Well Baby

We're all feeling a lot better here. I am unfortunately still prone to coughing fits, and when the one brought on by my attempt to unload the dishwasher combined with my lingering evening "morning sickness" to actually make me throw up for the first time in this pregnancy... well, I took the hint and decided to retire to the sofa with my laptop.

Right now, Pumpkin is having her snack with Daddy and demonstrating the new rhyme she's learning at day care: I'm a little teapot. She can do most of the rhyme with very little prompting. It is unbelievably cute. (Yes, grandparents, et al., we'll get this on video at some point.) She's also telling her Daddy that he should "be happy!" He's trying to extend that to "don't worry, be happy", because he loves the 80s.

Earlier today, we took her to the doctor for her 2 year well baby check up. It seemed like a bit of a misnamed appointment, since the entire family is still suffering a bit from colds, but Pumpkin still did great. She took her own shoes off for her height and weight check. She stuck her tongue out as requested, and let the doctor check her ears and listen to her heart without struggle. She also impressed the doctor with her words and phrases- her language skills have really taken off lately.

The doctor gave us a picture book for Pumpkin, as part of some campaign someone is running to encourage parents to read to their children. It is a worthy goal. It is very easy to forget just what a privileged upbringing Pumpkin is getting. She has shelves full of books and parents who are always happy (OK, at least willing) to read to her. She, in fact, has pretty much anything she needs. She's lucky that way.

The fact that other kids aren't as lucky as Pumpkin has been on my mind lately, due to a recent Economist article on the impact of childhood stress on later life. The Economist article is summarizing a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Evans and Schamberg. The PNAS stuy concludes that childhood stress correlates with reduced working memory later in life (working memory is an important component of intelligence), and strongly implies that a causal link is likely. This is far from my field of expertise, but I wasn't completely convinced by the PNAS study that the working memory reduction was caused by the stress. It certainly seems like a strong, plausible hypothesis, though, given everything we know about the effects of chronic stress (the summary of these are far beyond what I have the energy for tonight- check out Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, by Robert Sapolsky for a good book on the subject).

However, I certainly don't think that the conclusion the Economist article reaches is supported by the evidence. The article concludes by referencing studies that have shown that social position is related to stress (the lower your status, the more stress you have in general), and extrapolating:

"So, it may not be necessary to look any further than their place in the pecking order to explain what Dr Evans and Dr Schamberg have discovered in their research into the children of the poor. The Bible says, “the poor you will always have with you.” Dr Evans and Dr Schamberg may have provided an important part of the explanation why."

I think this lets those of us who are higher on the "pecking order" off the hook far too easily. Leaving aside the fact that wealth is not perfectly correlated with status, there is no reason to assume that the stress-related effects seen by Evans and Schamberg are entirely due to low status. There are many other sources of stress in a poor person's life. Not having enough to eat is stressful. Being too cold because your family can't pay the heating bills is stressful. Having parents who are stressed and worried about meeting the family's basic needs is no doubt stressful. Being sick and unable to go to the doctor for treatment because your family does not have adequate health insurance is probably pretty stressful, too. All of these things could be at least partially addressed by programs to alleviate the effects of poverty. We do not know if such programs will help to break the cycle of poverty, but we certainly cannot conclude from this study that there is no point in trying.

Some Bad and Some Good

We're all sick here. Pumpkin was sent home early from day care on Tuesday with a fever, which only broke Thursday night. She has a cough and an unbelievably runny nose. Her nose overflows dramatically when she throws a tantrum (a fairly frequent occurrence over the past couple of days- being sick makes her cranky). This leads her to switch from crying about whatever set off the tantrum to crying "blow my nose!" At least she no longer fights us when we want to wipe her nose. She doesn't like snot coming out of her nose anymore than we do. I credit day care with this turnaround. At least they are the ones who taught her how to blow her nose in to the tissues we hold for her.

Hubby has the runny nose, but says he feels fine otherwise, and just to prove it he spent most of the day today doing chores.

