I’ve been thinking about thankfulness (not too surprisingly, given that today is Thanksgiving).  I keep getting caught in the big things to be thankful for – the family / health / friends / house / job / food things.  And it’s not that I’m not thankful for these, I’m extremely thankful for them, but I find that there’s so much more to be thankful for.  So here, are some of the little things that I’m thankful for.

• My vanpool.  That I can zone out on the ride in and back from work, that I’ve been able to meet and make friends that I might not otherwise have gotten to know.
• Yeast.  Such little guys.  So essential for bread, beer, wine, and other alcohols.  Our Thanksgiving dinner would be far poorer without yeast.
• Which reminds me: wine and beer.  And coffee for that matter.  And all that goes in to bringing them to me.  Coffee and wine, especially, use ingredients that do not normally grow in Minnesota, and while I’m a fan of eating local, I make exceptions.  I’ll admit, I’d happily give these up for a while if I were pregnant, but since I’m not, I will thankfully enjoy these.
• Chocolate.  Not much to add here, but it bears repeating.  Chocolate.  Choc. O. Late.  Yeah.
• The Internet.  Allright, this once isn’t small.  Still, the fact that we can be connected with friends and family regardless of geography, that we can meet and talk with others in similar situations, no matter how far away they are, I’m thankful for that.
• The universe.  Ok, this is also not small, in fact, the opposite of small, but I had to include it.  How cool is it that we live in a universe with billions of stars, planets, nebula, and other wonders?  How cool that there is so much out there to explore and learn about.  And on that noew, I’ll end with this tribute to Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and the universe.

I love science.  My job involves searching for the published record of scientific studies, but much as I’d love to, I don’t get to participate in any actual sciencing much anymore.  Today, though, Zoe got to be the one helping science get done.

The University of Minnesota has an Institute of Child Development which (unsurprisingly, based on the name) runs studies on how children develop.  What’s cool is that the researchers are students, and the research subjects are kids living nearby.  When Zoe was first born, we signed up as being willing to have her in some studies, but we’d never been called in until this week.  One of the labs is looking at cognitive flexibility in young children.  The full name of the study is “Executive Function Training in the Preschool Years,” which sounds a lot like sending your 3 year old to business school for an MBA, but really, they want to know if children could be trained to switch gears cognitively.  They did this by having her play a computer game where one of two shapes might show up.  She was the press the button that matched the shape.  Then they switched the rules of the game on her and asked her to press the button based on the color not the shape.  We came in first on Wednesday, and she played the games, and then one of the researchers practiced switching between the two games with her.  Today we came back in, and she played the games again, to see if she’d learned to switch more easily between the games.  Then they also had her take part in a vocabulary test.

Oh, and the whole time, she was wearing an EEG head net to measure her brain waves.  It was very science fiction.  In fact, the researchers tell the kids that the head net is an astronaut helmet.  And they had her watch a little clip about a spaceship and space robots at the beginning of each session, I think to get things calibrated, particularly in terms of recording where she’s looking (they had her blink 5 times, had her look at one specific spot for a long time, and then had her close her eyes).  She couldn’t wear her glasses while in the head net, though, which was a little annoying.  Luckily, she was able to see the screen without them, and the pictures were simple enough that it wasn’t too bad.  Still, makes me wonder if  what would have happened if she hadn’t been able to see the screen.

Zoe all hooked up to the EEG and ready to go

It was fascinating to watch her in all of this.  She complained in the beginning that the EEG net was “a little tickly” but otherwise, she was happy to go along with the game.  Because of how the room was set up, I couldn’t actually see whether she was hitting the right buttons, so I don’t know how she did.  But they did say they’d send a newsletter out with the findings once they had collected all the data.

Zoe said this part was "a little tickly"

In the pictures, she doesn’t look like she’s having a great time, but besides getting to spend the morning with new people who were happy to play new games with her, Zoe got stickers for learning the games, M&Ms for completing the games, and a t-shirt and a puzzle from the institute at the end of the whole thing.  She’s pretty convinced that it was the best thing ever.  I would highly recommend getting in the participant pool if you’re in the area.

In a bit of a strange coincidence, Cribsheet (a parenting blog for our local paper) had a post about another study at the same institute looking at how babies develop the ability to perceive 3 dimensions from cues other than motion and binocular vision (using shading and perspective).  That’s a pretty fascinating read, too.

