Blessed by the Potato

The world was a new, scary place, divided at first into mommy and not-mommy. She just wanted to be swaddled and held, and to sleep the whole thing away.

Then she stared to get used to the world, and found it was kind of a neat place she could explore. She recognized certain snuggly people who weren’t mommy, but also nice. She smiled.

One day something clicked in her brain, and the world suddenly lost its scariness. It was an exciting and wonderful place, full of things she could put in her mouth. Plus, she had just figured out how to use her hands, things she could use to bring other things to her mouth to chew on and tongue. And when nothing else was around, she could put her hands in her mouth on their own!

She is now coming to the realization that the world is full of things she can’t put in her mouth. There are those that her mean parents won’t let her chew on, and also those that are physically impossible to place in her mouth for interrogation by her tongue. Indeed, I think the reason she hasn’t learned to crawl yet is that she spends the time on her face trying to find a way to eat the floor — and gets frustrated when it refuses to go in her mouth.

Wayfare thinks that right purple part should be a much much smaller sliver, if it’s showing at all. The set of everything in the world should perhaps completely intersect the set of things she wants to put in her mouth. “Have you actually found anything she didn’t want to put in her mouth yet? There may be something, but I haven’t found it yet. This morning she tried to put the following new things into her mouth: another little kid, the library carpet, and some man’s shoe. Turns out that Blueberry has the same reaction to other little kids as she does to the cat: A lot of arm flailing with her mouth wide open as she tried to lunge mouth first at the child.”

When we told Wayfare’s parents we were expecting, the fetus was roughly the size of a blueberry. The name stuck.

When the ultrasound later told us we were going to have a baby girl, Wayfare ran out and bought a half dozen copies of Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman. Wrapping one up and placing it into the hands of our parents was our way of sharing the news: Blueberry is a girl.

When she started kicking around inside Wayfare and we wanted her to know her daddy’s voice, when it was bedtime and everybody needed to settle down to sleep, I read Blueberry Girl to them both.

When the delivery was complicated and she came out as blue as her namesake and the doctors were working on her, Wayfare was whispering. The words weren’t for me, she was away in some other place. If we were religious, I would have said it was a prayer… and in a way it was. She told me later: she was reciting Blueberry Girl.

To the ladies of light, darkness and never-you-mind, the ladies of grace, favour and merciful night, and those ladies of paradox, measure, and ladies of shadows that fall: thank you for our Blueberry.

To Neil Gaiman, thank you for the lovely words.

Let’s start with the nazis: grammar and food.

For the grammar issue of the week, I bring you singular they: do you think it’s wrong to say something like “A consumer of 2012 expects their laptops to be lighter and more powerful than ever?” Or do you think the “they” referring to a single consumer is the wrong pronoun, and “him/her” should be used instead?

I’ve long been fine with the singular they: tradition was to use “him” in such cases, even where the gender was indeterminate. When that became politically incorrect, “they” seemed to be an appropriate alternative: it has some parallels in the disuse of thee/thou in favour of the singular ye/you (which then just became “you”). Many writers started to use it, and I hear it all the time in casual speech. It’s certainly a damned sight cleaner than putting in the awkward “his/her” or “his or her” compound everywhere.

One alternative I don’t care for is the idea that it’s somehow more correct to use “her” in place of “him” for a gender-uncertain third person pronoun. “A student has many books to buy at university, straining her budget.” The use of “him” in that kind of sentence has been traditional and common for so long that seeing “her” in its place makes me think that the writer must somehow know the gender — it’s not serving as an effective gender-unknown pronoun. I personally find that much more distracting than the singular they.

Like all things in life, there does need to be balance: we can’t have everyone making up their own dialect and rules, but “thou/thee” has long since slipped from common usage to anachronistic, and we’ve had to recognize that evolution. Similarly for now, writing “u” in place of you, or using numerals for homophones “to” and “for” is a disgusting mark of poor upbringing and laziness — a hopefully temporary artifact of T9 phones that will forever be forgotten with the rise of QWERTY smartphones. But I do have to accept that one day in the distant future — long after I’m dead — such usage may be commonplace. (And for all my acceptance of linguistic evolution, I will still spin in my grave if it happens.) The role of the grammar nazi is to try to keep that sort of thing from getting a foothold in the first place, not to deny the common usage long after it’s happened.

