history....

Anyway, this is a great song for a martial arts workout. I am doing my first round of full on heavy bag work while it plays. And then some more ab work and/or jumping jacks, depending on how I feel.

Ready to Go (U.S. Mix) - Republica
This is another song I found via Hubby. It was apparently used as an All Blacks theme song at one point. It is high energy and great for a workout.

I am doing more intense heavy bag work while it plays, followed by more ab work.

Common People - Pulp
This is a brilliant song, isn't it? Like so many Pulp songs, it manages to be upbeat and a little bit dark at the same time.

I am still pounding on the heavy bag. During this song, I throw in a round of "fast" work- a one minute round in which I just throw as many punches and kicks as I can. I don't disregard form, but I don't focus on it either. I've been mostly throwing punches- jabs, crosses, and left hooks are my favorites. This is an unbelievable workout for both heart rate and arm strength. By the end of a minute, my arms are jello. I need to add more kicks in as I get more fit, too.

Paint it Black - Rolling Stones
Apparently, this was an All Blacks theme song, too, at some point- how could it not be, given the NZ tradition of the "black out"? But I first heard it from my Dad. I've always liked it.

I go back to a focus on form for a round while this song is playing. By this time, my abs are getting tired, too, and I resort more to standing twists (and some of the other moves I learned from the abs workout on my dance workout DVD) than mat work. I expect that will get better with time, too.

Ring of Fire - Social Distortion
It pains my father when I say it, but this was the first version of this song that I ever heard. He quickly rectified that, but while I like the Johnny Cash version, this version is still my favorite. I think this goes all the way back to junior high... but I wouldn't swear to that. I had it on a cassette tape, though, and I can still see that tape in my mind. I loved it. I know I was still listening to it when I was 16, because I can remember driving around listening to the tape.

I do one more "regular" round on the bag, some ab work, and then the last 45 seconds or so, I do another speed round.

Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of - U2
To me, Joshua Tree will always be the best U2 CD. But All That You Can't Leave Behind is the CD that won me over to their newer stuff. This song dates from the time during which I was trying to deal with the slow end of my relationship with the man I dated all through graduate school- the one I broke up with before I started dating my husband. My ex is a great guy and we had some wonderful times together, but at the end he and I were, umm, stuck in a moment we couldn't get out of. Anyway, I still really like this song.

I am doing cool down, stretches, and putting the "gym" away while this plays. This gets cut short if I was late getting home, and I end up finishing my cool down stretches inside, while our leftovers heat up in the microwave.

By the end of my workout, I'm dripping with sweat (even though its been chilly here lately), and my muscles definitely know I've had a workout. I'm even a bit sore the next day, which makes me happy, because it means that I have finally figured out how to get some real exercise into my life, even if it is just a good workout and not a perfect one.

On the Importance of Comparing to Reality Rather Than Fantasy

2012-01-23T07:52:00.000-08:00

I am beginning to think that the secret to happiness is in learning the difference between real options and idealized fantasy, and to only allow yourself to compare your current situation to real options.

Cases in point, none of which were always obvious to me. Item 3, in particular, was hard won, and I still struggle with it from time to time:

(1) Awhile back, I got in an internet discussion with another woman who had worked in tech about whether or not software and related tech careers are a good careers for women. The other woman had had left her tech career because she was so disgusted by the sexism she encountered, and she came across as very bitter and unhappy about that. She accused me of being blind to the sexism in my field. I am most certainly not blind to the sexism in my field. I just don't think that it is either unique to my field or a good reason to leave my field. I could compare the current situation in my field with my idealized view of what a sexism-free career would be like, and that probably would make me miserable. Instead, I compare my career with likely careers in other fields, note that I cannot think of a career I could pursue in which I would not face the effects of sexism in some form, and I'm reasonably happy.

(2) I have, however, been thinking about making changes to my career. I am trying to be realistic about the other options I might pursue. I could allow myself to believe that some other career would be perfect, but that would be fantasy. In reality, all career paths have pluses and minuses. I know that, so even while I'm debating whether or not I'd be happier changing my path, I am not really unhappy now. (The downside of this, by the way, is that I'm not all that motivated to make a change, and my poor husband is getting tired of discussing the subject with me. I will almost certainly write some blog posts about this sometime soon, since blogging is one way I can think things through without forcing my husband to listen to me talk about the same thing over and over.)

(3) I refuse to compare my body to the images of women I see in the mainstream media. I know that those images are an airbrushed idealized fantasy, not a reality. As this old Blue Milk post makes clear, even the women in those pictures cannot live up to that fantasy. Sure, I want to lose weight- but that is because my clothes and my scale tell me that I have gained weight. Rather than being miserable because I cannot live up to those airbrushed pictures, I set myself a realistic goal for my weight and fitness level, and I have a plan to get there. So I'm reasonably happy.

(4) As I have noted before, I'm a happy work outside the home mom. I don't experience much mommy guilt. I do get twinges of guilt sometimes, and other people certainly say things to me that can start the mommy guilt cascade going, but I'm fairly good at short circuiting it. I think this is because I have a very realistic picture in my head of what my life would be like as a stay at home mom, and I prefer the life I have now. If I were comparing my life to some rainbow and fairy dust fantasy of what my life as a stay at home mom would be like, I am sure I would not be so happy, and I suspect that guilt cascade would be far more likely to take hold. Note that I'm not saying that I think stay at home moms have crappy lives. On the contrary, I know some very happy stay at home moms with wonderful lives. But knowing what I know about my personality, my kids' personalities (and low sleep needs!), the cost of living in our city, and the lifestyle we like- in short, knowing what the reality of me staying at home would be- it is better for everyone concerned that I work. And so I am happy to do so.

What do you think? Can you think of other examples of situations where you can make yourself happier by making sure you're comparing your situation to reality and not fantasy? Can you think of counterexamples?

Things We're Loving Now: Shoes, Toys, and Books

2012-01-22T08:47:00.000-08:00

I read an interesting idea once for remembering some of the sweet details of raising children: every now and then, write down what things they are enjoying. I liked the idea, and since this blog is, among other things, where I write down things I want to remember about motherhood and raising my children, a very infrequent series of posts about things we're loving now was born. (Here is the one earlier entry, filed along with a few other posts under "stuff".) I suspect I'll write similar posts from time to time. They aren't sponsored- i.e., no one is paying me to write them. No one has ever paid me any actual money to write any post, and I suspect it will stay that way. However, the links are likely to be referral links, as are many of the links in other posts I write.

Anyway, here's what we're loving now here at Chez Cloud:

Petunia has resurrected a toy that I was ready to give away. She found the wooden sushi set that Pumpkin got for her 3rd birthday. I never really understood what the point of that set was, and Pumpkin only played with it a little bit. But Petunia knows what to do with it- she likes to cut the sushi apart. The pieces velcro together, and she takes the big wooden "knife" and chops them apart. I suppose it is helping develop fine motor control or something like that. Regardless, she loves playing with it.

She also loves to read to us. She'll go get one of her books, and go through the pages, narrating the story in her incomprehensible toddlerese. She does a really good job with her current favorite book, Each Peach Pear Plum. There is at least one word on each page that I can understand- usually the name of a character. Her rendition of Knuffle Bunny is really cute, too. I can't understand much at all until she gets to the last page and yells out "'Uffle Munny!"

She still lets us read to her from time to time, too. She has recently executed a complete about face on a book called Dogs Don't Do Ballet, by Anna Kemp. When we first got the book, she refused to let me read it to her. She'd push it away and emphatically tell me "No!" if I tried. Lately, I've been reading it twice a night. Luckily, it is a cute story.

Pumpkin is making her father proud with her Lego-building skills. We got her a basic multi-purpose house and car set for Christmas, and she was soon building the house from instructions without help. Then a friend of hers had a birthday, and one of the toys her mom said she liked was Lego Friends- the new "girl" Legos that have caused so much fuss. Pumpkin came with me to buy the gift. She was intrigued by the Friends sets and I was curious about them, so I bought her one. She picked the Inventor's Workshop set. I'll probably write a post about this later, but the short story is: it is a Lego set similar to many others, except there are pink and purple and turquoise blocks. Hubby doesn't like the set because it has specialized pieces and no base- but looking at the "boy" sets that Pumpkin also considered, I think that is not limited to the new Friends line. I think that perhaps this "issue" got blown out of proportion. Regardless, she is now wanting to build things that are bigger than her current collection of blocks, and we are debating whether or not to get her another set now or make her wait until her birthday in April.

Pumpkin is also loving books right now. She is reading really well now, and we are having a hard time keeping enough books of the right level around for her to read. When we read to her, she has been requesting stories from a book called Just One More, by Joy Crowley. It was a Christmas gift from New Zealand, and doesn't seem to be available in the US. That is a shame, because it is a fun book.

And what about the grown ups? I'm loving my new Wavemaster heavy bag, but that is also probably the subject of another post.

I am also ridiculously happy with these shoes:

Hubby is loving his Roku. We decided to get Amazon Prime, so he has lots of shows to watch. But I think he might love it most because he can show us YouTube things on the TV without getting a laptop out.

What about you? What are you and yours loving right now?

Weekend Reading: The In a Hurry Edition

2012-01-20T19:10:00.000-08:00

Wow, what a week. What a couple of weeks, actually. I've been positively swamped at work, so I haven't been out reading lots of things- I haven't had time for my usual lunch breaks! It should start getting a little better next week, I think. I have a bunch of links saved for eventual inclusion in one of these weekend reading posts, but lack the mental energy to assemble them into a coherent post.

I do still have a couple of links for you, though. Both, in their own way, are about the consequences of being female.

First, this post makes that the point that just because having kids correlates with career slow down for a lot of women, we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that the women in question chose to slow down and get on some "mommy track". In fact, there is active discrimination against mothers in the workplace. This is not anti-parent bias: fathers actually benefit from positive discrimination. There is more evidence than the study cited in these posts, too, but I'm too burned out right now to go find it. As I said when I tweeted a link to this post, this discrimination is one of the factors that keeps me from blogging under my real name. I don't want prospective employers who don't know me to Google me and find this blog. Which is sad, but true. I have other reasons, too, around the privacy of my children, but the career protection reason is an important one.

Second, Liz at Mom-101 had a post about little girls and nail polish that I really liked. Nail polish is not a big issue in our house- Pumpkin has a couple of bottles, and we paint her nails roughly once every few months. But that doesn't mean that I'm immune to the deeper issue of helping my daughters navigate mainstream femininity, so her post still resonated.

Happy weekend, everyone! I just got word that the last of the four big upgrades my team has been working on has completed successfully, ahead of schedule. So I think I will really enjoy my Friday Night Beers tonight, and maybe I can unwind a bit this weekend. I hope you can, too.

Project Management Reading Suggestions

2012-01-18T20:45:00.000-08:00

A couple of the comments on my recent post about project management indicated that some people would like to read more about the topic. Eventually, I'll write a post about how I got into the field, but I don't have time to do that tonight. So instead, I'll give you a short list of things other people have written about project management that I like.

First, Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto is probably the best explanation I've ever read of why we need project management- even though most of the book isn't explicitly about the topic. However, one of the most important aspects of project management is making sure that teams don't forget to do things, and that topic is discussed at length in The Checklist Manifesto. As an added bonus, it will make you feel better about being the sort of person who writes a lot of lists.

For the actual nuts and bolts of project management, my favorite book is The Art of Project Management, by Scott Berkun. It is written for software projects, but I think people who are running other types of projects will probably pick up some good ideas from it.

I also like some of the management-centric posts on the Rands in Repose blog. Again, though, this has a software focus.

I don't find the PMP (Project Management Professional) materials particularly useful for day to day project management on the types of projects I run. However, if you're interested in managing projects for a government contractor or a large pharmaceutical company, you'll probably need to get PMP certified. To be fair, there are some concepts in there that you could argue I use- but I would argue back that I was doing those things before I'd ever heard about PMP. (I am not PMP certified, but I have taken training classes that aim to prepare students for getting the certification.) I have no specific recommendations for PMP materials, but there are lots of them.

Finally, I have always argued that some aspects of parenting have a lot in common with project management- in both cases, you're trying to get people to do things on your schedule, and frankly, some of my past colleagues were about as easy to argue with as my two year old. And apparently, I am not the only one who sees the similarity between parenting and project management. So you could also read some parenting books... And all joking aside, I think Faber and Mazlish's classic Siblings Without Rivalry is one of the most useful management books I've ever read. Replace "siblings" with "team members" and you're good to go!

Dinner during Dora: The Fish Hater's Fish Tacos

2012-01-16T19:00:00.000-08:00

I've written before about how I am a partially reformed picky eater. One of the types of food that I still really don't like is fish. This puzzles and frustrates my husband, who really likes fish. So, I've been trying to find ways to gradually introduce fish into my diet. Eventually, I may be able to eat relatively unadorned fish. Right now, though, I have to find recipes that mask the fish taste.

And so I present the Fish Hater's Fish Tacos. Not only do these not taste at all fishy, but they also are ridiculously fast and easy to make.

Fish Hater's Fish Taco's

Ingredients:

~0.5 lb mild white fish. Halibut works well. I suspect tilapia would, too, but my local supermarket does not carry any tilapia that is rated as sustainable by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I've also used Dover sole, which does OK, but is a little too flaky. If you like fish, you might like these with salmon. If you don't like fish, don't listen to the fish lovers who tell you that salmon doesn't taste fishy. It does.
1 tbs sesame oil
2/3 cup island teriyaki sauce. I use Soy Vay Island Teriyaki Sauce. I think you could also make your own.
grated cheese
shredded greens
diced cilantro
chopped pineapple (something I'm going to try adding next time I make this recipe)
tortillas

Slice the fish into bite size pieces

Heat the oil in a skillet on high
When the oil is hot, add the fish. Cook ~1.5 minutes each side (the halibut browned nicely. The sole did not)
Add 1/3 cup of the island teriyaki sauce. Mostly boil the sauce off while turning down the heat to simmer (I have an electric stove, so reducing the heat from high to simmer takes time- if you have a gas stove, you'll probably want to boil on high for a bit and then turn down).
Add the remaining sauce, and simmer covered for 5-10 minutes.
Meanwhile, dice the cilantro, shred the greens, chop the pineapple, etc.
When the fish is done, put the tortillas on a plate and microwave for ~20 seconds to make them warm.

I serve these disassembled- i.e., everyone chooses their own taco toppings from bowls on the table.

And by everyone, I mean me and my husband. Neither child has agreed to even taste these yet. We have them with sweet potato fries and they are both partial to "tacos" made out of nothing but cheese, so they don't starve.

Source: I made this one up. I was inspired by the Yaki tacos at Islands, though.

Who eats it: Just the grown ups, so far. Petunia will eat my sloppy joe tacos, though, so I'm hopeful that she'll eventually try these. I suspect Pumpkin will be like her mother, and will be trying to add fish into her diet when she's 40. But maybe one of these times she'll surprise me.

Quotable: Success

2012-01-15T08:00:00.000-08:00

"No one seems to have thought of the fact that if life is absurd, being a brilliant success has no greater value than being a failure. It's just more comfortable."

- Muriel Barbery, in The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Translated by Alison Anderson.

I can't say I'd really recommend this book, but it had a lot of interesting quotes and thoughts about life, the universe, and everything. I've got a post brewing about happiness and success (and money), so this quote caught my eye.

Weekend Reading: The Let's Not Freak Out About Education Edition

2012-01-13T21:33:00.000-08:00

My brain is fully occupied with two things right now: (1) figuring out what to put on our school choice form, and (2) my team's current status on our integration project plan. Since topic #2 is both dull (for anyone who is not on my team, and probably for some of the people on my team, too) and off limits due to confidentiality agreements and my own decision not to blog details about work... let's talk some more about education!

And specifically, let's not freak out about it.

First up, The Grumpies had a great post defending enrichment activities for kids- you know, the things that make lots of well-meaning people roll their eyes and expound about how overscheduled kids are these days. Now that I take a step back and think about it, it is pretty funny that we, as a culture, can simultaneously worry about whether our kids are getting enough challenges/enriching experiences and whether our kids are getting enough unstructured play time. And yet, we do.

Next, an article from the Nicolas Kristof in the NYTimes about the importance of teachers. I certainly agree that teachers make a big difference in kids' lives, and I don't actually disagree with the conclusion he reaches at the end of his article- that we should spend more time this election year discusing how to encourage good teaching- but I found some of his argument a little overstated. He states: "A great teacher (defined as one better than 84 percent of peers) for a single year between fourth and eighth grades resulted in students earning almost 1 percent more at age 28" and also quotes some figures about the impact of a bad teacher. But he glosses over a lot, no doubt partially due to the constraints of space in a NYT column. First of all, a 1% increase in income isn't really that much, particularly given what most people make at age 28. I was just one year out from grad school. If you'd judged my salary potential based on that year, you wouldn't have been impressed.

Also, kids are in school for lots of years. I actually think that most kids have a pretty good chance of coming across one or two (or more!) great teachers in that time. I had several really great teachers during my time in my average public schools. I had some mediocre teachers, too, but I can't think of one that I would consider truly "bad". And I doubt that one year with a not so great teacher spells doom, as long as the parents recognize the issue and make sure that it doesn't translate into hating school or something like that.

I'm sure most of us can look back and think of great teachers we had and a few not so great ones, too. And for the most part, we all got through our primary and secondary education, went on to college, and did fine. I'm not saying that there aren't cases where this isn't true- I'm sure there are. I'm saying that I think that for most kids, we're probably worrying more than we need to.

Which isn't to say that I think everything is hunky-dory in education land these days. I think there are serious funding problems right now, and lots of things that could be improved... but I also don't think that most public schools are anywhere near as bad as the conventional wisdom considers them to be. Take a look at GoingPublic.org for a different view on the state of public education in this country. They are very much an advocacy group, so I don't take everything they write at face value, either. (For instance, I'm not sure I see a conspiracy of moneyed interests behind the rise in charter schools.) But I think it is worth looking at their site and thinking about what they say.

I'd very much like a thorough, unbiased evaluation of the state of public education in our country. Anyone know of one?

None of this, of course, will stop me from thinking hard about our kindergarten choices. But I hope I can keep from freaking out about the situation, whether we get our first choice school or not.

The Looming School Decision

2012-01-12T22:28:00.000-08:00

Awhile back, I wrote a post about our upcoming decision about where Pumpkin (and eventually Petunia) will go to school. That decision is inching closer.

On Monday, Hubby and I tool the day off of work to visit a couple of potential schools for Pumpkin. We're faced with a decision because while our neighborhood school has a decent reputation, we don't think it offers any language instruction- not even in the after school programs. This bothers us for several reasons:

Pumpkin likes learning languages, and early indications are that Petunia will, too (she certainly loves our language DVDs).
Research shows that early childhood is the best time to learn a second language. There is also research indicating that learning one new language makes it easier to learn other languages later, and that it can improve performance in your native language, too. (Yes, I am too lazy to dig up the links to that research. Sorry.)
This is one academic area in which we feel completely unqualified to offer enrichment at home. As a scientist and an engineer, both now working in computers, we can probably cover the math/science/tech area. I like history and we both like to read, so we can probably cover those areas, too. But neither of us is fluent in another language, which we both regret. So, like all good parents, we're going to try to have our children make up for our shortcomings.

Anyway, back to our school decision. In San Diego, you can "choice" into any public school (subject to availability of space), and there are a range of magnet schools available focusing on various topics. You write your top five choices on a form, and then there is a lottery to decide who gets which choice. The form is due February 15. Magnet schools also often have enrollment targets to ensure diversity. There are several magnet schools that focus on teaching a second language in addition to the regular curriculum. One, a Spanish language immersion school, is actually closer to our house than our neighborhood school. It is two blocks away. We've been intrigued by it since we moved in and figured out what it was. In an immersion school, all or most instruction is conducted in the new language. We wondered how that would work, and weren't sure if it would be a good fit for Pumpkin. It is a K-8 school (although we could pull our kids out after 5th grade and go to another middle school if we wanted), and we wondered whether the math offerings in the middle school years would be sufficient.

Another magnet is a "Spanish enrichment" school in a neighborhood that would be convenient for our commute to and from work. Its curriculum includes 30 minutes of Spanish instruction every day, except for the "minimal day" (half day) that all San Diego public schools have every week due to budget cuts. We wondered if this level of Spanish would be worth the extra drive.

There are two other language magnets that we have considered. One offers an immersion program in French or Spanish, but is in a location that is not at all convenient for us- it is at least 20 minutes out of the way for our commute. There would be buses, but these have been cut recently, too, and we're not sure we want our kids to have long bus commutes this early in their education. The other offers a semi-immersion program in Chinese. It is in a moderately inconvenient location- Google maps says it is a 13 minute drive from our house, but we know that it is in a part of town with bad rush hour traffic. Also, it seems that the curriculum hasn't really stabilized. They started as an enrichment program and are now transitioning to immersion (except for "English language arts"- i.e., reading and grammar). So we hadn't really been considering it.

But now... well, now we're scrambling a bit to figure out what we should do. I hate to say it, but my friend who was horrified that we hadn't started looking into schools at this time last year was probably right: we should have started working on this earlier.

We loved the Spanish immersion school in our neighborhood. We got to see the Kindergarten classes, and they were amazing. The students were all speaking (and reading!) Spanish. They seemed happy, and while the school's resources aren't amazing, they aren't bad. There is a diverse group of students, both in terms of race and socioeconomic status, which we like. The magnet resource teacher who gave the tour had great answers to all of our questions. In short, we would be very, very happy if Pumpkin got to go to school there. But our chances are not great. The school had 300 applicants for 160 spots for this school year. They have divided the district into three zones, and we are in the zone that gets the fewest spots (23% of the incoming class). Now, we don't know how many applicants they usually get from our zone, so maybe it isn't so bad. But we can't count on getting in, so at the very least we need a strong plan B.

We thought the Spanish enrichment magnet was OK. However, the magnet resource teacher who gave the tour seemed to be downplaying the Spanish curriculum. This could have been because a couple of other parents on the tour responded quite negatively to her discussion of the Spanish program. They gave the impression that they thought learning a second language was a waste of time that would take valuable class time away from some other, more important subject. So maybe she was just trying to allay their fears. I need to call the magnet teacher and figure out what the goal of the Spanish program is at that school. Should a child who completes K-5 at that school be able to place in an intermediate or advanced Spanish class in middle school? Or is it more like the Spanish I had in school, which left me able to count and say a few colors, and not much else? The rest of the programs at that school seemed fine, but I was left with a vague feeling of unease about the other parents. I think most people were there looking at the school because it would get them on track to feed into one of the higher ranked high schools in the district, and not because of the programs that school offered. Several of the other parents were talking about how they wished they could get into the school in the next neighborhood over, which is ranked as one of the best in San Diego. Fair enough- but the reliance on the single number ranking has problems, and that ranking is based largely on test scores. I suspect that the other school has such high test scores because it takes very few out of area kids, and it is in a relatively wealthy part of town. Interestingly, some of the other parents were planning to check out our neighborhood school, too.

