The New Motherhood

Because I felt I didn’t have enough going on in my life, what with the new baby and my PhD and living in outer space super far from my family, I’ve started a new website/blog specifically for new moms (and dads) that will hopefully function like an online magazine. In my wild dreams, readers will submit posts about their own experiences, becoming writers, and creating a site where new parents can find support for the inevitable insanity that they’ve invited into their lives.

Currently, the site has nearly zero content on it, but here’s a link to my first post:

The Hardest Thing

If you’re interested in reading, DO! If you’re interested in writing and sharing your adventures in new parenting, PLEASE DO!

 

Hormonal Rage

Just to recap: I’m from Los Angeles, but I’m currently in the UK, two years into a very fish-out-of-water experience. Being an expat is no joke. I’m not exaggerating when I say that almost everything is different in England than it is in California, where in my homesick memory, even in the traffic is more tolerable.

I’m in England because I’m working on a PhD about childbirth intervention. Somehow, I managed to convince an academic department to fund my project, and now I actually have to DO this massive thing.

Finally, I’ve just had my first baby.

So: 5,000 miles from family + PhD student + new mom. I have no local family support, I’m working on a doctorate, I haven’t slept more than 4 consecutive hours in 7.5 months, I carry/cradle/pick up/put down/walk/dance/bounce my son all day long, I am still exclusively breastfeeding, I am ten pounds lighter than I was when I got divorced and stopped eating for three months, and until two days ago, when I passed my UK driving test, I couldn’t drive here and was walking/taking the train/catching buses with a child strapped to my body whenever I had to go anywhere. So, I’m fucking exhausted and sometimes I can’t think straight or make decisions or get through a driving lesson without coming home and losing my shit because everything is just DEMANDS CONSTANTLY.

Thus, I find it really offensive and dismissive when people tell new moms that it’s okay to feel upset because our “hormones are still settling.” As if not loving every second of our insane new lives could only be because us ladies are forever at the mercy of our hormones. We accept that a person who hasn’t slept well overnight or has a cold might be negatively impacted, but we feel the need to excuse mothers who feel bad. Don’t worry, Mom. You’re just hormonal. I understand that some women really do suffer from hormonal imbalances post-pregnancy, and I don’t at all mean to disparage them. However, patting a new mom on the the head and telling her that all her fears and anxieties and complete exhaustion are just by-products of her hormones does two things:

1. Ignores that having a baby explodes a woman’s life
2. Dismisses the very real and very visceral physical and emotional trauma of that explosion

I feel crazy sometimes because I’m sleep deprived and physically drained and walking around with eighteen pounds of squirming, grabbing baby attached to my skeletal frame all day long. I snap at my husband because as much as he loves us, he doesn’t understand what this is like for me. I am uncomfortable with the way I look because I look really different. I get angry or weepy or temporarily mean because I am tasked with something damn near impossible and I am just one human being and I am tired.

Being overwhelmed by a new baby is normal, because a new baby is overwhelming, not because women just can’t hang. I pushed a person out of my body and am now responsible for taking care of him. I think I’m entitled to have some real feelings about it.

New Motherhood, Internet Thievery, and Other Panics

The Baby is now 12 weeks old and three days away from his three month birthday. (Yes, I am now a person who discusses her child’s age in both weeks and month-anniversaries. Deal with it.) This means that I’ve been a mother forrreeeeevvvveeeeer, and therefore have some feelings about it.

The most pressing of these feelings is the overwhelming need to tell all new moms and mothers-to-be in my life that is okay to feel bad. People revel in telling pregnant women to dread stretch marks and sagging boobs and to expect the worst during delivery. Other women delight in this, bizarrely. I wish I had had fewer moms tell me that my body would be ruined and more moms tell me that I’d have to reconstruct my self. That my life as I knew it was over. Because it was, and it is. I will never again be the person I was before I had The Baby, and as much as I love him, I had to grieve the end of my old life. I wish I’d known that would happen. Maybe it doesn’t happen to everyone, but it has happened to 100% of the mothers I’ve asked.

I love my son more than anything I could ever imagine, but it is a love that consumes me, in every sense of that word. It isn’t romantic love. It isn’t familial love. It’s a love that forces you awake at 2am, even while your newborn sleeps, so that you can stare into the face of the person you created with your own body and cry about how much responsibility it is, how innocent he is, how much you miss life before, and how you would rip someone apart with your bare hands if they dared to take him from you.

Most of the time, I’ve got this handled. I’ve got time off to be solely with The Baby, and I am grateful for that. I can follow his lead, feed him on demand, hold him every second he needs me. However, some of the time, I find myself furiously rocking The Baby in the glider after trying to get him to sleep for three hours, wondering when I’ll ever be able to use my own arms again to make food, fold laundry, or use my laptop. (I’ve spent so much time in the glider that my new non-existent mom ass has bored a hole in the foam of the seat, and now it looks like Homer Simpson’s couch).