A friend and I were talking the other day, and realized that 1989 was 20 years ago.  (Yeah, the math department may not be too pleased to find out that their librarian is not super fast at the subtraction – luckily mental calculations aren’t really required in librarianship.  We know how to look up the answers).  Usually, if you name a year in the past, I have to do a lot of (slow) mental calculations to remind myself how old I was at the time, where I was in my school or career, and what might have been happening.  But not 1989.  When I hear that year, I immediately remember the fall of ‘89.  For all I know, the winter, spring, and summer may not have actually happened, they’re pretty hazy.  But the fall is crystal clear.

I started my freshman year of high school.

We moved to Indiana.

I had my first kiss.

The Berlin Wall fell.

They  probably weren’t all related.

Thinking back to the news that the Berlin Wall had fallen, and seeing the footage of the dancing and the celebration still fills me with happiness.  And it’s so very vivid – we had visited Germany that summer, though we never got to Berlin.  One of our relatives in Germany told us while we were visiting that something would surely happen when Hungary opened its borders with Austria that August.  And wow did it.   I did get to Berlin quite a few times in 1992-3 as an exchange student,  but by then, there wasn’t much of anything left of the wall, though the East and West divisions were certainly still evident.  The New York Times has some pretty spectacular pictures of Berlin now and 20 years ago here.

This public photo documentation wall (including the displayed image) was released and featured by the Senate of Berlin.

First thing, thank you everyone for being so open in sharing your stories and thoughts on my last post.  It was extremely helpful for my friend.  I am so sorry that your wisdom and thoughts meant that you had been through such a loss or losses.

I’ve been terribly remiss in writing, and October was chock full of events and things.  Every time I try to write something, I feel like I have so much just hanging out there.  If I write about one thing, I should really write about them all.  So I’m just going to give a quick run down of the month.  Some of these items deserve their own full post, but I’m never going to write anything else if I don’t just get these down and out there.

• Chris and I celebrated our 9th anniversary on the 7th.  It’s been a great 9 years, made far better by the fact that I’ve spent them with him.
• Zoe turned 3 on the 12th.  Anything I could say about her being 3 will just sound cliched.  But I will say that I’m loving her more and more as she gets older.  She has her moments of strong-willed craziness, but she’s also funny, and fun, and all of a sudden able to do all sorts of things on her own.  We celebrated her birthday on the Saturday before.  And it snowed that day.  Which means the whole party – with a lot of kids – was indoors.  But it went surprisingly well.
  

  three!

  

  Snow on the morning of Zoe's birthday party (Oct. 9)

• On Zoe’s actual birthday, I was out of town on at a meeting for science librarians at small undergraduate libraries.  Yeah, it’s a small group of us, but it was great to be able to spend time talking with people who really have the same job I do.  And how cool is it to go to a professional meeting where the first evening’s events include looking at Jupiter through a 100 year old telescope, and spend the next day’s lunch wandering through a really cool set of greenhouses.
• I must have been sick for much of September and early October, though it was mostly just a cough and fatigue.  It was only mid-October that I realized I was feeling better and had energy to think about the world beyond what absolutely had to be done in the near future.
• Chris and I went to the fertility clinic for our first appointment.  The short (ha ha, not really all that short) of it is that the doctor recommended we not start treatment too soon since I seem to be having reasonably consistent cycles, but he ordered some tests.  I had a moment of panic that we shouldn’t have gone to the doctor at all, but he reassured us that they recommend seeing couples who’ve had trouble in the past if they’re trying for 6 months with no success.  We were told to try ovulation predictor kits (I’d forgotten those could work, I only used them last time when I was in the middle of the lengthy no ovulation period), and were given a paper where the nurse helpfully wrote down which days we were to have sex.  Nothing like a prescription for lovin’.  From an older nurse.  Chris and I responded the only way we could, by making bawdy jokes about needing to “get my prescription refilled.”  The ovulation predictor kits worked by the way – well, kind of – they showed that I ovulated, but I didn’t fall pregnant, so it’s on to more testing next month.

