running update part deux

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Marie

So I was starting to feel like a major badass this week after going to the gym and run/walking on the treadmill for two days in a row. (Doctor cleared me to run, just told me not to do anything stupid. I’m so glad he didn’t tell me to listen to my body.)

Then last night, as I lay snoozing with the baby in the recliner and watching the 49ers/Giants game, I started feeling ominously chilly. I sat there contemplating, not wanting to miss the end of the game, and REALLY not wanting to wake the baby. It didn’t take long before my entire body began to ache and I was visibly shivering. I climbed out of the chair -queue: baby scream- and teetered to the hall closet to dig out the thermometer. 100.4, and the evening continued in a downward spiral from there: I missed OT and royally pissed off the baby. She thought it would be the perfect time to play the game where she falls asleep with the pacifier in her mouth, spits it out, and then wakes up and screams until you put it back in there. Repeat 50x.

I finally brought her in bed with me (BAD MOM!) and made her a nest out of the Snoogle so I could at least lay down while we played the pacifier game. In three shirts, flannel pants and a heating pad shoved up against my back, I finally fell asleep (and so did she). When I woke up a few hours later, the fever was gone and I felt perfectly fine. So weird.

Now that you’re up to speed, let’s talk about the running, shall we?

Pale, fat and optimistic, I doubled up on the sports bras Saturday and went to the gym for the first time in more than six weeks. My running shorts “fit” me again, but they look a little obscene, plus my incision is still tender, so I opted for the maternity crops. BIG mistake. (Julia Roberts: “HUGE!”) I kept having to hitch them up to keep my unsightly belly from hanging out.

I  did a 2:2 run/walk for two miles and managed a 10:00-11:00 pace (mostly closer to 11s, if we’re being honest) on the running end. Then I walked another mile. It all felt pretty gnarly and awkward, but really not as bad as I thought. Oh, except my right boob started leaking milk halfway through. Luckily my shirt was black and it wasn’t too noticeable.

Sunday, I ran for 15 minutes without stopping at about a 10:40 pace. It still felt kind of awkward, but I’m not sore today at all, which I think is really promising. (Yeah, I did come down with that four-hour mystery fever, but at least my crotch doesn’t hurt!)

So anyway, obviously my immune system is weak from the lack of sleep and I probably need to ease it up a notch. Thankfully, Kenzie slept straight through until almost 5 a.m. this morning -a MAJOR milestone- and I got some decent sleep.

Right now, I’m wearing her in the Moby wrap and she’s out cold! So goddamn cute.

Posted in Life, Running | Tagged | 16 Comments

boozing with baby

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Marie

Friday night. As if we were posing for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, we cozied up next to a roaring fire while a gentle snow fell on our fair city, and proceeded to tie one on. Naturally, I thought this would make for a lovely blog post.

The boozing part. Not the gentle snow by a cozy fire part. Duh.

 

I broke out one of my coveted Dogfish Heads, a new mom gift from this guy. (Last year, DFH rudely pulled out of Indiana, much like your college boyfriend with the backwards hat and tribal armband pulled out and came all over your lower back tattoo.)

It occurred to me that drinking a beer is a hell of a lot more complicated than it used to be. Whereas once, I could just crack one open any time, day or night, now partaking of the good shit requires a little more foresight. But it’s worth it. And if you found this blog because you’re pregnant or someday plan to become pregnant, this is the most important blog post you will ever read. For everyone else: send me hatemail about how my blog sucks now.

