home, safe and sound

we made it home yesterday evening. the trip home was six hours, with a twenty-minute stop. so, about five and a half hours of driving. it was so much better. still, it was the second-longest time it has ever taken us to make that distance.

it is nice to be home. everything here is fine: no fallen trees, no power outages, no water contamination, no gas shortages.

the re-population was fairly uneventful. traffic was heavy and slow from before huntsville, but it kept moving along. we managed to sedate one of the cats, but our orange cat zeugma, otherwise known as spanky the great, or president kitty, was having none of it. we tried five or six times, but the pill always ended up on the floor, and me with deep scratches all over my body. he screamed much more ferociously all the way home. and he would claw at the cage, trying to open the doors. we passed a car on our way to dallas in which two cats sat perched, one on a box, one in the back window, calm as anything, just like they were sitting in a boring ol' room at home. i am totally jealous. why can't our cats be like that?

i guess i am glad we evacuated this time. we did what we could with the information we had. but, i will say that i will think carefully before evacuating again. it is always hard to assess risks, but really, how much risk were we actually facing? even if it had come into galveston as a strong 4, the potential danger was nothing like new orleans faced with katrina. and our house, in our neighborhood, would it really have been at risk? granted, the thought of no power for a week or so in +100 degree heat is extremely unpleasant. maybe that's enough. i don't know. i just will think it all through more carefully next time.

in other news, there was an interesting article about doulas in the new york times this weekend. the article has some flaws, but it was nice to see some coverage. i was disappointed that out of all the hundreds of pictures of doulas and new mothers, they used a photo of a woman who was bottle feeding. i know, teen mothers especially have trouble accepting breastfeeding, but what a great opportunity to show that some do choose to breastfeed. the article said that the rate of breastfeeding among teens who had a doula was up to 50%. that is fantastic. why not show a picture of one of them? breastfeeding is so hidden in our society, i find it shocking. i know, one must accept women where they are and respect the choices that they have made, but seeing baby hurricane evacuees starving because they lacked formula and clean water, when they were with their mothers and her breasts, just made me angry. it isn't just an age or class problem. the statistics are up a little, but still, at 6 months, only 50% of babies are breastfed at all (and only 14% of those are exclusively breastfed.) or maybe, the statistics show that at 3 months, 42.5% of infants were exclusively breastfed , and 51.5% were breastfed to some extent. At 6 months, these rates dropped to 13.3% and 35.1%, respectively. either way, things aren't so good for the babies. and i think part of the problem is the media's subtle, but significant, messages about the convenience of bottlefeeding and the unacceptability of images of breastfeeding. all a bunch of malarkey.