Foreign Policy: The World's Worst Places to be a Kid

Baltimore's not on the list...

Update

I had another ultrasound on December 3. In the last ultrasound, Ruth was either taking after Daniel (laconic) or me (stubborn) and refused to roll over to show us the base of her spine. The latest ultrasound revealed that her lower spine and tail bone are perfectly formed. She's also turned around and is head-down now but moved fairly constantly during the scan. It was interesting to see what part of her was poking me while simultaneously feeling said poking.

It also revealed that my placenta is low-lying. Normally, the placenta attaches near the top of the uterus where it is out of the way during the birth. When the placenta is low-lying, there is a slight potential for complications during birth. However, my midwife assures me that complications can be avoided with occasional ultrasound monitoring. So, I'll have another ultrasound on January 14 to see if things have shifted -- in more than 80% of cases, things do shift as the pregnancy progresses. In any case, I'll get a few more pictures of Ruth so I can't really say I'm disappointed.

In other news, thanks to the incredible generosity of our friends M and S and their rapidly growing kids, we have a crib, changing table, and highchair to compliment the rocking chair, bookcase, and tiny roll top desk already in her room. We also picked up two prints to hang in her room from Devoted Bee (if you click on drawings, then on 2007 drawings, we got the one called "Just Before Bed" with the rabbit hugging a teddy bear; the other is a forest scene) at a local craft fair.

Ruth's Zeroeth Channukha!

Tonight is the first night of the festival of lights, which celebrates the victory of religious fascism over cosmopolitanism, or something like that. We hope to bring Ruth up to appreciate fully the great history of her people - to that end, I have made sure that we have two essential Judaism manuals around the house:



For me, To Be a Jew was the central devotional element of the holidays when I was a child. The Jewish side of my family was never very observant (and after I opted not to be Bar Mitzvah, I wasn't really welcomed by the local rabbis - my other grandparents' priest was much more interested in talking to me about theology... I just never found Catholic theology all that agreeable, but I give them points for being relatively welcoming), so holidays meant sitting down with my family so that my dad could flip back and forth through To Be a Jew and we could all stumble over the Hebrew transliterations. It was only later in life that I started telling everyone foolish enough to ask that Hannukha celebrated a terrorist victory. My folks had a lot to put up with. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Oh, and yes, that is a bad-ass oil-burning menorah. I fell in love with it at the synagogue gift shop when I was a kid. It went missing sometime around when my family moved from my old hometown back in 1992, and my mom (miraculously?) found it just in time for our first Channukah in the new house and our first "with" Ruth.