Oil.  That’s right.  Oil.  That’s all I use on my face.  No soaps, creams, toners, masks.  Just oil.

My favorite olive oil

Shortly after Katie was born, I started noticing that she seemed to break out when I put my fancy, expensive, anti-aging moisturizer on my face.  The days I didn’t wear the moisturizer, her face was clear.  The days I did, her cheeks broke out in itchy, red pinpricks that she would scratch and rub on. 

I had to do something.  Obviously, I wasn’t going to continue using something that my baby was clearly sensitive to.  For a while, I used coconut oil on my face with mediocre results.  She still broke out a little, and my face always felt kind of gritty.  My skin looked tired and dull.  I was perusing the Trader Joe’s toiletries section one day, and I came across a bottle of Jojoba oil.  “Good for oil cleansing,” the back of the bottle said.  I didn’t get it, but I did go home and do some googling.

And thus did I discover the Oil Cleansing Method.

Here’s the idea: Your skin is covered by natural oils that it needs to protect and nourish itself.  When we constantly strip the oils out with soap the skin either gets dried out or reacts by overproducing oils and breaking out.  It doesn’t make sense to strip out your skin’s healthy, natural oil only to replace it with a synthetic oil.  Instead, what if we simply gently released the excess oils, dissolve the dead skin cells clogging in pores, and allow your body to maintain its own natural level of moisture?  And what gently dissolves excess oil?  More oil!

Okay, do you think I am insane yet?  I’m not.  This really does work better than any skin care regimen I’ve tried.  To put things into perspective, I used to work at a cosmetics counter, and I’ve always used high-end department store skin care lines.  None of them ever worked as well as a cheap bottle of oil!

If you’d like to try it for yourself, here’s how

Before you get started cleansing your face, you need to mix your oil.  You will mix castor oil with a nourishing oil of some kind.  The castor oil releases the dead skin and unclogs pores while the nourishing oil moisturizes and soothes. 

Nourishing oil and castor oil

Some ideas for nourishing oils include:

• Olive oil
• Avocado oil
• Sunflower oil
• Jojoba oil

Don’t use coconut oil.  It will clog your pores!

Start with a 1:1 ratio of castor oil and nourishing oil.  If you find your skin is too dry afterwards, cut the amount of castor oil.  If you find your skin is too oily, increase the castor oil.  The beauty of this is that you can customize this so that it perfectly meets your skin’s needs.

Right now I use a 1:3 ratio of castor oil and avocado oil. I mixed it in a pretty glass dropper bottle that I got at my local natural food store so it’s easy to work with.

Please ignore the background and focus on how pretty the blue dropper bottle is

Once you’ve mixed the oil, it’s time to start cleansing!

1. Put a quarter sized amount of oil into the palm of your hands and massage it into your face.  Pay attention to those really oily bits like your chin and those crevices behind your nostrils.
2. Leave it to sit while you do something else like brush teeth, wrangle a kid into the tub, or change a diaper.
3. Wet a wash cloth with very warm water (not so hot that you scald yourself, but as warm as is comfortable) and lay back on your bed with it over your face to steam your pores.
4. Accept the belly slapping, wet willies, foot tickling, and zerberts that your family bestows upon you as they sense your helpless state.
5. When the wash cloth has cooled off (a minute or so), sit up and gently wipe the excess oil of your face.  This is the hardest step.  Your instinct will be to wipe really hard to take all the oil off.  Don’t do this as this will dry out your face.  There should still be oil on your face.  This will soak in after a few minutes, leaving your face feeling comfortably fresh.

I do this every night.  Even with the kids and husband piling all over me, it still feels so luxurious.

In the morning, I just rinse my face very briefly in the shower.

Simple.

Some things I’ve discovered while doing this

• Use old, cheap wash cloths, preferably ones that are big enough to cover your entire face.  They will get oily and the oil does leave stains on them.
• Drip a few drops of blue Dawn dish detergent into the laundry cycle if you are having trouble with the oil not coming out.
• Unless you are much more graceful than I am, don’t try to oil cleanse in the shower.  There’s nothing like stepping on the oil patch on the shower floor at 6 AM and busting your butt.
• Don’t leave out the castor oil.  I tried this for a couple of days thinking it was the castor oil drying my skin out and my pores got really clogged and my skin started looking dull.  Turns out I just needed to wipe off the oil in a more gentle way.
• Expect an adjustment period.  I don’t know if this was more about my skin adjusting to the oil cleansing or me needing to adjust to the way skin should feel in the wild.  Regardless, it took a few weeks for things to work themselves out and for me to feel really comfortable with the way my skin feels with all of this.
• If you have trouble with dryness during the adjustment period, just use a little bit of the nourishing oil on its own to give your skin a moisture boost.

