Mahh Ming!!!

In an unfortunate turn of events, Lucy likes to copy Josie. This results in some pretty annoying behaviors (it is funny when your 1.5 year old puts fake food in her mouth. When your 3.5 year old does it, it's just kind of gross). One of the unexpected outcomes of this pattern is the formation of our own special language. With Lucy copying Josie and Josie struggling to communicate, we have generated some of our own Allenisms. Here is a short list

mah ming - bath time (it doesn't even sound that close...)
bopple - apple
eeeese - cheese
oooose - juice
oooe - shoe (you can see how it can get confusing around here - do you want a shoe or something to drink?)
o ert - yogurt (I thought she was saying "over there" for a long time - that really made her mad...)
and of course, Bert - lentils and rice

Meanwhile Lucy now uses words like random and actually in appropriate ways in long sentences but is still a bit confused by the transition between today and tomorrow (she prefers to just use the generic, "this day").

The Happiest Place On Earth

We finally made our first visit to the happiest place on earth. Despite having lived in California for thirteen years and having lived in southern California for five years, none of us had ever been to Disneyland. I think this might actually be against the law in California. If not illegal, it is definitely beyond the pale. I've been wanting to go every since Lucy was born but I was having a hard time convincing others that this was a good plan.

About two weeks before Christmas I was talking to some friends at work and they were saying what a great time they had at Disneyland the night before. At Christmas they decorate Disneyland and do lots of extra Christmas things. Then I found out that our friends Ray and Sandy (and their kids Tyler and Chloe) and our friend Lena were all going to Disneyland that week. That was it, Disneyland was on!

S0 we loaded the family up into the minivan and hit the road to Anaheim. Of course we hit totally hellish commuter traffic and it took us two and a half hours to get there, but it was worth it. We had a great time.

Lucy worked her outspoken little girl magic and managed to dance with a prince, dance with Mary Poppins in front of a crowd, have a private audience with Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, and had her photo taken with Goofy. She was wearing a Princess Belle costume so that helped wow people with her charm. Josie wasn't so sure, she hated Mickey and Goofy but seemed to enjoy riding on the teacups, The Small World ride, and the Dumbo ride.

One of the funniest parts of the whole day was going on the Autopia ride with Lucy, Tyler, Sandy, and Lena. They actually let the kids drive the cars. The cars are prevented from going completely off the track by a cement rail in the middle but with two three year olds driving, the cars pretty much careened back and forth as much as humanly possible. I almost peed myself laughing watching Tyler and Lucy drive. Watch out southern California freeways, here comes the future.

Hand Jive

Before I forget, I want to take note of the fact that Josie is a crazy hands baby. She is always doing things with her hands, waving them around, grabbing things (she reminds me of my friend Tiffany with her expressive hands). When she is going to sleep she especially likes to hold your hand and will mess about with your hand in her hand (holding it 50 million different ways) for a long time (like 30 minutes). She is way into hands. Maybe she'll be a sign language interpreter or a sculptor when she grows up.

Josie strikes out into baby speak

Josie has been making lots of word-like sounds but hasn't really known many words except mama, until now. In the past week she has learned banana (anana, according to her), ball (mball), bye, hi, and the baby signs for dog and bird. She already knows the baby signs for more and all finished. She's not as much of a verbal powerhouse as Lucy was at this age, but she is on her way. Go Josie go!! By the way, Jos, if you read this later in life - we're not worried about your language skills and besides, you learned to walk months before Lucy, so you're even steven in the global perspective.

A Glimpse of the Future

Maybe you think this post is going to be about Obama winning the election. Luckily it is looking that way now at 7:40 PM on Tuesday Nov. 4th. But this post is about a more personal vision of the future. Last night I made Lucy mad in the bathtub by revoking her wash cloth privileges after unauthorized activities (flinging water across the bathroom). Lucy was pouting in one corner of the bathtub and Josie started trying to cheer her up. Josie would creep up to Lucy and peer around her shoulder and make little happy noises. Lucy would push her off and then Josie would do the whole routine again. Until finally both Lucy and Josie were laughing hysterically.

