Mothering, housekeeping, and procrastinating

I accomplish much more in a day now, with three children, than I ever did when I only had one child.

Once I realized that fact, I asked myself why that would be. After some thinking about the reality that there’s also just more to do, I figured it out! It’s not so much that there’s more to do or even that I have children who can talk now to remind me to do things that I probably wouldn’t have gotten done before. The key to why I get more done now than before is procrastination.

Procrastination has been the bane of my existence more than just a few times in my life. College is the time that springs most readily to my mind, followed by high school, and my entire life before then… Since having my own house I’ve struggled with the tendency to let things go and put things off for as long as possible. The dishes are dirty? Well, might as well just wait until after the next meal and do all the dishes at once! The floor is dirty? Might as well just sweep once a week and get more dirt with each stroke! There’ll always be more time later, right?

Wrong.

I don’t just procrastinate, after all, I wait until the absolutely last minute possible or even longer. Usually I wait too long when I have a known deadline. Something needs to be done by a certain day and I’ll stay up all night the night before doing it even if it’s something that takes longer than a day to complete.

Now that I have a preschooler, a toddler, and an infant I have different deadlines. If I don’t help my older daughters with their workbooks or play with them while the baby’s asleep… well… it doesn’t end up happening. If I don’t clean the kitchen while my older daughters are helping and relatively happy to help then the opportunity might not come again until the kitchen is completely unusable.

For the first time in my life, I have very specific deadlines. The great thing about these deadlines for someone who procrastinates is that they’re unknown deadlines. When will the baby wake up? I don’t know! I’d better get busy playing, working, or cleaning while I can! When will my older girls become tired, hungry, or uncooperative? Nobody knows… least of all me, so I’d better get their help (they are very good helpers too!) and get the house in order before that happens!

Realizing this has made a huge difference in the quality of my life. I relax now after my kitchen is clean, not before, and it’s much more relaxing to relax in a clean house than a messy one! I wish I’d figured this out much sooner in my life… but better late than never.

~B.

Transitions

As my family makes the transition to having three children from two, I’ve been thinking a lot about transitions. As I thought about transitions, it occurred to me that my main goal with the specific ways I parent my newborn babies has been to ease their transitions into this world as much as possible. I hadn’t thought about my parenting choices in that particular light before, but it’s certainly how I’ve practiced them.

The transition from womb to life outside the womb must be one of the most difficult transitions that we humans ever experience. It’s probably rather a good thing that we cannot consciously remember that time of our lives.

The book Magical Child has a wonderful chapter in it that describes how the transition must feel to a newborn baby… coming out of the nice, warm, wet, dark womb into the dry, cold, bright air. Then having the cord cut immediately and, in order to survive, having to immediately draw breath into his lungs that are unaccustomed to air at all. Being handled by several different people and being examined before being held by his mother. If the baby is unlucky enough to be a boy, he also frequently will have to undergo a painful surgical amputation that he definitely feels and equally definitely doesn’t understand before he’s more than a couple of days old.

Then, also, commonly being fed quite infrequently after being used to getting constant nourishment inside the womb. Being left alone in a bed by himself, sometimes to cry pitifully, after being next to his mother and hearing her breathing and heartbeat 24/7 before birth.

How then can this transition be eased? Certainly the baby eventually needs to learn to be independent of his mother and how to sleep by himself and not eat constantly, but just because these things need to be learned eventually doesn’t mean that the transition has to happen immediately. Nor does a gradual transition mean that the child will never learn to do those things.

Choosing a gentle, natural birth when possible can help ease the immediate womb to air transition because the baby is receiving the proper hormones that he was created (or evolved) to receive during this transition. Having dim lights can help the transition from dark to light. Not cutting the cord immediately can help ease the transition from being underwater to breathing air by not cutting off the baby’s supply of oxygenated blood prematurely and allowing him to receive his full blood supply rather than depriving him of up to 40% of it with an immediate cord clamping. Keeping the cord intact for a while also means that the mother gets to hold the baby for a little while before he is whisked away for a newborn exam thus easing his transition from birth to being weighed and measured and poked and prodded by strangers.

Choosing to leave the baby boy with his whole body instead of chopping off a perfectly healthy and normal part of his anatomy not only prevents all the risks that every surgery inherently possesses, but also allows him to grow up with the knowledge that his body is perfect the way it is and doesn’t need to be altered to fit an outdated cultural fad – to “fit in” with only half the boys in the current American generation. Just because his father had a body part amputated, doesn’t mean the son needs to have that same body part amputated. If daddy has brown eyes and son has blue, will daddy wear blue contacts so his son’s eyes will “match?”

