ElementalMom

Meet Halima. Gorgeous, isn’t she? She’s Aurora’s milk sister.

So what’s a milk sister? That’s a baby who has shared milk from the same mama. Because Halima’s mother had a rare and really unpleasant birth complication, she is unable to nurse this time (Halima has an older brother). And because her parents are completely clear on the fact that breastmilk is hands-down the best thing to feed a baby, they called for help. I’m on one of the email lists they asked for assistance on, and so here I am, pumping milk.

Technically, that means I’m nursing three kids right now. I am the dairy queen!

Joking aside, it’s astonishing how much distaste people have for this practice. The squidge factor is superhigh. And yet 100% of the people who flip out when they find out you’re feeding a stranger’s child, even indirectly, drink the milk of other species. But sharing human milk? That’s just yucky.

Grow up.

The research has proven, time and time and time again, that human milk is the best food for human babies. So why do people flip out when you feed human milk to a human baby? Clearly they can’t have thought it through.

It’s ridiculously hard to find information on this practice of milk sharing. I know that in the Muslim faith, milk siblings are considered so close they may not marry. I know that in Romanian culture milk siblings are considered as closely related as blood siblings. I know that before some 19th century man decided that corn syrup solids were better than wet nurses, this kind of thing just happened without comment, because women looked out for each other and for each other’s babies. If something happened to make it difficult to feed a baby, other women just stepped in and helped. And like so many other aspects of what’s now referred to as “attachment parenting”, it was such a common event it was pretty much entirely undocumented. Which makes it tough on those of us trying to access the accumulated wisdom of generations.

I have huge admiration for Halima’s parents. The lengths they’re going to to ensure milk for their girl are just herculean. I think of all the women who could breastfeed and don’t because of some misguided ideas about vanity and propriety, and I want to cry. But I also think that great challenge often gives great blessings both to those who endure and those who are called to assist. I feel honored to be able to give this connection to my children, this new milk sister of theirs. Even Kestrel gets that this is an important thing; he’s voluntarily cut back on his nursing times, in favor of “just cuddling” so there’s more milk for Halima.

So if anyone reading this knows more than me (which wouldn’t be hard) about milk sharing, especially in other cultures, let me know in the comments. And if anyone reading this is in the SF Bay Area, more donations are appreciated.

Tags: Breastfeeding, milk share

I‘m working on the birthstory, the announcement, and all that good stuff. But for right this instant… I had to post this photo.

I love the “getting to know you” phase. It’s everything babymooning is about.

More later, I promise!

Tags: Aurora, Family, Jason babymoon, Parenting

Last night, we figured out that “King Corn” was available on Netflix’s instant watch, so we did. And I am still wigging out about it.

Rowan has been reactive to corn products since he was small, so we’ve been a corn-free house for a few years. I wasn’t expecting to go into this to learn anything at all (sorta like my experience with “Super Size Me” and “Fast Food Nation”.) Sometimes, when you’re the only person you know on the “know what you’re eating” bandwagon, (OK, other than my two fave food blogs, the Cleaner Plate Club, who reviewed the film here, and Ethicurean, who reviewed it here, and my peeps over on the foodlab list), you get kinda jaded about yet another film trying desperately to get the average consumer’s attention about what they’re putting in their mouths.

So it’s with no small delight that I report here that there was one, just one, fact in the film that just rocked my world. I’m still geeking out over it. Maybe it’s because I came late to the party (and the film) and the lunacy with food prices going on right now highlights this particular aspect of the corn madness.

Near the end of the film, our heroes, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, interview Earl Butz. Ethicurean says,

Many would argue that Butz, who was secretary of agriculture in the 1970s, is singlehandedly responsible for the corporatization of U.S. farming, the obesity epidemic, and the pollution of vast swathes of America by agricultural chemicals. But face to face with the nonagenarian Bogeyman of the sustainable food movement in his nursing home, the guys can’t quite bring themselves to come in for the rhetorical kill, neither in person nor voiceover.

Friends, this was the most horrifying part of the film, and I’m still metaphorically chewing on it. Butz says flat-out that Americans today pay a smaller percentage of their money for food than any other generation, and that’s the key to our prosperity. In light of the sustainable food movement’s take that we should be paying more and getting real food for it (see grist’s blistering critique of Michael Pollan and Alice Waters’ takes here and the New York Times here), the idea that Butz was able (with what support? Who knows) to make the decision that our health as a nation was to be sacrificed on the altar of prosperity makes me ill.

What grist and the NYT are missing (along with the vast majority of Americans) is that it’s not about dollars and cents; it’s about choosing to eat food which sustains health, and choosing to eat crap which will kill you and make a lot of money for the pharmaceutical industry in the later portion of your life. You will end up paying the money, the question is just whether you want to spend it on food all along the way, or in medical costs at the end.

