This coming Wednesday will be the start of week 37, which means in about 10 days Bubble will be, essentially, full-term. As the time gets closer, I find myself getting deeper and deeper into denial. I know she's coming (and coming very soon!) but it still seems so far away. Finn is getting more and more impatient waiting for Bubble, which I completely understand - she's uncomfortable much of the time, can't sleep very well, and has been that way for months now. Meanwhile, I keep hoping for more time to get ready... mentally, physically, and organizationally.
So whichever way you decide to go, Bubble - early, late, or on time - you'll make one of us happy. And really, you're going to make BOTH of us VERY happy when you arrive. :o)
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Daddy's Take on Mother's Day
Today is Mother's Day: the first of many, many more to come for Finn. As I told her, I often question my own abilities as a father... Will I make the right decisions? Will I be able to help Bubble when she needs it? Will I be able to talk to her in a way so that she will hear me and understand? Will she respect me as a father and as a friend?
But, I told Finn, I have none of those doubts regarding her capacity as a mother. Why? Because she is her mother's daughter. Carroll was an amazing woman, and a fantastic mother. She had an abundance of love for all her children, and gave everything she could for them. And I believe Finn has inherited those qualities from her.
While I do have doubts about my own abilities as a parent, knowing that I am MY mother's son gives me great confidence that those doubts are unfounded. Thank you, Mom, for your love, confidence, and support for the last 37+ years. Happy Mother's Day to you, my sweet wife, my dear sister, and all other moms out there.
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| Carroll and Lynn, 2007 |
But, I told Finn, I have none of those doubts regarding her capacity as a mother. Why? Because she is her mother's daughter. Carroll was an amazing woman, and a fantastic mother. She had an abundance of love for all her children, and gave everything she could for them. And I believe Finn has inherited those qualities from her.
While I do have doubts about my own abilities as a parent, knowing that I am MY mother's son gives me great confidence that those doubts are unfounded. Thank you, Mom, for your love, confidence, and support for the last 37+ years. Happy Mother's Day to you, my sweet wife, my dear sister, and all other moms out there.
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| Abbie with Garrett and Kyle |
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| Sarah with Kelson, Jean-Luc and Connor |
How it Feels to be Pregnant
 | |||||
| After a 2-hour hike, feeling healthy, yummy, and ultra-preggo stretchy! |
It feels like... I love your Daddy so much that the emotion is sparking the fire of molecules in my belly, and I am weaving you as the incarnation of the harmony of our life together. You are our love given breath and a mind; you are our reward.
Being pregnant is like having a self-perpetuating exothermic ball of blue Life-light condensing in my tummy. It's very empowering because I work; my body does what it's made to do. It feels like a sacred honor to host you, and I love when you kick me. I felt you first at about 23 weeks (in Natural Language Processing, your favorite time to move of the whole week) and it felt like a goldfish squirming against the inside of my pelvic bone. Now, almost 3 months later, you fill me up to just below my rib cage, so when you move the sensation is much bigger, sometimes like an entire football flipping over, squished in between my organs. Only about 4 times have you moved enough to take my breath away or alarm me, and the first time was when Uncle Kelson and I arrived very sleep-deprived at a hotel in Orlando, Florida after flying all night. We hadn't eaten, and I was feeling too exhausted to move -- but I had to move if I was going to eat, and you really let me have it, gave me a great big lurching kick as if to say GET OFF YOUR BUTT AND FEED ME. It felt very weird and disconcerting but I was happy because you were so vigorous, which meant you were healthy (and we went to get food, where I, of course, broke down in hungry-happy tears). I had very little morning sickness, so when I did feel yucky it made me happy, because it meant you were really in there. The first symptom before I tested positive was that my breasts felt different -- not sore or tender (they never really did that, unlike most women) but just heavier, fuller, different. I went for a hike in the cold high Rockies outside of Frisco, Colorado at 6 weeks pregnant and the frigid air caused the first round of chest pain, a hard freezing so incisive it makes breathing a challenge. Fortunately it hasn't happened since January, because once it starts there is nothing I can do to stop it, and it hurts so badly it makes me laugh. There is no alarm or fear in the pain, nor is there any way I can stop it, so it's good practice for labor; instead of wishing it were over or trying to escape it, I laugh, and try to re-frame it as the American novelty of discomfort, a sensation I rarely have the chance to experience. And when it ends I am very relieved.
