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...