Learning To Simplify

I often forget the simple things. I look at the whizzbang fabbo toys that spin and light up and play for my children and I get sucked in just as they do, they’re advertised with “Super Hydraulic Action!”, how can I say no?

Then occasionally my kids will bring me back down to earth, reminding me in their subtle little way that they don’t need, or truly want the super duper whizzbang toys, they want something that grows their brain, that actually challenges them to think, something that doesn’t play for them whilst they sit and watch.

Today’s entertainment was Declan’s collection of cars, driven around a map that I drew out the paper I’d torn off our butcher’s roll. Declan beeped and honked to himself as he drove each car carefully round each corner, Connor pushed them about before he decided that eating them would be the way to go. They had a fabulous time, and all it took were $2 cars, some paper and a marker.

It was that little push I needed to remind me to stop where I was with the Christmas presents.

Adjustment

I spent July afflicted by seemingly never ending food poisoning combined with an acute case of cystitis that was never even vaguely cured by antibiotics. In August I clued in that something was up and peed on a stick. Immediately a deep pink line appeared, darker than the control line, telling me I wasn’t just a little bit knocked up, I was well and truly preggers.

I did what any completely sane and rational person would do upon finding this out. I said “FUCK!” loud enough for the neighbours to hear, ran into the bedroom slamming the door behind me, shoved my head under the pillow and burst into tears.

I love my children, I love having them in my life, but I was just coming around to the idea of sticking with the two boys. We would be great with a standard car, a three bedroom home would suit us just fine and the odds were even, there were two parents and two children, minimising the amount of kid juggling we had to do – we had our little routine for getting in and out of the car completely down and I was starting to like it that way and forget my plans for a third child.

Then some super hormone defying sperm managed to break through my protections and ruin all my future plans for family game nights involving four players.

I went to the first ultrasound to date the fetus and hoped it was just a false alarm, a fake positive on the test… and all the other tests, and maybe my blood got mixed up with someone elses at the doctors, and it was them that was pregnant, not me. Instead I found out I was due on the 19th of March, exactly a month after my eldest’s third birthday.

Then came my first OB appointment at 15 weeks, she couldn’t find the heartbeat on the doppler, suddenly it was obvious, it had all been a mix up! The blood work was incorrect, the sonographer had been wrong, the growing belly was just too much KFC, our fridge wasn’t cool enough which was why I STILL seemed to have food poisoning every other day and the fact that sneezing in the wrong way would lead to an emotional breakdown was just proof that my zoloft needed to be upped.

I laughed as she left to room and joked about how silly it was that I’d been thinking I was pregnant, until the OB returned with an ultrasound machine, squirted the cold blue goo onto my belly and didn’t discover a three piece meal with the Colonel’s secret spices, but a fifteen week feotus, hanging out and waving at us.

I went back to the car and cried.

I’m now just over 18 weeks pregnant and I’ve only just started adjusting to the idea of having a third child. I thought it would hit me all of a sudden, one morning I would just wake up and would be thrilled about the prospect of a third child, that hasn’t been the case, it’s been a slow process where I take a leap forward followed by a step back.

I’ve spent a lot of the time since August angry. I’m angry at the powers that be for putting me in this position.  I’m angry that our life, the lives of the boys, is going to be turned upside down by a tiny being.  I’m angry that no one seems to understand why I’m not elated. I’m angry at myself for not being elated and angry that I’m not grateful that I can even conceive in the first place when so many of my friends are struggling to conceive their second or even first child.

Somewhere in the background is fear. I will be the first to accept I’m not mentally stable, so I’m scared of the effects of having another child on my emotional state. I have a condition that causes my membranes to rupture prematurely which cannot be prevented in anyway, my waters broke at 37 weeks with Declan, then 34 weeks with Connor and I was told that with each consecutive pregnancy it’s likely to get earlier. One of the things that is said to raise the chance of this is having less than three years between deliveries. I’m very lucky that this won’t lead to my baby arriving prematurely, but I have to lay in a hospital bed leaking fluid until I hit 36weeks when the feotus is developed enough to be induced, not exactly how I want to be spending a few weeks.

