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| Riesling Schorle with local strawberries |
The sportscasters certainly don't expect the German team to pull it off, but it's an aggressive game, and the yellow cards are flying. Who knows? The stadium is full of red and white spirit colors and non-stop chanting. We've been in that stadium ourselves once. Last fall we joined a group from GGS (the business school where Markus is a professor) for a match-up between Bayern and Dortmund (Bayern won). All the guys running around the field looked like our old friends (from the TV screen). I enjoyed the chance to see a game without slow-motion replays and obsessive commentary. It all moves lightning fast.
Multiple times during tonight's game I saw both goalies reach and dive to ward off an oncoming shot. I wonder how they practice that, how they find the capacity in the moment to let out an extra inch of length to get their hand in front of the ball. Stretch.
Back in 1997, Markus and I took a birth preparation class called "Trusting Nature" from Patty Brennan in Ann Arbor. We learned so much to get us through pregnancy, birth, and beyond: starting with raspberry-nettle pregnancy tea all the way through handling required hospital procedures (vaccinations and tests) and breastfeeding successfully. Patty's voice was joined by several others in supporting a natural birth: our doula, Bonnie Marquis, my work friend Whitley Hill, and the nurse-midwife team at the University of Michigan Medical Center.
One day, early in my third trimester, I took a walk on campus with Whitley, who is a dancer and who had given birth herself and attended many others. I was weighing information from the obstetrician's office about the merits of episiotomy (a tidy cut in the perineum) vs. tearing (more ragged and uncontrollable). "You don't have to do either," Whitley said.
I was thrilled to broaden my vision beyond the duality of cut or tear, and I began working toward the goal of being ready to stretch when the time came. Around about the beginning of my third trimester, I switched my prenatal care from the obstetricians to the nurse-midwife team. And I began regular training--like these impressive soccer players--to increase my stretch.
To get an idea of the stretching sensation of the vaginal opening during birth, Patty Brennan instructed us to open our mouths as wide as possible. At the corners of the mouth, there's a slight burning sensation with this much stretch. That, she told us, is what birth feels like. The more practice you have, the better it will go.
Perineal stretching is a two-person task, and Markus was an excellent and conscientious partner. We followed various handouts, all of which guided us in the following procedure. I would lie on my back with my rear end near the edge of the bed and my legs bent. Markus would carefully wash his hands and generously lubricate his thumbs and fingers with olive oil. Using fingers and thumbs together, he would massage and expand my opening to a slight point of "burn." I'd breathe as he held the stretch. At the beginning, it was difficult for me. Near the end, it was more difficult for him because the training had worked and I had stretched beyond the expandable reach and strength of his fingers.
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| Soccer night candle |
May 12, 2015: A pretty good mix of work and errands (two hours at the car place). Miriam made tortellini salad for dinner. Yum. I settled in for the news and the game around 8:00 pm, got the laundry folded and some mending done. It's been a two mini-candle night, one after the other. The game ended 3-2 for Bayern.
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