January 1, 2006 - Backing up and filling in some details…

I feel like with such a brusque recap of the last 18 months, I have more to say.  I suppose I should just start picking and choosing more of my mommy adventures of late 2004 through all of 2005, as I feel inspired to do so, and start fleshing out the stories of our events with 1-year-old Aleksi and pregnant mommy!!  

Our Family Bed

      We started feeling a bit cramped in our queen-sized-ish bed, as the buggle prefers to roll around  and crawl around a few inches here and there in his sleep, and if he bumps into a wall or a person, he wakes up mad and crying.  Matti also loves to have tons of space in the bed, and takes an entire comforter blanket and wraps himself up like a burrito all the way to his nose, and occupies much space, not being a small man.  I am an economical space-occupier in the bed at night, poised tense and still laying on one edge of the bed, providing a barrier against falling onto the floor (only a few inches but still would hurt if the buggle fell out face first in his sleep, and would make for a rude awakening), but my efforts alone were unsuccessful in allowing everyone to get much rest at night.  I insisted for months and months, all winter long during the buggle’s budding toddlerhood, that we get a second bed, just like our first, to push against ours on the floor to double the room we’d have to sprawl.  As my belly got bigger and bigger, and nights became impossible to enjoy, my husband started to see the logic in allowing the family bed size to grow as the number of family members increased. 

     We finally ordered up new mattresses, and placed them next to each other, instantly transforming our normal-seeming bedroom into a wall-to-wall (practically) bed situation, with barely enough room left over for the changing table and the bookshelf stacked with cloth diapers.  At first we sort of just looked at each other and cracked up, that our bedroom was just a room-full-of-bed!  But, as the space we had every night available for us all to sprawl out and rest convinced us, it was the right plan.  Aleksi was able to roll around in his sleep, and flop hither and yon like a fish out of water, and my loner-sleeper-style-husband, who looks like he’s in love with his comforter, all wrapped up in layers, had plenty of room for his coma-esque sleep.  I slept terribly, but only because by then I was abundantly pregnant, and my belly didn’t allow for much comfortable manuevering or restful moments during the night.  But we loved our new family bed! 

     I highly recommend having a bed near to the floor, and as large of one as you can manage (that your bedroom will allow for) for parents with babies & small children.  Even if they have their own beds, they’ll want to climb into bed with their parents at times, and this way you don’t have to worry about any little ones falling over the side, and allows access for even the littlest crawlers to get in and out as they please.  We are sold, and will never be able to downsize bed size until we no longer have children in the house!  It’s simply so nice to have our whole family in the same bed at night, for sniffing and cuddling, everyone waking up together in the morning.  The drawbacks since then, now that my son is 2 and I’m interested in encouraging day-nursing and not so much middle-of-the-night-nursing, is that he smells my milk and it’s such a habit to want to latch onto mom if he wakes up even a little bit in the night.  But a little bit of consistency in that department goes a long way and we are all sleeping well through the night these days, for the time being. 

I suppose this is a good segue way into discussing my adventures of breastfeeding throughout 2005….

My Adventures in Tandem Nursing

     I hadn’t achieved much success with solid foods & the buggle when I found out I was pregnant.  Breastfeeding was still the bulk of his nourishment, even at 15 months, so I kind of started to freak out at the progress of my milk supply waning.  And I severely pumped up my efforts to get him to eat some solid food in addition to nursing as much as he could get out of me.  Pretty much the big successes came from pike perch fillet, a yummy white fish we picked up at the glamorous grocery store in town, at the Stockmann department store.   An expensive ritual, getting a little fillet for him everyday, but it is so nutritious and he’d actually gobble the whole thing up when all other efforts ended up in the trashcan, that I didn’t feel I had a choice but to keep buying them, fresh from the fish counter, everyday.  I also had some luck with scrambled eggs in the morning, and he’d eat a few bites of that.  Basically silverware hadn’t caught on with our Aleksi yet—he acted like trying to spoonfeed him something was the cruellest torture on earth, and couldn’t very well use the utensils between 12-18mo. himself, so fingerfoods were really our only source of success.  Scrambled eggs and cut up pieces of fish fillet were our best bets to get some sustanence into him….cow’s milk was hugely unpopular, but yogurt was sometimes appealing to him.  Indeed, we took one container of blueberry yogurt to Matti’s grandmother’s 90^th birthday party, fancy & catered, but it turned out to be the only thing he’d sample out of all the yummy things offered there.  You can see a picture of us posed at the party in the margins here. :)  By the time of those pictures (the one of the three of us, as well as the one of the buggle taken in Tennessee with my mom) he started sampling more foods because my milk supply was entirely gone. 

