Reading and thinking today and everyday

Here's what I'm reading and contemplating today:

1. Get Off Your Cloud, Marissa!

The New York Times' Maureen Dowd -- who sometimes nails it and sometimes miserably fails it -- published a thought-provoking piece today about the new Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer, who took a 2-week (!!) maternity leave, built a nursery next to her office, and has now forbidden all employees from ever "working from home." Dowd's column has me thinking a lot about being a working Mom and a woman in the workforce and someone who is constantly recalibrating every aspect of life, trying to maintain some semblance of balance.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/opinion/dowd-get-off-your-cloud.html?hp&_r=0

 2. We Need to Stop Faking it on Facebook

This blogger's take on "Fakebooking" resonated with me, as I realized that 1) I sometimes am annoyed when friends make it seem like having kids is a daylong shower of sunshine and chocolate bunnies, and 2) I am guilty of doing this as well, and 3) I sometimes use Facebook to remind myself that life ain't perfect, but it's pretty damn good.

Here's what I wrote on Facebook about it:
Seriously, sometimes I post the really good stuff to remind MYSELF that my life is really good. Because I can get in moods where I'm like, "My house is a wreck; there's laundry everywhere; potty training BITES; I look 5-months pregnant a year after giving birth; my kingdom for 6 hours of solid sleep a night; what's this thing people keep talking about called a "vacation?"; where's all my MONEY I was supposed to be making by now??? And dammit, if I see another chicken nugget, I'm going to cry!" So I'll look at photos of my crazy cute kids and post it up all pretty and Instagrammed and someone will say, "Hey Tanika, your kids are super cute!" and I do feel better. I can't lie. I do. I remember that I love my kids and my life, just because someone hit "Like" and took the time to comment. Is that pathetic? Maybe so. But it's better than taking up a nightly Scotch habit.

And then, in response to a later comment:

I agree, Sarah. Most of our friends are good at balancing the humorous, the self-deprecating and the ain't-life-grand posts. But there are times when the best parts of my day win out over the worst. I could have posted, for example, the long list of poop-related things that happened last night to me (none of which were pretty) with the status message, "Boy, what a shitty night I've had. Literally." That would have been funny, I guess. But instead, I chose to post the video of Clair walking, which made me feel much better about my shitty night. It's a form of self-censoring, and also a form of Facebook-as-therapy. Nothing wrong with it, I don't think. So long as there's balance.

http://www.kveller.com/blog/parenting/we-need-to-quit-telling-lies-on-facebook/

3.  Life is short. Live it -- really live it -- now, not later. Because later may never come.

Mary Corey was the Features editor at The Baltimore Sun when I worked a brief stint as fashion writer. I admired her very much for her dignity and grace, which seemed to be from another time. But I admit to feeling like her life seemed very lonely. She died yesterday -- at 49 years old, just 10 years older than me. She had her journalism career (which is impressive, no doubt) and her dog. And that's it. I don't want to seem disparaging at all to her, please don't get me wrong. But her death has left me sadder than I thought it would, and I think it's because it reminds me what is really important in life. And I know I can sometimes lose sight of that in my quest to do more, be more, have more. Mary's death is a billboard -- in my opinion -- for the fact that loving is living. And loving well is living well.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/obituaries/bs-md-corey-obituary-20130226,0,600276.story

4. Overcoming a Racist Past in Baltimore

Having grown up in very diverse communities, I forget sometimes that for most people life wasn't always this multi-cultural, this tolerant, this Benetton ad personified.

This commentary in today's Sun was amazingly self-reflective and enlightening to me. Being a part of the "minority" population, one of the "aggrieved," it has always seemed like a no-brainer to me that people should be treated equally, not stereotyped or discriminated against or despised. But reading this writer's very honest reflection on his childhood illuminates for me the incredible work that has to be done for even well-meaning folks to overcome the baggage they've been spoonfed most of their lives --from society, from popular culture, from their own neighborhoods and families.
It reminds me even more that patience, grace and forgiveness are key to achieving the kind of fair society we all say we want to have.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-racist-past-20130225,0,1981054.story



So what do you all think of these articles and their themes?

