translocation

Moving is the worst, I think we can all agree on that.  But since this is our fourth move in less than three years (YES), I like to think that at this point, we have things down to a science.  Our schedule for the current weekend is this.  Friday night, we moved the kids and selected essentials (read: clothes, diapers, toiletries, plates and silverware, particularly beloved toys, and just general crap necessary for daily function) over to the new house.  We spent the night in our completely empty new house, billing it to the kids as a "sleepover party" and amassing a giant mega-bed out of one mattress Joe was able to cram into a U-Haul laid next to the two futon mattresses for the as-yet-undelivered  bunk beds.  Today the movers packed up the rest of the stuff.  And tomorrow they will move all that stuff over here.  It is a series of staged maneuvers, like a military strike.

We learned that this staging is the best way to go about things only by trial and error.  Our first error was during the second move, where we spent the night in our first Atlanta townhouse after the movers had packed everything into boxes but before they actually moved everything out.  There were many boxes.  Cal was distressed.  Kids have a sense of order when it comes to their homes and seeing everything upended and entombed and mummified in plastic wrap horrified him.  So since then, we've learned to minimize the kids' actual exposure to the moving process.  Keep them out of the way for the packing, and remove them from the house when the movers are actually moving everything in.  (Planning for this, we have a babysitter lined up for tomorrow morning.)  This keeps their little heads screwed on straight, because forcing plasticity onto the construct of what they perceive to be a concrete entity tends to blow their tiny head gaskets.

After our last move (again, on a weekend), we discovered on Sunday night that not only could we not find Cal's lunchbox, but we also couldn't find his backpack, his jacket, his shoes, or any of the library books that he was supposed to return the next day.  So now we have a policy.  Anything that we anticipate needing within the first, oh, say, week of the move, we take with us ourselves.  Either we take it to the new house in a series of car trips or, as this time, we rent a U-Haul and take a whole truckload over in advance of the actual moving truck, so we know where everything is.  There is nothing more frustrating that needing something tiny and essential like a nail clipper, and not knowing which of the thousand identical, vaguely labelled boxes it resides in.  We have learned our lessons.  We will let the movers help us carry the couch down the stairs, but anything that we need and want to use, we bring over ourselves, in our own car, so they don't get tossed into a giant box maddeningly labelled, "HOUSE STUFF."

Anyway, we're here, at the new house, though most of the big stuff is not.  The movers are coming tomorrow.  I think we're in pretty good shape.  We don't have very much furniture, old or new, and I think that there's one room off to the side of the house that's going to have to be The Box Room for quite a few weeks (who am I kidding?  MONTHS.) until we get all our ducks in a row, but we're going to be in good shape by Monday morning, I think.  We're going to be at 80% efficiency, which, as long as you don't need me to attend a cocktail party or locate that one soup tureen that we got as a wedding present but which we never use--we're in pretty good shape.

Moving still sucks, though.  Did I mention we have no internet access yet?  I am stealing this connection from a nice man named Linksys now, as a matter of fact.  I know, I know, first world problems.  At least the weather's nice.

Have a good weekend.  Barring the possibility I will be pinned by a falling chiffarobe, I'll try and have a good one too.

mirror, mirror, off the wall

"So, is this house a money pit?" the handyman asked us this morning.

Joe and I looked at each other. "Money pit?"

"You know," said the handyman. "Keep throwing money into it, it disappears, requiring you to throw in more money."

"Well...no." said Joe, starting in on his explanation of how the house was actually in pretty good shape, but that we just wanted a couple of big, mostly cosmetic things done before we moved all the furniture in, etcetera etcetera.

I cut in. "It's not a money pit," I told him ominously.  "Yet."

We're getting some stuff done on the new house in advance of our move day. We're moving in about a week and a half, and let's be clear, nothing needs to be done. The house is move-in ready. But there are a few things that we'd like to get done, and these things are much easier to do when the house is still empty. Mainly, we wanted to re-carpet the upstairs bedrooms and paint a few walls. But before we could paint, we'd have to take off approximately a mile's worth of full wall mirrors.

The famed homework room, of course.  Now, I hesitated to post this up, because inevitably, some subset of you guys are going to start protesting, why did you take off the mirrors, the mirrors looked good, they reflected the light, made the room look bigger, you could turn your living room into a Jazzercise studio, and so on.  So let me just say a few things to start.

1.) The mirrors were everywhere.  In every room.  Full wall mirrors.  We're not even taking them all off, just the ones in the more heavily trafficked rooms.  Because...

2.) We have two kids.  Two young kids.  The kids are boys.  They like to touch things.  I don't want to spend the rest of my life following them around the house with a bottle of Windex.  I think it's because I wear glasses that I am particular about this.  I'm not an especially finicky housekeeper in general (as anyone who has ever been to our house can clearly attest) but there's something about smudgy glass that I just cannot abide.

3.) It did reflect the light, and probably made the rooms look bigger, because, you know, OPTICS, but the way the mirrors looked (there were beveled frames and whatnot) made the rooms appear incredibly dated.  They were put up in the 1980s and they look every year of it.

4.) THEY'RE ALREADY OFF.  Nothing I can do about that now!  And if I start second guessing this decision now I will probably start getting depressed and no one wants that, right?  RIGHT?  (Right.)

The thing is, there comes a point in every project where you get a sinking feeling in your gut that, oh shit, I just made things worse.  The handyman himself said that there are certain projects that people should not see the middle of, and oh man, this was one of these projects.  Because we took a fairly pristine house and turned it into this:

A paradise of gouged drywall, tar-like glue globs, and exposed wiring.  Just to get rid of some mirrors.  Did I mention that we were trying to make this a more kid-friendly house?  How many times did I think to myself today, well, hell, maybe we should have just kept the mirrors?  One billion times.  Well, one billion and one, now.

But no matter.  As of today, the mirrors in the dining room, the stairs, and the homework room are all gone.  Onward and upward.  Drywall may need to be replaced in the homework room and on the stairs (some damage underneath, and the installers got a little overzealous with the black glue globs--particularly a problem when you need a smooth surface on which to apply chalkboard paint), but we took the plunge, and now for steps 2 through 10.  And unlike in the other two areas, the mirror wall in the dining room actually looked pretty decent underneath, and should probably be ready to be painted sooner rather than later, once the drywall is patched and sanded.

Money pit indeed.

