Pedestrian Adventures

So yesterday, I decided to take a walk to the park, which is only a few blocks away. Walking is not easy in Doha. For one, there are no sidewalks. There are piles of construction rubble. This year, I have nice sturdy sandals, and I've always been pretty good at rock scrambling, so I'm OK, although having Thelma strapped to me does throw my balance off a bit.

The sturdy sandals are important. The other day, I saw a bevy of 3 girls, all dolled up under their abayas, giggling their way through one of these construction sites on the way to the mall. I could tell they were all dolled up, because they were holding their jet black abayas up out of the pale grey dust, revealing their tight jeans and outrageously high heels. The one who was talking on her cell phone stumbled and almost fell down into a 2-meter-deep pit, but was hauled back up by her friends, who had quite a giggle about it.

But I digress. So, I'm in my sturdy sandals, and I have a choice of walking through actual construction sites, or in the highway, which is very busy, and as far as I can tell has no speed limit. They don't seem to build anything narrower than 6-lane divided highways here. I walked along on the edges for a while, which meant jumping over these thick blue tubes, which are what they use to remove the groundwater and dump it into the sea, so they can build the foundations for all these skyscrapers. I pass some other pedestrians, who are almost always short, dark, skinny men, in blue jumpsuits. I know, I'm short, skinny, and dark by most American standards, but not by Qatari laborer standards. (These aren't actual Qataris of course. They're imported workers like Bob.)

I eventually got to a roundabout, which are what they have here instead of intersections. Cars never actually stop here, they just enter this vortex, orbit it for a while, and then whirl out in a random direction, sort of like when, um, it hits the fan. To get to the park, I had to cross a roundabout exit, an entrance, another exit, and another entrance. To cross each, I had to wait until all three lanes of traffic simultaneously had a gap. This took a while. There were some other pedestrians attempting the same goal at the same time. We had different standards for how big a gap had to be to justify a run for it.

I eventually made it all the way across, and was victoriously in the park's parking lot. After a short walk over baking blacktop, I was on grass. There were birds, two very small cats, and short, dark, skinny guys napping under palm trees. I sat under a tree with fragrant white flowers and unstrapped Thelma, who tried to eat dead fallen flowers. Our patch of shade, like the rest of the park, had a clear view of dozens of construction cranes.

In the shade, the heat was almost bearable, unlike on the walk I'd taken to get there. I eventually concluded that this pleasant patch of shade did not really justify the walk, although the air conditioning in the apartment did justify the walk back. So, I strapped Thelma on again, put my had back on, and set out to do the whole thing in reverse.

I'd crossed only one roundabout entrance, and was waiting for a gap which would allow me to cross the roundabout exit, when a car honked at me. I figured it was one of the informal taxis, so I just waved it away, but the guy pulled over anyway (although there was no shoulder to pull over onto) and rolled down his window. "Need a ride?"

No, I didn't need a ride, thanks, I was just crossing the street.

He got out of his car and proceeded to "help" me by jumping right out in front of speeding cars to try to stop them, so I would have a clear path to walk. Cars were honking and swerving. In these roundabouts, it seems like cars are always on the verge of colliding anyway, and he was pushing things over the edge.

I yelled at him to stop and get back in his car. Anyway, there was no way I was getting into traffic under these conditions. As he was heading my way, I kept backing away from him down the dividing median. He eventually gave up and got back in his car. I crossed when there was a naturally-occurring gap, which occurred soon enough for the patient.

I decided to postpone crossing the next street, but walk on the other side, which had a bit of shade from trees, and less-lumpy construction rubble. Then this same guy pulled his car over and offered me a ride again! He'd gone around the block to intercept me. Sheesh, when some boy scouts want to help an old lady across the street, they just don't give up.

I waved him away again, crossed the 3 lanes of traffic when there was a gap, hung out on the median for a while, crossed the next 3 lanes when there was another gap, and was on my home block. I walked into the ridiculously opulent lobby of this apartment building, full of crystal chandeliers and white orchids. I appreciated the air conditioning.

I'm on TV again, whoop-de-do

ABC bought some more Djinn music, this time for a special by Michael J. Fox on optimism:
abc.go.com/specials/michaeljfox/index
which will be shown tomorrrow, Thursday, at 10. I can only assume they needed our music to represent the forces of pessimism.

