Did you know that in every single women's bathroom of any restaurant in Texas there's a big sign on the wall admonishing you not to drink?
I did not know that. Even the restaurants that don't serve alcohol?
Most of the bathrooms of restaurants in PA say that employees have to wash their hands but the rest of us apparently don't need to.
I admit that it's probably only venues that serve alcohol. At the same time, that means that all the bathrooms at SeaWorld, frinstance, reprimand you for causing your child gross deformation. Not if you're pregnant, but just if you're of child-bearing age.
Even the restaurants that don't serve alcohol?
PREGNANT WOMEN SHOULD NOT DRINK THE HAND SANITIZER
in every single women's bathroom of any restaurant in Texas there's a big sign on the wall admonishing you not to drink
They have these in California too, don't they? I don't remember if they're in the bathrooms.
Not if you're pregnant, but just if you're of child-bearing age.
Wait, what? There are signs in bathrooms telling women who aren't pregnant not to drink?
Most of the bathrooms of restaurants in PA say that employees have to wash their hands
I like the CA ones, which say that state law and common decency require that you wash your hands.
I'm exaggerating a little ("if you think you might be pregnant") but the signs are prominent and ubiquitous.
all the bathrooms at SeaWorld, frinstance, reprimand you for causing your child gross deformation.
MOTHERS! IF YOUR CHILD IS HIDEOUS, HE GETS IT FROM YOUR SIDE OF THE FAMILY
signed
CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH
But Heebie, if women drink while pregnant there won't be enough white babies then we'll have cultural decadence!!!
6: PA has a commonwealth instead of common decency.
From the article: "I'd think of my baby swimming in a pool of chardonnay and being like, 'Mommy.'"
I'm not sure what message this was supposed to get across, but it sounds kind of awesome.
It used to be the thing to say to pregnant women, rather than "hello" or "goodbye".
Though wine's probably hard to swim in?
Chardonnay tastes too much like apple butter. I prefer a pinot grigio.
Or a red wine. I'll have a red wine with fish because they can't make me drink chardonnay unless there's nothing else in the house.
One factor that might give doctors pause about publicly endorsing drinking while pregnant is that women--pregnant or not--traditionally underreport how much they drink by four times the amount men do.
This is useless without an explanation of how much men underreport by.
I learned that if I tell my doctor I have less than ten drinks a week, the visit goes a little quicker.
If I tell him I weigh 170 pounds, it would probably go even quicker. If the nurse ever forgets to weigh me, I'm going to try it.
My self-reporting of how much grappa I consumed a couple of weeks ago was maybe 15% lower than everyone else who was present's reporting of how much grappa I consumed.
Oh, for heaven's sake.
I fondly remember my week in a maternity ward in Oz, where the mornings began with choosing which wine you wanted to have with lunch.
Meanwhile, here is the book on FAS.
From the article: "I'd think of my baby swimming in a pool of chardonnay and being like, 'Mommy.'"
WE HAD SUCH HIGH HOPES FOR YOU WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD. AND NOW LOOK AT YOU. YOU CAN BARELY AFFORD TO IMMERSE ONE FOOT IN A BUCKET OF FOUR LOKO.
Chardonnay tastes too much like apple butter.
Many American chardonnays taste like butterscotch schnapps to me. Teh gross.
I've never actually had butterscotch schnapps. I don't know how drunk I'd have to be for that to sound like a good idea.
I learned that if I tell my doctor I have less than ten drinks a week, the visit goes a little quicker.
Any respectable doctor would take an extra moment to point out that you have fewer than ten drinks a week.
Though wine's probably hard to swim in?
Further research is necessary.
When swimming in wine, you definitely want to wear goggles. Trust me.
I've told this story before, but when my mother had some bleeding and they thought she might be miscarrying while she was pregnant with me, the doctor prescribed bed rest and gin. And look how I turned out. (Perhaps not the absolutely strongest argument, admittedly.)
29: Yes, arguments from single cases are rarely epidemiologically significant.
Shorter 30: Your mom's not epidemiologically significant.
29. If he'd prescribed hot baths and gin, I'd have started to worry.
Honestly, I'm inclined to think this is yet more misogynistic crap. Obviously you shouldn't abuse your system while pregnant, but we're not talking about getting legless here, we're talking about the odd drink. Back in the day when everybody drank small beer all the time because you couldn't trust the water, do you imagine Leibnitz' mother never had a drink while she was pregnant? Voltaire's? Spinoza's? I don't think so.
We talked about this here recently (in the last three or four years?); not so much pregnancy specific, but an attitude toward risk where activities are divided into normal and unnecessary/frivolous. If something's an ordinary thing to do, you don't think about risk unless it's going to kill you instantly: driving's the big example. No one thinks about the additional risk of death in an accident from logging more miles on the road. If something is frivolous, on the other hand, like drinking, the possibility of any detectable risk, no matter how infinititesmal is intolerable and anyone who accepts it is irresponsible.
29: (I've told this story too but) when Jammies' mom was a neonatal nurse in the 70s and women came in with pre-term labor, they would start them on a freaking alcohol IV. Apparently they would get super hammered, unsurprisingly.
They would stay on the drip for days, or however long they could stall labor. So sometimes you might be coming off a days-long hospital-induced bender and be handed a newborn baby. Worst hangover ever.
Jammies' mom likes to say "Quite a few relationships got in trouble over those IV drips!" and she won't quite explain what that means, but I take it to mean it acts like truth serum and women start talking about infidelity or possible paternity doubts?
