24 cherries to better health

I am, taken on the whole, a fairly good eater.  Even at my worst, my diet is a fair sight better than most.  I eat 99% vegetarian; I don't drink soft drinks or eat fast food; most of what I eat is home-cooked from scratch; and my diet contains a very high percentage of fruits, vegetables, whole foods and grains.  Still, despite the value I place on eating well, I find that from time to time I get off track.  Usually this is the result of stress or a prolonged time/energy crunch.  I'm a terrible eater under stress, I admit.  Best case scenario, I have to guard against an eternal longing for sugary and fatty foods, and when the proverbial crap hits the proverbial wind moving device, I often don't even try to resist.  I'm extremely lucky to have the gift of a zippy metabolism, so I've never suffered in terms of my weight as a result of periods of lousy eating.  The ability to eat indulgently and stay slim has been a double-edged sword, however, in that I have also never had to really get down and learn the hard lesson of dietary self-discipline.

The wake-up calls have been coming, though.  First, my daughter.  We have significantly increased the amount of organic food we consume out of a concern for keeping her toxic body burden as low as possible, and it also has curbed, to some degree, those tendencies to drift into slob eating, since I want to set a good example and not been seen eating things I wouldn't want her to eat as well.  And more recently, there's been the upsetting news that my mother has been diagnosed with type II diabetes, already far enough advanced that she is suffering from some peripheral neuropathic damage as a result.  This is sobering not only as it is cause for worry about a loved one, but it also is forcing me to face up to a fairly strong family history of type II diabetes.  Many people in my family have or have had the disease, and many of them have not had a lot of the stereotypical risk factors.  My mother is a good example - she is not overweight and has never smoked.  I've started thinking seriously, then, about prevention for myself - it's a bit frightening, actually, and I am highly motivated to do what I can to avoid the same fate.  Now that I am a mother, it's of paramount importance to me to protect my health, both so that I can be there to mother my child and also to see her grow into her own womanhood.  And when thinking about cleaning up my health, diet is an obvious place to start.

My goals for my dietary reform are fairly simple - to significantly reduce the amount of sweets I consume and to boost still more my intake of fresh fruits and veggies.  Lately, though, I've been a bit off the wagon in general, so it's been easier said than done to not only work on those goals, but to simply eat mindfully and moderately.  It figured, then, that when we were visiting my parents last weekend, they sent us home with two boxes of chocolate covered cherries that my mother wanted out of the house so she wouldn't be tempted to eat them.  Rather than just mindlessly devouring them on this end, I plan to eat one each day, and in exchange for each cherry, I will work a little harder toward my goals, hopefully being much closer to where I want to be by the time they're all gone.  So - four down, twenty more to go.      

Faster than a speeding doula

Well, as an antidote to that rather heavy last post - and to show I'm not taking myself or any of this too seriously...  I had to share this amazing thing I found thrifting.  It's a tin vintage sewing box, and it actually contained some vintage sewing gear.  It's one of those things that I usually see other people finding and always grumble to myself that I never seem to be able to luck into around here.

I'm also taking a stab at sprouting.  Here's the jar on day one (the soaking stage):

And here it is on day three - we actually have sprouts!

I don't know why I didn't expect this to work, but it seems to be going OK.  An initial overnight soak and then two daily rinses - one morning and one evening.  The only thing I am changing up is the draining device on the lid.  I started out with a piece of cheesecloth, but I think I'm going to replace that with a piece of screen cut to fit the top of the mason jar since the cheesecloth has been staying soggy and getting a little funky.  I also think I'm going to have to divide this crop in half and put some in a second jar.  I didn't expect them to increase quite this drastically in volume.  These are mung beans, which I've read are pretty easy to work with (and experience thus far bears that out), but I think for a subsequent sprouting adventure I'm going to try alfalfa or broccoli seeds since I'm more a fan of those as a finished product.  I'm so pumped about being able to have sprouts, though, since I love them but rarely buy them because they're so expensive.  

And...  expect perhaps a bit of radio silence here for a bit while I work on getting my doula business up and running.  The momentum on that has been absolutely nuts, and I'm working like mad not only on my certification, but also on designing a webpage and business cards and taking care of things like contracts and fee schedules.  Exciting, but...  yep.  Fast. 

Cutting Through Blog-ual Materialism

This post on another blog got me thinking about something.  I have a love-hate relationship with a lot of the "lifestyle" blogs that are out there - people sharing their experiences living outside the mainstream according to various principles like simplicity, homesteading, Waldorf, etc.  Obviously, I think they have something to offer (having started one of my own), but sometimes they leave a bad taste.  I'm seduced by the almost-requisite photos, always lovely and professional, and am prone to becoming equally seduced by the sense of inadequacy that at some point usually overwhelms me.  I wonder how a mother (as these bloggers almost always are) with four children finds the time to sew, spin, farm, bake 10 loaves of bread and knit a sweater every single day.  A good day for me means I got 6 or 7 diapers changed (quite a process with a combative toddler), I and/or the kiddo got cleaned and/or dressed, dinner got cooked, the dishes got washed, maybe some laundry got done, and if it was a really bonus day, I got some knitting or blogging or studying for my doula work done.  Even though I know what I'm up against in trying to get through my days, I still can't help but feel as though I'm not trying hard enough, somehow.  Either that or these mamas have amazingly, precociously independent children who aren't needing nursed or otherwise fed, changed, read to, comforted, or helped every five minutes.  It's hilarious to me now that I once thought I would work from home doing transcription while minding a toddler.  HA!  What naivete.  I'm saved, though, from feeling inadequate in that department by my brother-in-law and a dear friend who have both recently expressed that they can't get anything done either as a result of having to mind their children.  So in that light, I can only conclude that these superhuman bloggers are either unusually productive or that there is some dishonesty of reportage going on.  "Natural" and DIY lifestyles are trendy right now among a certain crowd, and there's an undoubted cache in that image of purity and industry.  I can understand the urge to portray your life in a certain light, and I recognize that I am also guilty of some similar sins of omission when I tell people what I'm into.  "Hey!  I knit things!  I bake bread!  We make beer!" and people are suitably impressed, but what I don't tell them is how long it took me to actually complete one hat or how many messy moments there were on the way to the Kodak one.  I'm not saying that any of these bloggers are insincere in their dedication to the lifestyles they portray, but sometimes I wonder how authentic those blogged-about portrayals are. 

