Grand Adventure: family, house building and travel, Pacific Northwest style
Last weekend we attended the long anticipated wedding of some good friends in Honolulu. It was a beautiful and touching ceremony. Jack was in the wedding party and reflecting on what he wanted to say in his toast, caused us to recognize what a great couple they are.
D was a hit with the ladies (and gents).
What could be cuter than a bunch of babies, lined up in a gently swaying row?
These babies were in our centering pregnancy group.
This is from our Penny Simkin birth class reunion today. It was a wonderful class and all these babies were born without pain meds.
Here’s D meeting his new cousin.
As a bonus, here’s a picture from my birth class cohort. I’m leaning forward, wearing red.
This past week we had our first PEPS (program for early parent support) meeting, so I’m sure in a few weeks we’ll have another couch shot for our collection.
Last week my mom, D and I spent four days in Boston visiting D’s aunt and uncle.
It gave me a lot of confidence in being out and about with D. The primary lesson was that D at 6 weeks vastly prefers the plane, the subway and the bus (even in the rain) to the car. We already know he’s a big fan of walking.
D shared his cuteness with his aunt and uncle and a few other friends.
We also toured my sister’s lab (boys need encouragement in STEM careers too :) ) and went candlepin bowling, which is a local variation.
As much as the trip built my confidence, I couldn’t have done it without my mom!
I was just feeling kind of nostalgic as I thought about the qualities of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes which we hope D will possess. While the comic is smart, sweet, funny, creative and beautiful, the character of Calvin is actually pretty mischievous and somewhat delinquent, reminding us that D will have a mind of his own.
Right now, D and Emo have a lot in common. They sleep a lot and they are quite enamored with me. They enjoy gazing out our new windows and we have to clean up after them. They are also both incredibly soft in different ways and we love them.
We are the type of people who are reassured, not petrified, by knowledge and birth was no exception. In D’s birth I’d estimate that we used only about 5% of what we learned, but I absolutely don’t regret the time we spent learning it. Plus you never know which 5% it might come in handy.
Midwives and Natural Birth
Based on some of my earlier reading we switched to a midwifery group, rather than an OB group, in the fall. I expected to get some criticism or strange looks from people, but we didn’t encounter that at all. For us, planning to deliver with a midwife in a hospital was a perfect middle way in the spectrum of possibilities. We wanted a provider who would be more involved, more supportive of natural birth and less likely to encourage interventions that might not be necessary. The fact that midwives are all (?) women was an added bonus.
The primary reason we hoped for a natural birth is the “cascade of interventions” we read about which can be initiated by using pain medication. For example, when you’re hooked up to tubes and wires you’re less able and likely to move around, which can make it more likely for the baby to be malpositioned. When you can’t feel the urge to push, the pushing stage of labor takes longer. When it takes longer, you’re more likely to be exhausted. When the baby is “stuck” and you’ve been at it for hours and hours, more and more interventions become necessary. I also preferred to minimize the drugs ingested by our newborn.
So we were aiming for a natural birth, but we really had no idea if it was realistic. If we learned anything in the months leading up to D’s birth, it’s that there are millions of storylines that result in a healthy baby and that the plot is largely out of our control.
When our classes discussed coping with pain, it was hard to relate. How can you know what kind of pain tolerance you have and whether your most painful experiences relate in any way to the anticipated pain of birth? The most physically painful experience I could recall was tearing my ACL (knee ligament) when I was 17, but it was incredibly difficult to actually remember the sensations, which is probably for the best. When I thought about the concept of coping, my first Montreal winter leapt to mind. For better or worse, my mental refrain was “it’s just going to get worse, it’s just going to get colder” and before I knew it five months had passed and I was enjoying the balmy 1 degree Celsius weather at a Saint Patrick’s day parade and getting some color in my face from finally spending more than 10 minutes outdoors. I really do remember feeling warm at that parade.
Birth Story
Fast forward to 10 days after D’s due date. We went in to the hospital at 8 am for our scheduled induction. We knew I was already significantly dilated but I still wasn’t feeling the contractions, though they had been happening for weeks.
They started me on the hormone Pitocin at 10 am to strengthen the contractions. It worked. We walked around a little bit. Then we played a card game I particularly like. Then I threw up, which is one of the lowest points of my memories. Then my water broke and things progressed rapidly from there.
At 2 pm they stopped the Pitocin due to fluctuations in D’s heart rate. I was happy to let my body set the pace because the contractions continued with a bit more time in between them.
At 6 pm D was born after less than an hour of pushing, which is apparently pretty quick for a large, first-born baby. I am so grateful that the part of labor I felt lasted only as long as a workday.
So what were the coping techniques we used?
I would say that my Montreal winter pessimism method worked. It did get more painful, but I still had something left when it was over. In other words it was not a 10 out of 10 on the pain scale.
