Well. After gleefully realizing that Matt's health insurance was worlds better than mine and deciding with almost no effort at all to put the baby on his plan...

His company changed all the benefits. I don't know if that was a company decision, or if the insurance company suddenly said, "Okay, for that much money, this is what you're getting now," or what. It used to be that Matt had no deductibles unless he went to a doctor outside the insurance network. It used to be that his copayments were nice and low for both doctor's visits and drugs. It used to be that his annual out-of-pocket maximum was half mine.

Now, suddenly, he's got a deductible to pay, even in-network. (It's a bigger deductible if he goes out of network.) And his copayments have gone up - and they added a deductible for prescription drugs, which I've never even heard of before. And the out-of-pocket maximum doubled. It's still lower than mine, but the numbers are a lot closer.

So now I'm struggling to figure out which one is the better value. It's kind of a pain. Copayments, for both of us, are higher for "specialist" doctors. Do pediatricians count as specialists? Or will our child's pediatrician be considered our child's primary physician? Which one is likely to hit us harder - the deductible for drugs, or my coinsurance percentage? I don't know that we've ever reached our out-of-pocket maximums before, so is Matt's somewhat lower maximum worth paying the extra $300 a year that his insurance costs?

Matt was all in favor of just scrapping his insurance altogether and helping me pay to cover the whole family under my insurance - except my insurance comes with a clause stating that it won't cover employed spouses unless the spouse is first covered by their own company's insurance. So much for that idea.

Ah, well. I'm not sure when Matt's new insurance period starts, but mine kicks in at the beginning July. So we'll have a couple of months to see how our individual plans work for us before we have to add the baby to one of them. (We get 30 days after the birth to add her to one plan or the other.)

On a somewhat happier financial front, Matt has been doing research into refinancing our mortgage, and it looks like we could save a fair amount each month if we refinance now. (Or, alternatively, pay an extra $100 a month and be done with the mortgage in only fifteen years instead of thirty. But we've got thirty years before we can think about retiring anyway, and we're about to add another head to the house roster, so we'll probably be opting for the extra cash.)

It was an exciting day in the Brooks mailbox yesterday, too. We got not one, but two invitations. The first was an invitation to a friend's wedding in July. We've known about it for a while and been looking forward to it, even if I will be eight months pregnant. (Matt got funny with the response card, and filled in that the "Number Attending" was 2 8/9.)

The other was the invitation to our baby shower.

Kris has been dying to tell me the theme for at least two weeks now. Every time we've seen Braz and Kris, Braz has been forced to almost physically restrain her from telling me. We met them for dinner this past Sunday, and Kris was teetering on explosion, so while I was taking Emma for a walk outside so she could show me "Emma's car," Kris told Matt what it was.

I have to say, it was worth the wait. I almost fell over laughing.

I'll be doing a blog post about it a bit later today, just because the blog has a better setup for comments. Keep your eyes peeled!

I spent all day yesterday at work waiting for a stack of documents that absolutely had to go out yesterday. I'm usually at work from 7:30 to 4. The last document - at 200 pages, mind you, which would usually take me at least 2 hours to review - hit my desk at... 4:10!

The project's manager said, almost in as many words, that she didn't care if there were mistakes in the document - we just had to get it out the door to finish off the old contract so we could start on the renewal. Hokayfine. I skimmed it, did a few spot-checks to make sure that references pointed to the correct items, and signed off on it, with a note on my paperwork that there had been insufficient time for a thorough review.

On the plus side, the empty morning did give me lots of time to work on the photo album. I added the pictures from 2001, 2002, and the few I've taken this year. I also added a few new pictures to the 1993-1996 section. Check it out, and do let me know if you have any problems. And thank Matt for setting up the PHP code for me!

--Liz