The Bauer Confidential

Or nearly wordless. In the afternoon I like to take Jocelyn for walks, she takes a nice nap in the carrier as I walk around. Last week I decided to take the camera along. Since I’ve got a small human strapped to my chest, I can’t always get the best shots. I’m a macro kinda gal especially when it comes to flowers, but it’s not so easy with a baby making squatting nearly impossible. I tell you this just to justify why these images aren’t necessarily great in terms of composition, and I don’t have time to do any photoshop tweaking, with a baby and in-laws coming into town this will have to do. As you look at these, try to imagine the smell of fragrant blooms and freshly mowed grass.

More about Wordless Wednesday here.

Much to Matthew’s chagrin, Jocelyn’s got a considerable amount of Irish heritage despite having the last name Bauer. I was born in the Irish capital of Nebraska, where there’s a giant green concrete Shamrock in the middle of the town’s main intersection. Apparently my Grandfather played an instrumental role in developing the St. Patty’s day tradition there. This pretty much involves a parade with Irish Dancers and lots of drinking. To honor Jocelyn’s roots, her Uncle Brett sent her an Irish hat and Grandma Cindy brought her a shamrock bib so of course she had to wear them for her first St. Patrick’s Day (with Patricia for a middle name, you can’t ignore St. Pat’s). In true Irish style, after I finished taking these pictures, Jocelyn puked all over the bib and then did a face plant smack into the mess.

I don’t remember ever liking the color pink; at some point, in my teens I think, I began to loathe it.   I think my intense dislike for the color pink (especially as it is linked to girls) came from a story someone (I don’t remember who) told me about why we associate girls and boys with pink and blue respectively.  They contended that due to ancient Chinese tradition, boys were dressed in blue because it was the color of the sky and royalty, the most expensive and most valuable color, as boys were the most prized.  It was the cheapest to dye things pink, and pink was considered a throw-away color, so it was given to girls, as they had little importance.  Of course being a feminist I took major issue with this assertion, and vowed not to honor any misogynistic tradition that implied women were inferior to men.  So I’ve avoided pink as much as possible since then, I always preferred red anyway and feel it suits me better anyhow.  Now that I have a little girl, however, avoiding pink is more or less impossible.

I’ve done a little research and can find nothing on the internet to substantiate the pink/blue association I’ve resented for so many years.  I actually found that prior to the 1920’s the traditional colors for boys and girls were the reverse of what is considered the norm in Western cultures today.  Pink being a lighter shade of red, a power color, was more suited to boys, while blue was more dainty for little girls (and also associated with the Virgin Mary).  One site even claimed that the association of pink with girls can be traced back to Nazi Germany and their assignment of pink triangles to homosexuals in concentration camps.  So it seems that pink as a girls’ color isn’t inherently sexist.  And yet I find our society’s intense need to dress little girls in pink a little disturbing.  Every time I dress Jocelyn in something other than pink (green, yellow, turquoise, even lilac) people ask me about my little boy.  OK, so little girls are associated with pink, fine, but why do boys get every other color (maybe lavender is usually accepted as a girls color).  Boys get all the primary colors, any dark color, and definitely black.  When I was pregnant and looking at baby things I was always a bit saddened by the fact that there seem to be so many more choices for boys.  For little girls you get pastel colors, flowers, and few baby animals like bunnies and kitties.  Boys get everything else, everything bold, spaceships, puppies, trains.  It’s totally not fair.

We asked our good friends and close family to resist the urge to buy Jocelyn pink things, if at all possible.  We’ve still got a fair amount of pink stuff, but by and large people have been really helpful trying to find us non-pink clothes and toys.  I guess the real issue is, since babies look so much alike no matter their sex, why do we feel the urge to shoe-horn them into their gender “appropriate” colors from birth?  With my new-found knowledge of the history of gender specific colors I won’t stop putting Jocelyn in non-girly clothes, but I’m going to give pink a little more slack. Jocelyn looks pretty sweet in pink, but then again, I think she looks pretty sweet no matter what.

When returning my last book club selection to the library I decided to pick up something else to read while feeding Jocelyn. I perused the new fiction section and decided to give The Secret Papers of Madame Olivetti by Annie Vanderbilt a try since the summary sounded interesting and the book was an easy size for reading with limited mobility. I’ve mentioned before how I’m not really a fan of romance novels, so from now on I’m reading the reviews for books before actually devoting my time to one. The story of Lily, an adventurous and passionate woman who has lost her husband of twenty-plus years, this book recounts her attempt to recover from loss by escaping to a sea-side town in rural France, where she under-goes a great deal of self-indulgent reflection on her life. Lily is a strong woman, but she’s also pretentious. The characters in the book are all ridiculously well rounded and perfectly flawed. No one talks like these people, the dialogue is so stilted as to be unintentionally funny at times. The varying locales described in the book are the most interesting thing about it. I think the author has aspirations to greatness, she goes to great lengths to use flowery verbiage and detailed descriptions that are designed to immerse you in the story, most of the time they are just distracting. I had to make myself finish this book, though many times I thought about just giving it up. The end is ridiculously trite, destruction, love lost, love found. This book might be a decent beach read if it weren’t for the snobbishness of the characters. I think my upbringing has made me particularly sensitive to certain things, and one of those things is arrogance. Unfortunately for me this book reeks of self-importance and has very little substance to make it compelling. If you like romance novels (and you know who you are), you might like this one, if you don’t have a high tolerance for for neuroses and people who think too highly of themselves, then pick up something else.

We’ve had visitors and we’ll be having more in honor of Jocelyn’s arrival. My Dad and Cindy were here to meet our little girl last week. It was great having them, gave me an excuse to cook some yummy food. It rained a lot, welcome to an actual rainy season in the bay area. We didn’t do much but visit and fuss over the baby. She’s growing like a weed, at her last pediatrician’s appointment she was in the 90th percentile for both height and weight. Jocelyn is also a particularly strong baby and developing perfectly. Our only complaint is she’s not a very good napper these days and that makes her a bit grouchy. I think we’re going to break down and get a rocking chair; I’ve been having pain in my left shoulder which I think is from holding and rocking her in my arms while standing. Having Dad and Cindy here was great, Jocelyn likes to be held pretty much all the time so having a couple extra sets of arms was a lot of help. So any other visitors who want to come and hold the baby to give me a little break, please be our guest(s)!