Just Reston and Relaxin’…and looking ahead to ’08

So far today we’ve been taking it easy. Matt is rediscovering beloved video games from the past via versions for Mac, and I’ve been tooling around with the blog(s) and various other Internet pursuits. Thanks to everybody who has voted so far regarding where to host the blog, although at this point it’s a draw–so if you haven’t voted yet, please do!

We’ve also partaken in some of our favorite pioneer-style farm chores, like making soup stock and boiling rags.Otherwise, we’re taking our time off as a chance to reflect on our priorities for the upcoming year. 2007 has been a year of immense change for us (getting married, traveling, moving twice, finishing a master’s, starting law school, leaving law school, starting a total of three new jobs between the two of us), and one which has definitely brought us closer together. On the whole, we could not be happier with our lives and feel so incredibly blessed to have each other, as well as two loving families standing behind us. In that vein, a lot of what we hope for in the next year is a continuation of things we’ve already started. Here’s the list I’ve compiled so far of goals for 2008:

Do 30 minutes of activity every day, and closer to 60 on the weekends. As you may know, we’ve already started working on this one. We were hoping to go an entire year without missing a day, starting a few weeks ago, but we did miss two days while we were out of town. So we’re hoping to start fresh for the new year, and make it straight through. We find this works better than a goal like “exercise 4-5 times a week,” because it’s just too easy to fall into the habit of thinking that today will be the day off and we’ll exercise the other 4-5 days a week. This makes it simpler: if we haven’t exercised yet today, then we still need to do it.

Use the car as little as we can. This is one of the main benefits of having moved to a smaller town, and we’d like to maximize it as much as we can. It’s better for us, better for our budget, and better for the environment to walk and use public transportation as much as we can. We already try to accomplish an errand or two (pick up a prescription, rent a movie) on our daily walks, and each walk to work as much as we can, so we’d like to keep this up and make it even more of a habit.

Go back to cash envelopes for the Groceries and Entertainment categories of expenditure. We did this while we were saving up to pay for our wedding and it worked remarkably well. One sticky spot in doing it here is that we still don’t have a local bank from which to make fee-free ATM withdrawals–we’ve been so happy with US Bank (and having our sister-in-law as a personal go-to banking reference) that we’ve been hesitant to change. Bank of America has tons of branches and ATMs and even offers a $100 bonus for signing up, but we’ve heard terrible things about their customer service and about the borderline-fraudulent ways that they will strategically process withdrawals and deposits in order to hit you hard with overdraft charges. Because of that, we’re considering an ING Electric Orange account, which is attractive because it’s an interest-earning checking account with free online banking. (We’d also get a $25 bonus thanks to a referral from my brother.) On the other hand, they don’t have physical branches or actual physical checks, which seems like it might be troublesome, say, when we’re asked to provide a voided check for direct deposit at work. One of our sub-goals is to figure all of this out.

Pay off both car loans by August. The astute among you will recognize that that is loans plural when we only have one car. That’s one fact that makes it compelling to get these paid off, but they are also our two smallest loans (ala the debt snowball), they coincidentally have the highest interest, and paying them off by August will drop our monthly debt payments by $300–just in time for me to go back to school, hopefully.

Learn more about investing. While Matt is passionate about the arts and I about women’s health and birth, we’d be lying if we said that we didn’t dread it when one of our fabulously low-key weekends winds to a close and we have to go back to work. To that end, we’d love to get to the point where we had more options regarding how and when and how much to work, especially once kids enter the picture. Opening up new income streams via investing would be a potential way to meet this goal. Since most of our income this year (and the next several) will be devoted to paying off debt, it makes it a convenient and risk-free time to learn all I can about investing so that when we are in a position to do it, we’ll have a solid understanding of how it works.

Continue to make an effort to eat high-quality unprocessed foods. This kind of speaks for itself. It also speaks to our goals on health and money, as well as sparks our creativity in the kitchen (homemade Thin Mints, anybody?).