The thing about that article is, I don't think the author was setting out to condemn women. She seems like she wants to be sympathetic. But then she ends her article with the idea that a beer while pregnant isn't just a beer, it's a metonym for everything the woman has lost!
I don't even know what to do analysis-wise with the fact that it's a non-alcoholic beer that's the metonym for all she's sacrificed.
I'd think of my baby swimming in a pool of chardonnay
I swam in a pool of gin, or at least well flavored with gin, and while I wouldn't say I was okay, exactly, I definitely don't have FAS.
I think I've also mentioned this before, but my aunt was told that smoking while pregnant would make delivery easier because the baby would be smaller. She probably just had a really shitty doctor.
I second Gonerill's reading recommendation, but I find it too hard to be coming at this from my perspective with the same casual dismissal others here have. Bad prenatal situations (lack of medical care, manlnutririon, cigarettes, alcohol, drugs) can set the stage for bad outcomes and I've seen them. This is probably just a "fix poverty to fix the schools" response, but things are different on the other end of the spectrum in a lot of ways.
If I knew Mara's mom had been drinking through this pregnancy on top of her other risk factors, would people here judge me for thinking, "Oh, why does she risk THAT too?" I'm not sure where the line is.
I think that wasn't unconventional thinking at the time -- the idea was that they knew smokers had smaller babies, but hadn't figured out that they were less healthy yet. So, easy delivery, no downside.
I was also marinated in a warm bath of nicotine. Mom tells a charming story of giving birth unmedicated, and about fifteen minutes after the delivery wandering up to the nurse's station to bum a smoke. Which you could successfully do in a hospital in the early seventies.
Who was it again who has an adopted kid and a biological kid, and has commented on the difference between the parenting books aimed at each situation? Ie the books for pregnant women saying "DON'T TOUCH THAT BLEU CHEESE!" and the books for adoptive parents soothingly saying "What's done is done and studies show that statistically, your baby is probably super healthy and just fine."
Jammies too swam in a nicotine bath.
41: Related to that and what I probably said the last time this came up, I think FASD is probably underdiagnosed in kids who remain in their birth families and may be overdiagnosed in kids who are adopted. I have an online friend who placed her child for adoption at birth and the child's adoptive parents and the doctors they work with have decided the kid's problems all stem from FASD because she admitted that she had a margarita before finding out she was pregnant and then abstained after but they assume telling the truth about the margarita is proof she's just lying to cover her tracks in the rest of her bad behavior. That story certainly rings true to me.
39: Honestly, while I generally would be more reluctant to judge you on child/fostering related matters than I would just about anyone on any topic, I do kind of think you're wrong about that. AFAIK, there's really no good evidence at all of FAS short of genuinely heavy drinking in early pregnancy -- getting hammered on a regular basis. If Mara's mother isn't drinking like that, I don't think there's much evidence that she's risking anything at all.
(There's a bit of a meta-issue: the message that you can't drink at all in pregnancy is so strongly transmitted by doctors and signs and labels that if she is drinking, she's probably either oblivious to all that good advice or recklessly ignoring it, so her internal state of mind might be irresponsible. But this is an issue where all the good advice is, I think, wildly overcautious.)
Nicotine is a hygroscopic, oily liquid that is miscible with water in its base form.
Huh. Still, swimming in the stuff would probably be fatal. Also, if you swim in alcohol, make sure it's non-carbonated, and that you don't have any open wounds.
46: Because the bubbles will lower the density and you'll sink?
I was thinking the CO2 might kill you, especially if there's a nice head on your pool.
My wife's compromise between the overbearing paranoid advice and our read of the science was to avoid drinking for the first trimester, ironically when an outsider doesn't have any idea that there's a pregnancy going on.
The cheese thing was a particular sore spot, though. It's only unaged, unpasteurized cheese that's a potential problem (unlike FAS, miscarriage from listeria infection seems like a pretty real if rare problem). She went so far as to get her lunch shop to dig out the bucket their blue cheese sauce came in and show her the ingredient list, and as expected, the blue cheese was made with pasteurized milk.
I nearly drowned due to being in very bubbly water. I have a clear memory of figuring out why my life jacket wasn't carrying me to the surface and thinking "Oh shit, I'm going to be killed by bubbles." Then the water cleared up and I popped to the surface.
thinking "Oh shit, I'm going to be killed by bubbles."
Michael Jackson's staffers often had the same thought.
She went so far as to get her lunch shop to dig out the bucket their blue cheese sauce came in and show her the ingredient list, and as expected, the blue cheese was made with pasteurized milk.
Wait, they weren't going to serve her cheese?!
No, I don't think they were going to turn her down, she just wanted to double-check her guess that random fast-food blue cheese sauce was not any kind of unusual risk.
(Raw-milk cheese and deli meats are the standard things to warn about the listeria risk, but the reality seems to be that random contaminated vegetables are as much or more of a problem - such as last year's canaloupe outbreak).
The thing about listeria is, while it's a real thing, it's really, really rare. And the list of things it could possibly grow on contains just about every non-pasteurized thing you would keep in a fridge. And the most recently publicized miscarriages due to listeria? Were from eating tainted cantaloupe. Makes me tend toward throwing my hands in the air and eating whatever the fuck I want.
Cantaloupe is a very disappointing fruit anyway. Sometimes it is really good, but not often enough to justify the blah that is usual.
50 is similar to one theory about sudden ship losses - massive methane clathrate outgassing turns the water to froth and the ship suddenly isn't buoyant.
56 gets it right. It's the filler in the fruit salad to keep you away from the berries.
If you don't drink when you are pregnant, your kid is going to have a dangerously low tolerance for alcohol when they get to college.
