The Fingernail Monster

A quick moment for the absurd...


There are small things in parenting that you had never thought about that you would have to do. Cutting fingernails and toenails is one of them. It's hard to do something on someone else that you're so accustomed to doing on yourself! There's something about the angle that makes me feel like I'm writing with my left hand or driving on the left side of the street (like when you parallel park on the left side of the street on a one-way street) ... you get my drift. It's just awkward. 


So, add to the odd angle the fact that the baby doesn't know what you're doing and doesn't appreciate having their toes and fingers sequestered, so is working very hard to extricate them from your grip. 


Then, add the fact that there is a Fingernail Monster living in each and every finger and toe. Yes, it's true!! The Fingernail Monster sits, lurking, waiting for you to cut the fingernails, and then, within moments, gives a little shove so that they're out there, all nice and long -- and sharp and pointy, because it's impossible to cut them cleanly with all the above-mentioned factors at play -- ready to be cut again, immediately!!

Seriously. It's true. See?? It exists!!


I feel like I'm cutting his fingernails EVERY DAY. I get done, and then a few hours later, I'm feeling his daggers cutting into my arm, lip, cheek, scratching away.


Maybe I just need to stop taking my vitamins??!!


(Haha!! Because you never know what you're going to find in the world of the internet, when I Googled 'fingernail monster', hoping to find some fabulous image (which, of course, I did, because it's the internet!), and look what I found: http://www.michaeltenn.com/2010/05/17/fingernail-monster/! Another parent blogging about the Fingernail Monster, except that they refer to themselves as the Fingernail Monster ... I guess I better write him and set him straight! The Fingernail Monster is not out cutting nails and spreading love -- He is thwarting efforts at cutting them and thus spreading frustration!!!! This guy has it ALL WRONG!!)

Our Little Guy

We have a little pipsqueak. From the time he came out of me at 7 pounds, 4 ounces, I haven't quite been able to wrap my head around the fact that I produced a small child. It just doesn't jive with my worldview or what I expected from me, a Hymans, of the ice cream eating clan. I just forgot to factor in how much those small Kashmiri genes would wield their power over him. He will be the biggest Kashmiri and smallest Hymans ever!

Imagine my surprise at Zia's last appointment when we discovered that he was only in the 10th percentile of weight! (I'm quite certain I myself have NEVER ranked that low! Does Not Compute) He was, however, in the 70th percentile for length/height ... way to go, Hymans genes! Mo's mom always wished he was taller, so I guess she'll get it in his son.)

Discovering the fun of the paper at the doctor's appointment, displaying his skinniness

The doctor seemed utterly unconcerned, even mentioning that we are lucky that he's so light to carry around. Though I am not one to be worried comparisons with other babies (okay, fine; sometimes I do, but for the most part, what's the point? They're all different!), I nonetheless couldn't help but come home and think, 'Fatten this boy up!' Cuz it's kinda weird to have a skinny baby. They're supposed to be chubby. Luckily, we had only been feeding him 'solids' (i.e. solid foods cremated down into almost-liquids) once a day and discovered that he was supposed to be getting them three times a day, thus creating instant calories. Hopefully. (More on feeding him to come in a later post.)

The doctor also said that some moms' breastmilk just doesn't have as many calories as others. It was hard not to look at her incredulously and exclaim that it was simply not possible for MY breastmilk to be one of those to fit into that category, as I have never imagined myself to be described in any way as low-calorie.

But who knows. Stranger things have happened, I suppose. I guess I better eat some more ice cream to fatten up that breastmilk!!

Though Mo seems to be more concerned about our little guy being skinny, I'm going to go ahead and appreciate the fact that he's easier to carry around for a while and figure that we're feeding him what we can, so he's developing just as he's meant to be. 

Lights, Camera, Action!

Now that he's sleeping, we're starting to learn more about what Zia's like, since he doesn't have to be all cranky now from lack of sleep. Not that he was always cranky, but he certainly seems now to be happier on a more regular basis than previously. 


One of the things we've discovered, inadvertently, is that he's most definitely a super-extrovert who likes to be in the limelight. 


I know, I know -- shocking. How could the child of Katie & Mo be extroverted?! It's so not what you expected. Haha. So it's not that we're so surprised in general, but what is surprising is the way in which it shows up. It was most abundantly evident last week at the strike Mo helped to organize.

Mo & I had had intense negotiations about how long Zia and I were going to go to the strike. Mo started with eight hours; I countered with two. We both stayed strong for several rounds, not wavering, until Mo countered with twelve. Then fifteen. Then sixteen. 


You can understand why he's a union representative/organizer.


Negotiations being one of his strong points (obviously) and not mine (again, obviously), I finally settled on, "We will come after his morning nap and stay as long as he stays calm."


Which, as it turns out, was endless. We finally left after seven hours. Not including transport time there (walking, Kaiser shuttling, and BARTing, both ways) and back -- even on the way back, he was still charming the woman in the seat behind us! So we were gone for over nine hours in total all day. Crazy!


This boy is THRILLED to be out in public. Audience? No problem! In fact, delighted! Now I'm energized, happy, and able to carry on with my day. At home with only Mama to give me attention? Boorrrinnnnggg. I need my adoring audience!

