10+10+10+3.5+3.5=

I am officially 37. As of last Thursday (3/13).
It was an uneventful day, really.
A day like any other, as is typical for grown-up birthdays.

I did manage to get myself a coffee and pedicure, though, which was lovely.

Friday I got my hair cut and had my new driver's license picture taken. Two hours of boredom at the DOL. That night we went to dinner at The Old Spaghetti Factory and then we all went bowling. It was fun to just hang out with our kids because that isn't something we get to do very much anymore. I miss them, even though they are always here. It's different now that they (Paige and Brittani) are older. They don't need us or want us as much.

I got some pretty groovy stuff though:

• a new iPod--80gb classic
• gift certificate to Borders
• a nifty pink wallet case for my iPod (it will probably always be in my purse)
• and best of all--and a major surprise (I knew about the iPod): front row tickets to see Cake on May 11th at the Paramount!!!

We celebrated my bday at my parentals house today, and it was, as always, a swell time. My mom made me TWO chocolate cakes (due to an error on her part, but her error is my treat!) and we had TUNA BOATS for dinner (my request). Tuna boats are a a food that was a pretty regular item on our menu when I was growing up. I think we usually had them in the summer. It's an interesting food, and I think only my brother appreciated them as much as I did tonight.

To make tuna boats, which I hadn't eaten in about 10 years, you take a hard french roll and cut out the top to make it like a little bowl. You mix Cheez Whiz, tuna, chopped onion and chopped celery together and fill in the bread bowls. Broil til browned on top (and molten lava-like) and serve with cottage cheese and chips on the side. Healthy stuff.

The best part of having tuna boats for dinner is eating the bread you cut out with the left-over cheez mixture. Yum.

On our way to my mom and dad's, I was telling Wayne how every time we had tuna boats, my dad would say how expensive Cheez Whiz is, so I had to laugh when we got there and dad said, "I couldn't believe how much Cheez Whiz costs!!!" or something along those lines. Some things never change. I feel like I could write funny memoirs about my family like David Sedaris does or like Jean Shepard. Anyway, according to my dad, we all could have eaten New York steaks for the same cost as the tuna boat ingredients. Next year, I guess.

Nifty Giftys from la familia:

• Labyrinth by Kate Mosse from my brother, Aaron. It looks really good, and now I can add it to my Shelfari :-)
• The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs from my grandparents. One would probably wonder why I would want a book like that, but it looks ridiculously funny; I heard the author on the radio one day, and his interview was great.
  
• Grandparents also gave my some sweet bath stuff, which I always love, and I inherited a sexy piece of red lingerie that my aunt and mom gave my grandma awhile back. Lingerie passed through the women in my family--another odd story about my quirky family. I still have the gargantuan black lace bra that has been passed around; I need to get on the ball and start doing my part passing this stuff along!
• My parents bought me an awesome shower head that I specifically asked for as well as:
  
• Postsecret book (Yea!!!)
• Gift cert to a nail salon

All in all, it was a great birthday. The only bad thing is that I turned another year older. That pretty much blows. the good thing is that no one ever believes I'm 37 (well, that I was 36). They all tell me they think I'm younger, and I really hope they aren't lying to me.
I thought 36 was tough, but 37 makes me want to crawl under a rock and eat ho-hos. Except that ho-hos are gross. Brownies. Yes, 37 makes me want to crawl under a rock (or my cozy covers) with brownies and nice tall glass of Smith Brothers Farms 2% milk.

Speaking of brownies...I see Weight Watchers on the horizon, but Wayne is so not wanting me to join. I feel like I need to join, but he's really pissy about me spending money to lose weight. It was the beginning of an argument today that we quickly defused, so I'm sure it will come up again.

We never fight over money, nor do we fight about how we will spend our money, so this is new territory for us. It's so great that after almost 12 years together, we can still find new territory to explore.

maternity leave ramble

I have a student from my last class who was planning a homebirth with one of the wonderful licensed midwives in this area. She was due in December and totally expected to have her baby on Christmas eve or Christmas day. This student was very diligent about taking care of herself during pregnancy. Yoga. Acupuncture. Chiropractic. Massage. In addition to my twelve weeks of classes, which she never missed, she also took a hypnobirthing class. This was one prepared student and partner.

Christmas came and went, and no baby. New years...no baby.

All during this time, she was contracting on and off all day for weeks on end.

One night, in the week before her baby was born, she felt the baby make a huge movement, and she thought baby was moving from a right-side lying position to left side. At that point, she expected labor at anytime.

Still nothing.

She went for a biophysical profile, and the baby had turned from vertex to breech.

