A week for the recordbook, perhaps?

Babies

Yeah, it's my life now. I love babies. More specifically, I love MY baby. She's the cutest. I want to talk about her as much as I can to everyone.

 Everyone does not want to listen. (I also don't want to listen to one of my coworkers blather about her kids. The other people, sure. This lady, nope.)

  My baby is 11 months old, almost. She weighs 17.0 lbs with a onesie and a clean diaper on. She is 2 feet, 3.96 inches tall. She's almost walking alone, but not quite.

 In our birth class, we had a few big questions about our new life vs our old live. When I say "we", in this context, I mean all 13 couples in the class. It was about how to survive the newborn phase, how to adapt to having a baby, etc. People just wrote all questions in their list about how to survive, and one person wrote that they were worried about losing interest. I didn't think that would be a problem for me, really, but the answer the facilitator gave was a little funny:

 "Don't worry, they'll find ways to keep you engaged."
 It hasn't been a problem for me, staying engaged with the baby. This was how it worked for me: Age 0-3 months: So very in love with my little lady. Nursing her was a joy and all of the endorphins and hormones released by nursing kept our baby love fresh every day.
3 months: BACK TO WORK. This was terrible. I hated being separated from her and went straight to pick her up right after daycare ended and snuggled and nursed together. We'd often fall asleep together nursing and wake up around 5:30 or so.

Then she started to smile. The real smiles, not just dreamy-sleepy smiles.
And she smiled whenever she saw me, and she glowed when I picked her up. How could you not love a kid who does that?

And it's been like that ever since. Now, her separation anxiety has kicked in. "My mommy left the room! This is terrible!" "My mommy is sitting on the couch instead of on the floor with me! I want to crawl on the couch to get to her!" "My mommy went to the bathroom! I'd better follow her to stay nearby."

This is adorable to me. I love being the favorite adult right now. People have warned me that this can change quickly, which would make me sad, but obviously Daddy deserves a chance, too. Even when he is carrying her and playing with her, if she sees me, she lunges and leaps towards me. This is especially difficult when she is in her highchair and eating, because she wants to stop in the middle of her meal and have me carry her around.  I want to do it, but this has resulted in getting covered in left-over food all the times. Oh well.

Anyway, we love our perfect baby--and I love how evolution of joyful babies has allowed us to stay so in love with the kiddos.

