Looking for Doctor Right

Last Thursday I had an appointment for my annual physical. I had scheduled all of my various yearly check-ups to be done before I went on vacation and this was the last of them. Plus, I needed to get my prescription renewed since I'm on the final pill pack. Doc used to be at the clinic within walking distance of my house but she switched to the new one that's way up in the northern suburbs when that opened up. But I've been going up there and taking Kirk up there out of loyalty to her and because I honestly like her so much. So when I finally got up there Thursday afternoon? I was beyond dismayed to discover that she wasn't there; she was out delivering a baby.

When we took Kirk for his 2 year well child check-up Doc told us that she's going to stop delivering babies at the end of the year. She's 50 now and it takes too long for her to recover from the middle of the night calls and she just decided that she's done. To be honest, I felt betrayed. Sure, I haven't exactly jumped on the let's-make-a-sibling bandwagon but I do intend to get knocked up again. And now I won't have Doc as my Ob. I don't know that I've felt this attached to a particular physician before. Is it just because she's cool? Or because I saw her so often during my pregnancy and then for all of Kirk's well baby visits afterwards? I feel like I really know her and I don't want to find another doctor. I've seen quite a few random doctors at the nearby clinic for just miscellaneous visits and none of them have seemed like the right fit. But I guess I need to start trying to find one. I still like the idea of seeing a GP so that both Kirk and I can go to the same person. And I don't really have a hang-up about only seeing female doctors. My last physician was a man and I quite liked him but his clinic moved and then we moved and it just didn't seem worth going back to him.

In the midst of this debacle I had to really examine my intentions about getting pregnant again. Since I'm not going off the pill for France I've been wavering on how long I want to wait before trying again. And a lot of it has to do with my vacation plans for next summer. It's a family reunion year and we're going to be at a beach house on the North Carolina coast and I would really like to look halfway decent. But that's just my own personal vanity getting in the way. Do my cousins honestly give a damn? I doubt it. I don't know that I'd want to be hugely, third trimester preggers though. That's just not particularly comfortable. Especially since we plan to drive. So I realized that maybe first or second trimester would be OK. It's not like lis and I are going to be partying it up in DC during The Summit; she'll have a 4 month old after all. So my new thought is New Years. We'll see if I have a new excuse for putting it off when that rolls around.

Walkin' Tall

I think we're weaning ourselves off of stroller dependence. It was not intentional at all. When we went to the zoo Labor Day weekend we just completely forgot to bring it. And it was fine. Kirk was perfectly happy to walk on his own and responded pretty well to me telling him to "pick up the pace" when he started slowing down or wandering off course. If he had been in the stroller he would have demanded to get out all the time and be held up to see the animals. And then he would have wanted to push the stroller himself. That's what happened when I picked him up from daycare via the bus and we took the bus home. The final walk was excruciatingly slow because "Kirkie do it." But then Kirkie started gazing up at the clouds instead of watching where he was slowly pushing the stroller, decreasing his speed even more. So when we recently took a walk up to the city offices to drop off the water/garbage bill we decided not to bother even trying to strap him into the stroller. It was a lovely promenade and he stuck with us well and didn't get too tired out by the end. Oh, I'm not going to get rid of it any time soon. But I'm also not going to be as desperate to make sure it's in the car whenever we go to the mall anymore.

Fruits 'n' Veggies

Kirk eats apple slices the same way he eats melon wedges. And then we’re left with a field of spent apples. I don’t really want to be the kind of mom that always peels the apples but he just eats around them. Even if I cut each apple slice down to bite size pieces he leaves the peel.

Thankfully he eats the crust on his bread. He seems to have switched off macaroni & cheese as his failsafe, always-ready-to-eat-it food and is now on peanut butter (with or without "purple jelly") sandwiches. And those he eats strangely, too; he pries the bread slices apart and eats each side as its own open-face sandwich. Very messy. But "dood".

The only other failsafe food at the moment is "O-bars". He’ll eat a granola bar no matter what. We refuse to make him a whole separate meal of his own if he has decided that he doesn’t want to eat what we’re having for dinner so he has had quite a few O-bars in the past couple of weeks.

He’s a bit of a menace in my garden, too. I don’t have much growing in the way of vegetables but he took his soft Twins baseball bat to my yellow pepper plant and managed to knock off the only branch that was producing fruit. So, no peppers for me. He’ll pick tomatoes, either the Cherries or the Romas, and take one bite before spitting it out as "icky". For some reason the no pick rules I’ve hammered home regarding my flowers just haven’t stuck on the tomato front. "Mama’s pretty flowers. Kirkie no pick. Nose. *snorting exhalation as he attempts sniffing*" Maybe because I pick them but leave the flowers? Oddly he leaves the zucchini alone.



Except when it’s sitting on the counter of course. Then it’s a hilariously awesome thing to carry around. I have no idea why my zucchini plant produced such a monster. It really hasn’t put out that much fruit at all but two of them have been those ridiculously State Fair sized behemoths.

Finish Line

Today is my sister's birthday. She's 29 now and is about to have her third child. Third. Before 30. The thing that really struck me is how hugely pregnant she is. Her official due date is one week from now but her doctor thinks she'll deliver this weekend. And I don't know what that level of pregnancy is like. I never experienced the massive frustration, waiting for the end to come. I never got a chance to be desperate to get the baby outta me. It's sort of fascinating to look at it objectively like that and I realized it's a whole aspect of female reproduction that I just didn't participate in. I have secretly wondered in the past if women that have had C-sections really can understand what giving birth, actual delivery, is truly like. But in most instances, there was a serious medical reason that they had to operate. They did go through labor, at least somewhat, and that wasn't good enough. So I feel bad that I held that slight prejudice. I think realizing that I missed out on an integral part of pregnancy by having Kirk nearly a month early has helped me to change that opinion.

But seeing my sister tonight at her birthday dinner made me realize just what she has in store for her. And that I really am not ready to do it again. Not yet.

Remembry

Kirk's memory is kind of astonishing. He will bring up events, a bug biting him for example, that happened months ago and out of nothing he'll just start talking about them. I've certainly prompted him about stuff when we just get done, like on the drive home from the zoo yesterday I sort of drilled him on all the things we did (dolphins, train, monkeys, sharks, butterflies, etc.) but that's just making conversation. He does better on the phone with Nana and Papa or Auntie and A1 and A2 if he's got stories to tell. I don't think he's really got much of a sense of time yet though. I never know quite how much advance warning I need to give him before babysitters or big events or anything. Sometimes I'll tell him about something a few days earlier and sometimes, quite frankly, I forget to tell him at all until it's happening. So far he's fine with just rolling with it. But I figure that the France trip is huge enough that he's going to need to have it in the back of his little head. I've been mentioning it whenever vacation comes up or whenever Nana and Papa come up. I don't think he has any clue what's really going to happen but I'm hoping that it'll be in there enough so that he doesn't freak out entirely. I have no idea what to expect actually. Now that it's so close I'm starting to realize the enormity of leaving the continent without my son.