a birth story 2.0

Our little Spaghetti turned two over the weekend! I can remember it so vividly. Some of you have asked to share my story, so here it is. I wrote this about a month after Spaghetti was born and still count my blessings every day. Enjoy!

I had my routine checkup w/our OB Tuesday morning where she stripped my membrane. The OB said that usually stripping the membrane usually induces labor. Spaghetti was not due until another couple weeks (2/29, leap year) so I didn't believe she would come so soon. To enhance the "induction" I went home and had a pepperoni/jalapeno pizza, they said spicy food helps the labor along as well.

With still no contractions and high doubts, I went to class that night. I arrived home at about 10:30p and still nothing alarming. At about midnight, I started to feel the contractions, Pretty Pants had already went to bed and I did not wake him until I knew for sure. During this time, I started to chart my contractions, they didn't seem too painful but just in case I took a shower, ensured we had our bags ready and studied. At about 2:30a I could no longer write down my contractions, so I woke Pretty Pants up, he too, didn't feel that sense of urgency (looking back he thought I was way too calm!) so he also got ready, showered, and called the hospital. We even set up the car seat in between contractions! Within the next two hours chaos reared its ugly head, the contractions were coming closer, the hospital  had no beds, I could not stand up, the hospital still had no beds, Pretty Pants had woken up Meatball, at this point the pain was excruciating, and in an almost the same instance: Pretty Pants started to pack up the car, Meatball was holding my hand, the hospital had called to say they were ready for us and my water had broke!!

I barely could get into the car so I laid on my side in the back seat. I remember bracing Meatball w/my free arm as Pretty Pants backed out of the driveway. At this point, the contractions seemed to be tripping over each other, then I felt my body start to push to the point where I could feel the top of Spaghetti's head. Each time my body pushed I would relay the message to Pretty Pants and the Meatball gave him a play by play. ("Mommy can feel the head, Pretty Pants!") Feeling her head, I realized I had to make a decision to push with my body and deliver Spaghetti because I didn't want her to be "stuck" in any way. After about 3 pushes (her head, her tailbone, then her whole body) Spaghetti was born.

Five minutes later, we arrived at the hospital. Pretty Pants ran to get help, at first, they came out with just a wheelchair and an orderly, then they returned with 5 people peering into our back seat looking at me, Meatball and Spaghetti. The onduty physician got into the car on top of me, cut off my pajamas, cut Spaghetti's umbilical cord and took her away. After I had delivered the placenta, we all soon followed inside.

After a couple hours of recovery and quite an adventure, we were all finally together. Meatball even lost her first tooth while waiting to see her new sister! After so much excitement, we were all just very happy and thankful that Spaghetti was healthy and now with us.

Happy 2nd birthday, Spaghetti!

because you're so seksay

As I've ventured into the blogosphere, I'm been searching for experienced mom bloggers that I can relate to. I have a few mom blogs on my radar, that I'm slowly starting to read religiously. One of them is Leonore Skenazy of Free Range Kids. I love how renegade her personality is. Her opinions and topics stimulate so much thought within her readers that I find very inspiring.

A couple weeks ago she blogged about children's lingerie. What?!? Yah, children's lingerie represented by no other than Mylie Cyrus' younger sister, Noah. You can read more about it on Leonore's site here and here. Pretty ridiculous isn't it!?! I can almost hear the Colonel ask, "What is this world coming to?!? My Goodness!" Oh wait, that's me talking now. It's the age old opinion that what's current and new is downright outrageous and rebellious to older folks that have been there, done that. But I have to say, this children's lingerie thing is truly crossing the boundaries. Hello! Child molestors and predators!!

It's bad enough that I'm dreading the sex talk with my girls. Even though they aren't of age yet, I know it's coming around the corner, sooner than I'd like. Just the thought of it brings a whole lot of anxiety into my system. The Colonel nor Rambo never talked about sex and if they did imply it, it was masked behind the phrase, "Okay, be good."  I never really understood what that phrase be good meant until I had informed them I was staying the night at my longtime-then boyfriend's house. In college. I was 20. I also went to a Catholic high school where they didn't teach sex education. So looking back, I can understand how uncomfortable my parents must have felt with the subject. It's bad enough to be working your butt off in a foreign country. But to come home and have to talk to your child about your own values in a society you still don't understand yourself? I'd probably pass as well. Although,  I don't think this is abnormal for people from my generation to feel. Alot of my peers parents' never talked about sex either: "Oh my parents never spoke about it because they were strict Catholics", "We come from a very traditional family", or "Are you kidding!?! How embarassing!".

So what's a parent to do? I'm fortunate enough that I have a couple years to prep for this conversation. Are Pretty Pants and I planning to have it? By all means. Is it going to be uncomfortable? Most certainly, it's already uncomfortable now. just. thinking. about. it. But it's more important than ever to talk about sex with your children. Hello, children's lingerie!?! Thanks Noah Cyrus for making my job just a little harder. So here's the angle I'm thinking of and I've got a couple more years to fine tune and build up to it as well... self confidence and self respect: the ability to trust in one's own judgments, qualities and abilities. The idea that we will have raised our girls well enough through our faith, our community and our family and have armed them with enough information on the consequences of their actions to make the right choices for themselves. *sigh* Such a weighted topic that cannot be discussed in one post, but it's a start...  