In the last few weeks, it’s gotten markedly easier to be a mom, because The Baby interacts with toys now and loves sitting in his bouncer or laying on his playmat and punching things. For the first many, many weeks of his life, he wouldn’t tolerate being put down at all, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I carried this boy in my arms constantly for more than two full months. As I type this now, however, he’s happily attacking a dangling hippopotamus, which I am actively encouraging. You slap that hippo, Baby. GET HIM.

Being The Baby’s mom amazes me every day. It’s true what they say: seeing the world through the eyes of your child is incredible. I’ve watched The Baby discover that he loves warm baths, jingly noises, black and white illustrations, attempting to stand up, and Billy Joel. I know that he hates sleeping alone, being on his tummy, and pooping his pants, and that sudden changes in temperature confuse him. He is my favorite little person in the entire world.

I just wish that instead of smiling and gleefully telling me, “You’ll never sleep again,” people had told me, “You’ll never sleep again and you will feel crazy and everything will seem impossible and when it does, call me.”

In other news, I, like most new parents, think my child is the cutest, smartest, funniest, most interesting creature. I would love to document all his craziness here, but I recently made a discovery that has made me wary of posting any more photos of him to this blog. When he was one month and one day old, he broke out in what everyone assured me was baby acne, the product of swirling newborn hormones that would eventually resolve itself. It eventually got so bad that literally (I’m prone to hyperbole, but this was literally) every pore on his face was raised or red or covered in a fluid-filled bump. I became convinced it was a dairy intolerance, and within a week of cutting out all dairy, it started to improve and ultimately went away. (I snuck some dairy a few times in the last couple weeks and now his skin is reacting again, so take that, people who thought I was nuts!)

Annnnnyway, while investigating his mystery rash, imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon a Pinterest pin of a very familiar picture. The pin led to this website:

That’s a photo of ME, taken in a South Carolina hotel bathroom ten years ago, and posted on this, my personal blog, as an attempt to help other people who may be struggling with acne. I was immediately pissed to see that it had been lifted from here and used somewhere else not just because that’s a gross thing to do, but also because the reason I posted it was to offer potential help and support to other acne suffers and the way it’s being used by the person who stole it is disingenuous. It’s posted under the heading “How to get rid of cystic acne on chest during pregnancy,” which is shitty because: I wasn’t pregnant for the five years I had this problem, it wasn’t cystic acne, and I didn’t “get rid of it” in any of the ways listed below the photo. I haven’t pursued trying to get the photo removed because 1) I’ve been busy (see above) and 2) it’s being used by one of those aggregate content websites written in language that is just different enough from how actual people speak that it must be computer-generated (i.e. the site is called “Let’s Rid Of”), so I assume no one is really running it and no one is really reading it. However, it still upsets me.

And it’s also a clear example of how what I post on this blog I don’t think anyone actually reads can end up in places I not only didn’t expect, but also didn’t allow. I don’t want personal photos of my tiny little person to end up on some rando website that promises to “Cure Babies of Nighttime Farts” (although I would really like to know how to do that).

If you’re interested in seeing photos of the gremlin, you can request to follow me on Instagram (which has gone from a feed of various photos of travel and food to just photos of The Baby). Try not to look too much like a robot or someone trying to sell me baby weight loss products, because it’ll be a waste of everyone’s time.

The Baby!

The eagle has landed! On Friday, July 17th, our tiny little bub was born. We are absolutely in love with the little creep. I haven’t stopped staring at him since he was born, and am only now starting to put him down for naps (as in, not hold him 100% of the time) only because I need to get him used to sleeping in his Moses basket at the side of the bed at night. (I am too high strung to bed share, so every night has been a not-so-delicate balance between being terrified of falling asleep with him in bed with us and being terrified of not having him close to me.)

The following is a ridiculously over-long birth story, which I’ve recorded here mostly for myself, and then also for any moms (or dads) -to-be who might be interested:

Thursday, the day before The Baby was born, was The Boyfriend’s birthday. Randomly, and for the first time since taking his current job, The Boyfriend had Thursday and Friday off work, so we settled in to celebrate his birthday like the old people we are: by staying home for two days, eating a ton of candy and baking a ton of cookies. By late afternoon on Thursday, I had to abandon the remaining cookie dough because I was getting mild contractions every 2-3 minutes. Having gone through the pregnancy with no Braxton Hicks “practice” contractions and having never had a baby before, at first I thought I was having some totally unfortunate bowel trouble. The contractions felt like diarrhea pains, only they were on a regular cycle and they were close together. However, they were also mild and only slightly annoying, and at 39 weeks pregnant exactly, I had gotten used to just ignoring feeling like I had to poop all the time. I called the hospital for advice, and when the midwife heard that it was my first baby and that I could laugh off the contractions, she told me to go to sleep because it could still be days.

