Let it snow

On Monday, I was in a meeting with my team and our clients at their office buidling on Market Street downtown.

We were about two hours into a four hour meeting when one of my team members stopped mid-sentence and got up out of her chair and walked to the window.

"It's snowing!" she exclaimed.

And it was. Right here in San Francisco. Little white flakes falling from the sky as though that were a completely normal thing in a city where the temperature is, I think it is appropriate to use the word, never below freezing.

As we all stood there in the window looking out we saw that the people in the building opposite us were all doing the same thing - window after window had amazed faces in it. The ones who could open their windows were sticking their heads out of them like dogs in a moving car.

It lasted about 90 seconds, then turned to sleet, and then regular rain.

Later that afternoon, there was some very small hail, too.

Family traditions

Eric and I got a Christmas tree on Saturday and trimmed it on Sunday. It is just a wee bit larger than the tree we got last year (we're moving slowly) and it was really fun taking out the lights, the bead garlands and the ornaments and decorating the tree this year. You may notice the make-your-own-ornaments from last year which include Eric's bloodshot eyeball and my clown-drag queen snowperson. Make-your-own ornaments for this year are still to come. Watch out!

(We did not intentionally take this photo to hide my increasingly large belly, or to emphasize my foot; it just worked out that way.)

We also made cookies. Just like last year. They're very modern, and delicious.

These traditions make me feel like we are a real family. I love coming home to the tree and the lights and the cookies each night. It feels great to celebrate even these little things.

So they might be good on pizza

Savory-vegetable-flavored jelly beans came up at work today. What would be good? Cauliflower? Yam?

A colleague who had just been on the Jelly Belly factory tour chimed in to say that they have the Harry Potter inspired flavors of dirt, boogers, barf and more. She sampled them all (ew) and said they were disturbingly true to their names (double ew).

Then she shared this interesting fact: the barf one wasn't very hard to come up with - they just tweaked their pepperoni flavor and were able to totally nail it.

Triple ew.

Push

We started our natural childbirth class last Wednesday. It is a 36 hour class. This is a lot of time but giving birth feels to me like something I would rather risk being over-prepared for than under-prepared.

The first 3-hour class session laid the groundwork for working together. The other 4 couples in the class are a lot like us: white, 30-something* professionals who are having their first babies.

Other than introductions and a lot of administrative stuff, the theme of the class was "unlearning" what we have learned about childbirth from the media throughout our lives. We watched a video which showed maybe a hundred birth scenes from tv shows and movies from the past 30+ years.

This video included labor and birth scenes from the Coneheads movie, Junior (where Arnold Schwarzenegger, our illustrious governor, gives birth), and a Star Trek birth where, because the baby has already sprouted its horns in utero they opt for the "fetal transport" and the baby is beamed effortlessly and painlessly onto a table next to the mother.

They say that the technology supporting childbirth has come along way but I still haven't found any hospitals in the area offering a "fetal transport."


*Eric gets credit for still being 29. At least for another 17 days.

Come for the birth, stay for the food

Eric and I did the California Pacific Medical Center birthing facilities tour the other night to check out one of our three options for a hospital delivery in San Francisco.

If I were to write a brief synopsis of what was covered on the hour long tour, it would be something like this:

There are three doors you can come in; once in the building go check in with OB reception
Here are the elevators.
Here is the second floor where all the births happen. And what you can really look forward to is your farewell meal. It really is delicious.
Here's one of the labor and delivery rooms. Only 7 of them have jacuzzi tubs but they all have showers and a cot for your husband.
Here's a postpartum recovery room. This is where you spend a day or two recovering and this is where they serve you your special meal before you leave. They offer a really nice steak which is really quite tasty.
You can have a lactation consultant stop by to help you start breastfeeding.
Oh look - there's one of the food carts now. It is so great - you get a menu to order from while you are here. The food is very good.
We started a Halloween party for NICU graduates in 1967 and this year over 500 people came to it.
I'm not supposed to give you recommendations for pediatricians but I will. Talk to me after the tour.
This one woman who was on the tour last week had her baby here seven years ago and she's going to have her second one here in a few months. She came on the tour and she asked me "Do they still have they great steak dinner before you go home?" Some things have changed in seven years but not that. I guess that was what she was most looking forward to about coming back.
I hope you all enjoyed the tour. Good luck with your upcoming births and enjoy the food!

Behind The Blog

Me: I'm really struggling with my blog lately.

Eric: Why don't you try to write a funny blog post?

Me: Shut up.

Delivery

This morning I had a 10am meeting at my client's offices downtown. This was an excellent opportunity to pick up the deposit check from our Clementina Show landlords which we had missed over the holiday since the post office is open during the convenient hours of 9:30am-4pm, Monday through Friday.

Boy was I surprised when, after handing over the "sorry you missed our delivery" slip to the guy behind the counter he returned with a large box.

How odd that they would have put our deposit check in a large box, I thought to myself.

He handed me the box and it wasn't heavy enough to suggest that they had returned our deposit in gold bouillon, leaving me out of ideas for what it might be.

I opened it up with great curiosity and discovered: baby gifts. A yellow bib with a duck on it and a matching bottle cover, a sleep sack blanket thing and a little plastic bottle. And our deposit check, too.

A lovely, lovely surprise. Which I then had to bring with me to my client meeting. I think they particularly liked how the bib looked on me.