Milk: Letting Go

"You should try this," the clerk at the health store says, unprompted, holding up a box of mother's milk tea.

"No thanks," I reply, arms tightening slightly around my daughter. "None of those supplements really worked for me."

"Maybe you didn't try the right one," she pushes.

"We tried a lot of things," I say, then change the subject. "Do you sell honey?"

***

E. is nearly seven months old now. She's still small, but she's gaining weight at a normal rate and is busy crawling, sitting, and working on walking. She has yet to get sick with anything more than a slightly runny nose. We've introduced solid foods and moved her into her own bedroom. I'm still breastfeeding, but I've recently reduced our daytime feeds so that I'm only breastfeeding at night. I have to have surgery sometime in the next couple months and won't be able to lift E. very easily for a couple weeks afterwards. I'm cutting down on breastfeeding a bit sooner than planned so my recovery won't be as much of a hassle. It was easier than I thought it would be. It only took a day or two for my body to adjust with each one, and while E. was not happy about switching her afternoon breastfeed for formula, since she usually uses the breastfeed to get herself to sleep (which is why we're also in the process of teaching her to fall asleep on her own), it only took a day or two for her to be okay with it.

My feelings about breastfeeding are so mixed up that I didn't expect to be sad about reducing feeds. I hadn't realized how much the bonding part of it had affected me. In those first weeks, it didn't feel like bonding. It just felt miserable. I started counting down to when we could introduce solids. I don't know when it became something more emotionally positive, but it did, to an extent. 

My original goal was to breastfeed exclusively for six months. When that was derailed, I decided I would continue breastfeeding, along with the formula, for the six months, and see where it went from there. By the time we hit six months, I felt ready to quit most days, but E. didn't seem ready for it. Once I knew having surgery was a certainty, rather than a possibility, I decided it was time to cut down. And it felt stranger than expected.

Breastfeeding less has made me enjoy feeding her in the evenings more. It's easier to deal with her biting me with her brand-new teeth occasionally because it's not a constant battle. I don't get irritated from wearing uncomfortable nursing bras during the day (one gave me a bruise at one point because of the fit), my complexion is finally starting to clear up, and oddly, I feel more comfortable in my body. More like myself again. But once in a while, something reminds me of the hell of those first weeks of parenthood, and those emotions come rushing back.

I hate that incidents like the one above still make me feel bad. I know the clerk was just trying to sell me something and she took a look at me and decided that since I look like a crunchy mom, I'd obviously be exclusively breastfeeding. She didn't know my story. She just assumed. And it hurt. Enough that, while she and someone else in the store were chatting about natural vs. refined sugars, I pointed out that agave is pretty dang refined. I wasn't very catty about it, and it's true, but I said it out of my irritation more than anything else, and that wasn't right. 

I still want to slap the people who come up with the really sappy sayings about parenthood. I enjoy being a mum, and my daughter is very important to me, but this is not the be-all and end-all (I remember saying something similar about sex once). Parenthood does not always bring out the best in me. Sometimes it brings out the worst. Sometimes I am frustrated and unhappy about it, and sometimes I am extremely content. Some days letting go of the grief that I have about parts of is harder. Today is a more difficult day, solely due to that conversation at the store, but as always, I'll find an equilibrium again and be okay.

Expectations and Babies

As there have been zero comments regarding my last post about what linguistic or cultural things people might like me to try to dissect (pretty sure comments are enabled), I'm just going to see where the wind takes me. Today we're going with the schema involved when people respond to seeing babies (because this has puzzled me lately), thereby combining some semantics with this whole parenthood adventure I'm on. This will be a really casual discussion of the topic, and won't be terribly academic in style. You have been warned.

People sometimes say really moronic things when they see babies.

Well, at least, that's been my experience.

It started when E. was a newborn. She was too small for a baby carrier or the stroller, and if we were just walking to the grocery store, we didn't want to lug the carseat with us. So we'd bundle her up in a blanket and one of us would carry her. Inevitably, we would be asked, "Is that a baby?"

J.'s standard response became, "No, it's a bomb, that looks like a baby."