<--- Designanted pimp space --->

Hi! Again!  Still here?  OK, good. So, there's a new event I put on the calendar. I've been invited to take part in a lecture series this May sponsored by the Literary Center at Margaret Mitchell House. (Margaret Mitchell is, of course, the author of "Gone With The Wind," and if you lived in Atlanta YOU'D DEFINITELY KNOW THAT.) The event is going to be held at the Atlanta History Center, which looks like pretty swank digs, so you should come and we'll talk and eat some finger sandwiches and it will be super-fun. Nothing is more fun than finger sandwiches. Made with HUMAN FINGERS.

I will be adding to my events calendar both on this blog and on my book webpage, so check there again if you can't be with us in the ATL May 19th, hopefully I'll have some other events in other cities to add later.

no! sleep! 'til bunkbeds!

Given the sobering realities of home ownership (the grown-up realization that Things need to be done for the house and Things unfortunately cost money--like, so much money) we have a bit of a limit on what we're allowing ourselves to buy in terms of furniture for the new house.  A rug is furniture, right?  No?  It is the way we use it!  (That sounded kind of dirty, but really what I meant is that we sit on the floor a lot.)  But one thing I did promise Cal for when we moved in, and one thing that we're going to follow through on, is that we're going to get him a bunk bed for his new room.

First off, credit where credit is due, I got this idea from Amalah (hi Amy!), who recently talked about finding a bunk bed for her two boys off of Craig's List.  I could not find an equivalent deal because Craig's List in Atlanta sucks.  No, not really--we even found our nanny off Craig's List when we first moved here and nothing is better than that--but I'm just a sad, bitter old woman who does not like to pay full price for things.  

Anyway, after reading about how Amy got her kids bunk beds, I realized that Cal would totally go for the excitement of the upper berth, because, you know, he is a human boy.  Also, our new house only (not to say "only," there's plenty of room, an embarrassment of riches compared to a Manhattan apartment) has three bedrooms, which means that we don't have a dedicated guest bedroom.  And that is actually fine, no one ever visits us anyway because we are so hateful--but we did need an option for decamping one kid or another to a different room if we ever (glory!) did have people want to stay over.  Adult people who don't want to sleep on a cheap couch.  So.  BUNK BEDS.

(This is a picture from the website--we're not that patriotic, especially when it comes to bedding.)  

We needed to get the twin-over-full option because Mack is quite an energetic sleeper (I had to search around for that euphemism) and I am certain that him sleeping on a twin would be the equivalent of him sleeping on the floor 50% of the time.  I know, there are railings for such things, but you underestimate his nocturnal gymnastics.  If we put on hard bed railings, he would be Captain Subdural Hematoma.  With his sidekick, Neuro Check Girl!  (That's me.)  Also, I wanted to find the kind of bunk bed that had stairs instead of a ladder, because I had some kind of vision that this would be safer.  Not really safer?  I don't know, I'm new at this.  Anyway, the plan will be that the kids will have their own rooms, but when guests come over, Mack will sleep in Cal's room on the bottom bunk, while Cal sleeps on the top as usual.

We were going to hold off on the bunk bedding for a few months yet, because of, you know, the monies.  But then my parents very kindly offered to get us the bed as a housewarming gift, and I was like oh you don't have to do that that's too much OK OK BUNK BEDS HUZZAH!  

I slept in a bunk bed myself as a kid--my sister and I shared a room--and I remember it being a lot of fun.  So here's to new adventures, and to hoping that my kids and the concept of critical velocity remain mutually exclusive.

closing time

Hey everyone, thanks for all the input on the new video feature! Two things I have concluded after reading over comments and watching it again myself a couple of times. Next time, things have to be tighter. Better transitions, shorter stories, less meandering. As my editor can surely attest, my narrative tendency veers towards the oversaturated, so next time I'm just going to have to be more ruthless about cutting in the post-production process.

The second thing I concluded is that I should start speaking in the voice of Morgan Freeman.

Anyway, I'll keep working at it, thank you for indulging me while I work out the details. Hey, you liked seeing my toilet though, right? Did you notice how there were boxes of soap all over the water tank? That's so the rats wouldn't get them. I know rats can climb on toilets too, but they really, really liked gorging themselves in the cozy darkness of the bathroom drawers, so those are bare now.

Lord, I can't wait to move.

The closing date on our new house was Friday, and it went very smoothly. Everyone talks about how their closing date was the most stressful day of their lives, but those people obviously haven't taken a medical Board exam, or, you know, five of them. Our closing day was actually pretty fun. First we did a walk-through of the house to make sure that it hadn't burned down to the ground since the last time we saw it, or somehow been decimated in the move-out effort. Of course it wasn't. The former owners are such nice people that the husband was actually still doing yardwork in the back a mere two hours before he gave up possession of the place to us. Yardwork! Are these people real? And it's now because the backyard looked bad, by the way--you just got the sense that they had taken a lot of pride in the house and it was only natural that they'd want to send it off looking as pristine as possible. Lord, I hope we don't trash the place just by living there with our kids and dog and terrible furniture.

Anyway, after the walk-through we had lunch and went to this lawyer's office, and there we signed approximately eleventy billion pieces of paper. They were all pretty routine and matched all the numbers we'd already seen--the only that gave me pause was this one small box that gave the total amount of money that we'd be expecting to pay over the course of the 30-year mortgage, counting the interest and everything.

I pointed. "Wait, how much are we going to be paying by the year 2041?"

The lawyer just smiled sympathetically and shook her head. "Just don't look at that part."

So anyway, we signed all the papers and everyone hugged (I don't know if hugging is normal during a house closing, but what can I say, WE WERE IN LOVE WITH EACH OTHER) and then Joe and I drove back to our NEW! HOUSE! and looked at everything in wonderment. We looked at our kitchen. We looked at our fireplace. We looked at our yard. We looked at our door. Our first house! Such a cool thing.

We're not moving for a few weeks yet (the house is in really good condition but we're trying to get a few things done that are best done before there's furniture and toys everywhere--replacing some older carpeting, painting a few walls, dealing with miscellaneous maintenance issues) but I can't wait to move in.  Cal can't wait to get the bunk bed we promised him and to start planting raspberries in the backyard.  And Mack can't wait to brush his teeth in the little tiny sink that's just his size.

