Shannon Phillips

I want to thank everyone who left such nice comments on my last post. The Internet has been an amazing help to me as I learn my way as a parent—just to be able to express the frustration is helpful, and then to get supportive, friendly voices answering back can make a huge difference.

I feel much better this morning, of course. I don’t think I fully realized the sleep deficit I was running. Yesterday I went to bed as soon as Sam got home (around 6) and I stayed there, getting up only to nurse and to help put Robin to bed, until Davy woke up this morning around 5:30. The sad thing is that I’m pretty sure I could sleep for another six hours—but at least I’m not miserably tired like I was yesterday. And the weekend is coming! And Davy SMILED at me this morning, so that makes everything amazing and great.

Okay, today has been horrible. I don’t know how much sleep I got last night but it wasn’t much, and then Robin exhausted my reserves early by whining and whining and whining and then for a change SCREAMING and SCREAMING and SCREAMING. Eventually he wore himself down too and fell into a nap, at which point I thought to myself, Oh thank God, I’ll get to sleep for a bit.

That was exactly the point that Davy woke up. Okay, I thought, I’ll nurse him and put him back down and we’ll all sleep for a bit.

I nursed him. I put him back down. He cried. I nursed him again on the other side and put him back down. He woke up and cried. I burped him and cuddled him. He squirmed and fussed. I was so tired I started to fall asleep in the thirty-second intervals between his cries. I had little thirty-second dreams. They always ended with waking up to a fussy baby.

An hour and a half later, Robin woke up and I had a bit of a meltdown that ended with me scaring Sam badly enough over the phone that he offered to come home right away. I didn’t take him up on it; instead I am pouring out my woes to the Internet while Robin crawls around under my chair whining “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy” and Davy lies on the bed still fussing.

Right now I think the fact that I haven’t slapped duct tape over both their mouths and thrown them in the closet makes me the World’s Best Mom, but there’s still hours left in the day, so nobody should go out and buy me the mug just yet.

Despite the fact that Davy doesn’t do a lot besides eat and sleep, I can tell that he’s also learning. For example, we have a Boppy pillow that we use for nursing: when Davy is hungry and fussing, he’ll stop his crying as soon as he’s laid into position on the Boppy. He’s learned that being on the Boppy means the milk is coming soon.

Also, when he first got home from the hospital, we remarked on how well Davy slept in the bassinet. This was in marked in contrast to Robin, who caused us to rename it “the baby wake-up box.”

Well, guess what? In those first days I guess Davy didn’t know enough to care where he slept: one place was as good as another. But he has learned that sleeping alone in a bassinet is just not as nice as sleeping cuddled up to Mommy or Daddy. So now when he finds himself put down alone, Davy will cry until he’s picked up again.

This makes my life marginally harder, but I’m pleased to see the little dude already starting to make choices and express preferences. They are simple baby preferences, but they are his and they represent the first fruits of his exploration into the world.

I just booked an appointment with a housekeeping service to come and do a “deep cleaning” of our home. I actually wasn’t going to write about this at all, because I’ve read enough tortured, self-justifying blog posts by feminists who can’t stomach the idea of letting another woman scrub their toilets (but who, nonetheless, don’t want to do it themselves) that I certainly don’t want to contribute to the genre.

But the truth is I am not tortured at all. I’ve posted on this subject before, but when I first quit my job in anticipation of Robin’s arrival, I guess I probably had some idea that it would be amusing and frivolous to “play house” for awhile in 50’s style aprons. The reality of childcare and housekeeping slapped me on both sides of my face pretty quickly. I’ve done a one-eighty, and now am prepared to fiercely battle anyone who belittles traditional “women’s work.” It’s necessary work, it’s hard work, it’s honorable work, and I’m pretty sure that the stigma against housewives in modern American culture is just a symptom of ingrained sexism.

