Super quote

Today I read a really wonderful quote.
I couldn't agree more.

"I trust birth—not birth attendants—for if you only trust birth that is attended then you really don't trust birth at all. You trust the attendant. And then you start over. Who? Doctor, surgeon, CNM, CPM, SIM*? And it goes on and on..." - Carla Hartley

First-time mothers who have unassisted deliveries fare better than those who have c-sections or assisted vaginal deliveries

I have known this for years already, but I figured others may need to be informed about it.
Have a read, its very interesting.
http://www.ahrq.gov/research/jan02/0102RA2.htm
The article is already from 2001, unfortunately nothing has changed so far :-(

Dessert first :-)

Recently someone told me that letting a child eat dessert first will promote obesity and unhealthy eating habits, but that highly depends on what dessert consists of doesn't it
Our desserts are usually yoghurt or fruit or so. With that I really do not think there is any problem when fruit or yoghurt are eaten first, or even only the dessert.

Furthermore I do remember that as a child I had to first finish my main course before I could eat dessert, result I never ate dessert, because by then I was totally stuffed. I won't do that to my kids. They eat what is available and pick from it.
And as I do not make any fuzz over what they eat, they eat a bit of everything in general as there is no pressure at all on which food is eaten first or last or just. I do not expect them to eat anything they do not like either.

What I think the main thing is, is that dinner is fun, making it and eating it. There should be no stress at the dining table, because that doesn't make anyone feel any better or eat any better.

Child abuse

The last few days I have read article after article about seriously bad child abuse.
The little baby boy of 17 months old that must have had a 17 month hell of torture, his back was broken, 8 ribs broken, fingertips cut off, nails missing. And nobody noticed anything? It could just go on?
The child had been in the hospital, with the doctor, everything.

The a 21 year old mother who has probably murdered her own baby and toddler. Details still have to come out.

Then in the US a child beaten to death because it wet its bed?

And then the Fritzl case.

It makes me think again. I have read enough books of Alice Miller to know that these people doing it to their own children were abused themselves. I am fairly sure that the mother of the 17 month old baby unconciously wanted help, because she did visit medical professionals, who in my mind were negligent.
They should have picked up on it and helped both mother and baby adequately. Mother needed psychological help to deal with her own childhood trauma, because the state she was in now was obviously lethal to her own child.
But obviously those professionals were too damaged themselves to be able to pick up on it.

Then the mother who killed her own children, same thing, she obviously was too traumatized to handle it all.

Beating a child to death for wetting its bed. I wonder how those parents were treated as children.

And then Mr. Fritzl, well in the meantime I have read enough about his childhood to know that he had a rotten one and turned out to be the tyrant he is because of that.

What makes me so immensely sick with this all is that in our western civilization we keep excusing people and locking people up who do stuff like that. Only a few people really want to make sure this stops with informing people on what the reasons are for people going down that horrible road, but those are often enough not heard, as the majority of people do NOT WANT to hear it. They do not want to know that their own parents screwed up badly or that they themselves are screwing up as well as parents and are breeding violence with their parenting styles.
Of course we all have to hide that behind the stupid theories of how children are second class citizens and have to be disciplined and all that other crap.
We can do to children that cannot be done to adults because its against human rights.

What makes a parent have the right to smack a child, when its assault when you smack another adult and you could be jailed for that? Why not when you smack a child?
How did we come so crazy that those things can happen to such sensitive young people, who are still learning from us and need to learn what is right, not what is wrong. We should sherish these little human beings as they are still so open to influences etc.
It makes me want to scream it out loud to everybody who does something like that. There are so many examples in history of what can happen with the normally accepted parenting style, but its soooo wrong.
But, no I don't, I only talk to people who do want to hear it, because its "not done" to tell other people that they are parenting their children in an abusive way.
I keep seeing it happen around me and it makes me really really sad.

Positive reinforcement

What is the use? Or is there a use?

As studies have shown positive reinforcement is, like praise, rewards and other stuff like that an external motivator and with that not giving the child much intrinsic motivation, which is in general the best motivator a person can have. Intrinsic motivation will keep a person doing what they do (learning) and trying to become better at it. When there is praise, grades or whatever used, the child will work for the praise, grade or whatever, but not for the fun of it learning. What you can see is when a child is interested in something they will keep at it and learn more and just dig into it.
When a child is getting praise, they will not go for the topic, but for the praise and with that the topic becomes uninteresting.
Children love please their parents and teachers, therefore they will do what is necessary to please them, i.e. get a good grade, but do they remember anything from what they learned afterwards?
I do remember getting great grades for things, but don't remember much of what I learned in school in order to get those grades. I do remember being totally fascinated about a topic, which was not taught in school, so I went to the library and dug and dug, I was 12 and still remember the photographs.
Okay, I know.... this sounds like only unschooling is good. I wont say that, coz some kids love it in school so there is no need to meddle with that. But make sure that the children know that its not about the grades, that you as a parent are not interested in the grades, but in what they learned. You can do that by ignoring good and bad grades, but asking about what they learned and what they liked about it and all that stuff. Just by showing interest.

And this goes for other parts of parenting as well. Why would it be a good job if yr child makes a drawing, its not necessarily a good job. It can also be a crappy scribble job, but there is no need to say good or bad. Just say that you see scribbles in red and blue. Ask about the feelings or motivation that made your child make that drawing.

When I go to the playground I heard a load of "Well done" 's all the time for nothing.
When a child goes into a playground, what is the use in saying "Well done" when they go on the swing and swing. Isn't that normal for a child to want to do and have fun?
Or climb into a climbing rack? Isn't that just fun and stuff?

Hitting

Recently there was a thread on one of the forums I participate in. There were questions on how to handle hitting of a child that was not even 1 year old yet.

This was my reply:

Infants and young children basically have no clue what the consequences are from their actions. They have no clue when they hurt you or not.
So its the parents job to let the child know when things hurt, whether they hurt the parent or another child or a pet. But as humans have much more complex brains as animals its obviously not as simple as to train a dog into certain behaviour. Even though with my dog I am sensitive and look at her cues whether she even gets the point - but that is an entirely different topic

So how can we do this with little humans with complicated brains. First of all think of how you would want to be treated in case you ended up in a culture where you had no clue what they were saying and they had totally different idea's on what's normal and what not.
Young children / infants don't fully understand every word we say, but they are on a level of understanding emotions and sounds. Therefore show them it hurts and use the right words and sounds with it. Also explain how it can be done differently and what you would like her to do. Just keep talking, showing and redirecting. Its not going to happen overnight, but it will happen.
Simply keep respecting your child as a fellow human being and not put them on a secondary place, which is unfortunately quite common in the western world.

Example: My 9 mos old has no clue when she hurts the dog by pulling the dogs hair. So I stay with her when she is within reach of the dog, often she goes there. Both the dog (10y) and I are very patient with her. The dog usually keeps laying there - when I am not around she disappears - and when she grabs a hand full of hair I gently loosen her hand and tell her that that will hurt the dog and show her that the dog loves being stroked.
Slowly but carefully her grip has become less hard on the dogs hair.

She also head butts us, pretty normal for young children. My partner sometimes has a hard time handling it because it can really really hurt, so he hands her to me, while he regroups himself, but we keep being gentle with her.I have also handed her to him at times. And then we simply explain to her that it really really hurts.

Another thing to realize with things like pulling hair is that the hair grabbing is a rudimentary left-over from our evolution (no offence meant to the creationists here). In those times our babies had to hold on to us on our furs, like with the apes. Therefore they still keep grabbing our hair, but as we don't have a lot of body hair left its usually our heads and some kids also hold on to the ears or nose, not to hurt, simply to feel safe.

So, back to the topic hitting. It is al right to not feel happy about it. The trick is to handle it gently and keep repeating and redirecting.
You may have to repeat it a LOT of times, she is still a baby you know.

Basically in my whole parenting thoughts I start with how I would like to be treated if I didn't get that and with that I realize that a lot of parenting ideas out there, are in my view mistreatment as its not very respectful to the child.

Other than that, I think, that basically you don't really have to do anything more than say OUCH or what ever, coz sooner or later they will get the point that OUCH means that you really don't like it and somewhat older children hate doing things that are not right, they really want to be part of the group / family they live in and really do not want to be odd. So just simply by not hitting your partner and letting her know you don't like it it will stop, but it could last a bit.

My grandson...

.... is one year old now and needs to go to a daycare centre now because he needs to be socialized, he is old enough now.

Ugh..... has he been living alone then since birth? No social contacts at all?

Those type of comments always make me wonder how people think. Why would a child have to be put in an environment they are not used to in order to socialize? Don't they have parents to socialize with, no siblings, cousins, grandparents, etc.?
How about the people in the neighbourhood?
Why put a child into an artificial environment like day care or school with children of the same age group when real life doesn't do that. You don't learn socializing with older people or younger people that way, or just dealing with normal life situations.
I keep being surprised about those odd comments.

Quick soup recipes

Today I read about a tomato soup recipe that was quick and healthy. So I followed the link and indeed a great healthy recipe.

Here it is : Quick creamy tomato soup

Have fun making it.

Last years conversation

Last year at Halloween there was a party organised here, which I attended. I was pregnant at the time and this resulted in a couple of interesting conversations.

