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Friday, June 29, 2007

Amazon Groceries

So, my husband wants to know why I would advertise Amazon Groceries on this website. Well, for starters they are paying me $3 for everyone who clicks on the ads. That means you don't even have to order any groceries, you just have to click on the ad on the right to help me out. Second, I fantasize about a world where I would never go grocery shopping again. Woudn't be be lovely if you never, ever had to deal with the Walmart hassle again? Really, I think it would be bliss. Third, we often enjoy food we can't even get locally. We live in a rather small city (80,000 to 100,000 people) and people here love steak and potatoes. They don't eat very exotic foods. But, I enjoy making a coconut chicken curry now and then. We're trying to eat healthy, but I don't want to spend a lot of time cooking and it just seems like it would be super-easy to have the spice mix for coconut chicken curry delivered to my door.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Barbie for President?



By Tracee Sioux

So a friend asked me the other day where I stand on Barbie. I have included "no Bratz, Barbies or Princesses" on birthday invitations. But, I also have a hot pink Barbie VW Bug and a Barbie skate board in the house.

I used to be anti-Barbie because Barbie had unrealistic body proportions. Her breasts were gigantic, waist tiny and nothing was in proportion. Perhaps Barbie-lunacy lead to so many women feeling they had inadequate breasts? Maybe Barbie is responsible for the dramatic increase in boob jobs? But, I can't back that up scientifically.

Besides I'm not against boob jobs or plastic surgery on principle. I'm against women being perpetually dissatisfied with their bodies and passing that onto their daughters on principle. Barbie may have contributed to that feeling of dissatisfaction by making little girls feel like growing up to look like Barbie was the ideal.

"Estimates have put the doll's life-size bust between 38 and 40 inches, her waist at 18-24 inches, and her height between five and a half and an outlandish more than seven feet, with a weight of 110. Picture Anna Nicole Smith's breasts, suspended above Kate Moss' waist (after a fast) all resting comfortably on Cheryl Miller's frame (after a mid-life growth spurt). Reported a MotherJones article.


Then Barbie went and got a little-publicised maker-over. Her boobs shrunk and her waist got a little wider and her hips narrower.

"Our intention is for her to have more of a teenage physique," says Mattel spokesperson Lisa McKendall. "In order for hip-huggers [the new doll's debut outfit] to look right, Barbie needs to be more like a teen's body. The fashions teens wear now don't fit properly on our current sculpting."

Of course, they didn't take the average proportions of the average American teenage girl and mold Barbie to those. That would be way to healthy of Mattel.

Still I have conflicted feelings about Barbie. She's such a consumer and I don't like that. She gets the dream house and dream car, dream boat, dream everything. She doesn't appear to have a job or children, but she's guess she's not that dependent on Ken.

Maybe I'm just jealous of Barbie. How come Barbie got everything? Why does Barbie get to have such a freaking dream life? (It's kind of how I feel about Elisabeth Hasselhoff on The View, so easy to make judgements when you're sitting in a dream life.)

Then, a friend sent me an ebay auction Barbie for President, where Barbie was wearing a red powersuit and holding her own election sign. With Hillary running for President in 2008, I kind of wanted to buy that and give it to Ainsley. (Or keep it for myself.)

But, that's because I love the idea of a female president of the United States. Not because I think Barbie would make a good one.

So, I don't have a hard and fast rule about Barbie. The dream car is allowed because she was the only one selling a pink VW Bug at the time, the skate board got in because it was a garage sale find.

Ainsley used to have some Barbies and Barbie knock-offs, but I was thrilled when I found a Barbie graveyard on her bed one evening. It seemed to be a promising symbol of her emotional development. While, I can't back that up scientifically. I do remember being inexplicably proud that she had ripped the head and all the limbs from her little Barbie-like dolls.

There is hope for you yet, grasshopper.

Virtual Book Club

By Tracee Sioux

I run a women's book club, Between the Covers, and this month (and probably August) we're doing Suze Orman's Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny.

I confess I was financially illiterate until I took Dave Ramsey's course Financial Peace University. It was a fantastic course that put a lot of financial issues into perspective for us.

I want to read Orman's book because I think there are issues that deal with money that are specific to women and girls. She looks at our emotional issues and how that translates into how we handle money and whether we use it to take care of ourselves.

She also tells women how to safe-guard themselves in cases where the prince does not show up, or perhaps the prince turned into a jerk and left or whatever. It's called reality, with a 50% divorce rate in this country. No one likes the reality, but it's rather silly not to acknowledge that it's there.

I'm inviting all my readers of So Sioux Me and BlogFabulous to participate in the book club selection. I think there are tons of issues to discuss. You can order the book right here and it helps me out, or get it from your local bookstore. Either way, I can't wait to hear what you have to say about women and money.

Let's face it it's terribly hard to feel empowered if you're broke or don't have enough information to make good financial decisions.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Internet Safety Blog

If you have kids and are concerned with Internet safety issues I found this great blog Internet Safety - For Our Children's Sake. There is lots of great advice and resources to deal with mean girl behavior that ends up online and predators who are surfing for their prey.

It's a techno world and it would be irresponsible parenting to give kids free access to the Internet and never monitor where they go, who they talk to or who is talking to them. There are some real safety issues involved.

There's even a great page about cyber bullying.

I highly recommend clicking on Internet Safety - For Our Children's Sake as soon as your kids are old enough to surf the net. What is that in today's world - about 8?

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Girls For Sale



By Tracee Sioux

When is too early to "womanize" a girl?

On Jezabel.com there is a story, with some great editorial comments, about a new line of make-up being marketed to girls ages 6 to 9.

"Encouraged by sales of its makeup collaboration with MAC Cosmetics (left) Mattel is partnering with Bonne Bell to launch a Barbie-branded, "girl savvy" cosmetics line "aimed at girls 6 to 9""

Then in Business Week we have this story:

Little girls aren't just playing princess these days. Increasingly, they're being royally pampered at spas aimed at the 5-to-12 set. Sweet & Sassy in Southlake , Tex. , expects to add 16 shops to its current 15 by yearend, growing to 82 by 2010. Boise ( Idaho )-based Monkey Dooz plans to go from 6 locations to 21 this year. And Saks-owned Club Libby Lu, with 90 outlets, expects to add up to 15 annually over the next five years. In 2006, Saks reported Libby Lu sales of $53 million, up 13% from 2005.In pastel rooms lined with cartoon characters, Monkey Dooz offers a $35 Tutti Frutti Manicure and Chocolate Pedicure. At birthday parties--big in the tween spa business--guests at Sweet & Sassy can opt for a mini-facial or a "sassy up-do" hairstyle. In the age of Britney, Lindsay, and Paris, do the spas send girls the wrong signal? "A 9-year-old does not need makeup or a pedicure," says psychologist Irene Kassorla. "The message is, 'Lie back and do nothing, and we'll make you feel good.' It's just inappropriate." The spas say their services are harmless. "It's not about growing up too fast," says Sweet & Sassy CEO Dixie-Drake Davis. "We wouldn't do eyebrow waxing or highlights or anything that would keep a child from being a child." By Louise Lee
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_27/c4041003.htm?chan=search

There are so many things wrong with this picture. Not the least of which is that these companies believe our girls are for sale.

Do you let your daughter play dress-up and smear blue eyeshadow and red lipstick all over her face? Maybe you've even put a set of play make-up under the tree to keep her out of your good stuff? Do you paint her nails a bubble-gum pink or maybe some polish with stars and sparkles in it?

Sure, why wouldn't you? It's fun to play "grown-up pretty." Make-up is fun, going to the spa does feel really good? Is it terrible and awful to bond with your daughter over a simple manicure for a special mother-daughter day? I can see that in my future with Ainsley. And there wouldn't be anything hugely detrimental about it. I've even considered throwing a big "spa party" at this local place that has all the dress-up clothes and make-up and stuff for a "tea party."

But, that's fun and games. That's just playing. Play is healthy. Bonding with your daughter over make-up and nail polish is healthy, as long as it stays age-appropriate.

When does it cross the line? When the business model for marketing spa treatments to six-year-olds includes 268 outlets to market beauty services directly to them. When we're talking about mega-corporations putting $53 million in their fat pockets. When real companies like Mac Cosmetics starts rolling out real make-up lines with the intention of making 6 to 9 year olds believe they need make-up.

Girls in their target market (picture a bulls-eye) are children. They can't deconstruct advertising. While these companies think it's fair game to commando market to our little girls it comes at a cost. The cost isn't the $35 for the Tutti-Fruity mani-pedi, it's the self-image and self-esteem of America's little girls. The cost is in allowing companies like these to make millions of dollars by making our little girls feel not pretty enough. When our beautiful little girls feel like they need to wear make-up in elementary school it's enough already over the line. When the company spokesperson says they wouldn't give a little girl an eyebrow wax I think she's lying. I think, not only would they do it, they would make her believe she needed it.

There is a serious self-worth issue in little girl culture today. Already, 42% of 1st-3rd grade girls want to be thinner., and 81% of 10-year-olds are afraid of being fat, according to the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty White Paper. These negative feelings about appearance result in serious health issues for our little girls like eating disorders, unsafe sexual behavior to fill the hole in their souls, drugs, alcohol and suicides. Forget $35, the real cost is the feeling of being and looking "good enough" or "pretty."

In Mary Pipher's book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls she writes that girls maintain their confidence through elementary school. In part because they haven't been thoroughly genderized yet by having to "womanize" themselves. They participate in and can hold their own at math, science and athletics against the equally matched boys. She paints a picture of the years between 5-11 or so as being wonderfully free of being sexualized or "womanized."

We're selling that wonderful part of girlhood to Mac cosmetics and Saks' line of girl-spas? Yeah, if we let our girls get sucked in by their advertising and buy them the new line of make-up or take them to these spas - I think we are. I think millions of mothers, because let's not forget they will market aggressively to the mothers, will blindly buy the make-up gift set and put it under the tree or throw the big spa party for the 6th birthday and never realize just what they are buying. Or selling. The soul of their little girl. The child part of being a girl. The unsexualized, unwomanized part of being a girl. The pretty just as you are part.

When your daughter responds to the commando advertising, and she will, be kind enough to her to say, No. You are so beautiful exactly as you are, you don't need a bit of make-up.
More posts on Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty
Beauty & Reality
Self-Loathing Sin Bank
More posts on hair:
Pink Hair Fiasco
Pink Hair Fiasco Take 2
Curl Maintenance
The Meaning of Hair

Fit-Buff Carnival

Fit-Buff's new blog Total Mind and Body Fitness Blog Carnival is out, you know I love this one. I'm in it, three times due to a typo, not complaining. Maybe that will net me three times the readers? One can hope.

You know I love TherapyDoc, funny and thoughtful stuff about the therapists' "party-line" concerning drinking, drugs and seduction.

As far as your patients are concerned, You don't drink, and you don't use drugs, and you'll probably live longer for it (you hope).Now, seduction is something we can talk about. Like drinking, it's safest in moderation and at home with somebody you love, preferably a committed partner, not a blood relative. And talking in code is good, assuming both of you know the code, that is.

Brain Power
Anne-Marie presents An Interview with Nordine Zouareg, author of Mind Over Body: The Key to Lasting Weight Loss Is All in Your Head posted at A Mama's Rant.
Kendra presents Escaping ?Uterine Rupture? Fears posted at vbacadventure.com.
Caroline Latham presents Pattern Recognition Brain Teaser - The Empty Triangle posted at SharpBrains.
Meredith Mathews presents T spheres posted at Lemonade Stand.
Silicon Valley Blogger presents Cheap Ways To Learn And Feed Your Brain posted at The Digerati Life.
Exercise
therapydoc presents Alcohol and Your Therapy Doc posted at Everyone Needs Therapy.
Midnight Raider presents Weightlifting On Any Budget posted at Refrigerator Raid.
Lynda Lippin presents Pilates & Reiki In Paradise Blog: Supreme Pilates®–Be Very Afraid! posted at Pilates & Reiki In Paradise Blog.
baiguai presents Getting Off the Couch posted at Kung Fu Artistry.
Anmol Mehta presents Core Abdominal Power Yoga Exercises posted at Mastery of Meditation, Enlightenment & Kundalini Yoga.
Shane Magee presents Warming up before running or doing exercise. posted at Sri Chinmoy Races Blog.
April Kerr presents Improve your Immune System with Exercise posted at Natural Health Remedies.
Family
Tracee Sioux presents Second Generation Mean Girl posted at So Sioux Me.
Tracee Sioux presents Second Generation Mean Girl posted at So Sioux Me.
Grooming
Tracee Sioux presents Pur Perfection for Pregnancy Mask posted at Blog Fabulous.
Nutrition
Dean Carlson presents The 3 P's of a Healthy Diet posted at New Hampshire Fitness Personal Trainer NH.
Be sure to tune in every Monday for the next Total Mind and Body Fitness Blog Carnival, and if you want to submit your own article for inclusion, click here before midnight (eastern time) on Sunday.
Discuss this post on the FitBuff.com Forums. Did you find this article or site helpful? Why don't you Subscribe to the Free FitBuff.com Newsletter packed with even more useful news and tips to help you achieve total mind and body fitness.

Maternal Lineage

By Tracee Sioux

Sarah begat Viola, Viola begat Susie, Susie begat Tracee, Tracee begat Ainsley.

I've always wished at least one book in the Bible would have started with the feminine, maternal lineage. It is difficult for girls and women to relate to the Biblical heroes because it's just so hard to find a sense of self there. The players are men. Women are mentioned in relation to men, usually. (I throw the usually in there because I'm not about to have endless semantic arguments about women's place in the Bible.)

For girls, I believe, all of history is the same way. One must go searching for the heroines of history. They throw a few in there, like Joan of Arc, but in the end they are burned at the stake rather than lifted up as great changers of the world.

Without a clear sense of identity, including a historic identity, people tend to lose themselves by trying to fill every else's expectations. Girls are especially prone to this as they sit through endless hours of Sunday school hearing about the great men of Biblical times, as well as through school learning about the great men of history. Not only is it unfair, but it is inaccurate in a lot of ways.

Women have effected the world in as many ways as men, it's just not reported as loudly. For instance, I would call my family a definite matriarchy. The women have always ruled in my family. I use the term ruled in the sense that they have created the family dynamic and set the tone for the family's priorities and values. They have trained the children and maintained any emotional connection between the members.

I can trace the matriarchy back to my own great-grandmother. I knew her until I was 12 and she made such an impression on me that I named my daughter Ainsley Sarah after her. My mother was also named for her.

Over the weekend I went to our very extended family reunion and there was a memorial service for this great-great-grandmother of my daughter's. I took my daughter and her daughters (my grandmother and her sister) and sat listening to stories of what a service-oriented woman she was. There is something to be said in that the taste of her legendary rolls has been remembered on people's death beds, and lingered on tongues of literally hundreds of friends and relatives for well over 20 years. There is also something significant knowing you are curling up in one of hundreds of quilts made by her needle and thread. There is power in knowing that she survived more hardship than myself or my children could ever imagine and always had a grateful heart and an unshakable faith in God.

Our goal, as conscientious parents trying to raise empowered daughters, is to help them find an unshakable sense of self. A firm sense of self will preserve girls through peer pressure, enormous temptations, love affairs and friendships, and difficult decisions.

Part of our sense of self is made up of our sense of belonging to various groups. For instance, my group identities include American, Mormon, Democrat, Military Brat, ect (which is not to say those groups claim me, but that I identify internally with them). More intimately though is knowing that I come from a long line of strong women or my maternal lineage. I can trace my maternal lineage through my mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother.

