We've been living in Tampa for a few months now, in our new home for a month, and we are definitely still exploring. Walks through the neighborhood ("In search of kids!" Matilda says), visits to different parks & playgrounds, meals at new (delicious) restaurants, we like this part of moving. Tampa is a whole new city for us, in a state that is home. It feels like a fun and familiar combination of some of the favorite places we've lived. My little brother snapped these while we showed him around.

It's a new skyline...

And it's ours.

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This blog entry is part of a series I'm so excited to be participating in with a group of other lovely bloggers over the next 6 months. You can follow along with "The Sling Diaries" on Pinterest, Facebook, and through the blogs of each mother involved. Each of us were sent two beautiful Sakura Bloom Slings to enjoy and share about each month with a new theme in mind. 

I'm wearing the Sakura Bloom Simple Linen Sling in Blackberry Plum.

I'm a huge fan of Ryan Marshall's photography and writing. When I discovered his blog Pacing the Panic Room we were living many miles away from my dear old Florida and checking in with his stories and images was like getting a postcard from my own orangey backyard childhood memories. Hearing that he was shooting the trailer for Jen Altman's Instant Love book collaboration I knew it'd be cool. We had the pleasure of meeting Jen a couple times when we both lived in Brooklyn, and are proud owners of one of her polaroid portrait prints as she photographed Matilda for a piece in Small Magazine. 

I love polaroids, but the two cameras I've had are broken or long gone, so I'm very interested in the link to Land Cameras that Ryan posted. Going to check them out now!

But first, there's a blog giveaway afoot and that's why I'm posting here. To share with you of course, but also for a few chances at winning a camera for myself (and a copy of Jen's lovely-sounding book that I'll gladly purchase if I don't win). 

Enjoy & Enter!

Happy Belated Mother's Day to any of my mama & mama-to-be friends. I meant to post this earlier, but you know, kids pulling at my pajama pant legs and such.

You are doing an amazing job. I am so grateful to my children and my husband for the gift of motherhood. I am grateful that I was able to choose this path. I'm grateful for the things it has shown me about myself, about the world, about love.

A lot has been said about the Time Magazine "Breastfeeding Cover" over the past week since I started writing this, and so I lot of the thoughts I wrote down have already been said by writers with fancier writing avenues and better developed ideas, but I still wanted to get my little bits down here and into the world. I may edit this a few more times, but if I don't post it now I won't ever post it.

I'm a happily breastfeeding mother, and did so well into toddlerhood with my first child. I believe in breastfeeding, and the science that supports doing it as long as mutually beneficial for the mother-baby dyad. I believe in educating families about it's benefits. Obviously I'm glad that it's getting talked about in mainstream media. I hope the information shared about attachment parenting and breastfeeding inspires women to explore their cultural beliefs about nurturing and nourishing their children. I hope it gets more people breastfeeding!

But Time Magazine uses a photo of a mother nursing her three year old, not to educate women of their option to breastfeed past infancy should that be something that works for their family, but to paint a picture of an extreme (the almost four year old looks more like 6 or 7). They want to make mothers who do this into a sideshow, and to leave mothers who don't wondering if they've done something wrong. I think the picture that Time Magazine chose is meant to shock instead of inform. And though the woman on the cover is young, beautiful, and posing defiantly, extended breastfeeding isn't a "style." It is a biological norm still practiced in many other cultures. That being said, just because some people choose to parent a certain way doesn't mean they're attacking those who don't. Any breastfeeding is good breastfeeding, whether 6 weeks, 6 months, or years. The title on the cover is just so confrontational...and more stress is the last thing mothers need. I fear women will think that if they aren't nursing that long that they aren't doing it right, and it's so important to celebrate that breastfeeding doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing.

I shared a link to this post with friends yesterday. I'm refusing to buy into the so-called "Mommy Wars" the media is trying to stir up as a means to get attention and uprise from the different "camps" of mothering "styles." It garnered a lot of support from my friends, and so I wanted to share some of my thoughts about it here. These are thoughts I've been having for a while now, and it feels good to get them out.

There is nothing that turns me off lately more than people who turn motherhood into a competition. I see it in the birth community. I see it in the homeschool community. I see it everywhere. And I'm done with it. I've fallen prey to it myself, because it becomes part of the way we speak to each other. We speak in "one ups" and competitions of sadness. We've all been up since 3am. We could all use a cup of coffee/piece of cake/bottle of vodka. And we all are just SO BUSY. I am. So are you. I read somewhere recently and I can't remember where, so forgive me for stealing the quote, but "We all have our own freakshows going on." This work and play of parenting is beautiful, difficult, blissful, maddening, joyful, exhausting, all of it. If you don't know what I'm talking about, read this. And there are times that also feel like this. But you know, it keeps getting better. Now read this. 

If I've ever spoken to you and sounded smug about the way I raise my family, I apologize. I think that on some level when we feel bad about our parenting held next to someone else's, it's not becuase it's their fault, but because it does stir something up in ourselves that we want to do better, and that's okay. I've learned so much from other mothers. We're not supposed to know what we're doing right away, we're supposed to work as a village. We learn from each other, we try things out, we respect our differences in situation and philosophy. It's good to aspire to do things we realize we'd like to do differently, but it's also SO SO SO important to realize that we are "Mom Enough" just as we are. Or aren't! This piece says it fancier than I do.

Dear Moms,

This job is not a contest. We're all "Mom Enough" if we're loving our kids and doing our best. Enough with dividing the stay-homes and the working ones, the breasts and the bottles, the cribs and the family beds, the slings and the strollers.

Our kids will not grow up and do battle with each other, American Gladiator style to prove which one was parented the best. They will not wear signs that say "I was birthed in the ocean guided by a dolphin midwife/hurt so bad I made my mom get an epidural/born by c-section/breastfed/formula-fed/private-schooled/homeschooled/unschooled/only ate organic/didn't watch TV/allowed to play video games since I was 1/have a basket of matches and pocketknives in my bedroom." Some kids will have problems despite the most conscious parenting, and some kids will thrive and succeed in spite of the opposite. And it shouldn't be left to the praise or blame of mothers, only mothers.

Where's the cover asking if dudes are "Dad enough?" Our partners/co-parents have just as much to do with how things happen in a family, attachment parenting or otherwise. 

The "mommy wars" are another silly man made distraction from more important issues at hand, like how women still make 77 cents on the man's dollar, how birth control may soon be inaccessible to many (get your parenting chops ready, teenagers!) and how workplaces continue to make life difficult for women who choose motherhood. Let's fight THOSE wars together instead of letting silly ones divide us.

Sigh. Stepping down from the soapbox.

Let's mix it all up and do what we like. You're all awesome. The End.

Love, 

Mary Catherine

And a big ol' P.S...

One other MUCH more important issue facing mothers around the world is that not all of us survive it. Yes, even here in the fancy shmancy technological medical United States. Every Mother Counts shares some scary statistics.

1. Approximately 358,000 women die each year due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth. That's one woman every 90 seconds.

2. For every woman who dies each year in childbirth, 20-30 more suffer from lifelong debilitating disabilities.

3. Pregnancy is the number one cause of death in women, ages 15-19, in the developing world. Nearly 70,000 young women die every year because their bodies are not ready for parenthood.

4. Over 200 million women who would like to choose when they get pregnant don’t have access to family planning.

5. The United States ranks 50th globally in maternal mortality, even though it spends more on health care per capita than any other nation in the world. African American women are four times more likely to die in childbirth than Caucasian women.

Love your kids today in the best way you know how. Because you can, because you will, and not because any book told you to.