Labor of Love

Since today is Mother's Day and my baby girl is now 11 weeks old, I thought today it would be appropriate to tell the story of the day I became a mother... and I wanted to make sure I wrote down her birth story while it is still relatively fresh in my memory.

My "due" date was February 15th... but she didn't make her appearance until the 26th, so we can just leave it to say that I was very ready to meet her. After her due date came and went it seemed like I was in limbo land... feeling like she was going to come at any point, but she took her time. I did many things to urge her on - took many walks, danced, worked in our vineyard... but nothing. Let me tell you, if you ever know a woman who is overdue in her pregnancy, don't ask her when the baby is going to arrive. That seemed to be the only thing people kept asking me and it only made it feel worse. Anyway, the doctor started talking about inducing me, which I didn't want because I was hoping for a natural childbirth. On the 25th, I went in to the hospital for a non-stress test and they told me that my cervix was still closed and not dilated at all. Well, that made me more determined than ever, so that whole day I did everything I could...practically every old wives tale I had ever heard about. I got a pedicure and they rubbed essential oils of cinnamon and rosemary on my feet and hands, I bought a pineapple and ate at least half of it, I made eggplant parmesan, I danced, I had some nice time with my husband :), I took a bath etc. - all very pleasing things to do even if I wasn't trying to induce labor. I didn't go as far as taking castor oil or anything like that, thank goodness.

Anyway, in the evening I started getting contractions, so I decided to just relax and watch some funny movies. My husband had a friend over and they decided to go out, which was fine by me since I didn't really think the contractions were going to bring anything about, as I had been having quite a few contractions for a number of days. As midnight approached, my contractions started coming around 5 minutes apart and I started tracking them. The bump.com has a great contraction timer as an fyi, and its kind of cool because I was able to save and print it as a record of that night. My plan was to stay at home as long as I could before going to the birthing center. My husband tried to tell me I should get some sleep... but men obviously don't understand what a contraction feels like!! I tried to relax by taking another bath, and watching a Youtube playlist I had made of babies laughing, which did help to both bring on the 'good feeling' oxytocin hormones and get me excited about meeting my new baby girl. I had taken a hypnobirthing class, so I also practiced those techniques and played a few hypnobirthing videos. Around 4am I called my midwife and doula and told them I was in labor and I headed to the hospital birthing center around 5, with my contractions coming every few minutes.

When I arrived, they checked me and monitored me for about 20 minutes. I was 4cm dilated, so they let me get in the tub, which really helped to ease the pain. The birthing center I went to was fantastic. We were able to bring our laptop and play a Pandora "Nature Sounds" station. I had signed up for Pandora One a month previously, which was a great idea because there were no commercials. The birthing center had electric candles and they put those around the tub and lowered the lights. It was quite relaxing minus the intense pain :) I had purchased a couple of bath pillows from Earth Therapeutics, which was a great idea because I could lean on those in the tub as well.

After a while I knew I had to get out of the tub because I was getting shriveled up and I wanted to be able to be in at the end to have a water birth. I got on the birthing ball for a while and my water broke while I was on the ball... around 9:30 I think. They checked me again and I was 9 cm dilated, so I decided to get back in the water and start pushing. I wore my regular bathing suit top and had purchased a bottom that was like a  skirt and cut the bottom out. I brought my own bathrobe... so I just got in and out of the tub feeling very at ease. I know people say when they are in the throws of labor, they don't care if they aren't wearing anything, which is partly true - but I liked that I had a nice outfit on that I could feel comfortable in :)

I had a lot of back labor, so my husband and my doula, Carol, just rubbed my back a lot and Carol read me  some hypnobirthing affirmations that I had printed out, which helped. My main mantra though that seemed to help me the most though was that I would breath in and think "Peace" and breath out and think "Release". Although I was definitely in pain, I truly believe my mental state helped me to reduce the pain and it was a very peaceful birth... no screaming or any of the typical things the movies often portray labor as.

I pushed for about 2 hours and then she was finally born at 11:58 am. It was the strangest feeling when she came out and there was no longer any baby in my belly. I was kneeling in the tub, so I flipped around and held my baby for the first time! It is somewhat of a blur... but my husband said I kept saying..."my baby - we did it!" I really did look at it as if we were both 'laboring' as it is a difficult process for the baby as well and I tried to 'communicate' with her as best I could to urge her to come easily.

