It occurred to me today that I am in fact nursing a toddler.  Feelings of disbelief and sadness swept over me for a moment as I pondered the idea that we are edging ever so closer to the end of our nursing relationship and I have no control over how much longer we will be nursing.  I have no control over it because I believe in child-led weaning with my children, and to tell you the truth, I think I am going to be very emotional and sad when my little girl no longer feels the need to nurse.  Once that nursing relationship is over, it is over.  Whether it happens naturally at 17 months, 27 months, 47 months, or later, it is the end of an unbelievably precious and intimate phase that I don't think I'm going to encourage ending as long as my daughter wants to continue.

As I type this I have the urge to write "within reason," but I have to consciously remind myself that I do believe in child-led weaning for my family, and I do LOVE nursing, not to mention the fact that the longer I nurse, the more I lower my risk of ever getting breast cancer (what a perk!).  I also highly doubt my daughter will be nursing past 4 years old, knowing how independent she is.  I guess if she is still wanting to nurse at that point I will have to step outside of my comfort zone with her, like I do so often in my life now anyway just being a mom and figuring out how to balance both a public and a private life.  P.S. In case you didn't know, my husband is a rabbi, so I often feel like I have a very public life and live in a "fish bowl" - as my dad put it when he sat me down to talk about the realities of being a rabbi's wife that I should consider before marrying Jordan! 

I think Daliya and I are at a point now where more people are starting to look at us when we nurse in public - either that, or I'm just noticing it more often.  I also notice that less people are choosing to be vocal about it.  When Daliya was younger and smaller and less mobile I got complaints from people ranging from, (and I'm paraphrasing)  "It is distracting to have you nursing in the same room as me and I can't focus on the things I'd like to be focusing on," to, and again I paraphrase: "Don't listen to this breastfeeding nazi," as I was overheard offering my phone number to a new dad who told me that his wife was having a hard time breastfeeding their newborn and might end up wanting to call me for some support.

My conclusion from reflecting on my public experiences and conversations with acquaintances is that it isn't necessarily discomfort with nursing a toddler that is the problem in our society.  It is the discomfort with nursing in general, and the need to express that discomfort in inappropriate and disrespectful ways that is the real problem.

I have to wonder where the discomfort really comes from.  Is this man someone who has just never been exposed to women and babies nursing in front of him and he is just embarrassed about being curious about it?  Or is this woman someone who wanted to breastfeed her baby, but faced a lot of challenges and lacked a support system to fix things, so she became sensitive about the subject?  I don't really know what's really behind the discomfort and the comments, but I can only assume that if these people had any clue what extended breastfeeding is really like, they wouldn't be so quick to judge.

I'm not going to pretend that challenges don't still come our way regularly.  For example, every time Daliya gets a new tooth she has to re-learn for a few days how to get that perfect latch back.  It must feel like she has a foreign object in her mouth that she has to work around!  It is also challenging to satisfy her needs when my hormones ebb and flow throughout each month and thus my milk supply also ebbs and flows (so so much more than before she was about a year old).  But if these people only knew what it felt like to have your little girl look up at you right after latching on with such loving and grateful eyes when she is having a hard day and just wants to nurse, or the feeling of knowing that your toddler who is sick with pneumonia is not going to get dehydrated because she is still nursing regardless of how sick she is, or even how wonderful and focused the giggles are when you play and snuggle during a nursing session.

This morning, Daliya finished her breakfast and signed to me that she wanted to nurse.  I brought her to my lap and got ready to nurse, and as she leaned back into position she paused,  looked up into my eyes, and said what sounded like a pretty clear "I love you" before latching on.  It doesn't get any better than that.  I'm so glad neither of us chose to stop nursing before this day - before she could express herself to me this way.  I am so grateful.

In my doula business I talk a lot about the safety net that each woman should have at her birth.  While we would all love to just trust birth and have complete faith that everything will go smoothly according to plan, we know that there is a reason that there is fear surrounding birth in the first place. 

If you're in my line of work, you see things stray pretty far from the plan once in a while.  Babies get stuck, placentas abrupt, moms bleed too much, moms pass out, babies need a little bit (or a lot) of help getting started once they are out...

