Rantings and rambling from Oz - Laura style

Hello friends,

Well, Edie has been extrauterine for a month today. It’s been a great month at the same time as it’s been probably the most trying month of my life. Anyone who’s had children will know exactly what I’m talking about and there are probably a few out there who would be qualified to tell me “I told you so”. I was speaking with my sister yesterday and she mentioned that she wished that she could be here to witness Tim and I “do this” (“this” being raising a daughter)…Were she here she would definitely have lots of entertainment with the clown-show that we’re running. The most entertaining aspect I think would be how little Edie has succeeded in mastering the battle of the wills. Both Tim and I would consider ourselves strong-willed and determined people, willing to put up a fight. We have totally met our match, if not our superior. For instance, at the moment I am writing this blog entry with one hand while Edie is sleeping on my lap because she will not stay asleep anywhere else right now and the kicker is that this morning if she’s not sleeping, she’s crying. This is because (we suspect) that she’s overtired as nothing else has been able to calm the storm other than sleep on my lap. This is hilarious in itself because when I was a child I required a lot of sleep and if I didn’t get what I needed I was a crank (not much has changed there). If anyone were brave enough to point out the fact that I was cranky because I was overtired they would have heard “I AM NOT TIRED” in my tantrum voice, if not worse (i.e. a bite or a pinch).

Either way, I think that Edie’s got the edge on us in determination. It may be because she’s got that youthful energy that we’re lacking bigtime right now, or maybe it’s evolutionary somehow- a new generation with a new drive? I’m sure that I gave my parents a run for their money when I was pint-sized…and longer perhaps. I just can’t imagine what it would have been like to deal with me and 3 other children. Newfound respect for Mom amd Dad is being gained everyday.

With this month has come lots and lots of time for contemplation and reflection on life. While meeting the needs of Edie we usually have our hands tied up with her and are left with no other alternative than to exercise our brains as they are all that’s left free. So I’ve been thinking a lot about what to write about this week. I haven’t really left the house except to go for walks with the Edster, so there are no real events to speak of, so my thoughts are next on the list. There’s your warning, you can stop reading here and I wouldn’t be terribly offended. Another warning, I tend to ramble and rant if you didn’t already know. See earlier offer to stop reading here.

I’ve been thinking about zoos, kind of…All sparked by a conversation that I had with my supervisor when I was still working prior to Edie. I walked into her office one day and she was shaking her head because a student had come into her office and told her that she wanted to study zoology because she wanted to be a zoo keeper or work in zoo. Obviously the student had made the logical, yet incorrect, connection that the study of zoology was the study of zoos or at least the necessary pathway to get into zookeeping. Apparently my supervisor gets this at least once a year when new students are coming to the university to have tours and such prior to deciding where to invest either their parents’ money or the governments’ money in their undergraduate education. Of course I laughed at the idea that students might think that there are enough jobs in zookeeping that an entire branch of science might be devoted to it…Oh the academic superiority that we (I) can feel over such people. It’s such a stupid game and here are a few reasons why (I could list many, many more). 1) In my first year of my undergraduate degree I didn’t know what botany was until I got through my first botany lecture. 2) Zoology actually happened to be the second lowest mark that I made in my entire undergraduate degree as a close runner-up to calculus. 3) When I really stop and think about it, I had no clue about the wider fields of biology at all prior to going to university, I still only vaguely know anything about the fields that I had little interest in (i.e. botany!). I guess in my late night thoughts recently I’ve been able to see just how futile it is to feel good about being in a better informed position than someone else with less experience, because in my case I could easily have been that student in my supervisors office. And I have been that student in many other situations when I ended up looking like an idiot. Ahh, late night thoughts. They’re good at revealing our humanness. As a side note, the thing I remember the most about my zoology class was sitting next to my friend Mark, who, although for the most part spent lectures talking to me, still managed to pull off great grades in that class. It was always so frustrating. Perhaps he’ll be a zookeeper someday. I think he’d be a good one.

I’m reading a book right now by Peter Singer and Jim Mason called The Ethics of What We Eat. I picked it up in the local library because I remembered the authors from a bioethics class that I took in undergrad. It’s an interesting read. In a brief summary, the authors state that if we really knew how our food was being produced we’d think and choose differently what we ate, and the fact that many people do know how food is produced and continue to consume it reveals a sad state of morality in our society. The authors border on casting judgement on people for making food choices based on economics and painting farmers as evil villains, but you’ve heard it all before- factory farming is replacing the family farm and there are consequences. This book outlines these consequences in the way that only animal rights activists can. And for that reason I find myself feeling the need to keep reading, but also to take it all with a grain of salt. It’s so easy to make a case for anything these days and I feel like my own upbringing has had more influence on my eating choices than any book has.

So, as I’m explaining the concept of this book and perhaps revealing that I think that certain types of food production can be considered unethical (I can’t bring myself to purchase chicken), my brother is in the process of buying a chicken farm. Chicken farms have been under scrutiny by animal rights groups quite strongly since the 70’s as again, fewer and fewer farms are growing chickens non-intensively. If anyone has ever had the chance to walk into a barn containing chickens grown intensively (i.e. thousands of chickens in cages stacked on top of one another), you’d know without a doubt that there were serious problems with how our chicken is produced. I don’t know anyone who could walk away from seeing this type of farming and not question at what expense we are getting cheap chicken. But there are so many other ways to look at the situation and how things have gotten to where good people (like my brother) are getting into the business of mass production of animals where animal rights are in question. For that matter, I’ve worked in the aquaculture industry for the past 6 years, another form of intensive farming under scrutiny from many groups for animal welfare and environmental impacts. So how are both my brother and I sleeping at night? I can’t speak for my brother, but this is my take.

