Just Photos

Blue and Green with their career mentor


These are homemade "party hats." Notice the straws coming out of them? Presumably, liquid refreshments can come out of the hat and down through the straws. Blue and Green are preparing to become frat boys.


The Volcano


Green's new hobby: rolling down hills


Double Exposure

Boys and Girls

We have gone to great lengths to help our boys have access to as many creative play options as possible. I have found that this is a sizable effort in a society that wants to quickly divide kids into gender-specific consumer groups before they can even manage solid food. Before you start citing all those studies that show that little girls like to build warm enclosures while little boys like to build tall towers and then knock them down, I'll say upfront that the fact that there are biological differences between boys and girls is not the issue that rankles me. What gets me is how easily we claim those differences as unbendable, how we celebrate them, and then spend lots of money to make them stick.

For an example, take a visit to Pottery Barn Kids. Wanna decorate your child's room? Just click on "Boys' rooms" or "Girls' rooms." If you're a boy, you get sports and trains and trucks and airplanes and dinosaurs. If you're a girl, you get pink. Or you can go visit any Halloween costume website. The first thing you'll get to select is whether you want girls' costumes or boys' costumes. At one site I've visited, if you click on "classic boys' costumes," you'll get a choice of ninja avenger, aviator, astronaut, bandit, Buzz Lightyear, chef, confederate officer, cowboy, crusader, police officer, prisoner, mechanic, and doctor. A click on the "classic girls' costumes" will get you a choice of ballerina, Barbie, pink playboy bunny, cheerleader, flapper, mermaid, and bride. Isn't the fun of dressing up for Halloween that you get to be whatever you want to be? Does a girl today really have to cross the gender divide to pretend to be a doctor?

I recently read a really interesting essay about girl culture by Peggy Orenstein. What I like about this article is that Orenstein looks at the whole industry of toy production, how decisions are made about what gets to be a "girl toy." Have any of you been to Toys R Us lately? The place is so clearly separated by gender. Girls get roughly 30% of the store (it's the pink side!), while boys get the rest (not pink!). The girl section has Barbie and her slutty neighbors, the Bratz, mermaids, fairies, dollhouses, and kitchen stuff. Boys appear to get the rest (the vehicles, the sports stuff, the models, the bikes, the Legos), and this is all located across a wide aisle from the pink section. Are you looking for Dora the Explorer? She's in the girl section! Are you also looking for her cousin, Diego? He's in the boy section! And that's too bad, because he gets to do way cooler stuff than Dora does (Animal rescue expeditions! Trips to the arctic! Undersea adventure!).

Before you get the wrong impression, let me say that I loved Barbie when I was a kid. I had a whole assortment of them and their 1970s friends (Darcy Covergirl, complete with disco ball and stage; Marie Osmond in glittery green gown; Darth Vader, who acted as "the husband."). Do you remember, too, that there was a beauty salon and an apartment building? Well, check out what Barbie's up to these days! She's got a party bus! It has a hot tub! She has friends who are "scented" like suntan lotion. Then there's this one (don't you love the whip?!). And now, after her years as a drunken sorority girl and then as a dominatrix, Barbie gets married. And newsflash: she's white! Look at Barbie the Caucasian Bride.

Blue and Green aren't too interested in Barbies, but we've tried to keep the gender doors open when it comes to their toys. They have tons of trucks, but they also love their toy kitchen and their cleaning equipment.

(Blue, cooking with a bowl on his head, wearing a Home Depot apron)

The thing that's tricky with "boy toys" is navigating all the violence. Once you surpass the "I love you, you love me" toddler phase, suddenly boys are supposed to want to enter combat. Ninjas, Transformers, Star Wars, it's all about shooting. There were two rules in Blue and Green's boy-heavy preschool class last year: "no potty talk" and "no shooting noises." (Well, they also developed a third rule in response to the little kid who kept stripping off all his clothes. The rule was "no naked."). With Blue and Green, we just never brought up the idea of guns, and so they never wanted them. But despite our best efforts, Blue recently said to me, "Mama, can I have a water shotter that's shaped like a drill?" Oh well. Even without the language, the concept is still there. I know, I know, several of you are now saying, "See, it's all inborn!" Well, OK, maybe it is. Maybe Toys R US and Pottery Barn are just reflecting back to us our own primal desires. But I actually think we're smarter than that, that we can come up with new ways of talking about gender differences and similarities that don't box little kids into narrow roles before they learn to think for themselves.

