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breastfeeding, Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Marriage, mental health, NFP, Parenting, pregnancy, Sex, Theology of the Body

NFP: The methods and the madness

January 12, 2017

Never one to resist a pun.

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while, but I wanted to have a few months (a year maybe, now?) under my belt before going and saying something crazy like “we found an NFP method that works great for us and it’s been a game changer.” Before we go any further, however, the necessary disclaimer that I am not a medical expert, that my opinions are not those of a trained healthcare practitioner, and that what works great for one couple may not be so hot for the next. Which is why we have a proliferation of methods at our disposal. Some friends who learned the Sympto-Thermal method alongside us while we were going through marriage prep are still happily using it. Other friends have gone through one method after another, landing in their doctor’s office doing bloodwork and figuring out all kinds of hormone imbalances and health issues.

So the big fat disclaimer to this all is: NFP is women’s healthcare. And we women and the men who love us should take it seriously, and treat it as such. Which means seeking out doctors and nurses and instructors who are trained in the various methods, when we’re struggling with finding something that works and with figuring out our unique fertility. Facebook groups are super helpful, books are great, and online resources can be a godsend, but sometimes you need a trained professional to help figure out the language your body is speaking.

This is where I tell you that we found such a professional to teach us a wonderful new method of NFP well suited to my body, and we lived happily ever after. But no, I self-taught using the sage counsel of a combination of Facebook groups and my patient little sister. So do as I say, not as I do! End disclaimer.

Where were we? Oh yes, 3 methods in 3 years. Or just about. We learned Sympto Thermal through the Couple to Couple League when we were engaged, but perhaps because we were excited to start our family right away, I wasn’t paying the greatest of attention to that daily temperature taking protocol. Once baby #1 came along and I was supposed to start waking up at a reasonably early hour and testing again, along with making mucus and cervical observations, I was done. Between the night wakings, the nurse-a-thons and the unusual mucus patterns, we never found our rhythm (ba dum ching) with CCL again, and so we moved on to Creighton.

Creighton was great in terms of helping me to understand where I was chronologically in my cycle. Numbers are really difficult for me, and Creighton was more hands on (I’m sorry I literally cannot help myself) and helped make our fertility a more concrete concept. However. While I am nursing, it was basically an endless yellow sticker party for months and months and months. (For the uninitiated, yellow stickers are when your instructor gives you the green light to go ahead and consider some days infertile, based on observations over a period of months, and agrees that the hormones related to breastfeeding are also totally obscuring the cyclical mucus patterns your body is supposed to show once you cycle returns postpartum, and that you probably haven’t actually been in Phase 2 for the past 13 weeks. In my case, that return to regular fertility typically begins about 10 months after baby, as long as I’m breastfeeding.

The psychological toll of the yellow stickers was tough on me though, because it always felt very “fertility roulette” and very much all on my subjective shoulders to make the right observations and then to give the correct classification. Call it a lack of self confidence or just a body really intent on getting pregnant again, but I pretty much felt like every month we practiced Creighton we were going to conceive, so long as I was nursing. Enter the weekly Dollar Tree pregnancy test taking ritual.

After Luke was born in 2015, our 4th sweet bundle of joy in 5 years, I was very anxious for a break, both mentally and physically. Creighton did not seem to be a good fit for our particular situation, at least during the nursing months (and they were all nursing months, back then) so we sought out yet another method, one that several of my girlfriends had tried and found success with.

One thing I want to note is that because the postpartum season is so exhausting and so overwhelming, it is the one time I have really found myself tempted by contraception. I totally get it. I get that it seems like a godsend, like an obvious solution, and like the only non-insane thing to do when you’re bleeding and sleep deprived and financially bereft and just barely hanging on.

And I think a lot more of us have been there than are willing to let on in polite company.

But in my heart of hearts, and in the heart of our marriage, I know that God would not hold something good just out of arm’s reach from us. And that if contraption were a true answer to our hardships, the Church who is a good and faithful Mother would extend it as the healing balm to our fertility woes.

But she hasn’t. Because it isn’t. It isn’t the answer when you’re 7 weeks postpartum and haven’t slept in 44 nights, or when you’re struggling to make the mortgage payment, or when you’re teetering on the precipice of menopause and really, really afraid of having a baby in your mid forties.

Contraception is either good for human love, or it isn’t. It either builds up and supports marriages, or it tears them down. And it’s either something God has asked us to yield to His will over our own on, or else it’s something that everybody can freely partake of, no matter the circumstances.

Human circumstances are rarely black and white, but God is. And His guidelines for our happiness and holiness are unwavering, however wobbly and wrecked I might be in any particular month.

So, back to the new method. We ordered up a Clear Blue monitor (this one from amazon, use my pal Bonnie’s affiliate link to shop there), which comes in a really fun box with “helps you get pregnant faster!” scrawled on all four sides of it, as do the monitor sticks, which inspired a ton of confidence in me when I opened the package, and which I really love seeing under my bathroom sink every morning.

Basically, the Marquette Method did an end-run around this ovulation predicting and pinpointing urine-testing monitor and figured out a way use the monitor and to co-opt it’s data to reveal to a woman the specific parameters of her fertile window (Phase 2). The monitor uses urine test sticks which measure detectable levels of lutenizing hormone (LH) and estrogen levels and can give a pretty accurate picture of when ovulation is occurring, and then gives you a count down back to “low” fertility after peak day. I like the objectivity of the method tremendously, because I can put all my faith into a tiny machine instead of my exhausted midnight brain, and that seems eminently more reasonable to me. I’m only joking the very littlest bit about that. Which maybe I need to talk to someone about. But seriously, having an objective standard by which I am measuring my fertility signs has been a huge weight off my shoulders.

