Things I Miss About America

In no particular order, and with no particular purpose, I submit...

50 Things I Miss About America

1. My family
2. Traffic lights
3. Prairie Farms milk
4. The public library 
5. Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino
6. Target 
7. Squirrels 
8. Public restrooms 
9. Central air conditioning 
10. American church services 
11. Sleeping without mosquito nets
12. Huggies Overnites
13. Privacy 
14. Free shipping
15. Blueberries 
16. Local agricultural holidays 
17. Clothing stores with the same garment in multiple sizes 
18. Soft couches 
19. Putting away my own laundry/knowing where to find my socks
20. Garage door openers 
21. Soft serve ice cream 
22. Public parks 
23. Yard sales
24. Clean and uniform eggs 
25. Autumn 
26. Kids’ menus
27. Water pressure
28. Baseball 
29. Whiter whites 
30. Arby’s curly fries 
31. Historical tourist attractions 
32. Dollar bins 
33. Garnier Fructis 
34. Evergreen trees 
35. Child-sized clothing hangers 
36. Dishwashers 
37. Non-metric measurements 
38. Office Depot
39. Peaches
40. The roads…so deliberate, so well-marked, so deliciously passable
41. Pediatricians
42. Being able to hold hands with my husband in public 
43. Video streaming 
44. Cream cheese
45. Using my toothbrush without shaking the ants off first
46. Church potlucks 
47. Price tags 
48. Blending in
49. Carpet 
50. Winter

Rationale for Tot School…and Why You are Not a Bad Mom Even if you Never Do Any of the Cute Things You Pin

For several months now, I’ve been posting pictures to a Facebook album called Tot School, showing some of the learning activities I do with the kids. The reason for the album is to put ideas out there for any other parents of young kids who like to do fun pre-preschool stuff too. I was nervous about this right from the beginning, though, as it has the potential to look like showing off. Kind of gives off the vibe, “I not only having my 2-year-old painting triangles – I made the paint myself out of MILK! What do YOU do?” My fears were revived when one of my friends approached me the other day and said good-naturedly, “I saw your facebook album, and I thought, ‘I am a terrible mother!’” Even though she was joking, I felt the time was ripe to explain why and how we do tot school.

There are four main reasons why I tot school my kids. (And just to clear up any ambiguity, I didn’t create the phrase “tot school”; it’s in use on a number of blogs that are aimed at early childhood education. It seems to focus primarily on ages 1-3, and there are even a good number of such activities aimed at babies.)

1. It’s fun for me. Everyone needs a hobby, and mine is tot school. I get the same kick out of creating a sensory bin or a theme-related gross motor exercise as many people do out of sewing, scrapbooking, or hiking. I love to unwind after a hard day by staging a date with my laminator. Yes, I own a laminator.

2. It’s fun for my kids. Rose absolutely loves tot school and usually requests to “do some school” several times a day. For a really active, rowdy kid (like Everett is turning out to be), our activities would look a lot different and a lot less “schoolish”. But with open-mindedness the right sort of planning to address each personality and learning style, I think a version of tot school can be fun for just about any kid.

3. It’s a bonding experience. Like most kids her age, Rose likes to learn, but I think even more important to her motivation is that school is a little piece of the day when I focus entirely on her and we get to enjoy doing stuff (basically playing) together. This is a big part of what I love about it as well. For us, tot school fills that need for mother-daughter time and shared experiences.

4. It is one way of helping my kids grow healthy brains and prepare them for lifelong learning. I do think there is some benefit to the activities we do. Most importantly, I think it shows my kids how much fun learning can be and ignites an excitement for reading and exploring their world, which will hopefully serve them well later, both in school and in general life.

Note that I said this is “one way” of preparing my kids for school and life. I certainly don’t think it is the only way, nor do I think you are setting your child up for academic failure if you don’t do tot school per se. I excelled in school despite the fact that my own mom never heard of or attempted to implement tot school. This is not to say that my mom didn’t prepare me for formal learning, though. She certainly did, through informal teaching and mostly just through using everyday situations as opportunities to discuss and learn.

I do think it is important to help your young child develop a healthy mind, but I don’t think there is any one method for doing this. Parents who engage with their children and enjoy doing things and going places together as a family will naturally do what is necessary to help their children learn. God created children to explore and inquire, to challenge themselves, and to develop healthy minds. Given a safe, loving and stimulating environment with an active caregiver, and barring the interference of any learning disabilities, they will do so without any fancy activities or equipment.

