Riley and Avery

I had a few pictures of the girls that I wanted to upload but now realize that the camera batteries are in Avery's train set and don't have enough charge left to upload pictures. So that'll have to wait.

Nothing new has really happened to us lately. We have our unemployment hearing tomorrow morning. Should be a blast.

We went to the Fine Arts Center on Sunday. It was the strangest thing ever. We had been talking for a year and a half about how we absolutely needed to go there. They were under re-construction for a while, so we finally decided to go. When we got there, we were both kind of baffled and we look at each other and we say "What?! We've been here before!" Turns out we had gone when we lived in Ft. Collins and passed through Colorado Springs on our way to the Sand Dunes with Amy and Emily, like six years ago! Weird. Riley had said that she had no interest in going somewhere where the pictures are already painted (to her "museum" means "children's museum") but started to really like it. Total bonus that they had a small children's room with easels for the kids to draw. Riley got right to work and created three rather intricate drawings.

Anyway, I've been buried neck deep in my research for my anthropology paper. I'm finding this subject so fascinating that I am researching even topics that I don't need for my paper. Right now I'm almost done reading Milk, Money, and Madness: the Culture and Politics of Breastfeeding. Talk about fascinating. One picture that I find telling is this one:

This depicts a pair of boy-girl TWINS. The mother was told incorrectly by her doctor and her mother-in-law that she could not produce enough breastmilk to nurse both, and they advised her to nurse the boy (because of the importance of sons in Pakistani culture). The girl was bottle-fed and died of malnutrition and diarrhea the day after the picture was taken. The mother gave the rights to the photo and her story to UNICEF to promote breastfeeding efforts. So sad...

I'm trying to get my hands on a copy of Mother's Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture but I'm having issues with using my Barnes and Noble member account online. I just received Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives from Amazon. I haven't had a chance to look at it yet since Riley's been reading it (even though it contains no pictures) for about half an hour now, going through page by page. I look forward to going over it since it's written by an anthropologist. It could be really cool or really boring. Who knows?

I have recently been focusing on the Puritans, trying to support my claim that they WEREN'T the source of our breastfeeding taboos. I came across this rockin' article (here) that tells how breastmilk was commonly used to sustain the elderly and ill. How the relationship between a breastfeeding mother and suckling child was as close to divine as humans could become. The Puritans revered breastmilk for its healing and life-sustaining properties. Quite interesting. So, I was right. The Puritans did not have a skewed view of breastfeeding.

Sorry to bore everyone, but as I said before, I'm rather obsessed right now...