Thanks to the vacation this past week I have a bunch of pictures! Grandma Pat and I took Ruby shopping (new shoes for her and new jacket for me) at Klems, where there is a cool train set for the kids to play with. Ruby decided she needed a train hat to make her play more real, and to really get into the play, she decided she needed to sit ON the train set.

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This weekend we spent our entire Saturday at the NYC Labor Notes Troublemakers School. As one of the organizers, I was thrilled it was a huge success, as we had over 200 people attend. But what was even more exciting was that it was one of the first LN events I know of that had childcare, and so about 10 kids were on-site.

In the last year I have been organizing childcare for all my meetings (mostly our Solidarity monthly branch meetings, but also our weekend-long Solidarity Convention and now Labor Notes). It's been totally great for Ruby and for myself.

She loves going to meetings because she gets to play the whole time. And she is slowly but surely getting to know the other regular red-diaper babes and looks forward to seeing them. She loves seeing her EJ and Mairene and 'Milio (Emilio) and others. And she loves the big groups--she was running around the crowd yesterday, chatting with complete strangers and just generally proving to me that conferences, meetings and demonstrations are places where she really has fun.

Yesterday she got into giving high fives to a bunch of people, although Laura was sad when Ruby didn't give her one. She was wrestling with Amanda. She blew kisses to Stephanie and pocketed a few kisses that Stephanie blew back to her. Stephanie told me that she came across Ruby waiting with Marie (who is almost always one of the caregivers) in the hallway and Ruby told her that she was waiting for her boys (they were waiting for some of the boys who had gone to the bathroom). She got into a discussion with Ashaki about some cookies (Ruby insisted on taking a bite of her cookie and then putting it back in the container and Ashaki was trying to convince her not to do that) and went to get a cookie for Andrea. She went for a walk with David L and laughed when some lion statue bit her hand. And who the heck knows what else she did, said and laughed about because for most of the time I wasn't with her!

It's win win for me: I get to go to my meetings and not feel bad about dragging the kid along. But more importantly, my long-term hope is that this will become one way for me to expose Ruby to my socialist politics. She gets to see, from her perspective (a playful one for the moment, but as the kids in Solidarity become older I hope they'll have some role in the actual meetings), an organization and political perspective that I am committed to. She will also have the choice of befriending other kids of socialist parents and having "comrades" her own age that she can have her own relationships with.

I can't wait to see what she chooses to do with this exposure as she grows up and makes her own choices about her place in this world.