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Drinking and breastfeeding has been in the news recently after a mother in North Dakota pleaded guilty to child neglect after breastfeeding her infant while intoxicated. Fox and friends had a short segment on drinking and breastfeeding which you can view here. Once again, an “expert” was called that probably shouldn’t be putting ideas in the minds of current or prospective breastfeeding mothers.

Is Dr. Svetlana Kogan being sponsored by the formula companies to scare all women away from breastfeeding with her blanket, ridiculous approach to drinking and breastfeeding?

She claims that nursing mothers should wait 24 hours before breastfeeding after having even one drink. Nursing mothers around the world drink a glass of wine with dinner. As the Fox anchor noted, her own doctor (and many other doctors and lactation consultants) recommend having a glass of beer, Guinness in particular, to increase supply in the early postpartum days.

The anchor seemed to think the doctor was extreme, noting that there is a whole school of thought that formula is never better than breastmilk and that pumping and dumping one time is a reasonable approach for many breastfeeding mothers after they have had a drink.

A more commonsense and breastfeeding friendly approach is to tell women, yes it is OK to leave the house, yes it is OK to be social. Do not breastfeed drunk. Do not breastfeed if you cannot or should not drive. Do not breastfeed if you feel tipsy or buzzed. Be more cautious when nursing a 6 day old baby than a six month old baby. Drink with food. Drink after your baby goes to bed and wont be nursing for awhile. Stick to one drink. Isn’t this commonsense?

According to a quote taken from the La Leche League’s page on drinking and breastfeeding:

Dr. Jack Newman, member of the LLLI Health Advisory Council, says this in his handout “More Breastfeeding Myths”:

Reasonable alcohol intake should not be discouraged at all. As is the case with most drugs, very little alcohol comes out in the milk. The mother can take some alcohol and continue breastfeeding as she normally does. Prohibiting alcohol is another way we make life unnecessarily restrictive for nursing mothers.

Do not discourage women who are already embarrassed, uncomfortable and afraid to nurse in public to not breastfeed for 24 hours after one drink. That is only encouraging plugged milk ducts, mastitis, angry babies and premature weaning.

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One of the problems of pottying a baby who can barely crawl much less walk is that they cannot just stand up and walk away when they are finished.

Brielle would sit on the pot for a considerable length of time when she was a baby because it let her “sit up” before she could sit up on her own and she liked to play with her toys and books that I kept nearby.

Bianca on the other hand, wants to take off across the room the second she is finished. That means that even though she can hold it until she gets to a potty, there is still a huge potential mess. We realized that potential today.

After fussing for an hour or so (and a few failed attempts) Bianca finally did her business on the potty. I was sitting literally three feet away from her at my computer desk.

While I was saying hello to my brother online, Bianca decided that she was finished and dove off the potty which stuck to her butt and the whole thing tipped over spilling its carefully crafted contents into her training pants which were sitting down by her ankles.

Then she took off across the living room dragging her “filled” (formerly white) trainers behind her, smearing stuff up and down her legs with each crawling motion. The telltale poo stretched from the inside of the overturned potty, down the sides of the potty, in small piles across her little play rug and then up and down her legs and even into her toes.

The Elimination Communication Paradox. EC parents almost never have to deal with poo but when we do…..it isn’t pretty.

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Brielle has a basic knowledge of the male and female anatomy. After my recent pregnancy she probably has a better understanding of the female reproductive system than many adults.

She asks a lot of questions and I always try to give her honest, accurate answers that will not only educate her but will also keep her from learning about life from her adolescent friends a decade from now.

While I have no problem giving her answers to topics that other parents avoid like the plague, I have a few topics that I am exceptionally passionate about. One is routine male circumcision and yesterday Brielle hit the nail on the head.

The last thing I want to do is perpetuate the craziness that has made natural far from normal and the normal people far from natural. I also need to convey the truth without inadvertently bashing the people in her life who are either circumcised or chose to circumcise their own children.

