Oh how I love to read the obituaries in the good grey lady. Today's was a gem.
From the second paragraph:
"The cause was complications of liver cancer..."
From the third paragraph:
"Flamboyant and loquacious, wealthy and generous, Mr. Richards was a high roller in the theater world, and a high liver..."
Swoon. Liver, liver.
Over dinner, while she was inhaling some pasta, the girl asked me "when's Black Friday?"
I immediately thought shopping frenzy, day after Thanksgiving, oh no, how do I get out of this and asked her, blandly, "what's Black Friday?"
"Oh," she said, "it's the day we can send our letters to Santa Claus."
Oh that. That I can handle. Going anywhere near a mall, a big box store, a national retailer on the day after Thanksgiving? No can do. Hell, I avoid all of those places pretty much all the time.
It's funny how the few days after Thanksgiving have become an all out shopping frenzy, with a different shtick for each day: Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, [Blue Law Sunday], Cyber Monday.
As an antidote, we've got a newly minted concept: Giving Tuesday. I know that I don't need to be reminded to give, but maybe other people do. Do you?
Giving a bit to charity each year is a good thing. It's good for you, and good for the recipients. Think about it. And maybe, just maybe, set aside some of that money you save at the mall on Black Friday, or the $25 rebate from American Express from shopping locally on Small Business Saturday, and sit down and write a check to a charity on Tuesday. If it's something you've never done, and don't know where to begin, start locally. Do you have a local animal shelter? A food pantry? A daycare? How about a nearby historic site, or the volunteer ambulance corps? Does your high school have a scholarship fund for kids who need help paying for college? Is there a center for victims of domestic violence in the next town? Maybe there's a little county-wide orchestra - they need your help to keep playing Bach, Beethoven, Monteverdi. Really, if you just look around, there's a place that needs your help.
The Giving Tuesday site has a list of ideas - talk through the list with your family.
And remember: every little bit helps. I know this in my bones; I've spent my life working for non-profit organizations. We love your contributions - big and small. They validate us and our work, and we appreciate you every single day.
Give. Next Tuesday.
I'm not sure that there is anything more exhausting than spending three days on your feet selling the contents of the house you grew up in to friends and strangers. It is also cathartic, sad, funny, and odd. But most of all, it's exhausting. I got home at 7:00 last night, and was in bed by 8:00.
While the chief proprietors of the estate sale were me and my two siblings, lovely friends came and helped out, like the (gay male) matron-of-honor from my wedding, and my (also has a blog) best friend from college. Neighbors floated in and out, bearing cream cheese be-smeared bagels and pumpkin oatmeal cookies. Old friends carted away trinkets and clocks. More than one person needed stuff to replace stuff lost in the hurricane. A lady bought two percolators and two coffee grinders, and told me she was going to mail them to family in South America - so my sister threw in some coffee filters. One woman was the first one in the door on Saturday morning, and berated us because the cast iron skillet she'd seen hanging on the wall (in a picture on the internet) was no longer there. Sorry, lady, we sold it! You should have come on Friday!
Friends from inside the computer showed up - and tweeted and blogged about their purchases. Nice to have seen you, Jean! Great to have met you, George! Thanks for hanging out, Heidi! Glad you got that shell, Jane!
A strange woman came up to me and told me that Kathy from California had sent her. I was momentarily flustered, until the gears clicked into place and I blurted out "Kathy With Cats"? Yup - someone I know on Facebook had forwarded a link to a friend of hers who lived not too far away. It was like Kathy by proxy.
Tom came a couple of times and bought a mess of stuff. I'm sure he made out like a bandit, but whatev. Somehow, I can't remember why, he ended up with my phone number. My cell rang at about 9 on Saturday night; it was Tom. "I unpacked all my stuff, and remember that little pepper mill? It's not there. Remember that guy who picked it up from my pile? I think he boosted it." Tom wasn't calling to ask for his money back or anything - he was calling to caution us about the people who don't want to pay for anything, "they boost stuff all the time". [There was a little racial profiling going on, but his impulse was well-meant.]
Amanda came a couple of times and told us her entire sordid life story, and bought a mess of stuff. She might have boosted something; we know she dug the sterling ice bucket out of the liquor cabinet, but we reclaimed it.
