And She Was...

There was all sorts of talk about the movie "The Business of Being Born" earlier this year. I saw it shortly after Naomi was born (that was a deliberate choice on my part-knowing about the content of the movie, I knew I'd be angry and upset watching it, and I was concerned that those feelings would make the hospital birth that I really didn't want even more difficult to cope with.)

This video was posted on Facebook by my friend Maggie (who I met in her capacity as doula-we hired her to attend Naomi's birth with us, but that blossomed into a really amazing friendship.) It's the trailer for a movie called "The Other Side of the Glass"

( the video is back here )

Woah.
(Totally safe for work unless your work objects to external links about birth, but no pictures or anything.)
What sick person thought this was a good idea

Hello Friend's List.

Things have been a bit icky here lately. While I mostly feel good, my lungs are cranky. Cranky enough that my mother noticed I sounded winded on the phone yesterday and today. I've been feeling less than spectacular breathing-wise, and well, that's kind of an essential task. (Yes puzzld1 I promise I called my doctor.) So I call the OB who said "If you start using your inhaler more than 3 times a day call." And I was silly and forgot to ask what to do besides call. I've had issues with the triage nurses before-they seem to assume all patients are dumb, and this is no exception. I told her that while it wasn't urgent (I wasn't turning blue or anything) I did need a follow up call to find out what to do next-whether they were going to call in a prescription, whether I needed to go see another doctor, and so on. I have my routine appointment on Wednesday anyway, and so I'll mention the lack of a call back then, but more importantly I'll hopefully get some guidance about my lungs. Not breathing well is somewhere between frustrating and scary depending on how I'm feeling.

Oh and, my pharmacy has complied with the requirement to phase out CFC based inhalers. Fine. Most of us know the HFA propelled ones don't do the same job. Only problem? My insurance company covers the HFA albuterol as a tier 3 drug, which means they covered about five and a half dollars of it. So I can either pay nearly full price for it at the pharmacy, switch to a totally different rescue inhaler (anyone have experience with Xopenex-that, they'll cover as a tier 1 drug so I only pay $10) or get what the insurance company deems a 90 day supply via mail order for almost as much as the pharmacy. If I used it daily as a maintenance med, I'd do the mail order, but I'm not really using it that way so it doesn't make sense. *sigh* Usually my insurance isn't awful, but this is annoying me.

There was an issue with the dress I ordered for Cayne's holiday party (which is tomorrow night.) I'd put it off for about as long as possible, ordered four dresses in three colors and two sizes, only to discover that when I tried them on both of us preferred the green dress, which I had ordered in one size though I decided that a different size would be more comfortable. So, since I knew I was going to have to do a return anyway, on Saturday morning, I told him to go order the green dress in the size I liked...I went and finished getting dressed. He did it, and we decided to upgrade it to overnight shipping. The dress shipped on Monday morning, we expected it on Tuesday and it didn't show up. Somehow, UPS lost the package. After a circus of phone calls with the catalog I ordered the dress from, who then turned around to try and get UPS to trace the package, they shipped out a new one yesterday and told me they would refund the shipping on the dress, and I'd have the dress today. Which is fine and reasonable. This morning, our UPS guy shows up much earlier than he usually does (he arrived at about 9:20, his normal arrival time is between 2 and 3 in the afternoon.) He delivered two packages...each contained the same green dress. They've arranged for UPS to pick up one of the dresses on Monday, I have a green dress to wear tomorrow night.

We've been trying to get the house organized to have in laws here in January, and for the baby stuff. I'm starting to get to a place where it'll be okay to start getting the baby things we need to have to start with, though other things can wait. But it probably does make sense to start acquiring things in January or February rather than feeling overwhelmed in March.

Busy weekend planned...tomorrow I go let the vampires take my blood (thyroid panel, CBC, hemoglobin, hematocrit) then breakfast at First Watch (mmmm potatoes) then groceries and lunch and a nap before the party. Sunday we're going to spend the day with friends-the two pregnant people are baking cookies, and the other three (Cayne, Nick and Bob) are going to do "something manly." (Yes, it's been an on and off joke about this division of labor and such.)

