Oooh.... This one's a goodie!

"Although the mother has no direct responsibility for the care of her baby during the first week or so of the puerperium, she will naturally want to acquaint herself with all that concerns this new and precious possession."

On Smoking

From Expectant Motherhood.

"While most obstetrical authorities, then, disapprove of excessive smoking in pregnancy (twenty-five or more cigarettes daily), there is no reason for believing that a woman who smokes moderately, let us say ten cigarettes or less a day, need change her custom at this time. If you have been used to smoking considerably more than this for several years, by no means try to give them up in pregnancy. There is no surer way of upsetting the nerves at a period when you should be calm and happy, or of converting a placid, sweet-tempered girl into an intolerable shrew. With negligible effort, even the most inveterate smoker can usually be content with a package a day or somewhat less, and if you arrange this there is no great cause for concern."

Really, people.... We just need to preserve the placidity of our sweet-tempered pregnant women...! (Er, I mean pregnant girls.) :-D

Clothing.

Courtesy of Expectant Motherhood.

"The most important consideration in regard to the expectant mother's wardrobe is that it should be attractive."

Ok, stop right there! This is already awesome!

"This may sound like a superficial observation but it is profoundly true. Yes, more important than knowing the dangers of circular garters and high heels is the knowledge that you are well-groomed, because only then (if you are like most women) will you really enjoy entertaining your friends and meeting your husband's friends, and in turn visiting their homes. Pregnancy is no time to be a recluse. The more you are in the company of others, the better off you are; indeed, I have long chronicled the impression that patients who start in labor while playing bridge invariably [invariably! Wow!] have an easy time [emphasis added ;)]. This is simply another way of saying that the woman who cultivates a certain oblivion to the fact that she is pregnant (although obeying the ordinary rules of diet and hygiene) does much better than her introspective sister."

It gets better! :)

"As the appearance of many expectant mothers attests, it is possible to look as attractive at this time as at any other. To be sure, the abdominal rotundity is a handicap [hahahahahaha!!!] but, for some reason, during the middle months of pregnancy women develop a special radiance which is most becoming and [wait for it!] tends to offset this."

HAHAHAHA!!!

HAAAAAHH!! [*wipe eyes*] Ok, continuing.... :)

"Moreover, maternity dresses are so ingeniously contrived these days that they resemble an optical illusion in their ability to beguile the eye in regard to your real contour—which, incidentally, is always more noticeable to you than to anyone else. Patterns for such garments, as well as the ready-made dresses themselves, are readily and inexpensively obtained at any department store and it is a good idea to exercise your ingenuity on this problem."

Love it. Am I the only one laughing my face off right now...? :)

Pearls of Wisdom

Long before there was "What To Expect When You're Expecting" there was another primer on all things pregnancy: "Expectant Motherhood." An indispensable guide! It was written by Dr. Nicholson J. Eastman, M.D., the Obstetrician-in-Chief to the esteemed Johns Hopkins Hospital.

I know this because my mom likes to buy us awesome antique books. :)

This book was first published in 1940. I have the Second Edition, which was published in 1947 offering more modern advice (my copy is a 1949 reprint). I have no idea how long this book was a standard. But it's hilarious. Hahahahaha!!!

I'm not sure what's funnier: the medicine, or the social commentary! Let's just say I have an even greater appreciation now for booming research and also for women's lib. ;-)

(Although, to give this guy, his society and his field credit, I'm sometimes even more surprised with how progressive some of it is. I'm curious how this 1949 version might be different from the 1940 version—the War changed so many things for American culture and for medicine.)

I give you some gems! And I'm sure there are enough to keep them coming for the next little while. Enjoy!!

"Today, thanks to the studies of two German doctors, Aschheim and Zondek, we have at last a sound and trustworthy test for pregnancy and interestingly enough it is performed, like the tests of old, on urine. In carrying out the test a small quantity of morning urine is..."

Can you complete the sentence?

He's just spent several pages talking about how difficult it is to diagnose pregnancy (a problem which is actually kind of interesting to imagine!), but now.... Now! Finally! A simple, easy test!! The small quantity of morning urine is...?

"...injected into a mouse or rabbit."

Of course!

"If the urine comes from a pregnant woman, definite and characteristic changes are produced in the ovaries of the animal within 48 or 72 hours; if the person is not pregnant no alterations whatsoever occur. This test is accurate in about 95% of cases."