Ugh.

Her cesarean was scheduled for the next day.

We played phone tag for awhile; I knew she was having a hard postpartum period. I finally had an opportunity to really sit down and have a conversation with her last night, and we talked for about an hour.

I am angry.

I'm not angry at her, of course; I am angry at the health care system we have in place here. I am angry that there is no built in safety net for this mom, her baby and her partner. Once the baby is born, no one asks how the mom is feeling--emotionally. A mom is supposed to be grateful that her baby is okay and that she, too, is okay. Luckily she is still seeing her LM, who is in tune with postpartum issues mom is having. She gave her a referral for someone to help her out, as did I.

Her story is not unique, either. I've had three students in my last two classes who have had cesarean births, unexpected all, and they all had the same things to say:
recovery sucked
the birth is foggy
the drugs made them out of it for a good two weeks
nursing was difficult and for one, impossible to continue.

None of them understand the appeal of an elective cesarean.

They are unable to stay home to heal and learn to mother an newborn because they have to get back to work. 4-8 weeks seems to the normal maternity leave for my students who have to go back to work.

That. Is. So. Wrong.

Cesareans are on the rise, maternity leave is getting shorter, and I can't believe that's the way it should be. Obviously I feel the cesarean rate needs to be lower and can be lower, but I really feel that women who don't have enough time to recover from birth--no matter how they birthed--are going to be less healthy. They hardly know how to be a mom to the new baby before they have to go back to work again.

Here's an excerpt from an email from a student from my last series:
Yeah, I went back to work Jan 31st...Baby was about 5 weeks then. I guess I would say that it took me until the first week of March to stop feeling quite so overwhelmed. I started running a fever a few weeks ago and ended up sleeping for 16 hours ( Husband fed Baby bottles and woke me up to nurse which I don't remember much of) I broke into an intense sweat and woke up feeling fine every since. I think it was exhaustion. Working 40 hours, getting caught up at work, pumping, nursing at lunch, taking care of the baby at home and the house...wow.

I'm stressed out and overwhelmed just reading that!
I have such respect for the moms I know who go back to work and continue to pump and nurse their babies. I am the first to say that I nursed my babies mostly because it was cheap and easy, and I wonder if I have the perseverance to do all the pumping that a lot of my moms do.

So, Wayne and I watched Sicko right around the time that I was hearing from my students who had to go back to work, and I so wish we had a system in place where a parent (dad or mom) can stay home with baby for the first year (or two!), if they choose. That they would get their full wages and be guaranteed their position at their workplace when they returned. I also wish that every woman could have a full 12 weeks, at least, with full pay (without having to delve into sick time/vacation time/PTO), to recover from birth and to adapt to being a mom.

We need a change here in the US, and I honestly don't think that any of the presidential candidates are going to create the kind of change I want to see. It's just so frustrating for me to see the decline in maternity and postpartum care that my students receive-- unless they are with a LM. The LMs provide exceptional care that I wish every woman could experience.

album

I grabbed this from a blog I read.

That album cover meme:

Follow these easy steps:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4. Use your graphics program of choice to throw them together, and post the result in your own journal:



How weird is it that I randomly get the wiki about this, this quote and this picture. Interesting. Fun.

Lunar Eclipse

It's a little blurry, but it still looks pretty good:

gilly maya

This is so the picture I am going to submit for her 9th grade graduation slide show...her senior yearbook ad...her wedding slideshow... so many embarrassing options!

Late VD

Valentine's Day was low-key for us this year. We were unable to drop a couple hundred bucks on dinner this year, which was a bit of a bummer, but on the other and, what kind of an idiot spends a couple hundred bucks on dinner.

Wayne did buy me these beautiful chocolates:



They were so pretty that I resisted eating them...until I tasted one. They are so good! I have two chocolates left: cardamom and champagne. They were my two favorite flavors. I nibbled on every piece and have been eating them in order of preference. I'm saving the best for last, of course (champagne). It really does taste like champagne, too. Yum.

I made some cupcakes for Valentine's Day. I thought they turned out quite nicely. I impulsively bought a heart-shaped silicone cupcake pan that I will probably only use once a year, so I stayed up late on the 13th making six cupcakes at a time.



The next night, Wayne and I went out to dinner--something we haven't done in quite awhile. We decided to go to our favorite Mexican restaurant, which we haven't been to in months.

It's always nice to have an evening to go out without any kiddos.

Khaled Hosseini

For Christmas, I received The Kite Runner by Hosseini. I devoured it in less than two days. It was the best book I have read in such a long time, and I can easily put it at the top of my list of all time favorite books.

