I believe that I left off as we were leaving for the hospital.

I had already put the various items that I could quickly gather into an overnight bag including what looked like Sarah’s clothes and the dragonfly patterned bag holding Madeline’s smallest infant outfits for going home. I went out alone into the rain to move the car closer to the doorway and drop off the overnight bags Although it was about 3:30 AM and I was happy to see that I hadn’t gotten a parking ticket since they normally drop the $30 tickets on your car at about three. As I walked towards the car a stroke of lightning came down and I thought about how bizarre and tragic it would be if I were to be struck by lightning as I went to prepare the car for Madeline’s birth at the hospital.

We managed to dress Sarah in a pair of my pajama bottoms and my blue Ralph Lauren cotton robe. She had a blanket draped over her back because she was shifting between hot and cold. I thought about taking her picture because she looked very regal in this outfit but decided to keep the camera in my pocket to prioritize the work of getting to the hospital and delivering Madeline. The walk down to the car with Sarah and Joyce was slow because Sarah needed to stop each time she had a contraction. We had to go through four contractions stopping at each level on the stairwell to break for the contraction. I led Sarah holding her hands as I walked backwards down the stairs to make sure that she didn’t fall.

In order to drive over to the hospital from St. Paul Street it is only about a half mile and I took Aspinwall to Brookline Avenue. The route was unfortunately very slow because I kept hitting red lights. Sarah was facing towards the back of the car with her butt facing to the dashboard. I spent a few moments struggling to get my seatbelt on. The worst light was the left turn onto Brookline Avenue because while there was no traffic the light just hung on red for over two minutes. Joyce was in her car behind me and she was probably wondering whether I would run the light but I waited it out only to get to the next two red lights.

When we arrived at Beth Israel I parked the car in front and Joyce acted as doula and valet for me. I took Sarah through to the 10th floor where the deliveries occur. When we got to the 10th floor in the elevator Sarah had a double peak contraction so she couldn’t leave the elevator when it was time to go. I was stretched thin holder her hand with one side of me and holding the “OPEN” button on the elevator with the other hand. When Sarah finally made it out of the elevator she walked the five feet to the admitting desk. While the woman was making-up the official bracelets Sarah was by the desk leaning forwards. From the hospital’s perspective we were a few hours late since we had called near midnight and were arriving at 4:30 AM. The nurse came out of the doors for the ward to walk Sarah to a room but it took two contractions before Sarah was ready to leave her position of leaning over the desk. In that time Joyce had managed to get through security to come upstairs.

When we got to the delivery room the nurse immediately went into hospital procedure mode and this was less than enjoyable for Sarah who had been in labor for 8 hours already. The nurse wanted Sarah to go to the bathroom and produce a urine sample and then get right onto the table for an internal exam and to get connected to the external fetal monitors. Sarah managed through some internal strength and some grumbling about the nurse to generate the sample and move onto the table. The nurse also gave us some trouble about how because Sarah is Strep B positive and they needed to provide 4 hours of antibiotics intravenously that they weren’t going to have time before the baby was born to pump her with the antibiotics so Madeline would need to get more antibiotics later.

When the nurse examined Sarah she said that the water hadn’t broken yet but Sarah’s cervix was dilated to 9.5 cm. We were then given the option once the obstetrician on call came in to have the artificial rupture of the water done. Sarah wanted to think about it and the nurse was being a little too pushy for my taste. In general our natural childbirth classes had a ringing on our ears about every intervention leads to another so we were worried it might cause things to get harder rather than easier. But Sarah was starting to get tired and because we were taking a long time to decide the nurse gave us some high pressure trick by saying that she was going to walk outside and when we were ready to move things along that we could call her back in to have the procedure done. So with some agreement from Joyce we buzzed the nurse back in and had the doctor break the water.

The idea was that after the water broke that the cervix would quickly dilate to 10 cm and Sarah could begin pushing. So after the water broke the OB did an internal exam and saw that the cervix had receded a bit from 9.5 cm to a little less. Apparently the amniotic fluid can open the cervix wider and when the water breaks the cervix can contract. The internal exams do come at a price and the price is that Sarah’s contractions increased and became longer and more powerful. That was one of the reasons she didn’t have an internal exam until nearly 4 in the morning. Joyce had gotten out her special sterile glove more than three times and every time Sarah didn’t appear to be in a position to get the internal exam.

Sarah was very close to delivering Madeline but she couldn’t seem to get past the last bit of dilation. Joyce had Sarah change positions a few times and it wasn’t trivial with the wires all hooked-up to Sarah. The external fetal monitor is the main focus of the folks in the hospital because it is the big liability monitor. If the baby heart rate starts to drop below 70 regularly they come rushing in with all knives drawn for an instant C section. To monitor the baby the external fetal monitor needs to be in the right spot so when Sarah was on her hands and knees the fetal monitor wouldn’t properly pick-up the rate. Joyce had tested the heart rate five times during the evening and each time it was a strong 140, right where it should be. So Joyce was trying to hold the monitor in the right place but the nurse kept coming into the room. The OB tested again to find the cervix wasn’t going anywhere and the nurse became quite interested in placing an internal fetal monitor onto Sarah. This could also have been a result of the nurse trying to reposition the monitor on Sarah after they had gotten the buzz that the baby heart may have stopped. Sarah’s response to this was to tell her to stop F’ing with the monitor. At some point Joyce gave Sarah some natural remedy that looked like pop rocks and contained something to help her to get through the labor. I can’t even recall if it was before the baby was born or after.

So the OB made the decision during the exam to spread out the last bit of Sarah’s cervix using her hands. Madeline pushed through that bit and Sarah was ready to push. The nurse had been annoying also at this point because she made a smarmy remark to Sarah something to the tune of “wouldn’t you rather do something useful like pushing than just going through those contractions and getting nothing done?”. It made it seem like the contractions weren’t useful in the first place so I was pretty fed-up with the nurse but we were moving forwards once the OB got Sarah’s cervix out of the way and Sarah was on to pushing.

The pushing was fast and the nurse redeemed herself a bit because the OB left for the pushing and let the nurse bark out commands for how to push the baby out. The main order from her was for Sarah to hold her breath as she pushed and force the baby up. I could see the head even when the OB was futzing around and it looked like a slimy patch of alien turf. The top of her head reminded me a bit of the spinach artichoke dip from California Pizza Kitchen. It wasn’t clear where the part of the head that looks like a human would arrive but with each push the bulge of hair and skull would press forward a few centimeters and then recede back inside of Sarah. As Sarah became within a few pushes the nurse looked at Sarah and decided that she was starting to get tired. It wasn’t clear why she did it but the nurse gave Sarah some Pitosin to help get through that last surge of pushing to get the baby out. Sarah consented to it although with any intervention I wasn’t sure if it was needed or helpful. Right after the Pitosin came in the nurse told Sarah to just pant for a bit and then paged the OB to come into the room for the catching.

