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Every time he goes on a business trip, Adam gets Sam a little gift.  He’s made a tradition out of keychains because they have city-specific keychains in every airport in America, apparently.  Sam has quite a nice collection.

But sometimes Adam gets her an additional item, and Louisville, Kentucky brought Sam some Mexican jumping beans.

I don’t know that I’d ever seen real Mexican jumping beans before.  They really do jump and Sam loves them.  Besides the novelty of it, I think this is a great gift for preschoolers because if you want them to jump in your hand, you have to hold very still.  The larva inside the bean jumps to get away from heat, so normally you keep them in the fridge.  When you take them out, you can hold them in your hand to heat them up and make them start jumping.  But if you move around too much, they don’t jump.  It’s a nice way to practice being still.

They also do require a tiny bit of care, so if your child is begging for a pet, maybe this is a good first step.

Here’s another thing we’ve been doing a lot of this summer:  the townhouse version of the plastic pool.

This little “pool” is really meant for babies, I think, but it fits in our tiny front yard, and it’s even more fun than a regular pool.  Sam likes the little fountains of water that spray up when you hook up the hose, and she manages to get herself completely wet.  Considering how much we’ve used it, this was a $25 bargain.

I’ve been having trouble with caffeine lately – my body just can’t seem to process it as well as it used to – so I decided to switch from coffee to tea.  The trouble is, I hate making tea!  You have to wait for the water to boil and then wait five whole minutes for it to brew – all for just one measly cup of tea.  I don’t have that kind of time or concentration in the morning.  The last time I tried it, I ended up putting salt in the tea, thinking it was the sugar.  With coffee, you can set it up the night before and have the liquid heaven in your hand as fast as you can drag yourself to the kitchen and pour it.

I started looking around for faster ways to make tea, but then came upon this little gizmo:

It’s a single cup brewer.  It makes coffee, tea, hot chocolate, or even iced tea or coffee.  And it makes one cup in about ten seconds.

This device has opened up new worlds of hot beverages to us.  If one of us wants a cup of decaf in the evening, we don’t have to go through the whole brewing process for just the one cup.  Actually, we never did that – it was more trouble than it was worth.  But now Adam has coffee almost every night.  I can have coffee or tea, depending on my mood.  Adam and I don’t have to use the same brand of coffee.  (We were both compromising before.)  And when we have guests, we can offer everybody exactly what they want.

This is how it works.  You fill the machine with water, and it holds quite a bit.  It keeps the water hot enough to start brewing on-demand.  (You can also use a timer to keep the water hot only at certain times to save energy, but I haven’t tried that yet.)  When you are low on water, it flashes this pretty blue light at you and you just dump some water in the reservoir.  The things on the left side of the photo are “K-cups.”  I’d seen them in the store but had no idea what they were until we bought this machine.  There are K-cups for coffee, tea, and hot chocolate.  You stick the K-cup of your choice in a slot, put a cup on the tray and push a button.  Ten seconds later you are done.

There are three downsides.  When Adam wants to have a thermos full of coffee to bring to work, he has to brew two cups and pour them into the thermos.  The brewer has five cup size settings, and one is almost large enough to fill a thermos, but since you’re using the same K-cup no matter what size you pick, the coffee is just weaker.  Unacceptable!  Still, brewing two cups takes all of thirty seconds, including the time to change the K-cup and pour the coffee.

Next, the K-cups are expensive, they take up a lot of space, and you are limited to the brands available.  There are a lot of brands to choose from, but you can’t get Starbucks coffee or Lipton tea, which are our favorites.  We hope that will change someday.  To deal with the space issue, we got the handy-dandy dispenser shown in the photo which makes the process even more fun.  Luckily we have enough kitchen counter space to accommodate this without any trouble.  As for the expense, I’m currently bargain-hunting.  We’ll probably end up ordering them on-line, which is a bit of a hassle.

Finally, the K-cups don’t allow for the art of brewing either coffee or tea. Adam has always enjoyed grinding the coffee beans to just the right consistency and using the perfect amount of coffee.  With this machine, you have no control over the strength of the beverage.  There is a way around this problem, too.  You can buy a filter which allows you to use your own coffee grounds.  It still doesn’t make the coffee quite the same way as a regular brewer, but at least Adam is not limited to the brands available in K-cups.

Overall, we love this thing.  When I use it, I feel like Jean-Luc Picard, and that’s priceless:

(link to video)

You know how it is when you are house-hunting; it might be the 3rd or it might be the 53rd, but when you walk into the home you are going to buy, you know it almost immediately.

Well, apparently, it works the same way with doctors.

