Tree of Life Mothering

I feel as excited as a groupie for the Beatles! Dr. Nils Bergman, the medical doctor who popularized kangaroo mother care in a maternity ward in South Africa, is coming to Salt Lake for the Utah Breastfeeding Coalition on March 12-13.. You can read more about the conference here http://perinatalprofessionals.org/

Dr. Bergman has taught that the “mother is the baby’s habitat.” The mother is the place for the baby to be. In his hospital, he has put premature babies on the mother’s chest instead of incubators and had great results. Their vital signs stabilize on the mothers’ bodies better than when in incubators. Mothers and babies belong together, and they will be healthier if they stay together. Psychological and physical effects occur when mothers and babies are separated. In other words, mothers are meant to be trees of life to their babies. He advocates for just letting babies and moms be together right after birth, instead of doing all the traditional medical procedures of weighing and bathing.  He teaches that skin to skin contact, meaning baby’s skin touching mom’s skin, helps all babies, premature or full-term.

I love that he teaches that newborns are intelligent, not just blobs as some people have thought.

I really like these videos by Dr. Jack Newman. Dr. Newman is a medical doctor who devotes his sole practice to breastfeeding moms. If you are starting to breastfeed, getting the latch right is crucial. My friend had her 7th baby recently. He was born prematurely so she had him in the hospital and was able to see a lactation consultant. She found out that the pain she thought was normal for breastfeeding with her previous babies, through all these years, is not normal. She had an incorrect latch!

A page with step by step latch instructions is found here http://www.llli.org/faq/positioning.html and  here http://normalfed.com/Starting/latchtalk.html

This first video shows how to latch a baby on properly, with an asymmetric latch.

Here’s another one that shows the mother compressing the breast, a trick used to help more milk come out and keep the baby interested:

You can see more of these videos by Dr. Newman here at http://www.breastfeedinginc.ca/content.php?pagename=videos

Sat. March 10 is going to be a fun day! We will be having an amazing conference with naturally minded LDS moms who are into homeschooling, eating yummy whole foods, gardening, and more. Come bring a friend and learn how to  increase your personal power and joy as a woman, mom, and wife in the honored role you have as a feminine tree of life to your family.

Come hear these amazing speakers:

Karen Kindrick Cox of courageousbeings.com, about how to fire your child’s love of learning and heroic living by understanding how the brain works 

Steve Russell, homeschool dad and attorney,  on America’s Second Great Experiment:  Can a Vicious People Govern Itself? or
Vice, Liberty and the Hand that Rocks the Cradle

Caleb Warnock gardener, and author, on Pioneer Skills and Self-Sufficiency

 panel of moms who have experienced pain-free labor and childbirth (without drugs)

Diann Jeppson on the Seasons of Learning

Aneladee Milne on Moms as Heroes and Mentors

Kim Simmerman Help for the Whole Foods Challenged

Claudia Sudweeks on Why Family History is Not Just for Grandmas

Leah Shingleton on The Womanly Art of Wifing

Dr. Russell Anderson, LDS D.O., on the importance of natural family planning (NFP) for the LDS couple

along with Colette Child, NFP (Creighton Method) instructor

$57 at the door, $47 if you register by the early bird deadline of Friday February 24 midnight

$53 if you register online by the deadline of March 8 midnight. After March 8 midnight no online registrations will be accepted. But you can come to the door and pay the at door price of $57.

If you register by the early bird deadline you will receive a beautifully illustrated piece of art as an emailed document that shows the seven keys of learning, by our keynote speaker Karen Cox.

Group Discounts!

$37 if you register with a group of at least 10 people (including you) by Friday February 24 midnight!  

$27 if you register with a group of at least 20 people (including you) by Friday February 24 midnight!

Please go here http://treeoflifemothering.ning.com/page/mom-s-conferenceand scroll down the page to see payment instructions

For more information about our courses, products or events visit us at www.tenboominsitute.com

OK, I admit, this made me laugh. It’s funny, but it sends the wrong message. It seems to say, “If you are a woman and have talent and power and want to show it, the way to do it is to be like a man, strong and tough and scary.”

I disagree. We can be powerful and assertive and talented without becoming as fierce as a dinosaur. I really like this post from a homeschooling acquaintance here http://blog.oldfashionedmotherhood.com/2012/01/guest-post-female-roles-in-home.html

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the following seminar has been cancelled.

We can still discuss Headgates here however, http://treeoflifemothering.ning.com/profiles/blogs/come-join-us-for-a-discussion-of-headgates-1

Next week, Wed. Feb. 8 2 PM MST I am hosting another online discussion on Headgates and the sequel, Parenting. Watch this blog post for the link for next week’s discussion. We had a very lively discussion last time but didn’t even get much to the concept of the headgate since it is presented at the very end of the article. (see http://headgates.org) and we didn’t even touch the sequel article that Keri Tibbetts wrote on Parenting, which is her interpretation of the Love and Logic philosophy of child discipline.