The postpartum period was a little tricky with Marquette (and a little more expensive with the test sticks) but it was hugely freeing for me to feel like I had a good understanding of what my body was doing, and that even with the continuous mucus patterns during breastfeeding, the hormone levels my body was producing were low enough to reassure me that my cycle was not yet returning. I think it probably bought us literally months of useable days during the postpartum period with Luke. And now that I am in regular cycles again, it has been extremely helpful in corroborating other psychological and physiological changes that each cycle brings.

Learning Marquette with a Creighton background helped me to not trust the monitor overly much, too, I would say. Because I know have what I think is the most possible data at my disposal, short of blood testing, I can make truly educated decisions about my fertility using what I learned with each method, checking the hard data against the more subjective. (Not saying Creighton is not scientifically rigorous, just that it’s easier to be objective with a little computer than with a square of toilet paper.)

Also, it should be noted that for couples who are struggling to conceive, Creighton is something of a gold standard for many people.

I hope this was helpful? Informative? Not mind-numbing or totally repulsive? And I may write a more detailed Marquette “how to” post one of these days, if I can work up the enthusiasm.

About Me, breastfeeding, infertility, motherhood, NFP, Parenting

A good mother does _____

March 15, 2016

This morning, while preparing to host a dear (and newly repatriated to America, yay!) friend and her two young boys, I hastily wiped down a sticky kitchen counter and swept a handful of breakfast stragglers into my arms. As I loaded dirty plates into the dishwasher, my eyes drifted back to the glistening laminate (can laminate ever truly glisten?) and I spied a can of formula still taking up real estate. Hastily and almost guilty, if I’m being very honest, I snatched up the can, shoving it into the depths of the pantry and pulling the doors closed.

I wouldn’t want to explain that to her, I thought to myself in a surge of unbidden shame.

Shame.

I felt shame because my friend might see a can of formula on my counter.

This is ridiculous for a couple reasons.

First of all, this is a close friend. She handcrafted my wedding bouquet, for goodness sake. Why on earth would I expect her to care, let alone to comment negatively, about what I’m feeding my baby? Is the sight of a can of powdered milk going to send her running from 7 years of relationship?

Even more disturbing, at least to me, was the unbidden and automatic guilt that sprang to my mind as I stashed the offending canister.

Why do I care what anybody else thinks about this? Why do I assume feeding my baby certain foods makes me a good – or a poor – mother?

Because I don’t live in a vacuum. And because as much as I’d like to consider myself above the petty fray of the infamous (and largely digital, at least to my experience) “mommy wars,” I’ve still internalized a lot of the messages therewith:

Good mothers breastfeed

Happy babies get plenty of uninterrupted mommy time each day

Well adjusted siblings are spaced at least 3 years apart

And so on.

These are logical fallacies. Or at least what I’ve done with them is. Because yes, good mothers do breastfeed. But the reverse is not necessarily true: that breastfeeding makes a mother good.

Even though I’m living a vaguely countercultural lifestyle and I am able to laugh (sometimes charitably and sometimes not) at a lot of what passes for “expert” opinion on birth and childrearing, I’m not immune to the cultural milieu of which I am a piece.

So yes, I felt shame over my sad little can of (organic! top quality!) baby formula. Because for me, it represents a host of perceived shortcomings and disappointments that I didn’t want to compound with a friend’s potential disapproval.

I’ve breastfed each of my children, but with each subsequent baby the duration of our nursing relationship has shortened. Joey was a ripe 13 months when he bit me goodbye and we said hello to whole milk. John Paul, after a dalliance with exotic Italian baby goods, made it to almost a year. Evie was 8 months when her delayed growth plus my dwindling supply teamed up to push me into the baby aisle – scratch that, the pet food and cleaning aisle, with a single shelf of baby goods – of Whole Foods, clutching a slip of paper with the best kept secret in baby formula scrawled in furtive script, a recommendation from my crunchy best friend.

And now here we are, 7 months in with Mr. Luke, my sweetest and happiest baby yet, and I’m supplementing him.

And that’s okay.

It’s more than okay, as I see writ plain across his chubby, joyful face. He’s thriving, he’s securely attached (as fistfuls of lost hair can attest to,) and he’s frankly disinterested in where his milk comes from, so long as it comes.

Breastfeeding was never going to be a walk in the park for me. My mom struggled with it, and had no qualms about introducing formula for most of my siblings past a couple months of age. She and I and all my sisters have hypothyroidism, and one of the side effects is low milk supply. I knew that going into motherhood, but I dismissed the possibility that I was going to struggle because, well, it would be different for me. I just knew it! Plus, I’m stubborn as hell.

Well, it has been different, but it hasn’t been perfect. I’ve seen the lactation consultants, used the highest grade pumps, taken the recommended supplements, and sat in the support group circles. I’ve nursed in the Sistine Chapel, at Mass in St. Peter’s with the pope, on trains, on planes, and in (parked) automobiles. I’ve nursed as much as I’ve been able, but as I’ve aged and had more children, it’s become more challenging, both physically and logistically.

And this is where another nasty little lie from the mommy wars creeps into my mind: you know, if you’d spaced your children more carefully, you wouldn’t be damaging them by denying them the best food nature has to offer. If you hadn’t foolishly gotten pregnant so soon (I had one woman tell me this on an online breastfeeding support forum when I was pregnant with my second) your child would be so much better off. How selfish.

That’s for sure a lie, and some dubious science, to boot.

Ideal child spacing is a fantasy we’ve been lured into entertaining with the advent of contraception, believing that we have complete autonomy over our fertility. (There’s even a fun Catholic version of this myth that starts circling as early as pre-Cana NFP prep, touting the wonders of ecological breastfeeding for surpassing one’s return of fertility. And it really does work! For some people.)

Well, as a friend to multiple sufferers of infertility, both primary and secondary, and to countless dozens who struggle on the more fecund end of that spectrum, I’ll call it what it is: bullshit.