     I read the awesome book, “Adventures in Tandem Nursing” to get some advice on anything herbal I could take to keep my supply up, and tried everything, but to no avail.   Another obstacle in our breastfeeding relationship, was that I noticed nipple sensitivity and pain before I even knew I was pregnant, and the sensitivity didn’t go away, although the pain did eventually subside halfway through the pregnancy.  By the time we came back from our February 2005 trip to Tennessee I tried desperately to get out of the house and keep the buggle distracted with activity so I could minimize his requests to nurse.  We had it down to just nap-time and bedtimes, and having him fall asleep for his daily nap in his stroller got it down to just bedtimes most days between March and June.  Around June was when I actually felt like nursing triggered too many contractions, so I had Matti take care of bedtimes by taking a walk around the nearby duckpond at bedtime to get Aleksi to fall asleep so I wouldn’t have to nurse him to sleep (or deal with a major tantrum otherwise).   For a couple of weeks he didn’t nurse at all, and my mother had just arrived to entertain him so it helped to keep his attention off of this major change in his life, but once I got far enough in the pregnancy that I actually wanted to give birth any time, my family gave up the exhausting game of distraction-deception I started nursing him to sleep for naps and nighttime again, and he was thrilled.  He started calling bedtime, and nursing to sleep, or nursing anytime, “booby-pillow” or “booboo pillow”, as his pronunciation wasn’t always so predictable. :)  This was in reference to the fact that we surrounded ourselves with pillows at bedtime, and he got the “booble” (okay, so we have many cutesey words for boobs) at the same time.  I kind of enjoyed that he had a codeword for nursing that people wouldn’t immediately understand, in case he would demand loudly in public to nurse, it would come out “boo-boo-pillow YET” (he thinks that the word yet means exactly the same thing as the word “now”, I guess because often I say “not yet” when I’m in the middle of doing something and it isn’t bedtime “yet”/”now”), so not immediately understood by uninterested parties.

     Finally the nipple sensitivity and pain went away nearly entirely after the birth of Elias.  My milk supply returned and it was no longer a squirmy experience to nurse my older child.  However, it still does feel a bit more stimulating than I’d like—a.k.a. I cannot sleep during these sessions, so I’ve felt compelled to eliminate the whole routine of waking up in distress and needing to nurse that Aleksi has had going on his whole life.  I decided to be totally consistent and refuse all nursing requests after bedtime and before 7 am, at which point we would just wake up and go into the living room to snuggle and nurse and watch a movie, for example. 

Side note on TV & Movie watching:  Fall brought rapidly darker and more depressing weather, and I admit I started feeling quite overwhelmed when both boys wanted to nurse at once and it just never worked very well for me to try to nurse them simultaneously, so I utilized our large screen & projector machine to play DVD movies for Aleksi to try to capture his attention at times so I could feed or attend to the baby without losing my mind.  Not until the end of the year did Aleksi really start to watch the screen for more than 10 seconds at a time, though, and still it is only a peripheral activity to be enjoyed in conjunction with lots of other play activities, so he isn’t one of those zoned-out-zombies in front of the cartoon movie that you may imagine.