I am not telling you this to scare you.  I am telling you this to give you the opportunity to be realistic and to consider all of your options.  And I am telling you this so you understand why I believe in having a safety net in place.  I don't care how healthy you are.  I don't care how many babies and perfectly healthy births you have under your belt.  The shit could still hit the fan.  In fact, if you've had quite a few babies, your chances of hemorrhaging are actually higher in the first place.

Now, let me just say that 1) the less routine interventions and medications you have and the less you interfere with the physiological process of birth, the less likely anything will go wrong (and by the way, interference could mean anything from Pitocin, epidural, slowing down labor with too many people watching, inducing in "natural" ways, or pushing just because you happen to be 10cm dilated but aren't really ready to push yet).  And 2) thank God there are both holistic and medical solutions for so many of the things that come up in labor and birth.

Don't get me wrong, I do believe in a woman's right to choose her place of birth, her care provider, and even to have an unassisted birth if that is what she feels is right for her and makes informed decision after informed decision along the way.  But I want you to know that no matter how much you know, how much you prepare, or how healthy you make a point to be, you are not free from the potential of having something go wrong.  You are human.

And that's why we have midwives and doctors.  If we could prepare and know that everything would go 100% smoothly, we wouldn't need midwives or doctors in birth. Period.

But we know that we need them sometimes.  And If you feel confident you will never have to use your safety net, great.  I hope you will never have to.  But you just might be glad you had one set up "just in case."

I want to challenge you here to think about your own choices in choosing your safety net - past, present, or future.  You might be someone who believes that your safety net should be a doctor and a hospital (or only a very specific doctor and hospital), or you might be more comfortable with a particular midwife as your safety net, whether in hospital, birth center, or at home.  Whatever your instincts tell you is probably the right decision for you.  So be realistic, but trust your instincts!

If you'd like to share your thought process or get input or information from others in the Nurtured Mommy community, please feel free to post below.  Let's just all make a point to be respectful and nurturing to one another, even if we don't all agree that what is right for us is also right for the next person.

Greetings, my name is Jordan Gerson and I am Becky’s husband.  From time to time a blog post by me will be featured on the www.nurturedmommy.com blog site where I will share stories, experiences and tips that I have encountered or discovered during my role as a nurturing daddy.  For today’s post, I thought I would share what I experienced when we found out we would be becoming parents. 

I remember sitting in my school’s library working on finals when I got a call from Becky.  She was somewhat anxious because she had yet to get her period and thought she might be pregnant.  Now, this was nothing new.  There were often months where Becky was convinced that there was going to be a little Gerson on the way for at least a few hours.  The routine was almost always the same:

Becky:  “Do you think I could be pregnant?”

Me: “I don’t know.  Maybe.”

Becky: “I felt something right here a couple of days ago (points to someplace on her abdomen), I wonder if that was the egg implanting. What do you think?”

Me: “What the heck do I know?!?  I don’t have a uterus!  If you think you might be pregnant, let's get a pregnancy test.”

I would then get a pregnancy test, and sometimes run out for a second but soon enough things would start flowing and the visions of breastfeeding and burping would fade from our thoughts. 

This time when she called she said that things felt different than usual.  So I said, “well maybe you're pregnant, I’ll get a test on the way home.”  Becky wasn’t convinced but humored me and agreed to take a pregnancy test.

I walked in the door and handed her the test.  Becky took the stick in hand and headed into our teeny tiny bathroom.  When she finished going, she opened the door and handed me the test to read the results.  You know how when you watch on a television show or when someone is pregnant and you have to wait and wait and wait for the 3 minutes to be over so you can read the test.  Yeah well, not the case here.  As soon as the test entered my hand, the plus showed up immediately and two words entered my mind “Oh s&^%!!”

It was absolutely the happiest moment in my life to that point and the most terrifying.  Of course the only emotion I let my wife see was my sheer joy but my mind was racing with questions.  Were we ready for this?  How would this affect our marriage?  What is Becky’s pregnancy going to be like? Am I going to have to clean up poop all the time once we have a baby?  Will I still have time to rock out with my friends on Beatles Rock Band for the Wii?  The answer to the last two questions was “Yes” and “No” respectively.

