So I have to come clean.

I started this blog for a number of reasons, among them, to hold myself accountable for the choices I make, and for the ways in which I choose to spend my time and money. I wanted to make a conscious effort to balance work, training, and family life, and wanted to see if it was possible to pursue an incredibly daunting and time-consuming goal of completing an Ironman while being a good father, spouse, and public health worker at the same time. So is it possible? Yes. It is possible. But not for me. Not right now.

Many changes took place since I started this blog. My daughter grew up, is growing up, and has become a mobile, communicative, verbal, enthusiastic, intelligent, book-loving, bad-ass-color-er, and I have gotten to enjoy both observing and being part of every stage. I dropped work to 80% to allow me to parent and train more, then got offered a position in the next week for the other 20(+)% in what is essentially my dream public health job (I took it). I got accepted to grad school. But the biggest kicker was the omnipresent suboptimal ankle that I seemed to have injured during the marathon in 2009.

I have no idea if I could have actually completed an Ironman distance race with the multiple things going on simultaneously, but it didn’t really matter. When you can’t run, you can’t run, no matter how much time you have. Am I pissed about an injury that happened almost TWO YEARS ago and that is still limiting my training? To be honest… yes. I’m pissed, but I’m also methodical. When I finally got around to being methodical about the injury (this is just one of many, many graphs that helped me figure out what prevented my ankle from feeling any better), it finally started to get better. So yes it sucked to be limited. But, I’ll be frank. If there is ever a time to have an injury, to be forced to limit your triathlon training, its when there is something bad-ass to do with the sudden 10 free hours you have in your week. And nothing, absolutely nothing, is more bad-ass than watching a kid you love with every fiber of your being grow up and learn about the world.

One of the things that has shocked me about not being able to train is that a very large part of me doesn’t care at all. I am amazed at the lack of disappointment in shooting for a goal, writing about it, and, well, flat-out failing. And not just failing, but not even becoming remotely close. Remember that list of races I posted that I wanted to do? I’m pretty sure not a single one will happen. Yesterday, I swam for 20 minutes. I used to take the loooooonng route home from work on the bike multiple times a week, when I wasn’t running back, now, I simply bike the route I used to run, all 3.5 miles of it, once a week, if the ankle feels good.

But how can I care, really? You want to know my greatest accomplishment of the summer? About a month ago, my daughter had agonizing diaper rash. No parent wants to bath her child when she knows that the bath and soap and scrubbing will feel pretty lousy on her kid’s butt, but at the same time, the rash won’t go away if the kiddo is not bathed. So, I was bathing my kid, and she was crying up a storm, and not crying like she was annoyed, crying like she was clearly in alot of pain (well, as much pain as rash can give). She has this little rubber duck, about the size of a golf ball. You squeeze it and it fills with water, and you squeeze it again and it spits the water out, pretty simple concept. Well, I grabbed that duck with my left hand, filled it with water, and made it squirt me in the face….giggle….. I made it squirt me in the face again…..giggle. Then laugh. After a few squirts, my daughter was cracking up at daddy’s face getting spit on by her ducky. So, while I had her attention way out to my left, I grabbed the wash cloth, soaped it up, and used my right hand to give her a good scrubbing, painful I’m sure, but not the sort of pain that can smother the belly-deep laughter and spirit lifting giggle caused by a spitting duck. Hey, its no Ironman, but nothing could possibly be more fulfilling than helping your kid avoid being hurt.

So there you have it. I am not an Ironman. In fact, in that regard, I’m a distinct failure. But, I washed my kid’s rash while being spit on by a duck, so its been a pretty worthwhile year. The race will just have to wait. Maybe next summer (1).

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1. Of course I intend to keep the blog going, because, unless I’m mistaken, my kid wont stop getting cuter, and the Ironman-parenting narrative will be even cooler if it takes twice as long to finally accomplish…. or if it involves multiple kids!

a year and a half and looking for trouble

The term “parenting” is really a misnomer, a ridiculous attempt to place a myriad of evolving behaviors  into a single category. I spend alot of my time “parenting,” and by that I mean I spend alot of my time realizing that everything I know about my kid is no longer useful as she is an entirely different being than she was a few months back.  This baby doesn’t need to burp, can already latch and nurse, can use a spoon, is eating solid food…can crawl….can WALK. Damn.

But at the same time, each new phase gives way to a growing being, a being that futher understands how to interact with her world, her parents, the dog, her grandparents. A being that can move, can make decisions, can express desires. A being that is, frankly, no longer a being, but a person!

I talked about the changes in “parenting” that occurred when my daughter was 6 months old, and indeed, a year later, at about 18 months, the changes are again incredible and beautiful. SO what is it that kids do at 18 months you may ask???

