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.

Volunteer Spotlight

We have had more volunteers step up to help API further our mission of educating and supporting “all parents in raising secure, joyful, and empathic children in order to strengthen families and create a more compassionate world” and for that we are incredibly grateful! We seek to offer more innovative and creative ways to educate and support families across the world but continue to need volunteers to help make that happen.

Recently one of our API Support Group Leaders sent a note to all of her support group members and gave us permission to reprint it here. Also, be sure to check out this month’s volunteer position “highlight” at the end of this post. Who knows, we might just have something that’s right up your alley! We’d love to have you join our attached “team” of volunteers!

Volunteer Spotlight – Meet Dedra

I have always believed that volunteering was important. It connects us to other humans, increases our compassion, and allows us to give back to our communities. I have volunteered in various ways throughout my life and I’ve always wanted to set a good example of volunteering for my children.

However, I have found that it’s not so easy to volunteer and practice attachment parenting at the same time. My children would probably not be so welcome in a nursing home. They would make it very difficult to help out in a soup kitchen. I just have not found too many opportunities in which my children could participate.

Becoming involved with Attachment Parenting International has provided a solution. It flows naturally from my parenting style because my children can be by my side. As an API Support Group Leader, not only do I give back to my community, I get to learn more about this compassionate style of parenting. My children reap the benefits of what I put into it tenfold. Because of my position, I am diligently reading all I can about the best parenting practices and am using my research to improve my own skills as a mother and a wife.

There are so many opportunities at API. They need copy editors, book reviewers, foreign language consultants, website contributors, and much, much more.

You can contribute at your own level of comfort. If you can give a lot of time, wonderful. If not, that is appreciated, too. And if you have a family issue and need to step back for a while, who better to understand than API? Maintain Personal and Family Balance is one of the Eight Principles!

Volunteer Position Highlight – Retail Affiliate Coordinator

We are very excited about a new program that we’d like to get off of the ground. API is working on a Retail Affiliates Program and are in need of an enthusiastic individual interested in finding businesses and individuals to be a part of it. This coordinator will work together with API’s Business Management Director to create a comprehensive business plan. Once the program has been fully developed, they will seek and contact Attachment Parenting supportive individuals and businesses to establish a mutually beneficial relationship. The Retail Affiliate Program will ultimately give businesses additional exposure while assisting API with an additional source of revenue. If you are interested and excited about creating a new, comprehensive and exciting revenue generating program, this may be the position for you. Please contact me to request a job description and further details, I look forward to hearing from you!

If you believe in the value of our mission to educate and support all parents in raising secure, joyful, and empathic children in order to strengthen families and create a more compassionate world, please join with us today. Click here http://www.attachmentparenting.org/help/help_vol.php for more information on the various volunteer positions that our organization currently has available. Please know that this list is not comprehensive. If you have talents and experience that you feel would further our mission, please email me so that we can chat about the possibilities!

Warmly,
Brandy Lance

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.

Permission to Parent?

Is it just me or is our society ridiculously quick to expect moms and babies to separate? It seems to me that our cultural norm dictates that mothers need “alone time” that can only be meaningful if they do not have a baby or small child along. In my experience with mainstream culture, even “mom type events” as a rule are expected to be child free. We moved to a new city when my oldest was ten months old and I reached out to many different groups looking for companionship (Moms and More, Mom’s Book Club, Moms group through my husband’s residency…) and over and over the expectation and the norm was that moms and babies would be separated. Awful!

It just seemed so silly to me. I mean small babies nestled peacefully in a sling are just so portable! How silly to not be with my baby just so I could have adult companionship.

And really, all it takes is a nasty look or a snide comment to completely derail a now mom’s confidence and make her feel unwelcome. Yuck. Since when do we need permission to remain with our babies and small children?

I am so grateful that all API and La Leche League functions welcomed my babies and children and I am sad that this is even an issue in our society. Of course moms and babies belong together. How absurd to suggest otherwise.