Reasoning

Anyone can tell you, and everyone will tell you, that attempting to reason with a small child is a lost cause, a road to madness.

Except it's not true.

So far, my findings (based on a sample size of one child) are that as early as 18 months, explaining the logic behind parental decisions does make a difference. Not that it always gains compliance or averts a tantrum, but at least half the time it helps. And it probably makes me a better parent - if I'm focused on explaining why we need to brush our teeth, it keeps me calmer than the escalating cycle of "say aahh, please... open your mouth... open your mouth now... DAMMIT KID OPEN YOUR MOUTH!" Also, if I can't explain my reasons, sometimes it's because there's no good reason to be found.

I have a feeling that this approach to parenting will yield an amusing/maddening echo in another year or two, when she can turn it around and give me logical reasons for doing what she wants rather than what I want her to do. If she learns to out-logic me, I'll be in trouble.

As promised: pictures!

Don't get too excited; this whole posting of photos thing is not going to happen often.

With that disclaimer, I know I've been all about the garden lately, but for those of you who like toddlers more than plants, I'll start with a few photos of Annika, taken by her grandpa Khavin:



And some more of Annika, taken by me:


This is our new tree - a dwarf Hinoki cypress 'Fernspray Gold.' It's in a cedar planter, occupying a spot where a small rhododendron had declined and finally died this spring. It will eventually get about 6 feet tall; maybe less if it stays in a container.
On either side are smaller pots with an assortment of foliage-interest plants: purple-leaved ornamental sweet potatoes, "fiber optic" grass, creeping jenny, clover, dracaena and asparagus fern.

Below is raised bed #1, and from left to right it contains: 'european mesclun mix' from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, parsnips (the ones you can barely see), baby bok choi, spinach, and crimson bunching onions.

Here's that same bed when it was first set up, almost exactly one month before the above photo was taken. Set up: 3/24; above photo, 4/23. Hmm, those dates have symmetry. Cool.

Here's the first salad harvested from that mesclun mix. Yummy, although a little spicier than I usually like my salads to be. Also, it annoys me that I don't know what all the different types of leafy-green things are. Will have to start buying single-variety salad greens until I figure out what I like.

Here's a closer look at those baby bok choi... so adorable!

Meanwhile, in the basement under lights, tomato seedlings have gotten big enough that I don't think they're exactly seedlings anymore. They need to hang on for another week, and then they'll get to go outside.

Outside of the veggie garden, flowers are blooming... here's the bleeding heart that I planted last year.

Here's the dwarf crested iris (Iris cristata) that I'm so delighted to see bloom, because this is its 3rd year here and the first flower it has produced.

In the same shaded area as the iris, a fern (whose name I have forgotten) has emerged:

The lily shoots that I was so excited to see. When I found them, they weren't this big; they were mere nubbins nestled among the weeds.

These 'Starry Night' violas died back last year, but not before they left babies behind. Here's one of the youngins, carrying bravely on. And admittedly, clashing something wicked with the tulip just behind it.

My favorite of the three kinds of tulips we inherited with the house - a vibrant pink.

A passalong from my mother: foamflower, a woodland native.

That's all for now. More pictures... uh... when I get around to it.

Pleasant surprises

I think one of the things that is most addictive about gardening is the blend of the predictable and unpredictable. I can pretty well rely on daffodils coming up and blooming every spring; on the yew near our front door trying to grow big enough to block the path and my half-heartedly pruning it back, on maple seedlings coming up everywhere (including the gutters if said gutters weren't recently cleaned); and on some of the plants I bought in previous years having sadly departed.

My expectations are set fairly low when it comes to perennials actually being perennial. This probably has a lot to do with my first attempt at a garden in our yard: back by the shed, there's a very shaded spot in which I envisioned a mostly-native woodland garden - lush ferns, spring ephemerals, hostas and so on. What I failed to realize is that woodland soil is not what we have in that spot. Instead of a rich leaf-litter-derived humus, we have thick orangish clay back there, drained of nutrients (and moisture, in summer) by the shallow roots of trees. Now, I did amend the soil when I first started planting things back there, but not nearly enough. The net result is that 2/3 of the things I put there haven't made it, and of the ones that have lived, some of them are just hanging on rather than thriving and blooming.

