A child is born

I miss blogging. I miss it as a creative outlet. I miss it as a historical record.

Mostly, I miss all the attention.

A lot has happened since my last post. A reality show host became president. Katy Perry got a pixie cut. I GAVE BIRTH to the delightful Martha Williamson. Anna got rhabdo from CrossFit. They called off the search for MH370. Max and Natalie had a baby! I gasped as a Nordstrom sales associate announced that my bra size is now a 34E.

So much to unpack. Let's start with the birth.

It sounds like I'm kidding when I say that I had no idea it would hurt so bad, but I genuinely had no idea it would hurt so bad. Somewhere in the back of my mind I faintly remembered hearing that labor was painful, but that didn't apply to me! I was going to get an epidural at the first whiff of a contraction. I would feel a bit crampy, b-line it for the hospital and order a milkshake as they stuck a giant, drug-filled needle into my back.

Lamaze classes? More like scaremongering propaganda sessions backed by Big Aromatherapy and their cronies in the natural childbirth lobby. No thanks! I didn't need to sit in a room with a bunch of other couples, fresh faced from their pregnancy photoshoots, and subject myself to their absurd anxieties.

Well. I get it now.

Sometimes, even if you meet the "criteria" (1-minute contractions, 5 minutes apart for more than an hour), you still can't get the epidural. Why? Your cervix is the size of a pea and won't budge. The hospital is full of other human mammals pushing out offspring. The hospital staff are assholes. Who knows? All I know is that I was turned away twice and in labor for two days. At one point I was splashing around in the bathtub like a wounded manatee, wailing like a banshee while Andy placed a slice of Freschetta atop my throbbing abdomen. But for the first time in my life, even pizza didn't help.

EXPECTATIONS

REALITY

Hollywood made me assume that pushing was the painful part of labor. It's not. At least not for me. The painful part is the CONTRACTIONS. "What do contractions feel like?" I've since Googled that on a few occasions and never found a satisfactory answer. The closest description I read was that it feels like bad cramps...except also with someone stabbing you repeatedly in the stomach.

Now too much time has passed to describe it accurately. I can't find the words. I can't access the memories. What everyone says is true: your body forces you to forget. It's a survival mechanism.

OK, that's probably good enough for now. I don't want to use up all my good material in the first blog post back.

Cheers,
Margaret


P.S. For the record, I stand by my decision to skip the childbirth classes. Nothing could have prepared me for the pain. And the other couples would have annoyed me. And the classes are long and would have cut into my last remaining childless weekends.

P.P.S. I did eventually get the epidural!

P.P.P.S. My reward for the pains of childbirth, your reward for having to look at the photo above of me in the bath:

A visit to the Amazon

This is exciting. Natalie Orenstein, sister-in-law to the stars, is peeling back the curtain on what really goes on in those giant Amazon warehouses. Turns out, DVDs are still a thing! ESCANDALO!!!

---

Two weeks ago I spent three days working in one of Amazon’s largest warehouses, or as we call them—fulfillment centers. I learned how to do all steps of the fulfillment process—from receiving products from vendors to packing orders onto the outbound trucks. See photographic evidence below.

The overall experience was amazing—they do public tours there, so this writer from Wired magazine was able to capture the experience in detail. Here are a few of the trip highlights from my perspective:

1) A lot of people still buy DVDs. And I mean a lot. I couldn’t believe how many copies of Friends Season 5 I came across. All you have to do is turn on TBS and you can find it. Throw Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Instant Video in the mix and you have all of that on demand as well. But I guess there is something to actually owning the DVD that has still not lost its edge…

2) A desk job it is not. By 10:30 in the morning on my first day, I had already clocked over 13,000 steps on my Fitbit. For comparison, it is now 1:00 in the afternoon, and after rushing from meeting to meeting to picking up my Jimmy Johns from delivery downstairs, I have clocked in a whopping 2,500 steps. Given the start time in the fulfillment center was 7am and I didn’t get going until 9 today—but still. It is a workout. I spoke to someone who lost 70 pounds in his first three months on the job there.

3) Phoenix is flat. That’s where the fulfillment center is. Even with the pretty desert nighttime sky and warm temperature, I prefer Seattle. Give me rain and mountains any day.