Choosing to hold or wear the baby as much as possible and keep a new baby’s crib or cradle in your bedroom – maybe even to co-sleep for a time – helps to ease the transition from being with mom 24/7 to getting used to being with other people and eventually by himself.

Nursing on demand helps to ease the transition from getting constant nourishment to eating only periodically with greater lengths of time between feedings gradually over the first few years. Everyone knows how much toddlers need to snack still and they’ve been born for a while! Nobody I know looks at the clock before eating to determine whether or not they’re hungry – why would we look at the clock to determine whether a newborn baby is hungry? They’re used to eating all the time – of course they’re hungry extremely frequently, especially for the first few months of their lives!

Babies’ needs and wants are the same for the first few months at least – I believe that it’s really on us, as parents, to make sure that all of our babies’ needs are met. They do not only need nourishment and to be comfortable physically, but they need help through their transition. They need us to be responsive and to try and help them to navigate this extremely difficult transition as smoothly as possible. I believe that the more smoothly it goes for them, the easier it will be for us as well.

Not to even mention: They will be independent soon enough… the baby years go by so quickly!

~B.

My Third Birth

When writing my 2nd birth story and this last birth story, the most difficult part for me was to figure out where to start… my last two births both had a clear-cut “beginning,” but most of my laboring was done before the “beginning” which is why I can’t really call it an actual beginning. It’s a bit muddling when figuring out how to put it down on paper/computer screen!

For my last birth though… I suppose the real beginning was the day before my third beautiful daughter was born. I had been laboring for several days at this point, but my prodromal labor, while very effective, didn’t interfere with my life much at all – which is what happened with my second daughter’s birth as well. The contractions weren’t difficult or very uncomfortable at all and yet they got me more than halfway dilated before active labor ever began.

Anyhow, back to the day before my daughter – I’ll call her “Little Anne” – was born. I was done. I was more done than a burned Thanksgiving turkey. There was no room in my midsection whatsoever. My ribs were sore from the baby pressing against them constantly and kicking the right side. Every time I had a contraction, the upper part of my uterus felt sore just like my ribs did. The space was maxed-out to the extreme.

I don’t think I’ve ever been *that* done with a pregnancy before. I thought I was done with my other two, but I wasn’t. Not really. Not like I was this time. I honestly, for the first time, doubted that the baby would ever come out. She was just going to stay in there, getting bigger and bigger until I popped a few ribs or needed a c-section or something. I knew that I was about 6-7cms dilated because I checked, but even that didn’t help the feeling in my mind that I would be pregnant forever.

At the same time though, I had the feeling in my body that if I moved too quickly or rode in the car over too many bumps the baby would just fall right out. I knew that feeling… it’s the same way I felt a few hours before the precipitous (fast) birth of my second daughter. So, that evening, I called my midwife to give her some warning. My body felt as though labor was going to start that night or the next day at the same time as my mind was convinced that it would never begin. Ever.

Needless to say, this was very confusing and I probably wasn’t particularly convincing when I called my midwife because I wasn’t completely convinced myself.

We went out fairly late that night to pick up some good Chinese food and to get a few things from Wal-Mart that we needed before the baby could be born. Then we came home and ate some Chinese food. My husband set up the birth tub and then we went to bed.

I woke up the next morning at 5:24am with a quite strong contraction. I had another one about 8 minutes or so later and decided to get in a nice warm-hot bathtub to see if they calmed down so I could go back to sleep or if they got stronger and closer together in which case, it was probably the real thing.

My husband woke up as I was filling the tub and he helped me keep track of the timing because I really wasn’t able to do much in that area. I would forget the previous time by the time another one would start. The contractions were still not particularly close together or regular (ranging from 5-15 minutes apart), but they were definitely getting stronger and not calming down at all.

At around 6:30am I called my midwife and told her that I was pretty sure the baby was coming. I still wasn’t 100% sure, but by the time she arrived at our house about 15 minutes later, I was definitely in transition and was working through very intense contractions that were just a couple minutes apart.