Adventures in Clairdom

Yesterday, Clair was an explorer and outstanding mess-maker.

She was a sweetie, hugging her brother who was having a hard time accepting the fact that there would not be snacks before dinner (just like every other night).

She was super-duper silly (this is one of my favorite videos of her ever):

And...last but not least...

She walked!!!

Not once, not twice, but many times throughout the evening. As if she had always been doing it.

She started taking a few steps here and there a couple weeks ago. So she's had a bit of practice. But still, she just stood up by herself a month ago. And the boys were nearly 14 months before they braved this many steps at once.

So all in all, it was a big night for my baby girl!

Why you should always listen to your children (a lesson in parenting)

Lester's friends Stan and Nicole came to Baltimore this weekend so Nicole could interview at a hospital nearby.

Saturday night, we hung out with them and my sister and her husband (and Matty!!) at a Food Truck Rally in the kitschy Hampden neighborhood. We felt bad that they might think the best we Baltimoreans could do was beer and fried food from a truck. So we went out to a real dinner on Sunday night.

(OK -- that's not really true. We were at the mall buying the kids new shoes [why do kids' feet grow so darn fast?] and they met us at Stride Rite, and we were all hungry so we went to Cheesecake Factory.)

Being infrequent restaurant-goers, we totally forgot that people like to go out to eat on Sundays, so we were shocked when the hostess told us it'd be a 45-minute wait. But we braved it anyway.

55 minutes later, we checked on our table. "10 more minutes," she said brightly.

Fifteen minutes after that, I started to really get impatient. The boys were starving, Clair was restless. It was cold in the waiting area. Where was our table??

The boys were more anxious about the buzzer we were given. They'd been waiting patiently for it to buzz and light up, which we told them would happen when our table was ready. Every other second or so, they checked it. "Mommy, it's not buzzing!" "Mommy, when is it going to buzz?!"

So when we checked our watches that final time, and voiced our impatience, Cary said, "Let me check the timer."

Then he ambled over to a blank wall, and pretended to press buttons. "The timer says 'Two more minutes!'" he declared, holding three fingers in the air.

Dean looked at the buzzer and turned it around and around, inspecting it.

"Maybe the battery ran out," he said.

"That's a good observation!" I said to him, sorta automatically. "Maybe it did."

But then I started thinking about it. Maybe there was something wrong with the buzzer.

So I went back into the restaurant to inquire about our table.

"You have pager 75?" the hostess asked, bewildered. "That's weird. We've been paging you."

She took the pager from me and looked at it, much the same way Dean had peered at it a few minutes before.

"I'm so glad you came in," she said. "This pager isn't working."

It's at that moment that I realized my children are geniuses and should never be ignored.

The battery was bad on the buzzer -- just like Dean said. And we did get our table two minutes after Cary told us we would.

For their amazingness, we let the boy wonders order whatever they wanted.

Cary ordered chocolate cake. Dean got vanilla ice cream. We let them stuff themselves silly, and even gave Clair some whipped cream, just for being related to the two smartest boys in the world.

Clair's 1st Birthday Not-a-Party Photo Overload

Clair turned 1 on the 16th and to mark the occasion, we had a fabulous not-a-party at my Mom's house!

I could go into details about Clair preferring pizza crust over chocolate frosting and Dean being a bear the entire day and how we ordered colossal Costco pizza pies for TEN BUCKS! each and how the cousins could not stop harassing the birthday girl.

But you've been to not-a-parties before. You've probably had 'em yourself -- or something similar.

So instead, I'll just post here -- for Clair's benefit -- photographic evidence that her family celebrated the anniversary of the day she came into this world, and changed all our lives forever.

The scenery.

The birthday girl!

She kept trying to put this flower in her hair.

 Look at Matty's ridiculous cuteness.

Clair and Matty, conspiring cousins.

Alahna would not leave her alone.

And sometimes Aminah joined in the harrassment.

Not so sure about this center of attention business.

Alahna loves her baby cousin.

I told you I was making a Duncan Hines cake. You didn't believe me.

