A friend’s baby shower
Oct 17, 2002 Friends
So I just got invited to a friend’s baby shower and I don’t know what the hell to get her. Here’s my thought process:
–I love this friend. She’s a woman I admire and adore and this gift must be something special. Also her baby was conceived after a few years of infertility and two miscarriages meaning the gift must be even more special.
–This is my friend’s second child so she already has everything she needs. Also, my friend is filthy rich (really, absolutely filthy) and so she has everything she doesn’t need, too.
–My friend is a decorative artist so hitting up my sister (who is also a decorative artist) to paint her something is out of the question.
–My friend is a devout co-sleeper so the baby doesn’t have a nursery (or a room) yet and that leaves out tchotkes of any sort.
–She also has an enormous collection of books and is a Chinaberry hound, making a lovely picture book a dangerous present since it’s likely she already has a copy of just about everything.
–She loves Hanna Andersson clothing, which means her daughter-to-be already has a stunning, striped layette.
So what the hell do I get her? I’m thinking maybe a mama-made blanket or hat or little cardigan or something. But it’s hard to reconcile her taste. She’s not funky in the least. If I got her something great and vintage she would just think it was old. (”Oh dear, Dawn must really be in financial straits. Did you see she had to buy me a used sweater?”) I’ve got ’til November 1st to come up with something. I’m going to scour the AP-Biz database to find something wonderful.
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Tags: Infertility
For that freshly buried look
Oct 16, 2002 Read/heard/seen
I know that collodial silver is popular in alternative health circles (we’ve discussed its use at my alternative-friendly playgroup). I never did much research on it because it wasn’t something that I felt my family ever needed. See, this is the problem with some alternative health claims; it’s difficult to know who to believe. I’ll admit to being suspiscious of the Western medicine “emergency” mindset but I’ve met plenty of quacks in the feel-good alternative health care community, too. Dammit, it’s frustrating.
Back to the collodial silver corpse look, check out the links that I got from Zelda.
Here’s a silver-blue politican and here’s the story of a woman who has done her homework. Yikes.
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Kinda on the same subject
Oct 16, 2002 Shelter
I was reading Dru’s blog entry about fear and it was making me think about my training to do shelter intakes.
This is how it worked at shelter. Women called for help. We turned away most of the women who called (9 out of 10) because either we were full or we didn’t have a room to fit their needs. (Our grants stipulated who could sleep in what room so even if we technically had space, if the woman had 2 kids — and one was an infant who co-slept or something — she couldn’t have the room with 2 bed, she had to have the room with 2 beds and a crib. Stupid, I know. We all thought it was stupid but we had to stick by the rules or lose our funding.) Anyway, if we thought a space might open up for the woman, we might do a phone intake on her. The phone intake was pretty short but as always, humiliating, since the callers were stuck telling perfect strangers why they were homeless and whether or not they had had a glass of wine in the past 48 hours. (Our rules said that you had to have 48 hours clean and sober — even if you didn’t have a substance abuse problem — and other shelters made it more like 2 weeks. We used to have women detoxing in shelter because of our short clean time but we felt like it allowed us to help more women so we kept to it.) Ok, so if the woman’s phone intake worked out and if we had space, we would make an appointment for her to come in for an intake.
The intakes were 4 pages of personal questions and a whole bunch of rules and agreements to sign. Most intakes took at least an hour. During intake, my trainer told me, it’s important to listen to your intuition about whether or not this client was safe to come into shelter. Here’s the problem: how do you know when it’s your intuition working and when it’s your internal prejudices?
Sitting across from a young African-American woman with an angry expression and a history of gang involvement, is my discomfort due to the vibes she’s putting off? Or is it just racism causing me to shift in my chair?
I remember one time this white woman was in shelter and she looked like a pretty, well-dressed college student.
She doesn’t look homeless!” I blurted out in my trainer’s office.
“You’d be surprised,” she said. It turned out that this client had severe mental health issues and should have been screened out by the night-shift shelter worker but she (the worker) was probably as drawn in by this client’s looks as I was. Anyway, the client ended up disintegrating in shelter and had to be asked to leave for threatening her roommate.
When I realized that my “intuition” was actually my -isms sending bad signals, I reacted by going the other way. I was more likely to let someone in if they disturbed me (barring blatant warning signs) and that didn’t work either. Eventually I found a happy medium.
Anyway, I appreciate what Dru is talking about. I think it’s important for our safety to listen to our intuition but I appreciate how worrying it is when we don’t know whether it’s intuition or -ism’s talking.
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Ahh yes, lust
Oct 16, 2002 Read/heard/seen
Corrie says it better than I could.
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Sarah was wonderful!
Oct 15, 2002 Friends
I wanted to write a joke entry that went like this:
Well, Sarah just left. She showed up drunk and I’m not making any accusations but there’s $20 missing from my wallet.
But then I thought that someone might think I was serious.
In reality, Sarah is really wonderful. Her kids are pretty great, too, and Noah (Mr. Anti-social) adored Maya (he was missing her once she left). How could he not? She is so totally darling and it’s easy to forget that she’s only 2 1/2 because she talks so well! Sagan is very handsome and chunky and sweet; I loved them both. Honest to goodness. My friend L. came over last night for dinner to meet the Martin crew and we’re both sad that Sarah lives so far because we feel like she would be a swell addition to our mommy-group.
This is a weird compliment, but Sarah is quite a bit younger than me (a mere 26 while I’m a hearty 32) but I didn’t get young vibes off her at all. Yes, she has the dewy complexion of a woman not yet 30, but she’s awfully centered and I was really impressed by how well she was handling traveling with two little ones (especially since Sagan is teething and wasn’t feeling so hot). I feel like I could learn a lot from her parenting-wise.
All in all, I would love to have her visit again. One IRL visit just ain’t enough for me!!!!!
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Tags: Noah