If you don’t know the story, its about Horton the elephant who has great hearing and is able to detect a world of people living on a dust speck. He protects them at great personal expense from an authoritative mother Kangaroo with the refrain — “A person’s a person, no matter how small”.

In a sequel, he is tricked by a lazy momma to be bird to sit on hear egg for a whole year until it hatches. The bird shows up at the end to claim the egg just as it is about to hatch, but instead of a bird in the egg, its a baby elephant!

The stories are wonderful, like all of Dr. Seuss’s books. But after reading the books over and over again I wondered, are they anti-choice? Well according to Wikipedia, they are not. Theodore Geisel threatened to sue an anti-choice group to make them stop using his phrase on their stationary, and his widow stated that she “doesn’t like people to hijack Dr. Seuss characters or material to front their own points of view”.

Though evidence points to Dr. Seuss being a left-leaning person, and his wife reportedly supports Planned Parenthood, anti-choicers have co-opted this story for their cause. Anti-abortion groups actually PROTESTED the LA opening of the Horton Hears a Who movie, where children were present.

My opinion is that the story is meant to honor children not fetuses. It makes Matilda feel great to hear the phrase “a person is a person no matter how small” because she is small and often feels powerless. And while Mazie the bird was lazy and didn’t want to care for her egg, it shows how HARD it is to care for an egg. It makes me feel appreciated as a mom to know that Dr. Seuss doesn’t take gestating lightly.

So back off anti-choicers. Horton is too great to be brought into the abortion debate! Leave him alone!

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We also did a new bathroom floor and vanity and installed some new hardware. So far, we love the curved shower curtain rod!

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And the design is wonderful. Even though we can afford to buy furniture from other places we always buy IKEA because we love the way it looks.

When it came time to redo our bathroom we decided to go with the Ikea GODMORGON Cabinet ($199 + extra for the legs) and mirror. The brilliant design allows you to have two full size drawers. It gives you tons of storage and comes with neat little dividers.

We chose a BRÅVIKEN sink to go with it ($179.00). The sink is really shallow and wide. Its an interesting design and very european/modern looking.

And for our faucet we chose GRUNDTAL ($89.99), a sleek faucet with a neat mechanism for turning the water on and off.

We started by assembling the cabinet. Pablo and I are pros at this by now and it went quickly and easily. I was impressed by the quality of the materials.

Then came time to connect it to our plumbing and this is where it all went very wrong.

We got under the cabinet and removed all of the old plumbing. I assembled the PVC pipes that came with the Braviken sink and realized very quickly that the pipes are much narrower than the metal ones that we had previously.

Stymied, I started assembling the faucet since I already know how to change a faucet. To my chagrin I realized that the connectors were not the same size as what I had previously AND the cords were too short!

I went to IKEAfans to see if any advice could be found and I found some posts warning people about the fact that the connectors will not work with American plumbing. You would think that IKEA would perhaps warn you of this! (And yes, I realize that the world is metric except the USA, but that is besides the point).

Here is what the drawing the manual looks like. As you can see there are no instructions on how to connect the end of the pipe (bottom left) to your plumbing. IKEA considers that to be 100% your problem. In their defense, everyone’s plumbing is different, so they have no way of knowing what you have.

I made a call to my local hardware store and they suggested that I try Brother’s Plumbing Supply in Elmsford.

I made the trip out and thankfully, they knew EXACTLY what to do. The Grundtal faucet has a 1/2″ IPS connector, my old sink uses 3/8″ compression fitting. So I needed an adapter/extension shown below. The brass part is the adapter which I guess allows me to connect the two female parts. The adapter is the webbed hose part.

Click to enlarge

And for the waste pipe I needed a reducing nut and washer. What you do is put the rubber washer on the smaller IKEA supplied pipe. Then put the nut on it. Screw the nut into the waste pipe that you have and voila, it fits!

Total cost of materials was $19.00.

And here is a pic of it all put together!

My final review on the sink/faucet/cabinet. The finished product is beautiful, but don’t buy it unless:

• Your hot/cold shutoff pipes are short. Ours protude 4.5 inches from the wall. Further out, and you will not be able to open and close the drawers in the Godmorgon cabinet.We were fortunate that our hot/cold pipes are relatively flush against the wall. If they had stuck out another inch or two the sink would not be touching the wall. And who wants a sink that is 1″ away from the walls?
• You are replacing something that is the same width as your current vanity. This goes for any sink. The faucet and the drain hole need to be located in line with your waste line.
• If the above don’t apply then you should be willing to hire a plumber to redo the pipes under the sink, move the plumbing etc…

Further reading: If you are more knowledgable at plumbing that I am (not hard!) then you might be interested in:

• Steve’s Blog – He explains how to install an Ikea faucet.
• Parkerman’s photos on Flickr – I found this on IKEAfans. He discarded the pipes that came with the Braviken and did it with American fittings.

