Athens

I set down my knife and fork and turned around in my chair to watch Alleke and the handful of other kids who had come with their parents to dine at this restaurant, which amounted to a few checkerboard tables in the corner of an empty square at the end of one of the tiny streets that ran back and forth up the side of the mountain to the Acropolis, where the Parthenon sat perched like a crown over the city.

The kids were infinitely more excited about the empty square in which they could run around freely and the cat that they had found sleeping under one of the tables. I watched for a while as they huddled around the table and giggled as the cat batted his paws at a piece of straw one of the little girls had found.

Eventually we returned to the conversation April and I were having with my parents about how they had noticed that a lot of tourists were taking pictures of Alleke, sometimes even when we weren't aware of it. They had seen this a number of times since they were usually walking behind us.

"Do you want strangers taking pictures of your daughter?" my mom asked.

I looked at April and shrugged. "I don't know," I said.

When Alleke was younger, I didn't mind when people took pictures of her. I liked it, actually, because it meant people thought she was cute, and so did I. Alleke was growing up fast, however, and lately she had become more self conscious. She was shy when she met new people. She would come running over and hide behind my leg or beg me to pick her up so she could hide her face in my chest.

She was old enough to know that it's not normal for strangers to take pictures of her.

"How do you think Alleke feels about strangers taking pictures of her?" my mom asked.

I glanced over my shoulder to see where Alleke was. I couldn't find her at first until I noticed an over-weight woman in a sun hat at the far end of the square lifting Alleke onto a stone bench. I watched as the women took out her camera, asked Alleke to smile, and took her picture.

"Alleke, Alleke" April called, "Kelly, go get her."

I bolted out of my chair, and by the time I reached Alleke I had already frightened the woman so badly she was hurrying down the street and around the corner, holding onto her sun hat with one hand and dragging her husband behind her with the other.

Still enraged, I grabbed Alleke by the arm and marched off towards to our table. Alleke broke free and stopped. Just before she turned her back to me and crossed her arms, I saw the tears streaming down her face.

"Why did daddy do that?" Alleke asked, sniffling.

I just stood there for a while, not sure what to say. I had over-reacted, there was no question about that, and instead of protecting Alleke from an unwanted situation, I had put her in one, making her feel like she had done something wrong and embarrassing her.

I sighed. "I thought you didn't want that woman to take your picture," I said.

For more, take a look at our photos from Greece...

Paradise

The woman in front of us was holding her sleeping daughter in her arms. Her husband was in front of her pulling their luggage and pushing a stroller with a sleeping baby through the herd of backpackers and the men picketing with their signs for hotels and cars for hire and wine tours and excursions to the top of the volcano.

I was relieved when the family pointed at the sign with the name of our hotel written on it and pushed their way over to talk to the man with the sign. I was relieved because I could follow them through this mess of people, and as the woman glanced behind and smiled at Alleke riding on my back, to know that we had something in common in this strange place, which after eight hours on a ferry boat, seemed so clearly separated from any other place I had ever been.

We piled into a van, and I slid the window open as far as it could go so that we could feel the warm breeze from the Mediterranean on our faces as we darted up the side of the cliff like a gecko on a wall to the village above.

I watched the hotel owner show the family to their room down the hall before we disappeared into ours. I threw our suitcases on the bed, opened them, and already April was in the bathroom putting our things away and asking if I would run down to the store and buy some water since we couldn't drink the water on the island, and she would put Alleke in her swimming suit and take her down to the swimming pool since Alleke had been singing ballads about her "hotel with a swimming pool" for days.

Later I pushed open the gate to the swimming pool with a gyro sandwich in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other. I sat down on one of the lawn chairs next to the pool and ate my sandwich and drank a beer while I watched April making tractor noises and dragging Alleke around in circles in her inflatable pool ring.

The woman who had ridden in the van with us stepped out of the hotel room at the end of the pool. She was in her swimming suit. She walked to the edge of the pool and dove in. Her husband appeared with a towel over his shoulder. He left the door to their hotel room open, tossed his towel on a chair, and dove in after her.

I watched him glide across the bottom of the pool, his body lurking silently below the water as he came up under his wife. She began shrieking with laughter and splashing around as he grabbed at her heels, until eventually he came up for air, gasping for breath and shouting victory.

They could have been 7th-graders, even more convincingly for the way she grabbed him then around the neck and kissed him. I envied them for being young--not in years, but in spirit--defiant of the truth that they were busy parents worn out by two little kids at the end of a long family vacation. They made it look so easy.

I envied them even more that evening as we sat at an expensive restaurant at the edge of the sea as the sun went down, and Alleke shivered in her chair and cried, and we fretted over her until our food was cold.

As we waited for the bill, I watched the waiter wisk past us balancing plates all the way up both arms. I wondered why it was never easy for me to balance being a dad and a husband at the same time. I didn't like knowing that romance could come so easily for other couples with kids. They could just arrive at a hotel, dump their kids on the bed, leave their responsibilities hanging on the chair at the edge of the pool with their towels, walk to the edge of paradise together, and dive in.