My time to dwell on these questions was limited because my role as nurturing daddy had already begun and as it turned out Becky’s mind was also racing with questions and some doubts and that, coupled with the fact that all this was going on in her body, trumped my concern of dealing with poopy diapers and mastering Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.  It was my job to reassure her that having a baby was a blessing, that this is what we wanted and that everything was going to be ok. 

Being the partner of a pregnant woman is not an easy job, but it is more than worthwhile.  Being actively involved in my wife’s pregnancy gave me the feeling of being connected to her and my little player to be named later.  By feeding my wife, I knew I was helping to give nutrition to our little jelly bean. 

Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of times I wanted to pull my hair out, but being a nurturing daddy is a job I can’t wait to take on again (but first let me get in a few sessions of Beatles Rock Band).

What's the number one question, concern, or challenge you've been thinking or wondering about that relates to either preconception, pregnancy, labor, birth, postpartum, breastfeeding, baby, or parenting?

Is there a question you've Googled multiple times lately?  If so, what was it?

Elimination communication is what a lot of people call early potty training.  But to someone who actually does EC with their child, it is more of a way of communicating, as the name implies, and not having to go through traditional potty "training" later on.  For people who decide to try it with their newborn, it is also a way of keeping their baby from getting comfortable with being wet or poopy and just hanging out that way. 

EC involves learning your baby's cues that tell you she needs to go potty.  You also offer the potty often, especially when your little one has just woken up, and make a "pssssss" sound as she goes, so that she will make the association between the sound and eliminating.  My daughter, at 16 months now, says "psssss" when she wants to tell us either that she needs to go potty or she is going in her diaper and wants a dry one put on.  She also uses the same sound when she needs to poop.

My husband and I had talked about doing EC during my pregnancy and decided we would give it a try and see how it would go, but agreed with each other that we didn't want to be too "hard core" about it.  When Daliya was a week old we started holding her over her little potty that we kept on the bathroom counter whenever we would take her diaper off to change her.  We had the changing table set up right outside the bathroom and our bedroom to make it really easy.  That first day she peed on the potty 5 times!  We couldn't believe how easy it was! 

As time went on, offering the potty just became a routine for all 3 of us, and was even a fun time to play and sing and talk about the fact that "pee pees and poopies go in the potty."  Probably somewhere around 4 months old Daliya started to really get a kick out of peeing or pooping on the potty.  Don't get me wrong, there have been and still are plenty of times that she doesn't want to sit on the potty, and we don't push her to do it.  But the majority of the time it is a satisfying experience for all involved.  I can't even tell you how excited out babysitters have been to take a little baby to the potty when she tells them she needs to go.  And our parents, who definitely thought we were a little out of our minds to try EC in the first place, are now big believers and tell all their friends.  I think once people see that we don't put a lot of pressure on Daliya to go on the potty, but we offer and often she is the one to let us know that she wants to go, they are much more comfortable with the idea and even excited about it.

It also makes for a lot less dirty diapers, and very very rarely have we had a diaper leak when she was sleeping.  For the last few months Daliya has rarely peed in her diaper when she is sleeping.  It amazes me that she can go 12 to 13 hours with a dry diaper and no longer even asks to go potty during the night.  She still usually nurses before bed around 7:30 or 8pm, before I go to bed around midnight, and then again in the early morning - maybe around 4am, but keeps sleeping until somewhere between 7:30 and 8:30am.  When she sits on the potty in the morning once she is up for the day I'm still always amazed at how much pee is in the potty.  Her bladder has seriously gotten used to holding a lot of urine until she is ready to get up and go in the morning!  Daliya will even tell us when she needs to pee during her bath.  She'll get out, pee on the potty, and get back in.  I love not having to worry about her peeing or pooping in the bath anymore! 