We were seriously shocked at how well he did. He basically just bounced back and forth between Mo and me, getting passed around among the nurses, smiling the whole day. He was especially delighted when Papa put him up on his shoulders and danced with him. (Yes, there was dancing at this strike. It wasn't exactly your usual strike, with angry, scowl-faced people making demands. Put some nurses in charge of a strike, and they've got everything from 'Celebration' to Lady Gaga rockin' it and are doing synchronized dances with picket signs to make their demands.)

This trend has continued. When we take him to restaurants, he's delighted to sit in his little highchair (yes, he can do that!), play with a spoon, and look around at the room, watching the action, staring at people until they smile at him and/or tell him how cute he is. No fusses, just enthusiasm and love.


Yeah, he knows how to work it. We *may* have created a monster!!

Take cover!

WARNING: This post is not about sleep. I know you may not be able to wrap your head around that, so I thought I should let you know ahead of time so that you're not trying to read between the lines, trying to figure out how it relates to sleep, since that's pretty much all I've talked about so far.

Zia finally has a room. Yes, he's technically had a physical room all along, but it's finally set up to look like his room, rather than a dumping ground. It's very exciting.

As I was finishing it up the other day, he was sitting on the floor playing with toys. I had to vacuum the futon because it had plaster from my belly cast on it. (Zia's room is also the guest room; hence, the futon.) The vacuum was right next to him on the floor, and one of the things he was playing with was a soft fabric block. As soon as I turned on the vacuum, he put his head straight down on top of the block. Like an ostrich putting his head in the sand.

I turned off the vacuum to make sure he was okay, and he brought his head up. So, I went ahead and turned it on again. What did he do?? Head straight back down on the block! Hil.ar.i.ous.

I decided to be nice and finish it up with him in my arms, since he was clearly traumatized by the vacuum's noise.

Once I finished that, I set him up on the futon so I could vacuum the floor, figuring he'd be okay since he wasn't on the floor next to it. 

What happened??

This photo doesn't capture the heart of it. His little hands were up next to his ears, plastering himself against the futon like he was in a stick-up. 

And what did his loving mom do each time? Laugh.

And then tell his dad about it, who proceeded to help me recreate it so he could see it. (That's where the photos come from, which is why they're not as good as the original moments.) Great parents, huh?!

He's a funny little guy. So much for the vacuum calming babies!

Best of Both Worlds

I'm sure you're dying for an update on how crying it out is going!


Well, it turns out that Zia has the best of both of his parents: Mom's ability to learn new things quickly, and Dad's doing things in extremes.


He continued to get to sleep quite quickly every night but became increasingly difficult to get back to sleep the rest of the night. (We were trying to build up crying sessions in the night and not have him do it all night right away.) So, we had another session with our trusty sleep consultant, who said that he sounded like he was ready to push it and go through the night crying. We also needed to get him sleeping in his crib, in his room, and she said to just go for it all at once! 

Getting used to my crib!

So, last Wednesday night, we did just that. We were both nervous, not knowing what was going to happen. (Especially Mo, since he had to leave at 4:00AM for work the next morning.) We didn't anticipate the sadness of climbing into bed and not having him in the room with us; I actually teared up a little.


He still woke up every 1-2 hours, but he always stopped crying within 10 minutes, so we just left him. I was worried about if he was hungry back there since he was used to getting fed every 2-4 hours throughout the night, but I figured he'd cry like mad and let me know when he was hungry.


By 3:00, that hadn't happened, and we both felt like we were pushing it making him also not eat that long, so I went back and fed him when he woke up crying. (And let me tell you, I had SUPPLY by that time!!) He woke up crying one more time and was then just happily awake at 7. And didn't seem to hate me when I came to get him up -- *whew*!


The next night, we were curious to see how much the crying sessions would extend out, and drumroll, please ....


HE DIDN'T CRY FROM 7:30PM TO 4:30AM!!!!


What?!?!


He also still didn't seem to need to be fed at 4:30. By 5:30, when he was lightly crying for the third time in an hour, I figured he was ready for some food. But then he ate so much that he didn't go back to sleep. 


Oh well. We're learning. 


So, he learned super fast and did the extreme of crying often one night and not at all the next night! It was also hilarious, because he managed to get himself from one end of the crib to the other in about 10 minutes after we put him down last night. (We've now observed that he does this not by rolling but by putting his feet up on the side of the crib and pushing himself around the edges -- it's hilarious to watch!)


Then, when I went in to make sure he was still alive (because, remember, he'd never slept more than four hours at a time, and that happened rarely), he had found the corner of the crib where I had a blanket hanging so that he could cram his head into that corner, which was cozier than the other corners that only have the super-thin bumper covering them.


Babies are funny, aren't they?


His sleeping-through-the-night trend has continued, and he's now taken to sleeping with one arm behind the bumper, like he's cuddling it. He's his daddy's boy. :) I want to take a picture, but I'm afraid I'll wake him up, and after all this work to get him to sleep, we're not taking that risk!! 


Now Mo & I just have to figure out what to do with all this time on our hands since we're no longer spending a huge chunk of our day wrangling with him to get him to sleep! Such luxury! And I have to retrain my body to sleep continuously. I can already feel the difference in my demeanor, and I still haven't slept longer than a few hours at a time!


