Rachel Coleman Finch

I have done lots of reading about VBAC (vaginal birth after c-section) and ERCS (elective repeat c-section). It might have made a more productive meeting with the obstetrician on Monday if I'd done it first. I've primarily used the following resources:

Home Birth Reference Site (HBRS)
Guidelines from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynacologists on Birth After Previous Caesarean Birth (Green-top 45) (PDF downloadable from that link). (RCOG)

I very much like this sentence from the RCOG guidelines:

There are no randomised controlled trials comparing planned VBAC with planned ERCS and this may be an unrealistic aspiration.

( onward to the vast screed of research )

... and a flaming temper does wonders for cycling up Castle Hill - I overtook at least five people rather than my usual puttering quietly at the back of the queue.  But anyway, what I need to do is separate out facts and emotions after today's appointment with an obstetrician at the Rosie.  
( Cut for medical detail and crossness )

Silicone cups

There's a "hilarious" Amazon review of the Mooncup being retweeted all over my timeline at the moment.  I didn't find it that funny, but mostly because I felt it was suffused with an attitude of "what kind of CRAZY person uses THIS?" and I don't usually enjoy having my decisions laughed at for being crazy.    It prompted me to dig out the review I wrote 8 years ago, which reminded me that I too found the first few times a bit challenging.

I used the mooncup regularly until conceiving Charles.  Then I had a long gap without periods at all, thanks to my contraception.  When I started trying to conceive again, my periods returned, and were much more painful without the pill.  The mooncup's size and solidity seemed to trigger cramps on insertion and removal and so, reluctantly, I decided to stop using it.


Washable pads

I bought a load of Lunapads with a friend, sharing the shipping costs from the USA.  With stunning timing, they arrived just after I had got pregnant with Charles, but they came in quite useful for the post-birth bleeding, and then got put away again for five years. 

The lunapad consists of a cloth pad similar in shape to a disposable pad, but with poppers to secure it to the pants.  There are two elasticated strips which allow extra cloth liners to be inserted if more absorbency is needed.  They are softer and more pleasant against the skin than disposable pads, but also bulkier and less comfortable to walk or cycle in.   I also found that the liners would come out of the elastic too easily and stick to me and I had to be careful when going to the loo or I would lose them.

Laundry was easy enough: for the post-birth bleeding, I used to soak them in the nappy bucket; last year I just threw them in with my regular laundry.

I found them less likely to leak than disposable pads, but with the same problems of coverage (unless I use extra-long pads, I end up staining my underwear) and messiness/smell, not to mention incompatible with swimming.  Fundamentally I don't like pads much - tampons or the mooncup keep my blood much more contained, and though I never smell other women's periods I can smell my own and I dislike it.

If I liked pads better in principle, I would have bought some Party In My Pants pads to replace the Lunapads, as reviewed here by staranise.  They seem to use better textiles technology to solve the bulkiness issues I have with Lunapads, as well as actively encouraging "just throw them in the laundry with eveyrthing else".   Getting a set for post-birth bleeding would be extravagant but I might spoil myself and do so anyway.


Sponges

k245 alerted me to the existence of Jam Sponges, sold from the UK (I think I've seen them in Boots) and thus without enormous shipping charges.  I also like that they don't have a moon-based product name.

Usage:
Wet the sponge, squeeze it, insert it.  To remove it, you bear down until you can reach a bit of sponge, which generally provides a good grip to pull it out.  It's easiest to remove when it's full.  If you are somewhere with a handy basin, you rinse and squeeze it out and then can reuse it.  Otherwise you can put it in a zip-lock bag and deal with it later.  They are much more absorbent than tampons, and so I found it was always possible to save rinsing them for when I was at home.  For heavy flow, I used two sponges.

Cleaning between periods consists of soaking in boiling water with a bit of antiseptic (e.g. teatree oil) and then leaving to dry somewhere warm, e.g. in direct sunlight.

I found the sponges easier to insert / remove than the mooncup, and no messier.  I got similar "go all day or all night" performance from them: no faffing at work, no worrying about leaking in bed.  They didn't trigger cramps the way the mooncup did and I found the cleaning regime easier than boiling the mooncup.  They don't last as long as the mooncup - the Jam Sponge site reckons about a year - but I felt they'd make a good long-term solution for me.  (And then I got pregnant on the next cycle, so I'll not be able to test that for a while.)


