Cynical Mom

Why I will never like Pulp Fiction

It's really not Pulp Fiction's fault. PF couldn't help what happened between us.

Some friends and I went to a theater to see Billy Madison [I don't recall the exact reason why - they were male friends, and I think it had something to do with a white t-shirt, a certain actress, and a fountain that may or may not have had water in it].

Pulp Fiction was playing in the room next to ours, so we decided to sneak in to see this movie we'd heard so much about.

It was the beginning of the gimp scene.

Not the best way to get an introduction to a movie, shall we say?

Where are all the women bloggers at?

...Hrm, somehow that title is not as funny on this blog (which I unfortunately must admit qualifies as a 'mommy blog', ugh[1]). It was killer on my tech-focused work blog, trust me.

Aaaaanyway, I decided after reading about the wonderful time so many bloggers that I read had at BlogHer '05 (and how there will be educational & networking opportunities to help me in my job) that I wanted to go to BlogHer '06. So I bought a ticket today.

Anyone else going?

[1] "Books written by women are called chick lit. Books written by men are called books."

Right, right, it's the oxytocin system, sure

I've often read about how the % of mothers still breastfeeding decreases significantly over the first few months (from ~70% at birth to 36% at 6 months to 18% at one year) [1]. Given that I'm all about "whatever works for mom" when it comes to feeding babies, my interest in this number is not concern for the babies who aren't getting breastmilk after a certain age, but for the many moms who want to continue breastfeeding but find it too difficult once they return to work, due to unsupportive working environments[2].

I just stumbled on this article that claims:

"However one major reason why women stop breastfeeding is low weight gain and growth rate of their baby," Steven L. Bealer of the University of Utah points out.

Riiiiight. Leading to a groundbreaking conclusion of:

"if the efficiency of the oxytocin system can be improved, perhaps it will encourage mothers to lengthen how long they breast feed their children."

Dude... come on. It is SO not the oxytocin system. Go find something useful to study, like the flow rate of ketchup. Come to think of it, bring these guys who think the increasing obesity rates are a result of a virus with you.[3]

[1] For some reason, the idea of the CDC having goals for breastfeeding rates in 2010 amuses me. I think they should have a scorecard, and report on their progress at a monthly status meeting in front of their vice president.
[2] And the fact that breastfeeding while working is a TOTAL PAIN IN THE ASS.
[3] OK I admit the data described in that article seems mildly interesting, but I just have to love our eternal optimism as a society that we can find some magic pill to fix our weight problems that are of course caused by something other than how we eat too much, too often and don't move very much.[4]
[4] And I am fully guilty of all three offenses.

Plotting

Girl's Gone Child recently blogged about her son not crawling yet and got the expected spate of "Don't worry, kids grow at their own rates" comments (I nearly added one myself).

Jared didn't start scooting until 9m (in the most adorable army-crawl) and didn't really get far until 10m. And then he didn't take his first steps until 14m with actual predictable walking happening around 16m. All along I worried about it, was my boy slow, blah blah blah can you tell I'm a first-time parent blah blah.

Fast forward a couple of years, we're doing this whole thing over again. Audrey's about to turn a whopping three months, and I'm already starting to plot on how I can keep her from becoming mobile until she's ready for kindergarten.

I've covered most of our floors with a super-slick covering so that she won't even discover that such a thing exists as traction, much less master it herself. I'm going to be binding her legs together as soon as she shows the first sign of mobility so that she can learn from the beginning that Mama Don't Want Her Babies To Move, They Need To Stay Small Forever And Not Grow Up. And because I can already tell she's a genius and will figure out some way of mermaid-on-land-squirming that will make her semi-mobile even with the binding, I'm going to add weights to the binds and some industrial hook-and-loop fastener so that I can stick her to the carpet, couch and select places on the walls.

The first time around with parenting, I really didn't know what I was doing. This time, I've got it all figured out.

Do you *get* me? Do you get *you*?

My husband's taking a course at work, and tonight he brought some homework for me to do for his course. He handed me a thick stack of cards with various values on them (Knowledge, Excellence, Clarity, Uniqueness, Diversity, etc). First I had to sort them into three piles - very important, somewhat important, not important. Next I had to go through the "Very Important" stack and pick out the top six values that were most important to him. Then I went through the "Not Important" stack and picked out the six that were least important to him. Then we compared lists, since he had already gone through this exercise for himself during the class.

A coworker who took this course a while ago told me that in his class, some of his peers' wives had put 'family' in the top six for their husbands, and none of the husbands had included it. I remembering thinking about this situation and wondering what the core problem was... did the wives really not know their husbands' values? Were the husbands acting out a role without valuing it that highly? Did the husbands not want to list a "sappy" value in their top six in front of their working peer group? Or were there just too many cards?

What we learned from doing this exercise is that I know him very well (which begs the question, is "Understanding" something that he values highly? :-). Although we didn't have everything exactly the same, it was quite close, and as we discussed them we realized that where our answers diverged, we often meant the same thing but chose two slightly different words to represent it (such as "Knowledge" vs "Wisdom").

It was an interesting exercise to go through, both for self-awareness as well as seeing how someone close to you perceives you. Plus, it has led us to some good discussions, for example: "Which do you value more highly, honesty or intelligence?".

Apparently he's not so bright

My sister: "Jared, you sure are bright!"
Jared: "No! I not bright. I smart."

I am only "minimally odd"

At least, according to my dermatologist. I had a mole removed this week, and they found some "odd cells" in it, but they were "minimally odd", apparently called "minimal melanocytic atypia". Melanocytes are the cells that make the pigment melanin.