Now, I just have to say that Daliya is not peeing and pooping on the potty 100% of the time - which is totally fine with us because the point of EC is not being fully potty trained as soon as they possibly can be.  It is really more about getting comfortable with the potty and letting her body dictate when she needs to eliminate, while simultaneously learning to wait for her to be sitting on a potty.  I'll be honest, I tend to just have her go in her diaper when we are out and about because it is easier for me than taking a potty along that we have to clean out each time she uses it in the car. 

She also goes through "potty pauses" where she won't want to use the potty hardly at all for a week or two.  These "potty pauses" tend to coincide with developmental milestones, like when she started crawling, when she started cruising, and then when she started walking.  The other "potty pauses" have tended to be after we've traveled to see out of town family, and then come home to her not wanting to use the potty for a few days to a few weeks.  

EC can be different for each family and you can pick and choose what works for you and your baby - just like anything else you do as a parent.  Just know that any amount of EC, even if it is part time, can be a fun and positive thing - it doesn't have to be stressful because there is no pressure to be "done potty training" by a certain time or age.  It just happens so much more organically, and you can literally see the feeling of satisfaction and empowerment on your little ones face when she goes on the potty.  My daughter also obviously loves that we understand her when she needs to go or when she is wet, even though she isn't even talking yet!  I think it makes her feel heard and that her needs and comforts are taken into consideration and respected.

If you have any questions about EC, feel free to post below.  Or if you've done EC with your baby, then your story is also more than welcome if you'd like to share! 

1) Don't over-do the milk.  Yes milk has a good amount of protein, but it also has a lot more sugar in it than you realize.  If you are going to drink milk, limit yourself to a glass a day and drink it with one of your snacks during daytime hours.  Do not drink your milk with a meal or with a snack before bed because it will likely make your blood sugar jump and stay up too high - drinking milk before bed can even affect your reading after breakfast the next morning.

2)  Think about what HEALTHY fats you can add to your meals without adding too many carbs.  If you are on a specific diet to manage your blood sugar, chances are you feel pretty limited and sometimes question if you are getting enough calories.  Your care provider may have even told you that you need to drastically limit your calorie intake because being overweight increases your risk of having gestational diabetes and having a hard time controlling your blood sugar levels. 

If you are a healthy weight, you need to be really careful about limiting your calories during pregnancy.  It could be very hard on your body to do so, so add some healthy fats, like avocado or coconut oil, for example and make sure you write down what you had and seriously evaluate how each change you make influences your readings.  If you put a little coconut oil on your toast with your eggs in the morning and your sugar is still where you want it to be after breakfast, then you know you can do this again.  Another example would be adding a quarter of an avocado to your sandwich at lunch.  And I'll say it again, just make sure you are looking at what you ate and stop doing anything that is making your blood sugar jump higher than it should be.

3) Make sure that whatever eating schedule you are maintaining during your pregnancy you continue during labor.  Even if you don't feel like eating, it is really really important to keep doing so.  It can be downright dangerous for your baby to have to deal with you not eating, especially if your gestational diabetes has not been really well controlled.  Your baby is used to releasing extra insulin to be able to cope with the higher blood sugar that comes along with gestational diabetes.  If you skip a meal, your baby is still going to release the insulin in his body that he is used to releasing to cope, and if there isn't sugar from what you ate for it to interact with, his blood sugar is going to dip - possibly to an extremely dangerous level.  This is also why babies born to moms with gestational diabetes need to have their blood sugar checked a number of times in the hours following birth.  They need to make sure his blood sugar is staying at a reasonable and safe level.

If this was helpful to you, keep an eye out for my Nurtured Mommy E-Zine edition on meal planning for stabilizing blood sugar, coming soon!  (Sign up for the E-Zine in the box to the right.)  And if you have another question about managing gestational diabetes, or if you have any of your own great tips to add, just post a comment below!

So I said I might share with you the mistake I made on my daughter's birthday.  I'm going to write this post as a stream of consciousness and not go back to edit anything because I think that's the only way I'm going to get this one down "on paper."

