parentingtheoryandpractice

[parentingtheoryandpractice]

Reply to Kelsey re: unschooling

Kelsey Piper wrote this critique of unschooling a little while ago, and I've been meaning to respond to it. It's been a while (travel, family visits, etc.), but I finally found some focused time to do some writing. This also ended up being much longer than I anticipated, so consider yourself warned on that front.

Here's a link to Kelsey's post in full, though I will quote some parts more specifically inline as well: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/cVsxtWVqEEjnFKke/

Points of Agreement

Before getting into the parts where afaict Kesley and I don’t see eye to eye, I wanted to acknowledge a few points of major agreement, including where it might not be obvious.

A bunch of the online unschooling community is a trash fire

My experience, like Kelsey’s, has been that there’s a lot of terrible unschooling advice online. IME the epistemology is kind of terrible, including sometimes in a kind of culty way, and I’ve also come across a bunch of people who are being mean, invalidating, and seemingly completely unempathetic and incurious when people write vulnerably about their concerns. I’ve found some groups to be substantially better than others, and I’ll say a little more about that below, but I think this is a point on which we basically agree. I find the state of most (not all ) of the unschooling groups I’ve found to be quite unfortunate.

That Sudbury example you cited strikes me as bad behavior

Kelsey’s post includes this reference to a passage from a Sudbury educator:

An essay about Sudbury Valley School that I read while thinking about how to educate our kids had the following anecdote in it: "A few years ago a teenage girl who had been a student at SVS since she was five told me quite angrily that she had wasted two years and learned nothing. I did not agree with her assessment of herself, but I did not feel like arguing with her, so I just said, "If you learned how bad it is to waste time, why then you could not have learned a better lesson so early in life, a lesson that will be of value for the rest of your days." That reply calmed her, and I believe it is a good illustration of the value of allowing young people to make mistakes and learn from them, rather than directing their lives in an effort to avoid mistakes."

I think I may object to this passage even more than Kelsey does!

I find what the educator said to be patronizing, invalidating, and missing the point. I think educators and people in positions of authority should especially try their best to engage substantively when their students tell them they are doing a bad job, and to try to mollify someone by offering an insincere framing in order to calm them down is pretty bad behavior.

And IMO of course it matters if a kid’s self-assessment is that they haven’t been using their time well.

Which isn’t to say I think it’s especially damning if someone said something like that once when they were impatient or frustrated, but if anyone is writing down that story in an unapologetic way, that person and I have a major disagreement.

It’s mostly good to let parents do their weird stuff

In her post, Kelsey says:

I don't feel like I can confidently opine on whether other people are doing a good job and I don't have any desire to do so. I think that the healthiest culture around parenting is one where we basically chill the fuck out about other parents making decisions we disagree with, and are grateful to live in a culture and company where we similarly have the freedom to make decisions that they disagree with. I feel defensive of parents doing weird things, because I'm doing weird things.

And once again, I’d say we agree! If you want to read more about the details of how I agree, here they are: https://parentingtheoryandpractice.tumblr.com/post/160828234181/respecting-other-peoples-parenting

Pedagogy is a real thing and I’ve also seen unschoolers act like it isn’t 

I’m not sure that “pedagogy” is quite the word I’m looking for here, but it’s the closest I have. I think there there are a bunch of skills that I respect involved in:

explaining things well

providing good puzzles and exercises

modeling the specifics of what is going on in the learners head and being responsive to it

breaking things down into pieces that the learner will be able to interface with

sequencing material based on which foundational bits build on each other

sometimes back-chaining from material that you, having more context, strongly expect that the learner will want to know later

When there is something that I am trying to convey to someone, whether it’s my child or someone else, I try to pay attention to pedagogy, and I think it can be very helpful!

I have personally done a ton of tutoring over my lifetime, including professionally (not unusual for the unschoolers I know personally—a ton of them have also been professional educators), and when I have done it, a bunch of my focus has usually been on pedagogy.

Additionally IME, overall, the online unschooling communities, including the ones I like most, tend to be uninterested in leveraging pedagogy. I am sympathetic to some of the reasons I can guess for why this might be the case, but I agree with what I think Kelsey is saying about how the online unschooling communities often aren’t passing some sort of basic checksum about telegraphing awareness of pedagogy, presumably sometimes bc they in fact lack it.

Kids often don’t know what’s out there

I also wholeheartedly agree that kids don’t start out knowing what sort of cool things in the world, and that they will be much better served if adults who care about them inform them about, and sometimes try to sell them on, cool stuff that the kids don’t already know about.

I’m pretty sure all the unschoolers whose views on unschooling I respect agree with me on this point, and I think it’s too bad when unschooling advocates say otherwise.

Educational coercion is costly, and almost never worth doing

This is a point of agreement that Kelsey acknowledged as such, but it seems good to me to state it here again. We both agree that forcing kids to study material that they don’t want to learn is a bad idea, for reasons that include but are not limited to, that it often fails on its own merits; the kids often don’t even learn the material.

Some things where my experience has been different

I also wanted to note some points where my experience has diverged from Kelsey’s that don’t feel especially core to me, before attempting to get to the heart of where I think the two of us disagree.

Basically, my own experience of the unschooling community I have found has been vastly more positive than what Kelsey described, and my anecdata from grown unschoolers, while not universally positive, also seems to have a much more positive skew.

In the first case, my guess is that the main thing that accounts for it is that I’ve met a ton of unschoolers in person, and that has been vastly more positive for me than mailing lists and facebook groups were. And also, I think the main mailing list I used to read was a better environment than what Kelsey has mostly come across, though that that list hasn’t been especially active in years.

I posted some comments on Kelsey’s original post saying this, but, for example, I have quite often heard unschoolers recommend that families not unschool, all considered! I can think of a bunch of concrete instances, and I have done it myself in a substantive way at least once that I can recall.

(This is particularly non-central, but I actually disagree that a family couldn’t successfully unschool a 4 and 6 with both parents working full time. I’m not sure I personally could do it, but I knew one family where both parents worked full time, but they did shift work and arranged it so that one of them was basically always with their kids. Both parents had lots of energy, and their family seemed to me to be thriving as much as the families I knew with stay at home parents.)

And, to be clear, when I talk about positive anecdotes, I’m explicitly trying to exclude anyone where I only heard about their story because they were presented, on a podcast, in a book, or a conference, etc. as a success story, since I understand that of course I wouldn’t be hearing from them if it hadn’t gone well in their case, and that I wouldn’t be hearing about the parts that didn’t go well.

But even so, I don’t think unschooling is any guarantee of a happy, fulfilling childhood that the kids feel good about upon reflection. I don’t think I ever thought that, but I do remember when I was just starting out learning about unschooling having some hopes for certain outcomes that I now consider to have been unrealistically high. In particular, I think unschooling is far from a cure-all for the challenges faced by highly neurodivergent kids, or kids with mental illness, even though I think in most of the cases I’ve seen it has served them better than a public school would. And, perhaps notably, it was talking to the unschooling friends I met in person that gave me a more realistic picture.

It was pretty early in my unschooling journey that I remember having a substantive discussion with a good unschooling friend of mine about a kid in our extended unschooling community who had lamented that he didn’t know certain academic material when was around 18 or so, and how we wanted to relate to that sort of thing.

Ultimately, I don’t want to get into too many details about which exact experiences and anecdotes I have from different unschooling communities, for all the usual reasons I usually avoid posting details on the internet about people who aren’t me, but I did want to note that what I have seen seems to be somewhat different from what Kelsey has seen.

What I think unschooling is, with an emphasis on where I think Kelsey and I disagree

One thing I’m hoping to avoid, is the discussion of what unschooling ought to mean. I think that could be an interesting fight to pick, and maybe one day I’ll want to, but my hope is to instead try to clarify what I am trying to do as an unschooler, with particular emphasis on where, based on Kelsey’s critique, I think we don’t see eye to eye.

So here are some things that seem core to me about what I mean when I say unschooling. (With the caveat that I would expect many of my friends who unschool to agree with me a bunch, but I don’t expect else anyone I know who unschools to have quite the same take on it as I do.)

Actively challenging cultural defaults about what kids ought to be learning

I think almost everyone I know agrees that it’s in some sense ideal when people get to spend time learning things that they are actively curious about in a moment-to-moment way. Like how babies sometimes gleefully play with crinkly paper, perhaps because they want to know what’s up with it. Or when sometimes adults are like “my new hobby is that I will now learn as much as I can about abstract algebra”, perhaps because they recently realized that their mind seems to have an abstract algebra shaped hole in it. Or the way a lot of people I know go on “wiki benders”, where they follow one wikipedia link after another, opening a bunch of tabs, collecting novel information and hooking it up to other information.

And I think almost everyone I know agrees that sometimes, it’s valuable for people to do a more back chain-y thing where they form plans about learning things for instrumental reasons. Such as when,even though they don’t care in any intrinsic sense how tax law works, they want to comply with relevant laws. Or they’re not especially driven to understand how toilets (or plumbers?) work today, but they do want their toilet fixed.

And I think most people also agree that it’s also important for people to sometimes notice that their friends and loved ones might benefit a lot from learning about something. I personally tend to lean towards preferring explicit consent for discussions about what other people think I ought to learn, but I have often found them quite valuable.

All of that is roughly how I think it should work for kids too.

When a kid is curious about something, or a kid wants to learn something in order to accomplish one of their goals, I trust that motivation. And when a parent has a felt sense that it would be good for a kid to learn about something, either because it seems like the kid would be intrinsically into it, or a kid could better accomplish their goals if they knew it, I trust that motivation too.

(With the major caveat that IMO it’s usually good to treat that latter thing lightly, since there are almost always more varied ways that I have modeled for my kids to accomplish their goals.)

