Thursday, December 31, 2009

update

I've heard it said that being a parent is a juggling act. You've probably heard that, too. Some of you know that from experience. People without kids think they know it until they have kids. Then they understand.

For me its not so much balancing work and the kids because I don't work. Yeah, yeah, I know. I work. I have the hardest job in the world. Blah, blah, blah. I don't work outside the home. Sometimes I wish I did.

Those times that I wished I worked outside the home are often followed by feelings of guilt.

My balancing act usually revolves around guilt. I don't suppose I should feel like I have to have any guilt in my role as a mother but it seems to come with the territory. Stay-at-home moms feel guilty for not contributing financially to the household and working mothers feel guilty for not "being there" for their kids.

Since I had such a very rough time after Gavin was born I decided it would be in every one's best interest to make sure there was lots of relief in the first few months after the baby was born. Even though I'm an open book I don't think many people knew how bad off I was after Gavin was born. Bad. I usually make light of my crazy moments but there wasn't much to make light of the post partum period with Gavin. I cried every night as the sun set. I lived in fear of something awful happening to him. I lived in fear of me going over the edge. I didn't realize how bad off I was until my 6 week check up after Theo was born.

Sitting in the midwifery office this time taking the depression screening (not labeled as such but pretty obvious what it was) I was able to give a positive answer to each question (do you feel sad, do you cry, do you feel hopeless....). No, no, no. As I was answering the questions I thought back two years ago when I was giving 'yes' as an answer to all of the questions. It made me sad for the new mom that I was then and really happy for where I was this time around.

Seeing how happy I was made me realize hiring someone to come help in the mornings was a very smart move. An expensive move but a smart one. Of course it also helped that I had almost three weeks of help from Ryan's mom, my mom and his step-mom. What lifesavers!

All of that above brings me back to my point about balance. I feel spoiled. How many moms of newborns get time to themselves? How many moms can take a nap because someone else is in the house to watch the babies? How many moms can go to the gym or go grocery shopping or take a shower or *gasp* dry their hair after the shower and put on make-up? Really?

When I'm put together I feel more confident in myself as a person but less confident in myself as a mom. Does that even make sense? There is a war going on inside between the rational person and the person who thinks moms are supposed to be harried and stressed out.

A week or so ago we made an event out of a trip to the grocery store. Grocery shopping is usually something I like to do by myself. Ryan and I are especially bad at shopping together. It's not that we fight; we are just entirely to permissive when the other holds up something that we probably shouldn't buy and give the "eh? please? doesn't this look yummy" eyes. We end up buying lots of snacky foods and little else.

At the time of this trip I was feeling particularly dejected about my skills as a cook which are minimal. I try to lay blame every where but on my shoulders for my cooking woes. My kitchen is too small. There is no prep space. But my friend Heidi has a kitchen that is the size of my kitchen sink and she makes wonderful food. It's the recipes that I find on-line. Oh, but the recipe had 1,238 glowing reviews. It's the Betty Crocker recipe I used. Oh, wait, she's Betty Freakin' Crocker! So there I was moseying down the frozen food aisle looking for their yummy Indian food. I turned to Ryan and said, "They don't have it! Why would they take it away?!" He just looked at me and said, while pointing to a case I passed at least 3 times, "it's right there."

I looked at my two favorite Indian dishes and just like every other time I turned the box of my favorite one with basmati rice over to make sure it still had 21 grams of fat per serving. Drat. Still loaded with fat so I put it back and grabbed by second favorite Indian meal and tossed it in the cart. I kept grabbing and tossing until the cart was quite full of them. Ryan just kind of looked at the pile of frozen entrees then me and back to the food. Pointing to the frozen meals with one hand my chest with the other I said, "Best housewife ever."

Really. What kind of Hausfrau am I? I'm not so good at keeping the house tidy. Although in my defense I do have a little help in that department. My little helper is a little over 2 feet tall, weighs 30 pounds and is just about the cutest thing ever. He loves to help keep the couch clean - any freshly laundered and folded clothes sitting on the couch get swiped and knocked to the floor.

As mentioned above I'm not a great cook. I make killer jambalaya and white chicken chili. That's about it. Oh, and home made mac 'n cheese but I don't count anything where one serving has enough fat to completely occlude a blood vessel. Anyone can make anything tasty with enough butter and cheese. That's cheating. Oh, and I can make some fun salads but really - salad? Snooze. Sometimes I accidentally make good stuff. Once I tried making a tomato based stew using quinoa. It turned into a big fluffy tomato based bowl of ? It was good but I didn't know what to call it. I brought it with me to a function where everyone liked it - I ended up calling it a salad.

