I Promise Next Time Will Be Pictures Of The Girls...



In the meantime I am still using the time I would previously have used for procrastination (or writing blog entries) to cleaning out my e-mail, a task which one might describe as Herculean, akin to cleaning out those Augean stables of myth. If I was more willing to toss everything it would go much quicker. But if I tossed everything, how would I ever find gems like this one:

Correspondence of Two English Gentlemen

This is an actual series of e-mail correspondences that started, oddly enough with some confusion over whether the baseball player Kirby Puckett was forced into retirement by being beaned with a baseball badly enough to break his jaw. The first gentlemen writes:

"On September 28, [1995] however, Puckett was struck in the face by a Dennis Martinez pitch. The blow left Puckett with a shattered jaw. He attempted to make his comeback in 1996 and hit .360 in spring training. Then, on March 30, he awoke to find he couldn't see out of his right eye."

He got the beaning of all beans. I will admit that it probably didn't exacerbate his glaucoma, as it hit him on the left and his right eye went blind, but the timing is a little suspicious. Let me hit you in the head hard enough to break your jaw and lets see how the rest of your head likes it. Remember he eventually died of a stroke, another head-related item.

Even so, I conceed the point.

To which the second gentleman, a man of most ill-repute responds:

I concede the beaning.

Aren't we polite today!

These tepid beginnings rapidly escalate out of control, leading to this entire exchange, starting with the dignified hero:

Do you mock me, sir?

Swlap! Swlap! [Glove strikes each cheek]

Pistols at dawn. You may choose the location. My second will be Sir Harold of Teplitam, a most upstanding chap. If we both survive I suggest tea in the Buearegard Gardens afterwards, with a spot of crumpet.

Good day, sir.

I said good day!

Then the loathesome roustabout:

I accept! I demand satisfaction!

As my previous second, Lord Skiffington, was unfortunately shot in the head due to an unfortunate wayward shot during my last duel, I am forced to rely on the services of Edward, the piss-boy.

Do not fret, Edward! You shall make a grand second. Do you know what is required of a second? No? It's fantastically easy; you will be fine. You do know how to fire a pistol, yes? Good boy. Please instruct the stable-master to bring my horses around. What's that you're suggesing, Edward? Why would I be leaving town? Oh, the impertinence of you, Edward -- no, my boy, I merely feel like, er, a ride. Yes. A ride.

Some time passes, where assumedly both gentlemen prepare for their tense and well thought out duel... Then another correspondence from our tale's villain:

Despite my initial cowardice, I decided to be true to my word and show my manhood -- er, manliness. I was there for our duel.

Where, sir, where you?

In your cowardly absence, Sir Harold took up your pistol. Apparently, Sir Harold informed you neither of his extreme nearsightedness nor his fear of spectacles.

As I fired into the air -- after all, I bear no malice toward Sir Harold -- he fired wildly and shot poor Edward the Piss-Boy dead.

This being my second second to die in a duel, I fear that no one will second me in the future. My dueling future is doomed!

Outraged, our hero replies immediately:

Apparently you informed good Sir Harold of the locale, but failed to send me the same missive. Now while Harold is a true blue-blood, a gentleman, and a crack shot, he is not, sadly, capable of speech, having lost his tongue in an unfortunate croquet incident during the Boer Wars. He moaned something at me this morn, to be certain, but I assumed it was his usual good-natured jests and high feelings.

It was I that figured you for a coward, having never heard back as to the location, which I believe you will recall I left up to you. I figured you had scurried back to Normandy or Gibralter or wherever such neer-do-wells such as yourself call home. Perhaps Sussex.

But now Sir Harold has appeared with a detailed diagram done in pastels (or is it oils?) of him firing at a cowering second while a bewildered nobleman looks on. You should see the subtle gradations of reds. A tour de force. Anyway, clearly this is a misunderstanding resulting in the death of a peasant.

So no harm done.

I expect you to bring your third and appear before the gates of Lorkanmanshirebergexx at dawn tomorrow. No make that 10, I am having my car detailed.

Sir Harold can then kill him and we can have that spot of tea I was so looking forward to. The Buearegard gardens do have the loveliest honeyed tea cakes...

The bootblack is properly chastised:

Very well. Lorkanmanshirebergexx at 10 it shall be. I will bring my third -- a toad, which my 11-year-old niece has cleverly named Mister Toad. Although Mister Toad is quite unable to hold a pistol -- in fact, the pistol is quite a bit larger than Mister Toad himself -- I do find that he provides a most unexpected level of emotional support. Oh, Mister Toad! You comfort me in ways I have never before known.

Speaking of hopping creatures, please inform Sir Harold that indeed, I do have his false leg in my possession after all. I am not quite certain how it ended up with my irons and woods, but here it is. I do owe him an apology: the bad is mine.

Someday, I hope to hear from Sir Harold -- well, not so much from Sir Harold as from anyone else -- the story of the dangerous leech that took his limb.

Should Sir Harold be unable to fire his weapon at such a small creature with acceptable aim, I do believe he will find that Mister Toad can be crushed under his good foot without undue effort.

Very much looking forward to tea in the Buearegard Gardens. I wonder, sir: I am very familiar with the Beauregards -- and initially, I thought that it was this fine family that named the gardens. Ah, but twice now, you have informed me that the proper spelling of the name is Buearegard -- clearly a different family. I know no Buearegards -- perhaps you could arrange an introduction?

To which the dashing young gent can only express his delight at the opportunity to assist another in social advancement:

Oh, the Buearegards! A very old family. They predate the written word, don't you know.

They live in caves and smash the skulls of passerbys for food. Could not be more ancient. Their youngest, little Lord Chaka, has just grown his first full body beard and is most dashing.

And by dashing, once again I am refering to how he will crush your skull and then eat you.

But the gardens are lovely.

10 it is. Smashing.

I suppose I must mention that in all likelihood I will be completely invisible, for tomorrow is a Friday and I am afraid my religious proclivities insist on transparency on that holiest of days. Be assured I will be there. Feel free to tell the toad to shoot wildly at any disturbance or shimmering in the air. Harold, of course, will shoot your amphibian or barring that, smash it and then eat it (he's of French descent don't you know).

Then Marmalade. I am atitter!

But sadly, like much in life, it ends with a wimper:

French? I am afraid I must cancel. I am allergic to the French.

I was wondering about the cause of today's hives.

I am still available for tea, if you would like.

I do not believe the tea issue has ever been satisfactorly resolved.

S.

P.S. Kudos to the villain Todd who ably assisted me in going so off the rails.

