Sorry Darwin

As I was driving to school this morning I nearly broadsided a car who had pulled into traffic to turn left. What astonished me however, was not the actual boneheaded driving. As soon as the car pulled out I slammed on my brakes and began honking. Being a good driver I haven't ever found myself in the other driver's position, but I can imagine that if I pulled into traffic and heard a rapidly approaching car honking repeatedly, I would probably, you know, look in that direction. This girl felt no such compulsion.

I was able to stop just in time, and the car was able to merge about a half a second before I would have reached her (had my brakes failed). Half of me wanted to speed right into the other car. I'm pretty sure that my front end could beat her door in a fight. Maybe that would have gotten her attention.

Visual Update

A quick visual update on the things we didn't blog about as we were ignoring our blog this fall and winter:

My mom and Richard came for Thanksgiving. This was a blessing both because we got to see them and because I was too sick to manage dinner all by myself. We spent Thanksgiving Day touring Plimouth Plantation and the Mayflower II. Here are my mom and me at the Wampanoag Homesite:

And Adam and me at the 1627 English Village:

We were also "blessed" with a huge snowfall three weekends ago. Here is the view from our kitchen window the Sunday after the storm:

I think we got a full foot of snow.

Truly, this was about as exciting as life got for us during the blogging hiatus. I was too sick to do anything else photo- or blog-worthy!

Happy Statistics

Adam and I got the results of or Early Prenatal Risk Assessment today. The ERA is based on a blood test and an ultrasound, and (together with the age of the mother) is used to predict the chance of having a baby with Down syndrome, Trisomy 13 or Trisomy 18. The ultrasound also checks for other birth defects.

Our results put us in the low risk category, with no further testing indicated! Apparently, my odds of having a baby with one of the three chromosomal disorders are lower than a 20-year-old woman's odds. Now I will have to find something new to worry about!

Everybody's Doing It

Another common baby related question that we receive is whether Michelle and I have started thinking about names yet. Rather than answer that question at the moment, I'm going to follow a friend's advice and open the name up to your humble thoughts. Just remember, some people's suggestions carry more "weight" than others, so don't underbid. This is a limited time opportunity. Final bidding will close in mid-July. We are also open to corporate, non-name specific, sponsorships. For example, Baby Shain, brought to you with limited diaper changing interruptions by Ford.

Hey, if Blagojevich is doing it, why can't I?

Proof Positive

Although I didn't experience that "Am I really pregnant?" feeling that some of my friends had during the first trimester -- I had enough symptoms that I was sure every minute -- it was still amazing to see the baby for the first time on Monday. Here is a photo from our 12 week ultrasound:


I annotated the photo for those of you who aren't adept at reading these fuzzy black and white images.

More Information

Yes, we're having a baby! People usually want to know more than that, though, so here are the answers to a few frequently asked questions:

How far along are you?/When are you due?
I'm 13 weeks, which puts me in the second trimester. I'm due July 13.

Are you going back to work after the baby comes?
Yes, I'll be going back full-time. Brandeis guarantees 8 weeks of maternity leave, but if I can get approval, I would like to stay home with the baby through the end of Sukkot, which would be 13 weeks. I'll keep you posted on the negotiations.

Is the baby a boy or a girl?
I don't know yet! Sex is detectable by ultrasound at about 18 weeks. Adam and I will be finding out the sex, if the baby cooperates by being in the right position, and we'll be happy to share the information with all of you after the next ultrasound.

How are you feeling?
Ugh. I had a miserable first trimester, with lots of food aversions, nausea and vomiting, not to mention exhaustion. I was actually losing weight. My wonderful OB/GYN eventually put me on Zofran (Ondansetron), an anti-nausea medication, which helped a lot, and I do feel much better now. But I admit that I was surprised by all the intense physical changes that come with pregnancy! Not to mention the emotional ones. (Did you see the Pampers Peace on Earth commercial? I was absolutely sobbing.)

Can I tell people?
It's on the Internet, so it's public! Most of our friends and family know by now, I think. I told my boss this past week, and I'll tell the rest of my coworkers on Monday. Kudos, by the way, to our parents and grandparents for keeping the secret for 8 weeks!

Happy News for a Happy New Year

You may have noticed that it's been quiet around this blog lately. Too quiet. The kind of uncomfortable quiet that you find when there is something going down, but nobody's talking about it.