On to food/grammar nazi-hybrids: if you make a dish in a non-traditional way, does it cease to be that dish? I don’t think so: language evolves, as do tastes, yet again today I heard the old saying that “chili isn’t chili if it has beans.” Well, traditional Texican chili maybe, but I think it’s more common with than without these days, and it’s not like a totally different food either way. Or like a few years ago, when a friend of Italian descent tried to tell me that there’s no such thing as “vegetarian lasagna”, because lasagna by definition has meat in it. Well, fine, think that all you want, but my vegetarian lasagna (or as I call it, “lasagna”) is pretty damned tasty, and there isn’t any confusion over what it is I’m slopping on my guests’ dinner plates (or they’re able to surmount the seeming oxymoron). [Plus as an aside, my understanding is that the word refers to the noodle, not the dish.]

I made cinnamon rolls today — kick-ass ones, I might add — and someone asked if I put raisins in them. No, as a matter of fact, I did not, nor would I ever. Raisins are gross, and I think putting raisins in your cinnamon rolls represents a serious lapse in judgement… but they do not cease to be cinnamon rolls by the addition of the raisins and their dark influence.

—

Blueberry has been getting big so quickly. I’m finding that she’s already getting heavy and tough to carry around: though to be fair I had a lot of years of training with an 8-lbs cat, so when she was ~8 lbs I was well inside my comfort zone; now she’s pushing me into the feats of strength zone.

It’s amazing how fickle she is: perfectly content to screaming banshee in a second flat. And just as often, back again. I know that movement helps to settle her, so I hold her and walk, or do a little baby rain dance. I got tired today after just a few minutes of the baby rain dance, and it made me wonder if I had missed striking the right balance in terms of when to have kids: too young, and well, you’re too young: not ready, not able to handle them. Too old, and you can’t keep up.

Then she started crying again, and I lost that train of thought. I plodded on, doing laps of the house.

Singing turned to pleading. Pleading to soft moaning. “Pleeaaasseee. Hushushushushshhhhh.” Then I thought perhaps this is how the zombie apocalypse would feel: zombies shuffling across the face of the earth without end, moaning while being gummed by a smaller, unhappy zombie.

Well, I’ve been a dad for just about two months. I have to say that I like it: Blueberry’s an adorable child, and even though she’s been suffering from gas the last few weeks, she (mostly) hasn’t decided to handle it by screaming non-stop.

She’s not sleeping through the night yet, and that might be a few months off still, but her sleep periods are definitely getting longer, with at least one 4-hour snooze each night this week. Wayfare and I had been coping for the first few weeks by alternating responsibility: I stay up all night and do a late-night feed so she can get 5 or 6 hours of sleep in a row herself. But now that I’m at my new job, I can’t keep that schedule up, so hopefully Blueberry will be sleeping long enough at night that Wayfare won’t lose her mind from lack of sleep.

It’s amazing how many changes there have been in her over such a short time period. She’s not yet really interacting with the world (rattles and toys don’t hold her interest), but she does look at us, and is awake more than just the amount of time it takes to eat. We get to see her eyes so much more now than in the first week. She’s also so much bigger: many of her newborn clothes only got worn once before she outgrew them. And the difference between an 8 lbs baby in your arms and a 12 lbs one is huge.

She’s a very well-behaved baby: perfectly content with strangers. She’s obviously very gassy, and she’ll grunt and strain with it, but doesn’t scream bloody murder like some gassy babies will. When her diaper’s wet, she hardly even seems to notice now. She tolerates the nasal aspirator (snot bulb) surprisingly well, and even seems to be relieved to have an empty nose. And she’s very calm when we give her a bath.

Even when she does fuss, she’s good about humouring us when we try to settle her. While she’s making her hunger cry and Wayfare is still getting set up, sometimes I’ll put my nose on her lip and she’ll suck it for a second, only to stop and give me a look of (well-deserved) confusion. That little move can buy me up to a minute of silence.

We read a lot about pregnancy and delivery before the birth, but were hoping to have another few weeks of gestation to start reading the books that told us what to do after she arrived. So we’re not as over-read on what to expect with her as a baby.

One thing we didn’t read about until we saw a poster about it in the hospital was how difficult the second night can be: she barely slept at all that night, and was not quiet about being awake and unhappy. I think we would have lost it to despair (thinking that it would always be that way) if it weren’t for those 2nd night posters in the hospital. Definitely something not covered enough in the books.

Our parenting philosophy has evolved a fair bit to meet her changes through the month: for the first week or two it was all about trying to calm her as much as possible. We wanted to show her that the world is not such a horrible place when she was out of the womb. She spent most of the time naked (save for the diaper) and getting skin-to-skin contact for feedings or just snuggles, or nicely swaddled up. We were attentive to her little noises, and prepared for her to basically wake up with food in her mouth (also because she was jaundiced, so we were eager for her to wake up and eat most times, as she was sleeping the maximum recommended amount for a child that young).