When the OB arrived again they wheeled over a cart that had been sitting in the corner of the room. I had imagined that the cart was filled with the various knives for a C-section. The cart was actually filled with the “Vaginal delivery kit”. The OB now was wearing a mask with a face screen for either sterile purposes or to avoid blood splatters. She also had an orange splatter proof plastic bag jacket. The OB used what looked like an iodine paintbrush to cover the area where Madeline was going to come out. They then gave Sarah the command to make the final few pushes.

So with no understanding on my end of where the head was coming out and holding Sarah’s right leg up to help her to get the baby out I had a great angle to see what I must admit is one of the most incredible things I have ever seen or may ever see. From inside of Sarah and pointing sideways with a sudden release from having crowned was a plastic looking but very real human face turning and pointed right at me. Her face was surreal to look at because it was moving but was so much like a dolls face. For a moment the face just rested outside alone and not appearing to be connected to a full human body. She was just a head turning and struggling to begin life. Then from within Sarah a single arm reached out so that an arm and face were clearly in view. Finally the rest of Madeline’s body quickly slid into the arms of the OB and she held up my beautiful daughter.

Madeline’s eyes quickly opened and she was suctioned. Lots of events happened fast that are difficult to remember but the OB handed me that crooked scissors to cut the clamped cord. Madeline’s head was long and cone shaped from the birth and her face looked elongated as well to the look of an elf. She also reminded me of the aliens from the alternative ending to Scary Movie 3 with their wide eyes and stout physiques. They placed her onto Sarah to hold her briefly and Sarah was wide awake and ecstatic that the labor was over and that she could see and feel her baby. I had pulled my camera out of my pocket at this point and asked permission to take photographs. Joyce had placed a warm washcloth on Sarah’s head that she had been heating below in what looked like a pressure cooker connected to the same socket that the doctors connected to their mycomeum suctioning system.

Sarah had a tear of joy in her eye as she looked at Madeline. I could see she was in love with her daughter and I too got teary eyed to see the two women that I love together for the first time.

When they removed her from Sarah it was to take Madeline to the warmer. Madeline wasn’t having the easiest time breathing. She was taking deep breaths and looked like she was hyperventilating. The yellow jacket NICU folks moved me over to see her at the warmer and surrendered the oxygen flow to hold over her mouth so that she could get some heavy breaths of high oxygen content. Madeline was like a climber on top of Everest at this point getting oxygen to make it to the very peak and return to earth. As her lungs filled with the oxygen her breathing became more regular. Sarah and I were very tired but wired with adrenaline and pride. We wanted to spend the day with our newborn child. The NICU wanted to put an IV into Madeline to deliver antibiotics for 2 days and the OB found Sarah had a fever so Sarah got more antibiotics. While I had been watching the fan fare with Madeline Sarah had delivered the placenta. I took a look at it and noticed it looked like someone had grown a giant tomato with too much miracle grow and then let it get old and soft and turned it into the mushy canned tomatoes you use to make spaghetti sauce.

Sarah and I went upstairs to the post-partum room. Our room was gigantic compared to what we were expecting. Many people claimed we had the best room in the post-partum ward so we didn’t want to complain. They had already brought Sarah a breakfast of a crappy omelet and cubic home fries. It wasn’t very inspiring and Sarah wasn’t hungry so I at most of it. We slept for thirty minutes and then spent the bulk of the rest of the day in a daze with family members and Madeline for her first day in the world.

Posted by Melody at 03:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sarah and I are proud to announce that Madeline Eve was born on Sunday October 23rd at 7:18 AM. She was born weighing 6 lbs and 12 oz. and a full head of hair. Some pictures of her are available in the danhousman.com photo album from the last couple of days.

Things were a whirlwind of activity since 6:00 on October 22nd when Sarah began to deliver my birthday present. We had gone hiking in Dover with Lena and had planned a celebratory dinner with my family at The Met Bar at 8:15 PM. After the hike we stopped at the Shops at Putterham for some pastries, rugala, sugar cookies, and hamentashen and drinks at Starbucks. When Sarah went to the bathroom it took her longer than normal and she thought she felt different. She also felt some pain in her abdomen as we walked up to the peak in the woods. When we got back to Brookline we went to bed and then when Sarah awoke and took a bath she was feeling a pain in her side. She called Joyce, our doula, and Joyce gave her the advice to time her contractions.

Shelly had warned on Friday that sometimes you have false labor and contractions before labor so I figured the contractions would go away. We started timing in the kitchen on an old clock with a pen and an car insurance bill envelope. I thought I might be able to time on my cell phone but discovered that it doesn't have any way to present the seconds on it. So I hunted around until I found the watch that Ami had left with us when we cooked chicken together a week or two back. The contractions were very rhythmic, every 3 minutes ranging from 30 seconds to 50 seconds. Sarah has comfortable with the contractions at this point so we called back Joyce and she let us know she could arrive by 9:30 PM.

Sarah then began to rapidly proceed into a much faster paced labor. Her contractions got much stronger between seven and 9:30 while we were waiting to the point where they were lasting over a minute and a half and often were back to back with no break in between. Sarah was in enough discomfort to be vocalizing some Huh.Huh. sounds. Sarah's back hurt whenever the contractions started so she gave me the job of pushing against the base of her back.

When Joyce arrived she calmed Sarah and me down a bit. She had brought her baby monitor so we could measure her heart rate. The numbers were right in the healthy range. From 9:30 until midnight Joyce and I took turns helping to ease the pressure on Sarah's back by pushing on the back and her hips whenever a contraction came. We were able to move Sarah from the couch, to the bed, over the toilet, and into the bath to try various positions to move the labor forwards. At some points Sarah was losing blood and throwing-up into a bowl but I was proud to see how well Sarah was tolerating the process. She wasn't at all interested in going to the hospital when Joyce concluded that it was about time to drive to the hospital at 12:30. I called the hospital to let them know we would be over in about 10-15 minutes. Sarah was having very frequent double peak contractions which basically looked as though she was in a fight with an imaginary person or being tortured to tell some secret with the expectation that the contractions would stop if she just gave the secret formula for Coke to the Pepsi folks.

