LizaWasHere

Pro-What?

I don't care what your political views are, you have to be outraged, shocked, and grieved by the murder of Dr. George Tiller this morning. Dr. Tiller was killed while serving as an usher in church; his wife was singing in the choir and witnessed the entire event.

If his name isn't familiar to you, as it wasn't to me, let me tell you about him. Dr. Tiller was a doctor in Wichita, Kansas. He was one of very few doctors there who performed abortions, and his clinic specialized in late term abortions.

I keep trying to write the sentence, "it doesn't matter what you think about abortion, any reasonable person would find this news story horrifying." But I don't really think that. And I also kept trying to start a paragraph with, "I can't imagine that anyone who has ever been pregnant takes the idea of late term abortion lightly," which I honestly do believe, but which is only relevant in the most superficial way.

I think this murder is the tragic, inevitable consequence of radical right-wing anti-choice "journalists" and activists who demonize doctors who perform abortions. And I think that the moderate anti-abortion conservatives who don't call for them to hash out differences without resorting to calling licensed professionals "baby killers" and "mass murderers" contribute to the hostile environment that allowed this to happen.

Google news is full of conservative media and bloggers quoting Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, saying "We grieve for [Tiller] that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God."

But fewer use Terry's entire quotation:

Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue states, "George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God.   I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will use Tiller's killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder.  

"Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God. We must continue to expose them in our communities and peacefully protest them at their offices and homes, and yes, even their churches."

You read that right. He is talking about people -- Doctors! -- who are legally conducting legal work that is critically medically necessary, sometimes to preserve a real live woman's very life, and nearly always to preserve her continuing health, or her future reproductive capacity, or both. And he iscalling them mass-murderers and calling on his followers to protest and harange them at their homes and their churches as well as their offices.

When one of my friends was in medical school, there was controversy over the fact that she and her classmates were taught how to perform late-term abortions. Then some very shocking news came to light. One of her conservative Christian classmates was married, and his wife developed life-threatening pregnancy complications well past her first trimester.

Late term abortion stopped being an academic issue, where we the reader are free to imagine a lazy woman who didn't get around to scheduing her 4th abortion until she was 16 weeks pregnant, when she skipped merrily down the street to visit her rich sleazy boyfriend and hit him up for the cash for a day trip to Wichita and a visit to Dr. Tiller's.

Instead, that class of medical students -- and probably indeed that very doctor -- saw the reality of late term abortion. You could very well be dealing with a married couple, thrilled to be expecting a baby ... and heartbroken to find out that something is tragically and fundamentally broken about the pregnancy: maybe about the fetus, maybe about the way it is growing inside the woman, maybe both, but so inevitably broken that failure to end the pregnancy will still result in a dead baby, and maybe also a dead or seriously injured adult woman.

Although my heart breaks for Dr. Tiller and his wife and family, I can't help worrying even more for those families who were counting on Dr. Tiller in the next week or two, hoping and expecting, and probably praying, that he would be able to help them resolve their heartbreaking pregnancy-gone-wrong. I hope that they are able to find alternative care in time to preserve their lives and their future reproductive capacity.

I'm Moe!

Last night, at dinner, Noah began to sing: "If he hollers, let him go! Meeny meeny miney moe! If he grabs his foot...."

We joined in and sang the traditional version, to Noah's delight.

Then we tried to explain what the song was for, taking turns and deciding who gets to go first. Jill said, "The person who is 'Moe' gets to go first."

"I'm Moe! I'm Moe!"

There was no successful re-explaining. Noah still wants us to call him Moe.

Josie Is 9 Months Old

Dear Josie,

Today you turned 9 months old. You are a big beautiful bouncing baby, and you are charming, affectionate, and love to talk.

In the past few days, it seems like your physical development is trying to catch up with your obviously thriving mental development. Just this week, you've figured out how to launch your body toward your goal, essentially face-planting in your chosen direction, then unfolding your legs behind you. You haven't gotten the hang of moving forward yet, but you are working hard to get there. You might crawl after all. Other physical details: you are 19.25 lbs, 29" long (long and lean like your brother), and still have no teeth. You can sit for ages and ages, and are capable of standing while holding someone's fingers.

You are socially delightful. In the last month, you've learned to say "Mama" (well, Mamamamama, but we know who you mean), "Nono" (which seems to both mean your brother Noah, and also that you want something to change, and which also acquires lots of extra syllables), and "Boom!" We don't know why you say Boom. You also wave "bye-bye" after we leave places or people.

