Visits and Pictures!

A day at the pass with Daddy while I finished up the last of the schoolwork for the quarter and vacuumed up the tree droppings:




And a quick yo-yo teaching session with Papa in the evening, after he arrived on the late flight!


We went to the zoo the next day:


Did I mention Toddlerness took right to her Papa?


And reliving some baby times...riding in daddy's jacket:


The kids were sad, as usual, to see their Papa leave. I'm missing living close to my parents.

AHA!

If I ate like my preceptor - or even like how I eat on clinic days - all the time, I'd lose weight for sure.

Yesterday in the half hour that she was busy with a counseling session for someone that didn't want a student in the room, I wrote SOAP notes and reviewed charts and scarfed down the egg, two carrots, and orange I brought with me. So all yesterday I had that, coffee, and a bowl of spaghetti when I got to Neighbor's house to trade off (she watched my kids, I came back and watched hers).

Yeah, I'd lose weight for sure.

Which would be a good thing at this point.

While I love *who* I am, I am continually stunned...to see pictures of myself, to look down and see chubby hands, things like that. And I fluctuate all over the place, from pants almost falling down at the moment to barely fitting just before a period. Which drives me NUTS and has to be a function of the lovely padding I've got on my midsection right now. What is funny is that there is a very accurate scale at the YMCA, and I've found that even when I'm stretching/falling out of my pants, the scale tells me I'm only about a pound off. Am I destined to be this weight? Well, that would stink, eh?

Concluding the Dryer Saga

It has been a long time - what...two months? - since my dryer gave out in semi-spectacular manner.

This weekend my dad came (more on that when I find the camera). In addition to a trip to the zoo and more eating out than we're used to, he spent a couple hours replacing the socket and the dryer plug, to no avail...the old one was definitely fried.

Craigslist to the rescue! Before he'd even left town, I'd arranged to pick up an elderly but clean and working dryer for a whole $20. That I accomplished yesterday. Only to find that the plug wasn't quite the right type. DAMNIIIIIITTTTT. Went to Home Depot to see if I could get a different socket cover (seriously, it was a tiny difference and the internal stuff in the socket would connect just fine, I just couldn't get it through the plate). But no.

So armed with some more advice from dad, I spent nearly an hour today wrestling dryers and exchanging plugs from one to the other. And finally (finally!) I have a working dryer today.

Oh my goodness, the crazy. I am not sure I've ever been so happy to have accomplished something appliance-related, though! I have a fear - probably healthy but still - of dealing with electricity. I'll mess with the washer hoses or with plumbing any day (well, any day that I HAVE to), but damn if I didn't put off that job as long as humanly possible.

Lessons? I apparently can do pretty well without a dryer for a fairly extended amount of time. I suspect it wouldn't have been a problem at all if it weren't for the humidity of PNW winters.

Last Night

I went to my first birth as a student midwife! Whoohooooo! Beautiful water birth of a beautiful boy. Ah, the wonderfulness.

Boyness is SIX!

Happy Birthday Boyness! Here is the story I wrote right after his birth, and rereading it I'm wondering about potential inaccuracies...but I'll leave it as it is.

Deciding what we were going to do for his birthday was a bit of a fiasco. For a month, Boyness has proclaimed a desire to go to Red Robin for his birthday - which would be an our-family-only party. As we were finalizing that plan a couple of days ago, he changed his mind. Friends at the Science Center!! Drat, too expensive. Friends at the Zoo! Drat, snow/heavy rain forecast. In the end, all Boyness wanted for his birthday was fries and bacon. So out came the fryer, and Boyness had himself some fries and bacon. And was a very happy Boyness.

And now he's six. The first of my kids to kick over to the next year. Toddlerness will follow soon, and then Girliness, and then I'll have 3, 6, and 8 year olds on my hands, which somehow sounds very different indeed from the 2, 5, 7 year I am just finishing surviving.

Filling In the Blanks

Because I've left a lot of people who have participated in my life lately out of my blog.

We made the rounds for Thanksgiving, big-time. Which makes sense for us, because that is what we are most thankful for - these connections we have to our families and friends. So on Thanksgiving we went to MILs for the standard spread:




On Friday we grazed leftovers at ~L~s while the kids ran in and out of the house in full-play mode:




On Saturday we hung at the D (itandme) and had yet another re-Thanksgiving! The boys treated us to crazy stories, too!



We stayed the night, went to ~L~s, watched her kids for a couple of hours, goofed off with her for a couple hours, slept over, and flipped on into onsite week.

I have some pretty decent pictures of our placenta lab, but not everyone wants to see that (classmates of mine, I'll email them out).

