reading the room

I'm going to be out of town for four days next week (see: yesterday's post), so I signed up to be the "parent reader" for Nina's kindergarten class today. Because of guilt. Oh yeah, also I wanted to promote literacy and volunteer my time and surprise my kid at school. But mainly guilt.

I've done this "parent reader" gig a few times in the past, and I've learned a few things along the way. The first time I did it this, when Cal was in Pre-K, it took a lot more planning and schedule swapping (I was still working full time back then), so it was a higher pressure situation all around. I actually had to get some kind of special dispensation from the teacher to switch slots, since "parent readers" were supposed to come in only for the kids' SUPER DUPER ALL ABOUT ME SUPERSTAR week, and on Cal's original week I was work-scheduled up to the gills. (Cal went to a private school in midtown Atlanta at the time, and as a general rule I've noticed private schools are much less understanding about parents not being able to drop every damn thing and show up midday for stuff on short notice.) But anyway, that first time, the book I brought was...well, I thought it was a good idea. It was one of Cal's favorite books. It was by Dr. Seuss. We had a big hardcover with pictures that everyone could see, even all the way in the back. I loved this book as a kid myself. Right here:

MAJOR ERROR. First of all, the book is 64 pages long. Second of all, it has way too many words. Third, too much lingual dexterity is required, so you can only read it so fast.

Oh, brother.

I think by page four of the Happy Birthday book, the kids in the class were flopping around on the floor, running around the back of the room, and generally talking through the whole thing. (Even my own kid was losing interest, and this was HIS BOOK.) I think I skipped a whole chunk of pages in the middle, just to get through it (no one noticed), and at the end, one of the teachers came up to me and said (sympathetically, helpfully), "Yeah, I find that...shorter books are...usually better choices."

I'm not a naturally performative person. I will read to my own kids but I don't naturally have the type of personality that makes me want to read to all kids. I'm not even sure that I like most kids that aren't my own kids. But I can limp through this "parent reader" type of thing OK, because now I know to make better book choices. In sum:

* Keep it short. 

* Keep it pithy.  

* It doesn't matter if it's "too easy" for your kid. The other kids don't care how sophisticated your child's taste is, and the teacher isn't making judgements on your household or your kids' I.Q. if you end up choosing SPIDER-MAN'S POP-UP LASER TAG ADVENTURE for your parent reader selection, so long as the kids in the class stay out of her hair for ten minutes so she can check her e-mail and finish her sandwich.

* Pick books that are funny, where you can really act out the voices, are almost always successful if you're willing to go there. 

* For God's sake, don't read The Giving Tree unless you want to cry in front of a bunch of five-year olds like some kind of psycho. In fact, I try to stay away from melancholia altogether, because I hate feelings. Where the Wild Things Are? Get outta here. The Runaway Bunny? Fuck you.

* Bring a selection, and let the kids choose, but know that there will be split votes and you'll have to end up reading pretty much all of them.

So here are the ones I brought.

Not pictured: Don't Push the Button (which is kind of a dumb book, but interactive--and yes, I know the book was not written for me, but it's still dumb) and The Monster at the End of This Book, which is actually the perfect book for this kind of thing, but it's only available in teeny tiny board book or Little Golden Book size, and also I can't find our copy. (Those groovy fonts, tho!)

We ended up having time to read three. Don't Push the Button as a warm-up act, This Is Not My Hat as the headliner (I like the art in that one, as well as in John Klassen's other book I Want My Hat Back--first in a three part hat oeuvre, I suppose), and closing with that old evergreen Don't Let The Pigeon Drive the Bus.

"How come you have so many funny books?" this one kid in the front row asked me at the end. Like it was some kind of accident. Kid, you don't even know.

back to school

I've enjoyed seeing everyone's back to school photos of social media these past few weeks, though they make me realize that I must be either one click off age-wise or else totally disconnected from current parenting trends, as I have never in my life taken a picture of my kid holding a sign (or if you want to get real fancy, a blackboard) broadcasting what grade they were going into. (Another trend that either came later or else that I just totally ignored was that thing where you put a giant sticker on the front of your kids' onesie telling everyone how many months old they are.) I mean, not that I don't take a picture of my kids on approximately the first day of school, because I do...kind of. But it just seems like there are so many things and rituals and accoutrement now. Like the child-rearing industry is slowly becoming the bridal industry.

But speaking of back to school...

Around the end of last year (right around, oh, say...Wednesday November 9th), I started thinking about how I could get more involved in healthcare on a broader level. I love my job and have no plans to stop being an anesthesiologist, but I also wanted to do something...else. Something more. Something less zoomed in, something a little more macro, something more policy and population-based. A broader way to help out. So what I decided to do was to go back to school and get a Masters of Public Health.

This was not an easy decision. Getting this degree is going to take a lot of time. It comes with a not-inconsequential monetary cost. I don't "need" to do it, and in most ways it's going to make my life a lot harder. It's not linked to any particular path for upward mobility or higher earning power, and I'm not looking to switch jobs. Almost no one that I'm close to understands why I want to do this, or thinks its remotely a good idea. (My parents seemed initially excited at the news, but then rapidly realized that I said I was getting an MPH, not an MBA, as they misheard. They were much less excited after that.) Oh, and also, I don't really have a really good specific idea of what exactly I want to do with this degree when (or if) I finally complete it. If I'm going to be totally honest, the only real reason I want to go back to school is because I want to learn more about public health, and can only hope that in the process of going through the coursework I'm going to find a useful, real-life way to marry this knowledge with my current career and find a good, real-world application for it. But I don't know what that's going to look like yet.

So anyway, that's happening. I've been accepted to the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia, and will be starting their part-time executive MPH program next week. "Part-time" means I still will working my normal job, exactly the same as before. It also means a lot of remote work and an online curriculum, though once a month, for one long weekend (Thursday through Sunday, all day long), I will be flying into New York and completing my in-person classroom requirement. This, every month, for two years. We had an on-campus orientation in August. The first official day of classes is next week on September 14th. If I can get through this all without losing my mind, I'll be slated to graduate in August of 2019.

The time investment. The time investment is...a lot. I take it seriously. I work part-time at the hospital, but I have three kids (which is why I went part-time in the first place), and kids don't just go on auto-pilot. Doing this program necessarily translates into less time for me for them. It means more time in the evening spent in front of books, more than twice as many weekends I will be out of the picture, less flexibility for everyone all around. This was Joe's main objection to me starting this program. I don't think I'm airing any dirty laundry by talking about this, because he'd tell you just as easily: he doesn't think this is such a great idea. He's nominally supportive, and by that I guess I just mean he would never tell me explicitly not to do it. But for our family, I know he'd really rather I just...didn't. He doesn't see why we spent so many years getting to a point where our life was finally getting easier only to deliberately make it harder again.

But that was my exact thinking, only in reverse. We have three kids. Our youngest, Nina, just started kindergarten this year. I'm not saying our kids still aren't youngish (they are), or that they don't need me as much (they do, though the ways in which they need me are less about immediate survival and more about presence and guidance and...well, I guess I do all the food shopping and cooking, so, yes, maybe a little bit of survival). But it's a bit easier now. We have some breathing room. We have margins. What do you do with that elasticity? What else do you want to do? What's important to you? Is it about the luxury of empty space, or is it about the luxury to take on more? To do more with your life? What comes next?

