A Year in Review

I’ve read that there is this blogging tradition of going back over your year at New Years’ time and linking to all the big stories of the year. Since I didn’t blog most of this year, I guess you will be saved a bunch of links to stories you probably skimmed the first time while I catch up on my need to share life.

So here it is: Mama’s 2008

January: Mama adjusted to life with a new baby and toddler. Breastfeeding did not go as well this time around and Mama turned into a one-woman dairy farm, and my firstborn got glasses.

Mama reluctantly decided in favor of an IUD. Let me just say this: If taking The Pill makes you an insane, raging lunatic to the point that your husband would rather face the prospect of never having sex again than share the unstable air that surrounds your hormone-ravaged self, ignore your doctor when he tells you that the level of hormones in an IUD is so much lower that “You’ll be fine.” You won’t be fine. You will find yourself locked in your bathroom to avoid screaming at your already terrified children while you beg the nurse on the phone to GET THIS THING OUT OF MY BODY. NOW. I can has Prozac?

February: After removal of the Foreign Offender, and some chemical assistance from a very remorseful obstetrician, the clouds began to part and I finally began the process of bonding with my precious baby. I can has The Love!

March: Mama went back to work. Mama also grew giant asparagus. I can has giant bowl of hollandaise?

April: Mama began a long, slow march back into the depths of depression. I still don’t know if this is about hormones, loss, or something else, but yeah, I’m going to go ahead and use the D word. I can has no jokes about this one, people.

May: Mama started a new blog, but it turns out that I wasn’t any more consistent over there than I am here.

June-July-August: We learned that Isaac had had what the doctor later called a “neurological reaction” to the DtAP vaccine, or at least to the “P” part. Mama and family made the tough decision to discontinue the Pertussis series, and we continue to learn what that means for us and for him. Hubby had a birthday, which will be recorded in history as The Birthday in Which the Wii Changed Our Lives. Mostly, we enjoyed the Galveston beaches and the summer.

September: Hurricane Ike left both our home and my parents cabin on the beach (The West End, for locals and compulsive news-watchers) miraculously untouched. We even had our power back on in a matter of hours, most likely because we live on the same grid as a major hospital. Unfortunately, the cold front that blew in the next night proved to be the straw that broke our municipal sewer system's back, and we woke up to several inches of water in our house. I can has a new wet-vac?

October: God is just good, people. Despite having 18” of drywall cut from the bottom of every wall in our house and losing all our downstairs flooring, the whole flood thing really brought mostly blessings into our home. We got a new front door out of deal, and we realized that we can count on our friends and family more that we could have imagined.

November: Did I leave out the part where Isaac stopped sleeping at night and stopped gaining weight around six months ago? As it turns out, my 75th Percentile Preemie hit twenty pounds at six months old and didn’t gain more than a couple of ounces by his first birthday. Between not wanting to eat anything that wasn’t served a-la-boob and raging ear infections that kept him on diarrhea-inducing antibiotics for most of the second half of his life thus far, no one was totally shocked. But we were concerned all the same. We decided to get tubes put in his ears, but the we missed the first scheduled surgery because he had The Croup. I can has Amoxicillin?

December: Isaac got the tubes in. The doctor told us he was in the Top Ten of all the babies he’s ever “tubed,” meaning there was more gunk in there than anyone had realized…and within 2 weeks he has another ear infection and has actually started sleeping less. So we’ve come full-circle and here I am back at the blog. I can has naptime? PLEEEZ?

New Year’s Resolution: Sleep more, feel better, enjoy my kids – I think it has to be in that order, but I’ll take it how I can get it.

How do I say Goodbye?

I’ve loved doing this blog, and I’m not deleting it. Mama still really needs a nap, and I’m hoping that in time, I will find the balance that I need to come back to this blog and make it the thing that I want it to be.

The bottom line is that I can’t do that right now. Yes- I need to take time to write, to reflect, and to have something that is mine, but I need to take my focus a few degrees off of me. For now, you can find me here.

I love you all and I will miss you…but I’ll still be hangin’ out on your blogs, I promise!

P.S. If you have kids under 2, you need to read The Vaccine Book, by Robert Sears. When you are done, you just might know more than your doctor knows about vaccines.

~Mama

Things that I worry about

Every. Single. Day. It’s stressful being mama.

-My daughter being hit by a car. This might be an every hour item, really.

