Barely Beck

Jackson

bekkah — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 04:42:11 +0000

Jackson was born on January 14 at home in a big birth pool. This photo is about 8 hours after birth.

This photo is today - Jackson will be 3 months old tomorrow!

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Choosing to homeschool

bekkah — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 04:09:25 +0000

Homeschooling is a very new endeavour for us. Today marks about two weeks of ‘officially’ doing kinder at home with my two year old.
I can hear the questions ringing out even as you read those first two sentences. Believe me, I’ve been asked a whole bunch of questions a whole bunch of times, so I come prepared!

Mostly the questions fall into two categories: why homeschooling in general?; and why homeschool a two year old?
For us, those two questions are very closely linked. We discussed homeschooling when Taylor was first born - I thought it was a good idea, but we were just tossing ideas around. As time has passed, its become increasingly apparent that Taylor is a little ahead of the curve in terms of his intellectual development. I initially thought that it was just mother-pride… Does every mother think that their children are smarter and prettier and faster than everyone else’s children?

But then other people started to make comments and when we stopped and looked at him as impartially as we possibly can, we realised that its possible that Taylor is smart. He is two and a half and knows his whole alphabet and numbers up to twenty, and is recognising words on printed paper.
When he is with other kids his own age, he plays quite happily, but when there is activities involved, he gets bored quite quickly.

Taylor was born in July. The current Australian kinder legislation requires that you turn 3 before April in order to be eligible for 3 year old kinder, or 4 before April to go to 4 year old kinder. That means that Tay will be almost 5 when he is in 4 year old kinder. He’ll go nuts.

Homeschooling allows us, in the grander picture, to help him to learn at a pace that he is comfortable with, but that also stimulates him and encourages him to want to learn. Starting so early means that the bored tantrums have stopped and he is starting to be a happy boy again. He was just bored with the no-structure life that we’d slid into.

Next time I get a break with both kids asleep at the same time, I’m going to share some of my ‘curriculum’ and my rationale behind it!

Bye for now!

I’ve broken the theme…

bekkah — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 13:13:52 +0000

Still learning, and I’ve broken the dang theme.
Sorry that it looks terrible. Working on it… But my content is still here, and that’s a plus!

My birthing journey

bekkah — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 11:32:43 +0000

I have two sons. They were born in two dramatically different ways. In both cases, I ended up with a beautiful, healthy child. My mental health, however, was another story altogether. I’ve posted both stories in various places, but I wanted to take the opportunity to try and melt the two stories together and make this one clean post.
It does, however, contain some fairly explicit birthing language, so reader beware!

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When I found out I was pregnant, my first instinct was to wait until it was too late, have the baby in the living room and call the ambulance (whoops, I waited too long… please don’t be angry at me for not having my baby in a hospital). I hate medicality.
My hubby was freaked out. By the pregnancy, by the idea of having a baby in the living room, the whole deal. So I decided to book into the Birth Centre - they have private rooms and midwives and a big tub. Sounded like a better plan… and no doctors.

Unfortunately, the Birth Centre was in a hospital, and so there came a point where I just lost my rights. It started at 40 weeks - the Birth Centre ‘allows’ you to go to 42, but no further. So at 40 weeks, I had to go in for some tests. The midwife wanted to do a stretch and sweep - a what now? I’m going to willingly let you do what now? No way. I can wait.

But I went upstairs for a fetal heart monitor and a fluid ultrasound (so much for my plans of minimal u/sing.) The doc on duty wanted to induce me that day… in fact, she walked up to me cold and said “Ok. Now, we’ve done the monitoring, so you’ll need to wait here until we can get someone to come over and check your cervix… then we’ll administer some gel and get your baby out.” I argued my way back down to the midwives, who said that I probably was ok, but to come back in a couple of days for another round of heart monitoring and ultrasounds.
So I did.
And two days later.
And a day after that.
And the day after that.
The last week of my pregnancy, I spent driving to, sitting in, or coming home from hospital. 6 ultrasounds. In a week.

Eventually, they decided that my bp was too high (perhaps from being stressed out by all the trips to hospital???) and if I couldn’t get it down, then they were going to induce me the next morning - but I wasn’t allowed to go home - I had to stay in the hospital overnight, because I was at risk of going into labour. Does anyone else see a problem here???

I had been monitoring my own cervix, and I knew that up until that morning, it had been hard and not ready. That morning, though, it had changed.
They didn’t care.
In the end, after much fighting with the staff, I managed to get a midwife to come up from the BC to do the exam and the stretch and sweep… I didn’t want it, but it was either that, or the blunt and clinical ward doctor. It hurt. It really hurt.