Also. I finished residency nine years ago. Nine years into private practice. I love my current job, I love taking care of patients. It's the most rewarding, immediate, and intimate type of service I could ever hope to provide. (I know I'm supposed to say, "outside of parenthood" right here, but I won't. It's not that I don't think parenthood is important, I just feel it's a completely different thing.) But I feel like there's more I want to do. I just don't know how yet, so I want to learn. Because life is not lived in order to be easy. Life is lived to be worthwhile.

And honestly, once I decided to go ahead and do this thing, part of me was really tickled and excited about the idea of going back to school. It's been a long time. And I like school. I like learning. I like knowing things. I especially like knowing things that I feel I should know already. I've been doing some pre-reading for some of my classes, and there are so many things I'm learning now--about healthcare economics, policy, the history of Medicare and Medicaid--that I can't believe I hadn't been explicitly taught before. And the fact that I'll be back at school right where I started, at Columbia, on the health science campus...I just get a kick out of returning "home." (Columbia friends: the School of Public Health is located in the old Psych Institute, next door to the new Psych Institute, two doors down from our first year prison dorm rooms in Bard Hall. That was a grim little block wasn't it?)

So anyway. That's what's new with me. How have you been doing?

I overthink, therefore I am

This is the day where all my social media feeds are filled with people exclaiming, with varying degrees of vulgarity, "Good riddance, 2013! What a shitty year! Hope 2014 will be better!" Is it poor form at this point to say that I thought 2013 was pretty good?

Well, anyway. Happy New Year!

*          *          *

I don't think we go too too overboard with the Christmas gifts. At least I hope we don't--there's the tendency to lament the perceived extravagance and overindulgence of the modern secular Christmas celebration, but I think this self-imposed guilt can sometimes be a little much and tend to taint our enjoyment of the holiday as much as anything else. I remember one year in particular the kids were unwrapping gifts on Christmas morning (this was pre-Nina, so just the boys, but I think the stuff they got that year was, like, some puzzles, books, stuffed animals, a kiddie microscope for Cal) and Joe was kind of making a face and saying how disgusting it all was, I guess meaning the display of excess and the consumerism and whatnot.  At which point I said SHUT YOUR MOUTH because there's a difference between appreciating what you have and your ability to give your kids nice (if not entirely extravagant) things; and beating yourself up with bleeding-heart guilt because there there are those among us with much less. My point being that the two things can co-exist. You can choose to not hate yourself for being able to have a nice Christmas, and you also can donate your money and time to a worthwhile cause to help make someone else's holiday better. Anyway, it's Christmas, just let the kids enjoy themselves, it's not like they're getting video game consoles or a sportscar in the driveway or anything like that. A few Legos and some crap from the dollar bin at Target never made anyone a Bond super-villain. (Unless they used the Legos and Target dreck to build an excruciatingly slow crotch-slicing laser, in which case--yes, fewer gifts.)

That said, the reason that it was difficult to choose gifts for Nina in particular is because she's the youngest of three children and we already have a lot of toys. Cal and Mack were easy--some books, a mess of new Legos, some superhero crap, and we were golden. But Nina--what could Nina possibly want for Christmas? She's turning 18 months at the end of the week, and to be honest, she already has all the toys for this and the next three developmental stages. Wooden blocks? Check, Cal's Christmas gift four years ago. Little ride on tricycle? Check, Cal's first birthday present, inherited by Mack until he outgrew it--a little dirty but still in great shape. Plastic animals and people? Check, Mack has amassed a mighty collection. Thomas trains, wooden and plastic train tracks, a hogshead of die cast cars? Checkcheckcheckcheckcheck.

The only thing we didn't have, really, was girly stuff.

And I mean girly stuff as in really girly stuff, like Malibu Barbie's Dream McMansion and the like. In my effort to make sure the boys don't grow us as 'roid-raged meatheads, we had a lot of girl-ish things already, even before Nina was born, and certainly most of our toys are to my mind at least gender-neutral. Mack in particular has a self-avowed fondness for pink stuffed animals so we have our share of those, and while the boys never really got very interested in the baby doll already we've had lying around since time immemorial, they also don't think it's weird to have one around.

Sidebar: a conversation with Mack last week. (We were making bracelets for his friends--have you seen these little rubber band bracelet kits they have now? Apparently they are all the rage, at least if I am to interpret the ceiling-to-floor wall of bagged rubber bands at Target correctly, but what you really need to know is that they look like those rubber bands that people wear on their braces, and if you drop the bag they will fly out EVERYWHERE.) Anyway, the conversation:

MICHELLE

So what colors do you want to chose for your friend Charlie?

MACK

Uh...yellow, pink, blue, purple.

MICHELLE

OK, so we'll do that as the pattern? Yellow-pink-blue-purple. Start picking out the rubber bands.

MACK

Why does some people say I can't like pink?

MICHELLE

What people say that?

MACK

Girls. They say that boys can't have pink.

MICHELLE

Well, that's silly. They're just colors. Everyone can like any color. Like me, I'm a girl, and I like blue. And green. And yellow. They're just colors. They're for everyone.

MACK

Yeah.

MICHELLE

Do you like pink on your bracelet?

MACK

Yeah.

MICHELLE

Well I think it looks good on you! You choose what colors you want! Even Dad wears pink sometimes, and no one's going to tell Dad that he can't wear pink because he's a boy.

MICHELLE'S INNER MONOLOGUE

So anyway, my point is I try to be mindful about such things. To be honest Nina really hasn't expressed any preference at all about liking "boy toys" or "girl toys," (or even knowing the difference between boys and girls) and will happily play with anything, particularly if it's something that Mack has a particular attachment to so as to get the maximum possible reaction. But I'd like to think that if she enters a super-girly phase (the Disney Princesses and such) that I would go with the flow on that too, and not have too much of the opposite reaction, insisting that she only play with dinosaurs and Cal's old Black and Decker toy tool kit to make a big old feminist point about it. Whatever, she'll figure out what she likes, and I'll go with the flow. But either way, I don't want to push anything on her.

Anyway, to sum, for Christmas we got her some puppets, clothes for her baby (boy and girl clothes), some toy foods with a shopping cart, and a water/sand table that we'll hopefully move outside once the weather warms up--though until then we'll play with it here, which makes it easy to fill and clean up but also somewhat defeats the purpose of having a free-standing water table, because why not just take a bath already?

Her favorite gift, by the way, has been the puppets, so I recommend them in particular. I am also glad that I decided to go for the animal puppets instead of the people puppets, because while I love the idea of having the multiethnic people puppets for the kids to play with, the temptation to quote the Franklin scenes from "Arrested Development" would likely have been too great.

Well, onward and upward. Our New Year's Eve plans involve sparkling cider, snacks from Trader Joe's, and a "Simpsons" marathon courtesy of our increasingly outdated DVD collection. (But please note: we only have the box sets for seasons 2 through 7 because why bother with anything else?) Cal in particular has requested the B-Sharps episode, specifically citing the scene where George Harrison points Homer towards the platter of brownies at that party. "Well, what a nice fella." Kid's got good taste.

