a teeny blurb about me

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I am a 32 year old first time mom who is continually shocked at how much those baby books and doulas and midwives don't tell you about having and raising kids...let me tell you, it's a lot!

12.29.2010

Pearly white bastards

Wow. Teething sucks.

One minute they go to sleep all pink gums and toothless grins, looking like a 98 year old man who lost his dentures, and the next minute it's 5:23 in the morning and they're screaming like someone is poking their eyes with rusty nails because the first evil tooth has decided to pierce the gum line.

Except it's not quite that fast.

First comes the drool. Apparently, sometimes for a month or more, they drool excessively, and this is an early sign that a tooth, that pearly white bastard, is packing its bags and headed for the border. In the last 6 weeks I have had my fingers, shoulders, arms, pants, t-shirts and face all covered, at various points, with clear, drooly goo. He managed to soak the front of his jammies one morning so thoroughly that I had to change the fleece jammies, and the onesie underneath, AND wipe off his little chest. It drips in slow motion out of the corner of his mouth and drops like a slime mold off the edge of his little pink bottom lip. It's disgusting in a cute kind of way...

Then comes the vomit and the diarrhea. He didn't have too much of that this time, but in the 48 hours preceding his first tooth's first look at the world, he did have both unpleasant experiences. A few times. And it was heartbreaking. Especially when he threw up and had a massive poop at the same time on the couch. He looked so pitiful, puke coming out his nose and the nauseating stench of liquid poo surrounding him like a fog.

After droolfest, and the vomit/poop sessions, comes the screaming. Everything is fine, peaceful even. He is cooing at a toy hanging in front of him while he sits in his bouncy chair and mommy makes some lunch. He is babbling, talking to himself or to someone else, it's hard to tell. His little arms are wiggling in happy motions, and he's fine. All is right with the world. And then, in the time it takes you to put the mustard back in the fridge, he's screeching like a dying condor and as far as you can tell, not a damn thing has changed! Nothing has fallen on his head, he hasn't wedged an appendage in between two sharp objects, he isn't stuck under something. He's just hysterical, inconsolable, and you're beginning to feel the same way.

A word of advice: stick a finger in his mouth. I discovered that this not only soothes him by giving him something warm and fleshy to nom on, but gives you a chance to feel his little gums and inspect for the telltale ridge of a tooth starting its nasty little excavation. I did this, and found one such mean spirited jackass attacking his mouth, and while the finding of it did nothing to relieve his pain at its presence, it did tell me that some baby Orajel and a dose of Tylenol would!

12.21.2010

Nightmares

Since before he was born I have been having nightmares. Some of them while I am asleep, and some of them are like nightmare day-dreams. And no, they don't involve poop...

I actually have horrible dreams/visions about something happening to him. I had dreams that the pregnancy ended, dreams that he died during labor and delivery, dreams that he has been kidnapped, dreams that he has been sick and died at home or in the hospital. I have these sort of awful visions while I am awake of all the scenarios that could end in him being taken from me or even killed. It's horrible. It's acutely distressing and extremely anxiety producing to think about or dream about these things. And it is all something I did not expect.

I knew that parents worried about their children, even after their children are grown. I knew parents who had lost a child; in the case of my friend Kathy it was an infant son, and for my mother's friend it was a teenage boy. I looked at it like any other death. It was tragic, painful, and sad. Of course there was grief, and grieving. But I didn't have any real concept of what it can do to a parent to lose their child. I didn't understand what kind of love it is that parents feel, and what kind of bond. Now I do, and it's both remarkable and terrifying.

I wish my mother was alive so I could tell her I am so sorry for all the things I did to put myself in harm's way, all the things that gave her nightmares, or made her suck in her breath in that sharp way moms can do, or made her cry from the fear that something would happen to me. I am sorry for not looking when I crossed the street at 4, and wandering away from you in the grocery store for most of my childhood. I am so sorry for climbing that cliff on the Oregon coast when I was 6 or 7. I am sorry for driving too fast on a gravel road and wrecking your car at 16. I am so very sorry for sneaking out of the house, discovering alcohol much too young,  riding in cars with reckless boys who did donuts in the snow, and moving to Chicago from the safety of a small town.

