The Great Pretty Good Pumpkin.

Yes, blogosphere, I know I haven't blogged in over two weeks. And believe me, I have heard it from friends and family on all sides. My bad, y'all. Honestly I didn't know people cared. (And FYI, it's not that I stopped writing, I simply stopped writing here. I'm working on a teeny, tiny writing project of my own that I will never share with the internet.)

Life has been delishusly boring, but Ru was pretty adorable for Halloween, and I guess that's blog-worthy. Would you like to see pictures? Oh you would? OK, here you go (we're going backwards because I simply do not have the patience to move these into chronological order; blogger can go eff itself for making that such a pain in the ass).

I decided to be a happy homemaker for Halloween, making Ru's costume myself. It was a very DIY situation. I did buy the ears and some maribou for the tail, but instead of sewing the elastic to itself and then sewing the tail to the elastic, I chose (read: ran out of time on Friday morning before music class and conceived of plan B on my way out the door) to staple the whole gig together. Um, brilliant. I may never sew again. Skirt need some hemming? Want curtains for the kitchen? Pants split at the butt? Staple that shit together!

Here's the final product.

So cute, right? Such a sweet, child. Until...

This look on her face is quintessential Ruby these days. We were at a out recently, and this British lady was talking to her, being all friendly, and then all of a sudden, she looked kind of freaked out and said, "Well, that's a little off-putting." I checked, and sure enough, Ru was making this face.

Here's another version, closer up:

I think the British lady might have been scared just a little bit. And I think she probably had reason to be.

Here's a happier version of my little black kitten.

I didn't have the heart to tell her that cyclamen don't have any smell. She doesn't really sniff flowers anyways, she sort of puts her mouth to them, like a puckerless kiss. BTW, cute random fact about Ru: she calls flowers "bah bah" (whispering, always), because my mom will sniff a flower and say, "Bah, bah, bah, bah" -- like a Persian version of "Mmm, mmm, good." So now Ruby will stand at the door and whisper "Bah bah" for us to take her out on a smelling field trip. She's like the "zoom zoom" kid on the Mazda commercials.

And the day before (again, eff Blogger for making pictures hard to move around for lazy people), we went to a pumpkin patch (yes, on 10/30 -- and no, they were NOT discounted. Stupid YMCA). I thought we'd get all kinds of cute pictures, but Ruby is SO completely obsessed with airplanes right now (think Rain Man-Judge Wopner-obsessed), that every single picture I took looked like this:

No, really. Check it out:

If I had taken video, you'd hear (over and over and over) "Apuh! Apuh! Up! Up! Up!" We must have been near a flight path or something, because that kid was only looking up. My poor mom nearly went hoarse trying to get her to look at the camera. The airplane obsession is actually kind of amazing; she can hear an one buzzing from so far away that half the time I'm positive she's just thinking of airplanes or remembering one time that we saw them. But nearly every time, one will appear a minute later. She has a special gift, one that I hope to manipulate into some sort of circus performance or career in air traffic control.

Also? Pumpkin patches are DIRTY (but make for cute pictures).

So there you go -- I posted. Yay! I'm not even hitting spell check. Suck on it, blogosphere. I'm doing this on my terms.

October 17, 2008

Last year on this day, I posted something. I updated that post today -- the new link is here.

Rubyogini

What's that you say? You would like to hear things about Ruby, the person about whom this blog is supposed to be? You're tired of the political rantings of a frustrated pinko part-time housewife? Oh, my bad. OK, here we go:

WHAT RUBY IS UP TO THESE DAYS

Well for one thing, the kid is all about "goga" -- yoga. Frequently throughout the day now, you can find her in this position:

So I join her and tell her we're doing yoga. Sometimes from downward dog (and Mave, I think you'll support me in saying that her form is excellent -- look at how high those sit-bones are!), we lift one leg and then the other... and then she inevitably falls down. Still, fun while it lasts.

Also, her vocabulary has, no joke, doubled or tripled in last month. We saw my friends Neal and Angela when their daughter was about 15 months, and they said the same thing about Olivia. So I was sort of looking for it to happen, and damn if right at 15 months she didn't start jabbering away in actual words. Of course, when I say words, I mean sounds approximating words that actually mean something. Ru's "talking" is to say the first sounds with "ah." So for example, "shoes" are "shah," cheese is "chah," "socks" are "sah" and so on. This can get confusing though since there are loads of things that start with the same sound. Examples:

"apah" = apple, airplane (which she's seen at the Santa Monica airport and now can point out every. time. we. see. one. "APAH! APAH! APAH!" And I'm always like, "Apple?")

