Sometimes I find it hard to believe that a mere four or five months ago, Cordelia had only a tiny handful of words, and we weren’t even sure if she knew they were words, or if she just liked the sounds she was making. I would repeat things to her over and over, trying to coax new words from her lips, looking into her eyes for a hint of recognition at the sound of words like kitty, mommy, sleep, or eat.

Now, just over three weeks before her second birthday, I can’t shut the kid up. She talks nonstop, all the time.

Oh sure, as in months past, she often rambles on incoherently with the same inflection and tone as real words, but lacking any further resemblance. But now, more words and sentences are making their way into her brain, and she rehearses them frequently in front of us.

The amusing part of all of this is that she doesn’t require a conversation partner. She gladly carries on both sides of the conversation, unaware that half of what she is saying should be said by someone else.

Knock, knock!
Who der?

Yes, she’s learning both sides of a knock knock joke. She never waits for me to answer “Who’s there?” Soon my little version of Rain Man will certainly be quoting both sides of Who’s On First.

But it doesn’t stop with jokes. Cordy will also give running commentary about objects she sees:

Oh! Wook!
What izzt?
Itza ball!
Wook!
Where ball?
Der itz is!
Oh! Wook!

The above one-person conversation is carried out in roughly 20 seconds, and repeated over and over again, with no pause to allow you to join in on the conversation.

With a string of phrases like that, I can only assume that either she is simply practicing the phrases she knows, or she has no short-term memory like Dory, and the ball is new to her every 10 seconds. I seriously hope my first assumption is the correct one.

But reaching this point in language development is exciting. She’s now expressing her thoughts with words, instead of the tried-and-true scream. Instead of me playing 20 questions – “What do you want? Are you hungry? Are you tired? Do you need Blue? Do you need a diaper change? Do you want to watch TV? Do you want to run outside?” – she’s now giving her demands clearly and as precise as possible. While she is still ambiguous much of the time, the connection has been made. We are learning her language as much as she is learning ours.

I can also see the frustration on her face now, as she tries to express herself with the limited amount of words she knows. This is the age where receptive language is growing more rapidly than expressive language, meaning they understand many words, but can only express a limited number of them. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to understand so much and yet only have a small set of words to draw from to express yourself. Add in an underdeveloped emotional control, and it suddenly makes sense why tantrums are so common at this age.

While she is developing language in her own way, it is also interesting to see the habits she is picking up from Aaron and me. When she is exasperated with us, she will often exclaim, “Okay! Okay!” just like we exclaim when she’s screaming and we’re trying to hurry to fix whatever is causing the crisis. Because of this, Okay! has also become a stand-in for the word yes.

I’m really looking forward to seeing Cordy’s verbal skills increase in this next year. I remember when a friend’s son turned three, and I remember how well he could communicate at that birthday party, when only a year before that he wasn’t saying anything more than sound effects. The next year will continue the already rapid transition from being a baby who relied on me for everything to being a little girl who will determine her own preferences and do things for herself. By next year, she’ll hopefully let me into her head, telling me stories only her imagination could dream up and sharing every thought she can with me.

I only hope I can keep up with her.

Hello? Would ya quit yakking and give me a push?

The lovely Ohio weather was crap today, and we had a toddler bubbling over with energy, which of course is a combination destined for disaster. So we spent the afternoon at COSI. I’ve posted about it before – it’s one of the most awesome places to take a child under 5.

As usual, she runs for the water table first. It’s not a good day for her without getting wet.

“I have to take a nap after this? No way!”

Fun with airjets and foam balls.

Going down the slide on her own (after nearly running down another kid).

Driving the ambulance, loaded with sick babies. Hey, she’s a giver.

She doesn’t realize that we’re about to take her home for her nap.

I can sum up everything you need to know about garage sales in four lines:

(Scene: buyer picks up a beautiful child’s designer dress that still has original price tag of $30.00 on it)

Buyer: How much for this dress?

Seller: It’s $5.00. It’s still brand new, never worn.

Buyer: (thinking) I’ll give you a quarter.

Seller: *blink* (long pause, then sigh) Ok, fine.

And that just about covers it all. Yet somehow, we did manage to make a little bit of money, and clear some junk out of the house, so the day wasn’t a waste.