I know my son will do things that immediately bring that sharp, distinct fear for his well-being into my brain. He already tries to fling himself backwards out of my arms when I walk down the stairs, and he stretches at impossible angles, just narrowly avoiding sharp corners with his soft head, when I am changing him on those tables in restaurant bathrooms. I know he will do much worse. He will drive too fast, he will jump out of trees and run down steep hills and play with all kinds of dangerous toys, he will go places where doom is imminent. He will talk to strangers and wander away from me in crowded places. He will put all manner of things in his mouth that shouldn't go there. And in all likelihood, he will be fine. And the reasonable part of my brain understands this.

Then there's the mother part of my brain.

That part screams out in terror at the thought, shrivels into itself and weeps at the idea, the very notion, that something in this world could take my son from me. The mother part of my brain already knows that if someone were to take him, I would never rest, never sleep again, never stop moving, until I found him and took him back. And if something were to take his life, I don't know that I would ever recover the love of life and energy for experiencing it that I have now. I cannot imagine that I would ever be more than a hollow shell of a person, always aching to hold and hug my boy again.

I watched a documentary today about a love story during the Holocaust; this couple who went to concentration camps wrote letters to each other through the war, survived, and got married afterwards. It was a lovely story, very moving, very thoughtful. They are in their 90s and were telling the story of how it was for them, what they saw and experienced. And then they were speaking about the children, and how children were taken from their parents and often sent off to other camps without them, and more often than not, died without their parents. They said that 1.5 million of the deaths during that war were Jewish children. I can't even write that without crying. It has brought, for me, a new level of horror to the knowledge I have of that time and the suffering that those families endured. So many broken hearts, so many mothers in such indescribable pain...I cannot imagine the agony. Except now, maybe just a tiny bit, I can, now that I have a son of my own.

12.19.2010

Here we go again...

No poop since my post on the 14th. Please, oh holy higher power of baby bowel movements, don't let him wait until we're on our way to Nashville for Christmas. I don't want to try to bathe my baby in a rest stop sink...

12.14.2010

And the poop keeps coming...

I was quite pleased the first 24 hours that he didn't poop. Hooray for not having to change, rinse, and wash any poo-stained cloth diapers for a whole day. The second day, I was still kind of happy about it (I mean, who wouldn't be?!) but was beginning to wonder what was going on. The third day I was beginning to be alarmed, and started reading my baby books and googling "infant constipation." Day four, which happened to be a Saturday, I of course called my midwife on her cell phone (she never should have given me that number...) "Hey, it's Katy. Sorry to bother you on the weekend {again} but I am sort of worried about him. He hasn't pooped in four days, and I am concerned about his colon, you know, maybe it's backed up or something?" She assured me, calmly, while she was trying to clean her house and put on a 4 year old's birthday party, that breastfed babies often go a few days without a bowel movement. Her oldest son went a week, and it was perfectly fine. So I decided to wait, patiently, and let his bowels move on their own time.

So we waited.

And waited.

And this morning, it came.

Never in my wildest imagination did I ever think that a baby who weighs less than 20 pounds could ever poop so much at once. It was easily the poop of a grown man. A good 2 cups of the stickiest, grossest brown goo I have ever seen had exploded out the sides of his diaper, and when I took it off there was poo all the way from his tailbone to his belly button. You couldn't even tell he was a boy, his baby parts were totally covered and unrecognizable. It was amazing.

He was happy as a clam, probably because his tummy wasn't being smooshed up to his chin by all that poop in his bowels. I was horrified. And Daddy gave him his first shower.

At least now I know what to prepare myself for when he goes a few days with solely wet diapers...sheesh.

12.10.2010

Oddly jealous of his puke...

