first the cosby sweater, now this

It hit me suddenly at 3am last night (whatever, this morning) why Cal may have suddenly reversed his position on the wearing of Halloween costumes. Earlier last week, I let him watch "Little Bill," which is one of the shows on Noggin that I actually think is kind of cute and has some mild redeeming value. So far this list is short and just includes "Little Bill" and "Blue's Clues" circa The Steve Years. Not that I won't let him watch the other shows too, because lord, how am I supposed to get anything done around here otherwise? It's just that I'm muttering sarcastic commentary under my breath while they're on. For the record, because I know you are keeping one on what I think about sundry children's television programming:

• "Little Bear": Boring, old-fashioned, and Little Bear is a total weenie. Plus the disproportionately long arms on the animated bears creep me out, as they endow a certain marfanoid quality that I find distracting.

• "Dora the Explorer": Hate this show. Hate. I don't care if they're teaching Spanish or simian-human relations or any of that. They are always yelling everything. Why must they yell? Why can't they just talk?

• "Wow Wow Wubsy": Benign enough, I guess, and cute in that little Japanese animated character kind of way--you can practically see them as little erasers and bento boxes--but I am not fooled into thinking that it is anything other than pure brain candy. Cal loves it, though.

• "Yo Gabba Gabba": Watching this show makes me feel like I have taken a large dose of hallucinogenic drugs. In a bad way. Cal, of course, also loves this show.

But anyway, "Little Bill" I think is adorable. It's like an updated version of the Cosby Kids with no laugh track and less jive, about this multigenerational black family living in what looks to be one of the outer boroughs New York, though I think this is left purposely vague. The family dynamics are nice and the kids acts like actual kids, and they learn cute little lessons about, whatever, making sure your friends feel welcome when they sleep over, taking care of your pets, whatnot.

So. Last week Little Bill had a Halloween episode on, in which Little Bill wanted to dress up as Captain Brainstorm to go trick-or-treating, but the neighborhood store ran out of Captain Brainstorm costumes. "If I can't go as Captain Brainstorm," sulked Little Bill, "I don't want to dress up as anything." Then, a day later, Cal is telling us basically verbatim that he doesn't want to dress up as anything. Related? Coincidence? I don't know how the episode ended (I'm sure there were Compromises and learning about Disappointment, and that Little Bill ended up enjoying Halloween after all), but I don't think that Cal saw the end of the show either, which means NO LESSONS WERE LEARNED AT ALL.

Anyway, thanks, Cos. You and your wholesome family values teachings. Maybe we will just watch more "Yo Gabba Gabba" and go trick-or-treating as a giant red-studded dildo-looking cyclops.

i hope you understand this just means less candy for everyone

For the past three years, Joe and I have chosen Cal's Halloween costume for him, OVER-CONTROLLING PARENTAL INCLINATIONS and need to live vicariously though our offspring aside, for the simple reason that Cal had no idea what Halloween was, nor could he care less about dressing up. However, this year, he is a three year-old man, so I decided to ask him for the first time what he wanted to dress up as for Halloween.


CAL
(Promptly)
A butterfly.

MICHELLE
Oh, a butterfly! That's a nice costume. What kind of butterfly?

CAL
A pink one!

MICHELLE
(Not wanting to discourage the boy, though worrying somewhat about schoolyard mockery)
Well, I guess that should be easy enough to do...

CAL
(Reconsidering)
No, wait, a red butterfly. An orange butterfly.

MICHELLE
That is also easily accomplished.


This was about a month ago. So I ordered the wings and the antenna set (not a bad costume, considering it was only about $7.00 at the time), found his long-sleeved black T-shirt and a pair of black pants, and figured that we were set. Cal seemed to enjoy the costume well enough, and spent a few evenings flitting around the house, wings sprouting from his back, excitedly telling everyone who would listen (and occasionally some of us who stopped listening) that HE WAS A BUTTERFLY A BUTTERFLY A BUTTERFLY.

