Green Parenting

2010-09-08T10:28:00.000-07:00

Naturally Dyed Easter Eggs

2010-04-06T14:53:00.000-07:00

Well, we naturally dyed easter eggs this year. I was worried they wouldn't turn out because half the comments I read on other peoples' sites said they:

1.) Don't take dye well.
2.) They taste like whatever you use to dye them in so you can't eat them.
3.) You need to soak them overnight.
4.) Acid of vegetable dye thins out shells.

Hoo-rrah for us, though, because it turns out I am a natural egg dye making prodigy. Not only were the dyes pretty, but only one (pickled beet juice) required soaking longer than an hour. I am thinking complaint two above is a product of complaint three. Our eggs don't taste like tumeric or beets or cabbage. It IS true that the egg shells are thinner.

The photos there are lovely and so are her eggs. I like the rustic look of my eggs, but they are the product of a few kids gone wild and less crafty than the ones at craftastica. Also since she just posts twice a year or so (like me!) I like her extra and got the gumption to post something today.

Our recipe for natural egg dying is:

1) 4 cups boiling water for spice mixes; 6-7 if you are going to boil vegetable down for an hour. You can let the mixture cool if kids will be dying to no great harm, even though websites say you can't.

2) 1/2 tsp alum (found in the spice section of the grocery store). This is the magic ingredient, a canning ingredient I think. Alternatively, Martha Stewart uses 1/2 cup of salt for the same purpose. I don't know if it works as well.

3) 1/2 cup of vinegar

4) Contrary to what I've read on the internet, brown eggs work as well as white eggs, you just get different colors.

5) Add hardboiled eggs to dye containers as you would with a dye kit for between 15 minutes and 1 hour.

6) Martha Stewart suggests wiping down the eggs with vinegar before dying if what you want is a uniformly dyed egg.

As for colors that worked well for us:

Keepers for Sure:
Golden Yellow: Tumeric, 4 Tablespoons. Very pretty. Darker than food coloring dye.
Beet/Rose Red: Pickled Beet Juice (not boiled)
Earthy Brown: 4 boiled beets with red onion skins.
Purpley Blue: 1 head of purple cabbage boiled.
Yellow Onion Skins: 4 cups worth. Rusty, reddish brown.

Meh, but not terrible, especially if you like light pastels:
Pale Yellow: Saffron, 1 Tablespoon. Not quite worth it, even though we used the cheap Mexican Saffron from the Fiesta Market.
Pale Green: Six cups of spinach. I have read about people using different types of tea to get brilliant greens. This is what I will try next time.

Tricks:
Onion Skin Relief: You can tie the skins around the eggs and boil them. I wouldn't boil longer than fourteen minutes if you want to eat them. Or you can boil for 3 hours and make an egg that you can keep forever without it going bad (or so they say...). We tried this but I didn't have good elastics to attach the skins and they fell off mostly. Martha Stewart has a good video of how to do it well.

Flower Relief: Read craftastica for this. You attach a flower or leaf to the egg by tying a nylon or cooking fabric square around it tightly. You can cook as with the onion skin relief. My experiments with this failed as I didn't have the right equipment.

Barack Obama Killed Michael Jackson

2009-06-26T09:32:00.000-07:00

Some of my earliest memories are of trying to moonwalk while lip syncing to Michael Jackson's Thriller album. The Indian community of Mobile, Alabama, where I grew up, was as obsessed with Jackson as Indians all over the globe were, which I think was demonstrably more obsessed than any other culture. (The countless, and I mean countless, variations on Jackson's choreagraphy seen in Bollywood movies is the irrefutable evidence.)

When Jackson's hair caught fire while filming a Pepsi commercial, it was a major event that had to be discussed, parsed out, mocked, and imitated for years. Then there was his conversion from being a black man to something akin to a white person in terms of physiognomy -- the look of face, the tint of his skin. And that video -- I'm black, I'm white -- with all those racially diverse people morphing into each other. And that other video where Jackson is some kind of Pharaoh, and Eddie Murphy shows up.

What I'm trying to say is that Michael Jackson's life -- and his body -- was a vessel for the contradictions within the collective, capital-driven racial psychology of the US. Our society's struggles with inequality and racism were enacted on his body. His whole childhood was turned into a national childhood -- this innocent high-pitched, non-threatening version of James Brown that everyone could consume. And he didn't get to have his own childhood and he was always in search of it in the weirdest and, at times, disturbing of ways. He suffered for us.

The election of Barack Obama, and the nearly magical way his life story resolves national contradictions while acknowledging the histories behind them, is the flip-side to Michael Jackson's being the king of pop. It's as if Obama released all the tension that made Jackson the national and international figure that we needed him to be. As if Jackson didn't have organs -- no heart or kidney or liver -- just this national-trauma-turned-pop music-genius-energy inside of him. And Obama has taken that magic, converted it from art-producing-pathos to open, straight-forward expression.

We mourn Jackson's death, and the beauty he created and the suffering he endured, because we were all along casting our votes for it, creating it, feeding off it, surviving because of him.

Mission Completed

2009-04-22T12:44:00.000-07:00

Well. I finished my novel's second draft and defend the PhD next Tuesday. Maybe I will have more time to write on Green Parenting. I miss the community and I miss having a record of our lives...

My green missions for the summer: getting tankless water heaters, rainwater barrels (you might notice that's been on the list since time immemorial), and getting an energy audit for the home.

Green Valentine's Day Gifts

2009-02-04T03:36:00.001-08:00

I haven't been able to post to Green Parenting for a long time because I took a new and demanding job as the editor of a magazine called Cite: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston. I also launched a blog called OffCite.org that I think would be of interest to Green Parenting readers. Like Cite magazine, it covers urban planning, transit, preservation, environmentally responsible design, fine and decorative arts, neighborhoods, and community building.

MaGreen just wrote a fantastic post for OffCite on Green Valentine's Day Gifts. Some highlights: locally-made macaroons (well, local for Houstonians), flowers made from elephant poop, and a list of love poetry books put compiled by graduates of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.

I have some posts up too. Among them is an article about the devastation of Hurricane Ike on Galveston Island and the disproportionate effect it has had poor people and minorities.

That's how we do it. Joy and solidarity.

Chinese New Year

2009-01-31T14:52:00.000-08:00

Grasshopper and MaGreen went to Chinese New Year today. Just as we hit the crowd with my friend Nicole and her kids, my little girl tensed up. She held my fingers as we all snaked through a gigantic crowd. It was hot, we ARE still in Houston, and so we found our way inside where there were a few dancers on a stage and a large audience, and more booths. By the time we were half-way into the second group of rooms, Grasshopper was screaming that she wanted to go back outside: she was scared, she said.

So went back outside, and the crowd still scared her. I found a patch of grass, and Nicole and her family graciously sat with us while Grasshopper could wind down. But when we tried to leave the grassy knoll she started screaming again, and I let Nicole go on. I sat her down and asked her to try to give walking around one more chance, and that we'd driven a long way and I really thought she'd enjoy the festival if she gave it a shot. She sat still a couple minutes, and decided to try again...but she couldn't last three minutes. She was just terrified, it seemed, of the crowd.

So we left. I was sad not learn more, but Grasshopper was almost immediately calmer, and pretty articulate about her fear of all the people. We stopped by and Indian Grocery, had a quick lunch at an Indian buffet, and came home, where we both passed out.

I'm glad we gave the day a shot, but no more festivals for this family for at least another six months!

See how I'm going to pretend like the last post wasn't in September.

Flashl-IKE games

2008-09-20T18:07:00.000-07:00

Greendaddy has created two characters, Ravi and Yolanda, with the flashlights to amuse Grasshopper during the dark (and silent until some yanker went and plugged a generator in across the streets :() nights. They are just the dark lit center of the flashlight's glow on the wall.

Ravi and Yolanda dance together, and then go off to find monkeys or boats or whatever else they can hanging on the wall. Sometimes they go to the park.

In Celebration of Having The Blog Fixed

2008-09-19T13:05:00.000-07:00

#1
Grasshopper: Daddy I'm pooing!
Greendaddy: Great, Grasshopper.
Grashopper: It's a big poo jumping around like the dolphins.

(oops will return later. have to go...)

Hurricane Ike Mini Report

2008-09-15T11:21:00.001-07:00

Hi. Greenfamily survived Ike. This picture below is as devastating as it got for our family (face is filled with ketchup, not blood :))

We woke up on Saturday morning to this flood in our front yard.

When the winds and rain let up we went out for a walk.

At our friends, we played the requisite board games.

And spent much time camping inside our house by candlelight. We luckily have gas instead of electric cooking, so our meals are fairly gourmet and have involved cooking everything in the freezer, then the fridge. We are really, really sick of fake meat, which I had just bought a lot of since it was on sale.

We have enjoyed a few days without access to internet or electricity. Life is peaceful here on our street. GreenDaddy says its the most relaxed he's been in a long time.

Last night we took a card table out onto the lawn and ate with our friend Hosam. Neighbors joined in, and eventually GreenDaddy, Grasshopper, and Ben, the neighbors sun, gave an impromptu concert.

It's Good Not To Hear

2008-08-04T09:11:00.001-07:00

It's good news when you don't hear from us often, lately: it means I'm not stuck in my novel and GreenDaddy is busy at work at his new job.

Hope all the folks in blogland are okay. I am writing a real post, just isn't anywhere near being posted.

Al Gore's Speech on Energy

2008-07-20T01:11:00.000-07:00

I think Al Gore's recent speech is visionary. I'm proud that Texas generates the most wind energy of all the states and is investing five billion dollars in improving our grid to bring more wind energy from West Texas to the densely populated areas.

She Can Doyit Herself

2008-07-07T15:35:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what language she's imitating when she says "yit" and not "it"...but doing yit herself is a big deal for Grasshopper lately. We took these photos on our recent trip to Utah, where we visited my family, and I like the series and thought I'd post them until I get around to writing the couple other posts about Utah I'm thinking of!

Um, Thanks

2008-06-19T09:55:00.001-07:00

The other day I was waking Grasshopper up from a nap, which usually entails me lying down next to her and horsing around on the bed for about twenty minutes. On this day, she ended up on the other side of my rear.

"What's this, your butt?" she asked.

"Yes, Grasshopper, that's my butt," I said.

"And it's a big butt," she said, appreciatively, in her two year's old version of the teacher voice, the same tone she uses to tell me I've done a good job at something.

"A very, very, big butt."

Blueberries as Big as the End of Your Thumb!organic blueberry picking and pick your own farms near Houston

2008-06-11T22:05:00.000-07:00

Scroll down for a list of organic pick-your-own farms of all ilks near enough Houston, and a link to find farms in other areas of the country as well!

Last weekend the family went to Chmielewski's Blueberry Farm, to self pick blueberries. We'd visited a pumkin patch in Virginia with our family last fall, but never got around to buying one of the pre-picked pumkins because we exhausted ourselves on the excellent rides they offered, including giant slides made of pipes, a pig-pen converted to a sandbox kind of thing, except it was filled with corn kernals, a giant inflated pumkin to jump on, several different kinds of mazes, a petting zoo, and I'm sure I'm missing something else. And we probably all thought it was a little lame we weren't allowed to pick our own pumpkins (I was really excited beforehand because I really wanted to whack the pumkin from the vine!).

Well, Chmielewski's Blueberry Farm can't be accused of having too many distractions aside from blueberries. They're serious about picking your own.

Somebody told me that this year, because of the rising costs of transporting foods and hiring laborers, more and more small farms are implementing pick your own programs -- though I can't find any articles on Google to back that claim. But when I was researching the list of places to pick around Houston, I found lots of other organic edibles waiting for the picking: blackberries, dewberries, veggies of all sorts, apples, pumkins (in fall). Pretty much there's something to pick around Houston from early May till late September. Farm germs are supposed to be good for babies' immune systems, and it's such a relief to explore the countrysides around Houston, that I think I'll try to get us out picking at least a few times this summer.

For the blueberry trip we left our house at 6:30 in the morning, got to the farm by 7:30 to beat the June heat, and lost ourselves among many an amateur picker, and plenty of more serious self-pickers in the maze of berries. It was a lovely two hours we spent picking, eating, and calling out through the berries to our friends Jbrd and Nicole and their families.

We started with this empty bucket:

We showed Grasshopper how to pick berries without squishing them, and she caught on quickly.

Her two and a half year old self expertly avoided most of the red or green berries, and just picked the blue ones. The concept of finding blueberries on bushes, and not in plastic containers didn't seem wow her, and I was glad, hoping our little garden has taught her to assume that if there's a little fruit or veggie, it came from the earth.

She started picking.

And eating.

And plucking.

And eating.

Picking.

Eating.

And Greendaddy and I plucked...though we sought berries atop the bushes so kids could get the lower ones.

We ate berries too,

but not as many as Grasshopper.

They made her wacky.

And silly.

She didn't even want to pose for a picture if it meant she couldnt' have a mouthful of the giant sweet berrries.

So we hoisted her high away from the bucket to get one family shot.

Then it was time to go.

We snipped her blueberry patch umbilical cord, rushed her to the car, but it was very awkward fitting her into the carseat.

Once home, I gave away some berries, we saved some for immediate eating, and I froze the rest, which was very easy: to freeze berries, or any fruit, them out on a couple cookie sheets in one layer (I mean, I didn't pile berries on top of each other), and freeze them overnight. Then I put them in ziplock bags. They taste NOTHING like store bought frozen berries...they retain shape and taste. Yum yum yum yum yum.

******
Want to pick Blueberries or other growy sundries in the Houston metro area? Here's the mostly organic list I culled from the Pick Your Own website...and if you're not a Houstonian you can use that same site to find places to pluck in near wherever you are:

Chmielewski's Blueberry Farm
23810 Bauer Hockley Road, Hockley, TX 77447. Phone: 281-304-0554.
37.5 mi – about 40 mins north from Houston on 290, up to 1 hour 20 mins in traffic
Open: Wednesday and Friday 7;30 AM to 1:00 PM and Saturday and Sunday 7:30 AM to 2:00 PM; other times by appointment. Follows organic methods but not yet certified, blueberries, gift shop, restrooms, picnic area. Payment: Cash, Check.
37.5 mi – about 40 mins north on 290 up to 1 hour 20 mins in traffic

Moorehead's Blueberry Farm –
19531 Moorhead Road, Conroe, TX. Phone: 281-572-1265. 888.702.0622 (Toll Free)
40.5 mi from Houston – about 43 mins North on 1-45 up to 1 hour 10 mins in traffic
Twenty varieties of blueberries (primarily Tifblue, Premier, Brightwell, Climax, Garden Blue, Becky Blue, Alice Blue and Sharp Blue) on 20 acres. No pesticides are used. No entrance fee; you are charged only for what you pick. Sampling is not deterred. Buckets are provided, as well as picnic tables, rest room facilities. Soft drinks and water are available for purchase.

S & L Farms - pumpkins, summer squash, Other fruit or veg,
4606 Cr 186, Anderson, TX 77830. Phone: 830- 832-9755.
Crops are usually available in September, October, November. Open: We are open 7 days a week if no bad weather; if the gate is open come on in. We follow organic methods, but are not yet certified. Payment: Cash, only.
80.9 mi – about 1 hour 24 mins down 290/then 6 up to 2 hours 10 mins in traffic

Bauer Farms Berries
- blackberries, dewberries, Follows organic methods
17702 Mueschke Road, Cypress, TX 77429. Phone: 281-563-9669.
64.2 mi – about 1 hour 9 mins up to 1 hour 30 mins in traffic 1-10 and farm roads
Crops are usually available in April, May, June. Open: Monday to Friday 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm; Sat and Sunday from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm. Dewberries - Mid April to Mid May Blackberries - Mid May - Mid June. We follow organic methods, but are not yet certified. Payment: Cash, only.

Home Sweet Farm –
7800 FM 2502, Brenham, TX 77833. Phone: 979.251.9922.
1 hour down 290 JUNE 22 TOMATO FESTIVAL LET US GO!!!!
ORGANIC, beans, eggplant, flowers, melons, peppers, pumpkins, summer squash, winter squash, tomatoes, other vegetables, OTHER fruit or veg, pumpkin patch-pick in the field, child-sized haybale maze, and prepicked produce, snacks and refreshment stand, picnic area
Crops are usually available in June, July, August, September, October, November. We follow organic methods, but are not yet certified. Payment: Cash, only.

Ross's Blueberries - blueberries, blueberry2262@sbcglobal.net
1453 County Road 2270, Cleveland, TX 77327. Phone: 2816227725.
45 min down 59
Crops are usually available in June, July. Open: Call ahead. It is our home farm and very casual. You just come and pick. It is not commercial. Weekends are probably best but weekdays are possible. Just call ahead. Also, mornings or evenings are better because of the Texas heat! $5.00 a gallon. We use buckets bought at a feed store. Eat while you pick too! They start coming in during June. They go thru middle of July. We have 5 kinds and the best are in June. We follow organic methods, but are not yet certified. Payment: Cash, only. We are not certified organic. We do not spray our berries. We use Miracle Gro to fertilize. You may want to bring bug spray.

Griffin Berry Farm
Hour and a half down i10
2394 Moore Road, Beaumont, TX 77713. Phone: 409-753-2247. Email:
- apples, blueberries, grapes, pears, peaches, plums, Other fruit or veg, restrooms, picnic area. Crops are usually available in May, June, July, October, November. Open: Check Web Page. We follow organic methods, but are not yet certified. Payment: Cash, Check. (ADDED: May 30, 2008)

Goodbyes Always Sound Existential

2008-06-09T08:39:00.000-07:00

The other night Grasshopper, the member of our household struggling most with control of prepositions and personal pronouns, had so much fun with her Chuck Uncle, Hank Uncle, and Melanie Auntie that she could hardly believe it when they had to go.

"There goes my play for you," she said, forlornly, but resolutely, as they pulled away in Hank's white pickup.

Toddlers, Dentists, and YouTube

2008-06-06T11:42:00.000-07:00

Last year, before going to India, we took Grasshopper to a highly recommended dentist in Houston who told us that we needed to put our one-and-a-half-year-old under anasthetic so he could put a filling in her front tooth. He said the tooth was decayed because she breastfed at night. I had never heard breastmilk causes cavities, but I guess it makes sense since it does have a lot of sugar. (Wipe the baby's teeth if you're night feeding!) Three women in the office had to hold an hysterical Grasshopper down during this visit in which the man just looked into her mouth and did nothing else.

Greendaddy strongly felt it was too risky to put such a young baby under, and opted, against that dentist's strong urgings to do otherwise, to bring her in for regular checkups. The dentist seemed angry and genuinely certain it was a bad decision, which made it hard for us to follow through on visits to his office: and so we never went back.

We did, however, become vigilant tooth brushers. I stopped night feeding, and eventually, weaned Grasshopper. We inspected her tooth regularly, to ensure it wasn't decaying further. But this April Grasshopper seemed to be having a toothache. I thought: that dentist was right! What a terrible, terrible, parent I am. How could we have let so much time go by? But at Greendaddy's urging, I got the name of another dentist, Dr. Rita Camarata, who practices with a Dr. Sringam who is whom we got the appointment with.

The first dentist's office was kid friendly, but this one was out of this world. They have a waiting area for kids outside of the dentist's office. Even better, about five minutes before seeing the dentist the kids are brought into a second playroom, with lots more toys and books, and it's right in the same room where dentistry is performed, so kids can see other kids being worked on and feel less nervous themselves.

There are televisions with favorite kid-videos playing above every dental chair. The assistants in the office go out of their way to make friends with the kids once they're brought over to the examining table. Best of all to a girl like Grasshopper, patients get to wear cool sunglasses so their eyes aren't bothered by the harsh lights.

Still, while the dentist just looked into her mouth and brushed her teeth, Grasshopper screamed like every single one of her teeth was being ripped out with pliers, promptly assuring all the other kids in the office would have nightmares for years to come.

"Next time, I think we'll schedule her for her own room," Dr. Sringam, said, gesturing to one of five or six soundproof rooms they have.

But there was good news, too. Dr. Sringam suggested we bring Grasshopper in for monthly floride treatments, and assured me that the baby didn't have a toothache. She didn't even mention anasthesia, and when I told her another dentist had suggested it, she said, "No way, this girl is too young. It's better to wait and watch carefully." Her hope was that the floride might heal the decay already there, and if not, it would at least slow down decay so that her tooth can be taken care of when she's older.

We came back the next month, to our appointment. When the assistant showed my girl a toothbrush she started screaming, and Greendaddy, me, and Grashopper were whisked into the sound proof room, where Grasshopper used it to its full potential, though all anybody did was brush her teeth and wipe floride on them.

Grasshopper has never liked the doctors or the dentists. I alway tell her where we're going, and I've read her books about visits, but her fear of having an adult try to look in her mouth or put a stethoscope on her chest was too much for her.

After the last visit, while she was napping, it occurred to me I should search You Tube for videos about the dentist, and realized there are dozens, ranging from a classic Sesame Street video, to the ones parents have posted: Chloe's first visit to the dentist, Jojo's dentist visit, etc.

Grasshopper was immediately entranced by them. The first time she watched the Sesame Street video she turned to me and said, "That baby didn't cry! More dentist!" So over the course of a month we watched dentist videos almost every day, especially the Sesame Street one, which she would ask to watch four or five times in a row.

We supplemente the video by acting out what was going on in it. Every night when I brushed her teeth, I pretended to be the dentist and said, "Okay, now, open your mouth like a tiger at the zoo. I'm going to count the teeth on the bottom of your mouth. Now the ones on the top. Now I'm going to brush your teeth with my magic brush." Grasshopper loved the game.

Wednesday, the moment of truth came: time for another floride treatment. I told her that morning: we're going to the dentist, and she said she didn't want to go. In the waiting room she said again she didn't want to go. But when she went to sit for her appointment, in my lap, I said, "Open your mouth like a tiger in the zoo," because that's what the man in the Sesame Video did, and she did!

She let her teeth be brushed and florided, while she sat in my lap. Then Dr. Sringam inspected them. I told her our regular dentist worried Grasshopper's tooth might abscess, so she asked us to wait for Dr. Camarata to give a second opinion.

When Dr. Camarata came, Grasshopper had to lay on the examining chair, which she really wasn't fond of the thought of. But I held her hand, but my other hand below her neck to cradle her head and said the magic words, "Open your mouth like a tiger..."

And she did. She layed there bravely while Dr. Camarata scraped out some of the softness on Grasshopper's tooth and put in some cement for a temporary, toddler-hood fix: and my little girl didn't shed a tear!

Better for me, even, was the car ride home. "Grasshopper went to the dentist," she said, over and over again, clearly tickled with herself, "Grasshopper didn't cry. She's tiger."

It's like those You Tube videos were magic. I only wish I'd thought about using them sooner!

Grasshopper's Favorites:

A Trip to the Dentist, Sesame Street
A Doctor's Visit, Sesame Street
Anya's First Dentist Visit
Sealions Get their Teeth Brushed
Jade's First Trip

Let Them Eat $600my untimely take on the economic tax stimulus

2008-06-03T09:05:00.000-07:00

George Walker Antoinnette doled out an $168 billion economic stimulus package to Americans this spring. Eight years of war and irresponsible fiscal policies had turned out to be not so good on on the ordinary Americans who had been so taken with his down home accent and beer buddy likability. Someone must have told him people were losing houses, were being charged almost twice as much for food and gasoline than they were when he came into office, were watching the dollar loose value as monetary unit, were losing jobs to burgeoning worldwide economies etc.

I'm thinking he also had heard something about a French queen who suggested her own suffering masses wouldn't starve if they'd just eat cake (or, I think she really said something like baguette). George W. didn't want to be beheaded, so instead of suggesting the people eat baguette, he robbed from their children's future and doled out enough money for every working adult to buy almost two 99 cent baguettes a day for a year.

Yay! Now that's a way to keep your head on, George. Of course, he wants everybody not to buy baguettes, but to buy CD players and large screen televisions. Because a drinking buddy knows that's more fun than baguettes.

1793, France:
"We're starving Marie!"
"Eat cake!"

2008, USA:
"We're losing our homes/jobs/dollars/sons and daughters in war/moral standing as a nation, etc. etc, George!"
"Buy a flat screen TV!"

Of course, it turns out people are using it for bills and mortgage payments, not the televisions. But we all appreciate the thought of using it to buy something more fun (I still want three rainbarrels, and we need a shed.)

GEAR SHIFT

We got back $1,500 as a family, and used it to open up a savings account for Grasshopper, something we hadn't gotten around to before. As far as we can see, the money is borrowed from her, so we're just giving it on back. (And, frankly, we owe her as family has given her checks we've cashed, but didn't have a place to put.)

And in doing so I realize we're lucky as a family, to be able to do this. We're not big spenders (it's true: this is the third year running I've wanted a rain barrel), we have jobs & health insurance, we're both paranoid about debt, and we haven't accumulated any. We have the right fiscal personalities, and we've had the right amount of sheer luck to survive a president like Bush, I guess.

I have to go now and pick up my grasshopper from the park, so I don't have time to tie this up neatly, or to make it less simplified. But I will restate my point:

The whole giving money back to individual Americans scheme felt sickening to me, and offensive in light of what $168 billion could be used for in terms of broad social programs, in terms of the real 'downturn' the giving of it is meant to alleviate, in terms of the real social, economic, and political horrors it is meant to avert our minds away from. But opening up an account in Grasshopper's name with the money our family recieved alleviated some of my anger because if it was robbed from the coming generations, at least I got some of Grasshopper's back.

Now I'm off with my head! (and my arms, and shoulders, and rest of me, to take my toddler for a dentist appointment.)

Wildlife Menace

2008-06-03T08:55:00.000-07:00

If you are distracted today, do as I did, and vote in George W. Bush as the Houston area's greatest wildlife menace.

The choices the editors give are:
Raspberry ants, Flying Cockroaches, Alligators, Wild Hogs and Nutria

But I think we all know whose the worst menace in these parts. Take twenty impish seconds and write his name in by Tuesday. For the fun of it.

http://www.chron.com/entertainment/ultimate/

I wrote in George W. Bush, to be exact.

Graphic Blogging

2008-05-14T07:17:00.000-07:00

The other day I stumbled upon a website whose author makes cartoons out of peoples dreams. Which made me want to immediately try making a cartoon of one of my own dreams, though all I had was the tiny paint program that comes free on the PC. It was pretty fun, anyway.

So here's my first entry into the realm of graphic expression (you can see it bigger here):

The Hope Speech

2008-05-06T23:52:00.000-07:00

When I was in high school in Lexington, Kentucky, my mom would look for competitions for me. Anything that had to do with science, essay writing, or speech making. She believed I could win anything the way only a mom could believe. It turned out I could win a lot of the time. I had pretty good smarts. My parents gave me more encouragement, financial support, and guidance than any other parents I knew of. While most kids from my school worked behind grocery store counters after class, I was at a table with a calculus tutor or pipetting DNA samples into a PCR machine at a laboratory or reading Tolstoy. The other reason I won so much was that sometimes only one or two other students showed up to the competition. You start to recognize the five other kids in the state with parents like yours. If you show up enough, you’re going to win something. A certificate, a plaque, a trophy, two hundred dollars, a trip to Pittsburgh.

With this one extemporaneous speech competition, it seemed like there was nothing to lose but a couple of hours of our time. No preparation needed, it’s off the top of your head. My mom and I drove to the location – an American Legion Post not far from our house. I hadn’t really thought much about it beforehand. I spent my whole life in the South. I was almost always the only Indian in the room. Almost always the only person of color wherever I went. So even when I walked into the hall and saw that it was full of old white men, I didn’t blink. Only one other student – a white male – showed up to the competition. Like I said, if you go to enough of these things, your odds are pretty good. I was ready. Ready to extemporize.

The hall really filled up with veterans. We’re talking World War II GIs. The greatest generation. Children of the Great Depression, victors over the Nazis. A man gave me and the other student a piece of paper with the topic spelled out. It said – the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. My first reaction was relief that I knew all the amendments to the constitution. And the thirteenth amendment – that’s a really important one, the first of the three post-Civil War amendments to free American slaves. I was thinking, at least I have a grasp of what the topic is. But after that second of relief, I really felt my brown skin sticking to my skinny body. What was I to say about slavery to old white men in Lexington, Kentucky, a city that sided with the Confederates, a city that was Jim Crow when these men were kids?

There was a coin toss. Or maybe it was by alphabetical order. The other student had to speak first. I was sent off to a back room so I would not be able to hear and have an advantage by being able to respond. Even so, I could hear little bits of what the other student said. He clearly did not know what the thirteenth amendment was. He never mentioned slavery. Never mentioned the Civil War. He was just ranting about Bill Clinton. He said Clinton was a Nazi.

When they called me out, I stood silently for a few seconds and looked at the audience. The stony-faced aged warriors staring back at me! Then I gave the speech of my life. I will never be that good again. I said, the United States has a stain on its history. I said, slavery was a travesty of justice. I said, inequality and oppression were enshrined in the founding document of our nation. That we should feel shame that the founding fathers, who spoke out against tyranny and created the great institutions of democracy that we still benefit from, failed to stop slavery. That they agreed to count slaves as three-fifths of a human being. That the injustices slaves faced were of the very worst kind. So bad that we might ask if it is possible to rise above that past.

