Project 365: Natural beauties and ugly beauties

This was one of those weeks that interesting subjects practically hurled themselves at my feet, begging to be photographed. (thank goodness!) I think I could have taken enough pictures to last well into November, if only I could save them up and use one each day.

Sadly, in November we won’t have any of these beauties standing regally in the sunshine, waiting to be admired:

218b:365 Sunflowers

(I loved how the sunflowers turned out so much that I turned it into a blog banner on the spot. Sunflowers used to be a motif of mine, back in the day, and I’ve always had a soft spot for them.)

These beauties grow to a height of six or seven feet in my mother’s garden. The black border and square format mimic a photographic technique that intrigues me called “through the viewfinder” or TTV. In real TTV, you take a picture through the viewfinder of another, usually antique, camera. I haven’t found the right camera for actually TTV yet, but I faked this one in Photoshop. (Yet another way you can use post-processing to add a little zip to an otherwise humdrum photo, IMHO.)

219:365 Fake TTV daisy

I ran into an old friend on the weekend who happens to be a professional photographer. We both had our cameras with us (of course!) but his was a D80 with an intriguing-looking lens on it. His kind offer of “go ahead and play with my camera, if you like” was barely out of his mouth when I had it in my hands, and it wasn’t long before I figured out his 28-105 mm lens nicely fit on my D40 as well. It doesn’t auto-focus on my camera (I’m running into more and more limitations with my entry-level dSLR these days) but it still takes a fine macro picture. Covet, covet, covet!!!

214b:365 Coneflower macro

We’ve now concluded the “Nature is beautiful” portion of today’s presentation, and will procede with our “Ewwww, what was nature thinking?!” theme.

Take this spider, for instance. Please. (My apologies to Julie and any other arachnophobes out there. If it makes you feel any better, I can hardly look at the screen myself, and I’m not even particularly squeamish about spiders!) We found her on our back deck this week, she’s about the length of my thumb, and yes, that’s her *shudder* egg sac she’s sitting on. Filled with *shudder* up to a thousand itty bitty baby *shudder* spiders. She’s a ‘black and yellow agriope’, if you wanted to know, and she looks even more freaky large and up close, if you dare!

217:365 Garden spider and (*cringe*) egg sac

(Shortly after this photo was taken, Beloved scooped her and her egg sac up in a jar and we relocated them to the field across from our house. I simply would not have been able to sleep without nightmares of thousands of tiny spiders streaming in through every crack and crevice in the house! Did I mention *shudder*?)

And continuing with the “ugly is beautiful” theme, meet Winnie. She’s a pug, easily the snortiest, drooliest, gruntiest excuse for a dog I have ever met. Of course, I adored her on sight! She belongs to a friend of ours, and spent one night of her three-day vacation at the Humane Society after slipping out the door unnoticed. Luckily, she was reunited with her family the next morning.

214:365 Pug

(The boys were also enchanted with Winnie. The day after we met her, we took the boys to the SuperEx, and when Tristan won one of those water-squirt games — at a full table, nonetheless! — he chose a Pug Webkinz as his prize.)

Speaking of SuperEx, here’s another trio of adorable creatures. How many kids get to feed a lion cub her breakfast? She’s about seven months old — and apparently, she was starving! The boys held her for at least 10 minutes, and I think I’ve got about 35 versions of this picture in my camera. Thank goodness I brought the telephoto lens for a nice close-up!

215:365 Lion cub

Of all the photos from Papa Lou’s Excellent Hot Air Balloon Adventure, I finally chose this one as my favourite. I like the perspective that Granny and Lucas add to the giant balloon (I took this lying on my back!) and the way my Mom’s white jacket and pants compliment the red-green-blues of the balloon, the grass and the sky.

216:365 Granny and Lucas

I particularly liked this one as well. I like the triangle created by the balloon, the watchers and my shadow — how cute is her body language, waving to the balloon? — and the way all the shadows point toward the balloon. (The triangle was intentional, the shadows are just a lucky fluke!)

11 Goodbye!

This is my favourite photo this week. It’s not the best exposure, and even the composition is a little off — but, you have to move quickly when you’re taking a picture of Lucas in action! IMHO, though, the standing-up hair is priceless, as is the expression on Tristan’s face as he comes down the slide behind Lucas.

