Happy 3rd Birthday, Nora!

In some ways, it's hard to believe Nora is turning three today.  On the other hand, it's hard to remember what life was like before she joined our family.  She regularly does things I wasn't expecting her to do until she was older, which long since dissociated her from "babies" or "toddlers" in my mind. I guess those are some different ways of saying the same thing: "three" feels like the age she should be.

How to describe Nora as she turns three? The thing family and friends regularly comment about is how well and how much she talks.  Her teachers seem most surprised by how attached she and her best friend Layla are to one another, and though they seem to love playing together we sometimes hear about them bickering with one another like siblings.  We understand why people are surprised by her because every day she does at least one thing that amazes me and Billy.  The things she can remember, the astute observations she makes, the ways she finds to explain what she is thinking, and the ways she makes us laugh still catch us off guard.  Billy invented the "I like" game, where she takes turns naming things she likes with the other person.  We love this game because it highlights what she is thinking about and what is most memorable to her.  When she "reads" to herself or with one of us, she often recites several sentences in a row with complete accuracy, regardless of the complexity of the language.  Whatever the "terrible twos" are, she skipped them entirely.

Nothing about two year old Nora was terrible-- even her tantrums-- but she is testing us more these days.  She is such a rational child that we can more or less talk her out of tantrums and bad behavior.  Brief time outs alone in her room, after which we speak to her about what got her there in the first place and give each other big hugs, continue to be very effective.  She often has to be reminded to put on her "listening ears."  She naps easily in her room at home, and if she wakes up early, she plays quietly until her two hour naptime is up-- but at school she often refuses to nap entirely.  When she disagrees with us we regularly give her two options-- "You can do X or you can do Y, but you cannot do Z"-- or we bargain with her to incentivize good behavior.  Of course, this means she has gotten quite good at her attempts to bargain with us, too.  Lately she has gotten so good at stalling before doing something we ask her to do that we just find ourselves laughing at her attempts.

But enough of talking about her. Here is the video that captures a little bit of what she's like these days.




We celebrated Nora's birthday with the family at a Navy tailgate on Saturday.  The day we planned for all the family to come to the game happened to be the weekend before Nora's birthday, so it worked out great.  She loved having me, Billy, Gram, Pop, Oma (who is visiting), Aunt Vickie, Tres, Uncle Brian, Maggie, Aunt Mary, Uncle Gary, Heather, Jeremy, Jacelyn, Allen, and Cash and Lily celebrate her at the game.  When she went to bed that night, she asked me to tell her a story about "everybody who came to my football party because they love me very much!"  I didn't remember to take any pictures, unfortunately, but here is one my mom sent me of Nora with her cupcake!

I did remember to ask Tres to take pictures of the party we hosted for Nora's friends.  Thank goodness, because his pictures captured so many happy smiling faces that I missed when I was trying to greet all the parents.  Nora asked to have her party at the same place as Layla's (of course), so we invited her school friends and our friends' kids to join us at Rolly Pollies.  Here are a few of my favorites:

And here are a few videos Patti sent us of Nora enjoying the gym!

We can't wait to see what the next year has in store for Nora and for us! If you're interested in taking a look backward, you can click over to Nora's second birthday, Nora at one year old, Nora's 12 month video, Nora's first birthday, or Nora's birth story.

Writing, Just Not Blogging

Lately a few friends have sent me notes saying they miss reading my writing and/or asking whether I feel like I'm done blogging.  I wish I had more energy for writing "for fun!"  I have been doing so much intellectual heavy lifting for this dissertation chapter, and so much "serious" writing, that at the end of the day the last thing I can bring myself to do is sit down and write more.  But, in case people are curious about what I've been up to, I thought I'd share a little bit of that writing here.

