Hippie Mom in a Preppy World

Posts Tagged ‘pregnancy’

36 weeks. According to most people baby is now considered a fully baked bun if it decides to pop out of the oven so even though I technically have almost 4 weeks left we have entered the “any day now” stage.

First time moms are notorious for going overdue but the general consensus with the exception of 1 person is that I won’t make it to my due date.

I’m not one for competitions but I’m curious to see what the online consensus is, if you have an opinion, post a comment with the day you think Baby Fox will debut to this world along with your gender prediction.  If you feel really psychic you can also add other information such as time of birth, weight and length.  I’m curious to see if the online opinion varies a lot from the people that have already expressed their “knowing”.

I don’t care when baby decides to show up as long as it waits until next Thursday (the 37 week mark at which point it is legal to have a homebirth in Florida).  That is a big difference to most moms in the online message boards that I visit which are bragging about their baby “having an eviction date”.

Last Monday we had the home visit with the midwife, this means that she knows how to get to our house and won’t be accidentally knock on the neighbor’s door at 2am.  She loved my meditation bench, something I’ve had for years that allows me to meditate in the lotus position for hours while keeping good posture and preventing my butt from falling asleep.  It looks like a mini kneel cushion as seen in Catholic churches, apparently midwives can sometimes spend hours on their knees during a birth so it’s good to know that she won’t have to worry about sore knees at mine.

“If you really want a humanized birth, the best thing you can do is stay the hell out of the hospital.” – Marsden Wagner former director or the World Health Organization (Women and children’s health) and author of Born in the USA

We are thinking about printing a sign to put on the door for when I’m in labor just in case I am in the backyard and decide to get loud and somebody calls the cops thinking that somebody is dying, it would be nice if I could find a template online though, lol.

Mentally and physically I’m as ready as I’ll be, not saying I feel 100% ready but it’ll have to do (and I’m sure it WILL do).

On the house front we are not fully ready but we’re way closer.  Last week we had a baby shower hosted by MIL and SIL co-conspired with hubby, I didn’t know any details until a few days prior and it was better that way.  We got a lot of very needed items, baby is all set for clothes, bath items and we even got a nursery furniture set!  Out of town family and friends that couldn’t attend sent gifts from afar.

I feel very grateful and blessed for the generosity of family and friends, we certainly wouldn’t have been able to buy all of this on our own.

Now I feel like I’m on a time crunch to get the thank you notes done and sent before baby arrives, yet another deadline!

Now I’m in the stage of buying the last minute must haves, found a good deal on the sling I wanted online, got a changing pad for 1 of the 2 changing tables that we now have and other minor items.  Still pending… a diaper pail.

I can’t stand Diaper Genie, most diaper pails are designed for disposable diapers, I was looking into just a kitchen trash can with a step but haven’t found the right one so I’ll probably end up ordering online.

Still looking for a carrier that Daddy will like, it looks like it will be an Ergo which is on the pricey range, specially if he will use it before 4 months because we would need to buy  the infant insert.  I’d rather spend the money in the Ergo than go cheap on an Infantino or Baby Bjorn for him, heck I would use an Ergo once baby is older.

I have finished sorting through baby’s clothing just to separate the newborn and 0-3 sizes to wash those first, baby has a lot of clothes!  More than mommy, lol!

Thanks to grandma Fox the clothes have been washed and the cloth diapers are being prepped which is great for my peace of mind and also a huge savings of $ and time at $2.90 per load (wash only) if we had gone to the laundromat.

While my nesting urge involved laundry and shopping, Daddy Fox’s nesting urge involved clearing and setting up the nursery.  One day he just HAD to clear the room of anything not baby related, that same night!  So here we are in the middle of the night relocating computers, desks, etc.  not a bad thing except it happened on the same day that I was trying to get the house cleaned and organized but relocating things meant we first had to create chaos, rearrange furniture and then… we could clean, so that was annoying for me but we got past it.

