reading the room
I ' m going to be out of town for four days next week (see:yesterday ' s post), so I signed up to be the " parent reader " for Nina ' s kindergarten class today. Because of guilt. Oh yeah, also I wanted to promote literacy and volunteer my time and surprise my kid at school. But mainly guilt.I ' ve done this " parent reader " gig a few times in the past, and I ' ve learned a few things along the way. The first time I did it this, when Cal was in Pre-K, it took a lot more planning and schedule swapping (I was still working full time back then), so it was a higher pressure situation all around. I actually had to get some kin...
Source: the underwear drawer - September 7, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
back to school
I ' ve enjoyed seeing everyone ' s back to school photos of social media these past few weeks, though they make me realize that I must be either one click off age-wise or else totally disconnected from current parenting trends, as I have never in my life taken a picture of my kid holding a sign (or if you want to get real fancy, ablackboard) broadcasting what grade they were going into. (Another trend that either came later or else that I just totally ignored was that thing where you put agiant sticker on the front of your kids ' onesie telling everyone how many months old they are.) I mean, not that I don ' t take a pictu...
Source: the underwear drawer - September 6, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
shovel all the coal in, gotta keep it rollin' / woo, woo, Chattanooga, there you are
(I know I said I ' d update Chattanooga Day Two yesterday, but I LIED.)Day Two in Chattanooga had a leisurely start. We had one destination in mind (about which more later), but this place did not open until noon, and we had some time to kill before then. So we decided to take a five minute-ish walk over to theChattanooga Choo Choo for brunch.The Chattanooga Choo Choo is a hotel built in an old decommissioned railway station, with guest rooms both inside the terminal building and in the Pullman train cars, the latter of which are on the old rails out back behind the lobby. Don ' t get me wrong, our Air BnB was nice, but if...
Source: the underwear drawer - September 5, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
bend and ear and listen to my version / of a really solid Tennessee excursion
Ever since I moved to Atlanta (good God,nine years ago), people have been expressing, or at leastfeigning utter surprise, that I have never been to Chattanooga. " YOU ' VE NEVER BEEN? " everyone always says, aghast, like I ' m some kind of Abnormal, even though, GUESS WHAT, there are lots of places I haven ' t yet been, and Chattanooga hasn ' t really exactly numbered on my " must see before I die " list of travel destinations. But I wasn ' t opposed to the notion of visiting Chattanooga either (truth is I simply knew nothing about it apart from the Glenn Miller song), and so when we had a Labor Day weekend with no plans a...
Source: the underwear drawer - September 3, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
weekend warriors
I have this phenomenon in my house--you may be familiar with it in your own--where I need to get my kids out of the house on weekends to dosomething. It barely matters what. Really, it could be anything. The playground is a nice, easy choice. Or hiking, we like to do that. If it ' s rainy or cold, theGeorgia Aquarium is clutch, or theTellus Science Museum, or sometimes (when we ' re feeling a little least earnest in our intentions), any of a number of indoor playgrounds, plus or minus go karts. But the reason I need to get my kids out of the house on weekends is the same reason you need to walk your dogs. Well, maybe not i...
Source: the underwear drawer - April 15, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
April in Paris: Voyager Avec Enfants (chez nous, a recap)
I think I promised at the beginning of the week that I would give a little review of the apartment where we stayed, and though I almost don ' t want to, just to keep competition down for the same apartment should we want to book it again in the future, that ' s a pretty asshole reason to not share something good with other people.The rental company we used wasParis Perfect, and the apartment we rented wasThe Bergerac, which was in the 7th arrondissement on the Avenue de la Bourdonnais, basically one block away from the base of the Eiffel Tower. I picked this neighborhood for two reasons.One, which I mentioned before, is th...
Source: the underwear drawer - April 9, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
April in Paris: Voyager Avec Enfants (Day Six)
The theme of day 6 was:less fartsy, more artsy.The second guided tour I planned for this trip was a family experience for the Louvre. Because the thing is, I was pretty close to skipping the Louvre on this trip entirely. Cal would have been in the bag for it (to a degree), and Mack may have been interested to see the Mona Lisa and a few other pieces of art that he recognized, though not that much beyond that. But Nina, I thought, was not the right age at all for a classic art museum. Too big, not interactive enough, too many people in the way, too many queues, too much walking--it would all have translated into: " When are...
Source: the underwear drawer - April 8, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
April in Paris: Voyager Avec Enfants (Day Five)
" A touts les glories de la France. "Coming into this trip, I scheduled two guided tours, and deliberately put them at the end of the trip. I wanted to leave things a little open-ended and less time-pressured at the start of the week, just to allow for jet lag and child recalcitrance and the general unpredictability of kid life. However, Idid have two organized excursions I wanted for us to do, the first of which was a bike tour of the grounds at the Palace of Versailles.Generally speaking, there ' s enough in the city of Paris to do with kids, particularly if you ' re only planning to be here for less than a week, as we a...
