Your name here!

Have you seen this? Starting September 1, sixteen American authors, including the inimitable Stephen King and John Grisham, are auctioning off the right to have your name published in one of their upcoming novels. Funds raised will support the First Amendment Project, a US non-profit raising funds and awareness for the freedom of expression.

The e-Bay page for the auction has some pretty funny requirements from each of the authors. For example, while Peter Straub warns that the name supplied may be attached to a character of “dubious moral character” and Andrew Sean Greer will be attaching the winning name to a soda shop or bakery that houses a pivotal scene, my idol Stephen King says, “Buyer should be aware that [work in progress] CELL is a violent piece of work, which comes complete with zombies set in motion by bad cell phone signals that destroy the human brain. Like cheap whiskey, it’s very nasty and extremely satisfying. Character can be male or female, but a buyer who wants to die must in this case be female. In any case, I’ll require physical description of auction winner, including any nickname (can be made up, I don’t give a rip).”

Ahem. I know what I want for Christmas. Infamy at the hands of a zombie in a Stephen King story? Where’s my chequebook?

And that may in some part explain this quiz result, care of Andrea (who always finds the coolest toys first). Turns out on the Nerd-Geek-Dork continuum, I am:

Pure Nerd
75 % Nerd, 43% Geek, 34% Dork

For The Record: A Nerd is someone who is passionate about
learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.

You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd.

The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences associated with the “dork.” No-longer. Being smart isn’t as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful.

Congratulations!



So? Are you a nerd, a geek or a dork?

Everybody’s comin’ to Ottawa

Well, this is certainly an exciting week to be in our sleepy little government town.

On Sunday night, the Rolling Stones played to 43,000 fans to close out my favourite summer fair, the SuperEx. Then yesterday, a few scant metres from my humble cubicle, they filmed the video for their new single Streets of Love in the Byward Market. They pulled about 100 random people off the street to be extras in the video. And where was I during all the excitement, you ask?

Looking obtusely in the other direction, as usual.

I had no idea. Hadn’t had the radio on, was busying away like a good worker bee, and was completely oblivious. I often pop down to the Quiznos on York for a veggie sub at lunchtime, and the Quiznos is right across the street from Zaphod’s, where the video was being filmed. But not yesterday. Yesterday, I brought my lunch. Coulda been checking out the Stones, but I was eating microwaved cabbage rolls and working through lunch. How hip am I?

Aside from all that, looks like we’ve got another visitor on the way. The remnants of hurricane Katrina are apparently tracking this way, looking to dump a month’s worth of rain in 24 hours. Good thing I spent all day Sunday draining the pool (and scrubbing algae off the liner – ick!) According to the precicise and highly scientific forecast, we could get anywhere from no rain to 100 mm (4 inches) of rain, and winds anywhere from gentle breezes to gale force.

Apparently, Ottawa is where all the cool kids are hanging out these days. Well, at least the aging, once spectacular but now mostly spent ones.

Have you ever had a celebrity encounter?

10-pages-in book review: The Bird Factory

I read a review of David Layton’s The Bird Factory in the newspaper, and managed to get a copy from the library in fairly short order. When I read the review, I knew it was something I’d have to read because it touches on a couple of themes dear to my heart.

First, the author is a 30-something Canadian, and Canadian-ness is often enough of a selection criteria to just get me to open a book. Second, he happens to be the son of one of the grand old men of Canadian poetry, Irving Layton. Third, the review was generally positive. Fourth, and foremost, was the subject matter: The Bird Factory is about a 30-something guy whose life starts to spin out of control when he and his wife have trouble procreating, and he finds out he has lazy sperm. Among other things, the novel is about going through in vitro fertilization (IVF) from a guy’s perspective.

For the same reasons I wanted to read this book, I wanted to dislike it. See, we Canadians have this deeply ingrained quirk that makes us want to see successful Canadians knocked down a notch or two. I had hoped I’d risen above this nasty little peccadillo, but I fear not.

