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Girlie loves having water poured over her
and closes her eyes when we say 1-2-3, splash!
and closes her eyes when we say 1-2-3, splash!
One of her very favorite things….her blanket.
We’re crazy busy this week as our church is hosting a group for Interfaith Hospitality Network (IHN). In case you’ve never heard of IHN, here is the Madison site with more information. It’s a great program that is doing a lot good for an unnoticed group of people that truly need our help.
What a weekend! The hubby and I went away for almost 24 hours while Girlie stayed with Ruth and her family. We missed the babe of course, but having some time to talk, relax and sleep in was wonderful. We also did some shopping on Saturday and as my birthday present from Erik I picked out a new camera. Ours was starting to enter the age of extinction and I’d been frustrated for quite a while at not being able to take zoomed in shots of the most beautiful baby in the world. Anyway….here is one of the best out of the hundred billion pictures I’ve taken in a short 24 hour period.
Now that I’m a whole year older and wiser (yeah, right)
I thought I’d share some great insights with you. You know, because I’m now so much more mature and in general brilliant.
Well…actually, the inspiration for today’s post happened last night as one of my friends, Matt, shared with me that he thinks my best blog posts are the ones where I go off and rant a bit. He also said he reads the blog but doesn’t ever comment…I think there are a few like Matt out there….grrr….
Somehow over the past few months I’ve received, for free, this magazine called Mothering: Natural Family Living. It’s not horrible or anything and I don’t intend to completely rip the magazine apart on this post. I also don’t intend to pay for or order it if and when I stop receiving the free copies. Overall, there’s a few things bothering me that I just feel like venting about. *Note: If you’re into Natural Family Living and Mothering magazine and the things I’m about to vent about please know I don’t want to judge you or make you feel like crap. Feel free to comment and explain how you feel, I like diaglogues and discussions…it gets my blood pumpin’.*
So, Mothering is in favor of a certain type of birthing plan. The plan is as follows…have a natural, drug free birth with a midwife delivering the baby, preferrably at your home or at a birthing center. And do not have your baby in a hospital if you can help it. I think if that’s what you’re into, great. Our friends just had their baby boy at home and it was a good experience from what I’ve heard so obviously this works for some folks. For me I think I would have freaked out completely and gone berserk worrying about what might happen if something went wrong during delivery.
This month Mothering had an interview with the musician Ani Difranco who has a new little girl and in the interview she talks about how she naturally delivered her daughter at home sans drugs. Difranco claimed that women in our society have no control over their births and are forced to go along with the hospital and Doctor’s plans for their births. She thinks women and their babies are often in grave danger due to hospital and staff errors. While I agree that there have been horrible things that have occurred to women/babies due to medicine errors or complications, Difranco needs to take a step back and realize there are also a lot of babies that are saved every day in hospitals and by their very competent staff. In the past two years I’ve known three babies who have been born very prematurely. Our friends had their little guy at 26 weeks!! He is now a happy healthy little boy thanks to the amazing care he received when he was first born. When my Grandmother and her twin sister were born the doctor put them each in a cigar box (that’s how tiny they were), put them by the fireplace and told their parents they’d most likely be dead in a few hours. Can you imagine hearing those words and feeling such an overwhelming sense of loss and pain? Fortunately, both my Grandma and her twin survived and hence…I’m here, too. What I think Difranco and Mothering should at least honor is that we’re so lucky to live in a country where medical care is available to help even the tiniest babies survive.
Okay, folks….still with me? Guess what…I’ve got one more thing to rant about.
Here’s one of the quotes from her interview that bugged the heck outta me.
“If I walked into a fluorescent-lit hospital with people pressuring me to get it done, take drugs, get
on my back, and put my legs up in the air, it wouldn’t have worked. As Ina May says, the cervix is
a sphincter. It doesn’t open if it’s not relaxed. I knew I needed to be at home, comfortable-not
feeling any pressure. I agree [with] that whole school of thought that if I were drugged through
that moment of revelation, it would have taken something away from my life journey. I’m really
happy in the end that I felt every last bit of the pain, and was as present as I could be……I wanted
that more than whatever sort of numbing that the hospital would have offered.”