Problems:
It took me a while to figure out the right way to insert them to prevent leakage.  The sponges have a long axis and a short axis, and I started off inserting the sponge like a tampon, long axis up the long axis of my vagina, and then I wondered why it was leaking despite obviously not being full.  The trick is to have the long axis across the vagina: the sponge compresses amazingly when wet and will then expand to fill the space available.  After figuring that out, I had no leaks.

The pretty red bag supplied isn't actually waterproof, you need a small zip-lock bag inside / instead of it to carry around either clean wet sponges or dirty sponges waiting to be cleaned.  A couple of zip-lock bags are also supplied, but again I needed to learn from experience.

Charles's school is closed today for teacher training, so Tony & I are off work too until tomorrow. 2.5 weeks off - luxurious.

We saw lots of family and friends during the break:
( Read more... )

I've spent a lot of time resting and reading, not entirely by choice, but clearly my body's way of demanding I recharge my batteries. I've been studiously ignoring my work email, but a couple of days ago my phone started demanding the password so I expect it has expired while I was away. I can't remember what it should be anyway (oops). So that's first on the to-do list tomorrow.

 1.

How did I do?
( not that well )

I think last year I was overprescriptive - too many goals to keep track of. So this year I'll go back to being simpler.

1. Get and stay as fit as possible during pregnancy and afterward: as much walking as I can manage, aquanatal as soon as I can start it.
2. Do up to 10 hours a week on OU module DB123 until it's done.
3. Go to bed on time (10pm schoolnights, midnight weekends, at the latest).
4. Bitesize decluttering/tidying/cataloguing - 1 or 2 15-min sessions a day, starting with my bedroom, then Charles's, then the rest of the house. Avoid doing marathon sessions and then nothing for weeks.
5. Keep reading the Economist each week.
6. Remember to read for pleasure too (goals mentioned elsewhere).

I'm now officially into the second trimester. My body hasn't read the book, but hopefully the first-trimester symptoms will bog off soon.

A little planning switch has flipped in my head, because the chances of miscarriage are now much lower and so I am "allowed" to start making real moves to prepare for the new arrival.
( Read more... )

I made the seasonal donations today, because on the 24th I was at my mother's without my laptop. I could have done it on the phone, but decided to wait.

The grand totals were:
Schistosomiasis Control Initiative : £4.25
Practical Action: £5.75
Education For Choice: £3.50

I thought those amounts were a bit small for online donations so doubled them to £8.50, £11.50, £7.00.

(I then spent a bit of time seeing if any of JustGiving, Virgin Money Giving or MyDonate would let me set up a single page which gave donors a choice of charities to donate to - a sort of charity donations wishlist I could set up for birthdays/future Christmasses. But no: one page per charity. Also everything is set up around "an event" such as a race or a single special occasion with a deadline, not ongoing things like a wishlist.)

I've also managed to parcel up the gifts we should have posted before Christmas, but did not manage to get to the post office. Tomorrow I hope (before we head to London to see tla and family).

Short version; we had a scare on Wednesday when I started bleeding lightly. I had an ultrasound scan today and everything is fine. Phew.

( Read more... )

I'm 10 weeks pregnant, due on 6th July 2012, which was the birthday of my maternal grandmother Ada.

Short version: I'm really happy to have conceived, and really looking forward to the eventual baby, but I'm disliking the experience of pregnancy even more than I did with Charles.

Long version behind cut:
( Read more... )

The first cards of the year have been arriving with us, and for once I may be prepared enough to send cards to other people. If you want to send us a card, my contact details are here. If you want a card from us, and think I may not have your address, please leave it in a comment. (Comments are screened - I'll unscreen those that don't contain personal addresses.)

Alternatively! If you would rather avoid the exchange of seasonal paper-based products, I am going to borrow nanila's idea, and donate £1.50 per person who ticks the poll, split among the three charities I've chosen, following the direction you give in the poll. (So if you tick 1, they get £1.50, if you tick 2, they get 75p each, if you tick all 3, they get 50p each).