For the uninitiated, a stretch and sweep basically involves the midwife manually (read, with her hand) stretching your cervix open and seeing what membranes she can snag and remove. It is a horridly painful and humiliating procedure. The midwife, realising that I was pretty hesitant about it all, assured me that while it might be uncomfortable, the procedure shouldn’t be more than mildly painful, and if I needed her to, she would stop. She lied. I screamed for her to stop but she just kept saying that she was nearly done and that I was ok.

Retrospectively, I think that this was the moment that my heart went out of me, I felt so violated. There is a group that talk about BirthRape, and while that is a fairly strong form of expression, I do understand. I said stop and the woman with her hands in me said no.

And then I went home. They were NOT keeping me in overnight. No way. No how. I had a big fight with a number of staff over that. I don’t think they are used to women who can think for themselves…

By the time I had driven home, I was having mild period-pain like pains… so I walked. I walked around my living room all night. I watched late night shopping. I watched televangelists. I walked and I walked and I swayed, bounced, squatted and stretched. But the damn things just wouldn’t get any stronger. In the end, I crawled into bed at 5am, knowing that at 6am, I had to be at the doors of the hospital so that they could induce me because my body wasn’t performing up to standard.
I had forfeited my ‘right’ to a spot in the Birth Centre because I was a first timer, and I was being induced. The Birth Centre isn’t allowed to take on high risk cases like me.

So, they put me in a room and broke my waters - again, a person I don’t know unceremoniously jammed her hand up my vagina and caused me pain. I demanded my 2 hours to get labour happening by myself (in the vain hope that I would at least be allowed to use the shower during labour). At the end of the two hours, the doctor came in and said that she wasn’t satisfied with my labour and they put a drip in.

I went from having mild period pain, about 3 minutes apart to having incredible pain with barely a breath between them in about 10 minutes. I gave in and had the gas because the contractions were so bad…

At some point, early in the piece, they recommended that I go to the toilet. Which I couldn’t - the contractions were too bad… I just couldn’t pee to save my life…

Turns out that they’d pushed a bag of fluids into my drip at the start and then my bladder got really full. So full, in fact, that it was blocking the baby’s head from descending properly. But the baby’s head was stuck squishing my whatever the tube from my bladder is… so I couldn’t pee.
Solution? Catheter.
That hurt like HELL. Even in the midst of all the other pain.

Four hours later, they told my husband to go for a walk because I was “no way NEAR having the baby”… half an hour later, they had to run and find him because I had started to crown. All I can remember is something changing, my vision clearing for a moment and realising that the person holding my hand wasn’t my husband and for the life of me, I was scared without him there to anchor me… especially since I didn’t feel like I was in control.

My husband arrived as my son was crowning for the first time. The staff had rolled me onto my side and my husband “got” to hold my leg up at this point…

Then I remember this chorus of voices yelling at me to “stop pushing!” And then I had a baby! They put him on my tummy and he lifted his head up and looked at me…
Then they took him away - to measure and clean and stuff. I’d specifically asked them not to do that… but I wasn’t really there so my voice wasn’t working.

In the end, the paperwork says that I had a 4 1/2 hour labour.

An hour later, after they stitched me up, I got to hold him again. During the stitching the doctor doing the stitching looks up at me and says ‘now, I’m just going to put my finger up your back passage… don’t be alarmed.’
Alarmed? Not the right word for it.

THEN some dude walks in, presumably a doctor, but walks around, looks at my stitched and mangled private area, nods and walks off. Didn’t bother to talk to me. Didn’t ask permission.

I was told then that I could go and have a shower, but that I couldn’t leave the room (to go up to recovery) until I had peed.
Peed.
After having a catheter for 6 hours.
After having a 2nd grade tear and more stitches than I could count. Peeing was the last thing I wanted to do. And the last thing I did - I lied instead.

In the days afterwards, I was told repeatedly to remove my pants so some person could examine my stitches (ie, another person gets to look at my privates)…
In the hospital, I was woken up by a doctor who needed to counsel me about proper contraceptive measures, as I could fall pregnant again straight away.
Getting my son home would be, of course, a relief.
Until the home-visit health nurses turned up. Manhandling my breasts (to teach me how to breast feed), reprimanding me for having the baby in my bed… One nurse, after checking my stitches, suggested that I go and have a mole on my arse checked out, because it could be cancer.

That’s my birth story.
The next one will be different. I swear.

The intervening period was challenging… It took me fully twelve months to get around to understanding that the darkness I was living in was actually post-natal depression, and that it was due to the violation and disempowerment I was put through. My poor husband would wake up in the middle of the night and find me sitting up, staring into space and clawing at my arms, or sobbing my heart out muttering that being dead would be easier than being alive. Oh, what he went through watching that. I was so broken. My spirit was broken.
Thankfully, at some point, I began to read birth stories that were like mine, but the women were not happy with the outcome. They were traumatised. They told stories of the journeys they had to take to come back from that. I realised that I had a long way to come back.