This past weekend, Cal had an actual Halloween part at his school, and we attended, thinking that not only would it be fun, but it would be a great way to get a little more mileage out of his costume. Except for one thing: Cal would not put it on. He put on the all-black outfit fine, but when it came to putting on the actual butterfly accoutrement, he balked. "I don't want to put it on yet," he said in the living room, "I want to wait until I get to school." At school, we figured it would be an easy sell, since every single kid in attendance was in costume--quite a few of which featured wings similar to his--but he continued to refuse. "I don't want to wear my wings," he said. "I just want to wear my sweater." Which is why he was the only kid at the party wearing a gray zip-up sweater and black pants. Just like an old man. We should have just brought some baby powder to dust in his hair and then that could have been his costume.

That was five days ago. To date, Cal still does not want to wear his costume for Halloween. "I just want to wear a regular shirt and pants," he insists. He is a very odd child sometimes. So, unwilling to spend any more money on costume elements that he in all likelihood will refuse to wear, I have been scrambling to figure out a costume for trick-or-treating consisting of normal clothes from his closet. Which is proving to be a little more difficult than you would think, as he has no novelty-type clothes that we could push into costume territory. He doesn't even have a pair of overalls.

So far all I could come up with was to dress him all in black, put on his black stocking cap, and give him a flashlight (he likes flashlights, so he would probably agree to carry this--though who knows, he liked the wings too) to pass as a cat burglar. However, unless I slap reflective tape all over his back, I worry that the dark outfit combined with outdoor trick-or-treating might not be the most traffic visible costume to test the notoriously bad driving skills of our Atlantan brethren. (My other idea was to take the all-black outfit and send him out with a book of e. e. cummings poetry. But this costume would perhaps be on the subtle end of the spectrum.) I even thought of dressing up as a resident again, same as last year, only we still have a ton of boxes from the move we haven't unpacked yet, and I'm not sure where his scrubs are.

Any last-minute costume ideas for an extremely stubborn three-year old that preferably involves spending no money and minimal craftiness?

29 weeks


The fetus, he grows.

So we're at 29 weeks here, which means that we have somewhere in the range of about two and a half months to go before we launch Cal 2.0, a.k.a. The Do-Over. In terms of my maternity leave, I am planning to use a mixture of vacation time, sick days, and unpaid leave to total six weeks, which is the amount of time I took off when Cal was born. Again, it is hard to say this knowing full well that I am going to be stepping into a GREAT BIG PILE OF SHIT in telling you yes, I have decided of my own volition, pressured by no one, that I will be taking but six weeks off after the birth of my second child. However, there are a number of constraints, both practical and financial, that have factored into this decision, the top two of which are that 1.) I am at present the primary breadwinner for this family, so I need to work and get paid for it, and 2.) I took six weeks off when Cal was born, and despite some introductory angst it worked out fine, and he still loves me approximately 85% of the time.

Something else that will make returning to work easier this time around is the fact that my schedule now isn't nearly as bad or unpredictable as it was during residency (though in an ironic twist, now that I don't take night call, I never have post-call days off, which actually makes it very difficult to schedule anything kid-related during the day, including my OB appointments). And yes, I know all you Europeans and Canadians get, like, five billion years of paid maternity leave for each child, and that's a whole other discussion to get people all hepped up, even though at present, in the U.S., paid maternity leave is really the exception rather than the rule--but whatever. We work with what we have, and right now, I'm happy to look forward to six weeks off with Cal and his new brother, and returning to job that I love in a practice where people have been nothing but completely warm and understanding about the whole situation.

As for the other baby...

I'm about to start on the second round of edits for "Scutmonkey," which, according to my editor, is slated for an early 2010 publication. That sounds far away I guess, especially since I submitted the manuscript this past July, but there's still a lot of stuff that still needs to happen between then and now, so I'm glad to have a little time to tune things up, especially now that I'm working and don't have time to be lollygagging with my laptop at Starbucks every day like I was earlier this summer. I'm aiming to get this second round of edits back to them in about a month's time, with the goal of finishing almost all of the hardcore overhauling before I have my human baby, and past the legal department and into the copy editor by (I'm told) April. Anyway, the gestation period for a baby elephant is 22 months, so as long as my manuscript is in pre-publication limbo for less than that amount of time, I guess I'll be happy.

