crooked house

Breastfeeding and Birthing Dolls and A Rather Heated Conversation About Vaginas

We seem to be talking about breastfeeding and birthing here all the time lately, weirdly, since we are done with that phase. But the kids are still very interested in the subject and clear information and a healthy attitude about the whole thing will help to prepare them for their own future families. I just happened upon these Mamamor Dolls and I think they are hilarious, adorable, and informative. The babies have little snaps for mouths that attach to nipples, also made out of snaps, on the moms. (The designer should consider using pink, red, and brown snaps instead of silver ones, though.)

Some of the dolls also show how the babies are carried in the moms' bellies and how they come out. Some of the babies come complete with detachable umbilical cords and placentas.

 

There are even VBAC dolls, which also have a slot in the stomach through which the baby can emerge. Which reminds me of a conversation Luke and I had on the weekend. It was the kind of conversation that should have been an exchange of information expressed in a matter-of-fact, healthy manner, but it got away from me.

Steph (witnessing Luke putting shreds of a red balloon that has burst into his mouth): Luke! Never ever ever put pieces of balloon in your mouth! They can get stuck in your stomach and KILL you. And especially not red ones! A surgeon won't be able to find the red pieces in your stomach because they look just like blood and all the other stuff inside you.

Luke: How about if I chew this yellow one? Yellow wouldn't be hard for the surgeon to see...

Steph: Absolutely not! I don't care if yellow is an easier colour for the surgeon to see. It is NEVER a good thing if you have to be cut open.

Luke: All girls have to be cut open when they have their babies.

Steph: No they don't. Just sometimes, when the babies won't come out their vaginas. And it is NOT a good thing.

Luke: Ewww. They come out their vaginas?! Ewww. I came out your VAGINA? (starts laughing)

Steph: No, you did not. You wouldn't come out properly so they had to cut my stomach open and take you out that way.

Luke (still laughing): I came out your vagina! Ewww!

Steph (laughing too, but getting annoying and starting to shout): No! You DID NOT COME OUT MY VAGINA!

David (entering the room, says mildly): Well, now the whole neighbourhood has that clear.

Luke (continuing to snort and giggle): Did you come out of your mother's vagina?

Steph: Yes. Yes, I did. (muttering) Everyone comes out of their mothers' vaginas and it is natural and beautiful. That is what the vagina is for.

Luke: But you just said that I didn't come out of your vagina.

Seven Billion Babies

This is baby Danica Camacho, born yesterday, upon whom has been bestowed the symbolic title of the World's 7 Billionth Baby by the UN. She was born in the Philippines, a country that has a high fertility rate and poor access to contraception.  To mark this momentous occasion, she was given a cake and a certificate for free shoes. Shoes? Surely they could have mustered up a scholarship or a reality show or at least something a little more dramatic. Unless they are magic shoes.

I wonder what her life will be like?

There are differing opinions about whether our rapid population growth is not that big a deal or a total nightmare.

Here's the latest estimate on how many people have ever lived.

And here you can calculate your numbers: When I was born I was supposedly the 3,590,447,718th person alive on earth at the time and I am the 77,663,903,455th person to have lived since history began.

Dad's Good Egg?

I am perplexed by this tee I came across whilst browsing the sales at Old Navy. Shouldn't that be "Mom's Good Egg"? Or better yet, why not "Mom's Last Good Egg" for those whose mothers endured geriatric pregnancies, like me? If you must bring up Dad, and it has to be spring-y, I suggest: "Dad's Winning Seed."

Babies in Literature: Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography

According to Alexandra Popoff, author of Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography, Leo Tolstoy's wife has been maligned by history. Popoff, who had access to a great deal of previously inaccessible archival materials, explains that it all stems from Tolstoy's final years, when he experienced a religious conversion that led him to renounce his marriage, his family, and his property (or try to). However much Tolstoy may have believed in his principles of poverty and chastity, this renunciation put his wife in a completely untenable position. Sophia was left to look after the couple's eight surviving children pretty much on her own. Clearly Tolstoy felt some responsibility to his family, because he kept waffling on property and money matters. Admittedly, Sophia kept fighting him on these -- who wouldn't, when she had eight children to feed, clothe, and educate? He also kept waffling on the matter of sex -- he kept sleeping with Sophia and then blaming the matronly woman for being a seductress. Tolstoy's most famous follower, Vladimir Chertkoff, managed to insinuate himself between the couple in Tolstoy's final years and ended up controlling his literary works after his death. Popoff argues that it is he who is most responsible for discrediting Sophia Tolstoy's character. This book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in Tolstoy, and really, anyone who is interested in the concept of marriage and women's historical role within it.