My little Monkey is a champion puker. If throwing up was an Olympic sport, I think he would definitely medal. And I am oddly, unexpectedly, quite jealous of his skills.

When I throw up my whole body seems to convulse. My back arches like a pissed off cat, I have to brace myself against something (usually the floor), and a really loud, horrifying retch sound comes out of my throat (along with the contents of my stomach) that I am always sure the neighbors heard and have decided to report it as a domestic disturbance. And it takes me a minimum of 5 hurls to get it all out, after which I am usually sobbing.

But Monkey is a delicate, genteel, efficient puker. He barely moves, there's almost no sound (which I have to admit has me alarmed because I envision him puking in his sleep and choking on it and being all scared and stuff in the 12 seconds it takes me to wake up to his gaggy noises and run into his room), he almost always manages to empty his gut on the first try, and he never cries...he just looks startled and confused in a cute but smelly way.

Now of course I hate it when he throws up, and not just because it means I have to wash the couch cushion covers and the throw pillow and his clothes and my clothes and the dog and mop the floor...I hate it because it means his tummy was upset, and now his tummy is empty and upset, and anytime I suspect my little man is uncomfortable in any way it disrupts the balance of my universe. I am not a helicopter parent by any means (and will probably blog thoroughly about that at some point) but I do want him to feel good and be healthy and happy all the time.

And also, the smell of partially digested breastmilk is pretty gross. Not as gross as poop, but pretty gross.

12.06.2010

Boobs

I like my new, bulging, veiny boobs. They're big, which is kind of fun for me since I was never very well endowed. They squish together to make the most magnificent cleavage, and I enjoy that in one or two particular dresses that never did look quite right at the neckline. My best friend Amanda sometimes has a hard time taking her eyes off it, actually, and we giggle a lot about how entranced a person can become, just at the sight of my vast expanse of boobage.

But there's a lot about this whole lactating thing that I did not expect, still don't understand, and am often confused about. For example, why does one side feel like hot needles are being stabbed into my areola when he nurses, and the other side feels like butterflies tickling me? Why does he choke and gag on the apparently uber-fast flow of the right side, and lazily lap at the lolly-gagging stream on the left? Why do my boobs turn into giant bursting melons at 4 am instead of conveniently sleeping through the night now that he does?

My doula has suggested I contact a lactation consultant, and my husband tells me to call my midwife (so I can ask what will probably turn out to be yet another humiliatingly ignorant questions? No, thank you!) but I am so delirious and overwhelmed by such simple tasks as brushing my teeth (haven't done that yet today and it's 6pm) and unloading the dishwasher (which seems to take an hour) that by the time it occurs to me to call some La Leche person and beg for help, it's 11pm and I am falling into bed like a redwood tree in the forest. I half expect my husband to yell, "TIMBER" one of these days. No, I will just continue to be mystified at my milk makers. Sometimes not knowing is fun. Right...?

12.04.2010

Looking back...

As I enjoy a few moments of quite while my husband takes his turn at what is most assuredly a poopy diaper the likes of which would gross out Beetlejuice himself, I find myself looking back on the past year of pregnancy, childbirth and newborn infanthood, and realizing that there is so much I could have been sharing with all of you! So I am going to do a "Year in Review," a sort of top ten favorite highlights of the last year. I am warning you, some of this may be just as gross as the diaper being removed upstairs.

