Gadgetry

The other day I received my new laptop in the mail. I have been at home for awhile now – two months to be precise – and I have learned about the powers and dangers of online shopping. A week or so ago, my cousin (also on maternity leave) emailed me to ask would I like to Skype with her that afternoon? Why yes, I would like to Skype. However, I did not have Skype, nor did I have a camera on my old dinosaur of a desktop.

So I promptly went online and bought myself a laptop. This may seem to have been a rash decision at first glance but in fact I'd been thinking of it for some time – my desktop didn't have enough memory to play a game that I'd downloaded, and I wanted to be more mobile and connected in my maternity leave, so I'd been thinking of making the switch a long time ago.

I have since experienced a few frustrations with this new machine that I foolishly hadn't foreseen. For one, my internet connection is dependent on cell phone reception – I have a wireless key – but cell phone reception is no great shakes at my place. Turns out that the best place to get internet reception is actually in the same place as my old desktop so duh, not as mobile as I'd thought. The other frustration is that the old dinosaur came from a 95-year-old man's house, and he'd already installed Microsoft Office etc. So I had Word, Excel, all the other stuff I use regularly, and this one only has a 60-day free trial version. Expect a lot of blog entries for the next 60 days. What my computer does have are a bunch of weird and useless programs that I haven't yet figured out. There are apparently games on here too but I haven't had time to play them yet.

I have a feeling that the next bit of technology to enter our house will be a new t.v. I realized today, as I watched DVD episodes of Flight of the Conchords on my laptop, that our television screen is so blurry that I almost didn't recognize Brett and Jemaine in their crystal-clarity. The computer puts the t.v. to shame. Also tonight I noticed that the lower right-hand corner of our t.v. monitor is green – as in, everything on the screen in that corner goes green. I think the television is almost as old as my little brother so I have no problem replacing it, it's just that we have to amortize all of this technology a bit.

More technology: yesterday I went to town and broke down and bought the super-duper breast pump, as it seems my little gal is a lazy sucker and doesn't really breastfeed (just for snacks), so I pump and feed her breast milk with a bottle. We are still committed to feeding her breast milk, which makes it compliqué for me. Also, this way I know how much she's getting and can obsess over it daily (ok hourly – I have to restrain myself from creating an Excel spreadsheet for it all). I have hopes that this will change someday, but in the meantime, I needed an effective milk-removal system that isn't $80 a month to rent, as who knows how long I'll need to use it? This one is called the Medela Freestyle pump and it claims hands-free mobility. The instructions boast that I will be able to do such activities as read a book, write emails, talk on the phone and other simple tasks and indeed, I am pumping this very minute (does that make you feel weird?) but I would suggest other helpful things I can do while pumping: go to the bathroom, sweep the floor, fold the laundry, and tend to my baby when she barfs all over herself. Thing is, their idea of hands-free isn't exactly simple. I look like I'm wearing a giant rubber rack on my chest, there are so many separate and interlocking parts that assembling and disassembling it each time is a chore. The pump itself sounds like large animals having sex. I need to hide it somewhere or wrap it in a towel or something. The whole thing comes in a "cute tote bag" as the company calls it, which is handy, though the tote bag is black, which is not so cute. I mean, it's handy, so they should call it a "handy tote bag" you know? It's just a black bag. Anyway, I have my own milker. The resale on these things is crazy so I'm not worried about having bought it, and hubby brought up the point that we could always get a goat someday. In the meantime, I may go as Lady Gaga for Halloween or something. Or a dairy cow.

So right now I am wired, on my new laptop, wearing the milking harness of insanity, listening to this pump groaning away and the baby gurgling in her crib. The crappy side of pumping is that I can't hold the baby while I'm doing it, but at least I keep her in close range. She and I are working it out but we are reliant on technology and gadgetry – the pump, the baby swing seat, the crib. We went out yesterday, to the doctor and shopping, and she was a perfect angel but for a not-quite-ten-pound baby, she sure takes up a lot of space. She goes in the carseat, which is mounted onto the stroller (my beloved BOB), with the diaper bag tucked underneath her. It's like a whole caravan, and she kind of disappears in it. When we go for walks, we're either in the carseat-stroller combo or today (because hubby took the stroller to work with him by mistake) she was in the baby carrier, which I also wear around the house. I wear her while cooking dinner, while wandering around the yard, or for 'rock and roll time', where I put on music and sing and dance in the living room (I think it's important for all babies to have rock and roll time). Anyway to my chagrin my house is filling up with baby gear and I'm starting to feel a bit squeezed out, or like I'm cheating somehow. I used to come from the whole "let them play with cardboard boxes and tin cans" school of thought when it came to baby gear but like it was with our dog, it's a slippery slope to just doing whatever you can to avoid rocking the boat. Before we know it Nora will be eating table scraps and sleeping in the bed.

