Continued Questioning

Perhaps due to the fact the in 2001 49% of all labors in the U.S. were medically induced, the Western world seems to have forgotten that babies don't know how to follow a calendar. Or, if somehow the little ones do know how, the majority choose not to. The most incomprehensible question I have been asked recently is, "So when is the baby coming?" The reason it causes confusion for me is that the vast majority of the askers seem to believe that I will be able to just give them a date. (Oh, she'll be here by 4:35 Wednesday afternoon. . .) In fact, often the line of questioning goes as follows: "So, when are you due again? Oh. But when is the baby actually going to come?" Such questions would be completely understandable were there a hint of levity in the second question, but such hints are extremely rare. It really doesn't make sense to me in the least.

It's also interesting to me that several people have asked if we have an appointment to be induced yet. We haven't even gotten to our due date yet for heaven's sake! I think it's too bad that so many people think getting on medication is the best way to do this. I don't think very many Dr.'s talk about how going on Pitocin makes contractions that are harder to deal with than normal contractions (for baby and mommy, and thus for daddy too :), and increases the risk of having to have an emergency C-section. Plus once you're hooked up to Pitocin, you have to get hooked up to a bunch of other things, even if you still choose not to have the epidural. Maybe I'm the only one for whom that's a major deciding factor "Will I have to be hooked up to a bunch of junk and have to depend on the nurses to do anything and they might forget about me anyway?" That could be because once the nurses did forget about me and I was hooked up to a bunch of stuff, and although I was perfectly healthy I couldn't do anything, and that made me mad. (Thank goodness we changed hospitals!) Anyway, I'm not planning on letting anybody induce me unless it's due to an actual medical concern, and I'm especially not planning on planning for it before we even give the poor girl a chance to come on her own.

The last of my favorite questions is this one: "Are you in labor yet?" aka "Do you have a baby yet?" I know this one comes from the best of intentions. Pure curiosity is not a bad thing, and concern for how I'm doing is certainly nice to see. The only problem is this question's frequency, which is unknown to individual askers. They only asked once or twice in the last week, how are they supposed to know that they were the 14th one today? The frequency is only a problem because I start to think, "If everybody else is impatient for me to have this baby, I probably should be too by now." Those kinds of thoughts just make it more likely that I end up in a hospital bed hooked up to a bunch of unnecessary stuff waiting for the nurses who have forgotten me, and if that happens, Kevin is certainly going to have an ornery wife on his hands. Poor Kevin.

Somehow word spread that I was already 3 weeks overdue. The sympathy started rolling my way like a tidal wave. Goodness, I'm certainly glad I'm not 3 weeks overdue. I'm not sure I can take three more weeks of these questions!

A house!

Nope, we're not getting the ex-meth house. To make a long story short, the realtor (from Michaelson, Connor & Boul, or MCB) who told me that we would be the first to get the property after the cleaning process had no authority to do so. Further, the Teacher Next Door program was since replaced by the similar but more stringent Good Neighbor Next Door program, a new appraisal of the property had to be done because MCB took way too long for remediation, and for some reason, the condo was under contract with someone else for about a month, yet no one seems to know anything about it. In short, we're no longer eligible and therefore cannot buy the place. We had been so patient in waiting for it because we would have made a lot of money - we would've gotten it for $37,500, and after 3 years, we could sell it at market value (according to Zillow, it's currently worth $120,000). How about that for instant equity!

But don't worry, just as the MCB realtor feared, we didn't go down without a fight. We appealed, we complained, and we spoke our minds. In the end, we're okay with the outcome, because who knows what new doors will open for us...

One blessing that we've already gotten is that we've found a nice little house in West Jordan, UT. A rambler with only 1100 sq. ft., it's a good size for our needs and sits on a spacious .23 acre lot on a quiet cul-de-sac.

Hardwood floors throughout (except for the kitchen & eating area where there's ceramic tile), a huge picture window in the living room, a kitchen that was remodeled last year, new furnace & water heater, 3 bedrooms (one with pink carpet for our upcoming baby), a 2-car caport, a 2-car 25'x25' garage with a workshop on one side, and a super long driveway to park our RV. (if we had one) The yard is absolutely beautiful with flowers planted all over (100 flower bulbs in the front yard alone), 2 huge willow trees that give plenty of shade, 3 apple trees in the back, and an immaculate lawn. It's perfect!

Sure, we won't make nearly as much money as we would have with that condo, but now we have our own house with a yard, and no fear of the remote possibility of the ill-effects of meth...

Talyn the Scientist

My mom talked to my fifth grade teacher a few months ago and she was surprised to find out that I had become a teacher. She was sure I would have become a scientist. Well, I didn't, and in fact that never even crossed my mind once in my entire life. However, apparently I could pass 8 grade science today (with 80%). I think that's mainly due to the fact that I'm a teacher, so I reviewed a whole lot of the concepts tested so that I could teach them. That's the beauty of teaching: it's really learning in disguise. I was sad to see that I really don't remember anything from my college level physics class, which was actually one of my very favorite college classes of all time. Almost everything I got wrong was physics. The rest was fifth grade science, which I skipped by only teaching 4th and 6th grade. I guess I'll be back teaching someday, and fifth grade will have to be it. (They don't teach much physics in elementary school, at least not anything you can apply. I guess I did get the simple machine question right...)




Update by Kevin:
Sheesh, who really knows what the difference is between meteors, meteorites, and meteoroids? I got 96%!! Sciences naturelles (science) was my favorite subject after mathématiques, education physique, and recess.