So if you see pins for creative and artsy preschool activities and feel a sense of guilt that those kind of things don’t appeal to you, or if they do appeal to you on the surface but actually spending the time to do them dampens your enthusiasm, stop right there. You are not doing anything wrong, even by foregoing tot school entirely. I’m not an expert on early education, but I got some training in it and have learned a lot in my own self-directed learning since then. From my perspective, this is what you should focus on doing for the first 3-5 years of your child’s life, whether or not you tot school:

1. Interact. Talk with your kid, do everyday stuff together, enjoy experiences together. Your kid will learn best from the things that happen in the course of life by simply talking to you and watching you. Keep your screen time to a minimum during your children’s waking hours; those are your hours to engage their minds simply by being mentally and emotionally available to them. Be watchful for teachable moments.

2. Teach practical life skills. Keep your eyes open for the sorts of things your child might be ready to tackle next: self-dressing, cleaning up toys after play, drinking from a big kid cup, helping you bake, using good manners, folding dish cloths. These things are hugely foundational for the kind of ordered thinking and self-discipline needed for later school success. It takes an initial time investment to teach these things, but then having your kid be a little more self-sufficient frees up some of your time too. (I just want to confess here, I haven’t done well at this with Rose. Now we are starting to back up some from schoolish stuff and do more of these kinds of skills because I see how important they are.)

3. Love your kid. No matter how cognitively advanced your kid may or may not be, their success in school is tremendously dependent on their emotional health and the strength of their family bonds. Meet their physical needs, spend time bonding one-on-one with each child doing the things they like best, show them that you are always there for them, help them build a healthy self-image and respect for others, teach them about God’s love in meaningful ways, plan fun family times, and prioritize the health of your marriage.

If you do these things, I really think you can’t go wrong. Living in Africa has reminded me that even in families where the parents have little formal education themselves and don’t purposefully set out to prepare their children academically for school from an early age, children can succeed because they have healthy families and healthy childhoods. In the situations where they have been adequately nourished and raised in a secure environment, by the time they start school they have spent six years exploring, observing, and imitating. They enter school with the best piece of educational equipment: a healthy mind, ready for formal learning.

The time you could spend tot-schooling could just as profitably be spent investing extra energy in these essential things. 

And for those of you who do get as excited as I do about threading beads onto pipe cleaners, freezing toys inside blocks of ice, or making bath paint from shaving foam – stay tuned! The next few blog posts will be for you. I’ll be sharing some of my favorite sources and our own ever-changing method of doing tot school.

Breast is Best, and I am the worst.

If I could sum up the most important thing I have learned in my almost three years of parenting, it would be “Don’t judge.” I’m not by nature a merciful person. I tend not to give myself much grace, nor others either, and that has caused me a lot of frustration over the years. I’d like to think I’m improving on that front, and much of that is due to the hard-knocks education of surviving my children’s early years.

Maybe it started with the fact that I couldn’t breastfeed Rose. Breastfeeding is a big deal these days. The tables have turned over the past couple of decades, and now it seems the breastfeeders have claimed the moral high ground and feel justified in declaring (or at least privately basking in) their superiority over their bottle-feeding comrades. I probably would have taken that route myself had it not been for the cleft palate thing. My baby was 100% unable to breastfeed, and the only way to keep her alive was to let go of the vision I had of my baby peacefully nursing in bed with me and instead to embrace 2 AM dates with my Medela Pump-in-Style (I’m not sure I will ever hate any sound as much as that of the rhythmic electric sucking of that infernal machine), while my husband was the one sleeping on the couch with my newborn by his side, getting to be the one to nourish and bond with her by painstakingly squirting tiny amounts of milk into her mouth in rhythm with her instinctual but ineffective attempts to suck.

It was a few months before I stopped crying about my own sense of loss, and several more before I could let go of my desire to explain myself to everyone who saw me offering her a bottle in public. I wanted them to know how well I had prepared myself for a nursing relationship that turned out not to be possible, how hard I had worked to give her as much pumped milk as I could, how hard it was to feed a special needs baby…but as it turns out, it’s rather awkward to start volunteering that information to perfect strangers.

So I would sit there feeling ashamed and misunderstood. In some cases, I’m sure I projected all those attitudes from my own insecurity and people were really thinking nothing of it. But I know my own prideful heart, so I would be naïve to think I wasn’t sometimes right. I’m sure I was boosting some people’s ego by my apparent lack of concern for giving my child the very best.

