bearing blog

Home birth FAQ answer list.

1. The midwife cleans up the mess.

(End of list)

 

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A scary Halloween story.

My daughter is feeling much better now, to the point where she hasn't quite stopped complaining about pain from her incision, but we are starting to notice that she tends to do it when it's time to unload the dishwasher.  So it's about time I start buckling down and blogging a little more if I can.

I'll start with a story that doesn't have me in it.

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On the day before Halloween, Mark dropped the three big kids off at religious ed and then rushed off to do the grocery shopping as quickly as possible so that he would have time to stop by the hardware store and buy dowels for my nine-year-old's Archer-Cloaked-In-Black-From-Head-To-Toe costume.

Note the dowels emerging from the quiver on his back.  Mark is now an expert in duct-tape fletching.

 

Anyway, Mark rushed my three-year-old in the Car Cart through the grocery store, made it to the big-box hardware store, grabbed dowels and headed for the checkout with the 3yo in tow.

Just before they got to the checkout, Mark remembered that the three-year-old had been extra-wiggly back in the grocery store, and asked him:  "[Three-year-old], do you need to go to the bathroom before we check out?"

"No, Daddy."

But that's always a dangerous question.  Much as one should not point a gun at an aggressor unless one is prepared to deliver a disabling shot, one should never ask whether a three-year-old child needs to go to the bathroom before entering the checkout lane.  All asking does is begin the process of percolating the idea through the brain and down to the nervous system, eventually to find its way to the bladder.   One should either issue a firm parental command ("Time for the potty!") or else remain silent.

Mark entered the self-checkout lane and began scanning dowels.  Three-quarters of the way through the transaction, the three-year-old informed him:  "Daddy!  I need to go to the bathroom!"

Uh-oh.  "I'll take you to the bathroom as soon as I'm done paying for this stuff," Mark told him.  Then he let go of the three-year-old's hand to extract the credit card from his wallet.

A moment later, the 3yo darted out of Mark's peripheral vision.  Mark looked up and saw him running toward the front of the store, where the big sliding entry doors are.

And also where the displays are.  Display shower enclosures, and display vanity sinks, and...

There was an attendant there to assist people in the self-checkout lanes.  Mark handed her the dowels, screeched, "Hold these!" and sprinted after the three-year-old, who was already lifting the lid (and the seat) of a display toilet and pulling down the front of his pants.    Mark scooped him up from behind just barely in time.

"He was so very, very confused," Mark told me later.

Mark carried the objecting three-year-old back to the checkout lane and one-handedly retrieved his dowels from the attendant.  On the way out he passed a sign that said "Ring Bell if you received excellent service!"

Mark rang the bell.  After all, he did get his dowels back.

Update on Julia and her peanut-sniffing dog fund.

Remember Julia and her campaign for donations to help her pay for the training of an allergen alert dog?

With nearly three-quarters of the money raised toward the goal, Julia's family has been able to reserve a labradoodle puppy from a breeder in western Canada and set him up with a trainer from I Smell Trouble, LLC in Montana.

Meet Quincy, the eager freshman student with the $8,000 nose:

Says Cathie, Julia's mom:

Here's Julia's guardian angel. He is tiny now but we know he will sprout wings and keep her safe.

After a few months of preliminary training, Julia will take Quincy home for socialization training around Christmas. I will keep you all updated on his progress!

Thanks to all readers who shared the link, donated, or said a prayer.

 

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Service dog support.

Here's a little vignette that, I hope, will inspire you with gratitude and perspective.  And perhaps some generosity.  Share the link and enjoy.

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My friend Cathie (who's also my three-year-old's godmother, by the way!) has recently turned to GoFundMe to beg funds for a peanut-sniffing service dog, ASAP, to protect her teen daughter Julia.  I thought I'd put a plug in for them here.

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Julia is a lovely young woman, fond of crafts, children, chess, and literature.  She is Cathie's oldest daughter, number two in a family of six.  

