Some things just boggle my mind

I just had to write this really quick post today, because OH MY GOD, people!

My brother in law and his girlfriend are expecting a baby (YAY!!). So today she and I were talking about baby and pregnancy things and she mentioned she wasn’t sure what to do about a crib or cradle for the baby. I try not to talk to much, because, well, we all know how annoying too much advice is when we’re pregnant and also I epitomize the American consumerism ideal and had both a cradle and a crib for my kids, as well as a wicker basket for when we were downstairs, and I do, in fact, realize how completely ridiculous that is.

So anyway, I told her about the co-sleeper, because they don’t exist in Italy and when I saw it in the US I wished I didn’t already have more sleeping implements for babies than actual babies in the house. And, I told her, if you plan on breastfeeding, or if you’re a basket case like I was, checking to see if the baby was breathing every half an hour (on a side note, why do they have to terrorize new mothers with statistics on sids?) a co-sleeper is a really good idea, you can check on the baby and latch it on whilst practically still asleep. Optimizing sleep, when you have a newborn is really all you want to do anyway.

So I told her I’d send her some sites to check out and I went a-internet-searching, as one does nowadays, and I landed on this site: arms reach please go visit the site and come back, because you have to see this for yourself.

Now, I like animals, I’ve always had pets but for the love of all that is holy I cannot, for the life of me, fathom how you can put co-sleeper beds for babies on the same site as co-sleeper beds for pets. Seriously. What happened to your pooch sleeping on the rug near your bed? And also, I cannot, I simply CANNOT imagine buying a bed for a newborn with the image of practically the same identical bed for a dog. It blows my mind. And I thought the pet stroller was ridiculous enough all on its own.

What, I ask you, is the world coming to?

And the windows of the heavens were opened and rain fell upon the earth

Last week in Genoa, six people died due to rivers overflowing. Some were children. It’s hard to believe that something like this could happen in this day and age – people died because it’s raining. It’s humbling isn’t it? 

No matter our advances in technology and communication, no matter how evolved we are, how large our brain stems, nature is always stronger, faster, and mightier than we will ever be. I’d like to comment on how people reacted on the news (negatively, and oh so stupidly) to the events, but I won’t cause otherwise it seems I’ve always got it in for Italians and I really don’t, many more people were altruistic, helped out, made intelligent, compassionate comments and generally behaved decently and like human beings. There are always a few bad apples, right? So I’m going to focus on something else related to this tragedy.

The thing that amazes me about Italy is that (as far as I know – I’ve been accused of generalizing) they don’t do an awful lot to prepare people for natural disasters. I remember when I was in school in America we had fire drills, and talks about what to do if a hurricane or a tornado hit, if there was flooding. Parents were encouraged to make emergency plans with their kids, where do you go, who do you call, establishing a family meeting point – I don’t know if schools in Texas still do all this, but I think it’s pretty important.

Granted there are no tornadoes and hurricanes in Italy, but there are earthquakes and there’s flooding and I’m sure there are a whole host of snow related emergencies in mountain areas and yet they don’t teach kids (or adults for that matter) what to do. Schools don’t even have fire drills. Sure, all buildings here are made of cement or brick and mortar not wood, so there are fewer fires in general, but it’s not completely unheard of, I can’t even imagine the panic that would ensue here with no plan in place in case of a fire in a public building.

A mother and two children who died in Genoa last week ran into a building when they saw the waters rising thinking they’d be safe. When rivers flood waters rise very quickly, so they ran into the closest building and closed the entrance door. But they didn’t go up. So the force of the water blew open the door and (I’m assuming) they drowned. Some kids tried to get to safety by going in a basement.

Six (or seven, reports are sketchy) people died. Many people in the media here (and on the street) are blaming the government, blaming the rampant unregulated construction. It’s true, surely these things are somewhat to blame. In fact, did you know that in Italy most people will build without a permit and then wait for something called the “condono”, which basically is something that happens every few years in which the government says oh, ok fine, here’s your permit for this building, house or whatever you built with no permission, pay a fine. Ridiculous. Everyone just does whatever the hell they want and wait to get approval post factum. This is related because unregulated construction is part of the problem with flooding rivers apparently.

