And now 2 months!

Little James has changed so much already . . . he still looks about the same, the one and two month pictures are not that different. But he is so much easier to take pictures of now. The funniest pictures I have are the hundreds (not kidding) that we took trying to get a photo worthy of the US State Department’s passport guidelines. He only had his eyes open for about 30 minutes every day and we took pictures many days in a row. Not looking the direction of the camera, eyes half closed, mouth open, head tilted, hands next to face . . . the list goes on and on. His passport is very cute though and it will be hilarious traveling for the next 5 years on this picture we took of him when he was so young. Thanks for checking out the photos!!

This is James still in the hospital, he looked like a little old man, but a little cuter. His “two best friends,” the tiny little skinny hands, had to be with him at all times.

He did sleep a lot right after he was born, but Brad and I really didn’t sleep at all. We were watching and listening so closely to every movement he made.

Brad and James in the rocking chair right next to my hospital bed.

And now – Family plus James!

Here is James with his Great-Grandpa Don and next with Great-Grandma Tee.

And of course, with Aunt Grace.

Here is Grandma Diane with James (still in the hospital!)

Here he is with his godmothers, Angie and Heidi.

Baby James with Great-Grandma Alice and Mom

James with Grandpa

James with Grandma Laura in Kuwait (this is a little preview for the next post!!!)

Well, I was never huge pregnant. But this picture was me at 37 weeks (I think the day before I went to the hospital). I got to “full term” and was very happy, but every day I could feel the baby moving lower and lower and I wasn’t sure how many days that could continue.

On September 1, I started having contractions in the early evening (pretty normal for me) and starting walking around the neighborhood as fast as I could (Brad says it was very slow). My mom was determined that she needed a picture of us leaving for the hospital, even though I thought they would send us back home. So, this is me on the way out the door.

This was at the hospital at around 2:00 or 3:00am on September 2nd. I had gotten to the point that it was wearing me out to walk and I was getting ready to get a little bit of IV pain killers. The nurses laughed at me the whole night that I was walking around still smiling. I didn’t have a tough active labor, but I wouldn’t have been able to do it without Brad and my mom both giving me everything they had. They were both way more exhausted afterwards than I was!

And. . . . baby James. September 2nd, 5:22am, 6 pounds, 1 ounce.

A few highlights:

Cologne, Germany -  amazing cathedral, made Notre Dame look like a starter kit

Amsterdam – lots of tall blondes on bicycles, even girls with short skirts! Van Gogh is cool.

The Hague – Escher is really cool.

Brussels – The musical instrument museum. Wow, my music history class and all my band history classes should have met in this place.

Luxembourg – Good municipal bands and a really pretty big river valley cutting through the city.

Paris – The French are nice. The Louvre is huge, but not as crazy as the line for the Eiffel Tower.

Bordeaux – Our mid-vacation vacation. A nice walk in the park.

Bilbao – No one can capture the amazingness of the Guggenheim Museum bulding – partially because you can´t take pictures inside Naked beach.

Madrid -Bustling metropolis that never stops, except when the metro workers go on strike the day we departed. Yikes. The Spanish are really nice.

Barcelona – Madrid may be at the heart of Spain, but Barcelona is the soul. Could definitely live here. Picasso is deeper than I knew and Gaudi seemed a little crazy.

Coming up: Geneva and Bern, with little stops in Montpellier (France) and Zurich. We catch our breath in Frankfurt and then we´re back in the US!!

School – finals and grades. I hate grading. I totally became a teacher because I really wanted to write on the overhead every day, not because I wanted to hassle with stupid letters and numbers and percentages. It’s tough, I have to be so accurate reporting grades. For me, one little slip-up might be one mistake in 700 or 800 entries, but for that student it can be an incredible difference. Too bad teachers don’t get grades on percentages.

Travel – We’re off on our crazy European vacation on June 11, less than two weeks from now. We will visit 12 cities, staying at no frills hotels/motels/hostels and traveling by train. Many excellent pictures to come on Brad’s Travelogue. Koln, Amsterdam, Brussels, Luxembourg, Paris, Bordeaux, Bilbao, Madrid, Barcelona, Geneva, Bern, and Frankfurt to fly out. Was that 12? I’m too lazy to go back and count again

Baby – Doing very well, he moves around a lot but causes me very few problems (unless you count the fast growing, super fingernails!). We just bought our first baby stuff, a high chair, little toy boxes, and a few other things. Uh-oh, it’s starting to feel real . . .