One of the topics was co-sleeping. I was told that it was not good to do that as one of people the at the party had done that with her youngest son and now he was not able to live alone, so when he had to go to another country with the military he took his girlfriend alone.
After a bit of talking I realized that this whole issue had nothing to do with the co-sleeping. The mother of this child had worked full-time as she was a single mother and the little boy only had his mother at night. Therefore it was the best thing she could have done for him considering the circumstances. This had made him to be quite a stable and healthy adult. The only thing was that he preferred not being alone, which is not that strange, as humans aren't made to be alone, they are supposed to live in groups anyway. So definitely this could not have been attributed to co-sleeping and considered unhealthy. Unfortunately his mother did not agree with me.

The other topic was dummies and blankies. I do not want my children to be attached to a dummy or a blanky, as these are substitutes for a non-present mother. I want my children to be attached to me. The reasons for that are that I want them to be able to build up healthy relationships with humans and not have them have relationships with plastic or fabric, as we are humans, so the most healthy relationship is to have one with a human.

The next topic was carrying my baby and the way I parent. I could not continue doing that I was told, I wondered why. Well.... a young baby needs to have a room of its own and sleep on its own and needs silence to sleep and stuff.
Well... not my baby, my baby is going to be part of our family. My baby can sleep in a carrier or on the bed or in the livingroom or so. Wherever we are. There is no need to all of a sudden send my children to school because there is new baby or so. I was very very surprised by the thought that I would have to all of a sudden change my parenting style, just because there is a 4th coming, when I have managed with 1, 2 and 3 children I surely can manage to keep doing what works for us with 4 :-)

And to be honest, it has worked out very well.

Waiting till the next meal.....

we don't do that either. Gives too much stress in the house because the low blood sugar gets the emotions into high. Useless.

So what do we do instead?

We always have finger foods ready. Fruit, veg., bread, pieces of cheese. Stuff like that. We keep it on the lower shelf of the fridge and whenever someone wants something they take something without restrictions.

I do announce when I start making lunch or dinner, so that they can choose to hold out a bit until that is ready, or just take a few bites so that they can hold out until the meal is ready.

If you don't finish...

... your meal, you will not get any dessert!

So what is wrong with this statement?
Everything!
Dessert is used as a reward, which means that getting no desert is a punishment. Useless & respectless.
Why force a child to eat more than the child feels comfortable with in the first place, that in itself can breed obesity, which I doubt any parent wants that.
Besides, what's the beef anyway?
Why not take dessert for starters?
Why not make dessert the most important meal?
If you make sure dessert is about as healthy as the meal there is no issue with it at all.
I refuse to use that. My children eat from each course what they want, sometimes they skip dessert as they prefer the starter or the main course.
We don't need that type of stress at our dining table.

Sceptical? Why not try it for a few weeks and see if they still feel dessert is the most important?

That actually only happens when its used as a reward, then the focus goes to the dessert, not the rest, it all of a sudden makes the rest of the meal totally uninteresting, while when there is no stress about it, the whole meal is interesting. Really, just give it a try.

Have fun!

Household and the family

After reading a thread on an online board recently I have been giving this whole topic some thought and the following is how I feel about it.

When your family grows it can be difficult to find the right way of keeping it up to your standards while the rest of the family has to live there as well.
What would be the most respectful way for all family members to be able to live together.

One thing is for sure, there should be no coercion or pushing or threatening to help out with it. Of course parents can ask for help when things need to be done. And when the family takes the children seriously and respects them they will help. Freedom does a lot of a human being, no matter how small.

In our house there is actually an agreement, not a pushed down their throat type of situation, that after dinner we all take stuff to the kitchen so it gets cleaned up fast. Its pretty cool how this goes and it means within 5 minutes we all can have fun again.
It took time and discussion to get there of course, it didn't go overnight, like it would have when we would have pushed it down their throat.
Simply explaining that everybody likes to go have fun and that we are a small community where we all can help out each other to make the less fun tasks take as little time as possible so we all have time for fun stuff after that made it quite easy. They like playing board games with us, or just simply do math with my partner in the evenings, but when we are cleaning or so we don't have the time for that, when everybody chips in a bit, its a job of minutes and there we go, be there for them.
There is no nagging, rewards, punishments or so necessary to get that fixed, just simple life examples.

Observations in the pool

Yesterday we went swimming with the whole family. All of the girls always love going to swimming, so we try to do this regularly.
Yesterday was particularly interesting as I was focussed on unconditional parenting as I was re-reading in the book by Alfie Kohn the night before.
I have also been reading more of Alice Miller recently again.
So I ended up viewing the parenting styles of the people around us.
It was very disturbing to see a couple with their 3yo child. The girl obviously loved the water and loved her parents. It was pretty odd to watch how the mother was particularly bullying the child, by pushing it with the head under water, when the child clearly did not want that and then laughing very loudly afterwards. It was obvious that it was only clear to me, not to the mother, who thought it was lots of fun, nor the father who was not paying any attention to the scene at all.
When the child openly tried to object the father called the girl a spoil sport and the game just continued.
Later on the couple threw a kiddy life jacket to the other side of the toddler pool and the girl was supposed to go fetch, which the little girl did tirelessly. Every time she turned her face away from her mother to go get the jacket, the mother pushed her and the little girl fell and had to get back up and go to the other side to get the jacket. The water was fairly deep for the little girl, as it was almost as high as her neck.
At some point the girl didn't go fetch very easily, she was really struggling to get up and get there, so the father went there, got the jacket and hid it behind his back and told the girl it was at the mother, so there the girl went again. The father then threw it to the mother, who threw it back again when the girl was there and on it went.
The parents obviously thought it was all fun and games, the girl did keep on smiling, but it was a totally disrespectful way the way it went.
The whole scene gave me a very uneasy feeling, the total lack of being able to see that the little girl didn't like it and was struggling to keep up a happy face.
At some point as I was wondering if I was the only one who noticed, but I wasn't, my own children also noticed.

Later, short before we left there was a girl who wasn't willing to do certain swim exercises, that the mother wanted the girl to do, she was around 7 I would say.
This resulted in the threat of the mother that if the girl wouldn't do that, she wouldn't go swimming of the next month.

Both those scenes made me wonder how things could have been different.
The game of throwing the jacket back and forth could have been played, but without pushing the little girl under water and pushing her all the time. I think the girl would have had fun if it had been that kind of way. Or maybe a totally different game.
I do think both those parents could do with some counselling as they were totally oblivious to their own child's needs.

The second scene didn't make sense to me at all. A child who obviously loves swimming can be left alone to do her thing in a fun pool. And the threat of the mother only made it seem that the girl was doomed if she did, because then she would have to keep doing all kinds of exercises in the pool and doomed if she didn't, because then she was not allowed to go swimming anymore for a month. Either way, the joy in swimming is gone.
It really does not make any sense to me, when a child has fun in the water, let it be. There is no need to push for special exercises.

Teaching to say sorry, do we need to?

My answer would be no.

Why you ask?

I think that children will learn what they need to learn in this world without being explicitly taught to do so. Unschooled children learn to read and write without being explicitly taught to do so, just by wanting to. Sure, they will ask questions, but when they get those answered, they will learn it. My own children are just an example of that. My 11yo daughter is speaking, reading and writing in three languages. She has started messing around with the fourth in the meantime. When an average child can learn that, just on their own, then I do think people can really trust their children to learn to learn the correct word use of the society as well.
I think it would be quite an insult to their intelligence to think they wouldn't learn to use simple words like that when they can learn whole languages, don't you? Besides it also shows no faith in your own child to be able to learn as it is.

I have read about the Yequana, there people do not consciously teach children stuff. They expect children to just grow up and do their thing within the tribe. Obviously it has worked for a very long time, because they haven't changed their ways. It has made me wonder why the ways have changed in our society. I don't think it has much to do with whether children learned or not, probably more with a certain way of not trusting children to learn. These ways are on in the western civilized countries this bad, not in others. I guess people don't have time there to bother with these things, they have more important things to do, like make sure they get food.

Babies don't keep

I just love this poem:

Babies Don't Keep
By Ruth Hulbert Hamilton

Mother, O Mother, come shake out your cloth,
Empty the dustpan, poison the moth,
Hang out the washing, make up the bed,
Sew on a button and butter the bread.
Where is the mother whose house is so shocking?
She's up in the nursery, blissfully rocking.

Oh, I've grown as shiftless as Little Boy Blue,
Lullabye, rockabye, lullabye loo.
Dishes are waiting and bills are past due,
Lullabye, rockaby, lullabye loo.
The shopping's not done and there's nothing for stew
And out in the yard there's a hullabaloo,
But I'm playing Kanga and this is my Roo,
Lullabye, rockaby lullabye loo.

The cleaning and scrubbing can wait till tomorrow
But children grow up as I've learned to my sorrow.
So quiet down cobwebs;
Dust go to sleep!
I'm rocking my baby and babies don't kee

You gotta love Hathor

Hathor the Cow Goddess

Where does it all start?

Recently I have read a wonderful book: Banished knowledge by Alice Miller.
In this book she writes a lot of interesting stuff. I do recommend it for reading.