We can't go and visit our neighborhood school until January 31. I suspect that it will seem on par with the Spanish enrichment magnet, but without any language offerings. I've been looking into whether we could add an after school language program on our own, and we could, but it may not be easy. There are classes available from several places, but they typically start at 4:30- which is a little early for us. One of us would have to tweak our schedule to make that happen. I did find one program that will bring the class to you at a time of your choosing, so that might be an option if we could either find one other family who was interested in it or were willing to pay for a two person class on our own. Or, we could try to find an after school nanny who could tutor Spanish (given our proximity to Mexico, I actually suspect that this would be feasible).

We've also started thinking about our other options. Perhaps we should reconsider that Chinese magnet. We're running short on time for visits- we're both really busy at work right now, so all of these visits are difficult to schedule. However, there is a "school fair" that we could attend on January 28, which would give us some information. We could write the Chinese magnet in as our third choice, and then figure out whether or not we would take the space if it were offered to us. The only problem with this approach is that writing anything in addition to our first choice makes it a little harder for us to get our first choice. The initial lottery disregards this information, but they place everyone into schools if they can- and then take them out of consideration if a spot opens up later at the top choice school. The magnet teacher at the Spanish immersion school gave us some tips for handling that, though.

Another option would be to consider private schools as a fall back plan. The "top" private school in our area offers language classes (of course). It also costs $23,000 per year. We might get financial aid, but I'm doubtful. Remember that we will eventually have two kids in school and this school runs through high school (and I sort of doubt we'd have the fortitude to pull our kids out of the private school as they got older- but you never know). Also, the diversity at that school isn't so great (as you'd expect with a price tag like that).

There is also a French bilingual school that actually is accredited in France as well as California. It is in a location that would be moderately inconvenient, but not terrible for us. We know some people who sends their kids there, and they really like it. The kids are also bona fide polyglots, thanks to the fact that their parents have two different native languages (neither of them English), and there is French and Spanish taught at the school. I think the older child is also starting Chinese now. My husband works with the mother, so he is going to ask her for more details- like how much it costs. We could call the school and get this information, too. It is not on their website. We also don't know when we'd have to apply for that school, and when we'd have to commit to it if we wanted to go there.

So, we have some tough decisions ahead. Here are the options as I see them:

Write all three possible magnets on our choice form, with the Spanish immersion one as our top choice. Follow up as recommended by the magnet teacher and hope for the best. We've heard that it is very likely (almost certain) that we would be offered one of the three choices.
Write only the Spanish immersion school on our choice form, but research the French bilingual private school and consider that our back up plan.
Write only the Spanish immersion school on our choice form, consider our neighborhood school as our back up plan, and assume that we will be able to make some sort of after school or weekend language class or tutoring work out.
Let go of our obsession with having our kids learn a second language. Write the Spanish immersion school on our form, hope for the best, but just go with the flow at our neighborhood school if we don't get it.

Do any of see any other options? Do you think we're crazy for worrying so much about languages (a lot of the other parents at day care do)? Feel free to tell me what you think about any of this in the comments.

On Project Management

2012-01-10T21:53:00.000-08:00

My job has gotten very, very busy lately. My company is merging with another company, and, as the person in charge of the group that handles the corporate databases and scientific software, that means that my group and I are looking at over a year's worth of work to put everything together, all while most people wonder what the hell is taking us so long. Oh, and while we also complete the "regular" goals we had for this year.

It also means that today, I said something that five years ago, I would not have ever imagined would come from my lips: "I need to get this technical work done and out of the way so that I can concentrate on project management."

You see, five years ago, I was in the midst of a career crisis. I had somehow turned into a project manager and I wasn't all that happy about it. I didn't view it as "real" work. It seemed like I spent my days gently (and not so gently) encouraging other people to do their work, and I wondered whether it might not be better if I just rolled up my sleeves and did the work for them.

I have completely changed my tune. My "a ha!" moment was when I joined a project that was in trouble. It was behind schedule, but no one was sure by how much. It was over budget, but no one knew how the spend was trending. And management was threatening to just cancel it. I came on board and had a new schedule in place, with a known budget trend within a month. Roughly 8 months later, management decided to renew the project for another year. The team was happy, and so were the customers for the software the team produced. One of the customers sent me a really nice email (as I went out on maternity leave), complimenting me for turning the project around- and I realized that, yes, I had done that. Project management was indeed "real work".

So now, I am still a bit on the fence about whether or not project management is what I want to do with the rest of my life- a topic for a future blog post or ten, I'm sure- but I am not at all on the fence about whether or not project management is "real work". It is. I fully understand why someone has to set aside some time to keep his or her eye on schedules, dependencies, and communication (intra-team, inter-team, and up to management). In fact, if you are going to tackle multiple projects at once, or even just a single long and complicated project, someone probably has to forgo work doing the hands-on technical and/or scientific work altogether and focus on project management full time. Otherwise, your projects will probably finish late and/or over budget, if they finish at all.

I know that most techies and scientists roll their eyes at project management. I think that is because people try to apply the wrong techniques to their projects. If you are running an agile or agile-like software development project, you don't need the project management techniques that were developed by government contractors to deal with their multi-year projects, which were required by the government to be fully specified before they began. In fact, if you try to graft those techniques onto an agile-ish software development project, you will probably make it fail- or at least make your best programmers quit in search of less annoying pastures. (I actually spent an entire year of my life insulating project teams from overly waterfall-y project management requirements. I learned a lot, but I can't say that I have any desire to repeat the experience.)

Similarly, if you are in the development part of drug research and development, you use a different process than if you are in the early research part of the cycle. This is not to say that I think early research should run with no project management whatsoever- but it should have a much more lightweight process. When I work with a research project (yes, we have these in scientific informatics!), I favor the use of flowcharts and checkpoints over fully specified project timelines- and I don't expect the management of that project to consume anywhere near the amount of time that managing a project that is developing enterprise-level software will consume. When I worked with teams that were heading into the development portion of R&D (and yes, I've done that, too- and that had nothing to do with software!) I expected to be able to write fairly good timelines, because the processes the team would be using were already known, even if the outcomes were not.

All of this makes it hard for me to explain what a project manager does when I get asked about it at the various "alternative career" events I've attended. I guess I can boil the core responsibilities down to these:

Know the deadline(s) for the project, and what the impact of slipping that deadline will be
Know which of these three things management would prefer you compromise, and which you think you should compromise, if pushed: schedule, budget, or quality. And yes, sometimes compromising quality really is the correct answer!
Know the tasks that need to be completed in order to get the project done, and know their interdependencies (i.e., if task A runs late, will that impact tasks B and C?) Know which tasks are done and which are in process.
Manage team communications. Make sure the team is communicating however is most effective for it- be that with meetings, emails, or IMs. Know that different teams communicate in different ways, and allow- no, facilitate!- that.
Be the source of project information for senior management, so that they don't go bugging your team. Try to protect your team's time.
Know and track your budget, to whatever level of detail your organization requires.
Keep your eye on the hidden administrative tasks that can derail a schedule- like keeping contractor work orders up to date.
Keep an eye on your team's state of mind and availability. Are they burning out? Are the bored? Who's going on vacation soon? How will that impact the project? Try to fix the problems you see.

The processes I use to accomplish these things vary with the company and the project team. But if I'm not on top of any of these items, I do not feel good about my projects.

I know I have some other project managers amongst my readers. What do you think? Is my list complete? Since I just wrote it off the top of my head in five minutes, I doubt it. Add your items in the comments! Also, for those who are curious about project management- feel free to leave questions. I'll either answer them in the comments or write another post about the topic.

-----------------------------------------
Update: I've written a post with a short list of some project management reading suggestions.

Surprisingly Profound Kids Art: Friends and Fishy

2012-01-08T21:18:00.000-08:00

I've had a bruiser of a day- within 30 minutes of getting up, I let Petunia burn her mouth on oatmeal, causing her to refuse to eat any breakfast. And then about an hour later, she threw up all over me (we think because her tummy was fully of snot from the cold she's getting over and not much else). So there was a lot of laundry to do and a little bit of sofa cleaning, too. Hubby took Pumpkin down to the Children's Museum during Petunia's naptime so that I could get some work done, but Petunia didn't cooperate. We took two walks (at least it was a beautiful day!) before I finally got her down for her nap roughly 30 minutes before it was supposed to be over. I managed to get 40 minutes of work done- just enough to meet the immediate needs, but not enough to get ahead at all. To top it all off, Petunia threw an absolute wobbler at bath time. She didn't want a bath (but she needed one- see the bit about throwing up, above). Then she didn't want out of the bath, but she didn't want to stay in, either. Then she didn't want to go get dressed.

Anyway, she's off reading stories and snuggling to sleep with Hubby now, and I am ignoring the fact that Pumpkin and I should be cleaning up her room and am letting her color while I blog, instead.

And I'm going to make myself feel better by indulging in a post that will make me smile, but will probably only be interesting to my parents. Hey, its my blog. I can do that.

One of the things that has been making me smile these days is my kids' art. I have no illusions that they are budding artistic geniuses, but something about the innocent outlook and straight-forward execution just makes me smile.

First, a few months ago, Pumpkin drew this picture of herself (on the left) and her "silly friends"- these were the friends she started playing with a lot when she was having trouble with B. at day care (that trouble seems to have passed, thankfully). One is another girl and one is a boy. She and her silly friends liked to run around and do silly things. I never really figured out what those things were, but she was happy- and that was nice, after having her come home sad about B.

I had hoped that we would get to keep this one, but she came across it recently, and decided that she wants to give it to the little girl depicted in the middle, whose mom just had twins, so all I'll have is this snapshot.

Friends
Artist: Pumpkin, age ~4.5 years

Next, Petunia recently announced that she was going to draw a fishy. And then she did! We're not sure if the fact that she actually drew a fish was an accident or not, but we were still impressed. She drew a fish in exactly the same way that I do.

Here is a close up of the fishy.

I like to think that this depiction of a small fish in a big, strange, but beautiful sea is a metaphor for the artist herself. She won't confirm that, though.

Fishy
Artist: Petunia, age 27 months

Weekend Reading: The Back to Work Edition

2012-01-05T19:34:00.000-08:00

In honor of the fact that just about everyone is back to work after the holiday break, I have a bunch of posts about work and how it fits in with our lives.

First, I found a post about work-life balance that really resonated with me, from a woman in tech. I agreed with just about everything she wrote.

There was also a good Harvard Business Report post about the law of diminishing returns at work, something I've written about before, too.

Science- particularly academic science- as a culture could learn a lot from those posts. A few weeks back, Scicurious had a really good post about the persistent idea that being a good scientist requires allowing science to consume your entire life. I don't think that working on science is some sort of magical exception to the fact that most people cannot sustain maximum productivity over long hours. In fact, I first noticed the negative effect of trying to work past my "work limit" when I was still in academic science. And yet, the culture of bragging about long hours in the lab persists. It is a shame, and as the Twitter discussion in Scicurious' post points out, off-putting to a lot of potentially good scientists. Now you could argue that there are still plenty of scientists, so why worry? Well, I think we'd probably get more quality science done if we dialed back the work hour expectations on scientist. And I also think that life outside the lab informs the sorts of questions people ask, and that we as a society are probably missing out on some diversity in the questions asked because we are driving away diversity in the question askers.

Anyway. This all brought to mind a post of Laura Vanderkam's from November, musing about strategy in marathons and careers. The post is about how we motivate ourselves, but the topic made me think about how I've come to view my career as a marathon, not a sprint. I think I can afford to run a little slower when I'm running up a hill like having young children, as long as I stay in the race. The folks who are sprinting right now may run out of steam, anyway. So I'm focusing a bit more on long term strategy and less on short term positioning, and I find that perspective helpful in squashing the occasional career-related panic.

So, what strategies to use? Cal Newport argues for deliberate practice- i.e., seeking out work practices that maximize your effectiveness by actually making you better at your job. He had a recent post looking at how innate talent or intellectual ability factors into his deliberate practice theory. His conclusion is that the small differences in innate ability can be swamped by practice, which is reassuring for those of us who don't think we were born on the far ends of the bell curve!

He also had an interesting post about why we bother reaching for career success. Why don't we all embrace the minimalist lifestyle and try, as one commenter on a Slashdot thread I read once argued, to work as little as possible? His answer is that people generally want to do something meaningful with their lives, and work is how most of us accomplish that.

I agree... to a point. My thoughts on this and on the problems with our culture that glorifies working long hours were clarified by one of Anandi's recent posts. She writes about why she wants to see her crafts published, and that got me thinking about the value of diversification. My thoughts went first to diversification of income streams, and pulled up an old Scalzi post about the various revenue streams he has. It is accepted wisdom that diversification is good in investing, but not necessarily in other ways of earning income. Scalzi's post makes a compelling case for income diversification for creative types. I have long thought it would be good to have income diversification for the rest of us, too. It would certainly smooth out some of the bumps from lay offs and the like!

But perhaps more important than income diversification is self worth diversification. If all of your self worth is bundled into your job, you are probably in for a rocky ride. Even the most lucky of careers will have their down times. In those times, it is good to be able to look at the other aspects of your life and realize that you are still "adding value" to the world (to use obnoxious business speak) even if your career isn't going as you'd hoped at the moment. I actually think that having this diversification in self worth makes me a better employee, too. It (and the hefty buffer in my bank account) makes me less fearful and cautious at work. I will say what I think, and take some risks, because the consequences of failure don't seem catastrophic to me.

Which brings us back to work-life balance. I wonder what it will take to change our culture to be one that really recognizes its value for everyone?

Versatile Blogger Meme

2012-01-04T21:47:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week, FeMOMhist tagged me on her list of versatile bloggers.

I'm always honored when some one includes me in a meme/list like this... but I confess, I suck at the follow through.

Here are the rules I'm supposed to follow:

Here are the conditions of the award:
1) Nominate 15 fellow bloggers
2) Inform the Bloggers of their nomination
3) Share 7 random things about yourself
4) Thank the blogger who nominated you
5) Post the award badge.

So, thanks FeMOMhist for nominating me! Here is a list of fellow bloggers. Really, pretty much my entire blog roll could be considered versatile bloggers, so I think I'll introduce some bloggers to each other who may or may not have already found each other.

There are the blogs I found via reading women in science blogs- these are written by people working in academia:

Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured, written by Nicoleandmaggie (yes, they really are two people, but its hard to tell them apart!)
Academic Jungle, written by GMP
Apple Pie and the Universe, written by Alyssa
The Tightrope, written by Micro Dr. O
The Bean Chronicles, written by The Bean Mom

Then there are the blogs I found via AskMoxie:

Hush!, written by, Hush.
House of Peanut, written byAnandi
Zen Master Moo, written by Zenmoo
Parisienne Mais Presque, written by an American living in Paris
Adventures of SarcastiCarrie, written by (take a wild guess...) SarcastiCarrie.

And then there are a few blogs I found in random other ways that I can no longer remember:

Ramble, Ramble, written by Ginger
Bad Mom, Good Mom, written by badmomgoodmom
Antropologa, written by an American living in Sweden

I know that not everyone likes to do memes like this, so consider yourself tagged if you want to do the meme, but no worries about offending me if you do not!

Now, for seven random things about myself. I did a similar list earlier, but it doesn't come up when I search on "random things" and I can't be bothered searching more thoroughly. No doubt some of these will be duplicates from that list- I can't possibly have that many random things to share.

One of the phrases I know in Swedish is "Can I have an ashtray." I do not smoke and have never smoked. My other phrases are much more useful: "thanks so much," "I don't speak Swedish," and "I don't understand."
I don't really like to watch movies. Exceptions are made for Jane Austen adaptations and some Sci Fi films.
I recognize the comic genius of Ricky Gervais but cannot stand to watch The Office or The Extras because they make me far too uncomfortable.
I used to bite my nails, but managed to break the habit. I cannot, however, get in a good habit of flossing my teeth every night, so I am clearly not a master of self-control.
I prefer beer to wine. I'm also partial to a good margarita.
I thought the best thing about being pregnant was that I got to eat a lot of ice cream. Seriously, when I got pregnant with Petunia, one of my first thoughts was "Hooray! Bring on the ice cream!"
I used to consider sandalwood my signature scent. I've gotten too lazy to keep that up, though, and now use whatever shower gel is convenient to buy and doesn't small nasty.

The Requisite Resolutions Post

2012-01-02T22:57:00.000-08:00

Before we had kids, my husband and I had a tradition of taking a long walk on the beach on New Year's Day. In fact, we often took long walks on the beach- that is one of the things I miss about our pre-kids life. We did a lot of talking and planning on those walks. We got engaged on one. We hatched our plan to take an extended break from work and travel around Asia and the Pacific on one. We also discussed more mundane concerns, from finances to career goals to the fact that one of our favorite restaurants was in a 'black spot"- a location in which restaurants never seemed to survive (this one didn't, either, but it lasted longer than most).

I'm sure that we will eventually be able to incorporate our kids in this tradition, but so far, we haven't done so. Therefore, it was a special treat to get to revive the tradition this year. Our day care was open today, but our work places were closed, so Hubby and I had the day to ourselves. We decided to head down to Pacific Beach and go for a walk. We parked in one of the lots by the bay in Mission Beach, walked along the bay and then up to Law Street checking out the changes in our old neighborhood, then headed to the beach. We stopped for lunch, and then walked back along the beach to our car. It was wonderful, if a bit windy.

Note that I did not pose for this picture. This is what my hair looked like as we walked south.

True to tradition, we discussed the state of our finances (pretty good) and our financial goals for the new year (we probably need to get a new roof- we'd love to be able to connect our house to our garage first). We also discussed possible vacations for 2012 (we think we'll try to go earlier this year, to take advantage of our last year in which we can plan vacations without regard to school schedules) and random other things.

So, I've been in a New Year's sort of mood, and have decided to write up my resolutions for the year. I actually have intentions, not resolutions, but taking some advice from Laura Vanderkam's Just a Minute newsletter, I've decided to try to make one specific, positive goal to go with each.

1. Be happy with my appearance again

Sometime in 2011, I gained 10 lbs. I either need to lose them (and preferably an additional 5 lbs) or make peace with the fact that I'm not going to lose them, and go buy clothes that fit and look good on that weight.

I also need to make peace with the fact that I'm going to be 40 this year, and that I no longer look 21. I need to find my grown up style and be comfortable in it.

My specific goal: I've read that exercise makes you feel better about yourself whether or not you lose weight, so my specific goal is to do something active every day, with two serious workouts per week.

2. Figure out my five year plan

I'm working in a job that is literally the incarnation of the job description I imagined for myself when I left graduate school 10+ years ago. And something is missing. I need to figure out what that is- do I need to aim for a different level of job in my current track? Do I need to do something different in my same industry? Do I need to make a far more drastic change?

My specific goal: I use this blog to figure things out, so my specific goal is to finally write the career introspection posts that have been on my future posts list for months and months.

3. Enjoy the journey

It is my blog tagline, but I have to confess that I sometimes struggle to do this. I'm not sure what the specific goal is for this one (that's probably part of the problem!) but I suspect it involves slowing down and enjoying scenes like this more:

This was taken on New Year's Day. Pumpkin is working on her resolution, which is to read more books on her own (she says that she wants to surprise her Kindergarten teacher with all the words she can read). Petunia just wanted to be like her big sister.

There are more things I plan to do this year, but I keep a revolving list of goals/tasks, so they aren't really resolutions. No doubt I'll write about them anyway at some point!

A Demonstration of the Cooling Off Period Effect (At Least As Applied to Blogging)

2012-01-01T19:23:00.000-08:00

This post started out a lot angrier. In fact, it started life in my head as a snarky open letter. But time passed between when I first wanted to write the post and when I was finally able to sit down and write... and my anger has cooled and my opinion of the incident that provoked it has become more nuanced. So, instead of a snarky open letter, I'll just tell a story and ask a question at the end.

This morning, my husband, my sister, and I took the girls down to our local park. It was a gorgeous day, and we were all in a good mood when we got there. Petunia went straight to the swings. Pumpkin pushed her baby doll in a swing for awhile, but then she wanted to run. The park has a playground, a picnic area (with tables) on a slight slope, a basketball court, and a big open field. Pumpkin wanted to run in the field, but she wasn't sure, because there were also a lot of dogs in the field. All the dogs were with their owners, but none of them were on leashes- even though there are signs all over the park saying that dogs must be leashed.

Now, I'm sympathetic to the dog owners on this point. It is a big open field that just begs dogs to run in it. But here's the thing: it also begs little kids to run in it. Pumpkin wanted to run in the field, and all the dogs were with their owners, so I ignored the little voice in my head that said the dogs might think that she wanted to play with them and chase her. I convinced myself that the little voice was just the little kid I used to be, who was deathly afraid of dogs and whose sister still chuckles when she recounts the time we came upon a dog on our walk to school and I ran around and around in circles with it chasing happily after me, until I broke free from whatever centripetal force had me in its sway and shot off towards home.

I shushed the little voice, pointed to an area without any dogs in it, and told Pumpkin to run there, because if she ran too close to the dogs, "the doggies might get confused and think you want to play with them." She took off running, holding her baby. My sister and I watched her run, and commented on how the fact that she was holding the baby doll changed her gait.

She ran a little closer to the dogs than I intended, and two large dogs stopped playing with each other, right next to their owners, and started chasing Pumpkin. I cannot say whether or not the owners tried to stop this, because I was not close enough to hear them. But if they tried, they failed, because the dogs were definitely chasing Pumpkin.

Pumpkin is not a natural with dogs. She used to be as scared of them as I ever was, but with a lot of time and patience, and the help of a friendly, gentle dog who visits her day care, she has mostly gotten past that and is usually interested in petting a dog when she sees one. She is not, however, interested in being chased by two large dogs. She started to scream and run in circles trying to get away. I was immediately on my feet, running towards her, yelling for the dog owners to get their dogs away from her. Before I could get to her, one of the dogs knocked her over. I don't think the dog did on purpose- he just bumped into her. The dog probably weighed about 50 lbs. She weighs 35 lbs at most. She fell down, still screaming.

I got to her seconds later and picked her up. The entire incident probably lasted less than 30 seconds. The dogs had meant no harm. She had been licked and nuzzled, but not hurt in the slightest.

But she was terrified. It took several minutes to calm her down. She had lost her shoe and dropped her baby. I gathered those up, and I'm ashamed to admit that I told the dog owners, who had by this time come and put their dogs on leashes, that this was not actually a leash free park. That was unkind of me. The dog owners knew this, of course. They are locals, like we are.

