Author Archives: Nicole Boyhouse

Labour Stories – Part Two, The Hospital

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I fully support women who choose to give birth in places other than a hospital – their own homes, a birthing centre, or, in the case of an amazing You Tube video I saw, the Mediterranean Sea. A Russian woman traveled to Israel to give birth in the Mediterranean and it was astonishingly beautiful, the woman the picture of grace and strength. I fully agree that pregnancy is not an illness, and childbirth not – in most cases – an emergency, however, a woman like myself, who makes fifty to-do lists a week and panics over the unlikely scenario of twenty people being simultaneously unavailable to babysit, well, a hospital is my birthing place of choice. I find immediately available medical attention and equipment to be as soothing as the sound of ocean waves. But that’s just me.

Also, I secretly love hospital food. I love getting food on little trays, everything in its own little compartment. I love that the hospital staff brings you a bedtime snack, even if it is a bizarre combination of bran muffin, cheddar cheese, and orange juice with Metamucil. After I had Mark, they brought me a tuna salad sandwich and let me tell you, dear readers, this was the tuna salad sandwich to end all tuna salad sandwiches. This was the greatest tuna salad sandwich of all time. When I was pregnant with Jake, I dreamed about one day getting another such tuna salad sandwich. Nine months, I thought about that sandwich. Then when I had Jake, it was egg salad day. Wretched egg salad. However, they did bring me a Salisbury steak (I still ate meat at that time). It was a tremendous Salisbury steak experience. Angels sang around that Salisbury steak.

Later, as I was recounting this incredible meal, my husband said “You know it’s just a hamburger patty with gravy, right?” Oh, but what a hamburger patty with gravy.

The downside of giving birth in a hospital is, of course, the possibility that you can spend hours in triage, which is precisely what happened to me. Triage was packed, packed with women with scheduled c-sections, women in the early stages of labour, and women in the “MOTHEROFGOD, MAKE IT STOP!” stage of labour. Those in the latter group were quickly wheeled into delivery rooms, prompting my husband to suggest that perhaps I should add a little, shall we say volume to my contractions and although I am capable of dramatic screaming, I felt unable to rise to the occasion at the time.

My doctor came by to check in with regards to what is euphemistically termed “pain management”. Since I had no drugs with Mark, I felt that I should do the same with this baby, not just to quell arguments and sibling rivalry down the road (“Ha ha, you made Mom get an epidural!”) but also because I had the well-authenticated concern that having an epidural would slow down my labour and I wanted to finish and have the baby quickly so that Mark could come and visit in the hospital after his afternoon nap. Yes, you read that correctly. That was my actual concern. Yet another reason to make up a birth plan: when you are in labour, you are simply incapable of rational thought.

Speaking of rational thought, here’s another tidbit: if they offer you a wheelchair, take the wheelchair. I speak from wretched experience. When I was assigned a delivery room at about 7 centimeters, I refused the wheelchair. It’s just down the hall, right? Twenty minutes, several very loud contractions, and 8.5 centimeters dilated later, I finally made it to my delivery room. Why, you may ask, didn’t someone bring me a wheelchair? After all, I was crawling down the hallway, shrieking with a contraction every couple of minutes. I do not know the answer to that. Maybe they thought I would rip the wainscoting off the wall and begin beating people with it? Or maybe the staff is just used to hormonally crazy pregnant women and didn’t notice. All I know is that I was about to meet Cheryl, my delivery nurse, and that is a story for another day.

Today’s Date is 9/9/9!

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I’m having one of those “It’s already Wednesday?” type of Wednesdays. Because, in addition to mooning about Jake’s birth, there is his actual birthday to prepare for, which is in six days, but also not one but TWO birthday parties this weekend, one of which involves eight children aged five and under and a clown, and also there are cupcakes to make and a cake to order and sugar cookie dough to prepare and groceries to shop for and sugar cookies to bake and decorate, and we all know that decorating things is not my forte, and volunteer committee meetings, already, and a movie screening to attend. Did I mention that I was an extra in a movie? Well, that movie is being screened this weekend, right after the clown leaves our house and (I can only imagine) the children will collapse from their sugar high, but I may never be in a movie again so to the screening I must go.

So that outlines my next six days.

