Hospital pick

Today I decided on a hospital for delivery. We had 2 choices - Riverside or Dublin - because they are both associated with my doctor. We planned to go to Riverside because it's a little closer and we were impressed with the place when Susie delivered there. However, Dublin opened just a year ago and people kept getting a glazed over look in their eye when describing it. One friend said, "Go to the glory." So, we decided to check it out.

We had a tour scheduled for Tuesday, but a blizzard started and the telephone receptionist said we could come on Saturday, so we decided not to then. I called back to reschedule and was informed that the tour was full and I couldn't go. The only obvious solution was to crash the tour, which I did.

The place is really small, it's bright, quiet, and comfortable. They have sleeper sofas in every room, and your primary care in maternity is done by a nurse-midwife. The labor & delivery rooms are a little bigger and nicer than the average patient room shown in the virtual tour video. Gone are the days of shared, cramped rooms!

Gooooaaaallll!

I was so bummed to have missed a fundraising goal for the first time. I kept telling myself that it wasn't that big of a deal. We got 99% of the goal, it's still an increase over 2007, the economy sucks... but I was still very bummed.

On Tuesday I found a missed entry in our fundraising database. So, you guessed it, we made the goal! Now I have to hope that there aren't other errors that push it back the other way, which I dreamt happened last night. I have less than a $500 buffer.

2009 isn't going to be easy, either, but I'm stubborn so charging ahead full steam.

New pics as promised

Hot times

So, we need a new furnace. It turns out that the old furnace, which we just tuned up and paid boucoup bucks to repair, is ruining the bricks in our house. It's venting through the chimney, cooling on it's way up, and then condensing moisture on the bricks. As a result, they are literally crumbling. This mostly happens on the second floor which is, you guessed it, the baby's room. So, we have to replace the furnace ASAP. The good news is that our new, more efficient furnace will pay for itself in efficiencies over a period of 4 years. We might be able to recoupe a little bit of the cost by selling the old one, since it still works perfectly well.

By the way, I'm 3 weeks and 2 days from d-day, which means 2 days from "full term." Pics to come soon.

Farewell humor

1 month left

My due date is less than a month away, on February 17th. First time births are typically 9 days late, so have a pretty wide window of when to expect the kid. Today we interviewed our first, and fortunately our last, pediatrician. He was perfect so we need to look no further. He's honest, straight-forward, listens, educates his patients, doesn't act like he knows all of the answers, has opinions, knows and likes my obstetrician (who I love), and comes highly recommended by someone I trust. What more do you need?

He answered our critical newborn questions, so I now feel like we're ready for the little one.

Jim and company (thank you Adam, Stacey, Chris, and Carol!) just finished repainting our house, so it no longer looks like a circus tent. We'll post pics once we have the furniture moved back to the walls.

A love song

The things no one tells you about pregnancy

When mothers talk about pregnancy to women who are expecting or contemplating getting pregnant they tend to use terms like magical, wonderful, instinctual. For some reason when people talk in public about pregnancy they neglect to mention a few minor details about the 9 months before the birth. Mind you what I'm talking about here is not the actual birth but gestation.

So here goes:

1.) Morning sickness is a total misnomer, it's not restricted to morning. Further it's not limited to vomiting, it entails the whole body experience.

2.) As it turns out your arms do not grow with your belly hence you will struggle to complete basic tasks when your belly is an extra foot further out. (i.e. you cannot reach the sink, try squeezing into a tight bathroom stall).

3.)You will need two extra sets of clothes (maternity clothes). You need one set for the first couple of months when you are only slightly larger and then another for when you are really big.

4.)Okay now lets talk about sleeping. First you have to get up every couple hours to use the toilet (much less room for your organs in there). What people neglect to mention is the hip pain. You will be shocked to learn that when your hips are spreading out (a natural process when you are preparing to give birth) you will have hip pain. Further, what may not be so obvious is this will cause you a ton of discomfort when you sleep at night. You need to turn over every hour or so. Turning over when you have another human in your belly turns out to be quite a process. You have to move your body pillows, your partner, the family pets, and then you get to try to fall back asleep.

5.) No one tells you about stretching the perenium, enough said!

6.) Everyone has experienced late night lag cramps. Now imagine trying to jump out of bed in the middle of the night when you are 30 lbs heavier.

Seriously I have no idea how single moms do it! And I'm even the pregnant one!

Unlce jay explains the news

Reverend Jim

So at age 35 I have finally entered the world of alphabet soup. Though unlike most who have earned the right to put an acronym behind their name I simply had to click a button on a web page. As of a month ago I became a reverend with the Universal Church of Life. I joined the ranks of the clergy in order to marry one of my closet friends. Last weekend I spent the weekend in NYC performing the marriage of my good friends Molly Findlay and Steve Perez. An act I could not have been more nervous for. If it wasn't for the ceremony being broken up by readings my shaking hands might have made the balcony we were standing on vibrate.

