Baby Einstein

Aitana likes Baby Monet's video of the seasons. I like to pretend that her favorite is Summer, but I think she prefers Spring. My theory is that since Spring is the first one, her attention is still fresh and impressionable. And the colors of the flowers help, too.

(I am multiply exiled. I no longer live in my country. I no longer live in a real community of friends or family--my own nuclear family does not count as a community. It is way too small. I feel like an outsider where I live, exiled from this society of an odd normalcy that I cannot relate to. And now, I am even exiled from my own blog. ..)

She is sitting on my lap wanting to do something interesting. But it's hard to do things with a creature whose head still falls forward when she sits up too straight.

Perhaps we should go outside. Perhaps perhaps perhaps.

Let us try another Baby Einstein video. Maybe that is interesting enough...

The Veil in School

And other things...

There is a debate here about Muslim women's veils... there are some schools in Spain where nobody can wear anything on their head (baseball caps or condom hats or veils... and wigs?)... so it's opened this debate which in France is more-or-less sealed: the state forbids females from wearing veils to school, whether they want to wear it or not, because it signals oppression. That means some teenage girls do not go to school at all. That means some teenage girls who might have grown to not wanting to wear it, will now wear it and be activists about it. That means that some who are religious and want to wear it are not allowed to do so by the state. And some who did not want to wear it at all are now happy because they don't have to and their parents still send them to school.

I think that no school should should forbid the veil (I'm not saying chador or burka), until it also forbids rosary beads, crucifixes and crosses on necklaces, t-shirts that claim any ethnic or regional identification... etc... as a matter of fact, it should be illegal for parents to pass on their religion to their children, because that violates kids' freedom of choice, dammit! If you grow up in an X-adoring household you will probably follow X without really having had the freedom to choose, to know options, to judge by yourself... that is one of the things that they say here: "if a girl grows up in a household in which the veil is so normal that she cannot imaginer herself without it, then she is sort of forced to wear it..."  Wha...!?

Well, Aitana is starting to change from Fidgety Baby to Fussy Baby so I better cut that transformation short!!!

-Y