Labor

I have a baby. Nothing bad happened, I just got busy or lazy or overwhelmed or whatever you want to hear that excuses away why I haven't posted in forever. My baby was born in late February and he's perfect. Well, I think he's perfect. The labor part was pretty awesome considering what it entailed. I only had to endure 9 hours of actual labor and 30 minutes of actual pushing. He came out all gross and crying and he has all his fingers and toes and all that shit. While I wish I had reconsidered who was in the delivery room with me (at one point I opened my eyes and there were 10 student nurses staring at my vag,) I really wish I had known a few things about the delivery and postpartum. Here's a few that no one told me about: 

1.  Your milk doesn't come in right away. Considering how big my boobs were you'd have thought I could have fed an army directly after delivering. Not so much. Turns out, it takes a few days (sometimes a week) for real milk to get going. So I'm in the hospital pumping and trying to nurse every fucking hour while achieveing .1 ml of colostrum maybe 3 times a day. Yay for the nurse who finally offered donor milk. Also, yay for the badass women who donate milk to help babies like mine get a good start. My milk did come in, but on top of being totally sleep deprived and in crazy pain I added my milk production to the list of things I was panicked about. 

2.  More than just your vag will hurt. During active labor and pushing I ended up holding my own legs in some fucked up version of one giant, unending lat pull that left me with aching muscles for four days. Imagine maxing out a muscle group and multiply it by 100. That's what it was for me. I was sore as shit. 

3.  You leak. Out of your vag. For weeks. It's called lochia and it's awful. It's a mix of blood and uterine fluid. So yeah. Ooh, as a side note, the first time you pee after labor is a fucking train wreck. I'm grateful for the nurse who stood in front of me and squeezed water on my vag while I released what can only be described as bloody-acid-hellfire from my bladder an hour after my son was born. Holy shit.  

4.  Breastfeeding causes uterine contractions. So every time I pumped I got fucking cramps. That's cool, I didn't want to feel good physically or mentally anyway. 

5.  Men are useless. I don't mean that meanly. Okay, I mean that a little meanly. It's not entirely their fault though. Husband slept through many, many nighttime wakings while I wake up if that baby farts. My friend calls it the mother's curse. Husband also got sick when the baby was only 3 days old. I remember not having slept in 2 days, leaking fluids from my nethers, still crazy sore from labor, blisters on my fucking nipples from pumping and hearing my husband get upset and say "I'm sorry but I just don't feel good." I just wanted to punch him in the dick. But I was too sore to lift my arms. 

6.  Time moves both quickly and slowly. Every individual day with a new baby feels insanely long. Maybe because it's crazy work taking care of a human who can't even lift his own head. Maybe it's the panic that I won't be able to stop the crying or that I'll get covered in various baby fluids all day. (Spoiler alert, I get covered in various baby fluids all fucking day.) The start from sunrise to sunset can be agonizingly long. That being said, the time as a bulk unit flies by. I remember something came up in May that a friend reminded me about and I scoffed that the event was "months away." No, it was the next week, I just hadn't been present in the non-baby world and had no clue what day it was. I fucking blinked and my baby turned 4 months old. So yeah, having a baby makes for wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey. 

I'm looking forward to a day I can wake up and like the body I see in the mirror and not feel like moving to France just to escape the world. Until then, I do have a pretty rad little companion...who just pooped again. 

Braaaaaaiiiins

Pretty sure I just pregnancy--brained out and posted two Halloween recaps...I didn't remember posting the first one and I didn't think to check before writing another. Awesome. I'm going to leave them up as a reminder that I'm going insane.

Criers and Runners

Halloween is the BEST holiday. I start burning my pumpkin scented candles like the basic white girl I am starting in September, so by late October I'm in full Halloween mode. We also put up the biggest display in the neighborhood. We get tons of trick-or-treaters...and a surprising amount of drunk parents/adults who come by just to see everything. We go through bags of candy and see all kinds of awesome costumes. The badge of honor our display wears is given by all the little kids who either burst into tears both before and during an attempt to get to the front door and the ones who take off running. Every year is spent standing in the driveway holding the candy hoping not to miss giving treats to the ones who refuse to break the plane of the property. Some won't walk on the sidewalk in front of the house. Awesome. I love all the parts of Halloween. Pumpkin carving, costumes, scary movies and of course enough candy to ensure that I push the limits of gestational diabetes. (Which I was tested for and don't have!) I can't wait to be able to dress this kid up in all kinds of nerdtastic costumes and parade him around while teaching him to appreciate all the amazing decorations people put up. I'm already thinking about the cheesy family costumes we can do next year...Beetlejuice, Addams Family, classic movie monsters... I always suffer feeling a little down in the first week of November. Good thing I have this little dancer in my belly to keep me company and remind me that there's a lot more to look forward to in the next three months!

Halloween

I love Halloween. Every year the husband and I decorate the house and hand out candy. When I say we decorate the house, I mean we put up a HUGE display with animatronics and fog machines and skeltons everywhere. Kids and families come from all over to trick-or-treat and see what we've done new each year. This year we had an awesome set up, but I have to admit that it was really hard to be helpful and efficient at six months pregnant. The whole day was spent on my feet trying to be helpful in setting up, cleaning and then handing out candy to droves of kids until tear-down at 9:45pm. Usually I can survive Halloween on nothing but candy and pizza and take three Advil the next day to recover. Not so much when a second person wants to eat too and my body quits on me at 8pm and Advil is off the table. Lame. I feel like crap today. It feels like a terrible hangover without the fun of being crazy drunk the night before. On top of that, I skipped working out today in favor of trying to relax. The most I did was two laps around Target looking at more crap I didn't need to buy, but wanted. Bonus, I am super excited to dress my baby up next year in a variety of nerdy costumes and parade him around. Today though I'm just going to sit here and nurse my swollen cankles.