My mom and my midwife’s assistant arrived not long afterwards. When my mom arrived, I was out of the bathtub because the birth tub was full. I made a stop at the toilet to make sure my bladder was empty and *WHOOSH* my water broke. On the toilet. Perfect! Just like last time I felt stuck on the toilet for a bit – whether because of the contractions or because my legs just wouldn’t work, I don’t remember. I didn’t think I could walk, but my husband helped me and somehow (I don’t remember exactly how) I made it into the birthing tub where I knelt, leaning against the side and held onto my husband’s hands through every contraction.

I didn’t push for very long before the baby’s head crowned. It crowned for what felt like forever, but was really only about 4 minutes. I was able to reach down and feel the baby’s head – complete with hair! – as it crowned. I had to go slowly because it was quite a large little head and I didn’t want to tear, but it was extremely difficult to keep from pushing as hard as possible to finish up my least favorite part – the crowning – ASAP. I tried doing some panting-type breathing that helped to slow things down a lot. When the head finally came out, it only came out part-way because there was a little hand on the little cheek so I had to push an extra time to get the chin out. I had a wonderful short break between pushing the head out and pushing the body out – no crowning sensation anymore!

When the baby’s body came out, at 7:24am, I was able to catch her and bring her up to find out that she was a gorgeous little girl! Not so little either… she weighed 9lbs. 10oz. I still have a hard time believing that I – not quite 5′4″ tall and 110lbs when not pregnant – pushed out a 9.5 lb baby with a nuchal hand! Without tearing. Before I got pregnant last time, I could still fit into a size FOUR (might never be able to again though!). It’s no wonder that I felt there to be no room in my womb – there really wasn’t any!

The rather corpulent placenta came out 9 minutes after Little Anne was born and my husband cut the cord about two hours after that.

I remember my older daughters (2-yo and 4-yo) asking me questions periodically – “Is the baby coming out?” throughout this whole time. They woke up soon after I got in the bath and were very excited about the baby coming! My mom stayed with them and read them books while I was pushing. I think they were more interested in what was going on though. They also wanted to stay in the room. I think my mom suggested going into the living room, but they wanted to see the baby come out.

Before my baby came, I watched birth videos and slide-shows online with both girls so they’d know what was going on and I think that helped a lot. They weren’t worried or scared at all and afterwards they were thrilled to have a brand new baby sister! They both wanted to hold her as soon as possible and my oldest told me that I was very strong and brave to push that baby out!

It’s so amazing to me still that this birth even happened… the baby came out! And she was huge! Still is, actually There’s so much of her to love and she’s the snuggliest, chubbiest little baby ever <3 At least, she's the snuggliest and chubbiest that I've ever had! She's a good little sleeper (whether I'm next to her or not) and she nurses like a champ.

Welcome to our family, little Anne! We're so glad to have you with us!

~B.

Birth

So, I’m 35 weeks pregnant today and it’s that time again: Time to start thinking seriously about birth! It’s a little difficult for me to really focus on birth currently because of everything else going on. I’ve thought about it a little – after all, we’re about to move partly because I cannot imagine giving birth in the house we’re in right now – but not as much as I think I should have.

So, why now? Why in the middle of packing and finding crazy ant nests moving from the heating ducts to under a chair in the living room am I suddenly thinking about birth? Well, partly because I’m 35 weeks along, but also partly because I went to a baby shower yesterday and even though the mother is having twins and therefore a c-section, the topic of birth did come up.

It’s always interesting talking to my dad’s family about the choices that my family has made – breastfeeding, home birth, elimination communication, co-sleeping etc. – because they just don’t understand why anyone would make those choices. The choices I’ve made seem difficult to them and I’m pretty sure that they see at least a few of them as just another way I’m tied down to my children. The funny thing about that is that I view my choices as the easiest and best choices I could possibly have made. I cannot imagine having to sterilize bottles or get up in the middle of the night because my child is crying in another room. I cannot imagine having to let my baby cry for a few minutes because I have to mix up formula when it’s so much easier and quicker to just hike my shirt up and let them eat.

If I’m being completely honest with myself, I don’t do these things because science backs me up at all. Really, I do these things mainly because I’m lazy. One of the main reasons I started looking into home birth wasn’t because of some “birth experience” or because it’s safer for low-risk women or because I’m some crazy hippie person, but because riding in a car during labor (and possibly giving birth in the car!) just did not appeal to me at all. Why go somewhere else to have the baby when you can simply stay right at home?