Tips for safe boozing when you have a cuddly baby friend…

  • Plan ahead and store some milk. I have enough milk stored in my freezer to go on a two-day bender, give or take. (I also use this approach with my morning coffee!)
  • Benders are fun, but you might want to just start with one drink until you get the hang of it. If you have just one, your delicious milk is pretty much good to go after a couple-three hours. Two drinks, you’re looking at six hours. (And if you’re a fatty fat fat like me, it could take upward of eight hours.) Also keep in mind “one drink” does not mean any one drink. If you’re drinking a 12% ABV Palo Santo Marron, allow extra time accordingly.
  • At some point along your excellent journey of motherhood, you will hear the expression “pump and dump.” But it’s not as simple as just drinking your booze and then promptly pumping out the “contaminated” milk and dumping it. Since the alcohol isn’t stored in your milk, you could pump too early and the alcohol would still be making its way through your system. Or you could pump too late and throw out perfectly good milk. Really, you just need to wait until the booze has run it’s course. Pumping and dumping is only necessary to hold off that nasty engorgement troll that comes out every four hours or so.
  • Fail-safe: the alcohol test strip. My husband talked me out of adding these to our gift registry but I still think they are a brilliant idea.
  • Beware the cluster feed. Just when you think it’s safe to get tanked, your baby is going to have a growth spurt and demand to be fed every 45 minutes, and there goes your night.
  • Contrary to popular belief, there’s no hard evidence that beer stimulates lactation. (What does stimulate lactation is being at the grocery store in a light-colored shirt. Apparently.) But, I personally can offer anecdotal evidence that beer makes moms happy and happy moms make more milk.
  • Use the buddy system. Friday, my husband was the DP, or Designated Parent. For the first few months of your child’s life, probably at least one of you should be sober at all times. When your kid can hold her head up by herself, she’s on her own.

 

We're not there yet.

Note: I didn’t source any of this shit because I don’t care if you think I’m credible or not. This isn’t that kind of blog. But if you must know, I got a lot of information from the American Academy of Pediatrics New Mother’s Guide to Breastfeeding, as well as some tidbits from BabyCenter.com. Also, I made a lot of it up. 

Posted in beer, Life, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 25 Comments

every day I’m jigglin’

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Marie

So how’s that running going? The short answer: It’s still not. I see my doctor again Friday, when he will, with hope, clear me to do ACTIVITIES. (Please visualize the word “activities” in 148-point Myspace-esque animated glitter text.) Until then, I’m stuck walking.

But today I cheated, a little bit. I’ve been feeling really good on my daily walks, so I decided to see what a nice, slow jog would feel like. (I mean REALLY slow. Probably slower than most of you walk.) I jogged for about a minute for every five or six minutes of walking and it felt…dare I say…good?

I didn’t feel any of that disjointedness many postpartum runners complain of. My incision didn’t rip open. No massive hemorrhaging of golfball-sized blood clots. My crotch is a little sore, but not nearly as bad as it was when I was nine months pregnant. But again, what I did could barely even be called jogging.

There was a lot of bouncing, though. If I’m going to be a runner again, I’m going to need a serious overhaul in the sports bra department. Perhaps something in a stainless steel. My jugs are even bigger now than they were when I was pregnant (I swear to god they’re like double-Z’s) and my biggest, most supportive sports bra is still no match for them. (Oh, and the next girl who tells me “you’re so lucky, I’d LOVE to have big boobs!” is getting stabbed in the face.) Also, my fupa. It felt like there was a third boob bouncing around down there. Disgusting.

And, I’ve completely lost my tolerance for winter weather. It was breezy and cloudy today and in the mid-40s. Pretty spectacular for January. I was wearing insulated running pants, a long-sleeve top, sweatshirt, hat and gloves. Just when I was beginning to feel minorly badass for just being outdoors, I see a girl running in a tech shirt and shorts and realized that’s what I used to wear in January back before motherhood made me into a gigantic pussy.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I was going to complain, except that really, all things considered, a tiny bit of illegal jogging felt pretty damn good. I can’t wait to do it again for real.

I also can’t wait to take the snuggle muffin out with me in the jogging stroller and teach her how to blow snot rockets.

Posted in Life, Running, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 23 Comments

28 days later…

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Marie

What’s up, internet? My baby friend is a month old! Eight balls for everyone! (No really, who’s buying?)

So yeah, I no longer sleep, I wear nothing but sweat pants and I haven’t touched a comb or a hair dryer in more than a month. Ah, motherhood.

