Shannon Phillips

I am now responding to all inquiries about the baby with a dramatic impression of the little raincloud that hangs over Eeyore’s head.

My adjusted due date was yesterday—and that was already pushed back a week from the original due date—so I have this sense that I’ve been pregnant forever. And it will never end. There will never be a baby, only endless, endless bouts of Braxton Hicks contractions and backaches and an inability to pick things up off the ground or get comfortable at night or wear jeans or walk at anything approaching a reasonable pace. And everybody will be so disappointed in me.

So if you want to know if there is a baby yet, imagine the little black raincloud is giving you your answer.

My mom was married today, to her friend and partner of many years, Mark Esarey:

Welcome to the family, Mark! I’m glad you two wild and crazy kids have finally settled down. May you have long and abundant years of happiness together.

The newlyweds are planning a honeymoon in scenic, romantic Oakland, which is of course world-renowned as the “City of Love.” No, wait, it’s mostly renowned as the “City of Crime.” But maybe mom and Mark will start a new trend! Anyway, we are very much looking forward to celebrating with them and delivering our best wishes in person.

Well, it has just been the season of seven plagues around here. Thursday evening both Robin and Davy came down with sudden bouts of vomiting. We suspected food poisoning at first, because they seemed to improve with a day of rest on Friday, but on Saturday Robin developed sores on his tongue. That makes hand, foot, and mouth disease the leading culprit: it’s very common among kids, and despite the somewhat-alarming name it’s not a scary illness. It just takes about a week to run its course, and the only treatment is the standard rest-and-fluids.

The interesting thing about hand, foot, and mouth disease is that healthy adults almost never get it. I got it hard.

The immune system is suppressed during pregnancy, to prevent the mom’s body from attacking the baby as a foreign parasite, and I’m still feeling the lingering effects of our last round of viruses, so I’m very immunocompromised right now. Essentially I’m a sitting duck for any hostile organisms floating around. Last night I spent absolutely the worst ten hours I can remember in a long, long time, running for the bathroom every 10-15 minutes, unable to hold anything down despite what developed into a tormenting thirst. On top of all that the constant vomiting triggered another bout of contractions, which thankfully didn’t turn into actual labor because I don’t know how I could’ve possibly handled it. Meanwhile Sam slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of the boy’s room so that he could be right there to help them when they woke up sick in the night.

This morning is better. Sam went out for ginger ale and fresh ginger when the grocery stores opened, and by nibbling on a ginger slice whenever a wave of nausea presents, I’ve been able to guzzle the ginger ale and keep it down. Robin and Davy are holding down solid food at this point. I’m running a bit of a fever and I’ve spent most of the day in bed, while Sam, in all-out superhero mode, has fully taken over meeting the various needs of the household. He seems a little embarrassed every time I sniffle at him about how much it means to me that he’s taking such good care of us.

It doesn’t happen often, but every now and then something comes along that just completely outmatches and overwhelms me, and in those moments Sam always, always has my back. And while these displays of competence and compassion on his part aren’t truly gendered—I mean, if anything, an ability to step up and tend a household of invalids would seem a particularly feminine form of badassery—my response to him in these times is very gendered indeed. I feel exactly like a damsel in distress whose knight in shining armor has just come charging to the rescue. I’m overwhelmed not just with gratitude but with a doe-eyed admiration of Sam’s vast masculine strength. He’s washing the dishes as I type these words, pausing every now and then to fix toast for the boys or bring me more ginger ale, and I think it’s the manliest thing I’ve ever seen because I barely have the reserves to hit “post” and totter back to bed. These are the Big Damn Hero moments of real life.

Well, apparently it was just a prolonged bout of Braxton Hicks contractions. It’s a phenomenon often called “false labor,” but as a sop to us aggravated pregnant ladies, some practitioners like to call it “practice labor” or “pre-labor.”

I kind of like pre-labor, as it implies that some kind of progress is being made. Which is, when you think about it, almost necessarily true. We’re one day closer to Sol’s birthday, whenever that turns out to be.

Since yesterday evening I’ve been having light, irregular contractions—mild enough that I was able to sleep through them, so that’s good. It’s impossible to tell whether this is really the beginning of labor or just an extended bout of Braxton Hicks contractions (“false labor”), but I’ve had a couple of other pre-labor signs and I’m hopeful that this will eventually start going somewhere. It’s still a couple weeks before my due date but that’s completely fine and normal; I’m considered full-term now.

