Crash Into Me

She's coming.

There's something about the end of pregnancy. It is June 4th, and I am 35 weeks and 2 days pregnant today, and yesterday, my OB designated June 22nd as the big day: induction. Being a type I diabetic, I knew they wouldn't allow me to go to July 7th, which was my original due date. Too much can go wrong too quickly; already my blood pressure is beginning to climb (128/77 yesterday, a small increase over previous measurements, and probably having more to do with an intensely annoying nurse than anything else) and my blood sugars are becoming increasingly difficult to control. It's par for the course when dealing with diabetes, and pregnancy. There's only so much one body can take.

And believe me, mine is just about at its limit. Between insomnia, general discomfort, a precarious emotional state caused by hormones, and my totally non-pregnancy-related lack of patience with pretty much anything, I am at what could only be described as the end of my fricking rope.

This is, with luck, the last time I will be pregnant, and I would be savoring that fact if it weren't for the fact that it is almost impossible for me to savor anything right now, except the thought that my mother will be here in less than two weeks, and a week after that, I won't be pregnant anymore.

I just have so fucking much to do between then and now. I need to go through the clothes that we culled from Max's hand-me-downs one more time, figure out what we need now and what we'll need later, pack a bag, consolidate backup plans with our friends who are being kind enough to back us up with Max. I need to pick out a present from the new baby to Max, whose 4th birthday is June 21st, the day before induction. I have to do more laundry, put together lists and things for my mother, who'll be responsible for Max while I'm in the hospital, and in the middle of all of this, give Max as much love and attention as I possibly can so that he doesn't end up feeling too displaced by the little stranger who's coming to turn his world upside down.

Max seems to be doing fine. He is excited about the new baby, although I am quite sure she's not a great deal less abstract a concept to him than string theory at this point. He wants to share his toys with her, let her sleep in his bed, feed her French fries--I'm sure all of this will change as soon as she is old enough to do any of these things. The little boy who laid down on the floor of the ultrasound suite and sobbed when the tech announced that it was going to be a little sister and not a little brother is gone, and I'm not surprised. Max is a great deal like Dan. One of the things I've always loved about my husband is the fact that whatever space you put him in, he expands to fill. He is shockingly flexible when it comes to change, and that's one of the many things that makes him remarkably easy to live with. I'm not sure how to do more to prepare Max for a new baby than we've already done. One of the things we've had to do is all but abandon active potty-training--he just isn't interested enough in it to be responsible for any of it himself, and I don't see us fighting the yes-you-WILL-sit-on-the-potty-every-twenty-minutes fight with a brand-new baby in an upside-down household. It's fine. We'll just pick it up again later, when things calm down a little.

But as I was saying, there's something about the end of pregnancy. I used to have a variety of nightmares as a child, all different, but with one theme: something or someone is coming for me and I cannot do anything to prevent them from doing so. I have that same nightmare sense of foreboding now. Part of it is that I just don't feel like I'm prepared. There's just so much to do, and it's complicated by the fact that while we are doing all of the baby-preparation things, we are also cleaning and packing and getting ready to move halfway across the country, a situation which I haven't addressed here because, OH MY GAWD, I don't want to do it on so many levels, and on other levels, am really looking forward to, and can you say CONFLICTED EMOTIONAL STATE? I CANNOT TAKE IT. I am really looking forward to meeting this little girl, finally being able to tell people her name, see Dan like this again.

But the end of pregnancy--it has a flavor all its own. Nothing else feels like this, this sense of things flying at you, knowing that a collision is inevitable. The first weeks (months? Years?) of parenthood are really, really hard, there's no way around it, and it feels so weird to feel so conflicted.

Is it awful that I feel this conflicted, or that I'm admitting it? I can't wait to meet The New Girl, but at the same time, our life is what it's become, and it's all going to change when she crashes into us.

It's been pretty much all-baby-all-the-time here, I know, and it's because I haven't been doing much else besides being pregnant and doing all the things that have to be done in order for that to be true. I promise that I will eventually be interesting again.

Where Babies Come From, Part Four

Part Three is here.

One of the first things they do after the birth is over and the sewing up and the general painfulness is over is turn off your epidural. An epidural is, in essence, safe, but I can't imagine that an open door into your spinal column is something that they want to remain open for that long. That's what they did with me, while Max was having his first bath and being checked out in the NICU and his blood glucose was being monitored and we tried nursing a little, and slowly the numbness began to fade away, starting at the tips of my toes and working its way up.

Except. Except that the numbness was fading away from my right toes, but not my left. I could feel my right foot, flex it and point it. I could point my left foot, sort of, but I couldn't flex it at all. It was as if those muscles had totally forgotten what they were ever there to do, had gone missing.

"This doesn't feel right," I kept telling people. "I should be able to feel both of my feet by now, shouldn't I?" The nurses were changing shifts and the nurse who'd been there for my epidural the day before was back. I was hungry and it was dinnertime; why the hell wasn't my foot working yet?

A NICU nurse came down to tell me that Max was hypoglycemic: it's a common side effect for new babies of diabetic mothers in the few hours after birth. Would I prefer that he receive a bottle or an IV? To be honest, I didn't care really, just as long as the problem was solved (it's not serious, but it can be if it's not handled.) They checked with me, though, because they knew I was planning to nurse, which I appreciated. "Whatever's quickest," I told the nurse. "Just fix it."

The nurse took out my Foley catheter and wanted me to get up and go to the bathroom. I felt pressured. "I don't know if I can," I admitted. "I still can't feel my foot."

"You really should by now," she said disapprovingly. Did she think this was my fault for some reason? She practically dragged me out of bed and to the bathroom, and I felt tentative and anxious about dealing with the realities of any of the aftermath of birth: stitches, blood, pee, or any of the other, ahem, scariness. I was presented with a whole bunch of unexpected equipment: a spray bottle of warm water instead of toilet paper, an adult-diaper-sized maxi pad, a pair of giant-sized mesh underpants with a pocket in the crotch for an icepack. Talk about things that nobody tells you, I told myself. I knew there'd be blood; I didn't know it'd look like a mass murder scene. I felt like I was floundering around like an idiot and I could barely stand up off the toilet and get the whole arrangement of giant underwear and pad and icepack pulled up, let alone walk across the room on my still-numb (Still numb!) foot. My hospital gown was spattered with gore and blood. The nurse handed me a new one. "I still can't feel my foot," I told her. "I think there's something wrong."

Those became the two sentences I repeated more often over the next 72 hours than any other, and to almost no effect. The L&D unit was at capacity and they wanted me shifted to post-partum post-haste, and off I went, to one of the few private rooms in the unit. Can you imagine a post-partum unit without private rooms? I couldn't. The thought of having a roommate was absolutely awful, so bad I had trouble wrapping my head around it, and I was relieved I didn't have one. I told the post-partum unit nurse that I still couldn't feel my foot and she seemed less concerned with that than with my dinner order.

My dinner order didn't arrive. It was after 8 and I was starved. Dan hadn't eaten in hours either. Nobody seemed particularly receptive to my complaints, and eventually someone located a couple of dried-out turkey sandwiches, leftover from the previous day's lunch, by the look of things, but then nobody seemed to know how much insulin I should take with it. My insulin needs had grown exponentially over the last few weeks of pregnancy and I knew I wouldn't need that much anymore, but should I take half as much? A third? "Where's your endocrinologist?" the nurse demanded. "I'm quite sure he doesn't know he's supposed to be here," I told her, not particularly appreciating her tone. "I've been a little busy. If you've got a question for him, go ahead and give him a call."

At this point, it had been a couple hours since I'd seen Max or received any kind of an update on his condition, and Dan called the NICU, asked for him to be brought to my room. Two nurses showed up without a baby. "He's sleeping," one of them told me. "We were told you wanted to rest and didn't want him down here."

I was dumbstruck by the lack of professionalism. "Bring my son in here now," I told her, "or get me the name and number of your supervisor."

"Why don't you go ahead and do both?" Dan suggested. He was at least as upset as I was. The two nurses eyed each other apprehensively and disappeared. The NICU supervisor appeared a few minutes later, still without Max. "His blood glucose is still being monitored," she said. "I don't know who told them that you wanted to sleep and didn't want him in your room. I'll check it out though."

It was one fiasco after another for the next three days. Nobody seemed to know who my doctor was or why I hadn't been checked on by an actual physician until 48 hours after I gave birth, when Dr. Kane finally showed up, sheepishly apologetic. Because I'd come in while Dr. Hassan was the on-call doc for the practice, he explained, I'd been listed as his patient, not Dr. Kane's or Dr. Bushrod, the doctor who'd actually delivered Max. Was I ready to go home?

No, I wasn't, I said. I'd been complaining for for the past two days that I still couldn't feel my left foot, and people seemed more concerned with the elaborate and humiliating ritual of checking my episiotomy stitches than with the fact that I couldn't make it to the bathroom and back without the assistance of my husband. Was someone going to do something about that? And would someone please, please address the fact that I could not get a meal menu, let alone any food delivered to my room? For the past two days, I'd been getting whatever was leftover on the meal trays for three meals a day, several hours after anyone else was fed. It usually meant oatmeal in the morning (which I loathe and never eat), some kind of dried-out sandwich at lunch, and an inedible entree of some kind at dinner, cold and long-forgotten and consisting of mostly simple carbs--not an ideal diet for a diabetic or someone who was still waiting to poop for the first time after giving birth. My mother and Dan had been bringing me sandwiches and salads from the hospital cafeteria and the deli from the local Safeway, so I wasn't going hungry, but I also wasn't exactly amenable to the fact that the hospital was going to be charging my insurance company for meals that I wasn't getting.

The doctor agreed that, based on the condition of my still-numb foot, that I certainly wasn't ready to be discharged. "Let me call a neurologist I know," he said. "We'll get to the bottom of this." He patted my foot. I couldn't feel it.

