Lately, I’ve been talking a lot about our experiences with attachment parenting. In response my last post, Emily asked this excellent question:

So: how does attachment parenting affect your marriage? As opposed to non-attachment parenting, I mean? I know you and Ben have only ever practiced AP so you can’t compare from experience but I’d be curious to hear what you think are the unique effects of AP on your marriage.

I have to wonder if AP might take more of a toll on the relationship between husband and wife. Do you think it allows for less (or just different?) involvement from Ben? Attachment parenting, at least for the first year or two of life, seems so intensely the mom’s job, and less of a shared duty as it might be if a baby were bottle-fed, for example. Thoughts?

So here are some of my thoughts.

First off, I’ll just outline attachment parenting so we’re on the same page.

Defining Attachment Parenting

I love the way attachmentparengting.org defines AP, as focused on raising children “with a highly developed capacity for empathy and connection” by “eliminating violence as a means for raising children.” Its essence is about “forming and nurturing strong connections between parents and their children” and “treating our children with kindness, respect and dignity.”

I would personally define attachment parenting as a high-touch, highly-responsive approach to parenting, which encourages children to express their needs and parents to respect and respond to those articulations.

The opposite of attachment parenting, roughly, would include any kind of parent-led/Babywise approach, involving sleep-training, the cry-it-out method, scheduled feedings, et cetera. (Wikipedia defines the Babywise approach as “parental control of the infant’s sleep, play and feeding schedule rather than allowing the baby to decide when to eat, play and sleep.”)

I like Dr. Sears’ “Seven B’s of Attachment Parenting,” because it’s a simple way to outline some of the main features of attachment parenting:

• Birth Bonding
• Belief in Baby’s Cries
• Breastfeeding
• Babywearing
• Bedding close to baby
• Beware of baby trainers
• Balance

How This Looks in Our Marriage

One of the first things I want to point out is that the only thing on Dr. Sears’ list that my husband can’t directly participate in is breastfeeding. He also doesn’t wear Lydia, because he thinks all my carriers look too “feminine” (lame), but he does hold and carry her a lot instead.

He was there to bond with her as soon as she was born; he tries to respond quickly to her cries, trusting that they mean something; he shares the bed with both of us; and he’s just as wary as I am of baby-training.

It’s true that overall, caring for her has been primarily my domain. But caring for her in this way feels almost as easy as breathing. I just take her with me everywhere I go. I cuddle her when she cries and feed her when she seems hungry. Simple. There are no rules or schedules to follow.

I can hardly call breastfeeding work, unless you call holding a baby on my lap while browsing Pinterest, or rolling over in bed to offer her my breast in the middle of the night, work.

I do spend more time with her than Ben does, but this is mostly because I stay home with her while he works. When he’s home, he takes care of her just as much as I do, holding her and singing to her and playing with her so I can obsessively read my YA fantasy novels get important work done.

How does attachment parenting affect your marriage?

Honestly, I think AP — as opposed to another style of parenting – has been beneficial to our marriage, mostly because it makes our lives so much easier and less stressful.

We don’t have the added strain of trying to train her to be a “good” sleeper or eater; we assume she does these things appropriately by nature. Time and energy that we would otherwise devote to things like sleep-training, we can devote to conversation and leisure activities.

Because we share a bed with her (and I breastfeed), nighttime care is a cinch and we all get plenty of sleep. I haven’t felt sleep-deprived since she was about a month old. No one is fumbling around in the kitchen preparing bottles in the middle of the night. Well-rested husbands and wives are much more pleasant with to live with and easier to get along with than sleep-deprived ones.

Because we carry and hold her a lot, and because we respond promptly to her crying with cuddles, food, diaper-changes or changes of scenery, she rarely cries for long.  Less crying in the house means less stress, which means more amicable spouses.

And because she’s so portable – requiring no bottles or strollers or special beds – it’s easy to go on family “dates.”

Now, a brief word about date nights:

Sorry, this is the only photo we have of the three of us. We don't normally look this put-together.

As a new parent, everywhere you go people expound upon the importance of date nights for marriage. My mom-in-law keeps repeating in somber tones about how important it is for us to go have dinner or see a movie alone.

We haven’t gone on a single date without our baby yet and she’s 5 months old. We haven’t even tried feeding her with a bottle yet.

I can’t say I’ve felt the effects on our marriage yet.

I asked Ben the other day, while the three of us were on our way to have dinner, if he thought we should put more effort into going on dates without the baby. “Mmm, nah,” he said after a few moments. “How would it be any different than this?”

I’m sure things will be different when she’s older, when she can talk and interrupt and whine. But while she’s an infant, it’s no extra strain to have her quietly sitting and watching from my lap as we talk and eat and watch movies.

Everyone seems concerned that we’re going to fall out of love if we keep our baby close to us at all times, but I’m not finding that to be the case at all. Her presence doesn’t interfere with our intimacy or dampen our love for each other.  We still talk about all the important things, exchange details about our hours spent apart, and have fun together.

