Book Review – Ghosted

Ghosted is about Sarah and Eddie’s incredible week together before Sarah is ghosted. They’d instantly fallen in love and then Eddie fell off the face of the earth. Sarah’s left searching, wondering what to do, and being convinced by her friends that she needs to just give him up. She can’t seem to let go before she eventually learns there’s a reason for his disappearance, and now she’s faced with the hard task of sharing the truth. 

Confession: book 38 was my first Kindle read and I didn’t hate the experience. Chosen for book club and new and hip, book 38 was a challenge to get my hands on without buying it, so I had to borrow a friend’s Kindle who had borrowed an e-copy from the library. There were pros and cons to the experience, and I’m still definitely on Team Actual Book, but I can see why an e-reader wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to have…

Book 38:
Ghosted
by Rosie Walsh

Genre:
Fiction, Contemporary Romance

Published:
May 2018

Synopsis According to Mandi:
Without spoilers, Ghosted is about Sarah and Eddie’s incredible week together before Sarah is ghosted. They’d instantly fallen in love and then Eddie fell off the face of the earth. Sarah’s left searching, wondering what to do, and being convinced by her friends that she needs to just give him up. She can’t seem to let go before she eventually learns there’s a reason for his disappearance, and now she’s faced with the hard task of sharing the truth.

Favorite Quote(s):

“I wondered how it was that you could spend weeks, months—years, even—just chugging on, nothing really changing, and then, in the space of a few hours, the script of your life could be completely rewritten.” 

-Rosie Walsh, Ghosted

Awards (based upon my brief research):
None yet.

Pages:
337

My Overall Rating:
3.5 – I absolutely zipped through this book, and I can’t decide if that’s because I was reading it on a Kindle or if it was truly that engaging. It certainly tugged at the heartstrings at times, and it was a nice mix of love, mystery and moral challenging, though it did, at times, seem a little unrealistic. I don’t expect the plots of books to be able to happen in real life, but when so much of the story could happen in real life, those curve balls get a little bizarre. It’s worth the read, and maybe my 3.5 is low, but I’m not turning around and buying the book after returning my friend’s Kindle…

The Thanksgiving Commitment

On Thanksgiving, I finally acknowledged there had to be a definitive end point to the breastfeeding battle. I simply could not go on in the phase I was in for the sake of my mental health and my relationships with my baby and my husband. Knowing my current process was not working, I had three alternative options…

11.23.17

“This is not how motherhood is supposed to go. I’ve pleaded with God for the life of my child before she was even born because I knew the fight she would face, and I didn’t know if she could win. I never allowed myself to believe we’d be going home without a baby, but that possibility was a reality we prayed against time and time again.

“So now, here I am, complaining about feedings when her life was spared for moments such as these. Some day, we’ll be past this phase. We’ll laugh about how chronically Oaklee spit and how stressed we were about her weight gain. We’ll face different stresses – ones that feel more pressing than these. But wow, is this current phase hard. I had no idea that having a preemie would play out like this. Her prematurity defines her for far longer than I’d imagine for a kiddo who seems rather normal. “

Thanksgiving 2017 – we had so much to be thankful for. In a year where we feared we might lose our baby, we got to snuggle her tight on Thanksgiving amongst our families and in our own home. We were immensely blessed, and we knew it, but the dark clouds of the breastfeeding battle were low and relentless. It was a storm we couldn’t see past, and so we made the Thanksgiving Commitment.

On Thanksgiving, I finally acknowledged there had to be a definitive end point to the breastfeeding battle. I simply could not go on in the phase I was in for the sake of my mental health and my relationships with my baby and my husband. Knowing my current process was not working, I had three alternative options:

  1. Quit – allow myself to dry up and use up the milk I’d stored up in our freezer to get Oaklee through the flu season.
  2. Exclusively pump – the route I’d technically already been taking but so deeply dreaded committing to.
  3. Pursue breastfeeding like it’s our only option.

While everything inside of me wanted to take option 1 and avoid option 2, I headed toward option 3. On Thanksgiving, I nursed Oaklee every two hours instead of every three hours, giving her six opportunities of nine total feedings to learn, to bond, to eat without the pressure of needing to not fall asleep before getting full because she could eat again in two hours. In a day that was full of family and food, I slipped out of the room every two hours to try again and again and again.

