Thinking outside the uterus

The regular reader(s) of this column might have noticed that, lately, I’m having a difficult time writing about anything that isn’t directly related to local news.  Specifically, news that is local to my wife’s uterus.

The fact that a baby could very well come flying out of there at any moment makes it difficult for me to think about too much else, but I should probably spend some time recognizing that there’s a big world outside of my wife’s uterus, which is why this column will be devoted to various other topics that I’ve been neglecting, such as the Republican primaries, and perhaps my wife’s fallopian tubes.

I’ve been watching those primaries closely this year, mostly because they make me feel young.  Back in the year 2000, when bald spots were still things that happened to other people, I started driving my first car that had a CD player installed.

“Well, I’ve made my last mix tape,” I thought.  “And also, I’ve had my last thought about Newt Gingrich.”

Not that I spent that much time thinking about him anyway, but it just seemed like that space in my brain could be emptied out to house more important matters, like the phone numbers to the houses that my childhood friends no longer lived in.  But now that Newt is back in the headlines as a frontrunner among the nearly seven billion people who will never be president, I’m transported back to the days when my cranium was sunburn-proof.

Incidentally, for anyone who is concerned about the state of their bald spot but is too afraid to look, you can judge the severity of the situation by the altitude of the barber’s mirror at the conclusion of your haircut.  As the bald spot widens, the handheld mirror will drop lower and lower.

“It’s good?” the barber will ask, holding the mirror an inch from your clippings on the floor.

“Yes, the back of the chair looks fantastic,” you’ll say, content to imagine that the top of your head still looks the same as the last time you saw it, when you were twelve.

This is the kind of hard-hitting political coverage that the reader(s) of this column have come to expect, and it’s honestly a nice change of pace from the wall-to-uterine-wall writing that I’ve been doing lately.

Never mind that Kara’s doctor estimated that we have a 50/50 chance of having the baby in the next two weeks, and that he gave us this prediction last week, which means that I might very well not be able to type the rest of this sentence without having to fling the laptop across the room and run every red light between here and the hospital.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but I did take a break to eat a Double Stuf Oreo, the existence of which still baffles me.  The superiority of the Double Stuf is self-evident to anyone who has ever compared it to the original Oreo.  In a just world, Double Stuf would be the default, and anyone who wanted the inferior original could pick up a package of Half Stuf.

Insights like this wouldn’t be possible if I allowed myself to be consumed by the thought that very soon, we’re going to be sharing our house with a toddler and an infant, which means that the folks going through Navy SEAL training will be getting a better night’s sleep than us.

We may not have many sleepable moments on the immediate horizon, but at least we know what we’re getting into this time.  Actually, that kind of makes things worse.

Regardless, we’re very much looking forward to welcoming the newest member of our family.  As it turns out, he’s much more fun to think about than Newt Gingrich.

You can request more election coverage at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Two months of hard labor

“Did I take my pill at 2 o’clock?” my wife Kara asked.  I stared blankly at her, which is how I answer most of her questions.

“I don’t remember if I took a shower this morning,” I replied.

“It would be a little early to take my next dose, but I’d better do it anyway, just in case,” she said.

Kara’s doctors have been pumping her full of medication for over a month now, attempting to reinforce the levees that our unborn baby keeps trying to breach.  We’ve been to the hospital twice already, and since our first son Evan was born two months early, the doctors this time around have taken to injecting several ounces of prevention into Kara each week.  Still, she’s having contractions regularly, which will come in handy someday, when our future son misbehaves.  “I was in labor with you for two months,” should be a surefire argument-ender.

Some of her medications can’t even be bought at regular-people pharmacies.  A few weeks ago, I wandered around the hallways of the local hospital, trying to find the pharmacy that was hidden somewhere deep within.  Finally, I found a sign by the elevator that said, “Radiology: Second floor.  Oncology: Third floor.  Pharmacy: There’s a pharmacy in here?”

It wasn’t so hard to find, actually, once you pushed the boulder out of the way and removed the vines from the door.  And there, in a normal hospital room that looked like it should have curtain tracks running across the ceiling, was a miniature pharmacy, stocked with everything a normal store dedicated to human health would be expected to have, except Red Bull, candy and cigarettes.

The pharmacist charged $75 for the small paper bag that she pushed across the counter.  When I peeked inside, I expected a bright light to shoot out of the bag and light up the room, like the briefcase from Pulp Fiction.  Instead, the bag contained a tiny green vial with a mysterious-looking liquid, which supposedly contained ten doses of a medicine that would improve our baby’s chances of going full-term, but looked much more likely to turn Kara into the Green Goblin.