Way too busy to blog

I hear some babies fuss in the evenings. That must be because they want to go out and dance to a reggae band, as in this picture. My klezmer band oppened for Adonai and I at Castaways, and a good time was had by all. Thelma rarely has the chance to fuss.

I have more pictures, but Bob's hidden them on the computer somewhere.

Back in NYC

I'll try to type fast while Thelma naps. I'm in NYC, and will play at Djinn's weekly gig at Je'Bon tonight. My mom was going to babysit, but she's sick. Any volunteers (people I know of course) to keep Thelma entertained at the show while I play? The thing is, she likes dancing, but can't yet really do it herself, so someone has to pick her up and dance her around.

I took her out to The Cupping Room last night, and we both enjoyed the show, although Thelma fell asleep as I danced her around. She does that a lot.

I should do a more thorough blog than that. My new band, the Mitzfits, is getting gigs right and left. Ithaca apparently has been harboring a huge pent-up desire for a klezmer band for years. Oy, I need to update my website schedule! Thelma enjoys klezmer, and kvetches when we stop playing, so we have to keep playing.

Thelma has learned to roll over, and also is playing a new game called "Try to Catch the Stationary Object." You hold an object in front of her, and she looks at it very intently, then carefully swipes both her hands at it, usually missing it or knocking it away on her first several tries. But she perseveres, eventually grabs it, and rewards herself for this achievement by hitting herself on the head with it. I have to select objects for this game carefully.

Baby Thelma gets a bath

I thought that once Bob got home, he would get busy taking photos of Thelma, but like me, he's too busy adoring her. Anyway, here's a video my sister took back around Thanksgiving of Thelma enjoying her bath:
www.youtube.com/watch
You'd be surprised how much dirt can build up in the folds between a baby's rolls of fat. People say she looks like Bob, but I can't imagine Bob with this many chins.
And here's one called "Dramatic Thelma" which confused me at first, but apparently there's a whole genre of "Dramatic" videos on youtube.
www.youtube.com/watch
Enjoy. Thelma is actually even cuter than this now, as she's getting even more expressive. She seriously overacts every emotion she has.

Communication

Another baby blog. Thelma is just so absolutely adorable.

I'll use this blog to say a few words in rebuttal to some stuff I read in a bunch of baby books when I was pregnant. A lot of them say something along the lines of, "Don't resent your baby's cries, since after all, that's your baby's only means of communication, so she's just doing the best she can until she learns to talk." That's bull. My baby, at least, has plenty of means of communication at her disposal, and she makes use of them. As much as I'd like to think that my baby is unusually brilliant (and of course she is) I can't imagine she's such an extreme outlier on the communication skills bell curve.

Take hunger for an example. When Thelma's hungry, she puts her hand to her mouth in a gesture that very clearly says "Feed me." If a non-English-speaking tourist came up to you and made that gesture, you would know to point him to your favorite local restaurant, or steal his wallet because he's obviously a tourist, depending on who's reading this.

Once I see that Thelma is hungry, as I prepare to feed her, she opens her mouth and waggles her head very fast in what is clearly a gesture of excitement. It's not the most practical gesture, as it makes her mouth a moving target, but it is clear.

If there's a delay in my feeding her, usually caused by my inability to hit a moving target, she communicates her displeasure by punching me, and occasionally punching her own head. This does tend to further delay delivery of milk, as I now have both a wagging head and swinging fists to contend with, but I never said she was the most logical person, just that she was a fine communicator. For night feedings, these punches are often my first clue that she's hungry, since I can't see her gentler gestures when I'm asleep.

She's done all this communicating without crying at all, just perhaps the occasional grumble or giggle.

On very rare occasions,she makes more noise. If, for example, I'm in the shower, and don't see her gestures, she then starts saying "Eh" in a kvetchy tone, which clearly means, "What do I have to do to get some service around here?" She'll say this at increasing volume and frequency, until I finally stop whatever unnecessary thing I'm doing and pay attention to her. If even the "Eh"s don't work, then she'll pull out the heavy artillery and start using actual "Wah!"s. Even these will start fairly quiet and sparse. I've never heard her doing a full-blown crying fit since the day she was born, since I generally get out of the shower in time.

