The Agony and the Ecstasy of the Third Trimester

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

Note: I started this essay before Little Bird was born, but thought I’d finish it off even though the third trimester is now thoroughly over! Content note: pregnancy loss / miscarriage, pregnancy complications

The Agony and Ecstasy of the Third Trimester

The most dreaded era of pregnancy: the third trimester. But even though it could be a slog at times, my third trimester was also the best part of my whole pregnancy.

Of course, I dealt with a variety of physical discomfort. From retaining enough fluid that my wedding ring hadn’t fit for months to the baby being in possibly the least comfortable positions possible, it was damn painful. I think he enjoyed sitting on my kidneys and doing upside down push-ups on my hip bones. The Braxton hicks contractions – oh, the Braxton Hicks! The “irritable uterus,” where it gets ineffably hard for long periods at a time, made its return. The lack of sleep was a killer, especially the fact that I woke up every time I tried to turn over.

But despite all that, my mental and emotional health was much more solid than it was any other time in my pregnancy.

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Easter: Candy, Eggs and Grace

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

Easter_ Candy, Eggs and GraceThis Easter is a little different from usual, as we’ve never had a week-old baby around while celebrating it. Sprout was almost a year old by the time of his first Easter, so he had a bit more comprehension of the world by then.  At this point, Little Bird is strictly interested in eating, sleeping, and pooping. He’s hardly awake enough to register anything else.

But we still have a near three-year-old who is more than aware of the idea of candy, even if the concept of the Christian resurrection is beyond him. Fortunately, both we and the grandparents were more than willing to oblige his interest in sweets. He’s also old enough to do crafts, especially after a successful color-mixing activity during the blizzard, so egg-dyeing was a definite must.

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Guest Post at Good Mother Project: Unexpected Complications

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Trigger Warning: Miscarriage, pregnancy loss, pregnancy complications

As I mentioned a few months ago, I had some significant complications with my pregnancy. In my tenth week, I had substantial bleeding – enough to go to the emergency room.  I recount this experience in a guest post called Unexpected Complications at the Good Mother Project, from the initial discovery to the lifting of the restrictions.  (This essay was originally written over a month ago, so we now know that the true resolution was actually wonderful.)

At the ten-week mark in my pregnancy, I was lying on the living room couch, still recovering from putting my toddler son to bed. Suddenly, I felt a bubble and then wetness. Running to the bathroom, I saw blood. My breath faltered and then emerged in gasps.

Read the rest of the post at the Good Mother Project.

Welcome to the World, Little Bird

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

Babies are incredible at beautifully mucking up whatever plans you have for them. While his brother was five days late, our new munchkin arrived on Friday, a full three and a half weeks early! (I had been telling everyone, “Well, even if he’s earlier than his brother, he’ll still just be on time.” Ha!) Of course, I had been telling Sprout that his brother would arrive in spring, “when the flowers start blooming and the trees get their buds.” I thought with unseasonably warm weather, that the baby would be late weeks in comparison, but he turned out to be right on time.

Welcome to the World, Little Bird!

Despite him arriving much earlier than planned and faster than anticipated, both of us are doing well. (His birth was actually a bit dramatic, but I’ll tell that story later.) He was a little on the small side, but is eating fairly regularly. He’s a lot more sleepy than his brother was, but that’s common for early babies and Sprout slept very little for a newborn anyway. Sprout stayed with a friend during the delivery, but was thrilled when Chris’s parents arrived and showed him the picture of his brother and I. I was worried he would be negative – and there’s still plenty of time for mixed feelings – but it was a good sign.

But the baby’s entrance threw me for a loop, planning wise. Thankfully, we have most of the essentials for him – crib, mattress, sheets, clothes, car seat, changing pad – although we’re still waiting on his rocking chair to be delivered. But there are a couple of items at work I really wanted to wrap up before leaving for 10 weeks. And I had a whole schedule of blog posts that I intended to write and have here at the ready. So much for that idea.

Considering all that, it’s going to be a bit quiet around here for a while, even though it won’t be so quiet in our house.

Most importantly, welcome to the world, my beautiful baby boy, my Little Bird.