Wow, what a difference a few days makes. I disappear for two days (due to working and starting clinicals for my nurse aide class, leaving me only time for sleep) and during that time Forbes first pulled the inflammatory article, and then brought it back, but now with a counterpoint essay.

It seems that word spread fast through the blogosphere – a little too fast for the comfort of those at Forbes.com. The backpedalling has begun, and I’m not sure they’re finished yet.

The counterpoint provided by Elizabeth Corcoran is good, but still falls short in addressing this issue. She hints at calling out his misogynist ideas, but then falls back on simply telling how her marriage, as a career woman, doesn’t fit his guide. I guess I was expecting her counterpoint to have more bite to it.

She does make an excellent point in this paragraph:

The essence of a good marriage, it seems to me, is that both people have to learn to change and keep on adapting. Children bring tons of change. Mothers encounter it first during the nine months of pregnancy, starting with changing body dimensions. But fathers have to learn to adapt, too, by learning to help care for children, to take charge of new aspects of a household, to adapt as the mothers change.

Absolutely. Marriage takes change and adaptation from both people. Mr. Noer took pleasure in declaring how women should change when they become wives in order to make their marriages successful, but implied that men should make no changes to their own behaviors and actions. Instead of worrying that his wife won’t take care of his health if she works full time, a man should be capable of keeping track of his own medical needs. Surely he did it while he was single, or did his mother do it for him, even when he was on his own?

And what about the wife? Should she expect her husband to work less and spend more time worrying over her health and well-being? I thought marriage was a partnership, where things may not always be 50-50, but equality is always a goal. (The frightening thing is, I know men who subscribe to Mr. Noer’s guidelines, and I’ve seen hints of it from the stories some mommy bloggers tell of their husbands, too.)

I didn’t care for the wrap up that Ms. Corcoran provided, though:

So guys, if you’re game for an exciting life, go ahead and marry a professional gal.

Game for an exciting life? What? I was a career woman, and I can say I had an interesting life, but it wasn’t exciting. (My life now? Far more exciting. Living with a toddler is only slightly less exciting than wrestling with a bear.) Plus, what about those women who aren’t career women? Are they boring? I’m sure you didn’t mean it this way, but that sentence nearly confirms Michael Noer’s assertions. Exciting could equal dangerous or risky, right?

While Elizabeth Corcoran’s counterpoint was good, I just don’t think it went far enough to really challenge the original article.

My primary question to Forbes is: who thought this article was a good idea? If I’m not mistaken, writers generally must get their article approved before it is released to the web on a supposedly prestigious site for the world to see. So not only did Michael Noer write a misogynist article about why career woman are bad wives because they won’t cater to their husband’s every whim, but someone else read it and said, “Hey, this looks good!” Did this come across the desk the afternoon the editors had an end-of-summer margarita bash at lunch?

So if I’m still not happy, what can be done to make this situation better? I don’t know. I’ve already lost a lot of respect for Forbes, which I’m not sure can ever be won back. An apology might help. Pulling the article wouldn’t help – it would only serve to hide the evidence of what was done.

My suggestion to Forbes? Be a little more careful with what you publish, and don’t let inappropriate content go out to the public. Oh, and you might start with getting rid of this article. A list of “hot” billionaire heiresses might be a better fit for Spike TV.

I generally don’t pay attention to the news headlines Google gives me at the top of my Gmail page. Usually there’s something about someone winning a hot dog eating contest, or that oil companies are the next big investment (gee, you think?), or some other useless topic. But it’s hard to miss a news headline when it has the title “Reasons NOT to Marry a Career Woman“. Oh yeah, gotta go check that one out.

I expected something that was going to be far less sensational than the headline clearly designed to lure readers in. Instead, I was even more shocked at the content. The link, if you haven’t clicked it already in curiosity, is a slide show, put together by Forbes.com, counting the reasons why you, as a man, should run screaming from any woman who says her career is very important to her.

I’ll wait while you now rush to click the link. I understand, I did the same thing. I couldn’t believe this to be a real story, complete with research to back up the author’s position. While some of the points have validity, such as research showing that women who are focused on their careers and have higher earnings are less likely to get married (makes sense, right?), other points are simply sexist and insulting.

