Peter's Cross Station

Spring Jewelry Sale Just in Time for Mother's Day

Hi folks. Have you ever thought, "gee, I'd love to buy some of Shannon's jewelry, but the prices are just five to fifteen dollars too high?"

I have been reading your mind! In an effort to clean out the closet, I've reduced the prices on almost everything (except the stuff that was already dirt cheap). I have a bunch of new stuff, too, that needs to get photographed and uploaded, but for now, I thought I'd see if I could generate any interest in what's already up there. After something has failed to sell for a while, I will cannibalize it and use the beads for something new, so if you've had your eye on something for a while, here's your big chance. But it might be gone soon, so don't hesitate a minute longer. Get on over there now!

There, have I created panic and fear of scarcity? I sooo should have gone into marketing.

So Many Posts, So Little Time...

I am strapped for blogging time this month. If I had time, here's what I'd be telling you about:

1. Stuff White People Think is Funny (or not) and Why (or not). (Topic requested by reader and jewelry patron, Martha.)

2. Lazy Home-Made Baby Food Shortcuts Discovered by Shannon the Second Time Around

3. Interesting Ways in which Nat is Beginning to Express Growing Understandings of Her Adoption

4. Cute Things the Sisters Are up to These Days

5. Pics of Nat's Birthday (more than a month later!)

6. More about the Big Freelance Writing Job and Why I am Asking for Your Help and Whose Help I'd Like Next

7. A Roundup of Books I've Been Reading Lately on the Topics of Race and Homeschooling (but not both together in one book)

8. Other (specify)

Please vote for your favorite! I'll try to get them out in order of popularity within the next month.

Air kisses!

Casting Jewelry Upon the Waters

Sent this one to Gwen Ifill. Keep your eyes on the News Hour for me, will you?

The Pelosi Collection

I'm always checking out the jewelry of women I see on t.v. Anyone else do this? Gwen Ifill, Nancy Pelosi and of course, Hillary Clinton have some great necklaces.

I am starting to identify a trend. It seems that necklaces made of--ahem--big balls, are quite the "power tie" for powerful women.

So I made a gift for Nancy Pelosi:

I enclosed a card suggesting she wear it with a red blouse for a subtly tasteful, patriotic look.

It occurs to me now that maybe she can't accept gifts. it isn't worth tons of money or anything, though.

Keep an eye on her and let me know if you ever see her wearing it!

Check it Out!

Many of you have suggested that I open an Etsy shop. I did join Etsy a long time again when it was newish and nothing came of it. Here's my new go at it. Maybe I'll be more successful this time. Any Etsy experts have advice for me?

New Necklaces!

Look at my nifty new display bust for my necklaces! What do you think? I have some new things up, including the valentines Grace inquired about!

Books

This is what I've been reading for the past couple of weeks:

What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and Bias in Higher Education by Michael Berube

A Christmas gift from Cole. Two thumbs up! Berube (who is not as liberal as I am, given that he calls himself "liberal" and I tend to avoid that term) takes on the rhetoric from the Fox news set that somehow, higher education has been wrongly hijacked by "liberals" who are brainwashing students (you know, unlike Fox news). Anyway, I will stack my piles of student feedback forms insisting that I, a self-described socialist pinko, give my students free reign to draw their own conclusions through free and open discussions in my classroom against any "brainwashing" claims. Berube says this, sort of, but much more cleverly and convincingly and, for the record, in beautiful prose that is a pleasure to read (contrary to another academic stereotype). If you're a teacher, this will get you all fired up to be a better one. Anyway, it has that effect on me.

The Case against Homework: How Homework is Hurting our Children and What we can do about It. by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish

More below.

The Homeschooling Option: How to Decide When it's Right for your Family by Lisa Rivero

More below.

The Gift of Good Manners: A Parents' Guide to Raising Respectful, Kind, Considerate Children by Peggy Post and Cindy Post Senning

So far, my response to this has been "well, duh!" But I'm only up to the preschool section. Looking forward to reading about school-aged kids, preteens, teens, etc.

I had requests to talk more about both the homework book and the homeschooling book.

The homework book is a sort of watered down version of more scientific homework books (or so I gather, not having read any others). I think they are pretty much following an Alfie Kohn logic. They also give specific guidelines and suggestions for reducing your child's homework, and/or getting your school or school board to set more reasonable homework policies.

