First, a quick review. Every year since 2004, Jill and I have declared a possibility for the year. That sets the context, we hope, for plans and resolutions during the year. Last year, we declared 2007 the year of vitality, discovery, and fun.

I think we did an ok job this year, especially since until the end of December, I couldn’t have told you what the possibility was for 2007. In our peak year of success with this game, we actually had the possibility posted above the kitchen sink. I might try that again for 2008.)

Continuing with the review:

In terms of vitality, no one on earth has more energy than a healthy toddler. I’m feeling great and have lost approximately a pants size (but no weight) since I’ve been swimming, plus Jill’s thyroid condition is well under control and she’s started running again. All of us get full marks for increased vitality.

Discovery is probably an area where Jill has done better than I have — the whole car thing, getting an A in her Automotive Fundamentals class, etc. But I got a gift certificate for a cooking class for Christmas, and one for a “build yourself a bookshelf” class for my birthday, so there have been some discovery seeds planted in my life this year. And I think I’ll take credit for trying Curves and ultimately for rediscovering my love for swimming. And again, who can beat a toddler for discovery? (OK, a 4 month old, but who else???)

Fun? I think I have to give myself weak marks in this area. Yes, toddlers are fun, but I haven’t done much that’s been purely fun for me. There’s still room to grow here. Noah has begun telling us when he’s having fun, which is delightful. I’m not so sure with Jill — was the car class fun? It didn’t look like fun, it looked like a lot of work. But I could be wrong.

I think we did better with these possibilities when they were sort of funny and easier to remember. 2004, for example, was “unprecedented results!” and 2005 was “all about the boolings!” (Boolings is our silly family word for young children.)

What about 2008?

The first thing that popped into my mind was creativity – encompassing both the attempting to create another member of our family, writing, crafts, cooking, doing projects with Noah, coming up with creative ways to spend time together both as a couple and as a family.

I’m also thinking about mindfulness. Not exactly “planning” or “determination” or “getting organized” but really thinking about how we’re spending our time, whether what we’re doing is moving us towards our happiness or our goals, and what impact we have on one another and those people whose lives touch ours.

We could do a little better on nurturing ourselves, and also on nurturing each other. We’re pretty good with nurturing Noah, but he also demands it a lot more.

I toyed with a lot of different thoughts about this, beginning before I started writing this post, and continuing in the days since I began. Jill and I had one of those Big Talks about what’s working and what’s not working as well as we’d like it to, in all kinds of areas of our lives, and what we want to make a difference in next year.

Together, it came to us.

2008: Unprecedented Results Mach II

I’m also intrigued by BlogHer’s Lisa Stone’s approach to New Year’s Resolutions:

Heart - I’m committed to creating at least one date night with my wife, per month between now and September, and at least 2 more by the end of 2008.
Family - Continuing to help Noah grow and thrive, and add a new member of our family who is healthy.
Spirit - Electing a Democratic President, right now, I’m leaning towards Obama — and continuing with my Sunday School teaching.
Write - A minimum of 2 magazine articles, plus continuing with my blogs. Developing a plan to re-energize LesbianFamily.org.
Wallet - Get paid for my writing. I’m going to set the modest-but-stretch goal of 2008=4×2007, including BlogHer ads.
Health - Have a healthy pregnancy, gaining less weight than last time, and give birth to a healthy baby.
Create - Use my bran-new sewing machine for some kind of creative fun project. (Curtains? Slipcovers for the glider rocker? Maternity clothes?)
Work - Post-reorg, I’ve gotten some new responsibilities. I’d like to make the most of them, and have that recognized in a promotion.

I am officially not pregnant.

I knew that I wasn’t, having taken 4 home tests since last Wednesday, but there was the tiniest glimmer of hope that maybe the dollar store tests weren’t sufficiently sensitive to pick up the small amount of HCG. The RE’s blood tests are more sensitive, though.

We now have 3 shots left of the donor we used with Noah. I don’t know why, but 3 seems like a lot less than 4. I’m scared it won’t be enough.

And I had the most unproductive, irritating conversation with the phone nurse yesterday. (Who incidentally, never did call me. At 3:15 pm, knowing that they quit calling back at 4 pm, I called needing to know my results. It is so not-nice to leave infertility treatment patients hanging like that.) My regular nurse is out of the office until Wednesday. Let’s call the phone nurse Nurse Indecisive.

If you’re interested in more technical details, they’re below the fold.

(more…)

Some of you are probably curious for the post-reproductive endocrinologist visit update. I hope so, anyway, because practically all I have done since then is play “mental rubics cube” with the information he provided. You know, if we did X then Y, but if we did A, then B, what about P then Q? Which steps make the most sense, and in which order?