In the six breastfeeding attempts, she nursed anywhere from 4.5 to 13.5 minutes at a time, for a total of 52 minutes. Not everyone breaks down their baby’s nursing habits mathematically. In fact, I’m not certain I know of anyone else who has done that, but literally every feeding of Oaklee’s since birth had been tracked and charted and calculated and analyzed. We knew the number of minutes or milliliters necessary to get the results the doctors wanted to see.

So let me put it this way:

In a span of time where Oaklee should have eaten four times, I fed her six times. If you divide the 52 minutes by four feedings, rather than the six we actually did, she was doing approximately 13 minute feeds. Per the NICU suggestion, 15 minute feeds were considered full feeds. We were significantly closer than we were even two weeks ago by feeding more frequently for less breastmilk as opposed to less frequently for more breastmilk.

It seemed as though this may be a glimpse into what the issue actually was. Was Oaklee hungry enough to eat the amount she needed to eat? Absolutely. But breastfeeding is hard for the baby too, and especially one who’s known more bottles than breast and is still the size of a newborn despite being five months old. She simply couldn’t eat until she was full because she was too small, too tired, too premature.

On Thanksgiving, I committed to taking new steps – feeding Oaklee more frequently, wearing her more often, and dealing with my firehose letdown so she didn’t have to take it – to get Oaklee to be a breastfeeder by the end of the year. And if that didn’t happen, that would be the end. That was the commitment part. I had to commit to giving up if that was going to be best for us – if that was going to help me be a better mom, a better wife, and a better person.

There was an end goal in sight. An end that would either mean no more breastfeeding attempts or pumping – or – no more fruitless breastfeeding attempts. Which would surface, only time would tell.

In the stats:
Birth weight: 2lb, 12oz
Last known weight: 9lb 11oz (11.9.17)
Adjusted age: 5 weeks, 5 days
Actual age: 21 weeks
Days in the hospital: 69
Days home: 79
Appointments since home: 14

Book Review – All You Can Ever Know

All You Can Ever Know is Nicole Chung’s story, told in memoir fashion, of growing up as both an adoptee and a minority. Nicole was born 10 weeks premature and domestically adopted upon NICU discharge. She grew up an only child in a community where Asians were scarce. Like any adoptee, she always wondered about her biological family – are they still out there? Why did they give her up? What place do they have in her life?

This past summer I learned that by completing my local library’s summer reading club (reading two books per month for the duration of the summer), I would get to choose a free advanced reader’s copy of a book coming out in 2018. As you can probably already guess, reading two books a month is not generally challenging for me. I completed the club, and then went on to sign up for the winter reading club, looking forward to another free book at the end of the challenge, only to find out I first got a free book simply for being one of the first people to sign up. Score. Score. Score. This is said “free book.”

Book 37:
All You Can Ever Know
by Nicole Chung

Genre:
Memoir

Published:
October 2018

Synopsis According to Mandi:
Without spoilers, All You Can Ever Know is Nicole Chung’s story, told in memoir fashion, of growing up as both an adoptee and a minority. Nicole was born 10 weeks premature and domestically adopted upon NICU discharge. She grew up an only child in a community where Asians were scarce. Like any adoptee, she always wondered about her biological family – are they still out there? Why did they give her up? What place do they have in her life?

Favorite Quote(s):

“Family lore given to us as children has such hold over us, such staying power. It can form the bedrock of another kind of faith, one to rival any religion, informing our beliefs about ourselves, and our families, and our place in the world.” 

-Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

Awards (based upon my brief research):
None yet.

Pages:
222

My Overall Rating:
3 – Nicole has such an eloquent writing style and, as a fan of memoir, this book was so beautiful to me. Unfortunately, I am not very in tune with the overall theme of adoption. It was enlightening, to say the least, but not a topic that pulls on my heartstrings. I was still very grateful to have read a book written by a woman born years ago at 10 weeks premature; such a short part of her story, that was the part that lured me in. The rest was merely educational. I cannot imagine having grown up either adopted or as a minority. I’m glad she told her story.

Book Review – An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is the story of April May’s discovery of a large, not-from-this-world robot-type of sculpture in Manhattan in the middle of the night. She and her friend, Andy Skampt, film and post a silly video on YouTube of their “interactions” with the sculpture, whom April names Carl. The video goes viral overnight, making April a celebrity and changing the path of her life because, all over the world, Carls seemed to have appeared in major cities at the exact same time. How does April deal with the fame of being one of the first to interact with Carl? Where does she go from here? And what, on earth, are the Carls?