One thing from the book I want to highlight though.
The fear of gyneacologists and midwives making such a business out of births of babies.
The babies are being weighed, measured and given injections short after birth as if its life depended on it, but Frederick Leboyer clearly showed this was not the case.
Those films and books show that a baby that has come into the world naturally without destructive interventions is content and will smile.
The reason for this is that the baby is not treated like its a piece of meat in stead of a living human being. It must be quite hard on a baby to be immediately measure, weighed, bathed and all that under bright neon lights that hurt the eyes.
Oddly enough the evidence of Frederick Leboyer did not radically change the practises in the labour and delivery wards.
There was a phase in the 1970's where things were slowly going better, but short after that technologizing of the delivery room increased at an alarming speed and hasn't stopped since.
It seems that nobody is interested in the physical and psychological sufferings of the newborn baby, or the mother for that matter.
Leboyers evidence showed that its unnecessary, unscientific and right out dangerous that in most hospitals normal births seem to look more like a operation on an ill patient. Induction is becoming pretty standard and is used more and more often, babies end up in intensive care, coz frankly, quite often, they weren't ready yet to come out.
This means, psychological damage for the baby, because it needs its mother, that is what it expects by instinct and what does it get, a warm plastic room where nobody cares whether its crying or not, how traumatizing must that be.
Most babies are anyway separated from their mothers right after birth, which shouldn't be happening. The first minutes to hours after birth are for bonding, mother and baby should be together.
Mothers who have experienced the separation at birth themselves will accept the hospital rules without a battle as those are "normal" to them, mothers who haven't experienced that will put up a fight.
Post partum depression are result from this kind of unnecessary separation. Then the mother will get medication to treat their old (their own birth) and new (the birth of their baby) pain. Often its portrayed as being normal, but post partum depression is not normal.

The biggest problem in this vicious circle is that the obstetricians, gyneacologists and midwives have often been born under similar circumstances and with that consider it totally normal to treat mothers and babies so cruel.

And with this bad start a lot of things can go wrong slowly but carefully.

Freebirth story

Today I read a wonderful freebirth story.
Here it is: Sunny Ryder

Vaccinations

Vaccinations

Above a link to a page on the website of the Weston A. Price Foundation. Its a very interesting read on vaccinations and how easy it would be to do decent studies, as so far there has not been one decent study.
I am still waiting for a double blind study.
Till then, there is no way I am going to experiment with the health of my children.

Ultrasound, C/S, vacuum extraction

Ultrasound video

C-section video

Vacuum extraction

Amniocentesis


Here are a few more About.com video's that are very interesting to see.

Epidural

Epidural video


The above link will take you to an about.com page in which you can see a video on what happens in the female body when an epidural is given.
Its very simple, but I think clean enough to not risk it, unless there are complications which require this procedure.

Water birth

Here is a link to a pdf about the temperatures for a water birth.
It becomes clear that there are no real issues, what ever temperature the mother likes is fine.
Water birth

A user friendly vaccine schedule

Today I read a very interesting article on vaccines. Here it is:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller15.html

A User-Friendly Vaccination Schedule

by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD

Its very interesting as Mr. Miller explains in a lot of detail a lot of issues with vaccines. Have a read :-)

Our nutrition

What we do nutritionally is follow the ways described by Weston A. Price, Sally Fallon & Mary Enig.
Here is a little overview of how we implement it.

1. We only use whole foods with as little processing as possible. If they are processed, I usually do it myself. I'm a busy home schooling mom with 4 children, so I try to keep it as simple as possible. For now we don't grind our own flour, this will happen in the future, because I do want a flour grinder. For now we will have somewhat stale flour unfortunately.

2. I try to get most of our shopping delivered so I can fully think about what we need for the coming 2 weeks. I let Tesco come buy 1x every 2 weeks. I go to the farm 1x every 2 weeks as well.

3. My goal is 50% of our food raw, so far I haven't fully fixed it yet, but its an ongoing process.

4. I am working towards including a cultured food each day (sometimes every meal). These include sauerkraut, yoghurt, cheese, etc.

5. I make nutrient dense meals. Empty calories will make you gain weight and undermine your health. So we try to keep them out as much as possible. This means that we even fry our own french fries from organic potatoes.

6. We do not use multivitamins as they undermine your the health body usually, as they tend to be synthetic vitamins. When they are natural, you can use them. I haven't felt the need to use them during my last pregnancy, I felt perfectly healthy. We do use cod-liver oil regularly, especially in the winter.
I do use local raw honey, 1 teaspoon daily, against hayfever, it works like a charm. This year I have been feeling so much better.

7. Most of our food is organic. But I have to stay within budget, so sometimes I have to make concessions.

8. I buy milk, cream, eggs & local raw honey at Meadow Cottage, Churt Road, Churt, Headly. They have pedigree Jersey cows. Their milk is wonderful.

9. We use healthy fats. Butter, cream, coconut oil, flax oil and olive oil. We work on using less carbs than the standard diet has, as we have found this to be less healthy.

Pain in childbirth

I recently read a piece from a book written by J. Hausinger and published in 1801. It made quite clear to me how children were taught in those times and how the belief of a lot of pain and misery came to be.

Below I will quote.

Boy: Where do children come from, dear tutor?
Tutor: They grow in their mother's body. When they have gotten so large that there is no more room for them, the mother must push them out, something like what we do when we have eaten a lot and then go to the privy. But it hurts the mother very much.
Boy: And then the baby is born?
Tutor: Yes.
Boy: But how does the baby get into the mother's body?
Tutor: That we don't know; we only know that it grows there.
Boy: That's very strange.
Tutor: No, not at all.--Look at that whole forest that has grown over there. No one is surprised by this because everyone knows that trees grow out of the earth. In the same way, no reasonable person is surprised that a baby grows in its mother's body. For this has been so as long as people have been on earth.
Boy: And do midwives have to be there when a baby is born?
Tutor: Yes, because the mothers are in such pain that they can't take care of themselves all alone. Since not all women are so hardhearted and fearless that they can be around people who must undergo so much pain, there are women in every town who are paid to stay with the mothers until the pain has passed. They are like the women who prepare dead bodies for burial; washing the dead or undressing and dressing them are also tasks not to everyone's liking which people therefore perform for money.
Boy: I would like to be there sometime when a baby is born.
Tutor: If you want an idea of the pain and distress mothers experience, you don't need to go and see a baby being born; one doesn't have that chance because mothers do not know themselves at what moment the pains will begin. Instead, I will take you to Dr. R. when he is about to amputate a patient's leg or remove a stone from someone's body. Those people wail and scream just like mothers giving birth.....
Boy: My mother told me not long ago that the midwife can tell right away whether the baby is a boy or a girl. How does the midwife know?
Tutor: I will tell you. Boys are much more broad-shouldered and large-boned than girls; but primarily, boys' hands and feet are always broader and coarser than girls' hands and feet. For example, you need only look at the hand of your sister, who is nearly a year and a half older than you; your hand is much broader than hrs, and your fingers are thicker and fleshier. That makes them look shorter too, although they are not.

This "knowledge" must be quite frightening to little boys and girls.
The way people were messing with childrens' minds is frightening to me. Its such an insult to childrens' intelligence. And of course this makes it possible to manipulate.
Very sad how children were treated.
And no wonder people were frightened of birth and no wonder women were having lots of pain in childbirth, they were made to believe it was that way and no other way. Very very sad.

Cherry on the pie from nogreaterjoy

The child has no social consciousness, so he does whatever he feels like. Dumping it is not a great offense for a six-month-old, but he will not always be six months old, and it won’t be cute for long. It will make you downright mad when he is three years old and flings a whole plate of food into your lap.

So we watch him, knowing his propensity to selfish compulsion. When he seizes his bowl with intentions of dumping it, swat the offending hand with a little instrument (light wooden spoon, rubber spatula, flexible tubing less than a quarter inch in diameter, or any instrument that will cause an unpleasant sting without leaving any marks). As you swat the offending hand, say “No” in a normal commanding voice. The tone is more important than the word―not angry―but decisive. Children understand the temperament in your tone before they are born, and will recognize it. This swat is not punishment. Probably, it will not even cause the little guy to cry. He will be shocked and stop any action in which he is engaged. Explain to him that he is not to throw his food onto the floor. If he again makes an attempt, swat his hand again and say, no. The third time is the charm. He now knows that “No” uttered in a commanding tone, is something serious. He will not try that stunt again—at least not for this meal.

I find the above horrible. The one who the child expects to love and cherish him is hurting him, if not physically, at least mentally, that is just plain abusive.
I cannot understand people recommending parenting like that.

Nogreaterjoy

Recently someone pointed me to the website nogreaterjoy.org as this has "great" insights on parenting the biblical way.
I did go there and read. I am totally saddened by the way children are viewed there. Its about child training. Child training is very odd to me, it doesn't make a child a human, it seems to degrade them to a robot ?? or pet that has to immediately obey, in stead of being a more complex human being.
I have been reading this article, its in the BABIES section:
http://www.nogreaterjoy.org/articles/child-training/babies/view/archive/2000/march/01/how-early-should-i-start-training/
I will quote a few things below:

The first time an infant pulls your hair, if you pull his, he will never be a hair-puller.

