Author Archives: Katie Turnbull

Sleepy Time: Part 2

Emily has actually been doing better (finally) with the sleep training. After months of sleeping with her in a recliner, I may possibly be able to sleep in a bed again. My back will be thrilled. I think Mark will be happy, too, though he has gotten used to having a queen bed all to himself.

I’ve been reading a lot about sleep training lately, and thinking about why we’re doing it. Because it’s what you’re supposed to do. Because both grandmothers said we need to get her to sleep in her crib. Because co-sleeping is “bad”. Because the pediatrician said if we co-sleep past 6 months, we’ll be co-sleeping until kindergarten.

Did you notice none of those reasons were based on what I think? Sometime over the last week, I realized I was the problem, and the separation anxiety wasn’t on Emily’s part. As much as I want her to be able to put herself back to sleep when she wakes up (something we all do without even remembering it), I’m not ready for her to sleep alone. I like the fact that she needs me.

After 10 days of sleep training, I’m more sleep deprived than I’ve been since the first few weeks home from the hospital. I’m emotional, and irritable, and the crazy weather in Chicago has my sinuses acting up, which just makes everything worse. My almost 5 month old baby is sleeping peacefully in her crib, and yet, I’m miserable. I hate it. I know she’s going to grow up too fast. I realize that working full time means I get an hour with her awake in the morning and an hour at night, and that’s at best. Her morning wake up smiles and stories are the best part of my day. Is it any wonder I want her sleeping next to me at night?

So, yes, Emily won. And I’m okay with that.

Event Planning for Nursing Moms

Last weekend I attended a conference on big data. It was hosted by a local university and promoted through the grad program I’m attending. I was excited to go and network with classmates, especially since it was reasonably priced and on a Saturday. (I hate using up my PTO!) I realized about 2 days beforehand that attending a conference was suddenly not as simple as it might have been six months ago.

You see, a conference on big data doesn’t exactly cater to nursing moms. (For some reason, we’re not the target demographic. Go figure.) Now, I know the law states that companies with more than 100 employees have to provide a location for moms to use, and while it would be awesome if that extended to events with more than 100 people, it’s not something I’d expect. Even I will admit, pumping never would have entered my mind as a consideration when planning an event until very recently, and I bet it’s probably not even on the radar for the people who coordinated this one. (One of my friends attended “Mommy Con” the same day, which is probably the only exception.) I brought an insulated lunch sack with an ice pack and a manual pump, and figured I’d probably be pumping in a bathroom stall. No problem, I can handle this!

While I anticipated the lack of pleasant accommodations, I have to say, I didn’t count on the lack of breaks. I mean, wouldn’t everyone benefit from a 15 minute break every 3 hours? Especially considering the prolific availability of bottled water all day! (Kudos to them on that, though.) I ended up skipping question & answer sessions and missing half my lunch. Even when the one afternoon session offered a 15 minute break, I spent 5 of it trying to find the restroom on that floor.

Lesson learned- Next time, review the schedule ASAP and determine when to pump… and then show up early and scout out restrooms near every room so you don’t waste time looking when minutes count.

Oh, and if you’re the one planning the event, well, you’d have the gratitude of nursing moms everywhere if we even crossed your mind.

Eating for Two

So a post on cooking from a woman might not seem like “breaking roles”, but it is in our relationship. It was decided very early on that Mark owns the kitchen, probably about the same time that I tried to help him cook something and he ended up hugging me while laughing maniacally.

While you’re supposedly “eating for two” when pregnant, I don’t feel that my eating habits changed that much until after Emily was born and I was nursing. Mark claims that all I was doing at the end was pointing to my mouth and grunting, but I’m pretty sure that’s an exaggeration. Being home on maternity leave, I’ve actually had time to eat decent breakfasts, but I’ve found Mark doesn’t really appreciate it when I wake him up just to ask him to make me food. Thus began the great experiment involving forays into the kitchen for things other than beverages. This is actually a big deal- I’ve been known to melt butter lids and silicone oven mitts (bet you didn’t know that was possible), which resulted in Mark forbidding me from touching his Calphalon.