And a lot of what unschooling means to me is that in addition to trusting all those reasons for kids to be learning things, I also have an active interest in deconstructing, for myself, the orientation where I defer to something like a “cultural default” about what my kids ought to be learning. If there are arguments that make sense to me from first principles, great! But afaict lots of people either choose to adopt, or have and don’t especially question, a pretty deferential attitude towards standard curricula, what “most people” are doing, or what “most people” think “most people” should be doing, etc.

And I buy that that attitude of deference serves a lot of families better than any of the realistic alternatives. I could defend it if I wanted to!

But it’s not what I want for my family. I think it works better for my family to reject the cultural default.

I’m not sure, based on what Kelsey wrote, how Kelsey relates to what I am calling the cultural default. I would guess, given what I know about her, that she’s given it a lot of real thought. And given Kelsey’s choices to start a school, she is obviously up for doing weird stuff! My guess is that I’m more of a radical on this point though, and it may explain some of why we seem to see things differently.

Kelsey says:

It would have been a mistake, in my opinion, to make her learn geometry when it seemed pointless to her. But it would equally have been a mistake to go 'well, geometry isn't suited to her'. The thing to do was to come up with interesting material which would provide her with different points of entry into geometry until she saw the reason to study it and was excited to do so.

When Kelsey uses geometry as an example of something where she kept working to find an angle that clicked with her kid, on my end there’s a bit of a missing mood—a missing mood like “why geometry though?”

It’s not that I can’t think of all sorts of good reasons that Kelsey could want her kid to learn geometry, or that I don’t believe that she has them, or that I think Kelsey needs to justify this focus to anyone at all (or perhaps anyone outside her family).

I don’t personally find it especially compelling that geometry is a subject that kids often learn in school these days, or that I think math is great (which I do), or that geometry is a deep topic that connects up to a lot of other cool topics. But of course there are other topics that I do really want my kids to learn, so I can try to relate by substituting geometry for one of those.

(As it happens, I do feel somewhat differently about algebra. Kyle Aretae, a long-time uschooling friend of mine made the case to me that deeply “getting” algebra tends to be pretty cruxy for whether kids can be on the track where they can pretty straightforwardly get a technical math-y type job. And I was persuaded both of his model of the educational tracks, and of the practical upside of unlocking that set of jobs for my kids if it seems doable. I do have a felt sense that it’s important.)

But the thing that I think points most to a disagreement is that I can’t quite imagine writing up a similar story without including some sort of explicit nod to why this topic in particular is one where I want to keep searching for an angle where it clicks. Because at this point the water that I seem to be swimming in is one where it’s pretty unnatural to take it as a background assumption that kids should especially be learning almost any particular subject.

I’m not sure how close I’ve gotten to identifying any real specific disagreement with Kelsey, but I’m pretty sure there is a substantive crux somewhere near what I’m trying to gesture at?

Hayekian anti-coercion

Kelsey says:

The Sudbury, etc content I read mostly encouraged us to treat her refusal here as deep wisdom - that she in some sense correctly knew that geometry wasn't valuable to her. I read lots of anecdotes about a child refusing to learn something and then it turned out years later that that had been completely correct of them. Our philosophy was more that kids are almost certainly correct when they say that a lesson is not valuable to them - and it's not right to force them to do it - but that this doesn't mean they are perceiving something deep about the subject matter, it often just means you haven't found the right entry point and should keep trying.

I think I agree with the denotation of the words Kelsey says here, and yet I’m also pretty sure we have fairly straightforwardly different priors about how much deep wisdom tends to be involved in kids’ lack of interest in learning stuff.

Though even thinking of it in terms of deep wisdom or not isn’t really how the question looks in my native ontology.

Certainly it is also my experience that sometimes people’s lack of interest in certain topics can be addressed easily and quickly with a different framing or entry point. The example Kelsey gives about the Pythagorean theorem unlocking geometry for her kid makes sense to me. I remember one of my kids having trouble with the voiced “th” sound, and words that started with that sound not helping, but when we talked about the word “brother”, it clicked. I could probably think of dozens of similar examples without too much trouble. And I think I would have been meaningfully mistaken if I thought something like “well, I guess this kid just isn’t ready to learn about that sound”, and given up. I can also recall many instances of teaching young kids a slightly different body mechanic, or iterating some fine motor skill with them, and I have had many experiences of these things clicking very quickly!

However, after trying a bunch of different approaches, I have often gotten a clear sense that “okay, my kid wants me to stop trying to get this to click with them”. And of course, I can then also go meta about that, and try to figure out why, and see if there’s a crux to be addressed. And as they get older, more introspective, and more willing to talk to me about it, they can often verbally tell me what’s going on.

One such example is that I tried to teach one of my kids about letters and their sounds when they were a toddler. I got a lot of traction at first, but then I ran into what I now think of as a tell-tale dynamic, where it seemed like I kept running up against a particular type of resistance–not at first when I tried a new tact, but in a delayed way, seemingly to me as though it was kicking in when a high-order process noticed what was going on.

My current best guess is that given where my kid was at developmentally, it seemed like a higher priority for them to classify objects as the same regardless of their orientation, and my project about identifying letters conflicted with that. And that in and of itself doesn’t mean I couldn’t have kept trying stuff–maybe if I only worked with them on letters that didn’t have the rotation issue and built up from there, something cool could have happened. But the sense I got from my kid was more like “I’m trying my best to hold onto my developmental priorities here, and it’s kind of exhausting and bad for our relationship to have you poking around in this vicinity. Drop this for now; do not pass go; do not collect $200.”

An example from my own life that still has emotional charge for me, some 25 or so years later, was when Nancy Bidlack, who ran the chamber music summer camp I attended from ages 13-18, was my cello teacher for the summer. I had had a few cello teachers by then, including one of warmest and kindest people I’ve ever spent a lot of time with. But I think, until that point, all of my teachers had some sort of goal like “get me to be a better cellist”, that in retrospect I think I subtly wasn’t bought into. (Some context here is that playing the cello was an optional part of my life. My mother made it very clear that if I wanted to stop I could.) Nancy seemed to intuitively and deeply get that not only did I not want to be a professional cellist (lots of the kids at this summer camp did go on to become professional musicians), but that I was mostly there because I liked the vibe and wanted to hang out with my friends playing chamber music. Because of that, I think, she taught me in a very different way, that was more about satisficing learning pieces I was assigned. And not only did it work better in a narrow sense–my recollection is that did learn my pieces better than usual that summer–the difference in how it felt on my end was dramatic, and very positive, and I’m confident it helped me inhabit myself more fully.

These days I have a pretty high prior that my kids may want me to drop my educational agendas. If I let myself make up a number, I think maybe half the time I have had an agenda about one of my kids learning something in particular, I come up against something like this on their end, including when they were quite young and not able to confirm it verbally.

Which isn’t to say that I automatically give up just because my kid seems to want me to, since some things are quite important to me. And it doesn’t mean that even when I do drop my agenda for a while I might not revisit it later.

(In some cases, revisiting a thing later is more like my default plan. My 2yo is great at taking off his clothes, but pretty unskilled at putting his clothes on. I want him to be able to put his clothes on, which is why I have tried to show him how, but it doesn’t seem urgent. And I have a high prior that it will be much easier to show him in a year, and even easier in two years. I feel similarly about a bunch of academic subjects.)

And for me, part of respecting and supporting my kids’ developing personhood is trusting them when it seems like they are telling me, either in words or not, that if I keep trying to present the material in different ways, they will experience it as quite costly.

Which, on my end, ties into a philosophical position I hold pretty deeply about central planning importantly not working, especially at large scales. But if I speak from my gut, I want to say: “Not even within my family, and not even within my own mind.”

As I see it, the calculation problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem) is one angle on why it can work very well to be deferential to people (and even processes) about how they want to allocate their resources, very much including cognitive and attentional ones.

And then I see something a bit more abstract following from that, where it can be good and adaptive for people to build ego structures that often tend to reject a bunch of agendas other people might have about them, to maintain the sort of process-level separateness that makes them function well.

And so, not only do I have a higher prior that there’s deep wisdom in my kids’ choices about what to learn, but for me part and parcel of respecting their autonomy involves deferring to them quite a bit about when to keep trying to present material to them basically regardless of my prior about how deep their reasons are once they start to object. And empirically, they seem to object pretty often.

My kids seem to be unusually picky in this way, and that they probably get a lot of it from me, since I am also unusually picky this way.

On the other hand, a family is pretty small scale. (Cold take, but) I think central planning tends to work noticeably better for city states and small countries than it does for large countries. And families are obviously much, much smaller than even the smallest countries.

And, afaict, given people’s skills, context, and values, there’s a lot of variation in how it’s most functional to divide up their interpersonal and intrapersonal epistemology. (I don’t currently have great explicit models about which factors tend to have big effects here.)

Concretely I’ve encountered unschooling (and non-unschooling) families for whom it usually seemed to go smoothly when the parents had more of an agenda about the kids’ learning, and other families who seemed about as concerned about the potential downsides from that as I am. And I feel confident this is because our family dynamics around this sort of thing are meaningfully different. (Analyzing what seem to be the relevant differences interests me, but I consider it beyond the scope of this post, and I’m not sure I have a good handle on it anyway.)

So I’m not trying to say that I think everyone ought to be scrupulous about mostly holding educational agendas for their kids lightly, but I do think in some families there’s a lot of upside from relating to it that way.

Treating teaching as potentially costly

It’s usually quite costly for me whenever I’m in a “teaching” type context. Friends explaining stuff to me doesn’t really count, but when someone is occupying a role where they’re supposed to impart knowledge to me, it always seems to apply.

