Customers, Consumers

Tell me this: when did I turn into one of those people who considers college students to be consumers and sees her job as providing exceptional customer service?

Probably since I moved from the classroom to administration. I used to grandstand about the life of the mind and goods and services and commodity culture and all the rest.  I used to think college was more than just an exchange of cash for degree.  But now? Now I’m working my ass off to make sure that there is a tutor for every tutee, and I’m not doing it because I’m concerned about their education.  No, I’m thinking about how if a student is turned away, that student will complain that s/he didn’t get what s/he wanted, which will in turn piss off the dean-ly people, which will in turn jeopardize our funding.  Our cash.  Our Gs.

I’ll tell you more about it later. Right now I’ve got a customer.

Searches!

You’re all doing it, so why shouldn’t I?  Herewith, answers to your favorite search questions:

things to look for when a child falls: Hell. So you’re here because I’m a crap parent, are you?  Well, I’ll redeem myself by offering the following information, all of which has absolutely no medical value, cannot be vouched for, and should not be used in place of consultation with your doctor.  Okay, so, when The Baby fell off my lap, I freaked out and called the doctor’s office.  Their advice was pretty much in keeping with what I read in both the Dr. Spock book and What To Expect When Your Baby is Under One and Therefore Brand New to You and Thus Scary as All Hell: if baby quiets quickly (within 15 minutes, but the quicker the better), he’s probably fine.  Watch for swelling, bruising, vomiting, poor appetite, and unusual fussiness or sleepiness.  If you’re not sure how he landed (I wasn’t), watch for abdominal swelling or unusual marks/rashes. Seek immediate medical attention if there is any loss of consciousness or excessive vomiting, or if Something Just Doesn’t Feel Right.

Bottom Line: it really does happen to everyone (just ask the internet, they’ll tell you), and it will almost certainly be fine.  Also, it’s okay to freak out for 48 hours, but after that, let yourself off the hook, especially from the guilt you will undoubtedly feel.
my baby won’t nap unless he’s in a sling: Sheesh, that sucks.  Here’s my non-medical, unreliable opinion: see if you can just go with it for now.  Try to find a sling that allows you to do two things: work when you want to, and relax when you need to.  Our dude will nap in the baby bjorn, so that means I can work on the computer, wash dishes, and even SIT DOWN when I want.

Now, the baby bjorn instructions, if I remember them correctly, say: DO NOT SIT DOWN.  Okay, well, follow the directions.  Don’t listen to me. I don’t want to be the one responsible if your baby loses circulation in his piggy toe because you sat down.  However, I sit down with that thing all the time.  If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have made it through about two out of the last six months of parenting. (Incidentally, does anyone know why you aren’t supposed to sit while wearing a front carrier?)

what do old people say: A bunch of shit that will drive you crazy, along with occasional praise, tidbits of reassurance, and, if you’re lucky, “Why don’t you go away for a few days? We’ll watch the baby.”

sneeze pee: Me too! I don’t know how you fix it, but I assume it would involve a specialist in pelvic floor disorders. This is another one where my vote is for “just go with it.”

what does a star look like up close: I have no idea!  Gassy? Nebulous? Like when you try to see through your glasses after your baby has been handling them?

can’t afford a baby: Mmm…there are two kinds of “can’t afford.” There’s “this baby is going to seriously hamper my/our lifestyle” and “where do we go for WIC”? If you’re in the WIC category, then the good news is that there are a lot of government assistance programs out there for the taking, so you’re going to survive.  If you’re in the “Readjust Your Lifestyle” category, welcome to what it’s like to be anyone who makes less than $100000 a year (so, you know, most people).  My guess is that you only feel like you can afford a child if you have a buttload of extra income.  The rest of us feel greater and lesser sums of anxiety for roughly twenty years.

dissertation defense after having baby: You’re on your defense? Well why don’t you tell me how you got there?

Two Things I’d Rather Be Doing

It’s crunch-time around here, and I wish I could say that the crunchiness was limited to the leaves on the ground.  The weird thing about having a kid (and I don’t know why it’s weird, exactly–it should be obvious) is that downtime is just…gone.  We don’t have it anymore. There’s either work, or dissertation, or baby-related-tasks (as opposed to baby-related-funtimes), and as I said yesterday, I haven’t been particularly ambitious since around 2005.  Really.

Anyway, pictured below are two things I’d rather be doing:

1) chillaxing with the below-pictured Baby, while

2) making more little toys for him. Like the starfish he’s examining, or maybe a seahorse. Or a clam.  My drawing and sewing skills are limited to sea creatures. My dissertation skills, however, are limited to frustration (hardly a skill) and procrastination (I’m so good at that!), so I could certainly be doing worse.