After bathtime they then spent a glorious 20 minutes in Lucy's bed, jumping on the bed, sharing dolls, sharing stuffed animals, and playing pizza party. You have to understand, Lucy almost NEVER shares anything with Josie. She more typically spends a lot of time trying to take things away from Josie.

They are finally getting to the point where they can play together. Lucy is really starting to enjoy Josie and Josie, of course, has been crazy about Lucy from the get go. I think it is actually starting to get fun for the two of them to be sisters. I must say I enjoyed it quite a bit too. I gave Lucy lots of praise for sharing and playing so well with Josie. We had a good session of bed playtime again tonight. Let's just hope that this is a prelude for what a lot of the future sister vibe will be.

Same Old Story

We went to see Josie's urologist on Thursday. In some ways it was reassuring. After the confusing acid trip of our last visit where the doctor implied that it was a miracle that Josie's good kidney was still functioning (which previously had never been questioned - her good kidney was her good kidney and was supposed to stay that way!) and then mentioned that maybe she was miraculously cured and wouldn't need any further surgery (when the initial diagnosis was that her anatomy was so messed up that there was no way we would get out of this without major surgery), this time we were back to the original story. Her VCUG, done that day, showed that she still has grade V reflux on her left side so she will need to have major surgery in a few months. The surgery will involve reimplanting both of her ureters on the left side (she has two instead of one) and then "resculpting" her primary ureter on the left side. The reimplantation somehow results in the formation of a functional valve between the ureter and the bladder (this is the critical missing element in Josie's anatomy currently that allows lots of urine to backflow up to her kidneys). The surgery will involve a three to four day stay at the hospital and will include temporary stints in her ureters for a few days.

I was extremely disappointed because I was hoping for the miracle cure. I was hoping that Thursday would be our last visit to the pediatric urology department at the UCLA medical center. I was hoping that we would be able to come home and stop giving our daughter antibiotics three times a day. But no such luck.

So that is the crap news. Josie's kidney plumbing on the left side is still all messed up. The good news is that our guy has done this kind of surgery on little kids literally thousands of times and none of them has expired on the table. The good news is that we have a hospital with not one but literally tens of pediatric anaesthesiologists. The good news is that Josie has already had anaesthesia twice and did just fine. The good news is that Dr. C. says that his surgery will fix the problem. The good news is that a person has two kidneys and you can live on just one. The good news is that Dr. C. claims that even Josie's messed up kidney is 85-90% intact and that if anything happens to her good kidney, she could survive on her bad one. So that's all reassuring. We have tentatively scheduled the surgery for sometime in January.

Until then we have an extremely happy baby (except when she doesn't get her way) who has a complicated regime of antibiotics and pro-biotics all working together to keep her intestines happy and her kidneys infection free.

Christy and Josie both go to the Doctor

I'm not a big doctor person. Going to the doctor means being organized and making an appointment and then actually remembering the appointment. All of these things are challenging steps for me. But this week I actually went to see my GP about my possible asthma. He made me blow into a lung function thingy and listened to my lungs and said, yes indeed, I have mild asthma. He gave me some cortical steroids to inhale twice a day for a couple of weeks and a prescription for an inhaler. I have to go back in three weeks for a follow-up visit. Guess how they code a follow-up visit in my doctor's appointment book. You guessed it, f u. Well f u too I say.

On Thursday Josie goes to see Dr. Churchill yet again. Our pediatric urologist (who knew there even was such a thing) is seeing a lot of us these days. Josie gets her second ever VCUG. For those of you who don't have a child with kidney problems, a VCUG is a voiding cystourethrogram. It is basically a series of x-rays where they use a dye to look at what happens to liquids in your bladder when you pee. The question is, does any of the liquid backwash up to your kidneys through your ureter? Your pee is not supposed to go backwards - it is supposed to be a one-way process. We all have little valves where our ureters join our bladders that keep pee from going up and bothering our kidneys.