Now I Am Freaking Myself Out




I was cleaning up a mass of refuse from my old e-mails when I came across this chilling prediction:

"Okay, dudes, what the hell was the Terry Schiavo business all about?"
-Amy Lo

As part of a dark ritual 15 years ago, Karl Rove, Tom Delay and Dick Cheney withdrew all of the Democrat/Liberal mojo from America and placed it within the body of young Floridian woman. As you might imagine, the human mind was not designed to absorb that much Progressivism, and poor Ms. Schiavo's brain melted like a Dairy Queen Blizzard on a hot tarmac.

If Ms. Schiavo were to die, the Mojo would be re-released into the atmosphere, revitalizing the American Left. To protect their carefully choreographed plans, the Republican Cabal made sure Terry was put on life support, hopefully indefinitely.

Things went along quite swimmingly, until George Bush announced his run for presidency and got the backing of the Republican establishment. At this point, the Unholy Prince of Lies and Lord of Chaos realized he had let things go too far, and that some things went beyond a good practical joke on the Maker. Releasing Terry's husband from his dark slumber, the Devil tried to right the situation immediately, but it turns out there really is a lot of red tape that even the Father of All Whores has to go through.

Anyway, eventually his succubi and imps got all the i's dotted and t's crossed, allowing poor Miss Schiavo to finally pass on to her final reward, and consequently releasing the bottled up Liberal mojo.

And what happened in the first election after her death? I tell you, I have chills running up and down my spine in both directions. Lo, the Beast walks among us and is heavily involved in Florida politics. Be ye afraid and run henceforth to the Keys for Buffet Margarita Tuesdays.

Oh, and I saw the new Tenacious D movie. Eh, unless you are a die hard freak I would probably skip it. There are moments of greatness, particularly the opening sequence and the battle with the Devil. They should have made the whole movie a Rock Opera (like those scenes were), but they wussed out. Or their financial backers did. Either way, I would just buy the CD (or download it, whatever the kids DO nowadays) but skip the middle 4 tracks, which blow. If you have never heard of the D, I strongly encourage you to check them out despite the weakosity of their latest product:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenacious_D

Warning, these guys swear like crazy and mock-praise the devil. If you don't think that is funny, I might look elsewhere for my entertainment.

If any of you baby addicts are still with me, I promise the next post will be filled with cuteness. I just had to cleanse the palate.

Important Life Lessons



I have been thinking about collecting a list of important life lessons to pass on to my girls. If anybody has any they would like to add, please feel free to add it in the comments.

Lesson #1:
The close door button on the elevator doesn't really do anything except maybe.. MAYBE cancel a recent open door button push. It is basically a giant placebo, made to give anxious elevator travelers something to do if they can't wait the 3 seconds for the doors to close on their own. I have run tests, so I know this to be true. Any feeling you have to the contrary is just an effect of the intermittent reinforcement caused by occasionally hitting the button at the same time as the door was going to close anyway. Bottom line: The close door button is for suckers.

Been a little over a week since I last posted. This is mostly because I have not been up to anything really different. Feel free to re-read the Shut-In entry to see how most of my days are going.

We are ramping up for me to go back to work. This should be some fun. On the plus side we are going to try a Night Nurse/Doula to see how that affects our sanity. The negative is that they are not cheap, so even in the best case scenario I doubt we will use one more than a couple of times a week. We are also scheduling sitters/help to come and get Candy through the next 3 weeks. So far we got two days a week covered. We will need more. I think I am coming to terms with the idea of spending a fair amount of change on Baby Care assistance.

Turns out babies cruelly go through cycles of growth spurts and behavior change. It usually takes at least a week to develop a good routine where you feel comfortable feeding and getting the baby to sleep. Unfortunately something like every 2 weeks the baby's needs/patterns/general fussiness changes and you are back to square 1. Well, maybe square 1.5. It is my understanding that this cycle slows (i.e. a change every 1 week stretches to 2 weeks to 4 weeks to 3 months, etc). Good Lord I hope so.



They grow real fast. Kayla just measured in at 7.5 pounds, 2 punds more than when she was born. For those of you keeping score that is a 40% jump in body mass in a single month. While it may sometime seem like I can gain weight that fast, I really can't. It would be like gaining 80 pounds in a month. Of course, if I ate my full every 3 hours it would help. Rylie is also gaining quickly, although we do not have an official rate (because of Kayla's stay in the NICU and Rylie's tiny birth weight they got on different doctor visit schedules), but I can tell you it is much harder telling them apart with a single glance. Rylie has a smaller mouth and a rounder head, but at an angle with their mouth covered... definitely getting tricky.

Our longest trip was an ill-advised foray down to the ocean. Basically we were having a really bad day, with not much sleep and the girls acting real fussy. I was depressed even before we talked to our architects, who delayed our house renovations AT LEAST another month and half. Apparently this is because, and I shit you not, the structural engineer has run off to be with his wife in Budapest. Yeah, that's in Hungary. We felt powerless and very unhappy. But we were bound and determined to do this beach trip because we had been putting it off and were feeling shut-in and wanted to at least accomplish this one damn thing.

Yeah, maybe not the best attitude for starting a mini-road trip. Another reason this was dumb is that it took us so long to get going that we didn't leave the house until 2pm on a Friday. If you are familiar with LA traffic you may be thinking to yourself, hmm, I bet the drive back might be unpleasant. More on that in a sec.




We ended up taking Topanga Canyon down to Malibu and stopping for food and view at Gladstone's. When we arrived at the restaurant we were surly, grumpy folks (at least I was) but an hour of sun and surf with coconut shrimp and a beer and I felt relaxed and human again. I was starting to think this trip was a good idea... and then we tried to get home at 4:30 on a Friday. There is really no way to avoid significant traffic and we didn't. And we also discovered, while road noise and motion sooth the babies, being stuck in traffic does not. It kind of is like Speed, keep the car above 55 mph or the babies explode. When your baby cries for an hour 3 feet from your head... you will develop a headache.

Fortunately, most days and most outings are not like that. Like take this trip to see Gramps (my father). That was much more pleasant.

The New Parent Shut-In


It took me nearly three weeks to get down all the birth, hospital, and getting home excitement. Fortunately, that has not left me that far behind, as it turns out I don't really do much any more. As far as I can tell babies are God's way of saying, congratulations, you are now a hermit.

Interspersed are the beginnings of our Baby Fashion show, showing off all the outfits people made or purchased for us. If you don't see yours the most likely reason is that it is still too big. The second most likely reason is the baby spit up or crapped on it before we could get a picture. Be patient, they can't stay incontinent forever. Also, most pictures in this round feature Rylie, as I am going in chronological order and she was home a week before Kayla (one is Kayla.. can YOU tell which one?).