Flamenco

Alleke got her first flamenco lesson in Plaza Mayor while we were walking home from the ice cream shop.

Watch Flamenco on Vimeo.

Natural Childbirth in Madrid, an interview

For those who are curious about what it's like to give birth in Spain, I got to sit down with April this afternoon and interview her about her second pregnancy and how she's gone about choosing a birthing center in Madrid.

This interview is also available to listen to as a podcast.



Kelly (Spain Dad): In terms of having a natural childbirth in Madrid, what are you looking for in a birthing center? What are your priorities in order of importance?

April: What's most important to me is a birthing center's approach to childbirth and pregnancy. I'm looking for an approach that assumes giving birth is something women can do naturally, instead of a sickness that needs to be cured. The task of the staff at the birthing center then is to do whatever they can to make it possible for the woman who is giving birth to have a say over what is happening. For me what that looks like is being able to move around while I'm having contractions if that's what I need to do. I don't want to be tied down to a bed because I'm being monitored. I want the least amount of unnecessary procedures, like not having to be hooked up to an IV or a monitor if things are going well or lots of other procedures that I don't want to go into right now, but that are fairly invasive and are not necessary in the process of having a child because it's not an illness, it's a natural process. If I want to lay in the bed, I'll lay in the bed. If I need to pace up and down, I'll pace up and down. If I need to lean over, I'll lean over. I want to be able to do what my body is telling me to do. For me, that's a first priority.

Another priority for me is having options for dealing with pain. Often the options are either an epidural or nothing. I would like more options since I know they're out there.

I'm also looking for a medical staff that's supportive and encouraging instead of demanding or authoritarian.

Kelly: Based on this list of priorities you mentioned, what natural childbirth options have you found in Madrid?

April: So far I've found three options. One is doing a home birth with a midwife. Another option is a group called Nacentia with a doctor called Regina Cardenas. It's like a birth center, but their births actually happen at a small clinic nearby called Clínica Milagrosa. The third option is Hospital Quirón with Dr. José Ángel Espinosa.

Kelly: The home birth is obviously different than the other two options, so can you give me just a quick summary of the last two, Nacentia and Hospital Quirón, and what makes them different from each other?

April: Both of them were started, I think, within the last two or three years by doctors who decided that they wanted to give women more freedom in the way they approach birth. From what I've read, the biggest difference between the two is that Nacentia really prioritizes natural birth, while Quirón really prioritizes women having choices. So, women might choose natural birth, but they might choose not to have a natural birth as well. My guess is the support structures at these two places are different if they're coming from different approaches. But, it seems like at Quirón as well as at Nacentia there is quite a bit of flexibility.

Kelly: I'm curious where you looked for these natural birthing centers in Madrid, and if for example there's someone else that's researching childbirth options in Madrid with a different set of priorities in mind, what's a good way of finding out which options are out there?

April: The main place, or I should say the only place I found information was on the Internet. So, keep that in mind. There is a website and forum called Crianza Natural where I've found a lot of information on natural parenting in general like using cloth diapers and breastfeeding and stuff like that. They have information on their website about natural childbirth in Spain. There's another website called El Parto Es Nuestro, which is an advocacy group for women being in charge of birth instead of doctors. And then there's Nacer en Casa, which is a website specifically focused on home births. So, between these three sites, I was able to find the information I was looking for.

Kelly: Okay, so interfacing your priorities with these three natural childbirth options in Madrid, how did you go about deciding which one to pursue?

April: Actually, I decided which one to pursue not so much because of the priorities I mentioned but because of other factors, like which one took our insurance, how close it was to our house, and that sort of thing. From what I understand about how the birth will go, all three options matched my priorities equally well, so my final decision was based on other criteria.

Kelly: Can you talk a little more about how the distance from your home and health insurance helped you decide which birthing center to choose?

April: For a home birth, as far as I know, there's not any private insurance company or public health care program that would cover the cost for a home birth. One of my friends who had a home birth in Seville told me the cost for them was around 2000€ for everything, including all the appointments through the pregnancy, the birth, and follow-up.

Nacentia is a private clinic, so they work with most of the private insurance companies. Our private insurance is Sanitas. It covers most of the appointments, but it doesn't cover the actual birth. There are two options for paying with Sanitas depending on which insurance plan you have. There's a reimbursement option called Sanitas Mundi or there's the option where you have to get permission from Sanitas ahead of time, which they call Sanitas Multi. If you have the reimbursement option, it covers up to 80 percent of the cost of the birth. If you don't have the reimbursement option, the birth costs about 2,500€ beyond what Sanitas will cover. I do know that a lot of the insurance companies pay for the whole thing at Nacentia.

At Quirón they also work with most of the major insurance companies. The pregnancy and birth are covered, so there wouldn't be additional costs.