218:365 Hair-raising slide!

Years down the line, these are the pictures that will matter. Sometimes, the best pictures make up for in joy what they lack in artistry.

Who me, paranoid?

When my doctor and I reviewed the results from my annual physical, I was feeling pretty smug. Because I turned 40 this month, we did the big baseline reading thing: TSH, cholesterol, iron, etc. Turns out my risk score is zero… bad cholesterol is good, good cholesterol is not bad but could be better, thyroid is dancing in the low end for normal but within the healthy range, and while my haemoglobin is fine my iron stores are on the low side. All excellent results, so much so that we joked I had a little bit of room for misbehaving.

I wasn’t laughing too loud this morning, though, when I read this front-page anxiety-stoking article that trumpets those highest at risk for severe complications from the H1N1/Swine Flu epidemic are: healthy 40 year olds. Gah!!

(I’m also a little twitchy because she found a swollen “nodule” in my left breast that was of enough concern to book me for a mammogram and ultrasound. I’ve been carefully not thinking about it for three weeks, and my mammogram is booked for tomorrow. Stay tuned for yet another post in the continuing stoooooory of my vexatious breast…)

Ontario proposes IVF funding

My jaw dropped open in surprised delight when I heard yesterday that the province of Ontario is considering funding up to three attempts of in vitro fertilization (IVF) through OHIP. Hello (Ontario Premier) Dalton McGuinty? Between this and the all-day kindergarten thing, I think I love you.

I haven’t had time to read through the entire report yet, but I will and I’ll write an informed summary and analysis when I do. (Um, I still owe you that second post on the Senate Child Care report too, don’t I? It’s on my list, I swear!)

Anyway, here’s what I think of the recommendation at first glance: yippee!!!, with a healthy side of “It’s about farking time!” As most of you know, my first son Tristan was conceived through IVF in 2001, so I admit to a strong bias on this. But you know what? Given the horrible amount of misinformation and misconceptions (snicker) that swirl around the issues of reproductive technologies, people who have been there and done that truly are in a better position to evaluate the proposals.

I find it rather ironic, in fact, that (assuming the recommendations are implemented) our reproductive years will have fallen smack dab in the middle of the decade and a half during which IVF was not funded through medicare. Up until 1994, IVF was funded in Ontario, and continued to be funded for women with two blocked fallopian tubes. I’m quite happy with how things turned out for us, though, and wouldn’t change a thing — but I sure would love to know that other families don’t have to abandon their dreams of having a family simply because they can’t afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars on fertility treatments.

Here’s why I think IVF should be funded not just in Ontario, but in all provinces and territories.

As the media has noted, one of the driving forces behind the recommendation to fund IVF is the idea of reducing multiple births. Multiple births are expensive on the health care system — there are higher incidences of premature births, c-sections, and intensive neo-natal care. One of the conditions of public funding would be that Ontario’s 14 fertility clinics would have to agree to stricter controls on the number of multiple births, which they would do by making more stringent the rules about the number of embryos that are transfered during an IVF cycle.

(I’m a bit removed from the latest clinic culture these days, but in 2001 when I was 32 years old, they would not allow me to transfer all three of our surviving embryos. We were allowed to transfer two and elected to have the third one frozen. So the clinics haven’t exactly been irresponsible to this point in time anyway. I’ve always been a little bit shocked to hear stories of clinics – largely in the US – that would allow the transfer of up to five or more embryos for a woman undergoing her first cycle, who is young and otherwise healthy.)

The idea, then, is that the amount that would be spent to fund up to three attempts of IVF would be offset by the reducing the costs to the system that result from currently high percentages of multiple births. What’s not mentioned, IMHO, is the value to the system of us creating all these little future taxpayers. Aren’t we all wringing our hands about declining fertility rates?

One other argument that I don’t see in the current media coverage is this: currently, Ontario does provide funding for other fertility treatments like Clomid and intrauterine insemination (IUI). I’ve never used Clomid (a drug that essentially causes you to ovulate more than one egg, thus increasing both your chances of conception and your chances of multiple births) but we did try two cycles of IUIs with superovulation, meaning they used drugs to torque my reproductive system into producing multiple eggs, took a sample of Beloved’s junk and ran it through a gyroscope-thingee (really!) to filter out all the poor swimmers, and had the surviving sperm squirted into my uterus.

