Four Ounces of Sanity

I´m not a fan of extremists.  Or extremes, one way or another.

However, I have a newborn.  He doesn´t share my distain for extremism.

Because, let me tell you, this kid would be happy to hang on the boob ALL DAY.  And, for those who know newborns, you know that when I say all day, I mean all night, too.  It´s all the same around here, lately.

Now, there are plenty out there who get a little militant about breastfeeding.  Plenty of moms swear up and down that a bottle will NEVER touch their baby´s lips.  They happily feed their children around the clock, a lactating frenzy.  They eat with maximum production in mind.  They´ll even pump between latch-ons, stocking away "liquid gold".

If you are one of those moms, I congratulate you.  To be honest, I´d like to be you.

But I´m not.

I do believe in breastfeeding.  Having breastfed my other children, I know that pulling out the boob is much easier than heating a bottle.

And it´s free.  Can´t say enough about that.  

But during these first two weeks, breastfeeding can be really, really hard.

After all, when a mom is beginning to breastfeed, she is also:

• recovering from giving birth.  Depending on one´s experience, there may have been a bit of trauma involved.  So while the mother is dealing with the pain of recovering from her C-section, an episiotomy, or simply pushing another person´s head out of her body, she is simultaneously subjecting her sensitive nipples to being mangled every couple of hours.  

• really, really, really, really, really tired.  

• Hormonally out-of-whack, which often means that one´s emotions are all over the place.  

So if you are like me, and your child has been on the boob for five hours straight, and you´re about to throw him across the room BECAUSE he´s been on the boob for five hours, I´ve got a secret.  

It´s OK to give him a bottle.  

It´s even OK to give him a bottle of formula.  It´s not necessary to pump it out.  

Because, let´s face it--if the kid has been sucking for five hours, the tatas probably have not had a chance to replenish themselves and he probably isn´t getting much of anything anyway.  

My first child was born a little small, so the doctor suggested supplementing with formula.  Let me tell you, she sucked down bottle after bottle in the hospital.  While I did successfully breastfeed her, every bottle I gave her in those first few weeks felt like a symbol of my failure.   

My second baby didn´t touch a bottle at the hospital.  I was determined that he was going to be the perfect, breastfed-only baby. Then we brought him home.  He screamed for the first 24 hours.  I finally caved in and called the pharmacy so they could deliver some formula to our house.  I gave him the bottle and he finally fell asleep.  

Blessed relief!  

Yes, breastmilk is best for our babies.  I try to give mine as much as I possibly can.

But when he sucks away for hours at a time, I am done.  Those four ounces of magic might just be why I make it through those first six weeks on the upside of sane.*

Of course, if one does want to continue to breastfeed, take it easy--one or two bottles a day, max.  (Unless you kid is crazy, of course.)  Just keep in mind that if nothing comes out of the boobies for 24-48 hours, the magic will end.  The girls won´t work until baby has a sibling.

But if the baby has 4 ounces once or twice a day, no harm, no foul.

After a few weeks (or months, in my daughter´s case) both of my older children were exclusively breastfed.  In a few weeks, this baby will be, too.  But I´ll let him decide.

Watching me feed one of my babies the fake stuff, my mom told me in her saddest, most wistful voice, "I wish someone had told me I could haven given you a bottle now and then."

I´m passing on the secret.  Ain´t no shame.

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*This is in NO WAY a condemnation of those who´ve suffered post-partum depression.  That´s a whole different ball of wax.  There´s no shame in that, either, but do what you have to do to get through it.  And that´s the bitch about depression--it makes one not want to do anything to get through it.  Huge red flag right there.  Don´t blow it off.  

A Healthy Dose of Reality

I´ve lived here long enough that not much takes me by surprise anymore.

And then I´m flipping through my daughter´s homework and smacked up alongside the head with "Gee--we aren´t in Indiana anymore!"

Check out the illustration for a first grade test on life cycles:

Just in case you aren´t seeing what I saw, double-click on the picture.  Check out the top left corner.  

Yep, that´s a dead chicken.  

