Parent Extremis

Greetings!

I’m the new writer for Parent Extremis. I’m no more qualified to write for this site than I am to care for my own seven week old baby. So it should be a fun ride! No, really, I plan to use this site to evaluate and discuss a variety of parenting issues. I hope you will stay tuned for some potentially riveting, or at least mildly interesting discussions of all the issues I can dream up including breast versus bottle feeding, sleep issues (co-sleeping vs. crying it out), the effect of pregnancy on the family, dealing with pediatrician visits and vaccination controversy, dealing with toddlers, heading back to work, discipline methods and much more.

I recently became a stay at home mom, or a work at home mom who does some freelance writing, to Noah, born December 21, 2007. He is almost eight weeks old and I love him more than life itself. We live with my hardworking and devoted husband, Marc, four cats and a yappy little dog.

I confess that too often I look at other children and other parents, and assume that if I’m doing something similar to the other parents, and that if my child is doing something similar to other children, I’m not doing a bad job as a parent.

The only problem is, character isn’t graded on a curve. Just because everybody is doing it doesn’t make it right. My slave-owning ancestors probably were men of character in many ways. Just not in the area of slave-owning. Some of them were against secession, against the Civil War. But they weren’t willing to leave their plantations to do something about it. They were only willing to leave their plantations to do what everybody else was doing, which was to die in battle. Character has consequences.

In Elie Wiesel’s book Night, a pious villager returns to his former home with stories of the Holocaust that is beginning. He has seen it with his own eyes, but his former neighbors don’t believe him. They don’t flee. They had been taught religion and character, but not the character that gives you the courage to believe the truth even when it means you have to leave everything that’s familiar to you. Most of these villagers died in the Holocaust.