Tolstoy was a literary genius, to be sure, but he also must have been infuriating to be married to. Sophia was not only Tolstoy's muse, she was a  tireless worker who devoted all her efforts to creating the proper environment for her husband to write in. She was Tolstoy's copyist and later his publisher. She managed his home and often his estate and related business matters. She made most of the childrearing and educational decisions on her own. (At one point, when she asked about appropriate education for one of their teenage sons, her husband brushed her off with a comment that he should become a street sweeper or the like because of his own religious beliefs against taking part in a money-based economy.) Sophia gave birth to thirteen children, although she wanted to stop after seven or so -- but Tolstoy wouldn't allow birth control. She breastfed all these babies herself at Tolstoy's insistence even though it never became easy for her (she often developed mastitis) and most women of her position employed wet nurses. And she watched six of her children die. Exhausted and completely emotionally and physically spent, at times Sophia wanted to end these pregnancies:

By now, she was certain of her [twelfth] pregnancy. As she wrote her sister, she felt like "screaming of despair and rage."

Told the news, Tolstoy wrote he was glad they would have a child; Sophia's unhappiness came from her revolté. It would be easier for her and people around her if she assumed a more accepting attitude: "Why can't you surrender?" Sophia thought his position was morally superior and felt crushed. "If I were bad before, now I am loathsome! And if you were good, you have become so much better!" Her pregnancy explained her abnormal state, Tolstoy replied: "I know, I've heard, that it's terribly oppressive for the soul."

Meanwhile, Sophia attempted to induce a miscarriage: she took scalding baths and jumped from a dresser. To a nanny who tried to talk her out of it, she said that Tolstoy considered leaving her and their children. When her attempts failed, she approached a midwife in Tula, asking for an abortion. The midwife, afraid of exposure, refused: she would perform an abortion for someone else, but not for Countess Tolstoy.

At times, Sophia Tolstoy wanted to end her own life.

You can read a brief excerpt from the biography here.

Embrace Infant Warmer

This is the Embrace, a low-cost, low-tech baby warmer for the developing world, designed by a group of Stanford MBA students. The pocket in front contains a wax-like substance that, once warmed with hot water, will keep a baby at 98.6 degrees for 4-6 hours. It will cost around $25 -- as opposed to the $20, ooo an incubator costs. The group is testing the Embrace in India right now and you can read about it on their blog.

This video features Jane Chen, co-founder and CEO of Embrace, speaking at a TED conference in India. Now there's a job you could feel good about.

You can purchase one of these infant warmers as a gift in a friend or relative's name. I can't think of a better present.

Polo Is a Sport and Breastfeeding Kittens

A couple of nights ago I had an extremely vivid dream that I couldn't help sharing with Luke at breakfast. "I dreamed I had another baby," I told him, expecting either delight or horror from him, or a mixture of both.

He nodded calmly.

"And the baby had a full head of red hair!" I continued. "Isn't that funny? Both you and Sylvie had hardly any hair when you were born."

He nodded.

"But the funniest part was that he was born able to talk," I said. "The first time Daddy held him, the baby announced, 'Polo is a sport.'"

"What's polo?" asked Luke.

"Uh, it's a game where people ride horses and hit balls with some kind of stick," I said.

"Then polo is not a sport!" he said. 

I refrained from telling him the rest of the dream, in which the baby turned into a kitten and I debated whether or not to breastfeed. "I don't think I'm up for breastfeeding a kitten," I said to David, trying to convince myself it was okay not to.