So, like you said, I don’t have any experience with any other type of parenting, and we’ve only been doing this for 5 months with a single child, so I can’t say anything with certainty. But I personally think AP is the best approach to keep out marriage healthy . . . because it keeps us and our baby healthy.

What are your thoughts?

I know that only a few months have passed since I first wrote about how we practice the tenets of attachment parenting, but a lot can change in just a few months of early parenthood. I figured I’d offer a bit of an update to let you know how things are going with our five-month-old. Who is now rolling over, back-to-front and front-to-back like a pro, and who has two teeth already (sniff).

Goodness, how fast babies grow. (I know, I know, I said it. I’m officially old).

Each heading is a link to my original post on that topic.

Babywearing

I admit, now that she’s seventeen pounds and she can sit up alone in her Bumbo, I don’t wear Lydia around the house as much as I used to. I just never get around to wrestling her into the sling. I can just set her up in whatever room I’m in and have her watch me.  Unless she’s really miserable on her own and I really have to get stuff done — then I usually carry her kangaroo-style (which Ben calls “nugget position) so she can look around while I go about my business. She loves this position and never makes a peep. Every time I do this, I try to remind myself that I ought to do it more often.

Bedsharing

Oh my goodness. I honestly don’t see how other parents of babies manage to do nights any other way. I can’t believe some moms actually get up and go to another room in the middle of the night . . . sometimes more than once! How do you do it?? Hats off to you guys. That must take incredible fortitude and self-discipline. I’m sure that if I had to do that, I would be absolutely frantic to have my baby sleep through the night.

As it stands, she still generally wakes up at night, but usually only once or twice. It still totally doesn’t bother me. We just do “the ole shift and lift” (shift her closer to me while still lying down, lift the shirt, DONE), and I’m usually asleep again before I even realize I was ever awake.

I learned something the other day when I fell asleep in bed with Lydia before I intended to, around nine pm. Ben woke me up an hour later to ask if I still wanted to brush my teeth and change into my PJ’s. Oh yeah, I had forgotten. I lurched out of bed and stumbled down the stairs to the bathroom, bleary-eyed and cursing. It was horrible. Horrible. I was an absolute ogre. Being woken up in the middle of the night is the worst.

That is, unless you’ve synched up your sleep patterns with those of the person waking you. See, I never have a problem with Lydia waking me up, and I think it might be because my bodily rhythms have become so entwined with hers. Our lungs expand and contract together and our hearts beat right next to each other. I often find myself waking up just moments before her, anticipating her. We’re a single organism, mama and baby.

Recently, a friend read my original post on bedsharing. She told me I must be a “super-mama” for not minding my baby’s night-wakings. Oh, but I’m no super-mama. I’ve just made things incredibly easy for myself by keeping my baby right next to me.

Breastfeeding

I can’t believe how much I still enjoy breastfeeding. I’ll lie awake at night sometimes while my little babe suckles at my breast and just think, man, this is awesome. Her needs for nourishment and physical contact are so easy to meet right now. I don’t have to do a thing. Sure, it means I have to take her with me everywhere I go, or at least make sure I’m not away from home too long, but it’s a small price to pay for all the other benefits that come with such convenient, agreeable feeding and bonding.

Elimination Communication

This is the one category where I have to be honest. EC was going so well by two months, I couldn’t help thinking, “If we’re this good at it now, just think how great we’ll be at, say, five months!”

The truth is, we haven’t gotten all that much better at it yet. And I’m not sure we will.

All the books I read gave me the impression that all I needed to do was pay attention, and I would soon notice my baby giving me signs that she needed to go. I am now quite convinced that she doesn’t give any cues whatsoever. I’ll have her on my lap in only a fitted cloth diaper, completely silent, and feel the familiar warmth seep into my jeans without a squeak or wiggle from her.  What the heck? I’ll ask. Why didn’t you tell me you had to go?

During the day, I’m still only catching about half her pees. Which still amounts to 8-10 wet diapers a day. Some days I do worse, though. Oh well. I’ve resigned myself to being only so-so at EC.

But I am pretty proud of how well we do at night. She’s down to only peeing once at night, and then again first thing in the morning. I can read her half-asleep wriggles so well and catch her pees so consistently that I actually usually have her just sleep diaperless in bed. I’m that confident that she won’t get our bed wet. We do have occasional misses (she usually sleeps on a prefold diaper, so it’s not a big deal), but on the whole, we’re nighttime EC rock stars. She also always pees immediately upon waking in the morning, and I (almost) always catch that one too; she then tends to pee every 17 minutes after that for the rest of the morning. If I’m vigilant and set a timer and can usually catch most of them, but often I don’t. It’s in the afternoon when she gets less predictable and we usually fall apart.

Like I said: ah well. I’m still glad we’re doing it, even if not as well as I’d hoped.

