Every Word Counts

So I get these emails from babycenter describing what-all my ybab is supposed to be doing each week of her so-called life. Mostly I keep getting them because it reminds me how old she is, so I'm not utterly clueless when people ask. Anyway, I came across an ad for this, um, product, in the email. It is so shockingly bizarre, unnecessary, and freakish that I had to share it with you, my dear readers. It is a software system that records all the words spoken in the vicinity of your baby (using a special recording device that the baby wears in special clothing that you buy along with the system) plus statistical software to analyze the words to make sure that your baby is hearing enough of them. It costs 750 bux. Honestly, people, you have to see it to believe. And, Lena purveyors, I am sorry if you stumble across this blog post being absolutely horrified that you would even offer such a product to parents, but, um, I'm absolutely horrified. How fucking ridiculous!

Oh and parents, tip: If you can afford to pay that much money for the lena system, and if it seems like something that might conceivably be a good idea, then trust me, you don't need it. Your baby hears you talk just plenty.

Anyway, you must check out the testimonials. Here's an example:

"It is important to be able to view the number of our conversational turns and to compare our statistics with national and local parents. Getting to see the results of how much I interact with my child shows me how many times during the day I am just not cutting it. I thought the weekend would prove more beneficial with both parents, but I noticed Zachary received less direct conversation than when it’s just one-on-one. Awareness of these problems will help us improve greatly. Using LENA helps us become more attentive to what we read and what is said throughout the day.  I am also able to analyze how much I interact with my son compared to his other caregiver.

 

OMFG!

turkeys

Today there was a turkey in front of our apartment building, gobbling around on the street like it owned the place. Flew down out of nowhere.



This is strange, though not entirely unexpected. The turkeys have been making their way steadily into the city from the surrounding burbs, and had been sighted a neighborhood or two away.



still and all, not your usual city sight, and a welcome one, though I hear the turkeys are vicious. The survivalist in me fantasizes about what a great food resources the wild turkeys will make after peak oil. But of course, people will bag the turkeys pretty early. Now, squirrel meat...

sign of apocalypse

today my schedule said: "Manage medical bills." (It does not say 'pay medical bills', because mostly what I do is manage them rather than pay them. I send certified letters to the billing agencies explaining why I don't owe them what they think I owe them, and try to reconcile insurance explanation of benefits with hospital bills. Sometimes, with enormous gratitude, I get to actually write a small check for an amount that I think is correct and seems not unreasonable to me, staple a bunch of duplicate bills and EOBs together, and file them away. But mostly I just shake my head at the idiocy of it all, and wait for the next month's round of bills to see if the billing agency has actually bothered to read the certified letter it signed for to see why I'm not paying their bill. Sometimes I send certified letters to collections agencies to tell them why the debt they bought is not legit. I use fancy-sounding legal language like "Pursuant to Federal Law 95-109, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, I am notifying your office in writing that I dispute the validity of the debts you reference in your letter of ....". I follow up the scary legalese with a suggestion that they "revisit" the issue of the debt with the hospital or medical office in question.



I have hopes that one day soon, after last year's round of pregnancy bills go through, I will not require a whole item on my schedule devoted to "manage medical bills," but just be able to pay a bill during my normal bill-paying time.



Anyway, about the sign of the apocalypse. Two years ago, I had a pap smear. Yes, I have them every year. The one I had in May 2005 was billed to an insurer I was no longer with at the time of the smear. For two years now, my GP's billing service has been dutifully billing me for this pap smear, every single month. Some months I have ignored the bill. Some months I send it back with a form letter I've devised that provides all my insurance information (current and previous ) on it and politely requests that they bill it. In November, I broke down and went the certified letter route. In December, January, and February, I continued to receive bills for the ancient pap smear.



Today I opened up the March bill and found that on February 28th, they billed the insurance company for the pap smear. They even, I gather, billed the correct insurance company for it, because the company paid.* Hence, my feeling that the apocalypse must be coming soon.



Now if I can get the very same billing agency to deal with the certified letter I sent on Max's behalf, complaining about the $60 check they cashed but didn't credit, and their insistence that in January 2006 we were not covered by insurance, when we most certainly were, then I will really start stocking up on the canned goods.



*Though I still have the vague sensation that the amount the insurance company paid was not all that it should have been, because I still feel that the "patient responsibility" was rather high for a pap smear, which is neither an expensive nor elective procedure, and certainly far cheaper than metastatic cervical cancer....

Aya

is so proud of herself. She just rolled over back to front, which she's been diligently working on for a while now.



No, I do not recall if this makes her gross motor skills "advanced" or just short of qualifying for early intervention. Nor do I care.



This has been another edition of stuff you probably don't care about in my life.

A380

Ari informs us this morning that his barosaurus friend just flew in from New Zealand on an A380. It pulled right up to the building so that his friend didn't have to get wet when he arrived. Mysteriously, however, his friend then immediately went out to Trader Joe's, in the rain, to buy us some more English Muffins.

"If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

Yesterday was Mr. A's 4th birthday party. I made a cake with strawberry-colored frosting on it, studded with strawberries. Everyone asked for my cake recipe. "Bittman," I said. There were cupcakes to go along with it. The cake was gorgeous and full of butter, hence tasty. There were balloons, colors chosen by Ari, each blown up to a specific size chosen by Ari, each with the name of a guest written on it, and sometimes also an inscrutable balloon-related statement that Ari dictated to Max. I can't make that last sentence come out right, sorry. Take it as an illustration of the kind of convoluted statement that actually ended up on the balloons.



