Monthly Archives: January 2011

Night Weaning Questions

I’m considering night weaning.

Peanut is officially 22 months old and nighttime nursing is the only time I genuinely dislike nursing—mostly because she’s handsy at night and I’ve tried everything to stop it and she just continues. It’s gotten better since I wrote that post (mostly just better in my head), but it’s still very bothersome. That’s not the point of this post though.

Right now she nurses 1-3 times a night. On a “good” night, she goes to sleep at 8:30pm and doesn’t wake up until 5-6am, nurses once to sleep, then wakes up around 7am. She sleeps in her own bed (a twin mattress on the floor in her room) and usually when I nurse her back to sleep I fall asleep in her bed.

I don’t really mind the “good” nights, but it’s when she has “bad” nights that bother me. Sometimes she wakes up a 1am then 3am then 5am, then 7am for the day. She has always woken frequently at night, but getting used to her waking one time and then she suddenly wakes every two hours. It just throws me off. On top of that, with her being handsy during nighttime nursing, I end up staying awake because I’m pushing her hands off and when she’s handsy, it takes a while for her to get back to sleep. We’re also planning on trying to get pregnant relatively soon and I don’t think my supply will stick around because I’ve always had issues with keeping it up, so I don’t want her to rely on the milk to sleep and then have it suddenly be gone and her trying to nurse to sleep and she can’t.

So I’m wondering about night weaning. At what age did you night wean? Could a 22 month old even be ready? Could she understand if I tried the “no milk until the sun comes up” approach? How did you night wean? My husband could help. What do I do if she gets hysterical at night? Any time that I’ve ever tried to just comfort her back to sleep and not give her milk she literally goes nuts. She thrashes around and has tantrums. She won’t let me touch her. She’s entirely inconsolable. Entirely beyond reason. How do I reason with her when she’s beyond reason!?

Newsletter-22 Months

Hiya Peanut,

Oh boy, we’ve had an eventful month!

First off, there was Christmas. You LOVED Christmas. Honestly, you mostly loved unwrapping the gifts. You were meticulous in making sure you got Every. Single. Piece. of wrapping paper off. Of course, you were tremendously spoiled. Is anyone surprised? You love your new kitchen and play with it daily. Of course you also love the shopping cart you had fits about.

{Too} shortly after Christmas, Mama started school again. Last semester was a huge battle for the first few weeks where you simultaneously clung to me constantly while absolutely hating my guts. This semester I’m going part-time again an you’re loving it. Going over to one of your grandparents’ houses a couple times a week seems to suit you fine. I worked out my schedule so I’d have time between classes to do homework, so most of my time at home is homework-free. I also was able to mostly figure my schedule around a reasonable nap time, so I think that helps you stay cheerful.

Of course, in the second week of Mama’s school, we all got the flu. It was the first time you’d really had a cough and you weren’t a happy camper. Luckily, Mama got sick before you and gave you some immunities, so you didn’t get nearly as sick as Mama. Also luckily we’re still nursing because it was the only think you’d eat for a while and it kept you busy while Mama hung out on the couch.

Lastly, we started watching Squeed once a week while her Mommy is in a night class. We’ve only watched her once so far, but you were thoroughly happy about it. Of course you both had troubles sharing (especially with the immensely coveted shopping cart), but that’s to be expected. I’m sure you’ll both get better with time. Hopefully this will help teach you some patience for when you get a new brother or sister.

Of course, you still have a mind of your own. You’re quite demanding. The other day you wanted cereal for dinner. Daddy told you we don’t have any milk, so you slapped him on the face and said “No! Cereal.” It was so hard not to laugh! You’re still obsessed with all forms of transit. You love taking the train to music class and you love your music class. You have great tone!

Mama loves you so much. You’re such a cute little tiny human.

Mama

Revised Silent Night

I know that it’s a bit past the holiday season, but you could sing this song any time of year so I decided to post it.