It was that response, coupled with my desire to labor at home for as long as possible in an effort to avoid hospital interventions, that contributed to my spending the hours of 2am to 8am in a kind of crazy dream state, having increasingly painful contractions, closer and closer together, in the shower, on the toilet, in the bath, pacing the living room, crawling up the stairs. This was just five days ago, and I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t call the hospital back or wake The Boyfriend up, other than I’d never done it before and didn’t know when to say enough and I was also probably in denial. I’d abandoned timing the contractions because when they got painful enough for me have to lean over the back of the couch and moan my way through them, the last thing I wanted was to focus on exactly how long they were lasting. (This is why it would have been wise to wake The Boyfriend and force him to do it. Again: denial is a powerful force.)

I finally decided it was time to go to the hospital when I started feeling like a wild animal. I couldn’t think straight and knew I needed to be where the baby would be born. In addition, I started bleeding, which was scary. I woke up The Boyfriend, and then I called the hospital to tell them I was coming in. She warned me that they were very busy (incidentally, it was the full moon, which is a time when labor wards are notoriously full), and asked if I wanted to wait another hour at home, but I wasn’t about to spend another second in my house.

After I writhed around in the car in early morning traffic for a little while, we got to the hospital and all I wanted was privacy and someone to help me. It wasn’t even pain medication I wanted – I just needed to be where I was going to give birth and have someone close by who could tell me what was happening. As it turned out, they were so busy that there were no free rooms. Instead, I was led to a partner waiting area, where the midwife who dropped me off assured me that “no one would forget I was there.” Totally reassuring.

About fifteen hour-long minutes later, I was moved over to the maternity day unit…to a waiting room full of couples and children waiting to have ultrasounds. The idea, I guess, was that I could be examined in an out-patient room there while they sorted out a room for me on the labor ward, but for me, given no explanation and being guided to a chair in a crowded waiting room while sweating through my clothes and rocking back and forth, I was so upset. I wasn’t getting the help I thought I would at the hospital, and now I had none of the privacy I’d had at home. I went immediately to one of the bathrooms and cried while leaning over the sink. The Boyfriend had to come find me when they called my name, because I refused to leave the toilet until someone came to help.

To make a long story short(er), the midwife tasked with examining me in the out-patient room only got as far as checking the baby’s heart rate (which was perfect) before the blood and my absolutely heathen behavior freaked her out. She sent me back to the labour ward, where I was matched with the head of midwifery.

This woman was like an angel, and I mean that in the most sincere way possible. I remember laying on the exam bed coming to pieces and seeing her name and title on her badge and thinking, Oh, thank God. The Head of Midwifery. She took some rapid-fire notes about what had been going on with me, ran and got a pan just before I vomited all over myself, and then gave me my first-ever (and only) internal exam. To her surprise and my complete and utter relief, I was nine centimeters dilated.

NINE. CENTIMETERS. For those who don’t know, you start pushing a baby out when you are at ten centimeters. At this point, I cried tears of legitimate joy. I was close to having the baby, and I wasn’t being an insane person for being so angry about getting shuffled around. (Yes, even in labor, I was afraid of what people would think of me for being a dickhead to them.) I was in transition, the hardest part of labor which takes a woman from cervical opening to pushing, and had been sent to a public waiting room. In the hospital’s defense, there was no way for them to know how far along I was, as they just did not have the space to examine me when I arrived. Because the active part of my labor had, at that point, only been about six hours and because it was my first baby, I don’t think anyone expected me to be so far along.

Once my angel midwife knew this, however, she transferred me to a bigger, better, more “active” labor room, with mats and yoga balls and a giant bean bag chair to use to keep me off the bed. I was on beds on my back for a grand total of five minutes while in labor and it was horrible. I can’t imagine being strapped to a bed on monitors and having to labor without medication. The only thing that made me feel better was moving around, mostly because it was a distraction. Being on my back on a bed forced me to focus on how much I hurt.

I didn’t have the chance to use any of the active labor goodies, though, because as soon as I hit that room, I needed to push. The midwife threw the bean bag chair onto the bed, I got on all fours leaning over it, and using “gas and air” (laughing gas, effectively), pushed a tiny human out of my body in 45 minutes. The pushing was the most physically exhausting thing I’ve ever done, but it felt productive and didn’t ever hurt, which is strange, considering you’d think that would be the most punishing part of having a baby. I made lots of primal, crazy-person sounds, and tore off my dress and bra like a mad woman. For anyone concerned with how they might look/feel during childbirth: you will not give a shit. At all. I have never been so exposed or looked so insane, but when faced with trying to be modest or trying to be more comfortable, comfort won 100% of the time.

People told me that, but I didn’t think I would ever get to a point where I didn’t care. I brought make up to the hospital and had an outfit planned for delivery. However, I quickly learned that lots of the cliches about childbirth are true. In fact, at one point, I whimpered, “I just want him out already,” which felt like a cliche even as I was saying it.

