A Few Quick Notes

(Mostly TV-related, since watching television doesn't hurt.)

1) Sayid on Lost = so hot.

2) Tonight's Colbert Report = hilarious. If you didn't see it, catch one of the seventeen reruns tomorrow.

3) It's supposed to snow in Chicago tomorrow. I used to look forward to every snowfall because of the possibility that it might net me a snow day. I don't get snow days anymore (or sick days, for that matter), so I'm considering tomorrow's possible inclement weather with some trepidation.

4) If anyone has advice concerning collecting a urine sample from a dog with the least possible spillage and mess, please -- for the love of all that's good and pure -- share.

It Shouldn't Hurt to Blog

Tendonitis? Carpal tunnel syndrome? I don't know what it is, but whatever it is, it has my left hand and arm in a grip of fiery pain. And since I need to be using the little bit of typing I can do for activities that make me money (hello, big pile of freelance work!), I might not be blogging or commenting much until I have this sorted out. Forgive me! If you have any advice about setting up an ergonomic workstation, please send it my way.

Seriously, what's with those funny hats?

Tomorrow morning, we'll take Sophia and Evelyn for their twice-a-year check-up at the Shriners Hospital's osteogenesis imperfecta clinic. I don't mind telling you that this impending appointment causes me no small amount of anxiety.

What will the doctors find wrong this time? What is it that's been lurking undetected lo these many months? Fractures we never suspected? Dangerously bowed limbs? Limb length discrepancies? Other ailments my hypochondriac mind hasn't even dreamed up yet? Here we've been thinking they're fine, no OI-related problems -- things are tripping along nicely, thank you very much (as long as no one actually trips).

But since our last visit in April, both girls started crawling, then pulling up to stand, then cruising. Sophia had a bit of a fall. Both girls have bonked their heads and behinds countless times in the process of learning to stand. What damage has been done?

At our first Shriners Hospital visit, we didn't have this fear. We waltzed in with our miracle babies who survived a 10-week NICU stay and who, by golly, wouldn't be held down by this blasted OI. They're made of steel, I tell you! So we were not at all prepared to learn that, somehow, without us even suspecting it, both girls had broken several ribs. How does that happen? How does a baby who can't even roll over yet, whose parents have been trained to be so cautious they never pick her up by the midsection, how does this baby break -- not one -- but several ribs? And -- not one -- but two babies did it! How?

So, let me tell you, we lived with fear after that appointment. Every time we picked them up, we worried that we were breaking a bone. Every time they cried for no reason we could discern, we were sure they'd broken something. It was constantly in our thoughts. What's broken this time?

Turns out, nothing (as far as we know). Nothing has broken (as far as we know) since those ribs nearly a year ago. The girls sailed through their second Shriners Hospital visit six months ago with barely a comment from the doctors. They have survived all of the normal learning-to-be-a-toddler stages with no damage (as far as we know).

And yet, the fear is here to stay.

So, we'll find out tomorrow if the (as far as we know) becomes an (I can tell you for sure). We'll see if we can start the next six-month cycle with a cautious optimism instead of a petrified terror and guilt about a) having allowed them to break bones and b) not even knowing it, that's what bad parents we are.

Wish us luck.

Laura Roslin for President

While I'm on this TV kick, why not out myself for the total geek I am? Who else watched the series premier of Battlestar Galactica last night? (I'm guessing not one of you, with the possible exception of my mom.)

It was so great! More of the BSG we've come to know and love. So tense! Depressing! Timely! A little violent, let's be honest. I'm going to just come out and say it, and you can all mock me if you so choose: Battlestar Galactica is the best drama on television.

I'm Totally Lost

So who saw Lost last night? Take the title of this post seriously -- I have no idea what's going on on that island. I'm so confused! Can someone explain it to me? I kept thinking I was missing really important, revealing clues that would explain crucial aspects of the story to me, but they were all just flying right over my head as I stared blankly at the screen saying, "What? What's going on? I don't understand!"

And still, I love that show.