Their dogs had not actually hurt Pumpkin, just scared her. They'd scared me, too. The dog owners were no doubt confident that their dogs would not hurt a child. I didn't know that, though, and Pumpkin certainly didn't know it. And, you know what? The dog owners didn't really know that, either. Dogs are animals, and are not 100% predictable. I do not think a child should ever approach a strange dog uninvited, and I do not think a dog owner should ever let his or her dog run over to a strange child uninvited, either. Put yourself in Pumpkin's shoes. The dogs were both almost as tall as she is, and they each weighed more than her. Their mouths full of teeth were roughly at neck height. I don't know why people are surprised that some kids are afraid of dogs. I'm more surprised that some kids aren't.

After a few minutes, when Pumpkin had stopped screaming, one of the dog owners came over to check that Pumpkin was OK. I assured her that Pumpkin was fine, just scared. She understood. She was a nice woman, and I'm sure the other dog's owner was nice, too. The dogs and their owners left, and Hubby was able to get Pumpkin up and running again, although she would only run on the slope with the picnic area, not in the big field. We enjoyed the rest of our time at the park, and then walked home and had applesauce-oatmeal pancakes for lunch. I cannot say, as I was going to in my snarky open letter, that the incident ruined our day. It didn't even ruin our trip to the park.

I now see that incident as a warning to all involved. Pumpkin and I got a fright, for sure, but hopefully the dog owners also stopped and thought about what happened. They were not able to keep their unleashed dogs under control. The dogs caused no physical harm, so they were able to leash their dogs again and go home. If a dog had actually bitten Pumpkin, that would not have been the case. I would have called 911, and the dog would have been taken away, and might well have been put down.

Pumpkin seems to be over the incident altogether, although I suspect that we undid a lot of the careful work that has gone into making her more comfortable around dogs. A little dog walked past us as we left the park, and where last week, she would have walked confidently past the dog, today she froze, grabbed for my hand, and put me between her and the dog. Still, she was happy and playful the rest of the day, save the usual drama that seems to attend the phase we're in right now.

I'm mostly over the incident, too, although I am still a bit unnerved by what could have happened if those dogs weren't friendly. I don't think I'll let Pumpkin get so far away from me near unknown dogs again. And I still feel terrible for giving Pumpkin bad advice. She asked if I thought it would be OK to run in the field, and I said it would be. I was wrong. Hubby thinks that I should have run with Pumpkin. I agree that this would have allowed me to prevent the worst of the incident- I would have swooped her up as soon as the dogs came running over, and I could have held her until the owners came and calmed their dogs down. Perhaps the dog owners think it is Pumpkin's fault: she should not have run in a place where so many dogs were playing. The law says that those dogs should not have been off their leashes at all. It is a law that is routinely flouted in our local park, and as I said above, I can understand why. However, I expected that anyone who had their dog off its leash would be able to control the dog. That was not the case.

So, what do you think? Were the dog owners in the wrong? Was I in the wrong for letting Pumpkin run there? I certainly won't do it again- not that she is likely to ask. But that makes me wonder: where are children supposed to run, if every park is fair game for unleashed dogs, regardless of what the signs say? The dog owners could have taken their dogs to one of several leash free parks within a short drive from our neighborhood park. Where can I take Pumpkin to run?

Weekend Reading: The Privilege and Poverty Edition

2011-12-31T07:00:00.000-08:00

I considered making my year in review post my weekend reading post for the week, but that seemed a bit narcissistic, even for a blogger. So here are some other things to read:

First, via the Harvard Business Review, of all places, I came across this post about male privilege in geek fandom. It is a pretty good explanation of privilege, particularly as it applies to the "chilly climate" issue.

Then, Nicoleandmaggie wrote a post about how (and whether) they should help a young niece of theirs overcome some bad decisions, bad luck, and lack of money to get to college. They linked to an old post of John Scalzi's about poverty, which you should go read if you haven't read it before. And if you have read it before, it will stand up to a re-reading. (Incidentally, thanks to a more recent post of his that I came across after reading the old one on poverty, I finally figured out why his name sounded so familiar to me- he was the editor of my college newspaper for part of the time I was in college. You have no idea how glad I am to have finally figured this out. His 20 year old self even looks familiar.)

Finally, my friend Stevil wrote a great post about an encounter in a CVS store that helped remind me what is special about Christmas and pull me out of my pre-Christmas funk.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope 2012 brings you happiness and good fortune.

2011 in Review

2011-12-29T22:30:00.000-08:00

For some reason I can't really explain, I feel the need to do a "year in review" post, even though anyone who is interested in reviewing my year could just as easily use the archives in the right hand column. But it is my blog, so I get to do the post, even if it is not at all necessary.

I've decided to pick two or three posts from each month, and link to them here with a little bit of commentary. My criteria for inclusion in this list are arbitrary in the extreme- some posts are here because a lot of people read them and/or commented on them, some posts are here because they cover things that seem important to include in a year in review post, and some posts are here just because I like them.

Without further ado...

January opened with me weeding in my garden, and thinking of it as a metaphor for making self-improving changes. I failed utterly at starting a meaningful yoga practice, but I do still enjoy chocolate. So its a wash, right? Then a mentally ill young man shot a bunch of people in my home state, and the events leading up to the event and the reactions to it reduced me to feeling glad that at least we're no longer flinging live children at castle walls, which is obviously a rather low bar. But, on the bright side, the book I read about Genghis Khan (which included the story about people flinging live children at castle walls- and note, Khan was not the one doing the flinging) was really interesting. I truly am a history major who has wandered far, far afield. And, um, only took a few history classes in college, and knows nothing about doing real history research. I enjoy reading history, though! The month ended with a post that could be viewed as the first Weekend Reading post, but I called it Friday Links. It was about the Tiger Mom furor (remember that?) and included a hilarious beat poem (no, that is not an oxymoron) about "alternative medicine". If you missed that the first time around, you should go watch it now. Unless you're into homeopathy, in which case you are likely to be offended.

In February, I wrote a post that I really liked but no one else really noticed called Obscurity and Success. The seeds of that post were planted way back in 2003, when I came across a statue honoring the men who made sure that Shakespeare's works were published after his death. Later in the month, I was surprised to find myself agreeing with an article about parenting and food in the New York Times. Usually, food articles in the New York Times seem to be written primarily for serious gourmands who take food far, far more seriously than I do, and the parenting articles seem to be written about a different species altogether.

March saw me musing about the transitions in my kids' lives and what they mean for my own identity. It was quite a lot of navel-gazing considering that it was sparked by the sight of a crayon from The Olive Garden (don't tell the NYT food people, but I really like The Olive Garden's Zuppa Toscana). I am happy to report, though, that Petunia still lets me kiss her on the head, and it is still very sweet. March also saw my first real Weekend Reading post, which you should go look at if only to follow the link to Bad Mom, Good Mom's post about the life lessons of calculus. And I posted about an argument Hubby and I had about chores, which really resonated with some people, proving that I have no idea which posts will be interesting to anyone else- I thought that one was pretty dull.

In April, Pumpkin turned four and had some really good cupcakes at her party. I posted about how I buy time and compared the tension of balancing time with kids, time for other things, and money with the time-honored project management adage about how a project cannot be done cheaply, well, and fast- you have to choose two of the three. Finally, I had a weekend reading post that was really more rant about race, privilege, and education, which may (or may not) make the slew of posts I will undoubtedly write about choosing a kindergarten for Pumpkin make more sense. I will emphasize again, though, that I don't think there is anything wrong with people choosing private schools for their kids- I just want us all to remember how important public schools are.

May might have been the peak of our worries about Petunia's health. She still gets sick a lot, but it feels a lot more like normal day care stuff now. I also suspect that she's going to end up diagnosed with allergies eventually, but given my history with allergies, that won't be a big surprise. I also wrote a post about the conflict between our society's (and our own) parenting ideals and reality. I rather liked that one, because it bugs me how parents, and mothers in particular, get caught in a bit of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" bind in terms of how society judges them.

I turned 39 in May, but I wrote about it in June. I also posted my "Don't Lean Back Ahead of Time" rant,one of my most popular posts of all time, which was actually a series of comments on other people's posts, stitched together. I ended the month with a post about my "work limit"- i.e., how sometimes, trying to do more work is counter-productive. I like that one because it is a topic I really care about. I think we're a bit nutso about work hours in this country. Why in the world do people brag about working really long hours?

I followed up in July with my Work-Life Balance for Everyone Manifesto. I also reconstructed my first ever rant post, which was actually written in a paper journal. It makes me more happy than it should that even now, with two kids in my house, I still think my former coworker was a bit of a prat. I was also forced to admit that we were turning into "those parents" as we started Pumpkin on soccer lessons. Pumpkin loved those lessons, though, and has been asking to start them up again. So maybe "those parents" aren't so bad, after all.

I started August with a post that summarizes my parenting philosophy, and also explains why I can't talk about parenting with a lot of people in real life- namely, that I inhabit a different parenting universe than many of the people I know, because my kids don't sleep anywhere near as much as many of their peers. I also gazed deep into my linty navel and wrote about why I blog. You all wrote some really nice comments on that post, which is why I really like that post now. And just to prove that I still do sometimes post "mommyblog" things, I wrote a post about a walk with my daughters and their baby dolls. It was the first of many double stroller walks which I never really got tired of taking.

September brought the Great San Diego Blackout, which prompted me to write about emergency preparedness. We also went on a California road trip, which prompted me to write about how I travel with a toddler and a preschooler and enjoy it. That last post brought me a little good-natured flak from a commenter who thought that our brand of travel is unrealistic. I see her point, but stand by my post, and point out that we have made the road trip between San Diego and Phoenix enough times to have some experience with long days driving through scenery that bores the adults, let alone the kids.

In October, Petunia turned two. She had yummy cupcakes, too- not that she cared. I wrote a post about the phrase "working mom guilt" in which I think I offended Liz at Mom101, although that definitely wasn't my intent. And a twitter conversation with Fishscientist prompted me to draw a graph showing my post-partum productivity curve.

In November, I argued that I am not married to a unicorn, which is another one of my top posts if you judge by the number of hits it got. The follow up to that post eventually led me to post about being a feminist mother, which is a post that I thought sucked when I wrote it but that I now rather like, proving that not only do I not know what my readers will like, I don't even know what I'll like the next day. I also wrote the first post about our impending school decision. I'm sure there are more of those coming in January- we visit the two magnet schools we are considering on January 9.

Given how much I had to do in December, it would have been smart to be relatively quiet on the internet. I was not, however. I got in a prolonged discussion on someone else's blog that ended poorly, but made me think about why I get involved in online discussion in the first place. Despite what the other person on that other blog probably thinks, I don't set out to antagonize people! I held my first ever giveaway, as part of a review of the Secret Agent Josephine eBooks (and my new Kindle Fire). Pumpkin and I just read the Colors book tonight, so I wasn't lying just to get myself some free eBooks. My opinion cannot be bought that cheaply. I ended the month with a multi-part discussion about gendered toys, princesses, and how we handle the issue in our house. (Yes, I just broke my rule and linked to five posts in December. My blog, my rules, my exceptions, I guess.) I think the last post is the best, but also think that I probably beat that topic to death.

So... on to 2012. I enjoyed going through all my posts for this year and picking out the ones to include here. Who knows? This may become a tradition.

Different Genders, Gender Differences and How We Handle the Princesses

2011-12-27T20:58:00.000-08:00

I recently came across a post by a teacher about how she handled a little girl in her class who didn't have the typical girl behaviors and preferences. You've probably seen it, too- it was linked to from lots of blogs.

It is a great post, written by a teacher who sounds wonderful. I am glad our society is getting more accepting of little girls who want to dress and act more like we expect little boys to. It made me think about the furor over the little baby in Canada whose gender was being kept a secret and the baby's older brother, Jazz- and my reaction to that.

And this clarified some of my thoughts on the recent discussions about the "girl" LEGO sets, the Princess phase, and all that.

It has become clear to me that the reason that I'm uncomfortable with a lot of the discussions about gender specific toys is that they include an implicit judgment of the typically girl toys and of typically female pursuits. It is a fine line between advocating for little girls to have a wide open field when dreaming about their future careers and instilling an idea that being a hair stylist or a nurse is somehow less than being a mechanic or a scientist, and frankly, it seems like we're coming down on the wrong side of that line sometimes. And, as I wrote in those earlier posts, I am deeply uncomfortable with the message our culture sends that being into princesses (or, for the older girls and women, fashion and makeup) is somehow incompatible with an interest in building things or studying science. As I described in the gender bender post, I came up against that stereotype in college, and it was harmful. In fact, it may have been the source of my most serious doubts about pursuing a degree and eventual career in science.

The really disturbing thing about these issues is that they are coming from both sides of the political spectrum. I expect this nonsense from conservative traditionalists who think that women's place is in the kitchen, but it comes from people who consider themselves progressive, too. The same people who were defending Jazz's right to wear purple dresses and put his hair in braids wrote comments that said I was raising my children in a "pink ghetto" because we haven't banned the Disney princesses from our house. I don't want Jazz or the little girl in the post I linked to at the top to be bullied for being themselves. But I also don't want Pumpkin to be pre-judged based on her interest in princesses. I realize that the former is more vicious and harmful, but that doesn't mean that the latter is entirely benign.

We need to get to a place where anyone of either gender can be into anything, and not be judged, where we all recognize that the presence of one stereotypically female trait doesn't equal the presence of all stereotypically female traits, and where we don't denigrate those traits, regardless of who is exhibiting them. I want more women in STEM, but I want more male nurses and preschool teachers, too. And I want equal respect for all careers- even for that bogey-woman of the Lego girls discussions, hair stylists. (I mean really, what is up with the disdain for hair stylists? Where would we be without good hair stylists? Given how I feel right now, when I'm past due for a haircut- not a happy place.)

Pumpkin is fairly ignorant of all this nonsense so far. She doesn't see a problem with liking princesses and LEGO. She doesn't think that a love of purple is incompatible with a love of math. She doesn't know that strong language skills and strong spatial reasoning skills aren't supposed to go together (and you know what? She's actually pretty strong in both right now). It breaks my heart to think that soon, our culture is going to tell her that she's wrong. She is going to realize that people- even people who say that they are for equal rights for all- look down on some of her interests, while other people tell her that she is innately inferior at other things that she is actually quite good at, like spatial reasoning, while citing (incomplete and/or over-interpreted) science.

I hate that my culture is going to tear down my little girl's confidence. I want to protect her from that as long as I can, at least until I can start explaining this all to her and help her learn how to make her way through this mess of bullshit with her self-confidence intact. And I'm certainly not going to be the one who tears her down. Princesses are OK in our house, and I've told the adults who visit us that their joking references to gender stereotypes are not acceptable while my daughters are young.

I've also been making conscious decisions about toys and activities- but my decisions are driven primarily by a desire to make sure that her environment stretches all of her skills. I've been heavily influenced by Pink Brain, Blue Brain, by Lise Eliot. I recommend this book highly to anyone who is interested in gender differences, specifically as they impact parenting. Dr. Eliot, a neuroscientist with three kids of her own (one girl, two boys), surveys the literature and finds "surprisingly little solid evidence of sex differences in children's brains." She makes a convincing case for the role of plasticity (or the fact that our brains change in response to its environment) in the gender differences observed in adults. (She also points out that the gender differences in cognitive skills are much smaller than one would think from the popular literature.) As she says, "the male-female differences that have the most impact- cognitive skills, such as speaking, reading, math, and mechanical ability; and interpersonal skills, such as aggression, empathy, risk taking, and competitveness- are heavily shaped by learning. Yes, they germinate from basic instincts and initial biases in brain function, but each of these traits is massively amplified by the different sorts of practice, role models, and reinforcement that boys and girls are exposed to from birth onward."

I won't try to summarize her entire argument here- if you are interested, really, go read the book. But I will explain what it has meant to our parenting. We focus heavily on ensuring that our girls get experiences, via toys and other routes, that will let them grow all of their skills. Dolls are great for practicing empathy. Puzzles and LEGO are great for spatial reasoning. Trucks and cars are great for instilling an instinctive understanding of the laws of physics. Princess dresses are great for stretching the imagination. Etc., etc.

I think that we all start from a somewhat blank slate- evidence indicates that intelligence is only about 50% genetics. From the starting point provided by genetics and prenatal environment, we grow to achieve our potential based on the experiences we have. So my husband and I aim to make our daughters' experiences rich and varied, and to make sure that they get the chance to practice all of their skills. This does not mean that I think it is my job to make sure that their environment is optimal, as defined as "no iota of the potential on that not quite blank slate is squandered." Rather, I think my job is just to make sure that a strong foundation is laid to ensure that they have the skills to pursue their future interests, whatever they may be.

This is why we have Pumpkin taking Chinese lessons- the window of opportunity for language learning is too good to pass up (and she likes them). This is why I didn't just shrug my shoulders and put the puzzles away when Petunia didn't show the same early enthusiasm for them that her sister did. We kept trying different things and found ones she'll play with. Eventually, we figured out that her fine motor development isn't as advanced as Pumpkin's was. The puzzles that she was physically able to do were boring to her. After much experimentation, we discovered that she likes mix and match puzzles (like mix and match fix puzzle) and puzzles that make sounds (like this animal sounds one). We also give her stickers and freely indulge her love of coloring, which will eventually help her fine motor skills come up to speed. And this is why I care that the "starter" LEGO castle didn't have a princess- because I want toys that encourage spatial reasoning AND that will get played with by my princess loving daughter.

To me, the most pernicious thing about the princess phase and other gender specific toys is that they deprive kids of the chance to grow all of their skills. Don't get me wrong- I care about the gender-based career stereotypes in the toys, too. But my (probably naive and arrogant) assumption is that the living example I provide will be more important to my daughters' opinions of their career options that whatever Barbie or LEGO show them. I realize that it isn't all about me and my family, and that most little girls don't have mothers whose career is a traditionally male-dominated one. However, I somehow became a scientist despite the lack of any scientist in my family, male or female, and the abundance of Barbie dolls in my toy chest. When I was a little girl, I wanted to be carpenter, and then a country and western singer, and then a doctor, and then an anthropologist. Of those, only the carpenter had precedence in my family. My parents encouraged my ever changing interests. They contradicted the gender stereotypes when I came up against them, and always told me that I could do whatever I wanted. I'll do the same for my girls, and I think they will be OK.

What do you think about all of this? Tell me in the comments. It may be your last chance to discuss this topic here for awhile- I think I need to move on!

Christmas Cookies

2011-12-26T22:34:00.000-08:00

Can you stand one more Christmas post? If not, click away.

One of my favorite things about Christmas is the baking, specifically the cookies. When I was younger, I would bake multiple batches of cookies: sugar cookies, gingerbread cookies (mine were bunnies and teapots and various things more interesting than plain old people), two types of shortbread, chocolate chip cookies, and random other recipes that sounded good to me.

The arrival of children in my life has changed that tradition a bit. A lot, actually. So much that this year, I struggled to find time to bake at all. But baking at Christmas is important to me, so somehow, time was made to produce a few batches. We leave a plate of cookies out for Santa, you know, and perhaps he reads the New York Times and would be offended by store bought cookies.

So, we baked some cookies for Santa's plate. And our tummies. I am a bit of a cookie monster- I can easily skip cake, brownies, and all other types of treats, but it takes a great deal of willpower for me to turn down a good cookie! Particularly a sugar cookie.

In fact, we left a plate of cookies, a glass of milk, a note, and a picture for Santa.

Here's a close up of the cookies:

They are, from the top left: a caramel-oat bar (made by me and Petunia), a sugar cookie (made by me and Pumpkin, decorated by Pumpkin), a piece of chocolate shortbread (made by me), and a slice of ginger crunch (a New Zealand delicacy, made by Hubby and Pumpkin).

Hubby uses the Edmond's ginger crunch recipe, but doubles or triples the amount of icing. I use the sugar cookie and butter frosting recipes from the The Fannie Farmer Baking Book (a great cookbook to have on hand if you like to bake).

The caramel-oat squares are from an old copy of Betty Crocker's Cookie Book- the same book that provided the sort of dairy free brownies that got me through the dairy prohibition while nursing Pumpkin. These bars are super easy and fun for a toddler to help with- Petunia enjoyed mixing the ingredients and helping to spread the chocolate chips on top. The Google search for these turns up a bunch of things using some new Betty Crocker mix, so here is the recipe:

Caramel-Oat Bars

2 cups oats
1/2 cup packed brown sugar (Petunia loved packing the brown sugar. I had to help, of course)
1/2 cup melted butter
1/4 cup dark corn syrup (eh, I only had light, and it worked fine)
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
6 oz semisweet chocolate chips (I probably use closer to 9 oz. Note that the bag you buy at the store is 12 oz. We had an accidental but fortuitous innovation here this year. I bought mini chocolate chips. As you'd expect, they melt faster, which makes the step that uses them faster and more satisfying for a toddler)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Grease a 9x9x2 inches baking pan. I grease even a non-stick pan. What's a little more butter?

Mix oats, brown sugar, melted butter, corn syrup, vanilla and salt. Spread in greased baking pan and bake until bubbly, about 8 minutes. (Nice and short- good for toddler attention spans!)

Immediately sprinkle with chocolate chips. Let stand until soft (very quick if you're using mini chips!) and spread evenly. A rubber spatula works best.

Refrigerate at least an hour. Cut into bars. If you wait too long, this will require some muscle. Store in fridge.

The chocolate shortbread recipe is from The Cookie Jar Cookbook, which I no longer have. But I had copied the recipe out into my recipe notebook. I couldn't find it on Google (OK, I didn't look that hard), so here it is. You can thank the 15 years ago me for the lack of detail- but my batch turned out well.

Chocolate Shortbread

2 cups flour
1/2 cup cocoa
pinch salt
1 cup butter softened
2/3 cup powdered sugar
1 1/4 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.

Sift flour, cocoa, and salt together and set aside. Cream the butter and sugar together until fluffy. Add vanilla and bat. Add dry ingredients and mix (I had to finish this with my hands- basically squishing the dough together until it all mixed).

Press dough into ungreased 10x10xwhatever pan. (This recipe is fairly forgiving of pan size, actually- my notes say that I sued to make it in two round cake pans. They were on the small side, though, and my current ones are bigger, so I used a 10x10 baking pan and it worked well.)

Bake ~35 minutes, until it is firm to the touch and the center springs back when gently pressed. The edges shouldn't darken.

Cut while still warm.

Santa must have liked our cookies, because he left both a camera (real, not a toy! Hooray for cheap electronics from China) and a Ken doll (in the stocking) for Pumpkin. He did not bring the Barbie princess castle she had asked for. We suspect it wouldn't fit in his sleigh- which is a good thing, because it also wouldn't fit in our house. My mom had the brilliant idea of repurposing her toy shelves, which are cubby shelves from Target), into a castle. Pumpkin loves this. They even built a moat with her train tracks.