I hate that when I read this I feel guilty for having an epidural when Girlie was born. I hate that I need to justify my reasons for having one. It sucks. And it makes me feel like I missed some big moment or something. It makes me feel like I took the easy way out instead of being tough. This, my friends, is what parents call ‘Mommy guilt.’ It doesn’t go away after the labor part, either…it just gets worse unless you really try to do something about it. The thing that helps me ease up a bit is talking with my other fellow mom friends out there. They’ve helped me realize that every birth story is a bit different and unique. I start to lose my sense of guilt and realize that I did a great job not only during my months of pregnancy, but also in the 24+ hours of labor I experienced…including the seven horrible pain-filled crappy every-two-minute-contractions part, too. Who knows, maybe next time around things will be different. Erik and I have talked about future delivery options. For now, I’ll just vent once in a while and concentrate on the gift I received after my long labor…a healthy, beautiful baby girl.
And here’s something for those of you who look forward to the craziness that is my Friday childcare day. Here’s Miss Isabel asleep on the couch because she was sooooo tired and needed a little siesta this morning. The ladies baby took full advantage of Isabel’s lack of consciousness as you can see below.
Last night was my second women’s spring league ultimate frisbee game. I did much better than last week and seemed to have much more enthusiasm and energy. The best news is that today I’m walking around normally sans limps or muscle aches and not feeling too bad at all- yippee! I actually did pretty well last night, but most of all I didn’t get down on myself for any poor playing or mistakes. Oh, in case any of you are unfamiliar with ultimate frisbee, here are some sites you can check out. www.mufa.org
This other site is my friend Matt’s homepage. There are some shots of our co-ed summer team from the past few years, Huck Foo. It’s so great to play with this team each year…notice the half naked baby in our team shot from last summer! It was so warm that game, just ridiculous! Wow…Ms. Girlie was so tiny then!! We lost our final game and didn’t make it to the championship round…but this year is maybe our year to reign as champions!?
Tonight should be a great night. After Erik’s men’s league frisbee game we’re headed out for the evening to celebrate my birthday! Yep, that’s right, today I turn the big 2-8. I hope this next year is as good as 27 was for me. I think back to last April and it amazes me to see how much I’ve changed and grown in twelve short months…and by grown I don’t count the addition of stretch marks, he he.
What I’m really amazed by are the qualities that I see in myself that have really flourished with motherhood. I still have much I’d like to work on, but in truth I have grown spiritually and emotionally much more than any other time in my life. Well….enough ramblings. I’ll post some highlights from my big night out soon. And by ‘big night out’ that means I’ll be out till *gasp* 11pm…holy cow, tomorrow’s gonna be a long day!
On Sunday we had our good friends Adam and Lisa (and baby Devin) over for the day. They helped us out enormously as we had decided this was the day we’d put up our new flower circle retaining wall thingy. We were so smart in asking Adam to help us out because his family runs a landscaping business….so he knew what he was doing…thank goodness!! It actually turned out beautifully and we’re very happy with it. Most of all we’re feeling quite a bit of relief that outdoor project #1 is nearly complete (we just need to add the dirt and eventually some flowers).
After the project was done we ate a nice big dinner of pork chops on the grill and then hung out in the yard tossing the frisbee around and enjoying the beautiful 70 degree weather. Our friends and backyard adjoining neighbors Ben and Tracy were out with their kiddos, too. Here are the three littlest pals chatting away and waving to us from the fence last night.
They had a lot to discuss. Mostly they jabbered about politics, the environment and how a bad diaper rash can spoil a normally good day. The three cuties are (from left to right) Devin (9 months), Jacob (7.5 months and Jannah (aka Girlie at 10 months). It was all going well until Jacob tried to join the two lovebirds on the other side of the fence. Devin took a bit of offense to Jacob being next to his favorite girl-so he gave Jacob a bit of a talkin’ to…as you can see below.
I believe Devin’s words were…’Dude, step away from my woman or I might have to drool on you.’ Jacob was very upset as he can’t walk away yet and was fearing for his life due to accesive teething/massive drool capabilities from Devin.
And how did Girlie feel about being fought over? She contemplated it all while eating some leaves and dirt for the umpteenth time that day.
