Oh No about the Feeds

Since Graceful Parenting moved about two weeks ago, the RSS and email subscription feeds haven’t been working. They are fixed now, so if you think you have subscribed, please subscribe again. In the About Me section on the right, you can click on the orange RSS button to get an RSS feed to the reader of your choice or you can enter your email address to get an email with each new post. I’m sorry for the trouble. Stay tuned this week for some more posts, like how August Rush almost killed me…

 

For the Love of Dr. Sears

I was heading out the other day and I thought to bring my baby carrier with me. This was new, because I had gotten into the habit of using the stroller. Well, for one thing, the Snap-n-Go idea is so efficient and convenient! I can leave Baby Girl in her car seat and lock the car seat into a stroller frame. The diaper bag and other goodies fit in the basket below and off we go! But then again, I had been reading Dr. Sears late at night for a few nights in a row, and sure, I was trying to prove him wrong, but maybe I learned a little too.

What? Have I changed my mind since my post just two days ago? No, not really.

The thing is, I think reading Dr. Sears is like dating a sweet guy with good ideas who doesn’t shower often….

Technorati Tags: attachment parenting, breast feeding, graceful parenting, parenting, parenting philosophy, Dr. Sears

 

We moved!

Graceful Parenting has moved to a different site. You can still get there through the http://gracefulparenting.net URL. See you there!

 

Only Five More Days

There may be twenty-eight more days until Christmas, but there is only five more days until the new GracefulParenting blog goes live. There will be a new design, new features and some potentially controversial posts! It is sort of like Christmas, but with less presents.

Just wanted to drop a note, because working on the site itself and on the longer posts hasn’t left much time for regular posts. So I wanted to come clean and give a heads up that the new GracefulParenting.net will be live this Sunday, December 2.

 

Thankful for Thanksgiving

I was writing in my Spiritual Journal today about all I hope for and it came out something like this:
- Get the laundry done
- Go grocery shopping and bake something for tomorrow that will fit in with my Mom’s dinner, Blue Eyes’ new healthy eating habits and Noel’s favorite foods. (Good thing Baby Girl doesn’t have an opinion yet.)
- Pack for trip to Houston
- Meet with potential new babysitter at 10am
- Finish up my list of things to do from last week
- Reserve a spot at a nice campground for the spring, because I never think to do this until the spring, when our calendar and the nice campgrounds’ calendars are both full, so I must remember to do it today

Hmmm… That wasn’t what I had in mind for my Spiritual Journal or for how I think and feel about each day, especially during a time that I want to be more thoughtful than productive.

So, I sat for a few more minutes, thinking about what I was hopeful for today and tomorrow and came up with this:
- May I remember that I do have enough time for what really needs to be done.
- May I let go of the need for it to be perfect and be careful to not fill in the spaces in time with more, more, more things to do.
- May I think of my family – Blue Eyes, Noel, Baby Girl, our parents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews and friends while I’m doing the laundry, packing and baking a dessert. May I remember them and do it for them, instead of doing it in a hurry because I have to.
- May I put everything on my list from last week on hold that I can, anything that isn’t an emergency, which is usually everything, so I can have time to really be with my family this week.
- May the University of Texas beat Texas A&M in football on Friday afternoon. (Oh, well, maybe this isn’t a serious hope, but it is still a hope, so I’ll leave it in.)
- May I take the time and energy and space to be truly thankful. This time last year, Blue Eyes and I found out we were pregnant, after trying for several years. So much has happened since then, it feels like a decade has passed. I’m grateful that my marriage has helped me through this year. I’m grateful for Noel and her spirit, her sense of joy and her sense of humor. I’m so grateful that Baby Girl is with us. What a miracle she is. For today, tomorrow, this weekend, the rest of the year and next year too, may I be grateful for my family.

Happy Thanksgiving to you!

Technorati Tags: graceful parenting, journal, parenting, spiritual journaling, thankfulness, thanksgiving

 

The Agony of a Deep Freeze Thaw

There is a very special relationship, not well documented and known only to a small subset of the population. It is the relationship between a NICU Mom and the deep freezer in her garage.

To explain this fully, I’ll have to start at the beginning. I met my friend Barbara in the NICU (neo-natal intensive care) at Seton Hospital when our girls were born just a few days apart, mine two months premature and hers three and a half months premature. We felt a connection right away, because we had both been pregnant with twins and our first twins, mine named Grace and hers named Jack, had both died.

Now Sophia and Kate were here and an early delivery feels different from the beginning. I’ve never felt so intensely strange, so hopeful and lost at the same time, to think Sophia might be all right, but not be able to hold her. To know that she is being taken care of, but not be able to see her all the time. To want to breast feed her, but know she isn’t coordinated or strong enough. The regular ways a Mother cares for a baby and the ways a baby feels her Mother’s love weren’t possible and the six floors between the Mother-Baby unit and the NICU felt like a million miles.

