Molting Chicken

Gawd, I am losing a lot of hair.

My body apparently has jumped off the postpartum hormone cliff. It's a study in opposites: What was supple has become brittle, what was smooth has turned flaky.

On a happy yet intensely personal note, an arid desert has once again become the lush rain forest it's supposed to be.

But mostly I'm just losing my hair at an alarming rate. Much of what I read insists this is normal, but I've never had tresses so thin.

My son Gabe is astounded every time the chore of sweeping the bathroom floor comes up in rotation and he fills the dustpan with my hair, which is absolutely everywhere. I am constantly plucking it off of Max and out of my bra. Washing my hair in the shower has become absolutely depressing, as I stand there and scrape tangled clumps of it off of my wet hands.

My doctor notes that while it is indeed typical for women who don't lose even the daily amount of strands while they are pregnant to shed a fair amount later, my copious loss is a stress symptom. Stupid job.

Thankfully, my hairdresser -- the real professional in this area -- ran her hands through it today and assured me that while I may have less of it, the hair that remains is healthy. Not even split ends.

I got a little trim and a much needed color boost, and we'll just have to see whether that shocks my hair into behaving properly.

Or I'll just go bald and rock some head scarves.

Red, Black and Blue ...

... make purple!

Which is still the color of my left forearm. The bruise from where a nurse very apologetically blew through a vein when trying to insert my IV is one of the souvenirs from my hospital adventure in giving birth to my son Max.

I have a matching bruise on the inside of my right elbow, where a lab tech decided it was a grand idea to collect blood at 5:30 in the damn morning. My husband tells me the early blood draws facilitate results in time for doctor rounds. But those tend to come after bedtime, so perhaps these people need to get their acts together.

Other than that, I have very little complaint about the medical professionals who cared for me and my baby. The maternity staff at St. Luke's treat new moms with an incredible amount of dignity, which is impressive considering where they have to shave you and how often they must inquire about whether you're passing gas.

They took excellent care of my baby. I went to the nurse's station once to collect him and was slightly surprised to find his little rolling tea cart empty. My poor nurse chose to say, "I'm not sure where he is right now." To restore the color to my face and the strength to my knees, she quickly said, "He's just so cute, someone is always stealing him!" Again, the word "steal" was disturbing, but sure enough, around the corner a nurse was sitting at her desk computer with charts in one hand and Max in the other.

It wasn't just the medical staff displaying such decency and kindness. The women who cleaned my room and bathroom, one a regular and one a fill-in, were extremely kind and offered sincere congratulations. It was a pleasure to chat with both of them.

"Dietary!" was a lovely call to hear on the other side of my door, because it meant someone was bringing me food. The food was pretty tolerable, as hospital food goes, and my choices ranged from cream of asparagus soup to spinach salad (both quite good). But the smiles of the food staff were the best seasoning.

The most special meal was the "gourmet" one the dietary department plans for moms and their significant others the night before they head home. The staff had set a table in my room with lines and real flatware, and used the little vase of flowers from the hospital auxiliary as a centerpiece. While the nurses stole Max again, my husband and I enjoyed a nice, quiet time together. He had steak, shrimp, baked potato and salad, and I had popcorn shrimp, steak fries, salad and coleslaw. (I had eaten enough asparagus and spinach, it was time for something fried.) We both got big slices of something cheesecakey-moussey too.

And, God bless their hearts, dietary had found a big bottle of diet Coke for me. It's a Pepsi product-stuffed place, so the gesture was very appreciated.

For Unto Us Another Baby Is Born

The first ever Kleiboemer family portrait.

Our little sailor has finally come into port.

Maxwell Charles Kleiboemer was born at 2:50 p.m. May 10, 2012, by C-section in the surgical room of the Family Birthing Center at St. Luke's Hospital in Maumee, Ohio. He weighed 8 pounds 15 ounces and was 20 inches long.

When at 2:50 p.m. the next day, his daddy held him and sang "Happy Birthday" to him for being exactly 1 day old, I thought my heart was going to burst into a firework display of love and gratitude.

The event to bring Max into the world went fairly well, and my recovery is going better than I thought it would. I am taking the advice of several who have had this surgery and keeping a steady pace with Percocet and Motrin, and reportedly my incision is healing "beautifully." This would be the only reason anyone would smile like that after checking under my gown at this point.

A macabre homage to some rather
unfortunate military photos.