Every week, she has to have a specialized nurse give her an injection in her back, and she has to bring this vial with her, which seems a little bit like having to bring your own bamboo to your caning.  In any event, when she brings up the two-months-of-labor thing for the entirety of our future son’s teenage years, she should remember to mention the shots, too.

For all the trials that Kara’s enduring right now, including suffering through my rendition of scrambled eggs for dinner three nights a week, she does seem to be improving the prospects for a delivery that won’t involve whisking our son to the neonatal intensive care unit.  He’s already five-and-a-half pounds, a good deal heavier than his older brother at birth, though he’s still likely to spend his formative years on the receiving end of any wedgies given in our house.

Before going through this firsthand (some a little more firsthand than others), Kara and I thought that pregnancy was a simple matter of waiting nine months for the baby to be done, but the reality has been much more touch-and-go.  Hopefully, it’ll keep going for a couple more weeks.

Even if the baby were to be born tomorrow, he’d have a bit of a head start.  Two weeks ago, they found some skin on Kara that hadn’t been jabbed yet, so they gave her a steroid shot meant to help the baby’s lungs develop faster, in case of an early delivery.  There’s a very good chance that he could be the first child born into our family already holding the home run record.

You can call your shot to Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Battening down the hatches

We need a place to put a baby.  Adios, computer room.

 

"I don't wike wallpaper!"  Nobody does, my man.

 First grandpa deployed.

 Time for a break.  Wee-oooo!

 Second grandpa deployed.

Bring it, baby!

Second time’s the charm

“So you’ll try for the girl next time?” the lady at the pizza shop said, while her husband, standing by the ovens, smiled and nodded.  I’d just told them that we were expecting our second son within the next month or so, and they were already filling my wife’s uterus before its current occupant had vacated the premises.

Our pizza man once bragged about having four children without ever changing a diaper.  Easy for him to smile and nod at me.

“Taking care of lots of kids is simple!  Just be born before 1940, and then let your wife do everything,” he said, with his eyes.  This is a generalization, of course, but I suspect that a father born after that date who attempted to navigate parenthood without changing a single diaper would end up with at least one pizza box inserted into at least one orifice sideways.

The husband and wife at the pizza place are sweet people, and they make a delicious pie, but it was the second time that day that someone had made a comment about me and Kara trying to have a girl “next time,” which implies that we’ve achieved an undesirable result on this go-round.

When I came home with the pizza and told Kara about our conversation, she just shook her head from the couch, which has been her home/prison for the past three weeks, ever since her doctor put her on bed rest.  When she gets up to go to the bathroom, you can still see her perfect outline on the couch, like when Bugs Bunny runs through a wall.

“I am NOT doing this again,” she said, pointing at me with her needle.  Some people, when faced with daunting life challenges, get driven to drink, or to do drugs.  Kara’s situation has driven her to something even more unthinkable: crochet.  

Our friend Anna came over last week to teach Kara how to make a blanket using nothing but yarn, needles and vast, unending stretches of time.

As Anna showed Kara how to do it, Kara had a look on her face much like she was being shown how to pickle an anchovy.

“Once Anna leaves, those needles are never going to know the touch of a human hand again,” I thought.

Kara then blazed through crocheting her first baby blanket, and is halfway through her second.  She crochets as she knocks TV shows off our DVR queue, which makes her blankets the most enduring thing ever to come out of The Bachelor.

She continued looping thread around her needle as we discussed the imminent addition to our family, and how we’d agreed many years ago that two seemed like the perfect number of children for us, despite the family planning advice we might receive with our pizza.

My parents never had to deal with the “next time” comments, since they had one boy and one girl.
“One boy and one girl is the rich man’s family,” my dad used to say to me and my sister.  I always thought that expression meant that as a parent with a boy and a girl, you couldn’t ask for a richer family life.

When we found out that Kara was pregnant again, I asked Dad, “What does that expression mean, ‘rich man’s family’?”

He paused for a moment.  At that point, we didn’t know the new baby’s gender.

“It means that you’d better be rich, because you’re going to have to buy all new stuff,” he said.

I don’t know if that’s the truth or if he was just hedging his bets, but either way, I’m glad they don’t have any pictures of me in my sister’s “Daddy’s little princess” bib.

You can crochet Mike Todd a homemade email at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Outbrain, I give you zero stars

Earlier this week, my mom wrote me an email with the subject "Starstruck," asking where the star ratings at the bottom of my columns went. Indeed, they were missing.  Sometimes, they'd do that, then come back in a few hours.

