If I were to write a letter to an ombudsman from American Airlines or Miami International airport it might read something like this.

To whom it may concern,

I was recently travelling with my family including my wife, 2 and a half year old and 4 month old to Turcs and Caicos. Since there aren't direct flights we chose to go through Miami International airport. The trip to the island was fairly uneventful and surprisingly pleasant. Unfortunately the return trip was one that my family would prefer to never repeat again.

When we arrived at the airport at Provinciales my wife, carrying our baby in a sling was placed into the "high risk" search group. I don't know if anyone has ever tried to move a family of 4 with a toddler, an infant, a double stroller, laptop, and camera through the security checkpoints at airports but it is a complete nightmare taking about ten minutes with much frustration and confusion among children and parents often involving crying by more than one party. The walk through security was no exception this time.

Then while we were waiting at the terminal we were called to the front and told that our seat assignments had changed. We were given a better set of seats on the flight to Miami since they were in the bulkhead row. For this we were happy.

Upon arriving at Miami we had to split-up because our stroller was taking a very long time to get off of the plane and the attachment to the plane was too hot for the children. So I had a stroller and my wife had two children when we finally got out but because it is a long, multi-step journey from the plane to customs we ran into some problems. I couldn't find my wife coming out of the plane because one of the kids had needed to go to the bathroom. Because it was such a long wait to get the stroller I assumed she had gotten onto the train to customs.

So I took the train and then went down the escalator. I then waited for about 30 minutes. I wanted to return to look for her but there was neither a way to go back or a way to ask for help finding her from the prior areas like the train transfer or escalator. Since I had the transportation for her I learned that she had great difficulty getting both children to the customs area by herself. She finally appeared bedraggled with another passenger who had taken pity on her carrying our baby.

We got through customs fine but then arrived in the hall where baggage needs to be picked off of the baggage claim, walked through customs, and then transported to the area where it is then transferred into a cordoned off area. This place was a disaster with two kids and a double stroller. Since it had already been an ordeal they were starting to melt down as small kids tend to do. But we figured that if we had gotten through customs and our baggage then we should be all set to get some food and hop on our plane.

We then came to a very hard to navigate exit from the customs area. I am not sure if we walked the wrong way or not but we had to remove our kids from the double stroller to avoid the immense lines for the elevators by elderly and handicapped people. We were, with some trouble able to navigate the two changes in elevation on escalators with some great difficulty and then follow a path that directed us to our terminal only to find that we needed to go through a new security check that was backed-up with a long line.

The only thing worse than a security check with melting-down children is a long line with melting-down children. So at the end of the long line we reached the area where we prep all of our stuff and there were no buckets to put our things into and we were told the stroller wouldn't fit through. So I had to leave my wife with the two screaming kids after she hit me over the head with a bucket from another line to stroll the stroller over to the other side of the security area. Since we have to travel with a stack of tickets and passport documents I gave them to my wife and hoped for the best for getting through on the side where I was giving the security folks my stroller. But they wouldn't let me through without my ticket and my wife had gone through with the tickets already. Luckily when I returned to the side where we had originally tried to cross the security people recognized me and were able to figure out a way to get me through.

Following this security zone we then had to go both down an escalator and up an escalator to reach the terminal area where our plane was. The travelling in non-accessible areas was starting to become quite painful since every time we are able to place our kid or kids into the double stroller we need to take them out in order to go on an escalator. Given the long lines for the elevators it was unrealistic for us to wait.

But we did finally make it to our gate with about 30 minutes to spare for our flight and were able to find some food which we desparately needed since food isn't served anymore on lunch time flights and we hadn't expected an hour and half ordeal getting to our gate.

When we did get to the gate we needed to get our seating assignments. For some reason we didn't get seats on our flight despite having booked it 4 months in advance and having already been on a flight earlier in the day that we were transferring from. So we were assigned three seats in the last row in the back of the airplane - split into two seats and one.

After boarding the plane our 2 year old fell asleep on my lap. This was fine except that the plane didn't take off for an hour since they had been waiting on the tarmac for rerouting instructions. We were told that the plane would get cooler once it took off and the air conditioning system kicked-in.