But last fall after most of the plants were dormant, I put a thick layer of leaf mold and compost over the area, and by now it has mostly been broken down and worm-eaten into the soil. The plants that are left appreciate it, and for the first time since it was put there in 2008, the dwarf crested iris (Iris cristata) has a flower bud - I'm finally going to see what it looks like in bloom.

Elsewhere in the garden, I thought I'd lost the native Turk's Cap lily I planted last year because I didn't see anything there when the oriental lilies were already 2 or 3 inches tall. But in the process of weeding, I found that for one thing, I'd been looking in the wrong spot, and for another, it simply was later to emerge: as I was pulling out wild strawberry and wild garlic, I found not one but six (!) stubby little lily shoots coming up.

The two monardas I've planted have come back and are just waiting for warmer weather to make them grow big. The lavendar has some new sprigs of green, though not very many - it's probably in a location too wet for it. Physostegia seems to have self-sown, or spread underground, or both, and is coming up all over the place (I discovered after I bought it that it has this tendency). Intriguingly, the Dusty Miller that is supposedly an annual managed to survive the wicked winter, and is making new growth. I had no idea it could do that; I'm glad I didn't pull it out to "tidy up" at the end of the season last year.

I promise, I promise, I'll try to get some photos taken and put them here soon!

Gardens and therapy, psychology, fiction...

At May Dreams, Carol recently wrote about the overlapping ways in which gardening is therapeutic, and sometimes also the reason we gardeners need therapy.

I tried to explain the other day to my non-gardening husband why I feel the urge to dig in the dirt, to plant and weed and trim and water. And why I want a big rainwater storage tank that will be horrifically ugly until I cover it with vines or screen it with bamboo or lattice, and why I want to bother with growing food in the first place, when it's so much easier (and often cheaper) to just buy it, and why I have a lot of trouble preventing myself from buying random assortments of plants and putting them where I think they might grow well, rather that with any particular aesthetic goal or restraint. Alas, I'm not sure there's any way to have these things make sense to a non-gardener... but fortunately, he demonstrates great patience and forbearance nonetheless!

With Sparkling Squirrel, I pondered why it is that gardening is rarely a central theme of novels - maybe because it's so rich with opportunities for metaphor that it seems too easy?

Reading about the Square Foot style of vegetable gardening, I realized that the most important thing that's "different" about it is not a different shape of plot, but that it takes some of the quirks of human nature into account, in addition to having plenty to say about Mother Nature. Specifically, the benefits of placing limits on the size of the garden, and the number of seeds planted at any one time: people love to till up a big plot of earth in the spring, but keeping it weeded and watered gets to be an overwhelming task. People sprinkle a whole packet of seeds along a row, with every intention to thin the seedlings - but it goes against the grain to yank up those adorable little sprouts, so we tell ourselves we'll do it later. Acknowledging these tendencies and planning around them instead of trying to ignore or dismiss them is very wise, I think.

Almost all my reading (and thinking) lately has centered around gardening, can you tell?

Random garden notes

Inside:

Tomato seedlings: both varieties started 3/20 have just begun to put out true leaves. They took 5-6 days to germinate but have grown fast since then.

Wonderberry: nothing yet, even though it supposedly wants the same conditions as tomatoes

Strawberry: only 2 containers have sprouts, out of 12! I didn't think strawberries should be so difficult. Planted 3/20

Mesclun mix sown in garden: beginning to sprout, though weather has mostly been chilly since planting so not much is happening.

Onion: little threadlings outside appear not bothered by cold, though not exactly growing fast either

Hardy Geranium: variety #1 is growing like mad, variety #2 is just starting

Rose Campion: first batch is doing fine, second is coming up

Thyme: sprouted recently, took about 10 days to do so

Tiarella cordifolia: nothing. maybe it needs cold stratification? if it doesn't sprout soon, I'll put it in the garden next to the original plant.

Lavendar: nothing, harrumph. might need more warmth.

Outside:

Crocuses are done blooming, about 2/3 of daffodils are blooming, iris and daylily are sprouting, hosta is starting to sprout, sedum has adorable rosettes of new leaves.

Spring Fever

It's finally warm here, and this has prompted the annual re-emergence of my obsession with gardening. Daffodil buds are visible a few inches above the soil, crocuses are blooming (not in our cool shady yard, yet, but in warm spots around the area), and I peeked under the dead leaves of last year's irises to discover new green shoots just starting to poke out. The wild stonecrop that I brought home from a visit to Sparkling Squirrel last summer is happily growing in its container - I didn't know how tough that little plant is, but it survived a too-rainy summer and a cold snowy winter and is already green and content-looking.