My mother was advised to drink Guinness when pregnant, due to slight anaemia. Data point: I rather like Guinness.
56 is right. Why eat cantaloupe when you could eat honeydew?
50: That's totally terrifying.
It kind of amazes me how much people are willing to lie about their alcohol consumption to their medical providers. Under reporting a few drinks is one thing. Coming into an ER with symptoms of alcohol and denying that you've had anything to drink. They'll test your blood alcohol.
58: Even if it doesn't give you listeria, it makes everything else in the fruit salad taste like canteloupe.
62: If your blood alcohol level is high enough at that moment to be an issue, your judgment about whether to lie about it is probably not at its sharpest.
NOTHING IS HEALTHIER FOR PREGNANT WOMEN THAN ANTELOPE SALAD.
61: Actually, my thoughts on honeydew are similar to my thoughts on cantaloupe.
41: That was me. Advice worth repeating every few years as different folks get into babymaking. "What ot expect" books aimed at UMCs who are adopting children are very reassuring that nothing that happens in pregnancy or the first year or so of life matters at all, as long as you go all SWPL when you get your baby home.
I have never understood how Fetal Alcohol Syndrome could have first been discovered around 1980. Pediatrics was somewhat past the shaman stage by the Dr. Spock period, and moms had been drinking for millenia.
I read this thread while giving the baby a bottle instead of staring back into her eyes for twenty minutes. Am I risking that she'll have attachment issues and be unable to firm meaningful relationships later in life?
I have never understood how Fetal Alcohol Syndrome could have first been discovered around 1980.
The anti-alcohol movement was making a real comeback about that time. That was when the drinking age was raised, after all. In retrospect, we are lucky the Women's Christian Temperance Movement didn't retake the national stage to demand prohibition again.
I blame Reagan.
Also in the middle of it she had an explosive poop and got shit all over my pants.
69: You'll know you've done damage when she starts making cock jokes.
71: Sometimes there's not enough diaper in the whole world.
Did you know that in every single women's bathroom of any restaurant in Texas there's a big sign on the wall admonishing you not to drink?
They're in the men's rooms too.
47, 48: Interesting, I hadn't heard of that. Mythbusters apparently tested it recently, but I haven't seen the episode; it it was just with a machine bubbling air up rather than actual carbonated water, and ruled plausible but with a counterintuitive mechanism.
64: True enough, but the same person will deny drinking to doctors at other times too. I know why they'd deny it to their families.
69: You're not risking it, because it's already too late.
44: I didn't mean for fetal alcohol risks per se, just general fetal health and decent birth weight. I think I'd sigh about cigarettes the same way, but this is semi-hypothetical.
Is that an issue, if her nutrition is otherwise good? I mean, smoking is correlated with low birth weight and so on, but I had thought that other than FAS, moderate drinking hadn't been shown to be generally harmful to fetal health.
The only pregnancy book that isn't insane, Panic-Free Pregnancy, basically says that the two things you really, truly do need to give up while pregnant are cigarettes and cocaine.
Pregnancy also means you should re-think your career at the car battery factory.
And paint-chip sprinkles on the donuts.
Speaking of topics related to fecal matter, 2/3rds of young people lie about when they use Faceobook
It kind of amazes me how much people are willing to lie about their alcohol consumption to their medical providers.
76: You seem to be talking about a specific person with specific problems, but I lie to doctors about my alcohol consumption all the time. Pretty much every time I go to the doctor. Sometimes I think to myself that as a healthy, informed person, I should own up to exactly how much I drink, in the interest of better representing the range of possible healthy drinking habits. But I never do, because fuck it. I've dealt with way too many concern-trollish doctors reading from a script.
I have to admit I love the weasliness of how the prohibition is worded. "There is no known safe amount." Well, yes, that's true, because one can't go around getting pregnant women drunk to make their babies injured, but also not equivalent to "no amount is safe."
86: Yeah, counting up "Almost certainly at least one drink a day, often two, and any night I'm doing anything fun, which might be 0-3 times a week, four or five" starts sounding like an awful lot when you're putting it on a form.
I knew a guy who refused to count how many drinks he had because somebody told him that counting drinks was a sign of alcoholism and he wanted to avoid alcoholism.
79, 80: Ok, I should stop using fake hypotheticals. But I don't think cocaine is necessarily the worst worst drug either.
86: I know that people lie about moderate amounts all the time. It's the gross level of denial that surprises me especially when the alcohol is having obvious effects.
I don't drink much, but I had a conversation with my doctor about the frequency with which I engage in "binge drinking.". I said that I was just being honest. I mean, she always pushes exercise but she basically said, "I can live with that.". I try to be honest especially with people prescribing psych meds. I think one med I take says to avoid alcohol, and my doctor pretty much told me that I ought to make sure that I have a glass of champagne on New Year's Eve.
She did say she supervised a resident who was treating a guy with the shakes. The resident said, "He says that he only has one drink a day.". It turned out that one drink was like a 20 ounce glass of whiskey.
7-11's decision to start selling the Jameson's Big Gulp was probably a mistake.
My sister is trying to get pregnant and the "you're pre-pregnant!" line of reasoning is driving her crazy. She wants to have a glass of wine with dinner. She's been trying unsuccessfully for almost a year. Calls me in tears because she's being "good" about everything and still no baby.
86: Around here I elicited a shocked gasp from a nurse after detailing my exercise habits and doing the usual height/weight/BP check, and then answering that yes, three or four times a week I have a beer with dinner.