After taking off, a few minutes later the air conditioning did kick in. Unfortunately it then get very hot after about 20 minutes. We assumed it was some fluke of the back of the plane but were again very uncomfortable. I'm not sure of the expected flight time of a plane from Miami to Boston but it felt like about 20 hours total. Actually the flight plan after the hour of extra time on the run way added another hour in air to avoid some storm. This is fine and expected BUT the plane itself was unbearably hot and miserable in our last row bathroom view seats.

About 2 hours before the plane landed we finally complained to the stewardess that the plane was too hot. She told us that the reason why it was hot in the back of the plane was because the people in the middle of the plane had complained that it was too cold. Since the thermal controls of our plane couldn't handle everyone being comfortable the middle people had been given their wish to the detriment of our comfort. When asked the stewardess did lower the temperature of the back of the plane which made it survivable for the last couple of hours on the plane.

By the time we landed we were sweaty, tired, frustrated, and miserable but very happy to be home.

I think there are a number of areas where American and Miami Intl. could improve.

1. Get rid of all the elevation changes in the customs / re-security check process. They are brutal.

2. When people with kids book travel months in advance. Give them seating arrangements and keep them.

3. Try to figure out a more streamlined approach to customs to avoid a re-checkin through general security a second time.

4. Either get different zones for air conditioning planes, ensure uniform air circulation for temperature, or monitor the temperature to make sure neither folks in the back or middle are dueling for hot or cold to make the other uncomfortable.

5. Do better to avoid situations where the planes board in hot tarmacs to then have passengers wait an hour or more in hot planes.

6. Understand the special needs of people travelling through security with young children and assign staff to help/support them similar to staff who support handicapped people. Possibly provide them priority when going through security checkpoints.

I felt lonely as I was travelling since I had left behind Sarah, Zachary, and Madeline. It might have been that spending so much time on airplanes and in a city where I didn't know anyone. I was and am glad to be home.

1. Use old eggs for hard boiled eggs - Sarah and I had been thinking that there was something wrong with the high-end eggs that we purchase from Whole Foods. We just couldn't seem to shell them after boiling them for hard boiled eggs and they would disintegrate because the eggs were attached to the shell. As it turns out Sarah's mom discovered, learned, or knew that using older eggs a few weeks after purchasing them generates an egg that is simple to peel after cooking. Something about the eggs changes to separate the binding between the shell and the egg over time. So it's good to wait before boiling them.

2. Save fresh bagels by slicing then freezing them - The folks down the road from us at Rosenfelds have superb bagels but we stopped buying them because they would turn into rocks on the shelf after about 2 days. Microwaving them softened them but also made them rubbery. Nick suggested that the best thing to do with fresh bagels would be to freeze them but to be sure to slice them first. This week we enjoyed some leftover bagels with a quick toasting and they turned out great.

3. Freeze old bananas (peeled) for treats - As bananas get old they get very sweet. I like those fruit popsicles like Banana flavored ones and it turns out that if you peel a banana that is over ripe instead of throwing it out that it makes a great ice cream like treat.

4. Put avocados in the fridge when they are ripe - Avocados are a fantastic food but a pain to get in the perfect state for eating. We noticed that you can refridgerate them once they reach the ripeness stage and they stay ripe. We also eat them in our frequent low carb dinner dish - Chicken Caesar salad w/avocados (a recommendation from Linda) so we always need fresh ones.

5. Half bottles of wine provide good luxury - Sarah and I like to drink wine with dinner but it is tough to drink a full bottle, well sometimes it is just too much wine for a Wednesday night. I have a preservation system but it is a pain to remember to do so we usually end-up drinking too much wine in an effort to satisfy my need to not waste things and finish the bottle. The half bottles sold locally cost about as much as a full bottle, about $10, but they are much better wines due to the lower volume. So we have bought some stock of these and use them with dinner. We also have taken the mini-wines that are about the size of a wine you would get on a plane on hiking day trips.

M: I have a fairy pants on.
D: Are you a fairy?
M: No.
D: Are you a little girl?
M: Yes.
D: Am I a big boy?
M: Yes.
D: Am I a man?
M: No.... You are a daddy.
D: Are there any other daddys?
M: No.

