MEGABED and other true stories

We're not a bunch of co-sleeping hippies, I swear (well, maybe a little) but with the exception of Cooper, who snores too loudly, we all slept in the same bed last night.  Let me explain.

OK, so first thing: I don't think I've shared this with you yet, but we...have a MEGABED.  More accurately it is two queen-sized mattresses pushed up next to each other--I would show you a picture but it looks fairly terrible (remember that we, two adult professionals in our mid-thirties have never actually owned a bedframe, let alone a boxspring or any of the fancy bedding accoutrement, unless you count that one weird memory foam pillow Joe has that he swears helps his neck) and anyway, I have more pride than to reveal how terrible our bedroom looks.  But just envision two queen mattresses on the floor, next to each other.  Hell, even pretend the beds are made, it's the world of imagination: NO LIMITS!  So that's a really wide bed.

Our intention was not to make a MEGABED, of course--one of those queen sized mattresses used to live in our guest room, back when we rented a house and had a guest room.  Then we moved to this house, which is a three bedroom, and given that we no longer had the extra space (sorry, guests--sofabeds are groovy!) we stuck the queen mattress in Mack's room and let him have the biggest toddler bed ever.  Eventually, this morphed into a twin-sized Lightning McQueen bed in the hopes that it might actually get him to, you know, stay in his own bed at night (Mack has an unfortunate habit of climbing into our bed at 2:00am--he does it then because he knows when you're WEAK) and while this bribery through themed furniture has kind of worked we still needed a place to put the old queen mattress.  Not having any other options, we just put it in our room.  At first we stacked both mattresses on top of each other, but this option ended up being too squashy, so we just laid them side by side, exposed it to some gamma rays, and that's how MEGABED was born.  (This is called an "origin story."  Technical writer stuff, you understand.)  It's indecently large but it's also like having your own bouncy castle so who's to say if we're trashy with our floor mattresses and no furniture?  YOU?  (Maybe you.)

So Cal was sick yesterday. Really, he's overdue, since he hasn't been sick once this whole school year, but as timing goes this illness is particularly bad, given that the last day of school is literally tomorrow.  (The South!)  Also, it was a gastrointestinal illness, while benign enough, tend to be somewhat more dramatic and, shall we say, exuberant than your garden variety colds. So after it was clear that he was still feeling poorly by evening and would likely be missing school today, we told Cal that, if he liked, he could sleep with me and Joe in "the big bed" overnight. Partially so we could keep an eye on him, you know, but also partially (disclosure: mostly) because I trust that my own reaction time is faster than that of a six year-old boy. We have off-white berber carpeting in all the bedrooms, you see.

Mack, not to be outdone, also insisted on sleeping in the big bed with everyone. He also, for the record, wanted to have a fever and be throwing up and taking medicine, because while he was perfectly healthy and felt fine, he sensed some inequity in the compared situations, and where there is inequity, SURELY THERE IS INJUSTICE. I let him have some Gatorade, but I drew the line at giving him medicine, even placebo medicine (an M&M or the like--Cal likes those grape Tylenol Meltaways) because I don't want Mack to get the idea that medicine is something you can just take because you want to. One of the first Pediatric patients I ever had to pronounce dead was the victim of a Tylenol overdose (granted, it was a teenager attempting suicide--attempting and ultimately succeeding, I guess), and although it's like WOAH, DEBBIE DOWNER, my point is--don't fuck around with medications, kid.

 Anyway, we'd argued about why he couldn't take medicine if he wasn't sick for, like, an hour earlier that evening (note: you will never win an argument with a three year-old, no matter how measured and rational your points are, because they are all insane) so when he asked to sleep in the big bed I was like FINE, WHATEVER, JUST STOP TALKING ALREADY. Mack isn't the easiest person to sleep with, as he tends to rotate between "The Roundhouse Kick" and "H is for Hell" with a sprinkle of "Jazz Hands" thrown in to keep things spicy--but if he was willing to keep the peace I was willing to meet him halfway. Therein is the largesse afforded by MEGABED.

Anyway, I won't say it was the best night of sleep that I ever got, but at least there was sleeping, and no one threw up on anyone else, which I count as an unexpected bonus.

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Also to be filed under "Hippies, comma, we are not" is that I cut Mack's hair yesterday.  I've been cutting his hair for a while (I don't think we've even tried to take him to a professional barber yet, given how poor Cal's experience was at this age, both in terms of cooperation and the resultant quality of the haircut) but I think it turned out OK.  Mack's hair is a little wavier than Cal's so it tends to be more forgiving--both in terms of it getting a little too long and in terms of covering up any small errors in the trimming process--but we live in Atlanta and it tends to get hot here, so I like to keep it short, to avoid the matted hanks of plastered fur look.  We can't all be Tim Riggins, son.