(Though this probably does not need to be spelled out, I just wanted to add for the record that I'm glad I'm not an elephant.)

gold star

So today was Cal's "Gold Star Day." I know, I didn't know what that meant either. Apparently, it's this thing in his class where every kid gets a turn to lead circle time, which so far as I can ascertain involves something with pointers and calendars and talking about the letters and numbers of the week, not unlike on Sesame Street. There may be singing and hand movements somewhere in there. Oh, and by the way, your parents are encouraged to come for the morning to witness your GLORY.

Joe and I could not go to Gold Star Day.

I mean, I suppose we could have if we absolutely needed to, but it would have involved taking a day off work, and since I just started my job a few months ago (and am incidentally hoarding vacation days for maternity leave) and Joe is but a lowly serf fellow, it wasn't exactly something that seemed economical or practical to do, to take a whole day off work just to go to school for forty-five minutes. However, Cal is the last person in the class to have his Gold Star Day, and I have been observing (from the pictures that we get sent home) that everyone's parents goes to their Gold Star Day. Definitely at least one parent, oftentimes both. One kid had four relatives showed up, each with a different piece of photographic or video equipment. I think Cal would have had a fine Gold Star Day regardless of whether Joe or I showed up (he's too young to notice or remember that everyone else's parents were there for their Gold Stars--I'm hoping he'll save the comparisons and recriminations for adolescence), but the precedent that had been set certainly made me feel guilty to think about not being there.

Honestly, how can all these parents just take off work to go to school for the morning? How is that possible? Are they trying to make us look bad? It must be that either one parent doesn't work (outside of the home), one parent works part-time or has extremely flexible hours, or (also highly likely), the parents are so high up at their jobs that it doesn't even matter when they decide to take off or not. You know, like they're the Executive Vice President of Delta Airlines or something like that. Who knows. Or, more likely, they're just better parents than us, and love their kids more. Probably.

Luckily (and this was not planned, though it was fortuitous), Joe's parents are visiting us this weekend. So, like Obama sending the Clintons and his wife out to campaign for him by proxy, so were Joe's parents at school as parent substitutes. Taste great, less filling! Joe's dad even read a story to the class, which went over very well. (He's a retired school principal, so he loves that kind of stuff. Remember, the Principal is your Pal.) And Cal, after some initial shyness about having them there, ended up having a great time. So this allayed the guilt of Joe and I not being there somewhat. Not 100%, but somewhat.

Hopefully they can schedule Cal's next Gold Star Day for January, when, presumably, I'll have some time off.

Morning commute.

but he was still hungry





I think the real litmus test at work for separating out who has kids from who doesn't is seeing which people actually recognize the artwork on my scrub cap, and who just asks me, "Why do you have pictures of food on your head, and why does all the food have a hole in it?"

home improvement

We unpacked a bit after we moved, of course, but after the initial phase of unpacking of what we needed immediately (seasonal clothes, pots and pans, textbooks for work), our unboxing efforts kind of...stalled out. Sure, there were many moments where we would kick feebly at the moving boxes that still continued to line every wall, occasionally stopping to unpack an item or two before pronouncing ourselves way too tired from work, or (more often) willing the items to unpack themselves, but after a while, we started to get used to living in a shantytown, which is perhaps the most dangerous position of all. However, it was starting to get embarrassing, so these past few weekends, we've been making a little more serious effort at home improvement. Our bedroom and closets are still a disaster, but the first floor is starting to look almost like reasonable adult people live there.




(Click here to read notes on this photo.)

It is still decorating on the cheap, though. The bookcases are from Ikea (ah, the Billy bookcase--what medical student doesn't have you in some corner of their apartment?), as is most of our new furniture, with the exception of the 3-piece couch set, which is from Jennifer Convertibles. I am very happy about the posters though, which were designed by Amy Martin and which I ordered some time ago. They are supposed to be time travel agency posters, and I think they are just adorable. I would eat them if I could. And no, I'm not shilling per se, but since they are being sold as a fundraising item for 826LA, a non-profit engaged in efforts to support the creative and expository writing of grade-school-aged children (as well as their teachers)--so what if I'm shilling?