I feel like I still have so much to say about my experiences of motherhood, but I’m not sure you guys would want to hear it all.

Well, do you have any attachment-parenting experiences you’d like to share?

For Christmas, Ben, Lydia and I went with my family to spend the week at a Mexican resort. We’d never been to a resort and we’d never gone away for Christmas so it was a very different experience.

It was lovely. The weather was perfect the whole week. We got so much sleep and sunshine, and saw all kinds of beautiful things.

Naturally, when we came back we had a lot of people ask how it went, traveling with a baby. The short answer: it went smashingly.  I suspect that four months is the ideal age for traveling: she still doesn’t eat solids, so food a non-issue, but she’s not a completely floppy and defenseless newborn, either.

I also have a hunch that the practices of attachment parenting (AP) also helped to ease our traveling experience. I thought I’d go over some of the benefits of traveling with an AP baby — at least in our experience. I’ll just go over the four tenets of attachment parenting I’ve already discussed in previous posts.

I just want to be clear on one thing, though: of course, traveling with an AP baby is more difficult and complicated than traveling with no baby. Sure, there were tough moments, like when she pooped a mega-poop as soon as we sat down on the plane and we couldn’t get up to change her until we were up in the air and the seat belt light had gone off. She liked to have her meltdowns right in the middle of our classiest meals, too. But on the whole, it was pretty low-stress and I’m totally excited by the prospect of traveling with her again in the future.

Babywearing

Being able to wear my baby was so great on vacation. Ben, Lydia and I spent Christmas morning walking along the sunny beach until we found a beautiful, turquoise freshwater spring to wade in. Sand is no hindrance when you’ve got a sling.

While we were out in Mexico we saw and climbed on two Mayan ruins, went swimming in a cenote and visited a traditional Mayan family all in one day, and never had to unfold a stroller.  I wore her into restaurants and visited the buffet while she peeked out from the sling. It was so handy to be able to pop her in and out of the sling all week long. And she got to have a 360-degree view of it all.

I must warn you, though: don’t try this if you hate attention. Everywhere we went, people were pointing, ogling, awww-ing, and even laughing. We felt like celebrities. The vendors in Playa del Carmen thought we were downright hilarious. It was like no one had ever seen anything like it.

Bedsharing

OK, I guess bedsharing didn’t make a really huge difference on the trip. All of the hotels we stayed at had a crib option, so that would have been easy enough. We declined the offer, though, and kept her with us, just like at home. Except out here we got king sized beds. What luxury! Oh, I wish we could have that at home!

Breastfeeding

Breastfeeding is so ideal for traveling. We didn’t have to pack a single thing to feed her for the whole week — no bottles, no bottled water, no mixes. I don’t think I would have done it if we’d been formula-feeding her. I can’t imagine having to wash bottles and tote all that paraphernalia with us everywhere we went.

With breastfeeding, I could feed her anytime, anywhere — on the plane, on the beach, in restaurants . . . the sling worked as an excellent cover to keep feeding discreet when I didn’t have my official nursing cover nearby. I even nursed her while walking a couple of times because she started to wail as we were heading back to our room at night. (I will even confess I did this without a cover one time because it was dark and I was desperate).

The other great thing about exclusive breastfeeding: it’s a panacea for all baby problems. Is she tired? Hungry? Grumpy? Confused? Boob. It’s always the answer. We don’t use a pacifier, so that’s another piece of plastic junk we don’t have to keep on us and keep sterilized. I’ve always got a (relatively) clean pacifier on hand (*ahem* — me), and we never have to worry about it falling onto the ground.

Elimination Communication

So this didn’t really work out on the trip. We actually had her in disposables — the eco-friendly kind, made with corn starch — for the most part.

While it was kind of nice to only have to change her diaper a handful of times a day, overall I hated the disposables. I hated how they left her bum all creased and wrinkly. Cloth never does that. I know it’s just psychological, but it just felt gross to me to keep all that urine-soaked material against her skin for hours, especially in that hot weather. So we let her go diaperless when we could — on the beach, in our room.

At home we’ve totally mastered nighttime EC, and so I took her into bed diaperless with us a couple of times. We’d brought a lightweight plastic container to act as her potty while we were out there. The first night, I caught all her pees and kept the bed perfectly dry. I was very proud of us. The next night: not so good. The time-change coupled with unusual sleeping patterns threw us off. I had her on a towel but she peed through that and onto the bed. I felt bad about that, making the nice maid change our wet bedding and pee-soaked towels. And then I made the same mistake the next night. Oops. So maybe from now on we don’t do that in other people’s beds.

So we learned a lot on our tropical vacation. Babies totally don’t have to stand in the way of international travel. I don’t know if traveling with kids will ever be as easy as it was this time, but I wouldn’t mind the chance to try! Maybe next time we’ll do something a little more challenging than staying at a resort.