Continue to make our relationship not just a priority, but the priority. I firmly believe that this is a key to any high-functioning household, whether or not there are kids involved. I remember being relatively young and hearing my dad say “I love my kids and I’d lay down my life for them, but when they grow up and move on, you’ll be glad you invested time in your relationship with your spouse.” Or something to that effect. I feel like knowing my parents made each other this kind of priority helped me grow up with a sense of security in something bigger than myself, and I hope our kids grow up the same way. Even right now, the other goals we make are pretty pointless if we’re not working toward them together. Because of that, we’ve made communication and teamwork central to the way we run our lives. While it’s tempting to pound out crazy overtime and pay off our debts even faster, I believe that it’s ultimately more valuable to tackle it steadily while making sure there’s time for us to enjoy each other. Obviously there are times in life when this isn’t an option, but hopefully those periods are brief and finite. Our goal in paying off debts and saving money is to have more time to enjoy the things in life that matter to us, not less–so we try not to be penny-wise and pound-foolish with our time.

White Christmas!

Merry Christmas, everybody!

We’ve really enjoyed the past few days in Iowa, seeing people and hanging out with the family and eating lots, and we’ve even kept up with our daily walks–several of which have been in 8+ inches of snow, much to Matt’s delight. And today we head up to Wisconsin, so it’s the one day this year where we’ll get to see both our families!

As you may have noticed, I’ve also been calling on my brother’s expertise to help me make some visual tweaks to the blog, though they aren’t finished yet. Feel free to let me know what you think!

Up, Up, and Away

Compared to everything else going on in the world, we just haven’t had much to report this week. Except that we’re getting very excited to head back to Iowa and Wisconsin on Saturday! We both have a short day of work tomorrow, after which we’ll drive to Baltimore (flight reservations we made when we lived about an hour closer!) and stay the night so we can get up and make the early flight into Milwaukee.

Book Review: Pushed by Jennifer Block.

Today I finished reading Pushed by Jennifer Block. It’s one of the most informative, well-written, and disturbing books I’ve read in a long time. However, I also found it really inspiring. It’s made me wonder whether a lifetime of defying authority hasn’t been intensive preparation for someday becoming a midwife, where bucking the norm seems likely to become…well…the new norm.

Here are some of what I thought were the more interesting points in the book:

The lack of choice in a “patient-choice” C-section. Block (and others, including obstetricians, she interviews for the book) poses the question of whether doctors’ sanctioning elective C-sections is less about honoring an actual demand from the patients (despite the visibility of cases like Britney and Posh spice, “regular” pregnant women aren’t lining up for surgery left and right) than about giving physicians the opportunity to perform them at their own convenience–“without a second opinion, or rarely even a second thought.” More on this topic.

If it is a choice, is it the lesser of two evils? What does that say about maternity care in America? Block points out the irony in the fact that if obstetricians are willing to on the record as saying that elective C-sections are safer than vaginal birth (which, in her book, many are and in fact do), what they are really saying is that laboring in this country is more dangerous than major abdominal surgery. She also says that if giving birth means being induced, strapped into bed, exposed to a host of unnecessary interventions, and ultimately winding up with a semi-emergent C-section anyway–which, with a nationwide rate of over 30% (an increase of 46% in the past 10 years), is a pretty good chance for anybody giving birth in the hospital–could we blame women if they were clamoring to literally just “cut to the chase”?

The selective use and abuse of statistics. The rising C-section rate is often (probably correctly) blamed largely on on the growing litigiousness of our society. The risks of stillbirth if a baby goes past its due date, of uterine rupture during a vaginal birth after a previous Cesarean (VBAC), and hypoxic brain damage if a baby’s heart rate drops during labor have all been emphasized in support of why it’s “safer” just to do a C-section. Issues like the increased risk of maternal death (four times more likely in an uncomplicated elective C-section than it is in a vaginal birth) and massively dangerous complications like stillbirth, placenta previa, and placenta accreta in subsequent pregnancies, have meanwhile not been publicized. Jeffrey King, the head of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists‘ maternal mortality special-interest group, says in the book that “More cesareans lead to more repeat cesareans, and repeat cesareans are associated with higher risk of hemorrhagic complications, including placenta accreta leading to hysterectomy. It’s almost like a runaway train. In the long run, this will lead to more maternal deaths.”