Book Review, 2013

Top 2013 Books I'll have to qualify this one a bit. For one, these are books that I read in 2013. Not books that were published in 2013. For two, I guess I didn't even read 10 books in 2013. And the books that I read are really not that great. Really. So feel free to pass jUgdegment--I know I would. -Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman -The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v Wade by Ann Fessler -sisterland By CUrtis Sittenfeld -Special Topics in Calamity Physics Marisha Pessl -Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with JFK & its aftermath by Mimi Alford -The Power Broker by Robert Caro *did not finish -The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt *Did not finish -The Magic Room by Jeffrey Zaslow There you have it. OF the 8 books on my list, I didn't even finish 2 of them. I definitely plan to finish "The Goldfinch" but after about 500 pages, I skipped to the end. This book, plainly stated, is just not good. While it certainly seems realistic and it is well-written, there's just nothing in it that compells us to care about the protagonist. A terrorist attack, a wealthy family, an antique dealer and a seedy underbelly of Vegas lifestyle keep us going, but even that wasn't enough to keep me from skipping to the end to see what happens. The protagonist inadvertantly steals a painting from an art museum and keeps it hidden throughout his life. This is the theme that ties the story together, but honestly, his logic for holding onto it isn't compelling enough to care about him. Donna Tartt doesn't bring the mystery to this book like she did in "The Secret History." She does bring the drugs, though, and that nearly makes it a turnoff. The other book I didn't finish was "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro. I definitely wanted to finish this book, but it's over 1,000 pages long and I only get 3 weeks to check this out at the library. Ain't gonna happen. It talks about the creation of most infrastructure in New York and how Robert MOses built it without a care for anyone besides himself, and how this consequently affected mass transit & many population's continued disenfranchiesment in the city. What does that leave us? THe best book, of course, was "Orange is the New Black". It isn't too much like the TV show, but the TV show has created the same characters from the book, obviously. MOstly this shows all of the despondency of federal prison, but the most pivoting scenes haven't happened in the TV show yet. There is no secret revelation behind "Crazy Eyes" in this book and there's a lot more subtle mistreatment of inmates. I vaguely felt sorry for people in prison before, but now I really feel sorry for most of them. Even people who deserve prison aren't receiving the rehabilitation needed and the programs preparing people for the real world are described here. And good grief, we should be outraged at the great disservice happening here. I spent my Freshman English class reading books about prison, books like "Prison Journal: An Irreverent Look at Life on the Inside" and "Newjack: Guarding SingSing". We discussed the merits of prison rehabilitation vs restitution, and determined if prison really serves either angle. At length. So I guess it was time to revisit those topics again. I definitely suggest this book to you. To everyone! IN the middle are then "Sisterland" and "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" I loved the author of Sisterland, Curtis Sittenfeld. I love almost all of her novels, mostly because she writes very plausible, real, and very weak female characters. It's easy to chart their mistakes and draw their flaws, if you're looking closely. But this book was a little too close to home. No, I don't have a psychic twin sister. But the book centers a great deal around motherhood & nursing babies, which is what I spent my year doing, and I wondered if perhaps I identified too closely with this main character to see her weakness, and if I couldn't see her weaknesses as plainly, if it meant that I then had the same flaws. This was a cute book, but it wasn't as literary as the rest of her novels. The ending, though, is killer. Special Topics In Calamity Physics: I don't think I can summarize this one. I think you'd be served just as well by reading an online review of the book. EXTREMELY picturesque speech. Each line is quoteable, forever, but that's part of the problem. Sometimes you just want a memorable line once every few pages, so that these lines stand out more. That brings me to the most easily disregarded book: The Magic Room. I checked it out right before or right after I had the baby, and I knew it would be the biggest bubble-gum book ever. But when you've just given birth, the crazy post-partum hormones can send anyone into tears, very easily, so I knew I needed a bubblegum book to hold me over until the first few days of sentiment pass. I'd say if you were going to read another book on my list this year, you should definitely read "THe Girls Who Went Away." The Institutional coercion of sending unmarried women to a birthing center and quite nearly forcing the women to relinquish their children is just horrifying. This book is a collection of each woman telling her story of how she got pregnant, how she ended up relinquishing her children, and then, in some cases, how they found their child later. There are so many lies in this system of adoption, from "convincing" the women that their children were better off being adopted somewhere else, to falsifying records, manipulating signatures and then covering up the adoption records later, making it very difficult for a legal search to take place. I read this book in the first few weeks of bringing Esme home and it was a heartbreaking read. But I felt it must be done, in order to fully understand the plight of these women forced to give up their children. WHile this practice has hopefully ceased (mostly?) in the United States, it still occurrs internationally. (like the story of Philomena, the movie) That's all I've got, folks. Thanks for reading!

Princess

OH yes, there's a perfect princess in my life. I didn't think I'd ever call her a princess, I thought stuff like that was dumb. But slowly and gradually, it built on us until we were calling her a Princess all the time. Around 4 months of age, I bought a baby carrier for her and we took some walks with her sleeping in the carrier. It was always nice to hold your own snuggling and sleeping baby girl. We took a walk nearly every night this summer, and most of the time the baby would sleep in the stroller, nurse on me a little at home, and then sleep. Lately she has been sleeping after work by just crashing in the carseat as soon as Dan gets her from daycare and then staying asleep until the next morning. We will wake her to give her a bottle, of course, and then let her sleep for the rest of the night. At first, I really, really hated that routine because I wanted to spend time with my little baby and play with her. I didn't want to have her best hours be at daycare and then to only get to hold her at night while she slept. To make up for it, I held her sleeping body a lot longer than normal. After a few weeks, I started to get used to it, though, the free-time and freedom I had to actually eat an uninterrupted meal. :) And now for the last two days, she's changed her baby routine and does not want to sleep. Even though she is very, very tired. Instead, she crawls for me into my lap, and we read stories together. Just in the last few weeks, she's started to understand storytime and doesn't try to eat the book. Her attention span isn't very long, but she does like to read and listen to me talk. She also likes pingpong balls. Around 9/28, she really started getting on all fours and wiggling back and forth to crawl, and then about 10 days later, she started crawling like crazy, and at the same time, she decided she could pull up on things and stand. So she's been doing all of those things, but no independent walking yet. Which is ok. I know this is a disjointed blogpost, I just want to write a little about the things she can do/does do. She smiles the second Dan or I come into her room. She holds her arms out to be held and picked up. She loves me the most and it's adorable and wonderful.

