38 weeks, some unsorted thoughts

Last night I had a dream that I was in early labor and my midwife suggested that I buy some very expensive mint chocolate chip ice cream and eat it to stay hydrated.

Ha!

When people talked about having swollen feet at the end of pregnancy, I thought they were complaining because their shoes didn’t fit and their ankles looked fat.  I did not know that swollen meant painful.  I did not know that after a couple of hours laying down, I would have to move very slowly to get up, because moving too fast would give me round ligament pain in my sides, because my balance would be off and my legs would be stiff, because it would hurt to place my swollen feet on the floor to walk to the bathroom.

Pregnancy becomes more surreal after 37 weeks, doesn’t it?  Try to grasp the idea that there is another person living inside my body.  She’s complete and ready to live outside my body, and if you could reach in and pluck her out, she’d be able to breathe and cry and send blood pumping through a fully formed human body.  But she’s living inside of me.  Look at me, and you see two people in one.

The pregnancy book I’ve skimmed through most recently is Birthing from Within.  It is kind of like The Artist’s Way meets pregnancy.  Written by midwife Pam England and psychologist Rob Horowitz, Birthing from Within is based on a childbirth class taught by England in New Mexico.  Focusing less on institutional procedures,  scientific facts, or the kinds of guidelines you’d find in “What to Expect,” Birthing from Within is a right-brained, zen-influenced guide to preparing for childbirth.  There were a couple of things I particularly appreciated about this book:

• The early chapter on creating art as a way of exploring your own feelings about giving birth is challenging, helpful, and unique.
• England emphasizes the reality of the pain of childbirth (Ina May’s books, in contrast, do make it sound too easy).   Birth pain is inevitable, but you can handle it.
• While American culture today focuses on the baby in birth, England shows how other cultures have also honored the re-birth of the woman as mother when she gives birth.  The late, most painful phase of labor and delivery, where the woman loses awareness of everything going on, knows nothing but what her body is doing, feels that the pain is too much and she will “die” — this England likens to the death of the former woman and the birth of the mother.  Mothers and Fathers are both accepting a “death” to an old life (of being free to go out to dinner, to the movies, to sleep through the night, to earn the same income, to career plans, etc.) and a birth into a new life.  An interesting thought, and perhaps especially important for women (like me, and like most women in the US today) who didn’t grow up imagining themselves as mothers.
• The most helpful chapter, overall, is the chapter on pain management techniques.  Of course, not having given birth yet, I can’t say how helpful they will be, but the chapter seems to me to be the most complete collection of natural pain management tools that I’ve found in a general pregnancy guide (discounting books that focus primarily on labor pain).

30 weeks and 2 days; 68 days to go

A couple of nights ago I had a dream that while I was at school one day, babygirl stuck her hand out straight through the left side of my stomach.  It didn’t hurt, it wasn’t bloody — it was like one of those fantasy movie scenes where somone steps through a mirror or wall.  She grabbed onto my finger.  I asked one of my students to take some pictures.  We all thought it was pretty cool.

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And speaking of movies, sometimes when baby girl is kicking, I feel like I’m in a sci-fi flick, and my body has just been taken over by an alien.

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Some people know exactly the right things to say: “From the back, you don’t look any different!”  “You look beautiful.”  Other people, trying to show their enthusiasm, could do better: “Ooohhhh…getting bigger!” (Thanks for pointing that out, as if I don’t feel huge enough already.)

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“How’s the baby?”

I don’t know.  I’ll ask her when I see her and get back to you.

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We’re halfway done painting babygirl’s room.  It’s a little limey.  But I like it.  It feels brighter and cleaner than before. (Postscript: After two coats, the green walls next to the dark wood trim look like a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream…)

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My blood test results last week indicate that I have very low iron (29 when it should be 35, though I don’t know what those numbers mean, exactly).  I’m feeling it, too.  The last week, I’ve had a couple of headaches and a lot of bone weariness.  The worst part has been the breathlessness, though.  Lecturing in class, going up and down stairs, swimming, even just prepping the walls to paint today: I lose my breath and have to stop. I’m taking my iron pills, with vitamin C to help absorption, and I’m trying to eat iron rich foods every day.  I wonder how long it will take to build my levels back up.

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Reading Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth is probably the most empowering thing I’ve done in my pregnancy.  It’s making me feel much more prepared for giving birth.

for checklist lovers

I love this book. I love this book, which I picked up by chance at the library last week, so much that I have even considered purchasing it.  It’s one of the most practical, simple books I’ve seen.

It begins with two checklists: the To Do and the To Buy or Borrow.  The following chapters use an annotated checklist style to brief you on what you will need in the weeks before and after giving birth.  Besides the practicality and accessibility of the style, what I appreciated most was Huggins’s willingness to say, “You don’t need to buy {whatever}.”  It’s so refreshing to read something (anything) that isn’t pushing a product, that takes a simpler tack to preparing.  She even suggests that you might not need a “nursery”. !

