Parenting & Baby Tangents

This week.

I’ve hardly been on the computer the past week.  I haven’t blogged, I’ve let my messages and emails go stale, and I couldn’t take pictures because the old ones weren’t uploaded.

I did:

• spend the Solstice with my daughters and some friends (aged 5 and 2).  We made suns out of clay and out of tissue paper, and blew big, rainbow bubble spheres to dance around with.
• clean my house and hide gifts for a daddy scavenger hunt.
• have family over for a Father’s Day Party.
• paint bookshelves, and color code our books.
• rearrange the dining room for more crawling space.

I had a lovely, slow, non-technological kind of week.  But I missed blogging about our last mom’s meeting, and I had a lot of messages to catch up on.  The fact is that I love writing, love staying touch, and have an internet business to keep up with.  I love technology too.  The fact is, there just aren’t enough hours, so we juggle as best we can!

And Another Thing (co-sleeping)

Chances are, if you are pregnant with your first baby, you’ve daydreamed about what it’s going to be like to hold your baby, wondered what kind of personality your baby will have, even speculated about what your baby will grow up to be.  But I bet you haven’t considered whether or not you will “let your baby cry it out.”

In the milky haze of pregnancy, all my thoughts were rose-tinged baby toes, cute-as-a-button noses, and the perfect fit of baby to mother.  I wouldn’t have dreamed of sitting unhappily in the living room listening to my baby cry in the other room, and I don’t think any mother goes into it with this in mind.

You don’t have to and your baby shouldn’t have to, either.

While deciding not to co-sleep is not simultaneous with letting your baby cry, choosing to co-sleep precludes the concept most decidedly.  When your baby is with you, your baby will never have to cry for you.  It’s that simple.  It’s a very small, tremendously compelling reason to choose co-sleeping.

Perfectly at peace with her daddy...

Co-sleeping and Babywearing

Tonight Annabelle and I showed some moms how to wrap their babies.  Altogether TOO much fun!  But somewhere amidst the flurry of fabric, co-sleeping came up.

A mom (Hi, Lee Anne!) wanted my take on co-sleeping.  I told her how convenient it is, how cuddly, even how it contributes to ecological breastfeeding.  But I felt like I hadn’t really put my finger on the importance of co-sleeping, and now that I’m home, I realize what I was missing.

Human babies are designed to be with an adult human constantly.  Mostly the mother, for obvious reasons, but they need us for a lot more than sustenance.  Their bodies grow stronger when they are being held, and likewise their emotional constitution.  Their bodily functions are regulated by ours, learning rhythm, even remembering to breathe, by proximity to our more experienced lungs.  Their muscles gain tone and balance by the stimulation of being held against our working muscles going about our daily tasks.

This is not mere fancy, on my part.  Studies show miraculous interrelations between mothers and babies, from the mother’s bodily temperature adjusting in response to her baby’s need for temperature regulation, to the sensitivity gained from sleeping beside her tiny offspring.

Babies aren’t designed to be alone.

And so, many of the benefits of babywearing are shared by co-sleeping.  Keeping your baby close means a happier, healthier, stronger, safer baby.  It means a more relaxed, confident, peaceful, and fulfilled mother.

My Spoiled Baby

I am guilty of spoiling my baby.

She expects to be picked up when she cries, and I do everything I can to comfort her.

I spoil her by nursing whenever she is hungry.

She is so spoiled, she sleeps with us in bed every night and I help her fall asleep every time she wakes.

She is spoiled with my attention, even though it means we won’t have a second income to buy her things.

I spend time entertaining her and trying to make her laugh just to make her happy.

She spoils me too.

She lets me hold her whenever I want.

She spends hours just cuddling and nursing.

She spoils me by letting me stay in bed all night.

She spends all day engaging and enchanting me and nearly every smile that crosses her lips is for me.

Maybe when we’re old and gray we’ll regret having spoiled each other.  But I doubt it.

Parenting Choices…Mothers Day Post

I’ve been so busy increasing inventory, putting up new web pages for new products, and sending newsletters out to my mailing list that I haven’t posted much.  I really wanted to get one in on Mothers Day, and now that the kids are in bed, I have at least half an hour left to do it!

