I was right: my ex-OB was lying to me.
I’ve been thinking about this post for some time now – but it’s the kind of thing that some who I know read this blog might get very upset about what I’m going to write.
You see, I am now with a practice of homebirth midwives.
But let me explain.
I’ve been away a long time. Not physically, just internet-ly. But perhaps it’s time to return. I won’t make firm promises about writing every day or even every week. But I’ll try to keep things current about the most important stuff.
So… here’s the gist.
Early last October we moved to Manhattan, through a stroke of good fortune so huge that I still spend at least a few minutes of every day marveling at it and just… enjoying it. As best I can tell, one should enjoy the things one loves when one is right there with them, not least because everything can be gone in an instant. I don’t sit here anticipating that instant, of course.
I love city life. Adore city life. And I can’t even participate in it as much as I would like right now, for reasons I will get to in a moment. I love that we have neighbors we can be friends with because we live in SUCH a wonderful building. I love that A’s daily commute to his studio has gone from 3 hours by train and car to 3 minutes on foot. This, possibly, is the very, very best part. I love that if ever I feel a tiny bit gloomy, all I have to do is take a quick walk outside and it’s all better right away.
Walking has also become one of Z’s favorite things to do: like me, she LOVES the city’s hustle and bustle. Luckily we live on a block that gets real quiet at night and on weekends. Although… I have to confess that most city noises don’t bother me. On that note: bizarrely, Z sleeps better than ever. Though Z’s also had a cold lasting a month-ish, or perhaps several colds one on top of the other, because she goes to an indoor playground every day, one it’s really hard to drag her away from.
There’s a new kitty in our household: we adopted a lovely, very dog-like cat from a shelter this Christmas. His name is Cinco, because he’s the fifth member of our household. Cinco and our dog get along shockingly well, aside from a few spats about who gets to sleep where and a decided preference for the other animal’s food on both their parts.
We also have a Hungarian-speaking nanny a few mornings a week, partly because this way Z can practice her Hungarian and partly because, at the moment, I can’t do some of the things with Z that she needs someone to do with her.
Which brings me to the biggest news of all: I am pregnant with our second daughter. Sadly, I have a touch of placenta previa that may yet resolve but that’s caused my doctor to bar me from a fair amount of physical activity. I vacillate between thinking she’s overly cautious and believing I really need to be super-careful. And then I end up being super-careful anyway. So I need help with Z on playgrounds because I’m not supposed to do any exercise, and taking a toddler to the playground is, I think, a fair amount of exercise – hence the nanny. But I’ve slowed down a great deal also just on account of being pregnant. I get tired very quickly, just like I did when I was pregnant with Z. It’s starting to be painful to walk because, like with Z, I’m carrying on the low side. There’s a bit less than four months left that this baby needs to stay in me and, besides envisioning that goal quite frequently and refusing to contemplate the alternative, I really just hope I don’t have bedrest in my future.
I won’t write about A’s car being nearly totaled by a particularly able-bodied deer, or my car being difficult to sell, or almost having to sue our old landlord to get any part of our deposit back, or my having eight colds since getting pregnant because all of those things are kind of yucky and I don’t feel yucky so why write about yucky things?
Louis Menand, writing about the “overproduction” of Ph.D.’s in the humanities (via 11D):
The moral of the story that the numbers tell once seemed straightforward: if there are fewer jobs for people with Ph.D.s, then universities should stop giving so many Ph.D.s—by making it harder to get into a Ph.D. program (reducing the number of entrants) or harder to get through (reducing the number of graduates). But this has not worked. Possibly the story has a different moral, which is that there should be a lot more Ph.D.s, and they should be much easier to get. The non-academic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought, and had thereby acquired a little understanding of the issues that scare terms like “deconstruction” and “postmodernism” are attempts to deal with. And the academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction—and also if it had to deal with students who were not so neurotically invested in the academic intellectual status quo.
I couldn’t agree more. And wasn’t something like this the original purpose of a liberal arts education?