My M.O. before such big deals as this is to be the calm before the storm. I do not bother worrying or fretting because I am powerless before the impending nature of major surgery. I just sit back, relax and laugh my face off with my sister, mother and husband.

When the medical professionals take over, sticking me with needles and such, I just ask that they tell me exactly what they are doing as they do it and why it is important. My comfort level always increases with the amount of information I have. The staff responded really well to this, and in many cases enjoyed getting to talk shop a little with someone who cared.

While I was bemused by the hilarity of what it must have looked like as I floundered from my bed to the operating table like a beached whale, I reminded myself that this team sees big pregnant women all the time. Certainly there is a spectrum of grace but I didn't need to worry about my placement on it. I just needed to keep following their directions and note with some detachment what steps they were taking.

When we got to the part where needles were going into my spine, though, I knew this was the point of no return. My excitement actually started to rise here, because this was the step that really felt like it was beginning the procedure, even though other steps had started about an hour beforehand. Once I was numbed, a first cut was going to be made, my husband was going to be ushered into the room and our baby would emerge, all in a relatively short order.

Here's where I lost my composure.

The injection for the local burned far more than I had expected, and it didn't really seem to do all that much when the spinal needle started jabbing me. The anesthesiology team assures me that it is normal to take several attempts to secure this injection, but by the third time of a very painful sensation off-center of wherever they were aiming, I started to cry.

My OBGYN and two nurses were all over me, touching me and patting me and holding my hands, trying to reassure me. It was sweet that they were being so concerned, but I eventually communicated something along the lines of "please just give me a minute." The needles stopped jabbing, people backed up, I blew my nose on a sheet and pulled up my big girl panties.

Gabe is enamored with baby brother Max.

I had spent so much energy on not spending energy up to this point, that the perfect storm just boiled over. I was surprised that this is where things would get halted, right where I wanted them to accelerate. I thought it must be my fault, that I wasn't arching my back enough or was being too big of a baby myself.

Then the doctor told me with all the sincerity in the world that I was doing a great job helping him do his, telling them whether he was on target and such. A tiny part of me wondered if that was just bullshit, but a bigger part of me truly appreciated his approach to helping me get back on track. One more big breath, and I was ready to start all over again, even as far back as the burning local.

But after that, it took just one more jab for the spinal, and soon my butt started to get all warm. (Thank goodness my nurse had warned me that would happen.) They laid me back, and my legs started to tingle and then quickly turned ... I don't know ... funky. It's difficult to describe. It's beyond being numb, like when a leg falls asleep, and the immobility is trippy. But you can still tell when people are touching you if they apply enough pressure.

A nurse poked me with a sharp stick up and down my body to check where I could feel it, and I was surprised that my armpit was as high as I could sense. Very shortly after that, I became queasy at the realization that my chest also was numb, and had no conscious control over breathing. But as soon as they explained to me what was happening and I had some physiological understanding of it, I relaxed and the sensation went away. (I believe I also was aided by an injection of some anti-pukey thing in my IV at that moment too.)

The big blue sheet went up, the OBGYN made her first cut, and my husband was brought into the room, dressed like a Smurf mechanic. I could smell the burning of the knife as it cauterized the cutting, but I smartly kept that to myself. Husband Smurf would have left the room at that point. When a happy call came from beyond the curtain, "The head is out!" the anesthesiologist asked Dan if he would like to watch, and Dan asked him if he would like to see him puke through his mask. They both laughed and Dan remained where he was, seated next to my head and holding my hand.

Max, in the arms of cousin Jon.

After a fair amount of tugging, out came the rest of our baby, followed quickly by very strong shouts of objection from him. That was music to my ears. He was taken to the warming table to be cleaned up and assessed, and I thankfully had a clear view. Dan went over there to take pictures, and I saw him reach out enough to touch his little toes. Within a few minutes the baby was swaddled and placed in Dan's arms, just as I had hoped would happen no matter what kind of delivery I had.

Our healthy son with a perfectly cue ball head was soon brought within kissing distance for me, and a nurse snapped a really great picture of us. I think I should take all my photos upside down now; it makes my double chin disappear.

I was amazed when another nurse told Dan, "Come on, let's take him to the nursery and do all the other stuff," and let him carry him right on out of there. Later Dan would confide that while he obeyed the order, inside he was screaming, "I'm not qualified to do this!" But he became so in one short walk down a hallway.

