The party went well. The number who showed up was just about perfect, given the space we have. Much fun was had, and we'll be subsisting off of hummus and tatziki for the next week or so. We got to meet essara_lemuroid and family, which was nice, as we aren't really friends with many parents around here.

I have a new icon. Yay.

Leif has started getting really grabby and possessive in the past few days. I know part of it is just his age, but it's a little distressing seeing other kids treat Leif that way, and then having him immediately turn around and do the same thing (the main episodes of grabbiness were over the chalk, and earlier that day he'd had crayons taken away from him by their owner).

It's hard to know what to do when it comes to the other kids. We can get Leif to share, but we can't force other kids to behave a certain way, and Leif's too young to understand why we want him to act differently.

Speaking of disturbing, it's interesting seeing how suggestible he is when watching movies. His Wiggles movie has a song about having a drink of water, and he very frequently asks for a drink of water during that song.

Thankfully, they don't really "advertise" much in that particular movie beyond water, bananas, and vegetables.

Leif says "No" in the most adorable manner. He has an amazingly cute voice when he chooses to use it. "No" is especially cute for some reason.

Was reading through a parenting community, and found one post about a parent who had been seen verbally abusing her kid, saying (and forcing him to say) how he had been a huge mistake and ruined her life. People expressed proper horror. A bit further back, there was a post asking what people would do if their 13 year old daughter got pregnant. A lot of people said something along the lines of "If she chose to keep the baby, that's the end of her social life. I'm not providing free babysitting."

Isn't that the kind of attitude that can lead to that sort of situation? I understand not wanting to be the de facto parent... but if the baby had come at a more socially acceptable time, I imagine the grandparents would be falling all over themselves to watch the baby from time to time so the mom could do something social.

I also imagine that if the parents had another baby when the child was 13, the child would be expected to babysit and otherwise care for the baby on a regular basis.

Leif went in for an EEG today, which was an experience. He had some weird twitchy possibly seizure-like activity when he was a few days old, so they went and scheduled an EEG for two months down the line. Makes a ton of sense, huh?

The nurse attached about 30 electrode thingies to his head (thankfully, they don't have to shave the head anymore), and then wrapped his head in a bandage to keep them from coming off. Then I nursed him during the half hour test so that he'd stay quiet and go to sleep. He looked like a little war victim.

We find out the results in a week. I doubt they'll find anything. It was probably just a newborn thing, or a side effect of being slightly premature.

Before the test, the nurse said we could feed him a bottle to get him sleepy, and added as an afterthought that I could nurse him if we were breastfeeding. Is breastfeeding really rare enough around here that bottlefeeding is the default?

The National Day to Empower Teen Parents is Oct. 11. They're also having an ongoing zine/poster distribution campaign. If any of you would be willing to help out (especially those of you who are in regular contact with teens or young parents or go places a young mom might frequent), further information is at http://www.girlmom.com/archives/001165.html. Passing out fliers shouldn't take much effort, and this is something I feel is pretty important.

I finally got my cell phone email working. This means I can take zillions of pictures of Leif and easily spam people with them. Yay! Speaking of which, more pictures are posted at http://www.ansible.org/~jess/leif/.

I'm working on modifying some of Leif's onesies into t-shirts. He has so many of them and only a handful of t-shirts (which are much easier to deal with when doing cloth diapers), and he'll soon be outgrowing the 0-3 month size, so I figured a few of the boring white ones could be sacrificed. Since the sewing machine is still buried somewhere, I'm not actually cutting anything, just sewing up the flaps. We'll see how it works.

Abortion discussion below. If you're very strongly on one end of the pro-life/pro-choice spectrum and feel the need to forcefully express your opinion to anyone who feels differently, please don't read. Or at least don't comment.
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