Then as she got a bit bigger and the jaundice went away, we started to slow down our responses a bit. Now we let her fuss for a minute or two before feeding her, in a hopeful attempt to teach her patience (or as the books call it, self-soothing). I don’t exactly sit there with a stopwatch watching her cry, but when she does start I do take a moment to go pee, wash my hands, etc. Sometimes (maybe 1/4 of the time) she does push out the gas or whatever, and goes back to sleep.

Really, at this point we’re just striving for balance: trying to meet her needs soon with a minimum of fussing while also giving her a chance to learn to connect her sleep cycles and settle herself. To balance her needs for food now with our need to get her to sleep through the nights later.

Here are some things we found handy so far:

– Pre-cooked meals, especially for the first two weeks: we were so far behind on sleep, and so pre-occupied with feeding her, that it was super-nice to have some pre-cooked meals delivered every few days by the grandmothers. If you don’t have grandmother delivery service, then have some cash ready for delivery, or stock up on frozen dinners.

– The swing: it’s reclined enough to be safe for a very young baby, but upright enough to help her work out her gas, and of course the movement helps rock her to sleep. She spends like half the day in her swing now.

– There are a lot of books to recommend:

The Birth Partner Handbook by Carl Jones was a good one to prepare for labour (and even includes a handy “skip to this page if she is in labour now” section for the procrastinating dads-to-be). Though it’s written for dads-to-be (and other birth partners), it has a lot of good information in a fairly concise book.

Bringing up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman is part narrative, part parenting discussion/instructional. Wayfare didn’t find the second half as useful as the first, but that first half is worth checking it out at the library: it basically discusses some differences in typical French vs American parenting. In particular, it focuses on how French children tend to start sleeping through the night and eating more regular meals several months before American kids, and discusses some of the different philosophies that may help achieve that. The concept of balance and “the pause” really resonated with us.

– Wayfare has become a fan of well.ca: they stock a lot of things like nursing bra pads, and it’s handy to have ~3 day delivery when you’re too tired to leave the house to shop. If you’re interested in a referral coupon ($10 off a $40 order for new customers) just send me an email or leave a comment and I’ll send you one.

Foreword: this is an emotional post, one of those that I wrote more for my own sake than for you to read. It’s rambling and disjointed and running a touch long, so I won’t be offended if you skip over it and wait for something on math or hybrids or finance. I also need to mention up front that Blueberry is home with us and doing great.

I’m just all tears and raw nerves.

I keep seeing that blue, unmoving body and thinking “babies don’t come back from that. You don’t get this perfect pink smiling child from that.” I’m afraid it’s a dream, or a mistake, and they’ll whisk her off to some other room at any moment.

The educated part of me does know that it was a very brief period with a 0 APGAR score, and that babies are very resilient: if there even was any brain damage, she’ll heal up, adjust, compensate, and probably end up being smarter and better adjusted than me.

I used to think that the scariest two words in the English language were “Scottish cuisine”, but now I know for a fact they’re “code pink”.

It’s kind of weird because at the time I was just in the moment, and I knew I had to keep cool and let the medical team do their thing. I had to be ready to deal with whatever came next, to support Wayfare, or help make decisions for baby’s care. Then I was just overwhelmed with joy when she started breathing on her own, and even in the incubator it was so magical to reach in and touch her arm and see her look at me.

It wasn’t until about 20 hours later that I was able to hold her in my arms outside the incubator. Just after that it kind of hit me like a brick wall and I just broke down crying:

We were back in the ward. Wayfare had a shared room, and in the rooms are these little cradles because they want the mothers to spend as much time as possible with the newborns. The other mother had her new baby in the room, and I sat down and stared at our empty cradle and cried because our baby was in the NICU and not with her mother. Weird, since by that point I knew it had turned out ok and even though she was still being watched in the NICU, she was in fine health… but it wasn’t until everything was kind of stable and settled that I the emotional roller-coaster ride caught up to me and I had my little traumatic breakdown.

I’m still a mess of emotions. Every now and then I flash back and hear in my head “code pink” over the intercom and the NICU pediatrican calling out “one-and-two-and-three-and-four” and just start crying and worrying about how close we came to losing her. Or the opposite, I’ll look at her perfect little face and start crying from the overwhelming joy.

One thing is for sure: nothing went according to plan.