10. Sickness...morning, noon and night.
I had heard about morning sickness. I saw "Look Who's Talking." Kirstie Alley made puking look kind of cute. Then it happened to me. Usually in the evening, when I had managed to finally choke down something resembling solid food, something that would feel really horrible coming back up, like Frosted Mini-Wheats. It was intensely unnerving...I would retch so hard into my white plastic bucket (which I carried around the house with me because I could rarely make it all the way to the bathroom before spilling the contents of my stomach into the nearest receptacle, however inappropriate it may be) that I would end up with violent red splotches of broken capillaries on my face and neck. It looked like someone had tried to strangle me in my sleep. Actually, my throat felt like someone had tried to strangle me. Or at least had slipped some kind of caustic substance into my lemon water. No one told me that morning sickness would feel like dying, that nausea alone could actually make you weep uncontrollably, or that the smell of cooked chicken or lavender air freshener would induce vomiting. I lost seven pounds the first three months I was pregnant, spent one evening in the ER begging them to make it stop, and didn't eat an entire meal for almost 14 weeks.
9. I'm supposed to drink how much water?!? 
or 
'Peeing every 5 minutes for 8 months equals 156 rolls of Charmin Ultra Soft'
Me without a baby in my belly: Yeah, pregnant women pee. They pee a lot I guess. I mean, there's a thing squishing their bladders or whatever. Makes sense.
Me with a baby using my bladder as his personal trampoline: Wait a minute, midwife who I love and trust...you want me to drink how much water? Because I am already peeing 17 times a day and I am only 9 weeks pregnant. If I spend any more time in the bathroom I am going to start redecorating it. (She smiles knowingly at this point, and repeats that I should be drinking something obscene like 90 ounces of water a day at least.) So I tried to, I really did. And I woke up every 26 minutes every night for the remainder of my pregnancy so I could stumble to the bathroom, hopefully remember to put the lid up first, and pee for the 48th time that day. My lady parts became so sensitive that I turned into a toilet paper snob, spending outrageously for the softest, plushest, most silk-infused tissue on the market. {Note to self...make toilet paper out of cashmere and sell to desperate pregnant women. Million dollar idea!}
8. Hemorrhoids (before and after)
I know that this may be an unpleasant thing to think about, and even more unpleasant to talk about with your newly pregnant friend/patient/family member. But had someone warned me that gaining 55 pounds would give me hemorrhoids the size of cherry tomatoes (or even cherries, for that matter), I would have been much more diligent about NOT eating ice cream for a pre-breakfast appetizer - once I was able to eat solid food again, obviously. I would have MADE time and somehow found the energy to go for my daily walks. I would have thought twice before saying "Hot damn! I am pregnant and married and I can get fat if I want to! Bring on the seconds! Where's the gravy?!" and then following through on that attitude by eating like a hobbit for 5 months. Instead I gorged on an average of 5 meals a day, the last of which often took place at 3 in the morning when my kind husband would make me all manner of tasty treats. I ended up unable to sit on hard chairs...then unable to sit on cushioned chairs...then unable to sit at all. I would go out to restaurants or to church and sit first on one butt cheek and then on the other, rocking back and forth like a Weeble Wobble that was about to, finally, fall down. But, I thought, as month 9 was cruising past me, the end is near! I will push this baby out, lose 20 pounds in the first week, and my booty will again be able to serve its natural purpose of supporting my exhausted body when I plop down on the couch. Wow. I have never been so wrong about anything in my life. (Ok, I was pretty wrong about tight rolling the bottom of my jeans in 5th grade, but I was twelve. What did I know?) No, as soon as the unplanned-for epidural wore off and it was time for me to walk myself, however precariously, to the bathroom, I discovered the ignorant assumption I had been operating under. No sooner did I sit down than I thought, with some distinct alarm, that the whole of my intestines were trying to sneak out of my body as if I wasn't looking and it was time to make a break for it. My previous hemorrhoids, the cute and cuddly ones, had been replaced by evil, supernatural, toxic waste-enhanced hemorrhoids. I attacked them with creams, gels, sprays, suppositories (that was not fun for me OR my husband), and wipes. More than a month after my Monkey was born I was finally able to poop without tearing up. But it was an ugly war, and there was definitely collateral damage. If only I had known.
