And now for something...

Yes, I have more news on the real estate... situation. (Let's start putting that in quotation marks, shall we? And from now it will just be "the situation." With a Russian accent, like the one the KGB agent used while threatening Mikhail Baryshnikov in White Nights. Sounds suitably menacing, no?)

But I can't handle thinking about it, much less blogging about it, right now. Instead I will point you to this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/07/nyregion/07nurse.html

And this, a post I wrote some months ago on TBTINM (that would be The Blog That Is No More)

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A rant

I just sat down thinking that I had nothing to talk about today, but then of course many possibilities occurred to me. It's funny--back in the days when I journaled, or wrote long single-spaced typewritten letters to faraway friends, I would think of what I wanted to write and how over the course of the day. And I'd always have to stop myself from putting together the actual words, because then when it came to it I wouldn't have them anymore. That's what happened with the stroller story--I had written it in my head all day and then when I sat down at the computer I wasn't interested anymore.

In recent years, I haven't been writing much of anything for my own interest, and have cheerfully returned to writing things in my head that will never be committed to paper (okay, or pixels, but you know what I mean.) I guess if I want to keep this blog up I'll have to get strict with myself again. Funny.

So, about that rant I just promised... My friend W emailed me today, with an article about how babies who are considered underweight by current charts are probably just fine, and babies who are considered just fine are probably overweight, and kids who are considered overweight are probably obese, and we need to rewrite the charts. She sent it because my kid has been hovering around the 9% mark for weight, though he is around 44th for height. He's fine and healthy and happy, B"H, and hitting his milestones in a reasonable if relaxed fashion, so I've more or less stopped worrying and don't try to cram avocadoes down his throat anymore. Why did I bring this up, you ask? Well, I'm glad you did ask. Because at the bottom of the article (this was in the Guardian online, here:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1396599,00.html )

I saw something I see often at work. Namely, someone (nearly always male) bemoaning women's reluctance to breastfeed, despite the wealth of evidence that it is the best for everybody--babies are happier and healthier, smarter, and less inclined to obesity, at lowered risk of everything bad from allergies to asthma to ear infections to heart disease, and breastfeeding is free, and women lose weight faster, and bond with their babies better, and gee, why don't they do it? Most of them start, but most of those stop between six weeks and three months. Gee, they just must not get it. I know the answer--let's educate them so they know why they should nurse. Now excuse me, but that's just about the most ignorant and idiotic thing I ever heard. Talk about being blind to the obvious. Women in this country have to go back to WORK at six weeks or maybe at three months if they are very, very lucky--lucky enough to be able to take their FMLA leave unpaid. If they want to keep their health insurance and continue paying their rent, mortgage, credit card bills, student loans, car payment, whatever, well, it's daycare or a babysitter for the little one. There's a REASON why women stop nursing between six weeks and three months--that's when they have to go back to work! And although I am fantastically lucky and am not only employed part-time but have a sympathetic boss and an on-site lactation room, I probably represent fewer than 1% of the employed female population in this country (okay, fine, I made that up, but honestly, of the places you go in a day, how many of the female employees you see do you think have access to a lactation room and the freedom to hang out there for half an hour out of every three?) I have a friend in Boston who is at MIT, and was totally committed to nursing, and loved nursing, and just had to stop pumping at four months because it was too hard to keep crouching in the bathroom like that and hoping nobody in her lab wondered where she was or what the weird squirting sounds were that kept emanating from the handicapped stall. She still nurses at night, but how long will it last? And this is at MIT, not WalMart. I don't think any cashiers in this country are getting lactation breaks! And of course they are the ones least able to afford the formula, or the doctors' visits for the babies' ear infections either.

This "educate the ignorant women" take on the situation doesn't reach the level of willfully obtuse, though, until you hear, "Women in Europe [usually Sweden] nurse much longer than American women. X% of Swedish women are still nursing at six months, while a pitiful X% of uninformed American women who care more about their freedom to go shopping than their babies are still nursing then." All right, so that isn't an exact quote, but you get the idea--and the figures are around 80% for Sweden and 20% for the US. I have a funny feeling that those numbers correlate rather highly to the percentage of women who are still at home full time at six months. In Hungary, women get three years with full pay per baby, and if they have a third kid they can stay home till the third one is EIGHT! (There is a perceived population crisis in Hungary, so the lawmakers are pushing for more red-, white-, and green-blooded babies.) And you know what? The women there nurse their babies.Could you be any more stupid, guys?

Excuse me while I catch my breath.

Okay, I'm breathing again. So another thing. Let's talk about going shopping while nursing. Most babies need to nurse every 2-3 hours, so that necessitates some serious planning before you leave the house for any reason at all, unless you're the type who can put up with the glares and rude comments occasioned by nursing in public (these folks you can educate, guys!) Can I make it to Target and back before he's hungry? Is there a place to nurse him where I'm going? Can I stop by at a friend's and borrow her couch for half an hour so I can feed him? Will he fling the blanket off if I try to nurse him under one in the airport lounge, shul hall, restaurant, or department store? And how am I going to get there? Can I take the stroller on the bus, or will I get dirty looks for blocking the aisle or a driver who tells me that he won't help with the stroller because it's not his job? Will I get a wheelchair-accessible bus, and if I do, will there be people sitting in the seats that flip up to make room for the stroller?

Oh, but you can't solve all those problems at once, says you. No? Well, in October Barak and I went--just the two of us--on a bit of a trip. We went to Hungary to visit my granny and great-aunt, and to Vienna to visit a couple of good friends, and to Birmingham, UK, to visit Den and Ol, the sweetest kinda-Welsh people in Birmingham you'll ever meet. When we were in Birmingham, my buddy Sarah came by to visit, and we talked about going into town, and I said that we needed to get going right after he ate if we wanted to get home before he was hungry again. She was confused. "We'll just take him to a mother and baby room." A what? "A mother and baby room." What's that? "Rooms for nursing mothers." Huh? They have those? "Sure. [Duh! Silly American.] They have to! Otherwise how would women with babies go shopping?" How indeed...

So the point of this story is that in the shopping mall in Birmingham, not just in one place but on EVERY FLOOR, there is a mother and baby room. This is a small room with not only a changing table and a toilet, but a door to the outside world that locks from inside, room to bring in a stroller, a seat to sit and nurse in, and--get this--a child-height toilet in case you also have a toddler who is toilet training. AND--this just blew me away--over the safe deep clean changing table (more of a changing tub) there was a mirrored disco ball, with a motion-activated light, so that when you put the baby down to change his diaper a light went on, the ball started to rotate, and hundreds of dots of light appeared and started to move enthrallingly along the walls, ceiling, and baby. Barak, when this miracle commenced, stopped his usual diaper-changing protest mid-howl and was totally, utterly, completely transfixed.

Corporate leaders of America! Are you listening? Do you want stay at home mothers (the only ones who are still nursing, it seems), who need lots of baby equipment and probably a whole new postpartum wardrobe as well, and are otherwise stuck at home all day, to be able to visit your place of business? Put in one of those!

Oh, and one more thing. The buses in Birmingham? The new ones are built so that the bottom floor (they're double-deckers) is at exactly curb height. So you can just roll your stroller right onto the bus with no help from anybody. And the stroller/wheelchair bay? There aren't regular seats in it that are down by default, right by the door where they're the first seats to be occupied. Instead, there's one very uncomfortable flip-down seat that you would only want to sit on if every other seat on the bus was taken.

And that, my friends, is the real reason why American children are fatter than Europeans. Because their mothers have to stop nursing them because they can't take the bus and there are no disco balls for their babies.

I guess I had what to talk about after all.