Chicago Moms Blog

My Own Alzheimer's Project

Last Thursday I had the distinct pleasure of participating in a conference call with First Lady of California Maria Shriver along with several other writers from the Silicon Valley Moms Group. Ms. Shriver has teamed up with HBO to create an unprecedented television event concerning one of the most all encompassing issues of our time, ALZHEIMERS. Maria’s words are still echoing in my ears, Alzheimer’s is not an old person’s disease, but a young person’s burden. It is a disease which boasts no survivors, from the afflicted to the family that loves and cares for them.

• Alzheimer’s claims a new victim every 70 seconds.
• 70 percent of patients are living at home.
• 76 percent of caregivers are (uncompensated) women, many of whom also have small children in the home.
• Caring for an Alzheimer’s patient is overwhelming — financially, personally and spiritually.
• Alzheimer’s could bankrupt the American healthcare system as we know it.
• This is a family disease, and there are no survivors.

This issue touched me in particular because I have been carrying a fear around with me for the last decade. I am adopted. I have known all of my life. My adoptive parents are my unequivocal parents, but I had another story that I need to know. In 1997 when I was pregnant with my first child I decide that I wanted to find out as much medical information as I could before stepping into the World of parenting. I had found my birth mother a few years earlier and now it was time to find my birth father. I did, but the discovery was bitter sweet. He was in the beginning stages of dementia. He was only 47 years old. So instead of answers I gained more questions, Soon after that he had to be institutionalized and there were court papers filed. My name was included on the legal filings, along with all of my birth father’s family, including his 4 other children. I had a whole family out there and my only introduction was through a list on the back of legal conservator papers. I had so many questions. I truly wanted to know my genetic history, but I didn’t want to show up at the door announcing, “Hi, I’m your family!” when they weren’t in a position to ask my birth father any real questions. So, I buried the questions, the concern, the fear, deep inside of me for 12 years…until now.

Snow day...for SOME of us....

We got hit with a dickens of a storm here in Chicago, the second this week. 300 flights canceled at O'Hare, 30 (including my sitter's) flights at Midway. For the most part, the city went on lockdown last night before rush hour with schools and corporate entities alike planning for the worst. I stopped by my son's school to drop off gifts for the teachers and administration yesterday afternoon, assuming that today, the last day of school before break would be a snow day.  My husband works in commercial landscaping and snow is his winter specialty. We were making bets, despite the fact the storm kept getting moved from 3pm to 5pm to 7:40pm to 9pm on whether today would be a snow day or not.

Now, for the non-Chicagoland readers, one must understand that snow is an intricate dance between the City, unions, contractors, sub-contractors and the like. Daily commutes can range from those who live in the city and spend 20 minutes on an EL train to those driving in from Wisconsin or Indiana at the early hours of dawn, spending up to an hour in traffic. Add snow to the mix and a comfortable commute turns into 4 hours slugging through snow and slush.

Golden Birthday

"They look like space aliens," said my 12-year-old stepson. And they did. Born at 24 and 3/7ths weeks gestation, my twins spent five months on the neonatal intensive care unit, with tubes and wires attached to every part of their little bodies. The ventilators huffed and the monitors blinked and bleated day and night. Nurses shaved their plum-sized heads in a quest to find viable IV sites, and their little toes glowed red from the pulse oximeter that measured their blood oxygen levels, just the way ET's finger glowed.

On their birth day, my son weighed in at 1 lb. 8.5 oz. and my daughter was 1 lb. 10 oz. They were not the earliest preemies ever born, nor the smallest — world records I'm happy we do not hold. Chances are they won't make it through the night, we were told. Chances are they will be blind. Chances are they will be deaf or profoundly hearing impaired. Chances are they will have cerebral palsy, severe learning disabilities, asthma, allergies and chronic lung problems. Chances are they will have to be hospitalized on a regular basis.

But chances were with us and this week we celebrate their "golden" or "star" birthday, when they turn 17 on the 17th, in perfect health as juniors in high school. It was a long haul. They spent nearly a year on oxygen and reached every milestone months (in some cases years) after their peers, but they did reach them. In honor of their birthday, I would like to share 17 of the many gifts they have given to me:

Oh, Placenta

It's getting close. I'm just past 37 weeks pregnant now and patiently playing the waiting game. We're having a home birth and have everything ready- all the supplies and plans and so forth. There's just one last thing on my mind that I can't decide on. What should we do with the placenta?

