Maintaining our right to choose

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the American Medical Association’s decision to try to outlaw home birth over at my blog Crunchy Domestic Goddess. This announcement really hit close to home (no pun intended) since I had a home birth with my son Julian and, should my husband Jody and I want to try to have more children, I would choose a home birth again.

The first principle of Attachment Parenting is Prepare for Pregnancy, Birth, and Parenting. One of the ways I prepared for birth when I was pregnant with my son was to try out different health care providers until I found the one that was right for us.

Due to my history of having HELLP syndrome with my daughter, I thought I was considered high risk and started out my pregnancy with an OB practice. It took just two appointments for me to realize that I was only a number there and it was not the kind of care I wanted for myself or my baby.

At the recommendation of a friend, I tried another OB practice and really liked the doctor that practiced there. She seemed much more interested in me as a person and I didn’t feel like I was rushed in and out of the door. Yet, I still wasn’t 100% comfortable with the idea of another hospital birth.

After another friend of mine experienced an amazing home birth, I began talking to her more and more about it and she encouraged me to meet with a midwife just to discuss my options. She had checked with her midwife (who ultimately became my midwife and assisted with my son’s birth) and found out that my past history did not make me high risk or risk me out of being a home birth candidate. So my husband and I made an appointment to talk to her. We came armed with all of our questions and she answered them to our satisfaction and then some. It became clear to me that in order to have the kind of birth I wanted, I needed to plan for a home birth.

We felt extremely confident in this midwife’s experience, history and abilities and didn’t see any reason to interview another one. At around 20 weeks, I switched from the OB practice to my midwife, and the rest, as they say, is history. When my son was born a surprise footling breech, with the cord wrapped around his neck three times, and his arm behind his head, I was so glad we made the choice that we did. My midwife was amazing.

Amy and Julian after breech home birth - 11/23/06I feel so fortunate that I was able to make the choice that was right for me, my baby and my family. I had the kind of birth that empowered me and made me feel like I could take on the world mostly because I had the right to choose.

I can’t imagine what taking away the right to choose would do to so many women throughout the United States. If you feel similarly, please consider signing the Keep Home Birth Legal petition and/or spread the word about this. Home birth is a choice. Let’s keep it that way.

Written by Amy from Crunchy Domestic Goddess

Torso? Of Course-O!

Back Torso Carry

Q: Can you teach me to wear my baby on my back in a Torso Carry?

A: Sure can. Let me tell you why I love the Torso Carry. If you have never tried a torso carry (fabric is wrapped exclusively around your torso excluding the shoulders entirely) you are in for a treat. This wonderful position is exceptionally comfortable. Baby rides a bit lower on your back than some other back carries and ends up riding essentially on the top of your bum. Baby’s bottom is lower than his knees for optimal hip abduction. Baby’s arms can be tucked in the fabric or out (as in the above picture).

Because torso carries do not involve the shoulders, this is a great carry for people with neck or shoulder trouble. Quick and comfortable, you are going to love this carry. You can use many different pieces of cloth for this carry. Here are some ideas: a wraparound carrier, a podaegi, an extra-long Rebozo, a thin beach towel, or a Simple Piece of Cloth, with the dimensions and features which I described here.

Here is how I got my 8-month-old on my back: Start with baby on your hip. Lean to the side and scoot her back as far as possible. Bring your arm up and over baby’s head and catch her under the bum. Remain leaning forward and make your back flat like a table. Hop her around to your back until she is straddling the center of your back, piggy back style.

Then you just need to wrap the carrier around you and baby. In this series, I am using a woven Gypsymama wrap. This is very similar to how we wrap ourselves in a towel (tuck under our armpits and roll) except that you will be leaning forward and you will be including a baby.

Start by holding your fabric in the center and pulling it up and over baby’s back. The top edge should be at baby’s neck, bottom edge at baby’s knees. Hold the top edge taut (to hold baby in place) and pull the fabric straight forward and tuck one side way under your armpit. Tuck the other side under your other armpit and then gather both edges together and ROLL the fabric across the front. This top edge roll must be tight with baby flush against your back. Tuck the bottom edge under baby’s bum, bringing it forward with the fabric under baby’s knees (feet should be out), bum lower than knees.

