I'm not the kind of parent I thought I'd be...

Everyone offers you advice when you're pregnant, or become a new parent. The one bit of advice I got that was true beyond the shadow of a doubt was from Chrissy, when she simply said "NEVER say never."

I asked all my friends their opinions on crib bumpers, strollers, diapers and formula. Of course they all had something different to say. I've discovered on my own that it doesn't matter what kind of diaper I use...Huggies, Meijer brand or cloth....they're all the same (The cloth need changing more often). The brand formula I use doesn't matter, so long as it's soy, he reacts the same way. Even nursing advice, because I've heard it all, and it all conflicts. What works for me does not work for others. Everyone is different, every baby is different and every preemie is different.

In the end, the only bit of advice I got that holds true for me, for us, is to never say never.

I said I'd never breastfeed. I swore I'd never co-sleep. I said I'd never use any kind of sling or baby backpack. I said I'd 'almost' definitely put him into the local public school. I said I'd never take him to Church. Turns out I was wrong on all of that.

We all know about the breastfeeding so there's no need to discuss that further. As for co-sleeping, I swore I'd never do it. All I need is some 8 yr old kid still in my bed! Babies need to sleep, on their own, in a crib, in their own room. That's how I saw it. My house isn't that big, it's a one story, it's no big deal for me to get up and go to his room to tend to him at night. I thought I'd roll over and smother him. I thought I'd get worse sleep with him in my bed with me. Wrong.

How we began to co-sleep was purely by accident. His first night home from the NICU I was concerned about his breathing so I wanted to sleep in the same room with him. I planned to sleep on the couch and have him in the pack-n-play. Instead we both fell asleep by accident on the couch. He was swaddled, in my arms, and the next thing I knew, it was 2am and he was hungry. (I was still exclusively pumping at that time)

I decided I loved sleeping with him in my arms. I could feel and hear him breathe and I loved having him that close to me. I thought, well, I'll do this for one more week. A week turned into a month. We eventually moved into the bed. Now he mostly sleeps throughout the night. If he gets hungry, I roll over on my side and nurse him back to sleep. It's great. I actually get MORE sleep this way, and so does he. In the mornings around 4am he gets fussy, so I hold him closer to my chest so he's warm and can hear my heartbeat, and he sleeps right on through until 6 or 7am that way.

When he loses his paci at night, I'm right there to stick it back in. I can do this 100 times during a night. If I were not right next to him, I'd be getting UP 100 times a night to put it back in for him, so yeah, I get more sleep and better sleep this way. My plan now is to co-sleep until I'm done breastfeeding, and Chris is on-board with this.

I was not going to be a marsupial mom. I dig strollers....that is until I realized what a royal pain in the butt they are. My stroller takes up my ENTIRE trunk, and it barely fits. We have to squeeze it in there so hard it's all cut up now. So the girls at my LLL group gave me a sling. I didn't want to use a sling because I simply thought it was stupid. I thought it'd KILL my neck and shoulder as I have serious neck and shoulder problems. Again, I was wrong.

When worn correctly, it does not hurt my neck or shoulder at all. My back now that's a different story (OUCH!). Keeping him close to me is wonderful. He's hardly ever fussy when he's in the sling. He almost always sleeps in there. My hands are free and I don't have to mess with a clunky stroller. (Once he's too big for the sling, I'll resume using the stroller, and on really long hikes, I'll use it too. I'm so happy Liz bought us this stroller and car-seat, I just wish I had a bigger trunk!). The only drawback is I have no stroller to stroll around my heavy-ass diaper bag...which means I have to carry it. ICK.

Not only is the sling convenient and comfy for us both, but he's so adorable in it! Dayton Ohio is not a really hippie-dippy kind of place. Not many people have seen slings here, so we get looks everywhere we go. Men, women, children all stop us to smile and tell me how adorable he is, and of course, he is adorable. ;-) YES, we get far more compliments in the sling than we do in the stroller. One of the joys of having a handsome child is showing him off. What can I say, this kid is darling.

Chris uses our baby back-pack to tote the little one around...yes, we're Attachment Parents! I didn't even know what that was 6 months ago, so I couldn't say I'd do it or not. Turns out, we do...and we don't really know why. We just enjoy having him close to us, at all times. At this age (14 weeks real, 7 weeks adjusted) they need that.

[http://www.askdrsears.com/html/10/t130300.asp] Of course there's pros and cons to all forms of parenting. We just decided to do what works best for us, and for us, this is it. Maybe it's because he's a preemie and we're extra cautious, maybe we'd been like this if he were full term, we'll never know.

