The Mom Crowd

No one likes switching doctors. It is a pain to do–especially when you are pregnant but sometimes it is worth it. There is no rule that says that you can’t switch providers during your pregnancy. Some women put up with poor service from their doctors or their staff because they feel the hassle of changing providers is too complicated. And we feel guilty and don’t want to make anyone feel bad. Some women stay with their doctors for future pregnancies even if their doctor left a bad taste in their mouth from their first pregnancy. Well ladies, I am here to encourage you to break free and find a provider that you feel comfortable with, that doesn’t make medical decisions based on their fear of being sued, and who will support the choices you want to make during your pregnancy or well-woman health care.

Even if you aren’t interested in an unmedicated, natural birth, there are some things to look out for that tell you a doctor has a bad habit of meddling in labor when it isn’t necessary. It is important for us to voice our concerns to the people we trust for our healthcare. I cannot even begin to stress how important it is for us to also take charge and responsibility for our own health. Educate yourself, ask questions, read books and be your own advocate!

I have compiled a list of “red flags” for you to consider as you think about your experience with your own Ob/Gyn:

Your doctor starts pressuring you to have a c-section as early as 28 weeks for fear of a large baby.

Your doctor’s c-section rate is at or above the national rate (33%).

Your doctor patronizes you or mocks you for wanting a birth plan or a natural birth.

Your doctor has an episiotomy rate over 30%.

Your doctor doesn’t fully inform you of the risks on induction, c-section, epidural etc.

Your doctor will only allow you to push your baby out with your legs/feet in the stirrups and/or on your back. (Feels uncomfortable with hands and knees or squatting or whatever position you want to birth in)

Your doctor’s routine procedure for induction is to break the bag of waters early on in labor.

Your doctor uses cytotec for labor induction. (Run the other direction!)

Your doctor makes you feel stupid when you ask questions or share how you feel about pregnancy, procedures, birth, or your general health.

Your doctor makes you feel bad about your weight gain but doesn’t offer you any guidance on nutrition or diet.

If you want a natural birth with minimal interventions:

Your doctor says things that aren’t supportive of your desire to have an unmedicated birth. For example, “you don’t need to suffer needlessly…the drugs are safe for the baby…good luck with that…”

Your doctor requires continuous electric fetal monitoring.

This is by no means an exhaustive list but it is a start. If your doctor or practice makes you feel uncomfortable at all or if you have a gut feeling that leaves you uneasy as you interact with them then consider switching practices. Emotional relaxation during labor is very important and if you feel uneasy around your birth team then it can have a negative impact on labor.

You will remember your birth for the rest of your life so it is important to go to someone who treats you with dignity, respect, and care. Doctors don’t have emotional attachments with all their patients and will not be offended if you switch your care to someone else. Many doctors are overbooked (How many times have you had to wait and wait to see your doc only to feel rushed during appointments?) and will not be personally offended if you switch providers. You don’t have to tell them why at all–unless you want to.

If you are looking for a more personal care style for your womanly health care then I would encourage you to see midwives for your pregnancy and well-woman visits. Many certified nurse midwives also do yearly exams. There are many women who enjoy the holisitic care that midwives offer but still prefer epidurals or need c-sections for their births.

Finding a doctor or midwife that you feel comfortable with may be a challenge but it is worth the extra time and effort!

Have you ever switched doctors? What’s your story?

My husband and I are discussing where we want to go on our second Babymoon. A babymoon is simply a little vacation that you take with your spouse to enjoy your time together before the baby arrives. I remember hearing about the idea of a vacation to enjoy your time together before your world is turned upside down and I thought it was a fabulous idea. We love to travel, so this seemed like the perfect excuse to take a vacation.

Our plans for our first babymoon started grand with a week in Paris. Then the trip got downgraded to a weekend in New York City, then we decided to drive to Austin for a weekend, then we came to our final decision to just drive north into the Texas hill country and see where we landed. The weekend turned out wonderfully spontaneous in our Mustang convertible. Little did I know that that would be one of the last times we could go for a ride with the top down. Driving with my windows down on the Camry just isn’t quite the same.

