Fun Fact

Every time Dylan goes down for a nap my phone rings and/or the dogs come near the bedroom window and start barking for no apparent reason. Every time. Every single time. Without fail.

It must be a cosmic joke.

Thoughts on Fear & Halloween

I use to wonder if fear was inherent or learned. Halloween gave me some insight on this matter. 

I like apparently everyone else in the country, made the awful mistake of going to Party City the day before Halloween. You see, I was having a little party the next day and I needed to get just a couple more things. I took Dylan, of course (my wingman) and we headed out. Usually Dylan loves shopping... he seems fascinated with people, he loves the inevitable attention he receives and, like his mama, he enjoys exploring anyplace he hasn't been before. Party City the day before Halloween, I later found out, would be the exception. Granted, I went kinda later into the evening (Dylan has a smaller threshold when nearing bedtime) but he started out just fine. When we walked into the store the lines and the sheer number of the people was a little overwhelming but again so far, so good. As we made our way down the chaotic iles more and more creepy Halloween items began to appear. Dylan looked on with intrigued concern and began to wince and grimace a little bit. I comforted him and tried to brief him on this pretty weird holiday but he seemed uneasy. When we made our way to the last ile I unknowingly placed his stroller infront of the scary mask section while I hastily looked over the butterfly and angel wings. The next thing that happened confirmed my belief that some fears are inherent. Dylan let out this earth-shattering scream/cry, the likes of which I have never heard from him before or since. I looked down to see what happened and saw that he was looking at the creepy masks (Jason masks, zombie masks, devil masks etc... all of which were indeed horrifying) I had to quickly rush him to the kids party section where he was relieved to see the smiling faces of Elmo and other super heros. Luckily he recovered quickly and was smiling again in line as some young girl cooed over him. Later that evening while I was getting ready for the party I put on my black wig and dark eyelashes. Dylan would look at me and then hide his face, the way he does while looking at strangers. He seemed creeped out again and didn't like it. Moments later he crawled over to the edge of the bed and hung upside down with a giant smile on his face, which is ironically the scariest thing I have ever seen.

Moral of the story: some fears seem inherent... like terrifying murderous masks 

and others, like heights, appear to be learnt.  

My Star Was Born

 Maiden to Mother... How This Feels 

The question I get asked most is, "How does it feel to be a mom?" I always reply, "Euphoric and exhausting" but I thought I should elaborate. Now I know there might be someone reading out there with five kids of various ages thinking, "Bitch, please." I know I'm only 7 months in but in reality just as soon as that seed is planted the shift begins to happen.

I remember how I felt the next morning after his birth, I was taking a shower, cleaning off all the blood and goo... after such a long labor and all the pains and concerns of pregnancy, he was finally here. I remember feeling transformed, like I had just become younger. My skin felt new again. I was sleep deprived, drained, invigorated and refreshed all at the same time. Only later did I learn that the birthing process, if done vaginally, actually purges your body of toxins and cleanses you from the inside out.

I feel that becoming a parent offers an amazing opportunity to really be the best person you can be. It pushes you to your limits emotionally and physically but the reward, this insane unconditional life-changing love, is the greatest gift imaginable.

We are programmed to love in this way, it is natural and I'm certain that it is shared by every species on the planet. I feel so deeply saddened when I see people ignore their instincts to love. It such a loss, not just for the child but for the parents as well, it is like slapping life in the face. Life is here offering this amazing gift and so often I see people suppressing their natural instincts, ignoring what is pure and true in search for what is plastic and artificial. But back to the point...

How this feels... right now it is an all consuming, life-altering thing. I look at him and my heart expands. Our house has become like a precious moments cartoon and I feel like I understand musicals and cartoons and everything I loved as a child again. It is very pure. I feel so fortunate because I get to be a full time mama. Soon I will go back to work and he will go to school and life will shift again but right now I'm all in, head first, and head over heels. I know intuitively that what is happening now is shaping his subconscious. My main concern is that he is healthy and happy and feels secure and cared for.