At this point baby is pretty secure and you just need to finish up with the bottom edges. I usually just cross them over each other, do a U-turn and then tuck them up under the front. If the ends are quite long, you always have the option of crossing them back around baby and then tucking them up under in front. It does not really matter how you choose to finish, the success of this carry comes from a secure top edge roll.

The little scientist

Long before our daughter was born, I decided to be a stay-at-home-mom and I love it. I can’t say it’s always easy. Looking after a toddler requires lots and lots of energy. But then it also provides lots and lots of hugs and kisses!

As a first time mom, when my daughter was a newborn I wasn’t able to imagine her as 2 year or 3 year old little girl. She is almost 18 months old now and she’s turning into a little girl before our eyes.
It sounds like a cliché when people tell you that they grow so fast. I have now understood that it is so true!
Gone are the days when she’d sleep happily for hours in the sling. My daughter is a busy toddler now.

She enjoys climbing, giving mommy and daddy anxious moments. She loves looking into the drawers and cupboards and see if there is anything of interest.

She likes helping mommy when I’m cleaning the house.

She is interested to see and observe everything that happens in her environment. After some observation, she tries to mimic us.

I always try to respect her behaviors, but there can be times when I am not-so-patient. For example, last weekend we had a nice day out and about. It was time to go home. We were all very tired and hungry. As I was putting her in the Ergo,she was trying to take her flat feet footwear off which made me a bit angry. I didn’t show my feelings to her,but you know, I was grunting a bit.

Then I came across this article by Jan Hunt and I liked her analogy:

A two-year-old is a very curious person, always experimenting, always exploring. He is in fact, a scientist! And if you look at his activities in that way, it can change your perspective and allow creative ideas to emerge, making life easier for you and for him.
I’d like to suggest an exercise to try. For one day, picture him not as a small child, but rather as a visiting scientist. Pretend this scientist is staying at your home for a day. This person needs materials to use, needs time to do his research, and will need your assistance from time to time. If we had a visiting scientist at our house, wouldn’t we feel curious ourselves as to what he is doing, and wouldn’t we feel honored to be helping when we can? That’s exactly the right attitude to take with a busy toddler.

This shifted my perspective: My daughter had just discovered that it was very fun to take off the velcro straps of her shoes. She had no idea that I was hungry and tired. Being upset would only make me feel worse.
Instead of being frustrated with our children when we have very little time or patience, we should make time for honoring their activities.

This is a very special stage in their lives and we should join their “research” and feel as excited as them.

Feeding an Orally Defensive Child with Love and Respect

One of API’s Eight Principles is Feeding with Love and Respect which encourages parents to follow through beyond the infant and toddler years and follow their older children’s cues when it comes to eating. As a parent of an orally defensive child, I can say first-hand that taking this approach saved lots of tears and heartache in our house.

My son, almost seven years old, has never liked a variety textures in his mouth and as a result has low oral-motor muscle tone. In other words, his mouth muscles aren’t as strong as other children his age. Combining the muscle weakness with his sensory defensiveness equals very limited food choices. When he was younger, friends and family would tell me I was catering to his wants by making him special food. I was instructed that he would most definitely eat what I had prepared eventually, as he’d get hungry at some point.

What these friends and family didn’t understand is that no, he actually wouldn’t eventually eat what I had prepared when he was hungry. He couldn’t eat some of the foods because of texture, color or consistency. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t, he couldn’t. This was beyond toddler pickiness.

As he got older, the foods he would eat quickly dwindled down to five or six different foods. Mac and cheese was one of these foods, however it was only homemade mac and cheese. When a well-meaning family member made box mac and cheese, he quickly proclaimed that it was orange and he doesn’t eat orange food. This was the “a-hah!” moment for my family, they then knew why I was following my son’s cues for feeding well beyond his toddler years.