We went for the anatomy scan last week, and it was like acceptance just washed over me. I have no idea what it was, but something hit me whilst I was laying on my back with a stranger ramming a mushroom shaped zappy thing into my belly button. Something just washed over me, and it wasn’t acceptance, it was more than that, it was excitement. For the first time I felt more than fear and anger at this blob of cells inside me, I felt excitement at the future ahead, about giving birth, nursing a newborn instead of a wriggly toddler and about adding another member to our little family, welcoming them with open arms instead of frustration and tears.

It took a while, the adjustment that I never thought would happen has happened, I am now an expectant mother with a spring in her step and a baby in her belly, instead of fear I am excited about what is in store for us. I never thought it would happen, but now that it has I feel wonderful, and that is the best feeling ever.

The Shrine Of Disney

Before I had kids I promised a lot of things, no dummies (lasted 6 days!), no crazy flashing light up musical toys (my eldest wasn’t even born before we started collecting them!) and a minimal amount of characters.

I’m not sure what my issue with characters is. I think partially it’s the difference between a $11 pair of generic shoes and the $25 that can be spent on the same pair with a picture of Spiderman on. It’s also the thought of turning my child into a walking billboard, I don’t want him advertising for Disney or Nickelodeon or whoever. Primarily I think it’s just bitterness at asking for an Ariel doll one Christmas in my childhood and receiving a generic redhead mermaid doll, hell, if I didn’t have it then my kids can’t either. Santa had a lot to answer for that year.

As with all good intentions it has slowly dissolved. The boys have an older cousin, he’s just over two years older than Declan and my sister in law’s  last child, so most of Declan’s clothes for the first two years off his life (until he caught up size wise with my tiny nephew) were hand me downs. I’m not a complete idiot, so I’m not going to take someone’s generous gift of clothes and say “Actually, no thanks, they have Thomas The Tank Engine on them” and hand them back, so things started creeping into his wardrobe that way. Anything I bought new for Declan back then either featured generic images or was completely plain.

Then Dan and I discovered, through my nephew’s clothes, how much easier it made everything, a battle to put on the “blue pyjamas” turned into sheer excitement and even a rush to the bedroom when we said “time to put on your Thomas pyjamas”. Suddenly all the arguing about getting dressed eased as I slowly started slipping in character vests and pyjamas  – of course, nothing that would be seen outside of the house, because then he’d be back to walking billboard status.

Then my baby became a toddler, and then my toddler became a preschooler with a mind of his own. We now can’t walk through a store without him pointing out every single character he can see – and we don’t even have a television! He watches a minimal amount of shows and yet somehow everything gets sucked in. Dan had a picture of Batman as his desktop background for a month or so, and well, if Daddy thinks it’s cool then it’s probably awesome, he’s never watched any form of Batman, the movies, the TAS, even the old campy version, and yet it’s still so firmly engraved in his brain that it’s the most awesome thing EVER and so he must have anything and everything that features the caped crusader.

We went into Big W for some shoes today, we walked out with a Batman vest, a Roary vest, a Spiderman t-shirt and a Lightening McQueen hat, come night time Declan unpacked them and took them all to bed with him. We have no shoes because Dan and I started to argue, Dan (and Declan) wanted the Spiderman shoes, I wanted the generic We both refused to back down and ended up walking out of there with everything but something to put on the kid’s feet.

Dan’s argument, which I can understand, is that this is basically the first time we’ve bought him an entire wardrobe of clothes, with absolutely no hand me downs, so he should get clothes that he wants and loves.

My argument is that this is the first time we’ve bought him an entire wardrobe of clothes, and I’d rather not spend twice the amount because they have Lightening McQueen on the front.

Cue standstill. Dan says I have to be less of a tightarse, I say Dan has to pander less to what his two year old wants.

Do we give him what he wants and so keep this enthusiasm for his clothes and getting dressed still strong, or do I say “Sorry kid, Best & Less only from now on, say goodbye to Ironman.”?