PS Today, while at the plumbing store, I learned that this is not called a “Monkey Wrench”. Its called a pipe wrench. They guys at the store were both offended and amused that I used the term which is an anachronism.

Now that she is older, I am really starting to be concerned. He favorite princess is Sleeping Beauty and she has started to complain daily that she does not have light skin and that she wants long yellow hair. She constantly plays at “being married” and asks me who is her prince.

Perhaps I should just chill out.   But as I put Matilda to bed at night and read her one of the below stories, I cant help but to worry about what the effects hearing these stories over and over again. There are repeating themes of competition between females, not having a mother or friends, stress on the importance of beauty not to mention the violence.

Here are my evaluations of the popular, Disney princess books. The film versions differ greatly from the books. Matilda is scared to watch movies, so we have not gotten to that point yet.

Sleeping Beauty

Every character in this story has a name except her mother!

This is a really scary story for kids. The drawing of the witch is scary and its scary how Aurora get lured up to the highest tower by the witch so she can meet her fate.

This is the most violent of the stories. Just try to explain this to your child –  “when the baby reaches her sixteenth birthday she will prick her finger on a spindle and die”. The book features a page where the prince stabs the dragon/evil fairy in the heart. There is blood.

Beauty and the Beast

There are so many stories in our culture of  beautiful, long suffering women who love men who are violent and have terrible tempers. In the grown up versions of these stories, the woman usually ends up dead so that the male character can feel badly about it.

Stories like Beauty and the Beast teach girls to believe that we can change the beast into a prince through the power of our love! Beauty and the Beast is probably the first story of this theme that girls are exposed to.

Belle like most girls in most stories, has no mother. She also appears to have no friends.

There are good things about Beauty and the Beast however. Belle is a brunette and the smartest girl in her town.  They sell dumbed down versions of the book that show Belle and Beast as just friends. They are like Goofus and Gallant. Belle is polite and clean and Beast is rude and dirty. I try to stick to these books rather than the actual story.

Snow White

The female competition between step-mother and daughter is intense in this one. Snow White’s step mother decided to kill her because she is more beautiful than the aging queen.

Thankfully, Disney books has edited the story. In the original, the evil stepmother instructs the hunter to take Snow White to the forest, cut out her heart and bring it back in a box. In the new books, he merely abandons her in the forest. A strange man comes and kisses her at the end and carries her off.

Matilda used to like this story a lot but I had to stop reading it to her because it gave me nightmares.

Cinderella

More female competition.  Cinderella has mean, ugly stepsisters and a step mother who hates her.

Her big achievement in the story is to have small feet and marry the prince.  Matilda asks me all the time when is she going to get married. And tells me the details of her wedding.

This is probably the one that I read to Matilda the most as there are no witches or violence. I also like the way that Disney worked the mice into the story.

The Little Mermaid

I actually have few problems with this one. Ariel does not wear a crown and in the stories she actually has a fully developed personality. She actually spends some time with Prince Eric before they marry and he seems to be a nice prince. Her underwater friends are great too.

Though Ariel has no mother, she has a complex relationship with her father and defies him.

Ariel’s story is best told in the movie. It doesn’t work well as a 15 page book.

I have tried a couple of things to deal with the princess problem. I attempted at one point to retell the stories my way. But she caught on pretty quickly that I was not telling the story “correctly”.

Disney has of course introduced some diversity to their line of princesses. There is Mulan, Jasmine, Pocahontas and Tiana. However, Matilda has no interest in these princesses.

So tell me. Is your daughter obsessed with princesses and does it concern you?

But blogging for the family has been so much fun that I decided that I need to blog for the business. So yesterday, we launched the new www.haneedesigns.com. Please check it out!

We also launched a facebook page for the company.

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Its called a Nelson Saucer Lamp. The design is by American designer George Nelsen. It was designed in in 1947 and is part of the permanent collection of the MoMA.

I love the way it goes with my mid-century design chairs!

And this is my garden this year!