The hardest thing to accept is that this issue is going to be increasingly out of my hands. Other kids will become much more of an influence on our boys' interests. Yesterday, we had this fabulous little kid -- I'll call him Jacob -- over to our place to make a volcano with us. He walked into the house and said, "I'm going to have a pirate birthday party, and all the pirates are going to blow up and DIE!" Alrighty. Anyway, we did this volcano, assembled the plaster strips, painted it, added the baking soda and vinegar and red food coloring, and it exploded and oozed just as we hoped it would. This little friend abruptly took some dinosaurs and shoved them into the volcano's crater, screaming, "The dinosaurs are blowing up! They're dead! Their blood is running down the mountain!" Blue and Green looked skeptical, but they joined in the carnage anyway, throwing their own dinosaurs into the mess.

Later, the three of them gathered in the living room to play with Blue and Green's Playmobil airports and airplanes (Some of Playmobil's boy toys; the girl toys come in pink boxes). These toys are pretty cool, if you can get over the fact that it takes ten hours for an adult to assemble them. Blue said to Jacob, "The woman (pronounced wooman) pilot gets to fly today." My heart skipped a beat, because the female figure in this set isn't a pilot. She's clearly a flight attendant, as she came in a bag with the cups and the orange juice cartons. Plus, the real pilot, a man, is wearing a pilot's hat. But Blue doesn't know this, and he has been perfectly happy to run an equal opportunity airline. A moment passed. I was so sure that Jacob would say something. Another moment passed. "OK, she can be the pilot," Jacob said. Then he added, "But my guy gets to be the hijacker."

Finding a Job

I finished Field Notes from a Catastrophe last night. It was, as I mentioned, about global warming. I'm pleased to report that I found numerous funny things in this book (even though I'm pretty sure that funny wasn't what the author was intending). For instance, there's a whole section about frog mating habits. She quotes a special frog scientist, who describes "writhing masses of toad balls." (p.81). Now that's hilarious to me, proving that I haven't really progressed much since middle school. There's also a funny section where the author (Kolbert) writes out her interview with Bush's Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs just after the Kyoto Protocol took effect. This section is funny in a Daily Show kind of way, where you're laughing out loud to mask how depressed you're becoming.

But the thing that I found most interesting about this book had nothing to do with global warming at all. Those of you who have talked with me recently know that I'm struggling with the work/life balance question. Can you have a job you love and also not be stressed out all the time? Is it possible to feel ambition and passion for your work life, but still be done by 3 pm every day to pick up your kids and do your scrapbook? This book raised an entirely new question for me. Has my decades-long struggle with the "what am I going to do with my life" issue been merely a lack of imagination about what is possible?

What I noticed as I was reading was how many weird careers there are out there. Here's an example. In a chapter about bugs, Kolbert describes G. Russell Coope, who is, apparently, "one of the world's leading authorities on ancient beetles" (p84). Huh. Beetles. I can't say I've ever given a thought to beetles (except the VW kind). I wonder if he announced to his preschool teacher when he was four years old that he was going to grow up and be a beetle expert. An ANCIENT beetle expert, no cheap contemporary knock-offs for this guy. Has he always known that beetles were IT for him? Then there's Kolbert's description of two evolutionary biologists who "have shared an interest in mosquitoes for as long as they have been interested in each other" (p.74). Sounds romantic! This couple cemented their marriage and their careers by "driving across the country in a van equipped with a makeshift bed for their daughter and a miniature lab for sorting, labeling, and storing the thousands of specimens they would gather" (p.78). They managed to find a way to navigate their professional and family lives, so why can't I?

When I think back to college, it seemed like choosing a career was like choosing a snack from a vending machine. The choices were all there for you to select, pre-packaged and ready to eat. You could major in economics and become someone who sells things or counts things. You could major in English and become an editor or a professor. You could major in theater and become a coffee barista. Et cetera. What I didn't acknowledge at the time was that I'm not so crazy about vending machine snacks, so it's not all that surprising that building a rewarding work life, in my case, has been a bit more complicated.

I know that others of you are dealing with these things, too (how many of you out there have several bachelor's degrees, or two master's degrees, or are trying to do your own thing by being self-employed? How many of you have built a career doing something you didn't mean to do? How many of you work part-time at three different jobs, or are waiting until "the kids get older" to answer these questions?). I'd love to hear what you think.

