Those 9 to 5 birth days

Yesterday I was at the office doing prenatals. I got a call from one of our due-any-time ladies telling me her water just broke. It's baby #4 for her. She never had a labor start that way. She said she was having one contraction every 15 minutes. I offered to come out, or to send an apprentice. She told me she was fine, she'd call back if she needed me.

About a half hour later her husband calls me back. -You need to come now.

All right. The apprentice and I jumped in the car and drove out to her town as fast as I could. We arrived in about 30 minutes. Found her upstairs on a birth ball, really rocking hard labor. The apprentice set up efficiently and quickly as this mama started going, Uuuugggggggmph!

Really? So soon? I sat with her for a couple contractions. Yes indeed, she was pushing, with shorts on.

Her husband and I helped her get her shorts off and get onto the bed. Once there, she started pushing in earnest. She crowned this baby out so beautifully, with so much control. So often, a mama who has had a few babies will blast them out (or really have no choice in the matter). This baby just poured out slowly. It was such a lovely, peaceful birth. A sweet little girl born 29 minutes after we walked in the door.

The mama was a little shocked and overwhelmed. Previously, her shortest labor had been 9 hours. This labor was 1 1/2 hours! Being her 4 th baby though, the after-cramps were nearly worse than labor itself. The immediate postpartum period went well. I was home by 3:30pm.

So strange to attend a birth in the middle of the day, just as part of my day. As you all know, normally one comes home from a birth exhausted, hungry and with dirty hair. :) But I actually arrived home at the time I said I would be home (canceled a meeting to attend the birth). I was able to pick up my daughter at the appointed time from a play date, and get my MIL to the airport in time.
But when it finally came time to lay down for the night, I couldn't wait. I was suddenly exhausted. Even the most peaceful births bring on a bit of adrenalin, especially if I'm trying to set up and find gloves in a hurry. It caught up with me at bedtime and I was thrilled to be in my own bed, asleep in minutes.

American Girl, the bane of my existence

An American Girl doll.
My daughter has been asking for one for the last 3 years. I've been saying, "Sweetheart, those dolls cost $100. That's a lot of money, especially for a doll."

Last year, our daughter received the cheaper, and exactly the same Target version of the doll for her birthday. The Our Generation doll cost $25, and additional outfits come in at around $10, as opposed to the American Girl doll's clothes that average around $38 a freaking outfit. I infrequently shop clearance racks for my clothes, I'm not sure any one outfit totals $38 (except for my shoes,of course).

My mother and mother-in-law have gifted our daughter with accessories for her now 2 Our Generation dolls. She's got a lot of fun gear for them. Still, they are not American Girl dolls. Her friends have the real deal. A couple friends have 2 or 3 American Girls!

It pains me. The cost for a doll like this is so excessive. It's ridiculous. It's still made in China just like the Target version, only a bigger profit is made.
The Grrrr! in me just says, Ugh. It's just so damn bougie.


I've been able to hold off for 3 years. For one, I thought my daughter was too young to have such an expensive doll. And I would totally lose my shit if I found her wet and moldy after being left under a bush-fort in the back yard after a downpour. Two, I didn't want her to have one of these dolls if she wasn't into the books. The books after all, are quite good. I like them, even if they are a little ahem, a little too Americana at times.

But she reads the books now. Her friends know the stories behind the dolls and they all act this stuff out. They thoroughly enjoy playing with their dolls. My daughter and her friends are good kids with great imaginations. I'm thrilled that at the age of very-soon-to-be NINE (holy cow!), our daughter still loves to play dolls, to pretend, and to just be a kid.

The clincher though: after many months of begging for an A.G. doll, S said to us as she longingly flipped through the worn A.G. catalog for the umpteenth time, "If I could get any doll I wanted, I'd get Ruthie."

This made me stop. Ruthie is not one of the top-of-the-list dolls. She's a friend to one of the top-of-the-list dolls. She's a second-best. She's not uber hip. She's not fancy pants in some crazy outfit. She's just a doll. And her name is Ruthie.

I had an Aunt Ruthie.My mother's sister. Besides me, she was the only blond in the family (either side, for me)for a couple generations. People used to think I was her daughter, and as a kid, I liked that. Ruthie was hilarious and light-hearted and as a kid, I would've been thrilled to be her daughter. She passed away at the age of 37 of breast cancer, leaving behind two daughters and a husband.