Mom said it best yesterday. She said everyone will offer their opinions and their advice, whether is't wanted or not...but in the end, Chris and I need to do what decide to do. She had her kid, she raised her kid, now it's our turn. She does not agree with the whole breastfeeding, co-sleeping thing necessarily, but she knows it's safe the way we do it, and it's what we want to do. Her thing with the breastfeeding is, it's just too much work for me, and too challenging with all the problems we've had. She'd like my life to be more convenient.

Breastfeeding is not what she'd chose, but she made her choices when she had her baby. It's our baby and we'll raise him how we choose.

William and I have taken going to Church every week. If you read my earlier post on Church, and made it through to the VERY END, you'll understand why. Though I'm not a very religious person, and neither is Chris, we think it's good that William be exposed to some religion. We also decided to have him baptized Catholic. The class is at the end of the month and the ceremony is in September. So far William likes Church just fine. He's very well behaved, because he's slinged, and everyone as always gawks at him. It's 40 minutes a week I get to spend with him, massaging his back and hugging him close, it's just our little routine now.

We'll leave the homeschooling debate for another day.... ;-)

My thoughts on Church....

This blog entry has NOTHING to do with faith. It has to do solely with the actual, physical Church, the building itself and the experience one got in the building, not the religion in general.

I know more about religion than almost any other person I know. Why? Because I was very, very religious growing up and as a young adult. For reasons unknown to everyone including those who forced this upon me....I was raised Catholic....but attended a Lutheran school for ten years...ten formative years.

For those of you who don't know jack about the reformation it was started by a little known German monk dude named Martin LUTHER(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_luther)...hence the Lutheran Church...if any break-a-way Church is anti-Catholic, you can pretty much bet that the Lutherans are at the top of that list.

So I attended Lutheran school by day and Catholic Church on some weekends....Catechism for Communion was fun. I never understood why the Catholics hated the Protestants and why the Protestants hated the Catholics...I mean yeah, there was some selling of indulgences and stuff...but I was just a tad confused growing up.

Let me tell you a little something about my Catholic Church I attended growing up, Holy Family, in North Miami, Florida. (http://www.holyfamilynorthmiami.com/) You'll notice from the picture it looks like a rolled up receipt. That place was round, round and HUGE....very huge. The acoustics were great! You could hear every whimper from every baby, every second of every mass. The only thing I liked was the pipe organ. I still dig me a pipe organ.

Our Priests, never spoke good English. There were always hundreds of babies there, crying, so even if they did speak English I never heard a word they said. The only person who forced me to go was Mema...and Mema told me, and I believed her, that there was "no bathroom" in Church.

NEVER tell someone with a hyperactive bladder that there is no bathroom! I of course spent every second of Mass each time looking from my seat in the painful pew for a bathroom. I never did find it. I was not, of course, allowed to get up and look for it. I'm sure it existed...somewhere...somewhere in that void on that holy ground there had to be a bathroom!

So I equate Church with the pain of a full bladder and the fear of wetting ones self. Fun huh?

Our service was never short. It was long...over an hour. Mema liked to get there early too. I had to pee before the processional even started!

As a young Catholic, you sit, stand, and kneel and more importantly watch on as everyone gets up, stands in line, and gets their very own communion wafer. You wonder what it tastes like, and when you'll get to sample some. You attend classes to prepare for eating said wafer. Finally the day comes....you get up to the front of the line and the Monseigneur offers you the body of Christ and it tastes like.....stale puffed wheat...it also sticks to the roof of your mouth. You're not supposed to chew it, or dig at it once it's stuck with your finger, so it lingers...stuck....for a pretty good period of time.

Despite all that, it's still fun. You're finally a real member of the Church. You're practically an adult! So you almost look forward to sitting with a full bladder while babies scream and Priests from the eastern block talk about the same stuff every week....until your Mema tells you another tall-tale...."You can't have communion if you missed the prior week of Church."

This is bogus and there was nothing I could do. As neither Mema nor I had a car, we had to rely on others to drive us to Church...and others NEVER drove us two Sundays in a row! SO....I never got Communion again until twenty six years later....after Mema was dead and I actually at my own will entered a different Catholic Church. Guess what? I did not implode! Nor did I spontaneously combust...nor did I burst into flames....nor did the wafer poison my throat.

So now when I think of Church, I think of full bladders and starvation! Oh, and back pain. Why? Because I have mild scoliosis. Did anyone in my family tell me? NO! LOL! I thought it was normal to gimp around with a bent and bruised spine my entire life. Spending every week in my Lutheran Church at school, seated in wooden pews and then what seemed like every 'other' Sunday at Catholic Church did a number on my spine. All that wood rubbing up against me for years and years meant I had a perpetual cut and bruised spine. Don't get me started on my knees! YES, what 12 yr old has bad knees? Well, me.