I find the above very sad, consider that babies do this out of reflex to hold on to their parent. They do not want to hurt, so what is the use in hurting a child that is merely trying to hold on to their parent. They do this from birth.

If a child cries out in loneliness and is rewarded by being picked up, you have trained him to repeat the crying any time he wants to control the adults in his life.

Children do not want to control the adults life. Young babies are not able to be manipulative, that is something that they learn much much later in life.
Babies should even leave their parents arms, and young children need to have a lot of love and attention. Why would anyone want to deliberately leave a child lonely anyway, it doesn't make any sense to me.

When a child is told no, and he responds with temper, if the parents compromise and give over just one-inch to the child’s demands, they have trained him to throw fits. It will become a life-long habit, begun at three months.

Three months *shock*. A baby of 3 months doesn't understand any of this and will just feel abandoned by the people who are supposed to love him/her.
This can give life-long scars.

What you don’t do as a parent is as influential as what you do. If you permit a child to indulge in a pleasurable act several times, with no negative consequences, then he will develop a preference and a habit. If you give the kid an old set of car keys to play with, you have trained him to abscond with your keys. If you allow a child to snatch food from your hand, you have trained him to have crude table manners. If you allow him to get up after you have put him down to sleep, you have trained him to ignore your commands and to make his own decisions about his sleeping habits.

This is an article that talks about babies and toddlers. Since when can a child not indulge in a pleasurable act? Since when is it wrong to share your food with your child?
And how can we expect young children to just stay in bed alone when they are that young?
That is a very unsafe feeling for little ones. They do not understand house, doors, locks and all that stuff yet the way we rationally do. They are alone, this is unsafe, they feel scared.

A bully on one side and a whining tattletale on the other are social misfits.

Misfits? What language to use to describe a child.

Parents are failing to communicate moral convictions to their children. One reason they fail is that they start too late. Parents do not start trying to train their children until they are convinced they can receive instruction, by which time children are already confirmed in carnality, addicted to the pleasures of hedonism. I am talking about children two and three years old. Parents find it difficult to believe that their very young children are capable of early training.

PARDON?!?

If a ten-month-old child, capable of picking up his own socks, sits and watches his mother pick them up, he is being mistrained—trained to be lazy.

Sick!

This is only one article that I have been reading. There will no doubt come more as I read more on this website. The person pointing it out to me was someone reacting to me putting up a link to an article by Barbara Rogers on a forum.

Playground today

Today we went with a friend to the Savil Garden. We had a picnic there, which was really nice.
I realized that with my baby being 6 mos old that basically it was illegal for me to feed her there. But I went ahead anyway, as she got hungry of course. This felt really odd to me, a baby of 6 months really still needs regular feeds, how can legislation not be in such a way that mothers are able to meet the needs of their baby.
I am happy that I have breastfeeding clothing which makes it easy on me to feed unnoticed.


Another odd issue is that I noticed that some parents are having really odd behaviour here and there, some are being sometimes less mature that their toddlers. They are pushing their child forward, to make sure it gets on the slide first or in the crows nest first and with that even telling other children off who are in there. There seems to be very little respect for other human beings and especially not children with special needs.

Recently observed

In an area where parking is difficult, 20 houses where there is only parking on the side of the road. Most people use their garage for their stuff as they do not have a shed, so the car cannot go in there. So what do you do. Park on the road side. But as its tight people have to make sure they park well so everybody can park their car or cars.
Some families have 2 cars, others 3. Now what struck me was that 1 particular is most of the time in a particular spot. Its at the corner, so not a bad spot at all. We noticed that the older 60 year old grandmother who is usually driving it, cannot park very well and probably needs to park at that corner. She has trouble driving it anyway. Oddly enough its not even her car, at it is the car of her son-in-law. But never mind that.
So, what started happening since a few months. When this particular car is used, one of the smaller cars of the family gets pulled down, blocks the road. The van gets taken away, put in the middle of the road, the small car gets put on the spot of the van and when the van comes back, the smaller car gets put back where it came from in the opposite ritual.
This makes me wonder what goes on in their heads. There are no allocated spots, there are more people with vans. It intrigues me to see this happen, it doesn't bother me, as I park more up the road anyway, but where does behaviour like that come from. There are no allocated spots, so what makes them think they own that spot?
Another interesting one is that, as there is already a shortage of parking the grandmother has stated for as long as we live here that lodgers etc. have to park down the road, not that many of them really care. One of the women next to her very much agreed, as there is no room anyway, according to the comments.
Now that woman has a boyfriend and they make an effort of making sure his car is parked right in front of hers. She will block 2 spots and then drive her car backwards when he comes if she feels the need to. This soooo surprises me, as that can mean that other people have to park down the road, people who actually live up here.
I keep wondering where behaviour like that comes from. On one end saying 1 thing, but pretty much behaving the opposite when that all of a sudden fits better.

The shape of a mother

I love the following website: http://theshapeofamother.com/
This website shows clearly what the body of a mother can look like. Mothers do not have their teenage bodies anymore, which is totally normal.
Unfortunately the advertisements don't show what the body of a mother looks like after having had a baby.
This site does.

Birthtrack (tm)

Here is another disruption of: freedom during labour, freedom of movement, freedom of letting labour take its natural course of faster and slower phases, etc. etc.
How on earth can someone imagine using that and how on earth do they come up with the crap:

http://rixarixa.blogspot.com/2008/07/more-better-birth-track-tm.html

Have a read, its unbelievable.
I love Rixa's blog, very informative.

Personal Coaching

For the last 20 years I have educated myself on Continuum Concept parenting, breastfeeding, childbirth, elimination communication, baby language and baby sign language, homeschooling and traditional nutrition. Therefore I offer telephone based coaching for people who want to brain-storm with me on those topics. In our family we practise Continuum Concept Parenting, breastfeeding with child-led weaning, co-sleeping until the child moves on, unschooling, natural childbirth, traditional nutrition. For us this is a full package. Of course I can respect that this is not the case for all individuals. Therefore our brain-storm sessions can be limited to one or more of those topics.

The goal is to enjoy life, respect your family members and it needs a commitment to natural living, whether we talk about parenting, breastfeeding, childbirth, homeschooling or nutrition. The starting point of our conversations will always be what humans need and naturally evolutionary expect, whether it is parenting or nutrition. In some cases things may not be easy to discuss or hear.
You can read through my blogs to find out more about the way we, as a family, live these topics.

What I consider important in life and in our sessions:
- That parents understand that it is very important to create a strong bond with their children. This means: breastfeeding, co-sleeping, baby carrying, etc. This should not abruptly change at a certain age, children will outgrow their needs as a baby when they are ready and will grow up, there is no need to push that. This bond built through closeness should continue beyond infancy and toddler hood. It is important to keep working on this bond to make sure it is still there in the teenage years and beyond.
- That parents are looking into different ways than the common coercive ways of parenting. These ways do not create responsible or happy children. Therefore I recommend using alternative methods to time-out, punishment, threats, rewards and praise.
- That children get the chance to develop in their own time and ways. Children will learn the things they need in life, while living it. There is no need to teach as children are naturally curious and will ask question after question. In times that they do not, they are "digesting" the information that they have tirelessly asked questions about before.

As a coach I am a unique person with quite a few different (old fashioned?) thoughts on life, I am very suitable as a coach for people who want a personal coach to help them bring out the best for themselves and their families.
Working with a coach like me is all about what kind of parent you want to be or become. It is about brain-storming and thinking outside the box. It is not a therapy, although healing can happen in case this is necessary to be able to think outside the box. I do incorporate certain aspects of psychology to help parents reach their goals.

As a coach I do not want to focus on changing the children's behaviour if this is considered a problem. This is only short term management, which will not give any healthy long term changes. It can actually be quite damaging to the bond between the parent and the child and with that will not benefit you and your family at all. People who want to work with me want to build a good bond with their children.

My goal is to help parents understand the way children think and how to be creative in their problem solving. The starting point should be unconditionally loving your child, from that place you will be inspired to find loving ways of dealing with the various situations that can arise.
Slowly but carefully you and your family will create new patterns and habits which are much more pleasant for your whole family.

As I have a family myself and we are unschooling I do want you to realize that there can be back ground sounds and maybe even some interruption if one of my children needs me, of course when that happens your time will be extended, you will get what you pay for. Naturally this will be minimized as much as possible. Because of this I have preferred times for sessions, which are when my partner is home to take care of the children and other issues that may arise.

Anybody who needs a coaching session can book one with me.
The sessions can be booked for:
Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sundays between 10.00 and 14.00 hrs. or in the evenings after 19.30 hrs. The most ideal times for me are on Saturday and Sunday. Then I can often also book sessions in the afternoons.

1 hour: £35,00 / Euro 40,00
45 minutes: £ 30,00 / Euro 35,00
30 minutes: £ 20,00 / Euro 25,00
20 minutes: £ 15,00 / Euro 17,50

In case you would like to have ongoing, weekly coaching sessions the monthly fees are:

1 hour: £ 135,00 / Euro 155,00
45 minutes: £ 115,00 / Euro 135,00
30 minutes: £ 75,00 / Euro 85,00
20 minutes: £ 55,00 / Euro 65,00

Usually there will be four sessions per month when you book ongoing, weekly coaching sessions.

