Knocked Up – Knocked Over

my journey through pregnancy and hyperemesis gravidarum

Monthly Archives: February 2012


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Motherhood and Missing Milestones

Working full time and being a mommy is so difficult.  I feel like I am constantily missing out on Gabi and Katie’s lives.  A few weeks ago, Gabi and Katie’s teacher, who is also a dear friend of mine, texted me:

K just rolled over!!!!

I knew it was on its way.  She was so close to doing it the night before.  Juan, Gabi, and I were all watching her so carefully so that none of us would miss it when she finally did roll.  But she rolled over for the first time at school.  And I missed it.

I was so sad.  I sat at my desk and cried.  I couldn’t believe I missed it.  I felt so sorry for myself.  Why?  Why do I have to work?  It’s not fair.

It’s so hard being away from my girls.  In the beginning, it was intensely painful.  Walking away from Katie on that first day back was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.  It felt wrong.  I was her mother.  I was supposed to be with her all the time.  I had spent nine months holding her in my womb and then three more months holding her in my arms.  It hurt so much to give her to someone else and let the door close behind me.  It felt violent and wrong.

I grieved in those first few weeks.  Every instinct in my body was telling me to be with my baby and I couldn’t do it.  I cried so much.  I felt angry and sad and lost.  Looking back, I can see that I was going through the stages of grief.  Recognizing that made me feel even more angry.  A mother shouldn’t have to grieve.  A mother shouldn’t have to feel that sense of loss.  A mother shouldn’t have to leave her children to go to work before she’s ready.

In this country, we do not support mothers enough.  We do not provide adequate maternity leave.  Mothers suffer what I have gone through (twice!) every single day.

I have a dear friend who is working on changing that.  She’s at the front of a revolution.  Please read her blog to find out what we can all do to be a part of this revolution:  Mother Revolution.

They are also doing great things at MomsRising.org.  They do a great job of keeping an eye on upcoming legislation and providing concrete ways to get involved.

This past weekend, I was so blessed.  Little Miss Katie had a developmental explosion!  She started rolling front to back, she started babbling, she found her toes, and on the train back from San Diego she popped out a brand new tooth!  I felt so thankful that I got to share those moments with her.

But a part of me is still raging inside.  That’s not something one should have to feel grateful about.  Being with your baby for those moments should be the norm.

Please join the revolution.

SAMSUNG


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Hippie Hygiene Experiment # 1: Why (and how!) I wash my face with oil

I haven’t used soap on my face in over a month. Yeah, you read that right.  I haven’t washed my face with soap or any kind of cleanser at all in four weeks!  I haven’t had to use heavy moisturizers, I haven’t had breakouts, and my skin looks absolutely radiant.  How do I manage it? 

Oil.  That’s right.  Oil.  That’s all I use on my face.  No soaps, creams, toners, masks.  Just oil.

My favorite olive oil

Shortly after Katie was born, I started noticing that she seemed to break out when I put my fancy, expensive, anti-aging moisturizer on my face.  The days I didn’t wear the moisturizer, her face was clear.  The days I did, her cheeks broke out in itchy, red pinpricks that she would scratch and rub on. 

I had to do something.  Obviously, I wasn’t going to continue using something that my baby was clearly sensitive to.  For a while, I used coconut oil on my face with mediocre results.  She still broke out a little, and my face always felt kind of gritty.  My skin looked tired and dull.  I was perusing the Trader Joe’s toiletries section one day, and I came across a bottle of Jojoba oil.  “Good for oil cleansing,” the back of the bottle said.  I didn’t get it, but I did go home and do some googling.

And thus did I discover the Oil Cleansing Method.

Here’s the idea: Your skin is covered by natural oils that it needs to protect and nourish itself.  When we constantly strip the oils out with soap the skin either gets dried out or reacts by overproducing oils and breaking out.  It doesn’t make sense to strip out your skin’s healthy, natural oil only to replace it with a synthetic oil.  Instead, what if we simply gently released the excess oils, dissolve the dead skin cells clogging in pores, and allow your body to maintain its own natural level of moisture?  And what gently dissolves excess oil?  More oil!

