Zette’s gotten interested in having a home birth and we took a tour of the Alexandria Birth Center. It was pretty neat. I discovered yesterday that one of my co-workers’s wife delivered there just two weeks ago.

She and I both are pretty happy with the idea of a home birth as being better for her, although we aren’t opposed to a hospital birth. Suzette’s disabilities may make it more comfortable to deliver in some position other than the typical hospital pose. Of course, the normal concern is “What if something goes wrong?”, to which the answer is that you transfer to a hospital. Considering where we live there are plenty of those nearby. Little can go wrong that cannot wait for a 2-mile drive (or anbulance ride, if somehow that’s necessary). The nearest fire station (i.e. the nearest ambulance) is 0.3 miles away. There are some advantages to living in the city.

For Suzette’s birthday, I bought her a session at Baby Insight. Unfortunately, when we got home, we discovered that the video tape was damaged and blank. Fortunately, the folks at Baby Insight were sufficiently cool that they let us have an additional session.

I asked a friend to convert the video to DVD, which will allow me to post some video clips to the web. Stay tuned.

Zette and I took a trip to Boston a little while ago. She’s interested in taking instruction at the North Bennet Street School, and they had alumni/teachers demoing their work at two different craft fairs. I’m not so sure that I think this is a great fascination for her, partly because Boston is a bit of a hike from where we currently live, but also because I’m concerned that because of her disabilities, she’s either setting herself up for failure, pain, or both. Fortunately, they have shorter duration workshops that she’ll probably love without taking her away from home for long periods.

We also had a chance to revisit some of my old haunts, including MIT, Mary Chung’s (which IMHO is the finest Szechuan restaurant on the continent YMMV), 41st West (my undergraduate dormitory), the Union Oyster House and a handful of other Boston-touristy things. We spent some time at the MIT museum which was very cool but also somewhat disappointing, mainly because they had Kismet on display, but they didn’t have her turned on, which I think is a bummer. I can understand that it would be hard to keep Kismet maintained properly if she were still running, but it’s still a bummer.

As usual, I didn’t plan enough ahead to work in everything that I might have wanted. Apologies to Norm and Harris for not letting you guys know earlier that I was in town. Missed out on seeing Blue Man Group again, and I timed our departure wrong, so we weren’t hungry when we passed The Traveler restaurant (which everyone calls Food and Books).

Ah well, It is good to save some things for next time.