Hypnosis and Babies, Part II

I have a very good friend, Sheetul, from law school who got pregnant in our third year. She was frequently miserable and slept with about 16 pillows because she couldn't get comfortable at night. We loved to tease her relentlessly by telling her that certainly, without a doubt, she was the first woman ever pregnant. I felt really bad about how we treated Sheetul when I got pregnant myself the first time because, compared to me, Sheetul was indeed a valiant warrior unfazed by the horrors and gassiness of pregnancy.

I was a truly awful pregnant woman.

A total wimp.

I was nauseous from almost the moment I found out I was pregnant until I delivered. But in hindsight, I never threw up or had to be admitted to the hospital like other women I know. I did gain 50 pounds with my first pregnancy and got a nasty nasty rash in a bad place (not that bad place . . . the other one . . . under my [if I use the real word here, my site will get blocked when people want to see it from a library computer or at work, so insert a word here that rhymes with "rests"].) There's a good reason only one photo exists of me when I was pregnant with Casey. I looked like I felt and I whined and whined and whined. Such a shame that I just could not locate that photo to post with this riveting narrative.

Hand in hand with misery, in my case, went abject terror . . . of childbirth. So pretty early on I decided that I wanted to use all possible tools at my disposal for getting through childbirth -- drugs, birthing tub, drugs, lamaze, drugs, a doula, drugs, hypnosis, and drugs. Unfortunately, you can't use drugs and have a water birth (though doesn't that sound absolutely perfect?), but you can combine drugs with a doula and hypnosis. A few months into my pregnancy, when it was time to talk to my obstetrician about the actual birth, he asked me if I'd thought about a birth plan and I told him yes, I wanted to try hypnobirthing. He looked at me sideways and tried to keep a straight face as he encouraged me to keep an open mind and not rule out drugs altogether because I wouldn't know how I would really feel until I was in labor blah-bitty-blah-blah-blah. I interrupted him and said, "Oh no, you misunderstand . . . I want to use hypnosis AND lots and lots of drugs." So he shrugged and said the doctorly equivalent of "whatever."

Flamingo Joe was a good sport and went along with the hypnobirthing plan. But wouldn't it be strange if he wasn't up for any plan where he learned how to hypnotize his wife? I found a hypnobirthing center in south Tampa where we could go learn how to hypnotize me for labor. A doula taught the class and she was . . . well, do you already have a picture in your head of what a woman who calls herself a "doula" and teaches a hypno-birthing class looks like? That's her. We were in the class with two other couples, I think, but I only remember one of the couples because they seemed semi-normal and I was surprised. They were both accountants.

The "center" had its own birthing room (that under no circumstances did I intend to use) where moms who wanted a truly peaceful, natural birthing experience could walk around humming and listening to soft music while their baby came into the world with no screams or tears sporting an extremely high IQ.

The doula basically taught me how to relax myself into a stupor. If you are wondering how that helps you in childbirth, this is the theory: the more uptight you are, the more pain you feel because your muscles are all bunched up, and the more pain you feel, the more uptight you get, which just means you feel more pain; so if you can totally and completely systematically relax all the right muscles you will feel no pain whatsoever and your baby will come skipping into the world ready to explain the theory of relativity.

To practice this form of hypnosis, the doula gave me cassette tapes with some music on it and a woman talking with a soothing voice. First, the tape instructed me to breathe in and out very deeply in certain patterns. Then, I was invited to imagine myself floating on a strawberry colored cloud and then I think my cloud changed colors as I was floating along. Next, the voice instructed me to systematically relax my body starting with the top of my head and working my way down. If I remember correctly, the tape was about half an hour long, but after I got really good at following the instructions on the tape, I was out like a light in 3 minutes or less. I rarely got all the way to the first strawberry cloud.

Given all the discomfort I was feeling in my pregnancy, practicing hypnobirthing was the highlight of my day. I started putting myself to sleep every night by using the hypnobirthing tape. I would put a Breathe Right strip on my nose, pee three or four times (by the time I was 8 months along I couldn't make it back to the bed from the toilet without feeling like I needed to go again), put some baby powder under my word that rhymes with "rests," adjust the 7 pillows, put on the headphones, turn on the tape, and three minutes later it's possible I could have had triplets and wouldn't have realized it.

But I wasn't really sure . . . would the hypnosis work in the delivery room? I figured I could use the hypnosis to get me through the early stages of labor up until the point I could get the epidural. The problem was that in the class with the doula, epidurals were pretty much roundly blamed for ADD, ADHD, childhood obesity, and freckles, so it wasn't like I could ask the doula whether, for example, the hypnosis would work too well and that I would be so relaxed that I simply passed the point where early labor became hard labor without noticing and missed my opportunity for drugs. I did not want to miss my opportunity for drugs. This doula, I should tell you, does not use drugs for dental work -- she uses hypnosis -- so she was not going to be cutting me any slack on the epidural. So I just kept hypnotizing myself to sleep every night and hoped for the best.