Physically it is mostly ridiculously uncomfortable these days, so much so that I laugh rather often, typically shortly before wiping tears of frustration from my eyes. I feel like a balloon stretched to popping, but much more like an armored tank than a balloon -- very heavy, unwieldy. I read Nando Parrado's autobiographical Miracle in the Andes at 7 months pregnant because it describes the harrowing physical and spiritual gauntlet of a team of rugby players who barely survived a crash in the high Andes in winter and the starvation that followed; that's real suffering, which allowed me to see how silly it is to be reduced to tears by the bracing of my great big abdomen every time I was wracked by a cough. Nonetheless, tears come, which is another pregnancy thing, and I don't really mind, I just feel rather silly. Warm baths take the soreness from my overtaxed muscles and are relaxing, but my body fills up the whole tub, making it equally hard to lean back to wash my hair or to lean forward to get it wet -- so taking a shower is more practical, but standing up doesn't take the ache out.
The rare pleasure of deep sleep is like a coma; when it comes, it rolls in hard and stays, and it takes me 30 minutes or an hour before I can speak and move normally after I wake up (which, thank God, your Daddy finds endearing). Most nights I sleep very poorly in stretches an hour or an hour and a half long, awoken either by the need to pee or by pain caused by the heaviness of my body staying in one position too long. Rolling over is yucky because it feels like I have a 50 lb. suitcase pressing down on my tummy and my lungs, so I only move if I have to. I love the 4-foot-long body pillow but I've grown to resent it because it's EVERYWHERE, a lot like Niko the cat and our 3 dogs, whose light sniffing noses against my hands annoy the crap out of me now in a way they never did before I was pregnant.
I enjoy loving your Daddy in a way I never have before too; somehow me being pregnant has made HIM sexier. I love how he puts his hand on my tummy and sends you colored warm fuzzies of love every night before we sleep, and I love how he always giggles (even in the middle of the night, half-asleep) when he feels you moving inside me. The warmth of his skin against mine is very comforting, very grounding, and when I ache everywhere and am frustrated from exhaustion, he leads me through relaxation scripts while rubbing my back and it makes all the pain go away so I can sleep. I think he is sexier now because I know he will be a phenomenal Daddy -- because he is being one right now, working on Mother's Day as I write -- and the extreme excess of female hormones in my brain are rejoicing that I have found such a powerful and gentle ally to help me take care of you after you are born. Plus I think pregnancy enhances smells and sensations, which makes having bodies more fun, and intimacy more exquisite altogether.
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| Happy to host you -- in the delivery gown I'll wear when you arrive |
My own Mama, your Grandma Carroll (where your middle name comes from), described being pregnant with me this way: "The soon-to-be New Mother was terribly excited about having a daughter and dreamt constantly of holding her, nursing her, dressing her... She just could not wait to have that baby in her arms! Neither had she ever seen the terrific struggles a premature baby goes through and how much littler they are, how much healthier it is for the baby to stay in-utero as long as possible..." I am glad she wrote that! I won't overexercise in hopes you come sooner. But just like she said, I stay up at night thinking about holding you, about the sound of your breath and the smell of your skin. I love you, Bubble, whoever you are, and I am honored to be your Mother.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Week 34: Book reviews and giving birth like a cow (my golden grail)
5/4/2011 -- Daddy's sleeping
Bubble,
This is my first entry typed right into the laptop from the glider Elaina and Mike got you, from our new little house on King Street. Daddy had to go to sleep because he's been working a terrible lot lately and the RTD keeps assigning him sadistically early runs (tomorrow he wakes up at 3:30 and he went to bed really tired too). On the midwives' advice I've begun to drink two cups of warmed up skim milk every night before bed -- need the calcium and somehow the protein helps too.
