The "right" way to give birth

(I guess I'm on a news kick lately, guys.)

I love Rebecca Traister. Here's why:

I have met babies born at home and in hospitals and through vaginas and through surgery, and I call total bullshit on the idea that there is any one path you can take, or any song you can play as your child is being pushed into the world, that can determine who that child is going to turn out to be. Make the choices that work best for your family, for your body, for your budget and for your sense of well-being. But don't buy into the idea that those choices become your earliest parenting gold stars, or your scarlet letters of birthing shame.

Sing it, sister!

For the record, I have friends who had homebirths, friends who attempted homebirths, friends who had unmedicated hospital births, friends who had medicated hospital births, friends who had emergency/unplanned C-sections, and friends who had planned C-sections. I had a scheduled C-section myself. Although I didn't love recovering from the surgery, I have zero regrets about having had a section, and it is one of the few things in my entire conception/pregnancy/birth/postpartum experience that DIDN'T make me feel like a failure. It irritates me when people (like my therapist) try to make me explore my feelings about having a C-section, as if there is no way a person could come out of such an experience mentally unscarred. I got my baby. We are both alive and healthy. What more could I want?

For my PTBD peeps

And anyone else who's interested, from the April 2009 issue of The Atlantic:

The Case Against Breastfeeding
"In certain overachieving circles, breast-feeding is no longer a choice—it’s a no-exceptions requirement, the ultimate badge of responsible parenting. Yet the actual health benefits of breast-feeding are surprisingly thin, far thinner than most popular literature indicates. Is breast-feeding right for every family? Or is it this generation’s vacuum cleaner—an instrument of misery that mostly just keeps women down?"

Interesting to chew on, no matter what your opinions and experience of breastfeeding. (Link via The Juggle.)

Who what when where why

In the last week or two, Bat Girl has suddenly taken to asking lots of questions as her primary mode of conversation. Who's that? What are they doing? Why are they doing that? Even if something could be conveyed with a statement/request ("Tell me a story about Snow White") she phrases it as a question ("Mommy, what happened to Princess Snow White*?") If there is no obvious question to be asked, she will still come up with one somehow.

Example: This morning, while changing BG's diaper, I noticed...something...hanging out of her nose. I reach up, remove the thing, and flick it into the trash.

Bat Girl: "Mommy, what did you get out of my nose?"

Me: "A booger."

A moment's thought. Then: "Can I see the booger?"



*A few weeks ago we saw a play put on by our neighborhood children's theater company (the children of some friends of ours were in the production), a sort of revamped version of Snow White, vaguely Disneyfied but with jazz hands. In this production, they keep referring to Snow White as "Princess," and she also has a sister, Lily White. BG, having never been exposed to Snow White before, concluded that the main character's name was "Princess White." Ha! We gently corrected that to "Princess Snow White," which is how she refers to her now.