By passing that knowledge down to my daughter, I know that it makes her sense of identity stronger. Detailed knowledge about who her great-great-grandmother was will help her sit through all the hours of church and school ahead of her, those long hours and chapters of history and religion where girls are mentioned only as afterthoughts or in relation to significant men.

I encourage all parents to pass on their own maternal lineage to instill in girls a sense of feminine history (duh, "herstory"), a sense of belonging to and coming from someone or something significant. Such information can only benefit a daughter's sense of identity and self.

Labels: biblical lineage, blogfabulous, empower girls, family bonds, feminine history, group identities, herstory, lineage, self identity, tracee sioux draft

Monday, June 25, 2007

The Meaning of Hair


By Tracee Sioux

The kids got new haircuts. Ainsley got a long bob and Zack, a mohawk. Both haircuts beg the issue of the meaning of hair. How much do we use our hair to create our identity and to identify with our children?

The first time Ainsley ever got more than a trim is a very sore spot in our family. It was unhealthy, had a bunch of split ends and was without shape or form. She was three-years-old and for some reason it seemed rebellious to cut her baby hair. I had known lots of mommies with a no-cutting-of-the-baby-hair rule, not even allowing toddler daughters to cut bangs to allow basic vision. I wondered, Who is she, Samson? Does her hair have special powers I don't know about? If we cut her hair, will she lose her special girlness?

I then made a huge blunder. I dropped my 3-year-old daughter off at my mother-in-law's with permission to give her a "long bob, long enough for a ponytail." She came back with a short Dorothy Hamill pixie cut. When my husband saw it, he got so upset he nearly cried and then left furious about what I had done.

A. This was not the haircut I had asked for. Why was he angry at me rather than his mother?

B. Why was he putting so much meaning into a bad haircut? Did he know how many bad haircuts she's likely to have throughout her life? Why was he making it into such a big thing?

C. Why was he making her girlness all about the length of her hair?

Ainsley loved having short hair and has asked, since then, to have her hair cut short. A short bob is what she asked for this year. She was forbidden, I was forbidden, his mother was forbidden. Internet sites with long bobs were perused by all three of us (me, husband and his mother) to decide exactly what style and length Ainsley's hair would be. Ainsley was asked, after everyone else had agreed, whether she could live with that haircut.

At the same time my husband likes my pink highlights, is totally fine with me putting pink streaks in Ainsley's hair and thinks Zack's mohawk is baby-cool.

It's an enigma. One that seems to have everything to do with girls having long hair.


More posts on Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty
Beauty & Reality
Self-Loathing Sin Bank
More posts on hair:
Pink Hair Fiasco
Pink Hair Fiasco Take 2
Curl Maintenance
The Meaning of Hair

Friday, June 22, 2007

Mythbusters - Science is Girly

By Tracee Sioux



Mythbusters, a series on the Discovery Channels (TLC, etc), that puts myths and urban legends through scientific tests to determine if there is any truth to it is a fantastic way to empower girls.

When I was a kid I had no reason to believe that science or math might apply to me. When asking why I had to learn math I was given reasons like, to figure out a recipe, which frankly held no appeal for me. Math and science were “boy” subjects. Boys took wood and auto shop and learned how to built things and fix cars and girls were required to take home economics and learn to sew and cook. Seriously.

But, one of the best things we can do for our daughters is interest them in math and science professions, if only because these fields PAY a lot more money than social science professions do. Technology is moving quickly and science is becoming increasingly important in our society and culture. We need to be conscientious about preparing our children, especially our girls, for the scientifically advanced future they will face.

Mythbusters is fantastic because science become fun and interesting as all get out. We have spent entire lazy Saturdays or Sundays watching episode after episode of Mythbusters blowing up sharks, crashing cars or floating children with helium balloons. My husband got so excited about the experiment with Mentos and Diet Coke having the compound effect of a volcanic explosion that he performed the experiment at our daughter’s birthday party.

Even better for girls is that one of the scientists on the show is Kari Byron, a girl! It is totally awesome, for me and my daughter, to see her hold her own with other scientists and coming up with hypothesis’ and performing scientific experiments to prove or disprove a myth.

Will setting off too many roach bombs blow up a house? Actually, if there is a flame and a ton of bombs, it can.

Could the General Lee on the Dukes of Hazard really make those jumps? Uh, no.

Can you blow up a great white shark with an air tank? Watch the show with your daughter to find out.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Fergalicious, Big Girls Don't Cry



By Tracee Sioux

I often watch VH1 videos at the gym during my workout and I totally approve of Fergie's song Big Girls Don't Cry as a great message for girls.

The song tells the story of a girl who has dreams, but she's inconveniently in love with this guy who is obviously not going in the same direction. The girl chooses to leave the guy to pursue the dream. She's sad, but her self and her dream are worth the sacrifice of a love affair.

I hope you know, I hope you know
That this has nothing to do with you
It's personal, Myself and I
We've got some straightenin' out to do
And I'm gonna miss you like a child misses their blanket
But I’ve got to get a move on with my life
Its time to be a big girl now
And big girls don't cry

I love this message for girls. I think most of girls' cultural influences paint a rosy picture and glamorize giving up everything for another person. In reality, I think it is rarely the best idea to give up a dream, a future, an education or an experience for a lover.

Speaking personally, I gave up going to be a nanny in Maryland when I was right out of high school - to stay with a boy. I really just chickened out. What a bad choice. Going seemed much scarier, but who knows where I would have gone or what I could have done had I not given up the opportunity to spread my wings? But, at the time it seemed like a romantic decision to stay because he asked me to.

We owe it to our daughters to provide a clear definition about what is romantic and what is just an illusion of romantic. Especially, when they are young and unburdened my marriage or children. We should teach them that sometimes it's scary or painful, but their own dreams, educations, careers and experiences deserve pursuit.

By the way, my parents did tell me not to stay for him. But, I wouldn't/couldn't hear them.

I entered this column on Weary Parent as part of a blogging contest. The theme: "I want to know what advice your parents or another influential adult gave you as a teen that you took to heart. It can be funny. It can be serious. It can be a list, a story, a confession - be creative! Just keep it tasteful - this is a family-oriented site."

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Hot Princes


By Tracee Sioux


I saw Princes William and Harry on The Today Show. Wow, they turned out HOT!

As a Femimommy who is adamantly Anti-Princess, does that mean I have to be Anti-Hot Prince? I even caught myself fantasizing that if I couldn't have them, maybe Ainsley could. Isn't that just wrong?

My last significant memory of these princes is of little boys grieving over their mother, Princess Diana. My daughter is fascinated with Diana, by the way. I've encouraged this as a way to get her interested in political dynamics and how governments work, never too early for that, I say. Ainsley was fascinated by the idea that there are real princesses, but she's very taken, as we all were, with Diana. She's not interested in Caroline or Fergie, but she can spot Diana pictures and loves to point them out. The boys were promoting a big Diana tribute concert, 10 years after her death, airing July 1, also on NBC.
Watching these boys be interviewed was intriguing. They seem to have the same characteristic Diana had and to be able to captivate the way she did. There really seemed to be very little Prince Charles in them. Well the older son and future King of England, William did seem to be more reserved and stiff than "bad boy" Harry. If I were picking a prince, it'd be Harry for me, I mean Ainsley.

Diana's genetics certainly had a positive impact on the Royal Family's looks that's for sure. These are big, sexy, tall, good-looking almost men.
Their on Dateline too, DVR that.

Global Gag Rule is Anti-Girl



By Tracee Sioux

There is an amendment to the Global Gag Rule before congress right now. The Gag Rule is where the United States has decided to withhold money from International organizations like The Red Cross if they fund contraceptives or reserve the right to say the word "abortion" to any of their patients.

Ever wonder how Africa developed such an extreme AIDS problem or why there are so many starving orphans in poverty stricken countries? Global Gag Rule.

It's hypocritical and undemocratic for the United States to make a moral judgement about abortion and contraceptives for every country on planet earth. Sounds more like a hegemony than a democracy to me. We end up paying for the Global Gag Rule through other funding, like feeding their orphans anyway, so it's really rather like shooting ourselves in the foot.

Plus, any and all global restrictions on any kind of contraceptive information is anti-girl and anti-woman. Because it's not abortions the U.S. is refusing to pay for it's reproductive information we are refusing to pay for. Where's the democratic ideal of freedom of speech in that? Hence the word Gag in the Rule.

Right now before congress there is an issue that gets all convoluted. It's an amendment to a foreign operations appropriation bill called the Stupak-Smith amendment. The issue has nothing to do with pro-choice or pro-life camps because abortion is not at stake - only contraceptives.

In America, whether you are pro-life or not you most likely appreciate your access to condoms and birth control pills. Especially, if you feel your family is perfectly complete as it is, but perhaps have 10 or 20 more childbearing years in you. Well, imagine you had no access to these simple contraceptives because you had no money or some foreign country, like the U.S., forbade the distribution of them. If I was that girl or woman I would wonder why the U.S. wanted to ruin my life by forcing me to have more children than I could afford to care for.

No matter what your stance on Row vs. Wade, surely you can see the difference between abortion and contraceptives. Globally, millions of girls and women are in a precariously unempowered position by being denied access to birth control.

You can participate in empowering girls and women all over the world by following this link to write your representative. The letter provided encourages law makers to ease the Global Gag Rule to allow the distribution of contraceptives by voting NO on the Stupak-Smith Foreign Ops Amendment.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Second Generation Mean Girl



By Tracee Sioux

Just who is running the school clothes fashion show?

A reader's (Janet) comment on my column Kindergarten Fashion Show really provided some clarity about who is driving the fashion show in elementary school. Mommy, obviously.

Mean Girls are driving the whole thing. But, it’s Second Generation Mean Girls now. It’s the Mean Girls in our memory actually. Now that we’ve become mothers we’re trying to heal our own fashion wounds through our daughters. Or if you were the Mean Girl, perhaps you’re afraid your own Karma will work itself out on your kid. Perhaps you’ve developed a new empathy, or you just want to make sure your kid becomes a Mean Girl versus a picked-on Dork.

Mothers are really the only ones in the family ecosystem with enough power to drive the whole thing. Little girls can have a sense of taste and style of their own, my daughter certainly does. Yet, they don’t have jobs and therefore no money to make any actual decisions about what they wear. Dads couldn’t care less. Nor could they be trusted with something so important. It is also the mother who will be judged if her children look sloppy, unclean or trampy. Duh, all mothers know this. We take this seriously.

All perspective about the importance of a child's clothing is lost by Kindergarten. Which is why I feel like I’m sending my daughter into some hot bed of fashionistas in September. But, I now realize it’s not those innocent little five-year-olds. It’s their mothers.

I have had many in-depth conversations about the issue of kids clothes with women and every single conversation goes back to the mother’s empathy for her child. She remembers what it felt like to be wrong, out of place, not cool enough, not pretty enough, not stylish enough.

I have yet to meet a woman, whether she had been a Mean Girl herself or not, who hasn’t considered the issue in depth. It would seem parentally irresponsible not to consider the feelings of our children when it comes to clothing.

Wouldn’t it? Wait, what? Is the assumption that our parents just didn’t give a crap? Or that they didn’t understand? Or that they didn’t even know we were tortured at school for not having the Guess Jeans or the Swatch Watch? Were they that oblivious to our reality? Is it even possible they didn't know Gloria Vanderbilt jeans could make or break us?

I think the answer is in disposable income. Our grandmothers had none and went to school in dresses made of feed sacks and dealt with it. Our parents had some, but the importance of school clothes never took the place of a retirement plan. My parents, I called and asked, said they had a budget and weren't going to put the overall picture in jeopardy by paying twice the jeans budget. My dad then recalled that he bought his own clothes in junior high because he had a job by then. I probably should have been grateful that I didn't have to ride my bike three miles to wash dishes in a Chinese restaurant like he did. But, I just didn't have that kind of perspective yet.

Today I know a ton of parents who willy nilly charge school clothes on credit cards. The importance of the fashion show has taken on an emotional significance in their memories. It trumps a retirement plan. I can think of quite a few families who talk about being in precarious financial positions with big things like their mortgage or the failure of a business, but their 12-year-old daughters carry THE Dooney and Burke Purse. That’s just wrong.

I don’t really know the answer to this dilemma yet myself. I do know this: if we try to heal our fashion wounds through our children then we will create wounds were there were none. A Second Generation Mean Girl is, I imagine, about 1,000 times meaner with more electronic weapons than the Mean Girl of my day. First Generation Mean Girl passed a note calling me a "slut," her daughters are snapping pictures of girls in the gym locker room with their cell phone, posting them on My Space with the words, "Porn Star" and an ugly guy photoshopped in.

Am I the only mother who worries that my own daughter has the potential to become a Mean Girl? Am I the only mother who wants to keep her daughter out of Mean Girl status and out of picked-on Dork status, without blending into the wallpaper? Not a single one of those are empowering places to be for a girl.

School uniforms would be one solution and lots of public schools are going that way. Myself, I would like to see all the mommies step back and rein it in. Maybe a national school clothes boycott would be my fantasy. But, that could have unforeseen repercussions, like economic backlash or even more viciousness from those who refuse to participate. If not a boycott of fashion all together, I would at least like to generate a discussion.

What do you think is the answer?

Friday, June 15, 2007

Shoemotional



By Tracee Sioux

While I don't want my daughter to believe she IS her clothing. I have to confess to a bizarre attachment to a pair of dancing shoes I no longer have.

While packing for my femimother weekend I felt an old familiar yearning for my black dancing shoes. I lost one of them on a trip home to see my parents probably three or four years ago. I had been wearing them since college and had never worn any other pair of shoes out dancing.

They were really high, black Sandy from Grease in the very last scene when she's turned bad-girl, dancing shoes. They provided me this sense of balance and confidence and laissez fair and sexy that I don't normally possess. I felt powerful and carefree in them and I really only ever wore them dancing.

I kept the one remaining shoe in my closet for years after the other was gone. I kept hoping, even praying, the other would magically turn up. I'm sure it's on the side of the road in New Mexico living out a very Jitterbug Perfume life (or was that Still Life with Woodpecker?)

Omigod (so, totally stole that from my friend Rebecca), I just did a search for Tom Robbins and apparently he has written a new book I had not heard about. Wild Ducks Flying Backward seems to be a collection of short stories and I just got about as aroused as if I had found my other shoe. I'm so buying that immediately!




Femimother Must Go On Vacation Alone

By Tracee Sioux

One of the best ways to empower children, in my experience, is to get away without them for a weekend. It sends the message that they can and should be somewhat independent. They will, after all, be going out in the world without me eventually.

It gives their father the opportunity to be their primary caregiver (though there is a rumor going around that he's asked his mom to babysit while he plays golf on Father's Day.) Happy Father's Day Honey! It also gives the impression that I, though I am their mother, can and should take time for my self. I existed pre-kid and I will exist post-kid, and in the meantime, I can take a vacation from them.

I expect this weekend to be quite liberating. I'm going to Houston on a little errand for a family member in need of a wheelchair. I'm going to pick one up and hang out with a good friend of mine. Oh the pure pleasure of a good deed turned run of good luck. The best, absolutely best part about the whole deal is that she has not had children yet. So our conversations need not include children, nor do they need to be interrupted by the demands of any. My appendages are staying home. I do not intend to prattle on endlessly about them. They already get nearly all of my time and attention.

I adore my children, but sometimes after one of them has been sick and we've been home all week and my husband has had meetings virtually every night, I'm just plain tired of their company. And that's not only okay - I think it's the healthiest part of my femimothering style.

I must go out and have fun and have adult conversation and feel like a self again. I will be back on Monday to do my mothering (and my blogging) and no one will have suffered irreparable damage. To think otherwise is just a bit of mothering-conceit.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Kindergarten Fashion Show


Oh girls, you are not defined by your clothes!

