Apr
27
April 27, 2006
My boy can mostly sit up now, but has a bad habit of occasionally pushing himself backwards with great vigor. If there is no smooshy surface to absorb the collision, his head then pounds the floor with a thumped-coconut thonk! sound and after the initial moment of shock passes, the wailing and garment-rending ensues.
Most people like to talk about how bright and gifted their babies are; me, I’ll freely admit that the child has styrofoam packing material for brains sometimes. “Dude,” I told him last night as I helped him up for the third time (we were on the bed to minimize the chances of his skull getting Britney’d), “even Dog doesn’t ram her head into the ground. Plus, she poops outside. You’re seriously coming up short in comparison.”
I’ve been kind of eager for him to master this sitting business because I want to stop worrying about whether or not it’s weird that at eight months he’s still flopping over while other babies are pulling up, crawling, participating in gymkhana equestrian events, etc. At the same time, I’m trying to relish every moment that he’s not particularly ambulatory. After all, you gotta do the sitting first, then when you do the sitting, you get the power. Then when you get the power, you get the women.
(Hmm, that attempt at quoting Scarface in an amusing manner didn’t really pan out, did it? Note to self: stick head up ass, see if it fits.)
What I mean is, once he starts moving around we’re going to have to make some serious changes to our house. Hide the snarl of wires erupting from the entertainment center. Put locks on the kitchen cabinets. Shoo away the pack of slavering, foam-flecked dingos in the hallway. And so on.
There’s a baby at Riley’s daycare who scoots around on her butt, and I’m amazed and a little frightened by just how fast she can move. She’ll just be sitting there all innocent, and the next time you look she’s shot across the entire room as if her plump little rear grew a set of wheels and a small rocket propulsion device.
Well, Riley might not be the best sitter-upper yet, but I put him in the jumper this morning and after a brief period of why-have-you-thrust-me-in-this-instrument-of-torture complaining, he suddenly started bouncing, kaboing, boing, boing, and laughing up at me with his toothy pink wide-open-mouth smile. He bounced all through my shower and while I dried my hair and got dressed. BLISS.
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I dropped Riley off at daycare this morning and filled out the daily form that they use to record when and how much he eats, the frequency and contents of his diaper changes, and his nap schedule. Whoever takes him in has to write when he woke up, when he last ate, make notation of any changes from the norm – contact info for the day, medication, etc – and as always, there is a little section called CHILD’S MOOD.
JB and I usually just write “good”, except for the day a couple weeks ago when Riley’s MOOD the previous day had been decidedly not good at all; rather, it had been completely horrendous from teething. JB took him in that morning, and when I picked him up I noticed something on the sheet that made me laugh out loud: under MOOD, he’d written “BIT CRANKY”.
“Bit cranky?” I said that night. “BIT CRANKY? ‘Oh, sorry about Damien here, he’s just a BIT CRANKY.’ Talk about the understatement of the year.”
The next day Riley’s MOOD notation read “I’VE SEEN BETTER.” JB was clearly starting something, so the time after that I wrote “FAIR TO MIDDLIN”. The next time it was JB’s turn the form read “NOT BAD BUT DEFINITELY SUSPICIOUS”. This morning I wrote “NEEDS IMPROVEMENT.”
No one’s said anything to us about the notes so either the MOOD requirement is pretty much useless and not being read, or they just think we’re a couple of freaks.
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It seems weird to end this post on a completely sober note, but if you have not seen this amazing piece of photojournalism about the aftereffects of Chernobyl, I think you should. It’s heartbreaking and very hard to watch and I personally had absolutely no knowledge of any of it. There was a brief segment on the national news last night about the anniversary of the disaster, and they didn’t show anything like what you’ll see on that link. A fucking unbelievable tragedy.
Apr
26
April 26, 2006
Thanks for weighing in on the blog name question! I’ll let you know how it shakes out. I had this random paranoid fear when I emailed in my suggestions: what if they don’t like any of my ideas and they make me call it Baby Steps?
Nahhh.
So, this morning I was reading another blogger’s post about homebirthing, and as an associated topic in her comments section, there was a discussion about the high number of hospital C-sections, the risks of medicated births, etc.
I admit when I first started thinking about Riley’s great arrival, back when he was walnut-sized and I could still go five minutes in a row without peeing, I thought homebirthing sounded batshit crazy. I know of someone whose child has permanent hearing damage from a tough birth where they had to abandon their home situation and rush to a hospital, and to my fairly uninformed mind that was reason enough to surround yourself in a traditional medical environment from the start of labor to mitigate all the possibilities of something going wrong.
Of course, anything can happen during birth, and being at a hospital instead of your living room doesn’t guarantee a perfect outcome. The more I read about birth options, the more I started feeling much more open-minded about the subject; I never decided that I wanted anything other than a hospital birth for myself, but I learned a lot about the choices I had. I became less afraid, and more interested; I didn’t have any hard-and-fast goals for Riley’s birth but I did have preferences, I was gearing up for the experience and curious as to what it would be like.
My friend Jen had a gorgeous baby boy in March and her husband wrote a wonderful account of the birth; after I read it I was so happy for them, and yet I realized a nasty undercurrent, a weird sense of sorrow even through my feelings of congratulations. It was simple and stupid jealousy, an undeniable feeling of regret that I didn’t have a similar experience: the realization that labor was happening, the excitement of the escalation, the trip to the hospital and even the hours of painful work to produce a child.
I wouldn’t say that Riley’s birth was traumatic, there was no emergency, no fear for his safety. The consequences were ideal, as the result was a healthy baby and the rest shouldn’t matter. And yet here it is almost eight months later and I’m surprised by the amount of bitterness I feel.
I can’t help wondering, was it all really necessary? Was my blood pressure really that bad, and how could it have been–I felt perfectly healthy! All that terrible magnesium, did I really need that? Should I have tried harder for the vaginal birth, should I have taken the Pitocin, would I have increased my chances of avoiding the surgery and the fuzziness with which I remember everything that happened? Wasn’t it completely unnnatural to pry Riley out of my body three weeks early, was any of it–the medication, the sickness, the haziness, the fruitless attempts at starting labor–necessary?
I know it’s pointless to dwell on it. I know you don’t fuck around with pre-eclampsia. I know the medical staff made choices based on health and safety rather than their own convenience. But still. Still.
When I read the arguments against hospital births and all the advocacy of controlling your experience and making a better choice for baby I feel so conflicted; on one hand, yay for homebirthing and midwives and naturopathic herbs and all that, yay for choices, but sometimes things get way the fuck out of your control and all the books and websites and well-meaning opinion-holders in the world can’t make things different. I’m not sure that gets acknowledged much in the sea of righteous defense. Or maybe there’s some other reason I just can’t help feeling like I did something wrong.
(I hope it doesn’t matter to him.)
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