I was interested to hear that research pretty much shows almost any homework prior to high school to be almost useless as far as learning goes, and quite often very counter-productive. The rule of thumb they cite is that kids should probably not get any homework before high school, but if they do, they should get no more than 10 minutes per grade-level.

This book, along with every homeschooling book I've ever read, really got me musing on my childhood and my schooling. I never felt terrible about my schooling. I think I had a pretty good education from K-8 grade and I know I got an excellent one from 9-12 grade.

But.

I still have recurring nightmares about having to go back to high school (plaid skirt and all) and repeat Algebra. I have to remind myself when I wake up that now I have a terminal degree and truly never have to take Algebra again.

I had a great algebra teacher, I truly did. She even appreciated me for all my non-Math skills and gifts. I even think she liked me as a person. But she just couldn't teach the likes of me in a normal classroom setting. I was simply never going to get it without serious personal help. And so, when I was failing Algebra II, I asked her for extra help and she refused. She told me I was not turning in complete homework assignments, and given my failure to do my own work, she wasn't going to do extra on her end.

Her logic seemed fair at the time and I still think that according to her lights, it was fair. She was right about me in her assessment that I was more than bright enough to do well in algebra but needed to work harder than I was used to working in any other class. But she was wrong that I could pull myself up by my bootstraps or simply buckle down and get to work if I stopped my laziness.

I needed a coach.

So I took advantage of the "Math Resource Center" at school and the grad student tutor who staffed it. (Her name was Shannon and she was Hawaiian. I saw this as a Sign. I was right!) For weeks I spent hours in the resource center getting that tutor to coach me one-on-one through my homework and studying for quizzes and tests and I made straight A's on everything for the rest of the term, pulling my F up to a C+ (and the highest grade I ever got in HS math).

What does this have to do with homework?

The homework book says that 5 math problems is better than 40. If a student can get five right, she has shown adequate mastery to move on. If a student can't get five right, 35 more is going to be a miserable, overwhelming, demoralizing experience and only give the student exercise in doing it wrong.

When I read that, boy did it strike a chord. That's why I wasn't turning in my homework. I couldn't figure out the first two or three problems and continuing on for 30, 35, 40 or 50 more was just unthinkable. Impossible. I really, honestly couldn't do it after mere classroom instruction.

I have hated Math with an unrelenting passion ever since 3rd grade when the impossible homework started and it makes me so sad--especially now that I see what simple joy Nat is taking in numbers. I want not just to encourage her, but somehow identify even slightly with her joy.

But I digress. When I wasn't doing my Math homework, guess what I was doing? I was reading my way through the Penguin Classics section of my father's bookstore. And I was, often enough, getting in trouble for practicing this leisure activity when I was supposed to be doing homework.

The homework book says parents should write notes to teachers that say something like this:

"Dear Wonderful Teacher Whom our Child Adores, We know you are a professional who knows best, but after 5 math problems, it was clear to us that our child understands the math and rather than making her do 40 more, we wanted to let her get back the book she's been reading on her own this week. We believe reading is very important and hate to discourage her. Signed, supportive, respectful parents."

That blew me away. Mind you, just because I say I got in trouble for reading doesn't mean I was actually discouraged from it. My father did own a bookstore after all. It's just that reading was so taken-for-granted in our family that I came to see it on the same level as t.v. It was a fun leisure activity and anything you enjoyed that much must not be okay to do until you've finished your math homework and your chores, right? So I love the idea of telling a teacher that my kid couldn't do her homework because she was too busy reading!

The more I read about homeschooling the more I think back on how much dumb stuff I did in school and how much time was wasted--even in my good schools in my expensive education. I spent the better part of my 7th grade social studies class memorizing state and national capitals (many of which have changed numerous times since then, of course) and the order of the terms of the U.S. presidents. I got B's instead of A's in that class because I couldn't memorize facts in a void very well and did a mediocre job on the tests over this stuff.

In the homeschooling book above, Rivero gives as an example of a course of study a kid around 7th grade age might do, reading a biography of each U.S. president. And at the end of the year, if the kid can't quite recall the exact order they all came in? Who the heck cares. But she probably will be able to, given all the context she'll have gotten on history and society and politics via those biographies.

