Posts by B Jones
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Cord blood banking is marketed quite heavily to new parents. When it's mixed in with the info on epidurals and newborn hearing screening and immunisation, the effect's a lot stronger than set alongside $80 organic cotton bassinette sheets and other similar baby luxuries.
They don't mention the price of it, and it took me a couple of reads to establish that there isn't anything they know they can actually cure with individual cord blood. And I couldn't find out if I could donate it to a general cord blood bank where it could benefit people without several thousand dollars to spend.
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Am I late to suggest Maria Pia's? It really is quite fabulous. Although I have yet to try Sweet Mama's Kitchen and it's probably better located.
I beat you to it by several hours. It's one of my favourites, and completely different to Sweet Mama's, which is good fun for a gathering of mates on a night out, but not so much for the nice lunch with mum. At Maria's, you can tell it's a family business, you can smell the woodsmoke from what I guess must be a pizza oven somewhere, and it fills up all the corners of a lovely old house in a unique and quirky sort of way. And the food, my god. Italian but in the "what's that interesting vegetable" sense, not the red sauce and cheese sense.
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Maria Pia's is my restaurant of choice to take mums. It's special as all get-out, but with a lovely homey atmosphere. They do a good set lunch menu, main and dessert and a glass of wine for $25 last time I checked. It's near Old St Paul's.
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The only downside experience of being an early 30s mum I've experienced so far was that the registrar at the hospital looked way too young. Fortunately she and all the other support crew were professional, competent, kind and fabulous.
The brief dalliance with the carrycot is now over. Baby is transferred to preferred sleeping spot #2, my shoulder; spot #1 having returned to work yesterday.
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I had loads of fun the other night watching father and grandfather of the New Baby running around looking for a pump for the mountain buggy wheels, while step-grandmother found one installed in the undercarriage of the whole arrangement. They've thought of everything. I've taken it for a couple of spins so far and the suspension is awesome. Can handle the steps down from the front door very well. But it is a bugger to get in and out of the boot. They do a nice carrycot accessory that's not ridiculously overpriced if you get it on TradeMe, in which New Baby has been asleep for more than 10 minutes, so that's all good.
Huzzah for the early 30s mums. There's no way I'd have coped so well in my early 20s. For one thing, I wouldn't have read the Truth About Babies right here. I now recognise it as tasteful euphemism rather than outright hyperbole.
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Also, under no circumstances do you want them having sex.
A very popular gender-specific New Zealand child-raising manual with a poorly-hidden social conservative agenda has a lot of advice on this subject. It includes the firm injunction, amongst a lot of other fluffy feel-good platitudes, not to enable teenage sex.
I'm not too wound up about the instructions for getting into university. It's the stuff that educated middle class parents have known for years anyway, and it could be really useful to families pulling themselves up by their bootstraps who don't have that social capital. It's not like 15-18 year olds are all that well set up to decide how best to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a variety of tertiary training options.
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$22k for a pregancy is not anything like normal.
It's not standard (see the article) but shouldn't be possible.
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Epidural injections seem to have about a 50% success rate - if you still had pain after 6 weeks (my usual recovery time) I can see why you'd consider it, but I can also see why it wouldn't be on the list of first interventions given that people tend to get better within that time regardless of treatment.
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I slipped a disk in NZ, I waited weeks and weeks to see a specialist, and then was told that there was a 6 week waiting list to get a lumbar punch at Wellington Public
The hell? A lumbar puncture isn't standard treatment for a disc injury, it's a test for meningitis and cancer and a bunch of other things. The four or so times I've had a disc injury, I've had physio care (which didn't really achieve much), was eventually referred to a specialist, who said about the same as the physio: that surgery was usually no better in terms of result than just letting it get better on its own, and maybe pilates or exercise would help. It wasn't life threatening, just uncomfortable, and it did get better on its own. And these days, Wellington Regional Hospital is quite flash.
I read the other day that an insured person still had to pay US$22,000 towards the cost of giving birth, despite an uncomplicated pregnancy - her insurance plan only covered the first $3000 of costs. Contrast that with the cost in NZ - free with public and about $4000 for the whole lot if you want to go private.
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This is an important contribution to the exorcism thing, with a few other precedents described.
I'm not sure whether the "is it a genuine cultural practice or not" line of enquiry is a useful one. At what point does the circle of people who believe in supernatural effect X become so small that the criminal law can take precedence? Any line would have to be arbitrary, given that exorcism isn't subject to rational inquiry.