Coffee from a Reusable Ceramic Mug

If we ever have a son, the poor boy is going to wear bows in his hair because I have just discovered that bows in a baby’s hair is the cutest thing ever. Now I need to make some of my own in more interesting (ie. non-pastel) colors.

This is what it looks like to wear a baby carrier for a walk in winter -a bit bulky. Clair is constantly a pair of big eyes peaking out of a sack. I think she will be confused in Phoenix when she can go around in only her diaper.

Reading up for my tax preparation this year, I learned that I am considered ‘unmarried’ for filing purposes! Just like that, I am unmarried. I guess this is because Matthias is a non-person for US tax purposes last year - actually, that’s even more disturbing than the unmarried thing. Crazy tax laws - they could at least make is sound less weird. I keep reading the tax instructions out loud to Matthias and he laughs trying to figure out the logic sequence of instructions. I have to read everything at least twice to get the logic myself - how many PhD physicists does it take to sort out US taxes? Apparently, more than two.

I don’t know why, but I started thinking about Clair’s birth today, and I started flipping through photos from that day. I never posted any photos from the delivery room so I thought I’d finally share - some have been edited to protect the innocent (from seeing my bits and pieces).

It was a pretty intense 7 hours from the time we went to the hospital to the time she was born, which is why it comes back to my mind quite often. Most of it has faded from memory (luckily, I wrote it all down as soon as I got home). I like that Matthias and mom only took photos of the moments when I looked relaxed. I wonder what I looked like between the moments of looking relaxed. It’s probably best that I don’t remember, and, of course, the fact that they didn’t take pictures through the rough times was because they were too busy helping me. They were a good birthing team - even the midwife complimented them.

Note - If the thought of seeing a newly born baby icks you out, you may not want to scroll down to the last two photos. The rest are G-rated.

7 hour before Clair’s arrival - “This won’t hurt much, right? I mean, it’s not so bad right now…”

6 hours before Clair’s arrival - “OK, I am starting to feel something”

5 hours or so before Clair’s arrival - “I Love my ball!!!” (in fact, I hugged it with every contraction for about three hours)

3 hours before Clair’s arrival - “No, I REALLY love you ball!” (Mom:”Tammy, you may have to let go of the ball”)

2 hours before Clair’s arrival - (Midwife finally convinced me to change positions) “Matthias, If I’m going down, I’m taking you with me!!”

45 minutes before Clair’s arrival - I am actually probably asleep here. For some uncertain period of time, I slept between contractions. It was like having the worlds worst alarms clock ever! it went off every minute and a half or so, and it squeezed you from the inside!

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15 minutes before Clair’s arrival - I am almost certainly not asleep here as a lot of adrenaline was running through my body then as the second stage of labor was coming into full gear, but I was still pretty relaxed between the contractions. During contractions I screamed my head off - I kind of wish someone would have gotten a photo of that too. Mom took this one when, after a moment of lucidity, I said “Take pictures of EVERYTHING” and then continued to ignore everyone else in the room.

Clair is here! (I’ll spare you the photos of what happened about 10 seconds before this photo)

I don’t know what those two midwives are smiling at - there was nothing funny about that…

Wow! Mr. Rogers was a good Buddhist and wonderful child advocate. Watching is Congressional testimony about PBS funding gave me goose bumps. I’m a bit sad that Clair won’t grow up watching him - actually, I am kind of sad that I can’t watch anymore too.

This afternoon, it snowed (more - it actually snowed all day). The snow was novel the first few months of winter (it starts in November over here), but I’ve had enough now. Anyway, it snowed again this afternoon. This snow was actually pretty cool because it was like Disney Land snow. Every flake was beautiful! The crystals were so perfectly formed that they looked like mini paper cut outs like you made in first grade! I had my camera, so I snapped a few photos of Clair, Sarah and An getting covered in the confetti-like snow flakes. I’ve never seen such perfect snow. I wish Cliff were around with his camera as I’m sure he could have gotten some better close-ups of the flakes.

A Vintage cardigan from the 1970’s and some turquoise bell bottoms - how cool is she? A little Neutral cap to pull the whole look together. If he mom could just be as hip.

If you haven’t already, I recommend checking out whitehouse.gov and recovery.gov (the site used to track and solicit feedback on the TARP legislation - if you want to know where your money is going, check it out). I love the sites because, for the first time that I am aware of, it is very clear that tech-savvy ‘youngsters’ are putting the face on our government.