Hooray!!

The Laugh It Out Solution

Well, so far the joke's on us. 


We finally started 'crying it out' two nights ago, at our wits' ends with the bouncing, rocking, walking, driving, and other madness that was ensuing, taking upwards of 1-2 hours to get this boy to sleep. 


We did the extreme of hiring a sleep consultant to help us sort out what method was going to work for him and to help us craft a plan. I know, I know -- a sleep consultant?? Yes, you can do anything for work and be an expert in anything these days! But let's be real -- sleep is clearly not something that comes naturally and getting oneself to sleep is a learned skill. Zia clearly needs additional help with it, and we were getting tired of sorting through the stacks and stacks of conflicting advice about how to get your kid to sleep.


Enter sleep consultant.


Who was SO worth the money so far!! Why?

First of all, she explained a ton to us about Zia's temperament that really helped us to understand him and how to approach him. That right there was worth talking to her in and of itself. She also helped us make a plan for the daunting work of letting him cry himself to sleep, because again, there are as many opinions on how to do it as there are people who have written books about sleep. And, really, we just needed the confidence and reassurance to do it.


She said that most kids will take 30-60 minutes to cry themselves to sleep in the beginning stages, and that kids with temperaments like Zia's are likely to be persistent and take longer. (This had been our suspicion all along; hence, our hesitation to get started with it. Remember: Zia doesn't cry; he screams bloody murder. So contemplating over an hour of bloody murder is not exactly my vision of a pleasant evening -- on repeat for a week, or multiple weeks!)


Her recommendation was to let him cry for 1.5 hours and if he was still wailing, pick him up and do what we usually do to get him to sleep. 


So, Mo & I were 100% prepared for 1.5 hours of tortured screaming. We had things out to distract ourselves and prepped ourselves for the emotional drain.


We went in after 5 minutes, as instructed. It was hard. I got teary-eyed. It's not easy giving your helpless little infant reassurance that you love him and support him in his struggle when he's *clearly* MISERABLE and hating what he's having to endure. We were to go back 10 minutes later, but not if it was de-escalating.


Which it unbelievably did!


Mo & I sat, staring at each other in wonder -- could we be hearing correctly? And sure enough ... how long did it take altogether??


15 MINUTES!!!!


What??

We figured it must be a fluke. So, the next night, we put him down even earlier because I couldn't get him down for his usual third nap and he'd therefore been up for five hours, which is way too long for a child of this age -- and was thus clearly overtired.


How long the second night?


6 MINUTES!!!!


Unbelievable.


How much are we kicking ourselves for the pain we've been causing ourselves to get him to sleep?? 


Alas, all things in time. We clearly weren't ready before, and maybe Zia wasn't either.


Tonight was also 6 minutes. And might I also add that he's needed our assistance to stay asleep far less than usual after getting him to sleep in the first place. Hallelujah!

The next step is going to be trickier, though, because it involves letting him start crying it out during his (MANY) night wakings. We tried that last night when he'd already been up for 1.5 hours and I'd fed him, bounced & rocked him, Mo had bounced & rocked him, and he was wide awake. So, we thought, either we take him for a drive at 3AM, or we let him cry it out. We figured, why not? It's been going well so far! How bad could it be??


Really bad.


When it was 4:20AM and he'd been crying for 1 hour and 20 minutes and I'd been up since 1:00AM and we couldn't even be in our bed since we're still working on putting together the crib to transfer him out of our room (a whole different saga for a different day), I said, 'Enough.' Fed the boy, he fell asleep, and we were done with that. 


Hopefully, the night waking crying it out won't continue to be so hard, but man, are we laughing at ourselves for being so scared of, um, well, nothing, it turns out. 


Ah, parenthood.

A Difficult Confession

A friend recently posted this on Facebook: "People keep saying 'aren't you loving being a mom?' I'm tempted to say 'No', hand them baby & walk away ... but I may be the only one amused by that." One of the responses talked about all the cultural stereotypes and expectations we have of mothers, inferring that loving every moment is what a mother is supposed to do. 

One of my biggest struggles with this motherhood business has been coming to terms with admitting that this is hard. I mean, really hard. And there are times when doing just what this friend joked about sounds like a fabulous idea. 

Now, don't get me wrong, of course I love this little guy and his full-mouthed toothless grin, expressive face, soft hands that stroke me and grab my fingers, and funny antics. I adore him. He makes me smile and makes my heart melt.

And, sometimes he drives me absolutely batty. It's HARD spending so much of my day fighting with him to get him to sleep. It's HARD having to be at his beck and call, 24 hours a day. It's HARD to get anything else done. It's emotionally draining to deal with his frequent freak-outs during which he doesn't so much cry as he screams like he's being tortured to the point of busting your eardrum if you're close enough. Our upstairs neighbor closed their sliding door today in the midst of one -- I wished I could do the same! I was exhausted!