The birthday party thing is the bane of my existence. It all stems from my complete incompetence with cake decorating and my lack of creativity and imagination, which leads to canvassing people for ideas and trolling the internet at all hours. I have a new friend, who is amazing with birthday party ideas, and uses words like “fondant” and “royal icing” whilst I use words like “cake mix” and “creamy deluxe versus whipped”. Just saying.

Also, and this has nothing to do with birthday parties or the many, many volunteer committees I’m suddenly on, but I almost broke my nose yesterday! It was a lovely Calgary day with winds gusting 70 km/hour, I was parked on a slight angle, I was opening the car door and a wasp flew in my face. I brushed it away while letting go of the car door and smash! Door in my face. Fortunately I was wearing sunglasses, which took the brunt of it. I don’t even have a black eye, which I think would have made me look like the tough mom in the neighbourhood, and would have probably circumvented my appearance on any more volunteer committees.

Labour Day and Labour Stories – Part One

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Jake’s fourth birthday is less than two weeks away, which has had me reminiscing about, appropriately enough, his birth. I LOVE birth stories, labour stories, pregnancy stories. I love hearing about them. If you want to share, I promise to be a rapt audience. I love the ordinary run-of-the-mill birth stories, the grisly birth stories, the weird labour experiences, the pregnancy-related aches and pains. The only thing I do not like about labour stories is the term that is frequently employed, “birth experience”. I don’t know, that term conjures up the same feelings that “synergy” and “optionality” did in my long-ago working days.

You know when you see an enormously pregnant woman, and her behaviour is incredibly irrational and insane, and you know with the benefit of experience that any minute now, that woman will be going into labour, but when you are that enormously pregnant woman, you believe your behaviour is perfectly normal and reasonable, and everyone else around you is crazy? That was exactly my situation prior to going into labour with Jake.

The day before I went into labour I was at the hair salon, which was incredibly fortunate as I did not want to be an exhausted mother to a newborn and a toddler who was not yet one and a half with three inches of grey roots. I really needed those roots covered to rise to the situation. Thank you Dad for those genes. Anyway. In retrospect I should have guessed I was about to go into labour. I hated everyone in that salon. Every single thing bothered me but I had to hold everything inside because really, who wants to annoy the woman with the scissors? So I seethed on the inside. What is with the insipid chatter, I thought. Why is the smell so bad in here? This is an OLD issue of People! If they hadn’t been so behind, I wouldn’t be driving at this time of the day, I fumed in the traffic on the way home. I was so irritable and uncomfortable I decided to try to sleep on the couch. My husband checked on me when he heard my uncontrollable sobbing. He probably thought something was horribly wrong.

“WHAT IF NO ONE IS AROUND TO TAKE CARE OF MARK WHEN I’M IN LABOUR?” I sobbed. This was my fear: that I would go into labour and no one would be around to take care of the toddler. Side note: my parents live twelve minutes away, less if my lead-footed father is driving. My husband pointed out this fact, and also the fact that my elderly neighbour had specifically said she didn’t want to see me on the news as someone who had given birth in a taxi, so if my mom couldn’t come right away to call her. Also, I had been so paranoid that I had made up a list of people who could possibly look after Mark, starting with my best friend and my brothers and ending with almost every neighbour on my block and a couple of his co-workers. Still, I would not be dissuaded. I was convinced that everyone on that list would be unavailable all at the same time. Either I was going to go to the hospital by myself while Rob looked after Mark due to NO ONE else being available, or we would have to take Mark with us and he would be scarred for life watching his brother exit his mother’s vagina. There could be no other options. I cried until I fell asleep.

Then I woke up, at 4:30, to let Rob know we should call my mom to come over and take care of Mark.

The fat guy in the red suit

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Mark and I were reading on the couch, and talking about superheroes and villains. “Of course, this is just a story,” I said, “Sandman is not real.”

“Just like Santa Claus,” Mark replied.

Startled, I looked down at him and he smiled his angelic, gap-toothed smile. I went back to reading about Spiderman and Sandman.

I have a feeling this is not unrelated to the loss of his two bottom teeth. When they fell out, I told him that we could put them under the pillow and the tooth fairy would come.