My pregnancy went nothing like I imagined it would.  I thought I knew so much and was so prepared having been a doula and a student midwife for a number of years already.  Well, nothing makes you do your research and internalize what complications mean and all the possible solutions - both holistic and medical - like going through it yourself.  I'm not going to get into all those details right now, but I feel like putting that out there because I'm going to open up and tell you and the rest of the world that I had a cesarean birth.  I originally didn't want to have a c-section.  My identity was so totally wrapped up in natural birth and out-of-hospital birth, to be quite honest, that I just had such a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of having to have my baby in a hospital.  And having a c-section... well that was obviously something I had to come to terms with and I honestly thank God that I had about 10 weeks to get used to the idea of not having the birth I wanted.

The day Daliya ended up being born, I woke up in the morning and checked my email.  The first thing I opened was lab results from Kaiser from my 2nd (or maybe it was my 3rd...) 24 hour urine test to watch for protein in my urine.  The amount of protein had gone way up and I was surprised that no one called me right away to have me come in for other lab work.  It was Christmas, so I guess no one was checking that day - or maybe it was just overlooked because of having less staff on duty.  I called L & D and alerted them to the results that had been automatically sent to me.  I was told to come in right away, so I did, and they ran a bunch of other tests.  The labs showed that my liver and kidney function were changing, and obviously not for the better.

I wasn't going to go into so many details, but now that I'm writing I feel like it feels right.  Daliya was still in a breech position so the doctor wanted to automatically do a c-section.  I told her that I wanted her to check me because if I were dilated more than a couple centimeters I wanted them to try an external cephalic version to try to turn her head down so that they could just put me on Pit and I'd still be able to have a vaginal birth.  The doctor was so sure that I wouldn't be dilated, even though I told her that I had been in early labor a few nights before and made it stop (I think she might have thought I was a little crazy, but she doesn't know me and know what I know about the physiology of labor).  So she humored me and seemed shocked to find that I was 3cm dilated.  She got me set up for the version.  They gave me a drug to relax my uterus and Daliya's heart rate shot up and stayed up until she was born.  It was seriously nerve-wracking.

They tried to turn her 4 times.  It didn't work.  At the time I didn't know as much as I do now about versions and one of the key factors in it being successful is having a really really full bladder to lift the baby as far out of the pelvis as possible.  Sometimes I wonder if things would have been different if I had know that.  But I didn't know.  And it didn't work.  I felt ok with having a cesarean at this point, especially knowing that this particular hospital didn't have any doctors on staff who were comfortable or experienced with breech birth.  Even if I was comfortable birthing a breech baby, I wasn't comfortable having a doctor who was uncomfortable with it as my safety net.  I was more comfortable having a cesarean.

I think I just mixed up the order of things here a little, but hopefully you're still following.  After the doctor on call checked me but before the version (I think I have the order right, but my husband might correct me if it is less of a blur to him) she came into the room with my birth plan, pulled a chair up to sit right next to me, and proceeded to go through every single point on my birth plan with me.  It was incredible and I felt so respected.  I am literally tearing up right now thinking about it.  On a side-note, I always say that the care provider who ends up being at your birth is probably the one who is meant to be there, and for many reasons I do believe this was true for my birth as well - I might get more into that later, but let me get back on track for now.

We talked about my birth plan and what could and what wouldn't happen.  And she was straightforward in telling me that after I had my baby, we would be separated for a minimum of 12 hours, but more than likely 24 hours or more, because they were going to put me on Magnesium Sulfate.  I just about lost it (inside) at this point and as soon as she left the room I said to Jordan, "Should we leave and go to UCLA?  I feel like it would be different there."  We talked about it and the fact that my insurance wouldn't cover any treatment there, and I said I still would feel more comfortable there regardless of what was going to happen.  I don't remember which one of us suggested calling a friend for advice, but I called a friend of mine and asked her if it would be different there.  I remember her response sounding so quick and confident, and she told me the hospital policies would be the same there.  I for some reason let her response decide for me that I'd stay where I was.  That is the mistake that I feel like I am still healing from.  I later found out that the hospital I was at was one of the only (if not THE only) hospital in the area that had that policy.  If I had gone to UCLA chances are I would have gotten to spend that first couple of days with my baby.  It still hurts so much to think about her being whisked away and being told it was all because of hospital policy, and later that they could have bent their policy but they were short on staff because it was Christmas weekend.  They didn't even let me hold her before they took her away.  It didn't have to be that way.  IT DIDN'T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY.  Ugh, it still makes me so mad and sad.