She knows that cats and dogs have retractable penises. Yesterday she asked me (out of the blue),

“Does “so and so” (a male friend of hers) have a penis that disappears like Blackers?”

Me: “Um, no…”

Brielle: “It is always outside??” (At this point I don’t know if she is doing mental comparisons to the cat or to female genitalia, but she is pretty surprised either way.)

Me: “Well, yeah. Not all boys are outside all the time. Boys are born with it hidden but lots of boys have surgery to take away the part that hides it.”

Brielle: “Who does the surgery?” (she is fascinated at this point)

Me: “Doctors”

Brielle: “All boys have the surgery?”

Me: “No, lots of them though”

Brielle: “How do they do it?”

I was at a loss here. I know that they strap down the helpless, screaming, hysterical infant and crush off the foreskin with no anesthesia after literally tearing it away from the glans. I can’t tell Brielle that. She will have nightmares (I know I do). I am rarely at a loss for words but I really did not know what to tell her. I finally said:

“Um….uhh….they sort of cut it off.”

Brielle: “Maybe they use a special penis knife”

Me: “Yeah, they kind of do”

Brielle: “Why?”

Me: “What??”

Brielle: “Why do they do it? Why do they do the surgery?”

Sigh………..Now what do I tell her? Because it is a hugely profitable industry? Because some parents prefer amputation to soap and water? Habit?? Because parents don’t do the research first? Because ‘they’ can? Because some parents think their children are property? The best answer is probably ‘Because they don’t know any better’. I just said:

“Because they want all the boys to look the same.”

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You may know her as Blossom, the main character from the early 90s TV show with the same name. Her real name is Mayim Bialik and she is back as a super crunchy, attachment parenting mom of two small boys, Miles, 3 ½, and Fred, 9 months.

Mayim recently appeared on What Not To Wear in the makeover spotlight. I saw the previews but it never occurred to me to watch it because who knew she was 100% AP? I found out after the fact when reading a post by Summer from Wired for Noise. Summer raved about Mayim Bialik and I thought “Who the heck is that?!?”…so I read it and realized “Oh yeah, BLOSSOM!”

As it turns out, Mayim was babywearing in the show, concerned whether or not the new clothes were breastfeeding friendly or not and just overall super-duper AP.

It gets better.

After the show, she was interviewed by Celebrity Baby Blog and it turns out she homebirths, has a primarily vegan diet, practices co-cleeping (bedsharing), practices elimination communication and does not vaccinate!!! I love this woman! She also breastfeeds exclusively past one year. NO solids for one year.

Tons of celebrities are vegetarian or vegan. A number of celebrities babywear because lets face it, babywearing is very cool. A few celebrities breastfeed past the first few months (and admit it) and a tiny number have homebirths. A few notables don’t vaccinate or use alternative vaccine scheduling. I have never, ever heard of a celebrity mentioning, much less practicing EC. I have never heard of a celebrity breastfeeding exclusively past one year.

Mayik started EC-ing her second child at 2 days old. She talks about elimination communication during her CBB interview:

“The entire concept is not to potty train them, it’s not to do reward and punishment, I don’t clap my hands and say, “Good job.” It’s a very Zen, meditative experience of learning the signals, being able to respond to the signals. The level of communication you can achieve with an infant is really profound.”

Mayim also discusses childbirth with CBB:

“Fred, yes, was born at home, and Miles was able to watch the whole thing from his high chair while eating granola. Fortunately it was a very fast labor because I think Miles would’ve been bored if it was longer than the hour and a half it was. He loves it, he still talks about it.”

In reading other interviews and blogs, I discovered that she obtained her PhD after Blossom ended and she is also is devoutly Jewish (self described cross between Orthodox and Conservative, Conservadox). In fact, one of the reasons she chooses the skirts below the knees and the sleeved tops is for modesty reasons. Unfortunately these explanations were cut from the final version of What Not To Wear and the end, they made her out to be a frumpy mom with no fashion sense rather than an incredibly passionate, highly educated woman who stands up for what she believes in and walks the walk.