"I have never understood how Fetal Alcohol Syndrome could have first been discovered around 1980. Pediatrics was somewhat past the shaman stage by the Dr. Spock period, and moms had been drinking for millenia."
The whole 0% risk in some European countries thing may contribute to this.
Some book I was reading was speculating that Europeans gained genetic tolerance of alcohol since alcohol-based drinks reduced water born infections. Asians apparently used tea.
95.last: Where are you that drinking at that level is unusual? Yemen?
88: I mean, I'm a total lightweight. 3 drinks and--if one is stiff--I'm pretty much drunk. I couldn't do that 4 times in a week.
FAS is also pretty subtle, and pretty rare, isn't it? Not that it's not serious, but you've got a kid who manifests in preschool with developmental delays and an identifiable but not terribly glaring set of facial abnormalities, and a typical doctor might see one of them every few years, in amongst a whole bunch of kids with developmental delays caused by other things. It seems like the sort of thing that I'm not surprised was difficult to spot.
95: In fact, there are those who might say that moderate drinking increases your odds of pregnancy.
(One day when Newt was three or so, and being extraordinarily talkative, energetic, and imperious, Nancy came back from the park with him, slammed into Buck's office, ranted about Newt's behavior for a couple of minutes, and finished the rant with "Were you drunk when you made him?"
Buck counted back from August '01 to Halloween '00, and told her "Odds are, yes.")
I am fighting this battle on drinking and breast feeding now. So far as I can tell alcohol level in breast milk is the same as alcohol level in blood -- meaning that if you drank until you passed out your breast milk would have the same alcohol percentage as a typical *non-alcoholic* beer like O'Douls. If you drank until you felt a nice little buzz it might be one quarter that. But this has led to all kinds of paranoid recommendations about not breast feeding for at least two hours after drinking, timing you drinking, etc. I've got my girl up to half a glass of wine with dinner but I need to get her up to the 1.5 glass level so that I don't get totally wasted every time we open a bottle.
One bad thing with all this stuff is that it's self-reinforcing in epidemiological studies -- the more you convince successful middle-class people to be unreasonably paranoid in their alcohol consumption, the more strongly alcohol consumption is correlated with bad outcomes.
You don't drink wine when you're breastfeeding, you want a nice hoppy beer. Hops are good for milk production, and beer's less dehydrating.
103: This. My understanding is that that's where 'crack babies' came from -- you take a population of mothers who are abusing cocaine, they're also going to be malnourished, and smokers, and have other untreated health problems, and after birth they're going to have environmental problems with childcare, and and and. But when you disaggregate the issues, there actually wasn't all that much of a pre-natal drug use effect.
101: I told her that she should enjoy her wine ("drink till pink [lines on the test]") and recognize that when she does get pregnant, the kid will not be hooked into her blood supply for a few weeks, so if she wants to abstain while pregnant, she'll know she is before there's any risk at all. She seems to have followed my advice so now she's just stressed about primary infertility possibilities, but at least she can have a drink.
102: I think people read this as saying that if my BAC is 0.08, and I breastfeed, the baby's BAC is 0.08.
Also, geez, if you abstain from alcohol (and caffeine, for that matter) while you're trying to get pregnant, and then it takes a really long time, and THEN you finally get pregnant, you can be looking at years without drinking.
I think people read this as saying that if my BAC is 0.08, and I breastfeed, the baby's BAC is 0.08.
I know this is your point, but jesus some people are insane. See also, people who stop drinking kombucha during pregnancy because of the possible trace alcohol content, and people who cut out chocolate because of the caffeine.
nobody cares much except one's family and the state i guess whether one nurses a sick child or not, one's karma is one's own karma, and if one is willing to risk whatever chances are there, exagerrated or not, let them have it, the experience, i agree with sifu on that
So far as I can tell alcohol level in breast milk is the same as alcohol level in blood
There's only one way to find out.
It is in fact the case that the alcohol level in breast milk is the same as the drinker's BAC.
La Leche League put out a statement along the lines of "We'd really like to see women breast feed for as long as possible, so we'd really like people to quit scaremongering about drinking and breastfeeding, since it doesn't help the cause to have women thinking their going to have to abstain for multiple years." I think their saying is something like "Legal to drive, legal to feed." Dr Sears on the other hand asks what kind of selfish monster are you, anyway?
I'm extremely pissed at a Mexican. Can I be governor of Arizona next?
Is your BAC also the same alcohol percentage of your semen?
Unless you give up not only drinking, but every pleasure in the world apart from me, you cannot be a True Mother to me.
Calls me in tears because she's being "good" about everything and still no baby.
Tell her she should be bad and have sex.
69: not according to Winnicott! As my professor in one analytic class said: sometimes the breast is on the phone.
Around here I elicited a shocked gasp from a nurse after detailing my exercise habits and doing the usual height/weight/BP check, and then answering that yes, three or four times a week I have a beer with dinner.
Is this because you live in Mormon country?
Is caffeine really terrible? I don't think I'd have a hard time giving up alcohol, but I don't know how I would manage without a morning cup of coffee.
THEY'RE, MY GOD, THEY'RE.
It's full of stars.
I don't know how I would manage without a morning cup of coffee.
This kind of suggests it has a strong physiological effect.
But I don't think cocaine is necessarily the worst worst drug either.
I always quote this and may have here, but my friend in high school whose father was a pretty serious drug user passed along his opinion that PCP is the only one that's as bad as they tell you. On the other hand I just met a client who spoke fondly of it, so de drugibus etc.
I always heard that inhalants were the worst, but those aren't really drugs so much as a means of cutting oxygen from your brain.
121: Well, sure, but will it harm the fetus?
