Lawyer Mama

Family

I am a solitary person.  I'm introverted.  No matter how talkative I may to the outside world, I live inside my head.

I'm only my true self at home, with those I love.

Despite my need for solitude, I find myself following my children around even when they don't need me. 

I watch them play. 

I help them draw. 

I tickle their toes.

We jump on the beds.

We make peanut butter sandwiches shaped like bunnies.  I give them extra jelly.

We have popcorn fights.  (Shh, don't tell Daddy.)

I, who once couldn't stand to sleep with anyone touching me, can only rest easy with little toddler toes and elbows poking into my back.

I seek them out, these little creatures of dirt and noise and toddler sweat. 

I pull them onto the sofa; they crawl onto my lap, fighting over the spot between my knees or under my shoulder.

They settle into me, cheek on my chest, soft curls tucked under my chin.

They draw me out of my head and into their world.  I am present and in the moment in a way I never thought I could be.

I revel in the sheer physicality, the closeness, the slight claustrophobia of my family.

They are my everything. My soul, my frustration, my exultation, my solitude, my rest, my work, my peace.

We sprawl together, a pile of plump, pink limbs, until I can't tell where they begin and where I end.

I Can't Seem To Live Without My Camera

So you know how I whined and whined about my camera being broken?  It's been all of what, a week since I took my D40x in for repairs. 

I just bought a D60.

Seriously.

For mother's day my hubby sort of got me a Sigma 18-200mm lens.  I say "sort of" because I picked it out and said, "T, I want this."  Guess what I got?

Anyway, the Sigma lens covers the entire range of the 18-55mm kit lens that I broke along with my D40x.  So, when I get the D40x and its lens back, I'm going to sell it.  I figured, why not?  It will be refurbished by Nikon and still under warranty.

So, my new camera should be here in a few days.  I hope I can wait that long.

Does this mean I have a problem?
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In case you're wondering what I've learned since I got my digital SLR, took that photography class, and actually made an effort to learn something about light and composition, you can check out the new Lawyer Mama Dabbles.

I've posted some flower shots I took this week with my point and shoot camera.  Comparing these shots with those from my point and shoot camera last year, it looks like I might have learned something after all.  Go figure.

Oh and yes, I did say new Lawyer Mama Dabbles.  I moved it over to Typepad. Now that I've figured out a painless route for importing content, it only took about 15 minutes.  In the coming weeks I'm hoping to modify my code so I can have nifty little menu tabs up at the top so you can just click a button and go to my photography or review blogs. 

I'll do it in my nonexistent spare time!

Let's Keep 'Em Poor & Uneducated

Updated to add conference call link below.

This afternoon I participated in a blogger teleconference with John McCain to discuss the statements he made earlier today about how he foresees his first term in office. Because apparently it's very presidential to pretend that you've already won the election before you even officially have the Republican nomination.

First, I have to mention that MOMocrat Joanne Bamberger got a scoop on the call.  In response to her questions and several follow up questions, he stated that he will appoint Democrats to his administration.  (Assuming he has one.  And you know what happens when you assume?  You make an ass out of u and me.)  After listening to her dogged questioning, I can understand why Joanne is such a great journalist.  I bet she was a hell of a lawyer too!

The big news in John McCain's remarks this morning was, of course, his statement that,

By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom.... The Iraq War has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension....

Senator McCain didn't get to my question (although he did answer questions from MOMocrats Erin Kotecki-Vest and Joanne Bamberger).  I couldn't believe that not one person asked exactly how McCain intends to change the course of the war so dramatically in 5 years.  Because, despite McCain's claims that he's going to focus on what's "doable" I'm not seeing victory in Iraq, particularly in 5 years, as "doable."

I forwarded my questions to someone in his campaign in the hopes that he will answer them.  Here they are in full:

1. Senator, you said you agree that the war in Iraq was mishandled for the first 4 years.  Can you give us some specifics about what you perceive as the current administration's mistakes in Iraq and what you would do differently to achieve such a marked decrease in violence in the region by 2013?
2. Do you foresee adding troops or continuing the surge in the area? Or do you foresee implementing a national draft to increase troops with our current forces under such strain?
3. You've stated that you are in favor of increasing GI Bill educational benefits for soldiers.  I've also read that you, and others, believe that the educational benefit as currently implemented, encourages soldiers to leave the military in pursuit of education and that the length of time soldiers should serve before receiving benefits should be increased. Has there been any research on this issue or is this just based on supposition?  It seems to me that any extended length of time might actually discourage some from joining the military.

While, I would love to receive answers regarding the first 2 questions, I don't expect to get back much of substance.  What I really want to know is McCain's answer to my third question regarding GI Bill benefits.

