Jami Mays

the tech nerd in your pocket

Blog

One Week Old

by

Melissa Pepin is a client and dear friend here in Athens. She did such an incredible job with our maternity pictures and came to visit us last weekend when Charlie was a week old.

Melissa doesn’t do the typical “newborn” portraits where you wrap them up in cheesecloth and hang them from the ceiling or perch them atop a basket full of teddy bears. She’s such an authentic and real person and her newborn portrait style reflects that.

Colin asked me that morning, before she came, “What do you want me to wear?” I guess I was a little obsessing/controlling regarding our wardrobe for the maternity pictures. Heh! I told him to wear whatever he wanted to wear — that I wanted the pictures to just look like Melissa popped in for a visit. I just adore what she captured. I hope you like them, too!

[foogallery id=”275″]

Charlie’s Birth Story

by

I plan to come back and update this post with the full birth story when I have more time. (update below)

In the meantime, the pictures will have to suffice. HUGE thank you to Amy Moss for capturing the event so beautifully.

I’ve not posted the crowning shots — as incredible and empowering as they are — I’m not ready for my lady bits to be on the internet just yet. 🙂

Update: The Birth Story

I had been having erratic contractions for several weeks — most of the time, they’d start in mid-afternoon and last until bedtime. Nothing was ever strong enough to make me think that it was “real” labor yet, but we made sure to wrap up all the loose ends: installing the carseat, finishing his room, washing up all the cloth diapers, packing the hospital bags, etc.

We worked it out with my exhusband so that Harrison could be home for the delivery. We had plans to pick him up from church camp on June 27th — June 28th was our due date. We puttered around together, waiting for the baby, busying ourselves with things around the house, pretty much staying close to home.

On Thursday, July 2nd, I got up early and went to go get a haircut. A few days earlier, I had been commiserating with another pregnant mom on a local parenting Facebook group. She was 38 weeks pregnant and getting impatient and increasingly uncomfortable and I told her she needed to do something to take care of herself. Then I caught myself in the mirror and thought, “Oooh, mama needs a haircut herself.” So, off to Washington Square to see Shayne for a very pregnant haircut.

After that, I came home and Harrison and I set to tackle his closet — he came back from the first half of summer with his dad and his feet had grown a size and a half and I realized we needed to purge his closet of all the clothes he had outgrown so that I could figure out what he would need for the upcoming school year. I gingerly lowered my round, pregnant butt onto his floor and my eyes widened because, “Holy shit, did I just pee my pants?”

It wouldn’t have been unheard of — I was VERY pregnant and going to the bathroom every 30-45 minutes anyway because of the pressure on my bladder. At only 5′ tall, it’s pretty early in the pregnancy when you just, sort of, run out of room in there. So I got up, changed my pants, went to the bathroom and then went back to Harrison’s room, plopped myself back on the floor and, gush-gush-gush, I did it again! There’s NO WAY I just peed my pants again!

It dawned on me that my water was probably broken. I don’t remember my water ever breaking with Harrison, though I think I recall it trickling during active labor, so I changed my pants again and put on a pad this time and sat down to continue helping Harrison clean out his closet. We filled a trash bag with pajamas and shoes that he had outgrown (and I discovered that he only had one pair of shoes, a pair of flipflops, that fit him).

IMG_1645   IMG_1646

I texted Colin. An hour later, he was home from work, clearly concerned but not pressuring me or trying to let me know that he was concerned. He was quietly pacing the house, making sure all of the loose ends were handled.

I called my doctor’s office to alert the midwives that my water had broken, but that I wasn’t having contractions. I remembered that I had one of my midwife’s cell phone number, Alexa. And I also remembered that she was going to be on-call starting that evening. So I pulled my phone out and texted her as well. We pinged back and forth a bit and I shared with her that the water I was collecting in my pad was a little bit yellow. I laughed when she asked me to text her a picture of my pad (there’s a first time for everything!).