"Happy birthday to youuuuu! Yayyyy!"

They kissed her so much, her face got smushed. Poor Clair. So loved.

Here we are with our little girl. Awwww. Happiness.

Yay! It's my birthday! Now where's my pizza crust?

Nana and Auntie Tahira gave Clair books for her birthday. Cary was in heaven. Books!

This was pretty much Dean's mood most of the day.

What? You mean I'm not supposed to act the fool on my sister's 1st birthday? I didn't get that memo.

Reading one of her new books with Daddy.

Opening presents (and preparing to consume the paper.)

Thanks everyone for coming to my not-a-party! Drive safe now!

Throwback Thursday stories

On Instagram (where I mostly lurk, but sometimes post), there's something called "Throwback Thursday." On Thursdays, many Instagrammers post old pictures of themselves or friends or moments from the past.

I really enjoy TBT, especially when there's a story behind the photo that the poster chose to unearth.

I never have any old photos to post, because the scanner we have at home is garbage, and also because most of my old photos, for some reason, still live at my parents' house.

But this week, my Mom had me look on the Facebook page of one of her friends, because he had posted old photos of her and my Dad from fall 1972 at Tufts University, before I was even conceived.

These pictures are priceless.

Check out my Mom, her earrings and her Afro:

She was 18 here. Eighteen!

She looks so much like Cary here, I can't get over it.

 

And here's my Dad and his Afro and his 20-year-old physique:

I have no idea who this random woman is, looking so happy to be squeezed by my Afro'ed Daddy.

Anyway, these pictures make me ask so many questions.

What was my Mom thinking when she was staring into space like that?
How did she get her baby-fine hair into an Afro?
What was going on in their lives and in the world at this time?

In other words, I love the photos, but I really want the story behind them!

Who is that chick with my Dad? Who are those people in the photos behind them? Were Mom and Dad dating yet at this point? Was Mom always so effortlessly beautiful? What is the story??

This is why my Mom and Dad should have had a BLOG back in the day! I would have devoured every word.

Detective Mom and The Mystery of the Fallen Pacifiers

Clair has a bit of a problem with her pacis. She's addicted. When it comes time for her father and me to break her of this habit, I don't predict it will be pretty.

In order to keep my little addict from going through paci withdrawal over night, I have resorted to putting a jillion of the little suckers (get it?) in her crib at night, and I roll up receiving blankets and stuff them between the crib slats and the mattress, to try to prevent them from falling out.

But try as I might to prevent fallen pacis, every morning there are a near-jillion pacifiers on the floor near her crib. (She always has one in her mouth, so it's usually a jillion minus one.)

We all know Clair is a wild sleeper. But I just could not understand how she managed to litter the floor with pacifiers so successfully every night.

Good thing I grew up reading Encyclopedia Brown and Trixie Belden books! Because, I think I might have solved The Mystery of the Fallen Pacifiers.

That girl there on the cover? That's me.

Fun with Black History Month

In addition to February forever being known as the month Clair Davis was born, it also has another claim to fame.

It's Black History Month!

I have conflicting thoughts about Black History Month and have since I was in high school. But my boys have been learning about famous African Americans in school and seem to enjoy it, and some neighbors hosted a "Black History Month" costume party at their house this weekend, so I've been getting into it more than usual, for the kids' sake.

I agonized over what to have the children be for their costumes, because I didn't want to buy anything, really, and I also didn't want to be so Martin Luther King/ Rosa Parks obvious.

In the end, we decided to have Dean be Thurgood Marshall, because he's a truly great historical figure (hello, Brown vs. Board of Ed) and he's from Baltimore. Holla!

And we opted to have Cary be Tommie Smith, who is more famous for this iconic picture (a favorite of my Dad's) than he is for what he actually did, which was to win the gold medal in the 200-meter dash in the 1968 Olympics.

With the help of my Mom, who quickly pulled together two pieces of black fabric for a judge's robe, a store-bought gavel and mustache and one of Lester's ties, we turned Dean into the first black Supreme Court justice.

