I looked at the website and realized it's been a month since my last entry.. that's how busy it's been. Much has been going on, so here's my attempt to fill in the gaps.
OUR LAST HURRAH, EH!
Realizing that Jill is not going to be able to travel anywhere after her 34th week, we decided to take a long weekend in our favorite long weekend destination, British Columbia.
It was pretty much a garden tour:
Dr. Sun Yat-Sen's Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver's Chinatown
Classical chinese gardens are highly manicured and controlled to achieve full balance of textures and structures very much in line with the balance of Yin and Yang. Unlike English gardening style, every square inch of a classical chinese garden is planned and controlled for that reason. It's not our favorite because we enjoy nature taking its course in the garden.
Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island
I like this shot of Jill enjoying the rose garden, then at peak bloom. We spent the entire day there (2pm to close at 10:30pm). We first enjoyed High Tea overlooking the rose garden and the Italian garden. A full pot of wonderful, loose-leaf tea and then all sorts of finger sandwiches, cakes and other good stuff to thoroughly sate your appetite. We then spent the rest of our visit enjoying the gardens - which are always different when we visit because of the different plants in peak.
Van Dusen Botanical Gardens in Vancouver
Van Dusen Gardens is a former golf course that was
UBC Botanical Garden in Vancouver
The University of British Columbia garden is great because half of it is a large woodlands garden with all sorts of native cedar, spruce and fir trees with all sorts of large plant species from Asia. The above photo was taken by Jill. It shows a pink peony-headed or heroin poppy, a purple poppy and some red cape fuchsia. We have the red cape fuchsia in our garden and the hummingbirds love it.
When we weren't at gardens, we were eating at Hon's House of Wun-Tun... the best place in town for cheap, outstanding Cantonese food.
Who knows when we'll be back again, but we look forward to photographing the baby at all of these favorite places when it's old enough.
ME-MA INJURES HER HIP
Me-Ma fell and cracked her hip - barely avoiding a full break - in Tempe while we were in Canada. She was in the hospital for a couple of days, but she's been on the mend in Las Vegas at Sue & George's. They haven't yet moved to Pahrump as their house hasn't been finished yet as I am told (here's a link to info on their new neighbor). Her recovery is in our prayers.
PROFFITT SHIN-DIG IN GALLUP
Because she got hurt, Mom and Me-Ma both missed Terry's reception dinner after his recent wedding in Kansas. Tom, Kate, Sue, George and a host of others attended and reported it was a nice event, though Terry was working the room and wasn't able to visit people for an overly long time. But that's what you do at an event like that held in your honor. Susan, I believe, is the name of his new bride and we wish them both much happiness. I understand they're now in Hawaii enjoying a nice honeymoon. Good for them.
NEW KITTEN FOR MOM
Chance (or Tuesday as she was formerly known) was formally adopted by Mom when she was in Tempe. The five-week old kitten - long on black and white hair but short on common sense - was a nearly-dead orphan before Melissa and Miranda spotted her on a bicycle outing not long ago. The kitten was clearly abandoned by its mother, so it's been nursed back to health and now happily residing in Vancouver USA. She apparently is rather fond of Ellie and plays non-stop with her. That's a good thing as Ellie's so quick and jerky in her movements that she freaks out Nino and forget about Sundaye entirely.
BIRTHING CLASSES Q&A
And finally, we're in full swing with birthing classes. Right now, we're taking two of them: the hospital (mandatory) classes and the Bradley classes.
Q: What are the Bradley classes?
A: The Bradley(tm) method of birth is a natural childbirth approach that is notable because the husband is the coach.
Q: What do you mean by natural?
A: By natural, we mean with little or no medical intervention, i.e. drugs that induce, accelerate or deaden the pain of pregnancy.
Q: Are you completely insane?
A: Maybe, but that has nothing to do with our decision to have a natural birth. The whole idea is that medical births as they are commonly practiced in hospitals in the U.S. are flawed in ways that potentially harm the mother and the baby. They pose harm to the baby via the potential effects of labor pain-killing drugs and use of devices to extract the baby because epidurals (administration of drugs to epidural area near mom's spinal chord) actually slow and delay labor. They pose harm to the mom because the use of medical devices and procedures - episiotomies, etc. - are more common if inducement drugs and epidurals are administered, which in turn significantly increase the chances of need for a far more tramatic cesarean section birth.
Q: That's great, but does Jill have any idea what she's in for?
A: No, but then no first-time mother does. Yet natural childbirth is what the body was designed to do. It's a matter of physical preparation through exercise and relaxation techniques as well as education about the whole process that helps get through the inevitable difficult parts and avoids unnecessary difficult parts.
Q: What do you mean by unnecessary difficult parts?
A: Many things that uninformed couples do, before and during the hospital birth, can serve to complicate or make the birth far more miserable than it should be. Going in to the hospital too soon, not knowing what can be done pre-admittance to get baby into the best position possible, the mom not knowing all of the therapies that are available to her instead of drugs, the mom being allowed to lie flat on her back during labor, limited amounts of time for various stages of natural labor before inducement is required, inducement drugs administered at too-high dosage causing far more painful labor, artificially painful labor that then requires the mom to get an epidural, the epidural slowing labor and increasing the chance of a cesarean section, the rate of which are on the rise nationwide. All of these things can be avoided with education about the woman's body, labor stages and strategies for different parts of those stages to get through them without drugs.
Alternatively, a fully natural birth has many benefits, including a fully healthy and alert baby that is immediately ready to feed, an alert and healthy mom that is able to immediately begin breastfeeding and will have a higher success rate of sustaining breastfeeding through infancy, and a hormone surge that serves to reduce the size of the uterus more quickly as well as return the mother to her healthy normal weight sooner.
Q: But what if there are complications you can't control?
A: I didn't say we were militant, I just mean that we want to do everything we can to avoid medical intervention. If the baby is breach (butt/legs first), the chord is around the baby in a complicated manner or anything else, we are prepared to allow the doctors to intervene for the health of Jill and baby. But if all is normal, then a natural birth it shall be.
Q: So what does the dad do during all of this?
A: He's the coach. He is the anchor while Mom goes through labor, works with the hospital (nurse-midwife in our case) personnel on behalf of the laboring Mom, massages and comforts Mom in any way necessary and helps her to rest, relax and position herself however (soaking tub, labor bar, pregnancy ball, however!) so that labor passes as well as possible. His presence is particularly important through Transition - the short 45-minute to hour window of time when the Mom is insistent upon pain relief. Transition is immediately before the less painful Pushing stage begins and with Dad there to encourage her, she can get through the short Transition and begin delivery with less discomfort. Most women can get through late-stage labor without pain medication, but for whatever reason turn 180-degrees and psychologically demand it in the short, final transition stage, even though things will get much better very quickly soon after.
MORE LATER!
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