identity theft prevention 101

Living in a house is great, but we have found some downsides: shingles in the backyard after a windstorm. Stairs. Shoveling our own driveway. And today, mail theft.

Yup, you heard it. I never thought I'd have to worry about this, but it is very real in my life right now.

It started a few weeks ago when I realized a gift I had belatedly bought Shane for Christmas had not arrived. I checked the tracking information and it said it had arrived on Christmas Eve! Seriously?! It most definitely was NOT here. I talked to the mail carrier about it, and she alluded to the fact that our particular cul-de-sac had had some mail theft problems in the past. Oh no. The $25 razor blades were gone. In fact, I contacted the eBay seller to ask if they could do anything for me, since I hadn't received my item, and they didn't care and ignored me. I opened a case with eBay and eBay has ruled "in favor of the seller." That sucks.

Interestingly, we got have a PO Box because this rental is temporary and we thought maybe sending magazines and stuff there would be a better idea. Well now we are trying to move everything over there. Unfortunately at Christmas time, Shane told me to send more stuff to the house since he had to wait in line at the Post Office to pick up any packages that didn't fit in the box.

So yeah, razor blades gone. I couldn't decide if I wanted to file a police report or complain to the USPS, so I just let it go... until today...

When you have a new baby, you expect two big things in the mail: a birth certificate and a Social Security card. I naively arranged to send them both to the mail box. By the graces of heaven, the Social Security card showed up a few weeks ago. But I never saw the birth certificates. I noticed that King County Vital Statistics had cashed my check for the certificates on 12/28, so I called this morning asking where they were.

They were issued 12/22. They should have arrived soon thereafter. Most likely on Christmas Eve, the same day Shane's gift was also stolen.

I immediately went into freak-out mode. The department could issue me replacement certificates at no cost (very cool), and I had them sent to the PO box. But now what? What can someone do with my baby girl's birth certificate?

Could they get her Social Security number somehow and open accounts, establish credit, steal her identity? I spent all day trying to figure out how they could and how to stop it. Some things I learned:

• Birth certificates are public record. If someone knows my name, my husband's name, and the county Laurel was born in, they could go to any Records Office in the state of Washington and pay $20 and get her birth certificate. Anyone.
  
  
• Each birth certificate is "certified" and as such is printed on a piece of paper which contains a specific serial number. Unfortunately it is not possible to "invalidate" a serial number or two if they were stolen. Which seems lame, but whatever.
  
  
• The Federal Trade Commission has a hotline on identity theft and some nice people there do their best to calm you down, give you ideas, and wish you luck. Other than that, the FTC can't really help.
  
  
• The Social Security Administration telephone people are less helpful. I was told by someone (I thought at the FTC) that I could put a "flag" on Laurel's number and if anyone tried to get a copy of her card they would have to prove they were me or Shane, but that wasn't true. This lady told me to call the FTC; I got a little irked and said, "the FTC told me to call you." She didn't like me talking back to her.
  
  
• What you can do is contact all three credit bureaus and put a "fraud alert" on a Social Security number. That way if anyone tries to establish credit, etc., they have to like, provide additional identification or something. The credit bureaus do this a lot for minors (and it remains in effect until they turn 18), but the request must be submitted in writing. No credit reports exist for minors, so it's difficult to find out say, right now, if anyone has stolen Laurel's identity. It's not collected. This freaks me out. Plus, if I want any info on her number, I need to submit it in writing by mail anyway.
  
  
• My freak-out reached a fever pitch and I up and went to my local Social Security office and waited in line to talk to someone knowledgeable. Thank goodness I did. Basically, the man told me that you can't just waltz into a Social Security office with a birth certificate and demand a Social Security card and number, even a duplicate. You have to provide identification that you are the mother or father (on the birth certificate), or prove custody with documents from courts, pediatricians, etc. Essentially, someone would have to steal my identity in order to steal hers. Since I know I'm pretty safe, it's unlikely whoever has her birth certificates could do this. Although it still makes me a little sick.
  
