Baby Phoebe
phoebe
Elfing Oneself
UncategorizedThanks to OfficeMax, I “elfed” my little family. My mom chastised me for doing it without Phoebe’s “permission”. My ex-step-mom Elynn was disturbed by so much shimmying. And my friend Tori identified just what it is that makes it so creepy: “Frozen expressions on dancing bodies.” (All blame should go to wjcohen, who turned me on to the site in the first place.) Anyway, you be the judge: http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1391444500.
P.S. You can also Scrooge Yourself.
Muttering
UncategorizedInspired by the birth of our baby girl, my travel companion, sometime-collaborator, and life-long love, Sari (who’s also a published fiction writer and a former Stegner and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellow) has joined the blogging ranks.
Titled “Muttering,” her online journal uses the occasion of first-time motherhood as its jumping-off point. Get it? “Mothering”? “Muttering”? Pretty clever, I dare say. Anyway, Sari’s been periodically jotting down her insights, impressions, questions, prose poems, and elegant mini-essays since the little one was born back in July, so there’s a nice backlog of material for those interested. (And comments are welcome — Sari loves a good dialogue).
Check it out here. (And don’t ask me why she didn’t host the blog on LJ!)
Vocabulary Words Acquired in the Last Three Months
UncategorizedCradle Cap • Burp Cloth • Onesie • Latch • Breast Friend • Fourth Trimester • Swaddle • Bugaboo • Activity Mat • Co-Sleeper • Pack-n-Play • Gripe Water
Geysers of Pumpkin Sauce
UncategorizedThat’s what was coming out of Phoebe’s butt this afternoon in the middle of changing her. It got on everything: her onesie, the cloth covering the diaper pad, the diaper pad itself. And nothing would make it stop. Not multiple wipes, not a new diaper, nor the one after that. In the confusion, Sari slapped a diaper on her, and somehow not only put it on backward but inside-out! Sleep deprivation leads to creative “solutions.”
In the end, when we put the third diaper on her (properly), the orange stream had slowed down to a trickle. I’m sure that one day epic poems will tell of this poop, but for now this post will have to do.
Other than that, everything’s going great!
Pushing Phoebe Into the World
UncategorizedThe nonchalent way Dr. Russell said “It’s time to start pushing” really caught me off guard. Even though we’d been given that extra time, and even though Sari had finally fully dilated, I was still very much anticipating that a C-section was imminent. After all, as far as I knew, the baby was still “malpositioned,” and Sari still seemed in a passive state of her labor. But I figured Dr. Russell wanted to give it the ol’ college try. She even made us open the room’s shades, letting in the late afternoon light to create more of an “active environment.”
Phoebe Feuer Neufeld
UncategorizedThanks to my dad, we got back to the hospital by about 1 a.m. They put Sari back in triage for an initial exam, where we received two big surprises. One was that she was dilated up to 7 centimeters! The other was that her waters hadn’t actually broken. What we thought was her waters breaking in small trickles was actually just some small self-repairing leakage. No matter, though, 7 cm was definitely good reason to have her back at the hospital. They admitted Sari and gave us a labor room (one with a jacuzzi!). And they called Dr. Russell, and said she was coming in.
Despite Gabriela’s and my best efforts to keep Sari drinking, they found her slightly dehydrated (the barf in the shower probably hadn’t helped), so they hooked her up to an IV, as well as to a fetal monitor. Then we got back to helping her labor.