I'll end with a bit of wisdom I've learned from our neighborhood ice cream man. His name is Paris, and he has a frozen treat monopoly on the whole northeast side of the city. For three months, he drives around in a jeep, blaring his jingly-tinkly music, causing waves of kids to levitate out of the pool or the lake and run at break-neck speeds across busy streets and parking lots to buy 25 cent bomb pops for $3 a piece. Come September, he has enough money to travel for the remaining nine months of the year. Genius. Why didn't I think of that?

Nature

It's a good thing I'm reading that book about global warming, because something is definitely wrong with our climate. There are two rules those of us who live in this city swear by: a) it doesn't get too hot in the summers and b) it doesn't rain in July. And wouldn't you know it -- so far this month, we've had nearly a week of temperatures over 90 (with no air conditioning anywhere but the grocery store) and nearly a week of solid, downpouring, crazy, monsoon-like rain. Combine that with the hurricane force windstorm we had last winter, and the SEVEN snow days we endured (winter rule: it doesn't snow here), it's about time we pay attention.

Anyway, rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. It's the top story on the news (BREAKING NEWS!!!! IT'S RAINING IN JULY!!), and it's the top story in our house (IS IT STILL RAINING, MAMA? WHY? DOES THE ICE CREAM TRUCK STILL COME IF IT'S RAINING? WHY NOT? HOW WILL WE GET OUR ICE CREAM??!). It's particularly bad when it rains on the weekends, because it wrecks our plans to get the whole family into the great outdoors.

There's a lot of writing and talking going on about how little contact kids have with the natural world, and some of it is pretty compelling. We even live in an urban area with a ton of green space, and it still feels like the boys aren't really experiencing the freedom of the outdoors all that much. So, we've identified two kid-friendly, easy hikes with good payoffs (i.e. natural water slides, waterfall you can swim in) that we want to do this summer, and we have several planned trips to a nearby organic farm for vegetable picking (they won't eat the vegetables, but whatever. That's another issue).

But of course, rain. By yesterday we had exhausted our indoor options (dropping them off at the grocery store playroom -- yes, free childcare while you shop! woo!; going to the library; making cookies; crafts; fighting), and I was sorely tempted to push that "continuous play" button on their Franklin the Turtle DVD. But no, that would be bad parenting. So what did we do??? Can you guess? We went to.....

Funtasia.

Yes, Funtasia. We jumped in the car and headed twenty minutes into the suburbs to check out what was billed as "over 25,000 square feet of fun." OK, so this is what it was like: combine the carpeting, smell, neon lights, and vibe of a 1970s roller rink with the video game nirvana of Chuck E. Cheese (minus the chuck and the cheese). Then add in some of the tackier elements of a rural amusement park (bumper boats, miniature golf, pimply teenaged ride operators). There. You have Funtasia. Oh yeah, there was also the thing that drew us to this pleasure palace in the first place: a huge climbing structure for the kiddie set. This thing included a bouncy house, an obstacle course, a big twisty slide, and a winding habitrail tunnel system that connected all the pieces together. All this for $6.95.

We were there for hours. HOURS. The rain poured down, the kids jumped and ran, and Michael and I sat on a bench, so grateful for the reprieve.

I bring this up, because I was just reading that the National Wildlife Federation has started the "Green Hour" program, which is supposed to combat the "nature deficit" that kids today face. When you go to their website (greenhour.org), you find that outdoor play makes kids smarter, more creative, less stressed, and more respectful. Huh. Well, do me a favor, OK? Call up Mother Nature and tell her to turn off the giant faucet in the sky, or else I'm going to drag my kids to this syrupy, plastic, capitalistic, indoor fun factory every single day. Who can argue with this:

Leaving Comments

I've had several of you ask how to post comments to the blog. At the bottom of each entry, you can click on the word "comments." If you already have a google or a blogger account, you can use that to post. If you don't, that page shows you how to get one.

Blocked

Don't start a blog if you can't handle criticism. I've already received a few complaints (mom, Erin) that my writing is too kid-focused, too cutsie.

So you want deep? Dark? Scandalous? Scholarly?

Well, dang. I don't have any of that right now. I spent most of yesterday cleaning the grout in the bathroom. Now that's sexy, isn't it?

