DC Metro Moms

Percolating to the Surface

Things are starting to percolate in our ten-year-old's head since coming back a month ago from our trip to visit her birth country, China.  It was such a whirlwind while we were there -- only a few days in each place we visited -- so most of the discussion we had while we were traveling was about climbing the Great Wall, holding the baby pandas, and seeing the Terra Cotta Warriors.  But we knew that at some point, there would be a lot of emotions to deal with about visiting the country where she was born, spending time at the orphanage where she lived for the first 12 months of her life, and meeting one of the nannies who cared for her.

Things were still pretty much on an even keel when we spent some time talking with her classmates about the trip and showing many of the photos we took.  (Needless to say, the ones with the pandas were the biggest hit!)  PunditGirl was pretty stoic in talking about visiting the place where she was found before being taken to her orphanage.  But we knew it was only a matter of time until other feelings about her story started to percolate to the surface.

Things are now percolating.

Discussing Same-Sex Marriage With Kids, At Breakfast Of Course

Why are those two guys in the paper, Mommy?  Why are they holding those babies?   How come the babies are so fancy?

Read about these guys.  Read the story.  Would you please read this one, Mommy?

The questions and requests were simple, and although the answers should be just as easy to share with my 6, 4, and 3 year-olds, they weren’t.   Usually, our newspaper reading is a little less exciting, but today, it really got us thinking.

I realized in the brief moment between putting Cheerios on the table and pouring my coffee, that I had never really talked to my kids about same-sex relationships.  It’s not something that I’ve tried to hide from them, but before now, the opportunity to discuss same-sex marriage has never arisen.

I remember in my early 20’s, pining for a Carson Kressley to enter my life.  I envisioned marathon shopping trips topped with unlimited and unsolicited fashion advice.  I wanted a pal and confidant to guide me in all the ways we straight women--for some strange reason --believe that gay men would if we had one as our best friend.   It’s silly, ridiculous, and I’m embarrassed to even write it.

Still now, I--we--don’t have gay friends.  We really don't.  We don’t know many people—okay, anyone—in a same-sex relationship.  It’s 2010.  What on earth is wrong with us?  We’re a liberal, forward-thinking, open-minded, educated couple in the very diverse mid-east.  Where are our gay friends?

A Second Trip of a Lifetime

It's hard to get my head around the fact that after planning for almost a year, my family and I are just weeks away from our second trip of a lifetime.  The first, of course, was when we traveled to China in 2001 to bring home our daughter.  Now, in just a matter of weeks, we'll be returning for the first time in nine years so we can visit PunditGirl's birth country with her (thank you airline miles!)

It feels like yesterday and it feels like it's been a lifetime since we stepped off the plane at National Airport, our lives changed by a baby who spent the first year of her life in an orphanage with about 100 other children and about eight caregivers. We've talked for many years, as our PunditBaby grew into a PunditGirl, about the amazing things we saw and experienced in January of 2001 when we brought our daughter home from Hunan Province. 

Now we're busy finishing up our final preparations -- getting our visas, buying a snazzy new polka-dot suitcase for her, and thinking about how much rice (her favorite food in the whole world) she'll be able to eat while we're there.

And I've promised myself, I am buying that Mao watch this time! 

Terra Cotta Warriors Worth the Wait!

I think we were one of the first families to purchase tickets many months ago for the Terra Cotta Warrior exhibit at National Geographic that opened last week.  I know we have a special reason to jump on anything with Chinese culture since our fourth-grader was adopted from China and we do whatever we can to stay connected with her birth culture.

My only hesitance was the fact that she, as most nine-year-olds, is not a fan of the museum outing!  Lucky for us this tied in very nicely with planning our first trip back to China with her next year, which will include a stop in Xi'an -- the home of the Terra Cotta Warriors.

I'm happy to say, she was mesmerized. (Unlike Washington Post art reviewer Blake Gopnik).