The weather on Saturday wasn't great during the day but was a cool comfortable drizzle. By the evening the rain had become loud and sounded outside like hail. Thunder strikes were coming down one after the other and I was worried that lightning might take out the power. It was a dark and stormy night.

At one point while Sarah was in the bath tub Joyce thought she heard a sound rustling in the kitchen. I told her it might be the mouse and when she went into the kitchen she saw the mouse run off behind the stove. I guess the mouse wanted to get involved in the action. Strangely the most disturbing part of the evening was knowing that the mouse was still living somewhere and wandering about the kitchen.

Sarah's general philosophy was that since the contractions were coming so quickly together that it was best to not move or go to the hospital. Since she couldn't move except between contractions we could only get her to shift from one room to the next. So while I though we were headed to the hospital at 12:30 we didn't end-up going until 4:00 AM when Joyce gave Sarah an internal exam and found almost no cervix left in the way of the baby coming out. Her basic message to Sarah was that Joyce wasn't prepared to do an unassissted home delivery so it was really time to go to the hospital or the baby was going to be born right away.

The whole time we never saw the water break so we were wondering when it would happen or if it had ever happened. Sarah had a lot of trouble getting through the process of going from the apartment to the hospital to deliver Madeline. Since she was having so many contractions she could only really walk in between them. So we just moved her one small bit of distance at a time between contractions.

When we got to the hospital it was tough for Sarah.... to be continued...

Posted by Melody at 03:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Looks like the baby will be here by morning.

Posted by Melody at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today is my birthday.

This week was more waiting for the birth of the baby. I don’t expect Madeline to come before her due date on Halloween but it is something always in the back of my mind. I have had some nifty little anxiety nightmares. In one nightmare Sarah had called me saying she was going into labor and then when I went to go to the hospital where she was I ran into a ton of problems including:

a)I needed to drop off Jeremy in some complex way so I had to use a taxi but because of dream oriented car swapping issues the taxi driver ended-up driving my car.

b) When I went to go inside to a party I couldn’t find my shoes
c) My cell phone was not my current cell phone but instead my old cell phone that didn’t have Sarah’s phone number on it
d) The taxi driver disappeared and couldn’t be reached when I came out of the party
e) When my car with the taxi driver in it finally arrived the entire rear-end of the car had been totaled because he had driven it like a mad-man.

The other nightmare was much simpler. I had to take a math test with four questions and I had two hours to take it at home because it was a take-home test. The content of the test was beyond my knowledge of calculus and differential equations so I never made it past the first question even though I started an hour early.

So I have some background anxiety coming from a combination of the baby, work deadlines, and an analyst presentation that I gave on Wednesday morning. The good news is that the mice have moved out of my nightmares. I got plenty of helpful mouse removal advice ranging from calling an exterminator, a strange bucket solution that many people like to talk about where the mouse jumps into the slippery bucket with water in it and can’t climb back out the side. The two variants of the bucket solution include drowning the mouse in a pool of water and just leaving them trapped at the bottom of the bucket. I didn’t resort to anything more than the traps because it appears that the traps didn’t catch a mouse and that the cleaning out of the toaster oven was a major deterrent to reduce the incentive to climb onto the counter in the first place.

The week in movies for us was an odd hodge-podge. I found on Monday night that Hotel Rwanda was a good way for me to reduce my concerns about my own life. If you aren’t being hunted down during an ethnic cleansing where people kill each other with machetes that the UN isn’t putting a stop to then you probably shouldn’t worry too much about your problems. But then we watched Monster In Law. That was a terrible movie. The week ended with two screenings of adult film history, The Legend of Ron Jeremy and The People Vs. Larry Flynt. I was surprised at how much the edited out any X rated content from the documentary on Ron Jeremy. The Larry Flynt movie is among the better movies with free speech as a central theme. It was much less preachy and awkward than the Majestic.

I had been listening on the radio by accident to some right wing talk about how they are pissed off about sex education being included in school curriculum but school prayer being counted out of the curricula. They want to be given rebates to educate children their own way if they don’t want to get inculcated with the public school system’s values. I saw both sides actually. A more interesting commentary came when a liberal guy mentioned that the religious right serves the function of providing a community for their constituents and if the religion is a side effect rather than fighting religion folks who want to battle the religious nuts should focus on how to provide similar functions of community without the religious stuff because you can’t replace the bad stuff without continuing to provide the good stuff. It’s a tough problem. I would like to see better organized secular communities but in general people tend to form broad communities (not like people who knit) around race and religion. The only likely place to start in modern society would be some combination health club combined with a social organization that plans activities.

Posted by Melody at 03:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So having laid the traps last night early in the evening and blocking the entrance beneath the sink I was hoping to have fully sealed everything and to see no mouse droppings. Instead this morning I found what I take to be incontravertible evidence that the mice have reproduced and now include a population of both a large mouse with large chocolate jimmy/sprinkle sized poops and a smaller mouse with poppy seed sized poops. Neither the big mouse or the baby bothered to check out the inside of the mouse trap to eat some yummy peanut butter that I had put inside. I also started dreaming of the better mouse trap including fanciful visions with a camera tracking system to watch the mouse piped into my computer in the bedroom, a net that would pull up suddenly when weight or motion sensors were activated, or just a giant bell jar that would be dropped from above. While all of these are somewhat impractical I may have to resort to them at some point. But since I needed to feel like I was making progress while waiting for the first round of traps to take effect I considered poisoning the mouse, then figured I would probably accidentally poison the dog who is dumber than a mouse or my newborn baby when she is born. I also recieved some tips from a local blog reading helper who suggested a fancy trap that lights-up when the mouse walks in and zaps them. I have to deal with my guilt meter internally about the death sentence for the mouse if I could just drive them a few miles down the road but the cat is probably a death sentence for the mouse too, it just seems more natural that way.

So I posted the following onto craigslist Boston in search of a cat that might be interested in hunting on my turf:

Free cat sitting in Brookline (Brookline)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reply to: anon-104785383@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-10-17, 6:14PM EDT

My wife and I are about to have a baby in late October and discovered that we have a mouse that has moved into our kitchen. We aren't ready to take on the lifetime responsibility of a cat to help with the mouse scaring duties but we have had a cat living the in the apartment in the past. If you are interested we would be happy to give your cat a home for a few weeks or a month while you are away. In exchange they will police the kitchen for the mouse and obtain a loving family atmosphere from my wife and I as we are home full time while you are gone.

