Monday, January 28, 2008
Attention, Subscribers
If any of you are reading this through a feed reader and have forgotten that I moved because you couldn't figure out how to subscribe to the new blog, Dr. Maureen, go over to www.docmaureen.com. I figured out how to add the subscription link, and it's one of the tabs on the header image.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Graduation
As I have pretty much used up all of my stories about grad school – well, at least those that are safe for publishing – I have finally decided to move my blog. I haven’t gone far, but the title no longer ties me into any particular theme. I won’t be tied down, man!
Come join me at www.docmaureen.com!
Come join me at www.docmaureen.com!
Monday, December 17, 2007
Babies are weird, man
From the age of 12 to about 16, babysitting was my main source of income. I have also been an aunt since the age of 14. As such, I have had my fair share of putting babies and kids to bed. In my experience, babies who cry themselves to sleep start off with gusto and then taper off over the next 10-15 minutes with maybe one last, pathetic “Eh!” before finally settling down to sleep for the night.
Not my baby.
My baby doesn’t cry himself to sleep at all… or so we thought. Lately, he has been protesting his naps and bedtime about fifty percent of the time. When he does cry, instead of the 10-15 minutes of winding down exhibited by typical babies, Jack does this:
“AAAAHHHHHH!” (breath) “AAAAHHHHHH!” (breath) “AAAAHHHHHH!” (breath) “AAAAHHHHHH!” (breath) “AAAAHHHHHH!” (breath) “AAAAHHHHHH!” (breath)
“AAAAHHHHHH!” (silence)
You think that last silence is just him taking a breath for the next yell, but… nope! He’s done! The whole process takes maybe 2-3 minutes. On a bad night, it takes 15. It’s at these times that I wish we had a video monitor just so I could see what the heck he’s doing in there. Does he fall asleep mid cry? Does he just decide he’s too tired for all that effort? He’s usually standing up when I leave, so at what point does he lie down?
On nights like these, this is what I imagine is happening in his head:
But of course, I don’t know. All I know is that we have to listen carefully to hear the difference between angry, “I don’t WANNA go to sleep” yells and scared “I want my mommy and where is my bink*?” cries which don’t end, but just get louder.
So, yeah. Babies are weird.
*All four of your binks are on the FLOOR WHERE YOU THREW THEM. Sigh.
Not my baby.
My baby doesn’t cry himself to sleep at all… or so we thought. Lately, he has been protesting his naps and bedtime about fifty percent of the time. When he does cry, instead of the 10-15 minutes of winding down exhibited by typical babies, Jack does this:
“AAAAHHHHHH!” (breath) “AAAAHHHHHH!” (breath) “AAAAHHHHHH!” (breath) “AAAAHHHHHH!” (breath) “AAAAHHHHHH!” (breath) “AAAAHHHHHH!” (breath)
“AAAAHHHHHH!” (silence)
You think that last silence is just him taking a breath for the next yell, but… nope! He’s done! The whole process takes maybe 2-3 minutes. On a bad night, it takes 15. It’s at these times that I wish we had a video monitor just so I could see what the heck he’s doing in there. Does he fall asleep mid cry? Does he just decide he’s too tired for all that effort? He’s usually standing up when I leave, so at what point does he lie down?
On nights like these, this is what I imagine is happening in his head:
Why are you leaving me in here all alone? I want another story! I don’t want this stupid bink, I want a story! (snatches bink from mouth, throws it on floor) STORY STORY STORY STORY STORY! (looks around crib, finds second bink, picks it up for the express purpose of throwing it on the floor) I can’t BELIEVE they left me in here all alone! And with no binks! I’m in my bed, I get to have a bink! That’s the rule! How am I supposed to go to sleep with no bink? WHERE IS MY BIN-- (notices third and fourth spare binks in the crib) Oh, wait. There’s one. (puts bink in mouth, ceases crying, lies down, strokes blankie, goes to sleep.)
But of course, I don’t know. All I know is that we have to listen carefully to hear the difference between angry, “I don’t WANNA go to sleep” yells and scared “I want my mommy and where is my bink*?” cries which don’t end, but just get louder.
