For those of you reading this blog who are not in the US and might be wondering what the average American feels about the Wall Street bailout because you’ve only read news stories about it, let me tell you: they’re against it. I haven’t heard a single person come out in favor of it and a lot of people are talking about it. I was in a kitsch store last week and over heard three women in their 50s or 60s discussing it. They sounded skeptical at best and disgusted at worst.
The one thing that amazes me more than anything about this whole situation is how Americans are still clinging to partisan lines even though both candidates are for a bailout and neither one of them seems to have the faintest clue what’s causing it. Obama supporters all claim that Bush caused it (he didn’t, but he didn’t help matters, either) and that a President McCain would only make matters worse. McCain supporters claim that……yea, no idea what they’re blaming. I know that Bush blamed foreigners for putting too much money into the country and thus pushing interest rates too low, which conveniently ignores the fact that the Federal Reserve sets interest rates. At any rate, an Obama presidency would be absolutely disastrous for the country if you listen to the McCain supporters.
Guys, listen up: either one of those morons is going to be disastrous for the counrty, but why concentrate soley on them? Why not look at their partners in crime: the other members of Congress who are also going along with this plan to bankrupt the US and royally screw the US taxpayer. I sincerely hope that the voters remember this come election day and vote out all the ones that went along with the bailout, despite their constituents’ clear stance against it.
If you want to read up on what caused this crises in the first place, the Mises Institute has compiled a Bailout Reader. Daniel has also posted a very good video explaining it on his blog.
On the plus side, gold should go up in value, the federal government may weaken and pro-secessionist New Hampshire residents may see their day come.
The downside of having a child is that, suddenly, your business becomes everyones. I was waiting in the car with Haakon the other day at the post office while my sister ran in to mail something and an older lady came and got in the car next to me. She started to pull out when she stopped, got out of the car and knocked on the passenger side window. “Yes?” I asked.
“I was pulling out and I couldn’t help but notice that,” she began and I almost interrupted her to tell her that, yes, I knew there was a dent in my back bumper and that it wasn’t that big of a deal, no one here had hit me, but I didn’t and she continued, “the sun is shining right in your baby’s eyes.” Pause. “There is no shade whatsoever.” I stared at her wondering why exactly I should be concerned by this. He was asleep. He wasn’t fussing, just lying there peacefully. As far as I was concerned, he was getting his daily dose of Vitamin D. “Um, oh, really?” I managed and figured that maybe I should make some signs of being concerned, or else she was never going to leave. So I put my hand over his face and thanked her until she left. Then I took it off and continued waiting on my sister.
Another lady at a grocery store asked me if it was safe to carry him in a sling. “Oh, yes!” I enthused, eager to share the wonders of slings versus infant car seats to the world, “he loves it.” She apparently thought I was offended, though, and immediately began to tell me that she was “being nice. I was being nice to you, I didn’t mean anything by it, I was just being nice.” I stared at her, completely confused. I hadn’t thought she was being mean. So, I just started agreeing with her and telling her that I knew she was being nice. After she left, I looked at my husband helplessly. He told me not to worry; he had seen her talking to herself earlier.
This busybody helpfulness was probably worse when I was pregnant. Every old lady I worked with took turns telling me that I shouldn’t be lifting anything from the time it became publicly known that I was pregnant (about 13 weeks along) while none of them actually offered to help me lift said object. After I told them that, yes, it was perfectly safe and to mind their own damn business (only I phrased it more politely), they kept right on doing it. Only they would ask me instead, “Should you be lifting that?” The unfortunate consequence of this is that by the time I reached the third trimester, when I actually needed to start being careful with lifting things, I was so tired of being bothered about it, the temptation was strong to keep right on lifting things.
It’s kind of annoying to be treated as though you’re no longer an independent, intelligent human being and instead are a “Vessel of Life” and uncertain hormones that at any moment could burst forth in wrath and anger and kill us all. As many would say in my presence, “Remember: don’t piss off the pregnant lady.” To which I would respond, “What the heck is that supposed to mean? People should go out of their way not to piss me off just because I’m pregnant?” People shouldn’t try to piss anyone off, regardless of their reproductive status! Pregnant or not, I never make anyone angry. Unless they deserve it, that is.
