Cora’s figuring out pecking orders, and lately I seem to be the third person in line for her affections. First comes Daddy, then comes Grandma, and then comes me. Grandma and I actually alternate, I think, in terms of who takes position 2 behind Daddy. Cora will drop everything to go to Daddy; will cry and wail if Daddy comes into the room and doesn’t immediately pay attention to her; gets horribly upset if he leaves her sight. Grandma and I, well, we rate, but we’re just not Daddy.

The way that Cora’s affections work, if a higher ranking person is available, there’s no concept of sharing the love. Oh, occasionally she’ll drop a bone here and there, and go to a “lower-ranked” person for a moment, but she’ll quickly return her attention to the person higher in the pecking order. (Sounds like office politics, doesn’t it?) That means frustration both for the lower-ranking person and occasionally for the higher-ranking one who’s unable to peel away.

Tonight, after discovering I was in position 3 when picking up Cora from Grandma, I felt pretty hurt. Questions of: would it be different if I were home all the time, what am I doing that’s so different, why does Daddy win out – all went through my mind on the drive from Grandma’s to our home. I’m hoping to end up reconciling it with myself with a couple of points. The first is that Cora has lots of people to love because lots of people love her, and that’s a wonderful thing, regardless of where we all stack up in her current pecking order. The second I’ve forgotten because it still smarts that I’ve got to be an adult and forget about the “who’s loved by her best” kind of mental contest. She still loves to be held by her mommy, so long as her daddy isn’t around as an alternative. The third is that two days a week, mommy is around and daddy isn’t around as an alternative until he gets home from work, at which point its wonderful that Cora wants her daddy so that mommy can take care of other things.

Tonight I did make sure to work the system, though, so that I got my Cora-fix. Usually I come pick up Cora and then make dinner. We talk and coo, but I can’t hold her and play with her and still manage to get dinner on the table. So, dinner waited. (We had leftovers in the fridge, anyway.) And we played and cuddled and I got my mommy fix in until Daddy walked in the door. And then I made dinner and got the dishes done, since my hands were suddenly not needed for baby duty.

My wonderful husband set up a date for us at the Rams Head Tavern in Annapolis to watch the Beatles tribute band, 1964. Note that this band is so good that 1) they’ve played at Carnegie Hall [and are scheduled to go back next year] and 2) they were recently on the cover of a Beatles fan magazine that “never covers tribute bands” (according to our very into-it table mate – the guy apparently missed paying attention to the Beatles the first time around, so is making up for it in a big way). The thing about this band is that they’re apparently very good at mimicking the look, sound, and mannerisms of the original Four. Whether they’re a great knockoff or not, it was a really fun show. And, with a great dinner at the beginning of the date, our daughter being well-cared for by grandma, and a selection of pretty darn decent beers available at my beck and call during the concert, I’d have to say it was a really good date. (Oh, yeah, the company was pretty good, too.)

Now I’m jones-ing to go see Deanna Bogart there in February. She puts on a great show, has a new CD out, and at least two of the guys in the band are locals who play regularly at one of our other local favorite places to dine.

In the vein of they-can’t-be-serious(!):
Keep it Clean House-Cleaning Kit and CD-ROM
As quoted from their website:
“Humor him with the idea of housework. That’s right! He may not want to know how to clean the toilet, mop the floor or make the bed, but he will want to watch these captivating cleaning experts show him how to DO IT!”

Key critiques: one, I don’t want to “humor him” with the “idea” of housework. I’d much rather he do it, whether it’s humorous or not, and not just think about it. (I’m referring here specifically to their text – there’s no tie-in here to my hubby and our housework.) Two, again in the same vein, a guy who just wants to “watch [their] captivating cleaning experts” isn’t very helpful. “Dear, are you watching soft porn again? No, honey, I’m just refreshing on how to clean that toilet.”

[Brought to you courtesy of “Charlotte and John” who nicely sent me an e-mail with the subject “Make Your Valentine Shine!”. ]

Need to make a menu for dinner Friday, work on my Bible study for today, and make it to bed before midnight, but there are too many things swirling around in my brain. One set of friends is excited over the birth of their baby, another set of friends is mourning their miscarriage. We all know how to handle the happy event, but we don’t know quite know how to deal with the loss, though both are equally as important. Everyone will want to swarm around the new arrival and his happy parents (welcome to the world, Cambell Ray!), but I suspect M and B will have a quieter time of it, though they may need the support of people around them even more than the exhausted new parents.