I suppose I could have gotten these professionally framed, but that would have cost a bundle, so what I did instead was go to my local art supply store and get a cheap set of poster frames that were a couple of inches too large in either direction. Then I bought some matting board and had the scruffy art student who worked there (and who was questionably sober) cut the matting board to size to fit into the frames. I stuck the posters on the matting with My Friend double-sided tape, quickly sandwiched the whole thing into the frames before they fell apart, and voila! A touch of class! Sure, they're crappy frames, and a sadly amateur job at mounting the posters (especially the dog hair behind the clear plastic that I could not for the life of me remove before I just gave up), but stand a safe distance away and they don't look half bad.

I have a bunch of photos that I want to get up as well, but that's a job for another weekend and a second wind.

new toys

Cal is getting pretty good at riding his new bike. I can tell his confidence is growing because last week, he didn't want to ride on any kind of downhill slope because he felt nervous going too fast, and now he is racing down all the hills. I can't really run that fast anymore (really, I never could run that fast--I'm just using the pregnancy as an excuse), but honestly, I think that most people would have trouble keeping up with Cal on wheels now, unless they were riding alongside him on a bike themselves.

Also, the new camera came! It is rad. I still have to learn about the features, and I haven't really taken any pictures that amount to anything more interesting than stupid family snapshots so far, but I do like what I'm seeing with the D90 so far. New toys are fun.

(Here, Cal learns a vital lesson about riding your bike on grass as opposed to paved roads. Don't, because it is too hard.)



When we moved to Atlanta this summer and I was bemoaning the ridiculousness of the summer weather, everyone's response was that yes, summer sucks here, but the endless autumn season and mild winters makes the indignity of July and August well worth it. I don't know that anything is worth the kind of heat and humidity and GIANT FREAKING MOSQUITOES that defined our first few months here, but on a weekend like this, I'm inclined to let bygones be bygones.

(Full photoset from today here.)

gravity

I noticed this evening that Cal had a bruise on the left side of his face, so I decided to ask him about it.


MICHELLE
Hey Cal, did you hurt yourself today?

CAL
No, I didn't get hurt, just something fell down.

MICHELLE
What fell?

CAL
My cheek.

MICHELLE
Aha.

sweet



So, I don't have gestational diabetes! How was your day?

I won't bore you with the details of how I had to chase down someone at my OB's office, and how I have some serious doubts, given that there was no action that needed to be taken based on the results, that anyone ever would have phoned me to tell me that I was in the clear, at least until my next office appointment. But never you mind about that. I passed the glucose tolerance test. Ling Ling is not a macrosomic sugar baby, he is just huge because he is a mutant. How comforting to us all.

I guess it probably wasn't the best idea to have Carbs Ahoy for breakfast the day of my initial glucose screening test, but since they explicitly told me that I didn't need to be fasting, and since I didn't get to my appointment until the afternoon, I figured that it could do no harm. WRONG. Wasted a perfectly gorgeous early day off work yesterday sitting in a hospital waiting room, right next to a TV that kept playing commercials from local law firms insisting that if you have ever had a bad outcome related in the course of your medical care, ever, then you should be calling this toll free number to sue your doctor for CASH MONEY.

Also, I have four gratuitous holes in my arms.

Well anyway, all's well that ends well. And now, on to more pressing matters. That is: given that my vote is all but cast and I would merely be tuning in for the spectacle of a potential major gaffe, should I watch the last of the presidential debates tonight, or watch the finale of Project Runway? And, more importantly, will I be able to stay up late enough to even make that decision?

diabeetus?




Can someone explain to me why the serial glucose checks in the three hour glucose tolerance test can't be done by fingerstick? Honestly, if there's a good reason I'll totally buy into it, but since there was no real-time readout of my results and the lab people refused to look the results up for me (despite confirming that the results were, in fact, back from the central lab) it just means that I just spent three and a half hours sitting in the waiting room with absolutely no answers to show for it. So as for how the testing went, I guess it went...fine? In that I didn't die and was kept moderately entertained by the metric ton of electronics I toted along with me (iPod, laptop, etcetera). But in terms of how it went in a larger sense, stay tuned. I am hoping for the best but prepared for the worst--that is to say, ten to thirteen weeks of eating nothing but dry baked chicken breasts and whole grain amalgams fashioned into cracker-esque planks until this kid is born.