And notes to various people because finding LJ posts to respond to would drive me crazy...

To the person who found out she was pregnant this week-congratulations, I'm so very happy for you.
To the person in the UK who is worrying me and who is having great stress in her chosen family-I'm thinking of you
To the person whose pregnancy has reached a point where the first word that comes to mind is "difficult" and the next one is "complicated" I am crossing my fingers that things ease up soon and that the little remaining time is much smoother.

And with that, I'm hungry and need something to eat.

How in the world am I supposed to decide in a matter of oh, two-ish hours if we should start Bradley birth classes...tomorrow?

(We'd decided on Bradley method, but I wasn't expecting to start until after the first of the year. The teacher I wanted to take classes with isn't teaching again after her current session-she's got a baby due at the end of January. Which leaves me with a choice between a teacher who hasn't called me back and so I don't know her schedule or the one who did call me and who is coming down from Georgia and teaching two Sundays a month, extended sessions so that she can get the usual 12 session curriculum in, but in fewer sessions. Buh?)

I've taken to using this as a spot for just dumping things...I save them up and then make posts that are a collection of all the various things that have been going on.

Things like the weird dreams I've been having-most of them are about places that I used to have to go, like junior high school, where I had to talk about the people I had crushes on back then, or high school where I forgot my locker combination. And then there was the airplane dream. No one needs to tell me that the airplane dream was a birth dream....I dreamed about airplanes, on the ground, rolling through tunnels and into hangars that were smaller than their wingspans. Yeah, that was a birth dream.

There was the strange experience this morning. I got up and got out of bed and heard noise. Before I went to the bathroom or brushed my teeth, I went to investigate what it was, thinking that Cayne had left the TV on or something when he was getting ready for work, only to discover Cayne sitting on the couch watching TV-about an hour later than he usually leaves for work. I asked him what he was doing, and he responded "Sitting on the couch." I asked if he was taking the day off from work and he said "No, it's Saturday." I reminded him it was Friday and he looked shocked. He scurried off, got dressed very quickly and sheepishly headed in to work.

We got the second trimester screening results back-this looked at the risk of Down's Syndrome-1/3000, Trisomy 18 (Edward's Synrome)-1/10,000 and Spina Bifida-1/1600. That of course still means that there are plenty of other thing that could go wrong, but at least that's somewhat reassuring.

We bought a chair last weekend...it arrived the other day and is in a box in the living room, on it's side. It will probably stay there until we figure out what to do with the two chairs it's replacing (one spot is getting a chair, the other is getting a new filing cabinet, but I need to decide if I'm going to Freecycle or Craig's List or what with the old chairs.) But the box is right where a coffee table would go if/when we buy one for the living room. And it's become a hot spot for cats to nap in lately. I wonder if the same thing would happen with a coffee table.

The craving for salty foods is going to drive me crazy. I really wish I could cut back on them, but I can't get enough pickles. I'm going to go open another jar when I'm done with this post.

I hope the writer's strike doesn't mean that the new shoes I like on TV disappear. Not much in the way of new shows that we're watching, just Big Bang Theory and Chuck, I think. And on the subject of TV...NBC Universal has been going on and on this week about all sorts of environmental stuff. They also sent correspondents to the Equator, the Arctic Circle and Antarctica. And my first thought when I heard about this was "I wonder if they accounted for the environmental impact of moving crew and equipment there, and what they did to balance it."