All things considered, that's probably a trivial quibble, as I know that I alone am responsible for how good I feel about my life and what I do - what doesn't seem so trivial is a deeper disquiet that surfaces as I read.  For all the bloggers' claims toward rejecting the values of consumer-obsessed, stuff-obsessed, status-obsessed culture, I'm often aware of a not-so-subtle fetishization of possessions and accumulation.  Artful photos capture still-life montages of hip accoutrements, from vintage thrift scores to shelves and shelves arrayed with high-dollar all-wooden toys.  What exactly is the message here?  I certainly identify with and applaud the philosophy behind thrifting and wanting my child to have playthings that support our values, but the expression of those desires seems to have taken a different path in our household.  Maybe it's a function of disposable income; we simply don't have the money to go out and buy shelves full of anything, no matter how much we might value it.  And that still isn't, as I see it, really changing your fundamental relationship to stuff.  You might be making non-traditional choices that are unplugged from Big Consumerism, but it's still all about what you're accumulating, about being tied to possessions.

And we also started out with the grand idea that our daughter would have basically all "natural" toys, but we abandoned that in fairly short order.  We were given so many toys, and it seemed less wasteful to go ahead and use them, and certainly more polite to not refuse them.  We've gently steered people towards choices that we approve of when we've been asked, and there have been a couple things we've passed right along to others since they were just too far outside our philosophical boundaries.  And this goes for all the things we have and need for our daughter, from diapers to bowls.  So yeah, my kiddo has quite a few plastic things and she doesn't have a lot of the hip gear I see some mamas almost self-consciously pulling out of diaper bags, but she seems perfectly happy and we feel we're raising her right.

And all this leads me to ponder exactly what I'm doing here...  Why am I posting pictures of my yarn and talking up my resourcefulness?  Am I having a crisis of motivation as a blogger?  Maybe, though it's never a bad idea to do an occasional sort of self-authenticity check.  It's probably also time to go back and re-read Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, which, even though it's more narrowly about Buddhism, is really one of the best general lessons on authenticity I've ever read.  And lifestyle bloggers, if you think I might be talking about you, please don't take it personally.  I get it.  I really do love what we all do.  I just need to go think about it.   

Love the one you're with

An update on the question of whether or not to try and fix our current sewing machine (since I know there has to be someone out there waiting with bated breath)...  I decided to feel the love and hang on to our Pfaff.  One of the deciding factors was realizing that we really do have a quality machine here, much more so than I thought.  I found a couple auctions for machines like this on eBay, and had an audible jaw drop when they were selling in the $200-$300 range after a flurry of bidding.  I also found a blogger who is really feeling the love for his Pfaff 260, and maybe it was his sew-porn video with Depeche Mode soundtrack that did it, but I was converted.  Now I actually have to crack it open and see what it needs - still a somewhat scary proposition since replacement parts don't come cheap.  (I really wish I had those booklets this guy shows in the video!)

I do indeed doula

It's not every day that you get to sit down at your blog and write that you have just passed what is probably one of the most important weekends of your life, but that's what I'm sitting down here to do.  I spent it out of town at a doula training workshop, which is one of the major milestones toward my certification as a birth doula through DONA.  The instructor, Robin Elise Weiss, was amazing, as was the experience of sitting in a room (and laughing and crying in a room) full of women also passionately committed to the birth experience and toward helping women fulfill their potential as birthing mothers.  The more I read, the more I come to believe that a woman's body is precision-designed for birth and that with the proper support, the overwhelming majority of pregnancies can end with natural birth.  That said, I also believe in birth as an experience of empowerment for a woman, and I see my role as a doula as helping every woman have the birth that will empower her, whether that be natural or otherwise.  I hope that, if better educated on the amazing potential of their bodies, women will begin to regain confidence in their ability to give birth and will feel comfortable choosing natural birth.  Although advances in medicine have made truly miraculous things possible when interventions are necessary, I think the medicalization of birth over the last few decades has done women a great disservice in that it has caused them to doubt their ability to birth normally and naturally.  The control of maternal care by obstetricians (who are, after all, trained surgeons) has forced a reframing of birth from a normal, natural event to one where the process is seen primarily from the viewpoint of pathology, where the potential for disaster is a constant, shadowy companion.  Women have been stripped of their power and have instead become patients in a system that treats them as if they were ill and not on the brink of one of life's most awesome and transformative rites of passage.  The female body is seen as defective, not normative, and seldom able to deliver a baby without medical assistance.  I'm not asserting that these are the active thoughts of most doctors, but these beliefs do underly the culture in which medicine is taught and practiced.  It's shocking to me that most obstetricians leave medical school without ever having seen a normal birth, so how can we truly fault them for believeing that women need help delivering their babies?  And is it any wonder, then, that we have such an astronomical rate of intervention in the US and such a shameful rate of maternal and fetal mortality that can be directly attributed to those interventions?