Wayfare had a list prepared for labour: things to remember, and things to bring, and people to call for the big event. I saw it out and at the ready when I came home from the hospital from a nap and laughed and cried at how quickly that all went right out the window… For the last month of the pregnancy, Wayfare had unfortunately been experiencing a few complications: swelling and weight gain beyond what’s normal, and high blood pressure. These can indicate that the pregnancy is stressing the mother’s health, but they were slowly building up and weren’t so bad that it was an issue: just something to carefully monitor, and for her to live with until she delivered and they could resolve themselves. Last week though things started to escalate as she had traces of protein in her urine, which is indicative of stress on the kidneys. Then on Tuesday the traces became a fair bit of protein in the urine, and the urine production itself fell off a cliff: I think she said she only produced about 100 mL total that day, despite drinking plenty of fluids.

The midwives agreed it was time to consult an OB, go to the hospital, and get an induction (or potentially, a C-section) to move this pregnancy along.

An induction basically consists of two phases. The first is to get the cervix — which if you’re not up on your female sexual organ anatomy, can be thought of as the doorway the baby has to pass through to get out of the womb — to open up. It starts almost completely closed, and will open to something like 10 cm before the baby will pass through. So a drug is given to encourage the cervix to “ripen” or thin and open up. Even when medically stimulated, this tends to be a slow process: opening 1 cm per hour is a pretty decent rate, and it can take longer than that if the body isn’t ready. The second phase of induction is to give a drug that mimics oxytocin, which causes the uterus to contract and push the baby out, and this isn’t given until the cervix is at least most of the way along to opening.

So after giving Wayfare the cervidil to start the first phase of the induction, I was sent home to get some sleep: it was going to be 12-24 hours before anything more was expected, and I needed my rest.

Even the induction didn’t go as planned… after less than an hour of sleep she called me in a panic to get back to the hospital. Even without the oxytocin/pitocin, she was into furious, almost tonic contractions: one building up just seconds after the previous had ended. Her cervix had dilated 6 cm in 30 minutes, and there wasn’t time to do an exam after 6 cm, so we don’t even know if she was fully dilated by the birth. Things moved extremely quickly then, with doctors and nurses materializing, Wayfare’s body pushing involuntarily, and then — very quickly, in one push and one cut of the surgeon’s blade — the birth. All-told labour was just over an hour.

Out came Blueberry. Though she had a strong heart rate when the monitor was last hooked up just a few minutes before, and was kicking up a storm through the contractions, she came out blue and still. I didn’t get to cut the cord; there wasn’t time to even ask. Clamp. Cut.

Resuscitation.

Being readers and planners and worriers, we had even decided in our birth plan what to do if there was an issue with baby, and she had to be separated from mommy: my job would be to follow baby, and Wayfare would be accompanied by her mom. But they wouldn’t let me follow her to the NICU, and it was several nail-biting hours before I could see her. Even more before Wayfare was able to be moved to a wheelchair to visit.

—

My cousin was the first on that side of the family to father a child of the next generation. Everyone wanted to fawn over him, but the mother was crazy protective: she wouldn’t let anyone in the same room without washing their hands, and holding or touching him was out of the question.

Before the birth, I was telling Wayfare that there was no way I was going to be like that. Kids heal fast and need some environmental exposure to build up their immune systems. I might even lean the other way and invite people to “come and lick the baby” to boost her immune system. Wayfare looked at me and said “asking people to lick the baby is kind of weird”. Ok, maybe not lick per se — though babies are delicious — but you know: I’d let people hold her and visit; she’d play in the dirt and climb trees; she’d get kisses from puppy dogs and eat Oreos off the floor if it had only been 3 seconds.

Now, I don’t know. I’m afraid I may be broken, and I’ll end up being the most over-protective dad in the universe.

—

After-thoughts: just like Wayfare, Blueberry does have a real name, but will be “Blueberry” here.

I wrote the bulk of this post sometime on Day 2, after cracking up emotionally when we got Blueberry back from the NICU, and I just needed to try to put myself back together. I think writing some of it out helped. It’s now Day 4, and I’m starting to worry and fret a little less (though as Wayfare will confirm, just a little less). I’ve now managed to spend more time with our little family together and happy than separated and terrified, more time marvelling at my adorable daughter in my arms than reaching through a port in the incubator, and that’s helped a lot. While I’m still sleep deprived, I’m not at the 1-hour-in-24 level, which has made me feel a bit more human.

Each night so far I’ve spent at least two hours just holding Blueberry while she sleeps: I can’t bear to put her in the crib when I could just hold her in one arm while I eat or watch TV or whatever. Plus she seems to like it. But things are finally starting to feel normal-ish again. New normal perhaps, since no matter how she got here, things are never going to be quite the same again with a baby. I’ll probably stop being so ridiculous soon, and put her in a crib like a normal person.