Here we are!

Baby Esme is about to turn 7 months--in about 3 days. It's wonderful & I miss her terribly all of the seconds that I am away from her. I definitely elieve women should have a year off to spend with their babies--12 weeks is just not enough time. As it turns out Esme is a pretty small baby. She is still at the 13% for weight, though she did end up getting longer. It's even harder to leave a tiny baby behind, only because they are so fragile. In retrospect, now that she is 14-15 lbs, it still seems weird to remember her at only 7 lbs. It took us 12 weeks to get her up to 9 lbs, and she was always drowning in her 3 month clothes. Thank goodness for the newborn sizes! Here's a recap of her last several months: Day 1 home from the hospital happened around 2-3 PM. The radio was playing "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" on the drive home, which I found adorable. The whole world seemed different to us, everything was white, there was no traffic, and the house had somehow altered upon our return back home. We decided pretty quickly that I would just stay up with the baby at night when she cried, because it really wasn't worth it to make both people tired when only one person can meet the baby's needs. And that was me! We were able to get a really decent latch going when we got home & nursing didn't hurt at all. (Still nursing now, at 7 months, though I must supplement with formula a lot) I still recall that odd feeling of isolation on the first night, though. Dan was asleep, I'd turned off all of the lights, and then...waited for my turn to sleep. I vowed that I would always keep the baby in her back, in the crib, and never co-sleep, but even by night 2 I realized this was futile. Around week 4 or 5, we figured out side by side nursing and never really gave it up. Esme just kept nursing and nursing and nursing, even when it seemed like she was asleep, her jaw was still munching. Even when other people held her in her sleep, she was still munching. I figured I'd place her in her bassinet for her 2 hour long nighttime snoozes, but she instantly woke up as soon as placed down. But I could hardly complain about holding a sleeping baby and keeping her close to me. And still, it was lovely. On our second or third day, a visiting nurse came to the house to weigh the baby and examine her. I showed her the latch & Esme's sleeping habits, and it seemed that Esme was still swallowing milk, even though she was asleep. So I continued to nurse her, even if she wasn't eating, because I didn't have a way to tell if she was eating or not. Esme never really adjusted to the bottle--we waited until 4 weeks of age to try----and she hated it. We tried again and again and again, and she would scream and cry and fight, until I gave up and nursed her. Consequently, I learned how to nurse in a lot of new places: The bank The skyway Front seat of the car on the toilet every restaurant, etc But it was still lovely. Esme gained compliments and attracted people wherever she went, including 1) Grocery store, where someone asked if she was a real baby 2) Ice cream parlor, where a woman could not get over her perfect features and perfectly shaped round head 3) doctor's office, where a woman in a wheelchair desperately wanted to hold her 4) Mall of America, where many, many people admired her again 5) any place at all, where people would tell her that she was the cutest baby they'd seen that day, more beautiful than the other babies, and confide in us that not all babies are cute, but we were able to get a cute one. I often heard that she looks just like me. On the second week, I stared at her so much--she really did look like me as a baby. A lot. It was unsettling to hold yourself as a child, to be honest. But still it was lovely. My biggest memories back then were 1) How bulky I was--I am still 1 lb away from pre-pregnancy weight and thus lumbered around like a whale. 2) How small she was 3) How lonely I seemed, without a TV to watch while nursing, i was just watching junk on Netflix. I quickly tired of the selection and gave up & cancelled my subscription. I managed to catch a few things, though, like "House of Cards" on Netflix. awesome show. And even now, Esme is still lovely.

