Nightstand (July 2014)

So there’s been all this reading I’d been doing the past couple of months that I couldn’t include on my Nightstand because I was trying to keep mum about becoming a Mom – but now that we’ve announced Baby Garcia’s expected arrival, I can deluge you with the last several months of reading.

Back in May and June, I read:

• Best Baby Gear by Sandy Jones and Marcie Jones
  Parents: Baby Gear from Birth to Age 3 by Parent’s Magazine with Debra Wise
  Consumer Reports Best Baby Products by Sandra Gordon
  Interesting. Terrifying. I’m a minimalist when it comes to baby stuff and feel like some of the safety stuff is going too far (with some definite exceptions.) Basically, I spent my way groaning through these supposed essentials – and suddenly getting why so many people think they can’t afford to have children.
• The Smart Mother’s Guide to a Better Pregnancy by Linda Burke-Galloway
  Basically, a guide to second-guessing your doctor. I struggle to come up with what I think about this. I want women to be educated regarding their own care. I want them to know when to ask their doctors to look deeper. There’s nothing wrong (in my mind) with women having a basic understanding of what could go wrong during pregnancy and what to do about it – but Burke-Galloway’s advice almost always leans on the side of more intervention rather than less – which is the exact opposite of my personal stance on childbirth management. I can easily see a woman reading this book and then going out and insisting that her doctor give her every test in the book and every intervention available, never mind the risks of intervening unnecessarily.
• Homebirth by Shiela Kitzinger
  I can’t help but love Kitzinger, with her strong pro-home-birth stance and her straightforward descriptions of how to set up for a homebirth. Kitzinger is decidedly pro-home-birth, with a similarly decisive dislike of overmedicalized hospital birth. If you’re thinking of a homebirth or a birthing center birth, this is a great resource to help you interview a midwife and set up a strong plan. If you’re pretty sure you’re not interested in a homebirth, you’re likely to get frustrated with the author’s clear bias.
• Choosing a Nurse-Midwife by Katherine M. Poole and Elizabeth A Parr
  A nice overview of midwifery in America and things to take into consideration when choosing a midwife. While this is definitely written about choosing a nurse-midwife, the many questions included within are worth asking your certified professional midwife if you’re choosing one of those instead (Wichita’s hospitals are very anti-midwife and there is only one practicing nurse-midwife in town. She, unfortunately, only delivers in the hospital – leaving me with CPMs as my only option for a home birth.) I appreciated reading through this book prior to interviewing my midwife.
• The Essential Homebirth Guide by Jane E. Drichta and Jodilyn Owen
  A very nice guide for women who want to give birth at home. This covers choosing a provider, the distinctives of the midwives model of care, other people you might want to have involved on your home-birth support team, how certain circumstances would be dealt with by homebirth providers, and so on. In general, I think this is a very good book. I do have some quibbles with the authors’ tendencies to represent herbal, nutritional, and other “nontraditional” (in a medical sense, although generally “traditional” in the midwifery world) treatments as truth without showing any substantial evidence to support these (one particular bit about eating a raw cucumber a day to keep preeclampsia away struck me as laughable.)
• The Doula Advantage by Rachel Gurevich
  A description of the roles of a doula, how to hire a doula, and lots of stories about doula care. It sounds like doula care is a very good thing for a lot of women – but reading this book only cemented my opinion that doula care is not for me.
• Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta by Ina May Gaskin
  You can’t talk about midwifery in America without talking about Ina May Gaskin. In general, I found myself nodding and mm-hmming through much of this book as Gaskin complains about the high intervention rate and lack of accountability in modern obstetrics and calls for a better model of care (midwife-based care with obstetricians who are committed to doing what’s best for mom and baby) that protects women and babies. That said, some things about this book really creeped me out – specifically, the birth stories of women who delivered at “The Farm”. While these women raved about the care they received and the community they had, the fact that almost every story included some midwife or other women just showing up during labor uninvited did not sit well with me. While these women were able to labor without unnecessary interventions, they weren’t laboring on their own terms. In fact, one woman talked of laboring in the bathroom with the door closed because she really didn’t like having other people around – why didn’t her midwife kick everyone else out so the woman could labor however she wanted without being confined to the bathroom?
• Liz Lange’s Maternity Style by Liz Lange
  A standard fashion sort of book, complete with photos of disembodied clothes “mixed and matched” for every event, quotes from style celebrities, and tips that make you wonder what sort of world the author thinks you live in. I enjoy this sort of thing and liked browsing through it, but gained next to nothing in practical advice.