Petunia got a CD player/karaoke machine, which she seems to like, but not as much as the hand pump operated owl flashlight that her aunt in NZ sent to her.

We gave Pumpkin a "My first LEGO" house set, which she used a bit, with help. We gave Petunia some play doh of her own (she had been sharing her sister's) and some toys to stamp letters, numbers, and various patterns into play doh. She loves the play doh, but hasn't seen the point of the stamps yet. Both girls got many more toys and books and clothes from various extended family members, all of which were appreciated. Petunia even let me read one of her new books tonight, which is a remarkably fast uptake for her. It usually takes months to introduce a new book. I wish I were exaggerating.

I gave Hubby a home brew starter's kit. My idea is that if he has a hobby like that he'll stop hassling me about how much time I spend blogging.

Hubby gave me some CDs and a fancy case for my Kindle Fire. So I won this round. (He won last year with a surprise gift of a Kindle. Overall, we're probably about even.)

My parents and my sister went together to get me something with which to work off the effects of all those Christmas cookies:

It is awesome and way more fun than that stupid dance exercise DVD I've been using.

Christmas was almost completely tear free, although Petunia did insist on wearing butterfly wings and antennae for most of the day.

All and all, it was a good Christmas. We are very fortunate to be able to celebrate in the way that we do. I hope Christmas was also good to you, if you celebrate. We'll be back to rants and other such posts soon!

Weekend Reading: The Christmas Edition

2011-12-23T15:00:00.000-08:00

So, the gifts are (mostly) wrapped, despite the fact that Petunia got sick and had to stay home today. Hubby and I are (mostly) over the fact that our much-anticipated kid-free day turned into a "take turns snuggling Petunia on the sofa" day. Chocolate shortbread is in the oven, and I only cursed my 15 years ago self two or three times for writing such sparse instructions when I copied out that recipe. I can see myself writing it out, skipping all the detail, because surely I would never forget how to make something I made several times a year. Let me be a lesson to all of you people who don't have kids yet but plan to have them sometime- you will remember almost nothing of your pre-kid life. You certainly won't remember how to make the chocolate shortbread that you haven't made since before your first child was born.

But anyway. My Christmas spirit never fully appeared, but I think I'm doing a decent job of faking it. Our Christmas festivities start tonight, with our annual pilgrimage to see the house in my sister's neighborhood that has about 500 times the number of lights a sane person would put on his or her house. We'll load Petunia up on Tylenol and take her along. Incidentally, we discovered today "Tylenol" is one of the words she can say. Poor kid.

My parents come into town tomorrow night, and we will all gather for a tradition that I've carried over from my youth- the opening by the children of Christmas Eve presents containing ornaments. When I was growing up, we went out to see a movie on Christmas Eve, too. In my house now, we'll watch some recording Christmas specials. Since Petunia is inexplicably displeased with the Dora Christmas Special (she normally loves Dora), this will probably be the Grinch and- God help me- the approximately 800th viewing of the Bubble Guppie Christmas Special, which I agreed to record for Petunia in a fit of early December good cheer.

Posting is likely to be light for the next week or so. Or maybe the fact that my parents are here to entertain the kids will mean that I have time to write some of the posts I've got queued up. Either way, I couldn't NOT post this video my husband found, which covers the history of Santa:

Also, if you're looking for a last minute gift for someone who has everything... this superhydrophobic spray is unfortunately not yet available commercially. But it is pretty awesome.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Joyous Solstice... Happy whatever you celebrate. Don't be Mr. Grumpfish! (See, if you'd watched the Bubble Guppies special, you'd know what that means....)

Princesses Are Not The Problem

2011-12-21T22:07:00.000-08:00

I shouldn't really be writing a post tonight. I should be working on getting ready for Christmas. But I had a rough day. First, I wasted half of the day tracking down a bug in a data loading script that turned out to be a "feature" of the vendor-supplied database into which we were loading- a feature that the vendor damn well should have told me about when they suggested I load my data in this particular way. Then my day ended with a contentious meeting that ran 30 minutes late and made me late to pick up the girls at day care, which made me late to get home, which made me have to change my dinner plans. Then both girls had spectacular meltdowns around bath time- Petunia because she wanted to wear her (cloth, not water safe) butterfly wings in the bath and Pumpkin because she didn't want to take a bath for some reason.

So anyway, I'm thinking that maybe ranting some more about toys will be therapeutic. Or maybe not- but these thoughts have been bouncing around in my head and they are distracting me from the things I should be doing, so maybe by writing them down and asking you all what you think I can get on with finishing my #&%$! project at work and getting organized for Christmas at home. As usual with this sort of post, I make no guarantees for a coherent argument. This is a dump of my thoughts on the topic, and I am very interested to read what you think in the comments.

I continue to see reactions to the new "girl" Lego sets I wrote about in my last weekend reading post, and so I continue to think about them. I may not have made this clear in my last post, but I am not exactly thrilled by the idea of gender specific Lego sets. However, I think that the decision to have gender specific sets was made several years ago, when Lego decided to start making a lot of battle-themed sets. Now, I didn't have kids then, so maybe there was an outcry similar to what we're seeing now about the "girl" sets, but I doubt it- which I think is interesting, and says a lot about our culture.

I also think it is worth remembering that Lego started bringing out those "aggressively boy" sets not because they are an evil company intent on reinforcing gender stereotypes, but because they were fighting to survive, and those sets were part of the strategy that brought them back to profitability.

I think that sometimes we forget that toys are mostly made by companies, which exist to make money. They sell us what we will buy. Toys are an interesting consumer item, though, because they are simultaneously a mirror for our culture, showing us through our children's eyes what we are, and a tool by which our culture indoctrinates its newest members.

I am surprised to find myself concluding that princesses aren't the problem, and neither are "girl" Lego sets. The problem is a culture whose norms stratify interests into "boy" and "girl" and thereby work to push girls away from toys that will help grow skills that will help them with math and science in the future (and for that matter, push boys away from toys that will help them practice their nurturing skills).

The frustrating thing about cultural norms is that they are incredibly pervasive and hard to avoid. You would never know it from looking at the amount of Disney Princess crap we now own, but those Princesses were not invited into our lives by me or my husband- or any other adult, really. They came in because of day care. Specifically, because of what the other little girls at day care were talking about. Pumpkin knew all the stories from her friends, and she wanted Princess underwear and Princess bandaids because those are what her friends had. She could show the other little girls her Princess bandaid and they would be impressed, in their three year old way. I didn't really see the point of having a huge fight over bandaids- or underwear, for that matter- and so the Princesses came into our house.

Eventually, I felt bad that Pumpkin seemed so left out of the mainstream of her day care culture, and we decided to get a Disney Princess movie for her to watch. We settled on Cinderella, because it is the least scary- and she is still a child who would prefer her entertainment to be largely free of any tension. We had to talk her through the scene in which Cinderella gets locked in the tower, but once she made it through, she loved that movie, and we made peace with it.

And now Petunia asks for "Rella" and knows the names of the main mice in the movie. This is not something I ever expected to have happen in my household.

Given all of that, I certainly don't expect parents to fight the cultural norms all on their own. I think it is reasonable to ask for some help from the rest of society. In fact, if I were making the rules, I would require that every ad for a toy show an equal number of boys and girls. There would be girls in the ads for the latest battle toy and boys in the ads for that Barbie head that you use to practice doing hair and putting on makeup. And the toy packaging would have to do the same.

But I'm not making the rules, so I have to navigate the current environment as best as I can. It would be easy to despair, but I think that would be both wrong and defeatist. Our culture is pervasive, but I, as a parent, have a huge role to play in helping my daughters learn how to navigate it. To that end, I try to remember that my end goal is not to raise daughters who hate princesses, but to raise daughters who have the skills and confidence to pursue their interests, whatever they may be.

I will not tell my daughters not to like the Disney Princesses, but I also will not roll over and let Disney tell them what it means to be a princess (or, for that matter, a girl) and I will not let their interest in princesses and other "girl" things deprive them of the chance to play with toys that help them build all their skills.

I will confront the stereotypes, by doing things like reading them The Paper Bag Princess.

And I can subvert the stereotypes, by finding toys that fit their interests and stretch their skills. This isn't as easy as I want it to be- but it also isn't as impossible as some people make out. We adopted a family for Christmas this year, and one of the kids was a six year old girl. She asked for a "flying unicorn toy." As I expected, My Little Pony makes one of those. I was pleasantly surprised, though, to find that they also make a radio-controlled car (which is another great toy for stretching spatial reasoning).

I think it is a stroke of genius that the radio controller looks a bit like a magic wand, which is another thing that princess-obsessed girls love. The store I was at had a two-for-one sale on My Little Pony toys, so the little girl got the car as well as the (to my eyes) less interesting flying unicorn toy.

I love the look of the Castle Logix set, and will probably get that for Pumpkin or Petunia eventually.

(Thanks to FeMOMhist for bringing it to my attention.)

And yes, I may well buy Pumpkin a "girl" Lego set when they come out- it will depend on what the set actually looks like.

If I have to work a little harder than I'd like to find toys that stretch my girls' spatial reasoning and math skills- well, I think it is worth it. And I think that I can I do that with the imperfect toys available today, even while I also speak out to try to change our cultural expectations about what boys and girls like and are good at. In fact, I think that I owe it to my girls to do both of those things. They can't wait for our culture to change, but wouldn't it be great if they don't have to work so hard at this when they have kids of their own?

An Open Letter to Job Applicants

2011-12-20T20:51:00.000-08:00

Dear job applicant,

If all of your training and experience is in a research heavy field related to mine, and you are applying for the job I have posted for an entry-level position in my more applied field, it would be a good idea to write a cover letter explaining why you want to go into my field. Perhaps you have discovered that you would like to apply your love of science to a different type of work. Perhaps you have always wanted to work in my industry, and have only suffered through your more general training with this goal in mind. Perhaps you are desperate for a job and are just applying to anything that seems vaguely relevant. Perhaps you lack basic reading comprehension skills and are completely unaware of the requirements of the job for which you have just applied. Really, your resume doesn't make it clear which possibility is most likely, and I do not have the time to call everyone who applies to painstakingly extract this information.

However, if you are only applying for my job because you can't get a job in your research field, and are willing to settle for my job until you can find the job you really want, you are probably wasting both of our time. I am happy to train someone into this position- my job posting makes that clear, I think- but I am not interested in training you if you are not actually interested in pursuing a career in my field. Or, more accurately, if you can't even be bothered to hide your disdain for my field long enough to get through the job application.

You get bonus points on your cover letter if you point out the things in your background that make you think you can meet the job requirements I posted.

I deduct points if you tell me about your deep interest in your research field and desire to spend your life researching a topic that, while no doubt interesting, has nothing whatsoever to do with the position I posted.

If you don't know much about my applied field and think you might be interested, please go ahead and apply, but this is a case where it is not necessarily wise to be completely honest. You do not need to tell me in your cover letter that you don't actually know whether or not you are interested in my field. You are interested enough to apply, so just write me a cover letter saying that you are interested in my field and highlighting the aspects of your background that make you qualified for my job.

If you can find a connection to me, you can email me and ask for an informational interview (a meeting in which you ask me questions about my field). As I have discussed before, I am happy to do these, and will almost certainly buy you lunch if you are student or a postdoc. I'll be impressed with your initiative, and you'll have a boost over any other applicants, because I will already have met you and gotten to see what a sane, well-spoken, thoughtful person you are.

I will not, however, be impressed by a cover letter that says you are a brilliant jack of all trades who can pick up any field effortlessly. I will doubt that this is true, and think that you are probably an arrogant jackass with whom I do not want to work, let alone manage.

Sincerely, A Very Tired Hiring Manager

Weekend Reading: The Subtle Sexism Edition

2011-12-16T19:38:00.000-08:00

As promised, I have a "real" weekend reading post this week. This week's links are all about how men and women (and boys and girls) are treated differently, even when they're doing the same things.

First, in the adult world, here is a really good column about something I missed entirely (because it was in England)- but which makes a general point (that Nicoleandmaggie had also made in their post about the Womanspace fiasco) about how men making a feminist point are treated more respectfully than women making the exact same point.

Next, do you remember the little girl who was bullied at school because she was really into Star Wars, which was supposedly a "boy thing", and how a bunch of adult geeks rallied to her defense? CNN had a follow up on her. She's doing great. Her school has a new anti-bullying policy, and she recently came to the defense of a little boy at a birthday party who wanted his nails painted like the girls. She sounds like an awesome girl.

Finally, those of you who follow me on Twitter already know how I feel about Lego's new initiative to make more "girl-friendly" sets. If your initial reaction is similar to that of the tweet that brought it to my attention- i.e., that all Lego is for girls, I encourage you to (1) read the article before you judge Lego, (2) go look at the Lego sets aimed at ages 5 and up, and (3) wonder why no one raised an eyebrow when Lego decided to skew so "boy" awhile back. Why, when no one questions the existence of the umpteen-million warrior themed Lego sets, are so many people are bothered by the idea of sets with pastel colors and traditionally "girly" things?

Personally, I'm glad they are going to bring out some sets that aren't so aggressively "boy"- otherwise, I am afraid I'll struggle to keep Pumpkin interested in Lego, which is a great toy for stretching spatial reasoning skills and problem solving skills.

To give you an idea of why I think there is a problem now, look at this castle set, which we considered buying for Pumpkin for Christmas:

And tell me what is missing.

The princess.

In the article, it says that Lego's research showed that boys around the world think that a castle without a dragon is worse than no castle at all. Well, Pumpkin would think that a castle without a princess is not really a castle, and I suspect a lot of other little girls would agree with her.

(Sorry for the Amazon picture above- it was the easiest way to get the picture in, and this month, I'm all about easy.)

We bought her a house set instead. I was annoyed, because she wants a castle for Christmas, but I knew that the Lego one would not be acceptable to her. If that toy was really "unisex" it would have the knight and the dragon and a princess.

I've written before about how I am annoyed by the feeling amongst some feminists that pink and princesses are necessarily bad. My opinion is a bit more subtle. I wouldn't want my daughter to be into princesses to the exclusion of all else, and I'm not thrilled by the fact that Disney seems to be the sole arbiter of what it means to be a princess these days, but I don't think the fact that my daughter is going through a princess phase is a sign of doom, particularly if I can find Lego sets and other "good" toys that work with that interest while also letting her stretch some of the skills that are considered traditionally male (like spatial reasoning). I think this quote from my earlier post sums up my thoughts nicely:

So I guess what I really want is for people to start standing up for the right of people to be a little bit "male" and a little bit "female"- mixing things however their interests take them. Let the boys wear pink and purple if they want, and don't assume that a girl who loves princesses is not going to kick the world's butt some day.

And, as I said in that earlier post, parents of boys don't get a free pass, either- in some ways, it is harder to let a boy explore all of his interests than it is too let a girl do so. It is far more acceptable for a girl to be a tomboy than for a boy to be viewed as... what? There isn't even a non-perjorative term for a boy who is into feminine things!

Micro Dr.O had a good post about this issue this week- go check it out. As I said in my comment there, I think boys today are missing out on arts and crafts. I don't just mean the fancy stuff from Oriental Trading that shows up at almost every girl's birthday party we go to- I mean the basics, like coloring, and cutting and taping papers. All of the art supplies seem to be marketed at girls, and I have heard the little boys at Pumpkin's day care say things like "stickers are for girls". Maybe Crayola needs to take a page from Lego's book and go study how to get boys interested in coloring again!

Update: I wrote some more thoughts on gender specific toys.

Updates on Things You Probably Haven't Been Wondering About

2011-12-15T18:20:00.000-08:00

I have a long list of "real" posts lined up, waiting for me to write them. Among other things, I want to talk about ambition and my goals in life. I've promised Fishscientist that I will write a post about project management and becoming a project manager. And I want to write about how to keep pervasive sexism in your chosen line of work from getting you down.

But I can't find the time or the head space to write any of those things right now. It is all I can do to stay sort of caught up at work and semi on top of Christmas preparations at home. The month of December: brought to you by the letter C, the number 25, and the feeling of doing everything half-assed. It doesn't help that Petunia has brought several colds home to me since mid-November- I feel like I am constantly a little bit under the weather. Still, this is a huge improvement over last year, when Petunia and I spent most of December feeling really miserable.

So, I'll give you some updates on things I've written about recently, in no particular order. But don't worry- I'll have a "real" weekend reading post this week. In fact, I think I have three possible themes to choose between.

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The ornaments on our tree are far more clustered than you can tell from the picture I posted. Maybe these two photos will give a better flavor for our ornament distribution:

Some have been moved since they were originally hung, but we're discouraging that, for the sake of my sanity.

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The giveaway on my post about the Secret Agent Jo books is still open. I'll choose the winner on Saturday. I actually may have another giveaway post soon. I've been sent a copy of The Discovery of Jeanne Baret, by Glynis Ridley to review, and I think I get a second copy to give away. (Incidentally, I've started the book and like it so far- so, if you're stuck for a gift idea for someone who likes biographies of obscure but interesting historical figures, this would be a good gamble. However, I'm only about one chapter in, so I can't promise it doesn't suck in the end. And yes, if you're wondering, that description does fit me pretty well- which is why I agreed to do the review.)

Long time readers know that I don't do this sort of thing often- it is just random luck that I'll have two giveaways so close together. I've never done a giveaway before, and as far as I can recall, there are only two other freebies that I've reviewed on this blog- Baby Signing Time volumes 3 and 4 and 168 Hours, which I didn't so much review as use as a starting point for a series of posts. So never fear- this isn't turning into a blog where I'll write about anything someone will send me for free! I only accept things that I'm interested in, and I'll never sell my opinion. Still, if the occasional giveaway and/or review bothers you, feel free to tell me why in the comments. I don't promise to change my mind about doing them, though.

I also find it interesting to look at the readership stats. That Secret Agent Jo post has more hits than either my recent rant about women and negotiation or the post about being a feminist mother- two of my more popular recent posts. Clearly, Brenda's book tour is sending a lot of new people my way. I wonder if any of them are sticking around? (Any new readers out there who want to say hi?)

However, because Blogger isn't smart enough to filter out hits from crawlers, none of these are as popular as a random post I wrote about Petunia starting day care, which Blogger thinks 50,903 people have read. I am quite confident that there aren't that many people on this planet who are interested in Petunia's first days at day care.

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I called the schools we're considering for Pumpkin to arrange tours, and discovered that the two magnet schools will have tours on Monday, January 9. My husband and I decided to take the day off work and do both tours on one day. When I called our neighborhood school, they said that they would probably have tours sometime in January, and I should call back then. At first I was a little bit annoyed with this answer, but then I figured that we don't have to decide whether or not we're going to our neighborhood school by February 15- just whether or not we want to try to get into one of the magnets. So I've calmed down on that front. If you have any additional questions I should ask, there is still time to tell me about them!

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Pumpkin's reading skills continue to improve, and she's still enjoying learning to read. I am fascinated by the learning process. Watching my kid learn to read is one of the cooler aspects of parenthood so far. But I have to admit, I sometimes have a hard time sitting still and listening to her slow progress through a book. Our most recent book was Harry and the Lady Next Door, by Gene Zion, and Pumpkin was sooo proud when she finished it. I was just glad it was done- and that is not an indictment of the book, which is actually a good story.

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Progress on weaning Petunia continues, albeit slowly. We're down to nursing before bed, mostly. Some nights, she forgets. And sometimes she really, really wants to nurse at some other random time. I decided to ease off on my self-imposed deadline of the end of the year. It didn't seem smart to add forced weaning into our mix this month. We'll be done when we're done, I suppose.

She is also still as clingy and mommy-centered as ever. I'm beginning to think that the approach I used to get through these phases with Pumpkin- namely, give her all the mommy she wants and just wait it out- might not be the right approach with Petunia. But I don't really have any other bright ideas that seem consistent with our parenting philosophy, so I continue to spend half of each night snuggling with Petunia in her bed. We definitely should have bought her a nicer mattress.

Her language skills continue to improve, though. She is now very clear when she tells her Daddy to go away if he tries to come to her when she wakes up in the middle of the night. "No, Daddy! 'Way!"

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I think that'll do it for tonight. But if I've forgotten to update you on something that you've been curious about, ask in the comments.

In Which I Find a Little Christmas Spirit

2011-12-12T22:29:00.000-08:00

I've been struggling to find my Christmas spirit this year. Our December weekends are so full that we had to write "buy Christmas tree" on our calendar, and our initial weekend plan doesn't have me doing any Christmas baking until Dec. 24th. We still haven't figured out when we'll take the girls out to see the Christmas lights in our neighborhood. To be honest, the season has felt more like a forced march through a list of things I have to do than like a celebration of peace, love, and all that.

Yesterday, as our calendar dictated, Hubby went out and bought our Christmas tree. He came home with a tree that seemed far too big to me. We had to rearrange our entire living room to find it a place to stand, and even so, the only place it fits is right next to our front door. This is our first year with a full size tree- previous years, we have bought a small tree and perched it on top of an up-ended trunk full of books. We figured this would keep curious little hands from breaking any ornaments or pulling the tree over. But this year, we decided that the girls are big enough to handle a big tree.

So a big tree we have. It is so much bigger than previous years' trees that I had to go out and buy more lights for it. I bought a light up star for the top, too, in an attempt to buy myself a little Christmas spirit. That attempt failed, but tonight we decorated our tree, and a little bit of magic happened.

It started out poorly, with the girls chasing each other around the house giggling, and us almost yelling to get them to listen to us and calm down enough to start decorating.

But then, they started hanging ornaments on the tree, and it was wonderful. Pumpkin pronounced every ornament she picked up to be "beautiful" and was eager to help her little sister figure out the ornament hanging thing- maybe a little too eager, but Petunia didn't complain, so neither did we.

Petunia kept saying "I help" as she went between the table with the ornaments and the tree. She was so proud of herself every time she managed to hang an ornament that we didn't have the heart to tell her that the ornaments were meant to hang on tree branches, not light bulbs, and just surreptitiously moved them to safer locations nearby when her back was turned.

My sister had come to help us decorate, and brought a box of cheap but festive ornaments from Target to fill in the inevitable gaps caused by going from a 4 foot tree to a 7 foot one. The girls let us lift them up from time to time to put ornaments higher on the tree, but there is a definite local minimum for ornaments in the front and at the bottom, giving the tree a charmingly uneven look. But I think it is beautiful.

I'm sitting on the (rearranged) sofa typing this, enjoying the view of the tree and some newly discovered Christmas spirit. The only thing missing is a good Christmas cookie- the ones I bought turned out to be pretty dreadful. I think that if I go ahead and bake this weekend, even if there isn't really time, my Christmas spirit may turn out to be intact this year, after all.

How about you? How's your holiday spirit this year? What makes it feel like the holidays at your house?