With a few minutes left in the allotted time, I shifted tack and said that the thirteenth amendment was perhaps the most important of all the amendments. The greatness of our constitution, I said, and the greatness of our country is the capacity to change. Even though that amendment alone was not the end of discrimination and inequality, I said we should celebrate the incredible sacrifice that went into changing the law of the land and abolishing slavery. The very ability of this country to rise out of its slave-holding past, I said, was proof that we could rise above any challenge. That was what I said. I didn’t realize how much hope I had until I spoke about it to those old white men.

The MC who had run the competition said we should wait for the results. There were three judges at a table and they needed to confer. Well, we waited. And waited. More than thirty minutes passed. Finally, the MC announced that the other student won. My face got hot. I wanted to go home, but my mom – I think it was her not me – wanted to find out what happened. So she kept asking the MC questions until he gave us the actual results from the three judges. It turned out the competition was designed for a multitude of contestants, not just two. Each judge gave a score out of 100 for each speech. Two of the judges gave me the higher score. The third judge gave me a zero and the other student a 100. When they added the scores up, the other student came out on top.

I went home thinking about the irony of the whole damn thing. I was asked to speak about the end of slavery and what I got in return was mathematical proof for the continued existence of hate and discrimination. My mom and I talked about appealing. We could write letters to the national headquarters of the American Legion, but we gave that idea up.

This whole memory was buried away for years. A blip in my comfortable life. With the Obama campaign, it started to resurface. I heard that belief in hope expressed with stunning eloquence in his Iowa victory speech. And again when he conceded the New Hampshire defeat. MaGreen and I saw Obama with 20,000 other people in an arena when he came to Houston. And I thought, the country has changed. It is ready for the Hope Speech. Ready for a consensus about the grave injustices of our past and ready for the possibilities that come of reconciliation. But when the Wright videos surfaced and the TV people heaped scorn on Obama, I remembered the American Legion experience the way it happened. That judge, the one judge.

The consolation I speak to myself is that if the winner of that extemporaneous speech competition had been chosen by an up-or-down vote, I would have won. Won, you hear. As in the bigots would have gone home crying. I say to myself, the not-so-great of the greatest generation are almost all dead along with the great ones. I hear Will.I.Am singing in my head, singing yes we can.

Slow stretching...

2008-05-01T13:38:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to write awhile now, of course. Thanks Fiddler for asking what's up...I know in blog land it can be unnerving or worrisome if somebody just stops blogging.

Our excuse: we have had such a busy spring! We unintentionally took a blogging hiatus because MaGreen is working on a novel so she can get her PhD, GreenDaddy is finishing his last semester of PhD coursework and working his day job, and Grasshopper is long past the age of gurgling patiently whilst we invent.

I keep beginning posts and then stopping them because it seems there's so much to say. I suppose I don't need to try. I'll just start slowly, and pledge to not worry so much about writing posts that I don't write...

1)
MaGreen has started taking yoga again at Yourbodycenter.
Highlights: Her teacher is pretty funny, and her biceps are back.
Lowpoint: Her sticky mat was stolen from her car.
Highlight on the lowpoint: "if you're not into yoga, and have half a brain" seems pretty dated in the days when yoga mats are unsafe items to leave in a car. I'm hoping some homeless person stole it to sleep on, and not some style concious yogi (because it was a cool looking mat).
Second highlight on the lowpoint: Her new mat is not made of plastic.

2)
We've renewed ties to the Central City Vegetable Co-Op, and GreenDaddy's garden is also full of yummy greens.

Highpoint: MaGreen is cooking more, though she's afraid all her food tastes the same.
Highpoint deux: We're paying less for vegetables than we did going to Whole Foods.
Highpoint tran: Grasshopper knows you can eat things that grow.
Numero cuatro : GreenDaddy found a potato growing in the compst, replanted it, and made six of his own new potatoes!
The fifth good thing: MaGreen built Koski compost bins in the last yard after many months of saying she would.

Lowpoint: Grasshopper has lost her taste for vegetables
Another lowpoint: GreenDaddy's lettuce bolted (see in picture above!) and he was really excited, thinking he'd discovered a new way to grow lettuce before our friend JP told us bolting is a bad thing for lettuce to do.

3) We hired a nonprofit tree planting service called Trees For Houston to plant, stake, and mulch two new trees out front

a black gum

and an oak...I can't remember what kind!

and a tree out back started falling onto the cars

so MaGreen sawed off all the branches. It is possible she didn't kill it.

4) Grasshopper is all highpoint...Here she is with her friend Tom Sawyer, who was supposed to be taking her on a walk around the block:

No, no: that's C. Uncle. She is chatty, funny, sneaky, and likes to sing and tell jokes. I'll devote an entire post to her in the near future.

Now the door's cracked back open, we, or at least I, hope to reenter the world of Green Parenting in the blogosphere.

A Slow Coming Storm

2008-03-18T07:30:00.000-07:00

A slow coming storm
over Texas,
swing open the doors
so they don’t rattle,
let it in that wind in the window
through our little home.

I heard about a father
works nearby to me
next building over
and last week
he forgot his baby
in the car seat
inside an SUV
parked on an asphalt lot
and the baby died
in the heat.

I heard Obama will speak tonight
on race and the black church.
He’s going describe
just what I seen
Mobile, Brooklyn
Covington, Houston
white-robed women
old man dancing down the aisle
threadbare red carpet
straight-backed pews
a white woman in the corner
an Indian kid in the back
and thunder in the pulpit.

We need the thunder and wind
the cool air, rain over curb
rain breaking through the seals
of our cars, rain
boxing the traffic lights
sogging our shoes
whipping the haughty towers,
oil-slicked rain draining
through gutter and bayou
choking every ditch
lifting anthills
drowning highway ramps
throwing cars over rooftops.

I want to wake up to a new city.

Anniversary -- Remembering the Saptapadi

2008-02-27T10:59:00.000-08:00

Greendaddy and I had wedding anniversary on February 19th. We haven't yet celebrated -- though we did have a babysitter that night, so we could go see Barak Obama speaking at a Houston megarally. I have an inkling Greendaddy wants to be the one to tell you all about that, so I won't go on about it.

In celebration of our anniversary I will announce the reinstatement of some of the pages I created for our wedding's website and post a little about the description of the vedic wedding ceremony and the vows we took that day here.

Notice, over to the right, beneath the profile of Greendaddy and I is a little link that says: Our Hindu Wedding. If you click it, you'll find prettier pages, pictures, and a detailed description of the entire cermeony.

On the Vedic Ceremony

The Vedic wedding ceremony is more than five thousand years old, and is still performed in Sanskrit. It weaves two souls, two families, and two communities into one harmonious existence and a deep significance is attached to every step within it. With the completion of the ceremony, Greendaddy and Magreen enter into Grihasthashram, the second phase of life, which is devoted to family.

Our wedding will be beautifully sung by the priest, Rajan Joshi. Few people know Sanskrit well enough to understand the literal meaning of the ceremony. According to the seers who wrote the verses, there is more than one kind of meaning to them-the meaning behind a word's definition and the vibrational meaning of a word, which transcends language barriers. Thus, Om has a literal meaning (peace/breath/all that is) and a physical meaning in that its sound connects a person hearing it to the universe. This idea extends to all words in the Vedic ceremony-they all have multiple literal and sonic/transcendental meanings. If the ceremony were translated into another language the sonic meaning would be lost.

Thus, the performance of a Sanskrit ceremony retains the particular sounds of the Sanskrit words, as it connects us to a tradition older than history. We hope his small book will help everybody present to understand the literal and symbolic meaning of the ceremony, and that the sounds of the chants will move us all to a higher plane.

Here are the vows we took. Though it was unusual for a vedic ceremony, Greendaddy and I repeated the core wedding vows in both Sanskrit and English. We worked hard to translate the Sanskrit vows into English because we wanted our guests (and ourselves!) to understand.

The nice thing about translating from Sanskrit is that it offers a lot of room for interpretation since many of the sounds mean many things. I think next anniversary I might add a few new fangled vows...but it is nice to remember what we began promising.

Saptapadi (Seven Steps) Wedding Vows

1.
Greendaddy: With this step, let us love, cherish, and respect one another.
Magreen: With this step, I ask that our lives together be full of joy.

2.
Greendaddy: I promise you my love until our last days.
Magreen: Let us create a home full of laughter, where we find serenity and strength.

3.
Greendaddy: My love for you will grow deeper day by day, as we share in each other's trials and triumph.
Magreen: May our marriage be blessed by peace and harmony until our last days. Let us have a measure of patience and forgive with grace.

4.
Greendaddy: May we enjoy lightness, joy, and beauty until our last days.
Magreen: From our foreheads to our feet shall we share in each other's bodies.

5.
Greendaddy: I embrace your family as my own as well as our own yet to come.
Magreen: Hear me now, for richer or poorer, in sickness or in health, I will be with you.

6.
Greendaddy: May we care for people more than possessions and for honor more than honors.
Magreen: May the dimensions of our home be measured not by the details of the house but by the depth of our sacrifice and the breadth of our studies.

7.
Greendaddy: Let us be friends and partners until our last days.
Magreen: May all those present bear witness that we take these steps by our own will.

**Photos by Cristobal Perez, Azul Wedding Photography**

The Green Family's Further Adventures with No Poo

2008-02-20T11:27:00.000-08:00

I know the blog world has been up at nights wondering about the state of my family’s hair, and whether or not we have stayed on the no poo wagon. So here it is, the key to your future good night sleeps: my further adventures in no-pooing (not to be confused with Grasshopper's earlier problems with not being able to poo {solved by putting molasses in her cereal instead of multivitamins w/iron}).

First of all, needed to use the baking soda every day, or my hair would get overly oily, and this dried out my hair, which there is a lot of, but which is thin enough that just looking at a picture of the desert is apt to dry it out. The vinegar rinse helped a little. My hair wasn’t dry the way shampoo makes it – I mean, shampoo strips and dries, whereas baking soda just dried, at the same time it at least left some of the natural oils on my head. Sounds strange, but that’s what happened. Now having these oils has been a blessing: my hair looked fuller, was interested in doing a variety of things its untexured, overly-shampooed state had prevented, and was glossier.

While I liked this effect, there were a few things about using baking soda I disliked. First of all, I wondered if ultimately my hair was even more dry using baking soda than just shampoo. Secondly, it was awkward to take this method travelling -- powders just don’t travel well. Thirdly, it’s awkward having baking soda near water, and showers tend to have a lot of that. Last of all, I felt as tied to baking soda as I had to shampoo, and I was ostensibly trying out the No poo method…and I realized poo was just baking soda in this new reality of mine.

I was considering giving up, which was a hard choice since I liked my textured hair, and so I did what any desperate person does in this situation: googled “no poo” one last time. The second hit was something I hadn’t seen before, an article by Audrey Shulman, a reporter for The Phoenix, in Boston. Her method, which she says is Mexican in origin, is to wipe the left side of your wet head 100 times with a rag, and then the right side of your head 100 times. I’d heard of doing this with a boar’s bristle brush, but that never really worked for me. But since I was at wits’ end, I decided to give her particular method a whack.

I am happy to report that was in November, and since then, I have had a fabulous no-poo experience, devoid of baking soda. When I first started her method, I shampooed twice a week, now I shampoo once a week. This is far better than the baking soda, infinately better than using shampoo.

This is exactly what I do:

I put a wash rag on each hand (one of those rags sewn closed like a mit would be ideal, but I don’t have one.) Standing with my hair under the water, I grab my soaking locks with one rag, pull down, and then grab in the same spot with the other hand. I tried with just one rag and that took too long to get to one hundred, and was actually more awkward – two rags is easier. I do one side, then the other, and I go pretty fast. With the first hundred I try to cover all the hair on the left side of my head, the second hundred, ditto on the right. It takes three or four minutes. Like Ms. Shulman said in her article, my hair feels the way they tell you hair ought to in the TV commercials: soft, conditioned, not too oily, manageable. For zee first time in my life.

I haven’t gotten my act together to make some rinse with my essential oils, for a perfumed coiffure, but figure I will in the near future. Right now my hair smells like nothing, which is fine by me.

Grasshopper, by the way, still uses Aubrey Organics Baby shampoo once or twice a week. In between her hair doesn’t require the washrag cleanse, thank God, because I can’t even imagine trying to convince her two year old self to go for that.

Don't Tell Woody

2008-02-14T13:35:00.000-08:00

Grasshopper and I were singing, "This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land" in the car. We end the song,

"This land belongs to you and me," I say.

"No. To Grasshopper and Mommy."

"Okay, to Grasshopper and Mommy."

"And Daddy," she adds. "Akshay, Asha, Dada, Dadi. And Nina."

"And Percy cat?" I ask, and she laughs.

"And Percy cat. And Grandma. And the telephone."

Feeding Dangerous Cruelly Slaughtered Meat to Our Kids

2008-01-30T20:23:00.000-08:00

The Humane Society of the United States has made public an investigative video that shows how slaughterhouses try to force sick cows to stand up so they can be killed and sold as meat to children in school. I have included a copy of the video below, which is shocking but does not include any actual images of slaughter.

Whether or not you watch it, I hope you are moved to action. I sent a letter to one of the Texas senators. Here's what I wrote:

Dear Senator Hutchison,

Atrocious cruelty like that documented by The Humane Society of the United States at Hallmark slaughterhouse must stop immediately. (See the investigation video at
http://video.hsus.org/index.jsp?fr_story=346bfda2cbbf061e88fa57cbef243b30d049b3b7.)

For the sake of animal welfare and food safety, please institute a "bright line" ban on all downers in the food supply by closing the loophole in USDA's current policy and by redirecting agency resources to ensure meaningful enforcement.

I have a daughter who is two years old and I am shocked that the US government would not do more to safeguard the meat that is sold to children.

This case illustrates the need for constant USDA supervision at slaughter plants, including overseeing the way animals are handled when they're moved off the truck, rather than occasional check-ins. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
[name]

On Ending Extreme Poverty

2008-01-25T12:09:00.000-08:00

In the year 2000, the leaders of the world gathered to respond to the startling statistics of poverty at the start of the new millennium. More than one billion people still lived on less than $1 dollar per day. Over 115 million children did not go to school. Four out of ten people in the world did not have access to a simple latrine. Two out ten had no source of safe drinking water. More than half a million women died per year from complications of childbirth that are almost completely preventable. The world leaders agreed to a framework to end extreme poverty that are called the Millennium Development Goals.

Through my job at the journal Feminist Economics, I had the opportunity to interview Professor Caren Grown about the Millennium Development Goals and efforts like microlending that are meant to end extreme poverty, especially for women and children. Dr. Grown has worked with the World Bank, the International Center for Research on Women, and the MacArthur Foundation and her research is extremely well respected in economics and policy studies. Her experience working across academia, foundation, and major institutions puts her in a special position to comment on international action to address gender inequalities, especially at the macroeconomic level. She has published several books, most recently The Feminist Economics of Trade (Routledge 2007), and co-edited a number of collections. I am posting an excerpt of a talk she gave at Rice University along with my interview of her. The whole piece was originally aired on 90.1 KPFT in Houston on a show called Border Crossings.

Click on the title of the talk to give it a listen: Poverty, Gender, and the Millenium Development Goals: Debates, Progress, and Ways Forward.

Since We Last Communicated

2008-01-21T12:28:00.000-08:00

I wondered why it is that people always put things like blueberries or bananas or raisins in oatmeal, and rice with beans. Never one to have a thought without a recipricol action, when Grasshopper requested a bowl of cereal for dinner, I added some turtle beans to her oatmeal and molasses. I felt smarter than her the first few bites, when she, as usual, dived after the dark chunks that are usually blueberries in her oatmeal. It took her seven or eight bites before she determined she'd been hoodwinked. GreenDaddy and I tasted the oatmeal and were surprised it took her so long: the reason people don't but beans in oatmeal, we immediately surmised, is because it brings out the grossest sides of two foods that we generally like. The thick innards of the beans, particularly, doesn't go with the mushiness of oatmeal like it goes with grains of rice. This isn't to say I won't try adding lentils to the rice, one day, if Grashooper continues demanding to eat cereal 24/7.

How to Get Free Healthcare For You or Somebody You Care About

2008-01-11T21:50:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine recently accompanied a neighbor who does not have any savings or any health insurance to the emergency room. Before they went, MaGreen and I researched and talked to friends about what there options were. I have recorded what I learned in the post below. Some might use these tactics to help friends, family, co-workers, or your own paid help (maid, nanny, etc.). You might need this information for yourself, but I have written it as if a person were helping a friend in the City of Houston. The same basic rules apply across the United States for everybody including Spanish speakers and those without immigration papers. (If you live in Sweden, Canada, or the UK, just smile smugly for having guaranteed healthcare and move on to the next post.) Please note that I am not advising and advocating anything, I'm just describing what I learned.

Non-Urgent Care
If your friend’s illness is not extreme, visit a walk-in clinic. These clinics go by many names and are run by many organizations throughout the area. All residents of Harris County can call Ask-A-Nurse at 713 633 2255. They have bilingual registered nurses who can help you and your friend figure out the best option for care. Also for those who live in Harris County, there is a free healthcare program known as the Gold Card. Your friend does not need papers to qualify, but proof of living in Harris County is required. Visit this link for more information. With this card, your friend can visit doctors at the public hospitals and clinics for free or a very low fee.

Urgent Care
If your friend has an urgent need for care – a broken leg, extreme stomach pain, an open wound – you should go to a hospital Emergency Room. The ER must accept her as a patient by law. Period. She should be prepared to wait 24 hours in the waiting room. (If you go, cancel all your appointments.) Only the most extreme cases are seen immediately. Here are the steps you should follow.

1) Choosing a hospital
Ben Taub Hospital is the public hospital. The nurses and doctors are accustomed to uninsured patients, but the wait is long because of overcrowding. Private hospitals such as St. Luke’s hospital have shorter waits, but if your friend does not speak English well she ought to take someone who does with her.

2) Giving a Different Name, Phone Number, and Address
Before she goes to the hospital, the friend might think of a different name, phone number, and address that are easy to remember. Jane Thompson instead of Jane Williams. She might change the last digit of the phone number. The friend would agree on the plan. When she enters the ER, she would explain her need at the big desk at the front. They will ask for her name. She would give them the one decided on earlier. Then she will have to wait. If there is a big crash on the highway after she arrives, the wait might suddenly double. At some point, they will call her up and ask for her information. She would give the made up name, number, and address. When they ask for ID, she would just say she does not have any. They might ask two or three times for different forms of ID, but they will quickly give up.

3) Ask for Translation
If your friend does not speak English well, she should still have the benefit of understanding what the doctor says. Ask for a translator if you are with her. Diagnosis is a subtle art. And your friend must understand the doctor’s instructions. Hospitals usually have a list of people who can help with various languages, even ones you might not expect like Hmong.

4) Discharge
The ER might be your friend’s one chance to receive expensive tests like blood analysis and CAT scans. Ask for a copy of the medical record so your friend can show it to the next doctor she visits. If your friend needs a prescription drug and you feel that you can trust your doctor, the doctor might be asked to write it out using your friend’s real name. When you leave, the hospital might ask for contact information again or try to set up a payment plan. Your friend would keep giving the new name she chose. If you are with her and they ask for your name, being prepared to make up a new name for yourself too might be necessary. Your friend may leave the hospital without being bothered at all.

5) Follow-up
The most challenging step will probably be following up on the care your friend received in the ER. Again, the Gold Card might be the best option. Or maybe you have doctor friends who can help out.

Good luck!

Are Mothers Opting Out of Careers to Care for Children?

2008-01-10T22:33:00.000-08:00

A lawyer with a good shot at making partner quits. A picture shows her cradling a baby close to her breast. Since the publication of a New York Times story titled the “Opt Out Revolution,” the press has frequently reported anecdotes of high-powered, educated women who have decided to “opt out” of work in favor of full-time motherhood. The angle is that women in their thirties had mothers who fought for the right to work and raised their daughter to believe they could do anything, but it turns out that these successful women cannot balance a stressful career with childcare.Feminist Economics, which is the academic journal I work for, has published a new study on this controversial question.

The new evidence from scholar Heather Boushey refutes the idea of an opt out revolution. Boushey shows that the number of women leaving jobs to take care of children has decreased dramatically over the past two decades. The article, “Opting Out? The Effect of Children on Women’s Employment in the United States” counters media portrayal of “any exit from employment by a mother as about motherhood, not other factors, such as inflexible workplaces, labor market weakness, a decrease in men’s contributions to housework, or other reasons why women may not work outside the home.” She points to changes in the labor market, not children, as a cause for somewhat lower rates of women in the workplace more recently.

“Highly educated women, those with a graduate degree – those who the media claims have been opting out of employment for motherhood – have not actually seen a statistically or economically meaningful decline or increase in the estimated marginal effect of children on their employment,” Boushey writes. Furthermore, the effect of children on women with a high school or college degree and for single mothers has sharply decreased.

Using data from a nationally representative survey of the US population, the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Survey (ASEC) from 1979 to 2005, Boushey did not find any evidence of an increase in opting out. In contrast, she finds that especially for women with a high school or college degree and for single mothers, “the estimated marginal effect of having children at home has decreased sharply over the past two decades.” She finds that the ‘‘child effect’’ on women’s employment has fallen since the end of the 1970s from 21.8 percentage points in 1979 to 12.7 percentage points in 2005.

“The US’s 2001 recession was exceptionally hard on women workers,” writes Boushey. “They lost more jobs than they had in prior recessions, even though they lost fewer jobs than men overall.” Boushey suggests that “the opting-out story” may be simply due to the lower employment rates for workers overall since 2000.

At the time of writing the article, Boushey was a senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which is a progressive think tank. Now she works for Congress as a senior economist. Her work focuses on the U.S. labor market, social policy, and work and family issues.

I think that Boushey’s work is a crucial intervention in the debate about support for women entering the workforce. Discussions of mother’s choices should be backed up by real evidence and Dr. Boushey’s article offers a rigorous, peer-reviewed analysis. The point is not that parents can easily balance their work and home lives. But we should not assume, on the basis of anecdotes, that privileged women reject the opportunities feminists have struggled for. We do need to talk about ways to support parents and enable more people to be able to choose the lives they find most meaningful.

My goal is to include more summaries of and interviews about work published in the journal or presented at the panels I attend so readers of this blog can learn from and respond to the latest scholarship. Hopefully, this will be the first of several reports.

Crafty

2007-12-21T09:06:00.000-08:00

We're going to Oakland for Christmas. Last travelling venture we have planned as a family...I will take my first solo trip, to a conference, in February. I have been preparing by pretending to be a goddess of craft (nobody is very fooled) by:

Making dehydrated fruit tree ornaments (I'll post a picture of them hanging, once they're on the tree in Oakland):

Making wrapping paper out of butcher's paper we had on hand (sadly we were too painted to get a good picture during the making of the paper):

And I dredged up the sewing class I took in high school, senior year, and which I probably went to less than a dozen times, in order to produce these malshaped socks:

The pink socks are made from a wool shawl Greendaddy and I purchased in India, our first trip there, together...the shawl was later ruined in the wash, but turned out to be perfect for weird socks. The blue socks are made out of the leftovers of a sari my mother-in-law's aunt and uncle gave me. The maroon velvet socks are made out of the bottom of a long, victorian looking dress my step-mother gave me a few years back, and that I never wore. I saved the top of the dress, hemmed it, and now it's a shirt I'll wear!

Sometimes It's the Huge and Vicious Things That Count

2007-12-12T20:03:00.000-08:00

We have worked hard here in Megalopoland to teach Grasshopper how to be a smart, green little baby. She shares, so long as she gets something she wants at the same time somebody else does. Her drinks have never been tained by the taste of old plastic. Her butt has rarely been covered in poo, her hair has never been covered in sodium laurel sulfates. She has eaten cherry tomatoes from our own organic garden, she has learned to love molasses (thanks Amit) and is a pretty good little green baby. We thought we were teaching her to make intelligent, thoughtful choices that would guide her through life. But as we exited the plane in Missoula, and headed towards the stairs we passed this seven or eight foot tall Grizzly:

Grasshopper saw it, ran towards it full tilt, squealing, "Doggy, doggy, doggy!" and then hugged the bear's giant glass cage.

Thus proving that sometimes it isn't the little things that count. Sometimes it's the very, very, big, and vicious things.

Sadly, or perhaps luckily with Grasshopper's track record, we didn't see a live bear or moose, though we saw tracks. We saw Rock Creek freezing over, and deer, and this crazy bird that only comes to Rock Creek in the winter. It dives into the freezing water and digs for crazy, cold-loving insects. In the photo above Grasshopper is proving that so long as you have a daddy's chest nearby, it is possible to take a snooze sub-zero land.

Good Gifting

2007-12-06T08:13:00.000-08:00

This is newly updated for 2007. A couple caveats: I welcome suggestions, but this is not a site to advertise stores. I mention stores I've been to or shop at, but the goal here isn't to amass a long list of deserving stores. Mostly it's a list of 'generes' of giving with examples I particularly like. So feel free to leave info about your store in the comments, but don't be offended if I never ad it. There are millions of organic clothing stores, for example...I note this, and suggest people google them rather than this list being over-wrought.

I would like creative, unusual, green ideas...

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

In my green gift guide, below, I’ve sort of categorized the sorts of gift genres I like. Sometimes I construct a green gift; sometimes I get an item that I would otherwise label hoary from a local shop or a used store and feel better about it; sometimes I get a fairly traded gift from the web. Generally This list will grow with time, with your suggestions, etc. And please do make suggestions.

SUPPORTING LOCAL ECONOMY
Basically, the local version of any of the following is better than the internet-purchased version in terms of supporting local businesses. Local meaning a store owned by an individual in your community--probably not a corporation-- or a non-profit organization in your community. If the choice is from Amazon or Target, I don’t see a huge difference, especially if you’re sending it to an Auntie in Argentina or something.
1) Crafts, Foods, Clothes from Locally Owned Fair Trade Shops.
Most major cities have a few. In Houston we have an ever growing number, though I most often frequent: Corazon, Taft Street Coffee, and Ten Thousand Villages (which is a chain, but a worthy one…). Hey, see what shops sell fair trade products in your part of the states (there’s not a world-wide listing, yet…but Google…)
2) Resale or antique shops. I am not a pro at Houston resale. Mostly, I go to a resale children’s shop called Young and Restless. In Montrose I go to Bluebird Circle, but I know this city abounds with good resale I don't know about. I will quote a little birdie's comment on adult resale rather than paraphrase: "Blue Bird on W Alabama is the granddaddy of resale - good selection of furniture and so forth and they sort the clothes by size. Catholic Charities on Lovett and the Junior League shop in the Heights also sort by size, but the Junior League store is best for the size fours of the world. Salvation Army on Washington and Goodwill on the North Freeway are the largest of their brethern."
3) Gifty Foods or Crafts from Farmers Markets Etc. We go to Central City Co-Op and they sell little edible items. Friends like Bayou City Farmer’s Market and Mid-Town Farmer’s Market. To find other Texas or US markets, go to Local Harvest.
4) Support A Local Charity instead of a Mega-One In Your Loved One’s Name. Too many to mention…
6) Gift certificates to local venues…restaurants, your favorite baby shop, a masseuse, an art class, a composting class, a cooking class, a writing class
7) Memberships to a local museum…children’s, mfa, natural science, zoo.
8) Pass to a National Park in your area…go here
9) Shops of all Ilks. Childrens’, bookstores, bikes, hardware stores, antique shops. Might cost a little extra, but hey, no shipping and handling and the monetary and environmental costs it incurs.

GIVING DOUBLE, aka, SUPPORTING CHARITIES, SERVICE, JUSTICE:
All sorts of charities are making it very easy for you to give in another person’s honor. Most send the person something representative of your purchase, be it a certificate, a photo, a turtle tracking system, or the National Green Pages.
1) Giving That Benefits People: Give a cow to a family in a loved one’s name via Heifer International ... conservatives in the family? They're pro-Heifer, from what I've gleaned in my own family. You can all feel good about a gift from there. Or help a rural community develop health or social services (or a number of other options) via Seva Foundation, Oxfam.
2) Giving That Benefits Social Justice. Purchasing gift memberships for your loved ones to Oxfam, CoOp America, Pacifica, whatever organization it is you think they’d appreciate membership to.
3) Giving That Promotes the Environment. Trees for Life.
4) Giving That Promotes Conservation. Nature Conservancy gifts to save forests and reefs
5) Giving To Benefit Animals: Adopt and track a sea turtle throughout the year at Seaturtle.org, Farm Sanctuary
6) There are numerous websites that offer much longer lists of the many different ways you can give these sorts of gifts. The ones above caught my eye for various reasons. But here are three good sites to goto if none of the ones I’ve offered tip your kettles: JustGive.org, NoMoreSocks (defunct!), Oxfam, National Resources Defense Council
7) Echoage is a company that you ask guests to give $20 to for a gift (birthday is the idea on the site) and half that money goes to buying one gift for the child, the other goes to the cause of the child & parents' choice.