Mine was, "No, it's a turtle." Or a burrito, or anything along those lines. Apparently it messes with people's expectations when you're carrying a baby around without a stroller or a carseat.

Schema for baby includes: carseat and/or stroller.

The next weird comment I've gotten was when she got big enough for the baby carrier. It was amazing. I finally got to have my hands free when we went for a walk. And then someone said, "That's a baby? I thought you were carrying a dog in there!"

People actually do that? I've yet to see one of those, but I have seen people with dogs in strollers, so I suppose it's possible.

Schema for baby may not include soft fabric baby wraps/slings/carriers. At a guess, this may happen because we're in a suburb-y area with fewer people practicing more crunchy types of parenting.

The latest one is the assumption that my child is an inanimate object. I constantly get the comment that she's like a little doll (not sure why, since most dolls don't puke down the front of your shirt or bite), but the other day, someone seriously thought I was carrying around a doll in a baby carrier until E. moved. She said it was because E. was front-facing in the carrier. That might be a feasible assumption if I was eight, but last time I checked, I was in my late twenties. If I was carrying a doll around like that, I'd be a bit concerned about what was going on in my head.

Schema for baby does not include: front-facing carriers?
Additionally, schema for parent requires added height to suggest age? Or perhaps schema for parent requires said parent to be visibly in their thirties?
Drawing from above responses, my child's diminuitive size may be affecting people's responses, too. So:
Schema for baby includes an infant weighing more than 6 pounds as a newborn, otherwise, child may be mistaken for toy?

Judging from the few things I've extrapolated here, my own schema for baby doesn't match up to the ones these people have had. I'm finding it a little disturbing, to be honest, that the guy in the second instance was more primed to see soft carrier=dog than soft carrier=baby. The same thing goes for the people who think my daughter is a doll rather than a person. I've never seen an adult, or even a teenager, toting a doll around like it's a baby, so it's not part of the expectations I have when I see a person carrying a baby in a baby carrier.

A brief look at this topic tells me that I have a long way to go before I manage to put together a coherent cultural schema for "baby."

Pick A Topic, (Almost) Any Topic

I'm still trying to sort out what I'd like to focus on with this blog. The crafting's something of a given, and I'm still trying to finish my Shakespeare attempt. Admittedly, that's more for me than for my (very few) readers - it's a way for me to read through the works of Shakespeare and chronicle my thoughts on the project. I'm not a literary scholar, so it's a fun thing for me, rather than a serious academic exercise. What I have to say on the topic likely won't be that illuminating or terribly original. Parenting-related posts will likely pop up as well, as that's a rather large part of my life at the moment.

I have been thinking about doing some more linguistics-related things on here (the name rather lends itself to that, and it would fit with some of my intentions when I started here), which has the potential to be more original. I did write a thesis, and I am revising a couple pieces for journal submission. I write original fiction as well, and I will be publishing my first novel via smashwords and Amazon later this year (once my cover artist gets the cover finished). I did try the traditional publishing route, and was summarily rejected (no agent - complicates matters). A friend who works in publishing suggested (actually, highly recommended) trying out the online self-publishing option, and I'm giving it a go. If all goes well, I may toss up a few short stories from that 'verse for free on here.

Anyway, back to the linguistics idea. My areas are phonology, syntax, semantics, and sociolinguistics. While I was writing my thesis (syntax and semantics with a dash of phonology), I got into semiotics, which can intersect rather nicely with sociolinguistics. The interest developed too late for me to incorporate it into my thesis, and as I was using Construction Grammar in that analysis, I also have a working knowledge of Frame Semantics (though my understanding of it is not as detailed as it ought to be, really). But I want to play around with semiotics more. It's fun, and there's a lot of possibility there.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term, semiotics is the branch of semantics that deals with meaning relations. Most of my reading in that field has been in the theories of Charles S. Peirce and those who have further developed his ideas during the 20th and early 21st centuries (up to now - it seems to be a growing field). It's the sort of thing that made me go cross-eyed in my undergrad (particularly in a 100-level logic course), and that now I really love, though much of it requires multiple readings for me to start absorbing the ideas. Thus far, I'm working on a paper describing some of the semiotics of fantasy literature, and I'm re-writing an Othello analysis I did years ago to incorporate semiotics (it's funny to me that the undergrad who thought theory was useless and semantics hopelessly boring and complicated was already tinkering with semantics without realizing it). Semiotics can be applied to a broad range of fields, so the possibilities are pretty much endless. I have a large number of interests, so this is an interesting way to incorporate linguistics with other things I enjoy (and seriously, if you have access to the journal Semiotica, check it out. The topics range from mathematics to H. P. Lovecraft to fashion to punctuation - that's how diverse the discipline can be).

