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parentingtheoryandpractice · 5 months

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Almost 3 weeks of Violet (and everyone)

I think this is the latest I've put out an update from the newborn period, which is maybe fitting. Things have been great, but busy. The gap between Violet and Xander is the smallest we've had yet, and he definitely still needs a lot of active, hands-on care. For the first week, I was mostly only focused on Violet, with Will doing pretty much everything else, including taking care of the rest of the kids, but since then I've been doing what I can. And my physical recovery has been the smoothest yet, for which I am very grateful.

I don't expect this to be a very organized update, but I have a bunch of notes that I wanted to record before they become blurrier.

Nursing has been good. If anything, I think I'm trending more towards oversupply. There have only been a couple of times (once my milk came in, which was pretty fast) where it seemed like Violet might have wanted there to be more milk, and bunch more times where she pulled off as I let down. There was also one night the first week where Violet seemed pretty frustrated about latching at all, and I wrapped her and kept her away from breast some, but it basically hasn't happened since. I think partly because I figured out a way of holding my breast to help her latch better when she seemed frustrated, but I'm guessing more because she figured out some better latching skills. She nurses a ton when she's awake, and sometimes a bunch when she's asleep too. I haven't been timing how long she tends to nurse on each side, but whatever she's doing intuitively seems normal to me for my babies. We had one night so far where she nursed nonstop for about an hour a half, which was notably long.

I think the time where she nursed so much was an instance of "witching hour", or what we tend to call "evening fussy time". But unless I count that one early night where she had an issue latching, we mostly haven't had difficult witching hour nights yet. But it's not even three weeks yet, so I assume they are coming. I don't have a strong prediction of how those will go with her. Something about how the long nursing session was reminded me of Zeke as a baby, and I remember him, compared to the others, as being easier to soothe by nursing, or nursing while rocking, or nursing in the wrap while rocking, and not needing us to endlessly walk around as much to be okay. And as much as I don't especially enjoy the thing where the babies get more upset in the evening, I take it as a sign that they are getting more of a circadian rhythm, since it seems like whenever that period is over for the night they tend to have a pretty solid block of sleep.

Night sleep has been okay, but not super restful. Early on, it kept happening that either she'd be up for a while in the middle of the night, or she'd go back to sleep, but I'd be up for an hour and a half or so in the middle of the night. That hasn't been happening as much the last week and a half (according to my memory), but in that time it's been common for her to have her longest awake period of the day from around 9pm-midnight, which is usually just around when I'm wanting to go to sleep myself. But the past few days it's been somewhat earlier than that. And regardless of whether she's especially awake, I open the curtains when I get up in the morning, and she seems to be on track to have more standard days and nights. She nurses what I think of as a normal amount at night, which is maybe a few times? And she was originally peeing a few times at night too, either in the potty or in her diaper depending on how much I was pottying her, but lately she has been peeing fewer times at night than seems normal to me for a tiny baby, including I think two nights where she didn't pee at all until the morning. She was pooping throughout the night at first, but now she often doesn't poop at night. I'm pretty good at napping with her sometimes, and I haven't been especially tired overall. The increase in my deep sleep once she came out hasn't been as dramatic (according to my Oura ring) as it was last time, but overall I feel better rested than I did at the end of pregnancy.

In general, EC has been pretty easy with her, and I think she's only going through a few diapers a day. Who knows if it'll last, but for the last few babies I've been in quite a groove with baby EC. Once they start moving, becoming toddlers, having their own opinions, or at least being independent enough that I'm not focused on them almost all the time it's a different story, but we so far so good. And with newborns in some ways it feels extra easy because they sleep a lot and then pee and poop when they wake up. I've almost entirely been using the top hat potty for her, which I find a lot more convenient than the sink. A random thing I (think I) remember from Lydia being a baby was wondering how I could when she had peed in the top hat potty. But with Violet I can always hear it very clearly, which makes me wonder if I was especially oblivious to the sound then, am relatively sensitive to it now, or whether some babies pee much more loudly than other babies. I'd always heard it was possible for newborns to get a mini period thing, because of my hormones, but I'd never had it happen before. Violet had some of that going on, but it's been over for a while.

Overall, so far Violet has been the most stable sleeping on the bed that I remember my newborns being at this age, though I'm sure my memory is highly imperfect. This is also the first time I've had a video monitor, which I think helps me quite a bit in terms of feeling connected to her when she's on the bed and I'm not next to her. She has frequently had a period of at least an hour or so in the morning where she goes back to sleep and stays stable after I get up, which has been very convenient for doing some of the many things that are harder for me to do with her wrapped on. I have no idea whether this will last, and I tend to assume it won't.

One nice thing is that after doing a deep dive around when I had Xander into constructional aggression and constructional affection (dog training techniques), I think I'm much more attuned to small behaviors that mean Violet wants a little bit of distance, especially from nursing. My very not confident impression is that temperamentally Violet is pretty similar to Xander in her relationship to frustration, or maybe a little more frustration prone, but I think I've been managing it a little better on my end this time.

She's getting stronger by the day, with slightly more seconds where she's holding up her head some, and getting better at putting weight on her legs when I stand her up that way. I'd have to check videos and dates, but my memory is that Xander was a little more effective at squirming around on the ground than she is, but she's usually pretty happy to try, and tends to like tummy time. She also seems fine with being on her back, which I think all my babies have been except Lydia, who really didn't like it.

One fun different thing is that Violet seems to have lighter eyes than her siblings. Lydia, and maybe some of the other ones, had somewhat lighter eyes at first when she came out, but I'm pretty sure they had already turned brown by the time she was almost three weeks old. And Violet's eyes could turn brown too, but we think they might end up being hazel. Originally I thought her hair was as dark as Zeke's, but I think I was insufficiently accounting for how newborn hair can look darker at first. Now I think it's more like Maya's color. I think we collectively think that she looks the most like Zeke in terms of features, and I especially think her nose looks a lot like his. There's something about her body shape that reminds me more of Maya though.