The giveaway on the Secret Agent Jo post is still open. I'll pick the winner Saturday night, maybe over some nice Christmas cookies.

Secret Agent Josephine and the Kindle Fire

2011-12-10T06:00:00.000-08:00

In lieu of a weekend reading post this weekend, I bring you a special event! A review post with giveaway. And a title that sounds a bit like a Nancy Drew book. I even have a cool Nancy Drewish image.

As I've mentioned before, I recently bought a Kindle Fire. In fact, I ordered one on the first day that you could place an order, and therefore, got my Fire on the first day that they were shipping.

I bought the Fire for a couple of reasons. I have been a slow-adopter on the smartphone front, and still don't have one. In fact, I still don't really want one, although I do think it is nice that we can use my husband's smartphone to check traffic on the go and look up restaurants, etc., while we're out and about. But I was curious about apps, both because I wonder if the current boom in app programming has legs (or if I'm going to suddenly find it a lot easier to hire programmers at some point in the future when the app bubble bursts) and because I am interested in their potential as a way for people to make money in the "new economy".

I also wanted to let the kids try it out. OK, if I'm completely honest, I want it to help us through difficult situations, like waiting at restaurants. And the price was right for those purposes- I couldn't see buying a $500 iPad just because I was curious, and I doubted that I had the fortitude to hand such a thing over to my 2 year old at a restaurant, no matter how badly I wanted to not have to do laps around the place.

I wasn't planning to do much reading on my Kindle Fire. I have an "old" (I only got it last Christmas!) black and white Kindle, and I like reading on that. Actually, I love reading on that. I had checked out the iPad as a potential eReader and decided that I prefer eInk to an LCD for reading. (I also thought the iPad was too large and heavy to use one handed, which is a key requirement in an eReader for me, since I do a lot of reading while pinned on the sofa with a sick or sleeping toddler.)

Then, my Twitter friend Calee offered me review copies of some children's eBooks. Calee has founded Xist publishing, which has the tagline: "books for the touchscreen generation." Her goal is to create eBooks for kids. I love the fact that she has started her own publishing company (here is some of the back story on that). And I was curious to see what my kids would think of eBooks, so I agreed to take the review copies... and write this post.

So here's the disclosure: the three Secret Agent Jo books I am going to review were free. I am also going to receive two free prints from the Secret Agent Jo Alphabet book (one for each kid), and I get a print to give away- more on that at the bottom. Any other book I mention, I paid for (or downloaded for free as part of a general promotion). I paid for my own Kindle Fire, of course, but the links to books are referral links, as always. And I will confess that I am rooting for Xist Publishing to succeed. But I have tried very hard not to let any of that change the opinions you are about to read.

First up: my impressions of the Kindle Fire. I like it. For what I wanted, it is great. It is the right size to fit easily into my purse, and it is a good size for my kids to hold comfortably while sitting on the sofa.

It is reasonably responsive and fast. The picture quality is gorgeous. Really. We've watched some Sesame Street songs on YouTube, and the picture quality is top notch. I haven't tried the streaming movies yet, but I suspect they'll be good, too. As you might expect, shopping on Amazon is a breeze, but I don't find that I do that much on the Fire. Typing text is a pain- but that is a universal feature of the touchscreens, I think. No doubt, I'll get better at it. There were enough apps to satisfy me so far- and I'm sure more will be coming along. I got a memory matching game and a puzzle game for the girls, and they like those. I also got Angry Birds and made the mistake of letting them see it. Petunia still signs and asks for "birds" when she sees the Fire. My husband doesn't think they should be playing that game yet (a subject for another post, I think), so I regret letting them see it. But he has taken the Fire and played something like 20 levels o f Angry Birds, so I guess it works well. I got some Spanish flashcards for Pumpkin, and she loves those. She sounds out the English word, then taps to get the Spanish word and thinks that is great. Petunia struggles a bit with the dragging required for some games, but got the tapping action figured out quickly.

So all and all- I think the Fire is a great tablet for kids to use. Really, the only thing it lacks that I wish it had is 3G. I knew that was missing when I bought it, though, so I have no complaints.

Next: my impressions of the books. Calee was kind enough to send me review copies of all three books: Secret Agent Josephine's ABC's, Secret Agent Josephine's Colors, and Secret Agent Josephine's Numbers, all by Brenda Ponnay. I downloaded all three onto my Kindle Fire and my old black and white Kindle. I put them on the black and white Kindle because I was curious what they'd look like (and because my review copies came before my Kindle Fire did). Of the three, the ABC's book works best in black and white- I like it better in color, but the illustrations are still cute in black and white. The numbers book is a bit hard to read in black and white, and the colors book just doesn't make much sense without, well, color. I think Calee's own Caterpillars Don't Check Email is actually the kids book that works best on the black and white Kindle- the photograph illustrations work well in black and white and the story is charming. Incidentally, this one is also free at Amazon right now.

I read all three Secret Agent Jo books to both girls on the Kindle Fire. Pumpkin (who is 4.5 years old, and learning how to read), liked all three. She could easily read the ABC book, because the pictures help. She likes to try to read the colors book, even though there are a lot of words that are well beyond her current skill level (like patisserie)- I think the pictures are engaging enough to hold her attention even though she is struggling a bit with some of the words. They are cute illustrations. But I think her favorite is the numbers book. She loves the detail, and the way that all of the items illustrated are labeled.

This is where the eBook format shines- the labels on the items are a bit small, but we can tap on the screen and zoom in, which Pumpkin thinks is pretty darn cool. I'd actually recommend that Calee consider adding more zooming features in future books- Pumpkin likes "exploring" the page.

Anyway, if I sit down with her and the Fire and say that she can't play a game but can read a book, she'll usually pick the numbers book.

Petunia (who is 2 years old and still has a tendency to wander away sometimes when you're trying to read to her) likes the colors book the best. The bright illustrations capture her attention, and she likes the alliteration in the text. She also loves to listen to the ABCs book... especially if her sister is reading it to her. The numbers book is a bit too detailed for her right now.

So, my verdict is that if you have a color tablet, you should get some eBooks for the kids on it, and you could do a lot worse than the three Secret Agent Jo books. They are all charming and engaging for the kids. Furthermore, they are formatted with an eReader in mind. This is actually reasonably important. At Pumpkin's urging, I bought her one of the Step into Reading books on the Fire. We bought Cat Traps, by Molly Coxe. It is a cute story, and I'd actually recommend it... in paper format. It was clearly a quick conversion to the Kindle format, and it shows. The pages do not take full advantage of the Kindle screen:

Whereas the Xist Publishing books do not have that problem:

(Apologies for the crappy photos. I am too lazy to figure out if I can do a screen capture on the Fire. Honestly, I don't know how I can call myself a techie.)

The books come in a variety of formats- Kindle eBook, Nook eBook, iBook, and old school paper. You can see the list on Calee's stealthy book tour page. Or you can order the Kindle or paper versions from Amazon, via the links I put above.

And finally... Calee and Brenda were kind enough to offer me a print to give away to my readers. I get the S print, for Scientist... and Snake. So maybe a herpetologist out there wants this? Just kidding- it is open to anyone. Here is the print I'm giving away:

If you want to try to win the print, just leave me a comment that says somewhere in it that you want the print, and I will do a random drawing... um, I'm not sure when. I need to check with Calee and see if I'm supposed to wait until the end of their stealthy book tour or do it now. So soon, anyway.

And of course, as always, I'd love to hear what you think. Do you let your kid play with your iPad or other expensive electronic gadget? What do you think of eBooks, for kids or adults?

Updated to add: Brenda has an etsy shop, and she says that if you like that S is for Scientist picture at the top of the post, she could add it to her shop. Also, the pheasant has no agenda. And if you want to know what that means, I think you need to poke around on her blog for more details of her book tour.

Why Do You Get Involved in Online Discussions?

2011-12-07T20:12:00.001-08:00

I had an interesting experience in the comments section of someone else's post recently. I don't want to link to that post, because I can almost guarantee that doing so would derail the conversation I hope to have here, so I will try to use a metaphor. I'll make it ridiculous, but try to capture the flavor of what happened.

It was a post about how our society stigmatizes people who have elephants for pets, and how even if we are uncomfortable with the idea of having elephants for pets, we should recognize the humanity of the people who have them for pets, and treat them better than we do now.

I had never thought much about the issue of elephants as pets, and I for some reason decided that I would wade into the comments and see if I could learn something. In fact, I thought I might learn enough to actually formulate a somewhat informed opinion on the topic, because this site has a smart, articulate readership, and I figured some of them probably had thought a lot about elephants as pets.

But what actually happened is that I would write a comment, and then someone who actually kept an elephant as pet would write back arguing against something I hadn't said. Or at least something I hadn't thought I had said.

This went on for awhile, and I eventually gave up and went away.

But it occurred to me later that the problem was that the elephant owners and I were there for different reasons.

I was sort of interested in the topic, and thought I might learn something. So, while I didn't set out to write anything mean or inflammatory, I probably didn't take as much care in my comments as I could have.

Meanwhile, the elephant owners were there arguing for their right to choose the pet that they wanted, and came with a lot of history of having this argument with a lot of people- so they thought they knew what I was arguing, because they probably felt like they had heard it all before. And they came with a history that would understandably make them sensitive to comments such as the ones I was writing.

In the ensuing failure to communicate we both lost out. I lost out on the chance to learn something. And the elephant owners lost out on the chance to bring me closer to their way of thinking about the topic.

I felt pretty bad when I realized what had happened, and went back and tried to apologize. But this was actually better than some conversations I've been in. At least in this case, the elephant owners were making reasoned arguments, and not just saying "you're wrong" and calling people who disagreed with them names or writing snarky, condescending comments implying that anyone who disagreed with their opinion must be an idiot. I've actually banned myself from one blog whose main posts I found interesting and thought-provoking because whenever I engaged in the comments section I was likely to be treated in this way, and I decided that the blog, as good as it is, wasn't worth that aggravation. (Incidentally, the blog-writer in question and most of the commenters were academics, which made the experience even more disappointing. I expected academics to be more open to other points of view, and willing to discus things in a reasoned manner.)

All of this got me thinking about the various reasons I have for commenting on controversial posts.

I've been in various positions: sometimes I'm the elephant owner, sometimes I'm someone with a strong, well-thought out opinion against elephant owning, and sometimes I'm the person who has never thought about elephant owning and is trying to learn. I hope I'm never in the position of someone who has never thought about elephant owning and is just spouting off uninformed nonsense- but I can't swear that the elephant owners on the post in question didn't think that of me.

In thinking about it, I think I am less likely to comment when I'm the elephant owner, particularly if other elephant owners are doing a good job of presenting my opinions. I find that role to be a bit emotionally draining and very time consuming, and so will only do it on issues I feel strongly about- or sometimes on other issues, but then I just comment once or twice and go away.

So what about you? Do you comment on controversial threads? And when you do, which role are you playing?

Weekend Reading: The Rise of the Coders Edition

2011-12-02T18:06:00.001-08:00

I've just finished a 2.5 day stint of solo parenting- Hubby had a meeting up in Northern California, and flew out after dinner Wednesday night. He came back tonight right before bed time. The girls and I made it through OK, although I think that if Petunia ever goes to one of Pumpkin's swim lessons again, we had better be prepared to get in the water with her. Not even my new Kindle Fire could distract her for long.

So anyway, I'll keep this post short, since I want to go have Friday Night Beers with Hubby as soon as I'm sure Pumpkin won't be needing any monster repellent sprayed in her room tonight. (Note to other parents in this phase: don't be lazy like I was and just grab the can of Febreeze to use as monster repellent. Go get a spray bottle of water. Unless you are really fond of the smell of Febreeze.)

My links this week are all software related.

First up, an article arguing that Apple has done the seemingly impossible, and made software developers cool. And made some of them very rich. I feel a bit vindicated in reading this post, since I once got excoriated in someone's comments section for arguing that Steve Jobs created jobs here in the US, because he created a whole new class of programs that needed someone to write them- the apps. (And yes, I know, the article is from the UK, but trust me, there are app developers here, too.)

This thread on Slashdot argues the opposite- saying that a data center that went into one economically depressed area hasn't brought as many jobs as locals expected. But it is actually also consistent with the argument I was making on that other site: namely that we aren't aiming high enough in our worker retraining efforts. We shouldn't be retraining everyone as data center operators. We should try to retrain people into actual software development jobs. Unlike a lot of fields, you don't need a degree from a "name" school to have a good, solid career in software. I've hired people from Podunk U and from Ivy League U, and even from For Profit U, and I can honestly say that the source of the degree is not a good predictor of the quality of the code.

And finding good coders remains a challenge for me and just about everyone I know who is trying to hire them. From what I have been told by the good candidates we've lost, we have Apple (and the app boom) and Google (who are hiring like crazy) to thank for that.

Maybe we wouldn't be facing such a talent shortage if more women considered careers in tech. Which brings me to this post, about how to get more women in tech. Don't be put off by the website name or dating service ads on the site- it is an honest, interesting talk from a woman in tech. Credit to Hubby for finding this one.

Women may not be prevalent in tech, but after the Womanspace debacle and Nature's crappy handling of it, it was refreshing to come across this story demonstrating how a company should respond when a customer points out that their product is sexist.

Happy weekend, everyone!

A Short Rant on Women, Negotiation, Self-Promotion and All That

2011-11-29T21:09:00.001-08:00

Several people in my Twitter network tweeted about this Reddit post on how women need to negotiate better in order to get better pay. And then Jeff Atwood, whose Coding Horror blog is pretty darn awesome reading if you are interested in software and tech, pointed out that Clay Shirky had said basically the same thing (and much more) awhile ago, in a fairly famous (infamous? I guess it depends on your perspective) post about why women don't get ahead.

I've read this same basic advice many, many times. And you know what? It is reasonably good advice.

But.

It makes a whopping big assumption, which has actually been shown to be false, that women could just start doing the same things that men do and they will get the same results as men. Put simply, it is not at all clear that aggressive negotiation (or self-promotion, or any other of a number of stereotypically male behaviors) are actually the most effective strategy for a woman to employ if she wants to get ahead. In some cases, these behaviors may actually hurt a woman's career.

And that's leaving aside the objection that doing these things requires women to break free of a lifetime's worth of conditioning about how women (and girls) are supposed to behave.

Personally, I am not that great at negotiating my starting salary and the like, and I know it. I try to get better, and I do make the effort every time I have to do it, but I don't go at it as aggressively as many of my male (and some of my female) friends and colleagues do. I can't say whether or not this has hurt me in terms of my career advancement or salary. In every company I have ever worked at since entering the professional world, my salary has followed the same pattern: I am hired in at something close to what I was making previously, and then in my first performance review, I get a sizable raise. I have compared my current salary to the standard range for people in my position with my level of education and experience, and I come out slightly above average. Would I be making more or less if I negotiated aggressively when hired? I don't know, and judging from the research I've read neither does anyone else.

I'm not arguing that we can't all learn from that Reddit post or Clay Shirky's rant- I, for instance, am working on getting over my aversion to self-promotion. But I am saying that it isn't anywhere near as straightforward as those articles make out. This is one area in which our society has well and truly stacked the deck against women- we're damned no matter what we do. So please, let's recognize that when we're doling out advice about how to reach equality. And let's recognize that this is not a problem women can just decide to solve on their own.* The men have some work to do, too.

------------------------------------------
Unlike the working mom guilt issue, for instance- scroll to the bottom of that post to read about how I think that problem is one we can tackle on our own.

School Questions

2011-11-28T21:15:00.001-08:00

I had a post half-written in my head, talking about how hard my December is going to be. But then I listened to the words bouncing around in my head, and realized that they sounded whiny and obnoxious even to me, and decided not to write the post. Suffice to say that we'll be very busy this December. We actually had to write "put up Christmas tree" on our calendar, to make sure that we left enough time to do that.

I'm going to spare you my whining. In fact, I'm going to try to spare myself my whining, and change how I think about December to just be grateful that we have so many friends, filling our weekends with parties and jobs, filling our weekends with software releases and other "fun" things.

Tonight, I am going to write about our upcoming decision about where to send Pumpkin for Kindergarten. She will start next fall. We have decided to start her in a public school- or at least we will start our decision making process by assuming that she will go to public school. I suppose that if we are seriously unhappy with what we see when we look at our public school options, we would consider private school for her.

We are considering three public schools: our neighborhood school, a Spanish immersion magnet (all instruction is in Spanish for the first few years), and a Spanish enrichment magnet (they study Spanish every day, but the main instruction is in English). The emphasis on language is for two reasons: (1) she likes learning languages and seems to be good at it and (2) we think kids should get the chance to learn a language young, when it is easier and they are more likely to be able to master the new sounds. The Spanish immersion magnet is our closest school.We have to make a decision by February 15, 2012.

I looked up the test scores for all three schools. Our local school has the highest test scores, but also the richest students- so that didn't tell me much. I didn't really expect it to, and I don't have the patience to go spelunking through the data like Bad Mom Good Mom did. Test scores, particularly as we currently use them, are actually a rather poor indicator of whether or not I want my child to go to a particular school. And yet I felt compelled to look at them- compelled enough to spend several hours one night finding the scores and printing them out for comparison. My husband says it was so that we could be sure that nothing truly terrible was lurking in them. I suspect it was so that I can tell the parents who are shocked that we are considering such "rough" schools for our children that the test scores aren't bad.

So, if the test scores are no help, how will we make our decision? First of all, the decision isn't entirely ours to make. We are deciding what schools to put as our first and second choices on a lottery form. The fates will decide whether or not we get our choice. But obviously, we only want to try for one of the magnets if we like them. And if we are really unhappy with what our local school can offer, we will need to think about what we want to do about that. Go to a private school? Enrich with a tutor? Enrich with specialized after school programs? Decide we just need to get over ourselves and accept what is on offer at the local school? I think I have listed those options in descending order of both expense and ease of implementation.

Anyway, we will be going to visit the schools, to hear about their programs and ask some questions. Here is our current list:

Questions to ask all schools:

What is discipline policy?
What is homework policy?
What happens to kids who excel (GATE)? What about in early grades, before GATE kicks in? How are kids who are performing above grade level handled?
What will happen with a kid who is already reading before Kindergarten? (Umm, and who knows how to add and is figuring out multiplication on her own?)
What happens with kids who are struggling in a subject? (Let's not assume that our child will be universally brilliant, right?)
What extracurriculars are offered? Music?
What are the after school care options? (All three have some sort of program, but I want the details.)

Questions for the Spanish immersion magnet:

How are kids helped into the immersion program? What will happen with a kid who doesn’t really speak any Spanish before kindergarten?
Do children learn to read in English in kindergarten/first grade? Or in Spanish? Or both?

Questions for our local school:

Are there any foreign language programs available to kids at all? (I fear the answer is no, there are not- even though a lot of schools in the area have after school language programs that you pay for. So I guess the follow up would be: what would it take to get an after school language program in place?)

So, parents who have already passed this phase... what questions are we missing?

Weekend Reading: The Just Plain Good Writing Edition

2011-11-25T08:02:00.001-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving weekend everyone! I hope all of my American readers had a good Thanksgiving yesterday. We had 10 people at the table (including our two kids) for a traditional feast. We've been doing Thanksgiving at my place since graduate school, and by now, I don't find it intimidating at all. Petunia is sick right now, though, so it was challenging getting her to accept someone else for comfort when I had to be in the kitchen. My Mom and my sister did a lot of the cooking, too, so it all worked out.

Anyway, since I still have a houseful of guests and Petunia is still sick and will undoubtedly realize that she is cuddling with her Boppa and not me soon... I'll keep this short.

I have two links for you today. They have nothing in common except for the fact that they are both beautifully written.

First up, small animals has a moving post about attending the funeral of a family friend from her youth. It is sad, yes, but also uplifting. Whenever I think I'm doing OK at this writing stuff, I read something from small animals and I realize that I'm not really writing. I don't pay attention to it as a craft in the way that a truly good writer does.

Next, Sweet Juniper has a post about some unfortunate happenings in his neighborhood. If you are interested in the life and plight of struggling cities, and haven't found Sweet Juniper yet, you should start reading him. He writes a lot about his life with his family in Detroit, and it is almost always as wonderfully written as the post I linked to above.

My presence online may be sparse for a few days... or Petunia may perk up and decide she wants to play with her grandparents, in which case, I may write a post or two. We'll see. Either way, I hope you all enjoy your weekend!

On Being a Feminist Mother

2011-11-20T15:21:00.001-08:00

I've been thinking some more about my "unicorn post" and the response to it. I've been thinking about the various types of feminism (summarized nicely by Nicoleandmaggie). And I've been thinking about the changes motherhood brings to your life, your marriage, and your feminism.

I can't promise that this will be an entirely coherent, well-argued post. But I thought I'd write down some of what I've been thinking about, and see what everyone else thinks.

First of all, it occurred to me that people don't seem to have a problem believing that a married couple without kids has an equal division of labor at home. But once kids enter the scene, it seems to become a lot harder for people to believe that a couple might have a 50-50 split in the home workload. Only one person left a comment on the unicorn post saying that she didn't think I really split the work 50-50 with my husband, but I've heard that opinion plenty of times when I speak up in other places online, along with its cousin, the opinion that my arrangement is so rare as to not merit consideration: to may people, I am ridiculously lucky at best, deluded at worst.

I think some of this is probably due to the fact that it is true that for a lot of women a previously equitable- or at least not unbearable- household chore arrangement breaks down when kids enter the scene. The interesting question there is why is that so? I think the answer is related to the another reason that so many people don't believe me when I say that I have a 50-50 split, namely that the division of labor necessarily changes after kids come on the scene.

I know a lot of couples without kids who split every single chore 50-50. They alternate nights cooking dinner. The person who cooks doesn't have to clean up. They either alternate laundry weeks or do the chore together. Etc., etc. In fact, that was pretty much how my husband and I split things before we had kids. We even set aside a few hours every other weekend to do all of our cleaning. I took care of the car that I brought into the marriage, even though I hated doing it and was constantly forgetting to schedule service visits. We were scrupulously fair- we never discussed this really, it was just how we did things.

Then we had kids. And suddenly, that system made zero sense. I'm sure there are some parents out there who maintain the "split every chore" division of labor post-kids, but that just wasn't going to work for us. As I mentioned in the comment I quoted in my working women weekend reading post, the division of labor had to change, partly because biology assigned certain tasks to me, and partly because the amount of work grew exponentially, and suddenly specialization started to make a lot of sense. It no longer made any sense for me to try to maintain one of the cars, since my husband is much better at it. It takes him less time, and we need all the time we can get. Similarly, it makes more sense for me to keep track of what needs to go to day care every day, initially because that fit well into my routine of gathering up pump parts, etc., and now because I have a system that works.