And isn’t that the diagnosis for most of what passes for gospel in the mommy wars trenches?

We take a bunch of ordinary practices and parts of daily life with kids: feeding, sleeping, transportation, etc., and we turn it into some kind of maternal talent show, looking over our shoulders and hoping the invisible judges see that we’re using this particular BPA free orthodontist approved pacifier, and that we just sterilized it in mineral water.

Nobody is watching though. At least, there’s no objective panel of judges.

All we have is each other, other moms and even women without children, passing imaginary judgments on themselves and, unfortunately but much less frequently I’d wager, on each other.

I’m done. I’m too old and I’m too tired to care if anybody sees me nursing without a cover while sitting on a patio somewhere this summer. And when I asked a flight attended last week for some water to mix into a bottle, he didn’t bat an eye. In fact, he proceeded to serve me free margaritas for the duration of the flight, so it may have worked deliciously to my advantage.

I’m bowing out of the mommy wars which I didn’t even know I’d waded into, and I’m doing so first and foremost by taking control of my own deficient internal monologue; the one that says anybody who matters cares a whit about whether my breast or a silicone nipple are in my baby’s mouth, and that it should bother me if they do.

And the next time I catch myself musing silently that “a good mom would ______” right now, I’m going to stop and remind my sour-faced subconscious that “Actually? I am a good mom. And a good mom takes care of herself so she can take care of her children, too.”

And sometimes that self care involves a plastic bottle and a little rounded scoop.

About Me, birth story, breastfeeding, PPD, pregnancy

Why we chiro

September 11, 2015

All four kids are asleep and it’s still 30 minutes till my 8:45 bedtime so…why not blog about it?
I wanted to take a minute to shout out to a very special doctor in my life, and throw a little praise his way for how much his services have impacted our health this past year.

Last September when we were just starting to really worry about Genevieve and her chart-eschewing growth rates and gross motor apathy, a friend recommended that we see everyone’s favorite chiropractor (at least in Denver), Dr. Mario Chavez at Vita Nova Spinal Care, a NUCCA practitioner. I was tempted to file it away with all the other advice we’d been given as “to investigate at a later date,” but something nudged me to make an appointment.

Dave and I have been under regular chiropractic care for years, I as a former high-volume athlete and car accident aficionado and him as a guy who just inherited bad joints, but our former chiropractor was of the “whack ’em and crack ’em” school. I always felt great while he was working on me, but I was also always a little bit afraid he was going to break my neck. Also, my back usually started hurting again about 20 minutes into the drive home, so…not the best use of copay.

Our experience with Vita Nova has been utterly different from any other chiropractic care we’ve ever received. Which is part of what makes me want to write about it.

I’ve definitely had conversations with medical doctors and physical therapists and watched their eyes glaze over or roll ever so slightly at the mention of the c-word, so I know there’s some debate over the legitimacy or efficacy of the discipline, but we’ve seen such encouraging results in our entire family that I wanted to document them here in the event it might be helpful to someone else. And I’m a really big fan of both/and: we use both western medicine and alternative care, because if it works, it works! (And sometimes it takes both antibiotics and essential oils to kick an ear infection, you know?)

The two most dramatic stories in our family’s chiro experience are probably mine and Evie’s, so I’ll go with those.

Evie started seeing Dr. Chavez every week or two last September, and within the first two months we started to see tangible results. She’d been in physical therapy concurrent with chiropractic care, but most of her PT sessions involved lots of stiffened, panicked screaming and resistance to any sort of movement she wasn’t familiar with. This included hands and knees, kneeling, tummy time, rolling from front to back and back to front, and last but not least, standing/bearing weight on her legs.

After her first few chiropractic adjustments we started to see her visibly relax. Her little legs had been drawn up tightly most of the time, but gradually she started to relax them. Her hip joints, so tight that we’d had X-rays done (per the recommendation of the orthopedics team at Children’s Hospital) to rule out hip dysplasia, started to rotate more freely and she achieved almost a full range of motion. And then, best of all, about 5 months into her treatment, she finally started to crawl and to bear weight on her legs.

She was 17 months before she dropped her butt-scoot entirely, and 18 months before she walked, but she did it.

And now she runs.

And she’s very, very hard to catch.

I’m not saying she never would have gotten here otherwise, but it sure helped things along.

Once I started seeing Evie make progress under chiropractic care I was confidant that I wanted to sign up for the whole family plan, so we crunched the numbers and decided to make the investment by paying up front for a year of care at a substantial discount. I promptly got pregnant a month or so into our plan, and I believe that chiropractic was one of the best things I could have done for my 32-year old multiparous body.

Throughout Luke’s pregnancy I gained ridiculous amounts of weight (as always) and managed to keep a fairly impressive level of activity up (per usual), but I did not experience the usual back problems that generally come with trimesters 2 and 3.

I slept better, I kept up my workouts until the very day I went into labor, and I didn’t experience the excruciating low-back pain that had accompanied all my previous pregnancies.

Most impressive, though, has been the postpartum period. I was absolutely exhausted from a demanding and unpredictable labor and a somewhat traumatic delivery, and to top it off I was experiencing some of the worst-case-scneario side effects from the (two!) epidural(s) that you read about on Baby Center at 4 am and shudder while swearing silently.

When I would lie down or rise too quickly from sitting, an electric zap would run the length of my spinal cord, beginning at the area of the epidural catheter insertion and zinging its way up to the base of my skull. It felt like someone was shocking the inside of my spine with a cattle prod, and the reverb was traveling up to my brain.

I googled it (of course I did) and as I read other women’s stories, I concluded that I was, of course, doomed to suffer these aftereffects well into my 50’s because I was stupid enough to put narcotics into my spinal fluid (again), and that my number had finally been called. I’m not dramatic. At all.