If you don't have a Dreamwidth or OpenID account to enter the poll, leave a comment with your selection(s) and an indication of your identity. I'll leave those screened too.

My chosen charities are:

1. Schistosomiasis Control Initiative which, despite being nearly unspellable and unpronouncable unless you shorten to SCI, is a very cost-effective way to tackle poverty and reduced lifechances around the world.

2. Practical Action who work with poor people around the world to find appropriate technological solutions to problems facing them and keeping them in poverty.

3. Education For Choice who work to provide young people, primarily in the UK, with accurate, evidence-based information on abortion.

Reciprocal donations/cards are nice but not obligatory.

Last night we had some discussion about maternity leave and return to work.
( Read more... )

A couple of weeks ago, fanf bought us two pairs of Yaktrax. We saw recommendations for them late last year, when they had sold out everywhere because of the snow. They're easy to put on over our shoes and look to make walking down an icy driveway or pavement a lot safer.

Earlier this year, small wheelybins full of grit appeared at the end of the alleyway nearest us, and at another alleyway nearby. They're chained to the alley barriers and sealed with quite serious tape to discourage casual access. They should hold more than enough grit to keep the alleys (both busy pedestrian/cycle routes) clear as well as some nearby pavements.

I was amused last week, catching up on my podcasts, to hear Costing the Earth devote an entire programme (mp3 link) to UK winter preparations this year, and lessons learned from the last two winters.

Finally, FixMyStreet have launched a Fix Before The Freeze campaign to get potential troublespots and accidents-waiting-to-happen reported now, while there's still time to get them fixed.


In a story-driven world, doing all this would mean an unseasonably warm winter and surprise snow in April. In the real world, I'm keeping a lookout on my commute for Fix Before The Freeze candidates.

jae introduced me to this fun. Type 'why are [group] so' into Google and see what you get in autosuggest. In google.co.uk I got the following:


the British: funny, sarcastic, bad at languages, cold
the English: reserved, aggressive, arrogant, cold
the Welsh: dark
the Scottish: unhealthy, bitter

British people: pale, cold, fat
English people: polite, rude, cool
Welsh people: dark
Scottish people: tough, ugly, fat

Londoners: rude

IT people: snarky, annoying, angry, happy
students: stupid, lazy, stressed, annoying
teachers: strict, rude, annoying, mean
academics: weird, liberal, important, poorly dressed

babies: cute, ugly, annoying, fat
politicians: stupid, rich, ugly, corrupt

doctors: arrogant, important, stupid, rude
nurses: fat, mean, rude, important


I was particularly struck by these contrasts:

the Irish: angry, tough, proud, thick
Irish people: pale, proud, beautiful, nice

mothers: mean, difficult, controlling, stupid
mums: horrible, annoying, mean, good

fathers: protective of their daughters, mean, important, protective
dads: annoying, stupid, mean, protective

Please can you suggest RSS reading tools that are like Google Reader except without the look+feel that Google just brought in, that I'm finding really hard to cope with? In particular, I'm looking for

* easy adding of new feeds
* easy editing of feeds
* easy grouping of feeds (in my case into work / study / other)
* visual indicators of read/unread items
* more than half the vertical space of my netbook screen available for reading feed items rather than oversized and unchangeable navigation buttons

I got my first TMA in with 14 hours to spare: approximately 3 hours of typing up notes, 5 hours of moving notes around and expanding until I had a coherent essay, 1 hour of tracking down all my references (done over the weekend) and 2 hours on Monday evening of inserting references, formatting, and similar "administrative" editing.

I've just got the mark back: 75% which is a high pass, but well below the 85% threshold for a distinction. I'm pretty pleased but I'm taking note of the areas for improvement highlighted by the tutor (missed some references, included one area very sketchily when I could have left it out entirely and expanded another that was a bit weak). I want to do better for the second TMA.

Last week's study topic was the Welsh language and the associated nationalism movements. I found myself wondering how silly it would be to use some of my optional course credits on the OU beginner's Welsh course, to get beyond the road-signs-and-greetings level I've got to with family living in Wales. Who else do I know who I could talk with if I did?