Casey was due between Christmas and New Year's Day. On the day after Christmas, I went to the doctor for my weekly visit and noting that I had gained even more weight in the preceding week, the doctor sent me down the hall for a sonogram. The sonogram revealed that Casey was enormous, well over 9 pounds they thought, and that he had not turned, much less dropped. He wasn't budging. The doctor was mildly alarmed at the thought of coming back from his ski vacation (scheduled to begin the following day) and finding me still hanging out, growing an elephant, so he gave me the following options: 1) wait until he returned three or four days later and if Casey had turned head down, he could induce labor and I could attempt to deliver an extremely large baby; or 2) schedule a C-Section for the following morning before he left town.

That night, I used my hypnobirthing tape for the last time to ensure that I would be well-rested for my C-Section the following morning.

Hawwoween Identity Crisis

Tonight I went trick or treating with Jeff Gordon, Harry Potter, and an astronaut.

Dora came too. And after I took these photos, a mysterious girl wearing what she called a "beggar's skirt" flitted around our group pretty much avoiding the camera completely, but in the picture below, she's the blonde.

Dora's mom and the beggar's mom also came because it's okay for Dora the Explorer to run around with only her map, a monkey, and backpack in Nickelodeon land, but on the tough streets of Tampa, she needs some adult supervision.

Not that this adorable astronaut couldn't have protected her.

I love the picture of Harry Potter below. See his lightning-shaped scar just below his hairline? And note the palm trees reflected in his glasses -- how totally Florida!

We kept Harry's hair long for two weeks longer than we normally would have just so it could be messy like it's supposed to be for tonight. But even Harry is insisting on getting it cut tomorrow.

Our astronaut pooped out after about 20 minutes of trick or treating and decided to hitch a ride in the wagon, where he proceeded to eat a good bit of his candy. I didn't realize how much candy he'd eaten until I was cleaning out the wagon and found all the empty wrappers at the bottom.

Sweet Dora was actually sooooo cute as Dora that we all promptly forgot her real name and started calling her Dora from the moment she put the wig on. Everyone, including complete strangers, called her Dora, all around the neighborhood all night long. It was, quite frankly, impossible to call her anything else. Not too long after we started trick or treating, she ran up to her mom and said, "Mommy! Evwywon thwinks I'm the WEAL DOWA!!" But she sounded a little stressed out by it, as if she was afraid she was actually turning into Dora and wouldn't be able to turn back into herself. Later in the evening, when a woman saw her and said, "Oh hi Dora!!" She said, "No, I'm not weally Dowa . . . onwy for Hawwoween." When she got back home at the end of the night, you could tell she was just emotionally spent from worrying she was actually Dora. Once the wig came off, I think she was so relieved when she realized that no, she was not going to have to have a monkey for a best friend and rely on a talking map to tell her where to go for the rest of her life.

Hypnosis and Babies, Part I

Flamingo Joe and I were married for 7 years before I became pregnant with Casey and there was a good reason we waited so long . . . two good reasons, actually . . . Flamingo Joe wasn't so sure he wanted to have kids there for awhile and then in about year 5, we decided we'd like to adopt a little girl from China and started that process in year 6. At the time, adopting from China took about 18 months. In hindsight, neither of those reasons were particularly valid considering how much we love our children and that, because we waited so late, Flamingo Joe will be 61 when Mace actually goes off to college and I will be 56. I really should be working out more.

I had been on birth control for those first 7 years and was starting to be concerned about the side effects of the birth control (not that I can remember now what those were), so I bought a book about using natural fertility planning to prevent pregnancy (go ahead and start laughing now, you know you want to). I had been out of law school and working at a large Tampa law firm for about 8 months when my careful fertility planning fell through and I got pregnant while I was specifically planning not to.

On the day I realized I might be pregnant, I was going to a fund-raising dinner with a friend from my law firm after work. I had confided in her that I was afraid I might be pregnant at some point during the day so she insisted that before going to the dinner we pick up a pregnancy test and go to her condo and see if I was actually pregnant. If I had been thinking clearly and not in a state of sheer terror, I would have refused and gotten the test later that night and taken it in the privacy of my own home. Flamingo Joe was traveling at the time and I could have taken the test in private, processed the info, and then called him and he would have been the first person who knew.