What people don’t realize is that pregnant women are still intelligent. They are still individuals. They don’t need other people making decisions for them without their consent. It’s not polite to.
But, unfortunately, no one seems to understand this. So, I had to find out from a friend a couple of months ago that they weren’t going to ask me to help with the 2009 New Hampshire Liberty Forum (it’s more or less a convention of liberty lovers, with speakers, venders, and socializing) because I was going to have a baby and wouldn’t have the time. This was news to me (the not helping out with it, not the baby part). Last I had heard I would be helping out. My husband and I had both planned on it and had been at two previous planning meetings, and at one everyone had been told that their mere presence at the meeting implied they were volunteering to help out. I told my friend that it wouldn’t be a problem; I still wanted to help out.
“Well, it doesn’t mean you can’t. It just means that we aren’t going to ask you.” Ask me what? As far as I had known, I had already consented at the meeting earlier. “If you do help out, you’ll probably want an assistant or something,” she continued, “no matter what, that baby’s going to come first.” I agreed, an assistant would be handy. Actually it would have been handy at the 2008 Liberty Forum. It was my first experience at a convention; I’d never even been to one, much been in charge of managing the vendors. My conclusion was that it had been hard, stressful, frustrating, but really cool to see it all work out at the end, and that I hadn’t completely sucked at it despite my lack of experience.
But now that it’s almost October and registration for the 2009 Liberty Forum has already opened and many of the speakers have been announced, I’m beginning to get the feeling that I really have been cut out. The frustrating thing is that no one has officially told me this, aside from some brief conversation with a friend; rather, it’s something I’ve come to conclude by a lack of emails and other contact by the organizers of the 2009 Liberty Forum. The paranoid in me wonders if maybe I didn’t do such a hot job managing the vendors last year after all and this was the most polite wat they could think of tob tell me (that is, not at all).
At any rate, it’s extremely rude. As an independent person, I do not need other people setting limits for me or deciding that I can’t do something for whatever reason, much less just because I have a baby. It is for me to decide what I can and cannot do, what boxes are too heavy for me to lift. At the very least, they could have asked me if I still wanted to help when they found out I was pregnant and let me make the final decision instead of going behind my back and cutting me out of the process entirely.
My Diaper Stash
Since our little guy is almost a month old now, I figure I should let everyone know how the cloth diapers I made are working out. I didn’t actually finish all of them (the plan was to make 20 newborn, 20 small and roughly 20 medium sized ones so that I would be covered for the first year). I did manage to finish the newborn diapers the day before I went into labor, which was lucky, but since I messed up the first two I made I ended up having only 19 newborn diapers (9 fitteds and 10 all in ones). In addition to those, I had 6 newborn prefolds and 6 infant sized prefolds, a newborn diaper cover, a small diaper cover, a wool soaker (for the nights) and 3 snappis.
The first lesson I learned is that you need way more than 31 diapers for a newborn, especially if you don’t want to wash everyday and you’re using a drying rack. 40 is a much better number, but heck, 50 might be more like it. The first week we ended up washing everyday and it was expensive: our washers cost $1.75 per load, which means we spent $12.75 a week on cloth diapering, only slightly cheaper than disposibles would have cost and not even including the high start up costs of cloth diapering! I acted quickly and ordered 12 more infant sized prefolds from Green Mountain Diapers, along with another wool soaker for when mine got dirty. With this amount of diapers combined with the 19 small diapers that I eventually finished (he can barely fit into the fitteds if I velcro it tightly…) and “elimination communication” (which I’ll go into more detail later), we can go 3 days without washing. We start the laundry in the evening so that it has time to dry during the night. Provided we don’t have 90% humidity, it does.
