The US dollar is now worth ninety-seven Canadian cents.

Fuck.

Labels: emptor

i has had the peanut butter and nutella sandwich, and i is a geeenius.

sorry. the other day i left the room for a moment and when i came back dog no. 1 was on my table, drinking my coffee.

Labels: food

and you're stretching out more: when you came out, you were all froggedy, with your legs always tucked up and your arms doing this tight little chicken-wing thing to your chest. Sleeves are getting easier to put on, now, due to your stopping the i'm-so-small routine. It makes you look extra much longer, too, how long your legs are, where before we had to pull them out to get a measurement. You look huge! And you are growing out of the swaddle-thing. It doesn't fit around you hardly; the velcro almost doesn't catch. But this means that it's tighter around you, so it's harder for you to escape from. hee.

i'm nearly done healing. Or i think i'm done healing, but the doctors say it takes six weeks, so i think i will be slow and careful until then. The stitches have fallen out (i looked) and (TMI) i have a giant fucking scar, now, including little side scars for each of the stitches, and it was mediolateral (?) so i'm completely not symmetric. It took the side with the snip on it much longer to stop being swollen than the snip-less side. but now i can sit and stand and walk around and lie down and be okay. In the hospital you could tell who'd had an episiotomy and who hadn't by the way they winced when they sat. Also in the hospital, i learned that people make exactly the same sounds when in labor as they do when having sex. Seriously. The woman next to me kept screaming (in Spanish? Italian? something) oh god, oh god ...

Mom - that's nagymama to you - was in hungary for four days, and is back now, and says you've changed. You've almost started smiling, i think - you do it in your sleep, certainly, and you do it when you're awake too but i'm not sure if you mean it or not. Or maybe you just stare at me all day so whether or not you're smiling, i'm not so exciting, where you only get to stare at M when he gets home from work and wants to hold you for hours on end (which is really, really cute) and he's more special than me, which is fine, but he says you've smiled at him. And i think you smiled at me yesterday, but it might have been you being farty. Either way you are the most beautiful creature i have ever seen.

I think i have eluded postpartum depression. For now. At least. Possibly also elided it, or are the two mutually exclusive? And of course, today, when we have to go and get your social security card and passport and american birth-abroad certificate, it's pouring rain and nasty, and i have the mom-is-visiting-for-so-long it's-driving-me-fucking-insane crazies, i don't have the PPD. (She keeps buying food. And putting it in the fridge and in the cabinet. While she was gone we tried to eat it all, unsuccessfully, and now she is BACK and she brought bread and something in a chicken-labeled package with her already. Also i had a pen and a pair of scissors, and she moved them.) but i feel like a toon in a horror film: the PPD is hiding, sneaking around, lying in wait. Behind doors, under the bed, light glinting on its slimy graspy fingers. And i know, in an old building, a leaky faucet and a creaky floor are meaningless, but it is still real and scary even if there will be no two-dimensional hairy thing coming out from the television to mess with my head.

You like napping in the Ergo. With the newborn insert. Which works pretty damn well, and is fairly comfy for both M and i, and apparently perfectly comfy for you, too. we've been wearing it lots, me around town, and M at home - he likes playing warcraft with you in it. so you're in it now that we're just home from the embassy. Consulate. Anyway. Sleeping. You have the baby acne and the milk spots, and the little angelic look. and your mouth is a little lopsided at times - you suck on one side of your lower lip, but not the other. It's cute. And when i adjust you in the ergo you open one eye, slitted, like a lizard, just to see.

Your hair hasn't fallen out yet, which makes me wonder if it will. I think it would have started by now if it was going to. I have almost decided that your eyes are the color of old copper pennies - not really brown, and not necessarily green, but sometimes both at the same time.

And today we nursed in the American consulate. Screw the coverup blankets. Screw 'em. We can nurse anywhere.

Labels: baby, mamadom, milestones

and every surface is covered with burp cloths (i.e., the cloth diapers that are still too big for you, and a couple of towels). You have grown two centimetres and at least a pound. I am typing with one hand.