 

Homeschooling has been the right choice for their family, in part because Julia and her sisters and brothers live with numerous different food allergies and sensitivities, some of them immediately life-threatening.   Tree nuts, finfish, shellfish, wheat, eggs, dairy, rice, you name it -- somebody in their house is sensitive to it.   

Julia's mother is, as you might imagine, an extremely versatile cook, and very good at streamlining and doing things such as making one kind of meal for one child and a different kind for another and a third kind for herself.  I have had lunch at their house and personally observed three different pizza crusts being prepared at the same meal.  

Very tasty pizza crusts, I might add.  If anyone could rock multiple food sensitivities in a family of eight, it would be Cathie.

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But while one can adapt meals for kids and adults with "mere" sensitivities, peanuts (along with a few other things) have to be Protein Non Grata in Julia's household.  

Everyone knows some people are allergic to peanuts, a few of them quite severely.  Lots of kids have epi-pens stored with the school nurse.  It seems that more and more parents every year have to carefully vet each good-faith proffered piece of candy or baked goods.  We all know it's a growing problem.  

But Julia has one of those instant, frightening, call-911 peanut allergies that make it hard even to enter public spaces.   Here's Cathie, recounting the event that caused them to bite the bullet and start raising money for a service dog:

On Sunday we called 911 after arriving home from our Montana vacation. Julia had touched something with peanut residue at a restaurant on the way home. Within minutes, her fingers, knuckles and hands were swollen and covered with hives. She must have also brushed her lips because they were swelling up, too....

...We are quite certain that the contact happened when she touched something in the bathroom at the restaurant, possibly the bathroom door.   Whatever it was, it was small enough to not be visible or smell-able because she is overly scrupulous about what she touches.

Cathie has told me that Julia cannot shop in grocery stores that have an open bin of bulk whole peanuts because the tiny dust particles sent into the air from the shells as they are scooped and poured trigger an allergic reaction in her airway.  Some time ago, at a friend's house that had been thought "clean," Julia (walking barefoot on the carpet) stepped on a fraction of a piece of dry cereal, just a crumb, on the carpet.  "Her entire foot swelled up," Cathie told me.  "Within minutes."

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Julia is of high school age now.  She is active in a scouting organization, in church, and in several academic clubs, and hopes to attend college, hold down a job, travel, serve the community, and all the other things that young people dream of doing.  But at this point, she and her family have had to reckon with severe limitations on her activities in public spaces.  

• Young people with allergies as severe as Julia's cannot safely hold many typical teenagers' jobs, such as food service or babysitting.  
• Looking to the future, it's impractical to expect that prospective employers would be willing to enforce peanut-free policies.  
• It's unrealistic to expect that the young people she might meet while away at college will carefully keep peanut products off the surfaces in a college residence hall.   
• Maintaining a social and professional life will be challenging if she cannot safely enter most restaurants, coffee shops, or break rooms.

Of course,  most restaurants, coffee shops, and breakrooms are not, in fact, contaminated invisibly with peanut residue.  Most of them are, in fact,  safe for Julia to enter and use... but she doesn't have a good way of finding out when they're not safe.  

This is why a service animal seems to be an appealing choice for Julia.  Service animals are allowed to workin most public places by statute.  We are most familiar with dogs that have been specially trained to assist people who cannot see well enough to safely navigate public spaces and streets, and with dogs (and a few other animals) that perform routine tasks for people that have limited mobility.   

In Julia's case, an "allergen alert" dog -- using capabilities similar to those exploited by police dogs that detect narcotics or explosives -- offers her the hope of quickly assessing her environment as she moves through it.  Rather than avoiding EVERY place and event where she MIGHT come into contact with dangerous residue or dust, she hopes to be able to enter spaces freely, and rely on the service dog to alert on particular contaminated objects and surfaces.

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Julia's family recently returned from a trip to visit I Smell Trouble, LLC, a trainer of allergen alert dogs in Bozeman, Montana.   Julia's pictured above with one of their dogs, which I guess they were taking out for a test drive.