So the first lesson I learned was the importance of giving others the benefit of the doubt. Even though I was blessed enough to be able to have a wonderful nursing relationship with my second baby (one that is still thriving at 14 months and that I cherish every day), those first couple of months of extreme pain and exhaustion reminded me that breastfeeding, even when it ends up working, is rarely as simple as just deciding to go for it. Without a great support system, in less-than-ideal circumstances, or in those cases where the baby or the mother’s body simply won’t cooperate, I can 100% understand why someone would decide that it’s not the best choice for their family to keep fighting the battle. Families with newborns are nearly always under tremendous pressures of various kinds, and there may be things they have to prioritize above their desire to nurse. We never know what someone else is going through.

The other lesson I learned is that I can’t really justify my own parenting choices, or anything else in my life, to others and expect them to understand. We will all be misunderstood frequently, by many people, for many of our choices. The desire to feel superior to others and to justify ourselves at their expense is central to our fallen human nature. We can and must work hard to tame that pride within ourselves, over and over, as we repeatedly fail to approach others with the proper grace. And we cannot expect others to have conquered that in themselves. We have to live with knowing that other people will never fully approve of us, and that that is ok, because we do not have to answer to them (unless they ask us, in which case we can unload all of our cleft palate back story). There is so much freedom in letting go of that Mommy Shame, even for the thousandth time.

Breastfeeding, or the lack thereof, has been just one of many aspects of childrearing that have shown me how little control I have and how unable I am to handle, much less thrive in the midst of, parenting two small children. I could go on about my failure to have the natural childbirth I wanted to pursue, or about my failure to have either of children sleeping through the night by their first birthday, or about 18 months of futile potty training, or about how my home can go from spotless to health hazard in just 48 hours when my housekeepers leave for the weekend, or about disregarding the warning on the Bumbo seat and sending my 8-month-old plummeting head first from the kitchen counter…Suffice it to say, I am nowhere close to having it all together, despite my quest to get that magical snapshot of toddler-management bliss and frame it and pretend that our life is actually like that. I have two domestic employees and a fantastically supportive husband, and I can still barely make it through the day.

There is a part of me that will always long to be that mom who is the embodiment of all the calm collectedness of Supernanny, the creativity of Martha Stewart, and the domestic charm of June Cleaver. But all things considered, I guess I would rather be the frazzled mommy learning slowly and imperfectly to embody the grace of Jesus Christ, accepting it for myself and extending it to others. May I always endeavor to let Him work in me.

It's been a while

I haven't had time to write for the past almost three years. I don't have time now, either, but I think I will anyway. A lot of thoughts have floated in and out of my chronically sleep-deprived head which I wanted to tell the world about, but at the end of the day all I could do was fall into an exhausted heap. These thoughts were probably incredibly insightful, so it's a real shame that they have been lost, but it was either let them go or shrivel up and die at the keyboard.
Parenting is hard. Nothing has ever been so effective at dismantling my pride, at showing me without a shred of ambiguity that I am inadequate and ignorant. And then I moved to Africa, so I got another dose of humility from having not just the regular degree of inadequacy and ignorance that characterizes most parents worldwide, but a whole special brand of inadequacy and ignorance reserved only for foreigners trying to find their feet in a host culture.
Let this serve as my depressing summary of the past 33 months, which, while hard, have actually been the absolute opposite of depressing. This is real life, and it's what I have always wanted: a good challenge.

Everett's Birth Story

I had every intention of going past my due date. I had been gearing up for the inevitable induction battle with my OB for weeks. I had no signs that labor was approaching, and at 38 weeks Rose came down with bronchiolitis that brought us to the ER in the middle of the night on Christmas. A few days later Tim and I were sick too. I was fine with my baby staying put until we were all better. At 39 weeks and 3 days I decided to launch a house-cleaning initiative. Since I was feeling too pregnant to do much, this meant that I put Tim to work. I decided we would divide the house into five zones and clean one every day so that the house would be spotless by my due date.

That night I had frequent but only mildly uncomfortable Braxton-Hicks throughout the evening. I went to bed around 9:00. At 11:45 a strong contraction woke me up just as Tim was getting ready to come to bed. I couldn’t sleep after that because the contractions kept coming before I could drift off. I watched the clock. They were 15 minutes apart, then 12, then 10, then 7…at 2:00 I got out of bed and ate some cereal. From 2:00 to 3:00 they were 3-5 minutes apart and quite uncomfortable. I would stop what I was doing and just breathe calmly until they ended. I considered calling Mom, and I considered waking up Tim, but then at 3:00 I suddenly felt sleepy. I sat down to read, and the contractions spaced out some. I went back to bed and drifted off, going in and out of sleep as they continued for the rest of the night.

