As I’ve previously mentioned, I went to a Christian college. I was dating a nice Christian boy by the third month of my freshman year. I was friends with a married junior/senior (when I was freshman/sophomore) girl named Lisa, and I remember her advice: “If you’re NOT going to Wait, put off getting married until it’s practical. If you ARE going to Wait, get married early.”

My parents approved of this advice. I got married halfway through my junior year of college. I turned 20 in time for the wedding.

Here was our first practical problem: we were both full-time students at a Christian college. We could get excellent health care through the Student Health Center for practically nothing—but they wouldn’t prescribe birth control: it was a Christian college, and if you prescribe for SOME students, where do you draw the line? It’s a slippery slope. So even married students couldn’t get birth control. But we didn’t have full-time jobs, nor were we still under our parents’ care, so we didn’t have any other options for health insurance.

I went to Planned Parenthood, because we’d heard they charged based on how much money we made. I worked part-time in the library and my husband worked part-time for the department he was majoring in, and so I paid something small, something like $40, which we could just barely afford, for the exam that checked me for breast cancer and Internal Feminine Cancers, and then I paid $5/month for birth control pills to keep me from getting pregnant before we’d finished our education.

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Fast-forward to late 2001. My husband and I had two children ages infant and nearly 3 years, and my husband lost his job: his company’s main client was in the World Trade Center. With the lost job, of course, went our health insurance. I got a full-time job, but my earning power was low: I made $8/hour. At that income level, our family qualified for free government health insurance for the children, so we took it. Because I was working for $8/hour, Paul and I didn’t qualify.

If we’d had another baby during this time, I and the baby would have been covered completely by the government. This was not a desirable state of life for us, despite the benefits, but my OB/GYN wouldn’t prescribe the Pill without an office visit, and an office visit was significantly more than we could afford. So I went to Planned Parenthood.

Again, they decided our payment based on our income. They checked me for breast cancer and various Internal Female Cancers, and I paid $10/month for birth control pills. It would have been cheaper if I’d gotten pregnant and let the government pay for our lives, but that wasn’t the way we wanted to play it.

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Paul is a contractor for a company that does government work, so if there is a government shut-down, Paul is out of a job. Because he’s a contractor, he’s not eligible for reimbursement when the bickering is over.

May I impose upon your time and squeeze from you a moment of sympathy? Because my pap test, which I left 6 months overdue because of phone phobia -slash- scheduling hopelessness, and then had a HORRIBLE conversation with a receptionist that led to me making the appointment with a doctor other than the one I wanted, as if I didn’t PLENTY dread the appointment already—THAT same appointment led to a test that had “insufficient cells for analysis” and I have to have A DO-OVER PAP TEST. I am not even kidding. And, as the doctor I didn’t want (who turned out to be okay, but THAT IS NOT EVEN THE POINT) said, I “do not seem like a woman who has five children.” That is, THIS IS A VERY UNCOMFORTABLE TEST FOR SOMEONE WHO HAS HAD ONLY C-SECTIONS.

Thank you. I appreciate your sympathy/pity. Thank you. Yes. Keep it coming. Thank you so much.

Speaking of that general area of the body, I have had Baby Sadness today, a particularly bad spike of it. I told Paul that it seemed pretty dim that just when I would feel like I couldn’t manage/appreciate the five I had, and just as I wished we could flash-forward five years and be done with some of this crap, that I would be plagued by Baby Cravings. And Paul said no, it made sense to him: that when our current children were being all smelly and unpleasant and disobedient, it seemed appropriate I would crave a nice fresh newborn. (His eyes were kind of damp too, I’ll note. He’s not as crazy about the newborn stage as I am, but he is very fond of the Post-Newborn Baby stage.)

I’m so grateful that some of you are expecting babies. It helps so much. I know that some people, when experiencing Baby Sadness, resent pregnant people—-but I, probably because I have FIVE CHILDREN OMG THAT IS TOO MANY CHILDREN FOR RESENTMENT IN ANY FORM, feel comforted: it gives me a feeling of “There will still be new babies and new-baby happiness and new-baby excitement, even if they are not MY babies.”