As I’ve already posted about, I’m an atheist. I also love Christmas. I know that it’s kind of backwards to celebrate the supposed birth of Christ, but my logic is that Christmas is more about love, giving gifts, and spending time with family. As with every holiday, I spent the month or so before to try to teach the concept to Peanut. We did a countdown to Christmas. We read lots of children’s books about Christmas (which of course Mama had to read ahead of time to approve). We watched classic Christmas movies. And of course, of course, we sang lots of carols.

There are good ones to choose from without religion mentioned of course. Also, if there was only a brief mention I figured it was alright. We also sung songs that were pertaining to other religions such as the dradle song. One song that made me sad all winter was Silent Night.

Silent Night has always been one of my favorite Christmas songs. I love singing it as a lullaby and did sing it to Peanut most of the season. Then, suddenly, I realized I could change the words to make it non-religious. Quickly in the process of coming up with new words, I realized that I could do even more and give it an attachment parenting theme! So here it is:

Silent night, beautiful night

All is calm, all is bright

Sleeping peacefully mother and child

Sheltered infant so tender and mild

Eat in comforting peace

Sleep in nourished peace

See! It’s about co-sleeping and breastfeeding in the middle of the night! Yay!

Trusting My Body

I’ve had a rough time with birth control over the years. I always forget the pill (Peanut is proof of that). The shot made me bleed for literally 3 months straight. The ring made me nauseous. Now I’m pretty sure that my IUD is giving me acne worse than a teenager (and I had none while growing up) along with some other symptoms I’m not going to get into (that may include my problems with keeping my milk supply up in the past?).

I thought that I had exhausted all of my options. I thought that hormonal birth control was all there is. I thought I would just forever have this battle with birth control until the day that I’m done having babies and get my tubes tied. So naive.

I found out about Fertility Awareness Method when I started looking into planning our next pregnancy. You may or may not actually know it by that name. That lady on such-and-such sitcom that’s taking her temperature and then telling her husband “I don’t care that we’re fighting, I’m ovulating so have sex with me!” (so sexy, eh?) That’s Fertility Awareness Method.

Little did I know, it can also be used as a birth control. If you watch your signs, you can tell when you’re fertile and either not have sex during that time or use some sort of barrier birth control. Speaking of barrier birth control, there’s more than condoms. Looking around the Mothering Dot Com message boards (and starting a thread) and a lot of women were recommending a diaphragm. What a cool idea!

I’m still figuring out the whole FAM method and I’m reading Taking Charge of Your Fertility, so I don’t have a lot of information on that. I just feel like a lot of women weren’t even told there are other options than hormonal birth control. I specifically remember having a chat with my OB (before Peanut was born) and him telling me that I’ll just have to get in the habit of remembering the pill or I’ll have to abstain. Ha!

Just know there are a ton of other options out there. Check out the Family Planning section of the MDC forums if you want more information. Read Taking Charge of Your Fertility for exact steps in how to do the FAM. Know it’s possible to do FAM if you have a nursling that wakes you up in the night, so long as you make the right modifications. Know that there are other options than hormones.

The Benefits of Breastfeeding {a Sick} Toddler

As I mentioned yesterday, we have the flu around the LG household. Lucky us?

Over this week (and past sick-times for that matter) I’ve really learned a great benefit to breastfeeding a toddler: breastfeeding a sick toddler.

No, I’m not saying I enjoy breastfeeding my toddler more when she’s sick. Actually, sometimes when she can’t breathe it’s annoying that she won’t stay latched and if she’s in pain at all, she certainly makes it known to my nipples. Really though, it’s a great benefit to still be breastfeeding. How so? Let’s go over some of the things that suck about having a sick toddler (and a sick mommy for that matter) and how they’re remedied with breastfeeding.