We’re starting to get used to the idea that we have this tiny baby and that by some catastrophic failure of the system, we were allowed to bring her home with us and care for her. We are falling into a routine, getting A LITTLE more sleep and starting to actually feel like competent parents. She’s really bulking up and starting to act more like a human, so I’m less scared I’ll somehow inadvertently kill her. (Although I have had to reconcile my fear of the soft spot with this bizarre urge to jam my finger in it and push…I’m KIDDING.)

No, but yeah: all those wretched clichés people say about babies? All true. She’s amazing, funny, beautiful and I love her so much it hurts. I’ve become such a sap.

Stolen hospital blanket. (Tip to pregnant bitches: steal everything from the hospital that's not bolted down.)

I’ve also done the unthinkable and turned into a smug bitch. I can’t stop myself from visiting all the pregnancy blogs I read and sharing the vast knowledge I’ve acquired during my four weeks of motherhood. I’m aware of this as it’s happening, but like a bad dream, I am helpless to make it stop.

I could go on and on, but I’ll spare you. But not really. Here are some more highlights…

Milk: is flowing like wine. But now I completely understand why so many people give up on breastfeeding within the first few weeks. It kind of sucks. In the hospital when I first started feeding her, she latched on right away and we thought everything was fine, but she lost too much weight (10% of her body weight) and they almost kept us an extra day. (Apparently you have to make sure they’re actually SWALLOWING the milk and not just happily gnawing away at your boob while they starve to death. Crazy, right?) Luckily, her weight shot up that following week, but it was really frustrating and nerve-wracking for a while. (She also tore my nipples to shreds.) But now, I am a milk fucking MASHEEN and have pumped enough to have an impressive arsenal in the fridge and freezer. (Which means I can have a beer now and then! Which I may or may not be having right now.)

Here’s a look at a typical feeding schedule:

AM and PM are irrelevant to my life now.

You’d think I could remember the last time I fed her without having to write it down. Yeah, wrong. Which brings us to…

Sleep: is happening more often. She currently goes 3-4 hours between feedings, which allows me to get some sleep at night. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s made a HUGE difference in my mental state.

I saw every hour on the clock for the first few weeks. I was starting to hallucinate, seeing shadows and junk darting around in my peripheral vision. It was like being on meth, but without the perks. I’d wake up and think the baby was in bed with me. This also happened to my husband a few times: we’d be in this delirious, semi-conscious state, stroking a blanket or cradling a pillow. It would have been funny had it not been so pathetic.

The actual baby: is so, so good. Aside from a nasty case of cradle cap whole body and a blocked tear duct, she is healthy, good-looking and well on her way to fame, adoration and popularity among the huddled masses of less attractive babies.

Things could change, but as of now, we are amazed by how easy and predictable she’s been. She hardly ever cries. She does get fussy and gassy, but she hasn’t had any of those psychotic screaming episodes you often hear about, and for that I am thankful as fuck. At worst, she’ll just go “eh! eh! eh!” for a couple hours and then zonk out. I can totally handle that.

We had planned for her to sleep in our room (the smug, all-knowing Academy of Pediatrics recommend babies room in with you for the first three months), but she hated the Pack N Play and she fussed and whined every time we put her in there. Which is a shame because my parents even bought us this nifty tent to keep the cats out of it:

Cruel and unusual.

So for a while, I slept in the glider in her room while she slept in the crib. (Tip to pregnant bitches: Don’t go cheap on the chair. Even if you have to get your crib out of a Dumpster, buy an obscenely expensive, cushiony, fluffy chair and a matching ottoman. Trust me, it’s worth it.) Now I sleep in my bed and she sleeps in hers and we keep the baby monitor on full blast so I can hear every little gurgle and murmur. I still wish she were in the room with us, but this seems to be working, so I’m not going to try to mess it up. When it’s 3 a.m. and you’re desperate, you’re more willing to break the “rules.” I’d hang her upside down by her toes if she liked it enough to go to sleep.

