ElementalMom

Kestrel wanted me to take a picture of him and Aurora. He had been holding her for a while, and thought they looked cute. So I picked up the camera.

Clearly, Kestrel was far more interested in being photogenic than Aurora was.

Jason stepped in to try to get her to focus in the same spot, and maybe even get a smile out of her.

Kestrel even tried to help, to little photographic avail.

Finally everyone gave up.

The irrepressible Kestrel decided to entertain himself…

And got Aurora in on the act… providing a better photo op than all the others together.

Tags: Aurora, Kestrel, Posing

Yesterday, I received an email forward simultaneously from both of my favorite Jessicas in the world. They were pointing me towards a woman who had a bunch of frozen milk to donate to some worthy baby, and they both thought of Halima.

I pounced, and immediately sent the woman, Gal, an email asking for the milk on Halima’s behalf. And then went and read her blog, Growing Inside. For a while. And then I sat and held Aurora and cried (I’m actually crying again just typing this out now).

Gal’s baby girl, Tikva, passed away at 8 weeks old. That’s how old Aurora will be on Friday. And Gal has been pumping all 8 weeks, not knowing if she was going to be able to feed Tikva or not, and wanting to keep her supply going. So there are now three huge ice chests of milk for Halima, and Willa, another baby whose mother cannot nurse her for medical reasons. They are Tikva’s milk sisters, as Aurora is Halima’s.

Women are so strong, so tough. They go through so much just to keep the species going. I am struck by the fact that these little girls are all of different ethnicities and religions. At some place in the world, the men of each of their heritages are trying to kill each other. And here in the Bay Area, women, mothers are coming together in a heartbeat to nurture our young in the best way we possibly can, and take joy in the connections we can make.

Hope, apparently, and love, come through breastmilk.

Tags: milk siblings

Aurora's Dolphin Dreaming

Miss Aurora down for the afternoon nap. Who knows what babies dream of? We can only guess.

Tags: Aurora, babymoon, naptime

It’s clear I haven’t been blogging much by how my LWOS announcements stack up. And lest anyone harangue me for working on those posts instead of Aurora’s birthstory, I wrote the LWOS posts up while I was still pregnant. So there. Anyway, this post is a fun one, about something astonishingly cool that Rowan did.

http://lifewithoutschool.typepad.com/lifewithoutschool/2008/07/upside-down-and.html

Tags: dyslexia, LWOS, Reading, Unschooling

I‘m working on the birthstory, the announcement, and all that good stuff. But for right this instant… I had to post this photo.

I love the “getting to know you” phase. It’s everything babymooning is about.

More later, I promise!

Tags: Aurora, Family, Jason babymoon, Parenting

La Leche League founder Edwina Froehlich died last Sunday. She was 93.
I am completely devastated. Edwina pretty much embodied everything I admire in an activist. And also proved that even if you come late to your passion, you can change the world.

My favorite article about her, so far, is the Chicago Tribune piece. Some tidbits:

In the 1940s, Mrs. Froehlich witnessed her older sister Pauline go through what were then standard hospital childbirth procedures: plenty of drugs, the use of forceps and no fathers allowed, said another son, state Rep. Paul Froehlich (D-Schaumburg). Her sister also was discouraged from breast-feeding.

“That experience led mom to seek a better way,” Paul Froehlich said.

Newspapers would not run stories or meeting notices that included the word “breast,” so the group used the Spanish word for milk, “leche,” for its name.

How fabulous is that? Smack into some stupid arbitrary rule, and work around it creatively. See what’s wrong with the world, and change it. Some other fun bits from the New York Times piece:

Edwina Froehlich,… was inspired to help found La Leche League to support breast-feeding after being told at the age of 35 that she was too old to make breast milk for her baby…

A pioneer on several fronts of motherhood, she worked for Young Christian Workers, a Roman Catholic lay organization, before marrying John Froehlich when she was in her early 30s. She had her first child a couple of years later, making her comparatively old to have a first child at the time, and she made the controversial decision to forgo giving birth in a hospital in favor of a more natural delivery in her Franklin Park, Ill., home, with an obstetrician attending.

“We used to tell the mothers the three main obstacles to successful breast-feeding were doctors, hospitals and social pressure,” Mrs. White said.

