AmazonMidwife

I am so glad to see the back end of February, despite the subfreezing temperatures and blustery entry of March. Even with our huge, northern exposure windows & full-spectrum bulbs, February always wears me down. I get through on caffeine & Dar Williams' Mortal City song February.

THIS February was made extra special by our first visit ever from the lice fairy. Of course it happened around Brigidmas so at least I could dedicate all the futile-except-for-lowering-my-squick-factor cleaning, not to mention the laundry. But the nitcombing took 2-3 hours every night for two weeks. Have you seen the Girl's hair? It's THICK and over 2 ft. in length. The Boy wriggles like an eel, and it's more difficult to comb one's own hair than one would think. (The 'Savant escaped infestation due to his curly locks, I guess. And his efforts to comb my hair would have been ruinous to our partnership had he continued.)

But it wasn't all bad. The Girl & I watched Ken Burns' "The Civil War" and had some good discussions, not all of which were related to history. I learned how to make some lice rid hair pomade with essential oils which proved to be quite beneficial to my dry scalp issues. Think it must be nearly as effective as the chemical stuff we used the first time, since I combed 6 live lice out after they had been poisoned for the 15 minutes directed. Damned bugs are gonna take over the world. I also got over thinking that lice would be the worst parasitical infestation in the world (and I have experience on this, after managing an ICF/MR, people) and moved on to thinking preventively. We're combing weekly & have invested in a RobyComb, which has kept me sane by allowing me to distinguish between itchy winter scalp & reinfestation. So, the lice fairy has done the job, and I hope, will not need to come back.

Enough about bugs. In other news, I taught a large Childbirth Education class, and by the end, the families who weren't working with us & planning a homebirth had switched to providers who would respect their choices and work hard to give them the best possible experience, whatever that might be. 7 more babies to be born gently as possible----GOAL! I also didn't get a ticket driving like a bat out of hell to Logan to (just) catch a baby, so on the midwifery front, it's all good, if busy.

After Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog, I shouldn't be so surprised by NPH musical talents, nor am I by those of Jack Black. But I'm finding that this bears repeated viewing.

Blogging has been bumped down my priority list by births, homeschooling, picking apples, volunteering for the Obama campaign, sleeping, teaching, cleaning, cooking, running the kids to various events, watching re-runs of The Pretender on Hulu, etc. etc. I've stilll been reading blogs, however, and stumbled on this list over at Chewing the Fat. It's Library Thing's most unread books. I've italicized the ones I've read, bolded the ones I've loved/read over and over, starred the ones I just reserved from the library, question-marked the ones I've never heard of. The rest I've either read excerpts from, or read enough about to know their gist, or think they're not worth my time. But I can be persuaded otherwise. Anyone wanna talk books?

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell????
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel????
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife????
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin????
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius????
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books****
Memoirs of a Geisha****
Middlesex
Quicksilver????
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel????
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys***
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections????
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay????
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time????
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things????
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon????
Neverwhere????
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas????
The Confusion????
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything?
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow????
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth????
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

This is what passes for banter in our house:
Boy: "Dad, choose a number between 1 and 10."
'Savant: "4.7853629105"
Boy: "I said choose one number between 1 and 10."
'Savant: "I did. There's an infinite amount of numbers between 1 and 10"

(The Boy was trying to sandbag his dad into talking about his new favorite obsession, Ben 10, and gets hit with a math lecture---another example of Machiavellian Homeschooling at its finest. But it goes on:)

Boy: "No, Dad. I want you to choose a regular number so I can tell you which alien you like the best."

Instead of seizing the opportunity to expand on his math lecture, the 'Savant goes wacky/wicked:

'Savant: "I will if you will answer me these questions three."
Boy: "Okay."

Obviously, we've been slacking on our Python tutelege. But it's pretty clear to me that we're doing pretty well on teaching geek.

(This entry got a bit hijacked by one of those Palin scandals. The events described take place right after the end of the Democratic Convention.)

I must disclose that this is the first time ever that I've watched any part of a convention. (Yes, I've shirked my political duties, mea culpa.) And, while I'm confessing, I only watched the 'big' speeches of the Democratic convention. But they energized me and gave me enough confidence that I thought I'd try to open a dialogue with my siblings, all of whom vote Republican as far as I know. I thought I'd start by telling them that I wanted to do a blog interview with people who were voting for McCain, to inform all the folks on the 'blue islands' what people in the red areas were thinking. This would give me a chance to really listen and for my siblings to know that they would be heard, which IMLTHO, is the key to any good communication.

So I called one of my siblings (who wishes not to be identified, thus weird pronouns to follow. But I will say that it's a different sibling than the one from this entry, so you'd have a 33% chance of being right if you guessed.) Anyway, I gave shem the spiel and much to my surprise, s/he said, "I don't know if I'm voting for McCain."