FreshMD

California road trip

We're back, and the trip was great. We headed down to a cabin in Santa Cruz that we found online hours before we left home. The pillows were remarkably heavy, yes, but we were surrounded by redwoods and it was warm enough for sandals. Worth it.

The California coastline is stunning. It seemed a waste that for much of it, not a soul was in sight. In some places herds of cattle grazed on fields that ended abruptly as cliffs dropping into the Pacific. The beasts were oblivious to anything but the grass beneath their nose. You'd think they'd look up from time to time and gaze out to sea.

As I stood with my camera on a side road, a rancher drove by, a grey-haired man with a cowboy hat and a dog beside him in the old pickup truck. He nodded at me and lifted his hand in a brief wave. In that moment, I desperately wished I were his neighbour, farming the land next to his.

The kids were good. Of course, staying at the Super 8 on the way down already surpassed anything their little minds could dream up, and the cabin just took it up another notch.

There was a moment when Pete was reading Aesop's fables to them as we waited in the border lineup, and I looked over at the SUV next to us where the mother was tapping on her laptop as her kids watched DVDs, that I felt pleased with our parenting. But I think we canceled out any accumulated points another day when I passed back a drumstick from a bucket of KFC to Ariana in her car seat. Although I think that may have been one of the best moments of Ariana's life so far.

Pete and I drank a lot of coffee, enjoyed car conversation and listened to so much Johnny Cash that Leif shouted, "She got a body, oh yeah!" in the grocery store.

And to top it off, turns out it hailed and snowed back home while we were away.

Road trip

We're taking the kids on a road trip.

I've headed south on the I-5 a few times, in my student days. The first trip, my friend and I spent our first night in Mexico sleeping in the car next to an all-night taco stand. The next time, in California for reading break, we had a police incident where it was deemed suspicious that my '85 Ford Tempo was parked in an upscale neighbourhood for the day while we relaxed at the beach. And the final trip saw that same car abandoned just north of the Mexican border and my companion and I hitchhiking back to Canada just in time for the first day of my senior year at university.

So these trips have always been exciting and unpredictable. I'm going to hazard a guess and say that this time, with three kids, we'll just be upping the ante. Hitting California would be nice. I'll take Oregon, though. Okay, Seattle.

Wish me luck!

*   *   *   *   *   
I'll be posting again on Monday, March 31. Have a great Easter weekend and spring break.

Community

Ariana tripped over the power cord to my laptop yesterday, and I thought to myself - That's one childhood experience I definitely did not have, getting tangled in my mother's computer cables. And that got me thinking about some of the dissimilarities between my childhood and that of my kids.

The greatest difference, and the one that makes me most uneasy, is community. My elementary school was a few blocks from home, and directly across the street from the church. All the kids in my Sunday school class were also in my class at school. Several church families lived within a two block radius from us, so the neighbourhood kids with whom we picked blackberries and rode our bikes in the alleys were school friends. We were all Dutch, and many of us were related. Our family walked over to Opa and Oma's every Saturday morning for coffee, and we saw them again the next morning in church.

But my kids have multiple communities, and none of them overlap: extended family, school, church, neighbourhood and family friends. We live near the school but not the church; none of Saskia's classmates are in the neighbourhood; no family or friends live on the North Shore.

My children are not members of one tight-knit community as I was. And I'm not sure what to think of this. I've often thought that I've experienced small-town living just by growing up in the Dutch Christian community that I did. Sometimes secure, sometimes stifling. Good to be known, not good to be assumed to be known. The experience was a good one for me, but I recognize its limitations. I can certainly see the benefits of moving within several different social circles.

Friends with whom I've brought this up tell me that the kind of childhood I had just doesn't exist anymore. I'm not convinced of that. I know plenty of families where at least their relatives, school and church overlap; or school, neighbourhood and family friends.

But that one layered community doesn't exist for us in Deep Cove. And at this point, I'm not convinced enough of its value to move elsewhere or make other major changes to find it.

Sangria

I use an interpreter for the Spanish-speaking patients at the clinic, and sangria is one word that I hear regularly. It's usually buried in a long descriptive passage by the patient, and while I'm waiting for the English version, I think of a chilled red wine beverage with brandy and floating citrus slices.