I of course stayed strapped to the operating table for about 30 more minutes, being rather violently but still carefully manhandled by doctors and nurses as the placenta was removed and all my guts were cleaned out. (I heard later my OBGYN has a reputation for desiring really clean guts, and I think this is great.) Another doctor and a nurse stitched Humpty Dumpty back together again, and the anesthesiology nurse gamely responded to all my chatter throughout the rest of the procedure. Turns out we both have freshmen children enrolled at the same high school. Nice small world.

We all were shocked when Max's weight was reported to us. The betting pool had centered around 9 pounds 4 ounces, and all had remarked variations of "that's a big baby!" when he arrived. Later my OBGYN assured me that we still had made the right decision to deliver by C-section because while he wasn't anywhere near engagement in my pelvis, he apparently was patting the top of his head with one of his hands, and that could have been bad news if he had been like that if he ever did drop down.

His daddy will teach him how to properly shake hands one day, but it surely didn't need to be the first ever moment of his life.

Unzip Me

This is why people can't help but
giggle when I walk into a room.

I do have the intellectual understanding that this baby will be born eventually, but I also have the irrational exhaustion that makes me feel like I will be pregnant until the end of time.

So it is with immeasurable relief that I have received my doctor's permission and agreement to schedule a C-section this week. Someone will go in there and *get* him out of me.

And as you may be able to see from the picture, I am so freaking ready.

I am not keen on scheduling C-sections just to avoid vaginal labor or to protect the sanctity of one's cookie box. That seems like flipping off Mother Nature, and she can be a bitch.

Neither am I keen on Pitocin to induce vaginal labor. Talk about a bitch. I have experienced the kind of contractions that little concoction brings on, and they suck.

But this little bugger inside me is well on his way to being another 9-pounder, just like his brother, and I think once is enough to squeeze out someone that big.

He also is positioned in what's charmingly called "sunny-side up." The back of his head is resting against my spine, which would make labor all the less "sunny" and increase risks to me of horrible things like tearing and blood loss. Speaking of the position of his head, it is nowhere close to where it needs to be in order to go through the magic baby door. (That was the explanation my mother gave me when I asked where babies came from, according to my baby book.)

These things combined with my age, blood pressure roller coaster and history of excruciatingly long labor make me a very good candidate for a C-section.

This makes me a very happy pregnant woman, who soon will be a very happy mother.

With a gnarly scar.

The Indignities of Pregnancy

Back when my feet were pretty, and
I could take a hot bath without the
danger of boiling the baby inside.

Look at my fat feet!

I sat at a desk all day at work, sat in my car as I drove all over God's creation running errands, and then sat at a desk all evening at home, paying bills and printing shower thank-you cards and writing some blog posts. My swollen feet look like little sausages trying to escape my favorite Steve Madden flats.

Patti, my favorite nurse, would be pissed. She insists that I spend a significant time each evening with my feet "up." I'm not exactly sure how to get them "up," since that would involve me lying on my back and breaking the cardinal rule. (Pregnant women are not supposed to lie on their backs because it squashes a main artery and drops blood pressure for mother and fetus, which is very bad, hear tell.)

When I do lie on the couch for a little Food Network viewing, I adopt THE most unlady-like pose as I lie on my side with one leg thrown over the back of the couch. If I were 10 years younger and 100 pounds lighter, that might be sexy for my husband to see when he walks in the door. For the moment, it's creating skid marks on the kitchen tile as he does an about-face on his boot heel.

This little BTU manufacturer inside me raises my body temperature at whim, but especially after I get out of the shower. I put off getting dressed as long as I can, and I have to leave the bathroom door open while I style my hair or rub lotion all over my swallowed-the-moon belly. My teenager has had the unfortunate experience of walking down the hallway and glimpsing my naked ass, muttering to himself, "I did NOT need to see that."

Many pregnant women fear what happens to their nether regions, particularly hemorrhoids. (Think Darcy in "For Keeps?": "There's something hanging out of my butt.") I got news for you, honeys. Those are nothing compared to varicose veins.

Oh, and I just love this abdominal muscle separation, which is essentially a hernia on my belly. I literally have to hold myself together as I walk, or the pain is excruciating. I bought a giant belly band, which is helpful to wear around the house as I wash dishes or cook dinner, but I can't wear it for too long without squeezing my bladder beyond repair or exacerbating the lovely condition I mentioned above.