By Sunday we were on the road to recovery but still cautious about eating any real food. Since it was easter I snapped a few hundred photos trying to capture Madeline's outfit and other various Easter occasions. Madeline loved hunting for eggs and despite only having 24 plastic eggs I think she found about 100 due to some creative re-hiding after she had filled her basket. We have been playing a dysfunctional game of hide and seek lately where Madeline hides in very obvious places like lying down next to a radiator but she loves the idea of hide and seek. She is good at hiding in her closet low on the floor under a shelf but that doesn't stop her from selecting the hiding places where she is in plain view. So I get to tune my acting skills multiple times per session to look for her in all of the places where she isn't. It is quite fun. Zachary is fighting the transition from breast to bottle. I felt like we were torturing a captured enemy into telling us the location of the big guns on the hill as he screamed in discontent from the bottle feeding experiment this evening. Hopefully it will get better since we are in need of some alternatives to Sarah always being 10 feet away from Zachary when he is hungry.

So we were committed to getting him a passport back then since T&C is a foreign enough location to require a passport for us all. When Zachary was born, at home, we had no idea of the difficulty we would face in acquiring a passport for him. But here is the basic story thus far of our adventures to acquire positive identification for him. It started when I went to city hall to file the paperwork for his birth certificate. The basic workflow is that first you get a birth certificate then a social security card and then a passport. So I knew there would be three steps.

With a home birth there apparently is some increased risk of creating fraudulent children so the city of Newton and the state of Massachusetts are quite leary of us. In a hospital they would trust the physicians and the automated systems and punch out a social security number automatically. They are also leary about us because our house has two addresses but I'll get to that soon. At city hall I quickly was able to register to vote and then a nice clerk let me know that I couldn't get my birth certificate processed unless I brought a copy of my marriage license.

So I went home to look for my marriage license and was unable to locate it. Since Brookline City hall has these sorts of things on file I went in person to Brookline a few days later to see if I could get a copy or two made of the marriage license. Unfortunately when I first got there they were doing so much construction on city hall that I couldn't find my way to the door and needed to turn back so that I could make a meeting. Then when I finally figured out where the location was for the temporary town clerk's office they mentioned that all of their files including my marriage license was stored in the part of the buildings that were under construction. So we discussed the whole thing and I had them mail me the license since I didn't think I was ever going to get around to pick it up in person.

About a week later the license came in the mail. About 8 days later Sarah finally had the time to go to Newton City Hall to bring it to the town clerks office. Upon receipt of the item I figured I was on my way to getting a birth certificate for Zachary. But I received a call a few days later letting me know that the paperwork couldn't be sent on to the state processing folks because our official address in the logs for the tax payers is 80 Glen Ave. and the paperwork from the midwife said 80 Leeson Lane so they would need me to come and resolve it in person by signing some documents at City hall.

So we cleared-up that mess in about a week and were happy to know that we could get a birth certificate about 14 days later when I picked it up. Feeling confident that we were well on our way towards a citizen child we asked what to do to get a social security number. The answer was to go in person to a social security office in Waltham where they handle people like us. So on a day full of weather Sarah gathered the kids and took the birth certificate to the people at the social security office. They were happy to asisst her but sent her home because they need TWO forms of positive identification and the birth certificate was only one form of identification. Now I may be naive about global terrorism but I don't have a driver's license for my 8 week old child. When offered the documentation from the midwife that was used to process the birth certificate the social security folks said that the documentation was equivalent to the birth certificate so it couldn't count as a second form of identification. Sarah returned to the office about a week later with some medical bills and the documentation from the doulah and despite the policies of the US Government they agreed to send Zachary his social security card.

So just yesterday we received in the mail a new social security card. Now all we need to do is get a photo of Zachary and apply for a passport! How hard can that be?

Anyways with all that said I basically started a new photo library at Flickr that I will soon link or RSS integrate with the existing archive I have on my site. The new library will be at http://www.flickr.com/photos/danhousman/archives/ and hopefully it will be self explanatory for how to wander through Flickr to find whatever photo you want to see. One big adjustment for me is that I have had to group photos by date ranges to keep them straight on my side. Flickr can use the EXIF data from the camera to automatically group photos by day so I will try to stop organizing in that way and let Flickr figure out where in an archive to order the photos. One confusing thing for me will be sorting out what a public viewer vs. me the publisher sees. I just don't know what that looks like but I am trying to make pictures public for viewing where I can. The new library picks-up in late January and has most of time through March 4th.