1. Sick kids don’t like to eat. I know of many-a-parent that give their kids pretty much anything they want when they’re sick because at least they’re eating. Actually, my in-laws brought Peanut gummy candy and chocolate cookies the other day probably with that same thing in mind. It’s hard enough to get any toddler to eat, let alone a sick one. This is where the breastfeeding comes in handy. Even when they refuse the yummiest candy in the world, most kids won’t turn down some milk. I was actually reading this funny thing online regarding breastfeeding sick toddlers. The toddler gets sick and they revert back to drinking mostly (if not only) breast milk, so they start having breastfed baby poo again! That actually happened to Peanut once over this ordeal so far and it was nice to not have a stinky diaper! My husband almost thought it was diarrhea though, so make sure not to take them back to the doctor for a new symptom that’s really nothing!

2. Sick kids don’t like to sleep. This one sucks anytime, but I would say especially so if mama is also sick. Last thing you need when you’re feeling awful is to be kept awake by your kid who is also feeling awful. Throughout this illness, it seems like Peanut is constantly on the verge of passing out, but won’t do it. All it takes is to get her to relax just a little bit and she’ll be knocked out. Guess what gets a grouchy kid to relax a bit? Breastfeeding! I swear Peanut falls asleep faster when she’s sick than when she’s well! I even used this just to calm her down for a bit. I was napping on the couch and she wanted me to get up, so I offered her milk and fell back asleep for another 20-ish minutes!

3. Giving sick kids medicine sucks. Medicine is often a necessary evil, but when we can avoid it and still get healthy, it’s definitely for the best. If you’re reading this blog, you probably already know about all of the goodness inside of that awesome breast milk. The important part in this sense is the antibodies. I have yet to have Peanut be sicker than me. Any illness in a small child is definitely cause for alarm, but she never gets super bad. I’m certain that a part of that is that I’m giving her antibodies through my milk that help her to get better faster. I also notice that her stomach and throat never seem to upset her very much, even when mine are killing me. Maybe this is because they’re frequently getting coated with the good stuff? As I said in my post yesterday, when considering whether or not to give Peanut the anti-viral medication, we specifically took breastfeeding into account. Do we really need to give her this medicine when she A. Doesn’t seem that bad, B. Is getting antibodies through my breast milk, and C. could have serious side effects from it? We decided no. Without the breast milk there giving her antibodies for the exact illness she had, we may have chosen differently, regardless of the possible side effects.

 

There are a lot of reasons that Peanut continues to breastfeed. I know that we’re getting to the edge of a lot of our friends’ comfort zones, but I want you all to know that I don’t plan on stopping any time soon. We will stop when Peanut is ready and not a day before. I will spend all the time up until then cherishing not only the special bond that we have through breastfeeding, but also the physical benefits we continue to get from it every single day (and the convenience of it for that matter). Weaning is not an active process, but something that happens gradually with time.

Rethinking Flu Vaccines

I spent a lot of time researching vaccines. I developed a detailed schedule specifically for Peanut after doing this research. I feel like I thoroughly prepared myself to make the decisions I have regarding Peanut’s vaccines. The problem is there’s only so much you can decide from reading a paper.

We have the flu.

It started for me on Friday. Friday night I woke twice as often as Peanut (who was waking more often than normal too). I hardly remember Saturday besides feeling like I was hit by a truck and I also slept awful that night. Sunday continued to feel like death and sadly, so did Peanut too. Actually, she was grumpy and obviously sick, but didn’t really ever seem to feel like she was dying like I did. I’ll go ahead and contribute a bit of that to mama’s milk (another post for another day).

We wouldn’t have even gone to the doctor, but Peanut had a fever of 102, so I called the nurse. She said we should get her in immediately because it sounded like the flu and you can only give anti-viral medication for a short period of time. The only real benefit for that visit is that we got antibiotics for her ear infection, but that’s even kind of pushing it because I probably wouldn’t have given her antibiotics for a minor ear infection if I was in my right mind. They gave us a prescription for anti-virals and in my delirious state, I was ready to give them to her. Luckily my husband was not-so-delirious and said to me “We’ve avoiding giving her medication as much as possible for this long, do we really need to give her this with all of these possible side effects?” So we didn’t give it to her. She did test positive for influenza a while we were there.