:)

Even awesomer!:
"The skeleton of the growing baby is usually demonstrable in X-ray pictures of the mother's abdomen from the beginning of the fifth month and when thus seen is, of course, absolute positive proof of pregnancy."

Ah. Yes. So now we know what the deal is with those Baby Boomers.... ;-)

Actually, it at least goes on to say that visualization is rarely possible before 14 weeks (today's 16), so it's not that useful and is rarely used. Whew!

Wearing thin....

Yet getting so... not thin. ;-)

I'm at 28 weeks now. I think a week or two ago, a switch went off that went: "Ding. Third Trimester. Engage Misery." Not that I wasn't super-tired and super-sore the whole second trimester, too—but, wow! I'm just dying now! Awesome-baby-who-I-swear-I-adore is in my ribs now*. I'm getting a bit of a respite from the kicking-against-the-pelvic-floor trauma that seemed to last much of every day for so long (now it's just bits here and there), but my ribs! AhHOHOWHEHAHKJdfhkhsdfjhajhwoHWHAL!

[That groan turned out kind of cool. I like it. :)]

And, man.... Everything—everything!—just hurts. And I'm randomly morning-sick again, although this time, really just in the morning.

I'm overwhelmed, though, with how all this physical trauma (the pregnancy and the medical loveliness for so long before) is such a small price to pay. It really doesn't seem just to not suffer even more for something so miraculous and wonderful. So while I let myself acknowledge that, yikes, this is really, really miserable(!), I'm also really in awe. And so full of gratitude.

We have a good idea of her birthday ;-) (watch our plans get foiled, though!), and I'm counting the days...!

*Stand up. Find the top of your hip. Now find the bottom of your ribcage. How far is the span between bones? Mine is no more than an inch! Seriously! (My legs are 2/3 my total height!) This isn't so convenient when housing another human being.... The ribs—front and back—are truly suffering. Suffering, I tell you! Suffering! ;) 


Love, love, love you, baby girl. :-*

Auburn's Tips for Vacationing Off-Season!

Undoubtedly, there are places which should not be visited outside of the tourist season. ;-)

Alaska, for example.

I'd love to take an Alaskan cruise one of these days. My favorite travel months of November through February would, uh.... Probably not work out too well.

When we were planning our trip to Costa Rica, we were a little worried about reports that through much of the year, the country is under water and you need to ride a kayak around. (Or something like that.... ;-))

What can you do? Gotta go during tourist season, right?

WRONG!

You can still beat the system! Muwahahahahaha!!

Check for the when hotels and vacation rentals and airlines claim "low season," "medium season," and "high season." Do NOT go in high season. It will cost a ton more, and the experience will be worse. DO go in low season!

But go for the first or last week of it.... ;-)

Muwahahahahahaha!!! Oh, so sneaky!

(Not really. It's pretty obvious. And yet...? No one does it....)

This will make your vacation cost half as much, give you a thousand times the experience, and the weather will be virtually the same. Jackpot. Cha-ching! Cha-ching!

Maybe I'll end up with more tips than just this. We'll see. :)

Vacationing in Summer. Part Three.

A few years later, I was back in England—this time as a student of art and architecture (no, not creating my own :)). I showed up the first of the year.

For the next few months, I got to know London in a really fabulous way. I love London! I had a great time becoming familiar with the subtleties of London culture. It began to feel like a home away from home.

And then . . . .

SPRING BREAK!!!

[Cue Psycho slashing music! Strings, strings, strings, strings!!]

Americans descended upon London like the plague. Not that I have anything against Americans in London.... (I was one, after all. :)) But they all came at once!

The city was changed.

Everything was more crowded. Dollar bills filled the donation bins. The locals seemed to disappear.... Instead of the usual dispersement of wandering patrons throughout a gallery, crowds followed each other to sardine themselves in front of something like Sunflowers by Van Gogh. (Furthermore, Americans aren't as quiet in galleries....) Bridges were suddenly crowded with tourists snapping pictures of Parliament, or St. Paul's, or the Tower of London. Those obnoxious tourist buses (for folks who go to a city to sit in a tourist bus) were out and about in droves.

The foot traffic on the sidewalks shifted sides, for heaven's sake...! :)

It was a different place! Really a very stark, unexpected, jarring contrast! (Kristin can back me up on this. It's true! :)) And I couldn't help but feel really, really sad for these thousands of people who were taking a trip of a lifetime, but had no clue that they weren't experiencing the real London.

