Current Mood:  exhausted

So living with a newborn is totally exhausting. Even though Calliope is, I think, actually quite a good newborn. She rarely cries without a good reason.

We’ve got a full house again — my mother is here now, pretty much til we leave Switzerland, my older sister is here just for a few days, and likewise Mike’s father. Once again we don’t have enough beds, but can’t borrow the air mattress this time as Mike’s friend is out of town, so his poor dad is sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag. It’s nice to have everyone, of course, but it also does make things a little bit tense. I feel I should be a good hostess but I am just so tired. I did manage to cook an awesome Christmas feast, though, complete with a turkey (I actually found one here!), stuffing, gravy, mashed sweet potatoes, cranberry-pear sauce, and two kinds of pie… mmm… pie…

I can’t believe Calliope isn’t even 3 weeks old yet. I feel like we have had her forever. Every day seems a bit of an eternity, probably does to the sleep deprivation and necessity of constant feeding! She already looks so different than she did when she was born. And she can hold up her head for a pretty long period of time (strong baby!) and already is trying to crawl when we lie her on her stomach. Nuts. I think it makes her really frustrated that she doesn’t have good control over or strength in her muscles. Some of the noises she makes when attempting to crawl or push herself up or hold up and turn her head around sound extremely annoyed to me.

Breast feeding is effectively torture. It *has* gotten better since leaving the hospital but it is still really uncomfortable and painful and takes freakin’ forEVER. Every feeding takes 45-75 minutes because Calliope falls asleep and I have to spend all this time waking her up, changing her diaper, rubbing her feet, in an attempt to get her to intake a full meal so that she doesn’t wake up hungry a mere hour later. And she eats every three hours so there isn’t much free time to get anything done, or even sleep, not that I’ve been doing that, in between feedings. Trying to pump milk to store it so that someone else can feed her from a bottle also takes forever, like 45 minutes to get 60ml of milk, which isn’t even a full feeding for her. Gaaaaaaah. My nipples feel like someone has rubbed them with sandpaper.

It is really important to me to give her a really good start nutritionally etc. especially as I won’t be vaccinating her, but some days I am just sooooooooooooo close to ditching the whole breast feeding thing. I feel like I wouldn’t mind all the sleep deprivation, etc. etc. if it weren’t for the breast feeding. But the breast feeding just makes it all torture. In the mornings and afternoons I can grit my teeth and deal with it, but during my own personal witching hour which happens between early to late evening every day, I feel completely unable to deal and end up just crying pathetically Ick! I haven’t cried so much in my life, I don’t think, as I have between the last few weeks of my pregnancy and now. Ugh, ugh. I feel all wobbly and pathetic.

And I’m still wearing the same damn pair of H&M jeans. But at least I can button them normally now.

Current Mood:  depressed

Today I broke a window and found Mike’s hat.

The end.

One thing that cracks me up about it here is that everyone says hello and goodbye when they get in and out of elevators. Or waiting rooms. And so forth. I’m used to standing in an elevator and politely ignoring everyone else who is in it while trying to avoid being squashed up against them. But here, people get in, and it’s Grüezi mitenand! and they get out and it’s Adé!. Bus drivers too. They’ll be driving the bus along and suddenly get lonely or something and it will be Grüezi mitenand! over the bus speaker.

Last night I went through and examined my pre-pregnancy clothes. I know, stupid thing to do only one week after giving birth, but I really wanted to fold up all my maternity stuff and shove it where the sun never shines, and I needed something alternate to wear. Besides, my stomach almost looks like a normal stomach again. Not MY normal stomach, but a slightly pudgy normal stomach. Don’t ask me how that happened.

Anyway, in trying on my old clothes I discovered several things. First, all the legs of all the pants fit fine so apparently my legs aren’t any fatter. Hooray! However, none of the ass/hips fit even remotely, and it isn’t just that I can’t zip up the pants due to the bigger stomach… it’s actually that the ass/hips just plain out don’t fit. By a rather impressive margin. The thing is, I don’t LOOK much fatter to myself. And I am a harsh critic. From eyeballing it, I would have expected them to be a bit tight, but not ridiculously so. So I am baffled. Did my bones change or something? All I can think of is that my bones are actually wider now than they were before. It doesn’t make any sense.

Second, shirt-wise, even if my stomach were totally flat and back to normal (which I don’t know if that will happen), my shirts ain’t gonna fit anytime soon due to my new and improved bustline. Only, I don’t consider it improved. I don’t want these big honkers gosh darn it. I liked the other ones better!!

So, unless I want to continue wearing the same pair of H&M jeans I have been wearing EVERY DAY SINCE AUGUST, I’m going to have to buy more clothes. Gaaaaaaaah!! Who knew that pregnancy could be so freaking expensive fashion-wise? First maternity clothes and then afterwards all your other clothes have to be upped in size to accommodate new scary breasts and weird bone structure changes!

But… it’s just clothes. Clothes are easily come by. Most women would be happy for an excuse to go shopping, right? I’m determined not to worry about it.

