Yesterday I met Squid, a blogger who found me (hooray!) about three years ago. She was visiting Seattle so I took Strudel to have a run-around with her Mali, who is three months older. Mali’s a little smaller than Strudel, so it was funny to see someone a little smaller racing around spouting off words. Strudel decided to give Mali one of her patented menacing hugs and Mali shouted, “Hi Mama!” which I believe is toddlerese for “Get this nutbar off me.” I also met Squid’s older girl Iz, and I am very sorry Franny wasn’t there to meet her too. If I am very lucky I will meet some more cool women like her in my very own city someday.

I haven’t posted about this at all, but I really want to go to the BlogHer conference this year. Squid went last year and is going again this year [ETA: okay, I am completely high because I thought Squid went but she didn’t.]. I feel like I want to even more now, after Squid has stepped off of the Internet and become a real person (to me, I mean). There are some other people I would also like to meet in real life, like Badger. It’s all about the benjamins at this point. It should have happened sooner, but this house opened up, and BAM, we moved.

I think it will happen. Anyway, we tried to put the babies together and get pictures of them. We did okay. They are slippery little beasts at this age–Mali would shoot off one way, and Strudel the other.

The girlies climb up to get Iz:

The girls look happily at Squid:

Strudel has that “You!” look:

And now Squid and Crew have a standing invitation to come to the Zoo with us when she comes back, because we are about to buy a membership.

In Other News

Yesterday I also hung out with Supa, and we were talking about books a little bit. I told her I was reading America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, which is a history of women as wives, mothers, and activists in the U.S.

Since I had Strudel, I have found an interest in reading about the history and sociology of women and motherhood. I like to know things like how women in Dark-Ages Europe would hang their babies in a sack on hooks in the barn all day while they worked in the fields. (I would think that strapping the baby to your body would keep rats off AND decrease the mortality rate, but I guess those women didn’t have or make that choice.)

I knew a lot of young women who were women’s studies majors in college, which is something that often overlaps with issues in art history, but I was really put off by their angry feminism, which was, for the most part, fueled by histories they had read in books and lectures they had heard, rather than by their personal experiences.

Now that I have been a wife and a mother (twice), those issues resonate louder with me, and I identify more with what I read about expectations society has and had for mothers, and expectations we have for ourselves. Sometimes I feel angry about what I read, and sometimes I cry, but I usually feel better and less alone. I have been lending a lot of these books to Supa, and they have been making us both feel better (I believe). I have been reading a lot about women’s history post-WWII and before birth control, because it reminds me of changes that are being espoused in this country now.

“It’s really good,” I said to Supa, about the book. “It’s a history of the crappy time women have in the U.S. since Colonial days. The chapter I’m most interested in is the one on the ’50s, of course, with the planned neighborhoods and being cooped up in the house and all.”

“It sounds good,” Supa said.

“I’ll let you borrow it when I’m done. It will make you angry.”

“Oh, good,” Supa said.

I like that Supa, she’s my cup of punch.