The ceremony was quite fun at the end of the day, not to mention it was my first public speaking gig since working on Das's failed County Supervisor campaign. I always like public speaking, and I have to admit given the opportunity I would do another ceremony. I wonder if it would be as fun if I didn't know the bride and groom for more than 5 years?

Molly and Steve deserve a lot of props for pulling this wedding off on short notice. The combination of Steve taking forever to propose and an unexpected terminal illness in their family they only had 2 months to put the wedding together (Can you imagine!). The ceremony was held at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe at 126 Crosby St on the Lower East Side (I may have neighborhood wrong?), a store which donates 100% of it's profits to AIDS research. Other than the Jagermeister at the Bachelor/Bahelorette party everything went smoothly.

Shipwrecks

This is where we used to go surfing every spring (haven't been in a few years)

The name game

Since holiday and baby season are upon us, I thought I'd take a moment to answer the various name questions that have come up recently.

My name is still Jodi Segal. I did not change it when we got married. Jim is also still Jim Taylor. If you want to address a formal letter, I recommend Mr. Jim Taylor and Ms. Jodi Segal.

The baby will take Jim's last name. Segal will be her middle name. So, her full name will be Violet Segal Taylor. It's not likely, but still possible, that she is actually a he. In that case, we'll have to come up with something beside Violet pretty quickly!

Bathroom Ceiling

After 6 months of carefully tiptoeing on ceiling joists, Jim finally put his foot through the brand new bathroom ceiling...

Now it matches the new downstairs hallway ceiling. We had to hire an electrician to fix a boo boo and he ended up cutting a hole in the ceiling that we actually paid someone to replace.

At least you can see the newly refinished wood frames around the windows. The kitchen will have the same wood around the 1 window and 4 doors. What you can't see very well is that the primer didn't stick to the walls, so the pait is peeling off in big chunks.

29 weeks down, 11 to go

I made Jim take a couple of photos, so I wouldn't have crazy person hair like the previous pic!

Maddyisms

You can frequently find our 60 pound dog barking and growling at her basket of toys. For some reason she is afraid of the basket and afraid of the air return next to the basket. If you move the basket or dump out the toys, then she digs through them until she finds what she wants and goes about her merry way. I can't imagine what is going through her head!

Her other amusing habit these days is sticking her head in the corner by the kitchen sink in hopes that food will appear there. It doesn't matter if we are doing dishes, preparing food, or just standing around. If we are near that spot, her face is buried in the corner.

The Great Flydidni

Santa Barbara on fire

Huge forest fire rages in Santa Barbara and Montecito.

100 houses burned so far and 5,400 people evacuated.  We know a couple of people who have lost their homes.  As far as we know, none of our friends have lost their homes yet.

Edit:
As it turns out at least one friend's house burnt down, Jeremy Lindaman lost his entire house. This photo was on the cover of the New York Times.

And then there were 3

Today is a very sad day at the Segal-Taylor household. Today we lost Kitty. He was 16 years old. He was born in either Massachusetts or Rhode Island, I can't remember. Either way, he ended up living in both states. I got him in November 1996 in Boston. We moved to California in 1999 where we were joined by Sweetie. The two of them were my companions through the divorce. Jim & I doped up the cats for a week and drove them, with our moms, to Ohio two years ago. Maddy came along last August and then we got Batman in June to perk up Kitty. We thought that a kitten would give him something to keep him busy, which it did.

He had the same looks and personality as Garfield - fat orange tabby, surly, pushy, and lovable. Just this morning he was trying to claim my breakfast as his own.

He had lost more two-thirds of his body weight, so the kindest thing we could do for him was to put him down. The vet said that there's no way that he's not in pain. It's just like an adult human weighing 60 pounds.

This picture was taken in March. Sweetie is on the left and Kitty is on the right. They are enjoying their second favorite activity, after food, which is laying on the heat register.

I miss you already, Kitty.

Daycare

We registered for daycare this week at a place called Little Dreamers, Big Believers.  We toured 3 diferent places and knew as soon as we walked in that this was the place for us.

They are very small and have 3 infants per teacher.  They teach baby yoga, baby sign language, feed organic food, and seem to really engage with the kids in a personal way that wasn't apparent at the other sites.

Being a small facility they are more flexible to tailor the care to the child than the corporate chains or larger places.   For example, we asked about cloth diapers at the first place and they said that they require disposables.  The second place said they can do it, but really, really don't want to because it's a big hassle.  This place said, half of our kids use cloth. It's easy - all we have to do is have a separate pail and the parents take them home.  Woo hoo!