Okay, do you think I am insane yet?  I’m not.  This really does work better than any skin care regimen I’ve tried.  To put things into perspective, I used to work at a cosmetics counter, and I’ve always used high-end department store skin care lines.  None of them ever worked as well as a cheap bottle of oil!

If you’d like to try it for yourself, here’s how

Before you get started cleansing your face, you need to mix your oil.  You will mix castor oil with a nourishing oil of some kind.  The castor oil releases the dead skin and unclogs pores while the nourishing oil moisturizes and soothes. 

Nourishing oil and castor oil

Some ideas for nourishing oils include:

  • Olive oil
  • Avocado oil
  • Sunflower oil
  • Jojoba oil

Don’t use coconut oil.  It will clog your pores!

Start with a 1:1 ratio of castor oil and nourishing oil.  If you find your skin is too dry afterwards, cut the amount of castor oil.  If you find your skin is too oily, increase the castor oil.  The beauty of this is that you can customize this so that it perfectly meets your skin’s needs.

Right now I use a 1:3 ratio of castor oil and avocado oil. I mixed it in a pretty glass dropper bottle that I got at my local natural food store so it’s easy to work with.

Please ignore the background and focus on how pretty the blue dropper bottle is

Once you’ve mixed the oil, it’s time to start cleansing!

  1. Put a quarter sized amount of oil into the palm of your hands and massage it into your face.  Pay attention to those really oily bits like your chin and those crevices behind your nostrils.
  2. Leave it to sit while you do something else like brush teeth, wrangle a kid into the tub, or change a diaper.
  3. Wet a wash cloth with very warm water (not so hot that you scald yourself, but as warm as is comfortable) and lay back on your bed with it over your face to steam your pores.
  4. Accept the belly slapping, wet willies, foot tickling, and zerberts that your family bestows upon you as they sense your helpless state.
  5. When the wash cloth has cooled off (a minute or so), sit up and gently wipe the excess oil of your face.  This is the hardest step.  Your instinct will be to wipe really hard to take all the oil off.  Don’t do this as this will dry out your face.  There should still be oil on your face.  This will soak in after a few minutes, leaving your face feeling comfortably fresh.

I do this every night.  Even with the kids and husband piling all over me, it still feels so luxurious.

In the morning, I just rinse my face very briefly in the shower.

Simple.

Some things I’ve discovered while doing this

  • Use old, cheap wash cloths, preferably ones that are big enough to cover your entire face.  They will get oily and the oil does leave stains on them.
  • Drip a few drops of blue Dawn dish detergent into the laundry cycle if you are having trouble with the oil not coming out.
  • Unless you are much more graceful than I am, don’t try to oil cleanse in the shower.  There’s nothing like stepping on the oil patch on the shower floor at 6 AM and busting your butt.
  • Don’t leave out the castor oil.  I tried this for a couple of days thinking it was the castor oil drying my skin out and my pores got really clogged and my skin started looking dull.  Turns out I just needed to wipe off the oil in a more gentle way.
  • Expect an adjustment period.  I don’t know if this was more about my skin adjusting to the oil cleansing or me needing to adjust to the way skin should feel in the wild.  Regardless, it took a few weeks for things to work themselves out and for me to feel really comfortable with the way my skin feels with all of this.
  • If you have trouble with dryness during the adjustment period, just use a little bit of the nourishing oil on its own to give your skin a moisture boost.

Have you tried cleansing your face with oil?  How did you do it and what was your experience?

 


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5 Things to do with Nipple Cream that Don’t Involve Nipples

Nipple cream is wonderful stuff.  It’s gooey, sticky, and it feels so good on sore nipples.  I have a variety of nipple creams.  I’ve put all kinds of things (in addition to babyspit) on my nipples: the MotherLove Herbal Nipple Cream, the MotherLove Diaper Rash and Thrush Cream (on my nipples), the lanolin cream in the purple tube, plain old olive oil, coconut oil, and avocado oil.  But I’ve found that nipple creams are great for more than just nipples!  Here are my top five non-nipple-related uses for nipple cream. Specifically, I’m going to be talking about the nipple cream in the purple tube since it’s fairly inexpensive and I don’t mind slathering the stuff all over creation.

