Silicon Valley Moms Blog

Sleeping Through the Night

I've never been particularly good at sleeping.  When my son was born eight years ago, it was not a big deal to me to be up four or five times in a night.  I've been a restless sleeper and insomniac most of my life, so I am pretty well acquainted with late-night TV shows, and the bizarre informercials that appear between 2 and 3 am.  As far as I'm concerned, Tivo is the greatest invention known to mankind, ranking right up their with fire and the printing press.  It has, on more than one occasion, prevented me from unnecessarily purchasing some device or another hawked by Ron Popeil or Victoria Jackson.

When I do sleep, my husband can always tell if I'm stressed by the horrific teeth-grinding that goes on.  My husband describes it at as something akin to a recycling trucking being driven right through our bedroom.  I woke myself up with it once, and was super-annoyed that someone upstairs was moving furniture at 4 am, only to realize that we didn't have an upstairs and that sound was emanating from inside my head. 

I was a little surprised when my doctor suggested that I might have sleep apnea, and ordered a sleep study for me.  Snoring has not been a problem as far as I know, and as far as my husband will tell me.  He's more concerned about my grinding my teeth down to little nubs and needing dentures by the time I'm fifty.  At any rate, the doctor seemed to think that this could be the cause of a persistent cough I've had for about 3 months now, and ordered me to go to a sleep clinic for a test.

Building a National Platform, One Mom at a Time

On Sunday, July 19, the MOMocrats had a brunch with some of the members of the Silicon Valley Moms Group after the BlogHer Conference in San Francisco.  We turned our social session into a working session, putting our collective knowledge together to create a position paper to be submitted to the Democratic National Committee for inclusion in the party platform.  We posted the results of the meeting at MOMocrats, and we invite MOMocrats and Silicon Valley Moms Group readers to comment and add ideas or ask questions.   We will submit this to the Democratic National Committee on Sunday, July 27 as part of a nationwide series of community platform-building meetings.

Not all of the women in attendance were Democrats, and we encouraged them (and you) to get involved in framing the issues that face our nation, and letting the powers-that-be know about the issues that are important to them. 

We started out by voting on an issue to focus on, and chose Healthcare as the topic. 

Hair Through the Ages

I walked into the swanky Juut Salon in Palo Alto on Saturday, after a fairly lengthy hiatus from the chi-chi salon circuit, and felt a little nervous.  I had received a coupon in the mail to receive a free make-up consultation and lipstick if I came in for any salon service.  I can't resist a coupon featuring conspicuous use of the word "free," so I booked a long-overdue haircut appointment, and hoped for the best.

Like many women, I have a love-hate relationship with my hair.  My hair has either been a source of pride or an unruly monster that needed to be tamed.  As a child, after one disastrous Pixie cut in second grade, where I feigned illness to avoid school for two days, I vowed never to cut my hair again.  I let it grow long and straight until it reached my waist in junior high, and ran away shrieking any time my mother came near me with a pair of scissors. 

In high school, I finally succumbed to the trend of the day, and cut my waist-length hair short, into a Carol Brady/Florence Henderson long shag, and then attempted a Dorothy Hamill wedge, neither of which suited me terribly well.  In college, I went through a big hair perm phase. My Asian, chemical loving hair soaked up the stinky Toni Home Perm and exploded into frizz that would rival Sideshow Bob on The Simpsons. After much trial and more error, I went back to the long, straight hair of my childhood.  I managed to narrowly avoid the Rachel cut in the '90s, which all my single women friends had, even though all of them claimed that they never watched Friends.

Marriage and the Vortex of Doom

Our family took a short cruise up the Sea of Cortez in Mexico in January, just before school resumed.  It was a wonderful nature cruise that offered up-close glimpses of wildlife, hiking, snorkeling, and sea kayaking. 

I'm not a person who enjoys water.  I can tread water, but going out in deep water causes me to panic, due to some early childhood trauma involving my dad throwing me in a lake in an attempt to teach me using the old "sink or swim method."  I sank.  Like a rock wearing a toolbelt.  I don't like inhaling saltwater, so snorkeling has never held much appeal to me either.

My husband and son, on the other hand, are like a couple of friendly, inquisitive sea mammals and would rather snorkel than walk on land any day.  I was feeling a little left behind sitting on the beach with my People magazine, and so when the opportunity to kayak came along, I decided to "feel the fear and do it anyway."  I trusted that my husband would save me if we tipped over, and felt pretty sure that I wouldn't drown with the industrial-strength inflatable life vest I had strapped on my chest.

Peace Vigil: Better to Light A Candle...

Like many people across the US, my family attended a vigil for peace in our town.  The vigils were organized on a mass scale by Moveon.org.  In our town, people gathered in front of City Hall, held signs, lit candles, and formed small circles of rememberance, small circles of light.