Me, i am continuing to heal. I think the stitches are all done healing, though (TMI) i haven't checked with a mirror recently. I can walk farther without getting swollen, though it still happens, at unpredictable intervals, and can still be less than comfortable to sit if i'm not careful. You, though, you're so floppy and boneless we could put you upside-down on pointy rocks and you'd snooze on through. If we could put you down, that is. Good thing our books all say it's impossible to spoil a baby, or to hold her too much.

we are doing a lot of laundry, M and me. A lot. Not only yours: because you spit up on us, and then we do grownup laundry, too. I had the perfect shirt, almost - i oughta patent this shit - coolmax, so i was not only relatively dry, but the milk didn't hang out in the air long enough to go sour. Perfect would have been a subtle desert camo so the stains wouldn't show, instead of black. But you spat up on it. Which may have been your way to communicate, change your smelly shirt, smelly mama. Cloth diapers are not as complicated as i thought. We have a large stash of ones i'm calling Stretchy Chinese Prefolds, and then some contouredy looking ones, and then some not-stretchy chinese prefolds - the stretchy ones are best, so far. If i do diaper laundry every two or three days i can keep us in the stretchy ones exclusively. Three nice diaper covers with snaps, which dry amazingly fast, plus an extra less-waterproof one with velcro, and three pocket diapers i haven't tried yet. I think the contoured ones might be for boys; they're everything inherited or used except the covers. But. Easier than i had thought.

Breastfeeding is going ... going, i guess. Not too bad. So far, so good. I have a crazy fast letdown and i don't think you like it too much, but we are learning. I need to remember at night to not be lazy, to get up and get a decent latch, and that'll be better for everybody. When you get a decent latch, you eat for longer, and then you sleep for longer. Case in point: last night you slept for at least three and a half hours. Nearly four, i think, though i can't really see the clock in there in the dark. But still. Hours on end. All in a row. Kick ass! I hope this trend continues.

I have pulled out the 0-3 month clothes, now, as well as the newborn. Some of the onesies you're too big for (note: Gerber "newborn" runs smaller than Carters "newborn"). And you are the cutest thing ever. Oddly, neither your daddy nor i looks good in yellow. you? Look perfect in yellow. (OK, and every other color known to man.) How did i do that?

you are starting to have the little pout i always associate with breastfed babies. I do not know if the litle pout actually has anything to do with breastfeeding, or if it is just the way some kids are shaped. But. This makes me happy. It makes me think i am being a good mom (that, and M telling me, liz, you're being a good mom).

They say you can tell who i am by my smell. Which seems plausible enough - you know who i am by something, anyway. You know who M is, too, but he hasn't got that somehow calming reek of old blood and gone milk. Lucky man.

Labels: baby, mamadom, milestones

I was not very much involved; I was a 9-year old kid in a small town near Budapest. There's a picture of my brother, T, and my cousin, M. They're paddling with this homemade oar on the Danube in an inner tube, a bucolic country life, as far as we could tell. There's another picture of me and T and the chickens. The adults did their best to protect the children. We just got kind of second, or third hand news.

I was nine, and we lived in Felsogod, north of Budapest, on the eastern bank of the Danube. Fifteen miles north of Budapest on a main highway. One day when I was going to school, instead of the usual haywagon or truck, I had to watch a hundred and twenty-five tanks go by. This was after the revolution.

During the revolution, a kid who always used to get into trouble was cheered on by all the teachers, and kids, as he climbed the obelisk memorial next to my school to the "Heroic Russian Army" that had "rescued us from fascism." He went up and tore down the red star.

The revoultion began on October 23rd. Everybody was all excited, and talking about stuff I didn't understand - I couldn't really get what was happening. I was a very protected child. I knew that there were a lot of family secrets I couldn't talk to people about, like when my friend's father asked me if we listened to Radio Free Europe I wasn't supposed to tell, or that I wasn't supposed to tell what my parents talked about after dark. One of my classmates' father always asked me when I was playing at their house whether my family listened to RFE; lying about it was an absolute rule for me, because my classmate's father seemed to be an informer. I had known other people who had disappeared, and I didn't want my parents or grandfather to disappear. This was just one of many family secrets we had to keep. Another was, what did my parents talk to each other about, after they turned out the lights? Or around the dinner table?