See you next year! (She said cleverly.)

quotidian

Cal was supposed to bring a pumpkin to school on Tuesday for some sort of jack o' lantern carving activity in his class. There was an ostensibly academic twist to it (I think they were weighing and measuring the pumpkins first, converting ounces to pounds or stones to hectares, whatever antiquated non-metric systems we still insist on teaching despite the fact that they make NO SENSE) but let's get real, the true purpose of such an activity is to claw out all the pumpkin guts and show your friends the clotted mass of stringy entrails while making a variety of throw-up noises.

Cal left his pumpkin at home by accident, so when I went to drop it off at his classroom (ordinarily in such cases I leave the forgotten item at the front desk and someone from the office ferries it upstairs to the classroom so as to minimize disruption--however, in this case the pumpkin was gigantic and when I offered to carry it up myself they happily left the hoisting to me) I kind of got roped into coming back in later that afternoon to help Cal's teacher with the activity. Honestly, my first instinct when the teacher asked me if I could be an extra set of adult hands (in the setting of 26 fourth graders wielding a variety of hollowed out gourds and serrated blades) was to beg off because look man, I'm busy. But that response was a reflex, ingrained from years and years of having to say no to stuff. Because I actually wasn't busy that day. And having the time to do things like this in the kids' classroom was precisely the reason that I went part-time in the first place.

Which brings me to the topic for today, which I have deliberately been shying away from because the kind of honesty with which I want to discuss this is precisely the kind of thing that causes fistfights to break out in the comments section of The New York Times "Motherlode" blog. (Leaving aside the truly questionable decision to call a parenting series "Motherlode," because random puns aside, parenting is only for ladies, y'all!)

Joe and I agree that since I have made the move to go part-time at work, the quality of our home life has never been better. The benefits are obvious--I have more time to spend with each kid, I am more connected with what they are doing at school and at home, we can actually schedule doctors and dentist and teacher appointments, we are all eating better, acting out less...the list goes on and on. And there are moments every single day when I think, "Thank god we finally decided to do this." The mornings I spend with Nina after the boys are off at school. Time that I get to carve out to spend with Mack alone, which I hardly ever had a chance to do before. Having time for actual conversations with Cal, who for all his idiosyncrasies as a young child is actually turning out to be a pretty cool and funny kid. These are the obvious good things. These are the things that make it clear that the decision to dial back at work was worthwhile.

But of course these are the things that just make parenting in general a joy, and between these clearly treasured moments are the interstices, the webbing, the connective tissue that binds the important bits in a dense fiber of the banal. Because for every morning I spend with Nina watching the sun rise over the Chattahoochee there is of course an entire day of chasing down lost shoes and changing diapers and washing clothes, cleaning up one mess in the kitchen while Nina is creating the next mess because allowing her to create the next mess is the only way I can buy time to clean up the first mess. For every special afternoon with Mack there is the endless run of school pickups, school dropoffs, making sure that lunchboxes are packed and thermoses are not lost at school, corralling shoes and socks and sweatshirts and more socks, items which surely must walk around at night after we're asleep because otherwise there's no explanation for how they spread out and hide all over the house. And for every pumpkin carving activity I do at the kids' school, there is an hour of sweeping up sticky pumpkin seeds, picking up strips of newspaper and magazines that have glued themselves to the linoleum with bioglue, and wiping down desk after desk with antibacterial wipes and hoping to god that the janitorial staff at night come equipped with mops. (Though to be clear: I was more than happy to help, and Cal's teacher was a brave, brave man to even consider staging the mass class pumpkin carve-a-thon without a second adult around. We could have probably used another two or three adults, to be honest.)

It is in these moments, with the brooms or with the wet rags or running in and out of the supermarket or picking up the dropped (well, hurled) sippy cup again for the five hundredth time that I think: It doesn't have to be me doing this. This does not involved an advanced degree, or special training. ANYONE could do this. Or, perhaps more precisely to the point: I took a 40% pay cut in order to wash dishes and do laundry? DOES NOT COMPUTE.

(This is the part where people start polishing their pitchforks. Hey, you missed a spot!)

Look, I know that it's not the special advanced skill with which I drive to carpool or wash the dishes or make the school lunches that the time worthwhile--it's the fact that I'm doing it for my kids that makes it special. I get that. And I also get that, with parenthood, the amazing moments are not in the majority--that it is, in fact, the intermittent and punctuated nature of the awesome moments that make you get up each day and do all the non-awesome stuff over and over and over again. And that's probably true about most things in life, though I'm beginning to find that there's something different about spending a full day parenting rather than a full day being a doctor: it feels less special.

(And here is where you start jabbing the pitchforks. Jab on, gentle village people! Miss ye not the tender essential organs!)

And when I say "special," I don't mean to say that my kids aren't special, or that my parenting them isn't special. It's just that in the mundane moments, it feels like anyone could be doing this. I didn't need to go to college or medical school or spend five years in residency training to do that stuff. My educational background, or training, or the years I spent before I had kids doesn't inform my daily parenting in any meaningful way. It's just me, doing what millions and millions or other people are also doing at the exact same time--probably I'm not even doing as good a job as many of them are, because HAVE YOU SEEN PINTEREST? Just me, momming it up like a character in a Sunny Delight commercial, part of the hoarde, one of a type, a piece of a marketing demographic. And that's the part that doesn't feel special.

And the thing that bothers me is that I never considered myself someone who needed to feel special, or who cared about status. I don't make people call me "doctor," I don't wear my diplomas around my neck on a giant chain, and I think I've worked most of my professional life to try to put aside whatever ego may manifest in my persona because quite simply I don't think it serves any purpose. But obviously it must have mattered to me more than I thought, because while I recognize the luxury of spending more time with my children, and for all my whining I have plenty of help in keeping this family going; I still sometimes think, this is it? THIS is what I miss work two days a week to do?

Because at work, it sometimes seems like the significance of what you're doing is obvious. That the answer to the question, "What did you do today?" could be succinctly summed up by saying: I'm a doctor, I take care of patients. Boom. Instant credibility. Credibility to whom, unclear--perhaps it's just to justify things to myself. But on the days that I'm "off" with the kids...

JOE

So, what did you do today?

MICHELLE

Well, after breakfast I dropped the boys off at school, then I took Nina to the park. Then we came home, and while she took a nap I cleaned up the kitchen. Then I started to prep stuff for dinner, but then she woke up, so I gave her lunch. Then I cleaned up after lunch. After that we kind of played a little bit out back, and then it was time to pick up the boys again. So we did! And then I finished making dinner. And then everyone ate and I cleaned that up.

JOE

Sounds good.

MICHELLE

...

JOE

What?

MICHELLE

You know, when I say it all like that it sounds like I didn't do anything.
But then how come it took up the whole damn day?

