I Spy At The Wild Animal Park....

Does anyone else find this hilariously funny? We stood there and laughed for hours. Really. ;-)

Eight Years.

Well, we made it eight whole years without having to go there. But now we have . . . a second car. [Cue music. Whatever kind seems appropriate. :)]

You can read all about our good fortune to live so happily with just one car by clicking on the following sentence. We've been so happy and lucky to share a car!

Like I wrote before, it's been pretty amazing how our circumstances keep lending themselves so well to sharing a car. And it's also been SO rewarding to share our schedule to the extent you need when you only have one vehicle. We've loved it.

Lately we've been considering our various options now that:
1) A second baby is coming.
2) Seth is in his last year without school.
3) Matt is finishing his last year of roaming from hospital to hospital, soon to be working exclusively at Children's just three miles away.

The first two say to us, break down and get a car. The third says, HA! Yeah right! Three miles away means NO second car required! HaHA!

Which is absolutely totally true, and resulted in a firm decision to work out another plan. We'd still share the car. For the days when taking Dad to work would mean waking two kids up at 5:30 in the morning, we'd get Matt a scooter. It's a safe route for a scooter, and a lot safer than a bicycle would be, and would take much less time than riding a bus or walking the three miles. Scooter it was.

Then we started to get real about our Camry.

The awesome, awesome Camry. It's been with us our whole marriage, and with me before then (and my dad before then!). "The Crammy" (as my roommates affectionately named it when it was how we all got to grocery stores :)) has been a great car for 11 years and almost 200,000 miles. And it's still a great car. (Consider, too, that it was severely beaten for many years by snow and ice and snow-clearing things like sand, gravel, and salt! This car rocks!) But it's starting to demonstrate that if we keep putting this kind of mileage on it . . . it's on its last legs. :-(

It occurred to us: with this kind of use, we'll need to buy a new car in the next year or two anyway. May as well do it now and have two cars, right? And if the Crammy is only asked to drive three miles to Children's hospital and back every day, how long might it last...? Another five years? More? (That would be SWEET!!!)

So in an effort to be reasonable, and in a dramatic effort to possibly lengthen the life of our awesome old-man of a sweet car, we decided on Thursday to start—to start—looking at vehicles. The beauty being we were in absolutely no rush and could wait months for a great deal.

On Saturday we looked at cars just to get a preliminary feel for things.

And on Monday...we drove a new car home.

Hahahahahaha!!

Turns out that being in no rush with the flexibility to wait for a great deal gives you a killer position during negotiations to get the great deal. And you end up with a car in two days anyway! Kind of funny.

But Matt had a good time negotiating from his killer "I don't need this" position, and Seth had a great time test-driving cars (happiest day of his life :)), and we ended up with a 2009 Kia Rondo. It only has 20,000 miles on it but we got it for almost half the price of a 2010. And it's a Certified Pre-Owned vehicle, which means we keep the great 100,000-mile and 60,000-mile Kia/Hyundai warranties. All in all, it worked out pretty well! We love how the car drives, and we love that it has so much more space without being a van or an SUV or a big car (it's footprint is smaller than the Camry's, but it has seven seats that actually feel more spacious, and tons of cargo room!). It gets great reviews. Hopefully it can last as well as we expect it to after having a killer Toyota for so long.... (Oh, Kia, they say you're pretty decent now. You better be! I guess even if you're not, we got you for cheap. ;))

So, goodbye you fabulous eight years of shared-car bliss! We never thought we'd get that much of you. Thanks to good fate and a good car, you stretched out to almost a decade. I guess that's pretty awesome.

(Watch, the Crammy will die tomorrow, and our car-sharing will be back! Haha!)

Ohhhhh boy.

I've really been looking forward to getting a tour of the hospital where our baby will be born. I haven't been able to stand not knowing what it's like in there!

And I thought I'd enjoy it. Almost five years ago, I had really enjoyed the tour of Seth's hospital. Yes, almost five years! I had been so eager to see the place that I was one of the least-pregnant people there.

