One of those taggy games

Thanks to the Koala Bear Writer, I am going to spend the next three days lying on the couch in a self-therapy session for getting involved in one of these things. For the time being I'll justify it to myself by saying I haven't had much else to blog about and I know it's just a harmless fluffy diversion anyway. Ahem.

This photo was taken in 2003. A group of friends was out for dinner one Saturday night with another friend -- P, in the photo -- who was visiting from Sydney. P was a pretty exuberant bloke back in 2003 (I think marriage has turned him into a comparatively old man since then, but don't tell him I said that) and was entertaining us by spontaneously leapfrogging the parking meters as we walked down the street in search of a restaurant. These were tall parking meters too, I might add. Anyway, Craig pulled out the camera and P obligingly jumped another one for him.

What cracks me up about this photo, however, is that he happened to jump over a parking meter that was just outside a National Australia Bank branch, and Craig caught the sign in the photo. This in itself is not very funny, except that P was working for the NAB at the time. I always wished that the NAB was running one of those promotional campaigns where they photograph their own employees doing crazy stuff so that we could submit the photo and make millions from the royalties.

OK, now here's the fun bit. I get to share the love with some others. All righty then Dana (you knew you would be it, didn't you?), Sazz and skimbly -- go for your lives.
1) Pick the sixth photo from the sixth album or folder in your photo collection.
2) Post it to your blog and tell the story behind the photo.
3) Tag some other blog friends to do the same. Be glad it doesn't have to be six others.

It gets even worse

Yesterday the bill for the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law was proposed in Parliament House in Canberra.

Two of the proposed laws are:

Subdivision 6 General
148 Directing or inciting unprofessional conduct or professional misconduct
(1) A person must not direct or incite a registered health practitioner to do anything, in the course of the practitioner’s practice of the health profession, that amounts to unprofessional conduct or professional misconduct.
Maximum penalty:
(a) in the case of an individual—$30,000, or
(b) in the case of a body corporate—$60,000.

and

101 Conditions of registration
(1) If a National Board decides to register a person in the health profession for which the Board is established, the registration is subject to the following conditions:
(a) for a registered health practitioner other than a health practitioner who holds non-practising registration:
(i) that the registered health practitioner must complete the continuing professional development program required by the National Board, and
(ii) that the registered health practitioner must not practise the health profession unless professional indemnity insurance arrangements are in force in relation to the practitioner’s practice of the profession,

Let me make three things very clear.

1) Professional indemnity insurance is not available to independent midwives. It is not going to become available for several reasons, one of which is that "botched birth" payouts range in the millions of dollars, and with a pool of about 100 independent midwives in Australia to draw this money from, their insurance premiums would be untenable.

2) If you, as a woman seeking homebirth, even ask an independent midwife to attend you regardless of the insurance law, you could be up for a fine of $30,000.

3) The proposed legislation is not outlawing homebirth altogether. Homebirth will still be available -- if you have a hospital-based midwife operating under the hospital's policies*, live near a hospital offering a homebirth program, and you fulfil the hospital's low-risk criteria for the entire duration of your pregnancy and labour.

As two examples of women who cannot, ever, obtain a homebirth under these laws:
1) Women who have had one or more previous caesareans. Even if they've had three vaginal births since their surgery, they will still not be eligible for a homebirth.
2) Women who live too far from a hospital offering a homebirth program. This is the majority of women in Australia.

There is a protest rally against this oppressive legislation being organised by Homebirth Australia outside Parliament House in Canberra on the 7th of September, and I am going. This is not about "pushing homebirth" (it never has been). This is about human rights and justice.

***** ***** *****

*As an example of this, the Community Midwifery Program run by King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth requires that midwives measure the fetal heart rate every five minutes during the pushing stage.

Midwiving a poo

Thanks to Dana for inspiring me to record this anecdote, and to someone out in cyberland for giving me the title...

The other day Cassia was suffering constipation. The poor little girly was pushing and straining away, even developing beads of perspiration on her face with the effort. Unsurprisingly, the experience was a bit distressing for her and she started urgently requesting a nappy change.

"Are you sure?" I said. "It would be better if you finish doing the poo first. Come on, try to finish the poo."