Hope your week is starting off right.

domicile

Joe and I both got guilted into buying a couple of boxes of Girl Scout cookies (I for one am a sucker for stammered unpunctuated soliloquies delivered by kids at my doorstep. Just this week, I donated money to the American Heart Association because some little pudgy kid rang my doorbell and compelled me to--who knows what he really did with the money, but he was cute anyway) and my most embarrassing moment this week was bellowing at Cooper to shut up and stop acting like such a manic every time the doorbell rang...only to find a Girl Scout standing on my welcome mat bearing the Lemon Chalets and Samoas we ordered a few weeks ago. She was wearing a kilt and everything. Probably she's going to report me to Animal Cruelty now. Probably she'll get a badge for it.

So anyway, among other things, this weekend we've been eating some cookies.

We also had a walkthrough at the new house, wherein the current owners (who by the way are super-sweet people, I almost wish they were staying nearby, so that they could watch over us like benevolent godparents) sort of gave us the Owners Guide to the place, what switch turns on what and what kind of filters go where, that kind of thing. The inside of the house is very nice--not that it doesn't need a little updating here and there, but we're in no rush to fill it up with stuff right away, because when you don't have a ton of extra money, that's how The Ikea Room happens. And not that I don't love Ikea (it's a love-hate thing; I'm sure Darren Aronofsky's next film is going to involve being trapped in the underground showroom warehouse of an Ikea on a Saturday morning while mirrored reflections taunt you) but there comes a time in every adult's life when they want a piece of furniture that they don't have to assemble with that little L-shaped thing.

To this end, we are doing a couple of things. One is that we are going to throw out a ton of crap before we move. We've been pretty successful in paring down the non-essentials given the past three moves we've made in the last three years (one a long-distance move, even), but this time, my goal is utter ruthlessness, divorced of sentimentality. Goodbye to you, weird wooden baby peg toy missing half its pegs! If we ever decide to have another baby, we can get him or her a new peg toy! Or better yet, no toys at all, as it will only make the baby weak and frivolous! I will be like Genghis Kahn, only for throwing stuff away, not, you know, conquest.

Secondly, I am employing the assistance of this nice internet lady. We haven't actually ever met, but I have been reading her blog forever, and in the past few years, she's started to branch out into interior design. So anyway, we've chatted, and she's going to help us out with some advice for one particularly troublesome room at the new place--troublesome in that not only is it highly trafficked (it's the family room) but also of all the rooms, it looks the most...tired. (That's a real estate euphemism for "excessively beige and from the 1980's." Also: "full of charm" really means "fascinating in its decrepitude.") Anyway, I'm really excited about this, both for the prospect of brightening up a family room which has so much unachieved potential, but also to work with someone whose design sense I've admired from afar for many, many years. There will be pictures of the house later, of course, before and after, that kind of thing, and it will be fun. But for now, just look at this picture of my fried eggs this morning, that I thought looked like a jellyfish.




Hope you had a good weekend.

Janus

We just found out yesterday that we got approved for our mortgage. So...yay! Hooray for debt!

No, but seriously, we are very happy. We've always been fiscally responsible and we haven't exactly been living in the fast lane, but still, when you have bank people going through your history with a fine-toothed comb, even the most conservative of spenders and savers tends to get a little damp-palmed. (I know that my personal financial history was just about as boring and by-the-rules as you could hope, but I kept getting paranoid that they were going to find out that someone had stolen my identity and had maxed out twenty credit cards that I didn't know I even had on jet ski equipment or something. SO MANY JET SKIS.) Anyway, we've been approved, so that's good.

Life has been very busy and exciting lately. Aside from this House Thing and the Book Thing various other Things, there's a lot going on and most of it's pretty good, but I'm going to hold onto some of these topics until they're a little more fleshed out. But for now, let me point you in two directions: forward and back.

FORWARD: Last week? Or maybe it was the week before, I can't even remember--I got an e-mail from the Hachette Speakers Bureau asking if I was interested in joining their roster of speakers. I said, huh? whuzza? snrf? which I'm sure was very impressive (my oratorical skills are unparalleled under any circumstances, certainly) because I don't know what a Speakers Bureau is and therefore didn't know what they were talking about. But after a very nice phone call from a guy named Blair, now I do.

The Hachette Speakers Bureau is an agency under the umbrella of the Hachette Book Group (of which Grand Central Publishing, my publisher, is one imprint) that basically manages certain authors for speaking events. After ascertaining that I was interested (I was) and after I filled out a survey about myself and topics that I can talk about at some length, and I now have a page on their speaker site and am available to come talk about stuff in your town. What kind of stuff? Well, you read this blog, right? You tell me. Want me to come to your med school/college/Rotary Club/quilting bee and talk about, oh, say, the changing role of social media in medicine? You should e-mail the Hachette Speakers Bureau and try to work something out! Or, you can e-mail me and I will forward the e-mail to them. Technology!

BACKWARD: You guys seem to enjoy the pictures from the Way Back Machine, so here's another one--actually a paired set, from December 31st, 2007.





Here's how I spent my New Year's Eve that year, setting up for a lap appy. Luckily I'm not much of a party person anyway so being in the OR was about as exciting as anything else I could have been doing.

use it if you don't want to stink

There's nothing that's more boring (and a more stereotypical "mommy blog" trope) than complaining about being sick and how your damn kids gave it to you, right? Yeah, that's what I thought. Behold, my restraint!

(Cough.)

I got this package in the mail at work the other day. Usually my mail at work consists of clear plastic-wrapped medical journals (which I unwrap...sometimes) and various hospital-robot generated admonitions to sign my charts. So to get an actual package was something of a curiosity. This was what was inside.




Soap. Like a gift? From a patient that I had taken care of?

"Maybe they're trying to tell you something," one of my anesthetists piped up, miming the miasma of my prodigious body odor.

"Shut up, KEN," I said to him. (His name is Ken. Hi Ken!) "Oh wait, there's a card in here."

Turns out the soap was not from a patient, rather from a woman who had been pointed in the direction of the blog by her daughter, a third-year medical student. The woman (meaning the mom, though I'm sure they both read it because IT IS DISGUSTING) had seen my recent blog entry about the rats who have been eating our soaps (plural--upon further investigation, they actually tore into four or five bars, going preferentially for the Dove Men's Deep Clean soap while eschewing the unscented bars) and decided to send along a few bars of her handmade herbal soaps. And I think that's very sweet, because we are definitely bulk price club soap buyers, we've never had soap this nice.