If you had asked me that a few years ago I probably would have said with the WHAT? I didn't know you actually do anything with the placenta. And just what is the placenta anyway? (The placenta is considered a "life source" providing nourishment and exchanging respiratory gasses to the baby as well as eliminating waste and blocking most harmful substances.) Now that I am having this birth at home and have learned a lot about a whole mess of things that I'd never thought about before, we come to the disposal of the placenta.

In a hospital setting, the placenta is usually stored for a few days to be available for testing in the case of any complications post-pregnancy, and then it is destroyed. Some hospitals do allow women to have the placenta just as they allow patients to take home tonsils, kidney stones, or appendixes. But this brings me to the question-  what could a woman possibly want to do with a placenta?

Birth Day, Adoption Day, First Day of the Rest of Our Lives

The most important day of my life.  The day my life changed forever.  The day I grew up.  The day someone else became more important than me.  The day I touched a miracle.  The day I met my daughter.  The day my step-son first called me "mom."  The day I first held that tiny little bundle.

The day my oldest son was born.

All of these phrases can describe the day a child enters your life, but none of them fully explain it, do they?  We all know that having a baby (or a child, or a toddler) really does change everything.  But it isn't something we can fully explain to the uninitiated.  Parenting is a members only club, but we have a fantastic PR machine.  Parents love to talk about their kids!

To this day, nothing can choke me up more than thinking about or describing the moment I first held each of my boys.  (Gah!  In fact, I'm getting all teary right now.)  Most parents feel exactly the same way.  So today, the moms and dads of the Silicon Valley, Chicago, DC Metro, New York, New Jersey, Fifty Something, Deep South, and LA Moms Blogs are all writing about those magical days.

Get out your box of tissues and read along with us.

This is an original D.C. Metro Moms Blog post. 

Stephanie also writes about her children, and gets all sappy and sentimental, at Lawyer Mama and writes, with almost no weeping, about politics at MOMocrats.

My "preterm labor" baby story

I will never forget all of the planning and charting and waiting and charting...did I mention charting?  Our first attempt at conceiving was unsuccessful.  It ended up in a lot of weeping, depression and a D&C.  Our second attempt was planned to a "T".  As a matter of fact, I can tell you who, what, where, when and how.  I suppose the most important thing here is the "who", right?

I tried not to be anxious.  I tried to wait for at least a day after my missed period to test.  My patience wore thin and I grabbed that test and gave it my best shot (literally).  I waited and watched and it didn't take long for those two little lines to appear.  I felt relieved and nervous.  After the ordeal I had just went through three months earlier, I wasn't sure I could handle the stress again.

Fast forward eight weeks and I began sobbing as soon as I saw that little flicker of a beating heart on the ultrasound monitor.  That little flicker wasn't the only indication of a life blooming inside of me, I was sick as a dog.  It wasn't easy keeping our news from the family but we wanted more time to let the thought of becoming parents sink in.

Let The Babies Flow-

I'm one of those Moms that warns others about the side effects of mixing birth control and antibiotics... it equals pregnancy. Our first child was a surprise in this way. And thankfully we had planned on having children anyway, so we just started a little earlier than we had thought. In this pregnancy, I craved breadsticks and pasta and grew as big as a house. Many of us do that with our first- hey we're pregnant! We're eating for two! And when I thought it was time for him to be born, we faced the dreadful experience of being sent home from the hospital when it truly wasn't labor. I soon learned what real contractions felt like. A few hours later my water broke at home and we were headed back to the hospital and within an hour I held my first child in my arms. I was instantly in love, instantly a mother.

When Noah was just six months old and we found ourselves pregnant again (let me dispel another myth that you can't get pregnant while exclusively breastfeeding among other things), we thought someone might be playing tricks on us. But we knew we wanted a large family someday, so bring 'em on. Another boy would make our family an even number. I'd crave celery and only celery during this pregnancy and actually lost all the weight I put on with the first baby. One day in my ninth month I thought I was having bladder control issues all day long, and hubby encouraged me to call the doctor. We headed to the hospital and were told my water had broken and I was leaking... it was time to have the baby. I knew what it was like to be in labor this time around, and didn't believe them, so I didn't even prepare things to take to the hospital. Well, he was ready to come out - all 9 lbs 12 oz of him. I was fine, but he broke his collarbone coming out. They never could figure out why Carter was so big. I still think it was the celery.