Three of the bullet points listed in the Feeding with Love and Respect principle really helped our family get through my son’s extreme pickiness:

  • Model healthy eating habits
  • Avoid the use of food as a reward or punishment, or of making food (or dessert) contingent on behavior
  • Rather than restricting access to certain foods, consider having only healthy options available in the home and allowing the child to choose

Everything in the house was Alexander-friendly. If he was hungry and wanted to eat something, he had carte-blanche access to it. Nothing hinged on whether he ate. We continued to eat healthy meals as a family even if Alexander was eating mac and cheese.

He has now expanded his food repertoire and this past weekend he ate broccoli and a baked potato. He has also recently tried shrimp (previously stinky and slimy) and cauliflower (he didn’t like white foods). Although we took the slow road to an expanded food palate, Alexander was our navigator and we have happily arrived at our destination.

Melissa

Nurse until you cry.

I thought I would share some important information I discovered about nursing. Finding it changed my life.

The other day I popped over to Pumproom Confessions and saw a button on the sidebar that said “Breastfeeding shouldn’t be a downer.” As I am ever interested in the world of nursing, and an advocate for breastfeeding, I clicked on it. It led me to a website for Dysphroic Milk Ejection Reflex. Suddenly I was reading account after account from women who experienced the same thing I do when nursing.

I love to nurse, the closeness is amazing, the health benefits for myself and my baby are incredible, and I believe it is the best thing for myself and my baby. I breastfed my daughter successfully and without any difficulty until she was 18 months old. Therefore, I found it a bit dismaying that each time I sat down to nurse my son I would suddenly be overcome with a deep wave of despair. It would punch me right in the stomach and sit there for a minute to two, then it would go away. I told myself it was mild post partum depression. I told myself it was a reaction to finally sitting down and not distracting myself from my grief over a departed friend. I didn’t connect it with my milk letting down. I didn’t connect it with nursing at all, even though it happened every time I sat down to do it. I just figured it was something else. I never knew it was a documented condition that afflicted other moms as well.

I can’t begin to tell you how much it means to me that I am a) not alone, b) not insane c) not imagining it. I feel so much better simply knowing that there is a physical reason for those moments of despair, and that there are people researching it to see if there is something that can be done. Clearly some wire in my brain is crossed. Evolutionarily it makes sense to have pleasurable emotions released when your milk lets down, not despairing ones.

If you are a nursing mother, and you feel inexplicably sad, anxious, angry, or depressed for short intense periods while nursing, check out the website on D-MER. Breastfeeding is challenging enough without having to battle intense and nebulous emotional demons along with it. I feel so much better simply knowing more about the problem, and I would bet you will too.

If anyone reading this feels this way and wants to talk about their experience, email me at lawandmotherhood@gmail.com. There is no reason to keep silent about it anymore.

My life with strollers

If you had asked me, when my first child was a year old, if I ever thought I’d own a stroller, I would have said no. After all, if I hadn’t needed one up to that point, why would I need one in the future? We’d been all kinds of places without a stroller — to museums and zoos, on airplane trips, on the subway — and I’d always thought it looked like I was having an easier time than the folks who had strollers.

Then she developed her silver prams fascination, check out the deals here, the is where she gets them from. For six months, she climbed into every stroller we encountered. At 18 months, we were over at a friend’s house and she insisted on being pushed around the yard in the other child’s stroller. My friend offered to give me the jogging stroller she never used, and I gave in. It wasn’t something I was choosing for my own convenience, after all — I was perfectly happy as things were!

Thereafter, we used our Baby Jogger stroller around the neighborhood, primarily for walks to the playground. Once in a while, we took it to the zoo. We continued to use a sling for all other outings.