What I'm learning is that everyone is right when they say the first dissertation chapter is hard because you have to learn HOW to do something at the same time you are attempting TO do it.  There are other reasons its harder than writing, say, a seminar paper.  The stakes are higher-- I'm expected to come up with wholly original research and insights.  The scope is also larger-- I have to cover a lot more ground in the chapter, which is going to be around twice as long as any seminar paper I ever wrote.  My scope is particularly large for this chapter, since I've decided it's necessary to cover six novels.  As a point of comparison, I've read entire dissertations that cover six or fewer novels.  I am finding that this larger scope also makes organization more of a challenge-- how can I best manage to make several related arguments, rather than just one central argument?  It's also a challenge to think about how the chapter will fit into the grander scheme of the dissertation, but I'm trying not to worry about that piece until after I get a draft done.  It also requires SO much more reading than any single paper I've written before.  I had to read a ton to figure out my ideas, and read a ton to figure out how my ideas fit into what has already been said, and now I have to figure out how to articulate my ideas while situating them within that larger conversation.  Without forgetting which ideas were mine, which ideas were inspired by someone else's, and which ideas were someone else's to begin with.  And so on.

The other struggle for me is that I hate-- I HATE-- prose that is difficult to understand.  I would leave graduate school right now if I didn't think I was capable of writing a dissertation that would be fairly easy for, say, undergraduate students in an English class to understand.  But so much of what I read is just NOT written with that type of goal in mind.  Trying to figure out these peoples' arguments is difficult enough, but for my purposes, I also need to figure out how to explain them more explicitly in my own writing.  That's tough.  So anyway, in case anyone is interested, I thought I'd include a two paragraph chunk of the introductory part of the chapter I'm writing about Josephine Herbst and abortion.  When I copy and paste from Scrivener (the program I'm currently using to write the dissertation), none of the footnotes are transferred.  So just know that there are like 10 citations/footnotes in this chunk of text, too.  I don't know if these paragraphs will make a WHOLE lot of sense out of context, and they need to be heavily revised, but here they are in case you are REALLY curious what I'm up to.

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When Reagan insists upon conceptualizing abortion as an “open secret,” she credits American women with private defiance of the laws that criminalized abortion and labeled discussion of it obscene.  The push to make abortions inaccessible to American women was two pronged.  Between 1860 and 1880, laws were passed throughout the United States that illegalized the termination of pregnancy at any point, despite the commonly held belief that there was nothing wrong with ending a pregnancy before “quickening”— the point at which the pregnant woman can feel the movements of the fetus.  Additionally, the Comstock Act of 1873 “included abortion and birth control in federal antiobscenity legislation,” making it illegal to distribute any information about contraception or abortion techniques, including advertisements for related products, in the U.S. mail.  When American women living in the early twentieth century privately helped one another find ways to terminate pregnancies, they were helping one another break the laws that illegalized abortion.  But even when they merely talked amongst themselves about the termination of pregnancies, they were violating the spirit of the Comstock Act, which attempted to shut down the circulation of this type of information.  Their willingness to assist one another despite the increasing vilification of abortion in the early twentieth century is, indeed, necessary to acknowledge.

However, theorization about the practice of open secrecy reveals that its dynamics often reinforce the power of the modes of discipline it attempts to circumvent.  D.H. Miller’s influential insights about open secrecy reveal that “the function of secrecy… is not to conceal knowledge, so much as to conceal knowledge of knowledge.”   He argues that when an individual conceals knowledge of knowledge in order to avoid being penalized for possessing the knowledge that is obscured, often “the costs of social discipline have been averted only in an equally expensive self-discipline.”  This understanding illuminates why the Comstock Act was effective even though its legal enforcement was uneven.  Because its supporters attempted to penalize people and publishers for making information about abortion and contraception publicly available, the law set the dynamics of open secrecy into motion.  Following the law’s passing, advertisements for products that aided in contraception and abortion stopped making explicit claims about those properties but emphasized hints about feminine hygiene that were fairly easy for women to decipher.  The fact that women were willing to discuss abortion in private, but often only after an unwanted pregnancy had been conceived, shows that the Comstock Act succeeded in convincing the public that these topics should be treated as obscene.  While women did not stop speaking about abortion, they did discipline their own speech about it.  Sharing advice with women who have already conceived unwanted pregnancies is certainly more transgressive than remaining wholly silent about abortion techniques, but treating abortion as an open secret perpetuates the notion that abortion is obscene and prevents useful knowledge from circulating widely enough to reach all of the women who might benefit from its open exchange.  In other words, women who participate in open secrecy about abortion practice the very censorship of information that the Comstock Act sought to ensure, and in so doing, reinforce the power of that law.