Day: December 10, 2004

power purging

today i did something i find myself doing quite often these days; i sorted through the babies clothes.

i have been quite ruthless in this task to date. i keep very little for the babies keepsake anne geddes boxes. cardigans trinie knitted for them, cards of prayer and encouragement, hospital tags, their first outfits,the birth announcement my parents had published, that sort of thing only. clothes are quickly given away with the instructions i don’t want to see them again, not even if they have sentimental value.

aww, this was the outfit carys wore the first time we went to church. remember how sweet she looked as she vomitted all over sela, the carpet and the hymnals? look, you can still see a little stain. i bet that was from the second really exorcist-inspired spew.

i can be the ruthless throwing away machine (just ask magnificent charles, who is, despite of his magnificence, a bit of a packrat) but in order for me to be at my optimum, here are a few rooting through children’s wardrobes guidelines:

have music playing. NOTHING sentimental. some endorphin pumping gym music is best. nothing that will make you look tenderly at the tyke sized clothes. music that will make you feel empowered and strong for making more room in the closets. for moving on with your life, if you will.

don’t hold clothes up to your child to see if they will fit. this will just make you sit down, cuddle child and lament at how they are growing. and suddenly as you realise how child has outgrown said outfit, you will see the outfit as precious and a tangible reminder that your babe was once that small. BE VERY CAREFUL.

discard when child is in another room, at school, asleep. if they are crawling in and out of the place, again you are going to get swept away by sentimental memories. RID YOURSELF OF CHILDREN TO ACHIEVE FULL RIDDING OF CLOTHES.

if you do get feelings of sentiment washing over you, then call someone and dwell in it for a few minutes. ideally, the person should be more sympathetic than you are, and have a child of their own older than yours. call them, explain what you are doing and how you cant believe they ever wore clothes this small, how big they are getting, you will never have your baby again…get it out of your system. and then they will gushingly respond, and you will have to listen about when they had to rid their own closets…and she will go on and on and on and on and soon you will be holding the phone away from your ear and be thinking, "get a life! they’re only clothes with carrot stains on them!" then you will take a deep breath, and say

"i knew you would understand, thank you so much! listen i better get back or i will never finish this."

hang up, and your purging will be more vehement than ever.

when the discarding is completed, tie the bag firmly, and put it somewhere where you cannot see it. preferably, have someone pick it up THAT AFTERNOON. if that can’t happen, a closet is where the clothes need to be.

for the remainder of martha stewart’s time in the clink, feel free to contact me with other household diva queries.

what you can do

when our babies were in the NICU, family, friends and strangers from all over the world were incredibly supportive. time and again we got emails, calls and visits with the recurring theme, "we wish there was more we could do than just pray for you". although praying was actually the BEST thing they could do for us, i know what they mean. when friends are spending large amounts of time watching parents, siblings, or children fight for their lives, you wish there was a casserole you could bake, babies you could sit, laundry you could do.

there is something you can do. but first here is a wee anecdote, a teaser for the full story which i will post in a few months as soon as i finish it.

before i knew i was having triplets and right after my blood tests proved i was indeed pregnant, i was hospitalised. in five weeks, i had gained 80 pounds. i was suffering from something called ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS). women like me, who are polycystic, are especially prone to OHSS. what happens is, during an IVF cycle, you are taking a gonadtrophin that promote your egg production. your ovaries get larger and larger, housing these follicles. they dragged 37 follicles from me. and instead of my now empty ovaries shrinking, they continued to grow, and fluid from the bloodstream leaked into the abdominal cavity. causing it to swell, put me in extreme pain. the day i was admitted to hospital, my lungs were beginning to fill as well.

my stomach had to be drained multiple times. and my albumin, a protein produced by the liver, was dangerously low. albumin performs many functions including maintaining the "osmotic pressure" that causes fluid to remain within the blood stream instead of leaking out into the tissues.

my body was too ill to make more albumin, i needed transfusions of human albumin, which is derived from blood transfusions, twice a day for ten days. those transfusions saved my life, and the babies’ lives as well.

months (not nearly enough months) later, the wee three were born. and i remember walking into the NICU one day and seeing a big red hot water bottle on top of sela’s incubator.

oh how sweet, it is chilly today and they are making sela cosy by giving her a hot water bottle.

i smiled to myself thinking how caring the staff were, until upon closer inspection, i realised the hot water bottle was really a bag of blood. sela was getting a tranfusion. to help raise her white platelet count. to "perk her up". over the next weeks, all our babies had complete and partial blood transfusions. without a doubt, their lives were saved by the strangers who gave blood.

if you want to do something tangible to show your support for a preemie baby, a wonderful way is to give blood. jasper, sela and carys had complete transfusions, where the blood in their system was removed and the blood of strangers soon coursed through my children’s bodies. their blood became part of my children, strengthened them and saved their delicate lives. a stranger saved my child.

if you can, please give blood. you could be that stranger.