Every pregnancy is different, they say. Just as every child is different. 

My personal experience with pregnancy is that each of mine aren't really that different from each other.

Except that with each subsequent pregnancy, the degree of misery I've experienced in my first trimester has increased exponentially. 

The thing that threw me for a loop this pregnancy was that around week 32, when the baby should start thinking about turning head down, this one didn't. At week 32, at the recommendation of my midwife, I began religiously doing the five exercises she advises to keep the pelvic bones loose, open and baby-head friendly. Those exercises are as follows: 

1) The cat/cow maneuver (a yoga move)

2) Drawing figure 8's with my hips while on hands/knees

3) Figure 8s with hips while standing

4) squats and

5) lunges.

As the weeks clicked by and I could tell this baby was still head up, although extremely active, I started getting nervous. Obviously, as the baby gets bigger, the amount of room it has to move about lessens and it becomes more likely to stick in whatever position it is in.

I have also learned from my midwives that with each subsequent pregnancy, it's more common for a baby to remain head-up longer, simply because there's more room in the uterus. The uterus has been here before and as a result, the baby just can move about more, and later. Most midwives take a proactive approach beginning around week 32 (with hip opening exercises, etc) and ramp up the interventions as the due date approaches.

As a side note, one main difference between care from a midwife versus an obstetrician is that midwives do lots of Leopold's maneuvers, which is the process of manually determining the baby's position in the uterus. Most OBs do very little of this. Most midwives do this as soon as the baby is big enough to feel. And at each visit, they keep a record of how the baby is positioned and whether that changes, etc. 

A few weeks ago, I got really nervous. I could feel a little ball of a head up under my ribs, and although I would wake up in the middle of the night to feel that ball of a head at a 3:00 or 9:00 position, and occasionally at a 5:00 position, every morning it would pop back up to 12:00. Grrr. 

I found a website called Spinningbabies.com, which is all about things you can do to help a baby get into optimal positioning for birth. Turning posterior babies anterior...turning breech babies head down...

It was extremely informative and with the ok of my midwife, I started implementing more of those interventions:

Elephant walking, inversions on an ironing board, headstands in the pool, continuing my daily swims, elevated hip positions...on top of my regular visits to my chiropractor which is a highly recommended thing for all pregnant woman. Misalignments in your pelvic and hip bones can contribute to posterior babies and breech babies. Just an FYI.

I should not leave out here that first and foremost, I've been praying that God would position this baby properly for a natural delivery. A c-section was/is the last thing I wanted.

In the world of breech babies, there is a timeline for taking action. 

About week 32, you begin (or continue) all your hip-opening activities.

Between weeks 34-35, there is something called Moxibustion which has statistically proven to be highly effective at turning breech babies.

If at week 37, baby is still breech, you typically get an ultrasound to determine baby position, location of the placenta and then you attempt to manually turn the baby. This is called External Cephalic Version, and it happens to be something my midwife is adept at. Look it up on youtube sometime....it's kind of crazy to watch it being done. 

Anyway, about a week ago, I kept coming across the whole Moxibustion thing. It was something I'd vaguely heard of, but didn't know much about. It's an acupuncture treatment, minus the needles.  It involves burning a stick (like an incense cigar) of moxa (mugwort root) just to the outside of your pinkie toes, pointing the heat at a specific spot (Bladder 67) which has been proven to impact the baby's movement in the uterus. Now, I could have gone to an acupuncturist, but really didn't want to pay for a visit, so I researched moxibustion on my own and ended up buying some moxa sticks on Amazon. They're really inexpensive! Studies indicate moxibustion has a 75% effectiveness rate of turning a breech baby compared to a 50% rate of babies turning on their own. Not a bad stat. And more importantly, it was non-invasive and couldn't hurt anything.

A week ago Friday, my moxa sticks arrived and that evening, Kyle became my Moxa Man! I got in a comfy position on our bed and made sure the kids wouldn't accidentally bump Kyle and scorch my poor pinkie toes. Then he lit the moxa stick, using a candle, and alternated holding the stick at the outside edge of each of my pinkie toes for 5 minutes at a time, for a total of 20 minutes. This is gonna sound so weird, but the minute he got the stick close enough to my toe to feel the heat, the baby literally lurched. It continued to squirm and wiggle over the 20 minutes. After that, I went to bed. 