Anyway, we also had a huge roll of bubble wrap that we threw on the floor for the kids to jump on, which they did, gleefully. I hope the downstairs neighbors' chandelier did not break. There was wine and cheese for the grownups. ( The Dubliner cheddar was popular, and the guests were pleased to hear that it could be purchased inexpensively at Trader Joe's. ) There were 8 children, and they got along splendidly. My brother was there, and Max's family, and all the parents of the kids were people that Max and I know and like well on their own account. Ari blew out all his candles on his first try. Nobody got hurt. Aya got passed around from one adoring grownup to another, cheerful as could be. I wore a shirt with no spit-up, new jeans that fit me, and sandals with heels. And lipstick. I ate two pieces of cake. Ari did not receive any presents that will have to be quietly boxed up and given away when he is not looking. He did receive, among other things, a home-made superhero kit, a pair of alligator oven mitts he's been coveting at Max's parents' house for a while, an air gun with foam bullets (which goes well with the superhero outfit), some "Do-A-Dot" paints, and, from me, a tape gun of the sort that the UPS store uses to box up your Zappos returns. There were no planned activities, no theme, no party hats, and no party favors (save the inscrutable balloons). I think the party cost maybe 50 bucks (most of it cheese).



It was a beautiful party.



Today, as is my wont, I have a migraine, but it was worth it.



****



The title of this post is from a Kurt Vonnegut book I've been meaning to read since even before he died. A blog I like, The Happiness Project, posted a quote from this book yesterday:

But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”



So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Wow, even the students at Brigham Young don't like Dick Cheney...

Says NYT:

he invitation extended to Vice President Dick Cheney to be the commencement speaker at Brigham Young University has set off a rare, continuing protest at the Mormon university, one of the nation’s most conservative.

Some of the faculty and the 28,000 undergraduate and graduate students, who are overwhelmingly Republican, have expressed concern about the Bush administration’s support for the war in Iraq and other policies, but most of the current protest has focused on Mr. Cheney’s integrity, character and behavior. Several students said, for example, that they were appalled at Mr. Cheney’s use of an expletive on the Senate floor in a June 2004 exchange with Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont.

“The problem is this is a morally dubious man,” said Andrew Christensen, a 22-year-old Republican from Salt Lake City. “It’s challenging the morality and integrity of this institution.”

What I find most amusing is that the big issue appears to be that he said "Fuck".

Morning cup of Cary

Cary Tennis, replying to a man who's worried his son might be gay:

People come into being, and who they are is a mystery to us. We are bystanders at the magic show. The world is becoming what it's becoming with little regard to our opinions. It's not going to ask us whether it should produce gay people or straight people. People are just coming into the world at an alarming rate and becoming who they are and anyone who thinks hard about it can only conclude that our most dignified and respectful stance is one of reverence and amazement and service -- to our kids, to our fellow people, to the planet. Reverence. Service. And less crazy talk -- from all quarters.

I love my morning cup of Cary.

Self-Subjugation

NYT says:

A new, long-term hunger strike has broken out at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with more than a dozen detainees subjecting themselves to daily force-feeding to protest their treatment, military officials and lawyers for the detainees said.

Note to Times: those people at Kink.com are subjecting themselves to painful and humiliating treatment. Prisoners at Guantanamo are not.

workin'

egads, yet another book on how well-off, well-educated women (i.e., like me) are failing the world and themselves if they stay at home full-time to raise their kids. As always, Salon has the details.

Life and work are hard; some women don't want to be corporate cogs, and that's admirable; some can't find careers that let them balance work and family, and that's lamentable; and some just don't want to do the hard work of finding a career they love and getting good at it, and they use kids as an excuse, which is deplorable. For such women it's easier (in the short run; back to those actuarial tables) to pretend you never wanted to succeed in the first place, and to let your husband do the hard work of building a rewarding career. Bennetts' last chapter borrows Simone de Beauvoir's great phrase "the anxiety of liberty" as its title, and exhorts women to live through that anxiety to embrace a full and complex life of work and family.[my emphasis]

"Deplorable"? Really? As in "deserving strong condemnation"? As both author and reviewer point out, there is a perfectly practical reason to not let one's so-called 'career' fall entirely by the wayside: security. Do we need to have the Protestant work ethic, macho existentialism, and the threat of being labeled lazy shoved down our throats as well? If we were to start deploring one another for everything we avoid because of our vague existential fears -- well, there'd be a lot of strong condemnation to go around, wouldn't there?

Oh wait. There is a lot of strong condemnation going around.

Let's see what Salon's own Cary Tennis has to say about a lazy feeling of just not wanting to put in the effort for a career: "Give yourself a break, my man. If you are depressed and have a drug problem or have a metabolic imbalance, then that's some serious stuff and you need medical care. But if you simply lack ambition, I take my hat off to you. The world is way too full already of overly ambitious fucks elbowing us out of the way on the streetcar."

That's so beautiful, I'd like just to repeat it, and thank you Cary for writing it:

"The world is way too full already of overly ambitious fucks elbowing us out of the way on the streetcar."