What is the big deal about  Legos and Lincoln Logs? What’s wrong with lettind kids play with those or puzzles?

In the sequel article on parenting, she recommends spanking. What do you think? Is spanking ever OK? I’d like to hear your comments in our discussion.

Please follow the link below on Wed. Feb. 8 at 2 PM to participate.

This is my friend Katie’s living room. It is full of color, great books, and a great spirit. I just feel love and a love of learning in her home. The following pictures are of the books on her shelves and one of the papers on her wall

Last Thursday I thought of this great win/win situation. I wanted to go hear Mary Ann Johnson, of http://home-school-coach.com/ present about the closet at 7 PM in Bountiful, and my two scholar phase kids needed to be picked up at 5:30 PM at the same place, where we have their commonwealth school. It made no sense to pick them up, bring them home 20 minutes away, and turn around and come back. I wanted a place where we could stay and have dinner that was free, so that ruled out restaurants.

I started thinking, hmmm, and then came up with a brilliant idea. I would ask my friend Katie if she wanted me to babysit while she went to my daughter’s self-directed scholar phase class. I remembered she said that she wanted to go to that every week, but she needed a babysitter. I offered to bring dinner in a crockpot to share in exchange for letting us hang out at her home in Bountiful while we waited for the closet presentation to start.

So I called Katie and she was totally willing. She was having a bad day and needed a break. She was brave enough to take 9 children ice skating earlier that day! Anyone who does that deserves to have the rest of the day off. Her toddler was acting toddlerish and constantly getting into things, like climbing on chairs and dumping contents of containers. I was more than happy to help. But instead of going to the class, our mutual friend Christina took her to the temple. While they were gone I worked on finishing up the dinner and also took photos of all the awesome books on her shelves. I want to read them all! The big boys went sledding outside, and the younger ones watched some brain candy (I wish I could eradicate it from my children’s lives but I am not there yet) while her rascally toddler, thankfully, slept.

Katie came back home and she started nursing her 18 month old who had wakened while she was gone. I was smart enough to have his big brother get him out of bed instead of freaking him out as a strange face by getting too close.  I was pleased and surprised to see her nurse him. I didn’t know she was “still” nursing. I am still nursing my over 2 year old. We swapped stories about nursing toddlers, how great it is to do it to keep them healthy, and the big challenge of wanting to extricate ourselves in the morning from them when all they want to do when they first wake up is nurse.

Our scholar phase kids came home thanks to our other mutual friend Aneladee giving them a ride, and my husband came over. We had the chicken soup I fixed and then rushed off to hear Mary Ann. Katie’s husband didn’t come home yet and her scholar phaser son had a Shakespeare movie party to go so we offered my 13 year old to babysit her kids while we brought my kids to the meeting place with a laptop and a DVD player and my 16 year old to babysit my younger kids.

It all worked out beautifully. I thought the soup was yummy and was pleased that everything worked so well. I did have to laugh when my son told me that when Katie’s husband came home he took one sniff of the air and asked his kids if mom had made that nasty chili again.Sorry for snatching your wife away Mike and filling up your home with that “nasty chili” smell that somehow came from my chicken soup!

I don’t blog a ton about breastfeeding because after breastfeeding 7 children, over the course of over 18 years, and being a La Leche League Leader for 13 years, breastfeeding is just part of the background. It’s not something that I even think much about anymore. It’s something that’s always cool and always there, like chocolate (I wish), my husband’s gorgeous curly hair, freedom, God, and the Internet. 

i know a lot about breastfeeding, I’ve read a lot about it and I smile at every breastfeeding mom I can, especially if she’s nursing in public. Mother’s milk is the wonder substance of the whole of earth’s existence. It kills cancer cells! A pediatric gastroenterologist I once heard said that it has the widest germ-killing spectrum of anything on the planet.  To top it off, it is made effortlessly by ordinary moms like you and me. When I do stop to think about breastfeeding, I continue to marvel that God made women so they can feed their babies. Not just feed them, to give babies calories, but nurture them with soul food that is every bit of satisfying to them as a candlelight dinner of your favorite meal with your favorite people would be for you. And our lucky breastfeeding babies get that combo of physical and emotional satisfaction for every nursing! But when I was a brand new mother, I didn’t know so much about it. I discovered a book on my mom’s shelf when young that said breastfeeding was best for babies and why. When I was pregnant with my first baby I read Bestfeeding and that confirmed it for me. But I wasn’t confident enough to nurse in public yet. (Now I do it all the time…LOL, that’ s another post.)

If I were a brand-new mom I might be tempted by the following email I got from Jean Brown Reasearch, a company I looked into for a different research study. That’s how I got on their mailing list.