I Have a Green Thumb for Couch Potatoes

My new favorite channel: Sprout.

What can I say? The girls are sick. (And today we find out they have asthma to boot. Fantastic.) Everyone is grumpy and tired and needs a distraction. Who better than Tinky-Winky, Dipsy, La-La, and Po?

I know there are plenty of critics, but I say "Hooray!" for 24-hour toddler-oriented programming.

Welcome, Libby!

For those of you who have been following Kerri's extended pregnancy, good news! Elizabeth ("Libby") was finally born yesterday afternoon, only 9 days overdue and after nearly a day of labor. Congratulations, Kerri and Martin!

Why I'm Considering Homeschooling

What is wrong with this country?

Truck driver kills three girls in Amish school shooting

Principal killed at Wisconsin school; 9th-grader charged

Sheriff: School shooter sent letter to say sorry

Gunman spotted, 2 Vegas schools locked down

Federal funds to prevent school violence dropping

From that last article:

"From 1992 to 2002, 261 people ages 5 to 19 were killed at school, according to federal statistics. The worst years -- 1992-93 and 1997-98 -- saw 34 deaths, and the lowest total was 12, in 2000-01."

Kelly, the Amazing Relationship Counselor

I'm a big fan of The Amazing Race. It's one of the few reality shows I really get interested in. (That and the cooking shows -- when does Top Chef season 2 start??)

I'm fascinated by the Race because it showcases the world and because it brings home the fact that so many of my countrymen and -women fall into the Ugly American stereotype. Few are the contestants who really seem to appreciate the sights they're seeing and the cultures they get to experience. Too many are those who seem to view the world with a sense of superiority and condescension.

That, however, is not the aspect of the Race we'll be discussing today. Rather, our topic of conversation is this: Why is it that at least one team on every season is a couple who's using the Race to try to work out whether they really belong together? This season, it's Rob and Kimberly. Here's what the official Amazing Race site has to say about them:

"Rob & Kimberly met while bartending in Los Angeles, California. The young couple has been dating for two years and recently moved in together. Their primary reason for running the Race is to see if their relationship can withstand the intensity and pressure of traveling around the world at such a frantic pace."

The show is constantly showing clips of Rob and Kimberly saying things like, "We're at that point in our relationship when we need to decide whether to get married or go our separate ways."

What?? I'm sorry, but I don't think any healthy relationship ever reaches that point. You're happy together, or you're not. If you both want to get married, great! If not, that's okay too. If one does and the other doesn't, well, you have some issues to work out. But don't just say to yourselves that you've been together for X years, and that's the time when you're supposed to get married, so you'd better fish or cut bait.

These couples are letting society's expectations (or, rather, their perceptions of society's expectations) dictate for them the path of their relationship. It's not about whether they're happy with each other and their relationship -- it's about whether they're supposed to be happy. And whether they're supposed to be happier if they get married.

What an incredibly bad reason to get married.

Now, I don't pretend to be a relationship expert. (Well, sometimes I do.) I do have a marriage that I think everyone should envy, but every relationship is different and needs to be dealt with on its own terms. Perhaps it's conceivable that there are couples out there for whom this kind of thinking works -- maybe it really does make them happy to do what they think society wants them to do. (It's also possible, just maybe, that we don't see the whole story with these couples, but rather just the snippets of interviews CBS thinks will make for good TV. So it isn't really fair to judge them, is it? But I do anyway.)

Get married if you want to. Don't if you don't want to. If you're not sure, work it out. Talk about it. But don't take your relationship on national television and air your differences and fears and grievances there. If you feel like your relationship needs to pass some sort of test to prove it works, maybe you've already failed the test.

The Story of Evelyn and Sophia

After reading this post over at Nanette's Underachieving Mommy, I am inspired to write about my pregnancy.

(Many of you know the story, so feel free to skip this retelling. I'll see you back here next time, when we'll discuss my incredulity at the fact that Rachel Ray is America's second-most-trusted celebrity.)

