We are giggling like 12 year olds at the medical education supply manual.

You would too. Think of a medical procedure, they have a "lifelike" model for it. Complete with detachable penises.

I don't know if I could be a medical student - I'd laugh too hard.

I woke up hearing someone messing around with our stuff outside. Turned out to be the neighbor's cat, who wanted in out of the rain. But now I can't get back to sleep.

I'm tempted to give the doula program a piece of my mind. I sign up for two days a week. On those two days, I can't go further from home than the library (and even then I'm unlikely to get there within the 30 minute response time if they call - I basically have to be sitting at home ready to go for that to happen) and have to be ready to drop everything at any moment, pack Leif off to friends, and rush to the hospital. This means that my friend is also on call on these days.

I haven't been in since November. It's disheartening, especially since I'm the only person on the schedule those two days. I get no feedback, so I don't know if there's something I'm doing wrong that's causing me not to get called. I did get called once, but it was randomly on a day I wasn't actually on the schedule, and they found someone else before I could arrange care for Leif.

Looking at the tentative schedule for the next two weeks the coordinator just sent out, I don't think it's just me. Only four people (out of 50 or so on the mailing list) responded for her first request for availability information, and there are lots of slots open. I'm sure some will come out of the woodwork (like I did) now that she's basically sent the final reminder, but still, it looks like people are losing interest. Only 2 people other than me attended the last group meeting.

I have a friend who was in the program a few years back who eventually quit because she was never being called in.

I know the coordinator can't force the midwives and nurses to call doulas, and maybe there just truly isn't the demand. Not everyone wants a random stranger to come in and sit with them during labor.

Still, it seems like something needs to change if they want the program to work. The current coordinator is moving on to a new project (making the hospital into an official baby friendly hospital, meaning basically that they provide exceptional breastfeeding support), so perhaps the new coordinator will be able to push the program a bit more.

A funny LJ coincidence happened yesterday. In the morning, someone posted in ucdavis about seeing a cop staking out a local bank with a rifle, and mentioned seeing some people across the street taking about it and taking pictures. In the evening, I saw a post while reading friendsfriends from the person who had been taking the pictures. The really odd part - she's was just visiting Davis for the weekend, and our mutual friend lives on the other side of the country and has no connection to Davis. She was, however, with a local friend who is on the friends list of my former roommate. Small world.

Leif is in love with the Babar movie. It's cute, but I find I really don't like the colonialist, materialist message it has. Yes, the elephants are of course oh so much happier wearing clothing and living in a city than they were frolicking in the wild. And then there's the mommy-death, which, if I'd thought about it in advance, probably would have had me avoiding it entirely. The inconsistancies between the movie and the bonus episode on the DVD bug me, too. In the movie, he clearly becomes king as an adult. In the bonus episode, he's a child king. Ah well, continuity is for wimps.

I should try to get more sleep. 5 hours really isn't enough.

Leif is out of the house for at least the next three hours, regardless of whether I get called in for the doula thing or not.

I can:

A. Clean
B. Take a load to the consignment store
C. Go to Borders, get a drink, sit in a comfy chair and read a book ALL BY MYSELF!

If I knew I had the next three hours free, I'd do A and B first, but I could be called in at any time. I should be good, but it's soooo tempting. This feels like a once in a lifetime opportunity.

I think minor cleaning and then Borders is going to win.

Today I went to observe an aikido class. Someone else showed up to observe, only she wanted to actually try it out, so I ended up trying it out, too.

It was reasonably fun. I guess I'll give it a shot.

(Do I sound less than enthused? It was fun, and will be good for me, but for some reason martial arts really don't appeal to me right now. This is a little weird, given that I used to be really into martial arts, and aikido was one I always wanted to try. I have a feeling the mother archetype and the warrior archetype are too far removed from eachother, at least in modern society.)

(For those who did not actually know me in high school, which is most of you - I practiced karate for three years, so I was pretty into martial arts in the past. My most recent experience was with the world's most negative Tai Chi instructor 3 years ago, which, having observed other Tai Chi classes since, I no longer have any regrets whatsoever about dropping.)

The other new person and I spent the whole class rolling. I felt a little bad. She was, I think, entirely new to it, while I was mainly remembering skills I hadn't used in 7 years, or had learned slightly differently, so I was having a much easier and quicker time of it.

I'm not entirely sure if this is my One True Class. The sensei seems a little sharp-tongued, but not to an obviously intolerable point. It's a very small class (only three regular students, plus us two new people), which may be an indicator that he has trouble retaining students. Or perhaps just that not as many people are attracted to it in the first place.

Part of my hesitation is, honestly, dumb - my freshman roommate took aikido at the same place, and didn't like it. But it's been 7 years, and the teacher has likely changed, assuming it is the same teacher at all. Even if it is, there's nothing to say that her dislike has any bearing on whether I'll like it. It's not like we were all that close.

In any case, unless I end up really hating it, I'll give it a shot until I get pregnant again (probably not for at least another 9 months, given that both koyote and I were born about 3 years apart from our siblings and don't feel it's an ideal separation), and then see what I want to do from there. That should be enough of a trial for me to know if it's something I want to stick with.

There is a stinky skunk somewhere nearby.

Anyways, I feel like we're finally breaking the holding pattern we've been in. koyote has a job, and is taking hapkido 5 times a week. I guess I'm doing this aikido, probably taking over the superwork at the co-op (4 hours of volunteer work a week in exchange for a 16.5% discount on groceries), and this Saturday I'm taking the class for the volunteer doula program at the local hospital. Leif has story hour at the library tomorrow (we'll see if it goes better than previous attempts - he's more into books now than he used to be), and I think we'll sign him up for a gymnastics class starting in October (well, "Movement Education" actually. They don't start calling it gymnastics until age 3). It seems like the type of thing he'd like.

Yay.