But, then he was out, and it was surreal. He was beautiful and perfect and ours. We were in the delivery room for a few hours, so I could rest and shower and so that the baby could be examined, and then were transferred to a post-natal ward, where we stayed for just a little while longer before being discharged and coming home. The Baby was born before noon and we were home around 7pm.

Aside from getting a slight runaround at the beginning of the hospital experience, the labor and birth were as straightforward and wonderful as they could have been. My intentions were to avoid intervention and pain medication other than gas and air, and I managed to do it, by some insane stroke of luck.

Having had a baby without an epidural, I can say now that I understand completely why women chose to have them. Labor is scary and it is painful and if you found yourself with an IV or an electronic fetal monitor keeping you on your back in a bed, I can’t even imagine how much more painful and scary contractions can be. On the other hand, I think not having an epidural spared me a lot of complications. I was active and mobile right until the very end, which may have contributed to shortening my labor. I also had a lot of control over the pushing stage, which might have helped spare me any injuries. Ultimately, I think my experience was due partly to believing I could do it, and mostly to being really, really fortunate.

Now, I get to spend all day, every day with The Boyfriend and The Baby, who is basically the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. Love, love, love.

38 Weeks!

I am 38 weeks and 2 days pregnant today, which is just absolutely madness. A friend’s sister, who was due one week before me, had her baby a few nights ago, and even though I am very pregnant and living in a house full of baby things, it still boggles my mind that there could be a baby here at any moment.

For anyone even remotely interested, here’s the third trimester belly progress:

(In addition to being photos of some random internet stranger’s belly, which are by nature not interesting, I know these pictures are boring because I’m wearing the same thing in all of them. However, that was intentional, because I figured it would be easier to track changes this way. So, sorry, everyone.)

To look at me, it would appear that not much has happened in the last week or so. However, I feel like I am suddenly enormous. That pelvic pain I bragged about not yet experiencing in my previous post is here in full force, making my lower back and inner thighs feel like I’ve spent several days riding a galloping horse. I always thinking about food, but too full to eat anything. I am also totally exhausted. I haven’t officially started maternity leave from my PhD program, because I figure I might as well wait until the baby is born, considering I can very easily do my work from home, but my brain is basically already on a time out. It took me two full days to write an embarrassingly short project proposal, even though I able to crib most of the material from other things I’d already written. Luckily, I’d managed to get a lot done before I became useless because useless I most certainly am.

My PhD project, when it eventually starts really happening and isn’t just a bunch of stuff I tell people I will be doing someday, will focus on childbirth intervention, so I’ve spent many, many months researching maternal health care and childbirth and all its various outcomes. What I’ve found, for the most part, is that as wonderful as modern medicine has been to women giving birth (like, say, in its insistence that people wash their hands before attending laboring mothers), in many ways, processes that might be better left to proceed on their own are often too actively managed. (As an example, there’s the “cascade of interventions,” which is labor induction -> electronic fetal monitoring to watch the effects of medically induced contractions -> mothers laying on their backs in bed -> more intense pain -> epidurals -> the slowing of labor -> fetal distress and/or failure to progress -> caesarean section.) I had a lot of big feelings about this overmedicalization of childbirth when I drafted my PhD proposal, long before I found myself pregnant. Doctors are too pushy, medicine is too incentivized, nature has been abandoned in an effort to keep schedules or avoid lawsuits. And I still think those things. (To be fair, this isn’t just some earth-mother hippie crap being howled at the moon. Statistically speaking, the cascade of intervention is very, very real.)

However, what has been really interesting about doing this research while facing my own childbirth experience is discovering that as a pregnant woman, I will do anything to ensure my baby is healthy. I can intellectualize the medicalization of nature as a product of hospital care as much as I want, but I’ve learned that if a professional with an ultrasound wand tells me something might be wrong, I will drive home in hysterics and spend the next three hours on Google, working myself into a panic and vowing to consent to anything to make it better.

Those aren’t two opposing thoughts – in fact, in most of the theory I’ve read, that’s how medicalization works. Doctors and hospitals apply techniques to make childbirth more efficient/more scheduled/ostensibly “safer,” and mothers trust their care providers and consent to them.

It’s just been very eye-opening to experience it myself.

For the first 32 weeks of the pregnancy, I saw the same midwife practicing out of a medical practice near my house. At each of my relatively rare and low-key visits, she would test my urine, take my blood pressure, and then do a fundal height measurement using a tape measure. For the uninitiated, the fundal height is the distance from the top of a pregnant woman’s uterus to her pubic bone. This measurement in centimeters should, conveniently, mirror the number of weeks pregnant a woman is – a woman who is 26 weeks pregnant should measure on (or around) 26 cm. At all of my appointments, I was measuring spot on. At 24 weeks, I was 24 cm. At 28 weeks, I was 27.75 cm. At 31 weeks, I was 31 cm.

