Happy Birthday, Natasha Monkey

Everything went according to the plan. April 22, Friday morning Jason and I got up and made our way to the hospital saying goodbye to Adam for a few hours as he was left in the more-than-capable hands of his Grandma and Grandpa B. We ended up waiting an extra hour or two since someone came in for an unscheduled c-section before me. That didn’t stop them from putting all kinds of various tubes in me on time, though as I got to sit there without the benefit of pain medication. So we sat and patiently waited and watched Jeopardy.

Eventually they took me back to the OR without Jason to get the spinal in place. It was much more mellow than last time I got wheeled in. Last time (with Adam) everyone was already in the OR scrubbing up and in a big hurry. This time everyone seemed very leisurely about the whole thing. To my surprise, getting the spinal didn’t hurt a bit. Unlike the epidural, it took effect almost immediately. And this time I felt nothing. Eventually Jason came in and within minutes, little Natasha was lifted out of me. They didn’t tell me that they were about to pull her out so when they did, her cry caught us off guard. Here she is in her first moment outside the womb (complete with a picture of the two-vessel cord, which is supposed to have three vessels).



I was very surprised to learn that she was only 6 pounds 10 ounces. She certainly felt a lot bigger on the inside. But she was (and is) completely healthy. We do have an early follow-up appointment on Friday since she was 10% below her birth weight at discharge. I have a feeling she will have made up for that given how much and how well she has been eating. Speaking of which, she is a pro at latching on. We weren’t planning on breastfeeding, but she took to it right away and it’s working out marvelously well this time so we are going to stick with it. I do reap the immediate rewards from it to, as the prolactin makes me feel like I drank a glass of red wine. Good most of the time, not always what I need at our 4 am feeding.

So far she is incredibly easy. She barely cries. Her whimpers wake me up at night. Sometimes I wake her up at night to eat and often wake her at 3-hr intervals in the day to eat. She is becoming more alert now, which is nice. I get to see her blue eyes staring back at me. She loves to look at Adam. Whenever he is near, she watches him intently. And he loves her. He’ll come home from daycare looking for her, “Tasha?” he’ll call until I show him where she is. He wasn’t terribly fond of her the first day; he cried when she cried and wasn’t happy until they left the hospital. But the day we brought her home we could barely keep him from laying on top of her to hug and kiss her. We had to put a little step next to the pack and play so he can check on her when she’s sleeping in it. Desi, as always, is the consummate good dog and has left her alone now that he has memorized her smell and given her a few good licks on the head.

Here are my babies the day we brought Nat home:


Overall the birth experience was much better this time around. A c-section is much easier when it doesn’t follow a very long, difficult labor. The babies arrive much happier, and mom is much less exhausted. My recovery is going very well. Less than one week later I am already completely mobile. I wear out easily still, but I can see improvement each day. I don’t think it could have gone any better.

Grandma B goes home tomorrow, which is sad. Adam is going to have a hard time with that. She has been tremendously helpful taking such good care of my baby boy while I recuperate. She has also taken care of my house, leaving it in much better condition than I ever have, and she is always good for support and advice. We’ll miss her being around every day! My parents arrive late Friday (the 29th). They will help out tremendously too, and Mr. Adam and my mom get along fabulously as well. I hope their arrival helps him deal with Grandma and Grandpa B being gone (he’s still asking for Grandpa even though he went home almost a week ago).

I am such a lucky momma. Not only do I have the two best kids, but I have such wonderful support. Not to mention the best DH who is the best dad in the world.

Item! Children Need Affection!

Thank God for Harvard researchers! Where would I be without this new bit of information? I’m just glad it came before Natasha is born. This way I can properly raise her, unlike the hack job we’ve done on her poor older brother. I would stop locking him in the bathroom when he needs attention but I’m afraid to change parenting strategies with him now that we are already set in our ways. Perhaps someone will fund a study that will help me decide what to do about this quandary.