Have you ever traveled with young children? What kinds of things helped to make it go smoothly?

A number of people have asked me to explore this topic. (And by “a number” I mean “three.” Just keepin’ it real). In each of these requests, there seemed to be an underlying assumption that it made our marriage better, since we’re still together and happy.

How did your experience with infertility strengthen your marriage?

I keep trying to write about how our two-year struggle to conceive a child influenced our marriage, for better or worse, but I keep failing.

The first reason I keep failing,  I think, is because I have a hard time identifying this entity known as “our marriage.”

(You’d think I would have nailed it by now, given that I’ve been writing about it for over two years, right?)

All I can see is my life, and my life involves a lot of Ben because we had this wedding ceremony six years ago and now we live together. We eat together, sleep together, watch movies together, hang out with friends together, and take care of each other when we’re sick or hurt. We socialize together, we have sex with each other and we have a lot of conversations. We have promised to keep doing these things together for the rest of our lives.

When we’re not together, we text each other updates about how we’re doing and ask questions about our plans for the evening. I spend a lot of time writing about this life of ours, and I spend a lot of time cooking meals for us to share and cleaning the house that we share. So like I said, my life involves a lot of this guy.

What part of that life, though, constitutes “our marriage”? The sum of all our interactions? How is “our marriage” distinct from other parts of my life, since most of my daily activities trace back to Ben or our home in one way or another?

I guess you might rephrase it, “How did the experience of infertility affect life with Ben?”

Well, it sucked, and it was hard, and I cried a lot. It sucked for Ben mostly insofar as it meant his wife cried a lot. He felt very helpless, but not especially broken up about the lack of children.

So how did all that crying and suckiness change life with Ben?

I’m not sure.

Well, before our struggle with infertility, our main source of conflict and anxiety was Ben’s unhappiness with work. He just didn’t feel satisfied as an employee . . . he wanted to work on his own. I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t really want him to break out on his own – I was afraid it would flop and we’d be poor. I was scared. I wanted to have kids. I kept trying to talk him out of it. I guess you could say it was hard on “our marriage” if by that you mean we spent a lot of our time together arguing. But we also still talked a lot and had fun together, and eventually he started his own business anyway and it went really well.

Around that time is when we started realizing that the baby thing wasn’t quite working out as planned. Ben was quite satisfied with life, but I was becoming anxious. Now it was his turn to not understand. What was the big deal? We’d probably have kids eventually. And if not? Well, we’d see  . . . it just wasn’t something he thought about that much.

The most important thing I learned from that experience, in terms of relationships, was how important it was to have female friends who understood. Ben just couldn’t appreciate how important this whole motherhood thing was to me. And that was OK. There were women out there who did. So while Ben and I talked about it often, and he tried his best to be sympathetic, I dealt with my sorrow mostly by connecting with mothers and non-mothers who got it. It was other women who really helped me through it.

And out of nowhere all of a sudden last December I got pregnant.

So I can’t say with any confidence that our dark walk through infertility together either drew us closer together or made us drift apart. I’m not sure what it did. We just kept eating meals together and brushing out teeth together and talking, talking, talking. He watched me shed a lot of tears and gave me lots of bewildered hugs. Kind of like how I would pat his hand and tell him I loved him when he was going through his Thing about work.

I’m sorry that I can’t provide a better answer about how the experience influenced our marriage. My story can’t really help you out if you’re going through a similar struggle, because I’m not sure exactly what we did right, if anything.

This is why I don’t offer marriage advice.

We just kept doing life together, caring for each other, and acting out that promise we made to keep doing things together.

I guess that’s the closest thing to advice I can offer: when life is hard — and it will be — just keep doing life together. I guess that’s my definition of marriage.

Image courtesy of Kejadlen.

2012 could consider itself conquered.

It was the first weekday of January and I had sat down at 6:30am to write lists, set goals, and organize my planner. I tidied my kitchen and planned my weekly menu. 2012 didn’t know what was going to hit it.

Then I headed out the door to grab some groceries. I had a long list of items to cook and bake in the upcoming week — heck, in the upcoming year. I fed the baby so I could leave her with my husband, bundled myself up, and started up the car. I realized suddenly that I didn’t think I had my reusable grocery bags with me. I hopped out of the car and ran to the side door of the house.

WHAM.

I was on the ground. I hadn’t realized the sidewalk had gotten icy. My left leg felt like it had split. Gasping for air, I looked around. Snow was swirling around me. Ben was inside, in the basement. If I could just find a rock or something, I could throw it at the nearest window to get his attention . . .

No need. Ben was at the doorway.

“I fell . . . I can’t move . . .”

After quickly checking my leg to see if anything was obviously broken (it wasn’t, as far as we could see), he carefully lifted me up and within moments he was carrying me inside.