-Getting kidney stones from drinking water out of water fountains. I didn’t say these things made any sense.

-Whether I unplugged/turned off the flat iron. The sad thing about this one is that I only straighten my hair 2 or 3 days a week.

-The cat getting out of the house and being hit by a car. Yes, I have a thing about cars.

-People staring at my eyebrows because they are too thick. This is why I sometimes have gaps in my eyebrows – I pull on them unconsciously. In my saner moments, I understand that the gaps are much more conspicuous than the thickness.

-My son not developing his baby skills on time. This is universal among parents of infants, I’m sure.

-That I am working outside the home too much.

-That I am not doing enough at my outside-the-home work.

-Roaches taking over my kitchen. This is not as crazy as it sounds – the roaches really are on the offensive at my house.

- David Cook losing American Idol because in the finale, they are going to make him sing some corny song and it will sound terrible. This one is a short-term issue.

-Getting a traffic ticket. Every time I see a police car, I start having conversations in my head explaining to the officer why I did whatever I imagine he is going to ticket me for doing.


-Whether anyone will hang around to read my blog after another day with no posts / after reading the post I wrote today. Then I convince myself that it really doesn’t matter if anyone reads it anyway.

Something that we do

Consistent blogging. Yeah. I’m not getting there. Now we have addressed the obvious, so let’s move on.

These days I just don’t feel like myself. Is it post-partum depression? I don’t think so, but my OB/GYN does. I think it is something more like grief, more like struggling to accept with my heart a decision that I’ve already made in my in head. Most people who read this blog can probably guess what that’s all about, but for the rest, I don’t mean to be vague but I just can’t see it in writing yet.

I love being a mother and I love my babies, but the fallout of being gloomy and exhausted is that I don’t always feel that affectionate towards them – or anyone else for that matter. These days, about a third of the times my daughter wraps her arms around my neck for a hug or smashes her face into my cheek for a kiss, my internal reaction is “please oh please just back off,” and not the rush of warm fuzzies that I am accustomed to feeling. I am careful to smile at her and give her a squeeze, but she knows something is not right. In case my heart was not broken enough at not being able to embrace her affection, she seems to have drawn the conclusion that if she hugs me more, I will feel better.

We have our good days, good times, happy moments. She still falls asleep in my arms at naptime and runs to be scooped off her feet when I pick her up from preschool. Yet I realize that even though it may be years away, the day is coming when she won’t want every hug I have to offer and every minute of my time I find to give. Realizing that my time to hold her is limited, I know that love needs to be something that we do rather than something that we feel. I know that I need to kiss away every tear and smile after every temper tantrum, read the same story a thousand times and pretend to be Daisy Duck until Micky Mouse Clubhouse is no longer in style.

Still, I can’t enjoy the goodness that is so fleeting and every moment I miss just makes the need to get better more desperate.

**If this post made you teary, don’t go listen to this song**

The Short of it

I’ll spare you the long.

For the past 3 months, I have been collecting my thoughts and feelings in an attempt to tell the story of everything that happened around Isaac’s birth. The result was a little epic for a blog, but in writing the long version out, I made sense of it for myself. The heart of the story is what follows here.

On Saturday, November 24, I started bleeding- like A LOT. Hubby took me to the hospital in a panic, and I was quickly seen by my doctor and the ultrasound team. Baby was fine, but it appeared that my placenta had started to separate. There was a bunch of confusion around the ultrasound specialist’s report, but after a few hours, everyone seemed to agree that the abruption was “stable” and that I needed to stay in the hospital on a fetal monitor and full bed rest. I still wasn’t allowed food for awhile in case I needed emergency surgery. At the time, my doctor thought we would have to deliver the baby in a couple of days.

Everything started to look good, and I was unhooked from most of my attachments and allowed to move around the room a little bit. My doctor talked about keeping me for a week and then possibly sending me home on bed rest. On Tuesday, I started having labor, and the whole thing changed. They put me on a magnesium sulfate IV and tried to stop the contractions. I had a couple of injections of something that was a “smooth muscle relaxant” that made my heart race, and they got things back under control. My doctor called me a time bomb and said that the goal was to get to Monday (35 weeks) and then deliver the baby. Over the rest of the week, I had a few more scares and a few more shots of the heart-racey stuff. I lost count of shots, IV pokes, and blood draws around 25. My husband took care of Natalie all by himself, and he and my parents worked to make sure she got to come see me every day. It was all a blur to me because of the magnesium.

