Listen, I just can't quit sonofmax. I've tried LORD HOW I'VE TRIED but it seems I really need an outlet for writing about certain things in my life, such as today our babysitter's mom called up two minutes after she got here this morning to tell us that her daughter was EMOTIONALLY FRAGILE because she really wanted to go to the beach with her friends today but had committed to watching our two kids and could we please let her leave a little early? O! The strife-filled life of a rich, blonde teen in our ass-clenchy, neurotic little town. I told her to get gone, don't let the sand fleas bite you on the butt you doomed little brat.

Also, our good old Seattle friends were here last week, which made for beach, sparkler and lobster good times. They also turned us on to the best program ever, and paid me the enormous compliment that the show reminded them of me because I tend to make up songs as I go about my day. Were it that my songs ranked as high in awesomeness as theirs do, my days would be a happy ones indeed.

So there you have it, not much has changed since we've been apart. The same moral outrage, the same love of New Zealand digi-folk paradists. I'm glad we're back together again. It just feels right.

love,
Max

* Thanks Mimi Smartypants for the link, from the bottom of my plasticine heart.

Three and a half years ago, I gave birth to my first child just a few months before she was due to give birth to hers. Being a scientist, she was wisely conducting some research into the whole “motherhood” thing. What I told her at the time was basically this: “Listen sister, screw the pastel teddy bears and the duckie onesies. You can live without them. What you are going to need and need hard is a Crotch Care kit.” Somehow, in all of my own pregnancy/birth/baby research, I never saw any mention of “Oh by the way, your crotch will get totally blown out and you’ll be unable to sit, lie down, pee, or take a bath without fainting from pain because babies? They are pretty big and crotches? Not so much. DO THE MATH, LADIES.” I felt it my duty to warn her.

Fortunately, my mother was with us after we brought the Bean home from the hospital and, after scooping my shaking body off the floor and depositing me in two inches of tepid bathwater while I sobbed and bled, she sped to Walgreens to assemble a last-minute Crotch Care kit.

For those of you with babies in you that will soon need to come out, I heartily recommend purchasing the following items prior to the Big Event:

Crotch Care Kit
• Ice pack
• Frozen peas (very moldable and afterwards; a nutritious snack! Just kidding about the snack part. I think, I can’t remember.)
• Heating pad
• Aloe vera gel with Lidocaine (Best stuff ever)
• Cotton squares to apply above-mentioned magic gel (not balls, squares! They hold their form better. Unlike your crotch.)
• Dermoplast Pain Relieving spray (Also good. So squirty! So instantaneous!)
• Peri-bottle (the hospital will give you this as a parting gift)
• Witch hazel (um, what is witch hazel, anyway? Weird. Cool name, though)
• Waterproof donut-shaped pillow (for the bath; they have them at drugstores. Now you know: congratulations!)
• Medicated pre-moistened wipes (you can guess what these are for)
• Boppy (for your bum when sitting, not for the babe)
• The most gigantic maxi pads you can find. Maaaaxxxiiii Padzzzz
• Your pain meds. The Queen wanted me to mention that she forgot hers at the hospital and in the relentless and bleary fog of new parenthood, it slipped her mind that the very science she holds so dear to her heart could help her with her maladies. With drugs.

There you have it, one more crotch-related post for the people.

I began writing this post with the intention of mentioning the delightful (and practical!) gifties that the Queen sent via mail, but already it's too long and now The Office is on TV. You have this, then, to look forward to (or not) within upcoming days: Intro to Boobs as Food. And I don’t mean these.

Today I had lunch with the charming owner of this charming shop. To my husband’s annoyance, I had been squealing over how cute her new little store was every time we drove by it (there is a dearth of cute in my area) and then lo! She appeared in my pre-natal yoga class, which I have gone to exactly three times. It was like we were destined to eat soup together.

We discussed how, in our first class, we had a yoga instructor who just sort of disappeared. She was a rather kooky, maybe 50-ish lady, who surveyed the class and announced, “Your vaginas are factories, mine is a playground!” and then chuckled delightedly to herself, which simultaneously impressed me and weirded me out. I don’t know if someone complained or if she decided her body was a wonderland that could not be ignored even for an hour a week or what, but she never showed up to teach again.

Speaking of vaginal playgrounds, I think I am leaving the offices of Dr. Hotshot, Dr. Ear Hairs, Dr.Old and Icky, and Dr. Lone and Therefore Unavailable Female to the gentler, more feminine embrace of a midwifery practice. I realize it is kind of late in the game to be changing things up (um, five weeks to go!?), but I am really not digging on the Creeptastic vibe I get from my current ob-gyn practitioners, and I just got a referral to this heretofore unknown (by me) mystical place of Female Birthing Power, Womb Enchantment and Crotch-Healing Crystals. I think I am up for the change, providing those soul sistas have got epidurals at the ready. My consultation with them is Monday, or should I say “moonday”. We shall see how it goes.

