Mile-high Motherhood: How to breastfeed while piloting a plane
My daughter’s infant car seat had attached so nicely to the right front seat of my Mooney TLS single-engine airplane that our loving mother-daughter piloting adventures seemed meant to be.
Breastfeeding was crazy hard, but weaning is sad too
My son Conan is pretty much weaned now, at 13 months. It’s been about a week since he last nursed, and he’s perfectly happy without it. I have mixed emotions about it — on the one hand, it is SO liberating, but on the other hand it’s the end of a really close part of our relationship, a connection we will never have again. But time moves on, and my little guy is rapidly metamorphosing from a baby into a toddler.
Thinking back on my early experience of breastfeeding, the thing that really jumps out is that I never, NEVER believed that we would make it through a whole year…
I saw my birthdaughter, she loves me
I recently saw my daughter for the first time in about a year. She turned 6 this past fall, is going to school, and looks just like me. She calls me by my name. I think if she ever called me her mother, I’d cry as I corrected her. She may be my daughter, but I am not her active parent, her active mother. I am her birthmom — not as a derogatory term, but simply as a clarification. A different type of mother.
Calculated risk, or why I let my kid sleep on his stomach
I’m not stupid: I know that it’s recommended that infants sleep on their backs, and I understand why it’s recommended. SIDS is scary, terrifying stuff — and the fact it’s still mired in mystery means that there’s extra fear around it.
Stomach tattoo + pregnancy = ???
“I’m pregnant! …but what about my tattoo?” Ok, this was not my first thought, but as a bellydancer, it was an unavoidable one.
Slings, rings, and all these things — how baby wearing can save your sanity
I think kangaroos are definitely onto something! Aside from the Baby Bjorn, baby wearing was a completely new concept to me before having a child. I thought when I had a baby that I’d be able to lay him down on the floor with a toy and then go about my day as I always […]
Kids are portable
One of the promises that my husband and I made to ourselves when we talked about having children, was that we’d continue to satisfy our desire to travel. We looked forward to carting our future children around the country and around the world. Our 16 month old daughter has taken three trips in her life, […]
Our secular baby-welcoming ceremony
When our baby Gene was born, my partner Martin and I had already decided during our pregnancy that there was going to be no christening/baptism or anything along those lines as we simply didn’t go to church or follow a religion.
But we DID want to have some sort of ceremony. Here’s what we came up with…