And in grief and pain, of course. The film interviews a cabby in NYC, whose entire family is diabetic and/or dead from diabetes-related illness. It seems almost cruel and macabre to contrast his family’s story of early, gruesome death, with Butz sitting in his nursing home in his nineties. The man who decided that it was OK for us to eat the inedible and pay the inevitable health cost sits alone, well-groomed and clean into his nineties, while the people on the streets are slowly amputated to the point of choosing death.

Our family has always paid a larger percentage of our budget in food than pretty much anyone I know. When trying to plan last year’s household budget, I gave up in dismay, discovering that not a single budget recommendation I could find included an adequate food percentage (I usually transferred the allotment from “entertainment” and “clothing”, because being a Californian, there surely was no way to shed a dime from “housing”). The folks who deal in finance don’t see the difference between payments to a CSA and trips to McDonald’s; it’s all just “food” on the balance sheet.

This is not the only cogent point in the film; depending on your background, there may or may not be other bits that come as news. The filmmakers make the point that an acre of corn in Iowa touches “everything”, and of course, that alone comes as no surprise to folks who recognize that yes, it’s all connected, isn’t it? So check it out and see if there are any connections in there for you.

Tags: Cleaner-Plate-Club, Ethicurean, Fast-Food-Nation, King-Corn, Super-Size-Me

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90272530

Jonathan just sent me this link, to a segment on Fresh Aire with Jonathan Paskowitz, and his documentary Surfwise. This film both encourages and terrifies me, frankly.

When you’re steeped in a fear-based society, sometimes it feels safer to stay under the radar as far as possible, and a lot of that is letting people assume what makes them comfortable, and not making too much noise about the choices your family makes, because that way, you aren’t dealing with possible State interference. You can talk to people about homebirth, homeschool, blah blah blah, but not all at once, because they shut down and assume you’re completely insane and/or incompetent.

Then along comes a film like this.

Compared to what the Paskowitzes did, what we’re planning is tame. Nine kids in a 24-foot trailer makes three kids in a 47-foot boat sound pretty palatial and spacious. So that’s cool. And while we do enjoy the raw food thing, my kids know what fat and sugar are, and are allowed to indulge. I’m thinking I might keep this film up my sleeve, to show folks that we’re not nearly as extreme as we sound.

But once I’m done with self-protection mode, I start really thinking about what those folks did, and wishing someone had covered the stuff I really want to know. Like… do all nine kids still like each other? What kinds of encouragement in learning were they able to do? How did they manage things like laundry? You know, the real details of making a family like that really work… in a 24 foot trailer, nonetheless.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll have more to say when I’ve gotten to see it. Stay tuned.

Tags: Paskowitz, Surfwise

A while back, before I had her permission to post, I wrote “Triumph” about Shaye’s birth. On Brighton’s one-month birthday, she’s now published the full birth story. It doesn’t show up well in firefox, so use IE. And prepare to be amazed. A few of my personal fave bits:

• The look on her face after surgery, compared to the look after Brighton’s birth
• The fact that her husband went on the radio to ask for pilots to fly them to a birth place! What a guy! You go, Lee!
• Her discussion of fear-based living, at the end. Woah.

Way to go, Shaye. I am so so so proud of you, and of what you’ve accomplished. What a beacon of hope, what a trailblazer, to all the other women who are stuck where you were, and not sure how to get out. Because you did it, they’ll be able to see a path as well.

Tooth #2 is officially gone!

It’s the matching bottom tooth, so now he has a great gap front n’ center bottom, through which to whistle, or rest a straw. The Tooth Fairy brought him a lovely silver dragon charm, which he has not physically let go of in 24 hours or so.

This one hung on for very little time, compared to how long the other one was wiggly, which tells me that I’d better get busy stockpiling Fairy gifts.

Oh, and how’s this for cool? Picked it up off a homeschooling list… sometimes, when there’s no tooth at all, the Tooth Fairy randomly shows up with new toothbrushes, encouragements to brush, and other dental hygiene goodness. How cool is that?

Last night, the waiting was over. After wiggling around for three solid weeks, Rowan lost his first tooth.

I‘d been in a meeting in Menlo Park in February 13, being all busily corporate, when Jason IMd me with this exchange:

11:54 AM teamhudson: hello love

11:57 AM guess what?

11:58 AM me: what?

11:59 AM teamhudson: Rowan has his first loose tooth
bottom front middle right incisor

12:00 PM me: eeeeeeeeeek

12:01 PM teamhudson: uh huh

12:02 PM I think I’m right in thinking that’s also the first one that came in

12:03 PM several places say that’s likely, and he’s about the right age

12:04 PM me: I think so; he is

teamhudson: Cuz my first reaction was “Already?”

