Lightbulb

There is a women's Bible study that I attend every Wednesday morning, complete with child care. I was not planning on using the child care this year since Monkey3 is so small, but she is getting more and more unruly at the table. She grabs for books and pencils, yanks on the tablecloth, and does the back-arch-slippery-noodle routine. If I put her on the floor, she either goes under chairs, bumping her head whenever she pauses to sit up, or heads off exploring. Everyone pretty much ignores her antics, all of us in the Our Lady of Mercy group have children under preschool age, though the first-time moms of babies who are still lumps in their bucket car seats look in her in awe.

So a few times I've tried the child care. After all, she is mobile. Crawling, but easily overwhelmed. If the other kids get too loud, which with a bunch of two- and three-year-olds is a given, she's done, and last week when I walked off, she simply howled in disbelief until returned to me. So much for Biblical conversations.

Sometimes I'll try to settle her down by wrapping her. It goes like this: drape the wrap around her shoulders, two long streams of cloth on either side of her, swing her up on my back, fling the ends this way and that, tighten up the material, adjust and check, and tie off the ends. When I finish, someone is always staring pop-eyed at me.

I know, it is pretty incredible. But it is the only way I can get anything done.

Frequently someone will approach me after the study with exclamations and questions.

That was amazing! She really likes it! How did you learn that? Was it hard? How long did it take to really get? Does it hurt your back? Have you ever dropped her?

Always I reference the Babywearers International group that started me wrapping, with frequent mentions that an aunt showed me how to do the back carry. It was not hard. In two days I had the front wrap carry down; putting her on my back took me longer to get comfortable doing, though it got easier as my baby grew. No, it does not hurt my back; it is completely comfortable, except when she pulls my hair. And no, I have never dropped her. Once she rolled off my back, I caught her and said, "What are you doing?" She said, "Waaaa!" and then I noticed somebody's grandma had jumped out of a nearby car, breathlessly asking if we were okay and if she could help. But no, I have never dropped her and she has never hit the ground. And yes, she really does like being carried this way! She's just all smiles.

After one of these conversations I thought, "I should really get some of the Babywearers' business cards to hand out when people start asking questions and want to learn how to do it too. "

And then the lightbulb.
Just as I have no qualms about wrapping my baby during Bible study, I need no qualms about living as a Catholic. It needs to be so unconsciously part of my life that people will say:

That was amazing! You really like it! How did you learn that? Was it hard? How long did it take to really get? Does it hurt? Have you ever been dropped?

...

Whoa.
That lightbulb is so bright that my head still hurts, and it turned on almost two weeks ago.

Bringing Home the Tree

It was the bleary-eyed Sunday of Thanksgiving. I had been-out-of-the-house-three-days-worth of tasks on my mind, and I could hear Monkeys1&2 upstairs raising Cain. Too many hours strapped in car seats, too many late nights, and now they were gearing up for a wild day. My husband was about to leave for his music lesson, leaving me with three crazy Monkeys and no car for several hours. My morning looked terrible.

I turned my mind to another issue. When to get the Christmas tree? Since having moving south and having children, I have opted for tree hauling on St. Nicholas' Day. However, even though this is only a week into December, the selection has been terrible. I'm not picky about branch evenness, flat spots, crooked trunks, and all the other faults of trees, but when I look in the 3 to 4 foot tree section at the hardware box store I do not want a 2 1/2 foot tree. We only fill our bay window shelf, so I want a small one, but not tiny. Perhaps we needed to get our tree earlier.

I conferred with my husband.
He only shrugged.
We are never home on Christmas (really -- never, because in ten years of marriage we always wake up Christmas morning not in our own bed but at his parents' house), so a tree in our home is perhaps not that vital in his mind. Or perhaps he distrusts my tree judgement since I had brought a potted grocery store tree into our marriage, and I only gave it up because I couldn't fit that and baby Monkey1 and the bird cage and the 20+ year old Christmas cactus in my car when we left Long Island. (We also could not fit the vacuum cleaners, but that's part of another story.)

More commotion from upstairs. My question is answered. There is no way we were all going be be alive in three hours if we stayed in the house. "Get your coats on!" I yelled.