GIFT GIVING THAT PROMOTES EDUCATION , IMAGINATION &/OR IS SUPPORTIVE OF BUILDING FAMILY COMMUNITY:
There are millions of sites, so I won’t go into detail. But I like the ideas over at NoMoreSocks.
1) Scientific Toys
2) Board Games
3) Craft Items
4) Costumes, puppets…
5) Music
6) Photo related I have used Zazzle a couple of years to make mugs, aprons, t-shirts that make grandparents happy. Zazzle has a lot more options than similar sites for standard items. I am newly impressed with the sites Moo for unusual photo gifting options and the site QOOP because it makes nice photo books.

GIVING THAT GROWS:
I forgot this on my original lists, and it has been a longtime favorite gift of mine: sending seedlings or windowbox gardening kits to friends throughout the country. Last year I sent tomato plants to several relatives via Windowbox.com -- though they messed up two orders, they resent one and credited me money for the other, and I had a good experience. Windowbox promotes gardening for people w/o the space, which I think is a fabulous idea. Still, this year, my gifts will come via Seeds of Change because they sell organic plants and work hard at preserving biodiversity. You can buy a truffle tree for somebody to reap the benefits of, rent vines you get the bottles of wine from...

SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE ITEMS FROM SOME FAIR TRADE SHOP OR ‘GREEN’ COMPANY (ORGANIC, FAIRLY TRADED, AND/OR vegan):
Basically, you can get the green version of about anything, but it costs…Also, check to make sure item is really green…ie, many yoga mats from green companies are made out of gassing plastics. Many green things aren’t “fair trade” and “vice-versa.” I’m happy when I can get both (and can buy them locally!)…but it doesn’t always happen. I’d shop around for most any of these items…you CAN find good deals if you look hard enough
1) Clothes: Buying new (or used!), organic, worker friendly, fairly traded, and/or vegan clothes or wallets, bags, or shoes.
2) Crafts: Buying fairly traded crafts from around the world for your loved ones try Global Exchange, Bright Hope, Ten Thousand Villages, World of Good
3) Food Items: AKA fairly traded coffee, teas, chocolates…Global Exchange, Café Campesino, Shaman Chocolates, Glee Gum
4) Personal Care Items: Soaps, salts,at stores like Our Green House.
5) Toys: Wood, cotton, pvc-free…Kid Bean, Toys from the Heart, Peapods
Portals to find the stores that sell these goods: Co-Op America, Eco Mall, Global Exchange
6) Jewelry: Buy recycled gold etc from GreenKarat.com
7) Movies: Buy movies that support women filmmakers at WomenMakeMovies.com
8) Health equipment. Healthy yoga mats at stores like Natural Fitness.

SITES WITH MORE SPECIFIC GOOD IDEAS FOR GIFTS YOU CAN PURCHASE
1) The Green Guide via Grist
2) Co-Op America’s Green Pages
3) Environmental Defense
4) Tree hugger

BETTER WHEN THEY’RE USED…:
1) Books are good to give used, as they’re not particularly environmentally friendly. And it goes against the idea of local, but these days, it’s pretty easy to get a new-looking used book online. Or go the other way and get a funky old edition of a book, or an illustrated old edition…
2) Jewelry. Want to avoid supporting icky work practices in the mining industry & yet still get your sweetie some kind of bling? Antique jewelry is a good choice…
3) Baby/Kid Things. You can get good wooden baby toys and avoid those nasty plastic chemicals. Or a snowflake dress some baby only wore once. Or black patent leather shoes a baby wore twice. Or cool costumes for babies, kids, toddlers…
4) Furniture. Buy a crappy old table and refinish it. Or if you’ve got the dough, buy a refinished table.
5) Wrapping Paper. I’m ahead of myself here, but as long as you’re out, used stores (and your attic and about everywhere you look) is full of papers or cloth that make inexpensive, cool looking, distinctive wrappings.
6) Doo-dads. You know who you’re shopping for better than I do…go hunting!

HOME-MADE, CHEAP, OR FREE (AKA TIME)…GOOD FOR KIDS & STUDENTS OF ALL ILKS:
1) Bake. Deliver the goods to friends in lieu of purchased gifts
2) Books. Construct them yourself, write a poem or a story, or uses photos…or both…
3) Ornaments, picture frames, magnets. Go to a craft store (or a used store) find materials, and concoct them.
4) Calendars, cds, videos. Use the computer to make calendars or cds or a video
4) Compose. Songs, poems, stories, plays, portraits, dances…
5) Work. Clean out somebody’s garage, cupboards, paint their porch, weed their garden…
6) Sculpt. With clay or snow or granite.
7) Cross pollinate these and other ideas you have…
8) Puppets. Make puppets for the kids in your life…

HOARY GIFT GIVING:
A few trashy gifts that are not fair-trade, environmentally friendly, local, organic, or educational always slip into my giving. I don’t stress out too much, because I go out of my way to keep their numbers down. Last year I knew somebody who needed a talking Jackie Kennedy doll, so I will look locally and/or used…but I’m not holding my breath.
1) One way around this is to buy your gifts through sites like HEARTof.com, which is a portal you enter before shopping at regular places like Amazon or the Gap...but if you do enter these places through the HEARTof hurdel 75% of your purchase money goes to a charity of your choice. Similar organizations that give less money -- 35% -- are GreaterGood.com or IGive.com.

GIVING FRESH AIR:
1) Surprise the family with an outing to some outdoor place on your gift exchange day…an orchard, a sledding hill, a river, a park…bring snacks

***I have definitely not included all there is out there. This is a list that will grow at my pace, not the pace of the green gifting industry. If I forgot one of your favorites, or if you have a good idea about any of all this, please let me know in the comments!

McVeganism

2007-12-04T10:03:00.000-08:00

My post on Grasshopper's diet drew concern about Quorn, a laboratory produced mold that makes very tasty faux chicken, chicken nuggets, and meatballs. It is billed as akin to mushroom fungus, but is more like Miso, Tempeh, or certain cheeses that use fungus/molds to grow and/or ferment into themselves. The main concern over Quorn seems to be that a number of people in the US and Britain are very allergic to this mycoprotein. Lucky for everybody in our family, Grasshopper has no known allergies. But even though I had read about how Quorn is laboratory produced and not been bothered about it before, all the controversy Quorn sparked on the Raising a Vegetarian Baby post set me off thinking (that does happen, on occasion).

The highly processed nature of the product, and my desire to have this short cut, not to give up on a fast fix, reminds me about the troubles I have always had with plain vegetarianism or veganism: people use the words as synonyms for healthy eating, or for diets, but in many cases, I've known many (not all) vegetarians and vegans to be terrible, trashy eaters who happen not to eat meat products. They are more sucre-grainarians. In college the first move many of my vegetarian friends made was to find which Hostess products they could still stash away in some secret hiding place in their dorm rooms.

A major portion of the reason we eat 'green'...because vegetarian is vague and incomplete...is that we want to avoid eating processed junk, we want to put in foods low on the food chain high on our diet...which, aside from helping out our feathered and/or four footed friends, allows us to better avoid bioaccumulation of toxins etc. Part of doing this is at least trying to know what it is that makes it onto our plate.

Of course, like the last post I put up implies, it's very hard to know what's in or on our food. Raw almonds, for example, are no longer "raw" in the way the raw food eaters define raw. In being pasteurized things happen to the almonds. Similarly, I know that a lot happens to the dairy products my family eats before we eat them, even when I buy organic, and I'm not sure what exactly. I don't make all our own pasta or bread... I don't know how oil is pressed out of olives...I accept I am ignorant about the paths a lot of the food I eat followed to get to me.

Still, I believe in digging your heels in, wherever you are, and refusing to slide any further down whatever slippery slope you're navigating. I don't over-worry about not knowing what's in everything...but I just make sure that the majority of what I cook or snack on is whole grains, legumes, greens, fruity, nuts, seeds, berries, and vegetables. Dairy, tofu, processed grains, and sauces entering our diet I monitor in amount and by the limited standards that do exist -- organic, dye-free, non-GMO, etc..

We have a neighbor child being raised vegan, though both her parents eat meat. Her parents we barely see, and they seem nice, are great to Grasshopper, and their girl is a great kid. But her diet seems to consist of fake cheese, soy milk, and grains.

It seems a good example to think about how hard it is leaving meat and dairy. All these McVegan products exist because people miss what they had, they are nostalgic for what they grew up with. Our neighbors eat meat and believe, maybe, it is better not to, and maybe they themselves just can't give it up and want to somehow shield their daughter from temptation: but the way they approach the issue is to literally replace meat. It seems well-intentioned, but dangerously McVegan.

Which brings me back to Quorn, a product I originally purchased because I get sick of soy products, and because it's very easy for me to make high-protien faux-chicken nuggets at lunch or when I'm pressed for time. I don't always have time to make my own vegi-burgers or soy nuggets...which are easy enough: freeze tofu, thaw it, cut it into little squres, season breadcrumbs and batter, then bake or fry the tofu. But just like I used to turn my nose up at "real" macaroni and cheese, Grasshopper is about 1/3 more likely to eat the Quorn than she is mamma's nuggets. (Only recently has Grasshopper decided she likes peanut butter and quesadillas, which alleviates some lunch time pressure... )

Now when I think of Quorn I get some picture of a vat of mold in my head. So I don't buy them so much...though on occasion, I will. This whole conundrum has made me think about processed foods and their relationship to vegetarianism and veganism. I mean, there are giant markets for weirdly constructed McVegan foods, located in the McVegan section of the grocery, of course: Gimmie Lean, Tofurkey, Nayonaise, Sheese cheese, Stonewall's Jerquee, Tofutti sour cream. My favorite processed fake stuff is Notdogs. Other fake options I have let enter our diet: some soy milk, Tofutti Cream Cheese and Nayonaise. We eat tofu and sometimes Seitan.

It's funny I would never feed my child packaged Noodle-Roni -- I don't even like to feed her Annie's macaroni and cheese -- but I wouldn't blink if she ate Tofutti. And I have no idea what that is. I don't know what the fake turkey lunchmeat we used to eat on occasion is. Like when I ate beef and knew it was cow and some additives, I know Tofutti is tofu and something.

Okay, not exactly like that. I'm guessing the makers of Tofutti are more thoughtful than the beef industry. But when I'm getting at is my awareness of the need for fast options, and the ease of relying on processed foods, even when eating a diet that most people think is healthy. I'm getting at how it all unsettles me, how McVeganism or McVegetarianism are realities as potentially dangerous as McDonald's. Even when I knew Quorn was mold, for example, I was thinking: but it's so good! so tasty! it can't be that bad, even though I don't have a clue what's really in it.

Quorn is a shortcut. Tofu nuggets are easy to make, but easy still takes time. It's upsetting when the shortcuts we find to enable ourselves to spend time doing things other than cooking turn out to bring us to places on the part of the food chain located in the Twilight Zone.

I guess the solution to this problem is the same as always: everything, especially the more disturbing things, in moderation. Short cuts in moderation.

This Seems Important: Take Action by Dec 3

2007-12-03T13:19:00.000-08:00

Our vegetable co-op, Central City Co-op, sent this email over the weekend and I missed it. I don't believe I've ever posted a take action email/post before, but we eat a lot of greens around here.

* * * * *

First email I received:

The US Department of Agriculture/USDA plans to irradiate (which = pasteurize) ALL raw greens -- including organic. They have proposed to have federal regulations mandating the 'pasteurization' of all greens. The FDA has started using the word 'pasteurize' as a euphemism for irridiation. For example, almonds are being "pasturized" in California, and the most common method for treating them is with a known carcinogenic, banned rocket fuel.

The plan to pasteurize the vegetables was revealed recently, and the FDA is only allowing comments until Monday, Dec. 3. (In the past, the FDA had comment periods of several weeks or even months.

Second, more detailed email I received:

Protect Fresh Leafy Greens and Family Farms
Federal Regulations Would Harm Sustainable Farmers and Biodiversity

We need your help in another battle to stop the slippery slope toward a sterilized and industrialized food system that threatens biodiversity and the very existence of family-scale farms that grow food in a safe, healthy, and environmentally sustainable way.

In response to the E. coli 0157 outbreaks last year in bagged spinach, the USDA is considering a change in the federal regulations that could potentially require growers of all fresh leafy green vegetables to follow specified guidelines in the fields and during post-harvest handling. The federal rules would be similar to the California guidelines that were set by large-scale operations after the outbreaks. The guidelines include growing practices that discourage biodiversity and sustainable/organic farming practices, deplete soil fertility, and create “sterile” fields—methods that have not been scientifically proven to actually reduce E. coli 0157 bacteria but are certain to reduce biodiversity, harm wildlife, and burden family-scale farms.

Small- and medium-scale farmers would bear the greatest financial and logistical burden of such specified guidelines. For example, if the rules require testing for pathogens at every harvest—as they currently do in California—then large-scale farms that grow one type of crop and harvest only one to three times per season would pay much less than smaller and more diverse farms that continually harvest many types of vegetables. If regulations dictate a single set of growing practices and food safety measures, which are appropriate for large-scale “factory farms” but not for diverse family farms, we risk losing the very farms that grow leafy greens in a healthy and sustainable way. A one-size-fits-all regulation will not work!

The rules threaten biodiversity and environmental sustainability in several ways. Farmers would be encouraged to eliminate wildlife and any vegetation that may provide habitat for wildlife. The rules also discourage the development of microbial life in the soil. These methods have not been shown to reduce the risk of harmful bacterial contamination. In fact, sustainable farming methods that promote microbial life in soil have shown to reduce E. coli 0157 because it has to compete with other microbes and is therefore less likely to thrive. However, the aim of these rules seems to be for sterile fields that support no forms of life, except for the leafy greens.

We must make our voices heard, telling the USDA that we do not support federal rules that would put a great financial and logistical burden on family-scale farmers, discourage environmentally healthy ways of farming, and harm wildlife.

Taking action is easy, but with a December 3 deadline for submitting comments to the USDA, we need your help today. Please tell the USDA that food safety is an important concern, but that mandating measures with no scientific basis that will put small farmers out of business, and harm wildlife, is not the way to go.

TAKE ACTION:

Please help insure our right to purchase buy raw greens.

Here are the procedures for posting a public comment:

1) Submit online. Either

Submit via this website:
http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/oca/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=21743

OR submit directly:

Go to www.regulations.gov.
In the middle of the screen, you will see "Search Documents." In Step 1, choose "Documents with an open comments period"
In Step 2, choose "Department of Agriculture"
In Step 3, choose "PROPOSED RULES"
In Step 4, choose "Docket ID" and then type in "AMS- FV-07-0090"
Hit "Submit."
Next, you will see a column titled "Comments, add/due by." Click on the tiny tan dialogue icon, and you are now ready to submit your information and your comment.

2) Fax in your response: (202) 720-8938.

Please take action on this. Follow the link to read more and take action at the FDA Comment Line www.regulations.gov

Even more important, get to know your Senators and Representatives and call them; their willingness to address issues depends on how many constituents call them to complain or voice their support.

It only takes 5 minutes to call the toll-free Congressional switchboard numbers when an important issue like this comes up, and they are listening.

The FDA will listen to the public and heed their wishes IF enough people call/contact them.
Even more important, voice your concerns Monday to the Senators and Represenatives who represent you. Let them know you want the agri-business corporations to take responsibility and use more hygienic handling practices and more prudent shipping methods.

Reach Your representatives:

www.freespeechcoalition.org/reach.htm

AND

EAT YOUR VEGGIES

KNOW YOUR FARMER!!!

EAT LOCAL

The Month in Pictures

2007-11-21T20:57:00.000-08:00

So we're heading to Montana, tomorrow, to spend time with my aunt and uncle in their cabin just outside Missoula. (I know, I know: if we bought carbon offsets, this year, somebody would be very rich and we would be very poor.) I thought before I get a store of a whole new set of photos, I'd do a little photoblogging to make up for the long lapse of no posting:

After Greendaddy's parents left...and we didn't get any photos when they were here...we had a few regular days. Greendaddy and Grasshopper tooled around in the cool bike seat my friend Jbrd gave us.

And Greendaddy experimented with taking over my old job (or my boob's old job) of putting Grasshopper to sleep...

...then he perfected it.

After a couple weeks of moseying and snoozing, we hopped on the plane with our irate toddler and went to Virginia, where Grasshopper got to bond with her cousins Katydid (who is five) and Cricket (a little older than one). This was taken right before we went to a Pumpkin Patch:

This is the picture that shows how Grasshopper was the one little cousin who really needed a nap, but refused to take one:

At the farm with the Pumpkin Patch we spent about twenty minutes lounging in this pile of corn. Greendaddy wanted to make his own pile of corn, right in the back yard, because it was so comfortable and refreshing. Really, on both accounts. This is Grasshopper:

And Cricket:

And the whole bunch of us:

When we got back home, my mom came to visit, and it was Halloween. Grasshopper appears here as a Lion. She's wearing her friend Willy's costume, homemade by his grandmother the year before. She won $10 at WholeFoods later on, in the costume contest my mother quickly discovered and entered her into:

And she was also either a Boohbah or Rodney Dangerfield:

I didn't think she knew how to open up candy by herself
since we never give her any candybars. But my baby is no fool.

Here's my mom, Greendaddy, and Grasshopper -- the only proof mom was here, as I keep aiming the camera at the baby and my husband, and nobody else. Got to get better at that:

Mom took us to the Renaissance festival.

Grasshopper was sitting on a giant, fabulous cement pig that my mother didn't think was nearly as intersting as we are:

We went to Galveston with my mom, but we went too late to get in the water. The weekend after she left, though, we went to Surfside and it was still warm enough to get in the water. Two weekends ago.

Montana, where I'm going at five a.m. tomorrow, will be tough medicine for this subtropical family, but I hear we get to go cross country skiing...

Iron Poo and Potty Terrors

2007-11-20T20:35:00.000-08:00

The quickest version of the story (and I need quick since we're so far behind...) is that the iron supplements the doctors have been insiting we give Grasshopper made her poo do it's best to turn into actual hunks of iron. The poo got to be so hard it hurt her to poo, and in a perfect world, we would have figured this out instantly and put her onto a stool softener (Miralax, which is what my sister-in-law, who is a pediatrician, recommended.)

What happened is that she began despising her potty -- at first she wouldn't sit down for longer than five seconds, and with time, the sight of it made her howl. We thought she had a urinary tract infection, and we went to the doctor. Of course, she wasn't up to peeing in a bottle, and so the nurses in the office tried to catheterize our already nearly-demented-by-anger baby. The moment they stuck the catheter tube in she managed to send a stream of urine directly into the nurse's hair, and to poo on the table. Oh so embarassing for mommy and daddy and nurse, mildly ameliorating for baby.

Because the world works this way, we were at the night clinic because the next evening -we were scheduled to get on a flight to Virginia. Greendaddy was due to be a groomsman in a wedding that weekend, and we had scheduled a few extra days around that trip so that we could also spend quality time with Greendaddy's brother and his family. We ended up at the night clinic when we realized that Grasshopeer wasn't being suddenly moody about the potty, and that there was a real problem. Unfortunatley, the doctor on duty had enough time to tell us he didn't think it was a UTI, but not enough time to help us figure out what was really at issue.

Since Greendaddy's brother M. and sister-in-law V. are both doctors -- she is a pediatrician, even -- we figured we'd get on the plane, despite the fact that the cream the doctor had given us hadn't helped Grasshopper feel a smidgeon better. Our trip to Virginia was tear-filled and painful for Grasshopper, Greendaddy and I were stressed and ready to strangle each other because of it, and our family was gifted the pleasure of five days of ailing, suffering two-year-old screams and matching edgy parents. After a few days there, however, V. realized that though Grasshopper was peeing regularly -- though unhappily -- she had stopped pooing altogether, and we went out and bought the MiraLax.

By the time we got home, Grasshopper was regular again. But she didn't lose her fear of the potty. She still refused to sit on it.

You have to understand that this was the first time in her life that she ever really regularly used diapers. We caught her poo and pee in a bucket from the time she was two weeks old, and as I've written before, there were less than a dozen missed poos in the last year -- almost none since she was old enough to walk to the potty and sit down on it.

In Virginia, we actually used paper diapers for the first time, because sometime in August we had sold most of her diapers and started putting her in training pants. The trainers were too thin to sustain all the peeing and pooing she was up to. Grasshoppre soiled diapers the whole weekend.

When we got back to Houston, though, we had enough spare, old diapers to switch her back over to cloth -- a move she protested, by the way. She was smitten with the absorbent nature of the paper diapers, which made it easy for her to pee and not be uncomfortable. So anybody wondering if cloth diapers really help with regular potty training: Grasshopper's experience suggests a resounding yes.

Of course, even though the cloth diapers were less comfortable when wet, she continued peeing in them for five or six days. In the end, I bribed her: I gave her dark chocolate chips when she sat on the potty, just two or three times, one day, which was enough for her to realize the potty was no longer trying to punish her. She started peeing again. But it took maybe a whole week and a half for her to start pooing in it.

Have I ever mentioned that I haven't carried diaper wipes with me, ever, because we ECd. If she pooed in her diapers at home, during this time, she'd squat and poo, and I'd immediately change her diaper with little mess. But a couple times during this period she pooed in her diaper while we were out -- and the poo got all over her butt, which, again, I have never dealt with with before (not since I babysat). I'd be in the middle of a store and gasp, "Oh my God! My baby just pooed her pants!" and then I'd have to watch people turn from me, to my nearly-two-year old, and then back to me again with this look: Duh, Mommy. What's your problem?

The internet suggested that potty regression is normal, and that it lasts two months. A thought that totally freaked me out, which in turn, made me feel ashamed: ECing isn't about forcing the baby to poo in a potty -- it's about allowing them to do what comes naturally. But since pooing in the potty was so normal for so long, I found it difficult to just be okay with the poo in the diapers. I never raised my voice or got mad at Grasshopper, but I was annoyed, and she knew that.

All this happened in a span of about two and half weeks. She's back to her normal self now, thank God, but we have to figure out a new way to give her Iron. She's not fond of Black Strap Molasses, and though I'm grateful to the MiraLax stool softener, I'm not about to make it part of her regular diet. Any helpful hints will be greatly appreciated.

(PS: Photos from our visit to Virginia -- and actual highlights of the visit -- to follow)

Vegetarianism and Candy

2007-11-08T13:43:00.000-08:00

We're gearing into getting back to the blog. There is just SO MUCH to write about that the thought of starting again is obliterating. But today at the hospital we were compiling the tri-yearly newsletter and I came across these poems, perhaps the funniest in the world.

Vegetarianism
by Micah, 9 years old

A chili dog is a dog.
Not meat.
So I eat that.
No hamburgers.
I'll eat a little bit of fried chicken.
I like sausage.
I hate bacon.
No pork at all.
I like ham. Not roast beef.
I stopped eating meat.
I don't eat meat at all.
But hot dogs, ham, and sausage.
Tacos ain't meat.

I get my special powers
by being a vegetarian.

Nine Ways of Looking at Candy

I.
I like to give away my candy
because I'm a giver.
Give! Give! Give!
That's all I do.
Don't ask why.

II.
Just eat it.
You just better be happy.
I got this candy for you
because I rode on an ambulance last night.

III.
The reason I don't eat candy
or chips or stuff like that
is that it gets stuck in your teeth.
The more you eat
the more it gets stuck.

IV.
On Halloween my cousin Tracie
laid all my candy on the table
and took all the Whoppers.
My dad like's Robin's eggs.
He likes Easter egg candy.

IV.
My mom buys all the candy
and I stay home
watching television.

V.
If you eat too much licorice
you're going to grow tall.
Not red, but tall.
Tall with a red head.
If you eat too much chocolate
you turn into a blueberry.

VI.
I'll tell you who likes candy:
Brian.
He stole some from Armani.
A long time ago.
It's true.

VII.
I don't care
who eats it.

VIII.
a mixing of
chocolate and fruit
a mixing of
vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry
crunchy

IX.
I'm going to pass the candy
around.

What blog?

2007-10-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

October has been ghoulish, schedule wise -- a good thing for us, as we're having a bit of fun, but not so good for our lives in blogville. We had Grasshopper's Dada and Dadi visiting, threw a barbeque for our friend Martha, will go to DC this weekend for GreenDaddy's friend Mike's wedding, and then Grasshopper's Grandma from Myton will arrive. And, oh, yeah, we're trying to get work done, as well.

So we're not giving up on the blog...but say adieu until the end of the month, I'm guessing.

Wanted: Daddy Friendly Playgroups

2007-10-08T13:53:00.000-07:00

I received an email today from someone I don't know. A common friend referred her to me. Here is what it says:

Hi! You don't know me but I'm a student at UH working w/ Dr. B- on a thesis. I mentioned to her that I had a pair of friends doing the stay-at-home-dad thing and they were having a ridiculous time finding a playgroup for their youngest (about 16 mos.) that would allow Dad to bring her instead of Mom. Dr. B- recommended you as the man to ask about such matters. If you do have any leads on father friendly playgroups in the Houston or Baytown area, it would be a great help.

First, does anyone know of father-friendly playgroups around Houston?

Also, I would like to congratulate those fathers for taking a lead role in the care of their children. Staying at home is a big risk for any parent because it can lead to a lifetime of difficulty. Once you have a gap in your resume, it will always be there. The journal I work for, Feminist Economics, will be publishing a study next year that shows how caring for children lowers women's income over their lifetimes. I hope that these fathers will not face the same employment difficulties that mothers have. Perhaps with men taking time off, or going part-time like me, the gender norms that create the conditions for income gaps will change.

Raising a Healthy Vegetarian Baby or Toddler

2007-10-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

Here's to the illustrious, healthy vegetarian baby. Reading the newspapers, even talking to doctors, and certainly talking to my parents you might worry it's as rare as the three toed astronaut. But vegetarians have been raising healthy babies for centuries, throughout the world. But how to do it in Houston?

The major caveat in raising a healthy, happy, vegetarian baby is that you have to expand the kind of items you put on your grocery list. You need to start buying the exotic goods staring out at you from the bulk bins in your health food store or co-op of choice. The other major caveat is that you have to learn how to cook. No more sandwiches for both of your two meals a day, no more a slice of pizza here and some french fries there. If you can manage both these tasks, you can raise your vegetarian baby just fine.

Grasshopper, our resident vegetarian baby, usually has six or seven meals a day: breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, snack, dinner, snack. She eats so frequently because she doesn't always finish a meal, and that's okay. If she eats three bites of lunch, I operate under the assumption that that old demon hunger will compel her to munch more heavily during her later snacks. (GreenDaddy's mom -- Grasshopper's Dadi -- visited this weekend and told me she'd read an article suggesting that part of the obesity epidemic in the US is linked to people forcing their children to eat every last scrap on the plate...that is, to eat when they're not hungry. I love studies that support my habits!)

The best thing about Grasshopper's frequent snacking, I think, is that it makes it much easier for me to ensure she's eating from the Green Parenting Food Circle (not a triangle because somedays she gets more of one than the other): protien, fruit, grains, water, dairy & vegetables daily between snacks and meals. I should also mention that she still breastfeeds once a day, though she's forgetting to ask everyday now.

With all this in mind, I thought I'd put out this list of foods that Grasshopper is inordinatley fond of, and/or, doesn't know she eats but does regularly. I'm certain I've forgotten or don't know about other great ideas, and I'd love any new ideas to widen our range.

Grasshopper's Favorite Vegan Foods:

Quorn. It’s a brand of meat-aping protein consisting primarily of fungus n’whey, you find it in the frozen food, next to the Boc-blech Burgers. I like giving it to Grasshopper because I don’t want to overload her with soy. It comes in fake chicken & fake meatball forms. Whole Foods has it on sale once a month, usually, and I stock up, or I can’t afford it.

Veggie/Bean/Tofu Burgers. We make them at home, usually. None of us like the store bought much.

Tofu. What can’t you do with tofu? It goes into homemade veggie burgers, in Chinese food. While I’m not such a huge fan of tofu blocks in food, Grasshopper is. In a pinch, I buy the pre-made teriyaki tofu from the Whole Foods salad bar.

Frozen edamame and lima beans. I microwave them in water for about 45 seconds. A favorite snack of MaGreen and Grasshopper alike.

All the other beans. Since I got my pressure cooker in gear I love buying all sorts of crazy looking beans at Whole Foods. Turtles, Aztecs, Black Beans, Navy, Kidney. Usually I cook these with greens.

Lentils & Dahls GreenDaddy has a favorite traditional Gujurati dahl, and I have a few favorites I make. Grasshopper munches them up.

Rice. A quarter of our meals are served over brown or white Basmati. This was one of the baby's first favorites.

Hot Cereals. I alternate between oat grout, seven grain, and plain old oatmeal from the bulk bins.

Rainbow Light NutriStart Multivitamin Powder. Grasshopper needs Iron supplements and the iron drops the doctor prescribed taste exactly like you’re eating a pole in winter: metallic and you can’t unstick the flavor from your tongue for hours. Rainbow Lite is a brand my friend Kayte turned me onto when I was looking for prenatal vitamins. They’re free of “artificial colors, flavors, sweetners, preservatives and other objectionable additives often found in vitamin products.” Since they don’t have any goodies in them they taste like blech, which is why I buy the powder packets. I put them in her cereal.