In all honesty, there are some luxuries in life that I know I won't get to do for a long time and I don't know if I really appreciated them renough. If you are reading this and are not yet a parent I want you to remember this... the next time you decide to go somewhere and then simply get in your car/ hop on your bike and roll ... wOw, savor that! Taste the freedom, let it linger on your lips and rush through your bones.  For me, it's not that simple, there is the diaper bag, the changing (did he go to the bathroom yet, is he going to poo when we are out?) the timing (is it fussy time?) the car seat, the location (are kids allowed/welcomed) etc. As he is getting older it is getting easier but those first few months are like boot camp.

The next time you wake up half naked on some beach somewhere with foggy memories of the night before racing through your mind with some attractive stranger rubbing their eyes next to you, count your blessings, that is over for me. If this has never happened to you, don't have kids yet. In fact, my advice is to do everything you ever wanted to do or have been too afraid to do before you have kids. Go travel the world, quit your boring desk job, pursue your dreams, experiment with drugs... do it now before you have the weight of a dependent on your shoulders because good parenting requires a certain amount of selflessness that comes from life experience and sowing those wild oats.

Luckily for me I felt like I have had the luxury to be wild and carefree and I'm realizing now that the mistakes I've made are serving a very powerful purpose of making me a better parent today. When you do decide to be a parent I recommend that you give it your all. Play with your baby, try to see things through their eyes, everything is new and fascinating. Become curious again, remember they cry to communicate and it can be frustrating to see something so cool and not be able to walk over and get it or to have teeth cutting through your gums. Be compassionate, be patient, and above all follow your natural instinct and Love Love Love. When you let the love wash over you it can heal everything!

As I write I feel like these things always wrap up like the ending to a Jerry Springer episode. I don't mean to get all 'advicy' (if that's a word) but the lessons just come clear to me with the reflection of writing. Thanks for reading!

Hard To Watch

My little guy turns 6 months tomorrow and is getting mobile. I am so proud but now as I look around I don't see a friendly house anymore, I see death traps. It has already been made clear that given any situation Dylan will head straight for the most dangerous thing available. The other day I thought I was being clever as I baby proofed his room. All sharp corners were covered and he was placed on his friendly rug surrounded by a large variety of developmental toys. I left for a second to grab a cup of coffee and let him play on his own. When I came back a few minutes later however I realized that he had ignored all of his toys and went straight for his diaper bag on the top shelf of his changing table. When I found him he was laying on his back with diapers covering his face and laughing.
My instinct is to bubble wrap everything in the house but I know that I would be actually doing him a dis-service. I know that bumps and scrapes are teaching him valuable life lessons but as a loving mother .. it is hard to watch.

Boobs & Babies

Boobs & Babies: What Everybody Needs to Know about Breastfeeding 

DISCLAIMER: I know your time is valuable and that the internet is a wild temptress full of delicious information and inappropriate jokes... if you are pressed for time I've created a handy little "In A Nutshell" section at the bottom of the page... for people that want to know the full story by all means, read on. 

aLso... yEs, this is an article about breastfeeding but that doesn't mean this is a woman's only article. I think this information is essential for men too so that they can encourage and empower their wives, girlfriends, friends and baby's mamas to breastfeed their children. 

Boob's and  Babies

 Boobs and babies go together like peanut butter and jelly, like salt n' pepper, like Siegfried and that other guy. I use to think of boobs as these inanimate sexual objects. As with every paradox of the current female role we are taught to both flaunt them and hide them. And as such, they act as both a blessing and a hinderance. Along with just about everything else, this perception has been dramatically altered with the birth of my son. My boobs have become breasts. I went from looking at them as a nice rack to being the life sustaining source to this precious being. I could go off on the tangent of the very powerful paradigm shift that has taken place with motherhood but that is for another post... what I came to talk about today is the importance of breastfeeding.

If you See a Baby, Make Sure There is a Boob Somewhere Near that Child's Mouth!