When blowing off my homework I also used to sneak off to the local art gallery with sketch materials and sit and draw statues in the corridors for hours. I used to write short stories and poems in my journals. In short, I did stuff that would pretty much qualify as homeschooling in my "spare" time while getting mediocre grades in school because I blew off busy work (and algebra until that tutor). I graduated last of the top half of my class in high school (somewhere around 160th), while my ten best friends were all in the top 15 (including the top two).

Everyone shook their heads and tsk-tsked ("everyone" meaning my hardworking good-grade-getting peers) and went off to fancy colleges while I went an hour north of home to Small Baptist U. But Small Baptist U. sent me to Oxford for a year which I wouldn't trade for an extra decade of life on this planet, so that was all for the best.

And the homeschool book points out that when a kid wants something--say, admission to a certain college--a kid will be able to do what she needs to do--including finding an algebra tutor, for example--to meet the requirements of that goal.

Thinking about all of this gets me so excited to homeschool. It gets me excited about giving my girls a chance to follow their own strongest interests, to work hard with good coaches on stuff that doesn't come as easily, to learn for myself all kinds of wonderful things as they are learning. But these books also have a healing effect on this unshakeable shame that has been sitting in my gut most of my life for not having done better by working harder in school. I feel vindicated and actually glad that I was so "lazy" that I set aside work that didn't interest me for what I can now recognize as self-directed learning in subjects that were not only more fun at the time, but have made a significant contribution to the best parts of who I am today. BAsically, I am learning that it is okay to prioritize learning what is fun to learn. Fun doesn't mean "bad for you."

I know there are great schools, wonderful teachers and kids who thrive with and in them in the world. But for my family and me, nothing seems as exciting as the infinite possibilities of homeschooling. I am planning to start a homeschool journal where I record what we do every day, starting in the fall when Nat is about three and a half. Basically, I want to make sure that we hit certain things weekly. Some will be through classes and some will be at home and some will be via "field trips." There are big changes afoot chez LilySea that make these prospects even more exciting, but I won't tell you the details of those today.

/Insert your own conclusion here. I must get to bed./

ETA: If you're looking to read up on homeschooling, I started a couple of years ago with John Holt's Teach Your Own, as recommended by Dawn and I recommend it too! I also like the Big Classical Homeschooling Book, The Well-Trained Mind.

What Should I be When I Grow Up?

I keep starting projects and having ideas and then getting stuck or distracted and switching gears.

What I really want, and am trying to figure out how to get, is a paycheck for stuff that I am already doing. Oh, and I don't want to have to work for anyone else. Mostly.

So how would you fill in this blank:

Shannon, you are a natural-born______________!

or:

You should really start a _______________ business!

Thanks for helping.

Last but not Least

Long ago when NaBloPoMo was rising from the primordial ooze, sster asked me:

I'd like to see some posts on how you locate yourself within feminism, as a woman, lesbian, stay-at-home mother, partner, etc., or any other matrix through which you see yourself engaged with feminism.

There is a very short, very simple answer to this question. Then there's the answer that sster and the rest of you probably want to hear. but the shorter, simpler one is more true for me, so I'm going to give you that first and tell you right now that it is the only answer that matters to me and everything else is just details.

Short, simple answer: I define feminism as the belief that women are fully human. Given that belief, pretty much anything one does is done within a matrix of feminism.

I arrive at this definition of feminism by way of a few important moments in my life:

-- My Catholic girls' school in which the word "feminism" was never spoken to my memory because it was quite unnecessary to speak it, as it was the soup we all swam in daily. Everything that happened there assumed feminism. We were taught to say the Lord's Prayer "Our Mother..." No one said this was a feminist choice, it was just the logical choice in a women and girls' community--and I'll add, a feminist men's community as many wonderful male teachers who believed women and girls were fully human taught there with clear commitments to that belief.

-- My first year of college, where I learned that the whole world wasn't like my high school and maybe sometimes you needed that word, "feminism" to clarify where you were coming from. Girls there called me this word in an attempt to make me less appealing to the boys in my social circle. Thus I encountered competition among women for the attention of men for the first time in my life and I was dumbfounded. It took me pretty much all of college to incorporate this into my sense of reality and to figure out how to live in such a world. The summer after my freshman year of college I read The Feminine Mystique, having gathered it was a sort of canonical text of this so-called "feminism" thing and what I learned was that sure, okay, I was a feminist. Well, duh!