7. Back labor, front labor...what's the difference?
My mom had back labor. My friend Haylee did, too. Neither of them seemed too bothered by it. I have come to realize that either they really are superwomen, whose pain tolerance is so high that they could have had a limb amputated in a field hospital during the civil war and not even need that big stick between their teeth, or they conspire to keep the gristly details to themselves for fear that no woman will ever reproduce again once she hears about the sheer agony of back labor. Either way, I had no idea what to expect. I read about contractions. It feels tight. It feels like pressure. Your tummy muscles seem to constrict. Well shoot, I feel like that when I get constipated. That doesn't seem so bad. HA! That's what they want you to think, so you feel brave and inspired to say things like, "No, Dr. So and So, I don't want drugs, I want to do this naturally. I want to experience my birth and feel the joyful blah blah blah." That was me BEFORE agonizing back contractions every 90 seconds for 5 hours. I was pretty sure my spine was going to shatter into a million tiny razor sharp shards and pierce through my back in an epic explosion. My doula, my husband, and my sister were taking turns holding me upright, because I was shaking so hard I couldn't hold up my own head. And of course, trying to explain to them that I couldn't do this anymore was pointless. They didn't believe me. They had an absurd amount of faith in me. Thank god for the anesthesiologist, who had no faith in me at all, and who promptly numbed me from the waist down for about 3 hours so I could get that baby out of me without trying to jump out of our third story window. If I would have had any idea that was coming, I would have raised my flimsy hospital gown as soon as the first contraction hit, and let that nice man with the big needle poke my spine.
6. So THIS is what love is.
I loved my mother. I love my husband. I loved the cocker spaniel I had for 12 years. I thought I had a pretty good idea about what love is. I realize now that's like saying that you know how to say "Where's the bathroom?" and "What time is it?" in Spanish, so you must have a pretty good idea how to speak the language. As soon as his slimy purple body with his cone-head and wrinkled feet was plopped on my shuddering stomach, I felt something so intensely profound that I almost couldn't breathe. I knew, in that sweaty, sticky moment, that I would throw myself in front of a bus if it would save him from something painful or sad (and also hoped it wouldn't ever come to that...) I was totally unprepared and it was terrifying. I knew that if anything were to ever take him away from me, I doubted my ability to survive. I would feel like a shell of a person for the rest of my life. I would never recover. It was the most vulnerable moment of my life, recognizing the overwhelming love I had for my son, and making the choice to fully embrace that vulnerability. There was no way I could deny that love, no way I could smoosh it down into something smaller and more manageable. I did not see that love coming...and it changed my life forever.
5. It smells like something died...
The whole umbilical cord thing is a mystery to me. I mean, how that thing managed to keep my baby alive and nourished, not to mention allowing him to remain submerged in fluid without drowning...it's just too crazy for me to understand. What I do understand now, however, is that even though something smells like gangrene, it is not necessarily gangrene. Let me explain. When my husband participated in the ceremonial husband rite of passage and whacked through the umbilical cord, and they told us to wipe his little black stump with alcohol a few times a day, we didn't know how truly gross that prospect would be. When the nurse cheerfully told us it would just "dry up and fall right off in a few weeks" we thought it would be cute. Like a souvenir to keep with his first curl. Then it started to smell. At first we thought the smell was from his poopy diapers. But a clean diaper did not eradicate the stench. When we realized that the ungodly odor was coming from our poor little infant's stumpy cord funk, we freaked. I mean, it smelled like death. Like the decaying carcass of a house cat that crawled into your furnace ducts in winter and never crawled back out. This was one of the first of a handful of ridiculous voicemails I left my midwife. "So Heather? Yeah, um, there's this really horrible smell coming from his belly button, and I am worried maybe it's infected, or something, I mean it smells really bad. Does he need antibiotics or something? Call us back as soon as you can. Thanks." She said it was fine, totally normal, I didn't believe a word she said, and the next day the thing had fallen off and we had to look for it in his jammies. Needless to say, his belly button is not deformed and he did not end up with septicemia. But a little warning would have been nice.
