Fabulous birth symposium!

I was blown away at this week's symposium at George Mason University: "Perinatal: A Symposium on Birth Practices and Reproductive Rights" organized by MFA candidate and mother of two, Jessica Clements. There were so many great panels and talks, I hardly know where to begin. In fact, I may leave summary to a print writing venue but for now feel compelled to share a link to the story of Joy Szabo from The Unnecesarean. Szabo is a woman who has already had a VBAC and has been told by her Page Hospital in Arizona that if she refuses a c-section for her current pregnancy, the hospital will pursue a court order to force her to have a surgical delivery.

Henci Goer reported on this issue in her fabulous talk, "Cruelty in the Maternity Wards: Fifty Years Later." She had just added the info about Szabo to her talk, which detailed other incidents of abuse and an overall culture of abuse in mainstream maternity care. The news about Szabo broke October 1, and the The Unnecesarean has updates about conversations with the hospital, but I don't see that Szabo has had the baby yet. I've followed the discussion onto Facebook and am going to see if I can learn more that way. (Too many different logins so I can't do it now. Must streamline!)

Staying healthy

My head is swimming with all the info it has to process from the NVIC conference. It was great to see Dr. Joseph Mercola live and in person. The title of his talk was the same as his recent book: "Take Control of Your Health." I wrote the other day about Gardasil on DC Metro Moms, and, contrary to what some folks might think about people who speak at NVIC -- that they are there to scare people with stories of vaccine injury and take advantage of the human weakness to respond to anecdote -- the speakers generally want people to be in charge of their own health. It shouldn't be government mandates or doctors pushing drugs who tell us what to do, but our own bodies. It's just that it takes time on our part to learn and pay attention.

Mercola has a ton of info on his website, mercola.com, but I want to run down a few of his most important points.

The CDC allocated $20 million for vaccine safety, but of that (if I understood correctly), $12 is going to media promotion of vaccines, including the use of Elmo to tell kids they should get their shots. The alternative to vaccines, Mercola explained, is to build your health and natural immunity. I know a lot of folks think anyone who questions vaccines is a kook. I wonder how many of those folks feed their kids refined sugar and flour and artificial colorings and flavorings regularly? What could possibly be good about those things? Why serve them if they compromise your kid's health? What about having days go by when kids don't eat any fresh (not to mention local or organic) vegetables?

According to Mercola, 90% of the food Americans purchase is processed. That's what I call kooky!

Mercola's biggest suggestions:

1) No sugar or artificial sweeteners
2) Adequate Vitamin D

• Everyone should have their levels tested, and most folks need 5,000 IUs a day of D3 (not D2). An infant can get 1,000 IUs/day
  
• Vitamin D is rare in food
• Sunlight is not enough, especially in fall/winter, unless you're out 11am-1pm daily with lots of skin exposure.
  
• High doses (up to 50,000 IUs/day for three days) can treat acute infections, including swine flu.

Dr. Mercola talked in general about nutrition, as well, including omega-3s. He prefers krill oil to fish oil because, he says, fish oil is not sustainable ecologically.

Dr. Mercola also stated that the primary influence on disease is emotional wounding as a child that has not been resolved. He referenced Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) or the broader term Meridian Tapping Techniques (MTT), which I've found to be really powerful.

When moderator and Mothering magazine editor Peggy O'Mara asked about sleep, Dr. Mercola said that you can do all of the above (and exercise), but if you're not getting good sleep, forget it. He said most people actually need 6-8 hours and that getting too much can actually have a negative impact. It was getting late, and he didn't say anything about why/how or about the best time for sleep, but I've heard that sleep before midnight is much more restorative than sleep after because the body really needs to be relaxed when the gall bladder and liver do their flushing around 2-4 a.m.

Dr. Mercola had also started out his lecture talking about how little sugar there really is in the blood and how important blood sugar regulation is. When I get inadequate sleep, it seems like my body compensates by needing a ton of calories. I don't know how I got by as a breastfeeding-all-night mom for two years never getting more than five hours of sleep at a time, but I sure do know I ate a lot of nut butter!

It's inspiring to be around people who talk about health and well-being and how to achieve it. Since I'm already doing a whole lot of this -- at no small expense of time or money -- it's nice to be reminded that the effort really is worth it. I know that because I feel good and am not dealing with depression or gut problems like I did all my life before changing my diet, but it's still nice to get validation.

Watching out for mom & baby - a Japanese approach

Today I had the privilege of attending the National Vaccine Information Center's Fourth International Public Conference on Vaccination. Peter Doshi presented an informative look into the way the Japanese deal with mother and child health. From the time a pregnancy is confirmed, a woman is issued a Mother-Child Health Handbook in which to record information about her and the baby's health and development.

Into this boshi techo also go recordings of vaccinations. In fact, doctors will not give shots without the booklet in which to record them and to check on recent illnesses that might be contraindicated with getting a vaccine. The handbooks (and other information issued from the government) detail cautions about vaccines. They tell parents to reschedule vaccinations if the child has been ill (even in the last month) or has a fever, to plan for no strenuous activity that day, to pay attention the child all day the day of a vaccine and to make sure that someone who knows the child well is the one to take him or her to the doctor. The suggestion to take a child's fever before coming to the doctor in Japan contrasts sharply with information from the Centers for Disease Control's Parents Guide to Children's Immunizations that says that fever is "not usually a reason" to delay a vaccination.

