Baby Emily is here!

Just a quick note from my rocking chair to announce that Emily Alexandra was born last week. It was a long and difficult labor, and I ended up choosing several interventions that I hadn't wanted originally. However, I did avoid an unnecessary cesarean and I'm very glad for that.

My midwives rock. They totally fought (hospital staff) for me to not get cut open, and helped me deliver a 9 lb 4 oz baby vaginally with a one stitch tear!

We've posted a few photos on Flickr. If you have an account and aren't already a "friend/family" of mine on Flickr, let me know your username so I can add you. I've marked a few as for friend/family only for privacy.

We are at home now, taking it easy and getting into the swing of breastfeeding. It's going pretty well so far - two minor issues: she releases her latch quickly and then starts sucking her lower lip. She hasn't developed a blister yet but I'm worried she might. She's also very sleepy - she'll latch on, take a few sucks and conk out. I'm less worried about that, as it seems like when she is very hungry, she stays awake better.

When my awesome doula, who totally kept me sane during forty-eight hours of labor, sends me the birth story, I will probably edit it a bit for the TMI parts and post it here.

I am so happy. She is beautiful and healthy. More latah!

The due date comes... and goes?

So, yes, today is July 26th and it is the baby's due date. Except she's barely dropped (see top photo) and I'm barely having contractions. So I guess 40 weeks has come and may go with no baby. I've always felt that this due date was early, and I guess I'm right.

I've got loads of things to say but little motivation right now to write them down. I've been feeling very insular and withdrawn - not in a depressed sort of way but just in a can't be bothered with people if they're not family sort of way. I'm actually in a pretty bright and positive mood.

A couple of great gifts have come my way recently: a coworker gave me a really cute bib that says Eagle In Training on it - our employer's mascot is an eagle. My staff got together and bought me a glider chair for which I had registered. I am modeling both in the below picture.






Thank you everyone!

37 weeks pregnant belly photo

Though I expect the baby to be overdue, I thought I'd do a belly photo a week earlier than normal... Just in case I'm totally wrong about when she's showing up (just did one three weeks ago, and usually I've been posting them every four weeks). My belly button hasn't really popped out but it's getting very flat. Sleeping on my side with a belly this big requires that I find some support for the belly - either leaning over so that the belly is resting on the bed, or stuffing a bit of the body pillow underneath it.

I'm so glad that Frac suggested that I take, or rather have DH take, these belly photos. For starters, they're fun and a nice way to document what's happened, especially for the many friends and family far away. But also, I can look back at me at 14 weeks and think to myself wow I was svelte! Unfortunately, I've also noticed that my butt isn't what it used to be. I blame not walking up the Metro escalators - I've been taking it easy, but I'll get back to that asap.

Overall, I'm feeling good so far. The baby is still moving a lot - I think she's still head down, which is the position we want. The other night, her movements seemed weird, like she'd moved into a transverse (head to one side, bum on the other, horizontal rather than vertical orientation), as all of a sudden when she was pushing her feet against my side, they were really coming out from my side rather than below my ribs. I've been spending a lot of time on all fours, doing cat/cow (arching my back) which is supposed to help in positioning the baby, and I think she's back to head down. I'm crap at telling though - my midwives poke my belly for a second or two and say with all the confidence in the world yep, she's still head down. I'll be heading back to see them for a checkup Wednesday and I'll ask where they think she is.

She hasn't dropped into my pelvis yet, which usually happens between two to four weeks before birth (according to our friends at WTEWYE at any rate). I haven't had any other real signs of early labour yet either - though I noticed yesterday that I'm having round ligament pain again for the first time in a few months, which I suspect has something to do with either her funny movements or starting to drop.

I'm still enjoying being pregnant, but I'm getting close to understanding what other women say about really being ready to give birth near the end. The belly is so big, it kind of gets in the way of things (like bending over to pick something up from the ground!). I'm walking really slowly these days too. I'm beginning to look forward to being a bit more agile and fast again, not to mention meeting this new person - that's getting to be a more real idea these days.