The nationwide war on VBAC. One thing I took for granted working at UIHC was that when we finished up a C-section, the doctor would typically give the woman some variation on the following: “Your scar is the kind that’s low and horizontal, so if you want to try a vaginal delivery next time, there’s no reason that it shouldn’t work out.” Apparently this is not the case in much of the country, where the “reason it wouldn’t work out” could include doctors who abandon care of patients who want to VBAC or judges who court-order Cesareans against a patient’s will. Pushed includes incredible (and not in a good way) stories like that of Laura Pemberton, who labored at home until she was 9 centimeters dilated but got to the hospital and was forced against her will to undergo a court-ordered C-section. “The judge said that my unborn baby was in the control of the state and that it was the state’s responsibility to bring that baby into this world safely…[he] pointed his finger at me: ‘We are going to do the C-section, and we are going to do it tonight.'” Her case is the most extreme, but there are other, similar cases as well. She also talks about smaller indignities, such as doctors who don’t get consent to break someone’s water or strip their membranes–acts I’ve witnessed (and tried to rectify) already.

Pain in labor may itself serve a physiological function. Controversial, perhaps, but worth thinking about: Block talks to various professionals about the interesting idea that pain in labor is akin to that of getting a blister on your heel–it keeps you moving around to try to alleviate it. “It is not a side effect, rather it is a central component of normal birth–not something from which mothers should be distracted. Pain communicates, and sometimes it tells us important information.” Without the discomfort, a woman tends to lack the natural, restless, perpetual motion which helps settle the baby into an advantageous position for its journey down the birth canal. I’m in no position to comment here because I haven’t been through labor, and so I don’t want to be seen as singing the praises of pain I know to be indescribable, but I will say I’ve seen a huge number of malpositioned (and subsequently C-sectioned) babies in women with epidurals–especially early epidurals.

Like the old folks say: Babies come when they’re ready. To breathe. According to this Danish study, “It is plausible that hormonal and physiological changes associated with labour are necessary for lung maturation in neonates and that these changes may not occur in infants delivered by elective Caesarean sections.” It’s thought that possibly the baby’s lung maturity somehow signals the mother’s body to go into labor, and that labor itself then stimulates further development. So if you schedule a C-section (as opposed to one that happens after even a “failed” labor), your baby misses out on both.

Finally, synthetic oxytocin: you can’t beat the real thing. I’ve often wondered why, with every women’s magazine trumpeting the effects of oxytocin, the “love hormone,” released when you breastfeed or make love or even share a meal together, women being induced into labor aren’t on an endless, feel-good lovefest. (Far from it.) As it turns out, synthetic oxytocin (Pitocin) affects the uterus (causing contractions) when it’s introduced into the bloodstream, but it doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier–so it can’t affect mood the way the brain’s own oxytocin does. Furthermore, it signals the brain to shut down its own production of oxytocin, depriving it of the effects of the massive doses that a woman’s brain would normally be flooded with during and after birth to facilitate bonding and breastfeeding.

So. Much of this is controversial, but a great deal of it also seems statistically sound. All of it is food for thought. This isn’t to say that women can’t have normal or happy birth experiences today, but it does seem to point to the fact that doing so in the hospital is getting more and more difficult. I’m also not saying that I completely shun the technology that has saved the lives of so many mothers and babies and which people delivering babies in third-world countries would give anything for.

I am saying that I think it can be and has been misapplied to the point that we’re often doing more harm than good.

Sunday Soup

Yesterday we spent much of the day “feathering our nest,” as my mom would call it. Hanging up pictures and other things that had been put on the back burner while I finished finals and Matt was busy at work. We also watched Knocked Up (verdict: not nearly as funny as Superbad, though very realistic in how many doctors react to a patient who wants to be an active participant in her own labor) and I improvised some lentil soup:

What’s-in-the-Fridge Lentil Soup

1 T butter
3-5 stalks of celery, chopped
3 medium carrots, chopped
1-1/2 T sage, fresh or dried
2 tsp thyme
5 cups water
1 T salt
1 can (14.5oz?) diced tomatoes
1 cup brown lentils
1-2 T balsamic vinegar

1. Saute celery in butter until soft. Add sage and thyme.
2. Add water, carrots, tomatoes, salt, and lentils. Simmer until lentils are soft, about 30 min.
3. Blend the soup in batches until desired consistency.
4. Add vinegar (and salt/pepper if desired) to taste.

Serve with parmesan cheese and crunched-up crackers.