"Nah nah" = banana, Nati (our housekeeper), Nikki, Nonnie, Aunt Lacey (not sure why this is nah nah -- I guess "aunt"?)
"Pah" = peas, please, peace
"trabah" = strawberry; this sounds exactly like "dapah" = diaper.

So sometimes conversations take some guessing and looking around to see what she may be talking about. But at 12 or 13 months she probably had 20 words; now she's adding new ones everyday. (Her latest -- and most precisely ennunciated -- is "hammmm." She loves her some ham, what can I say? Bacon tastes good. Pork chops taste good.)

Communication is growing in other ways too: she totally understands things, which I'm not used to. So what used to be a rhetorical question like "Hey Ru, should we go change your diaper?" is now met with a very vigorous head shake. Same with "Are you finished with your bath?" and "More oatmeal?" All no's. Or when my sister asked her to put her toys in the bath tubs, and there she went, putting her damn toys in the tub. I mean, it's not like we sat there during the first year of her life and pointed at the tub and said "TUB!" It's more like she's been in a language immersion program for that year or so, and it's just now kicking in. Fascinating!!!

She loves to "hep" (help) with anything and everything. One of her favorites are using the sponge to wipe down her high chair after a meal (mostly just wiping back and forth in the same spot and looking up at us for approval). Another is helping feed Lulu her breakfast and dinner. We scoop the food and then give her the cup to dump the food in the bowl. Then we give her the various pills and powders that our nursing-home dog requires, and Ruby puts those in the bowl too. She also helps unload the dishwasher (great unless you're actually trying to load the dishwasher). Her "hep"ing is great actually. I feel like if we get her on this whole chore thing while it's cool, we're good for at least four or five years.

Her independent play is sky-rocketing. Now when we're home in the afternoons, I can do stuff around the house and she'll chill in her room "reading" (so crazy, how does she decide what book to look at? Color? Nice memories of us reading it to her?) or go to the kitchen and play with Tupperware or her fridge magnets. Just a kid, making decisions, doing her thing.

She's also remembering people. It's like she's entered another level of consciousness. People she saw a few times before before 14-15 months, she doesn't remember if she sees them now. People she's seen since that time are her best friends when she sees them again.

And lastly -- her eye-hand and, more importantly for DaDa, eye-foot coordination is spectacular. Like for serious, she can kick a ball (any size) all the way across the room. And her foot control? Ridiculous! She can stop a ball coming towards her and then kick it back at you. On purpose? Maybe not. Impressive? You betcha.

All in all, we've entered a brave new world. As W noted the other day, she's now surpassed our dog in intelligence.

Not that there's anything wrong with that...

My friend Omar -- a Havard MBA now working in the energy industry in Houston, a Muslim, and one of the more gung-ho, all-American guys I know -- just wrote the following as a note on Facebook. I thought he was very eloquent in discussing some issues that I have had on my mind as well. His thesis is that our national leaders and media personalities (both conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat) are playing to a rising acceptance of racism against Muslims, giving credence to the idea that Muslim = dangerous.

I heard it myself in a town-hall forum with John McCain: when a supporter stood up and said she didn't trust Barack Obama because he was "an Arab," Sen. McCain said, "No ma'am, he is a decent family man." While I appreciate the Senator's respectful defense of Sen. Obama, I think most would agree that his response should have been, "No ma'am, he's a decent family man, AND being an Arab would not make him a bad person or a bad President." (Here's the link where you can watch the exchange; the woman asks the question around 1:18.)

But what about Obama? Shouldn't he be, at the very least, channeling Seinfeld here: "I'm not a Muslim -- not that there's anything wrong with that..." And I feel like that should be the mildest rebuttal he offers. Something more along the lines of "HEY! What the hell would be wrong with me being a Muslim anyways? Come on, yo!" So I fault him and his campaign too for tacitly allowing this below-the-radar racism to continue. Campaign or no, it's not right.

Whoa. Just heard that Campbell Brown of CNN feels the same way (sorry for any redundancies).

Anyways, I apologize for the politicized post (man, that soapbox just will not stay in it's closet these days will it?), but I can't help but feeling that to simply read about these things and keep one's thoughts to oneself is part of the problem. Complacency is dangerous business, people. We have to be vocal in our dissension, both to each other and to those who have a more public voice, like the people that Omar cites in his note.

Anyways, here it is. Thanks for being patient with me and my meshugas. :)

"Is Obama Muslim? No, and F-you for asking."

I owe everything I have an am to this country and my parents’ decision to leave their home and to come to America. Like a lot of you, our love for this country was manifested in a deep sacrifice and in a profound appreciation for the gift of living and being raised here.

Which is why the unbottling of our society's worst instincts recently is so troubling. Specifically, the notion that being of Arab descent or being Muslim is some kind of disqualification for being American, for being patriotic, for being President, and the casualness with which national voices and leaders weave those messages into their discourse, is deeply offensive, and should be to more people than it is.