So, yeah. Babies are weird.
*All four of your binks are on the FLOOR WHERE YOU THREW THEM. Sigh.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Some firsts I'd rather skip
The first year of your child's life is just a series of milestones, one after the other. The first smile. The first word. The first steps. The first trip to the emergency room.
Yes, last Sunday, The Husband and I had the delightful pleasure of taking our baby to the ER to make sure he had not jammed his teeth back up into his head possibly embedding them in his brain. (Short version: He hadn't.) It had happened very suddenly. We had just gotten back from church and The Husband was making grilled cheese sandwiches while I searched for a recipe for cranberry bread and Jack played in the cabinet with the pots and pans. The next thing we knew, he had fallen on his face and blood was pouring from his mouth. Mouths bleed a lot, people.
This was not our first experience with this phenomenon, because Jack has fallen on his mouth at least four other times this year. This was more blood than I had seen, however, and I find bleeding from the mouth particularly troubling, as it is very difficult to see the extent of the damage what with all the crying and wailing and blood pouring out and all. Does he need stitches? Who can tell? At any rate, I held Jack upside down to try and look in there and in the brief flashes I could get, it looked to me like Jack's two front teeth had receded into his gums by at least 50%. I said, "That's it, we're going to the emergency room," and off we went.
I should take a moment here to tell The Husband's side of the story, which is that I "panic" every time Jack gets hurt. He bases this claim on the way I say, "Oh! He's bleeding! Oh! Oh! The blood! Does he need stitches? Should we take him to the ER? How do we clean it? Oh, he's swollen! His lip is swollen! The blood! The blood!" and things along those lines. But it is my position that I do not panic, it's just that I let The Husband be the one in charge of determining the extent of the damage while I take over the job of comforting the screaming, bleeding baby. I do this because I can let him be the one in charge. He's right there, all ready to take charge with his cool, calm, former lifeguard head. If he were not there, however, I would be quite capable of cleaning up the blood and driving to the ER all by myself, because I'd have to be. So no, I don't panic.
So. The ER. The Husband and I were pretty sure that Jack's teeth were probably fine, because he wasn't even crying anymore by the time we were packing him into his car seat, but we weren't going to take any chances with his teeth. He was triaged and registered within 20 minutes of our arrival, and then we had to settle down to wait. The Husband bought Jack a muffin because none of us had had lunch, and Jack had no problems chomping away at it. By the time we were finally seen by the nurse practitioner, Jack was biting a paper cup and pulling on it with his hands, further convincing us that his teeth were fine.
When the NP took a look, he told us that Jack had split his funiculus (that piece of skin that connects the top lip to the gums), but that his teeth looked fine to him. His gums had just swollen up, and that was what made me think his teeth had been jammed. The NP did suggest that we get a dentist to take an x-ray to make sure there was no root damage, and we did that on Saturday. Actually, we didn't. We took him to the dentist, but the dentist said an x-ray wasn't really necessary since Jack's teeth weren't even chipped.
And so it all ended well. Jack's teeth are fine, his funiculus appears to have healed, and we've all agreed that he has filled his quota of accidents for the next year and there will be no more falling on his mouth. We've AGREED.
Yes, last Sunday, The Husband and I had the delightful pleasure of taking our baby to the ER to make sure he had not jammed his teeth back up into his head possibly embedding them in his brain. (Short version: He hadn't.) It had happened very suddenly. We had just gotten back from church and The Husband was making grilled cheese sandwiches while I searched for a recipe for cranberry bread and Jack played in the cabinet with the pots and pans. The next thing we knew, he had fallen on his face and blood was pouring from his mouth. Mouths bleed a lot, people.
This was not our first experience with this phenomenon, because Jack has fallen on his mouth at least four other times this year. This was more blood than I had seen, however, and I find bleeding from the mouth particularly troubling, as it is very difficult to see the extent of the damage what with all the crying and wailing and blood pouring out and all. Does he need stitches? Who can tell? At any rate, I held Jack upside down to try and look in there and in the brief flashes I could get, it looked to me like Jack's two front teeth had receded into his gums by at least 50%. I said, "That's it, we're going to the emergency room," and off we went.