Will and I both independently said that if we had to pick, her personality seems the most similar to Xander's, and like him (and unlike the rest of our kids), I would say that her cry isn't very loud. She has her own personality for sure though, and I wish I had a better articulation of what I can see so far. She's still very sleepy, and there seems to be something sort of settled about her to me. She doesn't strike me as super people focused, but she also doesn't seem especially not people focused. I predict that she'll be pretty gross motor focused the way all of our babies have been, and will do all the gross motor milestones pretty early.

As I said, I've been feeling pretty recovered physically, even though there's more to go on that front, and one big exception is that I have some diastis recti. I've had that before, and I think it has always resolved on its own, though I don't think I ever confirmed that it did with a professional, since it wasn't always fully gone by my six week appointment. This time I got Katy Bowman's book about it, which seems good. It's weird and a little sad to think that I will almost certainly never be pregnant again, but it's also a relief to think about it. I'm hungrier than I was during pregnancy, which is probably because breastfeeding a baby is more calorie intensive than growing one on the inside is. I've also been eating carbier food, since I'm not worried about my blood sugars and the baby getting too big. I've also been wanting somewhat more sweet food than I usually eat, as is common for me when nursing a baby, so I've been going with that too.

One thing I remember very fondly from Maya's birth was that shortly after she came out, I experienced a bunch of shaking that was a lot like shivering but wasn't really about being cold. It's a pretty common phenomenon, and my guess is that that sort of shaking is protective against trauma. I didn't have anything like that happen after Violet's birth, but maybe two nights in, I did have a bunch of shaking around when my milk came in, and it seemed similar to me. Hard for me to confidently know whether it was functionally similar or not, but it felt important to me to record that it happened.

(It's been almost a week since I started writing this, so I'm going to post it now, even though there's more I think I wanted to say.)

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parentingtheoryandpractice · 6 months

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Violet's birth story

So, fair warning—this is going to be a drawn out, high context version of what ultimately could be a very short birth story. And if you want to really understand the progression of how I have related to labor and birth over the years, I’ll link my previous four birth stories below.

Lydia’s birth story

Zeke’s Birth Story

Maya’s birth story (and reflections on previous births)

Alexander’s birth story

This pregnancy was not an easy one for me. Will and I decided to have our (almost certainly) final baby closer to our next youngest than we have ever spaced before, since we were pretty eager as a family unit to move to a different life phase that was less pregnancy, baby, and toddler focused, in large part because we wanted to have a different type of focus and energy for our older kids while they were still kids. We knew it would be more work in the short term, and I would be leaning on Will a lot for a while, which has proven true.

We also moved while I was pregnant, which I overall very much stand by as a decision, but that was pretty brutal. We tried to time it so that we’d be moving when I was in the second trimester, since that seemed like it would at least be easier than the alternatives, and that almost/mostly worked out, but of course the timeline got pushed back some.

And then the second trimester was also a bit less of a smooth period than I had expected, since I had three episodes of nerve pain that meant I was pretty out of commission for a few days, which was itself inconvenient, but also led to a bunch of uncertainty on my part, since I didn’t know what was going on, or that it was only going to be three times. (All that could be a full-length post of its own, which I may try to write up at some point. As far as I can tell, not only did it all fully resolve, but maybe my body map and body mechanics are actually improved relative to my previous baseline, and I am better at something like Focusing in a body way, thanks to my friend James who explained to me how to do that.)

That said, compared to how things can go, I would still call my pregnancy pretty uncomplicated. I thought I had some blood sugar issues (which could again be its own whole post), but I got a cgm, tried some other blood sugar monitors, paused my Vitamin C since it turns out that can make glucose monitors read a little higher, and my eventual conclusion there was that my first blood sugar monitor was reading too high. I did somewhat limit my carb intake, but after an initial period of lots of tracking decided (in consultation with my midwife and the doctor she works with) to treat it as non-clinical, and I stopped taking measurements.

I also had some iron-deficiency anemia, as I have had every pregnancy, and taking a bunch of iron pills didn’t seem to be working at first, but just as I scheduled some appointments to pursue an iron infusion, my numbers came back up.

And for most of this pregnancy, especially as I was approaching the end, I had a lot of anxiety about birth. With that too, there’s a lot I could say, but I think the high bit is that, while I didn’t anticipate any bad concrete outcomes—I never seriously worried that the baby wouldn’t be born healthy, or that I would be physically at risk—I did have a visceral sense that it wasn’t going to “be okay”, and that the experience would be a bad one for me. And “bad” not just in a fleeting sense, but in a way that would leave my mental structures worse off than they were before.

I never found a concise way to verbalize exactly what I was worried about, but I’m very grateful for all the people (especially Will, Kenzi, Anna, Steph, and James) who listened to me talk at length in repetitive inarticulate ways about what my issue was. And for all the people who wrote up and published their birth stories, since (as has been my habit), I read a ton of them in the weeks leading up to my birth. And at the end of the day, I think the anxiety eventually worked as intended. I processed enough and set the right sort of intentions that it was pretty much gone. I remember a conversation with Anna right around my due date where I expressed that I figured birth would be unpleasant, but in an accepting way, and my desire to keep talking about it was largely gone.

Some of the more legible takeaways I had from all my birth processing were:

-I was pretty willing to let go of some things I had previously been (mostly implicitly) aiming for in service of having an easier birth.

-One such thing was accurately tracking what the experience was like for me. (So… I expect my written recollections to involve mostly the right amount of error bars anyway, but that’s part of the epistemic status of all of this.)

-Another one, somewhat to my surprise, was caring about the timeline. Talking it through, it became clear to me that I had few to no concerns about having a long labor per se, as long as the intense and overwhelming part wasn’t long. (My understanding of Kenzi’s later summary of this, which I liked quite a bit, was to think of early labor as for positioning, not dilating, and that moving to dilating before the position was good often wasn’t desirable.)

-Related to that, one of my conclusions was that during my labor with Xander in particular, after having gained a more explicit model of how my muscles worked during labor over the course of my previous labors, I was expending a lot of wasted effort trying to make things go faster, and my guess was that it didn’t speed things up and probably did lead to it feeling harder. So my plan was to not do that.

-I can’t remember if this was explicit, but I think another constraint I let go of was having other people be able to track much of what was going on for me in realtime during labor, which iirc I’ve written about mattering to me in the past.