Posted by Melody at 03:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I spent a good chunk of yesterday learning about how my 20 year old stove is constructed. The basic problem was that my attempt to lock-out the mouse with my crude hole coverage with a CD was insufficient. Since Sarah and I were out at Home Depot looking for supplies like cabinets to put over the washer and dryer and blinds for the kitchen I wandered into the area where contractors go and purchased some contractor looking materials to plug the hole where the mouse comes in. I considered buying a big piece of sheet rock but they are huge so I settled for some pre-mixed joint compound and the fiberglass tape used with it. We met Ami at Home Depot incidentally which was odd because you don't expect to see a BU physicist without a car in Watertown, but he was buying blinds for Ilana who doesn't sleep well with too much light.

The stove was still in the way of patching the hole where the gas comes in but after taking the top of the stove off where the burners were I realized that I could probably remove the useless clock and light section of the stove that was preventing me from getting into the hole. After fighting with two wing-nuts for thirty minutes I managed to get the top loose, although not off because I was stripping a bolt rather than actually releasing the final connecting bolt. So I then spent a lot of time playing with the gooey joint compound and the tape, ultimately doing what I considered to be a great job of covering the entire hole such that even the pipe was covered all around it. I did all of this without having to unhook the gas, which I considered for a bit, but decided against after reading on the Internet that it was a really bad idea and would probably kill me, Sarah, and my unborn child to do so.

So I anxiously awaited whether the mouse would be out again last night. I was a like a kid at Christmas hoping for the great present that no mouse droppings would appear and I would be heralded as a super-husband and uber-dad that had fought off the menace of a deadly vermin. But Sarah had to pee in the middle of the night and also stopped in the kitchen to get a drink to refill. When she returned she let me know that I would be very "disappointed". At first I sprung into action thinking that she had gone into labor. I have a lot of spare adrenaline ready for this event. But she then let me know that labor wasn't the problem. The mouse or mice had left more poop on the stove.

Now I can take a mouse leaving a dropping on the ground, but when they poop on the stove it is a direct attack and an obvious insult and challenge. Last night there were limited poops on the stove, only about three, so I may have fended off the mouse wine and cheese party for the evening that had apparently occurred on Friday night prompting my all afternoon spackling escapade. So today I took the bait and with the mouse sized dueling gauntlet thrown down and patched the hole under the sink. I actually used so much joint compound that I don't have any left and may need to refuel.

I also investigated the feasibility of borrowing a cat. Jeremy turned me down because his cat Cloey, despite having lived in the apartment for a year, doesn't feel comfortable moving from one location to the next. Sarah nixed the idea of borrowing her sister's cats, although Curtis is a mean small critter killing machine, because she didn't want her sister to have a reason to be mad at her for asking for something stupid. Sarah assumed that her sister would find it wrong to put her cats' health at risk in order to rid ourselves of a pest.

The additional advice I recieved from both Matt and Sarah's mother was that a mouse has a very agile and soft head that allows it to travel it's entire body through a space no larger than the size of a dime. This makes it nearly impossible to ever fully blockade a mouse from entering your space if it wants to. Every one of it's holes even if sealed off can be quickly turned back into a full, dime sized entrance, in no time. But Matt, who has struggled with mice before, happened to have some mouse friendly traps that when tipped lock the mouse inside of them. He loaned them to me because his battles with his own mice ended in victory for him. So I now have two plastic traps with small bits of peanut butter in the back of them waiting to capture a little critter tonight. One is on the stove and the other is on the floor next to the stove. The strategy is: Go where the droppings are. I also cleaned out my toaster oven because I thought that I might be sustaining the family of suckers with the burnt charcoal crumbs that have been accumulating at the bottom of it for the past two years.

Posted by Melody at 03:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I found the hole behind the stove where the mice enter and exit the kitchen. I didn't actually see them coming and going. I actually have never seen them but I can see the mouse droppings on the stove when they have been in the kitchen. The basic theory that I have is that the mice use the hole in the wall behind where the gas pipe goes into the stove as their entry and exit point. So yesterday I tried to patch the hole with some rudimentary tools. The problem with patching the hole is that the stove is connected with a gas pipe in the back so I didn't want to have to turn off the gas, unplug the stove, patch the hole, and then plug the stove back in. I figured the most likely result of this would be that I would slowly gas Sarah and me to death. Best to leave a task like unhooking the gas for the stove to an expert. But there is a valve for it?

So instead I tried to reach behind the stove with some joint compound that was still very runny. It mainly dribbled behind the stove. I then thought if I could actually join something in front of the hole that might work so I basically spackled a CD from the old VirtuFlex days of images of surfers used for marketing purposes to the wall in the upper right corner of the hole. There was still a visible hole though.

I had nightmares last night of unhooking the stove and having the mice go spilling out all over the street into a big parking lot where me and other people were all stomping and killing them.

Today when I awoke the mouse droppings were all over the stove. I am thinking one solution could be to replace the whole stove while we are at unhooking it. It's a very old stove. I'll be looking today at what a replacement might cost. I could then try not to die of embarrassment when the installation guy looks behind my stove to find a gooey mountain of spackle on the ground and a CD glued to the wall with joint compound. But I think I'm on the right track by closing the borders.

Posted by Melody at 03:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night the mice sent out a challenge to Sarah and me. We had left a bag of bagels on the counter that we had bought in the afternoon. When we awoke the bag had been skillfully penetrated and each bagel had been gnawed on. To show their victory over mankind the mice decided to have a party on top of the stove and leave hundreds of mouse droppings. I had nightmares last night about the mouse which I now believe is an army of mice plotting to take over the apartment after the nuclear armageddon. In the nightmare it was reminiscent of the lines from Hotel California "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast". We need to borrow a cat, get mousetraps, patch holes in the walls where they enter and exit with immunity, drain the swamp, increase border security, attack them where they breed, send troops, kill-kill-kill.

Posted by Melody at 03:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My mom wanted to understand what fusion was all about in layman's terms. Why not try to think of ways to save the world on Yom Kippur. Fusion is one of the better answers that I have heard. I probably failed but tried to explain it and may have gotten the science wrong since I was doing it from memory so correct me where I am wrong. She was interested in the project called ITER Tokemac.

This is what I sent her.

I'm not sure which part of the chemistry is confusing to you but the basics are this.