As you all probably know, Josie's plumbing is all messed up on one side (she has two ureters and they interfere with each other). We were initially told that the only way to fix this mess would be surgery. But now our pediatric urologist thinks it may have fixed itself somehow. On Thursday we will watch Josie pee through the magic of x-rays and find out if she still needs to have surgery or if she has cured herself.

It Turns Out that Hell is spelled F.O.U.R. A.M.

We made a big leap forward in the livability scale last night but boy was it a costly one. We finally moved Josie's crib into Lucy's room after a year of sharing our room with her and two weeks of Mitch and I sleeping on thermarests in the living room. We were worried that the move would disrupt Josie's new found ability to sleep solidly through the night without waking anyone up but we decided to forge ahead because both of us are tired of sleeping on the floor.

Well, it wasn't Josie that was distressed by the move. Despite months of advance warning and steady talking up of the idea, Lucy was none too pleased to have to share her palace with Josie. We managed to get through bedtime with no major hitches but Lucy woke up around midnight and started causing trouble. First it was the scary monsters (12:15 AM), then it was a sweater (1:30 AM), then it was the alligators (1:45 AM), then it was juice, "I WANT JUICE!!!!" (3 something AM). Finally around 4 AM I dragged her into the living room so that I could yell at her without waking up Josie. I gave Lucy some ultimatums (no Jungle book tomorrow if you don't shut up and go to sleep) while Mitch took Josie out of Lucy's room in anticipation of a giant Lucy screaming fit. I put Lucy back to bed and then she was quiet. She had won, Josie was out of her room.

Mitch and I had a mini parenting conference at 4:15 AM and decided that this wasn't good. So back into Lucy's room went Josie, with the added incentive to Lucy that if she was quiet and went back to sleep that in the morning Mitch would take her to store and she could pick out any stickers that she wanted.

Apparently, stickers weren't enough. Lucy started screaming at full decibel that she wanted juice. Then it degraded into screaming for Mama, and then just generalized enraged screaming. Josie amazingly slept through the ruckus for almost ten minutes and then it started. The loudest, most high pitched, incredible tandem screaming that our house has known. One of them would slack off and then the other would really shine through.

The only fortunate thing that a person can say about it is that it only lasted for about ten minutes. And then we were able to get in our three hours of sleep before Josie woke us up in the morning. Ah parenting. We're all looking forward to tonight, not.

Josie Turns 1, The blog makes it to 100

Lucy helps Josie open her present from Grandma Jo and Grandpa Jim

Lucy and Josie both like the cake, don't tell anyone that I didn't make it myself...

Josie had her first birthday on Tuesday this week. In an unanticipated turn of events, I would say that while Josie liked her carrot cake she wasn't as ecstatic about it as Lucy was about her applesauce cupcake on her first birthday. In general, Josie is much more of an epicurean than Lucy. Josie loves to eat and is particularly interested in eating whatever it is that YOU are eating whether that is pesto or pizza. Anyway, she liked her cake and hopefully she won't realize until she is forty that her cake was store bought while I made Lucy's. Chalk it up to eroding quality over time or maybe just relaxation of the momma worries by the time baby number two comes around. With Lucy I was concerned about letting her eat some store bought sugar fest. With Josie I was just happy that Mitch had time to go to the store and get her a special treat...Although we did still try to stay on the "healthy" side of cake with the perennial favorite, carrot cake.

In addition to cake, Josie had a nice bath and enjoyed opening her present from Grandma Jo and Grandpa Jim. She also enjoyed eating her cards from both Grandpa Tom and Grandma Sue and Grandpa Jim and Grandma Jo. I didn't bother to wrap the stuffed animals that we got her but instead let her play with the crinkly plastic bag that they came in (only under supervision, of course). All in all, it was a fantastic birthday. And it is still going. Her new wheely bug (a present from Grandpa Tom and Grandma Sue) arrived yesterday and I have promised Lucy that she and I will make applesauce cupcakes for Josie tomorrow.

