Baby update

So after one doctor last week acting as if I could have this baby any second, today's doctor seemed unsure whether the baby would come early at all. Now, to me that seems like an under-reaction because I'm 37 weeks 1 day, and already 4 cm dilated and 80% effaced. There ain't no darn way I have almost three weeks left in me. But I'm going to take it a little less easy. Maybe have a glass of wine later this week.

Meanwhile, I told the doctor I was worried I wouldn't be sure I was in labor because I was induced with my first, but when I got to the hospital and they hooked me up to monitors they told me I was contracting regularly on my own. I hadn't noticed and they really didn't get truly painful until hours after they started pitocin and they broke my water. Having suffered endometriosis since I was 12, early labor wasn't painful enough to even register on my pain meter.

And this is why I love my doctor: He told me to ask the Blessed Virgin for help, and pointed to the Miraculous Medal around my neck and said, "That's not jewelry you're wearing."

What an amazing reminder!

What a blessing.

Now, kid: I would like you to come out with your hands up, sooner rather than later. Preferably on Saturday so you can have an awesome trick birthday like your sister.

Progress...

So it turns out that what I needed most to get some stuff done for the imminent arrival of my new little bundle was talking about how underprepared I was. Since I vented two days ago about my list, I have:

• Washed some newborn clothes
• Found the almost-nonexistent unisex newborn clothes left over from Keira's infancy. She must have trashed everything because I found one tan onesie, one tan sleep'n'play, one pair of black pants, one pair of brown pants and one pair of navy pants. (Plus one pair of Santa jammies and a white bunting for going outside.) Turns out that it's a good thing I ignored my logical instincts and bought stuff for the new baby even though I "already had stuff." Because as it turns out, I ain't got stuff.
• Cleaned up the guest room, which mostly meant unearthing the bed. It has become my dumping ground for everything that didn't have a logical home, which in a home as small as this was a lot of stuff. A bunch of stuff is in plastic bins which will be stored, largely unsorted, in our garage until we move again, at which time I will likely just throw it all out. Sigh. 
• Got our wills notarized, so they're actually official in case anything should happen to us. Shamefully, our daughter's first two+ years were lived without any official provisions having been made for her care. Thank God nothing happened to us.

I swear I am usually an organized person. I'm just not up to the challenge of organizing this tiny little abode, which is about to have two kids in it even though there's really only room for one, when I have just spent the last nine months too sick to do anything useful.

So we just need a packed hospital bag -- although honestly I'm an expert at packing in like two minutes so I might push that to the bottom of my list -- and to figure out where this kid is going to sleep. We got one of these so that the baby can sleep in bed with us while still having his own space, because there is no room in our bedroom for a Pack'n'Play, but it remains to be seen if we can sleep with it between us, even in a king-sized bed. 

I need to move. To Texas. Where there is lots of space. Because Virginia is cramped, y'all.

Helloooooooo!

Last published in August... Oof.

Sorry, lone reader who might wander by!

Four months later, it's December and I'm in the home stretch of this pregnancy. By which I mean that I'm on modified bedrest to buy some time because I'm 36 weeks and three days and as of two days ago I'm already 3cm dilated.

Normally my doctor's office has an appointment at 34 weeks, one at 35 weeks where they do the Group B strep test, and then not another until 37 weeks, at which point they start cervical checks and go to weekly appointments, but I asked to go weekly AND start cervical checks a week early because a) my daughter was born at 38 weeks and b) this kid is beating the heck out of the doorway out. So when the doctor checked me on Tuesday she said, "Yup. Baby's head is really low and you're 3 cm so... Take it, like, really easy and maybe we can get another week or two out of this thing. I hope we see you here in the office next week." And then a minute later, "You're still working?!"

Eek!

I am not ready to have a baby before next week. I wasn't counting on being given a full 40 weeks to prepare but I thought I'd get at least 37-and-a-half or so. I got permission to continue working since I work from home, so I'm banging out everything that will be on deadline while I'm out and hoping for the best -- although my daughter's birth snuck up on me too and I left a lot undone and nothing burned to the ground so I'm not all that concerned, honestly. It's just a job.

I'm more concerned about the fact that I have not packed a hospital bag... Or figured out where this child is going to sleep... Or washed any newborn clothes... Or even found his sister's newborn clothes that are unisex in color... Or cleaned the house for the inevitable guests...

Yup. So that's how THAT'S going.

HPV Vaccine is REQUIRED for school attendance in the District of Columbia.

Holy frijoles.

I live in Northern Virginia, so my TV channels are out of D.C. I just saw a commercial that was not only touting the HPV vaccine, but stated that it is required by schools in the District for all teenagers.

This is horrifying.

Forget about the fact that there is documented proof that the HPV vaccine has serious risks. How about the fact that parents should have the right to determine whether their child gets a vaccine that they do not need?

I am not an anti-vaxxer. My child is vaccinated. My children will be vaccinated for anything they can catch from airborne transmission and casual contact with other people. HPV, on the other hand, is transmitted through sexual contact. My duty as a parent is to teach my children about the morality of sex, the risks and dangers of sex, and the joy that is sex -- within a marriage.

I traversed my teens and twenties during the meteoric rise of the incidence of HPV. I have friends who have HPV. I probably have more friends with HPV than who know they have HPV.

I, on the other hand, was abstinent until I was married. I not only do not have HPV, but I've never in my life had to worry about whether I had HPV. Or chlamydia. Or an crisis pregnancy. And it's not because my mom shot me up with a vaccine -- which was available -- but instead it's because my parents taught me to respect myself.

My children will never attend schools in the District of Columbia. And if this requirement should make its way to the locality where we reside, it's looking more and more sure that they will not be attending any school other than the one I establish in my home.