As a doula, I hope to do my part to change the culture of birth in this country through education and through honoring the strength and potential of birthing women.  Doulas also have an important role to play as birth attendants in hospitals, where staff shortages and charting obligations keep nurses from spending a significant amount of time with labor support duties.

It's hard to believe that I am now qualified to go out and start working as a doula, but I still feel as though I need a lot more preparation before I am ready for my own clients.  I'm now looking for a mentor, with whom I hope to spend some time shadowing and getting some on-the-job training.  And of course there's one of the greatest ur-mentors of all time - Ina May Gaskin, from whom I am constantly learning.

So... a momentous beginning, the first steps taken on a road whose destination is still unknown to me.

Here are a couple great videos on doulas and what they do:

Sew excited...

Spending the weekend HERE!  Almost too excited to sit still.

Also, I'm having a bit of a dilemma and am trying to figure out which is the most sensible and most frugal way to solve it.  I have a sewing machine, a vintage Pfaff, that was given to us many moons ago by someone who knew we wanted to learn to sew and get into making our own clothes; a guy we knew when we lived in Seattle.  He was a maverick of sorts, lived out on Bainbridge Island, made a lot of his own clothes; one of those people that marched to his own eccentric sort of drummer.  The machine has seen better days, but it's one of the super heavy-duty, industrial, all-metal kind that you can't even buy anymore.  Seriously - the thing weighs a TON.  I'm not even sure if it still works.  It's been sitting for years, so at the very least it will need a good oiling and tune-up.  It's belt-driven, so almost assuredly those will need replaced.  And we don't have a pedal, needles, bobbins - anything ancillary, really.  So in order to get it up and running we are going to have an unknown cash outlay, even if we find a used pedal, cheap accessories, and can do any required repairs ourselves.  Diagnosing what repairs will need done, however, will probably require calling in a pro and paying for their advice.  There's something about that path, though, that's really appealing - the satisfaction of DIY and of turning something we already have to good use; of loving it and mothering it and bringing it back to life.  And make no mistake, this is a good machine; there's one quite like it for sale on eBay now.  Fourteen bids so far, the price is up to $165, and the reserve is not yet met (or you can buy it outright for $395 - my eyes pop at this bit).  Another similar model is currently bid up to $110, so people know these are quality machines.  And on etsy, another one for $250.  Wow.

The flip side of this is that I have been, for years, coveting vintage Singer machines like the Touch and Sew with its cute little novelty stitch cams or the lovely aqua colored 338s...  You can find these on eBay or occasionally at thrift stores or CraigsList.  Failing this, there are any number of other used sewing machines readily available out there that are known quantities - that have all parts, are known to work, etc, and part of me wants to just go out and buy one of those.  I can spend $20 or $30 and know what I'm dealing with and be up and sewing right away (or at least as soon as I find a machine that's the right price and worth buying).

Fixing the machine we already have seems like the most frugal thing to do, but it might wind up costing twice as much to get it running as if I just bought one I know already works.  In that light, the second option seems like the wiser choice, but I'm afraid I'm being seduced down the paths of impulsivity by dreams of a sexier (at least to me) machine. 

Sew...  what to do?

And spring thinking...

Well, we've decided to forego planting a full in-ground veggie garden (yet again) this season in favor of keeping our regular herb garden and ordering up a share in our university's CSA.  We decided the amount of time and effort required to get trees down, beds put in, and everything started from seed and planted was too ambitious for this year.  I still want to get a rain barrel set up and a compost system started up again, since that's something we used to do but got away from in the last couple years.  I've been dealing with a recent flare of my illness, as I do most years around this time, so between that and the doula training, there just hasn't been much time to really think about anything else.  Even after over a decade of living with my health issues, at times - and this is one of them - it still catches me by surprise when I realize how much effort it sometimes takes just to get through the days, to do what I absolutely have to do.  This is especially true now that I am a mother, and I feel as though I watch a lot of time and energy just slip away without anything much to show for it.  It's then that I have to stop and reframe things.  If a happy, well-adjusted, thriving child isn't a good use of my time, then I don't know what is.  Also, there will be plenty of time to get around to gardening and canning and everything else I feel that I'm not doing now, once the kiddo is older and I can carve out a bit more space in the routine here and there.  I also know that signing up for life as a doula, which means that I will often be on call and will sometimes have to work very long hours, is going to bring additional challenges and require additional sacrifices, but I'm so thrilled to finally find something I feel passionate about doing that I am willing for now to do what it takes.

Every little hiccup with my health takes me to a sort of inner space for a brief round of navel gazing.  It used to be a scary place, full of fear and anger and pain, but now it's finally feeling like a place that stays a little brighter, a hole that's a little less deep, and one where I can more constructively deal with the issues that come up.  It's taken a lot of hard work on my part and a lot of generosity of spirit on the part of my husband (especially in the last couple of years, which have been very healing) to get here, but here I am, and the view is - for the most part - fine.

Are those buds I see?

