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2004-12-09

Clay has been finished with diapers for a month or two, all told a fairly painless process. I'm surprised just how proud I am of him. He's insanely cute in his little boxer briefs.

What a person he is becoming. Last night I asked him to choose between one more book and one more puzzle before bed. He didn't respond so I posed the question again. He said, "I'm thinking!"

I recently introduced him to

It's raining it's pouring,
The old man is snoring,
Bumped his head when he went to bed,
And he couldn't get up in the morning.

We only sang it a few times so I was a bit taken aback by our conversation one morning last week. I told him that after he'd gone to sleep the night before it had rained really hard, had really poured. And in this matter-of-fact way he said, "Did Daddy bump his head?"

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A bunch of people got laid off from my workplace last month. The bad news is that they just might shut the whole place down but the good news is that until they do I have an office with a big window. We're located five minutes from the airport; I see big, close planes all day long. Here comes one now.

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I've been listening to some Maya Angelou autobiographies on tape (one read by her, another read by an actress). I'd always thought of her as kind of cheesy but boy can she write. These books are about her life in the 1960s and are teaching me a lot about the times as well as about her.

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We bought camera phones, which feels kind of dumb but we did it anyway. Here's a blurry Clay at an all-you-can-eat restaurant he loves (it's kind of a disgusting place but I can handle it if I'm in the right kind of mood).

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Lately I have an idea for a career change to genetic counseling. I enjoy and am good at translating technical/scientific information into regular language and am looking for something more human/less isolating. I think this might be a better fit than the general counseling/therapy/social work I've considered.

Also, one strength I've repeatedly been told I possess is my ability to be calm. This seems like a useful trait when educating people about potentially very disturbing medical matters.

What prompted all this was my spending some time in a hospital recently while visiting a friend who'd just had a baby. There was something about the bustle of the place--a sense that important life-and-death things were happening there--that made me feel very alive and excited. I recall feeling this way last year when I took that class in psychoanalysis (it met in the hospital where one of the instructors worked). I started thinking about and doing searches for non-medical careers related to health care and genetic counseling popped up.

I've actually always been interested in genetics. In college I majored in English but took an upper level genetics course just because I thought it was cool. I also like math in general and statistics in particular.

There are only about a dozen programs in the country but one is at a state university an hour or two from where I live. It's a two-year program (including the summer in between) and I could do field work at a local university hospital. I'd apply a year from now for fall 2006--need to take a couple of classes first and probably do some volunteer work in counseling in the meantime. If anyone reading this knows any genetic counselors who'd be willing to talk to me about their work, I'd love to hear from you.

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B and Clay and I have been attending weekly meetings at a Friends (Quaker) Meeting House for a few weeks now and so far like it quite a bit. We've been hoping to find some kind of community/place to worship (his background is fundamentalist Christian, mine Jewish but neither of us really feel those fit) so it's very cool to find a place we both feel comfortable. Clay seems to like it as well.

I'm hoping that this will help our sense of social isolation--those we've met so far have all been really warm, thoughtful people. One thing that struck B and I both the first time we went was the relationship between the teenagers and their parents--watching their body language during the silent meeting made it seem that they had good relationships, the kind we hope to have with Clay when he's that age.

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Update on perennial second child question. At the moment I'm leaning toward no, surprisingly enough. If B had a change of heart and decided he really wanted to do it, he could twist my arm. But I don't see myself twisting his. I guess that part is old news; what's changed is that I currently feel fine about that. Almost relieved. Maybe because I'm excited about other things in my life?

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