PAAAAAAAAAAAAANK

Beer: is slowing making it’s way back into my life. The last beer I had before I got knocked up was Pepe Nero, March 20, 2011. 284 days later on December 29 (don’t do the math), I broke my streak with a Three Floyd’s Pride and Joy, and was ridiculously close to being drunk when I finished it.

OH. OH. OHHHHH.

AND AND AND the other night, one of my SUPER AWESOME FRIENDS came over with a Sun King Johan the Barleywine and shared it with me (so I only got half drunk). Also I have four Dogfish Heads in my fridge that I’m saving for a special occasion…or what I like to call “Tuesday.”

So, life is pretty much back to normal.

…

Are you still reading this? Wow. Thanks to those four or five or you who stuck it out! I wish I had a reward for you. All I have is a promise that I’m not going to do these long, drawn out baby updates more than once a month (or even that because let’s face it, I’ve never been able to follow through with any other commitments I’ve made on this blog). And I also promise to keep blogging about beer and (some day) running, sharing witty observations and clever anecdotes and writing mean things about people who I think are stupid, because that’s really the lifeblood of this site. Thanks for reading, you guys. We just might live the good life yet.

Posted in beer, Life, Running, tv | Tagged , , , | 38 Comments

take apart your bones and put ‘em back together

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Marie

So this c-section thingy marks the first time in my life I’ve ever had any surgery beyond your everyday tonsillectomy or wisdom tooth extraction, and it turns out I don’t have the patience or the common sense to allow my body to properly heal.

I did a lot of reading about c-sections and received guidance from my doctor, so I do understand on some level that recovery time is going to be 6-8 weeks, but I was still surprised and pissed off when, after three weeks, activities like sitting down, standing up, getting out of bed, getting into bed, rolling over in bed, bending over, holding the baby, picking up the baby, carrying the baby, showering and walking were still causing pangs of agony deep inside my gut.

Somehow I thought I’d pop Percocets for a few days and then be as right as rain. I even called my doctor last week and asked if it was normal to still be hurting. He was very nice to me but probably laughed his ass off after hanging up. Um, you had a HOLE cut through you skin and uterus and then a baby got pulled out of there.

And in spite of all my efforts to delay recovery, I’m also ironically paranoid about getting some kind of infection and dying. Every day I anxiously examine the incision, expecting to see the telltale signs: angry red lines, weepage, the stench of death.

I selflessly relinquished my body to the growth of the kid for 10 months, and now it just seems unfair that I should be expected to wait two MORE months to let the incision heal. Today: A routine trip to the grocery store exhausted me. We had a few days of snow and tornado-force (ish) winds, and I was really looking forward to finally getting out in the cold sunshine and going for a short walk. (Like, really short. Fifteen minutes, tops.) But when I got home from the store I decided that was exercise enough for one day. I’ll try again tomorrow.

I want to do planks, goddamn it. I want to lift something heavier than 10 pounds. I want to run until I puke. I’m sick of waiting, and I’m sick of feeling like an invalid.

Oh, and I’m also sick of my blog SUCKING. (Like, more than usual.) I feel like when I’m able to start running again, I’ll have some new thoughts to share and maybe my brain won’t be quite so mushy anymore. But, no promises.

Posted in Life, music, Running, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 20 Comments

burning questions you aren’t asking

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Marie

There are probably three main questions on everyone’s mind that I haven’t yet addressed on this blog, namely:

1. How are Marie’s cats adjusting to the new baby?

They’re coping. They spent several days with my parents and mother-in-law in the house while we were at the hospital, so they were already somewhat neurotic (rather, more neurotic than normal) by the time we returned home. Skylar whined a lot in her tiny little pipsqueak whine. Wrigley just sat in a corner and stared with giant black pupils. But once they were permitted to sniff the baby and determine she did not pose a threat to either Wrigley’s Alpha status or Skylar’s perceived Alpha status, they came around. Now, they are back to their usual spoiled-rotten selves and pretty much disregard the baby unless she is screaming, in which case Wrigley leaves the room and Skylar cocks her head to one side and asks, “mow?”

