The Mother's Almanac

While I was still pregnant my mother-in-law gave me a copy of The Mother's Almanac by Marguerite Kelly and Elia Parsons, copyright 1975, saying that this was the only book she consulted to raise her two sons. I wasn't sure if this comment was supposed to mean “Look how great my sons are, use this book” (which, granted, her sons are pretty great, I mean I married one of them) or if this was just another comment along the lines of “in my day we didn't have car seats, baby bath tubs or 12 books on infant care.” Yes, we actually own 12 books on raising a child. Everything from What to Expect the First Year to Touchpoints to Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. And that doesn't include the additional 10 books my husband checked out from the library.

Knowing much of the thinking on raising children has changed over the past 30 years I hadn't paid much attention to The Mother's Almanac, but yesterday I pulled it off the shelf to have a look. The back cover promised to cover the “realities of motherhood from the mechanics of diapering to... old fashioned virtues, basic physics, bricklaying... and much more.” Whoa! None of my other books have anything about bricklaying! And basic physics? Am I going to have to determine the coefficient of friction to keep my baby from sliding down an incline? I was intrigued. I flipped opened the book and started reading.

The opening sentences read “There are many times in parenthood when happiness thrusts your spirits higher than the stars and the pleasure of loving makes living a throbbing delight. This is normal, but like sex, much too brief.” This is is the only childcare book I've ever read written in the style of a trashy romance novel. And a few pages later I found this gem, “ In child care, as in sex, practice doesn't make it perfect every time, but it sure does make it better.” It's clear this book came out of the decade that brought us the key party.

I skimmed through the section on labor & delivery, which, amazingly, contained several more sex allusions, and an outright plea for the missionary position. It also defined hospital rooming-in as having the baby with you for 5-8 hours, which I found funnier than all the throbbing and thrusting comments. Finally, I reached the chapter on what to do now that you're home from the hospital. It begins by stating that you should dress every day as soon as you get up. As of noon, my bottom half is dressed, but I'm still wearing my pajamas top, does that count as being dressed? The authors also offer, “There are at least two times a day when a wife should look good and smell good: at night when she goes to bed and in the morning before her husband leaves for work.” I'm afraid I fail on those counts; I've worn sweatpants and a ponytail pretty much every day for the past month and I smell like spit-up more often than not. The authors go on to talk about getting your “good figure” back and spend several paragraphs on various exercises for postpartum moms. Of course, they also include “Vaginal Exercises” with the helpful comment, “You'll like these more.” I'm sure at some point they will get around to actually caring for your child.

I haven't gotten to the bricklaying section yet, that comes later in the book. It makes sense, a child needs to be at least 3 or 4 before you start letting him play with trowels and construction materials. I think this is my new favorite childcare book, I'm going to start buying it for all my friends.

Trapped

Baby M and I have been confined to our small, stuffy, non-air conditioned house the past few days because of the California wildfires. We are lucky that we're not in the path of the fire, but with all of the smoke and particulates in the air we can't go outside or open the windows so the 2 of us sit and bake in the house as my husband goes off to his nice air conditioned office each morning. I didn't realize how much I looked forward to our daily stroll around the neighborhood with the Zooper until now. Besides the novelty of getting out of the house the stroller also lulls baby M to sleep. My other sleep inducing trick, walking around with the baby in my Kangaroo Korner adjustable pouch, is also failing because it's just too hot to be wrapped in fleece. I put him in there and after 5 minutes he is a little sweaty ball of rage. So aside from being hot and uncomfortable we are both a bit sleep deprived and cranky.

Today I worked up my courage to take baby M to a nice air conditioned mall, or at least, I figured, drive him around in a nice air conditioned car. My husband and I have taken him out several times, but I haven't taken him out in the car on my own yet. So just after 10AM I strapped baby M into his Baby Trend infant seat and then went into the garage to pull the car into the driveway and put the dog out. When I got back inside a few minutes later the baby was screaming, which is not unusual, but he was also turning a frightening shade of blue. He's grown a few inches since birth and I think the straps were too tight. After unstrapping him, calming him down and apologizing profusely for being a bad mommy I pulled out the car seat instructions to figure out how to loosen the straps. Is it just me or are car seat manuals impossible to follow? I am college educated, even graduated cum laude in engineering. I have put together an entire apartment's worth of Ikea furniture using instructions written in Swedish hieroglyphics, but I failed miserably at adjusting the straps on my car seat. Somehow the straps on the underside of the seat lengthened but the straps in the front of the seat stayed exactly the same. So baby M and I both had a good cry and then went to stick our heads in the freezer. Maybe we will try again tomorrow.

Baby M is here!

Baby M has arrived! Actually he arrived 12 days ago, but between his hourly feedings (the little piggy) and my husband's new found love of Facebook, I haven't had a chance until now to get on the computer and update the blog.

We checked into St. John's Hospital around 3pm at 5 cm dilated. It took 3 hours for me to go from 5 to 6 cm and that's when I decided to get the epidural. I was never one of those “if I have an epidural I'll have failed as a woman” women, but I thought I would give going natural a try and see how it went. I was anticipating 9 more hours of increasingly intense pain and decided that it was not for me. Once the epidural was in I dilated the next 3 cm in 30 minutes, so it's not always true that an epidural will slow down your labor. But thank goodness I got the epidural because I definitely would not have wanted to feel the next 5 hours. I felt a gush shortly after getting the epidural which I thought was my water breaking, but was actually a gush of blood from an internal tear.

As with most hospital births, the baby's heart rate was being monitored and it had been up and down throughout my labor. As we got close to pushing his heart rate dropped precipitously. The atmosphere in the delivery room started getting frantic. My OB was calling for assistance, new people were coming into the room and I was fixated on the number on the monitor. After a few pushes and the heart rate dipping into the 70s my OB decided to use the vacuum to pull baby M out. The cord was wrapped so tightly around his neck that it needed to be cut before he was all the way out.

Thankfully both baby M and I are fine. He scored an impressive 9 on his Apgar test and after a brief weight loss he is above his birth weight. I ended up with some nasty tearing called a sulcus tear and my nether regions are still kind of a mess, but after a very rough first week I am moving around and even taking walks with the stroller through our neighborhood.

So after a harrowing entrance baby M is here and I am officially an LA Mom.

The The Salad

Well I am officially 4 days overdue and starting to wonder if this baby is ever planning on coming out. At my last OB appointment I was dilated one lousy centimeter and I haven't had any contractions so I've been feeling like we need to take some action to get things going. My husband has been repeatedly singing the Diana Ross tune “I'm Coming Out” to my belly, but so far it hasn't had any effect. I suspect baby M is not much of a disco fan.

My doctor suggested sex and Chinese food to get labor started, but honestly, sex is not appealing to me or my husband right now. Instead we decided to try the famous labor inducing salad at the Caioti Pizza Cafe in Studio City. The story goes that pregnant women start labor within 48 hours of eating the “The The Salad”. The salad has romaine lettuce, watercress, walnuts and gorgonzola cheese with a balsamic dressing. I had them add some chicken which my waitress assured me would not affect the “special properties” of the salad. It was a really yummy salad, but unfortunately here I am 48 hours later and still not in labor. There were 2 other pregnant ladies eating the salad at the same time as me, maybe they had better luck.