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.

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.

My Comment Box: As You Can See, It’s Nearly Empty*

For everybody out there dying to comment on our blog but without a Gmail account, I’ve now enabled anonymous comments so it should no longer be a problem. Now, I’m expecting this to dramatically increase the volume I receive, so don’t disappoint me!

Also, if you leave an anonymous comment, it would be great if you let us know who you are somewhere in there.

courtesy of icanhascheezburger.com

*Except for snide comments from brother. Thanks, L–you never let me down!

Pre-Test

Since my strategy immediately before the test is to relax instead of cram, perhaps because I know my grades don’t end up in the same hyper-competitive pool as everybody else’s in the room, I’m drinking hot chocolate and checking out the wealth of excellent new birth sites I’ve found lately. Such as: Citizens for Midwifery, Pushed Birth, and The Business of Being Born. TBOBB is something I would love to see (watch the trailer, it’s very inspiring!) but which has not seen fit to come to my area when I was aware of it. Pushed is a book, written by the author of Pushed Birth above, which I need to read. Giving Birth: The Journey into the World of Mothers and Midwives is on that list as well, along with countless others.

The return to reading for pleasure like this is something I’m eagerly anticipating after law school is over. And from this point on, it all counts as career research. Awesome.

Walk, Study, Sleep, Clean: An exciting life, but somebody has to live it.

Most of today has actually been comprised of studying–which is really kind of a surprise! I did hit a slump about 10:30 this morning and actually ended up taking about a 30-minute nap. I woke up still feeling so lethargic I almost went down for another one. Matt and I have set the goal of trying to do 30 minutes of some kind of physical activity every day, preferably an hour on the weekends (partly due to the desire on both our parts for more energy!) but it seems to me that any time I start any kind of exercise regimen, no matter how tame, the first week or so just absolutely drains me. Case in point: yesterday we ran for 30 minutes, today we walked for 30 minutes, and by mid-morning, my energy was totally sapped.

BUT, during the brief period I’m spending at home before I start my new job, I’m trying to set the goal that I spend most of my time doing SOMETHING productive. Realistically, it should be studying; realistically, it’s not gonna be. So after indulging in the nap (which, after this week, will no longer be an option most days), instead of rolling over for another one, I decided to see what I could accomplish in the next half hour of being awake, in the hopes that I would be able to energize myself somewhat in the bargain. Here’s what I did:

-Made Mexican casserole for dinner
-Did the dishes from last night
-Put away the dishes
-Did a load of laundry (though I didn’t fold it…folding laundry is low on my list of favorite tasks, though luckily, Matt doesn’t seem to mind it as much as he does other chores that I don’t mind at all!)
-Made a game plan for today’s studying

I did end up with more energy after all that was done, and so far I’m on track for accomplishing what I wanted to in the study department, too. It’s a good feeling! I’m hoping to get a little bit more done before Matt gets home, spend some time with him, and hopefully do another Civ Pro practice test before we go to bed.

As predicted, I didn’t get a ton done this weekend. Saturday I ended up throwing in the study-towel for a dish towel and helped Matt cook Potato and Cauliflower Masala from his new Indian cookbook, and I also made Red Lentil Soup. Personally, I thought it turned out too watery; I ended up blending in a couple of cooked potatoes to thicken it up, and it still seemed thin. It was good, though, and I think Matt especially liked it.

Sunday was the Messiah at the National Cathedral, which was very good but very crowded. We got there early enough to beat the line because we had asked for our tickets to be mailed to us, and we were concerned they’d been lost in the shuffle of the move, and had called and left messages to that effect to no avail. They ended up being at Will Call (would have been nice to have been notified that they were doing that), but when the usher went to seat us, one of the seats didn’t exist. We ended up pulling up a chair from elsewhere, which we didn’t actually have to use because the seat next to our existing one was empty, and somebody from the Cathedral took our name and is planning to refund us the cost of one of our tickets–which will be nice, but I haven’t heard from her yet. Anyway, that pretty much summarizes the experience: the music was beautiful, but the venue somewhat chaotic, which was unfortunate.

After that, we decided that the shine of trying to parallel park in the madness of DC weekend traffic had really kind of worn off since moving to Reston, so we drove back and got a decently affordable dinner at The Silver Diner, a place we’d go again.

Round Here…

…we don’t let a little thing like law school finals get in the way of a fun weekend. Yesterday was my Contracts final–harder than Torts, but I’m afraid not as hard as the Civil Procedure final will be on Tuesday. Has that stopped me from spending the better part of today gallivanting to an Indian spice store with Matt, or otherwise pleasurably frittering away the weekend? Hardly! The other night before bed, Matt asked me if I wanted to get up early and go running, something we’ve been talking about trying to get back in the habit of doing. I said “Oh, I don’t know, I have a test tomorrow, I’m not sure if it would be good to get up so early.” He looked at me kind of skeptically and then said, “Oh, I get it…you won’t STUDY for it or anything, but you will go so far as to sleep in for it.” Right. So what’s wrong with that?

Last night we went to a house performance, hosted by a co-worker of Matt’s by singer/songwriter Krista Detor. Said co-worker had raved about the performance, but being hard to please, we had prepared ourselves to be underwhelmed. We most definitely were NOT. Not only did we enjoy meeting and interacting with Krista and her husband Dave, and reuniting with Dave the sailor, but her music was in fact just breathtaking. She and Dave seemed to share our taste in music along with our affinity for homemade pesto, though they’re a step ahead of us in living off the land, being that they live on five acres in Indiana and we, as you know, are currently soaking up the joys of living in the planned community in Reston. Anyway, we had a wonderful time. Matt whipped up a batch of the brownies you’ve heard about before, with the festive addition of a bag of peppermint chips I’d picked up at Aldi the last time I was there. Delicious!

Tomorrow, we’re going to a performance of Handel’s Messiah at the National Cathedral, which should be pretty amazing. That and the house concert are why today was supposed to be the big Civ Pro Study Expo, but I seem to be having a little bit of trouble getting started on that.

The Weather Outside=Frightful?

We’re currently in the midst of the first snow of the season, and our first East-coast “snowstorm.” In other words, a light dusting that doesn’t stick to the streets but nonetheless has people panicking, cars careening into ditches, employees showing up late for work, and school officials conferring over whether to cancel finals. (Alas, no such luck.)

So far the only ill effect I’ve felt has been the increased difficulty of uprooting myself from our cozy apartment, where the cats and I are holed up watching the snow fall, to venture out and drive to the bus station to get on a bus to the train station to get on the subway to go take my test. (Everything in Reston is convenient to pretty much everything else in Reston, but convenient to downtown DC it is not.) My test (Torts, but not the delicious kind) doesn’t start until 2pm, but because of the Weather, and even more because I know that if I don’t get out of here I may be overcome with the irresistible urge to make a pan of brownies or something instead of performing some badly-needed last-minute cramming, I think I’m going to head out shortly.