Arts and literature

Very glad to see this blog has prompted a mini-book discussion. Please continue! Thanks to Ashley Borders, Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue is next on my list.

Edith did, in fact, have roseola. Just call me doc. (Note that in The Spirit Catches You, the sick child does much better when her parents diagnose her than when the pediatricians do.) Fortunately, Edith now seems fever-free, spot-free, and si Dios quiere, ready to return to school tomorrow.

In the meantime, she indulged this afternoon in a little watercolor work.


I had given her a single color at a time, but evidently I was stifling her creativity, because I turned my head at one point, and she promptly grabbed the ice tray and dumped all of the colors onto her tray at once.

"Hmmm...have I mixed my green hues adequately?"

No, Edith hasn't gone in for nude modeling, though I'm taking advantage of the arts theme to put this photo here. This is the typical outcome of an attempt to change her diaper these days. The second you take off the diaper and reach for a wipe, she flips over, pulls up, and tries to grab the letters off her wall. She can get the L, but not the E yet. (For any safety watchdogs who might be reading, rest assured that I do not usually back away from the table while changing her and did so only to snap the photo. You will see the ready hand of her spotter in the lower left-hand corner.)

Edith does have her more helpful moments. When we were visiting her friend Julia last week, she watched the various adults push Julia's stroller back and forth to keep her from crying. Edith really wanted to push the stroller, too. So I held her at waist height and she rocked the cradle, with only the slightest bit of help.

On the subject of safety watchdogs: I understand that carseats are a wonderful improvement in automotive safety of the last several decades. I know they save lives, and I know that it is VERY VERY important to buckle your child in properly on a car trip. That said, I think the carseat has become one of those flashpoint issues in modern parenting. Maybe because it's one of the few issues on which one can't overdo it (no such thing as buckling the child in too much) and for which there is one right way, it has become the do-or-die crusade of paranoid, officious people who are uncomfortable with the gray areas that abound everywhere else in child-rearing.

We received a mass email this weekend from the director of Edith's school, addressed to all the parents. She was writing to inform us that she had been very disturbed to notice parents driving away from the daycare center without buckling the straps on their child's carseat, or worse yet, with parents holding the child in their laps in the backseat. She wanted to warn us that we were endangering our children's lives and that even if we live nearby and aren't driving far, we should remember that most accidents happen near home.

Let's define "nearby." Edith's daycare center is on our street, a dead-end, residential side street. The daycare center is at the dead end. The rest of the street is seminary married student housing. Most of the children who attend the daycare live on this street or the adjacent one.

From our living room window you can see the daycare center across the street. It is probably 100 yards away. We usually just carry Edith to and from school. But if it's raining hard or is frigid out, we'll sometimes drive the three buildings down. Yes, we are among the guilty who have driven away with our child in our laps. The speed limit on the street is 25, but you'd be hard pressed to get up to 15 before you arrived at your front door. I'd like to know the likelihood of a high-speed crash on this street versus the likelihood of my dropping a squirming, 20+ pound child while carrying her, her bag of supplies, and an umbrella.

I know this is a litigious society, and a daycare director no doubt lives in fear of being blamed for anything that might happen to a child under her care. But let's not lose all perspective, eh? The director should read The Spirit Catches You. Consider fleeing your home on foot, carrying your babies through tiger-infested mountains for a month, drugging the babies with opium because if they cry and give you away, soldiers will kill you all. Then get back to me about the carseat.