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I don’t write about race issues, because, well, I’m white. What the hell do I know? Nearly nothing. When Navelgazing Midwife and Sagefemme asked on their blogs about the lack of midwives of color, they didn’t get much response…because there aren’t a lot of midwives of color, and all us lily-white types felt we didn’t have much to say. At least, I didn’t, other than regret that it should be this way.

Midwifery came back into the US as part of the second wave of feminism in the 70s, a wave that had many powerful women of color in it but is still symbolized, in white America’s eyes, by Gloria Steinem and women who looked like her. The third wave is still ongoing, is definitely more racially mixed, but has a lower profile in the media, and so doesn’t really have a lot of highly-visible leaders…except for a few older, mostly white, women.

So, although I have not had time to read it much yet, I did want to add Minority Midwifery Student to my blogroll, so that I can learn, and not be tempted to see midwifery as some sort of fancy-dancy white woman thing, which, frankly, it still tends to be in this country.

At any rate, I think all the midwives I linked above get into this issue much more intelligently than I can. Mostly I wanted to introduce another new link, the Black Breastfeeding Blog, because I think it’s an excellent example of personal=political. Breastfeeding, as intensely personal as it is, is increasingly a political act, much like birth, but more visible and less fraught with medical drama. The rights to breastfeed may even now be becoming a wedge to pry open a whole host of changes in the workplace, to make it reflect the needs of a workforce that is composed of many many people who gestate, birth, and nurse children as well as coming to work 40 hours a week. At least, I hope it will.

At any rate, while it takes time and lots of advocacy to get white women and women of color to change their minds about what makes a good birth, breastfeeding is a simple and powerful way to introduce women to their rights as gestating, birthing, breastfeeding human beings. Or rather, to what their rights should be. Women can stand behind unassailable, un-arguable medical evidence about the value of breastfeeding to demand more rights for women in general–among them, the right not to be hassled by Bill Maher, Barbara Walters, or any other ignorant types who think a breastfeeding woman should be locked away in a dark room until her child is weaned.

The recent protests at Applebee’s restaurants and today’s victory for a medical student who wanted time to pump breast milk (and thereby avoid severe pain and possible infection) during a nine-hour exam have kept this issue in the spotlight. And that benefits all women.

Of course, I’ve talking mostly about African American women, and when I say “women of color” I have to mention that Latina women face a different set of challenges for birth, midwifery, and breastfeeding, none of which I feel equipped to talk about intelligently from my small perspective. So if you see any good Latina (or any other nonwhite) midwifery, birth rights, etc. blogs out there…send ‘em my way.

I had to give a brief response when joining a local ICAN chapter about who I was and why I wanted to join. I thought what I ended up with was a nice succinct guide to my birth history and radicalization. Enjoy.

My name is emjaybee, my husband’s name is Matthew, and my son Nathan is nearly 2.

Birth story: water broke at 42 weeks. “Midwives” did not let me labor naturally, insisted on pitocin (because I was 42 weeks and it was “policy”)–and I didn’t know my rights, so I went along. Needed an epidural after 6 hours of pain, no shower allowed (because of monitor) no food allowed (because of stupidity). Progress halted at 8 cm for an hour, that was considered bad enough to c/sec.

Surgery was extremely traumatic. Hospital was filthy, cruel, and treated me like dirt, and I felt lucky to get out of there alive. I suffered with depression and trauma, and frequent thoughts of suicide, for a whole year and more. Breast milk never came in, and I had to formula feed.

I had a hemorrhage 10 days postpartum that no one could explain (because it’s “impossible” for a surgeon to leave any tissue inside; apparently the blood gushing between my legs was somehow imaginary), but I must have passed the tissue and only spent one night in the hospital before I felt like I wasn’t going to die. This did not help my recovery. I was a mess, because I trusted people in a system which did not care about me or my son.

Not surprisingly, I’m radicalized, and will homebirth if I ever birth again. I also finally found the courage to admit I want to be a CPM, and am planning towards that goal.

If you have a daughter, she is a full human being.

If you have a daughter, she is a full human being deserving of all the things a good parent should give their child; a good education, the right to grow up and make decisions for herself, the right to strive and succeed and fail, like any other full human being.

I do not care what your particular wangdoodly interpretation of a particular Holy Writ tells you, she is not a piece of meat, a piece of property, a uterus for bartering, or less human than any male person on the planet, no matter how saintly his daily life, no matter if he is Jesus himself.

