Mostly Granola Mommin’

BIRTH DECISIONS   I had a hard time before becoming a mom because while pregnant, I realized there are like 1000000 decisions that you have to make before the baby arrives.  You have to weigh who you are, your budget, your naive concept of the kind of parent you’re going to be, throw in a pinch of guesswork and you make choices. I choose mostly granola, obviously. One aspect of that choice is where to have the baby. Birth center or hospital. I’m not devoting blog space to that one, because my blog is just not where you research such a personal decision . I know most people choose hospital, even if they’re pretty granola, because the risks of not going to a hospital just don’t seem to outweigh the benefits in some people’s minds.  I am not into IV’s and constant monitoring and the whole thing. I was naive about birth. It hurt MUCH worse than my concept of it in my mind. I guess, you just can’t comprehend it really, until you’ve been through it.  Many wom...

BIRTH I had some ideas for pregnancy posts, so I’m skipping mom challenge 2, because that’s 100 different pregnancy related things and posted by birth story. AND I wrote this about a week after he was born, so it may be a little off to read, but here it is. #birthstory Cormac was 7lbs 14oz and delivered in a tub! He came March 16th, almost noon, at 41+3. I was very impatient (because wtf, baby. Show up!) because I had no signs of labor until March 14 but then I was in early labor for that whole night and day of the 15th, really destroying my energy levels and I'm sure prolonging the active phase.  Things got really intense around 6pm on the 15th. Contractions 3 minutes apart, lasting 45 seconds. I labored at home like that until 1:30am, when contractions were 2-3 minutes apart but FINALLY getting longer, between 60-70 seconds. I thought that meant I'd only have maybe 5-6 hours before baby! Haha. Nope. 1:30 am until 10:30 am was the most painful. Just nonstop contraction...

PREGNANCY SPOTTING The internet can’t dispense medical advice, y’all. Then why did I ask the internet about my pregnancy spotting? My inability to allow myself to feel as helpless as the bleeding was making me feel. I had found a birth center. I met the midwife the same week I was spotting. She more or less shrugged, told me it’s kind of a “we’ll see” situation. From weeks six-eight I bled a bit almost every day. I felt so sad about it, so sure, based on the stories surfacing about miscarriage and how common it really is, that the end was here for this pregnancy. I was telling myself it was OK to lose this baby. The internet was telling me that I’d have to wait and see. Sometimes spotting is fine. Reflecting back, I think that a lot of women did tell me anecdotally that they’d had this happen. Spotting is “common,” says Dr. Internet. Spotting can be harmless. Implantation bleeding. My soothing boyfriend didn’t show his worry. Perhaps he wasn’t attached to the idea yet. I wa...

CONCEPTION It was June 2016. I’d been with my boyfriend two years and three months. I wanted a baby. I used to want a baby in a primal, hormonal way, like an animal in heat. I’d think about trapping a man, they way other women jokingly/seriously tell you to. I wanted one, too, in this instincual way where I knew I’d be good at it, and it seemed like it needed to happen eventually. I wanted one because my biological clock was ticking louder and louder. I constantly told my boyfriend “I want one” in an immature and whiny way, because that’s how you convince a man to impregnate you, is to just be annoying about it. In June 2016, I was 28. My clock wasn’t quite screaming at me, but it had certainly been getting louder since 25. We were in love. My boyfriend was 35 and while that’s not old for papahood these days, it’s not young either. So we...attempted to make a baby. I, of course, obsessed over conceiving and scoured reddit and joined communities and read about 10,000 article...