Kelsey says:

substituting the adult's judgment for the child's judgment and teaching the child to please the adult - which is a critique unschoolers often make of conventional education that seems to me to have some merit

And my guess from reading this is that Kelsey and I have a disagreement about how costly it usually is for certain kids to be taught things, even when the teaching is pretty good.

One cost associated with teaching people things in general, as I see it, is that afaict there’s a pretty real low-level tradeoff between being the sort of mind that can absorb the thousands of years worth of accumulated human knowledge, and the sort of mind that can figure out stuff more like from first principles.

I do care about that cost somewhat, and for whatever reason it felt wrong to me to leave it out, but ultimately that’s not the one I’m worried about it.

The cost I worry about ~isn’t present (or at least I expect it to be much lower) when I’m reading a book, or watching a video of a lecture, and isn’t there for me when I’m playing a video game, no matter how heavy-handedly educational. But, as I see it, it has basically always there when a person was teaching me something in realtime. And it’s particularly there when the person teaching the thing is an adult, and an authority figure, and it was higher when I was a kid than it is for me now.

Because, as I see it, the teacher role is super relationally fraught, and almost no one seems into doing it in a way that supports the type of personhood I’m aiming for, which I tried to explain above. My own experience has been that the vast majority, though of course not all, of people who are in official teaching type roles have a bunch of their intentionality, often unconsciously, pointed at something like actively trying to interfere with my ability to:

think for myself

maintain my own sense of taste about the subject matter

trust myself about when to keep thinking about something

perceive the material accurately when the teacher is wrong

etc. I’m trying to gesture at a cluster here, and my list isn’t meant to be exclusive or exhaustive

One example that has stuck with me was when I was in a zoom Q&A near the end of a virtual conference I was attending about a longtime hobby of mine. They were explaining a particular principle (that people in this domain often elide), and I asked under what circumstances it was especially important to pay attention to it (since many of their colleagues did often ignore it, and seemed to get good results anyway). One of them ~said “always”, and the other one backed him up right after. The tone of both of their responses struck me as contemptuous. I still think about this, because I think it left some barb in my mind that I have only mostly removed. There was a reason I asked the question! I also think it had a real answer, and I think they were using my genuine curiosity and intent to deeply understand the material as a springboard for emphasize something they wanted to emphasize for their own reasons. Which is, in many ways, fine. It was their event, and I think my expectations for the Q&A were naive. I have since developed some explicit heuristics for when the sorts of questions I like to ask subject-matter experts are likely to welcome. It’s an example of how teaching can affect me though.

According to my worldview, and because of the shape of the personhood I’m especially trying to support in the world, I believe that teaching at its best involves actively modeling and trying to mitigate the sort of vulnerability people, especially young people, are taking on in the student role. Especially when the students feel obligated to be polite to the teacher, if not to also treat them as an authority figure.

I will freely admit that I seem very sensitive to teaching dynamics. I have almost always complained about them after the fact when I am trying to learn from subject matter experts who aren’t already my friends. Lots of other people that I’ve talked to don’t seem to share my issues, due to, afaict, a combination of aiming for something different than I am aiming for, being robust in ways that I’m not, and having more adaptive strategies for interfacing.

Certainly it struck me when Kelsey said:

As an adult, I learn well when a person who is an enthusiastic expert about the topic walks me through the key ideas - so it makes sense to me that this is also true of children.

I rarely learn from being forced to attend mandatory training, so it makes sense to me that this doesn't work that well for children either.

Adults frequently do (and like!) classes, bootcamps, trainings, and other structured instructional settings, so it doesn't make sense to me to assert that children's love of learning is inherently destroyed by those things.

Adults don't pick up skills by magic intuition, and so it's not surprising that kids mostly don't either.

I do tend to like it when an enthusiastic expert walks me through something I’m interested in, when I ask them to, and when they treat me respectfully. I don’t like mandatory trainings! (Though fwiw I think I have often retained quite a bit of material from mandatory trainings—people seem to differ quite a bit on this point—but that’s not a crux for me about whether I like them.)

And I almost never like classes and bootcamps. I hate almost all trainings and structured instructional settings I have tried. Even conference talks with questions are often fraught for me.

And, as far as I can tell, my kids are a lot like me in this way.

I’m also pretty skeptical of the claim that adults frequently do and like those sorts of structured educational things? Some do, for sure. Afaict, compared to the population average, my friend group (and probably their kids, too) contains disproportionately many people who enjoy structured educational settings and also disproportionately many people who are deeply allergic to them.

And also my guess is that the number of minutes of their adult life that the median American voluntarily devotes to learning things in structured instructional settings, other than to obtain a credential they want, is pretty low.

Ultimately, I don’t think it’s important for me to know what most people are like, but as it stands I do have a pretty high prior that children I come into contact with will rightly and meaningfully object to a whole bunch of structured instructional settings, particularly academically focused ones, since I think the frame stuff that bugs me (and some others like me) out that I tried to point to above is more part of the standard cultural context for academic material than it is for stuff that’s more hobby-coded.

And to the point about magic intuition—I totally agree that it’s very possible to model learning in detail and pretty mechanistically. And at the same time, my sense is that I more like disagree than agree with the statement. I think most of the time adults learn things because they decide to learn it, and figure out something that works for them. And most of the time when I learn things it’s usually pretty opaque to the people around me unless they ask me about it or I decide to tell them about it.

Magic intuition, no, but I do think the vast majority of the learning that people of all ages do happens for reasons and in ways that approximately no one else is modeling. I taught myself to touch type on a Dvorak keyboard one summer when I was a kid in a very straightforward way–I read something on the internet that I found persuasive about how the layout was better, I found a typing program, installed it, and practiced a lot. But I imagine that the whole thing seemed pretty out-of-nowhere from my parents’ perspective, if they even knew I was doing it.

I also think my kids can learn substantially more and better with me involved and as a resource, a lot of the time, and I try to help them with their learning, so I’m not quite sure why I felt compelled to write the above paragraph disagreeing with the magic intuition point, but I did.

And to be clear, I do not claim that teaching is never good and worth it. I have taught people things, and often it has seemed good and worthwhile to me to have done it. Despite my relevant allergies, I continue to look for teachers who work for me, and I periodically attend events that I know I’ll have objections to, because they seem like the best way for me to learn the material. I have recommended that my kids take classes about things that interest them, sometimes they have done it, and sometimes it has been a great experience for them. And when one of my kids wants to opt into a teaching experience, I try my best to support it. Furthermore, if you read this and think “all that stuff you’re saying about teaching seems pretty neurotic and it doesn’t seem to apply to me or my family”, I think that’s great! I am very much not trying to sell anyone on relating to teaching the way I do.

Since Kelsey and I support kids opting out of their classes, I also think we are way more on the same page about a pretty fundamental point about how children’s education ought to look than most people are. And also, I think my concerns about teaching may explain some chunk of the differences I see in our stances.

Conclusion

I don’t think most people should unschool. I am not an unschooling evangelist. I might even say, as I have sometimes heard about whether people ought to become professional musicians, that people should only do it when they think they couldn’t live with themselves if they didn’t. And I think even most parents who deeply want to unschool will have a pretty rough time of it if they didn’t manage to find enough supportive community.

But I personally really like unschooling, and I can’t quite imagine doing anything else for my family. So, since there’s been a bunch of discourse about unschooling recently, from Kelsey and a bunch of stuff I’ve seen on my twitter timeline too, I wanted to at least weigh in on the conversation myself, and try to articulate some of what it means to me and what I find valuable about it.

This ended up being way longer than I expected or hoped it would be, so thanks for reading this far if you did!

Many thanks to everyone who helped me clarify my ideas by talking about them and gave me feedback on drafts, including Steph and James Payor, Pete Michaud, Kyle Aretae, Cristy Henry, and Anna Salamon.

[parentingtheoryandpractice]

Almost 3 weeks of Violet (and everyone)

I think this is the latest I've put out an update from the newborn period, which is maybe fitting. Things have been great, but busy. The gap between Violet and Xander is the smallest we've had yet, and he definitely still needs a lot of active, hands-on care. For the first week, I was mostly only focused on Violet, with Will doing pretty much everything else, including taking care of the rest of the kids, but since then I've been doing what I can. And my physical recovery has been the smoothest yet, for which I am very grateful.

I don't expect this to be a very organized update, but I have a bunch of notes that I wanted to record before they become blurrier.

Nursing has been good. If anything, I think I'm trending more towards oversupply. There have only been a couple of times (once my milk came in, which was pretty fast) where it seemed like Violet might have wanted there to be more milk, and bunch more times where she pulled off as I let down. There was also one night the first week where Violet seemed pretty frustrated about latching at all, and I wrapped her and kept her away from breast some, but it basically hasn't happened since. I think partly because I figured out a way of holding my breast to help her latch better when she seemed frustrated, but I'm guessing more because she figured out some better latching skills. She nurses a ton when she's awake, and sometimes a bunch when she's asleep too. I haven't been timing how long she tends to nurse on each side, but whatever she's doing intuitively seems normal to me for my babies. We had one night so far where she nursed nonstop for about an hour a half, which was notably long. 

I think the time where she nursed so much was an instance of "witching hour", or what we tend to call "evening fussy time". But unless I count that one early night where she had an issue latching, we mostly haven't had difficult witching hour nights yet. But it's not even three weeks yet, so I assume they are coming. I don't have a strong prediction of how those will go with her. Something about how the long nursing session was reminded me of Zeke as a baby, and I remember him, compared to the others, as being easier to soothe by nursing, or nursing while rocking, or nursing in the wrap while rocking, and not needing us to endlessly walk around as much to be okay. And as much as I don't especially enjoy the thing where the babies get more upset in the evening, I take it as a sign that they are getting more of a circadian rhythm, since it seems like whenever that period is over for the night they tend to have a pretty solid block of sleep.