These are the first two photos of my baby's life. She seemed so peaceful. She didn't cry. We just rubbed her  and warmed her up and she started using her lungs for the first time bit by bit in her own time. These pictures are before they had even cut the cord because research has shown it is better for the cord to stop pulsing on its own and to let the cord blood transfuse back into her body before being cut.

I think she looks very alert and almost smiling. I know I sure am!

I got out of the tub to birth the placenta, which harder that I thought it would be... maybe because I was flat on my back at that point on the bed. They did all the normal weighing of her etc. during that time and then they brought her to me and she found my breast and nursed for about an hour before falling asleep. 

What an amazing journey it was! I am so blessed that everything really went smoothly according to my birth plan. Here is my Birth plan if you want help in writing your own. 

One year ago... last mother's day, I told my husband that I wanted to be a mother - and now here I am with a lovely 11 week baby who has been making me laugh like crazy this morning. I am so blessed.

Happy Mother's Day!

A Whole Lotta Love,

Adrienne

Our Little Lady

I haven't blogged since I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, Athena Geneva, in February and just wanted to share a few photos I took. This is our first child and she is such a joy. It's definitely an adjustment to get used to with regard to lack of sleep etc., but I'm loving being a mother so much.

My sister-in-law had given this little ladybug outfit to me and I had received this "Blooming Bath" sunflower as a shower gift from my mom's cousin and I thought it would be cute to take a few photos of her on it.

A Whole Lotta Love,

Adrienne

Made with love...

Hello out there in Blogger land,

I know I haven't been blogging much lately, but I just wanted to share some news with you... especially for those wonderful people who I have connected with in the past in this virtual world. As you can see from the pictures, we have a little bun in the oven :)

I'm over 31 weeks right now and have had a fantastic pregnancy so far. I'm very lucky to have had it so easy, as I know many women struggle with various ailments during this time... so I count my blessing every day. We found out its a girl too, which I am very thrilled about. Most importantly, everything seems healthy. I am enjoying her move and kick inside of me, which seems to be growing stronger every day. I know towards the end, these kicks might be painful, but for now I'm loving it.

These are a few pics my sister took the other day. Hopefully we can get some with some snow on the ground here soon before Christmas. After the foot of snow we had in October and some again in November, December has been decidedly free from snow here in Vermont.

Anyway, I hope you all have very happy holidays. I love this time of the year!

A Whole Lotta Love,

Adrienne

To have or not to have (kids).. that is the question.

Since turning the big 3-0, I've been thinking more about whether or not I should have children. I know the biological clock is ticking and there is enormous pressure from parents especially and society in general. I always thought I'd want kids when I was growing up. I love children (most of the time), but I also like giving them back to their parents when they start to fuss. The thing is that I love my life the way it is. I have the freedom to travel, the freedom to curl up with a book and read without interruption, the freedom to do pretty much whatever I want to do. But my genes and society say that isn't enough. I have to have kids to make my life full and meaningful.

I just read an article today in the New York Times,
God Said Multiply, and Did She Ever

"WHEN Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants."

You can read the article for yourself if you want, but the article ends with a quote from Yitta:

“If you leave a child or grandchild, you live forever.”


Its things like this that make my genes say, 'c'mon.. don't you want to live forever?'. And from my genes' perspective that is totally true. Biologists like Richard Dawkins talk about it in these terms in books like The Selfish Gene. He puts the evolution of species as not evolving for their own sake, but for the sake of the replication of their genes. Its definitely a strange way of thinking about things (as we humans have a tendency to think we are the center of the universe).

Anyway, I digress. So although I think its AMAZING that this woman has 2000 living descendants, does the call to 'be fruitful and multiply' still apply as the world population approaches 7 BILLION people?? And would having children really make my life more full and meaningful?


I found an interesting article in Newsweek about this topic:

When I was growing up, our former neighbors, whom we'll call the Sloans, were the only couple on the block without kids. It wasn't that they couldn't have children; according to Mr. Sloan, they just chose not to. All the other parents, including mine, thought it was odd—even tragic. So any bad luck that befell the Sloans—the egging of their house one Halloween; the landslide that sent their pool careering to the street below—was somehow attributed to that fateful decision they'd made so many years before. "Well," the other adults would say, "you know they never did have kids." Each time I visited the Sloans, I'd search for signs of insanity, misery or even regret in their superclean home, yet I never seemed to find any. From what I could tell, the Sloans were happy, maybe even happier than my parents, despite the fact that they were (whisper) childless.