And then I moved to another city and had to transfer to another midwife. In the five days between my last appointment with my previous midwife and my first appointment with my new one, the baby turned from head-down to transverse, meaning he was now laying horizontally across my belly as opposed to vertically along it.

I went from the long belly on the left to the short, stubby belly on the right. I didn’t think much of it, until the new midwife whipped out her tape measure and measured my nearly-32-week-belly at 27 cm. She immediately made me an appointment for a growth ultrasound, because measuring five weeks behind (even by super high-tech tape measure) could be a sign of a growth-restricted baby without enough amniotic fluid.

Now, as a person who knows too much about pregnancy and childbirth due to having had my super dweeb face in journal articles and books for nearly a year, I completely flipped out. In addition to taking me out of a midwife’s low-risk care and placing me into higher-risk “consultant” (doctor) care, this new potential amniotic fluid issue put me at risk of being harangued into an induction, as fears about a baby’s size and amniotic fluid levels are one of the most common reasons labors are induced. Cue the crying in the car on the way home, the drinking of tons of liters of water a day in an attempt to up my fluid levels, and the crawling around on my hands and knees to try to turn the baby.

A week and a half later, when I had the growth scan, the baby was head down again and measured in the 60th percentile for growth, which was lovely. However, the total amount of amniotic fluid measured via ultrasound was 8.2cm, which was still cause for alarm, as the “normal” range is about 8-18cm. I was hovering right at the low range of normal. My new hospital consultant wrote “low AF at 5% at USS” (low amniotic fluid at the 5th percentile at ultrasound) under a giant “ALERT! Please indicate risk:” label on the inside of my maternity notes, and told me she wanted me back for another scan in two weeks. That was great.

Two panicky weeks later, at my second growth ultrasound, the amniotic fluid was up to 11.8cm, which was firmly normal. In addition, the baby now measured in the 90th percentile for growth. In fact, the ultrasound tech thought the baby might be growing too big – she took the femoral length measurement four times because she thought she was making mistakes. The baby that was once thought to be too small was now almost off the charts.

Despite the incredible hulking baby, I passed the growth scan with flying colors and am no longer high risk.

I hope it goes without saying that I am, of course, very happy and grateful that everything ended up being fine. It was, however, really bizarre to know that the difference in fundal height measurements between midwives was entirely due to the turning of the baby and the admittedly insanely subjective tape measure method, and still feel totally nuts when I was sent for extra ultrasounds. I thought that there was something horribly wrong with the pregnancy because of a tape measure.

On one hand, it’s nice to know that the people taking care of us are proactive. I have had nothing but wonderful interactions with everyone, and I don’t think any of the extra tests were done to make me nervous or take advantage. However, on the other hand, it was unnerving to find myself ready and willing to submit to any intervention possible (I would have been completely on board with an elective c section, for example, if it meant combating growth restriction, which shocked me, given what I know about pre-term caesareans), when the methods pointing me in those directions should be approached with caution.

The extra growth scans illuminated to me that childbirth interventions are notoriously difficult to manage and are more often than not used based on evidence that is subjective at best. For all the actual problems that are addressed by them, there are hundreds of others that are caused by them. (I lucked out because in my case, the only issues the extra scans caused were emotional.) At the risk of sounding super naive and having to eat these words after I have the baby, my WARNING ALERT SMALL BABY EXTRA SCAN experience has only solidified my desire to try to have as few interventions as possible during the birth.

We’ll see how that goes.

P.S.: I’ve been writing and editing this post for 24 hours and I still feel like it makes no sense. There was a point in here somewhere, guys, but like I said above, MY BRAIN IS ON VACATION AND I JUST CAN’T.

Third Trimester!

In the last weeks, the bump got…pointier?

I’m 32 weeks and 3 days pregnant, meaning I’m a month into the third trimester, and about two months from having a baby. Eeeeep!

I’ve been relatively comfortable throughout the pregnancy so far – short of wearing terrible shoes and straining the top of my left foot (a feat I didn’t know was possible) several weeks ago and limping around in running shoes like a dummy for a month, I’ve managed to avoid things like sciatica, pelvic pain, swelling, back pain, and a bunch of other horrible pregnancy symptoms I don’t even want to type out for fear that the universe will curse me with them. Basically, besides being increasingly winded by stairs and needing to pee 100% of the time, I’ve made it to 32 weeks relatively unscathed. (Unscathed by the pregnancy. I have gotten more prone to being an idiot klutz, however, as evidenced by my burning a patch of skin off the top of my thigh with a curling iron yesterday. I don’t even know anymore.)