• They talk alot: My daughter’s use of language has indeed been one of the most entertaining part of her current age. She ‘knows’ a few languages… but gets them mixed up. Hence, last time we took her to church and the congregation started singing “Hosanna in the highest,” my daughter happily joined in, unleashing a full volumed ode to her favorite amphibian (OH RANA OH RANA OH RANA!!!). The audience was rolling.

• They move alot: My daughter and her grandparents love to skype, but my fam in Texas, not familiar with where my partner and I keep, say, my daughter’s monkey costume of Dora the Explorer books, love to ask her about these items. Of course, my daughter is just dying to show the books, costumes, etc,  to my parents on the camera, and thus runs up the stairs, digs through her stuff, and emerges 5 minutes later with a story of Benny the Bull wishing on Las Estrellas. Then with her monkey shoes. Then with her monkey hat. This goes on for hours, or until I get tired of following my daughter up the stairs and end up yelling at my folks to only ask her about the stuff directly in arm’s reach.

• 

  hiding the spoils of her successful request for "TWO!" juiceboxes (it worked multiple times)

  They make connections: Sure, you understand that you can sing a song two times or have two apples, but think about what a complicated concept that really is. Songs are clearly intangible, where as apples are tangible and juicy. So to ask for two apples makes sense to a kid, dude, give me two apples, but to ask for two songs, what you are really requesting is that the mama sing Rubber Ducky You’re the One a second time. When my daughter made this connection it was just awesome. She smiled from ear to ear in a way that just screamed, wow, intangible things can be numbered and counted too!

• 

  Parenting FAIL.

  They understand…. This one is a double edged sword. One day you say whatever you want around your kid and watch what you used to watch pre-parenting, the next day, your daughter is highly interested in the way the doctors treat the MMA fighters after 3 brutal rounds of fighting. Yeah, one day its MMA, the next day you are sreaming “back pack” and “Use the map!”, knowing that Dora will get there eventually, but still being oddly nervous…

• They communicate: One thing is for sure, “communicating” is fundamentally different than “talking.” Communication does not always involve spoken words, though our culture relies on them heavily. Kids, well, they dont always rely on spoken words. They throw fits, throw food, throw themselves on the floor… They communicate with looks of need, with gestures of desire, with faces of fear. And sometimes, they communicate through imitation. My daughter just loves to do this, I think part of it is her early relieance on Sign Language, but she is not afraid at all to use gestures and imitation to relay ideas. In fact, she has given to retelling entire stories by acting them out. My favorite instance of this: after seeing the doctor treat the aforementioned MMA fighter in between rounds, she proceeded to tell my mom the story, acting out the doctor looking into the mouth of the fighter to check his teeth, then, to all our surprise, acting out the role of the fighter, into whose mouth the doctor was looking. If you think that sentence was confusing, imagine how long it took us to figure out that she was alternating between characters in the story to tell us what happened! That little devil is gonna be a kick-ass charades player one day….

My wife and I spent a summer working in Tanzania, and along with the time we spent working with NGOs, we also made the time to allow malarial parasites to “snack on my blood,” as my doctor so affectionately put it. Now, I had done my share of readings on the diseases endemic to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and I knew a thing or two about malaria (1). While not in the detail of this wicked cool video on malaria plasmodium life cycle, I did know that malarial parasites reproduce in the red blood cells, and burst out of said RBCs in search of other RBCs to infect every 4-8 hours.  This “bursting”  feels like hell to the parasitic host, i.e., me, my wife, George Clooney, and, one child every 45 seconds in Africa.   Since I felt like death warmed over every 6 hours, I was pretty confident in my self-diagnosis of malaria.

Nonetheless, I figured I would go to the hospital and get a real diagnosis, along with some medical advice on what to do about this disease endemic to Africa, but totally foreign to my body’s immune system. So my wife and I trekked over to the hosptial (maybe an hour, T minus 4…), where I met with a doctor (T minus 3…), and was told to give a blood sample (T minus 2…), when, for no reason, we found out that the power went out, and thus no one could look in the microscope to see the little bastards swimming in my blood stream. So I waited (T minus 1…) and waited (blast off), and before I knew it, my RBCs were poppin’ like cascarones at a Mexican Easter barbeque. Time to pass out??? Maybe, but the shot of adrenal I got when the dude came out and confirmed my diagnosis (thus allowing me to get a prescription) gave me a little rush, and kept me together long enough to hobble to the corner store and pick up my pharmaceutical mana from the desert.

Cascarones: an Egg-cellent Tradition. From highlightskids.com

So in between bouts of near death, my wife and I hiked over to a pharmacy, forked out about $12, and bought medication to kill the little spindly bastards that had forgotten that I was top of the food chain. Well, let me tell you, that medication worked unlike any medication I had ever taken, and it wasn’t long before the 6 hour cycles between the times I wanted to die became 8 hours, 12 hours, and eventually petered out.

