I stumbled upon the Miss USA Pageant Sunday night while flipping through channels and while most of it is absolutely ridiculous and seems almost dated and inconsequential to what’s going on in the world, I found Rima Fakih of Miss Michigan totally charming. I was rooting for her as soon as I heard her speak and saw her smile. I assumed while I was watching, that she was Iranian, so you could imagine my delight and surprise when I learned this morning that she is, in fact, Lebanese — with parents who are Catholic AND Muslim. Hehem.
I know she will spend the next year traveling and drawing attention to frivolous things like hair care products and fancy jewelry, but I also hope she will cast a much-needed, positive light on being Arab-American.
What started out as a laid back quest to find the best reusable diapers that would fit our lifestyle, ended in a frenetic feeding frenzy to purchase them today.
I credit Jason with having discovered gDiapers in one of my pregnancy magazines a couple of months ago, and after falling in love, I set out to educate myself on what we would need for our little one to get started. Alas, the “new baby bundle.” Outfitted with 12 tiny gPants (for newborns), six little gPants in gender neutral colors, and one case of gRefills, this bundle is only available via gDiapers’ website and retails for $149.99. Sure other retailers carry gDiapers, but they don’t carry the precious new baby bundle, whose main attraction is the tough-to-get tiny gPant for newborns.
Delighted to purchase a bundle for us to get started, I was met with a message in red that said, “Sorry, but we are currently sold out of the new baby bundle. Click here to be notified when they are back.” Even though there was a lot of time left in my pregnancy for me to purchase them, my heart sank and I regrettably filled out the form to be notified. This was a couple of months ago.
Today at 2:30pm, I received an email from Kelli McKee at gDiapers alerting me that at 1:00pm (PST) the new baby bundle would be back in stock and ready for purchase, but that there was still a very limited stock. Yikes! I had an hour and a half until I could pull the trigger. “Should I go food shopping before, or after?” Dinner would have to wait. I did not want to miss the 4:00 door opener. And apparently, I was not the only one.
I checked in with gDiaper’s Facebook page, of which there are nearly 14,000 fans, and noticed a post from gDiapers at noon that said, “Before Dec of 2009 we only sold three sizes: sm, med, and lg. No tiny g’s just yet. So for 4 years folks (including parents on the gTeam) started their babies in small. And guess what? Diapers.com has an amazing deal on size small everyday g’s and sweet bundle (and individual pants, too!). Check it out.”
“Oh no, they are already trying to create diversion,” I thought. This is going to be war. And sure enough, at 4:00 my time and 1:00 PST, their website crashed. Thinking it would be temporary I refreshed the page frantically to no avail. Thanks to Facebook, though, I was able to stay apprised of what was going on. Almost immediately, fans (myself included) began to post to their wall that they were having problems. Then came the first update by gDiapers an hour later: “We’re experiencing technical difficulties because so many people are logging in to our shop at the same time. Please bear with us. We’re working through this as quickly as possible.” That update received almost 60 comments – some humorous, some annoyed, some sympathetic – within minutes. Sounds crazy, I know, but let’s not forget that the majority of customers are desperate pregnant women with wild and raging hormones!
So after several status updates and pleas by gDiapers staff to layoff the refresh button, I went food shopping. I mean a pregnant woman’s gotta eat, right?! Upon coming home I checked their Facebook page and saw that several users were rejoicing in the fact that they were finally able to buy their bundle. And so, at 5:51pm, nearly two hours after the gDiapers new baby bundle feeding frenzy began, I was able to buy ours!
It does sort of bring to question why there is such little supply for such high demand for the tiny gPants. As one Facebook fan by the name of Tammy suggested to me, “perhaps gdiapers is afraid of going too big too fast. making mass quantities of terrible products might not be worth it to them. in keeping it small, perhaps they’re able to do better quality control.” Point taken, but when there is overwhelming demand and clearly not enough supply, isn’t that when you want to uh, I don’t know, get big-ger? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want them to sell out to Procter & Gamble, but create the supply to meet the demand already!
At last glance, gDiapers staff posted a YouTube video to let us know that they were indeed hard at work to resolve the website crash. Aren’t they happy that this didn’t happen on a Friday!
So here I am at 25 weeks pregnant, and I can say that I finally and officially “feel” pregnant. Running has become more difficult, trips to the bathroom occur every half hour and people stare at my belly as I walk down the street. According to my midwife, my weight gain and size is “on point,” but perhaps most noticeable this week was that at 25 weeks on the dot on Sunday morning, I woke up with my arm draped across my stomach and could actually feel you moving from the outside. So of course I called for your daddy who came darting into the room, placed his hand on my belly, waited patiently and there you were… saying hello to him for the very first time. It makes the whole experience even that much more exciting now that he can be in on the fun!