This year is the year I will finally have raised beds for vegetables. We're starting with 2 beds, 3' x 6' each, and I already bought more seeds of more different kinds of plants than I can possibly grow in that amount of space. With my husband's help, I set up lights in the basement to start seeds last weekend, and just a few days later I already have a salad green mix sprouted, some onion seedlings up (I should have started them earlier, but oh well - I'll know that for next year), and of the seeds I collected last year, the Geranium maculatum seeds are germinating already. I also have lavendar seeds, rose campion, cinquefoil, and seeds from several interesting unidentified plants from the Penn gardens.

I haven't settled yet on a method of keeping records of my gardening activities. There's something satisfying about writing things down by hand, but there are definite advantages to electronic recordkeeping: searchability, ease of including photos, etc. What do you think - gardening-tagged posts on this blog? A separate blog? Or is reading someone else's garden notes and non-artistic photos even more boring than having to look at someone else's vacation pictures?

Broccoli Rabe

I've tried the above vegetable a handful of times, and never liked it - too bitter. But Eating Well featured broccoli rabe as the vegetable star of the latest issue, and included tips for toning down the bitterness. Namely: blanch it, and balance it with other flavors. The broccoli rabe and orzo salad with lemon and feta was very good. I wonder, though - was it only the prep technique that made it likeable, or is it that my palate has grown more tolerant of bitter flavors since I last tried it? Many of the things I like these days (coffee, strong beer, very-dark chocolate) are bitter, so it could be both.

Headscratcher

About 20 minutes before starting this, I put Annika to bed. I feel that this is a blogpost-worthy event, in part because it must have been the weirdest bedtime "routine" she has had yet.

Things were fine from teethbrushing to changing into pajamas and on through story time, with only the usual amount of protest at each step. The only thing that was slightly unusual is that instead of sitting in my lap during stories, she wanted to squeeze herself onto the chair next to me. But okay, fine, it's actually easier to read that way, and the chair is (sort of) big enough.

After stories, I braced myself and said, "Ok, that was the last story for tonight, time to turn off the lights." This is usually when the howling begins, and tonight was no exception. She cried, said "No!" about 500 times, then wanted "Chair!" So, I sat down in the chair with her in my arms - typically, she will snuggle on my lap and fall asleep, then I'll move her into the crib. But instead, she squirmed and hollered until she maneuvered herself off my lap and onto the chair next to me. We sat like this for a few minutes, then she asked for water. I gave her the cup, but because she was leaning back in the chair, half of the water that she intended to go into her mouth went onto her pajamas instead, resulting in a fresh bout of crying. Lights on, towel the pajamas dry, lights off again. More crying, and my attempt to get her to snuggle on my lap only resulted in her climbing down to the floor. So she lay down on the rug, still wailing "no no nooooo nooo no..." while I sat on the floor next to her. "Do you want your blanket?" She said yes, so I covered her up. "Do you want Barkley (her stuffed puppy that she sleeps with)?" Yes again, so I handed her Barkley. I kissed her on the forehead, told her I'd see her in the morning, and closed the door. Not surprisingly, there was soon much wailing and rattling of the door, so I went back in and ask if she wants to snuggle on the chair. She said yes, but again she refused to sit on my lap. I couldn't let her fall asleep in the chair the way she evidently wanted to, though, because it would be nothing short of miraculous to move her into her crib without waking her up, and it obviously wouldn't be safe to let her stay in the chair. So I put her in the crib; the bawling increased in volume and she pushed her feet against the bars, trying to figure out how to brace herself to climb out. By now, my patience had started to wear thin, so I just said "You're going to have to lie down and go to sleep now. That's how this works." I gently made her lie down, covered her with the blanket, gave her Barkley again, and said "Night night."

And she replied "Night night" and was quiet. From Hyde to Jekyll, exactly as if someone flipped the switch to "off" between one howl and the drawing-in of breath to get the next howl ready. I closed the door and went downstairs, and I heard one more halfhearted moan, then nothing more.

