Having been married as wee little children, Nonni and Poppy celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary recently. Their three children, with spouses and children, descended for the weekend to eat, swim and party.
Kissing cousins:
Fun with Uncles:
And with Auntie:
Asa discovered a new favorite toy - sort of a variation on the maraca - that once belonged to Mommy. Technically, one should walk and push the popper, but Asa, as usual, did just fine crawling and pushing.
At one point, cousins stopped by to visit, so Asa and Eva got to play with Lola as well:
Just about 20 minutes from our house, we discovered this total treasure of a park - it has a pond, some good walking trails, ball fields, picnic areas, a farmstand, ice cream, a huge playground, and one of the best carousels we've seen.
Mummy loooooooves carousels. And even though this one didn't go up-and-down (it was too old!), it went fast.
Asa wasn't as sure about it as Mummy (he wasn't as sure about slides, either, but we're hoping he'll come around), but Mummy was so excited that she immediately went and bought a ticket for Mommy.
Asa wasn't sure with Mommy, either. I think carousels take some getting-used-to. Still, I think we'll be going back often.
In his toybox the other day, Asa discovered a large plastic maraca. Now, usually he'll pull out a toy, play with it for a little while, and then forget about it in favor of another toy. Not so the maraca. Love at first shake, I guess. He carried that thing around all day. I didn't know you could crawl with a large plastic toy in your hand, but it seems you can - at least, Asa can.
Along came bedtime, and we tried to remove the maraca from his grip before putting him down. Nothing doing, he held on for dear life and screamed as though we were trying to remove his arm. So we put him down with the maraca. And he cuddled it until he fell asleep.
His hand was still around it until I went in with my camera, of course... then he shifted and made it look like I'd put it there. Sigh.
In the morning, we went in and said, "Hey, look, Asa - it's your maraca! You can play with it!"
And he looked at us as though we were nuts. Hasn't played with it since. Go figure.
This is a couple of weeks old already... maybe more? Not quite sure. He's gotten a lot better with the push-toy - we even took it to the park, where he had plenty of space to go in a straight ling for a long while.
But one disclaimer: yes, he fell. Yes, he bonked his head, lightly, and yes, he cried. For about 10 seconds. Then he flung himself back at the toy and started walking again.
I'll preface this by saying that Asa really doesn't need any more toys. He has all sorts of developmentally-appropriate and/or fun toys. Our living room is a testament to that. He's also got a basket full of stuffed animals, which he is learning now to appreciate... which, at his age, pretty much means that he chews them. About what could be expected.
However, M. and I have been wanting to get him the one thing that appears, to us, to be lacking in his collection... a complement, if you will, to his blocks and trucks and shapes. You see, Asa doesn't have a doll. Lots of stuffed animals, but no doll. Fair enough, said we, his birthday is coming up, we can get him a doll. Right?
You'd think we'd have stopped being this naïve a while back. But no.
M., doing errands today, stopped into Creatoyvity, a rather upscale toy shop that tends towards Political Correctness and organic/wooden toys. She came home emptyhanded, and looked at me rather thoughtfully. "They were all little girl dolls," she noted. "Frilly, pink, girly dolls. Not a single one that looked like a boy, let alone one that had boy parts." Hmm.
I went online to do a little more research. Surely, I said to myself, a big chain like Toys'R'Us should have something, right?
Well, right and wrong:
Huh, it's all pink and girly. Oops, what's that? Over on the left-hand sidebar?
Right. A "sort" function. In among all the girly princess dolls... six. None of which was remotely realistic, two of which were Raggedy Ann and Andy, all of which looked much more like stuffed animals. Because, really, heaven forbid a little boy have a baby doll.
FAO Schwartz wasn't any better:
etoys.com had something, at least: a couple of very expensive, hard-plastic dolls that weren't even available:
And one potty-training aid:
Right there, in the product description put out by the manufacturer: "Tinkles, an anatomically correct drink & wet friend to lead the way and teach the basics of potty training to your own baby!" This isn't a lovey, or something to care for and hug, it's a pee model. Which, apparently, means that boys can only have dolls if they have some sort of educational purpose.
Fisher Price had a whole series of "Little Mommy" dolls:
But no Little Daddy dolls. Apparently, Daddies don't love their babies, don't cuddle and rock them, don't change diapers... and we're once again living in the 1950s. What's up with that? A 2009 Bureau of Labor and Statistics survey noted that "On an average day, among adults living in households with children under 6, women spent 1.1 hours providing physical care (such as bathing or feeding a child) to household children; by contrast, men spent 0.5 hours providing physical care." That's over twice as much time spent by women. Last year. Do I blame this on the lack of little boy dolls? Of course not. That's just a symptom of a larger cultural bias that is not - no matter what recent so-called "post-feminist" college grads may think - going away anytime soon. (And no, just for the record, this isn't the man-hating lesbian rant that some may want it to be... I can't quite see women purely as victims - I know too many like this one.)
