26 posts tagged “babies”

Fox in Socks

Dr. Seuss

For a while after Luke was born I had the Dr. Seuss tongue twister about Luke Luck found in the book "Fox in Socks" stuck in my head. 

Luke Luck likes lakes.
Luke's duck likes lakes.
Luke Luck licks lakes.
Luck's duck licks lakes.

Duck takes licks in lakes Luke Luck likes.
Luke Luck takes licks in lakes duck likes.

Well now it's even more ironic that that poem was stuck in my head. My husband went and looked back at the receipt we got after filing for the birth certificate. Instead of writing my son's name as "Luke" (as I had written it out on the form), they typed it up as "Luck." And in my postpartum sleep deprived state I did not catch it and signed off on it.

Luke Luck Receipt

We're now in the process of trying to correct the spelling of his name before the birth certificate is actually issued, but I can just see the people at the state vital records office saying "look, some hippie home birth mom named her kid born on St. Patrick's day 'Luck'." At very least it looks like "Luck" is going to be a permanent nickname for Luke.

Change.org is hosting a campaign "Ideas for Change in America" in which the "Top 10 Ideas for America" will be presented to the Obama Administration on Inauguration Day. From the site:

The "Top 10 Ideas for America" will be determined through two rounds of voting.

In the first round, ideas will compete against other ideas in the same issue category. The first round will end on December 31, 2008, and the top 3 rated ideas from each category will make it into the second round.

The second round of voting will begin on Monday, January 5, and each qualifying idea will compete against the qualifying ideas from all other categories. Second round voting will end on Thursday, January 15.

I changed my facebook profile photo to support the M.I.L.C Campaign to highlight that breastfeeding is not obscene. I thought I'd share the photo over here as well. Enjoy!

FeedingEmma

I've had this thing on my mind that I've really wanted to write about, but wasn't sure I was really ready to put up a post about it on my blog. Like most of you, I have internet land readers and IRL readers. And, yeah, well you know how that goes.

Anyway, the thing I've wanted to talk about, which been consuming a lot of my thoughts, but none of my writing, is that I'm planning a home birth this time around. I am super excited about it. My husband is not as excited as I am, but is cautiously trusting my decision. I've met some awesome people  on my journey to learn more about home birth, and I feel more well-read and well-researched regarding all things surrounding birth/postpartum than I ever did before any of my other births.

If you're curious about my birth history and what brought me to the home birth decision, but don't want to dig through my archives to piece it together, here goes:

I've had three hospital births. All three were what I consider very classic hospital births. With all three I had epidurals, some other kind of narcotics (couldn't tell you what exactly), IV's, continuous monitoring, laboring while lying down in bed... all the usual stuff for a hospital birth. I had pitocin with my first, but not with my second two. I've torn with all three, but haven't had an episiotomy. Also, all three were vaginal deliveries, full term and over eight pounds.

To be honest, I probably would have been fine with this American cultural standard for birth if it had not had been for the fact that epidurals and pain medicine in general work very poorly, if at all, on me. The narcotics I've been given for labor pain relief generally give me light relief for about 15-20 minutes (just long enough to call the anesthesiologist and wait for him/her to arrive). I've had varying luck with epidurals. With my first it only worked on one side and that was the labor that I also had pitocin with. Fun stuff let me tell you. I was a very poor advocate for myself at the time. The second time I got an epidural with my next child it worked at a tolerable level, although I had to beg him to turn it up. That's another fun feeling: pleading with someone to help you while you are in labor. Fun stuff. But again, I still felt lots of pain, it was just best described as muffled. With my third and most recent birth the epidural did not work at all. However I was more prepared for that possibility. As calmly and clearly as I could muster I told as many staff as I met that it was not working, yet no one took me seriously. I decided that relying on the hospital staff to help me (through pain management or whatever) was a waste and I had to handle this myself. Against staff advice I sat up from lying flat (which was the position I was advised to be in to "help" the epidural work) and began to manage the pain myself. It was extremely frustrating to be dismissed in labor, but with this labor I finally figured out that I really don't need pain medicine to get through the labor. I realized I can manage the pain myself and I manage it better than the pain medicine.

Finally, I realized that my whole attempt to use pain medicine to manage my labor was really a waste of my time. It is no longer a realistic option for me (it never really was). I have to do this myself. But managing pain myself in a hospital environment was (and is) a pretty scary idea to me. I mean, I know people who've done it, and I think that's awesome, but I just can't imagine how I would do it.