Another Birth Story

Wowzer, time flies with a newborn. This is literally the first time I've been able to sit down with a sleeping baby AND have access to a computer. On Esmé's 10th day of life, someone broke in to our house and stole our laptops and kindles, so typing has been a bit belated.

ANYWAY! I was going to tell you the story of Esmé's delivery. 
**********Don't read this if birth stories gross you out.**********

Well, the first night, I was just waiting for my cervix to dilate, and while doing so, was connected to an IV of morphine, which meant we had to be on fetal monitoring overnight. I was sleeping on my side (poor Dan had to sleep on the most uncomfortable & drafty bed, ever) and the baby kept moving away from the monitor. So about every 20 minutes, a nurse would come in and reattach the monitor and search for the baby. Luckily her heart rate was always strong. It was hard to sleep and as I mentioned, we watched a few episodes of Firefly. Also, Lord of the Rings was on--which was lovely. It's been so long since I've seen it, I kept forgetting about each scene in the movie. 

During the insertion of the foley bulb, the nurse mused the mthat my pain tolerance seemed quite high and i tried to say that it was orphine, but in reality, I was in a great deal of pain--but didn't want to admit to it.

 Around 4:30 in the morning, after being awakened a bazillion times in the middle of the night, the nursemidwife came to check on the foley-bulb, which is something they insert to quicken the dilation, and my water broke. I'd also made it to 3cm, which was where I needed to be to begin the  contractions.  I didn't want to forget what time it had happened, so I sent myself an email: water broke.

At this time, I had one more quick IV of morphine and then we began the smallest dose of pitocin. I was very *anti*pitocin--it's like the EVIL DRUG of birthing--at least that's how it's portrayed these days. However, there was no choice--the baby needed to come out now that her amniotic fluid had broken. At this time, I also had an IV of pencillian since I was Group B strep positive. (yuck/>)

And so we began contractions. One every 5 minutes. I thought I could handle them--but I couldn't. A doula was sent in to help. I was struggling a LOT with the pain. Dan helped me a lot, but if he wasn't with me during the contraction, I got scared. I didn't know how to breathe through it. I panicked each time. 

Our doula came and really got me through the next 4 hours of contractions--she helped me breathe each time. I tried to walk around and nearly fell asleep standing up. I lost track of every single conversation we were having. I talked about imaginary people (the doula's sons? She doesn't have any sons.) My teeth started chattering uncontrollably. I drank orange juice, water, and had some food. Still chattering. I was shaking. Around noon, I asked for an epidural. Then I recanted. "I don't need the epidural!" Then I'd have a contraction and decide I wanted it. 

Finally, around 3 PM, I'd had enough. Yes, yes, yes, I definitely wanted the epidural. I had to wait for the IV to come so I could have enough fluid to accept the epidural. We also had to find someone to administer it--and it turned out to be THE DIRECTOR of the anesthesiology department for the whole hospital. The poor man took about 3 phone calls (and mentioned he'd have to do that) before we could administer it. During that time, we checked to see how many cm dilated I was. The answer: 4 cm. After nearly 11 hours, I'd only gone up one centimeter. Ugh. It solidified my decision to go for the epidural. 

It was wonderful. I didn't feel anything for awhile. I could take my nap. The nurses bumped up the pitocin for me to increase the contractions, which displayed on a pretty board for me to watch & not feel.

Around 5:45pm or 6pm, though, I started to feel a lot of pressure. It felt like...well, it felt like it was time to start pushing. I mentioned it to the nurse, who said that it wasn't likely that I'd feel that so soon. I said that I felt something, though, and gave myself another dose of the epidural medication. (Push this button!) The nurse did check and was surprised that I was at 9 cm already. 

