The girls, they just want to have fun!

After teaching Anthropology of Reproduction at 12noon, I sat down with my Kashi Pesto Pasta Primavera for lunch and read this article on the NYT: "Nursing Bras That Show Mothers in More Than ‘Work Mode’."

On the one hand, I am all for recognizing the woman in the mother and letting the girls get dressed up. Why should nursing bras be unattractive and otherwise unappealing to wear?

On the other hand, I find statements like this a tad irritating:

“As soon as you have the baby, nobody looks at you anymore,” Ms. Dimond said. “This is to treat yourself.”

I wish that the woman in the mother did not place quite so much significance in being looked at.

Even more troubling is this statement:

“Another driver is the rapid growth in size, influence and power of online mommy culture.”

As a parenthropologist, I could go on and on about the referencing of "mommy" and "culture," but the point that I wish to make is about commodification. To a certain extent, breastfeeding can be said to exist "outside" market economics (or at least is constructed to be free and "pure" of all that, which itself can have consequences both positive and negative for women who "succeed" or "fail" to breastfeed...) The making of a new market of glam and sexy nursing bras appears to me an attempt to commercialize what previously had been apparently uncommercializable. You cannot sell or buy the milk itself, but you can produce and consume commercial goods that accompany breastfeeding. You can make a commodity of the experience of breastfeeding.

It is true that women's breasts themselves long have been fetishized and commodified. The fact that lactating women's breasts, too, now are subject to it all... Is this really progress?

Why we all need recess!

Here is another instance of our conventional wisdom being proved to be quite wise: All work and no play makes us unhappy, unhealthy, and ultimately, unproductive.

Jane Brody in today's Personal Health column in the NYT reports on the benefits of what public health professor Tori Yancey calls “Instant Recess — the title of her new book (University of California Press), in which she demonstrates the value of two 10-minute breaks of enjoyable communal activity as part of people’s everyday lives."

I cheer anytime anyone says that I need not exercise in swaths of time that I simply do not have. Not only that, I actually kind of hate exercise. There. I said it.

Yet, since June 2009, I have stuck to an almost-daily routine of what I call micro-running, which involves dropping off one child (or occasionally, two children) at child-care, school, or summer camp, then running a short "loop" back home. It used to take about 10 minutes to run the loop, but I have surprised myself with how much easier the hills seem to take. Rather than making the loop longer, I have been challenging myself by picking up the pace.

I look forward to microruns as a way to clear my mind and ready myself for work. However, I readily admit to enjoying other benefits of exercise: Ah, vanity. I am now down to my pre-childbearing weight - not just pre-Bubbie, but pre-Beanie.

Re-finding my shape occasioned a visit to H&M yesterday after my sister remarked on the pre-Beanie jeans that I was wearing: "Wow, those are old." Referring not so much to their faded condition, but to their lamentable lack of fashion. Ouch. Because regardless of whether or not we "care" about style, it hurts to know that we do not have it. I mean, I could not even claim that I was being anti-fashion: Got to know the rules in order to break them. Quite the opposite: I had felt so good about being able to fit into them after all this time! It made me feel like the 7th grader who finally is teased to awareness that his mother has been dressing him in pants with elasticated waist bands. Oh, wait. That was StraightMan's story.

Enough about sartorial sense, or lack thereof. As a parenthropologist, I took particular interest in instant recess for kids:

Likewise, she said, 10-minute exercise breaks during the school day could do more to forward the goals of No Child Left Behind than double that amount of time spent trying to stuff math and English into students’ heads. She cited a federally financed study by the University of Kansas conducted at 24 low-income public schools.

The study, which included a matched control group, found that 10-minute activity breaks, usually done to music, led to improved scores in math, spelling and composition among the participants. The students also increased their activity levels outside school, on weekdays and weekends, and gained less weight than those in the schools who did not institute fitness breaks.

This study is especially telling because in schools around the country, physical education classes and outdoor recess have fallen prey to the demands to improve test scores.

Finally. I now have a public health justification for turning up the volume and having a little Pet Shop Boys moment in the middle of my day.

Mine might not be the majority opinion, but I think recess ought to be treated like lunch: All kids need to have it. This means also rethinking recess as a "privilege" that becomes taken away: Based on talk with parents and teachers, it seems like the same kids (especially boys) lose recess over and over again. I understand the aims of adults trying to guide kids meaningfully to understand the consequences of their actions, but it seems to me both that losing recess does not result in real understanding and that any "correction" in behavior resulting from losing recess will be a short-term gain.

I tend to think that the kids who "act out" the most probably have the most need also to be guided toward acting out productively.

StraightMan suggests that instead of losing recess, kids who act out should be required to run laps around the playground.

I say there ought to be mandatory "Macarena."

An Anna Wintour moment

Where I am now, the devil does not wear Prada. She wears OshKosh.

The scene: The other day, while walking Beanie and her friend, Pants, who is in the second grade, home from ballet class.

The fashion faux pas: Across the street, a young woman, possibly a college student, walking in the other direction, is wearing... well, something. Kind of a shapeless swath of fabric - a tube dress?! - that brushes against the tops of her thighs. Otherwise, her legs are bare. She is, of course, talking on her phone.

The second grader, Pants, speaking apparently at the top of her lungs: Did you see that? Is that a dress?

Me, lowering my voice to "model" what I think would be so much less embarrassing: I think it is [a dress]. It is pretty short...

The first grader, Beanie, matching her friend's pitch and volume: I would never wear anything so short. Unless it was a shirt. Then I would need to wear pants with it.

The second grader, helpfully: Or leggings.

The first grader, agreeing: Or leggings.

The second grader: Or jeans that fitted.

Me: Skinny jeans?

The first grader, firmly: Leggings would be better.

There you have it: Fash-shun tips from a first and second grader.