I think I was on to something....

Because this tour....
This tour scared the living daylights out of me. Too soon! Too soon!!

Even just sitting in the lobby waiting for our tour guide made me nervous! When a happy family came wandering in with "It's a Girl" balloons and bouquets of flowers, I apparently turned to Matt and muttered: "Oh gosh. Someone just had a baby. . . . Terrible things happen here...." (Haha! Matt laughed at that for a long while. At least one of us was having fun. ;-))

Have I mentioned I hate hospitals? Hate. It's amazing to me that Matt spends his life in them.

And have I mentioned that I hate not having complete control of my body...? The thought of all these people touching me, sticking things in me, collecting or measuring the gross stuff I can't keep from spilling out of me.... It's all very horrifying.

Worth it, though! Worth it! :) I keep chanting this to myself! (I'd be the perfect candidate for a home birth if I didn't care so much about having emergency care ready for our baby. Staying at home sounds sooo comfortable and appealing.... Aside from the mess. Hehe. ;))

So...yeah. I'm in a weird place. The idea of giving birth to a baby is a little too vivid right now, while the awesome idea of a new baby actually coming to our family is so surreal I can't even picture it. At all. Seriously? In a month we'll have another child? A baby again? A little girl? No....... Really?

Logically I say to myself, yes, there will be a new baby...right...? It's not just a medical horror occurring. It's really a new baby coming, Auburn, a new baby. Really! Even though you can't picture it. And I'll be so excited and happy in the hospital that I won't mind will be able to barely tolerate all the indignities and horrors. Right...? :)

And if there's one thing I learned from Seth's birth (or, rather, that was dramatically reinforced), it's that I want a pediatric team with their expertise and equipment to save my baby's life (or brain) if s/he plummets from looking low-risk to having a major emergency in mere (completely unpredictable) moments. So I can deal with it. Keep the maternal sacrifices coming.... ;-)

Less than four weeks, people! Whoa!!! :-)

A visitor.

A little while ago, Seth accidentally left the sliding door open to the backyard. When Matt came home a little while later and headed out to say hi to Seth, I heard Matt call out to me: "Hey, Auburn, is that a toy lizard or is it real?" Which sounds scintillating to me.... If he has to ask, it MUST be something cool-looking, not your ordinary lizard! And I knew there wasn't any toy lizard. Matt and I get up close to it about the same time. He (the lizard :)) was AWESOME. Haven't ever seen one like this before....

Our favorite thing about this guy? We had just had an infestation of ants inside, which he promptly took care of. Ran around for a little while eating all of them. Gone. The whole three trails.... You go, Lizard!!

He also moved like a snake! Super-fast, as lizards are, but not a darter—he was a slitherer with legs under him. This whip-like side-to-side thing going on. Totally cool.

We chased him around for a while, trying to capture him (hard to do when the tail is so long...) to help him back outside. The harder it got, the more tempted we were to keep him around. Maybe he eats silverfish, too.... ;-)

Kids' Day

(I actually wrote this on October 3rd! Just now got the pictures uploaded from Matt's phone, though....)

We had a great Mother's Day. And then we had a great Father's Day. And a little while later, Seth randomly asked from the backseat: "Is there ever going to be a Kids' Day?"

Haha! What a great question! If we can take a whole day for kids and spouse to say thank-you to a mom or dad for being a mom or being a dad, why not celebrate the kids sometime? How fun! It took about half a second for Matt and I to both answer, yes, there is a Kids' Day!

Then we made up some hooey about how, uh, I think it's next month sometime.... :) Seth was darlingly excited.

Every so often he asks us again, "Is it Kids' Day soon?" And today—woo hoo!—today we finally got ourselves together and had Kids' Day.