I was sort of surprised, too. Poor Dan had snuck off to a corner to try to get a nap as well, since he really needed it. The nurse said I could start pushing as much as I felt like--and they would get set up for delivery. I remember they moved a bunch of stuff around, but I was just focused on pushing with the contractions.

And I really started to feel it. I know I had the epidural, and they said I'd feel the pressure, but not the pain--yet it seemed I was feeling both.

Nurse change-over in the hospital is from 6:30pm-7pm--so both nursemidwifes were in the room with me. I felt bad, I wanted to delay the delivery for them until after their shift, but there was really no stopping it. I said a lot of weird things while pushing. 

"I'm afraid of the dark!"

I asked for the forceps and extraction. They were, of course, denied, since they weren't necessary. I started crying, twice. I was ordered to stop crying, since that could make me hyperventilate. Of course, that made me angry, since I didn't cry tooooo much while pregnant, I felt that at least I should be able to cry during delivery. But I needed to save that energy for pushing. 

The TV show "The Family Guy" came on in the background and I asked Dan to turn it off. The doula, Hawa, also went to turn it off, and thus the Family Guy came back on. I really just didn't want the baby to be born with that show on! Luckily the TV stayed off the second time.

And so I just had to keep pushing. I was to hold each push for 10 seconds--and even getting there was hard. Dan encouraged me, he said I was getting closer, but I felt like he was lying. How did he know?

And then, after more pushing and after I swore a LOT, Esme was born. 6:55 pm. 6.5 lbs. 

I got to pull her up right away, the nurse allowed me to do it right away. They cut the cord while I was wiggling her up my abdomen and I got to stare at my crying bundle wrapped in a receiving blanket and full of afterbirth. I told her that I loved her and that I've been waiting for her for so long, and for some reason started talking to her about her college account. 

"college?" the nurse laughed.

She's the class of 2031, we calculated.

After a bit, they took her with Dan to be bathed and weighed and measured and listened to her lungs. I couldn't walk, so he took the photos for me of her first bath. 

And then it was just all of the normal-post-delivery recovery. You feel so uncomfortable, there's a ton of blood, but you don't care beause your baby is with you. Esme was born the weekend of a massive snowstorm. 

Inducement

I want to finish thr rest of the birth story before we get too far.

 Eventually, the nurse told me that we were going to induce because sending me home would probably just result in the later development of preclampsia. Since  we were already past the due date, inducement wasn't the worst choice. They walked me down the hallway to a very large birthing room. I almost gasped. "wow, this is beautiful!"
Nurse: "Yes, it is, isn't it. This is our largest room, we call it the ballroom, since it's so large."
me: : "Well, I feel really lucky that we get to have it."

By this time, Dan had gone home to grab the birth bag and other stuff (Food! Movies! And letting the doggie outside) . I sincerely did believe that no matter what happened, I would have time to go home and get my stuff and pack a few things in it. Wrong-o. :) I went straight from work, as mentioned before, which also resulted in my car being stuck in the parking lot near my office.

At this point, the nurses warned me that inducement would take a long time. It could be 3 days, they said. I agreed. Since  I wasn't dilated at all, and only 90% effaced, there was a lot to do, naturally.

Please note: if you don't want to read about birth, the cervix and what-not, skip out now!

We used cervi-pro to begin the dilation. I was given morphine via IV (They said it would be like a cocktail, which was exciting. "I haven't had a cocktail in nearly 9 months!" Which of course, isn't entirely true, I had a few sips of alcohol the whole time)
Then they used (for lack of a better term) the "cervical gun" to begin the dilation process.

Eventually Dan came back--stressed and hurried. He was trying to get everything and do everything without forgetting anything.  Since I was on a morphine drip (I really didn't know this would be necessary during dilation, but ok...),  I was also connected to the fetal monitors. Dan and I settled in for awhile and began watching a tv show while we waited. The nurse was even kind enough to angle my bed so I could watch Firefly on the DVD.

And thus began our long night of fetal monitoring.