So because I now completely respect this women’s work, I don’t have a shred of guilt in paying another woman to do it for me. Frankly, between my two little boys I barely have the time (and physical reserves) to get dinner on the table and keep the house in some superficial semblance of order. The deep cleaning is not getting done, and I’ve started to notice ants crawling across the floors and between the cushions of the sofa. I have this choice: a) park my toddler in front of the TV and let my infant scream while I clean the house properly; b) live in squalor; or c) pay another woman a fair living wage to do the housecleaning for me, because women have wised up and you can no longer get a decent housekeeper for less than thirty-five dollars an hour (plus tips), at least in the Bay Area.

I find C a no-brainer. Providing for our new housekeeper in the budget won’t be trivial, but if we’re being infested with ants while my husband is home and contributing to the daily routine, I shudder to think of how things will get once he goes back to work. I did the research, I made the calls, and our housekeeper will be here for the first time next Wednesday. I feel an overwhelming sense of relief, and nothing else.

So I’m posting this as a kind of counterbalance to all the whinging, self-flagellating posts by self-described feminists who nonetheless cannot wrap their heads around the idea that housecleaning might be a suitable occupation for an adult woman. The emotion you are looking for is not guilt, it’s gratitude—and just about the same level of gratitude that you’d feel towards a competent plumber who stopped your toilet from spraying sewage everywhere. It’s a job. It’s hard job, a necessary job, an honorable job: so tip your housekeeper, and be grateful.

I knew Davy was a first-rate nurser, but at our check-in with the pediatrician today we learned that he clocks in in now at 7 pounds 4 ounces. The doctor was pretty stunned. To put this in perspective: all babies lose weight in their first days of life. (Davy had lost four ounces from his birth weight of 6 pounds 11 ounces when we had his last weigh-in on Thursday.) Pediatricians want to see babies regain their birth weight by the end of two weeks. So it’s pretty impressive that our little champ has not only hit his birth weight already, but packed on an extra half a pound to boot!

I also feel it’s a vindication for my on-demand nursing policy. The nurses at UCSF, like those at CPMC, strongly push a version of scheduled nursing: if the baby’s gone three hours without nursing, they want you to wake him up for a feeding. We did this with Robin and it caused a lot of stress. Waking up a sleeping newborn isn’t so easy: you can strip them down so the cold wakes them up, or tickle their feet until they wake, or various other methods that all feel like baby torture. The babies don’t like it; they wake up angry, and if you’re already having trouble getting nursing established then starting a feeding session with an exhausted, outraged infant certainly doesn’t put you on the best footing. My mom watched us struggling with the three-hour feeding schedule and broke her scrupulously non-critical stance to observe that it seemed like madness to her.

So this time around, when the nurses dropped by to check our feeding logs and remind me that it was time to wake Davy up, I nodded and smiled and let him sleep. (I know why they do this. A starving baby is a very sleepy baby: they don’t have the energy to fuss. I still think it’s senseless to treat a healthy baby the same way you would one that’s having genuine problems with nutrition.) As a result, sometimes Davy sleeps for four hours, and sometimes he wants to nurse for an hour and a half straight. But he gets to sleep when he’s tired and nurse when he’s hungry. And clearly it’s working well for him!

This post is for my mom friends, who are naturally the people most likely to be interested in the grisly details of childbirth. Men, the infirm, and those of delicate sensibility might want to stop reading now. Just as a cautionary example, this post includes a discussion of meconium—that’s when the baby poops inside your uterus. If this little bit of vocabulary disgusts you, then you probably shouldn’t read any farther.

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Hello World!

David Luke Phillips was born at 3:15 on Tuesday, 7/6/2010, weighing 6 pounds 11 ounces and measuring 19 inches from top to toe.

Check out this view from our delivery room! Yes, that is the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance.

I might write up all the grisly details of the birth story later, but the important points are that I had a successful VBAC (with the aid of a wonderful, beautiful epidural that left me able to experience the contractions but not be overwhelmed by them, and to retain almost complete muscle control over my lower body) and that Davy is doing just fine by every measure.