4. 1 Poop, 2 Poop, Yellow Poop, Green Poop
Another ridiculous voicemail to the most patient midwife in the universe. "Hey Heather, it's me again. Um, I have a question. Ha, obviously, since I am calling you. (I giggle nervously and clear my throat.) So his poops, when we got home from the hospital, were mostly yellow, like a dark mustard yellow, kind of like that carpet from the 70s, you know, but more orangey. Anyway now it's green sometimes, like a sort of grassy-olive green, with these kind of white specks, like cottage cheese, but smaller. So is this normal? Because it changes colors, drastically, from one diaper change to the next, and I am just worried maybe he's allergic to my milk, or maybe he's lactose intolerant? I read about that online...anyway sorry to bother you on your cell phone on a Saturday. Call me back whenever you can. Thanks!!" I feel sheepish even just writing this down, much less admitting publicly that I am such a moron. Thankfully Heather called me back and informed me (and this would have been a nice piece of information to have in my head when we left the hospital) that baby poops are usually orange and yellow when they eat breast milk and can be greenish when they eat formula, and since we were giving him a formula bottle at night so mommy could sleep though one feeding and daddy could do something useful, it would explain his technicolor diapers. Now how was I supposed to know that?!
3. Sex? What sex?
Yeah. Apparently it's not an urban myth that couples with kids are too tired or too covered in puke to ever have sex again. How unfortunate.
2. Sleep Deprivation 101
Do you want to get some kind of secret information out of someone you know? Do you want to turn someone into a drooling, spacey, wide-eyed idiot just for fun? Then give them your newborn. Lock them in a medium sized house for about 3 weeks with your newborn, a breast pump, and a giant stack of diapers. I guarantee when you come back they will have their shirt on backwards, they will be reduced to speaking in 1 syllable words and incomprehensible vowels sounds, and they will be eating peanut butter out of the jar with their fingers. You can ask them anything...did you really pass that organic chemistry test or did you cheat off of Randy Thomas?...what happened to the yellow scarf I let you borrow last year?...are you ever going to pay me back that $45 you owe me?...and they will have no choice but to blearily and honestly answer your questions. Just make sure you wipe the drool off their chin in gratitude for their forthcoming-ness. Seriously, I have always coveted my sleep. I never thought I could survive this level of sleep deprivation without hallucinating on a regular basis. And he's not that bad. My sister's son slept for about 30 minutes at a time for the first 6 months of his life. Parents always joke about how you won't get to sleep for the first year of your child's life, and they say it with a smile like it's really not THAT bad, and if you just nap when they nap you'll be fine. The smile they give you when they say this...it's not a smile of humor. It's the smile you wear when your face is too tired to make any other expressions.
1. Sleep Depriv...oh wait...did that one already...(sigh)
I need a nap.

12.03.2010

What do I do now?

So I am three months and two days into this mom thing, and I think the phrase I have uttered most often has definitely been, "What do I do now?" The baby threw up everything I just fed him...What do I do now? He just pooped so much it's come out the sides of his last diaper but we're at a rural wedding eleven miles from the nearest diaper retailer...What do I do now? He's been hiccuping for the last hour and a half and we're both pretty freaked out...What do I do now? Baby books, I have discovered, do not have answers to these pressing questions, at least not the books that my well-meaning and totally kid-free friends gave to me when I was 30 pounds pregnant with my little bundle of poop.

I feel like there should have been, not necessarily a user's manual exactly, but some kind of trouble shooting guide given to me before we left the hospital. I spent more money having this baby than I did buying my last computer, and at least that thing came with a 'Help' option. I can chat online with someone when my application freezes or I get some gibberish error message. It's very comforting knowing that in my hour of need I can turn to someone who knows more than I do, who is willing to walk me through my problem until we find a solution. Surprisingly, this does not happen when you bring home a baby. Not even just for the first year warranty period...

So I am starting this blog to pose the difficult questions, rant about the injustice for all the things nobody tells you when you have kids, and share some of our more humorous anecdotes as I raise my little Monkey Milk Face.