In both cases, these pregnancies had been long awaited and hoped for. Both couples were ecstatic to find out that they were pregnant. The pregnancy that resulted in a healthy baby boy would have been the pregnancy I’d have counted as higher risk. But biology, science or no, doesn’t always work as advertised, and babies that are loved aren’t always born.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4) Quoting a verse is an quick-fix comfort, both for me and for our mourning Christian friends. May I be a more tangible comfort, an instrument of God’s promise of comfort, for our dear friends.

Ran across a reference to James Gosling and what he’s up to on Craig Larman’s site. . . (I have this habit of seeking out famous software folks’ websites – typically they’ve got lots of interesting articles and resources on ’em, and sometimes sneak peeks at their books). Turns out Mr. Java is building a new development system. From Sun’s site,
“Ace technology enables developers to simplify and automate the development of enterprise Java applications, create applications that are easy to migrate from one architecture to another, and optimize performance and scalability”. The site claims to have replicated a system (the Java Pet Store) that originally required ~14000 lines of code and six months development time, in 224 lines of hand-written code and one week.

I’m interested, but not biting yet. Memories of bad experiences with another code-generation tool called Versata come to mind. I’ve never yet found any sort of tool that’s as inventive in its ability to both create business problems and solve them than the human mind. Code-generators have to play by rules; humans don’t. But if I can convince our CIO to give someone (me, maybe?) some free time to build a real app with it, maybe I could be pleasantly surprised.

For those of you who know me only by blog (and there ain’t that many of you – I know how few folks read this thing!), there are a few key characteristics of me that impact this entry. I’m not a girly-girl – I hated dolls as a kid, wouldn’t be caught dead in pink, and my idea of a great afternoon in college was getting muddy playing rugby and finishing off the day with a rousing round of bawdy songs and beer. My knees can no longer handle the rugby thing, but I’d much rather be out fishing/hiking/camping (and drinking beer, though I tend to pass the bawdy songs by) than doing anything that requires me to wear something frilly.

I figured when I had a daughter that I’d introduce her to all of the great virtues of being a tomboy. Sure, she’d have teddy bears, but she’d also play with footballs. At the moment she wears a lot of pink, but face it, there aren’t that many other colors available out there for ten month old girls. (I’m not so out there as to dress her in boy clothes. . . somehow I’m not comfortable putting her in a sweatshirt with little toy trucks on it.)

For Christmas Cora got all sorts of neat stuff. And she’d been playing with it all happily – gender-neutral stuff like stacker cups and Elmo balls and stuffed bunnies (hey, my nephews got the same stuffed bunnies). Then my neighbor showed up with one last Christmas present for her. It sat, unopened, for a couple of hours: Cora really doesn’t get the present thing yet. Finally my curiousity got the best of me and I prodded her to open it. Meaning, I mostly opened it and she played with a piece of the paper. Inside was a baby doll. One with a hard plastic head, plastic hands and feet, dressed in all pink. The very kind of thing that I wouldn’t have anything to do with as a kid, and teased my little sister unmercifully about. In the wondeful karma of life, however, my daughter has adopted this baby doll as her favorite toy. She often picks it up and carries it around, dives into it if it’s on the floor, pets its head. . . My vision of her future as a truck driving/motorcycle-riding/neurosurgeon has suddenly been clouded – suddenly the mist forms into a perfectly coifed, minivanner who is wildly successful running a company that makes Baby Einstein tape knockoffs. (OK, so that that’s not such a bad vision – do you know how popular those Baby Einstein tapes are?)

We’re guessing she might think it’s a baby that’s littler than she is. She’s often watched other babies and tried to interact with them. Maybe this is just a smaller baby from the nursery. Or maybe she’s pretending to be like her mommy and daddy, in which case she has some odd ideas of how we care for her, as she picks up her baby doll by the collar of its shirt.

Whatever the explanation, my utopian vision of a gender-role-blind child has been cracked. It turns out that there might be some kernel of truth to the girls will be girls and boys will be boys idea: my daughter will earn her own sense of what’s right for her as a little girl, and her poor mother will just have to live with it, and maybe get used to the idea of little baby dolls. Just so long as she doesn’t want to become a ballerina. (smile)