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!

Squirming

It's so funny now that Blueberry is to the point where s/he doesn't have much room to move around. It's not really so much kicking that I feel any more as squirming. A little movement here and there, but not the full-on kick. 

I can't imagine what it's like to be all squished up in there. That's definitely a trait s/he gets from Dad -- Mom needs room to stretch and take up space, while Dad likes to be in the womb (i.e. the bathtub). Well, not that there's much of a choice for it to be a trait at this point in time -- s/he's stuck there, whether s/he likes it or not. 

Though I have to say that it's still a strong power when squirming. Tonight I had my plate setting on my lap, with one side resting against my belly. It fully lifted up when Blueberry did a little shift, pushing my belly straight out. Just not quite as violently as the kicks were -- more of a gentle push. 

Not much longer, Blueberry, and then you'll be able to stretch (though we'll swaddle you for a while so you can't stretch too much...)!

(Not that that's permission to come soon, mind you! Mommy needs a week or so to get stuff done -- and rest!)