When you get excited, which happens whenever a member of the family walks into a room and you see them, and also when you see other babies, and your friends from day care, you bounce with enthusiasm. You kiss and "pat" (read smack the heck out of) out of our faces and anywhere else you can reach. When Noah plays with you, by getting his face right up in yours, the two of you giggle and laugh yourselves silly. It makes us wish we could have a dozen of you guys.

We marked your birthday by deciding yesterday that it was time for you to start learning some self-soothing skills and letting me get more sleep, so we are in the midst of our own family version of "sleep training." You aren't impressed so far; you'd gotten to the point where you were refusing to sleep at school and at home required me to be touching you at all times. (Occasionally you made an exception and would remain asleep if I got up with Noah and we didn't wake you up, say from 6 - 7 am.) But I am sitting here, typing on the computer, while you are asleep in your crib. So you seem to be pretty adaptable.

I love you.

That Mommy

New Blogular Home

I was planning on blogging a happy birthday post celebrating my sister and talking about birthdays near holiday weekends.

Happy Birthday, Aunt Anna!

But then wonderful reader Julie explained that not only has my blog become ugly and broken looking, indeed, now comments have spontaneously become impossible.

While I was relieved to know that you haven't been ignoring me or finding me too boring to respond to, it was also the straw that broke the camel's back. Byebye Wordpress and BlueHost. Perhaps you work well for others, but not for me. I need user-friendly interfaces that don't require me to understand the technology behind them.

Hopefully this will work, and get prettier and more customized looking over the next few weeks.

Four Years (and 2 days) Ago

Four years and two days ago, the Friday evening of Memorial Day Weekend, we had a moment that was at the time, probably the most exciting and terrifying single moment in either Jill's or my life. We figured out that I was pregnant. We'd been trying for 6 months. I was CERTAIN that it hadn't effing worked again. We'd both had long, frustrating days. We wanted comfort food. We were living apart, but I was visiting. The place Jill was staying was about a block from an IHOP, so we walked there. I ordered chocolate chip pancakes with a side of broccoli. I didn't think that sounded disgusting; I just wanted some vegetables. And some chocolate, and some pancakes. All at the same time. As we walked back to Jill's place, she asked me, "Did you say you kept falling asleep yesterday?" "Yeah...." "And the day before?" "Yeah...." "And you ordered chocolate chip pancakes and broccoli?" "I told you! I just wanted some vegetables!" "Are you ABSOLUTELY SURE that it didn't work this time? When exactly is your period due?" I paused. I thought. I counted days in my head. I'd had brutal cramps 2 days earlier, but no period. Maybe they weren't regular cramps. Maybe they were implantation cramps. I was 2 days late. I was TWO DAYS LATE! And sleeping 12+ hours per day! Oddly, we didn't go buy a pregnancy test. We really wanted to be optimistic. We even told the friends we saw the next day the whole "cautiously optimistic" story. Monday I went and bought a pregnancy test. Afraid of screwing up the results, I bought the kind that says "pregnant" or "not pregnant" and lo, it announced in big digital letters: PREGNANT. We celebrated today with dinner at IHOP.

Noah and Josie Like the Book

I just got my contributor's copies of Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the Mommyblog. (Buy through that link and I will make a few pennies on the deal; otherwise my profit is in the bragging rights.) I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but of course I will be posting a review! In the mean time, Josie and Noah want you to know that they like it. Josie really likes it!

Ugly Broken Blog

My blog has been ugly and broken for 3 weeks or so now. I don't know why. I still haven't found a nice quiet span of 2 or 3 hours where I can try to fix it on the phone with tech support. I think I'm not technological enough to be a Wordpress separately hosted blogger. My setup assumes a greater level of technological skill than I have. I picked it because it was cheap, flexible, and seemed cool. But the challenges are significant. I'm thinking of going back to Typepad. They'd be a more expensive option, but I think I could get a tolerable plug-n-play option that would still let me keep my vanity domain. If I stay with Wordpress, I need someone who can help me upgrade to a new template that looks a zillion times better than this, and hopefully at least fresher and newer than the template that mysteriously disappeared. This one, BTW, is the default template that I made minor customizations to when I first moved the blog over here almost 3 years ago. I don't know how it reverted. I might want a new hosting service too. I suspect that something happened on BlueHost's end that made my blog spontaneously revert to super ugly. I am looking for recommendations/opinions/advice. Priorities are:

• Easy to use
• Attractive end result
• Cheap
• Customizable

Also great would be someone who can read my mind and just make everything work and look nice and not make my head explode. Speaking of which, time to go pick up the kids.