Anyway, look at these animals I made:

The one dressed in green managed a front-poop through the diaper and onto his leg at 3 AM, 3 being his new wake-up time courtesy of daylight savings.  If you never thought DST was a terrible idea, ask somebody with a baby.   He then followed the magic that is front-poop with a pee stream that arched over his face and right into his hair.  Again, at 3 in the morning.  He wasn’t at all disturbed or, god forbid, tired out by any of this.  It only made his will to exersaucer-ize greater.

Nablopomo?

Oh, please. I didn’t pull it off last year, when all I had to do was obsess over the conditional condition and coast along in a dream of success after passing my proposal.

Yesterday I was talking about having another kid.  Another one.  And I’m not even ovulating, so I have no idea what’s up with that. I’ve met a number of people who have a newborn and a fifteen (or so) month old, so maybe that’s what happens around the six month mark. Whatever, the point is, I my lack of ambition trumps me lack of time for just about everything these days.

If you decide to do Nablopomo, there are some good ways to get through the week.  This is a great Monday option.  You can cover Tuesdays this way.

 

Attention, Academics, and those who are academically-inclined!

Is anybody going to the Narrative conference this year?  It’s in Cleveland, which is close to where I live.  Well, a state away, but closer than Texas, or the UK, which is where it was the last two years.

Anyway, I wanted to put together a panel this year but I got the big “you don’t have time for that, mama!” blow-off from several of my colleagues. I know!  Can you IMAGINE?  It’s outrageous.  Such is my existence.

Anyway anyway, I just had this last-minute notion to put together a panel of either blogger-mama-dissertators, or just dissertating-bloggers, which would, I don’t know, maybe discuss what it’s like to build a virtual community? Or something?

Yeah, I know.  Not really enough for a panel, is there…. Damn.  PLUS given how I am OMGsuperanonymous it would be weird to put a name and a big ass to a blog. But I just thought I’d ask because it occurred to me on the way out the door to grab the kiddo from daycare.

In the meantime I’ll drum up an individual proposal.  That is, if I can unearth myself from the pile of guilt my mother just threw on me for leaving The Baby in daycare until the evening even though I was “done with work” at 2 o’clock.

Sigh, moan, etc.

Nine things you learn after your 2-foot-tall child falls from a height of more than 2 feet (but less than 3).

1. Your mind’s capacity to remember and replay THUMP has not diminished, despite an overall loss of memory since the pregnancy.
2. Calling the doctor’s office to report that your 6-month-old has jumped off your lap and fallen roughly 30 inches to the ground is much more humiliating than using a breast pump in front of your parents AND talking about how pee leaks out when you sneeze, combined.
3. While it is the nurse’s job to run through the list of what to watch out for, it is NOT the nurse’s job to assure you that this happens to everyone.
4. Nor is it your mother’s job to reassure you that this happens to everyone.  It is actually your MIL’s job, who isn’t worried at all, or so she says.  It is also her job to peer at the kid’s head when she thinks you aren’t looking for the next day and a half.
5. Using the word “Spears-ed” to refer to the incident is mildly humorous.
6. Using the word “Spears-ed” to refer to the incident also reminds you that we’re too hard on Britney.  Because, really, who HASN’T wanted to drive with the baby on their lap when he’s so unhappy to be in the car seat that he is holding his breath and growling? We stop ourselves before actually doing it, but still.
7. Now that the baby has fallen from a height, it is much less scary when he merely tips over from a sitting position or over-enthusiastically greets the sun through the window.
8. #7 is great and all, but it would still be better if the baby didn’t, you know, vault off your lap and onto the ground.
9. Whoever invents a nontoxic, removable spray-foam that would cover all the hard surfaces (e.g. floor) and corners of my house in under a minute is going to win a Nobel.

Two Days

MIL’s jet lifts off in a little under 48 hours.

Thanks, all, for bearing with my incessant whining.  Since this was supposed to be a dissertation blog, I never spent much time thinking about things like how much overshare is too much overshare or how likely one is to isolate one’s readers via post after post of “I’m a-gonna tear my hair out, Internet!”

Of course if you’re like me, you think that reading about the mini-dramas of a stranger’s personal life is the stuff that makes the world go around.  Better-Dissertation-Topic-Than-Mine #6042: Identity Formation in the Internet Age.

Sigh, blah, etc.

