February. Wow.

Well as it seems to go, so much has been happening that I just haven’t had time to update, which means I’ll only be skimming the surface here.
We moved to Iowa City a couple days before New Years. Days later, we decided to move out of the rather dumpy place we had chosen from a distance, which entailed a lot of headaches and stress, but thankfully we were able to pay to get out of the lease and found a temporary place. Now we are moving again, and we sure hope it’s the last time for a couple years….lease signed until August 2013! This is where Cricket will be born, and we couldn’t be more excited about that. The one bedroom house on a gravel road in town backs up to a beautiful cemetery and park, and was actually featured in a painting by Grant Wood. It was built in 1848!

Between Texas and here we had quite the adventures...first selling our car in one day on Craigslist after having packed it up, upon realizing it might not make the journey (which was nice in the end, because we got to come up together in Justin's truck, but with less stuff than anticipated). Kansas City for the holidays and my grandparents' 70th wedding anniversary. Then Des Moines for a few days. And finally to Iowa City...with all our crap.

Here in Iowa City, Justin is working as an assistant-teacher at the Montessori School of Iowa City and I am doing some office work for my midwife and the midwife who I will very soon be doing births with. I was nannying for a 6mth old, but I started having a lot of contractions and wound up in the hospital overnight being treated for preterm labor, so I promptly stopped that work. The hospital experience was pretty icky, but ultimately good for me as a midwife…it’s all part of my journey in learning and experiencing different aspects of pregnancy and birth. I just thank God, Allah, the Devine, Universe, etc that I am not going to have to have the baby in the hospital… a few hours of being strapped to the monitor and I understood on a bodily level why so many women end up with C-Sections and epidurals in the hospital—you just become so disconnected from your body, not to mention become so physically uncomfortable and agitated! I was on bedrest for awhile and am just now getting back to normalish activity. I really miss going for nice long walks and yoga classes though! Soon enough I’ll be back to it, but I am still having a lot of contractions (several an hour), so I try to take it easy.

Other than that, Justin and I have been fighting lots of colds due to lack of sleep (from last week’s events), stress, and bugs from the Montessori school making their way home. Justin is also getting more and more involved with a farm 10 miles north of Iowa City, where he will be working full-time this summer, and hopes to get a little bee/honey operation going there as well asap.

The weather here is beautiful. I can’t help but delight in the sunshine, but Justin keeps reminding me that this is not normal weather and the prairie is suffering… yeaahhh but... :(

That’s it for now! I’ll be doing a 10-day meditation sit the first week and a half of March, so I shall be incommunicado.

Love!

Our little Cricket (this was almost 5 weeks ago at 22wks)

26wks

me, CPM

I can't believe I forgot to say too that I passed my boards and am now officially a Certified Professional Midwife (CPM). So that is very exciting for me; it's what I've been indirectly and directly working toward since early 2006 when I wrote the grant to go to Bali, Indonesia to study prenatal and perinatal customs, and saw my first birth.

Now, unfortunately that doesn't mean I can legally practice in my home state of Iowa yet. This year will be the 3rd year to have legislation at the capital to decriminalize and hopefully license midwives in Iowa. Iowa will hopefully become the 28th state (I believe) to do this. ALL of the other states are currently working to do the same. So if you live in Iowa, get in touch with your state legislator and tell them you support the decriminalization and licencing of midwives in Iowa!

Happy Winter Solstice

Well I'm 18weeks almost (4 1/2 months) and next week we are leaving our Austin lives to be Northerners. I am on a mission to eat as many tamales as possible before then. I think I've already had my fill of breakfast tacos and huevos rancheros by now, but I'll probably slide in another set of each before we leave Friday morning.

I just worked my last shift at YogaYoga, the best yoga studio ever, and probably worked my last shifts as a sub at the Montessori schools and a PRN nurse at a nursing home. Now my work is packing and cleaning. We realized we were doing this exact same thing at this time last year. We had a good laugh and mused: what the hell is wrong with us? hahaha

I've had some recent wonderful Austin experiences lately; trying to cram them in before I live in tiny (wonderful in different ways) Iowa City again. The farmers' market is still going on (temps are in the 50s here) and last Weds Justin and I feasted on vegan, organic tamales at one. A week ago we had a chakra balancing session with Tibetan bowls, where Everitt (one of my yoga instructors) put the bowls along our spines and at our head and feet and played them, as well as played the gong. Last night we went to a winter solstice gong ceremony with probably 50 other people. It started with a short kundalini yoga class, followed by laying back and having the vibrations of gongs wash over us, played by 3 different people. Also yesterday I just happened to walk by my neighbor's house, where they were hanging out and doing cleansing ceremonies with a Huichol Shaman from Mexico. He was delighted that I was pregnant and did a ceremony with me which involved lots of spitting, brushing me with a feather, sucking energy from my body, and rubbing me with something that smelled like alcohol, menthol, and herbs. In the end he said the baby was very happy and healthy.

A less unique experience occurred a few weeks ago, and is really not Austin-esque at all, but it's fairly telling of our lives. We had a giftcard to Walmart (don't ask), which is the only reason we stepped foot in there. Since we never go, it was like an exotic vacation: looking at all the people, experiencing the bright lighting, the smell of rotting produce, etc. Justin mentioned he wanted some coconut ice cream and we doubted they would have it, but wouldn't you know, they did! So we each got a pint, and after making the rounds and getting the full experience of Walmart, we rounded it out by sitting in the McDonalds, using plastic spoons borrowed from them, and ate our coconut milk icecream, while we watched other people spend their Saturday nights as well in the Walmart: working, hanging out, shopping, eating, whatever. Why this story took up a whole paragraph and the stories about solstice ceremony, gongs, tibetan bowls, chakras, and a Huichol shaman had to share a paragraph, is probably also indicitive of where I'm at in my life and what is really "out there" to me. Haha.