This month, I read:

• Beginning Life by Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald
  I mentioned last month that this was an “opposing viewpoints” sort of book – but found that wasn’t the case. Instead, this is an attempt by a single author to fair-mindedly address the various ethical issues surrounding conception. In general, Boleyn-Fitzgerald does a good job at being fair – but she definitely seems to lean towards the interventionist side on stem cells, abortion, etc. – and underrepresents the non-medical arguments against those practices.
• Husband Coached Childbirth by Robert A Bradley
  Daniel and I are attending a Bradley childbirth class (our first meeting was last night), but that doesn’t mean that I really know that much about the method. In fact, my only familiarity with the method is that it’s husband coached, that it has a good success rate for unmedicated births, and that a family friend told my mom that she and my dad “basically did Bradley” even though they never did it officially. Since my mom is pretty much my childbirth hero (7 natural births, 5 of them at home, 3 of which were unassisted by a midwife), I figured it must be a decent method. But I might as well read up on it before our first class. Thus, reading this book. We’ll see how things go – on first reading, I feel a little rebellious against the “one right way” to do things :-)
• Buff Moms-to-Be by Sue Fleming
  A good basic guide to fitness during pregnancy. As far as I am familiar with current exercise guidelines during pregnancy (and I have done a fair bit of looking in both the medical literature and in the recommendations of various professional organizations), this book gives tips in line with the latest research and recommendations for exercise in pregnancy.
• Bumpology: the myth-busting pregnancy book for curious parents by Linda Geddes
  An amusing and informative book set up in Q&A style. I was pleased with the rigorous way in which Geddes looked at the evidence and evaluated it objectively – being careful to describe how the strengths and weaknesses of a study should inform the conclusions we draw based upon that study.
• Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
  Read for the Chronicles of Narnia Reading challenge because I thought I hadn’t yet covered it – but then I realized I had, so I moved on to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (which I have not yet completed.)
• The Stone Age by Patricia D. Nerzley
  A children’s guide to the various Stone Age hominids. The aspect I found most interesting about this book was how the author took great pains to discuss how difficult it is to interpret artifacts from early hominids – before making bold statements about what these hominids looked like and how they lived. As could be expected, this book has a decidedly evolutionary slant and often confuses hominids with humans (something I have a quibble with – while all humans are hominids, I do not believe that all hominids are humans or “precursors” to humans.)
• Pregnancy Chic by Cherie Serota and Jody Kozlow Gardner
  This is a book of the nineties, when pregnancy fashion was just emerging (that is, pregnancy fashion that looked like normal people clothes). The authors sold/sell? a “pregnancy survival kit” which contains four fashion essentials – and this book is basically an extended advertisement for their kit (and your husband’s closet.) It had a few tips that I found interesting, but most of it was terribly dated – leggings are considered an essential, your husband’s denim shirt a must, and a sweater tied around the waist always in fashion. Not so much a decade into the new millenium.
• The Maidenstone Lighthouse by Sally Smith O’Rourke
  Ended up being much to raunchy to recommend – and nowhere near as compelling a story as The Man Who Loved Jane Austen. However, this marks me done with this author.
• Christmas in Denmark and Christmas in Spain by World Book
  More “research” into Christmas around the world.
• When We Were on Fire by Addie Zierman
  A memoir of belonging to the 90s Christian subculture, of losing faith, and of finding it again. Very difficult to process the thoughts that went through my mind while reading this. Read my jumbled thoughts here.

Books in Progress:

• Grace-Based Parenting by Dr. Tim Kimmel
  I suspect that this book was written in response to popular authoritarian parenting manuals marketed to Christians (the Ezzos’ Growing Kids God’s Way and the Pearls’ To Train up a Child) – and I definitely tend to agree more with its grace-filled approach than with either of those rigid parenting techniques. A lot of the topics addressed in this book are very future-tense for me (since our baby is yet unborn, and this book is more geared toward parents of preschoolers and up), but I have found it to be enjoyable and thought provoking. I do have one beef with this book – and that is that the author doesn’t always extend the same grace to parents that he asks them to extend to their kids. A parent could finish this book and feel even more pressure to perform, not receiving the grace that God gives to imperfect and fallible human parents.
• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis
  Reading along with the Chronicles of Narnia Reading challenge, also at Reading to Know. So far, I’ve written one post of reflections on how this title is different from the other Narnia tales.
• What to Expect When You’re Expecting by Heidi Murkoff
  Because every pregnant woman pretty much has to read this one, right? Kinda blah, in my opinion (but maybe that’s because I already have a lot of knowledge when it comes to pregnancy – it’s kinda my job). The author is not an advocate for natural childbirth and kinda reminds me of the hand-out-condoms-in-school crowd – “Yeah, you could be have a natural childbirth (be abstinent), but really, you might as well just get an epidural (use a condom).”
• Origins by Annie Murphy Paul
  A layman’s look (and NOT a prescriptive formula) at the science of fetal origins.
• The 101 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith
  Reading with the Reading to Know Classics bookclub and enjoying it greatly so far.
• The Babycenter Essential Guide to Your Baby’s First Year

Don’t forget to drop by 5 Minutes 4 Books to see what others are reading this month!