A typical day starts around 2-3am. Usually only one of the two little beasties starts crying. What we do at this point depnds how much sleep we have gotten so far. On an "optimal" night Candy has gotten to sleep around 10-11, while I stayed up later, say midnight-ish to adminster a final bottle feeding to both in an attempt to get them to sleep nice and hard. On these rare occasions that Candy has managed 3+ hours of sleep she will get up and feed both, with my drowsy assistance. If our luck is running really good we can get them fed and back to sleep in their crib in around 45 minutes.


As one might imagine, most nights don't go nearly so well. It seems as though the number of times both will simply feed and then crash into a deep sleep has been decreasing. We keep explaining this hyper-hungry behavior as growth spurts, although I am starting to suspect the babies are just taunting me. This thought crosses my mind most often in the early am hours. Anyway, it seems that on a more typical night Candy has been unable to sleep until 11-12-ish and I am just trying to get to sleep closer to 1-2am when all baby hell breaks loose. Exhausted, we tend to perform baby triage, grabbing only one baby at a time, feeding them in bed and trying to get them to fall asleep right there for just one precious hour for the love of God! This inefficient system is without-a-doubt extremely dumb, as it just leads to babies waking us up in shifts all night. However, when running on under an hour of sleep you do whatever it takes to get 10 more minutes right now. I would kill your grandmother for five. Don't test me.


Whether it was a good night or a bad one, we tend to right our ship by daylight and get back to dual feeding and babies that appear to remember how to sleep again. While still interrupted every 3 hours, I tend to get more sleep as Candy is awake a lot of this time, taking some of the extra burden I tried to take around midnight. Most days I "sleep" in to 11am, giving me a solid 6-8 hours of non-contiguous sleep. Funny how important that contiguous part is. At this point we get up, do the 11am feeding, and then worry about our own lunch. If we are going out we shower first. If not, then the shower, for me, is a bit more optional.



Hey, two of my roommates live in regularly soiled diapers, so I think I can skip an occasional shower when I haven't even seen the outdoors for days at a stretch. Don't judge. If you are visting, I probably showered just for you. Be polite.


All outings are 3 hours or less, as this is the nominal feeding period. On very rare occasions where breast feeding can be arranged "on-the-go" we can be out longer, but this has been very rare indeed. I should also note that 80% of our trips out of the house involve medical care of some variety, so the whooping it up has been minimal. Because of the extreme young age of our cohorts, our doctor has instructed us to keep their public exposure to a minimum. Don't want them to pick up a cold, or God forbid, the flu. With their tiny lungs and under-developed immune systems it could be life threatening. I believe twice now we have eaten outside, doing some patio dining: once at Sharkey's and again at Maria's.


Most days we have no specific outing planned and that works out well for the girls, as one or the other is a little extra fussy. There is almost no freak out so major that it is a big deal to handle in daylight hours, but it takes time. Time to feed. Time to change diapers or clothes. Then there is laundry (those new clothes got to come from somewhere) and dish washing (the bottles got to come from somewhere, too). Getting them to sleep again. Usually hours go by and the day is over before you know it. And you are tired from the lack of sleep, so this is just fine with you.



This leads to the new parent shut-in syndrome. I can easily go a day or two without leaving the house. Hell, without putting on pants... although I usually do just so I don't scare the kids. Or the mailman. Or my dog, really. Stuff I was hoping this time off would allow me to do has not come easily. Simple things like reading, writing, even computer stuff. If you always have a baby in your hands the only thing you can easily do is watch TV. Thank God for Tivo.



To finish the day: we usualy worry about dinner around 7pm. Most days we cook something, of various levels of complication. It could be frozen food someone else gave us (thanks everyone), a traditional store bought frozen meal, or something requiring at least a little bit of prep (Taco night!). By the time we get fed and the kids get fed and the dog gets fed and everything is cleaned up we are back to 9pm and about to start the whole cycle again.

I do recognize the irony. Candy was stuck on bed rest for 4 months. I am merely under house arrest. I go out of my way to allow her out of the house, as she really deserves to finally streatch those gams of hers. Yes, I have switched to 30s hardboiled detective vernacular. You don't like it I'll give you a belly full of lead from my twin heaters. Now, quit your malarkey or you'll be seeing cats pajamas in your poolside cabana, if you get my meaning.

I am quite certain you won't. I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Sleep deprivation does strange things to a mind. I find myself dancing to Candy's IPOD at 3am. Funky, funky dances. No, you will see no pictures of this.

We now take a break from my all-consuming experiment in new fatherhood to slip, momentarily, into a highly partisan fit of gloating:



WooHoo! Eat it Repubs! House and Senate -- A Ha Ha Ha!

We now return you to our previously scheduled non-partisan and sweet new child blogging.

The N.I.C.U. Queen



We chose our OB-GYN for two reasons. One, we were misled into believing we could switch HMO medical groups after Candy was pregnant to get a doctor we wanted. Turns out not so much: pregnancy is a pre-existing condition so we had to stay with the doctor in our medical group. It is possible to get around this with a permission letter from your new medical group saying they accept the new patient despite their obvious flaws, but this was obviously going to be a huge pain in the ass. We decided against exploring this option as Two: our OB-GYN would deliver us at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center, which has arguably one of the best Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU) in all of Southern California.

With modern technology doctors can deliver babies that will survive as early as 22-24 weeks. This is just over 5 months. These pound and a half babies are a mess, with nothing properly developed yet, from skin to heart to lungs to eyes to liver, etc. Going into this we hoped we would not need to deliver that early and would therefore not need this great NICU. We felt very fortunate to make it all the way to 36 weeks before our babies were delivered, placing us right around the median delivery age for twins. Twins still tend to be born a bit small, but 3-4 weeks earlier than the traditional “singleton” baby is just fine in most cases. So we assumed we were in the clear. Well, you know what they say about what “assume” makes of you and me…

The hospital has no middle ground between babies being allowed upstairs to be with their mothers and the NICU. So when they finally determined that “Baby B” was not going to be able to rapidly clear her lungs, they reserved a cradle for her in the NICU, Bed 11 to be exact. Dazed and Confused (my new ring tone by the way), her mother and I settled down in our tiny hospital room complete with fold out husband-bed, dealing with our brand new baby as best we could and hoping for better news in the morning.




The NICU is a secure, sterile space. To enter you hit a button outside two imposing doors and then stare into a HAL-9000 looking security eye. Someone might answer right away, or you may have to hit the button repeatedly. Eventually you state your name and that you are a parent of a NICU baby and they unlock the door. This gets you into the foyer where there is a check-in desk and a hand-washing station. This is where you need to scrub your hands up to the elbow for a full three minutes, like you were a doctor about to go into surgery. The first time you do it you feel as though your hands have never been cleaner. By the 20th time you feel a bit like an overworked dish washer.