A couple weeks later.... The American plague was gone, and London went back to normal.

And I logged away this rule of thumb: I'll never travel during Spring Break, either. (Not unless it's a place no one would go in Spring.... Like...?) What's the point of exploring a new culture if you'll just find a bunch of other visitors there? And even if I'm just visiting exotic Montana or something, I want to see exotic Montana the way the locals do! I want to see the quiet days! (Are there unquiet days in Montana? ;-)) I want things uncrowded and authentic. I want to soak up the culture. I want to wander a "tourist trap" on the days when it's left the most normal—the most natural, or the most empty, or the most quiet—and when it's being explored the way its own culture explores it.

And I definitely don't want to be one of those people who visited London during Spring Break 2001 without realizing that in the weeks before and the weeks after...it was a different place. They almost came at the right time. So close....

Strike Three against Summer travel. You're out, Summer. :) (And take Spring break with you. ;))

Vacationing in Summer. Part Two.

The next year, another spur-of-the-moment trip. (I love my family. :)) My dad came home from work one day and said, "Anyone want to go to England in a few weeks?!" Hahaha!

He had noticed some amazing fares and jumped on it, figuring, why the heck not...?

A midnight-trip to Kinko's for passport photos was really the only casualty of our quick planning (we all looked pretty scary! Haha!) and, thanks to being willing to leave last-second and on Christmas Eve, we were able to take a trip of a lifetime that we surely couldn't have taken otherwise.

Strike Two against tourist season. :)

My dad even made it on the news to share this awesome travel strategy! There was a news crew at the airport and my brother Dave, ever the extravert :), shouted over to them: "Hey! Can we get an interview?!" And they actually came over! Turned their lights on us and asked my dad why were we traveling on Christmas Eve...?

When we came home two weeks later, our neighbors and friends were all excited to tell us they'd seen us on the news with his two brief words of wisdom:

"CHEAP. AIRFARE."

Moral of the story: You can go more places if you go at a weird time. And you can even get on TV. :)

Vacationing in Summer. Part One.

I should have named this series: "Vacationing any time other than Summer." Because that's what I mean to promote.

But not too vigorously, mind you, because I'm counting on the world to keep following each other on vacation the same three or four months of the year. So we can have good vacations. :) Yessss!!!

My testimony of off-season travel began in Nauvoo, Illinois.

It's an historical site for our church—a place where Mormons built a beautiful city from swampland before they were forced out to trek to the Salt Lake Valley. Like many members of the church, we have several ancestors who had lived there. And one of the restored homes open for tours belonged to my 3rd-great-grandfather! He built it himself and lived there with his family. When he left for Salt Lake he gave the home to Joseph Smith's mother. It's billed as Lucy Mack Smith's house, with secondary billing to my gramps Joseph Bates Noble. Very cool.

My parents had always wanted to go, and it worked out for us to take a trip in . . . December.

Illinois.
In December.

We were all a little skeered. :)

Can I just say.... It was AWESOME!!! We were in Nauvoo for four days, and all but one afternoon when another family came through for just a few hours, we were the only ones there. Sure we were cold! Who cares?! We were the only ones there! (As in, really, the only ones.) It was awesome. We'd go up to the brickyard to make bricks, or the masonry shop, or a restored home, or wherever, and the senior missionary couple would just light up, so excited to have people come by! They'd put down their cards (how many people get to see missionaries playing cards? ;)) and swarm us, giving us the best tour ever. We became friends with everyone there. We lingered. Pictures and journals were pulled out for us to look at. By the end of our stay, the missionaries even organized a piano recital for everyone's entertainment. It was the most charming thing of all time, strolling around this restored town (that was fabulously decorated for Christmas, no less—1800's style!) with no one there but ourselves and a bunch of cute, lonely, cold senior missionaries who loved us.

We loved the cafe we kept frequenting, too, and became friends with plenty of non-Mormon Nauvoo residents, which was fabulous! What a wonderful experience to truly experience this quaint, charming place—not at all as a tourist attraction, but a real town with real people.

We went to several other church history sites—Liberty Jail, Adam-Ondi-Ahman, the Far West temple site, Independence, Carthage Jail—and in each place, we were alone. I especially loved being able to talk so much with people at other churches—splinter groups that believed in, say, The Book of Mormon, but not in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We had a particularly wonderful experience at the temple for the formerly-known Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now The Community of Christ), and became fast friends with the woman showing us their building and sharing her testimony.