It is so hard to be an “older” mother. It’s so hard to stand up when the world wants to shame you for doing what’s biologically appropriate in birthing and feeding your offspring. Having had a cesarean with my first baby, and feeling that breastfeeding was at least something I could do right, it’s because of Edwina’s work that I was able, 2.5 weeks out from that cesarean, to participate in the Berkeley, CA Guinness World Record Breastfeeding event. It healed a lot of the “broken” feelings I was working through. Breastfeeding has also been a really good arena for me to use in my birth activism work, to show mothers how very wrong doctors can be about very basic things.

But at the time Edwina and her six cohorts (Marian Tompson, Mary White, Mary Ann Cahill, Mary Ann Kerwin, Viola Lennon, and Betty Wagner) got started with LLLI, breastfeeding in America was down to 20% of women. It’s not a whole lot better now, but without them to hold back the tide, who knows how much harder it might have been for me to get the support and encouragement I needed for this critical aspect of mothering?

So thank you, Edwina, for standing up for what you believed in, and making it that much easier for me to do so as well. You’ll be missed.

Tags: , Breastfeeding, Edwina Froehlich, La Leche League

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90272530

Jonathan just sent me this link, to a segment on Fresh Aire with Jonathan Paskowitz, and his documentary Surfwise. This film both encourages and terrifies me, frankly.

When you’re steeped in a fear-based society, sometimes it feels safer to stay under the radar as far as possible, and a lot of that is letting people assume what makes them comfortable, and not making too much noise about the choices your family makes, because that way, you aren’t dealing with possible State interference. You can talk to people about homebirth, homeschool, blah blah blah, but not all at once, because they shut down and assume you’re completely insane and/or incompetent.

Then along comes a film like this.

Compared to what the Paskowitzes did, what we’re planning is tame. Nine kids in a 24-foot trailer makes three kids in a 47-foot boat sound pretty palatial and spacious. So that’s cool. And while we do enjoy the raw food thing, my kids know what fat and sugar are, and are allowed to indulge. I’m thinking I might keep this film up my sleeve, to show folks that we’re not nearly as extreme as we sound.

But once I’m done with self-protection mode, I start really thinking about what those folks did, and wishing someone had covered the stuff I really want to know. Like… do all nine kids still like each other? What kinds of encouragement in learning were they able to do? How did they manage things like laundry? You know, the real details of making a family like that really work… in a 24 foot trailer, nonetheless.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll have more to say when I’ve gotten to see it. Stay tuned.

Tags: Paskowitz, Surfwise

This is a guest post. I’ve been stockpiling ideas for a while, and in a fit of inbox-cleaning, have been unearthing gems lost in the clutter. I was going to riff on this idea myself, and then decided that Dawn’s words were so perfect, I’d just be messing with it. So here we go… Dawn Radcliffe-Snell, on Vampires and Unschooling.

Ah, I always want to post about something I’m reading on this list, and so rarely can manage the time and focus (even as I type my 3 yr old is trying to climb on my lap and put his had down my shirt! LOL!). It’s interesting, to really be present with my children, even as I try to squeak in writing. I do my best, and sometimes things slide into gear…

But this one I gotta respond to - I know pedophiles! Not a great claim to fame, but it is very true. Yes, I was molested as a child (like so so many), had three different pedophiles in my life, and at 19 put myself in therapy and then eventually went to the DA and prosecuted my dad. He was/is one of those sneaky pedophiles - not the kind that drags you off into the bushes, but the kind that gets into your head first. These are the dangerous ones. I’m not saying the drag-you-off-into-the-bushes guys aren’t to be avoided (wry grin), just that they are not the norm (most molesters know their victims) and they are more easily avoided.

The answer is not to make children afraid of strangers - in effect you are teaching them to be afraid of people, which ironically is at the root of a pedophile’s sickness. Pedophiles are afraid, feel completely alone (even if they’re not), and they are in pain you and I cannot imagine. They have become disconnected from their souls (it would take me a book to explain that probably), and yet are so hungry to feel better that they turn into, basically, vampires (I’m speaking metaphorically of course).

This is very much why I have chosen this path of unschooling, of radical parenting. Not because I am afraid for my children to be around other adults, around other “potential molesters”, but because I want my children strong, connected to their spirits. Children that maintain that connection to their inner knowing, to their instincts (I could use a lot of different nouns here, but basically I’m saying when they are happy and vibrant and soul-full) they KNOW themselves, they KNOW their world, they’re tuned in! Happy children with their voices and spirits intact do not make pedophile prey! My abusers did not molest me and then I was de-spirited, I was already mentally molested, I had already been emotionally severed, they just came in for the kill like any predator would.