I keep asking myself, are we ready? Are we ready? And the answer is: of course not, nobody ever is. But we’re excited and full of anticipation. I want a little baby to snuggle. I want to sniff his head and kiss his toes and look into his funny little face. Bring it on, kiddo, let’s do this thing.

When I was a girl, my dad used to make little books for me. They weren’t fancy, just sheets of legal paper folded over, with photos stapled in. But Dad would make up funny stories around the photographs, and I loved those books. I still have them!

I wanted to make a little book like that for Robin and Davy, to help them prepare for Sol’s arrival. I thought if I started with a bound blank book it would have a better chance of withstanding life in a three-boy household, so I shopped around online, and ended up ordering this:

Which is the point at which I became aware that I was actually making a scrapbook!

It’s funny because my friend Wendy is a great scrap-booker (scrapper?) and I’ve always admired her fun, colorful books, but never particularly had the urge to make one myself. It was only by approaching the project as a storybook rather than a scrapbook that I found myself dipping a toe into those waters! It was a lot of fun though, and both the boys are super excited about their “brother book,” as they call it. Davy had me read it to him three times this morning.

Here is the story I wrote around the pictures:

Robin and Davy are brothers.

Robin is the big brother. He was born first.

When Robin was a baby he lived with Mommy and Daddy in San Francisco.

He liked to go to the park. But he had no one to play with.

One day Mommy said, “I have a new baby in my tummy!” Daddy said, “Yay! Let’s move to Oakland.”

When the baby came out of Mommy, we named him Davy. Robin helped Mommy and Daddy take care of him.

Now Robin had a little brother to play with.

Davy grew quickly. Soon he could walk and talk.

He wasn’t a baby any more. He was a little boy!

Robin and Davy did lots of things together.

They helped around the house.

They went to the Oakland zoo with Nanita and Markie.

They even went to school together. Robin taught Davy how to eat his lunch at the table.

They liked to watch movies on the couch.

At Hallowe’en they went trick or treating together.

Sometimes they went to sleep together.

One day Mommy said, “I have a new baby in my tummy!” Daddy said, “That’s not a baby, that’s a puppy.”

“That is Thora and she is our puppy,” said Davy.

Mommy said, “Yes, but there is also a baby. I need Robin and Davy to help me take care of the baby when it comes out!”

Robin remembered when Davy was a baby. “Babies are a lot of work,” said Robin.

“That’s true,” said Mommy. “They are a lot of work. That is why I will need help taking care of the baby.”

“Robin and Davy will be good helpers,” said Daddy. “Because they are such good brothers.”

The End

Ugh, is there anything worse than kindergarten admissions lotteries? Robin has been wait-listed for our top choice neighborhood school, Urban Montessori Charter School, so we’re scrambling around examining back-up plans. The most likely one involves keeping him in Peter Pan for another year (for the socialization) while starting home lessons, and hoping something opens up mid-year at UMCS. I also have a tour scheduled next week at a private school that we cannot even remotely afford, I don’t know why we’re even looking, just to torture ourselves I guess. I mean, they do offer financial aid, but if I were running a private school I wouldn’t give us a scholarship: we’re above median income and we don’t check any diversity boxes.

I toured some of the other local public schools, and came away feeling that it would basically be like sending my kid to prison. The atmosphere was just incredibly oppressive and grim. I don’t even put a lot of weight on things like test scores—I’m confident in my ability to provide supplemental academic lessons at home if necessary, especially in the early grades—but I’m not going to send my kid to a frickin’ gulag. Right now Robin loves school and I don’t want him to lose that.

I still think we have a decent shot at ending up with a spot at UMCS. It’s a new school and last year they didn’t end up filling all of their classes. I suspect that a lot of the applicants were regarding it as a secondary choice, and won’t end up accepting a place there. I’m not a whole-hearted believer in “the Montessori method” but they do a lot of things that I like: mixed-age classrooms, multiple teachers to a class, and a focus on small-group learning with individualized lesson plans that give each child a choice of activities throughout the day. The child-led approach does represent a fairly radical departure from a traditionally-structured classroom, which is exactly what I think charter schools are good for—providing venues for pedagogical experimentation.

