There’s no such thing as a free lunch.  From the NYTimes – Digital medical records don’t save much money (if any) and have mixed results in improving care.  I’m too lazy to link, but I also found it extremely unsurprising to learn that increased preventative care does not save money.  Reducing costs most likely means reducing quality of care, but here in the US, we subsidize the rest of the world in many ways, and we’re probably at a place on the cost-benefit curve where the slope is fairly low.

We had a rough time getting I to sleep tonight.  But she is so adorable, basically at all times.  I love that she loves playing games these days.  She loves peekabo.  She’ll play with her blanket, with her bib, with whatever she’s got handy.  She loves it when I play, and she’ll pull the blanket off me or whatever I’m hiding under.  She ever plays with inanimate objects.  Today, she was covering up the dinosaurs on her pajamas and playing peekabo with the dinosaur.  So cute!

She thinks the wave sign means Daddy.  Basically, at some point I realized I should teach her to wave.  Waving is just not something I do normally, and we never started with I around, so I started saying “Hi Daddy” and “Bye Daddy” whenever B entered and left the room.  We have done Hi and Bye with other people as well, but B comes and goes a dozen or more times a day, thanks to his work-at-home scheme.  These days, if I say something about Daddy, she’ll start waving.  It’s so adorable.  If we walk by his door, she sometimes starts the waving sign with her hand.

I also love that she loves books.  She loves books above all things – textbooks, board books, regular kids books, novels, even catalogs.  She just loves flipping through them, turning the pages over and over, examining this and that.   I bring home stacks of books from the library for her and me to look through (as if I don’t have enough on my shelves.)  We used to read through all her books regularly, but it’s become much harder because she has so many, between the ones she owns and the ones we have out from the library.  We read all of them yesterday, and it must have been 20 books.   Her favorite book is O Is For Orca.  I can’t really recommend it because I don’t know what she sees in it, but she just loves it for some reason.

Today, she learned to “play” the xylophone for the first time.  She got two xylophones for Christmas.  Playing a xylophone is more complicated than you’d think.  You have to manipulate the mallet such that the end strikes the keys and then is lifted again.  She’d done it by accident a few times, but today she was able to do it with some consistency.  Naturally, every successful effort was greeted with plenty of applause on my part.  Until today, I’d gotten much more use out of the xylophone than she had.  (My favorite tune is The Gift to be Simple.)