I have realized that my parenting choices all work really well together.  Some of them would be very difficult without the others.  The choices I’m talking about, some of the things which are really important to me, are these:

1. Unmedicated birth, especially homebirth
2. Nursing (for more than a year)
3. Babywearing (bet you saw that one coming)
4. Meeting baby’s needs (not letting them “cry it out”)
5. Taking care of my babies and children myself every day (stay-at-home-momming)
6. Homeschooling (child-led, not curiculum-led)
7. Not vaccinating
8. Cloth Diapering

As mothers, we all want the best for our babies AND our families.  We can’t have happy babies without happy mommies, so it’s important that we not martyr ourselves for our children.  So there is no place to judge.

Homebirth is so much easier than hospital birth because the pregnant woman is in a comfortable place, and if she is alone or with supportive people, birth is not interfered with.  Mandated positions, food/drink prohibitions, monitoring, time-limits, and examinations can all lead to disaster–and those are just a very few of the most mild interventions that have become routine.

Nursing has never been hard for me.  One reason is that my daughters were born at home and no one interfered with our nursing.  Babies born in hospitals may be sabotaged from developing their natural nursing relationship by these means, among others: medicated birth, separation from mother (brief or long), being bathed, being swaddled, being offered bottles, and being subjected to a schedule.  Therefore homebirth made nursing easy.  The fact that the people I surround myself with are loving supporters of breastfeeding is also a huge factor.

Extended nursing–nursing until my babies are done–has been facilitated by my stay-at-home position, my group of nursing-supporting friends and family, and my babywearing, which allows me to nurse while doing other things.

Babywearing works because it is such a huge boon to my mothering that it would have been silly not to find a way to babywear.  As a stay-at-home mom I am with my baby every day, all day.  I know that holding her is best for her and she knows that she doesn’t like being put down.  Babywearing makes it all go smoothly, and allows us to nurse easily anywhere too!

I feel strongly that babies, in all their dependence, are supposed to be cared for constantly.  They are not supposed to be left alone until they can manage themselves.  They cry when their needs have not been met.  Sometimes it is impossible to meet their needs, and then we can hold them and let them know they are not alone while they are unhappy.  Constant care is not so intimidating when you realize that babies don’t need much.  Human contact and company, mother’s milk, someone to take care of their elimination and otherwise keep them comfortable, sleep.  Babywearing allows me to give my baby those things easily.  Staying home with my kids means I’m the one caring for them and I know that they get what they need.

I don’t like to say that I am lucky to be a stay-at-home mom because it’s so much more than luck.  Yes, my husband can support us with his income.  But we also live within our one-income means.  Some husbands make more money and their families cannot afford to give up the mom’s income.  Some husbands make less, and the family makes do with less.  Some people have kids and no husbands to support them.  We’ve built what we have in life, and we shape our lives around it to best fit our priorities.   One thing that makes it possible for me to take care of our kids is that we don’t pay for daycare or school.  Seems obvious, but it means that our children, so far, do not cost us much money at all.  Being a stay at home mom allows me to nurse my children as much and as long as we want.  It also allows me to hold my babies as much as possible.

Homeschool is very important to me for more reasons than I can reasonably list here.  Some biggies are that I think my children can learn more if they aren’t kept in a school all day; I don’t want to miss being with them every day; I don’t want them socialized by schoolkids; I don’t want strangers or the government choosing what to teach them.  My five year old loves learning, and so do I.  We learn all the time, and we don’t use a list to do it.  We learn out of order, anything we like, anytime we like.   We can do this because I am a stay at home mom.  This also means that we don’t have to follow a certain schedule, which means we don’t have to train our babies and children to schedules.  Instead we can see to their needs as they come up.

We don’t vaccinate because we trust and support our immune systems and we know there are many dangers in vaccines.  We try to eat well and take care of ourselves.  We do not put chemicals or medicines in our bodies if we can help it.  We are aware of and in control of these things much more because our kids are home with us.  Our children also start out with all the right immunological protection from nursing, and extended nursing means they continue to reap the benefits.

