the chamber of secrets

Cal did two weeks of "Danger Camp" this summer (basically a summer day camp program based on this book) and came away with it not only with the requisite mosquito bites and tie-dye T-shirt, but also with an enduring passion for spying, ciphers, espionage, and general subterfuge. It's all highly contagious, and while Mack will deny this to his last breath he idolizes Cal beyond all measure so whatever interests Thing 1 has rapidly become the interests of Thing 2.

Separate and mostly unrelated: we currently live in a three bedroom house, which while by New York standards is an embarrassment of bedrooms (and square footage), means that under current occupancy patterns, we have neither a guest room nor a room for Nina to decamp.

THEREFORE (and this is where the two threads come together) we are working towards the goal of consolidating both boys into the same room. We already have a bunk bed in Cal's room so we're halfway there (it's even a twin over a full so that Mack will be, what, 50% less likely to end up on the floor?) but even so, it's a transition that is sure to be met with some resistance, at least initially. So we're selling the idea by billing these new shared quarters as the SUPER-DUPER BOYZ HANGOUT ROOM. Jazz hands! And one of the ways that we thought we could make the room cooler? By building a secret clubhouse inside of it.

Cal's room has three small closets, the middle closet of which has a lofted crawlspace, about two and a half feet wide, thirteen feet long, and maybe four feet high. We'd been using this space to keep a variety of larger items that we had nowhere else to store (as we have neither garage, basement nor attic space); things like our Christmas decorations, moving boxes, an old set of doors from the laundry room, what have you. We still have no place to store these things, and in fact, all these things are kind of sitting out in the family room now until we find a better place to put them. But lack of storage aside we figured screw it, let's just empty out the crawl space and turn it into a clubhouse. A SUPER SECRET RAD CLUBHOUSE FOR BOYS. No Homers allowed!

The first thing we had to do, after we emptied the closet out, was change the light fixture. Being a closet, all it had was a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling with a pull-chain cord, which was obviously hazardous, what with the risk of anyone walking into the burning bulb with their face. So we took out the light fixture, capped it off, and put in an outlet instead. (I say "we" but when I say "we" I really mean the electricians did it and I watched, encouraging them with the thumbs up sign and offering beverages for their troubles at annoyingly frequent intervals.) After the electrical work was done, we vacuumed and washed the floors (and I apologize for the lack of any really good "before" photos because you have to understand, it's basically a railroad car-shaped space, there's really no room to get a good shot) and got to work decorating.

One thing that Joe really wanted to put in there was a full-wall panel of dry-erase board. A dry erase board that size (about four feet by six feet) would easily cost more than a hundred bucks, but we did it on the cheap by going to Home Depot and getting a panel of fiberboard with one side of white shiny coating (not sure what the coating is but it is smooth and slick, like melamine) and getting it cut to 48 inches, which was the length of the wall on one side of the clubhouse door. The whole panel of fiberboard cost something like $12.99, and after getting it cut, we ended up with two fairly large pieces of whiteboard material--I still have to find a home for the second piece, because I guess I'm too much of a cheapskate to throw it away. The only drawback to this is that the dry-erase board isn't magnetic like some of the more expensive "real" whiteboard options, but in the big scheme of things and especially given the price differential, I don't think it's a big deal.

My big contribution was the lighting. Mainly the concern was safety. Joe had wanted to install one of those recessed can lights up in the ceiling, but I just kept having visions of the kids burning their heads or their hands on the bulbs, as the ceiling really is very low in there--Cal can't even stand up straight without his head grazing the ceiling. Another issue is that as a closet, the ventilation in the clubhouse space isn't very good. We already put a fan by the door to move some air in there and I have talked to the boys about leaving the outer closet door open, because as an anesthesiologist I am somewhat paranoid about CO2 rebreathing. (That scene from "Apollo 13" where the astronauts have to make that new CO2 filter out of, like, a sock and some duct tape? THE STUFF OF NIGHTMARES.) Anyway, my point to the lights is that anything incandescent would heat up the space quickly. I originally thought about a string of low wattage Christmas lights, but then I found these:

Tape lights! (Not "tap lights". TAPE lights.) They're LED and energy efficient, bright, cool to the touch, and super-easy to affix, as they are literally backed with 3M tape so you can just stick them up wherever you want. And best of all?

They change color! They even have flashing and strobe effects, which is not my favorite setting (I kept waiting for someone to start seizing in there) but the kids certainly enjoyed pushing all the buttons. I mean, no kidding, right? THERE ARE BUTTONS? WE MUST PUSH THEM. Anyway, we got two sets of 16 feet each, which was enough to go around the entire clubhouse once with a few feet to spare. We actually like these lights so much we ordered another two sets to rim the bunkbed with, so the kids could use them as reading lights in bed. (See also: the awesome factor.)