I ate too much sugar and broke out big-time. I cried more often than is customary for me, but had a pretty low-stress week after all. On Friday I came home and for the first time, did not feel the need to go into a post-onsite catatonia. I cleaned up the kitchen and desk (!) and we ran off to IKEA, which was the kids' choice of activity.

We begun our day outside yesterday (after a hearty breakfast), wrestling the lights into place and making the kids pick up random trash they'd left around the yard. Just as I was completing the light-hanging, it began to snow. What timing! We didn't get any really great pictures, but here are a couple anyway:

Odd Childhood-ism

When I was in elementary school, a teacher summed up communism: "you are told what you will do when you grow up. You have less choice what you can buy - everyone may have to buy the same blender."

So to me, communism = everyone has the same blender.

Of course I've learned a ton since then. But it is just one of those things that comes up to remind me that we have to be careful about how we describe things to children. They might stick.

Placement (Probably) Accomplished, Moving (Probably) Planned

So yeah, barring major weirdness I'll be starting at a very busy practice in the first week of December. A VERY BUSY practice. Yiiiiiikes!! But this MW was telling me about how I do get to tell her when I want to be on-call and not. YAY for MWs that have their own backup plans!

And I submitted the rental applications for a place in Kirkland. Three bedrooms, here we come. Again, barring any major weirdness.

How strange to have those two things fall into my life at the same time, relatively out of the blue! As needed and looked-for as both events are, neither came through my direct efforts or in quite the way I was expecting. The Universe works, yet again...or so I hope. We haven't signed papers yet. So I may be bestowing a royal jinx upon myself. I shall knock on several large pieces of wood in penance.

Next challenge? WHO THE HELL IS GOING TO WATCH MY KIDS WHEN I GET CALLED TO A BIRTH once I've moved?! Holy nerve-wracking! Oh all ye Kirkland/Bellevue homeschoolers/unschoolers/homeschool or unschool friendlies....I'll trade you babysitting hours. Seriously. You'd only have to cover my ass in the daytime, no middle of the night babysitter calls...Fran's got that.

Non-Insomniac Insights

I swear, I have all these great ideas just as I'm about to fall asleep. Of course they deserve full attention and full treatment, but I just can't muster that lately. As I lay in bed, prisoned by sleeping Toddler and my own strange desire to actually get a little sleep, these thoughts are quite lucid and eloquent. As I sit at the computer in the middle of the night after finishing loads of reading and a little bit of writing, my brain has been pounded to the consistency of spicy mustard and these thoughts really aren't so lucid and eloquent anymore.

Still, they're not getting out otherwise, so here are a few that I can remember at the moment:

I just gotta love this whole "cesarean by choice" issue. Oh, gotta love it. A woman has a right (a right, I tell you!) to get a cesarean on request despite the fact that it is riskier than vaginal birth in low risk (and in many "risky") pregnancies. But she doesn't have the right to chose a vaginal birth? I've used up my thoughtful writing allotment for the month (how I'm going to get through onsite, I don't know), so instead of giving these points full treatment, I'm going to go ahead and just run the list:

• Doctors say they are after patient rights - what they're really after is their own right to make a living. If they were really after patient rights, they would be all over letting women chose VBAC after a risk/benefit discussion, just as they're all over letting women chose csection after a risk/benefit discussion. The fact that they're promoting the option that is more profitable, easier to schedule, less time consuming, more predictable, less likely to result in lawsuit, and *cannot be performed by alternative practitioners* is highly telling. When are women going to wake up and see this for what it is?
• Csection carries similar risk to vaginal birth for the fetus (various studies have shown slighly elevated risk to the same risk for csections performed without 'firm' indicators). Csection carries elevated risk for the mother and more trauma than vaginal birth (almost regardless of how traumatic the vaginal birth was! Csection is major surgery, remember, and even a very generous episiotomy...well...doesn't expose the abdominal organs). This proves *getting to the point here* that we STILL VALUE THE FETUS OVER THE WOMAN. If a woman balks at the stats that say she's more likely to DIE, that she will certainly experience morbidity, that her recovery will be difficult...she is told that it doesn't matter. Her baby will be fine. WOMEN HAVE THE RIGHT TO CARE ABOUT THEMSELVES, about their own health, their own well-being, and their own recoveries. They have a right to care about these things, to ask about these things, to demand these things, without being treated like selfish know-nothing amoral pains in the ass.
• We can cut into the abdominal wall, severing abdominal muscles. But heaven forbid that the vagina and pelvic floor get a little wonky for a couple of weeks. Shows where our priorities are, eh? Are women good for nothing else?
• When is the last time you heard of a woman getting a legal order compelling a doctor/hospital to allow her a vaginal birth? Never, right? But there has been such a thing as legally compelled cesarean section. And there is, and continues to be, such a thing as doctor-coerced (institution-coerced, insurance-coerced) cesarean. Why does the opinion of a doctor, a hospital, or (worst of all) an insurance company trump that of the woman whose body (and perhaps very life) is on the line? Why can't a woman DEMAND vaginal birth from the very providers that allow her to demand cesarean? The answer, I am afraid, is that women simply don't mean very much. In the scuffle to achieve an ethical solution, we've placed the fetus above the woman. Her elevated risk doesn't matter. The fact that the fetus is likely to be as safe or safer (this is debatable but most doctors believe it) - that is what is important.