You move very often now, and I love it; the midwives said your head is down (so your butt is up near my ribcage) and when you get the hiccups I can feel it as an arrhythmic pulse against the inside of my pelvic bone, since that's where your shoulders are snuggled when they move! I'm at that point in pregnancy where I'm sore most of the time and I get close to tears by default most days by evening, so usually by bedtime I am encouraging you to come early while Daddy tells you not to listen to me and to stay in there for another month. Please stay in there as long as you need to. You are truly fantastically easy to carry around in your internal sling :o)
Speaking of slings, I just finished reading Attachment Parenting: Instinctive Care for your baby and young child by Katie Allison Granju. So now for the first book review of your blog, for other parents, and so you know what our ideal intentions were! I read the whole thing in 3 days because I keep wanting to think about holding you, nursing you, carrying you around in a sling, listening to you breathe beside me in the Baby Bunk side-car bed Daddy is going to build for you (or the bassinet at arm's reach if he can't get it done between tired shifts driving buses). The book takes the stance that child-directed sleeping and feeding result in a child who is confident that her needs will be met without excessive crying or clingy behavior. It is well written and includes many citations of supporting research and useful websites/organizations for parents interested in breastfeeding, co-sleeping and baby-wearing (using cloth slings for carriers instead of "baby buckets" or strollers).
Attachment Parenting is 12 years old but the recommendations exactly jive with neurological evidence cited in my all-time favorite child-rearing book, The Science of Parenting: How today's brain research can help you raise happy, emotionally balanced children by Jaak Panksepp (2006). In the same way breast milk provides blood cells that proxy as an immune system for a newborn's own underdeveloped immune system, an infant's nervous system is only half-developed at birth, so skin-to-skin contact, whether during breastfeeding or sleeping, allows the regulatory functions of heartbeat and breath to piggy-back on auditory and physical cues from whatever adult is holding the baby. In countries like China where small houses require that almost all babies sleep with their mothers, SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) is so rare that even medical professionals from Peking to Shanghai had never heard of such a thing (did not recognize the description) by 1999 (Jackson D, Three in a bed). In affluent countries where babies sleep alone, the babies' heartrates and breathing can become derailed, and without the physical stimulation of an adult's body to keep them on track, sudden infant death is one of the leading causes of infant mortality. In these countries, including the USA, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, SIDS is known by the older names "crib death" and "cot death." Bubble, so you know, we're going to do everything we can to cosleep, and given the strength of the evidence, even your Daddy is really enthusiastic about it.
Despite the strength of the evidence that countries where cosleeping is the norm have drastically reduced rates of infant death, the American Academy of Pediatrics announced as recently as 2005 that cosleeping is unsafe. Sleeping with your Baby: A parent's guide to cosleeping by James McKenna PhD describes how to do it safely, because part of its American reputation as unsafe stems from our issues with obesity, smoking, alcohol and the use of sedative drugs. Basically, if an adult has a drugged nervous system or is obese, they may sleep too deeply to prevent a dangerous situation from developing, and babies can die from being smothered. A mother who is not drugged and not obese is evolutionarily designed to mirror the sleep rhythms of the infant, and to nurse periodically throughout the night, which keeps the baby's brainwaves at a lighter level which is safer for the infant, since the deep sleep of bottle-fed infants in cribs can actually be dangerous (Attachment Parenting, 1999). The physics of the bed matter too; the baby should not sleep between two adults, the mattress should not be really soft, the baby should be at breast-level (not near the pillow) and should not be covered by a blanket, all of which are measures to minimize the likelihood of suffocation.
The lighter sleep of the mother/infant pair when they're together sounds less restful for the cosleeping mother, though. Studies referenced in Sleeping with your baby show that mothers whose babies are in other rooms actually have fitful sleep because the human body is designed to need to know that the baby is okay, so being able to hear a baby breathing (which I suppose can also be done through a monitor to the baby's room) allows the mother peace of mind. None of my friends have done co-sleeping that I know of (though Nora's still in an arm's reach bassinet, which has all the benefits except skin-to-skin contact) but they have all figured out how to make it work for their families. My golden-grail ambition regarding cosleeping and nursing is to learn how to breastfeed so I barely wake up, which I am striving for because it will minimize sleep deprivation. That itself is a major risk factor in post-partum depression and the triggering of traumatic responses (Survivor Moms: Women's Stories of Birthing,k Mothering and Healing after Sexual Abuse, Sperlich and Seng).
