So thrilled for Andi and her little family of 4!
A second baby boy to join the bunch and I cannot wait to hear all about every single step of having two kiddos! I know you'll do it all with grace.
Congratulations, you are an amazing mama!
So thrilled for Andi and her little family of 4! A second baby boy to join the bunch and I cannot wait to hear all about every single step of having two kiddos! I know you'll do it all with grace. Congratulations, you are an amazing mama!
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5 reasons why #NIPLBC is important to me.1. Every time I nurse, she nurses, you nurse in public it makes it easier for the next mama to do the same. I know, that sounds like a cutesy little saying that we use to get mamas to keep at it. But it is so so true. Before I had Claire I had let a few people know that I was planning on breastfeeding and not using a cover, I just did not want to and felt like it would be one less thing to purchase. I had no idea what a personal issue it would eventually become. It was a little bit of a tough sell, my husband wasn't so sure he would feel comfortable with it, my mom said that she wasn't sure how appropriate it would be and some friends have and still say that they think its weird. I even wavered in the beginning and ended up with my very own cover [that I always forgot to pack]. I remember being at a wedding when Claire was about 3 weeks old, it was time to nurse so we headed off as far away as we could from the party and I placed a napkin over her head and my breast while Ryan stood next to me so I wouldn't be lonely. After struggling with the latch, being sad I couldn't eat my buttered roll and having to adjust the napkin again, I said, "fuck this" and threw it on the ground. I finished our nursing session and since then I have never allowed myself to be invisible while nursing again. {now if you use a cover I say HELL YES! You should nurse any way that works for you, if that is what is best for you and your nursling I give you a cyber high five! If you do it because you feel like you SHOULD or that you HAVE to then please call me and I will come nurse right along side of you until you feel more comfy}. Instead of hiding while I nurse I chat with my friends, explain to kids if they ask what I am doing, look people in the eye if they stare a little too long and I mostly just enjoy my child because that is what its all about. 2. The community. We have 1130 women in our Long Beach Breastfeeds, Online Support group and I have to say that I have met many of them in person and they are an amazing tribe of women to have in your corner. In the private support group women are able to be open about any issues they might be having, the group of admins try to keep everything positive and helpful and there is even milk sharing going on when a mother is in a bind. Without this group I don't know if the friendly breastfeeding initiative would have passed but I know for damn sure that without Celine Malanum & Maricela Renteria de Rivera there would have been no way. These two GIVE ALL OF THEMSELVES to this group, Long Beach Breastfeeds is run by two mamas and some volunteers who are just making it happen. They want to unify & progress our diverse local breastfeeding community by bringing equitable, accessible, quality support to every family & every neighborhood. To say thank you to them and to our city please join us tonight [plus its Maricela's birthday] at Long Beach City Hall for the council meeting. Long Beach Breastfeeds will be receiving a resolution formally recognizing our work and August as National Breastfeeding Awareness Month. It's huge. It's important. And I'm incredibly proud of our breastfeeding community. 3. It is your right. - A mother may breastfeed her child in any location, public or private, except the private home or residence of another, where the mother and the child are otherwise authorized to be present. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise, do not let someones eyes make you feel shamed and if they have the nerve to say anything other than, "oh what a sweet baby you have there" feel confident in knowing your rights and nurse on. Here is a list of the state laws if you want to check where you or a friend lives LAWS 4. The bond. Let me first say that I understand that if you breastfed for three weeks, 3 months or not at all that you are still bonded with your baby, my account of my relationship with my daughter is not to take away what you have experienced. Nursing for me has been a life changing thing. After having an emergency c section I worried about breastfeeding, I had heard that the meds, that the recovery time and all sorts of things that go along with a major surgery could negatively impact our nursing relationship. Thankfully our hospital was very supportive and we were off and running as soon as I came out of my fog. My husband and family/friends have been always there with a shoulder or an ear or lactation tea and I am forever grateful because of that I know how to comfort my daughter almost instantly, I am able to nourish her with just my body and I know how it feels to have her look up at me while she is latched on while I sing her a song and smell her little bit of hair. I came home from a night away and she ran straight over to me, took my hand and led me to a lounge chair so that we could nurse, this is how we get to be still and reconnect. I love breastfeeding my daughter. 