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.

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 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)

The purpose of the trip was to buy a new car seat.  (We finally realized that we’re not too poor to splurge on one for each car instead of moving the seat back and forth all the time.)  We told Sammy ahead of time that she could choose one item at the toy store – anything under $10.  She chose Silly Bandz, these little rubber/plastic bracelets shaped like animals or other cute things.  Adam and I only became aware of these bracelets about a week ago, when we noticed 3 different girls in the neighborhood wearing them, and now they’re everywhere!  I’m not sure when Sammy became aware of them, but the moment she saw them in the store, she didn’t want anything else.  This is officially Sam’s first fad!  Instead of being horrified, I actually think it’s quite cute.  I probably won’t think so when the next fad costs more than I spend on a night out on the town, or when I hear an argument like, BUT EVERYONE ELSE HAS THEM!

One thing Sammy’s teacher suggested we do this summer is to play board games with her.  (There are many good, educational reasons to play board games with your kids.)  At the toy store, we noticed Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders, so we bought them, and played them both for the first time yesterday.  I must say, one of the main reasons that I want a second child is so that we have four players for board games.  Playing board games is one of those images I have in my mind of what families do, and I’ve been looking forward to this since Sam was born.

Hurray for toys!

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.