On her first birthday, here is a list of some of Josie's many accomplishments:

- a generally sunny disposition (hey, this is a huge accomplishment in my book)
- lots of crazy noises that sound very conversational, although no actual words yet
- ZERO teeth but an amazing ability to eat anything despite the lack of chompers
- not one, but two marvelous cowlicks, one in front and one in back
- a total delight in bath time which involves lots of splashing, squealing and mayhem
- lots and lots of walking including on grass, sand, carpet, grass, and stairs
- baby signs for all finished and more
- great kazoo playing
- world's best lamprey (and still lampreying at a year old!)

We are very happy that she is kicking butt and taking names in this, her first year of life. We're looking forward to lots, lots, lots more.

And, in a neat coincidence, this is the 100th post for boomvang.

Sleep Draining...I Mean Training

Me yell all night long? Never...

Our children are mirror opposites of each other: Lucy is a hellion all day long who takes careful managing and a doctoral degree in psychology just to get dressed and out the door but at night she typically sleeps like a rock and doesn't bother a person. Josie is happy go lucky all day long and is equally entertained by eating cheerios at home, eating sand at the park, or eating carpet lint at school but at night she is hell baby who wants constant hand holding, rocking, and shushing just to get through until dawn.

Despite our enjoyment of all the Josie cuddling and even the sweetness of rocking her to sleep, watching her sleep, or having her rolling around in our bed from 3 AM until 6:30 AM, we finally decided it was time to bring out the smack down (as our friend Kyle says, "when the going gets tough, SMACK DOWN!"). We have tried various methods to enhance Josie's sleeping capabilities. To be honest, it is basically inconceivable to us that Mitch and I could have a child who is not a good sleeper. We both LOVE sleeping and are insanely good sleepers (fire alarms? no problem. urban noise? no problem. crying cats? no problem). I think we were both in denial that we would actually have to do something to get Josie to be a better sleeper, secretly we were both thinking she would grow out of it. Which sounds perfectly reasonable until you talk to some of our friends whose daughters are 7, 9 or 11 and who still sleep in their parents beds...

So we tried to let Josie cry it out a month or so ago. She seemed too stressed (after an hour of crying) and we caved. Mitch tried the no cry sleep solution (which our friend Becca calls the no sleep cry solution) but I couldn't implement a method that repeatedly asks one to risk not getting your child into a solid sleep by cutting out one or more of your eight gajillion sleep routine activities. Me, I'm either in or I'm out. I'm either going to soothe that baby so much that she won't wake up if world war III starts or I am going to sit in the living room and do nothing while she screams her lungs out. There's no in between for me.

So we started letting Josie cry it out on Saturday night. The method we are using is from some funky 1980's book by some guys who actually work at a place called the Crying Baby Institute (it sounds like a joke, doesn't it?). The CBI is at an actual university, even if it is one that you've never heard of (I've never heard of it anyway). It is a slightly harsher version of the Ferber method that seems to work on hard cases who will cry forever (like Josie). We let her cry for five minutes, then a quick check with no soothing. Then we let her cry with quick checks every 20 minutes until she falls asleep.

The first time we tried it was a nap time and she cried for an hour and then we let her get up (no nap). That night she did o.k. with a 25 minute crying period at bed time, following by lots of waking up but only one hour long episode at midnight that required quick checks. Although I must say she was clearly pretty darn peeved about the new system (picture her yelling for hours in baby language, "WHERE IS MY CUDDLING???? WHERE IS MY HAND HOLDING? WHAT THE @!**@!! IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE??? I'M AWAKE IN HERE - BY MYSELF!!! DO YOU NOT HEAR ME???") Last night she actually slept through the night after one quick check at 10 PM.

It is still pretty hellish. We're sleeping in the living room (to give Josie peace and quiet in our room). Lucy is waking up repeatedly at night because she has a cold and also because she wants to experience the novelty of everyone camping out in the living room.