Atoms are these stable states of matter, which is probably just bundled-up energy. The stable states are finite, not continuous. So think of them like a staircase with big steps. You can be on stair one or two but not in between because you would fall to the stair below.

So we have a periodic table of atoms. In there we get Hydrogen, Oxygen, Carbon, .... Etc. Each of these atoms has different properties based on things like mass, electrons, protons, neutrons, etc. such that we have the world we live in where Carbon is useful because it can make 4 bonds (a stable state is when you have 8 bound electrons and carbon atoms have 4). All of this is very nice but just something to understand as a backdrop of the stuff we are dealing with.

These atoms have to come from somewhere. The atoms can be created by combining atoms or splitting them up. So atoms are created by taking the stuff (protons, neutrons, electrons, energy) that makes up two hydrogen atoms and make a helium atom (fusion) or by splitting a big heavy atom like Uranium (fission).

But a helium atom isn't exactly two hydrogen atoms combined into one ball of stuff. The system together has a different overall stability and mass that are connected. Stability is like when you are on a stair at the top vs. the bottom. There is a difference at the top - you can fall down the stairs. At the bottom you already fell down and it will take work to get back up to the top. In general things in the universe become more stable and are always falling down the stairs. This trend should be obvious when you mix food coloring with water. It is a lot easier to turn the water green then to suck the food coloring back out into a spoon leaving the water clear again. The same thing is at work. The state that is more stable sticks around after the system is bounced about through states that aren't so likely.

Before we look at nuclear energy you can quickly understand chemical energy. The difference is that chemical energy, burning oil, is not about combining or splitting atoms, but instead about combining or splitting molecules. When you take a molecule like a hydrocarbon and burn it you are rearranging the bonds between atoms. If you have an one bond swapped for another bond then there has been a real change in the sytem because one is stronger or weaker, more stable or less stable, than the other. To break a bond then make a new one therefore either generates a net surplus of energy or requires energy. You can imagine in this case someone breaking down the materials from one bridge to build another one and when they take down the first bridge they use all of the materials from the first one to build the second one. So if it takes more energy to build the second bridge then you need more materials. If it takes less materials then you have extra materials. So when you make and break chemical bonds energy is released or consumed. It takes the sun's solar energy to make the bonds that ultimately created the hydrocarbons that we burn into CO2, etc. and it releases energy when we burn them. The problem is that we only have so much hydrocarbon fuel stored-up from old organic matter.

So the fun part with nuclear energy is that when you combine or split atoms you get a similar effect. But the size of the effect is actually much larger, not smaller because the combination of atoms to form a stable state can either reduce or increase their mass. If you reduce the mass to reach the stable state then you release the lost mass as energy (since mass and energy are basically the same stuff). This energy is released as heat(atoms moving faster) and radiation(energy particles that travel at the speed of light),. The heat is very useful because it can be transferred into systems we can use to generate electricity. The radiation can be an annoying side effect.

Getting atoms to fuse or split isn't as easy as making molecules burn because the amount of energy that needs to be put into the system is much higher before the reaction occurs. In general the image for activation energy needs to be considered to understand this. Basically if you were to look at an activation energy chart for any chemical reaction it looks like a hill with a trough on either side at different heights. So if I am looking relative to sea level and I am currently at 100 ft. and the hill is at 500 ft. but the sea is on the other side of the hill. I can't get to the sea to go swimming without first climbing the hill. If I am riding a bicycle with no brakes it will take me work to get to the top. If I don't put enough work in to get to the top of the hill, since I have no brakes, I will slide back down to where I came from. If I do get to the top of the hill and it is a very slippery hill once I am the slightest bit over the edge my bike and I will fly down to the sea. In this case since the sea is lower (and the next stable state) it took energy to get "activated" so that I could go down to the sea. The truth was that if I had an energy recovery mechanism on my bicycle since the sea is lower than the place I started I would have more energy at the bottom than I had at the top. Since I don't the energy was distributed out somehow, probably as kinetic energy when I crashed into the water at the bottom.

So the idea of an activation energy is very much at play with atoms fusing. They will be very unlikely to fuse without getting enough energy into them to do so even though once they fuse they will release a lot of energy. It's a high stakes game. Luckily for us atoms did fuse because we are made of some pretty complex ones like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur and use even bigger ones like magnesium all the time to work our organic chemistry magic. The way that carbon is created through fusion naturally is in a star like the sun where immense amounts of gravitational pressure cause molecules to get very close together start to heat-up and fuse. So the sun is a big reactor converting hydrogen to helium, releasing energy then converting the helium to bigger molecules up the periodic table. The spectrum of what colors a sun is depends on the fusion reactions currently at work when you see the light from it. Light is that radiation(energy particles that travel at the speed of light). Think red dwarfs, etc. So you can get a good idea of what is going on in the sun by looking at the spectrum from it since the light wavelengths coming out from each fusion reaction has a signature based on the energy that is standardly released from rolling down the mountain for hydrogen combining to form helium.

So we would like to get into this fusion game ourselves but we don't have the benefit of creating a big ball of gaseous radioactive crap in the middle of our planet like the sun does. The activation energy requirements for fusion of hydrogen are quite high by our living standards. The atoms start to fuse and release energy at a few hundred million degrees Celsius. Everything in the sun is a gas which is what happens when you heat mass up. Think tanks of liquid nitrogen. At room temperature the nitrogen just converts to a gas. At a few hundred million degrees celsius a lot of things we like to see as solids switch to liquids, think ice to water. This presents a problem if the metal we are using for our fusion reactor melts and the fusion crap goes flying all over the place at 100 million degrees celsius. Getting hit with stuff this hot could cause a slight burn with uncomfortable itching and rashes for a few days. So the idea of a tokemac was created to keep that hot stuff away from the container. The basics are to make a field that contains the hot stuff as a gas in a torus, think donut, such that the hottest stuff doesn't need to reach the outside of the container. This hottest stuff is heated and condensed by some tricks in the donut using magnetic fields because hydrogen at our temperatures is a molecule, H2, and not an atom H. with an extra electron. Hydrogen is most stable with two electrons close to it which is why it releases energy when it binds to other H. atoms to form H2. But when you heat it up and get the H2s into H.s you have charged particles with a negative charge. Things with a charge move away from things with a certain magnetic field. So if the torus has a strong field everywhere on the inside surface those H. ions will concentrate in the center (not the O) but an imaginary line within the donut circle and not bump into the walls to melt them.