And finally cloth diapering is so much healthier for our babies, without even bringing our checkbooks (remember we’re on one income) and the planet into it.  Just as we don’t put chemicals into our bodies, we don’t store chemicals beside our babies’ genitals.  We stick to 100% cotton–natural and breathable.  And we take our babies to pee and poop in appropriate places (toilet, potty, bush) when we are in good enough communication to know that they need to go.  Because healthiest of all is not having your urine and feces on your skin at all.  Also cheaper, and easier (imagine not having to change diapers).  As a stay at home mom I am our children’s primary caregiver, and I get to choose what to put them in, and I choose NO DISPOSABLES!  Because I babywear and am usually with my baby, I am able to facilitate her elimination needs with elimination communication.

Because we spend our days together, and because we do not have an academic schedule, we are able to cloth diaper, nurse, and learn all the time, and everywhere we go, and I know that my baby or child is not left with unfulfilled needs.  At the same time, my needs can be met because we are that flexible with schedules and plans.

It works so well.  I wouldn’t change a thing!

How I Had an Intact Birth after Cesarean

I was seven months into my second pregnancy, with many more discomforts than my first pregnancy, when my midwife asked me to get an ultrasound. Something just didn’t seem right, and she would be more comfortable if we checked it out.

We had the ultrasound and were joking together in the waiting room afterward, when the midwife came in and said soberly, “It looks like there are some malformations.”

“Oh my God,” I said, and looked at David. It was SO unexpected and such a shock that I didn’t really know if it was real. Once it sunk in, I started to imagine horrific malformations—a baby with two heads—and instead of feeling compassionately toward my baby, I found myself squeamish and grossed out that something malformed was growing inside of me. Suddenly instead of being a mother or a baby, I was a victim in Alien.

It did not help that the hospital could tell us nothing more. They sent us to another hospital where we were to get a level two ultrasound. We went the next day, and spent a good couple of hours trying to convince them to admit me. Apparently you can’t just waltz into a place and get an ultrasound. You have to have been sent by a medical professional. Well, we had been, but we hadn’t been given a piece of paper saying we had been.

At last we were in, and once they had administered the ultrasound they put on their serious faces and told me that I couldn’t leave. My baby had hydrops fetalis and the organs were not developing properly. I would have to stay in the hospital and the baby would be monitored constantly.

The next morning I was told that I would be getting a cesarean that day. The sooner the baby came out, the sooner the medical professionals could get to work fixing the baby’s body. It was our baby’s best chance at survival.

Being the last person in the world who would ever have a cesarean, I asked if there wasn’t some way I could birth vaginally. I was told that the baby was breech, and anyway wasn’t strong enough to survive being squeezed through the birth canal. I nodded numbly.

I almost told them how I didn’t want a hat put on the newborn baby because I had decided that being held skin to skin would provide enough warmth, and that I thought a baby’s body would learn to self-regulate temperature quicker without a hat; that babies were made to self-regulate when they needed to, and that their bodies are fast learners; that I didn’t want a hat to interfere with my smelling and nuzzling and bonding with my newborn. Then I remembered that they would be trying to save the baby’s life, to keep the heart beating, and that my crazy newborn hat ideas were pretty meaningless. I remembered that my baby might not live. And I kept my mouth shut on this most trivial of birth plan details—the only one that came to mind at the time. It hadn’t occurred to me to discuss whether my baby was bathed, or to request that she be kept with us, to mention my intentions to breastfeed exclusively or the fact that I didn’t want my baby circumcised. No, it was the hat thing that came to mind.

I treasure the few minutes we had to hold our baby girl, to name her and make sure she knew that we loved her. I really look back on this day fondly. It was the day I met my daughter and they only day I held and kissed her.

Those unmatched moments were preceded by a horrific operation. They kept increasing the anti-nausea influence pumped into my IV, and I kept vomiting anyway, so they gave up and handed my husband one of those little vacuums the dentist uses to suck the saliva out of your mouth. Thus were the mother and father engaged while the baby was being born. It was as if we were not at the birth. The birth happened on one side of the curtain, while my husband tried to comfort me through a terrible illness on the other.

They told me that I would feel as though I could not breathe, but not to worry because my body would be breathing just fine. I nodded at the time, but it turns out that when you feel like you can’t breathe, it’s very difficult to remain calm. I kept insisting that my collar was cutting into my neck and my husband and the anesthesiologist tried with futility to pull it away enough to make me comfortable.