Yeah, we could talk about my dad and how much of that de-spiriting came from him, but he was not the only one. It is all around, our society in many very well-meaning ways tells us as children to not hear our own voices, to ignore our selves. That is the root of it. (I cannot tell you how many well-meaning people have tried to tell my children to listen to them simply by virtue of the fact they are “adults”! Luckily my kids just look at them like they’re crazy! LOL!). Children are set up by our “control-based” society. You can try to avoid all the molesters you want to, but if a child is crippled and crushed, it’s a losing battle. Lift the child up, allow them to be who they came to be, happy and strong and loved. And as they are these things, they will naturally be protected (there’s another book to write of explaining…), they will be strong, loving, open, giving, which is why I say “Yes, honey, talk to those happy, nice people!” ‘Cause I know without a doubt that they won’t want to talk to the “unhappy nice ones”. Children get it better than we do IF WE LET THEM.

When I contacted her, struck by the metaphor of the vampire as pedoscele, she elaborated thusly:

And I have to thank you - I see so many connections ‘twix the two and assumed everyone else did too, that I didn’t think of the comparison as “potent”. But it truly fit for me, my joy (my spirit, energy, effervescence, self-belief…) was certainly sucked dry by some-bodies that couldn’t make it for themselves. It is interesting to think about, there are connections like:

• If you want to kill a vampire, put a stake through its heart (because that’s what needs to die, a faulty wretched heart).
• They can’t be seen in mirrors (’cause they’re not really there, they are living in the illusion of soul-lessness).
• They can’t stand garlic (garlic is a healer & blood cleanser).
• They can’t stand sunlight, they do their deeds in the darkness, hiding physically and metaphorically (bring them into the light and they fry!).
• They were bitten by a vampire themselves!
• They are considered damned.
• They are usually shown as suave, sophisticated, clever, slick, alluring, charming…

And I thought it was interesting how one of the producers of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” spoke of how the show was a mirror of the “vampires” teens have to kill to truly grow up, be whole w/themselves. It was why the show was popular he said. Now, I don’t plan on my children having to kill vampires to grow up, I plan that they are, by the nature of their very strongly already “being alive”, naturally avoiding it, but I completely get what the producer was saying - most kids today do have to fight many different kinds of “suckers”!

Thanks Dawn. Even though you wrote this post over a year ago, it still resonates. Vampires, indeed.

Tags: , Guest Post, Pedoscele, vampire

Tooth #2 is officially gone!

It’s the matching bottom tooth, so now he has a great gap front n’ center bottom, through which to whistle, or rest a straw. The Tooth Fairy brought him a lovely silver dragon charm, which he has not physically let go of in 24 hours or so.

This one hung on for very little time, compared to how long the other one was wiggly, which tells me that I’d better get busy stockpiling Fairy gifts.

Oh, and how’s this for cool? Picked it up off a homeschooling list… sometimes, when there’s no tooth at all, the Tooth Fairy randomly shows up with new toothbrushes, encouragements to brush, and other dental hygiene goodness. How cool is that?

As usual, things are nutty in the birth advocacy world. It’s not worth going into the details, but recently, I was questioned by someone who basically said that because I was a mother of sons, not daughters, my birth advocacy work didn’t have the urgency that the work mothers of daughters had. You know, because my boys were never going to get subjected to what women here routinely do.

That part’s true. My sons will never be the direct physical victims of the physical, emotional, and mental abuse that passes for birth care in this country.

My sons, like their father before them, are likely to end up being helpless observers as the women they love are gutted like halibut. Woken up from a restless sleep in an uncomfortable chair to discover that other people have decided that it’s time to take your firstborn child by surgery. Completely discounted, completely marginalized, completely ignored. Here, put this surgical suit on; we’ll let you into the OR so you can see your wife’s intestines, smell her skin roasting when we do cautery, hold her hands when she starts convulsing, and have a moment of sheerest panic when we take the baby to the nursery; here, decide on a dime who needs your presence more, your helpless newborn or your helpless wife. Try really hard not to guilt yourself for either decision, but do so anyway.