Unless you give up not only drinking, but every pleasure in the world apart from me, you cannot be a True Mother to me.
I think babies do believe this. THOU SHALT CUDDLE ME CONSTANTLY. COOING OR SCREAMING -- THE CHOICE IS YOURS.
Yet, for an infant of that age, could it be reckoned good to use tears in trying to obtain what it would have been harmful to get, to be vehemently indignant at the refusals of free and older people and of parents or many other people of good sense who would not yield to my whims, and attempt to strike them and to do as much injury as possible
118: Yes, and as a relatively wholesome looking blondish woman, I don't look like what they call to mind when they think of a habitual drinker.
119: I read a lot about this and there's some evidence that if you're having eight cups of coffee a day, it might be harder for you to get pregnant using IUI. Recommendations are "no more than a cup per day to minimize the risk of miscarriage", which with the typical pregnancy virtue insanity means "I will prove my virtue by forgoing chocolate because it may have caffeine in detectable amounts."
my neighbours' 10 mo baby cries sometimes in the midnight behind the wall, almost 30 min the same cry, not changing in in intensity or character in anyway, then the parents seem to wake up and come from the other room to pick her up and she instantly becomes quiet
what if she'll grow up someone insecure and neurotic and
who should compensate my insomnia due to the baby's cry, i wonder, thankfully it's not that annoying than some tv or videogames thumping sounds
I thought it was a little more than that -- that you did see an increased (but still very small) risk of miscarriage in early pregnancy from heavy but not absurd coffee drinking: I'm remembering five cups a day? But you're right, certainly nothing that a typical coffee drinker should worry about in the slightest.
The recommendation is not more than 200 mg of caffeine per day.
Of course, "one cup" depends on where you're getting it. Quick googling says that Starbucks brewed coffee has 260/330/415 g of caffeine in a tall/grande/venti.
I'm of the opinion that caffeine is an overused stimulant of underappreciated strength. But if I had to guess, I would say all it will do is make baby kick a bit more.
Relatedly, I think Kate Middleton is on a pregnancy diet of goat's blood and defiled Communion wafers.
133: Outside of the pregnancy context, don't they keep on doing more and more studies showing that it makes you stronger, healthier, more cheerful, and makes your coat lush and glossy?
Either Blume needs to check her units or Starbucks isn't going to have a lot of repeat customers.
135: I believe being hopped up on CNS stimulants is an advantage in this society, yes.
415 g of caffeine sounds like a lot, but those ventis are big. It's less than a pound anyway.
I think the miscarriage rate does increase significantly if you're drinking a lot of coffee, and "significantly" = maybe by a third?
That said, when I miscarried, I'd been having no symptoms for the past two weeks, which meant that my morning caffeine wasn't as nauseating as usual. So I'm a bit skeptical that the correlation is actually causal.
136: I knew there was a reason Starbucks gives me a stomachache!
Most early miscarriages are due to unpreventable chromosomal problems.
Also, excessive fetal foot tapping.
Back on the veldt...
I haven't looked up the evidence behind recent science-headlines that humans are currently in a state of wild genetic diversity due to our successful adaptive radiation. Weedy, that's us.
The little tadpoles just soft-shoe their way outta there.
105: I disagree somewhat, or more than I used to. I think that babies born drug-addicted are generally hard to care for initially. I am hearing horror stories from my friends parenting babies who are getting off opiates. But I think even with the "crack babies" it was clear early on there wasn't as wide a problem as was being reported and it was the reporting that was hysteria.
I guess I'm having a hard time with this conversation because my own expereince us so different from that of the other parents here. There are a lot of ways Mara could have gotten a better start in life than she did, but I think part of the reason she does as well as she does (especially compared to her older sister) is that her mom was incarcerated for a few months mid-pregnancy. That doesn't mean I want pregnant women (or anyone else) to spend time in jail, but there's a whole different conversation about the people I'm dealing with (and probably BG and Smearcase are if they're seeing parents) and I really do worry about the impacts of whatever the hell it is that is making things hard for kids. Trauma, certainly, but there's more than that.
I think part of the reason she does as well as she does (especially compared to her older sister)
Mara is, of course, placed with you and Lee, though.
I mean, as why she's doing so well.
Ok, part of what is tripping me up is the idea of the traditional FAS facial features (rare, even in kids with a diagnosis of severe brain damage thanks to prenatal alcohol) as "disfiguring" and that makes me roll my eyes and then it gets out of control from here.
But I'm being super mopey today and have a bad heqdache, so I'll just leave this alone and once Nia's done with her visit and I get her home and the girls fed and have a nap, maybe I'll be a nicer person.
Oh, totally, heebie, and I think Trinity would do better if (when?) she were placed with us, but their seeming inherent capabilities are strikingly different even though some aspects of their ungreat baby lives are very, very similar.
The issue that made us crazy was (ha!) antidepressants. The science is all over the map about SSRIs and pregnancy/breastfeeding - they may be harmful, somehow, but Mom being depressed is also harmful, so what are you going to do?
The psych resident who attempted to say, in response to some potential postpartum depression issues, "Perhaps you shouldn't breastfeed while you're on this medication" was not helping the situation at all.
Mrs ttaM hasn't really drunk since she got pregnant because she doesn't fancy it (it triggers queasiness), but yes, fuck a bunch of concern trolling shite.
Where do people come down on the prohibition against eating raw fish while pregnant? I think I could avoid blue cheese because there are so many cheeses to choose from, but I'm awfully fond of sushi.
I am pregnant and I have been eating sushi semi-regularly.