Getting pregnant was the easy part. It took only five months of trying, and that last month we weren't really trying very hard. It was December, we were stressed out and busy with holiday parties, gigs, trying to get our annual holiday CD out the door (someday, friends, we'll start that tradition back up again, but I don't think this is the year).

So we were kind of taking the month off from trying to get pregnant, which is apparently what it took to get the job done. The timing was nice -- we found out a few days before Christmas, so on Christmas Day we shared the news with our parents and brothers -- and swore them to secrecy. Not another soul was to know until we were out of the first trimester and in the (mythical) pregnancy safe zone.

Two weeks later, spotting and cramping sent me to the OB in a panic. It was a week before my first scheduled visit, but I was convinced a miscarriage was underway. Poor Airan was on a train from downtown, desperately trying to get to the hospital in time to be there for the ultrasound, but he didn't even come close. So I was all alone with the ultrasound tech when I got the big news -- two heartbeats, two little sacs, two babies.

(Ironic, because I'd just spent a few months teasing my pregnant friend Mary Beth about how she was eating for three, right up until her 20-week ultrasound, when she found out she was having twins. It was my karmic backlash -- I wished twins on MB, and I got them myself in return.)

So another round of phone calls to the parents and brothers with even more big news. Much rejoicing! And a little bit of fear -- because of my osteogenesis imperfecta and thus my low muscle tone, I was scared that my body wouldn't be able to keep it together through a twins pregnancy. My OB was optimistic, but I had doubts.

And just a few years earlier, my cousin Jim and his wife had premature twin boys who stayed in a NICU for six weeks after their birth -- I remember being terrified by pictures of those tiny little preemies, thinking they looked so tired, so world-weary, so fragile. How can such tiny babies survive in the world? But they did survive and thrive, and so I tried not to be too afraid.

At this point, it wasn't even crossing my mind that the twins might have inherited OI from me. I knew it was a possibility, but I wasn't worried. My OI wasn't diagnosed until I was seven, so I assumed that, if the twins did have OI, we wouldn't know or have to deal with it for years.

And so the first trimester went happily along, with lots of morning sickness, a queasy but otherwise fun trip to Paris, the barest beginnings of sort of starting to get ready for twins. We had OB visits every other week, with ultrasound heartbeat checks every time, so we were amassing quite a collection of in utero baby pictures.

At week 17, we got the ultrasound tech to place her bets on the babies' genders. She wouldn't give us 100% certainty, but she was 90-95% sure we had a couple of girls in there. Much rejoicing! Half the family confessed to secretly hoping for girls. (Honestly, I'd been sort of hoping for boys because I remember what a horrible bitch I was as a 13-year-old, but as soon as I got the girls verdict, I was converted. Girls rule!)

A few more weeks of happiness/nausea, and then the 20-week level II ultrasound. We should have been suspicious when the ultrasound tech, after chatting away through her evaluation of baby A (Evelyn), suddenly clammed up and was silent as she took measurements of baby B (Sophia). But we didn't notice. And when the doctor came in, all serious, asking me questions about my OI, still it didn't occur to us that anything was amiss. And then she showed us Sophia's femur, her thigh bone, and pointed out the fact that it appeared to be broken. And bowed. And not quite as long as it should be. And that was our evidence, years before I expected it, that at least one of the twins had OI.

It seems, as I write this, like this discovery shouldn't have been that big a deal. So what if Sophie has OI? I've lived my life with this disease. Yeah, it's really sucked at times, but it's never been life threatening, and it's never prevented me from doing anything I really wanted to do. (I never wanted to go skiing anyway. Roller skating, however...) And being an adorable seven-year-old trapped in the hospital for weeks on end has its advantages -- never in my life have I had such good luck getting people to bring me stuffed animals and root beer floats and anything else my heart desires.

Here's why I was so upset to learn about Sophie's (and, in a few more ultrasounds, Evie's) OI:

1) I know what it's like. I know having OI sucks. And I think, when I was growing up, it must have been much harder for my parents than it was for me. So I was scared for them and scared for us.