We rounded out the room with a berber carpet remnant we had lying around from carpeting the bedrooms when we first moved in (coincidentally the one strip we had was almost exactly the dimensions of the clubhouse space--we just had to lop off a few inches in width to make it fit), two beanbags from Target, a few superhero posters, and a world map from National Geographic. Et voilà.

The name of the secret club, by the way, is SECRET CLUB MOM AND DAD NOT ALLOWED (S.C.M.D.N.A. for, uh, "short") and after surveying the finished product, Cal and Mack promptly kicked me out, which I consider a successful end-result.

Hope you're having a happy Labor Day weekend!

recalibrating

I know there's a touch of irony in adding this disclaimer given that I haven't updated this blog in, like, half a year, but: LONG ENTRY AHEAD.

There's a snippet of a cartoon I remember from my childhood--I can't remember if it was "Tom and Jerry" but if it wasn't it was in a similar vein--where a mouse is reclining in a hot tub. He's sitting back with his arms along the rim of the tub, maxing and relaxing as cartoon mice do, wearing that look of smug satisfaction he was prone to. (As an aside: I never liked Jerry. I always thought he was a real jerk to Tom, a cat who was just fulfilling his evolutionary imperative after all. Ditto Road Runner. Ditto those capering harpy kids that keep taking the Trix away from the rabbit. JUST GIVE HIM A BOWL, YOU ASSHOLES.)

So anyway, the mouse. He's enjoying the hot tub. He's relishing the water, the heat. But the water starts to get a little bit hotter. And a little bit hotter still. Suddenly it's not so comfortable anymore. Not hot enough that he wants to get out of the tub or anything, but just...hotter. He starts sweating. His fur starts getting a little frizzy (from the humidity, you understand). Then, finally, he turns around and notices the cat behind him, slicing onions and carrots to add into the now boiling water. (My memory of this part is not quite as clear, but the cat may have been wearing a chef's toque.)

I've thought of that cartoon clip a lot in the last year.

But let me back up for a second.

If you've ever followed this blog with regularity in the past (though I'm sure with my sporadic updates I've winnowed that number down to only the die-hardest of die-hards) you've probably noticed that I haven't had the time to write much of substance since I went back to work after my maternity leave last September, and that I haven't updated basically at all since December. The reasons are all those that you could probably expect: busy job, three kids, and the responsibilities and duties associated therein. The explanations are always boring because everyone's reasons for being busy are pretty much the same, but to put it in medical terms: it's just a matter of triage.

It's hard to know where the tipping point was--though I have to presume that it was at least in part associated with the addition of our much-beloved third child into the mix--but at some point in the last year, things started getting hard. Not impossible, not un-doable, but subtly, Joe and I started to notice just how tight things were getting. Time was tight, at home, with the kids, with each other. Emotional resources were tight. Patience was less of a resource we could reliably depend on. The days and weeks started becoming these things that we were enduring, rather than living, let alone enjoying. Again, the imagery from an old movie comes to mind--inmates in a prison, grimly notching off yet another day on the wall of their cell.

I don't mean to imply that our life is a joyless dirge--far from it. We love our family, we love our jobs. Even working the hours that we do, we try carve out quality time when we can--long weekends, holidays, family vacations where they fit in. We bolus our family time because our basal infusion rate is so parsimonious, but we do make an effort to compensate. And we liked to tell ourselves that this bolus dosing was sufficient, and it worked...not well, but well enough.

But it didn't change the fact that over the past few years, and over the last year in particular, the feeling of our everyday lives becoming something that we were tolerating started to feel more an more pervasive. When you only see your kids for an hour or two at the very tail-end of each day, only to perform the most basic of maintenance for them (bath! brush teeth! yell at them for not taking their baths and brushing their teeth quickly enough because I'm tired and they're tired and everyone's tired so LET'S ALL GO TO BED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE) you start to feel like you're consisting on a diet of discarded crusts in an otherwise empty pizza box. Maybe you can piece together a life in these scraps of the day, but split between three kids, it's simply not enough time.

Joe and I have been discussing for years our long-term outlook for modifying (read: decreasing) the work hours for at least one of us to have more time with the kids, and for the longest time, our party line has been: soon. We're going to do it soon. "Maybe in a few years or so," was the stock phrase. But there was always the next thing. We'll think about it when I finish my fellowship. We'll figure it out it when I get more settled in my job. We'll do it if I make partner in my group. Later. We'll do it. But later. Meanwhile, time marches on.

