Oh, the waiting!

On a ship floating towards Cozumel, friends of my mother-in-law's are wondering whether the twins have been born.  A message from Sydney came through the other day asking if the babies had arrived.   On Skype, another friend in France left me a message to say that I should change my profile picture to one of them when they make their appearance.  And in Capitola, California, I waddle from my bed to my chair to the supermarket and out into the garden, wondering when the contractions will begin. But still there is no action!

Every woman gets to this stage in their pregnancy...the last few days and weeks when the anticipation has already peaked and transmogrified into a baser feeling...when will this happen already?  But whereas most singleton pregnancies are expected to go to 39 or 40 weeks, some 60% of twins are born by 36 weeks, and the "average" twin pregnancy lasts 35 weeks.  I guess the positive spin as I hove towards 38 weeks of gestation (this Saturday) is that I have never liked being just average.   But I am also asking myself just how large these two bundles of joy are going to be! 

At the last count, (on July 28th), the ultrasound technician estimated that they weighed 6lb 3oz and 6lb 4oz each.  And they are supposed to gain an ounce a day, which means that they would now be a stonking 7lb 7oz and 7lb 8oz today.  This is great from a health perspective, meaning that they are far less likely to need to spend time in the neonatal intensive care unit.  But it sure will be some work getting two regular weight babies out for me.

So the question arises, should I consider letting the doctor intervene in some way?  She has suggested an amniotomy (breaking the waters), which should get labor going.  But it was just her bad luck that a few days before this option was mentioned, I had read an article about the new March of Dimes campaign Healthy Babies are Worth the Wait, which makes me feel leary about sticking an oar in (or, rather more literally, an implement that resembles a crochet hook).  Plus I remember that the person who taught our childbirth classes muttered darkly about one intervention leading to another....In other words it's a short journey from an amniotomy to Pitocin to a Caesarean...On the other hand, if they get too big, it is likely that they would be delivered by Caesarean anyway! 

It's a fairly humbling lesson that, as evolved as we are, we really still don't understand what gets labor going.  Of course, there are a bundle of old wives' tales about how to help it along, including spicy foods, long walks and amorous relations as methods to start things up.  But while they might work for some, I can report that none of these has yet pushed the button for us. 

And so we wait.  In time, of course, I shall look back on this period of calm and laugh...maybe even wishing to get it back.  But in the interim, it is about time for my mid-morning snack of cherries.  I'll let you know if they happen to do the trick.

Tiger Mother?

I just finished reading Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.  It caused a furor in the States, mainly due to a Wall Street Journal headline which read Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.  The article generated over 8000 comments.  But when my Mum recommended I read it also, I realized that I was missing out on a worldwide phenomenon!  And it made me start to wonder what sort of parents Eric and I will be.

The basic premise of the book is that Western parents tend to coddle their kids, go fairly easy on them, and value creating self esteem over measurable achievements.  By contrast, Chinese parents (a term which Chua defines loosely to include all sorts of high-achieving ethnicities - often immigrants) expect nothing less than A grades, in addition to excellence in other areas, such as music, and will go to fairly drastic lengths to help their kids achieve their expectations.  A tad stereotypical, sure.  But there's more than just a grain of truth in it, too.  And Chua acknowledges that so-called Chinese parenting is not foolproof, when she relates her own comeuppance at the hands of her 13 year old daughter.

I think there may be a little of the Tiger Mother in me.  Not for nothing was I called Tolerance Torres at university (with typical British irony, my so-called tolerance was just the reverse).  And I was accepted at my first job despite being told that in one of the character tests, I had "steamrollered" over the other candidates' objections. (They also told me that my logic was good, and my ideas were strong, but that perhaps I should consider an alternative management style to get my way).

As for Eric, his primary concern is to see how young he can get the twinlets whitewater rafting.  So far, for any serious sort of river, the answer seems to be 4.  I hope his patience can hold out until then, but at least he can amuse himself in the meantime by teaching them self-sufficiency, particularly with regards to how to swim!

Of course, much will depend on the personalities of the twins themselves.  For that, barring any current empirical evidence, beyond a convincing ability to kick hard, I turned to the Chinese zodiac, which tells me that they will be born under the sign of the Rabbit.  I was delighted to learn that Rabbits are "classy, sophisticated, expressive, well-mannered and stylish, [and] enjoy leaning about cultural issues and learning about people from other countries".  Now those sound like pretty neat kids.
 