Anyway, as I was giving Mack his haircut, I considered if I should take pictures and do a tutorial on boy's home haircuts, but then I realized how very ridiculous that idea was, because really--I don't know what the hell I'm doing.  So my only advice to you is: just go for it, there's only so bad you can screw it  up, and just like all bleeding stops eventually, all hair eventually grows out.  That and make sure you have something good on TV, because that's how you trick them into staying still.

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Finally, gratuitous photos of our backyard.  Unexpected how all this greenery is starting to grow on me.  I pretend like it's about us asserting our dominion over nature or some such thing, but really, I just think it's pretty.

Hope you had a good weekend too.

now if only I had some sort of pollen repelling system

The first thing I noticed when we first moved to Atlanta July of 2008--aside from the heat, oh lord the heat--was the fact that the mosquitoes here are insane. Seriously insane. First off, they are everywhere. Secondly, they are gigantic. I was used to those little spindly mosquitoes in New York, especially in the parks, but the mosquitoes in Atlanta seem easily twice as large, so large that you can actually see these black and white striped markings on them. You can feel them biting you, and it hurts.  Horrifying. Third, the mosquitoes in Atlanta (well, really probably anywhere where there are so many and therefore competition for sweet, sweet human blood is so high) is that they are incredibly aggressive. Our first home in Atlanta, you may remember, was a townhouse, so we didn't have a significant outdoor living space. But even there, just walking out to let Cooper pee before bedtime, I would easily get five mosquito bites just in the forty-five seconds I was actually outdoors. Like I said: ridiculous.

I am also unfortunately pretty allergic to mosquito bites. I mean allergic in the classic sense--the bites swell up enormously, they get huge and hard and itchy. Like if I got a bite on my forearm, I'd have to take my watch off, that's how swollen we're talking about here. Joe, for some reason, doesn't tend to get bitten by mosquitoes (I've been told that it's a blood type thing? Who knows, either way, he got lucky) but the kids seem to have inherited my predilection for being bitten. At our last home, which we were renting, we had a large, relatively flat backyard with a jungle gym for the kids, but unfortunately the yard was surrounded by brush and it was pretty damp a lot of the time, and as a result, there were so many mosquitoes out there that we couldn't even go outdoors until basically November, after which point it was too cold to go outdoors anyway.

At the old place, we had exterminators come and spray for mosquitoes once a month, which...sort of worked for the first week, but after that (or after it rained, whichever came first) there was an exponential decay of the protective coating created by the spray, and then the mosquitoes came back in full force. And, to be honest, I never really loved the idea of having people come spray our yard with stuff where the instructions explicitly stated that animals and kids should be kept out of the yard for a couple of hours afterwards. Because: ew.

Anyway, when we bought the new place and it became apparent that the backyard was going to be some kind of tropical wonderland, I told Joe that we needed to get a better system for mosquito control. Because we had a nice yard, and the fact of it was that neither I nor the kids would be able to enjoy it at all if we didn't have more stringent measures in place. I mean, not only is our yard like some kind of bug breeding haven, but we're flanked on either side by two shady, ivy-filled gulches. "That's where we'll hide the body," I told Joe during our second viewing of the house. (Whose body? Who can say? Therein lies the mystery.) But as was apparent from our previous house renting experience, it doesn't matter how much you spray--if your neighbors don't spray, or (as was in our case) you don't have neighbors, you're going to have mosquitoes all up in your stuff.

Being a city person, I had no idea what kinds of mosquito control methods would be effective. Those giant citronella Tiki torches everywhere? DEET baths? Surrounding my entire yard in a net? None of these solutions seemed strictly practical. Then a few months ago one of my co-workers recommended that we get some kind of built-in mosquito spraying system. (Hi, Sandra!) She had one put in her extremely mosquito-prone yard years ago, and she told me the difference was like night and day. We didn't consider it at the time because the house we were living at was a rental, but when we moved into this place, I got the number and called the guy for an estimate.

Here's the guy:

His name is Chuck, and as you can clearly see, he is adorable. He's also very nice, and went over the system with me in some detail. Anyway, what his bug system basically does is create a perimeter of protection around any outdoor area that you would like to keep bug free. The core of the system is a reservoir tank of pyrethrum (per the website, a low-toxicity insecticide/insect deterrent derived from flower oil) that mists lightly at regular intervals throughout the day--usually sunup, sundown, and 9:00pm--for 30 seconds each time. The spray is administered through a series of nozzles and tubing that are installed around the perimeter of the property you want to protect--Chuck also recommended interspersing a few nozzles in and around our ivy, since its so thick. So the system mists three times a day (there's also a remote control so that you can have it spray additionally if you want, say, right before you go outside or if you're having a party or something), and...that's it. Per Chuck, it just works. I was hesitant about having anything installed (I didn't want it to be too obtrusive and to ruin our yard), and I wasn't so sure if it would work or not, but everyone just raved about how effective it was (including, it should be noted, the actual traditional exterminator who came for his twice yearly maintenance termite/roach spraying), so after some discussion and some looking at our New House budget, Joe and I decided to get the mosquito system installed.