Speaking of whatever we were speaking of and how it applies to this next topic, I don’t know which of you recommended the book Geek Love, but whoever it was did a really short review along the lines of “I can’t even describe this book but it blew my mind and you should read it.” That is how I feel about it as well. I can’t even describe it—or at least, not without totally misleading you. It blew my mind.

(image from Amazon.com)

I finished reading it the day before yesterday, so I’m far enough away from it to safely say I really, really liked it. And yet—it is the sort of book I would be reluctant to recommend. It reminded me of when Paul and I watched the movie Up with my parents, and all four of us were first all weepy (okay, TWO of us were weepy), and then we were all WTF?? and then we were laughing, and then back to WTF?? and so on. We had NO IDEA where that movie was going. Same with Geek Love: it had computer-geek font on the cover and computer-geek orangey-yellow on the cover, but IT IS NOT ABOUT THE COMPUTER KIND OF GEEK. And I don’t even know if I recommend it to you or not. I leave it as the reviewer I read left it, which was basically, “I can’t even describe this book, just read it.” [Edited to add: Okay, this is interesting. We have documentation (comments section) that this post from Hilarity in Shoes is what caused me to add the book to my library list. And yet, that’s not the review I’m thinking of.]

Elizabelle posted today about elevator dreams and I got all excited because I have SO MANY elevator dreams. So many! They’re ALWAYS stressful dreams: I can’t find the right elevator, or it takes me to the wrong place, or it’s broken, or I can’t find / figure out the buttons, or whatever.

I also have a recurring “Finding a room I didn’t know we had” dream. These are ALWAYS good dreams, good enough that I feel sad when I wake up and we DON’T have an extra room. Sometimes the extra room is a whole BUNCH of extra rooms: I open a door and there’s a whole WING, a whole HOUSE WORTH of rooms to explore.

I used to have the “finding money” dream, where I’d see a quarter in the sand by the side of the road, and hey, under it is a dime, and now I see another quarter and two more dimes, and OH MAN there is a RICH VEIN of coinage here! I haven’t had that one in ages.

Unpleasantly often I dream that I’m having a confrontation with someone, and I get so angry I start trying to hit them but my arms are too weak to manage it, which makes me even angrier and also I’m crying with frustration and also I’m feeling awful about trying to hit them and shocked at my impropriety.

I frequently have “packing” dreams, where I need to pack for a trip or for an emergency or for a move, and I just can’t get organized and the time to leave is getting closer and closer. These are usually stress dreams, but sometimes can be pleasant if I’m more organized and having some success with the task.

I can’t remember where it was, but recently someone wrote something about how you have school dreams for “a few years” after leaving school—but I left school fifteen years ago and it’s still one of my most common dream themes. Usually it’s the “can’t figure out my schedule, can’t remember what class to go to next or where the classroom is, can’t find my locker” variety. Once I reassured myself upon waking from a particularly drawn-out and unpleasant example of the genre that if ever such a thing DID happen, of course I could just go to the school office and they’d help. So then the next time I had the dream, I remembered that—and I couldn’t find the school office, and when I DID find it no one was at the desk. Thank you, brain, for kicking that comforting thought out from under me!

I’ve been playing Sims again, and MY GOODNESS I would like to re-recommend this game to anyone anticipating a baby, because it was one of the reasons I survived post-partum: it gets you in the mindset of improving overall mood by doing whatever is possible (e.g., even just PEEING helps considerably), and it reinforces the drops IN the bucket idea. I’ve found it useful even now, when I’m not post-partum but HAVE been in a bit of a MOOD. Playing Sims again has made me start thinking in terms of “little things that will make me feel overall better.” If I’m starting to kick the cats (NOTE: I do not really kick the cats) or yell at the children (NOTE: Er…), I have a little snack and then I clean up one small thing and then I get a drink of water and then I spend a little time reading a magazine, and gradually the diamond over my head is greening up.