Quinoa & Amarynth. Super protein filled seed-grains of the Aztecs. I add them rice whenever I cook it, put a little in her seven grain cereal in the morning.

Noodles. Who doesn’t like a good noodle every now and then?

Sunflower & pumpkin seeds. Sometimes I grind them and put them in food, sometimes I just put them in food, sometimes we just snack on them.

Nuts. Walnuts, peanuts, cashews. No allergies in this house, thankfully. She’s just learned how to chew them well enough to snack on.

Peanut butter. Grasshopper likes it on slices of apples.

Dried, unsweetened cranberries we always have on hand. And I also usually have another sort of dried unsweetened fruit, pineapple if it’s available, or mango.

Veggies. Broccoli, corn, carrots are her favorites. I don’t put any sauces on them, except butter on occasion. I remember my dad trying to “mask the taste” of broccoli with melted cheese and just destroying the vegetable for me. I was shocked to discover I loved it when I was twelve or thirteen and my always dieting stepmother demanded he serve the cheese to the side so she could eat hers with lemon juice over it. I believe I told every single person I met for a month about this amazing discovery of lemon juice on broccoli.

Greens. The vegetable that one ups all the others. We're in the south, we get a variety of Kales, Collards, Mustard, Beet, Dandelion, Chards, Spinach...and a few I just can't think of. For grashopper I choose the more tender varieties and least pungent: Spinach, Chards, Dinosaur Kale. I usually cook them with beans or if it's a tough green, I boil it in the water with pasta. Grasshopper loves them sometimes, hates them sometimes.

Mushrooms. She likes cooked mushrooms.

Berries. Frozen blueberries. Seasonal raspberries, blueberries, strawberries.

Fruit. Apples, oranges, bananas, mango, melons, grapes.

Crackers. Annie’s Cheddar Bunnies or TLC cheddar crackers. But also just regular wheat crackers.

Catsup. What can you do? She loves to dip.

Non-Vegan:

Whole Yogurt. Grasshopper eats a few bowls of plain yogurt with honey in it a day. It’s her primary dairy intake.

Honey. She inherited her craving of honey from my mom. For yogurt and cereals.

Whole Milk. In her cereal. On occasion she’ll drink it.

Eggs. She’s on and off with eggs, and we eat them rarely.

Cheese. Grashopper isn’t a fan of cheese, but some other babies might be.

Toddler Talking Trash

2007-09-26T20:22:00.001-07:00

I know I've been heavy on mommy posts, lately. But I'm thinking Grasshopper's interst in this blog, if she ever reads it, will be these sorts of posts. Don't worry, though: I'm in the midst of a post on feeding a vegetarian baby. Okay. That's a lie. In order to justify another post about my wee one I hustled some synapses, which reminded me of the Quorn taste in my mouth, and how I once considered writing a post on the topic of raising a healthy vegetarian child. I am still at the dawn of thinking about writing that post however.

This post, by the way, is unabashedly about my adorable toddler whose requisite pronounciation mistakes have a distinctly crass bent.

For instance, although she has always referred to her breastfeeding as, "NiiighNigh!" she ran up to me and started demanding boobies last week. Boobies?? Grasshopper is all but weaned and neither of us could remember the last time we'd uttered the "b-o-o" word. The next morning, though, she asked again. I said no, outright, which sent her into tears, but she quieted down and gazed at me intently as I started making her morning seven grain cereal. When I opened the freezer, as usual, and dumped a handful of frozen blueberries into the pot she let out a victorious gurgle of sorts and started laughing/chanting like an insane baby: boobies! boobies! boobies!

And just tonight she crassified another of her favorite foods. I was teaching her that all liquids aren't, actually, called agua or water. On the table in front of us: bilburry juice (jugo), milk, water, and ketchup. After a protracted conversation in which I had to assure her that my name was still "mommy" even if all the liquids were not "agua," she decided I wasn't pulling her leg. Then she pointed and named everything on the table: aqua, jugo, milk, cow poop.

And last but not least: after she sits on her potty GreenDaddy chirps: "Good job, Grasshopper! Let's go put the pee pee in the toilet." Grasshopper falls into a full tilt run towards the bathroom yelling, "Twat! Twat! Twat!"

We're trying not to encourage her in these mispronunciations, since I don't want to be one of the YouTube parents who thinks it's funny to teach their children to swear worse than sailors and put it on the web for the world to see. But, like my father always swore he was doing for me, I am saving these stories to tell her first dates (though by the time she's thirty-five, she'll probably just think they're funny too...heh heh).

Of course, my favorite of her words is not an uncouth mispronunciation at all: it's an extraordinary invention. A mix between the spanish and english words for shoe -- "zapato," and, well, "shoe." A shoepato.

Books, DVDs, & Online Toddler Activities

2007-09-23T19:54:00.001-07:00

I'm down to a couple favorites for BabyG's new name: Grasshopper I really like. Verdita I decided against, in the end. I like G-pers, G-minor, G-whiz, and am also considering just making the G her and dressing up as we feel, as we go. Recently a friend suggested Greenhorn, which I think is funny, but not the right name. Have to confer w/GreenDaddy.
**********************
We haven't discussed Gpers' media tastes in the blog. Ever I think. And though I take inordinate pleasure watching her move gravel around or discover fallen leaves, there are actually times when we read books or watch the computer.

Books
I read her books after taking her out of the bath in the morning, and before I get ready. Then, throughout the day we read on and off. And GreenDaddy reads her to bed at night.

Her first favorite book was a popular one: Moo Baa La La La. "A cow says moo, a sheep says baa, three singing pigs say, "La, la, la..." Since she was a little over a year old she's had at least the animal sounds memorized, and now she can actually recite most of the pages if it occurs to her to do so. Reciting this book while I'm driving the car or she's upset or sleepy is generally a surefire way to settle her down.

Or it was, until To Market To Market (this is a link to Amazon because I like reading the book reviews there). It's based on Mother Goose's:

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig,
Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.
To market, to market, to buy a fat hog,
Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.
To market, to market, to buy a plum bun,
Home again, home again, market is done.

Anne Miranda, the author, sends an old lady to the market for a farm's worth of animals, one at a time...but everytime the old woman returns from a trip to the market, the last animal she bought has escaped: the pig leaves the pen (uh oh!), the goose gets loose (uh oh), the goat eats her coat (uh oh)... You get the picture.

In the end the woman decides its no good trying to imprison or eat the animals, so she ends up taking them all to the market and together they buy tons of fabulous tomatoes, okra, corn, potatoes etc, go home and make vegetable soup.

I found the book listed in somebody's Amazon list of vegetarian books for kids. I guess this is vegetarian, but it's vegetarian in crazy, lovely way. No animals get eaten-- in fact at the end, the old lady and her menagerie snooze together on the kitchen floor. My hunch was that Gpers would be fond of it in a year or two because the illustrations -- very cool collages of vintage photographs from markets and cartoons -- seemed a little old for her.

But, of course, I remember reading all her books and thinking: no way my baby is going to like this, and then it's what she loves the most. As it went with this book. She loves the "uh ohs" in the middle of every rhyme. Sometimes that's all it takes.

Video Games

Boohbah Zone. I found the site Googling. The website refers to a BBC show called Boohbah, that I believe was only on air a couple seasons. Made by the Teletubbies people. We eventually rented the cd to discover the program is actually stranger than Teletubbies. But on the computer game version, Gpers loves watching the Boohbahs dance.

Kneebouncers is Gpers other favorite game. Boohbah I have to move the mouse around for her, except in a couple games where she's learning to do it just in the last few weeks. But Kneebouncers uses the whole keyboard: she has to push any key at all and it makes little things happen. She loves it.

Animal Noises we just click around and listen to sounds she loves to hear.

Stories at Nick Jr We (I) especially like the the Grumpy Bug, read by Sandra Bernhard.

Movies/TV

You Tube. That's right. When GreenDaddy failed at hooking Gpers on the Daily Show, he made his way to YouTube and got the baby hooked on cat madness.

GreenDaddy likes to comment that watching YouTube has made him think television and movies aim to high: people are satisfied with very little. These cat videos and slide shows Gpers is addicted to are a case in point. She will watch cats, dogs, birds, any of these things. Sometimes we just watch the opening to Boohbah, which is on YouTube, and which is usually about as long as she's interested.

My First Signs by Baby Einstein. When I'm getting out of the shower and she's just bathed, I set her in the chair while I get ready, and she watches this on the computer. She calls it Boohbah. She's learned the signs since she's watched everyday for about a month, and even though she knows the words for most of ths signs already, she loves having something to do with her hands. The whole family has a crush on Marlee Matlin, the actress in the video. I've watched snippets of her talking with puppets (who don't have any arms or hands: strange in a signing video) at least 50 times, and I still like watching her.

Other

Grandma Two things Gpers asks for in terms of the computer: Boohbah (any of the videos or the games) or Grandma. Grandma is my mother, who has a web cam. It took awhile, Gpers recognizes and asks after my pixelized mother with regularity. She's coming to visit the end of October and I think we're all curious to see how she reacts to a 3D Grandma.

We're wondering if she'll demand real life winks...in Windows Live Messenger my mom sends little cartoons or what have you, that last two or three seconds. After we all talk about ten or fifteen minutes, Gpers starts asking for them. Will she expect 3D Grandma to produce them in the air around her head?

On the Lust for Water

2007-09-19T08:11:00.000-07:00

After an hour-long ride from Gandhinagar to Ahmedebad, I am coated with dust and grit. I desperately want to wash my face. The building where Kalapi uncle lives is one of several in the Azad or “Freedom” compound. The rows of concrete buildings remind me of the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. The first time I went to visit him, I thought, “My uncle lives in the projects?” Inside, however, the apartment is conspicuously clean and well-kept. Kalapi uncle asks if I want to freshen up as soon as I walk in. The two-bedroom unit has one bathroom. I turn the faucet and nothing comes out. Not a drip. There are two buckets filled with water in the corner. Water for the day. I want to take off all my clothes and dump both buckets over my head. I know that I can make do with a cup full of water to wash my face, but I want to consume it all.

My father and Kalapi uncle grew up in a small town together. My father became a physician and immigrated to the United States. Kalapi uncle stayed behind in India and worked for a bank. He was the artistic cousin-brother. In the apartment, he played a cassette tape of Hariprasad Chaurasia performing Megh Malhar while we drank tea. He sprinkled the conversation with verses of Gujarati poetry, which were lost on me. His daughter chose the science and engineering track, though. At the time of my visit, she worked with India’s space agency at their headquarters on Satellite Road. In the corner of her bedroom, I could see her computer. It looked like a second-hand 286, but she had it covered with a sheet of plastic to protect it from the dust. I could not make sense of their situation. How was it that they had educations, solid middle-class jobs, and just two buckets of water to last them a day?

Gujarat, the area of India where my family lives, was in the middle of two years of drought when I visited in 2002. Over the five months of my stay, I got an education in water scarcity. A whole vocabulary – water tanks, tube wells, bore wells, step wells, pumps, bunds, catchment ponds, Bisleri, and Aquafina. I came to recognize rivers where there was only a long stretch of cracked earth. Rows of eggplants where there was only a parched field. Temple ponds where there were only dusty, old steps. I memorized the times of day and night when the city would most likely let the water flow through the pipes, for half an hour or fifteen minutes. Sometimes the water never flowed. In 2000, the drought got so bad that water had to be brought in by a train and tanker trucks to the city of Rajkot, where my cousin Dr. Jatin G. Buch lives. People said it was the worst drought in 100 years. Wells that had functioned for generations no longer yielded water, because the ground water levels dropped and weak monsoons had not replenished the supply.

According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the average water use per person per day in India is 135 liters or 35.6 gallons, whereas the average in the United States is 575 liters or 152 gallons, more than four times the Indian rate. These figures mask huge variations. People in Phoenix, Arizona use more than 1,000 liters of water per day to keep their lawns green, more than seven times the Indian rate. Villagers in Gujarat, especially those in the Saurashtra and Kuchchh regions, use far less than 135 liters per day. Women there often have to carry their water on their heads to their homes. Carrying 1,000 liters for a family of seven on one’s head is out of the question. That would be 455 pounds.

There are tricky questions of how water use is measured, by person or household, domestic use or total use. The average single family usage calculated by the American Water Works Association is just 262 liters of water per day or 69.3 gallons, but that does not include water used in offices and commercial establishments – the water in the coffee at Starbucks, the fountain outside the office building, the beautified highway medians watered by automatic sprinklers.

I cannot stop at comparing averages. They are not enough for me. I am thinking of my family. I need to understand the material difference between my life and theirs. I stay with them in their homes. We drink tea and eat kakra together for breakfast. We eat pau bagi for lunch. We fold up our feet under our legs when a woman comes in the afternoon to sweep the floors. They ask me what I think of microwaves, if they really do help prepare food more quickly. We compare our lives relentlessly. You make more money, but we have the closeness of family. You have every kind of food available in the grocery stores, but it will never be as fresh as our market vegetables, as the ladiwalla’s karela. These comparisons are a fundamental part of our lives. A daily calculus even when we are continents apart. The comparisons give us insight into what it is that we even want from life, but they can crush the soul. Every aspect of experience is on the table – familial bonds, leisure, access to jobs, physical stature, mobility, water.

According to our own water bill, MaGreen, Grasshopper, and I each use 66 gallons per day at our home in Houston. I am not sure how I use my 66 gallons. We do not water our lawn since the green goddesses do that pretty well for us. Now that the baby is nearly potty trained, we don’t need to wash many diapers. My showers are not that long. No hot tub. I suspect that our regular use of the dishwasher, the washing machine, and the toilet flushing are the main culprits. None of my family in India use those appliances. The woman who sweeps does the dishes and the wash by hand. They used eastern, “squatting” toilets that take a small splash from a bucket to flush. (The toilets in the US seem to flush with a vengeance, as if the excrement must be made to feel that it can never return.)

During our last trip to India, I asked my cousin Malay how much water his family uses, but he does not know because they pump it out of a well. Though they live in a city, the municipality does not supply them water. Malay did show me was his rain harvesting system. The roof is slightly tilted to channel water into a pipe that deposits it into their well. “We live near to the sea,” he said, “so if we use too much water the entire supply will become salinated.” This civic sense seems to be missing in the United States, the idea that we all must take some responsibility for our shared resources.

I remember going on a trip with my parents to Arizona. As we drove by the green lawns, I criticized the gross misuse of water in the desert and I expected my parents, having experience water scarcity as children, to back me up.

They said, “The desert should be made green. Why leave it undeveloped? Gujarat should learn from Arizona. Environmentalism is fine, but they want to stop dams before India has a chance to develop.” Although my parents immigrated to the US over thirty years ago and have lived outside longer outside India than they did in it, I began to see that their sentiments were shared by many Gujaratis and that civic mindedness can be claimed by people on opposing sides of the same issue.

In 2006, the Gujarat government raised the level of its Narmada river mega-dam to 120 meters. The estimates of people displaced by the project range from a few thousand people to one million. Several villages of “adhivasis” or tribal people were submerged by the water. However, water is flowing through an elaborate canal network from the dam to urban centers and villages all over Gujarat. The government claims that the value of agricultural production increased by one hundred percent in a single year.

One river has been killed to revive others. The tribals have lost their ancient way of life, but the Sabarmati, which runs through Ahmedebad, flows all year now. I wonder what Gandhi, who was Gujarati, would think. Would he accuse us of lust for water? In Gujarat, he seems to be an unwanted conscience. An honored but resented memory. When I went to Gujarat during the drought, you could hear the lust for water. It was a gurgling sound in the empty pipes and under the dry riverbeds. How much water does it take to slake the lust? Is sixty-six gallons even enough? The logic of our lust for water is cruel. It is not to be measured by volume but in units of compassion and desire.

Water is supremely practical. It is a clean pair of pants. A glass of water. It is a washed, smiling baby. But at another level, I am not trying to secure adequate water. I want the water dripping from the woman in soap commercials on television. I want the mystique of water rushing through a machine, water splashing our already clean dishes over and over and churning our unstained clothes. I want the water in our water heaters hot even when I am miles away at work. I want to know that the damn is there, a sea of our own making. That we can transform the land, make it wilt or make it green.

I went back to India a few months back. My cousin Amit had bought a washing machine and installed Western toilets. He asked me if I wanted to freshen up and showed me his new bathroom. There was a bucket in the corner for taking a dhol bath. “We have a shower too,” he said. “And don’t worry about the water, you can take a shower like you would at home.”

Pages Torn from the Franklin Day Planner

2007-09-16T20:23:00.000-07:00

Switched Grasshopper (name of the day) to training pants, completley. That was a couple months ago, but I keep forgetting to mention it. She's about 96% trained, has been for the last two months. Some of that 4%: sometimes she pees the bed. Sometimes she's too interested or absorbed in the world to stop and pee. Like in a Tuesday Morning discount chain store, where I've stopped to pick-up a board book for a party we're on the way to...and where totally soaked through pants force me to buy the only outfit in her size, a tank top and pants with a split down the butt and ruffles in it...:

Visited Keith and Theresa's -- two major Gs of Green -- and checked out the amazing, environmentally responsible home they're making out of this neat concrete that is 3/4 air. Even little Grasshopper can pick up big chunks of the block. And they have a pond and tons of frogs. And their house is smack dab in the middle of Houston...It can be done! Neato.

Prepared for Tropical Storm Humberto, who snubbed us. A week or two before the storm, though, we had a river in front of our house after a regularly heavy rain:

Lost keys at the Hari Krishna Temple either while cartwheeling with Marcia, Pearl, and Carrie, or chasing the ecstatically dancing children, during Earth Dance 2007. Luckily Grasshopper seems to be a natural at ecstatic dancing, so even though we spent an hour and a half looking for our keys and still didn't find them, she found a 21 month year old groove and went with it, instead of melting down (like her parents). At nine thirty our friend Charles rescued us in his pickup truck(Marica and family had left when her kids' stomachs started roaring). Later, against all odds, I found a spare car key surrounded by gooey, sticky, humidified cough drops, in the bottom of a black purse in the back of the terrifying tool/tape/shadowy/coat/probably-cockroach closet.

Painted the livingroom Mesmerize purple, using Sherwin Williams no VOC Harmony paint. It is incredible, a lovely color that actually looks like the sky right before it turns night-dark. It doesn't look so good on the computer. We started painting the second part of the room in Aurora Gold but GreenDaddy was unsure if the contrast made the room look more like Mardi Gras in general or the Minnesota Vikings' outfits -- and this is very apparent on the computer:

We had to go back and buy a more sophisticated stone brown, which we haven't painted on yet, and we'll save the yellow, which is actually very pretty in real life, for a bedroom. And: hardly any fumes. I liked that Harmony.

Multiple Choice Confession:

a) Grassroots campaign to bring back the prairies
b) Important experiment on the length of grass and overall compost health
c) Too otherworldsly occupied to tend to the lawn
d) All of the above
e) A little BS, a little of all of the above
f) A lot of BS, a little of some of the above

Bought and/or helped arrange tickets for: GreenDaddy's parents to visit at the first of October, my mother to visit at the end of October, and We Three Greens to have Thanksgiving with my aunt and uncle in Missoula, where they have a lovely new (an unburned :)) cabin in a place called Rock Creek.

Bought a bed for our parents to sleep on when they stay. We got this regularly $500 IKEA mattress from the special sale section of IKEA and bought the cheapest full bed frame to go with it, which we luckily liked better than the frames one or two hundred dollars around that range. (I like IKEA mattresses because they're the cheapest mattresses you can buy PBDE free...) At home, I spent four long hours assembling the frame. Then I put the mattress on to discover it was mislabeled. It was a Queen sized mattress that dwarfs the frame I almost killed myself assembling. We looked for the receipt and of course, though we have every piddling receipt for everything else we did that week, we threw the major purchase receipt away. So now we'll try to sell the frame I wasted important hours of my life assembling.

Developed a taste for Tofutti just this morning.

Phew. GreenDaddy, the ghost of Green Parenting, has a fabulous post he's holding out on. But that'll be up soon...

The Big L.I.

2007-09-05T20:32:00.000-07:00

I'm going to use my favorite BabyG names in the next few posts to see which ones feel the most like our little sweetie pie. Today's name of choice: Verdita (and variants).

GreenDaddy and I have been very busy the last two years doing all sorts of little things to make the world better for Verdita: we learned to compost, planted a garden, switched to 100% wind energy, joined a food co-op, searched out local and organic foods, turned more to buying used goods, got rid of one our cars and didn't buy a new one, we started avoiding petrochemicals, stopped using shampoo (usually), switched to nature store deoderant, joined freecycle to lessen our junk load in the dumps, & continued recycling, even our glass which means driving it to the recycling plant off Highway 59 and Westpark.

There's a lot more obviously green things out there we're not trying yet, but we're working toward: I want rain barrels and solar energy and a xeroscaped lawn and a meadow on our roof and less energy sucking cracks in the home and less time in the car and more efficient fuel and all sorts of things, these are just the first that come to mind. I think we'll get around to most of these things, as our life progresses.

But there are some difficult things you have to do to make the world better for your children, and you can't twiddle your thumbs and do it when you're ready.

First thing sounds silly, but it's on my mind a lot: we have only planted one tree in our yard, and we've cut three down. Choosing where to plant a new tree, what kind to get, thinking about how it will grow, whether or not it'll bump into the neighbors' trees...we keep getting caught in this indecisiveness that means there are three years of tree growing we have wasted in this house. I feel bad about that.

But I feel worse about the big L.I. Life Insurance. And how we still haven't bought any. Even though, like a tree, it's something you need to have planted last year. Once, GreenDaddy's work was going to send over a man to give him a checkup, and we totally forgot. That's the closest we ever go to it.

We're caught up on questions the way we are with the tree: how much should we buy? from whom? what kind is best? how will we know we have the best deal? Basically, we just want to have already had it. The rigomorolle is daunting. But daunting in this way we have no business of actually acceding to. Because there's this little former baby, Verdita, who needs us not only to do what we can to save the world, but also needs us to provide her some kind of security in case we don't survive the world long enough for her to grow up in it.

Our whole parenthood we've struggled in accomplishing legal and financial issues, the way I think a lot of people who don't want to be materialistic do. You don't want money to matter. You want the way you raise your baby to be enough. And I do think the way you raise your baby is a lot. But then, you, meaning I, I really want to make sure GreenDaddy and the baby, or just the baby, can recover as gracefully as possible if I kick the bucket. Money isn't all they'd need to do that, but having no money, and being short a parent, or two, isn't what I want for the baby either.

We did finally get around to writing a will, and we got it notarized, a few months ago. So our next hurdle as financially and legally responsible parents is the insurance thing. I wasn't sure this is something that belongs on Green Parenting...but it's a parenting issue we're grappling with and I wondered what other people are doing, how other people are faring on this front, and what other perspectives on the issue people have.

Foogo Stainless Steel Products Review (Sippy Cup, Straw Bottle & Children's Thermos)

2007-08-28T21:19:00.000-07:00

A few months a reader named Von announced the forthcoming of Foogo sippys, in the comment section of my Klean Kanteen stainless sippy review. I sent away for review samples, and was pleased to receive a nice packet of ‘foogo’ baby products right before we went to India. Here is the official review that pushes me over the line from ‘mom-concerned-about-safe-sippys’ into ‘part time mom, full time sippy kook expert.’

Finally! Another stainless steel sippy cup! After (three, four thousand?) years of begging for safe sippys there is one more option out there for us. Out of two. I mean, there are now two companies (that I know of) making stainless sippys. Two companies and plenty of information to suggest there is enough interest in the product to support two dozen companies: for example, we get more than 500 hits a month related to the keywords sippy, glass sippy, stainless sippy, safe cup, etc. [In fact, about half of those hits are specifically looking for glass sippys. Ahem. Did you hear me entrepreneurs??!! If that’s how many hits our piddly Green Parenting site gets, can you imagine the number of products you’re busily not making that would be sold if you were? Egads!]

But that’s not what I’m talking about. I am here to announce that the people who make thermoses have got themselves into the business of making baby sized ones, which I think is nice. Interesting, too, because they aren’t doing it to satisfy moms paranoid about leaching toxins into baby mouths. They just figured babies were as much in need of thermal containers as the rest of us. They worried about all the germs they discovered in plastic sippys full of milk, on hot days. Thermal sippys, they knew, wouldn’t have that problem.

So they stumbled into the green mom, non-plastic-sippy-fetish market. But that doesn’t mean their product doesn’t offer real competition to its sole competitor.

Pros:

Right off the bat, I’ll say Foogo offers real advantages over Klean Kanteen. The first, most important and obvious factor to me is that they aren’t trying to alter a product made for adults or older kids into something that could be used for a baby. Instead, they are actually designing the product from the outset with a baby in mind. The retrofitting of adult products for babies seems on the very edge of offensive when you think about the $17.95 you drop for the less-than-ideally-designed KK produc, and especially if you remember that they know you're buying it because you don't want your kids drinking out of plastic and there's nothing else out there. I mean, I can see initially retrofitting the adult product. But after that. You know. Make something my kid can hold onto. Don't make me feel like you're poking me when I'm down. Right?

The second advantage of the Foogo is related to the first: it is not one product, it is a line of products including a sippy with handles, a sippy without handles, a sippy-straw flip top thing, and a thermos for kids. The regular sippys look a lot like plastic sippy cups, they’re just made of stainless steel. The larger straw-flip sippy is as tall as the KK, but – and this is key – thin enough for little hands to grasp comfortably.

All this to say: my baby doesn’t look like she has a barrel in her hands when she drinks out of either the sippy or sippy straw cup: she looks like she’s drinking out of a cup that’s just her size. Which makes sense when you dish out $15 (two dollars less than the KK) for a toddler’s drinking vessel.

The third advantage Foogo has is that it is a thermos. If it’s winter and you live in Alaska, like my old friend Derick, you can fill it with warm cider and it will not only stay warm, but it will refrain from becoming a chunk of block ice, which it would not refrain from doing in most every other sippy in the world. If you live in Houston, like my friend myself, you can assure yourself your baby girl is drinking ice water, not boiling water, at the park. No matter where you live, as the Foogo people don't mind stressing, your Foogo is more hygienic for dairy products than any other product available for the little ones.

For all these reasons, I like the Foogo. It’s true that the water that goes to the park in the KK comes back hot, and it doesn’t in a Foogo. My baby can hold the dang cup. These are good, important attributes to a sippy cup.

Cons:

We talked about the half full part of the sippy cup. And I’m sad to report that there are definitely a few different half empty sides (it's not that I can't wrap up a metaphor, it's that I flunked geometry.)

Which is to say: sadly, like the Klean Kanteen, it has a lot of plastic parts. Of course, Thermos has only used the “safe” plastics -- #5, primarily. The spout on the sippy is made of Thermoplastic elastomer which is, the best that I can tell, a rubber of sorts. Many green sites (well, Treehugger) have little tidbits of info about TPE in ads for things they’re selling. TPEs are supposed to be biodegradable, and safer than plastics.

Unlike the Klean Kanteen, however, if you leave water in the Foogo for more than a few hours it starts tasting like plastic. Or TPE. Maybe it’s not a toxic leachy taste as much as an environmentally safe rubber taste: but it’s a bad taste. Especially this happens in the straw container, maybe it’s whatever plastic the straw is that causes it.

Sadly, I say, because I really like the Foogo. Since I do like it, we just keep up on changing out the water. I spend time hoping that “no known hazards” in the #5 plastic means “no hazards” instead of, “Oh, no. Yep. Ooops. There it is. Hazards.” If we’re going out into the searing heat, or if BabyG demands the Foogo, we opt for the KK.

The last annoying thing about the Foogo is this: if you buy a KK you get extra parts in case that little plastic thing that keeps sippys from leaking gets lost in the dishwater. Maybe those extra parts are the extra two dollars. I would pay them because in the life of a toddler’s possession, a tiny round slab of plastic stands a slim chance of lasting longer than two or three months. All parents will need a spare little piece of plastic, why not include a couple spares, like the KK people do?

Mind Blowing Conclusion:

My mom once met a slightly paranoid man who went around muttering all sorts of nutty things, her favorite being: “Everybody wants to go to heaven, kid, but nobody wants to die to get there.” In this land of inventors and entrepreneurs, I can't help noticing everybody wants to make a million bucks, but nobody will listen to the plaintive call of neurotic, maybe…but with reason!...and determined mothers across the planet that says: make me a plastic-free sippy. Day after day on this website the dozens of safer sippy hits coming in tells me somebody oughta.

Really I don’t get why the KK people didn’t figure out a different top. If people are shelling out $5 more for a stainless steel water bottle over a #5 plastic one, why not make stainless steel tops. Or those TPE, environmentally sound rubber tops? The Thermos people, I’m not sure they realized our part of the market exists. It seems to me they could tweak their tops pretty easily and make something more satisfying.

But. Sigh. Both options are better than all bisphenol A plastic. Or all ‘safe’ plastic, even, so far as I’m concerned.