Turns out, the company that provided the ratings widget (Outbrain) just decided that they weren't going to support it anymore, so all the star ratings that ever got posted to this site over the past few years just got deleted at the beginning of the month. I'm annoyed.

 I sent their customer support an email with the subject "My ratings are gone, along with my fondness for your company," (snap!), but I can't imagine that's going to do any good.

Anyway, I may look around for another easy way to drop some feedback on the columns here without having to write an entire comment with actual words in it. In the meantime, my buddy Chunks (a.k.a. Jered Four-Star) is going to have to find someone else whose averages he can bring down.

Update: Blogger offers a ratings widget now, which might explain why Outbrain stopped making theirs.  In any event, I've added Blogger's ratings widget to the site now, so Chunks, four-star me to your heart's content!

Addition to the update:  Also, I need to get a life.

And sometimes why

Sometimes, all you want to do is hurl yourself down a flight of stairs, especially if you’re a toddler.  You’ll find that despite your best efforts, though, something often gets in your way.  In our house, that thing is a baby gate.

“Mommy and Daddy can open the gate.  Only Evan can’t open it,” our son Evan complained last week, dragging his tin cup back-and-forth against the bars while playing a mournful blues riff on the harmonica.  Evan likes to speak of himself in the third person, like former presidential candidate Herman Cain.  That’s pretty much where their similarities end.  Evan still has a shot at being president.

“Well, Memphis can’t open the gate, either,” I said, trying to make Evan feel better.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because she doesn’t have hands,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because she’s a dog,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.  In computer programming, this type of situation is called an infinite loop.  We find ourselves looping quite often these days, ever since we plunged into the Age of Why, which began several months ago.  By the time you get three or four whys deep, the answers are no longer so obvious.  Why is our dog a dog?  I hadn’t pondered that one before.

After a moment, I figured out the answer.

“Because her parents were dogs,” I replied.

“Oh,” Evan said, nodding, the matter settled.

When you have a child who asks why you wear pants, why he should give you a hug and why it’s bad to smear strawberry jam in your hair, you have to resist the urge to try to exit the loop by saying “because” to end the interrogation.  Once you start answering questions with “because,” that’s the only answer you’ll ever get in return.

“Did you have fun at daycare today?” you’ll ask.

“Because,” he’ll reply.

So you do your best to answer the never-ending one-word questions, even though you slept through several relevant classes in high school that you wish you could have back.

“Buddy, don’t clutch that piece of chocolate for the entire ride home.  Either eat it or set it down beside you,” I said last week.  Evan has a habit of squeezing candy until it becomes welded to his hand, and then you need industrial solvent and a belt sander to clean him off.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because it’s going to melt in your hand,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because your hand is warmer than the chocolate, so the heat, uh, moves from your hand into the chocolate.  That’s how it works, right?  Yes, the heat moves into the chocolate and turns it into a liquid.”

“Why?”

“Because the melting point of chocolate -- did my old physics teacher put you up to this?  The heat in your hand causes the chocolate to cross its melting point.”

“Why?”

“I think it’s one of the laws of thermodynamics, maybe?  Or diffusion?  Maybe it has something to do with the periodic table,” I said, brought to my knees by a debate with a toddler.

“Why?” he asked.  The questions never end.  This must be how Socrates’ parents felt.

“Because I said so,” I said, ashamed for ending the conversation that way, but seeing no other way out of the loop.  “Because I said so” is a phrase that would be organically invented millions of times a day by parents all over the world, if it didn’t already exist.  It’s like the self-drilling screws that I invented once, before I checked homedepot.com and saw that some jerk preemptively stole the idea I hadn’t had yet.

In the rearview mirror, Evan was staring at me, seeming to realize that once he hits the fifth grade, Daddy’s not going to be much help with his homework.

You can interrogate Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Poughkeepsie in B&W

I didn't get any great shots from this weekend's visit to the Walkway Over the Hudson, but I did see this one tree that looked like it should be in a picture.  The regular shot didn't do it much justice:

But stick it into Lightroom for a minute, slide some settings around and blammo!  A half-decent picture kinda emerges, maybe:

I like seeing before and after versions of pictures that people screwed around with in a photo editor, so forgive me for assuming that the reader(s) of this blog might, too.

The knee bone’s connected to the wallet bone

The regular readers(s) of this column will probably attest that I’ve been in need of therapy for some time, and I finally got some this week.  Unfortunately for my brain, my knee was the recipient.  It would have been nice to have my brain looked at, but my knee takes precedence because I use it every day.

To diagnose the problem, the orthopedist felt my knee for thirty seconds, said, “Does this hurt?” a few times, then sent me off for an MRI.  The bill: Seventy-five bucks, or one dollar for every neuron fired during the consultation.