2. Why the hell did Marie, such a smart, attractive and talented blogger, have to go and ruin her blog by having a baby?

That’s a tough one. In my opinion, all the conventional reasons people give for wanting to spawn are stupid: I want to leave my legacy; I want to make a cuddly baby friend to play with; I want to experience the miracle of life; my cats don’t really appreciate me; it’s God’s plan; the Devil needs an heir. Instead of trying to come up with some noble reason for wanting kids, we’re better off admitting it really just boils down to 100 million years of primal fucking instinct. (LITERALLY!) Something in my brain wanted me to make a baby, and it was useless to resist. Also, she is really cuddly and cute and fun to play with. Or, I’m told she will someday be fun to play with. Right now she just kind of stares at me and screws up her face whenever I kiss her.

3. If it weren’t for the Chicago Bulls, would anyone still remember the Alan Parsons Project?

No.

Posted in blogging, Life, music | Tagged , , | 11 Comments

predictable curmudgeony NYE post

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Marie

The way I see it, there are several possible routes you can go when writing an end-of-year blog post.

  • You can reflect on the past year of your life as an excuse to re-post all your favorite and most flattering photos of yourself.
  • You can demonstrate how mature and sophisticated you are, sharing details of a classy and intimate dinner with your most grownup friends, not failing to mention how you drank one glass of wine, only a sip of champagne and closed out the night with a snugglefest on the sofa with your hubby.
  • You can post about your 2011 blog stats, using that helpful email WordPress sent you about an hour ago.
  • Inasmuch as you are above such arbitrary celebrations, you can whine about how much 2011 sucked and try to make everyone else feel like an asshole for having a good time.
  • You can do a this year/last year comparison, allowing you to post more gratuitous photos of your new baby friend.

Guess which one I chose.

Last New Year’s Eve…

This New Year’s Eve…

Happy New Year, bitches.

Posted in blogging, Life | Tagged , | 11 Comments

on my newly acquired fupa

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Marie

So when you have a baby, you come home from the hospital with a big vacancy formerly occupied by said baby. You probably haven’t worked out in several days or weeks or months, and your ab muscles have separated; basically the tone and definition or your torso does not exist anymore. These factors create the perfect conditions for a fupa.

I have already lost 30 pounds in the three weeks since giving birth (and I don’t even have AIDS, hooray!), but there is still a very pronounced fupal protuberance that I would like to be rid of. (Sidenote: you don’t know how awesome it is to step on the scale and find you’re still losing weight after eating like John Goodman all day long.)

Let’s explore…

Exhibit A: my honeymoon.

Also I had a tan this one time.

I feel obligated to note this photo was taken in 2005, right after I had conveniently stumbled upon a cache of illegal Mexican diet pills (hey, don’t knock ‘em until you’ve tried ‘em), and I haven’t been that skinny since. Also, the Caribbean (honestly, Red Stripe and rum) causes you to wear things you would not normally wear in real life.

And here’s me now:

Dramatization.

Don’t you love my little pink purse? I put my weed in there. No, but did you really think I was going to put MY fupa on the internet? This isn’t that kind of blog.

I haven’t been cleared by my doctor to do anything other than light low-impact activities like walking and ellipticalling (sp?), but rest assured, as soon as he says the word, I’m going to be a sit-up doing motherfucker, motherfucker.

What other exercises are good for fupas?

Posted in fitness, Life | Tagged | 30 Comments

my amazingly epic journey of childbirth, parts I – X

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Marie

I’ve been working on this post for a week. It just seems stupid to use my free time to blog when I haven’t gotten four consecutive hours of sleep in two weeks. I’ll say it again: I don’t know how you mom bloggers do it. Anyway, this was supposed to be a relatively brief and light-hearted “birth story digest,” but it somehow turned into the Moby Dick of birth stories. So I did some trimming. I didn’t think you guys would mind.