We went and bought a new rocking chair and Ottoman the day after Zachary was born. That finally came about a week ago. I also ordered some things online including a 32" flat screen Aquos TV and a system for making seltzer at home. Yuval's eye-fi card came in the mail a few weeks ago but I didn't have time to look into it for a while. I bought a blue-ray DVD player since it was too frustrating to watch the 1080P tv tell me my DVDs were playing at 480p. I also bought a 2 terabyte Lacie drive to hold the growing mountain of photographic documentation on our lives. We also bought a hot tub for the yard. That prompted us to need to acquire a patio since we couldn't figure out how to get to the hot tub without creating mud and when faced with the idea of having to build my own hard structure underneath it I realized I was better off hiring professionals. So the yard that I spent many an hour last year cultivating to grow grass is now a combination of pavers for the patio and torn-up from the construction. But the hot tub (a Sundance Marin) is now in the yard and Madeline's favorite thing to ask about before or after dinner.

Last weekend as Sarah's father was helping to rig the wiring behind the new television I was hunting for which panel on the circuit breaker ran the TV and I reset the computer in the office to the point where it wouldn't boot. Luckily I had already moved the photos off of it onto the Lacie 2TB drive so rather than worry about it I switched to my old Windows XP box that sounds like a jet engine but works fine. The benefit was that the computer that died was the Windows 2000 machine and the Eye-Fi card from Yuval requires XP to run. The unfortunate event lately is that I can't find the charger for the Canon Powershot camera so I am not sure what I will do when traveling or in situations where it is more convenient to have a smaller camera. I am tempted to deconstruct the whole house looking for it but don't have the time and I haven't taken a picture outside in a long time.

So I set-up the Eye-fi card and have been quite excited to see my photos saving both directly to the hard drive and output to Google/Picasa web albums. So I am considering revamping my photo publishing mechanisms to just point to Picasa Web albums given that I am already a few months behind on any publishing photos due to baby and start-up busyness.

But today is a quiet day for some reason with little plans and just some clean-up from the snow. Madeline and I began the day at 8:30 and took an hour long time in the hot tub with palm sized snow flakes falling on us. She enjoyed throwing the rubber ducks out of the tub and asking me to go fetch them... which I periodically did.

Zachary has been a lot of fun but I haven't had all the time I would hope to with him. He likes the swing which generally puts him to sleep. Lately he has had some unexplained acne that we are hoping isn't a long term thing.

At about one AM we awoke and I went to check on the final score of the game to find that Pittsburgh had made an amazing come-back then blown the game after taking a lead. As I was describing this to Sarah she mentioned that she was having trouble sleeping and a few minutes later she let me know that “this might be it”. So I timed the contractions with Sarah giving me mentions of potential vs. real contractions and they seemed to be about six minutes apart. We thought about calling J quickly to have her come as soon as possible but since she lives 45 minutes away in Worcester we thought it would be best to be certain that we were experiencing labor and not indigestion. Sarah was walking around since false labor apparently goes away with walking around. But after an hour of timing the contractions we were certain so Sarah called J and set the wheels in motion for the home birth.

J wasn’t the first person on the scene. The midwife in training, B, came first since she lives down the street from us. Now that I have experienced it twice I know that Sarah always wants deep sacrum pushes on her back to counteract pressure from the labor as much as possible. By the time B had arrived my thumbs were already numb from pushing on her back so I was relieved the B could help with that and I could give Sarah some moral support. I must admit that the midwives were better at both moral and physical support throughout the night so I tried to focus on what I am better equipped to handle – logistics.

So when J arrived we were in full swing and Sarah was undergoing some pretty heavy contractions. She was moving around the house from the living room to the bathroom near the kitchen. That was when the first logistics request was made to me. J said – “we need a flashlight”. That was when I realized that I was also going to be somewhat limited in the logistics department since the only flashlights we had were the clever charge them yourself with a crank kind that unfortunately only last about ten seconds if you haven’t been charging them with a crank for a half hour or so. So I was in the kitchen furiously trying to charge the flashlight I had with a crank and was ultimately told that it wasn’t that important since all J needed was to be able to look at her watch while timing the heart rate of the fetus on the Doppler sonar thing. So I gave-up on the flashlight until an hour later when J asked me if I had batteries for her flashlight and I happen to keep a lot of D batteries around since Madeline’s crib aquarium toy that used to be the only way she could keep herself asleep ate them like candy.