That being said, being 32 weeks pregnant is really uncomfortable. God bless the women who suffer terribly and go on to have more children. I’m pretty much only dealing with the physical ramifications of having half a watermelon in my abdomen, which makes eating, sitting, laying, putting on shoes, and walking really cumbersome, and it’s still enough to make me want to stop speaking to anyone who hasn’t been pregnant.

Things I’ve Learned in the Third Trimester:

1) I have freckles inside my belly button.

2) Toilet paper companies aren’t scamming me. They aren’t skimping on the TP. I am legitimately just in the bathroom all the damn time.

3) Lounging at a 45-degree angle is a thing of the past. I can either lay on my side with my head propped up or sit straight up like I’m Miss Manners. Super cozy.

4) It is possible to high-five a human being who isn’t born yet. I’ve done it several times.

5) Everyone has an opinion on the size of my belly. Intellectually, I know it’s because people want to be involved or show support, and that’s actually kinda cute. Emotionally, it weirds me out to have that be the only thing people want to talk to me about. I used to be interesting in a whole bunch of other ways, people! Hopefully, I still am!

6) I have very little body hair now – except for on my belly, which is ideal because that’s what everyone wants to see.

7) Despite having to roll out of bed because my core muscles don’t work anymore and getting sickly full on tiny meals, it is entirely possible for me to forget I’m pregnant, which occasionally leads me to totally panicking about some weird physical thing I just did that might have compromised the baby. (Read: in particular, the time I tried to stabilize our new washing machine when it was jumping all over the place by holding it down with my arms during the spin cycle, before remembering that there’s a person inside me who shouldn’t be vibrated super violently.)

8) I am very into smoothies. And avocados. And hummus. (And, let’s be real, also ice cream, chocolate, and cereal.)

9) People are really insanely generous. We have very nearly everything we need for the baby’s first few months, and haven’t actually purchased anything ourselves.

10) Having focused on being pregnant for the last eight months, it is both exciting and terrifying to start thinking about how there will be an actual baby here in a matter of weeks. As a former terrible baby who kept my parents up for several years in a row, I hope the baby is nothing like me and is kind to us.

Head down, butt up on his favorite side, like a good little boy.

California Knows How To Party.

I just got back to England after a glorious two and a half weeks back home in California. The fact that the trip has come and gone already is unbelievable to me. It feels like I looked forward to it FOREVER. The adjustment back to the UK has been hard, because putting 6,000 miles between me and Target my family and friends who are so excited for the baby was pretty traumatic. However, England has been kind to me – the last two days have been the warmest, most gorgeous days of spring, which makes leaving the endless summer of Southern California a little less upsetting.

I flew into LAX on a Wednesday night, saw my grandparents and great aunts, and then decided it was time for bed when I got dizzy after being up for 27,000 hours. Thursday morning, I was 22 weeks exactly, so I rolled out of bed in the room that was once The Middle Child’s and took this photo:

Everyone was aghast at how small I was. They were all kind enough not to say anything about how I still don’t have an ass.

The first week I was home, I saw tons of people near and dear to me, and ate all the food. I also:

1) Found Hershey’s Eggs my parents’ refrigerator, which was a comforting sign that nothing ever really changes:

I mentioned to my dad that I wanted to take some of these back to England, and he came home from the market with six bags of them. I am proud to say I took them all.

2) Hung out with Fertile Myrtle and Fiece #1 and 2:

3) Spent a lot of time reveling in the fact that I could be outside and comfortable, without battling wind, rain, humidity, mist, or bone-chilling damp:

4) Experienced many pregnancy-related skin fun times, including this random cheek bone hive:

5) And took a long walk in the hills with my mom, on a pleasant morning that quickly turned into a blazing hot day:

LOOK WHERE I’M FROM. SO PRETTY.

California poppies!

 Then, it was all about Mexican Fiesta Baby Shower Preparation. My mom had conscripted all the members of my family into Baby Shower Prep for weeks before I got home, so I missed out on most of the work. However, I am now super proficient at creating tissue paper flowers, having toiled for hours with my grandma and great aunt pulling apart thousands of sheets of colored paper until our fingers bled all over them.

The baby shower itself was one of the most magnificent things I’ve ever seen. My mom, along with her crew of unsuspecting family members, worked so hard to make everything so colorful and detailed and thoughtful and thematic. There were tons of games, onesies for people to decorate, trays of tacos and mini burritos catered by my favorite Mexican restaurant, and most importantly: churros. In addition, my mom decorates one hell of a cake, which shouldn’t surprise me anymore, as she’s done it my whole life. However, I’m still always amazed.

The amount of time, energy, and Pinterest-trolling that went into the shower was incredible. Thank you, Mom! It was fabulous!

The diaper (and washcloth and bib) cake.

My mom’s amazing cake.

Let’s play a game called Find The Churros.

Fertile Myrtle and I…and chips.

