ultimate mommy blogger post: diaper talk

Today was our first day using cloth diapers, not counting a brief stint during the meconium days when we soon realized that the prefolds we had were just too big for a tiny newborn.  Oh, and meconium is gross.

I decided I wanted to try wool soakers for diaper covers.  These are what people used before plastic pants were invented.  They are knitted or felted wool pants worn over a cotton diaper.  Because of the properties of wool (waterproof, antibacterial) they don’t get damp even when the diaper is soaked, and they don’t smell bad either.  You only have to wash them every couple weeks, the rest of the time you can just air dry them if they do get a little damp.  Plus wool is very breatheable, especially compared to plastic pants.  So all this seems too good to be true, right?

I really wanted to believe in wool’s superpowers, but I was skeptical.  So I made some wool soakers to try out.  There are many patterns out there for knitted or crocheted soakers, as well as soakers made out of old cut up sweaters.  I don’t enjoy knitting and never really learned how to crochet, plus yarn is so expensive, especially wool yarn,  so I hightailed it to my local thrift shop and bought three wool sweaters for a buck seventy-five a piece.  After looking at so many patterns I knew kind of what I wanted to do, so I winged it and made two wool soakers out of one of the sweaters.  The pattern I made up was nice and simple, just a triangle, with the three corners meeting in the front of the diaper, leaving holes for the legs.  The ribbing of the sweater makes the waistband of the diaper, and I used the neck ribbing around the leg holes for one of them, but nothing for the other one.  I think I like the other one better- it’s simpler.  But we’ll see how well it stops leaks.  I somehow doubled up the fabric in the front of the diaper for extra absorbency -can’t remember how I did it, so next time maybe I will take pictures.

This is the first one I made, with the neck ribbing around the leg holes.

So today was troubleshooting day, and really, there were no problems, except I need to make a drawstring around the waistband because it’s a little loose.  Also unfortunately his onesies don’t really work with this, or cloth diapers in general, because they’re so bulky.  Some of his onesies are stained around the leg holes (already!) and so I might cut them into t-shirts.  His footie pjs and sleep sacks work well though, and that’s most of his wardrobe.  For the other wool soakers I’m going to make “longies,” or a long-legged version that look like pants.  Oh, and I’m going to make some kimono shirts.

So, I’m really happy.  The wool covers seem to be working very well.  The cotton prefold can come out soaked and stinky, but the wool cover is dry and smells like wool.  I really, really like them!  Why did they ever go with plastic pants in the first place?

three of my favorite people

cuteness overload ^_^

yet another cute baby pic

I had to take a picture of this expression.  I love it.  This is what babies look like right after they pop off the breast and you kind of roll them into your lap so you can adjust your clothes.  A full tummy=total bliss.

dream job

he’s just so gosh darn cute!

I love wearing him around the house.  He loves to look at things around him…until he falls asleep, anyway!

All I’ve done all day is hold him and nurse him and admire him.  Talk about an easy job!  Well,  add in the fact that I’ve not slept for more than 2-3 hours in a row for the past couple weeks….

moby wrap

I tried out the moby wrap and I like it better than the sling!  Abraham can be upright in it, so it is especially nice when he has gas in his tummy, because I can hold him and comfort him without his body being squished or folded, which makes his tummy hurt more.  Also I like it because he doesn’t fall away from my body when I lean over.  He feels more securely attatched.  And it is nice to see his face.

Here’s a picture from to day.  He’s fast asleep

Today I made some pants for Abraham out of an old fleece blanket.  We got so many beautiful blankets as gifts, both homemade and not.  So I decided to use some of the hand-me-down fleece blankets to make pants for him, since he only has one pair that actually fit him and he seriously needs more.

I used this tutorial.  It’s super easy and took me about ten minutes!  These days, that’s my kind of project!

more mommy blogging

I’ll try not to turn into too much of a mommy blogger, but at this point there’s not much else I can write about!

Today I walked over to the doctor with Abraham in the sling.  It was heaven!  I haven’t really been outside in a long time.  The sun is shining, the trees are yellow, orange and red, the air is cool, there is frost on the grass in the shade, and it’s warm in the sunshine.