2) I did this to them. I knew full well that any child I have has a 50% chance of inheriting OI from me. I casually chose to believe that I wouldn't pass it on, that everything would be just fine, that we'd beat the odds. I am to blame for this, and had I not been so blase, so careless, I could have prevented this. (Here's where I choose not to think about the fact that, had we actually used genetic testing and in-vitro fertilization to avoid passing on OI, the egg(s) that became Sophie and Evie would have been discarded, and those precious girls would never have existed.)

We had only a few more weeks to deal with this knowledge before the next blow came. At my 25-week routine appointment, they couldn't get a good look at my cervix on the ultrasound. The OB did an internal exam and found that my cervix was completely effaced and I was starting to dilate. With 15 weeks to go.

Bed rest. They let me spend the first few days at home, but then (skip ahead, o ye of weak stomach) I lost my mucus plug. Airan rushed me to the hospital, where they discovered that I was having contractions. They drugged me and kept me in the hospital, dangling the promise that maybe in a few more days they'd let me go home to finish out my bed rest. Cue the amniotic fluid leak. Not a gushing flow, just a slow, steady leak. (I now understand why water torture is so effective -- especially if it were to involve your girl parts.)

No hope of going back home now. A fluid leak meant a risk of infection, so they had to monitor me and the babies several times a day to make sure we were all still healthy. At this point, the best they were hoping for was to get me to 34 weeks -- and from 26 weeks, that seems like a very, very long time to be stuck in the hospital on bed rest. Alas, I didn't get to find out just how awful that would be.

At 28 weeks, my water broke for real. Hard labor hit, and I spent the night writhing and moaning in a delivery room, hoping they could get the labor to stop, knowing we were looking at an emergency C-section first thing in the morning.

How can it be that the most terrifying day of your life is also the best? My tiny, tiny babies came into the world 12 weeks before they should have. They couldn't breathe without help, they couldn't eat, they had to be kept in incubators to maintain their body heat. That instinct that kicks in when you have a baby, the overwhelming need to protect and care for and provide -- useless. There wasn't anything I could do for them. But that's the day I got to meet them, finally got to see those little people who had been screwing up my life for the past six months (and who will continue to do so for the next 18 years), and welcoming them into the world was the best thing that's ever happened to me.

The girls stayed in the NICU for 10 weeks. The 10 longest, hardest weeks ever. In the beginning, while it wasn't exactly easy to leave them there, we knew and accepted that it was necessary. They couldn't breathe, they couldn't eat. They couldn't come home. But as they got bigger and stronger, as they were weaned off the breathing apparatus, as they learned to drink from a bottle, as they were moved from their little heater isolettes to open-air cribs, it got harder and harder to leave them there every night, to go home without them to an empty condo, a deserted nursery with two gaping cribs.

I started to lose it. Once-respected doctors became quacks, crackpots. Who let these idiots out of medical school? They didn't know how to care for my children. Nurses who had been friends and confidants became The Enemy. They didn't know how to care for my babies. I needed to get those girls home, where I could make sure they were getting the care they needed. I could feed them and change them and handle them carefully -- I didn't want those ham-handed nurses laying a finger on the girls.

Discharge came not a day too soon.

And, truly, happily, ever since those girls came home, life has been grand. Sure, we've had many sleepless nights. We have the occasional scare. Two babies/toddlers are a handful, that's for sure, and when you throw in a few special needs, things are even more complicated. But I wouldn't change a thing. The rocky path we took got us exactly where I want to be. Y'all know I'm not religious, so I won't say there was some sort of plan or destiny or any such nonsense. But we make the best of what life hands us, and I love my lot in life.

So that's the story. Still with me? Don't worry, I won't blame you if you skipped a paragraph or two. It's a long saga, and we all have our stories of hardship. I don't think mine is especially outstanding or unusual. It's just a big part of what got me where I am today, so it is (understandably) interesting to me. I hope you're not too bored, and I promise to move on to lighter topics next time.