-And, somewhat presciently (spoilers), partly since I found a great collection of unassisted birth stories to read, I made my peace with the idea of a delivery that was fast enough that the midwife wouldn’t make it, and talked Will about that some too.

-I also tried to consider which of the painful sensations it would be helpful for me to be especially aware of during labor, and which I could essentially safely tune out. My conclusion there was that anything that was telling me how to move my body seemed important, and that it was probably good to be pretty aware of any potential tissue damage from tearing during the pushing stage, but that microtears that were happening because of muscle exertion, and general muscle fatigue type sensations probably weren’t that actionable or important to pay attention to.

The one concrete and mundane-feeling anxiety that remained was that we would all get sick. We had all been sick multiple times recently, and then Xander had gotten sick shortly before my due date, and right around when I did give birth, Zeke was also just getting sick, which was not a surprise to us given all of our sick friends and his recent exposure.

But I am very grateful to report that (per my questionably effective request to my immune system) I didn’t get either of those sicknesses!

For a while, I had been saying that I didn’t want to make any plans at all for Thanksgiving, since it was two days after my due date, but as that week got closer, my sense was that I wasn’t having a baby anytime soon. And my midwife’s sense was similar. She said the thing she mostly goes off for her brith timing predictions is amniotic fluid levels, and that mine were high for someone who was going to give birth soon. So we decided to host Thanksgiving after all (with a backup plan in place for if I was in labor or if I had a baby by then).

And indeed, my due date came and went, Thanksgiving happened, and I continued to have the impression that I wasn’t very close to having the baby. It wasn’t that I was never experiencing contractions, but I’d been having intermittent regular contractions (which I suppose ought to be called Braxton Hicks, but I don’t tend to experience them as painless…) for months, and the ones I was having didn’t feel different. My energy was pretty good, and I started talking more walks. And I stopped taking my iron pills, since it takes a few weeks to make red blood cells from iron anyway, and I wanted to give my digestive system a break.

And then Saturday night, I felt something happen with my bag of waters. I’m still not totally sure what it was, and I didn’t find the ph strip my midwife had given me in the middle of the night to check whether it was for sure amniotic fluid (all the plausible alternatives are acidic instead of basic), but I think it must have been. That said, it wasn’t a huge amount—I’ve always had my bag of waters break near the end of labor before, and I know it was nowhere near that amount of fluid. Maybe more like a cup’s worth, most of it all at once, and then with a little more leaking out after that throughout the night. My midwife’s guess when I texted her about it was that it was only my forewaters, which wasn’t a term I had known until she mentioned it. In any case, her conclusion was that it didn’t sound like a “frank rupture”.

But I do think it kicked off something, and at that point at least I no longer had the subjective sense that the labor didn’t feel close!

At 9:46am I told my midwife there was “not much happening in terms of contractions since I got up”, and whenever Will got up I told him about the same thing, but he took over with the kids anyway, and I proceeded to spend most of the day resting, relaxing, working on a jigsaw puzzle, hanging out in the bath, and intermittently experiencing contractions that felt “real” enough, but weren’t in any sort of consistent pattern. For example, I’d have a few in a row that were about 7 min apart, and very noticeable but not at all overwhelming, but then I’d change positions and go 20min without feeling much of anything. This went on for most of the day, and I made sure to keep eating and drinking, and resting, though I am pretty sure I didn’t end up sleeping at all.

A little after midnight, I sent a message to our friends that were going to take Xander if we needed that during labor saying “I think Will has already given you an update, but I think I’m in early labor? […] I think there’s some chance things speed up and it’s tonight, but also easily could slow down and then speed up again at some point tomorrow. I think given what I’ve been feeling labor will not totally stop until I’ve given birth though”.

At that point I’d been timing my contractions for about an hour, and they were pretty variable. Most of them around a minute, but some shorter or longer, and a few that were under five minutes together but a bunch that were longer too.

By then, I had been back in the bathtub for a while, after being in and out all day, and I think it was around then that Will set up shop in there with a backjack and joined me. I mostly had my eyes closed, and I remember not noticing that he had come in, in part because I had put Fauré’s Après un Rêve on repeat—which I think was the only time during labor I had music on. I think I picked that song because my midwife had mentioned a few times that the way she thinks of labor is (my words not hers), was kind of like that I had to go to a journey to a different dimension to go get my baby. At some point a few keep earlier I’d made a playlist of some music I’d felt somewhat inspired by (this song was on it), and I’d been enjoying music a lot in the past few weeks, but once I realized Will was there, that seemed both better than music and like I was no longer inclined to have the music on.

And some more about my headspace around then… Until around that point in labor, I hadn’t been very focused on labor between contractions, and had been watching little bits of reality TV on my phone, but after about midnight that changed. I got the idea a couple of labors ago, I think from The Pink Kit, that it was good to use coping strategies even during early labor so that reaching for them became more automatic when I needed them more later on, which I was doing, but this time (for the first time, I think) I basically found it helpful to use my coping techniques between contractions too, starting around midnight (which, having discussed it afterwards with my midwife, is what we decided to call the start of my active labor).

My main coping techniques were deep breathing (in part because I figured oxygenating my muscles was going to make everything work better and hurt less), trying to tune in to exactly how my body wanted to be positioned (leaning on the sort of body type focusing I had practiced during my episodes of nerve pain), and reciting words to myself m. The main words I was relying on almost the whole time, as I have in the past, were The Litany Against Fear, but I’d decided when I was making the music playlist to also include this Irish blessing, which I first heard of because the head of school I attended used to say it to graduating seniors. It had more of a gentle, relaxed vibe—more about things being easier for me instead of me coping with something hard—and I wanted that to be in the mix.

Overall, it became increasingly clear to me as I was laboring that I was aiming for as little sympathetic nervous system activation as possible, and with that goal in mind, a bunch of my cognition seemed pretty counterproductive, in much the way that meditators I have known often talk about it. Basically all of my thought about the future seemed notably tinged with anxiety, in a way where I wanted to let go of them. And the same was true of a bunch of my self-referential thoughts, even about what was happening right then. Same with analysis. I had some pleasant hypnogogic type thoughts about the different patterns from the jigsaw puzzle I had been working on earlier that day, and some other ones about the reality show I had been watching between contractions earlier. I also remembered something Steph had told me about seeing each contraction as a spiritual journey, and I tried to learn into that way of relating to it some, which seemed good too.