Speaking of buckets (it was like mid-paragraph), I’m so glad to see the summer toys back in stock at Target, because we needed a new Barf Bucket and those are hard to find off-season. I got a nice colorful pail for I think two dollars, and this time I put it up high so no one would use it upside-down as a step stool -slash- launching platform, which is what happened to our previous Barf Bucket. These beach-toy pails also make good Easter baskets or egg-hunt buckets: they’re several times sturdier than the plastic Easter pails sold one section over.

Yesterday my mom and I were out and I decided I needed a new shirt, so I tried on a dozen. I found one I liked, but it had a hole in it and there weren’t any others. I found another I liked, but it was cotton weave and it was belted, and I don’t know if I would wear a belted shirt after living through the 1980s. All the rest were depressing: why are SO MANY plus-sized shirts designed for OLDER LADIES? I am aware of the whole “gaining weight with age” idea, but surely we are all also aware of “being that weight to begin with”? So shouldn’t there be a RANGE of shirts, some designed for old ladies and some designed for…I guess “young” wouldn’t be quite the word anymore, but YOUNGER ladies? Being plumpish doesn’t mean I want sequins and big distracting patterns and those drapey little sleeves and everything in rayon. And some of them were even “juniors plus” so they were INTENDED for young fashionable girls and yet they STILL looked like Golden Girls. What I wanted was the cute shirts I saw in the “misses” sizes, but LARGER.

Sam Harris on the lack of need for the word “atheism”: “Nearly everyone rejects Zeus, Thor, Isis, along with the countless other dead gods of antiquity, and yet no one feels the need to name this condition of unbelief.” I liked the sound of that until I realized this: “theism” means the belief in ANY god, not ALL gods—so an “atheist” would mean specifically someone who doesn’t believe in a single one of them, as opposed to someone who, as typical for a theist, believes in one god or a certain group of gods, but not the others. There isn’t a need to “name the condition of unbelief” of those who disbelieve in specific ones of the available gods, because that’s already got a word, which is “theist.” It makes sense to me that if pretty much everyone who believes in a god or gods believes in some but not all gods, that we WOULD want a specific word for someone who believes in none of them.

But his point stands even if I think it wasn’t well-illustrated by that particular example. He goes on to say that we don’t have special words to indicate our lack of belief in most other things. I don’t believe in horoscopes, but no one makes me identify myself as an anti-astrologist, and no one asks what horoscope-related trauma caused me to give up my faith in horoscopes. Did I perhaps have a bad experience with people who DID believe in horoscopes? Do I realize that horoscopists aren’t perfect, just predictable? I should try THEIR newspaper’s horoscope, because if I was trying some OTHER newspaper’s horoscope, of COURSE I didn’t feel like it was for me. Etc. Nor do I have to call myself a non-vegetarian non-Gemini non-doctor.

Having a word that means “not-that” helps give the impression that “that” is what’s normal and right—as opposed to “that” being an addition to the standard model. Better to have words for “plain” and “plain plus the religion option,” rather than to have words for “plain plus religious” and “plain plus religious but minus the religious.” Better to have “hamburger” and “cheeseburger,” rather than “cheeseburger” and “cheeseburger without cheese.”

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As I do each year, I have a sticky note on my computer monitor with “APRIL FOOLS’ DAY” written on it. Otherwise (or perhaps I should say “Even so”) I tend to fall for things, like the year I believed the most popular rock station in our college city was changing to an all-polka format. Or the year I believed Google had started a dating service, which I STILL think was an AWESOME IDEA. (Did you see this year’s Google prank?)

Every year I hope not to fall for a fake pregnancy announcement: I’d get so happy and excited, and the disappointment of finding out it wasn’t true would be so awful. So far I haven’t fallen for one, but I did fall for one on a non-April-1 day when a Facebook friend did the “I’m expecting!!” joke where the punchline is “…snow!,” so I got a sample of what that feels like (“really good followed by really bad”).

I have a little cold, and if I thought the universe was a sentient prissy jerk (and that I myself wasn’t part of that same universe, a la “There’s only one everything”), I would theorize that this cold was my payback for being happy about my good test results from my physical: nice low cholesterol, everything normal with thyroid and blood sugar and so forth—I don’t really know everything they tested, but they made a whole bouquet of little bottles when they were drawing blood, and everything was normal/low/high where applicable. So, in good health for now according to the standard markers, though heading for the time of life where we all start getting things and it’s a matter of what do we get in THE DRAW.