We found a hotel and mentioned that we were on a babymoon. Then the front desk clerk gave us a deal on the room. The next day we found a hole in the wall BBQ place playing John Wayne movies. As we walked around Inks Lake I saw an old couple in blue jeans canoeing. I thought that if they could do it, then I could canoe eight months pregnant. Rowing around the lake was the highlight of my entire weekend.

We took our trip about two months before I was due. I actually felt infinitely better towards the end of my pregnancy, than in the beginning. My friend took her babymoon towards the beginning of her pregnancy before she got uncomfortably huge. I don’t think it matters when you take your babymoon, just as long you do one.

Taking the time to be together and not worry about commitments or the future was invigorating. We appreciated the peace of the trip before we got back to painting the nursery, birth planning, and sleepless nights. Of course I miss the spontaneity of being a DINK, but I really feel like we celebrated the end of our childless phase with our babymoon. I am glad we took the opportunity to take a small trip with just the two of us. Now we will be taking our second babymoon, before we become a family with two children under the age of two (at least for two months)! I want to appreciate the quiet of only one child, before my life becomes even more full of the joys of parenting.

How about you did you do anything special before the baby came?

I know, I know I am writing another post on morning sickness. It is seriously consuming my life right now and that is what I am thinking about almost 90% of the day. Here are a few things I have learned since I have been sick.

Only time really helps morning sickness pass. It wasn’t until I was 20 weeks pregnant with my first that I continually felt good and I was not going to throw up or be sick to my stomach. So now I a counting down the days until I feel better. It will be the last week in October when I am 20 weeks with my second. I can’t wait.

Playdates and friends help pass the time. I usually feel okay in the afternoon. I have been scheduling my afternoons with friends so they can help me watch Ace. I think she enjoys leaving the house and I enjoy the company. Although, I am not much company to my friends as I lay like a lump on their couch.

I have learned to appreciate the work I did around the house. Since I have been out of commission Daniel has had to take up almost every chore around the house. I really did not realize that I did so much. I can be hard on myself and I never thought I did enough. Just making sure Ace had clothes to wear and taking care of her meals.  Also, taking care of the laundry and going grocery shopping. I picked up the house when I could. Some of the house hasn’t been cleaned in a while, but it is okay.

Putting first things first. It is one of the old Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but it is true. Since I have limited energy and time and I have had to let some things go. That isn’t easy for me to do. I am usually a suck-it-up-and-do-it-anyway kind of person, but not now. Blogs have gone unread, toys aren’t picked up, and phones aren’t answered. Really all I can do is make sure I am feeling alright and help take care of Ace.

Chloraseptic Sore Throat Spray is awesome after throwing up. I hate it when you get done throwing up and it still feels like you got a chunk in your throat, but really it is your uvula feeling beat up. I have drank something cold to calm my throat, but then I just throw that up too. Then in my one moment of genius I remembered my Chloraseptic Sore Throat Spray. I used it and it numbed my throat for a few minutes and it helped to take some of the throw up taste out of my mouth. I keep it handy now.

So that is what I have learned so far. I also really appreciate my husband a lot. I hate that I can’t help him more. I know he is tired, but this is just the way it has to be for now. Okay, I am going to go back to my couch now and get some rest while Ace is napping. I hope all you have a good week! Today is the first day of school in our school district. Hopefully some of you will be getting reprieves as some of your kids go back to school soon!

I am calling in sick to my blog this week. Seriously, scrolling down pages makes me nauseated. In the meantime, here is a guest post from the hilarious Brittany from BarefootFoodie.com. Thank you, Brittany, for taking pity on me and guest posting!