And not just a cartoon of a dead chicken--nope, that´s a photograph of a real, dead chicken.  (I just about wrote, "a real, live, dead chicken."  But that´s the point.  He is most certainly NOT alive.)  If I look close enough, I think I can see flies buzzing around it.  

Now, I´m not one to shy away from the realities of life.  Ever since Clara has been old enough to ask questions, she´s been well aware of where our food comes from.  A few years back, she was also fixated on the idea of death, or at least the realization that everything does come to an end, sooner or later.  

My sweet, little, six-year-old, whose head is filled with rainbows and puppies and glitter-filled hearts gets to stare at the grizzly remains of a chicken for her school work.  

Welcome to Mexico.  We don´t shy away from reality here.  

Death is part of the life cycle.  And well--this is what it looks like.  

However, being a sheltered midwesterner whose culture is generally in denial of the reality of death, the thoroughness of the diagram took my breath away a bit.   

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Civil Baptism?

Roughly 10 years ago, this commercial was pretty popular.  In a nutshell, it makes fun of the Mexican habit of putting lime on everything.


               


Toward the end of the commercial, where they´re squeezing lime on everything, even things that aren´t food, I thought to myself, "hmmm . . . so when Mexican babies have their birth certificates filed, do they get a little lime squeezed on their heads, as a kind of civil baptism?"

Can´t you just see it?  Mom and Dad and baby, all gathered in the Registro Civil, ink from fingerprinting still wet on their fingerprints, and as the official is about to hand the birth certificate over to the proud parents, the government offical takes a half of lime, squeezes a few drops onto the infant´s head, saying, "I now pronounce you officially Mexican!"

I love it.

As we just registered baby boy, I was really tempted to do just that.

But the comparison between filing a birth certificate and Catholic baptism is even more striking recently--because it is now necessary to bring witnesses to sign the birth certificate.

When we registered our oldest daughter, the people who worked at the Registro Civil served as the witnesses on her birth certificate, and (I´m guessing) on the majority of other kids´ certificates, too.  Or, if they Registry employees weren´t able to be witnesses, the Registry is right in front of a bus stop, so we could have just offered to pay someone their bus fare if they´d be willing to come in and sign their name on our kid´s birth certificate.

No longer.  We are now required to bring our own witnesses--no more picking random strangers off the street.

Thank goodness it worked out for us the way it did!  After all, we moved to Saltillo just two months before Clara was born--we simply didn´t have two people we knew who could serve as witnesses.  This time around, though, it was a whole other story.  First of all, Mario´s cousin lives with us.  Witness #1--check!  And Mario´s mom is visiting, to help take care of the baby.  Witness #2--check!

However, the day that Mario took off of work to file the baby´s birth certificate, both of our older kids were sick.  Since we couldn´t leave them at home alone, I was frantically on the phone, calling neighbors to see if they´d be willing to pay the Civil Registry a visit with us, taking Mario´s mom´s place as a witness.

Now that we´ve lived here for seven years, I had a number of people to call.  And at the last minute, one of my lovely neighbor friends was able to join us in a pinch.

As I told her and Paty (Mario´s cousin) as we were heading home with the birth certificate in our hands, "you guys are like Baby´s civil godmothers!"

And it´s true.  These women are, and will be, two of the more influential people in his life who will teach him, through example, how to be Mexican.  After all, as much as I enjoy and respect this country, I´m not Mexican and am therefore ill-equipped to teach him how to be Mexican.  I do my best, but--let´s face it--he needs a Paty and a Myra in his life.

His Mexican madrinas.  

Why Do I Do This?

What is it that attracts me to this blogging thing?

When I moved to Mexico for the first time, I thought it would be great to write a letter home every week.  But how much cooler would it be for everyone I knew to be able to read that letter?  Because, let´s face it, when I wrote letters to friends and family, inspiration would seize me within one week.  So I´d wind up writing three or four copies of roughly the same letter to three or four different people.  Had I only know that, through the magic of the internet, is was possible to maximize my time and write one letter for all my loved ones to read!  However, this was back in 2003 and the blogosphere was in its infancy.  Not being tech-savvy, I was clueless this medium existed.  So, during my first two years in Mexico, I was mostly out-of-touch with people, except for the occasional email.