Too many women today are formula feeding instead of breastfeeding. It easy to understand why if you see how pushy these formula companies are.  Somehow the corporate baby stuff sellers were even alerted to my pregnancy and at around 7 months I started receiving large formula samples in the mail. This would be all fine and dandy if I didn't know the God awful truth, formula could never in a million years replace breastmilk. 

"There are thousands of studies to show that formula-fed babies end up with lower IQ's, poorer health, and higher rates of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease than babies who breastfeed. Formula also contains environmental contaminants from cow milk and other ingredients, processing, and packaging. The reality is that contaminants are everywhere, in just about all the foods we eat. By far the safest, healthiest food for you baby is your milk." - La Leche League International, The Womanly art of breastfeeding by Diane Wiessinger, Diana West and Teresa Pitman 

I know there are some cases where babies reject their mother's milk or, for whatever reason, women aren't producing enough of their own milk. These woman should first turn to healthy donated human milk. In 1980 the World Health Organization and UNICEF issued the following joint statement:
"Where it is not possible for the biological mother to breastfeed, the first alternative, if available, should be the use of human breast milk from other sources. Human milk banks should be made available in appropriate situations."

Though it is believed to be quite common that women sometimes don't produce enough milk,  in reality these cases are few and far between. Even fewer and farther between than you might think or be told. In the past all children were breastfed and if you look into the natural world, all other mammals don't seem to have nearly as many problems breast-feeding as we do.  Some hospitals are considered "baby friendly" and advocate breastfeeding but others are not and the doctors act like drug pushers for the formula companies and even try to convince mother's that they aren't adequately feeding their babies when they are. The dangerous part is that your body works like a good economy, supply and demand. When your baby suckles at your breasts it lets your body know what kind of supply is being demanded. It takes time but this order will be met. If you interfere with this by say, supplementing your babies diet with formula or taking the baby away from their mother, then your body begins to actually produce less. Colostrum, one of the most nutritious and potent substances known to man, can be clear and hard to detect at first but if the child is suckling at the breast it is there. Colostrum is so amazing that Olympic athletes and health gurus often take supplements of the stuff. 

"Colostrum is also used for boosting the immune system, healing injuries, repairing nervous system damage, improving mood and sense of well being, slowing and reversing aging, and as an agent for killing bacteria and fungus."[ttp://www.webmd.com/vitamins-supplements/ingredientmono-785-COLOSTRUM.aspx?activeIngredientId=785&activeIngredientName=COLOSTRUM]

Why Formula Could Never Replace Breastmilk 

If they could make a formula as healthy as colostrum or breastmilk you and I wouldn't  be able to afford it.  Human milk has hundreds of known and unknown ingredients, including interferon and white blood cells, intestinal soothers, probiotics,  growth hormones, and everything else a baby is known to need. Babies that are deprived of their normal food miss out on essential immune boosters and their first dose of  good gut bacteria. When you think about how nutritionally dense breastmilk is compared to formula then your realize to deprive a baby of their natural food is tragic. However, upon more research I came across another lesser known fact about breastfeeding that blew my mind:

Breastmilk plays a major role in overall happiness and emotional stability in adult life. 

Breastfed children are much less likely to become suicidal/homicidal maniacs. 

It is well known and obvious that breastfeeding provides a very important and natural bonding between mother and child. (Snuggling up and watching my baby nurse into a peaceful sleep has provided the greatest feeling I've ever known....better than sex and Ben & Jerry's Americone Dream ice cream, combined) What you may not know is that this bonding is not just physical, it is also chemical. 

When you breastfeed your child both you and your baby release serotonin, a brain neurochemical transmitter substance essential for healthy brain development. In many studies involving depressed and violent adults they have a found a deficit of brain serotonin. "Serotonin has been shown to be significantly reduced under conditions of failed mother-infant affectional bonding." [...] However, "there is another neurobiological mechanism involved in the development of brain serotonin–tryptophan–a precursor amino acid essential for the development of brain serotonin which is richly present in colostrum and breastmilk but absent in formula milk. " [Breastfeeding:Brain Nutrients in Brain Development for Human Love and Peace By James W. Prescott, Ph.D.~ Institute of Humanistic Science http://www.violence.de/prescott/ttf/article.html]

 So basically there is evidence that if you don't breastfeed your baby your are depriving them of both serotonin and the precursor amino acid that allows the brain to develop serotonin. 