Of course, the very fact that they smell nice will probably make them irresistible to the rodentia, so I'm going to have to keep them somewhere safe, like in the fridge or something. Unless they can get into there too, opening the fridge with their little clammy paws, like Raptors. Blergh. I've mentioned we're hoping to move in a month and a half, right?

(Thanks for the soaps, Christine!)

I do not like them with a mouse, I do not like them in a house

For a few months now, we've been letting our current landlord know that we've been hearing a lot of noise up in the attic crawl space. Alive noise. Running and skittering and gnawing and what have you. Tiny little voices singing about making a new dress for Cinderella.* I'm not going to get into details too much, but let's just say that the problem has not been solved. And then, this morning, as I was getting ready for work, I took out what I thought was a clean new bar of soap from our bathroom cupboard and saw this:




Gnawed box! Forensic quality incisor marks in the (apparently delicious) soap! YERSINIA PESTIS! This is the first evidence (aside from a turd or two in Joe's closet) that they've actually penetrated the outer hull and entered the house. And I, for one, welcome our new rodent overlords.

Oh, wait, no I don't. Time to start looking for a new house. Oh, we did already? Awesome.

(* To make myself feel better, I am referring to them as mice, because mice are kind of cute. However, given the amount of noise we're hearing and the size of the bite marks, they are likely of a larger rodent genus, like a rat or a squirrel or a...raccoon? Wait, raccoons? OMG RABIES.)

placeholder

I sincerely apologize for not updating this past week. If it makes you feel better, I have four half-finished drafts on entries saved on my computer. It's just that everything I want to talk about or show you I can't talk about or show you yet, and all this includes:

1.) The new cover of my book! I saw a sneak preview, and guys, it looks so good. It's actually much closer to what I had originally wanted to to be than the other cover, and I can't wait to show you, hopefully by the end of the week.

2.) We bought a house! I mean, I think. We are getting it inspected on Sunday, so I guess we may still back out when we find ye olde burial mound in the backyard or what have you. But still...HOUSE. I am really excited to put up pictures, not so much for the HOUSE aspect of it all but because the inside does need some updating and...look, I don't know what the hell I'm doing. JUST TELL ME WHAT TO DO AND I'LL DO IT. Anyway: we are under contract. See, what with all the real estate terms that I now know. Closing costs! Earnest money held in escrow! Glengarry Glen Ross! I am a fountain of vaguely understood terms.

3.) I started looking for a preschool for Mack. This is one of life's more painful experiences, because first: oh my god, it's so expensive, and secondly: clearly you don't understand that my baby is a sensitive handsome genius and what school could possibly be good enough for him? Well, no, I guess I don't really think that anymore (if I've learned anything in the past, oh, say ten years, it's that kids are both endlessly adaptable as well as virtually indestructible) but we are looking at preschools and it is somewhat excruciating, though not without humor. This, for example, is a picture off the glossy pamphlet of one such school, a picture that I'll caption, "Rosie O'Donell circa 1992 loves the children of all races!"




Anyway, apologies again, and I will update you on any and all of these things once it is prudent or allowable to do so. But until then--hey, look the program for the Iowa Writer's Workshop Writing in Medicine workshop is out! And there we are, Saturday at 9:00! So far it looks like you have to register for the conference in order to attend the panel, but if we can work it out, maybe we could tape part of the panel and put at least some of it online after the fact. As a panel about the relatively untapped potential of blogging in medicine, I feel like there would at least be a little interest out there in the general population, don't you?

opening gambits, closing costs

Today Joe and I got a babysitter and looked at four more houses. I'm not quite sure why we did this, because we actually had a check for the earnest money for a house on which we were 98% sure that we were going to make an offer in our back pocket all the while. But our realtor (a very good guy, we actually like him a lot and he's much more honest and helpful than any agent needs to be) encouraged us to just look at a few more that were closer to our original search parameters prior to making an offer on a house which we really like, but turns out to be more of a departure from what we had thought that we wanted. Which reminds me:


A SHORT PLAY ABOUT TRYING TO BUY A HOUSE

JOE
So I have to get a check for the earnest money.

MICHELLE
To show we are Earnest.

JOE
Earnest Goes to Jail.

MICHELLE
See, you went lowbrow. The first thing I thought of was the Earnst equation.

JOE
That's the Nernst equation.

MICHELLE
Doesn't matter, it's still funny.


Anyway we looked at the houses and three of them were awful and one of them was pretty nice, but it was nice in a grown-up way. You know, like it had nice granite countertops and, like, crown molding or whatever. The other house, the one that we originally liked, is a house that while it looks a little haphazard (it seems like they redid the house room by room, but each room that they did it seems like they decided to do in a different style, such that the end result is a little calico) it's a house that's going to be fun for kids. It has a good play space and a good family room and a fun backyard and a nice garden and the stairs are not the kind that Mack can hurt himself too badly if he decides to go paratroopers over the side. (And he did indeed try to do just that several times when we went back to visit yesterday.) So at the end of our four house second-guessing tour, we did what we knew we were going to do, which is to say that we made an offer on the first house, which is the house that we liked all along.

So.

Well.

(Crickets.)

They could decide to accept the offer or not. Our agent seems to feel like we'll hear back from their agent tonight, but we might not. Who knows, maybe they'll think our offer is insulting and they'll just ignore us. Most likely they'll parry back and ask for something higher. Maybe something too high, and we'll have to walk away. And lord knows, if that happens, there are tons of other houses out there empty and ready and waiting for people like us to swoop in, with our compressed cardboard furniture, mismatched bedding, and many many Legos and broken crayons to secret in the heating ducts.

Or maybe it will work out.

(Crickets.)

Man, there are a lot of crickets out here in the suburbs, aren't there?

exteriors and interiors

Hey guys, thanks for all the nice comments on that last post. Funny thing about a blog--I don't know any of you, but you really did make me feel better. I do recognize that this topic has the potential to devolve into some sort of negativity spiral no matter how civil a group we all are (and I do honestly think that I can claim some of the most rational and level-headed readers on the internet--and believe me, I have seen a lot of internets!) so I just decided that the easiest way to keep the peace (we'll call it an NSAID move) is just for me to not talk anymore about the book cover issue beyond what's going on now and what's happening next. But thank you, thank you, THANK YOU all for your wonderful words and support. It has meant a lot, probably more than you know or than I can express.