Tracy came back three times, the first two times buying for her boyfriend, the third time WITH her boyfriend. They were great and enthusiastic and charming. Also, I loved her raincoat. They probably took us for a ride too, but again, whatev.
My high school flute teacher bought my grandmother's punch bowl and its dozen matching cups. Someone I babysat for bought the dresser from the front hall. Darius, who I'd never met before, but whose sister went to college with the woman I babysat for, asked me if I thought he could sew a cell phone case from a piece of leather he scrounged up. I told him how, and gave him the leather.
When we weren't selling and schlepping and talking and learning the names of almost every single buyer, we were running up to Starbucks and the train station and nailing signs to trees. Starbucks was supposed to be open at 6 on Sunday morning but when we got there at ten to 7, they were locked up tight - with all the lights on. I banged on the door, needing that double shot skim latte, stat. Finally, a woman came to the door. Apologetically, she told us she couldn't let us in, because no one else had shown up to work. But she took our orders, locked the door again, made the coffee, and came back with the two cups. Free! Brownie points to Starbucks for doing the right thing.
And in a fit of debauchery after dark, we drove around town with a slit-open dead feather pillow, sprinkling feathers up and down the streets, hoping people would think some chickens had run amok. Some of them are still there.
Almost. We're almost done.
Tomorrow, the girl turns nine.
Tonight, she's having a slumber party. Seven girls are camping out in front of the TV. There's ice cream cake in the freezer, and popcorn planned, and waffles on deck for breakfast. I even conjured up a perfect party favor: each girl gets her own travel sized pillow, with her name stenciled on the case.
Today, she took a mess of rice crispy treats to school. I only told my teacher what I was bringing; I wanted it to be a surprise for my friends.
Last night, the power was only out for an hour, and back on by the time we had the serious work of making the treats and stenciling the pillowcases. (Dinner had to be made in the dark.)
Nine years ago, I had no idea what was in store for us.
Happy birthday, girlie.
You want to know how I know our kid is actually listening to us?
Every time we spy a full moon, we sigh and say "la bella luna". And sometimes we launch into a couple of lines of That's Amore, when the moon hits your eye, like a big pizza pie. It's just one of those things we do.
I finally got around to addressing the third grade pile - all the writing and collages and spelling tests and math quizzes and the report on the arctic hare. [Yes, she's in fourth grade, but I've been a little swamped. An unplanned week at home helped.] I was entirely charmed by a set of poems she'd written, and completely undone by this one.
Labelaloona. La bella luna. Oh beautiful moon. Oh beautiful child, you light up my sky night and day.
Sometime when the girl was quite small, I systematically took all of the dust jackets off of all the the books in her room, because she was doing it anyway. And my latent OCD was kicking in and I didn't want the dust jackets lost or damaged so I put them away for safe keeping.
In my enforced absence from the office, thanks to Sandy, I went on a clean-up-the-girl's-room rampage and, sigh, edited her library. In the process, I reunited all of the dust-jackets with their books.
I'm very conflicted about dust jackets.
Pro:
They're usually pretty, and often a book without its jacket looks boring and naked. If they come with the book, they should stay with the book - it is as it was meant to be.
Con:
They slip around and make it harder to read the book. And you can't use the flap of a dust jacket as a bookmark because it distorts the dust jacket which then never lies quite straight again. (Oh, is that more of my OCD showing?)
It's quite possible to design a lovely book without need for a dust jacket - all the handsome hardcovers in the New York Review of Books Children's Collection have printed covers with red fabric spines. The worst are the picture books with jackets that are the very duplicate of the printed hardcover - it seems such a waste of paper!
Then again, once in a while, the dust jacket actually adds something wonderful to the book. A case in point is Eric Carle's Dream Snow. It has a clear acetate cover, printed with snowflakes, like the overlays within the book.
Without the jacket, there's no snow on the cover. With it, it's magic. Every year at Christmas, in the years after the great storing of the dust jackets, I'd pick up Dream Snow to read it aloud, and I'd cringe to myself about the missing dust jacket. Now, it's right again. I can't wait for Christmas.