Reading into some of the issues surrounding legally compelled medical procedures (I'm so distractable, that wasn't what I was looking for in those journals...) I've come several times across the rather inflammatory notion - and one I happen to at least partly agree with - that it is our own damn fault that we're in this frigging mess. If women would disagree with their providers more frequently and more vehemently, maybe their providers wouldn't feel like they had this moral imperative to decide things for women. Maybe they wouldn't be so confused by dissent. Maybe they would realize we have brains after all.

The pregnancy websites and magazines are still littered with listen-to-your-doctor advice. As if most women needed any MORE prodding to be compliant! We've got this "thing," we women do - whether it is natured or nurtured into us is largely irrelevant for this specific discussion - we want people to be happy with us (to be happy at all, really), and we do a lot to make it so. It is difficult for women to stand up to their doctors and their nurses. Why? Intimidation, conditioning, desire to make things quicker and easier, sincere belief that the doctors and nurses are acting in their best interests.

I've officially run out of coherent thoughts for the night. 'Till next time...

Lake in the Fall

These don't require a whole lot of explanation:

Random Parenting Rules

Parenting Math:

3 children x 3 harmonicas = ∞ potential to induce parental insanity

1(2 year old) + 1(5 year old) = 7 broken glasses in one month

1c milk + 1(5 year old) = 5 weeks of stinky carpet

300 pages midwifery care reading + 1(2 year old) = (1 very messy floor + 1 very mad mama + 2 hours refiling)x6 hours headache

5 minutes to complete an exam x 1(2 year old) = 2 vomiting episodes = 5 loads of laundry

2 completed vomiting episodes + 1 insanely stressed-out mommy + 1 week until the exam is graded = oh fuck, I can't add 2 + 1 + 1 anymore

1 broken dryer x 5 loads of laundry = 5 days of drying clothing/sheets in front of the woodstove

500sqft house x 5 days of stuff in the sole walkway into the kitchen = 2 insane parents

(2 parents / 3 kids)*(24 hours in a day) = accumulating mess and unfinished tasks, apparently increasing on a parabolic curve which plateaus at the shove-stuff-aside-to-walk-through-the-living-room point

Laws of Reduced Sleep:

The amount of time you need to complete an exam or assignment is directly proportional to the amount of time it will take your toddler to go to sleep.

The amount of time you need to complete an exam or assignment is directly proportional to the number of times your toddler will wake in the night.

Distilled to its purest form, the law of student-parent sleep is:

sleep lost = (time required)^2

Add some, would you?

I liked this so much...

That I'm going to link it:

http://unschoolingsupermom.blogspot.com/2007/11/bitter-homeschoolers-wish-list.html

Smoking Ruins Your Boobs

So, it isn't breastfeeding. THAT we've known ever since some bright soul decided to line up twins - one who had breastfed and one who hadn't - and found that they more often than not had the same saggy breasts. But you want a real reason to tell your teen girl not to smoke? Try this:

Breastfeeding Study Dispels Sagging Myth

ScienceDaily (Nov. 5, 2007) — Nursing mothers needn't worry. A new study shows that breastfeeding does not increase breast sagging. University of Kentucky plastic surgeon Dr. Brian Rinker and his colleagues conducted the study with patients at UK HealthCare Cosmetic Surgery Associates. The study found that breastfeeding does not adversely affect breast shape.

"A lot of times, if a woman comes in for a breast lift or a breast augmentation, she'll say 'I want to fix what breastfeeding did to my breasts'," Rinker said. As a result, Rinker decided to find out if breast sagging was a direct result of breastfeeding.

Rinker and his colleagues interviewed 132 women who had come to UK for a breast lift or augmentation between 1998 and 2006. The women were, on average, 39 years old; 93 percent had had at least one pregnancy, and most of the mothers--58 percent-- had breastfed at least one child. Additionally, the research team evaluated the patients' medical history, body mass index, pre-pregnancy bra cup size, and smoking status.

The results showed no difference in the degree of breast ptosis (TOE-sis)-- the medical term for sagging of the breast--for those women who breastfed and those who didn't. However, researchers found that several other factors did affect breast sagging, including age, the number of pregnancies, and whether the patient smoked.

