whoa nellie

Today Trang took us (Trang's daughter LA, me, T, & VL) to her secret kid spot The Brunk Children's Museum of Immigration in nearby Andersonville. Like any great children's museum, it had really great interactive roleplay exhibits; in this case, of life in the old country, the journey to America, and life in America. Not to detract from the museum's Swedish mission nor to detract from the basic fun-ness of it, I must allow that it's a rather grandiose museum name that surpasses its subject by far since it focuses on a very specific segment of Swedish immigration in the 1800s. The museum acknowledges as much:

The Museum has a Swedish focus; however, the story of Swedish immigration parallels that of many other groups who left the old world behind and forged new lives in America.

Indeed, there was the almost universalized American romantic meme of immigrating to America in the 1800s-a least if one was a European settler and not an African slave or a Chinese coolie or a dispossessed Injun. That substantial historical context aside, there was definite wholesome, rustic charm to delight my girlish homesteading heart having grown up reading & watching Little House on the Prairie. Think roleplaying Laura Ingalls Wilder. Plus, who doesn't love kid-sized pinafores, cast iron stoves, coffee mills, and chamberpots? The wooden milking cow that one could actually milk was RAD. So Sweden farmhouse in the 1800s was lots of fun for the girls. They cooked us fish, made us coffee, and had lots and lots of kitchentime fun. Then we took the cruise ship to America, a quick journey really because the girls weren't interested in rowing or shuffleboard. And then onto pioneer America of the 1800s, where the little one room cabin was adorned with hand embroidered aphorism in cryptic Swedish, with Ikea furniture (I kid you not), and *real* animal pelts-ugh, it looked way cuter on the actual racoons and coyotes. There was a darling garden handmade with recycled/repurposed rubber tires, boxes, fabric. Tucked away in a corner in front of the emergency exit was a small life raft-a story symbol of the desperate third world refugee influx to Sweden. This display was marked DO NOT PLAY. Refugee boat stories are depressing and not to be roleplayed, apparently.

At any rate, I thought wouldn't it be great for VL & LA to have kid-sized dioramas of vietnamese life? Oh, or better yet, a children's museum that could really reflect the diversity of immigration experiences? To come over, one could chose the boat or an airplane or... climb a barbwire fence. And then Life in America could reflect more recent realities like uh, urban homesteading, public housing, section 8, refugee camps... While not without humanitarian precedent, this roleplaying idea quickly devolved. Perhaps like the fragile refugee life-raft diorama, some stories are not meant to be roleplayed...

How do we tell our stories to our children?

dreaming of pork

what is it that Americans and approx 20% of the world have against pork?

T & i and others of our ilk been bemoaning the lack of high-quality, relatively inexpensive organic pork. at least with chicken we can go to a halal store and get humanely treated, non-drugged chicken for comparable prices to a regular grocery store. but no one does "halal" pork and it's considered an insult to even inquire. when we were in Viet Nam, the subtle flavor of the pork, just couldn't compare with anything we could get here at a typical grocery stores. and even when we go to that organic grocery store, all they have is pork chops. while delicious, you can't find the cuts--from the rooter to the tooter--used in vinamese cooking. what happens to all those organic pig trotters that could be the base for practically every vinamese noodle soup? (fyi non-vinamese people, pho is the only aberration. all vinamese noodle soups are made from pork bones even that wierdly named Bun Bo Hue|Hue-style beef noodles.)

T. dream-crushed my idea of raising our own vinamese pot-bellied pigs since he astutely surmised i would name the pigs, teach them tricks, and then recoil at butchering them. (rather, he has dream-crushed my idea of raising them to eat them; he hasn't dream-crushed my idea to raise them as pets cause the miniature donkeys would be lonely out back and what better company than pigs? smarter than dogs and can be potty-trained to boot.)

our friend Giang re-sparked my enthusiasm for acquiring a deep freezer. Giang & co. bought an organic 4H pig from the County Fair and it was delivered butchered into cuts, though unfortunately, american cuts. so no feet, head, ears or bones. darn!

i happened to find a source for organic, heritage pigs and practically every cut. heritage pigs are the breed of famed, succulent black pigs ghat are high in omega-3 fatty acids, that were all but bred out of existence by the commercial dry, anorexic pink pigs of factory farming.

better yet, you can get a whole pig (!) including shipping for about $300. and of course if you are a first time user you can 15% off. so for about $250 you can get a year's worth of pork! (or one fine pig roast. not that we ever finished installing the kalua pit in the backyard... there's always next year or la caja china.) pretty good price considering that non-organic, commercially produced heo quay|whole roast pig costs $150.