I apologize but I'm going to continuing quoting from this article for a second because I can't state it any better and you've got to read this!... 

"Thus, two distinct and different neurophysiological mechanisms have been identified that contributes to deficits in brain serotonin: a) failed physical affectional bonding in the maternal-infant/child relationship (sensory processes); and b) the amino acid tryptophan present in colostrum and breast milk but absent in formula milk (neurochemical processes).

Millions of years of mammalian evolutionary biology have naturally joined these two different psychophysiological processes together in the act of breastfeeding where they are clearly mutually reinforcing for one another. Only in the human mammal do we find the newborn separated from its mother at birth and the mother not breastfeeding its newborn and infant. We have discovered that such aberrant behaviors which violate millions of years of evolutionary biology and psychobiology have exacted a terrible price upon the physical, emotional and social health of the newborn and infant and as a child, adolescent and adult–depression, impulse dyscontrol, violence and substance abuse." [Breastfeeding:Brain Nutrients in Brain Development for Human Love and Peace By James W. Prescott, Ph.D.~ Institute of Humanistic Science http://www.violence.de/prescott/ttf/article.html] 

This preventable epidemic of formula fed babies is so tragic that I honestly feel like simply choosing not to breastfeed a child is a type of abuse. So how did this begin? How did these formula companies ever convince mother's to stop using their god given natural perfect breastmilk and start buying and using inferior products?  Let's take a little quick trip down:

Erased Memory Lane

It is a common saying that prostitution is the oldest form of employment in the world, not only is this rather rude it is also incorrect. Long before colonization and lonely sailors created a demand for this type of employment, there were midwives helping to deliver children. 

"Until the 1900s, midwives were the primary healers and birth attendants in the US. These healers knew anatomy and physiology, understood childbirth and childcare, and used herbal and traditional medicines to maintain health and to treat illness." -

[http://www.mesacc.edu/dept/d46/psy/dev/Spring02/prenatal/history.html] 

Around the turn of the century some buisness-savy doctors got together and realized that they could make money if they could convince the population that childbirth was a dangerous endeavor that required medical attention. They began a propaganda campaign casting midwives in a negative light as primitive "witch doctors." Meanwhile, they started implementing dangerous pain relieving techniques that were actually more hazardous than natural home births. The mortality rate for birth related deaths actually increased and in 1915 the U.S. had the highest birth mortality rate in the industrialized world. 

In the 1940's and 50's post world war II industrial era and with the baby boom hospitalization birth became the norm. Caught up in the frenzy to journey into the future people started moving away from the natural world and into a new shiny plastic world filled with electric light and microwaves. Somewhere in this race to be modern, breastmilk was sold out by clever formula companies. Woman wanted to be hip and give off an image of wealth. Breastfeeding was viewed as primitive and lower-class.

 Thankfully people are starting to wake up and realize the error in their ways. As humans we have spent millions of years inhabiting this planet, thousands of years creating civilization and a hundred years of moving away from the natural world. In this hundred years we have done more damage than previously imaginable, now finally and thankfully there has been a rebirth of natural sustainable living. People are humbling bowing their heads and admitting that mother nature is much more complex, brilliant, and wise than us. Companies are still trying to make a quick buck on our ignorance but the more people start learning, the more things will have to shift back to the non-toxic and natural way they were before. Things that were once the norm and were then sold out and forgotten and are now considered innovative. Hey, whatever it takes. 

In a NutSheLL 

Breast feeding is the best thing new mother's can do for their children and for themselves. Not only is it so nutritious its miraculous, it also helps create a bond that is everlasting and if deprived could be devastating.  

