I finished primary last week. Everything seems to be in working order. Only one leg will stay behind my head in Supta Kurmasana and by the time I get there, I am so pooped I can’t quite jump out of bakasana without the little cheating toe touch. I can do my dropbacks and I feel some, but not a lot of sensation in the front of my body around the incision. The biggest difference in my post-surgery practice is not being able to pick up in between navasanas. I have talked to a few c-section ladies, I haven’t talked to one who can do it yet. Does anyone, out there in interweb-land, know of a post c-section successful pickup practice? I am also hella stiff from collapsing into my back as I cart around the enormous vegan monster baby. My hamstrings are unforgiving, but that seems pretty mutable.

Speaking of carting around a monster – we bought one of these:

Word. I can put the baby down! At the moment he is having a nap, not on my chest, but on his own. Glory be. The biggest achievement so far of my mommy career is getting rid of the lame elephant mobile the swing came with and outfitting it with a smily baby face/veggie rattle/shiny heart mobile. Who wants to stare at elephant ass while trying to go to sleep?

Holden, David and I are preparing for our big trip to Copenhagen and Stockholm in less than a week. David will be teaching at the Astanga Yoga Studio in Copenhagen and yogayama in Stockholm. I have been in baby land and focusing more on logistics of flying with a two-month-old.  But really, thank the lord for Scandinavians. A seemingly complicated trip has been made so comfortable and effortlessly organized.

For example, David and I realized in a panic the other day that Mikko from Astanga Yoga Studio was picking us up and we weren’t going to have a car seat for the baby. We thought about options and whether we should just go ahead and lug a car seat around for two weeks. David wrote to Mikko, and of course, Mikko had thought of it (before even we had considered it) and had arranged to have a car seat fitted into the ride (cue angelic music). So fantastic!

The emails David and Eva from yogayama have been exchanging would restore even the most cynical person’s faith in human kindness. Eva is beyond sweet. And of course we are so looking forward to catching up with Laruga and David who have been incredibly supportive and awesome. When we were in Mysore together I was trying to keep up with the boys and and their appetites. Now that I am nursing, I am pretty sure I can go head to head with the two Davids. Woot! I love eating!

Because I am lazy and distrustful of the interweb, I would love tourist suggestions for Sweden and Denmark. Let me know if you have any advice – things I can do with a monster baby.

He enjoys: moving, looking at light fixtures and breastfeeding. He dislikes: not moving, breastmilk in a bottle, and stupid doctors. Ok, I just added in that last one.

The other day I had finished nursing the baby and handed him to David so I could eat dinner.

D: He smells like poo even though I just changed him

S: Yeah, I know. I’ll give him a bath after….

The fork poised in front of my mouth, I looked over at the rocking chair where Holden and I had been sitting and there was a long line of mustardy poo running down the front of it. I glanced down at my legs and they were covered in poo. I looked up at David, holding the baby, and his shirt had streaks of poo down the front.

S: The chair….My leg…..Your shirt….

At that moment both of  us noticed the large round puddle of poo

S: The floor!

We laughed.

The baby stared placidly on.

Mercedes reminded me the other day of something I used to talk to Holden about when he was in the NICU. I was really scared out of my brain for him and his relatively short stay seemed almost interminable.

The culture at the NICU is strange because they have your baby at such a young age, the nurses and doctors take a bit of ownership over your little one. Every new shift change is a new negotiation, how can I convey the issues my baby is having? how can I get you to let me hold him? take him out of here?

I can see if you were there for a while, you have two options either you develop a good relationship with the staff or you just sort of check out of the whole thing and wait for the staff to let you know when you can take the baby home. After spending some time in the NICU, I wouldn’t judge either decision and it seemed that both types of parents were present (or not present as the case may be).

For the first day and a half we could just touch Holden through the arm holes in his incubator. He seemed really big in comparison to the little early babies around him. When one baby would cry, the babies would domino on down the room – a wave of tears and high pitched cries. You could tell when it was your baby crying right away. This is my favourite picture from that time, because he looks so relieved to be held, finally.