Anyway, my OB office is supposedly going to call me either this afternoon or tomorrow. And since this afternoon is over, I'm supposing that I won't have an answer until tomorrow mid-afternoon if I'm lucky, otherwise I will be calling their asses and demanding some answers, dammit, ANSWERS. Lord, I miss my old OB. Not only was her practice far more welcoming and responsive, but since she and I worked at the same hospital, getting my own medical information wasn't quite the ordeal that it appears to be now. Certainly one of the most galling things about being a patient when you're used to being a doctor is the loss of control.

(And, for the record, Joe actually does technically have access to the lab results, since he works at the [Academic Hospital] where my OB has her practice, but he can't check the results either because I'm not his patient, and I don't want him to get FIRED. Why, what would we do without his job and the extra $5 a month* that it brings in?]

* To be fair--also, the health insurance.

now i will have three children

I know we are not supposed to be buying unnecessary things in These Uncertain Economic Times (and perhaps hunkering down in a bunker with our liquidated assets instead, waiting for the End of Days) but dude, with a new bike, a beautiful autum, a new baby on the way and three sets of grandparents due to visit all in the next few weeks, having a functional camera started seeming less and less like an unecessary thing. And after ascertaining that they don't, in fact, manufacture the Nikon D70 anymore, and that fixing our old D70 (whatever is ailing it--the camera version of leprosy, perhaps) might cost at least half as much as a new camera, we decided that we should upgrade and I ordered the Nikon D90, on the condition (per Joe) that this was to be our joint early Christmas present to each other. Also, I ordered just the body of the camera, as the Nikon lenses we already own are interchangeable, as are the batteries and a good number of our camera-related accessories, thus saving us many of our rapidly depreciating American dollars! See, thrifty!

I am inelegantly excited to play with the new camera. Which, needless to say, I will not make the mistake of letting Cal touch until he graduates from high school. (If he graduates from high school. See that, no pressure! Let's see people make cracks about nursery school MCAT prep now! Our kid couldn't even piss in the toilet at school for a month and a half! Ah hah hah! Ha! Hmm.)

And also: A very interesting op-ed by Frank Rich in the New York Times about the unsettling turn the rhetoric in the presidential race has taken. Worth a read.

sugar sugar

This didn't come as a total surprise to me--with the apparent hugeness of The New One documented on ultrasound and a passing knowledge of the physiologic changes of pregnancy, this was something I was on the lookout for--but I apparently didn't pass my glucose screening test. (For those not in the know, this is a 50 gram glucose challenge that they give pregnant ladies at around 24-28 weeks to check for insulin tolerance that can be induced by placental hormone production.) The cutoff for blood glucose one hour after the glucose challenge (essentially a slug of orange-flavored Fanta packaged to look all medical) for this initial screening is 140--some even more conservative practitioners make 130 the cutoff point--and I think that my blood sugar after an hour of chugging the thing was measured at over 160. So, there's that.

One one hand, it could just be that I'm a false positive. This was not a fasting blood glucose, and I did have a pretty carb-heavy breakfast that morning at work (bagel, cereal, yogurt--those on-the-go hospital delights) so it's not like I'm necessarily walking around spilling glucose out of my pores or anything that like that. But on the other hand, I could have gestational diabetes, which, while certainly one of the more common morbidities of pregnancy and usually for the most part benign-ish for mother and child (this is not to say that it is nothing, but merely said in the context of someone who has seen Many Very Bad Things happen on the Labor and Delivery ward, none of which are for the faint of heart nor will they be discussed here), is certainly something I'd rather not have to deal with. So now I have to go back in for the more rigorous glucose tolerance test, which involves an overnight fast, a 100 gram glucose challenge, and at least three hours of sequential blood draws, each an hour apart.

I do have an early day off from work next Tuesday for me to get my labwork done, but that just means that I might--might--make it to the OB's office by about noon or 1:00pm, unless the ORs are in overdrive, in which case it might be even later than that. The not-very-friendly receptionist at the clinic instructed me to be NPO past midnight on the day of my test, but clearly, if I am fasting past midnight and not getting to even start metabolizing my glucose bolus until about one in the afternoon, I will not be very happy nor necessarily even able to walk straight, never mind take care of patients that morning. But what can you do? Oh pregnancy, you are so troublesome.

