Dude, you are so hot.
However, I am older than your mother.
This body that you admire is held together only by the miracle that is Spandex. Let us bow our heads for a moment to give thanks to DuPont. It has seen four pregnancies and a caesarian section. I have stretch marks on parts of my anatomy that I bet you didn't even know could stretch. I sport a complete map of the Boston subway, worked in purple veins, on the backs of my thighs. I have not dyed my hair in interesting streaks of unnatural color: that is all-natural salt-and-pepper that you see. Those marks on my face are wrinkles, and that thing under my chin is called a wattle, which is only going to hang lower in years to come. That man over there, sitting on the deck of the hot tub, is my husband. He looks on my body with eyes blinded by love, seeing only the young, thin graduate student he met so many years ago.
The child with him is mine. Although she speaks in complete sentences and is almost potty trained, she is not yet weaned. She and I have given new meaning to the term "extended breastfeeding." I would probably be arrested in most states, including our own, if I were to give in to her demands to nurse right here and now. These breasts you keep staring at have been reduced to flat envelopes of skin, with nipples that point straight at my feet. Again, let us give thanks and praise to DuPont.
If your sole purpose in coming to the gym is to sport your wicked awesome tan and jiggle your perfect pectoral muscles at receptive booty, then for God's sake, wear your contact lenses in the hot tub. If you really do find professors who resemble your mother hot, then (all creepiness aside) you must get better lines. After two husbands, a string of lovers, and all the emotional detritus that builds up over nearly half a century of life, "Aren't you in my EE class?" and "What's your major?" come over as subtly as a fart in an elevator.
It is, however, my birthday today: one more mile-marker on the road to oblivion. I would rather believe that Angry Baker sent you into the hot tub to make me feel young again than that you could be so stupid.
Monday, October 03, 2005
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9 comments:
If Angry B. weren't holding our child and were a bit taller, he would've beat the boy senseless for hitting on my beautiful wife.
You have *four* children *and* tenure? You're my hero.
No, four pregnancies, one child. My plumbing doesn't work so good.
But, based on the morning sickness alone, since most of those pregnancies lasted through the first trimester, I should still be your hero. :-)
Happy Birthday!
Our Little Anachronism is also still suckling, though well beyond toddlerhood. Not so well beyond that state authorities would be involved in most places, but since our pediatrician thought we should have weaned at ONE, we don't bring it up at the doctor's visits anymore.
Thanks, Ahistoricality! Our Angry Toddler is not on the growth charts; she comes from two families whose matriarchs and patriarchs never broke the 5' mark. Our pediatrician was so upset that I refused to stop nursing and put her on formula that he threatened to get the authorities involved. We don't bring it up at doctor's visits anymore either.
Don't you guys know breast milk becomes deadly after 12 months? And, I'm the doctor, I know, I save lives every day.
I'm not going to tell you how old my oldest daughter was before she weaned, but I'll bet I nursed at least as long. It's worth it. Your pediatrician sounds like an ass. What was formula supposed to provide that breastmilk doesn't? He could have prescribed high calorie breastmilk additives if he were truly concerned about your child's weight.
Hi ibeth - he really is a pretty good pediatrician, as incredible as that sounds. He had us spike her daycare bottles of breastmilk with the high-calorie stuff, but she didn't like it and started reverse-cycling. Then he thought it was a behavioral issue, and got it into his head that if only she were weaned, even temporarily, she would "learn to eat."
The problem arose because of the piss-poor training in statistics that physicians receive (apparently). He understood that it didn't matter that she wasn't on the growth curve as long as she was showing some increase in weight gain. As with many breast-fed babies, though, her growth flattened toward the end of the first year, and this he diagnosed as "failure to thrive," contrary to all other diagnostic criteria.
I explained to him that I was a statistician. I used the same Box-Cox model that the CDC uses to generate the growth curves, and showed him how up to over 50% of babies of short stature were going to appear to taper off in weight gain because of the correlation between height and weight. I wrote up a 4-page document, with figures and (I though) pretty simple language.
[Swish!] (The sound the report made as it went right over his head.) Even though she was "on" the weight-by-height curve, her 0th percentile rank on the weight-by-age chart indicated big problems to him.
To assuage him we went through all the usual testing done on failure-to-thrive kids, all the while refusing to wean. When he threatened government intervention, Angry Baker said he was going to call a lawyer, and at that point he backed off and referred us to a pediatric gastroenterologist. She was on our side, so we won. And of course, Angry Toddler is growing just fine. She's very petite, and I think that's pretty cool. I like to think of her as portable.
He's a good ped because he really cares about her. He's young, having just finished his residency at [Big Children's Hospital]. Being new in his practice, the only really tiny kids he's ever seen have also been really sick. And given that failure-to-thrive is under-diagnosed, I was willing to cut him some slack.
Angry Baker wanted to fire him, and still doesn't think very highly of him, but the thought of going out and interviewing a whole new passle of peds made my skin crawl. At least I knew this one cared, even if he was a tad zealous.
Oh, Angry Prof, you make me so very happy that my pediatrician bf'd her own daughter for 4-1/2 years.
My peanut (really, she's tiny) just turned 1 year, and she weighed a little less than 15.5 pounds at her check in. She's 2 pounds below the chart for weight, 30th percentile for height, and somewhere just below the 3rd percentile for weight-to-height. And yet, she eats very well...and wants to continue nursing.
BTW, my pediatrician recently pointed me toward research that showed that analysis of mothers' milk showed that the mothers of toddlers had milk that increased dramatically in fat content after 12 months. It made me feel good that we haven't weaned (or even tried to) yet.
Back to the POST (oh, yeah)...
I think I'm due for one of those moments. Mind sending the blind but cute young punk down my way? I'd love a no-commitment ego stroke.
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