When my second child was six months old, I realized that I was having a hard time with just a single stroller. As he’d gotten bigger, it was harder to push my daughter in the stroller while carrying him in the sling, especially in the muggy summer weather. Even after I mastered putting him on my back in the Ergo, I was still struggling; among other things, my son is an incorrigible hair puller. I bought a double jogging stroller, which was, like the single stroller, used for trips to the playground and visits to the zoo. I never thought so much of my porch space would be occupied with jogging strollers!

Most surprising of all, on Monday, after visiting the pediatrician about my 3 1/2-year-old daughter’s knee injury, I bought a Maclaren umbrella stroller. I realized that there was no sensible way for me to transport both my toddler and my preschooler under the circumstances without a stroller.

Which puts me, a fairly hard-core babywearer, in the entirely unexpected position of owning three strollers. I sometimes think my kids like riding in the stroller more than they like to be worn! All of which serves to remind me that babywearing, cosleeping, breastfeeding, and other common Attachment Parenting practices are not ends in and of themselves, but tools we may use in our efforts to foster a particular kind of relationship with our children.

Respectful Feeding for a Lifetime

Every one of the API principles are incorporated in my home, and I believe in the wisdom of all of them. However one particular principle, feed with love and respect, strikes particularly close to my heart. This has been a hugely important aspect of my parenting journey in regards to my now six-year-old son.

My son was born full-term after an uneventful pregnancy and birth. The most remarkable thing was that he was a very difficult newborn to nurse. He wouldn’t flange his lips out, and wouldn’t open his mouth very wide. At times it even seemed as though he disliked the nipple being in his mouth. I cried so many tears those first few days and weeks, because the one thing I had been dedicated to was breastfeeding my baby, and it was proving to be very difficult.

The next month or two he and I learned together. It would take both me and my husband to get him latched on every single feeding. Finally, we began nursing in concert, and he would open up wide enough, and endure the nipple in his mouth long enough to get his fill and then pop off.

As my son grew, I noticed other things. Other babies we knew were mouthing their toys, and their mothers would talk about how anything left within the baby’s reach was fair game; toys, remotes, books, and even parent’s noses! My son never did any of those things. He never mouthed his hands, or his toys, or his books. We were able to leave small things well within his reach, and were confident that they wouldn’t go in his mouth and be choking hazards. Nothing was accepted into my son’s mouth but my nipple.

Not only did my son not mouth anything, but he did not like anything near his face; not toys, not tissues, not washcloths. Every time something came near, he’d turn his head. If he was not in a position that enabled him to turn away, he would scream.

When my son was six months old, we thought we’d let him try some mashed banana. As per the suggestion in Dr. Sears’ The Baby Book, I used my finger to put some of the food in his mouth. Instead of curiosity, he screamed in terror every time my finger drew near. He obviously wasn’t ready, and AP parent that I am, I didn’t push him as he obviously disliked it so much. “We’ll try again in a few weeks” became my mantra when time after time, month after month, he reacted the same way when we attempted to introduce him to food. It didn’t matter if it was my finger, a spoon, O cereal, or un-mashed bits of fruits or vegetables. It was all met with that same screaming refusal. He wouldn’t even pick up the bits of food to bring it near his mouth!

Six months old became eight months old, became ten months old, became one year old, and still the only thing my son would allow in his mouth was my nipple. The most frustrating part of the whole ordeal was not that my son was not eating and even seemed afraid of food, but rather that the people I told this to, the people I thought were closest to me, did not believe me. Friends and relatives told me, “Of course he’ll eat! Just sit him down and give him food!” I don’t think they ever understood that everything, everything, every single one of the suggestions they were telling me I had already tried months ago. I gave him Cheerios on his plate so he could control the food going into his mouth. I gave him the mashed bananas in a bowl with his own spoon. I had my husband try. I mixed breastmilk with the banana. Six years later, I don’t remember everything I tried, but I vividly remember the frustration I felt when nobody took me seriously.

At my son’s 12 month well child check, I was finally able to convince the pediatrician that my son really and truly did not eat. I don’t know if she fully believed me, but she did recommend that he get evaluated by an oral therapist.