I have been knocked flat by the cold. I have a sore throat, a cough, a runny nose, and absolutely no energy. The cold symptoms and the pregnancy symptoms are fighting it out, leaving me twice as miserable. At night, the pregnancy-caused nausea is least bothersome if I lay on my left side. But then the cold-caused congestion gives me an earache. So I toss and turn and get far too little sleep. I've recently started feeling hungry all the time, as pregnant women do. But the cold has knocked out my desire to actually eat, and made the still lingering nausea worse. So I spend a lot of time staring into our pantry, trying to find something I can stand to eat.

But enough whining. My Mom, who very kindly came over to take care of Pumpkin for her first two days home from day care (and would have stayed longer, except for a prior engagement back home) tells me that she is missing Pumpkin. So here is a cute story from tonight:

Pumpkin got down from eating her evening snack and noticed the large amount of food she'd dropped on the floor during dinner and snack. She said "Uh oh!" and looked at me with her cute wide-eyed, round-mouthed look of alarm. "Throw it away?"

I told her that yes, the food that was on the floor should be thrown away.

So she carefully picked it all up, and took it to the garbage, bit by bit. When she'd finished, she came back over to where she could see me and gave me a huge grin. She was so proud of herself! I was glad to have the mess cleaned up without having had to move from the sofa, so I quite sincerely thanked her for helping and told her to go have her bath with Daddy. Then she announced "poopy diaper!" so I had to get off the sofa after all.

Who's Judgemental Now?

I have been meaning to write a post about Hanna Rosin's and Judith Warner's recent articles blasting breastfeeding and pumping, respectively. It was going to be called "A Memo to Hanna Rosin and Judith Warner" and was going to start off with the true statement that I genuinely do not care how they feed their babies. Then I was going to point out that Hanna Rosin's review of the scientific literature on breastfeeding was casual at best, and that the scientific reviews of the literature on breastfeeding that I have seen come to a different conclusion, based not on any single large benefit but on the accumulation of many smaller benefits.

I was going to hope that no one read her article and decided that since breastfeeding isn't really that important they didn't need to give the nursing mothers at their company time and space to pump. I was going to end with a good rant about her statement that breastfeeding "pretty much guarantees that you will not work in any meaningful way". I was a working, nursing mother for 20 months. I think I did quite a bit of meaningful work during that time. I got a raise and a bonus this year, so I assume my employer agrees. Furthermore, women have been doing "meaningful work" (i.e., raising children) and breastfeeding since the human race first showed up on earth. Her suggestion that breastfeeding precludes working in a meaningful way was therefore deeply offensive.

I was going to tell Judith Warner that she'd have to physically fight to take my breast pump away from me, because it was an instrument of liberation, not subjugation to me. It allowed me to go back to work without weaning my baby. Going back to work helped me rediscover both my sense of competence and my pre-baby identity. The pump allowed me to take nights away from my daughter and go and get a good night's sleep without having to first wean, thereby saving my sanity. I don't care if other people don't want to pump, but how dare Ms. Warner imply that anyone who does pump is somehow subjugating herself? How dare she judge how I have chosen to achieve balance in my life?

But so many people have posted so many good, intelligent things about this already, and I've exhausted my indignation in comments on other people's blogs.

I do not discount the people who have felt judged when formula feeding. This is a deeply personal decision that is by necessity made in public. It impacts the thing that new parents have suddenly realized matters more than anything else in their life- their child's well-being. It is easy for people to get defensive and judgmental in this situation. I would not have been bothered had Ms. Rosin or Ms. Warner written an article explaining the reasons for their personal decisions. They could even have decried the judgmental attitudes they have encountered. But both moved beyond that, to judging the people who make the opposite decisions. We are apparently anti-feminists, setting the cause of women's equality back in a misguided belief that we are doing what is best for our families. To which I can only say: "excuse me?"

I think I would be considered a successful professional woman by most standards. I work at the intersection of two fields (science and IT) that have long been dominated by men. I have seen the salary surveys, and I know I am not underpaid relative to the men in my field. I enjoy an extremely egalitarian home life with a husband who truly does half (maybe more) of the household chores, is a fully involved co-parent and clearly views me as his equal.

How exactly does the decision to breastfeed and pump negate all of this and make me a subjugated woman?