We grew up on a small dairy farm in rural Nova Scotia. We milked roughly 40-60 head of dairy cattle and had other animals that each of us took care of, chickens, sheep, pigs, dogs and cats. It was strictly a family operation and the farm was originally purchased from my mother’s parents back when Mom and Dad were just starting out as a married couple with 2 kids back in the late 70’s. Every animal in our barn was named and was considered a being with a personality and with the right to be cared for properly. For the kids, productivity of the animals wasn’t even really a thought, but in retrospect it was apparent to us all along that having happy and well cared-for animals was very important for the business. I suppose that made them more productive and hence, profitable in the long run, but I think that our parents were more concerned that living beings deserved to be cared for properly. My parents were forced to sell the farm in ’97 as it couldn’t pay for itself any longer. And although we children would like to have taken the farm over or started a new one as adults, there is no way to do that in eastern Canada without having the ability to invest millions in a farm large enough to sustain itself economically by remaining competitive. This trend of going big or going home is apparent across North America, here in Australia too. I personally think that things went downhill once the North American Free Trade Agreement was put into place, but there were probably warning signs before that ever happened. Either way, large-scale, generally intensive farming is now what is typically required to remain in business for farmers in Canada. There is no way that a person running a large-scale operation can care for animals the way that one could in a smaller operation. So young and ambitious people like my brother don’t have much of an option in terms of how they’re going to survive if they should choose to farm, nor how well the animals are treated in the end. I suppose the poultry operation that he’s purchasing will offset the cost of the dairy production that he would like to continue with (he’s got a small herd of which he takes great care). I take solace in the fact that if there were a person who could farm chickens well and thoughtfully, even under intensive conditions, it would be my brother. It still won’t make me buy chicken though.

As for my aquaculture work, the same type of thing has happened with the commercial fishery in eastern Canada where fishermen have had to diversify into other operations to remain financially afloat. Over the years the general trend in aquaculture has also been go big or go home. So people are going big in order to survive.

It seems like as consumers we’ve bought into the idea that food should be cheap, and I believe that this creates a force which drives the food production industry to more intensive, integrated and large-scale operations. And ordinary people run these operations, whether they are the Bert Racoons of this world or the Cyril Sneers. Enough of this rant.

So we’ve discovered a lot of things about babies that we didn’t know prior to the arrival of Miss Edie. Here are a couple of them:

- Going for a walk with the baby sounds like a nice relaxing thing to do. It was only when we strapped Edie into the stroller for the first time that we started to feel a little apprehensive about the fact that we’d just strapped our offspring into a stroller that meets “Australian standards” but that really is not much more than a fabric box on wheels with a flimsy harness. Not only that, you push the thing in front of you, so it seems that it would be most likely the first thing to be hit if someone in a car wasn’t paying attention. And sidewalks here were definitely not built for today’s stroller. And then there is the issue of roads with no sidewalks of which there are a number around here. We’re getting better about it all, but I didn’t anticipate the number of scenarios that would be running through our heads on a simple thing like a walk. Edie likes going for walks though. An instant sleeping pill

- Babies can’t read. I’ll admit that I knew that they couldn’t, but my expectations were maybe off when I thought that our infant would like to be read to. I’ve had to scale back on Dr.Suess and the Nursery Rhymes and increase the “Rooby Roo’s Book of Friends” readings. Rooby Roo is a bit more colourful and has some sound effects. But the content is weak. Our compromise is a book called “One Lucky Duck”, although I still think that she prefers Rooby. Given that she is a month old, I can be patient with the content thing. The Chronicles of Narnia can wait until next month.

- Breastfeeding, although better for baby and mom, is cheaper, etc., etc. than formula, is hard work. I find it toughest on my head as Edie is very particular about just how she is fed, and it changes all of the time. If she’s not happy with how things are being done she lets us know by a freakout session. You can imagine how much fun that is in the middle of the night (not my finest moments in motherhood).

- As tough as breastfeeding can be, the boob can solve almost any and every problem in Edie’s world. If it can’t, a diaper change can.

- Babies make funny noises. When Edie is waking up especially, it sounds like what we imagine a baby elephant might sound like. Grunts, snorts, smacks, yawns, farts, burps, growls…Pretty much all of the unpleasant sounds associated with sleeping (especially as one gets older) are concentrated in her wakeup routine. But it’s so awfully cute.

- Babies re-establish their cuteness on a daily basis. That is, at a 3am feeding session freakout her cuteness is questionable. And then when daylight rolls around and she flashes those big blue peepers, we melt all over again even though she sounds rather like a hungry pig at the trough.

And that is that. It’s the end of the day now and Edie is asleep for the moment. We miss home like crazy these days so we’re really looking forward to December and the trip back. Hope everyone is well and taking care.

Love to all,

Laura