My book (along with, you know, the front part of the book) was supposed to go to press this week, so obviously there's something of a time crunch in coming up with a new cover. I think we've eked out an extra week to get our affairs in order, but obviously, at this stage, for something this important, two weeks isn't a hell of a lot of time to bounce ideas back and forth. I'm told that they have taken the original designer of my book cover off all her other projects so that she can just work on this, and only this, until we have a satisfactory end product. I have a few ideas myself, but of course, as I mentioned (I think in the comments) I as the author don't actually get final say on what my cover looks like, as it's ultimately more of a marketing decision. But I still have ideas.

Originally, after I heard the news, I started really blue-skying it and came up with a number of ideas--ideas that I still think are pretty cool. (One in particular involved an all red cover with line drawings in white and a sort of copperplate font...well, whatever.) But in the end, I came to the realization that while the new cover had to be different, it probably shouldn't be too different, because I want it to still be instantly recognizable as the same book that it was before. I spent six months building momentum behind the old cover image, I shouldn't have to throw all of that away. Anyway, it's ultimately out of my hands, but I had some ideas, and I e-mailed my editor a couple of Photoshop-generated cover composites, for what little that's worth. Anyway. We'll see.

So.

Hey, so we went back to see that house today! I was a little bit nervous about going back (firstly because I thought I might have romanticized things out of proportion; secondly because it is inhabited by what looks like an older childless couple who have a collection of many many ceramic knick-knacks balanced on top of the skinniest, most delicately balanced display pillars I have ever seen, and we were there with two kids with a penchant for acceleration--never has the term "bull in a china shop" been more accurate) but it was fine. It was more than fine. We're seeing four more houses tomorrow a little closer to our current neighborhood, perhaps more to convince ourselves that we are not rushing into anything more than any actual interest in seeing these other homes. But after that, we may be in the position to make an offer. It may not be the offer than the owners want, and they may well say no. At the very least they will parry back, and we may bat things back and forth for a while, like cats. But after that...well. I'll let you know what happens after that.

Joe and I have often remarked that, considering what boring people we are, we have a lot of exciting things happening to us, and we feel very fortunate that we have so many good people who and interested in coming along for the ride. Endpoints are never certain, but as long as we are in good company, we can have fun on the way there. So thanks for that.

this old house

Hi, are you alive? I, too, am alive. Good, so we got that straightened out.

This weekend Joe and I got a babysitter and looked at seven houses. SEVEN. Actually, it ended up being six--one of them had some problems with flooding that they needed to deal with before they were ready to show it to prospective buyers, which actually worked out well because who wants to buy a house that has problems with flooding? Of the six houses we had two good leads--two leads that actually highlighted the key schism in the real estate market generally. One was a older, smaller house closer to the middle of of town, and the other was a newer, bigger house farther out towards the suburbs. I grew up in a 900 square foot apartment in Manhattan (actually, 900 square foot might be optimistic--I was smaller at the time, after all) so you can imagine which way my loyalties skew; I often argue how our consumeristic American lifestyles make us think that we need more space when they've been living in prewar nestlike warrens in Europe for centuries and having a pretty good time of it. But actually--and very surprisingly, at least to me--I found myself gravitating towards the house farther out towards the suburbs.

It's not that I need a lot of space, mind you. For a family of four, we really don't have a lot of stuff, and even if we did, our habit of serial relocation has forced us to purge most of the non-essentials. The fact that what little furniture we have is basically disposable (various castoff mismatched Ikea-esque plywood monstrosities, what have you--except for Cal's little bed, none of the rest of us even have bedframes, JUDGE IF YOU MUST) winnows our possessions even further, as it's unclear what would survive one more move or what at this point is even worth moving. (I'm looking at you, interspecies pee-stained sofabed.) And the house wasn't even that nice. At least, not to the general public. It's been on the market for more than a year. It has weird 80's decorator touches inside, the equivalent of giant triangular shoulder pads on a teal and black power suit, but, you know, inside a house. The exterior is a little unusual-looking. Not decrepit or depressing, mind you (there are houses that we saw that I basically discounted immediately because you walked inside and my initial gut reaction was GAH, THAT'S WHERE THE OLD LADY HANGED HERSELF) but just a little unusual for the area--it almost reminded of of New England in a way. Our realtor (a very straight up guy, he's not one for the hard sell) tactfully referred to it as "an ugly duckling."

BUT I LOVE IT, YOU GUYS.

I know you're not supposed to fall in love with a house, and look, I'm not in love, it's business, strictly business...BUT THIS HOUSE IS GREAT. I could see us living there. I figured out where the kids should put their toys. I figured out where my bookshelves could live. The light is great. The backyard is where Cal could plant his vegetables. There's a whole separate room with two walls of windows where I could paint one wall with chalkboard paint and put a big wood table turn it into a homework room. GUYS GUYS YOU GUYS A HOMEWORK ROOM. If that didn't just give you a big old Chinese Mom boner, well, then I don't even know you anymore.

I'm not saying it's perfect and I'm not saying it doesn't need a little touch up work, but...guys. I love this house. I can't explain why, I can't explain why I love it so much more than the other houses in the same school district with the same number of bedrooms and the same square footage and offered at the same price. BUT I DO. Maybe we won't end up living there. Maybe we'll make an offer and they won't accept it. Maybe we will go back this weekend and realize that it was built on an ancient burial ground. They moved the headstones but they left the bodies! And maybe it's an ugly duckling, that much is evident by public consensus. But it's the only place that I've seen during our three-plus years of home-searching that I've so vividly been able to imagine us in.

We're going back to see it this weekend. This time, we're bringing the kids. And then after that...we'll see.

now, later, and much later

Hey all! It is I, the blog posting person! Just one quick word about the last: I thought that people would understand that I was kidding about "forgetting" Mack's birthday (obviously I can remember his birthday, I went to med school, at bare minimum I can remember many many numbers and facts, whether they are important or not). I just meant I didn't realize that it was THE DAY until I actually wrote the date down on my chart, which, it also must be pointed out, was at 7:00 in the morning, before the much-fêted birthday boy was even awake. But I'm already boring myself to death talking about it, and anyway, I'm not one to take things personally in what I view as a forum which is, by construct, largely impersonal and speculative, so let's just move on. Right? Right. Amigos? Para siempre! Thanks for the birthday wishes, everyone!