About a week and a half after Luke was born I had my first adjustment (and he had his second, much-needed after his shoulder dystocia tussle en route to the outside world) and guess what? I felt one final mighty zing during the appointment and then…nothing.

I have had zero pain or side effects from those stupid misplaced meds since.

Also worth mentioning, though I can’t prove the connection with hard data:

I’ve never had as much milk or had as much success breastfeeding. And Luke is the first baby to “get it” so soon after birth. Within 8 days or so we were chugging along like old pros.
He sleeps beautifully with minimal fussing or gas.
He is super alert and has the head control of a grown man.
His Apgars were off the hook despite having a distressing birth with some minor oxygen deprivation
I don’t have postpartum depression (this one’s a stretch because yes I’m also doing progesterone shots and yes, both sets of grandparents are semi local now and yes, I have wonderful sisters and friends around me to help carry the load. But I’m sure that there’s a tiny correlation all the same.)

In short? My body is healing properly because it’s properly aligned and able to do its thing. And I feel good. Tired, yes. Overwhelmed? Frequently. But hopeful, too, because I can observe the healing and the progress that’s being made.

If you’re local to Colorado I highly recommend you make an appointment with Dr. Chavez and see about getting your own “justment,” as Joey calls them, because life is short, and a healthy body can do a lot of good in this world.

breastfeeding, Family Life, Marriage, motherhood, Parenting, PPD, pregnancy

Bringing home bebe: Surviving week 1

August 21, 2015

I promise I’ve been percolating a birth story for you fine people, but mostly I’ve been breastfeeding. Which does not lend itself to much higher-level cognition or, actually, typing.

Let me preface this by saying that little Luke is a very, very “good” baby, as far as such a statement can be applied to a tiny unique human being. What I mean by good is that he nurses enthusiastically, sleeps a decent amount, and is almost supernaturally calm during his wakeful times. In sum: he’s the same baby he was in utero. Calm, placid movements, no insane periods of tumbling and kicking, and aside from the ferocious Dorito cravings (and subsequent heartburn) no major pregnancy pains. I mean, none that were his fault, per se.

When he was born he had a bit of a distressing final exit, but once arrived he blinked and calmly looked around the delivery room, checking out dad’s face and then settling on mine. The still slightly jumpy nurses watched him warily, wanting – but holding back, for which I am eternally grateful – to cut that cord and get him under the observation lights, but it became clear after about a minute that this baby was in no way distressed. He was just very, very chill. His 9/9 Apgar score underlined that for everyone, so we were mostly left alone for our first hour. And it was heaven.

I did make the rookie mistake of letting all the amassed visitors who had somehow seen the bat signal (I literally had told nobody but my sister and Dave’s mom that we were in labor) come tumbling into the delivery room with well wishes and tears less than 30 minutes after his arrival, so that delayed nursing for us until about the 1 hour mark. Once he got going though, he went to town, and I, tottering on the precipice of 40 hours without sleep, let him do pretty much whatever he wanted. Rookie mistake number 2.

By the next morning things were headed down to the dirty south in the nursing department because of my sleep-deprived inattention to form, and really, until yesterday, there was a lot of pain. A lot. The nurses were vigilant about checking Luke’s blood sugar every 90 minutes for the first 12 hours post delivery, because “big guys take a dip,” and sure enough, his did. So every 90 minutes he got a heel stick, I got punched in the stomach. And I basically nursed him in a zombie-like state of “oops did I drop him, nope, he’s magically back in the bassinet. Whew.”

Needless to say we checked out at the 24 hour mark on the dot. Much sleep. Such restful.

Once we got home I was able to deploy my arsenal of top 5 must haves for newborn survival mode, and thus we come to the long and rambling point of this post. Thanks for hanging on.

1. The rock n play. This thing is everything. We only started using it when a friend lent it to us for newborn Evie, and not coincidentally, it turns out, she was our very first baby with a sleep setting. We have the super simple model that does nothing but hold baby snugly at a 45 degree incline and it is amazing. 3-4 hour stretches of sleep amazing. And no spitting up. I can reach down from bed and rock him and I can drag it around the house and keep him from the roving paws of his adoring fans. 5 stars.

2. This pump. It’s technically my sister’s and maybe it’s become a literal sisterhood-of-the-traveling-pump situation as 3 of us have now employed it at one time or another, but we all have our own connective gear and whatever. I have a lesser-quality single side Medela of my own, but nothing beats the Pump n’ Style for efficiency and power. Which are, of course, what you look for in a diesel truck. Or a breast pump. We had to take a 8-hour pumping “vacation” this week while I healed and it was a life saver. As the baby gets older I’ll generally try to pump 1x a day to have some emergency milk in the freezer for when it’s 5 am and I’ve been up 5 times and daddy is relatively rested and ready with the bottle.

3. These swaddle blankets. I bought knock offs this time at TJMaxx and they’re just as awesome in terms of size and feel, but I can tell they’re not as sturdy and we’ll see how they hold up in the wash. Either way, you need a big, thin muslin swaddle blanket or three to wrap baby burritos, function as a floor changing table, and even a nursing cover. And a head scarf for those adventuresome forays to Trader Joe’s. Just kidding. Maybe.

4. These pacifiers. When Joey was a baby I remember crouching in his room in horror at 2 am sometime during week three, sobbing from sleep deprivation and the fear that if we retrieved the hospital-issued soothie from the trunk of the car, nipple confusion would set in immediately and he would never go to college. Well, we caved and he started sleeping a little more with the extra sucking satisfaction and we went on to nurse for 13 months. No word on college admissions yet, but he does know his colors.