So following the flashlight incident along came K, the second midwife. K is very experienced and is the owner of the aqua-doula that we rented. By the time K had arrived, three or four hours after Sarah started labor Sarah was already in a full bathtub that I had drawn and carefully set the temperature to 100 degrees – so as to not mask or create a false fever. J and K counseled me that Sarah was pretty far along and the it takes about two hours to fill the bath which would probably be longer than the time for the labor to be complete. I recalled the trouble with “finishing” the labor last time with the cervix having a lip that needed to be pulled back by the doctor painfully hours later than Sarah would have liked it to happen so I made the executive decision that I would spend the time while Sarah labored on an engineering project to fill a big tub in our bedroom with 100 degree water.

Now the first challenge we had was that Madeline was sleeping in the bedroom. So we had to set-up this tub without waking her up and that meant doing it in the dark. This was easy enough for K but not so easy for me as a novice but we did get the thing assembled. We then turned on the water hose to find after the thing was about a quarter full that our water heater had run out of hot water. It was flowing cold winter water into the tub instead of the 100 degree water we needed. Since the tub has some heating element in it I figured we could use that but I was counseled that it mainly maintains a temperature rather than actually heating the tub to 100 degrees. So K gave me a tutorial on my water heater. She was impressed with the size of it but noted that it wasn’t able to pull off the job. There is a knob at the bottom of the water heater that establishes the heat of the water in it designed to avoid people from scalding themselves. It ranges from vacation to warm to HOT. Our heater was set near the bottom of warm so we tuned it closer to hot and waited for it to warm-up. But we still needed to add water and we were low on time. Sarah was 9 centimeters dilated so the project was looking like a waste of time.

But the recommendation from K was to use the “boiling water” technique to heat the tub. That technique is to put pots on the stove to boil water and add the hot water to the tub to warm the temperature. This is a good idea and assumes you often have home clam bakes with four full 15 gallon pots. We generally make spaghetti for four people every two months so our largest pot is not very impressive. But I did cover the stove with two frying pans full of water, our meager spaghetti pot, and a small pot used for sauce. Since this was not having much effect on the temperature of the water we also resorted to using the coffee maker to make pots of water with no grounds in the filter and microwaving water in plastic bowls.

At 5 AM Madeline awoke in the bedroom to the flurry of mad boiling water carrying and Sarah moaning in the bathroom and threw me into a bit of a panic. So I called my parents to let them know that they may be needed to watch Madeline. I then hung up on them figuring I could tell them exactly when I would need them to help. A half hour or so later Madeline was starting to become tricky to handle without becoming a full time activity downstairs away from Sarah so I called my parents to come over. Since I was having water boiling problems I also asked them to bring bigger pots and remembered that I also needed them to bring the spare King size sheet set since ours was likely to get pretty messy.

So Sarah labored on and a half hour later my parents arrived with the pots. Apparently they frequently host large clam bakes since they had plenty of gigantic pots. Together we were able to boil enough water to heat the tub to 97 degrees and they managed to watch Madeline. The inviting of my parents over had a chain reaction back to my sister and Dave. They were asked to walk the dogs at my parents house so they were around the corner. As Sarah labored during the morning they came over to help entertain Madeline downstairs for a while.

The aqua-doulah was in full swing and the tub in the bathroom where Sarah was laboring was getting cold despite our having thrown a couple of boiling pots of water into it. So we moved to the big tub so that Sarah and I both got into it. I was there for some moral support and rubbing her back to provide counter-pressure. Madeline wasn’t easily contained downstairs so when she walked in the door to the bedroom to see a “giant tub” she wanted to “take a tubbie”. We got her into the tub with us and she was enjoying splashing around. She wanted to jump up and down because the tub was so big but that sent shock-waves through the water causing it to splash out into the bedroom floor so that was discouraged. Eli also was fascinated by this and kept climbing into the room and peering into the tub to see what was going on. Later when Sarah was laboring on the bed he was banished to the basement for his annoying curiosity. Eventually Sarah was very uncomfortable and Madeline was trying to climb up onto her to have Sarah hold her so Madeline was banished down to play with my parents and sister. When Madeline later wanted to come-up she was quite insistent but was easily convinced that going downstairs to get 10 gummy bears would be a superior experience to seeing mommy again.