Obviously this is something I'm still working out in my brain, and clearly part of it is that there are societal indicators of what is considered "important work" that I have allowed to imprint on me (despite the fact that I obviously know that raising my children is important work, therefore the need to take more time to do it right). Also obvious to me is that this probably reflects poorly on my personality in some way--some sort of egomaniacal needs that are not being met by the quotidian tasks of parenting three young children being chief among my deficiencies. But I am curious, particularly after reading this article in the Times a few months ago--does this experience of "status loss" or this sense of becoming unmoored from part of your identity ring true for anyone else who decided to take one step back from a career that has in many ways defined them?

just the two of us

I'm in a Starbucks with a pumpkin spice latte and my laptop now like some goddamn stereotype. Man, even I hate myself right now.

Starbucks always makes me think of working hard. I studied for all my board exams in Starbucks-es, from Step I at that Starbucks on 103nd and Broadway all the way up through my Anesthesia Oral Boards at the location on Monroe and 8th. The difference between Starbucks-es in New York and Atlanta, by the way? The Starbucks-es in New York serve you much, much faster.

I also wrote my entire book at the Starbucks on 29th and Park, which if you need to do work is (or at least was five years ago) an ideal Starbucks--huge, a preponderance of large tables, with a strip of power outlets around the entire outer wall. Oh, another difference between Starbucks-es in New York versus Atlanta? People bring work to Starbucks-es in Atlanta of course, but usually it's more like a rest stop, or a place to have some coffee and kill time between appointments or tasks. In New York, people set up shop. I read once in an article that Starbucks aimed to make their coffee shop locations into "virtual living rooms," places where people can kind of hang out in an armchair and meet with friends--hopefully buying large quantities of overpriced food in the process--and I think that there's likely no place where this is more true than in New York, where a lot of people frankly don't have actual full-sized living rooms in their apartments.

I mean, I brought my laptop there, and maybe my bookbag, a manuscript envelope, assorted miscellany. But there were people who brought full desktop computers (24-inch monitor AND the tower), the entire contents of their law library, extra desk lamps for those darker corners of the store. During my final year of residency when I was trying to finish my book by the July 1st deadline, I would take one day per weekend that I wasn't on call, leave Cal with Joe, set up base camp in one corner of that Starbucks and just sit there for eight, ten hours at a time. I would buy one coffee and get something cheap(er) but filling, like an egg salad sandwich. And then I would sit there and bust ass, looking up only occasionally if something interesting was happening, like the police coming in to extract homeless people that refused to get out of the bathroom--something that happened with alarming frequency. When I left, usually in the early afternoon, my hair and clothes would reek of smoke from the coffee roaster, as though I'd just smoked a billion cigarettes.

This has been Starbucks Talk. I'm your host, Michelle Au.

Anyway, the point of this post was not to talk about Starbucks (and it goes without saying that I have no affiliation with Starbucks, not only because I don't run paid ads on this blog but because this is such a small blog that STARBUCKS DON'T GIVE A SHIT WHAT I SAY), but to catch you up on Mack.

When I decided to go part-time, one of the first things that pushed me to consider scaling back at work was the fact that Cal was already halfway out the door to college, but the things that made me actually decide to make the leap was Mack. Because see, the thing with Mack is that...he's fine. He's always just fine. Cal's the oldest, so he often gets a lot of attention because of his school and activities (Cal recently joined the Lego Robotics team at school, and to say that Mack is inelegantly jealous would be kind); and of course Nina gets a lot of attention because she's a baby and needs us to do every damn thing for her. But Mack? Mack is always OK. He can do a lot of stuff for himself. He can play nicely by himself or with his siblings. A lot of the things he needs (a glass of milk, help reaching something high) Cal can often troubleshoot, and does, especially if I'm tied up doing something like cooking dinner or putting the baby down. He's happy, he's pleasant, he's not really that high-maintenance for a four year-old. And that's how I think he ends up getting ignored a lot. Classic middle-child syndrome.

And the thing with Mack is that he's just so reassuring with how normal he is. Cal was by all accounts kind of a weird child (he's much better now, warm and social and adaptable in ways we could only dream of when he was Mack's age, when he was...less so those things) but Mack has always been like the textbook illustration of Boy in Early Childhood. He like sports and wrestling with dad. He plays pretend and makes up little playlets with his stuffed animals and action figures. He's sunny and affectionate and snuggly and fun. Even his drawings are textbook--every human looks like a happy scarecrow with vertigo, all stick limbs with five fingers on each hand, clubby feet, smiley face. Every house has a chimney, every flower has six petals, and there's always a sun with beams shooting out in the corner.

(The reason that I make such a big deal about the drawings is that Cal's drawings at this age were--well, they were pretty weird. He was always good at drawing inanimate objects or landscapes, but when it came to drawing people, his drawings were just odd. Even when he was five and beyond, he'd sometimes draw people missing limbs, sometimes missing heads, and when he did draw a head it would be tiny, like a pinhead, with no face on it. NO FACE. What the hell, young Cal? Anyway, long story short I started introducing Cal to comics and gave him a little key of facial expressions so that he could draw his own comics and so the reader would be able to infer the mood of each character and thus the thrust of the story. So that's not an issue anymore, but still, I will admit that there was a period of time where I was worried that this was the first sign that we were raising some kind of sociopath who was unable to read human emotion or something.)

(And yes, I also see how telling it is that I just spent a paragraph talking about Cal in a entry that I ostensibly started to talk about Mack, but see, that's the thing! Cal was so weird and attention consuming! And Mack is so normal and easy! That's exactly why it's so easy to set him on autopilot-parenting and exactly why he's going to quit his tutoring job and join a violence gang because his parents never paid attention to him! I mean, probably!)

One of my main goals now that I have more time is to spend some time with Mack, just the two of us, one-on-one. I had to take him to the dentist two weeks ago, an expedition that I billed as our "special day" (in that yes, we were going to the dentist, but he could skip school for the rest of the day and afterwards we could go the playground and then have lunch together wherever he wanted! And also: free toothbrush!) and the degree to which he was excited about his "special day" with me was unreal. He talked about it literally every day for the weeks leading up to the appointment, and he seemed to especially relish the fact that it would be just for him, that Cal would have to go to school and that Nina would have to stay home, and weren't they going to be so jealous? There really was nothing that extravagant about the day at all, so the special thing for him wasn't so much the activities or skipping school or the Chick-Fil-A for lunch, as the fact that it happened at all. For half a day, he was my only kid.

So anyway, something that I've committed to doing is to try and have a special day with Mack about once a month--or at the very least, a special morning or afternoon. We'll just do something low-key--making Rice Krispie treats, going to the playground, doing an art project--but just something that we can do alone without Cal being there asserting his own superiority in gluing pompoms ("I used to do it like that when I was four too, Mack...but you'll get better at it. I mean, probably.") or without Nina there needing all of my everything. And maybe we won't even need a dentist appointment as an excuse to do it.

Parenthood, right?

boy meets world

Cal started fourth grade about a month ago, which would usually be my cue to say, "Can you believe it?" but every time I say something like that I think about that Tig Notaro bit and feel a little bit stupid.