What I question is why, if we truly want equality in the home as well as the workplace - if we want fathers to be as hands-on as mothers and to be full participants in both housework and childcare - why aren't we modeling this to our sons? Why are so many of the kitchen playsets pink and frilly? Why are doll clothes and doll accessories so often pink? Why is it that, nearly 40 years after the song first came out, we still frown when William says he wants a doll?
Now, certainly, Asa is far too young to notice the implicit gender typing in his toys. He's even too young to notice whether his dolly is a boy or girl. He's too young to cuddle a dolly, to see it as some sort of representation of a human, to treat it as his baby. But really, I have a hard time believing that in the next couple of years, during which time I rather expect that he will begin to notice and understand such things, there will suddenly be a glut of boy-dolls on the marketplace.
Granted, at Asa's age, a lot of days are days of firsts. But still, yesterday was remarkable.
We went to visit Aunt Becke and Uncle Paul, who we don't get to see nearly often enough. While we went to the store where Aunt Becke works, to shop (Mommy and Mummy) and be shown off (Asa), Uncle Paul made lunch - super yummy pasta with fresh tomatoes, basil and mozzarella. Which led to first number 1-3: first pasta, first mozzarella, first fresh bread dipped in olive oil and tomato juice. Although Asa looks just like Poppy, he certainly got some Italian tastebuds from Nonni - he absolutely loved his lunch! He also loved getting to play with his Uncle afterwards:
After lunch, we went to the zoo - not our usual, but one with animals Asa hadn't seen, like Bison and Elephants. There was also a farm-animal area. Uncle Paul took a lot of pictures of the rooster, but Asa seemed to prefer the horses.
Of course, social being that he is, he reacted best to the loving family around him.
He ended up missing the elephants, though - a warm day in a comfy stroller can really only have one outcome.
But the day had one more first: dessert back at Uncle Paul and Aunt Becke's included blueberry pie (homemade by Aunt Becke, and fabulous) and vanilla ice cream... Asa's first ice cream.
Hard to tell here, but he was all about the ice cream. Especially if there was a little bit of blueberry pie filling involved.
In all, a really wonderful day with really wonderful people, and one very very happy little boy.
As in, I'm tired of having to live two entirely contradictory truths.
M. and I file our Massachusetts taxes as a married couple. Our only choices are "married filing jointly" or "married filing separately". We opt for the latter. Why? Because we file our federal taxes, each of us, as "single." According to the federal government, we are not married.
So this year, I claimed all sorts of student deductions, and she claimed Asa. I claimed commuter breaks, she claimed our rent. Is it fair? No, not really. Is it kind of underhanded? YUP. Do I look at our taxes and think, "dang, if I were the IRS, I'd audit this one - it just doesn't look right"? Absolutely - I mean, on the surface, it looks like I have bunches more expenses than income, and wouldn't that make you pause? Really?
And even so, we're among the lucky ones. (See more about the less-lucky ones here.) M.'s work allows me to be on a family health insurance plan, despite being in RI (another place where we are not legally married). We do live in a state where our relationship is recognized, where I don't have to worry about whether she'd be allowed to visit - or even make decisions - were I hospitalized. We even got lucky when Asa was born - although not in MA, he was born in a state where M. and I are understood to be married, and both of our names are on his birth certificate.
And yet...
Because we are "not married", we get taxed on my portion of our health plan by both the federal government and the State of Rhode Island.
Because we are "not married", we couldn't change the names on our passports to reflect married hyphenation... even though the Social Security Administration issued us new cards with that new name, and we actually do file even our federal taxes under our married names - you know, the ones that correspond to our social security numbers.
You get the idea. And, if you've been reading this blog for a while, this is nothing you didn't already know. So why am I rehashing it all? Why have I just enumerated all of these discrepancies, all of these discriminatory slights?
Because they might be ending.
Because a U.S. District Judge in Boston ruled, yesterday, in two separate cases, that a) marriage is a states'-rights issue, and b) treating a class of married couples in Massachusetts differently than it treats all other married couples, from MA and elsewhere, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.
Duh.
What I absolutely love is that the States' Rights question was (and has been) precisely the one used by the opponents of same-sex marriage to deny the validity of the Interstate Commerce Clause - you know, the one in which states agree to respect one another's laws, the one that makes most people's marriage licenses valid from state to state. It's why so many states were so quick to pass their own Defense of Marriage Acts... and why the one passed by the Federal Government is inherently flawed. States' Rights. Ha.
What I love even more is that, although this ruling doesn't extend beyond the cases argued - which were all specifically about Massachusetts - all of the analysis seems to agree that this sets a strong precedent. (You hear that, CT, VT, NH, IA? Listen up now, y'all...) And that precedent says something that is so ridiculously obvious that it's hard not to shout it aloud:
The Federal Government has, for fourteen years, enshrined discrimination into law. It is time for that to end, and for our government to treat all citizens with equality and justice. Now. No more excuses.