With each birth I've tried to labor at home a little longer. I know how I manage the pain at home, and it's not by lying in bed with a bunch of wires attached to me like the hospital would want. And I know the whole argument of "you can just tell the hospital staff what you want," but after three hospital births all I can say is in my experience it just doesn't work that way. Not to mention, it is extremely hard to advocate for yourself in the middle of labor! I just don't want to put myself in an environment where I feel like I'm constantly saying "no" and feeling like I'm in an adversarial position with the people who are supposed to be helping me through this process.

I've also researched the safety issue. I'll probably talk about that more in a future post. However, suffice it to say that study after study demonstrates that home birth is just as safe, if not safer in some ways, than hospital birth for normal, low-risk women.

There just seems to be reason on top of reason why home birth makes a lot of sense for me. And even though it is way out of the cultural norm that I'm surrounded by, I think it is the right decision for me.

I just discovered the blog "Et tu?" The Diary of a Former Atheist and read her post How I became pro-life. Coming from an environment where pro-choice seemed like the right choice and then going on my own journey to becoming pro-life this post really resonated with me. Here's an excerpt:

The message I'd heard loud and clear was that the purpose of sex was for pleasure and bonding, that its potential for creating life was purely tangential, almost to the point of being forgotten about altogether. This mindset laid the foundation of my views on abortion. Because I saw sex as being closed to the possibility to life by default, I thought of pregnancies that weren't planned as akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street -- something totally unpredictable, undeserved, that happened to people living normal lives.

Being pro-choice for me (and I'd imagine with many others) was actually motivated out of love and caring: I just didn't want women to have to suffer, to have to devalue themselves by dealing with unwanted pregnancies. Because it was an inherent part of my worldview that everyone except people with "hang-ups" eventually has sex and sex is, under normal circumstances, only about the relationship between the two people involved, I got lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most tempting lies in human history: to dehumanize the enemy. Babies had become the enemy because of their tendencies to pop up and ruin everything; and just as societies are tempted to dehumanize the fellow human beings who are on the other side of the lines in wartime, so had I, and we as a society, dehumanized the enemy of sex.

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

Christopher R. Browning

I read a book in college called Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning. The book tells the story of how average people came to commit savage acts of inhumanity by the end of WWII through historical accounts and documents. I was again reminded of this book when I read this:

I was reading yet another account of the Greek societies in which newborn babies were abandoned to die, wondering to myself how normal people could possibly do something like that. I felt a chill rush through my body as I thought:

I know how they did it.

I realized in that moment that perfectly good, well-meaning people -- people like me -- can support very evil things through the power of lies.

"Perfectly good, well-meaning people" is absolutely right. To believe that the pro-choice community hates babies or hates families is ridiculous. The pro-choice mindset often comes from a position of compassion. The blog author, Jennifer F., touches on this in greater detail and makes a lot of other great points. The entire post is definitely worth a read.

For those of you have had a hospital (or outside of your home) birth, what were some of your favorite or essential items to pack?

As usual, I started to write a comment for someone's post and it just got way too long. So, I decided to write my own post.

My favorite hospital bag items:

• Carmex - my favorite lip balm, my lips always got so dry
• Snacks for Dad - "Don't you dare leave this room to go to a vending machine!"
• Cash - for who knows what (there's always something) just in case
• iPod & compact iPod Speakers - I'm not a fan of the headphones during labor and I didn't like just bringing CD's, because I didn't know what I wanted to listen to until I got there.
• Tube of Lanolin - I'm a firm believer in preventative nipple care. I don't wait until I start to feel sore. I use it after every feeding for at least the first 2 - 4 weeks. I've had difficulty with breastfeeding and that stuff has been a lifesaver for me.
  
