March 18, 2004

Hey, Baby!

Thursday night and I'm up a little late. I've been working to get some of what you see here onto the site, and Jenni is watching the end of a Spurs game at the other end of the house, in the living room. They were ahead of the Western Conference Midwestern Division's top-ranked Minnesota Timberwolves by nearly 20 points in the third quarter, and their star player, Tim Duncan, who had been out for 9 games with a knee injury, came into this one to get back into the swing of things. He played for a while without hurting himself, and ended up getting his 47th or 49th double-double (10+ points and 10+ rebounds). Apparently the Spurs are still ahead, because along with the occasional ref's whistle I can hear Jenni clap appreciatively at the TV when she sees a play or a call she particularly likes.

We had our 20-week untrasound today, and managed to avoid learning our child's gender, as planned. See our mementos of the occasion on the link to the right – and if you think you see something, smarty, keep it to yourself. I asked the ultrasound maven at the end of the session if she knew whether we were having a boy or a girl. "I don't want to know," I reiterated for the third or fourth time, "but I want to know if you know." She said she used to look all the time, just so she'd know, but then she'd slip and use a gender-specific pronoun or write it in the chart and the doctor would slip up somehow, so now she just doesn't look. Makes sense.

After the ultrasound we went to a 'financial advisor' at the hospital to ask about the costs of delivering the baby. She kept waving her hands defensively, like she was warding off an angry bull, and telling us all she could give us was an estimate ($4,000 to $5,000 dollars) but couldn't give us any specifics. We explained that we just wanted to know how the costs broke down, hypothetically speaking, so we would know in advance if we had any financial decisions we could make, at least in a vague and hypothetical way. No, no, no. Couldn't be done. Finally we had asked enough times that some little switch went off inside her and she decided to give us some other people's bills to look at. She carefully cut off the top portion that showed the patient's personal information and gave us copies of two "average" bills. One was for about $2,500 and the other was for about $5,000. The woman who had to pay more had needed to stay an extra day. Both of them had gotten epidurals and a labor inducer and lots of other stuff we're hypothetically going to avoid. It turns out the hospital has "VIP rooms" at only $45 a day more than the $580 regularly-priced rooms. It comes with some couches for relatives to sleep on. Ooh la la! Curiously, there are also some rooms with whirlpool baths, which Jenni would love to have for her labor, but they don't cost extra and are distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis.

We were glad to get those bills. They helped us get a more concrete idea of what it costs to have a baby. Lots of tubing, which apparently is really expensive, and if you have a short labor you get by a whole lot cheaper. It was funny that at first the counselor didn't want to give us anything. She was just one in a bank of about five little offices, one counselor apiece, like oversized confessionals. There were a lot of worried people milling around in the waiting room and it struck me that most people probably only deal with those counselors on the way out, when they get the bill and they go, "Wha?" and they go in and talk about the damage. What other planned expenditure would a business ask you to make without knowing how much things cost?

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This week we have added our Links page. I wanted to create a page Jenni and I could use as a home page.

Of course, the page also meets the traditional goal of sharing our favorite sites with others, and we have attempted to maximize our influence on your personal web-browsing habits by including only those sites we would speak ecstatically about at parties, if we talked about the Internet at parties, which we don't do all that much.

Non-virtual recommendations will appear regularly on the site as well in the righthand column of the page, as well as brief notices about changes on the site or farm products currently available. We are applying for affiliate status at Amazon.com, which will allow us to lead interested parties to books, music and DVDs to learn more about them, or purchase them if they are so inclined. On the weblog page, the list is intended to serve as a guide to what we're thinking about and entertaining ourselves with, and to that end, will contain items that we are currently reading, watching or listening to, rather than "best-of" brainstorms. As we add additional content, recommendations will vary accordingly.