P.S. You mean all that stereotypical MIL-hate circulating in our culture has some basis in factual experience?  Huh.  ‘Cause I thought nightmare experiences like the ones I’ve experienced over the past 6 weeks (SIX MOTHERFUCKING WEEKS OMG NO WONDER I’M C-C-CRAZY!!!) were merely manufactured by 80s era sitcom writers.  Guess not.

Old People Say the Darndest Things

AKA, Somebody stop me before I unleash my pent-up fury on not just the MIL but my own parents as well.

All three of them are in the house.  In the livingroom. Right outside my door, the door behind which I’m supposed to finish at least another quarter of this fucking chapter before I send it off (days late) to my diss group.

I’d fare better if there were three elephants out there.  Or one ovulating monkey.  Or a clutch of finger-painting four-year-olds.  I could go on.  I’m not proud. Or tired.

Today’s barely suppressed scream is brought to you by: “Your mother came here to help with the baby, not clean your house.”

Um, yeah.  But see, I didn’t say clean the HOUSE.  I said it would be good if she could CLEAN THE BOTTLES.  Because I need to sit and work, and if I start in on household chores I’ll just keep going.  So yeah, it would be helpful if she washed the bottles while MIL plays with baby and Wizard goes to work and I go to write and my father, I don’t know, sits around watching Turner Classic Movies. It would be abundantly helpful.

But apparently it’s only okay–with my father–if my mother does something on her own; I’m not supposed to ask.  My mother, meanwhile, doesn’t care.  I could ask her to paint the ceiling and she’d do it.  She’s like that.  So I’m careful to not ask too much, because she’s naturally inclined to do too much.  I figure cleaning the bottles isn’t anywhere near too much. I see where my father’s (over)protective impulse comes from, but, really? Dude? How big of an asshole do you think I am?

A pretty big one, I guess, since what was once a diss blog is now a “Listen to me complain about my family, everyone!”

But it’s that or scream and throw shit, and that kind of stuff you can’t do around infants.  Dammit.

I learned medicine–on the internets!

I don’t know whether to get the H1N1 vaccine, and I don’t know whether to get it for The Baby.

Yesterday I went to the GP to get some blood tests (Hi, ridiculously low iron levels!  How are we doing now?) and a flu shot (which they ran out of, so I ended up getting it at the drugstore anyway).  The lovely GP also put me on the list for the pig flu vaccine because The Baby is just shy of 6 months. I was really excited about this because I’ve been wanting that sucker since May.

Now, Wizard is completely and utterly against Baby getting vaccinated for H1N1, even though he is pro-vaccine otherwise.  And he is a scientist person, so while he isn’t a medical doctor he is good with medical journals and such.  As am I, because if you can read Derrida you sure as hell can read medical statistics. Anyway, he doesn’t think any of us should take the vaccine because, in his view, it hasn’t been tested extensively enough. I am of a mind that it is just a flu shot, so who cares?

That is, until my mom’s GP told her that he wasn’t taking it and didn’t want her getting the shot, either.  And he is generally pro-vaccine as well. He says it needs more testing, especially for kids.

Now I don’t know what to do.  What are you guys doing?  Are you taking it? Getting it for your kids?

ETA: Not that y’all don’t know this, but I work at a university and Baby is in daycare.  Exposure.  We has it.

Reader Poll

Well, hey everybody!  How are you?

If your answer ISN’T “my mother-in-law has been living with me for the past month,” then you are FINE.

So anyway, you tell me, which of these is more nasty:

“I’ve been through a dissertation with one child. I’m not putting up with it for another one” in response to my slight diss panic this week.  Mind you, there was no gnashing of teeth or rending of dresses.  I was just, you know, complaining.  And expressing my fear that I didn’t have enough material for the chapter section I’m working on.

***OR***

“The Baby is such a good vegetable eater. Maybe you should join him.”  This one references NOT my eating habits themselves (um, who doesn’t eat vegetables? I know I do), but the fact that I am overweight. (And by the way, the woman herself subsists on bacon, cream cheese, SALTSALTSALT, Kit Kats, pizza, Big Macs, and comté.)

So?  What say you, Internet?  Which one of these is more early-flight-home worthy?

ETA (because I’m all about the ETAs today):  Wizard, in a fight with his mother concerning HIS weight (he weighs maybe 160 I think?), mentioned the vegetables thing.  Jesus-effing-Christ. So now I have to avoid the hell out of her for the rest of the night. Not to mention that this adds to the ongoing “you don’t express yourself, why don’t you express yourself?” battle, which in reality means, “why don’t you express yourself so that I can have something to hold against you?”

Fucking hell.