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Worst. Year. Ever. for sickness. Since about October or November, The Bean and I have been hit with whatever’s going around and then some. January was the worst ever. Flu for him, flu for me, cold for him, sinus infection for me … cold for me. Worst ever.

Until February. Starting last week, it was like this: Flu for him. Flu for me. Chipper recovery for him, though a lingering cough prevented him going back to preschool (which he just started on Feb. 1 after January’s round, I might add). Disgusting mystery illness for me that involved progressively worsening nausea and the nastiness that goes with that. The only reason the blog had anything was because I was bedridden–just put a few things up whenever I felt well enough. My mother’s here now taking care of us, and she doesn’t fly 2000 miles across the country for little trifling colds. We are sick as dogs. I’m on the mend, but it’ll come slowly. Meanwhile, just as I am beginning the upswing a bit, the boy comes down with high fever and a stomach bug.

I swear, if I start throwing up again I will hunt down and kill the person who gave us this one. As soon as we are well, we are getting the hell out of this infested hive of a state where the temperature doesn’t freeze anything to death even in the dead of winter and going out to my mother’s country place. In North Carolina. Far from many of the things of man. Far from noise and disease-ridden human beings. To bring out that old saw, I am sick and tired of being sick and fracking tired. No CPAC for me. No nothing much for me, including food.

At least I’m well enough to feel like watching a movie. Mom hasn’t yet seen The Illusionist. Edward Norton is positively mesmerizing. Mmm, Edward Norton.

A comparison between childbirth (which I’ve successfully navigated), stomach flu (which I had last spring) and regular flu (which I have now):

Yes, labor contractions are painful. They are also relatively short and separated by periods of blissful relief. Stomach flu, by contrast, keeps you at a medium-level nausea for as much as an hour at a time, and the violent retching required to reach the “relief” stage is dreaded almost as much as the relief is anticipated. After which the long spell of nausea returns. Haha, sucker.

As for regular flu, try nine hours of high fever, chills, bone-rattling aches,* and again with the nausea, far more prolonged because the illness isn’t actually in your stomach but just causes collateral damage in the stomach due to respiratory drainage, resolved at some point by the violent retching aforementioned, but could easily return. Labor is long, but remittent. And unlike violent retching, the actual act of birthing is, compared to labor, hardly painful at all. It’s a relief to start doing the work that leads to the reward. And let’s not forget the three days or so of lassitude that go with both flus, the respiratory congestion that goes with regular flu, that leave you eating nothing and drinking little more, in bed and, when not in discomfort, pretty bored. All hail the bedside laptop. But I digress: the reward.

Oh yeah, the reward. At the end of childbirth, you have someone to show for it. At the end of either flu, all you have are weak muscles, shaky limbs, dirty house, cabin-fever child. If the flu could behave like labor for a couple days and then vanish, I’d hardly complain at all. So cheer up, ladies: If you contemplate having a child but fear what’s involved, trust me: if you’ve had either type of flu, childbirth ought to be a piece of cake.

*No, I didn’t take a fever reducer like acetaminophen or ibuprofen (the latter would almost certainly have come back up anyway). I suspect, possibly erroneously but with some observational justification, that as long as the fever is at a manageable temperature, the overall illness will be shorter if it’s allowed to run its course. I didn’t take painkillers during childbirth, either. Fair comparison.

A good friend of mine did graduate work at Texas A&M, her husband received his PhD there, and their daughter graduated last spring. Their daughter played soccer for the school. At a match, my friend met and became friendly with Mrs. Robert Gates, wife of the outgoing president of Texas A&M and incoming U.S Secretary of Defense.

My friend has Mrs. Gates’s number in her cell phone. Kinda cool, no?

In the wake of the Flying Imams, SeeDubya is concerned about similar incidents going unreported. He quotes Brent Bozell on an airline arrest he witnessed and describes his own harrowing experience on a plane that had an engine fire on takeoff. Though obviously SeeDub’s right that the airline has no incentive to report a fire in the engine to the media, I think they’re in something of a cleft stick regarding incidents like the one Bozell saw: they fear lawsuits, but at the same time, knowing that they’re playing it safe would reassure a lot of average travellers that the airlines and law enforcment won’t allow anybody, imams or no, to get away with the equivalent of screaming “WORLD TRADE CENTER!” on a crowded jetliner. In addition, I think the public deserves to know the outcome of these cases–are the people arrested? Imprisoned? For how long? Do they lead to potential terrorist networks? Are they joyriders looking to see how far they can push?