She was a little concerned by the coloring, looked a little bit like there might be meconium in my water. It was late enough in the day that getting checked at the office wouldn’t happen before the office closed. In addition, Meredith, another midwife in the practice was already at the hospital at the tail end of a long shift there. Alexa said she’d let Meredith know I was coming up to the hospital to get heart tones checked. We put all the hospital bags in the car and the three of us headed to the hospital. We got the last room on the floor and arrived shortly after 4pm. We left all the stuff in the car – I was certain that we’d be heading home once they checked me. I wasn’t even having any of my fake-labor contractions!

It took a few hours for my birthing team to come to a consensus. I was 3cms dilated and 60% effaced. I had a home birth with Harrison and did not want to spend any additional time at the hospital unless I really had to be there. My midwives knew that and really waited to make the final call. Ultimately, what they told me was that if I they were my homebirth midwives, they’d be coming to my home at this point, even if contractions hadn’t started, so that they could listen to Charlie’s heart tones. So… We were officially admitted.

Colin and Harrison went to the car to retrieve all of our bags and my brother in law came to pickup Harrison so he could spend the night with them. We got some takeout, unpacked all of our stuff and watched Family Feud together in the room. We were in bed by 10:30, in better spirits than I anticipated, considering where we were sleeping.

At 1:30 in the morning, I woke up with a steady, strong pain and I just knew it was a legit contraction. I waited in the bed until I had a few more before I woke up Colin, texted Devon (our doula) and texted Amy (our photographer). Both Devon and Amy had an hour+ drive ahead of them to get to St. Mary’s Hospital, so I wanted to make sure we gave them both plenty of time.

Sidenote:

Devon was my doula at Harrison’s birth 12 1/2 years ago. When we met, she came over to my house with pink hair, braless with her young toddler daughter. We sat on my mother’s back deck and she nursed her daughter while we talked about what I wanted my birth to look like. It was very early in her career as a doula and she was working for my mother’s company. After his birth, I moved to Atlanta and Devon and I became best friends. To have her at Charlie’s birth felt like the cycles of life coming full circle.

My mother had already driven to my sister’s house, where Harrison was spending the night. We enlisted her to be Harrison’s doula — to answer questions and shepherd him in and out as he was comfortable. My niece, Savannah (she and Harrison are the same age) wanted to attend the birth as well, so my sister would be coming when she came. We texted mom at 2am to let her know what was happening, but didn’t get a reply from her. (I laughed about this later — my mother, the professional doula, slept through her daughter’s in-labor-text!)

When Colin woke up, he was giddy with anticipation. I was pretty excited as well to actually BE in labor finally. I think we were both so high on adrenaline and excitement, it was easy to forget that we had only slept for like three hours. From here, my memory is a little spotty. I think Amy arrived shortly after 2:30, Devon got there about 3:30.

We walked the halls a little bit, but I ended up preferring to be in the room.I took a short nap in the recliner, but it was early labor still, so I was laughing with Colin and present between contractions still. I found a position I really liked, standing/kneeling/sitting on the ball with my upper body draped over the end of the bed. Because of the meconium, they were checking heart tones every half hour. The wireless monitor wasn’t working, so this meant that whatever position I was in, I had to position myself so that they could hold up the monitor, find his heart beat and listen to it for a minute. This was probably the most annoying part of labor, especially as things really ramped up and my contractions were closer together because I would have to stand up or hold myself in a position for the nurse even through a contraction.

Mom, Julie, Savannah and Harrison arrived around 5:30 or 6am. I wasn’t quite ready for the kids to come into the room yet, so Colin waited for my signal before inviting them into the room. This is when labor really picked up and got hard.

Sidenote:

Savannah, my niece, had called me a few weeks ago with a semi-rehearsed speech requesting to attend Charlie’s birth. She had attended her little sister’s birth, but she was only six then. She was really curious about the labor and delivery and also told me that she felt like attending Charlie’s birth would bridge the age gap for them and bring them closer. She didn’t want to be disconnected from her cousin just because she was 12 years older than him.

As her aunt, a feminist, proud natural birther, I was honored and excited to be able to invite her into the birthing space to be present and witness it happening. It felt like… Almost like it was my womanly duty to her to mirror the work that her mother had already done and show her what she was capable of, through my birth experience. Birth is normal. Our bodies stretch and the babies come out. The more normal birth could be for her — especially this early in her life — the more normal birth would remain for her. It was a gift, really, to me to have her there.