So why is this a bad idea? Because it doesn’t do anything to encourage women to breastfeed. It more than likely will appeal to poor moms who feel like they can’t afford artificial baby milk, who also feel like they can’t breastfeed. The reality is that most women can breastfeed, they just need the right information and encouragement from their family and friends. These poor women who opt in to this study will lose their milk supply by not nursing and then after 16 weeks, what do they do when they aren’t getting the free ABM? Hopefully, they would learn they could relactate but that’s not likely.They will be stuck having to pay for a vastly inferior product that their body can make superiorly, perfectly suited for their baby. A lot of people think “formula” is benign. I choose to use the phrase artificial baby milk, because that calls it like it is. It is artificial, and who would want artificial when they can have real? Would you rather have artificial blood or real blood? Artificial legs or real legs? Would you be OK with having artificial blood or legs for 16 weeks if you didn’t have to pay for it? What if it would be hard to get the use of your real legs or blood back after the 16 weeks were up? Why choose to use artificial in the first place? If you can’t have the real thing, get some help because you probably can have the real thing.

As Dr Sears says, (he’s a wise man who has a La Leche League Leader for a wife) the use of ABM is one big experiment on babies. Now here is an experiment of an experiment. A baby’s health is nothing to experiment with. We already know the perfect “formula.” And it’s free. If anybody you know is considering this study, please talk them out of it and point them to their nearest La Leche League meeting or web site http://llli.org

Last week was so full of drama. Princessa turned 6 so we had a birthday dinner and party. Sometime I will have to write up her birth story here on my site. She was born in my bedroom two weeks before my due date. I had planned on a homebirth, but I was just suprised that she came early because I have never been that early before. She was such a sweet, pretty baby and it was so nice to finally get another girl after three boys. We are so glad she is part of our family. For her birthday dinner she requested popcorn, which I was thrilled to do because that is easy, not like lasagna or turkey and stuffing, like some of my other kids pick for their birthday dinners. So we made regular popcorn and caramel popcorn, threw in some raw veggies, and had gingerbread for her cake and ice cream. She enjoyed herself!

Two days after our birthday celebration last week she gave one of the birthday presents I gave to her back to me saying she didn’t like it. It was a pink flashlight with Dora the Explorer. I had wanted to get her one from Melissa and Doug that was blue and green with flowers. But I ran out of time and put off shopping for her present until Saturday, the day before her birthday. And then I found myself with all the little home with my husband and two big kids/babysitter gone to the homeschool debate tournament. As soon as they got home I would go out shopping by myself. No way was I taking four little kids shopping. By the time dh and big kids got home it was the worst winter storm so far this season. We went out in that shopping and all I wanted to do was go to one store and take my chances. They only had one flashlight for girls,  the Dora one. Now she says she doesn’t like it. What? Just two days earlier she happily told me she had had the best birthday ever and I figured it had to do with the flashlight since she was carrying it with her all day. Sometimes she is a changeling and swears off anything that is too “girly girl.” Talk about a moody girl. And she hasn’t even hit puberty.

Last Monday I took the younger kids to the Treehouse Museum for our homeschool day. I like everything there but the life-size cutout of Obama in the fake Oval Office. I adore the threecornered hats though and love that they have my favorite book on Washington there, the picture book about him illustrated by Cheryl Harness.

When I got home my 16 year old daughter was in a lot of pain and had no energy. Her stomach hurt as it always has. But it seemed worse than ever. I’m not one to go to the doctor much at all, preferring to rely on time and herbal remedies. My husband actually thought she might be dying though so he took her in. He weighed her and  we found out that she had lost 15 pounds in a month, and then 20 pounds in the two years before that. She has had stomach pains since she was 9 but things have been getting worse. She says that it hurts to eat anything so she wasn’t eating much at all and she said even water hurt.

This condition of hers has stymied me for years. And the condition scared the doctor because the next day he called us and told us to hospitalize our daughter. I don’t blame him. Here he was with a patient that looked like an anorexic who was starving. She has lost her appetite, but not for psychological reasons to be skinny and gain control over her life, but just because she says eating hurts her stomach. She won’t eat because it hurts, and then hunger makes it hurt more, but she says that eating doesn’t make it feel better.

Well, we compromised by getting her into a gastroenterologist the next day, thanks to my husband, who took on the doctor’s assertion that we wouldn’t be able to get her an appointment sooner than a month from now by calling from a list of all the GI doctors on the Wasatch Front. 

Sure enough, the doctor called the next day to follow up and make sure we were doing what we said we would, to take her to see a specialist instead of hospitalizing her. The end of the long story is that we took her into get an endoscopy and she got a biopsy done to test for celiac disease. She has been eating more too so her energy is up and she is able to do get back to doing scholar phase.  Now we are waiting to get the results on the celiac test. We are supposed to go back for a colonoscopy.

Does anybody  know what would cause stomach pain for years if it’s not gluten intolerance or celiac disease? Maybe this is leaky gut syndrome and the GAPS thing is worth looking into.