I felt like a super awesome mom with my sling and all.  Abraham was all snuggled up inside, fast asleep.  And I was wearing normal clothes, which I unpacked yesterday, so that made me feel stylish.  I felt so stylish that I was actually worried about the sling clashing with my outfit.  lol  I do have a brown moby wrap that would have matched better, but I haven’t tried it out yet and it’s a bit more involved than a ring sling (though still looks pretty simple and easy).

I felt so awesome, I took a picture of myself with the timer.

Samuel’s fever was gone this morning so he went to work -though he still feels sick, but better.

Abraham has lost a little weight from his jaundice tribulation, but is now eating really, really well -even waking himself up on schedule sometimes.  So the doctor just wants me to keep breastfeeding, not worry, and he’ll weigh him next week to make sure he’s growing like he should.

mommy blogging

Here’s what happened:

Abraham turned yellow and obviously had jaundice last week.  Since jaundice isn’t very serious and usually goes away on its own, I decided to hang out in the sunny bedroom all week and then bring it up at Abraham’s doctor appointment on Friday.  But on Thursday and Friday he wouldn’t eat and he kept falling asleep.  He would sleep for hours if I let him.  After much experimentation, the only way we could get him to eat was by putting a cold cloth on his back or belly every time he stopped sucking.  It took an hour or more to feed him each time.  At the doctor they did a blood test to see how bad the jaundice was.  It was really high so the doctor said to do it again tomorrow (Saturday) morning, in case it would come down on its own.  We did and it was still the same, so the doctor proscribed lying under the “bili lights” for 24 hours in the hospital.  Bili lights are blue lights that break down bilirubin, the stuff that builds up and causes jaundice.  It’s like sunlight only more concentrated and it doesn’t cause sunburn.

So Abraham and I were taken to a hospital room with an incubater with the bili lights over it.  He had to lie in it for 24 hours, wearing only a diaper and some protective eye covers.  I could only take him out to feed him and change his diaper every two hours.

his peeling skin isn't sunburn or anything -it's just peeling because his skin is still getting used to the outside world. it doesn't bother him at all

Because bilirubin is flushed out of the body via poop, and because Abraham was so lethargic and not eating (jaundice often makes babies lethargic) he had to be bottle fed formula.  Bottles are a lot easier to suck on.  Doctor said the formula would give him slightly more fluid than breastmilk.  So I pumped out a ton and now I have a pretty good stash in the freezer.  I don’t really understand why I couldn’t feed him the breastmilk in a bottle, but oh well.  Formula smells AWFUL, I discovered.  It is so nasty.  But Abraham ate it and by the next day his jaundice was gone, so we got to go home!

It was  really hard to keep putting him in the incubator.  One time he got hiccups in there and his whole body would convulse, and it made him cry, but I couldn’t do anything but talk to him.  It was cool though, after the hiccups were gone and he was still crying, I talked to him and he turned his head toward me and stopped crying.   Most of the time he just slept in there.  They kept it pretty warm and he seemed content.

Now we are working on breastfeeding again.  It is difficult because he liked not having to suck very hard on the bottle.  Breastfeeding is tiring work for a baby. With a LOT of coaxing, he will latch on and suck for 2 or 3 minutes and then want to go to sleep.  But I have been able to get him to suck for at least 10 minutes every two hours since yesterday at 4:00, except for one session a couple hours ago.  I hope that is enough.  He seems to make plenty of messy diapers.  Hopefully he will build up his stamina quickly and be able to eat more.  We’ve already come a long way since yesterday, when he couldn’t seem to remember to latch on at first.

It was a rough weekend, plus on Sunday Samuel woke up with a fever and flu symptoms, so he has to wear a mask and not touch either of us.    So I’m kind of doing a single mom thing, but he can still help out in other ways.  We are all really lame around here.  I probably feel most energetic of all of us, and I’m 9 days postpartum.  blah!

But mostly I am so glad that the little guy didn’t have to have open-heart surgery or something.  He is perfectly healthy, thank goodness.

The Birth Story

Abraham Richard Shannon was born on October 17th, 2009, at 4:14am, after about 30ish hours of labor.