The main room of the NICU is row upon row of baby incubators, plastic boxes with little doors on the side, as if instead of babies one were handling toxic or radioactive materials. Every incubator is hooked up to a series of monitors. Every baby has its heart, temperature, oxygen, and respiratory rate monitored. Alarms are a regular occurance in the NICU, with one going off somewhere every 5-10 minutes. The majority are reading errors or tiny temporary spikes, but the nurses are always running this way and that, punching buttons, adjusting monitor leads, and calling for help. Despite all that there is a definitely sense of tranquility. These babies are quite sick and weak and most are likely to stay that way for a long time, so you can’t sustain a sense of desperate urgency.





The NICU is set up in rows of three, with about 18 total beds, nearly all filled. Our baby is in the middle incubator in one of these rows. On either side of her are seriously premature babies, little 1-2 pounders, so undeveloped and so small they don’t really look like babies at all but some other poor, sick mammal. Each has so many machines hooked up to it you can hardly see the child. Air oscillators pumping air into their lungs, blood transfusing, intravenous drugs pumped into their hands, bright UV lights helping their livers break down their body waste products. These really tiny babies basically have their own 1-on-1 nurse assigned to them, showing how constant monitoring is required to keep them alive.

Our daughter was born at 5 pounds, 6 ounces, truly a giant among this teeny, tiny population. While initially given an IV and some oxygen, in just a day or two she has both those removed, leaving only a NG (nasogastric) tube for putting food directly into her stomach through her nose. This is required as her breathing rate is much too high for normal feeding, spiking as high as 140 breaths a minute, a hyperventilating pant that she is doing to counter the decreased oxygen she is receiving because of the fluid in her lungs. Watching her, you can see her breathing ease and slow, then something catches (assumedly the fluid) and the breathing rate skyrockets again. Even so, she is clearly in a whole different class of health than her surrounding incubator-mates. A real Queen of the NICU.





Candy first got to see her second born (by a minute) in the late afternoon of the next day. Still literally stapled together, she had to be wheeled down to the NICU and propped up to wash her hands. She would be able to leave the hospital in 3 more days. Kayla, who we were finally able to name once Candy had seen her, would be there almost 2 weeks.

The hardest part of visiting Kayla in the NICU was definitely leaving her. Especially if you arrived before feeding so you were allowed to hold her for a while. Putting your child back in the plastic cube to have fluid pumped into her stomach… that is tough. Throw in some exhaustion and sleep deprivation and it was not hard to tear up a little bit. Sometimes I had to literally flee the ward to keep myself together.




The second hardest part was getting realistic information out of the NICU staff. The nurses are completely geared to ease fears and settle nerves, so they always had very encouraging but highly vague tidbits to give out. -- She is a little better. She was good last night. She should not be here too long. -- This is not entirely their fault, as the final say on child health really belongs to the doctors. If a nurse says something to get a parents hopes up or makes them upset and it turns out to be different than what the doctor would say… well, they would get a lot of crap. NICU babies appear to not be assigned a particular doctor, necessarily, but are assigned to the staff. This makes it more difficult to find the person who can really answer your question. Particularly the critical question: Realisitically, how long will my child be here? If I had one complaint with our stay at St. Joe’s, it would be that there should be some more systematic way to get information on our NICU children without having to ask whatever random nurse is on duty. It really led to a lot of unnecessary frustration with an already difficult situation.

After seven days Kayla’s breathing finally cleared. Candy, Rylie, and I had been home for 3 days at that point getting the nursery prepped and adjusting our lives to fit this new significant responsibility. It was sort of like we had a starter baby, to get ourselves adjusted to this new crazy parent-thing. Except that we had to go to the hospital every day, usually carting along our tiny little companion.

We wanted to take Kayla home right then, but what we had not been told before was that even when her breathing cleared, it would take days to wean her off her stomach feeding tube. Until it could be demonstrated that she could gain weight from regular feeding they would not release her. It was at this point I became very frustrated and bitched incessantly to anyone foolish enough to engage me on the subject. I am sure my increased irritability from lack of sleep did not help.

To complicate matters further, Kayla took to breast feeding right away, but had some initial trouble with the bottle. As we wanted to get her home as soon as possible, this meant we had to try and be at every non-lavage (lavage is medi-speak for stomach tube) feeding. At first this was not so bad when the non-lavage was only once a day. However she did very well and it ramped up quickly, so we soon found ourselves traveling to the hospital over and over at all times of night, including a mildly scary midnight feeding where we had to enter the hospital through the emergency room and travel through the whole empty hospital. Have you seen a hospital-based horror movie? Yeah, it was like that.



Finally we managed an all day hospital stay where they gave us a special room, so we didn’t have to go back and forth from our home. Rylie and Kayla met for the first time since their birth ten days before. This was an astounding success and Kayla finally got her nose tube out and was sent home on Sunday, October 29, at the tender age of 11 days. We could finally celebrate, which we did with a nice Belgian lambic. Of course, now the work has really begun.






This ends this little series, but I assure you there will be much more of these little rascals to come…

Hosting a Soiree



When we last left our heroes they had just been born. One peck on the cheek each from their mother and then they were wheeled out of the operating room and down the hall to the nursery. As father I am required to follow along. This serves multiple purposes. A) One of the parents is there to ensure no baby swapping goes on and to witness more of their first life moments. B) The father is removed from the room so he can’t accidentally get a glimpse of any the behind the curtain Mommy clean-up. You don’t want to know what goes on behind the curtain, but it sure ain’t the great and powerful Oz.

Thus starts one of the odd phenomenons of the modern day hospital. As soon as the babies are born it is the father that becomes pre-eminent, while the poor mom is patched up and tucked away in various waiting/recovery rooms. This is especially true for the C-section, as the poor mom literally can’t move most of her body for a while, placing her entirely at the mercy of the medical staff.

On the other hand, the father with his all powerful armband can go anywhere he wants. Into and out of the nursery, to the recovery room, to the public waiting area, upstairs to the patient rooms, and back to all them in any order he wishes. With all the fresh baby action, arriving in-laws, and mother needing info and comforting, it feels a great deal like one crazy party for which you are the only host. Mingle everyone, mingle.

When I entered the nursery it was a minor madhouse. Every cradle was filled. The nurses in the nursery were complaining that no one had told them that twins were coming. The nurses from the operating room snapped back that no one had told them anything more than a few minutes before either. There was a persistent rumor that a giant baby was coming, with an umbilical cord larger than anyone there had previously seen. One baby pooped everywhere as it was weighed (nasty dark, black mirconium poop), another failed its initial blood test so badly the nurse had to immediately tube food into its stomach. All this and, of course, it was a shift change.