And with a University of Maryland track jacket and pants (which once belonged to Russy) that we plastered over with hand-drawn "USA" patches, an American flag from the dollar store, an old medal we had hanging around from one of Lester's work events and a black glove, we turned Cary into one of the most enduring, and controversial, symbols of the 1960s black power movement.

Cary thought being in costume meant he had to scare people. So he kept going up to folks at the party, talking like Cookie Monster and pretending to eat them. Dean was too focused on not tripping over his judge's robe to do much else.

But they had fun listening to the African storyteller (Maria Broom, of The Wire, which was really cool!) and playing with all the other African-American greats-in-miniature. And I'm glad now I put my silly issues aside, and didn't blow this off. 

Clair is 1!

I wanted to write a whole big thing about my baby girl turning 1, but I got slammed this weekend with all sorts of things, including her not-a-party at my parents' house (more on that later, with photos!) And then today, which was supposed to be a day off, I got slammed at work.

So I'll just repost my Facebook status about Clair from her big day (Feb. 16) and most importantly, post a few of the BEAUTIFUL photos Angel took of her. I'll gush more appropriately about the 1-year-old child (Ack!) and the photo-perfection in a later post.

One year ago, God threw the Davis family the best Curveball ever: Clair! In the year that's passed since she surprised us with her existence, we've never laughed, smiled or loved so hard. Clair truly lives up to the meaning of her name (without the "e," it's French for "light") and we are overwhelmingly blessed just to get to live near her shine. Happy 1st Birthday to the best surprise ever!

Fave!

FAVE!

Awwww!

Happy Valentine's Day

Michelle sent me this picture of my silly little Clairzee this morning.

I'm still sick, sick but I dragged my a** in to work today and I am not loving life right about now, but this picture just made me laugh. So I thought I'd share -- I hope it makes your day a little happier too.

Happy Valentine's Day, all!

My first photo retraction

I caught a lot of flack about posting the photo yesterday of the boys on their potties. Lester was good-natured about it, but let me know that he wasn't thrilled. Angel made me worried about weirdos lurking around every mouse-click. And sooo many people on Facebook said my kids would hate me for that picture later, I actually started to get sad thinking about it.

So I took it down.

I want this blog to be honest -- our family, warts and all. But I don't want to embarrass my children unnecessarily. And I certainly don't want to compromise their safety. So I'll admit that I made a mistake (even though I thought the photo was cute!) and move on.

And just to even the score, here's a picture of me this morning, no make-up, sick as a dog (AGAIN!), in my bathrobe, in bed:

Lovely, no? I especially love my double chins and Kimora Lee Simmons neck rolls on full display. And what you can't see are the balled-up tissues strewn all about, or the half-eaten oatmeal on my nightstand, or the laundry that needs folding all over everywhere.

Seriously. Can it just be spring already? I have never been sick so much in my life. Excuse me while I go blow my nose -- again.

And so it begins...

Potty training has begun in earnest in our house.

It happened literally overnight.

On Saturday, everyone was in diapers, relieving themselves at will, without any thought about it.
On Sunday, Dean said he had to go potty, we sat him on the potty and he went.
Later he did it again. And again. Until it was so close to bathtime, I didn't want to put another diaper on him, so on a lark, I put on Big Boy Underwear. He told me two more times after that that he had to go -- and each time he did.

On Monday, we sent him to school with BBUs, and would you believe it? NO accidents.
And all day long, no accidents.

Somewhere along in there, Cary decided he didn't want to be left out of the potty parade.
He has less success actually going when he's on the potty, but we praise him nonetheless for trying.
Every time Dean says he has to go, Cary wants to try too. So there has been a LOT of pottying in our house the last two days. A LOT.

This morning, both boys went to school with BBUs, so we'll see how that goes.
Of course, as soon as we were about to leave the house to go to school, Dean said he had to go potty, and Cary parroted him. So we sat and sat and sat and eventually ended up late (of course), but what else can you do when they're just beginning but accommodate their every urge to sit and try?

Nothing happened (of course) but when we got to school, Dean said he had to go again. (Cary chimed in, of course.) So Miss Toni and I marched them to the school bathroom where Dean really did have to go and Cary really did have to try.  And 15 minutes later, I was late for work.