Simply put, there is a lot of hate and ignorance here today. You hear it in the crowds recently at McCain Palin rallies. It drips from the mouths of pundits like Limbaugh and O'Reilly and Glen Beck, all nationally prominent and syndicated voices. When Hillary Clinton replies in an interview, when asked about Obama's religion, ""He is not a Muslim as far as I know," she accepts the premise that is being implied. When Giuliani says to thunderous applause, that "the only people you offend when you call it Islamic terrorism is terrorists” he is playing on hate. That is when we have gone off the rails. That is when we have bred a culture of denigration and dehumanization that says that what you can’t say about Blacks or Hispanics or Jews for fear of being labeled racist, bigoted, or anti-Semitic, you can still say about Arabs and Muslims.
“The only people you offend when you call it Black (insert attribute here) are Blacks!”
“The only people you offend when you call them Mexican (insert attribute here) are Mexicans!”
“The only people you offend when you call it Jewish (insert attribute here) are Jews!”

Can you imagine the outcry? And that guy got to run for President?

Really, how far off is “nappy headed ho’s” (*cough*Don Imus*cough*) from “towel headed terrorist”. I meant this as a rhetorical question, but then I decided to test Google. I was surprised, and saddened to find that page hit references to Don Imus’s slur (166,000) were actually outnumbered by references towel headed terrorist (199,000). So sad.

And it is not a new thing. Dick Armey, when he was house majority leader, called for the expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, which, when they did similar things in other parts of the world was called ethnic cleansing. Glen Beck, of CNN, in his interview with Keith Ellison, the first Muslim Congressman, asks the Congressman, “"Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies." This guy is on CNN. Every flipping night.

And it plays it self out in the ugliest of ways. Forget profiling at the airport, which I can begrudgingly accept (so long as the profile also includes people who fit the profile of the Unabomber, the Anthrax mail guy, Timothy McVeigh, and their ilk, none of whom were Muslim, Arab, or browner than a grocery bag). But when a month ago I was reading outside at Barnes and Nobles, and a car drives by and the passenger throws a sandwich at me and yells “Fuck you sand Nigger,” well, then its personal. Then we have stripped the shame away from society.

Ironically, that is exactly what happened in the Middle East over the past 30 years. First, was economic decline, and a widening gap between ultra rich and poor. The middle class was stressed, and pushed almost to extinction. People felt like their leaders had failed them and abused them. Angry voices in the mob got louder and more organized and whipped crowds into frenzies while railing upon all the outside groups "responsible" for their misery. It happened in Germany, it happened in the Middle East, and it is happening here.

We should be careful when we open Pandora’s box, when we accept bigoted overtones as jocularity.

In Islam, in the Qur’an, we are taught that (to paraphrase), God made us different so that we can learn from each other. "O mankind! We created you from a male and a female and made you into nations and tribes that you may know and honor each other (not that you should despise one another). Indeed the most honorable of you in the sight of God is the most righteous." Chapter 49, Verse 13

Maybe we should hope for more Muslims running for President, not fewer.

Here, here, Omar.

Shalom Fall!

Today was the first really cool (read: high 60s) day of the fall. So how do we celebrate? By going to the beach, natch. At least it wasn't crowded like on all those "nice" days. Here's how it went down.

First, some swinging. While eating string cheese.

Then, some rolling around in the awesomely clean Santa Monica beach sand. I couldn't not let her -- she was having so much fun! Don't judge me.

Then, very randomly, like, 10 minutes of downward facing dog. Totally in hysterics the whole time.

Here's the insider's view:

I mean, she was DYING. Cracking up.

Finally I decided that she had gotten enough of the millions of organisms and bum spit and acid rain bits and bird poop in her hair, so I got her up. What did I see? Ru's nose had dripped snot or something while she was upside down, which in turn had gotten sand stuck to it. Sand was all up in there. So of course I had to take a picture before I wiped it off.

We left after that, because honestly, where do you from there?

Why my sister will move to Africa.

As a lot of you know, my sister spent two months volunteering in Africa last fall (the inimitable Nikki in Afria blog describes her trip). This November she will move back for another six-month stint in Zambia. She just sent me this day-in-the-life video from a similar organization in Tanzania, which, she says, "is a perfect example of why I want to go, and why I love it so much." Watching it, I can see why.

I couldn't figure out how to embed this video, so just click here to watch it (it's only like 3 minutes, and really truly worth the time).

And, by the way, Wade -- when Ru and the next bean [though I AM NOT CURRENTLY PREGNANT] are old enough, we're all going to move to Tanzania for a year and work for this organization. Don't say that I didn't give you a heads up.