Really, we’re not sending this message to our girls in any kind of adequate way. By the time my daughter was two she was getting herself dressed and had a very set idea of what she wanted to look like. She wanted to wear her sparkly Wizard of Oz shoes every single day. She was dedicated to never matching. I’m all for independence, so I let her wear whatever she wants as long as it’s modest.

By modest, I mean she is not allowed to leave the house looking like a Bratz Doll. No belly shirts and no bum cheeks hanging out of her shorts or skirt. She must wear shorts under her dresses because it’s no fun to “sit like a lady.” No bikinis either. Oh, how I wanted to be allowed to wear a bikini and always swore I would never make my daughter wear a one-piece swim suit. The first time we got one handed down I thought, are there any circumstances where I want my daughter wearing a bikini? The answer in my head was a resounding NO and I promptly threw the swim suit away without her knowledge.

By the time she was three she would absolutely freak out if we suggested she wear something she didn’t like. It got to such an extreme fight about what she was going to wear on any given day that I took away every single item of clothing she owned for an entire week. Well, except for the “I hate that shirt, I look like a boy” outfit that I just kept washing and making her put back on. It’s actually parenting advice I got from a Madonna interview.

You are not going to behave this way about clothes. You are NOT your clothes. Do you think I love every item of clothing I wear? No, I do not! I wear clothes I hate, because that’s what I have, that’s what people hand down to me and that’s what we can afford to buy! And you ARE going to learn to be grateful for every stitch of clothes you have the privilege of owning, I told her as I packed her entire wardrobe in a black garbage bag and shoved it in my closet.

All week long she went around telling everyone we spoke to, I’m wearing this because I’m being punished. My mom took away all my clothes.
But, I could tell by her tone that she was not complaining as much as she was bragging. It was as if she were very excited to be punished (paid attention to) in such a big way.

September is coming and school is going to start and everyone is going to be bombarded by commercials and sales and tax-free weekends with the big push to buy school clothes. Already last year, in pre-school, my daughter was complaining that her clothes weren’t as cute as some of the other girls', who came to school looking like a fashion show.

My clothes aren’t as cute as Caitlin and Abby’s, she would complain.

That’s not true. Grandma has bought you a lot of very cute matching outfits and those girls wear what their mother’s tell them to wear every morning. They match. You have the clothes, but you choose to dress yourself and you never decide to wear the matching outfits together. You could look just like them if you wanted to. You’re choosing not to. That’s okay too. You have your own style, I told her. She went to school unmatching again, so apparently it wasn’t that important to blend in.

I’m not okay with spending hundreds of dollars on “school clothes.” Frankly, we have more important needs in our family. I picked up a bunch of new-enough outfits at garage sales and a couple of dresses and three pairs of shoes at garage sales this weekend. I hid them and will pull them out when she starts to see all the advertising telling her she’s not good enough if she doesn’t get new clothes.

I spent $12. I’ll probably pick up a few more things at garage sales and the Grandmas might make a few contributions. If I happen to have money burning a hole in my pocket I may take her to Old Navy and allow her to pick one new school outfit with a budget of $20. Just so she won’t feel completely left out of the American Tradition of School Clothes Shopping.

I guess I just don’t understand why a whole new wardrobe is an American tradition. It’s not like in my grandmother’s day when she would save her money all year to be able to afford to buy her kids one new pair of shoes for school. Kids get clothes all year long now, don’t they? Mine certainly get them for birthdays, Christmas and whenever I happen upon them or when wonderful people hand them down.

It’s June, now is the time to decide how much you’re willing to spend on school clothes. Now is the time to give daughters the message,

You are not your clothes. You are good enough no matter what you wear. We are not going into debt so you can win a popularity contest at school. People will like you because you're a great person, not because of what you wear.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Dear God and Dave Ramsey


Dear God and Dave Ramsey:

Not that you’re one and the same or like you have the same address or anything, but you both live in the money department of my brain.

This is what I look like in the mornings. My eyes are sealed shut with monkey poop and they hurt, the lids are sore and red and the sinuses below them are full of fluid and puffy and swollen. I have to do a sinus wash and take a bunch of Benadryl before they stop hurting and itching and before I can breath. I don’t buy the Zyrtec, which helps more, because it’s a $50 copay and that’s not in our zero-based budget. The generic Benadryl is only $4 and it seems to help, but it wears off in my sleep and the window air conditioner blows everything I’m allergic to straight onto me all night long and I wake up in a swollen, itchy, painful mess.

My baby used to take a bunch of allergy medicine because he’s had a rattle in his chest since he was born. But, the Dr. said just forget giving it to him because it wasn’t even helping his constant congestion. So, now I take him for a lymph node massage and that’s only $10 and it helps him a lot. I usually end up using my blow money to take him to this therapy, Dave. In fact I rarely ever get to blow my blow money.

It’s the allergies. The pediatrician says it’s the mold in our tiny rented house and we should move immediately. Plus, the hay fever from having window air conditioners that blow all the pollen straight into the house.

Oh God, thank you so much for the money to buy a new window unit this year. It was expensive, but I just couldn’t take another year in the sweltering East Texas humidity at 103 degrees, Dave. It really will make you physically sick to sit in a house that feels like an oven all day long. I really would be perfectly happy with this solution if the pollen didn’t make me and the kids ill. Winters are a problem though, as the city has outlawed the use of the only heat source we have because it’s a serious carbon-monoxide risk (as the soot on my walls can attest to).

Dave, we finally paid off a ton of debt, around $8,000 probably. And we had a paid for, debt-free, we-own-him-outright, baby in the meantime. We took the crappy jobs and go without all kinds of stuff. But, I’ve still got a whopper of a student loan. My husband got a great new job with a big fat raise so we can finally make our minimum payments and get my student loan out of deferment. I graduated over 10 years ago. In college, they failed to teach me about how an interest rate accrues but they made me spend an entire year trying to figure out what the square root of something was. We’ve been “paying our professional dues” and have never made enough to pay the ever interest-accruing burden. My husband was pretty depressed that our actual lifestyle wasn’t improving with his new job. Who wouldn't be?

But, we’re afraid to get in over our heads with a mortgage. So many people we know are in a scary place with their mortgages. When you change jobs, that’s the only time you can cash out the 401K. We want to buy a house. That’s everyone’s American Dream isn’t it? After the penalties and taxes we’d have about $5,000 for a down payment, closing costs and moving expenses. It doesn’t seem like enough. But, it feels like this might be the only time we’ll ever have even that much all at once.

Dave, I know you say that $7,000 401K should stay in where it is and we should save up a 20% down payment and continue living here in this mold-ridden two bedroom house we’ve outgrown. Financial Peace Revisited even says we should save a real emergency fund of $20,000 before buying the house. Economically, that $7,000 is supposed to somehow turn into a million when we’re 65, or are they making us wait until 68 to retire now? And I guess we'll need it, becaue I just got a letter from Social Security saying they'll be paying me $335 a month when I retire and I certainly can't live on that. But, now that we have to pay that student loan it feels like we’re back to square one. There is no money left over to save. How are we going to save $80,000 to move out of here, Dave? Right now $80,000 feels a lot like never. (And Suzi Orman – where the hell am I supposed to come up with money for my own savings account?)

Thank you God, for our new mini-van. We HAD to buy a new car, the other one was dead, Dave. We drove the humiliatingly ugly thing around for 3-4 years but it really was finally dead and we bought the van with cash. Just like we’re supposed to, Dave. I have to admit, it really did feel pretty good. I felt like something brand new, only without any anxiety or burdens. It was definitely worth the wait not to finance a new car.

We gave up the envelopes after two years simply because it was ridiculous to carry around empty envelopes, Dave. We spend all our money in about one day – grocery and bill day – then the envelopes are just mocking us, empty as can be.

I haven’t gone home to see my family in two years because the price of gas is too much to justify. Like losers we’re letting my parents give us gas money to come home this year to meet my brother’s new baby. Two of my siblings haven't met my toddler either. My parents had to pay for the last trip too. It's too humbling.

We boycotted Christmas with the extended family and buy all our kid’s gifts and our clothes and furniture from garage sales. But, I confess to adding the expenditure of cell phones. I tried to say no, but my husband, well he HAD to have it. He said he could drive the ugliest car without a radio to work for the mileage, but he wanted to be able to talk on the phone during his 45-minute commute and he needed the “status” of something Dave. He needed it. It was a deal breaker. I fought it, I did. But, he deserved one thing for getting a new job, didn’t he?

We also kept basic cable. Dave, you can’t stick me in the house staying home with the kids, trying to get something done without a TV. We don’t even get ONE free station out here in the boonies Dave. Not even one. But, we cancelled the HBO so please, no one tell me what happened on the last season of The Sopranos and don't tell me about Big Love either. I did keep wearing makeup and doing my hair every 5 months and last week I bought Ainsley a brand new package of panties, as she’d been complaining for months. I snuck it into the grocery fund. We had to keep the Internet for work purposes, but we’re keeping our receipts for taxes. We’re taking the write-offs this year. We also added a babysitting fund of $20 every Thurs. We figure our marriage has to be more important than paying off my student loan doesn’t it? Never eating out or going to do anything fun pretty much ruins a marriage seems like.

So, maybe we’re not your textbook Gazelles going at our debt with what you would call intensity. But, we’ve paid a full tithe – that’s on our GROSS God, our Gross income – every single payday for several years now.

We’ve made a zero-based budget every single month, Dave. And we’ve stuck to it as well as anyone else without a crystal ball can. We’ve kept our emergency fund as close to $1,000 as possible. I’m working my butt off, writing from home, taking the leap of faith, just like you told me to God. My husband's taking every freelance job that comes his way. And we haven’t financed one single thing or put a single dime on any credit card, Dave. That’s something right?

Most days I’m optimistic and I’m so sickeningly grateful for this roof over our heads, cars that get us where we need to go and my husband’s job that provides a steady enough income to make our payments. I’m a huge bragger about the bargains I get at garage sales and as proud of being thrifty as anyone you’ll ever meet. I recommend the Dave Ramsey program to everyone I meet and I constantly remind my husband that we’re so close, so very close, just hold on one more minute, in 5 years this will seem like a blip, this is just what it’s like on the way up, just be a little tiny bit more patient.

But, then there comes a morning like this one. Where I wake up with allergies so bad my eyes are sealed shut from a moldy house with no central air, and a sick kid that I’m not taking to the doctor because I didn’t put the co-pay in the budget, and I’m having to mooch off my parents at the age of 33 to buy enough gas to see my family, and I’m kind of sick of it. I’m so totally OVER being the working poor and trying to live within our means.

So God, I’m ready for a major financial windfall any day now. In fact, NOW would not be too soon. And Dave, I’m working on Financial Peace, but sometimes I have to admit this feels more like pain than peace and it seriously sucks!

Monday, June 11, 2007

About the Author - Tracee Sioux

I was tagged in a blogger game or memed by Julie Q at The JQ Lounge here are the rules:

Each player starts with 7 random facts/habits about themselves. People who are tagged need to write their own blog with their 7 things as well as these rules. You need to tag 7 others and list their names on your blog. Remember to leave a comment for them letting them know they have been tagged and to read your blog.

1. I was raised a Mormon Military Brat. We moved a lot, as a result I could pick up and go at any second. For a job or out of boredom I have sold everything I owed to relocate as an adult four times already. I am only 33-years-old.
2. I am a journalist by profession. I resent my previous employers for not allowing me to work from home when I became a mother. I am a writer and since the invention of e-mail there is really no reason to make me come to the newsroom. I think it’s “motherism” as my employer allowed a man to work out of his home but denied my request. I’ve not found my female employers any more supportive of working from home than my male bosses. But, I do resent them more.
3. I got married when I was 17-years-old. That was a stupid thing to do. I totally believe in divorce and thank God every day that by 19 I was smart enough not to make my childish mistake a permanent one. I didn’t marry again until 27.
4. After my child-bride experience I found that I was unwilling to change my name back to my father’s name and unwilling to keep my ex-husband’s name and unwilling to take any future husband’s name. I went to court and dropped all the last names that made my identity relational to the men in my life. I decided to have an identity that did not change with my marital status. My given name at birth was Tracee Sue and I thought Sioux would look better in print – well, I AM a writer so it does matter how marketable my name is. I was only 19 when I divorced so it seemed inevitable that I would eventually get married and have kids again. But, it did not seam reasonable at all to change my identity in any way, including my last name. So, I am Tracee Sioux. Legally now and forever. It is not a nomdeplum – Sioux is my legal last name and it is who I am.
5. I witnessed 9-11 when I was 8 months pregnant with my first child. I was on my way to work. What strikes me now about the experience is that as a reporter my first instinct was to buy a disposable camera and report on it. I got a shot of the second plane hitting the building. I wasn’t close enough for anyone to buy the shot. The second thing that sticks with me is how worried I was that I was going to be late for work and how my boss might be annoyed with me – as if for the first few hours the shock was so complete that I didn’t understand the magnitude at all and went about my normal business like buying a chocolate donut.
6. I went to Lithuania after college to teach English, I wanted to travel and had been a political science major with an interest in the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Lithuania was a brand new democracy.
7. I’m grateful beyond belief for my current opportunity to work from home blogging. I feel like this is a “calling” for me. I’m pretty intensely spiritual about my So Sioux Me website. It’s my path, my personal legend, my way of being part of the soul of the world, my way to affect the collective girl consciousness and start a girl revolution. Through the suspension of disbelief and all my power of intention it is going to be THE place to go for Girl Empowerment.

So I'm tagging Therapydoc at Everyone Needs Therapy, Heather at Dooce.com, Karen at ThriftyMommy, The Simple Dollar, Kate at Babylune, Steve at Inside Fatherhood, and Karen at Live The Power.

Real Princesses



By Tracee Sioux

In the middle of Ainsley's Disney Princess Obsession I found a coffee table book about Princess Diana at the library and showed it to her.

She honestly had never considered the fact that there might actually be real princesses. She was as fascinated, if not more, with Princess Diana, Fergie, Duchess of York, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Caroline and any others I could think of. She loved having me Google them on the Internet.

They are really real Princesses? she would ask over and over.

It was actually a great segue way into politics and history lessons. I explained how our ancestors had come from England (we're Amercian mutts, but some of them did come from England) and other European countries that really do have royalty as a form of government still today.

Then I explained how the pilgrims had come to America and decided having kings and queens wasn't the best idea. So, we now have presidents and representatives elected by the people who live here. I take her with me to go vote and we talk about how important it is for the people to vote on who leads the country. (When she was two we were leaving the polls and she said, But, Mommy when are we going on the boat?)

But, in England, where Princess Diana lived, they still have princes and princesses, I tell her.

We just watched The Queen together. I would have thought she'd find this boring. But, she made me pause it every single time she had to go to the bathroom. She kept asking who Tony Blair was and how he ruled the country at the same time as the Queen. She can not wait to be able to go to Buckingham Palace in real life. I pointed out that Prince Charles really is just a man and he cheated on his Princess so she divorced him.

Funny side note: the only Barbi-like doll she has is actually a talking Bill Clinton that I bought for my husband for Christmas a few years ago. His foot came off the other day and she said, Oh Mommy, I broke my favorite Bill Clinton that I love to play with! Can't you fix my Bill Clinton? We also have a talking George Bush giant bobble head which Zack enjoys quite a bit.

Use the Disney Princess Obsession to open the door to teach girls about history and politics. It's way more empowering that girls will be privileged enough to vote than sitting around hoping for some prince on a white horse to come save them.

After all, when my grandmother was a girl, voting was not a privilege she could look forward to.

Get Paid to Blog

I've signed up for Pay Per Post as a way to "monetize" this blog. Obviously, I feel passionately about empowering girls or I wouldn't have so much to say about it. That's my main motive for writing these columns.