She obligingly had another go at pushing and then started crying. "Nappy change lie down? Nappy change lie down?" she begged.

"Oh baby girl," I replied. "I really think you need to finish the poo before I change your nappy."

Nope. She was pretty desperate for a nappy change lie down. So I finally relented, lay her on her back and took her nappy off. Sure enough, a small lump of hard poo was sitting just inside her bum and it was obvious there was more to come. "Come on, let's push the poo out," I encouraged her. I held her legs up over her tummy and made her squeeze. "Puuuuuuuush! Puuuuuuush!" I said. Oh man. Listen to me! I sound just like a really annoying midwife telling a woman to push her baby out, as if the woman wasn't already doing so or didn't know how. I'm even pressing on her belly! Gah. Shut up Nat, just shut up, keep your hands to yourself, and let Cassia get on with it.

But Cassia was still quite upset and didn't seem to be getting anywhere. I knew it was because she was on her back. It's just like giving birth, being on your back is a really inefficient way to do it. "Baby girl, it would be a lot easier if you squatted or stood up."

"No no no no no!" Sob sob sob.

This went on for a while. She refused to try squatting, but I finally somehow managed to convince her to stand up (maybe she just "got" that lying down wasn't helping). So she stood up and held onto me while I held the nappy underneath her and kept saying, much to my own disbelief, "push push push!" Shut up shut up shut up Nat! Gah. Amazing how I'm feeling compelled to say this stuff even though I don't want to. I guess I'd like to think I'm actually being useful. Maybe that's how a lot of nurses feel too.

A few more tears and hard pushes later, a very large, smooth, hard ball of poo fell out of her, rolled off the nappy I was holding and landed on the floor. OK, so that bit wasn't much like an ideal birth but she was an awful lot happier once it was out! Unfortunately, however, she's a very particular and tidy little girl, so seeing the poo sitting on the bare floor was simply Beyond Her Scope of Acceptability. She cried some more. I tried hard to comfort and reassure her that it was OK, Mama was cleaning it up, but I'm not sure how effective it was given the laughter I was suppressing at the time.

I was later relaying this story to someone who told me she'd been there, done that, except that she was obviously a better poo midwife than me because she said stuff like "Push when your body tells you to", "Not too hard" and "Can you feel the poo coming out?" She said it felt just like midwiving a poo, although she did manage to stop short of saying "Reach down and touch your poo's head". Oh man, I can't believe I find this sort of stuff hilarious these days.

Let the rains begin

I think we can finally say the rainy season has begun. It started raining last night and it's forecast to rain for the whole week. This is really no big deal at all, except that I was expecting it to happen about three weeks ago based on what I'd heard from locals.

I've never lived anywhere that had a "rainy season" before. Well, Melbourne traditionally has a rainy season; it lasts from April to December. But that doesn't count. And anyway, in the last few years with the drought we haven't seen much rain at all.

Anyway, my point is, this is new and different. The end.

In search of a midwife

"Moshi moshi!"
"Uhhh... moshi moshi... uhh... Hara-san desu ka?"
"Hai!"
"Uhhh... this is Nat, I live in Numazu and I've been given your number... you speak English, right?"
"Mmmm yes, a little."
"OK, so... well I've been given your number because I'm pregnant and planning a homebirth for late December or early January... you're a midwife, right?"
"Umm... well, no not exactly but I work in a sanin. I'm a nurse." (A sanin is basically a Japanese birth centre.)
"OK, umm... well, I'm looking for a midwife who speaks English who might be able to attend me at the birth... would you be able to help me?"