Have you tried cleansing your face with oil?  How did you do it and what was your experience?

1. Lip Balm!  This is, hands down, the best lip balm around.  The tiniest bit of nipple cream can protect, moisturize, and heal your dry, cracked lips. It doesn’t tingle and sting like certain lip balms do. It just leaves a smooth, rich, protective barrier. After I’m done putting lanolin on my nipples, I rub whatever is leftover onto my lips. Feels so good!
2. Ointment for Scraped Knees.  Gabi can be so sensitive sometimes on her wounds.  If she falls and skins her knees, even taking a gentle bath stings the wounds.  I hate seeing either of my babies cry.  Enter the lanolin.  It gives a soothing, non-stingy barrier, and helps it heal faster.  We save it especially for the rug burn-type wounds where the skin gets abraded off and every little touch burns like the dickens.
3. Drool Rash Ointment.  We are approaching teething-time with little Miss Katie, and her poor chin has seen better days.  She gets dry, chapped skin from all the slobber flowing down over her chin to her bib.  Enter the nipple cream. A few applications later, and the dry, red rash is completely gone.  I always rub a little up on her cheeks, too. It keeps her skin smooth and fresh. And I don’t have to worry about her rubbing a little into her mouth.
4. Diaper Rash Cream.  Just like on the chin, lanolin makes a great barrier.  It protects the bootie from the wets and dirties, and it heals the chapped area.  Are you seeing a pattern here?  Any time something is chapped and rashy, stick some lanolin on it!
5. Razor Nick Ointment. Not only does it sooth the sting and promote healing, but it stops the bleeding too. Handy!

And what if you get lanolin on something?  Yes, it stains. And no. You can’t just toss it in the washer to get the stains out.  So what do you do if your favorite bra, nursing pads, or sheets get lanolin stains on them?  Break out the blue Dawn! The grease-fighting action gets the oily lanolin out. Squirt some on the stain. Rub, rub, rub. Leave it to sit for a while. Overnight is good. Toss it in the washer, and voila! The lanolin stains are gone!

Do you have any odd-ball uses for nipple cream?  I’d love to hear!

One of my friends posted a great comment, though, that I wanted to quote to kick off today’s post. Megan wrote:

So I’m reading kind of mixed reactions to the hypnobabies CDs in this post. I know that a big hope was the thinking about the process without negative words like “pain,” but it sounds like that didn’t exactly translate during labor and delivery, yeah? But at the same time you visualized the birth process almost to a T and you give some credit to hypnobabies for that. Would you say they were still beneficial, and with your experience, what recommendations would you make to someone considering them?

Really great question Megan.  I started to write a reply to your comment, but I realized that the response was complicated and probably deserved its own post.

While many Hypnobabies birth stories tell of birth with no pain, Hypnobabies itself bills its method as one that allows you to birth “in comfort, joy, and love.”  They talk about replacing negative words with positive words and the hope is that you won’t experience birth as painful.

Birthing Katie was certainly physically painful, and I did a whole lot of hollering.  Yeah, you can call it “vocalizing” if you want, but you know me.  I calls it likes I sees it.  I got loud enough that I cracked a joke to my midwives about what the OB in the office next door must have thought was going on in the birth center.

Let’s be clear though. For those of you who haven’t had babies yet, pain in childbirth is absolutely nothing like pain from cutting yourself or pain from a broken bone or injury.  It’s completely different.  So different that I think Hypnobabies has it right when they talk about not using the p-word to describe it.  If you’re an endurance athelete you can come close to relating to the type of pain that childbirth entails.  Childbirth is much more like running a marathon than it is slamming your hand in a car door.  Does that make sense?  I think in many ways people focus too much on the pain aspect of childbirth and too little on the endurance aspect of it.

I didn’t go into the Hypnobabies expecting it to be pain-free.  I couldn’t really bring myself to use the alternate vocabulary very much in real life because it felt a little hokey.  What I did expect to get from the Hypnobabies childbirth method was a positive, empowering, natural birth that was free from fear and anxiety.

In that regard, Hypnobabies delivered tenfold.

Do I really believe in hypnosis?  Honestly, I’m not sure.  But what I do believe is that in listening to the tracks I was able to find a hidden well of confidence and power within myself that I didn’t know I had.

Leading up to this birth, I never felt anything but excited anticipation. During labor, except for those few moments right before Sue told my I was at 9 cm, I felt confident and powerful.

Unlike Gabi’s birth, which I went into with the idea of trying for a natural birth but if I need an epidural that’s okay, I went into this knowing with absolute certainty that I was not only capable of doing this but that I was going to do it.  I think that self-assurance showed in my birth preferences.