Green Kids: A Toddler’s Guide to Starting Seeds

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 14 Comments

A Toddler's Guide to Seed Starting

Our yard would be mostly vegetable garden if its topography and Chris’s aesthetic preferences allowed me to do so. As it is, we have a modest but productive 10X15 garden in the back. While I could fill it with seedlings from the farmers’ market, my thriftiness and DIY-aesthetic motivated me to learn how to start everything from seed a few years ago. So every spring, I flip through the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange catalog, order too much, and start the long process of bringing up seedlings. Except this year, I have a helper. Sprout – true to his nickname – joined me to start planting this past weekend.

Sprout also “helped” start seeds last year, although that was more about introducing him to gardening than him actually being useful. This year, I still could have done it faster and with less of a mess by myself, but he did actually contribute.

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Exploring Wonder at the Renwick Gallery

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

I’m a fan of “big art” – sculptures that fill entire rooms, take up your entire scope of vision, and make you lose yourself inside of.  So when I heard about the Renwick Gallery’s  Wonder exhibition, I knew we had to go. Nine rooms, each featuring a thematically and physically large piece designed to provoke wonder, hit all of my aesthetic buttons. While bringing a little kid to an art museum is always a bit of a crapshoot, I hoped that Sprout would enjoy it as well.

Arriving at the museum on Saturday, we found that we were in luck – we happened to come on the Smithsonian art museums’ Family Fun Day. While people have generally been welcoming when we’ve brought him to art museums in the past, this just added an extra layer of normalcy and acceptance.

Sculpture made of sticks

From the museum’s formal lobby, we entered the first room, filled with sculptures crafted out of sticks collected from the forest floor. Weaving our way around, it evoked the feeling of being somewhere ancient, hidden and enchanted. It was a fairy tale wonderland, a place where gnomes or huge, intelligent birds might make their home. In fact, we actually used children’s stories to relate it to Sprout. We remarked, “This is what Big Bird’s nest might be like!” and “Doesn’t this remind you of the second house in the Three Little Pigs?” (Although he might not have fully understood the point of that story – he said he would like to live in a house made of sticks. Of course, if they were this lovely, perhaps I would too.)

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What I’m Reading This Week

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

This week, I was a little obsessed with the foibles of small children, the terror that is Donald Trump, smart growth, and black history.

Sprout has his baffling moments in terms of eating – he oddly turned down pasta the other night! – but he’s nothing on Designer Daddy’s kid, who’s managed to eat toenails, sleeves, bathwater, and 16 other things since the last time he ate a vegetable.

With a second kid coming, I’m concerned about being overwhelmed by the number of toys we have. My friend Heather at A Walking Mama, who has three kids, has some nifty tips for keeping toys manageable: Part I and Part II.

Because the weather has been so warm, we’ve been trying to get outside as much as possible. While it’s actually hard for us to stargaze because of the city lights, this article from the Children and Nature Network has some great tips about star watching with kids.

Donald Trump as President scares the crap out of me. Besides his policies, even his rhetoric is poisoning our schools and children’s perspectives (Washington Post).

But when I’m scared of something, I’d rather laugh at it rather than cower in the corner. Lunarbaboon’s cartoon makes me chuckle, but what really cracks me up is Sprout saying, “Donald Grump has all the garbage.” (Okay, yes, it’s definitely because I’ve let him watch this clip from Sesame Street multiple times. No less funny.)

One of the best weapons against hatred is celebrating both what makes us the same and what makes us different. While Black History Month was in February, I was catching up with reading a “lost” Martin Luther King Jr. speech from 1964 (Democracy Now). I also watched a showing of the great play The Meeting about an imagined meeting between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

How we design our cities has a huge effect on how we live. Requiring businesses install a certain amount of parking hurts everyone who doesn’t drive, including our neighbors with the lowest incomes (Washington Post). Momentum Magazine has a breakdown of the Alliance for Bicycling and Walking’s impressive benchmark report, with lots of information on who bikes and walks and where.

And A Letter to You reminds us all that we’re fabulous (Five Kids is a Lot of Kids).

A Day in the Life During the Third Trimester

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

Life is very different in the third trimester of pregnancy than it is during any other time in life. Here’s a bit of insight into how a normal day has been going for me:

A Day in the Life During the Third Trimester1:00 AM: Wake up to go to the bathroom.

3:00 AM: Wake up again to go to the bathroom. Scoop water into my mouth with my eyes closed because I’m inordinately thirsty.

6:35 AM: Alarm blares. Attempt to turn over. Eventually flop onto back, then wiggle onto my right side and lurch my legs over the side of the bed.