By way of illustrating the point, let me retell this story of a friend’s first visit to the east coast. He was watching the men fish for lobsters. They’d haul up a trap and open it and shake the lobsters into a wide, shallow bin then they’d drop the open trap back into the water. (Pardon me if I gloss over the details. The lobster fishery is not something I’ve studied in any amount of detail.) The point is, the man watches the lobster fishermen (fisherpeople, I guess) for quite a while before his curiousity overcomes him.

“Excuse me,” he says, “but do you mind if I ask a question? That bin is so shallow, the lobsters should have no trouble climbing over the side. How are you keeping them from escaping?”

To which the lobster fisher person replies, (insert salty east coast accent here) “Well, me boy, these ‘ere are Canadian lobsters. Any one of them gets too close to the top of the pile, ‘tothers will just drag ‘im back down agin.”

More succinctly, as my dad recently put it, a Canadian is someone who will knock you down to size, then apologize for it.

So for reasons that are ingrained in me culturally, there’s an odd little piece of me that wanted this to be a bad book. Thinks he’s clever, does he? Writing about infertility? Thinks he has some insight, maybe some talent?

Turns out, he does have both insight and talent. It really is a good book. Layton’s wry humour, clean writing and genuine charm have me hooked. I’m a little more than 10 pages in – more like 60 – but just thinking about it as I’m typing makes me want to curl up and read another chapter to find out what happens next.

According to the review I read, Layton has gone through IVF himself, so he knows whereof he speaks. I found myself at various key points in the narrative thinking, “No, that’s not how it was for us,” then realized that he’s not narrating this from the woman’s perpective, he’s narrating it from the man’s – something to which I can’t really speak. I know what Beloved said and did, but I can’t claim to know how he felt. So when I was getting a little agitated with the protagonist’s laissez-faire attitude, it served as an interesting reminder that maybe my husband had a different way of experiencing that chapter in our lives.

I love a book filled with quirky characters, and this one has them to spare. Luke Gray, the protagonist, has a little lost boy quality that I would have found irrestible were I a literary character or he a real person. His wife Julia is a classic high-achiever who attacks the problem of infertility with a a single-minded focus that reminds me almost painfully of myself. Luke’s father, an erstwhile film-maker, builds a river in their suburban basement when Luke is a boy. Luke has made a business of constructing large decorative bird mobiles, and he seems to adopt employees like stray cats – odds and sods of societal rejects who seem even less engaged in their lives than Luke is in his.

You don’t have to have any experience in or even perspective on infertility to enjoy this book. It’s an insightful, darkly funny and poignant examination of one guy’s life and the forces that drag him through it.

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Friday photos

A little end of summer photo essay, because sometimes they really are worth a thousand words…

Tristan has given Simon some potty training tips this week. Most important: you gotta take time to look at the trains.

Two boys + one garden hose + one hot summer day = priceless.

Tristan’s first day on his big-boy bike.

Fun at the Ottawa SuperEx:

Not as sexy as Marla’s Charlie’s Angels pose, but yet more proof that we were separated at birth (both photos taken at an Ex on Sunday, half a province apart and with no prior consulation).

I believe

I was trying to resist this, really I was. But it’s so on topic that I can resist no longer. You see, I too have converted to the Cult of FSM – Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. No idea what I’m talking about? Then you haven’t been paying attention.

You might remember I have issues with Intelligent Design. I have found an ally and bloggy mentor on this topic in Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer. It was under his tutelage that I was first exposed to the growing FSM movement back in the first week of August.

I’ve been looking for a devotional outlet for a while now. Catholicism was good when I was young and naïve – and not divorced, and not mother to a child created through assisted reproductive technologies, among other things. I needed something more inclusive. Here’s what FSM founder Bobby Henderson said in his open letter to the Kansas State board of education:

I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design.

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

From the moment I first read about His Noodliness, I knew. And yet despite the obvious draw, I waited. I’ve been burned before, you know. Could I trust FSM, or would it leave questioning myself in the quiet dark of sleepless nights? But now that FSM has it’s own Wiki entry, I know it’s for real, and it’s here to stay. Far be it from me to reinvent the pasta wheel, when I can quote Wiki to tell you what FSM is all about:

Flying Spaghetti Monsterism is a parody religion created to protest the decision by the Kansas tate Board of Education to allow intelligent design to be taught in science classes alongside evolution.