The fees are in British Pounds and Euro's, upon request I can also inform you on the fees in other (European) currencies.

When you have made an appointment for a session, you can simply phone me on the requested time, after I have confirmed the time to you by e-mail. I will send you my phone number in the confirmation e-mail. It is also possible to make an appointment in which I phone you, this will add some charges to the fee for my telephone costs.
You can book a session by sending me a request by e-mail, following which I will send you a paypal invoice. e-mail: dboskma@gmail.com

A short in the dark

Here is a wonderful blog post.
Have a read.
I could for sure not have said it better, she did a superb job.

http://www.nakedauthors.com/2008/03/shot-in-dark.html

Twisted thinking in a modern world

Recently I had a enlightening moment of totally not understand what is going on in this world and the wish to live in another.
A few things that sprung to mind.
* the thought that its dangerous to have a baby at home. WHY? Statistically it is safer to have a baby at home than in the hospital. There are less possibilities to just get induced or get an unnecessean. We have done it for 13 million years, why change a thing that has obviously worked for that? There is no need to repair what isn't broken, women's bodies are designed to give birth - twisted, very twisted.
* to even consider bottle feeding. WHY? Women have breasts to feed. Its not healthy for a baby to be bottle fed. The baby expects naturally to be breast fed instead of having some silicon thing put in its mouth. The intestines of a baby is not fully ripe, human milk will take care of that.
* to consider spanking a child. WHY? Who came up with that stupid thought?
* to circumcise a baby boy or girl for that matter. WHY? Which perverted idiot started that crap?
* school? WHY? The one coming up with that must have had some twisted mind. Were people total idiots before someone came up with the idea of school. No, children learned and were able to make a living as well. Children will learn, I see it first hand. I also see first hand the problems the school system is causing, in terms of peer pressure etc.
* poly unsatured fats. WHY? They haven't been in our diet until recently and we definitely don't need those, they clog up your arteries, so why use it? Its not for nothing that heart disease, cancer and all kinds of other diseases are so on the rise. That has to have something to do with our present diet. Therefore my guess is, if we go back to a traditional diet we would all be much healthier. For 13 million years we have eaten a traditional diet with saturated fats, raw milk, meat whenever available, we are still here, if it would be so bad for us we wouldn't have made it here. In the hunter gatherer times there wasn't as much cancer and heart disease and people were cooking over fires and using saturated fats, they weren't using poly unsatured, that needs quite some work to get that out, so not natural, they weren't using tons of additives, they weren't using soya, they weren't using added synthetic vitamins, do I really need to go on? Its just a matter of common sense I would say.
* vaccines. WHY? The diseases vaccinated for are either easily preventable - HPV! - or had made a huge decline in happening way before the vaccines came on the market or were even almost extinct. Why was that, mainly better hygiene and another big part was that there was less malnutrition because people got better access to food.
In traditional cultures that have good food you can see that those people are healthy.
* additives to food. WHY? Why put chemicals in there, like MSG, colours, flavours, preservatives etc. when natural food is healthier?
* soya. WHY? This has not been a food in Asia like it is here. People mainly used it in times of famin. It was mainly used as a crop to grow and then dig under coz it made more nutrients in the soil more easily available to plants grown on there right after. In Asia people use less soya per day than the average person does here. So why use it so much here, when it hasn't even been grown here until recently. It isn't very healthy either in the way its prepared in the west, in Asia they use much different methods to prepare soya. Most processes taking several months, instead of several minutes in the factory.
* wreck the environment. WHY? Don't you want your children to inherit something that they can actually live in?
* antibiotics. WHY? Its in the meantime clear that its not the ultimate solution and sometimes makes things worse - MRSA and buddies.....
* cholesterol lowering meds. WHY? There is absolutely no conclusive proof that cholesterol is the problem, based on the studies its more likely that high cholesterol is a sign something is wrong, like arteries that need to be repaired, which the body can do itself, hence the high cholesterol. Its very unlikely that the present road taken is working.

Of course I could go on there are more things that bug me. I do not understand why the majority of people in this world seem to go for all kinds of unnatural, artificial and just outright stupid things when there is no need for that, as we have proven in the 13 million years we are in this world. Its mind boggling to me. I wonder where people's common sense went.

It can be really frustrating to live in this world with lack of common sense. Sometimes I wish I could live in another.

Case against Lotus Birth by Jaikali

A friend of mine who is an Independent Midwife wrote the following and I agree to that.
Have a read:

Below I have listed some reasons that I oppose Lotus Birth for myself. This is not to judge anyone who chooses Lotus Birth, which is a very personal matter; but I do think anyone considering it--as with any other matter concerning birth and health--ought to be able to look at all sides before deciding. This is not intended to be the start of a debate, either; those who support Lotus Birth have other threads in which to speak of those beliefs as well as LB methods. I hope for this to be a thread which the reasons to let go of the placenta soon after birth are brought forward.

1. However emotionally attached babies get to their placentas (and there is no way for us to measure or know this), the fact is that that attachment is based on the placenta as a live and nourishing/nurturing presence. At birth, the placenta dies. In life, there is no other loved being whom we would carry around with us after s/he/it was dead. We would perhaps lovingly and ritually honor that loved one, even keep it to look at for a day or so (as in a 'wake' before funeral), and bury it with respect and thought. But once dead, no human culture nor animal species chooses to carry around the dead....it is dead, however alive, loved and important it once was. Being born into human life necessarily includes dealing with the mortal and transitory nature of physical existence. It is my thought that if there *is* an emotional attachment between baby and placenta, including a spiritual significance of the placenta and baby's separation from it, then that, IMO, is about baby's first emotional/spiritual experience with knowing mortality and letting go. We can delay that with a Lotus Birth, at best...but I can't see any real purpose in that for baby. "there is a time for every purpose under heaven".

2. It is dead meat and begins to rot immediately. It is against all natural tendencies and creature habits to keep dead rotting meat hanging around--all mammals either eat the placenta entirely, or eat just a bit of it and then get up and get far away from it to avoid flies and predators.

3. Perhaps the best way to honor the placenta and it's physical *and* spiritual significance to all concerned is to eat it. On a physical level, that would be the reusing/ingesting of a ton of important nutrients and hormones. On a spiritual level, it is akin to Christian communion. An modified form of that communion would be to plant something over a buried placenta.

4. The cord dries quite hard and stiff. This can't possibly be comfortable for the baby, as it can't help but poke and be easily pulled with every movement--and every single LB story I've heard includes accounts of the inconvenience of dealing with the attached package of placenta in part because of the stiffness of the cord. Baby's discomfort is often described in terms of his/her grief or displeasure with anyone 'messing with their placenta'---but I can't help but think that it is more like simple irritation at having this dried stiff thing still attached, impinging on every move and possibly hurting at the umbilicus. I think we need to be very careful about assuming we understand what a baby cares about and experiences; it can be just as disrespectful to be oversensitive on baby's behalf, as it is to be completely insensitive to baby's needs and feelings. Also a mother, I want nothing at all to be in the way of nursing, changing and cuddling my baby, and passing her/him around to loving others.

5. If placentas were meant to stay attached for a few days, they would not require any sort of salting or preserving or a special bag to keep them from being touched by baby or others...it just wouldn't rot.

ok, well that's about it for now. Does anyone else have other reasons they feel that cord is best cut at some point within a few hours of birth, and placenta either eaten or allowed to return to the earth through burial?

Appendix

Today I read a very interesting article on the website of Dr. Mercola.
It is about the fact that the appendix does have a function.
Well, that is something that I always thought. I cannot imagine our bodies having useless features, would be kinda odd biologically speaking to put effort and energy into creating something that is useless.
It seems that is the place for the gut bacteria, which make total sense to me.
There you go, have a read:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/07/08/helpful-bacteria-may-be-hiding-in-your-appendix.aspx?source=nl

Birth Induction - Myth Busting - by Gail Dahl

Birth Induction - Myth Busting
by Gail Dahl

In some women, does labor never start? No! There is no woman in recorded history who has not gone into labor on her own. Myth Busted!

Does the placenta age or somehow stop functioning or have a best before date? No. There is no evidence that the placenta ages or stops functioning in a healthy woman. Your placenta is as new as your baby. It functions perfectly until and after your baby is ready to be born. If there is a problem with your placenta you will go into labor automatically. As long as you continue to nourish yourself, your placenta will continue to nourish your baby. Myth Busted!

Does anyone or any machine know the exact day a baby is ready? No. Your due date is only an estimated due date. The ultrasound cannot give you an exact date without an error rating. Errors are often made on the conception date. Only the baby and your body know the exact date your baby is ready to be born. Myth Busted!

Can the doctor or midwife tell how much amniotic fluid is available to the baby by looking at the mother? No. The ultrasound and the eye are unable to determine the exact level of amniotic fluid available to the baby. Some babies are born with very little or no amniotic fluid. The body is able to compensate for this situation. Myth Busted!

Are some babies too small or too big? No. No one and no machine is able to determine the weight of your baby before your baby is born. This is never a good reason for induction or cesarean. Myth busted.