So who's got the sex talk down pat? 

Momma Mina Loves The Electric Company

"Heeyyy you guuuyyysss!!!"

It's about time! Being a veteran mother serving about 8 years now I've had my fair share of Dora the Explorer, Blue's Clues, Oswald and Caillou. Granted, all are decent shows but of course they are children's shows and after three episodes of any of the above on repeat just about makes me want to bang my head against the wall, like a good friend of mine once said, until I can't feel feelings (Note: Barney only takes 1 but more on that in another post). Most television shows have a very short shelf life so I like to sprinkle in a little of the classics as well like Sesame Street. So you can imagine my excitement when I heard that PBS was reviving The Electric Company!!

In its second season, The Electric Company is geared for older children (5-10 years). With a multicultural cast, a slew of celebrity appearances (see below), and a hip, urban vibe, The Electric Company packs music, dance, arts, grammar and reading into 25 minutes of pure enjoyment. The Meatball enjoys rapping about homonyms and synonyms and I get to bob my head and be a wannabe cool mom to LL Cool J all at the same time! What!?! 


LL Cool J raps



NeYo croons


Lin Manuel Miranda (of In The Heights fame) breaks it down


G'head now, plug it in!

Where are your tsinelas (chee-neh-lahs)??

Tsinelas (slippers), Lolo (grandfather) and Lola (grandmother) are the only words my girls understand in the Filipino language.  And I don't know how I feel about that just yet. As a child, I lived 5 years in the Philippines because my parents were stationed at Clark Air Force Base. However, I can barely remember if I used to be able to speak fluently. I guess it doesn't matter because all my girls got are three words, tsinelas, Lolo and Lola.

When we moved back to the United States, the Colonel and Rambo never taught me to speak their native languages. I just caught on by listening and understanding two dialects, Tagalog (the national language) and Ilocano. When the question comes up about understanding Tagalog with one of my peers, most have said their parents never taught them for fear that they would be able to assimilate into American society. Although my parents never had that intention in mind, they never drove the language home either. So you must understand my amusement now that I have my own children, when my mother asks me if I have taught them Tagalog.

"Honey, are you speaking to Spaghetti and Meatball in Tagalog?" 
"Colonel, I don't know Tagalog that well maybe you can teach them."
"Oh, my dear! You do not know?"
"No, Colonel, you never really spoke to me in Tagalog so how can I know?"
"But we lived in the Philippines for a long time! How can you not know?!? Well, you just teach them what you know, okay? It's good for them to know, even just a little bit" 
"Um okay, Colonel, I'll try."

It's quite a conundrum "teaching" a language to my girls that I'm not too familiar with myself. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to teach it to them if I could speak fluently and I am trying my best to teach them any words/phrases that I do know. Studies show that raising a child in a bilingual household provide them with better mental development. But with what I know of Filipino, my girls nor I are nowhere near bilingual! It's a sad thing and I can't help but feel caught in the middle of another retaining the heritage challenge; slowly mourning the slow and agonizing death of the Filipino language in our family. It's not like they can listen to it all the time nor have someone fluent speak to them regularly. And you probably guessed it by now, Pretty Pants doesn't know the language, can barely make sense of his mother's own dialect (Pampanga) and has actually become one of my students of Broken Filipino as well. So I'm doing what I can to resist every step of the way through the interjection of Filipino words into our everyday life ("Meatball, where are your tsinelas?), finding some Filipino picture books, and reminding the Colonel and Rambo to speak to the girls in Filipino when they visit (which honestly lasts 10 seconds before they're back to English again). Maybe the Filipino language won't die in this generation after all.

Are you fluent in another language? Are you speaking to your children in another language other than English? Is it worth it?

decompress

Oh motherhood! It's a lot like going to work at times. There's good days, there's not so good days, there's a fair share of really, really bad days. The main difference, to me, is not the fact that you don't get paid monetarily for the job you do as a mother. It's the fact, that you really do take your work home with you around the clock. Unlike the 9-5 workday where you can leave your workplace and join your colleagues for happy hour, those happy "hours" have been replaced with dinner, bathtime and bedtime and none of those activities is about you.

Most days that is fine, because this is what you signed up for, right? But just like work, there is always that day. The day, where you'll tell your kids they don't need to take a bath today because they smell, "fine", you'll tell them they played too long so there is no time for a bedtime story because it's already late, or you look forward to 8:00pm because you know that's when they're supposed to be asleep Now that I'm a mother, I can remember times when the Colonel was just too darn exhausted from her day and would shut her door for the night. I've been guilty of quite of a few of these kinds of days in my "career" but have figured out that in order to stay "inspired and motivated", I must find make the time to decompress.