   

Spring fever

Welcome to the view from my desk.  I thought it was time to shake things up around here with a WIP post... though instead of feeling inspired, I think all I feel is dismayed.  I have not one, not two, but four wintry hand coverings in various states of incompletion, with the first day of spring less than one month away.  There's the (no longer ambisexual) muvv, take two, about halfway done; its partner, about one third done; and two toddler mittens, complete except for the thumbs.  These have been laying in my workbasket in this precise state for *cough* weeks now, despite thinly veiled comments from my husband (the muvvs' intended recipient - "You know, spring may be around the corner, but those morning bike commutes are going to be pretty chilly for quite a while longer...") and signs of incipient frostbite on the kiddo's fingertips.  I don't know what's come over me.  Maybe it's spring fever, as I was loving winter until the recent warm snap, and now I'm feeling a bit hostile toward all things grey and cold.  Sorry woolies, it's nothing personal.  I promise.  Give me a few weeks to revel in thoughts of warmer weather, and then I'm sure I'll be wistful about fall in no time.

A blog by any other name...

So you have probably noticed that I changed the name of the blog.  When I started it, I was very focused on simplicity and homesteading (which I still am), but in hindsight the old blog name had started to feel a little bit po-faced; a little bit too earnest.   I decided, instead, to go for something that was more personal; that created a sense of a personal space where I could share some things from my life.  I've always had this idealized little space in my head where I go and hang out, and it's furnished in a certain way that I find particularly cozy - lots of wood and pottery and windows and interesting textiles.  A child of the 70s, the decor was obviously hard-wired into my brain from some dim, long-ago images of home and comfort.  It also has lots of spider plants in macrame hanging baskets, and to this day, I've always had my own term for the kind of interior design I find the most soothing on a cellular level: "spider plants and macrame," hence the new blog handle.

In that vein, here are some images from an amazing book called Shelter by Lloyd Kahn.  Originally published in 1973, Shelter is a book of architecture unlike any I've ever seen.  It's a paper temple devoted to the creativity and ingenuity of human habitations.  From huts and yurts to logs, caves and cars, Kahn exuberantly celebrates the varieties of homes to be found through history into the present day, with an emphasis on handmade dwellings constructed from and in harmony with the environment.  Interspersed throughout are building instructions and stories from the author about homes he has encountered and how they successfully (and often ingeniously) used and integrated environmental materials.  Probably one of the first books to take on the idea of sustainable living, it's definitely "spider plants and macrame."  Check it out.  It's good living for free people.  

{hey look - there's a spider plant in a macrame hanger!}

Lloyd Kahn seems like a very interesting person...  He runs Shelter Publications, an independent press that publishes books on architecture, health and sustainable living.  His blog is sort of a modern continuation of Shelter, exploring natural and DIY architecture and other topics of interest.  And the guy is 75 and still skateboards.  Right on.

Here's a short video profile of Kahn by Jason Sussberg, where Kahn discusses his ideas about shelter.



SHELTER from jason sussberg on Vimeo.

Here's a brief rundown of some other blogs I've been loving lately:

Root Simple (formerly known as Homegrown Evolution); in the blogger's own words: "Root Simple is about back to basics, DIY living, encompassing homegrown vegetables, chickens, herbs, hooch, bicycles, cultural alchemy, and common sense. We're always learning, figuring stuff out, taking advantage of the enormous smarts of our friends and our on-line community, and trying to give some of that back in turn."

Cathy of California; focuses on design in Southern California in the 60s and 70s.  Tons of incredible images of vintage crafts and interiors.

Tiny House Blog; amazing and inspirational examples of downscale living.

And Wasted Food; from the blog by Jonathan Bloom: "Americans waste more than 40 percent of the food we produce for consumption. That comes at an annual cost of more than $100 billion. At the same time, food prices and the number of Americans without enough to eat continues to rise.  Fusing my journalistic research on the topic with the work of countless others, this site examines how we squander so much food. Part blog, part call to action, Wasted Food aims to shed light on the problem of, you guessed it, wasted food."

And this is rockin' our house lately:



I've always loved TMBG, and being able to share their nerdy zaniness with the kiddo has been extra fun.

Radical homemaking

So...  I'm deep into reading this book:

...and wow.  I certainly feel like I am going to have a lot to say about it, in the immediate and probably for some time to come, as ideas and thoughts percolate and bubble to the surface.  This book touches a lot of chords in me, and my first reaction when opening it up and doing some cherry-picking was "YEAH!  Right on!"  Her basic premise is sound: contemporary, consumerist society (what she calls an "extractive economy") is destroying the planet and bankrupting our values.  The antidote she proposes is achieveing personal, social, and political transformation by unplugging from mainstream society and living more purposeful, independent and creative lives that center on home and community.  It's hardly a new idea - people have been "dropping out" of mainstream society and forming alternative communities for centuries, and back-to-the-land movements have come and gone - most recently, in the US, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  But with climate change, environmental degradation, and social unrest becoming all the while more extreme, the feeling is strong that we're finally hurtling towards some sort of end stage showdown.  Increasingly, people are coming to believe that current global society is failing them and there is again a movement toward greater self-sufficiency and the consolidation of values felt to be ignored by mainstream culture.  People are engaging in all sorts of small-scale agriculture, even in cities; homeschooling is no longer the province of the religious minorities; and sustainability is the yardstick by which all is judged. 