5. All the domestic help you can get/afford + Progesterone injections. Super normal things to add to a baby registry, right? Well if you’ve ever danced with post partum depression (PPD) you know that it’s not an event you want to attend a second time. Ever. So far I’ve had it horrifically bad twice, and moderately bad once, and I’m crossing all my still-swollen fingers and toes that this 4th times the charm in terms of avoiding the big bad P. As soon as I get near delivery day, my wonderful doctor writes me a prescription for the progesterone to be filled as needed. This time that need surfaced on day 2, so Dave was able to hunt down a pharmacy that carried the goods and we were off on our every-other-day injection adventure. So far it’s helped to stabilize my moods and stave off the super crazy, (though, if I may be so bold as to offer some advice, if you struggle with depression or anxiety, do not take Percocet. Don’t ask me how I know. Gulp.) and in my doctor’s words: “it either helps or it doesn’t, but it can’t hurt. And if it’s going to help you, it will help you right away.”

True.

I’ve also been shamelessly accepting any and all offers of help, babysitting, meal deliveries, etc. The big kids are a little sensitive about all the upheaval and the start of the new school year, but we’ve farmed them out for afternoons at the park or play dates a couple times this week, and we’ve had some helpers at the house too, in the form of my college-aged sisters, Dave’s wonderful little sis, and my trusty mother’s helper who is currently steam mopping the disgusting kitchen floor. I wasn’t sure it was worth it to have her come today since Dave’s still home, but it turns out it was. And he was able to be spelled for a morning of work and silent coffee consumption.

Oh, and if you can and if he can, if there’s any way at all that it can be done, have your husband home for the first week.

Dave doesn’t have paternity leave, but he had accrued PTO and a rough idea of when baby was coming, so he planned his work projects accordingly. For which I am eternally grateful.

7 full days of breastfeeding boot camp and netflix in bed and trying your very hardest to not care that the floors look like that and the laundry is piling up, because thank God daddy is home to wrangle big kids and cook mac n cheese and give you the incomparable gift of a week-long baby moon.

I’ve been reading this and repeating Blythe’s mantra of DO NOT CARE over and over again, because taking it easy does not come that way to be, and it’s almost a force of nature to resist the siren call of the vacuum. But I’m recovering a lot faster for all the resting, I can tell. And I’m making way more milk (tmi? Whatever, we’re in full mommy blog mode today) than I usually am at 7 days out, and I’m gonna chalk that up to all the resting and water-drinking I’ve been doing.

The normally stoic bebe is crying out for his 11vensies, so I must away. But thank you for all the prayers and well wishes on the Facebook page. And Luke says hi.

About Me, breastfeeding, Marriage, motherhood, pregnancy

What’s in your {hospital} bag?

July 23, 2015

At the risk of becoming hopelessly and irrevocably preggie-centric around here, I thought it both necessary and worthwhile to list out some of the goodies making their way into my as-yet-unpacked hospital bag for round 4 of birth wars. So maybe typing about it will spur me to action, and maybe said action will entice said baby to decamp hotel uterus for the much roomier accommodations of an official, dedicated nursery space complete with crap mommy spray painted, just for you.

Maybe?

Last time we made the trek to the shining white building in the suburbs it was Christmastime, I was beyond done with the entire gestation business after a solid week of prodromal labor and one “false alarm/go home and sleep it off” drive of shame. So I think when we rolled back up to actually meet Genevieve I was wearing like, not my own pants? And maybe a Bronco’s tshirt and a peacoat? It’s hard to remember. And it’s entirely possible that I didn’t bring a toothbrush or any shampoo.

This time though? This time will be different. This time, for starters, I’m finally allowing myself to entertain the notion of staying for the entire recommended slash allotted period of 3 days/2 nights, even if I feel physically capable of going home. Because room service, cable tv, and endless baby holding arms in a handily equipped and conveniently located nursery down the hall.

But mostly for the crushed ice.

So if that be the case, I’ll need to be packing for more of a long weekend adventure and less of a “I woke up this way” crawl across the emergency room parking lot.

Here’s what I’m thinking of bringing along for the ride:

1. 2 nursing tanks, yet to be purchased (but leaning towards at least 1 of these? Because holy flattering drape), and one super stretchy nursing bra + disposable nursing pads. Yes, I laudatio si that there is a decent reusable option on the market, and maybe I even own a pair or two myself, but laundry is not my favorite way to recover from birth. So disposables it is.

2. Laptop + charger. Nothing says “spa like” quite the way hospital wifi does. Plus, no kidlets to share my screen with. Who knows, I might even get ambitious and bang out the birth story while the new arrival is sleeping off his or her epic descent.

3. This hair + body wash. Can I make a confession? I haven’t used grown up shampoo or conditioner with any regularity in months. And my hair has never looked or felt better. So a travel bottle filled with this for baby and me.

4. Ear plugs. Like, 3 pair. Last time we delivered at this hospital it was the second-to-last Sunday before Christmas and things were so blessedly silent on the L&D floor. I think I got maybe 1 knock on the door all night? And none of those awful “just coming by to tally up your wet diapers” rounds, either. It was bliss. Hoping for more of the same. (And as an aside, do you pray for your medical staff before your births? Some wise woman advised me to do so, esp. the nurses since they really do the brunt of the work of birthing, aside from mom, and can really make or break a delivery experience.)

5. A large, empty suitcase with my bathrobe, aforementioned undergarments, and some additional basic toiletries, including this magical elixir of humiliation which is super effective and which I felt not at all ashamed of purchasing at Vitamin Cottage last night. Cough. I’ll most likely wear my vvvvvvery attractive Liz Lange yoga ballon bottoms home, plus the hospital-issued secrets which are beyond Victoria’s comprehension. Why an empty suitcase, you ask? Why, for all the hospital-grade pads, lidocaine spray, newborn diapers + wipes and mesh fancies I can wrangle. We didn’t buy newborn dipes for ourselves until little miss Genevieve was 3 weeks old. #workthatcopay. Just saying.