If you don’t believe these things, you are not striving to be a parent. You are aspiring to be a slave owner. You are someone who believes it’s ok to stunt a woman’s mind, deprive her of rights and freedoms she deserves, and even control her sexual and reproductive decisions by pressuring her into marriage with someone you choose. You are no better than Warren Jeffs the child-bride rapist, even if you use prettier language. Even if you yourself are a woman.

If you tell your daughter she is less human, less free, than a son, or than any man, because she is a daughter, you are not a parent. You have revoked your right to be her parent, to give her advice, to be part of her life, and she will be fully justified in getting away from you at the first opportunity and never seeing you again.

Your child is not your property. She or he does not belong to you. Accept that or accept that you are not and cannot be a parent.

…remember that part of your medical training about “do no harm”? Might be time to take a refresher course, okay?

The maternal mortality rate in the U.S. is the highest it has been in decades, according to statistics released this week by CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.

According to the figures, the U.S. maternal mortality rate was 13 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2004. The rate was 12 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2003 — the first year the maternal death rate was more than 10 since 1977 (Stobbe, AP/Washington Post, 8/24). A total of 540 women were reported to have died of maternal causes in 2004, 45 more than were reported in 2003, according to the report (NCHS report, 8/21).

A rise in the number of caesarean sections — which now account for 29% of all births — could be a factor in the increased maternal mortality rate, some experts said. According to a review of maternal deaths in New York, excessive bleeding is one of the primary causes of pregnancy-related death, and women who have undergone several previous c-sections are at particularly high risk of death.

Now while the rising c/section rate and the risks it brings are one of my favorite rants, the other factors mentioned in the article are appalling. African American women are THREE TIMES as likely to die from childbirth as white women. That’s an astonishing statistic. And a sad one. Lack of care pre-and -post partum can be deadly.

Obesity (possibly) and improved reporting may also have increased the stats, which lets OBs off the hook a little bit, but our pitiful health care system not at all.

Universal care cannot possibly come too soon. It won’t take the morbidity rate down to zero, but it will allow us to keep women of childbearing age in a system of care, so that lack of access to care during pregnancy will not be a contributing factor. If how deaths related to pregnancy are reported vary so much now that it’s affecting our stats, then our stats still aren’t good; we need a national system to truly determine the effectiveness of care and the pinpoint the problems. How many of those women who died had no care at all until they showed up in labor, maybe with undiagnosed complications that could have been treated? How many were malnourished (which you can be while being obese), had low-grade infections (even an infected gum can cause premature births), had any number of problems that may not have been fatal if caught early?

Of course, I could say the same about all health issues, which is why I’m a universal care proponent. Preventative care is critical to everyone, but under our current system, will always be sacrificed by people without a lot of ready cash. People die from lack of preventative care every day; I’d be willing to bet a great many of the mothers in this study fall into this category.

So maybe it’s not the OBs I should be hollering at, per se, but a government run by people with lots of money who will always have access to care, but who take every chance they get to deny that access to their fellow citizens. Fellow citizens who work just as hard, who pay their taxes, but who are allowed to die for the sin of being too poor to buy their healthcare.

I am so much a newbie and a bit-player in the whole birth-rights movement, but I still get so angry and riled up when I read stories like this one (warning; original link has some birth pictures, not gory, but nekkid).

The forces arrayed against women who want to have control of their own births seem so large and powerful. We trust doctors to tell us what to do, how to take care of ourselves and our children, how to be healthy and stay safe. We lionize them in shows like House , ER, St. Elsewhere, even MASH . Saintly, all-knowing doctors abound in our imagination. They may have messy personal lives, but you hardly ever see actual practices being confronted; just the occasional Bad Doctor, or lazy doctor, or drug-addicted doctor, whatever. Probably because the shows’ writers know how to write good soap opera, but only know what their consultants tell them about hospital practice.

Anyway, Sagefemme’s post echoes the frustration of people like myself and midwives in particular, who remain powerless to stop their clients from being abused and hurt by aggressive, hostile, and ultimately harmful practices.