And it's hard not to be hard on myself for how I respond to him sometimes. Because, in addition to the pressure to love every minute of it, there's also immense pressure on moms to be able to do it all, and to do it perfectly lovingly. So when I'm not constantly developmentally stimulating him, cooking, cleaning, straightening up, running errands, remembering birthdays, working on my list of projects, and whatever else I'm "supposed" to be doing, while also responding to him in ways that promote him growing into an emotionally available male human being, I tend to beat myself up. Which just makes the whole thing worse. Because I should be responding to him with care and compassion, encouraging him to express his feelings and showing him that they are valid -- not getting irritated to the point of anger and sighing and wishing he would stop/listen/do what I want him to do, trying to shut him up and therefore invalidating his feelings. 

Ah, that word -- should. It's amazing the damage that one little six-letter word can do, isn't it? 

And poor little guy -- he knows not what he does; he's just a little baby trying to make sense of this crazy world, and he has very limited means of how to communicate. It's just hard to remember that when in the midst of madness. (But when I do, I thank him for his very clear communication and lack of passive aggressiveness, haha.)

It's a pretty major identify shift, moving into motherhood. And even more so doing it as a stay-at-home-mom. See, I never aspired to stay-at-home-motherhood. Mo and I always said that he would be the one to stay at home with the kid(s). But then I got fed up with my 7-year-run of nightmare bosses and failing organizations and needed a 'break'. And who are we kidding -- workaholic Mo wouldn't last a week without work outside the home.

So here I am, trying to make sense of my days and find a balance between caring for him, getting him to learn how to sleep and tending to his needs, and getting to go do things for my own self-care to make sure that I don't lose my marbles. Eventually, I'll hopefully find time to actually dig in further to my own personal growth and do some soul exploration to discover what my heart's calling is. In the meantime, though, I generally just have the energy to escape and watch TV. Which, again, leads me back to beating myself up further because this certainly isn't the life I envisioned.

This challenge doesn't gel well with my steely Midwestern persona. It's very much internalized within me that things are fine, I can handle this, and no, I don't need any help, but if you need help, I'm here for you! Battling this beast to allow me to succumb to the difficulty of the situation and embrace that it's okay for it to be hard is, like, well, battling Zia to get him to sleep. Or enduring his tortured freak-outs. They are one and the same.

So motherhood is a journey of self-understanding. And it is also generally fraught with challenge in facing oneself as one really is, as opposed to how one perceives oneself to be. Which is a good thing. It's good for me to learn how to be more present and aware and in the moment. It's good for me to face the demons that lurk within me and become more intimately familiar with my shadow. And learn that anger isn't necessarily an enemy; it's just another emotion that we all experience. But it all contributes to the hardness of the situation.

Hard is okay. Hard is good. It's just my personal challenge to learn to embrace that and be okay with it. And to feel okay saying it -- saying that this is hard and that I don't love every moment of it. It doesn't make me less of a person. In fact, maybe it even makes me more whole.

I'm getting there.

I just went twozie in my onesie

Apparently, onesies are meant to fill in the gap from the lack of instruction manuals:

and warning labels:

to accompany babies.


Though I suppose they do have other purposes like stating parental political beliefs:

In any case, isn't it funny how much goes into what a baby wears? I mean, what do they care?? Don't get me wrong -- I'm the first one to stop Mo if he's leaving the house with Zia dressed in a way that I don't determine to be fit for public. My kid may be naturally cute, but let's be sure to enhance it so there's no confusion, please! 


Some of the stuff is just silly, though. As adorable as I think that many of the pockets on pants are -- take for instance cargo pants -- so cute! But what's the point of pockets on baby clothes? Is he supposed to store his pacifier in there and take it out when he needs it? Stuff in a rag to wipe his own face when he drools and spits up all over? A parent can dream! (Come to think of it, perhaps that's why they have pockets -- a parent designed them, using the 'if you build it, they will come mentality'...)


In any case, there may not be a point, but it sure is fun to get sucked into the cuteness of the pointlessness and make sure that my kid is looking as adorable as possible! Though in used stuff as much as possible, because what's the point of buying new clothes they'll wear for three months??

All hands on deck!

Pacifier overboard!!!!


That's what happened this morning. Zia's pacifier fell out of his mouth somewhere in the bed and mysteriously disappeared into the abyss. He was back in the bed for a feeding and I was about to transfer him back to the co-sleeper when it fell out and we couldn't find it anywhere! Of course, as fate would have it, we ALSO couldn't find his other pacifier. Therefore ... 


Awake baby.


Yes, folks, it's true. We have created a pacifier addict. He's going to start attending Suckers Anonymous meetings any day now. 


This was at 6:00, so it's not as bad as if it had happened in the middle of the night, but he usually sleeps until somewhere between 7 and 8. And since it was an emergency to try to keep him asleep (refer to previous posting), Mo and I were both scrambling around trying to find a pacifier, to no avail. We even cracked open the package of 6-month+ pacifiers (does it really matter??) and were prepared to start boiling them to use, but by then it was no use. We had a gurgling, happily awake baby. 


Oh well. At least he's adorable. Even with the pacifier. See?

Sleep like a baby? No, thank you!!

Whomsoever coined this phrase and thought they were referencing good sleep clearly never had a baby. Because if they did, they would know that this is what 'sleeping like a baby' looks like. At least, it's what sleeping like a baby looks like when you're talking about the baby we know as Zia. 


