BAM! Cuteness!

Where's this coming from?

So, Norah is sixteen months old now and it's sort of crazy to consider what that actually means. It's been almost a year and a half since she was born, and a few months over two years since we first found out that she was coming. The entirety of our life in New Hampshire has been consumed by the fact that we're our own family.

I honestly barely remember what it was like to not have a kid. I only kind of remember what it was like to have an infant. Sure, I remember certain days and things she did, but mostly it's all a blur. The only thing I really recall with much confidence about Norah being less than six months old is that it wasn't as overwhelming as I'd prepared for it to be. I think I've made the comment on here before that parenthood really is an intuitive thing. It's less about preparedness and more about simply applying what you already know. I can say that, of course, because I have parents who did a good job of doing their jobs.

Anyway.

And now Norah is sixteen months old and walks around like she owns the place. She knows most of her body parts and will point them out when asked. She knows to say "please" when asking for things, even if she can only say the first three letters of the word (and even then mispronounces the "e" -- "pluhhh"). She'll carry stuff over to the garbage if you ask her to and she flips her shit when she sees a bus ("buuuuuuh!!!") or a clock ("CAHK!!"). She's obsessed with belly buttons, which is pretty weird. But hey... I guess there's a lot about being a baby that's pretty weird.

Sometimes I wish I was still kid-free. But never really... 'Cause then I wouldn't have moments like this one:

And that's what I'm thinking about tonight. Norah's sick and so is Sarah, so I've sort of gone into caretaker mode. I guess when you're care-taking you're also thinking about the bigger picture of why it's important to be taking care at all. It's not just about doing, but realizing why you're doing. At this point in my life, I'm doing most everything that I am because of the fact that when I close the door behind me as I leave the apartment, I can hear Norah behind it saying "papa?" And I can't think of any greater motivation in life than to realize that my kid knows enough to call me "papa" and knows that it means something (even if she doesn't yet have the vocabulary to describe it).

It's pretty rad.

STFU Glenn Beck

Tim Wise wrote this article on his blog in response to Glenn Beck's "March on Washington" this past weekend. It's titled "Farce on Washington: Glenn Beck and the Assault on Historical Memory." 

Tim Wise is the fucking man...

 

"To be angry with Glenn Beck would be easy. So too, to conjure an ungenerous spirit of contempt for his acolytes who came from around the country to attend Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally this Saturday, would hardly take Herculean effort. His demented narcissism and their cult-like devotion to the man who once said he was just “a rodeo clown,” to whom one should hardly pay attention — but who now suggests he is on a mission from God to save America — are both worthy of the highest derision.

Yet, rather than anger or contempt — however deserved — it is sadness that animates my thoughts today. Sadness that so many would feel the country so besmirched by the first 19 months of the Obama Administration that they would take it upon themselves to march on Washington. Not for jobs or peace. But to restore some vaguely defined sense of national integrity, and, to hear Beck tell it, to “reclaim the civil rights movement.” As unsightly as it can be to witness any man’s ego explode with self-absorbed mendacity all over the pages of history — as we observed this weekend, what with the rally coinciding with the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech” — it is especially so when that ego belongs to one as craven as Beck. That Beck thinks the civil rights movement needs “reclaiming,” and that so many others apparently agree, speaks to the miseducation of the American people (especially large numbers of white Americans), and it is this, which saddens.

For how could anyone take seriously the connection between Beck’s rally and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom? The latter was a direct challenge to the economic injustice of racism, and to a nation that had “bounced a check” to its black citizens. The former was led by a man who decries all talk of social justice, and having never apparently read a single word of Dr. King’s writings, suggests that the left has hijacked the movement’s legacy by speaking of such matters as were, in fact, central to its mission.

For Beck to insist, as he has, that the movement must be reclaimed, and that it is the job of conservatives to do it, because they “were the ones who did it in the first place,” is a historical perversion of such galaxial proportions as to call into question his very sanity. In truth, it is unlikely that any of the almost all-white throng gathered in Washington this weekend played any part in the civil rights struggle. Those at Beck’s event were people whose ideological forbears include the editors at the nation’s leading conservative magazine, The National Review, who supported segregation and excoriated King, or worse, the zombified denizens of the John Birch Society, and those like Beck’s personal hero, W. Cleon Skousen, who viewed the civil rights movement as a communist conspiracy to control the world.

