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.

Honey We're Killing the Kids

The other day we visited the recently remodeled home of an old college friend. The house is lovely and modern, like something out of Dwell magazine. As she walked us through the sunny, open floor plan she highlighted the low VOC paint, the environmentally sustainable cork floors, the whole-house water filtration system, and the earth-friendly carpeting. Then she reminded us of all the toxic chemicals in most retail baby products and gave us some free samples of Arbonne Baby Care. Convinced that my daily application of sunscreen, our VOC-emitting home and all that chlorinated water I've been drinking had already permanently damaged the baby, I purchased an additional $150 with of all-natural skin-care products hoping to fend off any further damage.

The next morning I pulled up Babble's main page to find this article on lead poisoning. Like the author of the piece, I assumed lead poisoning only happened to unsupervised children “gnawing on windowsills” in slummy apartment buildings. (and, of course, anyone who happens to buy toys made in China, which really, is just about anyone who buys toys) So now I was convinced that underneath my VOC-emitting Silver Sage walls a sinister layer of lead dust was accumulating, just waiting to off us all. I thought this news might finally cause that famous “nesting instinct” to kick in and I would get out my mop and buckets in a cleaning frenzy, but the information sheet on how to remove lead dust began with “PREGNANT WOMEN MUST NOT REMOVE LEAD DUST”, so I just stayed in front of the computer waiting for the next terrifying bit of information to come over the internet.

And I didn't have to wait long. I checked in on our neighborhood message board where I found a debate raging over whether or not petroleum based products (i.e. Vasoline) are causing irreversible damage to our kids. After doing a bit of my own research I concluded Vasoline is probably just fine, but I did spend about an hour on the Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep web site checking the safety rating of every cosmetic product I use. Most of them fell in the “moderate hazard” range, which was somewhat disconcerting because I actually do make an effort to use “safe” products, especially since I became pregnant.

I guess the point of all this is that even though I feel like a fairly well-informed, environmentally conscious consumer, there are still a ton of hazards that I hadn't considered and for a day or so I felt completely inadequate as a wife/mother/consumer/citizen. I can't rid my home of every possible toxin and even if I tried to I would probably end up introducing some new danger during my efforts. I know you can't believe everything you read on the internet and I know that the “natural products” industry has an interest in scaring us away from conventional products. At the same time there is compelling evidence that chemicals in many of the products we use may be causing developmental problems, fertility issues, allergies, etc. Am I just a big worrywart? Somehow I don't think my parents ever bothered with these sorts of things and they may have been better off for it.

Food Poisoning!

I thought I was going to make it through this pregnancy vomit-free, but after 8 and half months of avoiding morning sickness I ended up with food poisoning and have spent the last last 18 hours nauseated, vomiting and battling diarrhea. I know 18 hours is much preferable to the 3 months of nausea that many pregnant ladies endure, but I am still feeling icky and sorry for myself.

My husband and I had gone out to dinner at Chaya Venice for our anniversary and quite possibly our last nice dinner out for the next few months. I ordered the baked chicken wrapped in prosciutto. I know prosciutto is on the “bad food” list, but since it was baked (and since I really wanted it) I thought it would be okay. I guess not.

After not being able to keep anything down for hours I decided to call my doctor and make sure the baby wasn't at risk. I figured he'd be okay without food, but I was starting to worry about how the bacteria might affect him. Her office was already closed so I had to call her cell phone, which I always hate to do, but she was very nice about it and said that baby would be fine, but that I would just have to wait out the food poisoning since any of the medications typically used to treat it can't be used during pregnancy. She also reminded me to drink lots of fluids and try to eat bland foods like toast and bananas.

The car seat is in!

This morning my husband and I drove to the LAPD station near the corner of La Brea and Venice to have our child safety seat installed. We had considered installing it ourselves, but after reading the infant seat instructions, our Honda's owner manual and fiddling with a multitude of buttons, latches and straps we determined we needed professional help. Guess those 4 years of engineering school didn't prepare us for the complicated mechanics of car seats. Perhaps if we'd splurged on those Master's degrees...

Thankfully, LAPD has a free installation/inspection program and after a quick phone call last week we had an appointment with 2 very nice officers this morning at 8AM. They showed us how to adjust our Baby Trend Flex-Loc seat and buckle it into the center of our Honda's back seat. We asked them about installing it on one side or the other, but our reason (needing a place for the dog to sit) was deemed unsatisfactory. The officer asked us, “what's more important, the baby or the dog?” so we sheepishly agreed that the center of the backseat was the way to go. Our dog is too big to sit in the back next to the car seat, maybe she'll have to start riding up front with my husband.

I'm starting to understand why people run out and buy a giant car as soon as they have a baby. Between the car seat, stroller, diaper bag, etc., then throw transporting a dog into the mix, well, it's easy to feel a bit cramped. And we're just dealing with the infant seat here. I've seen some of those convertible car seats, which the officers informed us we'll need to upgrade to once the baby is over 22 lbs, and they are like mini Barcaloungers! I wonder if they come with tiny little cigars and brandy glasses.

I remember watching as our friends (who are a few years ahead of us on the whole kid thing) slowly replaced their compact sedans with mini-vans and scornfully asking “Why does the addition of 8 pounds of baby suddenly require 2 tons of car?” Now I at least understand the inclination. I still can't justify a mini-van or one of those obnoxious Hummers, but I do admit to eying station wagons lately.