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| | We'd Like to Thank Our SponsorsI have a "Bradley Method of Natural Childbirth" water bottle that I received at the end of our class. When visitors came during the first couple weeks after Katherine was born, I was usually drinking from my bottle, and Matthew took to arranging it strategically on the coffee table and saying, as we talked about the birth experience, "We'd like to thank our sponsors, the Bradley Method..." It's so true. Without the preparation, exercises, information, facts, ideas, positions, practice, etc. we gained from our childbirth classes, I don't know how we would have made it through labor. And without the help of friends and family, I don't know how I would have made it successfully through the end of pregnancy and the first month with a baby.
I have long been an "I can make it on my own" kinda person. I like being on top of things, I like being known as a person who can take care of stuff, I like being independent. Anecdote 1: I always hated team sports like softball and preferred independent sports like gymnastics and martial arts, where you stand or fall on your own merit. Anecdote 2: I remember one time when I was about 15, I was working on a poem and having trouble with a line. Zach (who has more "poet" in his little finger...) took one glance at it and suggested a MUCH better line. It was perfect for the poem. I am such a stickler for giving credit where credit is due that I abandoned the poem because I thought it would sound so awkward to constantly introduce it as "This is a poem I wrote that my brother helped with."
Marriage has helped break me out of that mindset to a certain extent as I've learned to function on a team. Having a baby, however, delivered the death-blow to my prideful self-reliance. I was exhausted, overwhelmed, and totally new to the whole experience, and I simply had to accept help.
A few weeks before my due date, our house was full of mini-mountains of baby stuff. People in our church had given us car loads full of used baby things, and we had received many gifts and packages as well. I was so tired in my last trimester that I barely had the energy to shuffle things from one room to the other to make room for living, much less organize it all. My friend and "mentee," Mandie, offered to come over a few days after my baby shower to help me get things set up. In spite of her allergies, she worked hard in a dust- and cat-fur-filled room for hours to begin transforming Matthew's office/the library/the storage-place-for-all-junk-without-homes into a space for Katherine's things.
Then, scant days before Katherine arrived (though I didn't know HOW scant at the time), Nichole came and helped me and my mom transform the living room and organize more baby stuff. The truly amazing thing about this is that I know Nikki through Xanga and had only met her in person once before. Due to a difficult ministry situation Matthew and I were going through, I had been realizing how few friends I had in Rhode Island and bemoaning that fact. When this nice person I barely knew offered to drive an hour from Newport to help me, it meant so much. She helped us clean and rearrange the living room, put the futon together (NOT as easy as it may sound...it too, set up the co-sleeper, and run errands. Then she came back the NEXT day too, bringing lunch and stopping at the hardware store for me, to finish up (and even organized our bookshelves!).
 
About a week after we brought Katherine home, there was still a lot of work to do setting up and decorating the baby area. Karin, a young lady at our church who is new to the area and whom I am just getting to know, came over and helped hang curtains and arrange the whole changing table area. It looks lovely with a pink canopy and pink decorations and pink...you get the idea. She was so sweet to help!
Many other people have been great - bringing us meals, sending all kinds of presents. Hannah even helped sew curtains while she was here. My sister-in-law Amy has been coming over a couple times a week after a class in Providence to hang out with the baby, and it's been really nice to have her hold Katherine while I take a shower, sweep the floor, etc.
And of course there's the patron saint of Helping Becky...my mom, Donna. If you combined the fairy godmother with Cinderella, you'd have my mom. One of the first days she was here, she told me to take a nap, and then I heard her scrubbing the tub! She took over the daily household management the whole month she was here so that I could focus on Katherine. She taught me how to take care of an infant - how to bathe her, feed her, dress her, comfort her. She took long shifts of caring for Katherine so that I could rest and recuperate. She took care of me, making sure I ate and stayed hydrated and had all the supplies I needed. She bought us all sorts of necessary things like nursing bras and newborn sized clothes. She cooked, cleaned, went grocery shopping, organized closets and pantries, hung pictures, sewed curtains and throw pillows...time will fail me if I tell all the other five million things she did. Two weeks after she left, I'm still discovering little things, like that she screwed the towel storage rack into the plaster wall so it would stop falling off the flimsy nails. In short, I shudder to think about what the first weeks with the baby would have been like without all her help.
THANK YOU all for your help, and thanks for teaching me that I can't do it all on my own. | | | Posted 11/21/2006 8:54 PM - 14 comments
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i learn new things every day, being a mommy.
I appreciate that you took the time to thank everyone who helped you. What a lesson in accepting help, and on giving thanks. Appropriate timing! (Oh and I echo Nikki, I like your mom! 
