crunchy parenting

No, I’m not talking about Twister for toddlers, though that is an entertaining concept all on it’s own.

I’m going to ramble for a bit about fetal positioning in pregnancy – specifically, posterior babies and some simple things you can do to encourage your baby to turn into the optimal birth position. Please note that I’m not a nurse, midwife or doctor, just a mom who birthed one posterior baby and is working on ideally positioning a second. This is what I’ve dug up in my research across the Internets.

Photo by gabi_menashe

What is a posterior baby, you ask? (I wish I could draw, but I’m a terrible artist, so you’ll have to rely on my overly verbose description.) A posterior baby is one that is typically head-down, but facing outwards towards your belly button. Her spine is aligned to your spine, and you can feel those lovely kicks and punches outwards against your skin. The opposite is an anterior baby, one that’s turned inwards towards (what’s left of) your organs. This is where you’ll feel more of the kicks and punches against your ribs, bladder, stomach, etc.

An anterior baby is considered to be ideal for birth, specifically LOA – left occipital anterior. (I know this all smacks of high school anatomy, but bear with me.) This means that, if you’re looking down at your belly, the baby’s butt should be at the top-left of your belly. (It typically feels like an orange-sized lump if you run your hand over it.) This is the best position for birth because the baby turns clockwise in labor and exits with her spine to your belly button. If she were lying on the right side, she’d have to turn fully spine-to-your-spine first, then LOA, and then spine-to-your-belly-button just to come out. That’s a whole lot of twisting, and possibly one explanation of why posterior babies/births are so long, arduous and potentially complicated.

In most healthy pregnancies, you can do a lot to influence your baby’s position. Here’s some of the popular ones:

• Drink lots of water and stay hydrated. It’s easier to spin a baby when there’s enough amniotic fluid in there.
• Sleep on your left side. Prop your right knee/leg up on a firm pillow and snuggle down onto your belly as much as possibly comfortable. Sometimes for variety, I’ll move the pillow between my knees.
• Don’t lounge or recline couch-potato style. This is a gravity thing. The baby’s spine is the heaviest, so it will swing to the lowest point when you’re reclining – against your spine.
• Sit leaning slightly forward. A birth ball is great for this. I try to do this for my short knitting bursts, resting my elbows on my thighs and leaning forward.
• Do yoga-style cat-cows. This is basically getting into a hands-and-knees position and doing pelvic tilts at the same time. It’s also a really good back stretch in late pregnancy when you have a hard time stretching anything around that belly!

Doing these simple tips and exercises has taken me from having a posterior baby at our ultrasound last week to a regularly LOA or ROA baby in the past few days. Yay! (The right-leaning position is because I just have to flip over on my right side to sleep part of the night. I try to sleep back on the left in the early morning to get the baby back on the left for the day.)

A bit about walking: walking is often helpful for getting a head-down baby to drop just a little further and engage, but I keep thinking that it makes more sense to get the baby into a reasonable anterior position first and then start walking a lot. I could be wrong and it could make no difference, but from some of the tricks it takes to get a baby to disengage, I get the feeling it might just matter a little.

For a ton of more information about spinning a posterior baby (or even a breech baby!), check out SpinningBabies.com.

Two weeks ago, I posted a pic of our living-room-in-despair. Here’s the updated version, thanks to the efforts of my mother and the spouse-unit’s wonderful cousin, C.

There are still some tweaks to be made, like figuring out how to get all the pictures back on the wall and re-organizing Spice’s toy corner. But for the most part, it’s habitable. They also stacked all the candles in the fireplace (which we don’t use) so it looks really pretty and cozy at night when they’re lit.

There’s been so much going on this past week that I’ve been a little lax in posting, but I’ve been skimming my favorite blogs and am reassured to see that everyone else is still being more productive than me!

• Why not just make them wear a sandwich board instead of a costume? // Julie of the Mom Slant talks about dragging kids and holidays into the political fray, this time over the Boo Nestle boycott.
• Nutmeg Microdermabrasion and Exfoliator // Just in time for the holidays, a facial treatment from Crunchy Betty that will have you dreaming of sugar plums and eggnog.
• Why I Said Good-Bye to My Microwave // Michelle of Green Earth Bazaar writes about the little box in the corner of your kitchen. We recently got an ultra-compact one after being without for a few years, but still barely use it, for all the excellent reasons Michelle points out.
• Trying to Become Organized // I loved Sarah’s recent post on One Starry Night about trying to get on board with organizing chores and meal planning. Sometimes I read so much promotional and instructional articles on how to get organized from all these already-organized people that I forget the slew of moms out there just like me try to get started and not fall off the wagon every day.