5. Long Beach is my home and I want it to be a loving home. I am so excited that August is now National Breastfeeding Month in Long Beach!!! Since I became a mom and started breastfeeding I have made it a point to try and help any mama I know, I remember the hard days when I never thought we would make it off the milk soaked couch and another mom would text me and just ask how I was. Or when I made lactation cookies with a girlfriend so that we could both pump enough milk for day care. Without those women I don't know where we would be. I want my daughter to grow up knowing her neighbors, saying hello to people on the street and offering help as often as she can. When it comes to new moms I know sometimes people worry about coming on too strong, they don't want to seem like they are imposing but I urge you to reach out. Drop off a meal, or shoot off a quick text saying you would love to help in some way, send over some lactation tea or just offer her your arms to hold her baby so she can rest. Be there, be present and go out there and let's build a community of women who support one another because really what could be better than that. Hope to see you tonight xo Join us at Latch & Link!
rsvp here!! Vince Staples' Summertime ’06 and Its Striking Resonance In A Violent Summer
- Ryan ZumMallen By now, hip-hop is well accustomed to West Coast rappers bursting onto the scene and demanding a permanent place at the table. From the early days of N.W.A. to the explosive rise of Kendrick Lamar, some of the most unique voices in rap have hailed from Southern California. With his new debut, Summertime ’06 (Def Jam), Vince Stapes may have added himself to that esteemed list and instantly placed among the most influential Long Beach rappers to ever grace the mic. But perhaps the astonishing thing about Staples is not that he succeeded in his debut, but how he has done it. In light of recent violence through parts of Long Beach that have left several people dead and more injured, and in fact, fears that they may be spurred by promises of a summer long racially motivated campaign (refuted by local authorities from the beginning, for what it's worth), Staples offers a debut album that sheds light on how it feels to lose innocence in an atmosphere defined by danger, and the damaging aftereffects that cannot be shaken. Staples hails not from the Eastside of Long Beach that Snoop Dogg and his cohorts — Nate Dogg and Warren G, as well as Daz Dillinger, Crooked I and others — made globally infamous during their height in the 1990s, but instead from North Long Beach, an area of the city that goes largely ignored even by longtime residents to the point of nearly being an afterthought. Summertime ’06 succeeds in introducing us to a Northside with history and personality; one could argue that Staples’ small pocket of the city is the true protagonist of the entire album, littered with references to local treasures like Louis Burgers and Ramona Park. And while North Long Beach reveals itself to be the main character in Staples’ epic, it is far from being the hero. Summertime ’06 rides the recent wave among rappers born into the War On Drugs and crack epidemic who paint their communities as warzones, traps, and pressure cookers with danger and despair lurking around every corner. One of the first tracks on the album, “Norf Norf,” exhibits a series of racially conflicting themes that show the community contains too much of both to be labeled good or bad. It is neither, but as long as you’re in it, it's inescapable. Similarly, when he raps “Rounds up in that chamber/ I’m a gangster like my daddy” at the end of “Birds & Bees,” it is not with the overblown bravado that allowed America to put gangsta rap into a neat and tidy box for more than two decades, but a low resignation and reluctant — almost hereditary — acceptance. Through Staples’ lens, we can begin to understand that the main ingredient in a violence-plagued neighborhood is often not greed, or bloodthirstiness, or nihilism — but fear. This is not an entirely new concept in hip-hop. The Geto Boys largely pioneered painting hyper-realistic imagery as a shock to the system, and more recently, Lamar utilized a rushed, unsettling tone that noticeably caused his voice to break several times in one of the most jarring tracks on his acclaimed 2012 album, “Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City.” Staples takes these ideas and runs with them, stringing together twenty songs with a brilliant soundtrack, sinister and ominous, provided by all-star producers No I.D., DJ Dahi and Clams Casino, and laces them with an unrelenting barrage of breathless lyrics about growing up in a powder keg. He may be from the same city, but the undertone of cynicism from Staples may as well be a world away from the entrancing pride and charisma of Snoop Dogg. By contrast, Staples regularly pleads for relief (“See this weight is on my shoulders / Pray Jehovah lift me up”) and in the chorus of one song, suggests that jumping off of his roof might at least make him feel alive for a moment. When he continues to repeat one of the album’s most loaded lines — “They found another dead body in the alley / They found another dead body in the alleyway” — with fading, deadpan delivery, it displays an alarming numbness to death and violence, and