Does a birth induction, by chemical or other means compromise the mother's and baby's health? Yes. In many cases forcing the labor compromises the health of mother and baby due to the familiar cascade of medical interventions needed to deal with the induction failures. It is always better to wait for the body to start labor spontaneously and for the body and baby to experience labor. There is no scientific or medical evidence that supports any benefits from forcing labor by any method or means.

Are baby's that go to full term, spontaneous labor healthier and happier? Yes, because they have everything they need to survive in our world with no shortcuts taken. The lungs are fully developed as the stress hormone is put into place, helping the baby to breathe more easily, the last layers of fat are placed so that your baby is warm and comfortable in our environment. Hundreds of events are occurring in the last few days before automatic, spontaneous labor, in the hours of labor and during the first breastfeeding event with the baby. The full term baby is healthier and the mother is healthier and recovers more quickly from childbirth. This baby and mother bond more readily, attach easily and have a greater ability to form a working, loving relationship from the start.

Birth Induction and Your Choices
A woman's body is beautifully designed for pregnancy and childbirth. The body will signal when the baby has finished developing. By not inducing the birth, your client may be able to experience a drug free childbirth and the all the benefits that come from it, including being able to successfully breastfeed the baby and to recover rapidly from childbirth.

There is no scientific or medical evidence that has proven that induction methods are necessary at any stage of the pregnancy. Women choosing drug free birth will mostly be unable to experience this when their labor has been induced. Many health problems and challenges face a pregnant woman who has been induced on the wrong date.

A due date is not a due date, it is an estimate, only. Some babies are ready sooner and some later. Most babies are ready ten days after the estimated due date, but many need more time. There is no scientific evidence that shows any benefit to forcing out the babies who need more time for development. All the evidence shows the life threatening dangers of premature birth.

Induction undermines a woman's belief in her ability to give birth and makes a drug free birth difficult, if not impossible. Women are not told of the consequences of inducing birth and the cascade of medical interventions that may be necessary as a result of the continual failure of the drugs and methods often leading to cesarean or a baby who has difficulty breathing.

You will read some of the most current research on induction in my book, "Pregnancy & Childbirth Secrets". I believe it is best to put this knowledge in the hands of the clients and allow them to come to a decision with current research on this subject. She can ask the caregiver, "What happens if we watch and wait?"

I have heard so many stories about why the baby has to come out right now, like the placenta is aging, your baby is too small, your baby is too big, your baby is too old, you are too old, the amniotic fluid is low, etc. The fact is the placenta is just as new as the baby, it does not stop functioning, there is no best before date. Your baby is just the right size for your baby. Your baby is well taken care of and is finishing the final development of the lungs, immune system, and many more finishing touches we are just becoming aware of. If you are an older mom, you most certainly want your labor to begin on its own as the labor will be safer and gentler for both you and the baby.

Birth inductions are killing mothers and babies. This message is going in front of the United States Senate in 2008 to alert the country to the dangers of this completely unnecessary procedure.

More Answers on Inductions:
I would like to know if either was actually postdates or if there was a slight possibility of an error in their estimated due date. How can you ever be sure? An ultrasound does not have the ability to predict an estimated due date. When your client is requesting no inductions or medical interventions I would feel that you would want to support their choice of birth.

Was that baby late or just not ready yet? That doctor has no ability to accurately determine the amniotic fluid level. There is no dip stick. An ultrasound is reliably unpredictable in measuring the fluid level or the estimated due date. The fluid level cannot be measured by eye. There is no scientific or medical evidence that fluid level would support an induction at any stage of a pregnancy. Some babies are born with almost no amniotic fluid whatsoever. The body is able to compensate for this unusual situation. An induction on any date will make the labor more painful and difficult. In this birth, the problems started with the induction. After twelve years of research I have found no scientific or medical evidence that there is any benefit whatsoever in inducing birth at any stage.

For the women who request a cesarean section, many of these would have experienced physical and/or sexual abuse sometime in their lives. Some of these women also experience panic attacks on a daily basis. Should these mothers be allowed a cesarean if that is their choice? Most definitely. Do these women benefit from experiencing labor? Most definitely. During labor the stress hormones are being laid down in the baby's lungs and the cesarean babies who do not go through labor do not experience this, leading to breathing and other problems later in life.

Some of these women, who would prefer to order a cesarean than experience birth find that developing their birth plan and researching caregivers and birth settings helps them to deal with the fear of being abused again, some not yet ready to re-experience their initial trauma will opt for a cesarean section to regain a feeling of control. If your client requests a cesarean section and shows a high fear of labor or delivery, this can be their personal situation. These women have been through enough and if that is what they need, that is what they need.

I understand you want to support a woman's choice, whatever it is. What I am concerned with are unnecessary inductions and the associated trauma caused by this procedure and the women who have agreed to induction without being fully informed of the alternatives available. One of the best alternatives to birth induction is waiting until the body and the baby signal that they are ready by going into spontaneous labor.

I believe we can have more positive birth experiences if we allow women to start labor spontaneously instead of using dangerous chemicals or methods to artificially start labor. Women and babies are dying from the new trend of using the drug, Cytotec, to artificially start labor. This is a serious matter for the health of our mothers and babies. There is a committee going in front of the US Senate in 2008 to talk about the dangerous practice of using Cytotec to artificially start labor. The drug company itself has said do not use this product on pregnant women. I have seen the warning and the graphic design that is stamped upon the packaging. Cytotec is a drug only meant for non-pregnant women with arthritis.

What is happening? Some doctors and some midwives are using it anyway on pregnant women and are completely ignoring the printed and graphic warning on the packaging. Some mothers who are exposed to Cytotec during pregnancy are dying. The baby often dies as well as the drug causes the woman's body to rupture from within. Imagine losing your child and grandchild in the same day because someone was impatient for things to get going or a mathematical formula said the baby was ready, when it wasn’t.

Watching and waiting will always give the best result. The best benefit to the mother and baby is waiting until the body spontaneously goes into labor on its own.

Copyright 2008, Secrets Newsletter 2008, by National Bestselling Author, Gail J. Dahl “Pregnancy & Childbirth Secrets” http://web.mac.com/pregnancysecrets. This article may be reprinted or posted for the purpose of childbirth education if references are included. The information contained in or provided through this publication is intended for general consumer understanding and education only and is not intended to be, and is not provided as, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your midwife, physician, nurse or other qualified health care provider before you undergo any treatment or for answers to any questions you may have regarding any medical condition.

New Events:
July 17th - 19th, 2008 - DONA International Conference, Sheraton Wall Centre, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Look for signed copies of "Pregnancy & Childbirth Secrets" at the silent auction table. Join DONA International for an enriching educational and interpersonal experience within the exquisite surroundings of historic, diverse and culturally rich Vancouver! Speakers include Steve Buonaugurio, Robbie Davis-Floyd, Harvey Karp, Andrew Kotaska, Penny Simkin, Nancy Sinclair and Nick Wechsler. Access the conference brochure on the DONA International Web site www.DONA.org for complete details on the core conference and pre- and post-conference workshops.

New Internet Events:
June 2008: New Reading Room Articles at www.babyontheway.ca

June 2008: Take a look at these wonderful upcoming courses offered on the Internet by http://ConsciousWoman.org. Low cost, great information, all in the comfort of your own home. This is a great way to learn, empower yourself and have the opportunity to work closely with some of the best in the business.

Wednesday, June 11th 6:00 p.m. Pacific / 9:00 p.m. Eastern
Gentle Birth: The Science and the Wisdom, with Sarah J. Buckley, M.D.
TOPIC: Epidurals: Impact on Mother and Baby
CEUs: IBLCE, MEAC, DONA, CAPPA, ALACE, ICPA

Tuesday, June 17th 5:00 p.m. Pacific / 8:00 p.m. Eastern
Advanced Doula Training, with Gloria Lemay (not just for doulas!)
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Tribes in danger.

As I am a TCC parent I love reading about how other peoples live, but I do not like reading about tribes being in danger. I have read about several tribes still being uncontacted and hope it will stay that way, as there is nothing good to be gotten from being contacted.

Here are some interesting links:

Survival International

On Survival international you can read about uncontacted tribes and why it is good to keep it that way.

Bushment wanting to go home!

While reading on these websites I realised that a lot of learning that we can do about these tribes could be gone at some point in the future when civilized man thinks they are better than those tribes and keep doing what they are doing.
There are so many animals extinct and now they seem to be working on ending healthy independent civilisations. I hope my kids and grandkids will still have tribal communities to look at to learn from.

Dolls childish? Weapons violent?

For years now I hear strange things like:
Young teens (13yo - 14yo's) shouldn't be playing with dolls, that is childish - why?
Boys shouldn't play with weapons, that makes them violent men - why?

I will go into my thoughts on this below a bit.