 

The End Result

As I write this, I have the most perfectly adorable, cherubic baby sleeping in the next room. Her name is Nora. She’s not named after anyone, although we gave her my mom’s name as her middle name – we both just liked the name ‘Nora.’ It suits her in a weird way, since she popped out of me looking like a wee Irish lass for some reason. She has beautiful smooth white skin, and reddish-blonde hair. Her eyes are of a yet-undetermined colour but I have a strange feeling she’s transitioning into hazel, at 2.5 weeks old. Sometimes they’re blue, sometimes they’re just grey, but today I was struck with hazel so we shall see. And that adorable little round head we saw on the ultrasound weeks and weeks ago? Still adorable and round, and covered in hair. Like, she was born with a mullet. I can’t believe how much hair she’s got – she almost needs a trim already.

The birth was not the smoothest. One goes into such things with a vision of how things are supposed to go, or how one would ideally like things to go, but sometimes shit happens and things go awry and before you know it you’ve ended up with every intervention in the book. Like I was thinking I could manage natural labour. I was wrong. I was expecting labour pains to be like bad menstrual cramps but turns out I had back labour and I do not mess around with my back. The pain started in my tailbone and wrapped its evil tentacles around my torso and turned into a kind of bad menstrual pain, but a menstrual pain that burns in the back, if you can picture that happening every two minutes. I did it from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. before they said “we want to give you oxytocin because you’re stalled” and I said “give me the epidural first” so here I am at 5:30 a.m. with the monitor strapped to my body, getting an epidural, oxytocin, and then oxygen because my blood pressure dropped quite a bit. I started pushing around 10 a.m. but wee Nora had other ideas; she was cranked to the side and had her head tilted up, and refused to budge. The doctor kept reaching in on every push and trying to turn her but she’d swivel back, so at around 2 p.m., they said “your options are: foreceps or a c-section.” I have already had one abdominal surgery and they are not fun so after a bit of conversation, hubby and I decided on the foreceps. I warned them they’d better not mess up her face, and we proceeded to the operating room, since they intended to move quickly to a c-section if the foreceps didn’t work. They cranked up my epidural, I pushed into nothingness, passed out, and gave birth to my daughter at 2:34 without realizing what had happened. Literally, I’d been dreaming of a medieval village. When I awoke to the operating room and its hysterics, I had no idea where I was or what was going on, just that I had to push and that something was a success. Nora was lying on the warming table, and I had to ask several times how much she weighed (7 lbs, 11oz) and how long she was (21”), and what her APGARs were (8 and 9). They never showed her to me or put her on my chest, just wheeled her to the nursery for tests (she had a wheeze in her chest – hubby accompanied her). I will never ever forgive them for that, in all of my life.

It took them an hour to stitch me back up. Nuff said about that. Then I was onto intravenous antibiotics, due to the nature of my injuries.

Nora survived the foreceps in style. She had a bruised ear, which went away within 3 days. She’s a beauty, and I still marvel at the fact that I produced a blonde (even though hubby is blonde – I am so dark that I thought it impossible that I’d create anything but black-haired spawn).

I spent the next 48 hours in the hospital, being prodded by a cabal of nurses, each of whom had a slightly different technique for forcing my daughter to my breast. By the second night, they were starting to supplement her with formula – I think they caught me at a weak moment. Apparently I did not produce enough colostrum for their liking, and Nora wasn’t latching, so in went the tube with formula. Another unwanted intervention. Because hers was a foreceps delivery, they labeled her a ‘trauma birth’ and so she was forced to feed every 3 hours, whether or not she was sleeping peacefully, whether or not she was hungry. We were both thoroughly rattled by the end of our 48 hours and only barely got discharged, since she’d lost 9 ounces within 48 hours.

Things haven’t been super ducky ever since. There are lots of things that people don’t tell you about having a baby, probably because if they did, fewer people would have them. My own experience is not universal, but from where I stand, there are a number of things that I would have liked to have heard about before going into this. They include:

- For awhile after giving birth, you smell real bad. Like, not to put too fine a point on it, but I sort of smell like fart. I don’t know where it comes from or what, or if it’s hormonal, but I can take a lavender-scented bath and one hour later I once again smell like fart. I blame the baby a lot.

