SUMMER OF MOM

Have I mentioned how much I love being a mother?

Well, no, I guess I haven’t really mentioned much of anything for several weeks now. I plead
"motherhood" as my excuse for untimely posting.

It really is a blast, though…

Even as I speak, she is sleeping across my lap. Long ago I moved my beautiful leather executive Captain’s Chair out of the computer room and replaced it with a less sexy but highly functional rocking chair / glider / recliner. With a nursing pillow in front on me, I can feed my daughter and she can happily sleep across my lap while I write.

In fact, I finished writing the book I started in November with her in exactly this position. However, by the time June rolled around she was becoming a bit active for this arrangement to work out as often as it once had. These days, she plays more and sleeps less, and while she is sometimes happy to play on a quilt on the floor next to me, more often she requires my undivided attention.

And that’s fine. Sometimes, shaking a jingly froggy and singing made-up songs is just way more important than anything else that I could be doing in that moment. Soon enough (way too soon) she’ll be doing all kinds of things without me and I will pine and lament the days gone by when we spent nearly every minute of our days interacting with one another.

Still, that is a ways off. She is currently in that stage where she understands that she "could" go over there and get that toy, but has a difficult time propelling herself accurately. Reverse and spin seem to be the most prevalent gears… sometimes she looks like a little boat without a rudder.

Luckily, she loves cats. (We have seven.) And, even more luckily, they seem to like her as well. They actually come to her for affection, despite the fact that she is still in the "grab everything and shove it into my mouth" phase. With a little supervision, we can come to a compromise which works for both her and her feline friends.

Despite all of the nay-saying, she is still the sweetest tempered baby I can imagine. Of course, I have nothing to compare her to, but I am told that her behavior is not really "normal." They say that the average newborn cries about three hours (!!!) per day, but she has always had a crying rate of maybe five or ten minutes per week, and never in a row.

Part of that is her general temperament and disposition, though we also endeavor to never give her a reason to cry in the first place. I’ve always been able to tell when she’s hungry, well before she gets to the fussy stage. As soon as she gets a particular look on her face, I know that it’s time for lunch.

When she was really little, she sort of "barked" when she was hungry. Just one short, sharp sound and then a minute or two pause to respond before the next slightly louder bark. Now, she just sort of wrinkles up one side of her lip and looks at me in that "meaningful way." Or, as has been the case a few times lately, she’ll just stand herself up by grabbing the front of my shirt and looking down it, like she’s saying "hey – what’s for dinner?"

I read (oh, my… I read so many books these days) that it is often wise to pick an innocuous word which represents the act of breastfeeding and use that word all of the time with your baby. This word should be one which you wouldn’t mind having screamed across a crowded restaurant or through an airport, especially if you intend to do extended breastfeeding and wean naturally.

My partner, being the wise and mostly un-embarrassable guy that he is, loudly and repeatedly suggests the phrase "booby juice" to our daughter. He happily anticipates the day when this culinary treat is proudly and publicly demanded by our earnestly boisterous toddler.

Since she is with us at night, she also has no reason to cry to get our attention. I really do think that co-sleeping is my favorite part of parenting. There is nothing like snuggling with a baby and having her sweet little face be the first thing that I see when I wake up. She stretches, looks over at me and smiles – no better way to start the day.

Not to mention that it has made nighttime parenting SOOOO easy. Instead of getting up several times a night, going down the hall to comfort a screaming baby, mixing up a bottle, sitting down, feeding the baby, trying to get her back to sleep, back in the crib, and myself back to bed, I simply feel her move, open one eye, position us both, then go back to sleep. Voila.

She also doesn’t need to cry to be picked up since she’s pretty much always in arms... that is, when she’s not busy spinning in circles trying to crawl or sitting up by herself chewing on shoes that have never actually been on her feet. Other than that, she’s on a lap or in a sling being worn by either myself or my partner.

Recently, we acquired a really sturdy and ergonomic backpack so that she can ride around behind me and watch everything over my shoulder. No longer do I have to worry about grabby little hands while I’m making vegetable soup and she absolutely LOVES it.

I have, however, found that this is a ride which should not be taken directly after lunch. Unless, of course, I want a huge pile of partially digested organic yams running down the back of my neck…

Speaking of yams, I am shocked that anyone buys baby food in a jar. Do you know how much that stuff costs? For the price of one jar of organic yams, I can make ten jars of it myself. Sure, it takes a little work…. very little. (How hard is it to steam something then dump it in a blender?)

I’m also able to make her really interesting concoctions which one could never find in a jar at the store, such as my patented Super Yummy Green Gucky Healthfood. It looks like… well… green guck, but it actually tastes really great. (Even the grandparents concur – they wanted to try it.)

First of all, I use nothing but organic food for her. Pesticides aren’t good for anybody, but I think that’s especially so when that body is so tiny.