I wondered if I would survive. I wondered how much longer I had to survive it. I forgot that a baby was being born.

Suddenly I realized that there were a group of doctors saying medical things on the other side of the room, and a second group of doctors murmuring over my body. I thought, the baby is out! Those doctors reading out heart rates aren’t talking about mine—I had a baby! I squeezed my husband’s hand and my eyes filled with tears. I don’t know when the baby had been born or how long until I noticed but I was a mommy and I no longer noticed whether I could breathe or remembered to vomit.

One of the doctors came over and wondered whether we wanted to be told the sex. Until now, even with all the ultrasounds, we had requested to remain in the dark. Suddenly the baby had been born and I realized there was no moment of revelation to wait for. Sheepishly I said that they could tell us the sex. I mean, hell, everyone else knew!

She was a girl. She was alive—I could still hear reports of her heart rate. She was going to be rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit and the father had to go with her. I could see her go by if I turned my head just so and waited.

They were wrong—I couldn’t see her. I only saw doctors and a wheeled table rush past. Then I was left alone. I guess they were still repairing me. I lay there for a long time not knowing what was happening behind the curtain but thinking about what might be happening in the NICU.

Finally I was wheeled into a curtained room to recover. Recovery meant a deceptively friendly nurse pushing down on my abdomen to cause uterine contractions. This was more painful than birth ever was. After a while family members were admitted one at a time. My mother and sister, and my husbands parents had all come to the hospital to wait outside the operating room. They knew that their opportunity to meet their grandchild might be brief.

One at a time they smiled at me and held my hand, and said nice things about our little girl. They had all seen her already. I guess she had been ready for visitors before I had been. We talked about giving her a strong name because she would have to be strong. Tiamat, my sister suggested. I told each of them that I knew she would be all right because our family was a strong and happy family that had good things happen to us. By now I was convinced that she would overcome the difficulties she’d had in utero and quickly grow into a healthy and normal girl. I believed in and expected a miraculous recovery. How could it be otherwise.

They each agreed with me in turn, but they were reserved.

Finally David came in to see me. He told me that I needed to come see the baby. He asked the nurse how soon I could see her. He didn’t say that he was afraid she would die before I got there.

Eventually I was wheeled through the hospital to the NICU. There were several babies in plastic boxes with parents hovering nearby. There were lots of wires and machines and blinking lights and blinking noises. And there was my baby, lying still, eyes closed. She was dark brown and a little bit purple and very big—she did not look premature. Her body was puffy and swollen beyond normal. She didn’t move.

I could touch her, and I did, reaching across from my sickbed to hers.

Hi, baby. I’m your mommy and I love you. I’m so happy to see you. You’re going to get strong and come home. Soon I’ll hold you and things will be much better. You need to be strong and get better, sweet baby.

I said these things, with my hand on her head, because it was the part of her that wasn’t covered up. I knew she needed a mother’s touch and a mother’s voice. My own mother was with me while I talked to her because girls need mothers.

David had been talking to the doctors and now came to get me. They took me into a closed room where we could have privacy, and David told me that her lungs, which had stopped developing months ago, would never develop the way they were supposed to.

While in my womb she had been healthy–I had felt her kicking strongly every day.  In utero my body had sustained her and she had not relied upon her own organs.  Outside the womb she would not live without life support. I was her mother and if I could have been her life support as I had been for more than half a year, I would have.  But I couldn’t even hold her.  I nodded calmly and said, “So we should turn off the machines?”

He nodded.

“Then can I hold her?”

He thought so, and the doctor confirmed it, and the fact that I would get to hold my baby made the decision so easy. Yes, take her off the machines and bring her to me!

Our family gathered in this room, and a doctor brought my baby to me and put her into my happy arms. I immediately started to unwrap the blanket around her so that I could see her body, but found that wires and syringes were wrapped up in it. I quickly covered her up again, because it was the opposite of how I wanted to see her.

I studied her face and this time I told her a different story. I told her that she could leave this body and find a healthy body. I told her this one hadn’t grown properly but that she could find another body that would be perfect and that she would live a wonderful life in a healthy body. I told her that life was really nice and that it wasn’t usually like this—hospitals and plastic boxes and blinking lights. I told her I loved her, and I would always be her mommy and she would always be a part of our family. I told her how glad I was that she had come so I could meet her. I told her we had decided to name her Clementine Annabelle.