The next module (DB123 - Personal Finance in context) starts soon, and the website opens on Thursday, which will give me access to the course timetable so I can plan my study for that too. Meanwhile it's half-term-at-home for me, Tony & Charles and I'm planning to take advantage of the extra free time.

... I was in labour and just beginning to struggle with contractions; we had the whole night to go before Charles arrived, courtesy of an ambulance ride and a surgery team.

This evening we went to the library and paid off his accumulated fees and fines, wandered around the shops together where I managed to buy him a present without him seeing, and had supper together at McDonalds. We talked about school and his new friends and everything and nothing. Back at home, he and Tony are making something with Hama beads he was given by a friend at his birthday party last Saturday.

Ailbhe, as so often, wrote a suitable poem, reproduced below with just the gendered words changed:


"You'll miss the baby days," they used to say -
"So short and sweet and then all gone away,"
But I don't miss those days at all, I find,
While I am witness to your unfolding mind.

I loved the baby days: delight
And joy, us wide awake at night,
But now the baby boy is gone,
And you were in there growing, all along.

I love the child you are now so much more
Than ever I could love the babe before
And daily grows my joy, as you do grow,
That ever-changing you is who I know.

I've just sent an email to Good Energy customer services.

I suspect I'm far from the only person being billed in contravention of the Code of Practice, and I worry about how many people will pay up when they don't have to.  I'd like to support sustainable energy production, but greenery is not an excuse for incompetent and borderline-legal billing.

I know LibDem Conference is so last week (literally), but I wanted to talk about the drugs debate there, and usefully the entirety of it is on YouTube. I felt it was an impressive, nuanced, mature debate: neither "war on drugs is the only option" nor "spliffs are ok man", and focusing on the harm caused by drug abuse and exacerbated by current policy.

If you care about the topic and have 75 minutes, please watch the debate. Even if you can just get through the first 7.5 minutes of Ewan Hoyle "moving the motion", I think his words are worth listening to.



The motion was passed, which means it is now LibDem policy to set up an independent panel to review current drug laws, with an emphasis on scientific and economic evidence, particularly the experience of Portugal in successfully decriminalising drug possession. I felt proud of my party and fellow members during the debate and when the votes were taken.

One of my tweets during the debate prompted that rare thing - a constructive exchange of views via Twitter, which also connected with my OU social sciences study last night. I've tried capturing it using Storify.

I'm at LibDem conference Sat-Wed. My laptop has zero battery life and no internet; my iphone keyboard is a disincentive to lengthy typing. So I've been tweeting quite a lot at rmc28.

I gave my first conference speech yesterday, on the vetting process, and later I asked a question on social mobility. I gather these were both televised on BBC Parliament.

At 4pm we're debating the IT & IP policy I've been involved with, and I've written another speech in support of it - I'll have about 4 minutes warning if I'm going to be called again.

I have just realised that 'charles' is an anagram of 'rachels' - or rather Charles and I realised it together as he moved magnetic letters around on the dishwasher. (Lovely wooden ones from John Lewis that I found tucked at the back of a shelf - a Christmas present he wasn't ready for I think, but I can't remember who from).

He's on the cusp of being able to read, but not quite there yet. I'm finding it fascinating to watch him put the concepts together.

The umbrella is not part of the uniform, but did you see the weather today? There are two more photos under the cut.
( he's nearly five already )

Also today I completed the work for week 1 of my 12-week OU module, D172. So far I'm really enjoying it, both the content and the activity of studying.

I'm currently being a bit old-school and making handwritten notes in nice ringbound notebooks with funky erasable pens, but I'm almost certainly going to transfer the notes into Scrivener for putting together the TMAs. From the small amount of noodling I've done with it so far, Scrivener is massive overkill for this module. On the other hand, that makes this module a useful introductory project for Scrivener. The 30-day free trial is very nice, especially being 30 days of use, not 30 wall-clock days. I should be able to complete the module before I have to decide whether I want to buy it.

I am trying to get ahead of schedule on D172 as a) LibDem conference is in less than 2 weeks, and will eat up most of a week, and b) my next course overlaps with this one by 4 weeks and I'd like not to overlap the study if I can avoid it. If I get through all the weeks as fast as this one it won't be a problem, but contingency is my friend.