Part I

Midnight, December 11. After watching a dismal 30 minutes of SNL (Dear Katy Perry: just…no), we turned out the lights and went to sleep. I dreamed my water was breaking and I woke up at 12:30, soaking wet. (waterproof mattress pad = success!) My husband called our doctor’s after-hours line and he told us to head to the hospital. When I got there, they confirmed the rupture, “checked” me (a procedure that sounds simple but actually hurts like bloody hell), did some monitoring and put me in a totally dope LDRP room that would be our home for the next three and a half days. I still hadn’t had any contractions so they induced labor around 2 a.m. (Sidenote: If you ever have kids, you should really try to go into labor after a solid night’s sleep. Losing a whole night before we even got started ended up sucking balls, but I’ll get to that.)

Part II

Contractions started quickly and forcefully. I’m told pitocin makes them harsher, as did the lack of amniotic fluid, which would have provided some cushioning. This is the part where I try to convince you that my contractions were worse than anyone else’s in the history of childbirth. I KNEW labor was going to be unpleasant, but nothing could have prepared me for this special kind of agony. My friend Jill said it’s like your worst period cramps ever, times 10, with knives. It felt like a red hot ball of pain radiating out from my gut. The next seven hours is a blur. I mostly spent the time doubled over the bed, a chair or a birthing ball, breathing out curses in a tight whisper. The contractions quickly went from 2-3 minutes apart to what seemed like one long, endless contraction with barely a pause in between. I’d start to stand up, and be racked with another one almost instantly. My husband, just as sleep-deprived, rubbed my shoulders, pushed on my back, held my hand, breathed with me. My parents were at the hospital too but made themselves scarce: my mom checked in every once in a while, cringed and fled the room; my dad wisely stayed in the waiting room and read a book. (I think he read about 11 during the course of their visit.)

Part III

9 a.m. This is the part where I tell you how I finally couldn’t take it anymore and conceded to the epidural. If there was any hope the contractions weren’t going to get worse, I might have hung in there a while longer, but it was still early. I was in tears and nearly passing out from exhaustion despite the pain. When I came into the hospital, I was at 1 cm and 0% effaced; after seven hours of contractions I was at 4 and 90%, which they said was fantastic progress. When my nurse went over the options with me, she said I could have narcotics by IV, which would last anywhere from 30 minutes to four hours OR might not work at all; or an epidural, which would last indefinitely and totally eliminate all the pain. I decided not to fuck around: I went for the epidural, and let me tell you, it was fanfuckingtastic. They warned me it would hurt, and it was definitely hard to sit still during the procedure while I was still in agony, but the sting of the needle was a walk in the park compared to the contractions. Thirty minutes later, I was in bed, blissfully unaware of my ever-stronger contractions and clapping myself on the back for making such a wise move.

Epidurals: rewarding smart people since 1942

Part IV

This is the part where everything started to go downhill. I couldn’t feel the contractions anymore, but the monitor showed every time I had one, the baby’s heart rate dropped. After a couple of alerts, they gave me oxygen and stopped the pitocin drip. I also got an amnio-infusion to replenish the fluid I’d lost when my water broke. The nurse gave me a pep talk that began, “I’m going to be honest with you…”

Part V

3:30 p.m. A major blow to my fragile, sleep-deprived psyche when my doctor tells me I have made virtually NO progress since the epidural (seven hours earlier) and I’m still at 4 cm. He believes her head is tilted, and the contractions aren’t pushing her down in the way that promotes dilation/effacement. Since we’re going on 16 hours from the water breaking, there’s a risk of infection and he recommends a c-section. The upside: labor is over. The downside: I’m about to have a big hole cut in me. I realize at some point in this monologue I’ve slipped into the present tense….

Part VI

This is the part where I try to forget I am utterly fucking terrified. They wheel me into the OR and start prepping me for surgery. A Brazilian wax joke gets me a few laughs. They pump me up with another epidural that paralyzes me from the chest down. (Sidenote: my anesthesiologist was this loudmouth Kathy Bates type and I absolutely adored her.) It’s sort of funny to watch my legs flop around like they belong to someone else.

