The Heartbeat and Research and the 2nd Bush Presidency

We had an appointment this morning with Kate's Nurse Practitione, so we got to hear EM's heartbeat. It's going strong at around 140 per minute (130 - 150 is normal range).
I also got approved by the insurance company for genetic screening for taysachs, finally. That was Monday. Since Monday I've been trying to find someone that can tell me how to schedule the test. There's a pretty big communication gap between the business side of our HMO and the medical practice side. Also, I spoke with a nurse that just clearly wanted to get me off the phone in the easiest way (for her) possible. We ended up sitting around the waiting room for a half hour or so while various nurses and clerical staff tried to figure out the authorization letter from the insurance company and get the test scheduled. Evidently I can now stop by the lab any time and they'll know who I am and what bodily fluid they need to take. We'll see.

I've been doing parenting research, which means I've been talking to my friends and co-workers that are parents to learn as much as possible about their approach to the various aspects of parenting.
Kate is comparing our current approach to parenting to the second Bush presidency. The nightmare of the last eight years, not that one's dad.
The comparison that she's making (which I think is brilliant) is that we spent years explicitly avoiding parenthood, then a long time trying to conceive. At no point had we really thought about what the hell are we going to do when they send us home with an infant.

I'm planning on looking on the underside for the service tag number and then calling tech support.

So, now getting out of eight years of a national governmental hell brought on (at least partially) by electing someone that put all his energy into winning the election without a single thought (clearly) spared to what the fuck to do when he got the job, we're determined not to repeat that type of mistake. In other words, our current goal is to be better at being parents than Shrub was at being president.
Aim low, I always say.

To that end, I've been asking a lot of questions and posing hypotheticals. I'm getting very helpful information, along with some stock answers that are a bit disturbing.
The biggest one of those is "...your lives will never be the same."
Thing is, I'm pretty happy with my life the way it is. I know parenting will change our lives, and we're expecting and anticipating a lot of change. What's distressing though, is nobody that I can recall has said that our already-pretty-good-lives will be enhanced or made better. They always say different. That's kind of the way your mom describes the neighbor kid that she thinks you should date, even though nobody in their right mind would date that kid, right? "They're just different." Or, god help me, "interesting". It all sounds a bit ominous.
Anyhow, my current research topic has been in the realm of boundaries and ownership. Mostly talking about appearance choice kinds of things for teenage kids. When do their bodies become their own?
The answers I'm getting are pretty wide ranging, but seem to come down to not much stress about hair related choices (cuts and colors), more stress about clothing choices (skinny jeans and stuff like that), a bit more stress about piercings, and a whole lot of stress about tattoos. Periodically the person telling me that tattoos are where they draw the line will then apologize in case they've offended me. They haven't. I think they're a bad idea for teenagers, actually, just because of their permanency. One friend who's the parent of a teenage boy and tween age girl did tell me that he thinks my tattoos will make those choices interesting for my kid. I figure if EM's a boy his clearest path to rebellion would be Dockers and golf shirts. And that would suck, but it would also be pretty damned funny. For the record, I have no idea about how Kate feels about this one, but I can't imagine she cares too much.
I did get very very good advice today from my new boss at work, who said he explicitly ignores those kind of choices, which really are pretty irrelevant in the long run, so that when he makes an issue out of more dangerous choices for his teenagers (should that become necessary), he has a pattern of respecting their choices by default, so they know that his disapproval is based on real concerns and not just knee jerk reactions. The dangerous choices in question being related to sexual activity and drug use and things like that. His oldest girl is a high school freshman, so those are real concerns. It sounds like a good plan to me.
We do have one parenting book, and I'm sure we'll get more as we go, but I really like hearing from people that I know and trust that have done this. Here's why:
The books are available for everyone. Clearly not everyone that has read a parenting book is a good parent. One has to only go to a restaurant or movie theater (haven't I beaten that to death already?) to see plenty of examples of bad parenting, and some of those folks must have read parenting books. I'd rather hear about real life experience from people who have kids than the current flavor-of-the-month parenting theorist.