Considering that sleep deprivation almost had me crying in the mall at lunch time on Sunday because they only had one piece of cheese pizza left (when I needed two - one for me and one for Lucy), all I can say is that if some heinous turn of events results in the McCain Palin sideshow being elected and then Palin ends up as President, I hope either that her child is a hell of a lot better sleeper than mine or that she doesn't feel about nannies the way she feels about personal chefs.

Random Daily News

Not much to report from daily living here in Ventura I'm afraid. I feel better about writing blog posts when I have some sort of theme or short essay format in mind. I've got nothing. But rather than languish unattended and let my blog get all dusty in the corner, I'll just post some random noise from daily living.

Mitch, Lucy, Josie, and I had a great four day weekend. Sometimes I feel like the government is stingy and is looking after your tax dollars a little too well. But one of the ways in which the government is incredibly nice is that if a paid holiday happens to fall on a day that you normally don't work, you get an extra day off so that you don't get shorted a paid holiday. Since the fourth of July is a Friday this year (and I don't work Fridays), I got to take Monday off instead. So we just had a blissfully long four day weekend.

Our four day weekend was plenty of time to get a little cleaning done around the house (mop the floors, vacuum, do some bush trimming in the yard) and still do lots of fun things with the girls like go jump at the bouncy place, take Lucy to a stamping party at Ray and Sandy's house, and spend lots of time at the park. I also made my rounds of all of the dog adoption places in a 40 mile radius of my house.

The weather was lovely and we spent lots of time outside. Lucy is really into wearing dresses these days (she calls all dresses "ballet dresses"). Since she is such a gonzo climber, runner, faller, nut job, we make her wear pants under her dresses. So these days she regularly looks like the hippie girls I went to college with who wore jeans under their dresses. It is a crazy adorable fashion statement for a three year old.

Josie is her usual chipper self. She is quite the land stander these days is likes to torment Lucy by pulling all of Lucy's toys off the shelves in the living room. She also crawls FAST and regularly tries to make it out into the backyard if we leave the door open for a milli-second.

The cats have fleas (damn cats). They have also been unusually affectionate recently because Seth and Elise were out of town (no neighborly petting for them). I notice that tonight I have yet to see Katafanga and low and behold, Seth and Elise got back last night...

Other than that, my tomatoes are taking over my entire raised bed garden and Lucy's school sunflower has gotten spectacularly large. We will cut it down soon and give room for Lorenza's sunflower to take over its spot. We didn't get around to trying to tie up the tomatoes this weekend so that will have to be a fourth of July project. We re-did about half of the side yard a couple of weekends ago. I hope to finish that project over the fourth of July weekend as well. I had to get rid of the lovely purple flowers I planted when we first moved here. They are too sprawling and have to be trimmed every month to make enough room to get the stroller down the walkway. So now a new approach, small grasses and rocks. See it here------>

That's about all there is to report from here in Ventura.

Beyond Food and Water

Have you ever heard of the hierarchy of needs? This is the idea that before you can make fine art or sing songs, you have to have food and shelter. I guess the theory is that cold and hungry people make bad art. Anyway, you get the idea. Well a few years ago I heard an expansion of this idea on NPR. The story was about a writer who I think was a social scientist. This guy had done a bunch of research on what makes a person feel happy and content with their life (or maybe he was some sort of new-age philosopher who just asserted what is to follow without any scientific evidence. To be quite honest I can’t remember the context at all….). And he had this really cool list of five crucial elements in life that you needed to have to feel satisfied with your existence. At the time that I heard the story I remember thinking that his five crucial elements made a lot of sense and that this would be a good framework for thinking about one’s life. Unfortunately, now, of course, I can’t remember a darn thing about the story – not who the guy was or what the five things were!

