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- Details
- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: pregnancy
I am sick, and this is by far the schleppiest I have felt for a bump picture. But I am not vain enough to dress up just for a picture, and I wouldn't want to falsely glamorize pregnancy lest my 16 year old readers think its all fun and games. No young ones, sometimes it's schleppy and stuffed up and achy, and the futon is the only place you can fall asleep, next to a Walmart bag filled with used Kleenex, and you alternate sleeping in the shirt you wore all day with wearing the shirt you slept in. Saves laundry.
- Details
- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: Thoughts
Sometimes as a Christian there are amazing and wonderful spiritual truths that lose their power because I become desensitized to them - I hear them so much I forget what they mean or play it off in my mind or deflect them with an eye roll and they don't make it into my heart.
This weekend I went to a youth ministry conference with Matt, heard some great speakers and enjoyed a lot of good sessions on several topics BUT the theme that God kept bopping me on the head was - and this is cool to me because it wasn't the topic of any session or learning lab, it was just a phrase that someone tossed out in passing that absolutely lodged in my heart - "the joy of the Lord is your strength." It's weird because when I think back on it, I don't know if I have really been joyful in serving God for... months? Years, probably. I mean, I've been happy to do things, and I've had moments of joy and fulfillment, but I've also been driven by a lot of willpower and sense of obligation or loyalty or... something. But I haven't been fuelled by joy. And when things are tough (as they have been), the thing I pray for (if I pray) is strength and help from God.
So this weekend God asked me, "What if you prayed for joy instead?"
And my answer is, I think that might change everything.
- Details
- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: pregnancy
This weekend it felt like the third trimester came out of nowhere, rifled through my cupboards and sat on my couch in ratty sweatpants eating all my favourite snacks. Does that make sense? It's a metaphor for taking over my LIFE! Thursday I hit 30 weeks (big milestone in my head, kind of like arriving at the home stretch because after the 30s come the 40s, and if you even make it to the 40s you know you won't finish them), and every day since then I have been tired, uncomfortable, and having acid reflux while all my internal organs get pummelled. I think maybe the Truck has realized that there are two more months to grow and it has more or less maxed out the current living space available in my belleh. It's not very impressed with my ribs, I think because it keeps getting behind/underneath them and just... pushing. Or maybe I have it all wrong and the Truck is just scratching its back on my ribs like a bear scratches its back on a tree.
Either way, I have come to terms with the likely arrival of stretch marks in my near future, there's a roll of Tums in my pocket, and I am more and more excited to meet our baby one day. Our due date is only 66 days away, so however long this discomfort/closeness with the baby lasts, I know it won't be forever!
- Details
- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: suffering
As I've mentioned earlier in this home birth series, I have become convinced that epidurals are not a free pass on the pain of labour, and part of my reasoning for choosing home birth is my commitment to not have one unless it becomes medically necessary. I am not morally opposed to epidurals at all, and I do not think I will be more of a woman for birthing a child without one, but having decided that I would rather go without one, I am obviously faced with how I will cope with the pain of labour (incidentally, not everybody agrees that labour is a painful experience, but I'm not counting on an ecstatic birth experience either).
- Details
- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: Life
Having shared why I feel just as safe to birth at home as in the hospital, you might still be confused why I'd rather have this experience at home. Honestly, I am looking forward to labouring and meeting the Truck in our apartment. I have a friend who had a natural birth in the hospital just about a year ago, and I was so impressed with her! She was offered an epidural as soon as she arrived at the hospital but insisted that she at least wanted to try to see how far she could get on her own (she got all the way). When she was telling me about the experience it was before I got pregnant, but I told her that I also hoped to birth without interventions and that I was intrigued by the idea of home birth. I was braced for a judgy reaction like I might have had a year earlier, but her instant response was, “oh, that sounds so relaxing!” I think that was the vote of confidence I needed to take myself seriously as I continued reading and researching my decision.