Step 1: When it becomes clear that The Parents are trying to get you to sleep, fight it like it's an intruder into your home in the middle of the night or the worst form of injustice imaginable.  Yell, scream, flail your arms, cry, and kick your feet stridently.


Step 2: Continue this while being bounced on a blown-up ball, with a pacifier in your mouth and something covering your eyes, music in the background, and a comfort blanket (i.e. lovey) tucked under your arm. If it's Daddy putting you to sleep, you also need something that smells like Mommy or you should yell REALLY loud.


Step 3: Finally succumb to sleep, with a few flails of arms occasionally just to keep the person putting you to sleep guessing.


Step 4: Give a few little jiggles while being carried back to the place you're supposed to sleep.


Step 5: Once put down where you're meant to sleep, open your eyes and move a little. You can opt to wake up altogether and return to Step 2 at this point, if you so choose.


Step 6: If you're willing to sleep, then this is where you sleep through a deep sleep and look extremely peaceful. (This is where 'sleeping like a baby' is desirable. Only here.) Note that this only lasts 20-45 minutes.


Step 7: Once you hit an active state of sleep and realize that your pacifier is no longer in your mouth, roll around, flail your arms, and yell for help. 


Step 8A: Once the pacifier is restored to your mouth, slowly calm down and return to Step 6. You may need some pats on the back and shushing to help you with the calming down.


Step 8B: Alternately, continue to roll around with the pacifier in your mouth, occasionally spitting it out and yelling for it again, until you have been picked up and returned to Step 2 (or a modified version of it, in the glider). 


Repeat 6-8 until you are truly awake or your parent gives up having to repeat all of the rigamaroll. Victory! You are awake and get to look at everything and get attention again!! Or, maybe you wore Mommy or Daddy out so much that you get this:

In which case, that also counts as victory because you get a warm body and a heartbeat to sleep to. Ah, the good ole days in the womb...


Makes ya think twice about saying you slept like a baby, huh? Maybe we should say 'like a worn-out parent' when someone asks how we slept and we slept especially well ...

Finding Siblings

Well, lookee here. Daddy is currently acting as Bed since the 'how we're going to wean him off of bodies' conversation scheduled for the weekend hasn't happened yet, and Mo is jealous that I get to sleep with him on me so much, which means I'm free to blog again, a mere day after the last one! Whoa!

Earlier this week, we were at our friends' house. They have a 1-year-old who is in a nanny share with another baby who is three days younger, and that family was there also. Afterward, Mo & I talked about how we want to make sure that Zia has buddies growing up, because it's super cute to watch those two babies now that they're aware of each other, interacting and crawling around. And we think it's important to raise babies in community.


Plus, if they hang out enough, maybe they can become like these twins:

Secret conversations about missing socks!

I've made lots of friends over the last few months with moms with babies right around Zia's age, so we have lots of potential to raise Zia with pseudo siblings. (And, of course, there are the gazillion friends who have had friends within the last year, though it will be a while before Zia catches up to those highly mature babies.) It's pretty funny how unaware of each other the babies have all been so far, though. Yesterday, I was on a hike with my friend Robin (of shared birth story fame), whose daughter was born a day after Zia. For about the first time, they seemed to actually look at each other from time to time, but for the most part they're far more interested in the wall than each other thus far.

Robin and I are planning to do a childcare swap starting in September or so. I'll take Eleanor for half a day a week while she's at work, and in exchange she'll take Zia half a day a week so I can have some baby-free time! Which will give Eleanor and Zia time to develop a fun little friendship like our one-year-old friends.

In the meantime, we're forcing it on them:

Clearly effective, as Eleanor found it to be an opportunity to just munch on Zia's clothes rather than her own. Baby expressions of affection!

It will be so fascinating to watch as they grow up. Who knows -- they may decide that they hate each other! Or, they'll develop a giant posse with all the other babies they get to see regularly. 

My Life as a Bed

So much for that whole 'now I can blog more regularly thing'. The last post was open in a tab on my laptop for over a month before I finally finished it and got it up. (Mind you, it WAS unusually long.) I've had another one going for over a month again and somehow just never get around to finishing it.


It's funny how time just disappears when you're staying home with an infant. I have a pretty good 'to-do' list awaiting attention, and that doesn't even include the big projects I want to get to. And yet, day after day, I'm delighted if I manage to get to the dishes. The days just melt into nights like nothing. But when Mo asks what I did all day, my report is quite short in nature, since it's basically just a cycle on repeat all day.


I keep wishing I could go back to the conversation I had with my boss and our Board Treasurer last summer, when I was about 2 months pregnant and hadn't yet told them. We were planning our upcoming 20th anniversary event and discussing the potential involvement of a board member who was on maternity leave and how much we thought she could/would do. I, of course, was saying that we should contact her to assess her interest/ability to participate, since presumably a maternity leave would apply to board involvement as well as her job. I'm just sayin'...

Yes, that's about how mad I was ...

Boss and Board Treasurer (both men -- middle-aged white men, one of significant means) immediately jumped to, 'Well, what else is she doing? She's on maternity leave. She's doing way less than when she was working!' Mind you, this was coming from someone who gets to go out in the world and stake his claim as a psychology expert in working with survivors of Gender-Based Violence. Lovely that he has no concept of sexism/feminism, huh?? But that's a whole different topic, and one on which I don't care to get started again, as I've wasted many a breath and high blood pressure on it already.