You can then get to fusion and collect the extra energy using the resulting inflow of energy from the fusion to keep the reaction going and since it doesn't take much conversions of hydrogen atoms to helium to generate a ton of energy we would have abundant energy and finally put an end to this silly conflict over oil in the Middle East. Instead we can just fight about religion which is much more fun because nobody can prove anything but everyone thinks they are right. Because of this the fight over religion is a more stable system than fighting over oil.

Posted by Melody at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As a Yom Kippur tradition we went out for dinner the night before the fast. I was rewarded at dinner with a reunion with my expensive $350 rain shell that had disappeared for the past six months. My dad was wearing it to get out of the rain and hadn’t connected that the coat he had found in a closet was my famed rain shell that had climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and rafted down the Grand Canyon. At dinner we spent a long time discussing energy as it is the topic du jour of interest to everyone now that we have a new energy bill. The general result of the discussion was that I convinced my mother that hydrogen fusion is the answer to all of our energy problems as soon as we can get it to work and that if we can’t we’ll go into space to harvest the energy of the sun’s fusion to bring home to earth in a consumable energy form.

I probably will skip breakfast tomorrow but will eat lunch. Since I don’t believe in God this shouldn’t cause too much problem other than the part of me that as an atheist struggles against religious stuff. But the part of me as a historian and cultural person who wants to use traditions to help transfer valuable time tested moral codes on myself and my family I can stomach not eating for a few hours.

Today I became very excited about how soon the baby is coming. This came mainly from misreading my cell phone to make me think today was the 15th while it is really just the 12th . The 15th is meaningful because it is the day after Sarah leaves work to go on maternity leave. She isn’t technically due until Halloween, but the official alert level goes up a notch the day that Sarah officially stops working. That day means that we are ludicrously close to becoming first time parents for real. A baby outside that belly is a different situation from the baby inside. That’s my hunch. I also got anxious because my cell phone at work didn’t ring so when I was driving home I had four messages. That made me think that if Sarah were in labor I would have been very hard to contact and I might miss this whole birth experience.

So when I got home I was poking around Sarah’s belly and getting generally impatient that the apparently full sized baby inside wasn’t starting to make her way out. We thought about how we could start to go down the list soon of home remedy induction processes as soon as the 15th came around. We don’t want to have to go to the hospital for induction. Stay at home as long as possible is the plan.

This weekend on Saturday morning we took care of one of the last big steps in getting ready for having a baby. We got our car seat installed and inspected by the Brookline police. The location for the inspection is the same place as the public works building. We had scheduled the appointment for 9:30 in the morning but awoke at 9:29. So we knew we would be late. The plan had been to install it in the morning before we went and to clean out the back seat of the car so they didn’t tell us things like “You are going to be terrible parents because the back seat of your car is filled with garbage, pens, and flip flops that could kill a baby if they were traveling 30MPH after a head-on collision”. That was the least of our worries as we were panicked on being so late that we would have to fall into the next window of opportunity for car seat installation inspection two weeks, and potentially, too late.

So we drove based on the directions that the address was something like 877 Hammond Street and near the Putterham golf course. I have played golf at Putterham so we had no problem getting there but we then drove around in circles through a series of connected rotaries that spit you out in random directions like a pinball for forty minutes looking for the “Works” buildings. We first went into the back lot behind the firehouse on Hammond street. It’s very cool and worth checking out because they have a practice apartment building that they probably torch on a regular basis and some other practice burning things. But nobody was there so I made Sarah ask for directions at the golf course. They directed us to a hidden gate after the firehouse that led up a hill to the building where they inspect car seats.

At the inspection the officer who helped us informed us that it was OK that we hadn’t installed the seat yet. From what I could tell nobody gets around to installing the seat themselves before going to see the officer for installation. He borrowed the PT Cruiser owner’s manual and was amazed that my 2001 car had a non-mandatory safety feature of middle-seat clips for connecting a car seat into. So he installed very quickly and then gave us the lecture on cleaning out the car so we wouldn’t have flying garbage kill our baby after seeing the flip-flops, pens, gadget refuse, and McDonalds paper waste in the back seat.

Posted by Melody at 03:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The game changed from what I had expected to see, Michael Vick and Warrick Dunn running around in all directions, when Vick showed-up at the game unable to play due to an injury. That was among the predictions for why the Pats would face a different team from the one that beat the Eagles on the opening Monday night game. Basically the superstar running back style quarterback has a fatal flaw. They get pummeled as they run and don’t make it to half of the games each season. We were without last years defense adding Richard Seymour to the list of lost defensive superstars reporting out for an injury too so it looked like the injury toll evened the game.

The game was being watched from Bedford because we had a 4PM wedding to attend at the Lutheran Church in Bedford. So Sarah and I got dressed in the fourth quarter for the wedding only to see the Pats slowly losing their nice sturdy 15 point lead. I did my tie while watching the Pats give-up a freak interception. As the Pats had been whittled down to an 8 point lead we drove to the church listening to the game in the car for a few minutes.

The wedding ceremony was beautiful. During it I was saved the heartache of the Pats getting tied with a touchdown and a two point conversion. I only had my cell phone tell me about the touchdown, but because Sprint and web browsing on cell phones is slower than using morse code to get the score of the game all I could learn was that it was 28-26 Pats near the end of the fourth quarter. So I was imagining that the Pats had stopped a two point conversion as I prayed that what God had brought together today nothing could cast asunder. My marriage to the Patriots was unlikely to reach any rift or any asunder casts unless they suddenly started on a terrible losing streak and rescinded our season tickets. If the 80’s didn’t scare me off what would?

Upon leaving the wedding and heading for the reception I learned that the Adam V. had punched in a last minute field goal and based on the callers into talk radio, Belichick had gotten emotional about the win. A little tear of relief came to my eye as I heard this.

Posted by Melody at 03:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My dad emailed me the URL for Sling Media
the other day in an effort to solve some of our general television dilemmas. I was thinking I should have invented such a device but was too dense to think of it.

Our problem is that we have a philosophical problem and a bit of a financial problem paying for television. He already pays for full cable TV at his house in Newton as well as a house in Marshfield. I barely ever watch television in Brookline except for times when there are major sporting events like playoff baseball or NFL Patriots games. So I don’t want to pay for television either. Unfortunately the free stuff in Brookline doesn’t work well because the big buildings bounce the signal back and forth causing ghosts to appear on the screen. I have even tried things like MLB.com but I learned that playoff baseball is not available on the web because of national broadcast restrictions. Hey television network dummies – if you broadcast it on the airwaves you should broadcast it on the net. You are selling ads anyways you nitwits.