(Mack says thanks too.)



* * *


A couple of you have been asking how the blurb solicitation for the book was going, and I think (at least, in my perspective) it's going pretty well. Here's a list of the people who have submitted some advance word-of-mouth for the book so far (I had to call it "Advance Praise" on the website because that's commercial don't you know, but that sounds so self-congratulatory it makes me cringe). I am really floored and honored that so many of these authors took the time out from their very busy lives to read my book in its typo-filled galley stage and even more humbled that they had nice things to say about it. I view this whole book process as nothing much more than a dalliance into a different field, an interesting side hobby, but I have to say that I'm really looking forward to next Spring. It's going to be fun.

On the topic, we're set to present at the conference at the Iowa Writer's Workshop (I'm told) the morning of Saturday, April 23rd. I'm relieved that we secured a weekend date for the panel--aside from ease of travel, I really wanted to make sure that wouldn't have to miss any work to travel to Iowa (that is to say, that I would not have to arrange some elaborate series of trades for coverage) and now I'm trying to figure out some way to tack on some kind of meet-up after the conference. I realize that I can't exactly expect too many non-locals to travel out for an event in Iowa (even with the enticement of CME credits--come on y'all, gotta keep that licensure up to date!) and even if you were going to the conference, that you might have other plans and other cooler people to hang out with.

HOWEVER. For those people who have nothing else to do and who wish to relieve my crushing loneliness (remember, this will be the first trip I'm taking without my kids since...well, since I had kids) is there anywhere cool to meet up around the university? I notice that Prairie Lights seems to have a café (a café that serves booze), so that might be a nice place nearby, but I'm waiting to hear from them to see if I can schedule a reading there and that kind of thing. But in case that doesn't work out for one reason or another, is there anywhere else nearby with a laid-back, hangout, non-fratty vibe? E-mail me, I will try to see if I can try to set up something in advance.



* * *


Joe, Cal and I moved to Atlanta in 2008. Since then, we have lived in three rental homes. Yes, we have moved three times in the past three years. It seems like in New York, when you rent, you just keep living there forever or until the building goes co-op or is condemned. But in Atlanta, housing rentals are by and large one-year leases, and I'm getting pretty sick of feeling so temporary.

We've been delaying one of the great milestones of adulthood for some time now, largely for financial reasons, but the lease at our current home is running out in July, and I think it's time to stop living out of boxes. (In answer to the flurry of questions of why we are continuing to live in Atlanta despite being New York partisans, the answer, quite pragmatically, is this: Atlanta is where our jobs are, and we really like our jobs. Hey, I want to live in Paris too, but I don't have a good job there either. Look, I'm not going to lie to you, as a place to live, I prefer New York. But choices in adulthood are more complex than which city has the best take-out options, so...yeah.)

Anyway, we're starting to look at real estate. We're looking to become homeowners. About which, hopefully, more later.

60 posts in 60 days, day 12: this old house




So we stopped by the new house today to finalize some last minute details before assuming the lease, including signing some papers and asking the landlord stuff like "what do we do with our trashbags?" and "what do all these light switches turn on?" Oh, also, we had to pay them the money. Our lease starts this Tuesday, at which point we can start our staged operation of moving select items in before the big move date on October 4th.

And for those security-minded who are going to e-mail me that I shouldn't put a picture of our house on the internet because that's how They find you and kill you in your sleep, maybe it will make you feel better to know that every single house in this entire neighborhood looks exactly like this. I guess Tudor architecture was all the rage in the 1920's, when the majority of this housing stock was built, but it makes the area look like some kind of Hobbit village.

60 posts in 60 days: I never specified that they were consecutive days

(First of all, let me say that there would have been a post up yesterday afternoon, had Blogger not decided to ingest it. RIP, post that never was. Someday it will turn up tucked into the archive, all dessicated and mutated looking, like when one twin absorbs the other in utero. Yes, well...)

First off, more pictorial evidence of why we are moving in a few weeks:




(Fortunately, not our car.)

I wish I could tell you I had to look and look and look for a car with a broken window, but the fact of it is that a few cars get broken into every week around here. Also, the assaults and the stabbings and the fact that when we left the house last weekend there was a police squad slapping cuffs on some guy right outside our door. Nice. So long, wrong side of the tracks. Three more weeks to go.

(Here is the part where I try to regenerate the post that got vaporized.)

I love having kids and I would not trade the two I have for all the tea in India, because what would I do with all that tea? No, but seriously, sometimes I envy my friends who don't have kids, not so much for their disposable income (well, a little) or their fancy travels (again, a little) but the very fact of how much time they have for themselves. I don't make a real effort to have "me time," (that started to sound hopelessly indulgent right around the time that I started my intern year) but I do get the feeling between work and home that my whole life consists of careening from the service of one set of needs to the other. Imagine what people do when they don't have kids! I can barely even remember. This is all somehow sounding very pathetic but you have to understand that I wake up for work at 5:00am and spend the few hours after getting home from work packing lunchboxes and giving baths and putting people to bed, until it's finally time for my own bedtime, usually around 8:30pm.

(Actually, I'm going to abort this post regeneration. Reading it again makes me realize how utterly boring it is to read about the minutiae of the ostensibly SO BUSY! SO HECTIC! life of the working mother. Wah wah, tell it to Joy Behar. Followed by some canned banter and Whoopi Goldberg drawling something borderline off-color.)

All of us have been a little sick this week, except for Joe, unless you count the myocarditis. Cal had some sort of flu (whether swine or otherwise I know not, nor does it really matter I guess, it's not like we would have been rubbing him on babies and the immunocompromised regardless) and Mack had one of those mysterious baby illnesses that manifests purely as a high fever with no other symptoms whatsoever. Is there anything worse than waking up in the middle of the night with a glowing hot baby beside you? His little hands and feet felt like mini grill pans, and his head felt like a giant light bulb.

I used to feel guilty every time Cal got sick as a baby, so certain that he was sick because I had brought something unsavory home from the hospital, clinging to my clothes or my hair like some miasma of infection. But now that Cal is in school I think that he can claim his share of the blame for bringing things home. As for me, I haven't had a fever or any specific symptoms, but I've just been feeling a little punky (Pediatricians would have you know that this is a clinical term) and have one giant lymph node blown up on the side of my neck. Nothing else. I'm not even sure if the three of us had the same thing or if we just happened to all catch three separate illnesses at the same time. Oh epidemiology, you mystify and intrigue me. Maybe we need a blackboard so we can draw lots of circles connected by dashes and lines. TV tells me that this is how medical mysteries are solved.