But, there was one thing I could do. I could provide breast milk for my baby. This would make her stronger and healthier and I could show my love by feeding her, even if there was a pump, a refrigerator, nurses and a feeding tube in-between us.

So, the same day Sophia was born, a lactation consultant showed me how to use the breast pump. I would need to pump every 2-3 hours around-the-clock to stimulate my breasts so the milk would come. I used to be a Software Project Manager and now I was a Breast Pumper, it was a full-time job and I took it very seriously.

I pumped about twenty times before I got a few drops of milk. The hospital provided syringes to store the milk instead of bottles, because the amounts were so small. Not only that, but they provided a little plastic tube that fit on the end of the syringe so I could suck up the tiniest of tiny drops of milk off the pump supplies. And I was soooo proud of my first few syringes of 1 ML or 2ML of milk that I could send to Sophia. Her stomach was so tiny then, this was enough for an entire meal. Here is my milk, baby, I’m taking care of you!

At one point, something was going on, a phone call or a nurse doing something, and I left a syringe of milk sitting on the food tray for twenty minutes. I panicked. This was Sophia’s FOOD. This is what kept her ALIVE. I didn’t have time to call a nurse to bring the milk to the NICU. I was by myself, with no one to push my wheel chair through the halls. So, two days after a c-section, I took the milk and left my room on foot. I walked the halls to the elevator, got to the eighth floor and through NICU security. I walked as fast as I could manage to Sophia’s nurse and said, out of breath and near tears, “THIS IS SOPHIA’S FOOD! IT HAS BEEN SITTING OUT FOR 25 MINUTES!”

The kind and gentle nurse took the syringe and said it was going to be OK. They leave milk out for 4 and 5 hours at a time. I felt so relieved, maybe a little silly, but mostly relieved.

So, fast forward several months. Both Sophia and Kate are at home now and doing well. Because our breasts got a little ahead of our girl’s small stomachs, we brought home frozen milk from the NICU. And because our girls need a high-calorie, high-mineral formula for two feedings a day and we pump then, we have some extra milk from that too. I imagine most NICU Moms end up with a deep freezer in the garage, so the milk will last longer and there is still room for ice cream in the house. And it still feels like gold. Barbara and I both have some trouble keeping up with our big girls now, so we always have the milk in the freezer to fill in the gaps and keep them well fed.

Think of this story, think of the precious drops of breast milk that represent all a Mother does for her baby, when I tell you how Barbara walked into her garage yesterday and saw the lid of the deep freezer open. She had left it open. For a long time. Almost all of the milk had defrosted. And the timing couldn’t have been worse. She had just gotten over a stomach bug which made her dehydrated, so wasn’t making enough milk and she needed her deep freezer supply to know Kate would be fed.

Barbara’s strength was amazing. In just a few hours, she had gone through the first four stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining and depression and was already in the final stage of acceptance. She was asking me what I had done to increase my supply, things she might try so she could take care of Kate.

I told her what had worked best for me – drinking lots of water, never going more than six hours without feeing or pumping, and, for a limited time, pumping after breast feeding, to get a little extra milk to store and let your breasts know you need more. Then I said, hey, can I recommend that you spend some time in grief for your milk? Can you stand by the freezer with your husband tonight and say a few prayers? Because this is a loss and you should give your self space and time to recognize the loss.

She said thanks for that. She knew another NICU Mom with a deep freezer of milk would understand. She said she was worried, because she didn’t have any safety net, if she didn’t produce quickly, Kate would need more formula. I didn’t think of this yesterday, but I let her know this morning, that she does have a safety net. I have a freezer full of milk and I put Kate’s name on one of the bags. No worries. It will all work out.

And that is only one of two reasons that Barbara is one of the strongest women I know. The other is that in the middle of all this, she started her own business. Kate won’t be cleared for day care until after this winter’s cold and flu season, so Barbara needs to stay home and take care of her. Her employer wouldn’t hold her job for that long, so they let her go. And, instead of spending a lot of time in denial, anger, bargaining and depression and while still waking up around-the-clock to feed Kate, she started a home business designing birth announcements and holiday cards and selling them on-line. She did Sophia’s birth announcements (well, half of them, which is a long story, and which haven’t been mailed yet, which is a longer story) and they are just about the cutest I have ever seen. They are also printed on really nice photo paper, so they feel like fine stationary. Here is the announcement, you can check out her web site here.

 

So, today, I’m saying a prayer for Barbara and her breasts and her business and for Kate making it through the cold and flu season with no troubles. Amen.

