Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Final Convention posting of the year (probably), to wrap up loose odds and ends before the holiday. There's also a mounting mountain of non-convention bits to get to ... but not today.

First, news ... Kyle Pruett dropped one piece of brand-spanking-new information during his talk on Saturday: fatherhood changes men's brains (and changes them different from the way motherhood changes the brains of women). Pretty said a student of his studied the brains of new fathers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and found increased activity in the parts of the brain related to bond formation, auditory processing and the ability to distinguish cries from laughter (no easy trick in the first weeks). It adds to Pruett's well-established point that hormone levels get nutty around a child's birth, and emphasizes his conclusion that these changes mean that men are indeed programmed by nature to parent.

Also, inspiration. The weekend brought back my longstanding goal of adding content to this site. I'll start by, over the next month, listing local at-home dad groups that have web pages along the right rail. I'd also like to add some of the content from the convention itself, and have asked some of the presenters for their handout. Part of what spurred the interest is Jay Massey's conclusion that Slowlane is going to have to be re-thought as a dynamic site. Jay is committed to re-building it but said he plans to have it exist as a lower-maintenance, more static resource. So I hope to pick up some of the slack and keep updating and adding to rebeldad.com content.

Finally, sex. I said I'd post my slides from my presentation. Here they are. They ain't very well done and they ain't very interesting. You really had to be there to listen to the discussion, which was informative and eye-opening. I'll never think of minivans the same way again. Thanks to all who participated. I really feared that I'd give my ten-minute presentation and then have to talk about sex all by myself for half an hour. But as it turns out, you guys had plenty to say.

As you can imagine, I'm curious if anyone put any lessons of the convention to work. Let me know if you did ...

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