Thanks, day THIRTY!

HAIKU FRIDAY

"All you have to do:

Post each day in November."
WHAT? An understatement.

I felt the burn, but
I SO did that daily post.
I win! Victory.

I write better now
Now a well-oiled blog machine.
New blogger friends too

Now time for a break
Off to warm place for awhile
To think up new posts

Thirty days of thanks
Thank you, boogiemum, thank you
Thanks, NaBloPoMo

I hope you check back in mid-December for my triumphant return. It's been a fun and wild month, and surprisingly intense. Think of me here, recuperating, nursing my mouse finger back to health with margaritas and long naps.

Thanks, day twenty nine

Thank you for all your good wishes for bubba's birthday! We are blessed indeed. I'm (finally) about full up with all my memories and attending nostalgia and sniffles. But one last hurrah--since today is the actual day, here is what I made to show at his birthday party tonight. See, we do actually call him bubba, for real life. And I promise my sense of humor and ability to talk about something besides my baby will return right after this. I promise!

Enjoy! (And turn the sound up!) If it doesn't play right, try this.

Thanks, day twenty eight

Today I am thankful for pain control. Because I went to the dentist today to repair a filling and I'm really glad he had more than whiskey to give me while he drilled into my mouth. And because on this day last year I was working on my second 24 hours of back labor. And I'm all about the natural birth, ALL about it really, but they have stuff for 48-hour back labors and that is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

OK, that was the interesting part of my post for today. For the heartiest and most bored among you, here is what I remember from this day last year (the first 24 hours are here):

My back labor went on through the night, of course. Our doula and Jeff took turns supporting me so they could sleep. It's all pretty fuzzy, but I remember (besides the PAIN) a bath, a popsicle, and some napping during the longer breaks between contractions. The bed, the couch, the chair, the floor, try kneeling here no that won't work. And at one point I took Tylenol, which is comical to imagine that I thought it would help but maybe I had a headache or something. I had all kinds of fun and joking with Jeff and our doula. Our doula spooned me in bed so she could push on the pressure point near my sacrum to support the contractions. The punk-#ss contractions that STILL weren't in any kind of pattern. We were still at home, still being told to stay home. I do remember thinking very clearly that if another nurse told us I wasn't in "active" labor I was going to drive there myself through the ice storm and throw something at her head. Laboring women are supposed to do stuff like that, right? I was ready.

OK, so that morning of November 28th last year I had had about enough of 24-plus hours of labor. I knew where to find my OB since I was supposed to see her in clinic if I hadn't gone into labor yet, so I called her clinic nurse and got through that way. She made magic and arranged for me to come in to the hospital to get assessed and possibly get some pain control so I could go back home and get some sleep. So in we went around noon, the roads were fine because they were deserted because of the ice storm. The wonderful, wonderful residents who took care of me validated that I was in real labor (so I forgive them for calling it "dysfunctional") because I was at 4cm. Into a labor room, yay! Having a baby, yay!

I labored more, more, more, more. Then some more. Eventually got myself to 6cm. Finally I oh so reluctantly consented to an epidural at 40 hours of labor, from gorgeous wonderful Todd the anesthesiology resident. We had a nice little thing going, jokes about how he googled to find out how to put a NEEDLE IN MY SPINE. Love him. I consented only partially because he was hot, but mostly because my OB was worried about my pain, exhaustion and ability to push after 40 hours and she wanted to break my water to see if that would speed things up. It did--I went from 6cm to 7cm in the moment they broke it. Oh, and this is funny--for the last 12 hours at least of labor I hiccuped at the end of each contraction, and so did bubba. We were in sync. The residents, in a loving and validating tiny gesture, trusted me that a hiccup signaled a contraction and used that instead of all their machines and printouts and such.

Then, some sleep. Another popsicle. Wondering whether bubba would have a 28th or a 29th birthday. My OB came in. Finally around midnight it was time to push. And after all that I had a "short" pushing for a first baby. Wonderful Todd came back and reduced the pain stuff so I could feel the contractions and birth. I pushed for 90 minutes, which felt like 20 in my time warp, and then I met my bubba at 2am on the 29th. I felt him coming out, and he was perfect.

My God, he was perfect.

Thanks, day twenty seven

Reason #876 why Nora is a terrible mother:

“WARNING” – “Never use on a raised surface. Never use as a car seat or bath seat. Designed for floor level use only. Never leave your baby unattended as the seat is not designed to be totally restrictive and may not prevent release of your baby in the event of vigorous movement.”

More about the Bumbo voluntary recall. Which is not for the seats themselves, but so they can add the warning label. I still think the Bumbo is wonderful.