I got into the tub — oh, the glorious tub! — and it was so large that my entire body fit, fully stretched and so deep that getting in and out almost required me to straddle the side. I think I was probably in there for an hour and the contractions were coming fast and hard now. Alexa came over and asked me to get out of the tub so she could check me — at this point, I hadn’t been checked since before I was admitted the night before. I don’t recall dilation/effacement numbers, but I had a small, stretchy bit of cervix left and felt a little pushy.

I climbed up onto the bed, thinking it would be nice to be in a modified hands and knees position to push, but my pushing just wasn’t productive. My sister wrapped the rebozo (like a giant, woven scarf) around her back and I held onto the ends, using the leverage to help me push.

Turns out, Charlie was in a less than desirable position. Instead of tucking his chin down so that he could fit into the birth canal, he was presenting in a military position, almost like he was looking straight forward, like a saluting position. This caused his head to get sort of wedged up against my pelvis and he was not going to come out like that.

Figure B is the Military Postion - Figure A is what he should have done - Figures C & D are dangerous because the neck could break Source
Figure B is the Military Postion – Figure A is what he should have done – Figures C & D are dangerous because the neck could break Source

So, my mother pulled Devon aside and explained to her how to do the ketchup bottle to me to try to knock Charlie loose from his wedged position so that he could have a chance to re-enter the birth canal with a better position.

So what is the ketchup bottle? I mean, Devon basically thumped my sits bones with open palms, like I was a bottle of ketchup… And as hilarious as it sounds, that shit worked!

At this point, I was really hitting the end of my energy reserves. I would have liked to have gotten up to a squatting position, but I just couldn’t find the energy. Devon and my sister held my legs up and, at each contraction, I would pull up on my own legs, mimicking a squatting position. Each contraction brought him closer. I remember bearing down with everything I had, taking a breath and doing it again and thinking, “Is this contraction ever going to end?”

Savannah was spooning ice into my mouth, but my mom swapped with her so she could be on the business end of things. Harrison was content, across the room, not watching, his back to me, but listening, Colin was called over by Alexa to catch Charlie and he wasn’t sure what to do. She said, “Put your hands on him!” His head crowned — fuck, it burned! I forgot how much it burned! — and with one more contraction, his body followed. He let out one cry and Alexa put him on my stomach and then his body flopped.

The NICU nurses were in the room — standard protocol when there is meconium — the room was so quiet. One thousand one… One thousand two… One thousand three… Alexa instructed Colin on how to cut the cord and the NICU nurses wanted him. There’s a lot at risk if the baby inhales the meconium into his lungs — so they wanted to suck it all out before he took in a big breath. They were looking for him to cry and his silence alerted them that they might need to spring into action.

Alexa scooped him up, pivoted and took two steps toward the NICU team and then Charlie let out a few great, big, loud howls and the NICU team said he was fine, so she spun on her heels and put him back on my belly. He was fine and all mine!

He was 19 1/2 inches, 7 pounds, 3 ounces. Born at 11:37am on July 3, 2015.

I typed the last half of this post with one hand while holding a fussy two week old with the other. Forgive the typos.

[foogallery id=”203″]

Blockquotes: Restyling an otherwise under-used WordPress feature

by

Most of my clients don’t use block quotes in the way they’re intended. Unless you’re a magazine and will be actually quoting folks for use in your content, there are better ways to make use of the Block Quote styling that is built into your theme.

By default, block quotes are ugly, boring and really uninteresting:

 

Screen Shot 2015-06-23 at 3.39.49 PM

I mean, it gets the job done, but it’s boring as hell. Light grey, italic text offset to the right a little bit…

When I’m working with a new client, I like to figure out a way to make better use of the block quote feature. Most of my clients are pretty comfortable inside the Visual Text editor, but they’re not comfortable adding custom styling via the Text Editor. Rather than create a custom style that my client will never actually use — and also, rather than let the blockquote sit dormant and never GET used, I like to style up my block quotes to be pretty.