My husband, bless him, began to pray for me, for healing, for light, for freedom.
I began to tell my husband what was going on in my head - most of the ’stuff’ was things he didn’t even realise had happened. But I began to talk and get free from the darkness.

Eventually, we began to talk about having another baby but this one, we would be doing it my way - to hell with the medical profession. I was not going through that again. And bless him - my husband faced all his apprehensions, absorbed all the information he could, prepared his heart and his mind, and backed me 100%.

The pregnancy hadn’t been easy - vomiting morning sickness for the better part of the second trimester followed up by a rotating cycle of infections - chest infection, tonsilitis, sinusitis, a different chest infection… I was aware that I’d lost some weight (although, I am, apparently, “morbidly obese” so its not like I didn’t have the reserves…)

I’d been in pain for about 6 weeks - deep, sharp pain which felt like it was centred on my cervix. The internet suggested that I was probably in pre-labour and that it was my cervix preparing and beginning to efface. I could feel the bones in my pelvis coming loose at the seams - at night, they were creaking when I moved and during the day it hurt to walk. After weeks and weeks of this, I was longing for labour to start. But my “due date” came and went… I was expecting it to, but I’d been *hoping* that after all that pre-labour, something might happen earlier.

But no.

41 weeks passed.

42 weeks passed.

I cried to my husband that the baby was never going to come out!!

Then, at 42+3, at around 3pm, I had a little tiny bit of blood when I went to the toilet. Not a whole lot, so I didn’t figure that it was all that promising, but nevertheless, I told DH that it might be game on. We called my mum, who was going to take DS1 for a few days, just to warn her that things might be happening.

With DS1, the midwife did a stretch and sweep (oh, yes, DS1’s birth was a very different set of experiences) and I had period pain all night, but it never progressed. I was having the same sort of cramps, so I figured that I had a long night ahead of me… Maybe I would have the baby in a day or two.

We ate dinner and I called mum back - the cramps were regular and getting noticable, rather than dull background noise. She came at around 8pm to pick up DS1, and as she drove away, I had two quite strong sensations that required me to stop and think through them. My body had been waiting for DS1 to be looked after so that I could concentrate on the next task.

The next task proved to be blowing up the pool… with an electric pump that decided to die on us. I couldn’t handle watching my DH get increasingly agitated about it, so I went to have a shower.

I threw up all my dinner (sigh) in the shower, and grunted through the contractions, which were getting fairly strong. I stayed in the shower until I felt I couldn’t stand up any longer.

Out in the lounge, DH was attempting to blow up the pool using a two handed manual pump - but the nozzle wouldn’t stay in the valve, so I ended up holding the valve/nozzle between contractions. Not fun. Finally, we began to run water into it.

It was that hot day with something like 80% humidity… there were puddles of water forming on the lino flooring, just from the moisture in the air, and DH was reminding me not to slip as I tried to move around.

At about 9:30pm I couldn’t handle being out of the water so I hopped into the pool, even though it was too cool. In the heat, the cool water was a relief. DH raced around, boiling water and, strangely, vacuuming (he said later that he wasn’t sure why he vacuumed, but just he sort of found himself doing it!)

Eventually, the contractions got so full on that I began to call for DH to come and support me through them. He’d come running as fast as he could on the slippery floor and pour buckets of water over my back as I roared through the height of the pain.

There was a movie on tv, which had been good for distraction, but when it was over, the noise of the ads just began to drive me mad, so DH turned it off.

At some point, I heard DH in my ear saying that the contractions were really close together, and he thought he should call the doula. She arrived about 10 minutes later. I don’t remember her arriving but I remember her asking how I was doing… “all right under the circumstances!!”

And then it was on.

DH sat by my head and held my hand as I roared through contraction after contraction. I remember yelling for him to make it stop. Retrospectively, this was transition. The doula in the background just kept saying that this was perfectly normal and that it was all good and beautiful.