Here is my expert advice on sippy cups: if you have a baby less than 2, go for a Foogo. Baby will be able to hold the cup. Change out the water every couple hours or so. If your baby is over two, and if they’re not jealous of their friends with straw flip containers, go for the Klean Kanteen. Both products are, for different reasons and in their own ways, and in the immortal words of Mary Hume, “almost perfect…but not quite.”

At the Greension we don’t use the plain thermos container so much because we picked up lots of stainless steel tiffins in India, and that’s what most of BabyG's snacks are stored in. They’re less bulky -- but I like the Foogo thermos and think one day it'll come in handy. Right now she’s not so much into soups, she’s more a Cheddar Bunny, Grape, and non-chicken Nugget kind of girl.

Despite our hesitations, we also do use the sippys every day. At least, we did until the little plastic part on the lid of the regular sippy fell off and got lost. I’ll send away for a replacement, but for now that sippy is nothing more than a freewheeling fount of water. Until it broke, BabyG loved it. She also loves the straw-sippy, which we still use every day.

Did I mention that in this land of inventors and entrepreneurs, I can't help noticing everybody wants to make a million bucks, but nobody will listen to the plaintive call of neurotic, maybe…but with reason!...and determined mothers across the planet that says: make me a plastic-free sippy. Day after day on this website the dozens of safer sippy hits coming in tells me somebody oughta.

I LOVE it when GOOD is EASY: A Tryptic

2007-08-24T11:12:00.000-07:00

I.

Last few days I've been searching the web dressed in black because Laura at Lines of Lattitude turned me onto this:

>If Google had a black screen, taking in account the huge number of
>page views, according to calculations, 750 mega watts/hour per year
>would be saved...[a guy therefore]created a black version of the Google search engine, called Blackle, with the exact same functions as the white version,
>but with lower energy consumption: spread the word-
>
>http://www.blackle.com/

I LOVE it when good is EASY. And when it makes me look hip and mysterious. So much so, actually, I darkend the whole computer yesterday. I use the Opera web browser and I chose a black skin for it, which turns out, is easier on the old eyeballs. Most of the places I write are still off white,but the surrounding areas aren't.

II.

Laura's socially responsible leadership doesn't stop there. She also turned me onto the New American Dream's webiste, and it's campaign to reduce carbon consumption by having people pledge to change one thing about their lives every month -- last month they shopped locally, this month they'll drive less, next month they'll "Junk Your Junk Mail", then they'll help "Break the Botled Water Habit", etc. etc. I like little one step at a time things that don't overwhelm me but that keep me on track. I hope I've mentioned how much I LOVE it when GOOD is easy.

If you make the pledge by clicking on the little icon below this paragraph it is possible you will earn GreenDaddy...the man so devoted this website that he posted a picure of his armpit (our most looked at greenparenting photo, by the way) in his quest to find a deoderant strong enough for bicyclers in Houston's August heat... a brand new bike. Because the C3 people are having a spread-the-word kind of contest.

III.

This last thing is GOOD and it is EASY depending on what you LOVE.

And since I've already been busy telling you how to be, I thought I'd actually point your eyes towards the little (unpaid, PSA) ad I put on the right side of the site a couple days ago. Click on it and see how the National Wildlife Federation has a campaign to get something like 10 or 20 thousand backyards certified as wildlife habitats, and what you can do to make yours one.

The process acutally isn't too difficult...I imagine many readers' yards already qualify, though we're only about halfway there. We might not get it done this year, but I'll definately keep the guidelines in mind and work towards them as our yard grows.

But you more naturally greenthumbed people can probably already certify, or just make a few changes to do it.

Life Changing, Love Inducing, All Powerful Toddler Naming Contest

2007-08-23T08:01:00.000-07:00

Our friend Chuck sent us this terrifying picture of my baby to confirm my last post's assertion that BabyG is more aptly TodderG.

Speaking of which: I never liked the name BabyG and am finding TodderG intolerable. I'm not sure I can ever write the word again it's so bad.

I therfore hereby and because of announce:
direct from MaGreen, GreenDaddy & the todder formerly known as BabyG:
the one and only, the first ever, never again, higly unique and extraordinary:

NAME!
THAT!
TODDLER!
CONTEST!
EXTRAVAGANZA!

Rules are: in the comments, you suggest one to fourteen possible blogland names for the toddler pictured above (or anywhere below). Hopefully the names will either adhere to the general rules of nomenclanture at Green Parenting, or completely revision them. I have already considered and discarded the following three options: ToddlerG, GreenToddler & Sprout. I like people knowing I'm talking about a toddler right off, but not so much I need toddler in the name. I like Sprout because it's the name of the Jolly Green Giant's little friend, and it's a little green thing. But that's also why I don't like it.

THE WINNER will receive a bottle of MaGreen's Famous, Handmixed, Non-Toxic, Sweet-Smelling All-Purpose Cleaner.

Notes On BabyG

2007-08-21T21:24:00.000-07:00

Who is, by the way, no longer a baby. She is a full blown, prancing, squawking, bluffing, bossing bundle of toddlerhood. And toddlerhood is an incredible thing – I realize now that the old doctors and aunties who write books about how to be parents were not even slightly exaggerating when they talked about the extraordinary smarty-pantsedness of these little tykes. In fact, I swear to moss and emeralds and all things pretty and green that if you put your ear to my baby girl’s ear the same way you’d put your ear to a seashell, you will actually hear the gurgling and bubbling of rapidly developing human brain. (Unfortunately you won’t be able to test this fact since my baby would bite, claw, climb, stuff an elbow inside of, yank the hair above, or kiss your ear long before it reached her ear for verification.)

Proof? In just the last few days I taught her to kick! Kick! Kick! in the pool. She's mastered the difference between her arm and her elbow. We’ve taught her to sleep without breastfeeding, to carry her potty to the toilet after she’s gone (she’s not ready to dump…) A chasing game I improvised the other day has been transformed, by her, into this: she: pulling a little ball toy behind her; Mommy or Daddy: follows her while pushing the ‘popper’ toy. Sounds harmless but it means hours of minutes ‘chasing’ the baby from room to room, in a circular fashion. The whole time we have to shout: Weeeee! Weeeee! Weeeee! And if we stop, she drops her toys and shrieks! (The twos are coming on strong)

More charmingly, I taught her to open her eyes and to close her eyes last night, in hopes it’d help when it was bedtime. Only it backfired, because she makes this hilarious effort at closing the eyes. Instead of just letting her eyelids fall normally, she expends all this effort and ends up in this fluttering eyelid state. (It reminds me of that exercise where you sit in a pretend chair, and your muscles shake and buckle, and your body’s saying: don’t tell me you’ve gone and forgotten how to sit down on the floor, because if this is the best you can do, we’re in a hell of a lot of trouble…)

Living the Three Quarters Life

2007-08-21T07:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I switched to a three quarters full-time schedule for my job. I negotiated this arrangement eight months ago, but the switch depended on a new person joining the office staff and training that person to take over some of my responsibilities.

At first when I wrote out my new schedule to share with my co-workers, I felt disappointed. After all the patience and bureaucratic legwork it took to make the part-time switch, I realized that thirty hours is not dramatically different than forty hours. I will still go to work five days per week and during most of the daylight hours I will be sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen. Instead of starting work at eight, I am to start at ten the first three days of the week. Thursdays, I will leave at one so I can take a course towards my doctoral degree. Fridays, I will work a full day.

But those two hours yesterday morning were precious and wonderful. I left the house when I normally would in the morning, but instead of going to my office I wrote in the library. The whole day I felt more cheerful and energetic. My work and family life felt more balanced. It is not that I spent more time with MaGreen and BabyG, but when I got home, instead of crashing on the couch and slogging through the evening, we all went to the university outdoor swimming pool. BabyG seemed to enjoy the pool. She climbed up the small slide and slid down it about twenty times in a row. Even though the absolute quantity of time I spent with my family did not change, I think the quality of the time was better.

In order to arrange this three-quarter schedule, I had to give up a quarter of my pay, which was used to cover part of the new staff person’s salary. We could not be able to pull this off oeconomically if MaGreen did not manage our finances as carefully as she does. She keeps track of our expenses using a computer program Quicken. She spent several days earlier this summer switching us to an internet bank, turning off our landline, setting up a good Skype account, and doing various other things to save us money. Also, even though my total income will decrease, our taxes will be lower so the cut in my take home pay is less than the total cut in my gross pay.

I hope I continue to feel good about the three quarters life and that it also helps MaGreen and BabyG feel a good balance in their lives too.

Material Differences

2007-08-20T20:29:00.000-07:00

During our trip to India, I tried to pay attention to the material conditions that my family there live in and the way they choose to consume. Last year, the state of Gujarat, where my family is from, grew at a 10 percent rate. That is equivalent to China’s growth rate.

So the material conditions and choices I want to describe are those of middle-class Indians in one of India’s most prosperous states. The very poor in India consume a fraction of the resources used by people in the US, but what about the rising middle-class? Is the Indian middle-class copying American behavior? For example, George W. Bush defended his decision not to sign the Kyoto agreement by saying, "Kyoto would have wrecked our economy. I couldn't in good faith have signed Kyoto," and claimed that the treaty didn't require other "big polluters" such as India and China to cut emissions. Indians were quick to point out that pollution rates per capita for India are extremely low. But even environmentalists in the US shake their heads and lament the thousands of new cars on the roads in Asia canceling out the virtues of those who buy hybrids in America.

What I saw was that the middle-class in India go to great lengths to conserve energy and resources. We ought to consider carefully how middle-class Indians live and actually compare, in a detailed way, their lifestyles with those of people in the US before we come to conclusions about what respective initiatives are needed by each nation. I wrote out a list of sustainable practices and design choices that I noticed in the homes I visited in Gujarat:

Multiple overhead fans strategically placed over seating areas that rotate at extremely fast speeds

Window air-conditioning units in specific rooms that are kept closed when the unit is in use, so that people gather in an air-conditioned part of the house rather than air-condition the entire home

Easy to open shutters that let breezes in

Marble or tile flooring that stays cool in the heat

Reupholstering of old furniture rather than purchasing new

Lines strung in the balcony for drying clothes

Long rows of switches that can turn off each light, appliance, plug, or electrical device so that nothing is left running on standby

Western-style, sit-down toilets with a knob that controls water coming from the pipes so you can flush using just the right amount of water rather than always having to empty the entire tank.

Bidets rather than toilet paper, so less trees cut and less water required to flush

Solar water heaters or small, gas water heaters that make hot bathing water on demand rather than the huge contraptions we have in the US that keep a big tank of water hot all day and night

Buckets in the bathroom for “dhol” baths

Rooftops that collect rainwater and channel it into wells, which prevents flooding, replenishes aquifers, and averts salination in seaside areas

Pressure cookers with stacked containers inside of them, which make the most of the energy used by their gas stoves

Wall-mounted water purifiers rather than bottled water

Numerous stainless steel canisters for efficient storage of dry snacks, lentils, grains, and rice instead of disposable containers

Scooters for small commutes and running errands

My relatives in India live in comfort. They have refrigerators, air-conditioning, washing machines, microwaves, gas stoves, hot water for baths, good drinking water, well-appointed living spaces, and their own transportation. And yet, they use a fraction of the resources that people in the US do. (My cousin said he would share his utility bills with me so I can back up my claim with some numbers in the near future.) When middle-class Indians – the so-called biggest polluters according to Bush – have gone to such efforts, how can we in the US demand “equal” commitments to reductions in emissions. The burden is on those of us in United States and Europe.

Car Seats in Asia?

2007-08-11T20:29:00.000-07:00

Before we went to Thailand and India, we made an appointment with a specialist in pediatric travel medicine at the children’s hospital. After a long wait, the doctor told us that BabyG didn’t need any shots or extra vaccinations beyond what she already had, but then the doctor read off a long list of precautions we should take:

*Dress the baby in long sleeves and pants
*Apply insect repellent on all exposed skin daily
*Apply permethrin to the baby’s clothes (another kind of insect repellent)
*Avoid rural areas and contact with animals
*Give the baby mefloquine to prevent malaria (based on BabyG’s weight, she recommended a quarter of the regular tablet)
*Use a car seat.

“The number one cause of child mortality in foreign countries is motor vehicle crashes,” she said.

The bill for talking to this specialist, even though she didn’t give BabyG any medicines, was over one hundred dollars. I remember thinking, we better heed her advice since it cost us so much. MaGreen bought Ultrathon insect repellent, which worked very well. We soaked the clothes in permethrin instead of spraying it on, since it repels insects longer that way. The house started to reek of poison while we did this, so we shifted the operation outside. Apparently, once the permethrin has bonded to the fibers in the clothing, it is not known to be toxic to humans. We even packed a mosquito net.

But a car seat? How could we carry BabyG’s huge Britax car seat around Asia? In my previous trips to India, I had never seen anyone use a car seat. Even my brother and sister-in-law, who are very safety conscious doctors, didn’t use one with their son while in Asia. But the doctor’s words rang in our ears. Number one cause of child mortality. After all of our preparations and expenses, what kind of parents would we be if BabyG got hurt because we didn’t put her in a car seat? People wanted to take Britney Spears’ kid away from her because she got caught by the paparazzi not using one. So we bought a $40 portable car seat off the web. The user reviews were mixed, but the manufacturer said it could fit into backpacks and weighed less than 4 pounds.

In Thailand, none of the taxis we encountered had seat belts in the back seat. They seemed to have been cut out. The tuk-tuks, which are like rikshaws, were built without seat belts. And sometimes tuk-tuks were the only mode of transport available. When we went to Khao Yai National Park, we specially arranged in advance for a taxi that did have seat belts. After a long and difficult instillation, we managed to get BabyG in the car seat on the way there. But on the way back, she absolutely refused to sit in it.

In India, my cousin’s van was also built without seatbelts and by that time we were resigned to holding BabyG in our lap or letting her sit on the floor. According to one of my uncles, fatalities from crashes in India happen for completely different reasons than they do in the US.

Most of the time, in India, motor vehicles are rarely driving over twenty-five miles per hour, so collisions between small vehicles at high speeds, where a seat belt would really help, don’t happen frequently, he said. Sometimes cars get trapped between large trucks on the two-lane roads, he added, and then a seatbelt will help no one.

As you can imagine, I didn’t find this analysis very reassuring! And yet, we all survived – praise the Green Goddesses -- and BabyG enjoyed the break from car seats as you can see in the pictures. (When we passed cows on the road, she mooed with glee.)

Travelling with Cloth Diapers

2007-08-02T18:28:00.000-07:00

At eighteen months, BabyG was, for the most part, potty trained. She consistently told us when she needed to go to the bathroom by saying pee pee, making the pssss sound, picking up her little potty, or grunting while squatting. She would try to take her diaper off and sit on the potty without assistance, but we usually needed to help her out. When she was done, she stood up, tried to pick up the potty, and walked it over to the toilet, but I helped out because I didn't want any spillage. We thought that maybe we wouldn't even need to take diapers when travelling to India and Thailand, but BabyG did occasionally wet a diaper (but always did #2 in the potty).

It was, of course, really difficult for BabyG and MaGreen on the fourteen hour plane trip from the US to Asia. During the first half of the flight, BabyG went through all of the diapers in the handbag and MaGreen used the maxipads from the airplane lavatory to line the diaper cover. BabyG seemed to sense the diaper situation at that point and during the second half of the flight she actually used the airplane toilet with her mommy's help.

When MaGreen and BabyG walked out of the airport terminal in Bangkok, both had this look on their faces, like they were trying their hardest not to cry. When BabyG got sight of me, she did start to cry. Not a full throttle, but bewildered and weak. We gave the diapers to the hotel laundry service and they charged $1.50 per diaper! So when BabyG wet a few diapers over the next couple of days while sightseeing in Bangkok, I promptly soaked them in the sink before they started to stink and tried to dry them in the window. They didn't dry well in the window so MaGreen found a spot on the roof near the hotel's solar water heaters.

During the flight to India, BabyG wet a few more diapers and we decided to wash the whole batch in my aunt's washing machine. Until recently, none of my family members in India had washing machines. They don't have dryers. All the lines strung in the balcony and all the bars across the windows were hung with our laundry.

I like the picture above. There are BabyG's diapers, slowly drying despite the monsoon rains. It rained for three straight days when we arrived. It's so cloudy, the energy-sipping, tube light seems brighter than the natural light. My cousin's wife is there quietly arranging things. She has a degree in statistics. She says that it's difficult to find part-time work in India and concentrates on raising two children and running the household, which she does very gracefully. As we toured the state of Gujarat, I noticed the laundry hanging from all the homes, nearly every balcony festooned, some with saris billowing out. BabyG returned to her Elimination Communication ways and it was over a week before we needed the diapers washed again. We were staying at a house where a young maid did the wash by hand and I saw her make a face at the diapers but she washed them.

So we travelled to the other side of the planet using cloth diapers. In case you were wondering, it can be done. It wasn't especially hard. I washed them myself by hand, sometimes we had access to a washing machine, and other times a professional washer woman did the work. And they dried, even during the monsoon. I feel good about not leaving a trail of soiled plastic across Asia.

How the Sun Shines on the Soda Men

2007-08-01T19:35:00.000-07:00

Two young male workers unload bottles from a Coca Cola delivery truck in Bangkok. Their shirts are a brighter red than the truck. The taller one is broad-shouldered and the veins of his forearms are thick. The shorter one has a Buddhist amulet around his neck. They are proud. They step out of the shade and pose for me in the full sunlight. They stare at the camera, but just underneath their serious looks are smirks. I want the picture to document how they collect used glass bottles while delivering full ones ready for consumption. In Thailand, as in India, soda bottles almost never go into the garbage. They are not melted down or remade. They go back to the bottling plant and are used again in their original form. You must drink your Cokes where you buy them. No sipping while strolling down the streets. No casual toss and clink of bottle against bottle in the garbage bin. I want the picture to be about recycling in Asia, but the picture is about something else. It is about Thai men who want the world to see how vital they are. I think they want their country to be seen shining, attractive, and modern.

Just Tea: An Interview with Janaka Biyanwila

2007-07-31T18:42:00.001-07:00

A month back at the 2007 Conference of the International Association for Feminist Economics in Bangkok, I met Dr. Janaka Biyanwila, a father and teacher of Organisational and Labour Studies at the University of Western Australia in Perth. He was awarded a prize at the conference for a paper on unions and women tea plantation workers in Sri Lanka. The contest he won is named in honour of Rhonda Williams, who was an African-American activist and economist.

I had the opportunity during a break between sessions to record an interview with Janaka, which I have transcribed below.

Me: Congratulations on winning the Rhonda Williams Prize.

Janaka: Thank you.

Me: Could you tell me about the paper you submitted to win this prize?

Janaka: The paper was about tea plantation workers in Sri Lanka. I was particularly interested in looking at trade unions in the tea plantations. The women at these tea plantations are one of the most marginalized and exploited groups of workers in Sri Lanka. Tea is a very important export commodity for Sri Lanka and has been for over 150 years, which is part of the colonial legacy. The conditions of the tea workers who live in these plantations have changed very little over the years. Even though these workers have been organized since the 1930s, there has been little change in the living and working conditions in the plantations. It’s about much more than the trade union strategy, though. It’s about plantations in general, the kind of productions systems there, because they have maintained these conditions of poverty. My intervention was to look at why these trade unions are not pushing for better conditions and livelihoods for these women.

What I discovered was that even though the dominant trade unions are mostly male-biased, patriarchal, bureaucratic unions, there are some unions that are willing to link up with more activist organizations and to mobilize women much more than the traditional, party-dominated trade unions that exist in the plantations. One of the things that I focused on in my paper was this new network that has come up linking tea plantation workers across the globe, which started out of the 2004 World Social Forum in Mumbai. They started a network promoting what’s called an International Tea Day, which is December 14, to raise awareness about tea plantation workers across the globe, who are living in similar conditions.

Me: Could you describe those conditions in detail? What’s so bad about them?

Janaka: First of all, in terms of wages, their wages are just above bare minimum. In terms of daily wages, they make less than $2 per day. That’s only wages, but there is a whole regimentation of work too. These women are not only burdened by household work and wage work, but they are also burdened with communal, religious work, so there is a triple burden these women are experiencing. In terms of living conditions, housing and education are key issues the trade unions have been fighting for. They still live in these barrack-style line rooms, which are almost 10 feet by 10 feet small rooms where whole families live next to one another. These line rooms are separated from one another. They are surrounded by these tea plantations, cut off from other workers in other estates. So there is a bit isolation happening. With that, the plantation owners have never provided enough infrastructure. There’s lack of access to water, lack of access to electricity, and lack of access to transport.

Me: What about healthcare?

Janaka: Healthcare is another major area, definitely. In terms of poverty conditions, poverty has increased in the plantations in the last ten years. Malnutrition has also increased.

The tea plantations were nationalized in Sri Lanka from 1972 to about 1992, and in 1992 they were privatised. But the real process of nationalization only lasted from 1975 to about 1977, because from 1977 onwards Sri Lanka shifted to a neo-liberal, export-oriented economic strategy. So the privatisation of plantations was supported by the major trade unions because they were under political parties and the parties pushed privatisation. But in terms of worker conditions, this has had limited impact on improving their status.

Me: So for people living in the United States, Australia, or other places, what can we do besides feel guilty while drinking tea?

Janaka: It’s not about stopping tea drinking. Feeling guilty is OK because that might be an emotion that initiates some interest and desire to intervene in what’s going on in the whole global production chain around tea. All tea-producing countries, which are mostly in the South, have similar conditions. So one of the things we can do is to struggle for worker rights across the board in many areas, but in particular areas of tea-growing parts of the world. There is a website called justtea.org, which promotes something similar to fair trade practices.

Me: Through this website you can get information about solidarity activities?

Janaka: That’s one level. The other level is also trade union action. If you are linked with any trade unions or work organizations, it is good to find solidarity and share information with tea plantation workers because they need that solidarity, even just knowing that you in America are aware of what’s happening to tea plantation workers in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, and Africa.

Me: Where I live in Houston there is a focus on maquiladora workers along the US-Mexican border. I think it is worth connecting those struggles with ones in other places.

Janaka: Definitely. In Sri Lanka, we have similar kinds of industrial zones, which are called Free Trade Zones. That’s another area I have been interested in studying, one of my research areas. Free Trade Zones are again anti-union, don’t allow worker rights. Nevertheless, these women have struggled and they have labour organizations. And one of the most innovative things one of these organizations has done is to have exchange programs with women plantation workers. So these young workers coming to these factories from rural areas are experiencing factory work for the first time, but at the same time, because of the way they are organizing, they are getting to share their experiences with other women and also understand what other women workers are going through. So I think these kinds of work exchange programs or awareness-raising programs are so important for building a broad solidarity for the struggle for worker rights.

Me: Thanks so much for talking with me. Is there anything else you want to say.

Janaka: Thank you so much. I’m glad you are here to push the struggle for worker rights and social justice.

Khao Yai National Park

2007-07-25T10:58:00.000-07:00

We are back from our trip to Thailand and India. I had hoped to blog while travelling, but that didn't work out. We didn't have regular internet access. So what we are going to do is publish posts about different different parts of the trip over the next few weeks interspersed with non-trip posts.

Once MaGreen and BabyG joined me in Bangkok, we had time for a daytrip out of the city. We decided to go to the Khao Yai National Park. It is in the mountains about three hours from Bangkok. We hired a taxi with seatbelts to take us there and back. The waterfall we saw was the most amazing part of the trip.

The trail was about one mile long followed by two hundred steep steps to the base of the waterfall.

The park is the home of wild elephants. We saw plenty of elephant excrement but no actual wild elephants. We saw other wild animals including this buck and several monkeys.

BabyG enjoyed herself. We let her stick her head out the window as we drove slowly down the nearly empty park roads.

We are all in Thailand

2007-07-03T21:26:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, MaGreen and BabyG made it to Thailand after a harrowing journey. They were not stranded in Atlanta for three days like I was, but BabyG had a very difficult time after the first seven hours of the fourteen hour flight to Seoul. MaGreen said that she cried for the last half briefly stopping to breastfeed. She would swallow the benedryl MaGreen brought and without a dropper, MaGreen could not force it down. Delta, apparently, was not terribly child friendly. The Incheon (Seoul) Airport had a play room which BabyG enjoyed. It even had a little trampoline that she tried out. The last leg of journey, via Korean Airlines from Seoul to Bangkok, went more smoothly. The stewardesses gave BabyG a wonderful book with “magic” reusable stickers of people from all around the world. Nonetheless, when MaGreen and BabyG emerged from immigration and customs at the Bangkok airport, they looked exhausted. I was waiting there for them. BabyG was quiet and had this look on her face that I had never seen before. As soon as she saw me, she started to cry, not loudly, but very plaintively. We took a metered cab to our hotel, the Bhiman Inn, and after an hour more of crying, BabyG, MaGreen, and I finally got some sleep.

Monday, we took the ferry down the Chao Phraya river to the Royal Palace and the temple housing the Emerald Buddha. The lady managing the boat really packed us foreign tourists into that boat. It was hot, but once we made it inside the compound we rehydrated. The temple was extraordinary. We were amazed by the littler details, like the golden bird lamps, the roofing, and the statues of sentries outside the entries of the buildings. In the afternoon, MaGreen and our friend Monica, who is traveling with us, got a traditional Thai massage at the massage school inside a nearby temple. BabyG and I went back to the hotel and reconnected. We read books, tickled each other, and crawled around the bed. MaGreen and BabyG skipped dinner and went straight to bed.

Tuesday, MaGreen was sick. She seems to have had a flu that peaked around noon and by the evening had nearly resolved. Monica, BabyG, and I visited some local markets in Baglamphu and Chinatown. Lots of plastic trinkets and lots of people. In the evening, we ate at the Oriental Hotel along the riverside. Many writers have staid at the hotel including Joseph Conrad, but I would say the rates these days, $300 to $500, are high for most writers.

Today, Wednesday, we started the day with our routine visit to the park down the street. In the early mornings, people do all kinds of exercise which seem to be derived from Thai and Chinese Buddhist traditions. We are going to take it easy and prepare for our planned trip to the Khao Yai National Park tomorrow.

I don’t usually write this kind of diary sort of entry but I just wanted to give everyone a quick update.

Feminist Economics in Thailand

2007-06-29T22:13:00.000-07:00

I have traveled to Bangkok and am participating in the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) conference in connection with my work at the editorial offices of the journal Feminist Economics, which is based at Rice University.

The conference is at Ramkhamhaeng University, which is one of the largest schools in the world. Over the next three days, scholars, activists, and leaders from government and NGOs from thirty-five countries will present talks at the conference. Many will focus on issues of major importance to this region of the world including international trade, sex work, migrant labor, and the informal labor market.

At the opening plenary, the speakers were Dr. Juree Vichitvathakran of the National Institute of Development Administration in Bangkok, Naiyana Supapung of the National Human Rights Commission in Thailand, Jean D’Cunha of the UNIFEM East and Southeast Asia Regional Office, and Jackie Pollock, the Director of the MAP Foundation for the Health and Knowledge of Ethnic Labour, Chiang Mai.

Unfortunately, I could not attend the first two talks. D’Cunha spoke about migrant workers in Southeast region, many of whom are domestic workers. She spoke about the situations of women who clean houses and take care of children. Jackie Pollock spoke about Burmese migrants to Thailand. She started her talk with a story of a migrant worker who came to her office asking for help. Her employer had not paid her for three years.

I'm hoping to share more as the conference goes on!

Green Parenting Goes to Asia

2007-06-23T14:31:00.000-07:00

Pretty soon the whole family will be travelling to India via a brief stay in Bangkok. I left today. MaGreen and BabyG will be leaving next week. I took all the family stuff packed up in my bags so MaGreen won't have to lug around much more than our 18 month year old progeny and her entourage of snacks and toys.

MaGreen thought the trip itself would go pretty well because the preparations have been vein-poppingly stressful. Passports that don't arrive. Supply orders that don't go through. Ungainly sized visa lines. Travel doctors priced for mightier Maharajas than we. Now I'm stuck in Atlanta because my flight got cancelled. Apparently, a volcano erupted in Russia and the plane would not have had enough fuel to fly around it.

If the whole experience is to balance out, Laws of balance ought to come out on our side once we're overseas.

Families Rising

2007-06-22T09:25:00.000-07:00

I know it is a little late to share a father's day e-card, but this one really gets at Green Parenting issues. It was released by Families Rising, which is an effort by MomsRising to open to men. I encourage all the US folks out there to add their names to the email list so we can all put childcare issues at the forefront of the national agenda. (Please share info about similar efforts outside the US if you know of any.)

Frog Nights in Houston

2007-06-17T21:04:00.000-07:00

I walked my baby to sleep this evening. She climbed in the stroller when I rolled it out. She knew what kind of ride it would be as she hoisted herself in. It was intrepid of her to venture out with her father as the sun set. I had dressed her in a white long-sleeved shirt and white pants. I smeared the remaining little strips of exposed wrist and ankle with insect repellent. Storms have swept through the city over the past two days leaving big puddles everywhere. This gulley, bayou, and sewer drained swamp-turned-city is saturated. It is one of those nights when you think about the precariousness of our city, how we live on a gigantic concrete platform moored by thousands of oak trees over a heaving lake of clay. Usually when I pass people in the street after dark, they remain silent but this evening everyone said hello, maybe to tacitly acknowledge the beauty of a near flood or else to stave off fear with human voice.

