Belly Tales

Apparently, 300 people showed up to last week’s Nurse-in at Toys ‘R Us! Wow! Go NYC breastfeeding community! It’s so sad that actions like this are even needed in the first place, but I bet Toys ‘R Us will never make the mistake of harrassing and calling security on a breastfeeding woman again, and every bit of education helps. I wonder what the employees will do next time they see a nursing woman? Hopefully leave her in peace! The Daily News picked up the story here.

Here you can see the lovely vaginas we cut out of our foam blocks to practice on. Notice that the eipisiotomy I cut is crooked. I’ve colored in the different layers: red = muscle layer, pink = submucosal, blue = subcutaneous, purple = subcuticular, and the edge is the mucocutaneous border. All so nice and neatly laid out: so NOT how it’s EVER going to look on a real woman, EVER.

The red vagina on the left is my very first attempt at suturing. Maybe the second attempt will go more smoothly? I’ve begun my anchor stitch in the submucosal layer.

Here I’ve tied off my anchor stitch, using an instrument tie that took at least 10 minutes to complete. Putting in an anchor stitch first, before suturing anything else, is only done if there’s a lot of blood coming from the apex of the wound, and the stitch is meant to tie off the bleeding vessels and help keep the rest of the wound as clean and blood free as possible. In theory. Notice how loose and baggy my anchor stitch is. I don’t think that would stop even the smallest vessel from bleeding.

Having botched the anchor stitch, I now move on to the muscle layer. The muscle layer has got to be the hardest to stitch, period. It’s so deep! And the stitch is supposed to go sideways, so that you don’t end up stitching through the woman’s rectum. Piece of cake, lemme tell you…

Here you can see where my first interrupted stitch through the muscle layer tore through the foam, and managed to absolutely not approximate the muscle together in any way, whatsoever.

My second interrupted stitch is a little better. At least it’s on both sides of the wound, ostensibly pulling the tissue together.

Enough with the muscle layer already! Suturing mucosa is such a blessed relief, after all of that deep stuff. This is an interlocking blanket stitch, in theory.

After suturing the mucosa above the hymenal ring, next comes a transitional stitch which dives under the hymenal ring, and comes up in the subcutaneous tissue in front of the hymenal ring. And then, what comes next is a descending continuous stitch down towards the perineal apex of the wound.

The descending continuous stitch continues.

After that, we sew our way back up the perineum, this time in the subcuticular layer, using a ladder stitch composed of interlocking C’s, if that makes any sense whatsoever. Trust me, it barely makes sense to me. Notice how taut and well approximated the subcutaneous layer is in the back *rolls eyes*. Honestly, though, how do you really do this on a live woman? If you draw up the sides of the wound together, how do you even get your needle in there to suture in the first place? Urgh, it defies me.

The finished product: well, it’s stitched up, at any rate. Not sure if it’s any good. Thank goodness this isn’t a live person yet!

Meanwhile, four more lacerated foam vaginas eagerly await my careful, skilled, well-controlled ministrations *snort*.

OPEN LETTER TO THE WOMEN OF THE WORLD: Do not fear! I am practicing this like nobody’s business! I promise you, before I even come within an inch of your perineum, I will be so much better at this! I will suture foam until my fingers fall off, then I’ll progress to raw chicken breast, and when I finally do suture the very first of you, it will be under the watchful guidance of a skilled, experienced midwife, who won’t let me place a single stitch unless it’s in the absolute right place. I will be so careful. I will keep working on this until I’m good at it. I promise you.

I feel like I’ve just barely been holding it together the past few weeks, and just barely (by the skin of my teeth) managing to keep on top of things…not that I’m even coming close to getting all of my reading and homework done, but I’ve been doing enough to feel like I’m working hard at it, and therefore, the stress has been kept somewhat at bay. Until today, that is. Today, it all came crashing down on me in one overwhelming heap. I blame the suturing.

Yes, ladies and germs, today I learned to suture—”learned” being a very generous word for what I actually did today. Mostly I flailed around with a needle holder. Usually I’d consider myself pretty competent at things: I’m smart, I catch on quickly, I can generally master most tasks I set my mind to in just a matter of a few tries. Suturing? Er, no. Suturing is going to take a lot longer than just a few tries.