      But to get back on the subject of nursing, I don’t know why but it isn’t stimulating or irritating at all to feel the baby nursing, but when my toddler latches on, his style of nursing is just hard to deal with and I only can deal with it when I have something else going on to distract myself from the event, like watching a movie for myself or talking with my husband.  I do still nurse him to sleep, alone in the dark, and this is hard but I try to use mental distraction techniques.  I revisited a few chapters of “Adventures in Tandem Nursing” on the subject, and took the advice I found, which was trying to reaffirm to myself my strong conviction to continue nursing Aleksi until he self-weans.  It has been working—as it still means so much to him to have those moments of connecting with mom in the most snugly, secure-feeling way, and I know it would break his heart to stop nursing him entirely right now.  I still absolutely love the way he looks so happy and content curled up in my arms and nursing his heart out with his eyes closed.  I know one day when he’s all grown up I will think back on those moments as some of the sweetest in my life.  Of course it goes without saying that nursing my new infant brings quite deep and complete contentment and bliss, there’s something really special about nursing a small baby.  Elias fits so compactly against me when we snuggle in bed, smelling like milky infant heaven, nursing a few quiet moments of the winter away just the two of us, whenever Matti is so good as to keep Aleksi distracted with lego-building or some other such activity.  When it’s just me and the boys I admit I don’t get a lot of quiet moments to enjoy nursing the baby—I have a hard time putting him down to sleep or getting a meal into his tummy without way too much distraction, with my toddler needing my constant attention….  But that’s the way things go when you have two kiddos less than 2 years apart! 

My Homebirth Story

As the threat of premature labor lessened with each passing week (on gawdawful-boring-bedrest, where I became a chronic shopaholic with a wireless internet connection on my laptop next to me, day in and day out, buying stuff for both the buggle and the baby-on-the-way like it was my full time job—bedrest is expensive!!!), we started to realize we were going to have a full-term baby, and all my discussion forum browsing on mothering.com and the friendships I made with other crunchy moms there, brought me to start more and more consider the option of having a homebirth.  We found a homebirthing midwife reference through a natural birthing association here in Tampere , and talked with him on the phone about the thing, and he said that as long as I got to 37 weeks, he’d be happy to come to our home and attend the birth.  The more we thought about it and talked about it, the more right it felt.  Now, I must say that the hospital in our city is not a bad place to birth, even for us who believe in having a natural birth when at all possible, but you’re not guaranteed a particular midwife or particular birthing options (i.e. only one birthing tub available and if it’s being used when you arrive, you’re just out of luck), and they do push drugs pretty strongly, with the majority of women getting epidurals and lots of episiotomies and vacuum extractions occurring.  So we decided we’d rather just stay in the comfort of our own home, which conveniently is a 5 minute drive from the large hospital, so if we ran into any problematic situation, we could get there within minutes for the necessary operation.  As long as things were going smoothly, we wanted to try to just stay home, with an experienced midwife (30 years of practice) giving us reassurance that things were progressing well.  Turns out it was the best 50 bucks and best choice we made re: the entire pregnancy. 

     Tuesday morning, August 9th, 2005, I woke up feeling like I had pretty bad menstrual cramps, and I felt pretty grumpy. By noon I warned my husband that he should wrap up all business & meetings for the day as soon as he could, because things could be happening later. By the time the buggle and I had a long afternoon nap for a few hours, when I woke up and felt exhausted enough to sleep again (around 3pm), my cramps were too strong to allow me any rest, and I remember thinking to myself that a lot of women describe the transition from false or early labor to true/active labor as being unable to sleep through the discomfort, and I wondered if today would be the day! I felt really wiped out and really uncomfortable with the lower back aches, so I let my mom entertain Aleksi and I laid in front of the fan on my bed and enjoyed the cool air. It has been chilly most recent summer days here in Finland, but August 9th was a balmy/humid/tropical type day, with a gust in the air that didn't reach us inside our flat, so I resorted to a fan blowing right on me to keep from getting too sweaty. I later jumped in the shower to cool off and clean off, and I remember thinking that there would be no point in putting on lotion afterwards since I may very well be getting in and out of the birth tub before too long!

     Around 6pm, my mom left me alone with the buggle boy, and my husband arrived home soon afterwards, and nothing had changed yet....but by 7:30 I noticed that the cramping would come on harder for a few moments every once in awhile, and by 8:00 the crampiness in my lower back (accompanied by a braxton-hicks-esque contraction in the front) would come QUITE strong for 15-30 seconds, and I decided to start timing them, and they were every 3-6 minutes, so we called the midwife. Aleksi would watch a cramp overtake me and mimic whatever I did (lean over and grab support on the table, moan a few nonsensical words, etc) and since there was music playing, he thought it was a game/dance! Even *I*, the laboring mama in pain. had to laugh. I noticed bloody show for the first time, which continued for a couple of hours, and clear/runny mucous along with it. For many days I had noticed white mucous being released and I felt sure things must be progressing but never saw any hint of pink so I never felt too encouraged, but since the contractions were pretty regular and pinkish show was now appearing, I knew for sure things were happening, and I got in the birthing tub to relax and help with the discomfort through the contractions. My mom entertained my son and then took him outside to walk him in the stroller to sleep.