I yelped and whined as he got me to the couch and as he looked me over. I cried like a toddler as he helped me pivot into a lying position. I moaned and complained as we debated the merits of taking me to the emergency room to wait four to six hours to get it checked out. He was completely patient with me as we decided to wait it out a bit. He got me painkillers and a blanket and ice.

All the rest of the day he fetched me trivial things — books, pens, notebooks — and looked after the baby.  He walked her to sleep, changed all her diapers, carried her to me for feedings, and brought toys for her to play with in bed next to me. He ordered and picked up lunch and dinner. After the eightieth time of me saying thanks, he started to sound tired . . . not of the requests, but of the constant thanking. This is just what husbands do, OK? His tone said.

He never told me how I should be more careful when it’s snowy out, or chided me for not noticing that he had already put the grocery bags out for me and that it had been unnecessary for me to go back for them. He returned the library books that I was supposed to return (all mine) and even got the groceries for me (something he had done maybe once before).

Not a fraction of a moment passed all day where I felt like a burden to him. (Except the literal kind, when he carried me on his back up and down the stairs. And even then he said, “Good thing you’re light.” Which is untrue. I’m 5’10”).

The next morning he set out and bought me a pair of crutches from the thrift store and a compression band from the drug store, and carefully iced and examined my ankle every few hours. The crutches were more for my benefit than his — I’m convinced he would have continued to piggyback me everywhere I needed to go if I would have asked him.

So I learned two important lessons this week.

One: just when you think you’ve conquered a year, you can take one sloppy step and end up on your back for a week. Plans are for chumps and suckers.

And two: a good husband is an invaluable gift. I’m so grateful for mine.

(Oh, and if you’re curious/concerned about my injury — thanks — I was completely out of commission for the entire next day, too, but my mom and husband talked me into seeing an unregistered Mennonite chiropractor. I almost peed my pants at the very thought of letting anyone touch my swollen, tender ankle, but I sucked up my terror and went to see him. Turns out to have been a good move: I was able to walk out of there on my own two feet. As I said on Facebook, Mennonite trechtmeakers FTW!)

Image courtesy of koalazymonkey.

(I wrote this before Christmas, so if any friends of mine are confused by the timeline, that’s the reason).

In the last two weeks I’ve learned that two close friends are pregnant. Both have been married less than a year and both pregnancies were unplanned. (Both are delighted, though). Earlier this week another friend gave birth to her unplanned baby, conceived within the first year of marriage.

Next month, two other friends are due to give birth, both to second children. Both conceived their babies in the first month of trying. Both times.

In every case, I have to admit I felt a little twinge of something like envy. It’s not exactly envy, because I now have everything I wanted — a vigorously healthy baby who charms the heck out of me, and the freedom to stay home with her every day — but I still feel a kick of something. How can everyone be so darn fertile? Why does everyone else get a baby just by thinking about it, when I had to pray and wait and wonder for almost two years, grappling with the painful possibility that I might never be a mother?

The truth is, though, I think those two years of waiting were a gift. In many ways, I recognize that waiting gave me something that these other women don’t have.

Here is a list of just a few of the blessings that came with having to wait.

1. I wouldn’t say that I appreciate my baby more than these other women, but there is definitely an added sweetness in my experience of motherhood due to my long wait. The hard stuff is rendered precious because I had to wait so long for her. Every time she wakes up at night — even if it’s once every hour — is another opportunity to clutch that little miracle close to my heart and marvel at the fact that she finally came.

2. I have a deep compassion for women struggling with infertility. Because I know what it feels like to stare down at yet another negative pregnancy test, or to cry until your cheeks ache because you can feel menstrual cramps coming on when you thought for sure this was the month, I can pray for other struggling couples with intense concern. Their plight is my plight, because I’ve been there. When it feels like the rest of the world doesn’t really care what these women are going through, I care. Deeply.

3. I have a heightened joy for those women who finally become pregnant after having to wait. Two women for whom I was praying recently became pregnant after years of waiting. My Christmas has been joyful because of them. Every time I think about them, the world feels like a happy place again.

4. Delayed pregnancy gave me the chance to learn so much about my body and fertility. If I had gotten pregnant at the first attempt, I wouldn’t have been forced to do all that learning. When months and months went by without pregnancy, I began to research ways to increase fertility. This led me on a long path of learning about nutrition and natural healing, which have become my passions. I’m sure I wouldn’t have bothered to look into those things if life had gone as planned. My whole life changed when I began to understand how my body works and how food and our environments affect our health and development.

It’s absurd, then, that I should feel envy. I am remarkably blessed. I have been reminded again that God makes ugly things beautiful . . . always.

Image courtesy of Bethan.

This is honestly one of the best photos we have of our baby.

Ben and I have established a game plan for when I get tempted to have professional family photos taken.