Anyway, fourth grade. It's going pretty well so far, at least academically, but I think we've entered the age where we really need to start watching his friends and keeping on top of their activities and interactions. And while this all would likely be true regardless of the existence of Minecraft, it sure doesn't help.

For those of you blissfully unaware (meaning you know no kids between the ages of, oh, say 5 and 21), Minecraft is a video game, and to call it a generational obsession would be understating things somewhat, like calling Pol Pot a pretty mean guy. I agreed to get the game for Cal because it seemed innocent enough--basically an open-world action adventure game, building things with blocks, resource management, that sort of thing--and more to the point I didn't want him to be some sort of out-of-the-loop freak if every single other kid in his class was playing this game and he wasn't. I know, I know, if all your friends jumped off a bridge, etcetera etcetera, but since he's a year or two younger than his classmates we try to be particularly sensitive about allowing him the social tools to be one of the gang more easily. Because if we didn't let him play Minecraft? He'd be, like, THE ONLY ONE. And I just hate to think about him being the pop culture equivalent of the kid whose parents don't let him eat sugar, and brings, like, unsweetened carob cakes in for his birthday, you know?

So anyway, we let him play Minecraft (which he's only allowed to play on the weekends--we still have rules and standards up in here after all), he plays it, he loves it, everyone is happy. And every time I pick him up from school all he wants to talk about is MINECRAFT and everyone's special strategies in MINECRAFT did you hear about the newest thing in MINECRAFT? And William? Told me that there's a mod? That you can put Star Wars skins on your MINECRAFT server? And also one time? Thomas was building a house and two creepers snuck up on him but then he used his leather armor and threw a sheep at them and then he fell into a trap in the nether? And it was SO FUNNY!

(I'd like to think the game makes more sense than this but suspect that it doesn't.)

Except one day I walked by when he was playing Minecraft and I noticed that there was this scrolling chat box open at the bottom of the screen, with these other randos talking to each other while they were all playing. (I'm no video game enthusiast, but I think there are similar things in most video games that you play cooperatively with people online, games like "Call of Duty" and of that ilk). Those of you familiar with such games probably won't be surprised to hear this, but the back and forth taking place in this chat box? Awful. Terrible. Slurs! Swearing! INCORRECT SPELLING.

"Cal," I spluttered, "what is all this going on at the bottom of the screen?"

"Huh?" He looked down. "Oh, I didn't see that. I'm not really sure. I think that's other people that are playing on this server. It's my friend Archibald's* server, he invited me to join when we were sitting together at lunch last week."

"OK, but who are these other people? Do you know them? And why are they saying all these terrible things?" For lack of any other better solution, I just covered the chat box with my hand.

"Oh, I don't know. I guess they're Archibald's friends. Or other people that joined his server anyway. I haven't really been looking at it. What are they saying?"

"NOTHING. They're saying NOTHING. But can you turn this screen off? Hide it in some way? Or better yet, why do you have to play on someone's server at all? Can't you just play by yourself? Play by yourself and do something peaceful, like build a diamond...zombie...hut...or something?"

So anyway, Cal turned the chat function off, and then we had a talk about not playing with people online unless he really really knows them personally and he's preferably in the same room as them. I also said he was never allowed to have the chat function on again, ever, because: INAPPROPRIATE.

He's still young and relatively naive, so I know this is just the beginning. And while I'm obviously not going to be a super-paranoic about the use of the internet and social media (see: this page you're reading right now, and the existence thereof) I am a little apprehensive, despite the fact that we have a pretty tight lid on his screen time and computer habits and who he spends his time with outside of school. Because what's it going to be next year? Or the next? Or even forget the computer--what are he and his friends talking about in person at recess? In carpool line? At their sleepover parties?

(Yes, you're right--they're probably talking about Minecraft. Because Hayden? Said one time? He got a pile of gold? But then a zombie came and fell into this lava moat that he made around his house? And then someone hacked into his server and stole his diamond armor! It was epic!)

Cal is eight years old now, which is the age that most kids start to form stronger and stronger ties with people outside of their families. So I have to let him do that, but it's hard not to worry, because even though we know his friends and know their parents, that act of sending your child out there into the world can feel like feeding a lamb to the wolves. Because we can't always be there, and we can't always filter, and can't always catch the chat box before they see it and cover it with our hand. We just can't. That's what raising a child is: getting them ready so that they will be OK without you.

In my mind Cal is kind of a low-maintenence child, in that's he's old enough now to fend for himself and his personality is generally allergic to trouble-making. (He's actually kind of a people-pleaser to an almost unfortunate degree, in that even the hint that he's transgressed in some way makes him start to get teary and apologize--at school, anyway.) But nonetheless, I'm glad that I'm going to have a little more time to spend with him now, not just in spite of the fact that he's older and becoming more independent, but because of it.

-----
* Not his real name, OBVIOUSLY. I actually have not ever met this kid before but I have encouraged Cal not to play on his server anymore because aside from the obvious reasons I detailed above, apparently he regularly stays up until midnight playing Minecraft on school nights and what parent lets their nine year-old kid do that? 

the chamber of secrets

Cal did two weeks of "Danger Camp" this summer (basically a summer day camp program based on this book) and came away with it not only with the requisite mosquito bites and tie-dye T-shirt, but also with an enduring passion for spying, ciphers, espionage, and general subterfuge. It's all highly contagious, and while Mack will deny this to his last breath he idolizes Cal beyond all measure so whatever interests Thing 1 has rapidly become the interests of Thing 2.

Separate and mostly unrelated: we currently live in a three bedroom house, which while by New York standards is an embarrassment of bedrooms (and square footage), means that under current occupancy patterns, we have neither a guest room nor a room for Nina to decamp.

THEREFORE (and this is where the two threads come together) we are working towards the goal of consolidating both boys into the same room. We already have a bunk bed in Cal's room so we're halfway there (it's even a twin over a full so that Mack will be, what, 50% less likely to end up on the floor?) but even so, it's a transition that is sure to be met with some resistance, at least initially. So we're selling the idea by billing these new shared quarters as the SUPER-DUPER BOYZ HANGOUT ROOM. Jazz hands! And one of the ways that we thought we could make the room cooler? By building a secret clubhouse inside of it.

Cal's room has three small closets, the middle closet of which has a lofted crawlspace, about two and a half feet wide, thirteen feet long, and maybe four feet high. We'd been using this space to keep a variety of larger items that we had nowhere else to store (as we have neither garage, basement nor attic space); things like our Christmas decorations, moving boxes, an old set of doors from the laundry room, what have you. We still have no place to store these things, and in fact, all these things are kind of sitting out in the family room now until we find a better place to put them. But lack of storage aside we figured screw it, let's just empty out the crawl space and turn it into a clubhouse. A SUPER SECRET RAD CLUBHOUSE FOR BOYS. No Homers allowed!

The first thing we had to do, after we emptied the closet out, was change the light fixture. Being a closet, all it had was a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling with a pull-chain cord, which was obviously hazardous, what with the risk of anyone walking into the burning bulb with their face. So we took out the light fixture, capped it off, and put in an outlet instead. (I say "we" but when I say "we" I really mean the electricians did it and I watched, encouraging them with the thumbs up sign and offering beverages for their troubles at annoyingly frequent intervals.) After the electrical work was done, we vacuumed and washed the floors (and I apologize for the lack of any really good "before" photos because you have to understand, it's basically a railroad car-shaped space, there's really no room to get a good shot) and got to work decorating.

