Welcome Baby S!

I based my birth plans for Baby S on my experience with Baby M.  Yes, I'd heard that second babies come faster, that every pregnancy is different, blah, blah, blah.  My pregnancy with S had been very similar to my previous pregnancies and I had no reason to doubt that labor would follow the same general path, just maybe a little faster.  Well, it was a lot faster and quite different.  With Baby M my contractions started mildly, ramped up over the next 8 hours and then I spent another 8 hours in the hospital before he was born.  So 16 hours total.  With Baby S it was less than 5 hours from start to finish.

My water broke late Sunday night.  This caught me off guard, partially because the first time around my water didn't break until I was already well into labor, but mainly because it was 3 days before my due date. I know 3 days is not terribly early, but Baby M had been a week overdue and I figured Baby S would be late too.  At my last OB appointment I was only 1 cm dilated and I thought I had at least another week to wait.  Consequently, I had planned a full day of tasks for Monday -- laundry, grocery shopping, meal prep and packing my hospital bag.

So now we were suddenly in the Hollywood  movie birth scenario.  I was throwing clothes in my hospital bag, calling relatives to come over at one in the morning and trying to convince my husband that yes, we actually did need to go to the hospital.  Right now.

I had been toying with the idea of having an unmedicated birth.  With Baby M I had the epidural and overall it was a positive experience,  but I'd also wondered what natural birth was like.  Was it really as empowering or,  heaven-forbid, orgasmic as all those books said it would be?  (I'd read Naomi Wolf's Misconceptions, Ina May's Guide to Childbirth and watched The Business of Being Born, my head was full of natural birthing propaganda).  On the way to the hospital, however, I realized that you don't really play around with natural birth.  You either need to be committed or not.  And I had never really fully committed.  I still felt flustered over the whole bag situation, my contractions were getting stronger and I forgot all about my visualization techniques.  This is silly, I thought.  I will just get the epidural.

When we got to the hospital it was 2am and I was 5cm.  The nurse checked me in, I got changed and situated in my room and I asked for the epidural.  At this point the contractions were getting quite strong and were right on top of each other.  Most of my focus was just on getting through them.  The nurse checked me again and I was 9cm.  Do you still want the epidural, she asked. Um, yes.  But by the time the anesthesiologist was ready my OB was there saying it was time to push.  So I ended up with an unmedicated birth after all.  I have to say, it was definitely not orgasmic and by the end I did not feel strong and empowered.  I just felt tired.  And that was after only 2 hours of hard labor, I can't imagine what it must be like for the women whose labors last for hours on end.  On the upside, my recovery has been so much easier and I do think that is in part because I did not have the epidural.  And, as my husband likes to point out, I now have bragging rights.

So Baby S came out at a healthy 8 pounds 2 ounces with all 9 on his Apgars.  We struggled a bit with jaundice and the poor little guy had daily heel pricks for a while, but now he is nice and pink.  He sleeps a lot and cries very little (the exact opposite of Baby M at this age).  Baby M is adjusting well and has been very helpful.  We'll see how we fare once my mother goes home and friends stop bringing us dinner, but for now we are all feeling good.

Siblings Without Rivalry

So I decided I'd better get in one book on siblings before baby #2 comes along and Siblings Without Rivalry by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish came highly recommended despite being written 23 years ago.  I liked the book and thought it was helpful, but it definitely read like something written decades ago, and not just because of the dated cover design and references to the library card catalog.  In case you missed it, I read a lot of parenting books, and I generally try to read current books-- NutureShock, SuperBaby, The Parents We Mean to Be, Unconditional Parenting, etc.  These books were all written in the last few years and tend to be footnoted extensively with references to scientific journals, experiments and additional resources.  And this scientific rigor has never bothered me; I like the fact that the advice being doled out has been tested and that there is more than just some "expert's"opinion or personal experience backing it up.

Siblings Without Rivalry is structured completely differently from most of the books I read.  It's based on a 6 week workshop on sibling rivalry and includes the conversations, stories and handouts from these workshops.  We hear about the participants' struggles with their children, their own sibling relationships and even tearful confessions of what they wished their parents had done differently. At times it is very much like sitting in on someone else's group therapy session from 1987 when latch-key kids were the norm, gender stereotypes were readily accepted and promoting self-esteem was paramount.

I know this does not sound promising, but I actually found the structure quite refreshing.  Instead of reading about carefully controlled experiments I was reading about real conflicts between real siblings.  We don't just read about what the research says you should do, we actually get to see how imperfect, tired, angry parents apply the techniques and hear about how they work or how they don't.  And, perhaps most encouraging, we get to see parents head down a wrong path, change their approach mid-conflict and still end up with a mostly positive result.  In so many of the books I read the author provides so much evidence for a particular approach that I start to feel doing anything differently will doom my child to a life of sleeplessness or low IQ or anxiety, etc. etc.

Sure, some of the illustrations in the book are a little hokey and the first chapter, which asks us to explore our child's feelings about a new sibling by having us imagine our husband bringing home a new wife, was more amusing than anything else, but I do feel that I gained valuable information on how to help Baby M deal with a younger sibling.  (And I did have to laugh when the authors asked me to write down my reaction to my husband giving the new wife one of my old sweaters and saying "you've put on a little weight, your clothes are too tight on you and they'll fit her perfectly.")   Some key points from the book:

1. Acknowledge each child's feelings about their sibling, even if they are negative
2. Do not compare the children to each other
3. Do not put children in "roles", even if both roles seem positive (e.g. the smart one and the funny one)
4. Instead of focussing on giving kids equal parts, try to give each child what they need when they need it
5. Intervene in fights when necessary, but try to put the onus for solving the problem on the kids.

These suggestions may sound obvious, but I can see how easy it would be to forget about them in the heat of the moment.  If my boys were fighting about the number of pancakes on their plates I can absolutely see myself snapping "You both have four pancakes" instead of asking if they were still hungry.  It's straight-forward examples like this one that make the tips in this book easy to remember and hopefully easy to implement.