Night sleep has been okay, but not super restful. Early on, it kept happening that either she'd be up for a while in the middle of the night, or she'd go back to sleep, but I'd be up for an hour and a half or so in the middle of the night. That hasn't been happening as much the last week and a half (according to my memory), but in that time it's been common for her to have her longest awake period of the day from around 9pm-midnight, which is usually just around when I'm wanting to go to sleep myself. But the past few days it's been somewhat earlier than that. And regardless of whether she's especially awake, I open the curtains when I get up in the morning, and she seems to be on track to have more standard days and nights. She nurses what I think of as a normal amount at night, which is maybe a few times? And she was originally peeing a few times at night too, either in the potty or in her diaper depending on how much I was pottying her, but lately she has been peeing fewer times at night than seems normal to me for a tiny baby, including I think two nights where she didn't pee at all until the morning. She was pooping throughout the night at first, but now she often doesn't poop at night. I'm pretty good at napping with her sometimes, and I haven't been especially tired overall. The increase in my deep sleep once she came out hasn't been as dramatic (according to my Oura ring) as it was last time, but overall I feel better rested than I did at the end of pregnancy.

In general, EC has been pretty easy with her, and I think she's only going through a few diapers a day. Who knows if it'll last, but for the last few babies I've been in quite a groove with baby EC. Once they start moving, becoming toddlers, having their own opinions, or at least being independent enough that I'm not focused on them almost all the time it's a different story, but we so far so good. And with newborns in some ways it feels extra easy because they sleep a lot and then pee and poop when they wake up. I've almost entirely been using the top hat potty for her, which I find a lot more convenient than the sink. A random thing I (think I) remember from Lydia being a baby was wondering how I could when she had peed in the top hat potty. But with Violet I can always hear it very clearly, which makes me wonder if I was especially oblivious to the sound then, am relatively sensitive to it now, or whether some babies pee much more loudly than other babies. I'd always heard it was possible for newborns to get a mini period thing, because of my hormones, but I'd never had it happen before. Violet had some of that going on, but it's been over for a while.

Overall, so far Violet has been the most stable sleeping on the bed that I remember my newborns being at this age, though I'm sure my memory is highly imperfect. This is also the first time I've had a video monitor, which I think helps me quite a bit in terms of feeling connected to her when she's on the bed and I'm not next to her. She has frequently had a period of at least an hour or so in the morning where she goes back to sleep and stays stable after I get up, which has been very convenient for doing some of the many things that are harder for me to do with her wrapped on. I have no idea whether this will last, and I tend to assume it won't.

One nice thing is that after doing a deep dive around when I had Xander into constructional aggression and constructional affection (dog training techniques), I think I'm much more attuned to small behaviors that mean Violet wants a little bit of distance, especially from nursing. My very not confident impression is that temperamentally Violet is pretty similar to Xander in her relationship to frustration, or maybe a little more frustration prone, but I think I've been managing it a little better on my end this time.

She's getting stronger by the day, with slightly more seconds where she's holding up her head some, and getting better at putting weight on her legs when I stand her up that way. I'd have to check videos and dates, but my memory is that Xander was a little more effective at squirming around on the ground than she is, but she's usually pretty happy to try, and tends to like tummy time. She also seems fine with being on her back, which I think all my babies have been except Lydia, who really didn't like it.

One fun different thing is that Violet seems to have lighter eyes than her siblings. Lydia, and maybe some of the other ones, had somewhat lighter eyes at first when she came out, but I'm pretty sure they had already turned brown by the time she was almost three weeks old. And Violet's eyes could turn brown too, but we think they might end up being hazel. Originally I thought her hair was as dark as Zeke's, but I think I was insufficiently accounting for how newborn hair can look darker at first. Now I think it's more like Maya's color. I think we collectively think that she looks the most like Zeke in terms of features, and I especially think her nose looks a lot like his. There's something about her body shape that reminds me more of Maya though.

Will and I both independently said that if we had to pick, her personality seems the most similar to Xander's, and like him (and unlike the rest of our kids), I would say that her cry isn't very loud. She has her own personality for sure though, and I wish I had a better articulation of what I can see so far. She's still very sleepy, and there seems to be something sort of settled about her to me. She doesn't strike me as super people focused, but she also doesn't seem especially not people focused. I predict that she'll be pretty gross motor focused the way all of our babies have been, and will do all the gross motor milestones pretty early. 

As I said, I've been feeling pretty recovered physically, even though there's more to go on that front, and one big exception is that I have some diastis recti. I've had that before, and I think it has always resolved on its own, though I don't think I ever confirmed that it did with a professional, since it wasn't always fully gone by my six week appointment. This time I got Katy Bowman's book about it, which seems good. It's weird and a little sad to think that I will almost certainly never be pregnant again, but it's also a relief to think about it. I'm hungrier than I was during pregnancy, which is probably because breastfeeding a baby is more calorie intensive than growing one on the inside is. I've also been eating carbier food, since I'm not worried about my blood sugars and the baby getting too big. I've also been wanting somewhat more sweet food than I usually eat, as is common for me when nursing a baby, so I've been going with that too. 

One thing I remember very fondly from Maya's birth was that shortly after she came out, I experienced a bunch of shaking that was a lot like shivering but wasn't really about being cold. It's a pretty common phenomenon, and my guess is that that sort of shaking is protective against trauma. I didn't have anything like that happen after Violet's birth, but maybe two nights in, I did have a bunch of shaking around when my milk came in, and it seemed similar to me. Hard for me to confidently know whether it was functionally similar or not, but it felt important to me to record that it happened.

(It's been almost a week since I started writing this, so I'm going to post it now, even though there's more I think I wanted to say.)

[parentingtheoryandpractice]

Violet's birth story

So, fair warning—this is going to be a drawn out, high context version of what ultimately could be a very short birth story. And if you want to really understand the progression of how I have related to labor and birth over the years, I’ll link my previous four birth stories below.

Lydia’s birth story

Zeke’s Birth Story

Maya’s birth story (and reflections on previous births)

Alexander’s birth story

This pregnancy was not an easy one for me. Will and I decided to have our (almost certainly) final baby closer to our next youngest than we have ever spaced before, since we were pretty eager as a family unit to move to a different life phase that was less pregnancy, baby, and toddler focused, in large part because we wanted to have a different type of focus and energy for our older kids while they were still kids. We knew it would be more work in the short term, and I would be leaning on Will a lot for a while, which has proven true.

We also moved while I was pregnant, which I overall very much stand by as a decision, but that was pretty brutal. We tried to time it so that we’d be moving when I was in the second trimester, since that seemed like it would at least be easier than the alternatives, and that almost/mostly worked out, but of course the timeline got pushed back some. 

And then the second trimester was also a bit less of a smooth period than I had expected, since I had three episodes of nerve pain that meant I was pretty out of commission for a few days, which was itself inconvenient, but also led to a bunch of uncertainty on my part, since I didn’t know what was going on, or that it was only going to be three times. (All that could be a full-length post of its own, which I may try to write up at some point. As far as I can tell, not only did it all fully resolve, but maybe my body map and body mechanics are actually improved relative to my previous baseline, and I am better at something like Focusing in a body way, thanks to my friend James who explained to me how to do that.)

That said, compared to how things can go, I would still call my pregnancy pretty uncomplicated. I thought I had some blood sugar issues (which could again be its own whole post), but I got a cgm, tried some other blood sugar monitors, paused my Vitamin C since it turns out that can make glucose monitors read a little higher, and my eventual conclusion there was that my first blood sugar monitor was reading too high. I did somewhat limit my carb intake, but after an initial period of lots of tracking decided (in consultation with my midwife and the doctor she works with) to treat it as non-clinical, and I stopped taking measurements. 

I also had some iron-deficiency anemia, as I have had every pregnancy, and taking a bunch of iron pills didn’t seem to be working at first, but just as I scheduled some appointments to pursue an iron infusion, my numbers came back up. 

And for most of this pregnancy, especially as I was approaching the end, I had a lot of anxiety about birth. With that too, there’s a lot I could say, but I think the high bit is that, while I didn’t anticipate any bad concrete outcomes—I never seriously worried that the baby wouldn’t be born healthy, or that I would be physically at risk—I did have a visceral sense that it wasn’t going to “be okay”, and that the experience would be a bad one for me. And “bad” not just in a fleeting sense, but in a way that would leave my mental structures worse off than they were before. 

I never found a concise way to verbalize exactly what I was worried about, but I’m very grateful for all the people (especially Will, Kenzi, Anna, Steph, and James) who listened to me talk at length in repetitive inarticulate ways about what my issue was. And for all the people who wrote up and published their birth stories, since (as has been my habit), I read a ton of them in the weeks leading up to my birth. And at the end of the day, I think the anxiety eventually worked as intended. I processed enough and set the right sort of intentions that it was pretty much gone. I remember a conversation with Anna right around my due date where I expressed that I figured birth would be unpleasant, but in an accepting way, and my desire to keep talking about it was largely gone.

Some of the more legible takeaways I had from all my birth processing were:

-I was pretty willing to let go of some things I had previously been (mostly implicitly) aiming for in service of having an easier birth.

-One such thing was accurately tracking what the experience was like for me. (So… I expect my written recollections to involve mostly the right amount of error bars anyway, but that’s part of the epistemic status of all of this.)

-Another one, somewhat to my surprise, was caring about the timeline. Talking it through, it became clear to me that I had few to no concerns about having a long labor per se, as long as the intense and overwhelming part wasn’t long. (My understanding of Kenzi’s later summary of this, which I liked quite a bit, was to think of early labor as for positioning, not dilating, and that moving to dilating before the position was good often wasn’t desirable.)