I have no idea why she wants to sit on the chair instead of my lap all of a sudden, or why she is more willing to lie down on the floor than in the crib, or what exactly made her decide to shut up and go to sleep so suddenly. Toddlers are weird creatures sometimes.

In other news, I made Chicken Chili Verde on Saturday while my parents were taking care of Annika, and it was a hella lot of work but the end result was worth it.

I seem to be on a kick of reading books about the Mogul Empire and the world around it at that time - I just finished "The Twentieth Wife" and started "The Enchantress of Florence," both of which take place at least in part during the reign of Akbar the Great. I'm tickled by the overlap, because I didn't realize it when I picked out the two books. "The Twentieth Wife" is enjoyable reading, but not great literary art in my opinion. "The Enchantress of Florence" is by Salman Rushdie, so I can safely say that the writing is wondrous and bizarre, but since I just started, I can't say much about the storyline. I also recently read "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell, and I'm not sure what to say about that one - it was beautiful but tragic, so although I recommend it to any of my bookworm friends, the recommendation comes with the warning that it's not an easy read.

Playful

One of my favorite parenting-related blogs, Child of Mind, is running a weekly "parenting challenge" where each week, there's a particular approach/technique for small-child discipline that they're exploring, and requesting the readers' feedback on.

The first one is playful parenting - the idea of using humor and play to guide your kid's behavior, instead of coercion/threats/punishments/rewards. Specifically, when faced with a situation where your child tends to put up resistance to something you want done (brushing teeth, getting dressed, taking a bath) you avoid the upcoming power struggle by saying "Let's pretend..." and make up a scenario where the troublesome activity turns into a game/fantasy. Let's pretend that if you put on the red shirt, you turn into Superman... let's pretend that this bathtub is a pond and you're a frog...

I like this one and although Annika doesn't quite understand "pretending" yet, I do try to use humor and laughter to bypass temper tantrums and power struggles, and I can definitely see using this technique as she gets older. Unfortunately, right now the main sticking point with her is bedtime, and I haven't figured out a "let's pretend" scenario that would encourage her to go to sleep.

I do wonder though - at what age do kids start to see through this and/or stop enjoying it? I would guess sometime around 5?

Raven mother

I discovered that in German, "rabenmutter" (raven mother) is a put-down, a derogatory term for a mother who doesn't care about her kids - particularly mothers who put their kids in day-care to go back to work. A mother who flies away from the nest, so to speak.

But since I don't have a gut-level grasp of the implications, to me "raven mother" sounds really cool. I am a raven mother, hear me caw!

In other news, this morning Annika would not put on pants except the ones with dinosaurs on them. Pink flower-embroidered shirt, and T-REX pants!

Resolved

In this illustrious and numerically lovely year 2010, I resolve that:

- I will cook a new recipe at least once a month. January is already taken care of.

- I will listen to two new songs a week if it kills me! And it just might, you never know. That's what I call living dangerously.

- I will spend no less than two hours a week petting and/or cuddling my cats. Strictly for their own good, of course.

- I will drink good beer at least once a month, and eat dark chocolate at least once a week, on the grounds that alcohol and chocolate have recently been deemed health foods and staying healthy is very important to me.

- If at any time I find myself feeling guilty about what cannot be helped (for instance, the inescapable fact that spending more time at work means spending less time at home), I will promptly find something to do or think about that provides a more sensible reason for feelings of guilt.

MDS

This is a chunk of a large article I found here. http://www.brainchildmag.com/essays/spring2004_feature.htm

I'm posting it here for a number of reasons - in part, it's for my many friends who have recently become parents or who soon will. Food for thought, a defense against the "no one told me" shock. It's an interesting mental model of what happens in women's lives after children arrive, because it goes beyond just looking at individual issues as separate and unrelated. For anyone reading this blog and contemplating parenthood, read the whole article, not just the section I re-posted here. It's long but worthwhile.

But I'm also posting it as an answer. Family and friends have been asking when/if I will have another child, and usually say I don't know, but that's not quite true. I'm in the second third (see red text). I'll have another when and if my reserves of strength/health/sanity are rebuilt to the extent that I think I can handle another kid without being in the third third.

*****************************************************

What's more, a new, small field of study is focusing on mothers on a day-to-day basis, particularly on the effect of mothering on a woman's general health and well-being. For the time being, these researchers are concerned not with major illnesses like cancer or postpartum depression, but with all the minor ailments that can add up to a life lived at a lower level of happiness and satisfaction than it could be.

