How To Bourne

This blog is for my best friend, my sister, my daughter, myself, my colleague.  I spend at least a few minutes a day texting out advice for a friend or re-researching something for myself.  This was made to put it all in one place.  If you don't know me or my blog, welcome and thank you for reading! About me. I am science-based . I am a Nurse Anesthesiologist .  I am an independent anesthesia provider in a hospital where I place epidurals for laboring moms and attend to cesarean sections. I also do anesthesia for a few plastic surgery centers in my area. I love labor and delivery.  I love my job. I have a bachelor's degree in English, two Master's degrees in Science, and a Doctorate in Nurse Anesthesiology. I can read a research study.  I have common sense .  When you google anything related to being pregnant or having a baby, the answers are very cautious. Never get in a hot tub, never sleep with your baby, never have a home birth.  Everyone is afraid of getting sued or be

Going back to work after having a baby can be so stressful.  My first day back to the hospital after four months out, I got a call from our nanny that baby was refusing bottles and hadn't had any milk since I left.  Six hours ago.  I agonized about what to do with this stubborn baby.  One of my colleagues heard me complaining and told me to just go home and nurse him.  They would cover for me for thirty minutes.   He tried to do the same thing the next day.  We just waited him out.  Finally, he got thirsty enough to take the bottle.  I learned a couple of lessons from this.  The first, that a baby will eat if they are hungry.  They won't starve before they will drink from a bottle. The second, that I need to introduce the bottle earlier than the day I go back to work.  If you are choosing to breastfeed, there are a few things you can do to make this transition back to work much easier.  1.) Establish a milk stash.  See my post on establishing a milk stash.  You want to have a

It is ironic that a woman with four sons and only one daughter would write a post about how to have a girl baby.  This post could also be titled "How to Have a Baby Boy".  I learned everything possible on the topic of gender fixing/gender swaying when I was preparing to get pregnant with baby number three.  I had two sons born by cesarean and I thought this might by my last baby.  I really wanted a girl.  I read lots of wives tales about how to prepare your body to gave a baby girl: eat lots of sweets (if I must...) have sex on a full moon, outside is best (like normal people) be relaxed (I'm historically so good at that) As awesome as these tips were, I wanted to see if there was anything scientific to swaying the sex of the baby.  That was how I found the Shettles Method. You can read the whole book here .  Quick recap on how a baby's sex is determined:  we each carry two sex chromosomes we get one from each parent we automatically get an X from our mother our fathe

 When I was in graduate school, I kept getting tight pains in my chest.  I couldn't take a deep breath, I felt like there was a band around my lungs.  One day, my heart was racing and I was having the chest tightness.  I had convinced myself I was having a pulmonary embolism. I went to my professor and told her what was going on.  She very calmly and sweetly told me that the chest tightness was probably anxiety and this new feeling was most likely a panic attack. Great. Shortly after that, I read this article in Oprah magazine about a woman's experience with Bikram yoga. Bikram= Stay in a 105 degree room for 90 minutes doing 26 yoga postures with no music. She was totally transformed by this grueling practice.  She was able to stop taking her high doses of depression medication. I wanted to be transformed.  I had two babies, newly diagnosed postpartum anxiety, an intense graduate program, and countless unresolved childhood problems. I wanted to feel new and calm.  This is how

I was active on a mommy message board for about five minutes in 2016.  I was blacklisted.  There are rules for mommy message boards. Everyone is mean to everyone all of the time.  This is always framed as concern, knowledge spreading, or advice from someone who knows way more than you will ever know. There is usually a group of OG moms who know one another (online) from the TTC (trying to conceive) message boards. They run that place.  They are allowed to talk to anyone in any fashion, they DO NOT want to see any pregnancy tests, and the birth month message board is really for them only.  They tolerate the presence of others who happen to have a baby due in their baby's month but advice from the newcomer mothers is inevitably wrong.   I lurked on these boards for all of my pregnancies and decided that by my fourth baby, I had enough experience under my belt to comment here and there. I was completely wrong. A first time mom posted saying she felt like she could tell the moment she