Leaving Kuwait – A few interesting tidbits about leaving your apartment in Kuwait behind for the summer. We have realized that we will be back in the US with no assets. No car, no home, and just our small suitcases that we’ll travel around Europe with. Minimizing your life to 100 things? That’s not bad, I think I can do 40 for the summer. Also interesting, we were instructed to wrap all our electronics in plastic so they don’t get dust inside. We leave Kuwait on a 12:30 AM flight, the teachers call it the “Midnight Run,” the “Freedom Flight,” and many other interesting names. There are a lot of people leaving Kuwait for the summer, so I’m sure that will be an experience.

Well, that’s all for now, more diatribes later, thanks for checking in!

My first year teaching, I remember starting the countdown in January. “Oh my gosh, thank goodness I made it to the second half of the year.” The next two years started to hurt in about March. We would start to get incredibly busy with spring trip, contests, elementary concerts, and everything under the sun. In Kuwait, our busiest part of the year was all to do with paperwork, the IBO’s Middle Years Program visit and moderation paperwork, and it was a little nutty, but nothing like festival season. May is just sneaking by into June and somehow I didn’t notice.

Brad and I have tried to figure out how the year went by so quickly. My theory: weird seasons.

It is too simple to just say there aren’t seasons here. There was definitely a cool down in the fall, a little chillier time in Jan/Feb and then a warm up. The “chillier” time was not that cold, and the warm ups and cool downs are very gentle. There was no “in like a lamb, out like a lion.” We have had the occasional sand storm, but I don’t have any idea what season that belongs to. What really threw me off, I think, was that the fall felt all like August or September . . . all the way into December. Then we had our winter vacation, we took some time off, we traveled, saw family. Then January until April felt like May and now it’s summer and the end of the school year. The regular markers of each month going by were all extended, and then there were fewer of them. THE WHOLE YEAR SHORTENED!!! I have decided to call this phenomenon of having your year sneak by because of seasons “Season Affective Disorder” . . . . already taken you say? Bummer. I thought it fit quite well.

ETHICS, MORALS, RESPONSIBILITY, JUSTICE. That’s what we’re talking about.

This one has been brewing for a while. I’ve been trying to come up with a fair assessment of health care. With some new found friends from Canada (how have I never known that not all Canadians say “aboot?”) and experiencing health care in a “2nd world” country, I think I have a better handle on things than I did having only lived in the United States. Watching any news outside of the US is interesting. After having just been to Greece over the winter break, I felt connected to the workers riots in the streets, but then found that my parents and grandparents who accompanied us, had heard nothing of the riots on the US news. The same thing happened in Bangkok, I reassured my parents we would be okay with the Red Shirt rallies, they hadn’t heard anything about them until it turned deadly after we got back. The news about US healthcare is laughed at a bit overseas. The US seems out-of-date, low on grace, and full of squabblers. Here’s my opinion, for what it is worth.

I’ll equate health care to a couple of different issues; education and nutrition. These are both issues that one could  view as “rights” and as “earned privileges.” It is only those making an income well above the poverty line that are shopping at “Whole Foods,” paying for preschools, and sending their kids off to enriching camps or workshops. But I think most people would agree that it would be Unethical, Unjust, and Irresponsible to deny people of these three basic necessities. I struggled with this a bit when I first moved to Oregon. I was teaching a lot of illegal immigrants. If there was an ICE rumor in the community, a bunch of students wouldn’t show up at school. I remember thinking, out loud, that I shouldn’t be paying taxes for these kids to go to school. They weren’t citizens, their parents were breaking the law. But a wise middle school band director (Jaimie Hall, I think of you often) set me straight. With some very straightforward language, and probably a few choice words, without even knowing it he convinced me that it really was in EVERYONE’s best interest that these students came to us. They had a brighter future, they spoke and wrote the language, they would be employable and contributing citizens eventually. Truly every dollar spent to educate illegal students was a dollar well spent, it would pay off in dividends, and would eventually make society better. I’m sure many fall through the cracks, but these students would not be desperate, homeless, criminals with the education we were giving them. We also fed them breakfast and lunch. Because of the large number of students living below the poverty line, every student in my first school received government subsidized lunch tickets. It was such a small amount of money, even with 100 or more students eating two meals a day, for what it meant to those kids. For many of them, eating fruit, veggies, and meat at school would be the difference between growing up underfed, obese, relying on fast food and a healthy childhood. I’m sure this saves oodles of money in energy consumption and health care (uh oh, we’re circling back). Before we totally circle back, I’m convinced that education and nutrition, while both could be considered something to always strive for better, really are RIGHTS in a 1st world country. If we are allowing anyone in the borders of the US to go without proper nutrition or grow up illiterate, we are shooting ourselves in the foot. “Let’s shut down those soup kitchens, they haven’t earned a meal.”  ”Those 4 year olds don’t speak English, we shouldn’t waste our time teaching them to read.” It just sounds crazy. I believe there are very similar statements in health care. “He doesn’t have a job, he shouldn’t get health insurance” and “You already had that problem before you signed up for insurance” are both just as insane to me, but those two statements especially get a lot of mindless nods.