Birth Day by Mark Sloan, M.D.: A Silicon Valley Moms Group Book Club

This month for Silicon Valley Moms Group bloggers' monthly book club we read a unique book - stories of birth, told from the perspective of a doctor. And a man. Hmmmm...think we might have some stories too?

Join in as Silicon Valley Moms Group bloggers discuss book Birth Day by Mark Sloan, M.D..

• Chicago Moms Blog's Melanie M. leads us off
• Chefdruck from Chefdruck Musings talks about castor oil, a very potent old wives' tale
• Tracey from Just Another Review Blog reads before she jumps
• Alma from Marketing Mommy experienced two kinds of births
• Jennifer from The Kamienski Chronicles chronicles Benjamin's birth day
• Bonggamom from Finding Bonggamom tells her birth story part two (and three)
• Jen from Laughing at Chaos had two births, too different
• Jennifer from Connect with your Teens starts with "It was 20 years ago today..."
• Kim from Passion & Art muses about becoming a big sister
• Catherine from Everyday Life as Lyric Poetry talks birth day miracles
• Emily from Mama Sick is glad to have given birth in 2006
• Wife and Mommy from Wife and Mommy compares her birth stories to gorialls
• Mary Kate from New Jersey Moms Blog asks whether to turn or not to turn?
• Jill from Musings from Me was never prepared for her c-section
• Nicole from Not Just a Working Mom concludes that soccer coach does not equal birth coach
• Bonnie from Faith Barista had her eyes opened to what her husband experienced as an expectant dad during her pregnancies
• Linsey from Me Too You talks about the critical first five minutes and having babies in the NICU
• Amy Jo from The Cheese Party is planning for a natural child birth for her third time around
• Stacy from The Fabulous Miss S asks "did you know...?"
• CosMama from wellthoughtoutspot says that her pain in not your pain
  

More posts will be put up throughout the day on our writer's personal sites, so be sure to check back to follow along.

.... and if you have a post up on YOUR personal site on this topic, please leave a comment here and we will add your link!

Read about the book Birth Day here.

Past Silicon Valley Moms Group Book Clubs have included:

• What Happened to the Girl I Married? by Michael Miller
• Testimony by Anita Shreve
• Comfort Food by Kate Jacobs
• Much to Your Chagrin by Suzanne Guilette
  
• It Started with Pop-Tarts by Lori Hanson
• Who By Fire by Diana Spechler
• The White Trash Moms Handbook by Michelle Lamar
• Writing Motherhood by Lisa Garrigues
• The Vaccine Book by Dr. Robert W. Sears
• The Other Mother by Gwendolen Gross

If you have a book that you would like to submit for consideration for a future Silicon Valley Moms Group book club, please contact us at info (at) svmoms dot com.

Birth Day by Mark Sloan, M.D.: Join us for Silicon Valley Moms Group's next Book Club on Wednesday, August 12th

As moms, we all tend to get talking about our birth stories from time to time. What do our collective birth days (either those of our kids, whether we birthed them or adopted them, or...our stories of our own births) reveal about us? Join us next Wednesday, August 12th as we discuss the book Birth Day by Mark Sloan, M.D. and talk about our birth days for our next book club.

About the book - Birth Day: A Pediatrician Explores the Science, the History, and the Wonder of Childbirth (from the publisher, Random House's, website:

"I delivered twenty babies in the summer of 1977. I was hardly more than a baby myself, just turned twenty-four and starting my third year of medical school.”—from Birth Day

So began Mark Sloan’s three-decades-long exploration of the wonders and oddities of human childbirth. Pediatrician, husband, and father, the author has attended nearly three thousand births since that long-ago summer, encountering everything from routine deliveries to tense labor-room dramas. In Birth Day, Sloan draws on his personal and professional experience to weave the strands of memoir, history, science, and culture into a fascinating—and often funny—tapestry of this fundamental human passage.