The nurse-supervisor showed up the next morning in response to the litany of complaints Dan and I were waging. Several minutes after she left, I got a phone call from the head of the nutritional services department, who apologized for the fact that I hadn't been fed in several days. I was not feeling particularly gracious at this point. She read off a menu to me and took my order for lunch personally. It never arrived.

The nurse-supervisor came back to my room with "some concerns" to address with me. One of the nursing aides had complained that she'd seen me doing "something inappropriate" with my husband that morning. I was stunned and uncomfortable and overwhelmed and full of loathing for this awful, stupid bitch, not to mention the fact that I had no idea what she was talking about and broke down in tears, unable to even respond to her accusations. "Your aide," Dan fumed at her, "saw me helping her out of bed to go to the bathroom. She's needed help every single time she's gone and she can't get any from your nurses, no matter how many times she's asked. In fact, any time she's asked for anything, any time either of us has, the only response we've gotten is, 'We'll get to it when we get to it.' She can't see a lactation specialist, she can't get ibuprofen for a headache, she can't get her goddamn breakfast! I've spent the last three days trying to make sure she gets to eat and take the medication she needs to keep her alive and the medical care that she needs. I'm about to start billing your stupid-ass, shitty hospital for my time, because I already have a job and I'm sick of doing yours!"

In my entire life, I've never been more proud of Dan.

I wanted to get the hell out. I wanted to take my baby and go the fuck home and forget this place ever existed. I was grateful, beyond grateful, to the L&D department and the NICU and all of the people who'd gotten us there, but I was at my limit of degradation. "Check me out of this place," I wept furiously to Dan after the nurse withdrew. "I just want to go the fuck home."

It took a little time and I still had to see the neurologist about my foot, but finally we got some action. Max was discharged that afternoon and I was finally discharged at about 9 that night. There was a long, dull session during which a nurse came to our room to make sure I knew how to take care of his umbilical stump, not to take him out of the car seat in a moving car, even if he cried (duh.), and under what circumstances I should bring him or myself back to the emergency room. One of the last things that they did was dress him in the clothes I had brought for him to go home in (a little red sleeper with bumblebees on it, the smallest piece of newborn clothing I had and the one that came the closest to fitting him; I'd never have guessed he would be so tiny) and at that point, the strangest thing happened.

He became mine. Up until that point he'd just been a little stranger who I was sort of partially responsible for caring for, when he wasn't in the NICU or having a hearing test or doing something else that took him out of my room, where I was confined by the fact that I couldn't walk without quite a bit of assistance. One night they'd brought him down to my room at around 1 a.m., where I was suffering from insomnia (and the fact that I hadn't had dinner) and watching a Discovery Channel marathon of some show or another. He was crying. "He's waking all the other babies up," the nurse told me. "Can he stay here with you for awhile?"

Of course he could. I tried everything I could think of to get him to stop crying, but he seemed miserably unhappy. I felt terrible and Dan and I couldn't think of anything that we could do to make him happy. Finally I turned off the TV, turned the lights down, and just cuddled him, and he drifted off to sleep in about thirty seconds. At that point, I felt more like a parent than I ever had before, but he still didn't feel like mine, despite the fact that he looked absurdly like a little-old-man version of Dan. It felt like Mom Boot Camp.

But as they wheeled me out of the maternity ward, Dan and my mother behind me with the assortment of stuff that we'd arrived with and were being sent home with, me with a semi-awake, squeaking baby in my arms, as people who passed by cooed at us, where we were left in front of the hospital to deal with the proper snapping-in of the car seat and the fact that I wasn't ready to sit in the passenger seat of my mother's car while my son sat in the back, the next six sleep-deprived and blurry weeks looming in front of us, for the first time, I remember looking down at him and thinking, I think this is how it's supposed to feel. I can walk away--or limp away--from this awful place and be this person's mother.

It's four years later, and I've watched him go from that little stranger, the little 7-1/2-pound meatloaf who doesn't do anything to the person who's driving me crazy this morning jumping on the couch while I just want to sit here, the person who wants to sing "You are my Sunshine" to my pregnant belly every night before he goes to bed, the person who wants a peanut-butter-and-lettuce sandwich for lunch today. The strangest thing has happened in four years: he's gone from being Max, the abstract concept to being Max, the person with opinions, who knows how to spell purple and rectangle and boom, but who, for some reason, spells the word orange O-R-A-N-G-L-E, the totally-potty-training-proof little boy who convinced Dan to shave his head last weekend so that he could have "none hair, like Daddy." I know him forward and backwards. I know when he's trying to manipulate me. I know when he's fake-crying and when he's really upset. I know when a kid at the playground is really getting on his nerves and when he can let something roll off his back. He says things that astound me. He uses Brickle Blocks to build a camera to take pictures of me. His imagination is humongous. He likes to play ice cream store. Sometimes he comes walking up to me and says, "Mom? I want something," and I'm supposed to know what it is, and I almost never do, mostly because he almost never does either.

He's mine, in ways that no other kid could possibly be, and being Max's mother has been an honor and a privilege I couldn't have ever imagined before becoming his mother. I am having a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea that soon I will be The New Girl's mother too, that she will go from being the annoyingly-active, kicking, flipping fetus who is still, at 34 weeks and 2 days gestation, still not head-down, to being a real person. She feels as unreal to me right now as Max ever did, despite my freakishly large belly, despite my myriad discomforts, despite the fact that earlier today she had the hiccups until I thought I was going to go out of my mind.

This last chapter of Max's birth story has been a long time coming, and it's because I'm not sure how it ends. It didn't end when they handed him to me and sent me home from the hospital. It didn't end in the L&D unit that they were in such a hurry to rush me out of. I feel like I'm still living his birth story, like every day is just an extension of it, how he's still becoming who he is. People ask me what his birth was like and I'm never sure what to tell and what to leave out: the part where my water broke in the middle of Sears? How absurd so much of the experience still seems to me? How awful the post-partum unit was and how much I hated being there?

It all ends up being okay. Now, with the possibility of a C-section looming in front of me, with the still constant threat that pregnancy poses to my health and my health poses to that of my daughter, with the daily discomforts, I keep reminding myself that it all ends up being okay. I've been listening to Rob Thomas singing "Little Wonders" a lot in the last few weeks, especially the part where he says "The hardest part is over." I'm not so dumb as to try to convince myself that the hardest part is over--I'm quite sure that I haven't imagined the hardest part yet, let alone survived it--but I find it incredibly reassuring to hear him say that In the end, We will only just remember how it feels.



Epilogue: the numbness in my left foot was a sciatic nerve injury. When I was having that awful pain in my left hip during the Transition stage of labor, the nerve was being compressed under my tailbone. By the time I went home from the hospital, I could flex my foot very slightly, half an inch maybe. It spent the next six months improving to about 95%, which is where it still is. I have numb spots in the back of my left leg and the sole of my foot, and my toes feel a little like they have rubber bands wrapped around my toes. I've found I can live with 95%.

Southern Maryland Hospital Center in Clinton, the hospital where I gave birth to Max, lost its accreditation as a teaching facility.

I never received an answer as to why the nurses thought I wanted Max kept away from me that first night, why I couldn't get a meal the entire time I was in the hospital, or the nature of the total breakdown in communication or professionalism that waged a completely merciless war on my entire birth experience. I would never be that woman who gave birth in a kiddie pool in my own living room, even if my health allowed for it, but I am still appalled by how truly awful the post-partum unit of Southern Maryland Hospital Center really was, and understand completely why women choose to have babies every day in birthing centers and in their own homes.

The New Girl will be born at Holy Cross in Silver Spring, where more babies are born every day than any other hospital in the D.C. area. I am cautiously optimistic.

Where Babies Come From, Part Three

Continued from here.

That night, and the early part of the next day, is fuzzy to me, and probably for good reason. I was on drugs. I understand the appeal to those people who get addicted: you feel sort of disconnected, and though I was summoned regularly to check my blood sugar or give myself a couple of units of insulin throughout the next 18 or so hours, I did so with a sort of detachment. One of my clearest memories is injecting insulin into my upper thigh, a spot I typically avoided because it's painful to give shots there. I couldn't feel my upper thigh at the time. It's a weird thing: when you're looking at your own hand gripping your own leg, and your hand can feel your leg, your brain doesn't necessarily get the message that your leg can't feel your hand. It felt like someone else's leg in my hand--I remember feeling surprised that it felt a little cold, but I'd complained since I arrived of how hot it was in my room, and they kept ratcheting up the air conditioning. My flesh felt a little like how I'd imagine a dead fish would feel.

They were giving me increasing amounts of pitocin, and as they'd turn up the amount I was getting, the contractions would start to hurt and I'd ask for more medication. I was relishing the feeling of being comfortable, after nine months of heartburn and backache and insomnia and various other complaints. I liked being reclined at 45 degrees, my feet slightly elevated, having ice chips brought to me. It was a little like being on vacation in a nice hotel except for the medical interventions, none of which phased me.

It was now June 21, 2005, and by noon, I'd officially been in labor for 20 hours. June 21 is the summer solstice, and believe me when I say that giving birth on that day brings new meaning to the words "longest day of the year." I kept waiting and waiting to feel different somehow, but with medication managing any pain I might have otherwise been feeling, I just didn't. I remember settling back after checking my blood sugar once with my blood sugar meter still balanced at the apex of my belly just as a contraction started, and watching the it on the monitor I was hooked to and the meter balanced on my belly, both rising exponentially as the contraction that I couldn't feel at all built and built and then falling as it receeded. I watched it with a sort of detached fascination, sort of a "Whoa, that was completely weird."