I say we swap our son for a child with a little less fashion awareness. He couldn’t care less about branded toys over generic ones or duvet covers with XYZ on them,  just the clothes. I thought I had another ten years before I would have to deal with such self-awareness!

The One Where My Eldest Takes Another Ten Years Off My Life

A few months ago Declan was sick, running a high fever and climbed into my lap for some cuddles. Literally the moment he settled there his arms bolted out from his body, his neck lost all tension and his eyes rolled into the back of his head.

The following hours after that are a blur, just fuzzy images in my head. Getting angry at the emergency line operator because I was calling from a mobile so she made me confirm our address three times, looking at my little boy’s body on the floor and seeing blood pooling from his mouth, watching Dan cry because our son was just a limp body on the floor.

The only thing that remains clear in my mind is when I looked down to see his head tip backwards and his eyes roll to being completely white. That image is burned into my mind. I had nightmares about it for weeks after wards and I still do occasionally when I’m stressed out or having a hard time with something.

The seizure was a febrile convulsion, just the brain’s way of dealing with excessive heat from a fever, the way it was explained to us was that the body works out what is briefly expendable so it can focus on stopping the fever, and so shuts off the brain for a couple of minutes. Now, I know I’m a little underqualified here, but if I was the body this probably wouldn’t be my way of doing things, I’d shut off the appendix, the spleen or maybe one of the kidneys for a few minutes, but not the brain. It sounds like overkill to me, but who am I to argue with evolution? Declan is apparently susceptible to them, which, for the record, is entirely Dan’s fault, as he also had them regularly until the age of five. Once again this is just another point in my argument for demanding full medical history from any man you even think about breeding with, or even have sex with, just incase. My next husband I shall vet more thoroughly.

Today Declan went from waking up fine that morning to burning up before lunchtime, he was given Nurofen to drop the fever and we tried to get him in a cool bath but he now knows the routine so I think we would have had more luck (and less injuries) shaving a cat. Around midday he was walking over to my armchair when it happened, his arms flew out to the sides, his eyes rolled to white, his body went stiff that he just fell backwards as though you’d toppled a domino. He cracked his head on the tiled floor and immediately snapped out of the seizure, obviously his body decided that to deal with his pain the brain was probably pretty important right at that moment. I was just happy that I was soothing a child who was upset because he’d hit his head rather than one that was upset and frightened because his body had started spasming uncontrollably.

But I still saw his eyes roll, and saw his body briefly lose control, I still felt that moment of sheer terror, and once again, every time I close my eyes that vision is back. I don’t think there is anything more scary than the thought of losing a child. Not until I gave birth did I realise how much these boys would change me and my life, the thought of not having either of them in my life any longer completely turns my blood cold. I love them with every last bit of me, but I dread to think how many years each of these episodes have knocked off of my life, let alone how many grey hairs they’ve added to my skull.

You Call It Preschool, I Call It Freedom!

Declan officially started preschool last Monday, I now have two days a week where I can experience the freedom of not having three foot of trouble hanging around my knees constantly. I spent the first day sobbing, the second day I was uneasy, but happy about how much he was enjoying himself, by the time yesterday hit I was delighted to ship him off to play with his friends and finger paint. As much as I love having him around, it’s like I’ve gained back a piece of me for two days a week. I have rediscovered so many joys since that first day, like peeing without an audience and eating food without having to share. If this keeps up I might even be able to do something really crazy, like take a bath ALONE!

Declan loves it, and by Thursday each week he’s already asking whether it’s time to go back to school. The ladies that teach his class keep on telling me how wonderful he is, how well he plays with the other children, how smart he is. I partially want them to see him at home stealing toys from his brother and slamming doors in my face because I’ve done something abusive and highly damaging, like telling him he can’t have a second cookie, but I also don’t want to ruin their image of how fab they think he is.

As nice as it is to get the break, it’s magic to pick him up, hear him scream “MUMMY!” and come pelting down the steps from the wendy house. He’ll run around the classroom and show me what he painted, and what he played with and tell me how wonderful it all was. His mouth is moving too fast for me to keep up and his enthusiasm is seeping from every pore in his body, it’s wonderful.