Anyway, back to the flood. A host of different things could have been done differently to prevent this, but it’s easy to point fingers after the fact. Natural disasters happen, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, damns break, lighting strikes… shouldn’t the very first step be teaching the population a few basic survival techniques to face them? If there’s flooding go up, don’t sit on the bridge with your iphone filming it. Talk about it in schools, write articles on what to do in the event of this or that apocalyptic scenario, talk about it on tv. And have drills because when people are in danger, they panic and often don’t think straight, or they sit and stare incredulously at what’s coming at them without trying to get the hell away, but if they know what they’re supposed to do they at least have a fighting chance against nature. That’s what our government can do for us. People need to be taught how to react in case of emergency, any emergency, and they need to be taught to listen to the authorities telling them what to do when in the midst of one instead of just doing whatever the heck they want. 

I’m pretty sure our public schools and our public television can spare some resources to educate the public on safe emergency procedures, after we’re done, you know, talking about whom our prime minister is sleeping with of course.

Natural disasters happen, whether we provoke them or not, the key is being prepared. So let’s hope we can stop the finger pointing long enough to educate people and coordinate our resources so that, not if, but when this happens again the casualty count will be zero. There will always be damage to property and infrastructure when things like these happen, but I’m pretty sure we can count ourselves lucky if no one dies because it rained too much. 

So, Italian Government, please, do something to educate us, to prepare us because knowledge is power, even over nature sometimes.

Things we'd rather not think about

Apparently Independence Day really took it outta me since I spent all day yesterday with an extremely persistent and annoying migraine. I even managed to miss my Virtual Coffee this week. And today I want to talk about something that’s going to send most of you running for the hills.

Pediatric Cancer.

I realize that there are approximately a gazillion charities and organizations out there fighting for all sorts of things, money, awareness, political pull…. So each of us has to navigate through all the information we’re constantly bombarded with and decide what we care about, or rather, what we want to vocally care about.

I’m lucky enough (knock on wood, touch steel and whatever other bad luck thwarting ritual I can think of) not to ever have been directly touched by pediatric cancer, but I’ve got kids and cancer is, well, a much despised, recurring, hopefully beat for real this time, annoyance in my life lately so…

Ever since the husband got sick my recurring, obsessive thought has been “please let the children be alright” right along with please let the husband get well and please don’t let me get sick. It’s a miracle I haven’t turned into a hypochondriac. The thing is, when cancer comes a knocking at your door, directly or indirectly, it becomes a reality, an obsession and you see it lurking around every corner.

I know what it feels like to watch an adult battling cancer, to watch them suffer and be afraid and it’s a truly horrible feeling. Imagine watching a child go through that, or don’t cause it’ll make you cry.

So I’ve decided to hang my hat on a cause vocally, for today.

I became aware of this through Lemon Gloria you can go read what she has to say here. What I’m asking you to do today basically is to vote for Journey 4 a Cure by clicking on the banner above (they’ll ask you to login with your facebook account, yes it’s another company asking to access your info and if you’re against this sort of thing, I get it, but if you allow some companies to access your info – say twitter for example – one more isn’t going to hurt is it?) the organization that gets the most votes by August 27^th gets $250,000 from Vivint. Not bad, huh?

All you have to do is vote, preferably every day, or whenever you remember, but if you vote every day think of the good karma coming your way!

If you want more information check out Journey 4 a Cure or Lemon Gloria or Masala Chica who inspired LG.

We all have children. Pediatric Cancer. Think about it. Or don’t because it’s just too horrible for thought, just vote.

Is conformity really so bad?

I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Canadian family raising a genderless baby, I read an article on their story by chance last week (I can't find it anymore, so can't link!). Since then I’ve been reading interviews and such and it’s given me a lot of food for thought. I’m not going to get into the merits of what they’re doing and I’m not linking to any of the articles I’ve read, because there’s a lot of negativity out there regarding this family’s decision.

Before sharing my viewpoint, I’d like to say that I’m not judging them, I think that as long as they’re doing what they’re doing because they feel it’s in the best interest of their own children and not because they wanted the media attention, then that should be good enough for all of us. But any sort of highly controversial act, as this one, is going to lead to a lot of discussion and thought, which is why I decided to write about it.