I do actually remember two of them and this weekend I had a wonderful fulfillment of one of his elements. The two that I remember are meaningful work – work that you feel makes a contribution to the world. He said this didn’t have to be your paying job, it could be volunteer work or whatever. And the second one that I remember was being part of a community. It was this community aspect that I really missed after leaving graduate school. In graduate school I had a great community of friends and mentors and colleagues. But in southern California while I really enjoy my co-workers, everyone lives scattered all over southern California so I never see them outside of work. And apart from Seth and Elise, we have very few friends in our new hometown of Ventura.

But now, thanks to Lucy and Josie, that has all changed. I did not anticipate that one of the fringe benefits of having kids would be getting to know loads of new people in our community. Through daily visits to our neighborhood park and our participation in our community’s First Five program, we have gotten to know dozens of great families. While many of these people may differ from me in politics or religion or eating preferences or hair style, or fashion, we have our kids in common. And they are all so nice. Nice counts for a lot in my book. Niceness is seriously under-rated.

On Sunday, as I was driving home from the grocery store, I saw two different families that I know from the park, and I waved as I passed them. And this simple act of seeing people that I know, walking around my neighborhood, made me like Ventura is my home and that if I dropped off the face of the earth someone other than Mitch might actually notice (I know my far away friends would notice but it might take a while considering what a crap correspondent I am). I know there are lots of other ways to meet people and make a community other than having kids (volunteering, joining clubs, etc.). But for me, Josie and Lucy have helped fill out another piece of my missing world. Waving at my neighbors is a simple thing, a simple thing that definitely adds to my happiness at being a human in this place at this time.

Sisters

Mitch with Lucy at five months and Josie at five months

Other Random Weekly News

Can you believe this handsome devil will be 40 soon?

Josie Update:
Josie is doing awesome, charming strangers everywhere with her cute smile and doll-like appearance. She is way into sitting up now and loves sitting on the floor, grabbing her toys, and putting everything into her mouth. She has also started trying out all sorts of people food. With Lucy we introduced her to food like all the books say, one thing at a time, starting with vegetables. With Josie, partly out of laziness and partly out of a desire to stimulate her interest in spices and flavors, I am letting her try whatever I eat. I break everything up into extremely small pieces or mash it up first. So far, she likes everything: garlic bread, pasta, beans, pizza, on and on. We don't have any food allergies in our family and a doctor friend suggested that most food allergies (except peanuts and dairy) manifest as only a mild rash anyway.

The only Josie downside right now is that she is making us crazy with her terrible sleep habits. She bothers me every hour from 7:30 PM until 11:3o PM. After that she starts sleeping for two hour stretches but still often ends up sleeping with us in a safe position swaddled in the boppy on my lap. She is very determined to get what she wants at night and so far Mitch and I haven't had the willpower to lay the smack down on her with the sleep thing....Plus we've done a lot of things wrong with her sleep-wise. She likes to go to sleep while eating. She likes to sleep on me. We feel bad for her because of all the weird antibiotics she has to take that mess up her stomach. My working means she has to get all of her boob-time at night. It's pretty much a disaster that we will have to fix in the next month or so.

Lucy Update:
Lucy had a great week visiting with her grandma. Today we went to the Harbor and she rode the zebra on the carousel. Grandma Jo also got her a new swimsuit and swim shoes. Of course she has been wearing her swim shoes constantly since she got them.

The Rest of Us
Mitch and I are good, if exhausted. We are still recovering from our week in the hospital with Josie and are looking forward to getting back to our regular routine this week. Mitch is gearing up for his big birthday bash in two weeks. Can you believe he will be 40 years old? Despite all his gray hairs, he's still quite the spring chicken and is still learning new tricks (like how to play the mandolin).

The cats are the same as ever, furry, slightly flea-ridden, and annoyed by the kids. We've seen a bit more of Katafanga this weekend since Barbara has been petting him and Seth and Elise are out of town.