In Felsogod on the day of the revolution, I was home, and everyone was very excited, and the adults tried to keep all the kids, boys especially, at home. People were more open, more friendly, a lot more polite. I was living on the edge of a village, away from any media, so I only saw what was going on around me. After the revolution the trains werent running right, all the services were disrupted. My father couldn't get to work reliably, he was a lawyer, commuting to Budapest back and forth every day. IT didnt disturb him too much because theere were very few cases, in his cooperative there were thirty lawyers with fifteen desks and one secretary, so he coudln't do much for working in his office anyway. So he stayed home for part of that time. He would go and see if there was a train and wait a while, two or three hours, and if there was no train that day hed come home.

My grandfather came over every afternoon. I remember my grandfater listening to RAdio Free Europe with all the interference played over it, on the contraband Grundig radio that was buried during WWII, because having it would have been a death sentence. It was the only radio we knew of that pulled in Radio Free Europe. The signal wandered, and there was a lot of interference broadcast on the same frequency. It was mostly news with a very American slant, religious services. A lot of encouragement to the Hungarians to continue their valorous fight, that the West would be totally supportive. We were leafleted from the air that the west supports us, but there was never any material aid - I picked up multiple leaflets in my yard, that said the US specifically supported us, but there was never any material aid.

When the revolution appeared to be successful they threw out the hammer and sickle seal and put up the Kossuth seal - he was a hero of the 1848 revolution to become an independent, autonomous nation from Austria - in newspapers, in papers that were published. They were trying to establish a new constitution, to establish a new government, and so for a few days this Kossuth sign was used. IT was put on tanks that were captured. The symbol of the revolution was a Hungarian flag with the communist seal ripped out from the middle. So the reestablished flag had the hammer and sickle back in it afterwards.

Movement was even more restricted than usual - you weren't allowed to travel. That affected me when we were escaping to Austria in December, that you weren't allowed to go anywhere without a permit. Slowly I guess things went back the way they were, somewhat, but services were still not really regular. Even in December when we were starting to leave it was somewhat unusual to have a train in the morning. When they brought the wagonload of bread to the store they just distributed it, they didn't even bother to take money for it, but they couldnt come every day. It was kind of like a pall over everything, everyone was just sad. People began to leave, to try to get out of Hungary. So as far as i know about one out of ten people left.

I was not directly involved in the revolt; my brothers and cousins were. One of those days my cousin J was supposed to be going to school in Vacs, five miles up the road, by bicycle. He was sixteen or seventeen. And instead he went with his friend fifteen miles south to Budapest to look at the statue of Stalin that had been pulled down, since it was such a big symbol of the communists, to seeit for himself. Like when they pulled down the Saddam Hussein statue, it was something like that. Very reminiscent. They were trying to chip pieces off the bronze statue. They heard tanks rolling towards them on the cobblestones, and so they dropped thier books and ran for cover and the closest cover they could find was inside Stalin's head. The tanks came by spraying bullets, and when it was quiet J and his friend came out and their books were crushed. They managed to get a few small pieces of the statue and rode their bikes home, real fast. My mother had a piece of that statue and every time she got homesick, she took that piece out, to remind her of why she dragged our family out of Hungary, why she'd uprooted us.

My brother T was thirteen and one day he went to the bank to pretend to shoot at the tanks. Of course the russians wouldn't have known that he and my cousin didn't have real rifles. They pretended to have Molotov cocktails too. They were hidden in the tall grass by the side of the highway and the tanks didnt see them, that was all. In Budapest thirteen-year old boys were blowing up tanks, they could have been shot. The rest of the time, the adults just about tied my brothers to chairs. I can't remember L getting out, he was sixteen.

The revolution was successful for about a week. One Sunday morning at about 4 am. the Russian tanks came in past our place toward Budapest. There was lots of stuff on the radio about Imre Nagy trying to organize a government and appealing to Western countries to help us. I remember hearing Nagy on the radio, begging for help before we were beaten down again. The adults had been very hopeful and optimistic sounding.