6:43 AM: Catch a glimpse of my hands. Realize that my left hand is currently three times fatter than the right. Stupid fluid retention.

6:45 AM: Get in the shower. Thank God for solitude and hot water.

7:05 AM: A little voice cries “Mommy mommy mommy!” After checking to see if Sprout’s pajamas are damp (this child does 90% of his peeing at night), lift him up and change his diaper. Send him into our bedroom to wake up my husband.

7:10 AM: Peek into the bedroom to see them snuggling in bed. Climb under the sheets for a few moments of wiggly bliss.

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What I’ve Been Reading This Week

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

This week, I was a little obsessed with parenting better (as always), cultural appropriation of food (and my white, white guilt), trans issues, and sustainability.

Are you teaching kids how to make good decisions? Here’s how to be sure (A Fine Parent): A Fine Parent has loads of great articles talking about positive parenting. This has a great breakdown on steps to take to teach the skills needed for good decision-making.

I Raised My Glass to the Moon (Five Kids is a Lot of Kids): Beth Woosley has a lovely, honest, hilarious voice. Some of her article make me laugh, some make me choke up. This is a mix of both.

Sniff (Lunar Baboon): Awesome comic about parenting and life, expressing a lovely moment through the generations.

A Guide for People Who Suck at Mindfulness (Rants from Mommyland): This is why I want to throw my phone across the room when I listen to the “mindfulness” app.

Babies (XKCD): What he gives actually is a pretty good response to seeing a baby.

 

Help Your Child to Wonder (Rachel Carson): As an environmental communicator, Rachel Carson is one of my icons. So I was thrilled to find out that she wrote an article way back in 1956 about exploring nature with her nephew. Also, the sentiments she describes and advice she gives still ring terribly true.

Life in a refugee camp (Yes and Yes): A very different perspective on refugee camps from last week (Syrian refugee camp in Jordan), from someone who visited this one because her students’ families were actually in it.

How It Feels When White People Shame Your Culture’s Food – And Then Make It Trendy (Washington Post): “I tried to pretend the blue fish swimming around in the murky green water were pets, but the lack of tank accessories gave away our true intentions, stunning my white friends.”

Craving the Other: One Woman’s Beef with Food and Cultural Appropriation: (Bitch Media): This is another great article on the subject and has some particularly icky examples of it, perhaps most unfortunately from Alton Brown.

Take the Red Pill: The Truth Behind the Biology of Sex (Disrupting Dinner Parties): While many people agree that gender is socially determined, even your sex is less black and white than it seems.

Here’s What’s Okay (And Not Okay) to Say to a Trans Person – Once and For All (Everyday Feminism): Trans people are just becoming more prominent in society, but people still ask them things that they would never ask cis-people (people who aren’t trans). Here’s a quick guide to simply showing respect.

Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic and radical (Boing Boing): I don’t know if I agree with this – I think we do have to seriously lighten up on the consumerism aspect of American society – but definitely an intriguing, unquestionably Marxist approach to sustainability.

 

 

Super-Exclusive We’ll Eat You Up, We Love You So Swag

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

Yes, the blog has swag! Except that it’s so exclusive that I’m the only one that has it. While I would love to say that t-shirts are here, in reality, it’s a single, amazing t-shirt. For my birthday, my friend Teresa designed and hand screen-printed the most thoughtful gift I’ve received in a long time. She captured so many wonderful things: Max riding on a Wild Thing’s back, the bicycle with a kid’s trailer, and even a baby in the trailer! And the shirt is my favorite color. (Weirdly, it’s much brighter in person.) I was flabbergasted when I opened it.

IMG_2943

Astonishingly, it wasn’t the first time I was flabbergasted on this specific birthday. On the actual day of my birthday, I had to be into work a bit early for a conference call. Opening my door afterwards, I almost walked into crepe paper hanging down from it. Then I saw the same someone had brought in brownies and scones. While I was on my call, my friend Natalie had snuck around so quietly that I didn’t hear her at all! It reminded me of the other girls getting their lockers decorated for their birthdays in high school, except no one ever did that for me. So to have someone do it as an adult was terribly sweet and unexpected.

Feeling that support and love from my friends was actually one of the reasons I was so hopeful and confident in the post about my birthday. Especially in a time of big transitions, we’re so blessed to be surrounded by people who love us so much.