Technorati Tags: breast feeding, graceful parenting, parenting

 

This Day In the Life – Convenient Diapers MUST be Expensive

One of the sessions I went to at the women’s retreat last weekend was a book group for the book – “This Day in the Life: Diaries from Women Across America” (Joni B. Cole, Rebecca Joffrey, B.K. Rakhra).” The editors recruited over four hundred women to keep detailed diary entries for June 29, 2004. It was fun to get a little insight into different careers, like life on the road for a barrel racer in the rodeo, the amount of administrative tasks for a fire fighting officer on the day shift and how a nun, in-between prayers and work in a hospital, spends time checking her email. Several women in the group commented that the older women seemed to have it more together and the younger ones seemed to buy a lot of things and go to Starbucks. I thought, how odd that I identify less with my own generation. Then I thought, how odd that I still think I’m that young.

Sarah was leading the group and she had recommended that we all keep diary entries for the Tuesday before the retreat. I read this part of my diary to the group:

9:30 AM – I’m at Babies R Us, in the diaper aisle, debating the role of coupons in my life. I don’t really comparison shop, I haven’t found time for that, so I don’t know if the price is better. I only have a general feeling that buying diapers in the grocery store each week is SO convenient that it MUST be the most expensive of all. And I MUST be saving money by doing the LEAST convienient thing, which is keeping track of the coupons, buying more than I need, finding room in the garage to store the extra boxes and making another trip to the store when she grows out of a size before we get to the last box. That MUST be cheaper.

I just think it is funny, that we have so many options and so much information, but how much of the time do we really know what we are doing?

Then another Mom in the group, one with three kids under five and more incentive for comparison shopping, said to ditch the coupons. She said if I wanted to save money, Costco was worth it, except their diapers were a store brand, but they worked great, so it wasn’t a problem.

So, I followed up with very unscientific survey of Pampers size 3 diapers, on November 14, without coupons, and this was the cost per diaper:
HEB – 24 cents
Babies R Us – 21 cents
Target – 19 cents
Costco – 17 cents (store brand only, not Pampers)

Which might seem like pennies, but using about 180 diapers a month, the difference between Costco and HEB is over $12 a month and $140 a year.

Well, I haven’t made the Costco commitment yet. We live in a house built in 1950, with closets that make me wonder if people actually wore clothes back then. So I don’t know where I would put the extra diapers, paper towels and toilet paper. And it is hard to make an extra trip, with Baby Girl sleeping a lot and not a lot of extra time in general. But I shop Target already, so I can get my diapers there. No coupons, no bulk amounts, no extra trip.

I love this women’s retreat. Partly because of the amazing women and their stories and the interaction between women of different generations and how I feel more relaxed and stronger, but also because I’m going to save some time and money when I buy diapers. It’s all good.

Technorati Tags: graceful parenting, parenting, diapers

 

I’m Nicer When I Journal

There was a session at a women’s retreat I went to this weekend on Spiritual Journaling. At first I thought, “I don’t need that session! I totally know how to do that!” Except that I don’t do that anymore, which makes it a much less effective practice, so I thought I would go to the session after all.

The session was led by Casey and was fun because people talked about all the very real reasons to NOT keep a spiritual journal, for example:
- This isn’t the right kind of notebook. It is too big (or small), the lines are too confining (or I need lines to provide some boundaries), the paper is too think (or thin) and it doesn’t soak up the ink just right.
- This isn’t the right pen.
- I can’t find my pen.
- Writing is hard.
- I might not know what to say.
- There is no way I can justify taking even five minutes a day in such a self-centered, self-indulgent exercise with no measurable results.

I am very familiar with these reasons, they are all very good reasons. So why am I coming back to the idea? Because when I was keeping my Spiritual Journal, I was a nicer person. I focused more on the joy and less on life’s annoying, day-to-day, administrative details. I was more aware of the day I was creating and made more conscious choices.

So, for one and a half days so far, I have brought back the Spiritual Journal. I found a medium-sized, blue journal with lined pages and a simple, mechanical, pink pencil that fits just right into the elastic pencil holder on the side. I decided to journal in the morning while eating breakfast and for a few minutes again at night, in bed, before I go to sleep. I made my prompts simpler than before, so I can write for just a few minutes on busy days. Here is what I came up with.

Morning prompts
- What am I hopeful for today?
- How can I be kind?

Evening prompts
- How did it go with my wishes and kindness from the morning?
- What am I grateful for today?
- What do I want to remember?

I imagine everyone’s prompts might be different. I chose ones that had meaning for me, around these ideas:

Find joy in the everyday

Sometimes it’s easy to get wrapped up in the big, important things. Like last year when I really, really wished that the University of Texas baseball team would win the College World Series. The team had a great year, they were ranked high, they had new talent like Kyle Russell and old veterans like Chance Wheeless, who will forever be my hero since his walk-off home run against Baylor in 2005.

But they lost oh, so early in the tournament to a team I had never heard of whose mascot was an anteater.