I also started doing a pulling down type thing on the side of the bathtub that felt right, and I think I was mostly squatting at that point. The house we moved into recently has a wonderfully massive bathtub, and while I had also borrowed our midwife’s birth tub, in large part because I found the birth tub I used for Xander’s birth really helpful (it was bigger, softer, had lovely handles), I hadn’t asked Will to blow it up. The place to blow it up would have been the bedroom, but Xander was asleep in there. And while we did have friends who would watch him, not only did him sleeping as much as possible seem even better, those friends (and also a bunch of our backup options) were all sick, so I was somewhat invested in him sleeping through the whole birth if possible.

And partly to that end, partly because it felt right overall, unlike with my other births, I was pretty much not vocalizing at all. If that had seemed like it was making labor harder to cope with, I think I would have made whatever noises seemed good to make, but the way I was relating to it was more that noises would have been wasted effort, so it worked out.

The main thing my more logistical brain was still doing at that point was trying to track where labor was enough to figure out when to call the midwife. I had texted her a log of my contractions around midnight, but since she hadn’t responded to that I (correctly) assumed she was asleep and I’d have to call to reach her. So I got out of the bath, had a contraction or two on the birth ball (that I had ordered at the last minute), and called her at 1:25. I told her the contractions seemed to be about five minutes apart at that point. She asked how long they had been like that and I said I wasn’t sure. Then she asked if they had a clear peak, and I said they did. She said didn’t I think she should come since she was an hour away, and I remember saying something about how I wanted to defer to her about that. She told me she was coming, and to tell Will to make up the bed with the waterproof liner and extra sheet and fill the birth tub. I knew I wasn’t going to ask Will to do either of those things just then, but I was in a pretty internal place, it didn’t seem worth saying that out loud.

I got right back in the bath after that, and at that point my conclusions was that there was nothing more to plan, and I could more fully relax into wherever labor wanted me to do. I think Will had mostly been with me pretty continuously for a while, but at some point I think he left to go pack a bag for Xander in case he needed to go to our friends’ house. At a different point, I remember telling him not to go anywhere. I don’t remember whether he was even thinking of going anywhere at that point, but I think I must have had an intuition that things were getting close.

Almost everything from here is increasingly hazy in my memory, but I do remember things getting more intense, though still not exactly overwhelming—more like reaching the edge of it during the peak of the contractions. I also felt some nausea, though not enough that I was close to throwing up, and did have a “hmm could this be transition” type of thought in response to the nausea that I didn’t focus on much.

I was intermittently checking my cervix, as I had been all day, and I felt pretty dilated by then—definitely active labor—but I couldn’t have quantified it. I could feel the head very distinctly though! I’m still not sure when the rest of my waters broke. I think there was one moment where I thought it might have happened, and since that was the only one I registered I assume it did happen then, but since I was in the bath it wasn’t an obvious dramatic thing.

But at some point I do remember feeling a different sort of pain, more like a potential tissue damage type, and one where I was inclined to vocalize. I picked up the washcloth in front of me and bit down on it, which felt right, and around then it became obvious that the baby was moving downwards. I can’t quite remember what if anything I managed to communicate to Will, and I’ll have to find out from him exactly when he realized what about what was going on, but from there things happened very quickly.

I couldn’t have said how long between that first pushing sensation and when I could clearly tell that the head was coming out, but it wasn’t long. I did try to pause a little with the head somewhat out, and not rush that part, so as to prevent tearing, but I think the pause was maybe on the order of seconds.

And by then I’m pretty sure the midwife was on speakerphone. I think what happened was that she had called on her own for an update, but maybe Will had called her? Maybe even I had asked him to call, though I don’t remember doing that, and I don’t think I did. In any case, having her there on speaker was exactly what I wanted, so I was very happy about that part, and also in a quite nonverbal place. I remember her asking some question about what was going on with the head, and me thinking “well, right now it’s not out, but I can distinctly feel her ear”, but it was totally beyond me to actually say that part out loud. I did have in mind what she had reminded me, which was to make sure the baby’s head stayed under water until she was all the way out, since once the baby is exposed to the air and likely starts breathing, at that point it’s not safe for her head to go under the water again.

Once her head was fully out, I may or may not have said anything, but I was very much remembering Xander’s birth, where it seemed to take forever to then push the rest of his body out. (It didn’t actually take long at all with him—but I do think I didn’t do it until I waited at minute or two until the next contraction.) This was faster though—basically once her head was out there was a brief pause, and then I kept pushing and her body was too, which was a massive relief. A massive relief, but then I also wanted to make sure she was breathing as she was supposed to. She seemed to me like she was breathing right away, but also like she was pretty much asleep, so I didn’t feel totally sure. I did some amount of rubbing her, blowing on her face, and talking to the midwife. Before too long I remember her producing at least one cry, and me asking if that meant she was for sure breathing now. I remember our midwife saying that if her muscle tone was good, that was what I should pay attention to. And it did seem like her muscles were working fine, and I remember noticing her hands opening and closing, but also in general newborns are so floppy at first!

In any case, I would say that I pretty quickly felt settled about her breathing, in part because the midwife didn’t seem concerned at all based on what we were saying. And the part after that is also somewhat of a blur, though I think I was already in a quite different and clearer headspace than I had been during labor, and was communicating with Will in a more straightforward way. He was getting me towels, and I was mostly keeping Violet out of the water so she didn’t get cold, but I wasn’t quite ready to move out of the bath yet. I also didn’t want to drain the water yet, since I figured it might be good to let the midwife’s look and see how much blood I had lost. I think I had Will take a picture of that. (I could tell by looking myself that it wasn’t much though, so I didn’t feel worried about postpartum hemorrhage.) Violet also pooped some meconium around then, but it wasn’t too messy—it was mostly on the towel I think. Though later there was a bunch of it on the floor of the bath, and I’m not sure if that was the same poop, or whether it came in stages.

