2011 - Talk Birth

Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book for review purposes.
1. http://www.amazon.com/Healthy-Eating-During-Pregnancy-Nutritious/dp/1906868417/
2. http://www.healthywomen.org/
Telling About It... (2011-07-19 23:02)
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
-Mary Oliver
I saw this quote on [1]another mother’s blog yesterday and loved it. To me, it sums up the reason why I
continue to write this blog. I have so many things going on in my life and I often wonder why I bother to
continue writing blog posts. Does it matter at all? Aren’t I just adding to the general cacophony of voices
and wild, information overloaded chaos of the internet (and even of the birth activist sphere in general). I
feel almost compelled to do so though. And, really, the reason why is to tell about it. There is a lot to be
astonished by in one’s everyday life. While I can get distracted and frantic and lose my present moment
orientation, I do pay attention a lot. To a lot of things. A friend told me at my blessingway that I live my life
with more intention than most people she knows. I considered that to be a great compliment—and, I also
think I live my life with a lot of attention. Sometimes that attention may seem like excessive navel-gazing
and very often it is excessively self-critical (and, isn’t that being self-centered, she says critically and selfevaluatively?),
but I feel like I am a generally observant person, paying attention to my place in the world
and the manner in which I walk through my day. And, the paying attention is intimately involved with then
wanting to tell about it—here, on my blog :)
Here’s what feels astonishing about my life today. Six months ago today I gave birth to a little treasure.
I feel like every day for the past six months I’ve experienced astonishment that she’s here—where did
you come from, I ask her. She’s magic. I can hardly believe it has been six months already and yet, it also
feels like she’s been here forever. And, guess what? My friend who has been waiting for her rainbow baby to
be born, gave birth to her own precious daughter this morning. So, now our journeys share one more point
of connection.
I really, really wanted to write an effusive blog post about my baby today in honor of her sixmonthabirthday.
However, the end of the summer session is wrapping up and I had many papers to grade instead. I spent
naptime working on them with the plan to reward myself with a blog post after finishing my grades (though,
since I planned to grade 22 papers and 11 exams, you can see that something was awry in my calculations!).
She woke up of course, after my only having graded 11 papers, and needed me to hold her rather than to
write about her and so now I am here at almost midnight, needing to go to bed rather than to gush. Anyway,
my happy, BIG, smiley, adorable, friendly, charming, unflappable, cooperative, sitting-up-and-working-oncraw
ling-and-pulling-up girl is six months old today. Her head smells like apricots and flowers. She loves
watching her big brothers. She loves watching chickens and cats. She loves watching me. While I’ve written
a lot about what an easy baby she is, she also likes to be held and toted along pretty much everywhere I
go—maybe some people would define that as ”high need” (i.e. ”I can never put her down!”). I, however,
think that is biologically appropriate baby genius. She is very grabby and reachy lately. My mom described
holding her like ”holding a bag of snakes,” because she is constantly on the lookout for something to snag. She
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