Doshi, a doctoral candidate at MIT and visiting researcher (faculty of medicine) at the University of Tokyo, explained that since 1994, the Japanese have had a completely volunteer vaccination program in which recommendations have children getting about half the doses of vaccinations by age one that children in the U.S. typically receive. And, he explained, vaccines are always given only one at a time.

There is no school waiver or enforcement, and yet there is a high rate of vaccination. With a high expectation for product safety, the Japanese value vaccines and trust authority figures, but they seem to just have the whole different approach, Doshi's research showed. It seems that the Japanese embrace the idea of "first do no harm" and also of parents being expected to take an active role in paying attention not just to getting doses on time but to the whole context of health.

Yay for looking at the whole picture! Can we get some of that?

Chores make the memories

As we drove through the neighborhood this evening, my son looked at all the trash cans ready to go out tomorrow and asked if it was going to be Friday, which is trash day around here. Then he asked, "Why did they take away the branches?"

He is so into the trash pick-up, it threw him off that he wasn't here last week for the truck drivers to wave to him or honk their horn, or to see the "leaf truck" come haul away all the brush he helped to clear. One weekend we had our first time working in the yard in our new house, and less than a week later we took our first family trip to the beach. And what he remembers is the branches that disappeared while he wasn't looking.

By some miracle, the world didn't melt into a puddle of "why?!"-laden tears when I explained the impossibility of being in two places at once:

"I guess we must have been at the beach."

"Oh."

That's what I call a good day.

Overdue travel: ripping off the band-aid

We have never gone to the beach. Except for in Maine. But not once in 9 years of living in the DC Metro area have we been to the ocean as a couple or as a family. Last year I took my son to visit my sister and her kids in the Outer Banks. But the three of us in our nuclear unit have never gone to the beach together or even been on any vacation that didn't involve going to visit family or friends.

We finally changed that. It seemed unwise to go through with our first kid-free vacation to leave our traumatized-by-the-beginning-of-school boy with his grandma overnight for the first time. So instead we all headed down to Chincoteague and Assateague Island for a short getaway.

I do mean short. We arrived at the hotel at 10:30 p.m. on a Thursday and headed for home the next day just after 2 p.m. It was cold and windy and a little rainy. But our little boy had a fabulous time playing in the waves just the same. We were out there for about a hour and a half, including two changes of clothing for me (pants to shorts and donning an extra jacket) and three for the little guy (into bathing suit from shorts, then to extra long-sleeved bathing suit on top).

Then we visited the nature center where some folks were going to set free Monarch butterflies they had raised and tagged. We learned about terrapin turtles and got to touch a horseshoe crab (I'd come to believe there never really was an animal -- only an empty shell). My husband stayed shivering in the car predicting nightmares about the swarms of mosquitoes closer to the woods while I jogged with my boy on my hip to give him at least a glance at some wild ponies. We ate lunch in town and then spent a while keeping our kid's fingers off fragile items in a gallery before buying a piece of art for the first time in years.

I told my husband that this trip was like ripping off a band-aid. We just needed to do it in order to move on. Now that we've done something, I'm hoping we can make it out to Shenandoah for some hikes and eventually back to Assateague for camping, which I've heard lovely.

And then the next band-aid will be to finally get away for a night without our little one.

Through little eyes

I just thought I was involving -- and amusing -- my son while we made dinner. Joel Salatin wrote in a recent issue of Flavor magazine that we need to keep our kids in the kitchen if we want to have any hope for the future of agriculture, for future farmers who will seriously care about food and the land it comes from instead of retreating to video game alternate realities where it doesn't matter what you blow up or who gets killed.

So if I made a sweet potato and squash bus with carrot headlights (a la the Saxton Freymann and Joost Elffers Fast Food books), I thought, my son might get stick around to try to "help" me and feel more invested in dinner.

Without skipping a beat, he said, "Lobster!"

Going to Maine helps appreciate food, too, I guess.

I was going for a standard vehicle, but I love that my son sees things I miss. He notices representations where I don't, and, on the flip side, he notices new details it never occurred to me he'd see, like the new 2010 county sticker on my dashboard within seconds of the first time we got in the car after I'd removed the old one.

I stand corrected

So, we did have a nice beginning to the school year as described last week. But then, on Tuesday, I got The Call. My son's teacher had to let me know that he'd bitten his friend's arm.

I freaked out. I cried. I felt horrible. Why is he feeling so much tension? Why can't I model for him how to just roll with the punches?

I sobbed and told him we needed to be nice to our friends or then maybe we wouldn't be able to play with them. I didn't yell or belittle, but apparently I did shame him, because the teacher told me the next day that he stuck close to her for a while and told her at lunch, "Don't call my mommy again because she cried because I was bad." I never use judgment words with him, and I really hope he didn't seriously use that word. But regardless, he took on my pain. That is not what I want. That's the last thing I want.

So it was an upsetting week, even if we did avoid the TV the whole week and he happily enjoyed playing in the kitchen while I made dinner instead of whining about something else he wanted to do or begging me to play with him. We coexisted peacefully a lot of the time

Except, that is, when things set him off. He was crushed that he didn't get to put the soap in the dishwasher, even though he was chatting with me while I did it. The world had come to an end. And he tried to hit me, as though mocking the fact that I was about to go off and lead a Holistic Moms meeting with a speaker on Craniosacral Therapy.

I sure was glad that I'd made an appointment for acupuncture weeks earlier when he'd had his first-in-a-long-time biting episode. As I wrote on my other blog, I think the acupuncture really helped -- both of us. It was a great weekend with few frustrations and lots of lovely weather. I hope he and I can both remember to breathe and enjoy what we're given.