My sons, like their father before them, will head home with a woman who underwent a surgery that everyone minimizes. Who is a shell of herself. Whose world was ripped apart and reassembled with vicodin and steri-strips. And they will be looking at between a year and as many years as the rest of her life, wondering when they get the woman they married back. And in the meantime, if she’s lucky, she’ll figure out that it’s the system, not her, and get her act together. If she’s not lucky, she’ll spend her days sitting in a rocker pulling on her hair, trying to figure out what’s wrong with her. Maybe she’ll get medicated, maybe she won’t. And my sons will be there, trying to deal with that and a newborn, and wondering where it all went wrong, and powerless to do a damn thing about it.

I have nothing to worry about. I’ll just be the mother in law, watching the impending train wreck, with no way to get in there and be useful to prevent … anything.

Friends… my urgency is huge. And there’s not nearly so much time as we think. In the time since advocacy groups began howling about the rate of cesareans, ours here in the US has skyrocketed from 5% to just over 31%. At that rate… by the time my sons are having children, my scenario is far more likely than the chance that the mother of their children will have a normal birth.

I could get lucky. They could hook up with women who know the score, who know how to fight, who are strong enough to have a normal birth. And of course I wish that for them with all my heart. But you know… *I* didn’t know any better. And in the years I’ve been doing this birth advocacy thing, I have met all kinds of women who are the sorts of women who could love, cherish, and honor my sons, who didn’t know any better. Not the first time, at any rate. Sometimes not even the second or third, and by that point, the fight to birth normally is insanely difficult, and uphill every step of the way, in the snow, both directions. I can’t assume my boys will hook up with women who are birth advocates. I have to assume they’ll be normal women, having normal lives, who are unaware of the monster of US obstetrics.

I can pray that I’ll have a relationship with them based on respect and support, and that maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll have earned the right to be involved in their process. It does happen; I myself have a wonderful MiL. But I can’t assume that.

Which means that I have serious work to do, on behalf of all women. And there simply isn’t much time.

Tags: birth-activism, Cesarean

The latest “sky is falling” panic to hit the homeschool lists is this case, wherein a judge basically declared homeschooling illegal unless you have a credentialed teacher in front of the child each day.

Naturally, mayhem, speculation, and doomsaying commenced.

My friend Tammy really summed it up nicely on her blog, where she states:

But right now, the best course of action is to know that we are strong here. We aren’t afraid that everything will fall apart, and we don’t need to spread panic in order to feel better about something we don’t know a whole lot about… If we panic now, how is that any different than being sucked in by sensationalist news on TV? Let’s rise above and be calm, wise and ready.

Precisely. It boggles my mind that people can think for themselves enough to become homeschoolers, and yet still do the Chicken Little thing on email lists, when a quick common-sense check tells you that the already overburdened, underfunded, and closing California state schools are NOT pushing for a return of the homeschoolers. While I’m the first to admit that our government is not always out for our best interest (HA!), even they would not set up such a scenario. At least, not in an election year. In 2009, maybe I’ll worry again.

Last night, the waiting was over. After wiggling around for three solid weeks, Rowan lost his first tooth.

I‘d been in a meeting in Menlo Park in February 13, being all busily corporate, when Jason IMd me with this exchange:

11:54 AM teamhudson: hello love

11:57 AM guess what?

11:58 AM me: what?

11:59 AM teamhudson: Rowan has his first loose tooth
bottom front middle right incisor

12:00 PM me: eeeeeeeeeek

12:01 PM teamhudson: uh huh

12:02 PM I think I’m right in thinking that’s also the first one that came in

12:03 PM several places say that’s likely, and he’s about the right age

12:04 PM me: I think so; he is

teamhudson: Cuz my first reaction was “Already?”

I‘ll be honest; I was trying hard not to choke up, that my little boy’s first loose tooth happened while I was not home. I freaked just a little that it meant I was somehow A Lesser Mother. And of course, because it’s me… I also immediately started researching.

There are all kinds of beautiful options for creative treatment of the Tooth Fairy gifts for girls. Pearl bracelets, charm bracelets, necklaces… all kinds of gorgeous options. For boys? Not so much. And it made me really, really sad that for girls, there is imagination and creativity, but I guess little boys are supposed to be OK with spare cash. It’s kind of the same thing you find about boys’ clothes. Sports, military themes, and commercialization are fine. It’s impossible to find a boy counterpart to the cute pink t-shirt we bought one of the nieces, that spells out in rhinestones, “Fairies Rock”. How about “Elves Rule”, huh?