Scabs, Lies and Videotape

Declan has recently discovered the joy of picking scabs, not one to deprive him of such pleasure I haven’t got massively out of my way to stop him – he’s the kind of kid that if I say no will just get even more excited about whatever activity I’ve banned him from. That is until I realised that this scab has been sitting on his knee for over a month now, barely being given a chance to heal before my son gets his little fingernails under it and rips it off delighting in the blood running down his leg. Ick.

The blood was there this morning, so I asked him whether he’d been picking, knowing full well the answer.

His face was sheepish, but his voice told another story, a flat out “no!” with a tone that was trying to tell me just how shocked he was by my accusation.

“Are you sure?” I asked him.

“Yes!” he said defiantly, then he bowed his head realising that the game was up “No… but you shouldn’t pick scabs.”

I don’t know whether to be shocked that he’s trying out lying to get out of something (particularly something that really isn’t going to get him into trouble) or to delight in the fact that yet another piece of his psyche has been formed, the part that will one day lead to him telling his teacher that his little brother ate his homework. It might not be the kind of thing the average parent jots down in a baby book, but ever so slowly the layers on my toddler are building up and turning him into a child, one that will one day be a teen and then eventually an adult.

I just hope that he doesn’t chose to take up a career as a lawyer, after folding that easily I don’t see him getting very far.

Twelve Months On

My baby boy turned one year old on Saturday.

One year since he shot out of my vag looking like a member of the Blue Man Group and entered the world.

One year since he was whisked off to the NICU before I’d seen him, with Dan following promising to return with a photo.

One year since I told Dan that he must have photographed the wrong baby because “my baby isn’t Asian!”.

One year since I learned that jaundice and swollen eyes from birth canal trauma can do funny things to your baby’s face.

One year of learning and growing and winding his older brother up

And yet it feels like he’s been in our lives forever. Not in an “oh god, when will this annoying house guest ever leave?” way, more in the way that he filled a hole that we weren’t even aware was there.

I’ve learned in the last twelve months just how different children can be. Declan and Connor have been raised in exactly the same way, and yet you couldn’t find two children less alike. My eldest will leap off a platform twice his height and just hopes that he lands well, whereas Connor will cling to you if you take the corner too fast whilst you’re carrying him to the bedroom. Declan will bounce off walls and demands constant amusement, Connor is quite happy to sit and take in the world. Declan started walking at nine months old and woe betide anyone who wanted him to sit down and chill out, Connor has only recently started to crawl and will happily sit down and cuddle with anyone that asks.

I love Declan with every piece of me, just as I love The Conman, but my entire pregnancy I was petrified of having two of him, two kids with that level of energy and gusto would have flattened me. From day one Connor was a different baby, he still has the stubborn streak that his brother has, and believe me, if he doesn’t approve of something, he’ll let you know, but he’s not the hellbeast that Declan was, and to an extent, still is. He’s calm, he’s quietly determined and he loves human touch. He is my little boob monster, my bed buddy in the mornings when he wakes up and wants cuddles, my living garbage disposal that will eat anything that looks like it might have at one stage been edible. The telly holds no interest for him, but he’s very aware of the world around him, and his play focuses more on mimicry, probably because he takes so much in.

I’m not sure how he’ll grow up, I’ve always said that Connor’s my rugby player and his brother is the soccer star, based soley on their build. I think he will be athletic and I think his silent resolve will get him further in certain elements of life than his brother’s brash way of taking on the world, I also think if he keeps on eating in the way he currently is we’re going to have to add extra suspension to the car.

So happy birthday my little Conman, thank you for filling that gap in our lives that we didn’t know we had, thank you for teaching your brother that he isn’t the centre of the universe and for teaching me that not everything is my fault, but that every baby is different from the next

And if you could walk sometime before college, that would be awesome.

Love always,

Mummy xxx

My OB Said WHAT???

I have just discovered (with thanks to Alicia of Tattoos And Drool) the fabulous site, My OB Said What???.