It was fascinating to read because it took place in Afghanistan, which is a place I am really not all that familiar with. Before reading this book, I only knew that the Taliban was situated in Afghanistan and that they are a horrible group of people. After we (The U.S) sent troops to Afghanistan, we were able to see images of the people of Afghanistan in the news; we began to hear of the atrocities committed by the Taliban against the citizens of Afghanistan. That was when I first became aware of women in Burqas and the horrible way that women are treated in Afghanistan.

Really, though, I was ignorant about much else regarding Afghanistan.

The Kite Runner made me laugh, made me cringe, made me cry and at times, I was afraid to turn the page for fear of what would be described in upcoming paragraphs. It was a devastatingly beautiful book, and I hated that I finished it so quickly.

A few weeks ago, I checked A Thousand Splendid Suns out from the library, and I was afraid that I would not have time to read it before it was due (2/14). I couldn't renew it because there are holds on it. Well, I don't know what I was thinking because I simply could not put down The Kite Runner, so I don't know why A Thousand Splendid Suns would be any different. I tried to put it down, but I couldn't. I read it in one day-- except for three chapters that I read on Saturday night. With this book, just like the previous, I would put the book down for fear of what I predicted was coming, only to pick it up again immediately because I had to know if I was right or wrong. I am also terrible at flipping ahead, and anytime I thought something terrible was going to happen, I would flip ahead. I spoiled a few twists and turns due to my flipping ahead, but it saved me a lot of reader anxiety.

My nails, which I chew, are hurting today because this book had me chewing away like crazy.

It, too, was a sad book. But more than sad, it made me so angry. It is terrible that people live the way that is described in Hosseini's books. He starts in idyllic times, when there was a monarchy and it ends in the present turmoil. The Kite Runner focuses on a wealthy and respected father and his son; A Thousand Splendid Suns has two main characters: Mariam, who was born a harami and lived in very poor conditions with her mother; her father visits weekly like clockwork. The other character is Laila, and she is a few decades younger than Mariam and lives next door to adult Mariam. Ultimately, their paths cross and intertwine, and the book becomes their story. It is tragic, of course, because what else could it be? Though in tragedy, one can sometimes find beauty, and Hosseini really paints a beautiful portrait of Afghanistan and the people there-- people who are hostage, really, to these different factions of leadership who turn their world upside down and inside out.

I cannot wait until his next book. Hurry up, Mr. Hosseini!!

Read these books. You can thank me later for the recommendation.

My girls dance; yes, they do!

Paige's Winter Formal...
February 2, 2008
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Brittani Goes to the Junior Prom
February 9, 2008

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caucus 2008

Maya and Sofia...show their support for Hillary

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Wayne and I went to our caucus today; it was crazy!!!

There were hundreds of people packed into the school where we were caucusing (?). Barack Obama kicked butt in our precinct: 50-26. My mom's precinct's numbers were similar. He really has a ton of momentum right now; if you go to his campaign store, everything is sold out and on backorder!

It was so fun to participate in the caucus, though; the energy was high. There were heated debates going on all around us. Cheering, yelling. It was fun. Wayne signed up to be a delegate to the Legislative District caucus and the County Conference-- both in April.

Sadly (depending upon your opinion, I guess), it was me and a bunch of (well, 25) elderly women who were voting for Hillary. After they voted, most of the elderly women left, which left me and 8 other women who had to try to get 1/2 of an Obama delegate to go towards Clinton. Yeah, right. Didn't happen. Barack got to keep his 1/2 and took Hillary's, too. Our precinct is sending 7 Obama delegates and 3 Clinton delegates.

I tried to spread the word about the caucus today, and it seemed like I may have actually had an effect-- I know at least three people who attended the caucus today because of my small effort. Yea, me!

Wayne and I went to watch Hillary speak today. It was so cool!
Here are some pictures.

Don't forget-- if you are voting for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in the presidential primary Feb 19, that vote means NOTHING!!! You must go to the caucus in your voting area tomorrow at 1:00pm to choose your favorite candidate. Kids are welcome. You don't have to stay the whole time they are deciding on delegates; just sign in, choose your candidate and you're done (so I understand). The primary only affects 1/2 the delegate choices for the Republican party in Washington state; the Democratic delegates will only be determined by caucus not by primary votes.

Here's some clarification. The video is 5 minutes long, but there is also a FAQ on that same page, if you don't feel like watching a video.

Please forward this information along to anyone you know who is a registered voter--regardless of their political stance.

And if you are not yet registered to vote: CLICK HERE to register. It's quick and easy and can be done online.

shan