Even for chores that we're equally good at- like laundry- it makes sense to divide and conquer. One of us will get a load of laundry going while the other one plays with the kids, or tackles some other chore. On any given weekend, I may do most of the laundry, or he may do most of the laundry, or we might serendipitously land on an equal mix- but we've stopped judging the division of labor on a chore-by-chore basis, so it doesn't really matter.

And then, of course, there is the parenting. This is unlike any other chore- for one thing, it isn't really a chore. It is work, yes. But it is also fun, and it is far more rewarding than doing the dishes. And it is also almost impossible to divide along strictly equal lines. Biology has other ideas- and so do your kids. The dishes don't care who washes them. Sometimes, a child very much cares who puts her to bed, or who plays certain games, or- and this is my current downfall- who helps settle her back to sleep when she wakes up in the night. My husband is a fully equal co-parent, not just because that is what is fair, but because that is what he wants, but that doesn't mean that we are 100% interchangeable. Could he do it all if I weren't around? Of course. Will the kids accept that when I am around? Not quietly. And sometimes, quiet is more important to me than fair, so we absorb the inequality in one area and try to balance it out somewhere else.

I can see how someone looking in on all of this would think that there is no way the division of labor is equal. It is almost impossible to judge, even if I wrote an exhaustive list of all of the work that occurs in our household. It is a never-ending negotiation, as the kids' needs change and work demands ebb and flow.

   -- I'll trade you the dishes for 15 minutes of time without a child demanding anything from me
   -- I'll take the car to the shop if you'll drop the kids off tomorrow
   -- I'll go to the store if you'll handle bathtime and snack on your own
   -- I need to stay late to finish up this big release. Can you handle dinner? I'll give you a couple of   hours of time this weekend.

And so on and so forth. Sometimes the trade off is unspoken, or assumed. Sometimes things don't run smoothly, and there are arguments (Dammit, anything I have to do at 2 a.m. counts double!) but we work things out, and in the end we both think we've reached equality.

Maybe it is impossible to understand this without living it. I don't know. There are aspects of motherhood that I struggle to explain even to my husband, and there are aspects of fatherhood that I don't fully grasp. One of the hardest things for me to get my head around after my first child was born was just how much she needed me. Pretty much all the time. I am used to that deep, seemingly unquenchable need now- but I still struggle with it sometimes. It is the reason I sometimes beg for just 15 minutes without a child near me, which is a request my husband respects but does not completely understand, because the kids do not draw on him in the same way. He is both envious of the closeness and not 100% convinced that it isn't something I could just say no to. We try hard to share this load- trading off bedtimes and bath times, having him provide comfort after little owies, etc. But this is one area of our life that is most definitely not equal.

I've been thinking about this aspect a lot lately, because Petunia is weaning. I'm weaning her now because I want (need?) a little more space. It is one of the many paradoxes of motherhood that the only way to get that space is to go through a phase in which she is even more intensely clingy than before. At least in my house, the easiest and least screamy way to wean is to make sure the kid being weaned knows that she can still have mommy when she wants, even if she can't have mommy's milk. So Petunia is spending a lot of time in my arms. Which is sweet. Except maybe at 2 a.m. Or when I'm trying to do something else. My husband, who needs far less sleep than I do, would love to help out in the middle of the night- but Petunia screams if he tries, and that wakes up Pumpkin, and pretty soon we are just one big unhappy sleep deprived family. So I am bearing the brunt of this phase, and he is just trying to compensate where he can. He does a good job compensating, but it is not how either of us would really like it. Petunia, on the other hand, likes this arrangement just fine, and in our approach to parenting, that is what matters most at this age.

The unreasonable and yet somehow absolutely undeniable demands my kids place on me are simultaneously the best and the worst thing about motherhood. I have routinely been pushed to the limits of what I thought I could bear, only to find that I can in fact keep going. I am amazed to find myself thinking "I can't take her clinginess for one more second!" and then instinctively scooping her up and giving her a kiss on the head. Somehow, the space in my life expanded to accommodate the demands of motherhood without crowding out the essence of me. I cannot explain it. During my first year of motherhood, I was sure it was not possible, that I was in fact being subsumed into this new mommy person. But I came out the other side wanting both to devote myself to my kids and to pursue my own goals with full vigor.

Perhaps that is the essence of what it is to be a feminist mother- the realization that your own goals can coexist with your love and absolute devotion to your children. Motherhood can grow your life rather than contracting it.

This post is perhaps even less coherent than I thought it would be. But it is late, and Petunia will no doubt be calling for me before too long, so I think I will leave it there and invite you to tell me what you think in the comments.

Quotable: Boundaries

2011-11-20T14:52:00.001-08:00

"I'm always asking myself if a near-accident is an accident, if standing right next to a disaster makes you part of the disaster or just a neighbor."

- Sherman Alexie, in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.

I didn't enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, but if I'm honest, that is probably because this one forced me to confront more uncomfortable truths.

If you've never read either, pick one and read it as an act of appeasement for the lies we tell our kids about Thanksgiving. (Pumpkin is old enough now that her day care class talked about Pilgrims. I found myself struggling to explain the Pilgrims, the first Thanksgiving, and what came after in a way that would be both accurate and accessible to a 4.5 year old. I am pretty sure that I failed miserably at it. Luckily, I can try again next year....)

Regardless, they are both good books. You won't be sorry you read them!

Weekend Reading: The Parenting Edition

2011-11-19T13:34:00.001-08:00

Let's take a little break from talking about unicorns and dinosaurs, eh? (But of course, if you have more to say on the topic, please do go and leave a comment!) The links I have for you this weekend are all about parenting:

First up, Mark Sloan, who wrote Birth Day, an awesome book on childbirth, now has a blog. Go check it out. So far it looks pretty good.

Coding Horror, one of the better geek/coding sites, had a post about parenthood. It is a pretty good read. I particularly like the pie chart, and the quote: "That one percent makes all the difference." So true.

From programmers to economists... I forget how I came across this review of a freakonomics podcast on parenting, but both the review and the podcast are worth your time. But then, I lean towards the "don't freak out about it" school of parenting, mostly because I can't maintain the intensity that so many of my parenting peers seem to be able to handle. This may be because I'm not selfless enough, but I prefer to blame the fact that my kids don't sleep as much as many of their peers.

I mentioned in passing on my unicorn post that one of my husband's areas of non-perfection is his tendency to make jokes about the fact that women are supposedly just naturally worse at spatial reasoning than men. He doesn't really believe this, by the way. He's just trolling me- which is fine, I troll him on things, too. But now that our girls are old enough to understand what he's saying, we had to have a discussion about this and he's recently agreed to stop. So it was perfect timing when I came across Parenting Science's recent post on the development of spatial reasoning. She has a follow up post with suggestions for games and toys to help kids develop their spatial reasoning. I found the bit about the benefits to building a Lego toy by following instructions and/or copying a picture particularly interesting, since I tend to think that free form building is somehow "better" (since it is more creative). Of course, Pumpkin already knew better than me- she does both.

(Update: FeMOMhist has a post up with some awesome looking toys to help practice spatial reasoning.)

Finally, my husband came across this and it is hilarious. I had to explain it to him, though, since they didn't have The Reading Rainbow in New Zealand. Even without the explanation, he thought it was pretty funny, so if you also don't know what the Reading Rainbow is, don't let that stop you from watching it:

(The Reading Rainbow was a show on PBS in which ~~Geordi La Forge~~ LeVar Burton read picture books.)

On Unicorns, Dinosaurs, and Why it Matters Who Does the Dishes

2011-11-17T21:29:00.001-08:00

Recently, the editors of Nature saw fit to publish a short piece, meant to be humorous, about how much better suited women are to do household chores, like shopping. Dr. Isis has an excellent discussion of the many things that are wrong and sexist in this piece, so I won't take the time to dissect it myself. Frankly, I could barely force myself to finish reading it. As I tweeted after I saw it: I'm not married to a unicorn, but there are still dinosaurs out there.

However, some might read a piece like that and conclude that the mindset I ranted against in my unicorn post is actually correct- here, after all, is an article (published in a prestigious journal!) that seems to confirm it. But I actually think that the Nature article and Twisty's IBTP piece are two manifestations of the same problem: namely, that we live in a society that has a hard time seeing that housework and parenting can be done equally well by men and women. On the one hand, we have one of the most prestigious science journals in existence publishing a blatantly offensive piece claiming that women are just better at these things than men (so of course, the men shouldn't bother doing them). And on the other hand, we have a subset of feminists who apparently can't even imagine the possibility that the man and woman in a two career family might share the work that goes along with keeping up a household and raising children.

In the middle, there are women like me, who have married men who are not dinosaurs, but are also not unicorns. We share the work at home with our partners, and have partnerships in which the dreams and aspirations of both partners are considered equal- even if the couple decides to arrange their lives such that one partner (or both) prioritizes something else (usually kids) over his or her own career aspirations for awhile. We're invisible to both the dinosaur who wrote the Nature article and Twisty the radical feminist. When the mainstream notices us, it is to tell us that we are somehow "lucky" to have partnered with men who are not jerks, when we know the truth is that we wouldn't have had it any other way.

I would argue that we're remaking the world. Progress is slow- painfully so at times. But now my husband tells male candidates about the good treatment he got during paternity leave, and they are interested to hear that. Now I can say "I can't stay late for that meeting, I need to take my daughter to soccer practice," and not have that negatively impact my standing in the office- instead, we all tell stories about our kids and soccer practice, even though I'm the only woman in the room.

We aren't done yet. Clearly, women like me are still in the minority, flying under the radar of the mainstream culture. But, as the comments and lovely follow-up posts on my unicorn post show- I'm not a singularity. And we're raising the next generation, teaching them, either by example or by more explicit instruction, that housework is not women's work- it is people's work. Parenting is for parents, not just moms. Careers are for anyone who wants them (even if there are some systematic barriers in the way of some people).

So, you might wonder, if we're making progress, why does any of this matter? Why do I keep posting on this same issue? Because the dinosaurs and unicorn-theorists out there are scaring the generation of young women coming up behind us. They are convincing these ambitious women to lean back in their careers before they even start them. Because they are complicating the quest for more realistic work cultures, in which everyone, man or woman, parent or not, is allowed to have a life outside of work, and this is no doubt depriving the world of the talents of many women- and men- who don't want to devote every waking hour to work. Because they are perpetuating the view that an unfair division of labor, in which women do far more scut work and men get far more glory (or at least intellectual challenge) is a biological norm, not a cultural construction. And because it perpetuates the idea that fixing all of this is something that only women need to worry about, when in fact, the solution must involve everyone.

I think that we can do better than this. And when I look at my girls- so full of energy and potential- I think that we must do better than this. And soon.

I Am Not Married to a Unicorn

2011-11-14T20:44:00.001-08:00

A few weeks ago, Blue Milk reposted a post where she responded to a post at I Blame the Patriarchy in which the author Twisty, in the midst of a post supposedly making a plea for mothers to make common cause with her particular brand of radical feminism, says that she, in essence, wants to free us from the oppression of our children. Here is the section that Blue Milk quotes (emphasis is from Blue Milk):

"We are desperate for women to reject the specious narrative that within the nuclear family we have “choice,” when in fact the “choice” (regarding motherhood) is between doing one full-time job (stay home and raise kids) or two full-time jobs (do paid work and also raise kids).* We are desperate for women to stop buying into the patriarchy-sponsored message about women’s fulfillment — that is, the notion that you are a selfish blob of failure, or worse, that you are missing out on life’s greatest joy, if you don’t martyr yourself to home and family and totally subsume your identity in the process. We want women to reject marriage and the nuclear family. We want women to not have kids in the first place."

Go and read Blue Milk's entire post- it is good, and interesting (as her posts usually are), and not at all about what I want to write about.

The thing that struck me when I read that excerpt, and then clicked over and read the entire IBTP post was that according to Twisty, I don't really exist. Or, maybe I exist but am deluded and unaware of my oppression. Whatever- I've made peace with the fact that there are a fair number of feminists out there who think I am greatly oppressed and need my consciousness raised. Who knows? Maybe they are right.

But the person who really doesn't exist in Twisty's post is my husband. Notice how in the quote from her original post up there, I have two choices- I could stay home and raise the kids and take care of the house or I could go to work and still do all the parenting and housework. I got my hopes up when I saw that asterisk. I thought that maybe she was going to allow for the existence of the option that I think I am living- in which I have kids and go to work and split the parenting and housework with my partner, such that while neither of us has anywhere near the free time that we had before we had kids, neither of us is doing two full time jobs. (Unless there are four full time jobs to be had in this scenario. Maybe housework and parenting are both full time jobs? They could be, if you chose to do them that way, I suppose.) Anyway, my hopes were dashed. The asterisk allowed for the option in which I can pay another woman- whom I oppress and pay "only slightly more than you pay for a meal" (yes, that is a direct quote)- to do the work of raising my children. My only response to that is that the IBTP folks eat at much nicer restaurants than I do. I use a day care center, not a nanny, and I still pay them a lot more than I pay for a meal.

I'll leave aside my oft-repeated rant about my frustration with the idea that it is somehow impossible to pay someone to do "women's work" without oppressing her (and my still unanswered question about whether I am oppressing the men who work at my day care center), and just focus on the fact that fathers are entirely missing from Twisty's world view. Apparently, there are NO fathers who pull their fair share of parenting and housework. In fact, it appears that there are no fathers who do even enough parenting/housework to decrease their spouses' burden from two full time jobs.

In short, according to Twisty, my husband does not exist. I am married to a mythical creature. Maybe a unicorn? (If that is the case, I want the kind that poops out chocolate, please. We've eaten all the good chocolate from the Halloween candy and I am once again reduced to raiding the chocolate chips.)

This is obviously nonsense. I am not married to a unicorn. My husband exists. He is human- i.e., not perfect, but he does pull his fair share of work around the house, and he is most definitely an equal parent. I know that this is not common, but I do not think it is so rare that he should be up for some sort of feminist husband prize. (I'd quash that, anyway, because I've been hounding him to stop making jokes about women's supposed inability to handle spatial reasoning. See? I told you. Not perfect. But in his defense, I think he finally understands why he needs to stop making those jokes in front of his daughters.)

As I argued in my recent working women weekend reading post, I think we need to acknowledge that marriages like mine exist, because otherwise we risk portraying the housework inequality issue as some sort of unsolveable problem. It is not. Not at all. In fact the solution is pretty simple. Men just need to start believing that they should do equal amounts of work around the house and spend an equal amount of effort raising their children. Easy!

Yeah, I know. Easy to say, hard to do. My husband and I may both start from the same assumption- that we should be equals- but working out the details is messy, and does involve the occasional argument. And, as another post from Blue Milk, and indeed, the responses I get to posts like the one I wrote about our housework logistics (now woefully out of date) remind me, not everyone starts from that same assumption.

So, since there seems to be some interest in knowing the details of what an equal partnership looks like, here are ours:

We both work full time. I think my husband puts in a few more hours on paid work- maybe about 50. I average about 45. However, I make more than him (about 20% more, I think), so take from that... nothing. Different people have different work styles.

Most days, he drops the kids off at day care. I pick them up. Except on Thursdays, when I drop them off (he has an early meeting), and we both pick them up (Pumpkin goes to swim lessons and Petunia comes home with me).

I leave for work earlier, so he does more of the morning routines. If Pumpkin wants her hair braided, though, that is all me. Maybe he should practice on one of the My Little Ponies we have laying around the place.

I cook dinner on weeknights. He cooks dinner on weekends. One of his areas of non-perfection is that he frequently needs to be reminded that our cooking experiences are very different. He generally has as much time as he needs and I watch the kids while he cooks. I generally have 20-30 minutes and must deal with the kids while I cook. Hence the occasional Dinner during Dora post. Although these days, it is more likely to be Yo Gabba Gabba.

I make most weekend lunches, but those are pretty low key, so I don't get many brownie points for this.

Laundry is done by both of us. If I'm completely honest, though, he does more of it. And he is almost always the one who changes the sheets on the beds.

We have a housecleaning service (yet another group of women I oppress!) and since we caved and started having them come every two weeks instead of every four weeks, neither of us does much toilet scrubbing. If anyone does it, though, it is usually me. He is more likely to pull the bed out and sweep up the dust or clean the windows. We split the prep work for the cleaners (i.e., the work of putting all of our stuff away). The girls also help with this, to varying effect.

I handle all communication with the housecleaning service, and I write the checks for them.

The nightly kitchen cleanup is done by whomever finishes with kid bedtimes first. We alternate nights on that- each of us takes a kid each night. However, since I am the required "finisher" for Pumpkin's bedtime right now, Hubby does the dishes most nights. I usually clear the table and do the initial dishwasher loading, though.

We also alternate handling the kids' bathtime.

He almost always unloads the dishwasher and puts away the washed dishes in the morning.

If Petunia wakes up in the middle of the night, I go to her. If Pumpkin wakes up, I elbow and kick Hubby until he wakes up and goes to her. This works out to me doing about 90% of the middle of then night parenting. This sucks, but Petunia is still in the "scream if I see Daddy in the middle of the night" phase, so there isn't much we can do about this. Whenever we argue about workload, though, I pull this out and win the argument. Therefore, we are both looking forward to the end of this phase.

He does almost all of the yard work, since I have allergies and asthma and am quite allergic to grass. I do some weeding from time to time, and plant herbs and veggies, usually with help from the kids.

I do the vast majority of the menu planning. I plan the weekday meals and pester Hubby to plan his weekend meals. I am also the one who figures out how we'll respond to Pumpkin's picky eating and thinks up new things to try feeding the kids.

I usually do the grocery shopping, but since I usually get to do this without the kids, I consider this a bit of a benefit, not a chore.

We split the non-grocery shopping. He does more of the driving to stores and buying stuff, but when I go (usually to Target) I have to take at least one child, so that evens out. I do most of the online buying of stuff, and we do as much of that as we can. (We buy time.)

We split taking the garbage out- usually, it is done by whoever is not doing bath on a Tuesday night. Sometimes he does it early, though, so this skews towards him.

I am definitely the social secretary. Except if rugby is involved.

He is the one who handles our family photos, and he does a quite thorough job of it. We have our own online site, with captions.

We both keep track of what needs to be bought, although this may skew a bit towards me.

He does the bills. I used to do them, but this is one of the things he took over when Pumpkin was a baby and I spent all my free time lactating, and he's kept at it. I know how much money we have, though, and could take over this again without trouble.

Extracurricular activities for the kids are split. He does swim lessons. I arrange the Chinese lessons. We both did bits of the work required for soccer lessons.

I'm totally in charge of remembering when we need to send stuff to day care. He's hopeless at it.

He's totally in charge of remembering when we need to get the cars serviced. I'm hopeless at it. (Before we married, I always had the reminder sticker on my windshield.)

I do almost all of the research on parenting things, but he'll occasionally read a book or article if I give it to him.

We split big projects- we both usually have one project we "own" at any given time. Right now, I own the kindergarten research and he owns dealing with the ants that invade our kitchen after it rains. (Since it keeps raining at just the wrong intervals, preventing us getting an exterminator in to deal with the problem, this is actually a very annoying project for him. I came out ahead, even allowing for the annoying nature of the local school district's website.)

We both wrangle kids on the weekends, but this skews a bit towards me. While I'm wrangling, he's doing chores, though. And we try to do at least one family thing every weekend, just for fun. I don't suppose we should call that kid wrangling. That's quality time.

So... what do you think? Am I oppressed and just deluded? Am I married to a unicorn (and if so, where is my chocolate)? How does this all play out in your house? Have I bored you senseless? Have at it in the comments.

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Update: Alyssa at Apple Pie and the Universe and Anandi at The House of Peanut have both written their own posts about this subject, and how the chores are split in their houses. Go read those, too! And if you write one, let me know and I'll add a link here.

Also, Alyssa's post reminded me that I didn't include the very important task of staying home with sick kids in my list. We split that- basically, the person who doesn't have meetings (or has meetings that can be missed or rescheduled) and/or isn't under a deadline, stays home. But we also are very fortunate in that my mom will come be our backup babysitter when a kid gets sick. Thanks to Southwest (and the fact that she is retired), it is easy to fly her over from Phoenix on short notice, and it is cheaper than a day off without pay, which is what we figure we'd eventually end up taking if we use all of our time off on sick kids. We both like to travel too much to not have a vacation! If my mom wasn't able to do this, the sick kid burden would be a lot harder to handle, particularly given Petunia's run of mystery fevers.

Trip Story: Santa Barbara, Oxnard, and Home

2011-11-12T16:12:00.001-08:00

I decided that I needed to write the last post about our not-so-recent-now California car trip soon, before I forget all the details. Last time I wrote, we were in Morro Bay and then driving through Solvang on our way to Santa Barbara. We arrived in Santa Barbara in time to check into our hotel and settle in a bit before heading out for dinner. We walked to The Brewhouse, a brew pub that was near to our hotel. It turned out to be a really lucky find- good food and great beer. My only complaint was that it was a little too loud, which was a bit overwhelming for Petunia. She handled it OK, but her eyes were huge for most of the dinner, as she struggled to take all the hubbub in.

The next morning, we rented a surrey bike and took a ride along the beach path, ending at the Andree Clark bird refuge, where we stopped for a snack. Then we biked back, stopping for awhile at a beachfront playground. The ride was surprisingly fun for all. Pumpkin and Petunia had a little too much fun ringing the bell, though. Helpful hint for the designers of these bikes: put the bell string by the grown ups, not the kids. The people whose apartments and hotel rooms face onto bike paths will thank you. (We did try to keep our kids from ringing the bell willy-nilly all along the way, but our success rate was probably only 75%. So 25% of the people along the path probably hated us.)

After we returned our wheels, we had lunch at the El Torito next to the bike rental shop. For the non-Californians out there, El Torito is a chain. The food is reasonably tasty, but it is far from authentic. There were many restaurants in Santa Barbara that would have had better and more authentic Mexican food. In fact, there is apparently a hole-in-the-wall place that is so wonderful and famous that people drive up from LA just to eat there. But it was sure to have a wait, and Petunia doesn't do waits right now. Petunia likes the rice at El Torito, they are extremely welcoming to children, and it was right there. And the margaritas aren't half bad. So I count this as one of the better lunches on our trip.

After lunch, we did some light sightseeing- we walked out onto the pier and along State Street. Then we went back to the hotel for a rest. Once we were all awake again, we headed out to take a ride on the Lil' Toot water taxi. We had to wait around by the harbor for a bit, so there was quite a bit of excitement when we saw the taxi headed towards us.

Pumpkin was pretty excited to get on the boat. Petunia didn't really know what was going on, but didn't protest.

Then we cruised across to the pier, getting a nice close up look at some pelicans on the way.

We decided to take the return trip, too, and were rewarded with a chance to try out piloting the ship.