So I’m working on the idea that maybe real happiness is in the little moments. It is in dinner with the family, Baby Girl’s sweet smile, Noel’s cool drawings and a call in the middle of the day for no reason from Blue Eyes. If I take some time to recognize these moments and be grateful for them at least for a few minutes each day, then the anteaters of the world won’t get me down.

Choose kindness

I think people have an emotional signature of sorts. You know, when they walk in a room, the energy they bring with them, their history and your expectations for what might happen next, what does all of that feel like? Some people feel like anger or contentment or silliness. I want to feel like kindness. (Now, if my friends were here right now, they might call me on this and say something more like Frustration or Business, but I’m working on it!) When someone tells a story, I want my first reaction to be compassion. When someone makes me angry, I want to listen better. When I choose what I do during the day, I want to help my neighbor. I want to think a little each day about how I can be kind and then look back to see if it happened or not.

Everyone’s Spiritual Journal could be different. Maybe yours is a prayer or scripture journal, a list of things to be grateful for, a conversation with God, ideas on making the world a better place, insights and wisdom from the day, Something, anything, that goes beyond a list of the day’s activities, in search of a deeper meaning. It’s a practice that takes a few minutes out of the day to reflect on where you are and send your thoughts and energy in the direction you want to be.

Technorati Tags: graceful parenting, journal, parenting, spiritual journaling

 

I am SO right! (Or am I?)

I haven’t blogged for a few days. I went on a short (less than 24 hours!) women’s retreat (stories to follow) and spent a lot of time with some family administrative business (oh no!). I have a lot of posts in me, but only so much time to write, so here is a short one.

I was angry, frustrated, sad, worried and weepy about this administrative business. I left a message first thing Friday morning for a medical professional and stated very clearly that I needed to hear back before the weekend. I KNEW she wasn’t going to call back. This has happened SO many times before. I REALLY need to talk to her and I give her the WHOLE day to call back and she doesn’t. It isn’t like she is the CABLE guy and who cares if your CABLE doesn’t work, she is a MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL FOR CHILDREN who doesn’t RETURN HER CALLS.

So, it is Sunday and I’m telling Blue Eyes how I KNEW she wouldn’t call, she ALWAYS does this, she is so WRONG and he says, “Did you page her?” and I say “Page her? Uh, umm, uhhhhh, no, I didn’t PAGE her.” He says yes, she is terrible with messages, but she will always answer a page.

I’m a person who thinks she has common sense, so why didn’t I think of this? Well, for one thing, I think paging someone is the same as calling 911. Someone should be bleeding before someone else gets paged. But, maybe that isn’t what a page means to her. Maybe to her, a page is what people do when they really want to talk to her. But, I was also very busy being ANGRY and as you may know from a previous post, I’m not very smart when I’m angry.

This morning, I paged her, she called right back and I got my questions answered.

Was I still right? Maybe. And I could write a letter to her boss or confront her in person or switch doctors. But last Friday, when I needed answers for my child, it wasn’t the time to BE RIGHT, it was the time to be calm, save the judgement for later and find an answer. The answer that was in my pocket the whole time, her pager number is in my cell phone, always ready to go.

 

Update on Helen

I wrote about Helen last week, a lonely, elderly neighbor I met on Halloween night. My friend, Katie, a family therapist, recommended getting in touch with Family Elder Care. I gave them a call and they have a great program, providing companionship, housekeeping, meal preparation, transportation and other services for the elderly in and around Austin. They said if I could get Helen’s phone number, they would give her a call. I brought Baby Girl with me, because she is pretty good at making people happy.

Helen opened the door and I walked inside. There was a table in the living room with family pictures on it. I felt a little like a private investigator, with a hidden agenda, trying to find out if she was living alone or had family to help her. I asked about her pictures. She showed a picture of her husband and another picture of her son who had died a while back. She showed me pictures of her grand kids. It looked like a lot of family, but I noticed that all of the pictures were older, with dated clothes and hair styles. Her grandkids must be grown up by now and they hadn’t sent any new pictures.

We head to the back room and sit on the couch to talk. Helen LOVES Sophia. She holds her and talks to her and watches her cool faces and is delighted with her funny sounds. I ask Helen about her family and house and life.

Her story gets hard to follow pretty quickly. She says she doesn’t live in this house, she lives in a small town a few hours away, but she visits this house sometimes. Then she says she can babysit Sophia any time. Then she says her husband and son are just out hunting over the hill. Then she she says her husband died last year. She says she didn’t have too many kids, then she lists about ten boy and girl names. Then she says she wishes she had had a girl, she always wanted a girl. Each sentence by itself was grammatically correct and logical, but any two sentences together didn’t make sense.

I got her phone number and gave her mine. I called Family Elder Care with the information. I’m going to come back and visit again. I hope she is doing all right.