I should take a moment here to tell The Husband's side of the story, which is that I "panic" every time Jack gets hurt. He bases this claim on the way I say, "Oh! He's bleeding! Oh! Oh! The blood! Does he need stitches? Should we take him to the ER? How do we clean it? Oh, he's swollen! His lip is swollen! The blood! The blood!" and things along those lines. But it is my position that I do not panic, it's just that I let The Husband be the one in charge of determining the extent of the damage while I take over the job of comforting the screaming, bleeding baby. I do this because I can let him be the one in charge. He's right there, all ready to take charge with his cool, calm, former lifeguard head. If he were not there, however, I would be quite capable of cleaning up the blood and driving to the ER all by myself, because I'd have to be. So no, I don't panic.
So. The ER. The Husband and I were pretty sure that Jack's teeth were probably fine, because he wasn't even crying anymore by the time we were packing him into his car seat, but we weren't going to take any chances with his teeth. He was triaged and registered within 20 minutes of our arrival, and then we had to settle down to wait. The Husband bought Jack a muffin because none of us had had lunch, and Jack had no problems chomping away at it. By the time we were finally seen by the nurse practitioner, Jack was biting a paper cup and pulling on it with his hands, further convincing us that his teeth were fine.
When the NP took a look, he told us that Jack had split his funiculus (that piece of skin that connects the top lip to the gums), but that his teeth looked fine to him. His gums had just swollen up, and that was what made me think his teeth had been jammed. The NP did suggest that we get a dentist to take an x-ray to make sure there was no root damage, and we did that on Saturday. Actually, we didn't. We took him to the dentist, but the dentist said an x-ray wasn't really necessary since Jack's teeth weren't even chipped.
And so it all ended well. Jack's teeth are fine, his funiculus appears to have healed, and we've all agreed that he has filled his quota of accidents for the next year and there will be no more falling on his mouth. We've AGREED.
Friday, November 30, 2007
It won't... stop... beeping...
There was a period of time when I was in high school that I slept in the attic. During this time, I also worked at a small convenience store as a cashier, and occasionally I had to work the 6am-11am shift on Saturdays which required that I get up at 5:30. Now, I am not one who rises easily, so this was, to put it mildly, a challenge. I typically set my alarm - which was always set to the horrible screeching buzzer and never to the music that stood no chance of awakening me - for 5:00 so that I could hit snooze several times before being late. Since I usually had no memory at all of the first and sometimes second times I hit snooze, I felt this 30 minute cushion was a necessity.
My brother, who slept in the room at the bottom of the attic stairs, felt differently.
"Mo," he said to me one Friday night. "If your alarm goes off more than once tomorrow morning, I am going to have to kill you." He was very polite about it, but he really felt he had no alternative. So that night I set the alarm for 5:20 with great trepidation, but also with the full intention of getting up as soon as it went off to spare my brother the morning Chinese alarm torture.
HONK! HONK! HONK!
I awoke with a start, leapt to my alarm and started hammering the snooze button. I wasn't going to use the snooze button, at least, not in the way God intended it to be used. I just wanted to silence the alarm until I had enough coordination to turn it off permanently. But the noise didn't stop! I pushed the snooze button. I pushed it again. I tried tapping it really quickly, and then I tried holding it down really hard. Nothing.
I finally remembered that to turn the alarm off, I had to turn the dial to the left two notches. I turned the dial. No change. In desperation, I turned the dial all the way to the left, then all the way to the right. To the left! To the right! Left right left right left! It was still honking! Wait! Unplug the clock! UNPLUG IT!
I unplugged it.
HONK! HONK! HONK!
Frantically, I looked around the room. Ever so slowly, my powers of deductive reasoning were returning to me, and I was able to determine that the noise was not coming from my alarm clock. It was coming from the window. What was in the window? A fan. I ran to the fan. "I have to turn off the fan," I thought to myself. "That will make the noise stop." But the fan wasn't on. No problem! I just turned on the fan. That way, I could turn it off and make the noise stop.