In any case, Board Treasurer, married to an Asian-American woman, commented that his wife threw their baby on her back and was back out in the rice paddies the next day (Don't get me started -- wrong on SO many levels), so surely the board member should be at our beck and call for event planning services, cuz, ya know, she's already been off a couple months already and stuff, so she can only get so many more pedicures and massages. (Okay, he didn't say that last part, but it was certainly implied.)


It was one of these moments where, not yet having experienced motherhood myself, I knew intrinsically that I was *furious* with them and that what they were saying was ludicrous, but I didn't have the specific language to respond when they asked what in the world she could be doing, particularly since the baby sleeps all day! I mean, REALLY!! Lap of luxury!!


So here I am with Baby Who Only Sleeps On Humans, unable to do much other than care for him, wishing to go back in time and tell Them Who Never Stayed Home With Their Kids just exactly what that board member's days probably looked like and why we should feel eternally grateful if she was willing to contribute any tiny amount of time at all. 

Alas, I have moved on and have zero interest in dredging up old anger spots. It just makes me think and roll my eyes. And be grateful that that is all behind me and that instead of working with people who make my blood boil all day, I now get to be greeted by a tiny person who flashes a gummy grin at me all day long. (Okay, part of the day when he's not flexing his oh-so-strong lungs. But that's a different post for a different day.)


So, as I begin to extricate myself from being a bed to him, I will get back to posting more and more. I'll just have to catch you up on the last four (!) months by integrating into the reports of the now. My head is constantly brewing with ideas to reflect upon here in the blogosphere, so be ready to be word assaulted once I get going!! Once I get done "luxuriating", that is ...

Blueberry Becomes Zia

And, I'm back!!


I've decided that this won't just be a blog to chronicle my pregnancy experiences -- it will continue to track stories of motherhood, which is a whole new adventure!! Having experienced it for almost eight weeks now (how is it possible that it's been that long already?!), I feel like there's so much already that hasn't been recorded!


But let's take care of first things first ... Zia's birth story.


(Warning: I gave up trying to tell the short version.)


I had been joking the week or so prior to our due date that I would be the fool who didn't even realize that I was in labor. Which is of course exactly what happened.


In our classes, we had been told over and over that, though every person's birth experience is different, we could pretty much count on it being fairly long as a first-time mother. I had expected that ours would be on the shorter side of things since my own birth was somewhat fast in the grand scheme of things, but I still had it in my head that we'd have this nice, leisurely early labor time when we'd be doing projects around the house, playing games, or watching a movie.


But instead, I jumped straight into active labor, it seems.


I woke up in the morning on Thursday, March 10, and noticed I was a little bloody, but nothing to be alarmed about. I told Mo to be on extra-alert during the day and put myself to the task of finally getting the house projects I'd been meaning to do all week going. (I'd been VERY busy watching 'Scrubs'.) By late morning, I noticed something that seemed like it was a contraction, but not having had any Braxton Hicks practice contractions all along, I didn't know if that's what it was, if it was early labor, or what was going on.


Around 1 or so, I found myself on the phone with my dear friend Kara for about 45 minutes. I realized then that I was definitely having contractions and was doing some light breathing to get through them, but still didn't think much of it since I was still able to talk with her and it didn't seem like such a big deal. After all, I had HOURS of early labor ahead of me, so why set off the alarms unnecessarily, right??


After 45 minutes of talking, however, I realized that these contractions were coming more regularly, and by the end Kara could tell that I was breathing through them, so I figured I best be getting off the phone to figure out what was going on. 


I started timing them and after 30 or so minutes realized they were coming anywhere between every 4-7 minutes. For those of you who don't know, the general rule for when to go to the hospital is 4-1-1: contractions four minutes apart, lasting one minute each, for at least an hour. Since I was already having some at 4 minutes, I figured it was probably time to call in the troops, so I summoned Mo and CC, my very good friend who was acting as doula, and they both headed straight over, arriving sometime between 4 and 4:30. 


By the time they both arrived home, I was having more trouble getting around and was spending a fair amount of time on my hands and knees breathing through the contractions. I was, however, also finally packing my bag, since that wasn't ready for the hospital yet. When they got to the apartment, I handed off the stopwatch for them to take over, and they both jumped straight into the game. Mo's previous fear was gone, and he was excited. He got himself some food and timed while CC supported me through the contractions and then they switched -- figuring we had a whole night -- and who knows how much longer -- ahead of us, they needed their nourishment up!


They started timing the contractions around 4:45pm, and around 5:35 I asked to see the chart they were making. We had called the hospital to tell them what was going on, and the intake nurse seemed fairly nonchalant, telling me I could come in 'if I wanted to'. I wanted to delay as long as was reasonably possible, but when I saw on the chart that contractions were coming anywhere from every 2-4 minutes, all I could think about was triage and how I'd been told it would take 45 minutes and required me being on my back for 30 minutes with the heart monitor attached to me. I was still a bit confused, assuming we were in early labor and having this rule of 'they have to have been consistent for an hour' running through my brain, but the thought of that long in triage sounded awful, so I said it was time to go.