At least her ability to force limbs between my ribs has meant that I am no longer in denial about her imminent arrival. My niece and sis-in-law came down from Vermont this past weekend to help me wash, fold, sort and organize legions of pink garments and generally get the ball rolling with converting my office to a nursery. Here are a few pictures of the results. I still have a ways to go but at least we have the basics ready, like socks and a few diapers, since I am convinced she could drop out of me at any moment. And by “drop out of me” I mean send me into 40+ hours of labor like her brother did.

This time, though, the Blue Angels (DUDES TURN THE VOLUME UP TO ELEVEN BEFORE YOU CLICK THE LINK! It will totally make for a multi-media experience!) won’t be flying around the hospital. There was something awesome and surreal about having massive contractions with fighter jets screaming past the windows, splitting the air open and sonic booming all over the place. In fact, that sort of sums up my first birth experience right there, if you add a few gallons of blood and a couple of highly disengaged doctors. Maybe this time I could request that lobsters and clams be strewn about the delivery room. Their soft clickings and scrapings would make for a subtler birthing experience while still imparting a local flavor.

I feel like the above is revealing me to be insane. The end.

But wait! In coming up for a name for this post, I found this picture. That's it--dinosaur not octopus! Next month's ultrasound should confirm it.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so naturally I have a few things to share. First, we’ve been having mild plumbing issues, resulting in an occasional back-up of our toilet. One week it seemed worse than usual, so we called Roto-Rooter to see if they could come snake the pipes. They did, charging us a cool $120 for their service. Not an hour later, the toilet backed up again, so I called them back and they said they would send someone over to take another look. I left my husband to deal with the second plumber and took off to buy some pink crap.

When I came home, I went into the bathroom and was hit by such a foul stench that I actually took a step back. “Jesus God!” I yelled to my husband, “What happened in here?” I imagined they had to open up some pipes or something, releasing long-trapped septic gases into the atmosphere. My husband sauntered in. “Oh, the plumber wanted to see if he could repro the problem, so he used the toilet.” I was smelling plumber poop!! I guess my husband didn’t really consider this out of the ordinary until I started grilling him. How did this “solution” come up? How long did it take? Could he HEAR him in there?! So we paid Roto-Rooter $120 to have a plumber come poop in our toilet. And the frigging thing still has the same problem.

One of the things I love about my husband, in addition to his cavalier attitude toward letting servicefolk poop in our toilet, is his occasional, broad declaration about some random thing. We were driving along the other day and out of nowhere he says “You know, if you were to get hit by a car and were obviously dead in the middle of the road, I’m not the type of husband that would rush out and scoop up your broken body in my arms and hold you until the paramedics came.” While some wives might have been offended, I was merely intrigued. “What would you do, sit on the curb and have a Coke Zero*?” I also wasn’t sure there were ‘types’ of husbands in this particular scenario.

He went on to clarify that he would be too upset to see me all smashed and couldn't handle it, much in the same way he could barely handle having to scoop up our beloved cat’s remains from in front of our house after he was hit by a car this fall. Thankfully, I was out of town for that. He confessed he had to use a cookie sheet because he couldn’t bear to touch/look at our poor kitty. He’s not squeamish at all; it’s just the personal association that does him in. “Of course,” he added, “You would have to be really dead and not just hurt.” I mulled this over. I knew what he was saying was, in its own way, sweet, for I know my husband well. But knowing him well also prompted my next question “Um, honey? What did you do with the cookie sheet…?”

* My husband loves Coke Zero so much that if a can of it were lying smashed and broken in the road, I’m pretty sure he would cradle it in his arms and weep until the recycling truck came.

crotches
When you are an elderly pregnant lady, you get to go the OB/GYN every month or so, especially when there are red flags all over your file concerning Gigantor Baby #1. One of the many things that I find annoying about our medical system is how the pharmaceutical companies and doctors are so in bed with each other, they don’t even flinch when you walk in and catch them. They just smile, take another drag off their cigarettes and stroke each other’s hair fondly.

Growing up, we had weird crap all over our house that the pharmaceutical companies had shilled onto my doctor father: stress balls with ads for blood pressure medicines; giant rubber noses (paperweights?) with ads for allergy medicine; clear plastic torsos with visible guts advertising various products to treat liver disease, indigestion, colon cancer, etc. I was in the waiting room on my first visit to the OB's when a smoking hot pharmaceutical rep* came in with her briefcase to dole out samples of meds like candy. They are still out there, like freakishly attractive sharks.