I never quite figured out the issue with sushi. Mercury? Parasites?
Pregnant women shouldn't eat octopus sushi because it tastes alarmingly like octopus.
Blume! I don't think I knew! Yay! (and yay to everyone else, too!)
154: Wait, what? Congratulations! Is that the announcement, or did I miss it earlier?
154: Congratulations. That's great.
No you didn't miss it, that's the on-blog announcement.
155: It's raw and foreign so it probably causes food poisoning.
This is kind of great, in that it feels like people are congratulating me for having the temerity to eat sushi while pregnant.
154: Congrats! And thank you for letting me know.
166: Good eye; that should have been a tipoff.
Congratulations! It's been ages since I've had sushi.
I was wondering if anyone had noticed 54!
Wait, Blume is a girl? Blogs are so confusing.
Yay, announcement! I was kind of wondering if the OP counted, or if that was too indirect.
My wife avoided sushi purely out of a desire not to get glared at (and the local sushi restaurant was one of the first places we went after the baby was born), but again, it didn't seem like there was a serious health issue with raw fish. (We did keep wondering "What do pregnant women in Japan do?", but never got around to looking it up)
Yeah, based on some quick research I did it looks like people in Japan don't care and it's only a problem here. But the articles also said we have to be concerned about "parasites" but not the specific names of parasites, which makes me suspicious.
But sushi in the U.S. gets frozen before it ever gets to you anyway, killing the parasites. It's extremely unlikely to be a listeria carrier, and if you get other food poisoning, well, that sucks, but it won't do direct harm to the embryo/fetus.
Hooray announcement! I'm bad with secrets and I don't read every thread so now I won't blow things.
When Sifu sat on Blume at the meetup, I kind of liked somebody mentioning the theory that heebie's brother, I think, had about women getting pregnant when men sit on their laps.
I understood that certain types of fish have a lot of mercury in them, but why raw fish in particular should be a problem, I don't know.
(We did keep wondering "What do pregnant women in Japan do?", but never got around to looking it up)
That's why they're so short over there. Mercury tentacle poisoning.
Congrats, Blume - wonderful news. I too eat sushi semi-regularly.
107: I had a first-try successful pregnancy and I'm still looking back at years of not drinking*, and of drinking tea rather than coffee, because the breastfeeding can go on and on and on. I do think caffeine can have startling effects on fetuses & infants in relatively low doses, but quitting caffeine and being chronically sleep-deprived was clearly not good for the child either.
Antidepressants were a big question. I took a vanishingly small dose for five months while pregnant and then nothing after the last month of pregnancy. I am now terribly depressed, but during the first six months postpartum I did incredibly well -- crisis mode and lactation hormones were just fabulous for my emotional resilience. It took over a year to fall down the ladder. I know this isn't encouraging, but my nursing marathon is unusual, and I'm pretty sure Zoloft is safe.
It's all completely maddening once you have a kid anyway. Does the kid have any problems or quirks at all? You chose wrong!
*lightweight to begin with, ridiculous lightweight now, so it's more a keep-balance-while-holding-child issue
107: I had a first-try successful pregnancy and I'm still looking back at years of not drinking*, and of drinking tea rather than coffee, because the breastfeeding can go on and on and on. I do think caffeine can have startling effects on fetuses & infants in relatively low doses, but quitting caffeine and being chronically sleep-deprived was clearly not good for the child either.
Antidepressants were a big question. I took a vanishingly small dose for five months while pregnant and then nothing after the last month of pregnancy. I am now terribly depressed, but during the first six months postpartum I did incredibly well -- crisis mode and lactation hormones were just fabulous for my emotional resilience. It took over a year to fall down the ladder. I know this isn't encouraging, but my nursing marathon is unusual, and I'm pretty sure Zoloft is safe.
It's all completely maddening once you have a kid anyway. Does the kid have any problems or quirks at all? You chose wrong!
*lightweight to begin with, ridiculous lightweight now, so it's more a keep-balance-while-holding-child issue
Yay Blume and Sifu! Hurrah hurrah. How far along are you?
To 95.1, Cala got it exactly right in her advice to her sister. The pre-pregnancy crap is super stressful, and I suspect* contributes to continuing fertility issues at some level.
*I have no actual data here, but the daily you're-probably-not-pregnant-yet reminder, in the form of ridiculous dietary constraints because what if you are, contributed a good deal to the difficulty of the years when I wanted to be pregnant and wasn't. More stress is really not what that situation needs, and indeed I got pregnant a couple of months after deciding, WAY too late, that I had had it with the pre-pregnancy business and was just not going to think about it so damn much. Who knows if that's what made the difference, but at least the hard years didn't have to be so hard.
Bah, crap. The second comment was supposed to say: congratulations, Blume (& Sifu)! Blume, I hope the pregnancy treats you well, even apart from sanctioned sushi (& sake & gen mai cha).
Just finished with the first trimester. So we're extending the unfogged babysplosion 2013 into early June.
The thing about FAS is that prior to ooh, 1950-ish, I would suggest that a large number of children would have been suffering from pretty serious adverse environmental factors. Like, not enough food. Smoking everywhere. Etc. So it's not a surprise that it doesn't get noticed.
Infectious diseases with permanent aftereffects. Measles mumps rubella.
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I'm trying to figure out if something is just really nice or creepy.
I was at a reception where I was, by far, the youngest person there. I was talking to one older guy who had a PhD in history and now works for a mutual fund. He's around my parents' age.
It turns out that he knew a friend of my parents from his graduate school days who recently wrote a book about the financial collapse (not a big name publisher but not self-published) and that the chairman of the board of his employer was someone who knew my grandmother well.