The only problem with the diapers is that my son pees straight through the fitted ones. They really aren’t absorbant enough to hold them—I guess it’s just a sign of how well hydrated he is. The prefolds are my night-time diaper of choice: an infant prefold coupled with a wool cover is 100% leak-proof.
All in all, I’m fairly impressed at how well my homemade diapers turned out. I will probably buy some microfiber towels to make the inserts on the fitteds more absorbant, but other than that I’m satisfied. We’ve used disposibles a bit (my sister bought us a package ‘just in case’) and they smell horrible. I’m guessing they’re perfumed but man, that smell makes us gag nearly as much as poop alone would. He smells much better (and looks a lot cuter!) in cloth. So we’re stickin’ with it.
When I took my gun safety course in May 2007, one of my classmates asked the teacher which gun would be most effective against a zombie attack. Tony paused and replied, “You know, I think that’s the first time that’s been asked in one of my courses.” What followed was a rather interesting discussion in the merits of various guns and their zombie killing properties. I opined that everyone knows a cricket bat is the most effective weapon and was surprised my classmate didn’t know that, considering the fact he was from Manchester, England.
But this article raises another interesting question: how would the US military fare against a zombie attack? Despite every zombie movie ending with the military triumphantly rescuing the heroes, I imagine it would do fairly poorly. Traditional armies can’t even win against guerilla fighting groups; how could they expect to triumph against even less organized, harder to spot zombies? Not to mention the army’s top-down structure. How long would it take for zombies to knock that out with a few lucky bites?
As always, I would recommend not relying on the “professionals” when it comes to defending yourself against zombies. Rather, fortify your house, own a few good firearms (is it legal to own rifles with bayonates, as recommended in the article?) and don’t come out until you’re SURE it’s safe, which might be a while. If you live in an apartment building, don’t be a moron: stay in there! This is especially true if you live on an upper floor and all the interior doors automatically lock when shut. A zombie would be hardpressed to break in there.
Having said that, in case of a zombie attack, you’re all welcome to crash at my place. But bring bullets. We don’t actually have any for our gun…
My husband and I pretty much followed the Bradley method during my pregnancy, or at least, we got the book and read it and tried out some of the exercises with the idea that it would make labor easier, faster, better, less painful, etc. Then we pretty much dropped it, at first out of laziness and then because I became very suspicious of the method. Namely, it struck me as too nazi. According to the Bradley Method, there are two approved ways in which one can labor: lying on your side with a bunch of pillows perfectly arranged so that “not even a fingertip goes unsupported” and with the arm that would otherwise be underneath you splayed out behind your back. Let’s just say my husband and I were never able to arrange this position with the proper amount of support to where I was comfortable and that damn arm behind my back never got comfortable like they said it would–not to mention in the later stages of pregnancy, laying down gave me heartburn. It’s hard to concentrate on their “practice contraction” exercises when you’re fumbling around for the Tums.
The second position is sitting up in a 45 degree angle with (again) a lot of pillows supporting you. This position looked most appealing to me–except for the fact it would take away my husband’s ability to rub my back and provide counterpressure, which I determined early on would be ideal to help me relax and provide pain relief (it was).
Those are it–the two Bradley Approved Laboring Positions. If you’re not doing it in those positions, you’re doing it wrong. I imagine the number of childbirths where the mother actually succeeds in laboring in Bradley approved methods all the way to the pushing stage are fairly limited. After a certain point, it gets too uncomfortable to sit down–I was 5 hours in when I reached that point and I was on my feet, squatting halfway down with each contraction in order to manage the pain. Laying down would have been horrible at that point–and yet there aren’t any alternatives?
I suppose the Bradley Method’s intent is pure: they want to feel as relaxed as possible and expand as little energy as possible so that you have enough left over for the pushing stage. But seriously, they mention many acceptable positions for the pushing stage–but only two for the longer stage of “opening up”? From the birth videos I’ve seen, not one was laying on her side throughout the entire labor.
