Translation

I wrote an essay for my English class on learning to speak Minnesotan. I won't make you read the whole thing, instead, I'd like to offer you the following translations, should you, traveling to or from Minnesota, ever want to communicate with the locals.

West Coast Speak .........................Minnesota Equivalent
Muggy.........................................................Humid
Lunch..........................................................Dinner
Dinner.........................................................Supper
Casserole....................................................Hot Dish
Ok, I've got to go.......................................Well, I suppose...
I'm hungry.................................................Oh, if you're hungry, we can eat
I feel like crap...........................................Oh, things could be worse

The biggest translation problem is not the words themselves, but the indirect way in which the words are used. I've learned that a true Minnesotan never has (or shows, anyway) strong emotions or desires. Being a fairly direct person, I've had a lot of difficulty adjusting to this.

I don't think I'll adopt the very indirect approach, but understanding the local custom helps a little bit.

Safety

How did we all make it out of childhood alive? Personally, I owe a great deal of gratitude to Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of the antibiotic effects of Penicillin. If it weren't for this wonder drug, I'd probably be dead - I had at least three ear infections a year, sinus infections, strep throat. Yeah, I'm a hardy specimen.

Beyond the raging bacterial infections that I had to fight off, I grew up outside the era of the extra-safe childhood. Like, I remember the 80 foot tall slide made of unforgiving steel that towered above actual concrete. The slide would heat up all day long under the scorching sun silently waiting for our little exposed legs to touch it so it could give us a fine searing. If someone had poured olive oil on the thing, I'm sure the school playground would have smelled of scent of lightly sauteed school children.

If the burns inflicted upon us were not enough to challenge our existence, we had to ensure that we would never fall off the damn thing. Because if we did, we didn't land on that nice blacktop or the soft rubber mulch they use now. We would have hit the concrete and left a school-child body-shaped dent. Of course, that would mean we would have bled or broke something, so the upshot is that we would have gotten to go home early that day. Sweet! I can hear the shouts now "Oh, Jenny! Your'e clavicle shattered! You're so lucky!"

Now things are so very different. As a slightly neurotic parent, I am glad things are safer. There are so many things to worry about. Things to choke on, fall off of, get hit by, run into, and so on. With my particular children, I have two different sets of worries. With Adam, I have never worried about his physical development getting too ahead of his cognitive development. He's never been overly confident and doesn't usually climb things. But, he is very clumsy. I swear he'll be standing still in the middle of the room, nothing around him and he'll just keel over like some schoolyard bully just tackled him. I think he gets that from me.

Natasha, on the other hand, well, she is a spider. At 7 months, she was climbing things that Adam barely started climbing at 18 months. She's very small, which helps, but she's also very strong. I think she has the strength of 10 grown men. Every ounce of physical self-assuredness that Adam may lack, Natasha makes up for in spades. So, yes, she worries me.

I vascillate between wanting to protect my children from all the dangers that are lurking waiting to snatch them from my protective grip and make us spend time getting to know the ER nurse, and thinking that if, somehow, I made it through childhood with a few minor injuries, that my children can too. But then I get the One Step Ahead catalog and wonder if I should be doing more than keeping the kids off the table and out of the street.

Like, maybe I should buy two of these so that when they do fall down, which they inevitably will, the kids will not sustain a massive head injry.



Yes, this bumper bonnet is an actual product marketed to terrified parents like myself so that when Jr. slips on a piece of macaroni n' cheese, he won't hurt his head. Thanks One Step Ahead.


Thank goodness Natasha and Adam are past the crawling stage, otherwise I would have to buy these knee protectors. Wait, Natasha! You can't crawl yet, you need your knee protectors on!



Frankly, it's kind of funny watching a baby learn to crawl on a hardwood floor. And what baby would actually keep those little legwarmers on? Personally, I think it's a way for the leg warmer industry to try to make a comeback. They market to babies, hooking them on the product early on.

Ok, ok, you argue that accidents are the leading cause of death among children between 1-15. You make a good point, but the biggest number of these deaths are caused by car accidents. Even with $300 + car seats, we still manage to leave our children at risk in the car. Fortunately, our hospital has a car seat class. It's a two-hr class designed to scare the shit out of expecting parents who are not only stressed about the major impending life change, but now have to learn how to properly install a gadget with 9,000 parts, including 857 buckles.

I don't mean to sound righteous, but back in the day, safety in the car meant sitting as far away from your big sister as you could so she wouldn't kick you.