(Some care had to be taken before the trip to identify a breed whose dander would not trigger sensitivities in any of the family members. Fortunately there are a few viable choices, so they do not find themselves in the especially unenviable position of being allergic to all the allergen alert animals.)

Here's Cathie:

 The trainer has an opening for a dog for Julia if we can raise the money quickly and locate the breed we need - an Australian Labradoodle or Standard Poodle, due to their hypoallergenic properties. This is an almost two year process to get a puppy and have it fully trained and certified as a peanut detection dog...

We've been contemplating getting a peanut detection dog for Julia for almost a year now, but there is just no way we can afford it. 

Today we decided we just have to ask for help.

Please check out our fundraising site. 

I thought I'd lend my blog today to tell Julia's story, raise awareness of severe and immediately life-threatening environmental allergy, and -- perhaps -- encourage readers to pass the story on and help Julia raise the funds she needs to get on the list to acquire a service animal.  

Julia would be about sixteen years old by the time her service animal is ready -- the perfect coming-out gift for a young woman who has a lot to offer the world, as soon as she can move freely in it.

Quick takes to break the block.

Okay, pregnant-me is still sleeping a lot and using my waking time to catch up. Here are a few short items that interested me for one reason or another, but that I never managed to turn into full posts.

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Christy P. sent me a link some time ago to a site about traveling light: OneBag.com . It has tons of tips for keeping the packing weight down (including in the case of traveling with kids). I think it has some wisdom that could apply to "traveling" around town, just running errands, with your littles in tow. If you always feel like you are lugging too much around, you might find it useful.

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From the OneBag site, I followed a rabbit trail that took me to a clothing manufacturer, Scottevest, that had me wishing I had found it when I wasn't under the No-Buying-New-Nonmaternity-Clothes-When-Pregnant ban. The concept behind these folks is crazy, I know, but let me spell it out anyway:

Women's clothing with functional pockets in it.

Okay, they have men's clothes too, fair enough. And they don't have lots of different clothes. But still! A dress with pockets. Women's cargo pants with real, not cosmetic, pockets. A classic trench with a pocket capable of carrying an iPad. A travel vest with tons of pockets. I am going to autosend myself an email for a year from now, when I might conceivably be getting back into my old clothing size, to go back and check them out.

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Back when DarwinCatholic and I were posting about whether college education is worth the cost, whether a liberal arts degree is generally worthwhile, etc. -- even my husband got into it -- we were doing a lot of calculation about means and medians: costs, returns, salaries, debt, graduation rates, etc. I recently came across a short post by Tyler Cowen that reminded me of a piece of vocabulary that we should really have been using to talk about what's changed in the college calculation: variance.

If you're deciding how much to invest in a particular game, there's a big difference between a situation in which most of the possible outcomes are clustered tightly around the median, and one in which the possible outcomes are spread widely on either side of the median. Even when the two medians in question are exactly the same. In the one case, you have a very high chance of getting the value you expect out of your investment, and a low chance either of "hitting the jackpot" and doing much better or of failing miserably and ending up a big loser. In the other, there may be nearly as much chance of losing your shirt as of getting the expected value; and even if there's also a better chance of hitting the jackpot, that's not much of a consolation to the large pool of losers (especially since humans often feel worse about losing than they feel good about winning.)

I've had more statistics than the average person but somehow that never stops me from forgetting to consider the effects of variance, at least when I first look at a problem.

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The Fourth and First Amendments have been getting a lot of press lately. From Melanie B via Facebook comes this interesting link about a lawsuit brought on (comparatively rare) Third Amendment grounds. I'll save you from looking it up: it's the one protecting us from having to quarter soldiers in our homes during peacetime. The Nevada homeowner in question refused to allow into his home police who wanted to establish a "tactical advantage" against persons in a neighboring house, but the police forced their way in anyway and occupied his house.