The “religion” has since become an Internet phenomenon garnering many followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (sometimes referring to themselves as “Pastafarians”, a pun on Rastafarians) preaching the word of their “noodly master” as the one true religion. FSM is primarily the invention of Bobby Henderson, a graduate of the Oregon State University with a degree in physics.

At last, I have a community to call my own: the Pastafarians. And I’m in good company. When the Lincoln Sign Company offered FSM stickers with the logo you see above and offered them to the first 100 people who sent an e-mail, they were inundated with over 3,500 requests in seven hours, and the 100 decals were gone in the first eight minutes.

Boing Boing has offered a $1M reward to anyone who can prove that Jesus Christ isn’t the son of the FSM.

How could you not love it?

Tired oh tired, yes so very very tired

(stretches, rubs eyes, peers blearily at the screen)

Oh god, I am so very tired. I thought the days of sleep deprivation were mercifully behind us, but I fear not. I’ve been up since precicely 4:15 am. I know it is 4:15 because Simon has an atomic clock stashed under his crib somewhere and wakes up at EXACTLY the same time for days on end. These past days on end have started in the ungodly hours before dawn, at precisely 4:15. Not 4:13 or 4:16, mind you. Every single day this week, 4:15 am.

He’s got this idea in his curly little head that when he wakes up at 4:15, he gets to go sleep with mummy, a myth perpetrated by mummy herself staggering around in the dark trying anything to make the baby go back to sleep for a little while longer. Some days the soother does the trick, some days the blanket does the trick, and some days only crawling into bed with mummy does the trick. How many of you are nodding along as I whine that once baby snuggles under the comforter he falls blissfully back to sleep, leaving mummy wide awake and grumbling in the gloaming? And no wonder I can’t sleep – he’s such a twitchy little sleeper. He grunts, he rolls, he hoots (there is no other word for it, he does in fact hoot) and he sticks his little feet in the middle of my back and kicks. He’s worse than his father! And inevitably, just as I finally drift blissfully back to sleep, the clock strikes 5:45 and the radio clicks on and another day leaps out of the bushes and exposes itself to us.

I’m not one of those people who functions well when sleep deprived. I can quite clearly imagine all the little synapses in my brain letting go of each other, breaking connections and disrupting mental traffic, so information traveling along its usual neural network highway gets as backed up as the 401 on a long-weekend Friday rush hour. That’s what my head feels like today – traffic congestion.

It’s better than it was. I went for more than a year without getting more than two or three hours of sleep consecutively, and averaging five or six hours of sleep a night. I was chronically and constantly sleep deprived. And it was not pretty. What I remember most is thinking, “I’m off work for a year at almost my full salary, staying home with my two spectacularly terrific children – this should be the best year of my life and I’m completely miserable.” And then I would feel guilty about being so miserable, when all I really needed was about 30% more sleep than I was getting.

I remember feeling such anger toward Simon when he woke up, when he woke me up, in the middle of the night. That part was scary. The sound of his cry would cause a violent release of adrenaline into my system, giving me that same nauseating rush you get after a bad scare, but three or four times a night, every time he woke up. I’d have to force myself to think of the “daytime” Simon, as I thought of it, the one who cooed and smiled and laughed, the one that I loved beyond reason, and not think of the nighttime Simon, my opponent and nemesis, who was not sleeping out of some form of infant spite. So many hours of silent and frustrated rage were spent in his room, rocking him endlessly in the darkness, while I wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed and let somebody else be the one responsible for taking care of him. Dark nights indeed.

It seems like it happened to someone else. I’ve never admitted to the anger before, never wanted to acknowledge it, but I can see from this safe distance that it was entirely the sleep deprivation. I regret those dark nights, regret not being better equipped to deal with and overcome my own tiredness. But that’s kind of like regretting the sky is blue, isn’t it?

So today I am tired. Oh so very tired. But I have learned that I can function on a whole lot less sleep than I ever, in the time before children, would have given myself credit for.

Pass the coffee, wouldja please?