As far as distance from home, I think that depends on how you give birth. I've given birth before, and it went really fast. Being 45 min. away from a hospital is not really an option for me. We'd have to deliver the baby in the car on the way to the hospital. So, having our birth center close by is going to be important to us, which is why a home birth or Nacentia, which is about a 20 minute walk from our house, rose to the top because they were closer.

It's also worth keeping in mind that when you have to go for appointments towards the end of your pregnancy, possibly every week depending on what's happening, it sounds very time consuming to have to travel 45 min. both ways for all those doctor's appointments.

Between Nacentia and a home birth, we haven't decided for sure what we're going to do because we haven't had the chance to actually talk to a midwife and find out more details about what kind of follow-up care there is after a home birth, so that meant that for right now, Nacentia made the most sense.

Kelly: At this point, what would it take for you to choose a home birth over going to Nacentia?

April: The main question is finding out what happens if something goes wrong. Because home births are not very common in Spain, how does the transition go from having problems at home to checking in at the hospital?

My second question is what happens after the birth? What kind of follow-up care does the midwife provide? If you're at the hospital, someone checks up on you and brings you food. Obviously, I don't expect a midwife to cook for me for three days, but I'd like to know what kind of follow-up care to expect from her.

Kelly: We're going to take some time to zero in on the childbirth option that we've decided to pursue, which is the Nacentia birth center in Madrid. You've had your first checkup at 14 weeks into your pregnancy, and you also had an ultrasound at that checkup. How was your experience at Nacentia. Any first impressions?

April: Overall, the checkup went very well. The receptionist and the doctor were both extremely friendly. The receptionist was helpful and welcoming and made us feel like we had a right to all the information we wanted. Sometimes in medical settings in Spain it feels like people have the information you want, but aren't comfortable with or used to giving that information to you. They're not used to being asked questions.

Something else that surprised me about our first pregnancy in Spain, and something that I've even experienced in other medical situations in Spain is that doctors tend to be pretty hands-off. Rather that using physical touch to determine health, they use machines or tests. I'm not exactly sure if my first appointment at Nacentia was a normal since I was so late in making the appointment. They kind of squeezed me in before lunch. The reason it didn't seem normal to me was because they didn't check my blood pressure, weigh me, or measure my stomach. So, even though Nacentia is a clinic that advocates for and approaches pregnancy from more of a natural perspective, there were still things about the appointment that were more medicalized than I think you would even find in general practices in other places. Nacentia is still a part of the general medical environment here where they'll do an ultrasound or another test instead of using physical touch to determine the health of the baby. Those were my first impressions. I'm looking forward to going back, so that's a good thing.

Kelly: I have one last question. You're not from Spain, and I'm wondering how being a foreigner plays into your experience of having a baby in Spain. Does the language or a fear of another medical system or anything else stand out to you as you think about giving birth here?

April: The hardest thing is finding the right information. The fact that there are these natural childbirth websites that I mentioned and the friendships you can make through these websites is what's probably going to help you find information much more quickly than other ways you might go about doing it.

It is hard when you have information from your home country, and you know how things work there. The realization that you're going to have to give birth differently than you imagined is a hard adjustment. I had to make this adjustment in my first pregnancy. Finding someone who is sympathetic and willing to listen and help you process through this is important. The key is trying to look for the positive things. For example, the first time I was pregnant in Spain when it looked like we were probably going to have a really medicalized birth, the positive thing that I tried to keep in mind was that Spain's infant mortality rate is one of the lowest in the world. So, as traumatic as a birth might be, the end, we were probably going to have a healthy baby, whereas there are other countries in the world where that's not necessarily going to be true. The challenge is trying to maintain a positive perspective in the midst of it all, and I don't know, believing that the options you want might be out there if you're willing to look for them. Almost anywhere you are you'll find a small alternative community that can help you.

Being Berber

Our friend Chris sings and plays piano for a band called Being Berber in Madrid. He was eating lunch at our house on Saturday when April asked:

"Alleke wants to know why you have hair on your face."

Chris grinned at Alleke, then scratched his soul patch in thought.

"Musicians have hair on their face so they look cool," he said with a shrug.

April turned and interpreted this for Alleke. "Chris has hair on his face because he plays piano."

Amy Swacina School of Dance

Alleke is a proud graduate of the Amy Swacina School of Dance in Madrid.

In other words, we leave Alleke with Amy (our ballerina friend) while we go to Spanish class, and they twirl around together in her living room. Here are the results:

Watch Alleke dancing ballet on Vimeo.

Ultrasoon

Apparently we're having the baby "ultra-sooner than we thought" since the ultrasound at our birthing center in Madrid today said we were 16 weeks along instead of 14 weeks. I'm all for getting this baby here as soon as possible. Patience is not my virtue.

Watch our 16 Week Ultrasound on Vimeo.

For more, read about my reaction to our first ultrasound...