Today was my first day of orientation at my new job. It was just basic hospital-wide orientation, lots of speakers to listen to and videos to watch, but so far, so good.

(Thin) Mint Condition

Half in the bag on mulled wine, we decided to make our own Thin Mints. A few notes on the recipe: as noted in multiple comments on the original site, the recipe as given seems to turn out very dry. (Admission: I used regular butter, powdered sugar, cocoa, and peppermint, mostly bulk from Aldi’s, and I can’t say I think it would make a difference to go the pricey/organic route on these.) Making half a batch as I was, I cut the flour from 3/4 of a cup to 1/2. (Making a full batch, 1 cup would probably be plenty.) Second, the cocoa flavor does wind up being a tad strong, so I made it a spare 1/2 cup of cocoa and a generous 1/2 cup of powdered sugar. I also ended up baking the cookies closer to 12 minutes and they were still just a little soft. As the author does, I improvised a double-boiler for melting the chocolate, using a nonstick pan on top of a simmering pot of water.

Ah, the chocolate: one of our favorite finds at Trader Joe’s today was the broken hunks of Ghiradelli chocolate–about a half-pound hunk of pure semisweet for just over a buck. We got one for eating and two for cooking, so one of those was what we melted for dipping. We didn’t have any trouble with the texture, so no need to add cream or oil as some others apparently did. The peppermint, I would recommend titrating by taste.

We also don’t have cookie cutters, so we cut them out with shotglasses per yet another suggestion. It worked like a charm. Absolutely the perfect size!

Here are the chocolate cookies just out of the oven:
The melting chocolate:
And the finished product:
Start to finish, just under an hour. They were fun and really quite easy; aside from making the dough in the KitchenAid, which I wouldn’t have had to, no special equipment required whatsoever. Also, besides the peppermint extract, which I think most people have on hand anyway, it was pretty much all stuff that we already had in the kitchen.

I highly recommend!

Mulling it over

Today marks one week since Matt and I committed to getting at least 30 minutes of physical exercise a day. Mostly that’s consisted of brisk walking in and around Reston, which we’ve really enjoyed. This morning we chose, perhaps counterproductively, to combine it with a breakfast date. I got mushroom and cheese crepes and Matt got eggs, a croissant, and bacon. Bellies full, we then walked back home and proceeded to run a couple of errands by car–hitting both the Arlington and Reston libraries, cleaning out my locker at work (hurray), and also hitting up Trader Joe’s for the first time. Let us just say we are big fans of that experience! We picked up some frozen fruit, bread, cheese, hot chocolate, and a couple of other things for around $30–not quite Aldi’s, but cheaper than some of the other grocery stores around and almost everything was some kind of funky organic house brand. Right up our alley!

Our favorite thing by far was a couple of bottles of Gluhwein, or German mulled wine, which we’d been introduced to at the Krista Detor house concert. If anything ever tasted like happy holidays come home to roost, this is it–delicious, warming, and spicy. We heated some up on the stove right away and are planning to spend the rest of the day getting cozy with that and our new library books. This is the way to spend a winter weekend!

The Name Game

First of all, anybody who says this isn’t the catchiest thing you HAVE EVER seen is lying!

Second of all, it being Christmas card season, I just wanted to say thank you to everybody who has taken the time to address a card to the two of us using the names we’ve chosen. I know it’s not the usual way of doing things and (believe me!) I know it’s a lot of letters, and to be honest, this is an issue that confuses even us at times. But it really means more than you know. So–thank you.

When the Dog Bites…Or, These Are a Few of My Favorite Links

OK, so the dog didn’t actually bite, he just lunged menacingly. But regardless, this is the sight we woke up to this morning–accompanied by the sound of our frantic cats skating across everything on our desk to get down from the windowsill where this character was nosing around. I have no idea what possessed his owner, because he was on a leash, a retractable one at that, and she continued to let him lunge and bark at the window instead of directing him elsewhere where there weren’t terrified cats and half-dressed people peering back out at her. We figured once she saw us, she would get the message and take her dog inside or elsewhere–but not. At one point, she backed up from the window, but continued to stand there and stare at us, like some kind of challenge. To what? It was the weirdest thing and it made me so mad! The cats have been going around with flattened ears and spiky tails ever since. If you can’t feel safe sitting in your own window, where can you?!

