Labor~ma! You having a niece or nephew?

Labor and delivery ~ma for your SiL, Askye!

labor~ma and healthy~baby and SiL~ma Askye!!

much ~ma for a smooth, uncomplicated labor and a healthy mom and baby!

I'm having a nephew! I'm so excited.

Oh, auntie-hood is so wonderful! Congrats in advance!

I posted in my LJ [link] about going to watch the movie Backdraft at the Fire Department this morning. Have you invited your Fire Chief over to help you plan your family's escape plan lately?

Nephew~ma to askye!

SQUEE to GC and her DF!! I'm so happy for you both. I hope it's a wonderful day.

So much calm and sanity and healing~ma to Brenda. Having just been through the same horrible decision and surgery with Byron, I truly understand how heartbreaking and awful this day is for you. Please know I am here if you need an ear or a shoulder.

I hope you feel better soon, vw.

Regarding the whole lady reclaiming thing...the thing about reclaiming any pejorative is that each member of the group in question has to make that decision on his or her own. I think "lady" has been reclaimed in many ways. I jokingly call myself a lady (which I so am not) or refer to my students as ladies (and called the boys gentlemen, much like ChiKat) or joke about my ladyparts, and so on. But in terms of sports teams, I will never be okay with "Lady ____s." The thing is, that implies that the norm is the men's team, and the exception is the women's. If you say, "I saw the Huskies play last night" (my college basketball team), the assumption is that you went to the men's game. That's a very old layover from the early days of Title IX, and it annoys me. I don't want to see the "Lady Huskies." I want to watch the Huskies play. If someone wants to assume that means I watched the men, well, they'll figure out pretty quickly when I start talking about team members that that's not who I'm talking about. Lady becomes a diminutive in that context. Since the teams are still generally funded and treated with such a tremendous imbalance, that "Lady" signifies much more than just a way to say which team is which. I saw that all the time at UConn, which is famous for both of its teams but always favored the men. The women's team swept the season and the championship while the men's team didn't even make it to the Sweet 16 one year I was there, yet the women's team was underfunded and belittled.

That said, that's my take on it. I know plenty of women and members of women's team who have embraced the "Lady" in front of team names and treat it as a kind of mocking satire: "The Lady Huskies will kick your ass tonight." That's their prerogative (oh crap, now I've earwormed myself), just as it is mine to be annoyed by it.

One thing I love about working in an all-girls school (and I use girls because they ARE girls for most of those years--it's grades 6-12, so much different than a women's college, IMO) is that they are able to make these choices. Their sports teams are the Panthers, not the Lady Panthers; however, the all-girls robotics team decided to embrace the all-girls stereotype and mock it by donning pink bowling shirts as their uniform. It's fun watching them decide how to define themselves. Ultimately, I think that's what it's all about--having the power to decide what to name yourself rather than having a name imposed upon you.

P.S. My dives in Grand Cayman were amazing, and I am now a fully certified PADI Open Water Diver! Whee!!!

Go, Diving Kristin!

W00t! Diving Kristin!

(Also, wise, wonderful Kristin. But also, newly certified!)