More than a month ago, my first cousin, a sturdy North Carolina boy, was on his way home from basic training with the U.S. Air Force. He was wearing his uniform. In the Atlanta airport, he was accosted and attacked by a man of unidentified foreign origin, screaming at him in a language my cousin didn’t recognize. The man grabbed for my cousin’s uniform ribbons and threw them on the floor as well as assaulting him physically. Cousin–did I mention he was returning from basic training?–put attacker on the floor fairly quickly; security appeared and accepted at face value cousin’s account of the attack (possibly with assistance from witnesses). They collected the attacker and left. And that was it. They didn’t take my cousin’s name or ask him for a statement; to my knowledge there was no follow-up. I called the Atlanta airport and Atlanta PD to see if I could find out anything, but I’m a rank novice at acting like press; I left a message in the airport’s PR office that wasn’t returned and got a bit of a runaround from the PD. I let it drop. I didn’t blog it at the time because I hadn’t spoken to anybody in Atlanta.

I’d sure like to know what happened to that person who attacked a U.S. serviceman in a public airport for no other reason than that he is a serviceman. Perhaps our friend the prosecutor can tell us if charges can be pressed without a statement from the victim or from witnesses. I know where I’d bet my money.

Update: In the interest of strict accuracy, I should note I was mistaken about my cousin’s point of origin–he was not returning from basic training, but from specialist training. Sorry for the error.

The Bean (age three, at the moment) has a book by James Thurber (!) called Many Moons. In it, the court jester finds that the princess can easily be given what she wants–the moon–because she is deceived as to its nature. Though I’m not sure the moral is sound–it might be psychologically healthier to modify our wishes to things that are within our grasp, but surely not under deception–it’s a cute book and won the Caldecott Medal for illustrations by Louis Slobodkin.

Tonight in the car, The Bean was entranced by the moon, talking about how it was following us home (it was) and how much he loves the moon (he does) and how much the moon loves him (it does). I asked him how big the moon is, thinking he would give the answer of the Princess Lenore from his book: just a little smaller than his thumbnail. Instead his answer surprised me: “It’s big enough.”

Back from a trip that grew longer than planned. After Thanksgiving week, The Little Bean and I spent a nice few days with my mother, my sister, her husband, and The Flower Girl, who got herself a personality since I saw her in October. She smiles, coos with great intensity and purpose, and pushes up with her two-month-old legs. She’s a feisty one.

Home again with the laundry and the clutter and the three-year-old who’s not satisfied with any of his pre-vacation activities. Have I mentioned to you prospective or new parents out there to forget anything anybody tells you about the Terrible Twos? Age three is when the grease hits the pan.

In college, I had a politically aware roommate who enthusiastically took advantage of our school’s cultural offerings. While we were at school, she heard speak, among others, P.J. O’Rourke, Dr. Ruth, Patrick Stewart, and Spike Lee, whilst I preferred to either moulder in our room, reading or watching TV; moulder in a computer lab, hopelessly addicted to what were then the very new-fangled interwebs; or moulder at another school about an hour distant, macking it up with my boyfriend.

The irony comes in here: the very interwebs that once kept me from broadening my horizons are now my primary connection to politics, culture (at least the pop kind), and information generally. Good thing I’m still addicted.

Where’re you going, instead of staying and blogging?

To my ten-year college reunion. Ulp.

Where’ve you been all week, instead of blogging?

Getting ready to go to my ten-year college reunion. Shopping for clothes is a huge pain in the ass.

Update: And what’s your excuse this week?

…

Lest anyone think that blogging is a walk in the park, it’s not. It would be even less so if I cared about my traffic. It’s a difficult matter to find things over the course of the day (if you blog at night as I do) that are 1) relevant, 2) interesting, 3) open to augmentation by comments of mine. Multiply these items by 1) the Blog-Saturation Factor (i.e. the number of blogs I read every day plus the number I comment on, which eats up no small amount of time and prevents me from wandering around for stories that I haven’t already seen blogged), and 2) the Toddler Factor. While it’s true that blogsurfing is relatively easy to do with a toddler about, easier than many things that can’t be dropped on a dime when The Little Bean needs Mommy for reading books, pretend-cooking plastic food, or taking her shot like a big girl when it’s time to play doctor, the Toddler Factor also doesn’t make for long stretches of coherent thought.

So in the spirit of blogging whatever comes to the fore when I sit down to the “Write Post” page, here is the Easing Back In rundown.