So far this conversation is looking smooth. That's only because I've left out all the things she said that I couldn't understand. If I have made myself sound uncertain during this phone call, you need to triple the effect to get closer to the reality of how I was feeling. I suspect she was feeling similarly, because she went on to say something that indicated she didn't really want to talk on the phone any more, including:

"Give me your... uhh... duressu?" mumble mumble something in Japanese "uhh... duressu?"
"Oh, you mean address? Jusho?"
"Hai, jusho!" followed by something else in Japanese -- maybe she thought I spoke more of her language than she realised, just because I knew the word for address.
Oh great, I think. My address is soooo complicated in English and I have no idea how to say it in Japanese. Sigh. All righty, but here we go.
"Well, I live in Numazu-shi..."
"Hai, Numazu-shi."
"Uhh... Takashima-cho..."
"Hai, Takashima-cho."
Hang on. Why does she even need my address? Is she going to come around and talk to me in person? She didn't say anything like that... unless she said it in Japanese.
"Um, why do you need my address?"
"Huh? No no no, your umm... email?"
"Oh! Email address! OK then, that makes more sense." But groan, this means I have to dictate my email address instead, oh this is gonna be fun...
"Well, it's natalie... Uhhh, n-a-"
"Ennn... ehhhh..."
Sigh. "Yes, n-a-t-a-" Oh crap, now I have to tell her about the letter L. She's not going to like this at all. "ELLLLLL..."
"Ennn... ehhhh... tiii... ehhhh? Eru? Eru?"
"Hai, eru." Sigh.

It went on like this for a painfully long time as I tried negotiating the sound of I and E (which to her would sound like A and I), ensuring that each time she repeated me she wasn't writing down something like nananattatatalieieieie. Eventually she asked me to repeat the whole thing, which I did and she said "En eh ti eh eru ai ii."

OK good. I think she's got it. "Hai. At."
"At."
"Hai." OK, now for the last name. I wonder how much fun this is going to be. "McQueen. That's emm..."
"Em."
"C."
At this point she finally gave up. "Chotto matte. My address is much easier. I give to you, you send me email."
"Ummm... OK then." It better be easier!
"S-I-S..."
Is that s-i-s? Or f-i-f? Or s-i-f? Or f-i-s? Or... oh man, how many other possibilities can I have with this combination?

I'll spare you the rest. Eventually I got an email address for her but am still unsure that I got it right. It was fortunately a hotmail address, so I figured I'd try all the possible combinations it could have been and if my message ended up in some weirdo's inbox it wouldn't matter too much.

And some people wonder why I hate the phone!

Gone AWOL: Inspiration, inclination and all traces of a sense of humour

So much for pregnancy providing me with blog fodder. There's nothing to report. I'll be up to 13 weeks tomorrow, I still don't have a fundus to palpate, and of course I can't feel any movements yet. I don't do morning sickness, so I can't regale you with embarrassing episodes of public vomiting, or even whinge about lying on the couch all day feeling crap. I haven't had any weird food cravings and only a few really boring aversions which aren't worth talking about. Possibly the only interesting thing I could mention is my search for a midwife but at the moment I'm in limbo either waiting for people to get back to me or plucking up the courage to make phone calls to Japanese people who speak varied amounts of English, so even there I don't have much to say.

I read over a bunch of my early posts on this blog when I was recording my pregnancy with Cassia. Dang, I had a sense of humour back then! (I will thank Kaz Cooke for the inspiration, even though I qualify any recommendation of Up the Duff as being for its humour value only.) What's happened to me? Vast amounts of sleep deprivation have contributed to it, I'm sure. But I dunno, maybe I do have PND after all. I remember one of the questions on the survey I filled out when Cassia was 8 weeks old -- you know the type, the ones where you rate on a scale of 1-5 how true a statement is for you, the ones for which the correct answers if you want to avoid being diagnosed with PND are screamingly obvious -- being "I no longer see the funny side of things". These days, meh, I can't be bothered trying to think of a witty way to say what I'm thinking.

Can't be bothered. That's another problem. It feels like the effort to write posts for this blog outweigh the benefits. In some ways Cassia is becoming a lot more independent so you'd think I'd have more time here. But the flip side is that she's also a lot more demanding and interactive, so when she isn't playing independently (which is most of the time), it is very difficult for me to give my blog the kind of uninterrupted attention I need to give it in order to write anything worthwhile. And I just can't be bothered drafting, because that requires constant refreshing of my thoughts and reminders of what I was trying to say in the first place.

I wasn't actually planning to have a whinge in this post. It's just come out that way. And now it's after 10:00 p.m. and I'm going to bed. Good night.

My babywearing days are numbered

At the moment pregnancy is making me too tired to carry Cassia in the Ergo. I have taken her out in it a couple of times in recent weeks, but the stroller is getting more and more air time these days, especially when it comes to grocery shopping.