They recommend you use the moxa sticks before bed because if a baby is going to turn, it's more likely to do so while you're sleeping.  Ha! That night, the baby was so active it was almost impossible to sleep at all.  I kid you not. The baby moved ALL NIGHT LONG.  I couldn't say that I felt it had turned or anything...it just moved a lot. A whole lot.

We continued the moxibustion treatment Saturday night and Sunday night and I had my 36 week home visit with my midwives on Monday. I also had my 36 week required visit with a nurse practitioner midwife that same morning. The NP couldn't say for certain, but she was pretty confident she was feeling a head down baby. Later that afternoon at my home visit, my other three midwives palpated the dickens out of my belly and all of them concurred that the baby was head down. I can't tell you the relief I felt hearing them all agree on this matter. I still need to be proactive in helping the baby find that happy spot and engage in the pelvic bones, but just not feeling that distinctly round little head up by my ribs is a HUGE weight off my shoulders.

So, if you're ever in a position where you have a breech baby, or know someone who does, reassure them that there is a whole range of things that you can do to promote turning.  There are circumstances where the baby just won't or can't turn and a C-section is, unfortunately (in this state anyway) unavoidable. But for the most part, there are options and possibilities and you just never know what might be the catalyst. I'd start with prayer and an active recruitment of prayer warriors.  And in addition, keep an open mind to proven techniques.  Was it moxibustion in our case? Hard to say....but I'm definitely not the skeptic I once was.  

I realize it's been awhile since I've posted anything, and I have to say it's because I find my days slipping by all too quickly these past few weeks. 

We started our homeschooling year a little earlier than normal, and just finished our third week. Which means that, to quote Calvin and Hobbes, "The Days are Just Packed." Ah, and not to be completely overlooked, I even turned 36 since I last posted (on the 24th of August). See? Too busy to even make note of my own birthday!

So far, so good on the school front. Even Dorien enjoys "doing school" although that just means he sits beside me when I read to the kids and then tries to steal the kids' workbooks or their pencils or their chairs. He just wants to feel included, even though he has no idea how to do what they're doing. It's just being in the middle of it that matters most to him. Or being Thor, as the opportunity presents itself.

 

He's also a good stool carrier. Whatever may be said about Dorien, he is a superb helper. Always ready to do anything I need. With a cheerful, "Ok!"

The past two weeks, my kids have been learning about Loyalty while studying the Great Horned Owl and the Canadian Goose.  It's a win-win. Science and nature combined with a practical Biblical lesson. In fact, after the animal lessons, there are Biblical stories in which the character traits are further demonstrated. 

In other family events, after 7 years of living in this house and watching the wisteria vines continue to wrap up across our driveway and into the huge oak in our front yard, we made the difficult decision to cut the chord.  We severed the connection between the wisteria in the tree and the wisteria on the ground.  

What this means now is that we now have a huge snarly mess of dead wisteria vines dangling most unattractively from our oak tree.  What this also means is that our oak tree is no longer condemned to death by suffocation. Eventually, we hope to re-shape the wisteria left in our yard over a pergola of some sort. There's no way the stuff (which is at LEAST as old as this house (ca. 1935)) is going to die, it's just a matter of channeling it into something pleasing to the eye. Instead of a snarly mess of vines that bloom magnificently a mere 2 weeks out of the year. One of those fun home-owner decisions you occasionally have to make.

On that fateful day the wisteria lost its grip on our oak, my little brood was all to happy to help their Daddy haul branches and vines to the street. They even made a temporary Tarzan vine that let them swing around our front yard.

Another thing I've incorporated into our school curriculum this year is a weekly "Nature Hour" where we take our sketch books outside and work on drawing things from nature. This past Friday, we let our chickens roam the backyard and followed them around to sketch them. 