Armed with my trusty pots from Mark’s college days and frying pans from IKEA, I’ve actually been doing pretty well with breakfast foods (my favorite meal of the day). Once upon a time in Home Ec, I learned to make waffles and pancakes, but that’s just way too many dishes, so I’ve been eating a lot of eggs and toast. Eggs also have the advantage of being a protein, which means I last longer before pestering Mark to feed me lunch. I’ve made hard boiled eggs before, which are about as easy as it gets, but for some reason I end up wanting to eat more of them due to the tiny portion size. Alton Brown’s Unscrambled Eggs are pretty fool-proof, so that’s the method I use for scrambling, but when I want to go for quick and easy, fried eggs are where it’s at. I’ve been eating a LOT of fried eggs with my toast. I like my eggs a bit more done than over easy, which is still hit or miss. When Mark told me to branch out, I decided to be adventurous and learn to poach them… I think he meant to make something other than eggs, but oh well.

Being that Alton Brown is my culinary hero, I decided to follow his recipe, which calls for poaching one egg at a time. My very first attempt was flawless, and I went on to round two. I discovered that first one was beginner’s luck, and, half a dozen attempts later, have yet to duplicate it. Mark even went so far as to buying me a poaching pod, which only helps slightly. The egg maintains a nice shape, but it seems near impossible to have the white cooked properly without overcooking the yoke. My experiment with cooking is drawing to a close, though- I expect that once I go back to work on Tuesday, I’ll be back to donuts and bagels.

Beginner's Luck (left) and Attempt 2 (right)

Beginner’s Luck (left) and Attempt 2 (right)

Newborn Diaper Rental

You may have noticed I said in a previous post that one-size (OS) diapers start to fit at 8-10 lbs and wondered what we did before then. Using cloth on a newborn is a whole different ballgame. They’re just so itty bitty! There are pretty much three options- use disposables for a month or two, buy a stash of diapers that are the newborn size, or do a rental. Remembering that we’re admittedly cheap, we basically approached it from a financial perspective, and our initial plan was to use disposables until she fit in OS. I’ve heard that you can do a pretty cheap newborn stash using covers and prefolds or flats, but since we were new to cloth, we weren’t quite ready to start with that level of effort.

MARK SAYS: “We’re cheap and lazy”

But that was when I discovered the rental option. A bunch of cloth diaper stores do them, but we found one for a steal from Itsy Bitsy Bums (IBB in the rest of this post). I looked at a lot of sites’ rental programs, and no one else really comes close on cost, though IBB only has one option for the type of diapers. You could either choose to rent brand new diapers for $295 or used diapers for $195, and keep them for 3 months. Once returned, you either get a $125 refund or $155 store credit for those OS diapers you’d need later. So $40 plus return shipping would diaper our daughter for 3 months. When I looked online, I found you could get a package of 234 Pampers for $47, so as long as we used at least that many changes, we’d break even. I talked to Mark about the change in plans, and ordered the rental when I was about 37 weeks… a little past the 4 weeks in advance they ask for. Then Emily came early, and we of course hadn’t received the rental yet. The customer service at IBB was great, though, and it shipped within a few days of me emailing.

The rental includes 4 Thirsties Duo Wrap covers (with velcro) and 25 Kissaluvs cotton fitteds (snaps). The amount worked pretty well for doing laundry every other day- you alternate between covers unless they get dirty, and just change the fitted inside. The system is pretty friendly for those new to cloth. No need to learn how to do an origami fold or deal with Snappies at 3 am. They fit well when we first got them, but we discovered the problem with snap closures is that sometimes the baby is between snaps. We solved that by occasionally using a Snappi to close the fitted, which looked a little funny, but worked ok. It took a little while to get used to the fact that the fitted would get completely soaked, front and back, inside and outside, but the cover is waterproof so as long as we put it on snugly, we didn’t get leaks. Fitteds were also great at containing runny newborn poop.