"Smoking breaks down a protein in the skin called elastin, which gives youthful skin its elastic appearance and supports the breast... so it would make sense that it would have an adverse effect on the breasts," Rinker concluded.

Rinker presented the findings of the study this week at the American Society of Plastic Surgeons conference in Baltimore.


Adapted from materials provided by University of Kentucky.

Pumpkin Procrastination

In best post-onsite form, I have procrastinated anything and everything having to do with school this weekend.

On the plus side, I've processed pumpkins all weekend and now have approximately 2 gallons of pumpkin butter, 20lbs of pumpkin puree, two pumpkin pies, and three loaves of pumpkin bread. I'd love to link you recipes, but in typical Niki fashion I read a bunch of recipes and just kind of threw shit together, and it worked. Oh, it totally worked. On the downside, I have no idea how to replicate it. Which tends to result in me, a year later, wondering why the hell my baking is coming out shitty and lamenting the fact that I didn't measure or write anything down. So here they are, the recipes as best as I can replicate them:

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Pumpkin Puree

Wash pumpkin well. Cut in half-ish. Scoop seeds and strings out. Cut into chunks, roughtly 3x3inches. Place rind-up on baking sheets or dishes, pour a small amount of water into the dish. Bake at 350 degrees f until soft, approximately 45 minutes.

Remove from oven, let cool. Remove rinds, blend the remaining pumpkin to desired smoothness.

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Pumpkin Bread

1.5 cups all-purpose flour
1.5 cups whole wheat flour
1/4 cup multigrain/flax hot cereal mix
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2/3 cup canola oil
3 eggs
just under 2 cups pureed pumpkin
1 cup apple sauce

1. Preheat oven to 350°.

2. Combine dry ingredients (through nutmeg) in a large bowl and stir with a fork (or have your toddler use her hands); make a well in center of mixture. Combine canola oil, eggs, carrots, apple (if using) and pumpkin in a medium bowl; stir with a whisk until smooth. Add to flour mixture, stirring just until moist.

3. Spoon batter into 2 (9 x 5-inch) lightly greased loaf pans. Bake at 350° for 1 hour or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool loaves in pans 10 minutes on a wire rack; remove from pans. Cool loaves completely.

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Pumpkin Bread with Cream Cheese Filling

Filling:
• 1 package (8 ounce) cream cheese, at room temperature
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
• 1 large egg
• 1 tablespoon finely grated orange peel
Bread:
• 1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/4 teaspoon ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 cup pumpkin puree, canned or homemade
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 2 large eggs
• 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

PREPARATION:
Preheat oven to 325°. Lightly grease one 11x5x3-inch loaf pan. In a medium mixing bowl, combine cream cheese, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon flour, 1 egg, and the orange peel; beat until smooth and creamy. Set aside.

Into another bowl, sift 1 2/3 cup flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg; set aside. Put pumpkin puree, vegetable oil, 2 eggs and 1 1/2 cup sugar in a large mixing bowl; beat well. Stir the pumpkin mixture into the flour mixture just until combined.

Pour half of the pumpkin bread batter into the loaf pan. Spoon cream cheese mixture on top of pumpkin batter layer and then pour on the remaining pumpkin batter.

Bake in preheated 325° oven for 60 to 70 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into center of the loaf comes out clean. Cool bread in pan for 10 minutes; remove to a rack to cool completely.

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Pumpkin Pie

3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
2 large eggs
approx. 2c pumpkin puree
1 can (12-13oz) coconut milk
1 unbaked 9-inch pie shell

MIX sugar, cinnamon, salt, ginger and cloves in a container. Blend eggs, pumpkin and sugar-spice mixture together. Pour in coconut milk and blend until smooth.

POUR into pie shell.

BAKE in preheated 425° F oven for 15 minutes. Reduce temperature to 350° F; bake for 40 to 50 minutes or until knife inserted near center comes out clean. Cool on wire rack for 2 hours.

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Pumpkin Butter

This one is going to be the hardest to translate into concrete terms. OK, I really can't. Best guess:

In a big 'ole pot, combine a large amount of pumpkin puree with about 1/4 that amount of apple sauce. Add a tablespoon-ish amount of cinnamon and ginger, about a half a tablespoon nutmeg and clove. Throw in a bunch of sugar. A lot-ish, but not as much as the apple sauce. Bring to a "simmer" and keep it that way until the consistency seems right. I think it was about an hour. Holy imprecise! It worked though.

Visit Here

http://www.mothersnaturally.org/

Spread it around. I am loving the due date range calculator :). This needs funding and development...the intent is a positive antidote to the obstetrics-centered industry of pregnancy websites. Start by spreading it around a little!

Pumpkin Farm Fun

We arrived just in time to see the farm owner instructing a crew of volunteers in arming a 3000lb counterweight trebuchet!Before he set it off, he had the kids gather around and delivered a short history and physics lesson. Then...