http://www.heritagefoodsusa.com/
*Ok and it cracks me up that part of their mission is the genetic preservation of endangered rare breeds, so their mantra is "If we want to save them, we must eat them! ." I can just see some chinese company breeding siberian tigers and sunbears to eat with exclusive Louise XIV VSOP cognac with that very mission in mind.

yarnage

alot has happened twixt then and now. too much to recount in the respite i have while bébé is snuggled on my bosom in a sling dreaming of bú (sometimes i can hear her little lips smacking away, other times i have to towel off the drool from my clavicle).

i am planning to blog about her birth by and by. elevator version is: all natural drug-free homebirth; 24 hours in labor; just over an hour of pushing; her hand was right alongside her face (gave me a 2nd degree tear which i chose not to get stitched. healed up nicely. thank the goddess! your yoni is never the same tho); she opened her eyes and started mewling as soon as her mouth emerged, even before her body was even born! she was lifting her head from the get-go, no small feat for a creature whose head practically weighed more than her body. the girl is feisty, headstrong and determined. hmm, wonder who she gets that from? yes, there are birth photos & video, and no, i don't plan on posting them to the blog. my yoni would rather be un-notorious. as i said to the boys hurling beads at me while hollering "show us your tits" in new orleans during mardi gras while T scavenged for lagniappes, "my mama raised me better than that!"

for now, i have found my cosmic yarnage twin--except i am infinitely less skilled at yarn craftage. if you don't have a yarn stash in the eaves, nooks and crannies of your house and if you don't have a profile on ravelry.com, you will not get this. seriously. stop reading.

the morning i went into labor, i bought an "amish" washing machine (bought from that company but hey, it wasn't just a punchline, the online amish store does indeed exist, and has a cool wringer, and who would have guessed that i have an affinity for the pennsylvania deutsch? it's the apocalyptic survivalist-cum-granddaughter of my grandparents in me. what can i say, this may make me white, but i love kitchen gadgets nd household sundries even/especially non-electric ones. i just got a foley food mill earlier this week. now, what can i mill?), 8 skeins of ooh so pretty felting wool (in twins) and two hanks of organic cotton yarn. on sale natch. now my yarn treasure box is overfilling. since it was online, i wasn't able to employ the basic techniques of a Yarn Collector however, i did admire the ooh so pretty felting yarn for months & months, would make rationalizations, put it in my online shopping basket, would be rational, delete it, and would come up with more rationalizations, replace it, and so on and so forth, before succumbing to imminent-labor-onset-major-project hormones and decisively purchased them for forthcoming, small but IMPORTANT projects beyond my skill level which i will diligently and heuristically plunge into. sometime. in the future. when i magically have more free time. projects to be added to my lifetime to-do list which i keep misplacing. now what did i buy them for? it's the post-birth hormones and sleep deprivation that make me forget.

my beloved T-sten doesn't understand why i keep buying more yarn (in singles and duos) or rather how the yarn mysteriously multiplies (duh, it's with the dust bunnies. everyone knows how fecund they are) but we've made a tacit agreement about each other's creative hobbies that he won't ask about the yarnage and i won't ask about the photog accoutrements.

let's chalk it up to another stupid power, my hoarding of nifty household gadgets & yarn. if only i could put this on my resume.

DIY baby hammock

who invented hammocks? no one knows for sure, but it was folks in the tropics, caribbean, latin america. all i know is that it is ingenious.

in VN, there is just about a hammock for every adult. every household has at least 4 steel screw hooks bolted into the studs for an instant midday siesta. even government offices close down to beat the tropical heat for lunch & a siesta. though i wonder if they too have hammock hooks tucked in the back. socialist bureaucrats need to snooze off the heat too. indeed the modern vinamese american household has an ancestral altar, a large flat screen TV, karaoke, and a made-in-vietnam steel-framed hammock (and usually some elder firmly ensconced while watchin the newest Pa-Ri Bai Nai|Paris By Night variety show spectacle or phim chưởng|chinese period serial martial art soap opera or cải lương|southern vinamese melodic storytelling). growing up in honolulu, i was lulled to sleep in hammocks from the time i was born. and i was so glad when my mom *finally* found the hammock she got for me in VN in 2001 buried in the depths of the garage which the two older kids use as free storage. (and before you siblings protest the unfairness of that generalization, all i know is that all my stuff was in the shed that exploded and burned down in dad's "shed incident." the only stuff i have in the garage is what mom has been stockpiling for years in the anticipation of another grandchild.) we lugged that hammock shit up from SanD posthaste. and believe me, it wasn't easy.