They're concerned about mothers who can't or don't take good care of themselves, don't eat well, don't sleep enough, don't get out enough, who spiral down, sometimes slowly, sometimes alarmingly fast, into a state of low energy, depression, marital dissatisfaction, guilt and disappointment, unhappiness with themselves and with their lives. These factors all add up to a condition that the authors of a recent book have dubbed Maternal Depletion Syndrome (MDS), a serious bio-psycho-social condition that they say affects the well-being of many women who bear and/or raise children.

The book that outlines MDS, Mother Nurture: A Modern Mom's Guide to a Healthy Body, Mind, and Intimate Relationships (Penguin, 2002), was written by psychologist Rick Hanson, nutritionist Jan Hanson, and OB/GYN Ricki Pollycove, the former chief of gynecology at California Pacific Medical Center. Together they're on a mission to bring MDS to greater public awareness.

In a Powerpoint presentation that Hanson and Pollycove often present to med school classes, they list "common presenting problems of women"--in other words, ailments that bring women in their childbearing and child-rearing years into their doctors' offices. These range from depression to low libido to auto-immune conditions, excess weight, fatigue, and gallbladder or kidney problems. The single common factor that increases the risk of each one of these conditions is motherhood, the authors point out.

The insidious thing about it, says Hanson, is that motherhood isn't usually considered a factor in any one of these conditions. Or if it is, it's written off as "just part of the job." Take fatigue, for instance, or stress. How many times have you heard people say that it's all part of having kids?

Maternal depletion is the number one unacknowledged health care problem in the U.S., Hanson says. We should take this condition seriously not only for the sake of the individual women themselves, but also for the impact on our country and the economy when so many women are "running on empty." Children are neglected, marriages get into trouble, jobs suffer--"all of which, one way or the other, costs our economy billions," Hanson says.

But research that correlates motherhood with particular health complaints is spotty. "There are virtually no longitudinal studies that match mothers with non-mothers over, say, a three to five year period to assess their risk for certain conditions," Hanson says. He and his co-authors spent months doing a thorough review of the medical literature, in the end compiling eighty pages of references. ("I'm the guy in your seventh grade class with three pages of footnotes on his book report," he says.) All of it adds up to a big gaping hole in our knowledge of how being a mother affects us on a day-to-day level.

The authors are both adamant and anti-alarmist. They don't want to sensationalize their findings, but they firmly believe it's both pervasive and invisible. It's been so easily ignored up to now, Pollycove says, partly because our culture doesn't like to hear mothers complain. And women who are ground down are less able to muster the energy to make a big issue of their health. Hanson also points to a psycho-social reason we've overlooked MDS to date: At some level, he believes, we're aware that our own mothers may not have always had an easy or wholly enjoyable time raising us. That makes us feel guilty, which makes us more inclined to stick our heads in the sand when faced with evidence that many women are suffering through their child-rearing lives today. "And you can't underestimate the economic motive either," he says. "We don't like to acknowledge that we are always exploiting the unpaid labor of mothers."

MDS happens, they say, when three common factors collide: the high physical and mental demands of bearing and raising children; the low resources many mothers have on hand when they have kids (ranging from poor-quality food to insufficient help from a partner); and "personal vulnerabilities," such as having children at an older age, a prior health problem, a temperament that's unsuited to the chaos of living with young children, or a bout of postpartum depression.

By their calculations, one-third of all mothers will sail through the birth and caregiving years relatively easily. They're likely to have the deck stacked in their favor: a loving, helpful partner, good overall health, youth, enough money, and "plain old good luck," Hanson says. One-third are likely to find it more challenging, suffering some depletion, fatigue, depression, or difficulty with their relationships--but they're able to rise out of it by the time their youngest child is in kindergarten.

The remaining one-third of mothers are at risk for significant depletion. "They have a really difficult time, especially in the early years, with more serious health problems and deeper depletion that has longer lasting consequences," Hanson says. "Their depletion may last into their children's teenage years, and then collide with the challenges of the transition to menopause."

Those mothers often suffer for years without pinpointing the problem. "It typically takes one to two years for a woman who has underlying risk factors to drain their deepest resources," Hanson says. "They'll have a lot of subclinical problems: they're run down, they're having weird periods, they've got no patience, they have insomnia, or a loss of libido. They see their doctor for the typical six-minute appointment, and they may get one of those thing looked at.