I‘ll be honest; I was trying hard not to choke up, that my little boy’s first loose tooth happened while I was not home. I freaked just a little that it meant I was somehow A Lesser Mother. And of course, because it’s me… I also immediately started researching.

There are all kinds of beautiful options for creative treatment of the Tooth Fairy gifts for girls. Pearl bracelets, charm bracelets, necklaces… all kinds of gorgeous options. For boys? Not so much. And it made me really, really sad that for girls, there is imagination and creativity, but I guess little boys are supposed to be OK with spare cash. It’s kind of the same thing you find about boys’ clothes. Sports, military themes, and commercialization are fine. It’s impossible to find a boy counterpart to the cute pink t-shirt we bought one of the nieces, that spells out in rhinestones, “Fairies Rock”. How about “Elves Rule”, huh?

So, determined to do better, I flung a quick request northwards, and within days, Rowan’s Auntie Ria had made a gorgeous glossy red beaded pouch (Rowan’s favorite color), and Nana and Grandpa Al had found a Sac Dollar and a small charm with gold dust to put in it. I was set… materially… to respond to the eventual loss of the tooth.

Except that then there’s the philosophical question. Do you tell them about the Tooth Fairy, or not? I know people who consider that sort of thing to be a form of institutionalized lying. We haven’t gone too overboard with Santa or the Easter Bunny; I think Rowan already is fairly sure those are just made-up characters. So this was my chance, if I took it, to put the magic back in, and give him something else to believe in. I quizzed Jennie, my hairstylist, about what she’d done. Her sons are slightly older than mine, and she admitted that it had been as much of a question of hers as it currently was of mine; what’s the right thing to do? Give em reality straight-up, or keep the magic going? She polled her clients, when it had been her son’s turn, and discovered that the majority of grown adults wished their parents had held the magic for them for just a little longer.

Naturally, it wasn’t even a question for Jason. He held out for magic. So yesterday evening, when Rowan came yelling “Mama! Mama! It’s out!”, I had my plan of action. I pulled out the pouch (which he instantly adored), told him it was for holding his tooth, we put his tooth in there (after showing it proudly to Kestrel, to Papa, and to Uncle Marc), and then when he went to bed, we hung it from a ribbon on the ceiling, so that the Tooth Fairy could come take the tooth and replace it with treasure.

After he fell asleep, but before I did (and there’s a tight time window there), I tipped up the pouch, got the tooth, and placed the treasures inside. And teared up, just a little. It’s hard to put into words, the confluence of emotions, at that point. I remember being the kid wondering what the Tooth Fairy would bring. I was the Mama, in charge of making that dream happen. I remember being the kid, totally unable to keep my tongue from testing that weird spot in my teeth where something wasn’t any more. I am the Mama,

trying to capture that in a picture.

This morning, he woke up early, and I could hear him checking out what the Tooth Fairy had left. He rocketed upstairs to share his “loot” with me, and ask me why the Tooth Fairy doesn’t let itself be seen, and why it had left what it did, and and and…

Mission accomplished. The magic is there. And he’s looking forward to the loss of the next tooth, to see what the Tooth Fairy comes up with this time. And so am I.

There’s nothing like a pregnancy to make you start really thinking about your eating. Again.

We are already pretty “different” about our food. We did a phase of hardcore raw, but then fell off the wagon what with the move onto the boat, and then my pregnancy. And of course, cold weather does not encourage a raw diet, it just doesn’t. And it has been cold this year.

But you know, the question of “what” to eat is beginning to pale really, really fast, when compared with the question of “how” to eat.

I stumbled into The Cleaner Plate Club a while back… she’s brilliant. Her “How I Taught My Kid to Curse and Why I Blame Big Food” is a work of genius, and I cannot read “The many things I can talk about” with a straight face (course, that’s my face wobbling between laughing and crying, but anyway, it’s a fabulous post.)

If you clicked on those links, you wandered off Cleaner Plate and onto The Ethicurean: Chew The Right Thing. She’s got a series of digests up right now that are anything but digestable. The two pieces about “accidental” GMO contamination of corn and rice crops both make me really, really nervous.

After a whole childhood colored by Feingold, the idea that diet impacts behavior is old, old news to me. Course apparently it is news to science, and a big study at the end of 2007, published in Lancet, indicates that really, I haven’t been insane for the last 30 years, artificial crap in your food makes you unwell! How novel! ::sigh:: I’m printing a copy of this study out, to beat people with who continue to insist that I’m making it up when Rowan freaks out from consuming HFCS or coloring.

So what’s my point? My point is that the more you read, from Downergate to Pollan, the state of food here in the US is absolutely abysmal. Finding real food to feed your family is getting tougher all the time, let alone organic, seasonally-appropriate, healthy food. Going to the grocery is a depressing endeavor, not because it’s so hard to find what Pollan calls “real food”, but because even then, there’s danger (like the time I saw a produce guy putting clearly non-organic broccoli in the organic bins, and who, when I called him on it, shrugged and said “no one knows the difference without the labeling.”).