Charter schools are a political minefield, of course, and most of the “debate” over charter schools has degenerated into sheer tribalism, with teachers’ unions painting them as the work of the devil and reform advocates casting them as a kind of Holy Grail. And of course Republicans have latched on to charters as a way to sneak religious instruction into public education, which only deepens the existing tendency of people to line up on one side or other of the issue based on party affiliation. There was an interesting op-ed in The New York Times recently that spoke to this trend:

Michael Petrilli, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a pro-charter education analyst with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, worries about this lack of exchange. He recently conducted an analysis of Twitter and the tens of thousands of followers of Ms. Rhee, who is pro-charter, and Ms. Ravitch, who is anti-charter, and discovered that only 10 percent overlapped. Just as conservatives gravitate to Fox News and liberals to MSNBC to hear their preconceived notions and biases confirmed, Mr. Petrilli speculates that those in education are now preaching solely to the converted, a phenomenon known in the media world as “narrowcasting.”

This is absolutely happening, and to an extent that’s frankly ridiculous. Charter critics have very valid points to make, although from my perspective the most substantial of these point toward regulation and reform rather than striking very deeply at the heart of the concept. For one thing, if charters are going to serve as real laboratories for testing possible avenues of school reform, then naturally many of the experiments are going to be failures. That’s why charters should be closely monitored and under-performing ones should be closed quickly. They should not be allowed to substitute “faith based” learning for actual learning. Et cetera.

However, teachers’ unions will fail where they align themselves against the interests of parents, also known as “voters.” Voters consistently and increasingly support charters because parents have a very strong interest in choosing the educational environment that best fits our particular children’s needs. A diversity of options—not just one top-down, cookie-cutter approach to schooling—is something that parents want very much and are willing to fight for, and in many districts the charter system provides the only alternative to factory-style learning and staggering layers of bureaucracy. To me it seems that those who set themselves as categorical opponents to charter schools are simply declaring themselves irrelevant to public policy, as they have been and will continue to be steamrolled by the voters. This is all the sadder because there is no inherent reason why charter schools cannot unionize—and in fact, some have, a trend I find encouraging.

The teachers at UMCS that I spoke to are enthusiastic about the school to an infectious degree. There’s already one Peter Pan family there, so Robin would have friends. At our tour we saw kids happily engaged with the materials, working at their own pace on projects of their own choosing. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Thora killed one of our chickens. This happened a couple of weeks ago, but I didn’t have the heart to write about it until now. She came trotting into the house with a chicken wing in her mouth: I screamed, everyone came running, there was yelling, and Thora dropped the severed wing and went tearing all around the house peeing and defecating everywhere to signal her submission and distress. A few minutes later she puked up a belly full of chicken innards. As apologies go I must say it is the worst I have ever received.

Eventually we comforted the dog, Sam went outside to gather up the remains (it was not an open casket funeral), and we gave Penny a decent burial. I said a few words. Her sisters did not attend the ceremony: chickens are not sentimental creatures. Sam said they were busy cannibalizing the corpse when he arrived at the scene.

We have mostly processed the whole episode at this point. The boys wanted to talk a bit about death and what it means: for Robin, it seemed to bring up some dim memories of Marlis, because he began saying things like “We used to have a cat but we don’t have a cat now.” I reiterated some of the things that I told him when Marlis died. I told him that death means you aren’t in the world any more. I told him that everything that is alive dies eventually, but that he and we are young and won’t die for a long, long time. I told him that when someone dies you can be sad and cry because you miss them a lot, and also that sometimes you might not feel sad, even though you still miss them. I suppose this is one of the benefits of keeping livestock: kids grow up experiencing the natural cycles of life.

For a while Davy and Robin would say “Thora is a bad dog!” because one of the things I yelled over and over, when I was yelling, was “Bad dog! Bad dog!” So I also had to explain that actually Thora is a good dog who did a bad thing. And that it is not really her fault, she was just being a dog. (Although I have to admit that it changed the way I look at her a bit. “She’s a murderess,” I told Sam, who responded quite reasonably that her kill count is nowhere near the total that Marlis racked up. “Yes,” I said, “but Marlis never killed anything with a name!”)

The boys also seemed to just like to tell the story of what happened: “Thora killed our chicken and then you screamed,” one of the boys would say, out of the blue. And I would just say, “Yep, that is what happened.” “And then you cried.” “Yes, I cried because I was sad.” We must have had that conversation ten or fifteen times in the first few days after. At this point they don’t seem to need to go over it so much.

