Practical & Conscientious Parenting
Things We Like
Little Bug’s Baby Shower
16 years
We had our family baby shower this weekend. When Mehalia was born, Anne and Ben buried her placenta at the base of a Bay Laurel, and we really like the idea of having a tree for Bug’s placenta, so Ashley’s mom got us a beautiful Japanese Maple. People put cards in it for us at the shower. Hopefully the tree can handle living in Yakima with its cold winters.
I’ve been reading Husband-Coached Childbirth : The Bradley Method of Natural Childbirth, and I just read a bit that Dr. Bradley wrote about the placenta. I had heard that animals and people sometimes eat the placenta after birth and I assumed the new mothers did so to replace some of the iron they may have lost during childbirth. While that may be partially true, Dr. Bradley also said that there may be a chemical in the placenta that helps stimulate uterine contraction after birth and that people used to take pills made from dried and ground placentas to help with bleeding after labor (uterine contraction is important to help stem the flow of blood to the uterus and heal the place where the placenta detaches from).
I’ve also heard that many people believe the placenta has healing and magical properties. While I don’t know if any of this is true, it’s clear that there’s something special about the placenta. Anyway, I love that we will have a beautiful tree to remind us of our baby’s first home.
Placemats
Another really fun thing we did at the shower was play “Placemats,” a game that works like this:
- Everyone takes a piece of paper and writes down a phrase.
- People pass their paper to the left, and then everyone draws a picture to represent the phrase on the paper that was passed to them.
- After folding down the paper so that the original phrase is covered and only the picture is visible, the papers are passed to the left again, and each person writes a phrase to represent the picture.
- Write, Draw, Pass, Repeat
We did several rounds of “interpretation,” and we ended up with some really funny phrases (things got especially funny after passing through Mehalia’s hands). A great example: one page started with “If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready,” and transitioned to “I’m so unhappy when my clothes fall off.”
Review: Schuyler’s Monster
16 years
Ashley keeps up on a lot of blogs, particularly those that are by parents of special needs kids. Maybe I’ll have her do a post soon on them. One that she has been following for a while now is Fighting Monsters with Rubber Swords, the funny, sad, heartfelt and thoughtful blog of Robert Rummel-Hudson. His daughter Schuyler was born with a brain malformation called bilateral perisylvian polymicrogyria, which most noticeably affects her ability to speak. Rob has been blogging for several years now and recently published Schulyer’s Monster: A Father’s Journey with His Wordless Daughter. Ashley loved it, recommended I read it, I read it, loved it, recommended it to my book club and they all loved it.
What stands out immediately in the book is Rob’s honesty. I assume that most parents want to be considered good parents, and I’m sure there would be a tendency to gloss over some of the less glamorous moments that every parent has, but Rob lays it all out there. His candor and quick wit had me drawn in from the beginning. I wasn’t sure how much I would be able to relate to Rob, having just started my fatherhood journey, but the book deals with so many topics that we all can relate to: fighting for something we believe in, struggling to find meaning in life, feeling inadequate and feeling tremendous love.
He writes a lot about dealing with doctors and schools, and fighting for Schuyler when the “experts” disagreed with him. One thing he shows over and over again is how well-informed parents are the best experts on their children. With Ashley in med school now, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between doctors and patients now that so much information about health is available online. I know I tend to self-diagnose before I even think about going to a doctor (if I even go after self-diagnosing), and having spent my whole life with myself, I know quite a bit about how I work. So when doctor’s don’t even listen to what I have to say it feels like when the dude at Jiffy Lube tries to tell me that my fuel filter needs changing because he doesn’t know I replaced it a month ago. Rob shows that a parent can be the best advocate and best expert of his or her child, and really should take the time to be just that.
This book is a great read for anyone, and I think doctors and educators – especially those in special education – could gain some great insights from it. Schuyler’s journey is truly remarkable, in no small part due to her crusading parents. People say it’s hard to describe a parents love for a child, but Rob does a great job of conveying it. A perk to reading Schuyler’s Monster is that I can keep up on Schuyler (and get a healthy dose of Rob’s synicism) on the blog.