George, Malaria, and Me.

Exhibit A: Parasitic Host

Malaria has gained a more prominent position in the media because of its most recent parasitic host, in exhibit A over there. Old Georgey was infected during his recent trip to Sudan. His work for Sudan was itself admirable, and thanks to them mosquitos that snacked on his blood, he is now the pretty face bringing attention to both Sudan and the death toll of malaria. After making a full recover, he summarizes it nicely: ”this illustrates how, with proper medication, the most lethal condition in Africa can be reduced to a bad 10 days instead of a death sentence.”

Likewise, I joke about the whole situation, because, in hindsight, that’s all I can really do. But let’s be honest, while I take particular pride in the wittiness of the entry’s title, here I am blogging about a disease that kills millions. Malaria is the 5th leading cause of death from infectious disease in the world (following, among others, HIV/AIDS and TB, also easily preventable) and 2nd leading cause of death from infectious disease in Africa (see this CDC article for a great summary of malaria’s presence world wide). Malaria accounts for an astonishing 1 in 5 deaths among children in Africa, and those children that are not killed by malaria can still suffer all kinds of nasty outcomes, like poor neurological development after cerebral malaria. Pregnant mothers that contract the disease are more likely to give birth to low birth weight infants, and even among strong, healthy adults, malaria is sure to take a chunk out of the economies, often labor based, when men have to stay home to cope with the whole horse-kick to the kidneys thing.

So malaria and I have this special relationship, in that it almost took my life, and that of my wife. But the fact that I almost died is not what boils my now-parasite-free blood the most, it’s that it was SO EASY for me to live. The medication I took cost twelve bucks. Twelve bucks! Millions of people die a year and it would only cost twelve bucks a piece (2) to save many of them?   Yes, saving lives is very, very cheap. Like George says, it doesn’t have to be a death sentence.

So what does malaria have to do with triathlons?  Well, maybe nothing. But maybe a lot. I’d love to grab on to my malarial experience, to use it as a source of identity, to shout to the world that I survived malaria, that I came back from the grave, and am now am going to put the feather in the hat of life by completing a ridiculous distance triathlon, proving that I will no longer take life for granted. But all of that, my friends, is pretty ridiculous. It’s an attempt to give positive meaning to a situation that illuminated the worst results of economic stratification. The entire experience makes me question how I spend my money and use my time and my cultural “influence” as an American, a “white” male, a person with health insurance.  As a person with 12 extra bucks.

Can we truly live cross culturally then? Can we blend at once our hobbies, how ever expensive and time-consuming they may be, with an awareness of global issues, or is impossible for the two to co-exist?

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1- I know what you are thinking, well, idiot, if you knew about malaria, why didn’t you take any anti-malarial prophylaxis before hand??? Well, truth is, I did, my wife did as well, and nonetheless, despite having the ENTIRETY of the Red Hot Chili Peppers music video done with stop-motion animation of Lego dudes replaying  in my mind at night (and that wasnt the weirdest dream either. Gotta love the side-effects), we still got malaria. This isnt to say malaria prophylaxes don’t work; the reason ours did not work had more to do with dosage, though exactly where the answer to the riddle is, I have yet to figure out.  Malaria propholaxes are an essential piece of the foreigner’s toolkit, and in no way do I mean to question their utility. Rather, I do want to point out that they should be taken very, VERY seriously. Look at what the doc prescribed you, look at what the CDC says, ask your travel clinic, be informed. My friends tease that the real reason I got malaria is because of Picture B over there. Yes, if you have a mosquito net, use it.

2-In the interest of full disclosure, I could swear it was $12, but after searching through all my receipts, I could not find one for the medication. I generally trust my memory about things like this, but I was about to pass out and having nightmares about RHCP Lego videos, so I could be wrong.

3- Disease progression is of course unpredictable, especially when it is entirely foreign to your immune system, and sure the malaria could have taken a turn for the worst. Just getta loada this poor student’s situation, who, similiar to me, caught malaria, then, very un-similiar to me, had the malarial parasites attack her brain, and totally wreak havoc on her health. Social injustice of the situation remains, as she was eventually transported to a private clinic for wealthy Ghanians and treated successfully. She was lucky, as she says, “lucky to be American.”

***photos by Benjamin Lopez***

When I was in graduate school, one of my good friends, a father, practicing doctor, and fellow MPH student, told me something rather prescient:

You can’t be 100% at everything you do. You can’t be a great student, a great doctor, AND a great father. One of them has to give. You just have to make sure it’s the right one.