It has been so, so, so fun. First, we made a special breakfast. Actually two special breakfasts! Matt planned to make cinnamon rolls but didn't get around to making the dough last night, so while we waited for the dough to rise, he made Seth's favorite pancakes: whole wheat. Mmmm.... Then came the cinnamon rolls for lunch.

We've spent the day thanking Seth for being our kid, to which he always grins sweetly and says, "you're welcome!"

And we got him some sa-WEET presents: two dress-up costumes, because we couldn't decide between them! (We might have to make the unveiling of the Halloween Costume a Kids' Day tradition. :))

Much, much, much thanks to our awesome Seth for being our kid, and a great one. Here's to you, kid!

Anesthesia

My book has gone back to a shelf that's too high for me to reach, and I'm too infirm at the moment to climb up a stepladder. But I have to recap the glory of 1940's anesthesia. :)

I loved the excited manner in which he described how, woo hoo! Gone are the days! The days when women must suffer such pain to give birth! Pain is now entirely optional thanks to . . . nitrous oxide!

It goes like this, he explains:

A woman is instructed to bear down just before the worst pain hits. Then she takes a deep breath of nitrous oxide, or "laughing gas." Blissfully unaware of . . . anything . . . the mother quickly awakes to discover that by bearing down before she was unconscious, she has assisted her baby in descending through the birth canal. As another pain begins to come on the process is repeated, until finally the mother awakes to find a newborn baby!

Awesome...!?!

You just have to appreciate our day and age, don't you? (And also, a man-centric medical world that managed to finally care about and address the issue of labor pain, even if the best they could come up with for a while was laughing gas!) Almost-all-of-human-experience Lady had no option but to suffer it out—over and over and over again if she didn't happen to be diligently scared into non-menstrual abstinence. (How sad that your relationship with spouse could be so scary! Imagine!) 1940s lady was still getting pregnant all the time, but she could at least whiff some laughing gas...? Dang! And now there's now, when the average woman can plan her pregnancies, then have a barrage of help during the delivery to manage pain in an actually low-risk way. Acupuncture, jet tubs, your husband, injections, epidural....

And you don't even have to be unconscious?! You have got to be kidding me! :)

Thank you, 2010. And all the research and progress that led to it. :)

Nurses and Residents

Courtesy of Expectant Motherhood.

This one had me chuckling a little. :)

"For many a young woman, admission to the maternity ward marks her first acquaintance with hospitals, as well as with the world of nurses and doctors. The immediate reaction may be one of strangeness, of loneliness and of homesickness. The nurses, in their stiff, white uniforms, may seem on first acquaintance somewhat stern and forbidding; you may even chronicle the impression that, to them, you are just another 'case,' which they are handling in a very matter-of-fact and routine sort of way. But beware of first impressions. Beneath their starched and sedate exterior, these daughters of Florence Nightingale cherish but one mission in life, the safety of such as you and yours; your welfare and that of your baby are their greatest concern and their greatest pride; let either of you show the slightest deviation from normal, and they are at attention to raise heaven and earth in your behalf. If they seem business-like, it is only because of their earnest desire to carry out every detail of the care necessary for your well-being. And what about the hospital doctors, the young men in white who venture hesitatingly into your room at odd moments, ask all kinds of silly questions and insist on thumping your chest or getting a drop of blood from your finger? Much maligned are these young men by misunderstanding patients, and a word in their support seems in order. They are doctors of medicine, you understand, who have gone through the most arduous period of study and training known to any of the learned professions. As medical students they have conducted dozens of deliveries and assisted at scores more; and they have passed no end of exacting examinations in obstetrics and every other branch of medicine. This may be their first, second, or even their third year out of school. Fresh from training in the latest scientific methods, they have at their finger tips an array of procedures which may be of the utmost help to your own physician, who will rely on them for much valuable assistance."

Ah, daughters of Florence Nightingale and young men in white....

(Interestingly, nurses are still almost all women. Do you find that odd? What's not "manly" enough for it?)

(I think I need to go watch Meet the Parents now.... ;-))