bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Time to sing a new song.

    Back in the days of the Cold War, Sting recorded a little song called "Russians."  Cheesy in a way, but also catchy, in a minor key.  It’s almost a paean to mutually assured destruction as a means of uneasy peace:

    What might save us, me and you

    Is if the Russians love their children too.

    Cheesy because — well, of course the Russians love their children too.  Who said they didn’t?

    Yeah.  So.  What about this?

    A HUSBAND and wife arrested in the British terror raids allegedly planned to take their six-month-old baby on a mid-air suicide mission.

    Scotland Yard police are quizzing Abdula Ahmed Ali, 25, and his 23-year-old wife Cossor over suspicions they were to use their baby’s bottle to hide a liquid bomb.

    The theory is one of the reasons security chiefs are now insisting mothers taste babies’ milk at check-in desks before allowing them to take bottles aboard flights.

    The pair are among up to 23 suspects being questioned over a plot to bring down nine airliners over five US cities, killing thousands of people in the air and on the ground.

    Maybe this theory is wrong.  I hope it is.  It does sound like the sort of thing one would say if one wanted to make the enemy sound as inhuman as possible.  But… what if it is not?  And what if this couple are not isolated psychopaths, but instead hold a view that is more common than we dare to imagine?

    Fighting dirty sometimes wins.  I can’t think how to defend oneself against an attacker wielding a  baby.  His own baby son or daughter.

    (And: Exactly how is having moms taste carried-on baby formula going to help here?  Stock it on the flight with the soda and coffee.)

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    1 comment on Time to sing a new song.

  • My favorite clouds.

    If you like weather, you should be reading Brendan Loy’s blog.  Today he has some lovely cloud photography, including a nice photo of mammatus clouds. 

    Mammatus clouds (here’s the wikipedia article) must be fairly rare, as I have only ever seen them once that I can remember.  Well-formed ones directly overhead are extremely striking.  Here is one example.  Here is another photo that unfortunately lacks context clues.

    I am not a weather nerd of any type, but after I saw the strange, pendulous formations in the sky once, the first thing I did was to Google "cloud formations" to find the name of such a thing.  As soon as I saw the term "mammatus cloud" I knew that had to be the term I sought…

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  • OK, try this one.

    The last humorous link was a dud, so… this?

    h/t Eve Tushnet.

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  • I do not understand marketing people.

    This is crazy.  Wait for the punch line.

    h/t Instapundit.

    UPDATE:  Looks like this entry has been taken down — sorry about that.  Must’ve been the Instalanche or something.

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    1 comment on I do not understand marketing people.

  • Dd.

    Pict0124 Pict0126 Pict0127 Pict0128

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    4 comments on Dd.

  • Babymoon.

    Blogging will be light over the next few weeks, I’m thinking.

    It’s so hard to know what the most important details are to post, with a two-day-old baby. 

    Birth junkies will want to know that the labor was fairly short, not terribly hard — the tough part, only about two hours long — though it culminated in about 60 somewhat scary seconds of shoulder dystocia.  Particularly since this is the second time I’ve had that problem.  But all’s well that ends well.  We had two midwives and two female friends come over — the friends helped our kids and so Mark could be with me the whole time.  The boys missed the actual birth, and I’m kind of glad because it was a bit frightening.  They came up after Mary Jane started to cry. 

    LLL types will want to know that nursing is going ehhhhh, so-so.  After two boys I thought I knew what I was doing.  MJ has a bit of a latch problem:  a receding jaw and a tongue thrust.  She does ok when she latches on, but it takes a good 5-15 min to get her latched.  We’re working on it.  I had a former League leader, a friend’s mom, over at my house today for a couple of hours to remind me of all the things I’ve forgotten because my second child was such an easy nurser.  After 6 years of continuous nursing I am back to Square 1, that being the Square Where You Need Half A Dozen Pillows Within Reach At All Times.

    If family dynamics are your thing, well… can you come watch my boys for a couple of days?  No, it’s not that bad, yet, but I’ve been intermittently VERY overwhelmed!  They love their new sister, but the energy around here is very charged!  Jumping and screaming and yelling and fighting and all that.  I suppose they will settle down eventually.  We are trying to keep Oscar’s routine close to normal — that seems to be helping some. 

    Me, I’m doing ok.  The afterpains are something fierce!  Worse than labor, a few of them.  But I think recovery will be fairly swift.  Home birth rocks.  Give me a couple of days.

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    3 comments on Babymoon.

  • Announcing…

    Mary Jane Frances Arlinghaus!

    Pict0108

    9 lbs even, 21 inches

    born at home 4:02 pm 08/07/06 after 6 h labor

    More later…

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    13 comments on Announcing…

  • News services behaving badly.