I try to tell myself that there were reasons that I decided to stay at Kaiser... that my instincts must have actually been telling me to stay even though for a long time I blamed myself for not trusting the instinct to go somewhere else for my birth.  I have to remind myself how supportive of VBAC's the doctor I ended up with is and how she kept telling me, literally multiple times, with excitement how the incision she did and the fact that I was already dilated meant I would probably have a successful VBAC with my next baby.  I honestly wanted to scream each time she said this because I wasn't in the mind space to think about my NEXT baby!  I was just trying to deal with everything that came along with THIS baby's birth!

I have to say though, that looking back, I remember so clearly that when we sat down to and looked at my birth plan together I said to her repeatedly, if I could pick just one thing from my birth plan, INCLUDING if I were having a cesarean, that I would ask her to let the cord pulsate and delay clamping for as long as possible, preferallby until it was done pulsating in its own time.  Well, guess what, during my c-section, she let the cord pulsate and stop on its own once Daliya was out!!!  This is still so exciting to me that I'm getting all teary again.  This was so so so important to me, and most doctors would not have waited, ESPECIALLY during a cesarean birth.  But she waited.  She waited, she told me when it stopped and when she was going to cut it, and she even showed my husband that it was white before she clamped and cut it!  Jordan took the most amazing picture of Daliya still attached to the cord and the placenta, the placenta still inside me.  It is seriously incredible.  Maybe I will post it above.  Can I get away with posting a picture that includes my abdomen completely open in surgery?  I think I can. :)

Anyway, I guess you can see that even though I still think about the decision to stay where I was as a mistake I'm really moving towards coming to terms with it and working on believing that I was meant to be where I was and that in the long run the birth I had and the things that happened during the process are what needed to happen to give Daliya the best and most healthy entrance into the world. 

There is some more to the story, but I think I'm emotionally spent at the moment, so I'm gonna leave it at that.  Maybe I should have titled this post my birth story - or maybe I'll do that at a later date when I feel up to going back and filling in all the details including more details about the birth itself.

If you're reading this, please leave me a comment.  This is probably the most intimate thing I could have posted on the internet today and I would so love to feel like the people reading it are becoming a community, my community.

Thank you. <3

I was tossing and turning last night because I made a mistake yesterday.  Luckily this particular mistake only cost me about $40 and I know that in the grand scheme of things that's really not a big deal, but it still felt unsettling.  I ended up spending some time reflecting on mistakes I've made in the past - some big, some small, some that have completely changed my life for the better, and others that have started a ripple effect that is still in the process of unfolding, that may or may not ultimately result in something I'm happy about.  Maybe this all sounds a little vague, but my point is that we all make mistakes sometimes and there's no going back.  If you're a perfectionist like I am you probably dwell just a little too much on the fact that you didn't quite think things out, didn't do the research you "should have" done, or you just went with the decision that felt right but didn't turn out the way you imagined it would. 

The thing is, you can't forget that as long as you make a point to trust your instincts in the moment, nothing else matters.  Fine if it doesn't turn out the way you pictured, or doesn't even turn out in a way you feel is positive.  You made the best decision you possibly could have made in the moment and the truth is that it may have turned out better than whatever the potential alternative was. 

And guess what.  If you're a mom, well if you're a human being, but especially if you're a mom, you're gonna be making plenty of mistakes along the way as you teach and care for and love your children.  They may even remember a few of your mistakes.  But in the end it isn't the mistakes that are important.  How you you make your kids feel on a day to day basis is what's important.  It's also what shapes human beings.

I'm debating sharing a mistake I made the day Daliya, my daughter, was born.  It is hard to share really personal details, especially when I still feel like I'm healing emotionally from that particular mistake.  If you're reading this and you want to hear about it, post a comment of love or support and maybe I'll let myself be really really vulnerable in my next post, and let you in on an intimacy of my path to becoming a mom, just like I hope you'll let me in on yours.