I’m not talking natural vs medicated. I’m talking unhindered vs interfered-with birth. I’m talking about barely making it out without being cut one way or another. About your baby being handled roughly. About silence and intimacy not being a piece of your baby’s birth. There are even some homebirth midwives that don’t get the idea of unhindered birth. Really, it’s my new platform. It’s the reason why I’m so angry. We can’t keep bringing the hospital into the home! We have to do this radically different – ways that honor a woman’s physiological process of birth. We have to step back and ask if we’re doing things to really help a mamababy or are we just doing things to cover our ass in case we’re looked at by someone? Is this evidence-based or are we doing it because it’s what our peers believe is necessary?

There’s this mis-perception that the safest birth is the one with the most instruments, procedures, people, and processes involved. But every bit of interference in natural birth–from restricting the mother’s movements and ability to get protein and hydrate herself to dictating her positions to push and whether she has to use drugs–comes with its own risk.

Let’s take another natural process–say, eating. Now eating does have risks; we’ve all nearly choked to death on something, or eaten something that made us sick, or gave us an allergic reaction. At least some of those risks could be mitigated if we received all our nutrition via IV and feeding tubes, the way comatose people are fed. But of course, this would restrict our movements, introduce risks of infection and malnourishment, and be painful and psychologically damaging. It would rob us of our freedom in the name of protecting us from bodily mishaps.

Now let’s assume that for the convenience of the doctors observing them, those who wished to eat were required to lie on a table with their feet tilted higher than their head, being questioned and monitored constantly by anxious medical personnel, while trying to eat a ham sandwich, potato chips, and a coke. What are the chances, now, that the patient will have trouble swallowing, and may even start to choke? And what if every time this happened, the surgeons rushed into to install a “safer” feeding tube “saving” the patient’s life?

Birth is no different. The muscles in a woman’s uterus that handle birth are just as capable as the muscles in her throat and gut that digest her food. But being pressured “for her own good” by people she trusts in white coats, to lie down and push on her back, to be prevented from moving because she’s attached to cables and monitors, to have strangers hovering over her frowning as they check her machine readouts and dilation, has a physiological and psychological effect. She doubts herself, she feels afraid and threatened, and her body reacts by tensing and slowing down.

In rushes the surgeon with the scalpel, ready to save her from the emergency that might not have existed if she’d just been left the hell alone.

This model has got to go. It’s harmful, it’s degrading, it’s disrespectful, and it’s bad practice. It’s sexist, because it assumes women’s bodies are inherently broken and incapable, and they need someone to save them from their inability to birth. Practices that separate and interrupt mother and baby bonding postpartum disrupt a key psychological event in the relationship of a mother and child, and their loved ones, in the name of control and hospital convenience. There are no good medical reasons to drag a normal health baby off to a nursery for observation. Leave him in his mother’s arms and observe him there, where he’s safest and she’s most at peace.

Women are people, not pieces of meat, and they deserve that personhood at all times, especially as they do the hard work of bringing new life into the world. They are not born broken, but they are being broken by a system that doesn’t care about them or their babies. And more of them are realizing it all the time.

Here are the key things you need to deal with a child’s meltdown:

1. The ability to remove the child from the environment they are melting down in;
2. The ability to provide the child with alternate/lesser/more comforting forms of stimulation.

How many of these do you think are available on your average overbooked, tarmac-parked, delayed, overheated, loud, uncomfortable airplane?

If you answered “none” then dingdingding! You win!

And you know, even before I had a toddler, I knew this! Because, being a person with a brain, I didn’t actually believe that 3-year-olds plotted how to torment adults with piercing screams. Having met some 3-year-olds, you see, and understanding that they have the attention span of a hummingbird. They are not capable of nefarious plots, other than trying to steal their brother’s cookie, which is strictly a crime of opportunity anyway.

What they are also not capable of is the kind of superhuman patience, endurance, and self-distraction it takes to get through an average hellish airplane flight without a lot of help from adults around them. Heck, I’m barely capable of it. It wouldn’t take much more to make me run screaming down the aisles, on many flights.

So when I read about people bitching about children misbehaving on flights, I wonder if they know any children, or have ever been one, shuttled around an airport with no chance to play and nothing to do. Personally, I find adults who have loud cellphone conversations, or take up all the elbow room with their laptops, or don’t shower, or leer at stewardesses, to be more odious than a bored child babbling at his mom or crying because his ears hurt. Because hey, my ears hurt too. Airplanes suck.