While McCain made a point of mentioning on the call that he is in favor of increasing educational benefits for soldiers, he also indicated that he thinks we should work on ways to retain soldiers.  What he didn't say is that he thinks the benefit should be increased, but soldiers should only be able to get it if they stay in longer.

For those of you unfamiliar with GI benefits, after a certain term in the military, usually 3-4 years, you receive a certain amount of money to use for college, living expenses while in school, and graduate school.  It's definitely worth it to some people, particularly those who can't pay for college any other way.

My husband, in fact, got through college this way.  He joined the Navy at 17, spent 3 years on active duty and then went into the reserves.  He finished college in the 3 years after he got out of the Navy and then went on to graduate school, where he met me.  Even with his GI bill money, he was basically living on Ramon noodle.

So basically, certain people in Congress, and apparently John McCain, want to keep people who can't pay for college in the military to be used as cannon fodder for a bit longer before they hand over the school dough.  They want to keep poor people in the military and out of college.

Think about that for a minute.

The military is already disproportionately made up of men and women from the lower socioeconomic strata in this country.  Why?  Because the military provides training and good benefits, like money for college.  Many people, like my husband (and my brother) join the military specifically so that they can pay for college.  So what better way to keep them in the military then to keep them uneducated and relatively poor for as long as possible?

Hey, maybe McCain will get lucky and those kids who might have left for college after 4 years will pick up a spouse and children during the longer wait.  Once a college education becomes economically impossible with a family to support, they'll have them for life. 

Bravo.  Brilliant plan.

I admit that this post is snarkier than usual because John McCain managed to really piss me off during the call.  Why?  Erin asked him a hard question he didn't want to answer, so he was patronizing and condescending to her, telling her she either hadn't read or didn't understand his statement earlier today and, "I'll try to clear it up for you." But I'm sure Erin will have plenty to say on this topic over at the BlogHer, so I'll leave it to her to tell the whole story.

Updated to add:

****You have no idea how much I had to fight the urge to name this post, "McCain you ignorant slut!"

Cross posted at MOMocrats.

Me, Unguarded

My 35 year old self with all it flaws.

The sun damage and freckles on my forehead and nose; the mole my son calls my "chocolate chip"; the lines on my forehead that don't go away when I relax my brow; the beginnings of crows feet; the eyebrows that need to be waxed; the lips that need a gloss.

These spots and wrinkles, blemishes and flaws.  These are my badges of honor, of wisdom, of womanhood.  They are who I am, who I was, and who I will be.

They are beautiful.

I am beautiful.

The Unexplainable War

How do you explain war to a 3 year old?

Sure, Hollis will make pretty much anything (even his railroad track parts) into a sword and he pretends to shoot people all the time.  But at this age he really has no concept of death, aside from the demise of his cat.

The whole discussion started because T is preparing for an exercise with his Navy reserve unit.  (The last one he will ever participate in before retiring.  WOOHOO!) While he was getting his uniforms ready, Hollis asked him what an army was and if he could see a picture of one on the computer.

Aside from being amazed at his early grasp of the power of The Google, I realized that I hadn't shown Hollis any pictures of Uncle B lately.  You see, "Uncle B" is off in the middle east having a grand old time in the insane heat, sand and dust.  B's unit has a photo page for friends and family, so I showed Hollis a few of Uncle B that I had found.

Then Hollis requested a photo of an "Army truck."  So we looked at a few shots of Humvees.  On the back of each vehicle is a large sign with two stop signs and a message in Arabic and English.  It reads "DANGER STAY BACK."  Hollis, being in the midst of the Age of Why, wanted to know why they had the signs there.  Oof. 

I tried the standard, "Well, cars and people could get hurt by that big Army truck if they get too close."  He wasn't buying it, pointing out that tractors are bigger.  So I stupidly said, "Sometimes bad people try to get too close to the trucks and blow them up."

Geez, louise, Steph.  What were you thinking?

Hollis, was understandably a bit upset and wanted to know why bad people would want to hurt Uncle B and he also wanted to know where the bad people are.  That led to a whole toddler level discussion about Uncle B trying to make sure that bad people don't hurt anyone ever again.  I couldn't bring myself to try to tell a 3 year old that they want to blow soldiers up to get us out of the middle east, where we shouldn't be in the first place.

Hollis barely understands what a country is, let alone a foreign one.  When I recently told him he lived in the United States he insisted, "No, Mommy, I live in Chesapeake."  He also barely understands the concept of God, let alone that there can be different ideas of God taken seriously enough to kill.

This isn't one of those stories where I tie everything up with a neat little parenting or policy bow at the end.  I honestly have no idea how to handle his questions.  I'm just muddling through the best I can without forcing my little man to grow up to the realities of this cruel world too soon.

If someone's going to write yet another parenting manual, I hope they deal with this, the hard stuff, instead of how to handle picking a preschool, educational toys, and the occasional time out.  Because that stuff was a cake walk compared to discussing war.