I always knew those words were true, but now, as a father myself (and a particularly busy one at that) I see the wisdom in them.  A full time job, training for triathlons, working on papers and graduate school applications, and being the type of dad and husband I want to be… well, one of them has to give. So which one? In this case, it was work. I dropped from 100% to 80%, meaning from 40 hours a week to 32 hours a week, thus giving me an extra 4 hours a week to train, and an extra 4 hours to spend with the kiddo, that beautiful kiddo that is the theme of the slideshow up there. We’ll see how this goes (or if something else has to give as well…).

So I originally started this blog to force myself to think about what completing an Ironman distance triathlon would entail – is it worth the time away from the family? the time away from work/school? the early morning workouts, bitterly cold runs, and perpetually smelling like cholorine? And what do such mentally, physically, and economically demanding undertakings say about the individuals that do them and the cultures that support them?  But, I must admit that life has been pretty distracting, and consequently this blog has rarely been about training, and much more about raising the kiddo. But  I’m ok with that. Life not only gets in the way of goals, it is usually more entertaining then their pursuit anyway.

However, I do want to get back to the at-least occasional athletic writing. 2010 held a number of athletic and academic accomplishments, among them, completion of the DALMAC bike tour, a 322 mile, four-day tour accross Michigan in which we also raised money for World Bicycle Relief, and publication of my first, first-authored article. Rock on.

So what is in store for 2011? Well, academically, I applied to U of M’s PhD program in Public Health, and submitted another article for publication. That will be two big feather’s in this nerd’s cap should the results be positive. Athletically, thanks to a pretty good physical therapist (1), my ankle is feeling, um, better, not great, not back to normal, but better. And thanks to a couple of good swim coaches, my swimming is my weakest link by an ever shrinking margin. Thus, 3 events  are in the books for now:

1) April 2, 2011: Martian (half) Marathon;

2) August 15, 2011:  The Island Lake of Novi 1.5 mile open water swim;

3) August 31 -Sept 4: DALMAC Bike Tour; yeah, being that that is the week before the next race, I’m probably gonna be driving from stop to stop carrying my amigos’ bags.

4) September 11, 2011: the Revolution 3 “Full Rev” distance triathlon of 2.4 in the water, 112 on the bike, and 26.2 on the road. Yep, this is the big one.

Of note, I haven’t registered for the triathlon yet…I’m a bit worried that my ankle will not hold out, and that I will either have to back out and lose my money, or run on an injured ankle, risking further injury. Thus, if I don’t feel that I could complete the full, then I will do two half-Iron distance triathlons, which, despite a half plus a half mathematically equaling a whole, in no way equates the challenge and discipline required to complete the full distance. Thus, Sept 11th will hopefully be a full, potentially be a half, and I’ll throw in the Ironman 70.3 in Muncie Indiana if need be.

Of course, since the few people who read about this are much more entertained by parental exploits, I’ll probably spend a good amount of time on that as well. Here’s a quick photo of the kiddo getting ready for her bike ride!

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1. So how many anti-malarial drugs could one treatment of physical therapy pay for…. Yeah, that’s coming up shortly .

Classic "All Done" sign. She has since extrapolated to "all done jacket," "all done shoes," and, my personal favorite, "all done daddy."

My wife and I decided a long time ago that we wanted to raise any children we had bilingually. When our daughter was born, we thus decided to talk to her at least partially in Spanish, and we also decided to throw some Sign Language into the mix. The result is the most entertaining exercise in self-expression I have ever seen.

Growing up in a mono-lingual US, its really easy to take language for granted. Language is pretty simple, after all. You say something, someone hears it, and bingo, the idea has been relayed. But if you speak two languages, have lived or worked in another a country that uses another language, or even speak different “dialects” of the same language (I swear academia has its own language), you realize that what you say, how you say it, your tone, your use of colloquialisms, your vocabulary, and the accepted norms of the language in which you are speaking all affect the way in which you try to relay an idea. Thus, trying to speak to a kid in some coherent pattern using three languages is quite the challenge, a challenge only trumped by trying to interpret the response of a kid that is merging three languages at the same time she is beginning to understand the idea of communication. You realize very quickly that some things are easier to express in one language over another, that some colloquial expressions just don’t translate (va a tener una vaca, for example), and that some languages use very colorful analogies that sound simply ridiculous when translated (does your head ache really feel like Jesus on la cruz?).

To begin, my Spanish is ugly. I spent time in Honduras and Mexico, and was dragged by a very adventurous wife through all of Central America. Spanish uses the usted form of words to represent both the third person and a respectful you, but when it is used differs by culture. My mom of Mexican heritage would never dream of using the usted form of verbs with either me, her child and therefore her inferior, or even her dad, a superior with whom she is familiar. However, in Costa Rica, they tended to use usted to speak to everyone and everything, kids, adults, turtles, trees, everything. In Honduras, they used vos (NOT vosotros, as everyone loves to tell me), which is, on the scale of formality, below tu, used to address specifically kids and good friends. I use all three of them. Hence, my kid, if she really thought about it, is at times addressed formally, addressed as a child, addressed as a friend, and addressed in the third person. Yeah, confusing even for me. So when she starts to conjugate verbs, it’s anyone’s guess how she will do so.