-Related to that, one of my conclusions was that during my labor with Xander in particular, after having gained a more explicit model of how my muscles worked during labor over the course of my previous labors, I was expending a lot of wasted effort trying to make things go faster, and my guess was that it didn’t speed things up and probably did lead to it feeling harder. So my plan was to not do that.

-I can’t remember if this was explicit, but I think another constraint I let go of was having other people be able to track much of what was going on for me in realtime during labor, which iirc I’ve written about mattering to me in the past.

-And, somewhat presciently (spoilers), partly since I found a great collection of unassisted birth stories to read, I made my peace with the idea of a delivery that was fast enough that the midwife wouldn’t make it, and talked Will about that some too. 

-I also tried to consider which of the painful sensations it would be helpful for me to be especially aware of during labor, and which I could essentially safely tune out. My conclusion there was that anything that was telling me how to move my body seemed important, and that it was probably good to be pretty aware of any potential tissue damage from tearing during the pushing stage, but that microtears that were happening because of muscle exertion, and general muscle fatigue type sensations probably weren’t that actionable or important to pay attention to.

The one concrete and mundane-feeling anxiety that remained was that we would all get sick. We had all been sick multiple times recently, and then Xander had gotten sick  shortly before my due date, and right around when I did give birth, Zeke was also just getting sick, which was not a surprise to us given all of our sick friends and his recent exposure. 

But I am very grateful to report that (per my questionably effective request to my immune system) I didn’t get either of those sicknesses!

For a while, I had been saying that I didn’t want to make any plans at all for Thanksgiving, since it was two days after my due date, but as that week got closer, my sense was that I wasn’t having a baby anytime soon. And my midwife’s sense was similar. She said the thing she mostly goes off for her brith timing predictions is amniotic fluid levels, and that mine were high for someone who was going to give birth soon. So we decided to host Thanksgiving after all (with a backup plan in place for if I was in labor or if I had a baby by then). 

And indeed, my due date came and went, Thanksgiving happened, and I continued to have the impression that I wasn’t very close to having the baby. It wasn’t that I was never experiencing contractions, but I’d been having intermittent regular contractions (which I suppose ought to be called Braxton Hicks, but I don’t tend to experience them as painless…) for months, and the ones I was having didn’t feel different. My energy was pretty good, and I started talking more walks. And I stopped taking my iron pills, since it takes a few weeks to make red blood cells from iron anyway, and I wanted to give my digestive system a break.

And then Saturday night, I felt something happen with my bag of waters. I’m still not totally sure what it was, and I didn’t find the ph strip my midwife had given me in the middle of the night to check whether it was for sure amniotic fluid (all the plausible alternatives are acidic instead of basic), but I think it must have been. That said, it wasn’t a huge amount—I’ve always had my bag of waters break near the end of labor before, and I know it was nowhere near that amount of fluid. Maybe more like a cup’s worth, most of it all at once, and then with a little more leaking out after that throughout the night. My midwife’s guess when I texted her about it was that it was only my forewaters, which wasn’t a term I had known until she mentioned it. In any case, her conclusion was that it didn’t sound like a “frank rupture”.

But I do think it kicked off something, and at that point at least I no longer had the subjective sense that the labor didn’t feel close!

At 9:46am I told my midwife there was “not much happening in terms of contractions since I got up”, and whenever Will got up I told him about the same thing, but he took over with the kids anyway, and I proceeded to spend most of the day resting, relaxing, working on a jigsaw puzzle, hanging out in the bath, and intermittently experiencing contractions that felt “real” enough, but weren’t in any sort of consistent pattern. For example, I’d have a few in a row that were about 7 min apart, and very noticeable but not at all overwhelming, but then I’d change positions and go 20min without feeling much of anything. This went on for most of the day, and I made sure to keep eating and drinking, and resting, though I am pretty sure I didn’t end up sleeping at all. 

A little after midnight, I sent a message to our friends that were going to take Xander if we needed that during labor saying “I think Will has already given you an update, but I think I’m in early labor? […] I think there’s some chance things speed up and it’s tonight, but also easily could slow down and then speed up again at some point tomorrow. I think given what I’ve been feeling labor will not totally stop until I’ve given birth though”.

At that point I’d been timing my contractions for about an hour, and they were pretty variable. Most of them around a minute, but some shorter or longer, and a few that were under five minutes together but a bunch that were longer too. 

By then, I had been back in the bathtub for a while, after being in and out all day, and I think it was around then that Will set up shop in there with a backjack and joined me. I mostly had my eyes closed, and I remember not noticing that he had come in, in part because I had put Fauré’s Après un Rêve on repeat—which I think was the only time during labor I had music on. I think I picked that song because my midwife had mentioned a few times that the way she thinks of labor is (my words not hers), was kind of like that I had to go to a journey to a different dimension to go get my baby. At some point a few keep earlier I’d made a playlist of some music I’d felt somewhat inspired by (this song was on it), and I’d been enjoying music a lot in the past few weeks, but once I realized Will was there, that seemed both better than music and like I was no longer inclined to have the music on. 

And some more about my headspace around then… Until around that point in labor, I hadn’t been very focused on labor between contractions, and had been watching little bits of reality TV on my phone, but after about midnight that changed. I got the idea a couple of labors ago, I think from The Pink Kit, that it was good to use coping strategies even during early labor so that reaching for them became more automatic when I needed them more later on, which I was doing, but this time (for the first time, I think) I basically found it helpful to use my coping techniques between contractions too, starting around midnight (which, having discussed it afterwards with my midwife, is what we decided to call the start of my active labor). 

My main coping techniques were deep breathing (in part because I figured oxygenating my muscles was going to make everything work better and hurt less), trying to tune in to exactly how my body wanted to be positioned (leaning on the sort of body type focusing I had practiced during my episodes of nerve pain), and reciting words to myself m. The main words I was relying on almost the whole time, as I have in the past, were The Litany Against Fear, but I’d decided when I was making the music playlist to also include this Irish blessing, which I first heard of because the head of school I attended used to say it to graduating seniors. It had more of a gentle, relaxed vibe—more about things being easier for me instead of me coping with something hard—and I wanted that to be in the mix. 

Overall, it became increasingly clear to me as I was laboring that I was aiming for as little sympathetic nervous system activation as possible, and with that goal in mind, a bunch of my cognition seemed pretty counterproductive, in much the way that meditators I have known often talk about it. Basically all of my thought about the future seemed notably tinged with anxiety, in a way where I wanted to let go of them. And the same was true of a bunch of my self-referential thoughts, even about what was happening right then. Same with analysis. I had some pleasant hypnogogic type thoughts about the different patterns from the jigsaw puzzle I had been working on earlier that day, and some other ones about the reality show I had been watching between contractions earlier. I also remembered something Steph had told me about seeing each contraction as a spiritual journey, and I tried to learn into that way of relating to it some, which seemed good too.

I also started doing a pulling down type thing on the side of the bathtub that felt right, and I think I was mostly squatting at that point. The house we moved into recently has a wonderfully massive bathtub, and while I had also borrowed our midwife’s birth tub, in large part because I found the birth tub I used for Xander’s birth really helpful (it was bigger, softer, had lovely handles), I hadn’t asked Will to blow it up. The place to blow it up would have been the bedroom, but Xander was asleep in there. And while we did have friends who would watch him, not only did him sleeping as much as possible seem even better, those friends (and also a bunch of our backup options) were all sick, so I was somewhat invested in him sleeping through the whole birth if possible.

And partly to that end, partly because it felt right overall, unlike with my other births, I was pretty much not vocalizing at all. If that had seemed like it was making labor harder to cope with, I think I would have made whatever noises seemed good to make, but the way I was relating to it was more that noises would have been wasted effort, so it worked out. 

The main thing my more logistical brain was still doing at that point was trying to track where labor was enough to figure out when to call the midwife. I had texted her a log of my contractions around midnight, but since she hadn’t responded to that I (correctly) assumed she was asleep and I’d have to call to reach her. So I got out of the bath, had a contraction or two on the birth ball (that I had ordered at the last minute), and called her at 1:25. I told her the contractions seemed to be about five minutes apart at that point. She asked how long they had been like that and I said I wasn’t sure. Then she asked if they had a clear peak, and I said they did. She said didn’t I think she should come since she was an hour away, and I remember saying something about how I wanted to defer to her about that. She told me she was coming, and to tell Will to make up the bed with the waterproof liner and extra sheet and fill the birth tub. I knew I wasn’t going to ask Will to do either of those things just then, but I was in a pretty internal place, it didn’t seem worth saying that out loud.

I got right back in the bath after that, and at that point my conclusions was that there was nothing more to plan, and I could more fully relax into wherever labor wanted me to do. I think Will had mostly been with me pretty continuously for a while, but at some point I think he left to go pack a bag for Xander in case he needed to go to our friends’ house. At a different point, I remember telling him not to go anywhere. I don’t remember whether he was even thinking of going anywhere at that point, but I think I must have had an intuition that things were getting close.

Almost everything from here is increasingly hazy in my memory, but I do remember things getting more intense, though still not exactly overwhelming—more like reaching the edge of it during the peak of the contractions. I also felt some nausea, though not enough that I was close to throwing up, and did have a “hmm could this be transition” type of thought in response to the nausea that I didn’t focus on much. 

I was intermittently checking my cervix, as I had been all day, and I felt pretty dilated by then—definitely active labor—but I couldn’t have quantified it. I could feel the head very distinctly though! I’m still not sure when the rest of my waters broke. I think there was one moment where I thought it might have happened, and since that was the only one I registered I assume it did happen then, but since I was in the bath it wasn’t an obvious dramatic thing.