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Another FB friend pointed to this article from the UK about a rise in rickets and scurvy there. The article's lede suggests it's related to parents who "rely on takeaways and microwave meals," and one analyst suggests it's related to the "impact of promotions, advertising, and marketing from the processed food industry."

It seems odd to blame the entire "processed food industry" for rickets and scurvy, when that is the same industry that brings things like frozen concentrated orange juice; canned and frozen fruits and vegetables of all kinds; canned oily fish such as mackerel, sardines, and salmon; and numerous other foods that would be out of reach of urban families during much of the year if we were limited to fresh, local food in season. Isn't it more likely to result from inattention to basic concepts of a "balanced diet," and (especially considering this is the UK) lack of natural sunlight?

It's possible that the marketers who advertise various processed foods in the UK have shifted away from advertising foods that help provide vitamins C and D and towards foods that don't, I suppose.

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Finally, another link suggested by Christy P: A plea to pack a "go bag." Timely, what with all the evacuations and tornadoes and explosions and wildfires that seem to have dominated the news this spring and summer.

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Do you know it took me all day to write this post? And it's practically a holiday. I started it this morning at 7 and have been working only in bits and pieces since then. Pregnancy brain -- ugh.

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Victim-blaming: an example.

Remember a couple of weeks ago I wrote a frustrated post about warrantless wiretapping (or cell phone listening, whatever) and how so many people say "I've got nothing to hide, so who cares?" and I identified part of the problem as the "magical thinking" of "bad things don't happen to good people?"

"Bad things don't happen to good people" is a comforting thought for a number of reasons.

... [T]hinking this way is a temptation to many people.  It is also called "magical thinking," because it causes so many good people to believe that they, somehow, can prevent bad things from happening to them by behaving the "right" way, where the "right" way is equivalent to "what good people do."

Go find any news story about a person who has suffered a terrible accident or crime.  Dive down into the comments.  Someone, somewhere, is convinced that the sufferer suffers (or lost his life), fundamentally because he did something wrong....

 

Found a bitterly amusing example of this today.  

Indiana Woman Shoots and Kills Leopard Prowling in Her Backyard

Last Thursday, a woman in Charlestown, Indiana and her boyfriend stayed up all night, armed with a rifle, to hunt down whatever it was that had been attacking small animals in her neighborhood. After spotting and shooting a creature prowling in the shadows by the woman's pool, they were shocked to find that they'd just killed a leopard, an animal that's not native to North America, much less Indiana.

The woman, who didn't want to be identified, mentioned the story to her friend and neighbor Donna Duke, who then told ABC affiliate WDRB about the strange kill. Officials at the Indiana Department of Natural Resources confirmed that a leopard had been found on the woman's property. Duke said the woman was worried about a recent streak of attacks against cats and dogs in the neighborhood....

"She's got cats that are basically her family," Duke said. "She was trying to protect her babies.”

...Bloom [of the Department of Natural Resources] believes the leopard must have been someone's pet, though authorities have no idea whose. The owner of a nearby wild life refuge denied that the leopard was his. So, people living in Indiana, if you're missing your pet leopard and reading this, we have bad news.

The first comment on this story?

She could've also avoided her cats being eaten by a leopard if she'd kept them inside. :\

That's right, folks.  Bad things -- like discovering your suburban-Indiana kitty eaten by an Afro-Asian wild cat that escaped from someone's private zoo, or whatever -- don't happen to good people who keep their cats inside.  Let that be a lesson to you.

 

A box that fits well enough.

Let me tell you a story.

When Mark and his buddy were out in Colorado a couple of weeks ago, they hired a mountaineering instructor and climbing guide named Russell. Over the first couple of days of the trip, the three of them had plenty of time to chat -- during the initial what-kind-of-climber-are-you conversation, during lunch, while driving up into the mountains -- and Mark got to hear some of Russell's life story.