It's odd that while there are classes for most things in life (like training dogs) few parents ever take any kind of educational stab at learning what they should be doing.  Like most parents, we will probably make it up as we go along, and hope for the best.


I see only one fly in the ointment with this plan.  The zodiac helpfully talks about compatibility between signs (presumably for future romantic interests).  The problem is that Rabbits apparently don't get on with Roosters or Rats.  And, Dear Reader... I'm a Rat.

Babymoon

In January this year, I was seduced by a New York Times Travel section headline: 10 Restaurants Worth a Plane Ride.  With Singapore, Sydney and Uruguay on the list, I was not hopeful that I'd be visiting any of them soon.  But the last one on the list, the Willows Inn on Lummi Island in Washington seemed feasible...

Not a month later, while browsing through the out-of-date selection of magazines as I had a pedicure, I came upon a Sunset magazine article which mentioned Lummi.  And when the restaurant came up again in something else I was reading, I was hooked.  This was where we'd go our our Babymoon.

A babymoon, in case you are not familiar with the term, is an opportunity for expectant parents to take a mini-vacation before the pandemonium of child-rearing begins. Eric was up for the vacation, but was deeply dubious about flying 700 miles to the rainy northwest to a restaurant that we might (or might not) like.

But after persistent lobbying, and the addition of Vancouver to the itinerary, the trip was booked, and last week, we headed out, on an unusually rainy weekend for California in June to see what all the fuss was about.

From the get-go, the gods smiled on us.  We touched down to a Seattle basking in sunshine (and we know that's not normal from the thrilled car rental attendant who gushed "isn't this weather great") as we left the parking lot after knocking off $170 of unnecessary charges that Thrifty had tacked on to our rock-bottom Priceline rental.  When we drove up to the line for the once an hour car ferry to Lummi, we waited only 10 minutes before being loaded on for the 6 minute trip to the island.  And then we checked into our room for the night, which had a spectacular view of the Sound, with waves lapping gently on to the beach - Hollywood style - immediately beneath our wide open windows.

It didn't hurt that our neighbors for the evening, three ladies who had escaped their daily lives for a taste of luxury, included a food writer for Seattle magazine, who promptly gave us additional foodie recommendations for the next leg of our stay in Vancouver.

But the real treat was the restaurant experience itself.  Perhaps because I had checked the "anniversary" button when I made my online reservation (babymoon, oddly, wasn't an option), Eric and I were the first to be ushered into the restaurant, and we were seated in the prime window with a perfect view of the about-to-set sun. 

We knew that for our $85 per head, we would enjoy 5 courses of dinner.  But before we even started on those, we were treated to a series of amuse bouches - six in all - which bested anything for creativity and innovation that I have ever eaten, anywhere, in my life.

[Spoiler alert! Do not read this section if you are going to go to the Willows Inn!] 

A chef (who we later realized was the rising star Blaine Wetzel himself) arrived with a small wooden box, and let us know that it contained smoked salmon.  We smiled politely and ignored him, as we were still figuring out drinks and the view.  Then we opened it, and  - ta da - it contained smoked salmon that was still smoking on tiny embers of cedar and other aromatic woods!  O.K, so I can just see the expressions on the faces of some of my foodie friends - that's not that impressive, right?  But follow it up with a basket of leaves and "dirt" (not real dirt, roasted barley that looked like the earth hadn't been shaken off the locally foraged herbs and leaves), or the brown butter toast with edible flowers, and the kale with truffles...and you can begin to see how the experience was  both cumulative and genuinely original.  In fact, when we finally got to the first course mentioned on the menu, it would have been an anticlimax (no surprises now) - except that it, too, was delicious.

We sat happily marveling at the privilege of it all, and contemplating our future (more likely to be filled with trips to Applebee's than fancy restaurants) and felt ever so slightly smug to be "in" on a place that has become a destination restaurant despite its somewhat remote location.  So strong is its pull that the Times has anointed it again in today's piece on Seattle - even though it is about 2 hours away.

I could bore you with the walks along the beach, and the bike ride round the island - or the pretty cool meals we enjoyed in Vancouver, but I'm not sure that y'all have the appetite for that.  So I'll conclude with a picture from Lynn Canyon park, about 20 minutes outside of Canada's overpriced western hub.  Most people who travel to Vancouver visit Capilano suspension bridge, which costs an outrageous $35 per person to enjoy.  We skipped that in favor of the free, ignored-by-tourists Lynn Canyon suspension bridge.  This picture is a favorite from the trip, because of the easy analogy with our lives right now.  We're caught up in the waiting - suspended between the end of our free-wheeling, white water rafting, fancy restaurant present, and the unknowable future adventure of parenting.