It was really important to me to know that the drugs were available if I wanted them. I think that actually helped me focus.
The teacher of our birth class, Penny Simkin, made a super important distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is physical but suffering encompasses your whole self. My suffering was minimal. I didn’t feel fear at all. I didn’t think I would split in half or that D wouldn’t make it. Jack didn’t think I was dying. I had no desire to lash out at the people around me.
Support People
At both the midwifery practice and the OB practice, patients have appointments with several practitioners during pregnancy and then deliver with who ever is on call. The labor and delivery nurses are the ones who take care of you most of the time, which I didn’t realize until I started reading in the fall. It has also become popular to have a doula, which is a non-medical labor support person. Having a doula has been shown to improve and speed up birth, so we considered it but opted not to because we didn’t want to work the dynamics of a new relationship.
Doulas are particularly helpful for laboring at home before going to the hospital, a typical step that we completely skipped. Since our induction was a normal business hours affair, we actually had a student nurse and a student midwife, in addition to our primary nurse and midwife so we had a full room of absolutely phenomenal support. We had met the primary midwife once or twice before and it really didn’t matter that we hadn’t met the others.
Saving the best for last, Jack was the most incredible support person I could imagine. He was calm, consistent, informed and familiar. I think the only time he let go of my hand was when he caught D at the moment he was born and put him on my chest.
One month later, D’s birth is a treasured memory.
Today D left Seattle for the first time to meet his great grandparents.
When asked about it later, he said “they’re pretty great.”
Remember that time in the fall when I was pregnant and we found bed bugs in our apartment?
And then the city of Seattle said we’d have to install a $250,000 main in the street in order to develop our lot?
Then we had to have our apartment heat treated to 130 degrees for over 24 hours to kill all the bugs, which required that we move all the furniture around, carefully remove anything that might melt or combust and follow a haz-mat procedure with our clothes, our cat and our persons as we went to stay at my parents’ house? Remember how many months of precautions and creepy crawly nights we spent?
Yeah that was rough.
Thankfully the bugs are still gone, the city changed its mind and D was born safe and sound.
We had a baby! To protect the privacy (hah!) of our brand new addition, we’re only going to call him “D” on the blog.
We’ve now reached the point where I’m blogging about what I had for lunch. It’s time to have this baby, am I right?
Today, on the two-hundred eighty-something’th day of this pregnancy, I finally got around to eating sardines. I’ve been meaning to eat them for years, and it’s hard to put my finger on exactly why I never managed to do so.
The pros of sardines are fairly obvious: fish is healthy and sardines are an inexpensive, low-mercury variety that comes in convenient shelf-stable packaging. What about the cons? While I have no beef with fish, or with canned tuna, I simply could not get past the can and the question of how to prepare the presumably cold and slimy contents.
Seriously, I’ve had (different tins of) sardines lurking in the pantry for at least five years.
I’m well rested from taking PTO now and not making any plans, and maybe I’m emboldened by the challenge of our labor-to-come. In any case, today was the big day.
The worst part was opening the can, which flicked oily tomato sauce in several directions as it opened. Good thing my cheap, stretched out maternity top already had a stain on it… The fish itself, which was packed in like a full term baby the day after the due date, was bigger than I imagined. There were no heads or eyeballs to be found. Perhaps I was picturing anchovies all along?
I figured that with enough parsley, some lemon and some good toasted bread they couldn’t be that bad. And it was actually pretty good. I feel so grown up.
Here’s a timeline of the house-building project. It’s hard to say how long many of the steps will take, but this at least shows some of the dependencies. The biggest questions is, of course, how much it will cost, which determines when we’ll be able to break ground. I’d imagine that this is an ambitious timeline and that it will take much longer than this, but it will be worth the wait!
Seattle is growing and we’re in the center of it! Aside from the enormous (stalled) SR 99 tunnel project, there are several other exciting projects going on around us.
The streetcar (shown in black and red) on the map on the left is set to open later in 2014. It will be really handy for my commute from our future house to work, assuming I keep the same job.
Work to make our (future neighborhood) section of 23rd Avenue safer will begin later this year. It includes cutting four lanes down to three, adding wider sidewalks and better lighting.
Yesler Terrace Redesign
We’ll be walking by this construction site for the next 20 years. Building has begun on Boren and another little piece that will start this year is a cool new staircase connecting Yesler Terrace to the International District via 10th avenue South (the yellow line on the map above).
In late 2016 the Angle Lake light rail station at Pacific Highway and S 200th Street is supposed to open. It’s closer to my parents’ which will be nice. By 2023 another stop will open at Kent-Des Moines road.
The Capitol Hill and UW light rail stations are set to open in 2016.