Russell used to be an accountant. He went through business school, did well, had a well-paying job behind a desk. After six months, he decided he didn't want that kind of life, so he quit his job and moved where he could work in the mountains. The work is hard and the money is unpredictable (besides all the guiding and instructing gigs, he also works as a substitute teacher), but he's happier, he's outdoors all the time, and he has more freedom -- enough to be planning a five-week honeymoon in Europe, climbing the Alps with his bride.

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Russell's story sounds like a trope, even though Russell is real. Maybe the story isn't accurate -- who knows? Maybe Russell really quit accounting because he wasn't any good at it, or felt like a failure, or struggled with depression. Whatever the background, this is the story that Russell tells his clients -- at least the ones who are athletic, professional-class middle-aged men.

It is a good story. I think it is a very acceptable story. In our culture at least, one way for a person who does not work a white-collar job to pass the "I am not a loser" test among white-collar people is to have this kind of story: I once was one of you, but I decided to escape the rat race and live a life with more freedom. Crucial to the acceptance-level of the story is some indication that the speaker could have chosen the conventional route -- in this case, had actually chosen it for a while -- but then freely decided to walk away from it. I'm a climbing guide sounds exciting enough, but I used to be an accountant, but now I am a climbing guide lends a whiff of adventurous respectability.

It works, I think, because enough professional-class people are dissatisfied with the frustrations of their daily lives that the story touches some unspoken fantasy of doing the same thing; or at least, a fair number of people can easily see how the mountains might call more compellingly than the spreadsheet. This is why so many people have hobbies.

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It occurred to me that my professional life story could be made to fall neatly into a similar trope -- only instead of sailing the wide accountancy, I was embedded in engineering academia, and instead of quitting to head for the hills, I left to have babies and teach them as they grow. To me, the story has a similar "feel" to the accountant-turned-mountain-man trope. I passed the entrance tests, so to speak. I spent enough time on the inside to have a grasp of the kind of life I might lead if I stuck to my original plans. Importantly (for the narrative at least) I stayed long enough to acquire a credential, the proof that I walked away from it all by choice and not because the system chewed me up and spit me out. And I did behold two possible futures that stretched out before me, and reached out my hand and chose the one that I foresaw -- for me -- meant greater peace and greater happiness. Less money, and more freedom (of a certain type), and more love.

The trope doesn't quite match up with the truth. (And who knows what details Russell the mountaineer left out of his story, to make his story ring so well, so that his listeners will slot him into the "ditched the rat race, found true happiness" box, which in America is a Good Kind Of Box To Be In, a noble working-class designation, if not the deserving poor, then the deserving mostly-broke). There is anxiety in the truth to my story; and an identity crisis; and the slow, terrifying grasping of Catholic teaching on marriage and how it was going to apply to the particularities of the marriage I was in; and the simultaneous appreciation of the needs and realities of children; and the trying-out, along the way, of unworkable halfway solutions where, I hoped, I might be able to keep one foot in each world.

The true story lacks the casualness of "I decided to walk away from all that."

The casualness is a key feature of the narrative's acceptability. The narrator establishes the self as cool and detached. I was anything but detached while it was all going on. I am, actually, pretty well detached from the old life now that it is so distant. I project that detachment back into the past as if I had it all along.

But maybe the pleasant trope, incomplete picture that it is, can be exploited. People will make snap judgments because this is what people do. Might as well get comfortable in a box that is reasonably close to the truth and has a fair chance of being looked upon with approval.

So.

I quit the rat race, and now I'm a somewhat-crunchy homeschooling mom, and I like it. That's my story, and as long as you know me only superficially, I just may stick to it.

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Prayer request. (UPDATED)

Particularly at 3 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, for longtime online friends facing an uncertain future and the prospect of uprooting their young family after a completely-unexpected denial of tenure, which means having to look for another job quite soon. The field is not one with lucrative alternatives in the private sector, so they face considerable hardship and a difficult job search. They are shocked and unprepared.

Three o'clock Tuesday is the hour of a crucial meeting that is part of a Hail Mary tenure appeals process. Please hold them in your hearts.

UPDATE FROM MY FRIEND.  