Hypnobabies helped me to find that confidence.

It was incredible how closely Katie’s birth mirrored the birth I had visualized.  I visualized myself having her quickly so I could get back home to Gabi and that’s exactly what I did.  And really, y’all.  I pushed out an 11 lb baby in 20 minutes.  Damn.

Even with Hypnobabies, Katie’s birth was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.  It made the half-marathon I ran look like a cakewalk.  But it was also the most exhilarating and empowering thing I’ve ever done.

So, sure, Hypnobabies didn’t give me a pain-free birth.  But would I use it again for myself if I were ever going to have another baby (which I’m not)?  Absolutely.  Would I recommend it to a friend. Definitely yes.

And for those of you who haven’t had a baby but are curious about what childbirth is like, go get yourself some running shoes and train for a marathon.  That high you get at the end of a race, the mix of endorphins, adrenaline, and tired and sore muscles, is like a smaller version of the feeling you have after unmedicated childbirth.

I’ve been away from the blog for a while, which is a shame because there have been so many interesting things going on.  Everything from hippy hygiene experiments to breastfeeding revelations to parenting two to food adventures to returning to work and on and on and on.  With as busy as I am, I really feel like I need to come up with a different plan to refocus my energy for 2012 back into this blog. I’d like to revamp my posting schedule, focus on the quality of my writing, and reserve more attention to my readers and others in the blogging community.

With the frequency that I have been posting for the past four months, my 3 posts per week schedule is too much to handle right now. I’ve got two kids and a full-time job, so I need to get real about what I can accomplish.  Moving forward, I will drop down to post once a week, with that post appearing on Sundays.  With as busy as I am with the two girls, this will still be a stretch goal for me, but I need to post at least every week to keep this blog viable for 2012.

I would also like to focus on the quality of writing.  Toward the end of my pregnancy, and with the commitment to post 3 times per week, I found myself just cranking out posts as fast as I could.  I would write furiously, get my thoughts out, hit the spell check, and then post it.  I think I owe my readers a little more than that.  I have the ability to write well, and I owe you all and myself the courtesy of putting forth that effort. So, for 2012, I will put much more effort into crafting readable and interesting posts.  I do have a degree in writing after all.  It’s time I put my skills to use.

In a similar vein, I will manage the comments section of my blog more effectively.  During my maternity leave, I got lazy about my comments.  I wouldn’t check them often, and sometimes it would be a week or more before I got around to approving a pending comment from a new reader.  That’s really not fair to you all.  You took the time to read my posts and comment, and I would like to show my gratitude for that by approving your comments quickly and taking the time to reply to each of them.

From a networking perspective, I need to get back to reading the blogs I follow.  It’s been a while since I’ve done that and it’s time to get back to it.  There are some excellent new blogs that have cropped up since I had Katie and I need to update my sidebar with their links.  It doesn’t seem right to expect folks to read my blog if I’m not reading theirs, so I will put more effort into reading and commenting.  I am setting a goal for myself to read and comment on at least 3 blog posts each week. This will get me motivated to come on out of my bubble and get back into the blogging community.

So to summarize, here is what you can expect from my for 2012:

• One article each week to appear on Sundays
• A focus on quality over quantity for my writing
• Quick response times in the comments section
• Replies to your comments
• Thoughtful comments from me on other blogs

I’m so grateful to all of my readers and I look forward to growing as a writer in 2012.

My sister-in-law, Carmen, arrived Monday, September 26th.  Before she arrived, I had been so worried about how we would handle things on our own if Katie decided to come a little early.  With my due date at September 30th, we knew we were cutting it close with her arriving on the 26th, but Gabi was 10 days late.

Still I worried.  I talked to my midwife, Sue, about it.  She gave us a few options, which helped to set my mind at ease.  We could switch from a birth center birth to a homebirth, but because of Juan’s discomfort, that wasn’t a really viable option.  We could bring Gabi with us to the birth center, but I wasn’t very comfortable with that option either.  I worried that with Gabi there, I would want to spend time comforting her instead of focusing on having Katie.

Eventually, we got a solution figured out.  If Katie started coming at night, we would take Gabi with us to the birth center.  Juan would hang out with her until morning, and then her teacher would come pick her up and take her to school (a home daycare) where she would stay until Katie was born.  If Katie started coming during the day, we would let her teacher know, and Gabi would spend the evening at school with her teacher’s family.

Thankfully, Katie decided to stay put until Carmen arrived on the 26th.  I truly think that my body listened to my need to have everything lined up with Gabi’s care, though, because in the wee hours of the morning on the 27th, I woke up with powerful contractions.  I knew this wasn’t a drill.  This wasn’t my body getting ready.  This was it.