Daddy Fox’s second wave of nesting entailed getting the new furniture assembled, he pulled an all nighter going to bed at close to 5am and although not completely done he made a decent amount of progress.  It’s funny how our nesting urges seem to take turns, now that he’s slow down on the nursery setup I’m starting to get itchy about getting it finished, lol.

So formula companies seem to realize that they’re dealing with a hippie and now they have started to market ORGANIC formula to me, they just don’t give up!

On other marketing news, Amazon.com seems to know that I want a camcorder to video tape everything baby because they have been sending me sales and discounts on camcorders for weeks, unfortunately I can’t splurge on such a luxury when we still have baby stuff to buy so I probably won’t be able to get one until well after maternity leave is over.

Yesterday I had my 36 week appointment with my Primary Care Physician/ Breastfeeding Specialist/ Baby’s Doctor.  As usual it was great, we (meaning I) took almost an hour of her time with a long list of questions on breastfeeding, cloth diapering, vitamin K for newborns, etc.  I’ve never before had a doctor not rush through things and take the time to give honest answers in plain English.

When she asked me how I was doing and I said “good, aside from the swelling”, she immediately offered to write me a note for work to allow me to wear non-restrictive shoes for the rest of the pregnancy.  This is welcome as right now flip flops is the only thing that doesn’t torture my swelling feet.

I did find some slippers at Wally World that feel very comfortable and although they’re not designed for work, they do look like ballerina flats from afar so I hope that upper management won’t mind, I’m sure that they’ll rather have their supervisor wearing that than flip flops.

I find it half amusing/ half annoying when several people demonstrate that they are masters of observation and state the obvious with comments like “that belly is getting bigger!” I usually smile and give a slightly sarcastic “I think it’s supposed to do that, I would worry if it was shrinking“.  I really don’t understand why people get so shocked at the bump doing what it is supposed to do.

And yes, I know that my belly has been getting bigger, I live with it 24/7, there is no way I could have missed that, I even wrote this list:

You know your baby belly is big when…

- you keep hitting it with doors, including car doors, fridge doors and cabinets, when you close or open them (ow!)
- you instinctively turn sideways to squeeze through a narrow space, only to end up more stuck
- you can use it as a table when your sitting down.
-  your maternity shirts don’t fit so well anymore
-  you knock things over with it!
- you have trouble getting in and out of a public bathroom stall…why do those doors have to swing in??
- It’s an act of congress to flip over in bed every night!
- when you have food stains in the same spot on all of your shirts
- when you drop something and debate on whether or not it’s worth it to pick it up
- you walk down the stairs and can’t see the steps below
- you bend over to tie your shoes and it sounds like you’re dying.
-  you can’t sit up straight to eat anymore, so you lean back and put the plate on your belly.
- you try to cuddle up to your hubby and kiss him and you’re still WAY too far away!
- you snap the elastic on several pre-pregnancy skirts that you were trying to wear
-  in the middle of the night you have to wake up to get momentum going in bed to flip to your other side.. then when you do and finally get comfortable again… you have to FRIGGIN PEE!!
-  you are eating and the food didn’t just fall ONTO the belly – it bounced OFF the belly and hurtled ACROSS the room at great speeds
-  you feel like a turtle on its back trying to get out of bed and your husband makes that your new nickname

On the evolution of the nesting instinct….

So at first I had no nesting urge, then it showed up in a weird way by making me want to throw away anything not baby related and go shopping for baby stuff. By now it has evolved into a must get everything baby washed, sorted and organized!

It sucks that we don’t have a washer at home or I would already be done…  that would have been a great way to satisfy the urge and deal with insomnia at the same time.  Sadly the nearest 24 hr laundromat is in Ft Pierce and hubby doesn’t care for that area during the day so he wouldn’t approve of his wife going there by herself at 2am.

The prefold cloth diapers have to be pre-washed 4-5 times to make them soft, quilted and absorbent and that would be an expensive and time consuming endeavor at the laundromat so I need to get started now if I want to be done before baby gets here.