"Back from meeting. There is tangible hope. We have a plan forward.

"It is still stressful and scary and is not for sure, but we were given some good advice from [COLLEGE DEAN] and it is more clear now what needs to happen and the size of the mountain we need to climb.

"It's huge. But at least it looks like there may be a chance to climb it, instead of there being no chance at all.

Thank you everyone so so so much I really felt strong going in there because of your prayers."  

Thanks, all. Sounds like they could still use your prayers for the next step, whatever it is. I'll update when I can.

In which I try to make up for lost blogging time, and only wind up being sort of pitiful.

I need to do something like what Jamie's doing over at Light and Momentary:  blogging something, anything, every day.  

Today she's got 10 Reasons to Love Confession.  If you always thought of confession as weird, scary, or depressing, her post might be the antidote.  Check it out.

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So I think the main reason I'm having trouble blogging is the end-of-the-year fog.  I've got one foot planted in 2012-2013, trying to wrap up all the school subjects, and the other foot in 2013-2014, trying to sort out all the things I'll need for fall.  I just sent a hefty payment to Rainbow Resource now that I've made up my mind about the last couple of subjects, and I'm sure I'll be buying some other thing that I forgot in just a couple of months.

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Plus, just last weekend we had The Great Split-Family Camping Trip of Spring 2013.  That would be the one in which Mark, committed to help lead a Boy Scout climbing outing, went one way with half our camping gear and our two oldest boys; while I, committed to our 6-year-old daughter's AHG spring campout, went the other way with the other half of our camping gear and our two youngest.  

I was intimidated, but I managed tent camping with my 6- and 3-yo.  I had dibs on the smallest tent, thank goodness, because I am too short to put the other ones up by myself.   I also led 14 elementary-school girls in learning to strike matches -- both wooden stick matches and book matches -- safely so they could earn their Fire Safety badge.

How do you do this?  Cookie sheets on picnic tables, two girls to a cookie sheet, each with a package of matches and an adult and a can of water to drop their matches in after they successfully light them.  Also you give away a bunch of colorful ponytail holders so they can pull their hair back before they start striking matches.

Incidentally, this is the first elementary-school-girls demonstration I've ever performed in which I had to stop at a local smoke shop for supplies.   The boxes of kitchen matches were easy to find at the hardware store, but I could not find book matches anywhere else on short notice.  The tobacconist charged me fifty cents a book for the normally complementary matches, since I did not buy any of his wares.  I went home and pasted colorful stickers over the tobacco company logo on the matchbooks.

Anyway -- between planning safety demos and managing a 3-year-old safely around campfires in darkened wooded lots, I had kind of a stressful weekend!  I meant to drop an email to commenter Christy P. to see if she had any tips for being intrepidly out camping singly with small children, but I forgot.  The one thing I did remember was to bring lots of food that makes the little people happy; so the little ones lived mainly on banana nut granola bars, because by some fantastic quirk of random chance there are NO NUT ALLERGIES IN MY DAUGHTER'S TROOP.  Now when was the last time you heard of that happening?

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In an hour or two I expect Mark home from the Great Fortieth-Birthday Climbing Trip of 2013.  We all got home from our camping trips, turned everything around (mostly -- there's still a tarp in our backyard that keeps getting rained on just when we've been meaning to bring it back in), and then on Tuesday he flew off to Colorado to go climbing with a buddy from work, well, actually, a buddy who works at this other plant in a different state that might as well be "a buddy from work" considering how much time my husband has spent at said plant in said different state.

So they had a day of Skills Training in which they hired an instructor to teach them how to do things like stop themselves from hurtling off precipices -- yeah, this is different from the lessons where you hire an instructor to teach you how to hurtle yourself off precipices on purpose -- those are so passé in May.  And then a day of climbing Mt. Lady Washington with the same instructor acting as guide and lead climber, and then a nice relaxing day of only hiking in the woods, and then a day of hiking nearly to the summit of Flattop Mountain (I guess they got to a point where it was just sort of flat and they decided that was good enough, so they went back down again), and from what I hear it was a fun time.

