Knitting Without Needles

Annie Modesitt is my hero!

ALRIGHT! No more feeling badly about my weird knitting style!! Yippee!! I was watching Annie Modesitt on Knitty Gritty and low and behold what’s that she’s doing? she knits like me! YES!

I am a COMBINATION KNITTER! HAHA! I don’t twist my stitches I don’t do it wrong! (well . . . → Read More: A Knitting Heritic

Perhaps I am a little jaded. After all I am worn out after changing one icky yucky poopy diaper, and then same again on the three year old who is supposed to be using the potty, and then wrestling same said three year old to sleep because he really needed a nap! My teeth need to be brushed my hair needs to be brushed I have to get swatches done for the book and it’s 85 degrees INSIDE..

But when I came across this article today, I was just stunned. Floored. Flabbergated! It is about Isabel the founder of AlphaMomTV. An on demand network for ‘parents’ that
” will be like a support group or a church—the church of the immaculate perfection. Goal-oriented parents can go there and find comfort that they’re not alone, that others are also struggling to grow the perfect child. They’ll be told what to do and what not to do and how to do it better…”

What happened to the happy child? The normal child? Why do they have to be perfect?

To sum it up, Isabel was a high power marketer working on Wall Street. Working 100 hours a week was just not fufilling any more. So she set out to take a break, weigh her options and
“do the baby while she was at it. And the baby, she thought, was eminently doable, “something we really dedicated time in our schedules for.”

UGH! She talks about the baby like it was a thing to check off a to do list!

So she had the baby and found herself completely unprepared for motherhood. She sought out the hippest and newest parenting ideas when her child cried all the time.

“The more Isabel’s child demanded of her, the more she went out to learn. And the more she learned, the more she was told to stay close—and the more people she hired who could do that for her.

This was motherhood’s magic bullet, the most valuable lesson Isabel learned in her studies: “It takes a village.” Isabel quickly hired one. Her son was just 2 weeks old when she retained a night nurse. When he was 5 months, “I started realizing I needed to get out more,” and she brought on a nanny. Then after about a year, when she started working, “I obviously needed more help,” so she hired a regular babysitter as well—also often employing her father and an Alpha Mom intern.”

I don’t know about you but hiring other people to be close to your child and meet their needs? Why bother ‘doing’ the child in the first place?

“While the village watched him, she set out to master motherhood”

Isn’t a HUGE part of motherhood being there and learning about your child FROM your child?

Her vision of national motherhood is grim: these “women who live in the Snow Belt, and they have just one car, and the husband drives off with it in the morning.” Isabel has known isolation like that. She wants to do something to help.

Ok.. let’s refer to an earlier quote.. “Her son was just 2 weeks old when she retained a night nurse.” There is just NO WAY you can know that type of isolation in TWO WEEKS in MANHATTAN! Come on!

This woman has no idea!

NOT. A. CLUE!

So what is she doing? She has started the AlphaMomTV to teach other mothers how to be the best they can be…and is now again working 100 hour weeks.

“You know what I love? I have absolute control over my day. I carve out the time I want with my son and the time I want with my husband. Everything I do is on my own terms.”

Wow.. well there are days I wish I could carve out time for a shower, or to brush my hair or to just be by myself. It seems what this woman is pushing is mothering skills for the ME generation. Our society just seems to be pushing off responsibility to make way for self fulfillment. If you look at that statement there is abolutely no concern about her son’s needs, or for her husband’s needs. Just ME Icarve out the time Iwant with them.

If this is the magic bullet of motherhood, boy, am I way off the mark!

I got to watch the ribbon cutting ceremony through an online video feed for my father in law’s new toy!

Not bad eh?

Oh what is it? A supercomputer of course! It is Big Ben. The Cray XT3 named after the Steeler rookie Ben Roethlisberger (they like to name their computers after Pittsburgh team . . . → Read More: My Father in law’s new toy!