**Photo from the Golf 237 web site by photographer PFC Joseph Lyons. Uncle B is the soldier with the neon yellow strap.

Cross posted at MOMocrats.

Negotiating With a Toddler

At the age of 2, Hollis only said a couple of things: mine, no, and Daddy.  Yeah, no Mommy for that kid.  Not until he was like 2 1/2.  Traitor.

I'm not sure when things changed so dramatically, but now at the age of 3 1/2, the kid won't shut up.  He has an answer for everything.  If he asks us a question and doesn't like our answer, he will insist that we are wrong.  Even if I'm telling him something like "Mommy is a girl and Daddy is a boy."  I'll get back from Hollis something like, "No, Mommy.  Daddy isn't a boy.  I'm a boy.  Daddy is big and I'm littler than he is so Daddy is not a boy."  I thought we were supposed to be all knowing until he hit his pre-teen years.  What happened?

Honestly, I'm thinking of sending Hollis to the middle east to broker a peace agreement or maybe using him during my next mediation.  The kid is relentless.

Here's a recent conversation between Hollis and T over whether or not Hollis could have some more candy from a birthday goody bag.

Hollis: "Daddy, can I have these now?"  (Holding aloft a small package of Sweet Tarts.)
T: "No, Hollis.  We're going to have dinner when we get home."
Hollis: "But I want them."
T: "I know you do, but they'll spoil your dinner."
Hollis: "But they're good."
T: "Yes, I know they're tasty, but you need to eat dinner."
Hollis: "But they are dinner."
T: ?????  (Stunned silence) "Huh? They're candy, Hollis."
Hollis: "No, they aren't. See the package says dinner."  Pointing to the words "Sweet Tart" on the package H says, "that spells DINNNNNNNERRRRR."

Let's see.  We have: (1) a passionate love of the sound of his own voice; (2) an opinion about everything;  (3) the inability to admit an error; and (4) blatant disregard for the facts in pursuit of his own agenda. 

I think I've given birth to a future lawyer.

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I have a review up on Law(yer Mama) Review for a new photo subscription service called Kinzin.  It's wonderful for keeping the grandparents up to date!

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For now, Lawyer Mama Dabbles is going to stay on Blogger.  I need to recover from the trauma of this move before I try moving all my photos!  I'll keep posting there, but I've also set up an album on this blog with some of my favorite photos from Lawyer Mama Dabbles and my Flickr account.  I actually like it because you can view the photos much larger than you can on the blog.

TypePad Can Suck It (WordPress Rocks)

The Scream (with apologies to Edvard Munch)

In my inaugural post here I alluded to the large pain in the rear I had setting up my TypePad blog.  The configuring and all that was just fine.  I got my lovely banner and colors fixed up easily.

No, the problem was importing my content from Blogger.

You see, Blogger and TypePad don't speak the same language.  The blog formats are different.  Or at least that's what TypePad's help page and Blogger's help page told me.  Apparently no one at TypePad has bothered to write some little program to make importing Blogger content easy and painless. 

I did, however, have the option of reformatting my Blogger blog, saving it to my computer & then importing it into Typepad.  So I did that.  If at any time in the last 7 days, you went to my blogspot blog & it looked all wonky and unformatted, that's what I was doing.  Saving my content for the 5000th time.

I say 5000th time because it just didn't work.  I followed Blogger's directions first.  It imported about half of my posts.  Then I tried TypePad's directions (which were slightly different).  It imported all of my posts - twice - and no comments.  I tried a slightly different version of the code format and got all my posts but only 10% of my comments.  I tried the same code again and got only 42 posts and no comments.  The same exact code!  And there's no easy way  to start over on Typepad.  I had to go through and delete every. single. post. every time.  That's 342 posts and almost 5,000 comments.  ARGH!

I was a heartbeat away from stabbing myself in the eye with a binder clip just to ease the pain.

So finally, after spending several days and countless hours messing with the code to try and get all of my content imported, I started a WordPress blog.  It took me 3 minutes to export my content from Blogger to WordPress.  It got every comment, tag, and post on the first try.

Then I exported from WordPress to my computer and finally successfully imported all of my posts and comments to TypePad in only 2 tries.

But, Typepad?  If I hadn't been able to export from WordPress to TypePad so quickly?  I would be canceling my 14 day trial period and over at WordPress for good right now.  So take heed and talk to the people at Blogger!  If you want us to come over here from Blogger and pay for the privilege, then you need to make getting here a little easier. 

And, Typepad? If y'all read this and actually care and would like to offer me a free account for awhile to make up for the loads of inconvenience and wasted time, I wouldn't be opposed.  You have my email.

My fellow blogging peeps?  If you're thinking of making a jump to a new blog host, go with WordPress.  It has all the options you have on TypePad and it's a hell of a lot easier to use!