We were all given large, thick blocks of foam rubber to practice on, and a set of instruments, and suture. We learned about the different types of suture today—chromic v. vicryl—learned about the sizes and shapes of needles, the instruments we’d need, knot tying (instrument and hand ties), how to cut an episiotomy if you absolutely have to (the indications for cutting one being, basically, almost never—except in cases of extreme emergency, or when you need to enlarge the perineal opening in order to perform additional manuevers, such as during a shoulder dystocia). We spent the entire afternoon trying to sew up the episiotomy we’d cut. Oye! Achor stitches defy me! How in the world do you manage to sew sideways through the muscle layer, instead of up and down, so that you don’t end up sewing through the woman’s rectum? I can’t seem to get the angle of the needle right, and all of my stitches are uneven and either too deep or too shallow, too close together, dimpling, too taut or too loose. And if this is foam I’m working with, and I still can’t do it…what am I going to when it’s actual skin and tissue and muscle, none of it neatly delineated, but all blurred together, and bleeding, no less?

This is actually the best motivation I can imagine for trying to preserve the perineum during birth: so long as the woman is intact, you don’t ever have to suture!

Just a quick update on the Toys ‘R Us breastfeeding harrassment I posted about the other day: the ACLU has taken up Chelsi Meyerson’s cause. While breastfeeding harrassment and intolerance probably occurs every minute of every day all over this country, it’s not every day that the ACLU gets involved. So this is really becoming a high profile case, WHICH, of course, is all the more reason for YOU to go to tomorrow’s Nurse-In, right outside the 42nd St. Times Square Toys ‘R Us, at 11:00 am.

Today I missed one hell of an opportunity: I was invited, along with several other feminist bloggers and activists (and cheers to Melissa from A Womb of Her Own for asking them to extend the invitiation my way), to partipate in a conference call with Lynn Paltrow, the executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Woman, aka NAPW. Unfortunately, my class on shoulder dystocia ran late, and I wasn’t able to join the call in time. Nevertheless, something needs to be said about Lynn Paltrow and NAPW. This is an oganization that seems truly committed to starting up a sincere dialogue on the inequalities, challenges and legal barriers that are placed in front of women—and in particular pregnant women—that prevent them from accessing the help they need and deserve. And not just “opening up a dialogue” in the politically-correct sense that looks good on a mission statement, but an honest, open, all-encompassing debate that encourages women, lawmakers and organizations to move beyond the pro-this/ anti-that polarity. And not just “inequalities” in the abstract sense, but a real examination of the socioeconomic, racial, educational, sexual and gender unfairness that every woman on this planet has to deal with every day (to quote Shannon from Egotistical Whining, who was able to attend the conference call: “I’m just saying it’s not super difficult to include people of color in your political movement.”) It seems like this is an organization that doesn’t dwell on whether or not a woman should be allowed to have an abortion (although NAPW has a pretty strong opinion on that, I’d wager), but on the social circumstances which lead women to seek abortions in the first place, or to carry unplanned pregnancies to term. This is an organization that asks “how” instead of “why”, taking the punitive blame off of the woman, and turning the microscope onto the world she lives in which forces such choices to be made.

We live in a scary, scary world right now. I was looking over some of the articles Lynn Paltrow has written or commented on, such as Blaming Pregnant Women, The Pregnancy Police Are Watching You, The Rights of “Unborn Children” and the Value of Pregnant Women and Do Pregnant Women Have Rights? , and I was shocked, not to mention frightened, by how far current and proposed laws have gone at eroding the civil liberties of women. While the Unborn Victims of Violence Act was blinking somewhere on my radar, it was mostly framed in terms of what this meant for abortion rights, without taking in the larger picture. I had no idea things had gotten so bad (guess I need to be reading The Mommy Blawg more often, huh?). These articles talk about cases where women have been forced to undergo surgery against their will; where women have been jailed as criminals for “murdering” their children through drug use; where fetal rights have been found to trump the rights of the living, breathing women who are “housing” them…women who used to be entitled to their own personal freedom and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…until they got pregnant, that is. Granted, these cases are rare, and seem like aberrations rather than the norm, but in a legal system that is built on precedent, even a single case can yield terrifying future implications.

