my first trip to staten island

....was to attend my friend's baby shower. It's amazing what you'll do when you want to be someplace. When else would I have a reason to go to Staten Island. I'd tease I never went over those bridges...Goethals...Rt 278...why go there? "I don't go east of Manhatten." I'd say. Now I had a reason, so Peanut and I trekked out together and I'm feeling quite adventursome. Tuesday I go to Brooklyn for the first time and now I'm not even worried. :) do i sound like a country hick? or a NJ-ite? I'm excited, though, b/c now I'll know how to get to Brooklyn to visit the new baby once it's born...all very exciting. And all very good reasons to adventure past the East River!

Customer service is dead.

I should probably edit that to "is hit or miss", which I guess can be said for just about anything. However, when you're in a retail setting, the one thing you'd think you could count on is employees helping you - with a smile would be even better. I have to say, my initial disgust has been somewhat metered by a second experience at the same store which was much more pleasant. I can only accredit this to the fact that my first experience was at 5pm on a Sunday, and the second was at 6pm on a Tuesday. It is a well known fact around here (being the metro-NY area) that weekend shopping is hell. And if you dare, or must, you risk being the recipeient of poor manners and rude behavior and this is from both other shoppers, as well as employees. Now on Tuesday (or almost any weeknight) you can be in the same place with the same people working and experience smiles, offers of assistance, and fewer shoving by shoppers b/c there are just fewer shoppers.

The NY Metro area on weekends is like the rest of the country during Christmas shopping month....so imagine what Christmas is like here.

As for people and rude behavior, I'm just sick of drivers as well. Now that I've been commuting 45 minutes on highways that are blocked up in the morning, I experience more inconsiderate behavior. I've concluded these people have not been taught the difference between right and wrong; they were never told to treat others as you'd have them treat you....rather, it's bite or be bitten these days. The world can be a sad, sad place some days.

Starting work again...

Well my first 2 weeks back to work were memorialized yesterday with my first illness due to day care. What a whopper and it barely made a dent in my kid. My stomach did cartwheels all day. But my child is taking to day care, and the routine, quite well. There are ups and downs, but overall her smiling, friendly, cheery personality is coming through each day. It's still not easy for me to leave her each day, but I know it's good for both of us.

Miracles...

As I sit pondering the year and the future, I hold my child and kiss her lightly on the cheek as she rests in my arms after what apparently was a very satiating meal from my breast and realize what a miracle she really is. It’s not that I haven’t realized this since the moment she was born and placed on my chest, with two very large eyes gazing at me and around the space all new to her, but it really hit me today. Her skin was made from our skin….and it’s the softest skin in the world. Being Winter, my hands have been so dry, I hate to touch her for fear of rubbing fingers like sand paper against her soft new skin. What a miracle babies are...and thus, we all are such miracles. How cells know to create each small detail on the body to make it run for years to come. But with the birth of each new child we are reminded of the precious life we are, that we created, that we should honor each day.

Thoughts on Parenthood

It’s amazing what you don’t know and what no one tells you when having a baby. Your life changes beyond your wildest dreams. It’s all good, in the end, because the baby is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen – of course it is, it’s yours! But no one really tells you the small things that change, but that mean so much (probably because, if they did, DINKs may never have kids). The “having a baby” part is kind of like “having a wedding” – that’s just the beginning to a very big change in your life. Sleepless nights are just the tip of the iceberg. No one really tells you – or if they do, you blow it off like that will never happen to you – that it’s not just the first few months, but really for the rest of your life. Newborns need you every other hour to eat. Toddlers need you to rid their closets of ugly, scary monsters, or to soothe them in a thunderstorm, or from a bad dream. Then teenagers stay out past their curfew and you don’t rest until they come home – and this continues when they’re home from college for the holidays. No one tells you all of that.

But parenthood is also a wonderful experience. Everyone does tell you it’s tough, and a change, but they wouldn’t change it for the world. To DINKs there never seems to be a good time to have kids so people tell you, “you just do it and it all falls into place.” And they are right.

What I’m most amazed of is that before this, everyone I knew who had kids seemed so unshaken by the experience. Is it that I just didn’t see them in the first few months? No. I saw plenty of them early on, and they all seemed so calm, so together. Meanwhile, I have bags under my eyes which, if I forget to cover up with make up, look hideous. (And I’ve been caught off-guard w/o make up a few times.) But I continue to wonder how so many of my friends have made it look so easy, so painless....cuz it's hard work.

And then I hear stories of how they’re lives are a mess – spilled paint or food, mud tracked inside, more than one kid crying at the same time – and I think, they have it tough too. But they look so normal. How will I ever survive?

This morning I awoke at 6am - I've been getting up early with the baby moving around inside me - but what a beautiful sky I witnessed in the pre-dawn hour. A slice of moon was hanging over our back yard view between the trees, joined by two bright planets - Jupiter and Venus. How lovely and brilliant at just that moment; as I returned to attempt a very rudimentary photograph, Venus was less visible, and by 6:30am the dawn had almost completely erased them from my sight. Needing to know more, I found this link http://www.space.com/spacewatch/041029_planet_duo.html and realized how rare this site was that I witnessed this morning. What a blessing to be awakened earlier these days to view such morning sky beauty.

Drug Importation...what are we thinking?

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Prescription-Drugs.html
Now states are initiating their own importation 'laws', regs...
Argh!!! as Charlie Brown would say. Pricing is important, but what about safety. There are so many issues around this it's impossible to state them all, but what's for certain is that each state cannot start initiating separate regs to import drugs.

Though I work for a pharmaceutical-"not so giant"-giant, I am speaking from a concerned consumer and a health care professional/pharmacist perspective. It was ingrained, and drilled into my head in pharmacy school that the FDA was the US's superior agency in reviewing safety and efficacy for products approved in the US, and I've seen this at work in my various roles within the pharma industry. Working within drug information and safety surveillance in an International division for one company, I saw first hand how other countries operate - how much less stringent reviews are completed, and more relaxed practices are in place every day with under dosing, unapproved uses, and now, more than ever, fraud.

While pricing remains an issue, and most Americans struggle to pay for medications, choosing between groceries and meds (or cigarettes!), the pricing is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. Deaths will need to occur before anyone, or any state realizes this - as they band-aid the situations with these relaxex importation regs. That is sad. Because, the real problem is too massive to handle with one new law on the books.

The overall healthcare situation is at fault here. Managed care has driven costs up rather than contain them, which was their initial mission. Insurance providers raise costs daily, causing employers to make tough choices in the amount of coverage they're going to provide their employees, and putting greater burdens on the employees. Tests are run in hospitals and in various health settings just because they can be, rather than they should be. The healthcare system is an intricate web of policies, practices and people -- it cannot be fixed by price guaging, price controls, or foreign drug importation.