For some reason, my boys are absolutely obsessed with mouths. They just think it is hilarious to stick their fingers in each others' mouths (They bite really hard, too, so I'm surprised no one has gotten hurt.), or anyone's mouth for that matter. It doesn't end with fingers either - food, toys, you name it. Here is some fun we had today. Please excuse the shaky camera work. I was trying to hold the camera out while 2 babies were climbing on me and shoving stuff in my mouth.
We bought some storage cubes/ottomans the other day to store toys in. Who knew they would be so fun for the boys? They immediately started pushing them around the house and digging their toys out of them. I sat the boys on top of them like seats today and they thought that was pretty cool.
OK, maybe more like milk beards...
When we got back to Seattle we walked down to Pike Place Market. We watched them throw the fish since that is what you do at Pike Place Market (sort of a weird tradition). Then Mike had us walk down to this alley to check out the gum wall. For some reason I was thinking a big wall of gum ball dispensers. Boy was I wrong. This wall in the alley is plastered with old wads of chewed up gum - it is seriously so nasty.
You can't end a day in Seattle without eating at Deb's favorite restaurant - The Old Spaghetti Factory. The poor babies were so tired by then. They had such a long night before on the airplane and woke up that morning at 4:30am. Then we had a long day touring Seattle. Just look at how exhausted Eli looks.
Monday, August 24th, was our 3rd anniversary. We had stayed the previous night in Forks, so before we left town, we checked out all the Twilight sites. First we went to Dazzled by Twilight, and I got a Forks t-shirt just so I could prove I was there. There were probably 3 or 4 other Twilight stores within walking distance - they even have a Twilight Touring Company. Next, we drove by Forks High School, Bella's house, and the community hospital. We then proceeded to drive by the police station and the Cullen's home (which didn't look anything like their house in the movie). It was kind of fun to see all the places that are in the movie.
Washington actually has several rain forests (I thought there were only tropical rain forests, but apparently I was mistaken). We went to the Hoh Rain Forest which receives 143 inches of rain per year compared to Seattle's 34 inches. We hiked the Trail of Mosses. The trees were so big and covered in thick moss. The water in the river was clearer than tap water - you could see everything straight to the bottom. It was so gorgeous.
We then drove all the way back to Everett. We took the Port Townsend-Keystone Ferry to Whidbey Island and then the Mukilteo Ferry to Everett. We made one last stop for dinner. We met Aaron's parents, the twins, and Katie and Bryan for dinner at Outback Steakhouse.
It was a short but packed trip. Aaron and I had a really good time and enjoyed the time alone (although I will admit, I missed my boys). Now we're back in Lexington and Aaron has started his Fall semester at UK. He has a really busy semester with class, proposing his thesis, running the lab for his thesis, and being a TA for 2 undergraduate psychology class labs. Wish him luck! I know he'll do great, he always does :)
We had a busy trip. We took the Edmonds-Kingston Ferry across the Puget Sound. Our first stop was in Sequim at a lavender farm. It was so beautiful! As soon as I opened the car door the scent of lavender hit me. It smelled amazing! It was such a relaxing and peaceful place. We snipped our own lavender and continued on our way.
We then headed to our motel in Forks (that's right Twilight fans, we stayed in Forks). That evening we drove down to Kalaloch Lodge for a nice dinner on the ocean. It was pricey, but the food sure was good. On our way back to the motel we followed a sign to the Big Oak Tree. It really was BIG!
We didn't see any vampires or werewolves. Aaron and I couldn't help but laugh about all this Twilight craze. Forks and La Push are such little towns but Twilight has really put them on the map. They are really capitalizing on it, too. Everywhere you look in Forks you see Twilight this or Bella that. Then you get into La Push and it's Jacob this and Jacob that. It's pretty funny.
Everyone came to celebrate with us!
The boys destroyed their first cakes! Noah had nothing but fun eating his cake. At one point, he shoved his face straight into it. So funny!
Eli didn't enjoy it as much as Noah. He loved the cake but he was so tired. He would take a bite of cake, then he would scream for a second, then he would get distracted and eat another bite of cake. It was pretty funny.
They got tons of presents - I couldn't even bring them all home.
Thanks everyone for such a memorable first birthday! I know the boys won't remember it but I sure did love it :)
That evening we all went out to Apple Bees for their birthday. The boys got balloons and their first icecream sundae. They really liked it!
Clockwise from top left: Eli, Noah, Eli, Eli, Noah, Noah
Yesterday was the first time I've been back to the cemetery to see my mom's grave since I left in March. The head stone looks really nice and my grandma and aunts did a really nice job with the flowers. It was hard going back to Michigan knowing that my mom wouldn't be there and this was the only way I could visit her but I'm glad I went.
WASHINGTON -- In 1986, Ronald Reagan and Bill Bradley created a legislative miracle. They fashioned a tax reform that stripped loopholes, political favors, payoffs, patronage and other corruptions out of the tax system. With the resulting savings, they lowered tax rates across the board. Those reductions, combined with the elimination of the enormous inefficiencies and perverse incentives that go into tax sheltering, helped propel a 20-year economic boom.