With the labor having moved along Sarah had some big challenges. She was dilated close to 10 centimeters but the baby wasn’t coming out. She didn’t feel the “urge to push” that you are supposed to. So the midwives asked her to do some pushing to move the labor forwards. She did the pushing but then the midwives checked her again and looked at each other perplexed at what they found. Their next piece of advice was to relax and rest since Sarah’s cervix was swelling and blocking the baby from coming out, because of the pushing. So Sarah went to take a half-sleep, half contraction laden rest. We found out later and they didn’t want to tell Sarah to discourage her was that after pushing for 30 minutes Sarah had gone from being 10 centimeters dilated to being 5 centimeters dilated.

I don’t recall exactly when this happened but one thought had been that Sarah’s water had never broken and that given how dilated she was that breaking the water which was bulging from the outside could cause the baby to find the right position to exit from. The midwives had trouble breaking the bag of waters but did eventually manage to do it.

At about 10:30 AM I called the Carvey’s to inform them that they should probably come over too given that the whole Housman clan was roaming the house and I had a hunch the baby might come in the next few hours. So downstairs a large crowd was gathering of family members and they were eating bagels and lox from Rosenfelds and donuts from Dunkin Donuts.

It was clear that Sarah was in a lot of pain and very frustrated and tired with the labor. She sat on the toilet and told J that she was ready for it to be all over and even asked J if it wasn’t too late to go to the hospital. J counseled her that we can always go to the hospital but once we do we can’t go back home and Sarah was happy to stay put for a little more effort. Sarah did some labor in the bed and then J mentioned that Sarah might find it less painful and stressful in the aquadoula. We had done some eating of eggs and toast after K cooked a dozen eggs and made toast for the weary crew and Sarah who had been up all night with the delivery.

The move to the aquadoula was considered to be the last option where most likely given Sarah’s exhaustion and frustration was at a level where after that I thought we would likely have to go to the hospital. Sarah mentioned that she just wanted it to finally be over. So Sarah and I got back into the tub. She labored for a while then started to feel like things had finally progressed.

She pushed out Zachary for three minutes while I was behind Sarah holding her. The intensity of the effort this time was much greater than for Madeline. With Madeline Sarah was calm when pushing her out. With Zachary she was screaming in pain letting out one very memorable primal scream as he finally came out. She referred to it as the overall labor being THE hardest thing she has done in her life and the pain of delivering Zachary as feeling like she was about to split in half.

The problem was made clear when Zachary arrived in the water. I was unable to see the exit because I was behind Sarah. The midwives let us know that Zachary arrived sunny side-up and to the side. This is technically a posterior acynclitic and is not a common home birth scenario. All babies do come out but posterior babies come out with their head in the opposite position from how the hips were designed to deliver them. So instead of having to dilate the cervix to 10 centimeters the cervix has to dilate to 12-15 centimeters. It also puts enormous pressure on the mother’s back. Had we gone into a hospital and they had run an ultrasound to find a baby in this position it is 90% that Zachary would have been born through a C-section.

But he wasn’t which was the best case since a C-section for Sarah because of her low platelets means being knocked unconscious with a tube down her throat and she was 100% opposed to that. So with Zachary out Sarah melted with joy and she cried a little with happiness as she held Zachary to her for the first time. Sarah announced to the midwives and me that it was OK for everyone to come upstairs to see the baby so my parents, my sister and Dave, and Sarah’s parents all arrived and surrounded the us to see the baby and congratulate Sarah.

Afterwards we celebrated with champagne but it was too hard to get everyone in the room at the same time with folks running around to do random errands but we did manage to sing happy birthday to Zachary once with Madeline helping to lead the song. Soon after while Sarah was recovering in the bed with Zachary - Lisa and Dave brought back an ice cream cake from JP Licks with a “Happy Birthday Zachary” written on it. We put a single frog candle on the cake and had Madeline blow it out (I helped a bit).

So I am so excited to welcome Zachary into the world. So far he has been an angel and Madeline, a two year old, appears in contrast to be a giant hand full of work to keep entertained, occupied, and to negotiate with.

I don’t believe in any form of immortality except for the genes I pass on and the memes in ideas and values that I show to the people that I influence. It is through Zachary and Madeline that I have an opportunity to make what I like best about myself, the ideas I believe in, and the people that I love to continue beyond my lifetime.