Trudging back and forth from my room to the NICU in my elegant hospital gown/coat combo I started thinking about our trip to Farm Sanctuary, and if Holden and I could just make it through this we would go the farm and everything would be OK. When I was allowed to hold him at 3 hour intervals, I would talk to him about the goats and the chickens on the farm. I told him the goats would nibble on his toes and the chickens would be scared of him because he was so big. Getting to the farm at that time seemed so far away from the beeping of monitors and recycled air of the hospital.

When we did get to the farm, I had forgotten about the stories I told Holden, and  seeing the goats, although amazing and fun, wasn’t as crucial for healing as it was the day after he was born.

I found his diapers that we took home from the hospital and they are so impossibly small. How could he have been that small? When he was born  I thought he was huge. He won’t ever be that small again.

It never seems like that big of a deal at the time, and then afterwards I realize how quickly everything has changed in such a fundamental way – for my baby and my family. All these big monents, I hope I can stay present for some of it before time rushes it out of my hands.

A few weekends ago, I went to a beautiful elopement party in the park with Holden. It was a perfect day and the ceremony was lovely. Afterwards, someone asked me if I always coordinated my outfits with Holden’s. I looked down at myself, and realized that 1) we were wearing the same colours 2) I was momentarily relieved to notice that I was, in fact, fully dressed.

A friend once told me about a woman they knew, who answered her door topless by accident. I now think that she must have been breastfeeding. That said, I did show up to my midwives appointment with my pants completely undone. They were being held up and obscured by the baby carrier. But the top button and the zipper were undone on the 40 minute subway ride to see the midwife. I only noticed the button was undone when I took off the carrier and handed the baby to the midwife and she gave me an odd look.

Holden’s Practice Notes:

The Buffalo crew from East Meets West are always so welcoming and fun to hang out with. Buffalo is really quite pretty if you aren’t just heading straight to the nearest Target, plus America is the land of a million vegan treats that you can’t get in Canada. This year, we discovered these:

Even the cashier at the store told us, “If you haven’t had these before, you are starting something you shouldn’t.” Oh lord. I am almost glad that we can’t get them in Canada. Now, why Buffalo – land of wings and almost winning football teams – has better vegan treats than Toronto, I have no idea. I just know if I lived here I would be 600 lbs and camped out at the Lexington Co-op.

So, while his mom is slowly slipping into a diabetic coma, Holden took a yoga class with the wonderful Sarah. Itsy Bitsy Yoga was so much fun, and Sarah said that Holden was a super genius for not crying. Ok, maybe she didn’t say he was a super genius but she might have mentioned Yale. I think our vinyasa should certainly include the song, “1,2,3,4 – I love you, forever and more!” I’ll write to Sharath – maybe at janu c?

Today we head home, I’m sad to say goodbye to all the desserts and the lovely peeps – but I’m excited to get back to our routine and see Mercedes and my mom.

I have been internetless in Farm Sanctuary over the past week. But I am going to make up for it with critter pictures!

AYCT sponsors a pig and a cow from Farm Sanctuary, which is a charity that does rescue and advocacy work for farm and food animals. Every year for the last three, David and I have travelled down to Ithaca, New York to visit the animals and spend time on the farm. It is a peaceful and beautiful place and it puts me in touch with why we are vegan.

This year we learned that Sprinkles, our pig had some medical problems due to his unnaturally large size. He wasn’t bred to reach this age, and he has developed leg and hip problems. He is on medication, but he seemed pretty content when I caught up with him again.

Samuel, our adopted cow, is in the special needs herd because he likes the senior citizens. He is also massive. He was pretty bothered by flies when we were hanging out and was swinging his head wildly from side to side, which is why we are keeping a respectful distance in the picture.

My favourite are the goats. Goats are friends with everybody, so you can always be sure of a warm reception in the goat barn.

Holden liked the goats too.

But the tour was pretty exhausting.