Seriously, this whole study is ridiculous. First, if you read the actual study, the authors state that they didn’t do their own research. Instead, they make extrapolations based on a seriously limited number of observations of multiple researchers with whom they are not even connected. It’s not that I disagree with the premise. Of course children need attention and touching! Of course they cry for a reason! Of course they need to be held and loved! But if you read the study, there is nothing that proves a one-time 30-minute crying jag will irreparably harm your child, causing him or her to suffer from generalized anxiety disorder in adulthood. Yet, this does nothing to calm down the attachment parenting zealots when arguing their case that your child, under no circumstances, should ever be allowed to be unhappy and should always be directly physically attached to your body, every coo and whimper immediately attended to. Among other apparent rules you must abide by to be part of the cool AP club:

· You must use cloth diapers, preferable ones woven by you. Out of hemp. That you grew organically in your own garden.
· Said cloth diapers must be washed in some sort of organic compound so as not to upset baby’s delicate skin.
· You must own at least 3 types of baby slings. Again, hemp is the ideal material. Extra points if you make your own. Extra extra points if you own one from each Asian country. Try some of these:
http://www.nurturedfamily.com/babycarriers.aspx
http://www.earthbaby.com/newnative.html
http://www.mayawrap.com/
http://store.peppermint.com/baby-slings-by-name.html
· You must not, under any circumstances, ever let a drop of formula touch the lips of your child. If someone says formula is ok to use, you must use the argument “Formula is not natural. You do not see animals in the wild eating formula”. (This argument of course, neglects the fact that infants of wild animals who could not, for whatever reason, eat their mother’s breast milk would die in the wild).
· Dr. Sears is your God.
· Make your own baby food.
· Do not own a television set.
· Co-sleep until your child is….eh, old enough to reproduce on his or her own.
· If you must choose between eating your first meal in 20 hours and actually putting your fussy infant in a swing to be happy alone for 3 minutes or holding your child, choose the latter. Or you are a bad mommy.
· Your child may never have any refined sugar, artificial sweeteners, or other additives. Seriously. Not even when his or her digestive system is mature enough to handle it in small quantities.
· If you see any parent not following the above rules, you must immediately feel superior to him or her. If their infant is crying, you must assume it is because they do not follow the rules listed above rather than the fact that sometimes…you know…babies cry!

Now that I got all of that off of my chest, I can say that I am happy there is a backlash movement against the parenting trends invoked by crazies like Dr. Spock and the infamous Gary Enzzo. But seriously, to make a movement out of it and attach yourself to this movement and identify yourself as a follower of it seems not only unhelpful to me, but at times, downright dangerous. The most deleterious effect is that it causes moms to not support other moms’ decisions. Without taking into consideration the circumstances behind their decisions.

But all this AP stuff is certainly good for one thing: Call your product “AP friendly” or advertise it in AP circles and you can charge an arm and a leg for it. Get it endorsed by Dr. Sears and you can increase your profit margin by at least tenfold.

The funny thing is, I don’t think parenting styles have changed dramatically with all the research being done or have been deeply affected by which parenting books are most popular. I used to crawl into bed all the time with my parents when I was a toddler and my mom let me get away with it. She didn’t call it “co-sleeping”, though. I was just “sleeping in her bed”.

If I sound a bit jaded and a touch bitter, it’s because I did everything I could to try to make Adam a happy baby. I swore that he wasn’t when he was still a little baby. He was very high needs and demanded to be held ALL OF THE TIME. So I did. But I didn’t love every minute of it and I felt bad for that. You know, sometimes I wanted to put him down and use the bathroom or take a shower. So he did end up sitting in front of Baby Einstein in a swing. But when I look at him now and I think back to his infancy….he was, and most definitely is, an extremely happy and well-adjusted little guy. We used some of the products dubbed "AP", primarily out of desperation. We'll use them on Natasha, too (the hammock, a sling), but I'm not joining a club. I'm not calling myself "AP". If she cries, it doesn't mean I'm unfit, if she has formula, she'll probably still be very healthy. And foremostly, if I see another mother abiding by a rule that is not my own or isn't AP, I'm not going to judge her for it.