I thought that the nesting urge would come with a surge of energy but it looks like the energy part called out sick. My brain is spinning with all it wants to do but my body is totally uncooperative, add to that the fact that we’ve had a very busy week with minimal rest and I have gotten very little accomplished.

Daddy Fox finds my nesting comments cute and amusing but has no idea to what extent it bugs me. Before I would be all “I still have a month to get it done” but now I’m feeling like I’m running out of time, like I have to HURRY! What if baby arrives next week?! I don’t have the cloth diapers ready! I don’t have a sling yet! aaahhhh! Yes, this has triggered insomnia and dreams on the topic once I do fall asleep.

On epic swelling…

Swelling has now become the most stubborn third trimester symptom. It started with me having to take my wedding band off because it didn’t fit anymore and by now it has evolved into permanent cankles and giant feet. I even had to enlist hubby’s help in removing my toe rings as they were starting to make indentations in my toes and it felt like blood circulation would soon be compromised.

This is the first time in approx 13 years that I don’t have anything shiny on my feet. The swelling has gotten so bad that I practically live in flip flops now, I can’t fit into most of my shoes anymore, not even my boots! And those that barely fit feel like medieval torture devices. I even ended up having to make an emergency shoe shopping run midweek to get elastic sneakers that I could wear to work.

I do pretty good on the drinking fluids part but I don’t have the luxury to put my feet up often. By now the swelling is such that even though it gets better after a night’s sleep, it doesn’t fully go away and I’m starting to forget what my feet used to look like.

On parenting…

People have commented on how they think that my parenting style is weird with the whole baby wearing, cloth diaper, elimination communication, etc.   it’s actually not as weird as you might think.  I have found myself identifying with the Attachment Parenting model and I have come across a lot of people that follow it as well both on the internet and locally, it is refreshing to see that I’m not the only crunchy mama in the Treasure Coast.  Obviously I’m adapting some of their principles to suit our lifestyle but it pretty much summarizes how I feel, you can see the 8 principles of attachment parenting here.

Even if I didn’t know of attachment parenting I would still wear baby, strollers have an useful place for certain scenarios but I don’t think that they should be the primary mode of baby transportation.  I find it funny that people complain about baby wearing being complicated when to me a stroller is more complicated!  I agree some slings are easier to learn than others but it’s a matter of finding what works best for you and after the initial learning curve it is easier, faster, a lot less bulky and a lot better than a baby stroller.

Another thing that some people complain about is why we have an Amazon registry, some don’t even consider it a registry and like to say that we’re not registered anywhere (wtf?).  Why would I be so “inconsiderate” and not register at Babies R Us or Target?  Various reasons, first an foremost because they simply do not sell most of the things that we need/want and I hate to be limited by a store’s inventory, I haven’t found a single store that remotely comes close to having every item that we would want.

Amazon offers an Universal Registry, meaning that we can add items from ANY online source, including handmade one of a kind items made by WAHMS, I wouldn’t be able to add Etsy items to a store registry.  Their prices are lower in general than Babies R Us and Target and most things come with free shipping if Amazon itself sells it.

We do have a handful of Babies R Us items in the registry to please those people, if you want to pick up something at the store, I can simply mark the item as purchased in the registry and Amazon doesn’t complain about it not being purchased from them (unlike Babies and Target).  So it’s not like anybody is tied to anything.

Today we went to the beach since it’s the first time we have a common day off in a while and due to the environmental sadness we decided to take advantage of something that we have been taking for granted while it’s still available to us.  It saddens me deeply that baby Fox may not have the opportunity to enjoy the ocean right where we live.

I don’t have a maternity bathing suit and wasn’t going to waste money on something I would use once so I dug up my old bathing suits, sadly because I don’t use them often enough I only found one matched bikini set in the my drawers.  This is from 2007 and 60 pounds ago so the bottom was tighter than it should have but it got the job done.

