Velveteen Mind

Birth of a Goose

Exactly one year ago, we welcomed our baby boy into the world.

Happy Birthday, Cheeks!

Now that you are a big boy, it's time to drop the baby blog nickname.  From now on, Cheeks will be Goose.  It's a play on his real name and a nod to his terrible habit of sharp, unexpected nips with those new teeth of his. 

So, then, Happy Birthday, Goose!

In celebration of one of my favorite days, here is Goose's birth story, as written on our personal family photo website shortly after he was born.  I've edited it a bit for this version, changing the names.  I'm seriously fighting the urge to spruce it up a bit, as the style is pretty sparse compared to how I usually write on this blog, but I'm going to leave it as I wrote it just days after Goose was born.  Still hopped up on Percocet and apparently with no patience for my usually articulate (read:  wordy) self. 

I love birth stories, and I hope you get a kick out of one of mine.  A quick word of warning:  there is a bit of blood in a picture or two below.  I could have chosen to share with you some totally cleaned up photos, but I feel like I know my readers well enough to know that ya'll would appreciate the photo of the exact moment that I touched Goose for the first time.  In any case, you've been warned.

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Such a wild night! Goose's birth story:

It's 2 a.m. and I'm thinking, "Wait, I can't remember...  are these what contractions felt like?"

After timing them myself for an hour, I woke Maguire up, timed them another hour, then decided to head to the hospital with my mom in tow.  We arrived at the hospital at 5 a.m. to find that I was 3 cm dilated.  Thinking we had time, the doctor on call for our OB practice decided to give our OB some more "beauty sleep" before calling her in.  No need to see a doctor for quite some time, right?  Wrong.

At a little after 6 a.m. (less than an hour later), I had zoomed to 7 cm dilated and Goose seemed to have arrival plans a little more pressing than any of our doctors had anticipated.  The nurse called the on-call doc, who hopped in his car and started trying to reach my OB.  Hmmm, at this point it would be nice to have a doctor here, folks.  My water breaks, the nurse checks me, and I then hear a fierce whisper across the room to "find any doctor and get them in here NOW!"  Aah yes, just what I wanted to hear.  

Of course, my mom tells me that at that point I had abandoned my hopes to see my own OB or at least a doctor from that office and was pleading for "any doctor, any doctor, any doctor!"  Goose and I were flying solo on this mission, no meds, and I'm thinking the pain was talking for us at that point.  Yikes.

I'm not entirely sure what happened from there, other than I thought the nurse was helping me along, checking my dilation, as she kept urging me NOT to push.  Apparently, I was confused, though, because my mom and Maguire tell me that she was not, in fact, checking me...  she was holding the baby in with her hand until a doctor came!  Yeah, that would be that "any doctor!" thing.

Cue the exciting "ER" music now...  they find a doctor in the showers (at least, I hope he was a doctor), he runs into the room (still wet), they throw on his scrub apron/ gown thing, they slip something under me (who knows), I hear "okay, you can push now," I push one time and Goose comes flying out like a baby missile in one shot-- head, shoulders, body, all the way to tiny toes-- all at once!  The doctor literally catches him in mid-air.  

Goose clearly didn't have time for any of that "he's crowning" crap that other babies do; once he commits, he commits! 6:54 a.m., less than 2 hours after arriving at the hospital, less than 4 hours after my first inkling of a contraction, and Goose arrives with determination and a fierce flair for the dramatic in one (quite literally) explosive shot.

Although friends and family had wanted to be there for the birth, we were obviously lucky to even have a doctor there.  Fortunately, Maguire and my mom were by my side the whole time.  Enjoy the photos and join us in welcoming Baby Goose.

Strength to Take

Oprah loves Oprah a little too much for my liking, so I rarely watch her show.  I think she's fabulous, but I can only take so much.  Earlier this summer, however, I did catch about five minutes of a segment with the life coach Martha Beck and it has stayed with me ever since.  In fact, it resonated with me so much that I immediately turned off the show so that my memory of it wouldn't be muddled by a bunch of other random Oprah-lovin' and "light bulb moments."  One was enough for me.

I thought about it again this week after reading the comment Shauna of Up in the Night left in response to my Johnny Depp Love Fest.  Because, as Megan at SortaCrunchy pointed out, it was all really just a Megan Love Fest.  Shauna said that she's "decided it takes a really good mommy to get away and truly enjoy the time alone."  I couldn't agree more.  Not because I want to toot my own horn as a great mom (which I am, who are we kidding? :> ), but because it is worth mentioning that taking time for yourself and allowing yourself to actually enjoy it can be a difficult decision and even more difficult execution.

So back to that Oprah show.  I found this great synopsis of the episode on Mom Writes taken from the synopsis available at oprah.com (which I never would have found on my own):

Martha explains to Wendy that if she wants her son's forgiveness, she must first forgive herself. "Our children model what we do to ourselves, not what we do to them. So if you see unforgiveness in his eyes, it's because you're not forgiving yourself," Martha says. "Your only job is to learn to love yourself. The children, that's all they're waiting for you to do."

According to Martha, a mother who lives her life well is going to have happier children. "Let me tell you my favorite story from a psychiatrist who spent 20 years dealing with neurotic patients. They'd always say, 'I know my mother loved me, but…,' and then they'd go into the problems," she says. "One day she met a really, really healthy man, and she thought, 'Gee, I wonder what a normal person's mother is like?' She never heard that. … She thought he would say, 'My mother loved me perfectly. She made no mistakes at all.' Instead, he said something she had never heard before from a patient. He said, 'My mother loved life.'"