Other things I feel passionately about are buying a house, not using credit cards or other financing options, having enough money for gas to go see my family in Utah, buying a new laptop so I don't have to share custody of my workspace, being able to pay for that college education I got 10 years ago, and being a little bit more financially independent.

Which is why I've decided to occasionally put ads on blogsPay Per Post blogging ads on So Sioux Me. It was a tough call, but I hope you'll all be down with it. Girl's gotta make some money to keep the enterprise going in an up and moving kind of way.

So, for this $10 I am recommending that other bloggers get paid to blog with Pay Per Post, I've been doing it for about a week and it seems pretty easy.

Sunday, June 10, 2007

Love Thy Neighbor, Love Thy Self

By Tracee Sioux

I was on the john reading this little devotional. It was a scripture pretty much everyone has memorized, even if they aren't Christian.

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self. Gal. 5:11

And I thought, How many people hate themselves? Women and girls especially. Cutting on themselves, saying "I hate myself' over and over, not allowing themselves to eat, or any number of other destructive behaviors.


The devotional was saying it's hard to love other people when they are so flawed. Boo Hoo. I think it's harder to love yourself if you perceive so many flaws and won't cut yourself any slack.


I had a similar epiphany moment when I heard something else I've heard a million times.


You teach people how to treat you.


I had always thought that meant that if you allow people to keep crossing your boundaries they will keep doing it until you stop accepting that behavior. And it totally does mean that.


But, one day I heard someone use it in a different context. How can you expect anyone on earth to treat you better than you treat yourself?


Of course, she was talking about the way women will sacrifice virtually everything and never even take care of their own physical bodies or mental health. Then women wonder why everyone takes advantage of us and treat us like crap. Well, obviously it's because we treat ourselves with a lack of respect.


I'm a word lover. I love a paradigm shift from a phrase or scripture I've heard a million times and an epiphany about how I'm living my life.


I've started treating myself in a kinder way by taking yoga, exercising, eating better, stopping smoking. I couldn't really say I "love myself" as much as "I love my neighbor" if I'm eating like crap, smoking and running my body into the ground and not taking care of my mental and emotional health. I'm treating my neighbor way better than that, because obviously I'm not actively trying to kill my neighbor with neglect and bad habits.


I've also come to a place where I'm not accepting behavior from friends and family that I used to accept. I'm going to be kind enough to myself to say, "no, you may no longer treat me that way," when someone disregards my boundaries or takes advantage of me or takes my generosity for granted.


I'm not longer going to treat my neighbor better than I treat me. Nor am I going to allow my neighbor to treat me as badly as she treats herself. Because that's not what the verse requires of me.


I hope you'll do the same for yourself and model that for your daughter. Already I've heard the words I hate myself come out of my 5-year-old's mouth when she was upset, frustrated or disappointed that she wasn't perfect the first time she tried something. She can only be getting that from me, because I am the person she emulates. I don't have to verbalize it for her to know it's true.


My task is to make it untrue and make sure she knows it's untrue.

Saturday, June 9, 2007

What the $%^&*!


By Tracee Sioux

Fill in the blank with whatever you want to believe I thought. I didn't say it because my kids were present and I didn't want them to freak out. Inside, I was totally freaking out though. It was a parenting moment for which I found myself with no other response than What the $^#%! my head.

Sometimes my daughter sees me bite my son's nails. If you've ever clipped a baby's nails and cut him, you understand that it makes your gut lurch like you want to perform some kind of flagellation on your self as penance. I read that I should bite his nails to trim them in a baby magazine. My daughter is a little mommy. She takes quite good care of her little brother. Always making sure I am aware of his needs and taking care of him herself if I am blatantly ignoring them while writing these columns.

Today she was climbing over him to get out of the van and noticed his toenail needed trimming and bent over and pulled the entire toenail out of his big toe. He barely flinched. She wanted to know if we should save it for his baby box.

There were so many things wrong with this picture all I could think was What the F$%&!

What I said was, Ainsley, how hard did you bite his toenail? You pulled his whole toenail out. You are not his mother. You need to let ME do things like that. I am his mother. You must be gentle with your brother.
>

But, I said it calmly, like it was no big deal. Unlike when I've asked her to pick up the living room numerous times and I really raise my voice as if it's a life and death situation.

I bandaged it up in the gym nursery and went back out the front door to cry and call the pediatrician. Who never called me back.

What truly disturbed me about the incident was that he barely flinched. In fact, he very rarely cries for more than a few seconds when he gets hurt. He's fallen down stairs and didn't cry much. Yesterday, I tried to surgically remove a piece of glass stuck in his heel and he cried while daddy had him trapped in a blanket to keep him still, but the second he was loose he was over it. In fact, just the other day my husband was proudly bragging about Zack's pain tolerance and how we should really exploit that to push him to excel in sports.

But, didn't they pull people's fingernails out as a form of torture? When my daughter lost her thumb nail after smashing it in the car door you would have thought it was about as painful as natural birth. I thought back to that poor little girl I'd seen on Oprah who didn't experience pain at all, they'd had to remove her teeth because she would chew up her arm when she was nervous as a toddler. She would get serious injuries, like burns on her hands, because her brain didn't register when she was touching something hot. She had no pain.

I spent the next hour on the elliptical and treadmill fervently praying for health and wholeness and normal physical, mental, and emotional development for my son, and my daughter too.

Sometimes as parents, I think we wish our children could go through life with no pain. We don't want them to suffer because we love them. But pain is good for kids, it allows them to pull their foot back or remove their hand from fire. Or learn never to something that again.

But, I was extremely relieved as he gave a wail of pain when I poured alcohol on his naked big toe to disinfect it. I was also relieved that he stopped crying rather quickly.

Mr. Z is tough and Ms. Thornton needs to stop doing my job.



Friday, June 8, 2007

Intuition and Instinct

By Tracee Sioux

One of our neighbors is this nice autistic man who is prone to random screaming at the top of his lungs. When they first moved in I ran over there to help whoever was being murdered.

He knocked on the door last week with his neice, a playmate for Ainsley, and asked if Ainsley could come over and play. Ainsley had been eyeing their new above-ground swimming pool with more than a little envy. I politely told him that we were on our way out, but that Cheyenne was welcome over at our house to jump on the trampoline anytime.

In my head, I had already decided that this man and his elderly mother was not enough supervision, so no way was Ainsley going over there to play by herself. My gut told me it was a bad idea and I'm learning to trust my gut.

A few days later Ainsley said, Mom, you know that guy brought that girl and said I could come swim in their pool?

Yeah, I said.

Well, I don't think I want to go over there alone. I'm a little scared, she told me.

You're right Ainsley, I told her proudly. My little voice told me the same thing. I'm not going to let you go play over there, but Cheyenne can come over here and play on the trampoline. I'm proud of you for listening to your gut when it's telling you something is not a good idea. You should always listen to your gut or the little voice inside you, because you can always trust it. It's God's way of telling you the right thing to do.

I don't know when it happens but somewhere along the way we stop listening to our guts. Or the little voice inside ourselves that might feel like a simple butterfly, becomes easily ignored. I think perhaps our parents tell us to suck up fear sometimes, so we quit listening to that intuition or instinct that tells us when there is danger. We start looking for "evidence" or "proof" of danger rather than accepting our butterflies as the evidence.

I don't need proof that the man across the street might be dangerous to my child. My gut is telling me "don't let her" and I'm going to listen. I've taken her out of childcare situations for the same reason - I just "had a bad feeling."

What makes me the happiest is that my daughter is tuning into her intuition, instinct, gut feeling, conscience, God or still small voice of the Holy Spirit working inside her own self.

The trick is to teach a girl (or boy) to go with her gut rather than stiffle it or ignore it. Otherwise, she'll have to learn how to rely on it all over again, later in life after she's already gotten into a bit of trouble.

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Beauty is Within: Beauty and Fashion Blog: “Looks Are Nothing Without Spirit”

I found this Beauty is Within: Beauty and Fashion Blog: “Looks Are Nothing Without Spirit” on a beauty blog carnival one of my articles about my favorite nail polish on www.blogfabulous.com appeared on. My sentiments exactly.

More posts on Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty
Beauty & Reality
Self-Loathing Sin Bank
More posts on hair:
Pink Hair Fiasco
Pink Hair Fiasco Take 2
Curl Maintenance
The Meaning of Hair

Subscribe by EMAIL!

Dear Readers,

I am more likely to read blogs and newsletters if they appear in my email inbox. Therefore, my wonderful genius of a webmaster/husband has added an email subscription service via Feedburner in the upper-right corner.

Please subscribe!

Thanks,
Tracee Sioux

Dear Tooth Fairy,



Dear Tooth Fairy,



I am excited to tell you that I have lost my very first tooth. It's been loose for about two weeks. When I first told my mom that my tooth hurt when I was eating she said, "See, I told you if you didn't brush your teeth good enough they would turn black and fall out of your head. Now we'll have to go to the dentist to see if you have a cavity."



Then she said I might be old enough to start losing my teeth like some of the kids at my school. She told me to wiggle it. It wiggled a little. So, I've been wiggling it and wiggling it a lot lately.



Today a girl at the gym pool shoved my face with a floaty and my tooth popped out in the water. We borrowed goggles and had about 5 kids and my mom diving to see if we could find it. But, we couldn't.



So, please leave the money under my pillow and take this note. You can find the tooth in the pool at the gym.



Love, Ainsley






Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Becoming Mommy, PPD or Identity Crisis?

By Tracee Sioux

I know a few new moms who are finding the transition to Mommy difficult. I can totally relate. I suffered Post-Partum Depression pretty severely after the birth of my first child. I had just witnessed 9-11 which was traumatic and that most likely contributed to the severity of my PPD. I've written a little bit about it in my article Fear Not, if you want to know more details about my extremely difficult transition into Mama.

What baffles me is that we are still lying to our little girls about the whole process of becoming a mother. I say things like, One day you'll grow up and have babies of your own and you'll be so happy. This may turn out to be part of the truth, but what about the rest of it? I've shown the crowning pictures of Ainsley coming out of me to some of my friends and it is quite literally shocking to adult women what exactly happens during birth. No, I do not plan to post pictures of my own vajayjay on the Internet. However, I heard you can see the crowning of a baby on a giant movie screen in Knocked Up. I think it's great and I plan to see it. If my daughter were a teenager I would take her to see it too.

I've had a second child since then and I have had five years to reflect on the massive overhaul of identity that happens when independent and empowered women become mothers and I've never felt like the reality of what becoming a whole new entity gets any validity.

So allow me to rant about becoming Mommy. Maybe, if you're a new mom and feeling not at all like yourself and kind of depressed, you can relate. And hopefully, actually my prayer is, that if you find yourself relating this will bring you a little bit of peace about what you're going through. Also, I hope it will encourage you to be more honest with your daughters or other girls you know about what the experience was like for you.

In America we totally minimize birth and the real trauma of the whole ordeal. One minute you're You. A woman who gets things done. Maybe you order underlings around at work or earn the respect of coworkers with your skills. You have money to play around with, gets to wear clothes you like, cash a paycheck and invest in whatever. You make deals or writes articles or manage a business or do whatever you do in your career. You communicate with adults frequently and daily on an intellectual level.

Your body was yours and you shared it when you felt like it and didn't when you didn't want to. You had a regular cycle and hormones that had been predictable. Therefore you'd learned how to manage your monthly issues since you were 12.

Now BAM you're body has experienced this traumatic violent event - birth. Personally, I thought it was about as violent as being hit by a car. You wouldn't emotionally bounce back from that in six weeks, I don't understand why Americans expect women to bounce back from birth in a month and a half. The event changed your hormones, shape, vajayjay and everything else about you. You gave up your body for nine months to grow a foreign life and told yourself you'd be back to normal after birth. Dream On. Now you're a milk machine. Now you smell of puke. Now you never sleep.

You feel like you are no longer YOU anymore. Your whole entire identity has gone through a dramatic and intense transformation. That's takes more than six weeks or twelve weeks or four months or a year to adjust to. You don't do the things that used to define You as You.

If you're staying at home not working means you're not getting any outside validation for the job you're doing. You're getting no paycheck. You're only getting poopy diapers and the occasional smile or giggle, but it's hard to cash that at the bank. You have to cut costs as expenses rise and you kind of resent not having your hair done like you used to.

Your husband thinks you're doing fandiddly-taskic - so obviously he's not very tuned in to what is actually going on with you. Which equals even less validation. But, there's no way he can really understand because becoming Dad may be an awesome journey for him, but he's still going to work, cashing a check and gets a lot of time away from the needy baby. And no one is sucking on his body half the day.

So what I'm saying is that what you are going through is NORMAL. It sucks but it's normal. You are doing everything right. What you are doing does matter in the long run and it's a valid and legitimate thing to be doing right now. You just have to realize that you are never ever going to get the same emotional kick-back from diapers and naps that you used to get cutting a massive deal in pharmaceuticals or whatever you did. The pay-off is different and there's not a lot of instant gratification staying home with a baby. It takes time and practice to get used to.

I now believe that being a stay-at-home-mom is a craft. Just like writing or any other profession. You have to learn how to do it. You have to make a structure for yourself. If you wake up everyday and just wander around and only do whatever you feel like doing then you will become clinically depressed. Period. You used to look forward to weekends cause it was Your time-off. But, now what do you look forward to? I can tell you the answer - you look forward to your husband coming home from work and you look forward to his time off.

I know you don't want to, but you really have to get out of the house every single day for something - anything. A walk. A neighbor's house. A grocery store trip. A mommy-baby sign language class. You have to leave the house daily.

You also have to "accomplish" at least one thing every day so you don't feel like a total loser. Laundry is something. Cleaning the bathroom is something. Doing a budget is something. Find something every day that you can accomplish and then feel proud of yourself for doing it.

And really you must ditch that baby! If you are taking the baby on your dates with hubby, that's ridiculous! You must leave the baby sometimes or you will lose Self. If You lose You all is lost, because the baby needs You to be You and not some drone who smells like puke and feels like crap. Go out with other women without the baby. Supplement with formula or pump, it's not that big of a deal. Join a book club. Go to a movie. Go out to dinner. Join a gym and leave her in the nursery for an hour while you work out or take a yoga class. You can not become only mom. You must also be You who has other interests outside the home. Otherwise you're just the weird crazy lady who believes the baby will die if she goes out to lunch. That's the definition of insanity! The baby can be without you for a few hours. The baby should be without you for a few hours or she will have attachment issues in only a few short months and that will not be fun for you or her.

Stop reading parenting magazines. They should all be titled "How many ways can you accidentally kill your baby." They induce anxiety and you do not need that much information. They are full of crap most of the time. Too much information is just scaring you can creating anxiety. You don't need to know about every freak accident that might possibly happened to a kid. Throw them away, stop your subscription and buy Secrets of the Baby Whisperer: How to Calm, Connect, and Communicate with Your Baby. She'll give sound advice without making you a panicked mess.

Honestly, physiologically and psychologically, you need to exercise. You just have to force yourself to do it. The endorphins you get from exercise are worth any anti-depressant on the market. Your poor body just went through a massive hormonal surge with way to much estrogen and then almost none overnight. Be kind to your new body and feed your brain some endorphins.

You probably don't want to follow this advice if you're suffering from PPD, but get off your butt and do it anyway.

If you are having compulsive thoughts about hurting yourself or your baby, which now that my child is five, I will admit to having had them. You need to tell your OB/GYN that you're having brief flickering thoughts of hurting your self (really, I think that's enough information to give him a picture of what's going on without getting any authorities involved) and get some medication. The Le Leche League has a list of anti-depressants that you can take while breast feeding.