So when I read these "Your baby cries to tell you she's hungry" sorts of books, I have to wonder how unobservant the authors are, that crying is the first stimulus that they notice. My baby cries when she's exhausted all other means of telling me she's hungry, and probably when she's gotten annoyed at my poor communication skills.

Fattening up for Thanksgiving

In Our Babies, Ourselves, which I'm sure you all read after reading my last blog, we learned that pretty much the only thing different cultures have in common is that they're all absolutely certain that they're raising babies the one right way, and everyone else is wrong and should be corrected before they do irreparable harm to their poor babies.

I, like the rest of humanity, am now an expert in how other people should be raising their kids. As credentials, I have checked many books on childrearing out of the library and read most of them. As if that weren't qualification enough, I can now report that Thelma's first pediatrician's appointment yesterday was great. Not only is she perfectly healthy, but in her first 14 days of life, she gained 13 ounces. The standard expectation for American hospital-born babies is to actually lose weight for the first week or so, and then, by the end of the second week, to return to their birth weight. I didn't go to all the trouble of giving birth to this big baby just to have her shrink afterwards. She's been gaining steadily since she was born. I'm getting an increasing workout every day just picking her up.

Now that my credentials are established, I will pontificate on what other people are doing wrong, at, of all places, today's La Leche League meeting. My mother was excited to go there with me, since she's a retired La Leche League leader herself. I didn't need any particular advice or support, but I figured I'd go there to show off Thelma.

This month's meeting had a different leader than last time, and the topic seemed to be Problems. One woman had a problem with low milk supply, she said. Her month-old baby weighs a couple pounds less than she did at birth. The mother is pumping her milk with a machine to try to increase her supply. She's feeding her baby every two hours in the daytime, and sometimes at night, but she says she has trouble waking up when the alarm goes off in the middle of the night for feedings.

This problem started a discussion of which makes and models of pumps are best, and how some women are unfortunate enough to require the more expensive models to pump effectively. Meanwhile, my mother and I were thinking the same things: What's this about feeding her baby every two hours? Thelma often eats more frequently than that, not that I'm timing her. The baby is hungry when the baby is hungry, not when the clock says it's feeding time. Also, this business about not being roused by an alarm clock in the middle of the night makes perfect sense, when you consider that she didn't give birth to an alarm clock, and has no evolution-honed instinct to respond to its signals. She gave birth to a baby, and if she keeps the baby close enough to her at nighttime, she will be able to pick up on its hunger signals and respond to them. That means she will produce milk automatically in response to her hungry baby, just as all mammals do. Hoping that she can be made to produce milk in response to some more expensive pump is completely missing the point. If you wanted to produce, say, saliva, which would be a better way to do it, being served a mouth-watering meal, or hooking some saliva-sucking machine up to your mouth?

But these gearheads kept discussing milk-sucking machines. My mother told me I should interrupt this discussion to offer different advice, but I said she should do it, since she was the retired leader and all. Telling other people how to raise their kids is much easier in a blog than in person. Then it was time to leave the meeting early, since I had to get to a dentist appointment. But my mother, who has no blog, offered the mother of the skinny baby some simple advice on the way out. "Try nursing more often," she said. That was probably better than the long evolution-laced rant I would have come up with.

I hope the skinny baby gets enough to eat soon.

Introducing Thelma the Quiet

I know, everyone's been wanting an update, so here it is, with the warning that it is not for the faint-of-heart. For months, I've been reading books that casually use terms like "mucus plug," as if they were acceptable in polite company, so you may encounter such terms in this blog.

My estimated due date was Oct. 15, and I want to emphasize that this is an estimate. Yet many of my friends seemed to expect me to produce a baby by that deadline. Sorry, folks.

I suspected my baby would appear after the estimated due date, if only because the midwife, and the OB she referred me to, both said that the baby was measuring small for date. Now, I say the simplest explanation for that is that they got the date wrong, but the OB in particular seemed to find it more interesting to speculate that something was woefully inadequate in my baby's environment. This sort of slow growth, he said, was just the sort of thing they see in babies that seem to be doing OK, until they suddenly die shortly before their due dates. I was like, gee, thanks for the info. My midwife said that the OB was an old grouch whose grumblings were best ignored. She said it was a much more likely explanation that, as Bob and I are both small but healthy people, our baby would be small but healthy too.