And off the kids ran to grab bits of shattered pumpkin...

...to feed to the pigs!

We wandered through a greenhouse full of declining tomatos:


And found a hay bale maze in the barn attic:


We took ride out to the pumpkin patch:








And got some choice seats for the ride back!



Before we left, we grabbed some crackers with pumpkin butter, took a ride:



Ran out of camera batteries (d'oh!), and took a stroll through the apple trees.

What a day!

Woot Boyness!

He had his surgery yesterday. At the Surgery Center at Evergreen, which seriously has the best wait rooms and intake and recovery rooms, like, ever. And an awesome staff.

Boyness reports that "go to sleep gas smells like monkey breath. And tastes like monkey butts." He warns us that he will get monkey breath (probably true since "disagreeable breath" was on the list of what-to-expects).

He woke up from anesthesia complaining about the monkeys. But was fine after a few minutes. We were outta there 3 hours after we got there. He never needed the vicodin they sent us home with; his only complaint was the little bruise at the IV site. By the time all the meds had worn off, he was running back and forth and bouncing around the house like his normal, crazy self.

The only bump in the road was our insurance refusing to cover the antibiotic eardrops for Boyness. Um, riiiiight. The nurse called around and they ultimately agreed to cover it (WTF?) but it took her quite a while. And I'm thinking that it isn't really her job to be arguing with insurance companies for me. I'm looking around for where to send feedback (apart from the loveliness, I've got two suggestions for them about how to rearrange things in very minor ways - I'm talking moving a piece of furniture from one end of the clinic to the other, that kind of thing - that would make it easier for parent/kid pairs to go through the process).

My Son Doesn't Have a Lovey. And Toddlerness is Crazy

As I was reading over the doctor's documents, I saw a little "bring a special toy or lovey for your child" kind of note.

Boyness doesn't have a lovey. He's not particularly attached to any of his toys (if I asked him, he'd probably want to bring his Spiderman Lego Set or something). Why does this make me sad?

I can't think of anything that comforts Boyness other than myself and Fran. There are lots of things that he LIKES. But they are get-him-excited likes, you know, ninja turtes! spiderman! donkey kong! YEAHYEAHYEAHPLAYPLAYPLAY!! Not oh, I've got you and now I can calm down.

Anyway, I am now really really procrastinating going outside and taking care of some stuff. 'Cause I really just pulled this entry out of my ass, just to have something to sit here and do for another couple minutes before I have to pull the aforementioned ass off my computer chair and go outside.

OK, so it started raining, so I guess I get to stay inside for longer. Like all day. On my ass. Oh yeah. (OK, OK, cut it out, I did the dishes already and am going to go sew something now. I couldn't ACTUALLY spend all day on my ass. I'd get bored, and my ass would hurt.) And Toddlerness *NEEDS* a gingerbread man. NEEDS it, she says. Junkie. She's getting entirely too big a kick out of eating gingerbread arms, legs, and heads.




Yeah, she is crazy. "This is like my daddy!" she says, as she holds up an intact gingerbread man. And bites its head off. And giggles. "But I still like my daddy," she says.

End of Soccer Season

Becca's last game of the season. I swore I blogged about this before but couldn't find it. Her last game was on the 10th, and she's already looking forward to next season and begging me to find her an indoor soccer league to play with.

Boyness...You Payin' Attention or What?

I SWEAR we discussed the surgery before. Not even kidding, he didn't remember. We were in Fred Meyer buying silicone earplugs (so that he can go back to swimming lessons the week after surgery), and he was TOTALLY COMPLETELY CLUELESS. I SWEAR we talked about it. He seemed to be paying attention.

D'oh.

This would be why kids cannot give informed consent, duh.

Anyway, we RE-discussed it right in the middle of Fred Meyer because he looked upset, and he just got MORE and MORE upset (which hadn't happened the first time we talked about it). It took a good long 10 minutes of freak-out to get out of him that his real worry was that he wouldn't be able to fall asleep so they could fix his ears. Once I let him know that the medicine they would give him before the surgery would MAKE him fall asleep, he didn't have to worry about that, he was FINE.

Alrighty then, Boyness. Please, for the love of all that is sanity-retaining for your mother, do not forget we had THIS conversation.

Many Little Things at Once

It isn't like we've been horribly exciting in all that un-posted time.

---

We went to Fright Night, and had a ton of fun with ShadyViolet and clan (her blog is "it and me" on my sidebar). I don't think we took any pictures, but the kids certainly had a blast. So did I. Fran and I were pondering as we got into the car - you know, we could have not gone on any rides at all (Fran only went on the ferris wheel, actually) and still had fun just watching the kids have a blast. Are we parents now or what? I remember being a kid and not understanding how parents could do that, how they could possibly be happy or be having fun without getting on all the rides themselves. So strange to just kind of realize that evening that that's where we were.