But as I said, I wasn't thinking clearly and went along with my friend's plan. We purchased the pregnancy test and went back to her condo. I can remember sitting there in her bathroom after having peed on the stick and waiting for about 10 seconds before the line popped up just as bright as anything you've ever seen. I started feeling faint and moaned something like, "Uh-oh." My friend, sitting outside the door, started squealing and laughing. We barely had time to chuck the test in the trash before we had to leave for the fundraising dinner, which was about three blocks away. So as we were walking, my friend was chattering away about how exciting it was that I was pregnant and I was numb with terror and thinking I really needed to call Joe because it wasn't right that he wasn't the first to know, but how could I? I only had about two minutes before I would be sitting in the dinner, so I decided I would call him when I got home -- I rationalized that my friend knowing first was okay since she happened to be there when I took the test. I would just get through the dinner and get home and call Joe. It's not like anyone else at the dinner was going to find out.

As we got close to the venue for the dinner, we ran into my friend's father, who just so happens to be a sitting federal judge here in the Middle District of Florida, and my friend's stepmother. I believe I had met the judge once before, but had never had a real conversation with him. As soon as we approached the judge and his wife, my friend re-introduced me and blurted out, "She's PREGNANT!" I almost fainted dead away. A federal judge I didn't really know and his wife knew that I was pregnant before my own husband. (I'm certain that my oldest child's inclination to judge a new experience before he actually tries it is somehow a direct consequence of my stupidity that day.)

I barely made it through that dinner without throwing up. As soon as it was over, I dashed back to my friend's condo, picked up my car and sped home. When I got home, I let the dogs out and then sat in the dark on the stairs and called Joe:

FJ: Hello.

Me: Hi -- how was your day?

FJ: Okay -- how was yours?

Me: Well -- you know that birth control method I was using to keep from getting pregnant?

FJ: Ummm -- it's not working?

Me: Right.

FJ: Let me guess -- it failed miserably?

Me: Yes -- I'm pregnant.

FJ: Well that's fine -- that's good -- are you okay with that?

Me: Sure, I'm fine. I'm scared.

I did not tell Flamingo Joe that he wasn't the first to know until later and that a federal judge actually knew before he did, but when I did tell him, he wasn't really upset as far as I could tell. He may have been as numb as I was, though, and didn't actually hear me. For all I know, this may be the first time Flamingo Joe actually hears this story and we'll have to take it up with a marriage counselor next week.

[To be continued . . . ]

Our Tiny Vermin Solution

I have gotten at least three direct mailings from these people:

I'm concerned.

How did I get on this mailing list?

What must my postman think? He probably puts latex gloves on every time he drives up to my mailbox.

Is there a national database of families who have frequent head lice problems and somehow we (erroneously, mind you) ended up on the list?

Or, worse, did my kids' doctor or dentist sell their mailing list to the head lice people? They aren't really allowed to do that, right? I mean, isn't that what HIPAA is for?

Or even worse, did one of my kids' schools refer us to the head lice solution folks because we just seem like the kind of people who would be a magnet for tiny vermin? I've heard that lice are attracted to clean hair, not dirty hair -- so I assure you, my children's heads are not hospitable habitats for lice.

And finally, just how reoccurring does your head lice problem have to be for you to need a solution to it as opposed to just a treatment?

[As an aside, the Google Ads that appear on this post are apparently generated by post topics. For example, when I post about camping, RV ads come up. I can't wait to see what ads this post will generate.]

This Year's Selection at the Pumpkin Patch

Our family just returned from the pumpkin patch at the local Methodist Church and I am excited to tell you that the Cub Scouts have a varied offering of styles and colors in pumpkins this year.



Specimen #1 -- a perfectly lovely vericose vein variety:



Specimen #2 -- a pumpkin alien giving birth to a piece of pinwheel taffy:



And Specimen #3 . . . our family's personal favorite . . .



Harvest Moon.

Balance

Today Mace decided that the inside of the dishwasher was in desperate need of a thorough cleaning . . . so he emptied out the racks and commenced the scrubbing:



He was very pleased with his work:



On Sunday, he was a tool for measuring the proper depth for a bamboo plant.

As someone who struggles with achieving a healthy balance in life, I'm starting to appreciate the way he lives his life.

Camping with the Flamingos: Day 2

When Mace joined Flamingo Joe by the fire on Day 2 of our camping trip, they were in for a bit of a wait while the rest of us took our time rolling out of the trailer. While they were sitting out there waiting in the dark, Joe and Mace messed around with the fire, which meant that Mace inevitably ended up getting burned. Something Joe put into the fire fell out, Mace grabbed it to put it back in and burned the tip of his finger. Joe said Mace cried . . . I -- alert, conscientious parent that I am -- slept through it snug and warm in the trailer. But when we emerged an hour or so later, poor little Mace had his hand curled into a fist, clutched against his body and refused to let me see it.



He was okay -- four days later when he opened his fist, I saw he had a small blister on the tip of his finger.