The difference between IUI and IVF, then, is a much higher rate of control of the number of conceptions that occur. With (currently funded) IUI, multiple rates are much higher and completely out of the clinic’s control — millions of frisky sperm seek out up to half a dozen fertile eggs. With IVF, the conception occurs in the labratory instead of the uterus, and the doctors place one or two embryos into the uterus, hoping they will implant and grow. It’s the difference between using a calligraphy pen or a bucket of paint to dot your i, if I can make up an analogy.

As an aside, as many of you know, though Tristan was conceived through IVF, Simon and Lucas (and the babies we lost in 2000 and 2006) were conceived naturally. Beloved had an OHIP-funded surgery on his bits in 2001, while I was pregnant with Tristan, because he was in considerable discomfort. (You have to be in a lot of discomfort, I think, to have elective surgery down there — spoken as someone who will never know!) As a consequence, his fertility improved dramatically and obviously. So we might have been able to avoid the whole cost of the infertility treatments had the fertility doctors recommended this OHIP-funded surgery before the IVF.

You know what I would even consider as a reasonable compromise, for those of you who feel that taxpayer dollars should not be funding fertility treatments? Fund unsuccessful treatment cycles. Including two IUIs, a cycle of IVF with ICSI, four years of frozen embryo storage, and the costs to thaw and transfer Frostie, we easily spent $10,000 or $12,000 to overcome our infertility. I think you’ll agree that my darling Tristan is worth every penny times a thousand. We’re lucky that we never had to face the unimaginable agony of an unsuccessful round of IVF treatments compounded by the idea of spending all that money for naught — just try to imagine spending everything you have, financially and emotionally, and coming away empty-handed.

At the very least, this proposal levels the playing field just a little bit for people facing infertility. This editorial, written by a couple who have filed a discrimination complaint at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, outlines some of the ways in which the current system of funding for reproductive technologies in Ontario are discriminatory. Two blocked fallopian tubes? You get three funded IVF attempts. Testicles fried from the radiation to treat Hodgkins disease? You’re out of luck. PCOS? So sorry. Low ovarian reserve? Too bad. Poor sperm motility or mobility or count? Yer on yer own, buddy.

Anyway, I’m all over the place here. As you can see, even after all this time I still react passionately to stories about infertility and reproductive technologies. (Hal, if you’re reading, now you know why infertility is one of the metatags on my blog!) I am beyond delighted to see that Ontario is considering funding up to three cycles of IVF for eligible families, and applaud the province of Quebec for its forward-thinking policies in this area. Once I read the report, I’ll come back with another post and try for a more detached tone. (Anybody want to take bets on how long I’m able to maintain that illusion of detachment?)

What do you think? (And yes, I’m open to dissenting opinions, so long as they are expressed with respect. And you realize that there’s nothing you can say that might change my opinion on this one!)

Tips for surviving the arsenic hours while parenting solo?

Beloved is a college teacher, and so each semester we are at the mercy of the administrative sadists assistants who generate the school’s timetables. This year, they’ve got him teaching late three nights out of five, so from now through December on three nights a week I’ve got to cover the after-work through bedtime parenting shift on my own.

Not bad enough this comprises the making and serving and cleaning up of dinner, but also the supervising and checking of homework, the emptying of school backpacks and packing of lunches, the monitoring of school paperwork and communications, and the wrangling of Lucas the Menace. Plus all the other myriad chores that comprise the second shift after my day-job ends. Three nights a week. I have no idea how single parents do this all the time!

I’m not at my best during the arsenic hours in the best of circumstances. My body rhythms and brain functioning reach a peak somewhere around 10:00 am and then it’s just a long, slow descent toward bedtime from there. I’m at my lowest energy ebb between 4 pm and 7pm — right when the day gets the most intense.

I’ve gotten used to Beloved running interference with Lucas while I make dinner, so that’s where I’ll be missing him the most. Any thoughts on how to make these days run a little smoother? I don’t mind ordering takeout once a week or so, but I think three times a week is a little excessive. I can even task the big boys with some of the interference-running and some simple tasks like helping get things ready for dinner, but they’re like me — not really their shining selves in the grumbly hours between school and dinner.