Rolling over in bed has become an exhausting production. So has walking up the stairs. Walking anywhere.

And where the hell did all of this hair come from? It's even growing on the big toes of my fat little feet.

Now that's sexy.

The Booby Trap

I am so making this "boobie beanie" for my baby.

I've got some news for you, Public Citizen. These are my boobs, not yours.

This advocacy group is admirable in many ways. I share many of its rants against pharmaceutical companies and their powerful lobbies in Washington, D.C.

But one of its recent efforts -- to stop hospitals from distributing free infant formula to new mothers -- is rubbing me in a way no nipple cream can help.

Public Citizen: Call to action
News report: MSNBC

I hate marketing. When I sat through my first educational session at my OBGYN, the nurse was surprised I didn't add my email address to the promotions list when she handed one more piece of paper to sign. "They send really good coupons," she said, to which I replied that I had enough crap in my inbox on any given day.

I will buy the products I need and want, and I will do my best to do so when they are on sale. Most of the coupons and promotions are for magazines and toys and other junk no one in my family will miss.

The rest of the "educational" material was decent enough, although I was informed enough on my own to already have decided to breastfeed once the little mouth makes his debut.

If my hospital happens to give me some free formula after I deliver, I will take it. I have three options of what I will do with it:

1) Store it in the cupboard for an emergency supply, in case my actual breasts become unavailable or if the freezer takes one of its frequent dumps and ruins any stored milk;

2) Give it to another mother I may know who is using that brand of formula; or

3) Donate it to a food pantry.

Public Citizen claims birthing centers should be free of marketing and that the formula give-away discourages breastfeeding.

Yeah, I can see that. There I am, all dopey from my epidural, just waiting for one little can of powdered nutrition to change my mind on one of the most important decisions I've been considering my entire pregnancy. I wouldn't put it past Sherwin Williams to put a color chip card in the goody bag to convince me to paint the nursery a different color that very evening.

If there is a mother in some delivery room somewhere who has such little resources or planning that she has nothing else to feed her baby than the first can of formula she gets for free from the hospital, the lack of a freebie isn't going to be what forces her to breastfeed.

Hospitals do recommend mothers let their little monsters latch onto them for at least six months, touting endless benefits to boob-giver and boob-taker alike. I wonder if Public Citizen would complain about marketing influences if the take-home swag included a free box of bra pads. How about a lottery ticket for a breast pump? Not so high and mighty now, are ya?

The reason only 14 percent of us moms are exclusively breastfeeding up to month 6 is because every other marketing effort in this country "has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy sh*t we don't need." So sayeth Tyler Durden in "Fight Club."

"SAHM" is all the rage, but not all of us can be that. If it's not our actual careers, callings and contributions to society motivating us to work for a paycheck, it's credit card debt and health insurance premiums and putting food on the table for everyone else. Breastfeeding is a serious commitment for moms working apart from their little bottomless pits consuming the yield.

Pumping and storing milk while you're at work is a pain in the ass, let alone the breasts. At my last newspaper, a friend and coworker had to do it in a wall-carpeted room we used for audio recording. Can you think of any place an employee at Burger King might be able to pump milk with dignity and adherence to health codes?

Very little in our society truly supports breastfeeding mothers. Doing it in public is hardly acceptable, and don't think for one second that someone won't complain if you whip out your baby's natural meal at a restaurant.

Encouraging breastfeeding is noble, but targeting the breastfeeders is misplaced. Taking freebies away from women who have decided -- for their own reasons, medical issues, schedules and conveniences -- to feed formula to their infants is just mean.

Instead, how about the following:

Run full-page ads inside porno magazines and on racy websites that urge men who are staring at titties all day long anyway to grow up and stop laughing if they see a woman's breast mid-feeding.

Most mosques have a basket of saris or other wraps for visitors to cover their legs and heads. How about a basket of those lovely breastfeeding bibs/tents at restaurants or libraries or other public places moms may be when junior squalls to be fed?

Circulate a petition to encourage workplaces to designate private pumping areas. Or better yet, LONGER PAID MATERNITY LEAVE.

Hey, you said you wanted my boy to be healthy and well-fed. Put your money where your mouth is.

Read the Bottom Line and Open Wide

After the standard well-baby care visits to the doctor, I pretty much suck at managing a child's health care.