And may I say . . . it is not a good idea to allow your children to run around a fire without shoes on. Not that he burned his feet, but still . . . what kind of parenting is that? Seriously . . . where is that child's mother?? It's a good thing DCF wasn't out at the campground monitoring fireside parenting on Day 2.

And one more thing about the photo above -- if you are going on a camping trip and plan to cook over a fire, take real full-of-fat oinky bacon . . . and cook it in butter. Turkey bacon sizzling in the frying pan sprayed with fat free cooking spray smells nothing at all like real bacon cooking over a campfire in a cast iron skillet. I'll remember that next time. I think I'll take real eggs, too, because we all know that Better n' Eggs are in no way, shape, or fashion actually better than eggs.

After eating turkey bacon and fake eggs, we decided to go canoeing on the river. Given the number of alligators we saw on the river the night before, none of us wanted to be the one to have to take the kayak. That normally would have been me, but I was not keen at all to be close enough to the water that a twelve foot alligator could just open its mouth and I would slide right in. We'd brought one canoe with us, so we decided to rent a second.

The canoe rental was back up the river about a quarter of a mile, so we piled in the car and drove up to rent the second canoe. When you rent the canoe there, you have to go ahead and put in there at the river as well, so Flamingo Joe and Casey (I'm not sure what happened to my skittish child who couldn't bear to be separated from me by more than 8 feet) got in the rental canoe and headed downriver to meet us at the campground's canoe launch. When we all met up again at the boat launch a few minutes later, Flamingo Joe looked nervous. He got out of the canoe to help us get the other boat down to the water and said, "I don't think you guys will want to do this . . . we just saw a huge alligator on the bank back there." I asked him if he thought the alligators would really bother us and he said no, but I know he thought Dez and I would freak out and want to come back. I was offended. So I handled it like any good wife would.

I ridiculed him for being a chicken and put the three year old in his boat so that if the three year old got eaten I could blame him.



Some of us on this canoeing excursion had long and varied outdoorsy histories full of camping and canoeing and others of us had heretofore lived lives completely devoid of any interaction with the outdoors whatsoever. I will not name names, but said inexperienced canoeist sat in the front of my boat and in order to actually get anywhere on the river that did not involve me having to untangle my hair from a tree, I just had to tell her to stop paddling.



At least she minds well.

And let me tell you something about canoeing on the Hillsborough River -- or at least the section of it that runs through the state park:

When you are not distracted by grown men wearing too-small hats . . .



. . . or your 7 year old inexplicably clinging to trees . . .



. . . you will find that the Hillsborough River is a wonderful, quiet, and lovely place that can only truly be appreciated in a canoe (though I did see one brave woman all by herself out there in a kayak). It was absolutely beautiful.

Look . . . turtle with a big leaf on its neck:




See the alligator back in there?



It's okay if you missed that one, we saw like, 25 or 30 more. See, here's another one:



After a while I had to stop taking pictures of all the alligators because every time I tried to snap a photo, the canoe would drift off course and Dez and I would end up lodged on a rock or stuck in the branches of a tree.

When Casey and I were taking the rental canoe back upriver, we saw this, too:



A red-shouldered hawk (you too will learn these official names when you start hanging out in state parks). Casey is still talking about how close we were to that hawk. Don't get me wrong, we live by water that provides us with all the alligators, herons, snakes, turtles, fruit rats and hawks that we can handle, but something about being in the middle of the woods, on a river, in a canoe, so close to a hawk that you could touch him with your oar, is amazing.


Later on Day 2, everyone but me did a little fishing.



Mace, as you might expect, didn't catch anything with his SpongeBob fishing pole. He kept trying to talk to the pre-teen girls that were hanging around. It was a little embarrassing to watch him walk up to girls, start talking, and be completely ignored. But he didn't seem to mind too much.

Joe caught a catfish for about 4 seconds:



It's hard to document these things when you only have four seconds to snap the picture, so you'll just have to trust me when I tell you that he caught the only fish of the day by just placing his worm on the fish's head right as Dez was telling him, "You can't catch a fish just by putting the worm right on top of . . . OH OH REEL IT IN REEL IT IN . . . dang."

By evening, we were tired, but we managed to cook some chicken over the fire, make some more s'mores for the kids and roll into bed. Mace fell asleep while sitting on my lap and it wasn't hard at all to convince Casey it was bedtime pretty soon after that. Dez slept in the tent the second night and the rest of us slept in the trailer. I wanted to make sure Dez fully experienced the outdoors on this camping trip, so when she volunteered to sleep in the tent, I didn't argue too much with her -- that would have been selfish of me.

On Day 3, as we promised the ranger, we packed up our stuff and left. When we got home, I took a shower and then laid in the bed and watched 8 hours' worth of movies on TV.