The good news is that Beloved will at least make in home in time to help cover off the kids’ bedtimes. And I’ll be crawling blearily into my own bed about 10 minutes after they all go down!

Walking with the Dinosaurs reviewer for CBC?

I got this request from my friends at CBC radio:

I’m wondering if you happen to know anyone who’s taking their kids to the “Walking with the Dinosaurs” show this week. We had the idea to have a couple kid “reviewers” on the show — kids who are old enough to have an opinion–maybe ages 8 to 12 or so, roughly, and who are pretty chatty.

My folks are bringing the boys to the show on Saturday, but they’d like someone who sees the show on Wednesday or Thursday to participate in a kid-review on All in a Day on Friday. I said I’d be happy to put the word out on the Ottawa parents’ network and see if anybody else might be interested. Let me know if you are and I’ll pass your coordinates on to the folks at CBC radio!

Papa Lou’s Excellent Hot Air Balloon Adventure

“Hey Dani, you blog a lot about affordable adventures for family fun in Ottawa. But what do you recommend if I’ve got a wad of cash burning a hole in my pocket and a need to see the city from a different perspective?”

How about a sunset trip over the city in a hot air balloon?

216:365 Granny and Lucas

We’ve toyed with the idea of giving my Dad a hot air balloon ride as a gift for years, and finally thought the occassion of his 65th birthday in May was an excellent time to do it. It’s not cheap (in the neighbourhood of $225 per person) but worth it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience for someone who has always been fascinated by hot air balloons.

He’d scheduled a ride for last week, but a poor weather forecast caused them to scrub the flight. (Ironically, by the time the sun set that day, the clouds had passed and the winds settled — but better safe than sorry, I’m sure!) When his flight was rebooked for last night, he invited the boys and I to come out to watch the launch. He knew the boys would be fascinated – they were – and that I’m forever grubbing for unique photo opportunities.

It was a gorgeous evening, bright and clear and warm, and just watching the launch was an event in itself — I can’t imagine how excited the boys would have been if we’d actually taken off. In fact, Simon said he wasn’t overly keen on the idea, but Tristan and I would have tagged along in a heartbeat had they suddenly found room for two stowaways.

Papa Lou's Excellent Hot Air Balloon Adventure

I haven’t had the chance to check in with Papa Lou to see how he enjoyed the ride, but the smile on his face as he waved to us and drifted over the treetops was well worth the price of the gift certificate. They were headed south-east toward Gloucester based on the wind direction. Passengers apparently get a champagne picnic upon landing, and a van drives them back to the launching spot. Sounds like quite the adventure!

Well, now I know what to do the next time I’ve got a spare thousand dollars or so burning a hole in my pocket. Or, ahem, if you happen to be the proprietor of a hot air balloon company and are looking for an enthusiastic photographer/blogger to document a ride, I’m your girl! *grin*

(P.S. I know, I know, the blog content has been skewed heavily to pix over words lately. Too many pictures? The photo opportunities just keep throwing themselves at me and I can’t help but share!)

Ottawa SuperEx 2009

Looking for something fun to do with the family this week? We never miss an opportunity to visit the Ottawa SuperEx. This year, we went early in the day, gambling against a forecasted 60 per cent probability of precipitation. The rain stayed away, the lineups were surprisingly short, the sun warm and bright, and the boys had a great time. I don’t think we came away from a single carny game without a prize of some sort — just one of those great days when everything comes together.

SuperEx 2009

See the centre and right picture in the top row? This was the first year that we let Lucas go on a ride other than the carosel, largely because Tristan could ride with him. I absolutely adore these two pictures, the centre one because of the expression on Lucas’s face as he looks at Tristan — “Dude, this thing is *moving*!! Are you sure this is okay?” — and the top right one because of Tristan’s protective arm around Lucas’s shoulder. It’s little things like this that make my heart sing with love for my sweet boys. (You can see the pix above in greater detail on the Flickr set, if you like. The square crop of the mosiac just doesn’t do justice to a few of them.)

And how often do you get to feed a seven-month-old lion cub her breakfast? Talk about an irresistable opportunity for a unique photo-of-the-day!

215:365 Lion cub

The Ottawa SuperEx runs through next Sunday, August 30. It’s *not* cheap, but I’ve never felt it wasn’t worth it.