Most notably, he’s a champ at nursing. I got to put him to the breast right away, and he latched straight on. He’s been nursing every few hours since. Sam thinks it’s because I know what I’m doing now, and I’m sure that’s a factor, but I think it’s mostly that the baby knows what he’s doing. There are some studies that seem to indicate that babies born vaginally are better at nursing, so maybe that’s a piece of it too.

I think mostly because the feeding is going so well, meeting Davy has been a much easier and more peaceful experience than caring for Robin was in those first days. I remember crying every day for a week after Robin was born, just from stress and overwhelm. With Davy, though, I’m calm and happy—happy he’s finally here, happy he’s such a great baby, looking forward to bringing him home and seeing him bond with the rest of the family. Yay, we have a baby!

Well, he didn’t come on the 4th.

I know due dates aren’t like UPS shipping estimates, and babies don’t come with tracking numbers (although when I mentioned this to my mom, she said “They should get on that!”)—but to be honest, all my expectations were focused on Davy coming early. Given how supremely close to bursting I was feeling, it seemed impossible that he could stay in there a full 40 weeks.

Apparently not only was that possible, but the Internet assures me that it’s in fact possible he’ll stay in for 41 or 42. If I truly believed this, I would cry: the idea of enduring these “prelabor” contractions on top of the usual full-term pregnancy discomforts for two more weeks is so awful that my mind basically refuses to accept it. And then I need to stop and remind myself, again, that it’s far from the worst thing in the world, and as long as Davy is thriving then I can manage whatever I need to manage.

But if we do go to 42 weeks, I’ll be faced with a real problem: the hospital will almost certainly want to intervene at that point, because past 42 weeks there are risks to the baby from remaining in utero. Many doctors want to induce at 40 or 41 weeks, but I’ve picked a hippie-crunchy-friendly hospital where I’m actually attended by midwives rather than doctors, and they tend to be more hands-off about these things. The problem is that I’m a poor candidate for induction because I’ve had a prior c-section, and the drugs they use for induction would increase the risk of my uterine scar tearing open. So although my midwife did seem willing to contemplate the possibility of induction when I talked to her, I’m not entirely sure that they wouldn’t end up just scheduling me for another c-section instead. I really don’t want that: Sam and I are probably going to want a third child, and each c-section you have increases the risks of complications in subsequent pregnancies. Induction itself also increases the risk that labor would end in a section.

Again, c-section is not the worst thing in the world, and I guess I may just have to dwell on that for a while. But I really hope Davy gets a move on—not just because I want him out of me now but because if he doesn’t come out on his own, none of my choices are great.

I, um, may be losing my mind.

by MC Big Belly

Already had one, now I’m going for two
Like a library book, I’m overdue
Knocked up, expectant, gravid
Enceinte, with child, rabid
For the babies I mean
Like a wolverine
Gonna hit that labor with a frenzy
Doctor gonna wait and then see
I don’t need to be induced
Mama’s got the juice
You know you heard it from the emcee!

Still pregnant dear God how is this even possible

I’ve been having intermittent Braxton-Hicks contractions for the past few days, which are doing a number on me psychologically, since I am so ready to be done with pregnancy that I get excited (and then crushingly disappointed) with each fresh onset of false labor. I have backache, foot and leg pain, various and diverse discomforts in the belly and pelvis, and any kind of movement I make—standing up, lying down, holding still in one position for too long—seems to hurt some part of my body. In fact I’m so much more physically uncomfortable than I was at this stage with Robin that I’m wondering if the extra three years in age has made some kind of crucial difference: am I old now? Is that it?

It helped a little that I went to the doctor today, and while they were monitoring Davy (everything’s fine) I happened to overhear a couple of other women who were in the antenatal testing unit for problems much more serious than my own velamentous placenta. It really is a reminder that I should be grateful for my good health. And I am, truly. But I would like to have my baby soon. In fact now would be great.

Some part of my brain is convinced that Davy is waiting until the 4th of July, so that he can be greeted with fireworks. I guess that would be kind of cool, huh?