On Saturday, October 18, I lost my mucus plug. Here I'd been imagining it as a sort of champagne cork, but it more closely resembled snot. I got all excited and called my midwife, leaving a message on her machine, then googled it. I found that losing my mucus plug is a sign that labor might start any week. I called my midwife back and told her not to bother answering my earlier message.

But the very next day, Sunday October 19, my water broke around 6:30. I managed to get to the bathroom in time, so no damage was done to the house. I was impressed at myself for handling that so neatly, but what I hadn't considered is that after the water breaks in the first impressive gush, then there's this constant drip of water after that, way too much water to be handled by feminine hygiene products. I sat on a towel and waited for contractions to start. They usually start before the water breaks, so I was like, let's get this show on the road already.

Now I might make a parenthetical comment here, and say that in a hospital birth, once the water breaks, the hospital generally puts some strict deadline on delivery. Like, they'll say that the baby has to appear within 12 hours or whatever. (The time limit can vary by hospital) This is because of the risk of infection to mother and baby, once that sealed-off barrier of water isn't there to protect them from bacteria. The advantage to going to a hospital in this case is that they'll have lots of drugs handy to hurry the delivery along, and if you don't make the deadline, they have the cesarian equipment all set up to go.

What hospitals don't tell you is that they themselves are often the cause of those dangerous infections. Hospitals are breeding grounds for all sorts of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Plus, with all the internal checks OB's generally do, they give the resident hospital bacteria a free ride upstream into the uterus.

So, I said no thanks to all that, and sat at home on my towel. (Have you read The Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy?) I got a pad of paper to write down my contractions, since the midwife said to call her when they'd been 5 minutes apart, and lasting a minute each, for an hour.

When timing contractions, first you have to know what a contraction feels like. Was that a contraction? Was that indigestion? Or do I have to go to the bathroom? If this is all contractions feel like, they're pretty lame. They were maybe 15-20 minutes apart, if that's what they were. Anyway, I waited excitedly for things to get more interesting. I took my towel and waddled the hall a bit, since walking is supposed to hurry things up.

By the wee hours of the morning, the contractions were strong enough that I didn't have to decide if each one counted or not, but they were still only about 10 minutes apart. I was getting tired. I tried to lie down to rest, but lying down made the contractions much more painful. Lying down between contractions felt fine, but lying down during a contraction was intolerable, and so was the act of sitting up during a contraction. So, I sat up or stood.

By Monday morning, I was getting tired of sitting up or standing, and just wanted some rest. Well no, I wanted my baby already, then some rest. My contractions, meanwhile, got further apart, as if the whole labor was just a false alarm. This would have been fine, except for my water being broken already. Even outside the hospital, it was only a matter of time before some opportunistic bacterium discovered this underutilized resource and moved in.

I took a few little naps Monday, and had some snacks.

By Monday evening, things finally got interesting. The contractions got more painful, and finally were 8, 7, 6 minutes apart. I wanted to walk to try to speed them up, but I felt too tired. Finally they were 5 minutes apart, mostly, for an hour. I threw up my snacks, timed a few more contractions, and called my midwife.

She was busy assisting another woman, whose labor was charging ahead at full speed. Bitch.

She dropped by anyway, then left to help the other woman. I don't remember the timing of all the details, but over the course of the labor, I was assisted by the midwife, her nurse, her apprentice, and another midwife who filled in when the first midwife was at the other birth. Plus my mom, who kept my spirits up by saying how much better this was than her hospital births, and Bob, via Skype video chat. With the 7-hour time difference, the interesting part of my labor was taking place at a reasonable hour for him.

I tried to drink some water or juice, but threw that up too. This is something really stupid my body always does, that just when I need energy or at least hydration, my stomach rejects it. And I was still leaking a little gush of water with every contraction, too. I don't know where it was coming from, since I hadn't kept water down for, like, a day. I started running a fever, and the midwife (the substitute midwife this time) mentioned how chapped my lips looked, both symptoms of dehydration. Chapped lips were the least of my concerns at that point. The fetal monitor said that the baby's heart rate was speeding up, which meant that it was stressed from the dehydration too. The midwife started talking about setting up an IV to rehydrate me, but I hate IVs, so I suggested taking some ondansetron instead, which was the anti-morning-sickness drug that kept me alive through the first half of this pregnancy. She looked it up, found it to be safe, and let me take it. It enabled me to keep some diluted juice down, which was a good thing.