After her visit we went to the doctor for me. I was having trouble breathing because of my asthma. I got chest x-rays and I have a small case of pneumonia. I’ve been slowly feeling better, but I still don’t feel great at all. The doctor said that with the pneumonia I’ll be coughing for 2-3 weeks. Exactly what I need at school.

The biggest part is the lack of going into society. The internet says that adults should stay inside for a week after they started getting sick, but the after hours doctor we went to on Sunday said 3-5 days depending on how you feel. For Peanut though, her doctor said 7-10 days because kids are contagious longer. This means that we will miss over a full week of appointments. That’s rescheduling picking up our half a cow, music class, my school for a week (the second week of the semester, which makes me look great to my teachers), my doctor appointment, our dog training (can’t reschedule that), Daddy’s basketball game, Toddler LLL, and possibly messing up Squeed’s mom’s first day of her class that we’re supposed to watch Squeed for depending on whether or not she wants to risk getting sick by letting us watch her Thursday. Considering I don’t even work and only go to school part-time, a week off still screws up life.

So this all makes me re-think our decision to not vaccinate against the flu. People on Twitter are telling me I would have probably gotten sick anyway because it doesn’t entirely protect you and doesn’t always protect against the right flu. This was the original conclusion I came to also, but I almost wonder if it would be better to just decrease it or have a chance of not getting it. I don’t know. I’ve also always thought of myself as a healthy adult that’s in a low-risk category, but my asthma obviously makes that not so. So am I willing to get pneumonia again? I’m certainly not excited to cough like this for the next 3 weeks.

So has anyone out there actually gotten the flu and still decided not to vaccinate against it? Or possibly getting the flu did change your mind about vaccinating?

My Very Own Farmer

This is the second part of a two-part series. Catch up with Industrial Organic.

As I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I quickly became enthralled with the idea of buying my meat directly from a farmer. I wanted to buy meat from a farm like PolyFace that let the animals live naturally. Cows roaming and grazing, chickens following the cows around pecking, etc. I used eatwild.com to find farms near me and it seemed like they all only sold beef—except Running Water Farms in Evanston, Wyoming (90 minutes from my house).

Running Water Farms sells beef, chicken, turkey, pork, and eggs. What kind of meat they have is dependant upon the time of year it is (just like it used to be before the days of industrial farming) and you buy portions of the animal rather than cuts. I decided to try it out last spring and since it was spring, they had pigs ready to go.

I ordered half a pig along with three dozen eggs (eggs are available year round) and Lyle helped me by explaining how it works. I decided to have the ham and bacon curred which took longer, but without it they wouldn’t have tasted like ham and bacon. Other than that, I told him to just get whatever the regular cuts are.

When my half pig was ready, I headed up to Evanston with my mom and Peanut in tow. I had told Lyle through email that I wanted to poke around the farm to see where my meat comes from and he was perfectly fine with that. I was nervous and had no idea what to expect. How much is 70 lbs of pork really? Will I be happy enough with the conditions of the farm to eat this pork guilt free? What if Peanut screams the whole three-hour round trip (she was a year old at this point and absolutely hated the car seat)?

After driving past the farm a few times on accident, we finally arrived. We went up to the house and two adorable little girls answered the door. They took us back into the kitchen where their mom, Jana, was baking.

Jana greeted us warmly and immediately took us back to see the pigs (Lyle wasn’t there because he still works outside of the farm because the farm doesn’t make enough yet to sustain them). The pigs were huge and happy in the barn with the doors wide open. There were little piglets that were just a few months old and they were nursing from their mom when we came in. Actually, she informed us, that wasn’t their mom. This pig had just given birth hours ago to three piglets that were all stillborn and they figured it would be good for her to have the other piglets nurse from her. Cross-nursing on the farm? Sounds perfect for Lactating Girl!

My husband later made the point that I was visiting with pigs that were to be slaughtered and eaten. What a far cry from the vegan I used to be! Yes, it made me sad that those pigs would be eaten one day, but less sad than for the pigs I had been buying from the grocery store. These pigs were living great lives. They were on a farm doing what pigs do! They were happy and had their tales intact—much more animal friendly than industrially farmed pigs.