When I showed up for my MRI appointment, the receptionist looked as if she felt sorry for me.  “Did anyone call you about your insurance?” she asked.

That’s one of those questions that indicates something bad has either happened or is about to happen, like, “Want to take this outside?” or, “How many fingers am I holding up?” or, “You didn’t eat that, did you?”

“No, nobody called,” I said.

“Sorry about that.  We have a note here that says this MRI is going to cost you $850 out-of-pocket,” she replied.

“One moment,” I said as I hobbled off to see if anyone had dropped any prescription sedatives in the hallway.  Not having any luck, I decided to call my wife to get her opinion on whether she’d rather have a healthy husband or $850.

“What choice do we have?  You need to find out what’s wrong,” she said.

“I could just put it off until I can pick a better insurance plan next year,” I replied.

“Babe, it’s only February.  You can’t limp around for a whole year,” she said.

“Just watch me.  It’ll be easy, ‘cause I’ll be going really slow,” I said.

In the end, we decided that I really didn’t have a choice.  In the great roulette game of choosing an insurance plan for the year, I’d crapped out, which might be mixing gambling metaphors, but I’m not really sure because I don’t have the stomach for anything with higher stakes than the McDonald’s Monopoly game.

If you’ve never had an MRI taken, just imagine a giant white machine with a cylindrical hole in the middle, which you’re meant to go into feet-first.  The technician only inserted me up to my chest, but I can see why the panic button he handed me is standard issue.  People who go all the way into the machine must come out with a much greater appreciation for how a battery feels when you drop it into a flashlight.

After the technician leaves, you try to hold still for twenty minutes while the machine makes sounds as if it is a giant modem from 1997, and it is having trouble connecting to AOL.  During this time, a huge magnet is causing the protons in your body to realign so that $850 can be extracted from your wallet.  Also, it takes a picture.

That picture gets sent to the orthopedist, who charges you seventy-five dollars to tell you that he doesn’t see anything in it.  Then you limp back to your car, feeling a little lighter on your feet because you don’t have all that money weighing you down.

Afterwards, you’ll wait a few weeks to see if your knee will heal on its own, which it won’t, and you’ll realize that you should have just bought a new knee at the beginning of all this.

That’s when you’ll finally break down and visit the physical therapist, which the orthopedist had, in fairness, recommended when he said, “I’m recommending physical therapy,” which cost eighteen-and-a-half dollars per word.

The physical therapist will take your leg and bend it around your ears.  Fortunately, there will be nothing left to fall out of your pockets.

You can roll snake eyes with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Photography for cheaters

Kara's Christmas present to me this year was a copy of Lightroom, the photo editing software from Adobe.  It was an awesome present, but kind of like giving a Rubik's Cube to a monkey.  He might have fun playing with it, but he probably won't be using it right.

I've been attempting to whip up some pictures into something we might want to hang on a wall somewhere.  Some of these might fit the bill, some won't, but I thought it'd be cool to post some before/after shots of my initial twiddling around with it.

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Before (my buddy Rob Kalmbach took this one):

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Dodging an early delivery

The regular reader(s) of this column might recall that last week, my pregnant wife Kara and I had a scare, wherein our unborn son showed some signs that he might attempt to procure a social security number three months before we’d intended.  Everything turned out fine, except that Kara’s doctor sentenced her to three months of soft time on the couch.

But then a few days ago, Kara once again sensed that something wasn’t quite right and dropped in for another doctor’s appointment.

“My doctor said I’m having contractions right now,” she said over the phone.  “Can you pick me up at his office and bring me to the hospital?”

Suddenly, what I was going to eat for lunch that day no longer seemed of consequence.  Modern cars should really come equipped with “I don’t normally drive like this” indicators, just so other drivers don’t get the wrong idea.

“It’s going to be okay.  Really, everything’s fine,” Kara said as she scooched into the passenger’s seat and our car’s tires became reacquainted with the pavement.  The assurances really should have been flowing the other way.  A pregnant lady having to settle down her husband is a bit like Tom Brady reassuring the water boy.

A hospital greeter met Kara with a wheelchair, and the three of us headed down the long hallway to the elevator, then the maternity ward.  In a few more minutes, Kara had a bed in the triage area, and the nurse had hooked her up to a seismometer-type device, complete with scribbling pens and graph paper.

“We’ll just monitor you for a few hours and give you some medication to stop the contractions.  You can relax,” the nurse said, though we were not feeling disposed to comply.

“I wonder if they’re going to put me on complete bedrest now,” Kara said, once we were as alone as you can be when your walls are made of sheets.