Unfortunately, Emily is turning out to be a tall and skinny little girl, and started to outgrow the rise in the fitteds pretty quickly. By 7 weeks, they barely fit, and she was soaking them fast enough that I tried not to leave them on for more than an hour and a half. (Thanks to my baby tracking app, I know we’d gone through over 275 changes, so we did make it past the break even point.) Since we’ll probably have the same issue with any younger siblings, doing a rental next time is TBD. It was certainly worthwhile for a parent with a newborn who has never used cloth, though. The Thirsties covers at least still worked, and we had purchased a few OS diapers that were supposed to fit earlier by that point which helped tide us over.

We did have a few snags ordering our OS replacements. After doing more research and deciding what to spend our credit on, I placed an order in the middle of December, assuming we’d have them by Christmas. We had an assortment of snafus- my sleep-deprived brain ordered the wrong size on the one sized diaper cover I was going to try (luckily I caught it before the order shipped), then they were out of the print I wanted, plus my back up, for the correct size, and the USPS 2 day delivery turned into 4, on top of all of the non-business days for the holidays. While I was frustrated and impatient by the time the diapers arrived on Jan 2 (impatient to get diapers- who’d have thought?), I can’t really fault IBB. Holidays are pretty crazy for retail, and since my earlier experience with them was positive, I’d still shop with them again for brands that aren’t carried by our local store.

Adventures in the Life of a Working Mother: Part 1

With the new year, I’m starting to think about my upcoming return to the working world. I’m sure I’ll miss my daughter terribly, but that’s actually not my first concern. My more immediate worry: How to get out the door. Our office has a fairly flexible start time; I just need to be at my desk by 9:30 am. Prior to being pregnant, my goal was to get to work by 8:30, which sometimes translated into 9. After two and a half months at home, I’m still usually in pajamas at 10. Ok, ok, I’m in pajamas all day as often as not. This led to my decision that we should spend the month of January getting our morning routine down. I figured we’d start with a realistic goal, and move the time back each week…

Week 1: Be fully dressed and ready to walk out the door at 9:30 (not that I’d actually be going anywhere).

Day 1: Emily 1, Mom 0. I set my alarm. I woke up when it went off. Emily didn’t. I should probably note here that she sleeps with on me. We sleep in a recliner in her room. I never intended to cosleep, I know you’re not supposed to, but the dirty little secret is that most moms I know do at the beginning. We’ve tried putting her in her Rock-n-Play, in her swing, in her Pack-n-Play, and in her crib. If we’re lucky, she gets 15 minutes of sleep before screaming. Anyway, I digress. I didn’t really want to wake a sleeping baby, so I turned off the alarm. She started stirring by around 9 am, and I thought, “I may still be able to make it.” Emily opened her eyes, closed them again, smiled, and continued sleeping. Five minutes later, she did it again. She finally woke up around 9:15. I fed her, and handed her off to Mark at 9:30, noting that she needed a diaper, and started getting ready. While I wasn’t ready to walk out the door at 9:30, I had at least given her to Dad by then. Not horrible for our first try, but clearly, we need some practice at this, so I’m glad we have a few weeks!

I had originally thought about actually leaving the house at the designated time to also give Mark some practice at parenting solo, but today happened to have a high of -13 with a windchill of North Pole. There’s no way I was going to walk to the mailbox to mail thank you notes from Christmas, let alone walk across parking lots when I don’t have to. So once I escaped the clutches of cuteness, I went downstairs to make myself a real breakfast and start on schoolwork since my class started this week. All the while, I hear Mark talking to Emily, knowing I’d overhear… “Wait until I tell your mom you punched me in the face/drooled all over me/clawed a hole in my chest.” My response of “I’m not here” was met with a video call. This little experiment is not going well.

