I started this blog in July 2003 and after almost seven years, I'm finally making the switch to a new blog - but bringing this blog along with me for the ride. Because that's just one of many great features on Wordpress, the ability to take all my posts AND comments so that the move has been fairly seamless.

The new blog is Five Days in May and can be found here.

Clara's getting new digs too - her blog, formerly Not Rudiger, is now Life with Clara and can be found here.

Hope to see you there :).

I've been working on the new blog whenever I get a second (and trying to keep Clara's blog updated - posted her three month update the day after she turned four months :s) but in the meantime, Jody tagged me in this meme over on her blog so here goes. At the end, I'm supposed to come up with my own five questions and tag others but whether or not that happens depends on the world's shortest napper.

1. Do you prefer watching movies or reading books? Recently I just finished reading the new John Irving for book club and I enjoyed it so thoroughly - I couldn't put it down and I read large sections of it to Clara at times so that I could keep reading. It's been a long time since I read a book that I enjoyed as much as it and based on that, I'd have to say reading. Plus, the entire time that Tay was away, I didn't watch a single movie. Or even turn any of the media stuff in the basement on.

2. What is the earliest memory you have? I don't know what's the earliest memory but perhaps my most favorite from my childhood, and the one I keep going back to in my mind over and over, is walking up the path to my grandmother's house in Newfoundland - the long grass, the clothes on the line, and the smell of her face powder when she'd come out and greet us.

3. What is your most favourite alcoholic drink of all time (if you had to chose just one)? Depends on the season - winter? A glass of red wine. Summer? A lime margarita. If I had to choose? The wine I suppose, since it's easier to drink year round :).

4. What do you think the best television series you've ever seen is?I think it's (still) Six Feet Under...but I really, really, REALLY like Mad Men.

5. What do you like the best about where you live? About downtown? Toronto Island I think - I don't go often enough but earlier this year, I discovered one of the beaches over there and if you didn't know better, you might never know it was a lake and not the ocean. I feel better just knowing that that beach is near by, even if I don't visit often.

Your turn - if you read this blog and want to play along, even if you've been tagged already. Post here or in your own blog.

1. Where is your favorite place to shop for clothes?

2. What would your very last meal consist of?

3. What's your biggest regret?

4. How many hours a night do you usually sleep?

5. Name a city that you visited that you loved so much that you would move to if you could. Would your answer change if money wasn't an issue?

I've been doing the whole "single parent" thing this week with Clara
while Tay's been in Europe with his dad and today, while they were on
a bicycle tour of Paris, I was washing poopy diapers in the bathroom
sink and instead of having wine and assorted cheeses for dinner, I ate
my dinner out of a plastic bag that I threw in the microwave (those
Joy of Cooking frozen dinners? Not as good as they look but pretty
damn easy).

Of course, it rained all day in Paris but was another beautiful, sunny
day here. (I should say, for the record, that I was pretty insistent that Tay make this trip (to celebrate his dad's 60th birthday)and that as much fun as a trip to Europe might sound - five (?) countries in 10 days, including Nurburgring in Germany - I've never seen anyone so miserable while packing and then leaving for the airport).

I took Clara to Mother Goose yesterday morning (a dropin nursery rhyme
program for babies) and it came up that I was on my own this week and
one of the other moms asked if I had any support, any help this week.
I shook my head, but it wasn't for lack of trying; circumstances are
just really crummy right now, making it difficult for anyone to be
here with me to help.

It's hard work, this whole single parent thing. Not getting a single
moment to really catch a breath, not even after she goes to bed
because as soon as she's down for the night I'm scrambling to eat
something quickly (hence the frozen dinners), get my final pump for
the day in, and get to bed so I can get as much sleep as I can. And
despite my best efforts, the earliest I've managed to be in bed this
week is 9:30 - early yes, until you consider that 10ish is our bedtime
these days, when Tays not away.

I'd been really anxious in the days leading up to Tays trip as I
anticipated the long days of being Clara's sole provider and mostly I
was anxious because I knew I'd have to find ways to amuse Clara for
some of the times I'd have to pump. Most of this week I've been able
to pump when she's been asleep or else I've been able to put her in my
lap and give her a bottle while I pumped but this must be getting old for even her - this morning when I tried to do that she squirmed the entire time, kicking at the bottles that I was pumping into and pulling at the tubing, once disconnecting me from the pump. That pump got cut short so I could deal with her; then so did my noon hour pump as I tried to amuse her with one hand while she laid on her play mat. She yelled at me and I did my best not to yell back, raising my voice slightly as I tried to be heard over her angry voice and the sound of the pump until finally she won and I disconnected the pump after 20 minutes and only 4.5 ounces in (and I need to do at least 8 ounces every pump to make my 40/day average).