But at some point I do remember feeling a different sort of pain, more like a potential tissue damage type, and one where I was inclined to vocalize. I picked up the washcloth in front of me and bit down on it, which felt right, and around then it became obvious that the baby was moving downwards. I can’t quite remember what if anything I managed to communicate to Will, and I’ll have to find out from him exactly when he realized what about what was going on, but from there things happened very quickly. 

I couldn’t have said how long between that first pushing sensation and when I could clearly tell that the head was coming out, but it wasn’t long. I did try to pause a little with the head somewhat out, and not rush that part, so as to prevent tearing, but I think the pause was maybe on the order of seconds. 

And by then I’m pretty sure the midwife was on speakerphone. I think what happened was that she had called on her own for an update, but maybe Will had called her? Maybe even I had asked him to call, though I don’t remember doing that, and I don’t think I did. In any case, having her there on speaker was exactly what I wanted, so I was very happy about that part, and also in a quite nonverbal place. I remember her asking some question about what was going on with the head, and me thinking “well, right now it’s not out, but I can distinctly feel her ear”, but it was totally beyond me to actually say that part out loud. I did have in mind what she had reminded me, which was to make sure the baby’s head stayed under water until she was all the way out, since once the baby is exposed to the air and likely starts breathing, at that point it’s not safe for her head to go under the water again. 

Once her head was fully out, I may or may not have said anything, but I was very much remembering Xander’s birth, where it seemed to take forever to then push the rest of his body out. (It didn’t actually take long at all with him—but I do think I didn’t do it until I waited at minute or two until the next contraction.) This was faster though—basically once her head was out there was a brief pause, and then I kept pushing and her body was too, which was a massive relief. A massive relief, but then I also wanted to make sure she was breathing as she was supposed to. She seemed to me like she was breathing right away, but also like she was pretty much asleep, so I didn’t feel totally sure. I did some amount of rubbing her, blowing on her face, and talking to the midwife. Before too long I remember her producing at least one cry, and me asking if that meant she was for sure breathing now. I remember our midwife saying that if her muscle tone was good, that was what I should pay attention to. And it did seem like her muscles were working fine, and I remember noticing her hands opening and closing, but also in general newborns are so floppy at first!

In any case, I would say that I pretty quickly felt settled about her breathing, in part because the midwife didn’t seem concerned at all based on what we were saying. And the part after that is also somewhat of a blur, though I think I was already in a quite different and clearer headspace than I had been during labor, and was communicating with Will in a more straightforward way. He was getting me towels, and I was mostly keeping Violet out of the water so she didn’t get cold, but I wasn’t quite ready to move out of the bath yet. I also didn’t want to drain the water yet, since I figured it might be good to let the midwife’s look and see how much blood I had lost. I think I had Will take a picture of that. (I could tell by looking myself that it wasn’t much though, so I didn’t feel worried about postpartum hemorrhage.) Violet also pooped some meconium around then, but it wasn’t too messy—it was mostly on the towel I think. Though later there was a bunch of it on the floor of the bath, and I’m not sure if that was the same poop, or whether it came in stages. 

I had been trying to get Violet to latch ever since she came out, but it took a while for her to do that. She was pretty sleepy! But at some point before the midwives arrived, she did end up latching, which seemed to me like a good sign that I could probably get the placenta out soon.

I also asked Will to bring me the large metal bowl we had set aside for the placenta, since I felt some urgency about getting it out. And I think it was around then that Will left to go let the dogs out and the midwives in. I think since he had already taken the picture, I did drain the tub a bunch, and once there wasn’t much water left I decided to try pushing the placenta out. I used some gentle traction on the cord, since in the past I had had midwives tell me it was okay to do that, and tried seeing if i could push on purpose, and I felt it move! That part was definitely easier and more straightforward than I had remembered it being with my past two labors, which was neat. But then it got a little stuck once it seemed like it was out, and I was pretty sure that was just the bag of waters, but not sure enough to want to pull on it. Once the midwives came, a few minutes later, they confirmed that the placenta looked complete, that was just the bag of waters, and it was totally safe to pull the rest of it out, which I did. 

And that was the birth! We put the time down as 2:20, and the midwives arrived around 20 minutes after that, shortly after I had pushed my placenta out too. We took around another two hours to do a bunch of post birth stuff, like getting the baby’s blood type from the placenta (negative, so I didn’t do a rhogam shot), checking me for tears (just a very small one that didn’t require stitches), weighing and measuring the baby (I thought she looked like she was about eight and a half pounds, and she came it at 8 lbs 6oz after she had pooped, and 20inches, which the midwife said was maybe a bit of an underestimate), and assorted other logistics, like me getting out of the bath, putting on a postpartum pad and some clothes, me taking some ibuprofen per my plan so the afterpains wouldn’t hurt so much, me peeing, oiling up the baby before putting a diaper on her so the next meconium poop wouldn’t get stuck on her as much, etc. The midwives also went though a chart with me that shows typical development and gestational age, and while my placenta was a little calcified, as is typical for an almost 41 week baby, some of Violet’s markers were closer to 39 weeks. So maybe that’s why she took her time coming out.

(As an aside, given Violet’s actual stats, which seemed fine and similar to all my other babies, I feel good in hindsight about the way I related to my blood sugars during late pregnancy. Her head was also a little bigger than her chest circumference, so that wasn't an issue either.)

Once the midwives left, we got Lydia and Zeke to meet the baby, Will managed to take Xander into his office to sleep with him there, and I had the bed for me and Violet. I didn’t sleep much that night, but I was very happy :-). 

Will and I are overall almost certain Violet will be our last baby, and I feel extremely grateful to have gone out on such a positive note with birth—this one was my clear favorite, though I also remember Maya’s birth quite fondly, and I believe I learned things and took away important insights from each of my births. Overall, before I had this last birth I would have said, as a summary, that overall I didn’t really like birth, and now I don’t think I can say that anymore. It’s probably worth anyone reading this taking that with a grain of salt, since I did explicitly let go of my desire to remember things in a precise way, but I think it captures something very real and quite important to me anyway. 

And aside from being a very cool experience, I like to think that this time I learned something that I can take with me about anxiety. Both from how helpful I think my pre-birth anxiety ultimately was in guiding my processing in productive ways, and from how helpful it was to relax and fully let go of even subtly anxious thoughts during labor itself. 

I used to be sort of baffled by some of the birth stories I would read or hear from people I knew by how easy they seemed, even though Maya’s birth had some aspects in common with them, but now that I had this last experience, I no longer do, and the range of labor experiences that seem intuitively plausible to me has expanded. I also remember after my first birth talking to the instructor of the birth class Will and I had taken somewhat incredulously about this video she had shown us of a Russian woman giving birth in a bathtub very peacefully, since it seemed so different not just from my experience, but from the experiences of pretty much everyone in the class. And the instructor had said, somewhat apologetically, “well, it was probably her fifth baby”. So now maybe I’ve come full circle by having a very peaceful labor with my fifth baby too. 

A cool thing about this birth that feels like a bonus to me is that because I think I succeeded at my plan to not expend a lot of wasted effort, partly due to my intentions, but maybe even more because it was my fifth time, and my body had a more targeted sense of which muscles were involved and not involved, my body felt way less sore than it ever had before postpartum. I’m writing this a little less than a week later, and while it is still my model that rest and recovery is important, I feel remarkably good physically. 

I was lamenting to a friend how it seemed sort of wasteful that I finally figured out how to do this birth thing just as I was never going to do it again, and she said that wasn’t this sort of the tragedy of life—we accumulate all this knowledge that’s ultimately pretty hard to transfer, and it’s very cool but also feels a bit like a waste.

If I have one regret from this birth, it’s that I don’t have any video footage of it. I would love to have more of a concrete record, and I really wish I could show Violet a video of her birth one day, but at least I’ve written this up while it was pretty fresh in my mind.

And if you got all the way here, thanks for reading a very long and drawn out story of a short birth! I’m very grateful for how it all played out. 

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Also sitting on this precarious of a “seat” shows off his balance

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And this time Xander pushed up to stand from a squat on his own! Only stood around .75s but wow

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He just stood on the bed for like… maybe 1.5s? I wasn’t expecting that :-)

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Here he is!

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I haven’t posted any Xander updates in forever, but he crawls! He sits a little, but not much. He eats food now. And he says a thing that’s a lot like “hello”, and repeats a “b” sound sometimes when I tell him about “ball” :-).

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Life is busy, and I have so many thoughts but I haven’t felt moved to write them here. Verify update though: baby just rolled back to front!!

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I keep missing the video, but these pictures are about how it goes :-)

Xander has rolled over from front to back a few times very distinctly! I keep failing to get a video though…

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Xander has rolled over from front to back a few times very distinctly! I keep failing to get a video though…

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Alexander’s birth story

Epistemic status: my pretty vivid but imperfect memory from two weeks ago---I doubt anything in super wrong, but I didn't go back and cross reference all my notes and messages, so I assume the timeline and details aren't as accurate as they would be if I had done that

I had been having lots of Braxton Hicks contractions throughout the end of my pregnancy, but the Monday a week and a half before Alexander was born something seemed different. I woke up in the middle of the night with back pain and contractions that were pretty regular, though not overwhelming. And I just felt different---spacier and differently emotional. And I was having carb cravings that I hadn't had all pregnancy.

On Tuesday I told Will that I thought I was probably going to have the baby that week, and I texted my midwife to say that my best guess was that I was going to have the baby in a few days.

