Dime bar.

A friend put it brilliantly when she said 'women who have a baby seem to give birth to their brain too'. Never a truer word spoken. I have become, I'd say, pretty brain dead in the 12weeks since the birth of The Boss. I actually lost my ability to speak, sentences seemingly lost or bundled up somewhere between my brain and my mouth, coming out all messed up where I ended up sounding like a bit of a div. I'd never heard of that before. But then again, I don't think it'd be the thing to tell an expectant mother 'oh by the way, you'll probably become a complete gibbering wreck for about 3months after bubba is born'. That would send most women running for the hills. Or the nearest pub.
Last week I was dog tired from The Boss waking up every hour the night before and we were both a bit sniffly. The Boss wouldn't sleep in the day, at all. It was about 5.30 in the afternoon and I thought i'd get on the bed and maybe a nice snuggle would send her off.. Dear God, what was i thinking! She screamed and screamed and screamed again. So, I got up off the bed and thought we'd take a walk but somehow managed to put my foot in the carrycot which was amongst the organized chaos on the floor, which sent me flying through the air, with babe in arms. I managed to soften the blow with my pre-broken arm on a desk. Ouch.
Living in a flat with no storage seems to create more clutter.. Or is that having a baby?? But ok, I admit it. I'm a hoarder. Hate to throw anything away me, always thinking 'oo, that'll come in handy'. I take the bits of rope off bag handles (you know the posh ones), flatten sweet wrappers, smooth the wrapping paper from gifts easing off the sellotape from the corners, flatten cereal boxes for the card, save bits of broken jewelery, in fact anything that can be re-used i will re-use it. In my mind its all been for a valuable and very green reason. For my future children to create things with.. and at last all this stuff thats cluttering up my tiny little flat will actually come in handy and will be used up. Well, until i get another bag with ropes on it..

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Birth Plan...

The end is in sight. The Birth Plan has started. Ahhhh!!

So, here are the options...
- Natural birth (the obstetrician uses the word vaginal birth.. gross) with no painkillers
- Natural birth with gas and air
- Natural Birth with epidural (an injection in your spine that kills all pain instantly)
- Natural birth with epidural, the baby pulled out using ventouse (that's a suction plastic thing that yanks the baby out by the top of the head - leaving them with cone head also called vacuum-assisted vaginal delivery) and forceps (scary looking massive metal tweezers used to pull out the baby).
- Cesarean birth.

Obviously, I wanted to follow the natural birth route - I wanted to join the birth gang, the women who have suffered for the next generation, to fulfil my job as a woman.. but due to my weird brain i had my options somewhat diminished.. It was either natural birth with epidural using those forceps and that weird ventose or Cesarean. Wow, what an array of special choices! But i thought about it... and thought about it some more and thought that if any woman had a 'choice' I doubt anyone would 'choose' to have their baby delivered with a contraption that left them with a pointy head.. surely that would only be a last option, an emergency.. not a considered choice? But a c-section was hardly a considered choice either. I met someone the other day who had been delivered by ventouse and still had a pointy head.. he is 30.

Having read some literature on the subject I found that in the UK 14 in 100,000 women die during childbirth, in developing countries that figure jumps to a terrifying 440 in 100,000 which we must agree is down to the availability of the emergency c-section in the western world. However, there are also risks with going for the full op.. risks of hemorrhage and infection etc. The doctor and the patient (that's me) has to take into account all of these factors and make a choice. So, I realised that I was not in the too posh to push category but in a completely different category of not being allowed to push on medical grounds.

That did it, I was going for the full op, the c-section. But how green can that really be?? Am I making an incredibly un-green choice?

There seems to be very little reading material on the net regarding how green medical operations are. But what I do know is that if I'm around then the baby will be leading a far greener life than if I wasn't. I will be bringing up my baby to be ethically aware and I will be ethically conscious with all the choices I have to make.

So what if I can't push the baby out of the conventional route, I'm sure there are many millions of women who do and who also use the full 5,000 nappies during the babies lifetime that take 500years each to biodegrade, don't switch their fuel suppliers, buy and throw away millions of tons of plastic toys/baby baths etc.. Where as I, ecomummy, will be living and breathing ethicalness (well, I will try my best..)

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