That said, I wonder if what new moms are really experiencing is a full-blown identity crisis resulting from adding MOM to the mix of SELF.

Friday, June 29, 2007

Amazon Groceries

So, my husband wants to know why I would advertise Amazon Groceries on this website. Well, for starters they are paying me $3 for everyone who clicks on the ads. That means you don't even have to order any groceries, you just have to click on the ad on the right to help me out. Second, I fantasize about a world where I would never go grocery shopping again. Woudn't be be lovely if you never, ever had to deal with the Walmart hassle again? Really, I think it would be bliss. Third, we often enjoy food we can't even get locally. We live in a rather small city (80,000 to 100,000 people) and people here love steak and potatoes. They don't eat very exotic foods. But, I enjoy making a coconut chicken curry now and then. We're trying to eat healthy, but I don't want to spend a lot of time cooking and it just seems like it would be super-easy to have the spice mix for coconut chicken curry delivered to my door.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Barbie for President?



By Tracee Sioux

So a friend asked me the other day where I stand on Barbie. I have included "no Bratz, Barbies or Princesses" on birthday invitations. But, I also have a hot pink Barbie VW Bug and a Barbie skate board in the house.

I used to be anti-Barbie because Barbie had unrealistic body proportions. Her breasts were gigantic, waist tiny and nothing was in proportion. Perhaps Barbie-lunacy lead to so many women feeling they had inadequate breasts? Maybe Barbie is responsible for the dramatic increase in boob jobs? But, I can't back that up scientifically.

Besides I'm not against boob jobs or plastic surgery on principle. I'm against women being perpetually dissatisfied with their bodies and passing that onto their daughters on principle. Barbie may have contributed to that feeling of dissatisfaction by making little girls feel like growing up to look like Barbie was the ideal.

"Estimates have put the doll's life-size bust between 38 and 40 inches, her waist at 18-24 inches, and her height between five and a half and an outlandish more than seven feet, with a weight of 110. Picture Anna Nicole Smith's breasts, suspended above Kate Moss' waist (after a fast) all resting comfortably on Cheryl Miller's frame (after a mid-life growth spurt). Reported a MotherJones article.


Then Barbie went and got a little-publicised maker-over. Her boobs shrunk and her waist got a little wider and her hips narrower.

"Our intention is for her to have more of a teenage physique," says Mattel spokesperson Lisa McKendall. "In order for hip-huggers [the new doll's debut outfit] to look right, Barbie needs to be more like a teen's body. The fashions teens wear now don't fit properly on our current sculpting."

Of course, they didn't take the average proportions of the average American teenage girl and mold Barbie to those. That would be way to healthy of Mattel.

Still I have conflicted feelings about Barbie. She's such a consumer and I don't like that. She gets the dream house and dream car, dream boat, dream everything. She doesn't appear to have a job or children, but she's guess she's not that dependent on Ken.

Maybe I'm just jealous of Barbie. How come Barbie got everything? Why does Barbie get to have such a freaking dream life? (It's kind of how I feel about Elisabeth Hasselhoff on The View, so easy to make judgements when you're sitting in a dream life.)

Then, a friend sent me an ebay auction Barbie for President, where Barbie was wearing a red powersuit and holding her own election sign. With Hillary running for President in 2008, I kind of wanted to buy that and give it to Ainsley. (Or keep it for myself.)

But, that's because I love the idea of a female president of the United States. Not because I think Barbie would make a good one.

So, I don't have a hard and fast rule about Barbie. The dream car is allowed because she was the only one selling a pink VW Bug at the time, the skate board got in because it was a garage sale find.

Ainsley used to have some Barbies and Barbie knock-offs, but I was thrilled when I found a Barbie graveyard on her bed one evening. It seemed to be a promising symbol of her emotional development. While, I can't back that up scientifically. I do remember being inexplicably proud that she had ripped the head and all the limbs from her little Barbie-like dolls.

There is hope for you yet, grasshopper.

Virtual Book Club

By Tracee Sioux

I run a women's book club, Between the Covers, and this month (and probably August) we're doing Suze Orman's Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny.

I confess I was financially illiterate until I took Dave Ramsey's course Financial Peace University. It was a fantastic course that put a lot of financial issues into perspective for us.

I want to read Orman's book because I think there are issues that deal with money that are specific to women and girls. She looks at our emotional issues and how that translates into how we handle money and whether we use it to take care of ourselves.

She also tells women how to safe-guard themselves in cases where the prince does not show up, or perhaps the prince turned into a jerk and left or whatever. It's called reality, with a 50% divorce rate in this country. No one likes the reality, but it's rather silly not to acknowledge that it's there.

I'm inviting all my readers of So Sioux Me and BlogFabulous to participate in the book club selection. I think there are tons of issues to discuss. You can order the book right here and it helps me out, or get it from your local bookstore. Either way, I can't wait to hear what you have to say about women and money.

Let's face it it's terribly hard to feel empowered if you're broke or don't have enough information to make good financial decisions.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Internet Safety Blog

If you have kids and are concerned with Internet safety issues I found this great blog Internet Safety - For Our Children's Sake. There is lots of great advice and resources to deal with mean girl behavior that ends up online and predators who are surfing for their prey.

It's a techno world and it would be irresponsible parenting to give kids free access to the Internet and never monitor where they go, who they talk to or who is talking to them. There are some real safety issues involved.

There's even a great page about cyber bullying.

I highly recommend clicking on Internet Safety - For Our Children's Sake as soon as your kids are old enough to surf the net. What is that in today's world - about 8?

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Girls For Sale



By Tracee Sioux

When is too early to "womanize" a girl?

On Jezabel.com there is a story, with some great editorial comments, about a new line of make-up being marketed to girls ages 6 to 9.

"Encouraged by sales of its makeup collaboration with MAC Cosmetics (left) Mattel is partnering with Bonne Bell to launch a Barbie-branded, "girl savvy" cosmetics line "aimed at girls 6 to 9""

Then in Business Week we have this story:

Little girls aren't just playing princess these days. Increasingly, they're being royally pampered at spas aimed at the 5-to-12 set. Sweet & Sassy in Southlake , Tex. , expects to add 16 shops to its current 15 by yearend, growing to 82 by 2010. Boise ( Idaho )-based Monkey Dooz plans to go from 6 locations to 21 this year. And Saks-owned Club Libby Lu, with 90 outlets, expects to add up to 15 annually over the next five years. In 2006, Saks reported Libby Lu sales of $53 million, up 13% from 2005.In pastel rooms lined with cartoon characters, Monkey Dooz offers a $35 Tutti Frutti Manicure and Chocolate Pedicure. At birthday parties--big in the tween spa business--guests at Sweet & Sassy can opt for a mini-facial or a "sassy up-do" hairstyle. In the age of Britney, Lindsay, and Paris, do the spas send girls the wrong signal? "A 9-year-old does not need makeup or a pedicure," says psychologist Irene Kassorla. "The message is, 'Lie back and do nothing, and we'll make you feel good.' It's just inappropriate." The spas say their services are harmless. "It's not about growing up too fast," says Sweet & Sassy CEO Dixie-Drake Davis. "We wouldn't do eyebrow waxing or highlights or anything that would keep a child from being a child." By Louise Lee
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_27/c4041003.htm?chan=search

There are so many things wrong with this picture. Not the least of which is that these companies believe our girls are for sale.

Do you let your daughter play dress-up and smear blue eyeshadow and red lipstick all over her face? Maybe you've even put a set of play make-up under the tree to keep her out of your good stuff? Do you paint her nails a bubble-gum pink or maybe some polish with stars and sparkles in it?

Sure, why wouldn't you? It's fun to play "grown-up pretty." Make-up is fun, going to the spa does feel really good? Is it terrible and awful to bond with your daughter over a simple manicure for a special mother-daughter day? I can see that in my future with Ainsley. And there wouldn't be anything hugely detrimental about it. I've even considered throwing a big "spa party" at this local place that has all the dress-up clothes and make-up and stuff for a "tea party."

But, that's fun and games. That's just playing. Play is healthy. Bonding with your daughter over make-up and nail polish is healthy, as long as it stays age-appropriate.

When does it cross the line? When the business model for marketing spa treatments to six-year-olds includes 268 outlets to market beauty services directly to them. When we're talking about mega-corporations putting $53 million in their fat pockets. When real companies like Mac Cosmetics starts rolling out real make-up lines with the intention of making 6 to 9 year olds believe they need make-up.

Girls in their target market (picture a bulls-eye) are children. They can't deconstruct advertising. While these companies think it's fair game to commando market to our little girls it comes at a cost. The cost isn't the $35 for the Tutti-Fruity mani-pedi, it's the self-image and self-esteem of America's little girls. The cost is in allowing companies like these to make millions of dollars by making our little girls feel not pretty enough. When our beautiful little girls feel like they need to wear make-up in elementary school it's enough already over the line. When the company spokesperson says they wouldn't give a little girl an eyebrow wax I think she's lying. I think, not only would they do it, they would make her believe she needed it.

There is a serious self-worth issue in little girl culture today. Already, 42% of 1st-3rd grade girls want to be thinner., and 81% of 10-year-olds are afraid of being fat, according to the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty White Paper. These negative feelings about appearance result in serious health issues for our little girls like eating disorders, unsafe sexual behavior to fill the hole in their souls, drugs, alcohol and suicides. Forget $35, the real cost is the feeling of being and looking "good enough" or "pretty."

In Mary Pipher's book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls she writes that girls maintain their confidence through elementary school. In part because they haven't been thoroughly genderized yet by having to "womanize" themselves. They participate in and can hold their own at math, science and athletics against the equally matched boys. She paints a picture of the years between 5-11 or so as being wonderfully free of being sexualized or "womanized."

We're selling that wonderful part of girlhood to Mac cosmetics and Saks' line of girl-spas? Yeah, if we let our girls get sucked in by their advertising and buy them the new line of make-up or take them to these spas - I think we are. I think millions of mothers, because let's not forget they will market aggressively to the mothers, will blindly buy the make-up gift set and put it under the tree or throw the big spa party for the 6th birthday and never realize just what they are buying. Or selling. The soul of their little girl. The child part of being a girl. The unsexualized, unwomanized part of being a girl. The pretty just as you are part.

When your daughter responds to the commando advertising, and she will, be kind enough to her to say, No. You are so beautiful exactly as you are, you don't need a bit of make-up.
More posts on Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty
Beauty & Reality
Self-Loathing Sin Bank
More posts on hair:
Pink Hair Fiasco
Pink Hair Fiasco Take 2
Curl Maintenance
The Meaning of Hair

Fit-Buff Carnival

Fit-Buff's new blog Total Mind and Body Fitness Blog Carnival is out, you know I love this one. I'm in it, three times due to a typo, not complaining. Maybe that will net me three times the readers? One can hope.

You know I love TherapyDoc, funny and thoughtful stuff about the therapists' "party-line" concerning drinking, drugs and seduction.

As far as your patients are concerned, You don't drink, and you don't use drugs, and you'll probably live longer for it (you hope).Now, seduction is something we can talk about. Like drinking, it's safest in moderation and at home with somebody you love, preferably a committed partner, not a blood relative. And talking in code is good, assuming both of you know the code, that is.

Brain Power
Anne-Marie presents An Interview with Nordine Zouareg, author of Mind Over Body: The Key to Lasting Weight Loss Is All in Your Head posted at A Mama's Rant.
Kendra presents Escaping ?Uterine Rupture? Fears posted at vbacadventure.com.
Caroline Latham presents Pattern Recognition Brain Teaser - The Empty Triangle posted at SharpBrains.
Meredith Mathews presents T spheres posted at Lemonade Stand.
Silicon Valley Blogger presents Cheap Ways To Learn And Feed Your Brain posted at The Digerati Life.
Exercise
therapydoc presents Alcohol and Your Therapy Doc posted at Everyone Needs Therapy.
Midnight Raider presents Weightlifting On Any Budget posted at Refrigerator Raid.
Lynda Lippin presents Pilates & Reiki In Paradise Blog: Supreme Pilates®–Be Very Afraid! posted at Pilates & Reiki In Paradise Blog.
baiguai presents Getting Off the Couch posted at Kung Fu Artistry.
Anmol Mehta presents Core Abdominal Power Yoga Exercises posted at Mastery of Meditation, Enlightenment & Kundalini Yoga.
Shane Magee presents Warming up before running or doing exercise. posted at Sri Chinmoy Races Blog.
April Kerr presents Improve your Immune System with Exercise posted at Natural Health Remedies.
Family
Tracee Sioux presents Second Generation Mean Girl posted at So Sioux Me.
Tracee Sioux presents Second Generation Mean Girl posted at So Sioux Me.
Grooming
Tracee Sioux presents Pur Perfection for Pregnancy Mask posted at Blog Fabulous.
Nutrition
Dean Carlson presents The 3 P's of a Healthy Diet posted at New Hampshire Fitness Personal Trainer NH.
Be sure to tune in every Monday for the next Total Mind and Body Fitness Blog Carnival, and if you want to submit your own article for inclusion, click here before midnight (eastern time) on Sunday.
Discuss this post on the FitBuff.com Forums. Did you find this article or site helpful? Why don't you Subscribe to the Free FitBuff.com Newsletter packed with even more useful news and tips to help you achieve total mind and body fitness.

Maternal Lineage

By Tracee Sioux

Sarah begat Viola, Viola begat Susie, Susie begat Tracee, Tracee begat Ainsley.

I've always wished at least one book in the Bible would have started with the feminine, maternal lineage. It is difficult for girls and women to relate to the Biblical heroes because it's just so hard to find a sense of self there. The players are men. Women are mentioned in relation to men, usually. (I throw the usually in there because I'm not about to have endless semantic arguments about women's place in the Bible.)

For girls, I believe, all of history is the same way. One must go searching for the heroines of history. They throw a few in there, like Joan of Arc, but in the end they are burned at the stake rather than lifted up as great changers of the world.

Without a clear sense of identity, including a historic identity, people tend to lose themselves by trying to fill every else's expectations. Girls are especially prone to this as they sit through endless hours of Sunday school hearing about the great men of Biblical times, as well as through school learning about the great men of history. Not only is it unfair, but it is inaccurate in a lot of ways.

Women have effected the world in as many ways as men, it's just not reported as loudly. For instance, I would call my family a definite matriarchy. The women have always ruled in my family. I use the term ruled in the sense that they have created the family dynamic and set the tone for the family's priorities and values. They have trained the children and maintained any emotional connection between the members.

I can trace the matriarchy back to my own great-grandmother. I knew her until I was 12 and she made such an impression on me that I named my daughter Ainsley Sarah after her. My mother was also named for her.

Over the weekend I went to our very extended family reunion and there was a memorial service for this great-great-grandmother of my daughter's. I took my daughter and her daughters (my grandmother and her sister) and sat listening to stories of what a service-oriented woman she was. There is something to be said in that the taste of her legendary rolls has been remembered on people's death beds, and lingered on tongues of literally hundreds of friends and relatives for well over 20 years. There is also something significant knowing you are curling up in one of hundreds of quilts made by her needle and thread. There is power in knowing that she survived more hardship than myself or my children could ever imagine and always had a grateful heart and an unshakable faith in God.

Our goal, as conscientious parents trying to raise empowered daughters, is to help them find an unshakable sense of self. A firm sense of self will preserve girls through peer pressure, enormous temptations, love affairs and friendships, and difficult decisions.

Part of our sense of self is made up of our sense of belonging to various groups. For instance, my group identities include American, Mormon, Democrat, Military Brat, ect (which is not to say those groups claim me, but that I identify internally with them). More intimately though is knowing that I come from a long line of strong women or my maternal lineage. I can trace my maternal lineage through my mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother.