"But if one more stressor is added to her life--a spouse's job loss, a difficult child, even less sleep than normal--she starts circling the drain of depression and depletion."

Many women are able to begin building up their resources (sleep, time apart from their baby, healthier eating habits) at about the time their child starts coming out of the toddler years. But if she hasn't fully "restocked" before the next baby comes along, the cumulative stress could drain her more quickly and more deeply.

Some of the underlying issues of MDS can be easily addressed, they say. There are simple medical tests that can pinpoint a thyroid problem (which is often a culprit in fatigue), for instance, or a nutritional overhaul. There are relaxation techniques for dealing with day-to-day stress and communication strategies to help an MDS mother talk more effectively with a spouse or partner. But the first thing that has to happen, they say, is that the mother herself has to acknowledge that her health matters. "I've been trying for twenty-seven years to sell women on the idea of taking care of themselves," Pollycove says wryly. "It's a hard sell. Women will buy ten books on pregnancy and the newborn stage. But after that, it's like they drop off the planet."

"We're not knocking the wonderful parts of motherhood. We're just trying to point out that if we can gain some recognition for the idea of Maternal Depletion Syndrome, more research can be done," Hanson adds. "Maybe we could find a way to flag those women who are higher risk earlier in their child-rearing careers which would not only help them, but help the children under their care, and even the economy.

"Motherhood is not a clinical condition," he says. "On the other hand, it's a very serious undertaking that doesn't stop when mom and baby go home from the hospital."

Flying

When we first saw our house, there were several major factors that made me want it - a large yard and a kitchen I didn't hate, for instance. I could very easily explain why I wanted those, although in retrospect my ideas about the benefits of a large yard might, just might, have been based on wildly optimistic assumptions.

There were some other things I liked, but couldn't easily explain. For example, the living room has 2 doorways, so that it's possible to walk from the living room to the kitchen to the dining room to the hallway and into the living room again, counterclockwise. I knew I liked this feature, but wasn't exactly sure what practical benefits it might offer.

Recently we've found one.

Annika learned about the game of "flying" - being held horizontally, arms outstretched Superman-style, with me running her around the house this way. It's especially fun to chase something, be it a cat or Daddy. Much better to run circles around downstairs than to be confined to one room at a time!

Now if only I was willing and able to "fwy" her as much as she wanted... alas, mama gets tired after a couple of rounds of this. Then there are many requests of "fwy? fwy? mama! fwy! mamamama!" and usually it all ends in tears. But only a little bit of tears, then she's distracted by something shiny.

That, I think, pretty much sums up the joy and pain of life with a toddler. Within the span of 15 minutes, you get a nice little tour of human emotion starting at baseline mood, onward to ecstatic giggling, to frustrated foot-stomping, to tears of bitter anguish, and back to baseline.

Words

Annika now has about 50 words she can say. Here's a not-necessarily-comprehensive list, in approximate chronological order. Notice that "mommy" and "daddy" were not anywhere near the top of the list.


kitty (kih-yee)
cat
no
uh-oh
bye-bye
go
boom boom - used for any loud noise
head (heh)
nose (no)
mouth (mouw)
ear
eye
beep beep - the noise the microwave makes
hot (hah)
tree
sky
down (dow)
peepee
hi
bath (bah)
shoe
green (gree)
light (lie)
daddy (dah-ee)
hello? (he'o) to "answer" a cell phone
peas (pee)
moss (maw)
shirt (sher)
hat (haa)
mom
acorn (ee-cor)
flower (fow)
meow (meeow)
hug (huh)
up
door (doh)
spoon (poon)
book (buh)
vroom vroom - to describe the sound of a car or motorcyle. she likes motorcycles, god help us.
crayon (cra'n)
teeth (tee)
corn (cor)
cup (cuh)
food (foo)
car (cah)
plane (pain)
foot (fuh)
hand (hah)
broccoli (bah-ee)
belly
Barkley (baw-ee) the name of her toy puppy
hair
ball (baw)
night-night (nie nie)

Book quote

Favorite quote from a book I recently read:

"How do you measure love? Quantify it? It's not something you can put on a scale or pour into a beaker to examine its volume and viscosity."