Brooklyn poses by my raised bed, which has one lone occupant - a mango seed that sprouted out of our compost pile.  I plopped it into the bed, covered it with more compost and the little guy is thriving. 

Here, our chickens slowly venture outside the familiar haven of their pen into the wild beyonds of our yard.

Aesop, our cat, attempts to stalk them. He wasn't very subtle. Or effective. 

He did get the beady eye from several bold hens.

Here's Minnie, one of our Auracana-Americana's (Easter egg layers) bounding off across the yard in search of bugs and adventure!

These ladies of mine are so social. They love to visit with me, and as soon as I peek into their henhouse, several of them race up the ramp to come up and see what I see. 

Here's Rosie, one of my Rhode Island Reds, hanging out in an egg box. She laid one of those eggs, but not all three. Sometimes, I have to open the egg box and poke around under the roosting hens to see what they've produced for the day. 

A close up of two freshly laid eggs in an egg box.

 The egg factory is officially open for business.

At 5-6 eggs per day (so far), we are nowhere near keeping up with their output. But that in no way diminishes our excitement each day as we see the bounty they continue to produce! What a beautiful rainbow of eggs produced from my very own ladies!!!

Does summer ever feel like an abstract concept to you?

Like something that was more fully realized when you were a kid and 

out of school for those precious months?

When I worked full-time, I remember thinking that summers were really no different from any other time of the year because my life didn't significantly alter just because it was hot outside.  Now that I'm at home with my kids, I really expect it to FEEL different. More like the freedom of summer vacation used to.

I so looked forward to summer this year because I was ready for a break after our school year. But I think the feeling I was hoping to recapture is something that can only truly be experienced as a teenager or college student with no real obligations, no bills to pay, houses to clean, kids to feed, etc. 

Don't get me wrong - I am very much enjoying the break from our usual school routine! I find many other aspects of my routine unalterable, however. 

I still have to balance my checkbook and pay bills and move money around.

I still have to plan a menu and prepare meals (although when it's hot outside, I'm so disinclined to cook at all. I prefer a plate of fresh sliced tomatoes and cucumbers to anything hot!!!)

I still have to vacuum and mop, dern it.

I still have heaps and mounds of laundry that constantly cycle in and out of the washer and dryer.

I've had to wake up early to deal with repair guys or organize getting things fixed around the house.And boy, does this summer seem to be that kind of a summer. My whole house seems to be as needy as my children! 

I'm not complaining. Really, I'm not. I'm merely observing that summers as a mom/wife/homeowner are very different from the carefree summers I used to spend as a lifeguard, getting tan and meeting cute guys. 

Although, come to think of it, I still do my fair bit of lifeguarding with the kids, and I am surrounded by some of the cutest guys I've ever seen (Kyle, August and Dorien...).

This could also be brought on by a long-overdue need for a vacation. 

You ever schedule a vacation, only to realize that you should have moved it up a few weeks? Kyle and I are taking our family to Captiva for a week later this month, and we are both counting the seconds!!! It's been far too long since he's been off work and we've all had some quality family time. 

 I am in very much need of some time spent right. here.

Meanwhile, this baby inside me continues to grow and wiggle and captivate our family. I get lots of little hands exploring my belly, hoping for a kick or a squirm. And this baby is happy to perform. I think it already recognizes the voices of its siblings. Just last night, I fell asleep with Dorien's little hands moving across my belly to feel the bumps he was seeing under the skin. He is enamored with little babies and loves to talk to the baby in my tummy and lift up my shirt to see the baby. 

Brooklyn, a self-proclaimed future midwife, has begun practicing on me already. She is great about feeling my belly and guessing what body part she feels. She's also great at reminding me that my glucose test is coming up, and that I need to do my prenatal yoga workouts. 

I'm 26 weeks as of this past Sunday, and I was a week late in taking my belly shot this past month.  Sorry, folks. My excuse is that Kyle was in Chicago that week, and my kids are unreliable at manning a camera. I feel huge and getting huger by the day. Although I find daily relief by swimming laps for 45 minutes each day while the kids swim with Kyle or take swimming lessons. 

I hope you are enjoying your summer, even if it takes a different shape than it once did.