Amazingly, the novice captains didn't run us aground, and we disembarked without incident. We strolled back to the pier for a dinner memorable mainly for the fact that Petunia spent most of it as far away from our table as possible, dancing to the music and charming a couple of older women who were eating at a table near her preferred dance spot. It was definitely a tag team meal for me and Hubby.

The next morning, we packed up the car for the last time and headed home. The drive from Santa Barbara to San Diego is about four and a half hours- and there is the wild card of LA traffic in the middle. I have literally never driven through LA without hitting a traffic jam somewhere, even the time in graduate school when I drove through at two in the morning. Therefore, we decided to split up the day. We got up in the morning and drove to Oxnard, where we visited the small but excellent Gull Wings Children's Museum. This was a far less flashy museum than the Kidspace museum that started our trip in Pasadena, but it was just as much fun. Our kids really liked it, and I actually think that kids just a little bit older than ours would have liked it even more. If you are ever near Oxnard, I recommend stopping in.

We played at the museum until lunch, and then drove to a nearby Olive Garden for lunch. Once again, the chain lunch went well- sorry, foodies, but some of our best dining experiences on the trip were at chains. I think they just have the routine for dealing with young kids worked out. They provide a coloring sheet that is busy enough to distract even a two year old for a little while, they fawn over the kids (which also distracts them for awhile), and the food comes out fast. With that said, Pumpkin actually did great at most of the restaurants we visited, so perhaps a wider range of restaurants will work for us soon, once Petunia is past the super short attention span phase.

After lunch, we packed the kids into the car and headed home. The requisite LA traffic jam was very short, and we made excellent time. Still, we didn't make it home before the end of nap time (I just don't drive that fast). We stopped at a park in Carlsbad for one last vacation playground visit and afternoon snack, then drove the remaining 40 minutes home. It was good to be home, but I would have been happy to stay on the road for another few days- so I guess this was a very good vacation, indeed.

Weekend Reading: The Things I Never Thought About Before Edition

2011-11-11T19:17:00.001-08:00

One of the fun things about reading blogs is that I sometimes come across a post that makes me think about something I hadn't thought about before. This weekend, I have three such posts for you.

The first, from Bad Mom Good Mom, is about reducing waste in the garment industry. She's also had earlier posts about sewing with pre-consumer waste fabric- i.e., the scraps from the garment trade. I must confess that until I read these posts, I never once thought about what happened to the fabric leftover when my clothes were made.

The second is from my friend Stevil, who had a post about our country's motto, wondering if perhaps it is time to change back to what we had before the communism scare of the 1950s. Again, before I read this post, I hadn't really thought about our motto at all.

Via @Cydharrel's twitter feed (a good feed to follow if you are interested in tech stuff and like haiku), I came across this post on how government is not a startup and saying that it should act like one is a bit daft. I have heard the same calls for government to be more like a startup, and had never really thought about what a crazy thing that is to say- and I've even worked as a government contractor.

What about you? Are there any posts that you've come across recently that made you think about something new? Or something in a new way?

Weaning, Exercise, and Other Updates on Things That Aren't Going As Well As I'd Like

2011-11-10T20:17:00.001-08:00

Thanks for all the sympathy and ideas on my last post, everyone. The cold is receding, albeit slowly, so things don't look quite so grim. But I still don't feel up to writing any of the "real" posts I have queued up, so I'll give you some updates on a few things.

First- weaning. As you probably guessed, I am too adverse to being screamed at to go hard core at this. I also have noticed pronounced effects on my mood as I drop feedings, so I go very, very slowly for my sanity, too. You'd think this would be easier the second time around, but I weaned Pumpkin when I was about three months pregnant with Petunia, and I was probably helped by the changes in milk supply and composition that brought on. Certainly, my resolve to wean was helped along by the fact that nursing exacerbated the queasiness I felt almost constantly in the first trimester. Even so, I remember having to back off for awhile and then try again. When I did try again, weaning was very easy.

I have no real reason to wean Petunia right now, other than that I'm ready to do it. I've set myself an arbitrary goal of being done by the end of the year. We'll see how it goes. I started following the "don't offer, don't refuse" method about four months ago, and now I'm in the actively distracting/trying to substitute method- but I'll usually go ahead nurse her if she won't be distracted, except when I physically can't do it, such as when I'm trying to cook dinner. I've substituted a bowl of her favorite cereal (Oatmeal Squares) for the after day care nursing, and mostly that is working out OK, particularly if I start a DVD or TV show ("Doh!" in Peunia-speak) right as she finishes her cereal.

The first thing in the morning nursing looks likely to be the next one to go. I am intrigued by the fact that she's following the same pattern Pumpkin did as far as dropping nursing sessions. I'm hoping that means she'll drop the middle of the night one soon, too....

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Next- exercise. A couple of weeks back, I realized that even if I succeeded in convincing Petunia to let me go for a decent run on Thursday nights, it was soon going to be dark by the time we got home, and the thought of running in the dark just didn't appeal to me. So I needed another plan.

I've never been a big fan of exercise DVDs (or videos- this aversion goes way back, although I do remember doing Jane Fonda's workout with my Mom and liking it). But I was out of other ideas, so I went looking for a likely DVD on Amazon. Petunia likes to dance in her cute toddler way, so I searched for a dance workout. I settled on 10 Minute Solution: Fat Blasting Dance Mix. It came over the weekend, and I was planning to try it out tonight.

I stuck with that plan, even though I'm still not 100% over the cold and even though I got home late thanks to the extra traffic that the Chargers-Raiders game provided. I started with the simplest workout. It wasn't what I was expecting- I thought there would be actual songs and we would dance/exercise to those. Instead, there was just a techno/dance beat. Still, Petunia was intrigued- but then decided that she wanted me to hold her while I did the routines (we often dance with her in our arms). So that didn't go so well. Then she decided she wanted more cereal, and I decided I wanted a chance to get some exercise more than I wanted her to wait for her dinner, and let her have the cereal, which allowed me to do the second half of the 10 minute routine unencumbered. It wasn't bad.

When the first 10 minute routine finished, Petunia decided she wanted to watch another routine, even though I thought I would turn it off and get our dinner heated up (hooray for leftover night), so I put on the abs routine, and even tried a little bit of it while I shuffled dishes in and out of the microwave. Also not bad.

So the jury is out on this one. I like the 10 minute workout idea- I'm already scheming about how I could maybe squeeze one in on one of the nights when Hubby is giving the girls their bath- and the workouts I tried weren't bad. But it is still an exercise DVD.

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Next- big girl bed. Remember way back in August, when I said that I thought we should get Petunia a big girl bed? Well, we finally did it. The one we'd bought for Pumpkin was no longer available (both the store we bought it from and the manufacturer are now out of business), so we had to shop for a new one. This was a major undertaking- Hubby doesn't make furniture decisions lightly. Unfortunately, we couldn't find many beds like what we wanted: with a bookcase headboard and under-bed drawers, but not a tall captain's bed, since Petunia is not that big. We finally ended up ordering the bed and headboard on Amazon. (Why not? We buy everything else from them...)

They arrived last week, and we set the bed up over the weekend. When I say "we," I really mean Hubby. I took the crib down and eventually put the sheets and duvet on the bed, but he did all the hard work. Petunia LOVES her new bed, which is no surprise, since (1) she likes to get on everyone else's bed and (2) she likes anything that her big sister has. I had hoped that the bed would make bedtimes easier, and maybe it will. So far, though, it hasn't. My plan was to continue to rock her to sleep in her rocking chair, and then lay down with her and thereby do away with that annoying thing where she's asleep, but then wakes up when we put her down. She won't have anything to do with her rocking chair, anymore, though. She insists on climbing into her bed- by herself, thank you very much- and going to sleep that way. The first couple of nights were disasters. But then I thought to tell her that Pumpkin goes to sleep by getting her back patted. I asked Petunia if she wanted to try that, and she said yes- and amazingly, that is working. Our bedtimes are back down to 30 minutes, which is a big improvement.

The bed is definitely making it easier to get her back to sleep when she wakes up in the middle of the night (I just lay down next to her), but has yet to work the magic that Pumpkin's big girl bed worked, and do away with those night wakings altogether. Its still early days, though, so I continue to hold out hope.

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Finally, an update on something that IS going as well as I would like- Pumpkin's reading. My Mom came over when Petunia got sick last week and stayed for the weekend. She took Pumpkin to the library to pick out some new books to try reading. Our library didn't have most of the things that you all recommended, but they still found some good books. Pumpkin really likes reading Hop on Pop right now. I'll probably order some of your recommendations soon, either from Amazon (of course) or via interlibrary loan, but for right now she's happy with what she has. She definitely prefers to read one book over and over until she basically memorizes it, which is fine with me- it gives me more time to get my act together and get some more early readers on hand.

That's all the updates I have right now. Is there anything I missed that you're wondering about? Ask away in the comments.

I'm Not Dead

2011-11-08T21:51:00.000-08:00

... I just feel like maybe I should be.

I exaggerate. I have a head cold, courtesy of Petunia. I am sitting here drinking a pathetic virgin hot whiskey (i.e., honey and lemon in hot water- virgin because once it is done, I'm having a Benadryl), feeling sorry for myself. I wanted to sit and watch TV with my husband while I drank my pathetic drink, but he doesn't have anything not annoying recorded. Our DVR died a while back, and he never set up the Daily Show and Colbert Report again. Boo.

Even so, I don't think I have a real blog post in me tonight. So I'll just give this helpful advice to fathers and other people who have never breastfed: weaning is harder than it looks. Saying "just say no" is no more helpful in this context than it was in the context of convincing teenagers not to take drugs. And the next person who suggests this to me may be required to come to my house after work and attempt to cook dinner while the ~~addict~~ toddler screams at your feet, alternating between frantically signing "more" (which also for some reason only known to her, means "I want to nurse") and trying to physically push you away from the counter.

I defy anyone to withstand that and not cave and just go ahead and nurse already when the phone rings and the person on the other end tells you he's going to be 20 minutes late for dinner because there is an accident on the freeway.

And then you look at the sweet little happy face nursing and wonder why you're weaning in the first place.

And then you blow your nose for the 7000th time since walking through the door, and you remember that once you wean, you'll be able to take something stronger than Benadryl for a cold.

So you suck it up, balance the still traumatized little ~~addict~~ toddler on your knee while you eat your now cold dinner (which no one else is eating, anyway), and tell yourself that you'll do better tomorrow.

Weekend Reading: The Working Women Edition

2011-11-05T09:29:00.000-07:00

I went to see Rebecca Skloot (author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks) talk this week, and that one night out had ripple effects on the rest of my week. It was definitely worth it, but it also definitely reminded me of what I do that sort of thing all that often.

I'd love to write a post about the lecture (it was great), or about how that night out messed with my week (less great)- but I haven't really got the mental energy for that right now. So instead, I'll give you some links I've come across recently about women in the workforce.

First, FSP had a post that really resonated with me, about how you gain confidence as you get older and have more work experience. I find that I can't really summarize it well, and it is short, so just go read it, OK?

It reminded me of the difficulty I have when I am asked by a young woman for advice about how not to have your career take second place to your spouse's. I understand where that question comes from, and I wish I had good advice, but I don't. My answer is as simple as it is useless to the questioner: "Don't let it."

Like I said- I know that is useless advice. But I guess I mean that there is no shortcut, except, perhaps, to marry someone who is uninterested in his or her career. You have to do the work of choosing a partner who will value your career as much as his or hers, and then you have to do the work of making sure that you both have equal opportunities to advance your career.

On that last point, Blue Milk had an excellent dissection of that Time cover article declaring that we should end the "chore wars". She does a great job of explaining why that piece made so many of us angry. Here's what I said over there (with typos fixed, as usual):

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This is a great post.

You did a much better job of taking this apart than I did when I first came across it. I just focused on the “but maybe the women would rather be doing less at home and more at work and can’t because someone has to make the damn dinner” angle.

I also wondered what would have happened if the research had matched men and women by career type. The (admittedly small) surveys I’ve seen in which that is done don’t look so good. I referenced one on academic scientists in this post: http://www.wandering-scientist.com/2010/01/housework-logistics.html

In that survey, the men and women are doing the same number of hours at work while the men do far less at home (on average, of course).

I think the reason things slide so much more out of balance when kids come along is because that requires a different type of division of the work. Before kids, we could just split all chores 50-50. I cook one night, he cooks the next. He takes one car to the mechanic, I take the other. Etc., etc. But then you have a baby, and suddenly two things happen: (1) you have a lot less time, so the benefits of specialization become more evident. I am faster at X and he is faster at Y, so I should do X and he should do Y. (2) if you are breastfeeding (and probably even if you aren’t although I don’t really know about that since I breastfed) there is a whole class of work that he cannot participate in equally. In our house, this meant we very explicitly decided he’d do more of some of the other work, like dishes. But this is a hard thing to truly balance, because how do you factor in the fact that some of my baby-feeding/comforting work happens at 2 a.m., while the dishes never wake you up in the middle of the night?

That said, I do think it is important to acknowledge that there are some men out there who truly are pulling their weight at home- i.e., that some couples have figured this out. I think this is important not so much because I think those men or their spouses deserve a gold star, but because I think it is important to acknowledge that this is NOT a problem without a solution. It is very much solvable, but it requires two partners who want to solve it. (And yes, I count myself and my husband in the group of people who have this worked out- usually.)

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As often happens when I write a post or comment saying that my husband pulls his weight at home, he did something last night that really annoyed me. It was raining, which is rare enough here that it inevitably screws up traffic. Therefore, I left work ten minutes early, so that I would still get the kids and get home on time to make dinner. He also knew that traffic would be bad, but decided not to leave work early, and got home after dinner was over. In his defense, picking up the kids and making dinner during the week is one of my chores. He does drop off in the morning, and makes dinners on the weekends. (There is, of course, a much larger balance sheet of chores, which I do think comes out equal- usually.) But I was mad that he didn't even seem to realize that the reason he had the flexibility to stay to his usual time despite the predictable bad traffic was that someone else was picking up the slack. And I pointed out that it isn't like I get up in the morning, see it raining, and then declare that I'm not going to help get the girls ready for day care and just rush out the door.

I think he saw my point, and all is peaceful again at Chez Cloud.

And I think this little exchange also makes my point about there being no shortcuts to some magical land of marital equality. You have to be willing to speak up when things are out of whack. Of course, this is much easier if you are both starting from the assumption that things should be equal, which is where I think there is a need for cultural change. But we don't have to wait for that change before we can have equal relationships. The details of how we do things have changed since I wrote the post on housework logistics that I linked to in my comment on Blue Milk's blog. Petunia's bedtimes got harder, we decided to have the cleaner come twice a month instead of once... and somehow we found our chores schedule went by the wayside. But we still manage to split the work fairly equally. As I said in my comment on Blue Milk's post, this is very much a solvable problem.

Frustratingly, though, even when we think we have solved this problem in our own lives, other people may have erroneous ideas about women in the workplace that impact our opportunities. I came across a defense of the ability of a mother to be a CEO of a start up recently, written by a mother who is a CEO of a start up, in response to an article written by one of her venture capital backers, who had concerns when he heard that she was pregnant. The venture capitalist's article is a bit depressing, but not as asshole-y as you might expect (he does come to the right decision, after all, and funds her company).

On a much lighter note, I came across this post about how annoying it is that tech conferences only have "unisex" (really men's) t-shirts. I laughed in recognition when I read this piece, since I, too, have a drawer full of t-shirts that resemble tents, all of the freebies from science and tech conferences or other events that don't really cater to women (like beer festivals).

And finally, Nicoleandmaggie had a post this week with a call from a reader looking for blogs written by working mothers. If you meet that description, go leave a comment on the post- or just go and browse the comments for new reading material.

Random Wanderings

2011-11-01T22:24:00.000-07:00

Halloween was really good. The girls were both butterflies. This was probably the last year in which I could make them match- and I also thought a good year to have them match, to minimize meltdowns from Petunia about differences in costume accessories. So I talked Pumpkin into being a butterfly by telling her that I'd get her a leotard (a "ballerina shirt"- something long coveted) and letting her choose the color butterfly from the options available on Amazon. She chose purple. And then I picked the most unbelievably adorable monarch butterfly costume out for Petunia, and I even ordered a set of butterfly wings for myself. (Helpful hint: do NOT search Amazon for "adult butterfly costume," unless you mean "sleazy butterfly costume." Search for "adult butterfly wings" to find a pair of Large Red Butterfly Wings that worked out beautifully, although I found maneuvering down hallways in them difficult.)

Anyway, here are a couple of pictures of Pumpkinfly

and Petuniafly:

We had tights for Petunia, too- but I don't have a decent rear photo of her in those. I do have a very, very cute photo of her running across the playground to us at our daycare's Halloween parade. She was walking around the circuit like she was supposed to until she caught sight of us. Then she took off running across the playground, with a huge smile on her face. That pretty much made my week.

The actual trick-or-treating went well, too. Pumpkin said "Trick or treat!" and "Thank you" and "Happy Halloween" at every house, with minimal prompting. Petunia said "twi-twee" everywhere, endearing herself to pretty much everyone. I called my husband and told him to be ready to capture that on video when we got home. But she wouldn't do it at our house, preferring instead to try to unload her candy into our candy bowl. She is not at all interested in eating candy, but she absolutely loved trick-or-treating. After almost every house, she said "more" and toddled off after her sister to the next house.

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I carved a pumpkin on Saturday, so that our house would be appropriately marked as welcoming of trick-or-treaters, and because Pumpkin likes having one. Petunia was fascinated by the process. Pumpkin was not, but she did get her hands on our camera for the first time, producing some really arty photos (as well as some random photos of the sky). I think Santa needs to bring her a camera. Or maybe he needs to bring Mommy and Daddy a new camera, and we can just give her the old one. We'll have to think carefully about what to ask him to bring.

I really like this one.

Helpful tip #2: If you screw up and draw a line across the teeth of your jack-o-lantern with a sharpie, you can remove that line with rubbing alcohol.

Here is the final product, in all its glory:

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On the way home from day care yesterday, Pumpkin told me: "Mommy, three fours makes twelve."

I was quite surprised by this, because although she has figured out addition, I'd never heard her extend it to multiplication before. I asked her how she knew, but she couldn't say. So I asked her how many four fours made. She thought for a minute, and then answered "16." We got up to six fours and then we got home.

She is also reading now. She can read The Foot Book pretty much all by herself, and tonight she read Cookie's Week to me with very little help. Halfway through, she confessed that she was using the pictures to help her get some of the words (she was also sounding some out). I told her that was OK, everyone did that, and that the more she practiced, the more words she'd learn, and before we knew it, she'd be reading books without any pictures, just like Mommy does. To her credit, she refrained from telling me that I read lame books and should get some with pictures.

Mimi and Boppa, be warned: she's looking forward to impressing you by reading lots of books at Thanksgiving.

Anyone with suggestions for other easy books to read should put them in the comments, because I'm struggling with that. I think she might be able to tackle some more Dr. Seuss, if I choose carefully. But I'd like other ideas, too.

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We didn't set out to teach Pumpkin to read (or, for that matter, do multiplication) before kindergarten. "Everyone" says that is a bad idea, and conventional wisdom predicts that now she will be bored in kindergarten. But she is interested, and I refuse to prevent her from learning things she is interested in.

Besides, I dispute what "everyone" says. I knew how to read when I started kindergarten and I remember loving the letter workbooks we had. There was one for each letter and they had a textured letter on the cover. I think there were various activities inside, perhaps including cutting (which I was not as good at- and, to this day, my family teases me because I cannot cut a straight line).

So it will probably all be OK.

Particularly if we go with the Spanish immersion school- which is what Pumpkin wants. We've explained that the teacher will only speak Spanish, and she might not understand at first. But she says that she doesn't care. She wants to go and learn Spanish so that she can go back to day care and speak it with Miss M., one of her favorite teachers.

We've told her that there is a chance we won't get in to that school, and she always pulls a pouty face when we say that.

We haven't told her that there is a chance we won't even try. It is time to get serious about this school choice thing. I've started trying to figure out how we're going to evaluate schools, and so far, I have a growing list of questions to ask on visits, but nothing more. Readers who have already been through this exercise (particularly in California!) are encouraged to give me helpful hints in the comments. Its only fair- I gave you hints about how to handle jack-o-lantern mistakes!

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I have meatier posts planned soon, I promise. But I'm getting slammed at work, for reasons that I (of course) can't post about (at least not yet). Suffice to say that the choice about Pumpkin's kindergarten will be made during a whirlwind of work activity. But so far, it isn't spilling over into home too much, except in that I can't find the mental energy to write thoughtful posts. That is a symptom of the fact that I haven't organized the giant boatload of work that has landed on my desk, so I'm holding a bunch of disorganized "do this, but do that first" thoughts in my head. Once I sort that out, I'll have more mental space, and will post interesting things soon. I have a post full of righteous indignation at some internet feminists on behalf of my husband (who remains blissfully ignorant of how he has been maligned- or willed out of existence, really) and another post about how I stay happy (downright chipper!) in the face of the sexism that pervades my field sort of written in my head, and I should type them out before they get swamped by thoughts about merging databases, revamping applications, and other random crap. Don't hold your breath, but feel free to tell me which of those topics you think I should write about next in the comments.

Trip Story: Morro Bay

2011-10-30T13:47:00.000-07:00

Morro Bay was probably the most chilled out stop on our California road trip. We arrived at about dinner time, and strolled down to the waterfront to find dinner with a view. We found a likely looking restaurant on the embrcadero, and had an adequate dinner coupled with a really quite good margarita (which I needed after driving the entire coast road south from Monterey- this kept me from getting carsick, but left me a little tense). After dinner, we strolled along the deserted embarcadero a bit and then spent the rest of the evening in our beautiful suite. We'd booked into the Beach Bungalow Inn and Suites, and were delighted to find a comfortable, nicely decorated suite. It only had one bed in the bedroom, though, so this was where Hubby came up with the idea of getting Pumpkin to sleep on the sofa while I got Petunia down, transferring her to the bed so he and I could hang out in the living room for awhile, and then transferring her back to the sofa for the rest of the night. It worked really well.

The next day, we had a truly wonderful breakfast (for us)/morning snack (for the girls) at Frankie and Lola's Front Street Cafe. Really yummy food, and just out the front door, a view of Morro Rock.

After we ate, we strolled along the embarcadero, eventually stopping park at the far end of it. It was a much simpler playground than the one we'd played at the day before in Monterey, but the kids still had fun. Petunia particularly liked the steering wheel on the wooden boat- she'd been enjoying steering wheels for the entire trip.

The kids played while the adults enjoyed the view of the harbor, which is peaceful and full of birds and the occasional seal. We eventually strolled back along the embarcadero and found a spot for lunch. We picked the spot because there was a flute/saxophone player playing nearby, and Petunia was intrigued. Unfortunately, he wasn't all that great. But Petunia liked the music, and at least we had a view of the harbor. I'd love to go back some day and explore it in a kayak.