At first, my baby babbled to herself. Then she began to strain against the belts by arching her back. She whined rhythmically, a plaintive kind of chant. I thought I would have to let her out so she could push the stroller herself or toddle across the nearest concrete lot. But all of sudden she was asleep and I realized she had been struggling against her circadian rhythms, trying to reset her own clock with a last burst of energy. The belts held her down, but it was the discipline of her own cells that did her in. I turned around and headed back home.

And then the frogs came out.

I saw dozens. Most leaped into the groundcover and under tree roots as we approached. Some frogs did not startle though. I bent over and looked at them closely as the baby slept.

A runner passed us from behind as I ambled along. I must have looked funny trying to stir up the frogs. He may not have noticed the frogs at all. He was probably too involved in his exercise to think about why I was running the tip of my boot along the puddles. I imagine he focused on his breaths, between which he rushed out a “hello” as he rushed by. I checked my baby and I felt thankful that I had her there, her weight in the stroller, her body heavy in sleep, slowing me down to frog-watching pace. I was glad to be a father fettered by my baby’s dependency.

Today was my first father’s day with my baby. Last year, she was in Salt Lake City with her mother helping Grandma Helen and Grandpa Lou. So I feel like I have a right to share my grandiose thoughts about the state of the world. On my walk, I thought about how vulnerable frogs are to toxins and that it must be a good sign that after all that has been perpetrated on the air, the water, and the land, these frogs have reclaimed one night. I thought about the hopefulness of finding frogs in Houston. I felt that hope in my heart, I felt it radiating in the world.

Navigating the Bamboo Wagon

2007-06-13T14:48:00.001-07:00

When I was registering for our wedding, a few years back, I asked my very particular aunt Patricia to recommend sturdy kitchen products. Among her many recommendations were bamboo cutting boards because, she said, they are light and bamboo is more sustainable to harvest than many of the woods we traditionally use for the likes of chopping upon.

Since then, I’ve noticed bamboo products popping up all over the place: in clothing, furniture, cooking utensils, diapers, and even, as a reader pointed out awhile back disposable plates. In other words bamboo, like hemp did a few years back, has entered into popular green-consciousness as a miracle child. It is the product you don’t have to feel guilty about buying, or perhaps even, you could feel proud about buying.

The idea behind the bamboo boom is that bamboo isn’t actually a tree, it’s grass. Thus, it can be harvested and within three years, the population will have regenerated. The shoots send out an immense amount of oxygen into the air. Moreover, the ‘wood’ as my aunt pointed out, is light but durable. Clothes made from bamboo are very, very soft and hypoallergenic. As far as I can tell, these are the primary reasons so many people have been so enthusiastic about bamboo products.

Of course, when anybody tells me they’ve found the perfect product, the one you can use endlessly, the all good source for x, y, or z, I hesitate. I begin feeling a little unsettled and squeamish. I smile noncommittally. I sneak into my skeptics den, first chance I get. I Google it.

My first foray into the world wide web on the matter of bamboo turned up numerous websites about how Japan’s insatiable need for disposable bamboo chopsticks was depleting bamboo forests in China. Several animal species rely on them. Panda bears, for example, eat them. Humans in the region of the forests rely on them to clean up the atmosphere. So while it’s true they aren’t ancient Redwoods, they function the way trees do in regards to the ecosystem they exist in.

Further searching led me to a few stories about how difficult it is to monitor the manufacturing of bamboo: like any process in which pulp is made into product, a number of toxic chemicals are needed to enable the process. There is no regulatory system governing the way these chemicals are disposed of. Although many companies state that they responsibly harvest bamboo, because there’s no regulatory system, consumers need to take the companies’ word for it.

I am certainly not an expert on bamboo. But it seems strange that this half of the world (where the US is) thinks of bamboo as an unending supply of miracle pulp, whereas campaigns on the other, bamboo-growing side of the world are encouraging people to investigate the realities of deforestation. There seems to be a disconnect between desire (the perfect green building material/fiber exists), possibility (it is possible to grow and harvest bamboo responsibly), and reality (but it doesn’t always happen, and the forests are being depleted.

Does this mean I think bamboo is bad? Of course not. The advantages of responsibly grown and harvested bamboo are well documented. Though I am skeptical about the existence of wonder products, I do believe it is possible and likely that many of the companies claiming to responsibly harvest bamboo are doing so. Probably a number of them aren’t. The problem, as I see it, is that there’s no easy way for me discern the history of whatever bamboo I buy.

So far as I can see, the industry isn’t regulated enough for ecologically minded folks to embark on a bamboo product free for all. I do hope that in time manufacturers and companies can benefit from bamboo’s versatility, and that it will be easier for consumers to trust their bamboo isn’t some Giant Panda’s lost lunch or the cause of some river’s ailing fish.

For me, this means that I might buy a couple bamboo products from companies I trust for some reason or another, but I’m not going to go looking for bamboo like it’s the grail of green. I might get a chopping board one day, or a bamboo spoon. Bamboo furniture? I think it’s better to buy used wood, if it’s possible. Bamboo clothes? Maybe organic bamboo I know the source of, but nothing I’ve read has convinced me regular bamboo clothing is more ecological than, say, rayon (a wood pulp broken down into fibers).

And, getting to the question a reader posed many months ago, and that spawned this post, how do I feel about disposable bamboo plates? If disposable chopsticks are such a huge issue, I can’t see how disposable plates wouldn’t be. Moreover, I fail to see anything green about a product made to throw away after a single use, even if you can compost it.

On The Benefits of Bamboo:
Bamboo Renewability
Bamboo A Versatile and Renewable Resource
Disposable Bamboo Dinner Plates

On The Troubles With Bamboo:
Bamboo Flooring: Is it Really Treehugger Green
World Bamboo Diversity Falling to Deforestation
Bamboo Paper: Not Forest-Friendly
Loss of Bamboo Threatens Rare Animal Species
Chopsticks Economics and the My Hashi Boom

Vegetarian Burgers for Babies and Toddlers (and Moms and Dads and Grandmas and Uncles and...)

2007-06-08T14:27:00.000-07:00

Like most vegetarian parents I know, we have striven, since BabyG started eating food other than breast milk, to ensure she’s getting all the iron, fat, and nutrients she needs. I’ve read about many tricks other vegetarian parents have used to ensure their children get the right nutrients on a lot of other websites, but one idea that has worked the best for us and that I haven’t seen written up very often, is making bean burgers.

I began making my own burgers when I realized that BabyG, who turned her nose up at anything that came on a spoon, would greedily eat Quorn, tofu, or bean burgers. Since buying these foods is expensive, I’ve learned how to whip up a batch of veggie burgers for BabyG over the last few months. It’s very easy. It’s satisfying because after you get the basic idea of what you need in order to make a burger stick together, you can mix and match protein, fat, vegetable, and grain sources to ensure your baby is getting a good variety of foods in her diet, over time.

Here’s the recipe I have made most frequently. I like it because the burgers are a pretty, pale orange and the cranberries are noticeable and exciting:

Cranberry Spotted Veggie (but not vegan) Burger
(vegans can use standard substitutions for eggs, cheese…)

Ingredients

1 cup white beans, dried (2 1/2 cups cooked)
2 T. Braggs amino acids or soy sauce or tamari
¾ c. marinara or ketchup
1 cup of shredded cheese (to bind burgers & add protein)
2 eggs (to bind burgers & add protein)
2 carrots, shredded
1 c. celery
1 cup dried, unsweetened cranberries
2 T. Herbs de Provence
Mix of cooked rice, amaryth, or millet; uncooked oats; or breadcrumbs if you’re out of all the rest. I add this until the mixture has a thick enough consistency to make into patties.

Directions:
Cook the beans in 3 cups of water, in a pressure cooker, eight minutes. Mash the beans, then add everything but the grains and mix well. Finally, begin adding grains until your batter has a thick enough consistency that you can form them into balls, flatten them with your hands, and put them on a greased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 for about 10 minutes on each side. If I want to take them to a barbeque, I still bake them long enough for them to be sturdy enough to sit on the grill (about eight minutes per side). People love them.

With that recipe out of the way, I want to say again that the glorious thing about veggie/bean burgers is that you can use anything in your cupboard, usually. You can use vegetables with high amounts of certain vitamins, or iron if you choose. If your baby isn't getting enough iron and hates iron drops, you can add some. Varying the recipe is a snap. Moreover, they are an ever expansive food that you can pack in a baby or toddler’s lunch, and have them munch on all day. You can put them on your sandwiches. You can barbeque them at home or take them to a barbeque. And one batch is usually enough to last our family and a couple friends about a week. They are a wonderful food.

Here’s the more general guide I follow when experimenting. You need: protein bulk, something to make the beans stick together, vegetables, nuts (good fats and protein), spices, and grains.

Bulk: 1 pack of tofu or 1 c. dried beans or 2 ½ cups cooked/canned beans
Fat: 1 cup of chopped nuts (if your baby is old enough/not allergic, of course)
Veggies: 1 to 2 cups. Whatever you want. If they are veggies that emit water, grill them; veggies like spinach or tomatoes, you may opt to squeeze juices out (but into your batter) after you grill.
Seeds and/or dried fruits: ½ to 1 cup
Spices: Herbs de Provence, curry, your favorite fresh herb, chile, salt (unless you add soy/Braggs/tamari), onions, garlic
Liquid: If I use tofu, I use less tomato sauce. But I always add tomato marinara of some sort.
Something to stick it all together: I use eggs and cheese. Vegans, I know, often use egg-substitute and vegan cheese.
Grains: I like using quinuoa or amaryth, for their protein properties. Rice and oats look pretty. Mashed potatoes and yams are another good idea.

Directions: Same as above. That is: Mash the beans or tofu. Add the rest of the ingredients. Then add the grains until you can make patties. Cook ten minutes on each side at 350. Sometimes I make a vegetarian gravy to go with this, using a little Braggs, a little not-Beef boullion, and flour. GreenDaddy was a big fan of it.

Is there Salmonella in your Tahini?

2007-06-05T07:01:00.000-07:00

Our friend Chuck suggested we post this press release about Salmonella in the Whole Foods Tahini. I believe he supposes a high percentage of tahini eaters peruse these pages. Is it true?

I'm in the middle of a post about bamboo. Also, I just read a post somewhere else about a car that runs on compressed air. FYI, that was another of my ideas that weren't. Somebody stole it away, but I guess the good thing about those ideas is that it's best when they're stolen.

******************
Whole Foods Market Issues Nationwide Recall of 365 Organic Everyday Value Sesame Tahini

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- Austin, TX -- May 22, 2007 - Whole Foods Market is voluntarily recalling 365 Organic Everyday Value Sesame Tahini 16-oz, with a Best By Date of 10/02/07 or earlier because it has the potential to be contaminated with Salmonella.

Food contaminated with Salmonella may not look or smell spoiled. Consumption of food contaminated with this bacteria may cause salmonellosis, a foodborne illness. In young children, the elderly and people with weakened immune systems, salmonellosis may cause serious and sometimes deadly infections. In otherwise healthy people, salmonellosis may cause short-term symptoms such as high fever, severe headache, vomiting, nausea, abdominal pain and diarrhea. Long-term complications may include severe arthritis.

365 Organic Everyday Value Sesame Tahini was distributed nationally through Whole Foods Market retail stores. The product comes in a 16-oz glass jar with the UPC number 0009948240599. The Best By Date is located on the top of the lid of the jar, any Best By Date of 10/02/07 or earlier is being recalled. No confirmed illnesses have been reported to date.

Potential salmonella contamination was brought to the attention of Whole Foods Market by the product's manufacturer. As a result, the company is voluntarily recalling this product as a precautionary measure and has put additional safety measures in place. No other Whole Foods Market Private Label products have been affected by this recall.

Consumers who have purchased 365 Organic Everyday Value Sesame Tahini can return it to Whole Foods Market for a full refund. Questions may be directed to the Company by calling (512) 477-5566 x20656 or via email at privatelabel.customerservice@wholefoods.com.

Thank You Cindy Sheehan

2007-05-29T22:48:00.000-07:00

Today, MaGreen and I read Cindy Sheehan's letter on DalyKos with great sadness. I'm not sad because she's retiring from being the face of the US peace movement, but because she has suffered so much. Her motivation truly came from losing her son to the war in Iraq, not from ego or ideology. She cut through the divisions within the peace movement. When she set up Camp Casey, MaGreen and I had already ended our intense phase of street activism because we were burnt out by those divisions. She gave us a way to lend our bodies and voices without having to debate points of unity and march routes with anyone. I didn't have to go downtown and ask for a sound permit. MaGreen didn't have to design a website getting out the word about the next protest. We just showed up in Crawford. Cindy Sheehan's authority as the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq seemed to trump all the distrust among activists. Her civility set the tone for the thousands of people who gathered with her in the Texas heat.

MaGreen was six months pregnant with BabyG when we drove to Crawford with our friends Keith and Theresa. The weekend we went may well have been the most frenzied moment in the history of Cindy Sheehan's protest outside George W. Bush's ranch, because a national group of pro-war activists had planned a counter-protest. On the way, we got caught up in the pro-Bush caravan made up almost entirely of SUVs and huge trucks. They had US flags mounted, draped, and crammed between various parts of their vehicles. Their windows were painted with “Support the Troops” type slogans. Right before Crawford, the whole caravan turned off towards what I assumed was their rallying site.

We drove into Crawford as pro-Bush people stood on the sides of the streets or sometimes in the street itself heckling us. People flipped us off or gave thumbs down signs. Many of the pro-war signs seemed factory made and they said, “I’m with W.” Others were homemade and said things like, “Cindy doesn’t speak for our marine.” Or “I support the troops and their mission.” There were several signs connecting the U.S. invasion of Iraq with 9-11. Free US flags were being handed out and the little plastic ones were strewn all over the ground. We had a big flag with a peace sign flying from our car. One man shouted that our peace sign looked like a chicken foot. “Now I know what it stands for,” he said, “chicken foot, chicken foot.”

When we got through their gauntlet of flag-waving and heckling, a peace protestor greeted us. “Ah, you’re friendlies,” he said and gave us directions. We worried that some pro-Bush person impersonating a peace activist had duped us. We had to park in a lot outside a hotel and take a shuttle to the site where the peace activists had gathered. We could see the road towards Bush’s place and there were secret service people there standing behind the “100% ID Check” road blocks. The volunteers hurried us into the huge tent where a rally was in full swing. We walked under the tent and there was Joan Baez getting on stage. Late, Cindy Sheehan spoke, mostly light-hearted quips, not her full-force polemics. “Joan proposed to me yesterday,” Cindy said, “and I accepted…just another day at Camp Casey.” A few more jokes and the rally was over. We missed most of it. Several Iraq veterans had spoken.

Once the rally broke up, some extraordinary musicians took the stage. Terri Hendrix, and Lloyd Maines played with a fantastic fiddle player. Non-Texans started shouting, “Who are you? You’re amazing!” One of Terry Hendrix’s song had the refrain, “Hey hey FCC don’t you turn your back on me.” The infrastructure of the whole camp was well done and clean. The main tent was situated behind “Arlington West” where all the crosses in honor of killed US troops were erected. To the side of the tent were about eight port-o-potties. Also tents for some groups like Military Families Speak out. There was a no drug and alcohol policy. Everyone volunteered to do something. I passed around the donations bucket and collected about $250 for the Crawford Peace House in five minutes. It was so hot, over 100 degrees in the sun, so everybody stayed underneath the tents or an umbrella. Water was available free and volunteers walked around handing them out. People had to drink massive amounts of water. The recycling bins for the “empties” filled over and over again. MaGreen had to find two chairs to sit on and placed them in front of a fan. She said, and I quote, she needed, "one for my enormous behind and another to put my feet up for the first time of my pregnancy."

A restaurant catering group served free food – celery, salad, tomatoes, cheese, dressing, cole slaw, cucumber and tomato salad, beef and corn and chicken and poblano tamales, tortillas, buffalo meat, barbecue chicken, roasted green peppers, roasted onions, two kinds of sausages, a vat of barbecue sauce, pecan pie, brownies, several other desserts, lemonade, and tea. While people were waiting in line for the food, they wrote thank you letters to the man who lent the land for Camp Casey II.

There were people there from all over the country. We met folks from California, Nebraska, New York, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Colorado. There were many, many middle-aged women there. There were few teenagers and children. Also very few people of color, perhaps twenty-five out of the 2,000+ people there. We did not see Camp Casey I where we heard that there were a 1000+ people. Singer songwriters must have been ten percent people there. One young man had a sign that read, “Country singers against the war.” One t-shirt had a Gandhi quote on it, “At first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.” Another said, “The revolution will not be televised…it’s online.” Several shirts said, “Yee-haw is not a foreign policy.”

After dinner, we volunteered for traffic duty and helped keep the road from getting congested. Many of the people who drove by were curious onlookers with cameras and many were pro-Bush people waving flags, giving us thumbs down signs, the three-finger W, holding up signs that said “Hippies go home,” and even people sticking their tongues out at us. We kept telling each other, “No confrontations, avoid confrontations.” Peace people also drove by. One truck had a hand-drawn devil on the back next to which it said, “Bush is my number one worker.” Every now and then a beat-up truck driven by tough-looking guys with thick moustaches, fencing materials in the back, would drive by. They just looked at it all and kept driving. The volunteers said, “Now that was a real cowboy.”

From the road, you could see the sun setting and a big storm coming in. In the tent, three sisters from Ithaca were singing a cappela, their refrain was something like “can’t be silent anymore,” and it was if their harmony drew in the wind. The tent started shaking violently. The overhead lights swung from side to side. People were packing up and securing things madly. We caught the first shuttle out. Keith and Theresa stayed back longer to help with the traffic. We reunited at the car. All the hotels in the area were booked solid so we drove home in the night through an electrical storm. Every two or three seconds the sky lit up like it was daylight. MaGreen said that the Calvinists tried to read meaning into everything they saw in nature and it was hard not to see the two thousand lightning strikes we witnessed as symbolic of all the people who had died in Iraq.

Cindy Sheehan wrote in her resignation letter:

The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.

That part made me want to cry. Camp Casey was an incredible moment in history, not just because it forced the human cost of the Iraq war into US news coverage but because for the people who were actually there it was a time of communion, renewal, hope, kindness, and friendship. That beautiful event happened because of Cindy Sheehan's determination. She deserves our utmost attention. We should open ourselves to the message in her "letter of resignation."

She ended her letter with bitterness and a challenge:

Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.

It’s up to you now.

Seven Greenish Things About Magreen

2007-05-27T21:23:00.000-07:00

Like GreenDaddy's post below, I'm responding to cake's tag: we were both supposed to write seven things about ourselves people don't know. Because I am stickler for the title of our website, mine are loosely based on ideas I associate with being (or not being) green.

1. I drank a glass of shelack, as a child, and had my stomach pumped. I don't remember the pumping, but I remember eying the shelack and thinking it looked tasty.

2. My friend Shelly and I used to clean my dad's bar every Saturday and Sunday morning, while playing barmaid. We stole a sixpack when I was six, drank it, and threw up all night long.

3. Throughout my pregnancy and even the delivery of BabyG I never actually envisioned having a baby at the end. I was thinking: I'm pregnant, or I'm in delivery, but never: I'm creating a child that will one day actually exist. I was determined to come through the 'phases' of pregnancy and delivery, but was totally shocked when suddenly there was this tiny other being, my baby, in the delivery room.

4. I learned to swim in an irrigation ditch full of leeches. Every summer I stepped on at least one rusty 'pop top'.

5. When I am depressed, I imagine myself curling up and resting in some coral cave deep in the ocean. When I'm happy, I look forward to passing lots of time swimming and canoeing in cold, cold clear rivers.

6. I once hitchiked out of Zion's park, during a Spring Break backpacking trip I took there with college classmates, because I missed my father so much and couldn't stand being so close to him without visiting(I went to school in Minnesota and he lived in Salt Lake City).

7. Whenever I am very angry at somebody I fantasize about supergluing their car's tires to their driveway.

Okay. I tag anthromama, fiddlehedz & pirate papa...none of whom I've met face to face, but whose blogs I've read awhile. I also tag top secret blogger juju, and anybody else out there yankering to yammer in meme form.

The Secret Seven

2007-05-26T22:02:00.000-07:00

I got tagged by cake to do a post that lists 7 things about me that you might not know. I've never done a meme, but here it goes:

1) The first album I ever bought was Aerosmith’s Permanent Vacation, back in 1987. That’s the one with the song “Dude Looks Like a Lady.”

2) I won a gold medal at the 1989 National Unicycle Meet for my age group in the Walk the Wheel race, which requires taking your feet off the pedal and putting them directly on the tire. Only one other kid finished the race. Mobile, Alabama – the city I grew up in – had a very active unicycle group. I got interested when I saw them performing at a pumpkin festival.

3) When I was about fourteen, I read and reread Ursala Le Guin’s Very Far Away from Anywhere Else at least three times.

4) I started a South Asian radio show at a college radio station that’s still going after nearly ten years. It’s on WNUR in Chicago and is called The Lotus Beat. I feel really proud of that even though the name embarrasses me.

5) I never had any wisdom teeth.

6) I enjoy checking everyday how many minutes are left on our cell phone plan.

7) One of my favorite tasks I have been assigned as part of a job was when I worked as an intern for a children’s magazine called Muse. I was asked to find pictures of monkeys that didn’t show any of their genitalia. So I spent half the day at the Chicago Public Library thumbing through books about monkeys and, among other things, learned about Jane Goodall.

Now I'd like to tag Laura.

Green Inventions That Aren't

2007-05-25T09:56:00.000-07:00

The frugal traveler, in the New York Times, is driving across the states. Since I've been having snark attacks lately, I began my sincere suggestion about where he should go in Houston (Menil, Artcar Museum, Cali sandwiches, folk houses, Clayburn cafeteria if he's a veggie...) with the observation that it is neither environmentally (the whole greenhouse thing) nor economically (with the rising gas prices) frugal for one man to drive an old car across the country. (Don't you think it'd be more interesting for him to take the Greyhound or one of the posh Mexican bus lines? He could have packed a portable scooter or bike to toot around on.)

Anyway, I know precisely how expensive gas is right now because my snarkish comment is a hypocritical one: GreenDaddy, BabyG and I have been guilty of a lot of car travel ourselves these past couple weekends. Which means we saw lots of new sights, but we also saw a lot of the same old sight: concrete & asphalt.

Gruesome, hot concrete. Unfriendly, scalding asphalt.

The whole starting off complaining about the frugal traveller's gas may have thrown you off track because, god knows, we need something that isn't gas to use in our cars...but corn, soy, oil, battery, electricity, fuel cell focused people seem to be on that one.

Which brings me to the green invention that isn't: more porous roads. I declare it high time for highways to be made of pastel colored clays. For city streets to be made of pressurized moss and tree leaves. Some sort of compacted organic 'waste' product. The roads would cool cities down by degrees. They would allow the water to fall back into the earth. They would be eco-modern.

Because hot asphalt isn't. It's 1978...as is the very idea we have to live in concrete jungles. It's 2007, ladies and gentleman, I am ready for some roads that feel good to walk down barefooted in August.

Do you have an idea for a green invention that isn't? Send it along to our gmail address which is greenparenting at said service.

The Official Meatrix I

2007-05-23T22:07:00.001-07:00

GreenDaddy and I have been thininking about how to talk about food and parenting. We've written about our incompetant gardening and our shopping at farmer's markets, co-ops, and health food chains. But somehow we feel like we've only touched the surface of...the Meatrix.

We just stumbled upon this video. Make sure you visit their site to see the other two videos and experience their interactive world.

Here's a shout out to the Other Mother and her family, who went vegetarian today.

Tale of a Fateful Trip

2007-05-22T12:01:00.001-07:00

I am yankering to begin this story about our camping trip to Bastrop State Park by assuring you readers that it really taught the Green family a lot about what we should do better on our next trip. Which you know means one thing: everything went wrong.

It did. Wrongness was the most confident and reliable member of the camping party GreenDaddy, BabyG and I set off on with our friends Gemini, Araf and their five year old daughter, Maha. I’m fairly certain none of us would deny it.

But just in case somebody would, I’ll make my case, which begins by explaining how the site we had planned to visit, Huntsville State Park, just an hour away from Houston, was filled. Garner State Park and the clear and cool Frio River, where I really, really want to go was too far: four hours away. So we drove to Bastrop State Park, which we knew little else about except that it had a swimming pool and pine trees. I could not dismiss a forboding feeling when I heard the park (was so lame) that even though it had two lakes, it also had to have a pool. Something seemed amiss.

But Bastrop is two hours from Houston and had a spot open: who cares about amiss? GreenDaddy and I spent hours Friday night amassing gear...so long we skipped breakfast and were two hours late meeting up the next morning. Then, though she didn’t scream the whole two hours, our child refused a nap and earned high high-maintenance marks.

Bastrop Park was hot. Our site was hilly, BabyG tripped, and this made her cry until daddy took her for a walk. We forgot ice. When Gemini and I went to buy some, I asked the cranky old lady in the park store where we could swim, and she told us nowhere: the pool was closed and no wading or swimming was permitted in the lakes or creeks. Since we were planning to paddle, I asked if water-contact was prohibited because the water was somehow dangerous, or if it was just a protected ecosystem. She said it was an ecosystem, and wouldn't say more. When an old volunteer guy carried our ice to the car, I asked him how to cool off. He said drive five miles to the lake in the neighboring park. We eventually did: it was a crowded, swimming-pool-sized, fairly shallow area in a lake otherwise meant for water skiers and that, Maha said (dismissivley) smelled like ketchup: otherwise it was perfect.

That night, BabyG peed the bed. Twice. It was blistering cold outside, for Texas, and we were serenaded by the continuous humming, honking and buzzing of cars passing on the nearby highway. Half the pan of oatmeal fell into the fire, that next morning. BabyG started saying bye-bye to everybody, which meant: okay, I’m ready to have been back in Houston three hours ago.

Instead, we headed to the lake you couldn’t swim in, to kayak and fish. It turned out we were missing GreenDaddy’s kayak oars, so he and Araf rented a canoe and then Araf went fishing. It took forty mintutes to put the Klepper kayak together, after which, Gemini, Maha, BabyG and I climbed into the canoe. I took one oar as Gemini had never paddled before, and GreenDaddy took the other in his kayak.

Maha, almost immediately, wanted to go fish with her dad, and BabyG was unabashedly unimpressed with her life-jacket. She performed her best shrieking raptor imitation, non-stop, until I stopped paddling and breastfed her. Gemini didn't want to take the helm as the canoe thing was new to her. She thought she'd kill us. She didn't though: she caught on to paddling nicely.

When we reached Araf, he said he’d like a ride. GreenDaddy jumped waist deep in the water to help moor us as we transferred vessels. When Gemini’s family came back, we all decided to picnic on what ended up being waterlogged veggie burgers. Yum. After eating, we packed up and headed to our respective homes.

Fast forward twelve hours and note how GreenDaddy’s body is a minefield of flatworm infestation. It looks like countless mosquito bites. Initially, I felt sorry for him, but didn't pay much attention. When the bites seemed to multiply, I searched the internet and discovered he has swimmer's itch: bites made from a parasitic worm that cycles through snails and ducks until humans stupidly offer up their, apparently, duck-like skin. Its itch is severe (like poison ivy) as opposed to mild (like insect bites) according to the Center for Disease Control. He has over 74 bites.

So, it’s like I said, we learned a lot about what to do better, next time.

But it's also like what I didn’t say, but what GreenDaddy and I talked about half the way home. As BabyG slept peacefully in her Aloha carseat, and we were following the wildflower drenched highway back to Houston (and there were dozens of varieties of wildflowers out this weekend: in purples and reds and yellows and golds and whites and lavenders...) we talked about how we both felt toatlly relaxed. Stress-free for the first time in months.

And it occurred to us, as it has occurred to all campers at one point or another, that the swim in the grass-filled and pondy bottomed lake, the making due with imperfections, the passing of intensely intimate time with another family, the learning to wash two pounds of spinach in a plastic bag, the witnessing of somebody learning to steer a canoe, the blossoming friendship between BabyG and Maha, even the little part of beauty evident in the presence of motorhomes with their sewage systems, Christmas light pollution, and satellite televisions: the power of camping is that all of these tiny things come together and trump the obvious wrongs. And no matter how annoying the wrongs were at the time, by the ride home they seem to be integral parts of camping fun (except for those worm bites.)

I mean, I wrote all this just to say: we had fun. More fun than we've had in ages and ages. It was nice to spend that time with our friends and each other. And though next time we’ll be sure not to wade in shallow lake water we’ve been told not to swim in, and we’ll remember toys for the baby, and we’ll make simpler meals, and we’ll get up earlier and swim in cooler water…something else unexpected will happen. And we’re looking forward to finding out what it will be.