So how does a gestating, lactating, mother of growing people, ensure that everyone’s eating stuff they really should be, and not eating the kind of yuck that is becoming more and more common in our food supply? It’s a trick, without being fulltime hunters and gatherers. I’d be interested to hear how other people are dealing with this…

I blogged a teeny bit about my July 31 miscarriage here. And until I was discussing the due date for the baby I’m carrying now with Mom2, I had forgotten that the baby I miscarried was due right around now.

I miscarried between Rowan and Kestrel too. That one, an eight-weeker and so-called “silent” miscarriage, was horrible, because I still felt broken from the cesarean, and took the miscarriage as a sign that meant I could not do this birth thing that normal women could do. I was an emotional wreck for ages. And that Christmas was kinda sad, because that baby would have been due then. A Christmas baby.

This time, I knew that miscarriages are just a normal part of a breeder’s life, and I wasn’t so freaked out about that; I was just very very sad. This one was not at all “silent”, and therefore I was also physically wrecked for a while. And that baby was due around my birthday. A Birthday baby.

Instead, we caught this one, who is due smack in between Kestrel’s birthday and Rowan’s. There will be a nearly perfect three-year spacing between our kids, which is precisely what Jason was hoping for, but too wise to “plan” for, since we all know that biology does what it does when it cares to. My three kids (how weird is that to type! Much less to think!) will be May-June-July. Late spring/early summer birthdays, perfect for parties, far enough apart that they don’t collide unpleasantly with each other, close enough together that they will all always remember each other.

And that, right there? That says “hand of the Divine” all over it.

See, the two miscarriages? Nice due times and all, easy for me to remember. But as my parenting guru pal Valarie told me once (and it rocked my world)… my children will be in each other’s lives far longer than they’ll be in mine. It’s easy, as a parent, to constantly frame your kids in terms of their relationship with you, but that’s not the primary relationship considering the scope of their lives; the primary relationship is with each other. And somehow, this baby picked a time snuggled right in between its brothers. Jason and I are both winter birthdays, but our children are the bright lights of spring and summer, all clustered together.

It’s another reminder that they are each other’s family, long after Jason and I have moved on to whatever adventure comes next. I know that there are some who feel that trying to ascribe meaning to tragedy is simply the coping mechanism of a gullible brain, and that’s fine, they can think that. But for me, for the rest of my life, when “birthday season” rolls around, I’ll be reminded that pretty much even the most awful events can sometimes end up turning out perfectly.

Tags: Birth, Family, Musings, Pregnancy

So here I am, over halfway. In our culture, for the first baby, you spend all your time panicking about the unknown of it all. In my case, I spent my second pregnancy wholly focused on the event of the birth, which was a planned HBAC, and came with all the challenges inherent to that. But with this baby, I have achieved an odd sort of calm. People keep shaking their heads at me.

It’s uncool, apparently, to be pregnant and non-dramatic about it. Apparently, despite the fact that I feel great, that I’m gaining normally, that baby is kicking around in there, I’ve got my midwife and my birth plans (including a full emergency backup plan) all dialed in, I am supposed to be freaking out about something.

There’s plenty to freak out about, if I felt like it. Birth isn’t all that safe an event, no matter where it happens. I could worry about shoulder dystocia, I could worry about stillbirth, meconium in the water, aspiration, short cord, breech. Last time labor was 38 hours, this one might be longer. Or, it might be supershort! I could fret about the fact that I’m older, so birth defects of some kind are more likely than they were before (although according to the Powers That Be, I’ve been a geriatric mother for five years already, LOL!). It’s true; this baby could have autism, CP, spina bifida, or a whole host of other things that people are born with. We’ll face that if it becomes necessary.

But you know… there’s nothing wrong with a little hope, is there? Must it always be about impending disaster?

It makes me sad that the American Culture of Fear has so pervaded the American Culture of Birth, that the fact that my simple statements that I feel great, baby’s doing great, and the birth is gonna be great, have people thinking I’m somehow naive or oblivious.

I spent Kestrel’s pregnancy reading everything. I mean everything. I am under absolutely no illusions about what could happen. I know that babies die. I know that mothers die. I’ve faced it, internalized it, accepted it, and… here’s the kicker… I am now moving past it.

In 14 weeks or so, I’m having a baby. And like everything else in this life, there are factors I can control, and factors I cannot, and I am going to meet them with the most joy, and the most faith, and the most love, I possibly can. Everything else is a waste of my energy; energy I could put to use growing this baby. So that’s what I’m doing.

Tags: Family, homebirth, Musings, Pregnancy