Then: I was talking with one of my partners at work a few months ago. He has four kids, the oldest of whom had just turned eight. "I just realized," he said as we were chatting in the front hall of the OR, sidestepping a stretcher careening down the hallway from the PACU, "that he's eight. In another eight years, he's going to be in high school, driving, getting ready to go to college. Half my time with him is already done. I mean, they come home after they go to college and all, but you know what that's like. It's not the same. Half my time of having my son in my house is over already."

There feeling that I had after having that conversation was not unlike being wrapped in a piece of wet burlap and gently asphyxiated. Because Cal was turning eight too. Half our time raising our oldest son in our home was done, and not only had this particular calculus not ever occurred to me, but looking back, I can't say I really know where those eight years went.

Because see, we've always lived like this. Cal was born when we were residents. His entire life--and thus of course, Mack and Nina's entire life too--we've worked. Both Joe and I have worked our tails off. We're not residents anymore of course, and some of the specifics of our jobs have changed from year to year, but the fact of it is that we each work on average 50-60 hours a week, more if we're taking weekend call, and although we've been saying for years that we were going to try to get more control of our work schedules to put some more time into our family life, it hadn't happened yet. The decision point was always pushed off down the road. Later. Soon. Not yet. Someday. And now Cal was turning eight and I have no idea how time passed so fast.

If I'm going to be completely honest with myself I'm sure some of this particular grim inertia was also linked to a perverse macho pride. I've always spoken a lot about work-life balance in medicine and how these antiquated notions, about doctors functioning as around-the-clock automatons sacrificing their personal lives for the greater good, would have to evolve along with the rest of the world. But I think that in some ways I felt safe championing the choice for others to go part-time because I myself chose to work full-time. You do what works for your family, everyone's definition of work-life balance is different. But saying it from the vantage point of someone with three kids and still worked full-time herself felt like a secure platform from which to proselytize, like I was somehow above reproach from people who might accuse all part-time doctors of being lazy or uncommitted. DO WHAT YOU NEED TO DO; BUT AS FOR MYSELF, I AM DOING ALL THE THINGS.

And to be honest, we were getting by. It wasn't wonderful, but it was OK. We were surviving. Maybe we weren't "living our best life" to invoke an Oprah-ism (and I don't even know how I know that since I never even watched Oprah) but...day to day, we were getting by.

And then, the week before Memorial Day, our nanny of five years quit. With no warning, and giving zero notice. She just left one day and mentioned on her way out the door that she wasn't coming back.

Boom. Game-changer.

I'm not going to talk too much about the nanny thing because frankly, after probably the most stressful two months of our lives, I'm just over it. It wasn't even so much the issue of finding a new nanny--though that, obviously, was a huge part of solving our problems, at least in the short term.  But the larger and more important part was having to honestly evaluate our life, our choices, and just how much time we did indeed spend at work, away from our children. It was like turning the stark, faintly buzzing fluorescent exam light onto the fish-white underbelly of what kept things functioning at a level that passed as "OK" for the past five years. And what we realized was that: it really isn't OK. Having to outsource this much of our children's care--of our children's lives--to someone else, particularly someone who after five years could walk out on them without so much as a backwards glance...is not OK.

(This is putting aside the obvious logistical difficulty of finding a non-live-in person to work 50-60 hours a week. It's a tough sell to say the least. One suggestion, perhaps less helpful than most, was that we should just hire two nannies. To which my reaction was, if you have to hire two people to take care of your kids while you're at work, it's possible you're not spending enough time with your kids.)

So. Joe and I discussed and agonized and number crunched and evaluated. We talked to a lot of people. We agonized some more. And what's going to happen now is this: as of September 1st, I will be going part-time at my job. Joe and I would have been fine with either one of us working less, but because of the ways our jobs are structured, it makes more sense right now for the part-time working parent to be me. My new schedule will have me working three days a week, mixed in with my share of nights, weekend and holiday call. And my main goal for the other two days of the week? To do some of the things that I've never been able to do with my kids because I've haven't had the time. Simply to be around more.

I know this all seems unnecessarily melodramatic of an announcement to some, because plenty of people in a multitude of fields choose to work part-time. But for me, it is a big deal, because to be honest, when you're accustomed to following a prescribed path, swimming against the current for a change can be scary. And there are a lot of issues--job guilt, fear of resentment from co-workers or being perceived as less than fully committed to medicine, concerns about crippling my career potential--that I'm working through having finally made this decision. There's a fear of not wanting to let people down.

But that's it on the other side too, isn't it? I don't want to let people down. I want to do my job well. All my jobs. And I think that right now, I need to spend more time with my kids. Nothing's broken, I still love being an anesthesiologist, and the fact that I've worked full-time for the first eight years of parenthood wasn't the wrong call nor has it damaged our family. It's just that our choices then are not the same as our choices now, and when we have better options we owe it to ourselves to take them. We could be making more of this life. We could be doing better.