-- Also in my first year of college, I read a lot of classic and antique texts for my honors program seminars and there I learned that certain church fathers had considered women to be "misbegotten men." That was my first glimpse into the idea that gender ideology naturalizes maleness and mark femaleness as "other." I suddenly started seeing how this idea was far from dead in contemporary culture.

-- When I decided to go to seminary, I thought I'd brush up on the subject of theology. I wasn't sure exactly what theology really was, so I decided to read something theological to lay some groundwork for what I'd learn. So I read Sexism and God Talk by Rosemary Radford Ruether. Just a little standard theology, you know. And she really covered a lot of history in that book--history of the way different ancient and modern traditions, religious, spiritual and philosophical have viewed women and their place in the cosmos and indeed, I laid myself quite the useful ground for seminary. I got into all kinds of trouble in seminary--especially in theology classes, ahem.

-- When I was teaching composition to first-year college students myself, I used a little essay from Katha Pollitt's collection, Reasonable Creatures. It was in the introduction I believe (it may have been the first chapter, I'm too lazy to go looking for it now), that she claimed that feminism is the radical idea that women are human. I thought of Aquinas and went "yeah."

So, being human and all, what I do with my life hardly matters. Anything I do is "feminist" in the sense that I claim full humanity with its good and bad and ugly; its justice and injustice; its kindness, its cruelty.

I think that many times when I see women getting into these arguments about what kind of life decisions and paths count as "feminist" and what kinds don't, what they're really talking about is whether and which choices further the cause of women's liberation. And that is a completely different question from whether a woman or her husband or her kids or her parents or her boss or her professors or her law partners believe women are human.

My response to the question of how I see feminism (women's liberation activism) in my life is that sometimes it is pretty strong and bold and obvious and active and sometimes it is lying there, not dormant exactly, but under the surface, waiting for the need or the opportunity to rise up. I think most decisions and life paths women choose can be used to further or to impede women's liberation. You can have a high-powered lawyer, doctor or politician who uses her power to disempower other women and this is especially so when you add to the matrix, class, race, region, religion and a number of other factors. You can have women with little power--mothers, nurses, teachers, let's say--who spend their days toiling away for the revolution, whether by teaching their students women's history, teaching their patients control over their own bodies and health or teaching their sons to cook and clean.

In my life, feminism is a given. Women's liberation is going to be a changing thing. Right now, I feel most interested in furthering the empowerment and recognition of the humanity of women like my daughters' first mothers. Because I find myself here at home, working for pay and for free, raising up smart, strong, confident baby women and teaching college kids and writing a blog and occasionally something more demanding than a blog, I am thinking all the time about how I can do these things within the assumption that we live in a universe in which poor women of color are fully human. I can do that in conversations with acquaintances about adoption, I can do it in teaching Zora Neale Hurston to working, adult single moms online, I can do it next semester by teaching ideologies of gender in the United States and how they are inflected by race and class. I can do it by creating an environment that leads my daughters to simply assume that they are fundamentally beautiful (yes, beautiful, because that's a liberation issue for Black women) and smart and worthy of God's love and the respect of all people.

Other women are going to be doing other things in other places. I dislike arguments about what everyone who desires justice ought to be doing the same. Because I firmly believe that for the real revolution to occur we are going to need everyone, everywhere doing everything.

Now, thank god November is over! Hope you all enjoyed it in spite of my many lame, lazy posts of the last week or so. Feel free to keep your questions coming. But I will answer them at a more leisurely pace hereafter.

'Tis the Season to Buy my Jewelry

Tears and Teaching

Nicole commented below:

There is a story (more of an image, or maybe several stories packed into the image) that you've told quite a few times about your (privileged, white) students "with tears in their eyes" demanding that you tell them what they can do about racism when they first confront racial guilt during one of your classes.

That image/story/moment seems to be something of a touchstone for you, but also it seems that you find the experience(s?) exasperating.