After November 4th, after the tanks had come in, the mood became very subdued. One day my school started up again, November 7thish. This was the morning with the hundred and twenty-five tanks. There wasnt any school in between, during the revolution, with all the adults jubilant. School started up again afterwards. I remember feeling rooted to the ground, knowing the tanks were going to Budapest to shoot up my people. School was very humdrum and drudgy. Everyone looked like they were carrying tons of weight on their shoulders. The communist principal went around visiting every classroom, throwing his weight around. I guess he was telling us that things were going to be back to normal. I think my teacher cried that day - she looked like she was on the verge of tears the whole day. I can't remember the substance of school at all at that point. We had to start wearing scarves again - when we were inducted to the Pioneers, which was supposed to be an honor but was compulsory, they said the scarves, the red kerchiefs, were a part of the red flag, were as good as wearing a piece of the flag around our necks, and i didn't see why Hungarian kids had to wear part of the Soviet flag. We had to wear the kerchief every day, we'd been inducted to the Pioneers at the beginning of fourth grade, a month before the revolution. A very fat Russian officer gave a brief talk, reminding us that the red kerchief represented the world socialist brotherhood, which was realized in the USSR. If you didn't wear the scarf they'd send you to the principals' office and he'd switch you with whatever his nearest piece of equipment was - a ruler, a paddle, his belt, his shoe, whatever he had. He was a brute. They would slap you across the palm with a meter stick; the teachers could be quite physical. The Pioneers didn't have any activities but every month you had to buy a stupid stamp for your membership book. The membership book had some intersting stuff, like a Boy Scout book, but also a lot of Commnist crap. This was the year that my history book had sixty pages of text missing, starting in September, that they'd changed their version of history again and the first sixty pages were missing. There was a uniform set of textbooks across the country for every grade but they'd printed them before they decided what to teach, so they had every teacher rip out the first sixty pages. After the Revoultion they didn't rip any more pages but there were parts where teh teacher was supposed to say, well, that's not true. They denied having had kings in the past, you know, csars.

On the way to escape from Hungary in early December, after the revolution had been crushed, we first went to Budapest to say goodbye to my aunt's family. Trains were running randomly, whenever an engineer was available, when there were a lot of passengers. In Budapest, I saw a lot of buildings that had been severely damaged, there was rubble in the streets, and there was very little traffic. There was a curfew after dark, which was in midafternoon. My brother snuck out with my younger cousin to hunt for some chocolate; when they returned a good hour after dark, my aunt was hysterical... and then beat them soundly.

From Budapest we took a train to about 35 km from the Austrian border. There was a 30 km restricted zone all along the western border. In fact, people were not allowed to travel more than a few km from their home, and so for every stretch of the train ride, we had to memorize various alibis. We got off the train in the dark, and immediately we were grabbed and dragged away by people in trench coats. My mother was frantic; my father and older brother had gone off to look for lodging for the night. A few blocks from the train station, we were told that someone would go back to get my father and older brother. We were taken to a home, fed hot soup, and put into beds with clean sheets, while the family doubled up in a couple of the beds.

The lady with the trench coat was a nurse in the railroad workers' hospital. She arranged to get us on a special train in the morning. This train left at nine am, and before it entered the restricted zone, two freight "mail" cars were loaded with 60 people each, out in the country; as many more were turned away. At the next station, the passenger cars were removed. Mind you, that much mail was highly unusual; the wagon we were put in had a tractor for delivery. From then on, we had to be extra quiet. A playful little boy was given liquor to put him to sleep.

At every station, a railroad worker greeted the train from the platform, with his hat either on his head or in his hand; one of these gestures meant that there were AVO (secret police) or Russian soldiers near the train. In fact we did have one stop like that. At every stop, the door was slid open, and mail was taken out. At one stop the doors were opened very wide to remove the tractor; the 60 of us were huddled in the dark shadows at the ends of the car.

Finally the train stopped, and the engineer revved up the steam engine. On that brilliant December morning, this created a dense cloud around the train. Fifteen people were let out of the railway car, including the five of us. Once again, we were grabbed and dragged away by strangers; and in that thick cloud, my mother gripped me with an iron clasp in one hand, T with the other. She was frantic again, couln't see my father and L. We were led to a house, through a long strip of back yard. Finally my mother was reassured when she saw the guys coming, too. My father, ever an outdoorsman, offered to chop the wood outside the house, which belonged to an attractive young widow, but they urged him to go right in.