It took us a while to get down to the car (haha to my idea of walking to the hospital, even though it's normally only about a 7 minute walk), since I had to keep stopping to breathe through contractions. We were taking the exercise/birth ball with us, since it had been my savior getting through the contractions up until then. 


When we got to the hospital, we went straight up to Labor & Delivery. When CC announced that they were there with me at the security door to the floor (you have to get buzzed in), she was asked if they had visitor passes and other questions, because they hadn't yet noticed me behind them, doubled over a chair, breathing through contractions. I finally hollered out, "I'm right here and I need to check in!" They apparently simultaneously spotted me on the monitor and came to the door with a wheelchair just as I was saying that. There was, however, no way I was sitting in that wheelchair, because sitting sounded like a horrible idea right about then. 


They pointed us back to triage, though there was no one there to greet us and tell us what to do, so it was a bit confusing. I just took my place on the ball on hands and knees in the middle of the hallway by the triage door and continued to breathe my way through until a nurse finally asked me to change into the hospital gown and give her a urine sample.


Side note. The previous day, I went to my usual prenatal yoga class, but our instructor didn't make it that day because her son was sick. We all ended up talking quite a bit, and one of my classmates and I realized we had more in common than we'd realized, including that her due date was the following Monday (mine was Friday) and we'd both be delivering at Kaiser Oakland. I joked with her that maybe we'd be at the hospital at the same time, with an actual strong feeling that we would be.


So, back in the bathroom giving a urine sample ... I saw one on the counter with her initials and wondered if it could be her. And sure enough, once I got into triage, I heard them say her name behind the curtain across from me! She also heard them say my name, but we were in wildly different situations. Her water had broken that morning but she hadn't started contractions yet. I was apparently in transition, with my body shaking wildly from muscle spasms on the bed they had me on. My water broke then. The doctor took some time getting to me, but once he did, he very nonchalantly announced, "Well, you're nine centimeters dilated, so we're going to go ahead and admit you."


In case you're not fully versed in the birthing process, 10 centimeters is full dilation, ready for pushing. They generally want you to be at least 4 centimeters dilated to be admitted to the hospital. So, needless to say, I was a *tad* further along than usual when people are just arriving at the hospital. And yet, I was still sitting there on the bed, half expecting them to send me home because I wasn't far enough along yet. Shows how off my expectations were all day!!


So, I got wheeled to the delivery room (I found out later that that's pretty unusual) and saw Robin, my friend from yoga, in the hallway on the way. The poor nurse still had to complete all of the intake that I would normally have done in triage, so there we were, with me breathing through intense contractions every two minutes, being asked questions like if I have a history of depression and if my address is correct. It was all quite bizarre.


Meanwhile, we hadn't even brought all our stuff from the car up with us because they'd told us not to in case we were sent home for not being far enough along. And Mo was busy trying to re-orient himself with the stage of labor we were in from the binder from our fabulous Zen Birthing class, and looking through her list of suggestions. At one point he disappeared and came back with a piece of paper and piece of tape that he put over the clock so I wouldn't be fixated on how long things were taking. He was also busy texting people saying that we were already 9 centimeters dilated, which I quickly intervened upon and told him to get over and help out and save the announcements for later. Leave it to the workaholic to be finding tasks to do in the midst of labor!!


The rest of the story is pretty much the same -- I managed to fairly calmly breathe through the remainder of labor. I spent most of my time on either of my sides. I tried squatting for a while, but they said that the baby didn't like that so made me stop (based on his heart monitor). They also made me put an internal heart monitor on him, which meant that in addition to the line they had strapped on me for antibiotics (because I was Group B Strep positive) and some other thing they had attached to my finger, I was constantly battling the wires as I moved around, which massively irritated me every time. I also had a wireless heart monitor, which was great, except that I was SO incredibly sweaty that it kept moving around in the little elastic belt thingie that was supposed to be holding it on, so the nurse kept having to come and reposition it (which I think is why they finally made me do an internal one for him). 


The nurse was really nice, letting me do my own thing. I finally asked her for advice for pushing, and she told me that I was basically on the slow boat with my breathing and needed to be bearing down more, so I asked for more clear instructions and started bearing down! I couldn't believe when she told me I was early in the pushing stages -- what?!?! I thought once you started pushing, it just came out!! Mo was impressed because at some point in all of this, I was able to admit that I could see how some people would want pain meds to get through it -- it definitely hurt!!


Finally, though, after about two hours of pushing (I think), they said they could see the head, at which point they asked me to stop pushing. (If you haven't been through labor, you have NO idea how hard that is. Your body just wants to push, so being asked not to is absurd. It wasn't the first time I'd been told that -- they wanted to give the baby a break after he didn't like the squat position, and I had to attempt to hold out for a couple rounds then too -- SO hard!!) 