To be continued…

The Argument for Cloth

Emily modeling her math-y diaper (Flip diaper in Albert print)

Emily modeling her math-y diaper (Flip diaper in Albert print)

Why on earth would anyone want to use cloth diapers?!

Having grown up in a town where almost every family seemed to have someone who worked at one of Procter & Gamble’s diaper plants (including my own), I’m sure it was a bit of a surprise to hear Mark & I had decided to use cloth diapers. I expect we’ll have a number of posts about our adventures along the way, but we’re about six weeks in now, and still pretty happy with our decision. So why’d we do it? Well, there are a bunch of reasons people will quote when you ask that question, but to be honest, we’re cheap. The idea of spending hundreds of dollars on mountains of diapers really bothered me. So now when Emily poops just as I finish putting on a clean outfit, I may sigh about redoing the task, but at least I’m not annoyed about wasting money. We also don’t ever have to worry about running out and having to make a midnight trip to the store.

Along the way, we’ve found that using cloth really isn’t a big deal, and there seem to be a lot of misconceptions floating around from people who haven’t tried it:

  • More laundry- Actually, we might be doing less. Yeah, I know that’s confusing. You know how babies manage to have blow outs and get poop all over their clothes? Doesn’t happen. The only blowouts we’ve had have been times we put her in disposables for one reason or another (like the first week before the cord fell off, or when the power went out and we packed up and headed to Mark’s parents… we now even travel with cloth). Personally, I’d rather just wash the diapers, which I expect to get poop on, and not have to change her clothes 700x a day. Plus, I now don’t worry about stains on her clothes.
  • Pre-rinsing- Our diaper sprayer is awesome. Think of your kitchen sink sprayer and hook it up to the toilet. I don’t touch poop any more than moms of kids in disposables. Plus, if you actually look at that package of Pampers, you’re supposed to be dumping that poop, too, not just tossing it in your diaper genie.
  • Having to change more often- It’s true that disposable diapers absorb an ungodly amount, but it’s not like she’s peeing more. You really should be changing just as often either way. The big difference seems to be that you can push it a little more with disposables when you have to, but I don’t want her sitting in a dirty diaper anyway. That’s how you wind up with rashes.
    • Speaking of rashes, we have yet to see a bad one. Really, we’ve only gotten a little red once.
  • Dealing with pins- If you haven’t seen modern cloth diapers, you should take a look. Pins are no longer required, even if you choose to use traditional cloth diapers (“flats” or “prefolds”). There’s this wonderful thing called a Snappi, which is much easier to deal with when the baby wants to roll off the changing table. It’s kind of like the little metal clasp on an Ace bandage, but Y shaped and plastic. Even those aren’t required, though, because you could just use “all-in-one” or “pocket” diapers, which go on like disposables, with either snaps or velcro built into the diaper. Most of our diapers are “all-in-twos”, which have the cloth part that gets washed separate from the waterproof cover, which you can reuse.

I will say cloth is a much larger initial investment, but it pays for itself quickly, especially if you use one-size diapers. They typically fit starting at 8-10 lbs (though they can be pretty bulky at first), and work all the way up until potty training. That’s pretty awesome on its own, but think about if you have two in diapers at the same time! No worries about grabbing the wrong size. It does hurt a little to spend over $20 on one diaper, but- fun fact- you can easily resell your used diapers when you’re finished with them, and get some of that money back.

So what’s the downside? So far, the only one I’ve found is that we have more stuff in our diaper bag. Unless you count wanting to buy more diapers. (I did say they’re adorable.)

Hypnobabies Ho!

Our little hypnobaby!

Yup, I know it sounds crazy (even Mark would agree), but I decided to try using hypnosis when prepping for Emily’s arrival, since I really wanted to avoid an epidural and other interventions. For those of you not in the know, there are two popular systems of hypnosis for childbirth, and after doing some research I ended up ordering the Hypnobabies home study course. One of the questions I had prior to the big day was whether or not it would work- I mean really, they claim you can have a pain-free childbirth, which sounds nuts after seeing all these TV shows of women screaming, crying, and generally being miserable in labor.