Then her daddy and each of our family members held her and spoke to her. I asked for a camera and someone found one to take some pictures of her. Then the doctor came in and listened to her chest and told us she was gone and we let him take her body away.

David’s mother asked if I didn’t think she had perfect little ears and I worried because I hadn’t looked at her ears. Later I asked to see her body at the funeral home because I wanted to look at those ears. It was a mistake, as this empty body looked completely different, her mouth stretched downward at the edges in a frown that could only be made by uninhabited flesh. I quickly looked away.

We scattered Clementine’s ashes in the Gulf of Mexico. Ada misses the sister she never met. Recently, after the birth of our third daughter, Ada asked me why we didn’t bring her to the hospital to meet Clementine and I explained how unpleasant it had been and that we didn’t want her there unless we knew the baby was going to be okay. She named her doll Clementine and takes very good care of her. She waited patiently for us to get pregnant again so that she could finally meet a little sister, and she celebrated the birth of our next baby with a lot of joy.

Ada has been the most amazing sister and daughter. She takes good care of us and shows a lot of love every day throughout everything. She delights in her little sister, with no impatience, and is always there to hold her hand and say, “Don’t worry, little Apple,” when the baby is crying.

Our new baby shares a name with the one we lost. She is Annabelle Apple, perfect, and healthy, and surrounded by love.

Before we could get pregnant again, our family had to move out of mourning and come to a place where we could look to the future again with love, excitement, and a certainty that life is good. Babies need happy families, which is why they are blessed with the ability to make us so very happy. And now I think of each of my three birth-days with love and happiness.

I encourage anyone who has had a traumatic birth experience (regardless of the outcome) to address it fully and with all your heart before you next birth. Annabelle’s perfect birth in our home would not have been possible without our comfort with birth and our knowledge that this baby was healthy and this birth was not tied inexorably to the previous one.

We had to come to this knowingness in spite of the medical warnings and admonitions. We did a lot of research to determine why it was unsafe for me to birth vaginally and based on the studies, statistics, and our own experiences, we determined that a home vaginal birth was, in fact, the safest birth for me and our baby.

I did a purification rundown through my church which rid my body of the drugs that had been administered to me in the course of my hospital stay, and this program culminated with a miraculous few minutes in which all the mis-emotions of that birth experience spilled out of me and when they were gone I was left with peace. That same moment is when the tenderness on my abdomen vanished and the numbness left by the operation disappeared. I know from this experience that physical toxins, body somatics and emotions are tied together in a very real way that I believe contributes to physical problems that can occur in the future—such as uterine rupture or stalled labor leading to a cascade of interventions.

I also received counseling from my father, a minister, on the experience of Clementine’s birth and we continued until the experience left the realm of emotional trauma and came to be better described as a memory with loss about which I can be sad without being helpless to that sadness. I was myself again, only richer in knowledge and experience and love, instead of being a victim of what had happened to me.

In these ways I was prepared to conceive and birth again and I am so happy with the outcome. It allowed my daughter to have a healthy and safe birth free from fear or sadness, and allowed her to have a healthy, happy mother too.

I am deeply indebted to my husband who took such good care of me and makes me happy enough to withstand any devastation! He never faltered in holding my hand through this despite what he was going through personally as a father and husband.

Our family couldn’t have been more wonderful and we are very lucky to have so much support.

Without Jill Adams, who puts the “independence” back in “independent midwife,” we would not have had prenatal care and a trained birth professional. No one else here would entertain the idea of my birthing vaginally due to the “high risk” vertical incision on my uterus. Jill not only accepted me into her care without batting an eyelash, but after our initial discussion of emergency procedures should we need to go to a hospital, she did not bring up my scar, never referred to me as high risk, did not refer to a “trial of labor” and showed nothing but confidence that my homebirth was assured.

Dr Magloire, based out of Miami, drove the six hours to Orlando just to meet with several of us VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean) hopefuls because there was no doctor closer than six hours away who would agree to discuss the risks and benefits of vaginal birth versus cesarean delivery and then sign a piece of paper saying we had been made aware of the risks.