Martha says parents who neglect to love themselves raise kids who don't show themselves self-love, either. "They don't treat themselves the way you treat them. They treat themselves the way you treat you," she says.

This bears repeating:  Your children don't treat themselves the way you treat them.  They treat themselves the way you treat yourself.

Being a stay-at-home martyr doesn't help anyone.  Breaking your back to devote your life to your family (or anyone or anything outside of yourself) will be for naught if you don't make yourself a priority.  If all you want in the world is for your family to be happy and healthy, and in trying to reach that goal you neglect yourself, all of your work will be wasted because they will only be as happy or as healthy (figuratively speaking) as you are yourself.  More specifically, only as happy as you allow yourself to be.  As you show them that it is okay to be.

I hesitated to tell ya'll about my little break for myself last week.  I didn't want to have to hear any "must be nice..." comments, as I knew I would feel compelled to defend my choice to take a breather.  I felt like I would feel like I needed to justify why I did it, explain that I knew I was lucky to have the opportunity to do so, give a nod of respect to those laboring mothers out there that haven't gone to a movie in years, and so on and so forth.   Defend defend defend.

Instead, I realize that I should be proud.  By taking that breather, I was and am doing right by my family.  I was teaching my boys and my husband an invaluable lesson about respect and self-respect. 

I mean, seriously, what do I think there is to gain by being a stay-at-home martyr?  When was the last time you saw a group of teenage boys or even husbands hanging out together and saying, "Man, you should see my mom (or wife) slave away all day and never take any time for herself.  She's something else.  Let's talk about how amazing she is and how she just gives and gives and gives and never takes.  Man, I suck." 

Ha!  Right.

But I have seen teenage boys and husbands remark that their mother or wife is laid back or, in a round-about way, that she takes things in stride.  I have actually heard the offhand (lest their friends think they love her too much) remark tossed out by a teenager, "No, actually, my mom is pretty cool."

What better way to instill the kind of confidence it takes for your older kid (or, yes, husband) to admit that they've got it good with you than to live a happy life?  And if that means sometimes living that life without them hanging off of you every waking moment, then so be it.

Room to breathe means room to grow.  Aaaaaaahhhhhhhh.

Feet propped up, waiting for Johnny Depp to take the screen.

Choosing Johnny Depp Over My Own Children

I took this week for me.  How do you like that?

After Breakfast at Wimbledon last Sunday, I drove the boys to my in-laws' home for a two day visit sans mommy.  Nothing like your toddler waving you off and yelling, "Bye Mom, don't worry!  Bye bye bye!" to reassure you that they'll do just fine without you.  Once the grandparent fun begins, no kid wants to risk their mom ending it too early, so best to get her out of sight of the ice cream indulgences and endless hours in the wading pool.

This time, my twinge of guilt at taking a break for myself only lasted a minute or two, because it was obvious that this break was going to be a load of fun for the boys, too.  Two birds, one stone.  Let the fun begin.

Risking making all of you out-of-inlaws-visit-range readers too jealous, I'll make my description of my day and a half off break quick:  it was all about Johnny Depp.  Almost immediately after getting home, I drove myself to the movies and made a night of it.  I bought a ticket to the late showing of Knocked Up (Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen) and spent the 45 minutes before the movie started to wander in and out of the other movies.  With a vat of Coke in hand and a fistful of candy, I snuck into the end of Pirates of the Caribbean:  At World's End.  Because it would be fairly obvious that I was crashing the show, I stole the first seat I saw, which was at the end of the third row.  People, there is nothing like a 20 foot image of Johnny Depp towering over you to dash all thoughts of toddlers and babies.  Good God.  That man is perfection.

Seriously, all of you Google Reader readers are missing out on my SnapShots images here.

Next up was the beginning of Evan Almighty (Steve Carell and Morgan Freeman).  While he's no Johnny Depp, it was a good warm-up act for the funny that was to be Knocked Up.  Maybe I was just in the mood for it, but Knocked Up was freaking hilarious.  It was just what I needed.

Of course, not all thoughts of being a mom escaped me.  In the row in front of me at my feature were four high school or college age boys, totally clean cut beach types in leather flip flops, plaid or khaki shorts, polos and t-shirts, and that omnipresent shaggy bangs look all the laid back boys seem to be sporting right now.  While checking out the tan, lean legs propped up on the seats in front of them, just a couple of years ago I would have had thoughts of :

"He's so cute!  I wonder what he's like?"

...in an "I know I'm married, but I can still look" kind of way.  That night, however, my thoughts were more like:

"He's so cute!  I wonder what his mom is like?" 

That's right.  Talk about flipping the script.

I was wondering if I was glimpsing my own boys a number of years from now.  I was hoping my boys would grow up to be so cool and laid back, cute and fun.  I was wondering what it takes to raise them successfully, so that they can be set free in the world and be as pulled together as these boys seemed to be.  So they can be trusted to go to a late movie with their friends and I'll know they won't act obnoxious or rude, but rather maybe catch the eye of some cute and pulled together girl to spend a little of the summer with before school starts again. 

Wow.  When did my brain start functioning so differently?

I love it, though.

I also loved the rest of my free time.  I spent the next day window-shopping, drinking coffee, driving around aimlessly without having to silently pray that I wouldn't drive off the road while picking up dropped toys from the floorboard to hand off to outstretched hands in the backseat, and generally never thinking twice about anything.  No computer.  No phone.  No nothing but me.

Oh, and Johnny Depp.

I just had to find out what the end of that movie was all about, so I went back and watched all of Pirates of the Caribbean the next day.  And yes, I sat in the third row again because why not?  Third row center.  My entire field of vision filled by nothing but deliciously dirty Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp.

Because why not?