I'm not going to be there hovering in the periphery for every single second of my kids' lives, nor frankly should I be. But I'm looking forward to just being around more.

So that's what's going on with us. In most ways, it's really no big thing. But in other ways, it's the biggest thing.

costume drama

He's my firstborn and so I say this with all possible love and bemusement, but Cal is a weird child when it comes to dressing up for Halloween. It's not so much like he has sensory issues--he doesn't have problems with the costumes being itchy or bulky or too hot, he just thinks they're dumb or something. I think in reality he just gets self-conscious. Like the act of wearing a costume garners too much attention, and he doesn't like the fuss. At all.

Above is, unfortunately, the only surviving photo of his first Halloween costume that I can find (there must be more out there, but I didn't use iPhoto during Cal's first year so many of those digital image files are archived somewhere unreachable). It also showcases Joe's unfortunate predilection for grafting cheesy beyond belief titles and borders onto photography--just be grateful we're spared a wreath of pumpkins around Cal's face or something similarly Printshop circa 1988. Anyway, I just show you this picture because this, taken at the time that Cal was about Nina's current age (they were both born in July), is the last time that we were able to cram Cal into a Halloween costume without him complaining.

Here the following year. You can't see most of the costume since he's you know, running away from Joe (I think I was actually on call that particular Halloween so I wasn't even there) but he's supposed to be a monkey. See how happy he looks? SEE THE LOOK OF CHILDLIKE WONDER WHILE TRAIPSING THROUGH THE MAGICAL WORLD OF MAKE-BELIEVE?

Above, the following year, when he was two years old. We, thinking ourselves terribly clever, dressed him as a medical resident. Cal quickly stripped himself of the accessorizing accoutrement (the scrub cap, the pager, the stethoscope which had been doused in alcohol and Clorox to eliminate all traces of Enterococcus fecalis--it's the small touches that really make the costume, after all) and just barely tolerated the rest of it, mostly once he realized there was candy involved. This was back when we still lived in New York by the way, so his exposure in costume was minimal--mostly we just walked down the hallway, trick-or-treated one apartment, and then walked back. (Some of the candy he got may have been from our own bowl.)

I had some high hopes the following year, as in September Cal specifically requested a pink butterfly costume. Yes, a pink butterfly. So I got the costume (OK, so maybe I got a red and orange butterfly costume--I am as open-minded as the next parent but maybe it's my own bias that led me to apply some well-meaning edits to his original intent), but by the time it came Cal decided that he didn't want to wear any costume, butterfly or otherwise. "I just want to wear regular clothes," he said, a refrain that would dog us again and again subsequent Halloweens. We went to his nursery school Halloween party that year wearing khakis and a grey cardigan (I begged him to let me put some baby powder in his hair so that we could at least pass his costume off as "old man," but he was not having it) and had no further costume planned as of October 30th.

Finally, we just ended up putting him in his beloved "regular clothes" (black long-sleeved t-shirt, long pants), gussied it all up with his rain boots and a two-tone bolt of electricity that I cut out from construction paper and taped on his chest. Enter "Captain Lightning Bolt."  He was OK with this for some time, but then had a little potty accident after hitting three or four houses (three year olds never feel like they have to go to the bathroom until all of a sudden OMG THEY TOTALLY DO) so trick-or-treating was cut short and the costume issue was put to rest for another year.

At age four, Cal finally acceded, after weeks of cajoling to think of a Halloween idea, any idea; to go as "a builder man." Again, a costume involving his everyday clothing and some accessories from the toy bin.  The hat, tool belt and goggles were, of course, instantly shed the second after the pictures were taken, and he ran around his school Halloween party somewhat incongruously dressed in jeans and a blue oxford shirt.

And then, the year he was five, Cal refused to wear anything even approximating a costume. In fact, we didn't even go trick-or-treating that year because he just flat-out refused to do anything and Mack was too young to know any better. At the 11th hour (that is to say: 6:00pm on Halloween night) we thought maybe we had convinced him to go as Steve from "Blues Clues" just by wearing stuff out of his closet (green striped rugby shirt, khakis, blue dog stuffed animal--boom, instant Steve) but then at 6:05 he decided with finality that costumes were BOGUS and trick-or-treating was DUMB and a horribly humiliating ordeal for LOSERS. Also maybe he whined and cried and acted like we were asking him to eat not but burning hot coals and drink not but burning hot cola.

"But if you go out and wear a costume, people will give you candy!" I told him, playing what I thought was my trump card.

"We have candy at home," he said, quite reasonably.