I am so very excited to find myself over here on The Mom Crowd.  I am an avid reader of this site, mostly because these girls are brilliant, their posts are helpful, their kids are gorgeous, yada yada, I could go on for hours, but you all already know they are all kinds of awesome.  In fact, that’s why you are here, right now, reading this post, thinking, hey…this weird…this doesn’t look like a typical The Mom Crowd post…something is fishy.  And, you’d be right.  I am pretty sure the last thing anyone would say to me is that my posts were helpful and/or informative, unless you count “Wow, that was way more information than I needed to know about a stranger online.”  So, I am cutting my losses and doing what I know best, and that is hopefully entertaining you as I share a piece of what’s going on in my life at the moment.

So, here it is.

I’m getting old.

Music is loud, computers are confusing, I listen to NPR, and before my uterus sags any closer to the ground, we need to get down to business, and by business, I mean sex…in a completely fun, yet baby making capacity.

I mean, I have things to do, body parts to tighten up and surgically re-perk, I want to add number three to our brood, talk my hubby into a little discreet clipping, and go into my thirties with my pre-baby Carmen Electra physique.

Which, I should be totally psyched about, except this time I have decided to suck the fun out of things.  This time, ladies, I am taking charge…of my fertility.

Now, I’m not sure who was in charge of things before I decided to take over, but this place is a mess.  Beer cans and Cheetos everywhere.  X-rated movies just lying about.  The whole place smells like patchouli.  It’s like MTV’s Spring break in my womb.

Luckily, I am armed with the standard issue Taking Charge of your Fertility bible, the special pink thermometer, which I was relieved to learn is used to take my temp orally…and not someplace scary and uncomfortable, and I signed up for fertilityfriend.com, because honestly, I am lazy, charting is scary and daunting, and God knows where my toddlers have hidden all the pens in my house.

On top of all that, and because I clearly operate on a rational and scientific level, I’ve been googling baby making friendly diets.

Turns out, the all cherry popsicle diet I’ve been on to look more Nicole Kidman and less Carnie Wilson this pregnancy is a no go.

I just hope that when they say a diet full of protein and dairy, what they really mean is chinese take out and mint chocolate chip ice cream.

So, yeah, here we are, amidst our very first official cycle.  I’ve advised my husband to not bother wearing pants this month, and I’ve just finished my second dairy mandated ice cream cone for the day, so we are good to go.

I had no idea being in charge of my fertility was so painful…the ice cream headaches are killing me (insert rim shot).

I don’t have a helpful or interesting topic today. I am still battling All Day Nausea. I have spent the entire weekend in bed or on the couch and I have missed two parties. In fact I haven’t left my house in over a week. Yesterday, my husband and I walked to our mailbox and I immediately threw up when we got back to the house.

Last Thursday night I broke down crying. Being sick is lonely. You don’t get to go out and see anyone. I don’t what the heck I want to eat most of the time. In fact, I don’t want to eat at all, but I know I have to for the baby and so I don’t have to get an IV. I hate that I can’t do anything around the house to help and I feel like I just boss my husband around all day. (I am sure most women would love that.) But we knew before starting the whole process of a second one, that would mean that Daniel has to do everything. He is doing a fantastic job feeding Ace and taking care of her. I try to watch Ace from the couch in the afternoons so he can at least get some work done.

So I just wanted to whine again here on The Mom Crowd. Morning sickness is really horrible. I keep thinking, “What if I can’t do this a third time and we only have 2 kids?” People say I can make it through it again, but I hate this. If my morning sickness lasts 20 weeks again like it did last time. I don’t know if I will want to try for number 3.

What I do know is that tomorrow I am 8 weeks along. In two weeks I will be able to hear my baby’s heartbeat and that will make it all worth while. But I still have two weeks of vomiting and hating food to go.

P.S. As I wrote this up I smelled the dry cat food and totally threw up my lime sherbert. Oh, I did get some meds. The Zofran works really well, but my insurance would only give me 12 pills every thirty days. I may have to call back my doc’s office to push it through insurance. When I called last week they gave me Phinagrin(sp?). I took it Saturday morning and it knocked me off my butt and I slept all day.

Thanks for letting me whine again.