Every week, usually on a Monday, a packet of papers comes home from my son’s school. Usually it consists of a lunch menu, various PTA correspondence, a fund raiser one-sheet, and if my wife and I have been doing our job, a letter from the principle or my son’s teacher talking about how awesome he is and how much they wish more of the kids were like him. (Okay, okay…maybe not the last one, but he did get tapped to be a Lunch Buster. Still need to read up on what that is.)

This week we received a sheet of paper from the district—a head’s up, if you will—about a few films that will be shown to the 5th and 6th grade classes between now and the end of the year.

Yep, those videos.

Continue reading "The Talk" →

From the age twelve years I have been told I would never carry a child to term. There were days of depression, fears of never having my own children, feeling like an oddity that I didn't menstruate like my friends and all around not feeling like a "real" woman.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that this did not mean that I would never be a mother – there was ALWAYS adoption and that life was just giving me a different path.

Then on November 7th, 2007 I went in for a routine lady visit and everything was going like normal when my doctor asked me to take a urine test to check for an UTI. Didn't seem too out of the ordinary until the doctor came back in and told me that my urine sample showed that I was pregnant.

Continue reading "Miracle baby proves there's no such thing as a 100% diagnosis" →

We featured Monica (did she not look stunning? in her green dress, cast and all!) and Paul's wedding on Offbeat Bride a few days ago.  Now the lovely wedded couple are new parents of a bouncing and beautiful girl, Amber Cassandra! Monica was kind enough to share her adorable baby bow tutorial made out of fabric scraps, and we're stoked to feature this simple but cutesy patootsey DIY project! – Offbeat Shrie

I didn’t really plan this project. I just thought “Hmm, what can I do with these extra scraps of fabric?” and ended up with this headband idea! Please keep in mind that I measured nothing and am just giving my best guesstimate on the sizes of things. If anyone else tries this and finds better dimensions, let us know so we can pass it on!

In keeping with my haphazard style, the pictures are not to scale relative to the end product or each other. I’m just trying to remember, months later, how I made this thing in order to give you a rough guide. I didn’t have a crochet hook when I made mine and I paid dearly for it. You definitely want one or something like it when making the headband portion of this.

Continue reading "How to DIY a purty baby bow out of fabric scraps" →

The most frequent question I get about my pregnancy is whether I want a boy a girl. The second question is whether I want to know.

The only reason I would like to know is for practical reasons, the baby shower. My husband says he wants a boy because of the “boyfriend issue” if we had a girl. I’ve noticed that’s something that freaks many men out about having a daughter.

It makes no difference to me whether it’s a boy or a girl, whether he has brown skin like me or she has light skin like my husband. I was born in Mexico City and my husband is from California, he is half Mexican and half Guatemalan with British ancestry (we think, sometimes he seems more Scottish to me) that makes him look white.

People are always shocked when he starts talking Spanish and he’s even had to face reverse racism from more brown looking Mexicans he has met. Racism has also shown its ugly face in comments that our baby will be a beautiful light skinned baby.

I know it’s so ingrained in our society to look at white babies as more beautiful than those of color, but it angers me. At this point in our so-called evolved society, shouldn’t we have grown out of that? Sadly we are nowhere close to seeing people from the inside out.

I doesn’t matter to me whether our baby is a boy or a girl or brown or white.

Continue reading "White or brown, girl or boy. It doesn't matter." →

My son Conan is pretty much weaned now, at 13 months. It's been about a week since he last nursed, and he's perfectly happy without it. I have mixed emotions about it — on the one hand, it is SO liberating, but on the other hand it's the end of a really close part of our relationship, a connection we will never have again. But time moves on, and my little guy is rapidly metamorphosing from a baby into a toddler.

Thinking back on my early experience of breastfeeding, the thing that really jumps out is that I never, NEVER believed that we would make it through a whole year. For the first 2.5 months nursing was excruciatingly painful for me. Besides the physical pain, I felt like a total failure because I was constantly in a state of dread regarding the next feeding. A good mama would WANT to feed her baby, right?

That special one-on-one nurturing bonding time that I had so hoped for during pregnancy sure took a LONG time to materialize. I nearly gave up on so many different occasions. In retrospect, only my sheer stubbornness and a sort of twisted sense of maternal self-sacrifice kept me going. Now, a year later, I'm glad I did. Because as horrible as the first couple months were, the later months really did make up for it.

Continue reading "Breastfeeding was crazy hard, but weaning is sad too" →

At Sundance this week, one of the most talked-about films is an indie comedy about a lesbian couple (played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) who are "unwillingly reunited" with the anonymous sperm donor (played by Mark Ruffalo) who fathered their two teenaged children. From everything I've read about "The Kids Are All Right," it sounds like it's a complete winner and completely hilarious. New York Magazine says:

This may turn out to be one of the most significant lesbian films yet made — especially because it's premiering in the long shadow of Prop 8. But straight marrieds will have little trouble identifying with the undermining, bitching, nagging, teasing, and reconciling, either: Lighthearted and uproariously funny, it's not at all a gay-marriage film, but just a great film about marriage.

Bonus: the son character is named "Laser." Why didn't I think of that?!

Read more about the film:

• NY Magazine
• Variety