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We went to the Woodland Park Zoo, and had a ton of fun with ~L~ and littles. We missed Zoomazium (the kid zone) because of the earlier winter closing hours, but the kids loved it anyway. ~L~ is supposed to have pictures over on her blog (Osgiliath is Overrun) but she hasn't gotten around to it yet.

---

I had a shitload of classwork and lost track of other human beings for a week-ish. And then my dryer did its thing and I had even more work. And then I went to ~L~s house and hung out and did laundry. While all of the kids played. Together. Without fighting. It was like someone did...something...to the universe. Somewhere, something has spun terribly out of balance. Maybe it was all in the cars. Yeah, cars. Fran's is having "I don't reaaaaally wanna start, you'll have to maaaaaake me" kinds of issues, and ~L~s threw a full-on tantrum in her driveway (refused to start). I left Girliness there for the night, and Fran and Boyness had a BOY MOVIE night (TMNT? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Well, Boyness was happy).

---

Today, we went to the Community Center in Federal Way - tell me again why they didn't have that thing when we lived there? - and the kids had a BLAST in the different pools and playthings and waterslides. We ate food at Saimin Says and left the two big'uns with MIL to stay the night and go do some special stuff at the Symphony tomorrow.

---

Her royal high-maintenanceness is hangin' on the couch, sitting on her daddy's lap and watching the "Miss Spider's Sunny Patch" movie.

On the way home, we stopped at Blockbuster. She wanted to rent a Barbie movie.

And she wanted to get a hot chocolate at Starbucks and go shopping. At the clothes store.

Where in the hell did this child COME FROM? Are you SURE she's mine?

Husband Turns 30

Well, today is Fran's 30th birthday. This is strange. I dunno, I still consider us pretty young, and the fact that my husband has left his 20s feels really strange to me. I still remember telling people that I was 24 and a parent of two and having jaws drop. Somehow, being 28 and the parent of 3 is no longer spectacular. And being 30 and having 3 kids is certainly not. It is a strange feeling to no longer identify as a young parent. It is even stranger that it is my husband's birthday that drove this home for *me*.

He also started his new job today. Which is interesting. It seems like things happen to him around his birthday that alter the direction of his life in a good way. We were actually wondering about this when he took a job in April. Having this job land on him, with a start date on his birthday, is a coincidence that we've seen bear good fruit too often in the past to dismiss. We shall see.

Boring

Well, I've spent the last two...three? days being completely boring.

Three days. We barely made it out of the house on Wednesday - just got out in time to run to Blockbuster and then to Girliness' last soccer game of the season. Yesterday Toddlerness was sick, and I took her with me to an appointment in the morning and then to get some cough drops (which she likes). She had a lovely fever and alarmed the nurse at my appointment quite nicely, but by the time we went to bed she was almost fully recovered. And today we went shopping for (more) long sleeve dresses for Toddlerness and running shoes for Becca, and to Blockbuster again.

Did I mention I'm really digging this thing where I can exchange an online (mailed-to-me) movie for an in-store movie for free? I'm loving not having to order movies for Toddlerness. And yes, I put her in front of the TV a lot. I have homework to do and I can't do all of it at 3am. It won't hurt her to watch a movie a day, I swear it.

Even if she does occassionally hum theme songs while she's nursing.

I totally aced a Midwifery Care exam earlier this week. Which is a good thing, because the subject - the mechanics and physiology of labor and birth - is really important. And these exams are notoriously difficult. But since I still am not in a clinical practice, I feel like I don't really know it yet. At least I have seen a few births and do know what a few of these things look like. I suppose even when you aren't a midwife or studying to be one, if you're interested in the subject matter you just notice things like how the head turns as it comes out. So I've got the visual in there somewhere. But at this point I'm semi-itching to see some real life...anything.

I feel like my energy from earlier this month is ebbing away, and I'm hoping that is a temporary state. But for now, my house is a wreck and that isn't helping. And my dryer decided to go ahead and die on me - sparking and maybe-flaming-a-little on the way - so yeah, laundry will be a challenge until we get that one figured out. For now, since the sparking and maybe-flaming-a-little episode happened after most of the laundry was done, the main laundry challenge is folding (GOD I hate folding).

And, you guessed it, I'm up at 3:30am writing this because I have once again consumed coffee to stay lucid through my assignments, completed my assignments, and found myself totally not ready to sleep yet. Well, I kinda completed my assignments. I finished everything that is actually due tomorrow. But there are things that I *should* do, so I'm gonna go do them I think. And then try to sleep a few hours before the kids wake up. At least they've been sleeping pretty late recently.

So, Boyness...