He gave me his card. I never gave mine, because my bag was checked. I just got a letter from him with a print out of the book my parents' friend wrote saying that he'd sent a note to the chairman of his firm giving him my regards. He had found my address in our alma mater's alumni directory.
He put his e-mail address at the bottom.
He mentioned a wife, but I don't remember if they were still together. He could have gone to the online thing and sent me an e-mail message. I suppose it's no weirder than looking someone up on Facebook, but it seems kind of funny to me.
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Congratulations to Blume and, I assume, Sifu.
176: the articles also said we have to be concerned about "parasites" but not the specific names of parasites
Go with "Kardashian" or "Windsor" and you'll be in good shape most of the time.
Yay for Blume and Sifu and another unfogged baby! Also for blue cheese and sushi and alcohol, though I'm not one for cigarettes or cocaine.
Thanks everybody. Except NickS, who wants me out of the picture.
Yes!, congratulations to Blume and Sifu.
Good work on the baby! I like babies, but certain baby-producers' name is mud in my book right now. Maybe we should just get a goat and be done with it.
Aww. Hooray for babies, you two!
baby-producers' name is mud
Wait, did they make a golem?
Is this the first baby that would never have existed but for the blog (that, is the parents met on the blog)?
Because if so I am worried about the small one's future power and possible universe-destroying capability.
I hear tell that an unfogged couple of the past has produced spawn.
200: Well, the kid *is* going to grow up with easy access to an army of killer robots...
I hear tell that an unfogged couple of the past has produced spawn.
More than one, even.
Congrats Blume and Sifu!
(I wondered, based on the post title and the fact that Sifu wrote it, if it was implying 154. Subtle)
Thanks everybody. Except NickS, who wants me out of the picture.
I was just congratulating Blume on eating sushi. Sushi is delicious.
But, now that you mention it, the baby sounds like good news as well. Congrats Blume and Beefo Meaty!
Hee.
206.2: I didn't write the post title.
208.2: Huh. It turned out to fit actual events, though.
whee! Congratulations! Some play on words re: adaptive radiation and the pregnancy glow!
Congratulations to Blume and Sifu. I find it entertaining to ask expectant mothers if they are sure it's their baby, but for some reason it always goes over poorly. Anyway, all the best to the three of you.
Huzzah, sprogs of the blog! Congrats, guys.
Blume and Sifu are fixing their marriage!
nobody is interested of course but in my culture we congratulate with babies only after they are born, and buy the baby clothes and diapers after the birth, so the first day is always so much stress for the dad or whoever family is responsible for collecting all the things baby, out of a popular superstition, cz there is a proverb "toroogui xuuxded tomor olgii" -"an iron cradle for a unborn yet baby", knock knock knock on the wood
the first three months after birth any visitors except family are not welcome too, out of the fear of infections that might harm the baby, pretty high uncertainty in pre and postnatal care i guess, traditionally, or that's just a traditional way how babies are cared for, pretty fussy
Heartiest congratulations.
I want to sell Double-Blind Chox: sets of individually wrapped candy bars, numbered. You mark on the box how hyper each one seems to make your kid. Then you scratch to reveal which ones were sugar-free.
I just saw all the congratulations at the end of the thread, and I was so happy to figure out what they're for! This is great news! But now we need to figure out what role unfogged will play--will we help you name the baby? just give you constant advice?
Oh wait. If an unfogged baby is one whose folks met here, I'm not as certain about the number any longer.
I am certain it's more than one.
I'm still waiting for a number, here. A lot hinges on this.
I thought Sifu was talking about property.
Tomorrow's winning Powerball number i
No I mean we have to start from the top and work down when picking a name, right? Is it going to be ogged, bob, or Labs?
Meekins is first, if you start with names that aren't listed.
Mazel tov! I was so enjoying the news I missed my change and had to ride an extra 40 blocks up and then down again.
212: After my son was born there was much asking my wife if she was sure of the maternity.
Names have to be taken from the blogroll: Instapundit Tweety-Blume.
I have a suspicion who Meekins is, but it is also something that I want never to be resolved. Meekins: more mysterious than Standpipe Bridgeplate.
(Meekins is cute nickname for a baby.)
Names must be taken from the Latest Comments. This is our chance to pass down our pseuds.
unfogged babysplosion 2013
Man, no kidding. Congratulations y'all!
233: The identity of Meekins was revealed in the archives somewhere, but it didn't really live up to the mystery.
Congrats. Let me be the first to suggest Wry Cooter.
"I have named the boy Caleb, in accordance with your wishes."
But now we need to figure out what role unfogged will play--
Babysitting co-op!
The identity of Meekins was revealed in the archives somewhere
Really? At some point LB invited anyone who was curious to email her to find out, but I didn't remember it being made explicit on the blog.
heh. I almost said who Meekins was at the Boston meet-up, and then conversation skittered off in another direction and it never came up.
244:Babysitting co-op!
Sure, you hook up the webcams, and I'm sure some will sit and watch. Also, new direction for the robot development to go in.
Babysitting co-op!
Who Wants To Change Mutumbo?
(I am assuming that the baby will be called Mutumbo. Safe bet I think.)
Snake robots make the best babysitters.
NOOOOOO. First scuba diving, now snakes. I don't care if the snakes are robots.
Holy cow, congratulations to Blume and Tweety. Are there really other babies who owe their existence to the blog?
Congrats. Let me be the first to suggest Wry Cooter.
Fuckin A got that right, dude. The next one can be Steven D/en Bes/te Tweety-Blume.