I went downstairs and hung out with Carmen for a while.  I sat on the birth ball, hung out, and chatted.  She was jet-lagged so she and I stayed up watching Say Yes to the Dress while things moved along.

At 4:45 AM, I texted our Doula and called Sue to let her know that I thought things were moving.

At some point, I woke up Juan and let him know that this was the real thing.  Can you believe that he thought I was mistaken?  Oh, no.  “Honey, I’ve already called Sue and Jessicka.  This is for real.”  I hung out a while longer, texted our doula and called Sue again, and took a shower.  By that time, it was time to go in to work.

Juan said he wanted to try to work for a few hours in the morning (ha!), but I told him that he needed to drop off Gabi at school and come straight home.  He tried to argue, but believe me when I say that you do not win an argument with a woman in labor!

At 8 AM, as they left, I called Sue and Jessicka again to let them know what was going on.  Sue suggested I hang tight for a bit to see how things progressed.  I told her that when Carmen and Juan got back I needed to come in to the birth center because we would get to a point where I was not going to be willing to go anywhere.

So that was it.  I knew exactly what was going to happen.  Interestingly enough, this was exactly what I had imagined in my hypnobabies birth visualization!  I visualized that Carmen would arrive, I would go into labor the next day while Gabi was at school, and Katie and I would be back at home in time to welcome Gabi home from school.  So far, things were going just the way I visualized.

It was around the time I made that realization that the contractions started getting a lot more intense.  I couldn’t talk through them.  I started to feel the need to vocalize a little bit by groaning during them.  I started listening to my birthing affirmations hypnobabies track.  (In retrospect, I should have done this right away instead of waiting until later.)

Oh, ha ha to Mr. Juan for trying to tell me this wasn’t really it!

Juan and Carmen returned shortly after taking Gabi to school, and I instructed them on putting together our cosleeper (I will describe that in a separate post).  They got the furniture moved and set up, and that was it!

At 9:30 AM, we called Sue and Jessicka, hopped into the car, and headed for the birth center.

Once we got to the birth center and got settled in, it seemed like things had slowed down.  Juan put the Easy First Stage CD in the CD player, but I wasn’t paying much attention.  I sat on the birth ball while Jessicka rubbed my lower back.

At around 10:15, my contractions were still spaced out a bit (6-10 minutes apart), and Sue suggested that Juan and I take a walk around the neighborhood.  Since things had slowed, Jessicka went across the street to check on another mom who was in labor.  I didn’t really want walk, but I went ahead and agreed to.  We walked.  Every few steps, a contraction would hit and I would need to hug Juan and groan a bit.  It was hot.  The sun was bright.  We walked down the sidewalk, across the very small parking lot, and I said, “Forget this.  I want to go back inside!”  So we did.

I was not a happy camper at this point.  I laid down on the bed where things became much more uncomfortable and painful.  Damn if it didn’t hurt!  But it seemed like the contractions were stronger laying down, so I stayed on my side.  Truth be told, I just didn’t want to move.

My contractions were still really far apart, so I sent Juan to Trader Joe’s to get me some snacks.  Davie, one of the other midwives, arrived during this time with a smoothie.  It tasted like hell, but I tried my best to drink it.  If my blood sugar dipped, I might start getting sick again and that was the last thing I wanted.  Carmen hung out with me and held a hot rice sock on my back.

By 10:50, my contractions were every 4-6 minutes apart and really intense.  With every contraction, I would holler down the hall to Sue, and she would come running in to hold my hand.  At the time, it seemed like I was shouting at her in a really demanding way, but later she told me that I just sounded lost like I was calling to her for help.

It was at this point that I started to freak out a little.  I asked Sue to check how dilated I was because I was really losing hope.  She encouraged me to wait just a bit.  At the next contraction, I started cursing and I hollered down the hall, “Where the HELL is Jessicka!”  “I’m here,” she said, “Right here!”  She had just come back.

It was 11:15 by now, and suddenly everyone was back.  Juan was back, Jessicka was back.  Sue, Dawn, and Davie (all 3 midwives were there), and dammit I wanted Sue to check me.  I know I said I didn’t want to be checked, but I wanted to know that something had been happening.  I was pissed, scared, I hurt, and I wanted to know what the deal was.

We waited through another contraction, and then Sue checked me.  I was at 9 cm with a bulging bag of waters and -1 station!  Well, that explained a lot!  I had been in transition!  No wonder I had been feeling so awful!

Hot damn! Davie, fill the tub!  Let’s have us a baby!