As I told one of my partners at work, pregnancy--it's a beautiful thing and a gift and all that--but honestly, if I could give away the actual physical aspects of gestating this kid for even a few hours a day, I would. Because so far as I can tell, sashemi and vodka each have a fairly low glycemic index.


* * *


So we got Cal his first bike last night. I don't know what make it is, but it is red 16" two-wheeler with training wheels, and he is infatuated. He loves his bike. He also luckily loves his helmet, which he calls his "cool hat." And after many admiring comments in the park today, he told me, "Everyone likes my red bicycle," so now he's getting cocky about the whole thing.

So as you can imagine, it was KILLING me that today, during Cal's first bike ride in the park, on a beautiful fall day with the sun and leaves and whatnot, that not only my regular camera, but also my phone cam and attendant video were all coincidentally broken. What's the opposite of serendipity? It was that. Luckily, after some consideration of what features of my old phone I used the most (aside from texting and making calls, I by far used the phone most for taking pictures and video) I have ordered a new phone, the Samsung i8510, so there will be more video in the days to come. However, for now, amuse yourselves with this, and imagine that it is Cal in the grey suit and red bow tie.

and then these bullies pushed me down and stepped on my glasses

Usually the streets are pretty empty when I walk to the subway station each morning, so it should have been OK when, as I was crossing the street, my cell phone case slipped off the waistband of my pants and fell on the floor. I have dropped this phone many many times, but it has held up quite well, so I wasn't worried about that part. Only what happened after that is: a car came along. There were no other cars on the road at 5:30 in the morning, but there, suddenly, was one. And like something out of a movie, where the main character (a lovable loser no doubt, perhaps played by Steve Carrell), is shown to be having a Really Bad Day, this car proceeds to run straight over my phone. It could have been anywhere on the three lane road, but it chose at that moment to be right there, and its front wheels right there, and at the moment of contact, which appeared to me at least to be playing in slow-motion, my phone obviously exploded into pieces. (If it were a movie, it would also have been raining, and the car would have then driven through a puddle and sprayed me.)

So. I need a new cell phone.

I stopped by my local T-Mobile hut on my way home to get a cheap replacement phone for the time being--I need my phone at a bare minimum for work, forget texting and internet and taking pictures and Those Things You Kids Do--I just need it so that the nurses and anesthetists and various staff can easily reach me--but this is a temporary fix, until I figure out what to do next. See, I really liked my old phone. It had a good camera on it, and it took DVD quality video, and while the web interface wasn't the slickest thing in the world, it was good enough for my purposes. It also didn't have all that business stuff that I never used, like Word and Excel and Crazy Business Card Organizer, because honestly, I'm not that kind of cell phone user. I liked my old phone, it was a goodly phone. And now it is a pile of plastic chips.

The saddest thing is I can't even show you a picture of the carnage, since not only is my camera phone (obviously) defunct, my regular camera also seems to have developed some horrible camera disease after I (perhaps unwisely) allowed Cal to take pictures with it, and seems to have lost all ability to focus. I'm not sure what happened, maybe something with the lens, or maybe the (hmmm hmmm) got knocked out of line with the (hmmmm). I don't know, I'm no expert on cameras. However, I suppose this is a minor point, unless one is actually interested in taking pictures that are in focus.

Anyway, I need a new cell phone now. Luckily, I seem to have some sort of business account through work (fancy!) so at least that'll cover the cost. Anyone have any good suggestions as to a suitable replacement for the Nokia N95?

juanita



So one of the yearlong projects that the kids in Cal's class has is taking turns bringing home the "classroom pet," a blue stuffed something of indistinct phylogenic origin named "Juanita." Juanita also comes with a journal, and we (the parents) have been instructed that we are to help document Juanita's adventures during her visits home with us in words and pictures, all the better to share with the class at large the day of Juanita's return to school before being whisked away to another family's waiting arms. The determination of who gets to go home with Juanita is apparently determined by raffle, and when Cal's name was picked (he is the second kid in the class who is getting to visit with Juanita so far this year), apparently all the kids cheered and started yelling his name, which made Cal very proud, after which a good deal of the rest of the afternoon strutting around with her. So that part was fun. However, when I started to look at the rest of the assignment--the photojournalistic element of it all, along with the fact that my three year-old (I don't know about yours) has dubious grasp of the intricacies of actually taking photos and writing words, this seemed like this was turning more into a homework assignment for me than for him.




