I started this post a week ago...

It's quiet right now.

Munch is asleep in her swing and there is Banana Bread is baking.

Banana Bread, incidentally, is not a pet name for my cat or anything. It's actual banana bread. I felt that I should clarify, since I make a habit of calling my daughter various food items. I'm pretty sure she things her name is Sweet Potato Pie. Poor thing will get quite a shock next Thanksgiving.

I love my life. I really do. But occasionally I look at my life and the quiet domesticity of it all, and can't help but compare it to that of my peers.

When most of my fellow '05 grads were graduating with their BA's, I was walking down the aisle.

When they began starting careers, I started trying to conceive and became a mother.

I never had the experience of going away to college. I never had that in between stage somewhere between teenager and full-blown adulthood.

That was initially a complete disappointment, by the way. In the fall before college, I was geared up to apply to Liberty University in Virginia. I had plans of scarves and hot coffee and football games in the fall, living in a dorm, being on my own, albeit slightly hidden in the safety of being at school. Not quite the same as the real world, I hear.

Anyway

I was all set to go, right up until my mother broke the news that it simply wasn't affordable. I didn't qualify for Bright Futures, and while I had a few scholarships, they weren't going to cover four years at a private university. That might have been surmountable, but then my father was deployed, leaving my mother, sister and I behind, and leaving me with a great sense of responsibility to them. Moving to Virginia just wasn't in the cards.

So I went to the local community college, got a job and started life. Met my husband. Nagged him into marrying me. Finally go my AA. Had a baby. Not the way I expected it to go. Not the way the lives of so many friends went.

I sometimes

You don't get to know what I sometimes, because at this point, Munch woke up and nursed, then proceeded to giggle and play and be all-around charming until I snapped out of wishing for anything but the life I've been given. Because really, how could you not love this:

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.

30 BEFORE 30 - Have a Baby

Done and done!

I didn't update at all during my pregnancy, mostly because life got hectic. I lost a job, found a job, started my novel in earnest, interviewed pediatricians, bought cloth diapers. It's been an exciting few months. But I'd say its been worth it.She's about a week old here, still in possesion of her gray eyes and newborn hair. The hair has since fallen out, to be replaced with hair that is her daddy's dark color though not, at this point, quite the same texture or amount. I'm sure that will come, to the bane of my future attempts at taming it. Her eyes have gone from gray to a very determined blue, again, just like her daddy, much to his dismay. He was hoping for brown, like mommy :)

My girl was born the day before her due date, via c-section. I still feel a jolt of anger and grief when I write that. She wasn't supposed to be born via C-section. I labored without drugs for nine hours before my delivery OB announced that, while I was dilating beautifully and my girl had dropped, she was breech, and breech delivery is something my OB does not "allow". I could have disputed it, and perhaps should have, but a woman in labor does not make good split-second decisions, and I let them cut me. I have a lot of regrets about that, which I may go over in another post. This post isn't about my regrets. It's about my perfect little success.

C-sections are odd things. I couldn't feel any pain, just tugging, which I found out later was **GROSS WARNING** the doctors removing my "guts" as my brother in law put it and placing them on my chest. Sick in the extreme. I had morphine in my spinal, which made me a little woozy, but I distinctly remember the moment she was "born". The doctor asked me if I was ready, and upon my emphatic "YES", I heard my little girl cry. I wish I'd been able to have a "right to the chest" moment, but when your arms are stretched out to your sides and the lower half of your body is numb and cut open, they don't exactly want to hand you your baby. They cleaned her up, and I did get to meet her before they took her off to the nursery for vitals.
They brought her to me within 15 minutes of my being post-op, and she was nursing within ten minutes of being with me. I will say that, other than the fact that I ended up with an "unnecesaerean", the hospital was very good about respecting my wishes. This picture is from the second day, probably less than 18 hours post op. Notice the lack of anything connected to me. I did everything I could to get off IV fluids and then GO HOME as soon as possible. We ended up going home 38 hours post-op. Less than two days. That's less than most vaginal deliveries. Take that, medical system
Our first family picture:

My girl is a month old now, becoming more and more alert, trying to hold her head up, still nursing like a champ. We are cloth diapering, something I'll cover in another post, but its going so well. I love being a mommy, but more importantly, I love being her mommy.