Full of gems such as…
“Your Cervix Is a Little Dehydrated”
“The Vagina is a Very Dirty Place for a Baby!”
And my personal favourite, regarding the DANGERS of birthing in a standing position:
“…It Makes All The Blood Rush Down Into Your Vagina.”

I have had one entirely midwife cared birth, where I don’t remember seeing an OB once during my entire pregnancy, labour and post-partum care. Then my second where my entire antenatal care was done via an OB, who didn’t believe me when I told him as I was being hooked up to the Picotin that I was going to give birth at 3:09pm, bid me farewell, said he had some places to go and that he’d see me around six. So instead of birthing my son when he entered the world at exactly 3:09pm he was off gallivanting around town, leaving a superb midwife (and I feel so terrible that I can’t even remember her name now) and my husband to play catcher. Of course he showed up just after my son had been taken in a little oxygen bubble to the neonatal care and I had birthed the placenta, to tell me I’d done a fabulous job, and that I owed him $2,000.

Oddly enough I can’t think of any gems that he said. My main memory of my care was an almost creepy obsession with ultrasounds, every single visit I’d hop up on the table and have an ultrasound, it was quite a novelty at first but after so many you start to wonder what the point is, maybe he was trying to justify that $2k by showing off his flashy equipment.

My gem surprisingly come from my midwife care. At 38(ish) weeks after spending the entire day with either end over a toilet and complaining of backache, timing contractions and laying in the bath to see if they were valid or not, they eventually became 6 minutes or so apart and so we phoned up the birth centre and were told to come in straight away.

I explained my day to the midwife on duty (who, from now on, will be referred to as Nurse Satan), said that the contractions were slowly, but steadily getting closer together and I could feel definite pressure on my cervix.

“Hah! How do you even know where your cervix is?”

Strike one.

Last I checked lady, it was somewhere up my vag, unless I’ve been horribly confused all these years.

So I lay down on the bed, she berates me for drinking lime cordial instead of water and does a cervical check to see how far along I am. Only 1cm. She laughs and says the next thing that will stick in my mind forever.

“You’re not in labour, come back when you’re screaming!”

Strike 2.

So off we go back home, I take the prescribed sleeping pills which last all of an hour before my waters break all over our bed and we jump back into the car and go back to the birth centre, under their instructions to come in as soon as my membranes rupture to prevent any infection.

That was Wednesday night. It’s thought I’ll go into full blown labour within 24 hours so they just let me sit it out, eventually a doctor comes to see me on Friday, explains that I have an unresponsive cervix and I’ll be scheduled for an induction on Monday, but my body will probably figure out what to do before then anyway.

Monday comes, I’m hooked up to the IV, a couple of hours pass by and I’m in the throes of a unmedicated induced labour, in pops Nurse Satan.

“Oh, it’s you! Now you KNOW you’re in labour!”

Strike three.

That was when I turned around to my midwife and told her that if Nurse Satan came into the birthing room ever again I was going to impale her on an IV stand. She was informed of my feelings towards her and kept out for the entirety of my eldest son’s birth. I saw her occasionally in the hallway for my short stay after birth and she refused to even make eye contact with me.

So, it isn’t just the OBs who are completely lacking in bedside manner or even just manners in general, occasionally you’ll get a complete nutjob midwife too. Infact, remind me to one day tell you about the midwife from my second pregnancy who would use the room with the long term care patients as her bedbound bitching audience. Apparently she hated birthing Asian babies because “the mother’s vagina always smells of curry”.  Rarely a shift went by without her coming in to moan about “the smelly woman in room 16a” or “that fat one down the hall”. Delightful.

Step Away From The Baby

From ParentDish’s most recent post:

Thumbs Down. You spot a pair of tiny feet bouncing along in a stroller and can’t resist taking a peek. What cheeks! What big, brown eyes! What an adorable sign hanging precariously above the baby’s head warding me off lest I whip out the hand sanitizer! We’re not joking. The signs read, “Please wash your hands before touching mine” and come in red, blue and pink silicone rubber. They cost $7.95 and can hang almost anywhere. A well-intentioned mother who gave birth to a premature baby created the jarring baby accessory, so we understand why germs were an issue for the mom. But isn’t it a parent’s job to model good social skills for their children by graciously addressing strangers who like to innocently touch babies instead of relying on signs to get the message across?