Astoundingly, this did not work.
I considered the situation. Assuming there was some sort of short circuit causing the on/off switch to fail, I decided to unplug the fan. Hey, it didn't work for the alarm clock because the alarm clock wasn't honking. The fan was honking. So I unplugged the fan.
HONK! HONK! HONK!
"It didn't take!" I thought to myself desperately, and plugged the fan back in so I could try it again. I unplugged and replugged the fan a few more times until a tiny shred of reason managed to penetrate my sleep fogged brain. "Wait," I thought, and held still, plug in my hand. "FANS DON'T HONK."
My father found me a few minutes later, with the window fan on the floor and my face and hands pressed tightly against the screen. I had finally deduced that the honking was coming from outside, but I couldn't shake the feeling of responsibility for the noise and I was trying my best to stop it using only the sheer force of my will. Unfortunately, I had made so much noise storming around my room trying to track down the source of the noise that I woke everyone up. My father gently assured me that the neighbors' malfunctioning car horn was not under my purview, and, thusly relieved, I went back to bed.
I did get up with the first alarm, though.
***
And so I have reached November 30, the last day of NaBloPoMo. I did it! Technically! OK, I totally cheated. Remember this entry? And this one? So I'm not going to put an icon on here that says I did it, because I don't feel like I did it. Well, that and because I don't really know how to make changes to my template. Nevertheless, I wrote a lot more often than usual this month, and that's got to count for something.
But, being incredibly lazy, I will probably slide back into my habit of writing when only I feel like it in December. Plus, I'm going to work on a super secret exciting blog development that I hope to reveal by January, and that will eat up some of my computer time. The rest will be taken up by my mindlessly clicking "Refresh" in my Gmail window.
Why don't people email me as often as I click "refresh"? You should all email me more.
My brother, who slept in the room at the bottom of the attic stairs, felt differently.
"Mo," he said to me one Friday night. "If your alarm goes off more than once tomorrow morning, I am going to have to kill you." He was very polite about it, but he really felt he had no alternative. So that night I set the alarm for 5:20 with great trepidation, but also with the full intention of getting up as soon as it went off to spare my brother the morning Chinese alarm torture.
HONK! HONK! HONK!
I awoke with a start, leapt to my alarm and started hammering the snooze button. I wasn't going to use the snooze button, at least, not in the way God intended it to be used. I just wanted to silence the alarm until I had enough coordination to turn it off permanently. But the noise didn't stop! I pushed the snooze button. I pushed it again. I tried tapping it really quickly, and then I tried holding it down really hard. Nothing.
I finally remembered that to turn the alarm off, I had to turn the dial to the left two notches. I turned the dial. No change. In desperation, I turned the dial all the way to the left, then all the way to the right. To the left! To the right! Left right left right left! It was still honking! Wait! Unplug the clock! UNPLUG IT!
I unplugged it.
HONK! HONK! HONK!
Frantically, I looked around the room. Ever so slowly, my powers of deductive reasoning were returning to me, and I was able to determine that the noise was not coming from my alarm clock. It was coming from the window. What was in the window? A fan. I ran to the fan. "I have to turn off the fan," I thought to myself. "That will make the noise stop." But the fan wasn't on. No problem! I just turned on the fan. That way, I could turn it off and make the noise stop.
Astoundingly, this did not work.
I considered the situation. Assuming there was some sort of short circuit causing the on/off switch to fail, I decided to unplug the fan. Hey, it didn't work for the alarm clock because the alarm clock wasn't honking. The fan was honking. So I unplugged the fan.
HONK! HONK! HONK!
"It didn't take!" I thought to myself desperately, and plugged the fan back in so I could try it again. I unplugged and replugged the fan a few more times until a tiny shred of reason managed to penetrate my sleep fogged brain. "Wait," I thought, and held still, plug in my hand. "FANS DON'T HONK."