You know the ones I’m talking about. They’re all over Facebook. The ones where the family is holding hands and frolicking through apple orchards in full bloom, or at the lakeside, or in a forest bursting with autumnal majesty. The babies’ faces look like porcelain and their eyes shine like glass as they look up from antique chairs sitting in the middle of grassy meadows or from wicker baskets filled with quilts. Moms and dads in cable-knit sweaters gaze at each other with laughing eyes while the sun glows in their hair. Everyone is radiant and smiling.

Perhaps your family has pictures like these.

We don’t.

Not because I don’t want them. Goodness, who doesn’t want to dress up in their nicest clothes and have a professional snap photos of them prancing around in some idyllic wood or meadow, and then have them edited to empyrean perfection? Who doesn’t want photos of their babies looking like little forest nymphs and their husbands looking like Urban Outfitters models? Let me tell you: I do!

The very reason I’ve gone over a game plan with Ben about this is because the allure is so strong. I want to see myself looking like a Mother Goddess in all her ethereal glory, dang it! I don’t for one second blame anyone who’s gotten them done. I’ve been thisclose on more than one occasion.

So when I’m overcome with the desire to immortalize my family in these gorgeous picture collections, I have my husband go over these reasons for refraining with me.

1. Cost. This is our primary reason for not getting them done. I know that photos today are cheaper than ever, now that they’ve gone digital, and now that almost anyone with a DSLR can become a photographer with a single class at the community college and a pirated copy of Photoshop.* I know it’s not a huge expense. But since I don’t intend to ever work full-time again, extra money is not something we’re likely to see, um, ever again. And professional family portraits aren’t high on the priority list due to the following reasons.

2. Ben and I have decided that for us, the purpose of photos is to preserve memories. So a photo shoot of us hanging out in our Sunday best in a verdant field wouldn’t make sense, because we don’t do that. My baby doesn’t sleep on an ottoman under a willow tree with an oversized flower in her hair. She sleeps in a playpen in the kitchen, wearing mismatched leg warmers and homemade flannel bibs.

So we try to take pictures of the things and people in our daily lives, as well as our vacations. My photo albums are filled with pictures of me cooking, of our dog begging at the table, of our baby learning to hold her head up from the computer desk where she formerly slept, of Ben building things in the back yard. They’re grainy and poorly composed and our hair is always messy, but they’re true to life.

3. I’m uncomfortable with the artificiality of photos that are staged and edited but passed off as realistic portraits. Their ostensible purpose is to “capture memories,” to show what we look like. But I’ve seen photos of close friends where I wouldn’t have even recognized them if I hadn’t been told who was in them. And the times I’ve been in other people’s professional wedding photos? You would never guess that I have problem skin and chronically limp hair. I look amazing.

I understand that photography is an art, and all art lies; but portraits are expected to represent reality. It strikes me as somewhat dishonest when we pass these off as realistic. It’s like reality TV: they allegedly portray real people in real situations, when in truth these people have been hand-picked based on various criteria (looks, charisma) and put into artificial scenarios for our entertainment. They give a false impression of reality.

4. I’m somewhat uncomfortable with the objectification of children. Babies are dressed up and put into unnatural poses and placed in unrealistic situations for the sole purpose of being looked at. They become pieces of art in these photos. Not that this is necessarily wrong or anything; I’m just uncomfortable with how this further removes children from the realm of real life and relationships.

Now, in case I’ve said anything offensive, let me just clarify a few things:

• I realize that my own photos don’t tell the whole truth, either, because I delete any pictures in which I look ugly. Which are many.

• I regularly feel ashamed of my lousy photos, and a little guilty for not spending money into getting Lydia a proper photo shoot. Almost every parent I know has a nice collection of newborn photos, with fresh little babies lying naked on cozy crocheted blankets. I feel like a cheapskate sometimes, unwilling to give Lydia that gift.

• It’s actually one of my life goals to take a photography class at the community college and get a decent camera so I can take nice family photos myself. So I’m not against nicely-composed photos or anything.

• I can’t guarantee I will never have a professional outdoor photo shoot. They’re just so darn beautiful. And if someone offered to do it for free? There’s no way I could say no.

*I am not knocking photographers just because they’re becoming so common. It still takes talent to be a good photographer. Besides, absolutely anyone with internet access can become a blogger. I have no claim to originality. There are probably more of us than any other type of aspiring artist.

Have you gotten these outdoor family portraits? What were your reasons? Or if you’re refraining, what are your reasons?

I’m talking about sex again. So here’s another preface for people who know me in real life:  if you don’t want to know about my sex life, you may want to skip over this one.  It’s scary writing about this stuff, you guys! But a reader asked about it, and I decided that if one person wanted to know, there might be others.  I know that before I was a mother, I would have wanted to hear another woman’s experiences, too.

Last week I got this email from a reader:

I just read your after-baby-sex blog post. But that’s the thing that scares me most about having a baby. That everything will change, and that I won’t have the time/ability/desire to want to have sex. And that it won’t be good anymore. It’s definitely worth it, right? Will my husband think having a baby is worth not being able to have the sex life we have now? Does yours?