The house had three rooms: the fancy room, the kitchen, and the bedroom. We were in the bedroom, with only a thin lace curtain and a broken pane of glass concealing us. I heard hooves, and I heard the train pulling away. My mother shoved me behind her, to shield me. I tried to push her aside to see what was happening. When I could see, I saw a large horse wheeling in front of the window with a large uniformed man on it; the head was out of sight. As the horse wheeled, the sun glinted on his AK 47, and for one frozen instant, it pointed at me. The others later talked about people from the train, a second group that had gotten out before the train could get away; that group was led past our window. We heard that the train let the other people out in a field somewhere, and they were left to their own devices. We were 500 m from the border.

After dark, the village was searched. We could hear them coming nearer and nearer. They served us some soup, but no one could eat. The tension built, and finally the searchers came to our house, and we were about to give up. But then, for the next hour and a half, our hostess, the 30-something widow, entertained the officer in the fancy room, while the granny in our house ran in every ten minutes or so with her rolling pin all evening crying, "We're lost, we're lost!"; the railroad man that had joined us sent her back out to the kitchen each time. We had brought liquor with us to bribe guards... so the widow plied the officer with many drinks, and threatened never to see him again if he bothered her house. So in the end he and his party departed.

We were to leave as soon as the moon went behind clouds, or nine o'clock came. There was a clear sky when we set out at nine. Scouts from the village had gone across the border and come back; they had memorized an exact path through the minefields, which were re-laid every day. We were to follow silently, exactly where the three guides went, in a narrow line. If there were any flares or shooting, we were to flatten ourselves on the ground. We walked incredibly fast, at times silhouetted on the crest of the hill, our boots clomping on the frozen ground, the moon casting long shadows. In the end there were neither flares nor shooting; we just saw the silhuettes of the guard towers, Sometimes we walked through tall rows, mostly vineyards, that looked like corn in the dark. We heard a church nearby tolling ten o'clock, came through a gap in a sandy hill, and were in front of the church, which was all decorated for Christmas. We were in Austria. We were photographed with little numbered signs; we were about 879th across at that village that night.

From Vienna, we were able to send a coded message via Radio Free Europe; this is how our relatives learned that we had made it to the West safely. RFE was always talking about the United Nations. When I arrived in New York City, just in time for my tenth birthday, my uncle asked me what I wanted to see. I asked him to go to the United Nations, the only place I knew about in NYC. At the United Nations they were just debating "The Hungarian Situation..." I never saw my grandfather again.

Labels: drama, family

because now, i don't have to get a tattoo to commemorate this incredible thing that we have done. It already shows.

Labels: mamadom, reflection

via Feministing

Labels: media

the Belly Stump has fallen off! i am irrationally proud of this.

also i have made a discovery: the hell with rocking, you like to be scooted around backwards on office chairs.

Labels: mamadom

you're getting better at having your eyes point in the same direction. You can hold your head up long enough to switch sides if you are lying on your belly. You regularly sleep for three hours in a row, including at night, which is something of a miracle on its own. When you came out you had itty bitty chicken legs, wrinkly fingers, skinny arms. Now you have baby fat - you've put on nearly a pound already. (This is what demand feeding gets me.) You don't like the texture of the stroller, but will sleep in it happily if we put a blanket down first. You like sitting like a frog, legs folded up, on our chests, daddy's and mine. And you are so soft and snuggly.

In the hospital the nurses and midwives and lactation consultants and social workers all said you were beautiful. Other mamas, too. You still have to have vitamin D drops, though - i think we live too far north, now. They gave you a real bath and told us not to repeat it until your umbilical cord had fallen off - it's hanging on by just a few centimeters now instead of the whole black lumpy thing. So this may be soon. You didn't mind the bath terribly. The heel prick blood test, that, you minded. And the hearing test where you were supposed to be sleeping. We're still deciding what color your eyes are: in daylight they are slate blue. With lightbulbs they are brown. Fluorescents make them gray.

i'm still tired. Sore. Swollen. Bleeding. I have four stitches in a Very Sensitive Area from the episiotomy and the doctors say they expect them to dissolve and fall out at some point in your first month. Together we are learning breastfeeding, and i am sleeping on a towel. Not that that's enough to contain the twin fire-hose moons, but if we can do the sheets not quite every day, it's a little less laundry and a hell of a lot more room on the drying rack. I think the milk comes out too fast for you - you pull off and stick out your tongue and cough and i worry - but you can spend that much more time sleeping and growing, because clearly something is working like it's supposed to with you gaining weight like you are. There was another pediatrician checkup yesterday and he said you were very healthy, your lungs with the little milky cough, your dry peeling snake skin, your black blocky navel, and he'd see you at the end of a month, too. So our next checkups are on the same day.