I was also annoyed that the ultrasound hadn't revealed the fact of my baby's kitten-ness earlier. "Although," I announced to the woman giving birth next to me in the giant gymnasium that served as a communal delivery room for hundreds if not thousands of labouring women, "My first baby was also a kitten. Then I had Luke and Sylvie before this kitten. It happens."

David and I spent hours dealing with the bureaucracy involved in getting special kitten formula, to no avail. Soon it had been so long that my baby/ kitten had gone without sustenance that I feared for his life. So I marched into the laboratory adjoining the gymnasium and started making a scene. All the technicians eyed me suspiciously, muttering to one another that humans never gave birth to kittens and that I was just trying to get attention. I was flabbergasted, hurt, and deeply worried about the kitten's well-being. That's what you get for not breastfeeding.

Irene Vilar's Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict

Irene Vilar's memoir, Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict, has gotten a lot of attention from the press and, with that sensationalistic subtitle, it's not hard to see why. Vilar wrote an earlier, well-received memoir about her relationship with her mother, who committed suicide when Vilar was eight years old, and her grandmother, an heroic Puerto Rican political activist. This second memoir is about what was happening in Vilar's life while she wrote the first, especially her relationship with a man at least thirty years her senior with whom she became involved when she was only fifteen years old and studying at Syracuse.

The man, a narcissistic professor of Latin American literature, had three successively younger wives before his relationship with Vilar and claimed that each of the marriages had ended because the women wanted children. It was, you see, essential for artistic and philosophical reasons that he remain free of all such encumbrances. (Of course. Why didn't he just get a vasectomy is presumably a question for another book.)

Once we learn about Vilar's mother's sucide and her father's quick remarriage, it's easy to understand how Vilar became unusually dependent on an abusive relationship with this man. The obvious question then becomes: why didn't she simply use birth control instead of undergoing fifteen abortions in fifteen years? Well, as her subtitle indicates, Vilar claims that the cycle of pregnancy and abortion became a kind of addiction as her unconscious desire to have children conflicted with her need to keep her lover. And -- although Vilar never mentions this in the memoir proper -- in the foreword it is revealed that, in the 50s and 60s, Puerto Rican women were used as guinea pigs by the US government to test female contraceptives, particularly dangerously high-dose pills that sometimes resulted in sterility. For me, this is a very telling fact.

Vilar prefers to call the book a "testimony" rather than a "memoir." I'd go one further, perhaps -- it reads almost like a psychological or sociological case study, albeit a well-written and even at times poetic one. But one that is uncomfortable to read, as such things usually are, nonetheless.

Babies in Literature Series: Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs (with A Very Brief Appearance by Ernest Hemingway)

Completely gratuitous picture of Sylvie wearing a pink foam crown. She looks a bit apprenhensive about her responsiblities as a monarch, don't you think?

Yesterday Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs, which I'd preordered a few weeks ago, arrived. As soon as the kids were asleep I dove into it. It's written from the point of view of a college-aged babysitter (or perhaps more accurately, a middle-aged woman looking back on her experience as a college-aged babysitter) and so there are plenty of funny, insightful passages about pregnancy and babies. Like this one, about the protagonist Tassie's potential employers:

One forty-ish pregnant woman after another hung up my coat, sat me in her living room, then waddled out to the kitchen, got my tea, and waddled back in, clutching her back, slopping tea onto the saucer, and asking me questions. "What would you do if our little baby started crying and wouldn't stop?" "Are you available evenings?" "What do you think of as a useful educational activity for a small child?" I had no idea. I had never seen so many pregnant women in such a short time -- five in all. They alarmed me. They did not look radiant. They looked reddened with high blood pressure and frightened. "I would put him in his stroller and take him for a walk," I said.

It's true. Most forty-ish pregnant women look far from radiant. It's only the twenty-something pregnant women who look radiant. Mind you, most twenty-somethings tend to look radiant anyway.

Lorrie Moore is one of my favourites -- I absolutely adore her self-conscious jokiness and word-play. She's so zingy and yet heartrending at the same time. Take this little remark, apparently tossed off, from a description of Tassie's depressive mom:

...one year the holiday card my mother sent out was an October photo of my brother and me, with a caption that read The children. In some dead leaves.