As Melissa from A Womb of Her Own rightly pointed out, though, this goes beyond the abortion debate. This isn’t even remotely about abortion any more. This is about women losing their voice, their rights, their power. And this is about a system that seeks to punish individual women, isntead of asking: why do so many women turn to drugs? How can we help them with that? Why do so many women live in fear for their lives? Surely it’s not just because abuse is a pattern, and some women “just keep dating the wrong guys”, like it’s her fault for choosing such a poor partner, instead of his fault for beating her in the first place? Why do so many women live in poverty? Why do so many of these women happen to be brown or black? Why is the health of a fetus more important than the health of the mother? And if we’re so concerned with the pain of the fetus that we’re now requiring doctors to counsel women about it before performing abortions after 22 weeks, why are we so unconcerned about invasive procedures during pregnancy that hurt the fetus, or circumcision, or children living in poverty and neglect?

Hummm. I bet some of these questions were addressed in the conference call that I missed. *sniff* However, the good news is: NAPW is hosting a summit in January, and we’re in the process of putting together another conference call or interactive chat with Lynn Paltrow and NAPW for midwives, student midwives and doulas. Because, let’s face it: this is something we should be more than just up-to-date on. This is something we should be razor-sharp-cutting-edge on, because as midwives, these aren’t just abstract questions to us, but the lives and choices and challenges of the women we’re taking care of every day.

CORRECTION: Nurse-in at Toys ‘R Us Times Square will occur at 11:00 am on Thurs. 9/21, and not 10:30.

Breastfeeding harassment in the Big Apple, at a children’s store, no less. And how ironic that this should happen here, in NY State, where we have some of the most protective and progressive breastfeeding legislature of any of the 50 states, and Carolyn Maloney, sponsor of the Breastfeeding Promotion Act and one of the most outspoken advocates for women and women’s health in Congress, is our House Representative.

Here’s a letter posted by Chelsi Meyerson last Wendesday on the Flatbush Family Network board, after being unfairly harrassed for breastfeeding her child at the Times Square Toys ‘R Us on 42nd St on Monday.:

Good morning. I wanted to write you all and tell you about the humiliating treatment that I recently received from one of our nation’s leading childrens’ stores. I am not one to usually vent publicly, but think that I have an obligation to share my situation with as many families as I can.

On Monday, my family and I were wrapping up my 3 year old daughter’s birthday weekend by visiting the 42nd Street Time Square Toy’s R Us. As a trip to the store is always fun, she was incredibly excited and quickly busied herself playing. Soon after she began playing, my 7 month old son let me know that he was hungry. I found a quiet and out-of-the-way area and plopped down to breastfeed him. Not 2 minutes into it, I was approached by a sales woman who told me I had to move to the basement floor to breastfeed. When I wouldn’t move, she told me that I was not allowed to stay there and it was inappropriate because there were children around. When I still wouldn’t move, 4 other sales women harassed me about it - the original harasser told them not to worry, she had already called someone to “deal with me”. Security then arrived to “deal with me”. By this time I had finished and stood up. I demanded to speak with the top store manager. All I got was a floor manager who simply gave me a simple “Sorry” and who demanded no apology or accountability from his staff. After being harassed by 5 sales women and having security called to deal with me as though I was a criminal, this response is simply not sufficient.

Today I contacted Toys ‘R Us headquarters to speak to someone there. All I got was “guest services”. They would not put me in to speak with any sort of manager or anyone with any authority, conveniently claiming that they were all “unavailable”. The representative that I spoke to also gave me a “sorry”. He said that he would pass it on the right “team” and I would be contacted in the next 7 to 10 business days. For so much harassing and the ruining of the birthday celebration for my daughter…..all they could do was say “sorry”. What they really need to do is educate their misguided staff on breastfeeding.

Breastfeeding is not a crime. Breastfeeding in public is not even inappropriate behavior. Breastfeeding is fundamentally one of the most precious gifts that a mother can provide a child and has been proven to improve the health and emotional welfare of a child. And, regardless of what an individual’s personal opinion on breastfeeding is, my right to breastfeed in public, when and where I choose to should never be in question. After all, New York State has been a leader in breastfeeding legislation. In fact, legislation passed in New York in 1992 guarantees mothers the right to breastfeed in any location (public or private) where the mother is authorized to be. In other words: if Toy’s R Us allows me to enter their store to shop than they have to allow me to breastfeed. By limiting these rights, they have committed the criminal act. Not me.