    A couple of days ago Reuters admitted transmitting a doctored photo of smoke over Beirut.   (The really amazing thing about that photo is the amateurish quality of the Photoshopping — doesn’t anybody even look at the photos before they hit the wire?)  To their credit, Reuters apparently acted quickly when bloggers pointed out the fake, dismissing the photographer.  It would have been more to their credit to put into action some of the much-vaunted "multiple layers of editing and checks" that supposedly elevate the MSM above the news blogs.

    This episode inspired bloggers to scrutinize other recent wire-service photos and their captions.  Jim Lindgren has a small roundup including Photoshopped "bombs" falling from an airplane, photographs of the same destroyed building showing up a couple of weeks apart as new damage, and the same woman pictured twice, in photos filed more than two weeks apart, both times mourning the destruction of her home, in one case a house, in another case an apartment.  (The "unluckiest multiple home-owner in Beirut," one guy calls her.)

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  • Caryll Houselander.

    Amy Welborn’s reading her.

    I’ll be posting some passages. It is rich, rich spiritual reading. Poetic and true.  An Archbishop, looking out the window at people leaving their work, considering the possibilities of a saint in the making, contemplates the Church:

    …she was both peasant and queen, a queen crowned with stars, who wore her jeweled cope over her peasan’ts frock and her wide apron, a mother who must wash her children with her own hands in the shining waters of Baptism and absolution, who must feed them at her table on the living Bread and the water of Life, who must close their eyes with her own, firm, pitiful fingers for the little sleep between death and resurrection.

    It was part of her wisdom that the glory of the the saints is secret, that we on earth see their tears, their struggle, their wounds, the old clothes they have left off, and their bones; that she cherishes their bones as a mother cherishes her children’s milk teeth, when the children have grown to manhood, because they remind her once they were little and weak, and were fed at her breast. Part of her illimitable wisdom that we must ask a miracle of every new waint, that to prove that they are at God’s side they msut reach a hand through the cloud to alleviate our sorrow. The sign of their glory, a touch of love in the darkness.

    I love the bit about the milk teeth.   Who doesn’t understand the need to keep that kind of relic?

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    1 comment on Caryll Houselander.

  • Morning-after pills over the counter?

    Pamela Pilch at HMS Blog points out a problem with the proposed, over-the-counter morning-after pill:

    Besides all the usual (and correct) arguments against the morning after pill, there is one argument I never hear expressed in the MSM, but which should be appealing to secular women and radical feminists.  It was first brought to my attention by Dr. Hanna Klaus.  And that is that women are being economically exploited by the morning after pill.  Because women can only become pregnant for a few days per cycle, many women will use the morning after pill on days on which they couldn’t have gotten pregnant anyway.  For each dose of the morning after pill, they are paying as much as they would pay for a whole month’s worth of regular birth control pills (which is still a lot more than they would be paying to use natural family planning!). 

    This burden will fall most heavily on young girls who are too scared to go to a physician for regular BCPs, but who engage in unprotected sex several times a month.  They may substitute the MAP regularly for unprotected sex and be spending much more money each month on it than if they just used regular BCPs.

    Not just that.  What about women without health insurance?  It takes a doctor’s visit to get a birth-control pill prescription.  Suppose a substantial subset of uninsured women begin to use the MAP as their primary means of birth control?  Has anyone determined what is the effect of taking the MAP several times a month for a year or more?

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    1 comment on Morning-after pills over the counter?

  • In case you were wondering why carbon isotopes are different in natural and synthetic testosterone.

    All  Mark and I could come up with last night was "Maybe this is something like radiocarbon dating."

    Here’s a better answer.

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  • Still nothing.

    Amazing.

    I spent eighteen hours Friday thinking I was in early labor.  Contractions seven to nine minutes apart, all day.  Then I went to bed.

    Saturday afternoon it started up again, fairly heavily.  This time, three to four minutes apart.   Occasionally I’d "skip one."  That lasted about six hours.  Then I went to bed.

    Nothing today except a couple of Braxton-Hicks-type contractions.  I feel almost normal.   At Mass I was able to stand and to kneel; for the past four weeks I’ve spent the whole time sitting.  I emptied the dishwasher and cleaned up the kitchen, twice.  I’m thirstier and more tired than usual, but otherwise it’s business as usual.  And it feels so empty and boring!  I thought I’d have a baby in my arms by now.

    This is so… anticlimactic.  I feel like I can’t make any plans or drive anywhere, lest it start up again heavier than before and I’ll be stranded.  Normally on Mondays I take the kids to music class, then to Melissa’s to spend the day.  Do I dare?  I just don’t know.  When I birthed Milo, I went from "oh, this’ll probably be a few more hours before it ramps up" to TRANSITION! in the space of about fifteen minutes and in a puddle of amniotic fluid.  I’m kind of reluctant to go anywhere that’ll make it difficult to get home quickly.

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