Were King alive today, Glenn Beck would surely have found a prominent place for him on his chalkboard of demonic progressivism, what with King’s commitment to economic equality, and condemnation of the United States government as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” And whereas King demanded a guaranteed minimum income for all as a hedge against poverty — and insisted that to ignore the needs of the poor was to invite “spiritual death” — Beck counsels us to worry not about the poverty of millions. After all, as he explained: “The poorest among us are still some of the richest in the world…The poorest among us have blessings beyond the wildest imagination of anyone that Mother Theresa visited.” So because there are others in the world with less than you, you who suffer here should stop complaining, speaketh the Good Reverend Beck. By which logic one could also have said — and many racists in those days did — that blacks in apartheid America should have stopped complaining and thanked their lucky stars they weren’t in the Belgian Congo under Leopold.

No Mr. Beck. You and yours have reclaimed nothing, for there was nothing awaiting your messianic rescue. Those who did the work of obtaining even the partially decent society in which we live today, did so with no help from those like the people who hung on your every word this weekend. And those of us who know the truth of the movement and this nation’s history — and of the descent into madness upon which some of our fellow citizens have lately embarked at your behest — will continue, as we long have, to struggle against the forces of reaction so well-represented and led by the likes of you. For your part, you will continue to race bait and to push buttons of white resentment, what with your claims that the president is only pushing health care reform as a way to obtain reparations for blacks at the expense of whites, and that his first name — or at least his insistence on using it, as opposed to some more “American-sounding” alternative — proves his lack of devotion to the country.

But it is you who lacks commitment to the valuable part of the national ideal. It is you whose slavish devotion to nostalgia — to the “good old days” of so-called “innocence,” long since lost — betrays your contempt for both history and millions of your co-countrymen and women. They remember how those good old days were days of terror and hellish oppression for the black and brown, of unchecked male domination of women, of the closet enforced on LGBT folks, of Christian hegemony at the expense of pluralism. Even today those structural injustices remain too strong, but in the days you revere and remember so fondly, they were not only present but were accepted as the very model of virtue. That is the tradition in whose shadow you stand. That is your dream, Mr. Beck: a nightmare for all who fail to live up to your white, middle class, straight and Christian ideal of what a “real American” looks like.

But we have other dreams to dream. Other dragons to slay than those at which you tilt: first and foremost, the historical amnesia you would today elevate to the level of a national sacrament. For while you were right to note that black folks don’t “own” Martin Luther King — actually no one owns anyone anymore, no thanks to the conservatives of the 19th century of course — make no mistake, it was the civil rights movement that produced him, the left that fought beside him, and it is we who will continue his work, work in which you have never played, and will never play, any part whatsoever."

15 Months

Norah had her 15 month appointment today. Here are the stats -

Large head. Norah was squirming so much...I'm not sure the nurse got an accurate number. I didn't ask. I just know the number was large.

22.2 lbs, I believe this is a little bit low. Doctor not concerned in the least based on other observations.

33" long! SUPER TALL!

The doctor was more than pleased with her vocab and said her walking at 15 months is perfectly normal. She is one healthy ba- I mean, toddler!

Love to you all.

Will post an update on my mom. God is good.

Wednesday's Awesomeness

Two super rad things happened today.

This: Federal Judge Strikes Down Gay Marriage Ban in California 

And this:

Does this count as "walking"? She's getting more and more adventurous everyday. Yesterday I turned around to find her standing up on her own in the middle of the living room floor. Today she's all about walking short distances. I like where this is heading, you know? Maybe by next month she'll be able to go out and get a job to start paying for all the crap we have to buy for her!

This is also pretty cool, though she's been doing this for a week or two now. She just can't get enough of her belly button...

Stay Gold!

MMK