Ellie’s hair is finally long enough for her to have bed head! Hooray!
And in case you’re wondering, yes, blond hair is very hard to photograph, particularly when there isn’t much of it! (And especially particularly when the subject of the photograph keeps trying to turn her head to look at you!)
One of Nik’s current tennis players was one of my very first students, in 2005. She was in 6th grade and I was a first-year teacher. She, blessedly, was quiet and studious and didn’t cause me any trouble (unlike a few others in her class). This year, she is turning 18 and invited us to come to her birthday party. EIGHTEEN!!!! That makes me old! Normally, I wouldn’t have made a present for one of Nik’s players (because I would never have time) but K is special to me and so, I decided to make her this little bag – from this great tutorial from Noodlehead. I figure it’s the least I can do to thank her for putting up with that crazy class and all my new teacher mistakes!
I had such fun choosing these fabrics, all of which I had in my stash. I lined it with a red polka dot and added a light-yellow pocket, just for fun.
Here’s Ellie with the bag, to give you a little perspective on its size.
And here’s the little thief in action.
See that mischievous glint in her eyes? 🙂 I wish you could have heard her laughing!
This was a one-nap project (plus about 20 minutes last night). I will definitely be making more of these!
And yes, I’m finally almost finished with my banner for church – finished enough that I felt like I could take the time to sew something else.
One more piece of evidence that Ellie is growing up:
in the chair, no stool, feeling very proud!
This past weekend was a fun but hectic one for us. We hosted Nik’s tennis team on Saturday night for the annual team dinner/Four On The Couch tournament. We made Chipotle-style black bean and rice burritos and WAY overestimated the amount of food that 20 teenagers would eat. (Yes, we took notes for next year!)
Here’s Ellie, smiling at A, one of my former students. He’s MUCH bigger than he was in sixth grade! He’s a junior now and while bigger, he still has the same personality. Nik has several of my former students on his team, which I love.
So then on Sunday after church, we invited a few friends over to help us eat the leftovers. Sunday evening, some friends from our small group came over for dinner before our small group, which has 14 adults and 12 children.
All in all, we figure that we hosted 50-60 people over the weekend! Ellie was a bit overwhelmed, I think!
And, I proved that 37 cloth napkins is NOT cloth napkin nirvana as I’d previously thought. I guess I need to make a few more!
Here’s how!
This post is part of my series, “Kickin’ It Old Skool: Why and How We Are Old-Fashioned” or KIOS for short. If you’re new to the series, please read my disclaimer before continuing on. I’m keeping a table of contents to this series here so you can see what I’ve already written about and what more there is to come.
This is Part 3b. Please also see Part 3a, Part 3c, and Part 3d with more of my thoughts on this subject.
Thanks to those of you who have shared with me your thoughts on yesterday’s post. It was getting way too long so I finally had to stop typing and hit “publish”. But here are a few more thoughts that I have on this subject.
1. The best place for a woman to labor is where she feels the most comfortable. So if that is the hospital, great. If that’s at home, great. For me, it was at the birth center…and it was great! I have a friend who feels the most comfortable in a hospital setting and has successfully delivered two babies naturally in hospitals. It certainly can be done and is done, every day. Unfortunately, if you want to deliver in a hospital setting, you just need to have a better birth plan and generally need to advocate for yourself more (as my above-mentioned friend did).
2. My greatest concern is with women who either don’t really know that natural birth is a good option or who think that having an epidural has no consequences other than pain relief (i.e. that an epidural is only a good thing with no negative effects). If a woman is fully educated about the pros and cons of natural labor or having an epidural, if she is fully aware of all of her options, and still chooses the epidural route, that’s her choice. I’m just saddened when I hear discussions in which an epidural is just considered a matter of course – as if it’s no big deal. Sadly, it is a big deal – it’s a major medical intervention into a natural process.
3. I know epidurals are sometimes medically necessary. I have a family member and a friend who both dearly wanted to deliver naturally but in the end, they needed that epidural to help them relax and fully dilate. This is a completely different issue than point #2.
4. I know that C-sections are sometimes medically necessary. In the event that we’re going to lose the mother or the baby, then by all means, I’m grateful that we have this medical technology available to us. What I am NOT glad about is the sky-high C-section rates at almost every hospital in the country. It’s the medically unnecessary C-sections that make me sad – not just the scheduled C-sections but the ones that are caused by all the unnecessary interventions in the hours before the C-section.
5. I think my last post came out as fairly anti-hospital and I have to apologize for that. For Nik and I, yes, the hospital became a source of distress rather than comfort for us so we decided to switch (see point #1). However, there are many situations in which there are complications in labor and women need additional help. In this case, yes, it’s good that the medical help is available. There is a hospital quite close to the birth center where we delivered Ellie. We were prepared to have to transfer there if we needed help.
6. In my ideal world, all pregnant woman would be taken care of in the midwifery model of care. Ideally, birth centers would be attached to (or very near) hospitals so that women could labor in a quiet, calm setting with medical care close by if needed. If this was the norm, rather than the exception, I think we would see the rates of C-sections drop dramatically in our country.