I don't like to throw up, not at all. I am one of those thoroughly perverse people who would prefer to sit miserably curled over myself for hours, sweating buckets of cold sweat, than throw up, feel better, and drive on. I was warned while I was still pregnant, that all women in labor throw up; it was a veteran L&D nurse who warned me, so I believed her. I threw up once shortly after I arrived at the hospital--just the remains of the leftover barbecue that I'd had for lunch that day, and then again in the early afternoon--that time it was just water, since all they'd let me have was ice chips.

That second throwing-up seemed to trigger an extra flurry of activity in my room. At that point, I had two nurses: a long-time L&D nurse who was training a student. "We need to check your cervix," she told me after I threw up. "You might be in transition."

They had been avoiding doing pelvic exams as much as possible. Since I'd come in with my water already broken, they wanted to avoid forcing any bacteria or anything else any closer to my cervix, and they were treating me with antibiotics, since now I'd been in labor so long. The veteran nurse gave directions to the student nurse on how to check for dilation. "You're eight centimeters, easy, maybe eight and a half," she told me. She snapped off the rubber glove and patted me on the leg. "Not long now."

It was right around this time that I began to feel a pain that was centered on my left hip that I didn't think should be there. Wasn't I supposed to be numb in that whole area? Why could I feel nothing but that one pain? Why did it coincide with every contraction I had? Why was I the only one who seemed concerned by it? And who the hell was making that awful wailing noise every time I had a contraction?

It was me, of course, who was wailing. Maybe the wailing was all in my head; I don't remember it bothering anyone else in the room, including my husband or my mother. Dan said I mentioned a pain in my hip sort of offhandedly; it was why he wasn't aware that anything had happened to me. I also remember it going on for hours and hours, when in reality, it was evidently just a few minutes. Dan tells me, still, though, that I didn't complain, although I began asking for more medication than they were willing to give me at that point. They did put more medication into my epidural line at one point, and it didn't help significantly. "This isn't working," I told them over and over again. "It only hurts in my hip." And it hurt a lot. It hurt like a knife stabbing me in the meaty part of my left hip. Apparently, though, I never complained.

"You're ready to push," the nurse told me. I felt like I'd been in terrible pain for hours, and I had no intention of pushing until I had more drugs. I was afraid pushing would make the pain worse, if that was possible; worse pain seemed inconceivable to me at this point. "What if you tried just one push?" she asked. "You're dilated to ten, this baby is coming." I hadn't felt any irresistable urge to push like I'd heard other women describe; I was focused on the pain in my hip and getting from one break between contractions to the next and just surviving the pain in between. There was beginning to be a lot more activity in the room, NICU nurses were coming in and setting up the table and scales across the room in the little nook that was reserved for the baby; other people were coming and going. Some of them looked vaguely familiar to me; most of them I'd never seen before. It seemed like a strange time and place for me to feel so exposed, although I wasn't really: I was wearing a hospital gown, and had blankets and pillows. I only felt like an obscene, crazed spectacle. I was still watching things with a sort of detached fascination; I don't know if it was an effect of all the drugs I'd taken or if I really was just much calmer than I remember feeling at the time. I had a short chat with a NICU nurse who'd seen me just after I'd gotten the first hit of narcotics; she poked a little good-natured fun at me for having not much of a head for the drugs.

The nurse finally convinced me to push. "Did you take a childbirth class?" she asked. We hadn't; everyone who I'd ever talked to said that they were a waste of time and money and they never used anything they'd learned in them. I shook my head no. "You'll want to push down with the same muscles you use to poop," she said. "When you have a contraction, you'll bring your knees up and tuck your chin into your chest and push from your middle, not from your head. Take a couple of big deep breaths, then push out the last breath."

Knees? Chin? Middle? Poop? What the hell? I was thinking. "I can't pull my knees up," I said. My legs and any muscular control I'd once had over them had left the building.

"We'll do it for you," she said. She grabbed one and the student nurse grabbed the other, my mother was standing down by my left foot. The end of the bed detached and rolled away; most of the parts of my anatomy I have never been eager to display publicly were now public domain in the middle of the room. There were bright lights focused on it and lots of people seemed to be gathering around it and I found myself wishing my mother would stand somewhere else, although I didn't say anything at the time because I was hoping she wouldn't notice it and I would prefer not to call attention to it. I can't fathom what I was thinking.

A contraction started and the nurse instructed Dan how to count backward from ten slowly for me, staying close to me so I'd focus on his face. He drew a chair close to the right side of my bed and put his chin on the rail of the bed, reached for my hand. One of the things I've always loved about Dan has been his ability to convey whatever he was thinking with a touch. I instantly felt better and more confident and secure; his faith in me came through as soon as I grabbed for him. I gamely followed all the directions they'd given me. "Good, good, good," the nurses were all saying. The pain in my hip was gone as soon as they'd flexed my knees back towards me and it felt exhilarating to be doing something, finally, after lying there for so long waiting for something besides the drugs wearing off to happen. I pushed maybe three times before they released my knees and put my feet in the stirrups that were at the end of the bed. "The doctor's not in here yet," the nurse told me. "I can do it without her, but I don't want to. So don't push."

Don't push? Whattayoumean, don't push? Pushing was doing something, I wanted to do something. I flicked on the television to distract myself while I waited and talked myself through the contractions. "Don't push," I hummed to myself. It felt like there was a grapefruit stuck in my butt; I wanted to push but I didn't dare.

Dr. Bushrod strode efficiently into the room wearing scrubs, shedding her white coat and exchanging it for a long-sleeved, cuffed blue cover-up sort of thing, donning gloves and a big plastic faceshield. "Do you want a mirror?" one of the nurses asked me. A mirror? I thought. Is my hair really awful? She must be thinking about pictures after...no. That's not what she was thinking of. She was thinking of a mirror so I could see what was happening. And, no. I very much didn't want a mirror. As much as I didn't want all my parts on display to the whole world, I didn't want to see them myself. Dr. Bushrod pulled up a stool, positioning it between my feet. The first thing I noticed was that the mirror would have been totally unnecessary; the plastic faceshield she was wearing was conspiring with the bright lights to become totally reflective; anything I didn't want to see I could now see as clearly as I could see Dr. Phil and his big stupid moustache still on the TV across the room. I had lost the remote control and frankly, I realized, I didn't care. I'd rather look at Dr. Phil than a reflection of my own gory genitals, especially after Dr. Bushrod picked up a tiny pair of scissors--no kidding, little scissors--and snipped an episiotomy.

A word about the episiotomy: yeah, I didn't really care. A lot of women take it as some kind of a personal affront; I just didn't care. Either I was going to tear or I wasn't, and I'd been hearing for weeks about how enormous Max's head was on ultrasound. I was picturing the Hamburgler in there; I didn't really care that much about how he came out. I guess I don't understand the women who are so horrified by their episiotomy; I picked good doctors that I was comfortable with and got educated and didn't let all of my control issues totally take over my head in the moment. I trusted them to do the right thing, and they did. It was fine.

"Here we go," said Dr. Bushrod.

It all happened fast after that. I was prepared to be pushing for hours; but all that time that I'd spent having to be coerced into pushing by the nurses seemed to have paid off. Dr. Bushrod gave good directions with each contraction: push just a tiny bit, push as hard as you can; push at 50%. I remember seeing Dan's face next to me and the wooshing of the oxygen mask they slipped over my face; I also remember my mother turning vaguely purple every time I pushed; she was pushing too.

Suddenly, I felt the baby slither free. It was a huge relief: seconds before I'd been pregnant, now I was most decidedly not. The difference was night and day and I remember heaving a huge sigh of relief. Dr. Bushrod held Max up for me to see him for a split second before passing him off to the NICU nurse who was waiting with a towel spread over her arms to receive him. He had fuzzy tufts of blondish hair that was full of bits of blood and other gore; he and I exchanged what I can only imagine was an astonished look of holy fuck! and he was whisked off to the other side of the room. I could hear him bleating noisily in protest at whatever was happening over there but I didn't mind; the activity on that side of the room was efficient, but not frantic; if he was crying he was breathing and I'd seen him; he'd been squirming and clearly a healthy newborn, even if he looked a lot like Dan's older brother in squashed-old-man form.

The doctor sewed up the episiotomy with a few quick stitches and positioned a basin under my butt to catch the placenta. I had to push more for the placenta than I had for Max. The heartburn I'd been suffering from for months finally paid off; I'd had a cough caused by reflux for weeks and finally by coughing in conjunction with the enormous pitocin contractions I was still having, the placenta dropped into the basin with a graphic-sounding squish. I never looked at it; I'm not squeamish per se, but there's some stuff I can live a long time without seeing.

They brought Max back to me, tightly swaddled in one of those ugly flannel receiving blankets with a hat squished down over his face. The first thing I did was strip all of that off of him so I could see him. He was totally normal looking: he looked just like a baby. He had giant hands and cute little feet and I thought he looked a lot like Dan. He did need to be monitored more closely in the NICU, though; low blood sugar is a major concern for babies of diabetics because they get excess insulin from the injections. He did have a couple of episodes of low blood sugar that first night, but I was, to be honest, a whole lot more concerned with what was happening to me at that point.

To be Continued...

Where Babies Come From, Part One

I am officially, by the most conservative of estimates, 30 weeks pregnant today. That means that in less than 10 weeks, The New Girl will be putting in an appearance.

I am officially beginning to freak out, in several different ways. I was so totally gobsmacked to be pregnant, finally, last fall, and to be pregnant under such an unbelievable amount of financial and personal stress, that, to be honest, I had a very difficult time accepting the idea that I was pregnant at all, despite my constant morning sickness, despite my official status as a run-on sentence (translation: my missing period. Get it? God, I'm funny), despite my bone-crushing fatigue that had me asleep on the couch by 8 o'clock every night, despite the multiple pregnancy tests that came up positive.