So after that debacle, we decided last year, when he was six, that he was going to find a costume that he would tolerate and we were going to go trick-or-treating whether he liked it or not. I don't think we're of the type necessarily to force our kids to do stuff that they hate, only it seemed like he was getting himself all worked up over nothing, and that if only he would stop being so rigid and just relax about "looking dumb" and allow himself have fun, that maybe he could actually have fun and we could be like a normal family going trick-or-treating. And then maybe I finally get some candy runoff at long last. IS IT SO MUCH TO ASK?

We decided, after brief discussion, that he would be Harry Potter, which was cool because he already had a Harry Potter wand, and anyway, Harry Potter wears regular clothes, he could even skip the glasses, all he'd have to do is let me draw on the forehead scar and wear this Gryffindor scarf that he got just so it looked like he was trying a little.

After a lot of discussion (and more whining, and more crying), he finally let us tie the scarf on him. But he was not real happy about it. "You know, Cal," I told him, "most kids actually really like Halloween. They think it's fun to dress up, and go around, and they like going door to door to get candy. It's kind of a really big holiday for kids, you know?  Some kids look forward to this all year!"

He just grunted.

(Though eventually he did get into it.)

This year, we didn't even have a discussion. We were going to do this thing. After polling Cal to see if he had any costume ideas (to which he responded, "I don't know. I have to consider it.") I just decided, boy, you're going to dress up as a Star Wars character, and I don't want to hear any more about it. Originally I bought a whole pile of cream and brown fleece and was going to sew all the kids matching Jedi costumes (pause for laughter), but reality testing eventually intervened and I ended up buying the chintziest of chintzy drugstore Jedi outfits for both boys, coupled with these foam colored light up rods that I highly recommend to anyone who has kids that are into Star Wars.

And when we went to the third grade Halloween party this Friday, he put it on without any discussion.

Cal!

Put on an actual non-regular clothing costume!

WITHOUT DISCUSSION!

(High fiving a million angels)

I know it's not a big deal (and believe me, I'm trying not to make it into one, especially in front of him), but it's been seven years and eight Halloweens to get to this point so...yeah, it is kind of a majorly big deal.

Both of the boys, by the way, decided to be Obi-Wan Kenobi for Halloween.  Originally Cal wanted to be Obi-Wan and Mack was going to be Anakin Skywalker (which I found actually quite fitting), but then Mack decided that he wanted to be Obi-Wan too, and Cal got mad because what are you nuts, there can't be two Obi-Wans, haven't you even seen the movie?  Like, a couple hundred times? And there was much squabbling, and I came in and decided, perhaps at a slightly higher volume than strictly necessary, YOU KIDS SHUT UP EVERYONE'S GOING TO BE OBI-WAN.

Ah, Mack.  Mack, on the other hand...

The only problem we have with Mack is getting him out of costume.


* * *


I'm kind of hustling to write this while the kids are asleep so I don't really have time to reflect on this fact or get overly introspective/profound/lachrymose about this fact, but: this weekend marks the twelfth anniversary of this blog.

Twelve years. That's a lot of years, boy. Twelve years ago I was starting my second year of medical school and decided, on a whim, to start an online journal in lieu of memorizing the complement pathway to have even a faint hope of passing my immunology midterm. And now I am an attending anesthesiologist, married to my med school classmate (who, not to knock my own clinical skills, but I often think is a better doctor than me, or at least good at different things), a mother of three, living in the South.

Aside from the part where I now have a medical degree, at the moment I started this blog I had no idea where I would end up ten-plus years down the line.  I can't say that everything that has happened to me since has been expected. But as much as we Type A personalities like to control things, the unexpected can be exciting, and what's more, the unexpected can be quite good. And really, I don't think that this blog anniversary requires much more reflection than that, only to say that life now is busy and full and, most importantly, fun. I think I've reached a point in balancing my life and obligations where I feel that if something extracurricular ceases to be fun, it's probably not worth doing anymore. But keeping this blog, even after twelve years, continues to be fun, and that's why I keep writing. So thank you for sticking around with me.

And yes, if the finer details of the CXCR4 signaling pathway are indeed important to my clinical practice, I am pretty much screwed, because I don't think I ever really learned it in the first place.

indian summer vacation

The way Joe and I schedule our lives we end up planning most of our family vacations more than a year in advance, and around the Spring of 2011 we made plans to rent a cottage in Jamaica for summer vacation the following year. Well, turns out that despite my neurosis about planning things well ahead of time, you actually can make plans too far in advance, because it turns out we were a little busy this past July. Luckily, the rental place was very nice about allowing us to reschedule once we told them the reason, and so we took our family summer vacation and moved it to a week in the fall. To this week, as a matter of fact.