Now as I write the latter half of this post a few things have changed from when I started this about a month ago. The biggest change is sleep. Theo is not the sleep champ he was early on. We stripped him of any and all medals we gave him. The categories he medaled in (and has subsequently been stripped of) were, but not limited to:

duration - sometimes 6 hours

ease of transferring while asleep - pick him up from bed, swing, bouncy chair and lay him in his crib without him waking up

frequency of naps - long morning nap, long afternoon nap, long evening nap

Here it is 2:56 in the morning and I'm in the living room writing this. Theo is sleeping in his swing. I really thought we wouldn't be doing this again. Me sleeping on the couch and the baby in the swing. The little turkey has been waking up around 1-ish and thinks he needs to be all cute and smiley. It's so annoying. Annoyingly cute!

Even in the dark I can see his eyes wide open staring at me trying really hard to engage me. As your eyes adjust to the dim light coming in from the street lights you see that his mouth is wide open in the cutest toothless baby smile. Oy. It is unreal how cute it is. Which, of course, makes it even more annoying.

Now that he is asleep I'm going to attempt to turn off the annoying swing music, mobile and the actual swinging.

Wish me luck!

Friday, December 18, 2009

Theo

Theo turned 2 months on Wednesday. It already feels like he's been a part of family forever. He is an ounce shy of 13 pounds and is 60th percentile all across the board. Everything is checking out normal. Now that you are up-to-date with how he is doing currently let me step back in time, all of two months ago and give you the birth story.

After having contractions for three weeks, yes, you read that right, THREE WEEKS, I was getting less and less easy to fool into believing labor was actually going to start. Sometimes the contractions were painful enough to make me stop doing what I was doing. I had Braxton Hicks contractions with Gavin and these definitely did not feel the same.

When you combine the stress of not knowing when your baby is coming - aside from a rough idea of the month - with the stress of needing to find intermediate care for your toddler when labor does start and the stress of knowing it was a very real possibility that my labor could be lightening fast (I came 45 minutes after my mom's water broke and my mom was born so fast that her parents didn't make it to the hospital - she arrived IN the car) I was going a little nuts. I think Ryan put out an SOS call to his mom after he woke up to find me crying, "Why won't he come out already?"

Later that week my wonderful mother-in-law arrived. I believe we were at 10 or so days before the baby was due when she came. Every day I had contractions. Every day they were painful and every day they stopped as soon as I laid down.

We went on family walks at night where I looked like the resident loon as I marched ahead of everyone else, stamping my feet, jumping off the curbs, hopping up and down... No exaggeration, folks.

I ate super spicy foods. Super. Spicy. Super duper. Hot.

I ingested special oils.

I drank special teas.

I had acupuncture.

I had my membranes stripped THREE times. (Not an entirely pleasant experience. What do you mean, membranes stripped? Google it).

None of it worked.

The only thing that worked was time.

Well, that and giving up. One day I was talking to my friend, also my midwife, who asked how my potions and diets and walks were going - I told her they weren't.

It was a Thursday night when I saw a group of my girlfriends at our weekly meeting. I sat there with a pad of paper as we chatted, marking down the intervals of the contractions. They ranged from 5 minutes to 10 minutes apart. Some were convinced it was the night. I would not be fooled. Part of me wanted to drive to SODO (South Downtown) and drive over railroad tracks before going home to run up and down the stairs but I knew it would give me more painful contractions that would just go away when I went to sleep.

Sure enough, I went to sleep and the contractions died down but that was ok. The next morning I went about my morning business but noted I was having contractions... in the a.m. All of my other contractions were at night. I started to look at the clock to time them and thought I should take a shower since that is a relaxing activity. Before I hopped in the shower I poked my head into the living room and said to Mary Jo (MIL), "I may regret saying this but I think today's the day."

Yep. It was the day. As they got stronger and closer together I called my midwife and told her what was going on. She called the hospital to tell them I was on my way. I kept asking her what was going to happened if I showed up and the contractions stopped; I was so afraid of getting there, getting checked in and being sent home when the contractions stopped because I knew they were going stop - they did every other time.

I called Ryan and told him it was time to come home. He arrived home and Mary Jo sent us off with a lunch she had packed. It was so sweet of her. I devoured my food in the car on the way to the hospital; I don't remember if I was hungry or not but I knew I wouldn't get anything to eat once I was admitted.

The labor was pretty easy. I waited a while to get the epidural because I was so afraid of the labor stopping even though Heather assured me if labor slowed down they would give me something to make it pick back up. Still, I couldn't risk being sent home (even though I knew they wouldn't).

We didn't take any labor classes this go around because we took them all with Gavin and I didn't use the techniques learned because I had a fantastic epidural. FANTASTIC.

Well, this time it wasn't so fantastic. I had what is called a "window". I think it should be called a "window to Hell". The anesthesiologist..

wait - if you don't like needles this next part may not be something you want to read...