Source: the underwear drawer - April 7, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
April in Paris: Voyager Avec Enfants (Day Four)
I had a whole itinerary for the Day 4, though what we ended up doing was …slightly different. But we’ll get there.Breakfast in the morning was a relaxed affairchez-nous again, and by the time we left the apartment, around 10:30am, we had plans to walk across the bridge at Passerelle Debilly to take 72 line of the city bus up to theCentre Pompidou. The Pompidou Center is architecturally unique, of course, and between the modern art and therobust children ’s programming I ’d read about, I figured we could spend most of the morning there into the early afternoon.The bus ride was fine, and easy to negotiate. We ’d bo...
Source: the underwear drawer - April 6, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
April in Paris: Voyager Avec Enfants (Day Three)
So, Day 3!We let the kids sleep in a bit because we ’d had a late night the day before and not any time-sensitive itinerary for the day anyway. While they were sleeping, I headed out to pick up some stuff to make breakfast at home—baguettes at a nearby boulangerie called Le Champ des Délices, and some basic groceries at a small chain market on t he corner called Franprix. The cashier was, I think, somewhat annoyed that I didn’t speak French, which…fair enough. People in the States get irrationally pissed at those who don’t speak English, and I suppose I could have brushed up a bit before we made our trip. Despit...
Source: the underwear drawer - April 5, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
April in Paris: Voyager Avec Enfants (Day Two)
Day 2 started off very well, jet lag considered. (Paris is 6 time zones ahead of EST.) Cal woke up oddly early —at 7:30am—and was reading in bed for a few hours, and we let the little kids sleep until 9:30am before finally waking them up. They probably would have slept for another few hours had we let them, but jet lag is one of those things that I kind of feel like you just want to kind of deal with imm ediately, particularly given that we’re only going to be here for less than a week. I don’t know if this helped, but I kept the little kids’ blinds open to let in a lot of sunshine in the morning, and so while th...
Source: the underwear drawer - April 4, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
April in Paris: Voyager Avec Enfants (Day One)
For the past six years, we ' d spent the kids Spring Break in Hilton Head, SC. It was a great family tradition--we ' d rent a house on the beach with pool, the kids would play in the sand and swim every day, we ' d cook, do a lot of reading, relax--it wasthat kind of thing. Simple, fun, kid-friendly, crowd-pleasing. However, now that my kids are getting somewhat older, we ' re trying to push ourselves a little bit more with our travel (in the somewhat limited time we have, around our work schedules and the kids school), and so after a very successful trip to London last summer, we decided,you know what, let ' s just go for...
Source: the underwear drawer - April 3, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
credible threat
Probably one of the ways to not fall into a funk of not writing is just to keep on writing. So with that in mind...this thing!I ' m on call at the hospital today, which —OK, look, no one likes being on call, right? Given the choice between walking the halls of the hospital at 6:30am on a Sunday morning and, I don’t know, having French toast with your kids at home, I think most people would choose the French toast. (Plus or minus on the kids.) But there’s some thing about being part of the bigger machinery that makes things work. There are unglamorous, less fun, more onerous parts to every job. But you spread them out...
Source: the underwear drawer - January 28, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
ch-ch-ch-changes
This blog, from the beginning, has been a journal about change. I started writing here in the year 2000 (though some of the older Homestead archives have since been eaten, believe me, they wentalllllthe way back, and yes, therewas an Internet then) and from the beginning, it ’s been a chronicle of∆x/∆y. Medical school. Marriage. Residency. Adifferent residency. Parenthood. Moving to the South. Every year was something big and something new andoh hell, how are we going to do this now and the constant, underlying theme through it all waschange.At the time I kind of petered out on the blog (and know that I never really ...
Source: the underwear drawer - January 27, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
I overthink, therefore I am
This is the day where all my social media feeds are filled with people exclaiming, with varying degrees of vulgarity, "Good riddance, 2013! What a shitty year! Hope 2014 will be better!" Is it poor form at this point to say that I thought 2013 was pretty good?Well, anyway. Happy New Year!* * *I don't think we go too too overboard with the Christmas gifts. At least I hope we don't--there's the tendency to lament the perceived extravagance and overindulgence of the modern secular Christmas celebration, but I think this self-imposed guilt can sometimes be a l...
Source: the underwear drawer - December 31, 2013 Category: Anesthetists Authors: Michelle Au Source Type: blogs