The golden grail of motherhood that I practice for daily is to give birth like a cow, which I hope to do using the techniques described in Hypnobirthing: The Mongan Method by Marie Mongan. When I told Chet four days ago that my doula gives me homework -- an hour of it every day -- he said Nora's doula didn't give them any at all, and the difference is that our fantastic doula Stephanie Watson-Cambell is also our hypnobirthing instructor. We do exercises -- pelvic floor (kegels), squats and pelvic tilts, and we do one relaxation/self-hypnosis every day along with listening to positive birth affirmations. Several times a week Daddy helps me with perineal massage, which is useful to prevent episiotomy but is especially helpful in lowering the likelihood of triggering from sexual trauma that often happens to survivors during birth itself. The first day I found out I was pregnant I started meditating in order to protect you, Bubble, from the dangers of being exposed to the cortisol in my system from how intense my moods are, and Hypnobirthing was a natural extension of that philosophy. I would far rather feel every bit of pain in birth than involuntarily dissociate because of the fear, the way I have so many times involuntarily dissociated because of sexual trauma, and the whole point of Hypnobirthing is to learn to stay very deeply grounded in my body while you are coming. Narcotic pain killers like percocet are really yucky for me because they make it impossible for me not to dissociate; I hate how they feel because they don't take the pain away, they just fuzz up my mind and take me away from myself. I refuse to sacrifice the opportunity for the amazing experience of escorting your soul into the world through birth by dissociatng, whether the stimulus be endogenous (fear) or exogenous (drugs) -- so if I can at all avoid it, I will relax and self-hypnotize so deeply that I will be able to be with you throughout the entire adventure. My favorite birth affirmation is "I look forward to birthing with joy and ecstasy," and now every time I feel a practice wave (a Braxton-hicks contraction), I get warmly happy and relaxed, probably in part due to direct hypnotic suggestions I have given myself that as soon as I feel the first wave of real labor, I will go into deep relaxation and well-being. I almost never talk to friends who are mothers about my plans for birth because usually they respond that I only say these things because I am ignorant of the pain I will undergo and I will end up as thankful for painkillers as they were, which is disheartening. If it's true, it's true, and this blog will report that in less than two months -- if painkillers seem like the only way for me to remain present for your arrival, I will certainly take them, and thankfully -- but for the moment I will continue the many hours of preparatory relaxation and looking forward to your arrival.
Oh my gosh! I've been writing this entry for 2 hours and it's 12:30am! Another natural pregnancy trick I'm using is gentle chiropractic care, which has also been shown to reduce the time of labors and the likelihood of C-sections by facilitating smooth birth through alignment of the baby and the mother's skeleton. And tomorrow morning at 8:10 I get chiropracted by the non-fruity Dr. Eric Graves, so I had better hurry to sleep. I love you Bubble... sleep well in there...
Bubble,
This is my first entry typed right into the laptop from the glider Elaina and Mike got you, from our new little house on King Street. Daddy had to go to sleep because he's been working a terrible lot lately and the RTD keeps assigning him sadistically early runs (tomorrow he wakes up at 3:30 and he went to bed really tired too). On the midwives' advice I've begun to drink two cups of warmed up skim milk every night before bed -- need the calcium and somehow the protein helps too.
You move very often now, and I love it; the midwives said your head is down (so your butt is up near my ribcage) and when you get the hiccups I can feel it as an arrhythmic pulse against the inside of my pelvic bone, since that's where your shoulders are snuggled when they move! I'm at that point in pregnancy where I'm sore most of the time and I get close to tears by default most days by evening, so usually by bedtime I am encouraging you to come early while Daddy tells you not to listen to me and to stay in there for another month. Please stay in there as long as you need to. You are truly fantastically easy to carry around in your internal sling :o)
Speaking of slings, I just finished reading Attachment Parenting: Instinctive Care for your baby and young child by Katie Allison Granju. So now for the first book review of your blog, for other parents, and so you know what our ideal intentions were! I read the whole thing in 3 days because I keep wanting to think about holding you, nursing you, carrying you around in a sling, listening to you breathe beside me in the Baby Bunk side-car bed Daddy is going to build for you (or the bassinet at arm's reach if he can't get it done between tired shifts driving buses). The book takes the stance that child-directed sleeping and feeding result in a child who is confident that her needs will be met without excessive crying or clingy behavior. It is well written and includes many citations of supporting research and useful websites/organizations for parents interested in breastfeeding, co-sleeping and baby-wearing (using cloth slings for carriers instead of "baby buckets" or strollers).