Dolls
In a tribal community young teenagers have babies to spend time with and to practise on to learn how to handle a baby. The mothers of these babies are also there, or the aunts, grandma's etc. So the girl learns under supervision how to do this. In some communities those young teenage girls end up being responsible for the majority of the care and entertainment of these babies.
They carry them a lot when the mother is busy with activities which make it difficult to wear the baby. These young teenage girls have quite a bit of responsiblity, also within their community with helping with all the other adult tasks. They start doing those before they are getting a partner and have babies, in general.
So in general by the age of 13 to 14 they are participating in the adult world.
In our world they are considered children until they are done with their studies, which could be 26, so pretty much double the age of maturity in a tribal community.
By nature, children expect to be entering the adult world from about 13 - 14 years of age.
This is one of the reasons why teenagers can be difficult, they are treated like babies, which they are not. They are supposed to be taking care of babies, house, cooking etc. Of course in our world that will have to find other outlets than in a tribal community.
With this in mind I don't think its childish for a 13yo to play with a doll like it is a real baby and I also think that its pretty educational for them when mothers explain to them how things would work with a real baby, iso telling them off for being "childish".
I really do think that girls of 13 - 14 should be slowly but carefully get more taken into the adult world. Its really important for them in their growth.

Weapons
Another hang-up in our western world. Boys aren't supposed to play with weapons it makes violent men out of them.
I think this is rubbish, just examine what happens in tribes that live more natural.
There boys have a bow and arrow that they use and learn how to use from a young age. Of course its made to size.
But the learning starts very young, they need to learn to hunt, they need to learn that to be able to help feed the tribe later on when they are older.
At about the age of 10 to 14 they go out with the men hunting, give and take a few years as this is different in every tribe.
At some point they start with small animals and the better they get the bigger the animals they can help hunt.
There is nothing wrong with that, they learn to use the weapons and learn how to provide food. This is still a natural instinct in our boys.
If only more people would recognize that and work with that life would be much easier on all.

I have a 13yo and I do see how much she loves messing with our 3mos old baby. The baby also enjoys it and it does give me quite a bit of space to do things without carrying her.

Respect

Today my 4yo told me that when she was in the paddling pool of neighbours one of the children there kept throwing water on her and she asked him several times to stop, but he didn't.
This is respectless to me and makes me wonder how he was raised when he cannot respect a 4yo's begs to stop, being 15 himself.
To me that is just not right. I am always making sure that my girls do respect other people's requests to not do something when appropriate.

There are also things that my kids are being told they are not allowed to do something, which they are allowed to do, i.e. go into the woods.
Its really strange and as far as I am concerned again respectless to tell my kids that I would not allow them that, when I do. It would be good to first run it by me, me thinks.

Helicopter parents

A few thoughts that occurred to me today are the following ones.
In the past my kids have always been able to do their things with other kids without parents messing with it. We didn't have problems with that at all. The kids in the area would fall out every now and then and be friends again later on. No big thing, those things happen with kids from very different backgrounds. If it would be that they had grown up together, like in a tribal community, things would be different.
Then we move to this neighbourhood. And then the mess started.
All parents in this neighbourhood are helicopter parents, as they are continuously meddling with things. They do not let kids sort it out on their own.
In the beginning I didn't realize that, after a while I got annoyed with it that my kids got told off by neighbours for things they hadn't even done. I knew they hadn't, as either we all had been gone, or they had been inside with me or something like that.
Then, as things didn't improve, but only went worse, I started meddling with things as well and there I am, trying very hard not to be a helicopter parent, but having to be one for the sanity of our family and the children, I need to protect them from the extremely intimidating way other parents are treating them, which even involved stuff like one of my kids having to help clean up the room of one of them right at the moment she came into the house to play and after the cleaning up, inclding the hamster cage (!!) the were kicked out. This type of stuff is totally unacceptable to me.
Moreover so as those children need to immediately come home and do not have the time to help clean the mess they made. So, as a consequence I had to interfere and make sure that neither of these things happened again.
I sooo hate not being able to just let kids have a relaxed life with other kids, but have to keep a constant eye on things as other people think they can treat them like shit.

This particularly goes for the excusing of one child with special needs, but not the other, its all so sick to me.

neigbours suck

A bit of history first:
2 months ago one of my girls comes in with very nasty bruise marks on her throat. She came in a few minutes are we had come back with our baby from the doctor who was quite ill with a nasty cold at that time.
So we ask what happened. H had done it, after H had been bullied by C earlier that evening and my daughter went up to her to ask if she was okay, after C had gone in.
2 other girls were there as well.
We take photos of it and call the police as this was too much, this was assault. I had actually been thinking about going going to the A&E with it to have her checked out, but we didn't. We also didn't go to the doc the next day as we should have, hindsight.

A standard thing with the mum of C, R, is that she excuses H for everything as H has special needs and cannot help herself - and its not even a relative to her, WTF my girl that was assaulted also has special needs, asperger and can therefore not always interpret peoples ways in socializing very well, which is held against her and always explained as lying. Which gets me extremely pissed.

Fast forward to last night one of my girls comes in telling me that she was told off by R&K to not go near H.
We talked a bit and she told me that R had talked and K was there. That the comment or R was that "they weren't allowed to play together" "you weren't allowed to be together" or something like that.
My girl was called to come over by C, the daughter or R and hadn't seen that H was there, else she would have stayed away as she doesn't want to risk trouble.
So when she heard that comment she left and told me about it, which I consider quite normal.
My partner got ticked off by this type of stuff happening again and again around here and went to the top of our garden and looked at them.
First he got a snarky grin by K - who has been actively ignoring me for a few months now after stating last year that she wanted to be friends.... - which got him actually more pissed.
Then R started talking to him, which in the end got him and me more and more pissed as R stated that our daughter is *always* lying.
We asked for an example and she comes with and example which is a total lie, she actually tried to get her daughter to say stuff to confirm her, but her daughter only looked down at the road, and didn't say anything, which made it even more clear to me what was going on. I feel very sorry for her daughter to have to put into those positions over and over again by her own mother. The daughter has at times even excused herself to me for the things her mother says and does. That is really scary, when a 10yo knows her mum is doing wrong stuff.
This 10yo has also at times told me that I am the only adult that you can actually talk with normal.
In the end the baby started crying so I went in, but my partner stayed with the conversation for a while and got totally insulted when he got the "parenting advice" that you shouldn't believe everything children say. Pardon.... my own middle child was there and got extremely insulted by it, as she is trying to tell me as much as possible about what is happening to make sure I know about everything before someone comes with stupid comments again.

A really stupid incident was at some point that this same mum R comes to our door with a whole big story and obviously didn't know jack shit about what had happened as I had been there and knew what had happened, but then she preferred staying with her own story, although she had been at work at the time it happened, what a way to deal with things.
At least one of the comments then was that her house is always tidy... like that has anything to do with it.... I could have stated that we always eat healthy - as we do, that didn't have anything to do with the kids argument either.

I am getting so sick and tired of this crap and have had a nice wish of moving, but for now we cannot afford that. So I will have to do quite a bit of work with the law of attraction to get a nice friendly neighbourhood fixed.

Breastfeeding musings

Today we were out. We went to the market and the shopping mall. First the market and then for lunch to the mall. When we were sitting there having lunch I noticed 2 women coming in with their babies.
The blond woman's baby was very young, I suspect only a few days old. The mother had trouble walking and looked like she had just given birth. Her partner was with her, but she was pushing the pram and holding the shopping bags. It looked strange to me.
The other woman's baby was about 3 months I think, looking at the behaviour of that baby in comparison to my own.
When I was observing them I was wondering how they would ever survive in another area of this world.
Both babies were in prams, no carrying.
Both babies were bottle fed.
The oldest baby's mum was continuously rattling with a bright coloured plastic toy in front of the baby's crying face. She was just continuing her conversation.
In view of my own views of child care, this was all very wrong.
I couldn't understand how a crying baby could just be ignored. I could also not understand that someone would not want to have a baby close to them, like on their lap or something like that.
Furthermore I totally fail to understand why only 1 in a 100 women in the UK follow the advice of health care professionals to breastfeed their baby.
BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6653679.stm

A baby expects at birth to be breastfed, the whole body of the baby is designed to digest human milk, not a substitute. For a baby its the norm to be breastfed, why do most people not see that.

A baby expects to be held a lot, not being put in some place, but expects to be with mum or dad, or big sister, aunt, uncle, who ever. Somebody that can protect the baby from harm. That is an expectation baby has at birth, its inside the baby, its disturbing for a baby to put somewhere alone, its traumatising.

A baby expects interaction with people, not plastic.

A baby expects to be nurtured at the breast, comforted at the breast, not at a plastic dummy.

A baby expects to be taken seriously, not ignored, because this and that writer, who didn't have kids when they wrote the book or has totally mentally disturbed kids, says that babies only need attention 1x every 3 hours and doesn't need anything when they are fed and cleaned.
I sure as hell need more attention than that, so why can a baby not get the same amount of attention.

Just like that I do not like to have to wee and poo in my underpants, that is just not right, babies also know when they need to eliminate. They expect help with that. Most people won't give them that help.

That's all for now with my frustrations of the day. No doubt more to come later.

My difficulty of late

Since my baby was born I have been in a bit of struggle. I won't let her cry and will try to carry her around as much as I can. Unfortunately after the pregnancy I didn't have a decent set of muscles anymore so carrying got a bit tricky, this also resulted in the house not being up to my standard lately. We still had home cooked meals but not to the level I want it to be unfortunately. Slowly the muscles have been building up again so I can carry her much longer now, but I really need to keep this up.
She was also not as comfortable with being in the carrier as I would have liked. Her big sisters simply loved it.

Too little room on the earth to feed all humans?