I woke up at 6:45 to the worst one yet. For the next couple of hours they were very irregular, about 10-20 minutes apart. My daughter woke up, and about 9:00 she was sitting on the potty and I was sitting next to her when I had a strong contraction. I had to get on my hands and knees and moan to get through it. But I thought my body might just be warming up and that the contractions would just fade away at some point.

For the next hour, we tried to get cleaning done, stopping to deal with each contraction as it came. We fell into the following routine: I would tell Tim another one was coming, get down on my knees and lean over something nearby. He would kneel behind me and rub my lower back hard in a circular motion. That ended up being the only strategy we used the entire labor – it never stopped being effective.

At some point during the morning, Tim asked me what the contractions felt like. Drawing upon our shared experiences on our Tanzanian internship, I said they felt a lot like dysentery. Then I amended that to say they felt like someone standing on my bladder while I had dysentery.

Around 10:30 my vocalizing was starting to scare Rose, so we called Mom at work to have her come to our house. She arrived, distracted Rose, and observed us. She said it looked to her like this was the real thing, and she thought we ought to head to the hospital. We started packing up, but we were being casual about it. We called our doula to tell her this might be the day. As I packed, I became more distressed and contractions became more painful. I started to feel urgent about leaving, so we hurried to get ourselves moving. Partway down the road we realized we had left our cell phone at home, so we stopped at my grandmother’s house to borrow hers. She was very excited to be able to help us out.

We stopped at my parents’ house, intending to labor there for a while with no one home. We called the doula again and said contractions had been 7-8 minutes apart for some time, but were becoming intense. She said it probably wasn’t active labor yet and that if we decided to go to the hospital now we should be prepared to resist interventions. I was discouraged to hear that. I ate a cereal bar and then told Tim I wanted to go ahead and leave. We still had a 70-minute drive to get through, and I was starting to wonder how I could cope with the contractions in the car.

While en route, I would turn around and drape my head over the car seat when I felt a contraction coming on. Tim would drive with his left hand and use his right to massage my back with the omni-ball. The pain of the contractions got to the point where I sometimes had to bite down on the car seat, and I was very loud but tried to keep my voice low-pitched. I started to think that if this was still early labor, I wasn’t going to be able to handle it when it got much worse. I decided that if we still had a long way to go when we arrived, I would need to consider an epidural.

Once at the hospital, I had Tim drop me off at the regular entrance to use the public restroom. I made it in and out between contractions, although I’m sure I looked bedraggled to the other people there, and then I had one contraction out by the vending machines with Tim holding me up. We went back out to the car, and I told Tim we should find someplace else to labor for a while, that I didn’t think it was a good idea to get admitted. Contractions were still 7 minutes apart, so I thought we were not progressing yet. He said we needed to go ahead and check in, so I consented. That was a good move.

We walked into L & D, having one contraction on the sidewalk on our way in, and went to the registration area. I told the lady, “I think I might be in labor.” Then I got on the floor for another contraction. I think she was convinced, because she started moving through the paperwork very quickly. One more contraction and a few signatures, and we were ready to go. She told me I was doing a really good job, and that meant a lot to me. I was feeling a little frazzled by that point.

In triage, I changed into my gown and got hooked up to the monitor. Contractions were harder to handle lying down, but not impossible on my side. The nurse checked me, which was more painful than any contraction I’d had. I said, “Please tell me I’m at least a little dilated.” She said, “Honey…” and the way she said “honey”, I was sure she was going to say I was barely started, but she said, “You don’t have much further to go. You’re at 8 cm.” I could have kissed that nurse.

Tim called my mom and the doula (who was shocked). The nurse said, “We better get your water broken.” I said I didn’t want them to break my water. She said, “Are you sure? It’ll go a lot faster once your water is broken.” I said, “I don’t need it to go faster”, which was so true. A couple contractions later, my water broke on its own…

And that’s when I went berserk.

I immediately had the urge to push. I told the nurse, and she said I couldn’t because I wasn’t complete yet. I ignored that because there wasn’t really any way not to push. Some nurses hurried in, and they wheeled me on the bed from triage to my LDR room at the other end of the hospital. I was insane at this point. The physical pain and pressure were suddenly completely overwhelming, and I had just gone from not being sure I was in labor to pushing in a matter of minutes. I was not prepared for that. I was screaming through contractions, and I was pushing even though the nurses kept telling me not to. I would push until the peak of the contraction was past, and then I was able to blow through the rest of it. I started yelling, “No!” and “I can’t do this!” and “Help me!” and “Get him out!” and all the stuff that you hope you won’t say when you’re having a baby.