Is that accurate, the observation of your exasperation? And if so, what's exasperating you? Some sense that these kids should have clued in to this reality way before they got to your classroom? Or with being annoyed that they are making a gigantic, drama-filled deal out of "discovering" said reality?

And, exasperated or not, what does this experience of the crying students mean for you as a teacher? Does it/did it significantly change your teaching style?

Also, Jody asked for my thoughts on online adjunct teaching.

I'll try to hit both here.

First, tears and exasperation.

I will answer the first part of the question last, about teaching style. Because my teaching style probably makes room for tears in a way other teaching styles wouldn't. The kids I'm thinking of who have cried (and otherwise emoted quite passionately on this topic) have been first-year students in a required composition class.

The way I taught composition at that time was to hit on about six challenging social topics that I thought would inspire my students to get all riled up and interested in sharing their opinions and thus in learning to write a strong rhetorical essay. In class we did debates and heated discussions and theatre exercises and group writing and all kinds of fun things to get the students intellectually, socially and emotionally involved with each other, the class and the material they were reading/watching. I also always took my first-year students on a field trip to the Smithsonian National Zoo early in the semester. It's an old habit from my preschool teaching days. I wanted them to see pandas while they could, since pandas probably won't be on the planet by the time they have kids of their own. I wanted to give them non-alcoholic options for entertaining themselves and I wanted to force them to learn to use the Metro. The field trip was always outside of class time and voluntary, but usually at least half of them would come.

In short, I paid attention to building trust and intimacy in my classroom because we were going to be talking about difficult things they had all been taught not to discuss in polite company.

So sometimes I got tears as a result of their learning about some of the history of the U.S government and American Indians, or about Christopher Columbus and what he did to the indigenous people on the islands he landed on, or about lynching (including the carnivalesque, celebratory atmosphere so many lynchings had). I think their tears and other dramatic displays were about their own exasperation at having never learned about this stuff before, and shock at discovering what they considered themselves to be heirs to.

I didn't find them exasperating at all. I expect the first response of basically good people (ie: my students) to be horror and maybe even guilt at these parts of history. They were just 18 and learning for the first time. But I was certainly exasperated along with them that they had no idea about any of it before they took my class. As one kid told me "I've learned more American history in this English class than I learned in AP American history last year!" They were horrified to learn about Columbus chopping off people's hands because they failed to bring in their daily quota of gold, I was horrified to learn that their fancy schools--public or private--hadn't taught them about it earlier. Teaching these kids fresh out of hoity-toity high schools from suburban New York, Boston, DC, Philadelphia, San Diego, Denver, etc. laid bare for me just what and how they had been taught previously to think about the world and their place in it and how hard the systems they came from had worked to miseducate them so as not to see problems with something that was clearly working in their favor.

If they started with teary guilt, I tried to get them around to seeing that guilt wasn't helpful, but perhaps a sense of responsibility was in fact, quite called for and then kind of leave them to decide how they wanted to take responsibility. Most times, they would ask me what they should do. I would give them some ideas, but tell them that was really their business. And since so many of them wanted to go into politics or public service, they really did have some concrete options for making real changes in their career paths that might address their concerns.

So tears are a repeating story for me when I think about teaching Race in the U.S. 101 because they are a dramatic illustration of the work that's been done to erase certain things for certain people and the work that needs to be done to recover the palimpsest behind AP American History. A few teary students suddenly re-evaluating their whole (okay, only 18-year-long) lives is a moving thing to encounter as a teacher. I tend to love my students dearly and think the very best of them. One of the reasons I teach is because it turns me into a better person. I tend to be quite annoyed with the general run of humanity much of the time, but hand me a classroom of bushy-tailed (or even cynically posing) young adults and I am Mother Teresa.

Funny story. One time, after teaching "How Capitalism Works 101" and an Andre Codrescu essay about the incompatibility of capitalism and democracy, a student blurted out, "What am I going to do? My father is a corporate lawyer!" No kidding, that really happened. I told her to settle down, stop fretting and use his money to fund the revolution.

Another student whose father was law school buddies with dubya (again, no kidding) called him up and said, "Dad how can you be a [you guessed it] corporate lawyer, if you were a philosophy major in college? Philosophy is about seeking the Truth!"

See? Aren't they adorable?