As I’ve mentioned before, my Book of the Month subscription has really pushed me to read some books I probably would not have picked up otherwise, and October’s pick was no exception to that. I figured Hank Green would be a reputable author considering his brother, John, seems to know a thing or two about writing, but the genre/synopsis of this one seemed so bizarre to me. I stepped out of my comfort zone and was deeply rewarded. It was like The Handmaid’s Tale – incredibly weird, not something I would have chosen, yet something I couldn’t put down.

Book 36:
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing
by Hank Green

Genre:
Speculative fiction

Published:
September 2018

Synopsis According to Mandi:
Without spoilers, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is the story of April May’s discovery of a large, not-from-this-world robot-type of sculpture in Manhattan in the middle of the night. She and her friend, Andy Skampt, film and post a silly video on YouTube of their “interactions” with the sculpture, whom April names Carl. The video goes viral overnight, making April a celebrity and changing the path of her life because, all over the world, Carls seemed to have appeared in major cities at the exact same time. How does April deal with the fame of being one of the first to interact with Carl? Where does she go from here? And what, on earth, are the Carls?

Favorite Quote(s):

“It didn’t even matter if I was right, because that was the world I wanted to live in; that was the world that made sense to me. And even if I was wrong, I believed the world would be better off if we just acted as if I was right.” 

-Hank Green, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

Awards (based upon my brief research):
None yet.

Pages:
338

My Overall Rating:
4 – This is one of the weirdest, most intricate plots I’ve ever read. It has everything from love to laugh-out-loud moments to the explanation of things like hexidecimal code. The plot grew and grew in depth as it went and finished with the perfect amount of resolution. I could not put it down. While the concept of the Carls was so bizarre, it was so well thought out, and the layer of April’s fame/how she addresses her fame was almost even more interesting. I really appreciated how the author took such a far-fetched plot and broke it down into the realities of day-to-day living – choosing what you believe in, choosing to live by what you believe in and standing up for what you believe in. This book had me questioning my own life choices, and I’ve yet to see a Carl in the world.

What is 69 Days?

Remember reading about Oaklee’s date of discharge – the happiest day of my life? Or do you remember reading the post “Homegoings” from the very next day? Those heavy hitters seem so long ago, but that’s what 69 days feels like. Just short of 10 weeks, it’s almost 1/5 of a year, 1/20 of my husband’s and my marriage, an entire summer… My greatest mental battle in those 69 days was knowing we would never get those 69 days back…

Born on June 29, discharged on September 5, on November 13, Oaklee had finally lived half of her life out of the hospital. 69 days in. 69 days out.

Remember reading about Oaklee’s date of discharge – the happiest day of my life? Or do you remember reading the post “Homegoings” from the very next day? Those heavy hitters seem so long ago, but that’s what 69 days feels like. Just short of 10 weeks, it’s almost 1/5 of a year, 1/20 of my husband’s and my marriage, an entire summer.

My greatest mental battle in those 69 days was knowing we would never get those 69 days back. We were often absent for Oaklee’s first 10 weeks present on earth – I worried about the firsts we’d miss out on. She slept in a plexiglass box instead of the spaces we’d dreamed up for her in our home. We shared her with complete strangers, entrusting them with her complete care. We had to ask permission to hold her instead of snuggling her through nap times and letting the laundry wait.

I can say a thousand times that I wish someone had warned me what life could be like in the event that my baby would be premature and spend 69 days in the NICU, but I don’t know it’s something you can comprehend until you’re the parent of a preemie and doing time in the NICU. And so now my heart breaks for the people who find themselves there. Now, because now I know. Now, but too late for those who traversed that world before me.

In the stats:
Birth weight: 2lb, 12oz
Last known weight: 9lb 11oz (11.9.17)
Adjusted age: 7 weeks, 2 day
Actual age: 20 weeks, 4 days
Days in the hospital: 69
Days home: 69
Appointments since home: 13

Too Premature

I wanted to roll over in the middle of the night, pick up my hungry baby, breastfeed her and set her back down to sleep. Instead, I was going downstairs, pumping, washing pump parts, storing breastmilk, heating a bottle, waking my sleeping baby and giving her a bottle. There are tons of women who do this, some even do it by choice, but it is not what I wanted. 

11.12.17

“Sometimes nursing is a dream, sometimes it’s an absolute nightmare. Oaklee and I have cried many tears over it. I just want it to work out, but at what point do I admit to myself that it’s not in the cards for us? I haven’t done so yet because I just can’t fathom exclusively pumping… Apparently I believe in the benefits of breastmilk enough to let all of this thoroughly piss me off for however long this takes.”