Any suggestions from the people who sporadically visit? Leave a comment about possible topics for me to tackle here, and I'll try giving it a go.

Valentine's Day at Epenthetical

A couple days late, but this is what happens when we do Valentine's Day.

Cupcakes. Chocolate-cherry.

Lamb stew, not pictured. It was supposed to be goat stew, but the bags of stewing meat were all mixed together in the bin, and I grabbed the wrong one, and the prices were nearly the same. Since both lamb and goat are delicious, it didn't matter so much. We finished that off today.

Origami. A thing in a group on Ravelry got me curious. I've been thinking about giving origami a try for a while, and this tipped me over the edge. It started with the modular origami book in the corner. Then it multiplied. A leaf, a lotus, a coat, a lantern, and a mushroom. I've done a duck and an owl since.

J. played some video games with his friends. E. practiced her standing. I got some quiet time. All in all, a lovely evening.

We're going on a date next weekend when we have a babysitter lined up. Valentine's Day isn't a big deal for us. It was, sort of, when we first started dating, when I made the mistake of saying that I didn't want to do anything for Valentine's Day and expected him to intuit that yes, I really did (learned my lesson there--J. is thoughtful but not telepathic), but not really now. I don't even remember what we did last year, or if we did anything at all. I've gone off a lot of the chocolate and candy things that are popular for it (same with most Halloween, Christmas, and Easter candy), and we don't really do cards. Flowers are nice once in a while, and I do like red roses, but I'd rather have a miniature rosebush and I'm not sure that's a good idea with a tiny person who's learning how to walk. So we skip most of the trappings of the holiday, and don't really miss them.

Anyone else find Valentine's Day fun but not that important?

Check off: Moebius knitting

Finally, a post about something I managed to learn how to do. Moebius knitting is the ingenious technique of making a knit-in-the-round Moebius strip. Cat Bordhi's got the awesome instruction videos and books. The basics can be found in her video here, on YouTube:

Moebius cowls were all the rage a few years ago, but at that point, I was a new-ish knitter and had many other things I wanted to learn. I decided the technique would keep. And it has.

When E. was born, a friend gave me a skein of yarn that she told me I had to use to make something for myself. It's gorgeous yarn, from Sweet Fiber. Melissa does beautiful yarn. It's just a skein of her Merino Twist in worsted weight, but the colour is deep and saturated, with enough variation in the shade to provide interest without being distracting. The colourway name is "Temperate" and it's one of my favourite shades of green.

So I wound my yarn into a ball and went out to Valley Yarn and picked up a set of knitting needles in a length appropriate for Moebius knitting. I cast on the night before we left for the Christmas holidays so I would have something to work on in the car. I used a pattern that involved ribbing and a picot bind-off, titled Sprong Moebius.

All in all, it went well. I think I miscounted my cast-on stitches, so there's a section where the two-by-two ribbing is actually four by two, but it's just one section of four stitches, so it's easily ignored. I am not a perfectionist (though I was, a bit, as a child).

There is something very remarkable about watching one of these take shape. A Moebius cowl is knit from the centre out, so each Moebius round is the equivalent of two rounds on a conventional cowl. It feels as though it's knitting up faster that way.

I want to do another one, but what I want this time is a stockinette cowl with a garter stitch lace edging. I'm plotting out the lace right now and figuring out what it'll look like. Should it turn out well, I'll post it on Ravelry as a pattern.

No Touchy

 
This is my latest source of irritation. It's happened numerous times now, and I'm never sure how to handle it. Does this happen to you? Do complete strangers walk up to you on the street and touch your kid?

