Mother's Day seems like a good time to make a resolution to get back into more regular posting on Birth Story. So let it begin!
With Nora on the couch
This is a picture of my daughter Nora, who is now 24, during her first few days home, relaxing on the couch with me. I don't know why she is sitting at the other end of the couch, but this is my husband's favorite early picture of us together.
Being a mom changed my life in big ways and small. I remember how disoriented I felt that first week, adjusting to nursing and my new post-pregnancy body. My daughters, Nora and Maeve, are two of my favorite people, and Mother's Day is one of my favorite days in the whole year.
Happy Mother's Day to all the other moms (and everyone else) reading this post today. Have a wonderful day!
The birth Jan. 7 of Blue Ivy Carter, daughter of hip-hop stars Beyonce and Jay-Z (Shawn Carter), had Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan in a tailspin this week.
Beyonce
Other new parents complained of disruptions and even security breaches as the celebrity family reportedly took over part of the hospital's sixth floor for a private, customized labor-delivery area for $1 million-plus. (A hospital spokesman said the Carters occupied an "executive suite" and paid the standard rate for it.)
Neil and Rozz Nash-Coulon were upset at being detained in the neonatal intensive care unit after visiting their newborn twins, while Edgar Ramirez reported he was refused entrance to visit his baby in the the NICU unit. Windows were covered, private security guards issued orders, and security cameras were even disabled, families complained.
"The security of our children is at risk when you cover security cameras," Ms. Nash-Coulon told Nina Bernstein of the New York Times.
And, all the secrecy fed rumors. Beyonce's website states that "Baby Blue" was "delivered naturally," while portions of the blogosphere ran with a report that the birth was a C-section. And there's even a contingent that holds that Beyonce's pregnancy was a fake, that a surrogate mom bore Blue.
Tina Fey and Jane Krakowski, stars of the sitcom 30 Rock on NBC, told The Today Show's Matt Lauer that they both had their babies at Lenox Hill Hospital as well. Said Fey, "My celebrity treatment at Lenox Hill involved taking a group breast-feeding class in a closet."
The Spanish movie star couple Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem reportedly welcomed a baby boy, their first child, on Jan. 22 at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles.
Bardem was nominated for an Academy Award on Tuesday for best actor for his role in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's new film, Biutiful.
He won a best supporting actor Oscar in 2007 for his role as a psychopath in No Country for Old Men. Cruz won a best supporting actress Oscar in 2008 for Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
Cruz, 36, and Bardem, 41, were married in July in the Bahamas. The couple, who met nearly 20 years ago on the set of Jamon Jamon, Cruz's first movie, reunited while making Vicky Cristina Barcelona for Woody Allen in 2007.
Actress Kelly Preston, wife of actor John Travolta, talked with Natalie Morales on the Today show on Wednesday morning about the "silent birth" of her son Benjamin at a hospital in Ocala, Fla., on Nov. 23.
Benjamin weighed eight pounds three ounces. Both Preston, 48, and Travolta, 56, are Scientologists. Their religion espouses a birth free of conversation, as supposedly "any words spoken ...can have an aberrative effect on the mother and the child."
Preston and Travolta have a daughter, Ella Bleu. Their son Jett died in 2009 at the age of 16.
Little Peter Gabriel Imson, born 18 seconds after midnight on Jan. 1 at Guam Memorial Hospital in Tamuning, Guam, has staked his claim to be the first baby born in the United States in 2011.
Guam, the largest of the Mariana Is., is a U.S. territory in Micronesia, in the western Pacific Ocean, and is officially the first place in the United States a new day touches — in this case, the first day of a new year.
Imson weighed in at six pounds 13 ounces. His mom is Cathy Narciso of Dededo, a nurse at the hospital. Peter is her first baby.
The singer Pink was reported to be planning a water birth with her first child, but this week she tweeted that the story isn't true.
"My mom just told me that "in touch" has informed her that she is invited to my delivery, and that I want a water birth. She asked me if she needs to get a snorkel. This is all news to me. Amazing. Good reporting," she wrote.
Pink, nee Alecia Beth Moore, and her husband, motocross racer Carey Hart, are expecting their first baby in the spring. The singer announced her pregnancy on The Ellen DeGeneres show last month.
Pink told DeGeneres that the doctor thinks the baby is a girl, and that she waited to talk about the pregnancy until she was a few months into it because she had a miscarriage in a previous pregnancy.
Francis Bacon, no particular relation to Roger, is credited with introducing inductive reasoning into scientific inquiry in the 17th century. A distinguished member of the English aristocracy during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, his life was a checkered affair that included a destructive corruption scandal.