Which begs the question of why anyone flies with a child. And I have to assume the answer is “because it’s the only way they can get where they’re going in the time allotted.” Most Americans get maybe 2 weeks of vacation a year; if you’re going to take some time to see Grandma A at Christmas and some time with Grandma B in the summer, that means you can’t spend 3 days of each precious week driving to Tucson or Pennsylvania. If you want more parents to drive instead of fly with their children, agitate for more vacation time for American workers.

And anyway, as you’re shooting the stink eye at Mom and Dad while their child is flailing his arms and telling a loud story about dinosaurs, or stealing his brother’s cookie, you might remember that they do not want to be there. They not only have to endure the shrieking and misbehaving, they’re being judged and held responsible for dealing with it by an entire planeful of people. They’re the ones who have to convince the 2-year-old to take off his shoes and give up his sippy cup for the security guard, who have to pack a week’s worth of food and amusement into 3-ounce increments in carry on bags, who are, quite frankly, in hell. So really, they’re being punished much worse than you are…after all, when you get off the flight, the torture ends. They still have to get all the luggage and the kids to their destination.

So instead of bitching, you might, occasionally, show some compassion. Pick up a lost crayon, give a mom your unwanted bag of pretzels for Junior, talk to the 6 year old about Barbie while her mom’s in the can. Tell the apologetic dad with the unhappy baby about the time your kid cried for 3 days straight with an earache and drove you insane. Practice remembering that all human beings start out as annoying, screeching little heathens, yourself included, but most of them improve in time, so long as the adults around them make an effort to help. And then be one of those adults, if you have the chance.

I’m the kind of geeky person who reads sci-fi, and sociology and anthropology and history, all the kinds of books that discuss how people are, why they are, what they could be or couldn’t be. Trying to figure out why things are this way, and what could possibly make them better.

At the bottom of it, politics is about this too. Your personal political beliefs aren’t just about “government should do/not do X,” they’re about what you think human beings are. What you think they’re capable of. Or not. Maybe your politics is really just a survey of what you’re cynical about, and what idealism you have left.

Anyway, on this blog I write quite a bit about how unsatisfactory the choices are that most human beings seem to have. For me, privileged white gal that I am, that translates into choking off some things that would make me happy in order to have what I must to survive. I don’t mean vacations to Paris, necessarily, so much as I mean a more satisfying life, that lets me combine my work with the rest of what I do, that gives me room to live.

Work and the rest of my life fight each other, and it seems like such a stupid setup. For one thing, I could so easily do the kind of work I do in a way that lets me have more free time, without losing any productivity, if the ass-in-seats mentality weren’t so entrenched. There is no logical reason to care how many hours in a given day I work on project X, provided it comes in on time; in fact, if I could work from home, or come in a few days a week, my employer could presumably save money on the power and water I don’t use and the building wear and tear I don’t cause. I could afford better childcare, I could spend less on gas, I could deal with real-life hassles like going to the bank or doing laundry or having a sick child without having to disrupt other people’s schedules.

But work is work, and life is life, and in our culture, we seem to think the two should never mix; that people would become sloppy and fail to do a good job without constant supervision. As though they don’t do that now in their little gray cubicles, if that’s how they’re inclined.

The system could change; we have the technology now. The system doesn’t change because it’s about control, and who has the power over whom, and people in charge seldom want to give up even pointless displays of power. Our corporate brains are still in the 19th century, and we are all still like Bob Cratchit, chained to our desks in a miserable office on Christmas Eve so that the boss can feel like he’s properly in charge.

Anyway, what I was talking about before was that human beings have this strange idea that whatever arrangements we already have for the way people live cannot change. Despite historical evidence to the contrary, despite speculations by many many writers about how we could live differently and still thrive. What is frustrating is to read something (like the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson) and see how they’ve fleshed out these concepts, and know that things probably aren’t going to change soon enough to make your life better. Not for any good reason, but because people cling to their assumptions long past the expiration date. And they use those outdated assumptions to vote with, too; they mock people who ask “why can’t it be better? Why can’t we live better?” like birds trained never to leave their cages.

I read blogs of people who live outside the mainstream, and oh, I’m jealous. But also aware that they are either accepting a lot of stress and poverty for doing it, or have more resources to cushion letting go of their fulltime jobs, teaching kids at home if they want to, thumbing their nose at the system. It’s not a luxury I have had, or am likely to have. And that has had a really profound effect on what I’ve done with my life, and what I can do with it. I’ve had to make choices that keep me awake at night because I’m filled with anger and regret. I’ve had to stare down the years that I have left and wonder if it will get better, because many days, I’m not too optimistic.

