MamaRama!

I was sure the baby would be late. I was sure I would be able to keep my date for hot chocolate with orange blossoms the next day. (I ♥ Cocoa Nymph!) But the labor train started chugging early in the morning of his due date, and slowly wound its way past my sureties.

Around 5:30pm, I give my midwives and doula a heads up before dinnertime. My doula says she’ll eat her dinner and come over, and the midwife asks that the doula call her after she sees me in person. Ten minutes later, my doula phones back and says she just got a wave of intuition that my labor might be a fast one, so she’s heading over now. Twenty minutes later my midwife shows up, saying she suddenly got a feeling things might pick up. It’s like they speak it into being. The train shifts up a gear.

I put on a mixed CD that a friend’s friend made for her when she was welcoming her first child. I remembered how it made me laugh, in her borrowed car, guessing each song’s connection to birthing. I change into a lighter shirt, my favorite maternity shirt that I’m somewhat sad to never have reason to wear again. I get out the electric massager to save from wearing my husband’s and doula’s hands out, while still guaranteeing I get massages!

The restlessness is beginning to wear off. The midwife checks me. Six centimeters. Music to my ears! This gives me the all clear to get into the birth pool. We have our birth pool set up in the middle of the living room on the top floor of a 100 year old house. There was some question of whether it would fall through the floor, but I love the spot between the fish tank and the ‘tree of love’. I climb in. I don’t fall through the floor. Instant relief!

I start to notice the music more now. The lyrics will come back to me in all sorts of ways over the next few hours and days. “It’s cold in here. Is the heat on?” The heat is ah-on. It’s on the street. “Doesn’t your 3 year old seem huge and noisy now?” But time makes you bolder, even children get older. “Do you want to cut the cord?” Everybody cut, everybody cut Footloose!

Why in the world would Footloose be on there?

I’m much more vocal in this labor. My three year old comes running to stroke my hair and kiss my head, as many times as it takes. How did I get such a wonderful kid? The next time I look over, he’s got his kids’ water birth book out and is pointing out what we’ve done and what is left to do. It all looks so easy in the kids’ book.

I hit transition within an hour of getting into the tub. I can’t quite believe it, because it hurts so much less in the warm water. Still, I let out a mighty holler when the water breaks. Good thing it’s still a decent hour for hollering.

I’m cold, so someone sets up the ceramic heater. Through closed eyes, its orange glow is like the sunset on a warm evening. I’m miles away from the cold, rainy, February night outside.

Finally, it’s too far past bedtime and my husband puts our son to bed. It’s not easy to fall asleep when your mommy is in the next room giving birth. The timing is a bit awkward, with me approaching the pushing phase, and I have no intention of having the baby while my husband is away. But in another way the timing is a gift. This is my final birth, and my last chance to explore “Laborland”. I float on my back and settle into a holding pattern.

My (amazing) doula plays the crystal singing bowl. Its strong, pure tone permeates the tub. There is nothing more pure in the world, and it’s exactly the focal point I need. I thought I’d be using various meditation techniques, but they all rely on words, and words are just buzzing flies in Laborland. The doula tells me later that sometimes the only way the midwives could tell I was having contractions was by watching the movement of my belly. It’s true that some of the contractions didn’t require any reaction on my part. I float in the sound of the singing bowl.

Forty five minutes later, my husband comes back. I gather my strength, and kneel at the side of the tub. During my last birth, all I felt was pain and panic at this stage. This time I can feel exactly how to move, despite the pressure and burning. And the less I seek my source for some definitive/Closer I am to fine. (If it HAD been Footloose playing, would Theo be destined for a Bacon number?) Seven minutes later, the baby comes out, with his cord wrapped tightly around his neck. My incredibly talented midwife quickly somersaults him through it, while keeping him totally immersed. I think this maneuver should be renamed in her honor. The baby is up and in my arms. Welcome, sweet Theo. Welcome.

Would I do it the same way again? Absolutely. Would I do any part differently? I would have gone for the hot cocoa long before the labor train left the station.

I’m feeling creatively inspired these days, mainly due to attending my friend’s wonderful creativity workshop, Lost & Found. I’m also reading Inner Excavation, by the author of the blog Be Present, Be Here. So I wrote something! And I actually like it!

I wrote this because the other night, after feeling thoroughly depleted by taking care of a sick child when I didn’t feel so good myself, I came out and thought I should “fill my cup” but didn’t remember how. This is a reminder of how I fill my cup in little ways throughout the day.

Free Refills

I fill my cup with ink and paint,
With f-stops and filters and bytes.
I fill my cup with loaves and cakes,
With coloring puddles and mama bikes.
I fill my cup with friends and neighbors,
Lives interwoven and stories shared.
I fill my cup with curiosity indulged,
Speed limit of the universe, solar flares.
I fill my cup with slow, silent counts,
The here and the now and the why.
My cup is full when I live in what is,
When I choose to BE, not to try.

How do you fill your cup?