Today is the anniversary of the day I went into labor. This day last year, around 2am the contractions started. They stayed irregular and early-labor like until about midday. I remember checking my email and puttering around savoring the regularness of labor, how a part of normal life it seemed, and how joyful and constructive the contractions felt. Then after lunch sometime it turned into a back labor, and the contractions were suspiciously still irregular, between two and fifteen minutes apart. It got hurtier and hurtier (this may be one of the more spectacular understatements of mine in recent memory). Jeff ran out of space on the sheet they gave him to log the contractions. The hospital didn't want us because it was too "early" and the weather was terrible. Our doula arrived that evening with some magic pressure point that made the back contractions on notch less unbearable. I went into a time warp and didn't realize that from one contraction to the next a whole day had passed and still I was not having a labor with any kind of pattern. Night came, along with a nasty storm:

SEATTLE (AP) - November 28, 2006 - A storm that dumped as much as 2 feet of snow on some parts of Washington state turned freeways and city streets into icy gridlock and left thousands of people without power.

The snowfall was capping off a month of heavy rain in Seattle - which was edging closer to a wettest-single-month record. As of 10 p.m. Monday, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where official measurements are kept, had received 15.26 inches of precipitation - just .07 inches short of the 15.33 inches recorded in downtown Seattle in December 1933.

So that's what I was doing a year ago. Still wouldn't meet bubba for two more days, though...

***

Today I am thankful for the flood of memories that is helping me remember birthing my baby, and for our wonderful who drove through the ice and snow to be with me.

Thanks, day twenty six

Today I am thankful for being mostly over my cold. Yay! It's surprising how much a little thing like that can affect your life. Of course, then I was riding the cancer center shuttle with patients today all identified as an employee and I broke into a coughing fit, hacking all over the place. I was not, in other words, anything like this:

(from my trusty government agency, the CDC, which also advises me in how to diagnose myself with rare infectious diseases)

Sorry! I get a D+ in public health for today.

Thanks, day twenty five

Today I am thankful for my parents. The older I get the more appreciate just what it is they built. They both came from divorced homes (in the midwest, in the 50s, the scandal!). They met and married at Earlham College, a nice Quaker school in Indiana. They moved to Pennsylvania, my dad's childhood home, so he could go to graduate school. They bought a condemned 18th century grist mill out in the country (for $2000) that had no roof or electricity, and on their weekends and holidays they built it up into a working home. Then they had four kids in five years, me number four. They continued to work on the house, and made it lovely, preserved the history of the place and in general a magic place to grow up. They took us around the world. And all without help from their own parents and very little money. It wasn't perfect, of course, but they truly built something from nothing. Now they have been married 45 years and are still supporting each other against whatever comes their way. They raised us in a house with no television, and taught me about family dinner, about reading aloud, about Scrabble. About scrapple and shoofly pie. About homesteading. And books, they taught me so much about books. My dad told us the Canterbury tales as bedtime stories. My mom taught me to bake from her cookbooks from the 1950s when baked goods invariably involved that wonder ingredient, Crisco.


Now that I am a parent myself, they give me so much more than what they had. More help than they had to do less than they did. Help with child care and building projects around the house, moral support, treats. They accept and love the man I married. And most of all, they are still together and still teaching me to be kind.

Thanks, day twenty four

Thursday is bubba's first birthday and in my fantasy world when you check here Thursday there will be a birth story for the ages and a video montage of his first year to make you cry cry cry and go, oh NOW I see how much she loves her bubba. I GET it. But his birth story locked up inside me and it won't come out. And I still haven't picked music for said video montage. And other thoughtful posts seem to be backed up behind that there clog. I need some writer's Drano. So. I like it when other bloggers post mundane details of daily living, it is like taking a walk at dusk and seeing into people's windows. Want to see in mine?

Today, "later" arrived to clean off my desk. Here's the before shot:

I read somewhere that there are two types of organizers. First, the ones who file everything as soon as they are done with it. And then there are the pilers, who let things accumulate to some sort of breaking point then sort everything at once. I am a piler (to state the obvious). The article also said that filers have neater desks but their files are often difficult to navigate because there is a lot of unnecessary stuff there. And pilers, we have messy desks but our files are pristinely beautiful and easy to navigate because they only contain the essentials.

So today I am thankful because I do actually have the capacity to sort and file! Here's the after shot:


Not bad for a piler. I found the lens cap for the camera, and some loose change, and I recycled a lot of paper that did not need to be filed. I kept these, though:


And in the spirit of remembering the first year of motherhood--since that birth story may or may not be forthcoming-- I found (and kept, for now--it was just so intense) the literature from the lactation consultant after bubba "failed" to regain his birthweight.


See it there, in fine print, where it says "you are a terrible mother who is starving her baby"? Just after "if he were born on the tundra ten thousand years ago he would die because you cannot nourish him" and before "all women who make enough breast milk are better than you." Then a little further down: "if you had only tried a little harder you wouldn't have to give him formula which I guess won't kill him but see above." I could have sworn it said that the first ten times I read it last December. That part about bub's newborn days, I don't miss that. Falling in love with him? That was better.

And one more thing, a postcard that I bought because surely I will send it to someone someday. Here! I'll send it to you. Wish you were here! XOXO, Nora