I took a spill yesterday while running in the new Brooklyn Bridge Park by the waterfront in DUMBO. Thankfully, my belly was spared but my knees were not! I guess it’s true what they say about your balance being off while preggers.
OUCH!
No lectures please, I feel like ass enough on my own. I was scared for a second about the bambino but as soon as I knew that part of my body was fine I got myself together and continued running. The more awkward part was making my way home with a burgeoning belly and blood dripping down my leg. The stares were interesting. One woman stopped me and offered me a crumpled up – if not used – tissue from her purse. It was a nice gesture, but seriously? I’m not eight! I’m a grown, pregnant woman who took a little spill! I’ll live, as will my baby.
Lesson learned: Watch my footing more carefully from now on. Especially while I run.
At the top of my dog Ella’s blog lies a quote from Ric O’Barry, one of my heroes. “We teach the child not to hurt the butterfly as much for the child as for the butterfly.” In my opinion, there is no saying more tender, more simple. Ella, a victim of animal cruelty, is my butterfly. She has given me the wings to embrace and advocate what I am most passionate about, protecting animals.
When I was a child I had dreams of becoming an ice cream truck driver. Luckily, for my waistline, those dreams later changed to becoming a marine cetalogist. I think I got off on telling people what cetology – the study of whales, dolphins and porpoises – meant. And no matter what, they always translated that into me wanting to be a dolphin trainer, like Ric O’Barry was to Flipper. Sure no one knew who Ric O’Barry was, but everyone knew who Flipper was. I would tell people that yes, I wanted to be like Flipper’s “former” trainer, but that no, I did not want to train Flipper, or any other dolphin for that matter. It seemed incredulous to me, even at a very young age, that anyone have the right to study these creatures anywhere, but in the wild.
Somewhere around 10th grade biology class, all my dreams of being a scientist, ceased. It turned out I was not very good at memorization, or test-taking for that matter, and so my apirations were rerouted once again.
I have always been distantly cognizant of the work of Ric O’Barry. The man spent 10 years in the 60’s working in the dolphin captivity industry training five dolphins to play the role of Flipper, and the next few decades activating against the industry. So it was of no great surprise to me that he’d be featured in The Cove, a ground-breaking documentary on the dolphin captivity and slaughter industry that garnered a wide theatrical release and went on to win an Oscar.
Even though the movie came out this past September it took being up thousands of feet in the air on a Virgin America flight last week, for me to see it. Sure, I cried — I’m not sure anyone can sit through this documentary dry-eyed. But watching these people band together to shoot this film… the courage, passion and extreme measures they went to, it was beyond humbling. And of course Ric O’Barry, remains, my hero.
I had just exited off the BQE on Sunday afternoon when I spotted them. A skinny, old black man and a mama pit bull with teets down to the ground. I was in the far left lane of a four-lane road with direct traffic that lead to the Brooklyn Bridge. Driving slowly, I couldn’t take my eyes off them. She was brindle, he wore a red tattered sweat shirt and they walked like a couple who had been together for decades.
I contemplated stopping but it seemed an impossible feat, not to mention that my motivation for stopping would likely turn out to be futile. At the same time, I couldn’t help but think that if I continued home, I would forever wonder about the mama pit and the man in the red sweatshirt.
Then it occurred to me that I was sans husband, who would most definitely not let me cut across three lanes of traffic to approach a perfect stranger, and so I did it. I cut 90 degrees across, pissing off several cars in the process, and pulled over onto a side street. I double parked the car, left the emergency lights on and got out just as the man and his dog were at the corner.
He looked at me, nodded and said, “good afternoon ma’am.” And then I went for it. I spoke to him about his pit – who was timid and clung closely to him – and told him about mine. I also told him how I work with a non-profit organization that holds free spay/neuter clinics once per month. His eyes lit up. He was not only interested but floored that we offered the service for free. I told him it’s $100 for poodles and free for pits, and he had a good laugh.
It turned out my new friend, Rufus, has three pits. Mama who was with him, papa and one of their daughters who were both at home. They are older – 10, 10 and eight – and he explained that the births were accidental. He had kept mama and papa separate assuming mama was only in heat for a week to 10 days. Little did he know that it could last up to a month.
While it’s great news and was well-worth the drama it took to stop and advocate, his pups are older, and will need special clearance from a vet in order to be operated on. I wish this had a happy ending but we will have to wait and see what happens…
Me and my husband Jason didn’t know a whole lot about the birthing process when we got pregnant. So when we found out we were expecting, at about five weeks along, I looked up local OB/GYN’s in our Brooklyn neighborhood. I wasn’t working at the time so finding a local doctor close to my home was important to me. I found and met Dr. Scott Postell, an attending at Long Island College Hospital, which was a five minute walk from our apartment.