It actually doesn't take that long to fly from Atlanta to Jamaica, but we did have to take a car to a shuttle to a monorail to a plane to a van, so it ended up being a fairly grueling trip for the three kids. Luckily we now have no other plans for this week other than to hang around and let the kids beach and pool themselves stupid.  So you know.  Vacation.

We invited my parents to come along with us for the trip too, because it's nice for the kids to be able to spend time with them, and also (selfishly) it's nice to have another two sets of eyes around to make sure no one's playing with anything dangerous/inadvisable/flammable.  Here are each of them holding the only remaining grandchild who will agree to sit on their laps.  In the picture on the right, Nina, like Kuato, wants you to open your mind, Quaid.

(I should also note that my dad came into town one day early so that Joe could do a blepharoplasty on him, which is why his eyelids still look a little bruised.  He would also want you know to know, however, that he got this done only because his lids were drooping and obstructing his vision, and not for purely cosmetic reasons.  Now, I don't know nothin' about no oculoplastics, but I do know that doing a good blepharoplasty is sometimes a tricky and subtle business--particularly on Asian people--but even just three days post-op, I have to say that Joe did a really amazing job.  First off, my dad can see better, so already: success.  But as someone who has been looking at my dad for my entire life, I also have to say that even this soon postop, he also looks really good and natural and himself, which is important.  So good for him, and less good for, you know, Kenny Rogers.)

Anyway, so we're here.  Cal's having fun swimming, Mack's having fun bobbing, and Nina's having fun lying in a variety of shady spots and looking at the ceiling fan in the bedroom.

I suppose there might come a time where our travels might not so reliably involve going to the beach.  Just probably not anytime soon.

Vacation!

emergence

The remarkable thing about maternity leave is how much free time it seems like you should have, but how little free time it is you actually have.

Nina is a sweet, delicious baby (again, I note our culture's predilection for comparing babies to confectionary--however, if you've been with this baby, you would understand, she's basically a giant lump of fondant shaped into human form) but she, like all babies, is fairly time-consuming.  That, and she enjoys being held, ideally constantly, unless she's asleep.  Actually, even when she's asleep, she prefers to sleep like this, which is why I have since switched to one of those Tom's of Maine hippie dippie deodorants that--sorry Tom--barely deodorizes.  Everyone step back three feet.

People probably have different schools of thought on this when it comes to babies, but I sort of tend towards the thinking that newborn babies can't really be spoiled, and that all they need to learn at this point is that they're going to be taken care of.  So if she wants me to hold her all day long, well then, by gum, that's what I'll do--it's why I'm on maternity leave, after all.  However, it also means that I can't really do much of anything else (I do have a growing list of dinners that can be cooked one-handed while the other hand is holding a baby, the Cliff Notes version of which is: cook not anything that requires peeling or a can opener) and that's my roundabout way of explaining why I haven't updated this blog in more than a month.  It's not that I can't type, but anything that requires more typing than can be accomplished with one thumb on an iPhone is perhaps more bimanual dexterity than I have been able to reasonably accomplish recently.

Cue gratuitous baby photos...and go.

(On a related note: if you've e-mailed me in the past month or so with a non-emergent message, I really apologize if I haven't returned it.  Life is triage, and so I've been somewhat unplugged from some of my outside obligations as of late.  Lo siento, etcetera etcetera.)

I started (well, multiple times) to write about the life of an anesthesiologist, pecking away at it until my fingers were damn near bloody bone stubs, because that entry was not even half finished and it was already, like, a skrillion pages long.  But then about two weeks ago I got an e-mail from someone at the AAMC (funny trivia: if you Google "AAMC," it will ask you, "Did you mean AAMCO?" and divert you to a page with links to mufflers and transmission changes; but no, as many of you know, AAMC stands for the Association of American Medical Colleges) who is doing an article series on medical specialties, and will be featuring the noble specialty of Anesthesia in September.  So since I'm going to be doing that interview anyway, I figured I'd just link to that when it came out instead, and add bits and pieces to it or field questions as opposed to posting a dense and possibly stultifying brickwork of text not unlike The Cask of Amontillado.  Fair?

So here's what else we've been up to.

Well, school started.  Actually it started the second week of August, which seems just shy of barbaric to me, but such are the regional variants of the academic year in the South.  I think the reasoning is that they time it such that the first semester ends right as the kids are breaking for Christmas (as opposed to having the semester end at the end of January like it did for me growing up--a two and a half week holiday vacation is a more natural break point) and as another plus, school ends usually the week before Memorial Day, which enables us to do things like this.  But the downside is that we live in Atlanta, and August is monstrously hot.  So pick your poison.