Ten years ago today – The End

It’s been hugely entertaining for me to relive my trip of a lifetime, even if it left some of you scrolling endlessly downward looking for something more current to read. Alas, ten years ago today, my trip ended – but not without a final dramatic turn. This is the day I decided Beloved was going to be my forever guy.

8:45 am, 23 August 1995
Aeroport Charles de Gaulle, Paris


Well, the worst has happened. I missed my flight home. No joke – my flight left at 7 am, and it’s a quarter to nine and I’m still here. A series of misconnections on the RER (underground commuter rail) and heading to the wrong terminal first got me to the right terminal at 7:05, five minutes after my plane’s departure. Remember Salzburg? That was *nothing* compared to this.

To make matters worse, I had to deal with the world’s meanest airline clerk – she made the Grinch seem like the tooth fairy. The harder I cried, the snarkier she got. Finally, I ended up asking another clerk for help. She brought me back to the first lady (and I use that term sparingly) and together they managed to book me on another later connection into Amsterdam, flying into Toronto rather than Ottawa. It was either that or wait for the next flight into Ottawa – in two days. I don’t think so! So I paid a hundred-and-something dollar penalty and I’m flying into Toronto two hours later than I would have been arriving in Ottawa – we’ll actually make it into London earlier this way.

Poor (Beloved)! He drove all the way from London to Ottawa last night to meet my flight. I called him and woke him up (he’s staying in my apartment in Ottawa) when I confirmed my Toronto flight number and arrival time and he’ll drive back to meet me in Toronto. It’s a good thing he’s such a sweetie. God, I miss him!


So I’m waiting for my new flight to Amsterdam. A bright spot in this disasterous morning: I’m in the terminal waiting room, and it’s pretty empty, maybe a dozen or so people, when I hear what sounds like a very unhappy cat yowling. I ignore it for a few minutes, barely past the state of yowling myself, but finally my curiousity gets the better of me and I look around as the yowling gets more and more insistent, and I see an extremely sheepish looking old man with a picnic basket in his lap. The picnic basket is yowling to beat the band, and the lid keeps trying to pop open. He’s trying to shush it, but the picnic basket doesn’t want to be pacified. Finally, he opens one flap and a little tabby head pops out. He reminded me I wasn’t the only one having a bad day.

1:07 pm (7:07 am Canada time)
Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam


Killing time here at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, spending my last moments on European soil much the same way I spent my last moments on Canadian soil, wandering around the duty free stores, reading the newspaper, killing time. Yawn!

All in all, it’s been an excellent trip. Aside from trauma day in Salzburg and these unfortunate transportation woes today, it has been a flawless trip. Even this plane fiasco thing is not so bad – more of an inconvenience for (Beloved) than me. I would have preferred to fly into Ottawa, but I can deal with this (even though I had to sacrafice my window seat.)

Petty things, really. This has been such an experience! The people I’ve met have really made the difference: from the helpful people like the nice hosteliers in Amsterdam and Salzburg to the new friends like Niall and Terry to the people I’d just as soon (but never will) forget like the evil KLM clerk and arrogant LA Girl.

It’s nice to be back in the Netherlands again. The Dutch people really are nice, and they have the most charming sing-song quality to their voices that I didn’t notice anywhere else in Europe. It’s funny, too, to look around and remember how excited and nervous and eager I was when I came through here four weeks ago. Things that seemed so daunting – the trains, the toilets, the telephones, the hotels, the restaurants, the curriences – I agonized over each of them at one point or another, but quickly became acclimatized to each of them. Even languages weren’t that much of a problem; tougher in Germany and Italy, a snap in Holland and France. I was even beginning to think in French by the end!

It’s all about context and perspective; that’s what I learned on this trip. Something along the lines of the Bogart quote in Casablanca, about the problems of two people not amounting to a hill of beans in this crazy world. There is so much to see, and so much to know and to experience, and it is far too easy to lose sight of that, to become wrapped up in your own tiny world and miss the chance to be anything beyond what you already know, what you are comfortable being.

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New feature – categories!

You might have noticed that I’ve started tagging some of my posts with categories. This is a feature I’ve coveted from Typepad and other blogging software for a while. (Not that I’m easily categorizable. I came up with more than 20 possible categories just looking at my list of post titles. I do ramble on.)