I've never told my daughter about my Aunt Ruthie. I don't even have contact with my cousins (Ruthie's daughters). It was just a little coincidence that tweaked my heart.

I'll probably order little Ruthie next week, in all her bougie glory. For the love of my daughter who has chosen this humble little character, and for the love of the name Ruthie and all that it means to me.

Smores and a Circus

More Smores. With a couple little friends over, we watched the bats swoop crazily low and loaded up on sugar 20 minutes before bedtime. It's pictures like these that I will look at to feel better about the state of things come mid-January when the ground is frozen white and absolutely nothing is growing except a few paltry houseplants.

And that scrappy, dark, out-of-focus picture of a tiny woman on an elephant?
Well, we also had a circus come to our fair city yesterday. My daughter has been able to read for a few years now, but she usually seems fairly oblivious to signs around us. However, thanks to good promoting, she's been bugging the crap out of us for two weeks asking, is it August 7th yet?!
I really hemmed and hawed over going. After all, circus animals depress me to no end. When I was nine I went to Barnum and Bailey at Joe Louis Arena. It was a very glamorous thing to go to downtown Detroit at nighttime and I was very excited. But as soon as I saw the guy walking behind the elephants with a sharp pointed metal stick, it dawned on me that living in the circus must really suck compared to living in a jungle in Asia. From that point on, I think I spent the rest of the circus watching the faces of the animals and wishing I could hatch some heroic escape plan for them all. God knows where they'd go to from Joe Louis Arena.
(Speaking of Joe Louis, did I ever mention that my grandfather was a non-successful boxer? Story goes that he got into the ring with the Joe Louis and was pummeled. Our family still holds onto that with pride. It doesn't matter that he was pummeled, he got to be in the ring with Joe.)

At any rate, the other Aagh! Factor of going to the circus is the price. I knew it wouldn't be cheap. Times are tight right now. My husband's job is connected with The Big (or growing smaller) 3, and July is our slimmest month due to many days of being called off work for there being no work. This is largely in part of "summer shut down"-- when the plants close down to re-do the lines for the next year's models. And then there's me. The big MANA conference is in October in Traverse City and my midwifery partner and I are on the planning committee. This means we'll both be in Traverse. This means we had to block out an entire month of taking any clients to insure that we could be pretty much off call for those 4 days without interruption.
So we're definitely feeling the crunch.

But we have to go to the circus, Mom!

Okay. We called friends to see who was coming. All the mamas seemed to take a big breath and say, Hell with it, we'll go. It better be good.
We packed our backpacks with water bottles and threatened the kids not to ask for anything. No popcorn, toys, light up, poke-your-eye-out rotating flashlights, and no elephant rides!
And we started walking to the park.
I must say it felt really, really good to see just how many families live in Ypsiville. Because it's a small college town, it always feels like the halfway house residents and college kids out-number the families and children. I joked with a friend that walking down the hill towards the Big Tent looked like a scene from Music Man. Very wholesome and happy.
It cost us $36 for the 4 of us to enter. As I was forking over my very hesitant cash, we noticed a small horse laying on the ground. To my knowledge, horses don't normally lay on the ground in direct sunlight.
"Has that horse foundered?" I asked my farm-escapee friend.
"Hmmm, doesn't look good, does it? I had a horse that liked to lay down for naps, but not many of them do."

It felt like a bad sign, seeing that young horse laying down. But to our surprise, it was a pretty darn good circus! More people-centric than animal. Really only a few dogs, 3 elephants and 2 horses in the show. Of course there was the intermission elephant rides that I absolutely refused to pay for which caused my daughter to brood for the entire 15 minutes. The smaller kids were great and stayed in their seats most of the time.

We left feeling good. We also left the tent to find a huge storm rolling in. Beautiful gray clouds and strong, cold winds. Lovely! It's been so dry this past month. The front yard is yellow from all the grass dying. The coneflowers are blackened from being sun scorched. We weren't 5 minutes walking distance from the circus when the downpour began. The kids laughed and screeched and we ran home, completely soaked. The rain only lasted 20 minutes or so, but it was really heavy. Things are looking a little greener this morning. And the garden finally got a good soaking.

Good times, after all.