A Compliment from the Oldest Living Doctor
While in the hospital we had several visits from the attending pediatrician, Dr. Fricker. He introduced himself to me as the oldest practicing doctor, and truth be told, he did look pretty darn old. One day I saw him and one of the resident pediatricians while I was strolling the halls with Josie in the Bjorn, dragging along her i.v. pole. As we passed them, he said hi, and the resident exclaimed that Josie was, indeed, "the cutest baby ever." A nurse who was there asked her who had told the resident that Josie was the cutest baby ever and the resident replied, "I heard about her from the oldest living doctor." Then the nurse said, "why is she so darn cute???" And Dr. Fricker replied, "genetics."

A Second Useful Thing About Gray's Anatomy
So Gray's anatomy has become a pretty annoying show. I am sick to death of Meredith and McDreamy and Izzie and George are pretty annoying too. Several episodes have jumped the shark (the ferry boat episode, need I say more?). But actually being in a teaching hospital made me thank Gray's anatomy for its rather accurate portrayal of the power structure of a large teaching hospital. Last week we got to meet resident doctors, attending doctors, the chief resident, nurses, and an added component, care partners. Having watched a lot of Gray's anatomy was helpful in deciphering all of the various players in the hospital.

By the way, the first useful thing about Gray's is how often they kill off characters that one grows attached to during an episode. All that death makes me cry over a lot of episodes but is helpful in trying to deal with one's own fear of death.

Surgery Success!!

Josie had her surgery today and she came through like a champ. She was her classic guy smiley self up until they took her into the procedure room (which did make me wonder whether she has been pulling my leg all these months with all of the eating every two hours...she hadn't eaten since 2 AM the morning of the surgery and she didn't have surgery until 11:30 AM. Yet she was still chipper. So why does she yell in my ear every two hours all night long acting like she is starving???).

Her surgery was a trans-urethral ureterocele puncture (for a super technical summary of ureterocele puncture research look here). The cast of thousands of doctors involved in the procedure all seemed very satisfied with how it went. The pediatric anaesthesiologists (who even knew there were such things, although I am very happy that there are...) thought that 6 kg (13 lbs) was plenty big for safe anaesthesia. The pediatric urologists said the procedure went smoothly with no complications. And Josie, well Josie cried with the voice of a 30 year smoker for about 15 minutes but now she is back to her smiley self (they put a breathing tube in which gives a person a sore throat).

In all likelihood we will be discharged tomorrow and will get to go home. Yay!!

On a side note, if you ever consider spending time in a hospital only a few months before they are moving to their new super swanky multi-billion dollar digs, I recommend strongly against it. It's sort of like being in Panama after the Americans turned the canal over. All of the infrastructure is falling down around you and no one seems to care. In Panama all the highways were full of potholes and the railroad no longer ran. Here at the UCLA med center all the walls have holes in them, the ceiling tiles are falling down, and the men's room is more full of graffiti than the bathroom in a New York subway station.

We'll have a chance to check out the new hospital when Josie comes back for her full-on reconstruction/repair of her duplicated system (two ureters instead of one).

Hopefully my next post will be more about something fun like a funny thing that Lucy said or somewhere cool that we went with Grandma Jo. Enough of this medical hoo-ha.

Little J-Bean Goes to the Hospital or Too Much Doctor Time for the Brighams

If only curious George were here to keep her company. Our little Josephine the Bean (J. Bean for short) has a non-functional kidney draining system on her right side. Some day I will write the details of this crummy condition in a post that will be titled 22 lbs (it's 70% written in my mind already). But today I don't have the energy for that. Suffice it to say that Josie has more medical intervention planned in the next ten months of her life than Mitch, Lucy, or I have had in our entire time here on Earth.

Unfortunately the hospital shenanigans started this weekend with a kidney infection and a trip to the UCLA med center emergency room. Josie and I have been hanging out here in the UCLA pediatrics ward having a good old time (NOT), ever since. Josie has an endoscopic surgery to puncture her ureterocele scheduled for sometime tomorrow. Grandma Jo is arriving into LAX as we speak to provide general assistance and Lucy wrangling. Yay Grandma Jo!! Big thanks to Grandma Jo for leaving the peace and tranquility of her home in Colorado to enter the craze of southern California. Big thanks to Grandpa Jim for loaning us Grandma Jo.