Well I'll let you in on a little secret my friends. There is something going down. It's not so big now, but it's going to get bigger and bigger until it takes on a life of its own!

That's right. Michelle is pregnant :)

HELP!!!!

So I must admit that I was a little surprised when I just saw that Michelle had posted to the blog a little while ago. For some reason I had it in my head that we were "taking a break" from the blog for a while.

Anyways, now that I've given you my incredibly lame excuse for not blogging let's turn our attention to the matter at hand. Simply put, I need your help.

I play around with business ideas all of the time and I think I stumbled into one with a lot of potential. I call it RecVault.com and in a nutshell, it is an online service that allows users to securely upload and store all of their recommendations, letters of reference and resumes. The "special sauce" of the site is that it will verify that the letters of recommendation and references are legitimate.

I entered the idea in a business contest online hosted at Ideablob. I need everybody to vote for my idea at http://ideablob.com/ideas/3780-RecVault-com-Store-Manage-Al

Tell your friends. Tell your parents. Tell your neighbors. Tell that guy sitting across the room from you giving you funny looks! Then tell him to get lost (but only after he voted).

I need as many votes as I can get by Friday night so that I can make it into the finals for a chance to win $10K.

Thanks in advance for your support!

Local Politics

I went to an event at Hebrew College last night, the first in a discussion series called "Jewish & American: Confronting the 21st Century." The event was entitled "Red, Blue and Jewish: Changing the Way We Talk About Politics," and it featured Steve Grossman and Jeff Jacoby in conversation. I love Jeff Jacoby's columns in the Globe -- he's a Midwestern transplant to Boston, politically conservative and Jewishly educated and committed, like me. Last night only increased my good opinion of him.

Of course, as often happens at these events, most of the questions from the audience consisted of mini-political diatribes thinly disguised as questions. Most of them had to do with Israel and the Middle East, and all but one came from middle-aged men. The one that wasn't asked by a middle-aged man was asked by yours truly -- I decided to represent my gender and age group (and place of employment) by taking the microphone towards the end of the evening.

I said that I work at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, and that our research consistently shows the strong, positive impact of Jewish day school education on future Jewish identity. How would the two candidates' positions on the economy and taxes, as well as education, impact our community's ability to educate our youth?

The question went over very well, as it tied together Jewish concerns and political positions, not to mention eliciting responses that showed real differences between the candidates. Afterward, I went to introduce myself to Jeff Jacoby. He was happy to meet another Midwesterner and hear a little bit about Milwaukee's voucher program, and he said that we should have a whole evening devoted to audience questions like mine! I totally agree. Bring it on!

Feminist Woes

In my office, everyone is on a first-name basis. So it wasn't until last Friday, when I was inserting a brief bio into a proposal for a new project, that I was hit with the title conundrum. While the other two bios in the proposal used "Dr. This" and "Professor That," I don't have a PhD. The default for me would be "Ms. Shain," as per the current position of the Emily Post Institute on the form of address to women in the business world:

Ms. is the default form of address, unless you know positively that a woman wishes to be addressed as Mrs.

Incidentally, this is a far cry from Chapter X ("Cards and Visits") of Emily Post's 1922 book Etiquette, in which she laments the necessity of any derivation from the Mrs. His Name format:

She is Mrs. John Hunter Titherington Smith, or, to compromise, Mrs. J. H. Titherington Smith, but she is never Mrs. Sarah Smith; at least not anywhere in good society. In business and in legal matters a woman is necessarily addressed by her own Christian name, because she uses it in her signature. But no one should ever address an envelope, except from a bank or a lawyer’s office, “Mrs. Sarah Smith.”

But I digress.

I very much prefer Mrs. Shain, because the use of Ms. as the default form of address for a woman was, if not invented, certainly pushed into the mainstream by the feminist movement. And I reject the label "feminist," because -- and I say this with all due respect to the very real accomplishments of the first- and second-wave feminist movements -- the (third-wave) feminists of my generation spend most of their time promoting a post-structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality, which I utterly reject, and advocating for issues more and more marginal to modern women's lives.

So, as part of my rejection of this trend and affirmation of gender, marriage and other tools of the Patriarchy*, when the time came to refer to myself in the third person in this proposal, I...boldly typed in Mrs. Shain, you ask? Nope. I avoided the issue and used my first name, which was eventually replaced with pronouns in the final draft.

Oh, well. At least it didn't read "Ms. Shain."

*This is a joke.