Here’s a big part of the problem: When you deny people health insurance, you deny them care. Maybe they can show up at the ER, and they won’t be turned away, but they won’t really be taken care of, they won’t be able to take care of themselves, and as a nation, we will end up worse off than if we had just helped them out in the first place.

Well, here’s my situation. I am currently a hardworking American, I’ve filed taxes since I was 17 (10 years, holy cow!), I paid way too much for health insurance when I was only considered 90% of full time at my first job, and I’m about to have a baby! Right now I live outside of the US and I benefit from a national health care system in Kuwait and additional private health insurance paid for by my employer. Unfortunately, there is a bit of a gap in my current health insurance; it only covers emergencies in the United States and, although it would completely pay for prenatal care and childbirth in Kuwait, that does not extend to the United States and I will be in the US for my due date. I am uninsured and seemingly uninsurable in the United States. It would have been dumb to pick up private health insurance to cover maternity before I was pregnant, I have both public and private care in Kuwait, and now, I have a pre-existing condition that would not be covered by a new health plan if I applied today. I’m not attempting to fleece any system in the United States, and I’ve really never taken any benefit from any other large social system in the US outside of the education, library, and public safety systems.

I find myself in the gap and truly, good health care is barely an option for me without health insurance. What if something goes wrong? I can imagine carrying a debt of $7,000-12,000 for the birth if I end up paying cash, but not $100,000 or $500,000 if something goes wrong. Especially if what goes wrong ends up with me, or the baby, or both, not coming home. Do I not deserve to go to a hospital with experts trained in maternity and birthing care because I am uninsured? Do I not deserve health insurance because the insurance companies with definitely pay out on me? Is it okay to just leave the helpless to “hope for the best” and cross their fingers? If I take the high road and show up to a hospital and am 100% honest with them that I cannot pay, I will end up negotiating what kind of debt I am able to take on and what the hospital’s lowest price really is. It won’t be in chickens, I hope.

Again it seems a question of what is Ethical, Just, and Responsible. If I am in the US, the only ethical option for the hospital is to treat me, and they are required to do so . . to a point. “Contractions 2 minutes apart, baby’s heart rate down, oh, no insurance, sorry, take it outside.” Fortunately, that won’t happen, but I believe we’re not far. The only just thing to do is to help out everyone, whether they have earned it or not. This is done currently, the hospitals really don’t turn anyone away, but I would get a different kind of care. Just imagine you were in a freak accident, maybe out of the country, that wasn’t covered by your car insurance. You’ll be able to get your car fixed, but you’ll go to “Shady McGee’s Car Repair” and make sure that your car is just running well enough to keep you going until you can afford to buy a new one. Just think, some people do this with their health care. Why do we require people to have car insurance, but we can’t handle that if it is health insurance?

Now here’s where we get to the hard part, the responsible thing, it to help me and my unborn child get the best care possible, to help us on our way to a better future than our currently uninsured one.

So here are the choices I face. I can be the responsible mother that I am in Kuwait with my health care here, I can go in for my monthly visit, meet with my obstetrician, visit the nurses at the birthing center and end up paying thousands out of pocket for a normal birth. OR, I can show up at the emergency room when my water breaks, tell them I have no health insurance and then never pay the bill. Truly, what is better for the country? What is a better use of your tax dollars? Helping me be responsible or forcing me to use my last option? Health insurance legislation in the US must view responsible health care as something everyone must have, a RIGHT, just like nutrition and education, or we all turn to desperate criminals.

If I make the ETHICAL, RESPONSIBLE decision to tell the hospital that I am uninsured then why can’t we make the decision in our country to truly treat everyone ETHICALLY and RESPONSIBLY?