This fetal monitor, by the way, was not some inconvenient machine they strap you into like in the hospital. This was a little hand-held thing that the apprentice would periodically hold on my belly, to hear the baby's heart. We made a very interesting discovery. You know how I'd been in such pain when I was lying down during a contraction? They midwifery team suggested I try lying down anyway, since I really needed the rest. So I tried it, but the fetal monitor said that when I had a contraction while lying down, the baby's heart rate got dangerously low. When I had a contraction while sitting up or standing, the baby's heart rate got slightly lower, which is normal, but not dangerously so. Apparently the baby and the umbilical cord were arranged in such a way that the combination of gravity and a contraction cut off the blood supply through the umbilical cord. I'd instinctively known to avoid this dangerous position, because it had been painful. That's what pain is for, so we don't do dangerous things. If I'd taken a painkiller in a standard hospital birth, I wouldn't have known not to lie down, the baby would have have been stressed, and the hospital would rightfully have had to rescue the baby from this stress by performing an emergency cesarean.

Anyway, after a whole lot of waiting around as the contractions got more painful, they finally got so intense that I felt the urge to push. So I pushed. You know how on TV there are always people in the hospital yelling at the laboring woman to push? There is no need to do that, unless she's been numbed up by drugs I suppose. I was perfectly obvious to me when to push, and I didn't need anyone telling me how or when to do it. Thankfully, no one did. They just let me get on with it. Since lying down wasn't an option, I found the least uncomfortable position to be a squat. Call it a plie if you're into ballet.

Pushing was the fun part. Here I'd thought that this would be the painful part, when the baby is actually leaving my body, but actually this was when the endorphins finally kicked in, and also when I finally felt like I was doing something useful, not just waiting around. I was really surprised at how it wasn't actually all that painful, compared to all those tedious and very painful contractions earlier.

The midwife told me when she could see the top of the baby's head, and said I could touch it if I wanted. So I did, and yes, it was the top of an actual head. I stopped touching it because I'm sorry, that's a really weird place for a head to be. I was holding out for a more proper introduction to an entire baby.

So I kept pushing, and there was the head! The hard part was over, and just another easy push or two would free the rest, right? No. Instead, there was suddenly a whole lot of busy scrambling by the midwife's team, and rather more difficulty than I'd been anticipating, but suddenly the whole baby was out, in a disturbingly gory gush of blood onto, yes, another towel, which was over some plastic that was protecting the bed.

It turns out that the difficulty had been because this baby had the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around her neck twice. She's a little breakdancer, spinning on her head in there. Despite this, she came out bright pink, not blue. The midwife had to revive her with a bit of oxygen, though.

Then my daughter was in my arms! She's beautiful, even with her head smooshed like that. (It has since returned to a normal head shape.) As soon as she was born, she looked around at everyone in the room with total fascination in her big dark blue-grey eyes. Bob and I named her Thelma after Bob's great-aunt. After all that fuss about her being to small, she (the baby) weighed 7 lbs, 6 oz.

Once Thelma had done enough crying to get some air into her lungs, she kept crying, which bothered the midwife. I mean really, anyone whose head has been smooshed like that has every right to cry, but the midwife tried various things to soothe her. Nothing worked, until my mother started singing to her. She quieted right down and locked her gaze onto my mother, completely entranced. Here I'm the musician, and I didn't think of singing to her! Not to be outdone by my mother, I sang to Thelma too, and she liked that.

The midwife was adamant that Thelma start nursing right away, but Thelma seemed content to just hang out. When I tried to get her to nurse, she pulled away. I was cool with that, and figured she'd nurse in her own sweet time, but the midwife insisted that she nurse right away. She explained that when a newborn pulls away, that doesn't mean she wants to pull away, it just means that she can't control her body yet. And indeed, once I fought past this pulling-away thing she was doing, she latched right on.

The midwife was so adamant, of course, since nursing signals the uterus that the baby is finally out, so it's time to expel the placenta. Supposedly. In my case, we were still waiting for it two hours later. For me, holding Thelma, the time just flew by, but for the midwife's team, it must have felt like a long time, since various problems can result from a placenta that overstays its welcome. Eventually, after establishing that it had detached properly, she pulled it out, which was a bizarre sensation.