I had my eyes clenched shut and had a death grip on the side rail of the bed, and I was oblivious to what was happening, but Tim said our trip through the hospital was pretty epic, with the nurses trying to move as fast as they could, me screaming, people dodging to get out of the way, the bed fishtailing…wish I could have seen it. I do remember them telling me I had to let go of the side rail, and in my craziness I wouldn’t. It turns out the bed would just barely fit through the door of the room, and they needed my fingers out of the way so they could squeeze through.

Once in the room, they checked me again and said I was complete (no surprise there; I could have told them that) and directed me to blow through two more contractions while my OB got her scrubs on. By this time I had gotten into the habit of saying no to everything. I was lying on my side, and they said to get on my back, and I said no. They said that if I was going to push like this, then I needed to pull my leg up, and I said no. One of the nurses told me I was putting all my energy into screaming, and it was keeping me from pushing effectively. I continued to scream.

I could kind of tell we were getting nowhere, and I felt like I needed to get on my hands and knees, so I did. Tim said they all looked at each other, and the OB said, “That’ll work.” So I pushed in that position for a couple of contractions, and the baby really started to move and got around my tailbone.

They were having trouble getting the monitor to pick up the baby’s heart tones because my belly was hanging down. One of the nurses said, “The baby’s not doing so well. You need to flip over on your back.” So I did. I honestly don’t know whether they were seeing a problem with the baby, or whether they just weren’t picking anything up because of my position. In any case, I ended up pushing on my back, but by that time, the baby was close enough to coming out that I was able to push him out relatively quickly in that position.

I felt the ring of fire for a couple of pushes, and then they said the head was out and that I should look down and see him. I looked, but my big belly was in the way, so I couldn’t see him yet. A little more pushing, and his arm and shoulder came out. And then all of him. At that point, I felt so relieved, and my sanity instantly returned. I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to say anything stupid. They put him on my belly, and there he was. I thought he was nice. No fireworks really, no supernatural/hormonal surge of maternal instinct, but I liked him.

About five minutes after he was born, my doula Marisha arrived. She felt terrible for missing the birth, but she jumped right in advocating for me. I got to hold Everett for quite a while, almost all the time they were stitching me up, which I think really helped me relax. I had a second degree tear along my episiotomy line from my last birth. I had been afraid of getting stitched without an epidural, but it turned out not to be all that bad. Marisha helped me get started nursing him, and he stayed at the breast for about 45 minutes.

The recovery from this birth has been far and away better than last time. With my first, I had an induction, epidural, episiotomy and vacuum extraction after about 2.5 hours of ineffective pushing, and ended up with a third degree tear and hematoma. This time pushing was much faster, my tear was less severe, and my body was generally not as traumatized. I was up and around some by the next morning and was able to sit in a chair and nurse as soon as we got home. I’ve had more energy to take on breastfeeding and care for my kids. My dad came to see us a few hours after the birth and said how much better I looked this time, and Tim has said the same thing many times over the course of my recovery. I’m very grateful for that, as it was one of my main reasons for wanting a natural birth. I am able to enjoy my baby much more when I am not in so much pain.

As for the birth experience itself, up until the urge to push started, it really was manageable. Very painful, but not excruciating. I think because my contractions never got close together, I was really blessed to have lots of rest time in between them to stay calm and regroup. The experience as a whole was probably the most painful experience I’ve had, but no individual contraction was the worst pain I’ve had. The pushing stage, however, was extremely painful and panic-inducing. I did not find it to be a relief. I felt like my body was out of control and if it lasted very long I wouldn’t be able to take it. I would gladly have asked for something to reduce the pain at that point if I had been able to form a complete sentence or known what to ask for. This was not what I expected. I really wanted an NUCB so that I would have control during the pushing stage, since I hated the feeling of not being able to tell my body what to do when I had my epidural. As it turned out, I still didn’t feel like I had control because my body was doing whatever it wanted against my will, and I couldn’t think clearly to be able to cooperate with the people around me.

As for next time, I have some ideas. I definitely want to find a new caregiver. Even though I have a good relationship with my OB, I never felt she was totally on board with my hopes, and it caused a lot of stress because I started to feel like I couldn’t trust her and didn’t know what she might throw at me in the middle of giving birth. I ended up pushing on my back with my feet in stirrups, and I’m still not sure if it was warranted. She forgot to delay the cord clamping; admittedly, I didn’t give her enough notice to be able to go over my birth plan at the last minute, but I just feel like she wasn’t all that interested in it. When I tore, she said it was “right along the dotted line”, as if she thinks having the episiotomy last time was good for me. The next day, when Tim told her how much better I was recovering this time around, she said something about having to get that first one out of the way so that the second one can go easier. I felt like she was minimizing all the work I did to keep myself healthy and plan for a better birth this time around, instead giving all the credit only to the fact that this was my second birth.