My impressions may have been swayed by the fact that their candy dish was always full, but several studies now show that the Sloans could well have been more content than most of the traditional families around them. In Daniel Gilbert's 2006 book "Stumbling on Happiness," the Harvard professor of psychology looks at several studies and concludes that marital satisfaction decreases dramatically after the birth of the first child—and increases only when the last child has left home. He also ascertains that parents are happier grocery shopping and even sleeping than spending time with their kids. Other data cited by 2008's "Gross National Happiness" author, Arthur C. Brooks, finds that parents are about 7 percentage points less likely to report being happy than the childless.

The most recent comprehensive study on the emotional state of those with kids shows us that the term "bundle of joy" may not be the most accurate way to describe our offspring. "Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers," says Florida State University's Robin Simon, a sociology professor who's conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. "In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It's such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they're not."

Simon received plenty of hate mail in response to her research ("Obviously Professor Simon hates her kids," read one), which isn't surprising. Her findings shake the very foundation of what we've been raised to believe is true. In a recent NEWSWEEK Poll, 50 percent of Americans said that adding new children to the family tends to increase happiness levels. Only one in six (16 percent) said that adding new children had a negative effect on the parents' happiness. But which parent is willing to admit that the greatest gift life has to offer has in fact made his or her life less enjoyable?

Parents may openly lament their lack of sleep, hectic schedules and difficulty in dealing with their surly teens, but rarely will they cop to feeling depressed due to the everyday rigors of child rearing. "If you admit that kids and parenthood aren't making you happy, it's basically blasphemy," says Jen Singer, a stay-at-home mother of two from New Jersey who runs the popular parenting blog MommaSaid.net. "From baby-lotion commercials that make motherhood look happy and well rested, to commercials for Disney World where you're supposed to feel like a kid because you're there with your kids, we've made parenthood out to be one blissful moment after another, and it's disappointing when you find out it's not."

Is it possible that American parents have always been this disillusioned? Anecdotal evidence says no. In pre-industrial America, parents certainly loved their children, but their offspring also served a purpose—to work the farm, contribute to the household. Children were a necessity. Today, we have kids more for emotional reasons, but an increasingly complicated work and social environment has made finding satisfaction far more difficult. A key study by University of Wisconsin-Madison's Sara McLanahan and Julia Adams, conducted some 20 years ago, found that parenthood was perceived as significantly more stressful in the 1970s than in the 1950s; the researchers attribute part of that change to major shifts in employment patterns. The majority of American parents now work outside the home, have less support from extended family and face a deteriorating education and health-care system, so raising children has not only become more complicated—it has become more expensive. Today the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that it costs anywhere from $134,370 to $237,520 to raise a child from birth to the age of 17—and that's not counting school or college tuition. No wonder parents are feeling a little blue.

Societal ills aside, perhaps we also expect too much from the promise of parenting. The National Marriage Project's 2006 "State of Our Unions" report says that parents have significantly lower marital satisfaction than nonparents because they experienced more single and child-free years than previous generations. Twenty-five years ago, women married around the age of 20, and men at 23. Today both sexes are marrying four to five years later. This means the experience of raising kids is now competing with highs in a parent's past, like career wins ("I got a raise!") or a carefree social life ("God, this is a great martini!"). Shuttling cranky kids to school or dashing to work with spit-up on your favorite sweater doesn't skew as romantic.

For the childless, all this research must certainly feel redeeming. As for those of us with kids, well, the news isn't all bad. Parents still report feeling a greater sense of purpose and meaning in their lives than those who've never had kids. And there are other rewarding aspects of parenting that are impossible to quantify. For example, I never thought it possible to love someone as deeply as I love my son. As for the Sloans, it's hard to say whether they had a less meaningful existence than my parents, or if my parents were 7 percent less happy than the Sloans. Perhaps it just comes down to how you see the candy dish—half empty or half full. Or at least as a parent, that's what I'll keep telling myself.

So, this doesn't really give me a clear direction one way or the other. But at least I'm engaging in the process of consideration.