It's a small town, Halifax. Saturday, I walked across town with the baby in the stroller to hang pictures and photos at the home of the friend of a friend. My friend had been asked to help, but couldn't, due to illness in the family and the need to care for an infant. She was distraught at having to say no, so I offered. I mean, after 16 years of working in art museums, I can at the very least hang pictures.

The baby fell asleep in the stroller as we walked to the house. She continued to sleep despite the occasional barking of the 2 Westies and the pounding of the hammer. The friend of a friend showed me the photos and nails and hammer and left to run errands. I stayed and hung 9 photographs and 4 paintings. The baby slept. I finished and said good-bye to the husband and left.

That evening, friends came for dinner and we chatted about this and that. They told us of a cottage they had rented for spring break and it turns out that the owners were the friend of a friend and her husband. Today, I dropped in on an old friend I haven't seen in years and on her fridge was an invitation to the party of the friend of a friend.

We're all so interconnected here in so many ways and on so many levels. It's nice and at the same time, it makes you watch your Ps and Qs.

Well, here it is, January 7th and I just saw the first robin of spring. He looked a bit harried, likely because of all the snow. It's a bit early for Robins around here. Perhaps he's the last Robin of autumn.

And no, I don't intend to make this into a birdwatching blog, but yesterday I saw a bald eagle flying right over my kid's school after I dropped him off. The bird was low enough that I could see his talons tucked in tight against his body. He was huge. Lots of parents were walking away from the school yard, but nobody looked up, no one saw him. I pointed him out to the person closest to me, and she turned just in time to get a glimpse of what by then looked like a big crow flying over towards the Northwest Arm.

Still, it was pretty neat.

Well, the economy officially sucks and my husband just informed me that his company is starting layoffs tomorrow. He likely won't be fired tomorrow, but who knows what'll happen in the coming months. Meanwhile, my boss has said that our company will do okay---or at least not go under---but I only work part time and don't bring in enough to pay all our bills.

Breathe.

It hasn't happened yet; we're both still employed, so it's probably not useful for me to tie my stomach up in knots.

But the fear is big.

I've e-mailed some contacts to see if I can take on extra work. Laughable, since I barely have enough time for the work I've got. Right now I'm supposed to be writing an article for a client instead of blogging, but I can't focus. Too scared.

Sad story about motherhood

Yesterday I took the kids to a big-box bookstore and was sitting with the baby in the children's section, near the table of little wooden trains they have set up there. A woman with a 2-year-old boy asked me how old the baby was and when I told her, she said that she had a daughter the same age. Without my prompting, she said that the baby went to China with her mother. What? This woman said that two children were too difficult, that she worried about the boy being too rough with the baby (this I understand), that her mother and father took the baby to Beijing and that she (the mother) might be able to send for her in a year.

So sad. I mean, I don't know all the details, just that her husband is in a grueling Ph.D. program and unavailable to help out with the boy or the baby girl. But this young woman was playing with my baby and crying because she reminded her so much of her own baby---gone now for 2 weeks. I can't imagine that she would send her baby away without pressure from somebody else, it's just not in the female makeup. She said that she and her husband just bought a new house and a new car and that they did not have enough money for daycare for the baby.

Is the woman being bullied? Is the baby better off with the grandparents? I don't know. I felt so sad hearing her story. Sad and judgmental. I had a hard time staving off feelings of self-righteousness. And anger. How dare she not fight to keep her baby! But how much of her dilemma is cultural? The woman is Chinese. If the baby were another boy, would they ship him off? How much choice did she have? How much coercion did she endure before she convinced herself that sending her baby away was the right thing to do?

My baby, has a beautifully shaped head. She slipped out of the womb covered by a caul and so never got the mis-shappen baby head from which some infants never recover. A friend calls her "Queen Neferititi." This woman asked how my baby slept and I told her that she sleeps on her side, as we're nursing often during the night. She said she always has her babies sleep on their backs and that you can buy props to keep them there. Indeed. Her boy did have quite a flat head from two years of lying on his back. "Yeah, lady." I thought, meanly, "I'm about to take parenting advice from you who sends your baby to live half a world away?"

In the Virtual Stacks

Spent the morning perusing the stacks of the various university libraries here, using the keywords: folklore, food, pregnancy. Didn't come up with much. Found out about a couple of clinical manifestos; one from the (US) Institute of Medicine---one called "Nutritional Status During Pregnancy and Lactation" and the other from the (US) National Research Council---"Nutrition and Fertility Interrelationships." The most promising book is a tome by one Philip Wilson called: Childbirth: Changing Ideas and Practices in Britain and America 1600 to the present." But I have to order it from another library and am having trouble doing so. Seems like it's time to contact my friendly reference librarian!

The Birth House and the birth of this project

I just finished reading The Birth House by Ami McKay and enjoyed it. I was really taken, captivated actually, by the idea of the Groaning Cake. In the book, friends arrive to care for a woman in labor and create---instead of a anxious environment---a cake. They bake it together and eat it together and it's full of carbs and things to sustain the laboring mum till she births her babe.

The groaning cake got me to wondering if there are other traditional recipes that support fertility, pregnancy, birth, and lactation. I'm really interested in the sort of spiritual/superstitious aspects of the recipes, but am also interested how the foods support the body as it goes through the above conditions.

I'm just starting my research, so far have contacted about 3,000 moms in the DC area and will start looking at older published sources in my library in Nova Scotia tomorrow.

Of course, I'm expecting my own little baby, sometime in the next two weeks; so I have a heightened interest in the subject of food and pregnancy. Mostly, I suppose, because I'm hungry all the time.

More later.

Christine