especially smacks of relevance after former Millikan High track star Alicia Todd was found murdered in a Long Beach alley just days before the release of Summertime ’06. Staples addresses violence in his music not to glamorize or fetishize it, but to display the callousness and insecurity it creates when treated by so many as a given. “When the smoke clears why was the war fought? / ‘Bout time you abandon the folklore,” he raps on "Surf." Ultimately, perhaps the moral is that there is no Biggie to his 2Pac, no Eazy to his Dre; in Vince Staples’ Long Beach, there is only the clear and ever-present possibility of harm every time you leave the house or turn a corner, whether it be from a girlfriend, a random tweaker on the street, any one of several different gangs or from the oft-ridiculed police, and a resulting undercurrent of fear that breeds paranoia, and begins to present itself outwardly as hostility and aggression in young men. Often, as throughout the tracks “C.N.B.” and “Street Punk,” it seems as though Staples is actively talking himself into feeling brave and fearsome. This is not the life that Staples would prefer to lead; it’s the one he employs to survive his surroundings. In eschewing current trends in both hip-hop production and lyricism, and instead focusing on a visceral, high quality aesthetic, Staples has ensured that Summertime ’06 will enjoy a lasting shelf-life among the annals of great debuts in hip-hop history. But to Long Beach, he has delivered a magnum opus on the experience of navigating a neighborhood ignored and even openly neglected by the establishment. Staples simultaneously and expertly juggles issues with identity, race, class, justice, greed, love, loyalty, hope and more; it seeks less to provide answers than to show how uncertainty and lack of opportunity permeate every aspect of a young life. It also provides clues to how a life of disadvantage can lead to tragedy. “Why they hate us? Why they want to rape us for our culture? / They greet, defeat us, bleed us, then they leave us for the vultures / They break the brilliant off with millions, trying to break their focus / More tan the man, the more alone and hopeless,” he raps on C.N.B. On another song he wonders whether he should listen to his teachers, who tell him stories of slaves, or his mother, who tells him stories of kings. Staples seeks answers, but these are momentary distractions. He maintains a wary distance with hope. These are experiences that I, and I suspect, many of the people making the decisions that shape communities like Staples’ North Long Beach, simply cannot relate to and therefore, judge. However, seeing the problem from his perspective — problems taken from his experiences nearly a decade ago, still very much real and hardly any better addressed today — can help us to understand and sympathize, and perhaps act more appropriately moving forward. The plague of gangs is one problem, but Staples shows that a prevailing sense of dread, cultivated since childhood and combined with the inevitability that you and your friends will likely end up dead or in jail, is a problem all its own. Pressure creates diamonds. Staples didn’t set out to shine, but his debut album nevertheless is a beacon to many who will not soon forget it. As a community, we should aspire to see that the children of Long Beach no longer grow up with the same experiences. In the past two weeks I have found myself beating myself over another kind of mom guilt that I was not privy to until it happened. I had heard about the working mom guilt and the formula vs breastfeeding mom guilt but no one had really mentioned to me what it feels like to be standing there, holding your crying child and feeling so guilty about not being fast enough. Last week it was about not being fast enough from stopping another little girl from assaulting my daughter and today it was about not being able to catch her when she fell. How was I not fast enough, how did something happen so damn quickly but also happen in slow motion. Why was I not two steps ahead of my daughter? I just wasn't. I treat Claire as a little person, I let her explore and test boundaries and usually I am so happy with the result. She is self assured, she can handle bullies and she tries all sorts of new things. Today I let her play next to me while I was working out [something she has been doing for the last 20 months] and she got on something that wasn't stable and she fell right off. Head first, on concrete and even being right there I wasn't fast enough. I picked her up and after screaming for a little she went stiff, started to shake a little and her eyes rolls. I cried out to Lora to call 911 and its pretty much a blur, while we waited nursing her helped me calm down and helped her come back to herself. In the end I am thankful that it sounded and looked much worse than it was, the paramedics checked her out and then we went to her primary doctor and she is ok. I was able to stay with her all day and we have cuddled and laughed and rested, she is ok. What happened when she went into shock, she hyperventilated while she was crying and that caused her to pass out. I guess that it can happen when kids get super upset or when they get hurt. I love Claire so damn much, today was a hard one but as we spoon on the couch I have to let it go, mamas we must let the guilt go. We are really doing our best.