     Around 9:30-10 pm things were pretty painful for around half a minute, every five minutes, and my husband massaged my back in the shower/tub with me, and soon afterwards my midwife arrived and took a look to see how far along I was. Having him internally examine me hurt terribly, but when I did build up enough courage to push down with my muscles when he inserted his fingers, the pain actually subsided and I just felt my muscles working, which was a surprising relief. He found that the water hadn't broken yet and I was around 5 cm dilated. I was feeling some nausea and fatigue, so I left the heat of the shower room and continued to labor simply laying on the bed, on my left side (in the dark with 'Deep Forest' playing on the stereo). I felt sooooo tired and unwilling to imagine the energy that would be required to birth my baby so soon, and just had so many whiney and wimpy thoughts running around my head. I actually complained like a kid to my husband that I was too tired, 'didn't wanna do this', while face down in the bed. I was starting to feel so uncomfortable in my lower back, most keenly at the peak of a contraction, of course, that I asked my midwife to use the water injections to help me out. They hurt like a *bitch*, or more specifically like 4 bees stinging in turn, but as soon as I recovered from the shock of that burning pain, I did noticed that it immediatly helped remove the back pain from the equation, and I felt the contractions only in the front, which were still quite powerful, but much better than having pain on both sides! (After about 30 minutes the pain relief started to wane and after about 90 minutes we did the injections again a second time, and they helped again with the intense back sensations.)

     I suppose it was around 11, although I'm not sure, that the midwife checked me again and found I was 7-8 cm dilated, and the pain was getting truly intense, and I found that taking a hot shower helped a bit....which I did for a few moments, followed by walking around the apartment… and then followed by sitting on the edge of the bed (our bed is just mattresses on the floor pushed together to accommodate our family bed situatoin) in a bit of a squat. Things were intense through each contraction no matter what I did, and after midnight we found I was 9-10 cm dilated, and the midwife encouraged me to push down on his fingers to help the water to break, (this hurt terribly and seemed to really exacerbate the pain of the contraction, until I really dug in and was able to engage all my pelvic muscles in a hard push, then it didn't hurt at all and I was able to hang onto the push and endure things quite well--strange!) and he was able to feel the head nicely engaged, but my water bag intact, and my contractions were hitting me like hurricanes and I agreed to let him break the waters and allow this baby to come on out and have the ordeal be over with. I still felt such fatigue, no sense of energy or empowerment at all, just soooo tired and the pain hit me so cruelly during each contraction (I thought at the time), and I felt disgusted and disappointed with myself for not being a powerful birther and just being this little wimpy girl hanging on for dear life while the ordeal passed over me.

     Anyway, the midwife did break the waters, caught the flood in a plastic bag, and it was about 1am when things switched to second stage labor. Within a couple of contractions with me pushing down on my midwife's fingertips, he was able to see the head---covered in lots of dark hair! Just a few minutes later I found out first hand what people refer to as the 'Ring of Fire' as I pushed the baby's head out and could not believe the burning pain could be so strong! I felt so 'full' as I pushed the baby out, but by 1:36am I did just that, and mini-bug was born and placed on my tummy. The ‘pushing stage’ only lasted maybe 15 minutes, so all-in-all I am so glad I had the midwife break my waters and let the baby descend and get out already, seeing as how he came out so quickly and relatively easily for a 9 pound baby!  After a little while of him clearing out the mucous from his throat, he started crying, and soon afterwards, nursing like a pro.