By passing that knowledge down to my daughter, I know that it makes her sense of identity stronger. Detailed knowledge about who her great-great-grandmother was will help her sit through all the hours of church and school ahead of her, those long hours and chapters of history and religion where girls are mentioned only as afterthoughts or in relation to significant men.

I encourage all parents to pass on their own maternal lineage to instill in girls a sense of feminine history (duh, "herstory"), a sense of belonging to and coming from someone or something significant. Such information can only benefit a daughter's sense of identity and self.

Labels: biblical lineage, blogfabulous, empower girls, family bonds, feminine history, group identities, herstory, lineage, self identity, tracee sioux draft

Monday, June 25, 2007

The Meaning of Hair


By Tracee Sioux

The kids got new haircuts. Ainsley got a long bob and Zack, a mohawk. Both haircuts beg the issue of the meaning of hair. How much do we use our hair to create our identity and to identify with our children?

The first time Ainsley ever got more than a trim is a very sore spot in our family. It was unhealthy, had a bunch of split ends and was without shape or form. She was three-years-old and for some reason it seemed rebellious to cut her baby hair. I had known lots of mommies with a no-cutting-of-the-baby-hair rule, not even allowing toddler daughters to cut bangs to allow basic vision. I wondered, Who is she, Samson? Does her hair have special powers I don't know about? If we cut her hair, will she lose her special girlness?

I then made a huge blunder. I dropped my 3-year-old daughter off at my mother-in-law's with permission to give her a "long bob, long enough for a ponytail." She came back with a short Dorothy Hamill pixie cut. When my husband saw it, he got so upset he nearly cried and then left furious about what I had done.

A. This was not the haircut I had asked for. Why was he angry at me rather than his mother?

B. Why was he putting so much meaning into a bad haircut? Did he know how many bad haircuts she's likely to have throughout her life? Why was he making it into such a big thing?

C. Why was he making her girlness all about the length of her hair?

Ainsley loved having short hair and has asked, since then, to have her hair cut short. A short bob is what she asked for this year. She was forbidden, I was forbidden, his mother was forbidden. Internet sites with long bobs were perused by all three of us (me, husband and his mother) to decide exactly what style and length Ainsley's hair would be. Ainsley was asked, after everyone else had agreed, whether she could live with that haircut.

At the same time my husband likes my pink highlights, is totally fine with me putting pink streaks in Ainsley's hair and thinks Zack's mohawk is baby-cool.

It's an enigma. One that seems to have everything to do with girls having long hair.


More posts on Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty
Beauty & Reality
Self-Loathing Sin Bank
More posts on hair:
Pink Hair Fiasco
Pink Hair Fiasco Take 2
Curl Maintenance
The Meaning of Hair

Friday, June 22, 2007

Mythbusters - Science is Girly

By Tracee Sioux



Mythbusters, a series on the Discovery Channels (TLC, etc), that puts myths and urban legends through scientific tests to determine if there is any truth to it is a fantastic way to empower girls.

When I was a kid I had no reason to believe that science or math might apply to me. When asking why I had to learn math I was given reasons like, to figure out a recipe, which frankly held no appeal for me. Math and science were “boy” subjects. Boys took wood and auto shop and learned how to built things and fix cars and girls were required to take home economics and learn to sew and cook. Seriously.

But, one of the best things we can do for our daughters is interest them in math and science professions, if only because these fields PAY a lot more money than social science professions do. Technology is moving quickly and science is becoming increasingly important in our society and culture. We need to be conscientious about preparing our children, especially our girls, for the scientifically advanced future they will face.

Mythbusters is fantastic because science become fun and interesting as all get out. We have spent entire lazy Saturdays or Sundays watching episode after episode of Mythbusters blowing up sharks, crashing cars or floating children with helium balloons. My husband got so excited about the experiment with Mentos and Diet Coke having the compound effect of a volcanic explosion that he performed the experiment at our daughter’s birthday party.

Even better for girls is that one of the scientists on the show is Kari Byron, a girl! It is totally awesome, for me and my daughter, to see her hold her own with other scientists and coming up with hypothesis’ and performing scientific experiments to prove or disprove a myth.

Will setting off too many roach bombs blow up a house? Actually, if there is a flame and a ton of bombs, it can.

Could the General Lee on the Dukes of Hazard really make those jumps? Uh, no.

Can you blow up a great white shark with an air tank? Watch the show with your daughter to find out.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Fergalicious, Big Girls Don't Cry



By Tracee Sioux

I often watch VH1 videos at the gym during my workout and I totally approve of Fergie's song Big Girls Don't Cry as a great message for girls.

The song tells the story of a girl who has dreams, but she's inconveniently in love with this guy who is obviously not going in the same direction. The girl chooses to leave the guy to pursue the dream. She's sad, but her self and her dream are worth the sacrifice of a love affair.

I hope you know, I hope you know
That this has nothing to do with you
It's personal, Myself and I
We've got some straightenin' out to do
And I'm gonna miss you like a child misses their blanket
But I’ve got to get a move on with my life
Its time to be a big girl now
And big girls don't cry

I love this message for girls. I think most of girls' cultural influences paint a rosy picture and glamorize giving up everything for another person. In reality, I think it is rarely the best idea to give up a dream, a future, an education or an experience for a lover.

Speaking personally, I gave up going to be a nanny in Maryland when I was right out of high school - to stay with a boy. I really just chickened out. What a bad choice. Going seemed much scarier, but who knows where I would have gone or what I could have done had I not given up the opportunity to spread my wings? But, at the time it seemed like a romantic decision to stay because he asked me to.

We owe it to our daughters to provide a clear definition about what is romantic and what is just an illusion of romantic. Especially, when they are young and unburdened my marriage or children. We should teach them that sometimes it's scary or painful, but their own dreams, educations, careers and experiences deserve pursuit.

By the way, my parents did tell me not to stay for him. But, I wouldn't/couldn't hear them.

I entered this column on Weary Parent as part of a blogging contest. The theme: "I want to know what advice your parents or another influential adult gave you as a teen that you took to heart. It can be funny. It can be serious. It can be a list, a story, a confession - be creative! Just keep it tasteful - this is a family-oriented site."

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Hot Princes


By Tracee Sioux


I saw Princes William and Harry on The Today Show. Wow, they turned out HOT!

As a Femimommy who is adamantly Anti-Princess, does that mean I have to be Anti-Hot Prince? I even caught myself fantasizing that if I couldn't have them, maybe Ainsley could. Isn't that just wrong?

My last significant memory of these princes is of little boys grieving over their mother, Princess Diana. My daughter is fascinated with Diana, by the way. I've encouraged this as a way to get her interested in political dynamics and how governments work, never too early for that, I say. Ainsley was fascinated by the idea that there are real princesses, but she's very taken, as we all were, with Diana. She's not interested in Caroline or Fergie, but she can spot Diana pictures and loves to point them out. The boys were promoting a big Diana tribute concert, 10 years after her death, airing July 1, also on NBC.
Watching these boys be interviewed was intriguing. They seem to have the same characteristic Diana had and to be able to captivate the way she did. There really seemed to be very little Prince Charles in them. Well the older son and future King of England, William did seem to be more reserved and stiff than "bad boy" Harry. If I were picking a prince, it'd be Harry for me, I mean Ainsley.

Diana's genetics certainly had a positive impact on the Royal Family's looks that's for sure. These are big, sexy, tall, good-looking almost men.
Their on Dateline too, DVR that.

Global Gag Rule is Anti-Girl



By Tracee Sioux

There is an amendment to the Global Gag Rule before congress right now. The Gag Rule is where the United States has decided to withhold money from International organizations like The Red Cross if they fund contraceptives or reserve the right to say the word "abortion" to any of their patients.

Ever wonder how Africa developed such an extreme AIDS problem or why there are so many starving orphans in poverty stricken countries? Global Gag Rule.

It's hypocritical and undemocratic for the United States to make a moral judgement about abortion and contraceptives for every country on planet earth. Sounds more like a hegemony than a democracy to me. We end up paying for the Global Gag Rule through other funding, like feeding their orphans anyway, so it's really rather like shooting ourselves in the foot.

Plus, any and all global restrictions on any kind of contraceptive information is anti-girl and anti-woman. Because it's not abortions the U.S. is refusing to pay for it's reproductive information we are refusing to pay for. Where's the democratic ideal of freedom of speech in that? Hence the word Gag in the Rule.

Right now before congress there is an issue that gets all convoluted. It's an amendment to a foreign operations appropriation bill called the Stupak-Smith amendment. The issue has nothing to do with pro-choice or pro-life camps because abortion is not at stake - only contraceptives.

In America, whether you are pro-life or not you most likely appreciate your access to condoms and birth control pills. Especially, if you feel your family is perfectly complete as it is, but perhaps have 10 or 20 more childbearing years in you. Well, imagine you had no access to these simple contraceptives because you had no money or some foreign country, like the U.S., forbade the distribution of them. If I was that girl or woman I would wonder why the U.S. wanted to ruin my life by forcing me to have more children than I could afford to care for.

No matter what your stance on Row vs. Wade, surely you can see the difference between abortion and contraceptives. Globally, millions of girls and women are in a precariously unempowered position by being denied access to birth control.

You can participate in empowering girls and women all over the world by following this link to write your representative. The letter provided encourages law makers to ease the Global Gag Rule to allow the distribution of contraceptives by voting NO on the Stupak-Smith Foreign Ops Amendment.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Second Generation Mean Girl



By Tracee Sioux

Just who is running the school clothes fashion show?

A reader's (Janet) comment on my column Kindergarten Fashion Show really provided some clarity about who is driving the fashion show in elementary school. Mommy, obviously.

Mean Girls are driving the whole thing. But, it’s Second Generation Mean Girls now. It’s the Mean Girls in our memory actually. Now that we’ve become mothers we’re trying to heal our own fashion wounds through our daughters. Or if you were the Mean Girl, perhaps you’re afraid your own Karma will work itself out on your kid. Perhaps you’ve developed a new empathy, or you just want to make sure your kid becomes a Mean Girl versus a picked-on Dork.

Mothers are really the only ones in the family ecosystem with enough power to drive the whole thing. Little girls can have a sense of taste and style of their own, my daughter certainly does. Yet, they don’t have jobs and therefore no money to make any actual decisions about what they wear. Dads couldn’t care less. Nor could they be trusted with something so important. It is also the mother who will be judged if her children look sloppy, unclean or trampy. Duh, all mothers know this. We take this seriously.

All perspective about the importance of a child's clothing is lost by Kindergarten. Which is why I feel like I’m sending my daughter into some hot bed of fashionistas in September. But, I now realize it’s not those innocent little five-year-olds. It’s their mothers.

I have had many in-depth conversations about the issue of kids clothes with women and every single conversation goes back to the mother’s empathy for her child. She remembers what it felt like to be wrong, out of place, not cool enough, not pretty enough, not stylish enough.

I have yet to meet a woman, whether she had been a Mean Girl herself or not, who hasn’t considered the issue in depth. It would seem parentally irresponsible not to consider the feelings of our children when it comes to clothing.

Wouldn’t it? Wait, what? Is the assumption that our parents just didn’t give a crap? Or that they didn’t understand? Or that they didn’t even know we were tortured at school for not having the Guess Jeans or the Swatch Watch? Were they that oblivious to our reality? Is it even possible they didn't know Gloria Vanderbilt jeans could make or break us?

I think the answer is in disposable income. Our grandmothers had none and went to school in dresses made of feed sacks and dealt with it. Our parents had some, but the importance of school clothes never took the place of a retirement plan. My parents, I called and asked, said they had a budget and weren't going to put the overall picture in jeopardy by paying twice the jeans budget. My dad then recalled that he bought his own clothes in junior high because he had a job by then. I probably should have been grateful that I didn't have to ride my bike three miles to wash dishes in a Chinese restaurant like he did. But, I just didn't have that kind of perspective yet.

Today I know a ton of parents who willy nilly charge school clothes on credit cards. The importance of the fashion show has taken on an emotional significance in their memories. It trumps a retirement plan. I can think of quite a few families who talk about being in precarious financial positions with big things like their mortgage or the failure of a business, but their 12-year-old daughters carry THE Dooney and Burke Purse. That’s just wrong.

I don’t really know the answer to this dilemma yet myself. I do know this: if we try to heal our fashion wounds through our children then we will create wounds were there were none. A Second Generation Mean Girl is, I imagine, about 1,000 times meaner with more electronic weapons than the Mean Girl of my day. First Generation Mean Girl passed a note calling me a "slut," her daughters are snapping pictures of girls in the gym locker room with their cell phone, posting them on My Space with the words, "Porn Star" and an ugly guy photoshopped in.

Am I the only mother who worries that my own daughter has the potential to become a Mean Girl? Am I the only mother who wants to keep her daughter out of Mean Girl status and out of picked-on Dork status, without blending into the wallpaper? Not a single one of those are empowering places to be for a girl.

School uniforms would be one solution and lots of public schools are going that way. Myself, I would like to see all the mommies step back and rein it in. Maybe a national school clothes boycott would be my fantasy. But, that could have unforeseen repercussions, like economic backlash or even more viciousness from those who refuse to participate. If not a boycott of fashion all together, I would at least like to generate a discussion.

What do you think is the answer?

Friday, June 15, 2007

Shoemotional



By Tracee Sioux

While I don't want my daughter to believe she IS her clothing. I have to confess to a bizarre attachment to a pair of dancing shoes I no longer have.

While packing for my femimother weekend I felt an old familiar yearning for my black dancing shoes. I lost one of them on a trip home to see my parents probably three or four years ago. I had been wearing them since college and had never worn any other pair of shoes out dancing.

They were really high, black Sandy from Grease in the very last scene when she's turned bad-girl, dancing shoes. They provided me this sense of balance and confidence and laissez fair and sexy that I don't normally possess. I felt powerful and carefree in them and I really only ever wore them dancing.

I kept the one remaining shoe in my closet for years after the other was gone. I kept hoping, even praying, the other would magically turn up. I'm sure it's on the side of the road in New Mexico living out a very Jitterbug Perfume life (or was that Still Life with Woodpecker?)

Omigod (so, totally stole that from my friend Rebecca), I just did a search for Tom Robbins and apparently he has written a new book I had not heard about. Wild Ducks Flying Backward seems to be a collection of short stories and I just got about as aroused as if I had found my other shoe. I'm so buying that immediately!




Femimother Must Go On Vacation Alone

By Tracee Sioux

One of the best ways to empower children, in my experience, is to get away without them for a weekend. It sends the message that they can and should be somewhat independent. They will, after all, be going out in the world without me eventually.

It gives their father the opportunity to be their primary caregiver (though there is a rumor going around that he's asked his mom to babysit while he plays golf on Father's Day.) Happy Father's Day Honey! It also gives the impression that I, though I am their mother, can and should take time for my self. I existed pre-kid and I will exist post-kid, and in the meantime, I can take a vacation from them.

I expect this weekend to be quite liberating. I'm going to Houston on a little errand for a family member in need of a wheelchair. I'm going to pick one up and hang out with a good friend of mine. Oh the pure pleasure of a good deed turned run of good luck. The best, absolutely best part about the whole deal is that she has not had children yet. So our conversations need not include children, nor do they need to be interrupted by the demands of any. My appendages are staying home. I do not intend to prattle on endlessly about them. They already get nearly all of my time and attention.

I adore my children, but sometimes after one of them has been sick and we've been home all week and my husband has had meetings virtually every night, I'm just plain tired of their company. And that's not only okay - I think it's the healthiest part of my femimothering style.

I must go out and have fun and have adult conversation and feel like a self again. I will be back on Monday to do my mothering (and my blogging) and no one will have suffered irreparable damage. To think otherwise is just a bit of mothering-conceit.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Kindergarten Fashion Show


Oh girls, you are not defined by your clothes!