We heard a lot of seals, but only occasionally caught sight of them. Pumpkin really enjoyed looking, though.

After lunch, we did a little shopping in the stores along the embarcadero, and then headed out. We drove to Solvang for morning snack. Solvang, if you don't know, is a Danish town in central California... sort of. It was actually founded by a group of Danish settlers who broke the Scandinavian tradition of settling in the Midwest, deciding that there was no need to keep the cold winters now that they were in the US. It is now a pleasant tourist trap with buildings done up in faux Danish style and full of bakeries offering yummy treats. I love butter cookies more than is healthy, so I couldn't let us get this close to Solvang without swinging through and eating a butter cookie or two. Petunia liked her cookie OK, but really wanted dry cereal instead. Pumpkin liked the chocolate and cream on the cookie she picked out, but wasn't too fond of the cookie. I loved my cookie, and somehow resisted the temptation to buy a bucket full. (I am not kidding: you really can buy buckets of butter cookies in Solvang.)

We strolled around just a bit after our snack, and Petunia found a fire hydrant to hug.

Then we drove on to the final stop on our trip: Santa Barbara.

Weekend Reading: The New Economy Edition

2011-10-28T21:40:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking (and reading) a lot lately about "the new economy," or, since that term is a bit vague, about how changes in how we consume entertainment have brought changes to industries like publishing, journalism, and music.

This isn't a new thing for me to be thinking about, but it got bumped up my mental priority list recently when I read this Slate article about the troubles of the creative class. I think the article is a bit overwrought, but I can understand where its coming from- the rules by which creative types tried to make a living have all changed, and no one really knows what the new rules are. It seems that one group of middle men have been replaced by another, and if anything, it has gotten harder for the "content producers" (formerly known as artists, writers, and musicians) to figure out how to make a living.

The Economist has a less "woe is me" take on this, at least for the music industry, and there was also a recent Slashdot thread on the upheaval Amazon is causing by trying to sign authors directly.

I think all of these changes create both problems and opportunities for people who like to create things that can be digitized, like writing and music. It is almost certainly getting harder to land a standard full time job as a writer, and as the Economist article describes, it is getting harder to land a record deal. But opportunities to succeed without first winning over a gatekeeper (i.e., publisher or record company) are increasing, too- the problem is, no one can really tell you how to do that, so everyone is left to figure out a path on their own. There are some spectacular successes (i.e., Dooce), who have definitely worked hard for their success. But for every successful person, there are tens- probably hundreds or thousands- of people who tried to make a go of it in this "new economy" and failed. So there is a huge component of what we'd call "FM" at work- that stands for "f#@&ing magic", and at work it refers to systems whose workings we don't understand. FM is a scary and frustrating thing, because it leaves you feeling out of control.

Still, I find this fascinating. We are living in a time when entire industries are being restructured. We're watching the new rules get written, and in some cases helping to write them. So, even though I have never logged into Klout and have no interest in finding out what my Klout score is, I found Bon Stewart's d iscussion of the recent change in the Klout algorithm, and the problems with using something like Klout in the first place, interesting, particularly because we seem to be heading towards a model where we "pay" for things by watching/reading ads for other things.

Here's what I said over there (with a few typos fixed):

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Anyway, what I wonder is- how much of this big businessification of social media is our own fault? We all expect all of our web activities to be free. We don’t pay for Facebook, the various things Google provides, Twitter, the blog posts we read… none of it. It is all free to us. But people are spending their time and effort creating not just the content but the platforms upon which that content is shared. And many (maybe even most) of those people will rightfully expect to be paid for the their efforts. If we, the consumers, won’t pay them- and we won’t- then they have to turn elsewhere, i.e., to businesses who see the value in using these things to increase their market share. Which will inevitably lead to people changing their products (be it blog posts, Klout algorithms, or Facebook privacy policies) to better serve the businesses, because they are the audience that is paying the bills.
And with so many people blocking ads, businesses are often going to want to do more than just buy ad space, so we see the growth of other creative ways to deliver their content to us or extract value from us (e.g., by aggregating and selling usage data).

Of course, it is tricky- if a platform or a blogger panders too much to business, they will lose the currency business cares about (i.e., user base/readers). But for many platform companies and, yes, many bloggers, those users or readers are just a path to the dollars from the businesses, and we’d do well to remember that.

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There are problems with this "content is free" model. As I say in my comment, if we won't pay people for their work, they'll try to find a way to get paid, and, as a recent post from David Wescott describes, this can lead to fraud. (And of course, there have been many earlier kerfuffles about being paid to blog without disclosing it, selling your blog out for a few coupons, etc., etc. I'll leave the uncovering of the posts on those as an exercise for the reader... i.e., I'm too lazy to go find them.)

I am hopeful that we will find our way to a better model, that allows people to be paid for their work without quite so much risk of corruption. But that is in no way guaranteed, which is why one of the things I think hasn't received enough attention in all of the discussion about Steve Jobs and his legacy, is the fact that he came up with a model that made micropayments actually work. We will apparently pay $0.99 for a lot of things that we used to take for free- not just music, but also things that we used to get for free on the web, as we turn to specialized "apps" instead of websites.

I wonder what the next innovation that convinces us pay for the things we use will be. Or if we will actually figure out how to make advertizing work for the individual content producer and not just the big companies that sell the ads, like Google. To the extent that I play around with monetizing this blog, it is to explore some of these questions. I am experimenting, but not in a rigorous way, since I am both the subject and the observer, and not in a way that is likely to actually answer any of these questions, since my readership is so small.

But the questions are interesting to me, particularly from my safe spot where I can call this blog a hobby and make the money that actually helps support my family in other ways.

Then, Blue Milk linked to me in one of her link round up posts. I was quite honored by that- my little post about men writing about work-life balance is in some good company there- including a post from The Boxcar Kids. Reading that post brought this new economy stuff all back to stark reality. For some people, these aren't just interesting questions, but questions whose answers impact how well they can feed their kids. So, if you want to do something good today, turn off your ad block and click through to that blog (because Google ads do pay for page views, not just clicks). And maybe click on one of those ads (because Google pays more for a click). Or, if you're going to buy something on Amazon anyway, click through from that site (because Amazon referral fees make more money than Google ads, in my experience). And if you know of other blogs for which these questions about how to pay for the words we read are of concrete importance, leave a link in the comments section- I promise I'll go pay them a visit, too.

Trip Story: Monterey

2011-10-27T21:53:00.000-07:00

Once we decided that we were going to do a California road trip for our vacation this year, I knew that we had to go to Monterey. I wanted to see the aquarium- I'd been through Monterey on my way home from a wedding in San Francisco in graduate school, but hadn't gone to the aquarium. And I wanted to show my husband the famous coastal drive south from Monterey.

We drove into Monterey at sunset, which was a good two hours later than I'd hoped. But we'd decided to stop for a playground break and afternoon snack in San Jose, which had taken longer than expected. Then we hit some traffic leaving San Jose... so the sun was setting as we drove past the marina and under the tunnel into the touristy section of Monterey. It was a beautiful sunset, and my husband still regrets that we didn't just stop and enjoy it. But we wanted to get to our hotel, which we thought was close, and get to dinner.

It turns out that our hotel was further than we thought- it was in Pacific Grove, not Monterey proper. We were led astray by a map in our guidebook. The hotel was nice, but I was bummed by its location and the fact that the suite I had carefully checked would be two rooms was not in fact two rooms- there was no door between the bedroom and living room. The lack of door meant that we ended up hanging out in the (really quite large) bathroom drinking beers after our kids were asleep. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

By the time we found the hotel, got checked in, got changed into some warmer clothes, and got back to the "main drag", it was quite late for dinner. We didn't look around much, and just went into the first likely looking place, The Loose Noodle. This was a much higher class of restaurant than we usually go to with the girls, but it worked out OK. In fact, it would have been awesome if we could have received out food as we sat down- our only complaint was that Petunia lost interest and decided she wanted to walk around, so we had to resort to tag team dining: one adult ate while the other walked around outside with her. But the staff were very welcoming of us, and Pumpkin really liked her tortellini. After a few bites, she looked at me with wide eyes and said "Mommy! These are even better than our home ones!" She was right, but to be fair, our home ones are just mass produced store bought tortellini from the refrigerator section of our grocery store.

We walked around Cannery Row a little bit after dinner, but soon headed back to the hotel to get the kids to bed and rest up for our big day at the aquarium.

We arrived at the aquarium in the morning, and we enjoyed the fish:

We stayed until lunch time, then headed to the Cannery Row Brewing Company for lunch. It was your standard brew pub fare with adequate but not exciting beers- but Hubby was impressed by his BLAT (Bacon, Lettuce, Avacado, and Tomato sandwich for those who don't know) and the fact that they gave him extra bacon on the side, so we had no complaints.

After lunch, we did the 17 mile drive, which provided the adults with something vaguely interesting to do while Petunia napped. The drive is through a gated community (Pebble Beach), and you pay for the privilege of appreciating the scenery and the fancy houses. It was nice, but I think the (free) drive through the waterfront portions of Carmel-by-the-Sea, which we did the following day, was nicer. We did see the Lone Cyprus, and get the requisite picture, though:

After nap, we headed back to the aquarium for some more exploring. Then, we went over to the marina and pier, hoping to catch a sunset as good as the one we'd glimpsed on the way into town the day before.

We were disappointed- but still had a good time strolling around. We had dinner on that side of town- it was another tag team affair, as Petunia discovered the joys of playing with newspaper boxes. There was a row of them outside the restaurant, and once she discovered those, there was no way we could entice her back to the table. This is one of the many things about our vacation that was annoying at the time, but is funny- charming, even- in retrospect!

The next day, we walked to the lighthouse near our hotel: the Point Pinos Lighthouse, the oldest continuously operated lighthouse on the West coast. It wasn't open for visitors, but the trip was not a waste, because on our way there (through the cemetery next to our hotel), we saw a deer. This was exciting for both girls, and apparently not that unusual for the deer, who didn't seem concerned by our presence at all.

We were almost ready to leave Monterey, but before we left, we stopped for some quality playground time at the Dennis the Menace playground in El Estero Park. If you are ever in Monterey with kids, you must go to this park. Really. It is an awesome park. I think it may actually have been the highlight of our stop in Monterey. There are several really cool slides, including these ones:

There are also some great climbing toys, that long bouncy bridge you can see in the picture above, a rock wall, and a real train engine that you can climb on.

We pried the kids away in time for a quick lunch, and then headed south along the coast road, detouring first through Carmel-by-the-Sea, which is as picturesque as you've heard. Petunia was already asleep, so Hubby and I took turns checking out the beach at the one stop we made in town. It was a nice beach.

It was fairly foggy, so our drive down the coast road was less spectacular than I'd hoped. Hubby was impressed with the engineering on the bridges, but not so impressed with the scenery, which he pointed out wasn't all that different from the scenery near Wellington or in the Marlborough sound in New Zealand. Spoil sport.

Maybe if we go back sometime and get some better weather he'll be more impressed, but I won't count on it. He has a valid point about the scenery in New Zealand. So here's a helpful hint: don't try to impress New Zealanders with coastal scenery. It is unlikely to work. Unless you have rows of palm trees. They seem to think those are cool, much like I thought the giant ferns in New Zealand were cool.

Hubby did allow that our snack stop at the Lucia Lodge was probably the most scenic snack ever, though, even with the fog.

And the seals at Point Piedras Blancas were pretty cool.

The seals were also a good warm up for our next stop, Morro Bay, which provided more seal sighting opportunities. More on that later!

Post Partum Productivity

2011-10-26T22:28:00.000-07:00

A twitter conversation I had with @fishscientist got me thinking about how long it took me to find my groove as a working mother post partum. Being the complete and utter geek that I am, I decided to graph it:

(If you do not have super-bionic eyes: click on the graphic to get a bigger version so you can read the annotations.)

Of course, I got pregnant with Petunia when Pumpkin was about 21 months old. So my productivity took a nose dive again not long after this chart finishes. The chart the second time around looks pretty similar, but I think I got up to about 75% productivity faster, because I was more organized and already knew the drill with pumping and how to ensure productivity when sleep deprived (hint: it involves lists.)

I do really think that my productivity is close to what it was before I started this whole motherhood experiment- and based on my experience when Pumpkin started sleeping through the night, I expect it to jump up again soon. (Petunia is soooo close to sleeping through reliably, I just know it. I've got a bed for her on its way- I'm hoping that is the last piece we need. That and for me to grow a backbone and just wean her already. We are making progress on that front, too, though.)

What about you? Would your productivity curve look similar? What was the "breakthrough" for you to get your productivity back?

Small Time

2011-10-25T21:44:00.000-07:00

My work is a bit crazy right now, for reasons that I can't blog about. (Of course. I can never blog about the work stuff.) My to do list is long and my days are full. The days whiz past in a flurry of activity. (Although I did find the time to go to lunch with my husband today. Priorities.)

Somehow, though, I always find myself sitting back in my chair roughly 15 minutes before I'm due to walk out the door and head to day care, with all the urgent things crossed off my day's to do list. The temptation to get up and leave a bit early is strong. No one would notice or care.

I don't leave early, though. I stay for those last few minutes. And I get a lot done. One of the things I learned from my years as a contractor, charging time in 15 minute increments, is how much you can get done in 15 minutes. It is enough time to write an agenda for the next day's meeting, which will make that meeting more productive and perhaps keep it from running overtime. It is enough time to check in on a project plan, and see how we are tracking to our projected timeline. It is enough time to fill out the paperwork and send the emails needed to get the process of hiring a contractor underway. It is enough time to do some of those little "quality of life" database maintenance tasks that inevitably pile up.

For me, they key to making good use of those last 15 minutes is to have these little tasks written on a to do list, so that when I finish a task, look at the clock on my computer, and realize that another day is almost over, I don't have to think to hard about what to do. I just take something small from my list and do it. Getting these little tasks done before they become urgent means that I can usually find some longer increments of time during the day in which to tackle my larger tasks. I've learned that if I let the little things slide, they inevitably pop up as emergencies when I can least afford the time to handle them.

Even when I look up and realize I only have a few minutes left before the end of my usual day, I usually don't leave early. I write my next day's to do list, or clean up some of the mess that always covers my desk.

At my previous job, one of the young guys who sat near me teased me about how he could set his watch by me- I got up and left at the exact same time every day. He was exaggerating. But not by much.

Trip Story: Sacramento

2011-10-23T14:57:00.000-07:00

Sacramento was one of the biggest surprises of our recent car trip. As I mentioned in my post about Merced, Sacramento was added to our itinerary solely because Hubby wanted to see the capitol.

And we did see the capitol:

(That's me and Pumpkin heading up the stairs. If you look closely, you can see that she is positively bounding up them.)

Hubby didn't want to go in. He felt underdressed in his flip flops. (This cracked me up, since I have yet to find another occasion- not even our wedding- for which he thought flip flops were not appropriate attire.) But Pumpkin really wanted to go in, so in we went. It is a good thing we did, because, as I described in the trip wrap up post, Petunia roaring at the bear statue outside the governor's office was awesome.

The view from the capitol steps was also pretty nice.

We had walked to the capitol by way of old town (which was nice, in a tourist-trappy sort of way) and an outdoor mall. After we finished our capitol visit, we headed back to that mall for dinner- there was a little play area we thought would amuse the girls (it did), and there was the River City Brewing Company brew pub that provided us with a nice dinner accompanied by some good beers.

We walked back to our hotel by way of old town again. We were amazed that Pumpkin was still walking along with only the occasional protest- we had walked a lot and at home she complains if we try to make her walk the six or so blocks home from the park (granted, those are mostly uphill blocks). But that night in Sacramento, she not only walked home without protesting, she joined her sister for some dancing outside one of the riverfront restaurants, which I unfortunately can't show you because all of our pictures suck too much. You'll have to take my word for it- they were pretty cute.

The view that greeted us the next morning- and the precious minutes of distracted children that it provided- made me glad that I'd paid the extra $20 or so for a river view room. Pumpkin is still talking about the "gold bridge". Petunia seemed most enamored with the many birds flying over the river.

(We stayed at the Embassy Suites, if you're curious.)

After breakfast, we headed to the premier attraction for preschoolers in Sacramento: Fairytale Town! Both girls had fun, but Pumpkin was clearly right in their target age, and she had a blast. Seeing (and sitting in!) Cinderella's carriage may have been the highlight for her, but it is hard to say. She also loved pretending to be a pirate:

And a scarecrow:

And running along the Crooked Mile path and playing on the playground in Sherwood Forest.

Petunia liked those things, too, but she really loved the slides, especially this one:

We finished up at Fairytale Town a little later than I intended, and we got to lunch at the Rubicon Brewing Company a little past the optimal time: the girls were hungry, and tired, and lunch did not go as well as the beer deserved. But we still left Sacramento very happy that we had come- even if it meant we had a long drive in front of us to get to our next stop, in Monterey.

Weekend Reading: Amusing Things My Husband Sent Me Edition

2011-10-21T21:39:00.000-07:00

It has been a bit of a bruiser of a week. Lots of meetings at work, a couple of them complete with tension. The cleaner was supposed to come yesterday, which was great, since we had guests coming today, but meant that Wednesday night was spent cleaning up toys, etc., so that the cleaner could actually clean things. Then she called in sick, so yesterday night was spent spot cleaning things so that our house wasn't filthy for the guests.... and so on and so on.

So, I haven't got the mental energy to write a thoughtful post around some of the links I had lined up. Instead, I give you... random funny/strange/vaguely amusing things that my husband found online and sent to me. (He subscribes to the "surf to cleanse your brain and/or let your brain find creative solutions to problems" school of thought, so tends to find a lot of stuff online. I agree with the theory- which is why I find the links I usually post. As you're about to see, my husband and I hang out in very different corners of the internet.)

Anyway, first up- he said this was the best attempt at making violins cool that he'd ever seen. (I, in case you didn't know, play the violin. Well, actually I play classical viola and I play Irish fiddle. Or I used to. I don't play much of anything these days, but I never played classical violin.)

Staying with the music theme, this just blew my mind. What an amazing, and sadly unprofitable, talent:

Moving on... my husband totally wants one of these throwable panorama cameras. I included this item for the two or three people reading this blog who know him, and know how fond he is of panoramas. He particularly likes to get panoramas where people appear multiple times. He has one from our stop at Slick Rock on our recent vacation in which the girls and I appear three or four times as we walk along the shore of the river. Unfortunately, I think our faces appear in one instance, so I can't post it.

And then, there are the Jedi Kittens:

I don't know where to go after Jedi Kittens, so I think I'll just stop. Happy weekend!

Would Guilt By Another Name Sting As Much?

2011-10-18T21:53:00.001-07:00

Mom-101 had another beautifully written post about the push and pull of being a working mother, in which she has to send her kids to "take the kids to work day" with the nanny, because she has to be out of the office on a big project. The post got me thinking about a couple of things. The first was that my kids are getting seriously cheated out of any awesome "take your kids to work day" goodness. We don't go in for that stuff in the biotech industry, possibly out of fears about liability with having bunches of children wandering through the labs, and possibly because we aren't, for the most part, actually profitable companies, and venture capitalists expect us to use their money to make drugs, not provide cool things to the employees' kids.

The second was that there sure are a lot of people feeling guilty about doing the right thing.

Let me explain. The original post mentions feeling guilty, but the actual vibe I got from it wasn't of guilt- more of "boy, this sucked... but my kids actually made it all better." But then a lot of the comments talk about "working mom guilt." And that sort of bothered me, because why, exactly, are working moms feeling guilty? For making the money that helps feed and clothe their kids? For doing the thing that makes them happy, well-adjusted women (and mothers)?

I've written before about how I think mothers have always worked at something other than mothering, and I wrote a comment mentioning that. Mom-101 responded that she didn't feel guilty for working, but rather for disappointing her kids. Which is fair enough, but her kids didn't sound disappointed in that post. (Of course, I wasn't there, and actually have no idea whether her kids were disappointed.) She sounded disappointed, and who wouldn't be? It sounds like an awesome event and I would want to take my kids to it, too. But is that really guilt? And if it is guilt, why? She didn't do anything wrong. She had a work commitment that rightly had to take priority over a "nice to have" event for the kids, so she found another way for her kids to go and have fun at the event while she did the work she needed to do. This sounds like the absolute right thing to do to me.

This got me thinking about a comment Today Wendy left on an earlier post of mine, in which she said that she thought people often conflate guilt with other negative emotions, like frustration, possibly because it is more socially acceptable to express guilt. Today Wendy's comment has been bouncing around in my head for a long time, and I've been meaning to write a post about it. So I took this idea and ran with it.... Here is what I said on Mom-101's post:

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But is that really guilt?

I’ve been thinking about this off and on all day, and almost didn’t come back to leave this comment because of course I can’t say how you feel and only a complete jerk would try.

And now I’m going to be that complete jerk, because I kept thinking about another comment someone once left on a post of mine. (I get such smart comments… it is the best thing about blogging! Well, that and the chance to ramble on about whatever I want to.)

Anyway, the comment said that she thought people sometimes conflate guilt with other feelings that make us feel bad. So we say we’re feeling guilty, when really we’re sad, or just wish that things could be different. It seems like semantics, but I think it is important, because guilt implies we think we’re doing something wrong and that we should have done something differently. The rest of the world picks up on that and the idea that we ARE doing something wrong perpetuates, when of course we aren’t. We are just making the trade offs that come with life. We have done the right thing, it is just that the right thing isn’t the perfect thing.

So, I feel guilty if I have a hard day at work and therefore lose my cool at my kids and yell. Or, for that matter, when I have a hard day at home with them and therefore lose my cool and yell. But I don’t feel guilty when I have a late meeting and their father has to take them to soccer practice- then I feel a little sad that I’m missing something, but not guilty, because my family needs my income and I need my job to stay sane. Staying for that late meeting was the right thing to do, even if in a perfect world it would have been on a different night and I could have gone to BOTH the meeting and soccer practice.

FWIW, I read your original post and didn’t read guilt. I read “gee, this sucked but my kids are so awesome that they fixed it.” My comment about guilt was more in response to the guilt I read in other comments than what I read in your original post. Sorry, I failed to say that. And of course, only you know if you felt guilty or sad or something else altogether. I don’t mean to imply I know how you felt, or- worse!- that I know how anyone SHOULD feel. I’m just throwing something out there for us all to think about as we try to make happy lives as working mothers.

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What do you think? Does it matter if we say we're feeling guilty when we're actually feeling something else, like sad, or frustrated? I don't feel a lot of honest-to-goodness working mom guilt. If you do, do you know why? What is that you think you're doing "wrong?" Or do you think guilt can come from something other than feeling like you are doing the "wrong" thing?