Me, well, it was Tuesday through Saturday.   I did hire a babysitter on Friday night so I could go out and sit in a coffee shop and look at art supply catalogs with my hands wrapped around a warm drink, because it is only 45 degrees in this insane state.

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But all of that has kept me from blogging, because I hardly have time to think.  I'm sorry.  I'll try to do better.  Please don't drop me when you port over from Google Reader to whatever it is you're going to be reading now.  I'll be good.

Resolutions, federal and personal.

We're having a "reading day" today:

•   I am catching up on organizing my schoolroom, planning the schedule, and knocking items off my to-do list.  
• The children are permitted to do whatever they like as long as it doesn't involve the computer, video games, or TV.
• Except after lunch, when we'll all have our usual "break time" including the possibility of movies.

It's my way of easing back into the schedule.  I hope to school them tomorrow.

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Right now one child is still asleep (I suspect him of having stayed up late reading) and the other three are outside in the snow, with Vaseline on their faces to protect them from chapping; it's about ten degrees out.  I don't know how much time I have to write before I have to start guiltily up from the computer (it's a reading day, remember?  I'm trying to set a good example).

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Did you know that the federal government has helpfully suggested some New Year's Resolutions for you?  If that isn't an argument for subsidiarity, I don't know what is.  Let's use them as a starting point for discussion. 

Drink less alcohol.   Sorry, government.  I resolve to drink more alcohol.  One "standard" drink per day is good for most women and I don't measure up, even if you correct downward for my surprising petiteness.

Eat healthy food.  Sounds great, except that the link goes to the government's nth attempt to revise the food pyramid/plate/whatever, which although somewhat improved in recent years is still unreasonably authoritative about nutritional issues that are still unsettled.  Anyway, I don't make food-related resolutions as they're bad for my mental health.

Get a better education.  I resolve to do the opposite:  give a better education.

Get a better job.  Impossible for me.  

(And goodness me, considering the unemployment rate, I rather think it rude to be suggesting this as a "resolution.")

Get fit.  Well, I suppose I can't argue with that one.  Not many downsides to it, if you can find the time.  

Lose weight.  I encourage people who are unhappy with their body mass to set goals not based on the body mass itself, which is out of direct control, but instead based on behavior, which is under direct control.   I would substitute this:

"Discover behaviors which improve weight, and turn them into habits."

Manage debt.  Interesting verb, coming from the federal government.  

Manage stress.   There's that verb again.  

Quit smoking.  Never started, myself, so I can't really comment.   Seems like it would be a good idea.  I wonder if cigarette sales drop every January?  (UPDATE:  January and February are indeed "low" season for cigarette sales.  The fact that it's cold and many people have to go outside to smoke is probably part of it.)

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.  Truth is, our family could probably stand to "reduce" a bit.   One of these days I might do the Squawkfox Food Waste Diary.  But I'm not likely to make it a New Year's resolution; more likely, a science project for one or another kid.

Save Money.  In our household, oddly enough, we'll be trying to figure out the best way to spend a bit more this year.  And giving more away, I hope.

Take a trip.  Well, that's a nice thought, actually.  I don't need a resolution for that, but maybe some folks do.

Volunteer to help others.  Also a good idea.  

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If I was feeling more smart-alecky or political this morning, I would suggest some resolutions from this citizen for the government to take on, but I'm not, really.

I don't have any particular resolution in mind this year.  I think I will put that sort of thing off till Lent.  I am not well-suited to resolutions, precisely because they appeal to me so much; I tend toward the control-freak, the inflexible, the planning and planning and planning.   It would be better for me to resolve to live in the moment more, but I'm not sure it's helpful to do that in a solemn declaration of how I will spend the next 365 days.

UPDATE.  Check out Monday's xkcd, which I just got around to reading today, and remember to read the mouseover text.  He's playing it for laughs, but I agree.