Why, Yes It Is 4:17 am

Josie woke up and would not settle down sometime in the 2:45am range, and stayed awake until just before 3:30am. Now that she's settled down, I can't seem to fall back asleep. Here are my tired and random thoughts I wanted to blog about:

• Noah and Josie had a great playdate on Saturday with Sam and Maggie. Maggie luuuuuuuuuuuuved playing with baby Josie, and Sam was remarkably good and tolerant of having a younger boy chasing him around. Noah's only complaint about the day? "Maggie won't let me win!"
• I found a way to deal with Noah and sugar! Meredith, the kids, and I went for gelato on Sunday afternoon. After eating maybe 2.5 tablespoons of "ice cream," Noah (and the rest of us) went for a walk. And by walk, I mean Noah sprinted up and down each city block while the rest of us strolled. He easily walked 2.5-3x our total distance, which was about 10 blocks. Noah did the sprinting back and forth thing for about the first 8 blocks, then slowed to our pace. Then we visited the neighborhood garden shop and looked at marigolds and baby vegetables. For $3, we left with 2 red sweet peppers and 3 orange marigolds.
• Our upstairs neighbors are amazingly tolerant and great with kids. Mr. Jason set aside his gardening and yard work projects to help Noah, and later our 3 year old neighbor also, look for worms and bugs in a ~8 square foot pile o dirt. Jason and Noah also raced cars in the dirt. Then he "helped Noah" plant his peppers and marigolds. And by "helped" I mean dug the holes, helped Noah take the plants from their containers, and filled in the dirt with Noah eagerly pushing and kicking dirt in his general direction. He must have spent 2 hours with Noah's enthusiastic distractions.
• First day on the new job went well. Due to some IT quirks, I doubt I will be able to get my laptop online from the office, so no blogging during lunch, but otherwise, all seems to be good.
• Time to see if I can get a little more sleep before Noah wakes up in an hour.

Josie Loves Wubbzy

Shoes

One of the bonuses of leaving the world of DC lawyer-lobbyist for the Internet side of corporate America was the clothing. Gone were high-maintenance suits, heels, and hose; replaced with shirts & nice pants, and later, giant maternity dresses. In short, I no longer have much in the way of "lawyer clothes" and what I do have, 90% was purchased before 2003, and long before my two pregnancies. So there are some wardrobe challenges facing the new job. But even more than wardrobe challenges, there are shoe challenges. We can't find our shoes. That's a slight exaggeration, but not a lot. Both Jill and I put some shoes in our "everyday luggage" when we moved, but nearly all of our shoes got packed in the "get the house ready to sell" phase of packing. Unfortunately, the people who did that packing for us didn't label any of the boxes. Determining which of those...50?...boxes contains our shoes requires opening all of them until we find them. And frankly, at least for me, it might not be worth the effort. I'm pretty sure that if I put my mind to it, I could count all of the shoes I've purchased since I was pregnant with Noah: black super-flat mary janes, dark red loafers, white athletic shoes, tevas, nike teva-type sandals, super-casual funky keds-type slip ons, rain boots, snow boots, and dress boots. Oh and some black patent leather sandals that I wore to work last summer, and maybe another pair of shoes I bought online last spring. I think it averages to 2 pair of shoes per year, and of those, I wore 2 pair of those to work 90% of the time, and another 3 at home or after work/weekends for 90% of that time, over the last 4 years. My "work shoes" wardrobe was in even worse shape than my "work clothes" wardrobe, that's my only point with all that. So perhaps I can be forgiven for buying 4 pair of shoes at DSW today. FOUR. Four pair of pumps with heels! I hope I can still remember how to walk in this kind of shoe. Now, I would not be admitting to the whole entire Internet how crazy I went today if I hadn't gotten great deals. I spent a grand total of $103. And I now have:

• Black, patent-leather Bandolinos, discounted 40%
• Funky black Mary Jane pumps, discounted 50%
• Red, faux snakeskin Bandolinos, discounted 30%
• Brown, suade & patent slingback Franco Sartos, discounted 70%

And none of them are open-toed, so I can continue to ignore any stray thoughts of getting a pedicure. You know, in my spare time. With my spare money. I also bought a suit this week, for $70. I think that between the few that are still salvageable from my previous career plus what Jill took to Texas plus this plus borrowing from Mom will get me through the summer. (Maybe I can even return Mom's shoes.) And HOPEFULLY by the end of the summer, the economy and my employment will be on their way to long-term good health.