Bad mommy moment when I realized she was yelling because she was
hungry. I apologized profusely to her later today for losing patience
with her - her response was to gurgle at me with those big blue eyes
that are still the same color as her daddy's and give me a gummy smile.
All seems to be forgiven except I still feel like an ass for asking a
3 month old to hold her horses for crying out loud.




I get why taking short cuts are essential for single parents, why a
lot of single moms in my position would likely opt to formula feed if
they couldn't pump. Why they'd opt to use disposable diapers instead
of cloth - or these handy-dandy G diapers that we use for Clara - yes
they're oh-so-cute and better for the environment but they're A LOT of
work and with it being just me these week, I've been guilty of letting
dirty diapers pile up on the bathroom counter because I don't have
time to pull apart the liner that goes in the toilet and flush it
down. Not to mention washing (by hand) the plastic liner that the
flushable insert goes onto as well as the cloth outter diaper that she
manages to poop on (thankfully the poop stays inside and doesn't get
outside - although it wouldn't make much of a difference considering
that I change her outfit about three, sometimes four times a day
because if it's not coming out one end it's coming out the other
because this kid spits up. ALL. THE. TIME. Yes, I'm that mother with the
shirt who's shoulder is constantly damp and has that slightly sour
smell to it. Word of advice to anyone wanting to hug me - lean to the
left so that your face (and your nose) is over my right shoulder).

Is there a point to all this other than I woke up at 1:30am to pump
and felt the need to ramble? (Yes, I wrote most of this post while hooked up - how's that for multi-tasking?)

The point here is that it'd be really easy for me to do the easy
things this week since I'm on my own - Clara certainly won't notice if
the diaper on her bottom is a Huggies and not a G (although she was PISSED off when I had to put her in a Huggies one night when she went to bed cause all her other diapers were still in the dryer and she leaked through the Huggies) and she'd probably not care too much if I didn't hook up to my pump as much this week and if the milk for her bottle came from the freezer (hey if frozen dinners are good enough for mommy they should be good enough for her). And if I didn't
have a freezer stash, which, at my last inventory over two weeks ago
had just hit 850 ounces - which is 5 weeks worth of meals for Clara
and has taken up so much space in both our freezers that I'm now
borrowing room in Anna Lee's deep freezer (showing up on her doorstep
with my little blue and white cool mate that looks eerily like the
type of cooler used for transplanting organs) - if I didn't have that
freezer stash I'm sure that Clara'd be just as happy with a bottle of
formula (even though I like to tell myself that she has discriminating
taste and prefers fresh milk - even when I had Doritoes earlier that
day).

Except I'd notice, and at the end of the day, it's about what's doing
what's - not so much what's right for her - but what's BEST for her
even if it's a pain in the ass for me (this week especially).

And because of that, I'll try not to let it bother me that I spend the
entire time she naps either a) pumping or b) washing dirty diapers and
I'll try to ignore the fact that for the past five days (and for the
next five) I'm not eating meals made from scratch with organic
ingredients but instead from the freezer (or the KFC that Dave and
Jackie went and picked up last night). Or to really, really wish that I was on my way to Amsterdam with her father tomorrow where he may or may not enjoy a visit to their coffee shops.

At the end of the day, she's worth the extra effort and she'd still be
worth all this extra effort if I was a single parent, which I'm so
grateful that I'm not (and that I've learned to appreciate, albeit the hard way).



Sent from my iPhone

(34 Things I've Learned the Hard Way in my 34 Years)

1. If you live in a rental property you can (and should) take as long
as you need to find the perfect house because once you're living in
your new home and you realize your neighborhood is less than ideal, it's
not so easy to just go out and get a new house.

2. When you're driving on the highway and the check engine light
comes on, you're apparently supposed to pull over right then and there
and call for help because if you don't and you wreck the engine you'll
here about it for the rest of your life.

3. Treating homeless people with respect will payoff tenfold -
especially when you park your car in a snow bank and can't get it out.

4. When you're struggling through a long distance relationship and
really lonely, going for the hour walk in the dead of winter with your
younger brother to the store to get movies, doritos and pepperoni to
throw in the deep fryer will make the evenings a little more bearable.

5. When you share a room with an older sibling you need to accept that
you pretty much have no rights whatsoever and because of this, the house
we live in will always have more bedrooms then the number of kids we have.