When a newborn baby is brought into the nursery they do several things. First they put drops of Erythromycin in their eyes, to ward off infection. This is supposed to be particularly effective against many sexually transmitted diseases, like gonorrhea and syphilis. Never mind that this makes much less sense for a C-section baby. Hospitals like systems from which not to deviate. Second, they get a shot of vitamin K which is what helps your blood coagulate. We had to feed our dog vitamin K once when we discovered it had eaten 2-3 squirrels. We suspected a blood thinning rat poison, but in fact our dog is simply an efficient squirrel killing machine. Anyway, I suspect one of the main reasons for the vitamin K is to be sure the baby stops bleeding as they administer the Third of their nursery horrors: the blood sugar test. A baby gets one of these an hour for its first 3-4 hours of life to ensure they are not crashing outside of the mommy placenta food bank. To get the blood needed for this test they stab the foot. Needless to say, babies hate this.

For the most part I stood between the two cradles, alternately filming, touching, soothing, and wondering at the two babies, temporarily named Baby A and Baby B. Baby A was the little one, 4 lbs, 13 oz and the reason we had decided to deliver that day. As things turned out, she was the feisty one, not giving us any trouble from the very beginning. However, it became rapidly apparent that Baby B (5 lb, 6 oz) was having some trouble breathing. There was a hitch in her breathing and a wet sound to her lungs, making her breathe fast and hard. It wasn’t long before the nurses had put a little oxygen mask over her face to ease her troubles. I was told she had some fluid in her lungs, something not all that uncommon in babies born of C-section, as they miss the orange juicing-like squeeze of being driven from the birth canal. So there I was concerned about both of my babies, one so small, the other not breathing right. I wanted to stay by them both all the time. But then I had to host this weird little party.

The first to arrive was my mother. She appeared on the other side of the nursery glass and we did a pantomime ritual to indicate which of the many babies were mine. There is good sound proofing for the nursery, but if you go right up to the glass you can just communicate without reaching a full bellow. Next I had to check on Candy, who was leaving a major surgery after all. I miss timed it of course, arriving in the recovery room before she did. There I spent 5-10 anxious minutes, paranoid worst case scenarios dancing through my head. Was she late? Is this delay normal? There is her doctor, so certainly he wouldn’t be chatting up the nurses if there had been any complications… etc. Too much adrenaline again. At last they pushed her through the doors, giving me a chance to fill her in on the babies she was still hours away from seeing again.

Then it was out to see my mother in person, briefing her on the situation. Then back to nursery, where I repeat this dance as my father arrives and then later again for my in-laws. At some point Candy is wheeled upstairs to our permanent hospital room, adding a further complication to the dance. No one is allowed up there but me, because, as the toughest tiny female security guard you will ever meet told us: “Visiting hours are over.” Oh, and I think she also mentioned that she didn’t make the rules. My poor in-laws arrived so late from Las Vegas they didn’t see their daughter for a whole extra day.

Meanwhile, Baby A got stronger and stronger while Baby B just couldn’t seem to clear its lungs. Somewhere around hour 3 the nurses finally decided that there wasn’t going to be a quick fix, and Baby B got taken not to its mother, but the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). The same place tiny 1 pound 24 week old babies get taken. This was the beginning of long stay that was more than a little tough to take. More on that in the third and hopefully final installment of this blog.



To end this chapter on a happier note: Baby A was bathed and sent up to be with its mother at 11pm, a full 4 hours after she was born. This was slightly longer than normal, partially because they really wanted to make sure the tiny guy was healthy despite a smallish size and partially because of the nursery overcrowding. A situation that had not been helped by the one-on-one care Baby B had received.

Before Baby A arrived I visited with Candy and told her I had looked at this baby carefully and could not see naming this little girl anything but Rylie, one of our top picks, although prior to seeing them it was sitting in at the runner-up position of #3.

After Candy saw her, she had to agree. Her name was Rylie.

Let's Begin the Beguine...




OK, I am getting a few moments here and there to hear myself think, so I thought I would take this opportunity to catch up on the blog. Like any story, I really should begin at the beginning, so everyone is caught up to speed. This will likely lead to several installments, so bare with me.

It is highly common in twins that one takes a bit more of the nutrients than the other. This can lead to one of the twins developing a condition known as Inter-Uterine Growth Restriction (IUGR), where basically one of the babies does not develop at a normal rate. They use to call it Inter-Uterine Growth Retardation, but changed the name for the obvious reason that mentioning the word retardation to anxious parents=to-be invariably led to super-freakouts. While it is clear in the title it is the growth that is retarded, not the child's brain, the multiple painful explanations finally led to a convention somewhere where beleaguered perinatalogists agreed to the name change.

Anyway, as most of you probably already knew, one of little ones was diagnosed in utero with IUGR. This led to Candy spending something close to 4 months on bed rest, as that is one of the treatments. Laying on your side all day is supposed to increase blood flow to the placentas and therefore the babies as well.

Along comes week 36. Candy has shown no signs of distress, except for the significant symptom of being as big as an hindoor game complex. At week 34 the signs of IUGR that had faded somewhat from early on appear to be back, so we know that if they persist into week 36 we may get our delivery moved up. We also know statistically that the median age of a twin is 36-37 weeks. So we thought we were somewhat prepared for news that the delivery would be soon.

At 11am we walked into our perinatalogist's office. He hooked us up to his fancy-schmancy ultrasound and took a few measurements. The little one was only 4 percentile in size for its abdomen, now two weeks in a row. Clear IUGR. At this late stage of the pregnancy it is his considered opinion that delivery is safer than waiting for some sort of critical development. I.e, tiny baby could become distressed and be in big (maybe fatal) trouble before the next check-up. He sends up to our OB.

At 1pm we see our OB-GYN, an old school Israeli (we think) doctor whose bedside manner definitely gives the impression he will suffer the questions of fools only to a point. He agrees with the first assessment and tells us we will indeed deliver.

Tonight.

We are to be at the hospital at 4:30pm. We should go home and pack for a 4 day hospital stay. The delivery is going to be a C-section, as inducing traditional labor would put too much strain on the little, possible weak baby. Inducing labor would take 12-14 hours. The C-section will be under an hour.

So you can imagine the chaos. Prepare to be parents in 2 hours. We had thought, at worst, they would schedule us for Thursday morning. Aye-yai-yai. We pack, we take out the trash, clear the sink, feed the pets, call the parents, I eat. (Candy can't, because of the surgery.) We pause to take some final pictures of Candy in the nursery, at her most splendiferous. Then it is throw the bags in the car, and off to have our lives turned permanently upside down.


Sitting in a Recovery/Prep room in Labor and Delivery, I read section's of King Lear to Candy, doing my best to do a different voice for each character. Occasionally I stop and summarize what I think happened in that scene, as it can take a bit of digestion to fully get all the nuances of Elizabethan English written in Iambic pentameter. I am doing this for two reasons. First and foremost I am trying to calm/distract Candy and myself from the fact she is about to undergo major surgery. Second, one of the top 3 names we are considering for the girls in Cordelia, who is the good daughter from King Lear. The room is shared, so I try to keep my absurd over-acting to a minimum.