So, dear readers, are you pro or con dust jackets? Do you keep them until they're tattered, and gently repair them with archival tape, or will you not have them in the house?
Storm. Wind, a little rain, a lot of luck. No trees down on our property. Power is still on. Internet/TV/landline phone still work. Cell service sucks; people who have Verizon instead of AT&T are in better shape in that regard.
But. Lots of power out in our town. Lots of trees down, roads closed. No school ALL WEEK. Halloween trick or treat theoretically postponed until next week, but essentially cancelled in my opinion. Really, who's going to have any candy left?
Con-Ed has one truck in the area - because, rightly, Con-Ed is focusing on that big swath of Manhattan south of 39th Street that is dark. Did I mention that's where my office is? Yes, no work for the weary.
Manhattan, like the part where my office is, may have power restored Friday or Saturday. But in my home neck of the woods? They're thinking maybe next weekend. This storm was a big deal; don't anyone tell you otherwise.
I have been cooking. It's therapeutic, and we need to eat. Since Sunday:
Chocolate chip cookies
Bread
Chickpea/fennel soup
Rhubarb/blueberry upside down cake
"Candy corn" cookies
Apple cider caramels
Unstuffed cabbage (in the crockpot)
Many cheese quesadillas for the girl and her friends
Happily we had plenty of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, not to mention apple cider, fresh sausage, heavy cream, plenty of vegetables, three stalks of rhubarb from the garden, lots of cheese, tortillas, and oddments in the freezer.
The caramels? Might be the best thing ever.
The unstuffed cabbage? I kind of made it up, and it tastes good but its consistency is like glue - I should have added the rice an hour ago instead of at 11 this morning. Oh well. Live and learn.
Here's hoping you are safe and sound and warm and dry and well-fed and well-rested whereever you may be.
See this picture?
What's missing? That's right, our Obama sign. For the past few weeks, we've had five signs marching up our curbstrip, exercising our right to free speech, sharing our support for the President, our congressperson, our senator, and a couple of local guys.
This morning, the Obama sign was in the middle of the road, and the wire frame that held it up was nowhere to be found. Now maybe, just maybe, someone had a need for sturdy wire in the middle of the night and thus liberated the frame for important purposes, but somehow, I don't think so. I think someone doesn't like the President and was offended by my yard sign.
No matter. I'm still voting for Mr. Obama. I think he's the best hope for our country, and I think Mr. Romney would be a mean-spirited, nasty-minded, destructive force should he be elected.
There are a lot of issues on the table right now. For me, I am horrified by the degree of inhumanity evidenced by Mr. Romney vis a vis women and gay people. I am dismayed at his lack of concern for the "47%". I am shocked by his poor grasp of foreign affairs, and the way he's put his foot in it over and over again. But one of the most important things to me is our domestic policy as regards health care. I wrote about this not too long ago, when I talked about how much it cost for us to have our daughter's broken arm attended to.
One of the issues for my family is that my insurance is a "high deductible" plan, which is supposed to make the patient be a better consumer. In point of fact, that is nearly impossible. James Surowiecki wrote about "Romneycare" in the New Yorker recently, and he explains far better than I did why patients don't make good consumers:
But the free market, though it may be the best way of allocating new TVs and cars, falters when it comes to paying for bypass surgery or chemotherapy. The reasons for this were established nearly fifty years ago, by the economist Kenneth Arrow, in a classic article entitled “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care.” Arrow showed that health care is distinctive in ways that limit the power of the market. Because people don’t have the expertise to evaluate doctors, hospitals, or treatments, it’s hard for them to comparison-shop. Because they can’t pay for major care out of pocket, they must rely on insurance, thereby often losing the final say in what to buy or how much to spend. More fundamentally, markets work only when consumers have the power to say no if the price isn’t right. Yet it’s very hard for people to say no in the case of things like end-of-life care or brain surgery.
For me, the health care issue crystalizes why I will vote for Mr. Obama again. I want the United States government to help people. Health care is a necessity for the collective good, for the whole of the country, just as national defense is something done for all of us, not just a lucky few.
And after Hurricane Sandy flies by, and assuming she doesn't take out the oak in front of my house, I'm nailing my Obama sign to the tree.
