7 Quick Takes Friday (vol 6)

7 Quick Takes is Hosted By Jennifer at Conversion Diaries. She is awesome.

1. Ha! Hilarity! I am still writing for NaNoWriMo even though with each passing day I fall further behind on word counts and my calendar keeps filling with other non-NaNoWriMo things like seeing actual people and doing actual work (like being on call for a birth! hurray!)

2. Theo is all done with NaNoWriMo. The rest of the month needs its own web page called MamaNoWriNoMo. That about sums it up. My only consolation is that at 3 1/2 I'm pretty sure he'd be this surly about something, so I may as well try to right a novel. His other options were a. being surly for no particular reason, b. being surly because mama is attempting to knit Christmas gifts (not so much this year), c. being surly because mama is on the Internet.

3. I've been baking lots of bread, which is lovely. When my little children reject the dinner plan, they are given bread and butter with fruit or veg and sometimes a little cheddar cheese. This reduces the stress immeasurably. We all enjoy the homemade whole grain breads and I don't spend dinner time stressing about the empty tummies of children who will surely wake at 6 and beg for bwekfast! bwekfast! bwekfast!

4. Henry has been reading his books backwards. There does not seem to be any hidden message. I sense he might be a little bored. I could use some suggestions. He is an emotionally young 5 with a crazy advanced reading level. I take no credit for this...but there it is. Apparently he is reading and writing somewhere between 2nd and 3rd grade. Send your book suggestions, oh literary ones. Or should I just start teaching him mandarin? Wait, I don't know mandarin. Crap.

5. Piano! My childhood piano arrives tomorrow by truck! Let's have a little party & ignore the part where I have to schlep south of Hartford to unlock, supervise and pay the final storage bill. Let's focus on the party a few weeks from now when the piano is tuned and sitting in my front parlor and I teach the kids how to play Jingle Bells. That will be awesome!

6. It has taken me from late August until today to figure out a great way to get where we need to go in a timely manner that doesn't involve the minivan every time. Traveling by foot, cycle or scooter with three children - 2 of them quite young - is extremely inefficient. I simply didn't have the time to devote to it - or I did, but other things suffered like having the time to write, knit, clean, cook, bake and be a person. We got off our walk through Northampton kick when we all got H1N1. Exertion made the coughs much worse for weeks after we were "better." Now that we are better, the weather is cooler and Henry especially was struggling with our trips. He is neither little nor big! It was all complicated by the fact that I have to be at school 3 times a day 4 days a week. Today, hurray, I noticed as if for the first time that our bike trailer - handed down from friends! - can really be used as a jogger type double stroller - meaning it can handle quite a bit of slush on the wheels, fits two kids and some back packs and I can walk as fast as I want! Isaac scooted home and I zipped the little ones up in it. They weren't cold at all and I could hardly even hear the chatter. It was quite a peaceful 1.2 miles - which means I will probably do it a bit more often and leave the van parked, which is my goal as much as possible. When the weather is poorer, this will probably be easier than moving than van in ice and snow and loosing our parking spot on the street.

7. A few weeks back we had an assortment of old and new friends over for a party that involved chocolate bread pudding and other yummy foods. My children fell asleep in front of everyone, some sort of personality shift that almost alarmed me - though I was delighted. We had a few musicians and one friend played for us for quite a while, long after Henry & Theo were asleep, but the music seeped into their dreams and they woke the next morning asking when mama's next music party would be and if they could please have pie for breakfast. It is just the type of childhood I want for them & I am more grateful than I can say.

March of Dimes' Fight for Preemies: Let's go Full Term Baby!

This blog posting is brought to you by the March of Dimes' Fight for Preemies
For more perspectives, visit the round up at Bloggers Unite
November is National Prematurity Awareness Month.

Back in the world of birth, I have so much catching up to do. Since I moved here to Northampton, I have joined the lovely and amazing Green River Doula Network. In addition ">to working on their own business this group signs up to volunteer as at two local hospitals >through an on-call doula program with the nurse-midwives on site. If the midwives get called to a birth, the on-call doula gets called and goes for birth and labor support. In addition I am connecting with the Prison Birth Project, an organization which serves pregnant inmates at a local jail. If all goes according to my hopes, I should be teaching childbirth education classes in the jail after the holidays and attending birth as a volunteer doula once a month.

As for my own practice, from which I need, hope and plan to earn a living, it is slow going in a new community. I am not known yet by fellow doulas, providers or mothers. This will take time Still there are changes, recently there is some movement on the insurance front. Doulas have been assigned those magic numbers....ah, the sweet sound of taxonomy codes & National Provider Identification numbers for Third Party Reimbursement. It's all so sexy! What it really means is that there is an outside chance that in the foreseeable future if I jump through enough professional hoops (approximate cost $400, hoops are pricey) and my potential one day clients jump through enough hoops and have insurance companies that recognize taxonomy code and NPI, that women can hire me as their doula and my services can be paid (or partially paid as is so much more often the case) by medical insurance. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blog. What does this have to do with preemies?