I’m not sure if I want to try to find another place to deliver next time. On the one hand, I didn’t feel totally supported in my birth plan at the hospital. Also, having such a long drive to get there really complicated things. On the other, I kind of feel more secure knowing I have everything the hospital offers to fall back on if things don’t go well - both the medical care and the interventions - should I need them. I know for many people it helps not to have an epidural available, but for me I think it actually helped me to be less panicked. I didn’t put pressure on myself to go natural at all costs, just for as long as I could handle it. As it turned out, we weren’t there long enough for them to interfere a lot with our plans. The postpartum care at our hospital is excellent, and the lactation department is simply fantastic.

All in all, Everett’s birth was a good experience for me, and I do feel empowered by it. At the same time, at the very end it was scarier than I expected. Tim feels very positive about it. He said the whole thing looked much healthier and less scary than Rose’s birth. He was a bit traumatized by seeing all that went on while I was delivering Rose (he had a better view than me!) and has often said, “It looked like they were hurting you.” I felt the same way, that I was helpless and maybe even a little victimized while giving birth to my daughter. This time my body got the baby out on its own, and that was much better all around.

We are enjoying having Everett in our family. I am anxious to see his little personality come out in the coming months, and I can’t wait to see my children become close as they grow up together. We are truly blessed to have had a good birth, and much more so to have an amazing, healthy son.

Everett Christian
January 4, 2012 at 2:55 PM
7 lb. 9 oz. – 21 in.

Rose's Cleft Palate Repair

The following post was written for my fellow cleft moms on Babycenter.

Before surgery & one week after surgery:

It took me long enough, but I’m finally getting around to chronicling Rose’s cleft palate repair – actually, the whole story of her cleft, including before and after surgery.

Rose Kathryn was born May 24, 2010. She had a complete cleft palate. Since there was no cleft lip, this has been (and hopefully will continue to be) her only surgery.
My husband and mother-in-law also both had cleft palate. We did not know about the cleft before Rose was born, but because of the family history, we had known it would be a possibility. We had actually been preparing for Down Syndrome, so were somewhat relieved that she turned out to have a much more treatable health issue.

I exclusively pumped for eight long months! Woohoo! She started on a Haberman feeder, but she couldn’t suck enough to get milk from it, so we were squeezing it for her. She was then switched to a cross-cut preemie nipple and did great with that up until her surgery.
Rose has always gained weight well and met her milestones (apart from speech, of course), for which we are very grateful. She also had reflux and has a non-functioning kidney.

We started out at Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis. In August, we got in to the cleft team at Shriners in Chicago on a cancellation and switched there for financial reasons. It turned out that we were much happier with her care at Shriners.
At her initial appointment, they told us her cleft was quite wide and said she would need to be close to a year old before surgery. They also assessed her hearing and said she would need intubation at the time of the cleft repair.

We are missionaries and were supposed to leave for Africa when Rose was three months old, but because of the surgery we had to stay in the US for an extra year. We had spent the first few months of Rose’s life living in my parents’ spare room while we waited to figure out what our next step was. After getting a timeline to work with from Shriners, we moved to Dallas for the winter so that my husband could do recruiting for our organization.

Rose’s next appointment at Shriners was April 20 of this year. Because our local shriners’ temple was unable to fly us all the way to Chicago for the appointment, we moved back to Illinois on short notice and drove up from there.

At the appointment, they said she was ready for surgery, but they had no openings in the near future. We went home discouraged. But the next day we got a phone call saying there was a cancellation opening on May 2, so we snatched it up!

Rose was eleven months old at her palate repair. Both of my parents took off work and accompanied my husband and me and Rose on the five-hour drive to Chicago.

We stayed at the Ronald McDonald House the night before surgery. Such a wonderful place. Rose loved playing in the “secret treehouse” full of stuffed animals. I love going there for appointments, because there are other moms of cleft kids staying at the RMH, and we can all share stories and tips.

We put Rose to bed early, but woke her up for some late-night avocado before the midnight cut-off for solid foods. We then gave her all the apple juice she would take at each night feeding and in the morning right up until the 9 AM clear liquids cut-off. I was most worried about getting her through the morning without eating (her surgery was at 1 PM), but she did surprisingly well, I guess because she was distracted by all the activity.