Also, when I picked up Juanita's journal on Thursday evening, I noticed that the first family that had taken Juanita for the week had apparently also happened to take a trip to DISNEYWORLD that very same week, so Juanita's journal entry from her visit with them was filled with photos of the Magic Kingdom and mentions of rides and balloons and More Fun Than You're Going To Have This Weekend. Curse you, other family. Way to set the bar so high. DISNEYWORLD, for chrissake.






Anyway, we hung out with Juanita this weekend. And Cal had fun with it all, talking to her like she was alive and dragging her around everywhere. Even to Ikea, where, it turns out, Juanita originated. It somewhat took the mystique out of the endeavor to find that one and only Juanita was, in fact, mass produced by the Swedes, and could easily be purchased by the armful from an endless bin. However, given that it was what I would consider the equivalent experience of seeing twenty Salvation Army Santa Clauses sitting around McDonalds with their beards half pulled off, eating burgers, Cal seemed nonplussed.




Full photo set here.

wouldn't have believed it otherwise

One of the nice things about Cal's school is that, at least for the nursery school children, the teachers are pretty committed to taking pictures of the daily goings on in the class and e-mailing these pictures home to us. This serves two purposes. One is so that we can actually get a straight answer of what Cal actually does at school. Ask him very specifically if he had fun in gym class rolling down the foam ramp, and he possibly will elaborate, but ask him open-endedly, "So, what did you do in school today?" and you will be subjected to an earful of whimsy and echolalia of questionable origin or fidelity.

The other purpose of getting these photos home is, at least in my mind, photographic evidence.




So he actually is capable of sleep.

all clear!

I never intended to create drama by not posting (or updating Twitter, or Flickr, or anything) for a month, but things around here just got really busy and I didn't post one week and then I didn't post the next week, and then next thing you know the very thought of this blog made me cringe, as did every e-mail I got that (for good reason) started off screaming, "Not to be alarmist or anything, but ARE YOU DEAD?" No, not dead. Not even maimed. I am fine. Joe and Cal and Cooper are fine. Giant Fetus is fine (about which more later). And I know (hence the cringing) that it really was unspeakably rude, not to mention panic inducing, to leave people hanging mid-pregnancy right before our Big Anatomy Scan on September 4th (about which! more later!) but that is why I was HIDING from my blog and from my e-mail for the past few weeks, because dude, I KNOW. And I apologize! But let's just hop back into it, shall we? Because so far, the only positive thing that has happened during this unplanned hiatus is that maybe I can express my dismay over all aspects of Sarah Palin publicly without being told that I'm just jealous that she's hotter than me.

Anyway, the anatomy scan.




For those unfamiliar with the various views of fetal parts on ultrasound, let me say that this picture is the equivalent of having the fetus sitting upright on a glass table while you sit under the table pointing the camera up into its parts. So yes, that's his butt, and yes, we're having another boy. Yay for boys! And not to perpetuate the whole "second-child-getting-the-short-end" stereotype, but--dude, we are going to save so much money on clothes. Of course, I haven't been able to stop myself from getting a few things (mostly cold-weather items--since Cal was born in July, our newborn clothing stash is conspicuously short on such important items as, oh, say, PANTS, or anything thicker than a single layer of thin cotton), but overall, this new kid is going to be living in (barely worn, highly fashionable) Hand-Me-Down City. Which, as we know, is just down the road from Second Child Syndrome-Ville.




I really didn't have a preference either way for the gender of our second child (nor did I have A Feeling, as some people purport to, though I figure if you do, hey, you have a 50-50 chance of being right--well, a 49-51% chance, anyway), but I have to say that the first inkling I had that this baby might be penis-y is when Joe mom was rhapsodizing about how she was dying to have another girl in the family so she could someday take her to Claire's. I figure that such a strong preference is a sure setup for disappointment. Not that she's disappointed anymore, mind you, but it's really surprised me now that the Vienna sausage is out of the can how strongly people feel about having sexual parity. For example, the most common responses when I tell people (after they ask) that we're having another boy:

"I guess the next one will have to be a girl!"