6. It's a catch-22 being a better photographer than other people -
you're better than them at something but they have tons of great
photos of themselves whereas you do not.

7. It doesn't matter if the book you wrote isn't well received by
your book club and sits collecting dust in a drawer because you
wrote a book.

8. Being the 'responsible' child means that your parents will call you
at your boyfriends and interrupt the romantic night he's planned
because your sibling has failed to come home to babysit - you do the
right thing and return home with your boyfriend so your parents can go out
and after the kids are asleep and you have that romantic meal on a
blanket in the backyard under the stars, you realize years later that
that's what being a parent is about.

9. Four of a kinds in poker do happen - they're just that much worse
when you're playing at the Wynn in Vegas, there's more money on the
table then you make in a week and your ace high flush all of a sudden
isn't good enough.

10. When you visit a city that makes you pause, pause a little longer
before a hurricane named Katrina comes along and changes everything.

11. When your friends tell you that they don't think your current
relationship is going to last, consider that they may not want it to
last for their own reasons. Then let it's run it's course and see what
happens.

12. It's really really painful to hold your friends newborn baby when
your trying to have your own and not succeeding but you should do it
anyway to remind yourself about why you're trying so hard.

13. Good things come to those who wait.

14. Agreeing to have your labour augmented with Pitocin will be
something that you regret for a very long time especially since
there's a very real chance that this is a mistake you can't learn from
because you're likely to have just the one labour.

15. It's very difficult to explain to your siblings and your parents
why you only want one child without having them take it personally.

16. When you're fifteen years old and your boyfriend is pressuring you
to go on the pill, trust your instincts when they tell you to wait -
and it'll hurt much less when you find out after you dump him that
he's been having sex with the girl next door all along.

17. Advil acts as an inflammatory and is essential when you're
training for a half marathon with a bum knee.

18. You realize very quickly what (and who) is important to you when
you're stranded in the middle of the night in a city where you don't
speak the language and you don't remember anyones phone number.

19. If your wallet is on the table while you're having dinner in a
restaurant's outdoor seating area, listen to your instincts when you
see someone walking towards you, even if they're of a different race.
Better yet, don't place your wallet on the table.

20. The last thing you do before leaving the house with a newborn is
change into the shirt you DON'T want covered in spit up.

21. When you're just a little kid watching television in your pajamas
and a police officer comes to the door looking for you, chances are
you're not going to be taken to jail. And while it'd be better if you
wrote down the license plate number, remembering a description of the
man who took your friend (and the color of his car) helps the police
quite a bit.

22. When your brother runs into a kitchen cabinet and it looks like
half his face his hanging off from the gash in his lip, and you need
to get help from the neighbour, they're not going to care that your
girl guide uniform is mostly unbuttoned.

23. Don't peel the stickers off your sisters Barbie van because she
will never ever let you forget it.

24. You should never make the assumption that it's safe to walk down a
dark street alone at night because even though nine times out of ten
it will be, there's going to be that one time when it's not.

25. Braces at 30 is much more painful then when you're a teenager,
mostly because of the surgery that could have otherwise been avoided.

26. When your oldest friend loses her only sister and you have so
many, the only thing to do is share yours with her - even if it means
you feel left out when you see photos and hear about all the things
they do together.

27. When you agree to be a hair model and you tell them that you're
okay with short hair, you need to specify that by short you mean
longer than a centimetre.

28. You need more than an hour to tour the Louvre, should wait for a
sunny day to climb the Eiffel tower, and the best thing to eat in
Paris late at night when everything is closed is a hotdog from the
street vendor.

29. When you find out your mother has breast cancer you need to try
not to let the constant reminder that you're not there to help get to you -
instead act like you're not as worried about it as other people because
it's just easier that way.

30. When you're slowly gaining weight and buying clothes that are a
bigger size, you're MUCH bigger than you actually think you are.

31. When you hallucinate that there is a man climbing in your bedroom
window while your sleeping and you run down the stairs of your two story
house looking for help while still asleep, that's when you REALLY need to
make the appointment to get your sleeping disorder diagnosed and treated.

32. When your nanny is in the hospital that's a block away from where
you work, it's worth being a few minutes late to stop by and see her
so you can tell her how much you love her.

33. Your family is not supposed to take advantage of you but you have
to be prepared that when you try and put a stop to it, the riff it
causes is one you'll be reminded of for years to come because you
won't 'fix it'.

34. After numerous people let you down, you'll realize one day that
your husband will do more for you than anyone else in the world and
therefore is and should be the most important person in your life,
apart from your child.