• Preemie Clothes - I had big kids (two 8 lb, 14 oz, one 8 lbs, 9oz) and none of them fit in their 0-3 months clothes until about 6 weeks, and definitely not at the hospital. I have no idea what actual preemie moms do for clothes. After my first I made sure to bring preemie clothes to the hospital so the baby looked cute in all the pictures.
• A Gender Neutral Coming Home Outfit - Maybe it's just me, but I was always paranoid of being surprised on delivery day. So, I bring, as an extra outfit, a simple white sleeper for the baby (for pictures) just in case.
• "Adult Diaper" style underwear - I know this sounds weird (and TMI), but there can be a fair amount of blood for a time (6 weeks after my first, 2 weeks after my last) after you give birth and basically I just got sick of things leaking (on my underwear, clothes, sheets, etc). I read somewhere on a mom message board a recommendation to use these and they worked great, much better than any pad, etc. combination I could think of.
• Forgiving Clothes Home - No one really knows what they are going to look like or what size they will be immediately postpartum. So, bring clothes for you to wear home that are stretchy (like elastic waist stretchy, not like leotard kind of stretchy) and forgiving. When I went home from the hospital I always looked like I was still 5 to 6 months pregnant. Also, don't be afraid to wear your maternity clothes for as long as you want to/need to postpartum. My youngest is nine months old and I wore a maternity shirt just yesterday (and no one gave a second glance). The idea of still wearing maternity clothes even though I wasn't pregnant gave me a lot of heart ache after my first birth, but after my third I just embraced it and was much happier as a result (btw, I'm now about the same weight as before I started having kids, so it's not necessarily a weight issue, it's a how the clothes fit issue).

The Business of Being Born

I've finally gotten to see this movie. Wow. Having gone through three hospital births there were so many moments in the movie where I was like "yes, exactly." When they talk about the domino effect of hospital interventions, in my experience that is extremely true. Just stupid things like "let's start the IV, just in case." After that it is SO EASY to pump in a drug based on an expert authority's recommendation.

I saw it on DVD and there was some extra footage that I image you wouldn't get to see in the theater. In one of the followup interviews with a homebirth couple the mother talks about how she reached a point in her labor that if there were pain medications available, she would have taken them. What the homebirth midwife refers in the movie to as a "rock and a hard place." Man, I know that place! The homebirth mother says "but I had it easy, I was at home." Wow. She set herself up in an environment where she could get through the pain, the worst pain, without medication and she did. She went on to talk about how she could freely move around, remove all her clothes because nothing felt comfortable (she said her mother kept giving her a robe for modesty's sake--heh!), and squat whenever and wherever she wanted, because she was at home. Even if the hospital "officially" says you can do that, that's just not how things happen. I remember going to a hospital childbirth class before my first child was born and seeing a video of this woman with no clothes on in labor moving around, squating and doing all kinds of stuff in a hospital room. When I got to that same hospital in labor I most certainly did not get "let's change your position to manage your pain," I got "let's start an IV, let's strap this monitor to you and this monitor to you, now lift your legs I need to check you, lie down on your back...."

I got a taste of what a natural birth is like with my last birth, because my epidural did not work. I managed my pain, a drug did not. Don't misunderstand, at that moment I really wanted that drug to manage my pain, but that just wasn't how things played out. I have a history of that also.  With my first birth I had partial numbing on one side and with my second I had an tolerable level of numbing from the epidural. I have never been one of those people that as a result of an epidural couldn't feel or move her legs. No, I was always in pain, just less pain (sometimes). Because of this history, I mentally prepared myself to (as I told myself) "not loose your marbles" if the epidural doesn't work. "Keep your game face on."

This last time I told the staff clearly and repeatedly that the epidural wasn't working. When the staff started feeding me the all too familiar lines "give it 20 minutes, lay on your back, lay on your left side, lay on your right side, bla, bla, bla" I thought "I'm not doing this again." I gave it five minutes of excruciating, lying on my back pain and sat up and said "This is ridiculous." The nurse then scolded me and said "Well, it's never going to work now because you're sitting up and the medicine is just going to all go to your bottom" (whatever that means!). So I said "It's NOT working. I have to deal with this and I can't lying on my back. I don't care." And it was not discussed again.

Since then I've discussed my history with epidurals with a few different health care providers and they seem to think that (as I understand it) pain medicine runs through me pretty quick. I never thought to correlate the two until after, but I also have a history of dentists not believing me when I tell them "I can still feel that!" and then give me line "it's just pressure." You gotta love that. Right, like I (along with everyone else on the planet) don't know what pain is. Anyway, even though I did have pain medicine and IV fluids (and who knows what else) in me I still got that super high after the birth that I didn't get with the other births. I just remember feeling like I have to get up and go. I have things to do and energy to do it. I guess it was because I had to deal with the pain and I was dealing with the pain. I had a lot of pain with my first birth, but I wasn't dealing with it, things were very much out of control for me. I felt like I was being dragged along to places I did not want to go with my first birth. I clearly remember after my first birth having a very fearful and shell-shocked notion of "I don't know if I can do this again." Thankfully, time heals a lot.

I still don't know if homebirth is something I can/will do in the future. But after seeing this movie and doing some more reading on it (both pro and con), I know at least some part of me really wants to.