The oddness was fully contained in the lesion removed, so I don't have to go back in unless I see any new moles. But given that my sister had melanoma removed a couple of years ago (I'm ashamed to say it took me this long to get around to seeing a dermatologist), I am now on mole alert stage red.

For anyone else who wants to know how to spot a "suspicious mole", here is a tutorial with pictures (and here's another) and some information on how to do a skin self-exam.

I'm it

Or, so my sista says. Rather than hurt her fragile, delicate feelings (duck), I shall obey her wishes:

Four jobs you've had 1. Program manager on a rockin' email server 2. Tester on a rockin' email client 3. Data entry chick at too many places to count 4. Ice cream slinger at baskin robbins	Four movies you'd watch over and over 1. Top Secret 2. Ali G In Da House 3. Eurotrip 4. Office Space
Four places you've lived 1. Seattle (OK OK, the suburbs) 2. Shampoo Banana (Champaign-Urbana) 3. Quezon City, The Philippines 4. Glen Hellyn (really it wasn't so bad, the H is just a habit now)	Four TV shows you love to watch 1. Battlestar Galactica 2. Lost 3. Family Guy 4. Futurama
Four places you've been on vacation 1. Corregidor Island (if girl scout trips count as vacations) 2. Baguio City (also with girl scouts) 3. Amsterdam... in December. By choice. 4. Indianapolis :-)	Four websites you visit daily I so don't visit websites anymore. RSS all the way, and I'll read it whenever I have time.
Favorite Foods 1. Chicago-style stuffed spinach pizza 2. Steak 3. Turkey dinner & stuffing & Karen's vegetable casserole 4. Any skillet with eggs, cheese, potatoes, sausage, peppers, onions, more cheese...	Four places I would rather be right now 1. Standing on the scale where I find out that the baby weight has magically dropped off overnight 2. At the mailbox opening a check from the Washington State Lottery 3. In bed, asleep, with my baby sleeping soundly next to me for more than two hours at a time 4. In the bathtub uhh... taking a bath.
Four bloggers you are tagging This ends here. :-) And on that note, off to the bathtub...

Much ado about nothing

What a weird day. At 9:30 this morning, out of nowhere I started to have severe vertigo and nausea. I managed to crawl to the phone to call David to come home, and then I called the 24-hour dial-a-nurse line and she asked me to try to stand up, which I couldn't do without the room spinning, thus making it pretty difficult to get downstairs to get to the car to get to the doctor.

So, she recommended we call 911. Oh, goody. "Hi there, 911 folks, you have a really important job saving lives and all, can you send an ambulance and some paramedics to please come take a look at me since I can't get out of bed?". But I got over my hubris and made the call[1], three lovely gentlemen (at least I think they were lovely, I didn't have my glasses on - but they sure sounded lovely and made every effort to ensure I didn't feel like an idiot, thus ensuring their loveliness) came and checked me out and determined that I probably have some kind of inner ear problem and should see my normal doctor. They also gave me a lovely puke bag with measurements on the side, in case I needed to know exactly how much I puked (I did).

I was feeling a little better by the time they left, so I made it to the car and we went to my doctor where he tested me for a stroke (negative) and said that it's Labyrinthitis (for the laypeople reading this, you may also call it "Cupulolithiasis"), which is this disease where you can't think of anything other than David Bowie in tight leather pants and a fantastic 'do.

According to this definition, one of the symptoms of Labyrinthitis is "malaise". The virus has apparently been living dormant in me ever since I was 13-16 and then again for a brief period when I was 19.

My doctor explained labyrinthitis thusly: "Your brain thinks it's moving in a certain way but your body is disagreeing with your brain, causing you to puke all over yourself. At least, that's the non-technical way of describing it." I courteously inquired as to what the technical terminology of "causing you to puke all over yourself" would be, and he said: "causing you to disgorge the contents of your stomach." Good to know.

The suddenness of this was what was really worrying me, so I asked some more questions about what the possible causes of sudden-onset vertigo were and my doctor, who has a great sense of humor[2], started listing off the possible causes: "Well you know it could be MS, or a stroke...". I told him I would get home and promptly go off to google to properly diagnose myself, which he seemed to enjoy.

At any rate, we returned home with a prescription for a patch, but since I was feeling better by then I decided to wait and see and only fill it if it got worse. And it didn't get worse, and in fact I was able to shower and walk around and --most importantly-- blog, and so here I am now, alive but properly humbled by my experience but again, capable of blogging, which is really the purpose of being in good health anyway.

[1] The first person who answered said "911, what are you reporting?" and I said "a medical issue" and she said she'd route me to the medical dispatcher. So then the medical dispatcher answers, and I start going into my symptoms... and she then asks if I'd called 911. "Um, yeah, I did, and then they connected me to you." Wha-huh?
[2] I went to him for a refill on a prescription when I was 8 months pregnant, and before he could give me the refill he had to ask me a bunch of questions to determine if the prescription was still appropriate for me. Some of the questions were: "Have you lost or gained a lot of weight recently?" and "Are you having disruptions in your sleeping patterns?". We shared a chuckle about it and he wrote out the prescription.

Referrers

Like most bloggers, I browse my referrer logs fairly regularly to see how people found this site. And like most bloggers, I come up with very witty (if I do say so myself) responses to some of the referrers. I usually laugh at my own joke and then move on without posting about it, but this one today really brought out the grammar geek in me: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=breastfeeding+videos+for+moms+with+nipples&FORM=QBRE3

What about the poor moms without nipples, eh? When is someone going to think about THEM for a change?