Baby Bird's First Pair of Shoes!

In honor of Fashion Week, Baby Bird's first pairs of shoes courtesy of my sister's lovely friend and talented shoe designer Keiko. They are super soft, lined in feminine, but not over the top girly, madras plaid or floral fabric, and well designed for baby as they are easy to put on, and stay on the happy dancing feet they inspire!

Lyv dancing! And she's only ten weeks old!

Also,  if you are looking for a new accessory for Fall, and want to celebrate Fashion Week DIY style, my sis Phaedra and Keiko are teaching a Fascinator Workshop tomorrow! Fascinated with Fascinators but don't know what they are? That means you should go! Details here.

Of Course We Can Update

Husband's trucks about to hit the streets! Gorgeous aren't they?

Of Course We Can

Husband's project that is starting a new conversation for 9/11 literally in the streets of NYC. Check it out! Send your support and keep the conversation going!

My Girl Isn't Too Dumb For Homework

Okay, so I'm late coming to the table on this one given the Maternity Leave From Life rock I've been living under, but the JC Penny website this week released a girl's sweatshirt - apparently in honor of the back-to-school time of year - that said, "I'm too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me."  Change.org circulated a petition demanding JC Penny remove the shirt from their site, and within hours enough people had signed it, that JC Penny removed the sweatshirt from their website.

It's not because I have a daughter that this sweatshirt pisses me off.

It pisses me off because it's one more sign of the sexist trend (or backlash from the feminist movement?) currently underfoot impacting girls, teenagers and young women.

Women have made amazing gains in the last fifty years. If you don't believe it, one episode of Mad Men will have you building an altar to Betty Friedan on your living room mantle by the first commercial break.  Girls now outperform boys in elementary, middle, and high schools. The top one-third of graduating high school classes are women - and their male counterparts now need affirmative action to get into college otherwise the incoming freshmen classes would be 75% female. (And while we're ranting - isn't it funny that affirmative action is no longer controversial or a big deal when white men need it for college? Has JC Penny considered a sweatshirt for teenage boys that says, "Affirmative Action. Don't leave for college without it"?) Women now outperform men in employment in urban areas for the first time in history.

Yet from the time they are infants and toddlers in pink princess outfits, butterfly wings, and bedazzled Mary Janes, they are being taught that what their mind is capable of matters some, but their appearance is the primary concern. I'm not suggesting that women and girls shouldn't focus on their appearance at all - we all like nice clothes and shoes, as does my husband and most men I know - but our appearance shouldn't come at the expense of our intelligence.

JC Penny isn't the only one at fault or the only ones sending the message to girls that if you look good, your mind doesn't matter. Indeed, it comes from all levels of life, from Disney and the American Girl doll to candidates for office and the world within the television set - even the previously innocent Sesame Street has been prettified and princessed. In her campaign for Vice-President, Sarah Palin's make-up artist was the highest paid person on her staff. Who better to send the message that you can say any idiotic thing you want, as long as you look good? But it didn't take Sarah Palin to convey this message. At a party a few years ago, I met a friend's daughter who had just graduated from high school. I asked her what she wanted to do for a career. She said she didn't care what she did -as long as she could wear stilettos.

I wanted an anti-depressant after she said this. In a world and life where you could do anything, why would you just focus on your shoes? 


Needless to say, I won't be shopping for my children at JC Penny - not that I shop there anyway. Nor do I shop at Forever 21 after their magnet that said, "I'm too pretty to do math." (and because I'm not 21). But such things have me sigh a deep sigh, and wonder what lays ahead for me as I attempt to raise feminist or non-sexist thinking children in a sexist dumbed-down world.


Recommend Reading for this and the related Princess trend that has contaminated girls across the land?
Lisa Bloom's Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed Down World and Peggy Orensteins' Cinderella Ate My Daughter.

Peggy Orenstein was recommended to me by a friend and mother of two daughters. I haven't read it yet, as I'm waiting for it from the library. I've read Bloom's Think. I can't say it's the best writing, but she makes some excellent points and she's done her research.

Surfacing & The Naming

Because of this little beauty, I've been on a bit of a blog hiatus. Now I'm beginning to get my head back above water for some catch up.

