Clickity click click

I have been thinking a lot but not blogging a lot. I have been reading a lot of other people’s thoughts. Here are some I’d like to share with you until I can come up with something else to say. Go on, click on the link and read what these people have to say.

Mojan’s recent post on Motherhood

She talks about how being a mother amplifies, on some days, her own inadequacies. She finally faces her “mirror” and realizes that it reflects back the most when she is looking into it the most. Very honest. Very sweet.

Arun’s post on what he and his family did during Earth Hour

They did some star gazing with the help of Stellarium, a program that helps you figure out what you’re looking at. Arun’s blog is a great one! He’s sincere and lighthearted while sharing what he’s learning about being a dad.

Susan’s post about healing after chemotherapy.

This is from a strong woman who won’t let cancer change her desire to be healthy, happy (she’s completely full of life!), and spiritually dedicated. She has also shares her drawings of flowers, a beautiful addition to her recovery.

Enjoy!

Comfort

My pre-pregnancy size 8 pants were nice while they lasted. Now that a year has gone by since giving birth, I’m tired of not having clothes that fit. For a while, I just kept using my maternity clothes and was waiting patiently for the extra pounds to come off with nursing. I could probably wait some more but it’s winter and I didn’t have anything warm to wear on my lower half that fit. Last month, I bought a couple pairs of pants from Ann Taylor Loft- just in time for winter. I’m realizing that the size 12 pants I bought are perfect not only because they’re realistic (and, really, I was feeling more comfortable in my size 10’s before baby anyway) and there’s more room to move in.

Before getting pregnant, my clothes were definitely more snug than they are now. I appreciate the room. On one hand, on a shirt, there’s more room to pull it up (and not expose your tummy- I don’t care about my breast being seen) to nurse. I don’t know what’s on the other hand, but you get the picture.

So, for comfort, I’m wearing clothes that fit better and I’m not worried about getting back into my old clothes. Luckily, I’ve got some pretty slim friends here and have been giving away the clothes that don’t fit me right now. It’s a win-win situation. I get rid of the pile of clothes that don’t fit and a friend gets some nice clothes for free. It’s also nice to know that a friend is wearing them. It’s almost like having visitation rights with your old clothes. You can see them from time to time and appreciate their color, texture and drape.

I drafted this post a couple of weeks ago and now, here I am, sitting on the pockets of my old size 10 pants. Go figure.

Doesshesleepthroughthenight?

Ok. Mothers. How many times has someone asked you this question?

At first, I always feel like saying, “She’s a baby!” and laughing. (Honestly, folks, she’s a baby. She’s not old enough to sleep without waking up and nursing or peeing.) When I react this way, I get the funniest looks. As if my answer didn’t answer their question. So then I proceed to say that she does. I’m then countered by the follow-up question, “She doesn’t wake up at all?” Then, I talk about the fact that she does wake up to nurse but falls back asleep pretty easily unless there’s something else going on with her. “What big eyes” comes next.

So, really, the “doesshesleepthroughthenight” question is a springboard for the next comment or set of comments. It doesn’t upset me to get the question and I’m not rude to those that ask it. It just amazes me how important a small baby’s sleep is to others. I’ve heard that in other countries what a baby is eating is the question that replaces the sleep question. It’s interesting that Americans are so concerned with sleep- which makes sense since this is quite the overtired population. We do too much, don’t slow down and when we do, we think we should be doing “something”. Milk every minute, you’re lead to think. In that case, wouldn’t Americans be more interested in whether a baby nursed during the night (bad pun but I’m trying to make a point here ) and used every essential resource to its full capacity? (have I gone too far?)

For the record: On a typical day bilingual baby falls asleep between 9:30pm and 11pm (yeah, big window, but you get used to it) and then wakes up between 7am and 9am. So, really, she’s in bed for about 10 hours every night. She nurses during the night (and how) and takes a couple of naps during the day. When she’s had a great couple of daytime naps, she sleeps better at night. The opposite is true, too. On a recent flight out west, she got two 1-hour naps during the whole trip. She was happy as can be and was alert and social (as is natural for babies…LGG) until 11pm- and that was crossing a couple of time zones. She had a rough night (didshesleepthroughthenight?) and woke up at 6am the next morning.

Anyway. I don’t want to bore you to tears telling you about my baby’s sleep patterns when you’d rather hear about her first steps. In the end, I’d rather not get the question after seeing people’s eyes gloss over when they hear me avoiding the typical ”yes” or “no” response. There ya go.