Practice Notes:

I practiced in YOGA PANTS for the first time in 6 weeks last Tuesday. Usually I practice in my undies at home, but that isn’t really acceptable attire at the studio. Yippee! It was stinking hot, but I had such a great time. I went up to Janu C and I did a backbend and full closing. At this point I have worked up to navasana with dropbacks, and David told me today that I am ready to finish primary, which I am a little scared about. Navasana is basically the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. Trying to lift my feet off the floor for the pick up seems like a far away dream. My belly is still pretty numb from surgery, but I can keep plugging away at it.

I love the studio, I love being able to practice. Mercedes watched the baby and I felt an overwhelming amount of gratitude that he has such a great older sister. It was such a gift to be back.

We are in Buffalo for the next few days, and by golly we have internet! I hope to update over the weekend with Holden’s practice notes. He took his first yoga class today. Super genius!

Holden slept 6 hours on Saturday night. I woke up with a start thinking for sure he was dead. I think I might have woken him up when I leaned over him to check to see if he was still breathing. 6 hours. My mind started racing – could I possibly try to sleep 2 more hours during the day to make it a full 8? 8 hours in one day would be like a normal person, and then I might start behaving like a normal person!

I didn’t get the extra two hours, so I’m still a big unsocialized weirdo, but thankfully my family and friends are understanding.

I told everyone I knew yesterday that Little Owl slept 6 hours. Every conversation went something like this:

Friend/family member: Hi.How are you?

Stan: Holden slept 6 hours!

David said all the moms respond like the baby got into Harvard, and it is true. I could replace “slept 6 hours” with “got into Harvard”.

S: Holden got into Harvard!

F: What! That is terrific. My baby only got into Harvard at 6 months.

– or –

F: Wow! My baby never got into Harvard!

– or –

F: Holden got into Harvard? You are doing a really good job?

I heard my mother on the telephone with friend yesterday;

Mom: Hello?…..Oh Hi! Holden got into Harvard last night!

Apparently, Harvard checked my bank balance, because during the night they decided he isn’t going after all. What would 2 hours be? Community college?

He smiles now – obviously ready for the Ivy League!

Practice Notes:

This morning, I heard Mercedes leave with David and I realized I had missed an opportunity to practice at the studio. I got on the mat and the day stretched out before me long and unbroken, and I suddenly started to cry. Like a dark cloud passing, it was over just as quickly as it started and I was left sitting on the mat wide-eyed and listening to Holden cooing himself awake in the next room.

I decided I would write a screenplay about a woman who spent her days alone with her baby (Ok – this is really not at all true of me, my family is amazingly supportive) because her husband is a high powered something or other (Hahaha!). Her left side begins to get overdeveloped because she is carrying a 75 lb baby around all the time and her right side withers because it is only used to shovel food in her mouth (Ok – this is a distinct possibility for me). She starts having delusions about her baby getting accepted into Havard. Then in a strange and horrible twist of fate, she goes so crazy about the Havard thing that Child Services takes the baby away and gives him to the next door neighbours. She spends the rest of her life picking her baby’s cigarette butts out of her flower garden and listening to his adoptive parents call him “Faggot”.

The end!

PeaceLoveYoga reminded me today of Guruji’s birthday. The rain last night cooled off the heavy damp heat from yesterday. This morning there are slim shafts of lemon light poking through the clouds. Nice day to think about Mysore, KPJAYI and Guruji. Big up.

Last week, my little milk jumkie got in the bad habit of eating every 20 minutes. Ok. I’m totally the enabler, but everyone kept telling me feed on demand. Then, I realized – I’m the dealer – I call the shots.  So, now I am cutting off his frequency. Yesterday was every two hours, today is every 2.5 hours. Eventually, I’m working up to 3 by the end of the week. David bought me a breast pump, so that I could leave Mr. Owl to run an errand but we couldn’t figure out when pumping would make sense because he is such a snacker. As my sister wisely told me, “It is a level of higher math you aren’t capable of on two hours sleep.” He is pretty good about the new wait, but there is some clockwatching around 15 minutes before he gets his next fix.