According to Allison from Jew in the City who is a personal friend of Mayim’s and also appeared briefly on the What Not to Wear episode :

“In my five seconds of fame, I said something about Mayim Bialik not being a messed up child star and instead raising a family and getting a PhD. All the stuff I mentioned about modesty not having to equal frumpiness and how I (the Orthodox Jew) had been encouraging her (the celebrity) to put herself together and find the perfect balance of cute, confident, and covered, was missing.”

She seems to be moving back into the spotlight again with recent appearances on Bones and Saving Grace. According to her interview at CBB, she is also optioned a set of novels called Rashi’s Daughters that she is working on.

According to Jewcy:

“In the decades since she stopped playing Blossom Russo, Bialik has not sat still. She’s earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience and has undertaken cutting-edge studies at UCLA as one of the top researchers of Prader-Willi Syndrome in the field….She’s also testing the waters of going back into acting, with recent appearances on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Bones. And she’s also in the middle of another big revival: she’s experimenting with being an observant Jew.”

I find that I have so much in common with Mayim’s parenting. We both even had babies born in the caul! Other than the fact that her sons are circumcised , she is hands down the best example of gentle, natural parenting in the public eye that I have ever seen.

Watch the full episode of What Not To Wear featuring Mayim Bialik.

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Were you following the blog of the single, pregnant Christian woman who refused to terminate her pregnancy after her baby, Little April Rose, was diagnosed in utero with a Trisomy 13 and HPE?

I was following. Thousands of others were following. April’s mom or just “B” as she called herself had over 11,000 Twitter followers. It was a great story. It appealed to the Christians and the pro lifers.

Her story also appealed to people like me who oppose unnecessary prenatal testing because it is a cash cow for obstetrics but stresses babies, mothers, leads to more testing, interventions, premature births and sometimes unnecessary terminations. All without improving outcome. Heck yeah I was following. I could not wait to see what happened.

People sent gifts. People sent hundreds of pictures of themselves, their kids and their pets dressed in pink. Churches prayed and people linked to her. Advertisers lined up. On Sunday, June 7, when April’s mom claimed to have given birth to April Rose in a homebirth, her blog got over a million hits.

So what happened to April Rose? She never existed, that is what happened. On the day of her alleged birth, the Chicago mom who orchestrated the hoax, uploaded photos to her blog of a lifelike doll after claiming that her baby was born alive but only lived a few hours. A doll maker in Buffalo recognized the image and immediately knew it was a scam.

It took me almost a week to figure it out. I was following her blog but I missed the Sunday post. When I checked it a few days ago there was a strange note about hate mail and the next day the blog was totally deleted. Now that she has admitted the scam, the story is making national news.

According to myfoxchicago:

“The woman behind the hoax isn’t “April’s Mom” — a single expectant mother who lay awake at night terrified her unborn child would die at any time, according to the Chicago Tribune.

She is actually Beccah Beushausen, a 26-year-old social worker from the Chicago suburb of Mokenka who says she didn’t know how to free herself from the web of lies she wove.

“Soon I was getting 100,000 hits a week, and it just got out of hand,” she told the Tribune. “I didn’t know how to stop. … One lie led to another.”

The really distressing part is that her “heroic, inspiring” story of refusing to terminate her pregnancy corresponds eerily with the tragic murder of Dr. Tiller on May 31. Dr.Tiller who was one of the only medical doctors in the country that would assist women in the unthinkable position of carrying a baby with fetal abnormalities that would not support normal life outside the womb.

There are brave women and couples (who desperately wanted their baby) who made the heartbreaking trip to see Dr. Tiller for what was most likely the worst day of their lives. What do you think these couples think of Beccah and her scam? What does Dr. Tiller’s family think? What kind of person can do something like this?