 I google everything.  I want to know everyone's advice before making a decision.  When I plan vacations, I spend months making sure we aren't wasting time on tourist traps or food that we could just get at home.  The biggest thing I think I am trying to avoid is regret.  I don't want to make a choice that is going to cause me to regret it one day.  The most stress-causing decisions of my life have always involved the question of having more children.  My first baby was a happy surprise.  Our second was an easy decision since his brother was so easy.  We hit a rough patch in our marriage and in our lives in general after that.  I was in graduate school and working nights in the ICU as a new nurse.  Adam was working a full time job as well and trying to keep our kids quiet on weekends when I needed to sleep during the day to work at night.  It was very tough.  On top of that, my mother moved in with us and we were raising my brother and sister.  I had been drinking too much

 I went to the Korean Spa with my daughter yesterday.  If you haven't experienced a Korean Spa- find one near you! It is a series of pools of different temperatures with jets that massage different parts of your body. There is usually a set of co-ed pools in one area and a set of gender separated pools in the locker room that is mandatory nudity because they don't want bathing suits messing up their pool systems.  They also have a huge co-ed room with lots of saunas and sweat lounges to just relax.  It can be very awkward your first time getting in a pool with a bunch of naked ladies and then you develop a sense of empowerment and freedom.  I like taking my daughter every few years to help her understand that we are all unique in our bodies and they aren't something we should be ashamed of.  It isn't everyone's cup of tea but I love it.  Anyway, in all of the five hours I was away from my baby, I developed a painful lump in my breast. I immediately knew what was hap

 I took my first pregnancy as an excuse to eat whatever I wanted.  I gained 60 pounds.  With my following three pregnancies, I tried to eat healthy and that included eating as much fresh fruit as I could.  All of those babies were nine to ten pounds. My fourth delivery was extremely difficult. He was huge and I really had to work to get him out.  I was in fantastic shape, I did yoga every day and I could bend myself into whatever position the midwife requested to help ease the baby out. It is helpful to be limber and strong when going into your labor (more on this in another post) but it is equally important that your baby is a healthy size as well.  While I was in the "agonizing about whether or not to have another baby" stage of my fifth child, I called my midwife to see if it was safe for me to have one more. I remembered my labor to be quite difficult and I was worried about future shoulder dystocia, potential cesarean sections, gestational diabetes, etc.  She said my lab

When we decided to move to Texas I had negotiated with my husband to let me have two more kids.  Its not that he didn’t want more children, our lives were just very busy in Virginia since I was working 60+ hours a week as chief of an anesthesia department that was almost an hour from our house.  We moved to Texas for Adam’s job that would give us more financial freedom and allow me to work part time. He was totally fine with having more kids if we had the emotional room for them to feel as loved as they would be.  We spent a few weeks in Florida on our way down from Virginia to Texas.  I called my midwife from Judah’s birth and went over a few fears I had.  Mainly, how long and difficult Judah’s birth was and how terrified I was of having an even larger baby with shoulder dystocia. She told me to act like I had gestational diabetes, educate myself about it and eat to build a healthier sized baby.  She also said my birth was uneventful to her and that I proved I could birth a ten pound

I had my first two sons via cesarean. My recovery from both of the cesareans was physically easy.   I did have adhesions that I felt over the next few years.   It was emotionally rough to hear about perfect vaginal births that other women experienced but I just said to myself and others “My body needs to have babies cut out and it is so much easier anyway.”   I became a nurse after I had my second son.   I worked on many c-sections and vaginal deliveries.   I always cried with the c-sections.   I thought it was the “miracle of life” affecting me until one day I realized I never cried during the vaginal births- I think it was hitting a chord that I still wasn’t fully aware of.   I ended up being an ICU nurse and leaving the labor and delivery realm.   In the ICU, we see the worst case scenario quite a bit and my perception of reality became somewhat skewed.   During a lecture in nursing school, we had a lactation consultant come and talk to us about random birth topics.   Somehow, I end