Yeah, his adenoids are really big, so we're going to remove them. They're almost certainly the reason he's having hearing issues.

It wasn't his hearing that prompted the dairy elimination - it was over-the-top hyperactivity/lack of impulse control/frenetic energy kind of behavior. And the dairy had in the past brought on the lack-of-hearing episodes reliably, so we still think he's allergic - just that the dairy wasn't the only thing making his ears not drain properly.

Assorted News and Crap

The Boyness Scoop:
So a while back we noticed Boyness wasn't hearing so well again, and it was consistent over a couple of weeks even without dairy exposure. I took a look in his ear and saw some fairly alarming things, so we did a week of diphenhydramine (an over the counter med, which worked the one other time we'd tried it). But after that week, when I took a look in his ear the negative pressure had persisted and I was alarmed to see something that I thought could be a cholesteatoma. A couple days later, his ped came up with the same thoughts (without me telling him first...sigh), so he sent us off with some nasonex and a promise to get our referral in to an otolaryngologist. That referral took a little over a week, but it took us an additional two weeks to get in...which brings us to Monday.

So, we went to see Dr. Jennifer Heydt in Bellevue. Their office is awesome, the staff is awesome, and they did a great job making sure we knew what was going on and why. A couple hours of tests, look-sees, and conversations later, we had decided to schedule surgery to place ear tubes (she said that what I and the ped had seen was not an abnormal growth but rather a portion of the middle ear not normally visible - the persistant negative pressure had drawn the membrane back that far), and to do an xray to help determine whether he needs his adenoids removed (she suspects adenoid hypertrophy has been blocking his eustacean tubes).

Boyness did a great job sitting in a little soundproof booth for a lengthy amount of time, raising his hand for beeps and repeating back words and all that stuff. He apparently has no nerve damage but his hearing is significantly impaired; presumably relieving the pressure on the tympanic membrane will resolve this entirely.

We left her office and arrived at the radiology consultants approximately 10 minutes after the xray tech had left for the day. Go figure. So we returned yesterday and I'm waiting now for Dr. Heydt to get the xrays and interpret them for us.

His surgery is scheduled for Oct. 24th. Now the only question is whether it will be the ears and the adenoids, or just the ears.

Other Scoopness:

I compiled the kids' school supply list - yes, only just now, but honestly who cares, they are learning - and it is awesome. If this actually works out the way it is supposed to, I should get their stuff in a couple of weeks. There are tons of cool things on their lists!

Snap Circuits
Young Scientist Kits
Logic Links

Microscopes and water testing kits!
Sentence and punctuation learning tools! Writing prompts!
Art supplies!

What fun! I hope.

I also signed them up for swimming lessons and sent in the reimbursement forms. Hoping I did everything right and will get my reimbursements promptly as well.

Zoo in Seattle Drizzle

We went to the zoo yesterday with ~L~ and her kidlets.

I LOVE, love love love, the zoo in the "winter". Nobody is there, even on the weekends. We have so few people to contend with. And it isn't like we're in snowsuits - it was still 55-60 degrees. Animals tend to be out and moving around. Even when it is "raining"...well, Seattle rain is not like the rain in Hawaii. You can stand in it for an hour and only reach the outer borders of damp (you certainly don't feel it through your clothes).

My only regret was that we didn't go early and hit up the zoomazium. Which we will probably do some time this week just to do it. I do get some good not-kids-on-me time while they're in there.

Today we are braving the drizzle again, this time down at the Wild Waves Fright Fest. The kids have been looking forward to this ever since we aquired the tickets a month ago. There are things to love about the drizzle and the rainy and the dreary. It clears out those who aren't as willing to put up with it.

More Wierd

So yeah, last night I dreamt that the school moved to a remote small-mansion-like house and cars had to be searched before we went in. The kids came - all our kids were running around all over the place. The school had hired this wiry gray-haired doctor to teach us, but his teaching got stranger and stranger until he was telling us the story of the time he removed skin from his face to see what was underneath...then drank whiskey until his friend could take him to see another doctor and get it fixed up. There were kids running in and out of the room while he told us about menthol breath drops as effective birth control. And I was panicking because I didn't know how we were going to get rid of this nutjob.

Banned Books Week

Today is the last day of Banned Books week, and I just want to encourage everybody (belatedly), to go grab a book from the top-100 (complaints) list:

Top 100 Challenged Books, 1990-2000

Or from the top challenges since 2000:

1. Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

2. "The Chocolate War" by Robert Cormier

3. Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

4. "Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck

5. "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou

6. "Fallen Angels" by Walter Dean Myers

7. "It's Perfectly Normal" by Robie Harris

8. Scary Stories series by Alvin Schwartz

9. Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey

10. "Forever" by Judy Blume

And celebrate your continued access to books that *other people* find offensive by reading them!