The proven safety of home birth was merely a side perk that helped me to justify my choice to other people. The amazing experience of home birth was a very cool perk that just happened to exist, but wasn’t my main reason. After all, I’ve never had a hospital birth so I truly have nothing to compare home birth to.

Anyhow, back to my dad’s family and the interesting things they have to say about my choices. Yesterday my dad’s mom (my Grandma) mentioned that she loved her hospital births. She went to the hospital, they knocked her out, and when she woke up they gave her the baby. A couple of older family members who’d had similar births agreed with her and I smiled and nodded, not wanting to open my mouth lest too much come out. It’s not as if they’ll be having any more babies, they’re happy with their births, and it’s not as if they’ll be making me change my mind or as if I’m defensive about my choice.

However, the truth is that the very thought of having a baby and not being able to remember it terrifies me. My first thought after contemplating what they said was: How did they know that they got their baby back? I know that nowadays they have all sorts of fancy equipment to prevent babies from going to the wrong parents, but back then… if all the mothers were knocked out (which, most were) and if all the babies were taken to the nursery (which, they were) then how did anyone know that they got their baby? It’s not as if they saw the baby before it was whisked away to be washed and examined and the fathers weren’t allowed in the room either. It’s a very scary thought to me.

I don’t know. They’re obviously happy and they had healthy babies and that’s really what matters, but it’s odd to me that they can say so confidently that their unknown births were so much better than fully experienced births when they’ve never experienced birth. Neither can I honestly say that mine were better than theirs, but I can genuinely say that my births were amazing events that I am blessed to have been able to remember!

The amazing event isn’t the most important thing about birth – the most important thing about birth is that the mother and baby are happy and healthy – but the memory of my births is important. At least to me. Whether in the future I have a home birth, a managed hospital birth, or a c-section, I wouldn’t want to be put completely under and I would want to remember the moment my baby was first held up for me to see even if I couldn’t feel anything from the waist down. I would want as much of the experience as I could have even if I couldn’t have the full experience at home. I would, at the very least, want to remember what my baby looked like right after he or she was born. Before a bath. Before an exam. Before the cord was cut.

Birth is amazing and newborns are amazing! I’m so glad that I live in a time when I wasn’t forced to blank out the entire experience or motivated by fear to seek out obliteration of my own volition. I’m so glad that I live in a time when other, more experienced, mothers could encourage me to look more into birth and what it means before I had my first baby. I used to wish I had been born a few decades before the 80s, but no longer. I was born in the correct time and place and I am so thankful for that. I’m also infinitely grateful to my friends and family members who stuck by me and encouraged me to make different choices than most of them did.

So now, it’s time to begin thinking about my next birth. A birth that will happen in two to seven weeks from today. The day that I will meet the stranger who’s currently living in my womb and poking me almost constantly with feet, knees, hands, and elbows. Who is this person? I can’t wait to find out! What will the journey be like? I’m looking forward to experiencing it! It will be difficult but I can do it – I’ve done it before. It might be long and will almost certainly be intense but there’s always an end – it will end with a brand new human being to love.

So soon. Very soon! It won’t be long now.

~B.

Moving and Such

So, once again we’re moving. We should be in our new house when I’m just shy of being 37 weeks pregnant which seems just slightly crazy to me, but hey, it’s what worked out! We will be living much closer to my parents and most of my friends in the area – the rent is a bit higher, but the new house is twice as big as our current place with a nice yard in a nice neighborhood so it’s definitely worth it!

We’ve met one set of neighbors so far and they are extremely nice. They’re a homeschooling family and I’m looking forward to spending more time with them. I’m also excited to be moving in right before Halloween so we can meet all the neighborhood kids in one fell swoop. I should probably ask the neighbors about how much candy to buy… I’ve never lived in such a large neighborhood before.

Lately the bane of my existence has been sleep or the lack thereof. I find myself tired during the day and then as soon as I slip beneath the covers of my bed, my mind starts racing, my baby starts kicking vigorously, and I cannot fall asleep. So tonight I’m blogging in the hopes that it will sufficiently empty my mind and I can go to sleep sooner rather than later.

Tomorrow is my cousin’s wife’s baby shower and I’m looking forward to seeing her and my other relatives! It’ll be an exercise in keeping my mouth shut, unfortunately, since she’s having a boy and given my family’s history with circumcision I’m 99% sure that they’re planning to circumcise which makes me horribly sad. I’ll probably mention something against the idea, but I don’t want to put anyone on the defensive. I still don’t fully understand why anyone would put their child through a non-medically-indicated elective surgery/amputation as a routine thing. Possibly if I understood a bit more of where people were coming from, I would have an easier time reaching them with the actual facts.