The wave of confidence and relief I felt when I heard I was almost completely dilated was incredible.  Suddenly I went from freaking out to ready to get down to business.  Sue was surprised as well.  My contractions were really strong, but they were so widely spaced that she was expecting me to not be nearly where I was.

They got me out of the bed and onto the toilet so I could pee before I got into the tub.  I remember getting up off the bed I told Jessicka, “Okay, I’m going to get up and then I’m going to hit the floor.  I’m not falling down, but a contraction is about to start and I need to be on my hands and knees.”  It helped. I had a few contractions on the toilet, and I did not want to be touched.  Walking from the bathroom to the tub, I went to the floor with each contraction.  But then at 11:30, into the tub I went!

When I finally got into the tub, Dawn put in the Pushing Baby Out Hypnobabies CD.  I wasn’t really ready to push.  The contractions were really painful and I just didn’t feel the urge to push.  The bag of waters was really in the way, and caused quite a bit of discomfort!  Thank goodness for the water though.  It helped immensely.

Sue suggested doing some gentle pushes with the next contraction to see if that would get my water to break.  I tried.  Really, I did.  But it hurt and my heart wasn’t in it.  She checked me again, and I was almost totally dilated except for an anterior lip.  The bag of waters was pushing so hard and was so uncomfortable with every contraction that I asked her to go ahead with the AROM.  A few contractions later, she was ready with the little hook thing, and during my next contraction, she broke my water.  This was 11:56 AM.

Now I was ready to get down to business!  At 12:05, my body started pushing and I started pushing, too.  Sue and Dawn really let me do my own thing.  They didn’t try to direct my pushing or my breathing and they allowed me to trust my body to do what it needed to do.

And now I really started vocalizing.  I was actually not aware that I could make sounds like that!  I think I sounded like a cow!  I grunted and groaned and growled.  In retrospect, I feel a little embarrassed about it, but nature really did take over, and I was just along for the ride.  I really think that the Hypnobabies practice was helping me to allow my body to do what I needed to do.

I pushed for a few minutes, but I was kind of on my back.  I remember at one point reaching down and feeling her head.  I felt a ridge and was really worried that the cord was getting pinched.  Sue checked between contractions and reassured me that the ridge I felt were the plates in Katie’s skull compressing as she moved through my pelvis.  Our bodies were both doing exactly what they were supposed to do.

I was having trouble pushing.  I was sitting up, but I had slid down a little so I was reclined a bit, and that made things more difficult.  Sue tried to get me to curl around Katie more to help push, but I had a hard time doing that.  I just kept sliding down in the tub, and my motivation to move was nonexistent.  If there were a next time, I would tell Sue to zap me in the butt with a cattle prod.  I think it would’ve been easier if I would’ve been in a different position.

I think at some point I yelled at Dawn (or Davie?) to shut off the CD.  The noise was bugging me and I wasn’t paying attention anyway.

Around the time that Katie started to crown (or maybe before?) Sue reached down to see if some perineal massage would help give some comfort, and she had only barely touched me when I screamed at her, “DON’T TOUCH ME!”  Which in retrospect is kind of funny since I had written into my birth plan that I definitely wanted her to do that.  It’s amazing how your body tells you what you do and do not need.  I could feel myself tearing a bit, and when she laid hands on me (gently I might add!), it just intensified the feeling.

Again, I surprised myself by how I was able to vocalize.  I was able to tell my birth attendants what I needed without feeling too shy to do so, and I was able to allow my body to make the noises it needed to help push Katie out.  A few times I felt myself panicking and the pitch of my sounds would rise up into a higher register.  Each time that happened, it seemed like Sue or Dawn would get my attention very gently by laying a hand on my shoulder and quietly saying my name.  And I would bring my voice down into the low, belly sounds.  Keeping my voice low and deep helped me to feel more in control and helped keep the pressure low in my belly to help me push.  I think the Hypnobabies class really helped me to feel comfortable using my voice during Katie’s birth.

Katie crowned pretty quickly, but she didn’t come out all in one push.  Her head stuck out under the water, and Sue said, “You need to get up out of the water now.”  Something about the way she said it motivated me, and Juan and Jessica helped me to stand up.  I think Sue was expecting me to get all the way out of the tub, but as soon as I stood up, I had another contraction, and… BLOOOP!  OUT SHE CAME!

(For those keeping track, the time was 12:24 PM)

Sue made it around in time to catch her, and half a heartbeat later, Sue was passing her between my legs for me to hold.  At first I felt really confused and I didn’t want to take her.  I couldn’t really figure out what had happened, but I reached down and grabbed her because Sue was telling me to. As soon as she was in my arms and I felt her weight the confusion lifted, and I realized who she was and what we had just done.

