The Nativity at St. Charles Borromeo -- Christmas 2017

[lblanchard]

"This is for pondhopper" -- I mentioned that the local parish priest, a former engineer from Chile, created an epic Nativity.

Comments

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

Yes! You did post this but I have loved revisiting it. This is exactly like the ones created even by families in their homes in Spain. I have never been quite that ambitious but we did more of a layout like this and the girls carried on until they left home creating mountains, caves and such. It's a deep-rooted tradition and Father Esteban did it well.

Has he done anything similar since then?

AND...he has a reclining Mary! (Mine is reclining, after childbirth it's all you can do!).

Thanks, Laura!

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Speak for yourself! After childbirth I was ravenously hungry. I delivered at 9 am. Oh, we didn't think you'd want to eat anything right after having your baby, they said, so we didn't order you any breakfast. WHAT??? Wrath and destruction! and a demand for not one but two breakfast trays, which I got and which I demolished. After that I reclined.

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

You superwoman, you. I was exhausted but admit to really needing food shortly thereafter. And then I started nursing the baby and that really made me hungry.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

I was in a Navy hospital and they wouldn't give me the baby! I stood there at the nursery window, milk streaming out and staining my hospital gown, listening to him wailing while they told me his blood sugar was low and they were going to give him sugar water! My ex- and I both threw wild fits on the spot and they grudgingly handed him over.

(I was their first Lamaze mother and their first nursing mother in decades. All their protocols were set up for women who'd had some kind of anesthetic and were bottle feeding. They also made me go nurse behind a screen, segregated from the bottle-feeding mommies.)

Edited to add yet more detail...)

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

ARGH...that would have sent me into a red hot fury as well. Here they install a crib in the mother's room (we have private rooms here)and unless you're having issues with breastfeeding they leave you to it. If you need the midwife to visit and help you out you can request that. Of course, for both births I was home the following day and then you're really on your own.

But I've never heard of a hospital keeping a baby away from the mother, not here anyway.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Navy Hospital. Early Seventies. They were just getting getting around to offering natural childbirth classes. I had done Lamaze independently. Their first crop wouldn’t graduate for a few months.

They were actually excited about seeing what an unanesthetized delivery was like — there were two dozen spectators in the delivery room. But they were still set up for drugged mothers who were handed their babies every six hours to bottle feed and had no clue about the needs of the breast feeding mother and infant.

That’s also why they didn’t order any food. Their usual patients were too drugged to be hungry post-delivery, not to mention too groggy. I was a real learning experience for them.

(The delivering physician also had no idea what he would get when he told a wide-awake mother to push with everything she had at the next contraction. I’ll never forget that moment: “Okay, push…push…Jesus, not that hard!”)