the underwear drawer

stand by me

Hi! Sorry! I was gone, but now I'm back! So busy! With the work! And fending off chaos on the home front! And the work!

But big things have been happening here. One of which is this:






Sweet Enola Gay, he's standing! He started doing this last week without much fanfare. One day he just reached up and pulled himself up, and that was it. What the hell? Who told you you were allowed to stand up? IT'S ALL HAPPENING SO FAST. Of course, he isn't, like, rock solid on his feet yet...




...but I have to admit, he's getting pretty good at the vertical orientation thing.

The other news is that I gave Cal a dork haircut. I am filled with shame. I promised myself that I would never cut my kid's hair in some way that would cause them ridicule, rather I would take them to Trained Professionals and have him sculpted into a miniature George Clooney. But his hair was getting so long in the front! And on the sides! I mean, he's not a fricking GIRL. And Joe's mom kept fussing at it (Oh, did I tell you that Joe's parents came to visit last week? They did. The end.) and saying how it was so LONG over here and it was ITCHING his EARS and finally I started to obsess over it and decided I would just trim it myself. No one brings a BABY to the barber! Anyway, it would just be a little snip! Nothing, really! Only I was so worried about gouging his eyes out with the scissors that I just did it really fast and I cut one side shorter than the other and cut his bangs too short. It's OK if you mess his hair up a little bit and tousle it just so, but if his hair just settles down into its native state (i.e. plastered to his head) he looks a little bit Stooge-like.

Oh well. It'll grow out. (Which is exactly the same thing that my mom said to me after she cut my bangs in an UPSIDE-DOWN U-SHAPED FRINGE. Gah! Genetics trumps common sense again!)

So what else? Oh, vacation plans. So, you all win again. Tampa is off. We made the plans with Joe's friends to stay with them for a few days, but I found that I really wasn't excited about the idea of going. I mean, it's going to be our first family vacation, after all, and our first vacation together since Cal was born, and darn it all if I felt a little underwhelmed with the idea of sitting on someone's couch, making small talk and perpetually offering to do the dishes, fold their towels, and basically be a Good Guest. It's going to be OUR VACATION, after all, and I wanted to lounge around a pool and order room service and take naps in the middle of the day with a book on my chest, all sloth-like. So Joe and I talked it over, and we decided, hell, what's a couple more bucks here are there, we've gotta live life, after all, and we decided that we'll be going to Sanibel Island after all. Well, not the island itself, because lots of the lodging there is all beachfront cottage-style, not ideally suited to those traveling with an infant. But we're staying at a nice hotel just across the causeway from Sanibel Island. And they have five pools! And many restaurants! And wild dolphins that swim up to you at the dock and SAVE YOUR LIFE IF YOU'RE DROWNING. Well, maybe they don't save your life. But there are dolphins, I swear. We're leaving in a month, staying for three nights. I can't wait. It will be like the days of the Roman Empire, except more decadent, and no vomitoriums.

Now I have to go do some work. On the weekend. I KNOW. Apparently I got roped into giving this talk in a few weeks, with research and using Power Point and EVERYTHING, and I have to get my ass into gear. At first I thought it would be this low-key thing, just for residents at lunchtime, so I wasn't so stressed about it. But then this week one of my co-residents gave his talk, and it was all sophistimacated with graphs and high-powered statistics and lots of words that I didn't know, and the chair of the department showed up and sat in the front row and all. So now if I don't have some presentation with, like, freaking LASER LIGHT SHOW shooting out of it, it's going to be a huge letdown. So I have to get to work. And also I have to kick that other resident in the head for doing such a good job and setting the bar so high. Ass.

Currently reading: A review article about pulmonary hypertension. FOR MY TALK.