Project 365: Shiny bits, old bits, and kids eating stuff

This week, I spent a lot of time wishing I was less stringent with my own damn project rules. I took dozens of great pictures on two days this week, and spent the other five in a mild state of panic trying to find the shot of the day. NEXT time, it’s going to be seven shots in seven days, or something equally forgiving.

The good news is, I now have the entire family trained not only to indulge me and be patient while I haul my camera around like a life support system, but to actually find excellent photo opportunities for me. My favourite shot this week is a great example of that. I was busy snapping pictures of stacked paperbacks at the flea market when Beloved pointed out this basket of marbles shining in the midday sun. This one was my 10th picture to make it to Flickr’s fickle “Explore“.

208:365 I've lost my marbles!

I don’t have a segue for this one — I just love it, though. I converted it to b&w because in the harsh, bright sunlight I found the colours were too vivid and actually distracted from the interaction between Lucas and Beloved. Lukey stands out from the trees better in b&w, and you can better see they’re looking right at each other. (This was taken at the little wading pool off Pinecrest in Linda Park — a highly endorsed spot for a bit of cooling off on a sweltering summer morning!)

206:365 Summertime in B&W

You’ve seen this one already, too. In addition to its ridiculously high cute-factor score, I like this one because of the contrasting orange and blue. I had to crop it hard on the right side because the light from the patio door was distracting, and I wish the highlight on the table wasn’t so blown out, but it still works!

207:365 The apple thief

Did I mention it was hot this week? Really, stinkin’ hot. After losing all of July and most of August to the summer that never was, I certainly won’t complain about a little heat wave, but we spent a lot of time this week looking for ways to stay cool. Simon thought this cotton-candy ice cream cone did the trick! (See note above about desperate scrambling for a picture at the end of the day!)

209:365 Cotton candy ice cream

Apparently I had a subconscious theme of “kids eating stuff” going on this week. I’d originally taken this picture and posted it on Flickr in this version, but I’d asked for opinions as to whether I should crop to remove the bit of bib in the corner or leave it in.

210:365 Peas

My friendly Flickr peeps recommended a square crop, which I never think to do. This is the final result. What do you think?

Peas squared

Even though Beloved and I have both gone back to work after a fun summer, we managed to take a mid-week Wednesday off and cram in one last family excursion, this time to Valleyview Little Animal Farm. (Blog post to follow!) Like the flea market, it was a wealth of photo opportunities and if I’m ever stuck for subjects I may just fork over the $6.50 to get in and take some more photographs in their most excellent antique farm equipment museum. I can’t remember exactly what this contraption is, but I think it makes for a fascinating photograph with all that chipped paint and mysterious mechanical bits.

211:365 Contraption

This was my alternate pic-of-the-day from Valleyview. I was down on my hunkers taking a picture of this guy when he hissed with enough rancour to scare me back about four feet with a single jump, even though there was a wire fence between us. Geese are mean birds – no wonder people eat them! (Don’t you love his blue eye, though? He’s looking at you!)

211b:365 Goose

Yesterday morning before the clouds set in for good, I was lucky enough to catch this gorgeous sunrise on my way to work. When I was reviewing my shots last night, I almost discarded this one because of the power lines (in fact, the picture is called “Damn hydro lines!”) but the more I look at it, the more I think that they might even add to the composition.

212:365 Damn hydro lines

This is the same sunrise, taken just a couple of minutes earlier.

212b:365 Red sky in the morning

Both photographs are straight out of the camera — no post processing except to add my watermark, and I cropped the second one to pull the sun out of dead centre. (Note to self: stop centering your subjects in the middle of the frame!!!) The difference is that in the first photograph, I exposed for the sky and in the second one I zoomed in a bit more and exposed for the sun. In the first, the camera let in more light, so you see the blues and the clouds. In the second, because I exposed for the bright sun, the camera tried to compensate by dimming the exposure, letting in less light and bringing up the reds in the spectrum. Neat, eh?

Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog (a book review)

About a million years ago, I used to do book reviews here on the blog. I think it’s been more than a year since I’ve put one up. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s been at least six months since I’ve read anything other than a photography book (but man, I’ve read a lot of those!) or a trashy detective novel from my mother’s endless stash.