Praise vs. Less talk

I read a book called The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff and I’ve been trying to figure out a way to explain it to people- which I haven’t (really). This concept didn’t strike me as “out there” or so incredibly wild that I couldn’t see how it works. Rather, I just saw in how many ways I’d have to trust my instincts more. On Liedloff’s website she gives a list of practices that are in tune with the continuum concept, as well as describing others that she finds “a baby subjected to modern Western childbirth and child-care practices often experiences,” like…

sensing (and conforming to) his caregivers’ expectations that he is incapable of self-preservation, is innately antisocial, and cannot learn correct behavior without strict controls, threats and a variety of manipulative “parenting techniques” that undermine his exquisitely evolved learning process.

The way it reads within the continuum is: “sensing (and fulfilling) his elders’ expectations that he is innately social and cooperative and has strong self-preservation instincts, and that he is welcome and worthy.” This idea that babies/children are innately social and cooperative is one that, if you think about it, you may find that you agree with BUT you may not practice. When we praise a child for being social with someone, in a sense we’re telling them that we don’t expect them to be social. When we praise them (or show how amazed we are) at their “sharing” behavior, we’re telling them with our words, tone of voice, and body language that we don’t expect them to want to share. When we tell a child (this one’s the hardest one!) to “be careful… I don’t want you to hurt yourself/fall/etc” we’re telling them that we don’t expect them to have any self-preservation instincts. We will be watching the whole time and we will pull them away when it gets dangerous.

We have a propane-fueled “wood stove” heater in our living room and it can get pretty hot. Before reading the Continuum Concept I kept bilingual baby away from it all the time. I kept going over and telling her how it would be hot in the winter. First off, I couldn’t reconcile the fact that she knows only the present, so this “it will be…” made no sense at all. After reading the book, I’d let her pat the front of the stove thinking that it would make much more sense to teach her hot vs. cold when there actually was a difference to show her. The day came when the heater turned on. She was so intrigued by it. She went up to it (with me right behind her) and slowly moved her hand toward it. She kept looking at me to see what she should do. I kept telling her that I was there. Nothing else. I didn’t want to tell her that she’d get burned because if she really did have “strong self-preservation instincts” she wouldn’t. I didn’t want to tell her to be careful because she was being careful. Any knee-jerk comment I would have made would have been pointless. She eventually did lightly touch the glass of the stove but she didn’t put her whole hand on it and she didn’t put her whole weight on it nor did she leave it there for more than a mili second.

She has now taught herself how to be careful around the heating stove. I kept myself from telling her that she had done well or that she was a “good girl”. I really just kept thinking that I was there for her to explore and I wasn’t going to blow extra air out my mouth to say anything more than “I’m here”.

What would you do?

Here’s a link to the Parenting Pit giving 5 reasons to stop saying “Good job”.

Feeling tired?

What if someone told you that (as long as you weren’t sick or in any other way ill) all you had to do was “fake it till you make it”? During the change of seasons, it’s common for folks to feel worn out. This is the season where things start to shift into a slower pace, less sun, more rain, trees and plants closing up shop for the winter… Gretchen at Happiness Project has vowed to stop saying that she’s tired. She feels that if she only would stop complaining she might make herself feel better. Changing your pace, on purpose, can make all the difference. You may have noticed a day when you felt tired and then all of a sudden you ran into a friend with whom you talked, laughed and just had a good time. As you walked away you thought to yourself, “hey, I feel pretty good now” only to slow yourself back into the lull of the “I’m tired” sequence.

I remember when I was pregnant my co-workers would ask me, “Are you tired?”, “How tired are you today?” and “How are you sleeping?” They wanted to know how awful I was feeling and truthfully I couldn’t have felt better. I started to notice that they really wanted to open up an “I’m tired” conversation and I just didn’t. That really got me focused on the energy I did have. Even in my last trimester, I recall having a good amount of energy. I wonder how much of that was positive thinking…

As you notice the patterns useful to you for regaining energy on a day when you feel you are so tired and nobody could possibly be more tired that you are, try applying the things you learn to wake yourself up and be happy. I know that sounds cliched but I’m finding with a baby who doesn’t have regular patterns of sleep that I need to stay as energetic and positive as possible, regardless of how much sleep I’m getting. Truthfully, it helps to chat with those people in my life that I feel positive around- it makes all the difference.

Oh. And check out the comments on Gretchen’s post. The readers over there have great ideas!

Canadian Flu shot humour and then some…

You have to hand it to the Canadians. They’ve got a good sense of humour. Check out this clip my friend Juliet sent me on the flu shot.

