I did stay late at work, but that was okay because I was waiting for the IT guys to finish configuring my new laptop, a very lovely and well-equipped Dell Precision. Okay, so they shouldn't have taken this long to get it to me, given that I ordered it long long ago. But I know from last year that it drives me crazy not to have computer access at SUUSI, so, yay for them getting it to me in the nick of time.
Tomorrow we will do laundry and pack and make some pretense at cleaning the house and pick up a banner from church. I will bake some kind of delicious treat for the neighbors who will be watering our garden while we're gone. It will be 97 degrees outside, and God help us, Alex has an outdoor T-ball-themed birthday party to attend.
At 6:45 tomorrow evening, I'll pick my father up at the bus station.
Sunday morning, bright and early, we leave for SUUSI. Alex has been sleeping in her sleeping bag every night to get ready.
I'm on vacaaaaaaation!
Two grape tomatoes and a miniature red bell pepper. Yum.
We have a substantial crop of small green peppers waiting to ripen, and a smaller but still lovely collection of green tomatoes. And one exciting green pendulum hanging from the midget muskmelon vine. It's about the size of my fist right now; I understand that they grow to approximately softball size. I am excited.
It's not totally intolerable, and in fact I actually find the symptoms reassuring. I need all the evidence of pregnancy that I can get. But... it's the difference between having to be careful about what I eat and sometimes being unable to eat; between often feeling tired and often needing a nap to get through the day; between outgrowing my regular bras and outgrowing my maternity bras. (ZOMG I have outgrown my maternity bras and I'm only just entering the ninth week.)
I produced pregnancy hormones last time - enough to make a placenta, even though it had nothing to support. My pregnancy symptoms were real. But they were a shadow of what I'm experiencing now that I'm churning out enough hormones to support an inch-long fetus.
Alex: Can I do this?
Me: I'm going to say... no.
Alex: I think I can do it. (pause...) Mr. Obama says, "yes we can."
The Towson church has lovely grounds, including a well-maintained "nature trail" that's perhaps a quarter-mile long. Alex and I walked its length and back. There were numbered markers that presumably correlated with some kind of printed guide, but there was plenty to see even without a guide.
This evening, during her bath, I ran my soapy hands down her legs and felt a little bump behind one knee. I tried to wash it off. No luck. It was a small black circular mark.
"Michael!" I called. "Would you bring up Alex's magnifying glass, please?"
Michael took a look while I was drying Alex off. She was pretty wiggly, but he said he thought it was just a scab.
"That's a funny place to have a scab," I said. We laid her down on her stomach on the bed for a closer look. Bringing in a flashlight to aid the magnifier made it clear: she had a tick. And Maryland is a Lyme disease state.
Michael dredged up memories from a Tennessee childhood and recommended putting Vaseline on it so the tick would have to back out to breathe. I was unsure, so I dashed downstairs to ask Dr. Google, who (in the form of the American Academy of Family Physicians) informed me that Vaseline can actually cause the tick to salivate or, um, regurgitate into the victim. Not recommended. So in the end, Michael just pulled the tick straight out with tweezers, and it came away clean. I saved it in a plastic bag just in case. It was even still alive. Alex was fascinated to see it.
A few different sites assure me that ticks need to be attached for 24 hours or more to transmit Lyme disease. Michael checked the rest of her body thoroughly, and he's going to check me before bed.
Presumably, if we'd had the printed guide to the nature trail? One of those rustic numbered markers would've turned out to mean "deer ticks." Had we but known.
Me: I guess you lay lots and lots of eggs, huh?
Alex (very proudly): I also mate!
Me: ...
Alex: I mate! I mate with the... what kind of bee is it?
Me: The drones?
Alex: Yeah. I mate with many drones.
Some puffed-up "Conservapedia" hacks decided that they were competent to take apart Lenski's conclusions, and wrote to him demanding that he release his raw data for "examination by independent reviewers."
The resulting exchange of letters is pretty entertaining. Here's my favorite bit from the exchange:
It is my impression that you seem to think we have only paper and electronic records of having seen some unusual E. coli. If we made serious errors or misrepresentations, you would surely like to find them in those records. If we did not, then – as some of your acolytes have suggested – you might assert that our records are themselves untrustworthy because, well, because you said so, I guess. But perhaps because you did not bother even to read our paper, or perhaps because you aren’t very bright, you seem not to understand that we have the actual, living bacteria that exhibit the properties reported in our paper, including both the ancestral strain used to start this long-term experiment and its evolved citrate-using descendants. In other words, it’s not that we claim to have glimpsed “a unicorn in the garden” – we have a whole population of them living in my lab! [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unicorn_in_the_Garden] And lest you accuse me further of fraud, I do not literally mean that we have unicorns in the lab. Rather, I am making a literary allusion. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allusion]
The Conservapedia talk pages are hilarious. My favorite unintentional bit of comedy: the plaintive heading on the talk archive page "Anyone a biologist?" (Answer: sadly, no.)
(Via Pandagon)
Edited to add: Wait, wait, here's another favorite bit from the talk pages: "I asked Zachary Blount to clarify his statements about whether evolution of Cit+ (citrate-eating) E. coli bacteria was a goal of the experiment. He answered by asking me to go on a wild goose chase by reading the whole paper, which has 8 pages of fine print -- this is called "bibliography bluffing." And when people balk at going on these wild goose chases, they are accused of not wanting to learn."
Man. I can't believe that charlatan Blount expected that anyone wishing to argue about the merits of a scientific paper would read all eight pages of the paper itself. Why would you set up such ludicrously rigorous standards? Only if you have something to hide...