Then, the cavalry rushed in. Seriously, I don't know who all those people were. And what they were doing there, particularly since my birth plan requested 'no unnecessary personnel'. Pretty sure all those six people standing off to the side just watching were not necessary. But there was no time to stop and question things -- even when CC tried to take pictures and they told her no video, so she had to stop, which means we got no photos of the birth process and immediate photos of Zia after he came out. :(


After the two or so hours of pushing, it was hard to estimate how long it was going to take to actually get him out once he was crowning. Mo was scrubbed up and ready to catch him, so even though I'd felt a slippery feeling with something other than the head coming out, it still took Mo's cries of surprise and announcing that it was a boy for me to comprehend that he was out and that we had our baby. I cried, "Oh! Oh! Oh! Let me see!!" We were both surprised -- both because no words can describe that moment of pain to ecstasy, and because we had been so sure that it would be a girl! (Ironically, we had only settled on the boy name, so I guess at some level we'd known all along ...)

The first moments were pretty precious. Luckily, Kaiser emphasizes the importance of initial skin-to-skin contact, so they put Zia immediately on my chest and Mo and I were able to just touch him and be in awe that he'd come out of me and was a combination of the two of us. It's just so bizarre to take in! They let us bond for quite some time before interrupting to do the initial bath, weighing, shots, etc.


I was shocked to learn that he was only 7 pounds, 4 ounces -- I never imagined that a baby of mine would be on the smaller side, but I forgot to account for the Kashmiri genes! :)


Zia spent most of that first hour or so fussing. We tried to get him to do the breast crawl for his initial feeding, but Mommy's breasts proved to be too large of a mountain to surmount, literally. What did make him immensely happy was being put under the heating lamp -- he's his Daddy's boy.

After a couple hours, we were ready to head up to our recovery room. Before we left, I had to go to the bathroom and was surprised at the amount of blood that accompanied my bathroom visit. The nurse said it was normal, so I didn't think much of it. 


Soon after we settled in our recovery room, I had to go to the bathroom again, and this time I trailed blood all the way with me into the bathroom, where I created World War III blood bath. My nurse was there with me and basically freaked out. Eventually, they got me on some Pitocin to help my uterus to contract, and the doctor came in and got a bunch of blood clots out of me. This meant that I was back on a tube limiting my movement. Grr.


We made it through the night without much sleep because of the blood debacle and because we were so high on adrenalin, and the next morning all we wanted to do was call everyone and send out announcements with photos, because we're dorks like that.

All the nurses were telling us that we should be sleeping when he was because he wouldn't be sleeping as much as he was in the beginning as he recovered from the birth process. However, we didn't listen closely, and sure enough, 23.5 hours after the birth, he went nuts. We don't even remember what exactly he was doing, but we were stressed out dealing with it. When our superstar nurse Opal came around 1:00 to take him for his 24-hour check-up, she asked if Dad wanted to come along. We both said, "Take as long as you need!" We were wiped.


I forgot to mention that Mo had gotten a cough the Saturday before Zia was born. He was on the mend, but the loss of sleep combined with the cold, stale air in the hospital -- and the fact that he ran out of cough drops during the birth and no one would give him any since he wasn't the patient -- sent him into a backward spiral, and he was a mess after a while. He even got a little mask from them to cover up his cough. So, that didn't help as we hit this 24-hour mark where suddenly Zia was awake and crying and we didn't know what to do!!


We therefore milked it (no pun intended) the next two days, taking full advantage of all the people we had waiting on us to give us help and advice -- nurses, lactation consultants, etc. On Saturday, we enjoyed our celebratory lunch from Kaiser, and then we were on our own! We had to stop at Baby World on the way home to pick up some last-minute things we realized we didn't have on hand. Thankfully, Mom's flight landed four hours after we got home, so we immediately had another fabulous set of hands on hand, and the rest will be told as I go along!

Thermostat Wars

From what I've heard, most heterosexual couples delight in pregnancy because the temperature differential gets evened out for a while. This is because the man usually runs warm and the woman cold, so when the woman is pregnant and running warmer than usual, she evens out with the man.


Unfortunately, in our case, I'm the one who runs warm and Mo runs cold, so rather than neutralizing, we're just taking it to a whole new extreme.

I guess it's nice for me that I'm running warm during the "winter" rather than the summer, when I'd just be plain hot and miserable. I feel like I'm constantly on a tropical island these days, but at least it's not also tropical island temperatures outside, so instead it's more like I'm always wearing a coat and don't necessarily need one also. I just get hotter when wearing a coat.


But poor Mo is still, as always, cold, and since it's "winter" (I mean, come on, it's the Bay Area -- I know HE thinks it's freezing, but it's not), he's just, well, cold. So put us into bed together, and here's what you get (don't worry -- I'm not getting graphic here):


Mo on one side of the bed, in long underwear (yes, the whole outfit -- shirt and pants -- the old school waffle kind), under the sheet, winter blanket, and thick winter duvet.


Katie on the other side, in a little cotton short-sleeved dress that's become nightwear, under the sheet and winter blanket, sometimes putting my leg outside of the blanket.


Since we're big cuddlers, that just makes it all that much hotter for me. Whilst Mo's feet are literally like ice blocks. You've never felt skin like this (unless perhaps you're a mortician). 


So he always puts the heater on at the beginning of the night to warm the room up and closes the door to the bathroom and bedroom to keep the heat in. I won't, under any circumstances, allow him to keep it on through the night these days, or I would be 100% miserable. He can be 20% miserable feeling like it's too cold, but really -- check him out. He's warm enough ... at least, after a while!