And we sat down for a good snuggle in the tub.  It was the most amazing feeling.  It told Juan later that it was about a hundred times harder than running a marathon.  It was like I had walked through fire and come out a new person.  It was amazing.

Bless her, little Katie was such a little cuddle bug!  I just held her and cuddled her and a few minutes later I nursed her and I cuddled her some more.  It was awesome.  She was so warm and soft and covered in vernix (sorry about your shirt Sue!).  She was so alert, too!  She just looked around quietly taking everything in.

Sue, Dawn and Jessicka were making bets on how big she was.  To me, she just looked like a squishy newborn, but apparently she looked pretty big.  Sue bet that she was 10 lbs 11 oz and Dawn bet that she was 10 lbs 6 oz.

We waited quite a while in the tub.  In my birth preferences, I wanted to wait for the cord to stop pulsing before we cut it, and it pulsed for a long time!  It was a big, strong placenta!  Finally, at 1:04 PM, it stopped pulsing.  We clamped the cord and Carmen cut it.  Juan was too squicked out to do that and I was high up in Happy Babyland.  So Carmen got the honors.

Katie kept trying to kick the scissors, so I had to hold her leg still.

When my body started pushing the placenta out (1:15), I remember groaning and saying, “Why?  Why won’t it just leave me alone?”  But we got that done, too.  Apparently it was a huge placenta, and I got a nifty placenta anatomy lesson from Dawn a little later, which was very cool.

Sue and Dawn gave me plenty of time to relax and snuggle with Katie.  When they did the newborn exam and weighed Katie, it turned out that no one had been right about her weight.  She was 11 lbs!  Eleven.  She was huge!  She was the 3rd largest baby Sue and Dawn had ever delivered and the biggest Jessicka had ever assisted with!

Weighing Katie. She's almost too heavy for the scale!

What a little beast!

Relaxing before the newborn exam

Cuddles from Papa

I had to get some stitches. I was pushing like the blue blazes, and she was 11 lbs after all.  But Sue got it done quickly.  By 4 PM that same day, we were home and settled in.

Going to bed for the first time

Gabi meeting Katie for the first time

A few days after she was born, Juan said, “Are you ever going to stop bragging about how big she is?”  Nope!  I had an 11 lb baby without meds!  I feel like superwoman!  Sometimes I wonder if I’m still riding high on the hormones from Katie’s birth!  No, by now it’s just the oxytocin from nursing that keeps me feeling so good!

It was an incredible experience.  9 hours of labor start to finish. 20 minutes of pushing.  One enormous and beautiful child.  Who could ask for more?  Juan was awesome.  My midwives were unbelievable. Jessicka was incredible.  I think I had the best birth team on the planet!

Gabi and Carmen making a Thank You Cake for Sue, Dawn, and Davie

Sue and Katie at my 6 week postpartum check

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 36,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 13 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Cultivate Gratitude. I don’t mean thanking your adult friends for helping you.  This goes without saying.  I mean cultivating gratitude toward your baby.  It can be so hard when you’ve been up all night, you’re tired, you’re hungry, and you just can’t find a spare second to yourself.  I found myself, with Gabi, focusing on what I wasn’t able to do during the day.  I wasn’t able to eat breakfast.  I didn’t have time to go to the store. I didn’t get a nap. And on and on and on.

I found myself struggling emotionally with how I could manage everything.  I felt like my ability to have a life of my own was slipping away.  I became frustrated and occaisionally resentful.  I felt overwhelmed.

But Gabi was patient with me.  That’s the thing about babies.  They are so forgiving.  They won’t stop loving you if you mess up.  They won’t say, “I told you so.”  They won’t hold your mistakes over your head.

Gabi taught me that it wasn’t so important to be perfect.  She taught me to appreciate each moment.  Her patience and joy and love helped me to grow into the mother I am today.

With Katie, I was able to find something different within myself right away.  Instead of focusing on what I didn’t get to do during the day, I found myself feeling grateful for what I was able to do.  I thanked her every day for letting me take a shower, for letting me eat breakfast, for napping while I drove, for letting me suction her nose without a fuss, for putting her legs down while I changed her diaper, and on and on and on.  It’s amazing how powerful those two words can be.

Try it.  Say those words.  Say them out loud.  Say them when you’re frustrated.  When you’re in the shower and you’ve only just soaped your hair and your baby starts to cry and you know you won’t have time to do anything else except rinse the bubbles and dry off.  Say, “Thank you baby for giving me the time to wash my hair.”  Take a deep breath and let the rest go.  It makes a huge difference.

I am finding gratitude in all parts of my life.  I’m digging deep when my bouncy four year old knocks something off the table.

Thank you Gabi.  Thank you for your joy and energy.