  
• My final act was to file a police report. I called a few offices, one of which told me to dial 911 (I really didn't want to since it wasn't an emergency), but I finally found an online report to do this. I reported mail theft of the razor blades and the birth certificates. In fact, one helpful lady said that you can submit to the precinct, in writing (no form exists, just write a letter), a letter stating an address and asking for copies of police reports filed and 911 calls made within a certain area of the address for a certain time period. Fascinating! If the resulting report is under 50 pages it's free, and if it's over 50 pages you have to pay a few cents per page. You better believe I'm gonna do this when we finally find a house to buy. Since the USPS lady told me there had been mail theft complaints here before, I wonder what I'll learn?
  
  
• Additionally, I'm planning to knock on every door in the cul-de-sac, introduce myself, and say that I have had mail stolen, ask if they have had mail stolen, and state that I filed a police report and encourage them to, as well. I can't be the only one who was a victim. Plus, if the perpetrator lives here and uses our mailbox as his own personal shopping center, then maybe that will scare him off. I doubt I'll ever get my things back. But I certainly don't have to sit here and cry. Although that also did happen today.
  

What a mess today was. I am physically and emotionally exhausted! I am so glad it wasn't that bad, so glad that Social Security card and number got here safely. Wow. If it had been reversed and I had birth certificates but no card... I shudder at the thought.

I'm buying a locking mailbox for our new house. I can't deal with this again.

our week in weather

It's been a wild week. This was last Friday... I opened up our front door to go check the mail or something and BAM, I mean, WOW.



Then this is out our back bedroom earlier this week...



It's been snowing CONSTANTLY. Wow. Wesley made a snowman with Shane on Sunday, when there was minimal snow, and then it kept snowing and snowing and snowing. I revamped the snowman yesterday with him; we had a blast outside. He has had other fun activities, namely pushing around his circus train and calling it a "snow plow train" (hilarious), and today I gave him a water bottle full of water dyed with green food coloring so he could "spray" the snow. Fun! Maybe tomorrow we'll do something different, if it all doesn't melt away.



It's been fun being cooped up at home, drinking our weight in hot chocolate, but I am ready to feel safe driving again. I feel like we should be listening to Christmas music and baking cookies?

make that nine...

A belated Happy Anniversary post to my sweet husband. We marked nine years on January 2.

We had considered eating out (the Macaroni Grill sent me a coupon for a free dessert!!), but with the new baby the idea kinda fizzled. Interestingly, we did end up having a candlelit dinner -- because our power went out!! I was halfway through assembling some bell pepper quesadillas (with the oven already preheated, luckily enough), when we lost all power during a HUGE wind/rainstorm. I knew exactly where my huge box of candles was amongst all the storage boxes in the garage, and luckily I also knew where two boxes of matches were. I was able to make a few quesadillas and stick them in the oven so they got a smidge toasty, then we ate by candelight.

Wesley thought the power outage was LOADS of fun. I was bummed about missing the Bachelor. Plus, part of me stresses about the uncertainty of power outages, and I start worrying about the meat in the freezer going bad and not being able to flush the toilet or whatever. Luckily, as I was changing a poopy diaper and Shane was getting Wesley ready for bed, the power came back on! Yay! I didn't miss the Bachelor after all!

Happy Anniversary, honey. I'm glad we got to spend it as a family, with no electronics, for a least a few hours Monday night. Nine years, five residences, two kids, and lots of memories (many good, some bad) later, we have had quite the amazing ride. Here's to many more years. I hope you're still happy you married me :-)



And happy new year to everyone else!

our new life for the new year

Oh gosh, I'm a bad poster. If you hadn't heard, our biggest and bestest news for 2011 was that we got a baby around here. Glorious! You could say that when she is sleeping or being held by someone, I am either sleeping, showering, cleaning my dang house, or doing any number of the millions of other things I feel like I need to do. And the blog remains neglected.