Everything seemed to happen to me all at once--I got a new job, our car was stolen, the holidays that ended up being so thoroughly dismal, Max going back to school full-time--to a degree that I didn't feel totally able to process the fact that I was finally pregnant with the baby we'd wanted so much for so long. So I didn't. We didn't make any plans to move out of this tiny condo that would be the perfect size for one or maybe two people, but is exhaustingly cramped for two people plus a three-year-old. We didn't buy a crib. We didn't buy anything at all, really, until after we found out we were having a girl--a fact, incidentally, which only served to make the entire thing more unbelievable. Partially this was just practicality--why buy a bunch of new baby clothes for a second boy? We've already got one boy and a whole lifetime's worth of clothes, and if it's a girl, we'll need different stuff anyway. But partially, it was my reaction to being pregnant at all.

I have ten weeks to do 40 weeks worth of worrying, and have come cruising out of denial mode into full-on WTF??? mode. I'm worried about a million things this time that last time never even crossed my mind. In an effort to talk myself through the crippling anxiety I am feeling, I am currently trying anything I can think of.

It occurs to me that I have never actually written down Max's birth story, which is practically unheard-of on a Mommy blog, which, more or less, is what this is. It's one of the first things I go looking for when I'm reading some other mother's blog for the first time, reassured by the fact that none of the weird, painful, awkward, embarassing, uncomfortable, startling things that happened to me were really that weird, painful, awkward, embarassing, uncomfortable, or startling.

So, in an effort to quiet some of the worrying that I am finding myself trying to cram into ten weeks worth of pregnancy, I'm going to spend the next few whatevers telling Max's birth story in a reminder that sometimes things just happen in an average, totally expected, not at all premeditated way, which, overall, was my experience with Max.

On June 18, 2005, I was 38 weeks and 3 days pregnant with Max. A few days earlier, I had gotten a call from my OB, Dr. Bushrod (a hilarious name for an OB-GYN, I think) saying that she wanted to induce me on June 21st, as she'd be going out of town and wanted the baby to be born on her watch. While I am technically a high-risk pregnancy, due to being a type I diabetic, it was as uneventful a pregnancy as anyone could have hoped for, save for one short hospitalization at 22 weeks due to getting a gastrointestinal bug that made me as sick as I've ever been in my life, requiring several days of IV fluids and an anti-emetic that is still by far my drug of choice. I'd had no problems with high blood pressure or anything else, and the baby was responding well to the multiple tests I was having every week. I was having an ideal pregnancy, even for someone whose didn't have health issues that could turn pregnancy into a nightmare.

My parents arrived by car with, among other things, the frozen top layer of our wedding cake that afternoon. Our first wedding anniversary was July 17th, and I was looking forward to finally getting a slice of that cake. On my wedding day, I'd been too busy running around, talking to people, to ever eat more than just that one bite that Dan had fed me for photos. Their plan was for my stepfather to fly back to Kalamazoo on the 20th, leaving my mother here for the first several weeks to help out, then fly back in early July to drive home with her again, with Dan's parents arriving that afternoon for 9 days.

The night before my stepfather flew back to Kalamazoo we went out and picked up take-out barbecue, then took it home to eat it. It was punishingly hot already, and I was spending most of my time either on the couch, complaining, or in the apartment complex's swimming pool. Most of the time I was there, I complained too. My mother baked me a blueberry buckle, which is a really yummy yellow coffee cake studded with blueberries and topped with a brown sugar strusel topping, which I was eating entirely too much of, mostly because it seemed to be one of the few things that didn't require me to chase it with a handful of Tums.

The next day, June 20th, we drove Tom to Dulles, which is, inexplicably, the airport which my parents prefer to fly to and from whenever they visit, which I don't understand--it's the least convenient and farthest away from us. We'd only been there once, and I didn't know the way--nor did I particularly care. I was riding along only because I was tired of complaining inside my own apartment, and also, because Dan didn't like to be that far away from me, and he was going along.

We got lost on our way back from Dulles. It's easier to do than you'd think, especially if you need to stop for gas, and, like my mother, you manage to do so in the least likely spot on earth. I sat crankily in the back seat of the car, wishing like hell that I wasn't pregnant. Somehow, we ended up in the middle of downtown D.C., on Constitution, while my mother gazed around and remarked repeatedly about how exciting it must be to actually live here. I wanted to punch her in the face.

Dan managed to get us back to 295 southbound, which took us through several not-great neighborhoods and along a rather heavily potholed route. In the back of my mother's Jeep, I kept picturing the contents of my uterus bouncing off my cervix every time she hit a bump. "Sorry!" she kept calling out merrily. "Doing okay back there?" I grunted at her, picturing the flat spot on my kid's head, that I was sure would result from his skull being bounced off my pelvis for two hours.

We went to my last doctor's appointment, where I shed my pants and gave my OB one final look at my cervix. "Still closed," she said. "Maybe a little shorter than earlier this week. No contractions or anything?" she asked.

"How would I know?" I asked. I'd never had a contraction, not so much as a Braxton-Hicks contraction, that I'd been aware of.

She laughed. "You'd know," she said darkly. "We'll see you tomorrow night at the hospital for induction." I felt like I was joining the army. I put my enormous maternity pants back on and waddled back to the waiting room.

We'd been waiting for the crib that we wanted to be in stock at Sears Essentials in Clinton, Maryland, for several weeks. On the way home from the doctor's, which was in the professional building next to the hospital, I asked Mom to stop at Sears so that we could pick it up.

Dan and I made arrangements for the boxed crib to be brought from the back of the store to the front, which required several walking trips through the store. Mom lost interest and wandered off to look at baby clothes. Finally, we were walking from the back of the store to the front one last time, me waddling several steps behind Dan, who'd never really learned to adjust his walking speed (typically, I walk much faster than him, because my legs are longer) to accommodate my pregnancy. Dan was talking, not really aware that I'd fallen behind him by several steps, as is his wont, and I was not really listening to him, thinking to myself, God, I'm just so effing uncomfortable, I'm so tired of feeling so totally uncomfortable, and what is this thing that's happening now, this is fucking miserable, I just wish it would stop--when all of a sudden, it did stop. Instantly. At the same instant that it stopped, I felt what can only be described as a hot, wet bomb going off in my crotch. It didn't hurt--in fact, it relieved some of the intense pressure I was feeling, so it actually felt pretty good--but an instant later, I felt something warm and wet running down the inside of both legs.

I stopped instantly where I was, and just about that time, Dan realized I wasn't walking with him. "Dan," I said. "My water broke."

Dan looked at my feet, then at me. "Are you sure?" He was looking for the puddle that he assumed I would instantly be standing in. But all I could really feel was a trickle--like I'd had to pee really badly, and I'd sneezed, or laughed hysterically.

"Yes," I said. I'd never been so sure of anything. It wasn't a feeling you could mistake for any other feeling in the world. I could feel my underwear and pants becoming increasingly wet.

Dan and I stood there for a couple of seconds, staring at each other. "What should I do?" I said. I was afraid to move.

"I don't know," he said. "Where's your mother?"

Just then, she stuck her head out from one of the aisles. "What's going on?" she asked.

"My water broke," I said.

"Oh," she said. "Oh! I'll buy a beach towel."

It was good thinking on her part. We were only a couple of miles from the hospital at that point, and the logical thing would have been for us to just get in the car and drive back. Logic, however, was not my strong suit at this point. My pants were wet, I had a bag packed at home, waiting to go to the hospital, I wanted my own pillows and things, and I thought it would be silly to go to the hospital with a crib in the back of the car. "Take me home," I ordered. "I want my stuff."

Dan and Mom didn't try that hard to argue with me. Instead, they shuffled me into the front seat of the car and drove me home, where I was beginning to feel increasingly uncomfortable. I called my doctor's office, which had closed in the twenty minutes since we left, and I left a message with the answering service, as the recording instructed me to do. "I'm one of their patients," I explained. "My water just broke." It felt like a huge relief to say so: even though I was anxious about when things would start to hurt, or I would start throwing up (which I hate to do), or things would otherwise increase in unpleasantness, I was relieved to think that there was a light at the end of the endless tunnel of pregnancy, one that hadn't even appeared when they'd given me a date for induction. The answering service said that the doctor would call me back. I felt remarkably calm and collected at this point, feeling mostly just that sense of relief that it was all almost over.

I went into the bathroom to change my pants, which was beginning to seem like more trouble than it had been worth. The pair I'd been wearing were soaked, of course, and they were the only pair of maternity shorts I owned. I'd also been wearing my most comfortable pair of underwear. I somehow managed to peel both of these off, despite the fact that I was increasingly uncomfortable, although not really in pain, and drag on another pair of jeans. The amniotic fluid wasn't a steady stream--just an occasional gush when I changed positionts or the baby moved. I found a heavy-duty maxi pad under the sink and pasted it into my maternity underwear and hoped it would suffice for the trip back to the hospital, managed to stand up and drag my pants up past my hips.

As I did, there was another gush of amniotic fluid and it was clear that any precautions I'd taken against having to go out in wet pants were going to be fruitless. I absolutely did not have it in me to change my pants again. I threw the bathroom door open. "Fuck this," I said to my mother and Dan. "Get me a towel to wrap around my waist and let's just go."

To be continued...

Fear of Falling

When he was about 14 months old, Max took a big face-planting fall off the arm of the couch, headfirst into the back of a chair that was sitting nearby, onto the floor. It was truly one of the most awful moments of my entire life, that split second of stunned silence between crash and screaming. It's the first time I can remember him having really hurt himself--he'd had stomachaches and other minor ailments before, and he'd certainly been uncomfortable, I'm sure--but he'd never really been hurt before. In the second it took me to get to him on the floor and flip him over, looking for blood or broken teeth or anything visibly terribly wrong with him, I burst into tears too. Dan was in the kitchen correcting papers at the time, and I screamed for him. He came running, I sat on the floor holding Max and wailing, Max flailed wildly and cried, and once he determined that there wasn't anything really wrong with any of us, Dan sat on the floor next to us and comforted his crying wife and son.