So, determined to do better, I flung a quick request northwards, and within days, Rowan’s Auntie Ria had made a gorgeous glossy red beaded pouch (Rowan’s favorite color), and Nana and Grandpa Al had found a Sac Dollar and a small charm with gold dust to put in it. I was set… materially… to respond to the eventual loss of the tooth.

Except that then there’s the philosophical question. Do you tell them about the Tooth Fairy, or not? I know people who consider that sort of thing to be a form of institutionalized lying. We haven’t gone too overboard with Santa or the Easter Bunny; I think Rowan already is fairly sure those are just made-up characters. So this was my chance, if I took it, to put the magic back in, and give him something else to believe in. I quizzed Jennie, my hairstylist, about what she’d done. Her sons are slightly older than mine, and she admitted that it had been as much of a question of hers as it currently was of mine; what’s the right thing to do? Give em reality straight-up, or keep the magic going? She polled her clients, when it had been her son’s turn, and discovered that the majority of grown adults wished their parents had held the magic for them for just a little longer.

Naturally, it wasn’t even a question for Jason. He held out for magic. So yesterday evening, when Rowan came yelling “Mama! Mama! It’s out!”, I had my plan of action. I pulled out the pouch (which he instantly adored), told him it was for holding his tooth, we put his tooth in there (after showing it proudly to Kestrel, to Papa, and to Uncle Marc), and then when he went to bed, we hung it from a ribbon on the ceiling, so that the Tooth Fairy could come take the tooth and replace it with treasure.

After he fell asleep, but before I did (and there’s a tight time window there), I tipped up the pouch, got the tooth, and placed the treasures inside. And teared up, just a little. It’s hard to put into words, the confluence of emotions, at that point. I remember being the kid wondering what the Tooth Fairy would bring. I was the Mama, in charge of making that dream happen. I remember being the kid, totally unable to keep my tongue from testing that weird spot in my teeth where something wasn’t any more. I am the Mama,

trying to capture that in a picture.

This morning, he woke up early, and I could hear him checking out what the Tooth Fairy had left. He rocketed upstairs to share his “loot” with me, and ask me why the Tooth Fairy doesn’t let itself be seen, and why it had left what it did, and and and…

Mission accomplished. The magic is there. And he’s looking forward to the loss of the next tooth, to see what the Tooth Fairy comes up with this time. And so am I.

This hit my feed reader this AM:

http://yellodyno.typepad.com/yello_dyno_blog/2008/02/realistic-fake.html

Realistic fake photos challenge child porn prosecutors.

Each week, about 100,000 sexually explicit images of children arrive on CDs or portable disk drives at Michelle Collins’ office.

Although challenges to digital photos come in all types of criminal and civil cases, they are especially pronounced in child-pornography cases because of a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down a ban on computer-generated child pornography. Defense attorneys are trying to use the ruling to introduce reasonable doubt in jurors’ minds about the images’ authenticity. And many law-enforcement officials worry that the time and money needed to withstand any challenges will only grow as technology improves and makes it more difficult to tell a computer-generated image from a real one…

Some of you work in the this arena. Please give us more insight into this issue so we can help to ensure children’s safety.

So please, if you have the talent (and the heart) to help, please contact Jan at YelloDino.

There’s nothing like a pregnancy to make you start really thinking about your eating. Again.

We are already pretty “different” about our food. We did a phase of hardcore raw, but then fell off the wagon what with the move onto the boat, and then my pregnancy. And of course, cold weather does not encourage a raw diet, it just doesn’t. And it has been cold this year.

But you know, the question of “what” to eat is beginning to pale really, really fast, when compared with the question of “how” to eat.

I stumbled into The Cleaner Plate Club a while back… she’s brilliant. Her “How I Taught My Kid to Curse and Why I Blame Big Food” is a work of genius, and I cannot read “The many things I can talk about” with a straight face (course, that’s my face wobbling between laughing and crying, but anyway, it’s a fabulous post.)

If you clicked on those links, you wandered off Cleaner Plate and onto The Ethicurean: Chew The Right Thing. She’s got a series of digests up right now that are anything but digestable. The two pieces about “accidental” GMO contamination of corn and rice crops both make me really, really nervous.