So. Sleep. I suppose I should head back to bed and try again. It’s been a wild ride, this year. The next two months seem to promise the same thing – a new house, a new baby, and a crazy mama who thinks she can participate in National Novel Writing Month despite everything else… we’ll see how that actually works out! Life is amazing and busy. Very busy.

I’ll try to update a bit more in the future, but I can’t make any promises
~B.

Babies and Overindulgence

It’s very difficult for me to write about topics that I think of as obvious or simply common sense. Once I’ve researched something to death and the conclusion I’ve reached has become obvious to me, it’s easy for me to forget that others probably don’t see the issue in the same way that I do. I think that’s true for most people, actually.

Occasionally this fact is really brought home to me by a friend or acquaintance who says something that I didn’t realize people still believed, and the obvious-to-me thing that I want to write about tonight is babies. Newborn babies in particular, but really all babies at least up through 12 months of age.

I was reminded this evening of a common phrase said to and about new mothers who actually hold their babies and nurse on demand, “You’re spoiling that baby!” or “She’s going to spoil that baby!” This is usually uttered by a well-meaning older relative or friend who was warned against spoiling her own baby when she was a new mother.

After doing extensive research into the way other cultures raise their children and into the biology of how babies develop once outside the mother’s womb, I came to the obvious-to-me conclusion that babies cannot be spoiled or overindulged. I personally prefer the term overindulged because it is a more accurate representation of what people actually mean when they say a child is “spoiled.”

So, why do I believe that a baby cannot be overindulged? First of all, during at least the first year, a baby’s needs and wants are the same thing. Babies are not manipulative – they are not complex enough to manipulate their parents or to even understand what that would involve. Babies simply know that they are hungry, lonely, wet, tired, or uncomfortable and they cry until someone responds or until they give up on someone responding.

Once they get what they need, babies are generally content until they need something else so it’s mainly a question of figuring out what they need and ensuring that they get it for as long as necessary. Some babies need to be held constantly, others seem to need to nurse constantly, and there’s nothing wrong with holding or nursing a baby anytime they need it. It is not overindulgence because if they need it, they want it and vice versa.

Wants and needs become gradually more divergent as a baby gets older, but it’s very clear to me that babies were created to have their needs met during the first year and that they cannot be overindulged during that time – perhaps longer. Studies have even shown that babies who are responded to more quickly in infancy are less whiny and clingy as toddlers and preschoolers. Perhaps they’ve fulfilled their need for being close to their parents and are better able to move on. This is explained fairly well with Erickson’s first of eight stages of personality: trust versus mistrust, and has certainly been borne out in my personal experience with my two daughters so far.

My older daughter was held all the time when she was a baby until she began to crawl everywhere at 6 months and to walk full-time at 9 months! She was nursed on demand until she was a bit over a year old. She has gradually become more and more independent and is now almost 4 years old, an age where I could certainly overindulge her if I continued to treat her as a 4 month old since her wants and needs are often very different now. Still, treating her as I did when she was tiny, feeding and holding her on demand, did not cause her to be overly dependent on me as a preschooler and it certainly didn’t hinder her gross motor skills at all!

My younger daughter is basically following in her older sister’s footsteps. We no longer hold her all the time – she’s been walking for well over a year now – and many times when she asks to nurse I’ll offer her something else like a cup of water or milk and she’ll take it instead. Generally asking to nurse for her means that she’s hungry or thirsty and I really don’t have any milk right now since I’m pregnant so it’s important to for me to fulfill her actual need as well as to help her realize that she needs to eat or drink when she feels hungry or thirsty. If she wants to nurse because she’s hurt or tired then I don’t refuse or redirect her because that’s a need to nurse while cuddling and not a need to eat or hydrate.

I haven’t personally received any comments about “spoiling” my children in the past, but now that I’m living in a different part of the country, as well as living closer to my extended family, I’m expecting to hear that phrase at least some after this new baby is born. While I appreciate the concern that I know lies behind the statement, I am fully confident that I have done the right thing in the past with my babies and that I will be doing the right thing with this baby when I hold or wear him/her as much as possible, co-sleep, and breastfeed on demand.