I attribute this to my high anxiety regarding paperwork, specifically insurance forms. I'm pretty sure that started the day I had to declare myself dependent on the state of New York for medical coverage and food benefits. Maybe someday I'll tell you more about that horror of horrors.

For now, I'll just admit that I'm not one of those moms who circles dates on her calendar six months in advance and works her schedule around her kid's physical or teeth cleaning.

I can barely plan six days in advance. Life happens, you know?

I myself don't go to the doctor unless 1) I'm growing a human being inside me, as I happen to be doing now, or 2) there is a profuse amount of blood or snot coming out of somewhere.

Between the months on Medicaid and my current employer's health plan more than a decade later, I never even had dental or vision coverage. I had worn the same pair of contacts for a scandalously long time. Let's just say, longer than any pair of shoes I own.

I managed to tend to my son Gabe's eyeballs only slightly better, dutifully getting him glasses but updating the prescription only when he couldn't see the blackboard at school. I took him to the dentist only when the office would periodically call and ask if they could finally throw out our records.

Don't I suck?

But I suck at that only, I think. I did fairly well in every other area of parenting. He always had clean clothes that fit him, he always had enough food in his belly, he always had a warm and safe bed in which to sleep. He went to libraries and zoos, parks and swimming pools -- hell, even Canada. He had an astounding vocabulary from an early age, including polite manner words. He had a self-confidence that comes from being absolutely and unconditionally loved.

He did have bad eyes and scuzzy teeth though. Until this week.

I finally got him to a new dentist, after getting him to a new eye doctor earlier in the year. (We've lived in this area about two years now.) Even more impressive, I've taken him to our family doctor several times in the past few months to freeze off some warty thingy on the bottom of his foot that has been there for goodness knows how long. All the while I've been dragging my own pregnant butt to the OBGYN and the lab for every possible thing.

I am way past my comfort zone, but there have been pleasant surprises. Gabe and I both got updated eyeballs, with new frames for him, at the eye doctor for, like, $30. Since I'm paying out the nose for this damned vision insurance through a paycheck withdrawal -- an amount that went up at the same time the salary went down in a round of union contract concessions -- I might as well use it.

I still experienced trepidation about going to the dentist office this week. I can't even remember the last time Gabe had a teeth cleaning; I think I may have been taller than him then. (That's a long, long time ago.) I even warned him that I might have to leave the office for a little while if the appointment was going to take a long time, not confident that I could sit in the waiting room without a sign magically appearing over my head with a big arrow, pointing out that: "Here sits the worst mother in the world. And look, she's even pregnant with another kid she'll probably neglect."

But the receptionist was kind and welcoming and didn't even ask me where our old dental records were. She filled in the insurance part on the new patient forms for me. I could have kissed her. A bonus: two big leather couches in addition to the standard waiting room chairs. I plopped my pregnant butt in one of those couches and watched episodes of animal rescue/cop shows on a big-screen TV. It felt much more like a home and much less like a courtroom.

Gabe emerged later with a goody bag of dental care products and the need for filling only two tiny cavities. The kind receptionist waved off my attempt to pay and said she would make sure to check all avenues with my insurance company first. I came home so pleased and energized that I even washed dishes and did laundry.

I may have gotten here even sooner if I hadn't needed months to recover from the absolute shame of getting dressed down by the school nurse at high school registration. She told me that Gabe really needed to get to a dentist and an eye doctor -- in front of EVERYONE. Every parent, every new student, every wayward 10th-grader in the wrong line. Right there in the hallway, looking first at the check marks on his paperwork (which had taken me three days of puffing into a brown paper bag to fill out in the first place) and then looking down on me.

First, I already freaking knew that he really needed to get to a dentist and an eye doctor. Second, the nasty letters sent home periodically did not help.

Would it have killed her to invite me into the little exam room? Or scribble down my phone number to call me later? Did she have to add peer pressure to an already horrible situation, exposing me to the pitying looks from other parents? Could she ever have asked, just once, what my problem was?

As people with odd anxieties are wont to do, I may be projecting my anger and misplacing blame. Sorry.

But it seems like a great big assumption that parenting comes naturally in all contexts, that all of us mommies are out there doing it with Stepford alacrity.

Not this sister. I suck at some things. But I did get a little better recently. We'll just have to see how well I keep up with it.

In the meantime, Gabe just needs to floss.