A second book I plan to keep on hand once the baby is here is The Moms On Call Guide to Basic Baby Care.  It’s got a similarly usable format, and includes a dvd.

twelve weeks

Sigh of relief.  We’ve heard the heartbeat, the risk of miscarriage has gone way down, and for several weeks now I haven’t felt nauseated at all.  All things considered, I must have had an easier-than-average first trimester, for which I’m thankful.  I feel like I’m entering early into the second trimester.

Entering the second trimester feels like the beginning of a big lull.  The uncertainty of the first trimester is over, but the anxiety about actually giving birth is still far in the distance.  For now, I just get to take it easy.  My only complaint is that the “glow” of pregnancy, in my case, seems to mean breaking out all over the place.  Well, and that my allergies seem to be exacerbated by pregnancy (but then, I’ve never lived in this city in the month of July before, so I can’t know if my allergies would be this bad if I weren’t pregnant).  These days, when I wake up in the morning I don’t look very pregnant at all, but by the end of the day I look very pregnant:

So, with not too much going on, I guess now is a good time to review the rest of the books I keep on my nightstand these days (which is also a good way to procrastinate from writing curriculum, which is what I should be doing now).  These books are more mainstream than others that I’ve mentioned, and I hope they reflect that fact that I am not hostile towards conventional medicine, doctors, or hospitals!  While I think some reform in our health care systems, including our system of maternity care, would be a good thing, I know many, many wise and wonderful doctors who do what they do out of sincere care for people.

The first pregnancy guide I got was the only one the library had checked in the day I was there: The BabyCenter Essential Guide to Pregnancy and Birth by Linda Murray, Lean Hennen, and Jim Scott (2005).

I really like the format of this book. It describes what happens week by week, and for each trimester it includes sections on health, nutrition, emotions, and “the rest of your life”.   It’s easy to thumb through,  and informative without being didactic.  The pages are laid out like magazine spreads, with sidebars, short article inserts, and quotes from other pregnant women (taken from the babycenter website).  It’s not too technical, and it’s a good place to start. It’s similar to “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” (which I picked up used for one dollar), but I like it better.  “What to Expect” goes month by month rather than week by week, and its tone is a little too preachy (I don’t like it when a book tells me I can only have one brownie, once a month).   “What to Expect” does include a chapter entitled “Are you pregnant?” whereas the BabyCenter book jumps right in with “Congratulations! You’re Pregnant!”, so if you’re not sure yet, the BabyCenter book doesn’t offer much to help with the waiting.

Finally, there is “Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn” by Penny Simkin, Janet Whalley, and Ann Keppler.

Written by three nurse midwives from the Seattle area, this book is probably the most often recommended in the Pacific Northwest. It is very thorough and informative, and definitely less of a warm fuzzy read.  It’s the most technical and medical of the books, focusing on anatomy, complications, nutrition, the birth event itself (200 pages!),  post-partum care, and breastfeeding.  I’ve only skimmed it, as I haven’t had any complications and am NOT ready to read about labor pains

Oh yeah: I also have “The Pregnancy Journal.”

For each day of your pregnancy, this book offers a short fact about the baby’s development, the mother’s health, and eating for nutrition.  It also includes fun facts about childbirth in other cultures and spaces for you to track your weight gain and the size of your tummy.  This book was a gift, and I’ve enjoyed having it.

Finally, an article about baby names changing dramatically in the last fifty years.  Which ones do you like?

take charge!

My grandmother emailed this morning after reading all about my pregnancy. She reminded me that, fifty or sixty years ago, most women were a lot less informed about fertility, conception, and pregnancy (they didn’t have Google, for one thing). In her first (of five) pregnancies, she didn’t even know she was pregnant until the third month.

Her email reminded me that I should recommend to you the one book that more than any other helped me understand birth control and fertility.

Take charge, girls!

Toni Weschler’s book taught me what really happens in each cycle, and how to know the signs of ovulation. Using only her charting methods (called the Fertility Awareness Method, or FAM) for birth control, we didn’t conceive for ten months. Using only her charting methods for conception, we conceived in the first month that we tried.

But this is a book for any woman, sexually active or not. If you want to understand and take control of your body, read it.

Pushed: The Painful Truth about Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care

This was the first book I read about pregnancy, back several months before I became pregnant. I found it by chance while surfing Amazon to check out my friends’ reading suggestions on GoodReads. I love a good piece of investigative journalistic type writing, so I gave it a shot.

While definitely a little slanted towards midwifery and natural childbirth practices, the book provides fascinating statistics about childbirth and maternity care. Did you know that there are at least 23 countries in the world with smaller incidences of mother or child death in childbirth than the USA? One thing all those countries have in common is that the primary caregivers for pregnant women are midwives.

I borrowed the book from the library, so I don’t have it any more and can’t give a proper full review. Suffice to say that the book was the scariest book I’ve read this year, and also the most interesting. Any woman who is even thinking about becoming pregnant needs to read it.