I felt great immediately after the birth, and I've felt great since, much better than during the pregnancy. I didn't need a single stitch. I'm amazed at how fast I'm recovering my former shape, too. I have to gain a few pounds to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight, though.

Anyway, Thelma is a delight! I realized I'd better write this blog already, since she's developing so fast, these early days are disappearing.

She's very good at her two jobs, sleeping and nursing. Sometimes she tries to multitask and do both at once, which doesn't work very well.

The midwife was right that she's not very good at controlling her body yet. Like, when she wants to nurse, which is most of the time, she will often put her hand to her mouth in a nursing sort of way. She's really good at communicating her needs like that. But then when I try to nurse her, she doesn't understand that first she has to take her hand away from her mouth, since only one thing can fit into her mouth at a time. I have to pull her hand away myself, which is hard because she's strong.

She gets very enthusiastic about nursing. Think of the Far Side cartoon of dogs at feeding time, saying, "Oh boy, dog food again!" That's what she's like about breastmilk. But to express her enthusiasm, she shakes her head back and forth very quickly, which can make it difficult to keep a grip on her and latch her on. Once she latches on, though, she gets right down to business.

Anyway, Thelma is an excellent communicator, and she does it all without crying. She occasionally emits a loud sound or two, to alert any adults in the area to the fact that something is wrong and needs an adult's attention. Once she sees that an adult is on the job, she quiets right down. Then she'll make occasional little distressed noises until the adult has solved the problem. Then she'll smile.

You hear about babies crying all the time, but she is definitely not one of those babies. I credit this good disposition to an excellent book, Our Babies, Ourselves, by local Cornell anthropologist Meredith Small:
www.amazon.com/Our-Babies.../ref=sr_1_1
She presents the obvious-once-you-think-about-it idea that babies come out adapted to a particular environment, the environment that humans spent most of our time evolving in. This would be the world of hunter-gatherers, where babies are generally carried around by their mothers as their mothers go about their daily business, and nursed on cue. The modern world, with its houses with separate rooms, its clocks, and its motorized plastic baby-entertaining devices, is completely alien to these creatures, so it generally makes them cry. Professor Small cites numerous fascinating studies that basically show that the more modern "improvements" Americans try to add to the old-fashioned hunter-gatherer model, the more babies cry. Seriously, the crying of American babies is often measured in hours, while the crying of babies from many other cultures is measured in minutes.

So, I sewed a simple sling to carry Thelma around in. This was with the plan of keeping her entertained with my daily activities, but actually she mostly sleeps in it. Since separate bedrooms are a modern invention, I take Thelma to bed with me, so she doesn't get lonely and scared in her own room. A hunter-gatherer baby left all by herself at night would be eaten by some predator by morning. Babies instinctively know this, so they'll complain very loudly if you try to put them in this situation. That's what I read.

Notice that I didn't say I sleep with her. As she sleeps much of the day, she's up much of the night. Anyway, this is still much more convenient than putting her in a separate room, since she has to be fed and changed several times a night anyway, so putting her in a separate room would just add a walk to each of these nighttime chores.

One reason many American babies have to cry so loudly is that they have to reach parents in distant rooms. They just keep increasing the volume until they finally get the response they need. Thelma, on the other hand, could never be called "The Loud" at least not until she gets a hurdy gurdy or zurna. At night when she needs something, she doesn't make a peep, but instead gets my attention by punching me in the face. I'm not saying it's a perfect system.

La Lech

I realize I've been blogging more about a suburban house and impending motherhood than anything musical recently, but hey, this is all novel and exciting to me, so this is what I blog about.