Finally a month later, my son had his oral evaluation. It turned out that at thirteen months old, my son had the oral development of a four month old. I learned that one of the reasons that babies mouth everything is to loosen the fascia in the cheeks and to practice their tongue movements, so that when it is time to eat, the cheeks and tongue will be able to coordinate to accomplish the complex task of chewing and swallowing. Because my son never mouthed anything (and I have my own theories regarding this) his fascia was never loosened, he didn’t know how to operate his tongue to eat. Additionally, his gag reflex was at the front of his mouth instead of toward the back. Even if he had wanted to eat, it would have been physically impossible.

Six months of therapy followed, with exercises and practice at home. I had to put my fingers in my son’s mouth to massage his fascia, manipulate his mouth, and try to get him to accept a sippy cup. He had vibrating teethers, horns and harmonicas to acclimate him to sensation in his mouth. We had special toothbrushes that we used to gradually move his gag reflex to the back. He was so defensive about his mouth, and it was horrible for him and for me. I remember emailing a friend during this time, “Why is this so HARD?” It was so incredibly difficult not to be envious of the parents of kids who ate so easily, whose babies ate so naturally, when we had to work so hard just to get my son to eat one Cheerio.

Finally at 19 months old, my son was “graduated” from therapy, and was on his way to being able to eat and drink food that didn’t come from me.

But the principle of feeding with love and respect was still a huge part of our lives. For many many months, the only food my son would eat were crispy crunchy things, such as crackers or toast. He couldn’t tolerate anything with a wet or mushy consistency. But one can not live on bread alone, so he had to learn to tolerate other foods and consistencies. But again, contrary to advice I was receiving, I never forced him to eat new foods. Instead, I did my best to incorporate the healthy stuff he needed to grow in the foods he was capable and willing to consume. When he began to eat peanut butter, I would grind up dried veggies to mix in with it.

When he began to eat muffins, I would make him carrot-banana-flaxseed muffins. I made him a fruit smoothie every day. When he started eating homemade macaroni and cheese, I would make it for him every night, and when he insisted I feed him every bite, I did. I had spent too long being screamed at when I approached his mouth that I relished in the chance to feed my two-year-old! I respected and worked WITH his oral aversions, instead of forcing him to eat food that he was not ready for. I never once considered the old standby, “If he’s hungry enough, he’ll eat anything.” I knew my son wouldn’t.

The following years were filled with efforts to get my son the nutrients he needs, while encouraging, but never coercing him to try new foods. Every time he ventured a new food experience it was a victory! But for years he ate the same things every day, and avoided so many foods. I’ll freely admit how incredibly frustrating it was, and of course I wished he would just try a certain new food. But I did my best to never let him see that frustration, and certainly never forced him to try anything he wasn’t ready for. I always followed his food cues. And every once in a while, he would make a gain; he’d try a new consistency, a new flavor, a new sensation. And oh, how excited I was when he began to eat cold things, and creamy things, and even began asking for fruit.

Curiously, he’s made the most gains in the past three years since his little sister’s been around. I fully believe seeing her eat absolutely everything without trepidation gave him the incentive to do the same himself.

My son is now 6 ½ years old, and eats just about everything I put in front of him! He eats many consistencies, many flavors, and many foods. He is still a picky eater, tends to eat the exact same things every day (making his school lunch is very easy for me as a result!) and he still has a tendency to vomit if he eats incorrectly; I believe his gag reflex is still not where it needs to be.

But I no longer worry about his nutrition as I once did; I no longer worry if he can eat something I’ve prepared. I no longer lay awake at night crying frustrated tears over it.

I have no doubt that the reason he’s made such incredible progress is because I followed him. I respected him. I respected his difficulties and the huge feat it was for him to eat anything, let alone anything new. My son worked hard at eating, and I never doubted for a minute how very difficult it was for him.

I know this is quite long, and there’s so much of the story I left out. But the main points are there. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to play favorites in respect to the principles, but feeding with love and respect will always be at the top of my list, and will always be an important part of my parenting and my family.