Well Intentioned Commentary

Im feeling a little terrible about any time in the past that I may have offered a pregnant friend any advice. I'm sure I'll make a post about the inappropriate questions and advice I get all the time in the near future. (Because my breasts seem like an open forum topic for strangers now that i have a bump.) But today I'm feeling irritated by the well-intentioned comments I've been receiving a LOT as of late. Example: Just today I was walking around the mall shopping for some clothes that will still fit me in a month, when a saleswoman that I have never seen before approached me, took in my whole look and said "you look tired." Well...thanks? The worst of it is that I thought I was looking pretty fly today. I had put on real pants (it's really tough to reject my sweatpants when they never struggle to get up over my thighs, butt or belly) and even a real bra and cute top. I was feeling pretty confident for about three seconds. Apparently to the outside world I did not look fly or composed or nice. Just...tired. I wanted to say "thanks! Perfect! Just the look I'm going for, exhausted!" Never mind that I actually AM tired. ALL THE TIME. I am spending energy physically creating another human being. I can't sleep well between the discomfort in my hips, bouts of insomnia, anxiety, random leg cramps and having to get up and pee several times a night. But gosh I'm glad this lady felt the need to point out that I'm looking beat down and fatigued. I wish I could say that this is the only time I've had a comment like that thrown at me, but it's not. The further along I get in the pregnancy, the moore people seem to find it acceptable and expect me to be gracious when they say something that no one would dream of saying to a woman who isn't lugging around a fetus. Even aquantances and friends are guilty of the well-intentioned comment. My personal favorite? "Wow, you really poppped. You're getting bigger and bigger!" Imagine if you said that to your female friend who wasn't preggers. Would you expect her to smile and nod and get excited? Would you ever have even said it? I'm horrified that people expect me to be elated about the idea of gaining weight, swelling, bloating, jeans no longer fitting, stretch marks and discomfort of having my organs squished around while someone literally kicks me from the inside while I'm down. Don't misunderstand. I'm excited for this baby. Every day I remember that this is a tiny version of my husband and myself mixed together who's going to rock my world and I can't wait to meet him. But the pregnancy itself, I could have skipped that for sure. It's a worthwhile struggle and I'm willing to rise to any occasion he throws at me, but I find it grating on my patience that people demand a positive reaction to their thoughtless comments. Every time someone gives a shitty comment I'm reminded that no matter how hard I tried that day to look good the first thing people feel the need to point out are the negatives. Yes, I know that my breasts got bigger. I'm the one struggling every day to contain them in a bra. I have had to buy new bras twice now. Running is already hard when I'm pumping double my blood volume, so add trying to strap down a huge rack on top of that and it's a nightmare. So you don't have to point them out. I am also aware that I may be waddling a little on occasion. I don't need to hear "ooh you're waddling already!" Yeah, I got it. Sometimes it's from hip pain and sometimes its from having crushed legs because I haven't stopped lifting even though I don't lift as heavy now. I know I can't stop the comments and it's not worth making my friends feel bad telling them how shitty they just made me feel by pointing out the obvious. Still, I can bitch about it here and tell the internets that it's annoying and crappy and I really want to punch people in the face when they do it. Then I can say "wow, that looks like it hurts...and you're bleeding." Just so they know, in case they didn't feel it happen.

The Day I Got Pregnant (or How I Learned to Accept the Complete and Utter Overhaul of my Entire Life)

When I was little, I never played with baby dolls. I never envisioned myself as a parent raising babies. In my teen and young adult years I never had a pregnancy scare. In my 20s, most of which I've spent married to possibly the greatest man alive, I never babysat my friends kids and dreamed of what it would be like. I've never strolled the baby aisles at Target and cooed over the little blankets and pacifiers. When invited to baby showers I bought kickass gifts and ate the food but abstained from the awful games and passing around of people babies. My maternal clock is on silent. Or broken. Or never set in the first place. The husband and I have traveled all over the place and spent countless nights playing video games until the wee hours. We both train in Brazillian Jiu Jitsu, run, rock climb and are generally active and social. I was chugging along thinking how we would be 80 years old doing just that, so imagine my surprise when the husband got baby fever. I would say my panic attack lasted no longer than 3 days. The very idea of giving up my lifestyle to cater to someone else was, no IS, terrifying. After a few weeks of contemplation and a few months of cleaning out the house I was pumped up for a potential life change. We could try to conceive. I'm 35, so I expected some challenge. I wish I had a picture of my face staring at the two pink lines after only one month. Are you fucking kidding me? What I expected was a year of trying and then settling on the fact that it just wasn't meant to happen. Surprise. Looking back I shouldn't be too shocked. I know how biology works, I had been taking vitamins and tracking my cycle. If the two pink lines weren't enough, the four other tests I took were a solid confirmation. Okay, so I guess that's happening. Looking back I don't regret my initial reactions. Any other way just wouldn't be me. Worlds okayest parent.