We used the cake to do a gender reveal for the family members who hadn’t had the surprise blown for them by either my mom or me throughout the week leading up to the shower (as it turns out, starting conversations about circumcision and asking for advice on dyeing a cake blue are both really good ways of indirectly telling people what the sex of a baby is):

IT’S A BOY!

Sensory overload, in the best possible way.

A beautiful photo of me and my dad.

We were so, so fortunate – people gave us so many fabulous things. I don’t think we’ll have to worry about buying the baby any clothing until he’s 20.

And, because we set up an Amazon.co.uk registry, tons of things were sent directly to our house in England, meaning that we’re currently swimming in delivery boxes that are just waiting to be moved to our new place next month. I can’t wait to build the nursery glider and the stroller, but The Boyfriend (The Grinch) insists it will be easier to move them while they’re still boxed up. THANKS, OBAMA.

While I was home, it was also Fiece #1’s fourth birthday, which I can’t even believe. Fertile Myrtle and I brought mini cupcakes to her preschool classroom, where her evil teacher sat all the kids down to watch the Fiece eat a cupcake while they had to wait to eat theirs for two hours until after lunch.

Then we went home to open presents. The Fiece told me she was really into the new Lego Friends line of Lego, which is all painted-on eyelashes and ice cream shops and purple and pink and while I loved that she is into building with Legos now, I just could not with the totally gendered Lego Friends line. So, I did what any self-respecting adult does when giving gifts to a child: I got her something I would have wanted. Namely, I threw her a bone and got one set of Lego Friends (the vet ambulance, which seemed to be the least offensive) and then bought a bunch of pirate Legos, which came with a cannon that actually shoots pieces, a skeleton, a treasure box, and a shark with a mouth that opens and closes.

Shooting cannonballs. “NOT IN THE EYES.”

Ripping the heads off the Lego pirates, while our skeleton friend gets eaten by a shark.

Basically, I think I did a really good job.

Then, on my last night at home, the family celebrated Passover. To celebrate the occasion, my father, who has been married to my Jewish mother for 30 years, brought (French) macaroons from a cool new bakery in downtown Los Angeles. It was an adorable, delicious mistake.

I left California two weeks and one pair of maternity pants after arriving.

Everyone was aghast at how huge I got.

I already can’t wait to go home again.

 

Full of Hot Air.

Because I am currently in the beginning stages of crafting a PhD project about maternal health, with a focus on childbirth specifically, I’m reading tons about pregnancy and labor (for work, okay?). As my interest is in childbirth, I’m focusing my time on what leads to various kinds of childbirth experiences. One of the more interesting things I’ve read concerns the rise in the reporting of “back-to-back” labor in the later 20th century. A labor is said to be “back-to-back” when a baby starts its descent into the birth canal with its spine aligned with its mother’s spine and its face toward the front of her body. This means that the widest part of the baby’s head (the forehead and face) enters the cervix first, which has a lot of implications for the mechanics of childbirth (which I will spare you) and essentially means a slower, more painful labor (leading to higher rates of induction, epidural use, Pitocin, and eventually c-section).

An explanation for this rise in back-to-back labor is that as women moved out of mostly housekeeping roles and into office work, they stopped performing tasks that kept them leaning forward (cooking over a massive cauldron, washing clothes, scrubbing floors on their hands and knees, etc). Instead, women began spending their days leaning backward into office chairs, which can lull their children into the back-to-back position, as the babies aren’t being forced forward by gravity all the time. My opinion on this theory is: who knows. This sounds a little like all the evolutionary psychology theories I used to love as an anthropology undergraduate, and have now come to side-eye pretty hard all the time. However, because I am a crazy person, after reading the book a few weeks ago, I committed to spending more time leaning forward as the baby grew. Every little bit helps, right?

This means that I’ve been sitting like an idiot on my chair at work, legs on the sides of the chair with my knees bent, and my belly forward and under the desk. Essentially, I look like I need to fart all the time, which coincidentally, is now constantly the case.

In previous weeks, I could feel the baby at very proscribed times: in the morning just as I woke up, in the evening laying in bed, and, very occasionally, if I really focused during some quiet time during the day. However, now, it’s all over the place all the time. I woke up to a dance routine at 2 am the other night. I feel kicks when I’m sitting like a moron at my desk. I am punched in the guts while standing around grocery stores, deciding which foods I am not going to be able to stomach. I also saw it from the outside last night for the first time and then spent more time than I will admit taking videos of my stomach, trying to document it. (Did not happen.) The baby is super active, and I think my insides are now beginning to feel it.

Why yes, I have nicknamed my baby Kickpuncher.

 

I made a super not great decision Friday night and ate Indian food, which haunted me for the rest of the weekend, because my digestive system can no longer handle foods that are not apples, avocado, or bread. In an ironic twist of fate, I finally found the time to spend hours on my hands and knees in Child’s Pose on my bedroom floor, my belly down, gravity pulling the baby into its proper position – at 3 in the morning, after frantically Googling remedies for what the English so delicately call “trapped wind.” Face down on the carpet in the middle of the night, sipping peppermint tea by the mugful, miserable and desperate for sleep, at least I was maybe preventing back-to-back labor.