“If they do, would you mind living on the couch instead of our bedroom, so I don’t have to carry dishes up and down the stairs?” I asked.  

“Oh, don’t make me laugh,” she said, holding her side.  Just then, the nurse poked her head in and said, “You can go grab lunch down the hall if you’d like.”

I’d almost forgotten why visiting the maternity ward again, almost three years after the birth of our first son, had been such a powerful experience, putting a lump in my throat and bringing back a flood of fond memories: the buffet.  Seriously.  Modern medicine may have a long way to go in other areas, but it has conquered the maternity ward buffet.

As I walked down the hall to get us some lunch, I passed the room where Evan had been born two months ahead of schedule, so fragile and thin.  These days, it’s easy to forget about the time when he was just a tiny wisp, especially when he’s executing a flying knee drop onto your crotch.

After a couple of hours, the pens on the seismometer, which had been tracing the peaks and valleys of Kara’s contractions, flatlined.  Her test results came back negative, which was positive.  According to the doctor, she now had a 99.2% chance of not having a baby in the next two weeks.  They didn’t even put her on bedrest, so she will hopefully just go on thinking that I was kidding about the dishes.

We drove home that afternoon, exhausted and relieved.  This pregnancy is keeping Kara off her feet and on her toes.  Hopefully, the next time we’re back in the maternity ward will be in about ten weeks, right on schedule.  And if we’re extra lucky, perhaps it will be baked ziti day again.


You can nudge ahead of Mike Todd at the buffet line at mikectodd@gmail.com. 

On early childbirth and zombies

The last thing you want on a Monday afternoon is to have your baby born three months prematurely, but as I sped to the doctor’s office last week to meet my pregnant wife, Kara, that possibility loomed.

“My doctor thought that I might need a steroid shot to help the baby’s lungs develop faster, just in case labor is imminent,” Kara told me over the phone, and I was out the door.

We met at the maternal fetal specialist for an impromptu appointment.  Two-and-a-half years ago, our son, Evan, caught us by surprise and insisted on being born two months early.  Nobody knows why that happened, so Kara is in the high-risk pregnancy category this time around, which means that she spends more time in waiting rooms than the receptionists.

This appointment had a special urgency, though, since neither of us knew if Kara’s aches and pains during the preceding day had actually been the start of an even earlier labor, as her regular doctor had suggested.  I started to get that same feeling I’d had when Evan was born, the feeling that this kind of life event should really be reserved for someone better equipped to handle it.

But then the fetal specialist entered the room, looked at the ultrasound and said, “Your cervix is beautiful.”
I was pretty sure he was talking to Kara.

“So everything’s okay?” she asked.

“Yes, you’re not going into labor now, and I don’t see any great reason to be concerned,” he said, and the examination room shuddered with our collective sigh of relief.

“But you do need to take it easy,” he continued, unfortunately still not talking to me.  “I won’t call it ‘bedrest,’ but you need to keep your activity to a minimum.”

Kara began inquiring about what exactly he meant.  Could she still go to work?  Go shopping?  Go to the mailbox?

“If it doesn’t involve sitting down, you probably shouldn’t be doing it,” he said.  

“What about doing my own laundry or even putting my dishes away?” Kara asked.

“Nope, you can’t do any of that now,” the doctor replied.

“Aw, dude,” I said, in my head.

So for the past few days, we’ve started adjusting to our new reality, one in which Kara isn’t allowed to get up from the couch.  It’s not that I’ve ever been jealous of a woman in her third trimester, exactly, but I can’t help feeling that she’s squandering a golden opportunity.

“It’s a shame you don’t play video games.  All this quality couch time going to waste,” I said.

“The only thing I’m allowed to do for the next three months is go to the bathroom and gestate,” Kara said.  “I’m an incubator with feet.”

“We have Call of Duty in the Playstation right now.  I can show you how to throw grenades the right way and everything,” I offered.

“No thanks, babe.  I’ll just read,” she said.

“But you can play against zombies!” I said.  For reasons I still cannot fathom, she shook her head.

Sometimes, just when you think you’re beginning to understand women, they’ll refuse to throw a grenade at a zombie.

“Fine.  I guess the zombies win, then,” I muttered as I wandered off to cook dinner.  Okay, order dinner.

Kara might very well lose her mind sitting on the couch for the next three months, but at least it looks like the baby is staying put, for now.  It probably helps that I constantly remind Kara to “keep holding it in.”

For now, all is well.  And in just three months, if we keep going at this rate, we’ll have a beautiful baby boy and a memorial wing at our pizza place.

You can send Mike Todd a premature email at mikectodd@gmail.com.