It isn’t graphic, but just in case you feel like knowing more about our babymaking thoughts is too much information, the rest is “below the fold.”

(more…)

The sleeping goggles you wear for the first week post-lasik. Can you tell that they’re taped in place?

I am googleable. And easy to find. And I tell people my blog URL like I want them to read this or something.

What’s up with that?

It makes it so much harder when you want to post something like, “How the hell am I going to lose 10 lbs before my 20 year high school reunion, and what am I going to wear?”

Followed by the observation that really, 10 lbs, only gets me back down to pre-pregnancy weight, not say for example, wedding weight. And 25 lbs — wedding weight — ain’t happening in the next 7 weeks. Probably ever. Especially if I keep giving in to the chocolate impulses. And I am not so good at denying the chocolate impulse.
Anyway, if the whole weight drama is right here on the Internet for the whole graduating class to read — granted, those of you who already read don’t care, and those that might possibly judge probably won’t read about it. Still and all, it makes pretending like I’m normally all hot and skinny a singularly fruitless exercise.

Still, I’m thinking about it, and also about the fact that I have nothing to wear.

For the 10 year, I had a fabulous dress: sleeveless, princess seams, white with large water-color-esque tulips scattered over it. This time, I am not seriously considering sleeveless, although I am always up for princess seams.

(That reminds me, is it a fashion faux pas to wear plaid shoes with a striped shirt? They’re both mostly light blue with a little bit of white and pink.)

Anyway, the partial answer is that I am participating in a Curves study, where in exchange for them testing me before and after, and a $20 refundable deposit, I get 3 weeks of their proprietary workout for free. That starts Tuesday.
And I am going back to tracking fruit and veggies for your reading pleasure.

Fruit & Veg, 6/7: ~1.25 cups raw carrots, 1/2 cup spinach with a few other random veggies

Don’t you hate it when writers say “First, XYZ” and then never get around to making a second point?

Me too.

The second point that I meant to make, before getting on a long and navel-gazingly interesting discussion about social class, is that my high school was an International Baccalaureate school.

At the time, not only were there not very many in the US, but there were really few IB programs in central city public schools. There are more now, but I think it’s still a program mostly geared towards elite international schools.

For freshmen there were “regular” and “honors” classes. But as you began selecting sophmore classes, the selection involved also deciding whether or not you were “pre-IB.” Then as a junior and senior, you could be “full-IB,” take some IB classes, or take regular and maybe also some honors classes. I don’t actually remember whether or not there were honors classes for juniors and seniors that weren’t IB.

To my 14 year old geek self, there were 2 primary benefits of being full-IB, meaning that you took at least 3 IB classes per semester. First, you didn’t have to take gym physical education, and second, you didn’t have to take the notoriously uninspiring class “College Skills 2.” No boredom AND no gym PE??? Sign me up!

As it turned out, there were other benefits too. We had great intellectually engaging classes, and terrific teachers.

I was well prepared for college. In fact, I think it was law school before I had another set of exams that were as long as the IB exams. But if you learn to take 3 or 4 hour exams at 17, they aren’t as intimidating.

Personally, I wienied out on the IB diploma. I was intimidated by the math, and also the idea of having to write a 4000 word paper. But I still took a bunch of rigorous, creative, surprisingly fun classes.

LONG DIGRESSION:

I figured out a couple of years ago where my fear of math came from. Would that I could go back and explain to my 8 year old self what was actually happening.

I was an unbelievably dorky 8 year old. We’re talking thick glasses, poorly washed hair in a gender-ambiguous cut, nose picking, if not reading then acting out scenes from books, afraid of the ball, thought a Fiddler on the Roof birthday party was a great idea, in other words, a top quality outcast.

To make matters worse, I was in 5th grade at the time, not 3rd or 4th. My classmates were on the verge of puberty. They were picking new crushes and I was picking my nose. And they were also picking on me. I was pretty cotton-picking miserable.

That’s the context in 1978 in which I was pulled out of class to do “math programs” on something called a computer.

The math programs were basic arithmatic and incredibly boring. Plus the UI had the numbers going across the screen and I could only do math vertically. And the teacher watched over the shoulders of the 2 or 3 of us being subjected to this torture.

I drew the obvious conclusion — I was being punished for being so horrible at math.

It wasn’t until I was in my 30s and telling someone this story that I Got It.

No one was putting the kid who sucked at math in front of a computer in 1978.

I was good at math, and unlucky in that the programmers and teachers picked a math program that wasn’t a good fit for me.

Sadly, I can’t go slap my 16 year old self upside the head and make her stay in Advanced Math II or enroll in IB Pre-Calc.