One thing that Joe really wanted to put in there was a full-wall panel of dry-erase board. A dry erase board that size (about four feet by six feet) would easily cost more than a hundred bucks, but we did it on the cheap by going to Home Depot and getting a panel of fiberboard with one side of white shiny coating (not sure what the coating is but it is smooth and slick, like melamine) and getting it cut to 48 inches, which was the length of the wall on one side of the clubhouse door. The whole panel of fiberboard cost something like $12.99, and after getting it cut, we ended up with two fairly large pieces of whiteboard material--I still have to find a home for the second piece, because I guess I'm too much of a cheapskate to throw it away. The only drawback to this is that the dry-erase board isn't magnetic like some of the more expensive "real" whiteboard options, but in the big scheme of things and especially given the price differential, I don't think it's a big deal.

My big contribution was the lighting. Mainly the concern was safety. Joe had wanted to install one of those recessed can lights up in the ceiling, but I just kept having visions of the kids burning their heads or their hands on the bulbs, as the ceiling really is very low in there--Cal can't even stand up straight without his head grazing the ceiling. Another issue is that as a closet, the ventilation in the clubhouse space isn't very good. We already put a fan by the door to move some air in there and I have talked to the boys about leaving the outer closet door open, because as an anesthesiologist I am somewhat paranoid about CO2 rebreathing. (That scene from "Apollo 13" where the astronauts have to make that new CO2 filter out of, like, a sock and some duct tape? THE STUFF OF NIGHTMARES.) Anyway, my point to the lights is that anything incandescent would heat up the space quickly. I originally thought about a string of low wattage Christmas lights, but then I found these:

Tape lights! (Not "tap lights". TAPE lights.) They're LED and energy efficient, bright, cool to the touch, and super-easy to affix, as they are literally backed with 3M tape so you can just stick them up wherever you want. And best of all?

They change color! They even have flashing and strobe effects, which is not my favorite setting (I kept waiting for someone to start seizing in there) but the kids certainly enjoyed pushing all the buttons. I mean, no kidding, right? THERE ARE BUTTONS? WE MUST PUSH THEM. Anyway, we got two sets of 16 feet each, which was enough to go around the entire clubhouse once with a few feet to spare. We actually like these lights so much we ordered another two sets to rim the bunkbed with, so the kids could use them as reading lights in bed. (See also: the awesome factor.)

We rounded out the room with a berber carpet remnant we had lying around from carpeting the bedrooms when we first moved in (coincidentally the one strip we had was almost exactly the dimensions of the clubhouse space--we just had to lop off a few inches in width to make it fit), two beanbags from Target, a few superhero posters, and a world map from National Geographic. Et voilà.

The name of the secret club, by the way, is SECRET CLUB MOM AND DAD NOT ALLOWED (S.C.M.D.N.A. for, uh, "short") and after surveying the finished product, Cal and Mack promptly kicked me out, which I consider a successful end-result.

Hope you're having a happy Labor Day weekend!

straddling

I had to take our minivan to the dealership for a physical (I don't know--what do you call it when you have to take your car in for a visit to the car doctor? A well-car check? I plead ignorance and this parenthetical is now threatening now to take over the whole intro) and at the dealership they have honest to god carrels in a room off the waiting area, like a damn library. On one hand--how great! A quiet area with a desk and a chair and a power outlet to get some actual work done! And on the other hand--how long do you expect that I'm going to be sitting here, exactly?

Well, nothing like a stretch of captivity to force you to update your foundering blog. Ahoy hoy.

Last week was my last week of working full-time. My first "official" week of working at a 60% schedule is actually the week of Labor Day, but I had this week fortuitously scheduled as a week off from almost a year ago, like I planned it this way the whole time, for transition. It's not so much a vacation as purely a maintenance period for our family (MAINTENANCE! That's the kind of car visit I'm at now! Le mot juste!) meaning yesterday I took Mack to the dentist and tomorrow I'm taking Nina for her one year well-child check and now I'm here looking at a wonderful hubcap display and wondering if I should get purple under-light effects to make our suburban splendor-mobile that much more splendid. I mean, it seems excessive and yet this pamphlet makes such a compelling case for them...

I am so excited to enter this next phase of being more engaged or at the very least present for my out-of-hospital responsibilities, but I acknowledge that various internalized cultural attitudes have been a little difficult for me to shake. Namely, I find that I really have to check myself from being too defensive when people talk to me about my part-time status. 

JOE

(As we are engaged in high-level strategy talks about managing yet another week of juggling 

call schedules, OR and clinic times, childcare, meal timing, and after school activities)

Man, this is hard. I can't wait until you start slacking off at work a little bit.

MICHELLE

SLACKING OFF?

JOE

I mean...not slacking...I mean...you know what I mean! Working less! Working less at the hospital!

MICHELLE

THERE IS NO SLACKING INVOLVED HERE. NO SLACK. 

ALWAYS WORKING! HARD WORKER ME!

Or possibly this:

CO-WORKER

So, you're going part-time, huh? Sounds nice.

MICHELLE

(Cautiously)

Yes...

CO-WORKER

Gotta go be mom. I get it. I wish I could do that.

MICHELLE

DO YOU THINK THIS WAS AN EASY DECISION OR SOMETHING?

BECAUSE IT WASN'T! NOTHING EASY! EVERYTHING HARD!

CO-WORKER

Uh...

(Starts backing away, feeling for the doorknob)

And also:

RANDOM PERSON

Hello--

MICHELLE

(Pointing)

AND YOU! I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW THAT I HAVE AN EXCELLENT WORK ETHIC.

RANDOM PERSON

Aha. Huh. Well, as I was saying, "Hello, and welcome to Target."

Anyway, sorry world. Obviously I am having feelings. It's like I'm all messed up on my Erikson's stages. Instead of "Generativity vs. Stagnation" I've regressed back to "Identity vs. Confusion." (Also, can we all acknowledge that the fact that I even remember any of this from second year med school psych is pretty fucking impressive? OK, not so impressive, but notable at least.)

I don't know why I default to the defensive--maybe I need to prove to myself and everyone that I'm not "slacking off" or "opting out" or taking some slow boat to Shangri-La. Not that anyone has implied that, I think it's pretty clear that going part-time at work amounts more to scaling back on one type of (rewarding, highly-paid) work and scaling up on another type of work which is both unpaid and elicits a less direct, calculable form of appreciation. Not that I need my head patted constantly, but I think many of us have experienced the Moebius strip that is the endless cycle of keeping a three-kid household running smoothly, and how the loss of old workday landmarks can make things both easier and harder.