Regardless of my being able to claim the legal and scientific high-road, this situation was one that I will never forget in my entire life. I have never been more humiliated and dismayed. My mother was the head of the La Leche League many years ago, and she passed down to me a deep respect and passion for the importance of breastfeeding. Breastfeeding my child is simply not a right that I am willing to give up or to compromise on.

Please pass this along to everyone you know, hopefully we can get the word out. If you know of anyone who can get this any other press or media attention - or legal action, please contact me directly or pass this note along. We can’t let Toys ‘R Us get away with this!

Also, anyone up for a “nurse in” outside the 42nd Street Toys ‘R Us? Let me know!

Thank you-
Chelsi Meyerson - Mom of Olivia 3 and Mason 7 months.
chelsimeyerson@yahoo.com

Now, here’s what the actual legal language of NY State has to say about breastfeeding:

NY CLS Civ R § 79-e (Article 7 Miscellaneous Provisions).
1994 N.Y. ALS 98; 1994 N.Y. LAWS 98; 1994 N.Y. S.N. 3999
§ 79-E. Right To Breast Feed.
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a mother may breast feed her baby in any location, public or private, where the mother is otherwise authorized to be, irrespective of whether or not the nipple of the mother’s breast is covered during or incidental to the breast feeding.

As you will read, all mothers have the right to breastfeed anywhere that they are are allowed to be. Furthermore, there is no burden of “covering up” that the mother has to consider. Despite the sexual purpose of the breast, the State has determined that breastfeeding does not in any way fit into the category of indecent exposure. This is evident by New York State’s own Public Exposure laws. Please read below:

§ 245.01. Exposure of a person
A person is guilty of exposure if he appears in a public place in such a manner that the private or intimate parts of his body are unclothed or exposed. For purposes of this section, the private or intimate parts of a female person shall include that portion of the breast which is below the top of the areola. This section shall not apply to the breastfeeding of infants or to any person entertaining or performing in a play, exhibition, show or entertainment.

Thankfully, Chelsi knew her rights, and is not one to back down. Since her degrading treatment at Toys ‘R Us, she’s been busy, contacting the local media and organizing a nurse-in outside the 42nd Street Toys ‘R Us for this coming Thursday (9/21) at 11:00.

It’s amazing to me that such a dual standard exists in our society right now. Images of breasts are plastered all over magazine covers and billboards, and are standard fare in movies and TV programs, yet when people actually see women using their breasts for the purpose for which they were designed, all kinds of puritanical hell is brought to bear upon the poor, offending woman who was just trying to feed her hungry child. I have heard people complain about breastfeeding in public, asking why can’t the woman just do it at home? Or in the bathroom? Or somewhere out of sight? Well, why don’t they just eat their lunch at home, or in that same dirty bathroom, or somewhere out of sight as well? Breastfeeding babies eat every 2 to 3 hours. If women can’t be seen while breastfeeding, and her baby needs to eat every 2 hours, then she is basically confined to the walls of her home. The lack of empathy inherent in a complaint like that implies that the person complaining has never once stopped to think about the demands placed on a mother trying to do the best thing for her baby by breastfeeding, but also survive as a member of our society, get the grocery shopping done, take care of her other children, and work and earn an income…just like the rest of us! And from a business perspective, this kind of attitude is just plain stupid. If you’re a children’s store catering to young children (and their breastfeeding mothers), discouraging breastfeeding in your store is the surely the best way to ensure that the breastfeeding woman doesn’t add her consumer dollar to your till. Basically, shooting yourself in the foot economically. This is not the way to encourage breastfeeding, especially when the number of women breastfeeding in the United States already ranks among the lowest in the world, and our Department of Health and Human Services, concerned by the health implications of such a low rate, is doing everything it can to encourage breastfeeding in the face of such public hostility.

If you’re as outraged as I am by this, here are some folks you can complain to:

Gerald L. Storch
Chairman and CEO
Toys “R” Us, Inc. Headquarters
One Geoffrey Way
Wayne, New Jersey
07470-2030

cc the letter to:
Dan Caspersen
Executive Vice President, Human Resources
Toys “R” Us, Inc.