Born at the Topeka Birth and Women’s Center
6lbs, 14ozs
20 inches long

This story contains lots of talk about bodily functions, etc.

So in my last blog post I described what ended up being the first twenty or so hours of labor, and there were about 15 hours left to go until the birth.  So I guess that’s about 35 hours.  But the first five hours or so were really mild.  I’m going to paste in my first blog post here and edit it a bit to make a complete birth story.

On Thursday the 15th I felt really good, very nesty, I did lots of cleaning and things and got out some baby stuff that I knew I’d want soon after the baby was born.  I’d been having occasional contractions that felt like menstrual cramps for the past several days.

Around 5 or so the contractions started getting regular, about 10 minutes apart, lasting one minute, and they hurt quite a bit more.  In hindsight, they didn’t hurt that much.  I didn’t have to make any noise through them or even breathe a particular way at first.  They were just very noticeable.  This stayed consistent for a few hours.  Then the contractions started coming a bit faster, about 6-7 minutes apart.  The evening was getting more unpleasant (but exciting at the same time).  At some point I took a bath, but that didn’t help at all.  We went through our bedtime routine, and I was tired.  I tried to sleep but every 5 minutes or so I would have a contraction and it felt really painful to lie in bed.  Well actually it felt painful no matter what I did.  After an hour or so of this it was 11:00 I wanted to get up and we put in a movie.  I timed contractions and they were 4-5 minutes apart, lasting a minute each.  These kept coming and got a little closer together and a little longer.

All this time I was wondering what I should do.  Surely this was not labor!  It hurt a lot, but not as much as I was expecting.  It was more just annoying because I couldn’t sleep or really do anything that felt comfortable.  My instructions from the birth center were to call if contractions were four minutes apart, one minute long, for one hour.  By 1:00 this had been happening for a couple hours.  So I decided to call them.  Then I threw up several times, and I thought, “yeah this must be labor!”

Emily, the midwife on call, talked to me about what had been going on and said we should come in and see what happened.  So we did.  When we got there the contractions had slowed and were 7 minutes apart.  She checked me and I was only two centimeters dialated, but almost completely effaced.  So the contractions were doing something, but I was not in active labor yet -just early labor.  I got in the tub to see if anything would change.  The contractions stayed about the same but I felt much more relaxed.  At about 4:00 I was really, really tired and decided to see if I could sleep.  I was able to sleep between contractions, which, by 7:00 had slowed to ten minutes apart.  I was pretty sure things weren’t going anywhere very fast so I talked to the midwife, and she checked me, and indeed nothing had changed with my cervix.  So I decided to go back home and try to sleep some more, in my own bed.

We got home about 9:00 and slept until lunchtime (in ten-fifteen minute spurts).  Then we got up and made lunch.  I wasn’t hungry but knew I should eat something, since I’d thrown up my dinner the night before and hadn’t eaten much since.   So I ate lunch, then Samuel went to work for the afternoon.  Shortly after he left, I threw up my lunch.

I never timed contractions on Friday because I thought it might be making me more anxious.  At some point in the afternoon I started making a little “aaaaah” kind of noise to see if it helped.  It seemed to, so I started doing that with each contraction.  This day was really hard.  I couldn’t do anything at all except try to rest between contractions.  I spent most of it in bed, especially as the day went on.  I would fall asleep, I think, and wake up every few minutes for a contraction.  That’s all I did almost all day long.  I ate an apple for dinner and threw that up.

In the evening things got more intense.  I had, with the midwife’s advice from the night before, figured out how to make use of our bathtub.  I labored in there at some point, for a good hour or two.   The “aaaaaah” noises I had been making all day were much louder now.  Around midnight I got out of the tub and checked my cervix.  I hadn’t been able to feel it at all in the days previous: it was too high up and far back.  But this time I felt it right away.  It was really open and I could feel something hard in the middle of it, with a squishy membrane over it.  I was 99% percent sure it was the baby’s head and the amniotic sac.  Holy crap! This really shocked me and made me feel excited and happy.  I decided we needed to call the midwife!