Typical Day With My Girls

I just realized that I don’t really blog much about my kids and my everyday life… or even much in general, but I’m working on that! I’m with my girls all day long and I love them dearly, but usually when I sit down to write a post it doesn’t occur to me to write about them. I’m not sure why, but I should write about them more often.

Lolo just turned 2 years old last week. She’s one of the sweetest little girls I’ve ever met. Amazingly enough, though her sister Nayna was barely talking at age 2, Lolo has been using complete sentences for several months now. She loves to talk about anything and everything, especially with her big sister! She’s very excited about the new baby and asks to rub my belly several times every day. According to Nayna, Lolo is expecting a baby girl and Lolo now talks about the baby in *her* belly as well as the baby in mine.

Nayna is a bit over 3.5 years old now. Her hair is still blonde and curly even though both her father and I have straight (maybe wavy-ish) brown hair. She’s fascinated with having her hair put up, especially in two ponytails, and she’s decided that she’s expecting twins – one boy and one girl. She’s very insistent that I’m expecting a baby boy even though I keep telling her that we have to wait and see if the baby is a boy or a girl.

Both girls are still sleeping in our king-sized futon with us though we move Nayna to her own toddler bed in a corner of our bedroom some nights after she’s asleep. Lolo is still nursing even though I’m pretty sure she’s not really getting any milk at this point. Nayna nurses periodically with a few days between each request and she’s very adamant that 4 year olds do not nurse, but 2 and 3 year olds do. That works for me since she’ll turn 4 right before the new baby is born! Tandem-nursing is no problem and I wouldn’t really mind with three, but two is much simpler I think because then they can both nurse at the same time – that part wouldn’t really work with three!

Our typical days are pretty uninteresting really… at least I think they would be to other people. We get up in the morning and eat breakfast – oatmeal is Nayna’s current breakfast of choice – then we play for a bit and read some books before lunchtime. Lunch is usually sandwiches, leftovers, or Annie’s macaroni and cheese (another current favorite that we buy when it’s on sale). The afternoon is when I spend some time online and the girls play with each other.

I also try to get some housework done between lunch and dinner and, when possible, the girls love to help me. They pick up their own toys and help me sweep the floor. Nayna clears the table and Lolo brings her own dishes into the kitchen. When I do laundry they help by handing me clothespins after I wash the clothes and then they put the clothespins back in the bag when I take the clothes down from the line. We don’t have a dryer right now so I’m busy learning the lost art of hang-drying everything and I now understand the rationale behind separating different types of clothing in the wash. It’s much more important when hang-drying than when using a dryer. Both girls love to help fold clothes and Nayna is getting quite good at folding square things like napkins and washcloths. We usually try to get a nap in there during the afternoon as well.

For dinner I usually have to soak some grains and beans or thaw some meat ahead of time to have along with whatever CSA veggies we have handy. Using the dried beans and grains as well as the bulk meat helps us save on our food bills and is actually quite easy, but does require foresight and at least planning a meal the night before. I’m not always on top of it, but the more we get settled in here, the easier it is!

After dinner we usually watch a bit of whatever Netflix DVD we happen to have. We don’t have a television and it’s much cheaper to just watch Netflix on our computers than to have a TV and cable or satellite service. Then the girls take a bath and it’s off to bed where Fred gives everyone foot rubs (what an awesome husband/father!) and he and I usually read a bit before going to sleep. Nayna sometimes reads a book also, but Lolo generally just drops right off after a few minutes of nursing.

Not too bad!

~B.

Dangerously Declining Birthrate

Amongst all the hype about the population boom and the popularity of the “zero population growth” movement, some of the more wealthy countries in the world are facing a very different problem:

http://www.vancouversun.com/Technology/Lack%20babies%20threatens%20life/1773454/story.html

The question posed at the end of the article is interesting to me – how to get “young liberal Westerners” to choose parenthood.

I don’t really know the answer to that. I’m not particularly “liberal” which might have something to do with the fact that I’ve always wanted to have a fairly large family. However, I’m young and I’m an American and I’ve also personally been bucking the current trend of waiting until the late-20s or early-30s to have children since I was 21 years old. So I thought that maybe I should take a stab at why I feel so differently about this issue than my contemporaries seem to feel. Why was I so willing to embrace motherhood? I was married at age 20 and I got pregnant (and was more than happy to be pregnant) for the first time only a month after turning 21.