I think that Ms. Rosin and Ms. Warner are missing the point. Yes, there are still inequalities in our society. Yes, the burden of early parenthood falls unevenly in a couple. This is pure biology- women get pregnant. Women breastfeed. But a fair society would not be one that ignores the biological differences between men and women. A fair society would be one that accepted, even celebrated, those differences and found a way to accommodate them while still providing equal opportunities for members of either sex to pursue their dreams and aspirations. We aren't there yet, but setting up a false "war" between breastfeeders and formula-feeders isn't going to get us any closer to that goal.

Advice for Moms-to-Be

Some of the comments on today's Moxie post made me realize what my number one piece of advice for any Mom-to-Be would be. Actually, this is advice for Dads-to-Be, too, but I never get asked for advice by Dads-to-Be. Maybe they're asking Hubby.

Anyway, the post asked readers to list things that "tricked" them about parenthood, and to name their most odious parenting tasks. (If you're curious, I felt tricked by the whole baby sleep book industry- no one's advice really worked on our particular child, and I now get visibly worked up by the idea that some magical technique can get every baby to sleep through the night. Some babies just don't do that. My most odious task is nail clipping, which is why Hubby does that most times. In exchange, I change most of the poopy diapers.)

Some people felt tricked by discovering how hard it is to stay on top of things with a child in the house, and others put the daily grind of chores/getting things done as their most odious task.

I have to agree- adding a baby does make keeping up with life harder. Much harder. I have daydreams about a service that would just come in and get me caught up on everything already. Or at least do the dishes and fold the laundry so that Hubby and I could catch up with each other.

I realized that what I should have been doing when I was pregnant with Pumpkin was strengthening our family processes and systems. The only way you stay anywhere near caught up is to rely on processes and systems. You just don't have time to keep figuring things out as you go. We have a system for keeping our family calendar up to date (Hubby seems to be a little fuzzy on that one, but he's getting better). We have a system for ensuring bills get paid on time. We had a process for ensuring that I had all my pump parts when I was taking a pump to work. We're still refining the system for keeping track of all the things that need to get done, and we have yet to really settle on a process for getting big projects done quickly. For instance, we wanted to redo our bathroom. The sink was a wall mount style, which Pumpkin was slowly pulling off the wall as she climbed up to wash her hands. We intended to do the work in January. The sink and new light just got installed this week. We haven't got a plan yet for the rest of the work.

Pre-baby, none of these things were really issues. Hubby and I are both pretty organized, in our own ways. We kept track of our calendar and made sure things got done without much trouble. Paying bills on time was easy.

Pumpkin changed all that. We were sleep-deprived, so I could no longer rely on my memory about bills or events. Our evening chores list got much longer even as I needed to move my bedtime much earlier, so we never seem to have time to really plan out projects. And our to do list was suddenly out of control with new things like "set up trust/will" and "research toddler finger foods" (at one point, we had an urgent need to get Pumpkin eating more finger foods so that she could move up to the older baby room at day care). And this doesn't even consider how much time we spent sick and/or taking care of a sick child.

Everyone always tells a pregnant woman to rest while she still can. This is sort of good advice, I guess. You certainly don't want to go into the newborn phase any more tired than you have to be. But you can't really store up sleep. All that sleeping and resting I did during my pregnancy didn't make it OK for me to be sleep deprived for months on end. It didn't make it possible for me to keep functioning as I had before the baby.

The other advice we got was to stock our freezer with leftovers, so that we wouldn't have to cook. This is definitely good advice, although I would add "don't make all the meals dairy heavy, in case your child turns out to be unable to tolerate cow's milk proteins in your breastmilk." You can't "pre-do" everything, and even if you think you're really well prepared, some portion of that work is going to turn out to be wasted because your baby doesn't do things that way.

What you really need to do is get organized. Talk to your partner about how things get done around your house. Tweak the systems and processes you do have and develop new ones. This will be much easier to discuss and do before you have a demanding little baby who thinks that you exist primarily to feed, change, and soothe him/her. And believe me, you don't want to try discussing family work balance when you and your partner are both trying to skate by on only a few hours of sleep. If by some miracle you manage not to have this discussion turn into an argument, you won't remember what you decided the next day.

OK, now I'm scaring myself. I think Hubby and I need to find some time to kick our organizational skills up a notch before baby #2 arrives.

Life Flashing Update

OK, watching the photos of Pumpkin's first two years flash by is pretty awesome, too.