That said, since there’s not much of interest going on with us, here are some sites I’ve found helpful or interesting lately:

Lifehacker is where I learned about Retailmenot, a Firefox extension which automatically–yet unobtrusively!–notifies you of any coupon codes available (for free shipping, a percentage off, or what have you) at any retail sites you visit. I used to have to scour Google for them and this saves a lot of time! Just yesterday we saved $12.95 on shipping from Fannie May, and they have codes for just about anywhere else you can imagine too. I would say it’s paid for itself already, but it was free!

Babycatcher is the blog of a 29-year-old nurse-midwife who currently practices in Malawi. Talk about an eye-opening look about a totally different set of problems than those currently facing maternity care in the United States. While she fights for access to basic technology, we’re fighting to curtail the invasion of what is arguably too much. (I read on another birth blog the other day that natural, drug-free “physiological” childbirth is set to become the next “fight for women’s right to choose”–it’s become that controversial of an issue.) In both cases, caught in the crush and losing big-time are mothers, babies, and healthcare workers. Cue midwives.

Morning Coffee isn’t really a site, it’s another Firefox extension that lets you open any number of preselected sites with the click of a button. You can choose to add sites on a daily, weekly, or
other basis which is great if you have a number of blogs or news sites you read on a daily basis. I really love it because it’s super convenient, and it also has the added functionality that when I’ve finished everything in my Morning Coffee, I know that then I should really get to work. (Whether I actually should have gotten to work about an hour earlier is not up for debate!) It helps limit (though does not eliminate) the “one thing leads to another” aspect of websurfing that has a tendency to get away from me.

Smitten Kitchen is a site with amazing recipes and gorgeous pictures. I believe they use the same Canon Rebel camera that is high on both my and my brother’s wish lists.

101 Cookbooks is written by a blogger who has written her own cookbook and is also cooking her way through a sizable number (guess how many?) of others–which explains the high caliber of her culinary abilities. She uses a similar Canon, if not the same model, as Smitten Kitchen and achieves similarly mouth-watering results. The cookies that are up right now use her recipe for Organic Homemade Thin Mints which I am planning to make at my VERY earliest convenience.

SmartWomanRx actually has nothing to do with motorcycles, despite the sassy animation at startup. It’s a site when you can buy mail-order generic birth control pills (OK, yes, I admit that sounds scary, but they’re really quite legit) for as low as $13 a pack. They’ve been around for awhile, but until about a year ago there were usually other low-cost options available. Myself, I’m sitting at a $20/month copay on an already-generic drug, which makes me cringe when I think back to my days at the University of Iowa and their free generic drugs (Zolpidem/Ambien, anybody? At our house, we sleep better than anybody on the block and we do it for free! …For a little while longer, anyway). While a savings of $7/month doesn’t sound like a ton, it’s something; and if somebody offered me a $7 coupon every month for the next five years or so, I would take it. Combined with the convenience of mail-order, it sounds like a winner to me. (Lest you worry about forgetting to order on time, you can have them overnighted for $19. While this does somewhat negate your savings, depending on what you pay now, standard shipping is free!). I also love the idea of supporting something innovative like this rather than just bending over for the pharmaceutical companies.

VistaPrint: not only do coupon codes abound for freebies like business cards, T-shirts, hats, and the like, but they are the first place I’ve found where I can easily fit both of our hyphenated names classily on on the top line of an address label. We paid about $4 for 240 of them, they arrived in about three days, and while what looked yellow on the screen is perhaps more of a lime-ish shade in real life, nothing compares to the thrill of seeing all 19 characters of our surname spelled out in all of its lengthy glory. In related news, you can visit the New York Times’ Interactive List to see whether your last name is in the top 5,000 in the country. Neither of our family names made it, and the combination obviously didn’t–but my sister-in-law’s maiden name did, as did my mother-in-law’s. Welcome to the road less traveled, ladies 🙂

So there you have it…a pretty good synopsis of what I learned in law school!

Flattered!

Who knew! Two comments within just a few minutes! I’m touched!

However…will the fellow Nickel Creek fan please stand up? Remember, these comments are anonymous, so if you don’t tell me in the comment who you are, you will remain…well, you know…anonymous.