Weekend odds & ends

• Older Nephew & his wife LOVE Halloween.  They've both taken Monday off work, and Little Great-Nephew will be staying home with them (and going out trick-or-treating later in his Buzz Lightyear costume, which I wrote about here).  "It's like Christmas for them," dh observed.  
• Unlike last year -- LGN's first time out trick-or-treating -- no invitations have been issued to us or to the grandparents. Last year, Halloween was on a Sunday;  this year, it's on a weekday/workday. BIL is still working;  SIL has a part-time job on top of looking after LGN during the day, and Older Nephew lives an hour away from us. Logistically, it would be pretty difficult to make the trip. (But if they'd asked, we'd have been there...!) 
• As a longtime Agatha Christie fan, I couldn't resist this article about two friends who started a podcast, where they would "read and rank all of Christie’s 66 mystery novels, and discuss them in exhaustive detail." But it's not just about Agatha, or the podcast. It's a wonderful story (albeit somewhat sad), even if you've never read a Christie book (what?!!). 
• Most of my Christie reading took place when I was a teenager, but I revisited two of the Tommy & Tuppence books in November 2015, in tandem with a British TV series based on them. My reviews of both books & TV versions, here and here.  (I will also swear that I've read "And Then There Were None" within the past decade, but if I did, I didn't write about it on this blog.) 
• From The Atlantic: "Adoption Is Not a Fairy-Tale Ending: It’s a complicated beginning." The author, Erika Hayasaki, has just published a book on identical twins raised in radically different circumstances. Worth a read (and worth sharing with those who tell you that you can always "just adopt").   
• Excerpt: "In America, popular narratives about adoption tend to focus on happy endings. Poor mothers who were predestined to give their children away for a “better life”; unwanted kids turned into chosen ones; made-for-television reunions years later... the reality of adoption is far more complicated than some might think—and, as many adoptees and scholars have argued, deserving of a more clear-eyed appraisal across American culture." 
• I recently mused:  "I've long been fascinated by the idealization of motherhood and the role of "momfluencer" culture, and the power they have to warp women's sense of self-worth. Most writing in this vein, of course, focuses on the pressure this puts on mothers to live up to the ideal -- [but] fails to take the next step and ponder how these unattainable ideals affect those of us who wanted to be mothers and never even got the chance to try to live up them. Still, it's a topic worth pondering." 
• Case in point: Sara Petersen of "In Pursuit of Clean Countertops" interviewed Chelsea Conoboy this week about "How the myth of maternal instinct perpetuates the myth of the Ideal Mother."  They make some excellent points about how the myth began and has been perpetuated (hint: it was created by men, whose Ideal Mother was white), its impact on systemic issues (parental leave and affordable, universal childcare), and how it affects women's experiences of pregnancy, birth and new motherhood.  
• The one glancing nod made to non-mothers here (emphasis mine): "Even before I had specifically targeted maternal instinct as something to be viewed with suspicion if not downright antipathy, as soon as I had my first kid, I knew in my bones that the cultural belief that women are “good” at motherhood (and so should become mothers if they want to be considered “good” people) was a scam." 
• I wish they had expanded more on that thought. I wish they had talked, at least a little, about how damaging the idea of "maternal instinct" can be when you're not a mother AT ALL (for whatever reason) -- the idea that (a) all women want babies, (b) women will stop at nothing to fulfill their dreams of motherhood (and thus, if you wanted children and don't have them, you obviously didn't want them ENOUGH), and (c) if you didn't want babies at all, there's something REALLY wrong with you...!  
• My new KitchenAid stand mixer is here! (The story behind it, here.)  Isn't it gorgeous?? (I will have to test it out soon...!)

My new KitchenAid stand mixer.  :)