The whitehouse, Congress and all Executive Branch Agencies (EBA) have websites, but for the most part, they are rather uninteresting and difficult to navigate - I must admit that NASA has some good stuff though. Even with NASA, I usually find info through Google a lot easier than searching the NASA site itself. The two new sites coming out of the whitehouse, however, are simple and easy to use. Given all of the bureaucratic loops that must be jumped through in order to publish anything for the government, the look, feel and timeliness of the website is even more impressive. They, for example, have announcements from yesterday! Having tried to get some info up in an unnamed EBA, that seems amazing to me.

As far as content of these sites, I find it really nice for getting my eyes on presidential memoranda and Executive Orders - I find that sometimes the media hasn’t even done this much when reporting on them. The recovery site has a nice time line for the implementation of the TARP and some general info on how it will be distributed. Both sites have running blogs that are updated almost daily with the changes and input from the people setting policies. This is Awesome! Previously, there were no blogs (ie. no first hand accounts made publicly accessible in a timely manner), and if you wanted to find documents on the policy coming directly out of the Whitehouse, there wasn’t such a simple way to get it. It was all available before, but now it is much more accessible.

Yay for the Whitehouse techies!! And props to the puppet master who knows enough about the importance of staying connected in today’s world to fight for his Blackberry.

I haven’t had much to write about lately. But, I know there are some grandparents out there looking for cute baby potos, so I must go on

We got Clair a Snack ‘ n Seat, that lets us put her in a normal chair so she can sit with us at meal times. So far she likes it long enough for us to both be able to eat with two hands. It is also nice to help her sit in the kitchen with us while we cook. It is a lot more portable than her bouncer (which I have had to put in the bathroom in order to get a shower without any crying). Like most things she tries for the first time, she has little patience for it, but hopefully she will start to dig it because we are taking it with us for the trip to the US.

Speaking of the trip. It is still over a month away,and I am already having dreams about traveling with Clair and trying to keep track of everything! Apparently, the idea of traveling with an infant is more stressful than I realized.

Like I said, not much to write about - if I think of something, I’ll post it right away!

I, like all of our Congressional representatives back home, wasn’t able to read all 1,000 (and some) pages of the stimulus bill that was just passed so I missed a lot of details. I was impressed to learn that evidence-based medicine will be getting a boost. I never even knew this issue existed until my first job in DC at the National Academies of Science where a colleague of mine was working on a study looking at the lack of evidence-based procedures in medicine.

Until then, I kind of assumed that doctors prescribed a certain treatment because it is the best treatment for the patient. It turns out, there is very little information on which treatments are best for almost any procedure because there has been little to no funding to cross compare treatments. You can find information on how effective one particular technique is on a set of patients, but you can’t evaluate how much better the outcomes are compared to a completely different protocol. In some cases ineffective or overly invasive treatments can create even more problems for patients.

I know, from personal experience, sometimes surgeries are recommended for problems that can be resolved much more simply in some instances (shoulder surgery and gall bladder surgery - to name two that I have experience with). I am not saying that doctors try to hide therapies from patients - I don’t buy into conspiracies because I know too many good doctors and researchers. I do think that doctors themselves have limited information on alternative treatments because they have learned from people who are really good at doing what they do and haven’t distracted themselves with alternatives. Plus, like I said, the studies just don’t exist for the most part because no one is paying for them. If, for example, I need my shattered wrist put back together (that was a bad year), I want the woman who knows nothing more than how to put wrists back together really, really, really well (hopefully that one will be on call when I land in the emergency room).

In my own experience with a shoulder injury (I have had to see a lot of doctors in my life - head, wrist, shoulders, neck, sternum…….) I also found the lack of information on less-invasive therapies a bit frustrating. The specialist I went to for a shoulder injury kind of laughed at me and bet that the physical therapy that I requested would fail - he said, “I’ll see you in six months for the surgery.” He begrudgingly gave me a referral so my insurance would cover it, but I had to push for it and endure a bit of ridicule. The only reason I even thought about alternatives to surgery was because of some knowledgeable therapists I met through the yoga community. If I didn’t know those people, I would not have had the confidence to seek out alternatives. When I came back six months later with a happy, healthy shoulder, the doctor was impressed, but one shouldn’t have to push as hard as I did to get referral for the cheaper, and possibly better, treatment.

I think this part of the stimulus package is a great long term investment to help in the larger problem with health care expenses - not to mention that is may save lives and improve the quality of life for many patients. The implementation will be a long, sticky process, but at least the funding will be there to get the ball rolling on a long overdue issue in health care.

Just thought I’d share……. I get all riled up about health care stuff.