At my mother's urging, I attended a La Leche League meeting today. It was really fun, and not just because of Bob's wisecracks about lechery afterwards. For one, there was all this extremely concentrated cuteness in the room, so it hardly mattered what people were saying. Two, people, at least the ones who could talk, were saying interesting things. The advice fell into two categories: "Just trust yourself and your baby to know what to do, and everything will work out" and "Don't be afraid to ask for help when things go terribly wrong, because there's nothing easy or automatic about nursing." Interestingly, most of the "when things inevitably go wrong" advice seemed to come from women who'd had the more medical type of birth, such as cesarians. I figure it's like this: A newborn baby is only as smart as it has to be. Its job is to nurse, and it's usually born with just enough brain power to figure out how to do that, and no more. (OK, our particular baby will be so brilliant, the moment it's born, it will relate its idea of how to fix the US economy, but I'm talking about the average baby here.) If its squishy little brain gets befuddled with some cocktail of drugs, as it usually is in a hospital delivery, it loses its ability to do even its very simple job. I've read statistics about this, but hearing actual stories from actual people made the statistics seem that much more real. The people selling you these painkilling drugs in the hospital never tell you about the studies showing the side effects these drugs have on the baby. I don't like pain, but I'd rather feel pain and have a healthy baby than feel numb and have a befuddled baby.

This is all making me even happier I decided on a home birth (with hospital backup in the rare event I actually need it.) Now that I have a bit of distance between me and my old midwifery practice, I'm seeing even more problems with them. Like, when I first became their patient, they handed me this sheaf of pamphlets and stuff to read. It included information and coupons from a couple of different formula companies, but no information at all about breastfeeding. That's kind of like going to a cardiologist and getting coupons for donuts but no information about vegetables.

The proof showing that breastfeeding is best is so completely clear and obvious to anyone who looks at it, it's outrageous that the other midwifery office didn't mention it, but instead promoted formula feeding. Formula companies have the money to influence medical practices, while there's no money to be made off mothers' milk. Here I'd thought that this sort of thing was mainly a problem with drug company reps visiting doctors' offices to give them gifts and talk up the latest expensive drug, but it's apparently the practice of formula companies too.

At the La Leche League meeting, the leader ripped a poster off the wall and talked about it a bit. This poster was paid for by a formula company, and it was supposedly promoting breastfeeding, probably as a result of some legal settlement that required it to do so. It basically said, "You can reduce your baby's chance of getting an ear infection by 50% if you submit to the degrading practice of letting the dirty little parasite suck on your tender bits instead of feeding it formula like a normal person." OK, that's a paraphrase, but that was the basic idea. A simpler phrase would have been, "If you give us a couple of thousand dollars a year, we will double your child's chance of getting an ear infection."

It's really quite odd how all these things are phrased. Like some study showed that breastfed babies grow up to be kids that have IQs that average 8 points higher than formula-fed babies. 8 freaking points! (And this is normal, cow's milk-based formula, not melamine-enriched.) But this data is usually presented as if these breastfed babies had IQs that were higher than those of "normal" babies. The proper way to present this data would be to say that formula lowers a kid's IQ to 8 points below normal. If some company were to try to market sugar-frosted lead paint chips that were known to permanently lower kids' IQs by 8 points, people would be up in arms, and the FDA would ban them. OK, maybe they wouldn't, because people are really stupid. Now we know why. But formula is such an entrenched business, no one can touch it.

It just occurred to me that babies who drink cows'-milk-based formula, while their IQs are lower than those of normal babies, do have IQs that are higher than those of cows. It kind of makes you wonder how smart cows would be if we raised them on human milk. I don't plan to do this experiment myself, but I'm putting the idea out there for any scientists who are looking for a project.

www.melissatheloud.com

Here's a quick blog post while tribe is temporarily up. I plan to post my blog somewhere on my website, www.melissatheloud.com. If tribe stays up, I'll duplicate it here. (Don't look for it just yet, though, since I haven't set it up yet.) Ideally, I'd like to figure out how to allow people to post comments, but not spam.

I sure hope tribe stays up, since I enjoy the discussions here.

Anyway, I haven't blogged for a while, but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy. My klezmer band played a bar mitzvah Saturday, that was a lot of fun. Kids know how to dance, and their parents often do too. By the way, my klezmer band needs a name. Ideas? We're a subset of the Cornell University Klezmer Ensemble (CUKE) that's a smaller and more manageable size. Gherkin is a little too obscure.

It was pretty hard wedging my doumbek onto the remains of my lap, though. And the baby still kicks off the beat. I've been playing in various rhythms in my various bands, and I expect this baby to be familiar with all of them by the time it's born in about two weeks. I mean, rhythm is fundamental, and I consider it to be more important than the martial arts it seems to spend most of its time practicing in there.