Reborn Doll Image Source: Teadrinker on Flickr.com

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The No-Cry Nap Solution, by Elizabeth Pantley is the fifth in a series of “no-cry” books on sleeping, discipline and pottying for parents of babies and small children.

What makes these sleep books great from an attachment parenting point of view is precisely what the name implies. These solutions don’t involve the much abhorred “cry it out” method that leaves your helpless, trusting infant to lay in bed screaming until they puke, give up or pass out.

Attached parents will pretty much do anything to help their little ones sleep without resorting to these cruel, unnatural tactics.

Attached parents are less likely to need help getting their children to sleep in the first place because parental closeness, breastmilk, babywearing and cosleeping are all exceptionally conducive to sleep.

That said, the sling may get your baby to sleep but you might not want to wear your heavy baby for their entire nap so you need help transferring out of the sling or detaching from the breast. That is just one of the many issues that Pantley addresses in The No-Cry Nap Solution.

One of the first thing she covers is the importance of naps as a biological necessity. Naps fill a different physiological need than nighttime sleep, can make up for lost night sleep, and just as importantly, allow the parent to recharge and restore as well. In addition, the sleep habits your child develops now can impact their health for the rest of their lives.

Pantley offers sleep guidelines by age for both nighttime and daytime sleep with a number of examples for each age group. It is not intended as a rule but as a rough guide to see if your child approximates the sleep recommendations for her age.

I like a lot of things about Pantley’s book other than the fact that she does not advocate crying it out. First of all, Pantley has a very supportive, gentle and kind writing style. She does not judge parenting methods and is very much in favor of “doing what works”. For example, on page 154, Pantley says:

“If your baby falls asleep nursing, drinking a bottle, or sucking a pacifier and then you are able to put him into bed where he takes a nice, long nap, then nothing needs to change.”

Pantley does not criticize or offer a list of rules. Rather, in her friendly and helpful way, she helps you uncover clues and cues that your child may need more sleep, when the signs suggest they are sleep ready and real life solutions to try.

Lastly, I like the fact that while Pantley is very understanding of all parenting methods including formula feeding, she comes across as pro-breastfeeding, mentions breastfeeding her own children and not only recognizes breastmilk as the ultimate sleep inducing food but doesn’t knock it as a legitimate way to get your baby to sleep.

The only thing I do not like about this book is that it is a “sleep book”. It may be the best available but sleep books in general fill nervous parent’s heads with “shoulds”, guilt and self-doubt. One of the worst things I ever did with Brielle was read a sleep book when we were quite happy until that point. It made me very nervous about what I perceived to be her “lack of sleep” and I started all sorts of crazy modifications into our routine because I was trying to force her to sleep at 7pm. Sigh. I wish I never laid eyes on that book. Pantley addresses this issue herself however on page 22:

“Address only those problems that are true problems to you, and don’t create or imagine problems because someone else thinks you have them, no matter if that person is family, friend, or expert.”

Thankfully I don’t personally need this book because I let Bianca lead her nap times by showing me when she is tired and I create an excellent sleep environment. I treasure the opportunity to wear her and/or breastfeed to sleep. I know the baby phase is just a blink in my life and I enjoy every second I get to hold and baby her. I do not pay one iota of attention to hours, times or schedules. Both her naptimes and bedtimes vary and that works great for us. She is always in good spirits so we are happy.

Brielle on the other hand was simply a terrible sleeper. Although the “shoulds” from that other book haunted me for years, I believe that I could have utilized a number of tips from Pantley’s book to get her to sleep when she was tired because she would fight sleep like it was her worst enemy. It took me years to get her sleep situation ironed out and any tips would have been very welcome.

If you are an attached, gentle parent with spirited children or difficult sleeping situations then I highly recommend The No-Cry Nap Solution as an excellent resource that may offer you a kind and loving solution to your naptime woes.

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