Birth Day takes the reader on a remarkable journey, from the dawn of human history to the quiet efficiency of a modern operating room; from Aristotle and Julius Caesar to a trailblazing, cross-dressing British army surgeon; from a recent past filled with the horrors of childbirth gone wrong to a present day, in which every pregnancy is expected to end happily. Some of Birth Day’s many topics include

• The evolution of human childbirth—or, why do gorillas have it so easy?
• The first five minutes of life—scuba divers, astronauts, and the amazing adaptations that transform a fetus into an air-breathing, out-in-the-world baby
• Cesarean section—a look at its origins, its future, and how it came to be the most frequently performed operation in American hospitals
• Pain and politics—the age-old quest for painless childbirth, starring Adam and Eve, Queen Victoria, a nineteenth-century medical brawl, and the rise of today’s “epidural monoculture”
• Daddies—raging paternal hormones, hidden anxieties, and the emotional evolution of men (including the author, his father, and grandfather) as they approach fatherhood
• The five senses at birth—does light enter the womb? how loud is it in there? what is a newborn baby searching for with those first anxious glances?
• A tour of the newborn body—springy skulls, hairy ears, innies and outies, the advantages (and disadvantages) of looking like your father, and why the United States is one of the world’s most circumcised nations

Delightfully instructive and entertaining, Birth Day offers a fresh, sometimes irreverent take on a universally familiar topic. Warm, reassuring, and packed with stories from the author’s work and life, this unique book is one pediatrician’s meditation on the hiding-in-plain-sight marvels of human birth.

Read along with us: Buy your copy of the book today and get ready to discuss with us on Wednesday, August 12th. See you at book club!

Past Silicon Valley Moms Group Book Clubs have included:

• What Happened to the Girl I Married? by Michael Miller
  
• Testimony by Anita Shreve
  
• Comfort Food by Kate Jacobs
  
• Much to Your Chagrin by Suzanne Guilette
  
• It Started with Pop-Tarts by Lori Hanson
  
• Who By Fire by Diana Spechler
• The White Trash Moms Handbook by Michelle Lamar
• Writing Motherhood by Lisa Garrigues
• The Vaccine Book by Dr. Robert W. Sears
• The Other Mother by Gwendolen Gross

Read along with us: Buy your copy of the book today and get ready to discuss with us on Wednesday, August 12th. See you at book club!

Past Silicon Valley Moms Group Book Clubs have included:

• What Happened to the Girl I Married? by Michael Miller
  
• Testimony by Anita Shreve
  
• Comfort Food by Kate Jacobs
  
• Much to Your Chagrin by Suzanne Guilette
  
• It Started with Pop-Tarts by Lori Hanson
  
• Who By Fire by Diana Spechler
• The White Trash Moms Handbook by Michelle Lamar
• Writing Motherhood by Lisa Garrigues
• The Vaccine Book by Dr. Robert W. Sears
• The Other Mother by Gwendolen Gross

Just Don't Call Me 'Grandma'

We have what you might call a blended family.  We adopted our nine-year-old daughter from China and my husband has two adult children from his first marriage.We have different cultures, religions and generations represented in our immediate family which I have always loved.

Until now.

My older stepdaughter had a baby girl a month ago, making my husband a grandfather for the first time.  However, as a 50-something mom, I am not ready to be a grandmother.  And technically, I'm not -- but I am going to have to get my head around this situation where I have a soon-to-be fourth-grader and a little baby who's going to need to call me something other than 'Joanne' in a year or two. 

But it ain't gonna be grandma! 

I acknowledge the fact that I am chronologically old enough to be a grandmother (mine was a week shy of her 40th birthday when I was born), but there are still plenty of days when I'm getting my head around the fact that I'm a mom to a nine-going-on-35 year old daughter.

I'm certainly not going with Bubbe.  Yes, my husband's side of the family is Jewish, but I just don't see myself as Bubbe.  Grammy?  Nope.  Nana?  Don't think so.   But recently the media came up with a term for the First Grandmother, Marion Robinson, that I think I could embrace -- Glam-ma!