I found my new doctor!  He was the second doctor I interviewed and the minute I got home I cancelled my other two appointments.

This man’s philosophy of medicine could have been taken straight from Leonard Peikoff’s DIM course.  He is an integrator.  Without my prompting, he told me that everything he does is about integration:  treating the whole person instead of just a part, how bringing together all of a patient’s medical records is essential, considering ideas from alternative medicine as well as conventional medicine, and always keeping in mind that a person is physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual, and that all of these affect health.  He said that conventional Western medicine treats all human beings as essentially the same.  If you have this disease, you take this drug, period.  Disease or body parts seems to be the fundamental unit of medicine, with totally compartmentalized specialists who have no interest in anything beyond their domain.  Eastern medicine treats all humans as totally unique, is non-scientific, and relies on trial-and-error.  He believes that we all do have much in common (we are human beings, after all!) but that each person’s case is unique.  He practically, but not quite, said that the individual is the fundamental unit in the practice of medicine.   Medicine is a science that can be objectively applied to all people, but medicine is the treatment of people, not diseases.

Now, plenty of doctors will say similar things, but I’ve found that what they actually mean is that they practice alternative medicine.  This is not true of my doctor.  He claims to have been one of the founders of the term, “evidence-based medicine,” which, even though I’m suspicious of the term, is something considered in opposition to alternative medicine. 

There might be a name for the kind of medicine he practices – it might be “complementary medicine,” which seems to be some kind of fusion of conventional and alternative medicine.  But I don’t know enough about these terms or medical philosophy to know if that is correct. 

Another reason I clicked with this doctor is that he answered almost every question on my list before I asked it.  We are totally on the same page. 

Most importantly, this physician is as relentless and passionate about diagnosis as is Dr. Gregory House.  He said that everything has a cause (or causes), and we can usually find it if we look in the right place.  He was obviously excited at the prospect of having me as a patient (I have an intriguing little mystery going on), and he complimented me on the amount of research and thinking I’ve done about these issues.

I’ve signed up with MDVIP, the organization which handles the administrative, legal, and marketing work for this group of concierge physicians.  The next things I’ll do are to collect all of my medical records (a daunting task, since I’ve seen probably a dozen doctors in the past few years), and then schedule my annual physical. 

It feels so great to have taken control like this.  I’ve been in health-limbo for almost 3 years now, and it has caused me enormous stress.  I wouldn’t be surprised if that stress is one of the causes of the continuing problems.  With this new doctor, I have confidence that I will find out, once and for all.

One of the projects that is keeping me so busy right now is my search for real medical care.  I mean, I’m looking for a doctor who will do more than listen to me for 5 minutes and indiscriminately prescribe drugs.  (Well, ok, they discriminate a little bit.  I exaggerate when I’m angry.)

My undiagnosed pain problem seems to be coming back – either that, or I’ve had a broken toe for the past 3 months which sometimes makes the rest of my foot (and sometimes my elbow) hurt, too.  I could go back for PRP therapy, but I thought I’d try again for an actual diagnosis.  That means that I’ll have to collect my medical records from about 7 places and find someone who will actually read them and use his mind to try to solve the problem.  Regular doctors have no time to use their minds.  (Hey, that’s a bit like parenting!) 

Thanks to a suggestion from Paul Hsieh on a private list, I found out about something promising:  concierge medicine.  I knew there were doctors out there who don’t take insurance, but I had assumed that they were unaffordable.  Those doctors may exist, but concierge medicine is something different.  The doctors still take your insurance, but you also pay a yearly fee for extra service.   The doctors only take a maximum of about 600 patients, instead of thousands.  The fees vary, but the ones I’m looking at charge $1,500/year.  That’s only $125/month.  I can afford that! 

There is a national group called MDVIP which has standardized the cost and service levels for the member physicians.  I’m sure there are plenty of independent operators out there, too, but what you get with MDVIP is:

• 24X7 access to your doctor
• a real annual physical exam which covers much more than your insurance would
• same day or next day appointments – for anything
• appointments that last as long as necessary
• a CD containing your medical records
• assistance with insurance issues
• a doctor who might even come with you to a specialist appointment or surgery

You also get a doctor who has chosen to practice real medicine instead of herding sheep through his office.  This is the biggest selling point to me.  These doctors want to use their minds!

There is another organization called the American Academy of Private Physicians from which I’m drawing referrals as well, but I’m not sure of the annual fees yet with those.  I’m going to interview at least 3 doctors and give this a shot.  Here are the questions I’ve come up with to ask each doctor.  If anyone has any suggestions for other questions, I’d love to hear them.