The whole thing reminds me of the Velvet Underground song, Waiting for My Man: “He’s never early, he’s always late/ First thing you learn is you always have to wait.”

Last year, David and I were walking down our street and on the corner, I noticed an addict punching numbers into a pay phone furiously and with a perplexed look on her face. I thought, “Funny, how you can see a crack addiction on someone’s face. The lines, the hardness has a uniformity to it.”

She looked up at me and stopped banging on the number pad. “What? You never seen a crackhead before?” She yelled.

Embarrassed, I looked away. Quietly and to David, I said “Well, I live in this neighbourhood – so yes I have.”

But a little self-awareness, even if it comes out of nowhere, is always welcome.

Happy moon day, happy birthday Guruji. Back on the game tomorrow.

Mercedes turned me on to 16 and Pregnant recently.

16 and Pregnant makes you feel super organized and on top of your shit, unlike most reality shows that just make you feel bad for watching and depressed about the state of the world. I get pretty weepy when the baby appears, as do all the grandparents (who are my age), which is nice. I hate to spread a bad habit, but if you go to the mtv.ca website under shows, you can watch all the episodes. You will have to scroll past such stellar shows as “1 girl 5 gays” though

Honestly, why haven’t I pitched a show to MTV yet? It seems like any awful thing that drifts into your head could be made into a program.

During pregnancy, I was quite into “I Didn’t Know I was Pregnant’ about moms who go to the bathroom and a baby comes out in the toilet. Mercedes, the purveyor of good music and terrible television got me started on IDKIWP. That show is truly incredible, and I think the product of limited access to  health insurance in the US. I go to the doctor when my fingernails are too long, so half the show is spent in gobsmacked amazement that someone could ignore the missed periods, the weight gain, the nausea, heartburn and eventually the searing pain of labour for nine months.

Postpartum Ashtanga Yoga Practice

It is a month since I gave birth and I have two weeks until the go ahead from my midwife to start exercising again.  I am doing all of standing first thing when I get up in the morning. I have just enough time to crawl out of bed, throw on a top and do a quick little practice in the morning before I am called to duty.

I have some twinges of pain on my right side when I do backbends from the surgery. I think that tightness will be there for a while. I am slowly accessing my strength again. It is funny, because I was lifting all that extra weight when I was pregnant and I carry the 12 lb baby around everywhere, but the strength you need for ashtanga is different. Often I feel like I have been repeatedly punched in the stomach.

I would sometimes have moms in my class that did not practice for a year after the baby was born and joined my level 1 class – something they could easily do before pregnancy. Most of them would get a bit panic stricken after the third sun salutation. I can really understand why now. Body memory or whatever is really out the door for the first little while, I think I will need to retrain my body for months maybe the next year before I can do what I was doing pre-conception. Mysore style will help with that. I don’t know if I could jump back into a led class without feeling a little defeated.

But then, anytime I start feeling a bit down about building up my practice – I remember: I’ve got the cutest baby in the universe!

Really, if I only do standing for the rest of my life it is the best trade off.

Now if I can only figure out how to get more sleep….

On Thursday night, the day before Holden was born, things started to get a little rough in labour. I was at home when my water broke and I was starting to develop a fever, which would end up lasting through until the next morning. I was on my hands and knees in our bedroom trying rather unsuccessfully to cope with the contractions by counting my breaths, sort of like a never ending headstand. I was wearing shorts and a tee shirt but they were soaking wet at this point. David and I thought there might be some meconium – baby poop –  in the water, and when the midwife came over for the third time that day she confirmed it.

She said: ”We can’t pretend anymore. We have to go to the hospital. David: put her in a large t-shirt and a pair of boxers with a pad and we will meet you in the hospital lobby.”

So, my husband pulled out the biggest t-shirt he could find. Yep. A huge white oversized boxy tee shirt that says in large black letters on the front: EAT MORE CHAPATIS. On the back there is info from a Sharath tour. He put me in the Eat More Chapatis t-shirt with a pair of his grey boxers. Mercedes tried to get me to put on shoes, but I couldn’t deal, so she had to carry my shoes with her to the hospital.