Why the Republicans can't win next November

Winning Presidential elections in America is a weird science.  It's not necessarily important that you be smart, (see George W. Bush), personable (Nixon), or even desperately well qualified for the job (the present incumbent).  But it sure does help to have some measure of credibility. 

And that's why I'm pretty confident that the Republicans simply can't win next November. They have yet to field anything like a credible candidate. 

Let's take a look at a few of the declared and likely candidates, starting with Newt Gingrich.  Granted, Gingrich is a darling of the right, remembered for his hardball takeover of the House in 1994, and his relentless pursuit of Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky affair.  But these career highlights are also the self-sown seeds of his own destruction.  He's deeply susceptible to being branded a hypocrite for his own infidelity (conducted while he was after Clinton) to his second wife, with the woman who is now the third Mrs G.  The Christian right is unlikely to be able to swallow any kind of family values pitch from a guy on his third marriage.  And there are few candidates who are more likely to galvanize the Democratic base than this particular nemesis.

Mitt Romney is deeply tainted too.  The further he distances himself from his healthcare reform as Governor of Massachusetts, the less appealing he is as a centrist alternative to Obama.  Independent voters must already be wondering how many other experiments he might be willing to conduct at the expense of the American people, and then renounce a couple of years later because they hadn't worked.

I was amazed by the amount of ink and airtime was spilled on a possible Donald Trump candidacy.  Here's a guy whose businesses have declared bankruptcy not once but several times.  Is this the dude we want in charge of our extremely fragile national economy?  His persistence in pursuing the issue of Obama's birth has also sullied him in many folks' eyes.  To my delight, however, the news broke as I was writing this that he had decided against a run.

There's a raft of others, whose national name recognition is a stumbling block that will hurt them unless and until they become the GOP's nominee, including Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann and Mitch Daniels.

And then there's our pinup for this post, Ms Palin, whose personal popularity did not suffer too badly even after she had Gabrielle Gifford's district in her crosshairs, but who suffers from the fact that fully 67% of those polled at the end of last year thought that she was unqualified to be President.

Plus there are important considerations about the Republicans' opponent.   Mr Obama has all the benefits of being an incumbent, plus his own credibility received a real boost after Osama bin Laden was captured and killed on his watch.  To be sure, the rose-tinted spectacles with which many viewed his candidacy last time have been replaced for many.  But if, as is likely, the economy shows signs of improvement in the next 18 months, he looks relatively secure.

That said, I'm a lousy predictor of which way the American people will jump when it comes to elections.  I've been consistently wrong over the 10 years I have lived in the States as to who would win (even when I voted for the winner).  Let's see if, for 2012, I can be fourth time lucky.  I'm calling it early for Obama, and looking forward to collecting on a bet made shortly after the 2008 election that he would be a two-term President.  There's a whole $1 riding on it.

Twinlets

Not telling anyone that I was pregnant for three months nearly killed me.  Especially after we found out we are having twins.  It made me think of the codebreakers who worked at Bletchley Park in England in WWII, some of whom held on to their secret work for nearly 30 years (even from their spouses), until the1970s, when the story of Enigma was first released.  I had trouble holding my tongue for a quarter of a year.  I can't imagine the self-discipline required for a quarter century!  

I have been broody for a Very Long Time.  Probably about 12 years.  But, partly due to my age, and partly due to the risks of miscarriage in the first three months, we held off telling anyone - even close family - until we got past the first trimester.  We have just cruised past 20 weeks, however, and the vast majority of family and friends has been informed, so it was time to do some baby pontificating online...

The savviest among you may have noticed that the tagline to this blog actually changed at the beginning of the year.  It used to read, Fortune in the Valley: One Woman's Search for the Job of her Dreams.  But since a few days after the pregnancy test came back positive, it has read On Life, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  To some extent, this reflected the sorry state of my job hunt, and the fact that the blog had long since become a place for me to do a brain dump of what was on my mind.  But it was also, of course, a virtual nod to the vast change that is about to come upon the Coatney household.