I hope we do as good a job with Natasha as we did with Adam. I just need to remember not to read too much Harvard Research.

Last time, I SWEAR

Ok, this is my last post on the misery of being pregnant and sick. I promise.

Only 4 more days until I'm not pregnant anymore and life gets a whole lot harder, anyway. But better in many ways, of course.

I am giving Natasha the nickname "Bruiser". When I finally went to the doctor last week I found out I had a sinus infection. I'm on the Z-Pack, as they call it. I have one more pill left and am only starting to feel more human. I told the doctor about the pain in my ribs and he said it is most likely bruised or fractured. Thanks to the tremendous amount of weight you get to carry around, all the pressure on your ribs combined with the hormone relaxin that's released during late pregnancy to make your body ready to squeeze a kid out, it takes very little trauma to break bones or misplace joints. The ends of a woman's ribs are very small. A little excessive coughing or a rambunctious toddler in just the right spot (in this case, where Nat's foot likes to stay lodged) and vois las.

So it hurts. A lot. Am I a bad person for looking forward to the drugs I'm going to get when I get out of the hospital?

It makes me think about how moms in the 1800's westward migration did it. They had like 10 kids, so you know they weren't spaced far apart. The men were often gone digging for coal in another city or mining for gold. The women had to care for these kids, often while pregnant from the last time their DH's visited. And they still had 40 acres to care for. I guess that was before child labor laws were enacted. I have been abusing Adam's helpful nature a little bit. He's really low to the ground, though, so having him hand me something that I dropped on the floor isn't too abusive. Right?

New Cognitive Milestone

Adam is almost 19 months now. One of the areas kids this age start developing is in the mental land of make believe. I think Adam picks up a lot of his make believe play from daycare and the older preschoolers that attend. Pretending isn’t new to him, though. He started pushing around everything he could find pretending that it was a car when he was 10 months old. He even added “vrrrooom” noises. Everything became a car at that point. Books, shoes, even, amusingly, a grilled cheese sandwich during lunch time.

But he has recently become more sophisticated. He can now form mental categories of “things you feed” and “things you don’t”. So all dolls and pictures of people are given things to eat and drink and since they can’t make eating and drinking noises on their own, he provides them. The other day as I was sitting at my computer, he found an old mouse pad with DH’s picture on it. It was taken in the pre-Jenny era of DH’s life (also known as the “independent days”). DH was sitting smiling on his first motorcycle, which was cherry red and perfectly polished. “Daddy! Daddy!” Adam exclaimed. It was cute that he recognized his dad, a fact I found surprising since, to me, given our 4 years of moving, buying houses, trading in cars, accumulating debt, having kids, etc., DH looks very little today like he did in that picture. Then again, there are times when Adam calls just about anyone “Daddy”, including, inexplicably, some of the men from The Wiggles (who, and I will take a lie detector test verifying such, I have never met).

I thought it might end there. But he disappeared for a few seconds and came back and sat down next to the mouse pad (which was on the floor). I didn’t pay much attention until I heard him say “there go”, which is his way of saying “there you go”. It’s pretty cute when he says it, but it can often be a signal of danger for me since it usually means he’s giving something to the dog that he’s not supposed to. So I looked over to see him feeding DH’s picture dog food. He had a fistful of kibble and was doling it out one bit at a time to DH’s smiling, unaware face sitting happily on his motorcycle. To be fair, he did lean over and give it a kiss, too. And then took his pacifier out of his mouth and shared it with DH’s picture. The pacifier, of course, was larger than DH’s head in the picture. Certainly big enough to make riding difficult.

I have to say, this picture was very well taken care of. I’m afraid of him taking such good care of his little infant sister when she comes home in about a week, though. “There go!” will certainly arouse a lot more panic on my part, that’s for sure. I just hope Natasha doesn’t have the same affinity for dog food that Adam does. I’m afraid the girl will be provided plenty of opportunities to eat it.