Somehow, all of us parents have reached adulthood. Looking at all the safety products, we scratch our heads wondering how we did it. I would like to say it's survival of the fittest, but given my track record with illnesses, I think in my case it's a combination of luck and survival of the meekest.

Now if I can figure out how to keep Natasha from spinning on the ceiling fan, I think I might be able to get my kids out of childhood alive.

Technorati Tags: toddlers, safety, motherhood, mothering, car seats

Peak Oil

I REALLY do not want to have a political blog. I've tried to keep all my posts about my error filled journey into and through motherhood, but I can no longer resist the urge to post about something that has been eating away at me for a long time.

As soon as I started my summer vacation from school, I decided I would do some light summer reading. Something casual, lofty, and light-hearted.

I went to the library and picked out a few things from various genres:

- A book about parenting (I usually don't read these, but, to my dismay, I actually like the Supernanny!)

- A cookbook (I think I got one on one-pot meals and one for making your own babyfood)

- The Best American Short Stories from 2004

- Crossing the Rubicon

The only one I kept beyond the due date was Crossing the Rubicon. I mean, it is almost 1,000 pages, but that's not the only reason I kept it so long. I would say it was eye-opening, but a better term might be pants-soiling. I had originally attempted to get a book by Richard Clarke, but none were available. So I grabbed this one instead.

I don't know how to convey to you how scary of a book this is. I'll just pretend to be a bad movie reviewer and say...if you only read one book this year, this should be it.

This book, by the way, did not fit the "lighthearted" requirement. It was just something I felt compelled to read after seeing an interview with Mike Ruppert on The Daily Show a long time ago. Rubicon is a non-fiction account of how and why the government was involved in the attacks of 9/11. However, the most enlightening concept within the book is the subject of Peak Oil - how it rules our lives and how it is fueling (pardon the pun) the current wars in the middle east.

Go now, and follow the link to the book. In case you don't feel like scanning my preceeding paragraphs, here it is again. I doubt that many of you feel like reading all 1,000 pages of the book, so instead, I have compiled a list of great links that will provide an overview of what Ruppert discusses in his tome.

I implore you to read as many of these as possible and to familiarize yourself with peak oil and to decide what behaviors of yours you are going to change so that you contribute less to the problem.

Wiki explainer of Peak Oil

Peak Oil Primer by the Energy Bulletin

Peak Oil News

The most terrifying "Project for the New American Century" and more importantly, an anti-PNAC site

You may disagree with the prophecies Peak Oilers are predicting. Many of their predictions are quite grim. And since having the veil ripped off my eyes, I have had a bowling ball in my stomach thinking about how it is going to affect us. One thing is clear, we are on the verge of WWIII now. So, unable to control world events, I am changing my behavior as best I can.

We'll be trading in our gas guzzler SUV for a Toyota Hybrid. I plant as much of my own food as I can and am learning to be a decent gardener (still, at this rate, if we ate only what I grew, we'd get about 2 beets every 9 months, but we'd sure be up to our ears in tomatoes during August). I am going to put in a compost bin because I feel so wasteful throwing out scraps of food that can be used for something. I'm trying to be less of a consumer and more of a make-do'er; relearning the lessons of thriftyness that our parents' parents knew and lived so well. We have a long way to go but I feel better trying to be more self-sufficient.

One thing that does make me feel better is trying to support the effort of relocalization, which is the antithesis of globalization. While I do support knowing about other cultures as much as one can, globalization enslaves citizens to huge mega-corporations in favor of economies of scale, which only benefit the heads of the economies (CEO's, our government), localization gives the power back to the people. Unfortunately for me, living in Minnesota, it also means that if you only shop at the farmer's market for you food, the only vegetables you eat are rhubarb, tomatoes, and corn. I'll sure miss my Kiwi's from California and my grapes from Peru.

Back from camping

We took the boat and the camper up to Starbuck, MN. In case you are wondering, no, there is no Starbucks there. There is, however, a small coffee shop that purported to have WiFi access. We, being internet fiends, took our laptops and were disappointed when we couldn't get it working; something was wrong with Qwests DHCP server and the people running the shop were not only unknowledgeable about their WiFi, but also very unwilling to help. But we did get coffee.

We spent a lot of time at the lake and Adam went on his first tube ride. Devin again proved his masterful kneeboarding skeelz by jumping waves and attempting a 360. His wipeouts were very impressive.

Here are a few pics: