Stained Glass Confessional

Puff Family 2011 Review

2012-01-27T14:56:00.001-05:00

Earlier this month my friend Jessica posted a review of her year using a 20 question guide. It was really cool to read her review, so I decided to steal it and do my own! I think she may have gotten this from a devotional or something - I'm not exactly sure, but feel free to steal the questions for yourself. I found this to be a really nice way to sit back and reflect on the year for myself, and found myself feeling really grateful for the year we've had.

Without further ado, here is my 2011 review!

1. What was the single best thing that happened this year?

We grew our family of 3 to a family of 4 in November of this year. Miles was born November 12, making Norah a big sister for the first time. I can’t say how much I have enjoyed getting to know my new little guy and getting to see Norah grow into her big girl, big sister role in our family.

2. What was the single most challenging thing that happened this year?

Daniel’s job was probably the most challenging aspect of our lives as a family this year. For the first time he has a job that requires him to travel for a week at a time. It has been hard for him to be away from home and it has been really hard for me to care for a toddler 24/7 by myself for a week straight. That’s just too much sometimes.

He also has felt very overwhelmed by the job’s expectations, and the sheer amount of work he is expected to do in the limited amount of time given to him. It just isn’t his favorite line of work, and he has not enjoyed this job. This definitely carries over at home, and it has been a challenge for all of us.

3. What was an unexpected joy this past year?

In May of this year my sister got engaged to the man of her dreams. I have never seen her so happy and sure of someone, and I’m so excited and happy for her. She is getting married in February, and I am confident that sharing in her wedding and getting to witness and hear about the beginning year of her marriage will be one of my joys for 2012.

4. What was an unexpected obstacle?

Developing pre-eclampsia during my pregnancy was definitely unexpected and definitely an obstacle. Because of this, we were unable to use the birthing center we had chosen and didn’t have the birth we really would have like to have had.

Another unexpected obstacle this year was that people I know have been fighting cancer. Michelle’s close friend Teresa battled breast cancer this year. She’s only 48. It has been a scary time, but she is cancer free and healthy now. My uncle has also been fighting cancer this year. Unfortunately, he is not cancer free yet. I’m still hoping hard for his recovery. I’ve recently started sending him my pumped breast milk because I have read that it can help with side effects of cancer treatment, rebuilding the immune system, and fighting the cancer. I’m so hopeful that it makes a difference for him. And it’s so apropos – his wife (my aunt) was a La Leche League leader for 10 years, and they are the ones who gave me money for my breast pump when I was pregnant with Norah.

5. Pick 3 words to describe 2011

Exciting, loud (I have a toddler), and freeing

6. Pick 3 words your spouse would use to describe your 2011

Changing, sleepy, busy

7. Pick 3 words your spouse would use to describe their 2011

Stressful, teaching, joyful

8. What were the best books you read this year?

This could be a whole blog post in itself (and my goal is to make it one ), but the books I enjoyed most this year were:

The Ender Quartet (Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind) by Orson Scott Card

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

Love Wins by Rob Bell

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Room by Emma Donoghue

Bag of Bones by Stephen King

The Long Walk by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachmann)

Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larson

I participated in a reading challenge this year with a goal of reading 17,000 pages. I didn’t quite make it, but I did read an impressive 13,500. For 2012, my goal is to read 10,000 pages.

9. With whom were your most valuable relationships?

The more I thought about this question, the luckier I have felt. I have had so many valuable relationships this year. A lot of relationships have been in a state of change, and that has made for an interesting year as well. Some cool people who made my year better include (in no particular order):

*Michelle – I love having a sister, and this year has been a great year for us both. Michelle gets my humor and never lets on that she thinks I am weird. And she agreed to take my placenta home for me. People don’t just do that, KWIM?

*Erica: This year I started meeting regularly with Erica on Tuesday afternoons for sewing and chatting. This has worked out so well for us. Our kids play together so sweetly, and we’ve both gotten motivated to finish / work on sewing projects we probably wouldn’t have otherwise. We’ve also had great conversations about books, parenting, spirituality, family life, and other good stuff.

*Sarah – a lot has changed for Sarah this year and I was really afraid of how that would change our relationship. I was afraid I would get left behind, or something, or that when she started dating whoever she met might not like having me around. Well, I didn’t get left behind, and so far Nicole (her new squeeze) and I seem to have hit it off. I really like her, anyway, and she hasn’t let on to me that she feels differently. Sarah is still my go-to girlfriend who gets the ‘my children are horrible and I want to smash my head into a wall’ phone calls, as well as the ‘if I don’t get to a drag show I will die, so get your butt over here’ calls. It has been another good year of having her for my ‘person’, Grey’s Anatomy style.

*The Tuesday Night Crew – What can I even say? It has been a year of transformation for so many of these people whom I love so dearly. I’m so happy and excited for Curt that he is so happy with Mike – I’ve never seen him actually happy in a relationship before. I’ve gotten to know Mallory and Meghan better this year as well. And I have had so many good talks with Cy, and seen so much of his awesome photography.

*Teresa – This year I was so lucky to have gotten to know my sister’s friend Teresa better. I have gotten to know her by doing senior portraits for her sons and by working with her to help Michelle plan her wedding. Teresa has been just wonderful. She is always so gracious and so eager to help. She never seems to judge and she always laughs with us rather than at us. Erica and I have both been fortunate to have her parenting and marriage guidance this year. She is just enough older than us that she remembers exactly where we’ve been, but that she isn’t there anymore and can offer perspective and advice from what worked for her. I have really enjoyed getting to know her this year.

*Beth & Crew – This year I was also fortunate enough to get to spend time with the Ritzmans as they have been growing their business, BabyEtte. Not only did they give me a job I could do entirely at home during naps and such, but I have learned so much from them about parenting, living holistically, and about good food. Beth is so gracious and always accepting of me, even when I can’t shut up even though my brain is going, “for the love of god, stop talking, you sound like an idiot!!” Spending time with the girls has also helped me to understand better what I want for my children in regards to education, discipline, and home life. And of course I have enjoyed getting to know Mike as well.

Of course, this wouldn’t be complete without me saying that, first and foremost, my most valuable relationships have been with my loves – Dan and Norah and the little dude. We’ve done a lot of growing this year, for sure.

10. What was your biggest personal change from January to December of this past year?

I stopped working at a regular job in February of this year, and I feel like, for the first time since Norah was born, that I’m really happy with what I’m doing with my days. Yes, there are difficult days. It certainly isn’t perfect. But I really like being a stay at home parent and being able to focus on my house, my family, and my other relationships.

Working while trying to keep up with everything was difficult for me, particularly because I worked from home and didn’t employ child care. My job took up my time, but then I was also expected to keep up with all the housework, laundry, cooking, cleaning, etc. while also taking care of Norah. Dan just couldn’t seem to grasp that my job was still actually a job, even if I did it at home, and that it still took up large chunks of time, even if that time was working at our house. With me no longer working, I feel like that has really balanced things out better and I am much, much happier now.

It feels really good to be in a place where I don’t wish I was doing something else because I’m very happy with what I am doing.

11. In what way(s) did you grow emotionally?

This year I learned to start walking away from some of the conversations that stress me out. There are certain people in my life who consistently add to my stress level and I’ve decided to avoid conversations that bother me and end these conversations abruptly if they can’t be avoided. I think I’ve hurt some feelings over this, but my stress level is so much better for it. I have mixed feelings about this because I hate to hurt anyone’s feelings, but I also feel that if I ask not to talk about something and the other person pushes it, then they’ve got coming whatever I decide to do with that.

Adding to that, I’ve been very conscious of the fact that I am not responsible for other people’s emotions, psychological states, or reactions to my life. I’m done being guilt-tripped by this crap and I’ve decided not to be manipulated by it.

12. In what way(s) did you grow spiritually?

In 2011, I was able to really address some of my feelings about the religious holidays celebrated in our culture. I have really struggled with these over the past several years since leaving the church, and I never know quite how to respond or whether I should celebrate. This year I feel like I learned a lot about being able to value and celebrate the Jesus story for what is beautiful in it without having to participate in the religion surrounding it, and that feels really good. I’ve also pondered the importance of celebrating the holidays that are significant in our culture, regardless of my personal feelings about the religious aspects of them.

13. In what way(s) did you grow physically?

Uh, I grew a baby. And I’m larger now than before I got pregnant, for sure. I’m hoping 2012 sees some of that baby weight disappear.

14. In what way(s) did you grow in your relationships with others?

This is a weird question for me. I met with people and talked to them and listened to them. I’m not sure how else I would go about growing in relationships with other people.

15. What was the most enjoyable part of your work (both professionally and at home)?

This year I really got to know Norah as her own little person and come to genuinely enjoy her company. I love that I can have conversations with her now and that we can mutually enjoy each other. Spending time with her and watching her grow have been so enjoyable this year.

I don’t have a “job”, per se that is a full time job or anything, but I have been doing a lot of sewing this year, much of it for BabyEtte, but some custom orders as well. I just enjoy sewing, so this has been a great fit and an enjoyable way to earn a little income.

16. What was the most challenging part of your work (both professionally and at home)

I have a toddler. Whom I am home with 24/7.

Do I have to say anything else? Learning to have more patience, to adjust my expectations, and to just walk away when I can’t deal have been a challenge for me this year.

Sewing challenges have included the limitations of my sewing machine, as well as learning what kind of limitations to set on custom orders so that I have time to complete them without taking away from my family.

17. What was your single biggest time waster in your life this past year?

The interwebz – facebook and forums and email and the like.

18. What was the best way you used your time this past year?

Raising my daughter has been an awesome use of time, as well as gestating the wee one and, oh, you know, giving birth. Not bad as far as time management goes.

I have also worked this year on setting up a more organized cleaning schedule for the house, and I feel like that has helped me to manage my time better as well. The house is nowhere near spotless, and at any given time something is a mess, but I feel like things are better under control and that housekeeping causes me less stress this way.

19. What was the biggest thing you learned this past year?

To slow down and take things as they come. Life is slower when you have small children. It just is. It takes a day and a half to do a load of laundry, or it takes 3 hours to get everyone through the grocery store, or I may sit down to sew and have to tend to a catastrophe 5 minutes later. Things don’t get done quickly – or at all, sometimes. I have had to do a lot of learning this year about being present in what really matters and accepting that I have limitations on how productive I can be in this stage of my life.

20. Create a phrase or statement that describes 2011 for you.

2011 was a year of change and growth for our family.

Goals for 2012

2012-01-13T15:01:00.000-05:00

It's that time again - time for my yearly goals! Not quite the same as resolutions, but things I want to work on/think about/do this year, and that I want down in writing so I can come back to them later. In no particular order, here they are:

Professional Goals

This year my goal is to update my resume. I think there’s a fair chance I may want to re-enter the workforce at some point, so this is probably a good idea. I haven’t updated my resume since I started working at the Y, so my jobs there aren’t included at present. It would probably be a good idea to get them on paper before I forget the details.

Another goal I have is to look into a small business opportunity that has come available, and to make a decision about it one way or the other. Details to follow.

And finally, this year I want to do some serious thinking about what my professional goals are for the future – do I want to go back into the workforce and work for someone? Do I want to work on building up some clients for freelance work? Do I want to keep sewing? Do I want to start that small business? What will help me contribute to my family financially without taking me away from my family?

Schooling for Norah

One of my goals for 2012 is to work with Norah this year on letters and numbers. I bought a preschool age letter workbook which I plan to begin working with her on after Michelle’s wedding. She is already asking me, “Mommy, what letter does (fill in the word) start with?”, and starting to identify some letter sounds, so I think we should go for it.

Another of my goals for 2012 is to figure out about preschool for Norah for the coming year. She turns 3 on the 16^th of this month, and believe it or not, 3 is now considered preschool age. Srsly. I don’t know if she will go to preschool this year or if we will wait another year, or if we will homeschool and I’ll need to make decisions about when to begin curriculum, but I think it is important that I start thinking about and figuring those things out this year.

2012 Reading Challenge

My personal reading challenge for 2012 is to read 10,000 pages. As with the past 2 years, I plan to track what books I read this year. I also have a few specific books I want to make sure I get to:

· 11/22/63 by Stephen King

· Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (I’ve had this on loan from Jason since shortly after Norah was born. Erm, sorry, Jason)

· One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

· Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

· The Awakening by Kate Chopin

· Harry Potter – I want to read the first book of this series and see if I like it. If I do, I’ll probably read the rest of them

· The new Dark Tower Book – rumor has it there’s a new one coming out this year. I’m sooooo excited about this. I heart the Dark Tower books.

My Blog

My blog got reeeeeally neglected in 2011. I blogged, like, not at all. It’s hard to write when you have a toddler that doesn’t nap and you’re pregnant and exhausted most of the year. But writing is so good for my soul, so I want to get into the habit again. My goal is to blog once a month this year, even if it’s something little, like pics of things I sewed or a cute story about the kids.

Housekeeping

My first housekeeping goal for the year is to get back to/stick with the cleaning schedule I started in 2011. It isn’t much, but if I commit to cleaning a room each day, the house really does look much nicer and requires much less from me in deep cleaning. I started back with it this week, and I want to stick with it for the year.

My second housekeeping goal for the year is to declutter, declutter, declutter! I decluttered a lot last year, but there is still a lot around the house. Specifically, I want to clean out all of my kitchen drawers, declutter the pantry, and go through the rest of Daniel’s stuff that was in his office before that room got turned into a bedroom. At the end of the year I also want to get rid of any clothes that don’t fit me anymore – if I don’t lose weight in the next year I’m guessing I never will (or by the time I will, those clothes will be out of style anyways). Any other decluttering is a bonus.

Picture Perfect

I would like to try to do a better job of keeping up with photos. I have a hard time making sure I get them printed and up in frames, and as a result, in my house it appears that time stopped when Norah was about 2 months old. This summer and fall I would like to set aside some time specifically to work on scrapbooks/photo albums/picture frames/photo storage, etc. (scrapbooking party, anyone?)

Those all sound pretty do-able to me, so hopefully I'll be able to report back at the end of the year that I actually did them. We'll see. But for now, I have them down somewhere, which helps me stay more accountable to them.

All for now!

Some Thoughts About My Birth

2012-01-04T14:59:00.000-05:00

It’s been 6 weeks now since Miles was born, and I’m really starting to work through some of my feelings about his birth. I’ve decided to write them here, partly because it’s good for people to know there are such things as bad birth feelings and that it’s ok to feel them, and partly because the people who love me can’t love on me well if they don’t know what’s going on in me.

So here we are.

In case you didn’t know, my labor with Miles was induced at 40w4d due to pre-eclampsia. We had planned to birth at the Auburn Birthing Center with zero interventions, and knew that if I felt like getting in and staying in the tub, I could have a water birth. And if I didn’t feel like it, I could stay out of the tub and labor and birth however and wherever in the center I wanted. We arranged for a close friend to be with us and provide support for Norah, giving Norah the option to be with me when the baby was born. We planned for my sister and Daniel to provide labor support for me as they had during my previous labor, and knew that we could count on my midwife for support as well throughout the labor. We bought champagne to take in with us and packed our birth bags to align with what the birthing center provided. We planned to go home hours after the birth, our whole little family intact and together.

We didn’t make it to the birthing center. Instead, I was admitted to DeKalb hospital and labor was induced using cytotec. I was strapped to a fetal monitor the entire time I was there until the baby was born, which limited my ability to move how and where I wanted. Norah didn’t make it to the hospital in time for the birth, and neither did our friend Carissa. My sister made it, but only marginally – she arrived as Miles’ head was delivered. Even my midwife didn’t make it there much before the birth, and labor support was left entirely up to Dan until shortly before Miles was born. I wasn’t able to leave the hospital early at all because my blood pressure wouldn’t stabilize. And so, Norah ended up at my parents’ house, away from me, for 2 days. The last night Daniel went home to be with her, and I was left alone at the hospital. The nurses came and went every few hours, and eventually put a lot of pressure on me about nursing because Miles wasn’t interested for about 24 hours. I was brought formula samples and told he would need his blood sugar taken if he didn’t eat soon enough, although I wasn’t anywhere near worried about it yet and reacted almost violently to the formula ‘gift’ package. The food we brought went bad out in the car because we couldn’t figure out how to keep it refrigerated at the hospital and we never got to bring the champagne in to celebrate.

We did not have the birth we had hoped for.

Before I go any further, I want to say that I realize I probably had a better birth than most women in America. I never had to worry about an IV, and I never had to deal with pitocin contractions, which I hear are terrible. I was able to make decisions about my care such as how I would like to proceed with the induction, and I never felt that I was ‘managed’ or that my care was dependent on what was ‘policy’ or what was convenient for my care provider. I was never patient # whatever, churning through the birth machine. No one ever gave me a hard time about wanting to have a natural birth, and no one ever even mentioned pain relief, let alone pushed it. I didn’t have to have a C-section, or even any stitches. I had a very good care provider, and DeKalb is the hospital to be at if you need or want to be at a hospital and still have a low intervention birth. I have a lot that I am thankful for.

And yet, I have a lot that I’m still processing and that I’m really sad about.

When Norah was born, I came home and told all my friends my birth story. I shouted it from the rooftops. This is what I had done – this is the awesome birth I had achieved. I had chosen a good care provider and a supportive place to birth and I had gone in there and done it on my own terms. I was so empowered by Norah’s birth. I didn’t know exactly what labor was going to be like, but I knew I could do it. I knew I would get through it, and I did – and what’s more, I did it how I needed to, how I wanted to, with the support of the people I wanted there.

I have very close friends who have not heard Miles’ birth story. I don’t know what to say to them. I feel very awkward saying, “uh, so, I had a baby,” because I don’t know what to follow that up with. “So, I had a baby, but it didn’t go how I wanted to and I feel like crap about it,” is really just not much of an opener. So I just have not said anything at all.

The story of Norah’s birth is mine. It is her birthday story, but it is my Birth Day story. The story of Miles’ birth feels more like something that happened to me - and a kind of shitty thing that happened to me, at that. Like that time when I had an ectopic pregnancy but I couldn’t get anybody to believe anything was wrong, and then I ended up in the ER having a laproscopy at 10 pm to make sure no important part of me exploded. That was a shitty thing that happened to me. That’s kind of the feeling I have when I think about how the birth happened.

Which is not to be confused with how I feel about Miles. He is a fabulous thing to have happened to me. Perfect and healthy and handsome, even if all his fuzzy hair is falling out, which does make me quite sad.

On Norah’s birthday, I like to think back and remember her birth, and I like to tell her the story of her birth. It’s something I hope to do each year; to sit with her and tell her the story of how she came to be in our family – of how we had waited and hoped for her, and then anxiously anticipated her birth – and how the birth happened and she finally made it into my arms.

On Miles’ birthday, I want to be able to think back on his birth and to feel good about it. I want to tell him the story of his birth without ugly feelings coloring it. I want him to have a story of his own that he can hear each year and know how much it meant for us to wait and hope for him, and to anticipate his birth, and to know how he finally made it here and how overjoyed we were to finally see him.

I feel like I really need to work through all of this, or else he will not be able to have that. Or rather, he will have that story, but there will be some ugly vague feeling behind it that he doesn’t understand, but somehow senses. Kids pick up on that stuff, I’m absolutely convinced, even when (especially when) we try to hide it.

And so here we are.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

I don’t really know where to go from here. I’m 3 pages in and I realize I haven’t actually said anything, which kind of makes me wonder how in the world I ever made a living writing. *shrug* I suppose maybe I should talk about how I felt about the induction and about not getting to use the birth center (and risking out for future births), and maybe about the things at the hospital that upset me. I don’t know. It’ll probably all get really jumbled, but I suppose that’s ok.

First off, I guess I should say that I’m surprised at how little it actually bothers me that I didn’t get to use the birthing center. It would have been a very nice place to birth, and it would have allowed me to have a water birth, but it really isn’t the end of the world not to have been there. I’ve realized that the physical location of the birth isn’t all that important to me in the grand scheme of things, and since I didn’t find the tub to be quite as magical as it supposedly can be for Norah’s birth, I really didn’t even miss it this time around. When I think of what bothers me about the birth, it’s never that I wasn’t at the birth center or some specific location. It’s the things that happened at the hospital with this specific birth. Norah was born at the same hospital but under very different circumstances, and I have very different feelings about her birth. Yes, they happened at the same place, but the things that happened during the birth were very different. So yea, it sucks that we didn’t get to go to the birthing center, but I think I’m pretty much over that.

Oddly enough, I’m really bothered about having risked out of the birthing center for future births. I don’t even know if I will have another baby (Puff scoffs at this: “Of course we’re having another baby!” Me: “Uh… we are?”), so this makes even less sense. I don’t know why that bothers me more than not having been there in the first place, but it does. There’s something about it that just makes me feel left out, I guess, like I’m no longer part of the club. It’s really stupid, but it’s there. If we do have another baby I will have to choose between a hospital birth and a home birth. While both of those are perfectly valid choices, neither one is my first choice. A birthing center is the absolutely ideal choice for our family, but is no longer an option for us. That makes me sad.

Aside from that, though, I’m not too bothered by missing the birthing center. Like I said, when I think of the things that bother and upset me, they are not related to the location of the birth. They’re other things I feel I missed because we decided to induce labor and because of how quickly everything happened.

For instance, it upsets me a lot that I didn’t get to go into labor spontaneously and I didn’t get to labor at home with my family at all. I was relying on medication to cause me to go into labor, and that felt really wrong to me. Lying in that hospital bed all night just waiting for something to kick me into labor was awful. Just lying there, doing nothing, waiting…… feeling like I should have been able to handle this somehow, that my stupid body should have figured out how to go into labor on its own. I couldn’t help but feel like an idiot for not doing more to encourage labor earlier. I’d been having contractions off and on for weeks, and every time they kicked in, I’d just go to bed and wait for something to happen. I didn’t feel ready for the baby to come, so I did nothing at all and figured I’d labor when my body was ready. Wrong-O.

Now, clearly I do not have psychic powers, so it was really silly for me to have been upset with myself about this. Not to mention pointless and unhelpful. Besides, if Stephanie is right and the reason why I developed pre-eclampsia is because of Miles’ super long umbilical cord that he somehow managed to get wrapped up around his neck four times (ninja baby, practicing his moves!), it’s reasonable to believe my body would have done something insane at some point anyways. Maybe I’d have gone pre-eclamptic a few weeks earlier, or maybe something scary would have happened during labor. But probably something.

So anyway, I didn’t get to go into labor on my own and that’s upsetting to me. I didn’t get to labor at home, either, which is also upsetting. I guess I envisioned this whole labor process as something that started out fairly tame at home. I envisioned my family caring for me at home for awhile – D taking good care of me and Norah being there, too. I figured we’d call Carissa fairly early to come and help us with Norah, and that we could all be at home together for awhile. I really wanted that time at home and I didn’t get to have any of it, and that makes me sad. There was no part of my labor that was secret and private, and my family’s own little bit of the story. Every last second of it was public domain. That makes me feel kind of violated, in a way.

Another thing that has been really bothering me about the birth was that I was strapped to a fetal monitor for pretty much my whole labor. Once I arrived at the hospital and got the first dose of the blood pressure meds, I was on the monitor from there on. We needed to be able to see if Miles was ok with my blood pressure going down, so I couldn’t leave the monitor. Every time I got up to use the bathroom a little alarm sounded at the nurse’s station and someone came in to check on me. The little alarm went off every time it lost the baby’s heartbeat, which happened quite a lot. When I moved, it went off. When the baby moved, it went off. When I sat there perfectly still it randomly went off for no apparent reason at all. All night long this stupid monitor kept going off and people came in to re-adjust it at all hours. This was very annoying.

However, the worst part of it was that once I went into labor, I still had to keep it on. It was hard to move around without it losing the baby’s heartbeat, and I couldn’t really walk around or go very far from the bed. I got up twice to go into the bathroom and sit on the toilet, and honestly, that’s where I wanted to be. I just wanted to be left alone in the bathroom. That’s where I felt the most comfortable and like I was handling the contractions the best, but I couldn’t stay there. I kept having to come back out and get hooked back up to that stupid monitor. It restricted what I was able to do and I feel like it made my labor more painful and difficult to handle because I couldn’t move around like I wanted to.

In retrospect, I think that if my labor had been longer I would eventually have been able to be off the monitor for periods of time. Once Stephanie arrived and checked the situation out, I think she would have let me go for at least a little while here and there without it. But the labor happened super fast and that chance just never arose. So while I’m still seriously annoyed at that monitor, I realize that it was just dumb chance that labor was so quick and I never got off of it at all. But still, I hated that thing. I don’t understand at all how or why people routinely hang out with monitors strapped to them for their entire labors if they don’t have to.

The third thing that I was upset about regarding the birth was that the people I wanted to be with me were not with me. Norah was not with me. Carissa didn’t make it to the birth. My sister made it to the very, very end of the birth, and my midwife only just made it there in time to catch the baby. This is another thing that I think would have been different if it hadn’t been such a quick labor. I asked Stephanie whether this happened so fast because of the induction and she said that it didn’t. She said that cytotec leaves the system in 2 hours – by the time I went into labor it had been almost 3 hours since my last dose. She said she thought that Miles and my body knew he needed to get out of there quickly and so that’s what he did. I suppose it is better that I was there at the hospital when that super fast labor went down than still sitting in my bedroom at home. While I think everything still would have been ok, I can’t imagine D staying calm while I delivered a baby at the house.

The last thing that I really disliked about the birth experience was that my family was split up for a few days – and not just any few days, but a few days of serious emotion and transition. I especially don’t like how this was for Norah. Here she is, living her happy little toddler life, and suddenly at the midwife’s office mommy gets all upset. Then the next day mommy stayed upset and Norah got carted off to Grandma’s house for reasons she really didn’t understand, only to finally get to see mommy again at the hospital, still upset (not openly, but kids know) and hooked up to weird things. Then the next time she saw me, Miles was here, but she couldn’t be with me and him for very long before being carted away from mommy again for a couple days.

That just isn’t what I wanted for her. I know there are people who were concerned about whether she would be upset by being there during the birth, but honestly I think being taken away from her momma for a few days when people were clearly upset was probably worse. I had really hoped for a smoother transition for her – not that she necessarily had to see the birth, but that we would all be in the same place, and all going home together at the same time and staying home together as a family for awhile. The continuity I had wanted just didn’t happen. I also didn’t like being away from her during that time. And when Daniel went home a day earlier than me so that he could care for Norah, I was honestly lonely at the hospital. I’m not one to normally feel lonely almost ever, but I really did that day. The baby slept most of the day and there was no one to really talk to and nothing to do but watch TV (which I just really don’t do or enjoy much), and there I was, all by myself, feeling unhappy about the birth and kind of phased by everything that had happened.

So there, that’s out. Those are the things that really bug me when I think about this whole birth experience. I’m sure there are more feelings down underneath, and that they’ll keep coming up and I’ll keep feeling new things, but those 4 things in particular are concrete things that really bothered me about the birth.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

I have spent a lot of time feeling really angry at my body for doing this pre-eclampsia thing. I have felt angry at my body, and I have felt really ashamed of my body. Actually, I think it’s fair to say I have felt more ashamed than I have anything else. I am supposed to be able to do this birth thing without interventions, aren’t I? And I failed at that. Every time someone asks me about the birth and I start with, “well, I ended up having to be induced….” I feel a little bit smaller. I feel tiny, actually. I feel like, in the back of their mind they must be thinking, ‘oh, right, had to be induced’, while mentally rolling their eyes but outwardly smiling and nodding. This is stupid of me, but I can’t help it.

My best friend had to be induced with both of her births and I never once mentally rolled my eyes at her – she needed to be induced to be safe with both of them, both for different, freak reasons. I know that sometimes that happens. It is harder to swallow when you are the *sometimes*, I guess. In a way, I blame some of how I feel on our culture of maternity care. So many people “have to” be induced that really don’t have to, but whose doctors throw scare tactics at them and frighten them into compliance. Believe it or not, your pelvis will not explode if your baby is over 8 pounds and your uterus will not disintegrate at 40 weeks, 1 day. But I digress. When so many inductions seem to happen for no reason at all, it makes it hard to accept that it really does occasionally have to happen for reasons outside our control.

In a lot of ways I feel afraid that people look at me and think I’m stupid for letting the induction happen, or think I am pathetic for quite simply and blindly trusting my care provider – which I totally did, by the way. I trusted her 100%, totally and completely, to know at what point it wasn’t safe for me to stay pregnant anymore. Which is another point altogether, for another paragraph. I feel judged by every person I tell my birth story to, regardless of whether they actually appear to be judging me or not. This is not great for my self-esteem, or that little shame thing I have going on. Even if I think the person believes me that I needed the induction, I assume they are judging me for somehow causing myself to need it, as though I had anything to do with those mad ninja baby moves that got that cord all wrapped up. I am psychotic, I know.

Here’s the most awesome part of that: Since when do I give a crap what anyone else thinks of me? Seriously. I can stand up in front of a crowd and make a total ass of myself without a second thought, I can wear a hoop in my nose to a formal event, and I can blog about the church in a heavily Christian culture. That’s exactly what makes me a good public speaker – that I don’t care whether, at the end of the speech, anybody really likes me or not. It makes it really easy to speak, which, ironically, means I usually end up with a decent % of people, well, at least not disliking me too much. I know who my friends are and I do my best to be considerate to people/love people well, but after that if you don’t like me then, well, *shrug*, I guess you don’t like me. No loss. But oh dear lord, start talking about birth and all the sudden I feel like I have to impress the masses. What’s up with that?

And the cord – Oh, the cord! Can we talk about that? In case I hadn’t spelled that out, Miles’ cord was wrapped around his neck 4 times and nobody knew it until his dear little head came out. Now I have always been under the impression that a cord around a neck is really no big deal, but apparently that does not apply when it is wrapped multiple times like that. Stephanie has had to explain this to me multiple times because my brain refuses to grasp it, but apparently when you get a cord wrapped up multiple times like that, it is easy for it to get compressed, especially when baby is moving down and when baby is getting out. Compressed cord = not enough oxygen getting to baby. This is bad. And so, it could potentially signal one’s brain to start pumping more oxygen to baby. More blood pumping = higher blood pressure. And the next thing you know, BAM! There’s the pre-eclampsia. Or so it has been explained to me (maybe in calmer terms). I am also told that this accounts for the super fast, under 2 hour labor – my body getting baby out super quick so he would be ok. I don’t understand why I can’t totally get this, as I’m generally fairly bright, but every time I get about to where it all makes sense this fuzzy fog settles over it and I shrug and try to assure myself that Stephanie knows what she’s talking about.

Stephanie says she is almost certain this is why I developed pre-eclampsia, which I guess makes sense. I didn’t have it with my first pregnancy and I guess it is unusual to get it in subsequent pregnancies if you haven’t had it in the first. I’m also told it’s not terribly common to develop it late like I did, after 40 weeks. When I took Miles to see my family doctor (who attended both my and my sister’s births *warm fuzzies*) for his 2 week check, he was very surprised to hear that this had happened to me, and reiterated basically everything Stephanie said. I don’t know why, but somehow this made it feel better for me, that someone else said the same thing, that it wasn’t my fault.

Stephanie made a very good point to me, and I am trying to hold onto it when I feel angry at or ashamed of my body for what it did. She said that in all actuality, my body was doing a very good job because it did what it did in order to protect Miles. It figured out there was a problem and set to fixing it as best as it could, and as a result he was never compromised, although he easily could have been. This is a very good point – I’m so very thankful that Miles arrived safely, and I suppose she is right. More oxygen to baby = good. That’s the best I could have done for him and that’s what I did. I am trying very hard to hold onto this when I feel badly about myself – that I took care of my baby without even knowing it, and if it cost me some good feelings about my birth, then I guess that’s just the first in a very long list of sacrifices I am willing to make to take care of my little guy.

So let’s go back to my care provider. Fact: I didn’t question one bit when Stephanie said we needed to go do an induction. I didn’t google or dig up any birth books or search for any studies; I said, “ok” (and sniffled a lot) and went. Somehow I have felt like I was supposed to have questioned this – I think this is another of those things that goes back to our culture of maternity care. People have so many ridiculous things done to them during birth, it is ingrained in my brain to question everything. Everything. I occasionally feel like a sheep for not having done so, and moreso than that, I feel looked at like a sheep for not having done so. This is another of those situations where I can’t believe I care what anyone thinks and yet I do care very much for reasons I don’t understand at all.

When I chose Stephanie as my care provider, I did so carefully, which is to say that I knew her C-section stats and how she handled what are considered routine interventions in most hospitals. I had spoken with her at length about her birth and care philosophies and policies, and had spoken with other people who had used her for their care. I did my homework, and she was the care provider I wanted. And when I chose her for my care, I also made the conscious decision not to question her if she decided an intervention was necessary (as in, not suggested, but we-need-to-do-this-now-so-you-don’t-potentially-die necessary).

I know a lot of stuff about birth. I even know a decent amount about the freak things in birth that require intervention, and about the risks and side effects of a lot of those interventions. This is mostly because, for whatever reason, there is some part of me that cannot survive unless I have a good book close by. But look, my degree is in psychology, and my work experience is as a writer. I am nowhere near qualified to make decisions about high risk situations. I realize that I have a right to make those decisions for myself, but I don’t necessarily think it is always wise to do so. Now Stephanie, on the other hand, is highly educated in her field, has attended I don’t even know how many births, and has a long, happy history of making good decisions regarding patient care without undue intervention. I don’t feel I am educated or experienced enough to make good choices about high risk situations. I know enough that I could spot scary things and get to Stephanie, but not enough to be able to decide what to do about them. Stephanie does know this stuff, and she can be trusted not to just randomly intervene for the sake of policy or convenience. Somebody has to be in charge of knowing what’s safe, and I choose to have that person be Stephanie, not me. I realize that is not a choice everyone makes about their care provider (and not a choice that is necessarily wise to make), but it is the choice I made. I don’t know why I feel compelled to justify it, but here I am, justifying away.

This is not to say that Stephanie is some sort of birth goddess. I mean, she is, in the sense that she is fabulous at what she does, but she does not know everything, control everything, or guarantee a wise decision or good outcome. In short, she is human. I accept that, but I still think that her version of human is going to do a much better job than mine at making good care choices in bad situations.

The fact that she is such a great care provider and that I did put a lot of effort into finding a good fit makes it hard to accept that this birth experience happened. I did everything “right”, dammit! This was supposed to go well! When I think of crappy birth experiences, I generally think of intervention-happy OBs in intervention-happy hospitals. It is hard to remember, sometimes this stuff just happens, no matter how good your midwife is. She is not god. Being a midwife does not magically keep bad things from happening to her patients.

All of that just to say, no, I didn’t question her when she said we needed to induce labor. I didn’t feel I needed to. She said it was no longer safe for me to go home and stay pregnant, and I suppose that should be good enough for me. I’m working on it.

When I look at how I feel ashamed about things, I am realizing a lot has to do with how I feel like other people perceive me, and I don’t really understand that. I suspect it is something I will need to mull over again and again. But already, just seeing that here in writing is helping me to feel better. If I can get past worrying what everyone else thinks about me, maybe I can be ok.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

I realize this is forever long, but there is more to write. I want to wrap this up by writing about the things I do feel really good about regarding this pregnancy and birth. I think if I can do that, it will give me some good points to focus on when I think about the birth, and will help me to tell a better story for Miles one day. So I’m going to do that and call this little writing project good.

My pregnancy with Miles was super easy, and I’m so thankful for that. I didn’t have any trouble getting or staying pregnant, which I was so afraid of when we decided we wanted another child. The thought of more miscarriages or another ectopic pregnancy really weighed on me I’m so thankful that I just one day turned up happily pregnant and then stayed that way for the whole 9 months with very little drama or fuss about the whole thing. Granted, I spent the first 20 weeks in a state of tiredness I would describe as near comatose, but that’s really about as bad as it got.

I also enjoyed having some quiet, relaxing time at the end of my pregnancy. When I started having contractions a few weeks before my due date, I figured the baby was coming early, but he actually ended up arriving a little late. During that time at the end of my pregnancy, no one really expected much of anything from me and that was so freeing. I stopped putting things on my calendar, stopped working, and just spent a lot of time resting and hanging out with Norah. I really enjoyed having that time with her before Miles arrived, and it felt good to do very little except keep up the house and take care of my little girl.

As far as labor and birth go, I have a lot to be thankful for and to look back on fondly. I’m so glad Daniel didn’t leave to go get breakfast when he was thinking about it. He decided not to, and very shortly after that I went into labor and had a very fast labor. If he had left then to get breakfast, he may have missed most of it! I really needed and appreciated his support through labor and I don’t know what I would have done if he had not been there. He wasn’t able to do much for me as far as relieving pain, but his support was so valuable, especially because the labor went really quickly and I was very overwhelmed by how intense things were getting right away. I kept saying, “I can’t do this for 12 more hours” because I didn’t realize how fast things were moving and I couldn’t imagine handling that labor for very long, and he helped me to focus on just the next contraction and get through them all. I am generally not good at counting on people to be there for me, so it feels good to have counted on him for that and for him to have come through for me so well.

I am also so excited about how lucid I was for the whole experience. When Norah was born, I got so disoriented around the time of her birth and for a good hour after she was born. I intellectually knew what was going on, what had happened, who was there, etc, but I felt like I was viewing everything from somewhere else. Nothing seemed very real. It was just so overwhelming I guess my brain took a time out to recover. This time, however, I was really there, really present, for the whole experience. I am especially happy that I was so with it right when Miles was born, and I will never, ever forget those first minutes after his birth and how I immediately, instinctively reached for him and then held him and talked to him and just marveled at him, and how dense and heavy and real he felt to me – how he immediately felt like a perfect little person who had always belonged but only finally just arrived. It feels so good to think about that and to have had that be such a good experience for me. I can’t really even describe it, except to say it was like my whole body just signed with relief and felt like the world was finally right, somehow.

During the time Stephanie was with me during labor and birth, I was really thankful for her presence. There were moments when I was having trouble focusing or getting through and she would tell me to just listen to her voice and I would find her and be able to focus again and get through the moment. I remember really well how soothing I found that in the midst of the crazy, and I’m happy for that experience.

I also appreciated that the nurse who was with us was so helpful and offered us different things, like access to the birth ball and a mirror to see the birth. I know that’s probably a rarity in hospitals around here and it was so nice not to have to think about asking for those things, but just to say yes or no when she offered them. I wouldn’t have remembered to ask, I don’t think, and it would have been sad to look back and not to have had some of those options. The mirror was especially nice because I had said no to the nurse who asked me about it when Norah was born and I kind of regretted that. This time around I did get to use one, and was able to see Miles being born and that was really awesome.

I also love telling the story of when Kristin showed up to pick up my placenta. First of all, I had paged the nurses’ station earlier in the day to ask if someone could pick up my placenta for me, and a nurse was in my room immediately. Immediately. Like, the fastest response time I’d gotten the whole stay. It was kind of funny. Then by the time Kristin arrived, that nurse was no longer there, so nobody knew to expect her. This new nurse walked into my room, looked at me real funny, and said, “Uh, somebody’s here…. they said they want to pick up your placenta??” So the nurse brought it in and gave it to me in this plastic box marked as a biohazard and then bagged it up in a hospital bag, “so no one will wonder why she’s walking around with a biohazard”. This still strikes me as hilarious. The next day one of the nurses came in and asked me all about it – what we were going to do with it, why, etc. It was kind of cool. When I was admitted at DeKalb, I didn’t know if I was going to be able to take the placenta or not, which I had planned on doing. I was worried it was going to be a big hassle or they wouldn’t let me have it, but it was no problem at all. Kristin encapsulated it for me and I think it really helped with that post-baby hormone crash. I just never had it this time around, and that made for such a good post partum experience at home the first week.

Another thing I am so thankful for is the outpouring of support I experienced when I found out I likely had pre-eclampsia. Erica talked to me for a long time that Thursday night before I ended up being induced, and her words were so helpful. Carissa came to the hospital on Friday evening and just let me be sad. I needed her presence so much right then and I was so glad she came. My mom came on Friday during the day and cleaned up my house and helped me with Norah. Friends and family kept checking in on me and made me feel loved. So many people from our community sent me thoughts and prayers and messages and made me feel so valued.

There’s a lot of good in this whole experience and I think that’s where I am going to try to focus from here on out. There’s always good in the bad and bad in with the good, and I guess that’s just life. No, this isn’t how I wanted it. No, it wasn’t perfect. I’m guessing no birth is perfect, but I was hoping for a little closer to perfect than what I got.

It has taken me 2 weeks to write this all up (so now Miles is almost 8 weeks old!), and I can see, from how my writing changes from beginning to end, that I am healing up. That is good. I am a firm believer that there is a place for the ugly stuff and that it is ok to hurt and be sad and wallow a bit sometimes. But I think healing up is good too, and it has to start some time. I’m glad to be feeling a little happier about things.

I’m not sure what else to say. I know I’ll keep finding things to feel about this for awhile, and that I’m not totally done with it. But I feel like I’m done enough to stop writing for now and to move along to something else for awhile. If you’re out there and you’ve read this, thank you so much for taking the time to hear me.

Diaper Sewing 101

2011-12-06T14:46:00.003-05:00

Cloth Diaper Sewing

Ever looked at cloth diapers and thought, ‘wow, that’s such a great idea…. but they’re so expensive!’ ? While using cloth diapers is less expensive than using disposables, it does involve an upfront cost which can be intimidating (though worth it in the end!) One way I’ve found to decrease the cost of cloth diapering is to make my own diapers. Not only does it cost less, it has also allowed me to make exactly what I want, exactly the way I want it. My hand-sewn diapers are more economical, trimmer fitting, more absorbent, and cuter than diapers I purchased before I learned how to sew my own.

Any type of diaper that can be commercially bought can also be sewn at home. If you’re good at reading directions and willing to give sewing a try, cloth diaper sewing can be an affordable way save even more on diapering your little one!

This cloth diaper sewing primer will walk you through the basics of diaper sewing, including the types of diapers you can make, what types of fabrics you should use, which patterns to use, where to buy materials, and more! It does not cover the basics of sewing, but if you need help with those I do have some resources to recommend.

Let’s get sewing!

Cloth Diapering 101

The first thing you will need to do if you want to sew your own diapers is gain an understanding of cloth diapers in general. There are a number of excellent resources that explain the ins and outs of cloth diapering, and I’ve listed some here.

Locally (in the Fort Wayne area), we have a couple of resources for getting to know cloth diapering basics:

Birth Matters, an education center for families from pre-pregnancy through toddlerhood, offers cloth diapering classes once each quarter. This is the only place you can go locally to see and touch the different types of diapers in person. I highly recommend them: http://www.birthmatters.com/
Sprouts Baby Wear, a local cloth diaper distributer, has a nice cloth diapering summary on their webpage which describes the different types of diapers available. If you’re considering purchasing commercially made cloth diapers, I recommend ordering from them. Here is a link to their diaper description page: http://www.sproutsbabywear.com/budding-out

There are a number of sites on the web that contain information about cloth diapering as well. A few of them are:

Now On to the Sewing!

When I first started sewing cloth diapers and diapering accessories, the most intimidating things for me to figure out were 1.which fabrics and materials to use (and how many layers!); and 2.which patterns or tutorials to use. The remainder of this primer will help you figure out those two key issues, as well as provide some additional resources.

Cloth Diapering Materials and Fabrics

This section will be a run-down of what types of materials are out there, and what they’re used for.

Absorbent Fabrics

Just like it sounds; absorbent fabrics absorb liquid. As a general rule, natural fibers absorb well. Some synthetic fibers are designed to be absorbent, but most are not. Absorbent fabrics are used to make prefolds, fitted diapers, the insert portion of pocket diapers, and the soakers of AIOS and AI2s.

Wicking Fabrics

Wicking fabrics do not absorb liquid. Instead, they allow liquid to pass through them and ‘wick’ onto other fabrics. Most wicking fabrics are 100% polyester. Wicking fabrics are used as the innermost layer on pocket diapers, which is what keeps baby feeling dry. Wicking fabrics can also be (but are not always) used as innermost layers on fitteds, AIOs, and AI2s, and diaper covers.

Waterproof/Water Resistant Fabrics

Waterproof or water resistant fabrics are used for diaper covers and for the outermost layers of pocket diapers, AIOs and AI2s. This is what keeps baby’s clothes from getting soiled.

Closures

This is what keeps the diaper closed and on the baby. Most often they are snaps or hook and loop tape (like Velcro).

Elastic

Most diapers utilize elastic around the legs and back, with the obvious exception of prefolds. Polybraid or lastin elastics are popular for this. Fold Over Elastic (FOE) can be used to bind diaper covers.

Needles & Thread

Cotton thread can be used for Prefolds, Fitteds, or any diaper not featuring a waterproof fabric. For pocket diapers and others using waterproof fabrics, use polyester or nylon thread to prevent wicking.
When sewing through PUL, it is recommended to use a small sized ball point needle in order to prevent sewing holes that can cause wicking.

Where To Purchase Materials

Local fabric stores carry many of the supplies needed for cloth diapering. Both JoAnn Fabrics and Hancock Fabrics now carry PUL, the most commonly used waterproof diaper fabric (it is with the utility fabrics), and nearly all fabric stores carry some sort of absorbent cotton materials and some sort of wicking fabrics.

There are, however, some specific diaper fabrics and supplies that cannot be purchased locally at this time. Online diaper fabric and supply retailers include:

Diaper Sewing Supplies: www.diapersewingsupplies.com
Very Baby: www.verybaby.com
Celtic Cloths: www.celticclothswholesale.com
Fabric Dot Com: www.fabric.com
Kids In The Garden: www.kidsinthegarden.com
Sewzanne’s: www.sewzannesfabrics.com
Diaper Fabric Station: http://diaperfabricstation.com/
Wazoodle: http://wazoodle.com/
Zoodad’s: http://www.zoodads.com/
Kamsnaps: http://kamsnaps.com/

Diapers can also be made out of upcycled materials from around your house or thrift stores. Old flannel sheets, t-shirts, and even wool sweaters can be re-purposed for diaper use. Just check the fiber composition and determine whether it’s absorbent, wicking, or water resistant.

A Few Quick Notes:

Always, always, always wash fabrics prior to sewing with the same wash routine you would use for your diapers. This will prevent shrinkage once the diaper is sewn and will help to increase absorbency. If you’re using upcycled materials, you may want to wash multiple times to eliminate detergent residue buildup.
Many absorbent fabric types can be made from cotton, hemp, or bamboo. Bamboo is the most absorbent, hemp is next, and cotton is the least absorbent.

The following cheat sheets outline a number of popular diaper materials, which fabrics and materials fall into which material category, as well as which materials you’ll need for each type of diaper or diapering accessory you might want to sew.


	Absorbent	# of layers for soaker	Wicking	Waterproof	Closure	Elastic	Available locally	Notes
Flannel (cotton)	X	8					X
Microfiber	X	3						Synthetic fabric designed to absorb, must have another layer of fabric between microfiber and the baby’s skin as it will dry skin out.
Zorb	X	2						Must be sandwiched between other fabrics
Zorb II	X	2						Can be sewed on its own
Birdseye	X	8					X	Often used for prefolds or flats
Terrycloth/French terry	X	4					X	Same fabrics typically used to make towels or bathrobes
Sherpa	X	4
Velour	X	*					X	Cotton velour available locally, hemp & bamboo velour available online *Typically used for inners/outers, not soakers
Cotton knits/ interlock/jersey	X	*					X	* Typically used for inners/outers, not soakers
Microfleece			X
Suedecloth			X				X
Panne Velour (Crushed Panne)			X				X
Minky			X				X
Polyurethane laminate (PUL)				X			X
Wool				X			X	Must be felted and lanolized for water-resistant properties, not for use in pockets, AIO’s or AI2s
KAM Snaps					X			Size 20 plastic snaps most frequently used for diapers
Hook & Loop (Aplix or Touch Tape)					X			Like Velcro, but Aplix & Touch Tape are higher quality
Snappi					X			Used for prefolds
Polybraid						X	X	Can be tacked down at each end and cased
Lastin						X		Must be sewn down throughout length of elastic
Fold Over Elastic						X		Used to bind diaper covers

Diaper Types & Material Requirements ~ Cheat Sheet
	Absorbent Fabrics	Wicking Fabrics	Waterproof Fabrics	Closures	Elastic	Notes
Prefolds	X					No closure attached to the prefold, but snappis can be used to secure them
Quick Snap Flap Wrap	X			X
Fitteds	X			X	X
Pocket Diapers (shells + inserts)	X	X	X	X	X
All-In-One / All-In-Two	X	X	X	X	X
Diaper Covers		optional	X	X	X
Wetbags			X	X		Closure is typically a zipper
Training Pants	X		optional	optional	optional

Patterns & Tutorials

Now that we’ve covered diaper materials, I’m going to go through each type of diaper and give my recommendations for patterns and tutorials

Prefolds

Very Baby free tutorial on how to make prefolds the way they are commercially made: http://verybaby.com/tutorials/sew-a-prefold-diaper-the-real-way/
Free shortcut instructions for making prefolds: http://diapersewing.wordpress.com/2006/12/08/diy-prefold-diapers/

Quick Snap Flap Wrap

The Quick Snap Flap Wrap is not a commercially sold type of diaper, but is popular among work-at-home diaper sellers on sites such as Hyena Cart or Etsy. It is easier to use than a prefold, is very quick and easy to sew, and has a very fast dry time.

There are 2 free versions:

http://jayejaye.freeyellow.com/diapers/sns/QSFWpatts.pdf

http://jayejaye.freeyellow.com/diapers/sns/SWQSFWpatt.pdf

Wetbags

Dilley Dally Diapers Wetbag Tutorial: http://dilleydally.blogspot.com/2009/03/wetbag-tutorial.html
Little Birdie Secrets Wetbag Tutorial: http://littlebirdiesecrets.blogspot.com/2009/05/wet-bag-tutorial.html

Cloth Training Pants

Wee Weka Knickers (3 links for pull up style and sized snap style): http://www.thenappynetwork.org.nz/images/WeeWeka_Knickers.pdf http://www.thenappynetwork.org.nz/images/WeeWeka_SMSideSnap.pdf http://www.thenappynetwork.org.nz/images/WeeWeka_MLSideSnap.pdf
Tinkle Time Trainer: http://www.ladderhilldesign.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=vmj_estore.tpl&product_id=10&category_id=2&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=1
Trimsies Trainer: http://www.trimsies.com/shop.shtml

Fitteds/Pockets/AIOS/AI2s/Diaper Covers

Most patterns for pocket diapers can also be used to create fitted diapers, AIOs/AI2s, and Diaper covers. There are so many of these, and they are so diverse, that I have put them into a table for easy identification

Pattern Name	Where to find	Free Pattern	Fitted	Pocket	AIO/ AI2	Cover	Notes
Darling Diapers Unlimited	http://www.darlingdiapers.com/shop.html		X	X	X	X	Extremely detailed with a variety of closure and style options. I highly recommend this pattern for the beginning sewer.
La-Di-Da	http://www.ladidadiapers.com/?page_id=2		X	X	X	X
Hippy Hippy Snap	http://hyenacart.com/onestore.php?vid=1224&category=4		X	X	X	X
Fattycakes	http://hyenacart.com/prod_details.php?id=92348&vid=752		X	X	X	X
Little Comet Tails	http://hyenacart.com/LittleCometTails/index.php?c=9		X	X	X	X
Trimsies	http://www.trimsies.com/		X	X	X	X
Je M’appelle	http://jmorganics.com/index_files/JMPNappyPattern.htm		X	X	X	X	One size buttonhole elastic instructions, S hook closure option (both are unique to this pattern, as far as I know)
Nykibaby One size	http://hyenacart.com/NykiBaby/index.php?c=11&p=53970		X	X	X	X
Nykibaby Butterfly	http://hyenacart.com/NykiBaby/mt/2272/28493/NykiBaby-Butterfly-Fitted-Diaper-PDF-Pattern		X				Fold-in wing soakers; easy sew
Rita’s Rump Pocket Fitted	http://handmadebyrita.blogspot.com/2007/10/classic-rrp-ritas-rump-pocket-pattern.html	X	X
Rita’s Rump Cover Pattern	http://handmadebyrita.blogspot.com/2007/10/httpwww.html	X				X	Fits over RRP fitteds
Cloth Revolution	http://themafiatutu.blogspot.com/2010/04/free-cloth-diaper-pattern.html	X	X	X	X	X
Katrina’s Quick Sew Soaker	http://katrinassqs.blogspot.com/2007/10/free-soaker-pattern.html	X				X	Wool pull-on cover

For additional diaper sewing resources, please visit: www.makelaughlove.com or feel free to message me via facebook or my blog.

Baby Miles: A Birth Story

2011-11-17T15:01:00.002-05:00

Baby is here! The following birth story contains all the gory details, so proceed at your own risk. Here goes:

I am pleased to announce the arrival of

Miles Daniel

Born on November 12, 2011 at 10:20 am.

8lbs, 6oz

21.5 inches long

I had begun having random bouts of regular contractions for periods of time in the weeks before my due date. I was a little surprised when my due date came and went and I was still pregnant, but I had been feeling pretty good and decided to use the extra time to get things done around the house and relax with Norah.

I had a routine appointment with my midwife on November 10, where my blood pressure was very high (something like 150 over 97). Lying on my side for awhile didn’t help it to go down at all, and then it also turned out that there was protein in my urine that day. These symptoms together usually mean pre-eclampsia, so I was very upset. Pre-eclampsia often means immediate induction of labor, which I really did not want to do, and would also risk me out of being able to birth at the birthing center, which we had been planning on. I had bloodwork drawn and went home with an appointment scheduled for the next day.

At that point, I was hopeful that I might go into labor that night and that I might be able to get my blood pressure low enough to still use the birth center if I could get into the tub they had there (immersion in water often lowers blood pressure, at least temporarily). I was post dates, had been having contractions on and off for awhile, and had my membranes stripped at my appointment, so I thought it was at least possible. I went and met with a friend for awhile that evening, went to the store and got black cohosh to take to hopefully help me go into labor, got some additional herbs for blood pressure help, and went home to, erm, spend some time with D. We went to bed around 1 am and I was having pretty good contractions every 8-9 minutes.

I woke up about 4:00 am not in labor at all and I was very disappointed. I started having some contractions around 4:45 am that got to about 5 minutes apart, and that lasted until about 7:00, when they slowed down. I continued having contractions anywhere from 7-10 minutes apart until about 1:00 that afternoon when they more or less stopped. By 2:30, I needed to leave home for my appointment with my midwife. I decided to take everything I had packed for the birth, knowing that it was unlikely that I wouldn’t be diagnosed with pre-eclampsia, and that if I were diagnosed I would likely be admitted to the hospital immediately. Norah went home with my mom, and D and I headed to Auburn for the appointment.

At my appointment I found that my blood pressure was even higher than the previous day, I had more protein in my urine than the previous day, and the bloodwork from the previous day didn’t look good. I was diagnosed with mild pre-eclampsia and sent up to registration at DeKalb Health. I was admitted and placed on blood pressure medication. Later in the evening I was given ¼ tablet of cytotec to start the labor induction. The plan was to receive 4 doses of cytotec, 3 hours apart and hope that it would cause me to go into labor. If the cytotec did not work, then I would need pitocin, which would require me to have an IV and additional monitoring, which I really did not want. As it was I already had to have a fetal monitor on, which was really getting on my nerves. It kept losing the baby and having to be adjusted, and it made it uncomfortable to try and sleep.

During the night I felt very frustrated at being at the hospital and everything that had happened. Here we had planned to birth at the birthing center where I don’t think they even have a fetal monitor belt, and where we could do pretty whatever we wanted regarding our birth. Now I was hooked up to a machine and had to tell someone whenever I needed to pee, waiting for a pill to kick in so I could have my baby. I was not impressed.

We had also planned for Norah to be able to be with us at the birthing center, which had toys for her to play with, cozy rooms for her to hang out wherever she wanted to, etc. Being at the hospital would make that much more difficult since there was really nowhere to go if she didn’t want to be right in the room with us, and since it really wasn’t cozy at all. As it turned out, the labor happened too quickly for us to even call for her to be brought up to the hospital, and that’s something I feel really sad about. I don’t like the way our family was split up for so much of the time we spent at the hospital and I really wish we had been able to use the birthing center like we had originally planned.

I received the final dose of cytotec around 6:30 am, and at some point started having a few contractions. They weren’t really catching my attention much because they weren’t very painful – I’d been having worse ones at home – so I didn’t pay much attention to them. About 8:45 the contractions started to get more intense and started coming much closer together. I felt like labor was getting underway, which was great – no pitocin, and so far no annoying IV!

I was surprised how the contractions were all of the sudden pretty difficult, and had D call my sister Michelle and tell her she should head up to the hospital as I felt I would need support from both of them very soon. The nurse taking care of me came in while I was having a contraction and told me that Stephanie (my midwife) would be there in about an hour to hour and a half and asked if I wanted her to come sooner. I said I did, so she called her and asked her to come right away. My plan was to wait for my sister and midwife to arrive, then to get checked and see how I was progressing. Then based on that, I would decide when to call my friend Carissa to come to the hospital and my parents to ask them to bring Norah up. Carissa had agreed to be with Norah during the birth and was still planning on helping us with that if Norah wanted to be present. If not, she could take her to the waiting room or leave with her, depending on what she felt Norah needed.

By 9:00 I was getting very worried because the contractions were difficult for me to get through. I knew that my previous labor had lasted around 19 hours and I didn’t see how I was going to get through 19 hours of these really intense contractions, especially if they got more difficult. I didn’t remember them being so hard so early on with my previous labor and wondered if my perception of my labor with Norah was off. Several times I asked D to talk me down because I was afraid I wouldn’t make it through the whole labor at that rate. I kept saying, “I can’t do this for 12 more hours. I can’t do this for 12 more hours,” and telling him I was afraid. He did a great job helping me feel less afraid and getting through each contraction. I wanted to ask for drugs, but I realized that no one here had my birth plan and they might actually bring me drugs, which wasn’t truly what I wanted. It occurred to me that I sounded more like someone close to transition than early labor, but I thought it was because of the cytotec. I was absolutely not going to let myself think that my labor could be short, because then if it wasn’t, I would never make it through.

Very shortly I started feeling like I needed to pee. I kept unplugging the fetal monitor (I needed it due to the cytotec and my blood pressure) and going into the bathroom to sit on the toilet, but I wasn’t getting any pee to come out, just a bunch of bloody show. The nurse came in after a bit and asked me if perhaps what I felt was pressure from the baby. I told her I had no idea, I just felt like I needed to pee. She thought I should come out of the bathroom and get checked, so I did, and she said I was at 4-5.

By 9:45 or so I was having a very hard time not pushing with contractions. I knew I wasn’t fully dialated, but I couldn’t figure out how to not push. It just felt like that was what I needed to do. At some point the nurse checked me and I was at 8 cm, which surprised me a lot since it had been such a short time since I was just at 4-5.

I’m not sure what time Stephanie arrived. When she got there I was on hands and knees in the bed (which, actually, is how I spent large chunks of my labor with Norah, too), and she checked me. I don’t think she said what I was at and I couldn’t pay attention enough to care. I was feeling like if I could just get a 5 minute break from the contractions I could pull it together and get through the rest of them, but I just wasn’t getting a good break inbetween. I was very overwhelmed.

Someone (Stephanie??) then suggested that I try lying on my side. I did, and my leg kept getting a cramp in it, but it was working otherwise. Very shortly I saw that Stephanie was putting on the delivery gloves and smock, and then nurses started putting pads underneath me. This is when it hit me that I was going to have the baby very soon and that my labor was just going to be really short. Apparently I really had been pushing the baby down all this time and he was close to being born. Nothing had really changed about how my contractions felt or how I was handling them for some time, so I just kept pushing with them because that’s what I felt like.

Very soon after this somebody asked me if I wanted a mirror. I almost said no because I was so focused on just getting through the labor, but I remembered that I had said no with my previous birth and then later wished that I had gotten one, so I said yes. One of the nurses brought the mirror in and set it up so I could see the baby starting to crown. Stephanie said, “Look, there’s your baby”, and I was like, “Oh, he’s really right there already?!?”. She said that, yes, he was right there, and he was ready to be born.

Very soon after this she asked D if he wanted to come and catch the baby, so he went to help her while a nurse stayed with me to help me labor. Michelle arrived a few minutes later and took over for the nurse. Baby’s head was halfway out when she came into the room. My water broke at some point while I was pushing out his head, but I don’t remember when. I was able to see his head being born via the mirror they had set up, and that was pretty cool.

Pretty soon his head was out and Stephanie started unwrapping the cord from around his neck. It seemed like she was doing this forever, and it turned out it had been wrapped 4 times, which surprised us all. Once that was done it took a few more pushes to get his body out, and D put him onto my belly. He was really blue, and even though I know babies often come out blue, for some reason this got me a little panicked, I think maybe because he was so still. He was being rubbed down with towels on my belly and pretty soon he pinked up and moved around and I felt so much better. I held him for awhile and I remember talking to him, but not what I said. I was so happy and just overwhelmed with how perfect he was and how wonderful it was to have him earthside. I was really thrilled to be so coherent and happy right at this moment because I had been so disoriented in the hour or so right after Norah’s birth and I don’t feel like I got to have this sweet moment with her right away.

Pretty soon I delivered the placenta and tried to nurse the baby, but he wasn’t very interested. Stephanie checked and found I had no tears or anything that needed repair, so that was good. I had my sister call Carissa and I called my parents so that they and Norah could be the first ones to come and meet him. I still feel really badly that Norah and Carissa missed the birth, but there’s no way we could have known he would be born so fast.

I stayed at the hospital for the full two days after the birth on account of my blood pressure not stabilizing very well. At the moment I’m still taking some blood pressure medication, and I have to check in with Stephanie once a week until it gets back to normal. She said this could take up to 6 weeks, although I’m feeling really good, so I’m hopeful that it won’t take that long.

I’m also working through my disappointment at not being able to birth at the birthing center. I’m a bit surprised that I’m not more upset than I am, but I’m feeling ok about it. I’m obviously bummed out that we didn’t get to have the birth center experience, and I really wish things had turned out differently. The main things I’m upset about are not getting to have the spontaneous labor experience, having to use the fetal monitor the whole time, Norah and Carissa not being with us, and my family being so split up for the days I was at the hospital.

However, I understand why we couldn’t use the birth center and I am thankful that we had access to a hospital where we were able to birth without a lot of interventions and where the staff were supportive of the kind of birth we were trying to achieve. I’m very thankful that Stephanie gave me options for induction that were gentler than typical hospital inductions (I found out later breaking my water would have been another option before resorting to pitocin) and that I was given as many choices along the way as possible. I also realize that policies like the one that risked me out of the birth center are an integral part of what make birth centers safe options. Pre-eclamptic people shouldn’t be birthing in places without access to continuous monitoring or emergency medical care. By eliminating as many risks as possible, the birth center ensures that the people who do birth there are safe.

I don’t know why I developed pre-eclampsia. I know that high blood pressure is common in my family, so I wonder if that is a factor. Stephanie also wondered if the cord being wrapped up so many times may have contributed to my high blood pressure. I wasn’t sure how that could be related, but she said if the cord had too much pressure on it or was constricted when baby was trying to drop, it could have restricted the amount of oxygen he was getting, and that my body may have compensated by pumping a lot of extra blood. I don’t really know a lot about blood pressure or how oxygen makes its way through the cord, so I really have no idea. Stephanie did say that she felt future pregnancies would be safe for me on account of not having had it in my first pregnancy and it developing so late in this one. I’m not sure if we will have more children or not, but I’m glad that I have it as a safe option.

We are all home now and doing well. I feel really good aside from minor soreness and general newborn-at-home tiredness. Norah absolutely loves her little brother – the very first thing she did this morning was to find him and give him a kiss. Dan is off work for the rest of this week, so we are spending some time together as a family of 4. Overall, life is pretty good around here.

Crockpot Yogurt!

2011-07-28T21:56:00.000-04:00

Every couple of months or so, someone sends me an email or a message on Facebook that looks something like this:

"Hey, don't you make your own yogurt? What's that all about? Do you have a recipe I can use?"

I have to say, it is actually pretty cool to be known around town for your mad yogurt making skills (humble, yes, I am so, so humble), but I since I always end up typing the recipe back up and then going on and on with yogurt tips, I figured it might be a good idea to just stick up a blog post about it. Then I can link to it if anyone ever asks me about the crockpot yogurt again (which, in accordance with Murphy's Law, will probably never happen again).

First, let me say that crockpot yogurt is not my original idea. I got the idea from the extremely fabulous blog, A Year of Slow Cooking. In addition to crockpot yogurt, this blog has some great crockpot recipes which you can literally use every day of the year. Good stuff. At any rate, here's a link to the original blog post that got me yogurt-making.

Now, you certainly can just follow the instructions in this blog and... wha-la! you will have delicious crockpot yogurt. Just click on that link above and go to town. I have made it this way with no problems, and it has turned out just great!

I do have a different way of making yogurt in the crockpot which I prefer because it eliminates the several hour waiting period of heating up and cooling down the milk before adding the rest of the ingredients. I like to do it this way because then I don't have to think about making yogurt until maybe an hour before bed. Both methods (the blog one and the one I am about to post) work well. I don't notice a difference in the quality of yogurt or in success in making it, so feel free to use either method without worry. This is just the method that I prefer. Here is my preferred recipe:

Ingredients:

8 cups (half-gallon) milk - whole milk works best, and you don't want the ultra-pasturized stuff
1/2 cup live/active culture yogurt
1/4 cup honey (optional)
1 TBSP vanilla (optional)
Thick bath towel

Instructions:

Turn empty 4 qt crockpot on low
In a saucepan on the stove bring milk to 190 degrees Fahrenheit (I use a candy thermometer to keep track of the temperature)
Immediately place the whole pot in a cool water bath (I use cold water in my sink) and let the milk cool to 110 degrees F.
Mix in yogurt, honey, and vanilla
Dump everything into the crockpot
Turn off the crockpot, wrap it up in a thick bath towel, and let it sit for 8-12 hours.
Eat yogurt!

It really is that simple. And that delicious. Mmmmmm....

So here are my random crockpot yogurt tips:

The higher the fat content of your milk, the better and thicker your yogurt will turn out. I always use whole milk. Yes, that means you are eating more fat, but guess what! It's nice, happy, healthy fat. And you get to control how much sugar is in it. And I think sugar is way worse on our bodies than animal fats, so I'm not terribly worried about the fatty yogurt. It makes me happy.
I've read mixed reports on using different types of milk (as in, not animal milks). My understanding is that you can't do this with soy milk. I have no idea why or what kinds of milk it does or does not work with. Cow milk - yes. Goat milk - yes. Anything else? You may want to Google it.
Rumor has it you can buy yogurt cultures from health food or whole food stores. I don't know how to use these, but they are an option if you prefer not to have to have random 1/2 cups of store bought yogurt around in order to make your yogurt. Again, Google can probably be your friend on this one.
In the summer when I run the air conditioner, my yogurt doesn't turn out very well. I suspect that it cools down too quickly with the air blowing into the kitchen. I have been told that putting the whole crock, towel and all, into the oven and shutting the door will take care of this problem. I haven't tried it yet, but I will next time I make it.
If you would like thicker yogurt, you can add one more step at the end and strain it through cheesecloth. I usually get an enormous bowl, stick a collander in it, put the cheesecloth on top of that, and pour the yogurt in. When it is the thickness I want it, I scoop it out and put it away. The stuff that strains out of the yogurt is whey, and it has lots of super-good bacteria and healthy goodness in it. You can substitute whey for water in pretty much any baking recipe, so I usually make whey bread when I make yogurt. It's also good for plants, so you could water some plants with it if you like.
If you do decide to strain your yogurt, you will want to refridgerate it for a few hours to let it set up. Otherwise, when you strain it to the thickness you like and then put it in the fridge, it will thicken up even further and you may end up with something resembling cream cheese (not that that has ever happened to me.....). It does set up a bit when it gets cold, so let it cool before straining.

And that may be all I know about yogurt making. I tend to eat the yogurt with either frozen fruit, preserves I've made, or homemade granola. Or all of those. At once. Slightly delicious.

If anyone tries this and comes up with good tips, let me know and I'll add them to this post. Until then... happy yogurt making!

Reflections on Easter: The Jesus story, zombie faith issues, and the unlikely victory of Icarus

2011-04-16T20:29:00.001-04:00

There’s no promise of safety on these secondhand wings/ but I’m willing to find out what impossible means / Climb though the heavens on feathers and dreams / cause the melting point of wax means nothing to me
~ The Melting Point of Wax; Thrice

So, it’s happened again. Easter time has snuck up on me, and now that I’ve taken a moment to think about it, it’s difficult for me to know what to make of it. Those of you who know me well know that Christian holidays have been difficult for me since I left the church several years ago. I never know what to do with Easter – not celebrating it doesn’t feel like an option. I’d be opting out of multiple family gatherings, and for what? A defense of my belief system? My belief system doesn’t permit me to hurt people I love just so I can be ‘right’. But celebrating often feels like a giant hypocrisy, because I don’t believe in the Easter story. Or, more accurately, I’m not sure whether I believe in the Easter story and I’m not overly concerned with figuring that out right now.

More on that in a moment.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Jesus story lately, probably in large part because I just finished reading Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins. It’s been prompting me to think deeply about the loss of my faith and about leaving the church, which are both fairly unpleasant topics, but both important.

There are things no one tells you about what it is to lose one’s faith. Holidays have been hard for me over the past several years for the same reason Easter feels difficult this year. And there is a profound loneliness involved in losing one’s church and god. I remember very clearly reading Coupland’s Eleanor Rigby around the time this all went down for me, and being profoundly impacted by the strong focus it had on human loneliness. Leaving the church was a deeply thought out, very difficult decision. It had become apparent that the Jesus story I was reading in the Gospels wasn’t the Jesus story I was being preached from the pulpit (and yes, I tried many pulpits). I came to realize I didn’t actually believe the same things the Church believed, even though we were reading the same text (and for this I say, Rob Bell, I feel your pain, man.) I didn’t feel I had a choice but to leave – staying was a lie. But being without the church community you have relied on for years is harrowing. It is heartbreaking, soul-sucking loneliness. It is constantly questioning yourself, never feeling sure of anything, always feeling on the outside and never understanding exactly why. Not exactly pleasant, I’m sure you can imagine.

Church communities, as it turns out, can be replaced. Cuthbert and I have since somehow managed to build a vibrant, healthy community we rely heavily on, and that I’m honestly not sure I could survive without. We have Christians, atheists, agnostics, pagans… anyone who can live with our adherence to creating a safe space for people to live in community. Gods, though… well, they’re not very replace-able. I will never forget reading the passage of Eleanor Rigby in which one of the characters describes what it is about zombies that is so frightening…. the way they have no souls, and have lost their connection to the divine. I felt that so strongly, that loss of a connection to the divine. To this day, I have never felt lonelier or more lost than I did during those first few months without a god.

And so, it turns out that reading Rob Bell around Easter time is basically stirring a giant pot in my head, for reasons that should be obvious at this point.

I like the Jesus story that Rob Bell seems to read when he reads the Gospels. It isn’t at all unlike the Jesus story I thought I was reading.

The Jesus story – the one you get if you read the Gospels as a story, not the one the church lays out in rigid dogma and single verses and alliterated fill-in-the-blanks – is beautiful. It is the story of a man who breaks all the rules in order to love people he isn’t ‘supposed to’ love. This is a man who answers questions with questions, who consistently questions authority and challenges religious leaders. He is a gifted storyteller who consistently finds himself in community, eating with others, walking with others, talking with others, drinking wine. He’s celebrating with people, hurting with people, and loving the people on the fringes right where they are. He does quiet contemplation and angry outbursts, celebrating with people he loves and weeping for losses. He is genuine and human in a way most people cannot be. Injustices piss him off.

He says, in essence, over and over again, “I don’t care what you think the rules say I am or am not supposed to do. This is what I’m going to do because this is what love looks like. I will defile your Sabbath, because the very idea that I cannot heal (read: love) people because of your rules defiles everything I am.” And if you read the story as a story, sometimes you can almost hear the quiet sighs as he realizes, once again, no one is ‘getting it’.

It is a beautiful story. There is absolutely no denying that.

I don’t know if it is true or not, but it is a beautiful story.

All of this makes me think of Icarus. Random, I know, but this will all make sense in a moment. In the event that you are not familiar with the story of Icarus, here’s a quick rundown: Icarus and his dad are imprisoned at Crete as punishment for royally pissing off King Minos (pun intended). Icarus’ dad comes up with a brilliant plan to create two pairs of wings out of feathers and wax so that they can fly off the island and escape. There are a few issues with the wings though: they can’t fly too close to the sea, or the feathers will get wet and weighed down, and they’ll fall into the sea and drown. They also can’t fly too close to the sun or the wax will melt, the feathers will fall off, and they’ll fall into the sea and drown. Cheery stuff. Icarus curiously soars toward the sun, and realizes only as his feathers fall off that he has flown too high. He falls into the sea, et cetera, et cetera.

This is Cuthbert’s favorite story of Greek mythology. He reads it, and in it he finds something beautiful – that Icarus flew toward the sun, testing his limits, and truly living, not settling for mediocrity, but flying as high as he could. Cuthbert finds victory in the melted wax, and the fluttering feathers, and, well, that nasty bit about falling into the sea. There’s a song about Icarus, The Melting Point of Wax, that makes the points I always have such a hard time explaining about this story. It’s a song about refusing to accept limits without testing them ourselves, about refusing promises of safety in exchange for making ourselves smaller, about taking leaps of faith in ourselves. It’s essentially the dirty rocker boy version of Defying Gravity from Wicked, only about Icarus instead of a green witch. (Yes, that sentence made complete sense to me. Really.) I’m a fan of the dirty rocker boys.

When Cuthbert tells us the story of Icarus, or when I hear that song, I cannot help but find the story to be beautiful. It simply is.

As far as I can tell, Cuthbert doesn’t believe that the story of Icarus actually happened. It’s a little bit out there, isn’t it? Very likely it isn’t true. But that has not stopped Cuthbert from loving this story, from finding the beauty in it, and in celebrating it whenever and wherever he can. The story being only a myth hasn’t stopped him from tattooing Icarus onto his chest. None of us think this is strange (us Tuesday Nighters, anyway). The beautiful things he has found in this story are worth celebrating, whether they really happened or not. The truths he finds in the story are central to what he strives to be, and so he owns them, and we own them with him.

There is no church of Icarus (at least that I know of) that will say Curthbert is a heretic for valuing the story without believing it is true. No one is going to tell Cuthbert he is going to hell for blasphemy in regards to his position on the story. No one will make religious assumptions about Cuthbert based on his love for this story. No one is going to do anything except listen to the story and decide for themselves whether they find it beautiful as well.

For that, I envy him. Loving the Jesus story always seems to come back to haunt me.

But anyway, back to Easter. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?

I love the Jesus story. I really do. It’s up there with The Dark Tower for me, and for good reason. It is a beautiful story. I don’t know if it is true or not. To be honest (and I know this will get to some of you – I’m sorry) I don’t really care. I’m just not overly concerned with it at the moment; I find peace in not knowing. I also fail to understand why it matters whether it is true. I strive to live more like the Jesus story, not because of a religious conviction, not because I am afraid of hell (which I have not believed in for years), and not because I necessarily think it is a true story. I strive to live more like the Jesus story because it is a beautiful story, and it awakens a part of me that wants to live in a better way – much like the Icarus story does. And that, to me, is worth more than all the religious conviction, all the church community, all the promises of heaven in the world. I think that’s what stories like this are supposed to do. That’s why we love them.

And so I’ve decided to follow Cuthbert’s example. I am going to own this story as a story I love, as unapologetically as I can. Which, as discussed earlier, is a little bit more difficult than owning Icarus, but I’m going to try. According to the Easter story, Jesus was crucified on a Friday and rose from the dead on Sunday morning to redeem mankind and spread God’s love through the world. Good Friday has always been a day that has felt sad to me. I am going to mourn it, because that’s what feels right to me. And on Sunday I am going to celebrate, because I have the culmination of a beautiful story to celebrate.

Then on Monday, I am going to continue loving people as best as I possibly can, just as this story has always inspired me to try to do. I’m going to continue playing the role of storyteller whenever I can, live in community as best as I can, love the people who are hard to love as best as I can, and, in the words of Meghan, try to “go around making injustices my bitch”. Because that’s what the Jesus story inspires me to do.

Some people will call me a hypocrite, but the reality is that the only thing that colors my love of the story with something deemed hypocrisy is the modern Western Church’s idea that they have the market on how the story should be valued. I haven’t much cared what the modern Western Church has thought of me for some time now, so this shouldn’t be a problem.

It is a story I love. I am going to celebrate it. And if anyone has a problem with that, well, that’ll mean about as much to me as the melting point of wax.

Goals for 2011

2011-01-18T11:41:00.000-05:00

Every year in January I come up with a list of things I’d like to do. Not ‘New Year’s Resolutions’ per se, but just stuff I need or want to do during that year. Sometimes I complete my goals, sometimes I don’t. But having them posted gives me something to go back to throughout the year when I’m trying to remember what in the world it was I wanted to do. And so, here are my goals for 2011:

Read some stuff

Complete the Tuesday Night reading challenge of 17,000 pages for 2011
Read these books:

Til We Have Faces ~ C.S. Lewis
The Stand ~ Stephen King
As I Lay Dying ~ Faulkner
The Lords of the Rings Series ~ Tolkien
Outliers ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Read whatever else I feel like.
Keep a good record of what I’ve read so I can track my reading challenge.

Be healthier
Everyone wants to be healthier, right? So there’s some stuff I want to try:

Reduce my consumption of these:

Refined & added sugars
Artificial sweeteners (i.e. Diet Coke – this is my major vice)
Processed foods

And since I’ve realized that fake food is just silly, let’s get rid of that too. It’s mostly gone from the house, but I think we need to purge the rest of it. Spray-on-butter, anyone? Seriously, what was I thinking?
Oh, and I need to lose some weight. But that’s depressing, so we’re not going to talk about it today.
Continue hitting the gym twice a week. Since the time I spend on the elliptical constitutes a decent chunk of the actual amount of time I get to spend reading in any given week, I think I’ll be able to stay motivated.
Milling various grains to bake bread with. This should be interesting, to say the least. But I’ve been reading that if you mill your own stuff you get a lot more nutrients and it tastes yummier. So I want to try some different grains this year and see what tastes the best and what bakes up nicely.
Not being afraid of good fat. Eat butter. Lots of it. And eat other good stuff like coconut oil and tree nuts and animal fats. Keep pretend fats (hydrogenated and vegetable oils) out of the house.

Declutter, declutter, declutter. And declutter some more.
We have too much crap in our house. Some of it has to go! Here’s the plan:

Go on a fabric no-buy for 2011. Ack! Rules for my fabric no-buy:

Don’t buy random fabric. At all. No matter how cute it is, how cheap it is, or how great it *might* look on some future unforeseen project that I’ll likely never finish anyways.
Buying fabric to finish a project I already started is ok.
Notions to finish projects are ok
Obviously, buying fabric and supplies to complete custom orders is ok.
Work really hard on using up scraps this year. I’ve made a folder of good scrap projects, now I need to use it!

Finish going through all the CDs and movies in our house, and get rid of most of them.
One way or another, get rid of the piano in the garage
Get rid of the rocking chair in the garage
Take D’s grandma’s chair to be looked at. If it is salvageable, have it re-covered. If not, get rid of it.
Decide what to do about D’s grandpa’s dresser. Re-finish it or get rid of it.
Get rid of all the windows hanging out in the garage
List and sell any photography equipment I'm not going to use

Community Goals

Work with Cuthbert & Mia to finish vision/values documents for the Tet Cohousing group
Learn more about consensus based decision making, and implement it into our cohousing procedures
Figure out how to successfully re-implement book club into Tuesday Nights. For some reason, our last 3 book club attempts have crumbled.

I think these all seem do-able. I guess we’ll see when 2012 rolls around what I was actually successful at!

2010 Book Review

2010-12-29T15:58:00.001-05:00

This year I participated in a reading challenge on a message board I frequent. Our challenge this year was to read 20,100 pages. I don’t think anyone actually completed the challenge, which seemed totally do-able to me back in March but right now seems like a slightly insane goal for someone with a small child, a job, and a sewing gig on the side. I’m just past 17,000 pages so far, but I don’t think there’s any way I’ll catch up before the year is over. *shrug* Eh, there’s always next year!

Anyhow, as a result of participating in the challenge I actually kept pretty good track of what I read this year, and I’ve pulled out my favorite ten to give short reviews on. These aren’t listed in any particular order, so the ones at the bottom are as good ast he ones at the top!

My 10 Best Reads of 2010

Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity From a Consumer Culture
By: Shannon Hayes
I loved this book so much I bought 3 copies to pass around. Radical Homemakers is divided into two sections, one about (for lack of a better term), the fall and rise of homemaking, and one that details the lives of several radical homemakers. Hayes does an excellent job of describing the shift from American households as units of production to that of consumption and states her case for why she believes that reclaiming our homes as units of production is key to helping us straighten out the modern mess we’ve found ourselves in (Obesity, anyone? Environmental destruction? Maybe a little consumerism?).

While I personally don’t think I’ll go to some of the lengths she describes in this book, it was very affirming to find that I’m not the only weirdo out there, doing things like making yogurt in my crockpot, canning from my garden, sewing my own diapers, or bartering for goods and services. Overall, a fantastic and inspiring read.

The Book Thief
By: Markus Zusak
“I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate.”

I am still trying to figure out who recommended this book to me! Either way, it was excellent. The Book Thief is narrated by Death (as a character) during Nazi Germany. While collecting souls, Death continually sees one particular little girl, a book thief, whose story we learn throughout the book. This is the kind of book that has both deep subtexts and a can’t-put-it-down-cause-I-gotta-know-what-happens plot with characters you can’t help but love. One of my favorite reads of the year.

Bodies In Motion And At Rest
By: Thomas Lynch
“The hypochondriac is therefore a hopeless case, whose illness (the fear of sickness and of death) is most often cured by sickness and death. ‘I told you so’ seems the haunting subtext of their funerals.”

I simply adore Thomas Lynch. As a poet and undertaker who isn’t actually all that far away (Michigan, I believe), he always makes the most unique and interesting observations about the human condition. His writing style is witty and humorous, which makes some of the topics he deals with every day much more bearable. Bodies In Motion And At Rest is a series of essays including observations about life, death, religion, the funeral industry, divorce, raising children, and, quite possibly my favorite, a hilarious poem about his fuming hatred for his son’s beloved cat, which begins, “One of these days she will lie there and be dead”.

In addition to this book, I also highly recommend Lynch’s other collection of essays, titled “The Undertaking”.

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
By: Seth Grahame-Smith
This book is hilarious! It reads as a biography of Abraham Lincoln, written after Lincoln’s “secret diaries” were bestowed on the author, and details the turn his life made toward vampire hunting after his mother’s death was caused by a vampire bite. The book follows the remainder of Lincoln’s life, describing factual events but attributing them to things related to vampire hunting. Loved it!

Juliet, Naked
By: Nick Hornby
I was surprised by how good this book was. I’ve always enjoyed Nick Hornby, but never like this. An aging former rock star, a devoted fan, and his inwardly lonely girlfriend all must sort out how to cope when the album Juliet, Naked is released. The album is essentially a demo version of Juliet, a prior album that an online community of fans have idolized. I love the way Hornby used the internet to fuel the events that take place in this book. There’s something about it that makes it feel like it is ours – our generation’s book, that is taking place in our generation’s world, and in our generation’s reality. The characters are lovable and all desperately flawed – which I suspect makes them all the more lovable. The story is meaningful in small ways - it isn’t going to change your life, but it does give you some things to think about and was also overall a pretty feel-good book.

The Twilight Series
By: Stephanie Meyer
So, not exactly one book, but a very good series. I initially started reading Twilight when I was pregnant with Norah and was put off by how ‘young adult’ it seemed (Erm... maybe because its a young adult book?). I, incidentally, went into labor the day I started the book and never picked it back up until late this year. But once I got started again, I couldn’t stop reading. I think once I accepted that it was going to be light reading and what I would call ‘fluff’, I got over myself and was able to just enjoy it. The romance in the story is nearly ridiculous and sickly-sweet at times, but still fun to read. It was also fun to see what vampire/werewolf ‘rules’ and legends came about in the story. A super quick and easy read, and it’s pretty fun.

The Things That Keep Us Here
By: Carla Buckley
This novel is the story of one family’s struggle for survival when bird flu becomes a pandemic of massive proportions. When I picked this up, I was prepared for disaster, The Stand style. This is not The Stand. By concentrating heavily on one family and their struggle for survival, the story became real in ways that were truly distressing. Imagine your dying neighbor leaving her baby at your doorstop and fighting amongst yourselves about whether to bring him in because you don’t know if he’s sick… and if he is, at least half of you will likely die with him. This is not a fun read, but it is a good read, if you can dig the difference. It’s a powerful look at humanity and what comes out in us when we’re forced into dire circumstances.

Fast Food Nation
By: Eric Schlosser
I don’t think I will ever eat at McDonald’s again. Even if I could stomach what I now know is in the food, my conscious won’t let me give them my money after Schlosser detailed the unethical business practices designed to oppress both employees and franchise owners. Fast Food Nation examines a variety of fast food chain practices, as well as food processing practices in America. This book particularly focused on the meat packing industry and the potato industry. Schlosser’s witty writing style made the grim news easier to read, but not necessarily easier to digest (pun definitely intended). A must read for anyone concerned about the food industry. Paired with Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (which closely examines the corn processing industry, among others), you will learn everything you ever wanted to know about fast food and processed food (except what the food companies refused to tell the authors, which is interesting in itself).

Water For Elephants
By: Sara Gruen
After his parents are killed in an auto accident one week before he’s scheduled to sit for his veterinary exam, Jacob Jankowski finds himself quite accidentally running away to join the circus. He eventually finds himself in charge of treating the animals in the circus, and in the middle of a love affair destined for disaster. It’s written mostly as a period circus piece, which I loved, and has an intriguing plot with characters that you’re rooting for desperately right up until the end. I don’t know that there was anything particularly deep or meaningful, but I really enjoyed this novel.

Full Dark, No Stars
By: Stephen King
Un-put-down-able. I finished this book in a day and a half, which for the pre-child me may not have said much, but for the mommy-Heather, is saying quite a lot. Four novellas show ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances and leave you wondering…. now, what would I have done? In typical King fashion, he captures what is truly scary…. us.

And there you have it - my ten best reads of 2010. I hope you enjoy! And if you should happen to read any of these, please let me know what you thought!

2010 Quote Review

2010-12-20T15:01:00.000-05:00

It’s that time again… time for our annual quote review! For those of you who aren’t familiar, every year I gather up the things I have heard and read and then sort out the very best quotes. This year they’re divided up into two categories – things my friends and family have said and things I read this year.

My understanding is that there’s a small competition going on within the Tuesday Night community as to who can get the most quotes on the 2010 quote review. I haven’t tallied them up, but I’m sure someone will take advantage of their bragging rights soon!

Enjoy!

From the Mouths of Friends

*I must say, this is the first time in my life I’ve experienced a spontaneous Sister Act moment. ~ Curt

*I have a theory that denim is a giant napkin. ~ Heather

*My cat peed on the census forms. She’s an anarchist, I’m just a spineless liberal. ~ Meghan
- This is, hands down, my favorite quote of the year

*I’m looking at you and I see a problem. ~ Mallory
- Mallory was actually trying to comfort me when this one popped out, but it sounded much more like she thought there was something very wrong with me. It’s since become a Tuesday Night staple.

*My goal today is not to be a dick… so, like, ten minutes later I was being a dick. ~ Curt

*I wish apartments were as easy to steal as purses. ~ Meghan

*He was, like, really, really touchy, but with his pelvis. ~ Heather

*Punching might be a love language for Jason. ~ Curt

*I asked him what cologne he wears and he was like, ‘Man Sweat!’ ~ Meghan

*Heather: I never did anything mean to a pastor before….
Curt: It’s surprising how quickly you get used to it.

*Is that the sound of toenails being clipped… or a gun? ~Carissa

*They don’t have whiskey in space. That’s what I don’t wanna be an astronaut. ~ Curt

*Shimmy like your rent’s due! ~ Mallory

*5,000 year PMS = The Old Testament ~ Curt

*I’m so excited because my yoga ass is coming in! – Bex

*There’s always gonna be this beautiful, bitchy undertone. ~ Curt
- Why thank you, Curtis. That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said about me all year!

*That’s the night I was my father’s Japanese son. ~ Mallory

*There’s not a word in the English language that conveys the magnitude of my “ewwww”. ~ Curt

*I’ve actually won two dance contests with the sprinkler. ~ Meghan

*That was my Tuesday Night before I had them. ~ Bex

*Curt: Was he hot?
Bex: He was in a I-might-have-just-killed-my-parents-and-put-em-in-the-freezer kind of way

Things I Read This Year

*Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. ~ Marianne Williamson

*The hypochondriac is therefore a hopeless case, whose illness (the fear of sickness and of death) is most often cured by sickness and death. ‘I told you so’ seems the haunting subtext of their funerals. ~ Thomas Lynch; Bodies in Motion and at Rest

*I don’t drink. I did of course, and plenty of it, but had to quit for the usual reasons. It got to where I was spilling so much of it. ~ Thomas Lynch; Bodies in Motion and at Rest

*What is said and unsaid are both instructive. ~ Thomas Lynch; Bodies in Motion and at Rest

*Among the few consolation of what has been called writer’s block is the assurance that, so long as one has it, one is, indeed, a writer ~ Thomas Lynch; Bodies in Motion and at Rest

*I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate. ~ Markus Zusak; The Book Thief

*It’s a fundamental human need to pass music around. ~ Rob Sheffield; Love Is a Mix Tape

*You’re fighting a battle of good and evil with your dog pimp! Your only weapon is the shimmy! There is power in the shimmy! Make him fear your shimmy! Now, goddamnit show me your war shimmy! ~ Laurie Notaro; There’s a (Slight) Chance I Might be Going to Hell

*If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more or become more, you are a leader. ~ John Quincy Adams

*All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. ~ I have no idea who said this; I saw it on someone’s facebook

And there we have it, 2010 in summary!

Trainers for the little bug!

2010-11-18T13:09:00.003-05:00

If you recall this post about my diaper sewing, and then this post about potty learning, you my have concluded that Norah decided she wanted to potty learn right after I made her a nice, new, squishy batch of diapers. And if you came to that conclusion, you are correct.

However, we are still having our share of 'oops'es, espeically now that the potty is no longer a new, cool concept she is intent on mastering. To help out with the oopses I've sewed her up a nice new batch of training pants. And hey, who knows! Maybe the production of a giant batch of trainers is just what she needs to keep her nice and dry. ;)

For your viewing pleasure, here they are:

I made her two of each design except for the owl pair - she has 3 owl pairs - for a total of 13. What can I say, blue eyes looking up at you saying, "Owl undies, peeeese" cannot be ignored. Here are a couple closer-ups of my favorites.

The inners and outers of these trainers are plain 'ole cotton knit. I've used a rib knit with some spandex content for the legs and waist bands, so they will fit nice and snug and retain their stretchiness. They all have soaker pads consisting of three layers of cotton flannel, which is (I hope) enough padding to keep a small accident from being catastrophic (pee running down the leg and into the shoe, anyone?), but not enough to feel padded like a diaper.

Now, the very best thing about these trainers... they unsnap. This may not mean much to someone who doesn't have a small child in underwear or trainers, but to those that do, it means a whole lot - namely that you will never wrestle with your conscious over wanting to cut a nasty pair of undies off of a child rather than attempt to slide them off. No worries, here. Just unsnap, clean up, and go about your day.

Once I finished these up, I started wondering if these could be made with a waterproof material. And so, I made up one last pair. These last ones have a layer of PUL on the outside, which is a waterproof material. I don't know how much it will actually help, as the leg ribbing is sewn right in between the inner layer and the PUL and will therefore likely wick like mad. But, being trainers, they're intended to be taken off as soon as you know there's an accident, so maybe they won't wick too badly if I get them off her quick enough? I'll be testing them out to find out. I espeically like the star snaps on this pair:

These are all made from the Tinkle Time Trainers pattern. It comes in sizes 18mo - 7 years, and also includes pattern pieces to make big kid undies as well as the trainers. The pattern includes instructions for a pull up style trainer (no snaps - boo!), and a snap on trainer with one or two rows of snaps on each side. I've made these with just one row. These are relatively easy to put together, but did take me more time than I had anticipated. The pattern is available for purchase here. The pattern maker also has an overnight trainer pattern that's similar, but I haven't tried it out yet.

Now to see if these help the little bug stay dray!

My first custom diaper order!

2010-10-18T14:40:00.001-04:00

I've just completed my first custom diaper order and I just had to post!

This order is 5 one size diaper covers - 2 dark blue, 2 dark lime green, and 1 aqua. The mama who ordered it wanted something she could wipe clean between changes and didn't want FOE. The result? Two layers PUL with the shiny side of one layer facing in toward baby and the 'right' side of one layer facing the outside. These have rise snaps to adjust the, erm, rise (that's why they're called rise snaps, right?), and snap closures.

Take a look!

There they are, all together.

Here's a comparison - the pic on the left is on the setting that fits Norah right now (21 months, 27ish lbs). The pic on the right is the smallest setting

Here you can see the outside and the inside - see how the inside is shiny and wipeable? Mission accomplished!

And last but not least, a stack of diaper yumminess.

I'm guessing most of you didn't know I was taking custom orders. Guess what! I am currently taking limited custom orders for whatever you might want sewn. That includes diapers and diapering accessories, stuff for around your house, bags, baby and children's items, or whatever else you might want to throw my way. While I'd be happy to make any style baby carrier you might want, if you're looking for a ring sling or wrap, I'd reccomend that you get in touch with Beth at Babyette first - she makes these things day in and and day out, and is more of an expert on them than me.

I'll be posting more on taking custom orders at the beginning of 2011, when I'll hopefully have more time. For now, I'm taking a few here and there. Feel free to message me if you're interested.

I think that's all for now. Thanks for looking!

You know you want one.... (Calling All Babywearers!)

2010-09-28T20:17:00.001-04:00

Calling all babywearers!

Remember that lovely SweetPod Soft Structured Carrier I made awhile back? You know, the one with the adorable print on the outside panel, comfy and convenient internal panel, and hidden sleeping hood? The one that left you wondering where you could get something like it?

Well, you're in luck!

This Saturday, October 2nd, there will be a SweetPod for auction at the Safe Infant Sleep Symposium. I finished this up this week and can't wait for it to find a good, loving home and a sweet, squishy baby to carry around!

Humor me as I post these pictures - I still haven't acquired a dress form and am making due with my dining room chairs.

Here it is, in all its glory!

You can see the internal panel here. This panel makes it so you can put baby on and move him/her to your back easily if you want. The contoured shape of the panel also still allows access for nursing.

And here's the sleeping hood. An invisible zippered pouch hides it when not in use.

This handmade carrier can be yours for the low, low price of... well, whatever it auctions for.

There's only one way to get this carrier, and that's to come bid on it at the Safe Infant Sleep Sympsoium Saturday.

See you there!

*The SweetPod Soft Structured Carrier is made from this pattern. Carrying instructions can be found here.

Safe Infant Sleep ~ Symposium coming soon!

2010-09-23T12:56:00.001-04:00

This is another one of those H got herself into something and now she's going to endorse it posts. You are officially forewarned.

So, what are you doing next Saturday? You know, October 2nd? Around 12ish?

Nothing? Great!

Oh, you're doing something? Well, you're still not off the hook. The laundry can wait, the grass can be mowed this weekend (it won't grow much next week, I don't think), and the kids can visit with grandma (tell her I said so).

'Cause this is important.

On October 2, 2010 Birth Matters will host Fort Wayne's first Safe Infant Sleep Symposium. The Symposium is free to the public and will provide evidence-based, up-to-date information and guidelines for safe infant sleep in cribs, bassinets, co-sleepers, and parents' beds.

In addition to the three speakers who will present, the Symposium will feature free giveaway bags to the first 100 families/individuals in the door, as well as giveaway items (Arm's Reach Co-sleeper, anyone?), and a silent auction featuring family friendly products such as Halo Sleep Sacks, co-sleepers, and baby carriers.

Speakers for this event will include Dr. Christopher Tallo, a Fort Wayne Pediatrician; Dr. Robert White, an Indiana Neonatologist; and Dr. James McKenna, Director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame, Chair of Notre Dame's Department of Anthropology, member of the SIDS Global Task Force, and consultant to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Safe Infant Sleep. Whoo! That's a mouthful!

You're probably asking yourself, What's this all about? Or Why is H so worked up about this event?

You are in luck: I'm going to tell you.

What's this all about?
In case you weren't aware, Allen County has a ridiculously high infant mortality rate. Like, crazy high. For example, among the African American population in Allen County, the infant mortality rate is comparable to several third-world countries. Last I checked, Allen County was located in a developed nation where people have access to food, shelter, health care, etc., regardless of whether they have any money. Even if Allen County was far more underpriviledged than the rest of the country, which it isn't, social service programs should fill in a lot of the gaps that contribute to infant mortality.

And yet, we have all these babies dying what are apparently preventable deaths.

Indiana Department of Child Services and an enormous chunk of Indiana officials have decided that a large number of these deaths are occuring because babies are sleeping in unsafe sleep conditions. I have no idea how they came to that conclusion, but after working with Birth Matters on the symposium and hearing about conversations with local officials, I've no doubt that a lot of babies are dying because they aren't sleeping safely. And that is a shame, mostly because these babies are so precious and because unsafe sleep deaths are so preventable.

There's a definate, documented need for families in our county to learn more about safe infant sleep. Birth Matters is stepping up to educate and empower families about their safe sleep options.

Why is H so worked up about this event?
Here's where it gets a little tricky.

You see, when the Indiana Department of Child Services decided to get concerned about unsafe sleep deaths, their approach to preventing these deaths was to tell parents to never, ever, ever sleep with their babies.

Which makes absolutely no sense in light of the fact that in cultures where cosleeping is the norm, SIDS rates are minimal or non-existant. Did you know, for example, that in China, where cosleeping is taken for granted, SIDS is so rare that they don't even have a name for it.

Now, a lot of babies are dying in Allen County while sleeping with another person. But these deaths are taking place outside of safe bedsharing guidelines. For example, of the 13 unsafe-sleep deaths in Allen County last year, one infant was sleeping in a bed with five other children, despite safe bedsharing guidelines that specify that infants should not sleep next to older children. One infant was sleeping in a bed with nine other children. Nine. Multiple infants were sleeping with parents on sofas, which also goes against safe bedsharing guidelines. Drugs and alcohol were involved in several other deaths, the use of which is advised against in safe bedsharing guidelines. One of these babies died improperly strapped into a carseat, which isn't even related to bedsharing. And so on, and so forth. So it isn't that people should never, ever, ever sleep with their babies - it's that if they want to sleep with their babies, they need to do so in a safe way.

Unfortunately, most people don't know what safe bedsharing guidelines are - if they even know such things exist. The Department of Child Services campaign last summer did nothing to help with that problem - in fact, they may have made it worse. A lot of people in this county have no idea that sleeping with a baby on a sofa is much, much more dangerous than sleeping with a baby on a firm mattress, so they just plop down on the couch with baby. Which is not good at all, for anyone involved.

Birth Matters believes (and I concur) that families have the right to full information about safe infant sleep so that parents can make informed safe sleep choices for their children. And so, in addition to crib and bassinet safety guidelines (which are completely legitimate sleep spaces, by the way - we utilize a crib as well, so this isn't a crazy, cosleeping elitist thing), this symposium will provide guidelines for safe cosleeping and bedsharing.

H is worked up about this whole thing because she doesn't like to hear that someone's baby died, and because she believes that unless people are educated about their options, they can't make safe sleep choices. And because she believes that the state is limiting that education and that is hurting babies, and the Symposium is doing something about trying to make that right.

But I'm also worked up about this whole thing because I value my right to choose how and where my child sleeps safely, and because I know that if I don't step up and make a big fuss about it, there's a decent likelihood that I (and parents like me) will lose that right.

Maybe that's way too much information just to promote this Symposium. But this isn't just something I'm endorsing because I like it or because it seems cool or because it is going to help people or give me the chance to love people better (although those are all true). I'm endorsing this because it affects my rights as a citizen and because I believe it is my responsibility as a member of this community. I'm endorsing it because it hits me in a place that you can't hit a parent without getting a reaction - it hits me in the spot where I strive with all of my heart and with all of my very being to care for Norah and raise her up in the best possible way I can - which means she needs to be safe when she sleeps, no matter where she sleeps.

So, if you're not busy Saturday (and we've already established that you're not, right?), come along for the ride. Hear the guidelines for all kinds of safe infant sleep, empower yourself to make safe sleep choices, get a goody bag (come early!), win a giveaway, bid on an auction item! Or if nothing on that list interests you in the slightest, just pop in to say hi to me - I'll be there all day!

For more information about the Symposium, visit http://www.safesleepindiana.org/.

My Baby, My Bed, My Business

2010-09-14T15:45:00.002-04:00

Does anyone remember those shockingly disturbing commercials last summer depicting a father walking through the house with a hand-held video camera intent on videoing his wife and new baby girl sleeping on the couch, only to find that the baby wasn’t breathing?

Anyone remember how at the end of that extraordinarily disturbing PSA was a message telling people to never ever sleep with their babies?

Anyone remember spending a complete 10 seconds in silent shock and disgust before throwing shoes at the television and screaming, That’s bullshit! They aren’t even following safe sleep guidelines! Everyone knows you can’t sleep with a baby on a couch! Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!! while your husband contemplated whether to physically restrain you before you found something heavier to lob at his television?

Anyone? Or was that just me?

I’m a bedsharing parent. What that means is that Norah has spent a decent chunk of her nights nuzzled into our bed, sleeping right beside me. Despite the indications of the Indiana Department of Child Services’ disturbing and extremely misleading PSA last summer, Norah has never gotten wedged between the cushions of my couch, smothered under a pillow, overheated by heavy blanets, rolled over on, or fallen to her death from my bed. No one has squished her, smothered her, tangled her up in the sheets, or forgotten she was there. She has been quite safe, sleeping in my bed.

Norah has never once been in anything that even remotely resembled danger in my bed, in large part because D and I religiously follow established safe bedsharing guidelines. This might seem like a no-brainer, but safe bedsharing guidelines basically outline all the things you should/shouldn’t do before you bring your baby to bed with you, so that hazards to your baby can be eliminated and your baby can be safe in bed with you.

They aren’t crazy requirements, either. No one is asking you to sleep on a bamboo mat on the floor of a bomb shelter, with the building facing east and a voodoo priestess safety spell firmly in place. It’s normal, common sense stuff – don’t sleep with your baby on a waterbed or couch, don’t put a bunch of squishy pillows by your baby’s head, don’t sleep with your baby stone cold drunk.

It’s possible these might be paraphrased.

There are more guidelines, and they are all reasonable, normal sounding, achievable things. And generally, they keep babies safe. I personally have never heard of a case where a bedsharing infant died and parents were following all of the safe sleep guidelines. Which is not to say it doesn’t happen, but that it seems to me that if it happened very frequently, I would have heard of one. Every infant death I’ve ever heard of that was related to parent/infant sleep sharing involved infractions on safe bedsharing guidelines.

So when DCS aired their ever-so-misleading campaign against parent/infant sleep sharing, that did not fly with me. At all.

It is difficult enough being a bedsharing parent in a culture where bedsharing isn’t the norm.

It is difficult listening to people suggest to you that you might be stunting your child’s emotional growth, or that you sleep with your baby because there’s something psychologically wrong with you, or to hear people tell you you’re “asking for (your baby) to die”.

It is difficult to be put on trial over and over for parenting the best way you know how, just because it’s different from other people.

It is difficult to repeatedly clench your jaw, close your eyes, count to 5, force a smile, and non-confrontationally explain the benefits of bedsharing and the safe bedsharing guidelines to people who have more-or-less accused you of child endangerment.

All of that is already difficult. But when the state steps in and tells everyone that you’re parenting the wrong way, and, what’s more, they’ve used an outrageously unsafe example that not even the most hard-core bedsharing advocate would ever consider, that’s just enraging. Completely enraging.

I have to be honest here, I’m slightly pissed off about the whole thing.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t set out to bedshare. I bought a crib and set it up. I borrowed my grandmother’s bassinet – the one my mother slept in as a baby and borrowed from her mother for me to sleep in as a baby. I got swaddle blankets and a crib aquarium and borrowed “The Happiest Baby on the Block” video from the library. I got sleeping wedges to make baby feel snug. I was set.

But that didn’t really work out for me. My baby turned out to be higher needs than I anticipated. If you set her down awake she screamed bloody murder. If you set her down asleep, she slept… for 15 minutes. Literally. 15 minutes. I could set my watch by her. No amount of swaddling, heating up the bassinet sheets, gentle, gradual transfers to the bassinet, or white noise would keep this baby asleep for more than 15 minutes. I read every book I could find, scoured the internet, implemented every solution that seemed safe to me, and still she would not sleep. It was pure hell.

And so, I did what any desperate parent would do – I called someone who knows more stuff than me and asked for advice. Hallie from Birth Matters showed up at my door with 2 books, a giant list of resources, and advice to look through everything and make a decision that would work best for my family.

We started bedsharing that night.

Once Norah started sleeping next to me, she slept for hours. Hours. And when she woke it barely disturbed me – I’d just cuddle her, nurse her and drift back to sleep. It was like I’d traded my newborn in for an entirely different baby. People would ask me how she was sleeping and I’d open my mouth to respond that she was sleeping through the night, and then realize that she wasn’t actually sleeping all the way through – it just felt like it because we were so seldom awake for more than just a few moments here and there.

Bedsharing was a lifesaver for me. We slept, we nursed more happily and easily at night, we got to cuddle more, Norah cried less. Despite the claims of DCS, I felt better about her safety once she started sleeping with me, having read about the causes of SIDS and the ways that mothers’ and babies’ bodies react to one another during sleep. Norah wouldn’t forget to breathe and never wake up; she would be prompted by my breathing to start up again. She wouldn’t get into a deep sleep where she couldn’t rouse herself; she would stay in a lighter, safer stage of sleep and rouse simultaneously with me. Call it God or call it evolution – babies seem to have been designed to sleep next to their mommas.

I was happier. Norah was happier. Norah was safer. And, the thing that I think ties this all together for me, it felt right. Human intuition is a powerful thing.

Once we started bedsharing, I was so happy about how sleep was going for us. But on the flip side, I was also so incredibly angry that for 3 weeks I’d struggled and cried and fretted when I could have cuddled and napped and spent sweet time getting to know my baby better.

Nothing feels very good or works very well when you’re getting 15 minute stretches of sleep, and that includes new mommyhood. I was absolutely furious that those first 3 weeks had been so unnecessarily difficult. I didn’t even know who exactly I was furious at – the hospital that had signs up on the walls instructing me not to sleep with my baby?; the media that said I’d kill her if I snuggled up with her at night?; the baby sleep products supposedly designed to keep baby safe, which seem more likely designed to turn a profit? I was just furious that all these powers-that-be imposed themselves on the initial weeks of motherhood and made it so hard for me.

The subsequent campaign by DCS when Norah was 6 months old did not make me any happier. It would be safe to say it made me even more angry than I already was. And it continues to make me angry that people do not have ready access to information about safe bedsharing.

The problem is, if you don’t know what the safe bedsharing guidelines are – or if you don’t even know safe bedsharing guidelines exist – it makes it awful hard to follow them. This is what really irks me about DCS and their campaign – that families who could otherwise safely bedshare are now engaging in unsafe sleep practices because they don’t know safe bedsharing is an option.

Did you know, for example, that there are people I am related to who believe it is safer to put a baby to sleep on their stomach than to sleep with the baby in bed? And so their babies are sleeping alone on their stomachs; the single greatest SIDS risk factor that I’m aware of, while they remain blissfully unaware that in cultures where bedsharing is the norm, SIDS rates are miniscule or non-existent.

In essence, DCS is putting babies at risk by demonizing parent/infant sleep sharing and refusing to acknowledge safe bedsharing guidelines.

Correction: DCS is putting babies in my family at risk.

I am not currently a fan of DCS. I rather like the babies in my family, and very badly want to see them stay safe.

I’m not advocating for people to sleep with their babies at any time, in any place, under any condition. Clearly, there are situations that aren’t conducive to safe infant sleep.

I’m not advocating for people to sleep with their babies at all, actually. If people want to, and can safely do so, I’m happy to lend advice or talk about my experiences. But bedsharing isn’t for everybody. Some people don’t want to bedshare; some can’t implement the safety guidelines. Whatever. It isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. Some babies like bassinets. Some babies hate them. Some parents can’t stand being away from their babies all night. Some parents can’t stand being touched all night. It’s an individual thing.

I’m not advocating for any particular sleep solution for any particular family, except to say that whatever families choose they should implement safely.

I don’t want to make every family sleep the way my family sleeps. What I do want is for safe bedsharing guidelines to be readily available to the public, the same way that safe crib sleeping guidelines are.

What I want is for the wide base of research supporting safe bedsharing to be acknowledged and accepted, the same way crib safety research is acknowledged and accepted.

What I want is for our officials to recognize the difference between safe and unsafe bedsharing, the same way they recognize the difference between safe and unsafe crib sleeping.

What I want is for our officials to believe that families are intelligent enough to make safe sleep choices when given full information.

What I want is for my researched, deeply thought out choices to be validated as the legitimate choices that they actually are.

Is that too much to ask?

How to Potty Train Your Toddler

2010-08-29T14:57:00.001-04:00

1. When she is but a little baby, think to yourself that elimination communication (EC) makes some sort of bizarre sense and attempt to implement it part time. Ignore snickers behind your back and people telling you that you are abusing your child for holding her over a toilet.

2. Buy a pink potty. Because pink potties are all the rage.

3. Use a diaper/EC combo for a long time. Occasionally fight the urge to punch people in the face when they comment that your ‘potty training’ must not be working. Instead, kindly explain that EC is not potty training, it’s just trying to meet your baby’s elimination needs the best you can. Sigh on the inside when said explanation results in slack-jawed, vacant-eyed stares.

4. Utilize your pink potty.

5. Use more diapers.

6. Hide your pink potty when company comes over to avoid having the EC/potty training/child abuse via toilet conversation EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. you see anyone.

7. Witness your 12-month-old suddenly refuse to use the potty on account of her newfound ability to get up and walk away from it.

8. Attempt to put her on the ‘big potty’ since she can’t get down from it by herself.

9. Listen to terrified shrieks as your toddler reaches for you with what can only be described as horror.

10. Wonder what’s so scary about a big potty and take her off of it.

11. Watch with a bit of sadness as diapers become your full-time routine.

12. Give up on EC completely and totally. Use diapers full time, without even bothering with the stupid potty anymore.

13. Hide the pink potty after your toddler attempts to use it as a hat, shoe, and saddle for the dog.

14. Realize your toddler is going to grow out of her diapers pretty soon if she continues to grow at a normal rate.

15. Sew new diapers.

16. Realize the prefolds you bought for a newborn do not make good inserts for the diapers you sewed for a toddler because they are, well, newborn prefolds. And toddlers pee more than newborns.

17. Sew a bunch of toddler-sized inserts for your diapers.

18. 4 days later, listen to your 18-month-old beg you for underwear (i.e. screams of “Undies! Undies!” when you attempt to diaper her)

19. Shrug your shoulders and put the undies on her.

20. Take her to the bathroom every hour. Or when she squirms like she has to pee. Or when she looks at anything even remotely near her undies. Or when she's "too quiet". Or when your 'mommy instinct' tells you to. Or anytime you feel paranoid at all.

21. Listen to Muse to help feel justified about being a paranoid person.

22. Realize your toddler has been dry all day.

23. Spend the next two weeks wondering when your toddler will regress back to peeing herself all the time and need diapers again, and dread the smug looks from people who have seen her in undies this week as they see her back in diapers, look at you, and think to themselves, "See, I knew that kid wasn't potty training. For God's sake, she's only a year and a half old. What was H thinking?!"

24. Think up good comeback lines in case anyone is rude enough to actually vocalize all that.

25. After a decent 2 weeks, realize this is the real thing; she is potty training.

26. Wonder what the hell to do with the new diapers and inserts.

Moral of the story – if you want to potty train your toddler, give up on any potty usage and sew a bunch of diapers.

More Things That Make Me Happy (i.e. More Sappy Stuff)

2010-08-01T16:03:00.002-04:00

*When Cuthbert and I say the same thing at the same time and it doesn’t even phase us because it happens so often

*When someone asks me for help with something and it reassures me that, yes, I am actually good at the thing they want help with.

*Velma and Norah talking to each other in their own crazy language – “Dude! Cool! Shell!”

*J stopping whatever he’s doing to walk us ladies to our cars when we leave the party

*When awkward, one-off quotes somehow become regular conversation pieces – “I’m looking at you and I see a problem”

*Norah reaching up to hold my hand.

*Being identified by someone else as something I secretly want to be, but that I don’t feel successful at actually being – i.e. Velma casually mentioning she’d like to be more of an urban homesteader – like me, or that she’d like to become known for throwing great parties, so she’ll have me plan all of them.

*Playing Rock Band

*When something prompts me to realize I’ve gone a bit off the grid on something (sew your own diapers, anyone?) and I realize I feel pretty good about it rather than feeling like I’m weird.

*The Dark Tower books

*Norah shouting people’s names that she sees in photographs around the house (Shell! Beep beep! Papa!)

*Making good progress at a cohousing meeting

*When friends-of-a-friend become, simply, friends