My favorite method of decompressing may not be for everybody. But I've realized that I enjoy silence and that I'm a bit of an introvert. I take 5 minutes after the girls are completely asleep (snoring asleep, not I just put them to bed and they're settling down asleep). I go to my living room, turn off the lights and just sit in silence on the couch. The sitting is very important because with all the lights out I have a higher chance of falling asleep if I lay down. So I sit, just perfectly still, listening to my breathing, the humming of the refrigerator in the kitchen or playing some classical piano on the iPod. Either way, I try to focus on just one sound to get centered and let the decompressing begin. Some like to call it meditation but for me decompressing just fits. Ever since I've incorporated this practice, I've found it easier to decompress on demand. Through the motherhood experience, you learn really fast to be flexible. If I don't have the space (my living room) nor the time (evenings) to decompress, I can easily find a few seconds of breathing at the playground, car, grocery store that make a world of difference when everything seems so chaotic and noisy.

What's your favorite way to decompress? How do you fit it into your schedule?

sandboxes: the unnecessary evil

It's quite challenging to have kids cooped up in the house all day, especially toddlers. There's only so much coloring, hiding and seeking, and watching episodes of Yo Gabba Gabba and Sesame Street that our 23 month old Spaghetti can do before she decides to venture into pulling pots out of the kitchen cabinet, unrolling the toilet paper or climb furniture. So to relieve her (and us) from cabin fever we try to get outside as much as we can. The other day, Pretty Pants and I took Spaghetti to Golden Gate Park Children's Playground to expend some of her energy.

She spent a good 45 minutes going down 3 slides she had in her rotation before her attention span started to dwindle. Noticing her restlessness, my husband and I redirected her attention to the swings across the park. "Look Spaghetti, look at the swings!! Whee!" As we made our way to the swings we crossed over children playing in the sand. Spaghetti was very curious about this scene as she dug her feet deeper and deeper into the grainy substance while we walked along. Just as she was about to pause to reach her hand out to actually touch the strange mass, Pretty Pants made one quick scoop to pick our daughter up in his arms and carry her to the swing. No sand for her, he glanced at me knowingly.

I don't know about you but I don't get the whole sandbox thing. Why are children so intrigued by it? What makes it fun? For me, it pretty much seems like quite a nuisance cleaning between crevices of your child's body already but after a romp in the sand? No thanks, I'll pass. It's bad enough that as parents we have to clean up after them on natural spills like poop and pee, acid reflux or spaghetti dribble. But really? Throwing your kid in the sand to let them become more dirty... I just don't get it. Not to mention the inevitable sand in the shoes, sand in the socks, sand surprising you in your car, that's a lot of sand!

The only place sand is good for is at the beach. It's the only place that makes sense. Living in Northern California, there's not much time spent on a warm beach. So I know that if we are going to the beach, that we're going to be there for a whole day and not just one quick jump in the sandbox. The trade off of time versus cleanup just makes sense to me at the beach. Allow your child to build sandcastles? Fine! Bury their bodies up to their necks in sand? Even better! Got some of that sand in your behind? Awesome, let me take you to the shore so we can rinse some of that off and if it's not completely clean there's a shower in the parking lot. Seriously, keep the sand where it belongs... on the beach.

the Meatball and the Grammys

As we were gearing up to start another week, the Meatball ran into our room this morning with one excited question, "Did Taylor Swift win after I went to bed???" Referring to her short lived viewing of the Grammys, the Meatball, her sister and I were one of the 25.8 million Americans that watched the Grammys last night. CBS had been advertising the annual awards event to tune in to see which female singer would take the most coveted prize in music, Album of the Year. With two little girls at home, I'm all about supporting female empowerment and watching dreams come true. So under my supervision, we watched the first hour of the Grammys (woo hoo bedtime was postponed for a whole hour!)

As we watched I fielded questions about Lady Gaga, interjected little lessons during performances and speech acceptances about how each of these artists had to work very hard for a very long time to get their award or nomination (Beyonce's story is a great example), and offered random words of encouragement anytime I saw the Meatball's eyes light up with excitement or start dancing around to a song she knew. (Subliminal message: You can do this too!)

Growing up, the Colonel and Rambo weren't so supportive of occupations that they deemed unstable. So even if I had created a whole stage show with programs, performing tunes from ABBA (sung and choreographed by moi) at the end of the show they would still remind me that although it was fun and nice, I needed to focus on my education. Now as a mother, I can see their perspective and how in this economy and society, financial and career stability has taken the forefront and seemingly only a select few succeed when following their dreams. I can now understand their worry of the risks and struggles one has to take in order to follow their dream. I only wished they communicated it a little better. Now as a parent, I try to support any glimpse of a dream I see unfolding, asking questions, creating dialogue, finding positive role models to encourage my girls to dive into things they are passionate about... of course after they've done their homework.  But Taylor Swift, a young girl herself, couldn't have said it better when she accepted the award for Album of the Year, "thank you Dad for all those times you said I could do whatever I wanted in life" and really that's what it's all about. As parents, there's only so much we can do to help, support, guide, counsel our children while we have them, the rest we just have to trust we did or are doing the best we can.