Best Quote I've Heard in a While

I was listening to an old episode of one of my favorite radio shows, Speaking of Faith, a while back, and heard this pithy and poignant statement of values from progressive Catholic leader Sister Joan Chittister:

We have 10 million babies, as you and I speak, without health insurance in this country. It's wrong. It's immoral. And the whole notion that private sexual morality is the definition of religious life in this country is a cute ploy. It gets our minds off of the sins that are really killing the greatest number of people. I'm not saying that those are also not important values. Of course they are. They define our character as a people and our ability to live within our relationships. But there's a big difference between being pro-life and pro-birth. It's easy to get a baby born. What I want to know is once that baby is born will you feed it and house it and educate it? All I see is that every day we reduce those figures in our national budget more and more. That's the morality and the religion that I'm talking about. And until we care about those things, we cannot, on either spectrum, left or right, call ourselves a religious people, I don't think.

The Perils of Your Children Actually Believing You

Like all parents, we fight an uphill battle to have our kids hew to our values rather than some of the values n society at large. We've gotten off relatively easy on the commercialism question, given that toys and brand names are not as available in Cambodia as they are in the US, and that our kids are still young and they don't see TV commercials. But one battle we do fight is on gender roles. The PC attitudes in the US haven't translated into their preschool, and the kids have learned that pink is a color for girls, not boys, and other social constructions. Being a good feminist, I of course tell them that they can wear whatever color they want.

We also try to communicate a respect for cultural differences, and we talk about the way Cambodians do things vs. our style, Buddhism and other religions vs. Christianity, etc. Sometimes all these abstractions get a little confusing.

So imagine my conundrum when it became clear that Ellie was listening! We were going through her clothes, setting aside ones that were too small for her to give away. The more unisex things we saved for Ben, but I have to admit to putting pink corduroy pants and other really girly things aside to send to friends who have two little girls. Ellie, however, internalized everything I told her and happily grabbed an adorable velvet and red taffeta Christmas dress and said, "We can save this for Ben! Cambodians might think that boys can't wear dresses, but Christians think people can wear whatever they want!"

Happy Birthday, Nathan

Despite his slacker wife--who was so distracted by trying to forestall violence and arrests at the largest political march in five years that she forgot to wish him a happy birthday until noon on April 4--Nathan managed to celebrate his birthday in style. We got him a new set of super-cool home brewing equipment and had a joint birthday party for him (with another embassy friend) at a local bar. Seems like an odd idea, but it was great. The bar--one of the few in Cambodia that's known for modestly clad waitresses who offer you food, drink, a smile, and nothing else--gave us the top floor for a games night. We and the other birthday family provided snacks and cake, and had a cash bar.

Nathan and friend Greg Liddle celebrating their 69th birthday

Ben the Literalist and other stories

A few quick anecdotes:

The other night at bed time, Ben was looking at a dinosaur book upside down. Seeing a whole page of dinosaurs seeming to stand on their head, I said, "Ben, what's wrong with those dinosaurs?"

He thought for a moment before replying, "They're extinct!"

(And then, the next day, when we told this story to adult friends, Ben was apparently concerned that their vocabularies might not be quite as extensive as his, so he clarified for them at the end: "That means they don't exist anymore.")

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Ellie has been having a tough time sleeping through the night recently. She wakes up in the early morning and then wakes one of us up (usually Nathan) to help her move all her things to the sofa, where she stays--often falling asleep again--until the first light of morning. Then she wakes one of us up (usually Jen) at 5:45 or 6:00. We were struggling with this schedule and trying to get her to just stay in her own bed. She explained that because a light in her room had broken recently, she was having bad dreams because there wasn't enough light. So we got the light fixed and hoped for the best.

The first night with her fixed light she revealed some of her true motivation as she asked me, "Mom, tomorrow morning, can you wake me up--just me and not Ben--as soon as you wake up in the morning so we can have cuddles and read stories together?" How can you say no to a request like that?

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Ben is soooo excited about seeing dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum in Washington when we head back to the U.S. Ellie is less thrilled, as she thinks the dinosaur skeletons they have there are scary. We were trying to reassure them both by saying that Ben could be close and Ellie could stand far away. Ben started to cry, confusing us greatly, until he said, "No, they should be naked!"

Poor guy, close and clothes are not the same thing.