Umm. No. How about teaching our children that if someone disrespects their private space will tell them in no uncertain terms?

For the first six months of his life everytime I was out with Declan in public I would lose count on the amount of people who insisted on touching him. In the pram, sitting on my lap, even in the sling, the child was not safe from the prying fingers of strangers. Fingers that I didn’t know the history of, I didn’t know what they’d touched prior to stroking my babies cheek, they’d be shopping right? How many hands had their change gone through before it hit theirs? Had they touched another baby before they decided to touch mine? DOGS! What about DOGS?!

So PD says I just need to graciously tell the stranger not to touch my newborn. Fair enough, but the kind of people that would listen to a gracious request aren’t the kind of people who are busy jabbing their fingers in my baby’s face. Those people understand that you don’t just wander around touching freshly birthed babies. The finger jabbers are the kind of people that when you say “Please don’t touch him, he’s asleep” the respond with “Oh just his cheek, it won’t wake him up!”, it might not, but when I crack your skull for ignoring my “gracious request” it will probably disturb his slumber.

So for baby #3 I would probably consider this sign, or I could just do what one of the women in my mother’s group did when faced with the ongoing barrage of strange hands reaching into her pram; place a fart machine in the bottom basket with the presser to activate it attached to the pram handles. If you think a sign is jarring, wait till you see them pull their hands away when your infant lets rip with a fart that measures on the richter scale. Suddenly the friendly coloured sign doesn’t seem quite so horrendous, eh?

Interestingly enough, Connor never got many touchers, maybe the slightly psychotic look of a frazzled mother internally berating herself for even CONSIDERING leaving the house with two children under the age of two scared them off.

Police Checks For IVF Patients In Vic

In the news today the Victorian government have announced that Police checks for IVF patients are now mandatory. The countries “top IVF experts” have condemned the move, and looking around at opinions online it seems that many people are agreed, I, on the other hand, am completely torn.

I have no personal experience with IVF, but in the Mother’s group I’ve been part of since Declan was conceived, more than half have struggled with infertility issues, and I have seen many IVF journeys over the last three years that we’ve been together. IVF is already a traumatic enough procedure, it takes a toll on a mother’s body, on both of the parents mental state and of course financially. Adding yet another step in the road on an already difficult ride is just making matters worse. I also feel that if the counseling and interviews that are required when going through treatment should be able to weed out anyone that isn’t suitable as a parent. Lets not also forget that police checks (at least when I had mine) have a six week turn around time on average. Six weeks may not be an age, but when you’re waiting on a piece of paper so that someone can allow you to start a family, it can certainly seem like one. There’s also a question of where the line should be drawn. If you’re requiring police checks for an embryo transfer, what about the woman who can’t concieve without Clomid? Should those parents have to go through the same checks before she’s given the prescription?

But then imagine if out of all the IVF treatments that one clinic preforms, imagine if five, even ten years down the track, one or both of the parents are found to be abusive. This child that has been artificially created by that clinic has been suffering at the hands of their parent, and if a background check had been done at the time of conception it would have been discovered that one of the parents had previously been charged with child abuse. How are the staff at that clinic supposed to feel knowing that they had aided a child coming into this world to live that life, and knowing that with one check the
parents could have been deemed unsafe and that child would have never have been born to see that life.

No we don’t have police checks for parents to be when the child is conceived naturally. I wish we could. The only way I could ever see that working is to automatically run a police check on both parents when a birth is registered, highlighting any dangers that would then allow authorities and DOCs to keep a closer eye on the family. Unfortunately as we’ve seen in all of the horrendous child abuse cases that have slipped under the radar lately, DOCs is already overstretched and under funded as it is.

It’s invasive and it’s discriminatory, but if it saves one child from suffering, then to me it’s worth it.