By the time my second trimester kicks in and I have some energy back, it'll be too hot here for much serious babywearing. I did it last year when we first arrived because I had to, but it was pretty awful. Usually I loosened the Ergo as much as possible, but that meant more of her weight was being taken by my neck and shoulders.

And by the time the really stinky hot weather is over (late September), I'll be too pregnant to do much carrying.

I'm really sad about this! They often say you can mourn the loss of your breastfeeding relationship (either because of weaning or difficulties which caused you to give up early), but I am so much more sad at the prospect of not being able to carry Cassia any more. I love the snuggling up so much; it's my favourite "feature" of attachment parenting, and I have always been grateful that she's such a lightweight I can do it easily.

Some friends have suggested she might come back to it once the baby's born, but... well by then I'll be carrying a new baby, so I'm not really sure how this would work. The things you learn to do when you have more than one kid, I suppose (which is a bit like the things you learn to do when you have a kid in the first place, isn't it?).

Round Three

Almost everyone I know of who reads this blog is already aware of this, but now it's time to make it official: I'm pregnant again. 11 weeks along and this time I think it's here to stay. I'm already feeling a little growth anyway, which is more than I can say for last time.

I posted a while back about having reached the 40-week mark of what would have been my previous pregnancy, and in that post I mentioned still not wanting another child until we were back in Australia for good. It was too late for such wishful thinking, although I didn't realise it until a week or two later.

Anyway, accepting this pregnancy has not been as hard, although you'll forgive me for not having used a single exclamation mark as I'm not very excited about it yet either. I am delighted that another little soul will be joining our family. The circumstances are not at all what I expected or wanted but I'm OK with that now.

Hopefully this means I'll have some fodder for my blog, so that's got to be a good thing. I've run very dry for inspiration lately (have you noticed?), but now that pregnancy and birth have a good reason to be at the forefront of my mind you can stay tuned for lots of rants about the current birthing climate and my adventures in working out what I'm going to do about bustin' this baby out. Plus the odd pregnant-woman-whingeing-about-stuff post, a few belly pics (nothing to see yet), and all the hilarious things people try to tell me I can't do/eat/say now I've got a baby on board. Apparently Japan is a veritable mine of such treasures, although the language barrier will perhaps make me more immune to them. I've already had a friend express concern that I've been riding my bike, although I did reassure her that I have no plans to climb Mount Fuji this summer.

First challenge: Weaning Cassia. Breastfeeding is hurting like crazy with no sign of letting up. I am totally, totally over it. Cassia is still booby-mad however, so going cold turkey is not an option I'm willing to entertain. Fortunately we have managed to drop her mid-morning feed without much complaint and next week I'm going to attempt dropping her mid-afternoon feed. Overnight is still extremely unpredictable -- sometimes she wakes only once (!), other times every hour and a half from about 2:00 a.m. onwards. We tried cold turkey night weaning just after we got back from Australia which was a Total Disaster, so I'm not going down that road either.

Anyway, welcome to the new adventures of Nat the Baby Buster.

Stillbirth

The tragic death of a child at or shortly before birth is the great fear every birthing woman faces. Even the word itself can evoke some pretty powerful emotional responses in people. It's also a bit of a taboo topic, much like miscarriage, probably because most people just don't feel equipped to deal with the grief that such an event brings.

I recently read a really fascinating study in the British Medical Journal about unexplained stillbirth at term. The data were fairly old (late 80s/early 90s), but the most interesting facts were that stillbirth occurs more commonly at 38 weeks than 39-42 weeks, and that stillbirth is five times more common than SIDS.

I find this amazing, and yet not. I know of at least seven women who have experienced stillbirth and not of a single baby that has died of SIDS. I don't think I'm that unusual either. What is amazing, and really quite sad, is the realisation that stillbirth is a tragedy that strikes relatively many women and yet something like SIDS is given greater place in our collective conscience. (Not trying to trivialise SIDS. I'm sure for the families who have experienced it, it's just as tragic.)

I wonder how many women are carrying that grief around in their hearts and have never had a real avenue to express or process it. My heart goes out to all of them.