Finally, I asked the translator why the word kept cropping up. Turns out sangria means bleeding, and my pleasant reveries are completely at odds with the experiences the patients are recounting. I think I may even have been smiling while someone described a hemorrhage.

Less city savvy than his sister

The kids and I ate grilled cheese at a little diner on Fraser Street in Vancouver the other day. If you've never eaten out with a one- and three-year-old, the view from across the table looks something like this:

I think that was a five-second sequence.

At one point Leif looked up from his lunch to comment on a passerby: "What kind of man is that?" It was a Sikh, wearing a turban.

I was surprised that he had to ask. It made me wonder if we're limiting the diversity of the kids' cultural experiences by moving them out of the city.

Saskia, who spent her first five years in Vancouver, could identify the smell of marijuana by the age of three.

Mumps

There were twenty reported cases of mumps in Chilliwack, BC last week.

Mumps is a highly contagious viral infection, spread by saliva. It usually causes painful inflammation of the  salivary glands. The infection can result in complications such as inflammation of the testes, meningitis and pancreatitis.

The vaccine for mumps is highly effective, and is part of the routine childhood immunizations series in Canada.

I found one sentence in the article particularly interesting: "The Chilliwack outbreak . . .involves a Christian group that doesn't believe in immunization."

Believe in? Why the religious language? Believing in is for things that require faith, like purgatory or miracles. There are cold hard facts about immunization. You can research the results of scientific studies and draw conclusions based on the evidence.

You might decide against immunization; you might choose not to vaccinate. Your choice may even be influenced by religious beliefs.

But it's not a question of whether you believe in immunization.

Sites I like

I've started to compile a blogroll in the sidebar. As I sifted through the blogs I enjoy, I realized that they appeal to me for a variety of reasons. I might appreciate the writing, the photography, the subject matter, the blogger's personality or the site design. Some blogs spark pleasant memories of my past experiences, some parallel my current situation and some give me something to which to aspire. I'll be adding to the list.

I've had a few requests for a contact email, so I've moved that to the front page. Apparently there are things people need to tell me that can't be left in the comments. That makes me curious, and mildly apprehensive. And I'm always interested in ideas for posts.

Grand Rounds

I'm pleased to be included in Grand Rounds, the "weekly rotating carnival of the best of the medical blogosphere." Canadian Medicine, who hosts this week, describes me as an "avid knitter," but it would be more accurate to say that I'm a sporadic knitter who is duly impressed by the anatomical knitting feats of others. Just to be clear.

Afternoon at Harrison Hot Springs

It always feels a bit ridiculous to make a day trip somewhere, when we live in Deep Cove. Why leave Mt. Seymour and Indian Arm to go admire other mountains and bodies of water? But sometimes I just need to get away, and so this past weekend we made the trek out to Harrison Hot Springs for an afternoon.

The Back Porch, below, is a small farm with a restored Victorian house, a circa 1919 coffee roaster, antiques scattered across the yard and in various outbuildings, a pottery studio, and chickens and goats.

When Leif started heaving pieces of lumber into the chicken pen, we took our leave and headed for the beach.

On the way home we stopped at The Farm House in Agassiz and Pete ran in to buy some cheese. When he returned to the van he told me, "A husband and wife run this place. He manages the goats and she makes the cheese." We sat for a few minutes, sampling the gouda, and tried to think how we could manoeuvre ourselves into a life of farming in the Valley.

That's what I love about time away. It's energizing, considering new possibilities.

I take it back

The pleasant familiarity of handwritten charts is all well and good when the notes are legible. Yesterday I was stumped by this word in a note by a consultant:

The entire entry was written in that neat, yet not, penmanship. If it were rushed, messy script, I'd have overlooked it. But it looks like the writer was bearing down on the writing tool, maybe with a ruler held below each word, and to put that much effort into writing with indecipherable results is unforgivable.

I could figure out most of the record, but that lone word had few surrounding clues. The final dot, so carefully placed, made me suspect the word might be important.

Make your guess, and click below for the answer at which I eventually arrived.