Fifteen minutes later my husband dropped me, a hiking backpack, and the three Monkeys off in front of Home Depot. I squished the fluffy pink snow suited Monkey3 in the backpack and she shrieked with excitement. The other two Monkeys were confused. "Why are we here? Where's Dad going?"

We toured the tree area and then went inside to ooo and ahhh and point and exclaim over the lawn inflatables, lighted animals, giant Nutcrackers, and battery operated singing toys/decor.

Delight satisfied, we picked a tree and a swag, and started to walk home, a less than two mile walk.

Suddenly, Monkey1 was cold, Monkey2 was too tired, Monkey1 said it was too far, Monkey2 wanted her bus pass, Monkey1 refused to go another step, ...
"You can stay here," I retorted. "Dad can come pick you up at two o'clock, or whenever he's done."
(There's a headline for you: Mother of three abandons children to carry home Christmas tree.)
Monkey1 grudgingly kept walking.
I pointed out that half-way home was a grocery store, and we could stop and buy doughnuts or something.
This cheered the Monkeys considerably, and not too far later, Monkey1 pointed out that the drug store was closer, could we stop there instead?

So we did. I expect people gave me some funny looks, walking in with a three-foot Christmas tree under one arm and a baby in my backpack, but we bought a box of chocolate covered brownies and pink strawberry flavored milk and walked out again without knocking anything over. We stopped in a bus stop shelter and enjoyed our snack, Monkey3 was asleep, and then on we went.

We took turns carrying the tree, Monkey2 thought it was great fun, Monkey1 not so much, and we got it home not too much the worse for wear.

Four loads of laundry? Meal planning and grocery shopping? Oh well. At least all Daddy's girls were alive and sane when he got home.

The red-red-red quilt, or The Queen of the Run-on

I'm copying my second grader's spelling homework again. (The Blogger app ate two of my posts in draft, so I'm ticked off, which knots up my writing.) The teacher has amended the "write a story" exercise to three consecutive nights of "write a five sentence paragraph with five spelling words." I've put the spelling words in all caps but otherwise preserved the spelling and punctuation.


Once upon a time, a ten-year-old girl was walking home from school one DAY, when she met a litte old man. The girl BELIEVED that he could make her hair as gold as the sun. Then he said: "You must do one thing for me, to find a quilt that is as red as a BARN." The girl started home, when she got her mom had a DARK red-red-red quilt and the girl said, "May I have that?" and her mom said, "Yes" "please do!" and the girl said "Thanks Mom!" Affter that the girl ran to the place where the litt old man is, but it was HARD to her, because she loved it but, the girl remeded what he said, so she give it to the litt old man. The End


As punctuated, there are five sentences. Incredible.

Sweeping up the Crumbs

I just wrote a long post, but my iPod ate it.

I can only remember the end of it:
Beltway Babywearers

Tooth Fairy Tales

On All Saints' Day, Monkey1 ducked out of the class line into church, spoke to her teacher, and joined me. The "sit with Mom" privilege, or in her case, play with Monkey3 during Mass, since I sit in the back with the other mothers of squeakers, squawkers, and just barely walkers. When Monkey3 got tired of this, I wrapped her up on my back, and Monkey1 showed me her loose tooth. All during the rest of Mass she sat there wiggling it; I was surprised she did not have it out by the closing prayer. She's very proactive with her teeth, unlike me, who would pamper a dangling tooth for days and days. So no surprise, when I picked up the Monkeys after school, the tooth was out. "It came out during lunch!" Monkey2 told me (they have lunch at the same time), and Monkey1 was proudly wearing a necklace with a plastic tooth-shaped box containing the lost tooth.

Hours and groggily later at 2 a.m. after dealing with Monkey3, I suddenly remembered the tooth. I went to investigate the situation. Monkey1 sleeps in a full-size loft bed strewn with books, dolls, various blankets and pillows, and she is in there somewhere. Hopefully the tooth in the tooth-box was under her pillow, but getting it was Mission Impossible. I went back to bed. My husband half woke up, I said something about the tooth, and he grunted and went back to sleep. He had pulled off his share of tooth fairy missions, so I knew this one was on me. I lay awake for a long time.