Here are a couple of examples:

Phillips Gradick Engineering is a client of mine in Atlanta. They’re a well-established company and their website redesign was a slick, modern facelift highlighting their varied portfolio of projects. Click here to visit their site.

Screen Shot 2015-06-23 at 3.47.26 PM

And the CSS to accomplish this was pretty straightforward:

blockquote,
blockquote::before {
 color: #333;
}

blockquote {
 background-image: url('images/texture_white.png');
 border: 1px solid #f5f5f5;
 padding: 10px;
 margin: 40px;
}

blockquote::before {
content: "\201C";
display: block;
font-size: 150px;
height: 0;
left: -52px;
position: relative;
top: -77px;
}

I added the background image on line 7 (to match the rest of the background images on the site in the header and footer), a very light border on line 8, increased the size and darkened the color on the unicode character on line 14.

And now, instead of just your basic boring blockquote, you’ve got a nice, still pretty minimally styled blockquote that ACTUALLY looks like somebody designed something.

Another example, this time slightly more involved, is with one of my therapist clients, Megan Swisher with Swisher Psychological Services (visit site here). Megan had worked with copywriter extraordinaire Charlotte Riley and one of the elements that kept coming up in her copy were stylized versions of quotes on a few pages. Initially, I took the lazy designer’s way out and just built them in Adobe Illustrator and uploaded the images. But because of the responsive nature of her child theme (Adorn by Restored 316), these images took up too much real estate on desktop and not really quite enough on mobile devices.

Enter… The styled blockquote!

Screen Shot 2015-06-23 at 4.01.58 PM

This time, I reinvented the blockquote as it’s own special little creature.


blockquote,
blockquote::before {
color: #262626;
}

blockquote {
margin: 0;
font-family: Emblema-Fill1Basic;
font-size: 30px;
line-height: 40px;
text-align: justify;
color: #262626;
background-color: #229b91;
padding: 0px 40px 10px 40px;
border: 1px solid #262626;
margin-bottom: 20px;
background-image: url(images/menu-cursor-01-01.png);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: top center;
padding-top: 70px;
background-position-y: 20px;
}

blockquote::before {
content: none;
display: block;
font-size: 30px;
height: 0;
left: -20px;
position: relative;
top: -10px;
}

And, to combat the issue with the imbalance of mobile responsive design, I added this little bit to the media queries:


@media only screen and (max-width: 460px) {

blockquote {
padding: 0px 20px 0px 20px;
padding-top: 60px;
background-position-y: 20px;
font-size: 20px;
line-height: 25px;
text-align: center;
}

Inside the text editor, Megan needs to only create her quote, align the quote to the left and the attribution to the right and highlight the text, click the blockquotes button and wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, it’s beautiful. Not only does it match and reinforce her branding, but it’s just really damn easy for her to recreate quotes on the fly. Having the ability to do shit for yourself as a site owner = autonomy. Autonomy will save you money in the long run (and this designer will love you for wanting to do this kind of shit on your own).

Have you seen any pretty blockquotes in the wild? Give it a shot and make something beautiful.

 

 

Sucker Punched: Gestational Diabetes

by

I realize I haven’t written in a while and I feel compelled to do that blogger thing where you apologize for it being so long since you’ve updated your blog, but the truth is, none of y’all have been sitting with bated breath since my last post in October. And really, the bigger truth is that I want this blog to be for ME, not for YOU (#sorrynotsorry). So, I’ll write when I wanna write.

So, the news you’ve missed, if we aren’t close in real life is that we’re pregnant! Charles Howard Mays is due at the end of June and we could not be more excited about how our family is growing. Having a 12 year old son at home is kind of like having two daddies in the house to care for me. It’s been awesome.

This past week, I was diagnosed with Gestational Diabetes and it was a really low point emotionally. The most pervasive feeling is guilt – did I do this to myself? Did I do this Charlie? And after that, fear. I was terrified that I would have a huge baby, that my plans for a natural hospital birth with no intervention (a “home birth in the hospital” is what I’m aiming for) would be dashed.