• 

  Epcot

  We went to Disney World.  I know!  Disney!  World!  Us!  We went with good friends who have a daughter Zoe’s age, and a 5 year old son.  I highly recommend going with friends, it gave us a lot of options for splitting up so different people could do different things, and since they’d been before with their kids, we absolutely took advantage of them and their knowledge.  We celebrated Halloween with Mickey and his friends, and had a wonderful time.  Oh, and it was hot.  Kind of awesome to get to enjoy hot humid weather for a bit in October.  It will be a long time until we have that weather again in MN.  I’m afraid that if I tried to write about it, it would just sound like a dry recitation of what we did, so instead I’ll just post some pictures and a link to even more.

  

  mmmm....frozen treats

  

  dressed up for Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party

Photo album of our Disney vacation

An acquaintance of mine is a doctor, she recently had to tell a woman that she’d had a miscarriage. She wrote: “I don’t think I did a great job of it and I want to do it better next time. If anyone’s been on the receiving end of this kind of news, what was helpful or not helpful for you to hear? Did you prefer medical language (e.g. is “embryo” or “fetus” too harsh for non-medical people?)”.

I’ve never been through a miscarriage, but I know that some readers have.  If you have thoughs, you can leave them here (you are welcome to post anonymously, if you’d like).

In honor of today’s announcement of the Nobel Prize for Physics, which went to Charles Kao for his work with fiber optics, and Willard Boyle and George Smith for their invention of the CCD technology (the technology that makes digital cameras work), I offer up a few random pictures that I like, taken on a digital camera and shared on the Internet, which runs on fiber optics networks.

tomatoes from my garden

Zoe in the dress my mom made for me when I was her age

cows at the State Fair

tomato sauce - some assembly required

Zoe and my best friend's cat

giraffe

butterfly on a flower

purple potato from our farm share

Zoe and I went to the opening of a nearby park.  Silverwood park is along the shores of Silver Lake, a little ways north of us.

The celebration included rocks that you could color with markers, buckthorn rounds to decorate, spinning demonstrations, the raptor center showing a kestrel and a red-tailed hawk, good food, music, performances…  Oh, and face painting.  The woman who did the face painting was good, and really fast.  All the mothers ahead of my got their faces painted, too, so I gave in to peer pressure.

At bedtime, I worried that Zoe would let me wash off the butterfly.  She didn’t want to at first, but she accepted my explanations that her pillow would get dirty, the butterfly would end up messy, and besides, we had a lot of pictures so we could look at it any time.  Her face was washed with no problem.  A couple of hours later, when it came time for me to get ready for bed, I balked.  I didn’t want my little penguin to go away.  I had to recount those same arguments to convince myself it would be ok.  I do have a lot of pictures to look at if I want to remember my penguin.

With the fall term having started, I’m back to working one evening a week – Wednesdays, this term – so I have Wednesday mornings off.    The current plan is to get back to doing yoga more regularly.  There’s a ton of yoga studios around here, but I really like the non-profit one that’s a few miles from my house, and I’ve already bought a pass there.  Yesterday I got their fall schedule.  Wednesday morning class is … wait for it … pre-natal yoga.  Nice.

(I’m being overly-dramatic here.  There is another yoga class earlier in the morning that sounds lovely that I’m planning to take)

Each year in mid September, friends of ours host a deep fry party.   They have 3 fryers running for the event, and everyone brings food that they think would be good (or just fun) to deep fry. There’s a couple of brilliant things about this deep fry event.  First, it’s not at my house.  It’s also an annual event, any more often would be way too much, but a year gives you just enough time to detox from the grease and plan your entries for the next year.  There’s also a spirit of experimentation and one-upmanship.  You start finding yourself looking around your kitchen in early summer wondering, would this be good deep fried (the answer is almost always yes).

This year, we brought three items

• I made a curried use-up-the-farmshare-veggies (zucchini, carrot, onion, bell pepper, one little hot pepper) fritter.  The veggies made it healthy.  Like a deep-fried multivitamin with curry.    I added a lot of curry powder to the batter, but the fritters ended up pretty mild.
  

  curried veggie fritters (pre-fried)

  

  fritters all fried up

• I also tried to make donut holes this year with the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day brioche dough.  After frying them, I tossed them with sugar, cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, and a little salt and pepper.  I think I made the circles too small, but they were light and the sugar coating was yummy.
  

  my spiced donut holes

• Chris tried fresh mozarella balls, that were battered and breaded with ancho powder and dried epazote, and then made a yummy fresh tomatillo salsa.  The fresh mozarella was too liquidy, but it was very tasty.
  