- Sirantha Jax in "Wanderlust", a sci-fi/romance novel by Ann Aguirre

The Ethics of Modern Agriculture

http://www.springerlink.com/content/l12858476u034458/fulltext.pdf

I thought this paper was thought-provoking.

One sentence summary: compared to either pre-industrial agriculture or organic farming, modern agriculture is better for people, better for the environment, worse for farm animals.

Discuss (but only if you actually read the paper - it's only 5 pages long).

Moss snob

"The work of moss gardening has an elitist quality that I must admit I find appealing. Every John and Jane grows grass. Only Nature's chosen grow moss."

- George Schenk, author of "Moss Gardening: Including Lichens, Liverworts and Other Miniatures"

I'm infatuated with moss lately, and having stumbled across this quote at Each Little World blog, I am amused that this apparently makes me elitist. And among Nature's chosen!

I've started removing grass in some already mossy patches of our yard, mainly around trees where the roots make it difficult or impossible to mow. There's something very Zen about both the process and the result.

I've also collected some mosses to try to grow in a shallow dish indoors... sort of like a bonsai garden. Er, without any trees. Just the moss. Hard to tell if any of them are actually growing, though.

What you wish for

Since we moved back East, we have been complaining to each other that the summer storms here are weak and disappointing compared to those of Kansas. They're also less likely to remove our roof, but that's besides the point.

Yesterday as I was driving home... after a weekend of hard work on gardening projects (more details to follow when I can post photos), the wind kicked up, a torrential downpour became more of a horizontal-pour, the lightning stabbed down, and it HAILED. Pea-sized up to nickel-sized balls of ice. Now that's what I call a storm!

There's a price for such entertainment, though. My Cherokee Purple tomato plant fell over, and although the stem appears to be intact, I'm not yet certain whether it will survive. Same with the cute little Patio Tomato, a bushy thing designed to be grown in a container. The basil plants had some stems broken off, but nothing they can't grow back - and the "harvest" made a tasty addition to the stir fry we had for dinner. The new shrubs I planted had some of their leaves chewed up by the hail, but no major damage as far as I can tell. My poor hostas, though... the ones not protected by trees overhead really took a beating.

Annika thought the hailstones were interesting, but at this age she doesn't understand where they came from, or even that it's odd to have little balls of ice on the ground in June. What she really enjoyed was splashing in a puddle left on our driveway after the storm.

Predictable

I ran across a piece in the NYTimes about iPhone applications that are geared towards kids of various ages, for purposes of education or entertainment. The first line line of the article posed the question "Say you were faced with a 3-year-old child on the verge of full meltdown — which iPhone apps would distract and delight him enough to avoid mayhem?"

Predictably, when I skimmed the comments to see what apps people had found besides the ones mentioned in the article, I found the following comment:

Pathetic. Parents are so helpless in how to handle their kids that they have to resort to this?
Somehow we’ve managed to raise kids for thousands of years without iPhone applications. Sometimes we’ve even done the strange thing called “interacting” with them.Oh, and occasionally saying “no” to tantrum throwing 3 year olds and leaving whatever place they’re throwing the tantrum in!— Library Lady

I wonder, has Library Lady ever been on a long plane flight with a toddler? This sounds to me like exactly the kind of comment made by people who don't have kids of their own, but are nonetheless experts on parenting. Or conversely, someone who raised their own kids long ago... long enough to forget their own troubles and shortcomings, and bemoan those of the newer generation of parents. Someone who, when faced with their own tantrum-throwing 3 year old all those years ago, would probably have killed for a device that could magically bring peace and quiet.

Personally, I plan to use my iPhone with Annika - to entertain, amuse, soothe, stimulate, teach, and whatever else I find it can do. I'm not the least bit worried that if I do so, I'll be depriving her of human interaction or somehow severing her from the "real world." The more puzzling question for me, is at what point it might be reasonable to get a kid their own iPhone. Not anytime soon, certainly. She'll have her own camera long before she has her own phone!

Botany help

I know I've seen this plant before, and I can't recall its name. Here's a link to some photos on Flickr that someone took of the same thing.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/52074377@N00/2570898933/

I saw it at a rest stop, tried to remember if it's native or not, decided that either way it's kind of interesting, and put the seedhead-puff in my purse.

Because doesn't everyone want something in their garden that looks like a giant dandelion?