So the tears don't bother me except as they reveal the shortcomings of U.S. education. Then yes, I am definitely exasperated. And it is a touchstone. When I start to get annoyed at someone's ignorance about race, I think of those tears and figure a whole bushel of people never took a class like that one and so haven't have their big breakthrough about white privilege yet.*

How does this relate to online teaching?

It's a whole other ballgame, exasperating for its own reasons.

Online teaching per se is not the greatest gig I ever had. The technology is annoying and the support is not great and the syllabus is set in stone and written by someone other than me several years ago when the book we use for the class (that I am required to use) was in its first edition, rather than its second. So half the material for the class (again, not generated by me) is inaccurate. And they won't let me fix it. That is, I fix it every single semester by tweaking the syllabus as necessary, but they won't let me do a grand redesign of the class. I think it's because I'm a peon or something. But in the world of online teaching everyone is a peon. And anyway, fine, so don't let me redesign the class, but have someone do it! But no. So that's really a pain.

The students I teach online are pretty much a total demographic opposite of those kids in DC. Most of my students are African American (possibly because I am teaching African American literature, but I do think the school--brick and mortar and online--is majority African American anyway). Most of them are adults with kids, maybe partners, usually full-time jobs and many of them are military or military spouses. Over the summer I had a single mom of three who had three weeks' notice that she was going back to Afghanistan (again) and had to relocate her kids out of state with relatives on that short notice.

Some of my students are quite dazzlingly talented. They're keen readers and great writers. But some are honestly what I'd call barely literate. And it's awfully hard to do well in a class whose format is exclusively writing when you aren't sure what makes for a complete sentence. Most students fall between the extremes. But the ones at the low end exasperate me for the same reasons the tears exasperate me. These students are often quite sharp at picking up on concepts and themes in the literature we're reading. They "get it" right away even if they can't write a clear essay about it. They've been miseducated not to be able to express themselves.

(I have a real sense of where they come from, too, because the high school where I taught in DC sent many kids on to the school whose online program I am teaching for. I can picture them. I saw a lot of kids leave that school with HS diplomas who couldn't make sense of their own horoscope in the daily newspaper. I use that example because every day, I had kids asking me to explain their horoscope to them. The school got free papers. After a few requests of this sort, I started using the horoscopes to teach them reading comprehension and vocabulary on the sly. By the way, for a while there, I was teaching at the high school during the day while also teaching an evening class at the university. Talk about the social bends.)

Mind you, I don't think there's a smoke-filled room where bald white guys are saying "keep lynching out of AP history and make sure the poor Black kids don't have enough books." But there kind of almost is.

They don't pay me enough to work as hard as I'd need to work to get the low-end students up to snuff. But I do focus very much on writing, and I give them many opportunities to workshop drafts with me and other students and I try really hard to teach them at least one or two basic principals of writing they can take with them into other classes or work, or where ever.

I am somewhat torn about online teaching because it's just not that great for me or for my students. But it's accessible in a way that other education options are not. And many of my students--probably the majority of them--couldn't finish their degrees without doing at least some of the work online. So I am exploited labor and in a way, the students are cash-cows for the school (though I do think the program I teach for is as good as online education can get) and you can only do so much for the ones who are slipping through the cracks, but in another way, I get to work with a population who I really care about and want to see educated and getting better jobs and more respect and other things a degree can help bring.

And it's a convenient job. My teaching is all asynchronous because students can literally be scattered across the globe (I had a Navy guy on a ship in the Mediterranean once), so I check in at my convenience and I can take the job anywhere there's a $t@bucks with wireless access. I took it to Hawaii last summer. And there are five semesters a year in the is program so I can pick up a job almost anytime and get some spare cash. I took the summer job at the last minute after we were matched with Ivy last summer, so we could pay her living expenses. So it's a handy job to have. I suppose I'd recommend it for limited income, keeping your toe in the door of academia (maybe just a toenail, really) and meeting some interesting people. And it is the Way of the Future when it comes to higher education. It's so "cost effective" that universities can't resist it. Having some experience in it is probably an asset to a real academic resume (I go back and forth sometimes about whether it's an asset or a liability--probably depends on your field. Snobby English? Mostly liability I guess.)

And now I am going to end this tome wihtout a pithy conclusion. Again, I'm posting every day, what more do you want?