I'm reading Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies right now. In one of those little frissons of synchronicity, she just won the Man Booker prize for it, and she was profiled in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. I feel so au courant; I'm rarely reading anything that in the news right this very moment.
But a curious little bit of Mantel's biography struck me in the gut, a bit that hasn't really anything to do with her book.
Allow me the liberty of a two longish quotes from the New Yorker profile by Larissa MacFarquhar:
She deduced that she had endometriosis, a disorder in which uterine cells are found in other parts of the body; the cells bleed each month and scar tissue builds up, and when that scar tissue presses against nerves it causes pain. Her pain was growing unbearable, but she had finally come to the end of her book, and she was determined to type out a fair copy to show to publishers and agents when she went back to England for Christmas. She spent weeks typing, finished, and collapsed.
In England, she saw various doctors. “I went into St. George’s Hospital,” she says, “and ten days later I came out minus ovaries, womb, bits of bowel, bits of bladder. Minus a future, as far as having children was concerned.” It wasn’t that she felt such a strong urge to have children—she had been married for seven years and hadn’t tried to get pregnant. She was good for more than breeding, she thought. But she’d always assumed that she’d have the chance to change her mind.
[....many pages....]
She is much calmer now than she used to be. She never thought that she’d end up so calm....She isn’t calm because she has reconciled herself to her medical fate: she has not. “I wasn’t certain, and I’m still not certain, whether I wanted children,” she says. “What I wanted was the choice. I have felt most sorrow in later life, over the last ten years, when grandchildren are being born, I suppose because I was very close to my own grandmother. Of course, it follows that if you’re not a mother you’re not going to be a grandmother, but that’s not something you think of in your thirties. So the loss keeps changing its shape.”
Infertility. The grief that keeps on giving.
In another bit of synchronicity, I just read a blog post at the Chloe Chronicles. Not only did Chloe have her own encounter with infertility, her daughter and son-in-law have now discovered that they can't have any biological children. So, Chloe is facing second generation infertility.
I just hadn't really thought about it before. If our treatments hadn't been successful, and we'd ended up a childless couple, my parents and my in-laws wouldn't have been grandparents to our feisty little girl. And, while I'm a long way from being a grandmother - she is only eight still - if I hadn't had her, I wouldn't have that possibility to look forward to.
You just never get away from it.
The other day, I got up and wandered into the kitchen, as one does. That's where the coffee is, you know? I found the girl there, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, "Mommy, I made my lunch!". "Oh," I said, "whaddja make?" She waved various containers at me: "A hot dog bun with butter and cinnamon sugar, two Mallomars, and some apple cider!"
I groaned. On the one hand, initiative! On the other hand, not so healthy! Granted, it's a modest dilemma, as dilemmas go. I assuaged my guilt about the unhealthiness by insisting she take an apple with her, so I didn't feel like the worst mother in the world.
You know Emily, right?
If you have a Kindle, or a Kindle app for some other smartphone/tablet device, get her book. It's free today, just today. Tomorrow it'll be $7.99 again. Read her book. She wants you to read her book, because, as she says:
I’ve found that every time I speak or write about my childhood, it reaches people who are then able to finally speak about their own childhood abuse.
She's talking about it, to make it easier for others to do so as well.
You're probably wondering how I got from the buttered hot dog bun and Mallomars to Emily's book. Every day, every week, occasionally, we all think we're bad parents. But Emily, because of her abuse at the hands of her stepmother, has a particularly hard cross to bear. Here's a passage from her book:
Despite the hours spent reading and the endless conversations about steam trains, I felt like a terrible mother. I also felt all alone. I could not tell anyone what a failure I was, because that would involve acknowledging it to myself. I had entered one of the biggest organizations around – the Terrible Mothers’ Club – but because membership is secret, I had no idea how many other people had joined along with me, or even that I was in the group. The club I had joined has a secret litany that its members chant to themselves so quietly that even they cannot hear.
“I am not patient enough,” we whisper in secret.
“I should be gentler,” we grudgingly admit.
“He needs more consistency,” we desperately chastise ourselves.
“If I had handled things differently, it would not have escalated into a tantrum,” we secretly suspect. These are the words we hear from inside and try very hard to ignore for fear of their strength.