This world of dew

2007-05-18T10:38:00.000-07:00

This world of dew
is only a world of dew -
and yet

Kyoshi Takahama

Okay Something Weird is Happening

2007-05-17T10:03:00.000-07:00

BabyG is a veritable toddler's dictionary, she says: (za)pato (as in shoe), aqui, mas (as in more or in give me food now), no (as both a command and a joke), shoes, one, two, three, ojo, pelo, boca, park, book, baby, ball, ouch, not, Mama, Dada, all done, meow, kitty, woof, baa, moo, neigh, Ana, pretty, bye-bye(as a command (let's go NOW) and a salutation), hi, hello, bath, good, buenas, adios, pee pee, poo poo, happy, vaca, qua, pato (duck), Lila, La la la, mine, mia...She's making sentences: No, no, Mama, night night! (I don't want to do that, mom, I want to breastfeed!)

I am giving up on blogging until Sunday night when I hope the blogger glitches that have devastated a longer, better post are no longer.

Vicious Canines Attack BabyG

2007-05-07T12:36:00.000-07:00

It happened in Utah, the second to the last day we were there. My cheerful, funny, walky little baby was mauled by what I think were two canines sometime between breakfast in my mother's hotel and lunch. It happened that fast.

What started out as a fever and mild crankiness, evolved into her most painful teething episode yet. It has meant a two hundred percent meltdown from a general feeling of discontent into an outright rage, several times a day, for the last 6 days.

Teething has always been hard for our little one. She refuses to eat anything but breastmilk, she gets diahrrea, she has 100.9 degree fevers, she wakes every couple of hours and requires long bouts of nursing...And these canines, they have been the worst. And I hear the most painful teeth to come in are molars.

I've decided to amass a list of green teething solutions. I'm going to say upfront that BabyG has been eating lots of Infant Motrin because nothing else I tried came close to working for her. We tried Hylands teething tablets, teething bisquits, teething toys.

However, I know there are levels of teething, and I know there are lots of remedies out there I haven't tried, and that might work alone for mild teething or (for us) augment the pain medication. Maybe there's a natural solution that will beat out Motrin...

So this is a general call: What teething remedies have you all used or have you seen used to good effect?

I've heard about: frozen bananas, vegetables, frozen washrags, clove oil. Anybody use any of these methods, or know anything about them? Teething post will be up in a week or so...

Why You Might Not Try To Save $2,000

2007-05-07T11:24:00.000-07:00

The ATT&T Lesson: When you called AT&T two months ago to complain about the ever-increasing bill, a young man put you on a new plan to help you save $35 a month. The new plan, it turns out when you get your bill, costs exactly five dollars more than the old one. Because you like the quality of AT&T, you call and ask if you can get their cable internet without the phone. You can! If you also get their cable TV, which will eventually cost you $75 a month. Nobody believes you don't have a television (or that you have one in the attic, in case of emergencies). So you decide to switch to Earthlink cable. When you call to cancel AT&T, they tell you that it will cost you $100 because you were just put onto a new plan that requires a one year contract. You say you weren't informed of a yearlong service contract, that you wouldn't have signed up for one since you were considering the switch to cable for awhile now, and that even if they had told you, they lied about the price. They ask if you if you want to pay the one hundred dollar cancellation fee or keep your service. You ask for the manager. They say it's the weekend, the manager will call you by Wednesday. They have told you this before, about another issue, and you know what they mean is that you should call back on Monday. I haven't had the resolve to do this as of yet.

**Update** 43 minutes into a call in which you speak to 6 different AT&T reps, half of whom think your contract actually expired in August, half of whom think it began in March, you are informed that the manager has to call back because they're backloaded. Turns out it's not only on the weekend you can't talk to a manager, it's everyday.

The Internet Switch Lesson: No matter how proficient you have become in the last twenty years, it will always take at least eight solid hours, usually thirteen, of your time. When the installation guy leaves, for example, you will discover you don't actually have a working connection. The Earthlink call center will help you along and a few days later you will learn a 56k modem is faster than your new Earthlink cable. The Earthlink call center will tell you to unplug your modem and cable connection and restart your computer (the old goat takes more than 5 minutes to restart every time, and throughout this process, you will restart it at least 20 times) and swear your problem is solved. An hour later, you will call the same call center, tell them about the same slow problem. The new call center employee will try a completley different solution that sort of works. Eventually, they will refer you to Time Warner, who installed the service. Time Warner employee will perform all the same tests from your computer that Earthlink did, look at various settings, finally refer you back to Earthlink. At the last second the employee will get a bright idea, have you fix one more thing, and that will work.

The Energy Company Switch Lesson: You sign up for a new service April 16th or so, and get a note back from the Texas Power Commision telling you they've approved the switch for June 15. It takes two months, I guess, to. Um. What???? Whatever. I'm not making any phone calls.

The Bank Switch Lesson: Switch banks before you switch phone companies or you may not have enough life force left to fill out the online application and send it in via snail mail. We are switching from Chase, king of $12 service fees and low interest rates, to EverBank that charges nothing and gives 6% interest on both checking and savings. It's an internet bank...meaning I'll have to send in deposits, but it pays for ATM charges at whatever local bank you make withdrawls.

The Saving $2000 A Year Lesson Ask the internet readers to come up with one. You spend too long trying to think of a pithy aphorism or metaphor, but your brain is in a hateful mood and won't help out.

I Love You Sleeping Worker

2007-05-02T16:01:00.000-07:00

Today, for lunch, I ate two sandwiches garnished with dill and chard from the garden. Then I walked back to the office from home. I usually ride my bicycle back, but I had a flat tire and I didn't want to switch out the tube right then. It's about a two mile walk. Probably the most walkable two miles in all of Houston. Nearly the whole way the sidewalk is shaded by oaks and magnolias. I walk down Woodhead street through the lower Montrose over I-59 and into the elite neighborhood near Rice University. The trees over there don't just shade the street, they form perfect canopies. Most of the people outside in that neighborhood are brown like me. They're landscaping or taking white babies out for a stroll. Of course, I don't pass among them. My spectacles and at least a dozen other markers give me away as someone walking to the campus.

After I crossed Rice boulevard and entered the campus, I noticed a facilities worker sitting on the grass by the side of the road. He had his back resting against a tree and his legs stretched out in front of him. I thought he might be sleeping, but I couldn't tell because of his sunglasses. From about ten feet away, I heard him snoring. As I passed him, I saw a line of saliva hanging from his lip, gleaming brightly because the sun was hitting it at just the right angle. I thought about taking a picture of him with my cell phone camera, but was afraid that even allowing my camera to record the light bouncing of his body would ruin the perfection of his sleep. So I just kept walking and smiled for five minutes straight.

Economics for Humans by Julie A. Nelson

2007-05-01T17:14:00.000-07:00

I was surpised a few years ago when I found out that economics comes from the same root as ecology. The common root is oikos, which is Greek for home or household. Back in the seventeenth centure, if you read a book of oeconomics, you would find dinner recipes, home remedies, and advice on managing expenses. Green Parenting is a 21st century blog of oeconomics in a way. The archives of this blog are largely dominated by our documentation of how we cook, what we throw away, what utility companies we use, and our struggle to share responsibilities. Then all of a sudden, we post about the World Bank or Global Warming. You see, we're harking way back to the oeco- in economics and ecology, like we're ancient Greeks. Call me Aristotle, baby. We're erasing the modern boundary between the public and private, the domestic and the civic, the personal and the political. Agoramania in the blogosphere!

A book called Economics for Humans helped me think through what it means to question the separation of what goes on inside a home and what happens in the global economy. Published in 2006 by the University of Chicago Press, the book moves from economic history to the challenges people in the United States face now. I think what's most interesting about the book is that Nelson takes aim at right-wingers who think the marketplace solves all problems and "her friends," who believe that corporations are intrinsicly evil. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

Probusiness, neoliberal zealots firmly believe that the economy is a machine. They assert that any direct concern with ethics or care is unnecessary because a market economy automatically serves the common good. Antimarket critics also believe the economy is a machine. They assert that ethics and care are impossible within capitalism since the system automatically runs on the energy of self-interest and greed. Either way, the metaphor forces us to divorce the "body" concerns of economic provisioning for our lives from the "soul" concerns of social responsibility and caring relationships. The economy-as-machine metaphor has blinded us to the real-world qualities that make humans work and care and organizations run.

Non-profits, she argues, are not necessarily the instruments of good. Nelson gives examples of corporate hospitals that provide better benefits to their workers than non-profit hospitals. She's extremely critical of lefties who think of non-profits, churches, and volunteers as mop-up operations for the inevitable destruction of mega-multinational corporations. She's also critical of those who insist that government has no place in making sure everyone has access to childcare, eldercare, quality healthcare, and paid leave. She argues that the first step to addressing the caring crisis - a crisis I believe most parents are acutely aware - is to jettison the economy-as-machine metaphor. Then we'll be able imagine pragmatic solutions that involve corporations, non-profits, government, and individual responsibility.

I talked to an economist who specializes in the study of big corporations about Nelson's arguments. This person said, "We know the economy isn't a machine, that's Introduction to Economics stuff." Maybe that's true, but it's that Intro to Econ rhetoric that actually drives the public debate. Most of our politicians and journalists didn't get past that intro class. So I would recommend this book, along with The Invisible Heart by Nancy Folbre, for anyone who wants to learn a humanist and feminist economics.

TIme for Change at the World Bank

2007-04-28T15:28:00.000-07:00

I find this last video released by Avaaz.org, as part of its Fire Wolfowitz Campaign, less slick than their past videos on climate change and the Israel Palestine conflict. Since I don't watch The Office television show, the jokes don't quite click. What I love about the video, though, is how it portrays how absurdity of the current situation at the World Bank.

Some of my friends think that the World Bank is an inherently evil organization, designed from the beginning to maintain a world of economic inequality. Only the wealthy benefit from World Bank loans, they say. Although the loans are supposedly given to spur economic development, poor nations are burdened with debt and the terms of the loans prevent governments from spending on healthcare, education, and other kinds of social provisioning. I believe, however, that the World Bank is an institution that often funds studies and programs that help lift entire populations out of terrible deprivation. If World Bank governance were improved so that the interests of marginalized groups were considered more substantively and loans were administered in a way that did not constrain nations from pursuing solutions right for their particular economic challenges, the World Bank could be a central part of a successful struggle for a more just and peaceful world.

Instead of working towards a reformed World Bank, we have a sex scandal. Paul Wolfowitz, who Bush appointed as its president, has embroiled the organization in controversy. Here is a man whose last job was to design a unilateral invasion of Iraq. At the World Bank, on the basis of his anti-corruption campaign, he bypassed the normal processes at the bank and cut off funds to poor countries. At the same time, he arranged for his own girlfriend at the bank to receive a huge raise. He really should be fired. Parents around the world should - in solidarity with the mothers, fathers, and children whose lives are profoundly affected by the World Bank but cannot make their own voices heard - demand that the World Bank board fire Wolfowitz. Then we should demand a real change in how the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are governed.

Baby Steps to Green Parenting

2007-04-26T19:26:00.000-07:00

After dinner last night, BabyG walked for the first time. That is, in my opinion, she walked for the first time. It has been a longer process for her than for her toddler friends. She has taken steps before. She has pushed her stroller for blocks. She has traversed without assistance the distance between the couches, but that’s not “walking for the first time.” We always had to get her started and encourage her. This evening I took BabyG to the Rothko Chapel. There’s a large paved area between the Broken Obelisk and the chapel itself. At first, I held BabyG’s hand as we walked around this area together, but then she let go of her own accord. She walked towards the pool around the obelisk. When she fell and whined, I offered my hand and she said, “No!” Then she got up, brought her feet closer together, and began walking again. She fell and raised herself up. She walked for some twenty minutes occasionally asking to rest on a bench. A couple of time, I took off her shoes and let her dangle her feet in the pool.

I feel hugely relieved that she's walking. It's one of those montage moments in a syrupy movie, flashy through scenes from the beginning - MaGreen moaning in the delivery room, BabyG rolling over in her Grandpa's house, BabyG learning to toss her wrist from Uncle Chuck...Who was I two years before BabyG was born, back when we started this blog? I'm astonished by how much we've changed. Astonished, and a little self-congratulatory. Also, I recently read Christine Gardner's post called Baby Steps to Green Parenting on Gristmill, which got me thinking about making a list of steps. So here we go. In honor of BabyG's steps, I offer five baby steps to Green Parenting.

1) Seek Complementarity

Consider what ideals or principles you have besides environmentalism. For us, gender equality in our own household over the long term is a must. So is living joyful, creative, and expressive lives. That means for everyone – MaGreen, BabyG, and me. Amartya Sen’s capability approach and Martha Nussbaum’s working list of core capabilities helped me think more completely about just what our goals are. Then, when we considered our lifestyle and our choices as parents, we looked for things that matched up with all our hopes, i.e. complementarity. For example, buying our food at the local co-op and at nearby farmers’ markets means tastier and cheaper food, a stronger sense of community with our neighbors, and a lower impact on the environment. If you find yourself consistently using words like “trade-off” or “sacrifice,” you may not be on the right track. I think looking for complementarity is the best way to begin.

2) Baby Proof Grandma Style

Every handbook on parenting says that you should go through your house and lock up your poisonous cleaning supplies. Why just lock up your poisons? Why are there poisons in our houses at all? The more MaGreen read up on what our cleaning supplies were made of, the more horrified she was. Then she started to have fun making cleaning supplies from vinegar and baking soda like her Grandma used to. I’ve learned from MaGreen’s playful experimentation. I never thought cleaning supplies could take on so much meaning. Check out MaGreen’s guide to cleaning supplies. I think this is another good example of complementarity. Your wallet wins, the health of your whole family wins, the environment wins, and you don’t have to commit much more time than “non-Green Parents” do to baby-proofing.

3) Celebrate Often

Every day I hear about some innovative way to celebrate holidays, birthdays, achievements, recoveries, or whatever else in environmentally and socially responsible ways. The reason I think that celebrating is central to Green Parenting is that it can build communities of love and support around you, it can reaffirm your identities, and it can transform your lifestyle, all while you enjoy yourself. For example, check out our gift giving guide and MaGreen’s compilation of 1st-year birthday cake recipes.

4) Try Lazy Composting and Incompetent Gardening

One of my favorite schools of environmentalist thought is permaculture. I’ve never read a permaculture book, attended a permaculture class, or joined a permaculture society, but I think I understand its central tenet – tap into the ecological systems around you. What I like is that it sounds like an advanced form of laziness and stinginess to me. For example, when we wanted to compost, we didn’t buy an $80 bin from Home Depot. We just started to bury our peelings in the backyard. I found digging the little holes strangely satisfying. Then we became more confident, so we leaned some shipping pallets we found in a lot against each other and we piled all our yard waste, along with our peelings, in this make-shift bin. The compost didn’t get hot. No teaming masses of red worms. We didn’t even turn it regularly. But just about anywhere except the desert, if you leave out a pile of clippings and peelings, it turns to black gold in a few months.

Once you have compost, no reason not to start gardening. I didn’t have any experience gardening, so I really messed up most of my plantings. But the few plants that have defied my incompetence gave us wonderful food and an intense feeling of satisfaction. Between the decay of composting and the birth of gardening, there’s a good chance you might find what you need as an overburdened parent. I hope you can hear complementarity bells ringing. If you want to read more, check out our collection of writing on composting and gardening.

5) Join Collective Actions

Hate to say it, but your own actions and those of your family will not save us from environmental collapse or propel us into a utopic world of social justice. One of the main reasons to systematically green your lifestyle is that your choices connect you with other people. Half the friends we have, we met through activism. And networks of individuals can change social norms. We can, as groups, force governments and multi-national institutions to change the rules of production, trade, consumption, and waste. Sierra Club and Avaaz.org online petitions count, but a meeting in the park with your neighbors who support light rail is better. Avoid caustic activists, but don’t give up on activism.

These five points are not exhaustive, of course. I’m just suggesting some initial steps. Start with what’s easiest and most obvious, then go step by step. I’m completely amazed by how much we have changed since MaGreen became pregnant. BabyG has motivated us – not to “sacrifice” or “give up luxuries” – but to actually pay attention to our well-being. We haven't arrived, but we're walking.

Care of Objects: Guest Post by Cake

2007-04-25T10:47:00.000-07:00

It is tempting for me to view people who are overly concerned with keeping things clean and in good shape as being materialistic. I often see people who are meticulous about caring for their cars, or who fuss over stains on clothes as being too fussy. After all, objects are meant to be used, not preserved.

True enough, but as I was preparing some baby clothes to take to my favorite consignment shop, I started to think differently. When I keep clothes and other items that I only plan to use for a short length of time (most baby items fall into this category) clean and in good condition, I prolong their lifespan.

I can take them to a thrift store or consignment shop, and someone else can use them and maybe even pass them on one more time. Sure, I can take stained clothes to the thrift store, and they will accept them, but will they actually end up getting used by someone else if they are trashed? Most of us who purchase used items want them to be in pretty good shape. This also holds true when I pass things on to friends. I don’t want to give away stained or torn clothes. It’s insulting.

So I have started to view the act of caring for our possessions as an ecological gesture--a form of resistance to the throw-away consumer culture. As a result, I’ve been learning about stain removal and I might even get around to washing the car one of these days.

Hungry for more Cake? Check out her very toothsome blog Whistling Leaf Blower.

Dadaism isn't Dead

2007-04-18T22:03:00.000-07:00

For two years our doors looked like this:

I tried to install new knobs, but the tubular latches that come with new knobs were too large for the little hole on the side of the door they were supposed to go through. Eventually, I bought a special file that fits in a drill, and enlarged the hole. I created a little pile of actual sawdust in the process: MA-CHO!

But unsuccessful: I soon discovered that the big hole the door knob goes through was too big to install modern handles in. I needed a giant backplate instead of the tiny round one. After a fruitless six months search, my dad said he'd had the same problem, I should go to Lowes.

When I went to Lowes for the 90th time in search of backplates -- oh, yes, I had gone and not found any many times before -- I found them immediately because I was channeling my father. He would think what I had failed to: I need a giant backplate, and if the the only big backplate the store carries is a crazy, giant sized rectangle meant for a door with an old fashioned key lock, that's what I'm looking for.

I tossed several backplates into my cart, browsed my way back towards the counter, and we have finally arrived at the story I intended to tell:

I found myself, at Lowes, in the large powertool section. I was searching for water pressure washers. Some seventy or eighty year old white man came up to me and said, "You finding it?"

No I said, asked where the power washers were, and noticed his hedging and confused body language. "Oh, I'm sorry!" I said, simulaneously realizing he had no Lowes uniform and noticing his wife was behind him, checking out the rotary saws, "You're just another customer. I thought you worked here but you were just being friendly!"

"Yes, I am friendly!" he nodded, looking relieved. But I was a bit flustered, I am terrible at chatting with nice people in stores, it makes me nervous. So I was trying to flee -- one of the 200 main reasons I didn't become a General.

"Are you a member of that group?" he said as I turned away. He motioned towards my Code Pink, Women For Peace T-Shirt.

In Texas, you never know where a question like that might take you. Friendly old men in mega-hardware stores could swing either directio on the political scale, but "that group" is particularly ominous phrasing. The only thing worse than making small talk with a friendly old man in a store would be watching the friendly old man transform into a raving lunatic. In the power tool section of the store.

So, again, he says: "Are you a member of that [Code Pink, Women for Peace] group?"

And so I say about the most nonsensical thing possible: "Guess we all are, bye."

I know, I know. We all are what? Women? For Peace? Members of Code Pink. I was five or six steps away from him, turned towards the lighting aisle, but still tuned into his voice when I heard him say in this voice that sounded totally baffled but convinced:

"We sure are!"

It was good to agree, but what were we agreeing on?

An Ode to the Two-Bedroom Apartment

2007-04-18T04:56:00.000-07:00

We must cull
what our lives,
and your walls,
cannot fit.
Room one,
room two.
Where I had a desk,
the baby sleeps,
so I write on the bed.
I must cherish
the multifunctional.
Not even room
for self-hate,
you therapist.

You don’t know
about my drawer,
the bottom one,
where I keep
useless things,
expired IDs,
campaign buttons,
and cassette tapes,
in sweet defiance
of your parsimony.

Opposite Day

2007-04-11T20:16:00.000-07:00

I had a long day and missed the bus home, the last bus for the night. MaGreen had to pick me up. We didn't get to the apartment until ten pm. No time to cook, so we bought veggie burgers, french fries, and a Coke from the Burger King drive through.

BabyG enjoyed the break from being an exemplar of green.

She insisted that the cat try out this strange and exciting lifestyle her parents have somehow neglected introducing to her.

Here she is totally blissed out on ketchup and french fries.

May the Green Goddess forgive us.

O Quandary, Thy Name Is Electricity

2007-04-09T11:28:00.000-07:00

I have been a Green Mountain Energy (GME) subscriber since before meeting GreenDaddy. I love getting the monthly bill that tells me that by using 404 Kilowat hours of wind electricity, I have saved 593 pounds of C02 Emissions from being released into the atmosphere -- the equivalent of 659 automobile miles not driven.

But in the excavation of our energy costs, it turns out we're paying a lot of money for the 100% wind energy. The average amount we pay, per month, is 17.2¢ KWh. If we went for the cheapest power company in Houston, we'd be paying about 11.2¢ KWh -- a difference of upwards of $40 per month or $480 a year.

So it feels good not dumping coal into the atmosphere, and bad thinking about how GME claims to cost the same as Reliant, the region's major power source. The truth is, there is no energy in Houston that costs as much as 100% wind from Green Mountain. I went to GME's website to research what was going on, and realized the deal that costs the same as Reliant is not 100% wind energy derived: it is 90% water/dam energy and 10% wind. Both are renewable energy sources, unlike coal, and if you sign up for a year contract, this plan is 14.3¢ kWh.

I would prefer dams to coal, but still. I hail from Utah, the land of many incredible, historic, unusual canyons erased forever by dams -- usually created to create recreational lakes. I grew up reading Edward Abbey. Dam energy isn't the renewable source I prefer...though, it certainly helps the budget out.

As a last resort to using dammed water, I sought out other electric companies in the area using 100% wind, thinking I wouldn't find any. But it turns out there are a few 100% wind plan offers including:

Commerce Energy: 14.8¢ kWh
Reliant: 15.4¢ KWh
Spark: 13.7¢ KWh

So my quandary is this:

I think:

Aren't these companies able to offer a reduced 100% wind rate because the majority of their sales are from coal, and the coal energy people offset the price of my wind?
Isn't it because of companies like GME, who invest money in alternative energy technologies, that these traditional providers are entering the green market?

And at the same time...Isn't it the goal of green energy to induce the mainstream providers to include green options...and eventually, to offer soley the green? So shouldn't I let these 'dirty' companies know I value their green options?

And at the same time...Shouldn't I support GME, who invests in soley green technologies. If they go out of business, what incentives do the others have to keep providing green solutions?

And at the same time...Shouldn't GME figure out a way to be more competitive in this market?

I don't know what to do. I do know we need to spend less on electricity. Of course, we're going to work on making the house itself more efficient, but I also want an efficient energy company.

So I'm trying to decide between 100% wind energy, my preferred energy source, from Spark and 100% renewable energy, mostly dammed water based, from my preferred provider GME.

Anybody have any information that might tip the scales of my indecision one way or the other?

Seder

2007-04-08T21:36:00.000-07:00

Robin, the illustrious author of The Other Mother, and her partner, Marcia, had us over for Passover Seder last week. I’d never been to a Passover Seder before and didn’t have any expectations ahead of time. At first, BabyG was happily dazed by the company of the other children – Pearl, Carrie, and Miles – and after about fifteen minutes she started playing. Robin and Marcia told us that they would keep the Passover ceremony short and child-friendly. Their tone was reassuring, as if I was thinking, “G-d, I hope it’s not going to be one of those long ones,” which I wasn’t thinking since I’d never been to one.

We all sat in a circle on the floor around a platter, in which several kinds of food were arranged. I can’t recall the ceremony exactly, but I remember eggs, parsley, horseradish, a sweet mix of apples and nuts, unleavened bread, a chicken bone, and wine. (I hope I didn’t miss anything.) Robin explained that each food had a symbolic significance connected to the Jews fleeing slavery in Egypt. Actually, she started off by explaining that Passover is for all people, not just Jews. All groups of people, she said, have experienced different high and lows in their histories. Then as we ate each kind of food, she explained how we might understand its significance. All this discourse took place in English. Later, when we sat down at the dinner table, Robin led the recitation of a few Hebrew prayers.

Though we apparently experienced an abbreviated Seder ritual, I found it very meaningful. Hindu rituals are almost never performed in English. Our wedding sacrament, for example, was in Sanskrit. I hope one day American Hindus can emulate the way American Jews have woven Hebrew and English together in their ceremonies. And I’m so impressed by the way Robin drew us into her tradition and expressed that tradition in an inclusive way. MaGreen and I have the ambition of doing the same with Holi next year.

Every Day is Kids' Day at the Bayou City Farmers' Market

2007-04-02T19:14:00.000-07:00

Two of our friends wrote a great article about a farmer's market in Houston. They go by "keefski" on the internet. We got to know them when we were all organizing peace/anti-war events. They published their farmer's market article on the Houston Indymedia site. I think the article gets right to the core of what Green Parenting can be so I am republishing here. Enjoy!

It’s getting harder to see the food for the forest of non-food items at the big box food chains. Shoppers must weave their baskets around lawn furniture, seasonal displays, greeting cards, toys, and DVDs.

Grocery store shelves are lined with rows and rows of boxes and boxes of bleached out, dead, dyed, depleted substances, that have been “fortified” with "nutrients" defined by The Food and Drug Administration. The same entity that approved Vioxx® and Sacharin®. Packaging and branding are the food industries equivalent to spin and propaganda. The last thing the Agriculture Industrial Complex wants is a consumer who asks questions. What’s really in that colorful box? Where did it come from? How was it grown and should my children be putting it in their mouths?

So where does food come from? For starters, food comes from soil. Healthy soil is very complex. There are fungi that interact with minerals that interact with bacteria that interact with enzymes that interact with birds, beasts and bugs in a way that cannot be duplicated by the FDA’s selective fortification and Big Ag’s chemical fertilizers. The best food comes with the least amount of time between it being in the ground and it landing on your table. Take the quickest trip away from Monsanto’s mutants, Chiquita’s death squad hirelings, Wal-mart’s version of “organic,” and gigantic Dean’s Foods buying up every once-independent dairy farmer. Visit your local farmers’ market. You can put food on your family and have fun doing it. Vendors will gladly give you the dirt on their produce while the overhead PA plays live music. There is fresh coffee, cake and cookies as well as the freshest produce in town. There may even be a baby goat or two frolicking among the bokchoy.

A rainy March 31st was Kids Day at the Houston’s Bayou City Farmer’s Market. Below are pictures from the event.

Little shopper

This little cutie beat the drops in her best rain duds. The woman in orange is holding flowers grown without pesticides or herbicides. The commerical flower industry is a heavy user of both.

Babes at the market

A tuckered out chick gets a gentle tot tickle.

Rabbit

There were ducks, chickens and a rabbit for the kids to visit at the Bayou City Farmers Market annual Kids Day on March 31. But every day is Kids Day where you don’t have Monsanto lurking about.

Cooperative Neighbor Kids

Just a small sample of local produce you can put on your family, includes grapefruit from Pearland, tomatoes, fresh basil and eggs from Weimar, mushrooms from the Sealy area, a bar of handmade soap from Spring and oregano grown by students at Houston’s Kolter Elementary.

This Houston market is located at 3000 Richmond Ave. between Eastside and Kirby, in the back parking lot. Hours are, Saturday from 8:00 am - 12:00 pm, and Wednesdays from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm. Find a farmer's market near you (United States directory).

Running the Numbers

2007-03-31T19:53:00.000-07:00

GreenDaddy is away for the weekend and I've been chasing BabyG around all day...except for the two and half hour nap we stole together. We don't usually do that. Well, she does, but I don't usually go down with her. It's napping weather today though: strong rains, humid.

I don't usually get to spend so much time with BabyG, alone. It's been very lovely, and I have all these things to brag on her about, but I'll save that for a time I'm less lulled by the weather. I'll write a more proper post tomorrow.

Today I thought I'd share images from this art series by Chris Jordan that I've admired for a few weeks now. Just like GreenDaddy, he's running the numbers on consumption...but clearly in a very different way.

Cans Seurat, 2007
60x92" archival inkjet print

Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.

Skin Deep: It's in the Details

2007-03-28T13:03:00.000-07:00

Little Scotty Meek announced one day, out of the blue, that Vaseline is made of petroleum, just like gasoline. I was seven and he was nine. His information launched a heated conversation in which I reminded him that Vaseline neither smells nor looks like gas, and that if it was at all related to it my father surely wouldn’t put it on my lips when they were chapped.