I know I'm probably stomping all over the landmines with this but just hear me out, I'm sitting in the backroom of a Toyota dealership waiting for them to finish checking my brake fluid or god knows what else so this is a bit of a rush job. I realize that my defensiveness is just part of my natural adjustment to our new situation (see also: guilt at bringing home less bacon than I was before, particularly after many years of being the primary or equal bacon...herder) but this all makes me happy that I have the option to partially scale back as opposed to having to make a binary choice to be all in or all out. The identity loss I'd have without some career focus would definitely be traumatic, and I think that this option, the part-time option, might allow me the best of both worlds. That's the theory anyway, and hopefully once I see that, I'll stop alternately taking everyone's head off and showily doing one-armed push-ups to prove that I'm JUST AS POWERFUL AS I EVER WAS.

(Psychological problems! I has them!)

*          *          *

I was going to write some more stuff here, but in the interest of just getting this up and saying BLOG UPDATE: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED I'm going to save that for next time. My goal in general, by the way, is for there to be a next time more consistently, and to do a little more writing in addition to the other thousand things that I've been neglecting in the past year. And now I have no idea how to end this  entry so I guess I'll just put in this video of Nina lurching around because didn't you hear, she's a toddler now.  Unreal.

recalibrating

I know there's a touch of irony in adding this disclaimer given that I haven't updated this blog in, like, half a year, but: LONG ENTRY AHEAD.

There's a snippet of a cartoon I remember from my childhood--I can't remember if it was "Tom and Jerry" but if it wasn't it was in a similar vein--where a mouse is reclining in a hot tub. He's sitting back with his arms along the rim of the tub, maxing and relaxing as cartoon mice do, wearing that look of smug satisfaction he was prone to. (As an aside: I never liked Jerry. I always thought he was a real jerk to Tom, a cat who was just fulfilling his evolutionary imperative after all. Ditto Road Runner. Ditto those capering harpy kids that keep taking the Trix away from the rabbit. JUST GIVE HIM A BOWL, YOU ASSHOLES.)

So anyway, the mouse. He's enjoying the hot tub. He's relishing the water, the heat. But the water starts to get a little bit hotter. And a little bit hotter still. Suddenly it's not so comfortable anymore. Not hot enough that he wants to get out of the tub or anything, but just...hotter. He starts sweating. His fur starts getting a little frizzy (from the humidity, you understand). Then, finally, he turns around and notices the cat behind him, slicing onions and carrots to add into the now boiling water. (My memory of this part is not quite as clear, but the cat may have been wearing a chef's toque.)

I've thought of that cartoon clip a lot in the last year.

But let me back up for a second.

If you've ever followed this blog with regularity in the past (though I'm sure with my sporadic updates I've winnowed that number down to only the die-hardest of die-hards) you've probably noticed that I haven't had the time to write much of substance since I went back to work after my maternity leave last September, and that I haven't updated basically at all since December. The reasons are all those that you could probably expect: busy job, three kids, and the responsibilities and duties associated therein. The explanations are always boring because everyone's reasons for being busy are pretty much the same, but to put it in medical terms: it's just a matter of triage.

It's hard to know where the tipping point was--though I have to presume that it was at least in part associated with the addition of our much-beloved third child into the mix--but at some point in the last year, things started getting hard. Not impossible, not un-doable, but subtly, Joe and I started to notice just how tight things were getting. Time was tight, at home, with the kids, with each other. Emotional resources were tight. Patience was less of a resource we could reliably depend on. The days and weeks started becoming these things that we were enduring, rather than living, let alone enjoying. Again, the imagery from an old movie comes to mind--inmates in a prison, grimly notching off yet another day on the wall of their cell.

I don't mean to imply that our life is a joyless dirge--far from it. We love our family, we love our jobs. Even working the hours that we do, we try carve out quality time when we can--long weekends, holidays, family vacations where they fit in. We bolus our family time because our basal infusion rate is so parsimonious, but we do make an effort to compensate. And we liked to tell ourselves that this bolus dosing was sufficient, and it worked...not well, but well enough.

But it didn't change the fact that over the past few years, and over the last year in particular, the feeling of our everyday lives becoming something that we were tolerating started to feel more an more pervasive. When you only see your kids for an hour or two at the very tail-end of each day, only to perform the most basic of maintenance for them (bath! brush teeth! yell at them for not taking their baths and brushing their teeth quickly enough because I'm tired and they're tired and everyone's tired so LET'S ALL GO TO BED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE) you start to feel like you're consisting on a diet of discarded crusts in an otherwise empty pizza box. Maybe you can piece together a life in these scraps of the day, but split between three kids, it's simply not enough time.

Joe and I have been discussing for years our long-term outlook for modifying (read: decreasing) the work hours for at least one of us to have more time with the kids, and for the longest time, our party line has been: soon. We're going to do it soon. "Maybe in a few years or so," was the stock phrase. But there was always the next thing. We'll think about it when I finish my fellowship. We'll figure it out it when I get more settled in my job. We'll do it if I make partner in my group. Later. We'll do it. But later. Meanwhile, time marches on.

Then: I was talking with one of my partners at work a few months ago. He has four kids, the oldest of whom had just turned eight. "I just realized," he said as we were chatting in the front hall of the OR, sidestepping a stretcher careening down the hallway from the PACU, "that he's eight. In another eight years, he's going to be in high school, driving, getting ready to go to college. Half my time with him is already done. I mean, they come home after they go to college and all, but you know what that's like. It's not the same. Half my time of having my son in my house is over already."

There feeling that I had after having that conversation was not unlike being wrapped in a piece of wet burlap and gently asphyxiated. Because Cal was turning eight too. Half our time raising our oldest son in our home was done, and not only had this particular calculus not ever occurred to me, but looking back, I can't say I really know where those eight years went.

Because see, we've always lived like this. Cal was born when we were residents. His entire life--and thus of course, Mack and Nina's entire life too--we've worked. Both Joe and I have worked our tails off. We're not residents anymore of course, and some of the specifics of our jobs have changed from year to year, but the fact of it is that we each work on average 50-60 hours a week, more if we're taking weekend call, and although we've been saying for years that we were going to try to get more control of our work schedules to put some more time into our family life, it hadn't happened yet. The decision point was always pushed off down the road. Later. Soon. Not yet. Someday. And now Cal was turning eight and I have no idea how time passed so fast.

If I'm going to be completely honest with myself I'm sure some of this particular grim inertia was also linked to a perverse macho pride. I've always spoken a lot about work-life balance in medicine and how these antiquated notions, about doctors functioning as around-the-clock automatons sacrificing their personal lives for the greater good, would have to evolve along with the rest of the world. But I think that in some ways I felt safe championing the choice for others to go part-time because I myself chose to work full-time. You do what works for your family, everyone's definition of work-life balance is different. But saying it from the vantage point of someone with three kids and still worked full-time herself felt like a secure platform from which to proselytize, like I was somehow above reproach from people who might accuse all part-time doctors of being lazy or uncommitted. DO WHAT YOU NEED TO DO; BUT AS FOR MYSELF, I AM DOING ALL THE THINGS.

And to be honest, we were getting by. It wasn't wonderful, but it was OK. We were surviving. Maybe we weren't "living our best life" to invoke an Oprah-ism (and I don't even know how I know that since I never even watched Oprah) but...day to day, we were getting by.