The photos are exactly one year apart. I guess the plants just needed time to put down roots!

May 3, 2010
Teaching Physicians the Price of Care
By SUSAN OKIE

When Dr. Ryan Thompson, an internist, was a medical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston a few years ago, he worried that he and his fellow trainees weren’t learning about the cost of medical treatments, the financing of health care and the impact of high medical bills on their patients.

So, with the help of faculty members at Harvard Medical School and another resident, Dr. Thompson organized an elective course for residents on the topic. In one session, “I made up a kind of ‘Price Is Right’ game,” he recalled. “I got the bill of a patient and actually went through it,” asking colleagues to guess the cost of commonly ordered tests, like CT scans. Their answers “were all over the map,” he said. “They had no idea.”

Doctors in training have traditionally been insulated from information about the cost of the tests and treatments they order for patients — in fact, for decades, the subject was virtually taboo when professors and trainees discussed treatment decisions during hospital rounds. During four years of medical school, students learn to order tests and treatments based on their knowledge of diseases and of scientific evidence.

Until recently, most schools included little information on financial factors, like how the insurance system works and how treatment costs affect patients’ behavior. As a result, most physicians enter practice with little sense of how to make the most cost-effective choices for patients, or how their own decisions affect the patient’s — and the nation’s — medical bills.

“Medical schools have done a really terrible job over the years in educating students about the system that they’re going to encounter,” said Dr. Michael Whitcomb, former senior vice president for medical education at the American Association of Medical Colleges, or A.A.M.C., and former editor of the journal Academic Medicine.

But escalating costs and the national debate over the health care overhaul are forcing medical schools and residency programs to grapple with teaching about the financial side of their profession. Accrediting organizations now require such teaching, and students and residents recognize that they need to understand finances as well as blood tests.

“It’s a very odd system where we make purchasing decisions on behalf of patients but we don’t know what anything costs,” said Dr. Neel Shah, a first-year resident in obstetrics-gynecology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “There’s no disincentive to ordering tests — all we have to do is click a button and we’ve ordered it.”

To be accredited, medical schools and hospital residency programs, in which doctors spend three to five years learning a specialty, are supposed to be teaching future doctors about health care costs and cost-effective practices. The A.A.M.C., which does the accreditation of medical schools, made this clear in a 1998 report. And since 2007, residency programs in the United States have been required to teach doctors to “incorporate considerations of cost awareness and risk-benefit analysis” in caring for patients, according to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.

A commentary in the April 8 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Molly Cooke, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and director of the school’s Academy of Medical Educators, said it was “a critical responsibility of medical schools and residency programs” to educate physicians about cost issues.

“Medical schools and residencies, in general, are taking this very seriously,” said Dr. John Prescott, a physician and the medical college association’s chief academic officer.

Nonetheless, the effort has not been universal. According to a recent A.A.M.C. survey, about 60 percent of 102 American and Canadian medical schools include some material on health care costs, although the time they devote to it varies widely.

Dr. Prescott said a separate survey of 155 large teaching hospitals that together sponsor more than two-thirds of accredited residency programs in the United States found that only 41 percent had made sure that all their residencies included material on health care costs.

Dr. Whitcomb, the former A.A.M.C. vice president, said one reason medical schools and residencies have been slow to tackle the subject is that most of their faculty members are academic doctors or researchers who know little about health care economics and don’t feel comfortable teaching it. “Trying to figure out how to do it and who’s going to do it is a real challenge,” he said.

Some medical schools have met the challenge by creating courses for first- or second-year students on health policy or professional responsibility that include information about treatment costs and insurance.

A second-year student at the Yale School of Medicine, Alexandra Ristow, said, “We discussed the fact that we have all this technology now that we can’t necessarily afford to provide to every single patient — and it’s not necessary, either.” She added that, in other classes, cost considerations are part of the discussion of how to treat hypothetical patients.

Professors ask: “What is this test going to tell you? Is it going to change the diagnosis, or change how you manage the patient’s care?” Ms. Ristow said. Concerns about treatment costs, she said, are “just very pervasive.”

But once students begin working on medical teams in hospitals, during their third year of medical school, they must focus on developing clinical skills and learning to care for patients — and, according to students at several schools, the financial aspects of care are seldom discussed.

“We all know that the cost of health care is high, but it’s sort of fuzzy how doctors play into this,” said Chitra Akileswaran, who has completed three years at Harvard Medical School and is enrolled in a joint degree program in medicine and business administration.