Finally they come to wheel Candy away. While they are prepping her and starting her spinal block anesthesia I am not allowed in the operating room. They hand me scrubs and tell me to wait for approximately 15 minutes, at which point they will call me in to witness the event.

The waiting room is actually just a single chair sitting in a hallway out side a large set of double doors marked "Authorized Personnel Only". There is nothing else there, except a single still from Dumbo framed on the wall exactly opposite the chair. St. Joe's medical center is basically across the street from Disney Studios, so they have decorated all up and down Labor and Delivery with Dumbo themed paraphenalia. The picture exactly opposite me shows Dumbo flying joyously with Timothy the mouse dressed in his bandleader outfit atop his head. Clutched in Dumbo's trunk is the magic black feather that allows this little baby elephant to escape the bounds of gravity and do the impossible. Of course, the trick [spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't seen Dumbo. Seriously?!] is that the feather is nothing special and that Dumbo is doing it all himself.

It is hard to describe my feelings at this point. Adrenaline cranked to the max. Palms a little sweaty, clutching the video camera. This was clearly one of those BIG life moments and it was not dissappointing. I put it up there with asking my wife to marry me as one of the most intense experiences I have had. I think what heightened it was that at this moment of significant life transition I was forced to sit and wait. Staring at that little baby elephant and doing everything in my power to concentrate on getting from one breath to the next.

When they finally call me Candy is strapped down to an operating table, crucifiction style. A curtain has been placed at just about her armpits, blocking a view of her lower body. She was shivering, mostly from adrenaline I suspect, although I think there was also shock involved, as by the time I had arrived she was paralyzed over more than half of her body. I do my best to comfort her. I think I tell her how proud I am of her. Then I am told I should stand up and look behind the curtain and that is where I see my girls enter the world.

I had watched enough birthing shows to not be surprised by the tugging out by the head of two white, gooey babies. The white goo is vernix, something the babies produce to protect their skin from the amniotic fluid. I don't know how many people get to see a birth live and close up, but it is truly astounding. Something from nothing. Spontaneous Generation. One becomes Two. Or in our case Three.

After they clean the babies and I get to cut the cord, Candy is allowed two quick glances at the babies she carried in her womb for 36 weeks and then we are all whisked off to the Nursery. The whole process I witnessed could not have taken more than 15 minutes.

But as you might suspect, I was far from done.

My Daughters, the Smurfs



That's Kayla, or Kaylee to her friends. I think she is just smurfy.

Below is Candy (the night of) holding Rylie for the first time.



Again there will be a lot more to come, but for now I got to run back to the hospital.

S.

ATTENTION, ALL SHIPS AT SEA

dee deedee dee deedeedee

Two new baby Colberts have been sighted in the Pacific Quadrant.

Rylie Jayne Colbert

&

Kayla Mackenzie Colbert

Both are pink, hungry and assumed to be extremely dangerous...To my sleep patterns.

Born Oct 18, 7:00 and 7:01pm.

More will soon follow, including pictures, but things are still a might crazy now.

That is all.

deedee dee dee deedeedee dee...

Satisfaction



I got the Chair Rail molding up and painted this weekend, with an assist from my mother who was passing through. I did the touch-ups and voila!



The best looking room in the house. While it was a tremendous pain in the posterior, now that I have executed my lovely bride's master plan I must admit it looks damn nice.



Check out the fish "wallies", stickers designed to stick to your walls without destroying your walls. We might add some sea turtles or doplhins or something, but have to make sure it doesn't get too busy.

It wasn't all sugar and light.

For one, I installed new breaker electric outlets. The kind that trip themselves off in they feel a surge (faster and with a lower threshold than your fuse box). In addition to being slightly more complicated than your normal outlet (you have to connect the wires to the correct leads or it can't "break" the current) these are grounded sockets where my previous ones were not. The previous ones were literally falling apart, so some change had to be made, so why not upgrade to the latest in outlet technology? Anyway, grounding a socket simply requires connecting it to the outlet box, the steel box the outlet is sitting in inside your wall. The steel box is grounded, so anything connected to it will be as well. To ensure a tight connection, I like to drill a hole in the box big enough to put in a screw that I can then attach to a grounding wire. Needless to say, sometimes drilling into a steel box recessed into the wall can be a thankless task. In this particular instance it led to one broken drill bit and, worse, a slip that pulled about an inch of plaster off the wall. Already painted plaster. Arrgh!!!

Fear not, I have already repainted the area. But between the initial incident and the final latex painting, there was some swearing and tossing of dustpans. You can tell when I am really angry at myself for doing something dumb, because I start inventing new swear words. In the interest of not having this blog blocked by parent filters I will repeat none of them here. Let me just say I combine the standard dirty seven words in combinations with objects that just don't make much sense... bubble gum, kazoos, whatever pops into my heated brain. Usually I also mention donkeys.

Another problem I had was that one of the closets refuses to dry properly. Every time I think it is completely dry I close it. After an hour it creates a strong, superglue-like bond with the door frame and when the closet in opened again, it rips the pain off. Presently we are living with this issue as dealing with the oil paint any further is more than I can bear... although now we are considering the painting of bureau.

So, what I would like most now is that the room not be used at all, but instead declared off limits using a velvet rope. Tour groups will be brought by, but they may only gawk inwards longingly.

Apparently this is an unreasonable request.

Instead we are filling the room with baby gear. More on that next blog. In the meantime, please enjoy this photo of me and my dog, Pismo, which looks wholely inappropriate, but is in actuality, not:




I'm scratching her back people! It is either this or more pictures of animals wearing hats, I swear!

S.

Do Not Touch The Trim!


Behold the wonder that is fresh painted trim! Know that while beautiful, it must always be remembered that oil-based paints produce fumes that make the head throb and ache. Ventilation, my child, ventilation.

Seriously, I had to get some serious fan-action going to keep the fumes out of our "temporary" bedroom last night. The room got a little cold, but I put the down comforter back on the bed so it felt quite warm and snuggly. Wife and childs appear none the worse for wear.

Painting with water-based latex paints is so relatively pleasant, that I had forgotten what a bitch-fest oil stuff can be. Right now, as I speak, there is a fan in the nursery-to-be window, producing negative pressure in the room to ensure whatever fumes are still being outgassed go out altogether. Important mental note: In future set up fan FIRST, so that throbbing temples do not ensue. Also, do not talk with the Space Bunnies. They are not real.

So I am truly in the home stretch, needing only to hang the trim and do final touch-ups. Hopefully with as little oil-based paint as possible.

Now, as it is Friday the 13th.... DEVIL CAT!!!!



...and mildly Satanic turtle.