I think I will wait til the very end of our stay here before going shopping. Exactly 4 weeks to the day til we leave I wish they had H&M in Australia…

So I thought I’d document this whole birthing thing, before I forget it.

So I woke up early on Tuesday, after a very restless night, at about 5AM, because I was (as usual) so darn uncomfortable in bed. My stomach was contracting away as usual and it just hurt. I was so sick of being pregnant and totally discouraged. So I lay there for about an hour and prayed for patience. And I listened to the wind, which was blowing a gale outside, and had been all throughout the night. Then I got up and decided to make a pumpkin pie. That is, I’d decided the day before I would, and had cooked and pureed all the pumpkin, but didn’t actually make the pie.

So I made the pie dough and it was a really annoying recipe. One of these recipes that calls for 30 minutes of chilling in the fridge after almost every step. Gah! During the chilling steps I was trying to finish some contract work. But it gradually dawned on me that my stomach was hurting a lot worse than usual, and even more frequently than usual. But I really wanted pie. I was determined to make pie.

So at 7:30am or so I put the dough in the fridge to chill again and decided to take a hot bath. I was really hurting. Woke up Zaubi after a while and told him I thought baby was on the way but we had to finish making pie. By 8:30 I had just rolled out the dough and put it in the tin but then I saw it had to chill AGAIN. At this point Zaubi told me he didn’t think that we should finish making the pie. I grudgingly agreed and we put the pie dough into the freezer, but I still didn’t want to go to the hospital. These things take lots of time, right? It had only been about 3-4 hours. That’s nothing, according to all the books.

I should have known.

Over the next hour I remember walking around with no clothes on trying to get organised enough to put my hospital bag together and get dressed, but I hurt so much and so frequently that it was very difficult to concentrate and get it done. Taxi came at 9:30 or so. It should have been a short drive, only 7km or so, but we hit horrible traffic. Zaubi discovered later that a water main had broken on the street below ours and completely messed things up. The driver, a young unmarried guy, was distinctly unhappy to have me as a passenger and kept honking in a very aggressive manner so I tried to be very good. I stared out the window and refrained from making any noise or weird breathing but just squeezed my stress ball thingie. After the stormy night it had turned into an absolutely gorgeous day (a really rare thing in Zürich in December!) with cloudless blue sky and bright sunlight. I remembering thinking this is a great day to be born!

We finally got to the hospital a little after 10 and they took me into some little assessment room and strapped these annoying monitors to my stomach. I just wanted to walk around the room and pound the stress ball on the wall but she made me lie down so I could stay next to the monitoring machine and so she could put some elaborate needle apparatus in my arm in case I needed something or other later. I don’t remember what. My ability to understand German was very quickly going downhill. Lying down made me feel distinctly nauseated. She kept telling me to breathe deeply, which annoyed me. Then she told me I was only 3-4 cm dilated (you have to get to 10) and I nearly cried. The pain was extremely awful and I was thinking there could be how many more hours of this?!?!

At some point she confiscated my underwear and gave me a hideous pair of giant white fishnet disposable ones. I remember staring at them in a kind of horror, but they were actually exceedingly comfortable. Then she jammed two of the most enormous pads in there I’ve ever seen. I was thinking What in the heck are THOSE??

She went away for a while so I jumped up off the bed to get away from the nausea. One of the monitors was strapped really tightly to my stomach and making painful dents in my skin. I wanted to rip it off. The other one, which was the fetal heartbeat monitor, kept sliding off down my hips so the baby’s heartbeat would go to 0 in a most disturbing fashion. My tailbone was absolutely in agony. I thought it was going to explode and sent my bones flying in all directions. Then all of a sudden there was this soundless pop — I yelled in surprise — and my feet were soaked in hot water. Then I understood the giant pads. And I was really glad that we hadn’t called the taxi 20 minutes later than we did!

She led me down the hall to a proper labor/delivery room and Zaubi came after with our stuff. It was a very large, pleasant room with big windows and — ooh la la — a big bathtub. I was still hooked up to the blasted monitors but now they were attached to a wireless monitor instead of a big one. Poor Zaubi had the task of holding onto the wireless monitor and following me around as I lurched around the room, hunched over, pounding my stress balls together. I felt so sick from the pain but I couldn’t see anywhere to throw up if necessary, except the bathtub, and I didn’t want to do that. None of it made any sense to me. If I was so little dilated, why did my waters break already? And why were the pains so painful and so close together? The book said I was supposed to have at least 3 minutes of resting time in between.

After about 20 minutes of this someone asked if I wanted to get in the bathtub. Hooray! I thought. I’d taken a lot of hot baths in the past few weeks and they helped me relax a lot. So they filled up the bathtub and I got in, still with the stupid monitors eating holes into my flesh. What a disappointment? The bath was not actually HOT. It was only WARM. And they wouldn’t let me put anymore hot water in it, and moreover, they had me go in this all fours position in it, I guess to take the weight of my stomach off, but it left my back sticking out and so I was cold. Gaaaah. They measured again and I was at 5cm. Bleh.