Apparently, the parents decided to do this because their oldest child, a boy, doesn’t “fit traditional gender roles”, he likes his hair long and likes dresses and the color pink. Evidently, this boy has faced some hardships due to his preferences and I think the logic is that keeping the baby genderless as long as possible sets an example to their two older children about how gender distinctions aren’t important, or in any case, aren’t as important as looking at the individual without a gender bias.

The following italicized bit is the comment I left on the article, it was my initial gut reaction, which incidentally is still my opinion after having researched the subject further:

This is interesting, and a little bit scary, I think. It's one thing to not "fit traditional gender roles" and another thing to remove the concept of gender altogether, because we are, in fact, characterized by our gender. The older child may have to face a series of difficulties due to the fact that he doesn't fit traditional gender roles, and his parents will have to help him navigate through them. But preventively creating an issue, where one simply doesn't exist - this baby is only four months - is risky. This child, exactly like the older sibling, will have to go out into society at large sooner or later and will be faced with the issue of his gender. But whereas the older child when faced with the very simple and straightforward  "are you a boy or a girl" question can be taught to answer "I'm a boy and I like pink, it's no business of yours" this baby won't have an acceptable answer at all. And by acceptable I mean an answer that his peers and strangers will be able to understand without lengthy, drawn out explanations. I think the risk here is putting this child in an impossible situation. We don't want to stick our children into categories unduly, but not giving a child a category at all is doing exactly that, isn't it? […]

The only thing I really take issue with is something the mother said in a letter she wrote in response to some pretty harsh criticism that they received, this is what she wrote:  “the idea that the whole world must know our baby’s sex strikes me as unhealthy, unsafe and voyeuristic.”

I take issue with this because in my opinion it is neither unhealthy, unsafe nor voyeuristic that “the world” as she says, knows the sex of her baby, no more than it is unhealthy, unsafe or voyeuristic that the world knows her baby is blond with blue eyes. First of all the whole world doesn’t know the sex of your baby unless you put it out there, which they did in a sense, because though we may not know the sex of the baby suddenly it's become a big issue. 
Generally, for non public figures, which the majority of us are (which this family was before all the hoopla), the people that know our baby’s sex can be counted in the hundreds, possibly the thousand’s at most, if you’ve got loads of friends and acquaintances hell, if you’ve got a really popular blog, maybe hundreds of thousands, but with a worldwide population of a little under seven billion it’s still a comparatively small number. And even then, how many of the people that know your baby’s sex actually care, or remember? I have acquaintances I see only rarely that I know have kids but can’t for the life of me remember how many and what gender.

So her kids don’t have gender appropriate behaviors. So what? They must have done a good job as parents, giving their children the freedom and the security to be whichever way they want to be. Their boy wants to have long, flowing hair and likes dresses and colorful fabrics and they supported him and gave him the self assurance to be any way he wants, so as far as that goes Bravo, I say. But, I believe that with this third child they took it too far, because they turned it into a media thing. Now they don’t just want to teach their children the best way they know how, they want to be an example of something to everyone else. They want to “change the world” as they say to a more accepting, tolerant place, a sentiment I wholly concur with, but... changes happen gradually. We are in a far better place today than fifty years ago, and I believe that fifty years from now we’ll be in an even better place – there’s always room for improvement.

I’m just not so sure that becoming gender-less is an improvement. Some people fit gender roles to a T, some not so much, others not at all, and I do believe that all the options must be accepted and respected. All of the options, including the desire to conform to long-standing societal roles. I’m a conformist, when my kids were born I tended to dress my boy in blue and other “boy colors” and my girl in pink, I thought the clothes were cute and the babies were cute in them. It never occurred to me to dress them any other way. As they grow I’ll support and accept any of their choices, as long as they’re happy and healthy, and I’ll help them navigate society if they decide to make choices that are hard to explain or live with. But in my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with conformity as there’s nothing wrong with non-conformity.

I find it very tiring that everything has to be “original”, original is the new cool. And I find it especially tiring that if someone decides to live their life in a manner that goes against the grain they feel the need to make it public, to teach a lesson where none is needed, to face the world with a look at me, this is how it’s done attitude.

Because, “this is how it’s done” is how we get conformity and uniformity to begin with, it’s the opposite of original if everyone does what you do, isn’t it?

So, again I ask, if everyone tries to be tolerant, sympathetic and understanding, if we face the world with an open heart and a smile on our face and take things at face value, differences and all, then is there really something wrong with conformity?