Pachalla's Blade

This will be another conglomeration.

First: Cute baby.

Second: Cute girls snuggling while they slumber.

Third: Two girls doing dishes just like their mother does.

Fourth: The pacemaker. When I awoke early Tuesday to go to work, I felt an unusual amount of pacemaker activity. I continued to feel it at work whenever I sat down, so I put on one of the heart monitors and had a look at my rhythm (one of the perks of working on a telemetry unit). Indeed, my pacemaker was not behaving as usual, so I spoke with one of the cardiac nurses and one of the cardiologists and arranged to have mt pacer interrogated that afternoon.

Now, when I say "interrogated," I'm not necessarily talking about anything involving Dick Cheney or electrodes. Well actually, I guess it does involve electrodes, and I suppose there's really no way of knowing whether or not Cheney was involved.

So it turns out that my battery needed to be changed. When the battery is low, the pacemaker reverts to a power-saving mode in which it only fires in one chamber, and the minimum rate is 65. My lower rate had been set at 50. So, ironically, the power-saving mode was shocking me any time I stopped moving.

With some cajoling, I managed to get Dr. Sarat Pachalla to agree to switch out my pacemaker on Thursday. It's a good thing I know the man, because I seriously never saw the guy's face. I spoke to him briefly from under the surgical field, but then the drugs kicked in.

So here's number 2...

And here's number 3.

And here's some proof that our daughter is pretty much the most awesome.

The Magic of Descriptive Language

A quote from our oldest:

"Yesterday, I made a poop, and it was shaped like an 'L' and this long."

Amberthing

Octoberween

The spookiest and least diabetic-friendly holiday has passed over the Tolman household. Come to think of it, Halloween is a lot like Passover, but with fewer feasts, more costumes, and less Judaism.

Our youngest was an apple. Or a strawberry. Or a chili. I think it was probably an apple, since it had a worm on it, but she's shaped more like a chili, and she tastes more like provolone.

Lucy was an African version of Cruella DeVille. Has no one else heard of "101 Wildebeasts"?

Samantha pranced about as an adorable invertebrate.

Superdad. Delivering chilis to the hungry children of the world.
There was actually a version that involved red jocky shorts instead of running shorts, but we figured that if Dad's superness was making us uncomfortable, it would likely make the neighborhood children and their parents uncomfortable as well.

Rebecca Tolman, the unwashed lima bean.

It was a theme. All things from nature. An apple, a ladybug, a zebra, and a creepy doofus.