34 weeks pregnant belly photo

IMG_0163
Originally uploaded by xxcaro

DH was kind enough to snap this last week but it's taken me this long to get my round tuit up and running to post the darn thing. Can you believe it? Ah well. I thought when I finished school, I'd have all this free time to relax, and blog, and read, and study the hypnobabies course. And I find myself flopping on the sofa when I get home from work and vegematating with my feet up.

And nesting. There's definitely some nesting going on: washing all the clothes and blankies we've been given, organizing space for it all, cleaning the apartment a little, etc.

The Worried Pregnant Tourist in Barbados

I wasn’t sure what to expect from my most recent trip to Barbados. We’d selected it as our destination because we used to live there, and figured it would be both relaxing, and handy to have existing relationships with doctors, should I need one.

My midwife gave me a complete copy of all of my medical records since I started seeing her practice, to bring my OBGYN in Barbados up to date, should I need to see her. I bought travelers’ medical insurance for the first time in my life, though after paying for it, I read the longish list of exclusions and found that maternity care and childbirth are excluded. Rats.

I worried about staying regular and whether I’d be able to find prune juice at the grocery store there, so I bought some bags of dried prunes and apricots to be on the safe side.

A colleague got me worried about sunburn, saying pregnant ladies are more susceptible to sunburn than normal, so I bought some children’s SPF 50 sun block – opted for the children’s type, hoping it would have fewer weird chemicals. This is in addition to the lovely natural sun block product I’d purchased at Lush, which they say is approximately SPF 15.

I remembered our hotel room from last year where we were on the third floor with no elevator, and figured that would be hopeless, or rather, I would be hopeless trying to climb two flights of stairs right now. I called the hotel a month before we arrived and requested a room on the ground or second floor.

I have read that mosquitoes are particularly drawn to pregnant ladies, so I worried about contracting dengue fever again (you can get it up to four times) and considered buying insect repellent, but didn’t find any citronella based products before I left. I don’t use DEET based stuff under normal circumstances, and really don’t want to while pregnant.

In the last days before departure and the first few days of the trip, I got myself completely worked up and convinced that I was going to go into labour while in Barbados. Happily, that turned out to be wrong and I’m still quite pregnant.

Here are my lessons learned for traveling to the Caribbean while pregnant:

• It doesn’t matter how much your traveling companion loves to have the window seat, you really need to get an aisle seat. This is not just for you to be able to get up and down to the bathroom frequently, but also for some shoulder and arm rest space: on one of the longer flights, I was stuck between my husband and a larger guy. I thought my back was going to go into spasm, I was so uncomfortable.
  
• They sell prune juice in the large grocery stores, just not the little touristy ones.
  
• The guy selling papayas out of the back of a van is also your friend: ask him for a large, very ripe one and make a basic little fruit salad with lime and brown sugar in the hotel. It will keep for days in the fridge and help with the digestion.
  
• Mosquitoes still prefer my husband (poor guy!) to me. I don’t think I got bitten once.
  
• The SPF 50 was pretty effective, but so was the stuff from Lush. I wore a hat and stayed out of the sun from 11 am to 3 pm and only got a bit singed – mostly got brown. Someone to whom I’m married doesn’t think he needs sun block or a hat, and he’s peeling now. And a lot browner than me.
  
• People are nice to pregnant ladies everywhere I go. Except those that aren’t, but they’re outnumbered. I got the best customer service I have ever received in Barbados on this trip. Even the cashiers at Big B’s grocery store were sweet to me, and that’s a minor miracle.
  
• Gobsmacked is kind of a wacky thing to say when explaining your reaction to hearing that someone is pregnant, but in a funny, irreverent way that I like.
  

So that’s what I learned on vacation in Barbados. I spent loads of time listening to the Hypnobabies recordings... or in some deep state of hypnosis where I snored, and listened to them at any rate... We had a lovely time, visited with many old friends, enjoyed perfect weather and hope to be back again soon!

UPDATE: forgot to link to the photos on Flickr. All better now.

Belly photos and a bit of love for The Parent's Journal

Here I am with my 30 weeks pregnant belly. It's still at a size which is fun, rather than too big... but I can see how it's going to get too big before it's over. I'm really enjoying the attention and enthusiasm from friends, family and strangers. The belly touching by strangers still hasn't manifested for the most part.