We're heading to San Antonio in a bit for Christmas with Justin's family. I'm excited to be making a strawberry rhubarb crisp for them. I ran across rhubarb at the grocery store (eeep imported from Holland!), and just had to get some because Justin has never had it before, because generally they don't sell it down here since it appears they do not grow it...

Loves!
Rachel

gong and bowls: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hncJzoAiAw

13wks

Well. I've had a hard time cajoling myself to update: yet again daunted by the sheer density of the past several weeks. That and I've had to feel things out and see how they're going to go before writing about them publicly.

I hated Kansas City. I was driving all over the place, which in a way was interesting, because I learned the streets of a city that I have spent so much time in, but never been the driver or the one in charge. So now when I go back to visit family, I'll know where to get some awesome dolmas, go for a great walk, people watch, and take a free yoga class---and take the back roads/scenic routes. Much more significantly though, I hated my job. I found it demoralizing. The practices of the docs/nurses and the hospital were out of the dark ages and they were disrespectful and actually quite unethical in their treatment of low-resource patients. I won't go into that because I had enough trouble getting it out of my head at night for weeks following. So since then, I've been hugely battling with the hospital and the staffing agency to get some sort of pay, even though I was only there for a week of training and one day on the floor.

After a particularly horrifying day on the floor (yes, the only day), I decided Ohhhh NO, this won't do. I won't be here long enough to actually influence their culture of practice, and this is just too demoralizing. So I quit. And here's where it get's more interesting.... Justin and I had been talking more at this point: sometimes in nice voices, sometimes in stern ones, but it was productive and we knew we wanted to make it work. Why? Because it turns out that about 24hrs before breaking up, it would appear that we conceived...that is, by this time in Kansas City I was about 8 weeks pregnant (another reason I could not stomach the ill treatment of pregnant women and babies)!

So I decided I may as well come down to Austin, TX and see how things go with Justin and me. I was not naive enough to think that just because we were having a baby that we had to be in a romantic relationship again, but I figured since we both really love each other and have had some time to work on things for ourselves, we may as well give it a fresh start, and if it works out great! If it doesn't we'll still be good co-parents. I stopped along the way at the Vipassana meditation center outside of Dallas for a few days, which was perfect. Then, less than a week after leaving the job, I was living in Austin, TX with Justin.

I feel like it's all been meant to be. First of all I feel like there were plenty of other opportunities that we could have conceived earlier in our relationship, but it seems that what was meant to happen is that it occurred at a time when we could take some personal space and work out some issues (as opposed to traveling in Mexico together for example). I also think that I somehow knew that I was going to become pregnant and had to pull the breaks on our relationship to allow some space for us to do some internal work, so that we could come back together and be great partners and parents. Secondly, I think that I was meant to go to Kansas City to work at that terrible place so that I could impact the culture there in some way--I of course made sure that the DON (director of nursing) and the hospital's director were informed of the out-of-date practices and unethical treatment of patients on the L/D floor. Living in Kansas city also gave me the unique opportunity to spend some quality time with my family who lives there. And I probably just needed be be distracted for a little longer before the situation was ready for Justin and I to proceed.

So I have been down here, for almost 6 weeks I think. Wow. Justin and I are doing great! I am so happy that I was able to come down here. We are taking a prenatal parenting class, which discusses the psychology of the fetus/neonate/baby and of the couple, highlighting the different regions of the brain (reptile, mammal, human/neocortex) and their importance in communication (etc!). We're also doing counseling. And we're reading books together on conscious pregnancy and parenting. There are some expected bumps, but I really feel that because we are eager to sit down to difficult and honest conversation, we have a super solid and fulfilling relationship. I feel so blessed by everything.

So for now Justin works at a Montessori preschool/kindergarten and I substitute there as well as at a different school. This has been awesome exposure to little ones (2 months of age to 6yrs) and exposure to different ways of consciously raising kiddos and facilitating their independence and self-esteem (etc). I also have a work-trade at a yoga studio. Our plan is to drive up to Kansas City for Christmas and my grandparents' 70th wedding anniversary (!) and then on to Iowa City, Iowa, where we are intending (manifesting) to buy a house and live happily ever after and never travel again :) I will be joining a homebirth midwifery practice as a Certified Professional Midwife (I just took my test in Niagara Falls Canada last week) and Justin will start building bee hives and preparing a honey business for the spring. He's also looking at opportunities to work with local farmers as well as maybe assist at alternative schools in Iowa City (Montessori or otherwise). We will miss the frequent trips down to San Antonio to visit Justin's parents and grandma, but they are already planning their road trip up to the exotic midwest.

So, phew! There it is! Here I am! Again, I am exhausted looking back and seeing what I've been up to in just under a couple months. I cannot wait to significantly slow down my life. Hibernating and gestating in freezing Iowa will be a good place to do so :) and we can't wait to get out of the traffic of Austin.

I just found this new video of Kimya Dawson, who is singer-song-writer/activist who I rather adore. She just put out an album inspired by being a mother. If it doesn't make you smile, ummm you should probably just watch it again :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VELferPHZIo

Love!
Rachel + baby "Cricket" (due to enter this world the end of May)

our glowing fetal Halloween pumpkin :)