Attachment Parenting is 12 years old but the recommendations exactly jive with neurological evidence cited in my all-time favorite child-rearing book, The Science of Parenting: How today's brain research can help you raise happy, emotionally balanced children by Jaak Panksepp (2006). In the same way breast milk provides blood cells that proxy as an immune system for a newborn's own underdeveloped immune system, an infant's nervous system is only half-developed at birth, so skin-to-skin contact, whether during breastfeeding or sleeping, allows the regulatory functions of heartbeat and breath to piggy-back on auditory and physical cues from whatever adult is holding the baby. In countries like China where small houses require that almost all babies sleep with their mothers, SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) is so rare that even medical professionals from Peking to Shanghai had never heard of such a thing (did not recognize the description) by 1999 (Jackson D, Three in a bed). In affluent countries where babies sleep alone, the babies' heartrates and breathing can become derailed, and without the physical stimulation of an adult's body to keep them on track, sudden infant death is one of the leading causes of infant mortality. In these countries, including the USA, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, SIDS is known by the older names "crib death" and "cot death." Bubble, so you know, we're going to do everything we can to cosleep, and given the strength of the evidence, even your Daddy is really enthusiastic about it.
Despite the strength of the evidence that countries where cosleeping is the norm have drastically reduced rates of infant death, the American Academy of Pediatrics announced as recently as 2005 that cosleeping is unsafe. Sleeping with your Baby: A parent's guide to cosleeping by James McKenna PhD describes how to do it safely, because part of its American reputation as unsafe stems from our issues with obesity, smoking, alcohol and the use of sedative drugs. Basically, if an adult has a drugged nervous system or is obese, they may sleep too deeply to prevent a dangerous situation from developing, and babies can die from being smothered. A mother who is not drugged and not obese is evolutionarily designed to mirror the sleep rhythms of the infant, and to nurse periodically throughout the night, which keeps the baby's brainwaves at a lighter level which is safer for the infant, since the deep sleep of bottle-fed infants in cribs can actually be dangerous (Attachment Parenting, 1999). The physics of the bed matter too; the baby should not sleep between two adults, the mattress should not be really soft, the baby should be at breast-level (not near the pillow) and should not be covered by a blanket, all of which are measures to minimize the likelihood of suffocation.
The lighter sleep of the mother/infant pair when they're together sounds less restful for the cosleeping mother, though. Studies referenced in Sleeping with your baby show that mothers whose babies are in other rooms actually have fitful sleep because the human body is designed to need to know that the baby is okay, so being able to hear a baby breathing (which I suppose can also be done through a monitor to the baby's room) allows the mother peace of mind. None of my friends have done co-sleeping that I know of (though Nora's still in an arm's reach bassinet, which has all the benefits except skin-to-skin contact) but they have all figured out how to make it work for their families. My golden-grail ambition regarding cosleeping and nursing is to learn how to breastfeed so I barely wake up, which I am striving for because it will minimize sleep deprivation. That itself is a major risk factor in post-partum depression and the triggering of traumatic responses (Survivor Moms: Women's Stories of Birthing,k Mothering and Healing after Sexual Abuse, Sperlich and Seng).
