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.