At one point, a very sweet friend from church who is an RN came to visit and was alarmed by my mental state. I didn’t really know what was going on at the time, but she apparently had the nurses check my magnesium levels, and found out they had gotten too high. They fixed that, but then I had to have more of the heart racey shots.

What I remember most about that time is being confused about whether I was making good decisions. I couldn’t differentiate between what was good for the baby and what was a risk for him but better for me. It was all very confusing, and I am thankful for my doctor coming to see me every day and helping me stay calm about it all.

Early in the morning on Monday, December 3, I was prepped for c-section delivery. It was very different than what I remembered with Natalie, and I was scared. I just didn’t know what to expect little baby Isaac to be like. I didn’t know whether I would see him and hold him right away, whether I would hear him cry, or whether he would be whisked away by the army of pediatric specialists in attendance.

When he was born, it took about 15 seconds for him to let out a terrific cry. They did take him away to the next room and put him on oxygen, but we could all hear him wailing the whole time. I just cried and cried in relief that his lungs really were working. It wasn’t long before my husband got to hold him and show him to me, which was great. I remember mostly thinking how different he looked from Natalie.

Soon, he went to the NICU and I went to my room. I was sick from the morhine in my spinal anesthesia, and he was getting fed by IV and under an oxygen hood. It took him about a day and a half to get the magnesium out of his system. I did get to go see him Monday night, and I also got to hold him. I could go see him every 3 hours. The nurses had gotten a little attached to me since they don’t usually have any patients longer than two days and I had been there nearly two weeks, so they were happy to wheel me down to the nursery whenever I could go.

We didn’t know then how long Isaac would have to stay in the NICU, but most of the staff thought it would be about a week. I was just in shock at not being pregnant and having this baby that I couldn’t bring home. I had spent most of pregnancy in fear of preeclampsia, and now it was done and I was left with more questions than answers. My doctor said we would probably never know what caused the abruption. Although preeclampsia can cause this to happen, I did not have high blood pressure or protein “spilling” this time. I did have several of the other symptoms of pre-e (unusual amount of swelling, pinwheel spots in my vision, and pain in my rib cage) that I had while pregnant with Natalie in the weeks before my blood pressure got out of control, but it’s just not a complete picture.

In my heart, I believe the complications of both pregnancies are related, but I’m not sure exactly how the pieces fit together. I’m not sure there is a way to answer the questions or whether it would make any difference, but I do know that I am blessed to have two beautiful, healthy babies and the rest of my life to enjoy them.

Where did I go?

The routine used to be:

1 - sit down at the computer for blog time
2 - visit the sites on the blogroll...try to make interesting comments
3 - check the news
4 - make a cursory check of my work e-mail and maybe reply to one or two messages that needed my attention
5 - focus on the blog

Since I have been in the office a couple of days a week, people have caught on that I am available to do their work for them. Now the routine is this:

1 - sit down at the computer for blog time
2 - check voicemail while the computer is starting up
3- return gazillion phone calls while making sure my favorite bloggers are still around
4 - pull up work e-mail and freak out that there are 20 e-mails: 3 with those little exclamation points that let you know the sender thinks you won't read his e-mail unless he puts his important pants on, 2 with the word "urgent" in the subject line, and 7 that are forwards with only "fyi" addded on top of a string where my co-workers said things to each other that should never be put in writing
5- frantically attempt to answer e-mails while feeding the baby and stalling Natalie until I finally give up and shut down my computer to go take care of family
6 - avoid computer remainder of day

March of the Whys

These days, almost every request made of Natalie is met with a “but” or a “not right now,” or most often, a “why.”

Mama: Natalie, don’t stand on your book please.

Natalie: Why?

Mama: because it will break

Natalie: Why?

Mama: because it’s not made for that

Natalie: Why?

Mama: because people don’t want to pay for books that are strong enough to be stood upon

Natalie: Why?

This is not going my way, is it?

Mama: because they have budgets

What? Budgets?

Natalie: Why?

Mama: because we have to feed our families and pay our bills

I need a new strategy here…

Natalie: Why?

Mama: Ninjas

Natalie: (laughter) No, mama! Try again!

Dang.


This post is dedicated to Russell – you would’ve had so much fun with this girl, man. Happy Birthday. We miss you so much.