After a whole childhood colored by Feingold, the idea that diet impacts behavior is old, old news to me. Course apparently it is news to science, and a big study at the end of 2007, published in Lancet, indicates that really, I haven’t been insane for the last 30 years, artificial crap in your food makes you unwell! How novel! ::sigh:: I’m printing a copy of this study out, to beat people with who continue to insist that I’m making it up when Rowan freaks out from consuming HFCS or coloring.

So what’s my point? My point is that the more you read, from Downergate to Pollan, the state of food here in the US is absolutely abysmal. Finding real food to feed your family is getting tougher all the time, let alone organic, seasonally-appropriate, healthy food. Going to the grocery is a depressing endeavor, not because it’s so hard to find what Pollan calls “real food”, but because even then, there’s danger (like the time I saw a produce guy putting clearly non-organic broccoli in the organic bins, and who, when I called him on it, shrugged and said “no one knows the difference without the labeling.”).

So how does a gestating, lactating, mother of growing people, ensure that everyone’s eating stuff they really should be, and not eating the kind of yuck that is becoming more and more common in our food supply? It’s a trick, without being fulltime hunters and gatherers. I’d be interested to hear how other people are dealing with this…

Previously, I’ve posted about Digital Natives, (here and here) mostly in terms of how unschooling is pretty much the most ideal way to approach the sticky problem of trying to be an authority to someone who can look up your sources faster than you can.

It did not occur to me, until I was sitting in a room with about 40 other corporate web content delivery professionals (a set of Kiss-of-Death adjectives if ever there were), at a recent gathering for sharing of information about using multimedia on websites, how thoroughly our assumptions are informed by the schooling we got. The point was to familiarize people with the technologies available, and give them some ideas for how to use them.

So how come, I’m sitting there wondering, less than 1/4 of the presentations actually used multimedia? See, corporate folks? Their attention is on keeping their jobs, and looking good for their management. Sort of like how kids in school want to impress the teacher. More and more, I’m convinced that they don’t actually participate in the web beyond what’s required in their daily work, the same way that schooled kids tend to do what’s required for the grade, and not much more, and certainly not much different.

For example, one presentation stressed strongly how important it is to have good solid metadata in things like videos, because there’s no text for a search engine to provide more context and/or relevancy through, so the tagging you give is pretty much all you get. People all over the room are nodding and smiling, like this is news.

Um, hello? Old news, folks. My son Rowan, who is five, understands metatagging. He knows how to start the laptop, launch a browser window, get to YouTube, and search for Tom & Jerry cartoons… in English. He also gets really upset when his searches return videos in other languages (although sometimes he thinks the Japanese ones are pretty funny…). He gets that lack of appropriate tagging is a usability problem, because that’s what it is for him. Of course, he doesn’t have the language to fully express all that the same way we do. But the fact is that as a consumer of multimedia content, his behavior and his reactions are utterly predictable, and at age five, he is already forming opinions about the technological acuity of the people who post such content.

You can remind people to tag their content, but if they are not consumers of such content, they won’t really understand, as Rowan does, how insanely frustrating it is when it all goes pearshaped.

So then, later in the day, people are talking about using new media (whatever that is) to attract “the new developer”… you know, the youth who are driving things now. And I’m nodding, cause I totally agree. And then they start talking, heaven help me, about the Universities and speaking to college students! And in my head, I can see Rowan, already cruising the web, already conversant with how to click past annoying Flash intro pages, already becoming a savvy consumer of online technology. Considering the ugly brushes we’ve already had with minor forms of academia, (here and here), the very idea of my child going to college is ridiculous, and waiting to graduate from the Ivory Towers Of Ossified Thinking to become successful is laughable in the economy of today.

Rowan knows who Duke is, he knows what Flash animation is, and he knows to look for the blessed “skip this intro” buttons. He knows what HTML is, and I’m teaching him coding, a little bit at a time. I think about him encountering his first “Hello, World” and I cringe just a little bit. Just like it’s absurd for a roomful of adults who don’t even use multimedia to stand around talking about presenting it to people who are native users of it, it’s absurd to think that someday some professor will be more competent to teach my child about the Cloud than he, who’s been breathing it for years, is.

I‘d like to really recommend that my colleagues and compatriots leave work early, go home… and watch their kids interact with the digital environment. They will learn far more from that exercise about the context of the Digital Native, and about the reality of content propagation for that audience, than they will by listening to a roomful of Digital Immigrants blather on about a sky they’ve never even really seen.