I had been trying to get Violet to latch ever since she came out, but it took a while for her to do that. She was pretty sleepy! But at some point before the midwives arrived, she did end up latching, which seemed to me like a good sign that I could probably get the placenta out soon.

I also asked Will to bring me the large metal bowl we had set aside for the placenta, since I felt some urgency about getting it out. And I think it was around then that Will left to go let the dogs out and the midwives in. I think since he had already taken the picture, I did drain the tub a bunch, and once there wasn’t much water left I decided to try pushing the placenta out. I used some gentle traction on the cord, since in the past I had had midwives tell me it was okay to do that, and tried seeing if i could push on purpose, and I felt it move! That part was definitely easier and more straightforward than I had remembered it being with my past two labors, which was neat. But then it got a little stuck once it seemed like it was out, and I was pretty sure that was just the bag of waters, but not sure enough to want to pull on it. Once the midwives came, a few minutes later, they confirmed that the placenta looked complete, that was just the bag of waters, and it was totally safe to pull the rest of it out, which I did.

And that was the birth! We put the time down as 2:20, and the midwives arrived around 20 minutes after that, shortly after I had pushed my placenta out too. We took around another two hours to do a bunch of post birth stuff, like getting the baby’s blood type from the placenta (negative, so I didn’t do a rhogam shot), checking me for tears (just a very small one that didn’t require stitches), weighing and measuring the baby (I thought she looked like she was about eight and a half pounds, and she came it at 8 lbs 6oz after she had pooped, and 20inches, which the midwife said was maybe a bit of an underestimate), and assorted other logistics, like me getting out of the bath, putting on a postpartum pad and some clothes, me taking some ibuprofen per my plan so the afterpains wouldn’t hurt so much, me peeing, oiling up the baby before putting a diaper on her so the next meconium poop wouldn’t get stuck on her as much, etc. The midwives also went though a chart with me that shows typical development and gestational age, and while my placenta was a little calcified, as is typical for an almost 41 week baby, some of Violet’s markers were closer to 39 weeks. So maybe that’s why she took her time coming out.

(As an aside, given Violet’s actual stats, which seemed fine and similar to all my other babies, I feel good in hindsight about the way I related to my blood sugars during late pregnancy. Her head was also a little bigger than her chest circumference, so that wasn't an issue either.)

Once the midwives left, we got Lydia and Zeke to meet the baby, Will managed to take Xander into his office to sleep with him there, and I had the bed for me and Violet. I didn’t sleep much that night, but I was very happy :-).

Will and I are overall almost certain Violet will be our last baby, and I feel extremely grateful to have gone out on such a positive note with birth—this one was my clear favorite, though I also remember Maya’s birth quite fondly, and I believe I learned things and took away important insights from each of my births. Overall, before I had this last birth I would have said, as a summary, that overall I didn’t really like birth, and now I don’t think I can say that anymore. It’s probably worth anyone reading this taking that with a grain of salt, since I did explicitly let go of my desire to remember things in a precise way, but I think it captures something very real and quite important to me anyway.

And aside from being a very cool experience, I like to think that this time I learned something that I can take with me about anxiety. Both from how helpful I think my pre-birth anxiety ultimately was in guiding my processing in productive ways, and from how helpful it was to relax and fully let go of even subtly anxious thoughts during labor itself.

I used to be sort of baffled by some of the birth stories I would read or hear from people I knew by how easy they seemed, even though Maya’s birth had some aspects in common with them, but now that I had this last experience, I no longer do, and the range of labor experiences that seem intuitively plausible to me has expanded. I also remember after my first birth talking to the instructor of the birth class Will and I had taken somewhat incredulously about this video she had shown us of a Russian woman giving birth in a bathtub very peacefully, since it seemed so different not just from my experience, but from the experiences of pretty much everyone in the class. And the instructor had said, somewhat apologetically, “well, it was probably her fifth baby”. So now maybe I’ve come full circle by having a very peaceful labor with my fifth baby too.

A cool thing about this birth that feels like a bonus to me is that because I think I succeeded at my plan to not expend a lot of wasted effort, partly due to my intentions, but maybe even more because it was my fifth time, and my body had a more targeted sense of which muscles were involved and not involved, my body felt way less sore than it ever had before postpartum. I’m writing this a little less than a week later, and while it is still my model that rest and recovery is important, I feel remarkably good physically.

I was lamenting to a friend how it seemed sort of wasteful that I finally figured out how to do this birth thing just as I was never going to do it again, and she said that wasn’t this sort of the tragedy of life—we accumulate all this knowledge that’s ultimately pretty hard to transfer, and it’s very cool but also feels a bit like a waste.

If I have one regret from this birth, it’s that I don’t have any video footage of it. I would love to have more of a concrete record, and I really wish I could show Violet a video of her birth one day, but at least I’ve written this up while it was pretty fresh in my mind.

And if you got all the way here, thanks for reading a very long and drawn out story of a short birth! I’m very grateful for how it all played out.

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parentingtheoryandpractice · 2 years

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Also sitting on this precarious of a “seat” shows off his balance

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parentingtheoryandpractice · 2 years

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And this time Xander pushed up to stand from a squat on his own! Only stood around .75s but wow

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parentingtheoryandpractice · 2 years

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He just stood on the bed for like… maybe 1.5s? I wasn’t expecting that :-)

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parentingtheoryandpractice · 2 years

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Here he is!

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parentingtheoryandpractice · 2 years

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I haven’t posted any Xander updates in forever, but he crawls! He sits a little, but not much. He eats food now. And he says a thing that’s a lot like “hello”, and repeats a “b” sound sometimes when I tell him about “ball” :-).

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parentingtheoryandpractice · 2 years

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Life is busy, and I have so many thoughts but I haven’t felt moved to write them here. Verify update though: baby just rolled back to front!!

