More Photos and a Public Service Announcement....

So continuing on with more family going's-on during Doug's visit....


Tabitha discovered the joys of Fruit-Loops from Drew & Chase, and one morning Aunt Lisa was up and braided her hair. Huge hit! But didn't last the entire day at school.




Tabitha also fell in love with Kona. He apparently reminded her of a dog she'd known in Russia and while he was here, she was in love with him. A daily ritual got started that every morning she & I would walk to school with Doug and the dogs. Doug had Mia since she is huge and hard to manage, and Tabitha got to walk Kona every day. She was quite embarrassed that he felt the need to urinate on every vertical surface between the front doors of home & school, but she was thrilled to walk him all by herself. Most mornings my view was this....



A favorite picture of Doug & I, taken by Little Miss Shutterbug....



Mother's day we visited with Michael's 80 year old grandmother, Dorothy. She was thrilled to meet Tabitha and Tabitha warmed up to the idea of meeting *more* family. Interestingly enough, Russian doesn't have descriptors for great grandparents or distant relatives, so the best I could do was describe Dorothy as the "Big Grandma", which was endlessly amusing to Tabitha since Dorothy is definitely not big by anyone's standard. Tabitha is presenting Dorothy with her Birthday / Mother's Day gift which was a Russian Orthodox crucifix with the Russian gold chain to go with it. We bought Tabitha one like it, and she'll end up growing into the chain. Dorothy had a china doll to give to Tabitha and she was thrilled. The doll is apparently the prettiest object she has ever owned.

My first Mother's Day was a lot like any other day. Doug nudged Michael's memory and so I ended up with a gift certificate to one of my favorite scrapbook stores, and he helped Tabitha to make me a card which was pretty good. Otherwise, I pretty much still ended up doing laundry, cooking, feeding the hordes & then some, and being the mean person who insisted that Tabitha go to bed early on a school night.... I suspect it's going to be that way for a while.

So on to my Public Service Announcement....

I am very proud of myself since today I lived through my first ever mammogram.

I firmly believe that I can not take care of anyone else until I take care of myself, and preventive medicine plays a huge role in that. Last month I turned 36 (really, just the 7th anniversary of my 29th birthday :-)) and as was pointed out to me last week by my doctor, "That means you're more than 35." So I ended up with a baseline screening mammogram for today.

The radiology place I went to has started using a new gadget called the "soft-touch pad". It's a radio-lucent padding to soften "the jaws" and is apparently not reimbursed by insurance and costs a whopping $8. Frankly, I thought it was money well spent. Now even though I'm a doc and should know these things, I have not ever *experienced* a mammogram and just had horror stories from older members in my family to go by. Honestly, I've always been afraid that as a rather flat-chested gal, there wouldn't be enough there to squish. Let me assure you that was not the case, and the radiology tech was nice enough to not laugh hysterically at me when I told her this. The process itself was really NOT THAT BAD. Ok, maybe not my favorite procedure to date, but I've had a lot worse done. And get this, the machine has an auto-release feature so that as soon as the x-ray is taken "the jaws" LET GO. Instantly. So total clamp time was less than 2 minutes. Hey if it saves my life, that was two minutes well spent. If my telling this story encourages someone to go do a procedure that they've been avoiding, hey that was two minutes well spent. So go out there and do some preventive maintenance! (And No, I didn't take a camera in there with me - photo courtesy of Google....)