When we moved to Saltillo, I was seven months pregnant with my daughter.  I explored the town well for the first month or two, and then more or less hibernated for the next few months, being the on-demand milk machine and sleeping whenever possible.  "Sleep when the baby sleeps."  Right.  No one told my daughter that most babies take a nap or two every day.

On the very first day she finally took a nap (at the ripe old age of 4 1/2 months--Mother´s Day, no less), I started this blog.  At the time, my only plans for this blog were to keep my friends and family in touch with how my daughter was growing.  But then I started writing about Mexico.  Most of my friends won´t have the chance to visit me here.  They´re curious, and have their preconceived notions about what Mexico is like.  Much like my preconceived notions, some are true, some are false, and most are some nuanced version that´s neither true nor false.  This blog became my way to explain what I like about Mexico.

What I like about Mexico can´t be summed up in two sentences, those sound bites that we like to take away from stories of others´ travels.  What I like about Mexico is a conglomeration of lots of little things, most too subtle to even remember, unless I find myself sitting down in front of a computer screen, trying to explain what it is that draws me here.

It´s the uncovered bulb that lights every corner store at night, bravely pouring its light and warmth into the darkness.

It´s the native poinsettias, colorfully proclaiming a joyful holiday, instead of the cold, white snow that I grew up with.

It´s the pork meat, slowly rotating on a spit, exposed to the air and elements and fire, dripping with fat--delicious and decadent and dirty all at the same time.

It´s the exposed, aged, wooden beams in the ceiling, and the foot-thick stone window frames in colonial buildings, silently supporting and witnessing centuries of history.

It´s hanging my clothes to dry on a line in my patio, knowing that they´ll be dry in a half hour, with that clean-clothes-crunch, and smelling of the sun and fresh air.

After doing this for awhile, I realize that this blog is mainly just for me, to define my thoughts and experience and is a somewhat concrete way to make sense of life--a therapy of sorts, a practice of which could benefit anyone, wherever they live.

But like any therapy, a certain amount of sharing must take place.  And let me be honest, this sharing is what makes my husband a bit skittish about this whole blog business.  Growing up in a big city, Mr. Mexico City is well-versed in the dangers of letting strangers know your personal information.  And he´s spent enough time with Ms. Small Town me to realize that I can show some pretty amazing displays of midwestern American naivety in that regard.

But, at the same time, what´s the point of doing anything unless it´s personal?

This blog started off as a vent for my loneliness.  Then it became a means of meeting the first, real, human friend I had here in Saltillo.  Then I found a community of bloggers, and we all discovered that we´re not just a handful of nutters packing up and leaving the US for life in Mexico--there are LOTS of us!  Finally, this has provided me with a means of meeting people who are preparing to move to Saltillo, and reassure them that yes, you can do this, too.

It´s funny, the places where small decisions can take us.  I just thought blogging would be a good creative outlet for me.  I had no idea I´d get something nearly tangible--like real friendships--out of it.

This makes me pause when I make a small change in my life.  Will this change wind up taking on a life of its own?

But I guess that´s that´s the good thing about some changes.  I´ll try to embrace them more often.  

Name Yourself, Kid.

So, we´re letting the baby pick out his middle name.

How does he get to choose, you ask?  It´s fairly easy, thanks to the calendar of saints´ feast days.

Now, for those who aren´t Catholic, one might not be familiar with these beauties.  But every day of the year is commemorated to whichever officially cannonized saint died that day. So most days, there are a number of names to choose from.

This may sound kind of weird and off-the-deep-end, but it used to be a traditional way of naming children in Mexico, even as recently as the 1940s and ´50s.  I´m not making this up, as I have a number of friends and neighbors in their sixties and seventies and LOTS of these fine people have about 11 brothers and sisters.  Let´s face it, when you´re faced with naming more than five children, I´m willing to bet that it gets tricky to find (and agree) on decent names.