Enjoying the spoils of successfully signing "food please."

And our Sign Language knowledge? Well you could hardly call it knowledge at all. After a semester of it, we can sign complete sentences and thoughts, but can hardly converse in it. And relaying the message is much easier than interpreting it, as our poor daughter is forced to do. Thus, we can sign things as complicated as “I’m tired. Are you tired? Let’s go up to bed, brush our teeth, take a bath, and go to sleep”, but nothing like, “If we were to leave now, we would have time to read a book before having to go to bed” or “your mom and I always tip the waitstaff extra; the working class makes the world go ’round”.  So I highly doubt that the first time she decides to express complex reasoning, it will be with her hands.

They say that when children learn that one word equals one “thing” (called “fast mapping”),  their language development just explodes. That is indeed what happened to our daughter, and she went from like 4 words (“milk,” “all done,” “food,” and “more”) to like 12 words (including “airplane,” “bird,” “shoes,” “dad,” “dog,” “book,” “water,” “fish,” “car,” “jacket,” and others). However, what is most interesting is the language she chooses to use to express the words she has so fast-ly mapped. Sometimes there is a pattern, but sometimes, well, I seriously think she can say it out loud, or say it in sign, and just has more fun saying it in sign. I mean, signing “more milk please” is more fun than saying it. So far, she only “speaks” five words, “hi”, “up” , “arm,”, “Heidi,” and “mama”. She learned “up” when she spent the weekend with her grandparents that communicated with her in verbal English for four days straight. She learned “Heidi” (the name of one of her favorite caretakers) because Heidi continually repeated it to her and then bragged to the daycare staff that she was our daughter’s favorite (“see, she even says my name!”).  She learned the word “mama” seemingly when she was born.  God only knows why she says “arm.” But the rest of her words she knows in Sign (1). And while she has yet to say anything in Spanish, she responds with Sign to both Spanish and English questions, telling us, for example, that both what she wants and lo que quiere is [the sign for milk].

I’ll close with one of my favorite stories of her language development:

Like many kids her age, she latches on to particular words, and uses them whenever possible to show that she is beginning to understand the world around her. One of those words is “ear.” When she hears us say the word “ear,” (or oreja) she points to her ear, or mommy’s ear, or daddy’s ear, then smiles, well, ear to ear.

The other day, I asked her in Spanish where she wanted to go, “Vidita, adonde quieres IR? (2)” She looked at me, slightly confused. But slowly, the furrowed brow gave way to a huge smile, and she proudly pointed to her EAR. I didn’t quite get it, so I asked again:

“Hijita, adonde quieres….[light bulb] oh! Yes! EAR! very good!”

Has anything shocked you about your kid’s language development? Are any parents raising their children bi- or tri-lingually? How did it go? Do they rely on one language more than another? Did their language development mirror that of their peers?

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1. Cutest thing in the world: she even babbles in Sign Language. At first I sat there trying to figure out what she wanted, but when “car-fish-dog-alldone-chair-bird-chair,” didn’t compute, I caught on that she was just doing the Sign equivalent of baby babble.

2-See, in Spanish, calling her vidita is normal. In English, calling her “my dear little life,” seems a bit carried away.

This  was one of my favorite events I’ve ever done for two particular reasons:. first,  for the first time in 15 months, my wife and I were not sharing a room with the-child-we-love-that-keeps-us-perpetually-awake. That’s right, for the first time in over a year, we were in the same place, at the same time, with no one to think about but ourselves. If we managed to ignore the fact that it was pouring rain 75% of the time, that our tent was especially cramped, and that everything we brought was dripping wet, it was borderline romantic. However, this also meant that our co-sleeping breast-feeder had to go without the communal bed and her favorite mid-night snack for four nights. And second,  we used the bike ride to raise money for World Bicycle Relief, an organization with which I am currently enamored.

When left to face your own dragons…

I like co-sleeping. I believe in it. I dig it. I have no problem that others don’ feel similarly, but for me and my wife, it works just fine. Sure, it means that for 15 months I have never slept more than 4 hours in a row, that my wife and I always have a warm and snugly body in the middle of the bed, and that the midnight nursing and (for reasons I don’t understand) corresponding kicking to daddy’s midsection (she’s gonna be a soccer playa, this one) will continue unabated.  And that is fine with me: our child feels safe and secure with two dragon slayers around to scare away the bad dreams, and I get to spend an extra 8 hours with my kid in a day that is otherwise filled with work and daycare. And of course, when you intend to travel with baby, co-sleeping just rocks, as there is no need to bring a Pack n Play, use a hotel crib, or follow any sort of bed time routine besides “here is a breast: suckle and fall asleep.”