For some reason she wasn’t answering her pager (we later found out she was in the hospital with another birth and her pager was in her dress pocket and she couldn’t feel it vibrating!) But we got a hold of Kelly, one of the employees at the Birth Center, and she said she would make sure the place was open for us, and she would try to get a hold of Norla, the midwife.

So finally at about 1:00am we left for Topeka.  The only things I remember were that it was raining lightly, and we almost hit a deer.  Other than that, I was completely in “labor land,” basically sleeping between contractions.  Each time I had a contraction I would pull on the handle on the roof of the car, and push my lower back into the seat with my legs, and make really loud “aaaaah” noises.

When we got there Norla, the midwife, was there, thank goodness!  She had everything set up for us.  She checked my cervix and said, “Wow, girl!  You’ve got almost no cervix left!  You’re 9+ centimeters!”  She said I just had a small “lip” left to go.  I got up, threw up, and then got in the tub on my knees, with my arms resting on the edge.  Samuel sat facing me and would remind me to drink juice after every contraction, and during contractions would remind me to “breathe” the aaaahs instead of yelling them, and also to rock from side to side, like Norla said.  This REALLY helped me stay calm(er).

Soon I started making involuntary grunting noises at the end of the “aaaahs.”  I knew that meant it was about time to start pushing.  At some point my water broke -it felt like a pop and then I had a loooong contraction.  I felt a TON of painful pressure on my bottom -that’s where it hurt the most at this point.  I couldn’t not push a little.  Norla asked me to see if I could feel the baby’s head at all.  I felt and said I couldn’t.  I was kind of disappointed.  After a few more contractions Norla felt and said, “That’s the head!” and I felt and it felt just the same as last time.  I said, “It’s really squishy!” and she said that was normal.  She told me to get out of the tub after my next contraction, and get on the bed to start pushing the baby out!

I got on the bed on my hands and knees, with my arms resting on the footboard and a pile of pillows.  Samuel was facing me, telling me I was doing good.  Norla and the nurse, Brianne, were watching the back end, telling me about my progress.  I was making a TON of completely involuntary noise at this point.  Grunting noise like “AARGHHH!”  It was wild!  Norla told me that the baby had lots of dark hair, and that made me feel motivated.

After a while I said, “My legs are really tired!”  So Norla told me to lie on my side, with Samuel holding one knee up, and the other knee lying on the bed.  Everyone kept telling me how good I was doing, how good my sounds were, etc.  Every time I had a contraction and pushed, Norla would ask me for “just one more” and that was pretty hard but I tried.  I really wanted the work to be done by this point.  When the head was being born it stung a lot and Norla and Brianne guided my pushes a little bit to help things stretch out slowly instead of going too fast and tearing me.  After a few guided pushes the head was born!  It felt SO AMAZING to have that done.  I said, “Oh my gosh that feels so much better!”  Then a few more pushes that stung just a little, and the rest of the baby slid out of me!  That also felt completely amazing!  It was such a relief.  I asked if it was a boy or a girl and Samuel said “It’s a boy!”  I can’t remember too clearly, but I remember Samuel was really emotional and saying things like, “Wow!” and “You did it, honey!” and “You are so awesome!”  I felt really awesome and didn’t hurt any more.  I was SO GLAD it was over!! They put our baby boy on my belly.  He was crying a little and had lots of mucus in his nose and mouth.  We wiped it off and suctioned him a tiny bit.  We tried to get him to latch on.  He would open his mouth really wide but then wouldn’t actually latch on, so we decided to take a break until I could sit up.

When the placenta was born a few minutes later it felt like this squshy thing sliding out of me.  It didn’t hurt at all.  I actually didn’t know it was born for a while because for some reason I thought Norla and Brianne were still talking about waiting for it.  After the umbilical cord stopped pulsing they clamped and cut it, and Norla gave me a few stitches in the two small tears I got.  The tears don’t bother me at all -I hardly notice them stinging or anything.  It’s my bottom that hurts.  It feels really achy and bruised, and I have to waddle when I walk.