Like Hayes, I firmly believe one of our greatest hopes for exerting enough oppositional force to reverse the swing of the pendulum is to decouple ourselves from mass culture and seek out lives of purpose and intent.  There are many valid ways to do that, but I, also, happen to find the DIY homesteading/homeschooling/homemaking model particularly resonant.  Hayes' book is largely based on interviews she conducted with 20 individuals and families who are pursuing a life somewhere along the spectrum of self-sufficiency, but are commonly linked by the emphasis they place on consuming (and usually growing) local, organic food; on rejecting conventional employment and cultural expectations associated with wage earning; on choosing housing and transportation arrangements that allow them to remain free of mortgage and loan debt; and on seeking alternative education for their children.  I'm still rah-rah at this point.

Then I notice something that bothers me.  After going on at some length about the evils of the "extractive economy" and the necessity for creating lives and livelihoods that distance themselves from it, Hayes then reveals that some of the people she interviewed are accepting or have accepted financial assistance from relatives.  It's unclear whether or not those relatives acquired their assets according to the same values, but the implication is that benefitting from the extractive economy, provided that you do it by proxy, is an acceptable arrangement.

What really threw me for a loop, though, was the section dealing with health insurance (or the lack thereof).  Although mentioning that a few of her interviewees had traditional health insurance, Hayes quickly blows past this detail in favor of talking at great length about how the others are living without (and doing just fine, thank you very much).  For many, this is as much a conscientious objection to the current health care situation in the US, and while I think that's an interesting and certainly valid point of view (I don't like the health care situation any better myself), I was really turned off by the ensuing preachiness.  We get told that the real way to insure your health, basically, is to eat organic food and lead a stress-free life.  And while I believe that is of great value, I get the feeling that none of these people (the author included) have ever really been sick.  My husband and I both have chronic health issues that require expensive supplies and medications, and all the grass fed beef on the planet won't change that.  Without health insurance, our expenses would run to thousands of dollars a month, which there is no way we could afford.  I get where they're coming from, it just seems really naive.  I was also really bothered by the fact that some of these people think it's OK to choose not not work and still take advantage of social programs like Medicaid.

I'm also uncomfortably aware of the fact that Radical Homemakers reinforces the perception of sustainable living as mainly the preoccupation of the monetarily or educationally well-advantaged.  Although many are not currently wealthy by conventional standards, Hayes' interviewees all seem to come from a relatively privileged background.  But across the country and around the world, urban farms and gardens are springing up in low-income and inner city areas, bringing pride, good nutrition, and food security to thousands of people in an often overlooked example of ecological devotion.  I think often about how "voluntary simplicity" movements presuppose that living with less is a choice and not a forced circumstance.  There seems to be a minimum level of material and financial comfort necessary for living with less to be empowering and not oppressive.  I'd be interested in exploring where that line lies and how people on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum approach the idea of sustainable living.  I think this aspect has to be acknowledged for the movement to be truly impactful.      

So my rah-rah is a bit more muted now, but I'm sure I'll revisit this topic and this book time and again.

And I ran across this article by Stanley Fish in the New York Times' Opinionator.  Titled "Race to the Top of What? Obama On Education," it addresses almost exactly the issues I blogged about here.

What goes on around here of an evening...

NIP and other scandals

It had to happen - it was mostly just a matter of how long it would take.  The answer?  15 months and 20 days.  That's how long it took to get my first disgusted, scandalized, you-are-not-normal stares for NIPping (nursing in public) my toddler.  It never ceases to amaze me that people think that breastfeeding your child is shameful, perverted, or whatever flavor of odd they happen to think it is.  What is wrong with our culture when flashing naked breasts in a movie occasions very little comment (it's even a good thing for a lot of folks), but a woman using her hooters (sorry) for their intended biological purpose is disgusting beyond belief?  Not that I wasn't prepared for it - I've been going to La Leche League meetings since I was still pregnant and I've heard tales from other mamas who (as we are) are doing child-led weaning and have had to put up with some truly amazing behavior from people around them.  I'm a huge fan of evidence-based decision making, and I almost hope that someone actually says something to me so that I can share some stats on the higher IQs and better health (both physically and psychologically) of children nursed into their toddler years.  It takes a lot of guts, I think, to do this, but it makes me feel kind of perversely joyous.  I feel like NIPing is courageous and normalizing in and of itself, but nursing a toddler is even more so.  People who might not really think much about the fact that you were breastfeeding an infant will almost definitely notice that you're nursing a toddler.  With all the gyrations required to make it happen (both from you and your acrobatic offspring) it's almost impossible to do it on the QT.  A woman said to me recently (knowing that I'm still nursing) that it was all well and good to breastfeed a baby, but when they were old enough to come up and ask for it, then it was time to quit.  Assuming that our kiddo was preverbal, she obviously felt like she was in the clear to offer such an opinion.  Little did she know that my daughter DOES ask to nurse (through sign language), and has for quite some time.  We were at a party, and I was dying for the kiddo to walk up to me right about now and ask for milk, but alas she didn't.  I got a good chuckle, though.   