I also had my first mammogram. If you are a little nervous about your first mammogram, as I was, I will tell you how to get a good idea what it’s like. Go into your kitchen, or I guess it doesn’t have to be YOUR kitchen but I do recommend it for privacy reasons. Take off your shirt and bra. Then take one mammo, and lean it into the open freezer, or refrigerator if you are shorter or have one of those freezer-on-the-bottom fridges—whatever’s at the right height for you.

Now you are going to start to close the door, slowly. You will need to reach in and pull/stretch the mammo into the fridge or freezer pretty firmly, or else it’ll just pop out as you close the door. You know that unflattering “orange in a sock” image people use? The orange should be fully into the fridge, with the door closing on only sock. You are right if you’re suddenly thinking that the “orange in a sock” analogy never really worked, and that this can’t work either and the orange will HAVE to be squashed.

Continue closing the door until you are ALMOST in pain: you should have a slight panicky feeling about impending pain, combined with an impulse to pull yourself out of the situation, combined with the strong feeling that pulling back at this time would lead to a worse feeling. There will also be a scraping feeling as the edge of the door travels tightly across the skin surrounding the mammo. Now hold still. Hold still, hold still, hold still—30 seconds. Open the door. Whew! Do it once more on this side, then twice on the other side. Done!

It was not as bad as I’d feared, though I was glad as usual to have been pessimistic and anxious about it, if only for that delightful “Hey, THAT wasn’t so bad!” feeling afterward.

My mom took the little kids for a couple of hours this morning, and after I dropped them off at her house I drove from there to have my bloodwork and peework done, which I realize is not the MOST exciting way to spend some child-free time, but on the other hand it is super nice not to have children knocking into trays of sterile tubes/needles.

Anyway, so this is just to explain why I was driving past my own house, and when I DID drive past my own house I saw a Suspicious White Van parked across the street, with some guy Taking Notes while looking at my house, so I got all anxious—until I saw it was a van for a home security company, and the guy was in uniform, and he wasn’t looking at my house, he had just responsibly pulled over to take a cell phone call. But this gave me such a good marketing idea for home security companies: sit around in unmarked vans looking Suspicious. Better yet, since you’re sitting there pretending to track people’s schedules for robbery purposes, you could use that time to actually track their schedules; then, break in when no one’s home: don’t take anything, just dump out a bunch of drawers and sweep the mail pile off the counter and make a scary mess. They’d call for an alarm system right away! Well, and I guess they might not call YOUR company, but perhaps some sort of arrangement could be made with other home security companies and the calls would even out.

Or possibly that’s a terrible idea. It was FASTING bloodwork and then I got a large coffee afterward.

For some reason, perhaps because of the words “terrible idea,” this reminds me of the children and how they’re in difficult stages right now. You know how there’s that time when you have a newborn, and the newborn goes to sleep at your bedtime or even AFTER your bedtime so you feel like you just never, ever, EVER have any time that you’re not feeding or holding or comforting a baby, and after you finally put the baby down it’s only to climb into bed and you know you’ll be awakened to immediately pick up the baby again, and the cycle of your days seems endless and exhausting? And then the newborn starts gradually going to bed earlier and earlier so that FIRST you actually have some time to brush and floss without having to hand the baby to someone else, and THEN it starts being you have a good half hour to refill your water cup for the next day or to open a baby gift, and THEN it’s like a full hour and you start to feel like WHEEE SOME FREE TIME, and then the baby starts going to bed at 7:00 and you think “OMG I HAVE MY LIFE BACK”?

Well, it is going in the opposite direction now, is my point. Our two oldest are staying up later and later, and unfortunately they are not yet to the stage of life where we’re so lame they can hardly stand to be in the same house with us unless they have headphones to block us out, so instead they are yammering yammering yammering at us all evening. And we DO appreciate this time with them, but we would ALSO appreciate some time to look at a computer or television or book or magazine WITHOUT having our attention jerked away EVERY TEN SECONDS JUST LIKE THE ENTIRE REST OF THE DAY.