And, there are many of us who are Premium Club Members. We have a whole other set of voices, nastier than the first.
“My childhood has left me unfit to be a mother.”
“I am repeating the cycle.”
“He will never know how much I love him.”
And, the constant refrain, a phrase repeated so continuously that it becomes a hum of white noise we no longer acknowledge: “I am acting just like her.”
In light of that, in light of the literally rotten food her stepmother fed her, in light of the cruelties inflicted upon Emily and her sister, I'm pretty happy that my daughter had the unfettered room and comparative luxury to make herself a hot dog bun with butter and cinnamon sugar and be proud to call it lunch.
It's immigration month in the fourth grade. Last week, the girl had to bring a pillowcase to school, weighing no more than 10 pounds, containing the essentials you'd pack quickly if you had to make a run for the boat to America:
[She refused to bring underpants: "what if someone sees them?" No discussion of why you always travel with clean underwear would convince her.]
Today was the immigration simulation, where all of the fourth graders get off the boat and line up in the cafeteria to be admitted, detained or deported. For that, she was dressed up as her character, a Russian named Ekaterina Romanoff. [Actually, she started off as Maria Romanoff, until I suggested that Ekaterina was nice because it was the Russian version of her middle name.]
Tomorrow, they go to Ellis Island. Thursday and Friday are the performances of the class play - with, naturally, an immigration theme, and Friday is the international luncheon. Being Northern European mutts, I wasn't sure what to send in, so I'm going to make blitz kuchen, a "lightning" fast German crumb cake that my mother used to make.
The other night, just because, we poked around on the Ellis Island website, and found some relatives: my two grandfathers, and one of my husband's. None of those were immigration journeys, though - they were returning US citizens. Still, it was fun to find them there.
I have to say, it's a pretty wonderful immersion.
I can't resist sharing two nearly back to back stories from the good grey lady:
1) As Partners, Mormons and Scouts Turn Boys Into Men
Virtually every Mormon church, or ward, has a scout troop. Every Mormon boy is automatically enrolled, and the vast majority participate.2) Boy Scout Files on Sex Abuse Detail Decades of Accusations
A familiar local scout leader, referred to only as Joe, had sexually abused boys in his troop, including the writer’s own sons, and yet was still being allowed to have contact with boys.Hmm.
I'm still trying to process Tuesday's debate. The whole Women In Binders thing has gotten lots of ink, but I'm hung up on a few other things - like the question about how to "limit the availability of assault weapons" which Romney failed to answer in the most meandering fashion ever:
ROMNEY: Yeah, I'm not in favor of new pieces of legislation on -- on guns...change the culture of violence that we have...good schools...do a better job in education...perhaps less violence from that...We need moms and dads, helping to raise kids. Wherever possible the -- the benefit of having two parents in the home, and that's not always possible. A lot of great single moms, single dads. But gosh to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone, that's a great idea.
Right. The way to limit the availability of assault weapons is to have married parents. How about we BAN ASSAULT WEAPONS?
And then there was that whole thing about workplace flexibility:
ROMNEY: I recognized that if you're going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school. She said, I can't be here until 7 or 8 o'clock at night. I need to be able to get home at 5 o'clock so I can be there for making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said fine. Let's have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.
Hey! What about the fathers who cook dinner? What about the employees who need flexible schedules to accommodate medical needs, like chemo or radiation? What about middle-aged people taking care of elderly parents? Everyone needs flexibility, and you know what? A low-key attitude towards flex time makes for happier employees. In my admittedly idiosyncratic office, we just let someone take off three and half weeks so he could go tour coffeehouses and music festivals in Europe, because if you don't get to live your artistic dreams now, when's it gonna be? It was more work for me and my assistant, but I'm so glad we were able to be flexible and let our guitar player go play his heart out.
And you know what else?
ROMNEY: I know how to make that happen.
If you know how to make that happen, share it with us. Let us decide whether it sounds like a good plan. Because right now? It doesn't sound like you have any concrete, well-thought-out, workable plans, Mr. Romney. I've tried and tried to understand the magic math of lowering tax rates and scaling back deductions and how that could possibly help small businesses and it just doesn't make any sense. And if you just keep saying "I know how to make that happen", it's not helping.