True to form, when I found out I was (finally) pregnant, I started a new blog, like I've done for so many other chapters in my life. The pregnancy blog was the sequel to the getting pregnant blog, which, I guess in many ways, was part two in the trilogy of blogs which I guess you could say began with the wedding blog, oh-so-many years ago (does this coming Wednesday really mark our 6th wedding anniversary?). And if those three blogs are a trilogy of sorts, then what does this blog become? The coles notes that accompanies all the other blogs? The commentary track on my life in pieces?

This blog serves it's own purpose in many ways, and has previously been criticized for being negative at times, or overly indulgent, I suppose. I let those comments get to me in the past, and often times, would structure my posts in a way that they could be perceived as my defense to some of the not-so-nice things that were said. When I got engaged, when I was going through fertility treatments, when I got pregnant, I created new blogs so that this blog wouldn't be taken over by post after post regarding what was consuming me at the moment. Heck, I even created a fitness blog and a knitting blog and a writing blog, and a cooking blog - all things that have been an obsession of mine for any given time. A chain of blogs that was created because what was a current obsession of mine might not be the obession of those reading this blog, and so I wanted to maintain a neutral area with blogs branching off of it so that if people wanted to read about my efforts in knitting, or cooking, or planning a wedding, or getting pregnant, they could go there if they wanted, but not have it shoved in their face everytime they opened my blog.

I only update two blogs these days, this one, and Clara's blog, that I started when she was no bigger than a poppy seed and still more just a dream than an actual being. On Clara's blog, there is (or should be 40 gestational posts), one for every week that I was pregnant with her, followed now by a monthly update (I thought I could keep up with the weekly posting but she very quickly let me know that she had other plans for my time). I've noticed lately, that there's a bit of crossover between that blog and this blog (ie where I talk about breast feeding) and the story of her birth was taken directly from this blog but I'm very quickly realizing that there's things that relate to Clara, to what it's like being a mother, a very new mother, that don't belong on her blog because they're less about her and more about me.

There's a blog that I'm working on in my head, that I'm writing mentally on the long walks that I take with Clara while she sleeps in her stroller and I'm listening to music, walks that take us up and down the streets of surburbia and along the bike path, a blog post that doesn't belong on Clara's blog because it's more about what being a mother has been like for me, the impact that it's had on me, how difficult it was at the beginning, how I did in fact struggle with suddenly having this little demanding being that sucked every bit of energy out of every second of every minute of every day; about the bond that didn't exist between her and I right from the beginning, a bond that society promises but that nature does not always deliver. It's a blog about the things that I would never say to her until she is much, much older (perhaps as old as I am now, or when she has her own child and she needs to know that what she is going through in those first few days and weeks post partum is normal, that she is not alone). It's a blog about just how hard being a mother is, how there were days where I wondered if I would or could survive, if I perhaps waited to long to have a baby, when I should have done it when I was much younger and was less impatient, when I had more energy and hadn't invested a lot of time and energy in a career that I would eventually walk away from for a year (and perhaps longer). And yet, it's a blog about how I would have drowned if I had done this years ago, when I was still very much a kid myself and unable to take care of my own needs, much less the needs of a baby.

It's a much longer blog post than I have time for while she naps; a blog post for when she goes to bed at night and sleeps for nine hours (which she did last night).

In the meantime, I might be making some changes to this blog over the next little while, as I debate transferring the entire thing to wordpress (taking all content, photos and comments with me) and in transferring the blog, I may or may not continue calling this blog LocoBellaTuna. I've toyed with new names for this blog over the past year or so - East Coast Girl being one (preview it here) and using The Edible Woman (currently my writing blog) as another. I listen to a lot of music, trying to stumble on lines in songs that stand out to me ('squawking like a pink monkey bird' being one, but a bit long for a blog title) and a lot of those songs lately, are Beatles songs since that's the music that's playing constantly in the house these days (Clara is a fan). The perfect blog name and my favorite Beatles song, A Day in the Life is (of course) not available yet could I really call my blog the Yellow Submarine or I am the Walrus? Octopus's Garden? With Tay going away at the end of the month and Clara's bedtime being between 7:30 and 8pm, I SHOULD, in theory, have lots of time to implement any changes to this blog that I want to make - unless of course, I take advantage of the chance to sleep and go to bed as soon as she is. Which is not beyond the realm of possibility, even if it means going to bed when it's still light out.