He wasn't hurt, luckily. Max is like a cat: it seems to me like he should have gone through all of his nine lives ten or twelve times over by now. I've read more near-misses and horror stories recently: babies who've rolled off their parents' bed onto a hardwood floor, toddlers who've miraculously been caught by a passing stranger as they've fallen from a third-story window, and of course, like nearly every blogging and Twittering mother on the planet, I was shocked and horrified to read earlier this week about little Maddie Spohr.

It's gotten warm here over the last few weeks, and for several hours in the afternoons most days, we've opened the windows, and Max has taken a particular and somewhat peculiar joy in pressing his face against the window screen in his room and screaming out the window at the top of his lungs. Yes, I'm aware that my kid is a bit of a total weirdo, but at any rate, no. We live on the third floor, and there will be absolutely no pressing of our heads against a window screen. The screaming I can live without, but the real issue is the visual I have of the screen giving way and Max falling headfirst out of the window, three stories, into the parking lot below. It's one of the few infractions of the rules that has earned Max a spanking: we only spank for things that could seriously hurt him or someone else.

I can't prevent every header that Max is determined to take off the couch. I just can't. This kid is three and a half. Sometimes they have to fall down, just to check to see if gravity is working. I get that. I can (and do) keep the machetes and heroin and porn out of his grasp (yeah, the heroin and porn are all mine; hands off, kid), but I can't eliminate every sharp corner and edge and forehead-level-everything from our house. And furthermore, I don't want to. He is, after all, three and a half. At some point, you should learn not to walk headfirst into things.

When he was six months old, Max was exposed to whooping cough from a ten-month-old who had not been immunized according to the CDC's childhood vaccination schedule, or, as it turned out, according to any medically-recognized vaccination schedule at all. Max had just received his third dose of the DTaP vaccine when he was exposed, but I was concerned enough to call his pediatrician immediately. I was further concerned a few days later, when I learned that the older baby had, sadly, died. Max has a wonderful pediatrician, a brilliant clinician and an extremely capable woman who's never pooh-poohed my concerns, no matter how outrageous they may have sounded to her, and the first thing she said to me was, "You've done the right thing calling." She immediately looked at his vaccination records to see that he was fully up-to-date, saw that he was, and said, "My immediate thought is that he should be completely fine, but keep a close eye on him over the next two weeks." Done and done, I thought. I was a stay-at-home mother at that point; I had not a whole lot else to do besides keep a close eye on him.

Max never developed so much as a sniffle. In checking with the local health department, I learned that six cases of pertussus were reported in conjunction with the baby who died; all were children who were on "alternative" or "delayed" vaccination schedules. They never ascertained exactly how many people were exposed to pertussus; but no fully-vaccinated children or adults reported becoming ill.

Let me repeat that, because I think it's significant: no vaccinated children or adults reported becoming ill. There has been a lot of talk about vaccination lately; Heather Armstrong at Dooce is a lightning rod for most internet-based parenting controversy and this is no different.

My feelings about vaccination is pretty straightforward: I have and will continue to vaccinate my children on schedule against anything that they have vaccinations for, including measles, mumps, rubella, diptheria, pertussus, polio, varicella, hepatitis A and B, rotavirus, Haemophilus influenzae type b, pneumococcal, influenza, meningococcal, and HPV. These are, by all reliable accounts, medically safe and proven to prevent, not cause, life-threatening and devastating diseases, anecdotal evidence notwithstanding.

I could not be more sympathetic to the parents of children who suffer from autism-spectrum disorders. I have a nephew who's suffering terrible social, developmental, and learning delays due to an autism-spectrum disorder. As a parent of an energetic and precocious pre-schooler, I am struck multiple times a day by how much of a challenge a totally normal kid is; I simply cannot fathom the depth and breadth of challenging a delayed child.

When Max fell head-first off the couch, I immediately blamed myself. I was sitting right next to him; why didn't I grab him? Why did I let him climb the arm of the couch? What was I thinking? He could have broken his skull, his neck. I could be sitting here holding his dead body right now! What is the matter with me? That's why I cried, not because of him getting hurt. I cried because it was my fault he fell.

You spend nine months, minimum, anticipating and growing this tiny little human being, and they hand them to you, and they're perfect, a total stranger to you, but still somehow exactly what you were expecting. When this perfect little person turns out not to be perfect, of course there must be a reason for it. Of course. Of course parents struggle to find some reason that the train has come off the tracks in such a thoroughly hideous way.

Vaccines are taking the heat for things that they're just not responsible for, and as a result, there are individuals out there who are making the decision not to vaccinate. As a result of that decision, diseases that should be practically extinct on this continent are making a comeback, and my kids are being exposed to things like whooping cough. Here's a news story from today, about patients who've been exposed to measles in a local hospital.

I know it's not pleasant, the idea of your baby getting a shot. But at the risk of sounding intolerant, the mothers that tell me, "I'll never vaccinate my precious children, I can't imagine making them get a shot," well, don't get pissed at me or anything, but I'm going to be forced to push you in front of a bus. That's what's known as thinning the herd where I come from.

The same goes for parents who tell me, "I won't vaccinate my children--everyone else does, and they'll never be exposed to anything for that reason." Well, your thinking is flawed, and you clearly don't have much of a grasp on, you know, science, but whatever. Do me a favor and don't let your kid come within twenty yards of my kid, okay? They probably don't wash their hands either.

And for the parents that cite the anecdotal evidence of vaccinations causing developmental delays, I don't know what to tell you, except that I'm afraid of my son falling down. I'm afraid of him falling off the couch, I'm afraid of him falling off the bed, I'm afraid of him falling out the window, I'm afraid of him falling off his bike and off the playground equipment and from the loft in our condo and down the stairs. I'm scared to death of the feeling of helplessly watching him fall, the anticipation of the sound of him colliding with a hard surface, the sight of my own hands reaching toward him just a second too late. I'm afraid of that moment of silence before he starts to cry, of that moment going on and on and on, holding my breath while I wait for him to start to cry, and what will happen if I never hear him cry again, how I'd ever be able to stand it.

But I know he will fall down. I know he will. I know he'll hurt himself, probably, at some point seriously. I did. When I was about Max's age--younger, maybe--I fell skiing and sprained my ankle badly, an ankle I've reinjured numerous times since then, probably due in part to the injury that I sustained when I was three. Kids do that. It happens. You take risks, calculated risks. You spank them for leaning on the window screen on the third floor, but you cheer when they ride away from you on their bikes. You stop them from jumping on the bed, but not from jumping down the last two stairs.

I am vaccinating my children because I feel that it's not only the responsible thing to do for them, but it's also the responsible thing to do for my community. I can't depend on other people to be responsible, so I do my part. Herd immunity is something everyone has to contribute to; I do my part by contributing, and I will continue to do so. I have no good evidence that vaccinations cause anything other than immunization.

Sure, go ahead and don't vaccinate your kid. But don't tell me I'm harming mine by vaccinating him. Don't tell me I'm putting him at risk. I'm not stupid and this is the calculated risk I'm taking: the slim possibility of vaccine reactions versus the much-less-slim possibility of devastating neurological damage or death due to a preventable illness. I get it, okay? You take risks as a parent. This is the devil I know versus the devil I don't.

And do me a favor: if you're not going vaccinate your kid, keep him away from mine. I wasn't kidding about that.

Six Years

Six years ago tomorrow, Dan told me that he was really enjoying the conversation we were having in the parking lot of our job, standing next to our cars, and he'd really like to continue having it, but he was cold and tired and would I like to come over for awhile?

I said yes. And six hours later, he kissed me for the first time.

In the past six years, we've moved in together, worked together, gotten new jobs, planned a wedding, moved halfway across the country, had a baby, lost jobs, made new friends, gotten pregnant again, changed plans mid-stream, evaluated and re-evaluated and re-evaluated what was the best thing for us and our immediate family and our extended families, and now, six years later, we've come to another bend in the road.

I lost my job earlier this week. I know for a fact that my former place of employment knows about this blog and I am still waiting to hear about unemployment benefits, although I was assured it was not a factor, so I won't go into the finer points of the loss of this job, but suffice it to say that, working in media, it wasn't totally unexpected and the economy has a great deal to do with it.

I am 26 weeks pregnant and I can't go running out to get another job right now. We can't make it here on one income. We're having a baby in July. Our parents are getting older, and we want our kids to really know them. We miss having the backup of family. Dan isn't happy with the school where he teaches, he feels that it's been a hostile work environment and the administration is phoning it in in the worst possible way. And worst of all, in five years, we feel like we haven't made any real progress toward the things we want--a real home, some security. It's incredibly expensive to live here, and becomes more so all the time. Add to that the expense and inconvenience of Dan having to re-certify as a teacher this year, and it's all just a little more than we can handle.

So. We've come to a decision. We're going to finish out the school year and have this baby, and then we're going to move back to Kalamazoo, permanently. In a lot of ways, it breaks my heart. I love it here. I've always loved it here. I have friends here. My best friends are in town twice a year, minimum, and I've loved that I've had the chance to see them so often. There are great restaurants and museums and places to go, an endless supply that we'll never get tired of seeing. I love it here.

But our families are a long way away. We need the backup, especially with a new little person arriving so soon. We've been the victim of crimes here, repeatedly, and every time it knocks us down and it's just so fucking hard to get back up. And we're exhausted.