- Details
- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: Life
I went to the health store at the mall to buy toothpaste today. Remember how I'm a little bit crunchy? Well today I found out where I draw the line. I was looking for a brand called Tom's, which makes toothpaste with a pretty short ingredient list and no fluoride - I bought it as an experiment a couple months ago since my teeth have become extremely sensitive and my gums have become really bleedy during pregnancy (it's not all glamour, folks! LOL, as if you thought it was). I liked how things have gone, and I was all ready to drop $8 on a new tube, but the only flavour the store had today was fennel.
I asked the saleswoman if they had any other flavours stashed somewhere I couldn't see, and her response was "it's okay, this is an herb." No ma'am I did not ask what fennel was, I asked if I could not have it in my toothpaste. Fennel in toothpaste is my line right now. I'm not saying it's a forever thing for certain, but I am simply not in a place to spend $8 with the hope that Matt will still kiss me (because if he also draws the line at fennel, I can't say that I blame him). I still bought overpriced crunchy toothpaste, but it was a $6 tube of some European-looking brand. Flavour: spearmint, thanks.
- Details
- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: home birth
When it comes to discussions of home vs hospital birth, safety is usually the top concern. I suspect that cleanup is probably the second concern, but that topic isn't going to get a whole post: as our prenatal class teacher says, "Birth washes out!"
The biggest factor in my decision for home birth is trusting that my body was built to make babies, that the biology and physiology of birth have not changed at all since long before all the technology of modern medicine, and the belief that normal birth is not a medical emergency but a natural event. I know that things can go wrong and that for all the stories of women giving birth in fields then going straight back to work plowing them there are also stories where moms and babies lose their lives (for the record, at 29 weeks, I do not feel like plowing any fields! Obviously these women are superheroes). With that said, a hospital birth doesn’t guarantee any particular outcome, and I don’t want to make decisions based on either fear or a false sense of security. For the record, Matt and I will pre-register at the hospital (which is less than two blocks north of us) and pack a bag in case we need to transfer there, and we will be attended by midwives – birth experts with a ton of experience to facilitate normal birth and recognize when things are getting not normal. I’m not choosing home birth because I don’t want to go to the hospital period, I just don’t want to go unless there’s a need for it.
- Details
- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: pregnancy
29 weeks today, which means 77 days until our due date! (Yes, the Truck could be born healthy any time between Jan. 17 and Feb. 21, but the internet is counting us down to Feb. 7 so we'll go with it :P)
Nimoy was almost in this picture, but he is a burner and ducked out at the last minute.
- Details
- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: home birth
When I first heard of home birth, I'm not gonna lie, I thought it was pretty dumb. Or if not dumb, at least weird – definitely weird. Why would you not want to be in a hospital when it comes time to have your baby? It seemed way easier and safer to just go to the hospital where there are doctors and machines and not-my-sheets, where births happen all the time and they know what they’re doing!
Almost 2 years ago, a friend told me she’d been thinking of a home birth before her pregnancy became too high-risk, and I thought, “how weird/nice for you,” but I think that was the first time a seed was planted in my mind that maybe it wasn’t only weirdos who considered home birth as an option. She told me about the documentary The Business of Being Born, which I watched on Netflix, and that led me to also watch Pregnant in America, and both documentaries blew my mind a little bit. I know that health care in Canada is completely different from the US, but it didn’t seem like my friend’s experience of giving birth in the hospital had been very different from what I was seeing in the documentaries, and I also realized that home birth might be different from what I had been imagining.
- Details
- Written by: Alyssa
- Category: Life
We are more than half way through the month now, so I thought I'd check in with how our month-long break from plastic is going.
Overall, I'd say the goals of our plastic fast are being met. However, we have adapted the rules because living on cash only is complicated and requires organizational time and skills that we apparently don't have. So instead of never using any of our cards, the limits we've been living with are:
- using the credit card we share only for groceries and gas.
- I pay for my chiropractor visits on my debit card because my insurance pays directly into our bank account, so the money goes in and out of the same place.
- we still use cash for personal spending, miscellaneous things we need for the house, and for treats like the pizza we had for dinner last night :)
I am waiting for the last automatic bill payments of the month to go through before I update our budget so we know where we stand for the home stretch of this month. So far things look good though, and I'm happy!