Aside from that, the Bradley book is fairly outdated: it was written in 1984 and “updated” sometime in the ’90s. However, these updates kept the same old pictures and most of the same old information–I read both the old and new versions and didn’t really see much difference between the two. I strongly suspect a lot of their information regarding hospital procedures (mandatory shaving and enemas, making the woman labor on her back) are outdated in all but the most backwater places. I also imagine the chapter discussing pain relief offered in hospitals is also rather outdated. Shouldn’t this stuff be updated for accuracy?
Other than that, the book did provide some good tips as far as nutrition, physiology and the emotional signposts of labor are concerned. I found myself referencing them to myself while I was in labor. I could tell when I got serious and then entered the “confused” stage of labor (which was apparently transition, though I refused to believe that at the time. When the midwife said I was having transition contractions, I thought she was lying to me so I wouldn’t get discouraged). For this alone, I would recommend the Bradley Book, but I would take its advice on how to labor with a large grain of salt. Keep in mind the odds that you will actually labor like that throughout the whole thing are slim–I managed 2 hours of laying down. The rest of the time I was up, either in the shower, or eating, or in the birthing tub, or on the toilet. So don’t take the Bradley book and make it your Labor Bible. It’s informative, but it shouldn’t be seen as the endall of how you labor and give birth.
There’s nothing that irritates me more than things that “empower women.” For example, at my old workplace, they played a commercial for a tv show on Lifetime featuring “heartwarming feature stories that empower women.” What the hell? Heartwarming feature stories don’t empower women! How could they? This commercial led me to conclude that most things that are billed as “empowering women” are bullshit designed to appeal to a feminine herd mentaity that automatically assumes anything empowering to women is something they must have because women need to be empowered. This assumes, of course, that we are not. Apparently we’re still crushed by the heel of patriarchical oppression and desperately need heartwarming feature stories, Oprah, and Glamour magazine to free us from it.
Then I saw the article on the wall of my midwives’ practice with a subtitle about how midwifery empowers women. I knew long before I got prgnant that I wanted to use a midwife, but seeing that word made my bullshit-o-meter go off a bit. Exactly how much bullshit would I encounter at the midwives, I wondered. It turned out to be remarkably little. Aside from childbirth visualization suggestions that asserted I was a beautiful flower opening myself up, their advice regarding my pregnancy was delightfully low intervention and high common sense: eat more protein, drink more water, get some rest, put your feet up, that sort of thing. The whole attitude regarding pregnancy and my care was that I could do this, the baby would in all likelihood be fine and pregnancy is perfectly natural.
When I went into labor, the attitude was the same: very low key. I labored at home for all but the last two hours before the little one popped out and was encouraged to eat, get some sleep and take hot showers when needed. At the birth center, I was allowed to do whatever I felt necessary to labor. I could lay down (I didn’t), sit on an exercise ball (I did a bit), get in the birthing tub (I spent most of my time there), or go to the bathroom. For the most part, my husband and I were left alone to work things out while the midwife and her assistant prepared things for the birth–they were very low key and just checked on us periodically.
Once I popped the sucker out and realized that I had actually done it and done it exactly the way that I wanted to, I realized exactly what they had meant by empowering women through midwifery. The entire time, throughout the labor and birth, I was the one in control. Everyone else was there to make me more comfortable, not to make the situation easier or more convenient for them. No one pressured me to take some medication when the pain got bad and when I started complaining about how I didn’t want to do this anymore and I just wanted him out. No one offered me a c-section as an easy escape or told me that the baby was endanger at any point in time. Instead they just told me how well I was doing and that he was almost out and the horrible ache I felt low in my back was the head coming down. They made me feel that I could do it and because of that, I was able to.
After the birth, the assistant, who works as a doula and was standing in for the second midwife who was on vacation, told me that I made it look easy. It wasn’t easy–at least, the last two hours weren’t, but they were so worth it. It’s amazing look out my son and think that I pushed did that–okay, fine, my husband and I did that, but I did all the heavy-lifting, so to speak. And that makes me feel powerful.