Blogger still doesn’t have a category feature, although they came out with a comment feature within a week of me installing HaloScan and with Blogger Images the very day after I discovered Flickr, so expect something new from them soon. (Four hundred thousand bloggers, but they’re dialed in to me.) In the meanwhile, thanks to FreshBlog and Ted Ernst, I’ve figured out how to use del.icio.us tags to organize some categories. When you click on a category tag at the end of a post, it will bring you to delicious, which sorts the tags by category and lists the posts.

It’s an inelegant workaround, but it does the job. I’ve been using delicious for a while. I love the social aspect of the bookmarking – what do other people think is cool. I’ve gone through some of the archives and tagged them, and will pick away at more of them as time permits.

Now, can anyone explain to me how to make conditional expandable post? The ones where you can truncate yourself and have a “click here to read more” link to the full text? (Andrea, no pressure, but I’m thinking of you here.) I tried the Blogger hack but I must have lost something in the translation from the original Spanish.

Speaking of Andrea, she’s got a really cool new project going on – a new Webzine called The Whole Mom:

We believe that mothers have important and interesting things to say about the world outside of the nursery, the kitchen and the playroom; but that too often our voices are marginalized into “mothers’ publications” or that, if a mother speaks in another venue, she will frequently mask her status in the interests of supposed objectivity. At TheWholeMom.com we believe that motherhood (of any kind) is central to a woman’s identity, but it is not the whole of her identity—and it is the intersection of this one life-altering role and the many other roles, pursuits, interests and identities a woman may have that we intend to explore.

Cool, eh? They’ve put out a call for submissions. Check it out!

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Ten years ago today – still Paris

The penultimate entry in my great Canadian Eurotour 1995 travel journal.

9:15 pm, 21 August 1995
Pont Neuf (again)

Here I am, setttled in at my favourite Parisian perch, the Pont Neuf, watching the sun set.

Had an amazing day today: spent 9.5 hours (from 10:30 am until 8 pm) in the Louvre – I loved it! I became completely enthralled with some of the galleries and totally lost track of time. I really paced myself, even took breaks occasionally to keep my perspective fresh.

My favourite gallery, I think, was the one exhibiting Jacques Louis David and (?) Ingres. David’s “Coronation of Napoleon” is breathtaking – it’s absolutely massive! My audio-guide quotes Napoleon as saying “It’s not a painting – you walk right in.” It’s true! I’ve never felt so drawn into a painting before. The vibrant red of Josephine’s cloak, and the shimmering movement of it; the light and shadow on the teal-blue steps; the imperious expression on Napoleon’s face – it’s incredible, even moreso that it’s so alive so many years later. The same room also houses two paintings called “The Rape of the Sabines” and “The Oath of the Horatii”. I knew both of these from my prior studies, but was shocked by the sheer size of them, especially “The Oath”. Huge doesn’t cover it, and a textbook reprint doesn’t do it near justice. I read somewhere that “The Coronation of Napoleon” took David three years to complete, and a guide for a tour passing through said David had an entire layout of miniatures made up and positioned to keep his memory of the event clear. Amazing.

In the same gallery were a series of paintings by Anne-Louis H something or other. I’d seen a pciture of one of them before and if I could remember the damn title this would be much easier. I have it back home. Anyway, I found this painting, neither whose title nor artist I can recall, quite haunting.

This particular gallery opened on to a stairway showcasing the “Winged Victory of Samothrace,” an ancient Greek sculpture of massive proportions that (Beloved) had told me about . Down another staircase was the “Mona Lisa” but you had to be very patient, very persistent, and a little forceful to get anywhere near it. I entertained myself by taking pictures of the people taking pictures of the bullet-proof glass that shelters the “Mona Lisa”. I was disgusted by the number of people who would hurry in, spot it, take a picture of it and run off like they were on some artistic scavenger hunt, without actually taking a half-decent look at it. Now, I’m no art snob, but really!