Now, let’s talk about the flu shot. (Yeah, I just can’t let it go) I find it interesting that I wasn’t told to get the flu shot while I was pregnant. I do know that many of my pregnant friends (then and now) have had the flu shot while pregnant and I’m curious why they were told it was good or necessary or whatever while I wasn’t. Why were my doctors so confident?

I started googling “pregnancy and flu shot” and got a bunch of links telling me that the flu shot was recommended for pregnant women who would be pregnant during the flu season- from the CDC no less, among others. I’m sure you’ve seen the recent AP news story criticizing parents that don’t want to vaccinate their school-aged children by using the religious exemption. (Did you recognize Paul Offit’s name- he’s named as a big proponent of vaccines… because he has a patent on the rotavirus vaccine. He also receives money from the big Pharm companies to do his research. So, he has a “special” cha-ching interest.) They have failed to address the issue of parents’ fear of what exactly is in the vaccines, how little they are tested for side effects and really how ineffective they turn out to be- remember you still can get one of these illnesses even though you’ve received the vaccine. All of these concerns lead parents to do what they feel they need to do to protect their children. Now, we could say that this is going overboard but once you start down research lane it’s hard to comply with the majority (if not all) of the vaccines required for small children.

This article from the AP states: “Unvaccinated children can spread diseases to others who have not gotten their shots or those for whom vaccinations provided less-than-complete protection.” So, if a child has received a vaccines, why would the parent be afraid of the unvaxed kid? I’m sure we all saw the hole in that argument. It also states that there is no more mercury in vaccines. Now that is a half truth. There are vaccines without thimerosal (mercury) but you have to ask for them. If you don’t ask, they may not offer the information. (Always ask to see the ingredient list before receiving a vaccine.)

After that search did me no good as to see the other side of the vaccine debate, I went to the Mothering.com forums. There are some smart women over there. You can always find intelligent arguments for either side of a debate. On the forum, I found a link to the Vaccine Risk Awareness Network. On that site, there’s a article talking about the flu shot and pregnancy that might be of interest. The article goes through a bunch of research to see what the evidence settles on. They say, “Because the benefits of influenza vaccination during pregnancy appear lacking, a safety-benefit analysis should not tolerate any risk to vaccine recipients or their offspring, even at a theoretical level.” But how can they gather more evidence if the flu vaccine keeps changing every season? This is one of my main concerns with vaccines in general. They are “making them better” than the old vaccine but these new vaccines aren’t being tested in the lab but in practice. That’s where they get their research on the vaccine’s effectiveness and side effects- from our children. Why do you think the CDC and the FDA have VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System)? After a couple of months (possibly years) they find out that the “new” vaccine was causing short-term reactions so they create an “even better one” that they start giving out. It’s a vicious cycle.

If you’re still interested and have more questions- which I hope you do- here’s a link to the Mothering.com forum with a great thread with more evidence-based research on the flu vaccine during pregnancy. Here’s an another thread with archived links to some vaccine discussions.

Now, why would a doctor tell a woman who is pregnant to get the flu shot? This is where I’m lost. We are brought up to trust doctors and vaccines. Now, all of a sudden, I can’t trust either? I have to do all the work of finding article after article about ingredients, side effects, personal vaccine horror stories, actual information about the diseases themselves; sit down and absorb all of this… while pregnant??? And the proof I have that makes me doubt the safety over the benefit of vaccines isn’t even respected by my doctor? I can see why most pregnant women don’t have more information. It’s too much. Information is buried and families that don’t vaccinate or do delayed/selective vaccines (click here for some examples of this kind of schedule) are called names. Who wants to deal with that when hormones are already shoring up? Not me. And I didn’t. Not until I had my daughter.

You may be wondering if I wouldn’t rather avoid any “preventable diseases”. This is the big question. Can I protect my daughter from all harm? I can’t. The odds of getting the majority of these “preventable diseases” are low. The odds of getting a bad reaction to a vaccine are also low. However, the consequences could be worse. For example, if you’re vaccinated for meningitis you still can get meningitis but with a higher probability of a more severe case than if you had not been vaccinated (Medela’s website states that: “Breastfed children are four times less likely to contract the infections that cause meningitis.“). Vaccines are just not the thing we want our daughter to try out… to see if they work. This is our family’s choice. (That should be all we need to say to defend our decision.)

I’m not certain but I believe that the only way the government can, by law, make you get the flu shot is if there’s an epidemic. So, if you’re wary of this vaccine, go to the end of the line and hope they run out before you get up there.

Next, I’ll write about Johnny Depp- lighten things up around here. Stay tuned.

Daily affirmation

A silent tongue is the safest.