xo Nikol Well, this is what a little Claire Olive looks like at 23 months! She is our little smiling string bean and I just can't get enough of her. This past month has been fun filled: she has been to the aquarium too many times for me to count, she saw her first firework show and she even watched her first proposal!! (Congrats Stephanie & Keith!!!) A few fun facts about Claire - 1. She gets a little more nervous than she used too when it comes to books and TV, this morning a bear growled in a cartoon and she screamed and cuddled. She doesn't like the commercials for The Walking Dead and if there is tension on a show she can pick it up. It's so interesting and we're working with it because I want her to like scary movies haha jk 2. She still loves eggs and food in general but dislikes sitting in her high chair, hoping to buy ourselves a table soon and get her a little table of her own and maybe that will help. Snacks snacks snacks all day though- she loves em! 3. Unsure on her weight and height because we haven't had a pediatrician visit in awhile, but we'll have her 2 year check up next month. 4. ITP struck again, she had a ton of bruising that we couldn't explain so a few blood tests and we found out that her platelets had dropped drastically. After two days of being nervous and waiting on results after more blood tests we found out they were slowly rising by themselves. Thank goodness no more hospital stays!! 5. Loves to give Besos and hugs. makes all of her toys give each other Besos too haha 6. She can throw a damn good tantrum but we have a system that's been working for us. We ask her to look at us, we sit down and talk, then we hug and give Besos. If this doesn't work then we stay close and help her feel her emotions and let her know we're there. I'm glad they have been a lot less lately. We are working on figuring out her triggers so that we can keep these at a minimum. 7. Our morning routine cannot be called a routine due to the fact that Claire is all over the place. Between 4am and 630am we really never know haha. The one thing that we do every morning is put away all of her bedding (she tosses it all out when she wakes up) and then we go say good morning to the day, it's adorable! Ryan created this little ditty and it's so sweet. 8. Still babbles a lot but throws a lot of real words in for good measure. It's been so fun to watch her learn and try out new phrases. 9. Bath time has become a time for her to test out her floating abilities. She side eyes us while slowly lowering herself under, crazy girl. 10. Each day when we get home from work we get to learn more about her. She tries to tell us about her day, she makes us laugh and it's like she grows up SO MUCH in a day. It's always hard to be away from her but she really is such an independent lady already and has her own friends to see and things to do. She is amazing. SHOUT OUT to Keith & Stephanie last weekend we had the honor of celebrating their engagement!! My sister deserves all the happiness in the world and I am so excited to watch her and Keith plan a wedding and then have the most fun being married. You two are going to be so awesome at this, just like you are at everything else.
Stephanie, I love you so much. so happy for you!! xo Nikol |
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AuthorI am a working mother who jots down random thoughts, monthly updates and occasionally my husband posts. |