APtly Said – Page 109

Three Easy Tricks to Maintaining a Loving and Positive State of Being

To consistently express the nurturing and attentive love that Attachment Parenting is all about is no easy task when you’re out of your mind sleep-deprived, weary of toddler tantrums and stretched to your capacity to care for your family, your house, your work, and maybe — if you’re lucky — yourself. I’ve teetered on burn-out quite a bit over the last several months and was delighted recently to learn some quick tricks for shifting out of my “this is too hard” mindset and into total gratitude for my life and my ability to create something new and magical for myself and my family every day.

Sadie Joy 2 Knowing how well these tricks can work for me during grumpy moments (when I remember to access them), I’m inspired to guide my 3 year-old in giving them a try when she gets emotionally stuck too. I can remind her of how she felt in this picture when her arms were outstretched in pure, unfettered bliss and encourage her to replay this physical state or others that she likes to access the joyful emotions that accompanied them.

As a leader of tropical yoga retreats in Hawaii and Mexico, I’ve researched numerous resorts and retreat centers to find the locations most suitable for the clientele I want to draw. Retreat centers range from the rustic to the luxurious, from mountain to beach settings, and from remote to city center. Below are some considerations for what to look for in your search for the ideal yoga retreat. Click here if you want to find out more about yoga resort and adventure.

Do you want to retreat into yourself or have a social outdoor adventure? Some centers have several groups intermingling at meals, at the pool, dance parties, or are centrally located in a town with street noise, music, etc. Others have space for only one group, or are in remote locations with no cars in sight. Many are in between. I’ve found that even if there are plenty of extra activities offered, one can always choose to abstain, stay quiet, take naps, receive bodywork, etc, as long as the setting is tranquil.

Courtesy of Helen Attridge of Inner Wisdom Coaching, here are three amazing mood shifting strategies.

1) Change your physiology. When you’re angry at life, how does it feel in your body? What do your shoulders do? How do you breathe? What happens to your forehead, your mouth, your jaw….? Now think about your physical state when you’re feeling your favorite emotion. My favorite emotional state is a combination of inspired and secure. When I feel this way, I feel energetic, powerful, open, and tapped into Life. My chest is open versus hunched, my face is bright and content versus scrunched or clenched and my breathing comes easy.

To find the emotional state that matches the physical state, start with the latter. Stretch. Walk outside. Dance. Practice Yoga. Check out this great article from Fit Yoga Magazine posted in Yoga in Tribeca on how to impact the way you think and feel and create through direct manipulation of the body.

2) Check in on your focus and your beliefs in that moment. Last week I received a rejection letter from a company I was really excited about working for and my mind really struggled to stay positive. The thoughts and questions that clouded my head, together with other self-deprecating slams were, “Why is this not happening? and “It’s going to take forever.” Feeling and expressing disappointment is healthy and natural of course. Keeping my mental focus there and maintaining the ridiculous belief that anything takes “forever” would energetically block opportunities, connections and any number of other wonderful things that cross my path.

3) Change the question. If you hear any version of “What’s wrong with me?” or “Why can’t I figure this out?” in your head, get conscious of it, recognize that no valuable answer comes from a negatively oriented question, and try asking a different set of questions like:

“What’s next?”
“How can we have fun?”
“What am I grateful for right now?”
“What am I willing to do to create a new reality?”
“How can we make this an amazing adventure?”
“What is perfect about this moment?”
“What am I learning?”

The transformation from Grumperella back to Sweet Loving AP Mama is great!

What tricks do you have for maintaining your ability to provide consistent and loving care when you’re feeling tired or grouchy? I’d love to hear them.

Monica Cravotta lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and two daughters, ages 3 and 1. She blogs at AttachmentMama.com.

Prepare for Pregnancy, Birth, and Parenting Blog Carnival

Attention attachment parenting bloggers. The first of the 2010 Attachment Parenting International Principles of Parenting blog carnivals will be posted on February 19, just two weeks away. The February carnival will focus on API’s first Principle of Parenting, Prepare for Pregnancy, Birth, and Parenting. Although the submission deadline for this carnival is still a week away, February 12, I’ve already received a few entries.

If you are interested in submitting a post for the carnival, please have it published on your blog with the following text (including hyperlinks), by the 2/12/10 submission deadline.

This post is part of the 2010 API Principles of Parenting blog carnival, a series of monthly parenting blog carnivals, hosted by API Speaks. Learn more about attachment parenting by visiting the API website.

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Trusting Birth

A few days ago I was putting together a letter for the 2010 Trust Birth Conference and it started me on a train of thought that culminated today as I was sitting having the second pedicure of my life at the local beauty school. Let me take you for a little ride.

Most of us know that your bond with your child starts at a very early age, pre-birth actually. They hear you and are able to sense many of your emotions. They can even detect some of your actions. A baby can sense when they are wanted and loved and when they are not.