However, as the 20th-century writer and anthropologist Loren Eiseley put it, Bacon, "more fully than any man of his time, entertained the idea of the universe as a problem to be solved...."
Francis Bacon
Bacon was a philosopher, and he sought to resolve the problems that Aristotle's deductive approach to creation presented, such as the fact that Aristotle decreed that the world conformed to his construction of it, rather than vice versa.
Not only that, but most medieval thinkers had swallowed Aristotle whole, and regurgitated his ideas, which were often not even close to being correct. Bacon was frustrated by the obsolete and often clearly erroneous view of the world most of his contemporaries held.
He sought to bring a whole new approach to philosophy and science. And so he did. While many others built on his ideas, Bacon accomplished something truly revolutionary.
Inductive reasoning begins with specific details and observations — of natural occurrences or behavior, say — and uses them to arrive at a principle to explain them. What we now call the scientific method is largely inductive.
Deductive reasoning moves from the general to the specific. It uses logic to confirm something we already know to be true. Deduction is vulnerable to error at every step because it accepts the truth of the elements it uses to establish new truths.
This 13th-century English monk recognized that going to the source of phenomena was the surest way to understand them.
Statue of Roger Bacon at Oxford
Bacon was born in Ilchester, in Somerset, around the time King John granted the English nobles some important rights in the Magna Carta of 1215. Education was apparently an important value in his family, and he went to Oxford University probably at about age 13.
Bacon lectured at the University of Paris and pursued a life of dogged intellectual inquiry at a time when unorthodox opinions were dangerous — even fatal. At about the age of 40, he became a Franciscan friar, which limited his ability to publish his works, as any writings had to be approved by his order.
About 10 years later, though, his friend Guy le Gros de Foulques became Pope Clement IV. During the few years of Clement's reign, Bacon published his Opus Maius, about science and theology, and other works.
Bacon understood that mathematics was crucial to understanding science. He refused to accept received knowledge without testing out its tenets with experiments — and at the time, the scholarly world was all about received knowledge from the ancients.
He created the first useful maps in hundreds of years by re-introducing map projections, he was a pioneer in the field of optics, and he began a reformation of the calendar that was adopted hundreds of years later by Pope Gregory XIII.
Some small organisms are visible to the eye, at least in large numbers. Thousands of years ago, people came up with an explanation for the sudden appearance of mold on bread, maggots on meat, mice in grain: The creatures came to life spontaneously in decaying organic matter.
The theory of spontaneous generation — the belief that under the right circumstances living organisms could come into being without parents — was the target of perhaps the first real scientific experiment, in 1668.
That was the year that the Italian physician Francesco Redi set out to prove his idea that maggots came from eggs laid by flies. This was no fluke: Redi was an intellectual who belonged to prestigious literary societies and undertook many experiments over the course of his life.
Redi set out three groups of jars containing rotting meat. One group he closed completely, one he covered with gauze, and one he left completely open.
As time went on, flies enter the uncovered jars. They landed on the gauze on the partially covered jars. However, there were no flies around the totally covered jars.
Later, many maggots appeared on the meat in uncovered jars. A few maggots appeared on the meat in the partially covered jars. No maggots showed up on the meat in the totally covered jars.
Redi's use of several jars for each situation showed that his results could be replicated, an important aspect of any scientific experiment.
Redi had proved that flies had to be present on or around the meat for maggots to generate. His work began to raise doubts about spontaneous generation, though it was a long time before it was truly put to rest.
Anton van Leeuwenhoek was a linen merchant in Delft,the Netherlands, whose passion for science helped make him one of the most important figures in the history of microbiology.
Van Leeuwenhoek saw his first microscope, in use in the fabric trade, in 1653, and he soon bought one of his own. He read Robert Hooke's Micrographia,and it reportedly enthralled him.
Anton van Leeuwenhoek
By 1668, he was grinding lenses for his own simple microscopes and looking at every tiny thing he could find. Those two things — his boundless curiosity and the fact that he kept improving his lenses — were critical to his discoveries.
Van Leeuwenhoek was the first to identify microorganisms, notably protists and bacteria, and the first to describe red blood cells and sperm.
Van Leeuwenhoek's discoveries were documented in letters he wrote to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society of London, between 1673 and Van Leeuwenhoek's death in 1723. The letters made him famous, and the Royal Society made him a fellow in 1680.
Over the course of his lifetime, van Leeuwenhoek made at least 500 microscopes. The few that survive are little more than powerful magnifying glasses. However, he developed his own technology for making them, and he never revealed the secrets of their power and brightness.
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