P.S. Now that I've angered the TypePad gods, If my blog suddenly disappears overnight you'll all know why.

My Nikon is Sick....

I'm depressed today.  Despite having a wonderful Mother's Day morning, complete with a sleep in, pancakes, kisses, hugs, and flowers, something is missing.

You see, I broke my camera.  My lovely new Nikon that I've grown very attached to over the last 4 or 5 months.

Last weekend we took the boys to the botanical gardens for the day. It was beautiful and we had a great time.  Until the end.

I fell trying to catch Holden, my daredevil child.  I twisted my ankle (pictures to follow soon), gouged a nice chunk out of my knee, and almost saved the camera.  (Hmmmm.... That falling part sounds so familiar....)

When I landed, my right hand came down on the concrete while holding the camera.  My hand and the LCD screen took the brunt of the blow, but the lens popped off.  One of the threads that holds the lens onto the camera broke off.  The camera itself seemed to be fine.  I've been using my 50mm manual focus lens on it for the last week.  But a few days ago the exposure started going all wonky while I was shooting some photos of the boys.

So yesterday I brought my lens and camera into the repair shop.  The bad news?  When we popped the cap off of the camera body, a broken piece of black plastic fell out.  One of the seals around the sensor and mirror inside cracked in half and is lodged down in the camera. The good news?  Nikon can probably fix the camera and the lens for between $200-$300.  (Better than buying a new one!)

More bad news? It will take 4 to 6 weeks.

I, who have carried my camera absolutely everywhere for the last 4 months, am now cameraless.

Well, I do have my little Nikon Coolpix point and shoot camera, but it's not the same.  I tried to take some photos of the boys with it today and found myself incredibly frustrated.  It's slow; I can't manipulate the settings or focus the way I'm used to; and the picture quality just sucks compared to my Nikon D40x.

There is some more good news in all of this.  When I was refamiliarizing myself with my point and shoot camera, I found a treasure: 5 photos saved in the camera's small memory, not on the memory card.  I somehow missed them when I uploaded the photos from the camera 2 years ago.

Here's what I found:

Holden, 3 weeks

Now that's a reminder to be thankful for my blessings.
Happy Mother's Day.

Happy Mother's Day!

If you made your way over here, leave me a comment so I know you're here.  I'd hate to be rambling around this place wondering "Is anyone here?  Is anyone listening?"

It was truly a large pain in my rear end to move my content from Blogger to Typepad and I'm still updating.  You'll notice I haven't changed my links yet and some photos are missing.  I'm slowly working on it. I'm also sure there's something I can do to my feed to make sure it picks up this blog instead of the Blogger one, but I have no idea what it is. If you happen to be more technologically proficient than I am, please let me know what I should do. 

Although, I'm feeling pretty damn proud right now just because I've gotten this far all by myself!  (Well, the gods of Google and many nameless techno blogs helped too!)

But I digress.... Welcome to my new home!  Make yourself at home, curl up on the couch & stay and chat.  If you're really nice, I'll even let you try on my shoes.

And, Mom?  Happy Mother's Day.  I love you.

Dreams of a Mother

One of our fabulous MOMocrat sisters pointed us to a wonderful site this week. On it was the Mother's Day Proclamation by Julia Ward Howe. Julia was the founder of Mother's Day and the writer of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, but she was so much more. She was a mother, an early feminist, abolitionist, poet, and writer.

After the Civil War, Julia had a dream, a dream of peace. She believed that peace was the most important social cause of her time and she wrote about it tirelessly:

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:

We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

First Stanza of The Mother's Day Proclamation by Julia Ward Howe.

Julia's proclamation stands as a reminder to all of us that this Sunday is not about flowers, candy, and brunch. It's about fighting for your beliefs, whatever they may be. It's about political activism. It's about standing up for justice.

The MOMocrats will each be writing about our own dreams as mothers and we encourage all of you to join us over the next week. In true MOMocrats style, each MOMocrat will be sharing a political or social issue close to her heart. We'd love it if you did too, but your own special non-political dreams are important as well. We want the world to hear them.

Take the button above, write about your own Dream of a Mother and link back to MOMocrats. Come back and comment and give us your link so we can read about your special dream.

Here's the code for your site:

<center><a href="http://momocrats.typepad.com"><img border="0" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v470/steph-trey/DreamsofaMotherButtoncopy.jpg" alt="MOMocrats: Dreams of a Mother" /></a></center>

Don't forget to link back to http://momocrats.typepad.com. We want to hear your dream.


After the Wish by Lawyer Mama
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Speaking of social justice, the Just Post Roundtable links are up over at Jen's place, Mad's place, and Su's place. These women work every month to bring us some of the best of the blogosphere. I love reading the Just Posts because it reminds me that, no matter how small I feel at times, speaking out will change the world.