In terms of the aesthetics of the system--I have no complaints. Chuck said that it would be virtually invisible, and it basically is--all the pictures from my yard yesterday have elements of the bug spraying system in them, but you can't really seem them unless I point them out. The most visible parts, frankly, are the nozzles in the ivy and at the edge of some of the flower beds, and even those are pretty subtle--they just look like thin black pipes with a silver tip. Here's a picture of one in the ivy here (I posted this picture yesterday)--you can kind of see one at the bottom right, and one at the top left of the ivy mound.  Also, if you look at the middle of the tree in the center of the frame, you can see some tubing running up the trunk.  The rest of the apparatus you can barely see at all, mostly because our backyard is fully fenced in, and the fence provides both structure and cover for the tubing and nozzles.

Here's another picture of the system doing its sunset spray--this nozzle is near where we planted the tomatoes:

And well does it work?  Well, let me just say that I've been outside basically all weekend (we've had almost every meal outside since we got back, not to mention we were out in the garden planting all day Sunday), and I've gotten one mosquito bite--one--and that was from when we left the protective bubble of the house to go to the plant-buying place.  ONE.  I know that getting "just" one mosquito bite doesn't sound like a big deal, but if you live in Atlanta and you've been outdoors in the spring and summer (and fall) you know: IT IS A BIG FUCKING DEAL.  And let me tell you, it's just so nice to be able to have the kids running in and out of the house (as they do) without having to wrestle them down to rub insect repellent all over them throughout the day.  We had that "natural" kind that comes in a big chapstick-like thing, which made things a little easier to put on and less slimey, but--not really.

As so, did I mention that Chuck has a black lab mix that looks just like Cooper, only her name is Miss Skeeter?  Nothing is cuter than that, friends.  Nothing.  Except for maybe this jacket.

nature's own

Hey everyone! First off, thanks for participating in the head count from the last entry. It occurred to me after the fact that given the purpose of the poll, I probably should have just made the two choices "Yes" and "Yes," because obviously, if you live in Hawaii, you're not going to come to New York for a book event (nor would I--in fact, if I lived in Hawaii, I probably would never leave to go anywhere, ever).  But as an inexact headcount, the poll was more than adequate. Thank you all so much, and I hope (hope!) I will have an event to tell you about soon, at a nice venue in which to meet you all and thank you in person.

Oh, and I should address this one too: someone pointed out that Step I of the USMLE is usually taken around May or June. (I know it seems impossible to those of you entrenched in this process right now, but I actually can't remember in the slightest what month I took any of the three USMLEs, just like I couldn't remember what month Match Day was a few years after the fact. Believe me, once you pass them and place into a residency program, their significance in your mind will drop exponentially.)  Anyway, I'm not even talking about the possibility of this event in specific, I just wanted to say: it's OK to not study for a few hours once in a while. In fact, it's good for you.  So at least once a week, go out to dinner, see a movie, play frisbee in the park with some friends. Your poor, overstuffed brain will thank you for it later, I promise, even if you have to put off for another day memorizing the difference between the different types of MEN syndrome.

(For some reason, that's one fact that sticks with me, that before I took Step I I really thought that knowing the different types of MEN syndrome was going to make or break me.  I'm not really sure why I thought that, all I know is that I memorized the shit out of MEN syndromes and I never got asked about it on any standardized test, ever.)


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One of the things that really drew us to our new house was the backyard. The people that lived here before us (and not doubt, the people before them) were obviously into gardening, and it really shows. It's not a big yard, and it's not a flat yard, but it's all planned and planted and, now that we're officially in the thick of Spring, incredibly lush. Joe and I live in fear that, now that the house is our responsibility, we're going to totally screw it up. TOO MUCH PRESSURE.

Most of the foliage is of the flowering, ornamental variety, and before we moved in we told the kids that once we got moved in, we'd plant something edible, because that's some good clean family fun right there.  So today, we made good on our promise, got a few things from the local plantatorium and shoved them into the ground.  Hopefully they will survive, because in the face of all this verdant growth, it's going to be really embarrassing if they don't.

We planted we little strawberry plants (shown in the first two pictures), two blueberry plants (above), and some tomatoes and peppers.  So anyway--we'll see!  My gardening experience is strictly limited to planter boxes on our balcony in New York, but those flowers didn't die (immediately), so I figure these plants here have an even better chance, because, you know, nature and stuff.

Despite the look of the pictures, our backyard is basically full sun for most of the day, so that's helpful for the photosynthesis and whatnot.  But if anyone has any more detailed advice on how to keep these plants in decent shape, I'd love to hear it.  Do we need to do something to keep woodland critters out and away from our imminently delicious edibles?  Oh, and if there's anything else that's reasonably easy to plant and maintain, let us know, and maybe we'll shove some of those in the ground too.  I mean, if we can find any room back there.  Or maybe we can reclaim some of the planting space from all that ivy, because it's getting a little out of control.