You've been warned.

So, the good doctor was asking me about my first epidural and I made the mistake of being honest. "Well, it was great but my blood pressure kind of bottomed out. It was like 40 something over 30 something, but I was fine." Oh, and yeah, I have a small heart condition, PVCs (preventricular contractions) but it's not uncommon in women and its totally benign.

Well, there here is, holder of the goods. The goods that will keep me from being in agony. In that moment he was my knight in shining armor - or at least my knight with a shiny needle and a white lab coat. But he was looking at me as someone who had a bad heart and was going to die from a lack of blood flowing through my blood vessels. He started me out with a small dose of drugs. It was like he didn't want me to die or something. Sheesh.

But before we get to the lack of medicine, lets talk about the insertion of the epidural. Yowza. You know how you are supposed to be still like a stone while he jams a needle in the epidural space around your spine cord? I knew how still I was supposed to be. I didn't so much as bat an eye when I had it done 2 years ago. But two years ago it didn't feel like lightening hit a nerve shooting down my left leg.

It felt like someone plugged my left leg into a light socket when he put the needle in.

There was a bit of movement.

There was even a little scream.

There were many people who probably peed themselves (I don't think I was one of them but I wouldn't know - giving birth is that gross).

Good news: my jumping and screaming didn't ruin my spinal cord! Woo-hoo!

Before I get too far I want to tell one story about a nurse before I forget. One of the nurses came in the room to check on me and I was having a contraction. Ryan came to my bedside and played with my hair - my coping mechanism - make him pet my head. The nurse asked me what my coping strategies were for labor pains so I took that as an opportunity to ask her if she used guided imagery. Well, yes, she did. So I said, "Please don't. I don't like it."

Nurse: "Well, what do you like?"
Me: "Silence."
Nurse (with confused look on her face): what about (I don't remember what she offered up here).
Me: "No. Just silence."
Nurse: "What about this..."
Me. "No. Nothing. Just silence. No talking. No laughing. Just silence."

A few minutes later a contraction started and the nurse was talking to someone and I think Ryan was talking. I looked up with eyes full of pain trying to get someones attention. I started shushing everyone and Ryan looked over so I said, "Shh" again. The nurse tried to finish what she was telling the other nurse which kind of peeved me so I put my hand up and waived it while saying, "PSHHHH!!!!" while giving dirty looks when I could bear to bring my head up out of my chest.

It worked. Everyone shut it.

We also learned one technique that does NOT work. Joke telling - because it leads to laughing.

Right before this shushing incident Ryan came up to me as I was obviously having a contraction and said to me in a nice calm tone, "Picture sandy beaches." I started laughing. Then crying while laughing and trying to tell Ryan to not make me laugh but I couldn't because I was laughing and crying.

Once the contraction was over is when the nurse asked me if I liked guided imagery. I told her no and asked if she did it. It was right about then that I realized she was Sandy Beaches! She was one of my nurses when Gavin was born. She kept trying to use the imagery of water washing over a sandy beach with me. It was driving me nuts. I wanted silence but didn't know how to politely tell someone to shut up so I asked Heather how to tell her I didn't like it. Heather told me her shift was over in 15 minutes so I figured I could last 15 minutes with the sandy beaches because the nurse wasn't picking up on the talk-to-the-hand hands I was shoving in her face when she started talking about the water and sandy beaches.

From then on I referred to that nurse as Sandy Beaches.

So it dawned on me Sandy Beaches was once again my nurse so I motioned for Ryan to come over and managed to hiss in his ear, "She's Sandy Beaches!" before he could regale her with the story of the nurse who annoyed me with the sandy beaches imagery. Ryan's eyes bugged out of his head and he laughed. Whew. Close call.

So this story is getting longer and longer.

Let me shorten it....

The epidural was not providing, um, even coverage. They repositioned me which helped a little. They gave me more medicine which helped a lot more but then a window opened where it felt like there was no medicine. It was a small spot but oh, boy. What a spot! One of the nurses, when I started complaining about it, convinced me to tough it out since I was at a 9. There I was toughing it out (and by toughing it out and I mean whimpering and sobbing and crying with each contraction) with Ryan telling me, "Why don't you ask for more medicine?" I think for his kindness I sniped at him. Then my midwife came in and saw I was in a lot of pain and asked why I didn't get more medicine. Heather knew I wasn't down with the pain.

In hind sight if someone told me that I was going to be stabbed with a knife, but only for about 45 minutes or so, and that I should be able to handle it I would tell them they were crazy.

So I got more medicine and life was good again.

Shortly after that Theo Frederick Jahns was born. 8 pounds 13 ounces.

It was amazing. I looked at him and found that I loved him like I loved Gavin when he was born. Instantly, completely.

Stay tuned for part two...