this woman’s work

Bilibo indoors and outdoors, all year round…

Be sure to click the video! (Sap that I am, I actually got a lump in my throat watching all that open-ended play. No, truly I did!)

(I totally forgot I was supposed to review this yesterday — I had it on my calendar for the 26th for some reason — so this is a day late. Also, to the Blogher folks — I’m not receiving a gift certificate for this review so am not violating the Blogher ads guidelines.)

Like lots of homeschoolers, I have a small collection of books for things to do on rainy days. My favorite one is The Fun Encyclopedia, which came from a library sale like most of the activity books I have. I’ve got ‘em for science tricks, nature activities and regular every day “Mom, there’s nothing to do.” I buy them whenever the price is right and I give some away and some I keep and flip through every now and then or tell Noah to flip through every now and then. The ones I skip — sometimes reluctantly — are the gendered ones. There are an unbelievable number of old books that are “just for boys” and “just for girls” and some of them even look pretty good but I skip them because it’s a message I’m fighting a lot — there there are things just for boys or just for girls.

So I skipped the whole Dangerous Book… brouhaha, too.  I figured Iggulden was sort of cashing in on this nostalgic idea, what with the hardback cover and fancy old-fashioned script. And I thought if people want to spend $24.95 to teach boys how to build a fire instead of snagging an old boy scout manual or wait until an American Boys Handy Book shows up at a garage sale and grab it for $.50. (I’m gonna add here that three out of four grandparents were really into this book in our family and one of them is handing it over to Noah for Hanukkah.)  I haven’t read the whole thing through but I did check it out and it looks pretty much like the old activity books I leave on shelves at thrift stores only the pictures are in color.

The Daring Book for Girls, on the other hand, updates the genre. While I’m still no fan of gendered activity books I’m also not hugely against them (to each his/her own, right?) but if there are going to be gendered books, it’s nice to have one for girls that includes paper airplanes and forts and isn’t just a treatise on the home arts. But then would you expect any less from two feminist mothers of daughters?

It’s definitely an improvement on the dusty tomes dedicated to girls that I’ve found going through boxes of books at church sales and also far more likely to catch the interest of a kid, what with the pretty aqua color, terrific illustrations, and sparkly font on the front. Because, let’s face it,  The Fun Encyclopedia is awesome but it also looks like an encyclopedia and not a book that’s going to be fun as it trumpets. (It is though — it’s a totally fun book. It just has bad packaging that hasn’t improved for sitting in someone’s basement for a few decades.)

I’ve already got a little girl picked out to receive my copy of this book (no, it’s not my daughter) along with a “changing bodies” kind of book ‘cuz she’s at that age. So this year she’s getting a book that let’s her celebrate her childhood and one to celebrate her impending womanhood. I’d say that’s pretty darn good, eh?

I use gmail and my goal is to keep my inbox under 50 emails because that’s how many fit on one page. But for the past few weeks I’ve been able to keep my inbox under 20 (and sometimes 10!) thanks to this nifty email service.

Sandy is an automated system that let’s me clear my inbox out quickly. It’s buggy but it’s just come out of beta and everyone can sign up for it and give it a try. How it works is that every time you get an email that needs an action but not a right-away action you tell Sandy to remember it for you. Say, for example, that you want to follow up with an editor on Wednesday and there’s a client who asked you to get back to them next week and someone else is asking a question that you need to look up on your other computer (this happened to me a lot last week). You just email Sandy and tell “her” to remind you at such-and-such a time then you delete (or archive) your email and forget about it.

It’s been a big help to me so I’m sharing it here in case it’s a big help to you. (A shout out to Web Worker Daily for the heads-up!)

From: Day 11: Organ and Tissue Donor Sunday. : Kidneys and Eyes

In September 2001 Quinn was born and diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease. She would need a kidney transplant to survive they said. We were told: “with kids like this you need to take her home and love her as long as she is with you.” Three months later, Gage was diagnosed with PKD as well and we were devastated once again.We’ve lived our lives with this congregation.

We didn’t know then he would be placed on the national list in need of a kidney transplant by age 7.

For the next few years we tried to act like a normal family. We were active in this church, our kids were in activities and school, we moved, we worked. And the kids were regularly tested and took many daily medications to control the devastating effects of PKD.

Knowing your child has a progressive disease and waiting for your child’s organs to fail until you will be able to do something in nearly unbearable.

Now go read the rest of it.

I’m reading Mary Pipher’s Writing to Change the World and I came across this:

Theologian Reinhold Niebuht wrote that to effect change, we need to practice “spiritual discipline against resentment.”

Pretty heady instructions, that. My mom used to think I ought to be a lawyer because I love to argue but the problem is that I get emotionally involved in my arguments and usually I end up crying. It feels so urgent to me, whatever it is that I’m arguing. That’s why I’ d lose on a debate team, too.

But it goes back to empathy. I’m trying hard hard hard not to be so caught up in what I’m feeling that I can’t see where someone else is coming from. Sometimes even recognizing another point of view feels like giving in, you know? Sometimes it feels scary to say, “I can see how you’d feel that way.”

When I was a young feminist taking my first women’s studies class one of my assignments was to interview a woman who worked for The Child Assault Prevention Program (”Living Safe, Strong and Free!”). I’m not positive, but I think she helped create that child abuse program, which is now used nationwide. In any case, she was a radical feminist lesbian and we were talking about activism and effecting change. She told me that she used to not shave under her arms or her legs. She used to buzz her hair crazy-short (it was still pretty short but styled) and she didn’t wear skirts or make-up. Then she started working for CAPP and part of her job was development, which is the getting of money. And she discovered that these fancy-schmancy business guys in suits were more likely to listen to her if she wore some make-up (this was the eighties after all when we all wore at least four shades of eyeshadow) and if she wore a skirt and she noticed that her unshaven legs didn’t look so hot in nylons so she started shaving her legs.

“I did this,” she told me. “Because I wanted the program to have money because I wanted to prevent child abuse.”

But some of her friends were angry. They said she was giving in. They said she was selling out. There’s no doubt that it was a sacrifice for her but it was a sacrifice she was willing to make in the interest of a cause that was more important to her than not shaving her legs.

I’ve thought about this off and on in the twenty years since that interview. I’ve thought about how powerful it can be to change things from the inside out and how compromise, used with discretion, can be a good thing. I thought of it again today in a conversation with another blogger (she knows who she is!).

Sometimes it takes more strength to work with the perceived enemy.