We have one edge of a front tooth! It's poking out gingerly from the gum right now, and I am so proud of her! It seems like such a little thing, people, until it's your own child who's throwing fevers and having that miserable little whimper, burrowing their hot heads against your chin. It adds a whole new dimension to motherhood that I never dreamed of even a year ago.

To switch topics to something totally different, I've been thinking about gender roles lately. When did men stop being Men, and women stop being Women? Really. I'm not advocating a return to the olden days of prejudice/sexist thinking where one gender is the chattel of another, but I'm coming to think that when we had the Sex Wars and Feminist Revolution a lot of the good stuff got thrown out with the bad. For one example, a lot of men and women that I've known spent a lot of time in their young adulthood trying to figure out where they belonged -as they were learning who they were, what the rules of society currently dictated for that role, and how they were going to incorporate all of that with what they had been raised to believe. Our own parents suffered from this; mothers teaching their girls to reach for the stars and letting their sons play with girlie things. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm concerned about the opposite being true- that girls don't get to play with dolls enough and dream of being homemakers. Boys don't get to grow up with the assumptions of one day having a family and supporting them, being the Man of the House. We have learned a mishmash of the way things should be now and the way things were in our grandparents' time. I know that I struggled for a couple of years with the thought that my true dream in life was to be a good wife and mother, a frugal and thrify housekeeper, in the ways of my foremothers... There's no career in that. There's very little glory and a lot of criticism in that, these days. The choice to have me stay home involves a lot of careful planning and budgeting, and we've agreed that this will mean that we're going to pass up a lot of expensive things. We're also not going to live on revolving credit cards. As much as my husband complains from time to time about always being broke, we're not in debt, and we're living in one of the most expensive economies in the country on one income (his) and with a child. There *is* a certain status in that which we can be proud of. I'm a lot less emotionally fragile than I used to be, believe it or not. I know where I am now is where I truly want to be. My husband can feel a real pride in being the sole breadwinner, knowing that he is providing for his family. There may be a lot of things he can't provide- he never went to college, he never learned to drive, and he is in an occupation that makes him leave us for a lot of the year. All those things are nothing compared to knowing that he is providing the roof over our heads, the food on our table, and that he's living up to the role that (for good or ill) he found instilled in his own subconscious mind as a boy.