You can also write to our enlightened Congresswoman:

www.maloney.house.gov

Washington Office:
Congresswoman Maloney
2331 Rayburn HOB
Washington, DC 20515-3214
202.225.7944 phone
202.225.4709 fax

Manhattan Office:
Congresswoman Maloney
1651 3rd Avenue Suite 311
New York, NY 10128-3679
212-860-0606 phone
212-860-0704 fax

For women experiencing problems breastfeeding in public (harassment on the
train, by public officials, etc.), the BPLC (The New York City Breastfeeding
Promotion Leadership Committee) will take complaints, or you can contact Kate Sharp directly (katealma@earthlink.net).

Thankfully, the media is also making a meal of this:

NY Daily News

NY Post

NY1 News

ABC local

The Gothamist

Letter from NYCLU to Gerald L. Storch, Chairman and CEO of Toys ‘R Us.

So, what are you doing this Thursday at 11:00?? Come to the Nurse-in at the Toys ‘R Us at 42nd Street, Times Square! (Sadly, I’ll be in class, otherwise I’d be there waving a banner around with all of my lactating sisters). Chelsi, thank you for your bravery and committment to this!

Look what happens when you do. This is a birth that could have gone so differently if the midwife involved had acted out of fear instead of trust.

Two studies have recently come out which highlight the risks of cesarean birth for both mothers and babies, particularly primary cesareans with no medical indication. A recent study printed in Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care found that neonatal mortality rates were higher in babies born by cesarean, even after the statistics had been adjusted for congenital malformations, socioeconomic and medical risk factors. This is especially significant given that the focus of the study was on low-risk mothers who had no medical indication for cesarean, and the sample size was quite large (311,927 low risk women were analyzed). The NY Times picked up the story in last Tuesday’s paper (Voluntary C-sections Result in More Baby Deaths).

And then, it never rains but it pours: Nabbed from Milliner’s Dream, who saw it first, a recent French study also found that having a cesarean more than triples a woman’s risk of death when compared to the risks associated with a vaginal birth. (Postpartum Maternal Mortality and Cesarean Delivery) The increased risk of death was found to stem from complications from anesthesia, puerperal infection and venous thromboembolism, all of which are risks associated with surgery.

So, how…vindicating. There is now a sudden spurt of evidence which suggests that cesareans aren’t nearly as safe or benign as common practice would indicate. Now the question is: how long will it take for the medical community to absorb this new information and begin to cite the risks involved to the women trying to schedule a primary cesarean when there is absolutely no medical indication for one? It took years for the medical community to acknowledge that routine episiotomy can cause more harm than good, but practic is finally beginning to change. And, I wonder who will be the first to try to refute these findings?

(By the way, have you noticed how chock-full of good stuff the September issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology is? In addition to the above French study on maternal mortality and c-sections, check out ACOG’s Committee Opinion on the HPV vaccine).

ADDENDUM:

ACOG’s press release on the results of the French study in this month’s Obstetrics & Gynecology :

Though rates of maternal death in most developed countries are relatively low—US women have a 1 in 3,500 chance of pregnancy-related death—incidences of maternal mortality have not significantly decreased in the last two decades. These study results suggest that mode of delivery may be a modifiable risk factor, and in some cases, choosing vaginal delivery over non-medically indicated cesarean delivery could help lower maternal mortality rates.

So, here’s what I’m taking this semester:

Intrapartum
Neonatology
Postpartum
Intro to Teaching

And eeegads, that’s a lot! IP and Neo alone are enough to snow someone under, and then they’re putting postpartum and teaching on top of that? When am I going to breathe this semester, let alone eat, sleep, work and blog? But it’s been absolutely wonderful so far, I can’t even begin to tell you! All we’ve done this week is talk about labor and birth. I’ve had more knowledge packed into my brain these past three days than I have all summer, and I feel like my understanding of labor and birth has already increased dramatically. Wednesday was all about normal labor: what it’s like, what it sounds like, what it looks like, the phases of labor, what to expect etc. etc., and then the afternoon was devoted to the mechanisms of labor, which just absolutely blew me away. The baby goes through 7 very specific manuevers in order to successfully navigate the maternal pelvis, and it’s such a tight fit! How in the world do those babies actually get through that bony pelvis? And yet they do it all the time, every day. It’s amazing how perfectly adapted for labor they are, and how the natural curve of the head, when it’s well flexed and in an occiput-anterior position, fits so beautifully into the natural curve of the pelvis. The two were absolutely designed for each other, with only ONE centimeter or so to spare! The widest diameter of a baby’s head (the biparietal diameter), when it’s well flexed, is 9.5 cm. The narrowest part of the pelvic cavity (the bispinous diameter, between the ischial spines) is 10.5 cm. That’s not a whole lot of wiggle room!