We've both been reading Scott Westerfield's books-in particular the Uglies series. I finished the first one about a year ago, on one of our winter trips, picked up the second one months later and caught the third one on a remainder table at Borders recently. They're adolescent fiction, so they're quick reads, but they're pretty good. Someone at Border's suggested them to me last year. I gave Cayne the fist one when we were traveling recently and he liked it, devoured the second and third within a matter of days, and insisted on having the fourth one, which had just come out in hardcover, and between a coupon and a sale, it was reasonable. The third one felt unevenly written, but the fourth one, the writing has gone back to what we expected, but the concept is really interesting. I'm enjoying the concept of a reputation economy, though I'm wondering how different some of that is from the way adolescents currently live today.


And the links, since I collect them.

This one talks about post partum sex...someone fears that her vagina will be too loose after giving birth. And also on the subject of vaginae, slinkr pointed me at The New York Times on the word Va-jay-jay.

This one (text follows behind the cut) is about a woman who was asked to cover up or leave Universal Studios because she was breastfeeding. (The end result, by the way, is that Universal apologized to her, because Florida law allows her to breastfeed in public.)

( The Cut )


There's also Abstinence Doesn't Curb Teen Sex

( Read about how abstinence fails )

Has anyone looked into Sony's Digital Book Reader? Despite his hatred of Sony, zedrikcayne has suggested that if I want one, I should get it. I haven't really investigated it much yet, but the idea of being able to read while nursing late at night in the dark if I'm awake, for example, is kind of appealing. It's bigger than a Palm, which is also appealing, as I've always found reading on my Palm screen rather irritating. Does anyone know more about it than I do?

We're also starting to shop for cameras-it's amazing what's become lumped in with "baby expenses" even though they really have very little to do with the baby. The two things that first come to mind are more life insurance and the camera. We're looking for a point and shoot, throw into the diaper bag kind of camera. I bought Mom a Canon of some variety last year, and the camera that I'm replacing (nothing wrong with it but the LCD screen is shot, and frankly, the cost of the LCD replacement isn't worth it) is also a Canon.

In case you haven't read about it already, comment editing is in place for paid users. Can't edit a comment that's already been replied to, but it was nice when it helped me correct some bad HTML today.

Okay, that's enough. It's time for pickles.

It's twenty past seven in the morning. I woke up at four. I slept maybe three-ish hours last night, and had a 90 minute nap on Saturday afternoon.

I woke up at four to use the bathroom (not an unusual thing these days) and then decided I was hungry, so I cut up an apple and ate it. Still couldn't sleep, so I watched a movie on TV for a while, and still wasn't sleepy. I heated some chicken soup, straightened up the kitchen and family room, and ate my soup.

This wouldn't be a problem if tronochick wasn't coming over at 2 this afternoon (and if you read this, don't even think about not showing up...you should know that already after talking to Cayne and reading the IM I left you.) She's coming over so that we can prepare a Canadian Thanksgiving dinner, and hang out. And a few other friends are supposed to come over later in the day.

I'm also still hungry...the problem is, I'm supposed to take my thyroid meds in about 20 minutes, and if I do that I shouldn't really eat for an hour. However, I'm really not in the mood to wait another hour and twenty minutes to eat, and I don't want to put off my thyroid meds either because if I do that, I'll end up waking up to take them and be ravenous and then have to wait an hour. And so I think I will eat and take thyroid meds and know that they won't work as well for the day, but considering where my tsh was when it was drawn about two weeks ago (.94something) I'm willing to risk it.

Courtesy of aquariumgirl (note-registration required, but bugmenot.com usually has working logins for the Washington Post) HHS Toned Down Breast-Feeding Ads Formula Industry Urged Softer Campaign. Also available here from MSNBC.

And much more pleasantly....

Design your own onsie.

The next two, courtesy of rockstarbob:

Most popular baby names by decade from the 1880s to 2000s.-I found my name in the appropriate decade.

Also, The baby name wizard blog with some interesting articles. Do note that the words "vagina" and "penis" appear in entirely mundane context on the current first page of the blog.

I think it's time to go talk to my breakfast cereal, and see what my Rice Krispies inspire me to do today. Maybe they'll prompt me to answer the three e-mails in my inbox that I want to deal with.