We're also one of those families who bought a crib but who have to take a few minutes to clear it out (it's usually full of books, laundry, toys, etc) if we ever actually want to put our kid in it.  We set it up as a side car before the kiddo was born, and at times she slept in it as such, but for safety reasons we lowered the mattress and put the side rail back when she started pulling up.  That was pretty much the end of her sleeping in the crib.  Even though it's still right beside our bed, it's too much trouble to lift her in and out, especially to try and put her back without waking her after a nursing session, so for the last few months she's been sleeping between us in our bed.  Given how poor a sleeper our daughter is, having her right there in bed with me has been a lifesaver.  It's so much less disruptive than having to actually get up out of bed and go somewhere else to attend to your child.  And the family bed has jibed well with our general philosophy of making our child feel as safe and secure as possible while she's forming these early impressions of what kind of a place the world is.  To the extent that I think we've had anything to do with it, it's very rewarding to see the confidence, openness and love she displays when she interacts with the world. 

We've been lucky to be surrounded by supportive family and friends, so we've been spared a lot of the trials many people go through when choosing to parent attachment style, but every now and then we're reminded that this isn't the dominant praxis in our culture.  Our daughter's ridiculously awful sleep situation is something that usually comes up at some point in our conversations with people, and I'd say 90% of the advice we've gotten (sometimes solicited and sometimes not) involves letting her cry it out.  This is something we're absolutely not willing to do under any circumstances as it's totally outside the attachment philosophy.  I'd rather deal with the situation we have going on now than feel as though I had "broken her spirit" as one CIO advocate wrote, as if that were a good thing.  I'm convinced that for those who do CIO and have "success" there's actually a play-now-pay-later dynamic at work.  I've looked at some studies on CIO and they seem to suggest that any short term "fix" results in poorer sleep later in childhood as compared to children who were not subjected to CIO.  What appears to happen is that CIO kids give up when they realize their cries for security and reassurance are going to be ignored, and this creates a fear imprint associated with bedtime that manifests at some future point as (among other things) refusal to go to bed, refusal to stay in bed, and problems with nightmares.  CIO kids learn that bedtime is a fearful, lonely time and so it stands to reason that kids who haven't been forced to CIO feel more positive and secure when they become independent sleepers.  Numerous studies have shown that cosleeping children grow up to have higher self esteem, a lower incidence of stress disorders, perform better acdemically, have fewer behavioral problems, and are generally healthier than adults who were abandoned to sleep independently from a very early age.  Some interesting reading on the benefits of cosleeping can be found here, here, and here.     

It's frustrating that a lot of people assume that our daughter's nighttime issues are a result of cosleeping.  Most families I know who cosleep report that they actually sleep better than families who spend all night being woken up by their children as they get out of bed repeatedly.  But there's this persistent belief in our culture that "good" babies go to bed early, in their own bed, and don't bother their parents until morning.  Other variations on nighttime behavior are due to the children having "problems." It also reflects poorly on the parents, who are seen to be failing somehow in their job of parenting.  But babies who sleep independently through the night because their parents have done CIO are not necessarily good sleepers, they've just learned that efforts to get their nighttime needs for nurture met are futile.  What you're seeing is resignation, not obedience.  I think, a lot of the time, people's rush to judgement comes from an insecurity about their own child's bedtime "performance."  Numerous studies on cosleeping have found that parents significantly under-report bed sharing behavior in their own homes, no doubt because there's such a social stigma attached to it.  People also want to know when we are going to kick her out so that she can start being an independent adult-in-training.  I really would like to know where we got this idea that babies should be independent.  They're BABIES, for crying out loud.  I want to tell people studies have found that cosleeping children develop into MORE independent adults than their peers who were forced to sleep alone, contrary to what nature obviously intended.  It makes sense - everything in their lives is met from a place of greater confidence, a place where they feel secure with themselves and with their value in the world.  Traditional cultures the world over follow this practice, and if there are whole countries out there that are wracked with dependence and immaturity, I've yet to hear of them.  I believe children need work at independence on their own timetable and that if I create an environment in which my child feels safe and secure and loved, her independence will flow naturally from that.  Furthermore, that feeling of safety and security and self-worth will be the ground from which she approaches every experience in her life.  I don't know when the kiddo will move to her own bed or her own room.  We'll do it when it feels right for all of us.  Right now, we love our family bed.

It takes something of a warrior spirit to attachment parent.  Parenting is hard enough, and it's even harder when you are swimming against the mainstream.  I wouldn't do it any other way, though.

And the usual kind of stash...

Brace yourselves for knitterly content...  Above is all the new stash that has entered the house since Christmas.  I have a plan for about half of it.  Everything in balls came from thrifted and recycled sweaters.  The Eco Wool and the Malabrigo worsted were gifts from Laurie (mwah!) and the teal alpaca and Malabrigo sock were Christmas gifts from my folks.  It was definitely a high-fiber holiday.  My swift is going to be busy for a while. 

Laurie also got me one of the most clever books I've seen in a long time - Closet Monsters: Stitch Creatures You'll Love From Clothes You Don't.  I love homemade soft toys for kids, and this book of DIY stuffies is especially nifty because it teaches you how to turn disassembled garments into some pretty cool fabric friends that would appeal to children and grown-ups alike.  Yet another reason to get my sewing machine fixed (and another thing to look for at thrift stores - clothes to recycle into critters).  Oy.