My father found me a few minutes later, with the window fan on the floor and my face and hands pressed tightly against the screen. I had finally deduced that the honking was coming from outside, but I couldn't shake the feeling of responsibility for the noise and I was trying my best to stop it using only the sheer force of my will. Unfortunately, I had made so much noise storming around my room trying to track down the source of the noise that I woke everyone up. My father gently assured me that the neighbors' malfunctioning car horn was not under my purview, and, thusly relieved, I went back to bed.
I did get up with the first alarm, though.
***
And so I have reached November 30, the last day of NaBloPoMo. I did it! Technically! OK, I totally cheated. Remember this entry? And this one? So I'm not going to put an icon on here that says I did it, because I don't feel like I did it. Well, that and because I don't really know how to make changes to my template. Nevertheless, I wrote a lot more often than usual this month, and that's got to count for something.
But, being incredibly lazy, I will probably slide back into my habit of writing when only I feel like it in December. Plus, I'm going to work on a super secret exciting blog development that I hope to reveal by January, and that will eat up some of my computer time. The rest will be taken up by my mindlessly clicking "Refresh" in my Gmail window.
Why don't people email me as often as I click "refresh"? You should all email me more.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Hi, Honey, I've reentered the domestic habitat!
The following conversation is a near word-perfect transcription of a typical conversation between me and The Husband as we discuss our days.
THE HUSBAND: You know antifreeze?
MO: Uh... yeah?
TH: I froze it today.
MO: Well, everything freezes eventually.*
TH: We had to run a test at -40 Celsius --
MO: Which is also -40 Fahrenheit!
TH: I know! One time I tried to convert -40C to Fahrenheit in my calculator, and it came back as -40! I did it three times before I realized.
MO: Well, the lines aren't parallel! They have to intersect at some point, right?
TH: Yeah. So anyway, antifreeze freezes at -50F, and we had cooled it so quickly that we overshot -40F, and it froze.
MO: That's pretty cold.
TH: So we're going to run it with ethanol instead, since that freezes below -120C.
MO: Ethanol or ethylene glycol?
TH: Ethanol.
*The Husband helped me remember this conversation, and he maintains that not everything freezes. I said that even hydrogen freezes at absolute zero, and he said no it doesn't. I still think it does, but I suppose he might be right, now that I'm typing this, because I guess that freezing is not the same thing as a cessation of molecular vibration. And yes, I'm typing this footnote as an excuse to write the phrase "cessation of molecular vibration," because I like to show off sometimes.
THE HUSBAND: You know antifreeze?
MO: Uh... yeah?
TH: I froze it today.
MO: Well, everything freezes eventually.*
TH: We had to run a test at -40 Celsius --
MO: Which is also -40 Fahrenheit!
TH: I know! One time I tried to convert -40C to Fahrenheit in my calculator, and it came back as -40! I did it three times before I realized.
MO: Well, the lines aren't parallel! They have to intersect at some point, right?
TH: Yeah. So anyway, antifreeze freezes at -50F, and we had cooled it so quickly that we overshot -40F, and it froze.
MO: That's pretty cold.
TH: So we're going to run it with ethanol instead, since that freezes below -120C.
MO: Ethanol or ethylene glycol?
TH: Ethanol.
*The Husband helped me remember this conversation, and he maintains that not everything freezes. I said that even hydrogen freezes at absolute zero, and he said no it doesn't. I still think it does, but I suppose he might be right, now that I'm typing this, because I guess that freezing is not the same thing as a cessation of molecular vibration. And yes, I'm typing this footnote as an excuse to write the phrase "cessation of molecular vibration," because I like to show off sometimes.
Hi, Honey, I've reentered the domestic habitat
The following conversation is a near word-perfect transcription of a typical conversation between me and The Husband as we discuss our days.
THE HUSBAND: You know antifreeze?
MO: Uh... yeah?
TH: I froze it today.
MO: Well, everything freezes eventually.*
TH: We had to run a test at -40 Celsius --
MO: Which is also -40 Fahrenheit!
TH: I know! One time I tried to convert -40C to Fahrenheit in my calculator, and it came back as -40! I did it three times before I realized.
MO: Well, the lines aren't parallel! They have to intersect at some point, right?