From the very first moment I wanted my baby and everything to do with baby making to be healthy and holistic. Several people suggested I drink before my wedding night to make things “easier.” My thought was “Why? I want this to be the night that my husband and I become one, where we attach, where we form our life-long bond, why would I want to be anesthetized for something as amazing as this?”
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Co-sleeping Outside the Family Bed

I love co-sleeping, and I have co-slept in one capacity or another with both of my children. There are few things sweeter than curling up to sleep with my toddler and sharing a good night’s rest. Co-sleeping has made breastfeeding easier, it has helped my babies to sleep better and it has meant that I don’t have to wake up as fully or as often.

In spite of my love of co-sleeping, I occasionally wonder whether co-sleeping loves me. There are the mornings that I wake up sore, contorted in some awkward position because that’s the only way my little one would sleep. There are the infrequent but jarring kicks to my head or fingers attempting to pry open my eyelid. And there is the amazing ability that my toddlers have both cultivated that allows them to take up 75% of a king sized mattress.

My daughter Hannah, napping in her parents’ bed

I am willing to sleep with my kids for as long as they need me, but with both of my children I found that at around 18 months the family bed stopped working so well. The space grew increasingly cramped, and our babies stopped sleeping as soundly. However, my little ones still needed me throughout the night for breastfeeding or just for comfort, and so we had to get creative.
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Child’s Hierarchy of Needs

Parents often find it overwhelming trying to meet their children’s needs. With limited time, limited resources, and limited patience meeting all of their needs can seem like an impossible task. If we can’t do it all, where should we begin? Where should we focus? What is most important?

Last year, Meagan Francis from The Happiest Mom developed a Mother’s Hierarchy of Needs based on the work of Abraham Maslow who developed Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In simple terms (from businessballs.com, emphasis mine):

Each of us is motivated by needs. Our most basic needs are inborn, having evolved over tens of thousands of years. Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs helps to explain how these needs motivate us all. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs states that we must satisfy each need in turn, starting with the first, which deals with the most obvious needs for survival itself. Only when the lower order needs of physical and emotional well-being are satisfied are we concerned with the higher order needs of influence and personal development.

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Modeling AP Values

I spend a lot of time writing and speaking to people about the values I hold as a person who practices attachment/responsive parenting. I try to use facts and logic to respectfully encourage others to research their parenting decisions and embrace ideas that might have been uncomfortable a generation ago, such as full-term breastfeeding and breastfeeding in public, leaving our sons intact, responding to our children with love and respect, and realizing the detrimental effects of physical discipline.

Looking through some recent pictures of my son (Kieran), I realized that we (as parents who share these values) might be doing more just by modeling these concepts to our children. Of course I will continue to extol the value of full-term breastfeeding, and I will defend every mother’s right to nurse in public when, where and how she wants to. But I take immense comfort in the fact that my son might not need to fight these same battles because we are normalizing it for his generation, simply by living.

Here are some examples of how the Eight API Principles are being normalized for my son every day:

Prepare for Pregnancy, Birth, and Parenting

My sister recently had a baby (this picture is of Kieran with my sister only weeks before she gave birth). Throughout her pregnancy, we talked with Kieran about how babies grow in their mama’s tummies. He loved feeling my sister’s stomach, and he often talked about the baby growing in his own belly.

Someday, I hope that he will experience the pregnancy of his own little brother or sister. I look forward to his thoughts on all of the changes that will occur in my body. We will prepare him for his sibling’s homebirth and allow him to participate as fully as is practical and comfortable for everyone.
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The Power Of Choice

Imagine a day in which you had no say in what you did. Someone else decided when you got out of bed, what clothes you would wear, and what you ate for breakfast. Someone else dictated when you played, what you played with, and for how long. Someone else chose where you went that day, when you had your meals, and when you slept. Someone else instructed you on how to behave, what things you could and could not touch, and what you watched on TV.

P1210167 Now imagine how you’d feel at the end of such a day. After being bossed around and having all your decisions made for you, wouldn’t you want to flex your muscles and have a say?

At my children’s preschool, we talk a lot about how important it is to allow children to make choices. It’s important for many reasons. First of all, a child can’t learn how to make decisions on their own if they’ve never been allowed to do it before. Secondly, presenting children with choices and encouraging them to weigh their options is a powerful tool when it comes to self discipline, self esteem, and restraint, all of which are valuable lessons when it comes to such issues as drugs, alcohol and sex. In other words, letting your toddler choose her own clothes can help equip her to make the right choices when peer pressure kicks in years later.
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Welcome, Cosleeping Crib-Sleepers!

Many of us attached parents understand what it’s like to feel ostracized for our choice in parenting practices. We’re tired of the looks and comments about giving birth without drugs, breastfeeding beyond six months, holding our babies all the time, disciplining without empty_crib punishing, forgoing a career to stay at home, and taking the time to soothe our night-waking children back to sleep. Attachment Parenting would be great except for that whole bit of dealing with the judgment of our family and friends, not to mention complete strangers.

Which is why I want to call attention to what is happening in our AP community: As much as we try to be welcoming to every AP parent, there is still judgment passed among us – the woman whose birth ended in a Cesarean, the mother who cannot breastfeed, the father who came to AP later and with a history of spanking, the lower-income families in which both parents must work, the parents who do not take their baby to bed with them, and so on.
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