Recently I read a statement from an organisation for vegetarians in which it said that there isn't enough ground on the earth to grow all the crops necessary to feed all the animals necessary to feed humans.
This actually makes no sense at all.
There are large amounts of land in this world, about two thirds, on which it will not be able to grow any crops to feed humans. The animals that we mainly eat are animals that eat grass.
Cows, sheep and goats f.i. should not be mainly fed grains, that is bad for their health, they need a large amount of grass, weeds, etc., this goes for most of the animals that we feed ourselves with.
Therefore it is total rubbish to say that when the western world would eat less meat that this would give the third world countries more food and the people there would not starve to death. Basically the western world should feed the animals what they need to feed and then there wouldn't be such problems. I personally think it would be pretty sick to not use about two thirds of the land and overuse one third which would then end up being infertile.
We would also need to eat higher quantities of food to get the required proteins and fats if we were vegetarians and no longer getting concentrated protein and fat from animal products, so we would need to greatly increase vegetable and grain production and wearing this land out. As a result I can see starvation for all.
Of course vegetable growing can be more productive using organic techniques instead of factory farming, which is true, but that this would require a lot more human labor, which I would love to see happening. The majority of us would have to go back to hard labour in the fields instead of just a few now. This would of course benefit the health of most of us, but its unlikely to happen in practice as most people do not want to do hard labour. I personally love having a vegetable garden for our family, saves money and feeds all 6 of us easily throughout the year.

Fermentation, kefir & kombucha

In our family we are very interested in natural healthy foods.
Therefore we have gotten a kombucha mother or scoby, we also have scoby for milk kefir and water kefir. In case anyone is interested in getting that, I often have too much of it, as it grows and am willing to send it to anyone who wants it, just drop me a line.
We also do a lot of fermenting, we make sauerkraut, cortido, kimchi and other sauerkraut types. We have also made fermented carrots with ginger.
Furthermore we make our own bread, sourdough bread.
The good thing about natural fermented foods is that it is lactofermented and with that it makes the food more nutritional for us, we can digest it better and are better able to get the nutrients out of our food.

Spending time

With a newborn baby there is very little time for anything else than feeding and caring. Therefore I think I will post a bit less the next couple of months, as the house needs attention as well, dinner has to be made and kids have to be educated and cared for.
I do hope to be able to keep a bit on track here as I do love explaining how things feel for us with parenting etc.
For now, nursing needs to be done about every hour, as she is still small, that also means that there is a nice amount of dirty nappies, as she does feed very well.
Newborn babies need about 10 to 12 feeds in 24 hours, so it makes total sense that she does this, as she is sleeping quite well during the nights.
Furthermore we needed to make sure that feeding was going smooth, and that takes a few weeks to get that fully settled. In general mums are explained not to use any dummies or bottles before the first 4 weeks are done and that they have made sure that breastfeeding is well established, that will take about 4 weeks.

Natural age of weaning - Kathryn Dettwyler

This article is also one that I truly love, it is so well researched and so very true that I wonder why our culture has come up with such different ideas from what is natural.


http://www.kathydettwyler.org/detwean.html

My research has looked at the various "life-history" variables (such as length of gestation, birth weight, growth rate, age at sexual maturity, age at eruption of teeth, life span, etc.) in non-human primates and then looked at how these variables correlate with age at weaning in these animals. These are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, especially gorillas and chimpanzees, who share more than 98% of their genes with humans. I came up with a number of predictions for when humans would "naturally" wean their children if they didn't have a lot of cultural rules about it. This interest stemmed from a reading of the cross-cultural literature on age at weaning, which shows that cultures have very different beliefs about when children should be weaned, from very early in the U.S. to very late in some places. One often hears that the worldwide average age of weaning is 4.2 years, but this figure is neither accurate nor meaningful. A survey of 64 "traditional" studies done prior to the 1940s showed a median duration of breastfeeding of about 2.8 years, but with some societies breastfeeding for much shorter, and some for much longer. It is meaningless, statistically, to speak of an average age of weaning worldwide, as so many children never nurse at all, or their mothers give up in the first few days, or at six weeks when they go back to work. It is true that there are still many societies in the world where children are routinely breastfed until the age of four or five years or older, and even in the United States, some children are nursed for this long and longer. In societies where children are allowed to nurse "as long as they want" they usually self-wean, with no arguments or emotional trauma, between 3 and 4 years of age. This interest also stemmed from the realization that other animals have "natural" ages of weaning, around 8 weeks for dogs, 8-12 months for horses, etc. Presumably these animals don't have cultural beliefs about when it would be appropriate.

Some of the results are as follows:

1. In a group of 21 species of non-human primates (monkeys and apes) studied by Holly Smith, she found that the offspring were weaned at the same time they were getting their first permanent molars. In humans, that would be: 5.5-6.0 years.

2. It has been common for pediatricians to claim that length of gestation is approximately equal to length of nursing in many species, suggesting a weaning age of 9 months for humans. However, this relationship turns out to be affected by how large the adult animals are -- the larger the adults, the longer the length of breastfeeding relative to gestation. For chimpanzees and gorillas, the two primates closest in size to humans and also the most closely genetically related, the relationship is 6 to 1. That is to say, they nurse their offspring for SIX times the length of gestation (actually 6.1 for chimps and 6.4 for gorillas, with humans mid-way in size between these two). In humans, that would be: 4.5 years of nursing (six times the 9 months of gestation).

3. It has been common for pediatricians to claim that most mammals wean their offspring when they have tripled their birth weight, suggesting a weaning age of 1 year in humans. Again though, this is affected by body weight, with larger mammals nursing their offspring until they have quadrupled their birth weight. In humans, quadrupling of birth weight occurs between 2.5 and 3.5 years, usually.

4. One study of primates showed that the offspring were weaned when they had reached about 1/3 their adult weight. This happens in humans at about 5-7 years.

5. A comparison of weaning age and sexual maturity in non-human primates suggests a weaning age of 6-7 for humans (about half-way to reproductive maturity).

6. Studies have shown that a child's immune system doesn't completely mature until about 6 years of age, and it is well established that breast milk helps develop the immune system and augment it with maternal antibodies as long as breast milk is produced (up to two years, no studies have been done on breast milk composition after two years post partum).

And on and on. The minimum predicted age for a natural age of weaning in humans is 2.5 years, with a maximum of 7.0 years.

In terms of the benefits of extended breastfeeding, there have been a number of studies comparing breastfed and bottlefed babies in terms of the frequency of various diseases, and also IQ achievement. In every case, the breastfed babies had lower risk of disease and higher IQs than the bottle-fed babies. In those studies that divided breastfed babies into categories based on length of breastfeeding, the babies breastfed the longest did better in terms of both lower disease and higher IQ. In other words, if the categories were 0-6 months of breastfeeding, 6-12 months, 12-18 months and 18-24+ months, then the 18-24+ month babies did the best, and the 12-18 month babies did the next best, and the 6-12 months babies did the next best, and the 0-6 months babies did the worst of the breastfed groups, but still much better than the bottlefeeding group. This has been shown for gastrointestinal illness, upper respiratory illness, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, heart disease, and on and on and on. Likewise, the babies nursed the longest scored the highest on the IQ tests. One important point to notice is that none of these studies looked at children who had nursed longer than 2 years. Anyone 18-24 month or longer was lumped into big category. Presumably, the benefits continue to accrue, as your body doesn't *know* that the baby has bad a birth day and suddenly start producing nutritionally and immunologically worthless milk.

However, no one has yet proved, either way, that the benefits of breastfeeding either continue or stop at two years of age, because the appropriate studies have not been done. The trend during the first two years is clearly for continuing benefits the longer you nurse. Clearly the phenomenon of dimishing returns is at work here -- the first six months of breastfeeding are clearly much more important in terms of the baby's nutrition and immunological development than the six months from 3.5 to 4.0 years. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't continue to provide breast milk if your baby wants and you don't mind. It would be like saying, "Well Mabel, we don't get very much income from that oil well anymore. Used to get $56 a month in royalties, now we're lucky if we get $25 a year. Guess we should tell that oil company just to keep their durn money." And Mabel says, in return "Good grief, Clyde, don't be ridiculous. That check still buys $25 worth of food. Where has your mind gone to now?"

Clearly, babies born in the U.S. don't have to contend with all the diseases and parasites and contaminated water that babies in Third World countries do. We have more supplementary foods that we can generally trust to be safe and clean. We can get our children immunized, and get them antibiotics for infections when necessary. The fact that we *can* does not mean that breastfeeding is unimportant. Breastfed babies still have the "edge" over bottlefed babies, even in a squeaky clean environment with wonderful medical care. They get sick less often, they are smarter, they are happier. Another important consideration for the older child is that they are able to maintain their emotional attachment to a person, rather than being forced to switch to an inanimate object such as a teddy bear or blanket. I think this sets the stage for a life of people-orientation, rather than materialism, and I think that is a good thing. I also can't imagine living through the toddler years without that close loving connection to a child going through enormous changes, some of which are very frustrating to the child. I could go on forever, but will stop here.

I hope this has been of help. These ideas are developed much more eloquently and in much greater detail in my chapter "A Time to Wean" in Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives, being published by Aldine de Gruyter.