In overhauling any segment of our economy, the 1986 tax reform should be the model. Yet today's ruling Democrats propose to fix our extremely high quality (but inefficient and therefore expensive) health care system with 1,000 pages of additional curlicued complexity -- employer mandates, individual mandates, insurance company mandates, allocation formulas, political payoffs and myriad other conjured regulations and interventions -- with the promise that this massive concoction will lower costs.
This is all quite mad. It creates a Rube Goldberg system that simply multiplies the current inefficiencies and arbitrariness, thus producing staggering deficits with less choice and lower-quality care. That's why the administration can't sell Obamacare.
The administration's defense is to accuse critics of being for the status quo. Nonsense. Candidate John McCain and a host of other Republicans since have offered alternatives. Let me offer mine: Strip away current inefficiencies before remaking one-sixth of the U.S. economy. The plan is so simple it doesn't even have the requisite three parts. Just two: radical tort reform and radically severing the link between health insurance and employment.
(1) Tort reform: As I wrote recently, our crazy system of casino malpractice suits results in massive and random settlements that raise everyone's insurance premiums and creates an epidemic of defensive medicine that does no medical good, yet costs a fortune.
An authoritative Massachusetts Medical Society study found that five out of six doctors admitted they order tests, procedures and referrals -- amounting to about 25 percent of the total -- solely as protection from lawsuits. Defensive medicine, estimates the libertarian/conservative Pacific Research Institute, wastes more than $200 billion a year. Just half that sum could provide a $5,000 health insurance grant -- $20,000 for a family of four -- to the uninsured poor (U.S. citizens ineligible for other government health assistance).
What to do? Abolish the entire medical-malpractice system. Create a new social pool from which people injured in medical errors or accidents can draw. The adjudication would be done by medical experts, not lay juries giving away lottery prizes at the behest of the liquid-tongued John Edwardses who pocket a third of the proceeds.
The pool would be funded by a relatively small tax on all health-insurance premiums. Socialize the risk; cut out the trial lawyers. Would that immunize doctors from carelessness or negligence? No. The penalty would be losing your medical license. There is no more serious deterrent than forfeiting a decade of intensive medical training and the livelihood that comes with it.
(2) Real health-insurance reform: Tax employer-provided health care benefits and return the money to the employee with a government check to buy his own medical insurance, just as he buys his own car or home insurance.
There is no logical reason to get health insurance through your employer. This entire system is an accident of World War II wage and price controls. It's economically senseless. It makes people stay in jobs they hate, decreasing labor mobility and therefore overall productivity. And it needlessly increases the anxiety of losing your job by raising the additional specter of going bankrupt through illness.
The health care benefit exemption is the largest tax break in the entire U.S. budget, costing the government a quarter-trillion dollars annually. It hinders health-insurance security and portability as well as personal independence. If we additionally eliminated the prohibition on buying personal health insurance across state lines, that would inject new and powerful competition that would lower costs for everyone.
Repealing the exemption has one fatal flaw, however. It was advocated by candidate John McCain. Obama so demagogued it last year that he cannot bring it up now without being accused of the most extreme hypocrisy and without being mercilessly attacked with his own 2008 ads.
But that's a political problem of Obama's own making. As is the Democratic Party's indebtedness to the trial lawyers, which has taken malpractice reform totally off the table. But that doesn't change the logic of my proposal. Go the Reagan-Bradley route. Offer sensible, simple, yet radical reform that strips away inefficiencies from the existing system before adding Obamacare's new ones -- arbitrary, politically driven, structural inventions whose consequence is certain financial ruin.
Got stuck,
Got our haircut for the first time (Eli really needed it),
And, our favorite, played with our toys.
We just bought Amanda health insurance the other day: it cost about $50 a month. It's one of those "high deductible" insurance packages that Congress wants to make illegal. People don't seem to understand the purpose of insurance, and its noble ideal. Through insurance, we are able to share risk, and when someone is unlucky enough to protract an illness that they are not able to pay for (e.g., cancer), then insurance (paid for by others who did not get serious illnesses) covers the sickness. It is ridiculous to demand that insurance covers things like check-ups because they have nothing to do with risk. Thomas Sowell, one of my favorite economists and authors, explains this distortion and how it has artificially increased insurance premiums:
This is why, I'm not a member of the APA and never will be: Because, I do not believe that we should force others to pay us (mental health professionals). If our services are such that force is necessary for us to get gainful employment, then something is seriously wrong.Politicians are already one of the main reasons why medical insurance is so expensive. Insurance is designed to cover risks but politicians are in the business of distributing largesse. Nothing is easier for politicians than to mandate things that insurance companies must cover, without the slightest regard for how such additional coverage will raise the cost of insurance.
If insurance covered only those things that most people are most concerned about-- the high cost of a major medical expense-- the price would be much lower than it is today, with politicians piling on mandate after mandate.
Since insurance covers risks, there is no reason for it to cover annual checkups, because it is known in advance that annual checkups occur once a year. Automobile insurance does not cover oil changes, much less the purchase of gasoline, since these are regular recurrences, not risks.
But politicians in the business of distributing largesse-- especially with somebody else's money-- cannot resist the temptation to pass laws adding things to insurance coverage. Many of those who are pushing for more government involvement in medical care are already talking about extending insurance coverage to "mental health"-- which is to say, giving shrinks and hypochondriacs a blank check drawn on the federal treasury.
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
You smell like a monkey