I also got to see the chickens (who were actually fenced off because a skunk they were having problems with currently) and the cows that were off grazing on the grass that the Willams had literally grown from the ground up (when they bought the farm two years ago, the grass had been severely overgrazed). Peanut got to pet a horse and she chased the cats around the house while Jana chatted with my mother and me. When Peanut needed to nurse, Jana didn’t give me a second glance. Actually she told me a story of when one of her older daughters called her up saying she was ready to wean and didn’t know how. Jana’s response? “Stop breastfeeding.” So simple!

This farm turned out to be exactly what I wanted. I walked away feeling like The Willams are people I could be friends with and I will be, because they are my farmers.

So how is the food? Is it really worth all the effort? OMFG yes it is! The eggs had the most orange yolks I’ve ever seen! I didn’t even realize yolks are supposed to be orange! Normally I have to put salsa or ketchup on scrambled eggs, but I feel absolutely no need to do so with these. Also, Peanut—who at the time wasn’t too huge on eggs—shovled them in her mouth as fast as I would let her. She shoved so many eggs in her mouth at once that some fell out when she smiled and she was still grabbing at my plate.

As for the meat, the bacon—though a little on the salty side from the curing—was delicious. Jana actually called me a couple weeks later saying the person who bought our other half of the pig complained about the bacon and she told me she’d buy it back, but we decided to keep it. They don’t pre-cut it for you so it will stay good in the freezer for longer, so when I clumsily cut huge slices my husband called it “bacon steak” (which he loved). We ended up getting a lot more chops and not very much ribs (which come from the same place), so next time I think I’ll specify more ribs. I’ve loved the roasts, chops, and oh my goodness the sausage is the best I’ve ever tasted!!

What about the price? First off, is your health really worth you getting such cheap food? Well, that’s another post for another day. Pure numbers, this is how it adds up.

We recieved: (approximate number because we used an old scale made for people and ended up weighting a total of  62 pounds when there was really 70)

6 lbs bacon
11 lbs ham
2 lbs shank
7 lbs sausage
13 lbs roast
3 lbs ribs
14 lbs pork chops
6 lbs steak

We also got 6 dozen eggs for free and 2 soup bones from a cow that she had because I wanted to make beef broth (6 lbs). If you add in $12 for gas, we ended up spending a total of $245. I went to the store and added up the amount that we would spend on non-organic (because my grocery store doesn’t have organic pork) pork of the same cuts (and the ones that were vague like roast, I took an average of all of the different types of pork roasts at the store). At the store, I would have spent $277.50 for 62 lbs of non-organic pork in those cuts. It was actually cheaper to get it from the farm and that’s not even counting in the eggs and soup bones or other 8 lbs!!!

Over this summer, we got a total of 25 chickens. I didn’t keep track of the exact amounts we spent, but I was consistently amazed at how much chicken I was getting for my money! Some of the chickens I froze whole and cut some before freezing (because I don’t always want to cook a whole chicken). When I was cutting the chicken while watching a tutorial on YouTube, I was amazed! The chicken I was cutting looked pink and the one in the video looked white! The one in the video’s fat was everywhere and white, while my chicken’s fat was limited and yellow like fat is supposed to be! I also got two turkeys before Thanksgiving and I’m about to get two more when I go back up. The turkeys were a bit expensive, but huge! I’m going to get half a cow when I go up too.

Every time we go up, Peanut loves it. She gets to pet the animals. She gets to play with the little girls. I love talking with Jana. I even got my mother hooked on their meat and eggs too, so she goes up with us. She’s getting half a pig and half a cow when we go up next. Overall, this place is soooo worth it. My family’s health is worth it.

As part of your “New Year’s Resolution” or whatever you want to call it, read up on how what you eat can affect your health. When you’re ready to make the change, find a farmer near you that shares your ideals. Get to know that farmer. Get to know your food. Become involved in the process of preparing your food. Don’t be fooled by convenience, because it will cost you in the end.