• How many doctors in your practice and do they all participate in concierge medicine?
• How many patients in your practice?  How long are appointments?
• Why did you decide to practice concierge medicine and how long have you been doing it?  Has it lived up to your expectations?  How could it be even better?
• What is your philosophy of care, if any?
• How do you decide on specialist referrals?  Will you coordinate my care?  Will you help me get appointments?
• What are your views on nutrition and exercise?
• I believe in informing myself about health issues and being an active part of my own care.  What if I come in with information on a study I found on the Internet or from a book and ask you if it is valid?  If you’ve never heard of the study, will you take the time to research it and help me understand if it is scientifically valid?
• What does “evidenced-based medicine” mean and what is your view of it?
• What tools do you use for diagnosis?  Is trial-and-error with medication part of diagnosis?

After reading my thoughts on teaching Sammy to ride a bike, a friend of mine sent me this super-cool video of a bicycle wheel you can buy that makes training wheels obsolete.  Gadgets are Good Things:

This week I opened a new 529 account for Samantha.  For all you new and prospective parents, a 529 is a way to save tax-free for your child’s college costs.  I won’t bore you with the details, but I will say that opening a 529 is a no-brainer if you want to start a college fund.  There are many investment options, but if you use your state’s program you might be able to deduct your contributions from your state income taxes.  We had a Michigan-based 529, but we’re moving to the Virginia plan for obvious reasons. 

We’ve put very little money in the fund because we believe Sam should be primarily responsible for her own college costs, if she chooses to go to college.  But we have a credit card through this Futuretrust program, which deposits 1% of our spending into the 529.  This way, we can help Sam out a bit with no pain at all.  When we are financially comfortable, we put a little bit in each month on top of that, and we’ve also received gifts for her that went into the account.  All those little bits have added up nicely.

If you want to find out more, try bankrate.com, my go-to web site for everything financial.

Ever since Samantha learned to open doors, I’ve been looking forward to, and dreading, her first foray into leaving her room on her own during the night.  As you can see by my comment in the linked post, I decided to buy a digital clock so that Sam would know when it is ok to come out and when she should stay in her room and either sleep or play quietly.

While browsing clocks at Target, I noticed one that advertised changing colors.  I thought, “What a perfect way to signal that it is morning – the clock changes color instead of sounding an audible alarm!”  Upon closer inspection, however, this clock simply changed colors when you pushed a button, not as an alarm function.  But once I had the idea, I knew somebody must have invented my dream clock.

Teach Me Time Clock

Here it is!  We got this cute little clock a couple of weeks ago.  Besides having a color-change alarm clock, it also has a digital and analog display (well, the “analog” display is really a digital reproduction of an analog display) and a game you can play to help your child learn to tell time.  It is super-versatile:  you can adjust the volume, the brightness, the colors, whether the “child buttons” on the front do anything or not, and whether you want digital, analog, or both types of time displayed.  All the important controls are in a latched panel in the back which I’m sure older children can open, but hopefully by the time they can do so they can also understand why they shouldn’t.

I set it up so that its backlight would turn green at 7:45am each morning and so that it displayed the digital time only, but I turned off everything else.  Sam was very excited to have her own clock.  She knows a little bit about time, clocks, and watches, and I explained how this clock would tell her when it is morning.  She still hadn’t ventured out of her room at night, but I told her that when the clock is green, she could come out of her room.  She listened without interest for a while, but at one point in my explanation she looked up, thinking.  I paused, and after a moment she said, GO DOWNSHUSH, PLAY TOYS?  I said, “Yes, when it turns green, you can open your door and go downstairs to play with your toys.”  Her face lit up in understanding.  The very next morning, I awoke to a sweet little face at my bedside.  She said, TURNED GREEN, MOMMY!  GO DOWNSHUSH?

Every morning since, Sam has waited until the clock turned green and then come out of her room on her own.  She positively loves it!  A couple of times she obviously woke up after it turned green and came right out, but many times she has turned up at my bedside right at 7:45, so I know she was waiting for the signal.  Today she woke up screaming at 7:30 (she is not a happy-waker-upper), but didn’t come out until it turned green.  With that one exception, our mornings have been so incredibly pleasant.  Instead of waking up to someone yelling at me to come get her, I wake up to a sweet girl whom I can pick up and cuddle in bed with me for a few minutes before starting my day. 

She hasn’t gone straight downstairs yet, but that day will come!

Even if you use cloth diapers, you’ve got to admit that disposable diapers were a great invention.  Well, if you use cloth diapers you probably can’t express an idea very well yet.  And of course, there are those pesky environmentalists.  OK, so you don’t have to admit it.  But I think it was a great invention, and one of my favorite blogs, Heroes of Capitalism, has the story right here.