That being said, the SYGGH is basically brown rice, millet, whole oats, lentils, split peas, tofu, avocado and pears all blended up into a creamy pale green paste. It looks like spackle from outer space, but it tastes really good. Really – try it and see if I jest. I would never make her eat something that I wouldn’t eat myself… if I had no teeth.

It’s all just so much fun…. Even making her baby food while she watches me over my right shoulder from her backpack while I explain everything I’m doing is fun. Feeding her pears that I canned last fall is fun. Having her blow bubbles while she’s drinking water from her tiny espresso mug is fun. Having her grab my ears and shove my nose into her mouth is fun. Washing her diapers or folding her little clothes is fun.

Speaking of diapers… my, cloth diapers sure have come a long way. We’ve used Fuzzi Bunz and I just love them. I never thought I’d be gaga over a cloth diaper, but these just rock. So many people predicted that I’d use cloth diapers for about two weeks before I switched over to disposables, but obviously that hasn’t happened. Actually, I bought one pack of disposables in the beginning "just in case," but ended up giving them away several months later to a friend who had just had a baby – I think we used three or four of them.

However, these days she has needed fewer and fewer diapers every day. We’ve started doing something that they call "Elimination Communication" or "Natural Infant Hygiene." As with all other aspects of parenting, I’ve tried to look beyond what our consumer based culture does with children to see what the rest of the world / eons of non-industrialized humans are/were doing and make my choices based upon that spectrum. Just because Pampers and Similac have an agenda (and sponsor medical studies) doesn’t mean that I have to listen.

So, I heard about EC and decided to give it a try.

WARNING: If the Victorians have really gotten to you and bodily functions frighten you, perhaps you should skip ahead.

It has been assumed in this culture for the past thirty years that babies are incapable of anything but diaper wearing until they’re at least two or three years old. This assumption is based upon a study by a man named Brazelton which was sponsored by Pampers all those years ago. Certainly, I don’t advocate the very harsh, on a strict schedule "training" which was popular at the beginning of the last century, but I also don’t think that there is something inherently psychologically rewarding about wearing a toilet all day long.

And, in many other cultures, diapers either don’t exist at all or they are only worn for the first few months of life. So, what do these people do differently?

Just like knowing when a baby is hungry because of their communication signals, it is also possible to know when they need to eliminate. Contrary to what the popular culture would like us to believe, babies are very aware of this and often try to tell their parents what is going on. As one researcher put it, the instinct "not to soil the nest" is very strong.

So, when that happens, you just give them the opportunity to go somewhere else. In our case, that is a little plastic potty with a cat on it. (My partner insists on calling it a bunny – he doesn’t want our daughter to get the idea that it is okay to pee on the cats.) We have nicknamed it the "scat cat" or, alternately, the "shitty kitty."

Our daughter gets such a big kick out of sitting on her potty – she’d be happy to sit there all day chewing on her favorite book or talking to her stuffed sheep. Amazingly enough, she goes nearly every time I put her on it. Many days she only needs two or three diapers all day long. Her grandmother (a former nurse) is totally amazed – they always learned that that was impossible. But, there’s the evidence right there.

There is no "goal" to EC – it is not potty training. In fact, it pretty much negates the need for potty training – by the time the child is of that age, she has usually been continent for quite some time.

It has been believed that a child doesn’t have the musculature to control these functions until they are at a late age – much later than is deemed reasonable in most of the rest of the world. (And these days that age gets later and later… Pampers makes much larger sizes now, don’t ‘cha know…) In reality, those muscles atrophy from not using them and need to be redeveloped later when the child is "ready."

All of this seems ludicrous to me, and as is the case with many things in this culture, appears to be largely driven by the financial desires of large corporations. I mean, if we all breastfed, co-slept, made our own baby food and didn’t use diapers, who would make any money? Never mind if this is actually in the best interest of society, the environment or the individuals involved, The Stockholders need to make a buck, buy god! Or several million…

But I digress…

Being a parent really is all about fun – every single thing is an adventure. Recently, my partner and I got together with Myo and took The Little One to the Newport Aquarium, ostensibly to see the otters. She loved the fish…. Brightly colored slow moving objects are a big hit right now. By the time we got to the otters, both they and she were sound asleep, though certainly no less adorable. Hey – it takes a lot of energy to be that cute!

That was also the day that we learned she loves puppets. In the gift shop (which you MUST walk through in order to leave) we found an otter puppet which my partner animated for her. She just lit up – of course she had to have it. To her, it was a kitty that she could chew on, which in her world is The Perfect Kitty.

We also recently discovered that she was able to and enjoys drumming. (She also likes the piano – if Miles were still around, Herbie might have been out of a job.) She has been exposed to live drumming quite a bit – we have percussion instruments all over the house and drumming circles are a pretty common activity for us.