A different sort of destash

I've been spending a lot of my "free" time lately gathering up things around the house to sell or donate.  I'm trying to adopt more of a "something new in, something old out" policy to try and keep down the clutter as well as to try and keep the focus on having things we truly value as opposed to just accumulating objects we don't really need.  It's not a one-to-one deal, but more of a guideline philosophy to ensure the flow is going in both directions.  Some of the things have been easy to put in the "out" pile, others not so much.  I've gathered up several bags full of clothes the kiddo has outgrown, most of which were handed down to us by friends and family.  A good number of those are being handed on to other friends and family, and some I've decided to donate to a women's and children's shelter.  In the past, our M.O. for getting rid of things usually involved trucking our stuff to the local Goodwill, but (as much as I love them) Goodwills have become almost like a "boutique" and seem to have a lot less to do with the truly disadvantaged.  I view so many things differently now that I have a child, and when I think that there are children out there who honestly don't have clothes to wear or toys to play with, my heart simply breaks.  As much as there are children out there whose families can't afford to spend a lot of money on things, there are other kids who are worse off still, and those are the ones I want this stuff to get to.

But, as I said, I'm having an absurdly tough time getting rid of a lot of these things.  There are clothes Harper never even wore that it's tugging at my soul to put in the "go" pile - things that she was the wrong size to wear in the right season, but that I spent a lot of time fantasizing about her wearing; things that are so tiny and adorable that I can't help but touch and hold and thrill at the incredible smallness of.  Then there are the things she actually used - slings she's outgrown, toys she's moved beyond, all connected with sweet memories.  One of the hardest things to think about letting go are the cloth diapers she's outgrown, partially because they're a reminder of how I feel we failed in that department - how little we used them compared to how much I wish we had.  And those little diaper covers!  So cute!

I think it's reasonable to hold on to some things I just can't bear to part with for whatever reason, but we really don't have the space to hold on to much.  Any money we raise can be used to get some of the things we need now around here.  And I don't want to cling - these things served my daughter well and she has been lucky enough to have them.  Now it's another lucky little baby's turn.

Shifting gears a bit, I'm setting a challenge for myself to look at everything we are getting ready to either throw away or recycle to see if there's some way it can be repurposed.  I already am upcycling/recycling/repurposing a lot of things I once would have junked, but I know we can do more.  A couple days ago, I was getting ready to toss a broken dish into the trash, and I stopped.  The kiddo knocked it off the table and it broke into 4 or 5 fairly good-sized pieces, and it occurred to me that there might be something that can be done with it.  Don't ask me what, but I laid it aside to give it some more thought.  I don't want this to be another excuse for the pack rat in me to get another burdensome hoard going, but I really want to make sure we're being mindful about our waste around here.  So if you have any ideas what to do with a very small amount of broken crockery (short of having the kiddo make more), let me know.

This coming Thursday is Chinese New Year, and in our Sino-friendly household, we started the celebrations this past weekend with the big festival at the Lexington Opera House.  Here are a couple of pics of the kiddo in her Chinese New Year regalia (or part of it anyway - the top + the pants seemed a bit over the top, and not very warm).  新年快樂, y'all.

 

Our birth story

Seems like everyone I know who is involved in childbirth, either as a profession or just a passion, eventually gets around to airing their birth story, so it seemed right that I should tell my daughter's.  It was not only the best experience of my life, but also the experience that kindled within me the passion and drive to become a childbirth professional myself.  I've read so many birth stories that in some ways mine seems a bit lacking in drama, although it certainly didn't feel like that, and I consider myself very lucky that we didn't have drama in the form of big scares or hospital showdowns. 

I'd long thought I wanted a home birth, and I still wanted one by the time I got pregnant with the kiddo, but circumstances that put me in the technical high risk category took that off the table.  My husband and I were still committed to having as natural and non-medicalized a birth as possible despite having to deliver in a hospital setting.  I'd been unknowingly radicalized long before I really even envisioned myself as a mother when I stumbled across the incredible book Spiritual Midwifery by Ina Mae Gaskin.  The films Pregnant in America and The Business of Being Born, as well as other books by Sheila Kitzinger, Penny Simkin, and Martha Sears sealed the deal on my committment to natural childbirth.  I was actually terrified of having to give birth in a hospital, especially after we toured the "birthing center" at the hospital where we had to deliver and were told that IVs and fetal monitoring were mandatory.  I was sobbing by the end of the tour, convinced that we'd have to struggle VERY hard to get anything approaching the birth we wanted.  As my pregnancy progressed without major complications and as we deepened our relationship with our amazing Ob-Gyn, I began to hope that things might be salvageable if my pregnancy kept on being uneventful.  I did have a big scare at 28 weeks when I started having strong contractions that landed me in triage at L&D, with some question for a while as to whether or not they were going to admit me and start steroid injections in the event I went into premature labor.  I ended up being diagnosed with irritable uterus, was on semi-bed rest for a little while, and had weekly checkups and regular fetal fibronectin tests for the rest of my pregnancy.  As time went by and our confidence increased that these contractions were going to remain non-progressive, it became the "new normal" and we started to relax a bit.  With our doctor's full support, we drew up a birth plan that clearly stated our wishes and outlined our ideal scenario for our daughter's birth.  We had our doula lined up and ready.  We ferreted out tedious details of hospital procedure and policy to make sure we knew our rights.  We hashed it out and rehearsed it and picked it apart, back to front and up and down, until we felt we were prepared for anything, and then we just had to sit back and wait.