I’m finding it when my husband is stressed and grouchy from work.  Thank you Juan for keeping a roof over our heads.

This gratitude helps me get through my day.

So my advice to new moms is this: Don’t focus on what you didn’t accomplish.  Thank your babies for the small things.  The small moments.  The time to eat a snack or use the restroom or shave your legs.  Find joy in the little things.

And to my daughters, Katie and Gabi?  Thank you.  Thank you both.  Thank you for your patience and your unwavering love.  Thank you for teaching me to be a better person.  You are my two blessings, and I give thanks for you every day.

This confession of mine predictably earned me a lecture on healthy eating.  I should eat only organic food.  Whole grains.  Home cooked.  Gluten free.  And while I’m at it, I should stop eating dairy and soy because that’s probably why Katie has a stuffy nose.  What I eat goes directly to her, didn’t I know, so I must avoid foods with chemicals of any kind and by the way, I should only eat brown rice, not white rice.  Scratch that, don’t eat rice at all because of the gluten in it.

I left the appointment feeling guilty, overwhelmed, and exhausted.  The more I thought about his speech to me, though, the more irritated I got.  Aside from any rare allergy issues in kids (where there are specific clinical signs) milk is milk.  Milk is not made from stomach contents.  You don’t go to the drive through and then have cheeseburgers coming out of your nipples.  Milk is made from blood.  Unless the situation is one of extreme famine, a mother’s milk will always be rich enough, nutritious enough, and wonderful enough.

I kept turning this over and over in my head and getting madder.  If I was another woman, one who wasn’t as plugged in to breastfeeding resources, I might have walked away from that conversation believing that since I couldn’t live up to this doctor’s impossibly high standards, my child would be better off on formula.

I experienced this kind of situation again following Katie’s tongue tie clip.  First I had to get her clipped by a very specific doctor out in L.A.  Then I was supposed to see a very specific lactation consultant (also in L.A.) to retrain her to latch.  On top of that, I needed to get her in to see a cranial osteopath to get her jaw muscles working properly.  Follow that up by special exercises and speech therapy, and you’ve got one seriously overwhelmed mama.  How many specialists do I need to take my kid to?  Can’t we just nurse?

Confession: I took her to LA for the clip, but I stuck with local lactation consultants to help with the latch.  I only saw the cranial osteopath three times instead of the recommended five visits because darn it, it’s expensive and I don’t really dig it anyway.  I haven’t been doing the exercises very religiously.  We probably won’t do speech therapy at all unless we find out that she actually has a speech issue.  Her sister didn’t.  Her father and I didn’t.  If she does, we’ll deal with it, but I’m not prepared to assume that she will.

Want to know something else?  I eat fast food sometimes.  Sometimes I even feed my family fast food.  I don’t always cook.  I do my best, but some nights, it just doesn’t happen.  I take ibuprofen when I have a headache.  And I cook with butter.  So there.

There is so much pressure for breastfeeding moms to be perfect.  Setting the bar so high (organic food, expensive doctor visits, no medicines, no wine, etc.) can ultimately drive women away from breastfeeding, and it’s critical that we not do that.

So nursing moms–all moms for that matter–Be good to yourselves.  You’re not perfect and that’s okay.

She has been sleeping on her own in her room for almost a year, but suddenly, when it comes time for me to kiss her goodnight, it’s meltdown city.  She also will not go into her room alone to choose her clothes.  Or to the bathroom alone.  Or anywhere alone.  She would rather stand there and pee in her pants* than click on the hall light, click on the bathroom light, and use the toilet.  At 3 in the afternoon.  (*We assume she would pee in her pants.  We’re not willing to humiliate her by putting that to the test.  She’s insistent enough that I’m certain it would end with a puddle on the floor if one of us didn’t intervene.)

Clearly this is not about the dark.

I talked to her about it last night, and, from what I gathered, she is missing some of the attention that we are having to give Katie.  She feels sad that Katie is with us all the time while she has to do things on her own more.  Poor kid.  I never lived with a sibling.  I have no idea what she must be going through.

We tried adding more night lights.  No dice.  We tried keeping her door open.  Didn’t work.

But I think we might have finally hit on a solution.

We have a very sweet boxer dog named China (pronounced “Chee-nah”.  She’s nearing old age at 8 years old, and as a working breed dog, she’s needed a job for a long time.  Well, we may have finally found one for her: watching over Gabi.

The trouble is, she’s been trained for so long that she’s not supposed to hang out in Gabi’s room.  She’s unbelievably loving and patient, but you don’t leave a dog with a baby.  Period.