And then, the week before Memorial Day, our nanny of five years quit. With no warning, and giving zero notice. She just left one day and mentioned on her way out the door that she wasn't coming back.

Boom. Game-changer.

I'm not going to talk too much about the nanny thing because frankly, after probably the most stressful two months of our lives, I'm just over it. It wasn't even so much the issue of finding a new nanny--though that, obviously, was a huge part of solving our problems, at least in the short term.  But the larger and more important part was having to honestly evaluate our life, our choices, and just how much time we did indeed spend at work, away from our children. It was like turning the stark, faintly buzzing fluorescent exam light onto the fish-white underbelly of what kept things functioning at a level that passed as "OK" for the past five years. And what we realized was that: it really isn't OK. Having to outsource this much of our children's care--of our children's lives--to someone else, particularly someone who after five years could walk out on them without so much as a backwards glance...is not OK.

(This is putting aside the obvious logistical difficulty of finding a non-live-in person to work 50-60 hours a week. It's a tough sell to say the least. One suggestion, perhaps less helpful than most, was that we should just hire two nannies. To which my reaction was, if you have to hire two people to take care of your kids while you're at work, it's possible you're not spending enough time with your kids.)

So. Joe and I discussed and agonized and number crunched and evaluated. We talked to a lot of people. We agonized some more. And what's going to happen now is this: as of September 1st, I will be going part-time at my job. Joe and I would have been fine with either one of us working less, but because of the ways our jobs are structured, it makes more sense right now for the part-time working parent to be me. My new schedule will have me working three days a week, mixed in with my share of nights, weekend and holiday call. And my main goal for the other two days of the week? To do some of the things that I've never been able to do with my kids because I've haven't had the time. Simply to be around more.

I know this all seems unnecessarily melodramatic of an announcement to some, because plenty of people in a multitude of fields choose to work part-time. But for me, it is a big deal, because to be honest, when you're accustomed to following a prescribed path, swimming against the current for a change can be scary. And there are a lot of issues--job guilt, fear of resentment from co-workers or being perceived as less than fully committed to medicine, concerns about crippling my career potential--that I'm working through having finally made this decision. There's a fear of not wanting to let people down.

But that's it on the other side too, isn't it? I don't want to let people down. I want to do my job well. All my jobs. And I think that right now, I need to spend more time with my kids. Nothing's broken, I still love being an anesthesiologist, and the fact that I've worked full-time for the first eight years of parenthood wasn't the wrong call nor has it damaged our family. It's just that our choices then are not the same as our choices now, and when we have better options we owe it to ourselves to take them. We could be making more of this life. We could be doing better.

I'm not going to be there hovering in the periphery for every single second of my kids' lives, nor frankly should I be. But I'm looking forward to just being around more.

So that's what's going on with us. In most ways, it's really no big thing. But in other ways, it's the biggest thing.

party of five

Hey everyone.  I meant to update sooner, but you know, NEW BABY.  Always needing stuff, they are.

Nina's been doing really well.  I was afraid, after having two pretty easy babies with Cal and Mack, that we were going to strike out with Thing 3 and be granted some kind of hellion.  But Nina's much like her brothers were, in that she's a good, sweet baby who is easy to please and whose cuteness makes up for the rest.

I do think that some of it is due to her innate good nature, but I also think that our easy time of things is framed by expectation.  With a new baby, people mostly complain about the lack of sleep, and the constant neediness of the newborn--so much feeding! so much holding and rocking! where one diaper change ends, the next one begins!  And so forth.  The thing is--that's what babies are supposed to do.  And what I'm doing on my end--holding her basically all the time when she's awake, feeding her on demand, changing many many teeny little poo diapers and scanning her pee diapers with almost clinical intensity to assess her degree of urobilinogen excretion (though now, linking to Wikipedia, I am realizing for the first time that urobilinogen is colorless--all that wasted observation!)--that's what I'm supposed to do.  So I don't really think I'm having an appreciably easier or harder time than anyone else with a new baby, we're just all doing what we're supposed to be doing, and everybody's happy.

Anyway, I'm pretty firmly of the belief that if you want to sleep all night, you probably shouldn't have a baby, much the way that if you want to be well-rested, ever, you probably shouldn't go into medicine.  See, it's all about framing your expectations.

Hey, wanna see some pictures?  Most of these are on my Tumblr already, but I know not everyone is my buddy on the twitters et al.  It's fine, little technophobe, we'll just churn some butter and make some corn husk dolls right here by the flickering light of this here computer screen.

I knew that Cal would do well with a new baby (little old man that he is, I knew he would relish the expertise conferred by being not only seven years her senior but also a veteran older sibling) but I'll admit that I was a little concerned that Mack, who has spent the last three and a half years marinating in his baby-of-the-family status, would be jealous.  And I'm not saying that he's not ever going to be jealous or competitive (just wait until she starts getting mobile and his slavishly guarded collection of superhero action figures comes under siege) but so far, he is in love with his baby.

"Mom, I love baby Nina," he'll say unprompted.

"Baby Nina is so pretty."

"Can I kiss her?"

"Can I rub her and smell her?"  (He means rub her head.  We talked about the fontanelles and the importance of using his flat palm instead of poking her brain with his fingers, but then Cal was like, "She has a HOLE in her HEAD?" and then we had to kind of soft-pedal the anatomy lesson lest everyone freak out.  Mack also particularly likes smelling the baby.  I understand the appeal of smelling a new baby and much as the next weirdo, but the way Mack goes after her, you'd think she's one of those really fascinating second generation scratch 'n' sniff stickers that really really for real OMG smell like food.  Like the buttered popcorn one.  Or that one that smelled like pepperoni pizza that I was fascinated with as a child because wow, they made a sticker smell like pizza?  THE FUTURE IS HERE.)

Anyway, sibling rivalry averted for now.  Cal and Mack seem to have reserved all their petty animus for each other ("MOM! Cal looked at me!") but Nina, so far as they're concerned, is a princess.

I'd meant to post this up earlier today (because I'm pretty sure no one's going to read this now when I'm posting it, almost 11:00pm on a Friday night), but see above: baby, comma, care of.  There are a couple of other posts that I'm working on in my head to post hopefully in the next week or two when I have a free moment, including but not limited to:

• Private practice anesthesiology: a day in the life

• Breastfeeding and pumping after returning to work, my experience and strategies (warning: boobs will be alluded to though not depicted)

• More sewing projects that I done did, culled of the more embarrassing mishaps (like the time I got confused while making a pair of leggings and sewed half the seams on the outside, half the seams on the inside)

Any other post topics you guys interested in hearing about while I'm on maternity leave and have some time for such extracurricular pursuits?  Aside from wanting to see more pictures of Cooper to prove that she didn't die a year ago and I just somehow never mentioned it here?  I'm working on that post too--I'll get her to hold a copy of today's Wall Street Journal in the pictures, you know, as a proof of life.  (Not to joke about our dog dying or anything--obviously we care deeply about our dog.  But we're just no longer in the phase of life where we treat her as a child by proxy.  Rest assured that she is well loved and taken care of and just got a new memory foam dog bed that she is very pleased with.)

Anyway.  Have a good weekend, everyone.