In the morning, Monkey1 came in with disappointment and a note from the Tooth Fairy. She said she read it, but I think she's in that reading phase where she can get a lot of the words but miss the comprehension. So Dad read it, eliciting peals of laughter from the Monkeys as the story unfolded. The note said:

Dear Monkey1,
I am very sorry I could not change your tooth into a quarter. Here's what happened...
I brought a Tooth-Fairy-in-Training, and she got so mixed up! I let her go in your room by herself, and first she brought out a doll shoe because I told her that your tooth was in something. Then she brought out your glasses because they were shiny (I hope she put them back where you could find them). Then she brought out a pencil because it was cylindrical.
Then the baby woke up and your Mom said we were making too much noise. The Tooth-Fairy-in-Training wanted to look in your sister's mouth, and of course, flying that close to a baby, she was grabbed... Her wings got slobbered on, so now I have to take her somewhere with sun to dry them off!
I will come back tomorrow and have your tooth exchange done properly!
Please have your Mom make a tooth pillow with a pocket to make this easier.
Fondly,
Your Tooth Fairy

"What?!" I interjected, "I have to make... Who told the Tooth Fairy that I can sew?"

Monkey1 giggled and showed me the picture that the Tooth Fairy drew of the desired tooth pillow.

"Did Monkey3 really see the Tooth Fairy?" she asked.
"Yes."
"How come?" After all, kids are not supposed to see the Tooth Fairy.
"Because Monkey3 doesn't have any teeth."
"And you saw the Tooth Fairy?"
"Yes. They were making a lot of noise. You should have seen the Tooth-Fairy-in-Training trying to carry your glasses; they were really heavy for her. She could barely fly."
"Did she put them back?" asked Dad.
"Evidently," I pointed out, "Monkey1 is wearing them."
"They were in a different place than where I took them off," she told us.

Monkey1 took the note to school to share with her class.

As instructed, I made a tooth pillow. It looked like a molar, a large soft cube with two roots off the bottom, and for a pocket I attached a pretty little drawstring bag. Monkey1 was very pleased with it, and we put her tooth in the little bag that evening.

In the morning, not only was there a coin instead of a tooth in the bag, there was a note pinned to the tooth pillow. It said:

Dear Monkey1,
The Tooth-Fairy-in-Training tried again... she was a bit over-enthusiastic when it came to the quarter. I'm sure you won't mind since you had to wait an extra night.
Fondly,
Your Tooth Fairy
P.S. Please use the tooth pillow next time too!

The coin was not a quarter, but a golden coin. Monkey1 was very excited when I had her examine it closely and she realized it was $1!

And so the stories begin...

I Made Three Phone Calls

During the presidential debate on Tuesday night, the current President said: "When Governor Romney says that we should eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood, there are millions of women all across the country who rely on Planned Parenthood for not just contraceptive care. They rely on it for mammograms, for cervical cancer screenings. That's a pocketbook issue for women and families all across the country."

Wednesday night a friend invited me to join her in "Call Planned Parenthood to Schedule Your Imaginary Mammogram Day." 

So Thursday morning I called my local Planned Parenthood, which is eight miles away. When I asked to schedule a mammogram, the scheduler said she could set me up for a "clinical breast exam" and that if the clinician saw abnormalities, I could be referred out for further testing. 

"But I've already had that," I said. "I need a mammogram. I was told I could call Planned Parenthood to schedule a mammogram."

The scheduler repeated that she could set me up for a clinical breast exam. She also explained that patients without insurance typically pay $125 to $175 for this, although self-paying customers are eligible for a discount of up to 20%.

I told the scheduler that I felt we were going around in circles, so "never mind" and hung up after she finished her end-of-call pleasantries.

Off the phone, I looked up my latest insurance statements to find my recently covered annual well-woman visit. The doctor's office had submitted two different coded and billable items for the date of that visit, one for $453 and one for $155. My insurance covered both, but if I had no insurance, and I thought I was well, would I have bothered to go to the doctor? I know I'm supposed to go every year for a check-up and screening, but ... And if I had to pay out of pocket, really, would I go?