At this point my stomach started doing pushing motions of its own accord. I had absolutely not control over it whatsoever. They were like “Don’t push!” and I was like “I’m not!!” But I couldn’t halt it. It was like my uterus decided, all of a sudden, that it was dead sick of being pregnant and wanted to get the baby OUT as quickly as possible. I’ve never felt such an intense feeling, the feeling of my uterus making its own decisions like that. They said something about giving me some drug to make the uterus relax and stop being so crazy but I don’t know if they ever did: I never saw them put anything in the arm tube thing, and it didn’t say anything about it on the birth report. Perhaps there simply wasn’t time.

A short time passed and then they did another examination, and then made me turn over. Ahhhh. Now my back got to be in the water. Much better. But they kept grabbing my knees and holding them apart. I didn’t want my knees apart. I didn’t get it, but whatever they were saying just went over my head. It turned out that I had gone from 5cm to 10cm –fully dilated — in the space of about 10 minutes, and now it was the right time to push. Thank goodness! thought I when I finally understood it. All the books say that after the pain of the contractions, pushing is so much easier and less painful.

They were wrong.

At this point it’s worth noting that they were saying everything in German, and Zaubi was translating. My brain was just not functioning well. So they would yell Atmen! And Zaubi would say Breathe! Breathe slower! Now push! now don’t! I felt like I was insane, in some awful nightmare of pain and people grabbing my knees and telling me to breathe. Moreover, all the hospital staff were required to wear face masks because of swine flu so they all looked like aliens to me.

That pushing was, bar none, the worst thing I have ever felt. By a magnitude of I don’t know what. I am not a stranger to pain, and I’m good at being a stoic. But the pain of having this baby was so fantastically horrible that it was like being in some kind of horror movie. During the pushing I thought I would die of it. I remember this quiet, clear little voice in my head saying people cannot get through pain like this. I don’t know how many pushing attempts there were — at some point they said Do you want to feel her head? and I shouted NO! very loudly and rudely. I was having trouble modulating my voice. I was yelling angrily with every push — I was so mad that it was taking what seemed like forever and the book lied about the pushing being better — but they told me to stop because it was wasted energy, and I had to put the energy into pushing. So after that I didn’t yell any more, though I remembering kind of dry heaving a few times because the pain was so bad.

Then there was one really awful push, and I screamed. I am not a screamer. I never scream. But that pain was so horrible I couldn’t help it. And there was this weird slithering feeling, and poof! my stomach completely deflated and they plopped this sodden baby onto my stomach. And she was purple. And didn’t cry. I felt so freaked out.

I thought mothers are supposed to weep with joy and feel a massive rush of love when their baby pops out, but I didn’t at all. I was thinking what in the heck is this slippery silent purple thing sitting on my stomach?!. And it was uncomfortable, because she was still attached to the cord, which was still inside me, and so it was annoyingly taut and pulling on my insides. Gaaaah again.

But she stopped being blue quite quickly, and they cut her cord — or Zaubi did — and then she cried or whimpered or something a little bit. But I still didn’t understand what I was supposed to do with her. And then they started teasing me to push again, to get rid of the placenta. I was so tired, and disturbed that I didn’t feel all excited and motherly, and I was illogically feeling guilty that I had yelled too much, or not done well enough, or some such. I just wanted to crawl under something and disappear.

I couldn’t see my legs or anything under the water, and also illogically, I thought it was because the bathtub was made of pink material. But in fact it was because the water was dark with blood. For some reason I had been thinking that I hadn’t lost any blood. Anyway, I climbed out of the tub and I think I took a shower. I have a weird vague memory of taking a shower hose and trying to get all this strange white waxy goo off my stomach and chest. Then I somehow ended up lying on a bed clutching the baby — who had turned a more normal color — while they stitched me up, and the stitching took forever, and was kind of annoying, but it wasn’t a big deal.

I understand now why people get epidurals. But even if I had wanted one, there simply wasn’t time. The baby was born at 11:58am, less than 2 hours after I arrived at the hospital.

The midwife who came by today for the home visit told me that people with short labors are not necessarily lucky although everyone thinks they are. They feel the same amount of pain as the longer ones, but in a much shorter period of time. Akin to being run over by a train, is what I think she said. I can definitely vouch for that!

Current Mood:  amused

I am sitting in my living room — arrived home from the hospital yesterday. I am not wearing anything except a hideous pair of disposable, white net underwear that they gave me in the hospital.

Why?

Because I, and the clothes I was recently wearing, in addition to about half a dozen towels/pillowcases/cloth diapers, am covered with milk, spitup, pee and bright yellow liquidy baby poop. Moreover, I still can’t button up my pants due to an interesting pot belly that I have to hold in place so it doesn’t fall out when I walk around. I have developed enormous uncomfortable porn-star breasts, I am still leaking fresh gore in disturbing amounts, I can’t sit down properly due to some very inconveniently placed stitches, and I can’t pee without spasms of agony because I have road rash on my girlie parts. I’m hungry and tired and my hair needs washing and I’m pretty sure I stink. And there is a really grumpy person howling in my bedroom.

(But she’s awfully cute)

Parenthood is fun!