The day I went into labor, I woke about 6 am to contractions that I knew were the real deal (I'd had 12 weeks of "not the real thing" contractions to compare them to).  Part of our plan involved laboring at home for as long as possible, so we went about the business of breakfast, showering, some last minute cleaning, making phone calls, and enjoying the last hours of our life as a two-person family.  By the time I had been in labor for about 10 hours, the contractions were starting to become quite painful and, surrounded by family, friends and our doula, we hunkered down for the toughest part of the journey.  It was a chilly, rainy October evening and my house was full of people I love having tea and maple bars that I'd made the day before and drifting in and out of the bedroom where I was laboring.  It was a really wonderful, supportive environment.  I decided it was time to go to the hospital when my contractions were about 3 minutes apart; this was about 8 pm.  By about 9 pm, I'd been processed thorugh triage and was dilated to 7 cm and 100% effaced!  Show time!  Off to the L&D suite...  We'd been sweating because our Ob-Gyn was due to go out of town any day, and I shouted with relief when we found out that he was still in town and on his way.  Things were happening so fast at that point - the nurses tried to get a heplock started but couldn't due to my tiny, uncooperative veins and the fact that I was in such heavy labor, so they finally gave up, which was one of the greatest reliefs of the night.  No IV!

My parents and one of my best friends accompanied us to the hospital and were with us in the labor suite (along with our doula).  It was great to have the support, and I guess we seemed like a capable little army since the staff left us alone, for the most part, to labor in peace and relative privacy.  My water broke about 10:30 pm, and not long after that I hit a real low point - total and utter exhaustion and the fear that I wasn't going to be able to go on.  I had been kneeling on the bed for quite a while as that was the most comfortable way I'd found to ride the contractions.  The nurses were, by that time, really starting to push me to get down on the end of the bed and into the squat apparatus.  I could hear them and I knew what they wanted me to do, but I just.could.not.do.it.  I couldn't access either the strength to move my legs or the command over the periphery of my body to make it happen.  All of my senses and energy were concentrated in my belly; my reality had shrunk to just that.  Just that.  From somewhere out in space, I heard my voice saying that I couldn't, and the next time my doctor came in, he told them it was OK, we'd just roll with it (the man is awesome, awesome).

I really had to struggle to regain focus at this point.  I'd done enough reading to know that I was probably hitting the transition and that if I could just get through a little more, our daughter would be born.  Not long after I started trying to regroup and get it together, the urge to push came along, and as we had decided to do self-directed pushing, I just went with the urge and the flow.  I didn't think about it at the time, but in retrospect it was amazingly easy to do, and worrying that I would know when and how to push was one of my big anxieties prior to labor.

Although I was only dimly aware of what was going on around me, I could tell that the room was starting to turn into a hive of activity.  My doctor came in and stayed, I had a couple minutes of fetal monitoring, and the nurses were gathering and starting to roll around several tables of gear.  I had expected that once I got through transition my contractions might spread out a bit, but it didn't seem like they did, and I felt like I was still flailing around, psychologically, trying to find a place to anchor myself.  I was still feeling an overpowering fatigue, but at some point I heard my husband yell "I can see her head!" and that did it for me!  I pulled it together for a few more big pushes, felt that incredible sensation of crowning, and then at 12:05 am on October 15th (five minutes into her due date!) my daughter slipped out into my husband's hands.  The doctor pulled her forward through my legs, and there I was, gazing down into the face of my child.  She came into the world very true to her personality - hyper-aware and intense.  She didn't cry much, but seemed more interested in just checking everything out.  The doctor went about the business of giving her a quick once-over, my husband cut the cord once it had stopped pulsing, and then kiddo was placed on my chest and we did skin-to-skin and I nursed her.  There were some immediate concerns about her body temp being a bit low, so after she had been at the breast for a while, they took her and put her in a warming bed on the other side of the room.  While I nursed her, I delivered the placenta, got an intramuscular shot of Pitocin due to the fact that I had lost quite a bit of blood, and had 2 stitches placed in a small tear.  While the kiddo was in the warming bed, my mother helped me shower and get changed, and after that I crawled back into bed and did some more skin-to-skin and nursing.  Fortunately, my daughter's temp came up fairly quickly, so there was no need to discuss having to take her away, and we were moved into our room to finally get nested down and have some sleep.  Luckily, our hospital had rooming in, so my husband was able to stay with us, all three together in the room for the rest of our stay.

Our daughter, just a few minutes after birth 

In hindsight, the only aspect of the birth I was unhappy about was the time my daughter spent in the warming bed.  I wish we had been a bit more insistent that she stay skin-to-skin with some warm blankets over top of us, which I think would probably have been more effective.  All things considered, despite my fears, we really did have the "homebirth in a hospital" that we had dreamed of.  It was without doubt the most intense and most wonderful experience of my life.  In some ways, it was almost as if my daughter gave birth to me; so changed was my life afterwards, it was almost as if I was the one completely new in the world.  Nursing also came very easily for us, and I believe a big part of that was that I didn't have any drugs during labor that could have made my daughter groggy and interfered with the nursing process.  All the more reason, I think, to have a natural childbirth and one more reason I want to do the work of helping other women birth their babies without drugs, too.  So - to that end, I'm taking a birth doula workshop next month which will count towards my DONA certification.  With any luck, this time next year I will be finished with my certification and seeing clients of my own.  I don't think it's possible to overstate how excited I am about becoming a birth professional, and suddenly there are all kinds of things to think about, such as business cards, a web presence, memberships in professoinal organizations - all kinds of planning and things to start organizing in my head.  Over the last couple of weeks, it's kind of gone from 0-60 with that and it still has something of a sense of unreality about it, but it's only about 5 weeks until the training, so it's going to get a lot more real very soon!  Stay tuned.