  1. Lip Balm!  This is, hands down, the best lip balm around.  The tiniest bit of nipple cream can protect, moisturize, and heal your dry, cracked lips. It doesn’t tingle and sting like certain lip balms do. It just leaves a smooth, rich, protective barrier. After I’m done putting lanolin on my nipples, I rub whatever is leftover onto my lips. Feels so good!
  2. Ointment for Scraped Knees.  Gabi can be so sensitive sometimes on her wounds.  If she falls and skins her knees, even taking a gentle bath stings the wounds.  I hate seeing either of my babies cry.  Enter the lanolin.  It gives a soothing, non-stingy barrier, and helps it heal faster.  We save it especially for the rug burn-type wounds where the skin gets abraded off and every little touch burns like the dickens.
  3. Drool Rash Ointment.  We are approaching teething-time with little Miss Katie, and her poor chin has seen better days.  She gets dry, chapped skin from all the slobber flowing down over her chin to her bib.  Enter the nipple cream. A few applications later, and the dry, red rash is completely gone.  I always rub a little up on her cheeks, too. It keeps her skin smooth and fresh. And I don’t have to worry about her rubbing a little into her mouth.
  4. Diaper Rash Cream.  Just like on the chin, lanolin makes a great barrier.  It protects the bootie from the wets and dirties, and it heals the chapped area.  Are you seeing a pattern here?  Any time something is chapped and rashy, stick some lanolin on it!
  5. Razor Nick Ointment. Not only does it sooth the sting and promote healing, but it stops the bleeding too. Handy!

And what if you get lanolin on something?  Yes, it stains. And no. You can’t just toss it in the washer to get the stains out.  So what do you do if your favorite bra, nursing pads, or sheets get lanolin stains on them?  Break out the blue Dawn! The grease-fighting action gets the oily lanolin out. Squirt some on the stain. Rub, rub, rub. Leave it to sit for a while. Overnight is good. Toss it in the washer, and voila! The lanolin stains are gone!

Do you have any odd-ball uses for nipple cream?  I’d love to hear!


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What about that Hypnobabies thing?

Following the publication of Katie’s birth story last week, I received so many well-wishes and congratulations.  Thank you all so much for your support.  It truly was an incredible ending to a difficult journey.

One of my friends posted a great comment, though, that I wanted to quote to kick off today’s post. Megan wrote:

So I’m reading kind of mixed reactions to the hypnobabies CDs in this post. I know that a big hope was the thinking about the process without negative words like “pain,” but it sounds like that didn’t exactly translate during labor and delivery, yeah? But at the same time you visualized the birth process almost to a T and you give some credit to hypnobabies for that. Would you say they were still beneficial, and with your experience, what recommendations would you make to someone considering them?

Really great question Megan.  I started to write a reply to your comment, but I realized that the response was complicated and probably deserved its own post.

While many Hypnobabies birth stories tell of birth with no pain, Hypnobabies itself bills its method as one that allows you to birth “in comfort, joy, and love.”  They talk about replacing negative words with positive words and the hope is that you won’t experience birth as painful.

Birthing Katie was certainly physically painful, and I did a whole lot of hollering.  Yeah, you can call it “vocalizing” if you want, but you know me.  I calls it likes I sees it.  I got loud enough that I cracked a joke to my midwives about what the OB in the office next door must have thought was going on in the birth center.

Let’s be clear though. For those of you who haven’t had babies yet, pain in childbirth is absolutely nothing like pain from cutting yourself or pain from a broken bone or injury.  It’s completely different.  So different that I think Hypnobabies has it right when they talk about not using the p-word to describe it.  If you’re an endurance athelete you can come close to relating to the type of pain that childbirth entails.  Childbirth is much more like running a marathon than it is slamming your hand in a car door.  Does that make sense?  I think in many ways people focus too much on the pain aspect of childbirth and too little on the endurance aspect of it.

I didn’t go into the Hypnobabies expecting it to be pain-free.  I couldn’t really bring myself to use the alternate vocabulary very much in real life because it felt a little hokey.  What I did expect to get from the Hypnobabies childbirth method was a positive, empowering, natural birth that was free from fear and anxiety.