The transition to third grade has been pretty good so far.  As expected, the fact that we were making this transition after finishing up first grade in full made the switch much more natural--new class, new teacher at this point in the year is par for the course, so Cal blended in with his classmates pretty seamlessly.  There is one girl in his class who towers over him by a full head, but on the whole, he's not that much smaller than his classmates (despite being one to almost two full years younger than some of them), and that has helped.  He's also making friends, which is a huge relief.  (Somewhat on-topic: I still remember when the term "playdate" entered my lexicon--growing up we just called it "going over to [insert friend name here]'s house" but my sister, ten years younger than I, was set up on "playdates" in a semi-regular fashion--and at the time, the terminology seemed overly formal, like saying that your four year-old had a pressing engagement at the sandbox.)

Veering back on topic, Cal is making friends, and while it seems that the size and age difference isn't a really big deal so far, Cal's lack of working knowledge about miscellaneous juvenile pop culture ephemera is.  "You don't know who Usher is?" one of his new friends asked Cal.  Cal did not.  Ditto Justin Bieber.  He did, however, just finish reading a biography about Albert Einstein, but somehow the conversation didn't quite take off with that one.  So maybe we should consider some remediation with respect to such topics, though honestly, I myself wouldn't know where to begin.  (Something something vampires?)

The schoolwork is very manageable so far, Cal doesn't seem to be having a problem with it (even with French class, which I was the most worried about because it seemed like the class that most needed to build logically from one year to the next and for which Joe and I are the least equipped to provide help).  But there is more homework, and it's a little more free-form and independently generated (for example, learning to write expository essays and do research, as opposed to mindlessly filling out worksheets as in first grade) and that has created some dramatic frission in the afternoons.  I'm still on leave until the end of the week so I've been able to help him get it going up until now, though I have some concerns with how he's going to handle it after I go back to work and won't be home until after The Homeworking Hours at least four out of five days of the week.  But we'll deal with those problems if and when they come up.  We have a meeting with his teacher on Thursday to discuss how the transition is working, but from all indications, he's doing well.

Mack has been on the difficult side of perfection lately.  Likely it's his age more than anything else--Cal at three and a half made me seriously consider the risks and benefits of tubal ligation--but I'm not ruling out that some of it may be reacting to being usurped as The Baby by, you know, a real baby.  But it's nothing unusual, just the usual battles over control, stubbornness, whining, perseveration on details and assorted other miscellany.  If there's a reason that siblings are rarely spaced four and a half years apart, I am convinced it is because most three and a half year-olds are nightmarish maybe 20% of the time, and what might be euphemistically described as "cheeky" another 40% of the time.  But on the whole he's a pleasure.

The thing about Mack is that, after Cal, he's just so reassuring.  Cal is, to put it gently, a little bit of an unusual child (nothing pathologic, he's just kind of peculiar--overly cerebral is probably the best description, with an overlay of quirky) and so we naturally worry about him because worrying is what we do best.  But Mack is, in contrast, the prototype of Boy In Early Childhood.  He runs and plays and pretends and makes his action figures talk to each other.  He jumps off things while making rocket blaster sounds.  He loves cars and light sabers and wrestling, and has a bin full of superhero costumes that he cycles through on a near-constant basis.  (Current favorite: a Spiderman costume with foam muscles built into it.)  He can be a stubborn fool, and he can scream very loud when he wants to, but he's our screaming stubborn fool, and he's a delight.  You know...most of the time.

I'm on call Labor Day weekend (everyone I tell this to thinks this is cruel and unusual somehow, but our holiday call schedule was actually determined almost a year ago, before I was even pregnant, and the timing is such that my maternity leave would be close to ending anyway so I'm more than pleased to fulfill that particular responsibility) so I'll be back at work bright and early on Friday morning.  I won't lie, maternity leave has been really nice.  Yes it's been nice to have a slightly different pace to my day (though I'm not really getting up much later nor getting any more sleep than usual), but mostly I appreciate having so much time to spend with Nina.  For the rest of her life, she's going to have to share me with her brothers, and I'm going to have to share her with, well, everyone.  But these past eight weeks have been, for the most part, just about the two of us being together.  And that's been really, really special.

I know that me going back to work doesn't mean I'll never see her again, and this being our third time around we have most of the larger issues of scheduling and childcare largely blocked out.  But it's still going to be hard to leave that first morning, and every morning after that.  I work full-time, take overnight call and work long hours, so it's hard not to feel (and I felt this way with Cal and Mack too) like I'm giving away huge swaths of her babyhood away for someone else to enjoy.  Is this the ideal solution?  Is this the correct balance for us?  It's hard to say at this moment, and I know that this is something that everyone struggles with, and that I'll continue to struggle with--what worked well with two kids may work differently with three, after all.  But I am lucky in that I love my kids, and I also really enjoy my job, so while my daily life does feel like living between a rock and a hard place, at least I like the rock, and I love the hard place, so finding the right space between is hopefully worth the blisters.

party of five

Hey everyone.  I meant to update sooner, but you know, NEW BABY.  Always needing stuff, they are.