I don't like all these books, not by a long shot. I *do* like some of them. And I think that is of essence here - should which books I like or don't like dictate the ability of others to access them? NO! If Reverend Head-Up-His-Ass who has never even READ Harry Potter wants them banned and urges his congregation to file complaints at every opportunity (it actually seems very common that people who complain about books have never even read the book they are complaining about, at least in those accounts I've read) - that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH ME and should not affect my ability to access those books.

This is not an arguement about whether these books are crappy, but rather, about whether we have a right to read and like books that other people think are crappy.

And allow me to just point out how shockingly stupid this concept is given what is readily and constantly available on television sets in everyone's living rooms. At least you have to work to get into and through a challenged book. There are a good number of titles on there that never say anything you can't find on the evening programming for The Disney Channel.

Oh, Onsite Week

In the midst of the insanity that is onsite week. Which might not have been so bad this go-round, except that I had put off some preparation work. So here I am at 2am, finished a presentation about half an hour ago (to give tomorrow morning), and absolutely wired to the CEILING after 2 large mugs of coffee. My presentation is going to be 1) awesome for what it actually is, and 2) perhaps something that I will have to repeat entirely, because it only peripherally addresses the exact assignment as it was written. But I think it covers important ground anyway...so I don't know. I *do* know that it is too late to change topics - by far.

I adore, love, the newest incarnation of Office. But if there is a shortcoming in PowerPoint, it is that you STILL can't wrap text that is continuous in a text box around a picture that is a separate item automatically. Come on now. That has GOT to be something that people want to just DO. Buh-bye 20 minutes of my life doing it.

I am also finding myself increasingly nervous about actually getting in a clinical placement and getting my objectives accomplished. Like, before I was growing impatient, and now when I think about the timeline my physical stress level rises (ah, don't you love that system? can't I just shut it up sometimes, like after I've had 2 large mugs of coffee and a cookie in the last 6 hours and am feeling a bit not-nice in the belly already?). Hearing about how some other students are moving through clinical and getting stuff done is simultaneously encouraging and stress-inducing, because I'm so far from it. Hearing about how many other students are in situations similar to my own is nothing short of terrifying. Will we all get the placements we need? Is the school in fact looking after us adequately? Will our already-dimished class diminish further? We are down to 9. So we've lost more than a third of our original class in about a third of our total school time.

I went ahead and dumped on Fran the fact that I am really nervous and uncertain about how my clinical thing is going to come down. I realized that I hadn't clearly TOLD him that I feel that way about it at this point. But I told him in response to a question he asked...and I wasn't ready to really talk about it. It sucked to basically say "I feel really uneasy and scared about this, but I need to process it first and I really am not up to that right now." (Yes those were nearly my exact words, only there were children running around and I was sitting at the computer and he was pacing back and forth getting them juice, so the net effect was even more crazy than it sounds.) He told me that he didn't think that it was going to be as difficult as I was thinking, and that we would do what we needed to do. Viola, role reversal. What the hell.

I'm falling back on not thinking about things until I get a new piece of information, because my energy is out. This has been the decision since approximately, oh, last Wednesday. So far? Not working so much.

Beach Day

We began at noon on a foggy beach:



And wound up with beautiful sunniness by the time we left at 4:



There were lots of kids:



And a decent amount of cuteness:



Girliness found something!



The big kids had a project:









Toddlerness was exceedingly girlish even on the rocks *sigh*:



Marshmallows!



And a last pretty for the day:

Last Night...

I had a dream that prominently featured my Midwifery Care instructor standing over my shoulder, marking my LOs so that the questions were more difficult, and cackling like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Yikes.

Overwhelmed

So my school started, which is nearly overwhelming enough.

Then there's the kids' school, which yeah, is all about me too. They had these irritating things called SLPs due (the learning plan for the year), in order to secure all things good and paid-for about our homeschoolingness, that took up precious time that I should have spent on my own school work this week.

Then there is the fact that this place is just.too.small for us, but we can't afford anything bigger. Seriously, we can't, not with my school and at Fran's income. There is a house we're interested in buying but because it is manufactured, they want a downpayment, which we don't have. And I'm feeling very frustrated with the confined space, and stressed-out about how the kids bounce back and forth and into each other all day.

*Sigh*

A frustrating, overwhelmed kind of day. And I'm going to go try to write an essay for school now.

Math Before Breakfast

At the park with Marie last week, someone asked us if we sit the kids down at certain hours and do "school."

HA.





Note PJs, witch hat, bedhead.

Math Manipulatives (bucket full of small farm animals) - $1 at Target
Math Cards (this is all one set they're playing with) - $1.27 at Target
Kids having fun learning math while I make breakfast - PRICELESS