Case in point? How about this reason not to marry a career woman: your house will be messier. Apparently women who earn more than $15 an hour devote 1.9 hours less a week to housework as compared to their close-to-minimum wage sisters.

So clearly if you want a spotless house, (and of course you don’t want to do any housework yourself, for heaven’s sake) you need to marry a girl who won’t work, or who will only work some poorly-paying job (you know, to give her a sense of accomplishment). Otherwise your house will be dirty and you’ll just have to beat your wife for not doing her job of keeping house.

But wait, this isn’t a lone sexist reason in a group of perfectly sane ones. How about the reason: she’ll be more unhappy if she makes more than you do. Hear that, ladies? If we make more than our husbands, we’ll certainly be miserable, because even if we hold feminist views, deep down we know that our husbands should be the breadwinner. And if he’s the breadwinner, we can be free of that burden to instead pursue our part-time, “meaningful but not particularly remunerative job”. So they’re just doing us a favor, for our own happiness, and here we are not being nearly thankful enough. Geez, aren’t we just bitches?

My favorite reason (to hate) has to be this one: men are more likely to fall ill if they have a wife who works more than 40 hours a week. A woman who works more than 40 hours a week has “substantial, statistically significant, negative effects on changes in her husband’s health over that time span”. Translation: we’re killing our husbands because we work. The author goes on to explain that “wives working longer hours not do not have adequate time to monitor their husband’s health and healthy behavior, to manage their husband’s emotional well-being or buffer his workplace stress.”

Now, maybe I’m just being a little too modern here, but I had no idea that my husband was an extra child. Last I checked, he can take care of himself, make his own doctor’s appointments, and has the sense of mind to know when he’s sick or needs help. While I can express concern over his health, just as he can do for me, my role as wife does not include the duties of nurse and mental health practitioner. I’m pretty sure that requires some extra training.

Are men really still searching for women who will be their nurse, their housekeeper, their sex toy, their baby producer, and their mother rolled up into one? And I’m not just talking about people stuck in the 50’s – I’m talking about educated, intelligent men who read Forbes Magazine. (Well, I thought they were well-educated and intelligent. I’m doubting that now.) I guess I’m just baffled that in 2006 a woman can be thought of in such diminutive, sexist ways as soon as her status is converted to “wife”. It creates an entirely new warning for parents to tell their sons. In the 50’s, it was “Party girls make great dates, but you should never marry them.” Now will they tell them, “Career girls make great dates, but you should never marry them”?

Is it OK in today’s world to think of women as equals in the workplace and in society, until one of them becomes your wife, at which point she should take her proper role in the marriage of taking care of the husband, his castle, and the kids? Are some trying to create a new dichotomy for feminism, of being equal but only where marriage isn’t concerned?

Now, I’ll admit I’m not a career woman. I had aspirations of that at one time, but I gave up graduate school and my ideas of being a college professor because I decided it wasn’t for me, not because I was married and planning to have a child. And in not being a career woman, I can’t say for sure one way or another that this author pulled random statistics out of the air and the reality of American marriages looks nothing like this.

However, I just can’t see that a woman who chooses to pursue her own career goals is destined to wreck her marriage simply because of those career aspirations. I think it is possible for two people to be happily married, to each have a successful career, and to possibly have kids or no kids. Of course, the author infers that nearly all women want to have kids, so it’s a problem if they’re not having kids. The key, I think, is in how you approach your marriage. If you approach it as a power struggle, where one person must have control of the other, then you’ve got much bigger problems than a woman who chooses to work. And I think it is those problems in perception that will lead to divorce, not because the wife has a career.

Maybe instead of crafting a list of reasons not to marry a career woman, Forbes should write an article warning career woman how to spot and avoid sexist, spineless, controlling men who are actually looking for a servant and not a partner in marriage.

Edited to add: After a lot of digging through Forbes.com’s (poorly organized) website, I did finally find the intro to the slideshow. While it confirms that the slideshow is dead serious, it also acknowledges that the author is simply pulling together a lot of recent research. However, just because the intro isn’t (as) offensive doesn’t excuse the overall tone of the article, in my opinion.