BUT…. when you intend to travel without your little bundle of joy, well, is it selfish to set up a system in which security depends on your presence, and then you are suddenly absent? My wife sometimes goes to conferences and is away for a night or two. And then on the occasional parental outings, like this bike trip, our daughter is forced into a system in which there is neither an available breast to nurse nor bed to fill. Should I teach her to sleep on her own for the infrequent occasion of our absence, or continue with my beloved co-sleeping, forcing her to deal with occasional lonely nights? (Or, door number three, am I over-thinking it?) After giving it a good bit of thought,  I actually felt ok with the decision to leave her with her grandparents for four nights. Note: these are the grandparents that have watched her two out of every seven days a week since she was .001 seconds old. So she knows them practically as well as she knows her mama and daddy. Plus, although the Texicans in my familia tended to share beds with the kids until the child was old enough not only to complain about lack of bed space, but do so in two languages, I have no intentions of co-sleeping indefinitely (3). So it was going to happen at some point.

Among my ever-growing circle of new parent friends, we have also breastfed longer than any family I know (though at a mere 15 months, we hardly broke any records) (1,2). So she would also have to go without her beloved midnight snack. Nonetheless, she goes without breastmilk often, and it is clearly a dietary supplement,(and designated mama and baby time), not her main source of calories.

So we biked. She played with the grandparents and the dog she loves so much. We biked more. She played more with said dog. We got back, and, curious to see if she had weened herself off of the milk or not, we just went ahead and asked her. She didn’t answer however, because she was too busy nursing. So she jumped back in our bed to celebrate our 11PM return, had her (multiple) midnight snacks, and all was well in the world.

So other parents out there, what do you think about your sleeping choices? When you chose how to sleep with your baby, did you make a conscious choice (ie, im gonna travel alot, Ill teach em to use a crib) or did you make it out of necessity (ie, damn, i need more sleep)? And has anyone transitioned from a solid co-sleeper to crib-user?

(4)

Giving purpose to your hobbies

I have written a few times about the difficulty I have spending large chunks of money on myself and my hobbies. The fact that my wife and I were both spared death by malaria when we were in Tanzania because we had 12 expendable dollars has cursed me into thinking of all expenditures in multiples of $12. Hence, the 900 or so bucks that my road bike cost (before any fancy upgrades) could have saved 75 people from malaria.  And entry fees? Yeah, try entering an Ironman (upwards of 500 bucks) without the old  global consciousness kicking  in. But this time, my wife, two other Notre Dame amigos and I decided to go the Pink Ribbon route and raise money for something we believed in. We chose World Bicycle Relief, whose mission is to “provide access to independence and livelihood through The Power of Bicycles.” And what do they mean by “independence and livelihood” exactly? Well, after the tsunami devasted Sri Lanka in 2004, they provided 24,000 locally manufactured bicycles to aid in recovery, allowing individuals to bike to, say, the doctor, work, school, etc. They later provided 23,000 bicycles to home-based care volunteers, disease prevention educators, and vulnerable households in Zambia. Then, in 2009, they began the Bicycles for Educational Empowerment Program, that gave 50,000 bikes to kids in rural Zambia who are at risk for extreme poverty and high rates of HIV.

But what is most impressive about WBR is not what they target (after all, many great NGOs target increasing HIV rates and lack of access to education and health care), but the way in which they do so. First of all, the bicycles they use are manufactured locally. That means that the populations benefiting from the bikes are  manufacturing them themselves, rather than simply taking a donation from yet another  aid organization. And the research is clear, we treat goods that take time, effort, and money far more responsibly than goods that are given to us for free. Second, in addition to giving bicycles, WBR trains mechanics to maintain the bicycles, thus  creating opportunities for employment in areas where such opportunities are often scarce. Third, they ASSESS WHAT THEY DO (just check out their Field Reports on the right hand side of this page. These things could make a MPH student cry they are so thorough). Anyone that has done any readings on NGO work either here or abroad knows that the road is paved with good intentions, built with empathy, and painted with a big, open heart. However, so many programs lack long term vision of sustainability, and fail to question if the program designed to help actually helps. Don’t get me wrong, good intentions, empathy, a big figurative heart, are all the fuel of social movements. But its when the  analytic brain and empathy-filled heart mix things up that you end up with sustainable systems that help vulnerable communities grow for decades on end (5). Plus, let’s be honest, bikes are pretty cool. I love em, but really, that I can ride for fun so as to allow others to ride to school, now that’s pretty awesome.

