Dingo and the Baby Archive
Rollercoaster
It's a rare moment of calm in my house.
The house is clean, and dinner is chopped, prepped and marinating in the fridge. My husband is asleep in the livingroom. My new baby is fed and changed and sleeping in his car seat on the table next to my laptop. My cats -- who have been in lockdown because they lunge at the baby whenever he cries-- are peacefully coiled at my feet. They are miraculously angst-free for the first time in weeks. And also for the first time in weeks, no one has called or emailed to ask me whether I'm staying at TechCrunch or to tell me whether I should stay or go. And in China, it's well into the weekend, so the endless flood of urgent emails about Disrupt Beijing has slowed too.
People really don't believe I'm taking time off with the baby. I get several emails a day that start out, "Congrats on the baby...." and continue with a story pitch. You guys aren't helping my work-a-holic tendencies.
It's probably no surprise that the last few weeks have been a bit of a rollercoaster for me between work and home: The Crunchfund was announced on my baby's due date, and the day before he was born I was walking around the mall trying to induce labor, texting with Mike as decisions that would forever change TechCrunch were going down in real time.
I've made a point of not getting into the public debate of everything, and I don't plan to now either. Except to say the two biggest things I miss being on maternity leave are breaking stories with Mike and laughing in my office with Paul. It's sad-- for me-- that neither of those will resume when I go back to work in January. But I'm happy to see good news for each of them today: Paul is starting a new company and Mike has finally launched his new personal blog.
As for me, I really am taking the rest of the year off to bond with my baby. How could I ignore this face?
...There are a few caveats to that, of course. Disrupt Beijing is in a matter of weeks. It's something I spent two years convincing Mike and Heather TechCrunch should do, and I've spent the last six months begging, bartering and pleading to put together an amazing lineup of Western and Eastern entrepreneurs and VCs as speakers and judges. Even though I raced to get the agenda locked before the baby came, there's still a million details floating around. And, yes, I am going to China to emcee the conference in late October, despite one VC who bet me $100 I would throw it all away once the baby came.
I also have a single coming out on the Byliner imprint in the next month or so. I wrote it in my spare time during the last few months of my pregnancy. You know, when I wasn't working a full time job, flying between four continents to promote my last book, planning a conference in China and hiring an editorial team there, and growing a human being. The due date for the single was the same as my due date for the baby. I filed it the morning after, as early labor was already starting.
The single is an extended thought-piece about one of the more popular TechCrunch posts I've written since I've been on staff. The first person to guess which post I'm referring to will get a free copy once it comes out.
I'm excited to see how it does. I've written before about how bullish I am about what Byliner is doing for longform journalism. And since the baby has likely put off my writing a third book for another year or so, I'm hoping an imprint like Byliner will be a good way for me to scratch the constant itch to do projects longer and more in-depth than a blog allows.
(Note: Shortly after writing that paragraph, baby started crying, cats freaked, all hell broke loose...)
Oh, That's OK. I Didn't *Need* That Rib.
I try not to blog much about baby stuff. But this week was insane.
A few months ago when my baby was just getting active, I asked via Twitter whether it was possible for him to break a rib. The answer from my followers was yes, with several links to accounts of it and personal stories. Lucky me: I've also gotten to learn the answer the excrutiatingly painful way.
Last Friday I heard a crack, felt a pop and for the next five days the pain got worse and worse and worse. After surviving 8.25 months of the world's easiest pregnancy, the little guy finally got me good. We actually don't know if the rib is broken, cracked or merely kicked out of place (probably the latter).
But we do know what Western medicine does in all cases: NOTHING. There's pretty much no treatment for it. I wasn't even put on bedrest. There's not really a point, because with an ever-crowded torso and a constantly wiggling, kicking and hiccuping baby inside, there's no way to stabilize anything.
I've had a broken rib before, and it was nowhere near this painful. The doctor estimates I've got an eight-pound kid in there, and I can still feel him growing.
So far two things have made a massive difference: Yoga and acupuncture. Two things I never did before pregnancy. In fact, it's amazing how much of a difference they've made. On Thursday there was so much inflammation that the pain had wrapped around my back. I couldn't take a deep breath, and it felt like a knife was stuck clear through my left side. I felt absolutely hopeless. So hopeless I actually cancelled meetings and took a sick day. This was a solid eight on the one-to-ten pain scale. I have a pretty high tolerance for pain, and I just couldn't do anything. Even typing on my laptop was causing spasms in my ribcage and back.