I admit it; I’m greedy. Not for things, but for freedoms, for a little more air. For a chance to do good work without chains or cages being necessary. For not having to choose between the cage and the poorhouse.

According to this link, Public Advocate for NYC Betsy Gotbaum is giving local hospitals heat for their lack of transparency:

The Maternity Information Act requires that hospitals provide site-specific statistics on delivery procedures to all incoming maternity patients and all members of the public upon request. In 2005, the Office of the Public Advocate determined that none of the 44 hospitals providing labor and delivery services in New York City were in compliance with the MIA; most did not provide any information, and the one hospital that did attempt to comply provided a pamphlet containing information that was eight years old.

Well isn’t that interesting. I birthed in Brooklyn, and I can assure you, they didn’t give me any of those stats either. Here’s something that also surprises me not at all:

The Office of the Public Advocate further determined that the cesarean section rates among hospitals in New York City were striking. Overall, public hospitals had lower cesarean rates than privately operated facilities; however, with the exception of New York University Downtown Hospital, all hospitals had cesarean rates well above the 15 percent maximum rate recommended by the World Health Organization….The report also noted, In 2004, the average cesarean rate in New York City was 28.6 percent, a 2 percent increase over 2003, when the rate was 26.6 percent. Many New York City hospitals now have a c-section rate over 30 percent.

I’ll bet it’s closer to 35% by now.

Transparency is a huge issue in all aspects of healthcare. It can be impossible to find out how different hospitals compare in terms of outcomes and quality of care, and the hospitals themselves do everything in their power to resist giving out that info. Which is especially galling under an American system that constantly tells us we are “consumers” with the right to choose how we get our healthcare. Right to choose is meaningless if you don’t have accurate information about what you have to choose from.

Thankfully, the Lamaze organization is partnering with the Coalition for Improving Maternity Services to try to create some more transparency for pregnant women seeking maternity care:

An incredible group of grassroots advocates with leadership from Sandra Bitonti Stewart and Elan McAllister (under the umbrella of and with the accolades of the Coalition for Improving Maternity Services and with support from Lamaze International among others) will officially launch the Transparency in Maternity Care Project in New York City on July 21, 2007. In the meantime the Grassroots Advocacy Committee has been collecting hospital data on hospital care practices and interventions and have developed a birth survey that will be used to gather women’s personal stories of their birth experiences. In the future women will be able to go to the website and find information about hospitals and providers…not just intervention rates but, just as important (if not more so), women’s personal experiences.

Oh man. I can’t WAIT to add my personal experiences at Brooklyn Methodist. Whoo doggie. That’s going to be a fun entry on their website. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the mom.

It’s hard to explain, in a group of other moms, that you didn’t buy your son any shoes until he was almost a year old and absolutely needed them, in order to save money. That your hair looks bad because a good cut is about 50.00 and you have to space those out as long as you can, or cut your own. That paying money to fly in a plane, stay in a hotel, or rent a car is the kind of thing you only do in emergencies, and sometimes not even then. That you’ve borrowed money from friends and family to get by, and may have to do so again. That you’ve never had enough spare cash to open a savings account. That you are still paying (or in my case, presently not paying) a student loan on an undergrad degree that’s 15 years old and should have been done years ago.

It’s hard to explain all that, because of shame. Because people judge you, and because (if you’re honest) you’ve judged others, for having financial troubles, for not being able to figure out how to get what you need and keep ahead of your expenses.

We judge because we all want to believe that it can’t happen to us–that it happened to someone else because of a dumb choice they made that we would not. Sometimes, that’s true. I would be worse off if I’d picked up a drug habit, or had a shopping addiction.

But sometimes…well, sometimes you’re just poor despite your best try. You work hard, you try hard, you say no a thousand times a year to things you want that are too expensive. You go without things you need. But it’s never enough. You never get in the clear. You hope someday, that you will, that the steps you’re taking now in your career or your life will pay off. But you don’t have any reassurances about that. And in the meantime, life goes by and you have to walk dangerously close to the edge. You hope you don’t fall off. But it wouldn’t take much to push you over. Sickness, layoff, natural disaster, car collision, theft. It doesn’t take much at all.