The golden grail of motherhood that I practice for daily is to give birth like a cow, which I hope to do using the techniques described in Hypnobirthing: The Mongan Method by Marie Mongan. When I told Chet four days ago that my doula gives me homework -- an hour of it every day -- he said Nora's doula didn't give them any at all, and the difference is that our fantastic doula Stephanie Watson-Cambell is also our hypnobirthing instructor. We do exercises -- pelvic floor (kegels), squats and pelvic tilts, and we do one relaxation/self-hypnosis every day along with listening to positive birth affirmations. Several times a week Daddy helps me with perineal massage, which is useful to prevent episiotomy but is especially helpful in lowering the likelihood of triggering from sexual trauma that often happens to survivors during birth itself. The first day I found out I was pregnant I started meditating in order to protect you, Bubble, from the dangers of being exposed to the cortisol in my system from how intense my moods are, and Hypnobirthing was a natural extension of that philosophy. I would far rather feel every bit of pain in birth than involuntarily dissociate because of the fear, the way I have so many times involuntarily dissociated because of sexual trauma, and the whole point of Hypnobirthing is to learn to stay very deeply grounded in my body while you are coming. Narcotic pain killers like percocet are really yucky for me because they make it impossible for me not to dissociate; I hate how they feel because they don't take the pain away, they just fuzz up my mind and take me away from myself. I refuse to sacrifice the opportunity for the amazing experience of escorting your soul into the world through birth by dissociatng, whether the stimulus be endogenous (fear) or exogenous (drugs) -- so if I can at all avoid it, I will relax and self-hypnotize so deeply that I will be able to be with you throughout the entire adventure. My favorite birth affirmation is "I look forward to birthing with joy and ecstasy," and now every time I feel a practice wave (a Braxton-hicks contraction), I get warmly happy and relaxed, probably in part due to direct hypnotic suggestions I have given myself that as soon as I feel the first wave of real labor, I will go into deep relaxation and well-being. I almost never talk to friends who are mothers about my plans for birth because usually they respond that I only say these things because I am ignorant of the pain I will undergo and I will end up as thankful for painkillers as they were, which is disheartening. If it's true, it's true, and this blog will report that in less than two months -- if painkillers seem like the only way for me to remain present for your arrival, I will certainly take them, and thankfully -- but for the moment I will continue the many hours of preparatory relaxation and looking forward to your arrival.
Oh my gosh! I've been writing this entry for 2 hours and it's 12:30am! Another natural pregnancy trick I'm using is gentle chiropractic care, which has also been shown to reduce the time of labors and the likelihood of C-sections by facilitating smooth birth through alignment of the baby and the mother's skeleton. And tomorrow morning at 8:10 I get chiropracted by the non-fruity Dr. Eric Graves, so I had better hurry to sleep. I love you Bubble... sleep well in there...
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Registry
We saw Bubble's face and she even smiled. Thanks to Aaron, Fehring, Allyn, Kelly and the Nieters for funding our first peek at our baby...Ways you can help us prepare
Kind folk have been asking what we need lately. While lacy outfits can't go wrong, the best way to help would be gift cards to Costco, Target, Amazon, Lowe's hardware so Brian can build the baby bed, Jo-ann Fabric (www.joann.com) so Finn can make happy yellow/lace curtains or Pharmaca (www.pharmaca.com) for herbal vitamins, teas, and gentle baby products. We're also registered at BabiesRUs.com for the basics we still haven't borrowed. If you mail something, our new address is 7540 King Street, Westminster CO 80030.
Specific ideas of luxuries we would LOVE
A week of cloth diaper service ($25 for 1 week to $50 for 2 weeks) from www.bundlebabyshop.com
A week of organic produce delivery ($22 to $55) from DoorToDoorOrganics.com
Nursing clothes at www.motherwear.com
Mommy & Me Yoga and Massage from www.yomamaboulder.com/specials/
Chiropractic care ($25 to $50) at www.dregraves.com
For the sheer fun of it:
Books/videos about baby sign language (we have no videos yet)
Kid's books in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Swedish, Japanese, or Native American Languages
Books about infant development, how to sew baby stuff, baby massage... or whatever, we'll read it :o)
And for those of you who would like to give Bubble a more lasting gift, we will be opening a 529 college savings plan for her once she has a name and a SSN. Anyone will be able to donate any amount they want up until she actually goes to college. $50 now will become $200 by the time she needs it. So that might make good birthday presents for her in the future, too.
Thank you so much for following Bubble! More updates to come soon. She's been moving a ton and is already head down.
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