Then came the quest for the bottle of Vaseline, which he pointed out, is also called: “petroleum jelly.” Since we lived in oil country, I knew petroleum was a fancy name for gas, but the new knowledge didn’t trip me up. Plenty of words, I told him, sound the same, but have different meanings. I couldn’t pull the word homonym from my pocket, but I did have examples: board/bored, write/right/right, and every child’s favorite: but and butt.

He wouldn’t concede, so we took the matter to my grandfather, a mechanic, and of course, I lost the argument. After that I refused to use gasoline jelly. No matter what people said, my child’s brain would not allow for the dual use of petrol in our car and on my lips. Lucky for my dad that Scotty didn’t know pajamas, toothpaste, or baby oil, vitamins, and bubble bath were also petroleum products or I’d have had the excuse I’d always needed to be in actuality the naked, dirty, deficient little varmint with rotting teeth that I’ve always been at heart.

II.

Lucky for BabyG, in the last couple of decades knowledge about not only the petroleum, but a host of other chemicals used in bath and body products has almost become mainstream. The likes of the world’s hippies, old-fashioned-recipe-traditionalists, new agers’, yuppies, and power-yoga-enthusiasts expressed so much distress at using these sorts of products that a number of new, more “natural,” often organic products had been called into being.

Of course, plenty of people working in the beauty industry did not relish being left out of the new order of environmentally-friendly upstarts. They realized many people weren’t even sure what they wanted when they bought 'natural'…that the word itself had become a fad. They hired ad executives who concluded something like: petroleum comes from old dinosaur bones: what’s more natural than that?, and then stuck the word natural on all sorts of dangerous, healthy, and not what I would consider "natural" products.

As a green consumer, I thought one simple way to ensure I get more “natural” products, is to shop at stores that are geared toward environmentalism. So for awhile, after our family decided to go green, we shopped at Whole Foods, and bought the exorbitantly priced lotions and toothpastes and shampoos there. But I couldn’t get it out of my mind that just because it’s at Whole Foods, doesn’t mean it’s natural. That’s like thinking buying a product at Safeway’s or Randall’s means its safe. You would like it to be so, but experience suggests you need to take the quest a few steps further.

I googled around until I found recommendations from environmental-friendly sources. But I was dismayed that while many of them told you what major-consumer-brands to avoid, why to avoid them, and what to use instead, they rarely if ever explained what products were used in the making of the ones they touted.

So I got online and researched the sorts or chemicals I definitely wanted to avoid. You’ll note the length of that list if you click on the link. It was a little much for me to carry every time I went to the grocery store, so I settled on just a few of them.

III.

Enter the Environmental Working Group, “a non-profit research and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. focused on safeguarding public health and the environment.” This group spent two years compiling information on almost 15,000 products, and they offer up their findings in an online database called Skin Deep. If you want information on a beauty product not already in the database, you can send the brand in and get it added.

Skin Deep has an incredible database that not only includes information on brands like Crest or Suave, but it covers alternatives like Tom's of Maine, Jason, and Avalon Organics. It analyzes the numbers of toxins, the number of ingredients that haven't been studied, and the known risks of the toxins that have been studied and comes up with a level of safety: 0 for products that pose no risks, 5 for extraordinarily toxic products. You can search the database by typing in a brand name you're interested in, or by searching via a general area, like baby shampoos.

Below, I entered "Jason toothpaste," which I switched to when we first went green.

If you click on the product name, you get a long page detailing the particular products analysis, as well as a side bar glance that sums it up. To the right, is the sidebar that came with the Jason Sea Fresh Spearmint Toothpaste my family has been using awhile. It took awhile to get used to Jason -- it's a clear gel with a tingly taste totally unlike any toothpaste I'd tried before -- and I wasn't looking forward to switching brands. I was relieved that although the Sea Fresh Spearmint we were using rated as moderately unsafe, the Sea Fresh Plus Coq-10 rated a whole point lower (go Coq-10!). The lowest rated toothpaste, Fresh, is made of Umbrian Clay and costs $20 for 4 oz. -- I can get a 4 pack of my Jason Sea Fresh Coq-10 for that. Its safty rating ties with Burt's Bees, but and lags only behind Fresh, Dr. Bronners, PeelU, Accelerade and Garden of Life. One day I might get sick of shelling out money for toothpaste and revert to using Baking Soda like my dad (but what about fresh breath!?)...but until then, I'll enjoy the days dappling in the oddities of health food toothpastes.

For those of you dying to see a general topic search, the first one I looked up was baby shampoo. Because while GreenDaddy and I have gone no-poo, Lila is an Aubrey Organics girl. Here's what I found:

Clearly, I was pleased to see BabyG's was the least toxic on the list...of 18 shampoos, it was only one of two with a low concern rating. But one thing I like about this list is the surprises: Johnson and Johnson was in the lower 2/3...but still ranked about the same as the "green" brand, Desert Essence. However, Desert Essence signed a cruelty-free compact, and Johnson & Johnson didn't. The worst rated shampoos are Gerber, Mustela, and Modern...they got actual red, high risk dots.

IV.

Admittedly, obsessing over these sorts of things can be loony-bin-making material. I'm still not sure how bad moderate is, really, or how good low is. When I look up one of my favorite products and get a long list of the toxins it contains, the ingredients nobody knows anything about since they haven’t been studied, and the final analysis of its safety, I am slightly flummoxed. I am no scientist. I don’t really understand the analysis, but the spirit of the site: which is free, which sometimes recommends big-named-brands over the health-food store brands, I trust. And in this era in which the numberless amount of labels claiming to be natural finally suggests the word "natural" itself has crossed into homonymuous terrain, this might be the closest I’m going to get to understanding what I put in or on my family’s bodies.

A Recent Interview with My One Year Old

2007-03-22T08:05:00.000-07:00

My Baby: Daddy, I’m not so sure about the narrative of progress and justice that I gave you in our last interview.

Me: Why not?

My Baby: Last weekend when we stopped by your office, I looked through a copy of the 2007 UNICEF report (pdf download). Just the picture on the cover made me so sad.

Me: I’ve spent a lot of time looking at that picture. That poor mother with her two kids and in the background a train is leaving, like global prosperity is leaving them behind. India’s growth rate may be 9%, but they don’t seem to be benefiting.

My Baby: What’s wrong with the baby in the mommy’s arms? He doesn’t look right to me.

Me: He's underweight. The report says that 78 million children in South Asia alone are underweight.

My Baby: Do you think it is because of the way our global economy is structured so that governments can’t provide social protection for the most vulnerable groups even if there is the political will? Or do you think it is a legacy of colonial exploitation? Or do you think that there is some kind of cultural problem and it’s the values in our South Asian communities that need to change?

Me: I don’t know BabyG. I don’t know. I do know that mommy wants to feed her children well.

My Baby: The girl in the yellow dress looks like she could be my friend. Maybe if we were friends, I could help make sure her family has enough food. We could form an organization that overturns the economic order. Children for a Revolutionary Economic Order – CREO.

Me: That girl is probably very nice. Her dress looks pretty doesn’t it? But I’m not sure you could ever be her friend. There are oceans between you and her. The Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the ocean of difference in your class. She doesn’t have a basket of toys or three shelves of books like you do. And you don’t speak her language either.

My Baby: But things have to change now. I’ll learn her language. Teach it to me.

Me: The UNICEF report says that putting resources into gender equality is the best way to raise children out of deprivation, because women are generally responsible for childrearing and they are more likely to invest in their children’s education and health. If resources are put into achieving gender equality, they say we can get closer to the Millennium Development Goals.

My Baby: Get closer? That family deserves justice now!

Me: So much has to change BabyG for that family and all the families like theirs to have justice. Kofi Annan said it takes time to train teachers and build clinics.

My Baby: Are you crying daddy?

Me: Daddy cries about this kind of thing all the time.

Is Al Gore a Hypocrite? Am I? Are you?

2007-03-20T21:05:00.000-07:00

The Fox News people seemed to enjoy reporting on Al Gore’s utility bills. The source of their reports was the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, a conservative non-profit that obtained the past two years of Al’s electricity bills. They are high. His twenty-room home and pool house consumed nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours in 2006, more than 20 times the national average of 10,656 kilowatt-hours. Apparently his pool is heated. An Al Gore spokesperson offered a number of defenses on his behalf. He and Tipper work out of the home. They have to maintain electric security systems. They bought an old house and it takes time to increase its efficiency. They have plans to install solar panels. In the meantime, they buy their energy from green sources and purchase carbon offsets. So he’s not really a hypocrite.

I wasn’t surprised that the Fox News report on Al’s utility bills was unfair and unbalanced. I am surprised about the heated pool. Surely Al can exercise or enjoy himself some other way in the winter? I’m glad he was called on it. The lifestyles of public figures should be scrutinized if they claim special authority. Another example would be a gay-bashing gay preacher. He should be outed. Likewise, Al Gore’s heated pool is news.

What about us? How do DaddyG, MaGreen, and BabyG compare against the 10,656 kilowatt-hours average? I pulled out MaGreen’s electricity file and added up the figures. The bill lists our “KWh Electricity Used” very plainly. Our total electricity usage for 2006 was 7,802 kilowatt-hours – three-fourths of the national average. In your face Al! We win, you lose. You, Al, are a hypocrite and we are the high priests of green. So what if your documentary helped establish a public consensus on global warming? We walk the walk. I haven't even mentioned yet that we buy our electricity from Green Mountain Energy, a wind energy company.

I guess it helps that our home has four rooms not twenty. We have a gas stove and water heater. We keep our windows open and the air-conditioning off when possible. And most importantly, we have a special kind of motivation that’s missing in Al’s life – a tight budget. (I just heard that the reduction of my hours to 75% full-time that I requested will happen. That’s great news for our overall well-being, I think, but our budget’s about to get even tighter.) We can’t rest on our laurels, we need to reduce our electricity usage and our bill. Our total electricity cost for the past year was $1,500. It would be great if we could cut that by 20%.

I logged into the Green Mountain website, guessing that they might provide some statistics. The website not only gives basic statistics, it automatically generates nifty charts showing our usage by month. Below is a graph for 2006:

I learned a lot from that graph. Clearly air-conditioning is the number one source of our electricity consumption. Our August usage, when the air-conditioner runs at full blast, is almost quadruple our usage in January when our gas heater runs.

The sad thing about this piece of knowledge is that I don’t know what to do about it. We live in Houston. It’s very difficult to live without air-conditioning here. Maybe getting insulating curtains would help cut our energy consumption, but those curtains can be expensive. I’m not sure that we would recuperate the cost of buying and installing them. And from what I’ve read, they keep the heat in during the winter. They don’t keep the heat out in the summer. I also read about these electricity meters in England that help people monitor their usage. Even if I could find one for our home in the US, I don’t think micromanaging our appliances will help that much.

I’m hoping that by paying more attention to the monthly bills, keeping our ceiling fans running more often, and being more mindful of when we turn the airconditioning on, we can cut our usage without suffering in the coming heat.

Must Green Parents Be Rich Parents?

2007-03-14T20:19:00.000-07:00

Before BabyG was born, MaGreen and I saved a little each month like a good bourgeois couple. Even though we didn’t make huge incomes from our teaching and editing jobs, we were paid decently. We lived in moderation but did not have to count every penny. Right after BabyG was born, the balance of our income and expenses did not change much. I took all of my vacation days and my supervisor allowed me some flexibility. Though it was stressful, MaGreen and I managed to care for BabyG without any substantial extra expense or loss of income. After two months, I had to return to the regular schedule for my full-time, five days per week desk job. And MaGreen had to kick her own studies into highgear. So we started to pay for childcare and we went from saving money to barely breaking even.

According to the 2005 US Census statistics, our income is thoroughly average. We make about 125% of the median family income for a 3-person family in the state of Texas. (In the US, the disparity of wealth is huge. A relatively small number of people make way more money than we do. For this reason, the average income is a lot higher than the median income.) In terms of income, our family is the representative American family. We’re the 21st century Cleavers. So if we are barely breaking even that means families below the median income – half of the families in the US – are probably not barely breaking even. They’re just breaking. Despite the high GDP per capita here, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) ranked the US second to last for child well-being among economically developed nations. The US was at the bottom or near it for nearly every category including income poverty, reading levels, aspirations, and child mortality. Check out the full Unicef report (1.5MB pdf).

Unlike a very large percentage of our fellow Americans, I think we have the minimum “capabilities and functionings” to call our lives dignified. Our incomes, education levels, assets, and status allow us to raise BabyG with enough attention that she won’t have a childhood of deprivation. We don’t deprive ourselves either. But I want more than the minimum. I don’t just want to attain the lowest threshold of dignity. I want to spend less time at my desk and more time with BabyG. I want to have an exercise routine. I’d like to write my novel. I’d like to do more community organizing. So I asked my supervisor to get my workload reduced to 75%. Instead of working 40 hours per week on average, I would work 30. And it looks like my request might go through by August. I am very excited. Even though I haven’t even started the new schedule yet, I feel a tremendous sense of relief. The problem is that if I work a 75% schedule, I will make 75% of my previous salary. We will go from slightly above median family income to below the median and from barely breaking even to going into debt.

So I decided its time to count the pennies. We need to cut our monthly expenses by several hundred dollars! I logged into all of our accounts and compiled all the expenses from checks, cash cards, and credit cards. Then I assigned the individual expenses to one of the following categories: childcare, education (tuition and books for MaGreen and me), professional development, rent, miscellaneous (gifts, clothes, toys, etc.), groceries, eating out, telecommunications, transportation, energy, health, cash, bank fees, and entertainment. Finally, I made a table showing monthly totals under each category so I could get a sense of what stays the same and what varies.

Out of our expenses, childcare, education, and rent account for 65% of the total. Those are fixed costs. We can’t change those arrangements without hurting our quality of life and our future. Groceries are a whopping 8% of our expenses. Buying organic vegetables adds up. We thought eating out would be the obvious “culprit,” but even though we go to restaurants two to three times a week that’s only 4% of our expenses. We spend more on our telecommunications (phone line, cell phones, internet connection, and webhosting) than we do on eating out. Since I bicycle to work and MaGreen drives our old Mazda about ten miles per week, our transportation costs are low. And even though we buy our electricity through a windmill company, our utility bills aren’t that high. So it’s not clear to me what we can cut without sacrificing our emerging green lifestyle.

MaGreen went over the numbers and we talked about them over dinner. We decided to eat out less and cook more with cheaper ingredients without giving up on organics. We’re going to look for cheaper telecommunications deals. And we’re hoping that by tracking our expenses more carefully, we can generally rein them in. I’ll post how we’re doing the next time we do the calculations. Wish us well!

The Incompetent Gardener, Part III

2007-03-11T17:36:00.001-07:00

Supermarket grocers would have thrown it out. If the grocers missed the gaping wound on its flesh, supermarket shoppers would surely pass it up. They would sneer and shop somewhere else next time, at the supermarket on the next corner. Even if light streaming through windows played across the tomato’s skin and made the blemish look more like a beauty mark, the tomato would not be bought. What if worms had crawled into the tomato, the shoppers would think, rare worms from Asia that crossed over in the hulls of cargo ships, worms that cause all the wrong parts of the body to grow to absurd sizes. Also, it would probably taste bad, right? Given that shoppers pay for tomatoes by their weight, not by their appearance, why would someone deliberately choose an ugly tomato when some other tomato in the stack of available tomatoes looks perfect? Only a shopper with an ugly soul would buy an ugly tomato.

But this tomato was never in a supermarket. I grew it. I planted six tomato plants late in the season in 2006. They did not produce. I never saw a blossom. Out of frustration, well after the season for tomatoes ended, I tore up four of the plants. I left two of them in the ground. I left the scraggliest ones as a reminder of my incompetence. As winter arrived, the two tomato plants hung limply. It got cold and their leaves shriveled. Then, in late December, one of the tomato plants started to bloom yellow flowers the size of BabyG’s fingertips. I still didn’t water or care for the plants. Then the flowers turned into tiny green fruit. When the temperatures dipped below freezing, this survivor finally passed and I plucked the fruit from the brittle vines. They were miraculous tomatoes. The ripest one was the wounded one.

I ate the tomato after slicing off the imperfection. Maybe I should have swallowed it whole without chewing, as if it were a big red pill that cures alienation. I sliced the fruit up and put it on a sandwich with cheese and mayonnaise. Before eating it, I smelled the tomato and it smelled intensely of tomato. When I ate the sandwich, I realized I should have plucked the tomato from the vine earlier, because it was mushy. The other ones, which were not so red, tasted better. I’m not interested in memorializing those succulent tomatoes. It’s that first homegrown tomato with its repulsive mark that I sing of here in cyberspace. I will always remember that blackspotted tomato bathed in light.

I Had a Dream about Barack Obama

2007-03-06T22:47:00.000-08:00

I missed Barack Obama during his recent visit to Houston, so I listened to a recording of the speech he made in Austin the next day. Obama has made some fantastic speeches, but I was not moved by the recording. Seemed like a you-had-to-be-there kind of event. About twenty thousand people showed up in the rain and Obama spent several minutes saying thank you as young people in the crowd shouted "we love you." At one point he responded by saying, "I love you too."

I didn't bother listening to the whole recording, but that night I had a dream about attending one of Obama's rallies. The rally was in a giant arena, the kind of venue where a professional basketball team plays. I somehow ended up in a seat right next to where Obama stood at a podium. I think I ended up there because the regular seats got filled. Obama was standing before the cameras and gesturing with his arms. I could not concentrate on what he was saying because I was awed by being in his presence. During a break, he suddenly came up to me as if I worked for him.

"I need you to draft a letter for me," he said.

"Sure," I said. "Anything I can do..."

"It's to the board of a local nonprofit," he continued. I was glad. That's the kind of thing I do normally at my real job. Obama gave me a brief description of what it should say and then went back to the podium like a true multi-tasking, genius politician.

I got to work right away. I had a pen, but I didn't have a piece of paper. All that I could find around me was a hamburger bun. Maybe there was a concession stand nearby? So I started to write out a letter onto the hamburger bun while Obama gave his speech, but every few strokes the pen would break through the outer surface of the bread into the soft middle. I was getting nowhere and didn't know what to do. And that's when the dream ended. BabyG was crying and I woke up.

I'm not sure what my dream means. Here are some possibilities:

* The dream is a message from the Green Goddess and I should devote myself to Barack Obama's campaign. The bread is like the Eucharist. Obama's speeches and his mission are not texts to be reproduced, but are a sacred body that I should consume so that I am transformed.

* I really want to help change the world but deep inside I feel that I am ineffectual. The attempt to write on the hamburger bun represents feeling like a failed change-agent.

* Barack Obama is like a hamburger bun. He may be brownish, but he's made of processed wheat flower not whole grains. He is an unfinished script as many have said, but like a hamburger bun he can't ever become a substantial, finished text. At best, he'll be the packaging for a hormone-fed piece of cow flesh like Bill Clinton was.

A Call to Parents Round the World

2007-03-05T14:01:00.000-08:00

Take a look at this new video from avaaz.org. My friend jip wrote, "So important to reject this concept of a constant, ahistorical culture clash. The video lays out the lie of inescapable difference between 'East' and 'West' very well."

We Don’t Want BabyG to Throw Herself into a Fire, But...

2007-03-04T14:31:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, MaGreen and I took BabyG to a Hindu temple for the first time. Our friend Melissa was selling us a used bike and she lives to the southeast of Houston. We decided to meet her halfway at the Sri Meenakshi temple in Pearland.

Completed in 1982, the Meenakshi temple is one of the oldest Hindu temples in the United States. Loosely modeled on the original Meenakshi temple in Madurai, the temple is made up of a walled compound with five buildings inside. The walls are covered with icons and symbols. Over the years, the temple society has added ancillary buildings behind and to the side of the temple. They have housing for priests and guests, a fenced yard for peacocks, a cafeteria, classrooms, a library and bookstore, and a community hall. When the temple was built, Pearland was a little town past Houston’s outer suburbs. The land around the temple was just open fields. Now Pearland has become a true ex-urb of Houston and a trailer park sits across from the temple. It’s odd to come upon the temple out there, to see all the software engineers in their Camry’s sharing the two-lane country roads with pick-up trucks. Something about that temple makes it dear to my heart. The odd setting suits me. I love the peacocks, the temple food, and the books. The temple itself is clean and efficient. The priests are skilled at performing sacraments. And I have memories of past visits with aunts, uncles, my brother and sister-in-law, and my parents.

So after we met up with Melissa, all four of us went into the temple. I asked the priest in the main building to do a blessing. He gave us some fruit to eat as prasad. I donated money and asked the volunteer cashier if they had any special ceremonies going. She pointed us to one of the corner temples, which we walked to. Priests were chanting and making offerings to a goddess. They bathed her in milk and honey. They rang bells. About twenty people were gathered sitting in two rows. I could not recognize the deity, so I asked a man sitting next to me who this goddess was.

He said her name. It was a long, multi-syllabic South Indian name. I believe it was Kannika Parameshwari, but I’m not sure.

“Is she an incarnation of Kali or Durga or another goddess?” I asked. “What is the story?”

“Are you Hindu?” he asked glancing at the two white people with me. I said yes.

“Actually, you see, there was a young woman. When the Muslims invaded, the Muslim king saw her. He looked at her and desired her. The young woman knew this. And according to the old Hindu laws, even for man to look at a woman in this way is the equivalent of marrying. But she would not consent to such a thing and she threw herself into a fire. Today is the anniversary of the day when she sacrificed herself,” he said.

We remained for a few more minutes and listened to the chants. We had never planned to sit for an entire puja, so we left. I was embarrassed that the ceremony commemorated such a troubling story. It starts with war, occupation, and religious oppression. Then it moves on to the possibility of rape or forced marriage. There’s a reductive, patriarchal notion of the male gaze. That a man’s gaze defines all social relations. And it ends with an act that has a terrible history in India and an even worse present – bride burning. Why would I want to expose BabyG to this religion?

Many liberal people in the United States look at Hinduism as this open, accepting religion with non-violence at its core. Many Hindus have portrayed Hinduism in just that way. Hindus believe in many incarnations of a single, unknowable divine energy, including women and trees and animals and half-animal-half-humans. Buddha came out of Hinduism. So did Gandhi. So on and so forth. But Hinduism, like every single other religion, has a sordid history of racisms, sexisms, caste-isms, and classisms. You could argue that oppression is a constituitive element of Hinduism, that you cannot divide the bad parts out or sheild your kids from them. Our little trip to the Meenakshi temple is a case in point for that view.

On the other hand, as Amartya Sen documented in The Argumentative Indian and explained in my interview with him, the South Asian tradition from antiquity to present has a remarkable diversity of thought and belief. Within Hinduism, there have been debates about agnosticism and atheism since Vedic times. Radical efforts to end caste injustice date back to the birth of Buddhism and Jainism. There’s the Bhakti movement with figures like Mirabhai and Narsinh Mehta who created a discourse of gender and caste egalitarianism in their lyrical poetry. There’s Gandhi and Ambedekar. Why not count Kancha Ilaiah, Gayatri Spivak and Amartya Sen as part of the tradition?

I don’t think abandoning history and tradition is the way. I don't want to hide my baby's background from her and tell myself that's progress. I want her to feel that she can enter into the deep Indian traditions without regarding them as other. We can teach her to "read against the grain" or to understand the tradition as a spirited exchange of ideas. By ideas I don't mean dry logic or abstruse philosophy only, but all ideas, including those informed by nonrational experience. May the debates encompassed within our stories, songs, poetry, slokas, mantras, and iconography help her negotiate life.

Ten Reasons Why Our Protests Against the Iraq War Were Not Inconsequential

2007-03-02T11:50:00.000-08:00

Back when we were dating, MaGreen and I led local protests against the Iraq war. We were the megaphone carrying, permit securing, speech writing, meeting attending activists. The marches and rallies we helped organize were the largest Houston had ever seen. We spent between twenty and forty hours per week, between the two of us, on anti-war organizing from 2003 to 2005.

We never got paid and nobody gave us a plaque. Our activism was at a tremendous personal cost. Yesterday, a student I work with told me, not knowing my history of activism, that the anti-war protests were “inconsequential.” My chin started to quiver as I tried to calmly explain why the protests did have tremendous consequences. Below is the list I wish I had given him:

10) The invasion and subsequent occupation has devastated Iraq, killed thousands upon thousands of soldiers and civilians, drained funding for pressing problems, and undermined diplomacy. At one level, I’m simply glad to have voiced our opposition, and helped others’ voice theirs, to this catastrophe.

9) We helped develop a critical public discourse before the invasion, which will contribute to ending the war more quickly now. Widespread, public opposition to the Vietnam War did not develop for many years in the US and the catastrophe of that war lasted a very long time.

8) By questioning the motives behind the invasion, our dissent helped prevent UN backing of the invasion and helped to keep most nations from joining the so-called coalition of the willing.

7) Our protests helped embolden corporate media to cover dissent and the catastrophic effects of the war. We helped shape a media landscape dominated by coverage of celebrity wardrobes and football games.

6) We helped build a national and international infrastructure for coordinating dissent. We planned our actions on dates set by United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ). I attended the UFPJ’s first major conference and voted on its governance and agenda.

5) The anti-war protests helped generate interest in the development of alternative, local media in Houston, such as houston.indymedia.org and KPFT local news.

4) We learned how to plan actions without much help. We made mistakes. Once we had figured out how to secure permits, hold meetings, form functional coalitions, disseminate our announcements, and stage a good event, we trained other people who wanted to do something but did not know how. We especially tried to collaborate with young people, women, and people of color. I think we contributed to the development of a more empowered and diverse group of activists in Houston.

3) We were transformed. We passed through fire. We saw the charred innards of activism in the US. Yet, I believe we emerged less cynical. We may be weary, but I feel strong inside.

2) We became friends with extraordinary people who worked with us organizing actions. Our lives have been filled with their love and support.

1) MaGreen and I learned that beautiful, unimaginable things can come of our relationship. I grew confident that we could be good parents.

The Innies and Outies of Interpreting BabyG

2007-02-27T13:51:00.000-08:00

BabyG has become an expert at identifying her favorite words in the world around us. She spots miniature cat ornaments nobody else notices and screams: “Baicy! Baicy!” since she calls all cats after our own, Percy. In other people’s homes, she giggles wildly if she comes across a stuffed dog before addressing it: “woof woof!” or if she sees a picture of a cow: “moo! moo! moo!”

If you say, “BabyG, where’s your belly button?” she opens her mouth like you’ve reminded her of the most incredible idea in the world, hitches her dress up and points. “Bay bay!” she croons, hanging slightly on each of the ‘y’s.

In her picture books, she points at babies and says, “baybay.” Faster than a belly button, but the same word.

When she’s on the potty, or she has to go poo, she says, “bay bay,” only this time, the ‘b’s are very slightly sharpened…not quite ‘p’s yet, but on their way.

Finally, there is the word which, when she's in an enunciatory mood, may come out "bye-bye" or "bye" or "bay-bye" – but just as often comes out "bay-bay."

I figure she’s determined to use words to their full potentiality at this tender age. That she wants to reuse, renew and recycle syllables in order demonstrate the innate connection between the words we use and the way we use the world. And I am very proud of her for making such an intelligent stand at such an early age.

The only problem is that sometimes she drops whatever’s in her hands as if she’s been suddenly shocked by something she sees, points her tiny finger, and says, significantly, as if she’s introducing somebody to the queen: “Bay bay!”

And then you have to figure out what she’s pointing at: the potty, a baby, a belly button…or, God forbid, some new thing she’s decided should be signified by her favorite two syllables. Because not only does she want to point it out for her, she wants you to agree that she’s right by looking at whatever it is she’s found, pointing at it yourself and saying, “Yes, BabyG, Bay Bay.”

The other morning she was sitting in her highchair, eating some of her coveted frozen blueberries, when she began frantically pointing at the closed closet door and chirping: “Bay Bay! Bay Bay!”

“No, BabyG, there’s no Bay Bay, there,” I said, when I walked in from the kitchen to see what the commotion was about.

“Bayyy Bayyyy! Bayyyy Bayyyy! Bayyyy bayyyy!” she insisted, making the ‘y’s as distinct as possible.

By this time she was doing her best to jump up and down in her high chair, leaning as far out of it as she could (thank God that Svan is so well balanced). I stared into the door like you do at those 3D stereograms, and noticed she was pointing specifically at the closet’s missing door knob...

Which is, you will note if you take the time to move your mouse over the picture below...

quite clearly, an "innie."

A Blessing for You and Your Newborns

2007-02-23T07:16:00.000-08:00

For Ruben and Angela, and for Ruby Graciela and Lucia Simone who were born 19 Feb 07

May they mash you up in their gummy mouths.
May they render you into a pulsing goop,
a thing that shares only a DNA signature
with the person that you were.
Make it new, they will say in their secret languages.
May they hold back their first smiles.
You will peer into their faces at dawn.
You will try swinging around to catch them
laughing at you like torturers.
May they hold back
and yank you down with their first smiles
like undercurrents in the warm sea.

Surfing

2007-02-21T08:48:00.000-08:00

Here's some of the websites I Stumbled Upon recently, and thought I'd share.

The Sim Sweatshop
The P Mate
The Trash Vortex
Duck and Cover for the Modern Age
Flash Face
Global Rich List
The Miniature Earth