1) Look what SeeDub found just for me! Bonus: in addition to the LotR fun, I’m always pleased to find other conservative-type Oregon bloggers about. Yes, Virginia, they do exist, and the proof shall be added to the blogroll. Also, according to Michael Medved, so does Bigfoot. Who, I’m quite sure, is also an Oregon resident.

2) Allah’s losing the South. I’m thinking a blog caucus: The Southerners of Hot Air. Bryan, SeeDub, Mary Katharine Ham, yours truly, and the commenters who gave AP the static. We could make a calendar. With pictures of country ham, grits, biscuits and gravy (cream OR redeye), fried apples, mashed potatoes, pinto beans, and cornbread, of course! What kind of calendar were you thinking about?

3) Speaking of food, Nina Planck says sausage and gravy are good for me. As well as butter, cream, cheese, red meat, eggs cooked in bacon grease, and basically anything the medical establishment has warned against in the last thirty years except refined sugar and flour. And trans fats. Those are definitely bad; ironically, they arose to replace the butter and lard that were supposedly so dangerous. I’m reading her book, Real Food: What to Eat and Why, right now. I’m hooked. She confirms things I’ve thought for a long time but haven’t had the research to back up: namely, that naturally produced fats like butter and lard have got to be better for you than manufactured cooking oils. Turns out they are. Hallelujah! She’s got more good stuff: the reason why I’m mildly lactose intolerant, enough that although I think I want a bowl of cereal, when I’m done eating, it turns out I really didn’t want it after all, might be because industrial processing breaks down the very enzyme in milk, lactase, that aids in the body’s processing of lactose! One problem for us Southern-heritage girls, though: Mom’s biscuits are made with vegetable shortening, which is loaded with hydrogenated whatchamacallit trans fat. Looks like I need to get a good recipe for lard biscuits.

4) The schooling turmoil continues, amid potty-training tactics, here at Chez Anwyn. Out of the seven (!) preschools I visited last spring, only one is a possibility, a small Montessori model run in my church. This article goes a long way towards convincing me The Little Bean would be well off there; it’s a constant argument in my head about preschool vs. homeschool. I think The Bean would be, by far, best off here at home with Mom, but I question my chops to do the job–my patience, specifically, not my brains. I admire Venomous Kate’s capacity for the vocation; she’s got some great remarks on the dishonesty of the “socialization” argument against homeschooling. One quote from the Montessori study article leaped out at me:

Dr Angeline Lillard, from the University of Virginia, who co-led the study, said: “We found significant advantages for the Montessori students in these tests for both age groups.

“Particularly remarkable are the positive social effects of Montessori education. Typically the home environment overwhelms all other influences in that area.”

At first I thought it meant the homeschool model outstrips the schools in producing positive social development and that Montessori was able to hang in. On further readings, I’m not so sure; does it mean the home environment overwhelms all other attempts at particular socialization–i.e. whatever the school tries to do with respect to socialization, the home influence can engulf? Either way it seems I win.

Tim P. commented at Kate’s that the important thing is, of course, parental involvement and guidance no matter what model of school is chosen. While that’s true, Kate’s point is still very well taken: that schools don’t automagically churn out socially well adjusted citizens and it’s a crock to assert otherwise, especially when the “argument” is being used as a club by people who just don’t like homeschooling. For whatever reason.

5) If people you know read your blog, it takes a hefty amount of chutzpah to do this. Here’s another, and one more. They’re fascinating to read even when you don’t know the person writing and can have no clue who she’s speaking to. When you spot one that’s either similar to something that you’d like to say to somebody in your life or that you imagine somebody could say to you, it’s a little clue to the universality of human experience. Well, that, and it’s a totally gossipy look into the lives of strangers. (Via Alarming News, where Karol recognized trouble when she saw it.)

Update: I keep thinking about that quote from the Montessori article. Somebody should clarify with Dr. Lillard what she meant. Does she mean that ordinarily the home influence overwhelms social patterns picked up at school, except in this case? I.E. that the behaviors picked up at Montessori withstand the way Mom and Dad are telling Junior to act? If that’s the case, I’d have to think again.

… from blogging, at any rate, I became an aunt! Sister Joy gave birth to her first child, a daughter who is hereby christened in blogspeak “The Flower Girl.” She is gorgeous, with dark hair and eyes and pale skin and pink cheeks. Sister Joy did not have an easy time of it bringing her into the open air, but that is past and both are doing very well.