Sunnier days.

My world is back in balance. Yesterday, Facebook brought me gray cloudy feelings. Today, I came across an article that I wanted a particular friend to see. It deals with a sensitive subject in her life, but I knew it would do her some good, so I posted the link on Facebook in the hopes that she'd see it. I didn't think I'd ever know if she read it, but about an hour ago she shared my link.

Facebook can bring so much ugliness, but today it served as an instrument of God.

On nursing and failing to nurse.

I just finished reading about Haley's recent experience with downshifting her nursing schedule with her 14-month old, and it made me think about my breastfeeding experience with my now-21-month old and what I'm hoping for with #2, due in December.

I had a serious problem with low supply with #1. I have various hormonal issues which caused me to be infertile for years, and so I was dismayed but I wasn't very surprised when, four days after giving birth, my milk still hadn't come in. I was more surprised by the lack of support from the pro-breastfeeding community, some of which insists (with a stunning lack of compassion) that there is no such thing as an inadequate supply of breast milk. "Don't supplement," they insist, "Because if you do, you'll cause nipple confusion and tell your body it doesn't need to make milk."

Okay, well, four days into her life, my daughter was bright yellow. Bright. Yellow. Her bilirubin levels were rising and rising and it was all because she wasn't pooping. She wasn't pooping because she wasn't eating. She wasn't eating because I had no milk and the very unhelpful lactation consultant insisted that I not feed her formula.

Her pediatrician, who had initially encouraged me to "just keep at it" and not supplement, changed his tune. "She's going to have to go back into the hospital if we can't get these numbers down. Give her some formula."

If I hadn't been a brand-new, clueless, impressionable mom, whose own mom lives a couple of hundred miles away, I would have done that already. If it happens again with #2, everyone can give whatever advice they want and I am going to feed my child.

My poor baby sucked down two ounces of formula in about three seconds flat. She was so hungry, you guys. They told me to only give her 10 ccs at a time but it was empty, all 60-ish ccs, before I could stop her. I'm glad I didn't stop her because she was SO HUNGRY. She fell asleep within seconds, after four days of crying all the time, and an hour later pooped out so much meconium it overwhelmed her little newborn diaper. She pinked right up.

I continued to nurse her. I spent all my time doing something to do with nursing. I would nurse her, then give her a bottle since she hadn't gotten much from me, then when she fell asleep, finally satisfied, I would pump with the hospital-grade torture machine I had rented, collecting about a half-ounce total, and then I would wash the pump supplies, and then sit down for what felt like four seconds, and then she'd wake up hungry again and we'd start over. Meanwhile I was drinking gallons of water, plus that absolutely foul concoction called Mother's Milk tea, and eating oatmeal and doing every other folk remedy to increase milk supply that anyone's ever heard of.

The machine of my nightmares.

It was beyond miserable. Eventually I got to a place where I was able to satisfy her with exclusively breast milk during the day, and only had to give her a bottle of formula at night because I didn't have enough to get any length of sleep out of her by the end of the day. From the time she was a month old until I had to go back to work when she was three months, she was in this way (almost) exclusively breastfed. I never felt letdown once. I have a vague idea what that means, and I know it never happened to me. I never got engorged with milk.

When I went back to work and she went to daycare, despite my best efforts I had hardly any frozen milk for her. This is when my amazing sister-in-law came to my rescue. She had a baby five weeks and one day after my daughter was born and while I was bemoaning my undersupply, she was dealing with the opposite. She had so much milk that she couldn't nurse without pumping first because her daughter would gag and choke on her letdown. She had so much frozen milk they couldn't fit anything else in their freezer. So every time I went to Pennsylvania to visit, I would come home with a cooler stuffed with frozen breast milk, and so my daughter was able to go to daycare every day with breast milk instead of formula. At first it felt a little weird, feeding my daughter someone else's breast milk, but I was so grateful -- my sister-in-law eats a healthy diet and lives a healthy lifestyle, and I don't care whose breast milk it is, it's got to be better for a baby than formula. (And I'm not knocking formula; that stuff saved our lives. But you know what I mean.)

While Keira was at daycare, I was pumping four-to-five times a day, and getting diddly-squat for my efforts. I could and did pump for twenty minutes a side and collect less than an ounce. Total. When she came home and nursed, she seemed to get something, but pumping just didn't work for me. I propped a picture of her in front of me, hoping for some oxytocin stimulation from the sight of her, and nothing worked. I would nurse her in the morning before I took her to daycare, in the early evening when she got home, and during any night wakings.

I held her off of solid foods for as long as I could, even though she was so interested in watching Mommy and Daddy eat. My mom told me she hadn't given any of her seven children a single bite until they were at least nine months old because they didn't need it. I, again, was young and impressionable and stupid and tried to hold off for that long too but only made it to seven months, at which time she took to eating like an old pro and refused nothing (except mashed peas, which begs the question: can you blame her?). At this time, she self-weaned. She had given up the evening nursing in favor of food, and I basically dried up immediately.

Please ignore my voice in the background. "Num nummers," indeed. Good grief.

So, obviously, what I'm hoping and praying for with #2 is: none of the above. I pray I have enough milk to feed him or her but not so much that it's squirting from my eyeballs like my poor sister-in-law. I pray I have an aggressive eater with a strong latch and enough patience to wait it out. I pray I have enough confidence to do what's best for my baby without listening to medical professionals who haven't been listening to me. I pray I have the humility to ask God for the wisdom to know what's best for my baby and not make any rash decisions borne of frustration (I'm asking Him now, but I'm going to have to remember to ask Him then, too).

St. Giles, patron saint of breast feeding, ora pro nobis.