Things are changing. We live here now, since a little over a week ago:
I love Manhattan.
One of the comments on DoubleX’s reader stories of health insurance nightmares:
To the woman with blood clots…
Call your insurance company and ask for their Appeals department. You want to file an expedited appeal. (Expedited appeals are different legally than regular appeals. The company is required to get you a decision generally in less than 24 hours, but it depends on your state’s laws.) In most cases, even if your coverage only carries generics, if there is no generic, they have to cover the name brand. You just have to know how to make them.
Contact your doctor and let them know you’ve requested the appeal so that they can be ready with the medical records.
Look up your state’s Office of the Insurance Commissioner (OIC). They should have a lot of information about patients’ rights. Contact them if you get the run around from your insurance company.I work for an HMO, and work closely with our Appeals department. It is their job to make things like this right. But the likelihood of anyone at your insurance company telling you this is an option is low, so you have to ask.
No, dear commenter, you’ve got this quite wrong. No patient should EVER have to appeal anything at all when it comes to their healthcare. No patient should ever need to research if there’s a generic or not for the drug they need, whether to survive or just to be comfortable. No one should ever need to contact their state’s Office of the Insurance Commissioner about patients’ rights because insurance companies should simply respect those rights by default. No one, no one should ever have to worry about whether their doctor is prescribing an affordable treatment, whether it be medication or not. No one should ever, ever have to figure out how to make someone pay for the treatment they need, especially not if that someone is legally obligated to pay for it.
And don’t even get me started about preexisting conditions. Is there a human being alive, I mean someone older than a second-old baby, who doesn’t have some preexisting condition? Seriously.
The biggest problem with healthcare reform as it stands today – given the chance that there will be no public option – is that it will be overly complicated and most of us will have no idea how to figure out all the stuff that we’re entitled to get from our health insurance companies, stuff our health insurance companies will surely continue to try not to give us. And so most of us will continue to do what we’re doing now: we won’t go to the doctor unless we absolutely have to because god forbid the thing we’re at the doctor for is something our health insurance won’t cover. I mean if we are lucky enough to have health insurance to begin with. Which means that overall, healthcare costs will remain high because people will go to the doctor only when they have something unavoidably bad and therefore expensive to treat. In no other developed country does spending lots of money on healthcare actually result in worse health than in the United States.
So, umm, let’s work on finding all this funny… this morning produced the following series of adventures for our toddler:
- first, she got hold of and spilled and broke my coffee cup. My fault: it seems today she’s rather taller than, say, yesterday, and my brain seems to be having a slow day because I typically remember not to put anything breakable where she might reach within the next year or so. But today I managed to set my coffee cup down where she could easily have reached it a week ago. But also? She’s surprisingly fast. I took my eyes off her for, oh, 2 seconds and oops! went the coffee cup. I proceeded to clean up the mess and she proceeded to walk around the house leaving a long trail of blood: she cut her toe on a shard (small cut, nothing left in wound). She didn’t cry at all except once we cleaned her up and bandaided her toe, at which point she got really pissed off that she wasn’t allowed to rip the bandaid right off. That pissed her off several more times during the day but it’s a real nice secure big bandaid. She seems to be developing a taste for tantrums because later on she got really angry when I wanted to use the laundry basket for laundry instead of pushing her around the house in. And I’m sorry but the laundry (and mommy) won. Z and I made peace later with a nice fruit smoothie and some Thai food, which I made because I decided I want to learn to cook Thai because finally there’s someone besides me in the house who is all about the coconut milk. Not that I can do much cooking while the miniature tornado is awake and tornading around with her bloody toe.
- Then, then! A half hour later Z and I are in the bathroom, and she turns to the tub, chucks in her pacifier, then jumps in headfirst after it. Happened so fast I didn’t even have time to react: I was standing an entire foot away. She wasn’t hurt (very low tub) but my panicked reaction kind of scared her.
- I don’t know, either I’m an awfully careless mother or she’s super-suddenly super-fast. I vote for the latter.