Hypnobabies in a Nutshell: It’s a five week program where you listen to CD tracks and practice self-hypnosis cues every day and have readings every week. The readings cover everything from diet (which hopefully you already are handling, since by the time you get to this course, you’re probably already at 30 weeks) to what common interventions are used, with pros and cons. There’s also readings and a CD for the husband/other support- which Mark completely ignored. To give him the benefit of the doubt, Emily did come early, so maybe he would have gotten around to it in the last 2 weeks before I was due. The program changes some of the language of childbirth to avoid the negative connotations we associate with those words- “contractions” become “pressure waves”, etc. I admittedly felt kind of silly referring to pressure waves and my birthing time, and had some trouble with that aspect.

I did the readings and listened to the CD tracks religiously, but I put them on at night and generally fell asleep within minutes. (This is actually pretty common, and they suggest that you make sure you listen to each track at least once while awake so you know what’s on them, but that your subconscious mind will still pick up the suggestions if you do fall asleep.) I will say I had no trouble sleeping when I was pregnant, all the way up until at least week 35, and even then I only woke up occasionally. I like to think that was due to the CDs, but who knows. I wasn’t nearly as good about practicing the cues as I should have been. I work long days and I just had trouble fitting in the time. (Excuses, I know.) I didn’t do any of the practicing with Mark, which I regret because I think it would have helped. Being first time parents, neither of us really knew what to expect, and he ended up basically letting me do my own thing.

Of course, the big question is did it work?

Yes and no, but I take at least some of the blame for the “no”, and definitely plan to use the program for the next kiddo.

  • I was calm throughout my pregnancy and labor from the first day of the course. I felt less stressed about everything, including work. I really think this was the biggest benefit of the program for me. I had no trouble having rational conversations with nurses, I didn’t panic, and the only time I yelled at Mark was when I told him to go get lunch already. Actually, I went into labor at 3:30 am and didn’t wake Mark up until about 7. I was more calm than he was, and I actually felt like I should have labored at home longer. He insisted I call the office at 7:30. (This ended up resulting in me skipping breakfast and going in right away- one of my few regrets. Ladies, eat breakfast. I was starving. I felt like I belonged in a Snickers commercial.)
  • I progressed steadily and had a relatively quick labor for a first time mom, without pitocin or anything else to speed things along. It actually felt even faster than it was- one of the hypnosis suggestions from the program is that every 20 minutes would feel like 5, and that’s pretty accurate. I didn’t get tired.
  • The only real pain I felt during contractions was in my back. (Back labor is not fun.) I’m convinced that if Emily had been positioned better that it might really have been pain-free. It was worst when I was laying down, which was pretty much required for about 20 min/hour for monitoring. I did end up getting an epidural as a result, but that wasn’t until I was at 7 cm, and it only took about an hour from that point until I was at 10, and they turned it off. Honestly, I could have probably gone longer (or avoided entirely), but I was worried about passing the point of no return and then not being able to get one if the back labor got worse. Not really being able to handle laying down didn’t help.
  • I felt about 95% back to normal within 2 weeks.
  • Random observation- one of the things the program has you do is visualize the birth. I had been visualizing going into labor in the morning and the baby being born around 5. In actuality, we went to the hospital around 8 am and Emily was born around 4:30 pm. Next time I’m going to visualize eating breakfast beforehand and the baby being born in time for lunch. 🙂

As I said, I absolutely plan on using the program again next time, so while things weren’t perfect, I still think it was well worth the cost. I actually would recommend everyone use it, even if they plan to get an epidural, just because of how calm I was. The course was worth it for that alone. Plus, my labor looked nothing like what you see on TV- though whether that’s due to Hypnobabies, I’ll never know.