OK, have to put the kids to bed. Alcohol-based hand sanitizer, people. Buy yourself a bottle today.

60 posts in 60 days, day 3: nomadic

So we're going to move again. The first weekend of October. It's all set up, movers are coming and everything. We are just moving to another neighborhood five minutes away, Cal will be going to the same school and no one has to switch jobs and we are likely still going to be going to the same supermarkets and everything because it's that close by--but still, it's light years away.

We're moving to a house. A real house, not a townhouse. It has four bedrooms. (It's listed as a five bedroom, but the fifth "bedroom" is in the basement and it's barely habitable, I wouldn't stick anyone down there, except for maybe Cooper or possibly my in-laws) (HA! Just kidding in-laws! If you're reading, you know I love you guys and would not incarcerate you in the basement) (No, seriously, I was really kidding) (Don't kill me). It also has a backyard and a garage and something called a "bonus room" (???) and it's in a neighborhood with trees everywhere and lots of other houses with backyards garages, and if you kind of squint and look at it out of one eye, you might think that you were in the suburbs. I never thought that I would live in the suburbs. Except, apparently, I sort of will be now.

Because of Joe's HEART CONDITION (I have to say it like that, like it's in caps--partially to make it sound funny because to the casual observer he looks fine, but partially to disguise the fact that I was scared out of my everloving wits when he was ensconced in the ICU) he's not allowed to lift anything, and between that and our work schedule and all these damn kids underfoot it's a little difficult to pack up everything in this house in order to move it to the other house. And thus was a dream fulfilled, and that was to have movers come into our home and pack everything up for us and move it to our new place, just like on that final episode of "The West Wing," where the second the outgoing president left for the inauguration, about fifty professional White House staffers swooped in and packed up every single item of furniture and clothing and all the Americana knicknacks off the desk in the Oval office, presumably (this was not shown on the show) unpacking it for him at wherever Martin Sheen was going to go live post-presidency. Well, our movers aren't going to unpack for us, and we have to pay them many dollars to help us pack the day before the actual move, but miracle of miracles! To have someone pack for us! And to have it all done over one day! Truly, this is what makes our country great. That, and baseball.

(Really, I don't care about baseball. I just threw that in there. But I do hate packing.)

It's not even going to be as big a deal packing this time as the last time we moved. Well, first of all, we've only been living at our current place a little more than a year. Second of all, most of my clothes have never been unpacked in the first place. When we moved down from New York to Atlanta, I was pregnant, so most of my clothes I couldn't wear anyway, and therefore never bothered to unbox. And then I had the baby, but then it started to get warmer here, so I didn't need to wear my sweaters. Or my winter coat. Also, I never wear anything except scrubs and the most slovenly of weekend clothes, so I'm pretty sure I have several boxes of dresses and smart work-type clothes (from college and med school and my Peds resident days) that I have not looked at since I hermetically sealed them up in cardboard all those months ago when we were preparing for our interstate move. So good deal for these movers now. Just take those same boxes and throw them on the truck.

The real question is, if all those boxes are filled with clothes that I haven't found it vital to unpack and wear in more than a year, and probably didn't wear for a considerable amount of time prior to that, why am I even moving them with us this time? Have they not necessarily proved their obsolecense? This is Joe's argument. And while I see his point, part of me also thinks, they're fine clothes, and they still fit me, isn't it at least possible that I might still wear them at some point? Yes, I can no longer readily think of a venue in which to wear those black leather pants or those horribly uncomfortable stacked heel platform loafers circa 1996, but if the fashions of the 80's are back in vogue now, I only have to wait another ten years before 90's-wear is once again cutting edge. That's how it works, right?

let no one say this has not been an eventful year

OK, OK, but before you get all piqued at me about not posting, quick pop quiz. Which of the following things happened in the four months since my last substantial post?

1.) Random stray gunfire came in through our window one night
2.) I took the Anesthesia written boards
3.) Joe was hospitalized for three days in the cardiac ICU
4.) We found a new rental in a less bullet-y neighborhood and are moving in five weeks

All of the above, my friends. All of the above.

First thing: I reposted those two entries I redacted a few months ago, here and here. There, now everyone knows what I was cryptically referring to in my penultimate post before that video with Cal and the driving dogs. We got a bullet through our window. No one was hurt, but really, a bullet through our window? That is excessive drama by any standards, and I am a decidedly undramatic person. Despite the sweeps season-like air that the incident lent this blog, I took down my posts about the bullet shortly after posting it because Joe didn't want his parents (read: Mom) to know about what happened until we were out of our current living situation (lest she worry unduly), and I found that since I couldn't talk about the bullet and I couldn't really talk too much about work and since I couldn't talk about XYZ other topics for a wide variety of reasons (ranging from general discretion to topics just too boring to write about), I realized I couldn't think of anything to blog about. One week became two, became a month, etcetera etcetera. The more you stay away, the more you stay away. Anyway, barring any further upheaval to cap off the year (perhaps alien abduction would be a fitting coup de grace), I will resolve to do better. Perhaps I will do what I did last year after I fell off the wagon for an overlong period of time. 30 posts in 30 days, that kind of thing. Anyway, we'll see.

Oh yes, Joe in the ICU. That was about two weeks ago. Short answer: viral myocarditis. Long answer: I will try and get a blog entry up about it sometime soon, both about the general experience and about the dual advantage/terror of being a healthcare professional hospitalized for a potentially serious condition. He's out now and doing better of course, or I wouldn't be talking about it at all. Call me superstitious, but I'm a firm believer that talking about bad things makes them come true.




Cal and Mack are both doing well. Cal started school a few weeks ago. He is in Pre-K this year--after some stunning-to-the-teachers (though not stunning to us) gains in the social arena during the Spring semester, his teachers decided not to pursue the issue of retention, and though he still is the youngest kid in his class this year, he's basically normalized himself amongst his peers and is just acting like a regular kid--talking and playing and laughing and running around, as opposed to sitting on the sidelines with the teachers chatting about numbers and scowling evilly about this kid or that kid breaking the rules. (Among other things little-old-manly, Cal loves pointing out and imposing rules on others, sometimes in less than adorable ways. My little mid-level manager.)