In Florida this is a legal requirement for a midwife to deliver a baby vaginally to a woman with a scarred uterus. That’s right, I had to get permission to use my vagina. Why is it that “no means no” but when it comes to using my vagina for its intended purpose my right to assert that “yes means yes” is passed off to an OB?

I originally thought I would have to birth in a hospital. It was only after searching in vain for a doctor who would “allow” me to have a VBAC in a hospital that I started to wonder whether I had a chance at a homebirth—my first choice.

But was it safe? I researched heavily and in the end the truth found in my heart was more important than truth found in statistics. I’m convinced that uterine rupture (the big risk of vaginal birth after cesarean) is more closely linked to spiritual and emotional than physical state, not because the integrity of the uterus is not important but because the physical follows the spiritual. Form follows function. I’m not proposing that it’s all about confidence, or being prepared. But I think fears are very important to the VBAC and that coming to peace with the past is probably the greatest contributor to success.  Birth is such a sacred event and going into it with anything less than a full measure of strength and peace is dangerously irreverent.

I did have to come to terms with the statistics as part of the process of gaining peace. Other mothers with a classical incision may find it difficult, as I did, to understand “their chances” because of the amazing dearth of information on the VBAC with a classical incision. This incision type is very unusual now, so that all the literature reassures mothers that unless you have a classical incision, the risk of rupture is really very small. That left me saying, “But what if you do have a classical incision? What then? Is there no hope?” And the literature doesn’t give any clue.

The information here gave me hope: http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/275854-overview.

A 2% rupture rate was not so high.  And I did not have any information about the health, weight, diet or spiritual state of any of the women in the study. I reasoned myself to be healthier than most Americans, physically and emotionally, and concluded that my risk of being in that 2% was itself small. Add to that my advantage of having had a prior vaginal birth, and the fact that it would be two years between births. Most compelling, I planned a large family, and all the studies show that the more vaginal births you have after cesarean, the lower your risk of rupture, while the more repeat Cesareans, the higher the risks of dangerous complications.

Furthermore, I reminded myself that a 2% rupture rate did not mean a 2% incident of fetal mortality. Outcomes were best when a woman with a rupture could be gotten into an operating room within about ten minutes. Our home is very close to a good hospital. Close enough that getting to the operating room might take no longer for me than for someone in the labor and delivery ward of the hospital itself! I called the hospital to verify that they are in fact ready to operate at all times with anesthesiologists, O.R.s, and surgeons on hand.

I had come to realize that for me, birthing in a hospital would mean major abdominal surgery.  So I decided to birth at home, and plan on going to the hospital only in the event that I needed that surgery.

Another tangent to research is the laundry list of risks associated with cesareans in general and repeat cesareans in particular. The 2% risk of rupture was not after all weighed against a 100% guaranteed complication-free cesarean birth. To the contrary, I found benefit after benefit of birthing vaginally, for both the baby and the mother.

I told my husband how sure I was about having a homebirth, assured him I would not risk our baby’s life and that my choices were being made in order to secure the best outcome for our baby. My husband told me that after one homebirth and one hospital birth, the last place he wanted us to go was a hospital. He much preferred a homebirth, a safebirth.

So I was ready to hire a midwife. Unfortunately, the search for a midwife mirrored my search for an obstetrician—this one, too, seemed destined to failure. I was contemplating going out of state for my birth when someone on the local ICAN (International Cesarean Awareness Network) recommended Jill Adams. They didn’t know if she would accept a client with a classical incision, but she was known for accepting higher risk mammas. Lucky for me, Jill had just started her own business as an independent homebirth midwife after working at a birth center for a woman with more conservative views.

We met with Jill who explained that we would have to get our permission slip signed, but assured us that she would be happy to attend our birth with that legality out of the way. She wanted us to get one ultrasound to verify the position of the placenta, but she was willing to forgo use of the doppler during my prenatal care and resort to her old-fashioned fetoscope so as to minimize our baby’s exposure to ultrasound. She was experienced with vaginal birth after cesarean, and with home waterbirth. She was confident, comfortable, friendly and wonderful with our five year old daughter, whose presence was welcome at the birth along with whoever else we wanted there.

And she does this for families all the time.

The story of our perfect, peaceful homebirth on Christmas Day 2009 is here.