Things I have had to explain to my 6-yr-old

- Many, many aspects of Star Wars, including lots of questions about "Dark Vader" and "Obi Wan Kedobi".

- How that woman got a beard on her chin (yea Portland).

- Why some medical treatments make you feel yucky even if they're doing good things for you.

- Why boys can't have babies.

- How long it takes things to turn to compost.

- Which things will never turn into dirt or compost.

- Who was Martin Luther King Jr.

- Why, if MLK was so important, he wasn't President.

- The difference between primaries and the presidential election.

- Why the gums around a loose tooth bleed just before the tooth comes out.

I've probably forgotten a bunch already. Whew.

tabla lesson

This was later on Bea's birthday.

medical pet peeve

When you get an ultrasound, and it's not for pregnancy, you're in the room staring at the screen, trying to relate the grainy black & white images to the nice color diagrams you've looked at from medical texts. The technician can tell you what that blob is ("That's your uterus.... that's your ovary.... that's your endometrial lining....") but since that person is not a radiologist, they can't show or tell you what's actually wrong or not-so-wrong. It's another day or two of waiting until your doctor gets back to you with the radiologist's reports. So, you've already seen the images first hand, but you still don't know what's going on.

I know they do this for efficiency, because the radiologist can determine what is going on in much less time than it takes to grab the images, but I do wish they'd just schedule a few minutes of time to hear the interpretation at the end of the ultrasound. Waiting really, really sucks.

Birthday hijinx!

Oh my, I no longer have a baby.