     My mom and my son were back inside, my son woke up and we wanted to wait to clean up the scene before introducing him to his mama and little brother, but he was getting really hysterical hearing me yell in pain as the midwife stitched up a small tear, so as soon as my crotch was mended, and the midwives left, I covered up things with a towel, and my toddler joined the scene. Unfortunatly, he was so freaked out as his sleep had been interrupted in the middle of the night to so much activity he couldn't understand, and he just felt so upset and confused. He needed one on one attention from me, in the dark, nursing him, to be able to let go of some very intense hysterics and fall asleep, and I got a little tense that I was missing out on time with my newborn to ease my son's tantrum, but at least daddy and grandma got some nice time with mini-bug and found out he was 51cm and 4.18kg ! Big boy. Finally my toddler slept, and I held and nursed the baby a long while, and finally left him sleeping by his brother as I went to shower and clean up, and my husband cleaned the room all up nice while I showered. I crashed in bed with the baby but was too excited to sleep, so I just stared at him, and later my husband showered, ate, and joined us, after sending text messages and emails out to everyone he could think of to announce his second son's birth! All in all, a success, I think.  This time we chose our son’s name well ahead of time, rather than spending weeks after the birth debating first-name-second-name combos back and forth forever, and we started calling him Elias from the first.

~Tales of an Ex-Pat, 3 years away from home~

The only thing I truly miss about the United States is the fact that my mommy is there, and I am here, an ocean and continent away.  I imagined my whole life that my mother would be an integral, daily part of my own journey into motherhood, and it does hurt that it didn’t work out that way.  I don’t regret any of my choices, as I love my husband and feel we want all the same things out of life, and his entrepreneurial ventures are at the moment bound to Finland , but won’t always be that way.  So we live here and I’m happy with that, as well as with the incredible mother benefits inherent in this socialist democracy we are living with (and excellent pre-natal care with one branch of the city’s antenatal clinic in the building right next to our apartment building!)  But, I do regret that it’s so hard on my mother and I, with her declining health and my increasing small travelling companions, to spend time together.  In case I haven’t specified exactly the situation with my mom, she has been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis within the last couple of years, and combined with the stress on her immune system of Hepatitis C, a chronic condition she’s had since before I was born but was only discovered in 1999, when it started to affect her overall health in subtle but all-of-a-sudden noticeable ways, she’s just not as physically agile and energetic as she was when I was still living with her back in Tennessee, some 8-9 years ago, and the last two years especially has seen her losing a lot of momentum if you’re measuring in terms of keeping up with the energy of a 2-year-old, that’s for sure!  Luckily Aleksi and my mother had a wonderful time together just snuggling on the couch and reading books or learning his alphabet (my mother taught him all his letters in English and started teaching him to count as well!) in our apartment, and he can get roughhousing and romping-around-town fun from other family members. 

     So, I still consider every month and every year that passes a potentially highly valuable time for grandmother-grandson bonding, and hate that we’re so far apart and we’re all missing out on this time together, while my mother is indeed still so capable of enjoying her kiddo and grandkids (for indeed, we never know how much time we have with our loved ones and it’s important not to take it for granted and assume we’ll have unlimited access to each other in our lives).   Every time I get the urge to get somewhere sunny for some Vitamin D therapy during the dark months out here in Finland , I end up remembering that what’s really most important at this time in my life is maximizing time with my mom, so we almost always opt to direct our travel budget towards good ole Knoxville , Tennessee !  Not the most glamorous destination or warmest/sunniest in the winter months, but certainly always an improvement over Finland (except in July/August, when it’s so darned hot in Tennessee and often mild & lovely in Finland ).  We have recently discussed, after being nearly seduced by a few attractively-priced package deals marketed towards winter-depressed northern Europeans to get away to Brazil or the Canary Islands, that we should just be realistic and go ahead and plan for next winter going back to see my mom in Tennessee for a nice long stay, as buying 3 full fare plane tickets, and one partial-priced baby ticket, will be very expensive for us, and the long trip will be quite challenging with two little ones.  It just wouldn’t be worth it to stay a short time, so we are going to try to stay 7 weeks, so I can spend Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years in the US next year.  Yay!  

     I hope she’s able to come to Finland this summer for awhile and play with us, also—the reason my mother was in so much pain her first month of her visit this past summer, as I mentioned in my brief recap, was not only not enough good rest and tons of jet-lag from a long, tough journey involving missed connections in Europe, was also because her pool-exercise therapy that she’s come to depend on wasn’t available to her here.  I think we should consider that if she is to come here for weeks at a time again, we have to budget and plan for her getting to the spa in town every day for a couple of hours, as the water therapy helps her so much to deal with the pain of her chronic arthritis condition.  There’s just no way I’d be able to ask her to make such a long and difficult journey and then be without the best pain relief she’s found to help her deal with her condition. 

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