First, about Change.

The prospect of huge life changes — for better or worse — is always terrifying. At least it is for me. So I understand that it’s frightening when I say that everything changed when I became a mother.

But oh, it has been so worth it.

When I say my life is different, I mean it’s richer. When I say I feel differently about myself, I mean I hardly recognize myself because of how strong, how powerful, and how amazing I now see myself.

So how exactly has sex changed?

First, it’s probably helpful to know what sex was like before Lydia. In a word: fantastic. I’m learning that sex isn’t very satisfying for a lot of women out there, so I guess I’m one of those lucky few for whom it was great since the first year of marriage. I still generally didn’t want it as often as my husband did (what’s new), but whenever he managed to convince me to go for it, we both enjoyed it. Always. Even during the whole infertility thing.

And now? Well, first the bad, and then the good.

The Bad

I’ll be honest. Sex happens less often now, post-baby, than it used to. And it wasn’t all that frequent before. Our sweet baby tends to be most fussy and needy in the evening, especially just before bed. Which is almost universally, I believe, the time when most couples have sex on a given day. So that’s kind of hard.

Second, sex is the thing we argue about most these days. Not only am I usually busy and tired at the prime sex-having time, but I think mothering hormones have decreased my overall interest in it. I’m just not in the mood most of the time, even if I’m not busy with the baby. This has been frustrating for my husband.

Another thing. I don’t want to freak anyone out, but I do want to be completely honest. It took me a long time to heal, physically, from childbirth. We didn’t have honest-to-goodness sex for almost three months because it hurt too much. I don’t know if that is normal. I would be curious whether other women felt pain for such a long time after. (Maybe experienced women would like to share in the comments?). Fortunately, I have a very gentle and caring husband who never pressured me to do anything that hurt me. So that meant even less sex.

But: I’m finally fully healed (it’s been four months now), and I have some good news.

The Good

Sex can still be awesome, even if it’s happening less often. I won’t go into detail, but I can assure you, we have had some Good Times while Lydia has been napping.

Also: rather than feeling lousy about my post-baby body, I actually feel better about my body than ever before. No kidding.

Not only do I feel like a fiercely powerful and miraculous creature who can build brand new people with my body (!!!), but I actually feel sexier.

And you know what? My husband actually finds me sexier. Which can be, ironically, kind of a problem given the fact that I’m less interested in sex than usual. See, he didn’t tell me this in one of my vulnerable moments in order to make me feel better, thereby making his compliment suspect: he told me this out of frustration when we were arguing about sex. I was all exasperated, like, “Geez, why do you want to have sex now more than ever before?? Of all the times for you to go all raging adolescent on me, you pick a time when I’m busy with a baby?” And his frank response was, “Because I find you more attractive than ever before. Look at you!”

I think it’s the bigger boobs. And also the increased confidence. I’m told nothing is more attractive than confidence.

So yeah: sex has been a source of frustration since we’ve become parents, especially for him. But there’s no question that he thinks having a baby is worth it and he would never regret it, because he loves having Lydia in our lives so much. Lydia hasn’t ruined sex, she’s just made it a little more complicated. We’re still figuring out how to make it as good as it can be. It’s a process.

* * *

Last night I was brushing my teeth while Ben tried to keep Crankypants Lydia entertained upstairs in our room long enough for me to get ready for bed. All of a sudden I heard her shriek, followed by my husband’s laughter. Soon I heard his footsteps heavy on the stairs, accompanied by a swooshing noise. The two of them burst into the bathroom, Lydia in airplane position in his arms. “She’s flying!” he announced. And then, on Lydia’s behalf, said, “Screw you, mom! I’m outta here!” before flying back out into the living room. She dive-bombed Narnia, sending the dog running for her life; she whooshed past the bookshelves and paintings on the walls. All the while, she drooled and laughed. Soon they were thundering back upstairs. I joined them to find Lydia moon-jumping, with Ben’s help, all over the bed. “You can’t catch me, mom; there’s no gravity here!” he said, again on her behalf. She just smiled at me and drooled some more while I changed into my pajamas.

Finally, he handed her over to me. “Woo! That’s a workout on the arms. But it was the only way I could keep her from crying until you got here,” he said breathlessly.

I pottied her, and we settled into bed, all three of us together with the dog in her bed on the floor nearby.

“This is all so awesome,” I said as Lydia began to nurse, curled up beside me.

“It sure is,” he agreed.

So no: this is nothing like how we would have spent an evening four months ago. It’s not necessarily better, but it’s certainly not worse.

Everything is different, but neither of us would change it for anything.

I’ve been putting off posting this because I know that some of my relatives read this blog. If you don’t want to think too hard about your daughter’s/sister’s/cousin’s/niece’s sexuality, you are cordially excused from reading this post.

Before I had Lydia, I thought I didn’t want motherhood to change me.

