Busy week--and I've been tired because of this whole pesky menstruation thing. David said, "At least it's not as bad as labor cramps," but when I was in labor, I was the center of the universe. Nobody expected anything of me but to lie there and do it, and I was surrounded by people whose entire job at that time was to take care of me and do anything I told them to. This week, I've had to try to keep slogging along. And then yesterday, I pulled a bunch of muscles in my back trying to open a painted-shut window. Last night when I went to bed, my back was killing me and I was having those terrible cramps that make you feel like you might throw up, and I said, "This is not unlike being in labor, except that the back pain is worse."
Last night Eric slept from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. I call that sleeping through the night by any measure (this is Su doing a victory dance in the end zone). We decided that he knew he was preparing to do that, and that's why he pretty much ate constantly all yesterday evening.
We took him for a walk last night and he was crying in his stroller. Finally David said, "Maybe he wants to be sitting more upright so he can look around." I thought, "yeah, right," but we un-reclined him, and for the rest of the walk he looked happily around. For much of the time, he seemed engrossed in a bit of red plastic that is part of the stroller-folding mechanism, not too interested in the wider world. But that's OK.
On Thursday evening I went to a meeting of "Mothers and More," an organization for "sequencing women," which basically means stay-at-home moms. it was fun to be with other moms; there were about a half dozen of us with babies under four months old, including a woman who gave birth hours before I did at the same hospital. The discussion topic was supposed to be "getting by on one income," but the facilitators made practically no effort to facilitate, and we just kept degenerating into little chatty groups. Which was mostly fine by me. I had a nice long chat with the mother of a 3-month-old who had practically the identical experience I did with breastfeeding--that was nice, just to talk with someone who knows exactly what it's like to pump and weep around the clock. She is angry, though, at the lactation consultants she worked with. She feels like she was pressured to do an enormously hard thing, and thinks they should have told her up front that, as she says she has since learned, only a very small percentage of women and babies are actually successful at establishing breastfeeding if they have to pump exclusively for more than a week or two. I can see feeling that way.
I also talked to a woman who is starting a business selling cloth diapering supplies. I had just been thinking again about trying cloth diapers now that Eric is older and we're getting into a routine. I told this woman, "I have had no doubts that using disposables has been the right thing up until now, because even one extra load of laundry a week would have been a huge burden." She said, "I probably shouldn't say this, because I'm a big advocate of cloth and absolutely love using them with my daughter, but I think people should use disposables with newborns. People try to start out with cloth when they're sleep deprived and their routines are completely disrupted, and they give up after a few weeks, and then they remember how impossible it was and they never try again. When the baby is new is the right time for disposables." She said, "You might even give yourself another month or two before you think about trying cloth." Of course, another month coincides with the Labor Day launch of her business, so perhaps she was just engaging in good marketing.
The only uncomfortable moment for me was when a third woman joined our chat. She started out also asking about cloth diapering, but then, I don't remember why, she announced, "I don't vaccinate my children." The conversation that followed was uncomfortable for me. I understand, I think, the parental fears that the anti-vaccine folks play on. Eric will get four vaccines at his two-month check up a week from Monday, and it seems like a lot to me. There are a lot of vaccines in general; they've really proliferated since we were children. Also, when they give a vaccine to the baby, they give the mom a sheet that lists all the potential complications, no matter how rare. This time around, I'm not going to read it. But I am a rational person, so I understand that, even though it's scary to me, it's better for Eric to have the vaccines than to wander around unvaccinated.
I also understand, because I am rational, that my experience is not universal, a subtlety which seems to escape many people. Some parents, for instance, believe it's safer for a child to have chicken pox than to have the chicken pox vaccine (did you know there was a chicken pox vaccine? It came as a surprise to me), on the grounds that they had chicken pox as children and it wasn't so bad. To which I could reply that the year I had chicken pox, it was particularly virulent and children were dying of it, even in my own school. My mother says they actually feared for my life. So I say, give the kid that shot!
It is an interesting phenomenon, though, that a small number of people with absolutely no medical evidence behind them have managed to put the whole medical/public health establishment on the defensive about vaccines. Every parenting magazine has to have its article on the debate, and even our most recent Consumer Reports did a feature on it.
In our talks about budgeting, one woman suggested we all go to a certain website where, for a $99 start-up fee and then $11.95 per coupon book, we can order coupons sent to our homes. You get to pick the products that you get coupons for. Someone asked, "Are these special coupons, worth more than regular coupons?" No, they're the same coupons you can cut out of the paper, and they do expire, but you don't have to go to the trouble of cutting them out, and they send only the ones you want. I was having trouble seeing the advantage, frankly. The woman who suggested it said, "Someone posted about it on a mailing list I'm on, and she knew a woman whose grocery bill was over $200 but after her coupons it was only like $50 and everyone, even the cashier, was amazed." I don't see how that's possible with just regular coupons, so I didn't bother to write down the URL.
Well, today I pop into the Stay-At-Home Parents bbs and there is this post: "A few weeks ago a woman named Sherri posted this URL for this great place to get coupons and I just want to say I went there and it is terrific...." It even included the story of the amazed cashier. And someone posted in response, "This message is being posted verbatim on multiple boards which leads me to suspect it's not legitimate." Can't say I was surprised.
Posted by Su Penn at July 29, 2003 10:38 AM | TrackBack