* There is some rule about pharmaceutical reps needing to be smoking hot. I saw a documentary on it or something, but apparently they recruit these folks from the same pool where they get tradeshow spokes models. They are also one of the few remaining professional groups to use a briefcase.

In the exam room, the stirrups on the exam table were covered with little purple felt booties. Written on these booties were, you guessed it, ads! The text of the ads was helpfully aligned so that you, the patient who was about to have her crotch examined, could read it. Alas, I didn’t recognize the name of the product they were selling, which I really felt was a missed marketing opportunity. Imagine the possibilities: “Not feeling so fresh?” the left bootie could read “Try Femu-IckBegone!” the right could helpfully suggest. This would be especially useful when to your extreme dismay you find out your OB/GYN is a…

hot guy
I don’t go to male doctors. To me, it makes more sense to have someone with the same parts inspecting your parts, especially because, um, traditionally, when a man is “down yonder”, it’s for other, less medical reasons if you know what I’m saying. It just seems really odd to be talking to some dude about the weather or the Red Sox or whatever and then two minutes later have him peering at your nether regions with a cool and clinical eye while you pretend there’s nothing weird about the situation. Because YEAH, THERE IS!

My OB's office has four doctors and only two are female. Although I requested to have a female as my primary, the last time I went in who popped through the door but a Hot’n’Flirty twenty-nine year old with a clipboard and a crooked smile? Thankfully, it wasn’t an exam visit but more a “Howyoudoin’?” visit, which meant no purple bootie usage for me. My next visit is an exam and somehow I got scheduled with Dr. Hot Crotchlooker. Actually, I don’t know what would be worse, a hot guy or some 80 year old Grandpa-type.

While I freaking out about all this to my husband, he attempted to use what I feel to be very flawed logic to calm me down. His first point was “Men don’t really even like looking at crotches”, so I had to bust out my 274,323,3423,003 back issues of Lady Crotch magazine to show him that in fact, they do. Then he pointed out that the loveable Dr. Cliff Huxtable was an OB/GYN and I said, “Dude, would you want fricking Bill Cosby looking at your crotch?!” Nice try, honey.

The city of New York lost 343 firefighters on September 11, 2001, and Lt. Charles William Garbarini was one of them. Just 44 years old, Charley left behind a wife and two young sons, as well as a legacy as a sweet, fun-loving man who loved his family and his job and brought much joy to all who knew him.

Born in the middle of nine children, Charley was the boisterous center of a boisterous family. As a child, he would dance on the coffee table to make his siblings laugh, and often tricked his sisters into doing the dishes for him. He and his future wife, Andrea DeGeorge, both attended Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx. After a decade-long engagement, they eventually made their home in Pleasantville, NY, and had two boys, Dylan and Phillip. There’s was a love affair that spanned over twenty years. Charley still surprised his wife with flowers now and then, perhaps to make up for the gentle teasing she endured from her wisecracking husband.

Charley became a firefighter in 1986. Nick-named “The Comedian”, his business card read “Firefighter Charley Garbarini. You light ‘em, we fight ‘em.” Battalion 9, Unit 3 was one of the first teams to arrive on the scene on the morning of September 11th. His truck, Engine 23, lost five other men that day as they rushed into the Towers to aid others even without fully knowing the magnitude of what had happened. Communications that day were spotty, with cell phones down and chaos reigning, but Charley and his fellow firefighters remained calm and professional and did what they had been trained to do: rescue people. Less than two hours after the first plane hit the South Tower it collapsed, taking down with it the very people who had first arrived to help those trapped and in peril.

A memorial service for Lt.Garbarini was held on October 6th, 2001, which was led by a bagpipe procession and attended by hundreds fellow firefighters, EMTs and police officers. Friends who attended said that although there were many tears, there was also a lot of laughter as they shared stories and celebrated Charley’s life. “Charley wouldn’t have wanted it any other way,” remarked one friend.

Charley’s vibrant presence lives on in the hearts of his many friends and family members. A charity golf event is held in his honor by the Milltown Fire Department every year in New Jersey. And Engine 23 was recently refurbished as a training rig, with Charley’s and the five other fallen firefighters’ names proudly displayed on a plaque on the side. I hope by sharing a little of Lt. Charles William Garbarini’s life, he will remain in your memory as he will in mine. Love and sorrow to his wife and to his boys. It was an honor to get to know your big-hearted Charley.