6. Some of these Arbonne fizzies to mix with my amazing crushed ice in my amazing new water bottle (which is a large motivator for continuing to breed. Large.) I don’t like to drink that much coffee in the first few days because I get parched so easily, but I also don’t want to feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. So, compromise.

7. My own pillow. I’ve never done this before, maybe because of germ phobia? Which makes exactly zero sense because of all my other personal effects I feel no hesitation bringing with. But this time I’m determined to bring my own, deliciously cotton-covered and adequately-sized pillow and case to rest mine weary head upon. And who knows? Maybe without the thin, sweat-provoking layer of non-wicking industrial grade latex beneath my face I won’t sweat to death in my adjustable bed. Dream a little dream.

What am I forgetting, mamas? Do you have any hospital stay must-haves that you won’t give birth without?

breastfeeding, motherhood, Parenting, pregnancy

Why I Don’t Believe in Parenting Styles

January 31, 2015

Once upon a time I was newly married and freshly pregnant with our first little bundle of joy, and I had all kinds of plans and ideas for how we were going to raise him. For starters, I would be delivering him naturally because birth is exactly like a marathon and you just need to train for it, everybody knows that.

My little sister who’d flown across the country with her her 6-week old son to stand up in our wedding should have known that, but since she ended up getting an epidural, she obviously hadn’t put in the work to train for it. (Somehow, she refrained from punching me in the face. Bless her.)

But I was going to do it differently. I was going to birth my baby naturally, with my husband-coach standing supportively at my side, and then I was going to exclusively breast feed because of course it was best for his little brain and it would handily assist me in losing all 55 lbs. of baby weight within 6 weeks of giving birth.

I remember vividly the first time we gave him a pacifier. He was about 3 weeks old, neither of us had slept in as many days, and one evening during an hours-long scream fest I furtively pleaded for my husband to run down to the car and dig around in the backseat where I thought I’d remembered throwing the free sample pacifier from the hospital.

“Nobody has to know, we’ll just give it to him this once. He’ll still nurse, right? Right?!”

Sobbing, second-guessing, and then, wonder of wonders…a calmed and soothed baby. Who went on to breastfeed for 13 grueling and occasionally rewarding months. I remember being so proud that his first beverage other than breast milk was plain old dairy milk. No nasty formula for my little prince, I was mommy, hear me roar.

About a year and a half later I was standing in an Italian farmacia on a Roman street corner, anxiously scanning the shelves of baby supplies, trying to select a formula that might be good enough for my colicky 10 month old who’d never slept through the night and who had injured me so severely with his budding teeth that I had to supplement for a couple days. Let’s just say I chose unwisely.

Boom.

By our third trip down L&D lane, I swung merrily into the nurses’ station after 3 days of prodromal labor and announced that I’d like my epidural placed now-ish, and that I didn’t want to feel anything other than joy for the next 12 hours.

The unifying theme to all of the above? Well, aside from the obvious you don’t know parenting until you’ve done it with each particular child, the common thread is this: never say never.

Unless, of course, it’s truly an issue of good versus evil.

I’ve learned to pick my battles in the ongoing drama that is the mommy wars, and there are only a handful of hills I’m willing to die on. They all have something in common though: they deal in objective moral reality.

Have a different style of discipline than we do? Great! We can still totally be friends. Super into co-sleeping and attachment style parenting? Okay, well that’s cool if it works for your family. Feeding your children conventional dairy products and processed chicken nuggets? Hey, if the grocery budget balances, who am I to judge?

But seriously, none of those issues deal in moral objectives. There is no black and white when it comes to pacifiers vs. nursing on demand, sleeping at mommy’s bedside vs. a room with a view down the hall, and appropriate spanking vs. love and logic.

The issues I will do battle over? Exposing our kids to evil via inappropriate television or movies. Vulgar or sexual language in front of them. Violence – true violence, not playground scuffles – against them or by them. Those are moral issues. Those are the times when parents must stand up and fight.

But for the love of all the loves, let’s back the flip down when it comes to co-sleeping. Let’s stop spamming up threads all over social media about immunization. Let’s not pat ourselves on the back so hard we fall flat on our faces if we’ve been blessed with an unusually compliant toddler who doesn’t need to be leashed near traffic, because we all know it’s our immaculate parenting practices that are responsible for his angelic nature.

The truth of it is, kids are a crazy combination of genetics and gentrification, nature and nurture. And for the most part, every parent is doing their best with what they’ve been given. And please, please let this filter down deep inside your mommy brain: nobody is parenting at you.

If your sister posts a Dr. Sears article on her Facebook page, you don’t need to feel affronted. If your best friend chooses not to vaccinate with morally-questionable (NOT illicit, mind you, but questionable, i.e. up for determination by the individual conscience) formulations, she is not trying to kill your newborn. And if your mother in law chides you for not giving that squalling 4 month old a hearty bottle of cow’s milk, smile kindly and thank her for her suggestion. No need to whip out The Womanly Art and start quoting scripture to her.

You are not a hero for birthing a baby without drugs. You are not a criminal for putting your child in day care. You are not a negligent mother for working outside the home. And you are not a thoughtless breeder for having your children 15 months apart. You are an unique, unrepeatable individual and a highly-specialized expert in your field: your kids.

Nobody else has the right to raise them. God knows, because He’s the one who gave them to you.

So strap on that Ergo. Or don’t! Toss that chubby baby in an exersaucer and hit the treadmill next to them. Hell, switch on that iPad and take a shower by yourself. And be confident enough in your decision that you don’t waste precious time and energy defending your choices to strangers on the internet or your comrades in arms at play group.