Eventually I was laying in bed with lots of pillows, and Samuel next to me, and he called people while I tried to get Abraham to latch on.  It took a good half hour but then we finally got it and he nursed steadily for twenty minutes.  After that, the relatives started coming in.  It was really nice to see them.  Samuel was exhaused but I felt pretty good.  I was tired, hungry, and thirsty though.  It felt like I couldn’t get enough water.  My throat hurt from all the yelling.

So Abraham was born about two and a half hours after we got to the birth center!  Norla said the pushing stage was about one hour, and I would guess that the rest of labor was about 24 hours of early labor and 12 hours of active labor and transition, more or less.

During labor I remember thinking that I wished I could take a drug and make it all go away, but I knew I didn’t really want that, and I never actually said it out loud.  Samuel says I never complained at all except for saying “OW!” several times during pushing.  Heh, so that makes me feel pretty cool!  I remember thinking things like “How much longer is this going to take???” especially while pushing.  Pushing was really hard work.

We went home on Saturday at around 8:30 or 9:00am, after getting lots of assignments from Brianne to keep track of our “vitals,” and after Abraham got a basic exam from Norla.  We got home and slept until lunch time.  I had a little trouble sleeping though because I was so excited.

gahhhh

I thought I’d write a blog post about what’s going on, and dispel the rumors that are probably floating around.  This post will be full of Too Much Information and details about my bodily functions.

Yesterday I felt really good, very nesty, I did lots of cleaning and things.  I’d been having occasional contractions that felt like menstrual cramps for the past several days.

Around 5 or so the contractions started getting regular, about 10 minutes apart, lasting one minute, and they hurt quite a bit more.  This stayed consistent for a few hours.  Then the contractions started coming a bit faster, about 6-7 minutes apart.  The evening was getting more unpleasant (but exciting at the same time).  At some point I took a bath, but that didn’t help at all.  We went through our bedtime routine, and I was tired.  I tried to sleep but every 5 minutes or so I would have a contraction and it felt really painful to lie in bed.  Well actually it felt painful no matter what I did.  After an hour or so of this it was 11:00 I wanted to get up and we put in a movie.  I timed contractions and they were 4-5 minutes apart, lasting a minute each.  These kept coming and got a little closer together and a little longer.

All this time I was wondering what I should do.  Surely this was not labor!  It hurt a lot, but not as much as I was expecting.  It was more just annoying because I couldn’t sleep or really do anything that felt comfortable.  My instructions from the birth center were to call if contractions were four minutes apart, one minute long, for one hour.  By 1:00 this had been happening for a couple hours.  So I decided to call them.  Then I threw up several times, and I thought, “yeah this must be labor!”

Emily, the midwife on call, talked to me about what had been going on and said we should come in and see what happened.  So we did.  When we got there the contractions had slowed and were 7 minutes apart.  She checked me and I was only two centimeters dialated, but almost completely effaced.  So the contractions were doing something, but I was not in active labor yet -just early labor.  I got in the tub to see if anything would change.  The contractions stayed about the same but I felt much more relaxed.  At about 4:00 I was really, really tired and decided to see if I could sleep.  I was able to sleep between contractions, which, by 7:00 had slowed to ten minutes apart.  I was pretty sure things weren’t going anywhere very fast so I talked to the midwife, and she checked me, and indeed nothing had changed with my cervix.  So I decided to go back home and try to sleep some more, in my own bed.

We got home about 9:00 and slept until lunchtime (in ten-fifteen minute spurts).  Then we got up and made lunch.  I wasn’t hungry but knew I should eat something, since I’d thrown up my dinner the night before and hadn’t eaten much since.   So I ate lunch, then Samuel went to work for the afternoon.  Now I am writing this blog post, having contractions, and I just threw up my lunch.

On the bright side, it looks like this baby isn’t going to be overdue.  It will probably come in the next few days, I guess.  I just hope I can eat and sleep enough to make it through.

Wish me luck, pray for me, etc.!

good news

We have a doctor lined up for the baby, and we really like him. We’re lucky, considering the reason I chose him is because our insurance says we can, and his practice is across the street from where we live. It’s a two minute walk over there.
Anyway, we met him today, and he is easygoing, accommodating, doesn’t have a “god complex” or anything, is not overbearing, etc. Yay!