My husband and 7-year old son and I are veterans of a number of peace rallies since the war in Iraq began five years ago.  My husand and son traveled to Washington, DC last year to participate in one of the largest demonstratons since the war began, marching one cold day from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon.  That day, a pro-war protester handed my son an American flag as he walked by, and he carried it proudly.  The anti-war people were somewhat appalled by this gesture, and separated themselves from him.  To us, protesting is part of being American, and our son carried his flag proudly.  Isn't the right to free speech one of the rights we're supposedly sending our young men and women to die for?

Why is it considered unpatriotic to exercise the freedoms guaranteed under the Constitution?  I would posit that the most patriotic acts of all are those in which we raise our voices in opposition to tyranny and oppression, those acts in which we stand together so we don't fall apart. 

Teaching Compassion, One Child at a Time

My son Alex was watching the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" movie while I was cooking dinner the other night.  A commercial came on for a program to help kids in third world countries.  It featured a story of a family with several children, one of whom sometimes opts to go hungry so his little brother can have food.  Normally, Alex doesn't watch commercials, since the magic that is Tivo allows us to fast forward through all those sugary cereals and Bratz dolls ads.  This time, he watched this commercial intently, and ran in to tell me about it.

"Mom! There are kids who don't have food or parents! They don't have schools or medicine!  I need to help them!"  he said.

I asked him if he got the number or the website.  He went back and got his dad to back up the Tivo so he could write down the number.  The next thing I knew, he was on the phone.

Birth of a Liberal

I have been thinking about this election and how invested and involved I am in it, probably more so than any election since my first time as a voter. That was way back in 1980, when I was a sophomore at Barnard College in New York. Since it was my first time, I looked at the candidates carefully. I didn't consider myself a Democrat or a Republican. I was the product of a mixed marriage (dad's a Republican, mom's a Democrat). I liked Jimmy Carter as a person, but as a President, he fell short of expectation. With the Iranian Hostage Crisis, gas rationing, and all the economic problems of the late '70's, it seemed like someone else could do a better job.

The problem was, the alternative was even scarier. I remember watching a video of Ronald Reagan driving through the California countryside, pointing out the window and saying, "I expect that some day this could all be ashes...all be gone...if the Soviets get their way. We have to build up our nuclear arsenal to make sure that doesn't happen."

He was so calm, so matter-of-fact. He scared the crap out of me. He was basically saying, "We'd better get them, before they get us." The idea that this guy would be in charge of nuclear weapons, or even a water pistol, gave me nightmares.

Walking with (Animatronic) Dinosaurs

Yesterday was my husband's birthday, and what he wanted to do on his special day was go to see the Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience stage show.  Since you only turn 48 once, I decided to indulge him and go along.  Our 7 year old son, of course, was thrilled.

My husband and son are big fans of the Chased by Dinosaurs BBC series.  If you're not familar with it, a guy named Nigel Marven takes a trip back in time to visit with dinosaurs.  It's a very well done series, and the dinosaurs really come to life with a combination of CGI, puppetry, and animatronics.  Nigel get into a few scrapes now and then, just to make it interesting.  He's like the Steve Irwin of the Jurassic era.

They've taken this concept and turned it into a live-action stage show, with an "archaeologist" guide and some life-sized dinosaurs that move, make noises, and act a lot like what I imagine dinosaurs would be like.  The host explains the different periods, from the Triassic to the Cretaceous, and the famous Jurassic in between.  The big finale is the T-Rex, which stops and bellows at the audience.

Sometimes, Breastfeeding Sucks

When I was pregnant with my son, there was a mini-baby boom in my office.  That year, no less than five women gave birth, which was pretty remarkable considering that only 22 people worked in the office at the time.  Of the preggos, four of us were committed to breastfeeding, and one decided early on that she would not, under any circumstances, breastfeed her baby.  Her rationale was that she had given over her body for 9 months to this baby, and that was her limit. She wanted her body back and that was that.

Around the watercooler, this became a topic of ongoing conversation.  No amount of research (she was herself a trained biologist) or emotional appeals about mother-child bonding would sway her.  I'm pretty much a "to each her own" kind of gal, but this was puzzling to me. 

I entered into the breastfeeding business a bit naively, I must admit.  I had this vision of a blissful scene of mother and baby bonding and gazing lovingly at each other in blissed-out harmony.  I thought, "How hard could it be?" and defiantly scoffed at the training video provided by the hospital.

School Days

Parents in Palo Alto are notoriously involved in their kids education, perhaps overly so.  There's a sense that if your child doesn't go to the right pre-school, or the right elementary school, they will not get into Stanford or one of the Ivies and be doomed to a lifetime of asking, "Paper or plastic?"

I went to a parenting lecture once by a local physician who said something along the lines of, "It's as though we're setting out kids up to go to do well in school so they go to the right college, to get into the right grad school, to get the right job, so that maybe they'll be happy when they're 34.  What about teaching them to be happy right now?  Teaching them to appreciate what's in front of them and not being so focused on what's ahead?"