As much as I love my daughter, I've come to realize very quickly that I'm going to sometimes need a break from her, a break that lasts more than the thirty or forty-five minute nap that she's taking. Of course, she does go to bed now anytime between 7 and 9pm, but when that time rolls around and the house is quiet, I'm usually too zonked to want to do anything other than get in my last pumping session for the day, watch an hour or so of television with Tay and then hurry to bed so that I can get in three to four hours of sleep before I either have to get up with Clara and/or pump again.

Last week I suggested to Tay that we each take one morning on the weekend during which we could do whatever we wanted, by ourselves. Since there's an early morning Body Pump class that I wanted to go to on Sunday that also fits into my gym schedule for the rest of the week, I took Sunday and Tay got Saturday. On Friday night, Tay set his alarm so he could get up before 7 to make the most of his morning - the clock stops at noon but starts whenever we get up and he was down in the basement shortly after seven am playing the latest Final Fantasy.

I set my own alarm clock for Sunday morning, which I slept through but woke just a few minutes afterwards - got up and pumped and through on my gym clothes and was out of the house by 8am to make the 8:15 class. I was back at the house just after 9:30 (after having stopped to buy a couple of cartons of ice cream - which I'm obsessed with lately - and the Superstore has these Ice-cream shoppe style ice creams that come in quarts; I got Marshmallow chocolate swirl for me and for Tay his usual chocolate mint). I got home to find Clara sleeping in her pack and play in the living room and Tay on the laptop and despite wanting desperately to go back to bed for a couple of hours of uninterrupted sleep I opted to do what Tay did the day before, and headed down to the basement to play a couple of hours of Heavy Rain on the PS3. I finished the morning with a bath in which I read, and when the water had cooled off sufficiently, Clara joined me in the tub for a bit of splashing.

Gym, some gaming, a long hot bath with a good book - a lovely Sunday morning, not exactly lazy with the gym thrown in there, but just what I wanted.

Here it is Monday morning, and I'm already thinking about the things that I might do NEXT Sunday. So far on my list of possible things to do on my Sunday mornings are:

• Body Pump
• Sleep
• Have a bath and read
• Lay on the hammock and read
• Lay on the hammock and sleep
• Go to Cora's and order eggs benedict and read my current book club selection
• Go to a 10am movie at the AMC and only pay $6
• Invite a friend to join me at Cora's or for the movie
• Go for a pedicure or a massage or both
• Play one of our many video games on one of our many gaming consoles
• Go for a bike ride with my camera

The great thing about this list of things to do is that I can start with the Body Pump class and also do one of the other things that's on the list. Unless of course, I want to sleep in but I can't really do that anyhow since I need to be up by 7, 8 at the latest to pump. Of course, there's something nice about going back to bed once you've already been up, especially on a rainy Sunday morning.

What else could or should be on this list?

One of the things I was asked the most when I was pregnant was whether or not I was planning on breast-feeding. Just the nature of that question used to annoy me because it really wasn't anyone's business whether I was planning to or not, and yet I never responded to that question by saying that it was in fact, none of their business. Mostly, I guess, because the people that asked only meant well (except for the fact that my child's well being was - and is - my business) and also because I wanted them to hear my response that I used over and over - that I was certainly going to try my best. I did so much reading prior to having Clara about everything and anything and when I tackled learning about breast feeding, I very quickly realized that breast feeding wasn't as clear of a choice that I - and many others - were led to believe. I learned very quickly that breast feeding, though natural, doesn't come naturally for many, that it's a lot of work when it doesn't come naturally and worse yet, for some women, it just doesn't happen at all.

Are you going to breast feed? It's not the yes or no question that people think it is.

The hospital where Clara was born is very big on new mothers breast feeding - within moments of your baby being born, she is placed on your chest so as to allow the mother to breast feed and a nurse is nearby to offer assistance if needed. Numerous nurses - both in the birthing suite, where you have the baby, and in the obsetrics unit, where you go to recover, came to us to make sure we weren't having any problems - or, to make sure we WERE breast feeding because god forbid if we weren't. If I hadn't lost all modesty in the delivery room with numerous people seeing me mostly naked the rest of it was stripped away as various nurses walked in on us while I breast feed and groped my breasts to make sure that I was doing it right.

Except, and this is the frustrating part, I wasn't. And yet none of the five nurses that attended to us was able to see that. The night I spent in the hospital, Clara was awake most of the night, feeding. I'd get her to latch on, she'd eat and eat and eat and then fall asleep - I would take her from me, put her in her bed and she'd start to cry - so I'd put her to my breast again and the same thing would happen. The nurse that came and saw us in the middle of the night, watched her feed, and listened to me describe what she was doing and told me that Clara was cluster feeding. Perfectly normal, she said, and it would last only a couple of days.