We were able to raise a good sum of money for WBR (thanks to everyone who helped!), and I am strongly considering adding this fund-raising component to any race in which the cost of entry is greater than, say 5 rounds of anti-malaria medication. Damn, when you put it like that….

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1-Is it strange to anyone else when guys say “we breastfeed…” or “we are pregnant”? I never thought about it, but apparently people have some pretty strong opinions on it. Whachya think?

2-The World Health Organization recommends exclusive breastfeeding for 6 months, and breastfeeding with appropriate supplemental foods for “two years and beyond.” My guess is that this is not only for the health of the child, but also as a means of preventing a second (or third or fourth) birth. Either way, works for us.

3-For an excellent comparison cultural and social influences on co-sleeping, check out Dr. McKenna’s

Cultural Influences on Infant and Childhood Sleep Biology, and The Science that Studies It: Toward a More Inclusive Paradigm

4-I love this picture. Remember kids, co-sleeping can be dangerous if done incorrectly!

5-There are many good examples of charitable organizations that have created sustainable systems of social change. Micro-credit lending, started by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh,  is a great example. The founder of the bank, Muhammad Yunus, just won the Noble Prize for his efforts “to create economic and social benefits from below.”

Now I say “dragged along” purposefully because, although I hope she enjoyed the wedding to whatever extent a toddler can enjoy a wedding, and although the couple was extremely important to us, I hope this wedding blends into the background for her, gets clumped  with all the other weddings to which we dragged her in the first year of life.

Because for me, this wedding was fundamentally different from any wedding I have ever attended.  Of course it was special in the ways all weddings should be special: an expression of love, a public pronouncement of shared life, a representation of willingness to self-sacrifice. But this wedding was different for one simple reason: it had two grooms. Thus, in addition to feeling honored to have been there to support my best friend as he transitioned from a single guy, to a fiancee, to a husband, I could not help but feel part of something much bigger.  Throughout his engagement, everyone had questions: “will you both get engagement rings?”, “who will propose to whom?”, “do you eventually want kids?”, and the reason for these questions was simple: marriage between a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, is still kinda rare. Sure, there are places in which it happens frequently, places where marriages of this kind are absolutely accepted, but to pretend that homosexuality has not been a source of discrimination is to be ignorant of reality.   Now however, innovative companies like Google are supplementing the incomes of their homosexual employees in relationships in order to make up for the fact that heterosexual couples get tax breaks for being married, the Matthew Shepard Act added sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability status to the federal definition of a hate crime in 2009,  odds are looking good that openly gay military servicemen and -women will be allowed  to continue to serve our country (Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, a strike against my hero, Bill Clinton), and, just a few days ago, a federal judge in California overturned Prop 8, thus giving homosexuals the right to legally wed (in his words: “Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex  couples are superior to same-sex couples.” Read his whole ruling here).  So for me, it was not just a wedding, it was a social movement, and I was thus standing not only at a wedding but smack in the middle of a maturing society that is able to recognize love without bombarding it with stipulations, and, judging by the number of Catholics there, of a centuries old religion whose members are not scared to evolve.

Throughout the whole wedding, I continually got goosebumps. Sure, maybe it’s melo-dramatic, but to be able to provide support to a group that has been stigmatized and discriminated against for centuries, all over the world, felt somewhat karmic (1). It was not long ago that my parents were treated like second class citizens for the color of their skin. There were those along the way that supported them, that treated them as human beings, that helped them get a step up. And while the law in Arizona proves that immigrants still face a number of issues, things are indeed better.

But those goosebumps I got, and continue to get as I look back on this wedding… yeah, I hope my daughter never gets them. My parents grew up yelling “Uvas No!” in support of the rights of migrant farm workers, but now, the grapes that were once boycotted as  a representation of immigrant cohesion, of standing up against the man, of cultural empowerment, of the ‘Prefiero morir de pie que vivir de rodillas‘ (2) mentality that brought the most forward-thinking immigrants across the Rio Grande, are to me a great addition to a chicken salad. Each generation should see social improvement over the one before, and indeed this is true in my case: I have not once been hated for being Hispanic (indeed, in a post-Enrique Iglesias world, being “Latino” is sometimes even considered cool), though no doubt the guidance counselor that told my Mom to be a maid and my dad to be a mechanic was not ignoring their complexion. In the same way, my daughter has been born into a world (or at least a US) that is fundamentally different form the one of mama and papa, and, dare I say, fundamentally better. This world has a black president, a black Disney princess,  and the beginnings of health insurance for all. It’s a world in which gays, straights, agnostics and Catholics can gather together to see a man and a man join in marriage.