I don't mind that it's hard. I don't. This is being a grown-up, and I'm not afraid to stand on my own two feet, especially with Dan standing next to me--I couldn't ask for a better partner in life. But it should be a little easier, shouldn't it? After five years, should we still be fighting this hard, every day? I want to let my guard down a little, and I still can't. I don't mind that it's hard, but it shouldn't be this hard.

I don't know exactly what we're going to do. Dan can absolutely sub until he finds a real teaching job, and his teaching certificate, which he originally got in Michigan, is still good there. He'll have to take some classes this year in order to keep it current, but he's willing. The economy in Michigan is terrible, and I'm pretty well assuring myself a boring job in marketing or something like that, stuff I've done before, but I'm also giving The New Girl a chance to have me all to herself for awhile. Max got that chance, and I feel like I owe it to her as well. I owe it to myself. This is the last baby I'm going to have, and I want this for all of us.

My parents are thrilled of course. We're having a hard time getting a read on Dan's mother's feelings on the subject, mostly because her reaction was to immediately change the subject to something totally unrelated, which enraged me to the point that I had to get off the phone and find something else to do. I am probably going to leave this topic alone for the time being, as I have nothing productive to say about the subject. We anticipate staying with my parents for at least a few weeks, and then, depending on the job situation, either looking for an apartment or a house--home prices in Michigan cannot be beat right now, and we're pretty happy about that. A lot of the salient details of all of this remain firmly up in the air at the moment, but we're putting our ducks in a row to make all of this work in the best, easiest, most expedient way we can think of. Additionally, living in Kalamazoo, our kids will qualify for the Promise, possibly the best college scholarship program in the country.

The lesson in all of this is that I am learning, once again, that things that feel permanent seldom are, except for things like the love you feel for your children, your partner, your friends, and your family. Six years ago, Dan took my hand and stepped off a cliff, and the results have been serendipitous; I couldn't have asked for more. This summer, we'll take a step off another cliff, and it's scary, but I've got no choice but to hope that our luck holds.

An Impressive Family Tree

Dan and I put up a few family pictures of various members of our familes on the wall in Max's room yesterday. We figured that since we live so far away from most of them, he ought to at least be able to recognize them.

We were looking at a picture of two of my cousins with their father, my uncle, who is now in his mid-eighties and in faltering health. "Who's that?" I asked Max.

"That's Cousin Dan," he said.

"And who's that?" I asked.

"That's Cousin Don," he said.

I pointed to my Uncle Lonnie. "Who's this guy here?"

Max hesitated for a minute. "That's God."

I think I'd like to place a moratorium on all further discussions about religion between my son and his father until Max establishes a firmer grasp on some of the more elusive elements of the topic.

Almost Paradise?

There is a weird thing that happens when you can't get pregnant when you think you should, for whatever reason. You start to think of the state of being pregnant as this sort of quasi-nirvana. I think it has something to do with the grass always being greener; you want the baby of course, but more than that, you crave -- what? The act of outgrowing your pants overnight? The loss of your appetite for three months? The overwhelming urge to fall asleep any time you aren't physically in motion?

Well, it all comes back to you pretty quickly. I was feeling pretty decent with this baby until the middle of Thanksgiving dinner. If you'll recall, when I'm in charge of Thanksgiving, there isn't turkey or cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie; there are mini crabcakes and cocktail meatballs and boiled shrimp and hummus and cheese spread and all the other things that I usually like about the three hours before Thanksgiving dinner. That's what we had this year, and I bit into a perfectly poached, perfectly seasoned, perfectly chilled shrimp with homemade cocktail sauce, and my universe instantly changed shape. And not in a good way.

Goodbye, appetite. See you sometime in mid-February.

A partial list of things I couldn't/wouldn't eat while pregnant with Max: Yeah, I got nothing. My food aversions were not terrible with him. Cereal grossed me out a little, and dairy.

A partial list of things I couldn't/wouldn't eat while pregnant with The New Girl, only in the first trimester: ground meat of any sort, or really meat or poultry of any kind, dairy, citrus fruit, tomatoes or tomato products of any kind, nothing sticky or gooey, or anything sweet of any kind except for the possible exception, on very good days, of Sour Patch Kids. They actually were pretty great as far as a short-term cure for morning sickness. I pretty well subsisted on apples, diet Ginger Ale, saltine crackers, frozen bean and cheese burritos and Chef Boyardee ravioli.

Those illusions about how great pregnancy was flew pretty well out the window in the months of December, January, and the first half of February. I felt shaky and sweaty with a combination of fatigue and hypoglycemia pretty much all the time, had an overwhelming schedule of doctors' appointments with a variety of specialists and a brand new full-time job, and the three-and-a-half year old who lives with me couldn't understand why I was far more likely to fall asleep mid-sentence than I was to get down on the floor and play with him. I was not enjoying myself very much at all, and I'm pretty sure no one else around me was enjoying me at all either.

Right around the time that I experienced a brief but violent bout of the stomach flu--how's that for a kick in the pickle?--the morning sickness eased and I found my appetite again. It was really great, to be honest: food hasn't ever tasted as good to me as it has in the last three weeks, and after two and a half months of not even wanting to think about, look at pictures of, or discuss food, let alone eat it--well, sufice it to say, I've been a very happy girl.

In general, I am happier than I tend to be most of the time, to be honest. The cloud of low-grade anxiety that typically floats around me has magically cleared and despite my initial shock at the news that I am pregnant with a girl, I don't feel as much sheer terror at the thought of raising one as I thought I would. I never enjoyed traditional girlhood that much, not being really a big fan of clothes and makeup and dolls and stuff, and guiding someone else through it--well, the thought didn't exactly make me do the Snoopy dance. But I survived it, and it was not that much fun at the time, but I am basically no worse for wear because of it, and so will my daughter.

I am a little sad about all of the adorable little boy clothes that I am currently sorting through, all of the memories of 6-week-old Max, round and drowsy and adorable in the smallest baseball jersey I've ever seen. The fact is, we're not having another baby after this one--we can't afford it, for one thing. For another, it's a good round number--two kids, two grownups, and maybe a dog eventually. Nobody's outnumbered that way. So we just don't have the need of all of the boy clothes, and we've culled out most of the things like pajamas and things that are sort of unisex, and we're sorting things into too-tired-looking-and-stained-for-anything-but-the-trash, donate, and send to Kimberly and Michael for their little Sprout. It will actually be kind of great to see Sprout wearing a Nationals uniform, however deeply it will most certainly gall his Cubs-fan parents.

In the last couple of weeks, I have begun to feel The New Girl kicking, prodding, rolling around, and in general being as active as Max ever was. This weekend, I was sitting on the couch and noticed that she was kicking me hard enough for me to be able to see my shirt moving. I am looking far more pregnant at this point than I did with Max--I have all but given up on even my fattest fat-jeans, the ones I bought right after Max was born, ones that have been too big for me for two years now, and am splitting my time between maternity jeans and my most forgiving yoga pants. I am carrying this baby very high, much higher than I carried Max, and as a result I look far more traditionally pregnant than I did with her big brother, with whom I looked mostly just fat and never more than about six months pregnant.

Despite the fact that Max had his heart set on a "baby brudder" and there were several meltdowns on his part after the ultrasound that revealed girl bits--I really wondered about some kind of prescription sedative in a dose safe for a preschooler--he is as excited as we are about having a girl, and far less trepadatious about what having a 13-year-old girl around the house will be like.

The thing about second babies is that they're unpredictable. You learn your way around the first baby, figure out what they like and what they don't like, whether the bouncy seat makes them cry and the swing puts them to sleep, what kind of blanket they like and which they can't stand. Then the second baby comes along and you start fresh and you don't know anything again, except that you're still overwhelmed by love and a number of years older and more tired, and as it turns out you still don't know anything.

And that's really the thing that's causing most of my small amounts of anxiety surrounding this baby--I have no idea who this little stranger is. A week or so ago, I demanded that we decide on a name for her, because I couldn't bear that I didn't even know what to call her in my own mind. I suspect that I rushed Dan into making a decision, but in the meantime, I think all three of us have become a little more at-ease with the thought of a little person whose name we at least know.

So in general, I am very much enjoying this pregnancy. Despite the fact that I have "stranger danger" in regards to my own daughter, I feel good--energetic, most of the time, clear-headed, not too physically uncomfortable, my health is good. Basically, I don't have a lot to complain about. The grass, in this case, really is greener on this side of the fence, and I'm pretty relieved about that.

I'm So Glad We Taught Him to Speak

I just had the following conversation with Max:

Me: Max, stop wiping your nose on the bookshelf. (Max ignores me, continues to spread snot everywhere.) Max!

Max: (Gets mad, turns around shakes an index finger at me.) No! You stop yelling! I'm so mad at you! I quit!

Me: Yeah, if I can't quit, you can't quit.

A Feeling Like the Clenching of a Fist

Dear Max,

I know the last few days have been hard for you, and uncomfortable, and scary. Someday soon, you'll have forgotten all about it though, and all there'll be to remind you is the hospital bracelet that your bear is wearing. I'd do anything to make you feel better, sweet boy, and so would your daddy; it breaks our hearts to see you like you are right now.

I know you'd never understand it if I told you that something so much more significant is happening right now to us, the importance of which we can only begin to comprehend. You probably won't remember the night that Barack Obama was elected, but your father and I do. We remember standing out on our deck after you went to bed that night. I was thinking about how nights like that were the reason you have kids, the hope that someday they'll see a better, more worthy world with a stronger, more potent voice to follow than their parents had. I was thinking that the past eight years would be a lesson to us, a reason to be more selective when it comes to who we choose to speak for us.