I had two main concerns in the diapering area when I first had a baby: I wanted to keep harmful chemicals away from my baby’s skin, since it’s 5 times thinner than adult skin, but I wanted our diapering system to be easy enough that Daddy and Grandma would change as many diapers as possible!

There are a bewildering array of cloth diapering options out there. It’s no longer just those white rags in plastic covers that the non-initiated think of at first mention of cloth diapers. In fact, cloth diapers are getting ridiculously cute.

Because babies change shape constantly during the first couple years, with the constant cycle of pudging out and then shooting up with growth spurts, I wanted to get a diaper that would fit snugly no matter how skinny or pudgy he was that day, and no matter how tall he got in his first couple of years. Since I was doing this partly to reduce his environmental impact, it didn’t make sense to get through several sets of fitted cloth diapers, which have their own impact because of the materials used to construct them.

I also wanted a diaper that would dry quickly, so I didn’t have to use up a lot of time and electricity to dry something that’s designed to hold onto water. We live in a temperate rainforest, with no good indoor space for drying, so line drying wasn’t an option.

I finally decided on the BumGenius 3.0. It has 3 sets of snaps the vary the height of the diaper, and a generous band of velcro along the front to vary the waist size. It is a pocket diaper, so the absorbent inserts fall out of the pocket during the wash cycle, and are free to bounce about in the dryer, which makes total drying time less than an hour. The insert is made of microfiber, which is incredibly absorbent, but shares the same problem all synthetic materials have: it can start to smell. This smell is a deal-breaker for some. It is lessened by bleaching the diapers every few washes. I was somewhat glad to use this excuse to use bleach (which I normally avoid because it’s bad for the environment), because the bleach probably cleaned out the washing machine, too.

When we first got the diapers, the interior cloth was so soft and beautiful that it felt almost profane to give it to my baby to poop in! I knew I chose the right design when my initially skeptical husband would excitedly show any hapless guests our brilliant cloth diapers. Success!

We’ve been using the BumGenius for 2 years now, and have saved about $1200 in diapering costs. (It cost about $500 to start with 24 diapers and 30 cloth wipes and diaper spray; we also bought disposable diaper liners once our son started solids.) BumGenius are only guaranteed for one year, so we feel we got our money’s worth. Our toddler is average height for his age, and he seems nearly too tall for them now. (They’ve addressed this issue in the new model, BumGenius 4.0.)

Will I cloth diaper for the next baby? Absolutely! Will I use BumGenius again? It seems likely. There are other diapers on the market now that incorporate the adjustable height, velcro waist, and pocket insert features that I prefer, so I’ll check those out when the time comes. But for now, I’m very pleased with our cloth diaper choices. Now I’m off to investigate cloth training pants. Have you seen how much they charge for Pull-Ups these days????

My beloved dining table got a very unlovely white ring on it (see above) when a hot French Press was accidentally left on it. I put off fixing it because I figured I’d have to buy some smelly chemicals to rub into it. But the internet came to the rescue, with a brilliant technique that just requires an old t-shirt and an iron!

The technique is to place a clean, lint-free cloth (t-shirt or cloth napkin is fine) over the stain, then iron with a normal clothes iron on medium heat for a few seconds, lift the cloth, and repeat until stain is gone. It took about 15 tries to get the above ring out, but that’s less than two minutes’ work. And it was free! And non-smelly! Yay!

I adore the color of red velvet cake, but after making it once the modern way (with an entire bottle of food coloring), I couldn’t bring myself to actually eat it or serve it to my family. There is some mention of how the interaction between baking soda and cocoa could create a red cake in the pre-food coloring days, but no one seems to have had much luck recreating that magic. Some people have tried adding beets to make the crumb red, but in the heat and the alkaline environment that baking powder and dutch processed cocoa creates, the beets oxidize to a drab brown.

Finally, someone figured out that if you are going to use beets, you need to keep the batter acidic to keep the beets from turning brown – the same idea as squeezing lemon juice onto apples to keep them from browning. I followed this recipe that uses the juice of two lemons and cocoa powder that isn’t dutch-processed. (Dutch processing uses an alkalizing agent to make the cocoa taste milder.) Out came a beautiful deep red velvet cake with no food coloring! It was very moist and didn’t taste too “beety”, though it was very slightly “sharp” from the lemon juice. Sadly, my toddler must have heard me mention the beets and refused to eat it, so this won’t be the recipe I use for his red double-decker bus birthday cake.

I found this recipe when I was looking for breakfast foods to feed my one year old. They are wheat-free, with no refined sugar or added fats. Instead they mix bananas, applesauce, oats, and molasses to become deliciously moist with an earthy sweetness. I’ve probably made this recipe 2 dozen times because they are so popular around here!