Robin is very keen on getting a new hen. “We need to get another girl chicken with a bow,” he says. I did try to explain to him that not all creatures that are girls wear bows on their head, but he is quite certain that the next hen ought to come beribboned.

In fact we probably will want to replace Penny at some point, but introducing a new hen to an established flock isn’t necessarily easy. The existing chickens will try to drive off any bird they perceive as an interloper, and can injure or even kill a new hen by relentlessly pecking her. One way to get around this is to wait until one of the hens goes broody and then to slip some fertilized eggs underneath her, letting nature take its course from there. So I’m inclined to give it some time and see if Henrietta or Genevieve show any signs of wanting to be a momma.

Meanwhile Thora and the chickens are no longer allowed to share the yard. Instead we keep the hens cooped up until late morning, giving Thora a chance to run around for a bit, and then the chickens are let out and Thora is kept inside until sundown. (She also gets a walk in the early afternoon.) Once the chickens have put themselves away, Thora gets free run of the yard again. In some ways it’s a better arrangement anyway, because I don’t have to worry about the dog finding eggs before I do.

Here is a picture of Thora looking angelic. (Murderess!)

Cross-posted from my Goodreads account

The rap on this book is that it’s “like Neverwhere, but bleaker and more depressing.” I bought it because I love Neverwhere, and then let it sit gathering dust on my shelf for a year because I didn’t feel like reading a really depressing book.

Now I wish I hadn’t waited so long. The Secret History of Moscow takes its characters on a quest through the underworld of Russian folklore to rescue a stolen sister: I found it beautifully written and, actually, a lot of fun. I wouldn’t call it “depressing” so much as “Russian,” though I know that may sound like a distinction without a difference. Yes, the urban landscape is harsh and the characters all marked by poverty and alienation. But the story is about love, the plot is one of magic and adventure, and the ending is triumphant if not exactly happy. It’s a bittersweet story but I didn’t find it depressing.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the Series of Unfortunate Events—I read the first three and got a little bit bored with the central gimmick. There was plenty to like: they were well-written and amusing little books. But I didn’t feel impelled to read any farther in the series.

Who Could That Be At This Hour lands in a similar spot for me. It was fun—I don’t want my time or money back—but nothing about it grabbed me enough to seek out the sequels.

I missed this somehow when it first went up! My friend Megan (this is you, isn’t it, Megan?) did a very nice write-up of The Millennial Sword for her review blog:

This is, to a certain extent, one of Those Books, and reads like a debut indie novel in a popular subgenre. If you like that sort of thing—that is, if you enjoy an author riffing on a theme because she’s enjoying herself—then you are likely to enjoy yourself. Particularly since Phillips knows how to incorporate her research without resorting to the sort of extended infodumps that can temporarily transform fantasy novels into pages from the D&D Monster Manual.

That part made me smile because I tend to describe the book to people as “the sort of thing you might like if you like that sort of thing.”

Book-selling updates: the e-book version of The Millennial Sword is now available in all formats, for all devices. I’ve made a dedicated page here listing all the buying options. One discovery I made is that many independent bookstores have partnered with Kobo to sell books through their websites—and Kobo, it turns out, is something of a dream to work with, providing by far the nicest direct-publishing platform of any of the sites I worked with. I will seriously consider buying a Kobo-compatible device as my next e-reader simply in order to be able to support my local bookstore (the wonderful Laurel Book Store) when buying e-books.

Somewhat distressingly, though, after I finally succeeded in withdrawing the book from Amazon’s “Select” program, sales there have flatlined. Part of the draw of the Select program is that Amazon gives those titles more visibility in search results, and the effect, I can now say, is quite significant. It remains to be seen whether Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Apple’s iBooks store, and the other e-book channels will be able to compensate. I want to support a diverse bookselling ecosystem, so in the interests of fairness I’m running the same promotion for Kobo that I did for Amazon: the book will be free there till Monday. Barnes and Noble and Apple don’t allow you to give away books, or I’d make it free there too, but I’ve also generated a coupon code for Smashwords that will allow folks to download The Millennial Sword for free in any e-book format: that code is CM23R, and is applied at checkout. It will work through Monday, so feel free to share it around!