Ezekiel. Actually, it's Ezekiel's toes, in a close-up from one of the Chagall windows in the Union Church of Pocantico Hills.
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| Marc Chagall's Ezekiel window, from the Union Church of Pocantico Hills |
Despite having lived near this church for the past 8 years, and in the same metropolitan area for my entire life, I'd never been in it before last month. It's extraordinary, with a rose window by Henri Matisse, and nine stained glass windows by Marc Chagall.
Because you can get right up close to most of the windows, you can really see the paint and the lead work and the etching in the glass. It's magnificent.
It's gotten to be a little private joke between me and the girl. I'll pull out a book to read to her, and she'll say "what's it about?". "Well", I say, "the main character is an English orphan." And then we howl with laughter about those pesky orphans.
In point of fact, a few of them haven't been English orphans - Anne Shirley is Canadian, Dorothy Gale is from Kansas, Pippi, Hugo. But that's splitting hairs, I think. What's with all the orphans in children's literature?
Here's a few of the books I'm thinking of:
What's it all about? No parents to guide you mean you need to find your way in the world much earlier. Get rid of the parents and the powerless-ness of the child is catapulted into high relief. Grow up kids, parents just get in the way. It's kind of a sad message, but yet, these are some of my favorite books. The spunky children in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and The Secret Garden are fabulous. Pippi Longstocking is the embodiment of question authority. The orphans triumph over adversity, letting the little children tucked into mama's arms see that life is not so bad, and it'll be easier with parents in the background.
Can you think of some more English orphans?
A Saturday in August
She broke her wrist, ice skating - a buckle fracture. Because the pediatrician was about to close for the day, and they had no orthopedist on anyway, we went to the ER. She was seen by two nurses, a nurse practitioner, and an x-ray technician. And someone - who we didn't see - read the x-ray. She was sent home with a splint, and instructions to see an orthopedist on Monday.
Out-of-pocket cost: $1,572.94
Monday, Two days later
The physician's assistant at the orthopedist's office put her in a cast. They didn't need new x-rays, because they could access the ones at the hospital.
Out-of-pocket cost: $215.48
A Wednesday in September, 3 1/2 weeks later
Back to the orthopod. Again, the PA saw her. He took off the cast, sent her for a new x-ray, and put her in a (new) splint for another two weeks.
Out-of-pocket cost: $177.28
Total out-of-pocket cost to us for this minor little buckle fracture: $1,965.70
So. Is this a lot, or a little? If she'd broken her arm in the middle of a weekday, we probably wouldn't have had to go to the ER and the cost for that initial visit would have been a lot lower. In that case, the overall cost might have been more like $600 (assuming that the first visit was in the $200 range of the subsequent visits). And, this is with insurance. My insurance has a HUGE deductible, so high that if we meet it, it means that something really bad has probably happened. The benefit to having the insurance is that we get a few routine visits covered in full (a general physical and a GYN visit for me, an annual physical for the girl, flu shots, my mammogram). And when we have to pay for stuff, we pay the insurance company's contracted rate. For the above stuff, without insurance the Monday visit to the orthopod would have been $677, and the total out-of-pocket would have been a good amount more than the nearly $2K it was. [I can't compare all of the billed vs. approved costs to the penny because the hospital is smart enough to bill the insurance company what they know they're going to get. So my explanation of benefits looks like the insurance company approved what the hospital billed, but I know better.]
So, is this a lot or a little? In the entire treatment course for this minor bone break, the girl was never seen by a medical doctor - only by nurses and a nurse practioner and a physician's assistant. I'm not complaining - it was a minor break and the professionals that cared for her did a fine job - it didn't need a doctor.
A lot or a little? If we didn't have insurance, we would have paid more for treatment. If we had insurance with a lower deductible (and a higher premium), we would have paid less for treatment (but we'd be paying higher premiums each and every month). The huge deductible* that we have is supposed to force the insured people (in this case, me) to be better consumers. But the only way to be a better consumer is to know what the costs look like and have a way to make rational choices. In this particular case, the ER was the only rational option, but it was certainly not the cheapest solution. But what were we to do? Our child broke her arm, she needed to be treated. In an emergency situation, you can't make a rational choice. Maybe you can comparison shop for a colonoscopy, but you can't be choosy when you need an emergency appendectomy.
