A FEW ITEMS OF A MISCELLANEOUS NATURE

i know it's only monday but boy does it feel like a thursday.

so first of all, huck. huck is it these days. good gravy. also he is potty trained. which went a lot easier and a lot faster than i expected it to and i know better than to think any of it had anything to do with me. chalk it up to my kid being rad, yet again. he makes it easy. before bed tonight we read one of our books about thanksgiving. it lists all of the things this little boy is thankful for, and after the last page i asked henry what he was thankful for, and OFF HE WENT. he was thankful for this, he was thankful for that, he was thankful for penguins, he was thankful for his "pack pack," he was thankful for his treasure map. and then he asked me, mom? what do bugs eat? and i said, bugs? and he said, "yes bugs. they eat poops. isn't that silly." he said this very serious-like, frowning the whole time. so i said, "what does henry eat?" and he said, "sandwiches!" so i said, "what does mommy eat?" and he said, "cereal" (guilty as charged), and then he said, 'what does caroline eat?" and i was like, caroline?! sort of out of the blue, but okay. what does caroline eat, huck? and he paused and looked thoughtfully at the ceiling and tapped his finger on his mouth and said, "probably grapes."

on saturday afternoon i got to run down to see the first new york screening of "breastmilk" at the new york documentary festival. it was kind of amazing. it was produced by the same ladies who did the business of being born (full disclosure, i didn't totally love that movie), and it was about breastfeeding and all of the hoopla that surrounds it. i get really fired up about this stuff, just because, i'm not sure why. raging feminist is probably why. but what i was most taken by and what i need to really explore properly sometime was this: there was a lesbian couple in the film who had had a child through sperm donation. the birth mother was able to breastfeed successfully, but not only that, the birth mother's partner, a woman who had never been pregnant and had never given birth, she was also able to breastfeed successfully. she latched that baby on for five minutes at a time, each side, a few times a day, and within a week she was lactating. that's it. she had milk. and even though she didn't nurse every day, she kept up a steady supply for whenever her baby needed her. isn't that amazing? the rest of the women in the film were followed from pregnancy through their baby's first birthday, and each one of them, without fail, said in their first interview before they'd even given birth, that they "hoped" to breastfeed. they "wanted to" but "most people can't" and "so many things could go wrong." and then... so many things did go wrong. because, well of course, things always go wrong, things always go wrong all of the time. but i've been i thinking about that woman who was able to nurse even after never giving birth in the first place, and i've been thinking about the lack of trust we women seem to have in our own bodies sometimes, and how we think we have to fight our bodies, and how we might assume they aren't good enough on their own, just the way they are, in whatever shape they happen to be in... and i guess i always think about this stuff when i'm trying to get pregnant, because these days i don't trust my body to do anything. but i'm starting to think our bodies are onto us. i think there's a healthy amount of fatalistic self-determinism happening here. and i sometimes wonder if maybe the only reason i was able to nurse as long and as happily as i did was because, stupidly, and for whatever reason, i went into it knowing that i would. i've never gone into anything knowing i could do it before even starting, and this is starting to make me rethink the whole way i live my life. 

so, like, see this documentary, if you're able to. really really great stuff in there. 

*i guess i should clarify that this was MY experience with breastfeeding, and that i am in no way trying to minimize what other women go through in their experiences, when we all have very, very different situations from each other. and also, i should clarify that if just believing you could do something were enough, obviously i'd be pregnant by now! so that is NOT what i'm trying to say, and i apologize if it seemed like it was. i was mostly just thinking out loud in the middle of the night, which, obviously, is never a good idea.

huck! huck is solidly between sizes of clothes, it's funny. nothing fits him! he swims in 2T and pops out of 18 months and have i mentioned he is three? sigh. short genes. here he is in this really cute get up that was sent to us from the sweet folks at carousel and these pants remind me of luke skywalker and i can't wait for him to grow into this stuff. particularly those pants, they are the raddest.

the central park zoo got some new baby snow leopards this fall, so we went with my parents last week to coo at the cubs and take the mama a casserole. which remiiiiiiiinds meeeeeeee. after huck was born some friends brought over an entire pot of beef stew and i'm not kidding, it was the greatest thing in the entire world. beef stew. 

brandon took these photos, and basically someone at national geographic needs to snatch this dude up already. crap.

aaaaand a sea lion.

lastly i will leave you with this. this year for thanksgiving we up and got reservations at landmarc for the macy's parade. it's genius. you go eat brunch, you watch balloons go by out the window without freezing yer bum off or having to wake up at 5am, and now i shall include the photos i took a million years ago the last time we were at landmarc, since they're now related only slightly.

worth it.

oh wait!

also.

spiderman.

the end.