Adapted from Katy’s Muffins:

Flourless Banana Mish-Mash Muffins

2 ripe bananas
1/4 cup applesauce
1/4 cup blackstrap (or regular) molasses
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 large egg
1 1/2 cups rolled or quick oats
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 cup dried fruit, minced

Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease muffin tins, or use muffin liners.
In large bowl, combine applesauce, molasses, bananas, and vanilla until smooth. Mix in egg. Mix in oats, cinnamon, baking powder, and salt. Fold in dried fruit. Fill muffin liners halfway with batter.
Bake for 20 to 25 minutes in the preheated oven, until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.

Makes 12 muffins

For a lighter flavor, try substituting maple syrup. For tiny hands, use a mini-muffin pan and bake for half as long.

These freeze very well. Wrap individually in cling film and store in freezer bag. Save the cling film to reuse on your next batch; you WILL be making another batch!

Some dear friends of mine (and my only 2 readers – hi guys!) recently had a welcoming party for their 40 day old son. On the invitation, they requested that nobody buy anything, but said we were welcome to bring homemade gifts. I dug into my drawer of unfinished projects, and came up with this:

I took a Beatles quilt panel and sewed purple dot minky chenille on the back, following this tutorial. Et viola! An awesome handmade gift for about $20 that took very little skill.

All you need is love and some good fabric.

Like a lot of parents, we’ve been debating whether to give our toddler the H1N1 vaccine. Since they haven’t yet done the safety trials of this new vaccine on children in the 0 – 3 age group, we’ve been keeping track of how many severe adverse reactions to the vaccine showed up, versus how many died from the virus, versus how many die from the seasonal flu. (Dealing with hard numbers rather than vague impressions with the media is reassuring to us.)

And then there’s the question of what kind – do we give him the effective, squalene-containing one, or the less effective squalene-free variety, that has 10 times the amount of mercury? There just doesn’t seem to be any good answer.

I breathed a sigh of relief when my doctor said that while the vaccine is new, very similar vaccines have been shown safe for very young children? Breathing a sigh of relief, I asked, “And these safe vaccines contained the same adjuvant?”

“Well, no,” she said.

But that’s the controversial part, doc!

That’s why I was especially relieved to see this article in the Vancouver Sun this weekend: “H1N1 pandemic ending with a whimper, not a bang“.

A ray of hope, from the article:

H1N1′s “reproductive number” — the number of people each infected person passes the virus to — was above one when the epidemic began, which led to the explosive initial increase in cases.

Now it is less than one, because many people have become immune, and each old case is making less than one new case. When the reproductive number falls below one, the epidemic can’t sustain itself, and fades away.

The drop in cases suggests Canada has hit the critical fraction of the population that needs to be vaccinated to control the pandemic, says Dr. David Fisman, a University of Toronto expert in infectious disease dynamics.

Fisman can’t understand the rational for continuing mass vaccinations. He said that for a virus as contagious as H1N1, fewer than 30 per cent of the population needed vaccination to reach a critical level of immunity.

What was also interesting to me, as someone who finds the balance between personal risk and civic duty a bit tricky, was what David Fisman, a University of Toronto expert in infectious disease dynamics, said about the cause of the decline:

“I’m sure that the vaccine has prevented some deaths. I’m sure that there are people who are alive right now who would not have been alive if we hadn’t vaccinated,” he says. But the pandemic was already peaking, and then subsiding before the vaccination was rolling out in force.

“That’s nobody’s fault, that’s just how long it took to make a vaccine against a brand new virus. Those were the cards we were dealt,” says Fisman, an associate professor of infectious diseases epidemiology at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

I’ll be interested to hear what other experts in the field have to say in the coming weeks. I know we’re not entirely out of the woods yet, but it is certainly a relief when a ray of hope breaks through the canopy!

I’m really enjoying the Parenting series on Salon. Today there is a hilarious missive to all those childless people who are sick to death about hearing about our kids and of our mommyblogging. I confess that I was once one of those people who couldn’t understand why my friends became so single-topic after they had kids. But now, oh, have I ever learned!

“The common misconception of childless, alcohol-imbibing party guests and cyber-ether baby-haters alike is that parents blabber constantly out of some arrogance or indulgent desire to show off their great kids and their perfect parenthood. Nothing could be further from the truth. We parents have so little now; the children have taken so much. We just have nothing left to say.

We know it’s sort of sad, but it’s all we have until the kids become a little older. Allow me and my kin to engage in our one conversation, even if it’s just to stay in practice for when we emerge from the bunker.”

Made me laugh in that, “How painfully true” sort of way!

Read more: Is my kids making me not smart?

I confess to being mildly baby-obsessed these days. You’d think that being around a baby all day and night, I’d become inured to the charms of other babies. But no, I ALWAYS check out other people’s babes! I love that there are myriad ways to carry them, sing to them, entertain them, and generally look after them. I also love that babies seem to all make the same funny sounds and expressions, regardless of what language(s) they’re raised with.  That’s why I’m hugely excited about this movie, “Babies,” that follows 4 babies from 4 very different cultures through their first year of life.  It’s a shame it doesn’t come out till April 2010!  Until then, here’s the trailer.  Enjoy!