I was thinking that I am lucky to be here, watching this wall come down. I was thinking about 1989, when my mother, your grandma, and I sat in our living room and watched the Berlin Wall be torn down. I was 13 years old at the time, and I remember my mother turning to me and saying "I don't want you to ever forget what you saw tonight." When I was pregnant with you, your father and I went to Roslyn, Virginia, and saw the sections of the Berlin Wall that are there in Freedom Park now, along with things like the bronze casting of Martin Luther King Jr.'s jailhouse door and a boat the size of a wagon powered by a lawnmower engine that refugees from Cuba used to sail to Florida. I remembered watching a crowd full of people who believed so deeply in change that they were willing to die for it pull down a wall.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It's the birthday of a pioneer, someone who wanted better for his kids and for kids everywhere, and in that respect, he was just like any parent anywhere. He translated that desire into action, though, in a way that most people never find a way to do, and that action changed the shape of our country, and for that, I am so truly grateful. Today we are celebrating his commitment to change and peace and the ties between people everywhere, remembering what he wanted for his children and what we want for our own.

Tomorrow at noon, we will stop what we're doing and watch something amazing happen. It will change the shape of our country again, and you are too little to understand this right now, Max, but someday, I hope I can convey to you the need for this change. This has been such a dark place for eight years now, and I'm foolish for pinning my hopes on a person who is, after all, just one man. But I want you to know that what I hope we'll see tomorrow is the change that we've been hoping for, for you and for your little brother or sister on the way.

I hope the next eight years are better than the eight behind us, just like I hope that your fever goes down soon and you become my sweet boy again soon. You are three and a half years old, and on the day before President Barack Obama's inauguration, when I left for work, you were asleep on the couch with your Spanish-to-English dictionary in your arms. Your fever was down again, after running high all night, and you opened your eyes just long enough to tell me goodbye.

Feel better, Max. Soon, hopefully, we'll all have a reason to.

Love,

Mama

I am an Ugly Person, and Also, I Have a Flat Face.

Max is sick. He's a kid in pre-school, and his father is a public school teacher, so virtually every bug that occurs in nature enters our house. He is relatively seldom sick, too. He's only ever had one stomach bug, and he gets the occasional cold, but I've never seen him the way he was this weekend.

His fever never went below 100, and most of the time it was more like 103. He wouldn't eat, wouldn't drink, cried with no provocation, and mostly, wanted to lie on the couch. And we're not talking about a kid who's normally low-energy, even when he's sick.

Yesterday afternoon, he looked like a deflated balloon. He had slept most of the day, and I hadn't gotten him to eat more than a couple of bites of a popsicle all day. His fever was hovering around 103.8 when I gave into my fear mid-afternoon and told Dan that we needed to go to the Emergency Room.

I am not that mother. Hospitals are where sick people go, usually to get sicker. I don't race him off to the E.R. at the drop of a hat. However, we had several factors working against us. The first was simply his condition. There is a significant difference between Sick Max and Healthy Max, and the difference is obvious. I don't see Sick Max often at all, and this is what I was looking at today. He was sick, getting worse, I'd tried to help him for two days now, and nothing was helping. The second factor was where we are and when it is: it's three days before the Inauguration, in a suburb of Washington D.C. On Monday and Tuesday, if we needed an emergency room, it is very unlikely that we'd have one available to us.

I wrapped him up in a blanket, carried him to the car, and we drove him to the Emergency Room, which is only about eight blocks away. We registered in the E.R. and sat down to wait with him.

A few minutes ago, a very strange-looking man came staggering in the door. After registering, loudly, he came staggering across the room. He said something to Max, I don't remember what, but it was off-putting, and I wanted him to go away. Max gazed at the creepy guy uneasily. "He's sick," I told the creepy guy as icily as I could possibly muster. "Please leave him alone."

He did not do so. He continued to harass us while Max became more and more agitated by the man. Eventually, he took off his sunglasses to show us his face that had quite obviously been crushed by something--a hammer, by the looks of it. Finally, I told Creepy Guy to leave us alone or I would ask someone to call security.

He did not leave us alone. "There's a man over there that won't leave us alone," I said as loudly as I could to the registration desk. I didn't want him to miss who it was that was telling on him. "Could you please alert security that we're being harassed?"

They did so, immediately. This caused quite an interesting scene which, at this point, was mostly amusing to Dan and I. At one point, Creepy Guy announced loudly that he didn't have nothin' to say to them white people. Dan burst out laughing. "Why can't I just be 'that asshole?'" he asked. "Why do we have to be 'them white people?'"

At some point, they convinced him that he would have to be quiet, stop attempting to engage other patients in conversation, and generally reign himself in, or he would be forcibly removed. This was the point at which he stood up, pointed at me, said, "You know what? You ugly. You an ugly person. You and your flat face."

I started to laugh. "Did he say my face was flat," I asked Dan, "or fat?"

Dan was laughing too. "I think he said flat," he said.

"I was just wondering because the second one is sort of true," I said, "but the first one is just weird."

Creepy Guy, who was almost visibly under the influence of some sort of mystery cocktail of substances, went outside at this point, pulled a navel orange from his pocket, and appeared to engage it in a conversation of some kind. At that point, we were called back into the triage area.

Two very capable women quickly assessed Max, weighed him, took a short medical history, discovered that his temperature was now 103.9, his pulse was 178, nearly sixty beats a minute faster than a healthy 3-year-old, and began to work with a sense of urgency to which I am not accustomed to seeing here in the D.C. area, and certainly not in an emergency room. One of them got on the phone. "I have a baby here with a fever of 103.9," she said to whomever was on the other end of the phone. We were whisked through a back door and into the Emergency Ward, a series of three-sided cubicles arranged around a central nurse's station.

We'd not been there fifteen seconds before a nurse whisked in with a digital thermometer in her hand. "I need his shirt off," she said crisply. "His pants too, please." She took a rectal temperature, which I found unpleasant, although I'm sure not nearly so much as Max did.

104.1 now. She patted Max gently on the leg. "We're gonna make you feel better, buddy," she said to him. She took me aside. "He's gonna need an IV," she said. "There's really no option at this point."

"That's fine," I said. "Do it." We were left alone for a minute again, and Dan and I stared at each other. "I'll bet you all the money in my wallet against all the money in your wallet that his doctor is the guy talking to his orange out in front of the Emergency Room entrance," I said to him.

"No bet," Dan said.

His doctor was actually a calm, slender, silver-haired gentleman in a blue button-down shirt and khakis. He was kind and thorough and very gentle with Max, and moved fast. Max claimed that nothing hurt as the doctor prodded and poked at him, and the doctor seemed very concerned. He pulled me aside as well, and said, "Well, I don't like what I'm seeing. His temperature is very concerning to us." I nodded wordlessly. "Let's get that under control and we'll see what happens next. At this point, we start to worry about seizures."

Max was naked, laid out flat on the hospital bed, too scared to cry, whimpering in fear as the nurse, who could not possibly have been doing a better job, showed him exactly what she was going to do to him on his teddy bear. "I'm going to put this piece of rubber around your arm, just like the bear," she said, tying on the tournequet. "Then this little needle is going to stick you just for a minute, and then come right back out, and you'll have tube in your arm. It won't hurt at all once the tube is there."

"Look, Max," I showed him my insulin pump. "Just like Mom's tube." He was not consoled by this information.

Max held Dan's hand with one hand, my hand with the other. A nurse's aide held him down, although he was almost too weak at this point to struggle. He shrieked in terror, and then as she withdrew the needle and taped the IV in place, he calmed to a whimper again. She worked quickly, as quickly as I've ever seen anyone move, taking several tubes of blood, blood cultures, taping a plastic urine culture collection bag in place, the whole time talking to Max to keep him as calm as possible. "I'm giving him heparin in this IV," she said to me as she injected it. "It's an anti-coagulent, which-"

"I'm familiar," I said.

There were ice packs, and cold drinks, and more Motrin, and more Tylenol, and more tears and whimpering. Max still wouldn't drink, and they came and put an IV bag on. Slowly, Max began to look less like a deflated balloon and more like my boy again. He drank a few sips of the apple juice that they brought him and held a graham cracker in his hand, although he didn't eat it. He was dozing off.

His fever was falling, enough that they let us put a blanket over him. His arm hurt and he was crying, but he was also singing. He sang "You Are My Sunshine" to the nurse, whom he was charming thoroughly.

The doctor came in with the results from the labs. "These are largely inconclusive," he said. "His white blood count is borderline-high, which is indicative of an infection, but we don't really know what kind. How does he seem to be doing?"

"Our car got stolen," Max told him. It's a story he's told everyone he's seen since it actually happened. "It got crashed into a gate."

The doctor looked nonplussed. "I'm sorry to hear that," he said. "When was this?"

"This morning," Max said, at the same time as Dan and I both said "December."

"Okay," said the doctor. "Let's watch him a little longer."

Throughout the evening, Max repeated this story to everyone he saw, every time he saw them. At one point, the doctor asked if he'd been perseverating on the car being stolen before he got sick, or if this was possibly an effect of the fever. I am almost positive that he was joking.

Max's heart rate was falling from the 170's, where it had been when we came in, to the 140's, to as low as 129 as he dozed between seeing nurses and doctors. It wasn't low enough for the ER doctor, nor for the on-call pediatrician who was checking in with us too. I was listening to the two of them outside the cubicle, saying things to each other like "spinal tap" and "chest x-ray" and I wanted to cry. I would have changed places with him in a heartbeat.

In the end, they sent us home in the middle of the night, without a spinal tap or a chest x-ray or anything else that was scary for any of us. Max felt better, not much better, but better. His heart rate was down to the 130's, which they were more comfortable with, but not really comfortable. His temperature was down, but not normal. Overall, they were convinced that he didn't have pneumonia or meningitis, that he had a viral infection of some kind, that he was uncomfortable but no longer dangerously dehydrated or feverish. "Keep pushing the fluids," the doctor said. "That's going to make the difference betweeen whether he stays home or comes back here in a couple of days.