So this Sling Media thing seems attractive to us. From my basic understanding of it the device grabs content from your television after it’s been output from the cable box and then streams it to the Internet. This would allow me to watch the same television program that my dad was watching on his living room television, like the Red Sox game. The tool also appears to be able to dig into Tivo programs and can change the channel so basically I would have a remote version of a cable TV box in Newton available wherever I wanted to view it.

I don’t know how long this will stay legal since there are some obvious re-broadcasting tricks that can be done with a tool like this, provided that the person doing so has plenty of bandwidth. For example – they could have one person subscribe to the paid movie stations or PPV TV and then broadcast it to a large number of illicit network subscribers. I can imagine that the Canadians, fearless satellite hackers converted because of silly broadcast restrictions in Canada, would be some of the first to pioneer Internet re-broadcast TV stations. The content would probably be porn from satellite stations like the playboy channel but it could evolve into more sophisticated stuff. All you would need is enough tuners or virtual tuners hooked-up from various folks and some organization around it all through a password protected web site. I’ll wait and see.

For now I think the demand lowered significantly for this device because the Red Sox got swept in three games. So all we have are the Pats and we usually gather for that.

Some other folks have taken notice of it on places like EnGadget. I also noticed that Commerce5, one half of my empire formerly known as ChannelWave is the direct sales processor for this gadget.

Posted by Melody at 03:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sarah figured that Roshashana was a good day to take her car into the Volkswagon shop in Brookline. Her work gave her the day off on Tuesday so we pugnapped the little guy on Monday night. Leelin came along to drop off the Passat and I read an interesting article in CFO magazine about the Rise and Fall of Crispy Creme donuts. Luckily it was much shorter than the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that is an anchor stabilizing my bookshelf. So with one car running for three people Sarah dropped me in Wellesley with Jeremy and began her day with an OB/GYN appointment to check her for group-B strep.

Among the endless litany of things to worry about in childbirth is that the nice innocuous colonies of group-B strep bacteria are big enough to pass on to the baby during childbirth. In other countries they spritz something onto the baby when it is born to kill the bugs but in America we use an IV to deliver a quick dose of antibiotics to take them out. The doula recommended trying to reduce the count, similar to reducing your cholesterol before a cholesterol test by avoiding eggs or avoiding poppy seed bagels before a drug test. The basic course of action to do so was to eat lots of garlic, in Sarah’s case in the form of garlic bagels, and vitamin C.

While you are swabbing around inside where a baby might find itself coming out of the OB figured it might be a good time to reach a finger in for an internal exam to check Sarah’s cervix. The internal exam discovered that Sarah was 1 cm dilated and that baby Madeline’s head is in the desired down position.

So all of this medical testing stuff was going on and I was busy doing some work on a datamart. As I am working I get a frantic call from Sarah letting me know that she has had a lot of bleeding, more than she would expect from the results from an internal exam. She then went back to the OB/GYN office and when they put the speculum in to check what was going on another big gush of blood came out. So she was recommended to go to the hospital immediately in case there was an emergency where they needed to suddenly deliver the baby through a C-section because there was a problem. At 36 weeks and with a nice healthy six pound baby rustling about they weren’t going to take any chances.

The main problem was that Jeremy and I didn’t have a car so Sarah had to choose whether to have me hitchhike my way down Route 9 or take the thirty minutes to drive to pick us up. She decided to pick us up and I dropped Jeremy off, and then we went together to the hospital. The main decision criteria was that the blood was stopping. But when we got to the hospital the staff was plenty ready for an emergency with guns a blazing ready to drop an IV into her to prepare for a possible transfusion or to knock her out. Sarah’s hereditary thrombocytopenia, low platelet count, had them all freaked out about any loss of blood. Their thought was that someone with a low platelet count will bleed to death if they nick themselves shaving. So any blood at all made them think that there might be some major internal disaster inside of Sarah.

But we calmed the nurse down to tell her that the bleeding had pretty much stopped. Sarah discussed the story of what happened at the OB/GYN office and the discussion centered around trying to determine the amount of blood that she had lost through various means of estimation like the color of toilet water and pad absorption. The room at BI that we were put into was far larger than the tiny room that we had seen in the tour last month. When we asked why it was bigger the nurse mentioned that they like to show the smallest rooms during the tour so that if a woman gets a smaller room when she delivers she doesn’t get indignant that she has been relegated to the smaller room and demand to be put in the premiere rooms. The view out the window was also better in this room. It was overlooking an all girls high school with the girls playing field hockey, tetherball, and hockey in the yard and continued outwards to Brookline. The trees below were starting to change but were mostly green in the Fens. I wasn’t particularly happy with one aspect of the room. Behind the bed they had taped a plastic sheet protector with a pink piece of copier paper inside of it. The words on the paper said “Have you counted your sponges?” The implication to this is that people regularly can’t count their sponges during C-Sections and leave them inside of people to infect them and cause sepsis. The solution that some administrator came up with was to put a cheap sign behind the bed.

The main activity after talking the nurse out of putting an IV into Sarah’s arm was to hang out with the fetal monitors checking out Sarah’s contractions and the baby’s heart rate. The basic idea is that the baby heart rate should increase when moving or during a contraction. For the most part it did this but having been on the monitor for hours Sarah had moved a few times and propped-up the bed to get more comfortable. This roughly coincided with a brief coordination problem of the monitor where it appeared that the baby heart rate went down during a contraction. Yes, Sarah is having little contractions every few minutes that appear on the monitor but she doesn’t recognize as happening.

This caused her to need to stay on the monitor for longer, but we were going to have to wait for a test that had been taken back at the OB appointment for counting her platelets. We also eventually had to stay even longer because the platelet test wasn’t going to get processed fast enough by the Quest labs so they needed to take a platelet count in the hospital. The idea was that if her platelets were below 20,000 (whatever that means) they would have to transfuse her with platelets.

During the six hours of hanging out and chatting we also got to meet the full cast of characters at BI. Since Sarah has a bleeding disorder she was the perfect candidate to meet both the high risk OB and the regular OB. Then she also got to meet two anesthesiologists who basically wanted to let her know that if she went into an emergency C-Section that they needed her to sign the consent form to knock her out. The nurse was also being followed around by her nursing student who got to learn fun things like – how to estimate the amount of blood loss from a pad. We even got the surprise appearance of a resident. All of them went through some of the same list of two or three questions regarding whether when Sarah bleeds normally if the bleeding stops or not.

