We made it to Living Computers: Museum + Labs,
in Seattle not far from where we live.
We scored a library pass, but you could check it out
on a Free First Thursday evening.

Here's a video glimpse of our adventures
with robots and vintage gaming systems and more:

Happy spring!

 

Does your mind go blank when your child says, "Tell me a story!" before bedtime? I'm a professional writer of fiction, and I can't tell a children's story on cue to save my life. I've decided spontaneous storytelling is its own skill, and I needed to find a workaround. In case you're in the same boat, I will share it with you.

Just to burst your bubble right away, it's a terrible story. I'm just saying, it works. My five-year-old loves the structure of it and wants to participate in it every night by telling the first part himself. I like that it's adaptable to both creative and literal-minded children, because you invite their feedback, and they can embellish the details as much as they want, or not. It also gives you as the parent an opportunity to feel "homeschool parent-y" by slipping in a little pop quiz about whatever topics you want. (You'll see.)

Once upon a time, there was a …

Now you ask your children what there was. Is it an animal? Is it a person? What's this character's name? What do they look like? Let's say it's this:

… purple giant chicken, and it was friends with …

Another round of character development!

… a friendly and unusually small spinosaurus. They really wanted to …

Here's the video accompaniment to Karsten's birth story. You can head over to that link to read the details if you haven't already.

Short version: We planned a homebirth for our third baby, with a midwife in attendance. After two-plus weeks of prodromal labor, more active contractions kicked in for 21 hours, which meant our midwife went home to sleep. I woke up to my waters breaking, and half an hour later, out our baby whooshed into the birth pool, before the midwife could make it back! It was a lovely, hard, beautiful, excruciating birth, and I was aided by my Hypnobabies childbirth hypnosis practice of deep relaxation and calm.

I've made two versions of the video, one for my fellow childbirth fans and one for, say, my dad. In other words, one is semi-graphic, and one is censored to be family-friendly. There's breastfeeding in both, of course, but I managed to keep my top on this time during the birthing so I could make these videos without as many qualms. (This was a hard ask for me! I tend to unthinkingly strip during labor!)

If you're preparing a child for an upcoming sibling birth, you can choose which video might be more useful. In both, the birth is peaceful, and I edited out the swear words (!), but there is grunting and obvious … um … labor. The family-friendly one has much less vocalizing and no scary bits, so I thought it might be a good resource for sharing with kids.

Full, semi-graphic version:

(I'm wearing a top, and I've censored my bits up till the baby's
literally coming out, because that's what I felt comfortable with.)

Family-friendly version:

(I've shortened the actual birth and cropped in.)

I've been putting off writing Karsten's birth story, or even thinking it over and retelling it to myself. I can't say why. Maybe it's that it's my third birth. Maybe it's that I've been able to keep it more special and private if it's not recited or shared. Maybe I'm just not sure what to make of it. Maybe a little of all of those.

Labor lasted a long time. What does "long" mean? Weeks, folks. It lasted freaking weeks.

All right, technically that's called "prodromal labor," or "practice labor." Or "stalled labor" or "false labor" (grr … my uterus didn't think so). At any rate, that went for a good long while. I thought Karsten was going to be born around 38 weeks, but he hung in there till nearly 41.

So, every day, I had contractions, many times at regular intervals, and lasting for several hours at a time. And then they'd peter out, and I'd scratch my head and go "huh." Karsten kept bobbing up and down in my belly, at one moment so low I could barely waddle, making me sure he'd just, plop, fall out onto the floor, and then the next bouncing back discouragingly high up. I walked miles each day. I lunged and climbed stairs like a crab and did pelvic tilts and slept in the Sims' position, all to open my pelvis and engage that stubborn baby. I drank red raspberry leaf and nettle tea to tone the uterus and ate dates to soften the cervix. I always tried to get plenty of rest in case this was "the day." I kept myself well fed in case I needed the energy for birthing. I did all the techniques I could Google about how to kickstart a labor, turn a baby into optimal position, free my mind and spirit for birth, etc., etc. I tempted fate frequently: traveling far from home, doing activities that were interrupted when previous children were born, making firm plans in expectation of having them broken.

Karsten could not be moved. He was taking his sweet, sweet time, and there was nothing I could do about it.

I'd been hoping this labor would be more like Alrik's than like Mikko's. To recap, with Mikko I had 42 intense hours of back labor, culminating in a transfer to the hospital and finally a no-meds vaginal delivery. It was empowering that he came out through my strength alone — all 11 pounds, 13 ounces of him — but after the fact, we could guess that he had been posterior, we could see that he came out with an arm wrapped around his head (aka nuchal arm leading to an asynclitic head positioning, both of which are suboptimal), and, well, he was obviously huge.

My kids and I, ever so charmingly behind the times, just went to see Sing at the cheapie theater. If you are also delayed in your cultural viewing, it's an animated film about animals performing in a musical talent competition.

It's a really cute movie in general, and I love me some musicals, but one thing I was struck by was how diverse the body types were, and how no one cared.

Here are the main characters posing below. You can also see the promo clips in the video above.


Starting from the left, you've got a tiny male mouse with a big ego. The elephant is a shy girl who's trying to overcome her stage fright. The pig in capris is a stay-at-home mom to 25 piglets. (She does some amazing Rube Goldberg-esque preparations to care for her kids while she's off rehearsing, leading me to think she should really have been an engineer.) The porcupine is a teenager who's coming out from under the smothering shadow of her wannabe-rockstar boyfriend. The koala is the morally ambiguous manager. The gorilla is a boy from the wrong side of the tracks who wants to break free of his family's crime business. The sassy pig in bright red spandex is a confidently dancing phenom.

One thing in common with all of them is that never, in the course of the movie, did anyone suggest that they should make their bodies look different.