*Which reminds me of something that happened at the adoption conference that I need to blog about.

Easiest First

Jody asks many things, but I'll answer this bit first: ...how you manage your time; what you do with the girls during the day...

Just yesterday, I sat down and tried to write a schedule that reflects what I'm doing with my days. My hope was to find better ways to manage my time and perhaps tweak it to be more productive in areas ranging from bathroom cleaning to meal planning to writing my novel. I am going to keep track of my schedule for a couple of weeks, adding stuff that I am doing that I didn't put on it and tweaking the times, depending on when I actually do the things on the schedule. Today I found about three things that I had forgotten to put on the list and the times were off by an hour here, half an hour there.

Without further ado, here's the basic schedule so far, annotated for blog-friendliness:

9:30 tea in bed, clean kitchen, make breakfast, check email (Nat and Selina getted plopped on me by Uncle David and they crawl around in the bed for a few minutes before I get up. Nat putters around with me afterwards.)

10:15 eat with Nat (This is Nat's late morning snack. She eats breakfast with Cole or David around 7.)

10:30 get Nat changed and dressed (Most days she isn't dressed by the time I'm up, but when she is, half the time, it needs redoing from a Mama Shannon perspective.)

11:00 get Nat down for nap

11:15 get Selina fed, changed, dressed and down for nap (Selina floats through the earlier parts of the morning, on and off of David or Cole if they are around, in and out of the bouncy seat and on me, etc.)

11:45 put on laundry, shower and dress (I work on laundry all day. It's in the bathroom so I toss the loads around in there most of the day and pile the clean, dry clothes on a chair in the living room.)

12:15 lunch (This is wishful thinking. I really want to start being religious about making sure I eat lunch and eat it in a timely manner. Yesterday, Nat didn't sleep well and got up three times during nap so lunch didn't happen until she was up for good and I shared it with her for her post-nap snack. I have lost about 12 pounds since Selina came home and am currently at my rock-bottom decently healthy weight.)

12:30 check email, other computer stuff (Again this didn't happen because of the nap drama.)

1:00 Nat up, potty, dressed, hair done, snack/lunch (What/how much she eats kind of depends on what she ate before nap.)

1:30 Nat out with me or sitter (Tuesdays and Thursdays I have the wonderful Sarah from 1:30-4:30. She is an English major who wants to do Teach for America. I adore her. She is Nat's number one favorite person on the planet. When she's not here, we play in the yard, make trips to the post office, grocery shop, have a play date etc. at this time.)

3:00 Selina fed/put down for nap, Nat potty (All these potty references don't mean she's using the potty. She has peed in the potty exactly once and still wears regular diapers. But we are in the habit of changing in the bathroom and hanging out on the potty in the hopes she'll decide to go for it one of these days. Oh, and Selina has yet to actually nap in this window, but that's the goal.)

3:30 play/clean (laundry, kitchen, etc.) (Sometimes I just sit with Selina on Nat's bed while she "feeds" us tea party food (usually cupcakes!) or dances, or brings books over to read or whatever. Sometimes we do some laundry or other housecleaning together or I do it while Nat putters.)

4:00 fix dinner (If I put videos on for Nat, this is when I do it. Selina usually sits in the bouncy seat in the kitchen and chats with me while I cook. Sometimes Nat "helps" too. She's getting good at setting the table!)

4:45 feed Nat (She either gets what I've been cooking or some frozen Nat food which we affectionately call "green supper" and is made of multigrains, broccoli, beans and blackstrap molasses. She loves it. Go figure.)

5:15 dinner time for grownups (Nat eats "again" with us. She just can't usually wait until Cole makes it home. She's super grouchy when she's hungry!)

6:00 news

6:30 PJ/potty Nat

7:00 Nat bedtime (This includes a fifteen or twenty minute routine.)

7:15 Selina fed and bedtime (Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha... this works about 20% of the time, but it's getting slowly better.)

7:45 clean kitchen (dinner dishes), prep bottles, check email (You know, I actually spend a lot more time in the kitchen than this schedule reflects. Every time I am in the kitchen I clean something. And that happens about 10 times a day. A dish in the dishwasher here, a towel hung up there, a bottle rinsed here, an empty cereal box thrown away there... ad nauseum. I have a zero tolerance level for clutter in the kitchen, but that is not to say the kitchen is always actually clean.)