I walked all over the eighteenth district yesterday to get you a birth certificate - ten languages, now, to say how real you are, but all European languages: German, French, English, Spanish, Greek, Italian, Dutch, two Scandinavian languages, and Czech. They called these "the ten world languages" in the magistrat's office. Again, "they" being full of shit: i thought this would include Russian, Chinese, Arabic. But we walked and walked, me with you in the stroller. We practiced breastfeeding in the magistrat's office - twice! - once in the hall downstairs and once upstairs in the waiting room. But today i am tired and procrastinating hitting the drugstore just two blocks away for more hand soap.

i'm being very careful about falling in love with you. I don't know why or quite how this is working. I am pointedly not expecting too much of myself, because i am afraid of postpartum depression, being isolated in a foreign country. I wait for M to come home and hand you off and take a long, hot shower, with the added benefits of you love your daddy and of being nice to the rocks of engorgement, though that's starting to pass, now. M went all googly-eyed over you immediately but to me you are still something of a mystery: how did I do that? In the hospital i had books, two decks of cards, electronic Sudoku, but instead i stared at you for hours. You slept. How did i do that?

Labels: baby, mamadom, milestones

October 2nd, 1:36 in the morning, 3.2 kilos/7 lbs, 52 cm/20.5", Erica Renee came into the world after fifty-odd hours of labor and some week and a half overdue......

Oy. So. Saturday morning, the 29th, i had contractions that were Different, being very regular and a bit painful, and i hopefully took the dogs for a good long walk, but they went away when we got back. Le sigh. Around 7:30 or 8:00 PM they started up again, which is where i'm counting from, and we went off to have proper Mexican food, which involved going on the streetcar and walking a pretty long way, again, and slowly, with many stops, and it was really good Mexican and spicy and the bean dip was absolutely delicious and the contrax went on all the way through. I took some Tylenol and tried to go to bed, but couldn't sleep. I started having bloody show (or blood, anyway) around eleven. By midnight the contrax were five minutes apart and lasting about fifty seconds; around two they were lasting a minute, and we obediently called a taxi and went to the hospital. The taxi driver was Turkish and very sweet and excited for us.

At the hospital they determined that i was a fingertip dilated and not terribly effaced, and said i could spend the night or go home and come back in the morning. Yeah, we live an hour from the hospital and i was starting to think that this was back labor - i stayed. By morning i was 2cm and pretty damn sure that this was back labor; i'd had about an hour and a half of sleep and had a cup of fennel tea and some yogurt for breakfast; they said it was good that i'd stayed, and that i'd have a baby that afternoon. Ha. I was on fetal monitors for twenty minutes every two or three hours throughout but didn't much feel like moving except to try and see if sitting up helped, if bending over helped, if this side helped, et c. Sitting was best at this point (and M was amazingly helpful and completely awesome). My legs kept shaking. Sunday afternoon i was still at 2cm and they gave me some homeopathic pessary to help with pain and, therefore, help me relax - lavender and something else, prostaglandins, maybe. Sunday evening i had an enema (which was unpleasant) and a shower (which was pleasant) followed by cervical massage (which was also not pleasant), but was still at 2cm. I can't remember if i ate anything else, but M said i didn't eat for two days, and i tend to believe him. Around ten p.m. they gave me an injection combo of nabufin and prepetil, neither of which i can spell, to help me sleep and speed cervical ripening, respectively. I slept for about two hours. Monday morning i think i had a banana and some more fennel tea, and was found to be at 3cm and they gave me little round white homeopathic pills to take five of every fifteen minutes: Caulophyllum thalactroides and Gelsemium sempervirens. M copied the names off the bottle. Monday afternoon i had another enema (still unpleasant) and a bath (which didn't help with the pain in the slightest, and was very disappointing) and more lavender suppositories to help with pain and another sleeping-and-cervix injection, but i couldn't sleep. I was loopy and out of it (the nabufin (sp.) was something like morphine), but still very much having very fucking painful back labor, and not sleeping. I was starting to be not able to breathe through things any more and started saying things like "i can't" and "i am pretty sure i am going to want an epidural later." I was on my side in bed most of the time and would get up and try to walk every so often. Sitting started to be worse than laying down. At some point i threw up. We think my water broke with the enema or bath because it wasn't there later, but we hadn't noticed anything new. Monday evening - after the hospital dinner time, which was around 5:30, but hell if i could eat - i was finally at 5 cm and went to the delivery room, which was lovely because i could have an epidural.