He still doesn't want to eat or drink, but he's eating and drinking more. He still has a fever, but it's not out of control like it was. He's testy and uncomfortable, but he doesn't look like roadkill like he did yesterday.

It's been a bad weekend, mostly for Max, and maybe a little for a guy with a crushed head, who may still be having a conversation with an orange outside Laurel Regional Hospital's Emergency Room.

A Tale of Too Stupid

First of all, go and read this post. Then come back.

The upshot is that this mother, in her nightly struggle to get her pre-school-aged daughter to bed and to sleep, in her frustration, wondered aloud via Twitter if it would be acceptable to smother her daughter in order to get her to stay in bed. A woman who follows her on Twitter, who clearly doesn't know her, her morbid sense of humor, or the deep and abiding love for her child that is so obvious to anyone with the common sense God gave pistachio nuts, found this tweet to be objectionable.

Shortly afterwards, the police appeared at her door. At 11 o'clock at night, this woman had to show them her sleeping child in order to prove that she hadn't murdered her own daughter.

I am totally dumbstruck by the ardent stupidity of this entire situation. I am absolutely horrified for this woman, and so sorry for the mortification and abject humiliation she must be feeling.

Dan is a teacher, as are several of our closest friends. They are all required by law and their jobs, not to mention simple human decency and civility, to report suspected physical, emotional, verbal, and sexual abuse of all children they come in contact with. In a thousand years, I cannot imagine anyone legitimately interpreting what this woman was saying as a threat of actual child endangerment.

Not a month ago, I threatened to tape Max in a box with a couple bottles of water and a couple of sandwiches and Fed-Ex him to my parents. Did any of you--seriously, anybody at all--interpret that as something I would publicly brag about doing, let alone actually do? Even for a minute? Did anybody sit down and give it any thought at all, whether that was something I was capable of?

Honest to God, I know my readership isn't enormous or anything, but really--anybody?

People don't brag about murdering their children on Twitter before they actually go and do it, for fucking Christ's sake! Especially not rational, sane, loving parents--as this blogger clearly and obviously is. People abuse children secretly, then they bury the body, or burn it, or chop it into pieces and stow it in their freezer! They don't write about what they're doing on the internet--especially before they do it. Come the fuck on.

That's the point. I've admitted my parenting shortfalls right here on this blog--a year ago, when Max was biting, I admitted to biting him back once. I admitted how terrible it made me feel to have physically done something that made him cry. I've admitted that I'm not the most patient parent on this earth, that I have a tendency to tune him out when I'm deeply involved in something else. Does that qualify as child neglect in somebody's mind? Quick--call child protective services.

This is busybodying run totally amok. This is a woman with not enough to do (and there's a link to her blog at the first link; I won't link to her because, frankly, I don't think she deserves the traffic) and too much time on her hands and too little to think about. I won't go so far as to call her stupid or ignorant, because name-calling is a little inane even in a case like this, but really, I'm starting to think that there ought to be a common sense or I.Q. prerequisite in order to connect to the internet, if for no other reason than to protect us normal, sane, rational human beings.

Several Short Items

1. Tomorrow is my birthday.

2. My internet is broken.

3. Morning sickness that lasts all day totally sucks ass.

4. My kid will not stop getting out of bed at night. Last night we dragged out the old portable crib, set it up, and made him sleep in it, because the little shit would not stop getting out of bed. I feel bad about the fact that he almost became a child abuse statistic last night, but there it is. Not really. But maybe. I may take him to Fed Ex, seal him into a cardboard box with a couple bottles of water and a couple of sandwiches, and send him to my parents' house. Forever. Not really. But maybe. Maybe just until the next one comes and we decide whether or not that one's a keeper. Not really.

5. I will never send my mother a Christmas list at her request again, because not only does she ignore what I ask her for, she buys me stupid, insulting gifts that illustrate the fact that she has no idea who I am or what I care about.

6. My holiday was fine. How was yours?

Insomniac, Again

My best friend's baby won't sleep. I feel so completely bad for Kimberly and Michael, because I remember how completely awful it was when the kid won't sleep, how it totally destroys any sense of routine or normal in your house, how thoroughly it clouds and confounds all of your other experiences.

To be totally fair, let me just say that Max was a really good sleeper, all things considered. Sure, he wanted to get up in the middle of the night some nights, and there was no convincing him that the day doesn't begin at 3:15 a.m., and there was nothing to do but sit in the living room, facing him as he bobbed cheerily in his bouncy seat, blearily staring at him and wondering how I was going to get through the next 24 hours. But I also had the reassurance that it was only going to last 24 hours, give or take, and soon, the kid would go back to sleeping four or five hours at a time at night, and an hour or two at a time, a couple of times a day.

We did go through a few phases where things that had worked before stopped working. They are panic-inducing, and you're sure your kid will never sleep again. Don't worry, he will. The single-biggest victory in the sleep war was the swing. We never had a regular-sized swing for Max, we figured with the bouncy seat and all the other stuff, we didn't really need it taking up room in the apartment. But at seven months, he gave up sleep totally over the space of about a month. It was a gradual thing--when he'd been going to bed at 8 or so, suddenly it was 9. Then it was 10. Then it was 11, and midnight...and he was still getting up at around 2 or 3 for a snack and a cuddle, and again at 7 in the morning, for good for the day.

I didn't know what else to do, so I bought a small, travel swing for him. It's just like the regular ones, only it sits closer to the ground and folds. It ran on a battery, and for a few months it was a total game-changer for us. We'd put Max in it at bedtime, tuck one of his "friends" -- a stuffed animal -- in next to him and tuck a blanket around him, turn the lights down, play some music, and lo and behold, the kid would be asleep within half an hour. From there it was just a matter of sneaking him out of the swing and into the crib, without waking him up. You had to wait just long enough for him to be really out and not get impatient with your non-sleeping, still squawking baby.

The thing that finally worked on a more permanent basis was when we examined what we were doing every night, and what time we were doing it. When they're tired, babies's brains make a substance that makes them think, I've been awake so long, now I might as well just stay up. The less sleep they get, the worse they need it and the harder it is for them to get it. It's a bad system. We realized we didn't really have a routine at all. and we were putting him down way too late--around 10. Everything we read said we should start working him into bed around 7.

By establishing a routine--bath, story, snack and cuddle, and into bed once he was asleep--we really helped the whole sleep situation a lot. He still got up in the middle of the night and wanted to eat, but we were pretty well accustomed to that by then, and one half-hour wake-up was pretty bearable. We would feed him until he was so deeply asleep that the bottle was literally falling out of his mouth. Also, we would pre-warm his bed with a heating pad--going from a warm lap to a chilly mattress was enough to wake him up again most of the time. Yes, of course we took the heating pad out of the bed when we put him in. We're, you know, not Brittney Spears or anything.

This all worked pretty well until he was about 1. That was when we transitioned from two naps a day--which he mostly took on the floor of the living room, on a blanket--to one nap a day, around noon. He just wasn't sleeping at night and we figured he was getting too much sleep during the day.

None of this addressed the fact that he just didn't fall asleep on his own. When he was about a year and a half old, we decided it was time. We did what the books recommend--put him down sleepy but awake--by altering the bedtime routine to keep him from falling asleep in our arms. When he started to look like he was having trouble keeping his eyes open, we would put him into bed and leave the room. If he cried, we would let him cry for a couple of minutes, then come back, comfort him without picking him up, and leave again. If he cried again, we would wait a little longer, comfort him without picking him up, and leave again. And so on.

It honestly wasn't that bad. There were two really bad nights, a couple of medium-bad ones, and a couple of not-so-terrible nights, and after that he didn't need us at all. Let me qualify that by saying that Max has always been extraordinarily independent, which we've encouraged by not always jumping in to help him when we thought he could work something out for himself. It hasn't always been easy, but the payoff has been enormous, especially as he's gotten older.

At one point, we started letting him go to bed with a bottle of water to drink--never milk or juice, but the water helped him settle down. We had to eliminate that when he was around two and a half, because he was drinking sixteen ounces, and then filling his diaper so full overnight that he woke up in a giant puddle every night. Breaking the bottle habit wasn't too bad--a couple nights of asking for it, but that was it.

I don't know a ton about getting babies to sleep. Mine slept mostly on his own. But some of the things that helped was keeping Max physically and mentally active during the day--just walking around the house or the neighborhood, pointing things out, imitating the car noises or the dogs barking or the birds, flipping through books, or sitting in front of the sliding glass door watching the birds. I would put him in the bouncy seat, which encouraged him to be physical without requiring a lot of effort on my part. I tried not to hold him too much--I felt like it discouraged him from being very independent and the more I held him, the more he wanted to be held and the less he would tolerate not being held. I didn't let him fall asleep in my arms--that became a total recipe for disaster, since he wouldn't sleep anywhere else.

Parenting doesn't get a whole lot easier, but it gets more rewarding, and the challenges come in forms other than sleep-depravation. We are struggling with potty-training, with defiance, with getting him to eat. The things that are hard about parenting change shape, usually without warning. But don't beat yourself up. There aren't really right or wrong answers, just things you've tried already, things that have stopped working, things you're not willing to try, and things you just haven't thought of yet. The right thing for your little person is out there.

Oh, and I should add--I was a stay-at-home mother until Max was 14 months old. One thing that really helped me was to hand Max over to Dan when he got home from work and lay down for a nap for a couple hours in the evening. I knew I'd be up at night, and the change of parenting scenery helped Max, and that couple of hours made life manageable. We decided it made more sense for me to get the couple of hours than to have a sit-down dinner all together as a family while I drooled into my food and fell asleep with my chin in my hand.

Those are my suggestions. If you have other suggestions for a desperate set of parents and their wide-awake Sprout, leave them in the comments.