Oh, but it has.

More specifically, I didn’t want others to perceive a difference in me. I hoped my friends would still see the same old Kathy (as my oldest friends call me), just with a baby.

But motherhood has changed everything. Most notably, my concern for things like other people’s perceptions of me. I don’t give a rat’s patootie if others think that I have become lame and boring. Lydia’s entry into my life has altered me permanently and, in my opinion, for the better. I don’t even care that I use stupid words like patootie. The cool kids can deal with it.

* * *

I wrote recently about marriage after baby. I politely avoided the topic of sex, though it is quite honestly the one area in my life that has actually changed significantly in my (and my husband’s) life.

Sex is different now that I’m a mother. Not just in the way that sex feels, because of what my body has gone through, though that too. It’s not that my body has merely changed; it’s that it is a wholly new and different thing.

My body is a thing that brings forth life. It brings new people into existence. How can I ever feel the same way about it again?

My body no longer just belongs to me and my husband. It belongs to a child, and possibly a whole host of future children. So the meaning of my husband’s treatment of such an object is permanently changed. He is not simply touching his wife anymore; he is touching a mother, a sacred creature who brings forth life.*

My breasts no longer serve only an aesthetic purpose: they’re sources of nourishment. They sustain life. My vagina is no longer merely the site of shared pleasure; it’s the site of birth. A new person — the most important person of my existence so far — came into being there, and she left a permanent mark.

My body is a very, very sentimental thing for me now.

* * *

I’ve never had a role that was so completely physical before. I’ve always been primarily a Thinker. My body’s main purpose was to house my brain. It enabled me to do the important things: meditate, reason, read, write. It got me to school where I would listen and think. It got my brain back home where I could type out my ideas and reflections. If my body played any important role, it was as a mediator between the world and my brain; its value lay in its senses — primarily sight and hearing. I was a vessel, a receiver of ideas and perceptions.

In my role as mother, my body has become more important than my brain for the first time in my life. My body’s value lies in what it gives, what it sends forth.

I nourish through touch. I nourish with my voice. I nourish with my breasts. My baby needs the warmth and softness of my skin and the sound of my voice and the sight of my face to thrive. More than my intellect, she needs my body.

I still need to receive, but my identity no longer rests primarily in what I receive, but what I give.

So like I said: motherhood has changed everything.

*I do not mean to imply that my body is more sacred now than it was before I gave birth, nor that a woman who has not given birth is any less sacred. It is only that in giving birth, I have been able to sense just how powerful and holy the female body is.

If you’re a mother, how has it changed you? If you’re a father, how has fatherhood changed you? If you are neither, how do you expect/fear it may change you? For the worse or for the better?

Image courtesy of Faith Goble.

Every so often, I think about killing Project M.

I’ve been tired of the topic of marriage for a while. You can probably tell. I really just want to write about other things, like motherhood and social justice and radical Christian living. Writing about marriage has been great, but I’m not sure if I have much else to say on the subject. I still don’t think marriage is hard; I have no patience for trite marriage tips and I have little interest in talking about how to improve marriages. At the same time, I still think marriage is incredibly important and worth defending and staying committed to, and my marriage brings me extraordinary satisfaction and joy. I’d still say I’m passionate about marriage.

Also, I recently took the book Marriage, a History out of the library and that might ignite a new interest in the topic.

But that’s neither here nor there.

Anyways.

Some very generous soul (souls?) nominated my blog once again for this year’s Top 10 Marriage Blogs list. I was frankly astonished by this gesture, especially because I never promoted the contest on my blog or elsewhere. Someone out there still thinks Project M is a viable contender for the Top 10 Marriage Blogs of 2011?

I feel like I’ve mostly been a curmudgeon when it comes to the topic of marriage in 2011, and off-topic the rest of the time. I’ve written about pregnancy, birth, and parenting; I’ve talked a whole lot about singleness; and I even wrote a random post on barefooting. There were long stretches where I didn’t blog at all – I only wrote one post for the month of June, and then only about why I wasn’t blogging.

So when I heard that I’d been nominated for the Top 10 list, I was hesitant to even bring it up. I waited a whole week. I didn’t feel like my blog was worthy. But then I decided that if someone felt it was worth nominating, others might think it was worth voting for.

After all, I did write one post about how husbands can help in times of crisis. See? I’m still a marriage blogger!

So this is me asking you to take a second to vote for my blog. Stu (an all-around nice guy, I must have you know) at Stupendous Marriage has made it really easy to just select a blog from the drop-down list.

Thanks a lot, you guys.

I also just want to throw out there that you guys are the greatest. As I was going through my year’s posts to get a sense of what I’ve been doing in 2011, I was reminded what an amazing bunch of people have been supporting me through all this. Every comment that you leave here helps to make me a better person.

And if I do start up a new blog to follow my more recent interests, I will be sure to let you all know.

Thanks for being awesome.