So I guess the end of the sentence depends largely on who you ask. If you ask our generation how you know if a wedding is a gay wedding, you will get all kinds of funny answers: the entire wedding party gets fitted at Men’s Warehouse, the DJ plays Seasons of Love and everyone joins in without missing a beat, or a rainbow colored teddy bear is tossed in place of a bouquet (3); if, in the future, you ask my daughter or her generation how you know if a wedding is a gay wedding,  here’s hoping she’ll say, “hmmm, I never thought of that. “

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1-Not to say more progress cannot be made. My argument is never that stigmatization has disappeared; human beings tend to create in-group out-group biases all the time based on any number of arbitrary characteristics. This helps in resource allocation: should we suddenly find ourselves confronted by a shortage of  food, we share first with those like us, then those unlike us. But, given that the apocalypse is at least a few years away, and there are enough resources to feed and shelter everyone in the world many times over, our problems are better defined as how to appropriately distribute those resources, not ration them.

2-I prefer to die on my feet than live on my knees- Emiliano Zapata

3-

This awesome photo, as well as the one  of the grooms holding their wedding rings, was taken by Amelia Soper, of Amelia Soper Photography. Her live action shots are a mix of vintage wedding and A+ photojournalism; easily the best wedding photos I have seen. Her blog, with her own take on the wedding, can be found here.

I don’t think had ever ever seen so many two-parent families in one place. But moreover, I know I had never seen so many dads carrying around so many pink bags full of so much pink spandex and sequins (see bar chart at right for a better idea of little girl garb).

And that wasn’t the first time the flexibility of papi’s gender role here in Ann Arbor surprised me. Sometimes I take my daughter to the mall to walk around and play on their indoor playground. Sometimes I take her to Children’s Orchard to buy her some new pants for her ever-lengthening legs (90th percentile in height, this one). Sometimes I drop her off at daycare, and sit there for a bit, feeding her a bottle, rocking in the rocker, before I leave. And, despite engaging in behaviors that are  stereotypically maternal and feminine, I never feel particularly judged.

Growing up in the south, gender roles were a bit more rigid. The man worked, often with his callused, grease-covered hands, to bring home the family bacon. The mom stayed home,  cooked the family bacon, then nursed the baby, dressed the baby, stroller-ed the baby, bathed the baby, and put the baby to bed. That is absolutely not to say I didn’t have some great fathers in my family, but the masculinity quotient of the Southern (Hispanic? Texan? Immigrant?) father had to be maintained at a bit higher level than I ever could, or ever would maintain it.

Now, in academician-infested, modern-hippie Ann Arbor, where blue-collar work is not as common, being the sensitive, empathetic, diaper-changing father that washes your daughter’s pink reusable organic diapers is the norm.

And I love it that way.

I am so thankful for this gender role flexibility, for the freedom to split the parental duties without regard to which is more masculine and which is more feminine. It’s great being a dad, great to be able to be sensitive and compassionate, to care about your child’s clothes, to gently clean her rashed booty, to rub her head softly  to put her back to sleep, to worry if she is too concerned with Bratz dolls (1), or too indoctrinated by Disney Princess culture.

How about you fathers and mothers out there (or fathers and fathers, mothers and mothers (2))? Do you feel that you are trapped in a rigid parental gender role? Or do you feel that parenting has allowed you to touch the masculine/feminine side you did not know existed? And how does your family, town, or city influence it?

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1-Someone please bring up Bratz dolls and Disney Princesses. When it comes toys for little girls, nothing has riled up more hate mail than the barely-dressed, big lipped, eye-linered Bratz dolls.

2-I mention mom/dad families purely from an observational standpoint. I have many friends with partners of the same sex, and think a child with two dads and two moms can grow up as healthily as a child with one of each. The gender-bending involved in homosexual parenting could hardly be addressed here though, as its much more complicated, nuanced, and, well, still very much evolving.

To complicate matters, this triathlon I want to do, the Racing for Recovery Triathlon, falls on my daughter’s first birthday.  This race is one of my favorites, as my wife placed in her age group in the half-IM last year, I ran part of the Detroit Marathon with Todd Crandell,  the organizer of the race, and I really believe in the cause – trading unhealthy addictions to drugs for healthy, um, hobbies, like triathlons. But, should I race on my daughter’s birthday? Part of me thinks its just selfish to do so, that I should give her my undivided attention that day, celebrate her presence in my life, and that racing is my psyche’s way of totally avoiding the moonwalk v happy meal question.  The other part of me thinks that racing is a non-issue, that my daughter won’t even be aware of how June 6th is different from any other day, and that, unless I plan to throw a party for her between the hours of 5 am and 10 am, spending some time in the water, on the bike, and in the tennies will not change our potential for ponies and moonwalks later in the day.

So, two questions: 1) What did you do to celebrate your kid’s first bday? 2) Racing: non-issue or selfish?