Because whatever else you’re choosing to do for your child, in your home, in your family…you surely don’t have the time for that.

breastfeeding, media, morality, motherhood, Parenting, pregnancy, vaccines

Why I Don’t Believe in Parenting Styles

January 30, 2015

Boom

The unifying theme to all of the above? Well, aside from the obvious you don’t know parenting until you’ve done it with each particular child, the common thread is this: never say never.

Unless, of course, it’s truly an issue of good versus evil.

Nobody else has the right to raise them. God knows, because He’s the one who gave them to you.

So strap on that Ergo. Or don’t! Toss that chubby baby in an exersaucer and hit the treadmill next to them. Hell, switch on that iPad and take a shower by yourself. And be confident enough in your decision that you don’t waste precious time and energy defending your choices to strangers on the internet or your comrades in arms at play group.

Because whatever else you’re choosing to do for your child, in your home, in your family…you surely don’t have the time for that.

birth story, breastfeeding, pregnancy, Suffering

Jesus doesn’t care about your epidural

November 25, 2014

… At least not any more or any less than He cares about your harrowing trip to the dentist sans novocaine, your half marathon finished under 2 hours with a stress fracture in your tibia, or your heroic push through to bedtime while your better half is away on business and the natives are restless. And pooping in the bathtub.

I’ve observed an uncomfortable phenomenon in the Catholic blogosphere whereby some moms seem to be trying to out-suffer each other with gruesome labor tales, stories of timing contractions to correlate with each mystery of the full, 20-decade rosary and, my personal favorite, uniting the incredible pain of labor to the mystery of Christ’s redemptive suffering on the Cross. Because holiness.

This is right and good. It is what we as Christians are called to do: unite temporal suffering to the salvific passion of Christ.

But, here’s the thing. There are as many ways to suffer virtuously as there are human persons on this planet. And there is nothing uniquely efficacious about labor pains and the grueling achievement of birthing a fresh human being. Aside from the fact that in modern day 21st century America, it might be the closest many of us come to true physical anguish for the first time in our lives. And I totally get that. That is powerful.

But there is nothing about labor – particularly labor sans meds – which makes the suffering incurred more holy or more effective than any other cause of suffering. And there is nothing wrong with a woman choosing to forgo or mitigate some of that incredible physical pain with modern medicine. It doesn’t make you less of a Christian. It doesn’t make you less of a hero. And it definitely doesn’t make you less of a mother.

Look, I’m all for a good birth story. God knows I’ve penned a few in my day. But let’s cut the crap and stop trying to one up each other in the delivery room (or in the birthing pool, as it were.) It’s not a competition. And you are not more holy than what’s-her-name if you did it all without a needle stuck in your back or an incision across your bikini line.

We live in a time where medicine is available to mitigate the pain of labor. And God did not say “though shalt not numb thy nether regions for to give birth is to remove the stain of original sin.”

That’s actually what baptism is for (the stain removal, not the numbed nether regions. But I digress.)

I love that some women are prepared to enter into the birth experience with a clear mind and veins absent of any controlled substances. My two best friends have birthed 7 children between them using nothing stronger than castor oil. Good for them!

And if that is your story too, then good for you! May your child know of the real sacrifice you made, for whatever reason, to bring them into this world au natural.

But may you never presume that the months of sleepless nights with a newborn, the horrors of mastitis, the hell of postpartum depression, or the pain of recovering from a c-section are somehow lesser sufferings. We each carry our own crosses. And no two look the same.

There’s no one way to have a baby. Thank God for that.

breastfeeding, Parenting

7QT: Whole 30 update, baby milestones, and 100% more bacon

September 13, 2014

1. Can I just start out by saying thank you again for the overwhelming flood of love and support this little blogger received thanks to my pity party of a post on Monday? Well, I’m grateful. And I’m glad I’m not the only crazy in the bunch, as so many of you have reassured me. Solidarity in psychosis.

2. We’re on day 13(!) of the Whole 30 and it is going so well. I mean so, so well. Last night we went on a date to Barnes and Noble where we sat side by side for 2 hours in dead silence, drinking tea and reading books we had no intention of purchasing. It cost us $4.17. It was awesome.

The last time we had a date night that cheap I think was…never. Do you know how much more expensive it is to drink something other than flavored water and go to restaurants? Yeah, who knew? But obviously this way of being is not a lifestyle. At least it never could be for us. Has it become less painful now that we’re almost at the halfway point? Much. But do I still fantasize about giant glasses of wine and slabs of chocolate cake with salt and vinegar chips sprinkled over the top? I’ve said too much…

3. If I can take one more take to talk at you about my food, I will just go ahead and post the following to evidence that ain’t nobody suffering in this house. Behold my lunch:

Homemade green apple, acorn and butternut-squash soup with coconut milk and curry. With bacon on top. This is not a restrictive way of eating. At least not when it’s snowing in bleeping September and I don’t mind roasting winter squashes in my oven all afternoon while I dress my urchins in rags from last winter and resolve to go glove shopping soon.

(Recipes here and here. I loosely adapted both to accommodate my very large acorn and butternut squashes, and it is friggin delish. I’ll write it all down one day, but just know that it’s very hard to screw anything up with squash in it. And there’s no dairy! And it’s so creamy.

4. This girl.

When she’s not busy gnawing off my nipples (TMI TMI why can’t I stop?) and yelling mama and dada, she’s busy throwing my parenting for a loop by refusing to look even somewhat interested in crawling, scooting, pulling up or growing legs or feet. (I mean she has legs and feet. They’re just pretty much the same size they were at 3 months.) I’m sure she’s fine and I’m 100% sure I’m one of the craziest moms on the block, but I’m still taking her in for a weight/development check this afternoon just to rack up one more copay in the name of neurotic parenting. Can’t help myself. (She’ll be 9 months old on Monday.)