I never knew how important it was to me to breastfeed until my hungry baby was crying, I was crying and I was making my husband sit silently on the floor of the nursery for “emotional support”… several times every day of the week. For as long as things had been going an other way, I just couldn’t see it any other way. I have breastmilk. My baby needs breastmilk.

A+B=C

For four and a half months, I’d largely been exclusively pumping but I just had it set in my mind that I was going to breastfeed Oaklee and couldn’t fathom only ever pumping. It was yet another checkpoint where I was being dealt a hand I didn’t want to play and yet another reminder that prematurity doesn’t end. It doesn’t end when your baby finally breathes on her own. It doesn’t end when she takes her first full bottle. It doesn’t end when she’s discharged from the hospital. It doesn’t end the first time she rolls over…

I wanted to roll over in the middle of the night, pick up my hungry baby, breastfeed her and set her back down to sleep. Instead, I was going downstairs, pumping, washing pump parts, storing breastmilk, heating a bottle, waking my sleeping baby and giving her a bottle. There are tons of women who do this, some even do it by choice, but it is not what I wanted.

We were warned of the possible growth and developmental delays Oaklee may face, but to see them play out in such a necessity as feeding post-discharge was heart breaking. Several people told me to, “Just give it time. She’s just too small,” but you’re not allowed to be too small to eat. It had to happen one way or another, and I was banging my head against a wall over that other way.

Pump. Wash the pump parts. Measure a bottle. Give a bottle. Wash the bottle. Pump. Wash the pump parts. Measure a bottle. Give a bottle. Wash the bottle… and then sometimes she would spit up entire feeds, rendering the cycle moot and adding the steps of change the clothes, wash the clothes.

She was too small. Her digestive system was too weak. She was too premature.

On November 12, we were offering 120 ml (approximately four ounces) bottles and Oaklee nursed a total of 28.5 minutes, split between four breastfeeding attempts of eight total feedings. We had still made very little progress toward getting Oaklee to be a true breast-fed baby. And we still didn’t know if that would ever happen.

In the stats:
Birth weight: 2lb, 12oz
Last known weight: 9lb 11oz (11.9.17)
Adjusted age: 7 weeks, 1 day
Actual age: 20 weeks, 3 days
Days in the hospital: 69
Days home: 68
Appointments since home: 13

Book Review – Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is the story of retired, widowed Major Ernest Pettigrew who lives a quiet, ordinary life in the English countryside until a friendship blossoms between him and widowed shopkeeper, Mrs. Ali. The Major, Mrs. Ali and the community around them are forced to consider the consequences of crossing racial and class divides, breaking culture and tradition.

A Used Book Sale find, this next one was a book I grabbed based on it’s cover (which I do with literally every book I read, so…). When I opened it to read it, I knew nothing more than what the picture on the cover looked like. I don’t actually usually do that. But alas, book 35…

Book 35:
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
by Helen Simonson

Genre:
Romance Novel, Fiction

Published:
2010

Synopsis According to Mandi:
Without spoilers, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is the story of retired, widowed Major Ernest Pettigrew who lives a quiet, ordinary life in the English countryside until a friendship blossoms between him and widowed shopkeeper, Mrs. Ali. The Major, Mrs. Ali and the community around them are forced to consider the consequences of crossing racial and class divides, breaking culture and tradition.

Favorite Quote(s):

“I probably should get a dog. No one thinks dog owners are crazy, even if they walk out in their pajamas.” 

-Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand

“‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘A couple may have nothing in common but the color of their skin and the country of their ancestors, but the whole world would see them as compatible.’” 

-Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand

“Can the bleakest of circumstances be pushed aside for a few hours by the redeeming warmth of a fire and the smell of a dinner roasting in the oven?” 

-Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand

“We, who can do anything, we refuse to live our dreams on the basis that they are not practical. So tell me, who is to be pitied more?” 

-Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand

Awards (based upon my brief research):
Goodreads Choice Awards Best Fiction
Goodreads Choice Awards Best Debut Goodreads Author

Pages:
355

My Overall Rating:
2 – As mentioned, I went into this one blind. I didn’t know much about the story at all. I came out of it seeing the potential in the plot, but I don’t think Simonson tapped into that potential deep enough. It was a great overall story. The themes are timeless. However, it moved so slowly, often included an unnecessary amount of detail and there were so many typos I questioned whether I was reading an Advanced Reader’s Copy or not – I was not.