I'm just starting to read Field Notes From a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert (http://www.washington.edu/uaa/commonbook/about_elizabeth_kolbert.html), which is the University of Washington's "freshman book." They have all the freshman on all the campuses read the same thing, presumably to generate conversation and connection around a common topic. I'm reading it because I'm always up for good conversation, and also because a little piece of me wants to be a freshman again. When I see my own students, I'm envious of their freedom to try new things (e.g. "I'm double majoring in sculpture and astronomy!" or "I'm interested in combining my love of breakdancing with forestry management!"). That "everything is possible, all at the same time" mentality is something that has ebbed for me, and I miss it.


I don't, however, miss waking up to my freshman roommate's posters of naked men holding babies. Do any of you remember these? She had three of them.

OK, there. A whole paragraph about something un-cute. Now I'm going to spoil it:




(Blue, 2002)





(Green, 2002)

Science

I remember being a little kid, just six or seven or so, and telling people that I was going to go to Harvard and become a scientist. But even as I said it, I knew it wasn't true. Could I have recognized, even at such an early age, that the world would honor me, or at least pay me well, if I focused my enthusiasm on chemistry instead of, well, all the things I was really interested in doing? I said I was going to be a scientist, but then I went ahead and played orphanage with all my stuffed animals and wrote rhyming poems about social problems.

I'm not a scientist. This is not a shock to most of you, but what you probably don't know is that I've worked really hard at not being a scientist. Take, for example, my sophomore year in high school. In biology class, we were supposed to dissect fetal pigs. I can't even tell you how much this task repulsed me. Do you remember doing this? It took a week to fully dissect the animal, and each day you had to put the carcass in a drawer for storage. By the fifth day, the thing was grey and flabby and oozing. Anyway, somehow I managed to convince my lab partner that since she wanted to become a doctor, it would make sense for her to do all the actual work. I, on the other hand, would do all the recording, in practice for my future career as an administrative assistant.

The reason why I'm mentioning this is because Blue and Green are REALLY into science. They particularly like science that causes smells (my guess is that they would love the whole fetal pig thing). So I've checked out tons of books from the library with kiddie experiments in them, but the boys really just want to do their own thing.

So here is the boys' scientific question of the day:


What happens when you mix:

soggy leftover cereal and milk from the morning and
water and
ketchup and
mustard and
onion powder and
garlic powder and
oregano and
wheat germ and
red pepper flakes and
sea salt and
regular salt and
pepper and
chili powder and
blue food coloring and
green food coloring and
olive oil spray and
Pam spray and
peanut butter and
flour and
sugar and
English breakfast tea and
Mexican hot sauce and
chocolate sauce and
dillweed?

The answer:




Because the results to every experiment must be properly documented, Green whips out his science notebook and says, "Mama, how do you write, 'This is more disgusting than farts?'"

Two Good Reasons To Visit Us

Reason #1: We have great beaches.

There are several ultra-low tide days this summer, and we went cruising for critters last weekend. Blue and Green brought their "science notebooks," and we investigated (read: tormented) star fish, crabs, sea slugs, and other sticky creatures.





Here's a picture of the boys in a tidepool:





A picture of Blue:




Reason #2: We have great baseball

We have gone to the stadium twice this summer. The boys would say that the best parts are the seventh-inning stretch, ice-cream, french fries, and asking "who's winning?" over and over.



A cheaper and even more exciting option is going to the boys' T-ball practices. This is T-ball anarchy -- rules don't apply. Wanna tag a player out even if you don't have the ball? Sure, why not? Feel like sitting down on the third base line to play with the dirt? OK! The boys' favorite part of practice is seeing Liz, their coach. I've noticed that there are an awful lot of dads in the bleachers appreciating Liz, too.

Here's a warm-up:




Here's Green at bat:



And here's Blue:



Beaches and baseball, what more do you need?

Howdy

We used to be very good at keeping in touch. Then we had kids, and we thought, "Oh, we'll get back into our groove soon." And then 5 years passed us by, and I think it's time that we reconnect. This blog is one way we plan to share what we're doing with all of you.

Sometimes I will share stories about our twin boys, Blue and Green. I'll leave it to you to figure out which kid is Blue and which kid is Green. I know you can do it.

Other times I might talk about academia, or career angst, or teaching, or writing, or pop culture, or the books I'm reading, or how many plants I've killed this summer. I do kill a lot of plants, but I'm happy to say that the two pumpkins I planted as part of our neighborhood pumpkin growing contest are thriving. Maybe I'll even take a picture of them and show you, because it might be the most exciting thing that's going on around here. Really.

So that's it. Welcome to the blog.