In that regard, Hypnobabies delivered tenfold.

Do I really believe in hypnosis?  Honestly, I’m not sure.  But what I do believe is that in listening to the tracks I was able to find a hidden well of confidence and power within myself that I didn’t know I had.

Leading up to this birth, I never felt anything but excited anticipation. During labor, except for those few moments right before Sue told my I was at 9 cm, I felt confident and powerful.

Unlike Gabi’s birth, which I went into with the idea of trying for a natural birth but if I need an epidural that’s okay, I went into this knowing with absolute certainty that I was not only capable of doing this but that I was going to do it.  I think that self-assurance showed in my birth preferences.

Hypnobabies helped me to find that confidence.

It was incredible how closely Katie’s birth mirrored the birth I had visualized.  I visualized myself having her quickly so I could get back home to Gabi and that’s exactly what I did.  And really, y’all.  I pushed out an 11 lb baby in 20 minutes.  Damn.

Even with Hypnobabies, Katie’s birth was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.  It made the half-marathon I ran look like a cakewalk.  But it was also the most exhilarating and empowering thing I’ve ever done.

So, sure, Hypnobabies didn’t give me a pain-free birth.  But would I use it again for myself if I were ever going to have another baby (which I’m not)?  Absolutely.  Would I recommend it to a friend. Definitely yes.

And for those of you who haven’t had a baby but are curious about what childbirth is like, go get yourself some running shoes and train for a marathon.  That high you get at the end of a race, the mix of endorphins, adrenaline, and tired and sore muscles, is like a smaller version of the feeling you have after unmedicated childbirth.


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Blogging and the Future

Wow. Doesn’t that sound dramatic?

I’ve been away from the blog for a while, which is a shame because there have been so many interesting things going on.  Everything from hippy hygiene experiments to breastfeeding revelations to parenting two to food adventures to returning to work and on and on and on.  With as busy as I am, I really feel like I need to come up with a different plan to refocus my energy for 2012 back into this blog. I’d like to revamp my posting schedule, focus on the quality of my writing, and reserve more attention to my readers and others in the blogging community.

With the frequency that I have been posting for the past four months, my 3 posts per week schedule is too much to handle right now. I’ve got two kids and a full-time job, so I need to get real about what I can accomplish.  Moving forward, I will drop down to post once a week, with that post appearing on Sundays.  With as busy as I am with the two girls, this will still be a stretch goal for me, but I need to post at least every week to keep this blog viable for 2012.

I would also like to focus on the quality of writing.  Toward the end of my pregnancy, and with the commitment to post 3 times per week, I found myself just cranking out posts as fast as I could.  I would write furiously, get my thoughts out, hit the spell check, and then post it.  I think I owe my readers a little more than that.  I have the ability to write well, and I owe you all and myself the courtesy of putting forth that effort. So, for 2012, I will put much more effort into crafting readable and interesting posts.  I do have a degree in writing after all.  It’s time I put my skills to use.

In a similar vein, I will manage the comments section of my blog more effectively.  During my maternity leave, I got lazy about my comments.  I wouldn’t check them often, and sometimes it would be a week or more before I got around to approving a pending comment from a new reader.  That’s really not fair to you all.  You took the time to read my posts and comment, and I would like to show my gratitude for that by approving your comments quickly and taking the time to reply to each of them.

From a networking perspective, I need to get back to reading the blogs I follow.  It’s been a while since I’ve done that and it’s time to get back to it.  There are some excellent new blogs that have cropped up since I had Katie and I need to update my sidebar with their links.  It doesn’t seem right to expect folks to read my blog if I’m not reading theirs, so I will put more effort into reading and commenting.  I am setting a goal for myself to read and comment on at least 3 blog posts each week. This will get me motivated to come on out of my bubble and get back into the blogging community.

So to summarize, here is what you can expect from my for 2012:

  • One article each week to appear on Sundays
  • A focus on quality over quantity for my writing
  • Quick response times in the comments section
  • Replies to your comments
  • Thoughtful comments from me on other blogs

I’m so grateful to all of my readers and I look forward to growing as a writer in 2012.

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