I get up at about 5:40 a.m., and there is ALWAYS at least one child up before 6:00, and more often three. So at 8:00 that night, fourTEEN hours later, I am really really really really DONE with dealing with children. And yet it’s still half an hour until the two big kids go to bed. And by the time we’re done with “Did you brush your teeth?” “Oh yeah, I forgot” and tucking in and so forth, it’s more like 8:45. And we go to bed at 10:00, so that means it’s one hour until it’s time to floss. Oh, sure, one hour is nice! I mean, that’s the WHEEEE SOME FREE TIME marker when there’s a newborn. But because we’re going the other direction, it feels like the walls are closing in rather than finally giving way a bit, and I’m starting to GET BACK some of that “My life is an endless cycle of drudgery and exhaustion” feeling that can happen at bedtime when a person is tired and cranky and didn’t get to read her book.

Some of this can/could be solved by the very solutions that are springing to your mind as you read this. We could make them start getting ready for bed a little earlier so that we are DONE tucking them in at 8:30. We could consider earlier bedtimes, and maybe they could read in bed instead of being up with us—but they are 10 and 12 now, and they already read in bed after 8:30, and 8:30 seems like a reasonable bedtime. I suppose we could tell them they could only stay upstairs if they were perfectly silent and talked neither to us nor to each other nor to the cats. The main issue here is not that things need to be changed, it’s that we have children in an awkward stage as far as our free time is concerned—a stage that, as with those early newborn weeks, I hope will naturally adjust until we have a more pleasing quantity of free time again.

With the long train of children we have, this may take some time: just as the older two start wanting to spend their time wearing earphones and/or mooning around in their rooms instead of talking with their parents and getting all giddy and unpleasant, the younger three will be needing later bedtimes than their current 7:00. Already Elizabeth would be ready for a later bedtime: she’s always awake until after 8:30, reading in her room because we can’t think of any fair way to give her a later bedtime without giving the same to Edward—Edward who has dark undereye circles at about 5:00 in the afternoon and who falls asleep by 7:01. (We’ve thought of doing it all sneaky-like by waiting until he falls asleep and then letting her stay up, but that doesn’t work for us: the other kids can’t be trusted not to spill it.)

So really this is like when you complain to a guy, and he starts trying to solve it and you say “No, no, don’t try to fix it, I just wanted to tell you about it and complain a little.” Which is not to say a “Here’s how we solved it!” would be unwelcome, if you DID solve it and if it doesn’t involve moving to a different house where everyone gets his or her own room.

1. Distributing Children’s Vitamins

If you hand out children’s vitamins that vary in color/shape within the bottle, and if you have the problem we have, which is of children clamoring for a specific shape/color and/or of all the children wanting the same shape/color so that that shape/color gets used up first, I will tell you how I solved this problem: I shake vitamins out into my hand, and the very first MATCHING SET I get is the vitamin everyone gets. I don’t think this would work as well if all five were on the same vitamin, but the littles have one type and the bigs have another so it works great. The vitamins we use are ones that vary in color but not in shape, so I shake out vitamins into my hand until I get two purples or two oranges or two pinks, and then that’s what the bigs get. Then I do the same for the littles: I shake out vitamins until I get three that match. This stops the “OOO OOO, can I have orange??” and also stops the problem of them eating all the orange ones and then complaining about it until 66 vitamins later when we open a new bottle. It also takes the blame off me: hey, it’s FATE that decides today’s vitamin color, not ME. (I could also just shake out one vitamin at a time and say that’s the vitamin that child gets, but this led to “NO FAIR, he ALWAYS gets orange!!”)

2. Peeing Without a Stepstool

If you have a small boy who needs to use a public restroom and only wants to do it standing up but also still needs a step stool, try having him stand on your feet: you stand at the toilet as if YOU were the boy who was about to get to pee without the Public Toilet Seat squeamishness issue even entering into things, and then have him stand on your feet. This still won’t be enough for smaller small boys, but works for the ones who need a little boost. And you don’t have to stand there dangling a child in the air over the toilet while your arm muscles complain.