We were there from about noon to Five O’clock and only turned on the television to watch the Sox-Sox match-up. By the end of the few innings we watched from the hospital room the Red Sox had bled so many runs that it was already over. We now have a good idea of what some of the basics are going to be like when we go in to deliver the baby. After the ordeal at the hospital had ended we drove out to Marshfield and ate a Roshashana dinner with my family. I took my last dip in the pool for the year after we tried to heat it to Sarah’s comfort level and failed and we drove back to Brookline through the back roads this morning.

The whole dry run dress rehearsal at the hospital made me think about all the things we still need to do to get ready for the baby including putting the car seat into the car at the police station, getting a bassinet for the baby to sleep in, putting the light dimmers back in their sockets, and putting-up the pictures that we took off the walls to have the apartment painted. Yipes!

Posted by Melody at 03:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was at a wedding last year when I met with some of my old "liberal?" Jewish friends from college and happened to get into some discussions about the Bush administration. What had changed since college was an unexpected growth of neoconservative Jews who were supporting Bush because the general positions of conservative economics and Middle Eastern intervention were projected as pro-capitalist and pro-Israel. In general Jews don't support right wing Christian candidates who would like to implement Christian values through the government. Most Jews tend to be liberal because Jews have had enough historical experience, going back to Egypt, with civil rights issues to know that in general local majority religious values coded into laws don't work well for people who aren't in the majority religion. The Yom Kippur and Passover messages communicate to the Jewish kids that historically living as Jews in a minority requires fighting for minority freedoms and ultimately the separation from church and state in the US.

To the neocon Jews at the wedding last year it was considered a reasonable trade-off to them to support some minor undesirable Christian religious government aspects of the Republican party. So they built-up an ends justifies the means argument of putting Bush and the Republicans into power as being better for Jews and Israel than the Democrats. The counter argument that I took and continue to take is that placing the religious right into power with two supreme court justice seats up for grabs is a formula for long term civil rights disaster. The stated goal of the religious right wrangling into control of the Republican party, Bush, and appeasement of many splintered groups like the neocon jews was to start to push agendas to accomplish things like pro-life, pro-Christian family, and anti-homosexual legal adjustments.

So now we come to some dark days of political harvest with two supreme court justices now nominated by Bush. The latest appointee, Miers, appears to be the pro-life crony for Bush that the right wing Christians have been waiting for. It looks like the fight is behind us now that the supreme court is inevitably shifting for a long time to the right. The Christian majority is no doubt gearing-up to roll-back the "liberal" civil rights fought for in the past half century to return them to the level of the fifties. A filibuster won't stop the supreme court now.

I sadly predict that somewhere within the next few cases pushed to the supreme court there will be a couple that are designed to have maximum impact on Roe v. Wade, gay rights, and civil rights. The Republicans may wait until 2008 to drop the bomb in order to stay in power, but I am sure something big is heading for the new supreme court to make all of this wrangling of neocons into the tent worth the right wing's while.

Posted by Melody at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My dad and I watched most of the first Pats loss in Foxboro stadium in three years. The last one we watched was a Jets game that Philip and Hattie came to where we were tailgating on a camping stove that we picked-up at EMS on the way to the game. It wasn’t the kind of stove you grill on but instead the kind you put a frying pan over. So we had pan fried sausages on a cold winter’s day and watched the Jets ruin the playoff hopes for the Pats in that one out of four year that not only did the Pats not win the Superbowl but they didn’t even make it to the wildcard. That’s one of the reason why I hate those J-E-T-S fans yelling at Foxboro. One day one of them is going to fall out of the rafters and they’ll never figure out why they jumped.

The loss to the Chargers was reminiscent of the other home loss we watched that 2002 season. It was a loss to, you guessed it, the Chargers. The game was similar with Ladamian Tomlinson running through the Swiss cheese Pats run defense. Tomlinson wasn’t the only running back to do it that year. Edgerrin James, Ricky Williams, Corey Dillon, and Curtis Martin all shredded the run defense. Watching the past two years with the run defense looking like it had clotted and sealed an open wound I thought that bringing the big fat guy (BFG) was the solution to all of these problems with the running game. They basically plugged a hole in the middle with a 350 lb guy who looked like a mountain and then had a strong safety and linebacker contain runs to the outside. The BFG in 2003 was Ted Washington who was then replaced by Vince Wilfork last year when someone else was willing to pay a ton of cash for a BFG after the Pats won the Superbowl. From what we saw yesterday the BFG strategy only works when combined with a big mean guy (BMG) safety like Rodney Harrison who crunches bones when he hits and a little smart guy (LSG) like Tedy Bruschi. So given that the Pats only have one of these three items in their arsenal with Wilfork I wonder what will happen for the rest of the season.

My sunburn from the 80 degree fall day may be my scar marking the end of an era for the Pats but I am hoping that Belichik has something up his sleeve. I also might be jumping too fast to a conclusion about the viability of the Pats because they have a very tough first six weeks followed by an easier schedule for the rest of the season. But I never thought the offense for the Pats was that great the past few years because you could see that the defense was causing turnovers that could be converted into points and holding back the best players on every team they played, like Ladamian Tomlinson. Now with the defense hurting from injuries everywhere they have a ton of work to do. Don’t get me started on the offensive line with Matt Light out!

Posted by Melody at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The preparation for Madeline continued this week. Sarah has been getting an ultrasound every week with pictures lately that allow us to see Madeline’s face. The latest pictures look similar to that picture of a man’s face on the surface of Mars. My thought as I was scanning the pictures into my computer and having been to the OB office was that they could easily produce a USB ultrasound attachment. It would be fun both to look at your unborn baby and to look at fun internal components like your heart, lungs, and food you have eaten. The home ultrasound wouldn't be something the doctors would like and they would worry if you found something like a tumor then came into the doctors office. But why not?

Among other preparations was a visit from the Doula on Saturday. We did fun things like talk about the details of what might happen if we had to deal with an emergency C-section and watched some home movies of labor and delivery. Today is Sarah's baby shower so a whole bunch of women will all converge on Bedford bringing gifts selected from the baby registry in exchange for party favors that look like pink baby bottles filled with pink M&Ms. It's a fair trade. They also will be getting bagels. While that is happening my dad and I will be doing a manly activity - going to the Pats game in Foxboro. This may be the last one I go to for a while. The next home game is on October 30th, one day before Madeline's due date.

Posted by Melody at 03:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)