Remove the "one year" (for the purposes of word count) and you've got an entire award-winning twitter-sized short short story right there. Ernest Hemingway and his "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" can eat his heart out.

Enormous and Boneless. With a Side of Head-Cold. In a Cup.

This morning we were watching the beginning of Wall-E -- although I think it's a terrific movie, for some reason Luke never makes it more than halfway -- and I realized that at this point in the pregnancy I feel exactly like one of the enormous boneless people who live on the shapeship. Early on, one called Josh falls out of his chair and squirms helplessly around on the floor until he can be rescued. That's me right about now. Also, everyone in the house has developed a head-cold. I'm hoping it's gone before my c-section, which is scheduled for three weeks from last Friday. And/or that I don't spontaneously go into labour before it's gone.

Speaking of c-sections, last night while reviewing The Nursing Mother's Companion (and trying not to hyperventilate as my first attempt at breastfeeding was a total nightmare), I laughed when I came across this brief note on the operation: "If you have had a cesarean birth, keep in mind you are recovering from major abdominal surgery. Most likely, you will have to take pain medication during the first week or so at home. You may perhaps be bothered by an uncomfortable feeling that your abdomen may fall out." I don't really remember being too bothered by the c-section the first time round -- I was much too busy trying to stay awake for the round-the-clock feedings. This time I've vowed to make myself take notes through everything, no matter how tired I get. I'll pay particular attention to any sensations that indicate my stomach is about to fall out and report back.

How to Talk To Your Kids About Sex On Oprah

Instead of painting my pregnant belly as an Easter egg, I should probably paint it as a giant potato. For once again I have become a big old couch potato. I was definitely one in the beginning. For the first three to four months of this pregnancy I felt like I was dying, so much so that when I had my first ultrasound I badgered the technician to make sure there was a fetus in there and not a lump of cancerous tissue. (At my age and with my history of fertility problems, I would've been less surprised by a diagnosis of cancer than pregnancy, anyway.) Then, once I got past that first trimester and started taking iron supplements, I was able to get off the sofa, at least now and then. However, as I enter the third trimester, I am once again so anemic that I suffer heart palpitations and breathlessness whenever I walk around the house. The other day I had to leave the shopping mall in the middle of a bunch of errands because I felt like a) I was about to pass out and b) the baby was about to explode out of the region of my belly button right there in the grocery store's check-out line. All this to say that I am once again pretty much a full-time couch potato and that therefore, I watched two complete episodes of Oprah this week. Maybe I should start a blog devoted to nothing but reviewing the Oprah show.

Yesterday's show featured Dr. Laura Berman, the sexpert with the Oprah seal of approval. And after watching it, I have decided to give her the Crooked House seal of approval, too. Unlike the show a few days ago about mothering, this show provided useful -- and inevitably controversial -- advice, in this case about how to talk to your kids about sex, which is, for many, many people one of the most difficult aspects of parenting. It's also probably the main area where parents screw up the most, generally by not providing enough information and by not appearing open, non-judgemental, and non-threatening enough for their children to come to them to talk about sex. What was particularly interesting about this episode was that Dr. Berman focused on being positive about sexual pleasure with your children. This translated to including the concept of masturbation (and stressing that it's perfectly fine and normal) when you first have the discussion about the mechanics of sex to a child, most likely when that child is around 10 years old. This absolutely floored many of the people in the audience and particularly Oprah's friend Gayle King, who looked like she needed smelling salts. And then, then Dr. Berman went on to say that when your daughter is in her mid-teens and your conversations are getting more specific, you might want to tell her about vibrators that are designed for clitoral stimulation. This, of course, had the audience in an uproar. But Dr. Berman was still able to make her point that, if you teach your children about sexual pleasure and let them know how they can give it to themselves, they're not going to be as quick to run out and look for it from somebody else.

If only I'd had a vibrator seven months ago, I wouldn't be stuck on this couch right now.

I'm kidding. (I mean it, Mom, I'm really kidding! I never heard about vibrators until yesterday! Honest!) But I'm not kidding about how informative this particular Oprah show was on a difficult parenting issue.