Except that it didn't. Clara cluster fed the first couple of nights we were home and after hours of having her at my breast, I was sore to the point of bleeding. When we took her for her three-day check up, she had lost too much weight and the doctor was concerned she wasn't get enough to eat and pushed us to supplement with formula. Then one night, which I consider to be one of the WORST nights of my life, I found myself unable to feed Clara because it hurt so much and I was more exhausted than I've ever felt in my entire life. I turned away from my crying child and I cried myself to sleep.

We got help the next day - I booked an appointment with a nearby breastfeeding clinic while I cried on the phone with a nurse from the public health office. The nurse there watched Clara breast feed, she saw the physical damage that had already been inflicted and then she did what no other nurse prior had done - she stuck her finger in Clara's mouth. Clara was bottle sucking, we were told seconds later, which was causing the pain and the bleeding and her inability to get enough to eat - which was driving the crying and the cluster feeding. Her recommendation (and one that she had never made before to a nursing mom) was to stop breast feeding immediately and get myself an electric breast pump. Put Clara on a bottle and feed her breast milk that way until I had healed enough that we could try again.

I started pumping that weekend, and Clara starting eating. A few days later, we went back to the clinic and she had gained weight. We tried breast feeding again, with not very much success - I went home and kept pumping. A few more days passed, another trip to the clinic - same thing, Clara was still gaining weight, it still hurt to feed her, she still wasn't latching on properly. Every visit to the clinic resulted in both Clara and me crying and we'd leave and I'd ask myself why I was torturing us both the way that I was.

There is so much pressure on new mothers to breast feed and I was allowing myself to fall to that pressure. I looked past the pain that I was in, the misery that my daughter was experiencing, the blood that stained her pajamas when we woke up the next morning after a night of forced breast feeding (my blood not hers). Breast feeding is not neccessarily an easy thing, even if it's a natural thing, and yet, it's not supposed to hurt. It's not meant to be a bloody affair and that's what, for Clara and I, it had become.

And so we stopped. And as a decision that was a long time coming, it wasn't a decision that I was able to make easily. I believe in the benefits of breast milk, wanted to give Clara that the antibiotics that naturally existed in my milk, wanted her to be one of those babies that wouldn't get sick as often, get ear infections and whatever else because she was breast fed. I wanted her to have all those things but I was at the point where I didn't want her anywhere near my breasts. If you watch her eat, and other people have seen this, she's ferocious. She attacks like a snapping turtle when food is nearby.

So I did the only other thing that I could do. I started using my pump all the time, never the eight times a day which is what's recommended (every three hours, are you kidding me?) but often enough. Five, sometimes six times a day. For at least twenty minutes, sometimes thirty. I have healed physically, Clara continues to gain weight.

It's been seven weeks since I started pumping and other than the rare, random time I try and breast feed again (because I'm feeling optimistic or because Clara wiggles herself into position next to my breast and I think she wants to feed from it and I feel guilty that she's not) Clara eats from a bottle. Other than the few ounces of formula she was fed at the beginning while I was trying to pump enough to get ahead of her feeding schedule, she's been on breast milk exclusively. At her four week appointment with the doctor, she'd grown half an inch and had gained two pounds. Very healthy baby, my doctor commented, as he admired her in her orange G-diaper.

And still, we get asked if I'm breast feeding and I falter with my answer. Because yes, she's being fed breast milk, but it's not from my breast. I use a machine to express it, she's fed from a bottle, it's not really breast feeding. Or is it?

We haven't been able to watch as much television as we used to, but on two different shows, a reference was made to pumping. There was a Time article recently on breast pumping about the rise in women that have opted not to breast feed and instead choose to pump and feed. There's a convenience factor there for sure, and it makes it easier for women returning to work and it makes it easier for women who want the freedom to go out and run errands while leaving their baby at home. There's the freedom to drink a few drinks and pump and dump, feeding your baby milk that you've saved in the fridge or, thinking ahead, frozen in the freezer. It's a raising trend and, when you read the article, it almost seems fashionable.

But what they don't accurately capture in the article is just how much work it is. How difficult it is to attach yourself to a pump numerous times a day, how difficult it is to make plans when everything revolves around when you pumped last and when you need to pump again. How you CAN travel with your pump, but then you have to consider how you're going to clean your equipment when you're done, and how you're going to store your milk. They don't really discuss what it's like when you're attached to the pump and your baby starts to cry and you have to choose between letting her cry (which she's too small to do) or, tending to her which means stopping in the middle of mid-flow, detaching all the equipment, getting her to settle down and then hooking up again. There's no mention of how much it HURTS if you don't pump when you're supposed to because your schedule gets thrown off by what your child wants (just because you think she's going to eat or sleep at a certain time doesn't mean that's when she's going to do either). Or, and this is perhaps the worst of all, you can't really enjoy it when your child starts to sleep longer at night - you don't get the benefit of that seven hour stretch because guess what? You're getting up every three to four hours, and you never want to skip that middle-of-the-night pumping session because those are the best ones of all (because that's the time of day when your hormones peak and you produce the most).