Six hours of class a day, with our model pelvis in our laps, and our dolls in our hands, going over the mechanisms of labor until we have them down cold: descent, flexion, engagment, internal rotation, extension, restitution, external rotation and then finally birth by lateral flexion. Pelvis, doll head-down and in, internal rotation, head out, shoulders turn, shoulders out, body out, and again. And then flip the baby sunnyside up (or “face to pubes” as our professor jokingly calls it), and go through the mechanisms all over again for posterior deliveries, both long arc and short arc. I’m telling you, this is the coolest stuff in the world! And having read a little bit about anterior and posterior babies in nursing school, and documented the position of the baby at countless deliveries (always by asking the doctor what position the baby was in, LOA, ROA, ROP, LOT etc. etc.) I finally feel like I understand it well enough on my own now that next time I won’t have to ask the doctor…I’ll just watch, and see for myself what position the baby was in as it restitues and externally rotates. Such a huge leap of knowledge in such a short span of time, and school has only been in session for 3 days.

Today was spent going over procedures we’re going to have to know how to do: rupturing membranes, how to check to see whether a woman has indeed broken her water or not, inserting scalp electrodes, and delivering a baby. Just a basic, standard delivery, with the baby in plain old Right Occiput Anterior (ROA), nothing fancy yet. But it’s an amazing start. And I have a lot of practicing to do. Where to put my hands while the baby is crowning, how to assist the head, then check for a cord wrapped around the baby’s neck, and then wait for the baby to rotate, and then support the shoulders as they come out. We have a rubber model of a woman’s torso, with a pregnant belly and a baby inside, and as your professor pushes the plastic baby out through the pelvis, and you stand there with your gauze and clamps, ready to catch, it begins to dawn on you: you’re actually going to be catching real babies, very very soon.

And here’s my note to self: It’s a huge, overwhelming amount of material. Lots and lots of mental stuff to cram into your overwhelmed brain, and learn, and relearn, and know. But in the midst of all this mental exertion, don’t forget about the heart. When you’re shaking and nervous and approaching your very first birth, EVER, in the role of the midwife, the one with hands out and ready to receive…remember that you’re standing in a holy place. Birth isn’t in the textbook. It’s in the mother, grunting and sweating with exertion. It’s in the father, kissing her forehead and urging her on with gentle words. It’s in the baby, wiggling, wriggling, working so hard to navigate that bony pelvis, pushing up towards the surface. Try to focus on that, while you’re struggling so hard to master all of the didactic knowledge, and clamp the cord correctly, and remember to check the placenta, and assign an apgar. Your heart has called you to this profession, this work, this path. Let your heart shine through, and not your nerves.

I’ve gotten out of the habit of blogging. Our move this summer created a long stretch without internet, and I must admit, once I got used to a life without daily internet needs, it was hard to return to the wired world. While I’m a bit disappointed with my somewhat less than inspired summer blogging output, it was actually a very nice break. However, today being the first day of the new semester, it’s time to turn over a new leaf. I am already regretting my steadfast refusal to crack a textbook all summer, because the amount of work that now awaits me is rather monumental. Honestly, though, it’s fantastic to finally, ACTUALLY be in IP (i.e., Intrapartum, i.e. the class that focuses on labor and birth). It feels like the real meat and potatoes of midwifery, the main course after eating appetizers for all of last year. I’m so excited about learning all of this that I came home from school and immediately threw open those summer-neglected textbooks, and I’ve been reading and studying and working on my IP module all night. Hopefully this burst of enthusiasm will last for quite awhile, because I’m sure I’ll need it.

It was also very nice to be reunited with my fellow student-midwife sisters, none of whom I saw over the summer. Lots of hugs and chit chat and catching up. Our school has the tradition of pairing returning students with new students, in a big sister/little sister arrangement, and today for the first timeI was a big sis, which was also an interesting new perspective. As returning students we were also responsible for the traditional first day potluck, and I’m pleased to say that we outdid ourselves. The table was heavy with food, just like this year is heavy with anticipation. May it be every bit as delicious as I hope it will be!