There are plenty of days when glamorous is definitely NOT the word I would use to describe either my life or my appearance, but perhaps I could grow into Glam-ma!   Because, really, doesn't grandma conjure up the image of the gray-haired, orthopedic shoe wearing little old lady?  That, I'm not.

But in this era of blended and non-traditional families, where nine-year-olds like my daughter become elementary school aunts and uncles, maybe it's time to think of some new words to describe these relationships.  So I'm open to suggestions!

But the first one of you to call me grandma is going to be SO sorry!

When Joanne isn't struggling with the intricacies of modern family relationships, she's usually embracing her wonky side at her blog, PunditMom, as well as The Huffington Post & BlogHer, where she's a contributing editor for News & Politics.

Original DC Metro Moms post.

ROUNDUP!!!! Birth Day, Adoption Day, First Day of the Rest of Our Lives

RECAP!

The most important day of my life.  The day my life changed forever.  The day I grew up.  The day someone else became more important than me.  The day I touched a miracle.  The day I met my daughter.  The day my step-son first called me "mom."  The day I first held that tiny little bundle.

The day my oldest son was born.

All of these phrases can describe the day a child enters your life, but none of them fully explain it, do they?  We all know that having a baby (or a child, or a toddler) really does change everything.  But it isn't something we can fully explain to the uninitiated.  Parenting is a members only club, but we have a fantastic PR machine.  Parents love to talk about their kids!

To this day, nothing can choke me up more than thinking about or describing the moment I first held each of my boys.  (Gah!  In fact, I'm getting all teary right now.)  Most parents feel exactly the same way.  So today, the moms and dads of the Silicon Valley, Chicago, DC Metro, New York, New Jersey, Fifty Something, Deep South, and LA Moms Blogs are all writing about those magical days.

Get out your box of tissues and read along with us.

Round-up of all the posts across the sites below the fold....

This is an original D.C. Metro Moms Blog post. 

Stephanie also writes about her children, and gets all sappy and sentimental, at Lawyer Mama and writes, with almost no weeping, about politics at MOMocrats.

My Dream Birth

I've had three unmedicated births -- meaning no induction, no epidural, no C-section -- with midwives attending. Contrary to what some unkind women have said, I don't expect a medal, a cookie, an award or any other kudos for doing something billions of women have done before. I figured if God's apparent curse of a roomy pelvis and wide hips were good for anything it's birthing babies, so I decided even before getting pregnant that I'd attempt birth the natural way.

Birth is like a marathon. I'll probably never run an actual marathon, mind you, but enduring labor and delivery is my personal Olympic feat. Each of my births, especially my first, required physical and emotional training (prenatal yoga, deep breathing exercises, childbirth preparation classes). Each demanded my stamina, my focus, my all. I had no idea how long each birth would take (full disclosure: luckily, they were six, three and four hours long), but I knew that in the end I'd cross the finish line with a newborn in my arms. Plus, birth, like running, offers an amazing, empowering high. Birth provides me with such an overpowering feeling of bliss that you could call me a birth junkie.

It Was You, All Along

I had a very difficult pregnancy, and suffered through preeclampsia through most of it. I was on and off bed rest from about the 4th month of my pregnancy. After 38 weeks, my doctor really wanted to induce me. But, my ob won't induce unless you are dilated at least 1 centimeter, because she believes that is walking you into a c-section. (Not that there is anything wrong with a c-section, my doctor just felt your body had to be ready for an induction.)

For two weeks I went to the doctor every day. And every day I was not dilated. My due date was March 17th. (We called Michael in utero, baby shamrock, the Irish Jewish child.) On March 14th I went to the doctor and was told I was (finally!) dilated 1 centimeter and my induction was scheduled for tomorrow morning at 5:30 am. I went to work for a few hours, cleaned my office, and left around lunch time. I grabbed lunch and bought a book for the hospital and went home. I wasn't feeling great, my stomach was all knotted up, but I thought it was nerves. I mean, come on, who is really ready to be a mom?