When you breastfeed your child you are giving them ---

*powerful immune boosters (a breastfed babies immunity is almost as good as their mother's... formula fed only, not even close)

*white blood cells

*interferon (a very very powerful anti viral & anti bacterial medicine)

*natural growth hormones (not the kind monsanto is trying to feed you)

* probiotics (babies aren't born with these, they get them from their mother... without these digestion problems and allergies are much more common) 

*tryptophan (the precursor amino acid essential to the development of brain serotonin) 

*everything a baby is known to need

* and other unknown substances that undoubtably perform a powerful purpose... nature is wild that way and we are still just novices trying to keep up.. the more we learn about breastmilk the more we realize that it is not just a food but a medicine 

O.k. So I know what your thinking, that is all fine and great but what's in it for me?

For one breastfeeding will help you lose that extra baby weight! Breastfeeding burns about 500 calories a day. I could feel my uterus contracting as he breastfed and because my little guy was a hungry bear, my uterus went back to it's normal lemon size so fast that even my midwife was surprised. 

For more information & support visit : http://www.llli.org/ 

The Baby Plague

Creepy Crawlers 

I think people are afraid of babies. Lord knows I was... with their horrific crying and inability to  carry out a good conversation... I always felt like a flat footed ballerina in their presence. All of this has changed of course, but I'll get to that a little bit later.

A century ago I would of been an old lady new mom, but now, at the tender age of 28, I'm the first amongst my good friends to have a little one. I can tell that they don't know what to do. As the shock of pregnancy and the excitement of birth has worn off, I have noticed a dramatic decline in my social life. At first I assumed that they thought pregnancy was contagious and considered doing lectures on the birds & the bees. However, after more thought, I realized that it's simply that they aren't doing any "baby-friendly" activities. The kind of debauchery and shenanigans that my favorite people get into isn't exactly for the faint of heart or young of age. I use to wonder where all the children were when I was biking around town going to happy hours, art shows, & film-fests. I now know where they are... they are at parks & playgrounds... which is exactly where I was today, alone with my little guy.

I understand the fear of babies. Personally I was terrified at the very thought of them. They were right up their with ghosts, spiders, and zombies as the world's most terrifying inventions. But, as fear often does, with knowledge this has dissipated. My little man is by far the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. I look at him & feel so lucky to get to hang out with him everyday. I understand now why parents post YouTube videos of their kids farting and doing mundane things... it's because in the love struck eyes of an enamored parent, it's pure magic. However, while I'm bursting with all of this insane love & admiration, I also feel pretty alone.

It takes a village to raise a child

Some people come from big loud families with children at every angle bouncing off the walls. I have always fantasized about such a house but in reality am the youngest of two and am apparently the only one that is having any children. As previously mentioned, my friends haven't been very family oriented either. While I was going to ultra-sound and prenatal visits my best friends were going through break-ups, abortions, & sexual revolutions. Post birth the gap has only widened.

I think this feeling of aloneness has been heightened by the fact that I am now what the world refers to as a stay-at-home-mom. While I enjoy the lack of traffic on weekday mid-afternoons, I do miss the social interaction & intellectual stimulation of working. In my previous life I was an ESL teacher working with people from all over of the world. Now I find myself having very one sided conversations with my infant son who really just looks at me intently with an expression of curious confusion. Anytime, I bring up these emotions to my partner he refers me to the First World Problem Meme. I giggle and know what he is getting at but emotions, however irrational, have a life of their own. While I am happy to have all this precious time with the most important person in my world, I am also burdened by the realization that most everyone else I know works and is therefore unavailable for the lunch in park play dates.

Wrapping it up - pun intended 

I know what you're thinking.... it is time to realize that my life has changed and to find new hot mama friends. I've met quite a few and feel blessed to have them... and I promise to make it to baby sign language classes and the work-out stroller mom meet-ups... but in reality, though I am social and love people, I don't make new friends so easily. Though I'd like to think of myself as fickle, adventurous, and outgoing, I am actually pretty loyal. If service & a dish is good at a particular restaurant, I will go back there and order that dish forever. I think the only thing left for me to do is to put pin holes in my friends condoms so that we can share in the joys of parenting together.