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.