Matt Weiner met AC (a high school friend of mine) on the blog, they both grew cross with the blog and left permanently, got married, and I believe they've reproduced, making the Weiner-C baby the first Unfogged offspring, however estranged from its internetty progenitor it may be.
Let me be the first to congratulate Blume for eating sushi.
Some day young Weiner-C will show will show up on the blog's doorstep, just wanting to know, you know?
Let me be the first to congratulate the sushi.
250:His lab has also made a snakebot that may enable less invasive heart surgery. Instead of opening a patient's chest, a surgeon could guide the robot to the heart through a small hole, then thread a surgical tool through the robot.
No, no, no, no. Okay, amazing, but just don't call it a snakebot.
Steven D/en Bes/te Tweety-Blume
To preserve the baby's privacy, commenters would have to Google-proof the name: Steven D//en Bes//te Tweety-Blume.
Are there really other babies who owe their existence to the blog?
Labs and I made eye babies at the first UnfoggeDCon.
And inside that tool, a tiny doctor. Ooh, maybe call it a Patsnakool.
a surgeon could guide the robot to the heart through a small hole
The peehole or the other one?
257: I knew about that because the dude actually lives directly behind me. They were trying them in his drain pipes one time.
If teenage Robert Halford Blume-Tweety* and A.C. Weiner** have sex, will that be incest?
* I know. I'm touched and flattered. You have my blessing. May he bear the name and its connotation with excellence well.
** World-beating porn name.
Halford is now the third to suggest we name our offspring after himself, although one later changed his suggestion to Sifuadvisorfirstname Sifuadvisorlastname Blume-Tweety.
Fine, if we're going that route, I defy you to come up with a better name than Jesus McQueen Tweety-Blume.
Bockley Wickleheap Blume-Tweety
Done.
265: Too bad it wasn't "I. C. Weiner."
The canonical child pseud naming protocol has been explained by HG. RTFA.
Congrats B & ST!
Jadeveon Clowney Mountbatten-Blume-Tweety
265: It's a good thing that mine is female because I really do like the name Roosevelt.
You will be calling the new baby Hewlett-Packard online, right? I really think you should.
273: But we never had a pet named Hewlett-Packard!
Peep's RealName also made it on our Excel Spreadsheet for boys.
Didn't you ever have a calculator?
I thought the best suggestion from that thread was Higgledy Piggledy. It's the kind of name a kid would give a guinea pig or hamster.
That's only acceptable if all comments about the baby are written as double dactyls.
I really do like the name Roosevelt.
I went to college with someone named Delano, which I rather like.
281: If we're going to have dactyls I'd prefer ptero ones to mere doubles.
280: What's wrong with Hegemonic Patriarchy?
Hegemonic Patriarchy hurts everyone.
Higgledy Piggledy
Hipster Poseur
Humbert Pumbert
Halal Porkchop
Habermasian Pragmatism
God, you all are going to be so disappointed. I'm sorry.
Well, that would just be confusing, since I call my calculator that.
I'm so old I remember when heebie's boobs used to post as hokey-pokey and hawaiian punch.
And then she pretended they were guinea pigs.
heebie's boobs used to post
It was really cold in that office, oudemia.
I forgot about that! Well, kids do sap your looks.
My friend told me that when she was pregnant, someone said to her "You must be having a boy, because no girl would do that to her mama's ass." Both nonsensical and insulting!
Also, I used to be whimsical.
In the UK, they call that "whim lollies".
You've got another thing coming, heebs.
272: I went to college with a girl who called herself Edward, so I don't see why a girl shouldn't be named Roosevelt.
You could just have done the normal first name, odd last name thing and call her Eleanor Roosevelt Geebie
I keep wanting to spell it "Rooseveldt," who was obviously the president in the ancestral environment.
The nickname for Roosevelt is Rosey, BOOM! I named your baby, I named your baby.
And then you could sing her to sleep with "It's all right to cry."
Dear god, not twins.
Heh. My favoritest Hugo Wolf lied (song starts at 2:30; text and translation in notes to the video).
Funny, we were thinking about Delano for our girl. Mrs Ksky doesn't like it but is ok with Della.
Oh, congrats Blume and Sifu! Yay babyplosion.
308: I guess better Delano than Domino.
Speaking of listeria: Avoid TJ's "Butter Chicken with Basmati Rice".
http://www.traderjoes.com/about/customer-updates-responses.asp?i=89
Light drinking during pregnancy does children no harm - sample size 11,500 from the UK Millennium Cohort study
So, so late, but, congrats Blume and Tweety! Hurray! Babies!
I keep wanting to spell it "Rooseveldt," who was obviously the president in the ancestral environment.
Clearly much of current US political psychology can be explained when you consider that it all evolved in an environment of global war, high social spending, high taxes, strong unions and continuing white supremacy.
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NMM2 Oscar Niemeyer. Hands up anybody who knew he was still alive (he was 104).
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I knew that he was still alive relatively recently.
Blume and Sifu's unborn child will never not have known that Oscar Niemeyer is dead when it enters college in 2031.
Posted in the other thread, but what the hell:
OT: In connection with certain Christmas-related program activities, I'd much appreciate the Mineshaft's recommendations regarding photographers who could produce relevant-arts-sector-appropriate headshots for the woman you reprobates call Lunchy. Let us set aside the vulgarity of cost for the nonce and consider, first, the quality of the work and the relative risk of some sleazy Terry Richardson-wannabe inviting doucheslaughter by trying to get my girlfriend to take her top off.
I would recommend either Mike Kortici or Insuh Yoon.