7. In my ideal world, every woman would know at least one other woman who had delivered naturally. Stephanie (who I’ve never met – thanks for commenting) left a comment on my last post saying,
I didn’t know anyone who delivered med-free, but I was determined with my second birth, and I did it!
Hooray! Go Stephanie! Now she can be that one person to all the other women in her life! I think as a nation, we’ve lost that collective memory of what it’s like to deliver naturally. So I’m trying to add my voice to the chorus to bring that memory back.
This post is part of my series, “Kickin’ It Old Skool: Why and How We Are Old-Fashioned” or KIOS for short. If you’re new to the series, please read my disclaimer before continuing on. I’m keeping a table of contents to this series here so you can see what I’ve already written about and what more there is to come.
This is Part 3a. Please also see Part 3b, Part 3c, and Part 3d with more of my thoughts on this subject.
Long before I met Nik, I knew that if I was ever blessed to be pregnant, I wanted to deliver naturally. I had the beautiful examples of my mother, sister, and sister-in-laws to inspire me that a natural childbirth was the better way.
However, until I was pregnant with Ellie and learning more about pregnancy and childbirth, I didn’t understand why natural childbirth was better. I just thought, “Clearly, delivering a baby the way God designed the process to work is the best.” In my research, however, I learned about the incredibly intricate and fine-tuned process that a labor and delivery truly is. I learned about the cascade of hormones that helps the mama and baby work together to have a successful birth. I learned that when a woman is allowed to labor how she wants to, the vast majority of the time, there are no complications.
I also learned about how an epidural completely screws up this fine-tuned system, rendering it ineffective. This in turn leads to a number of complications, including longer labors (usually with much longer pushing sessions); increased complications with the delivery, and increased rates of perineal trama, including more tearing. There is also lots of anectodal evidence that epidurals lead to more C-sections, although there’s some controversy attached to this assertion and I don’t think it’s been statistically proven. (I know there are times when an epidural is medically necessary and beneficial but those are rare.)
(There’s lots of info on the web about the science of labor and delivery so I’m not going to link to any specific sites. If you’re interested in this, the best book I know of is called Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering, written by a pediatrician.)
I became convinced I wanted to have a natural labor, not just because it was cool, but because it was the safest and best thing to do for my baby and for myself. Nik and I never managed to find a childbirth class to take* so we just read and re-read our books**, practiced breathing, talked through what I wanted in terms of help (which ended up being not at all what I wanted!), and prepared ourselves at home. We also made the decision to deliver at Special Beginnings Birth Center. The more I read, the more nervous I became about delivering in a hospital. I was scared that I would be forced to accept interventions that I didn’t want and not allowed to do what was best for my body during the delivery. When I was 26 weeks pregnant, we switched to Special Beginnings and were immensely grateful that we did.
Ellie at about a minute or two old (I don’t think we even knew she was a girl yet!) Read Ellie’s birth story here.
Many times, I hear women saying (to another woman who delivered naturally), “Oh, you’re really strong and amazing. I’m just not that tough.” Or, “I could never do that. I can’t take the pain.”
This saddens my heart because I truly believe that those are lies that Satan feeds to women through our culture, lies that diminish their self-worth, that cause them to think that their bodies are inferior, that cause them to question the wisdom of their Creator God who made them perfectly. The problem is that our current medical system is set up to cause women to fail if they want to deliver naturally. If you deliver in a hospital, you have to fight to be allowed to walk around, to eat, to not be attached to a monitor, to not push on your back. All of these things force women towards needing an epidural and possibly a C-section.
The other day, Nik, Ellie, and I were out for dinner in a very small restaurant and there was another family there, including a pregnant teenager, maybe seventeen years old. She was due in a couple months and I so desperately wanted to tell her,
Your body is perfectly created to give birth. You ARE strong enough to do this. If you let your body do what it was designed to do, you will be able to do it. Trust in your body! Trust in yourself. Trust in your baby.
I didn’t say anything and maybe I should have. But part of the problem is that hospital policies don’t let women’s bodies do what they are designed to do and so they do desperately feel the need for pain relief measures and there’s no shame in that.
Some day, I would love to be an advocate and helper for women as they undertake one of the most amazing tasks of their lives. In the meantime, every pregnant woman I meet, I try to say,
“Isn’t it amazing the way our bodies are created to do this? Giving birth is one of the coolest things I ever did. I’m glad you get to do it, too.”
Thoughts? Reactions? Let me hear them in the comments!
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*Note that I am NOT recommending that you skip a childbirth class! I still wish we would have taken one!
**Our favorite pregnancy/childbirth books:
Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn by Penny Simkin – if you only read one book, this is the best one.
The Birth Partner, also by Penny Simkin – a lot of the information is repeated from her other book but it’s nice for the dad to read – because it’s written from the birth partner’s perspective
Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering by Sarah Buckley
Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin
A long time ago, I told you about Ellie’s new skill of stacking up her rings, not just taking them off. Finally, here’s proof from when she was almost 15 months.
Salmon and Souvlaki 