At the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, students can get hands-on lessons about the impact of treatment costs on patients by volunteering Saturdays at the East Harlem Health Outreach Program, a student-run free clinic for uninsured residents of a low-income neighborhood nearby.

Medical students evaluate patients, choose which drugs are prescribed, arrange care for patients who need to see a surgeon or other specialist and collaborate with a social worker to help those who need social services or assistance paying for medicine. They also sit on the steering committee and are in charge of researching and updating the clinic’s formulary, a stock of inexpensive, cost-effective drugs that are purchased from the hospital pharmacy.

Dr. Yasmin S. Meah, an assistant professor of medicine at Mount Sinai who directs the program, noted that medical students initially campaigned to establish the clinic, similar to others at several New York medical schools and an estimated 110 nationwide, as a service to the community. Since opening in 2004, it has become an invaluable setting for teaching future doctors to practice cost-effectively. Students come to “understand what is necessary and what is not,” Dr. Meah said. “They’re using the cheapest drugs to get the biggest bang for the buck.”

During residency, trainees’ heavy workloads and the need to care efficiently for very sick people make it hard for them to consider the cost of tests and treatments. “You definitely try to think about it,” said Dr. Ian Warrington, a first-year resident in emergency medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “All of us are aware that a CT scan is significantly more expensive than a chest X-ray, and an M.R.I. is significantly more than a CT scan.”

Emergency-medicine residents memorize guidelines that help them determine when imaging studies are needed after certain kinds of injuries, and professors routinely ask trainees to defend their rationale for ordering certain tests. But sometimes, Dr. Warrington said, residents and the doctors supervising them will end up ordering an expensive test even when the probability of finding a fracture or a hemorrhage is low because they are worried about missing something serious, and about being sued if they do.

“You’re sort of working on not enough time and not always enough information, and you do the best you can,” he said. Cost “should be factored in, but realistically, with the environment that we practice in, you have to be very cautious how you do that.”

This article was produced in collaboration with Kaiser Health News — an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health policy research organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Matilda had a bronchial infection, so the doctor prescribed antibiotics. The particular antibiotic that she prescribed cost us $53 (with insurance). If I did not have insurance it would have cost me over $80. Is azithromycin SOOOOO much better than $4 amoxicillin? And is the doctor aware that the medication that she prescribes is so expensive?

Health insurance would be a heck of a lot cheaper if it was not treated as a Las Vegas style all you can eat buffet (lobster included).

If there is a doctor here to comment, I would love to hear your thoughts.

We went with friends Julie and Dave (and the kids) and made the trek out to Sik Gaek (16129 Crocheron Ave, Flushing, NY 11358, (718) 321-7770). When you walk into this place its like you are suddenly IN Korea. The tables are close together and picnic table style. The decorations, the waitstaff and the really loud Korean pop music are all fun and festive.

When you first sit down at your table, they bring you fried eggs and steamed eggs and dduk bok ki. Not your typical ban chan. We waited around for service until we were informed that there is actually a button on the table where you can buzz for your waiter!

We ordered live octopus two ways. The first plate of live octopus was just simply cut into small pieces and put on a plate with slices of hot pepper and garlic. It came with hot pepper and sesame oil dipping sauce. Its really hard to grab with your chopsticks, but using your fingers is somewhat out of the question because the octopus will literally crawl up your hand. It tastes like fresh raw seafood. It is not smelly, but it is slimy. The tentacles grab the roof of your mouth and tongue. Its chewy, so you have to really chew hard to get it to stop moving and be able to swallow it. Its more of a fun dish to eat than being really tasty. It really isn’t as gross as it sounds. It costs $19.00.

Next, we ordered san nakji jungol. They bring a large pot to your table and put it on a burner. Inside, there are clams, mussels, calamari rings, noodles, vegetables, a conch and on top, there is a severed whole lobster. And it is still moving. And then the waiter comes back and puts two whole live octopi on top. He turns up the flame and the whole thing cooks your food alive. The octopus and lobster twitch and squirm until they are done. The waiter comes back, cuts it all up into bit size pieces with scissors and you enjoy a hearty seafood stew that is nice and spicy. The jongol is a lot of food, you can probably feed 6 people with it. It costs $80.

Matilda thought the restaurant was pretty fun. Its not very kid friendly. The food is all really spicy. But they DO have high chairs. We had to leave eventually because it was so loud, it gave her a headache.

Thanks to Dave for making the awesome video!