Last night, though, she got the surprise of her life when Gabi and I invited her into Gabi’s bed.  Poor China was confused.  It took a few tries to convince her that she was allowed to stay in the bed with Gabi.  And in the middle of the night, she did her usual pace through the house to check up on things elsewhere.  But overall, I think we’re onto something good here!

I think I will do something special for the both of them and find China a pretty new bed that we can place in Gabi’s room for her to sleep on.  She doesn’t always like to sleep with people.  She gets hot sometimes and just wants her space.

Maybe this new found friendship will be good for both of them.  Goodness knows, China’s been unemployed for far too long.

Gabi's New Roommate

Gabi's fingernails. The don't actually look too bad. Mine were always a little red and inflamed because of how far down I bit them.

He doesn’t understand.  He was never a nail biter.

But I was.  Oh, did I bite my nails.  I bit them right down to the quick.  I bit them until they bled.  When I ran out of fingernail, I would chew the skin around the edges of the nails.  Then I would chew up the inside of my lips.  Then I would bite my toenails.  Yeah, I know.  Gross.  Don’t pretend like you didn’t do gross stuff as a kid.  You know you did!

The nail biting was a compulsion.  I couldn’t stop.

We tried everything.  My Grandma promised me a beautiful ring when I stopped biting my nails.  Didn’t work.  Later, we tried painting my nails with bitter nail polish.  I bit them anyway.  I tried painting my nails with pretty nail polish so they’d be too pretty for me to bite.  I learned to carefully scrape off  the nail polish so I could access the nails beneath and resume biting.  Bandaids over the nails?  Peeled them off, bit, and then carefully stuck them back on again.  Every single trick that they recommend, we tried.  Many of those attempts were attempts I made myself.  It’s not like my parents were harassing me to stop biting my nails or anything.  They had given up on that years ago.

The nail biting was absolutely outside my control.  The more I tried to stop it, the more I chewed.  When I got anxious I chewed.  The attempts to quit made me anxious.  Having adults notice and point it out made me anxious.  All of that fed into the cycle.  Nail biting was just something I did and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.  Then I just… stopped.

There was nothing I did to stop.  I just woke up one morning and no longer had the need to bite.  I still felt stressed about things (who doesn’t?) but because I was developmentally ready to stop, the need to chew disappeared and it no longer served as a comfort measure to deal with anxiety.

For me the need to chew disappeared when I was 17 years old.  For some people I think it comes sooner.  For others later.  For a few people, the need never disappears.  And you know what?  Who cares?

Now that Gabi is older and biting her nails, what is the big deal?

I see parents agonizing over this on various parenting message boards, and I’d like to really examine the reasoning for wanting so badly for their kids to stop biting.  Let’s break this down:

• It looks ugly.  So what?  They are her hands.  If someone is going to judge her based on her fingernails, they’ve got bigger issues than she needs to deal with anyway!  Chewed finger nails aren’t going to keep her from a career in a professional setting.  Unless she applied for a hand modeling gig.  In which case we would probably have a conversation about what her strengths really are.
• It can be painful.  Oh, yeah.  Chewing down to the quick definitely hurts.  Does it ever!  Part of this is responsibility.  If she’s going to chew, she needs to be prepared for the consequences, and that means that some days her fingers might be sore.  It goes with the territory.  But is it really a huge deal?  I bit my nails until they bled, but it never kept me from enjoying activities.  I just had to take responsibility for what I had done and let them heal for a day or two.
• What if she gets germs?  Well, she might, but so might a lot of other kids.  She will need to be able to keep her hands washed frequently to keep from spreading or catching any illnesses.
• If she bites them too far, they could get infected.  It could happen.  Never happened to me, but sure.  It could happen.  We’ll just have to keep an eye on it and enforce the hand washing.
• It’s a “bad” habit.  Like what?  Like smoking?  Not really.  It’s not causing long term effects.  It’s not hurting anyone.
• It bugs me.  (This is Juan’s gripe.)  Then you really just need to use your neck and look the other way.  Sorry if I sound a little defensive on that one, but as a long-term nail biter, this particular line of reasoning really gets under my skin.

Look, here’s the thing: No amount of us harping on her, offering rewards, putting tabasco sauce (thanks for that idea internet), or threatening is going to stop her from biting her nails.  She can’t control it, and if we bug her about it we will just be feeding into the anxiety cycle.  Some day, she will probably grow out of it, but in the meantime, there’s no major harm being done.

See? I stopped. They don't look too bad do they?

So please.  If you have a kid who bites his or her nails, please just leave them alone and let them grow out of it on their own.  The more you push, the more they’ll bite.  Please don’t feed the cycle.

So how about it?  Are there any other nail biters out there?   Any parents of nail biters?  I’m interested to hear your story and find out if you (or your child) eventually stopped biting and how it happened.