That night I was up a bunch of times in the middle of the night with either back pain, pretty regular (but not that strong and not progressing) contractions, or both. And that Friday, I took a long walk, was having quite noticeable contractions about every 5 min for what I think was a few hours.

But none of that was labor! And I think after Friday I announced that I was giving up on trying to predict when I was going to have the baby. Which was probably a good call on my part, since nothing new seemed to happen for almost a week, until the next Wednesday night. At that point I was again having pretty regular contractions, but either they were strong enough, or something was something enough, that I told Will that I wasn't up for taking care of the older kids. And I never really know how to define these things, but that's around when I would call what was happening "early labor", partly while it did slow down after that, it never really stopped, and partly because from that point on, labor was pretty much my main activity. I also started having some bloody show that night, which was another encouraging sign.

I did sleep okay that night, but it was between contractions. I'm not sure how far apart they were at night, but they were strong enough that at least some of the time I would wake up when they were happening (which is also a decent heuristic for "real" labor). And that morning I texted my midwife again to say despite my previous false prediction, I was pretty sure I was actually in labor this time.

That said, things were mild enough that afternoon that I was able to have a pretty focused non-labor conversation with a friend of mine for a few hours. But then, shortly after getting off the phone with her, it wasn't long before things noticeably picked up. Maya needed some attention at first, but once she was more settled I asked Will to be with me while I was laboring in the bath. (I have always really liked laboring in the bath.)

And before we had been doing that for very long, I asked him to call our two friends who had volunteered to watch the kids while I was in labor, since all of a sudden it felt quite important to me to have him there with me as much as possible.

At 6:21 I also texted my midwife, this time saying, "My cervix seems more open and I feel something hard behind the bag of waters that I think is the head! I haven't been keeping track of how close together the contractions are recently, but I think I'll start doing that". (This is when I would say that I was definitely in active labor.) And by 7:00 I told her that they were about a minute long and about 3-6 minutes apart. I asked her how long it would take her to get there, since I remembered her saying it might be two hours, and that's when she said it sounded like a good time for her to come, even if it ended up being a little early. (Later, after I had already had the baby, she mentioned that she had been staying nearby that night with one of her children, so I might not have asked her to come as soon as I did had I realized that, but it all worked out.)

I have found it quite useful and empowering to check my own cervical dilation during labor. I wouldn't say I'm any good at figuring out how dilated I am with any precision, but once I started trying I think I've been pretty good at telling whether I'm in active labor, which is information I have really wanted to have!

I think around the same time I had that conversation with the midwife was when Will offered to fill up the birth tub, and I took him up on that. It took a while for that to happen, and in the meantime things were getting quite intense. I kept feeling around for the head myself, I think partly because it was trippy for me that it was right there!!! And I was seeing more and more bloody show. I remember thinking that I was more free to relax into whatever labor was going to be, now that it wasn't my responsibility to track how far along I was and figure out when to ask the midwives to come, which was a relief. I think that meant my labor sped up around then, but it's always hand to untangle causality with this stuff! It could also be that I had a pretty good guess about when it was going to pick up, and that's why I texted when I did.

When I got out of the bathtub, I think because I was going to head to the birth tub, but maybe because I was going to use the bathroom, I remember experimenting with pulling down on things, which had been one of my main strategies for coping during Maya's labor, and that did seem to give me some relief. And in particular, while I think I had been laboring pretty quietly to that point, it seemed helpful to make louder (somewhat pushier?) noises when I was doing the pulling down thing. A friend of mine who recently had her first and said it was less painful than she expected had told me that she thought it was very helpful how she made a ton of noise, so I was leaning into that more than I think I would have been otherwise.

The birth tub was bigger than I expected! In the weeks leading up to the brith, I had been waffling about whether it would be too much trouble to have a birth tub, but I'm so glad we decided to do it. It was really pretty perfect. I could be in the tub, and choose almost whatever position, and there were handles on the side that were really good for pulling down on. And biting on sometimes. (I didn't puncture the liner, so I think I didn't damage anything by doing that!)

By the time I was in the birth tub, labor had gotten quite intense, though not as intense as it eventually got! The midwives arrived soon after that, briefly checked the baby's heart rate, which was fine, and then after we had a short conversation about how I wished I could skip the rest of labor, retreated to the back of our house, saying that their plan was to rest, and to call them whenever we needed or wanted them.

At this point, Will was sitting by the tub with me and mostly holding my hand, which was very important to me! I didn't want him leaving for even a little while. I labored like that for what I think was a couple of hours, and it was a lot... I remember mostly experiencing the contractions as coming almost one on top of the other, and also being sort of volitional? Not like I could stop them from coming, but like I could bring them on a little sooner, maybe by shifting position, and that I was choosing to do that a bunch of the time because being caught more off-guard was quite aversive. My memory of this part of labor was that I was making very loud and pretty tonal noises during most of the contractions, and buzzing my lips as loudly as I could during some of the other ones. And my memory was also that between the contractions I was feeling pain too, just much less. Because I remember thinking about some birth stories I had read where even very near the end, the women were able to rest and even doze between contractions, and that seeming unthinkable given what I was experiencing. But then I also remember some breaks between contractions where I was talking to Will that seemed like pretty complete breaks. So I don't really know, nor do I especially trust myself to remember the proportions of what was happening that accurately.

During this time I remember reaching to feel the head quite often and doing something that I would describe as scraping out more and more of the bloody show, and then also poking at my bag of waters. I was quite dilated at that time, though I couldn't say how much, but there was definitely a cervical lip. I tried pushing while I pulled that back, which I remember being even more painful than the rest of it, but I also remember feeling like maybe it was doing something good.

Eventually I felt something that at the time I assumed was me peeing, but in retrospect was probably my water breaking. I'm not sure because a few minutes later it happened again. I know there are actually two bags of waters, but I also think they most commonly break together, so maybe one of them really was me peeing? Being in the water, it was very hard to tell. I also expected to be able to feel the difference in the head once my water broke, but I couldn't. I think I almost certainly would have been able to feel the difference if I hadn't been in the water, but in any case, my best guess is that when the bag of waters broke I didn't have nearly as much of a cervical lip anymore.

I think it was shortly after that my sounds started getting noticeably more like "actually pushing a baby out" sounds, and Will said that I sounded different, and asked if he should get the midwives. I knew I was trying to push, but I wasn't sure it was working, so I asked him to hold off. But (what I think was) only a few minutes later, I could tell that the head was moving after all, so I told him to text one of the people who was with our kids to go get the midwives---I didn't want him going anywhere!

I know everyone has things they like more and less about labor and birth, but for me the pushing is definitely the best part. I would say it feels less painful once I'm really doing it, and of course it's a relief knowing that it's close to over, but also it's just so exciting and cool actually feeling the baby move out of my body!

The midwives were there, and I remember a few parts pretty distinctly. One was really wanting his head to be out already, but somehow pausing with his head sticking out a little and thinking that it seemed like I might not tear this time, even though I had at least somewhat with all my other babies. And indeed, that ended up being mostly right! I had a very small perineal tear that my midwife said didn't need stitches. And then I also remember feeling his ear and saying something about that! (We had a video of the whole last part, but I haven't watch it yet, nor do I feel ready to yet! I'm very grateful to have the footage for when I am ready though.)

I also remember not really being aware of pushing contractions, though I assume I was having them, and mostly just being very motivated to push out the baby. Once his head was out, I was surprised that the rest of him didn't just slide out, which I think had happened with the rest of my babies, and I believe I said something like "I can't remember how to push anymore" and asking the midwives if the baby was okay. They told me that it was fine, that hands and knees and squatting would probably help, and that while they did want him to come out soon, there was nothing to worry about yet.

I changed my position, and of course I hadn't really forgotten how to push after all, so once I pushed, his shoulders and the rest of him came out, maybe a few minutes after his head had. He was born just around 11:30pm, around 30 hours after I would say early labor started, and around 6 hours after what I would call active labor started.

And wow, what a relief! One of my requests in my birth plan was that unless there was a medical reason to do it, I wanted the moments after birth to just be me, the baby, and Will, and that worked out really well! I was rubbing him and blowing in his face some, and he breathed and cried pretty quickly. It was so exciting to finally have him on the outside and see what he was like. Will and I both thought that, while he clearly looked like one of our babies, he looked less similar to our other newborns than they had to each other, which I think I still agree with two weeks later, but I'm less sure now...

Once he was out and okay, and we got to know him a little bit, I was then very preoccupied with getting the placenta out, partly because I didn't want to have to worry about it anymore, and partly because I knew the cramping would be more painful with it inside. Though as the midwives pointed out to me, there was no guarantee it was fully detached yet. I did get Alexander to nurse some right away, which helps that happen. I also learned that even after the umbilical cord looks quite white and floppy, there's still what the midwives called a "phantom pulse" that I could feel when I held it between my fingers, and they typically wait for that to also stop before they cut the cord. So I'm not positive I'm remembering this right, but I think I gave Alexander to Will to hold while I delivered the placenta, and that it was still attached to him when it came out. I did like being able to do that all in the tub, so I didn't have to worry about squatting over anything.

There's a lot I love about the midwifery model of care, but I think maybe my single favorite thing about home birth is that once the baby is out, I get to relax in my own bed. There were a few things to do, like, cutting the cord (with no clamp attached, just a tie! Why doesn't everyone do that?), weighing him (he was 8lbs 10oz), and checking me for tears (as I said, just one small one that didn't need any attention), but then the midwives left.

Our 6yo had just fallen asleep, but we had our 9yo and our 3yo meet him, and also the friends who had been watching our kids. We still had birthday cake from the 3yos birthday the previous week, so we ate some of that. (It felt good to celebrate, but the cake wasn't what my body wanted! I ate some buttered sourdough toast afterwards, and that was more satisfying.)