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parentingtheoryandpractice · 2 years

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I keep missing the video, but these pictures are about how it goes :-)

Xander has rolled over from front to back a few times very distinctly! I keep failing to get a video though…

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parentingtheoryandpractice · 2 years

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Xander has rolled over from front to back a few times very distinctly! I keep failing to get a video though…

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parentingtheoryandpractice · 2 years

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Alexander’s birth story

Epistemic status: my pretty vivid but imperfect memory from two weeks ago---I doubt anything in super wrong, but I didn't go back and cross reference all my notes and messages, so I assume the timeline and details aren't as accurate as they would be if I had done that

I had been having lots of Braxton Hicks contractions throughout the end of my pregnancy, but the Monday a week and a half before Alexander was born something seemed different. I woke up in the middle of the night with back pain and contractions that were pretty regular, though not overwhelming. And I just felt different---spacier and differently emotional. And I was having carb cravings that I hadn't had all pregnancy.

On Tuesday I told Will that I thought I was probably going to have the baby that week, and I texted my midwife to say that my best guess was that I was going to have the baby in a few days.

That night I was up a bunch of times in the middle of the night with either back pain, pretty regular (but not that strong and not progressing) contractions, or both. And that Friday, I took a long walk, was having quite noticeable contractions about every 5 min for what I think was a few hours.

But none of that was labor! And I think after Friday I announced that I was giving up on trying to predict when I was going to have the baby. Which was probably a good call on my part, since nothing new seemed to happen for almost a week, until the next Wednesday night. At that point I was again having pretty regular contractions, but either they were strong enough, or something was something enough, that I told Will that I wasn't up for taking care of the older kids. And I never really know how to define these things, but that's around when I would call what was happening "early labor", partly while it did slow down after that, it never really stopped, and partly because from that point on, labor was pretty much my main activity. I also started having some bloody show that night, which was another encouraging sign.

I did sleep okay that night, but it was between contractions. I'm not sure how far apart they were at night, but they were strong enough that at least some of the time I would wake up when they were happening (which is also a decent heuristic for "real" labor). And that morning I texted my midwife again to say despite my previous false prediction, I was pretty sure I was actually in labor this time.

That said, things were mild enough that afternoon that I was able to have a pretty focused non-labor conversation with a friend of mine for a few hours. But then, shortly after getting off the phone with her, it wasn't long before things noticeably picked up. Maya needed some attention at first, but once she was more settled I asked Will to be with me while I was laboring in the bath. (I have always really liked laboring in the bath.)

And before we had been doing that for very long, I asked him to call our two friends who had volunteered to watch the kids while I was in labor, since all of a sudden it felt quite important to me to have him there with me as much as possible.

At 6:21 I also texted my midwife, this time saying, "My cervix seems more open and I feel something hard behind the bag of waters that I think is the head! I haven't been keeping track of how close together the contractions are recently, but I think I'll start doing that". (This is when I would say that I was definitely in active labor.) And by 7:00 I told her that they were about a minute long and about 3-6 minutes apart. I asked her how long it would take her to get there, since I remembered her saying it might be two hours, and that's when she said it sounded like a good time for her to come, even if it ended up being a little early. (Later, after I had already had the baby, she mentioned that she had been staying nearby that night with one of her children, so I might not have asked her to come as soon as I did had I realized that, but it all worked out.)

I have found it quite useful and empowering to check my own cervical dilation during labor. I wouldn't say I'm any good at figuring out how dilated I am with any precision, but once I started trying I think I've been pretty good at telling whether I'm in active labor, which is information I have really wanted to have!

I think around the same time I had that conversation with the midwife was when Will offered to fill up the birth tub, and I took him up on that. It took a while for that to happen, and in the meantime things were getting quite intense. I kept feeling around for the head myself, I think partly because it was trippy for me that it was right there!!! And I was seeing more and more bloody show. I remember thinking that I was more free to relax into whatever labor was going to be, now that it wasn't my responsibility to track how far along I was and figure out when to ask the midwives to come, which was a relief. I think that meant my labor sped up around then, but it's always hand to untangle causality with this stuff! It could also be that I had a pretty good guess about when it was going to pick up, and that's why I texted when I did.

When I got out of the bathtub, I think because I was going to head to the birth tub, but maybe because I was going to use the bathroom, I remember experimenting with pulling down on things, which had been one of my main strategies for coping during Maya's labor, and that did seem to give me some relief. And in particular, while I think I had been laboring pretty quietly to that point, it seemed helpful to make louder (somewhat pushier?) noises when I was doing the pulling down thing. A friend of mine who recently had her first and said it was less painful than she expected had told me that she thought it was very helpful how she made a ton of noise, so I was leaning into that more than I think I would have been otherwise.

The birth tub was bigger than I expected! In the weeks leading up to the brith, I had been waffling about whether it would be too much trouble to have a birth tub, but I'm so glad we decided to do it. It was really pretty perfect. I could be in the tub, and choose almost whatever position, and there were handles on the side that were really good for pulling down on. And biting on sometimes. (I didn't puncture the liner, so I think I didn't damage anything by doing that!)

By the time I was in the birth tub, labor had gotten quite intense, though not as intense as it eventually got! The midwives arrived soon after that, briefly checked the baby's heart rate, which was fine, and then after we had a short conversation about how I wished I could skip the rest of labor, retreated to the back of our house, saying that their plan was to rest, and to call them whenever we needed or wanted them.

At this point, Will was sitting by the tub with me and mostly holding my hand, which was very important to me! I didn't want him leaving for even a little while. I labored like that for what I think was a couple of hours, and it was a lot... I remember mostly experiencing the contractions as coming almost one on top of the other, and also being sort of volitional? Not like I could stop them from coming, but like I could bring them on a little sooner, maybe by shifting position, and that I was choosing to do that a bunch of the time because being caught more off-guard was quite aversive. My memory of this part of labor was that I was making very loud and pretty tonal noises during most of the contractions, and buzzing my lips as loudly as I could during some of the other ones. And my memory was also that between the contractions I was feeling pain too, just much less. Because I remember thinking about some birth stories I had read where even very near the end, the women were able to rest and even doze between contractions, and that seeming unthinkable given what I was experiencing. But then I also remember some breaks between contractions where I was talking to Will that seemed like pretty complete breaks. So I don't really know, nor do I especially trust myself to remember the proportions of what was happening that accurately.

