Year in review meme.

First line of the first post of every month of 2005.

January: I spent two hours at the hospital this morning doing my best pincushion imitation.

February: I dreamed that I was making lunch for eight or nine people.

March: Some true things really make you feel like a jerk when you say them.

April: I'm starting to feel kind of dragged down.

May: Every time Alex nurses, she stimulates the production of oxytocin in my body.

June: fourgates gave Alex some CDs, including For the Kids, a collection of children's music recorded by pop stars.

July: Michael's off in the wilds of Kentucky for the week, at the national convention of the National Federation of the Blind.

August: My love affair with the Enoch Pratt Free Library continues.

September: Last night I met therealjae's parents.

October: My research assistant Greta took me shopping today.

November: What's more unprofessional, missing work on a day that things absolutely have to get done there, or taking your baby to the office?

December: Library book sale this weekend.

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The latest edition of my college alumni magazine mentioned that one of last year's graduates is now in her first year of graduate school in clinical psychology at the University of Iowa. Reed is a small enough college - about 1,200 students - that having another Reedie follow my exact educational path seems like quite a coincidence.

The transition from Reed to Iowa was a terrible culture shock for me. At Reed people always used the line that it was "like a graduate school for undergraduates" - the curriculum included a qualifying exam in one's major and a required senior thesis involving original research; the classes were based on rigorous (if not to say vicious) discussion and deconstruction of primary texts, rather than textbooks; and students tended to take themselves very seriously as scholars and as adults who were solely responsible for their own private lives.

If Reed was like a graduate school for undergraduates, the psychology department at Iowa - at least for first-year clinical students - felt a lot more like an undergraduate college for graduate students. Our schedules were dictated to us, with no choice of courses. Our courses tended to be lecture-based and heavy on memorization; in the rare class that had a strong discussion component, students tended to address their comments to the professor rather than to each other. (That ethos was so strong that I once had a student stop me after class and ask me to stop responding to her comments. I wasn't being harsh, or anything, she just felt that I was putting myself above her by taking the professor's role of evaluating what students said.) At my first psych department party, someone tried to pressure me into drinking more beer than I wanted to. And I was the only person in the department who was openly not straight, as well as the only person with a disability. I was also one of only a very few people who were... outside of the very center of the midwestern American cultural mainstream. Things got much better as time went on, especially the classes - but let's just say that my adjustment was rough.

I don't know if this other Reedie is feeling any of the same things that I did. But just in case, I dropped her an e-mail telling her who I was, mentioning that I had struggled with the transition, and offering to be a friendly ear if she wants to talk to someone who's been there. I hope it's some help to her.

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The worst thing about getting a cold when you're the mother of an infant is that you know you'll suffer twice - once when you yourself are sick, and then again when the baby catches it.

We are all three of us sick. Michael had it first, then me; Alex is on her third miserable night. During the day she seems fine - she's coughing, sure, and her nose is running, but she laughs and plays and crawls all over the place pointing out new venues for childproofing.

The nights are something else.

She's been in bed for three hours, and I've had to go in to her five or six times. A couple of times she's been soothable with a pacifier and some gentle patting, but mostly I have to pick her up and rock her back to sleep while she whimpers and tries to catch her breath through clogged nostrils. I just did something unspeakable with a bottle of spray saline and a bulb syringe, which accomplished nothing but a long bout of hysterical, back-arched screaming. If she puts me in a substandard nursing home when I'm eighty, it will be because she remembers the bulb syringe.

Last night I slept with her. When we first moved her into my bed, at bedtime, she slept for three hours more-or-less straight. I didn't, because I kept alerting to her every twitch, trying to soothe her to stay sleep before she really woke up, but I can sort of sleepwalk through that kind of thing and still feel moderately rested. But the rest of the night was less successful. She was restless. She woke a lot and cried a lot, in ways that required my full alertness.

We've elevated the head of her bed to help her breathe, and we try to encourage her to sleep on her side for the same reason. There's a vaporizer moistening the room air and a heater to keep the vaporizer from giving her a chill. She's medicated with Tylenol for the raw throat which Michael and I are sure she has, given how our throats felt a couple of days ago, except for the intervals in which she comes off the Tylenol so I can see if she has a fever. She's too young for cough medicines or decongestants. We're doing everything we can.

It's a cold, and nothing serious. Her doctor told us to expect six or eight colds to hit her inexperienced immune system this winter.

If I were breastfeeding, she would already be getting my antibodies to this virus. If I were breastfeeding, she wouldn't have been laid as low by the stomach virus she had at Thanksgiving - she could have nursed through it, and we wouldn't have had to deal with the temporary formula intolerance. I wonder if not-breastfeeding guilt is ever going to stop stabbing me in the gut at random intervals.