It's a Problem

It's Friday.

My girl is asleep upstairs and, because she has recently started sleeping through the night (knock on wood and thank the Lord), I have until 5:30 tomorrow morning to work on my novel, get laundry done, catch up on some rest.

But no.

It's Friday.

Which means I am busy with three things. One thing, really.

These

We cloth diaper Miss Alice's sweet little bum, and I love it, I truly do. The one problem is that Cloth Diapering can quickly become an obsession. I spend countless hours on cloth diapering websites and online stores, drooling over new prints and products that I want.

Our stash is pretty economical. We have Alice covered until she's 18 pounds or so, all for under $300. We'll probably spend a little under $100 more, and she'll be set for the rest of her diapering years. We don't NEED more diapers.

But look at those things. How could you not want more? And they're so cute that I want one to match every outfit she owns, and that can get a bit expensive.

So here I am, on Friday, entering contests.

You'd be amazed the things people give away on the Internet. To me, Friday means three things.

Fluff Friday
(this week is two itti bitti tutto's, normally over $20 apiece)

Thirsty Thursday
(Two Duo Diaper in Snaps. WANT WANT WANT)

Feed Your Stash Friday
(two Happy Heiney's. I don't even know if I like that brand, but hey, free is free.)

When I'm feeling super ambitious, I'll visit the cloth diaper round-up and just go nuts entering giveaways. I keep a Twitter account solely for the ability to earn extra entries by tweeting. I blow up people's newsfeeds on Friday, liking this post and that, posting status updates about various giveaways.

I've never actually won a giveaway. But it's happening. One of these days, it'll happen. The statistics say so.

Besides, how cute is this:

Unnecesarean

I said in my last post that I still have a lot of anger and grief about my sweet girl being born via C-section.

I still do.

I'm not obsessing over it the way I was, having trouble even picking up my girl because I couldn't stop hurting and crying over her method of birth. No, I'm not there anymore. I'm enjoying being a mommy, enjoying my life. But every once in awhile, I still look at the way she was born and just want to cry over it.

Sometimes I do. But not always.

Even though I don't cry every time, I do tell myself, every time,

"Never Again."

Our next birth will be a home birth, barring an absolute emergency. I will not willingly put myself back in the hands of an OB who refuses to even consider a vaginal breech delivery. I will certainly not put myself back with a group that checked the position of my child FIVE TIMES by five different doctors and still missed that my child was breech. The thing I have come to realize is that obstetrics is moving away from vaginal delivery. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I'm getting to the point where I believe that every OB should have a 100% cesarean rate and that vaginal birth is no place for a doctor, especially not doctors that are so afraid of litigation that they cut for something as simple as a frank breech baby.

On a side note, the reactions I got to the word "breech" were incredibly varied. Anyone who gave birth within the last ten years looked at me with horror and said "Oh no! That's so scary!" Anyone who had given birth before that time said "Oh, my daughter/niece/son/nephew was breech and they had no problem delivering him/her. I wonder why they wouldn't let you try it normally."

But I digress.

Our cesarean went "well", meaning my baby was healthy, I was healthy, and my recovery, physically, was easy. Everyone tells me that I should be grateful, because all that matters is that I have a healthy baby.

But no one will listen to the fact that, emotionally, it was horrendous.

I feel like I was given no options, simply told that, because I hadn't given birth before, I couldn't deliver her vaginally. That my body, designed by an Almighty Creator, could not fulfill one of its basic purposes and give birth.

I feel like I was robbed of a normal birth because the doctor was unwilling or unable or to scared to help me, and because a cesarean is, for the doctor, so much easier. I feel like my doctor took the cowards way out.

I lost control of my contractions toward the end, because I saw no point in working with them and working through them anymore, if they were just going to cut her out of me. Where I had been calm, if in pain, but focused and in control, I was now terrified and in pain, unfocused and out of control.

I felt like a complete failure because I had worked so hard to prepare for her birth, only to have it ripped away from me by a doctor who would not do their job.

I felt completely out of control of the actual delivery. I didn't actively push my child into the world, she was removed from me, like something unwanted.

I didn't get the first precious minutes of her life. Instead, I spent those being sewn up, while she was taken from her mother and into a room to be examined.

My feelings were discounted by every single person I spoke to after the surgery, including my doctor. Each person made me feel that I was weak, failing in my emotional response the way I had during my delivery. That I was ungrateful for my healthy baby girl.

Like I said, Never Again.