It’s a difficult, maybe even impossible, thing to quantify… I’ve always looked at future jobs/careers in the light of what I could easily manage while staying at home with my passel of kids. That’s one reason I love teaching private music lessons. It’s a good amount of money for the time spent and it can easily be scheduled either around my husband’s work or I can occupy my children with other things while I’m busy teaching. Private music lessons can also be taught at my home or at the home of my students – something I only offer if my children are welcome in the other family’s home which hasn’t been a problem so far since most families who choose lessons at their home have large families themselves. Those have all been important career considerations to me ever since I can remember.

My mom was a stay-at-home-mom and still is for my much younger siblings who are still living at home. My dad has always valued and appreciated her contribution to the family so I grew up thinking that staying at home and raising children has value. My husband agrees with me about that – his mother was also around a lot when he was young. Growing up in a church where larger families (ranging from 4-12 children in a family) were common probably didn’t hurt any either. Large families were not required or even expected in my church and it wasn’t a church that taught that birth control was evil or anything, but most families in the church viewed children as blessings and not as hardships.

Fueling the “children as a hardship” idea are the inevitable expenses of having children. I don’t deny that having children can cost a lot of money, but I’ve personally never bought into the “more is better” or even “new is better” aspects of consumerism… I’d much rather buy needed things at Salvation Army, yardsales, or Goodwill than the mall or Wal-Mart. Not feeling the need to buy many things or new things unless absolutely necessary has really cut back the cost of having children for my family! I’m optimistic that I can continue this way of life even as my children get older because of the success that others like Amy Dacyczyn have had in passing along their frugal values to their children – even their teen children. This remains to be seen in my case, of course, but I don’ t think my children will have much of a choice in the matter regardless

Then there are the pregnancy and birth climates in the Western world!  Who really wants to go through multiple c-sections when the risks increase so much with every single one? The first one isn’t so bad, but once you’ve had even 1 prior c-section, your risks in subsequent pregnancies and births go up quite a lot. Who even wants to go through multiple vaginal births with the, sometimes overpowering, fear surrounding childbirth in our society? I was very fortunate to learn about natural/home birth and to personally know so many women who were not afraid of birth (and were very open about their positive – or at least not horrible – experiences) and who gave birth at home, but most women aren’t so lucky.

Most women in our culture are literally inundated with birth horror stories from the time other women find out about their pregnancy. Unfortunately, with managed birth and lack of evidence-based care being the norm in American hospitals, women are also likely to find their birth experience to be rather more unpleasant than necessary which serves to fulfill the horror stories they heard during pregnancy. Instead of being a time for rejoicing because a child is about to be born, birth is a time for dreading what comes next.

Pregnancy in our culture has likewise moved from being a time of joy and anticipation to being a time of fear and trepidation. All the tests that are done on the unborn child and the resulting anxiety for the mother if everything doesn’t come back exactly perfect don’t exactly encourage women to go through the ordeal of pregnancy more times than is absolutely necessary.

I am so grateful to all the women who shared their positive pregnancy and birth stories with me as well as their horror stories about misdiagnosed issues with their babies that caused them more worry than was necessary. I think that their encouragement was a large part of why I was able to avoid the fear of pregnancy and childbirth that seems to be so ingrained in our society today. Yes, things can go terribly wrong, but it doesn’t happen nearly as often as shows on TLC would have women believe.

I definitely believe that pressure to have careers, feeling the need to do it all before having children, and the news stories about overpopulation have a lot to do with why so many women wait to have children or have fewer children than they might have wanted, but the issues above are the ones that most influenced me in wanting children. I know the issue is a complicated one without a simple answer – it just got me to thinking about why things are this way and why I’m apparently different.

I’m not sure how to change things to be more family-friendly in our culture, but I truly believe that support for young couples/mothers who want or who had children earlier than our culture deems “appropriate” and positive support for pregnant women of all ages would go a long way towards encouraging a higher birthrate. Paid maternity leave wouldn’t hurt either…

~B.

Exercising and childbirth

Well… okay, I didn’t get back to blog that I’m definitely pregnant until now and I apologize if anyone was on pins and needles. Although, given the lack of e-mails or comments, I highly doubt it!

So, I’ll be 16 weeks along this Sunday and I’ve finally begun my customary diet of pregnancy and childbirth books. I usually don’t start reading books about childbirth or even pregnancy until my second trimester after the queasiness has died down a bit.