There's a group of women in the online community that refer to themselves as ec0-breast feeders, having coined the term as a result of this uprise in pumping mamas who still refer to what they do as breast feeding. Not wanting to share the credit perhaps, these women are breast-feeding the natural, old-fashioned way, and what they're doing is more environmentally friendly. They don't waste electricity running breast pumps and water washing pump parts. They probably breast feed at night by candlelight, or perhaps by the light of the moon, unlike pumping moms who have figured out how to go hands-free and pump by the light of their laptops or iPhones.

(I wonder how many of these eco-breast feeding moms are using disposable diapers, or, for the ones that are using cloth, how much water they're wasting washing diapers?)

One night last week I stood in the kitchen and I assembled my equipment to do my last session of the day so that I could go to bed. I settled in on the couch to begin, and before I could start, I started to cry. I'm not sure exactly WHY I started to cry - it could partly have been because I was tired (but no more tired than normal) and maybe I cried because it just seemed to be never ending. It could partly have been because I still deal, on occasion, with my disappointment in not being able to breast feed, or how, on occasion, I feel like a failure for NOT being able to breast feed (due in part to the nurse at the breast feeding clinic hinting that my epidural may be the cause for Clara not being able to latch properly). Maybe I cried because of the ec0-breast feeding mamas out there, trying to take credit away from pumping mamas who work so hard to give their babies what the eco-mamas seem to be able to do so easily.

Or maybe I just cried because all of this was not what I expected. At all.

It's not even eleven o'clock and I've had my breakfast, showered and dressed. Substantial improvement over yesterday where I remained unshowered and didn't actually get dressed until almost three o'clock when we went out for a walk.

Today is a new day however, despite the fact that someone was awake at 2:30 this morning and refused to go back to sleep until almost 5am, only to wake a half an hour later when I was just falling asleep. I spent half an hour trying to get her back down before I gave up and put her crying self in her crib. Fortunately for her, her father came to her rescue and stayed up with her until he had to go to work, therefore allowing me to catch a couple of hours of sleep before my mommy-shift began.

I've upgraded my uniform from pajama bottoms and a t-shirt however, and today I'm wearing a pair of my regular, non-maternity jeans (only 1/2 pound to go to my pre-pregnancy weight!) with a long-sleeve white t-shirt and over top it, my Self-Rescuing Princess t-shirt.



I'm prepared for the day a few years from now when Clara asks me why I'm allowed to wear a princess t-shirt and she is not. And I'll happily explain to her that my idea of a princess is so much different than Disney's idea of a princess and if she's a sensible girl (which I hope she will be) and gets it, then I'll be only too willing to get her her own t-shirt. And perhaps a skateboard to go with it.

Clara Haley Hughes B.* was born Saturday morning, February 13th at 6:27am. Her birth weight was 8lbs 1oz and she measured 21.5 inches long. From start to finish, my labour and delivery with her was 49 hours (and 18 or so minutes).

I spent probably an hour or so last night Saturday night starting a post and then another couple of hours finishing it this morning Sunday morning - it was a super long post with lots of details, and just as I went to post it, I did something stupid with blogger and erased the entire thing. Considering how easily and how often I've cried over the past week, it's amazing that I didn't burst into tears right then and there and startle my husband yet again. Pre-Clara, I would have spent the time trying to reconstruct the entire post, right down to every last sentence. But that was then and this is now and these days, I am at the whim of a tiny person that still weighs less than 10lbs.

So here it is, in point form(ish) but still considerably long - some habits die hard, I suppose :).

(Taylor may need to chime in to correct some of the times and progress made as a lot of it's a blur).

Thursday, February 11th:
5:09am
My water breaks, while I'm in bed but not asleep, having just gotten up to pee. Taylor and I both have showers and head to the hospital, arriving there just before 7am. My water breaking is not one big gush, therefore it continues to leak for the remainder of the day. I'm grateful that my water breaks on it's on; apparently this is only the case for about 10% of pregnant women.