I'm a klutz. I bang my knees, often! One in particular, my right, gets banged badly, every two years or so. Four years ago I managed to crack the darn thing. That was fun. I wore a knee brace for years in my 20s...kneeling was not an option. Okay so now Church equals full bladders, starvation, back bruising and knees that pop so loud when I kneel even the Priest who speaks no English stops yapping and the babies stop crying.

Then there is the boredom. Here's how my Church went....pipe organ, my favorite part, processional, always made the hairs on my arms stand up...song, some muttering in a foreign tongue, a reading from the book of who knows because all I hear is the baby behind me screaming at the top of it's heathen lungs, some more talk by the Priest who I couldn't hear, another song that I couldn't sing but thankfully the choir could, step class...and then...the story of Communion.

It was the same story every week, obviously, it'd not changed in 2000 years. It took 30 minutes to tell. A wafer would be held up to the sky light over the alter, a bell would be rung by a alter boy, then the blood of Christ would get held up, another bell...then some stinky incense would be released thus gassing us all nearly to death. Then 2000 people who I know for a FACT did not attend the Mass the week prior got up and took their Communion while I was forced to kneel on bad knees and NOT take the Communion I worked so hard to earn because the week prior our ride fell through!

All I would think about was a toilet...which was easy to do as our Church was so plain. See, Church's are supposed to be beautiful, right? Ours was......plain...........minimalist..........it was decorated by Ikea I think. Red carpet...tan walls....and the gorgeous stained glass windows? Um no. These were solid colored stained glass cubes scatted throughout the circular building. The colors were red, blue or green, and since there were no walls really they were just...there...in no particular order. I always wanted to sit in the front but Mema liked the back. The back was good because I could stake out a path to a potential albeit fictitious bathroom that way but the front would have a nicer and different view of the skylight over the alter, and closer to the choir. But no, never happened.

Fast forward many years. Ohio is a very Catholic state. They say that most people in SW Ohio are Catholic, yet I'm surrounded by Protestant Churches. I did some research and found a Catholic Church in my town, my very small town. It was founded in the mid 1800's...so, it's old! It's older than dirt! Unlike the rolled up receipt, this one looks traditional, with dark brown brick and real stained glass windows.

For reasons I won't mention, I made a promise that I'd attend Church one Sunday if something 'good' was done for me, which it was, so I went.

First I was struck by its size. It's tiny! Very tiny! I'd never been in such a small Church before. I thought all Catholic Churches were gigantic....nope! Second, it was gorgeous! The walls inside were a subtle gray and there were beautiful stained glass windows, mostly blue in color, with events from the bible depicted in them. Same painful wooden pews of course...oh, and the kneeling. LOL...which now I cheat and lop my butt onto the pew...(yes I said butt and pew) and fake kneel, I doubt anyone will care.

There were babies but the acoustics made it so they didn't dominate the sounds. There was no pipe organ! Shame...no room for it! There was...........a piano.....a dude with an electric guitar and....a drummer. Yup...their very own Tommy Lee. I was...shocked. The Priest, was American, and happy...he smiled...a lot! He waved to everyone. Despite its size the place probably holds 200 people or so, and he seemed to know a lot of them.

Yeah we sang some song, well they sang, I don't sing...some dude read from the Bible....and then the Priest talked....about.....well I don't even recall on that day as it was three yrs ago, but he talked and he was funny. He talked about normal every day stuff and in the end tied it into Christian doctrine. Then, some people carried the wafer down the aisle to him...and he read another passage and everyone got up to eat. No long drawn out story, the same story....no bells, no incense. Is this a Catholic Church? I assure you it was!

I stood up and after not attending Church in 7 yrs and I took Communion. I even gave a dollar in their "beg" basket. Then, it was over! We sang a song and poof, done! Forty whole minutes! I was shocked. I thought to myself, wow, that wasn't bad, not bad at all!

I went again last weekend, with William. I was terrified he'd cry and ruin everything for everyone. Instead he farted. Man what I would have given for those incense. We sat in the last row, at the end of the pew...the painful pew which killed my spine and tail bone....there was standing room only behind us, all of them no doubt staring at my gorgeous baby, who I wore in a sling, nice and snug.

I once again took that wafer! I listened as the Priest talked about the importance of fathers, it was after all Father's Day. Father Manning is a plump man of older age. He smiled, a lot and had great stage presence. It was obvious he wanted to be there. He was happy to be there. He made jokes and smiled and laughed....I thought it was a sin to smile in a Catholic Church.

So, in the end, after all those years...I thought I hated the Catholic Church. No, I thought I hated Church in general. Turns out...I didn't hate the Catholic Church....I just hated 'that' Catholic Church. The one that I'd always gone too....

Still though, despite my going to a different Church, I never did find the bathroom....