Adam resting happily in his old baby hammock, which has recently been hauled out for Natasha.

Spring Fever

It’s been awhile since the last entry because I’ve been sick and haven’t had anything on my mind but how miserable I’ve been feeling. Personally, I find the topic very interesting and worthy of describing in great detail, but I have learned that those who are not pregnant and are under the age of 75 generally don’t enjoy discussing the various ailments one’s body inflicts upon them, so as much as it pains me to let slip away so much good material, I have held myself back from writing about it.

Still, I feel I am entitled to complain about a few aspects of being riddled with a nasty, insidious head cold. First, I am 9 months pregnant. I am already plenty miserable on my own without the help of some virus. My body is plenty capable of producing pains, aches, and leaking fluids of its own without the added help of a virus. Not to mention, it is already being invaded upon by a foreign entity. I consider myself a decent hostess, but I can only throw so many parties at once. Second, and not that I am keeping a count, but this is at least the 14th cold I’ve had since September. And it must be the 900 millionth one of my life. How many variations of a cold virus can there possibly be? Haven’t I conquered all of them by now? Also, must these viral infections inflict themselves upon Adam? As terrible as I feel, I know he feels 10 times worse. He has gotten pretty good at blowing his nose, but I’m afraid he’s not capable of the more sophisticated aspects of handing cold discomfort like snorting in just enough to suction the mucous out of the airway and into the back of the throat while simultaneously holding back the epiglottis to get the blob into the esophagus rather than the windpipe, which is gross, I know, but when there is no tissue nearby, what are you gonna do? Instead, he has to rely upon the more pedestrian version of letting it voluntarily run down the back of his throat until it attempts to enter his windpipe (epiglottis didn’t know blob was coming because there was no cue of swallowing food, you see), whereupon he coughs and gags and sounds like he’s going to die. Also, the sicker Adam is, the more he refuses to swallow medicine (or food for that matter), so he must rely upon this uncomfortable system of dealing with heaping mounds of snot without the aid of good ol’ decongestants, anti-histamines, or even your basic analgesic. I’ll never know how so many of us OTC weaklings make it through childhood.

My primary complaint about this cold, however, is its timing. As soon as the weather is nice enough for us to get outside and enjoy ourselves, we are hit with this nastiness and there is nothing we need more than to be inside resting. Not an option with Adam, so we have still managed to spend a fair amount of time outdoors. With less than two weeks to go before Natasha is set to arrive the last thing I want to do is sit helplessly trying to conserve energy. But what little I have must be used on the baby that is already here, and more specifically, when I have to wrestle him to the ground and drag him back inside against his powerful protests. Not only do I have lots of gestating to do, I have procrastinated doing so many things to prep for Natasha until these final two weeks that it is now humanly impossible to accomplish more than 1/25th of them. And when I do expend a little extra energy, I start having contractions. Or my body just reminds me how pathetic it becomes during pregnancy by hurting for a full day after I just raked up dead leaves, grass, and dog poop for 15 minutes.

Still, I am thankful that March did leave like a pleasant, mewing little lamb. And despite its potential to be a bitch of a month (as if to not be outdone by March), April has been kind to us Minnesotans this year. Instead of teasing us with a glimmer of hopeful temperatures in the 60’s one day and savagely disappointing us the next with wind chills in the 10’s, our weather has been remarkably….unremarkable. Except for the tornado that touched down here a week ago and left us hanging out in our basement, that is. But I consider that normal spring weather and would happily trade in other weather extremes Minnesota is capable of producing in favor of the occasional storm clouds capable of producing heavy rotation (my new weather lexicon impresses you, no?).