So I now present to you, the bump- bikini edition…

We had a good time while we were there but as the sun kept rising the heat started to get to me and I had to seek shady shelter but not before we went into the water and the waves massaged the bump.

While we were in the water daddy Fox yells out “holy $hit what is that?! watch out!”, by the sound of his voice I would have thought that there was a shark right behind me.  I turned around to see this big dark mass coming up right behind me under the water so I announced “it’s just a manatee!”.  The sea cow swam over to check us out, got pretty darn close stuck its nose out of the water, turned around and swam back the way it came.  Odd. I have encountered manatees before but only in rivers,  never before in the ocean.

That’s a story that we’ll be telling baby Fox about his/her first visit to the beach…

We also took an Infant CPR class courtesy of a friend who does that for a living.  I hope that I never have to use what I learn but must admit that it was simpler than I feared.

I’ve reached the conclusion that tv shows like “A Baby Story”, “Deliver Me” and “Birth Day” should be renamed “Fear Factor” because they play on a woman’s often natural concerns about the birth by portraying the whole process as highly dramatic, with a woman strapped down and hooked up, by a doctor gowned and gloved like an alien visitor and often highlighting very anxious family members.  Sure a woman has fear, fear that something is going to happen to her or the baby, fear of pain, fear of failure, that she just won’t be able to “do it.”  Add in snarky, cynical nurses and doctors who ridicule anyone who seems to want to be in charge of her birth (after all we’re the experts)…limited labor support or assistance in the form of doulas…restricted mobility, lack of food and drink…and almost endless interventions and you have potential for trouble.  We have cultivated an environment that this is normal, and somehow now some women even find value in being “risky.”

And here I was thinking that movies were the only mass entertainment media that did a disservice to natural birth….

This comment was overheard in an online group that I was participating in: “I should have booked my scheduled c-section date today!”   WTF?

This was in reaction to the fact that her “preferred” date has been taken by another to be induced mom to be and how horrible such a tragedy is.  This came from a 23 year old first time mom with zero complications and no medical reason to be induced or have a C-section. To me having an induction without a legitimate medical justification is the equivalent to evicting your own child, extremely selfish and not at all a sign of love.

And the above are just but samples of society’s distorted perception of what is normal and safe for pregnancy and birth.

And that’s why when curious minds inquire about why I’m not picking dates or seeing an OB or taking tours of a hospital, I want to quote the statement so eloquently written by the founder of the “Bring Birth Home” website:

“As soon as the standard medical model of care in hospitals today pays more respect to the sheer and awesome power of women’s bodies, we will continue to give birth at home.

Until hospital staff can completely and totally honor a woman’s wishes to birth naturally, without interruption, with or without food, able to move, able to moan, able to labor over 24 hours without hearing the words “induction or cesarean section,” we will give birth at home.

Women birth at home to avoid so many of the often unnecessary interventions that take place in hospitals today. We are not treated like customers – the nurse and doctors do not aim to please us – we are told to be quiet, we are strapped down and plugged in. We are cut, drugged and lied to.

And until that stops, we will give birth at home, under the experienced and caring hands of midwives who LOVE their jobs, love our bodies, love our children, and this big world that we’re bringing them into.”

On matters closer to Baby Fox….

While shopping at Babies R Us for somebody else I decided to look into the Rewards program that I signed up for but never use.  7 out of 8 of their rewards promotions required purchasing disposable diapers or cans of formula, yet another confirmation that I am NOT their target audience.

And Enfamil still sends me e-mail reminders to print their coupon to bring to the hospital to make sure that I get my breastfeeding kit and diaper bag when I have the baby…

Recently I received a package from my parents containing an assortment of baby clothes.  As I added them to the clothes that we have already been very generously given the first thing that comes to mind is gratitude and the second thing is that this baby needs tie dye!  I really need to look into ordering some tie dye shirts and onesies.

I am officially in the stage that people think I am a ticking time bomb and only my midwife seems to think that I’ll carry to term or very close to it.  I am not one to place monetary bets but if other people are going to start guessing on dates when baby will come they might as well be contributing to his/her college fund.

