The GirlAlive Blog

I've learned some interesting things about childbirth at my new job.

One thing I've learned is that a lot of things can rupture and lacerate and bleed and explode when you're giving birth. But those things usually aren't too bad, or people would not have a bunch of kids.

People really do accidentally give birth at home. Sometimes into the toilet.

If you write a detailed "birth plan" and specify things like, "avoid using forceps" and "no episiotomy unless an emergency" and "I wish to use the birthing pool", that's almost a guarantee that you'll need a forceps delivery with a big old episiotomy in an operating theater. I've never ever seen a birth follow the detailed hippy "birth plans" that the parents write. In fact, I believe that God likes to assert his power over creation in births. Whenever parents make detailed plans about how it is supposed to go, God steps in to cause some obstruction of labor requiring forceps or a c-section just to show the parents that He is in control of life, not them.  So don't ever try to plan ahead for a birth and micro-manage your delivery.  It never works, and you're just begging for an emergency c-section.

Meconium is gross.

Try not to give birth during pre-eclampsia week. I had never seen a pre-eclampsia case in the first 3 weeks working here, and then I got 7 in one day, all from the same week.

I don't like hippies.

Using a birthing pool sounds like a nice idea until you remember that one of the last stages before the baby comes out is "rectal pressure".  You will poop in the pool, and then they'll have to drag you out of the pool quickly so that the baby doesn't get cholera from swimming through your poo.  Just say no to birthing pools.

Posted by Alana at 07:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So just after I posted the last entry, I heard a strange banging noise from behind me. I thought it was the guinea pigs throwing stuff around their cage (as they love to do). I was just about to yell across the room for them to knock it off, when I turned around and saw that it was Binky. I gave Binky a stick to chew on, and he was trying to drag it into his igloo. The stick was about 9 inches long, and he was trying to pull it through a doorway about an inch and a half wide. He continued to try to get the stick into his house for about 15 minutes before he got tired and went back to bed.

I'm fairly certain that Binky spent most of last night trying to dig under the wall to his old house area. He even got up briefly this morning to get a drink of water and try to dig under the wall. I'm not sure how to convince him that there's plenty of cool stuff that is not on the other side of that wall. I think I may hang some more treats from the ceiling just to try to distract him.

So now we have 3 very interesting rodents. I think Homer has the guinea pig version of autistism. Then Spike has the guinea pig version of ADHD. And now we have Binky, with a case of hamster OCD.

Now that Binky has joined the family, Spike seems a lot more normal and calm. He's still a spaz, but by comparison, he's downright lethargic.

Alana

Posted by Alana at 06:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This is my 100th blog entry (counting the previous stuff from diaryland).  I wanted to post something significant here.  But instead, I have stuff about my hamster.

I have reason to believe that Binky may be possessed.  Or at least crazy.  Binky has a cage designed like this:

The food bowl is mounted recessed into a little hole, and Binky's nest is built under the food dish, and he gets to it by going through the doorway under the ramp.  One morning, my husband and I came downstairs to find Binky's cage like this:

He had pulled out the food dish, dragged it to the other side of the platform, and filled the food dish hole with wood chips.  We put everything back, and he did it again a few days later.  He didn't like that we would wake him up by taking the food dish out (usually to fill it).  

We formulated a plan.  We would buy a hamster igloo to give him a new nest, then we'd get a heavy ceramic food dish, and plug up the hole under the food dish and the doorway into the nest area, so that we have better access to him and he can't trash the cage like a rock star in a hotel room every night.  It would look like this:

So I got to work and took the plastic platform out of the cage and left Binky in the cage, all exposed and annoyed that I had woken him up in the middle of the day. I modified the cage, blocked off the openings to his old nest, then went to install the new thing.

I opened the plastic top of the cage, thinking that I'd just grab Binky, put him in his plastic rolling ball thing, and then do what I needed to do with the cage. It didn't work that way. Binky launched himself over the side of the cage, off the coffee table and onto the floor, all on one lightning-fast movement. I found out that flying hamsters make me scream like a girl. Then I chased Binky around the living room until I finally caught the naughty little rodent. He didn't bite me, which was good. He just looked up at me like he was all sweet and innocent.

I put him into the cage with the new igloo and the nest blocked off. He filled his cheeks with most of the contents of the food dish, then tried over and over to get through to his old nest. He tried to dig under the wall. He tried to dig under the other side of the wall. He tried to move the food dish. Finally, I picked him up and put him inside the igloo. After that, he got the hint and made himself a little nest in there. He is currently asleep in his new nest. But I'm still a little afraid to see what he'll do to his cage during the night. He's crazy.

Posted by Alana at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yesterday I was supposed to be going to the bank to open an account.
If you'll recall, on the day that I bought Binky, I had set out to do
the same thing. I still do not have a bank account.

In Seattle, I needed to set up a bank account. So I walked in with my
paycheck from work, and a utility bill and my Minnesota ID card. It
was 6:30 at night, and I stopped in after work. I didn't have to go to
the main Washington Mutual building downtown or anything. The small
storefront branch next to the grocery store could do it. In 15 minutes, I
had an account and some temporary checks.

Here, you can't open an account at small branch offices. You have to
make an appointment with a customer service rep, and they don't make
appointments after 4pm. So you have to take time off work to get to one
of the big branches in the city center in order to do something as
simple as open an account. And then, we found out last night, there are
only 2 people in the whole bank who can do that. And both of them were
out sick, so we had to reschedule again. I'm supposed to go back on
Thursday.

By the time I get an account, I will have had to take time off work
twice, and my husband will have had to take time off three times.
Assuming I get it sorted on the next trip, which is seeming unlikely.

I really think they need to legalize firearms here. If you gave that
kind of service in the US, you risk pissing off some psycho with a gun
and triggering a shooting spree. The lack of firearms here means that
you can be as discourteous and inefficient as you want to, without fear
of your brains decorating the walls behind you. The Scottish service
industry needs to be a little more afraid of its customers. As it is,
they sit comfortably behind a non-bulletproof glass wall, knowing that
they only have to step back a few feet to avoid the worst weapon the
British can manage: a knife.

The whole experience left me wanting to go back home and join the NRA.

Alana

Posted by Alana at 05:00 PM | Permalink

It would be against the law for me to show you a screen print from my
computer at work, so I'll have to use fake things to recreate what one
screen looks like.

On one screen in the maternity record, it is a summary of the baby's
information. It looks kind of like this:

Date of birth: 1/1/06
Sex:         2     [Girl]
Outcome:  1     [Alive]
Weight: 3500
etc.

So everytime a girl is born and is not stillborn, the system shows the
name of my web site. I thought that was kind of cool. Or maybe I'm
just easily amused.

Also one of my co-workers is a very nice Slovenian woman who is very
pregnant. She had a scan the other day, and her new adjusted due date is June
6. So if he (or she) is born on that date, it'll be 6/6/06. She says
that if it's a boy born on that date, she's tempted to name him Damien. 

Alana 

Posted by Alana at 09:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)