That night I did five minutes of yoga everytime I woke up for a bathroom break. (That's a lot these days.) I felt demonstrably better by the morning. And after 25 minutes of acupuncture Friday, I still felt the stabbing pain at the rib in question, but my back felt almost 100% better. Today, I got a massage, and it's better still. In just a few days it's gone from an I-will-not-make-it-two-more-weeks amount of pain to a totally-doable-for-the-rest-of-the-pregnancy amount of pain.
If I weren't pregnant I would be spending the week doped up on pain meds and muscle relaxers. It's amazing how much relief I've gotten without it.
So, I have to give huge shout-outs to the places and people that helped in case anyone else goes through this awfulness:
Yoga: I religiously attend Jane Austin's prenatal yoga class at Bernal Yoga and try to make another one during the week at Yoga Tree on Valencia. It is easily the highlight of my week. Jane is revered in prenatal circles in San Francisco, and her classes are packed with pregnant women. Believe all the hype. I credit the bulk of my easy pregnancy to her, and I'm so not a yoga person. I even bought her DVD and did it while I was traveling.
Acupuncture: I went to East-West Integrative Medicine Clinic and saw Holly. I've only been there once, but it made a huge difference, and I plan on going back at least through the rest of the pregnancy. They worked me in quickly and were super nice too.
International Orange Spa: I've been getting a prenatal massage every Saturday morning here for the last few weeks. International Orange offers some nice prenatal packages, and my therapist, Chloe, has done a better job each week as she's gotten to know my aches and pains more. The staff is also super nice. When I had a cat emergency and had to cancel at the last second a few weeks ago, they rescheduled me without charging for the missed appointment.
International Travel Tips: The 23 Weeks Pregnant Edition
During my book travel, I posted a series of International Travel Tips. Most of them revolved around how I managed to live out of a tiny green suitcase for up to five weeks and three countries at a time. Now, I'm doing it pregnant.
For me, traveling pregnant isn't near as difficult as many people imagine. I'm having an insanely easy pregnancy, and the doctor has ordered anyone who wants me to fly across oceans to speak has to fly me business class-- a luxery I've never had before. Still, there are some pregnancy-travel necessities that I've come to appreciate.
1. COMPRESSION SOCKS. Other than a Passport, this is the only thing that would get me to turn around and drive back to the house mid-airport dash. The only real threat of this kind of travel is the increased risk of bloodclots, and one of the best ways to guard against it is wearing maternity support hose. Blech. I wore them on my flight to Indonesia and was miserable. They're just not comfortable and I look about as cool as a 1980s secretary who's switched her heels for tennis shoes for the commute home. Even the maternity ones squeeze my belly more than my ankles.
But I picked up these compression foot-less socks at The Nest, a great maternity boutique in San Francisco, earlier this month, and I adore them. Anytime my ankles turn into elephant feet, I throw them on just like I'd put on legwarmers during a flight or in the evenings and the swelling goes down dramatically. Last week, I wore them under some boots walking all over New York, then caught a flight home in them, and still got home to normal, non-cankles.
They're actually comfortable too. No one minds compression around their ankles-- it's like a massage. It's the full pantyhose pushing on the belly that suck.
2. ThinkThin Bars and Decaf Green Tea Bags. I discovered ThinkThin bars when I was crashing Benchmark Capital's offices a month ago and fell in love with them. Low on sugar, high on fiber and protein and yummy, they are my new favorite ready-snack. And those are more important to have on hand pregnant, because I can't do two things I do constantly when I travel: Skip meals and then eat anything in sight.
I've also found that "decaf" doesn't exactly translate in most places. Having some tea bags in my purse at all times makes it easier to turn down coffee when I'm horribly jetlagged.
3. Maternity Trenchcoat. I got this awesome coat at The Bump, a maternity boutique in Brooklyn that Mr. Lacy discovered while he was working in NYC earlier this year. It's hands-down the best maternity store I've found, and this trench was one of the best things I bought. No jackets button these days-- obviously-- and that's a problem living in windy San Francisco. This trench is great on the road too, because it keeps the wind out, but is incredibly lightweight, packs easily and doesn't wrinkle. It's an instant way to look pulled together-- looking fitted and classic up top, with plenty of room to flare at the belly.