Ironically, of course, I was finally offered a job just a few weeks ago by UC Santa Cruz.  But it was a fairly simple decision to turn the offer down.  The money was lousy!  And the possibilities were limited.  The positives were all around the location and the potential for something more fascinating down the road.  But even as I declined it, there was some agonizing.  I had always assumed that if I were ever fortunate enough to have kids, it would be as a working woman, and that I would be the sort who juggled a job and the cooking and the childcare (while naturally maintaining a regular gym schedule, and remembering to get pedicures).  So much for that.  Instead, I am adapting to the new reality and privilege of being a stay-at-home Mom (apologies to my English readers).  Which is actually far more scary (for me, at least) in terms of the skills required.  And the gym schedule is already up the spout.

Even though I haven't had a tricky pregnancy so far to date, I am amazed at how easy other people make it look.  My girlfriends all appeared to sail through in the manner of Hollywood film stars...looking glamorous and elegant, and producing extremely cute offspring at the end of it all.  By contrast I feel schlumpy all the time, and go to bed at 8pm regularly, since the thought of staying up until 10pm is a distant memory now associated with other illicit treats like cocktails and unpasteurized cheese.  And this isn't even the difficult part!  As all the mothers of any age I have met recently have said, with twins, we are going to be "busy".  Since when did "busy" become a euphemism for manically sleep deprived and completely unable to form coherent sentences?

Over the next few months, you will doubtless read more about the trials and tribulations of the pregnancy, before twinlet one (a girl) and twinlet two (a boy) arrive, probably sometime in late August or possibly early September.  After that, it is quite possible that this will turn into a mommy blog (Eric's hoping that I will be able to mimic the success of www.dooce.com and bring in $30,000-$50,000 a month).  In his dreams.

In the meantime, I am delighted to declare that I have found my Fortune in the Valley, and it wasn't in the place I was looking for it.  Not at all.

Green Guilt

So I confess that I switched back to Lysol.  For months, I had been struggling with an eco-friendly biodegradable toilet cleaner by Seventh Generation, but the unfortunate line of grey scum in my loo just wouldn't go away.  Enter the bleach, exit the scum.  Problem solved, apart from the agent of doom environmental guilt of course.

Generally, I consider myself to be an averagely responsible consumer where it comes to the green lifestyle.  I recycle religiously.  I compost occasionally.  I own a vast number of shopping totes and reusable water bottles, and remember to take them with me at least 75% of the time.  But I'm pretty much over what the Wall Street Journal christened the Pampered Countertop of products...the Mrs Meyers, Method Home, Seventh Generation stuff which looks pretty and smells great but does a fairly lousy job of actually cleaning anything.  I mean the hand soap is fairly harmless.  But have you tried Mrs Meyer's Lemon Verbena shower cleaner?  You need a real cleaning product at hand to wipe off the streaks and cut through the limescale deposits.  So you end up cleaning twice!

It was such a relief to discover that I was not alone in my disdain for some of these products, and that folk around the country are having a hard time adapting to the filmy deposit which new eco dishwasher detergents leave on their glasses and dishes.  As one savvy consumer put it, if you have to wash the dishes again (either before or after they've been through the dishwasher), then surely the excess water consumption is nearly as environmentally unsound as the phosphates in the old sudsy detergents were in the first place?

The problem with my argument is of course, that while my little piece of pollution is just a drop in the world's mop and bucket, if you add all the other polluters, it suddenly becomes more serious.  And if you scale up my argument to a bigger issue, it just doesn't work at all.

Take, for example, uranium mining at the Grand Canyon.  Two years ago, the Secretary of the Interior placed a moratorium on new mining claims within 1 million acres around the Canyon.  But that period is about to expire, and public comment is sought  by April 4th as to which of four proposals the Bureau of Land Management should adopt with regards to mining in the vicinity of the Canyon.  Let's make this easy.  The Colorado river supplies drinking water to some 25 million Americans.  Uranium contaminated drinking water, anyone?  I don't think it's necessary to refer to recent events in Japan to make this point any clearer. 

Should you need any further convincing on this subject, then I encourage you to visit the Grand Canyon Trust's website, which has additional cogent reasons for supporting Alternative B (which would ban all new uranium mining claims within public land watersheds that drain directly into Grand Canyon National Park), and has convenient links to the relevant reports, as well as the e-mail address where you can comment.