So let´s just rely on the Saints´ Day Calendar.

While completely unintentional, my other two children were born on their saints´ day, even though we picked out their names well in advance.  For instance, we picked out Joey´s name before we got married--five years before he was born.  And then he up and decided to be born on the day we chose for his middle name.

So now when he tells me he doesn´t like his middle name, I can retort back that he choose it, not me.
And that´s true.  Mostly.

Part of what convinced us to name Clara Clara was that our book of 10,000 baby names listed her due date (and birthday) as a Santa Clara Day.  However, now that I´ve been investigating on the internet, I can´t find a single Santa Clara for January 28th.  The closest I can find is an obscure St. Cannera--a hard-headed Irish broad whose story I think is a hoot (and reminds me of Clara, even though she´s not willing to admit it yet).

But a Santa Clara on January 28th?  If anyone knows anything about her, please let me know!

Since coincidence has worked so well for us in the past, and we can´t agree on a decent middle name for this guy, we´ll let
fate take over and Little Boy can pick his own name.  I was hoping he would have been born this past Saturday, so his middle name could be Antonio.

Apparently, he wasn´t so interested in that one.

My luck, he´ll decide that he´s comfortable until November 1st, and then decide to be born on All Saints´ Day.

Then we would be forced to be creative and make a decision.   Aargh.

What Have I Gotten Myself Into?

It all started with a guitar.

For quite some time, I had been wanting to play music again.  Or to sing.  Basically, I just missed music.  We still don´t have space for a piano (and I´m not sure it´s in the budget, either).  But I´d often fondly remember some of my favorite evenings when I worked at camp in the fall of 2006.  Often when the 5 of us on staff would finish the day, we´d gather in our living room, bust out the guitars, and sing.

So peaceful.

So simple.

And one of my favorite memories ever.

While I couldn´t completely recreate that, as I´m unlikely to be in the same room with those Fantastic Five again, I thought about it good and hard for a year and decided learning to play the guitar and to sing would bring me a bit of what I was looking for.

And it did.  While I still wouldn´t go so far as to call myself a "guitar player," I do enjoy playing what I can and singing along with myself.

But that little change started an avalanche of change within the last year.  A few months after getting the guitar, a puppy followed us home from school.  He still lives in our garage.  I knew when we took him in that dog-raising was a long-term project.  Sometimes I´m still floored by the responsibility I took on, thanks to a spur-of-the-moment weakness brought on by big, brown eyes.

Then a few months after taking on the dog, I decided to start another blog.  Because one isn´t enough, apparently.  While that´s been rewarding, and I believe is starting to accomplish some of the goals I had for it, it´s one more thing that I jumped into that is taking on a life of its own.

Then I got involved with the PTA at my kids´ school.  After serving lunch every day for two months, it turned out that I bit off more than I could chew with that one, and scaled back my involvement a bit.  We´ll see how carried away they try to get me to be this year.

Then I signed up the oldest child for her first after-school activity--ballet. With rehearsals three days a week, that one also became a bigger commitment than I had originally intended.  However, Clara still loves it, and from what I can tell they do in class, I know it´s good for her.  So we´ll sign up again this year.  But, let me tell you, I am dragging my feet a bit on that one.

Then in the spring, I found a facebook announcement for open auditions for a choir to accompany the Coahuila Symphony Orchestra.  The moment I saw that sign, I knew I wanted to do it.  I knew my chances were slim (while I sing OK, I haven´t had any vocal training, and I NEVER sing by myself in front of people).  But I really wanted to do it.

So I tried.  About 70 people showed up to the audition.  They said that they were only looking for about 30 people to be in the choir. Listening to the audition, I thought that there was no way I´d get in.  However, the audition was a great experience in itself, so I was happy to have tried.

Lo and behold, a few weeks later, I got an email that told me I actually DID make it.  Woah.  And they jumped right off the bat with plans for a zarzuela (a Spanish opera) and then a Queen tribute concert a month after the zarzuela.  Initially, the rehearsals were twice a week, but as the date got closer for both shows, they often turned into nightly rehearsals.  Yes, I once again chewed off more than I planned on, but I´m loving it so much (and my family is being fantastic about supporting me with this) that the choir and I will just keep slugging on together.

