Hudson: 10 months

Sheesh.  Where does the time go??  I am constantly behind on my "baby-book" documentation!  :) Oh well, here goes:

This little man is always on the move!  It was crazy to re-read this, from Ellie's 10 month entry, because she wasn't even crawling at this point, and Hudson's been crawling for 4 months already!

Hudson:

*can push a walker and walk holding onto our hands.

*can stand on his own for several seconds.
*has 2 top teeth and 2 bottom teeth that have come in, and one more on both the top and bottom that are on their way.  It's changed his whole look, but that grin is still SO adorable!

*babbles mamama, dadada, bababa
*eats anything we put in front of him, with the exception of beans.  He will eventually eat the beans if I mix them w/ yogurt, but they're definitely not his favorite.  He's getting good at the pincer grasp, though, with lots of practice picking up cheerios!

*still nurses 3 times/day (just weaned the 11 am feeding this week).
*has a morning nap from 9-10 still; an afternoon nap from 1-3; goes to bed at 7, wakes up at 7.  The last 2 months have been awful though, as far as waking up multiple times in the night due to teething, coughing, congestion, etc.
*has had that cough for almost 2 months now!  We finally put him on an antibiotic and after improving for 2 days, he suddenly got much worse.  The dr. then prescribed a stronger dose, which made him break out into a rash.  So, round 3 is now almost complete and he is finally starting to sound better.  We'll be happy to have our sweet baby back... he's been much more of a fussy pants lately, which is not like him.
*was Sandy (from Annie) for his first Halloween.

*weighs about 20 lbs; is in 25 percentile for weight, 75th for height!  In other words, he's a bean-pole... not roly-poly like big sis. :)

*knows to rock back and forth when I put him on my knees, in anticipation of "Trippety-Trop."

*loves his bath, but I constantly have to make him sit back down so he won't fall.

*still puts everything in his mouth.  His favorite toys are still rattle-like toys that he can chew on.  Currie says Hudson's world is mono-categorical: Things That I Can Put In My Mouth.

*is too cute for words! (This last one is actually a 9 mo. picture, but I just can't resist that adorable face!) 

9th Anniversary Weekend

8 months

*two bottom teeth
*"cruising" around the furniture
*loves to bang on his highchair tray
*must. move.
Sweet Boy.

The drawbacks of central planning

"One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century."

--"Our One-Party Democracy", by Thomas Friedman. Op-ed, New York Times, September 9, 2008.

Some of the 'drawbacks':

A 2002 comparison of the Aral sea from it's natural size, to it's then-present size

The Aral Sea, 2009--forty years after Moscow-planed water diversion programs began to kill a native fishing industry employing 40k workers (and producing 1/6 of the entire Soviet fish catch) in order to divert the water through inefficient canals to grow cotton on the cheap. Uzbekistan did become one of the world's largest cotton exporters, but its low-efficiency canals and poor planing mean that the industry requires far more water than is necessary to grow cotton under normal conditions--or would be possible in a private system--and the salt-flat lying where the Aral Sea used to be still gets the runoff from the pollutants and pesticides used in this massively inefficient centrally-planned industrial-farming venture (the problem may be complicated by the fact that the bioweapons facility and dump on Vozrozhdeniya island ceased to naturally quarantine its contaminants when the island joined the mainland in 2001).  The resulting climate produces hotter summers, colder winters, toxic dust storms which have caused cancer rates to skyrocket and led to a child mortality rate of 75 per 1,000 newborns and a maternity mortality rate of 12 per 1,000 women.

Cottage Cheese Face (7 months)

The Crawler! (6 months)

King Corn: is the industry the enemy?

I just saw King Corn (2007—I know I’m a little behind the time to be responding to it, but...) The Movie does an excellent job of demonstrating the problem—that government subsidies have turned farming low-quality corn for a net loss into a major corporate business. The difficulty is that they set their sights on “industrial farming” as the enemy, rather than a subsidy system which forces a low-quality crop to become such an economically viable option. The proposed solution—turning the acre they farmed for a year into a vacant field for playing baseball—is impractical and unhelpful.

 The enemy is not industrial farming, but wasteful and pointless industrial farming. We moved from a system in which the government paid farmers to not produce, to a system in which the government pays farmers to produce a useless product.

 That seems a high charge to make against a product which has found its way into so many things (virtually everything). But I say corn is useless because the price system reveals that people are willing to pay less for it than it costs to produce it. Were it not subsidized, it would not be available for such a low price, and it would not find its way into so many applications; the only reason our entire food system is built on it is because subsidies keep its price unnaturally low, and so companies find it economical to find new uses for such a cheap product. Were the price system allowed to work, corn would not be a cheaper option for sweetener than sugar, and we would end up supporting more third world economies where sugar cane can be grown to produce sweetener more efficiently than can corn, and American farmers would find a more valuable and cost-effective crop to grow--like maybe grass which, farmed a la Joel Salatin’s methods, could offset the low quality beef produced at animal feeding operations.

While Joel is opposed to the industrial food system, I’m persuaded by Tyler Cowen’s arguments in An Economist Gets Lunch that the industrial system could be used to produce better food more cheaply for more people, if we got subsidies out of the way of preventing the market from finding more efficient options. Can grass-fed beef be done industrial style? I’m not sure.  My point is that with the current system we don’t have the opportunity to find out. By making the industrial food system the bad guy, we ignore that that system has brought us from a country that deals with starvation problems, to a country that deals with obesity problems. And I would rather deal with those problems than starvation. If we stop subsidizing the system to produce junk, maybe we can fix multiple problems.