The Wearin' O' the Green!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! The other day I made some chocolate chip cookies and I picked out all the green M&M's from our candy dish and stuck them into the cookies. Tonight I will make corned beef and cabbage. I've managed to make it every year we've been married (and I think I made a good attempt the year before we were married, but failed miserably) and every year I still forget how to do it. And every year we eat the meat and potatoes and throw the cabbage away because cabbage is gross. This year will be no exception! It's all ready to go.

By late yesterday afternoon Martin was feeling so much better--a great relief. He even suggested a family walk! So we strapped Anja into her rolling throne (I will have to sometime take and post a video of her face when we bring the stroller in from the back room--it's HILARIOUS) and took a nice walk over to the Levee. It was GORGEOUS evening! I knew the day was nice because Anja and I managed to get out once in the afternoon to go get Martino some Gatorade and a cherry coke, so I was soooooo happy when he was feeling better and suggested a walk. Today is supposed to be EVEN BETTER, if that's even possible!!! Martin is taking the car to work in order to run some lunchtime errands, and Anja and I have two downtown errands to run, so we are guaranteed to get out at least once to enjoy the gorgeousness of the day. Yay!

Anja's started doing this really cool thing lately where she wakes up around 4:00 and doesn't go back to sleep until around 6:00. It's so awesome. And last night there was the added bonus that when she DID finally go back to sleep she slept so restlessly, and since Martin had been sick, I worried that SHE was going to be sick, so instead of sleeping with her I just sat up and read and watched her. It was great. Martin slept on the couch again last night as a precaution. I really like taking Anja's naps with her, all snuggled up together, but night sleeping in the same bed with her is a different story. She spends all night rolling from one side of the bed to another, flip-flopping around, etc. AND, she's evidently inherited Martin's habit of sleep-talking. Last night on different occasions in her sleep she asked for music, panted like a dog, and started saying "Da-da! Da-da?" It was mostly really funny... except for the fact that it woke me up. And when Martin talks in his sleep it's more easy to just chuckle and ignore him. When Anja talks in her sleep it's just kind of weird.

So I came to the part in the book I'm reading where things go wrong for this midwife. Things like babies dying and end-of-labor medical emergencies. Maybe it's not the best choice of reading after all for a person who is three days away from her due date. Oh well, it's still interesting. This one story in particular was VERY interesting--the midwife had a client that she wouldn't deliver at home because of a previous cesarean (she did homebirths but also worked as a hospital midwife) so the client decided she didn't want to pay for a midwife at all if she was just going to have to deliver in a hospital anyway. (This girl was a major snot-head in the first place.) But she DID want to hire the midwife to be her "labor coach." Reluctantly, the midwife agreed. So THEN, the woman's pregnancy turned complicated and the doctor warned her that things could get dangerous for the baby and that she should come to the hospital early in labor. The woman ignored the doctor, and ignored the midwife when she tried to explain the same thing to her, and the doctor and midwife both thought that this woman was going to try to trick them into giving her a home birth. They didn't trust her. Well, as it turned out, labor never really started, but the complications that she was warned of came anyway, and her baby died. Except, he DIDN'T die. They went to great lengths and ended up reviving him, but he had been without oxygen for so long that he was SEVERELY retarded. After some days of life support, they pronounced him brain dead and the parents prepared for his death, then they cut off life support. But the baby still didn't die! So a few weeks later, this woman and her husband put their baby in an institution and SUED THE DOCTOR AND THE MIDWIFE! Isn't that crazy?!?!?!? Anyway. It's a really good book. And most of the stories in it are really happy, or really funny, and everyone should read it... but that one story was just nuts.

Okay, anyway... I'm going to go lie down with Anja until she wakes up cause I don't think I have time to take a shower before she wakes up at this point.