Until the day I posted about it — was it Friday? — I hadn’t given my high school reunion more than 2 minutes of thought.

Those two minutes of thought were guilt-ridden and icky. After the Significant Challenges of our 10 year reunion, like lots of people not being invited, including most of my friends, and also having it over 4th of July weekend 2 blocks from Milwaukee’s Summerfest grounds, I said I would help do the next one.

Then I moved away. And now I’m mom to a toddler. Yeah, not so much with the time to volunteer.

BUT, I emailed the email addresses of everyone I could find to the person who sent a “do you know anyone in the class of 87″ to the class of 86 yahoogroup. And every day since then I’ve sent her another address of someone else I’ve just remembered that I have their address.

(Aside to the person in Minnesota who I don’t think wants me to name names here — the last email I have from you says that you are about to change jobs and will send me your new email address when you get settled. That was about a week before Noah was born.)

Have I mentioned that I went to a very interesting high school?

I didn’t know it at the time, of course. It was just high school. But Rufus King was one of the grand educational experiments of the 70s and 80s that actually worked more-or-less as idealistically imagined. At least for me.

First, it was really integrated. I just counted through the senior class pictures, and of the 225 pictures, there are ~4 more white people than people of color. Roughly 98% of those people of color are African-American or biracial with African-American and white parents.

In the spirit of honesty, I can’t claim it was a particularly integrated experience, although it probably was more than most.

My classes were mostly white — I remember there being 3 people of color in nearly all of my classes (Hi Madelaine! And Michele and Alan!) with double that in Spanish (Hi Lynn & Tracy) and a few more in English (Dave, Marnya, Lisa)….

Looking at the pictures, it gets more complicated. I have only the vaguest of memories of most of the African-Americans. A few I still know, a few more I remember well, but the majority either look familiar, or look…unfamiliar.

A few stand out from beyond my classes — eccentric characters who had gone to the feeder middle school with my friends (Kelly and Ike?), a few others who went to the same magnet elementary school where I went (Michelle & Willie).

The most telling thing is in the class polls. I had no idea who the girl who won most unforgettable was. I thought it was a joke. But no.

It was someone who managed to graduate on time, in spite of having — I was told — 4 children during high school. I don’t know whether or not that’s true, but of course if it is, and you knew her, it certainly is unforgettable. I just don’t think I ever met the young woman. Unless she was in Personal Typing with me in 9th grade, I’m pretty sure our class schedules were mutually exclusive.

As I write all of this, what comes clear is that there was “pretty good” racial integration in my high school, but more limited class integration, and practically no integration across both race AND class.

The people of color in my classes nearly all went to and graduated from college. Many went on to graduate or professional school. I think that was the case of most of the people who went to King, all races included.

Was race “just” one factor along which high school cliques broke down? Something tells me it couldn’t have been that simple.

What about class?

There were maybe three loose cluster categories in terms of class (I think this is true for both whites and people of color, although probably the distribution looks different):

1. People from families like mine, where our parents expected us to go, most likely to a private college, most likely without financial aid.
2. People from middle to slightly upper middle class families, where our parents were clear that we were going to college, but if it wasn’t Wisconsin or Minnesota, we better be getting a good financial aid package.
3. People from working to middle class families where if the financial aid package, probably at a local or state school, wasn’t big enough, then they were joining the military first and going to college on the GI bill. Or maybe later.

I don’t know how much class integration there was among the African-American students, socially.

And now that I think about it, I don’t know how much there was among the white students, either. At least not the mainstream(s).

Within the geeks (I was a geek), there was a lot of social integration, both race and class. A tiny handful of us lived in my neighborhood (Hi again, Madelaine!), but we spread out pretty far across the class spectrum. That was the biggest blessing of magnet schools. There were enough geeky smart kids that we could have a nice social life too.

A few of the less or non geeky African Americans seemed to have social mobility — Lynn, Tracy, LaTanya. I also had some, although not including the non-geeks of my own social class. I wonder why about both of those things.

We didn’t communicate well outside of the geek divide. I am pretty sure that in the 4 years of high school, I didn’t exchange 25 words with either boy in my class who lived on my block. Including the one whose parents were friends with mine. They were “soccer studs” and for some reason, I found them utterly and insurmountably intimidating.
I did talk to the one who lived around the block, but his parents were such close friends with mine that we shared Thanksgivings and Christmas Eves. And even so, Eric and I barely acknowledged each other while we were actually at school.

Anyway, classmates (and teachers!) and perhaps more objective readers, I’m curious about your impressions, corrections, opinions, etc. But if I don’t go to sleep, I’ll start hallucinating.