As I don't have this impulse (my impulse when seeing babies and small children is to smile at them and maybe make a face), I can't sympathize with them. I just want to shout, or run, or do something that goes against the ingrained politeness. I usually settle for awkwardly backing away, but at some point, I'm going to really lose it. Especially when awkwardly backing away means that they follow me.

In what universe is it okay to walk up to a woman you don't know and poke at her baby without so much as asking permission? I'm pretty sure that if she was older, people wouldn't be doing that (I hope), so why does being a baby mean that she's immune to those rules?

Seriously. There's the germs thing. There's the fact that my child sticks everything in her mouth these days, so if they stick a finger towards her face, she will try to grab it and stuff it in her mouth. There's also the "you are touching a complete stranger without their permission" thing. Not okay.

What also bothers me is that it happens mostly when she's in the baby carrier, so not only are they touching her, they're getting awfully close to me. This means that they are breaking some of the unspoken rules about how close to get to someone in this culture. It takes invading my personal space to invade my child's personal space.

I've had a few suggestions from friends. One said, riffing on the "telling people your baby bites" idea, to say that she's a vampire and she bites. I'm tempted. I could just poke the person back and say, "Oh, sorry, I thought it was try to touch a complete stranger bingo," but I'm not sure I'm bold enough for that.

In the meantime, it's enough to make me want to put this on a onesie. 

Why I Am Not an AP Parent

We feed on demand. We cloth diaper. We don't plan to spank our child. I wander around with a baby in one of those wrap carriers when I go out. As a current stay-at-home mum, my daughter is constantly around me, and if she's not with me, she's usually with J. I don't believe that babies are out to manipulate their parents or that holding them frequently spoils them, like some parenting methods say. I think those ideas are rubbish, actually.

On the surface, our parenting style often resembles the one advocated by attachment parenting (AP). But.

We aren't an AP family.

We don't practice exclusive breast-feeding, as I've written before. Combo-feeding is enough to get me kicked out of the hard-core AP groups, and enough for milder AP parents to look slightly askance at me. I get a pass because I'm still breast-feeding and my kid wasn't gaining weight normally on exclusive breast-feeding, but it's still one of those things that makes us really not fit.

I don't like co-sleeping--it never feels very safe and I think it interrupts my sleep and hers more than it does when she sleeps on her own. That said, there have been times when that was the only way all three of us could get enough sleep to be functional the next day. I still prefer it when she sleeps in her crib and doesn't require holding all night.

Unlike several of the AP families we know, we vaccinate. I could rant about this, since not vaccinating makes me extremely angry, but it's not really the topic of this post. I know that not vaccinating isn't a tenet of AP, but it seems to coincide a lot with AP families.

I don't call it baby-wearing. The term pisses me off. My daughter is a person, not a fashion accessory, and I do not "wear" her. I put her in the baby wrap and carry her. When invited to join a baby-wearing facebook group by a complete stranger, I just smiled, nodded, said I'd think about it, and then never bothered to check out the group. I also have no problems setting her down. Time to do the laundry? She hangs out in her crib or on the floor with some toys.

The thing is, while some of the stuff about AP I agree with (being physically and emotionally present for your child whenever possible, some of the alternative methods of discipline), I really don't like the culture that surrounds it, and the science of it is a tad dubious (from what little I've read, some of it is based on studies that aren't entirely compatible with the assertions that are then spun out from them; not that this form of parenting is bad--I just would like to see a little more research on what happens when a family actually practices this style of parenting).

I just feel uncomfortable in the AP culture. Yes, the spinning, knitting, sewing woman who makes her own vanilla extract and lip balm is uncomfortable in the "granola" culture of AP. It feels too faddish. Though I, like many, am prone to fads, I'm more prone to researching the heck out of them. I've avoided researching too much about AP because, like lactivist literature, it just makes me upset when it tends towards extremes. Unfortunately, this phenomenon isn't limited to AP parenting sites, because discussions about parenting become polarized so quickly. And ultimately, that's my biggest problem with any parenting style. I'm doing my best with my child, trying to respond in the way that seems to work best for her, and I'm sort of practicing a couple parenting styles, in moderation. I'm a moderate with many things, and in a world of extremes (at least on parenting forums), I don't fit.