I'm eight weeks along. On Friday I had an ultrasound - the first time I've ever had one this early - and saw a little grey ovoid blob with a tiny rapid flicker on one side. That was the heartbeat. The fetus is measuring exactly on pace for calendar dates (1.2cm long), and the heartbeat is 136bpm, which is excellent for this stage of development.
So things are hopeful, but. This is my third pregnancy, and I have one kid. So we're not exactly 100% yay-hooray-let's-decorate-the-nursery yet.
This is, on the one hand, further along than I ever got the last time. To the best of our providers' understanding, in the last pregnancy fetal parts never developed (just a placenta) and there was certainly never a heartbeat. On the other hand, though, last time I made it five weeks further than this before suddenly there was blood and disaster.
I'm having some hormone issues in this pregnancy. My levels of HCG, the "pregnancy hormone," have been beautifully high and enthusiastically doubling from the very start. (Midwifery model or no, we have been monitoring the hell out of things this time around.) My progesterone levels are a different story. They started out on the low-ish side, and then dipped lower instead of increasing. So I've been taking progesterone supplements for the past 3.5 weeks. They seem to be working. So far.
I feel very, very pregnant. The first trimester symptoms are all present and accounted for. Of course, they were last time as well.
We are hopeful that sometime in the second week of February there will be a baby. Hopeful, but not, you know, sure. I'm adopting as my mantra a phrase from the defunct-and-disappeared blog Chez Miscarriage: Nothing Bad Has Happened Yet.
Nothing Bad Has Happened Yet. Which is a good place to be.
He took Alex out of the house this morning so that I could sleep in. (Until 9:30!! Wow!!) And they went to the farmer's market and brought home fresh blueberries, so I could make blueberry pancakes for breakfast.
Yay, Michael.
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
mactavish linked to this lovely XKCD comic, and via her comments section I learned that it's a takeoff on a truly beautiful ad for the Discovery Channel:I can never have too many reminders that the world I live in, while infinitely flawed, is a magnificent place deserving my wonder and awe.
Especially on mega-high-stress days like today.
She made it out of the dining room, through the foyer, and about two steps into the living room before she burst into tears.
And came back. And leaned against my side, sobbing, "DON'T LET ME GO!"
"Don't let you go?" I put my arm around her and rubbed her back. "Do you want me to tell you that you have to stay at the table?"
She sniffed. "Yeah."
"Okay. Alex, I want you to stay at the table with Mama and Papa, even though you're done eating. Climb back into your seat."
She scrambled happily back into the booster seat. And I figured that it was probably time for the "No matter how angry I get..." conversation. (She responded happily, "And I love you even when I'm angry!", so apparently that was a useful framework for her, too.) Because all I could think of was that that strange exchange must have been about needing us to prove that we're going to hold onto her no matter what she does.
She definitely chafed at being restricted to the house for the rest of the day. Not at first, but when Michael came home and I went out to water and fertilize the garden without her. And then after dinner, when I decided that just because she didn't get to go to the library shouldn't mean that I missed my trip to the library. She wanted to go, I explained in a gentle but firm and matter-of-fact voice why she couldn't, and she clearly remembered, and made the connection, and was sobered by it.
She told Michael that because she had run away from me, "I can't go outside for the rest of my life." (He corrected her.) And also: "I'm not going to run away from Mama anymore. I'm only going to run with her."
So ultimately I think it all ended well. My discipline was more effective than I feared it would be, and we had a chance to re-connect emotionally and talk about our love for each other. And I brought her home some special treats from the library.
We went to the playground for a picnic and running around with friends. While I was packing up afterward to go home, Alex started running down the long long path to where we parked.
"Alex, wait for me," I called. She laughed and kept running. She kept laughing and running when I stopped what I was doing, stood up, and bellowed "No, stop now" at the top of my lungs, in my this-is-a-major-issue voice. She kept running when I came after her, still shouting for her to stop. She finally stopped about 100 yards away from where we'd started.
Not. Okay.
All I could think of as I came after her was spanking her. Instead I told her how angry I was, grabbed her firmly by the arm, and marched her back to where our things were. I ordered her to sit on the ground and not move while I packed up the rest of our picnic things and I tried to calm down a little. Then I got down at her level and told her, firmly and angrily, that the biggest safety rule our family has is that she STOP and COME BACK when she is told. She knows this rule. Breaking the rule is dangerous. I told her that I was very, very angry.
I held her firmly by the hand all the way down the long path to the car. She's not used to that. She tried saying that she didn't want me to hold her hand, and I told her that she had to have her hand held because I couldn't trust her to listen to my directions. We usually go at a meandering, flower-picking pace. Not this time.
I told her that we aren't going to go anywhere else today, and she's not going to play outside at all. She asked me if I was going to water the plants without her, and I told her that I was.
I am still so, so angry. And a part of me is still thinking that she'd take the whole thing a lot more seriously if I had hit her.
Other non-spanking parents, I could use a pep talk right now.
Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
fairoriana:Post 3 things you've done in your lifetime that you don't think anybody else on your friends list has done.
See if anybody else responds with "I've done that."
Ask your friends do this in their journals to see what unique things they've done.
1. I dyed monkeys different colors. (I tested their vision, too, but that seems less outre.)
2. I interviewed Transylvanian villagers about their parenting practices.
3. I chauffeured Mary Daly around in my car.
Edited to add: I thought this one seemed familiar! The last time it came around there were ten things. I am interested to see that the Transylvanian one came out in the exact same words, years apart.