The Great Leap Forward



Yes, today's post has been inspired by the Chinese Communist Party's 5-year plan circa 1958, in which they tried so hard to throw the country into collectives while increasing production on all fronts that the entire country essentially collapsed. It is really a classic example of why running an economy from the top down does not work. Everyone got pressure from the next level up to produce results, so each level lied/exaggerated to the next and therefore the entire country began to starve while the upper echelon thought things were going so swimmingly that they started pulling farmers to make more iron or steel. Since the farmers weren't exactly metallurgy experts they did the next best thing and melted down their farm implements. By the time Mao and company realized what a disaster they had created they were in deep trouble, as they had been claiming just the opposite. So they continued to act as if everything was going swimmingly, hoping it would eventually fix itself. For instance, over most of this time period that people were starving, China continued to export large quantities of food to the world. Because there was such plenty in China. Because Mao was a genius and collectivism worked. You get the idea. Long story short, 20-30 million people starved to death and Mao lost a great deal of power and credibility (temporarily, it turns out... but the Cultural Revolution is a subject for another do-it-yourself project).



So in that spirit I announce the successful launch of stripes and waves on the walls of my nursery. This was done without outside intervention (except for Nan...thanks Nan) and demonstrates the indigenous wisdom and mad paint skills of our people. Pictures now follow. All hail our great leader, Sherman Williams.





For those of you keeping score, I still need to do the trim, touch-ups and hang the new chair rail molding.

Here is some evidence of the wear and tear this nursery painting has exacted on my poor, tired bones. Either I have decided I can't take it anymore and have decided to end it all by driving my head into a pile of plastic sheeting, or I am masking stuff at floor level. Or both. Quite possibly both.



Blessed be Zod.

S.

P.S. I believe I have activated the "allow anyone to post comments" option. So, go for it, anyone.

Tom Sawyer was a Genius.



While the lighting was not exactly optimal, this is what the room looked like after the initial painting of the ceiling. Notice the snazzy dropcloth on the floor, part of my Home Depot birthday present. A cloth drop cloth is roughly 4000% better than plastic, except for the fact that at the end you need to clean it instead of just throwing it away. It doesn't rip, paint dries uber-quick on it, it doesn't slip much on the floor, etc. This drop cloth is just slightly too small for the room, so I had to put plastic down on one stretch and it is just not as good. Plastic sheeting is definitely cheaper, but I say invest in the cloth drop cloth. Everything will go much smoother.

Anyway, now that I have made my plug for the National Foundation for Advancement of Textile Paint Protection Materials (NAMBLA)...

This is how things stood Saturday afternoon: Ceiling painted. Check. Next 25 steps. Still to be done. Fortunately Candy had lined up a whole bunch of sucker-- er, I mean, helpful volunteers to come over on Sunday and make a good push on the whole project. Painting is fun. Why, it is so much fun you should pay me to be allowed to do it.

They didn't pay me, but thanks to Nan, Jacole, Marie, and my mom (Jane) anyway. Thanks to them we 1) Emptied the closets of roughly one ton of stuff, 2) Cleaned and painted the inside of the closets, 3) Painted the top 2/3 of the room (Nacre), 4) Painted the bottom third of the room (Honeydew), 5) Masked everything that still needed masking. This flurry of work even allowed me time to run out and get some chair rail molding to put in the room. I have two pieces cut to order, each ~13 feet in length. Even in my mom's SUV I had to stick them out the passenger window to get them home. It felt a bit like jousting. I was desperately afraid I was going to take out some poor pedestrian's noggin on the way back to my abode.

The room now looks like this:



Coming up Next: We get fancy. There are going to be stripes and waves. Stay tuned.








Oh, and the Dodgers rolled over and died without much of a fight, so I am no longer distracted by baseball. Just this baby any minute thing.

Holy crap, My wife is gonna have a baby!

No, not now. At least I hope not. No labor, no panicked rushes. None of that.

I did, however, spend a good portion of two days watching her hooked up to baby heart monitor machines. They average ~130 beats/minute which although squirrel-like, also happens to be very good for a in utero baby. My wife has even started having mini-contractions, or pre-contractions, or Braxton-Hicks contractions. Call them what you will, they are really Holy-crap-this-is-really-gonna-happen-soon contractions.

With my other mind-occupier, the Dodgers, just about circling the playoff toilet bowl, I have little else to obsess over. It doesn't look like the House re-model will start until after Thanksgiving, so no escape there, either.

So if I am going to run around like a father-to-be with its head cut off, I might as well get something accomplished. So begins the epic and heart palpitating tale of "Painting the Nursery". While it doesn't have the emotional complexity of "the Hole", it should end up being more colorful.

Here is what my bedroom looked like about a week ago.



Sort of a Where's Waldo game of messiness. Find the cat, the mouse, and the sheep and win a fabulous prize!

I can't tell you what it is, but I can guarantee it will be fabulous. If by fabulous we all agree means stuff I am trying to give away that is sitting in my garage.

The idea is to clear the bedroom and paint it into the nursery. This required we move out and into the back office. Which required clearing the back office and putting most of it in the garage (hint hint, fabulous prizes). If it all sounds very
complicated, well, it is. Needless to say it is sort of a musical chairs process that is less a whacky birthday party game and more like continually moving everything you own. In the end, we probably move the bed back in the nursery until the re-model is ready to start. Then we move to my Mom's house. Six years go by and then we have a bigger, nicer home. The End, trumpeting swans, fade to shimmery white.

In the meantime, someone had to clear that room. It now looks like this:



Holes are being patched and sanded. Next I will scrub the walls down with pre-paint, wall-cleaning soap. (TSP I think it is called. Total Soap Product? Try Something Porous? Tom Sucks Pe- No. Probably Not. Anywho...) Then comes the tarp, taping, and painting. Stay tuned loyal viewers, as this room goes from plain Jane to room of the future!!!!

S.

Happy B-day to me,

Thirty-Four, thank you for asking.

I am mighty distracted of late, which is not helping me get my stuff done at work. Because I definitely need to get my stuff done before the babies comes. But the fact the babies are coming is highly distracting.

And so it goes.

On the Home front I have been obsessed with cleaning up and clearing out our offices to put a giant room swap into play, whereby we move our bed into an office and start some hard core baby nursery decoration. This mainly entails boxing things we want to keep in some semi-organized fashion, and throwing away the other half. You accumulate a lot of crap over the years, I can tell you.