Many months ago (when she was still very small) I learned that there really is no such thing for her as "too much drumming." We were at a party (her very first one, in fact) and a group of people were drumming in the basement. Though she has heard us drum at home, it is not the same as having ten people in an enclosed area – it was very loud down there. Gradually, I made my way toward the sound, checking in with her to gauge her reaction. Since she showed no signs of discomfort, we eventually went downstairs right into the noise.

She loved it. I had her in a wrap next to my body, and as soon as I started dancing she fell immediately and soundly asleep.

Now, a few months later, she has her own djembe just like mommy’s… only without the goat hair. (We thought it best to find one with no rough edges or exciting goat hair to chew on.) Sure, they make drums for kids, but plastic heads sound like crap – what’s the motivation to make sound on something like that? No, we wanted a "real" drum, so that’s what we got.

There are lots of rounds of "aawww…" when we go to drum circles with her. My partner can carry her in a front-pack with her drum hanging beneath her and his drum hanging beneath that so he is able to play, too. When we were in the store in Yellow Springs looking for drums, she immediately started beating on it correctly to "try it out," much to the surprise of the ladies behind the counter. With some lessons later on from Uncle Hacksaw, I think she could be a natural.

I figure since we’re saving so much money by not doing the "commercial parenting" thing that we can "reinvest" that money in things like her drum, rattles, a xylophone, a hand-crocheted hat, books (which she loves), an interactive baby mandala, her education…

Speaking of which, our baby started school yesterday. Some people laughed at me, but when she was four months old I started looking into private schools for her. She WILL NOT have the same educational experience that I had – I will not have her curiosity stifled by the heavy wet blanket of institutionalized mediocrity which is the public school system.

I started looking so early for a couple of reasons. First of all, some schools have very long waiting lists, so waiting until a few months, or even the year before, is not a good idea. They also tend to be expensive – financial planning is a very good idea.

Second of all, I wasn’t sure if there was a school I would trust with her mind and development – did a school that good even exist? Or would I have to homeschool her? If that turned out to be the case, so be it – my partner and I are both well educated enough that that would be viable, and we certainly know of enough outside resources that her opportunities would not be lacking.

I also wanted to get an idea of what I was going to be doing for the next twenty-odd years… would I be at home educating my daughter? Or should I be looking into doing other things? (Like my own continued schooling?)

Happily, I found the school I was looking for. I had known of Waldorf Schools and the philosophy of Rudolph Steiner for a long time (we have a book of his blackboard sketches) but didn’t realize that there was one in our area. Last spring, my mother, daughter and I went for a visit one day with a local Attachment Parenting group.

I loved it – my mother said that if she had known about it when I was young, I certainly would have been going there. It was beautiful…. Big, open rooms with lots of windows and high ceilings, soft, billowing curtains blowing in the breeze, beautiful paintings on the walls, organically shaped wooden frames around all of the blackboards, toys made from only natural materials, kids happily running around with violins, stacks of paper maiche Viking helmets sitting in a classroom, a playground with trees and no pavement…

And the curriculum is fascinating… exactly the kind of stuff I’d want my daughter to learn. The kids seemed unusually well-adjusted and non-institutionalized – there was a distinct lack of "commercially popular" fashions around. I was also very impressed to see a couple of thirteen year old boys DANCING to classical music, spontaneously and by themselves, with no self-consciousness whatsoever. They were so comfortable in their bodies and with themselves – none of the "too cool for you" posturing and physical awkwardness that is so common at that age.

In the bookstore, the first thing that I saw when I walked in was a copy of "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" by Jerry Mander, a book which both my partner and I own. Ahh… yes, these people would be allowed to educate my daughter.

So, we started school. They have programs beginning with infants and going up to eighth grade. Of course, the infant and toddler classes are for both the kids and the parent(s), so all three of us went today for the Music Garden class. We sang songs, danced, played with silk scarves… our daughter had a blast. I figure that by the time she is going to school without us, she’ll be very used to the place and have an easier time transitioning.

And, of course, we took her picture going into the building for her "first day of school." It was all very exciting.

All of it has been very exciting – I’m loving every minute of this. I can’t even begin to fathom how happy I am as a mom, nor can I imagine what my life would have been like without this truly wonderful experience.

My partner, too, is really enjoying being a dad and is truly a great one. He was recently asked to be a "Dad Expert" on an Attachment Parenting web site where he is asked to give his views on circumcision, co-sleeping, and whatever other questions come in. Until he and I were together, I had never even CONSIDERED having a baby. But, lots of things have changed over the years… and always for the better, it seems.

Life… what a funny thing – you don’t really know where you’re going until you get there. And though I can’t yet know where the future will be, I know that here is pretty darn great.