- Sometimes, it’s way too much effort to get dressed. Right now it’s 7:55 p.m. and I’m still in my pyjama pants from last night. Today I have decided not to fight it.

- You get the sweats. As soon as the nurses started making me breastfeed, I would break out in a fierce sweat, and this continued for about a week. Every time the baby cried, I started to sweat. Every time I tried to feed her, I started to sweat. Sweat more than I have ever sweated in my life. Rivers pouring out form under my boobs – that kind of sweat.

- If you breastfeed, or try to breastfeed, you, your child, your furniture and all of your clothes will be covered in breastmilk for awhile. And it’s sticky.

- Some level of depression is apparently unavoidable. If it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen. This does not, apparently, make you a terrible mother. But it makes it hard to get anything done.

- Breastfeeding could possibly be the hardest thing you will ever do in your life. For those of you who are into numbers, goals and targets, everyone’s got numbers for you to follow, or else your baby is close to death, apparently: meconium elimination starts within 24 hours (no problem here, she pooped within a few hours of finally being presented to me, and got rid of it all within 36 hours), then 6-8 wet diapers a day (we’ve got that one licked, Nora pisses like nobody’s business), 4 poops per day (this one is an issue for us – Nora likes to keep it to herself), 8 to 12 feedings per day of at least 80 ml per feeding, no longer than 3 hours between feedings (which can be a challenge if you have a sleepy baby), weight gain of 1 oz. a day on average, and your baby must exhibit a nice range of temperaments. Man alive. I thought my regular job was hard. We’ve got most of these ones licked except for the pooping one.

- Not everyone breastfeeds instantly. I have done an informal poll of my mother-friends, and approximately 9 out of 10 of them had some kind of issue to overcome within the first two months, sometimes longer. One friend, who I had assumed had no troubles whatsoever, admitted to me yesterday during the first 9 weeks of her first daughter’s life, she actually had two other friends breastfeed her baby on occasion, just to make sure she was getting something to eat. More people supplement with formula than would let on. I do. Apparently I don’t produce enough milk to feed my child, which makes me personally feel like a failure but that’s another story, and so here I am hooked up to a milker 8 times a day, supplementing with formula, and breaking my balls to feed my child the requisite 80 ml 8x per day so that she will grow the requisite 1 oz per day (she’s now averaging 1.5 to 2 oz per day, the little porker). It’s rough. The temptation is to give in and just give her formula, but I am not ready to do that yet. As long as I’m producing something (and I am producing at least 2/3 of her diet from my boobs) I will give it to her, even if it means pumping it out and feeding her with bottles for the next six months. Maybe. We’ll see – hubby and I are trying to work on our own plan for total breastfeeding domination but we’ll see how it goes. Meantime he keeps pumping me with this terrible fenugreek tea and making me think ‘milky thoughts,’ whatever that means.

- Sleep is precious, but you can be remarkably alert at 4 a.m. when the baby cries. I instantly wake up, pick her up, go downstairs and begin the feeding ritual – within 2 seconds of her first squawk. Then I can go back to bed 45 minutes later and be asleep again within seconds. Also, napping with your baby on your chest is super nice for both of you. I get no more than 3 hours sleep at any given time and aside from a bit of blurred vision (in the hospital I was convinced I was going blind – I could no longer read), I am pretty functional. Relatively speaking.

- Before I gave birth, nobody told me about the squeeze bottle, which every new mother insists became their ‘best friend’. I don’t know if I would have done this if I’d known that a squeeze bottle of warm water would be necessary every time I go to the bathroom.

- You will have a lot of medical professionals breathing down your neck. If you thought you had a lot of appointments before giving birth, wait until you have a baby. Everyone has opinions, everyone has concerns, and everyone wants you to do something new and different. Everyone wants your baby to poop 4 times a day, I have learned. I often find myself wondering how people manage to give birth and successfully raise children in remote parts of the world, away from the purview of doctors and public health nurses wearing too much perfume. Like Hutterites. How do they do it? I’m sure they have all kinds of olde timey wisdom that would come in super handy.

Anyway, that’s enough of a list for now. I’m sure I’ll think of more horrible things to complain about in the days and weeks to come. In the meantime, here is a picture of what makes it all worthwhile, what makes it impossible to quit this job or take shortcuts just because it’s real hard and my body hurts and I’m sad a lot and I can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel on some days. This is why I bounce out of bed at 4 a.m., if not exactly perky, then at least willing. This is my baby daughter Nora.