TH: Yeah. So anyway, antifreeze freezes at -50F, and we had cooled it so quickly that we overshot -40F, and it froze.
MO: That's pretty cold.
TH: So we're going to run it with ethanol instead, since that freezes below -120C.
MO: Ethanol or ethylene glycol?
TH: Ethanol.
*The Husband helped me remember this conversation, and he maintains that not everything freezes. I said that even hydrogen freezes at absolute zero, and he said no it doesn't. I still think it does, but I suppose he might be right, now that I'm typing this, because I guess that freezing is not the same thing as a cessation of molecular vibration. And yes, I'm typing this footnote as an excuse to write the phrase "cessation of molecular vibration," because I like to show off sometimes.
THE HUSBAND: You know antifreeze?
MO: Uh... yeah?
TH: I froze it today.
MO: Well, everything freezes eventually.*
TH: We had to run a test at -40 Celsius --
MO: Which is also -40 Fahrenheit!
TH: I know! One time I tried to convert -40C to Fahrenheit in my calculator, and it came back as -40! I did it three times before I realized.
MO: Well, the lines aren't parallel! They have to intersect at some point, right?
TH: Yeah. So anyway, antifreeze freezes at -50F, and we had cooled it so quickly that we overshot -40F, and it froze.
MO: That's pretty cold.
TH: So we're going to run it with ethanol instead, since that freezes below -120C.
MO: Ethanol or ethylene glycol?
TH: Ethanol.
*The Husband helped me remember this conversation, and he maintains that not everything freezes. I said that even hydrogen freezes at absolute zero, and he said no it doesn't. I still think it does, but I suppose he might be right, now that I'm typing this, because I guess that freezing is not the same thing as a cessation of molecular vibration. And yes, I'm typing this footnote as an excuse to write the phrase "cessation of molecular vibration," because I like to show off sometimes.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Uh oh, it's magic!
Nanoposting is almost over, and I am desperately trying to hold my head above water over here. I had no idea posting every day would be so taxing. Well, that's not true. I did foresee difficulties which is why I wasn't going to sign up, and I knew that if I did sign up that I would moan and whine about it, because that's what I do. I'm a complainer. Still, it's been really hard! Did you know that Thanksgiving is in November? And our anniversary? And that I am nursing a cold I've had for over a week and am considering taking Mucinex even though the commercials for Mucinex are the most disgusting commercials ever and I wish not to support them? But still, here I am, slaving away at the keyboard. And it's all for you, Internet! All for you!
Last night, The Husband and I watched Night at the Museum. We thoroughly enjoyed it, despite getting a little over-invested in the plot. (Warning: Extremely minor spoilers ahead. Well, not technically minor in that I sort of give away the end, but if you couldn't have guessed how it ended you have never seen a movie before. Or read a book. Or interacted with humans.) We were both incredibly concerned that the T-Rex and the other museum displays would get stuck outside at sunrise. It seemed impossible to us that Ben Stiller would be able to round them all up. How could he do it? There were too many! Ah, but there was one thing we had forgotten. We had neglected to account for the possibility that magic could solve everything in this story about museum displays magically coming to life. Crisis averted!
I would like to think that it is because the movie was so well done that The Husband and I were so worried. Yes. That must be the reason. Because the only other explanation is that we are both idiots.
Last night, The Husband and I watched Night at the Museum. We thoroughly enjoyed it, despite getting a little over-invested in the plot. (Warning: Extremely minor spoilers ahead. Well, not technically minor in that I sort of give away the end, but if you couldn't have guessed how it ended you have never seen a movie before. Or read a book. Or interacted with humans.) We were both incredibly concerned that the T-Rex and the other museum displays would get stuck outside at sunrise. It seemed impossible to us that Ben Stiller would be able to round them all up. How could he do it? There were too many! Ah, but there was one thing we had forgotten. We had neglected to account for the possibility that magic could solve everything in this story about museum displays magically coming to life. Crisis averted!
I would like to think that it is because the movie was so well done that The Husband and I were so worried. Yes. That must be the reason. Because the only other explanation is that we are both idiots.
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