When we arrived at the hospital, they did some check-in stuff, made sure she was healthy, got a health history, etc. This took place in a check-in room where there were a few other babies prepping for surgery too. There was a lot of downtime between check-ups, so they let us walk around the hospital while we waited.
After we had been there for a while and seen several nurses, the ENT doctor who was going to do her ear intubation came to see us. He told us that no one had informed him that he was scheduled for surgery that day, and he had patients scheduled at his regular practice. He said we would have to reschedule. I started crying and telling him that we needed to have this surgery that we were moving to Africa! I guess my motherly tears won him over. He grumbled a bit, but said he would do the surgery after all. Whew!

The hardest thing that happened pre-op was that they had to do some bloodwork because Rose was under a year old. We were with her when they drew blood, and of course that was traumatic for her. We took her back out to the waiting room, and she and Nana took a look at the fish tank, which helped her calm down.

Next came the admission room. They asked more questions, checked her out some more, had us meet with the anesthesiologist and the surgeon for more explanations of what would happen. It turns out the cleft surgeon didn’t know he was scheduled for surgery either! He had gotten a call asking if he was on his way, and that was the first he heard about it. So someone in scheduling apparently made a pretty big error there, but amazingly, it worked out and things proceeded as scheduled.
The last thing they did in pre-admission was give her some Versed to calm her down, and then the anesthesiologist took her away. She was zoned from the meds, so she didn’t mind being carried away from us. She looked back at us in a daze and waved bye-bye as the doors shut behind her. We had to leave at that point, but they told us they would put her to sleep with gas before they put her IV in. I was really comforted to hear that.
She was in surgery for 2 hours or so. The ENT doctor came out when he had finished putting tubes in to tell us that part went fine. Then the craniofacial surgeon came out when he was finished to say the whole thing had gone well also. It was a while before they got her awake and moved into her room in the PICU, so it was about 4PM (three hours after surgery began) when DH and I got to come in and see her.

Seeing her right after surgery was the hardest thing ever. For those of you who have yet to go through a surgery with your LO, just know that it's ok and normal to feel overwhelmed and emotional when you see your baby post-op. She was lying kind of limp in the arms of a nurse and crying. The thing that surprised me the most was how her voice sounded, kind of like a barking seal (because of the breathing tube used during surgery). She was obviously in pain and confused. She had a big thread coming out of her mouth (it's a suture that they can use to pull her tongue down and clear her airway if needed), and was bleeding some from the mouth. She had her IV, and was hooked up to monitors for respiration, heart rate and oxygen level.

For the first three hours after surgery, she drifted in and out of sleep, and she cried all the time that she was awake. My mom, husband, and I took turns holding her all evening, and we all cried a lot. When my mom came in the first time, I was holding Rose and crying. She told me, “You had to do it.” And somehow that was exactly what I needed to hear. Around 7 PM, she woke up and didn't cry, just sat there looking miserable. But that was a relief!

I was the only one allowed to stay overnight with her, and they were really kind to let me sleep in a regular hospital bed with her. I put her to sleep for the night by reading Goodnight Moon, like we usually do. I kept reading it until she just fell asleep. She only woke up twice during the night, about the time she was due for her next pain medication. I would summon the nurses and they gave me the medicine to give her. We would also try to give her some apple juice or water while she was awake. She would fuss for about 10 minutes until the meds kicked in and then go back to sleep. At 2 AM when she was awake, she tried to smile. =)

In the morning, things looked so much better. She was smiling some and feeling ok except when her meds started to wear off, but she was able to get by with only Tylenol and Motrin. They capped her IV, unhooked her monitors and let her eat some real food for breakfast (yogurst, pureed oatmeal, formula, etc.). It was a big relief to get the suture taken out of her mouth!

Later in the morning she was moved to a regular room. She started crawling around that morning as well. We walked around and took Rose to the play areas inside and outside the hospital. For meals, we brought her to the patient dining hall. At lunch, we enjoyed a concert by a bunch of junior high orchestra kids. She ate decently, but took less and less formula.
She spent one more night at the hospital because we had a long drive and they didn’t want her in the car all day so soon after surgery. I stayed with her all night again. It was about the same as the night before, but less scary without the monitors beeping.

She handled the drive home pretty well. She spent two weeks in arm restraints, which didn't seem to bother her at all, although she stopped pulling up and cruising, and then had to spend some time catching up again on her gross motor skills afterwards.
She had to eat by syringe for two weeks, and that was rough because she wouldn't take any liquid from the syringe after we left the hospital. We diluted her baby food with water, made "smoothies" with fruit, yogurt and milk, whatever we could do to keep her hydrated, and she was ok.