Well, I have heard their are doulas who do not want insurance companies as part of their business because they don't want them weighing on what service doulas can and can't provide. I acknowledge that there is some wisdom in being suspicious about insurance companies. However, ultimately I'd love to see more women experiencing supported births. My fee for births is not out of the realm of possibility for every family, but for some it is. For most families even seeking to hire me as a doula, if they choose not to hire me for financial reasons it is because they are going to spend that money in other ways on their baby - unpaid time off, breast pump so they can return to work and still provide breast milk, moving house, setting up a nursery, hiring a housekeeping service for a few months, etc. We can all weigh on what we personally would choose to do, but those are all personal choices. Many times I hear from people, I cannot afford a doula & this may be true. I have to interpret this in their context. Some cannot afford a doula and to take unpaid time off. Some cannot afford a doula and the upcoming loss of income if they choose not to return to work -Sing to us, Oh, Canadian Readers of this blog of paid maternity leave - some cannot afford a doula and to "do the nursery" in the way many families like to do (we never did this...it is quirk on our part, I suppose, but since they all ended up mostly in our bed anyway, I guess that was a good choice for us, huh?).

Ultimately, I'd like more women to be able to afford a doula - period. Maybe insurance reimbursement will make this possible for women who could have never had this on their radar screen before, maybe my NPI # will make it possible for women to have a supported birth & take the the extra unpaid family medical leave time after their paid maternity leave runs out, maybe my new sexy taxonomy code (that I haven't got yet....) will make it possible for some families to have a supported birth & a kick-ass stroller. That's really not my business. My business is supporting women in the childbearing year.

As for insurance companies, they will always watch the money. Doulas make incredibly great financial sense. Medical costs plummet in doula supported birth - cesarean rates, epidural rates, postpartum depression rates and yes, prematurity rates as well. Recently an insurance company that shall remain nameless on this blog released a memo that it was going to stick its neck out for preemies and come down against elective cesareans and elective inductions. These are expensive procedures with some expensive outcomes. EDD (Estimate Date of Delivery) is an estimate after all & being marginally correct is not enough.

Here from the March of Dimes site itself are some facts to consider:

With any cesarean, it's important that the surgery be done when the baby is full term: born after 37 completed weeks of pregnancy. C-sections may contribute to the growing number of babies who are born “late preterm,” between 34 and 36 weeks gestation. While babies born at this time are usually considered healthy, they are more likely to have medical problems than babies born a few weeks later at full term.

A baby's lungs and brain mature late in pregnancy. Compared to a full-term baby, an infant born between 34 and 36 weeks gestation is more likely to have problems with:

• Breathing
• Feeding
• Maintaining his or her temperature
• Jaundice
• It can be hard to pinpoint the date your baby was conceived. Being off by just a week or two can result in a premature birth.

So oddly enough, I find myself suddenly siding with an insurance company, which is, well, odd and a only because they are making sense. We will all watch what happens next, in the mean time I fight for preemies by encouraging all my clients and all pregnant women I know not to be romanced my elective, scheduled inductions or cesarean deliveries. Unless a compelling medical reason exists, the benefits of waiting to go into labor outweigh other considerations.

I will leave you with a story of a baby not born too soon & all thanks to the strength of his mother. Last summer a client of mine was nearly bullied into a cesarean delivery that she felt was at 35 weeks, though the hospital insisted was 39 weeks. Without telling her whole story here, she choose a path that allowed her to wait until her body went into labor & she did need a cesarean. She took a risk on her own intuition and her baby was born weighing 6lbs at what the hospital would call 42 weeks. He showed every sign off being 38 weeker, he was teeny, sweet, strong enough, but only just shedding the furry lanugo that shows up on babies born on the nearer side of their due dates. Had she gone in for her surgery 4 weeks before, he would surely have had weighed under 5lbs and probably had lung and digestion issues. It doesn't have to be this hard. And hopefully, soon it won't be.

I'd like to thank the March of Dimes for hosting this round up on Fight For Preemies Day.

By the Numbers

NaNoWriMo Word Count: 2013 (not enough)

Health to Illness Ratio: 1 out 3 kids sick - much better ratio than Monday

Price of Washing Machine on Craig's List: $40 (Amen to that)

Days til our Gas Dryer is hooked up: unknown

Bike Rack for back of my bike &
Training Wheels for Theo's bike: $0 (Freecycle)

Networking doula meetings I have missed due to family illness: 5 (but there is one tomorrow night, so here's hoping)

Hours of sleep I needed last night to feel sane: 12, meaning I went to bed at 7:30.

Days til the days start getting longer again: 47

Days til I make chocolate breading pudding for our party: 3

Boo!