now that t&i are at that procreating time, we're trying to evade the consumer mentality manufactured by the billion dollar baby product industry, and society at large. looking to expand its market and profit margin and led by multi-culty parents, the baby product industry is beginning to embrace and commodify the "natural" ways the rest of the non-industrial world has raised billions of babies. co-sleeping, baby carriers/slings, attachment parenting, elimination communication, practices & crafts/artifacts the world over are are making their way in the mainstream, being trademarked, branded and packaged as a westernized consumer product.

i'm predicting that hammocks are the next big baby thing. there is one american brand complete with a frame and padded hammock. aussie & kiwi's are getting in it too. why? because hammocks mimic the natural rhythm of in utero, they ergonomically conform to the baby's shape (unlike stiff flat mattresses), they are self-propelled (amazingly, a baby soothing product that doesn't require batteries. yet.) and, most importantly, unlike cribs they don't cost an arm and a leg. in the global context, it's important to remember that hammocks are safe to use because the baby is never left alone. there is always a caretaker whether parent, grandparent, extended family within ear's reach and unlike america, no one anywhere else in the world ignores a baby's cry believing that promotes independence rather than abandonment issues and SIDS.

when i was a kid i used to sit and draw blueprints for playhouses. really detailed blueprint of a playhouse with sunroof, down to the lumber sizes, number of nails, reinforcing beams, crossbeam supported foundation, weather-proofing, etc. i get this from ông ngoại|maternal grandfather who as a self-sufficient peasant could grow rice & produce, raise & train waterbuffalo, make bánh tết & banh chưng|new years sticky rice, pork & mung bean cake and kẹo mè|sesame candy from scratch, build a house from scrap lumber & palm tree fronds, and invent a flapping angel-wing harness for the christmas pageant. nowadays they call a person like him a "renaissance man"--though i'm fairly certain self-sufficiency pre-exists the renaissance & capitalism--i just call him ông ngoại.

so rather than pay $200 for some bourgie plastic & polyester version manufactured in some sweatshop in China that will offgas neural disrupters horribly and break apart or be recalled due to shoddy workmanship, i decide to DIY and make my own. who knows maybe i will make a business plan out of this. may as well make some money off of this. maybe i can market it as phong thuỷ|feng shui hammocks. no one has niche marketed oriental metaphysicism and baby products yet.

disclaimer: this is still under product development, so experiment at your own risk.

PORTABLE BABY HAMMOCK
can be installed anywhere there is a door frame or lintel

• begin with 2 iron industrial C-clamps (6-8 in width) these have a carrying load of 1200 lbs+ each so it can handle a baby no worries.

• circular rubber or silicon pads (glue to the clamp faces to prevent damage to the surface)

• 2.5-3 yards of heavy cotton, 8mm+ habotai silk (also called parachute silk because it is used for parachutes and also for portable hammocks. load of up to 400 lbs.) or sling suitable fabric (36-48 width). the bonus with using natural materials is that they wick away moisture and regulate temperature.
  

• folded up baby blanket or towel approx the size of the baby.
  

on both ends of the fabric, hem the fabric with a double or triple seam (can also interlock) leaving about 1-1.5" hem loop. thread each end of the looped hem over each of the C-clamps.

clamp the padded C-clamps above the door frame about 1.5' - 2' apart. this will give you a loose parabola.

place the folded baby blanket parallel to the 48" width of the fabric at the vertex of the parabola. this is very important! the baby will lay on top of the blanket. babies should not be placed in this hammock the way an adult would lay for this particular hammock. the legs of the parabola (which are around 48" wide) will prevent the baby from rolling out of the hammock.

lay a bunch of pillows & padding underneath the hammock just in case and test it with some phonebooks (or cats as the case may be) before putting your baby in.

as in all things, use common sense.

PERMANENT INSTALLATION (under construction)

1 steel heavy duty eye screw or screw hook (carrying load of 400+ lbs each)
2' dowel
whipping rope technique
carbiner or quick link
2.5-3 yards

..to be continued...

i started this on 7.5.07 but waited to post so i wouldn't let the cat out of the bag. will finish at some other date.

p.s. the C-Clamps don't work over the lintel. Back to the drawing board. Am considering the Miyo clamp but it's $50 and I'd have to import it from NZ...