Sitting in the back seat, through the counting, I could hear David saying to Mercedes:

“Stan is going to kill me.”

After the 20 minute drive to the hospital, I got out of the car. The boxers were soaked with water and meconium, which was streaming down my legs, as I stood barefoot in the lobby of the hospital with EAT MORE CHAPATIS! blazed across my chest.

No one said a thing.

But anyone who has had a baby in the hospital knows that you meet about forty million doctors and nurses in the course of your labour and they all want to check how far dilated you are, where the baby’s head is and if you are me – what exactly your shirt says.

So, it really was an ashtanga birth! And I really will one day kill my husband for putting me in that ridiculous thing.

David was away last week, and I am just getting back on my feet. This week I am committed to being a better blogger and to responding to everyone’s lovely comments. Keep checking in, I promise I will be updating regularly with my post surgery practice and the amazing amounts of food I am eating while nursing.

Is it possible that I gave birth to the cutest baby that ever lived? Totally possible! My son is the greatest evah!

Hi.

I gave birth to a 10 pound baby boy, Friday June 18th at 3:27p. Holden Owl Byrne. There were complications during the birth and I ended up having an emergency c-section. He is beautiful and calm, and we are definitely going to keep him.

I’m not sure how vegan babies get to be 10 pounds. The doctors were a little shocked when they pulled him out. Diana thinks my uterus is made of candy, and Erin thinks he is 8 pounds of Indian food. I think either is entirely possible.

So far, life is pretty quiet. I am healing from my incision, and Holden Owl is eating an enormous amount, sleeping and watching the world cup with his dad. As I write this he is napping, strapped to my chest all hot and sweaty.

The night I gave birth, Holden’s breathing started to get progressively more shallow. Because I had a fever and he had pooped in utero during labour, the pediatrician was worried that he had an infection or pneumonia. That night they took him to the NICU.  I couldn’t get out of bed until the next morning, and the next three days were spent dragging my IV back and forth to his little incubator where he was hooked up to monitors, an antibiotics IV, and a respirator. The culture in the NICU is really weird, I’ll write about it more when I have a bit more perspective. It was the most difficult three days of my life, I cried a lot, I was in a lot of pain, and both David and I were sick with worry and frustration. Coming home was the greatest. I spent the first few hours just sniffing the air and listening to the birds. Home is the best place to heal.

So, you get the pregnancy and the baby you need, but I think you might also get the birth you need. Because I maintained my practice through my pregnancy, most people said the baby would just fly out of me. I was sort of hoping that would be true, but it ended up being the total opposite.

With my lower half numb and obscured, my arms stretched out to either side of me, an oxygen tube up my nose, the largest, brightest lights I have ever seen, and an anonymous team of 20 masked professionals who I will never see again in my life – it wasn’t exactly the hippy love-in birth I was expecting. But actually, despite the hospital’s best attempts, the experience is so spiritually intense – it defies description. I felt uplifted, high. At first I couldn’t see him, I could only hear him crying and his crying sounded beautiful and adorable to me. Instant, unbridled love, mixed with this new feeling of nervousness.  Over the past two weeks I have felt equal parts hugely important and just an embodied vessel carrying the baby into the future.

Although, I don’t know if I am strong enough to go through the NICU experience anytime soon, I would gladly go through my labour and delivery again. Strange. I mean, I felt my uterus – warm and wet – being pulled out of me and placed on my tummy as they sewed it up. The whole thing is nightmarish, but it doesn’t touch me.

I love him. Who is he? It is glorious and complicated over here.

Practice notes:

Haha! As if!

I cried last week when David lifted me out of bed because my abodmen hurt so much.

I have managed to do some sun salutations for the past three days. I have no arm strength, and upward dog is tricky. It is nice to move again and fold forward without having a large belly in the way. My goal is to slowly add on standing, with no twists for my healing uterus, by the time I get to 6 weeks. Slowly, slowly.

How is it going over there?