During this time I remember reaching to feel the head quite often and doing something that I would describe as scraping out more and more of the bloody show, and then also poking at my bag of waters. I was quite dilated at that time, though I couldn't say how much, but there was definitely a cervical lip. I tried pushing while I pulled that back, which I remember being even more painful than the rest of it, but I also remember feeling like maybe it was doing something good.

Eventually I felt something that at the time I assumed was me peeing, but in retrospect was probably my water breaking. I'm not sure because a few minutes later it happened again. I know there are actually two bags of waters, but I also think they most commonly break together, so maybe one of them really was me peeing? Being in the water, it was very hard to tell. I also expected to be able to feel the difference in the head once my water broke, but I couldn't. I think I almost certainly would have been able to feel the difference if I hadn't been in the water, but in any case, my best guess is that when the bag of waters broke I didn't have nearly as much of a cervical lip anymore.

I think it was shortly after that my sounds started getting noticeably more like "actually pushing a baby out" sounds, and Will said that I sounded different, and asked if he should get the midwives. I knew I was trying to push, but I wasn't sure it was working, so I asked him to hold off. But (what I think was) only a few minutes later, I could tell that the head was moving after all, so I told him to text one of the people who was with our kids to go get the midwives---I didn't want him going anywhere!

I know everyone has things they like more and less about labor and birth, but for me the pushing is definitely the best part. I would say it feels less painful once I'm really doing it, and of course it's a relief knowing that it's close to over, but also it's just so exciting and cool actually feeling the baby move out of my body!

The midwives were there, and I remember a few parts pretty distinctly. One was really wanting his head to be out already, but somehow pausing with his head sticking out a little and thinking that it seemed like I might not tear this time, even though I had at least somewhat with all my other babies. And indeed, that ended up being mostly right! I had a very small perineal tear that my midwife said didn't need stitches. And then I also remember feeling his ear and saying something about that! (We had a video of the whole last part, but I haven't watch it yet, nor do I feel ready to yet! I'm very grateful to have the footage for when I am ready though.)

I also remember not really being aware of pushing contractions, though I assume I was having them, and mostly just being very motivated to push out the baby. Once his head was out, I was surprised that the rest of him didn't just slide out, which I think had happened with the rest of my babies, and I believe I said something like "I can't remember how to push anymore" and asking the midwives if the baby was okay. They told me that it was fine, that hands and knees and squatting would probably help, and that while they did want him to come out soon, there was nothing to worry about yet.

I changed my position, and of course I hadn't really forgotten how to push after all, so once I pushed, his shoulders and the rest of him came out, maybe a few minutes after his head had. He was born just around 11:30pm, around 30 hours after I would say early labor started, and around 6 hours after what I would call active labor started.

And wow, what a relief! One of my requests in my birth plan was that unless there was a medical reason to do it, I wanted the moments after birth to just be me, the baby, and Will, and that worked out really well! I was rubbing him and blowing in his face some, and he breathed and cried pretty quickly. It was so exciting to finally have him on the outside and see what he was like. Will and I both thought that, while he clearly looked like one of our babies, he looked less similar to our other newborns than they had to each other, which I think I still agree with two weeks later, but I'm less sure now...

Once he was out and okay, and we got to know him a little bit, I was then very preoccupied with getting the placenta out, partly because I didn't want to have to worry about it anymore, and partly because I knew the cramping would be more painful with it inside. Though as the midwives pointed out to me, there was no guarantee it was fully detached yet. I did get Alexander to nurse some right away, which helps that happen. I also learned that even after the umbilical cord looks quite white and floppy, there's still what the midwives called a "phantom pulse" that I could feel when I held it between my fingers, and they typically wait for that to also stop before they cut the cord. So I'm not positive I'm remembering this right, but I think I gave Alexander to Will to hold while I delivered the placenta, and that it was still attached to him when it came out. I did like being able to do that all in the tub, so I didn't have to worry about squatting over anything.

There's a lot I love about the midwifery model of care, but I think maybe my single favorite thing about home birth is that once the baby is out, I get to relax in my own bed. There were a few things to do, like, cutting the cord (with no clamp attached, just a tie! Why doesn't everyone do that?), weighing him (he was 8lbs 10oz), and checking me for tears (as I said, just one small one that didn't need any attention), but then the midwives left.

Our 6yo had just fallen asleep, but we had our 9yo and our 3yo meet him, and also the friends who had been watching our kids. We still had birthday cake from the 3yos birthday the previous week, so we ate some of that. (It felt good to celebrate, but the cake wasn't what my body wanted! I ate some buttered sourdough toast afterwards, and that was more satisfying.)

I think that's most of what I have to say about the process of birth, but I have some more reflections on how I relate to it, mostly centered around how painful labor is! At least for me! I recently asked a group of moms I talk to regularly how they thought of labor, and while a bunch of them agreed that it seemed natural to call it painful, more of them than I expected said that while it was intense, they weren't inclined to call their labors "painful" exactly.

But yeah, I don't like the way it feels. I would say that even Braxton Hicks contractions are kind of painful, and early labor is definitely painful, active labor is more painful, and transition is almost unbearable. But then at the same time, I have pretty much always been pretty able to "stay on top of" my contractions, and when I'm in the right position, making the right noise, etc., I think it's basically true that for those slices of time it's in an important way actually not that painful after all. But even then, I'm doing all theat with something like the threat of a lot of pain looming over me if I misstep. So I'm perpetually confused about how to narrativize it. After my labor with Maya, I figured I was cured of my desire to go to the hospital and get an epidural, since I left as soon as I could tell I was in active labor and I had her before I could get one. But now I wonder again... Because this labor was somewhat longer, and I imagine there would have been time to get an epidural and skip at least some of the pain. But then again, while I don't like the way labor feels, I hate pretty much everything about the hospital experience other than the potential of pain relief. And it does feel pretty awesome to feel the baby coming out. So I'm very conflicted! I think I would plan another home birth, but I'm not totally sure. If I could be sure that the people I encountered in the hospital would be respectful and consent-oriented, I could see going there and getting an epidural. But I don't expect it to be that way. And then, I'm also not even sure what to do make of my desire to avoid the pain of labor, since another part of my brain wants to keep pointing out that all sorts of things in life are painful, and that's just how it is. (Which is nowhere near a complete argument for anything---it's more like a trailhead for something that I can tell is still unresolved.)