Here endeth the lesson.  Because I know that the above two paragraphs sounded just a tad preachy.  Which is ironic, given where I started.  I guess I'm just a conflicted green contender - eager to tell others how to clean up their act, before I have my own house in order. 

Why no Brouhaha?

Is anyone apart from me surprised at the lack of hullabaloo surrounding the Deutsche Borse acquisition of the New York Stock Exchange?  NYSE, surely, is one of America's most storied institutions - having been founded in 1792, when the fledgling Republic was not yet two decades old.  Some of you will remember the massive kerfuffle which occurred thirty years ago when the Japanese bought the Rockefeller Center in New York.  Or what about the Dubai Ports scandal back in 2006?  That was an issue of national security!

But turning over the largest stock exchange in the world by market capitalization to the Germans doesn't seem to pose any problem at all.  Even Chuck Schumer, a severe critic of the Dubai deal (which ultimately failed), has given Deutsche Borse his blessing, insisting only that the merged company have the words New York somewhere in its name.  Has America's financial capital come to this?

Time was that the stock exchange was seen as a viable measure of the strength of our economy.  Periods of strong stock market performance often coincided with low unemployment - the Eighties spring to mind.  But as Felix Salmon argues convincingly in Wall Street's Dead End, the stock market is becoming increasingly irrelevant.  Two of the most innovative American companies to launch in the last decade, Facebook and Twitter, have chosen to bypass it entirely.  They are valued at $50 billion and somewhere near $10 billion respectively, but have chosen to raise money privately, leaving them free to develop without the pesky interference of shareholders.

Don't get me wrong.  It's not that I have anything particularly against the Germans.  Neither am I reflexively against foreign ownership of U.S. companies.  We buy stuff overseas.  It's only natural that strong companies abroad would be interested in owning a piece of the world's number one economy, and being able to tap into its freespending customer base.  But I guess I was under the mistaken impression that our primary stock exchange was sacrosanct.  It makes you wonder what's next.  Will the Mint start printing money in China because it's more cost effective?  Will the White House be sold to the Abu Dhabi Investment Council and leased back to the President for use? (You may mock, but that group controls 75% of the Chrysler Building).

I can't help feeling that America in 2011 is a bit like Britain in 1945. This is the beginning of the end of an empire.

The Changing Face of Friendship

In 1993, a British anthropologist called Robin Dunbar posited that there is a natural limit to the number of friends one can reasonably sustain, and put the number at approximately 150.  How could he anticipate the Facebook phenomenon, where many of the folks I know are already over 200, and one has over 1000 "friends"?

My own count is still below the so-called Dunbar number, but what strikes me more is the weird lens which social media provides into the lives of folks I don't really know that well.  There's no question that some people are status update addicts, obsessively posting something about their day to day lives, interesting or not.  Then there are the voyeurs, folks whose presence online is confirmed by their profile icon appearing on the left of my screen, but whose posts are rare (and usually, quite worthwhile).  And then, of course, are the vast swathes of souls who joined Facebook because someone pestered them to, and who have now given up, because they got bored of the drivel, or more likely, are busy living their real lives off line.

This creates a weird dichotomy.  I'm often more familiar with some random acquaintance's travel plans than I am with my best friend's pregnancy.  I discovered this week by telephone that another close friend's marriage could be disintegrating,  but that this disheartening situation had been going on over a month.  Meantime, thanks to Facebook, I am bang up-to-date on what a friend of a friend made for dinner last night.  Odd, and occasionally unsettling.

As of this month, I am back in touch with two schoolfriends who had happily lived out the 20 years since we graduated with nary a word.  Interesting to find out where life took them, yes.  On my list to visit during my trip to Britain in March - not likely.

And real world friendships seem to have changed somewhat too.  Partly, in my case, this is a function of distance.  Having settled some 6,000 miles and 8 hours behind the land where I was born throws up some barriers for the people in Blighty.  And even the east coasters have to count backwards by three to figure out what time I'm on.  But the truth is that really it's a matter of how much effort each friend puts into the relationship.  Friends in Sydney and Tajikistan have done a splendid job of staying in touch despite much greater geographical and time lag distances (perhaps because like me, they are operating in a less friend-rich local environment). 

So come on people, pick up the phone!  And if you don't already have Skype, then get with the picture (literally - the video function is really fun).   Put the coffee pot on, or pour out your cocktail (after all, it's definitely five o'clock somewhere), and get ready for a good, long, old fashioned gossip.