Here is our baby story... taking us back to early December:

I went to my OB visit (37 weeks) on December 6, and she said, "guess what?? I have you scheduled for an induction on Monday!" I was pretty floored. I guess I knew she would induce me "somewhere in the 38th week" because of the blood pressure issues, but I didn't realize it was six days from then! Shane had initially said he wasn't sure he was comfortable with an induction, but she had some good reasons to go ahead and do it, i.e., the risks for not doing it and staying pregnant with obnoxiously unpredictable blood pressures were greater than doing it and having a baby a smidge underbaked (since full term is "officially" 40 weeks, although Wesley was 37 weeks 2 days and anything after 37 weeks they are all "OK" with).

So, we prepped for induction. Which meant I asked all my Facebook friends their experiences and I asked all my mommy friends how to induce labor. My Facebook friends said mostly good things, just that pitocin makes things hurt super bad super fast, and obviously doing it all artificially isn't as good as having your body do it on its own. And we tried; there was some spicy food and primrose oil and other things involved, but when Sunday night came around I was still not in labor. Oh well.

7:45 AM

We got to the hospital early; the first order of business was something called Mizo (sp?), a cervical softener that was placed at 8:30. It takes four hours to "work," so you sit in bed for an hour and lay real still, you can move around in bed the second hour, then the third and fourth hours you can walk around. And basically it did nada for me.

12:30 PM

After walking around for a bit, I did feel some real contractions, but I'd dilated from like a 1 to a 2. Woooo hoo. My doctor swung by on her lunch break to check on me, and she also did a fun thing to allegedly help: "stripping the membranes." Weird. She suggested breaking my water, but I declined. Part of me still felt like if nothing was going to happen, we could just go home. But the minute the waters break, you have to have a baby. It' a point of no return.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) I was having too many contractions on my own so they couldn't give me pitocin. If they did, I'd run the risk of having too many contractions at once, which put the baby in distress. They went ahead and got my IV going (urgh) with the goal to reassess in a few hours after letting me walk around for some more, or whatever.

Basically, if I understand it correctly, no amount of medicine will make you dilate. All the tricks do is soften the cervix, give you contractions, and try to get your brain to believe it's in labor. Your brain is the ultimate go/no go decision maker. When your body finally decides it's OK to have a baby, you'll dilate and out baby will come.

3 PM

Well, I was going nowhere fast; now at maybe 3 cm. No news there (it got to the point where I was sick of them "checking" me since nothing was happening and it isn't pleasant. Oh well, labor and delivery isn't pleasant so I suppose I needed to get used to it). Turtles' pace. They started me on the teeniest of teeny doses of pitocin. Something like 1 cc an hour; no, I don't really know but it was the smallest they can give. It also didn't really do anything.

4:45 PM

My OB was off work for the day, but she was on call at the hospital that night (I think a big reason she scheduled me for induction that day). She came by to say hello. I was still only dilated to a 4 -- nothing was happening! Shane was out getting some fast food and a redbox, since we were pretty sure we'd be there forever with no baby and watching a movie would be a grand idea. She again suggested she break my water, and I guess by that point I was like, "ok, whatever, sure." So she did.

5 PM

Things got crazy really fast. Remember I'm not even on pitocin, I just had my water broken. The contractions got hard and fast and really painful really quick. The nurse suggested she call over the anesthesiologist so we could "talk" about my pain management options. By the time he got there, I was thinking I should hold out a little longer, since I was only dilated to a 4 and it seemed pretty wimpy to go ahead and get an epidural. My doc had given the OK though, that if I wanted one I should go ahead and get it. As the anesthesiologist and I were talking, everyone could see that I was in massive amounts of pain so they encouraged me kindly to go ahead and get the epidural.

OK fine, you convinced me, let's do this.