I was pretty certain that I wasn’t particularly dilated - I was convinced that I had hours more of this… until I said to DH that I had to poop but that I didn’t think I could get to the ensuite and the doula said “I’m not sure that you DO need to poop. I think it might be something else…”

Suddenly, I was aware that I felt like I had run out of space inside - like my vagina had just sort of retracted and the baby was coming through my cervix and straight out of my body… I started to breathe deeply and said “stop stop stop” because I felt it was too soon - I was so worried that I wasn’t ready and I didn’t want my body to be pushing against an undilated cervix… DH was sounding confused - “I don’t think you can just stop at this point…”

So I changed my words. “Slow. Slow.” And in a huge crest of pain, I put my hand down and found a head! “I can touch a head!” I yelled… and as the crest of pain broke, his head receded. One more. I suddenly knew it - one more and it was over. I took a slow, deep breath against the beginning of the cresting pain and put my hand over his head, almost pushing back on it as my body contracted. Determined not to push, or to tear, I let my hand control the speed of his head reaching the water. “Quick - his head is out but I don’t think I can catch him… ” I said as the rest of my son slid out into the water behind me. I was aware that my DH wasn’t by my head any more and I could hear him breathlessly giggling as he caught our son in the water and brought him up for his first breath.

Manoeuvering my leg over the cord, the doula helped me to roll onto my back in the water and DH placed my beautiful slippery son on my chest and we cuddled. And nursed. And smiled.

The placenta was finally birthed something like an hour and a half later.

So the statistics - most of which came later…

DH had called the doula at just after midnight and she arrived at about 12:10am.

DS was born at 12:40am. That basically makes it a 5 hour labour from when the contractions ‘became’ something.

He weighed around 5.5kg at birth.

He was covered in a layer of vernix, so despite my ‘post-date’yness, he was perfectly cooked.

I didn’t tear or even really graze (peeing was painless after two days).

I cannot believe how easy it was, already I am happily telling people that I want more! Seriously… 5 hours of pain for a beautiful child? Bargain!

And compared to DS1, this is like another planet - no day 3 blues, no feeding dramas, no supply issues… no ongoing post-partum depression, no relationship stress (beyond simply sleep deprivation!)

I am so blessed that I had the opportunity and the support from my DH to do this my way - it has been such an incredible experience!

Acts 4 Sermon

bekkah — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 04:08:34 +0000

This is the culmination of a 3rd year exegesis subject that I finally completed at the end of my degree. This assessment task was to have been delivered orally.

To compensate for the lack of actual delivery, I have provided bolded and italicised words and sentences to indicate where verbal stress would have been delivered during the sermon.

Just as a footnote, exegesis: “(from the Greek ἐξηγεῖσθαι ‘to lead out’) is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially a religious text. Traditionally the term was used primarily for exegesis of the Bible, however in contemporary usage it has broadened to mean a critical explanation of any text and the term Biblical exegesis is used for greater specificity. The goal of Biblical exegesis is to explore the meaning of the text which then leads to discovering its significance or relevance. (thanks Wikipedia)”

Read the Acts 4 Sermon here

Ethically Wed: Towards Guilt-Free Celebrations

bekkah — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 04:03:17 +0000

This essay was my last piece of work for my theology degree. It is for an applied ethics subject. I chose ethical weddings because at the time, I was about to get married, and it seemed very relevant andappropriate to explore some of the ethical implications of wedding ceremonies. It received a mark of 87%

Precis:
This essay seeks to engage the ethical weddings movement, critique in the light of theological validity and to provide a sound understanding of Christian ethical responsibility in regards to weddings.
Following an ethical model developed in the context of a post-modern, post-Christian culture, this essay seeks to provide a culturally valid approach to applying Christian values to the ethical issues raised.

Read the essay “Ethically Wed: Towards Guilt-Free Celebrations” here

Long time between posts

bekkah — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 05:27:39 +0000

Its been a loooong time since I’ve posted anything, anywhere.

Taylor is one.

He’s big and beautiful… walking like a pro… teeth like a vampire.

I’m so proud of him!

I’m tired all the time. Life can be challenging sometimes.

Taylor at 9 and a half months…

bekkah — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:50:32 +0000

Well, 9 months have kicked past so quickly.

Taylor’s Photos: At the hospital

bekkah — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:11:39 +0000

It is with delight that we welcome Taylor James into our little Heyfron family! Taylor arrived at 4:12pm on Wednesday, 09/07/08… weighing in at a (fairly massive) 4.5kg… He is a delight, and we thank God for such a precious gift!

Our beautiful boy!

Faith and hope… and my husband

bekkah — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 10:20:48 +0000

I had an epiphany this afternoon…

I was thinking about how my dear husband gives me such hope for the future…

So I was thinking about how the Bible talks about hope and faith, and how they fit together - Hebrews 11:1 says that faith is being sure of what we hope for…

It occurred to me that before I met my husband, I had faith, but I didn’t have a lot of hope for the future… I just believed that God would sort it all out. Now, I have such hope for the future, and I have faith to believe that God can make it all happen…

Rather than worrying about whether I was placing too much …er… emotional investment, I guess, in my husband, I realised that the two work together so perfectly - my husband gives me hope, and faith in God gives me the ability to believe wholheartedly in the future…

Its a team effort, and that makes me so glad!