So I woke up aware that today was going to be another gorgeous day. Despite the fact that I was dead tired from not sleeping, it left me sanguine and eager to see what could become of the day. I love the spring for being capable of producing wakings like that! Especially Minnesota springs. I think it reached the mid-70’s. The forecast said there was a good possibility of rain and thunderstorms, but I knew better. Funny how you come to predict weather better than the weatherman once you’ve lived in Minnesota long enough. “Nope, them bones ain’t achin’ no thunderstorms today”, well I don’t say that now, but I look forward to saying that someday. Actually, Desi, our Boxer proved himself quite reliable the day we had the tornado and walked around whining (very uncharacteristic) for about 2 hours before the tornado warnings started making their appearance. He also ran away from home that morning, the little turd (got a call 20 minutes later from a neighbor that wanted to keep him; I guess he just walked right into their yard and sat down beside them).

Immediately upon waking, Adam demanded to go outside (this is normal for him). His pleas start off cute by bringing us one boot and one sock, sure that once we get these items on him, we will let him run out the door and play despite the fact that he has on no pants and it’s still only 7 am (I am gaining a reputation in the neighborhood as the crazy lady who goes for 6 am walks; but I assure you, this is not of my own choosing). After we persuade him to put down his ONE BOOT and ONE SOCK, he’ll run and find a miscellaneous pair of pants or some other clothing item he is sure is all that is preventing him from freedom. When that fails, he’ll start knocking on the door to the coat closet saying “coat?!?” as if it might just come when he beckons. DH was dying to “go for a ride”, which can usually be translated into “go to Cabela’s”, “go to a car or recreational vehicle dealership” (which, thankfully are closed on Sundays, yet this fact does not stop us from loitering their lots on random Sundays), or just generally “go somewhere you really don’t want to go and is probably a long way away and requires traversing a really bumpy road which is going to hurt your majorly pregnant belly”. So, of course, I pushed my agenda.

I wasn’t dying to go for a walk. Given my druthers, I think I would rather stay home, be alone in quiet, read the paper, take a nap, have a nice luxuriously long shower without someone banging on the door, drink some coffee…but I knew that a walk would please at least 50% of what’s left of our family (we got rid of Dora which alters the equation from 60%, I’ll have to fill you in more later) so I suggested that course of action. DH, the ever good husband obliged and Adam, DH, Desi, and I took off for Silverlake. We ended up walking to the park, which I had never been to and now regret never having visited. It’s a toddler’s paradise and I’m going to have to bring Adam there as much as possible this summer. The kid had a blast. And Desi, with his gentle leader collar on was the perfect dog. After we wore Adam and Desi out, we ended up driving to Cabela’s. It’s about a 45 minute drive and both Adam and I caught some shut-eye. We ended up only buying stuff for Adam: a child-size life jacket, which he hated trying on and will no doubt protest wearing the entire time he is forced to when we finally make it out on the boat. We also bought some yogurt-coated pretzels, two of which he consumed and 4 of which he partially consumed and then threw into never-to-again-be-seen crevasses of the Excursion. But still, these two pretzels are the most the poor kid has eaten in days, so I’ll take it.

After we got home, DH decided that he was going to do take the wheel off of the Excursion to check out what was causing the horrendous noise that again made its appearance. So Adam hung out there with him. They were pretty cute together. Jason had to lay on the ground under the truck to check it out. I guess Adam thought laying on the cement on your back is a pretty good idea so he tried it out himself. Unfortunately, I did not get a picture since I was inside catching a nap, but I can definitely envision it. For not more than 20 minutes from coming inside, Adam demanded to go into the garage and listen to the wiggles. Poor little guy was so tired that he had to lay down on the garage floor for awhile.

Despite being sick, he had a pretty adventurous day. DH got his trip to Cabela’s, and I got a nice quiet afternoon nap, so we’re all pretty happy. Adam has been in bed for about 4 hours (went down at 6 pm on his own volition) and I have barely heard a peep from him. Perhaps I’ll hit the sack early too and we’ll both knock out the remnants of this cold so we can enjoy our lovely spring.