The fallout from that was tremendous. “TOOTH FAIRY? I don’t want the TOOTH FAIRY to come! I don’t even want a fairy in my ROOM. PLEASE don’t make the TOOTH FAIRY come here!” I looked at my husband a little helplessly. His inspired answer? “Don’t worry, Mark. The tooth fairy is really just Mom and Dad, and we’ll give you money for your tooth.”

Mark was instantly relieved. I, however, was a bit anxious he would shatter everyone else’s tooth fairy dreams, although this has not yet happened. I’m all for being truthful, but is five too young for abject cynicism?

The store in Yellow Grass is actually called "The Store in Yellow Grass"

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I just returned from a weekend in Estevan, Saskatchewan, celebrating my grandfather’s 95th birthday! The birthday itself was wonderful, such a joy for my grandparents to have so much family and friends around. It was great to see all of my cousins, who I see rarely, and many of whom now have families of their own, which is touching and beautiful.

It was the first time ever that we stayed in a hotel with the boys, and despite the fact that our hotel was mostly inhabited by rig workers – several of whom witnessed me, disheveled, braless, and in my pajamas getting coffee from the lobby and then looked away quickly and silently – it was really fun. Fun until the trip home today.

We were delayed in the Regina airport for three hours, which is a very long time to be stuck in the Regina airport. A very long time. Since we had already driven two hours to get to the airport, the day started to feel long indeed. Jake began to morph into some kind of enraged little demon, ranting sporadically about not liking ANYTHING AT ALL, and Mark started to unravel. “How many minutes until the plane is here? How many minutes until we are on the plane? How many minutes until we will be at home? Okay, I’m ready to go. When are we getting on the plane?” I started fantasizing about drinking heavily.

Perspective, Nicole. Really, traveling with kids is not that bad these days, is it? I mean, when I was a kid we used to drive ten solid hours from Calgary to Estevan and back several times a year, which was inevitably hell, what with me in the backseat of a sedan with two brothers and a dog (“Stop touching me! He’s looking at me!”), my mother who would either be smoking heavily or in nicotine withdrawal, and my father driving, grim-faced and fanatical looking (“We are going to get x miles to the gallon.”). The highlight of the trip would be eating Life Savers. Looking out any window, the vista was field after endless field, punctuated by pumpjacks and small towns with names like Yellow Grass and Drinkwater. Compared with those memories, I think my kids have it pretty good.

Now, how many minutes until bedtime?

The Kissing Hand

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Today was Mark’s first day of kindergarten, signifying the end of summer vacation, the return of actual summer-like weather notwithstanding. I thought I’d be spending the last of vacation doing fun, outdoorsy things, but instead I spent it taking care of the boys who alternated between being lethargically, feverishly ill and incredibly rambunctiously healthy, but neither at the same time. I also spent some time pondering which would be easier, two simultaneously sick children, or a longer bout of illness with only one child sick at a time, before concluding that the former is definitely preferable in my mind.

Futile ponderings aside, I was startled at how quickly and how enjoyably the summer passed. Back in February or March, I fretted a bit about the summer and activity planning, and would I go crazy without the 7.5 hours/ week of personal time I was now accustomed to? Then in the spring I was at a playground with a friend and her younger children, and she was speaking about her oldest daughter, who was in Grade One. “She has friends I don’t know and I don’t know their parents. She’s gone all day and she has her own life, completely separate from me.” It would be hard to overestimate the impact those words had on me. I could practically see the leaves of a page-a-day calendar rapidly tearing themselves off and fluttering away. I drove home with the feeling of one who has made a firm resolution: I was going to enjoy the summer with the children, dammit. We were GOING TO HAVE A GREAT TIME.

I did what I always do in the face of uncertainty, and that is to make lists and schedules. Oh yes, I am nothing if not rigid and rules-oriented. For fun, I took an Oprah quiz – Find the (Diet) Plan That Fits You – and my result was the one entitled “Restrictive”, for people who thrive on organization. I was a bit depressed at my own lameness. Anyway, I made lists of things I wanted to do and tried to schedule at least one fun place to visit per week – the zoo, playground, Science Centre – and we really did have a great time.

So what about the first day of kindergarten? The class was only one hour long, and the parents were called in to listen to the teacher read “The Kissing Hand” after which each child gave their parent a paper heart to put in their hand. I was just so proud of my big kid, who was so proud of himself at the new big kid school; although at that moment, all I could see were the calendar pages that were flying away from me.