Some of the catch up:

We named our little bird Lyv Eyre Lindis Corbell. It took us a month, much to my mother's irritation. She wanted us to name her Tallulah. I had a few rules about our girl's name. One of them being that the name not end in -ah or -a. (90% of girls' names right now end in a. It's a bit much when you spend time on the playground and only hear ValeriaJuliaStefanaIdaMikaLilaLula so on and so forth. Not that each isn't pretty in its own right). Also no names that Demi Moore used on her own children. No names in the top 100. No names that happen to be names of any of our former pets. No names of Disney princesses or heroines. No names that rhyme with Corbell or Fyo (obviously). Also hesitant of alliterative names because it doesn't take much to go over the top (Coco Corbell? Corbett Corbell? Ick) In short, a unique name that's cute and sounds smart.

Tallulah happens to be rather common in Brooklyn, so it didn't make the list. The names that did?

Aerin
Quin
Gwen
Prue
Tru
Tucker
Calder
Ansel
Ari
Roan (as in The Secret of Roan Inish)
Blythe (Bly)
Skaadi
Blix
Astrid
Hazel
Maris/Meris
Marin
Meryl
Mer
Elan
Erwin
Pip
Quindalin
Luv
Quil
Cody
Lil
Bronwyn
Taavi
Tate
Oiseau (since we call her Birdy anyway. but this one took Husband 30 minutes to grasp the spelling)
Agnes
Iris
Io
Ione
Hero/Hiro
Aerwyn
Yves
Lin

just to name a few.

Ironically, Husband thought of Lyv the first week, but the night before the birth certificate was due, he got cold feet. So we filled the birth certificate with the mundane Baby Girl Lindis Corbell. Except that if you don't give your child a first name, they don't let you give your child a middle name. Rascals. So then. Baby Girl Corbell. On the official certificate, this translated to "No Name Given Corbell." (They could have added "Not For Lack of Trying"). Almost a month to the day after she was born, Husband was ready to commit to Lyv.

I had the middle names Eyre Lindis picked out months before. Because yes, Jane Eyre is my most favorite book ever. I would have made her first name Eyre, but couldn't imagine shouting it on the playground and having it sound like "air".

In the end, we think Lyv is perfect and gorgeous and fits her.

And my mother who so hoped we'd name her Tallulah?

She hates it.

(oh well. What are you going to do?)

Lost Photos Found!

Six months (or so) along in pregnancy, we had our ultrasound done - the one where I learned the sex of our unborn baby girl, but Husband did not (at his insistence - not because I was being mean as my grandmother accused me of). I was rather excited about our ultrasound photos and was eager to post them. Husband took them upstairs to the desk, so he could scan them in later, and that was the last we saw of them. I was not the most graceful with this development and had more than one frustrated tantrum about it - and more than one protest about how maybe we need to rethink our organizational systems? hmmm?

During one of my tantrums, I threw up my hands and said, Fine, we'll fine them when the child was ten and they'll be completely faded and it will be completely anti-climatic.

She wasn't ten. They weren't completely faded. She was ten days old, however, when Husband found the two books on the bookshelf that Fyo had shoved the pictures in between.

So here's our baby girl in utero. She was just as gorgeous inside as she is out. The above is the first glimpse I had of just how much she would look like her brother and how little she would look like Husband or I.

Baby Girl Lindis Corbell

Born at home on July 4, 1:30pm. 7lbs and 21 inches long. She is gorgeous, healthy and perfect; she's sleeping and nursing well (ie all the time), and I'm resting, and trying to honor the very sage advice of not getting out of my pajamas for 2 weeks, not just for recovery purposes (though I certainly need it for that) but mostly because I will never have the chance to spend two weeks with my new born love sleeping on my chest again.

Both Husband and I look at 32 month old Fyo and think, oh, it goes by so fast, doesn't it? 32 months is not very long, and he is a walking talking independent little boy. He takes himself to the toilet, he gets his noodles out of the fridge, he's learning how to put his underwear and shorts on, as well as his button up shirts (without putting them on upside down) - pretty soon Baby Girl Love won't be far behind him.

We're still working on/sleeping on her name - much to the chagrin of our mothers who are rather anxious to find out, but are at least trying to get into the spirit of it by suggesting a name here and there.

Just look at her - we are over the moon - in love and in new born bliss and so very very very blessed.