Back to the task.

So Planned Parenthood does not do mammograms, they refer them out, just as a regular doctor would do, but to get the referral, one needs to pay... and twenty percent less than the bottom fee is still $100. That's a lot of groceries, Mr. President.

I decided to zero in on the scheduling issue. If my primary physician had indicted at my annual check-up that I needed a mammogram, and the President had mentioned Planned Parenthood as a resource, then I could call them to set that up, right? Maybe it would be cheaper than whoever my primary physician referred me to go see. I called Planned Parenthood again, same number, which turned out to be the scheduling clearinghouse for the all clinics in my metropolitan area. A different person took my call.

The scheduler nearly went into hysterics trying to explain and re-explain to me that I needed an annual exam at Planned Parenthood first, and if necessary I would be referred out to an imaging center for a mammogram. 

Finally I said I understood, thanked her for explaining it all to me, and apologized for wasting her time. 

"No it's okay, that's what I'm here for," she crooned as she bid me good-bye. 

I nearly choked. It's okay to waste her time? There's customer service for you!

Since they do not do mammograms, if I had already been to my primary physician, I would not be any farther ahead by trying to tap into Planned Parenthood's network. I would be repeating steps, the clinical breast exam, and payment for that, in order to gain access to a mammogram. I decided to try to get a better grasp on the financial angle.

Third call, yet another scheduler person. Again, they could schedule my annual exam, which would include a clinical breast exam, and if necessary, I would be referred out for a mammogram. The cost would be between $125 and $175. 

"How do I budget for this if I don't know how much money to bring?" I asked. 

So to determine my payment, to my appointment I would need to bring proof of income, or student ID and schedule if I was a student, pay stub, bank statement, or if family were supporting me, a letter saying how much they help me out a month. And to cover the mammogram, the scheduler said, "Planned Parenthood health centers work to submit our patients with grants to help recover the cost of additional needing screening and diagnostic tests..." (Yes her grammar really was that bad.) So how much a mammogram might cost is still a mystery. 

I said I would have to gather my paperwork before making an appointment and said good-bye. Again I was left to wonder, if I was really financially in a tight spot, would I even bother with this sort of preventative care? Is it a luxury? Does Planned Parenthood really solve the pocketbook issue, as our President claimed?

While I was doing my calls and in-between chewing on the issues, a friend of mine also made her call to Planned Parenthood for a mammogram, and dissatisfied with what she was told about paying for services (a clinical breast exam, then referral out for a mammogram), she searched for a financially more sensible option. She quickly turned up the Mammovan, an outreach of George Washington University Breast Care Center and the Prevent Cancer Foundation, as a more affordable option in our area. Surely other communities have their own options. Or are we ready to believe that Planned Parenthood is the only game in town when it comes to mammograms -- which it does not do -- or when it comes to affordability -- since it is a business and not a charity (I checked their website and did not find a claim to non-profit status)?

A good spin doctor will say that the President "misspoke." 

But just as troubling is the myth that it perpetuates. Planned Parenthood has been trying to shake its Face of Abortion reputation for years. The organization and its supporters continually maintain, "No, we do good things for women... like ... " 

Like mammograms that are referred out? I believe that is called bait and switch. A dishonorable practice, to say the least. Or to properly name it: a lie.

Homework

Now I understand why spelling assignments such as "write a story with the spelling words" drove my mom crazy.

Here is Monkey1 (grade 2)'s homework:
[Spelling words underlined.]

The rainy day
I was looking out the window.  It is too muddy. Mom says. Is it time to see Dad? I ask. No. She said. Ten minutes later... I'm bored. I say. Sorry. Mom said.

(At this point I intervened because after twenty minutes only one spelling word had been used.)

Spot came he wants to play. I sort to play. The phone rings. I get it. It's Dad! I say. He wants to be peckd up. That's good. says Mom. In the excitement the phone broke! Oh no! I say. Don't worry! Mom says. We get Dad first. She said. Dad has two of the same phones. Dad makes a new rule!
The End.