Part VII

I stare at the ceiling while my doctor cuts me open. My husband watches over the dividing sheet in rapt fascination. Every few seconds he tears his gaze away from the carnage and gives me an encouraging nod. It only takes a few minutes, and doesn’t hurt in the least, but I feel tremendous pressure as my innards are not very delicately shoved around and they pull out my kid. They whisk her across the room where a gaggle of nurses is waiting. Ten long seconds go by before we hear her start to cry. The whole day suddenly catches up with me and I begin to sob uncontrollably. My doctor tells me to hold still because he’s still all up in my junk.

Gooey babies are only cute if they're your own. That being said, LOOK AT MY ADORABLE GOOEY PRINCESS BABY.

Part VIII

This is the part where I tell you how it took them 20 goddamn minutes to stitch me up and my husband is the first one to hold the baby. When they’re done toweling her off or whatever it is they do after a baby is born, he is allowed to bring her over and hold her near my head so I can see her. I sort of kiss/slobber all over her face, still blubbering and sobbing, and now shivering uncontrollably from the anesthesia.

Panda warmer is brought to you by Japan.

Part IX

Freshly injected with morphine for the pain that will come when the epidural wears off, I am wheeled back to my room with my freshly extracted kid tucked into my arms. (Don’t worry, they made her a little nest by cramming a couple of pillows between her and the edge because, safety first!) Someone forgets to tell me I’ve just had major surgery and I try to go traipsing around like I haven’t just had major surgery.

Part X

Sixteen hours later, the morphine wears off and I am in a world of hurt. Whoever said a c-section is “easier” than traditional childbirth can smile and blow me. (“Smile and blow me” is still a thing, right?) On top of that, I’m still having pretty fierce contractions every time I breastfeed, something else nobody told me. They’re almost as bad as the contractions I had during labor, and I let the nurses feed me Percocet and Naproxen after confirming half a dozen times that it won’t hurt the baby.

Afterbirth

This is the part where I reflect. It seems to me that in my case, pitocin –> epidural –> c-section. I’m told the epidural is not what halted my progress, but it seems an incredible coincidence given the timing. That said, do I regret having it? Fuck no. I was in agony and would have agreed to birth the baby rectally if that’s what it took to ease the pain. I think what really screwed me was the water breaking so early and the contractions not starting on their own. I could have refused to go to the hospital until contractions started, assuming they would have started eventually (thus perhaps avoiding pitocin and perhaps avoiding the epidural), but I’m not a doctor and I have no business playing those odds. Yeah, it would have been neat to watch her come out, but in the end, we got our baby friend, so I’m happy, and I think she’s happy too. Or sharting. It’s hard to tell.

Pffft.

Posted in Life | Tagged , | 44 Comments

please stand by: new baby edition

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Marie

It’s 4 a.m., I have a dual breast pump strapped to my juggies, and I’m trying to think of something prolific to say about childbirth and simultaneously seeing to a troll-type who is earnestly replying to every comment on a couple of my old posts. I don’t know how you mom bloggers do it.

This announcement is a week late so it’s probably rather anticlimactic (and also shallow and pedantic), but I did want to share the news of our new baby friend and obviously, wallow in my glory a bit…

Kenzie Ryan made her grand entrance December 11 at 4:17 p.m. She was a teency 6 pounds 12 ounces, 21 inches long, and cone-headed. I’m currently working on the birth recap to end all birth recaps, but since I can only manage to type about one sentence at a time, you’ll have to wait a little longer. In the meantime, enjoy some photos of our loinfruit:


Looks like my 10 step program worked, eh?

For those of you wondering what kind of food it was that actually threw me into labor, it was leftover-Thanksgiving-turkey enchiladas and Spanish rice.

And for those of you who are concerned the baby is going to ruin this blog, you’re probably right.

P.S. Thanks, Rob!

Posted in beer, Food & Drink | Tagged , , | 38 Comments