3. Inexpensive Non-Leaking Children’s Lunchbox Bottles

I’ve tried a bunch of different reusable lunchbox bottles and they ALL LEAK. I have been SO FRUSTRATED. Then I thought, “…Hey. These reusable bottles are sold empty. But little bottles of water and juice are sold FULL: they CAN’T leak, or the transportation/stocking issues would be a nightmare.” I first bought the little 8-ounce bottles of bottled water, and they DIDN’T LEAK. But they were also made of thin, easily squashed/crumpled plastic. So then I bought these:

(photo from the Amazon.com listing, where they
probably cost a million dollars when in stock)

They’re Mott’s 8-ounce apple juices, and I buy these at Target, though only two of my three within-driving-distance Targets carry them. They cost about $4 for an 8-pack, which is more than I’d want to pay for a disposable product (for field trips I send juice boxes), but think of them as an 8-pack of reusable lunch box bottles, only 50 cents each (which is what our school system charges for a carton of milk, which is what inspired me to start this whole quest). I peel off the paper label and I write the child’s name on the bottle and the lid in permanent marker, to make it clearer to school staff that the bottle is meant to be reused. The bottles are surprisingly sturdy and they don’t leak. (We’ve had occasional problems this year with the twins, because they don’t always get the concept of the screw-top needing to be threaded correctly, in which case of course the bottles WILL leak.) The kids reuse them until they lose them: in several years of using these, I’ve only had one bottle taken out of commission for breaking, and it was the lid that cracked.

Boy, writing all my stressies to you guys definitely helped me reduce the list. Well, and also it’s several days later now, so some of those things were solved by the passing of time. But MOSTLY YOU.

1. I had my physical/pap/Tdap, which I hated but then it was over. Now I have to go get a mammogram, my first, which makes me feel like I’m getting old. I also have to get bloodwork and peework done. So I’m not done yet, but the part I really dreaded is over, and it’s a relief to be getting these things tested and/or taken care of. And she didn’t lecture me about my weight, which is one of the fears that makes me reluctant to go to the doctor.

2. I made the call to the vet about Mouse’s Final Appointment, and I’d hoped I wouldn’t cry on the phone but I did, and I’d hoped I wouldn’t choke up to the point of being unable to speak but I did, and I’d hoped I wouldn’t make an inappropriate joke about how it would be nice if a cat had one of those pop-up turkey timers that would let you know when it was Time To Make The Final Appointment but I did, and it nevertheless went fine. I reminded myself afterward that this is a routine part of the vet’s job, and that she too probably worries about how to handle these phone calls: how much sympathetic talk and how much practical, saying too much or saying too little, knowing whether or not to talk when someone else is choking up. The appointment is tomorrow morning, and it will be fine. Mouse has been a good cat, and it’s hard to let a good cat go—but on the other hand she’s also been peeing all over my new carpet, which makes it a little easier.

Poor old thing
(there’s a heating pad tucked into the towel)

3. My mother assured me that although there is indeed a frustratingly large financial impact from their recent medical drama, it’s not as bad as I’d feared (I’d been under the mistaken impression that one entire hospital stay would not be covered), and they are able to handle it, and it just means I won’t be able to buy an indoor lap pool with a future inheritance.

So if you’re wondering what to get me for Christmas…

4. I told Paul I couldn’t face calling the car place again, so he stopped by there on his way home from work, and they told him they’d found the problem, and the part has been ordered and should be here tomorrow, and the car should be ready by tomorrow afternoon, and we won’t be charged for any of it.

5. I’m trying to do a small house-reorganization thing each day, and not get overwhelmed by how big The Whole Project is. Today I cleared all the junk off the bureau in our room, putting it where it actually belonged (most of it was stuff from the previous room). That meant I could get my jewelry boxes out of the dining room and into our room, which reduced (1) the mess in the dining room, (2) the mess in our room, and (3) some of the living-out-of-suitcases feeling.