So i had the epidural. After they pumped in a liter of saline, at about 6cm, but whatever. Two days of back labor was enough of a natural childbirth for me. It wasn't quite a walking epidural - my right leg I wouldn't have trusted with my weight on it, and they were both still shaking - but I could move on the bed pretty well. The midwife we had on duty was cool and funny and spoke better English than she would admit to if you asked. The epidural was delicious. The pain was almost gone - just almost, and I pushed the button for more relief twice - but I could still feel contrax. Three contractions after it went in, i fell asleep, and essentially slept through transition - the midwife would come in and check how dilated i was every so often, but oh, it was wonderful to sleep. I need to find the patron saint of anaesthesiologists and thank her profusely. The midwife was able to rotate the baby's head into a better position so i didn't need to push the extra-epidural button any more. At about eight (i think) they started me on some form of pitocin, coupled with a belladonna pessary to finish the cervix. At eleven forty-five i was ten centimeters dilated. I don't know if there is a different standard in the States, but here they start a two hour timer when they tell you it's okay to push. An actual, ticking, timer, that you can hear. The baby was slow to descend. The midwife brought in the doctor on duty, who upped the pitocin. I'd met the doctor before. They said i was pushing the right way - it was hard for me to tell with the epidural - but even so, with half an hour to go on the timer, they wanted the baby out. And the doctor came back, and a nurse, and a pediatrician too, so with M and the midwife it was fairly dense. They decided on a vacuum and episiotomy - and with the fetal monitor going, i wasn't about to say no. The midwife did the episotomy and i don't know why but it made me feel a lot better that it was a woman doing it. I saw them holding the scissors and looked away - i couldn't feel it, i couldn't hear it, i could hear the doctor saying things like "maybe angle it a little more" in German. And then they went in with the vaccuum, and I pushed, and they pulled, and the nurse pushed on the top of my belly, too, and the baby finally came out. The cord was wrapped around her neck just once, but it was long. It looked like a plastic-covered bicycle lock. It - and she - were a little purple. It was Tuesday morning.

They put her straight on my chest while the pediatrician suctioned out her lungs. We were a bloody pair. M and i dried her off and put her in a slightly cleaner towel; she nuzzled at my breast and latched on a bit while we waited for the placenta. They took her away for measurements and clothes after the placenta came out and M held her while they stitched me back up. We got to breastfeed and gape at each other in the delivery room for maybe another two hours before Erica and I went upstairs to go to sleep and M went home - there'd been a mini-boom that night and all the private rooms were already filled. We both got this crazy adrenaline high - after being exhausted, after all that long, but the tired went away for an hour or two at the sheer blinding miracle of it. And then the tired came back, and we slept, Erica and I upstairs in the hospital, and M at home.

And she's here. And she's perfect. And i can't quite believe, yet, that she's mine and I get to keep her. She takes my breath away.

Oh! And, there are pictures.

Labels: baby, drama, family, health, mamadom, people, reflection, writing

I'm just an idiot, sorry.
matt

At 50+ hrs of labor, Eirca Erica Renee Watson was born Oct 2nd at 1:32 am. 3.6 kg and 52 cm long (about 7.5 lbs and 20.8 in). Liz and the baby are doing fine. Pictures and more details soon.
matt...

*not very factual on motorcycles either

:anmut: :annika: :chin: :dooce: :ewok mama: :food: :little frog school: :lj: :longform: :low odysseys: :natalya: :rich: :salon: :slate: :this is how: :unique yn:



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