If that wasn´t enough, we walked in with open eyes to the biggest game-changer in this year of changes.  We decided to have a third child, who will be born in October.  Even though he was planned, and we had actually been waiting on him for awhile, I was still in a bit of denial throughout much of this pregnancy.  Throughout the spring and summer, I was making bigger and bigger plans.  Now that Little Guy is making is existence known pretty constantly (at least to myself), I´m finally making the changes that we need to get through this next season.  Or at least, mentally restructuring myself to get ready for this.

A lot of the changes we had this year, we will be sticking with.  Some will have to be scaled back (like 2 days of ballet a week, instead of 3 . . . and that´s after giving it up entirely during November and December).  The dog went from 3 walks a day to 2.  I´m hoping that the bulging belly will give me a polite means of declining the more arduous positions within the PTA.  And I´ll take a whole week or two off of choir after he´s born.

But he is the third kid, so I should be good to return after a week or two.  ;)

Oh, changes.  They make life more interesting.  And, even beyond New Little Buddy, I know there are more on the horizon!

Yikes.

This Year´s Reverse Culture Shockers

I spend about a month in the US every year.  Every year, I´m struck by something that makes me step back, reeling from reverse culture shock.  This year, I´ve got a bit of a list going, of things in the US that just strike me as odd.

Not necessarily bad or good, just odd.

Because these things just don´t happen in Mexico.

#1:  Freebies

The other day, I went to the grocery store.  After paying at the self-checkout (another oddity in itself), this cupon popped out with my receipt.

Really--the grocery store is just giving me $5 for shopping there?

I could get used to this.

Then a few days later, I bought a pair of jeans.  In the bag, the saleslady threw in a "gift bag".  After opening it up, I found over $100 of cupons, two diapers, and all kinds of other offers.  Sure, it is good advertising, but . . . really?

OK, I´ll take it!


#2  Obscene Amounts of Mail

Every day, piles and piles of mail arrive at my parents´ house.  Sometimes it´s useful information.  Sometimes they are legitimate bills.  Sometimes they are requested catalogues.  But often, they´re just ads addressed to "the resident".

In contrast, we get mail in Mexico maybe 8 times a year.  Literally half the time, it´s because my mom sent someone a birthday card.  


#3  Sour Candy

Growing up in Mexico, my kids know they need to approach candy carefully, in case they´ve stumbled upon a piece of candy covered in chile powder.  In fact, they´re starting to acquire a taste for spicy candy.

While we don´t have to worry about spicy candy when wandering candy aisles in the US, we´ve discovered a new flavor to watch out for--SOUR!

It´s everywhere!  And a certain kid I know really, really doesn´t like it.


#4  Restaurant Bills

OK, I have seen this one on a number of cultural comparison lists.  But it´s so unsettling that it deserves these multiple mentiones.

The majority of the time, when I go to a restaurant in the US, the waitress brings our food, and then plops the bill down right on the table with it--as if the bill is a side dish.

Wait--did I want dessert?

Apparently not, as they just want me to eat and get out.

As frustrating as it can be to flag down waiters when asking for the bill in Mexico, I do like the feeling that I am welcome to stay for as long as I please.

And not rushing us through to get the next family to line up at the hog trough.


#5  Talking to Strangers

This isn´t such a comparion with Mexico (because in this respect, Mexico is somewhat similar to the US).   However, my husband and I spent two weeks in Sweden this spring.  It was beautiful, and I loved noting Swedish innovations that would be really useful on this side of the world.  (Biogas, recycling, seperate bike/walking paths, etc.)

But, upon our arrival at the airport in Houston, I stood in line in the bathroom.  Three different people talked to me.  I came out of that bathroom and told Mario, "I´ve talked to more people in that bathroom in the last 10 minutes than I did in two weeks in Sweden!"

So, stay friendly, America!  (Or, Texas, as it may be more pronounced there.)  ;)