We began prenatal care with Dr. Postell but thanks to a woman I met and became friendly with in prenatal yoga class, I learned about midwives, doulas and liberal birth plans. She lent me The Business of Being Born, a documentary about how giving birth has gone from being a natural process to a catastrophic medical process in America. I had heard of midwifery before but assumed it was a phenomenon of the past, and common only in other countries. Unfortunately, I was right.
The documentary was an eye-opener and because I was considered “low risk,” it got us thinking seriously about a birth plan. We decided a liberal birth experience with minimal-to-no-intervention is what we wanted. We didn’t want to have a home birth (it felt responsible to be in a hospital) as many of the women portrayed in Ricki Lake’s documentary did, but we did want to bring our child into the world with a midwife.
I was 20 weeks pregnant when we severed our relationship with our OB/GYN before finding a midwife. Looking back, it was a terribly naive thing to do. I guess we thought finding a midwife would be as easy as finding a doctor, but we were wrong. Because I was already halfway though my pregnancy, it proved no easy feat.
Midwives take patients based on their due dates, so we needed to find one that not only had space in her calendar in August, but one that would accept our insurance and preferably have privileges to deliver at LICH, the hospital closest to our home. Phone call after phone call to midwife after midwife we were being turned away — until we got a call back from Beverly Woodard of Fruition Midwifery.
Beverly not only took GHI but also had privileges at LICH and space in her schedule for us. The only downside was that her office was in Chelsea, a short subway ride away. Gone was my office-within-walking-distance-requirement, but beggars cannot be choosers!
Before I met Beverly my impression of a midwife was someone who was was warm, maternal and perhaps a bit crunchy. Beverly was anything but that. She was a whippersnapper. She was autocratic, and she took great pleasure in shooting down our fanciful, liberal hopes for a drug-free birth. “Wait, what? Don’t midwives advocate for natural birth?” They absolutely do. But Beverly’s point was that first-time expectant parents shouldn’t rule out all birthing options, including drugs.
So I kept the option of having or needing drugs on the table, but it was important for me to avoid having a Cesarean birth if it was not medically necessary. One thing was for sure: Beverly would not scoff at me if it turned out I needed either of these interventions. Luckily we had found ourselves a midwife!
Has anyone else found themselves changing health care professionals during their pregnancy? If so, did the switch turn out to be a good one?
…and seven pounds gained. We went for our second trimester testing and you look normal. Ten little fingers and ten little toes with a steady heartbeat and spine and an alien-like face! We spoke to Dr. P about transferring over to a midwife. He wasn’t thrilled to say the least, and since there is only three midwives to choose from that have privileges at LICH, who knows, we might not even get in and may wind up staying with him. In any case, I think he got a sense of what kind of birth plan we are after – one with minimal intervention – and I have to say, it was nice to hear I am on course to have a low risk birth.
I have lived in Brooklyn 10 years but would go back to Long Island where I grew up, for that once per year dreaded gynecological exam. I figured my commute east for these office visits would bite me in the ass some day, but there a million things more comforting than having to find a new gynecologist.
Good times at the gyno
So when I found out I was pregnant, the first thing I did was look up doctors who were close by where I lived. I knew there would be many appointments in my future and I wasn’t working, so being in walking distance of the doctor’s office was important to me.
That’s when I met Dr. Scott Postell at Long Island College Hospital. After some further testing confirmed my pregnancy, he fed me his credentials and shpeel on the thousands of babies he’s delivered and assured me that a merger with SUNY Downstate Medical Center would not hinder my birthing plans. He spoke in layman’s terms often, but he had a personable quality that made me more at ease about exposing my vajayjay. Plus, the walk to his office was only five minutes from my home.
We were fortunate to have a hospital in our neighborhood and thus it felt it was only right to have our baby in the community we loved and lived in for so many years. It was decided. We would have our baby with Dr. Postell at LICH. All of a sudden I was having visions of walking (or waddling) myself to the emergency room when I went into labor!
Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, NY
Of course I made this decision before I did my homework and combed the web for reviews. Turns out the message boards were ripe with negativity about giving birth at LICH. One woman wrote in the comments to an article about births being down at LICH that she wouldn’t let her dog give birth there. Well if you read this blog then you know how I feel about people who think their life has greater value than that of an animal’s.
But there were also comments from moms who had great things to say about giving birth at LICH. Like the woman who was in labor 65 hours (yikes!) and called labor and delivery at LICH “top rate.” Hopefully I can second that motion. The top rate comment, NOT the 65 hour labor!
The new documentary Skin Trade premieres tomorrow, and who best to promote it but two of the biggest anti-fur activists of our time… the Barbi Twins! Click here to read more…