I have a feeling that I send a kind of standoffish vibe which only the most effusively affectionate are likely to overcome and decide they should touch me anyway. I don't intentionally cultivate this, it's just the way I roll. (Did I really say that? Funny thing is I just imagined my daughter reading this as a twelve year old, cringing at the old fashioned idioms I use(d). Sorry dear!)

I've been listening to some quality content on the iPod these days. I'll talk about hypnobabies another day - today is the day I want to give some love to The Parent's Journal. It's a radio show on NPR which on my affiliate is on at a crazy time on Saturday mornings... so I like to load their podcast onto my iPod and listen to it in the afternoons when I'm walking home from work. 

Each week, the host, Bobbi Conner, interviews a series of parents, pediatric or obstetric health practitioners and others with interest and expertise in child rearing. Her interviewees largely seem to have written books and I suspect the show is sort of a stop on the book tour for many. However, I really like what a lot of them have to say. 

Many seem to have a fairly relaxed view of parenting - often somewhat in line with Lenore Skenazy is trying to convey with her Free Range Kids movement. I listen to it all, topics ranging from raising resilient toddlers, to childbirth options, to being a good parent during divorce. Like a lot of other things, I take it all in, and spit out the stuff I think is hokum, such as the folks who say that eating peanuts during pregnancy will cause a peanut allergy in the child. 

The show covers a wide range of topics and I find each segment usually has something that might be worth filing away for the future.  Sometimes when Conner is interviewing someone over the phone, I find the audio frustrating to listen to on my headphones. Her voice ends up being a bit too loud and the interviewee's voice a bit too soft. But that's really my only complaint. It's a great source of ideas and things to think about. 

Of course, when it comes to applying these suggestions to reality, we'll see how it goes... 

Oprah, let's see Shape of a Mother on your show

If you haven't seen the photos or better yet, subscribed to the RSS feed on The Shape of a Mother website, do go check it out now. It's good because it's beautiful, it's real, it's expectation setting (in that women look very different - it's a very snowflake  uniqueness sort of thing), and I think it's especially good to look at if you're pregnant, as it's kind of reassuring that the changes you're going through are normal.

Some folks are lobbying Oprah to profile the site on her show and I'm joining in. I've tweeted about it, I've joined the Facebook group and now I'm blogging about it. Go do me a favor and tell Oprah you think she should have The Shape of a Mother on her show, too, OK?

In other news, I'm well and while I have graduated, I'm  not actually quite finished until COB tomorrow. Work has been a tad nutty and some dear friends threw a baby shower for me last weekend... right after graduation. I was completely knackered. So I'm playing catchup, and then I'll be back to proper blogging... Our little futbolista is kicking away.

Belly photo quickly...

Lots to say, so little time. The belly is really happening now, and it's getting rather hard to miss.

However, I'm also wrapping up the last few weeks of grad school, so 26 weeks pregnant or not, I must get back to it.

In other news, I'm getting class credit to write this blog, so if you're missing my wacky sense of humour, go check it out. And I get credit for tweeting. It's a pretty excellent class.

Graduation is 21 days away and I'm looking forward to having free time to write a (noncredit) blog post more than once a week!

new belly photo

Well 22 weeks almost slipped by without a photo. I think this photo looks a lot like the 18 week photo, but I know the belly is bigger. I think in the 18 week photo, I was putting my hands on my hips and throwing my elbows back, thus pushing my belly out more... whereas these photos, I'm in a more neutral position.

I'm wearing maternity clothes pretty much full time, and that's good and comfy for sure. And our little futbolista is kicking like she's going for the prenatal world cup!

No one else (except my chiropractor who was just in the right place at the right time!) has felt her kicking yet, but I think that's just because I've got this *ahem* extra layer of padding that maybe not all the other pregnant ladies have...

I've rejoined freecycle and found a babycycle for this area too - fingers crossed for some kind of decent rocking/glider chair. I can't find one online that I like at all, for any price!

Sonograms the second ... and news..

So I went for the second sonogram on Friday and it was great. It actually wasn't as neat as the first one - it seemed like the technician couldn't get a low enough resolution to see the whole baby at the same time... she kept saying oh look here's the left ventrical of the heart, and here's the bladder.

