A Day at the Farm

A Day at the Farm . . . Followed by a Day in Bed

I've been feeling so much better postpartum than the sick-all-the-time feeling of pregnancy that I had a hankering to go visit our friends on their farm about two hours outside of Charlotte.  We love our friends, the C----s, and we always laugh that their five and our six children so far amongst them share four of the same names!

Chris was able to join us for the day too, which made the day more enjoyable and much easier. I had been planning to take the children by myself, which, in retrospect, would have been a disaster.

Just sitting on an ATV, not really riding it

This is a working, small farm on 19 acres with a pig for slaughter, chickens, and a certified micro-dairy. The children had a grand old time riding the ATV, climbing things, playing football and soccer, feeding the big its slop, digging a pit, and shooting a cross-bow and bow-and-arrow.

Boys climbing everything in sight

The mama cow looking at her two-day-old calf

Super friendly, calm farm cat "Annie Jane"

I was humbled by our outing that was seemingly so simple--drive two hours, sit inside the house most of the day chatting with my friend and her baby (while the dads chased kids outside), drive home--because I developed mastitis again (twice in a month). How many times as a La Leche League counselor have I advised women with mastitis that this is a sign of Doing Too Much, and that the cure in almost all cases (antibiotics are so rarely needed) is to go to bed with the baby for a whole day and night?

Even being in the car for two hours (which itself does represent being "separated from the baby") and being in a foreign environment where I thought I was nursing the baby often enough, but apparently was not, was too much for this smaller-than-I-thought mama. By the time we departed for home at 4:30, I was starting to feel bad and had my suspicions; by the time we arrived home, I knew I was done for and I crawled into bed at 8:00 with a fever that burned all night. Then I was out of commission all of Monday recovering.

So, the latest gives this mama of a larger-than-average brood much meditation about what is normal activity in our culture, why not to compare to what other families might be doing, that God writes natural law into our very bodies sometimes, and about how what my body, my baby, and my family need is different after each delivery, so I need to discern anew with every baby what I can and should be doing. That's a lot of words to say, "I need to be doing even less than I thought."