It’s the little things.

20 Weeks.

On Thursday, when I was exactly 20 weeks pregnant, I had my 20-week anomaly scan. According to the ultrasound technician, the little bub is measuring totally normally and was very cooperative. (This is something this very same tech said to me at the 12-week ultrasound, so I think it means I’m guaranteed to have a very well behaved child for the rest of my life. A GIRL CAN DREAM.)

We got to see its brains and its kidneys and its ten little fingers wiggling around. In the photo above, it’s basically dancing a contortionist jig, with its arms all over the place and its legs up over its head. When this photo was taken, the tech asked us, “So, looking at this, who does it take after?” prompting a sex joke from The Boyfriend, which the very English technician then pretended not to have totally set up for him.

At various times throughout the scan, as the baby moved around and we saw bits of facial bone and dark shadows, it really did look like most of the terrifying online ultrasound photos my mother and aunt tried to convince me were fake, so I win. THEY ARE REAL.

We also found out what the little bub is, and as much as I want to tell everyone I know on any and all social media platforms, I am keeping my huge mouth closed about that until I go home for my mom’s Most Epic Baby Shower In History. I’m also kinda in love with the idea that the people who might get me gifts (because that is so not an expectation) will have to do it without knowing what the gender is. This kid will love cupcakes and dinosaurs no matter what its genitalia is!

Maybe I’ll have that printed on a t-shirt and make Baby wear it on the first day of kindergarten.

Creature Feature: The Kick Came From INSIDE My Body.

I am now 19 and a half weeks pregnant! I am officially too enormous for my favorite jeans, which I have now shelved indefinitely. Before I was growing a human being, I used to despise that all denim is now 2% Lycra, because it meant that for the most part, I could wear a pair of jeans one time before they were all stretched out and falling off my ass. (And I’m disgusting and cannot be asked to wash my clothes often enough to keep up with that kind of demand.) However, now, those previously maligned, instantly-too-baggy, only-skinny-for-four-hours jeans are my saviors. They hang below my belly and are just stretchy enough. Plus, they still fall off my ass, which at this point in my life, I really appreciate. Thanks, 2% Lycra, for making 5 Month Pregnant Sarah still feel thin enough to have her pants falling off her. 2% Lycra is also allowing me to get through the weeks before my trip to California without paying tons of money for maternity jeans. Basically, a win-win at the moment.

In other news, we are days away from finding out what this little creep is, and I am very excited to pin one of the two names we’ve chosen on this little unsuspecting person. In addition to allowing us to define the rest of our child’s life by giving it a name, finding out what the sex is also means I will know what proscribed gender stereotypes I will be battling for all of Creep’s childhood. (No one is more humorless than me!) Yay!

In the cutest, most adorable development thus far (barring, of course, all the baby clothes I’m starting to collect): my mother has discovered the gender reveal party and is going to fold that into a baby shower she’s throwing for me when I go home in a few weeks. She’s also running full steam ahead with the “Mexican fiesta” theme I suggested initially as a joke, which is fabulous. I wanted to avoid the seemingly inevitable lean toward pink or blue, so I chose something that would force the use of every color in the rainbow. Inspiration:

Who could care about pink for girls and blue for boys when there’s glitter in a Modelo bottle?

Also, I currently have a fiesta flag banner hanging in my bedroom in England as part of the normal, every day decor, so this is pretty much perfect.

Finally, while I’d felt tiny flutters and occasional “bubbling” before, just this week, I’ve started feeling actual baby movement. Last night, I drank a glass of cranberry juice from a hotel bar (as you do) and then laid down in my hotel bed at 9pm (again, as you do) and absent-mindedly put my hand on my belly, because I’d been catching little movements here and there and it’s reassuring to know that all is well in there. Seconds after I placed my hand on my skin, the baby kicked the hardest it has thus far and I felt it from both the inside and the outside and was immediately creeped out by my own body. It’s one thing to feel something that could be misconstrued as an upset, rumbling tummy and another thing entirely to feel something almost deliberate knocking around in your insides. Again, it’s comforting to know that the babes is okay and doing well and I’m actually loving the growing reminder that yes, there is a baby in there, because for weeks, I just felt fat and bloated and moody, but unable to drown my sorrows in wine. Now, I am pregnant. For reals. However, imagine for a moment that you are holding onto a small plastic bag full of water and someone drops a big fish in your bag and this big fish bops around in the too-small plastic bag, hitting its face and tail on the plastic lining and you can feel this fish if you put your hand on the outside of the bag. Imagine all of this, except now the bag is your guts and the fish is a baby person. That is what fetal movement is like.

Fish Baby: debuting July 2015.