  Chris's Mexican-spiced mozarella balls and tomatilla salsa. They didn't hold together well, but they still got eaten

• Zoe got into the spirit of things, too, by helping a friend dredge zucchini slices in flour before they were battered and breaded.  It kept her occupied and entertained for nearly an hour.  Though ended with a very floured child.
  

  Zoe helps with zucchini fries

  

  happy, and quite covered in flour

Other pieces of deep fry wisdom that we’ve learned over the years:

• You think deep frying Peeps would be cool.  It is not.  The peep will melt into the oil, leaving you nothing but a clean up job.  The same is true for unbattered candy bars.  You also shouldn’t try deep frying a whole egg.  In the shell.  Or maybe you should if you think exploding eggs are cool.  Which I kind of do.
• A good batter can make a lot of things taste better.  Battered and fried twinkies?  Awesome.  Battered and fried candy bars?  Like donuts with the bestest filling ever.
• If you aren’t up for battering food, try wonton wrappers, this works really well for dessert items.  At past deep-fry events, I’ve eaten wontons filled with: bananas and chocolate, gummi worms (not good unless you like biting into molten, brightly colored sugar), hostess scary cakes (also not good), apple pie filling, almond pie filling, and my favorite this year, rhubarb filling.  Sprinkling powdered sugar on these is highly recommended.
• I’m personally a huge fan of shredding things, adding a flour-egg batter, and frying these to make fritters – like this year’s curried fritters.  A couple of years ago, I did apples and cinnamon this way, which was quite yummy.  The batter is approximately 1 egg to 1/3 flour – make enough to really coat all of the shredded whatever.

I have no desire to even look at anything fried for a good long time.  But if you have ideas for next year’s foods, let me know!

table of friedness. Just before we left for the evening. You'll note that there's not much fried food left. There are a lot of fresh veggies left. Coincidence?

It’s been 6 months now since we decided to start trying to get pregnant again.  I haven’t posted much about it, which was pretty much my plan.  At this point when we were trying for Zoe, I had had 4 “normal” cycles, and then completely stopped ovulating, and had already been to the doctor to see what was going on.  She gave me couple of blood tests, a prescription for provera to start my period, a pat on the hand, and assurances that certainly that’s all I would need, but if I didn’t get my period again, I should wait a full 90 days before coming back for more tests and treatment.  None of this coming in after only 50 days of no period.  And so off we went on our journey.  If nothing else, it was easy to know that something was wrong, and that we needed help.  This time around, though, my body is pretty much ticking along doing what it’s supposed to – except for the whole getting knocked up thing.

So I’m in this weird limbo of unexplored territory.  As far as I can tell, things are going fine, and I’m very aware of how silly it is to complain about not conceiving after 6 months.  I mean really, who complains about that?  (um, apparently me).  But it’s not like things are working out, either.  Am I back to infertile country even though it  hasn’t been a year of trying?  Did I ever leave?  Does it even matter in the end?  Is going in before a year giving up on my body too soon?  Is waiting and continuing to try on our own just staying in denial?  I don’t want to go back in for treatments – I don’t think anyone in their right minds wants to do that – but I don’t want to waste anymore time, either.  I have this strange feeling of being an impostor, of using my previous infertility as a way to get in for testing and treatments earlier than I should, but I’m pretty sure that’s stupid.

So I called the clinic.  And since it’s been over 3 years since my last appointment, I have to fill out all the forms all over again: the 13 page medical history form, the new patient registration form, the insurance verification form, the authorization to transfer medical information.  The medical history form is it’s own type of torture, though occasionally giving us the opportunity to talk about the important issues: “honey, have you ever exposed your genitals to high heat?”   (As Chris mentioned below, the answer is no, which meant there really wasn’t much to talk about.)   And the question that really got me: “Describe any emotional problems caused by your infertility.”  They provide less than half a line for your answer.

It’s a busy time at work, and I don’t have a lot of emotional reserves – not that work has been bad, I love this time of year, but it’s draining as we get ready to launch into the new academic year.  And here I am with my own homework, my own graduation requirements that I have to fulfill before I can even get to see the doctor.  Each question on the worksheet is tempting me to back out, to procrastinate just a little longer, to think that maybe if I just wait another month, it will happen.  But I’ve managed to fill it out.  Pulled out my old file to get the dates and tests and the results.  Talked with an extremely helpful insurance rep about my coverage.  Just need to send it all in now.  Off we go.