Anyway, I wouldn't say my thoughts about all that are very coherent, but it seemed more honest to include at least some of them anyway. (Will and I hope to have one more baby some day, which is why this stuff bounces around in my head the way it does.)

In any case, Xander is a great baby, and I've been very in love with the newborn stage this time around. He's two weeks old today, and he's already so different from how he was when was totally new!

And while my birth story doesn't feel totally complete, I can always come back and add more if I remember more details that I want to share. I wanted to at least make sure I wrote up the main bits while they were still pretty fresh.

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parentingtheoryandpractice · 2 years

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It's been long enough since I wrote anything in the tumblr window that I forgot how refreshing can make it all go away :-(. I will restart my birth story...

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parentingtheoryandpractice · 2 years

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Never mind---he pooped twice last night. In retrospect I think maybe what was going on there was that he got way more hind milk that night because I was prioritizing nursing a ton on one side due to a plugged duct (which has since resolved!).

10 day update: He didn’t poop all night until just now at 10:30am :-)

It would be nice if this mostly sticks—one less thing to manage at night makes my life easier!

I think he peed less last night too, though it was at least a couple of times iirc.

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parentingtheoryandpractice · 2 years

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10 day update: He didn’t poop all night until just now at 10:30am :-)

It would be nice if this mostly sticks—one less thing to manage at night makes my life easier!

I think he peed less last night too, though it was at least a couple of times iirc.

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parentingtheoryandpractice · 2 years

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It’s now been a little more than a week with Alexander, and I haven’t gotten around to sitting at my computer to write up an update as I had planned, so I suppose I’ll try writing on my phone.

My overall impression of him is still that’s he’s pretty chill. Over the past few days he noticeably has a proto evening fussy time/witching hour, where he might need to nurse a bunch continually or be in motion to stay happy. And then when that’s eventually over, he’ll tend to sleep more soundly afterwards, and pee and poop somewhat less during that block of sleep.

Overall, he seems to be really good at EC! He caught on pretty much immediately that when I hold him over the sink, it’s a good time to pee and poop. IIRC it took my other ones longer with pee especially. It also helps that he tends to both pee and poop in a bunch of little spurts, so even if he starts to go in his diaper, there’s very frequently more when I take him at that point. I think with Maya I didn’t manage to actually have the top hat potty on hand during the newborn period, but I’m also making good use of that this time, either because it’s night and I don’t want to get up, or because it seems better to have him nurse and pee or poop at the same time.

Breastfeeding has been going super smoothly, and I think I’m tending a little towards oversupply and leaking, but I expect that to resolve itself if I keep doing what I’m doing. He hasn’t been weighed since last Monday, but then he was 5oz up since he had been a few days before that, so I’d be surprised if he hadn’t regained his birth weight and then some.

Our big outing this week was that we went to our homeschool park day, where he got enough sun that I wasn’t 100% sure it would be okay, but in hindsight it seemed to be totally fine. I do think his nursed less than his usual amount being outside and wrapped on me for a few hours, but then I think he made up for lost time once we were home.

Babywearing is going great, but even though he’s so little, I haven’t built up my muscles yet, and he’s floppy and has a tendency to flop pretty asymmetrically (I’m pretty sure in roughly the same position he used to favor when he was inside me!) so my back can hurt a little if I do it for too long at a time. I put him on my back for the first time a few days ago, and that was both comfortable and a nice change of pace for getting some stuff done around the house.

I feel good about my own recovery. I basically took the first week off from everything except taking care of myself and the baby (thanks Will!), and was pretty antsy to be doing more than that by the end of the time. I have napped at least once with the baby more days than not, but there have been a few days where I didn’t.

The afterpains were pretty brutal at first, but then I decided to try taking Advil for them (which I have never done before), and that seemed to work as advertised, which was nice! I truly love the early newborn days, so I didn’t want to have my appreciation for them colored by periodically being in a bunch of pain. I only took the advil for a few days anyway, and my uterus has shrunk a whole bunch by now.

I still haven’t quite figured out how to juggle all the kids for a while day, and Will is doing a lot on that front, but I’m at least back to waking up Maya on my own in the morning.

Speaking of which, she seems to have come around a lot more to the baby! She was suspicious at first, seemed a little curious but mostly upset, and then seemed to forgive me for the situation but was pointedly ignoring him. But as of last night she was hugging him a bunch <3. She doesn’t really understand yet about being gentle with a baby’s neck while hugging, but I take this as a very positive development!

The older kids are very into holding Xander, the cats don’t seem to care one way or the other, and the dogs are getting more familiar with him and gradually accepting that I won’t let them lick him all over to their satisfaction (mostly because IME baby skin doesn’t do well with that!!)

It’s hard to really remember well enough to compare, but I think Xander’s legs aren’t quite as strong as my other babies’ legs were at this age, nor does he seem to actively enjoy when we hold him in a standing position, but he also doesn’t seem to mind it. And his head control is getting better and better by the day :-). When I put him down without a diaper on a relatively harder surface like a bath mat on the floor, he sometimes does a lot of trying to crawl type motions, and sometimes he rolls from his front to his side. I suspect he’ll be pretty early on gross motor stuff like our other kids were.

Most of his cord stump fell off in the first few days, but the midwife left him with a fairly long piece attached, so there’s still a little bit that’s on there.

It seems like maybe he’s a more sound sleeper than the other ones were at this age, but I think this is somewhat confounded by me being better at identifying when he’s sleeping deeply enough that I’ll be able to walk away for a bit. This house is also all on one level, with the main bedroom quite centrally located, which means I can more easily move around and do stuff while being near where he is sleeping.

And I think that’s most of what I had on my mind that I wanted to write down! Ever since he came out, I have been really loving this whole stage. I kind of wish it could last longer than it does, but I know there’s different fun stuff to come soon too. It’s also very weird to think that one day before too long I won’t ever have a baby again (the working plan is to have one more). But for now I do have him, and it’s pretty great <3.

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