‘Abdú’l-Bahá

There is no parenting recipe

No matter what any expert says, there is no such thing as a recipe for parenting. No “to-do” list that’ll score you any amount of mommy or daddy points. There are, however, a number of people who write well about parenting. In my opinion, you can take or leave any of it. Look into it, use your instinct and stand by your thoughtful decision.

Crunchymama gave her thoughts on her blog on what crunchy parenting meant to her and I was thinking I’d like to put some thoughts down on my parenting style but then I read an editorial by Peggy O’Mara, editor of Mothering Magazine on what she thought Natural Family Living meant and thought it was so well written I’d have to share it here. I actually like it so much I’m going to leave it as a permanent fixture on my sidebar. So, instead of sharing my ideas and ideals of parenthood, I’d like to share what Peggy has to say in her editorial. She talks about following our maternal instincts and trusting your body, your baby and yourself.

Read it and see what you think.

My theory about a thriller

I can’t get out of my head the following words:

Everything is something. 

I’ve thought before that I felt like I wasn’t doing anything and that thought got me all knotted up. I’d feel stunted. Today, it feels different. My daughter is going through something. I don’t know what. She’s been acting different. It’s not a cold. It always could be another tooth, but the signs are strong in that area. So I’m thinking that it’s probably something else. I remember reading somewhere that usually when your child seems to be possessed you can count on something big happening shortly after.

In other words, if you were to find yourself thinking your baby was “fussy” or “crying for no reason” or “out of it” or “tired all the time” or even “omg, that’s the third nap today!” (and they’re already 9 months old!), you can count on a developmental change. It’s a matter of patience and knowing that it’s all part of the ebb and flow of their ever-changing lives. Now, how long will it take before we see the marvels of our baby’s new skill? Who. Knows. I did mention patience, right? I should remind myself to mention it again.

What has she been working on so hard that she’s tired all the time? What’s got her so focused that she doesn’t even want a wet diaper changed…. And cries when we change it? It’s the suspense no thriller can match. In a movie you know the killer is right around the corner and that the writer, the producer and the director (among others) wouldn’t leave you building the suspense over several weeks. A baby works more like Shakespeare. She gives you a scare, a cry and some suspense. Then, right when you think you’re going to find out who done it, she comes in with comedy. You get all distracted and then bam! there’s something else.

We’ll see what flows… to be continued…

Sweet land of motherhood

An hour. We’d be out an hour. At most. But nobody would be around. No kids. No moms no dads. The children’s library would be deserted. No children for my daughter to play with. No moms to meet and chat with. No noise. Nothing. I head over to the old issues of Mothering magazine to see what I want to leave under my pillow for naptime reading. As I reach for an issue that promises a desperate solution to morning sickness, which I want to read to a friend, I notice a mom and her child playing by the window. I’ve never seen her before. I’ve never seen her daughter, who has to be the same age as mine. How can this be happening? Nobody ever comes to the library during universal nap time. The time between noon and 3 in the afternoon is when a lot of toddlers take their nap and this town is full of toddlers. Those of us with younger babies still quietly lay them down for 2 or 3 naps a day.

This mom and I get into talking. The regular chit chat that moms engage in when they first meet. In parenthesis I’d like to share with you what I think these questions translate to. Each question is returned by the answering mother. Reading body language helps decipher what each of us mean.

How old is your baby? (If they’re close in age, could we hang out?)

Where do you live? (If you don’t live too far, could we hang out?)

What’s your baby’s name? (I’m really interested in hanging out with you and I won’t forget your baby’s name. I promise.)

After we go through a mother’s repertoire of questions, the other mother invites us to her daughter’s birthday party, which requires us to give her our email. She also threw in that we could also get together besides the party. Woohoo! Houston, we’ve made contact!

You know, it’s the little things that get me now. I used to be much more outgoing than I am now, as you can tell by the things I think of when I’m going through the monotony of questions that we go through so we can step into the next phase of getting to know someone. Whenever I see a new mom with her little one (who could potentially be around my daughter’s age) I wonder if we could be friends. What’s great is that now that I’m a mom it doesn’t seem as important whether or not you get along great with the other mom. It’s nice if you do immediately but with a lot of these new frienships you grow on each other. It can just happen. From what I’ve seen you do sorta steer toward those moms who you *think* may parent similar to the way you do… but you don’t know. I mean, when you meet a mom at a La leche league meeting, you’re pretty sure they breastfeed. You could always miss out with this strategy. Anyway, what ends up being the most important thing is having some time for your child to play with another child.

We did it. We made another friend.