5. Bacon. Can I be frank with you? We’ve gone through a pound of it since yesterday morning. Can I be more frank? By “we” I mean “I.”

Be still my heart? Like, very, very still. Maybe as in no longer beating?

But I’m thisclose to fitting into a size 10, which is crazy because I was a healthy 12 in my magic mom jeans when this adventure started. I’ve even been able to start running a little bit again, and I feel good. Like really, really good. Power to the pork products.

6. Do you have a grasp on your child(ren)’s temperament? I was mildly obsessed with this book in college and then I was chatting with a girlfriend this week and she brought up the junior version, which I’m dying to get my e-paws on. And she dropped a bit of a bombshell in so doing. While describing her incredibly sanguine firstborn son I realized that she was also describing my unbelievably social firstborn, and I may have had a stern chat with the Man upstairs about why He saw fit to saddle an introverted choleric melancholic with an extroverted sanguine with egomaniacal tendencies. Oy vey.

7. Hearing/Watching/Reading: Currently spinning in my virtual playlist. Currently streaming on my Amazon prime. Currently hanging out on my nightstand.

Linking up with Mrs. Fulwiler, Laura Ingraham’s hottest new competition.

breastfeeding, motherhood

7QT: training, nursing babies, and my new momiform

August 30, 2014

1. The momiform. Here ’tis, folks. At the tender age of 31, I think I’ve finally settled on a daily uniform that doesn’t involve obvious amounts of spandex and/or sweat-wicking performance fabrics.

Flats, studs, skinnies, flowy top, repeat.

Optional seasonal mix ins to include scarves, riding boots and flip flops.

There. Done. Do I look like a grown up? I feel 100% better when I leave the house like this, and shockingly, I still manage to make it to the gym around 4 pm even when I don’t strap on my workout gear first thing in the morning. Don’t believe the lie, ladies, don’t believe the lie…

2. I’m starting work with a personal trainer at said gym next week, 2x’s weekly for one month. Inspired by Heather’s fearsome results and hoping to do more to combat the chronic back pain that child bearing and child hauling seem to have sentenced me to, I’ve been promised big results. I tend to believe the spritely, 114 lb girl who will be training me, because she’s really nice and has a blinged out miraculous medal ring on her finger, and because I fell down the stairs the day after our first 30 minute session because my thighs gave out. If you can make me fall down the stairs in muscle spasms, you have my business. I’ll let you know how it goes.

3. Breastfeeding: the saga continues. Seriously, I had all but thrown in the burp cloth and had even sent a few SOS texts to Grace and to my bff Eliz (no blog, sadly) fabulous formula feeders both with big, healthy babes, and then I decided to try one last resort and scheduled a session with my friendly neighborhood lactation consultant Mariann (literally she’s in my address book. Such dairy. So milk.) and what do you know, she told me that Evie might just be teething, that she’s 8 months old and eating 3 squares of solids a day, and that if I wanted to keep nursing her I should go ahead and nurse her when I felt like it, as long as it was comfortable, and with the expectation that babies her age can take a full feeding in under 10 minutes. Also she told me to go ahead and use formula too, if it helped me.

What the what? I think the takeaway was that I’m the mom and can decide what’s best for baby and me, both. Earth shattering.

Seriously though she’s the most amazing woman, and she helped save breastfeeding for me not once but three times. So now Evie is happily snacking in limited amounts of time as long as she promises not to nibble or pull, and as soon as she starts misbehaving, pop goes the bottle in her mouth. Win/win. Oh, and a nightly Guiness is helping my supply recover from our hell week.

4. Which is not strictly Paleo, mind you. Okay it’s not even loosely paleo, but my sister in law brought some for Dave’s birthday last weekend and it’s just taunting me from the fridge. Just like the Chicfila I served to “the kids” for lunch somehow ended up in my mouth, too. Oops.

5. On that note…starting a brand spanking new Whole 30 tomorrow. Why tomorrow? Why, because it’s the beginning of Labor Day weekend! And won’t it be fun to not eat any chips or buns or beer or cookies at any of the parties we’ll be attending?

I figured it would be a good exercise in mental and physical discipline, you know? Because there’s always a reason to cheat. Plus, I’m tired as hell every single day even though I’m not pregnant and I’m sleeping 8+ hours a night. Seriously I feel like death by 4 pm every day. I even tried a month of super expensive vitamins and supplements, to no avail. It’s got to be the naughty nighties that have crept into my routine (ahem, Guiness. Chocolate that my boss left for the boys after a dinner party the other night (hi Uncle Ollie!) The insanely aromatic banana bread that our wonderful nanny baked with the kids yesterday afternoon.

But no more. I’m putting my foot down for a solid month. I figured that by synching up with my 4 weeks of training at the gym, I’ll be giving my postpartum body the biggest push I can muster. Plus, once Fall begins in earnest, I tend to lose major health motivation in the face of an endless stream of holidays and birthdays. So it’s now or never!

6. Haley’s running a Whole 30 on the Carrot’s Facebook page, but I don’t know if I can access the closed group without a personal FB account, so I think I’ll just troll along on my own. Anyone in? Solidarity?

7. I got nothing, 2/3rds of the household is now awake because their wildly optimistic mother put Evie down for her “morning” nap at 11 am and oops, there goes the afternoon edition. Oh, wait, there is this:

We met Matt Maher this week at a conference and he was gracious enough to take this very awkward photo with a very excited fan. (I am so stupid when I meet famous people. So stupid.) Anyway, I have loved his music for forever. Seriously he’s one of the only Christian artists I like, and not just like, but absolutely adore. Speaking of that, he led worship for Adoration and it was beautiful. Real. Brought me back to Steubenville in a good way, in an honest and refreshing and unpretentious way.

Okay, duty calls. See you at Jen’s.

p.s. we’re not really doing school this year, per se, but this killed me.

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