So I particularly liked French painting from the 19th century, and I really enjoyed the sculpture galleries, too; all the genres of sculpture from ancient Greece through Italian Renaissance and beyond. I’m surprised how easy it was to learn, and how much I learned. I really didn’t expect to get that drawn in; I could go on for pages listing discoveries and things I’d always heard about, but I guess that’s why I bought a book – to remember. I just wish it weren’t so far away that I didn’t have to feel like this may well be the only chance for me to see these things. I also wish I had someone to share all this with…

(Editor’s note: the last two sentiments took care of themselves in July 1999 when I returned to Paris with Beloved on our honeymoon. Six years later, I think we’re well overdue for another visit!)

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Paying the price of indecision

Last week, I sent another cheque for $300 to our fertility clinic, and bought myself another year of indecision.

Tristan was conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the summer of 2001. At the time he was conceived, a total of three embryos were created. Because of my relative youth and reproductive health, the doctors advised us that they were only willing to put two of the three embryos back into my uterus, as twins was a more mitigable risk than triplets.

It was a hard decision for us to accept, at the time. We had gambled everything we had, financially and emotionally, on the success of IVF, and we had a hard time understanding how transferring three embryos wouldn’t improve our odds of success by 50% more than transferring two embryos. And it left us with the question of what to do with one lonely leftover embryo.

We followed the doctors’ advice, and transferred two embryos. The third was cryo-preserved – frozen in suspended animation at 3 days old. When I found out a little less than two weeks later that I was pregnant with twins (we lost one at 9 weeks), we were relieved that we hadn’t transferred all three.

Every year around the anniversary of our IVF treatment, we get another bill from the clinic for rent. Apparently freezer space is even more valuable real estate than downtown Manhattan, because we pay $300 a year for about a half a cubic centimetre of space. The embryo itself is nearly microscopic, and it is stored in a tiny glass pipette thinner than the ink stem in a bic pen. Friends of mine who have frozen embryos from more than one treatment cycle pay $300 for each tiny pipette of embryos. IVF is not for the financially faint of heart. (And despite the many praises of socialized medicine in Canada, we are on our own with the costs. Everything is out of pocket, and in five years of looking I have yet to come across a private health-care insurance company in Canada that covers any part of an IVF cycle, aside from the drugs.)

Our original plan was to go back to the clinic when Tristan was two or three and ask them to thaw and transfer our little “frosty”. The chances of the embryo surviving the thaw are somewhere around 30 per cent. The chances of the embryo successfully implanting and leading to a full-term pregnancy are about 30 to 40 per cent after that. But before we could put that plan in motion, out of the blue came my sure thing – Simon, the surprise baby.

So, each year I scratch out a cheque for $300 to keep our frosty on ice and buy another year to think about the future of our family. We had never really planned for three kids. Our finances are modest, as is our little townhouse. If we were blessed with a third child, we’d have to double kids up in a room and get a mini-van (this last being perhaps the most insurmountable hurdle. Me, driving a mini-van? Yikes.) I have serious concerns about the “middle child” dynamic, and about having the kids outnumbering the parents.

What really keeps me awake at night is the biggest “what if” of all – what if it’s a girl? A daughter. A mini-me. An XX ally in a house teeming with men. There is no way to find out the embryo’s gender, despite what many people seem to think about IVF. While it is possible to determine the embryo’s gender, that would only be done if you were already doing some heavy-duty genetic screening (at a wicked cost, by the way, and only at the prerogative of your clinic), but you can’t just order these tests à la carte for your family planning convenience. And if indeed we are blessed with another pregnancy, and it turns out to be a hat trick in my collection of boys, that would be okay, too.

There’s no real hurry. I read last month that a baby was born fully 13 years after she and her siblings were conceived. (It’s a fascinating story, although I almost didn’t want to add the link because of the bit about the clinic being shut down for taking people’s eggs. I expend a lot of effort fighting against those kinds of ideas when I talk to people about reproductive technology.)

So I scratch out my cheque each year, and think almost every day about our little totsicle, sleeping in a nitrogen bath. Although I am not in any way opposed to donating embryos to other families, or even to science, I don’t think that is the destiny of this little embryo. We can’t leave (him? her? it?) frozen forever, but each $300 buys us another year to think about it.

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