I bought this book and slowly, with the help of the most supportive husband on the planet, pulled myself out of my panic. I’m really lucky that my husband is a chef – he’s taking on this new low/no-carb and low/no-sugar diet on as a personal chef’s challenge. I’m really fortunate to be with a midwifery practice that isn’t panicking and pushing me with fear and talk of inductions.

For now, I’m testing my blood sugar and closely monitoring what I eat. My midwife believes I’ll be able to get a handle on it by changing my diet, so I’m white-knuckling to that belief as well.

 

More later…

A dysfunctional look back

by

What do you see as the difference between religion that causes trauma and religion that doesn’t?

Winell: Religion causes trauma when it is highly controlling and prevents people from thinking for themselves and trusting their own feelings. Groups that demand obedience and conformity produce fear, not love and growth. With constant judgment of self and others, people become alienated from themselves, each other, and the world. Religion in its worst forms causes separation. Source

That.

That paragraph describes my experience in my church when I was in high school and the first year of college.

Even down to the smallest things — that we were not allowed to go on single dates, that we had to have roommates, and not just like, housemate-roommates, but like, two young women sharing a bedroom. That I was allegedly so untrustworthy — when I was at the height of my “good behavior” no less — that I couldn’t be left to make decisions on my own. I wasn’t even allowed to play after school soccer at my high school because it was mostly guys and none of them went to my church. The leadership felt like it was not a good situation to spend so much unsupervised time with non-christians, especially non-christian guys.

Pair it with the ever-present judgment of the “worldly” people around me and the intense desire to separate ourselves from the “rest” — we used to have own PROM PARTIES — and I don’t mean like “prom after parties where everybody hooked up.” I mean, we’d buy tickets to our high school’s prom, go for an hour, dance to one or two songs, take pictures and then LEAVE AND GO TO A CHURCH SPONSORED PROM-STYLE PARTY AT A HOTEL BALLROOM. Complete with radio-edited music from a church member DJ and teen “workers” who were there chaperoning things… When I was SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD.

I remember one Congregational Sunday at the World Congress Center, Steve Sapp was on stage and said, “If you are not a member of the International Church of Christ, you are going to hell.” And we all cheered. Like, thunderous applause. I remember feeling a sense of pride in my inclusion to such an exclusive order.

I remember doing things out of fear of being rebuked, not because they were things I wanted to do, but because I was SO desperate to be “sharp” and I wanted to be noticed for doing great things so that I could be someone that the boys liked or so that I could stand out as a “leader” or something… These things included pressuring my genuine friends (Lynn! Sheri! ugh!) — people who liked me for who I was — to come to MY church and study the bible with ME. I remember feeling like such a failure because I never personally was “fruitful” and never was able to baptize someone myself.

It was drilled into us that the ultimate goal, as a young woman, was to be sharp so that we could marry sharp men and lead ministries together. Like, the ultimate level of success for a young christian woman at my church was to be in a relationship with a man who was a great ministry leader — nobody talked to me about pursuing my own dreams. I remember saying to people, when they’d ask what I was going to major in at college, “It doesn’t matter. I just want to get married and have babies.” I SAID THAT. Multiple times, even!

I remember having to say yes to dates with “brothers” at church that I was not interested in, that I did not like, that I had nothing in common with… All in the name of “encouraging” them — but when I think about how fucked up it is to basically strong arm young women into the arms of young men based on where their religious affiliation is situated… It makes me sick. Looking back, I realize that I wasn’t bad at picking partners through my twenties. This is a DIRECT result of not learning, as a teenager, how to say no. How to be selective. How to be choosy.

It’s bananas, when I look back, and really start to inspect things, how terribly, terribly wrong they had it when I was a teenager.

Buz Amason

by

I needed a total website makeover for the ministry I work for. Jami did a great job of explaining to me the options for my new website, what functionality it would have, and how I could update it. She also worked with me in getting it on a server when I had problems with the server I had been using. Overall, I am very pleased with the look of the website and the support I’ve received from Jami.

[Read more…] about Buz Amason