The process was not sugary sweet. The anesthesiologist told me that women with high blood pressure and water retention (helllloooo me) usually have a hard time during the epidural placement process. At least I was warned. It was yucky. I suppose I'll leave it at that.

When everything started working, it was only working on the right-hand side. The pain on the left was still excruciating. I had to lift my numb self up and switch sides so the medicine could like, drain down the left-hand side of my body. But at this point I was hooked up like a robot -- IV in the right hand, with separate tubes for the IV fluid and pitocin drip; epidural in the back (which I could totally feel -- lame); oxygen indicator on my right-hand middle finger; blood pressure cuff on my left arm. Anytime I moved, I inevitably squished one or more of these tubed items. It was awful.

We had donated Wesley's cord blood when he was born, and I had a kit to donate this baby's cord blood, too. The kit needed a few samples of my blood before birth, so they were trying to do that, too. Except I was so drained and I guess dehydrated, that they blood wasn't flowing all that well, and it clotted in the tubes, they had to poke me like three times, it was awful!! Shane was trying to encourage me to just give up, but I really wanted it to work out... so I let them continue to try and get this blood. Pincushion Angela.

When it was all over with, 90 minutes later, and the pain finally subsided, I just sat there, defeated. The nurse checked me again and I was at 5 cm. Literally, nothing was happening but my getting beat up. I cried. I fell asleep.

7 PM

The nurse shift changed and the night nurse suggested we order dinner from the cafeteria and keep it in the fridge until baby was born, since we'd be hungry and tired. That was totally a good idea. I was happy just laying there, half-sleeping. I was thinking we'd start our movie soon. Comparing the experience to my experience with Wesley showed several stark differences. After my epidural with Wesley, I was in a good mood, I was laughing, I was relaxed, I felt great! This time, I felt awful. Just awful. I wanted this whole experience to be over with.

7:30 PM

Shane took a phone call in the hall. My doc came in and checked me... again. Imagine my surprise when she said, "OK, you're fully dilated, time to push!"

WHAT?????????

My mouth hit the floor. I was totally shocked. Shane had to get off the phone! But I did it. And 20 minutes later, little lady made her appearance. Right before she was born our food came from the cafeteria and Shane had to go pay for it! My doc is like, "um, where did Dad go? We have a baby coming here!"

7:50 PM

Baby girl is born. I hold her for just a second; she's all squirmy and messy but very much alive and alert. Wow. Apgar scores were 8 at 1 minute and 9 at 5 minutes. One of the nurses took her to give her her eyedrops and whatever else they do, and she immediately peed on the nurse. Hilarious. Shane took her and held her for awhile while my OB was finishing things up with me. I was shaking. I was shaking uncontrollably, and my teeth were chattering. It felt so weird, like the birth was this traumatic experience for both me and my baby. I don't remember feeling so "spent" after Wesley was born.

Seeing Shane hold her was such a sweet experience for me. We are so in love with this baby girl.

Everything settled down after that; I got my post-partum nurse, we tried breastfeeding at about an hour after birth, eventually we got to eat that food we ordered :-) , and we realized we had no idea what we would name her.

She was up all night... not really awake, but not sleeping for huge stretches of time. Now that I think back on it, she is 3 weeks old today and she operates that same exact way today. This girl doesn't like to sleep alone in her crib and she doesn't settle on her own very well. Hmmph.

But of course, in the hospital I was so hopped up on internal adrenaline and painkillers that I didn't care. I got up with her at 3 AM (beat up body and all), and we danced around the room while Shane slept. It was marvelous. Me and my sweet baby girl.

It wasn't until the morning that we looked more closely at our list of names and decided on Laurel. I had three or four names I LOVED, and Shane had one or two he LOVED, but neither of those names were the same for both of us. We went down our list of other possibilities, talking about each one, until we found one we both really liked.

Laurel.