Ugh.

And people keep telling Lester and me all about the awesomeness that now awaits us in terms of having to rush through public places trying to find bathrooms for panicked toddlers, having to wake them up in the middle of the night to pee (or worse, to change clothes and sheets) and all the cleaning up and laundry and inability to drive long distances unencumbered. 

Ugh.

Is it wrong to be happy that they're growing, getting more independent and inching their way toward a diaper-free existence, and at the same time dread all that comes with it?

Even if they do look super cute in their little Big Boy undies!

Seriously awesome weekend!

So much great stuff happened this weekend, I would be here all day writing if I didn't break it into manageable chunks.

First ... Clair perfected her get-down-get-funky dance, and it is the best part of my day.

The girl's got rhythm, no? Takes after her Mommy. Sorry, Lester. You know it's true.

Also, we went to Storyville again, and Clair really got into it, as opposed to the last time we came, when she was a teenier baby and conked out the entire time.

Fun with magnets.

The Davis family took over a whole section of Storyville. We roll deep, yo!

The boys' second time at the library was a huge success. While I picked out books that were all on a waitlist, dangit, they picked out books to take home, put 'em in a basket, and then sat down -- uninstructed by me -- and started "reading." Yes. My boys are awesome.

Seriously, I turned around from the library counter and this was happening. I almost fell over.

Also, drumroll please ...... Dean Ezra Davis earned himself a pair of Elmo-covered Big Boy Underpants for successfully declaring his need for the potty -- and then successfully using said potty -- three times in a row!

"I'm getting bigger!" he said, after putting on his underwear.

He was sooo excited! And when he also woke up this morning with a dry diaper, and went to the potty first thing in the morning, we also decided to send him TO SCHOOL WITH HIS BIG BOY UNDERPANTS ON!  I have no idea how this turned out. I will have to call Michelle at some point and see if there were accidents, but I'm too scared.

For his part, Cary tries, but he is not having as much success as his brother. But he melts down when Dean gets a Raisinet for his potty-success, and he doesn't, and he wants to wear Big Boy Underpants, too. So, being the sucker that I am, I just give him a chocolate raisin for "trying," and I put underpants on over his diaper. This seems to satisfy him for now. But it's making a mockery of the incentives. Oh well.No one said parenting was easy.

But the total cherry on top of this sweet-sundae of a weekend, was piling my entire family into the minivan and driving 100 hours to Angel's house in Virginia, where we got Clair's 1st Birthday photos taken, hugged and squealed over one another, ate, drank, laughed and had the. best. time.

Of course, I have NO photos of us together because I was so focused on Clair and her photo shoot, I lost my phone for several crucial hours in Angel's bedroom. But Angel has documented the fun, fun day here on her excellent blog (which you should be reading, anyway, if you're not already because she is absolutely hysterical and her children are gorgeous).

Angel and I have become such good friends over the course of the last 3+ years, seeing us together on Saturday, you would never have known that we've only actually met in person twice -- yesterday's visit counting as one of the two times. Being with her was so easy and warm and familiar, it was like we were lifelong friends. I was so happy to be in her house, cooing at her babies, laughing with her two Roars, eating fine cuisine (LOL!) and drinking supremely tasty cocktails. (I was a little tipsy when the night was over, but don't tell my children.)

Anyway, I am always amazed at what a great job I do picking friends. Just about all the women in my life are fabulous in so many ways, I marvel at how much awesomeness would be in one room if I was lucky enough to get them all together. Angel is no exception. She is beautiful, talented, smart, skilled in a wide range of things, a loving, kind and inspirational Mom, creative, generous and has great hair.

I kind of hate her.

But when I start to get jealous, I think about how those talents often benefit ME (of course). For example, her skills with a camera give me sweet shots like these:

Tahira, don't ask me what I'm doing with her hair. OK? I don't. frikkin.' know.

Isn't that so cute? I can't wait to see the rest of her photos! Most importantly, I hope we can find time to get together more often, now that we know that we fit together like orange juice and coconut rum. And oh, how sweet it is.