Lucy had her first visit to Josie and I at the hospital today. She had a great time riding a tricycle up and down the hall and pushing a doll in a doll-sized wheelchair. Josie is currently napping and is blissfully unaware that she will soon be having yet another venipuncture since the freaking surgeons and the pediatricians can't get their games together enough to figure out how much blood, and for what tests, they are all going to want together. Instead, we get to have a venipuncture for the pediatricians at 2:3o and a venipuncture for the surgeons at 5:00.

In addition to all of this wonderfulness, my good old Dad is going to see a radiologist on Wednesday (same day as Josie's surgery) to see about his radiation needs. So we Brighams are pretty much not feeling the medical intervention love these days. I mean, in a way we are. We'd rather be here than dead but really, we'd rather be eating ice cream on our sofa watching a bad action adventure film. So in the grand mood ring of life, we're currently somewhere between blissfully happy and mired in misery.

Josie is holding up like a champ and thankfully she won't remember any of this. We walk the hospital halls together, her in the baby bjorn, me in my dirty clothes and dirty hair. And Josie smiles at all the people we go by and they can't believe that she is a patient here because she looks so healthy (except for that I.V. coming out of her foot that, by the way, took 6 tries and 3 blown out veins to put in).

So just in case any of you were wondering if my posting on a Tuesday at 3 PM indicated that I was violating my no posting at work rule, you can rest easy knowing that I am not, in fact, at work.

Good luck tomorrow Grandpa Tom and Little J. Bean. Your mom and dad (or daughter and son-in-law), curious George, and countless others are all thinking of you.

Which came first, the chicken or the Lucy?

Mitch and I have planned all along to have two kids. We decided about two weeks after we met, while we were riding our bikes to school, pedaling through the Vons parking lot, that we would have two kids and if they were a boy and a girl, we would name them Miles and Lucy. We also thought we would like to have one child biologically and maybe adopt the second one.

Well since those early planning days in 1995, we have actually had two daughters. We had our first girl, Lucile Linnea Brigham Allen (Lucy Goosey), in 2005, and our second girl, Josephine Jo Jacobson Allen (Josie Bean) in 2007. We ended up having both of our kids biologically out of laziness, economics, and an inability to deal with the complex logistics of adoption versus the simple logistics of just getting it on.

We settled on two kids from the start because both of us have siblings that we are pretty darn fond of (Stuart for Mitch, Jeremy for me) and both of us have found having a sibling in the family arena to be a plus. Many of my closest friends are only children (Tiffany, Sarah, Allie practically-speaking) and I think only children ROCK. So I'm not knocking only children. Just for us, we decided on the zero population growth option of two.

When we started down the road of number two, and my belly got fatter and fatter, we started wondering out loud what our second child would be like, especially in light of our first child. Everyone who knows her will acknowledge that Lucy is a total force of nature. She talks a ton, loves people, is bossy as all get out, and pretty much tries to run the show around here. So both Mitch and I wondered whether Josie would have to be some sort of shy retiring flower, just by nature of the bold niche space being all taken up by Lucy. I was pretty not keen on this idea because I feel like I somewhat got stuck into the pigeon hole of being the "good" one in my family due to my brother's sometimes questionable behavior as a youth and my mom's off again on again sickness. So I really want Josie to be able to be whoever she is regardless of Lucy.

Of course, that's not how life really works, is it? Your personality is probably 65% you and 35% your experience or something like that, where your parents and your siblings and everything else are parts of your experience.

So far, Josie is only 6 months old but like her sister, her personality traits are showing up early. She seems to be more calm and contemplative than Lucy and less liable to glom on to any old random human being who wanders by. So she does seem to be pretty different from Lucy and more towards the calm and less towards the melodramatic in comparison to L.B. (another Lucy nickname). Which leaves me wondering, could it be happening already - Lucy's shaping of her sister's personality or is Josie just by nature a more calm person? In other words, which came first, the chicken or the Lucy?