Really, we’re not sending this message to our girls in any kind of adequate way. By the time my daughter was two she was getting herself dressed and had a very set idea of what she wanted to look like. She wanted to wear her sparkly Wizard of Oz shoes every single day. She was dedicated to never matching. I’m all for independence, so I let her wear whatever she wants as long as it’s modest.

By modest, I mean she is not allowed to leave the house looking like a Bratz Doll. No belly shirts and no bum cheeks hanging out of her shorts or skirt. She must wear shorts under her dresses because it’s no fun to “sit like a lady.” No bikinis either. Oh, how I wanted to be allowed to wear a bikini and always swore I would never make my daughter wear a one-piece swim suit. The first time we got one handed down I thought, are there any circumstances where I want my daughter wearing a bikini? The answer in my head was a resounding NO and I promptly threw the swim suit away without her knowledge.

By the time she was three she would absolutely freak out if we suggested she wear something she didn’t like. It got to such an extreme fight about what she was going to wear on any given day that I took away every single item of clothing she owned for an entire week. Well, except for the “I hate that shirt, I look like a boy” outfit that I just kept washing and making her put back on. It’s actually parenting advice I got from a Madonna interview.

You are not going to behave this way about clothes. You are NOT your clothes. Do you think I love every item of clothing I wear? No, I do not! I wear clothes I hate, because that’s what I have, that’s what people hand down to me and that’s what we can afford to buy! And you ARE going to learn to be grateful for every stitch of clothes you have the privilege of owning, I told her as I packed her entire wardrobe in a black garbage bag and shoved it in my closet.

All week long she went around telling everyone we spoke to, I’m wearing this because I’m being punished. My mom took away all my clothes.
But, I could tell by her tone that she was not complaining as much as she was bragging. It was as if she were very excited to be punished (paid attention to) in such a big way.

September is coming and school is going to start and everyone is going to be bombarded by commercials and sales and tax-free weekends with the big push to buy school clothes. Already last year, in pre-school, my daughter was complaining that her clothes weren’t as cute as some of the other girls', who came to school looking like a fashion show.

My clothes aren’t as cute as Caitlin and Abby’s, she would complain.

That’s not true. Grandma has bought you a lot of very cute matching outfits and those girls wear what their mother’s tell them to wear every morning. They match. You have the clothes, but you choose to dress yourself and you never decide to wear the matching outfits together. You could look just like them if you wanted to. You’re choosing not to. That’s okay too. You have your own style, I told her. She went to school unmatching again, so apparently it wasn’t that important to blend in.

I’m not okay with spending hundreds of dollars on “school clothes.” Frankly, we have more important needs in our family. I picked up a bunch of new-enough outfits at garage sales and a couple of dresses and three pairs of shoes at garage sales this weekend. I hid them and will pull them out when she starts to see all the advertising telling her she’s not good enough if she doesn’t get new clothes.

I spent $12. I’ll probably pick up a few more things at garage sales and the Grandmas might make a few contributions. If I happen to have money burning a hole in my pocket I may take her to Old Navy and allow her to pick one new school outfit with a budget of $20. Just so she won’t feel completely left out of the American Tradition of School Clothes Shopping.

I guess I just don’t understand why a whole new wardrobe is an American tradition. It’s not like in my grandmother’s day when she would save her money all year to be able to afford to buy her kids one new pair of shoes for school. Kids get clothes all year long now, don’t they? Mine certainly get them for birthdays, Christmas and whenever I happen upon them or when wonderful people hand them down.

It’s June, now is the time to decide how much you’re willing to spend on school clothes. Now is the time to give daughters the message,

You are not your clothes. You are good enough no matter what you wear. We are not going into debt so you can win a popularity contest at school. People will like you because you're a great person, not because of what you wear.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Dear God and Dave Ramsey


Dear God and Dave Ramsey:

Not that you’re one and the same or like you have the same address or anything, but you both live in the money department of my brain.

This is what I look like in the mornings. My eyes are sealed shut with monkey poop and they hurt, the lids are sore and red and the sinuses below them are full of fluid and puffy and swollen. I have to do a sinus wash and take a bunch of Benadryl before they stop hurting and itching and before I can breath. I don’t buy the Zyrtec, which helps more, because it’s a $50 copay and that’s not in our zero-based budget. The generic Benadryl is only $4 and it seems to help, but it wears off in my sleep and the window air conditioner blows everything I’m allergic to straight onto me all night long and I wake up in a swollen, itchy, painful mess.

My baby used to take a bunch of allergy medicine because he’s had a rattle in his chest since he was born. But, the Dr. said just forget giving it to him because it wasn’t even helping his constant congestion. So, now I take him for a lymph node massage and that’s only $10 and it helps him a lot. I usually end up using my blow money to take him to this therapy, Dave. In fact I rarely ever get to blow my blow money.

It’s the allergies. The pediatrician says it’s the mold in our tiny rented house and we should move immediately. Plus, the hay fever from having window air conditioners that blow all the pollen straight into the house.

Oh God, thank you so much for the money to buy a new window unit this year. It was expensive, but I just couldn’t take another year in the sweltering East Texas humidity at 103 degrees, Dave. It really will make you physically sick to sit in a house that feels like an oven all day long. I really would be perfectly happy with this solution if the pollen didn’t make me and the kids ill. Winters are a problem though, as the city has outlawed the use of the only heat source we have because it’s a serious carbon-monoxide risk (as the soot on my walls can attest to).

Dave, we finally paid off a ton of debt, around $8,000 probably. And we had a paid for, debt-free, we-own-him-outright, baby in the meantime. We took the crappy jobs and go without all kinds of stuff. But, I’ve still got a whopper of a student loan. My husband got a great new job with a big fat raise so we can finally make our minimum payments and get my student loan out of deferment. I graduated over 10 years ago. In college, they failed to teach me about how an interest rate accrues but they made me spend an entire year trying to figure out what the square root of something was. We’ve been “paying our professional dues” and have never made enough to pay the ever interest-accruing burden. My husband was pretty depressed that our actual lifestyle wasn’t improving with his new job. Who wouldn't be?

But, we’re afraid to get in over our heads with a mortgage. So many people we know are in a scary place with their mortgages. When you change jobs, that’s the only time you can cash out the 401K. We want to buy a house. That’s everyone’s American Dream isn’t it? After the penalties and taxes we’d have about $5,000 for a down payment, closing costs and moving expenses. It doesn’t seem like enough. But, it feels like this might be the only time we’ll ever have even that much all at once.

Dave, I know you say that $7,000 401K should stay in where it is and we should save up a 20% down payment and continue living here in this mold-ridden two bedroom house we’ve outgrown. Financial Peace Revisited even says we should save a real emergency fund of $20,000 before buying the house. Economically, that $7,000 is supposed to somehow turn into a million when we’re 65, or are they making us wait until 68 to retire now? And I guess we'll need it, becaue I just got a letter from Social Security saying they'll be paying me $335 a month when I retire and I certainly can't live on that. But, now that we have to pay that student loan it feels like we’re back to square one. There is no money left over to save. How are we going to save $80,000 to move out of here, Dave? Right now $80,000 feels a lot like never. (And Suzi Orman – where the hell am I supposed to come up with money for my own savings account?)

Thank you God, for our new mini-van. We HAD to buy a new car, the other one was dead, Dave. We drove the humiliatingly ugly thing around for 3-4 years but it really was finally dead and we bought the van with cash. Just like we’re supposed to, Dave. I have to admit, it really did feel pretty good. I felt like something brand new, only without any anxiety or burdens. It was definitely worth the wait not to finance a new car.

We gave up the envelopes after two years simply because it was ridiculous to carry around empty envelopes, Dave. We spend all our money in about one day – grocery and bill day – then the envelopes are just mocking us, empty as can be.

I haven’t gone home to see my family in two years because the price of gas is too much to justify. Like losers we’re letting my parents give us gas money to come home this year to meet my brother’s new baby. Two of my siblings haven't met my toddler either. My parents had to pay for the last trip too. It's too humbling.

We boycotted Christmas with the extended family and buy all our kid’s gifts and our clothes and furniture from garage sales. But, I confess to adding the expenditure of cell phones. I tried to say no, but my husband, well he HAD to have it. He said he could drive the ugliest car without a radio to work for the mileage, but he wanted to be able to talk on the phone during his 45-minute commute and he needed the “status” of something Dave. He needed it. It was a deal breaker. I fought it, I did. But, he deserved one thing for getting a new job, didn’t he?

We also kept basic cable. Dave, you can’t stick me in the house staying home with the kids, trying to get something done without a TV. We don’t even get ONE free station out here in the boonies Dave. Not even one. But, we cancelled the HBO so please, no one tell me what happened on the last season of The Sopranos and don't tell me about Big Love either. I did keep wearing makeup and doing my hair every 5 months and last week I bought Ainsley a brand new package of panties, as she’d been complaining for months. I snuck it into the grocery fund. We had to keep the Internet for work purposes, but we’re keeping our receipts for taxes. We’re taking the write-offs this year. We also added a babysitting fund of $20 every Thurs. We figure our marriage has to be more important than paying off my student loan doesn’t it? Never eating out or going to do anything fun pretty much ruins a marriage seems like.

So, maybe we’re not your textbook Gazelles going at our debt with what you would call intensity. But, we’ve paid a full tithe – that’s on our GROSS God, our Gross income – every single payday for several years now.

We’ve made a zero-based budget every single month, Dave. And we’ve stuck to it as well as anyone else without a crystal ball can. We’ve kept our emergency fund as close to $1,000 as possible. I’m working my butt off, writing from home, taking the leap of faith, just like you told me to God. My husband's taking every freelance job that comes his way. And we haven’t financed one single thing or put a single dime on any credit card, Dave. That’s something right?

Most days I’m optimistic and I’m so sickeningly grateful for this roof over our heads, cars that get us where we need to go and my husband’s job that provides a steady enough income to make our payments. I’m a huge bragger about the bargains I get at garage sales and as proud of being thrifty as anyone you’ll ever meet. I recommend the Dave Ramsey program to everyone I meet and I constantly remind my husband that we’re so close, so very close, just hold on one more minute, in 5 years this will seem like a blip, this is just what it’s like on the way up, just be a little tiny bit more patient.

But, then there comes a morning like this one. Where I wake up with allergies so bad my eyes are sealed shut from a moldy house with no central air, and a sick kid that I’m not taking to the doctor because I didn’t put the co-pay in the budget, and I’m having to mooch off my parents at the age of 33 to buy enough gas to see my family, and I’m kind of sick of it. I’m so totally OVER being the working poor and trying to live within our means.

So God, I’m ready for a major financial windfall any day now. In fact, NOW would not be too soon. And Dave, I’m working on Financial Peace, but sometimes I have to admit this feels more like pain than peace and it seriously sucks!

Monday, June 11, 2007

About the Author - Tracee Sioux

I was tagged in a blogger game or memed by Julie Q at The JQ Lounge here are the rules:

Each player starts with 7 random facts/habits about themselves. People who are tagged need to write their own blog with their 7 things as well as these rules. You need to tag 7 others and list their names on your blog. Remember to leave a comment for them letting them know they have been tagged and to read your blog.

1. I was raised a Mormon Military Brat. We moved a lot, as a result I could pick up and go at any second. For a job or out of boredom I have sold everything I owed to relocate as an adult four times already. I am only 33-years-old.
2. I am a journalist by profession. I resent my previous employers for not allowing me to work from home when I became a mother. I am a writer and since the invention of e-mail there is really no reason to make me come to the newsroom. I think it’s “motherism” as my employer allowed a man to work out of his home but denied my request. I’ve not found my female employers any more supportive of working from home than my male bosses. But, I do resent them more.
3. I got married when I was 17-years-old. That was a stupid thing to do. I totally believe in divorce and thank God every day that by 19 I was smart enough not to make my childish mistake a permanent one. I didn’t marry again until 27.
4. After my child-bride experience I found that I was unwilling to change my name back to my father’s name and unwilling to keep my ex-husband’s name and unwilling to take any future husband’s name. I went to court and dropped all the last names that made my identity relational to the men in my life. I decided to have an identity that did not change with my marital status. My given name at birth was Tracee Sue and I thought Sioux would look better in print – well, I AM a writer so it does matter how marketable my name is. I was only 19 when I divorced so it seemed inevitable that I would eventually get married and have kids again. But, it did not seam reasonable at all to change my identity in any way, including my last name. So, I am Tracee Sioux. Legally now and forever. It is not a nomdeplum – Sioux is my legal last name and it is who I am.
5. I witnessed 9-11 when I was 8 months pregnant with my first child. I was on my way to work. What strikes me now about the experience is that as a reporter my first instinct was to buy a disposable camera and report on it. I got a shot of the second plane hitting the building. I wasn’t close enough for anyone to buy the shot. The second thing that sticks with me is how worried I was that I was going to be late for work and how my boss might be annoyed with me – as if for the first few hours the shock was so complete that I didn’t understand the magnitude at all and went about my normal business like buying a chocolate donut.
6. I went to Lithuania after college to teach English, I wanted to travel and had been a political science major with an interest in the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Lithuania was a brand new democracy.
7. I’m grateful beyond belief for my current opportunity to work from home blogging. I feel like this is a “calling” for me. I’m pretty intensely spiritual about my So Sioux Me website. It’s my path, my personal legend, my way of being part of the soul of the world, my way to affect the collective girl consciousness and start a girl revolution. Through the suspension of disbelief and all my power of intention it is going to be THE place to go for Girl Empowerment.

So I'm tagging Therapydoc at Everyone Needs Therapy, Heather at Dooce.com, Karen at ThriftyMommy, The Simple Dollar, Kate at Babylune, Steve at Inside Fatherhood, and Karen at Live The Power.

Real Princesses



By Tracee Sioux

In the middle of Ainsley's Disney Princess Obsession I found a coffee table book about Princess Diana at the library and showed it to her.

She honestly had never considered the fact that there might actually be real princesses. She was as fascinated, if not more, with Princess Diana, Fergie, Duchess of York, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Caroline and any others I could think of. She loved having me Google them on the Internet.

They are really real Princesses? she would ask over and over.

It was actually a great segue way into politics and history lessons. I explained how our ancestors had come from England (we're Amercian mutts, but some of them did come from England) and other European countries that really do have royalty as a form of government still today.

Then I explained how the pilgrims had come to America and decided having kings and queens wasn't the best idea. So, we now have presidents and representatives elected by the people who live here. I take her with me to go vote and we talk about how important it is for the people to vote on who leads the country. (When she was two we were leaving the polls and she said, But, Mommy when are we going on the boat?)

But, in England, where Princess Diana lived, they still have princes and princesses, I tell her.

We just watched The Queen together. I would have thought she'd find this boring. But, she made me pause it every single time she had to go to the bathroom. She kept asking who Tony Blair was and how he ruled the country at the same time as the Queen. She can not wait to be able to go to Buckingham Palace in real life. I pointed out that Prince Charles really is just a man and he cheated on his Princess so she divorced him.

Funny side note: the only Barbi-like doll she has is actually a talking Bill Clinton that I bought for my husband for Christmas a few years ago. His foot came off the other day and she said, Oh Mommy, I broke my favorite Bill Clinton that I love to play with! Can't you fix my Bill Clinton? We also have a talking George Bush giant bobble head which Zack enjoys quite a bit.

Use the Disney Princess Obsession to open the door to teach girls about history and politics. It's way more empowering that girls will be privileged enough to vote than sitting around hoping for some prince on a white horse to come save them.

After all, when my grandmother was a girl, voting was not a privilege she could look forward to.