Photo by Piez

This pregnancy, I’ve been dealing with a little bit of sciatica. Not quite the shooting-pain-down-the-dead-leg type, but the something-painfully-pinched-in-my-hip kind. If I Do Something about it, then it subsides, but all it takes is a few days of lounging around preggo-style for it to flare up again.

In the long run, I try to see a chiropractor I trust while pregnant, but I recently found a few stretches that help. When I feel the twitch of pain in my hip, I make myself do these stretches at least 3 times a day. If I don’t stretch the muscles out regularly though, the pain escalates.

The two stretches are the Knee-to-Chest stretch and the Piriformis Stretch. I’ll be the first to admit that doing them while pregnant is akin to trying to touch your toes with a basketball duct-taped to your belly, but it’s not impossible. For the Knee-to-Chest stretch, I angle my knee towards my shoulder rather than my chest. The Piriformis is a little tougher; instead of crossing my legs, I put one ankle up on my knee and pull that knee towards the shoulder. Yes, it’s still uncomfortable and awkward, but it gets the job done.

After reading several popular pregnancy books, including the “What to Expect” books and the “Girlfriend’s Guide” books, I stumbled on the various Sears’ books. I bought The Baby Book first and quickly ordered The Pregnancy Book. I really wish I’d just started with these books first, and here’s why.

Many pregnancy guide/books/advice I’ve found in the mainstream has been so profoundly negative, I’ve been turned off talking about it to many friends, or reading popular culture books or magazines on the subject. Sure, maybe being pregnant and delivery is going to be the worst 9 months of my life, or maybe, I can make it my own experience entirely. Without being prejudiced by tales of horror and pain and fat suffering, I can make my own choices on how to be pregnant (ie. choosing to make sure I don’t eat everything in sight just because I’m “eating for two”, but eating nutrient-rich choices in moderate amounts, etc).

The Sears’ provide clear guidelines and outlines for 9 months of pregnancy, month-by-month. (Skip around; they acknowledge no one’s going to have their textbook pregnancy in chapter order!) The tone is sensitive, warm and caring, like talking with an elderly aunt or old family doctor. The advice is natural and simple with out being “natural childbirth”-elitist and failing to acknowledge the common sense of modern medical guidelines and talking with your doctor. Neat topics through the book include general health (including oodles on morning sickness), detailed nutritional information, handling work & family, what to get to prepare for baby, nursing, etc.

Both books are now part of my standard gift bundle to expecting family and friends.

I’ve been a little slow on the crunchiness here because I’ve been guilty of spending the past two weeks knitting almost non-stop. Finally, last night, it occurred to me that knitting (and other crafting habits) can actually be pretty crunchy and sometimes they’re even parenting-related, so I’ve decided to create a category here to occasionally document the stuff I’m currently working on.

The weather here in Los Angeles just started to change this week. It went from boiling-hot to cool grey skies the past week and that’s had me feverish to make up a few more sweaters and cardigans for Spice. I’ve only made her one sweater in my knitting career, a travesty really, since it was in some cheap acrylic. I’ve started a navy cardigan for her in a supersoft cotton blend, but have stalled at the seaming since I hate seaming. In the meantime, I’m knitting away on Elizabeth Zimmerman’s famous seamless raglan sweater in a soft superwash wool. It’s in a natural white, but I figure I can always overdye it some color if it gets stained.

I was reading a section of the Free Range Knitter by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee this morning about knitting and self-esteem. The musings boiled down to the fact that while we’re often so self-critical of ourselves, knitting is a bit of peace from all that. When I knit, I (mostly) know what I’m doing, and if I don’t, I’m (reasonably) confident that I’ll be able to figure it out. I loved this section because it was me in a nutshell and was an eye-opening truth about why I’m so obsessed with knitting and why I fall back into it so heavily at times. When I’m generally unsatisfied with the rest of my life, I find myself knitting with an obsessive vengeance.

I say “unsatisfied” because that’s what it is, not unhappiness. It’s this pervasive feeling that things just aren’t quite right, or that they could be better, or that I’m in some bizarre limbo point of life (like now, being 7 months pregnant and just waiting). I’m a do-er at heart; I notice that something could be better and I do what I can to fix it or get it done. Now I know that when I get stalled like this, I knit for self-esteem, warm socks and my own sanity.

So if you’re stuck in an emotional rut, pick up your sharp pointy sticks, dust off that yarn and knit a little. If you don’t know how, learn to knit, join Ravelry, find your Local Yarn Shop, make some new fiberholic friends and fill your soul with a little satisfaction.