8:15 fold and put away laundry/teaching work/hang with Cole (I frequently pay half-baked attention to whatever show Cole is watching on t.v. while grading papers or whatnot on the laptop.)

9:30 computer (This is YOUR time, folks!)

10:30 in bed (This is my new goal anyhow. I have to admit I often stay up until 1 am or so and really regret it in the morning.)

11:00 lights out

overnight Selina (She usually wakes me up two or three times and around 3 or 4 am I end up bringing her to bed and don't sleep much after that until I pass her off to Cole between 5 and 6. By the way, Nat has been back to sleeping in until 6:30 or 7 these days. So that's good, at least!)

As an addendum to my schedule, I gave myself a cluster of things to be doing during my babysitting time. Here's the cluster:

writing, grading, business-hours phone calls, extra housekeeping (bake, make baby food, pack/unpack, organize space, sort baby clothes, make donation piles, plan meals, grocery shop, clean room of the week, etc.)

But my childcare is only for Nat, so how much I can really get done depends on how Selina does. Sometimes she is actually napping for part of the babysitting time, but often enough, she is not.

Having made this list, I was dismayed to see that I have no more time to manage. I know it looks like I sleep for 11 hours but I actually only sleep for 4-7 hours between Selina getting me up and my own stupid insomnia which I can't treat with melatonin since I do need to be able to wake up for the baby. When she's sleeping through the night (when! not if!) I will get back to the melatonin and hopefully sleep better, adding some productive hours to the day (probably to the night knowing me). I wish we could afford five days of afternoon babysitting for Nat, but as long as I keep working for nothing-to-very-little, I have to limit it to two. Next fall, we'll send her to a part-time preschool somewhere. Which leaves Selina, of course. So who knows when I'll get more wiggle room for writing etc.

And that is what we do all day.

A Grand Time Was Had by All

Well that was fun!

The adoption conference went really well this weekend. Not only did I get to meet Susan, Jenna and Dawn--all face-to-face for the first time--I got to see some of my favorite academic adoption writers, develop a new academic crush on another and meet my researcher friend, mentioned in the post below!

Our panel was very well received. It was like adoption summer camp except colder. We had a terrific mix of academic and non-academic, first and adoptive parents (one of the best mixes at the whole conference) on the panel and in the audience, which leant itself to fabulous discussion after the panelists read their work.

Now I've got two new articles brewing in my brain that need homes and time to get written. If only my desire for sitting and thinking and reading and writing wasn't in such (slightly losing) competition with my desire to hold my babies while they're young enough to let me! It looks like chiropractor's advice aside, the baby wrap is coming back out this week...

We Are Back

But I have papers to grade and I am trying to churn out a paper for this conference. It will be my first academic-esque presentation in something like two years and my first quasi-professional adoption writing, so I am really bummed that I have to write it in a sleep-deprived stupor. I just hope it won't be complete drivel.

Workmama Comp

The driver who caused the accident last Friday was uninsured.

But we have unisured driver insurance so we are covered and then covered some more.

One thing we are covered for is compensation for lost work. I talked to the adjuster today and she asked if I had lost work due to my injury.

"Yes," I told her. "I am a stay-at-home mom and I can't lift my children. I can't change diapers or feed the baby" (it strains my whiplash to hold her in a cradle-hold). "I am going to have to spend a lot of extra money on baby sitting while I recover from this injury. Can I receive some compensation for the baby sitting expenses?"

The adjuster had quite obviously never heard that question before (which, the more I think about it, surprises me) and she kept repeating "well, if your employer says you can't work because of your injury you can get compensation." You know how people who are programed to say the same things all day can't really function off-script? It was like that. She kept saying "if you can't work due to your injury..." blah blah blah.

Clearly, changing diapers and feeding babies isn't work if no one pays you to do it. Even if, when you stop doing it, you have to pay someone else to do it.

Makes all the sense in the world.

New Site

I decided to put my jewelry in a blog format, as the old format was cumbersome for me to keep up, what with the amateur hand-coding and all...

So the book club blog is no more. If we want to read books together, I figure we can do it here.

Meanwhile, here's the jewelry. What do you think?