Get Paid to Blog

I've signed up for Pay Per Post as a way to "monetize" this blog. Obviously, I feel passionately about empowering girls or I wouldn't have so much to say about it. That's my main motive for writing these columns.

Other things I feel passionately about are buying a house, not using credit cards or other financing options, having enough money for gas to go see my family in Utah, buying a new laptop so I don't have to share custody of my workspace, being able to pay for that college education I got 10 years ago, and being a little bit more financially independent.

Which is why I've decided to occasionally put ads on blogsPay Per Post blogging ads on So Sioux Me. It was a tough call, but I hope you'll all be down with it. Girl's gotta make some money to keep the enterprise going in an up and moving kind of way.

So, for this $10 I am recommending that other bloggers get paid to blog with Pay Per Post, I've been doing it for about a week and it seems pretty easy.

Sunday, June 10, 2007

Love Thy Neighbor, Love Thy Self

By Tracee Sioux

I was on the john reading this little devotional. It was a scripture pretty much everyone has memorized, even if they aren't Christian.

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self. Gal. 5:11

And I thought, How many people hate themselves? Women and girls especially. Cutting on themselves, saying "I hate myself' over and over, not allowing themselves to eat, or any number of other destructive behaviors.


The devotional was saying it's hard to love other people when they are so flawed. Boo Hoo. I think it's harder to love yourself if you perceive so many flaws and won't cut yourself any slack.


I had a similar epiphany moment when I heard something else I've heard a million times.


You teach people how to treat you.


I had always thought that meant that if you allow people to keep crossing your boundaries they will keep doing it until you stop accepting that behavior. And it totally does mean that.


But, one day I heard someone use it in a different context. How can you expect anyone on earth to treat you better than you treat yourself?


Of course, she was talking about the way women will sacrifice virtually everything and never even take care of their own physical bodies or mental health. Then women wonder why everyone takes advantage of us and treat us like crap. Well, obviously it's because we treat ourselves with a lack of respect.


I'm a word lover. I love a paradigm shift from a phrase or scripture I've heard a million times and an epiphany about how I'm living my life.


I've started treating myself in a kinder way by taking yoga, exercising, eating better, stopping smoking. I couldn't really say I "love myself" as much as "I love my neighbor" if I'm eating like crap, smoking and running my body into the ground and not taking care of my mental and emotional health. I'm treating my neighbor way better than that, because obviously I'm not actively trying to kill my neighbor with neglect and bad habits.


I've also come to a place where I'm not accepting behavior from friends and family that I used to accept. I'm going to be kind enough to myself to say, "no, you may no longer treat me that way," when someone disregards my boundaries or takes advantage of me or takes my generosity for granted.


I'm not longer going to treat my neighbor better than I treat me. Nor am I going to allow my neighbor to treat me as badly as she treats herself. Because that's not what the verse requires of me.


I hope you'll do the same for yourself and model that for your daughter. Already I've heard the words I hate myself come out of my 5-year-old's mouth when she was upset, frustrated or disappointed that she wasn't perfect the first time she tried something. She can only be getting that from me, because I am the person she emulates. I don't have to verbalize it for her to know it's true.


My task is to make it untrue and make sure she knows it's untrue.

Saturday, June 9, 2007

What the $%^&*!


By Tracee Sioux

Fill in the blank with whatever you want to believe I thought. I didn't say it because my kids were present and I didn't want them to freak out. Inside, I was totally freaking out though. It was a parenting moment for which I found myself with no other response than What the $^#%! my head.

Sometimes my daughter sees me bite my son's nails. If you've ever clipped a baby's nails and cut him, you understand that it makes your gut lurch like you want to perform some kind of flagellation on your self as penance. I read that I should bite his nails to trim them in a baby magazine. My daughter is a little mommy. She takes quite good care of her little brother. Always making sure I am aware of his needs and taking care of him herself if I am blatantly ignoring them while writing these columns.

Today she was climbing over him to get out of the van and noticed his toenail needed trimming and bent over and pulled the entire toenail out of his big toe. He barely flinched. She wanted to know if we should save it for his baby box.

There were so many things wrong with this picture all I could think was What the F$%&!

What I said was, Ainsley, how hard did you bite his toenail? You pulled his whole toenail out. You are not his mother. You need to let ME do things like that. I am his mother. You must be gentle with your brother.
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But, I said it calmly, like it was no big deal. Unlike when I've asked her to pick up the living room numerous times and I really raise my voice as if it's a life and death situation.

I bandaged it up in the gym nursery and went back out the front door to cry and call the pediatrician. Who never called me back.

What truly disturbed me about the incident was that he barely flinched. In fact, he very rarely cries for more than a few seconds when he gets hurt. He's fallen down stairs and didn't cry much. Yesterday, I tried to surgically remove a piece of glass stuck in his heel and he cried while daddy had him trapped in a blanket to keep him still, but the second he was loose he was over it. In fact, just the other day my husband was proudly bragging about Zack's pain tolerance and how we should really exploit that to push him to excel in sports.

But, didn't they pull people's fingernails out as a form of torture? When my daughter lost her thumb nail after smashing it in the car door you would have thought it was about as painful as natural birth. I thought back to that poor little girl I'd seen on Oprah who didn't experience pain at all, they'd had to remove her teeth because she would chew up her arm when she was nervous as a toddler. She would get serious injuries, like burns on her hands, because her brain didn't register when she was touching something hot. She had no pain.

I spent the next hour on the elliptical and treadmill fervently praying for health and wholeness and normal physical, mental, and emotional development for my son, and my daughter too.

Sometimes as parents, I think we wish our children could go through life with no pain. We don't want them to suffer because we love them. But pain is good for kids, it allows them to pull their foot back or remove their hand from fire. Or learn never to something that again.

But, I was extremely relieved as he gave a wail of pain when I poured alcohol on his naked big toe to disinfect it. I was also relieved that he stopped crying rather quickly.

Mr. Z is tough and Ms. Thornton needs to stop doing my job.



Friday, June 8, 2007

Intuition and Instinct

By Tracee Sioux

One of our neighbors is this nice autistic man who is prone to random screaming at the top of his lungs. When they first moved in I ran over there to help whoever was being murdered.

He knocked on the door last week with his neice, a playmate for Ainsley, and asked if Ainsley could come over and play. Ainsley had been eyeing their new above-ground swimming pool with more than a little envy. I politely told him that we were on our way out, but that Cheyenne was welcome over at our house to jump on the trampoline anytime.

In my head, I had already decided that this man and his elderly mother was not enough supervision, so no way was Ainsley going over there to play by herself. My gut told me it was a bad idea and I'm learning to trust my gut.

A few days later Ainsley said, Mom, you know that guy brought that girl and said I could come swim in their pool?

Yeah, I said.

Well, I don't think I want to go over there alone. I'm a little scared, she told me.

You're right Ainsley, I told her proudly. My little voice told me the same thing. I'm not going to let you go play over there, but Cheyenne can come over here and play on the trampoline. I'm proud of you for listening to your gut when it's telling you something is not a good idea. You should always listen to your gut or the little voice inside you, because you can always trust it. It's God's way of telling you the right thing to do.

I don't know when it happens but somewhere along the way we stop listening to our guts. Or the little voice inside ourselves that might feel like a simple butterfly, becomes easily ignored. I think perhaps our parents tell us to suck up fear sometimes, so we quit listening to that intuition or instinct that tells us when there is danger. We start looking for "evidence" or "proof" of danger rather than accepting our butterflies as the evidence.

I don't need proof that the man across the street might be dangerous to my child. My gut is telling me "don't let her" and I'm going to listen. I've taken her out of childcare situations for the same reason - I just "had a bad feeling."

What makes me the happiest is that my daughter is tuning into her intuition, instinct, gut feeling, conscience, God or still small voice of the Holy Spirit working inside her own self.

The trick is to teach a girl (or boy) to go with her gut rather than stiffle it or ignore it. Otherwise, she'll have to learn how to rely on it all over again, later in life after she's already gotten into a bit of trouble.

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Beauty is Within: Beauty and Fashion Blog: “Looks Are Nothing Without Spirit”

I found this Beauty is Within: Beauty and Fashion Blog: “Looks Are Nothing Without Spirit” on a beauty blog carnival one of my articles about my favorite nail polish on www.blogfabulous.com appeared on. My sentiments exactly.

More posts on Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty
Beauty & Reality
Self-Loathing Sin Bank
More posts on hair:
Pink Hair Fiasco
Pink Hair Fiasco Take 2
Curl Maintenance
The Meaning of Hair

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Dear Readers,

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Thanks,
Tracee Sioux

Dear Tooth Fairy,



Dear Tooth Fairy,



I am excited to tell you that I have lost my very first tooth. It's been loose for about two weeks. When I first told my mom that my tooth hurt when I was eating she said, "See, I told you if you didn't brush your teeth good enough they would turn black and fall out of your head. Now we'll have to go to the dentist to see if you have a cavity."



Then she said I might be old enough to start losing my teeth like some of the kids at my school. She told me to wiggle it. It wiggled a little. So, I've been wiggling it and wiggling it a lot lately.



Today a girl at the gym pool shoved my face with a floaty and my tooth popped out in the water. We borrowed goggles and had about 5 kids and my mom diving to see if we could find it. But, we couldn't.



So, please leave the money under my pillow and take this note. You can find the tooth in the pool at the gym.



Love, Ainsley






Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Becoming Mommy, PPD or Identity Crisis?

By Tracee Sioux

I know a few new moms who are finding the transition to Mommy difficult. I can totally relate. I suffered Post-Partum Depression pretty severely after the birth of my first child. I had just witnessed 9-11 which was traumatic and that most likely contributed to the severity of my PPD. I've written a little bit about it in my article Fear Not, if you want to know more details about my extremely difficult transition into Mama.

What baffles me is that we are still lying to our little girls about the whole process of becoming a mother. I say things like, One day you'll grow up and have babies of your own and you'll be so happy. This may turn out to be part of the truth, but what about the rest of it? I've shown the crowning pictures of Ainsley coming out of me to some of my friends and it is quite literally shocking to adult women what exactly happens during birth. No, I do not plan to post pictures of my own vajayjay on the Internet. However, I heard you can see the crowning of a baby on a giant movie screen in Knocked Up. I think it's great and I plan to see it. If my daughter were a teenager I would take her to see it too.

I've had a second child since then and I have had five years to reflect on the massive overhaul of identity that happens when independent and empowered women become mothers and I've never felt like the reality of what becoming a whole new entity gets any validity.

So allow me to rant about becoming Mommy. Maybe, if you're a new mom and feeling not at all like yourself and kind of depressed, you can relate. And hopefully, actually my prayer is, that if you find yourself relating this will bring you a little bit of peace about what you're going through. Also, I hope it will encourage you to be more honest with your daughters or other girls you know about what the experience was like for you.

In America we totally minimize birth and the real trauma of the whole ordeal. One minute you're You. A woman who gets things done. Maybe you order underlings around at work or earn the respect of coworkers with your skills. You have money to play around with, gets to wear clothes you like, cash a paycheck and invest in whatever. You make deals or writes articles or manage a business or do whatever you do in your career. You communicate with adults frequently and daily on an intellectual level.

Your body was yours and you shared it when you felt like it and didn't when you didn't want to. You had a regular cycle and hormones that had been predictable. Therefore you'd learned how to manage your monthly issues since you were 12.

Now BAM you're body has experienced this traumatic violent event - birth. Personally, I thought it was about as violent as being hit by a car. You wouldn't emotionally bounce back from that in six weeks, I don't understand why Americans expect women to bounce back from birth in a month and a half. The event changed your hormones, shape, vajayjay and everything else about you. You gave up your body for nine months to grow a foreign life and told yourself you'd be back to normal after birth. Dream On. Now you're a milk machine. Now you smell of puke. Now you never sleep.

You feel like you are no longer YOU anymore. Your whole entire identity has gone through a dramatic and intense transformation. That's takes more than six weeks or twelve weeks or four months or a year to adjust to. You don't do the things that used to define You as You.

If you're staying at home not working means you're not getting any outside validation for the job you're doing. You're getting no paycheck. You're only getting poopy diapers and the occasional smile or giggle, but it's hard to cash that at the bank. You have to cut costs as expenses rise and you kind of resent not having your hair done like you used to.

Your husband thinks you're doing fandiddly-taskic - so obviously he's not very tuned in to what is actually going on with you. Which equals even less validation. But, there's no way he can really understand because becoming Dad may be an awesome journey for him, but he's still going to work, cashing a check and gets a lot of time away from the needy baby. And no one is sucking on his body half the day.

So what I'm saying is that what you are going through is NORMAL. It sucks but it's normal. You are doing everything right. What you are doing does matter in the long run and it's a valid and legitimate thing to be doing right now. You just have to realize that you are never ever going to get the same emotional kick-back from diapers and naps that you used to get cutting a massive deal in pharmaceuticals or whatever you did. The pay-off is different and there's not a lot of instant gratification staying home with a baby. It takes time and practice to get used to.

I now believe that being a stay-at-home-mom is a craft. Just like writing or any other profession. You have to learn how to do it. You have to make a structure for yourself. If you wake up everyday and just wander around and only do whatever you feel like doing then you will become clinically depressed. Period. You used to look forward to weekends cause it was Your time-off. But, now what do you look forward to? I can tell you the answer - you look forward to your husband coming home from work and you look forward to his time off.

I know you don't want to, but you really have to get out of the house every single day for something - anything. A walk. A neighbor's house. A grocery store trip. A mommy-baby sign language class. You have to leave the house daily.

You also have to "accomplish" at least one thing every day so you don't feel like a total loser. Laundry is something. Cleaning the bathroom is something. Doing a budget is something. Find something every day that you can accomplish and then feel proud of yourself for doing it.

And really you must ditch that baby! If you are taking the baby on your dates with hubby, that's ridiculous! You must leave the baby sometimes or you will lose Self. If You lose You all is lost, because the baby needs You to be You and not some drone who smells like puke and feels like crap. Go out with other women without the baby. Supplement with formula or pump, it's not that big of a deal. Join a book club. Go to a movie. Go out to dinner. Join a gym and leave her in the nursery for an hour while you work out or take a yoga class. You can not become only mom. You must also be You who has other interests outside the home. Otherwise you're just the weird crazy lady who believes the baby will die if she goes out to lunch. That's the definition of insanity! The baby can be without you for a few hours. The baby should be without you for a few hours or she will have attachment issues in only a few short months and that will not be fun for you or her.

Stop reading parenting magazines. They should all be titled "How many ways can you accidentally kill your baby." They induce anxiety and you do not need that much information. They are full of crap most of the time. Too much information is just scaring you can creating anxiety. You don't need to know about every freak accident that might possibly happened to a kid. Throw them away, stop your subscription and buy Secrets of the Baby Whisperer: How to Calm, Connect, and Communicate with Your Baby. She'll give sound advice without making you a panicked mess.

Honestly, physiologically and psychologically, you need to exercise. You just have to force yourself to do it. The endorphins you get from exercise are worth any anti-depressant on the market. Your poor body just went through a massive hormonal surge with way to much estrogen and then almost none overnight. Be kind to your new body and feed your brain some endorphins.

You probably don't want to follow this advice if you're suffering from PPD, but get off your butt and do it anyway.

If you are having compulsive thoughts about hurting yourself or your baby, which now that my child is five, I will admit to having had them. You need to tell your OB/GYN that you're having brief flickering thoughts of hurting your self (really, I think that's enough information to give him a picture of what's going on without getting any authorities involved) and get some medication. The Le Leche League has a list of anti-depressants that you can take while breast feeding.

That said, I wonder if what new moms are really experiencing is a full-blown identity crisis resulting from adding MOM to the mix of SELF.