I think that's most of what I have to say about the process of birth, but I have some more reflections on how I relate to it, mostly centered around how painful labor is! At least for me! I recently asked a group of moms I talk to regularly how they thought of labor, and while a bunch of them agreed that it seemed natural to call it painful, more of them than I expected said that while it was intense, they weren't inclined to call their labors "painful" exactly.

But yeah, I don't like the way it feels. I would say that even Braxton Hicks contractions are kind of painful, and early labor is definitely painful, active labor is more painful, and transition is almost unbearable. But then at the same time, I have pretty much always been pretty able to "stay on top of" my contractions, and when I'm in the right position, making the right noise, etc., I think it's basically true that for those slices of time it's in an important way actually not that painful after all. But even then, I'm doing all theat with something like the threat of a lot of pain looming over me if I misstep. So I'm perpetually confused about how to narrativize it. After my labor with Maya, I figured I was cured of my desire to go to the hospital and get an epidural, since I left as soon as I could tell I was in active labor and I had her before I could get one. But now I wonder again... Because this labor was somewhat longer, and I imagine there would have been time to get an epidural and skip at least some of the pain. But then again, while I don't like the way labor feels, I hate pretty much everything about the hospital experience other than the potential of pain relief. And it does feel pretty awesome to feel the baby coming out. So I'm very conflicted! I think I would plan another home birth, but I'm not totally sure. If I could be sure that the people I encountered in the hospital would be respectful and consent-oriented, I could see going there and getting an epidural. But I don't expect it to be that way. And then, I'm also not even sure what to do make of my desire to avoid the pain of labor, since another part of my brain wants to keep pointing out that all sorts of things in life are painful, and that's just how it is. (Which is nowhere near a complete argument for anything---it's more like a trailhead for something that I can tell is still unresolved.)

Anyway, I wouldn't say my thoughts about all that are very coherent, but it seemed more honest to include at least some of them anyway. (Will and I hope to have one more baby some day, which is why this stuff bounces around in my head the way it does.)

In any case, Xander is a great baby, and I've been very in love with the newborn stage this time around. He's two weeks old today, and he's already so different from how he was when was totally new!

And while my birth story doesn't feel totally complete, I can always come back and add more if I remember more details that I want to share. I wanted to at least make sure I wrote up the main bits while they were still pretty fresh.

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It's been long enough since I wrote anything in the tumblr window that I forgot how refreshing can make it all go away :-(. I will restart my birth story...

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Never mind---he pooped twice last night. In retrospect I think maybe what was going on there was that he got way more hind milk that night because I was prioritizing nursing a ton on one side due to a plugged duct (which has since resolved!).

10 day update: He didn’t poop all night until just now at 10:30am :-)

It would be nice if this mostly sticks—one less thing to manage at night makes my life easier!

I think he peed less last night too, though it was at least a couple of times iirc.

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10 day update: He didn’t poop all night until just now at 10:30am :-)

It would be nice if this mostly sticks—one less thing to manage at night makes my life easier!

I think he peed less last night too, though it was at least a couple of times iirc.

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It’s now been a little more than a week with Alexander, and I haven’t gotten around to sitting at my computer to write up an update as I had planned, so I suppose I’ll try writing on my phone.

My overall impression of him is still that’s he’s pretty chill. Over the past few days he noticeably has a proto evening fussy time/witching hour, where he might need to nurse a bunch continually or be in motion to stay happy. And then when that’s eventually over, he’ll tend to sleep more soundly afterwards, and pee and poop somewhat less during that block of sleep.

Overall, he seems to be really good at EC! He caught on pretty much immediately that when I hold him over the sink, it’s a good time to pee and poop. IIRC it took my other ones longer with pee especially. It also helps that he tends to both pee and poop in a bunch of little spurts, so even if he starts to go in his diaper, there’s very frequently more when I take him at that point. I think with Maya I didn’t manage to actually have the top hat potty on hand during the newborn period, but I’m also making good use of that this time, either because it’s night and I don’t want to get up, or because it seems better to have him nurse and pee or poop at the same time.

Breastfeeding has been going super smoothly, and I think I’m tending a little towards oversupply and leaking, but I expect that to resolve itself if I keep doing what I’m doing. He hasn’t been weighed since last Monday, but then he was 5oz up since he had been a few days before that, so I’d be surprised if he hadn’t regained his birth weight and then some.

Our big outing this week was that we went to our homeschool park day, where he got enough sun that I wasn’t 100% sure it would be okay, but in hindsight it seemed to be totally fine. I do think his nursed less than his usual amount being outside and wrapped on me for a few hours, but then I think he made up for lost time once we were home.

Babywearing is going great, but even though he’s so little, I haven’t built up my muscles yet, and he’s floppy and has a tendency to flop pretty asymmetrically (I’m pretty sure in roughly the same position he used to favor when he was inside me!) so my back can hurt a little if I do it for too long at a time. I put him on my back for the first time a few days ago, and that was both comfortable and a nice change of pace for getting some stuff done around the house.

I feel good about my own recovery. I basically took the first week off from everything except taking care of myself and the baby (thanks Will!), and was pretty antsy to be doing more than that by the end of the time. I have napped at least once with the baby more days than not, but there have been a few days where I didn’t.

The afterpains were pretty brutal at first, but then I decided to try taking Advil for them (which I have never done before), and that seemed to work as advertised, which was nice! I truly love the early newborn days, so I didn’t want to have my appreciation for them colored by periodically being in a bunch of pain. I only took the advil for a few days anyway, and my uterus has shrunk a whole bunch by now.

I still haven’t quite figured out how to juggle all the kids for a while day, and Will is doing a lot on that front, but I’m at least back to waking up Maya on my own in the morning.

Speaking of which, she seems to have come around a lot more to the baby! She was suspicious at first, seemed a little curious but mostly upset, and then seemed to forgive me for the situation but was pointedly ignoring him. But as of last night she was hugging him a bunch <3. She doesn’t really understand yet about being gentle with a baby’s neck while hugging, but I take this as a very positive development!

The older kids are very into holding Xander, the cats don’t seem to care one way or the other, and the dogs are getting more familiar with him and gradually accepting that I won’t let them lick him all over to their satisfaction (mostly because IME baby skin doesn’t do well with that!!)

It’s hard to really remember well enough to compare, but I think Xander’s legs aren’t quite as strong as my other babies’ legs were at this age, nor does he seem to actively enjoy when we hold him in a standing position, but he also doesn’t seem to mind it. And his head control is getting better and better by the day :-). When I put him down without a diaper on a relatively harder surface like a bath mat on the floor, he sometimes does a lot of trying to crawl type motions, and sometimes he rolls from his front to his side. I suspect he’ll be pretty early on gross motor stuff like our other kids were.

Most of his cord stump fell off in the first few days, but the midwife left him with a fairly long piece attached, so there’s still a little bit that’s on there.

It seems like maybe he’s a more sound sleeper than the other ones were at this age, but I think this is somewhat confounded by me being better at identifying when he’s sleeping deeply enough that I’ll be able to walk away for a bit. This house is also all on one level, with the main bedroom quite centrally located, which means I can more easily move around and do stuff while being near where he is sleeping.

And I think that’s most of what I had on my mind that I wanted to write down! Ever since he came out, I have been really loving this whole stage. I kind of wish it could last longer than it does, but I know there’s different fun stuff to come soon too. It’s also very weird to think that one day before too long I won’t ever have a baby again (the working plan is to have one more). But for now I do have him, and it’s pretty great <3.

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Some initial notes on Alexander after about 24hrs with him:

He’s awesome! But of course I would think that :-).

Labor was hard… I think I did a good job handling it, but wow. Maya’s labor was definitely shorter, and my memory says that it was also less intense.

The midwives were great though—I’m sure this time around I did my best job so far thinking through and articulating what I wanted beforehand, and that part of it played out pretty perfectly! Eventually I’ll write up my whole birth story with more details, but I got to catch him myself, and that was a big highlight!

He totally looks like one of our kids to me, however with both Zeke and Maya, Will and I had more of the “oh it’s the same baby again” reaction, and Xander seems like he has more of his own face. Time will tell of course.

Also too soon to really say of course, but he seems kind of chill? His cries aren’t super loud, and he doesn’t seem to escalate quickly when he gets upset, or be particularly hard to calm down. If I had to make a guess now, I would predict that he won’t be an especially hard baby to soothe.

He’s great at nursing! If my count is right (and I think it is) he has pooped 4x and peed 5x in the first 24 hours of his life, which is a lot! Ironically, maybe this means he will have lost more weight than most babies? Or not? I’ll find out tomorrow when the midwives weigh him.

I’ve had some early EC success too! Successfully caught 3 pees and 1 poop :-).

Lydia and Zeke are really happy about having a little brother :-). Maya… not so much. I think despite me trying to tell her a bunch that it would happen, she was quite surprised by his arrival. She seems overall suspicious of me, but will eventually be cuddly when I approach her without the baby, but she seems mostly upset when she sees him :-(. I hope it doesn’t take her too long to adjust. I imagine it will help when I start feeling more capable, and I can give her better quality attention.

I think I’m actually doing well (so far) in terms of physical recovery, and for the first time I had a small enough tear that my midwife didn’t recommend any stitches! But the afterpains have been pretty painful… I took some advil though, which for whatever reason I had never done before, and it seems to be helping. I can breathe better than I have been able to in months though, now that my lungs aren’t squished, and that on it’s own is amazing. I didn’t sleep much or well last night (I think mostly due to afterpains), or the night before that (because my contractions were strong enough to wake me up) but I’m hopeful that tonight will be better! And I did get a decent nap in this afternoon, which was really nice.