4. Atlas Visa. Regular readers know the most annoying part of all my book travel was dealing with VISAS. Because my husband and I were bootstrapping this book and strapped for cash, I couldn't afford expediters and spent days at consulates, mostly begging to get documents in the short windows I had between trips. Thankfully, a full-time job has changed that, and the best visa expediter I've worked with is Atlas Visa in Washington DC. They've got great relationships with each consulate and are super efficient.
5. Pinky Ball. For those who don't know the way around a pilates studio, this is a hard pink ball about the size of a fist that rolls out all your tense muscles. It takes up little space, and put it on knots in your back and rock back-and-forth in your seat or against a wall, and you've got an in flight massage.
No Swearing on This Book Tour; There Is a Minor Coming
My first book had a rather non-traditional book tour. It was a sprawling, spazzy user-generated affair where I weedled some money out of the publishers, matched it with my own and hit the road to go visit entrepreneurs and social media enthusiasts in fifteen different cities, doing about three events per city. I picked those cities based not on anything qualatative, but based on feedback I got over social media to the question, "Where should I go?"
We did a lot of corporate events, but most of them were held in bars, drinking and talking entrepreneurship until the wee hours. Attendance ranged from thirteen people at one event to more than five hundred at another, and collectively I met thousands of entrepreneurs I may have never heard of in the Silicon Valley echochamber.
What I loved most about this tour was the other conversations that pulling like minded group of geeks together spawned. I'm most honored that the Big Omaha conference grew out of it-- and I'm happy that I'm going back to speak at that event this month.
But return trips to Omaha and my hometown of Memphis aside, this time around book promotion is different. And that reflects not only the very different book I've written, but also how much this book-- considered a reckless gamble when I started it more than two years ago-- has changed me.
The biggest difference: It's an entirely sober tour since I'm carrying precious baby cargo. See also the lack of strappy heels and waist-hugging dresses. (Before picture to your right coming into my SF party for "Once You're Lucky"; I don't even know that I have one from this book's launch party. But trust me, that dress is now in a space bag under the bed to make room in the closet for maternity wear.)
I'm not complaining about any of those. I'm always surprised at the look of horror on someone's face when I say, "Look at me! I'm HUGE!" and the "Oh, no, no, no....you're not..." back-pedal. I know women have conditioned men NEVER to tell us we look "huge" but at least for me, that's not an insult for the next five months. I am reveling in it. I've never been more proud of how I look.
Another big difference: People are actually paying me to show up, rather than just indulging me. Most of this "book tour" -- if you could even call it that-- are just paid speaking gigs from places as diverse as Colombus, Ohio to Lagos, Nigeria. And there's a limit on how many I can do, because unlike the last time around I have a full time job and I can only travel during the second trimester. I'm pretty much booked-solid as you can see here. But I'll likely pick up some more dates after November.
I was deeply terrified of public speaking during my last book tour. Almost pathologically so. But as I've written before, the experience of reporting this new book, spending forty weeks in megacities, slums, villages and in more than one dicey situation has totally reshaped my relationship with fear. It's made me a zen mother-to-be, because I've seen what most pregnant women around the world go through. News flash: We have it very easy. This tour's catch-phrase should be: I'm pregnant, not disabled.
And of course, this tour is fittingly international. The most exciting destination is the one I'm going to next: Nigeria. Nigeria was on the short list of countries I didn't get to during the book's reporting that I really, really wanted to get to, so I was ecstatic when my speaking agents called with a perfectly good excuse to get on a plane and go.
It's our first family vacation, as I'm taking not only the baby but Mr. Lacy too. We're spending an extra week in Nigeria to see the country and do some reporting. If you're as fascinated as I am with this 150-million person nation that's mostly known in the West for 419 scams, stay tuned here and to TechCrunch for my thoughts and experiences. And since Mr. Lacy is coming, expect some amazing photos.
New Book
An unforgettable portrait of the emerging world's entrepreneurial dynamos Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky is the story about that top 1% of people who do more to change their worlds through greed and ambition than politicians, NGOs and nonprofits ever can. This new breed of self-starter is taking local turmoil and turning it into opportunities, making millions, creating thousands of jobs and changing the face of modern entrepreneurship at the same time. To tell this story, Lacy spent forty weeks traveling through Asia, South America and Africa hunting down the most impressive up-and-comers the developed world has never heard of....yet.
Buy it from these sellers
Sarah Lacy is an award-winning reporter who has covered high-growth entrepreneurship for more than fifteen years. She is the founder, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of PandoDaily.com, the site-of-record for the startup ecosystem. She lives in San Francisco.
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