Also a million years ago, I was a co-presenter with an amazing panel of writers and bloggers at the Association for Research on Mothering’s (ARM) Motherlode conference. Have you heard of ARM? This is how they self-describe:

The Association for Research on Mothering, at York University, Toronto, houses the Association for Research on Mothering, the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, Demeter Press, and Mother Outlaws. The Association’s mandate is to promote feminist maternal scholarship by building and sustaining a community of researchers interested in the topic of mothering-motherhood.

These bits of ancient history intersected in a recent e-mail I received from ARM. Earlier this year, they released a book called Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog. I received a review copy a week or so back, and I couldn’t wait to dive into it.

The book is a series of essays, ranging in tone from scholarly papers to personal narrative, all centred around the experience of “mommy” blogs. The essays also range in perspective from the blogger to the reader of blogs to, in the introduction, the relatively uninitiated.

I have to tell you, I didn’t read every word. Some of the essays appealed to me more than others. Of course, I devoured every word of the contributions from my friends and Motherlode co-presenters, Ann Douglas and Jen Lawrence.

In “Web 2.0, Meet the Mommy Bloggers” Ann Douglas, esteemed parenting writer and a long-time friend and mentor, writes about the darker side of the “mamasphere” — how the influx of marketers and marketing, as well as human nature’s baser instincts, make mothers compete against each other for a slice of the pie. The pie is not just financial recompense, though. She notes,

…social networking sites are able to attract hundreds of thousands of members who are willing to accept popularity — or even the promise of popularity — in lieu of cash payment for the content they provide to these sites. […] This can, in turn, create an atmosphere of competition rather than cooperation between mothers.

Jen Lawrence, a blogger I credit as one of my first favourites and a blogger I’ve tried to emulate over the years, submitted a reworked version of her Motherlode presentation. In “Blog for Rent: How Marketing is Changing Our Mothering Conversations” she discusses how the advent of the monetization movement circa 2006 completely altered the dynamic between bloggers and readers, and among bloggers themselves. She includes one of my favourite analogies of all time, with respect to marketing and bloggers. She says,

I think that blogging can be an incredibly powerful tool when it comes to building community, even if there are blog ads running down the sidebar. […] But I don’t want blogging to become just another guerilla marketing technique. I don’t want to be invited to a friend’s home, only to discover I was really invited to a Tupperware party.

I didn’t just love the essays in this book that happened to be written by my friends, though. I was completely sucked in by Melissa Camara Wilkins’ “Beyond Cute: A Mom, a Blog, and a Question of Content.” Her essay examines why she blogs, and the satisfaction she derives from being a part of the online mothering community. She perfectly surmizes one of the reasons I so love mommyblogs as a whole: “I’m not narcissistically writing about myself; I am recording my personal narrative and contributing to a collective, descriptive understanding of contemporary motherhood.”

Also on a personal note, I was drawn in by May Friedman’s essay, “Schadenfreude for Mittelschmerz: Or, Why I Read Infertility Blogs.” Since I cut my teeth reading those same infertility blogs, I found Friedman’s perspective (as a “quite fertile” reader of infertility blogs) rather intriguing. And I read with a sort of openmouthed wonder Jennifer Gilbert’s “I Kid You Not: How the Internet Talked Me Out of Traditional Mommyhood.” She explains, in witty detail, how reading mommyblogs convinced her that “mothering was a thankless, Sisyphean exercise that involved prying jellybeans and loose change out of a child’s nose from sunup to sundown” (*snicker*) and simply not the life she wanted to live.

When I first started reading this book, I cringed at how dated some of the references felt. I don’t know a lot about the publishing industry, but it must be hard to get out a book that’s cutting edge when references to things that happened less than two years ago seem like ancient history. Then again, there have been a lot of pixels posted about the nature of mommyblogging again this summer, so like every other fad in motherhood, whatever is old is new again… the cycle is just a lot faster now!

If you’re at all interested in how mommyblogs are shaping our mothering conversations, I highly recommend this book — or at least, big chunks of it. And the nice thing about such varied styles and perspectives is the fact that the chunks that appeal to you are likely not the same ones that appealed to me. Like the mamasphere itself, it offers an intriguing range of voices and opinions, some contradictory and some conciliatory, some vexing and some inspiring, some educated and some entertaining. In this case, as in the mamasphere, the whole is as intriguing as the sum of the parts.