And Mack?




Mack is delicious.

So let's jump back into it, shall we? Or hell, I'll do you one better. Forget 30 posts in 30 days. It's 60 posts in 60 days this time around, baby. This is called "penance." And lord knows we have enough to catch up on.

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.

beginnings and middles

Well, not like I thought that the first week of school would be PERFECT or anything but...yes, part of me wanted the first week of school to be perfect. I fantasized beyond reason that Cal would instantly fall into place with the new environment, that he would jump in with gusto and he would love the teachers and the teachers would love him and we would all be sitting 'round the fire with Cal leading a rousing chorus of Kumbaya, a song that he had never sung before but learned flawlessly after hearing it once at SCHOOL. The reality of this first week was...well, it was a little different.

Two things happened the way I wanted it to--probably the most important things. Cal loves his new school, and his teachers (at least purportedly--not like they would tell us if it were the opposite) think he is wonderful. But this transition, which we are still working through, has not been the smoothest. First of all, let me underline the obvious--in the past two months, basically every single constant of Cal's life, save his parents and his dog, have changed. Everything is different, and he probably feels like he has had very little control over any of it, because, well, he hasn't. New city, new house, new nanny (well, two new nannies, actually--we are on number two now, and she is wonderful and seems to be settling in well), and now, a new school with new teachers, new kids, and new rules. So it is perhaps not totally shocking that he is reacting to this in some way.

Cal was basically toilet trained. His main problem is that he was shy about going to the bathroom with anyone other than me or Joe (he still won't go with our nanny, or his grandparents for example), but he was pretty reliable in general about holding it, letting us know when he needed to go, and actually going in the toilet, both in and out of the house. We even managed to get him to pee standing up, a coup accomplished not by Joe, who actually understands the mechanics of this maneuver, but by me, which was very surprising to all involved. (I just told him to aim for the water. This ready-aim-fire is probably fun for him in some gross boy way.) But since he started school, he has regressed in this arena. I expected some accidents at school, of course, owing to the shyness of telling the teacher that he has to go, but he basically started acting like he had never in his life been out of diapers. By day three, they started putting him in Pull-Ups as more of a hygienic issue than anything else. Though in my heart of hearts I knew this might happen and in fact sent him to school with about three changes of clothes, I hadn't sent him to school with any Pull-Ups (well, really the Pampers brand "Easy-Ups," but whatever, I call adhesive bandages "Band-Aids") because I didn't want to encourage him to fall back on old habits. But dude, he was peeing everywhere. And upon further consideration, I think that reverting to Pull-Ups in the short term at school may just be a way to remove one more stressor from the transition. You know, he has a lot to adjust to, why not let him worry about one less thing and concentrate more on the other social aspects of being at school. We know he is capable of being toilet-trained, he hasn't had an accident all weekend since he's been at home. But I think it will fall into place once he settles in, so let's just remove the puddles from the equation for right now and maybe we can all start doing a little less laundry.

The other thing (and this probably goes with the rest of it) is that he is manifesting an ability to be amazingly stubborn. For the first few days, he was just absolutely refusing to do what his teachers were asking him to do. Even things that he likes to do, like putting on his backpack (he loves his new backpack), he was refusing to do, basically because he was asked. He would not help clean up, he would not lie on his rest mat, he would not sit in his cubby for roll call at the end of the day, he would not talk to the teachers when they spoke to him. I think this is partially a control thing--he was fine nattering on to the teachers and everyone else the rest of the time, and he clearly enjoys the activities that they do in the class, he just would not for the life of him follow direct orders. This, of course, was completely distressing and foreign to me--as a real weenie kid myself, I lived my whole childhood obedient and quiet and eager to please, distraught at even the idea of disobeying. The thought of my kid being a "problem kid" (even though there are plenty of reasons for him to be acting out, and not like it's anything the teachers haven't seen before) just floored me. But he started getting a little better by the end of the week, and I think that these issues, along with the toilet training regression, will smooth out over time once he starts to feel more comfortable and settle into his new routine.

But--BUT--the important thing is that he loves school. I was lucky enough to be able to pick him up from school every afternoon this week, and he is always in a great mood, telling me, "I love my new big school," and asking me if he can go back tomorrow. The teachers are wonderful and empathetic (I wrote them a little note, explaining about all the upheaval in Cal's life recently), and they've been really patient and warm about the whole thing, giving us updates sometimes even midday (via e-mail) and assuring us that they are not worried, and that Cal is doing great. We are "playing school" in the evening, practicing some of the routines so that Cal can get used to them, and we have instigated an incentive program at home, with M&Ms rewarded on a sliding scale for various potty-related tasks. (3 M&Ms for peeing with me or Joe, 5 M&Ms for peeing with our nanny, 10 M&Ms for peeing in the potty at school or, wonder of wonders, actually pooping in the potty. We are still working on it.) So it's been a long week, but a good one, I think.

The other thing that happened this week is that I hit the official midway point of this pregnancy, reaching 20 weeks today.




I haven't been taking any belly photos up until now, because frankly I was doing other things, and also, the size of my abdomen seemed to be highly dependent on the time of day, so a picture seemed like it would only convey a partial truth. The ballooning of my mid-section happened a little earlier this time around than last time, most probably because I am pre-stretched for comfort, but at the end of the day, I am significantly larger than in the morning, probably related to eating and smooth muscle relaxation and decreased GI motility and all the rest of it. So this is a picture from this morning, which probably most accurately represents the actual size of my uterus, minus the additive effects of lunch and dinner and about ten liters of gas. And yes, those are still moving boxes in the bathroom, what of it? WHAT, YOU WANT TO SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THE FACT THAT WE'RE NOT UNPACKED YET? Honestly, I've barely unpacked any of my clothes at all, mostly because many of the boxes contain winter clothes, which, even come winter, I will probably not be able to fit into, because I will be all gravid and stuff. The problem with having a due date in January this time around instead of July, like with Cal, is that all my maternity clothes are for the wrong damn season. Oh well, more reason to go shopping, I guess. This is the only time in my life, by the way, when I think that the current trend of billowing trapeze tops and empire waisted dresses is an attractive idea. Usually, I'm like, "THIS SHIRT MAKES ME LOOK PREGNANT," but now I'm like, "Woo, cheap-ass maternity top from Forever 21!"