9:00am
We're sent home from the hospital after half an hour of electronic monitoring. There are contractions showing up on the monitor, every 6-10 minutes but they're so mild that I can't feel them. We're instructed to return to the hospital when the contractions get more intense and closer together, or at 5pm, whichever happens first. Taylor and I spend the day mostly together, except for when I take a short nap and he finishes up some work. We try many of the things to encourage labour - walking around the block, accupressure, a warm bath, massage/stimulation, breathing etc. I even climb on the elliptical for 10 minutes or so, but with no luck.

6:00pm
Back at the hospital; our doula, Laura arrives. The hospital wants to admit me and start administering Pitocin to augment my labour. I resist, knowing that the Pitocin will make a natural birth that much more difficult to achieve and often leads to medical interventions - mainly an epidural or a c-section. We're told that if I don't go on the Pitocin, we'll have to go home and return at 5am the next morning. At the 24 hour mark of my water breaking, there's a risk of infection - the Pitocin will need to be started. We go for dinner with Laura, stop back into the hospital to meet the new OB on call for the night (someone I had met previously and was happy to see on call), do another 30-45 minutes of monitoring and then head back home, feeling very much now like we are racing the clock.

11:30pm
We try to fall asleep listening to my hypnobirthing cd - it works on Taylor but not on me. At 12:30am I give up on sleep (even though it's now been 19hours or so since I slept) and decide to update my baby blog (to relax me) and then have a warm shower. I fall asleep briefly at 2:30am for about a half an hour or so.

Friday, February 13th:
3:00am
Wake Taylor at 3am. We try more things to get things going - pacing the house, climbing the stairs, more hypnobirthing visualization exercises. The visualization stuff works and gets me to sleep for another 30 minutes or so; I wake shortly after 5 and tell Taylor that I'm not comfortable staying at home anymore (the 24hour water-breaking deadline/risk of infection weighs heavily on my mind).

6:00am
Officially admitted to the hospital and assigned a room. Agree to the Pitocin -even though the new on-call doctor gives me the option to go back home (what happened to the risk of infection?). Have resigned myself to having my labour managed via IV and am impatient and ready to go.

9:00am
An IV is put in shortly after 9am and the Pitocin drip begins. We're assigned a nurse named Annie who proves to be wonderful - not only is she a nurse but is also a doula and a doula trainer, having met and attended some of Ina May's (probably the most well-known midwife in North America) workshops in the US. Annie insists that we try and sleep before things start to get uncomfortable for me - she tucks me into bed, tucks Taylor into the pull out chair/bed, lowers the lights and leaves us alone - for what will prove to be our last time alone as a couple :).





10:15am
Laura arrives, I decide to get up and be as mobile as I can with the IV in my left hand and the electronic monitoring bands on my belly. Baby is doing fine on the Pitocin, her heart rate remains at a steady 130ish and will stay that way for most of my labour.

12:00pm
I'm allowed to be off the monitors for 15 minutes at a time, which allows me to use the bathroom and go for a walk if I want to. We start walking the third floor of the hospital, me in my slippers, with Taylor and Laura alongside me, taking turns dragging my IV for me. We establish a route that takes about 10-12 minutes to walk - the first time we make the walk, I experience 1 contraction that I breathe easily through - the last walk (same route) we take I experience 5 contractions that I need to stop and breathe through.



1:00pm
Annie advises that as she increases the Pitocin, that things are going to begin to get very intense. She predicts that within a couple of hours, I will become very uncomfortable and start to be in a lot more pain. I take advantage of the heads up and suggest to Taylor that he go and get us something to eat. He returns shortly with Druxy sandwhiches and we have a make-shift picnic in the hospital room.

3:00pm
True to Annie's word, the contractions begin to get worse. Annie askes me where my pain level is and I give the pain a score of 4 out of 10. I continue to do all the things I had read about in coping with contractions - deep breathing, sitting on the birthing ball, in the rocking chair, on a stool, leaning against the wall. At one point, I get into a squatting position, resting against the bed. Annie declares me to be a champion squatter, saying she's never seen a labouring mom hold a squat position quite so long. Must be those months and months of Body Pump prior to getting pregnant :). Taylor and Laura help with the contractions where they can - taking turns and sometimes massaging my lower back together, when I crawl onto the bed for a bit, Taylor massages my feet for me.

I finally got around to having Taylor take some photos of me - my friends kept telling me to hurry up and do it before it's too late.




These photos were taken a couple of days ago - but as of today, we're in the single digits. Only 9 more days before she's due to arrive.



Despite the little bit of complaining that I allowed myself throughout, I have enjoyed every single day of being pregnant.