- But I learned two important lessons: one, a cut on your toe doesn’t necessarily hurt but bleeds something awful if you walk around with it, and two, falling headfirst into a tub really scares your mother but can otherwise be construed as fun.
- I need some beer now.
- Oh but yesterday? Z tried to lend her pacifier to another little girl in the park. How sweet, no? And before that she tried to put it into her lamb puppet’s mouth.
- This next item is also not, strictly speaking, an adventure of this morning but nevermind: Z can say book (she’s suddenly starting to show more interest in books although mostly picture books, in particular one: Good Night New York), she can say ladybug, ball, lamp, car, lamb. Or I should say she’s trying to say these words, with varying degrees of success, as of a few days ago, and given the right context you can sort of begin to recognize them. She also seems to like shoes a lot, which makes me wonder if shoe will be her next word. All her words thus far are Hungarian.
- A couple days ago she decided that dogs barking sound mostly like slightly tipsy hyenas. At least in her interpretation. It’s hilarious.
- It’s also very similar to what Z sounds like when she sings. Which, believe it or not, she tries to do sometimes.
Z can walk really well now, and she can walk fast. Like, look-away-a-minute-and-she’s-at-the-other-end-of-the-house-throwing-the-phone-into-the-bathtub fast. So there may not be a lot of writing here for a while. There is so much walking going on, and not enough time!
I shan’t be going to Blogher this year after all. Why? Well. A has to travel for work then and I’d have to take Z with me. Which would be fairly expensive. And right now, we suddenly need to hoard all our cash and then some because something so awesome I can’t quite believe it might really happen.
I shan’t say more about it because I don’t want to jinx it. But this, this that could happen? It’s been a fantasy, unattainable, for a long time. Now I must go knock on wood for the rest of the day because I might already have said too much.
Also? I think I’m going to cook some lamb stew.
This is more of a challenge these days than it sounds because Z is extremely good at walking now. She is also extremely good at being a tornado. Which requires closer supervision than ever and our house is, basically, wrecked anyway. No one can do anything while Z is awake these days. Except play with Z, of course. Because on top of the walking and the tornado-ness she’s decided that henceforth everyone must play with her AT ALL TIMES and do nothing else ever and acts deeply and loudly offended when people fail to comply.
But Z is taking an uncharacteristically long nap, which means I am free to chop vegetables to tiny pieced and, just possibly, do a load of laundry or two. I am embarrassed to say I’m quite excited about these possibilities.
Z is now a walker. She taught herself to walk carefully, meticulously, and with lots of caution designed to avoid encounters with anything that might hurt. It was impressive to watch: she set her mind to it and practiced and practiced and slowly but surely figured it out, over the course of a little over a month. She took her first step on May 29th. (According to Twitter – apparently, I tweeted this. Which was smart because my brain has absolutely no record of that date.)
And, and! She understands a bunch of words in Hungarian, some in English, and knows some phrases, mostly having to do with determining where, for example, her head is, which she also knows in English. A pretty cool party trick, incidentally: your baby showing everyone where her head is in two languages.
But, also! I’m pretty sure Z’s now trying to SAY a few words. She can say bye-bye (or, well, the Hungarian baby-form of it: pah-pah – close enough though), I’ve heard her say something very close to ‘ball’ (labda) at a ball several times now, and today while driving home from the dry cleaner’s we stopped at a red light and I heard her say something that sounded suspiciously like ‘head’ (fej) and when I turned around to see her she was looking straight at me and smiling, holding her head. So… I think she said ‘head’ and then to emphasize her point, she showed me where her head was.
Sadly, we’re now also entering a phase where she freaks out completely when I leave her with anyone else. Which always makes me feel sorry for those someone elses although I’m always quite certain my child will survive until I get back and feel somewhat less sorry for her. Cruel, I know. I can’t deny I feel flattered, in a bittersweet sort of way. Never again, for the rest of her life, will she think I am so irreplaceably awesome.
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