I just finished reading Birth as an American Rite of Passage by Robbie Davis-Floyd which was such a mindblowingly awesome book that it even made me briefly consider going back to college for a sociology and anthropology double-major. It was a real page-turner and I should not have started reading it right before bedtime because I didn’t get to sleep until nearly 4am that first night. I took the second half of the book a bit more slowly and am letting the implications of what she wrote percolate in my brain before I write about it. I do plan to write about it though I cannot promise that it will be within a certain time-frame.

Currently I am in the middle of Elizabeth Noble’s book Essential Exercises for the Childbearing Year. I wish wholeheartedly that I could go back in time and read this book during my first pregnancy… or before I ever got pregnant in the first place. I’m only halfway through, but I’ve already learned so much about how my muscles work during labor and how to prepare them to be strong and flexible for the big B-day.

It always surprises me how little I really know about pregnancy and childbirth even though I know so much about it. I mean, I’ve done it personally twice, I’ve read countless books about it, talked to at least 50 different women about their experiences, and ruthlessly mined information from my wonderful midwife/student midwife/doula/grand-multip friends’ brains. Yet… I know so little.

Every time I pick up a new book or talk to a new friend, I learn more. Every time I learn more, I become even more amazed at how wonderfully our bodies are made and how spectacularly the female body works when a strong and healthy body, good diet, and hands-off birth attendant all come together during this magnificent birth process.

I knew before reading Elizabeth Noble’s book that the pelvic floor muscles were important, but I didn’t realize that a stronger pelvic floor meant a pelvic floor that could more easily stretch and was less likely to tear during childbirth. I didn’t realize that the pelvic floor muscles are also important in preventing uterine prolapse as well as for the more well-known maladies I knew about before such as urinary incontinence.

Thankfully I’ve been doing Kegel exercises since I was a teenager (probably because I read about it somewhere like “Savage Love” – certainly not to prevent urinary incontinence which I did not consider to be an issue to think about for many many years to come), but I had no idea how beneficial those simple exercises really were for my body. Now that I know more about the different ways the pelvic floor strengthens my body in general, I’m certain that I will be more diligent about exercising those muscles.

Also, by exercising the pelvic floor muscles, the inevitable stretching that the muscles undergo during pregnancy and childbirth (even with a c-section there is quite a bit of stretching during pregnancy from the baby’s weight) can be mitigated. With consistent (and easy) exercise, those muscles can regain the tone they had previously. I knew this before from personal experience, but it’s always nice to have my personal experiences reaffirmed by a well-referenced book.

I’m currently in the section about the abdominal muscles and their role in pregnancy, childbirth, and everyday life. I had no idea before that weak abdominal muscles can contribute to lower back pain – especially during pregnancy. I’m extremely glad that my abdominal muscles were well developed during high school and college through many hours of playing trumpet every day because I certainly haven’t been exercising them much since then and I need to begin again ASAP! They’ve been stretched and worked hard during my last two pregnancies and I need to take responsibility for making sure that they are strong enough to work properly this time around as well.

I’m so glad to be learning about why it’s so important to keep these muscles strong and limber! When I don’t have a concrete reason to do something – especially exercise – I tend to forget to do it. Frequently. However, knowing what I know now, I’m more likely to keep up with my body and I’m more likely to pay attention to my posture and how strong I am in various areas.

I still wish that I’d read Essential Exercises for the Childbearing Year four years ago, but it truly is better late than never!

~B.

So it’s April Fool’s Day!

I know it’s been a while since I’ve updated because Firefox no longer completes my blog’s address in the address bar, and now it’s April Fool’s Day. Day one of my birth month. The day of tricks and tomfoolery. The day when many women announce that they’re pregnant and then when everyone shouts, “Congratulations!” they say, “April Fools to you! I tricked you!”

So, to follow in the spirit of things, I’m going to now announce that I’m pregnant with #3 who we hope is a little boy (we’d be happy with another girl, of course, but techie guru husband really wishes he wasn’t the only male in our household). Except nobody will believe me today, which is just fine because we were planning to wait until my birthday in two weeks before telling everyone anyhow. Therefore, in two more weeks or so I’ll just announce it again and then everyone will be like, “Hey! You weren’t fooling!” and I’ll just smile.

I suppose this is also a tricky ploy to see who reads my blog and who doesn’t.

So, assuming everything goes well and nothing untoward happens in the meantime, expect an announcement sometime soon – if you dare to believe me today

~B.