Check ups, conferences, workshops, and milk.

As you can see from the picture above, Jack is still madly in love with Bebe.

Harry still looks like his baby self when he sleeps. Here he is sleeping last night:

Here he is sleeping at 10 months old:


In other news, Jack had his 2 year well-child check up, and it was great. He's great. The doctor could understand everything he said and thinks his speech is completely age appropriate. (Harry was waaaaaaay ahead for his age, so it hard to not see Jack as behind. But he's not. He's great!). The doctor asked Jack how many fingers he has, and Jack held up one hand and said "Five." It was pretty cute. He also counts by saying. "Dew, five, one," in a very sing-songy tone. So, I think he has my math skillz.

Just like when Harry was 2, the doc advised us to switch from whole milk to skim. We ignored that advice with harry because it felt weird. We switched Jack to 2% like H, but now we're wondering about going skim for all (that's what we drink. If by drink you mean sprinkle a few drops in our coffee.) I looked it up, and the AAP recommends skim. What about you? What do you give?

We had a parent-child conference at one of Harry's schools, and it cracked us up. The teachers told us that every.sinlge.day Harry spills his milk at snack. Not because he can't drink out of a cup but because he gets distracted and gestures wildly and dumps it over. This made us laugh because he does the same thing with his water at dinner. Every.sinlge.night. There has been no spill progress at home or at school. But he's really good at cleaning up spills with paper towels...

I attended a workshop on turning a dissertation into a book yesterday that made me almost throw up. It was actually really great; it reinforced a lot of what my advisor has been saying since the beginning of my project (she did a fantastic job of directing my diss with an eye toward future publication). I had a lot of moments of clarity and one crystalizing moment when I could see the path from where my project sits right now to where my book will sit on the shelf at Borders. That's why I wanted to hurl. It's a long path. One of the speakers at the workshop is a series editor for Cambridge University Press, and he was talking about how a dissertation is NOT a book because it's like a driving test for PhDs. He was making fun of the obsessive annotation in humanities dissertations, and I thought of all the nights I'd be working late at my office and I'd come home and Ben would ask me how many pages I wrote, and I'd tell him 8, but they were all endnotes. I realized, too, how incredibly lucky I have been to teach my rhetoric of reproductive rights class this past year. I have been able to wrestle with a lot of theoretical issues and engage in some collaborative thinking with 2 semestersful (that's a new unit of measurement I just invented. Yup, that's Dr. Mommy to you, mister.). of advanced undergraduates. All this time, I thought I have been slacking on my work, but really? It has been part of my consciousness and my teaching everyday. Reframing my own relationship to my project was really, really helpful and healthy. On the other side of writing my dissertation, I can finally see the forrest for the trees, and I better understand the scope of the field I am entering and how I can place my contribution in it. Writing a dissertation is in part about finding your voice as an expert. Writing your first book is about making the dissertation matter for many more people than its original audience of 6 experts. When I am done with my book, I wonder how much it will look like the dissertation that inspired it.

But back to the milk-- what do your kids drink?