Nina's been doing really well.  I was afraid, after having two pretty easy babies with Cal and Mack, that we were going to strike out with Thing 3 and be granted some kind of hellion.  But Nina's much like her brothers were, in that she's a good, sweet baby who is easy to please and whose cuteness makes up for the rest.

I do think that some of it is due to her innate good nature, but I also think that our easy time of things is framed by expectation.  With a new baby, people mostly complain about the lack of sleep, and the constant neediness of the newborn--so much feeding! so much holding and rocking! where one diaper change ends, the next one begins!  And so forth.  The thing is--that's what babies are supposed to do.  And what I'm doing on my end--holding her basically all the time when she's awake, feeding her on demand, changing many many teeny little poo diapers and scanning her pee diapers with almost clinical intensity to assess her degree of urobilinogen excretion (though now, linking to Wikipedia, I am realizing for the first time that urobilinogen is colorless--all that wasted observation!)--that's what I'm supposed to do.  So I don't really think I'm having an appreciably easier or harder time than anyone else with a new baby, we're just all doing what we're supposed to be doing, and everybody's happy.

Anyway, I'm pretty firmly of the belief that if you want to sleep all night, you probably shouldn't have a baby, much the way that if you want to be well-rested, ever, you probably shouldn't go into medicine.  See, it's all about framing your expectations.

Hey, wanna see some pictures?  Most of these are on my Tumblr already, but I know not everyone is my buddy on the twitters et al.  It's fine, little technophobe, we'll just churn some butter and make some corn husk dolls right here by the flickering light of this here computer screen.

I knew that Cal would do well with a new baby (little old man that he is, I knew he would relish the expertise conferred by being not only seven years her senior but also a veteran older sibling) but I'll admit that I was a little concerned that Mack, who has spent the last three and a half years marinating in his baby-of-the-family status, would be jealous.  And I'm not saying that he's not ever going to be jealous or competitive (just wait until she starts getting mobile and his slavishly guarded collection of superhero action figures comes under siege) but so far, he is in love with his baby.

"Mom, I love baby Nina," he'll say unprompted.

"Baby Nina is so pretty."

"Can I kiss her?"

"Can I rub her and smell her?"  (He means rub her head.  We talked about the fontanelles and the importance of using his flat palm instead of poking her brain with his fingers, but then Cal was like, "She has a HOLE in her HEAD?" and then we had to kind of soft-pedal the anatomy lesson lest everyone freak out.  Mack also particularly likes smelling the baby.  I understand the appeal of smelling a new baby and much as the next weirdo, but the way Mack goes after her, you'd think she's one of those really fascinating second generation scratch 'n' sniff stickers that really really for real OMG smell like food.  Like the buttered popcorn one.  Or that one that smelled like pepperoni pizza that I was fascinated with as a child because wow, they made a sticker smell like pizza?  THE FUTURE IS HERE.)

Anyway, sibling rivalry averted for now.  Cal and Mack seem to have reserved all their petty animus for each other ("MOM! Cal looked at me!") but Nina, so far as they're concerned, is a princess.

I'd meant to post this up earlier today (because I'm pretty sure no one's going to read this now when I'm posting it, almost 11:00pm on a Friday night), but see above: baby, comma, care of.  There are a couple of other posts that I'm working on in my head to post hopefully in the next week or two when I have a free moment, including but not limited to:

• Private practice anesthesiology: a day in the life

• Breastfeeding and pumping after returning to work, my experience and strategies (warning: boobs will be alluded to though not depicted)

• More sewing projects that I done did, culled of the more embarrassing mishaps (like the time I got confused while making a pair of leggings and sewed half the seams on the outside, half the seams on the inside)

Any other post topics you guys interested in hearing about while I'm on maternity leave and have some time for such extracurricular pursuits?  Aside from wanting to see more pictures of Cooper to prove that she didn't die a year ago and I just somehow never mentioned it here?  I'm working on that post too--I'll get her to hold a copy of today's Wall Street Journal in the pictures, you know, as a proof of life.  (Not to joke about our dog dying or anything--obviously we care deeply about our dog.  But we're just no longer in the phase of life where we treat her as a child by proxy.  Rest assured that she is well loved and taken care of and just got a new memory foam dog bed that she is very pleased with.)

Anyway.  Have a good weekend, everyone.