Also highly distracting are the Dodgers, who are in the thick of a seriously entertaining playoff chase. Basically three teams, the Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego Padres, & Philadelphia Phillies (Is that a crappy name or what) are in a race to go the playoffs. One will win the Western Division, one will win the free pass of baseball known as the Wild Card, and one will go home to sulk and probably develop a substance abuse problem. As of this morning the Dodgers lay exactly half way between the Padres and the Phillies, with basically a game separating them either way. You don't want to know what happens if teams end the season tied, but it is complicated and involves a white board to explain. I have all sorts of playoff tickets if the Dodgers can get there, as I am part of a Season Ticket pool, so that kind of makes this doubly distracting.

Fortunately the Dodgers just won their game this afternoon (19-11, a traditional Coors Field pitcher's duel), putting pressure on both their rivals who play later.

See, I told you I was distracted.

Breast Feeding Class: Less Hot Than You Might Think

Demonstrating I am well on my way to full middle-class, suburban husband-hood, I attended a Breast Feeding class last night. There is nothing young, hip, or edgey about learning how to breast feed. I am prefectly willing to allow that a totally cool, with-it hot chick might attend such a class (although I don't recall any there...uh, except my beautiful wife -- phew! that was close), but since my attendence was to learn about it so I could understand and help my wife go through with it, I think this clearly puts me into the mini-van man demographic.

Hell, I have even been talking about getting a mini-van. Mini-vans are so uncool, that they are almost cool. Especially if I could get a brand new one, fully tricked out. Maybe I could put those spinning wheels and some fluorescent under-lights on it. I could really cruise in one of those and have plenty of storage room for strollers and diaper bags. Yeah, bitches!

Anywho, the class was actually kind of interesting, sort of like the Science of the Breast 101. Apparently a breast is a lot like a stalk of broccoli. Seriously, the lecturer brought broccoli as a visual prop. I imagine afterwords she went home and boiled her breast before melting some cheese on top. Mmm.

I learned a newborn baby has a stomach the size of a marble, which grows to the size of ping pong ball over the first few weeks of their life. Again, there were props. Really, the lecturer was like the Carrot Top of lactation consultants.

I also learned TOR. Tickle the lower lip. Open the mouth wide. RAM it in.

Apparently the nurses have asked the lactation people to stop using this memory acronym. I am not sure if they find the ramming of breasts distasteful, or merely the linguistic faux pas of putting an acronym in an acronym, as RAM also stands for Rapid Arm Movement. All I know is breast feeding requires a good latch. I will probably check out Home Depot after work.

Finally I learned we are suppose to breast feed every 2-3 hours for weeks on end and that we should really wait 4 weeks before first trying to introduce a bottle. Yikes, that doesn't sound like much sleep. With two of the little rugrats we have to make sure they feed simultaneously, otherwise the little woman will never do anything else. Even as it is I imagine more often than not she will look like a shark with a couple of remora fish tucked under each arm.

T-Minus 5 weeks to destruction of decadent, lazy-do-nothing lifestyle.

For God's Sake, They Don't Hate Our Freedom!

I don't know who came up with that gem, but it has traveled back and forth across the American psyche so many times it has become gospel.

Muslim Terrorists Hate Our Freedom.

I mean seriously, a 19-year devote muslim living in Baghdad is blowing himself and a school-load worth of children off this planet because someone, far off in the United States, is enjoying an abstract concept like freedom. Oh yes, I want to fight and die because Jennifer Thompson in Long Island, New York is allowed to watch MTV. Oh, you person I have and never will meet, I hate your ability to travel freely throughout your territorial boundries so much that I will march and chant "Death to Israel".

It is absurd no matter how you look at it and is among the most blatant propaganda since we declared Saddam Hussein to be the next Hitler. Yeah, that level of rhetoric worked out well.

Muslims Terrorists do not hate freedom or liberty or puppies or apple pie. They may not be fond of Western culture or morals, but that is also not why they are lining up to die. Muslim Terrorists hate the way the Western nations and particularly the United States are interfering in the Muslim world.

Period. End of sentence. No further explanation required.

Now whether or not the West should be interfering in the Muslim world or even whether we have a choice in the matter is another question. I am not a proponent of packing up our diplomatic bags and going home. But that is where the hate comes from.

The U.S. created, armed and continues to support Israel.
The U.S. props up multiple repressive "friendly" regimes, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt.
The U.S. continually plays one Muslim nation against another, with Iraq vs. Iran being among the bloodier examples.
The U.S. attempts to extract the maximum amount of oil from the region, putting money into the pockets of an elite few.

And this is all pre-Iraq invasion, a completely bald-faced attempt to impose U.S. control on an Arab country.

You can add to all that the general (and quite accurate) sense that the United States thinks of everyone in the Muslim countries as second class citizens (of the world), and you can begin to get a notion of why a vocal minority would, in fact, hate us.

We disrespect them while at the same time constantly interfere in their lives. How would you think of that sort of person? Particularly if they make things worse 75% of the time (I may be being generous) and seem to be getting more belligerant and more controlling.

Using the Terrorists Hate Freedom propaganda is not helping us solve this problem. How do you fight that? Give them Freedom? Take their Freedom? Hide our Freedom? I think we need to publicly address the grievances, real and false, the Muslim world has with our policy towards the region, where they live. It is not giving in to terrorists to address problems that make the majority of Muslims unhappy, any more than it is giving in to inner city criminals to address the urban decay issues that led to their creation. In general, terrorism is a crime and terrorists are criminals and that is how they should be dealt with. You can't win a war on terrorism any more than you can win a war on crime. Or poverty. Or any other abstract concept one could name.

Like Freedom.

Anxiety

Now the main purpose of this blog is to blather on and on, like I am wont to do, about all subjects great and small. I have many opinions and the world (i.e. 4-6 people who irregularly read this blog) need to know them.

It is not meant to be a diary, except in that it gives me an excellent place to post progress on various projects that I obsess about but no one should be forced to hear about. Example 1: The hole. I figure once my kids are born this will be an excellent place to vent new father stuff without boring other people to death who really do not want to know about the latest adventure in diapers.

Having said all that, today I will post a more personal/diary-esque post and see how that feels.

I feel anxious. Not sure why. I have some very good reasons, I suppose. Kids on the way, behind in my work, major financial/logistical implications of consolidating my finances and re-modeling the house. Stupid air conditioning has some sort of issue with water collecting in the system, condensing and pouring water down into the furnace/blower. This is collecting down on the hallway floor, leading to both wood warping and mold issues. Called a repair guy this morning, the company that installed my A/C and repaired my blower. Apparently, they don't fix this sort of thing (?!?!??!). Then who does? Sigh.

Some days you wake up and feel ready to take on the world and others you wake up and want to crawl back into bed. Maybe I just need more vitamins? Protein? Less sleep? More sleep? I don't believe in biorhythms and it seems unlikely my hormone levels are changing by much, so why do some days suck more than others? Dropping air pressure? Am I a human barometer?

Ah phooey. I may not know what causes an anxious day. But I know what the cure is.

About three fingers, neat.