I routinely wear a pedometer, as part of my goal to walk at least 10,000 steps a day. Over time, and especially since we got bicycles and I started cycling my commute rather than walking, I've not been hitting the target much and my fitness has been going down. The pedometer keeps the previous 7 days of step counts, but doesn't do any averaging or any longer-term information.

I made myself a motivational spreadsheet at the weekend. Conditional formatting means the step counts go green if they are over 10k, and I also calculate the means of the previous 7 days and 28 days. Making numbers turn green seems to have been just enough motivation to get me out in the evening to walk the last 3-4k steps. My father calls it my evening constitutional; I call it walking around my neighbourhood listening to podcasts.

Yesterday's podcast was the last of the three Torchwood: The Lost Files radio plays. A ghost story while walking in the dark was not the best plan, and might explain why at a particularly exciting part I failed to see a kerb and went flying in a spectacularly clumsy way. This morning I have bruises, but I also turned the spreadsheet numbers green again.

A-Level results came out this week, prompting Chris Cook of the FT to dust off his annual complaint about the photos always somehow being of pretty young women rather than representative of students as a whole. The Sexy A-Levels Tumblr "satirically" collects examples of the genre.

fleetstreetfox thinks we're all wrong to "get het up about pictures of young girls who are happy" because around the world women have it much worse than a bit of sexist photography, and in fact we should have even more photos of girls looking happy.

It's certainly true that women are often treated badly. For some heartbreaking detail, there's the Economist's article last year "The worldwide war on baby girls". However, appalling sexist treatment of women elsewhere is not a reason to be happy about the much milder sexist treatment of women getting their A-Level results. It's classic what-aboutery: why are you fussing over trivial problem A, what-about terribly serious thing B. The rhetorical device fails when you remember you can do both. I am unhappy about sexy A-Levels photos and unhappy about female infanticide too.

I made the mistake of snarking on Twitter about the article (Twitter is a rubbish medium for arguments):

rmc28: . @fleetstreetfox @j4 Objectifying women getting A-level results totally makes up for the shitty way women are treated around the world?

To which I got the charming response:

fleetstreetfox: @rmc28 @j4 Why don't you just see it as celebrating women, Mr Misery?

Sexy A-Levels photos have barely anything to do with celebrating women, and nothing to do with celebrating women's academic achievements. They are a thinly-veiled excuse for printing lots of pictures of pretty young women for readers to ... admire. They are yet another tedious manifestation of the everyday culture that tells women that what matters most is our looks, not our skills; that only those of us who meet conventional standards of attractiveness and success are worthy of attention, and then only as objects of admiration, not independent people in our own right.

While pretending to be about the "real" celebration of women, the article continues to enforce gender stereotypes: "[girls] also express emotion in photographs and boys, with the best will in the world, just don't." (Note that the vast majority of those getting A-level results this week are over 18, they are not "boys" and "girls" but adults.) Meanwhile, fleetstreetfox denies it's all about looks because she saw a few "porkers" in photos, and couldn't be bothered to read my name before snapping at me for disagreeing (few people named Rachel are Mr anything).

These are not statements or behaviour consistent with treating women as people rather than decoration. Nor is celebrating only the prettiest female A-level students while dismissing and disparaging all the rest. And that's why sexy A-Levels photos are wrong.

I have great admiration for the Speaker of the House of Commons. The latest edition of Prospect has a profile on him which includes new (to me) reasons to admire him:

* he does the morning school run (like the PM and Deputy PM - hurrah for powerful men doing parenting as though it were an unremarkable thing)

* he started the first parliamentary nursery

* .. and made it open to staff as well as MPs

* he got a licence for civil partnerships to take place on the parliamentary estate after being approached by Chris Bryant MP (also interesting and admirable from what I've seen, follow @chrisbryantmp)

* he does educational outreach to schools and charities about parliament

* he dismisses people attacking him for the opinions/actions of his wife and rightly points out the implicit sexism: 'They are married, he points out, “not joined at the hip” and “the premise upon which this argument is based is that the wife isn’t an independent person at all; she is just an extension of her husband.”'


For more admiration and praise for John Bercow, there is always http://fyjohnbercow.tumblr.com/