I love it. It passes all of our rules -- people will have heard of it and know how to spell it, but it's not trendy and there won't be 10 of them in her kindergarten class. In fact, according to ssa.gov, our main baby name popularity source, it hasn't been in the top 1,000 names country-wide in 2008. Wow. We had the same stipulations with Wesley's name, and I feel like we did well there, too. I get compliments on Wesley's name all the time, and so far I've gotten lots of positive feedback about Laurel. That's good. Choosing a kid's name is SUCH a big deal; you really worry about screwing it up. For the first few days I really second-guessed myself and ran through all the other names in my head, thinking one of them would be better... but in the end, Laurel has won out. Her middle name is my mother's name; we had a family tradition that the middle name of the first daughter is the grandmother's name. It goes back for generations! I am happy I could continue the tradition. (For the record, almost names include: Claire, Summer, Bridget, Joy, Elizabeth, Marion.)

Introducing, Laurel Brenda Gottula. 7 lbs 3 oz, 19 in long. Born 7:50 PM on 12/12/11.



































So, now all about me: I'm recovering well... thank goodness it's over. I felt awful for the first week. The whole experience was just tough. The bummer part is that we did all that bloodwork to donate her cord blood, but in the end the cord blood sample didn't weigh enough (my OB didn't harvest enough or something), and we were ineligible to donate the sample. Lame. I was disappointed. It was just like, the icing on the toughest, cruddiest labor and delivery cake ever.

I had water retention issues and soreness issues for at least a week... I think I finally felt better around Saturday. I actually felt pretty good when we went home from the hospital Tuesday, but by Thursday I hurt worse. I guess all the great drugs had worn off. I managed to recover without the hard drugs (only one dose of Percocet in the hospital), since they make babies sleepy and I didn't want to affect Laurel that way. But by Friday I was thinking maybe I should go get that Percocet, hehe. But we lived. Three weeks later my hands still aren't 100% -- I had some awful awful pregnancy-induced carpal tunnel and my hands are still pretty numb. I realized in Church yesterday that three of my 10 fingers are normal -- YAY! So things are getting better. If they're not 100% by my 6-week postpartum appointment, I may have to get surgery :-( Numb hands STINK. Try buttoning a teeny baby sleeper while your hands are falling asleep. Not easy. But I am super glad not to be pregnant anymore. This was a tough ride.

Now, all about Wesley: Wesley is doing well, too. Grandma was a little worried, because the hospital is on the way to Seattle and Wesley is obsessed with the Space Needle, so he thought they were going to visit the Space Needle when really they were coming to see us. When they pulled off the freeway he launched into a crying fit, "but I want to go to the Space Needle!!!" Evidently going to see "baby sister" wasn't fun enough.

But he did fine; he held her and in the last few weeks he has said that he loves her. It's adorable to see them together. We are "gentle" with baby sister. He likes to shake her rattle (and take her rattle and say "mine" which is ludicrous, but he's at that age where he doesn't like to share and everything is his), he is worried when she cries (he'll say, "is baby sister hurt?" or "mom, go help baby sister!"), and in general he is pretty hands-off. Which is OK. Shane and I are struggling to make sure Wesley gets the attention and activity he needs; that has been the real adjustment. I can't just sleep until noon with a newborn anymore. Yikes. Shane goes back to work tomorrow and I'm nervous to go at it alone!

When we first decided on Laurel, I said to Shane that Wesley wouldn't be able to pronounce it very well :-) Shane said he knew that, but it would probably be cute :-) Wesley calls her "rural," or something like that, and he is trying hard and it is cute.

So, we're adjusting. That's our news! Christmas was great, I suppose I could report on that but I am all blogged out for now. This is already a marathon post; thanks to all of those who are still with me. I hope to post a Wesley update and a Laurel update before too long. And maybe all those posts I promised at Thanksgiving? And maybe New Year's resolutions?

I hope you had a Happy Holidays! We sure did around here!