She became more like herself every day, and after about ten days she was no different than before the surgery, except that she did become more snuggly and was shy of strangers for a while. For several days she didn't make any sounds, but within couple of weeks she was saying "mama" and "nana" like before.
The week after surgery, she spiked a fever one night. We called Shriners and they said to treat it with fever reducer, which we did, and it went down the next day. A couple days after that, my husband thought he saw a hole in her palate. She also had a white coating on her tongue. A nurse friends told us it looked like thrush, so we took her to the pediatrician. He said there was no thrush, but that a hole had definitely reopened in the palate. He thought her fever might have been from fluid building up in the palate, and that it had burst, which caused the hole and also allowed her fever to go down. We were so discouraged about the hole, thinking she would have to have another surgery.

At her one-month post-op appointment, we asked her surgeon about the hole. He looked in her mouth and said there was no hole. He showed it to us and, sure enough, it had closed on its own!
All went well at the check-up, except they were concerned that she wasn't making new sounds yet. They referred her to early intervention. We were travelling all summer, so EI didn’t get a chance to evaluate her until she was 15 months old. By that point she had caught up and was making several new sounds and saying about 20 words, so they said she didn’t need services.

Her language has really exploded since surgery. It was immediately obvious that she was able to understand so much more once she had the tubes in her ears. Now she’s 17 months old and has a 100-word vocabulary. She has some trouble with her velar sounds (K and G), but the EI speech pathologist is a friend of ours and answers any questions we have.

Incidentally, the week after Rose’s surgery, we found out we are expecting another baby. Our son is due January 7, and according to his 20-week ultrasound appears to be cleft-free! We are planning to leave for Africa next April.

To all the other moms and dads who have a surgery (or several) looming in your future, you can do it! Your LO will be ok, and the hardest part doesn't last that long. Because you have been through this, for the rest of your life you will be able to encourage and comfort other parents who are going through similar situations. You will get to see your child learn new skills and do the things they couldn't before. You will both have so much fun the first time they discover that they can blow raspberries!

Nesting Notes

So the past month or so has been pretty fun…except for feeling like a penguin with elephant feet. At last I’ve been able to do some hardcore nesting. I have been accumulating a prize-winning cloth diaper stash, sewing nursing pads, washing and folding side-snap t-shirts, and reading up on how to do a baby massage.

Here are a few of the skills I’ve been working to acquire. (Special thanks to Kristie Ann, Kathy’s baby doll, for being my guinea pig.)

I made myself this stretchy wrap out of a length of knit fabric. There is a bit of a learning curve regarding how to use it. I practiced on myself, but with my huge belly it wasn’t very accurate, so I had to practice on Tim as well.



I have learned to fold a flat diaper. I had no leaks in my trial run. We’ll see how it goes on the real baby.



And here is my rendition of the Happiest Baby on the Block swaddle. This baby isn’t going anywhere.



In the process of assembling baby’s necessities, I have noticed an interesting tendency. It seems that manufacturers of baby products have an irresistible compunction to choose ridiculous names for their products. Some of the best ones have to do with diapering and breastfeeding. Apparently even though we’re all adults, we still think there’s something giggle-worthy about butts and boobs.

Top 5 cloth diaper brand names:
5. FuzziBunz
4. Thirsties (that just grosses me out when I think about it)
3. Happy Heiny’s
2. Cutiepoops
1. Tinkle Traps

Top 5 breastfeeding products:
5. Breast pump: Medela Pump-in-Style (seriously, some things just aren’t chic)
4. Nursing cover: Udder Covers
3. Feeding pillow: My Brest Friend
2. Nursing cover: Hooter Hiders
1. Nursing top: Pika Bubi

So on to some real news. It looks like we’re having the baby on Monday. I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of being induced. I mean, seriously, I spent four months trying to stay pregnant, and now that everyone is ready, she won’t budge! Apparently I have a cervix of steel. But anyway, the doctors all think it’s best if she comes before her due date. I guess because of her kidney problem, the longer she stays in there the more dangerous it becomes for her. So of course we’ll do what we have to. I’m sure excited to meet her!

One last unrelated note. I was at the hospital the other day, and this lady gets one of those grins on her face that people get when they see a hugely pregnant person, and she says, “Do you know what you’re having?” I tell her we’re having a girl, and she responds, “Well, as long as it’s healthy. Maybe you’ll have a boy next time.” I didn’t know how to respond except to play along, so I said, “We can only hope,” and walked away. Seriously? I didn’t know people still thought like that. I should have told her not to worry because we’re moving to Africa and in about fourteen years I’m sure we can get at least a dozen head of cattle for her.