I didn’t want to talk about this in relation to myself…still don’t. It’s like admitting a weakness, like airing dirty laundry. But flea wrote a post at her blog that reminded me how many people there are out there who look all right, who seem to be making it, but who are lying awake at night, wondering if they’ll get their utilities cut off, their car repossessed, their credit dragged down so far that there’s no hope of clearing it. Wondering what they’ll do with all their stuff if they’re evicted. Wondering if the local food bank will be able to help them feed their kids.

We’ve had some of those troubles, and avoided some of them…so far. I don’t know when it will get better, or how. I keep going forward because, what choice do I have? Because I don’t want to give up, because giving up is worse.

This isn’t a begging post, or an asking for sympathy post. I take responsibility for my choices, as much as possible. We are still above water, for now.

But I don’t want to have to pretend it’s all ok when it’s not, or be ashamed to be in this situation. I want anyone else who’s reading me, who’s in the same situation or worse, to know that someone out there is *not* judging them, is not going to give them a lecture about What You Should Have Done to Avoid This. There are far too many people in this boat with me for me to think we’re all a bunch of spendthrift idiots…even if I deserve everything that’s gotten me here, I’m pretty sure there are at least a few others who don’t.

I love LOVE Pinwheel cookies, and as a result have no self-control about eating them. I once ate myself sick on them at my grandma’s house as a kid, and STILL I love them, in all their marshmallowy chocolate-coated goodness. (NOT fudge-coated…those are an abomination!).

Anyway, I only buy Pinwheels under conditions of extreme duress requiring extraordinary measures. Which is a fairly accurate description of my life at the moment.

First, of course, is the fact that I’m still laid off. That sucks, because I haven’t even gotten any nibbles on my resumes (about 10) that I’ve sent out. Not a call or an email. So I called the temp agency to get re-signed up…but I know the pay isn’t going to be much. I may even end up having to take a crappy admin job to get insurance, and I HATE being an admin. Hate making travel plans for portly, balding sweaty executives with cheap ties and high blood pressure. Hate filing documents that No One Will Ever Read Again. Hate cheerful company memos. Hate taking messages. Hate hate hate. But there are plenty of those jobs around, and they’re easy if you are capable of minimal brainwave activity, so they may be my only option as the cash continues to run out. Yes, I should follow my bliss…but sometimes, I must first follow my need to keep eating and sleeping indoors.

The second thing is that Matt has been sick for 3 days….horrible bowel-problems sick. To the point where this morning he begged me to call the EMTs because he couldn’t even walk to the car so I could drive him to his doctor’s. So I did, trying not to think about ambulance bills. And then I was PUT ON HOLD BY 911, ya’ll. Before they even knew my emergency. Good thing Matt hadn’t been shot or anything!

The EMTs were here fast, though, and they were nice. I think were trying to save us cash. After they determined Matt’s blood pressure didn’t put him in the danger zone, they managed to help him to the car so he wouldn’t have to ride in the ambulance. They didn’t take our insurance info, so I don’t know if we’ll be billed for their help or not. At any rate, I got Matt to his doc’s and didn’t have to sit in the ER for six to 12 hours with Nathan. Matt is feeling better after his doc put him on Pedialyte and antibiotics, but I’m still zoned from 3 days of nonstop baby and husband care. Compounded by the third thing…

…the goddamn rain. It has rained EVERY day, often TWICE a day, for the last TWO WEEKS, and it’s taking a toll. I can’t take Nathan outside much at all (he heads straight for the nastiest oil-slicked puddles he can find) so we have to drive him somewhere twice a day so he can play and get out of the house. Our backyard remains a poison-ivy infested mosquito swamp that we can do nothing about till it dries out. Our front yard is OK, but the first two inches below the grass are all mud. The rain has also led to an explosion of web worms, so there are freakin’ caterpillars everywhere. And it drives the roaches and ants indoors…I’ve had to fumigate my kitchen pantry several times, and grout up entrance holes, but I doubt I’ve got them all yet.

There’s hardly ever any sunshine, and the heat with 100% humidity is unbearable. So we’re all stir crazy. I am sick of taking Nathan to the bookstores and the mall playground, the only places he can mostly play safely and stay dry. I am sick of this goddamn weather. If Nathan were in daycare, he would get much more stimulation and have more fun. But I can’t put him in daycare because I still don’t have a job.

See, it’s all one big Circle of Suck!