Grading systems of élite high school teachers

A: What grade should M. get?

Z: Is it his birthday?

The letter I just wrote to the junior senator from my state

To Senator Casey:

This is a duplicitous response. The Stupak amendment is much more far-reaching than the Hyde agreement and the Hyde agreement itself is a shameful government attempt to influence decisions best made by a woman in consultation with her doctor and family.

If you were truly pro-life in the principled way that you suggest, you would be introducing legislation to end the death penalty, to reduce infant mortality, and to end our reliance on foreign oil so that we did not commit the lives of our young people to risk their own lives and kill others. I do not see that you are in the forefront of any of these efforts to protect life that exists independently of a woman's body, so I call you on your deceitful language. You are not pro-life. You are in favor of controlling women's bodies when they are pregnant. Call your beliefs and policies what they are, and then see if Pennsylvanians like me will continue to support you.

--S.

Summer's winding down

(From our trip down the shore last weekend)


The windows are open and the sound of crickets is drifting in to the accompaniment of the neighbors jamming on the sidewalk with electric guitars and trombone. But the nights are cooling off and I'm sleeping hard.

The season's turning.

It was a long summer with far too much weekend travel in it and far too little time to hear my own thoughts, but I got used to having A. and Z. around. With both of them back at school, I spent hours walking outside this week, taking advantage of the time between day care dropoff and when the store opens. It has been very very grounding having time to get reacquainted with myself but I also feel a little like the parts of our family have been cut adrift from each other. I guess those feelings will balance out soon enough, kind of the way I adjusted to returning to sleep deprivation in September when I was teaching. But I'm noticing it.

I am my grandfather's grandaughter

I just subscribed to The News From Lake Wobegon and This American Life. They are free. Free!!!

I might weep over the goodness that is public radio.

In other completely unrelated news, will you all keep your fingers crossed for the store? We seem to be on a little bit of a roll and I want--no, I need it to keep on going for like, well, the rest of my working life or so. Because I really don't want to get a different job.

Shehecheyanu

The first ripe fig and the first ripe tomato! (I was late with the tomatoes).

Good question

A.: Z, can I introduce you to your taco? (pitched high, voicing taco) "Hi Z.! Please eat me!"

Z.: (addressing taco) Why do you want to die so soon?

A heart I know by heart

We all went to the Please Touch Museum today for Z.'s adoption day,* and I spent a lot of the visit mom-watching. The mom in the chador, the mom in slinky sundress with the backpack slung around her waist, canceling out the look, the many moms in t-shirts and the scattering of moms with visible pregnancies, and I realized that I assume a mom has given birth and most likely nursed, and has watched her body change because of her children, and that motherhood is an experience that involves a radical disruption of one's sense of physical self.

I assume that even though none of it is true for A.

Hunh.

*Yes, I birthed her, but A. and I adopted her together--such being the ins and outs of same-sex parenthood.