The system is broken, in many many ways. Above all, there are way too many options and choices regarding health insurance. People need health insurance, and if everyone has it, the costs are more rational - because yes, the young healthy people underwrite the older sick people. People need health insurance, and it shouldn't be employer based - because some people don't have jobs. People need health insurance, and it ought to be single payer. It would be simple, efficient, and fair.
So, what is it? Tune in next week for the answer.
Just in case you've been under a rock, we're in the middle of one of those quadrennial circuses that will result in a presidential election in November. Remember? They're even getting into it at my kid's school, what with the 4th graders running a shadow election, polling everyone else in the school. The other night, my kid was thrilled to announce that her homework was to Watch Television! This made her day. School sanctioned late night TV trumped the fact that she had to answer questions about the event, like "what were you wondering about when you listened to the debates?"
If you can't read it, her answer was:
I don't know how Mitt Romney thinks we need to drill the oil in Alaska. That will kill animals and create pollution.
No matter what side of the race you fall on, if you have kids, you probably want them to be versed in American history, and to know something about the presidents we've had, from Washington to Obama. And hey, there's an app for that. Basher Presidents isn't much more than a set of virtual baseball cards with a fact or two about each president, and a little game where you have to plop them into chronological order.
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It's fun, and probably worth the $1.99, if only so that your kid can tell you from the back seat that George W. Bush "nearly choked to death on a pretzel while watching football on TV".
You know how it is, right? On Twitter one night, I fell into a conversation about homemade baby formula.
I don't even know how it started - ask Beck - but I was able to get myself out of a warm bed and pad down to the cellar, where I unearthed the baby care instruction book that my mother had gotten from the hospital when she was there after having birthed me. Vintage child-rearing instructions! In my very cellar! Courtesy of New York State! Complete with the instruction that "sun baths are not necessary"!
I was able to answer Beck, sort of. It turns out that the proportions for making homemade formula are based on the size of the baby. But that's not really the point. In 1960, baby formula may well have been homemade, and consisted of nothing but canned evaporated OR fresh whole milk, plus sugar or corn syrup, plus water. I quickly fell down the rabbit hole of baby feeding, and learned any number of interesting things - including that in 1960, "it is estimated that 80% of bottle-fed infants in the US were being fed with an evaporated milk formula" - that is, not a commercial product.
Back in the day, like Colonial America, "if a mother's milk supply was inadequate or she chose not to nurse, the family often employed a wet nurse to nourish infants." When wet nursing fell out of favor, "the practice of feeding human babies milk from animals, called dry nursing, began to flourish". Isn't that fascinating? Wet for human milk, dry for goat/cow/mare/donkey milk, even though at the beginning, the animal milk would have been fresh and therefore a wet liquid. This bit about wet vs. dry came from a fascinating article in Contemporary Pediatrics, called "A Concise History of Infant Formula".
According to the Food Timeline, ready-to-serve formula was introduced in 1964, already sterilized in a glass bottle, able to be kept unopened without refrigeration. "All you have to do is replace the bottle's cap with a sterilized-sized collar." Commercial formula, a liquid or powder to be mixed with water, had made inroads by 1964: "only one mother in five now fixes the baby formula using the traditional evaporated milk mixed with carbohydrate modifiers...half of today's mothers now use a prepared infant formula, either a powder or liquid which is mixed with water...one baby in five gets whole cow's milk...only one in 10 is breast fed, still the safest, most convenient and least expensive method of nourishing an infant."
I do find it fascinating that in my lifetime, baby formula has gone from a simple concoction of evaporated milk, water and sugar, to a highly-processed exactingly-contrived product with many variants.
Mind you, none of this is meant as commentary on breastfeeding or formula feeding. I did both, I'm happy I did both, she needed formula both for convenience and because I did not have a robust milk supply. But I'm damned glad I didn't have to boil and sterilize and weigh and measure. That powdered stuff out of a can, mixed with tap water? That's a good modern convenience.