Contrast that with the stories I remember hearing from friends the following Summer: tales of waiting in two-hour lines, of picking and choosing which places you can hit on account of the crowds, of a line being ushered quickly through a building.... They all had a good time! But...we were the only ones there!

Was it worth the extra pairs of gloves to see a totally empty Nauvoo...? OH my goodness, YES.

It was an experience we'll never forget. Authentic. Not at all contrived. And complete with new friends, from LDS missionaries, to normal ol' residents, to volunteers from other religions.

My testimony of non-Summer travel was born! BIG time.

Summer's Over! Woo hoo!!

I went back to Sea World, the Zoo, and the Wild Animal Park this week after a bit of a hiatus and thought...ahhhhh.... Summer's over!

I hate Summer. I've always hated Summer. I remember as a kid—in my couple of years before year-round schooling—that while the end of the school year was pretty exciting, within a week or so I was so over Summer. By the time I got back to school, it was as if Summer had lasted four years. (And, when you think about the percentage three months is in a 6-year-old's memory, that makes some sense!)

Then year-round began, and my love-affair with the other nine months of the year hit full-swing. One-month vacations instead of three? Awesome. Three-month school periods instead of nine? Double-awesome. Family vacations in . . . Winter? Awesome times infinity!!!

Because, you see.... I hate Summer.

And here's why:

1. Too hot. (Not so much in San Diego, but still. We had a week or two when being outside all day wasn't pleasant. And that's just annoying.) (Oh, but then we'd go to my parents' and, AHHH! 95 degrees! 100 degrees! 90 degrees! No thank you. Denver.... 93 degrees! Provo.... 100 degrees!! Summer most of my life has been way too hot.)

2. Too dead. Denver was the one exception to this—it's dead the rest of the year! Haha! Seriously, it is. And then Summer comes around and everything is green and you think, ahhhh.... Why can't it be Summer all year? This was a huge paradigm shift for me: to look forward to Summer. (It was still too hot, though. :)) But California gets gorgeous through Fall and Winter—wildflowers galore—and within three days of Summer weather it's all a mass of death. Very sad.

3. TOO MANY PEOPLE. Anywhere you want to go, there are too many people! We refuse to partake. What's better crowded than uncrowded? Nothing.

So let's get this straight. Everyone else waits for Summer to do things. So they can go somewhere crowded. And bake.

Very smart, people.

We went back to some of our favorite spots this week, found quick and easy parking, walked around in the 68-degree breeze and sunshine, saw nearly no one, took a refreshing breath and thought...ahhhhhhh.... It's back! Life!

I'm starting to get majorly depressed about Seth starting school next year—despite how much I know he'll love it—for two major reasons:

1. (another bullet list :)) Full-day kindergarten! Curse working parents for the demise of half-day! I have to lose Seth for 30+ hours a week?! You kidding me? That's cruel.

2. The Traditional Calendar!!!

I don't know who to blame for that one. But I'm having a heck of a time finding a year-round school. Even the "year-round" calendars still give you two months of your vacation in the Summer, and that is not ok with us. Not ok at all.

So I guess the school and the state and the country and the universe are just going to have to be ok with the fact that we will dapple into truancy. Hahaha! Really, though. We will. Because we love our family time! When Matt is post-call with a whole weekday free, we do something as a family. And we'll be darned if we start to only do those things during . . . Summer. [Ewwwwww!!!] Or weekends! [More ewwwwww!!]

Will we ever, ever, ever go to Disneyland in the Summer? Ha! No way. (You've got to be INSANE to go to Disneyland in the Summer. Those of you who have only been in Summer: do you have any idea what you're missing? It's a completely different place on those 10-6 days. Totally fabulous. Pain-free.)

Will we ever, ever, ever take a family vacation in the Summer? Double-no!! (Nothing ruins a great place like tourists! We'll even take bad weather to not go with tourists! A post on this to follow.... :))

Will we be able to resist bringing Seth home for perfectly gorgeous Winter days at uncrowded beaches and empty tourist sites, or for two-week vacations to destinations no one else is destining...? No times infinity!!

If truancy is a crime, lock us up now! (Or just get the independent study contracts ready. :))

Don't take it too hard. We like you, school. We just like being together so much more!

And we hate Summer.