So I am 34 weeks and baby doesn’t have a decorated or furnished nursery, the room is still our computer room and a big mess after my failed attempts at moving stuff out of it, it sucks but I don’t see it as the end of the world.  It’s not like baby is going to sleep in there anytime soon.  Baby doesn’t have furniture or a crib, it’s ok, we’ve got the Arm’s Reach Co Sleeper to get us started.  We don’t have a changing table, we can use the bed, we don’t have a diaper bag, we can use a backpack….

This is how I feel about a lot of the stuff that we don’t have, it sure beats freaking out about it when I don’t have the savings account to go on a shopping spree for those items.

Now that I have all of the prefold diapers I had ordered in bits and pieces, I need get started soon on the process of pre-washing them along with everything else.  Right now the diapers are in a pile overflowing out of a box because I don’t have anywhere else to put them, soon I hope to have cleared out enough space to improvise some shelves for them.

The nesting urge just hasn’t been there!  Instead my exhaustion and fatigue waves are arriving earlier in the day and hitting me stronger.

There are some things that I do still need and can’t avoid such as a breast pump which is  the big ticket item in this category.  I can get an used model but it will still cost me more than I can spare right now as I just finished paying bills and shopping for father’s day and a certain father to be’s birthday.

But it’s ok, I’ll start to freak out once I hit 36 weeks….

On reasons why it rocks to have a midwife and not an OB…  at our last appointment she really took the time to not only talk about the physiological aspects of pregnancy and upcoming birth but also to check in with us emotionally and discuss any fears and anxieties, we were never rushed and the appointment lasted for over an hour.  I have yet to have anybody I know tell me of anything even close with an OB.

It actually reminds me of when I saw an OB last year for the miscarriage and when things bordered the emotional he said “you look like a strong woman that won’t crumble at the receipt of bad news but if you are let me know and I’ll give you a referral to a psychiatrist”, that was part of the 3 minutes I spent with the doctor at that appointment, how different right?

Another major impressive thing about our midwife, when Daddy Fox asked about what the plan would be if a hurricane comes, without hesitation she responded that if she checks me and see that I could go into labor soon she would come and stay at our house during the storm.  I didn’t expect to hear that for a response, specially coming from someone with a family of her own, but apparently she has been known to drive in the middle of a hurricane when not even cops are out on the street, pissing off her husband but making sure that she was there to catch a baby.  Now that is what I consider commitment to one’s calling.

From people that I know, their OB’s tell them that if a hurricane is coming that they need to check the hospital and unless they happen to be on call they wouldn’t leave their family to attend a birth. Can’t exactly blame them but in my opinion it defeats the purpose of building rapport with a provider during pregnancy just to have a stranger present at the pivotal moment.

I had the opportunity to share the final drafts of my 2 birth plans with the midwife and she was 100% cool in supporting our home birth plan.  For the “in case of hospital emergency” plan she was kind enough to point out which hospital in the area would be more likely to do what and which requests had a higher chance of being ignored but she still encouraged us to leave it as is and not change any of it.

I feel so blessed to be having such great supportive and caring providers on this pregnancy and into labor.  Today I had an EFT session with the practitioner that I have mentioned in previous postings and it was AMAZING!  If budget allows I may end up booking another session in the next month before baby arrives.  She is so good at intuitively getting the nuggets hidden in my words to discover the true emotional roots that need to be worked on and does it in such a gentle and effective way.

I was delighted to discover that she offers labor consultations at no charge to current clients!  It is good to know that if I’m freaking out in the middle of labor that I can call her cellphone day or night and she will work with me on the spot.  I almost feel like sessions with her should be part of standard prenatal care.

I have now booked the 36 week appointment with my primary care doctor who will also be baby’s doctor and breastfeeding support if needed beyond the scope of the La Leche League leaders.  I am really looking forward to that, she’s such an amazing doctor and so different from the standard of Western Medicine even though that is what she practices.