"TWO BOYS? Oh man, you're in trouble!"

"So are you going to try for a girl?"

I'm not offended or anything by all this family planning, but what I usually say is, "We're just going to concentrate on this baby first." And then I point out again how DUDE, WE ARE GOING TO SAVE SO MUCH MONEY. But anyway, we're all very happy, and excited to meet him in January.




None of the still screenshots they took during the anatomy scan turned out too well, since frankly, the kid was moving around like in those Tasmanian Devil cartoons, but everything else--that is to say, everything that was important--looked great. It did confirm my suspicions, however, that this kid is going to be large. I mean, Cal was on the larger end too, weighing in at 8 pounds, 3 ounces (that's 3.72 kilos for you metric system devotees out there. You're welcome.) but this time around, I feel like I can feel more, and more specific body parts poking around earlier than with Cal. Indeed, the ultrasound confirms that New Kid is measuring at the 84th percentile for dates, which, you know, is big. So the good news is that all his parts look to be in the right place, he's growing, and abundantly perky. The bad news is that HE'S FREAKING HUGE. But let's just worry about that later, shall we?

And, in answer to another popular question, we do have a name picked out, including his Chinese middle name, though I am going to practice some uncharacteristic restraint and wait until he's actually born to announce it. The reason is not superstition, but more because the last time around, with Cal, people took it less like me saying, "We're going to have a son named Cal" and more like some sort of open solicitation for opinions. So I got more than a few comments in Ye Olde Comments Section that were like, "CAL? WHAT THE HELL KIND OF NAME IS THAT? THAT'S DUMB." or "That poor kid, the second he turns 18, he's going to court to change his name" or "CAL? What are you going to name your next kids? HAL and MAL? Bwah ha ha!" Well, guess what people, we now have a three year-old son, and his name is Cal. And we look forward to introducing you to our new kid when he's born, and not quite so theoretical that people feel the need to contribute to the naming process. We do live in a democracy (for the most part), but this is not up for a vote. (And no, he will not be named Hal, or, as others have suggested, Stanford.)

In other news (read: everything else in life) things are going well. I have been working a lot. Not a lot compared to residency, and not a lot compared to probably a good number of people out there, but life is busy. I love my job. I'm not going to talk overmuch about it since, you know, I would like to keep it, but I'm with a great group, working with a really excellent team of people, and I am having fun while getting paid to do it. I am also really pushing myself with respect to my skills, which, coming straight out of training, makes me happy, and there are many days that I go home and feel like I have done a reasonably good job and am proud of myself. So that's a good thing. Liking what you do for a living isn't the most important thing, but it's one of the more important things, I think. Anyway, I'm lucky is what I'm saying.




Cal is doing really well. As expected, by now he has gotten over most of his school-related peccadillos, including his fear of the school toilet, though the last took an hour and a half of me kneeling with him in the bathroom after school one afternoon, and Joe taking a morning off of work to coach him in class to just pee in the damn toilet, for chrissake. (Also, there were jellybeans. Many jellybeans.) I never quite figured out what it was that set him off on that one--was it the multiple stalls? The lack of privacy? The other kids? The loud flushing?--but I've stopped trying to analyze it. Kids are weird is all. Anyway, I don't get to pick Cal up from school every day, but I do get out from work early enough on average about once a week, and every time I get him, he tells me with complete sincerity, "School is so fun. I love school." So either he's being brainwashed by the PTA fundraising committee, or we're going to have a hell of a time keeping him as happy and entertained at home during Christmas Break.

Joe is doing well, making him useful by assembling various baby items, surgically repairing sundry torn eye-parts and the like. He's busy too, but enjoying work, and I think we're both enjoying Atlanta a little more now that it has decided to turn the corner from HOT AS THE SURFACE OF MERCURY to Less Hot. Apparently, the temperate autumn here lasts damn near forever, so that's something to look forward to. Especially since I don't think I have a winter jacket that will fit me until after January.

So, in sum:


1.) Sorry!

2.) Not dead!

3.) Quite well, in fact!

4.) I'll try harder to keep up.


Thanks for sticking around.