From Sonograms

Click through to see this and a bunch of others, including some cute feet shots.

Apparently my daughter (yes we think it's a girl, or at least the tech and the doctor do) has a bladder and left ventrical within the normal parameters for a babe her age.

But between not being able to see the whole baby bouncing around doing her kickypants thing, and then she just looks kinda funny, it wasn't as amazing for some reason, as the first one was. The technician also did some other kind of scan which I've not posted which I guess the point of which was to show us what her face looks like. But apparently she's upside down and the placenta is right in front of her face. So the placenta in this particular colour scan makes her face look weirdly bumpy, and it's just a weird looking image anyway. I didn't immediately love the image, and kind of forgot about it. I took it home and showed it to DH, who was slightly horrified and asked if I was growing some kind of alien in there or something.

I realize I sound like one of those spoiled modern people whining about the miracle of air travel and mobile phones that was some late night talk show clipped to youtube and IM'd to me the other day. Unfortunately, I just watched the video without bookmarking it. The guy clearly didn't understand how mobile phones work (apparently he thinks your regular average mobile phone involves satellites or something else in space, but whatever). The sonogram technology is amazing and wonderful. I guess I was hoping for a look at the whole baby, but she's maybe too big now to get a good gander at all at once.

The baby kicking feels like a second heartbeat, like I've just done a quick sprint or run up a few flights of stairs. But my alien heart in my abdomen. She's wonderful.

UPDATE: the whining about the miracle of air travel is this video: Everything's amazing, nobody's happy.

Photo update

Ok so here we go. As I try to type and eat carrot cake (yes, latest craving is carrot cake. I doubt it's the carrots that I'm seeking... and if this continues I'm going to need to learn how to make it myself. Any recipe suggestions?)

The shirt arrived. I love it!

From body changes

From body changes

From body changes

Aside from the excitement of new clothes, I must say that I'm digging the maternity pants. I'm not wearing any of the trousers I bought with the full belly panel - I still don't have enough belly to hold them up. So I'm largely wearing the ultra low rise elastic band pants. They're wonderful because: look Ma, no zippers/buttons/anything holding me back from doing what I need to do when I run to the loo every hour or so.

Last night, I convinced a not enthused DH to go out dancing with me. We'd not been out for over a month and I'd been listening to salsa music all afternoon, so I really felt the need to get my dancing shoes on. Not to mention a little worried about whether or not I'd outgrown the bloody expensive things! We had a nap (my second one for the day!) to get ready. It was almost impossible to get him out the door after that - he was a very sleepy boy and made me promise we'd take a cab home while we were walking to the club (he forgot so we didn't).

We danced quite a bit, though we can't dance merengue or reggaeton like we normally do, hip to hip, as the growing belly is getting in the way now. But we had a good time, goofing around, him pretending to dance just with my belly, and both of us enjoying being out of the house together for the first time in awhile (other than journeys to the immigration office, which don't really count).

The lovely dance shoes were really beginning to hurt my feet just as he got his second wind and was wanting to dance to every song. Sigh. So I put my regular shoes back on, we danced a bit more, finished our drinks, said goodnight and walked home.

Oh, and last night was the first time someone touched my belly unasked/uninvited without being my husband or a midwife or doctor. It didn't bother me as I'd expected, as it was someone who I really like and trust. But it was a bit weird nonetheless. The belly touching thing is something I'm dreading. I think it'll mostly bug me when it's someone I don't really like or a stranger... We'll see!

More images to come - we're doing another ultrasound this Friday and might get to find out the sex of the baby.

As promised: photos

Right so I must be pregnant or just a bit nuts to be posting this, but DH was kind enough to indulge me by taking these this evening.

From body changes

I'm somewhere around 13 or 14 weeks pregnant, depending upon whom you ask. So I'm barely showing - what's showing is the fact that I was a little high from my ideal weight before getting pregnant and now can't diet. Nor do I have any energy plus have been blessed with the weird and random cravings... I haven't actually gained any weight according to the scale, but I think it's just compensated by muscle loss as I've not been for a run in ages...

From body changes