A MUCH BETTER BLOG

Do you ever have days where everything seems to go wrong? I had a few years like that. From the moment I left my abusive husband with a baby in my belly in a foreign country, everything seemed to go downhill. I entered the darkest period of my life and I often wondered if anything would get better. I was about a million miles from my dearest friends, penniless and pretty damn close to hopeless.

Of course Brielle was and is a wonderful addition to my life but I faced the conundrum that most mothers face whether single or not; Stay home in poverty (and be with your child) or fork over money to daycare to work for someone else and net poverty wages at the end of it all (and leave your child with strangers). I tried a job, it was a freaking nightmare with Brielle in daycare, so like many enterprising women before me, I have clawed my way out of the hole via my own business.

That said, things are finally looking good. Life is good. Life is great. It just keeps getting better.

Business is great. Cloth diapering is huge. Babywearing is huge. Attachment parenting is huge. People are talking about the benefits of natural family living and the trend does not seem to be slowing down. I published my first newsletter the other day, hired my first virtual assistant to handle inventory and order fulfillment and our first print ad appeared in Mothering Magazine’s May/June issue.

Our little family is also doing great. Brielle is about to turn 5 and she is athletic, delightful, energetic, INCREDIBLY funny, helpful, brilliant and downright gorgeous (in my eyes anyway).

Bianca is the most wonderful addition to our family. A year and a half old, she is also funny, lively, brilliant, happy, social and a joy to be around. People and animals alike can’t get enough of her.

I just got approved for the super duper premium life insurance. Why would I be happy to fork out thousands of dollars over the next 30 yrs for something that will never benefit me directly? Because it means I am not fat, I have been a non-smoker for a long time and the medical test didn’t show any pending life threatening illnesses that they could find.

To top it all off, I just booked a very long overdue trip to Florida to see those dearest friends that have been about a million miles away for the last 5 years. Life is great.

Has it been 9 months already???? Bianca has been on the outside almost as long as she was on the inside. I can hardly believe it. Time has flown but it has been good time. We are having a blast.

She continues to be a fabulous baby who is loved by all. She engages strangers and cashiers when we are out and seems to love all people, especially babies (she goes nuts when she sees other babies and usually tries to poke them in the eye).

She continues to be an alert, ridiculously happy, low maintenance baby. While I consider myself exceptionally lucky, I also attribute her demeanor in part to the fact that she is 100% natural with no vaccines, chemicals or other trauma from pregnancy, birth or beyond. Anecdotal I know…..

Here is the rundown of where she is at physically and developmentally.

Appearance
Naturally I think she is the most gorgeous baby in the world (and naturally I thought the same thing of Brielle when she was a baby). It is hard to be objective when talking about your kin. Her hair is coming in fast, brown and curly at the ears. Her eyes are still blue as can be. She is holding steady at eight teeth but I can feel the bumps on her upper gum so more are on the way. Her smile lights up the room.

On top of being gorgeous (there goes proud mommy again), she is BIG. She can easily wear 2T clothes and can wear almost all of Brielle’s summer clothes and pajamas in a pinch. She can’t wear Brielle’s jeans because of length but I am pretty sure her thighs and butt are bigger than Brielle’s are right now. Add a diaper of any kind to that butt and it can actually be difficult to dress her.

I think Bianca weighed about 21 or 22 pounds the last time I weighed her and Brielle is weighing in at 32 pounds (at 4 yrs 4 mo). I don’t think it is a matter of if Bianca catches up but when.

Eating/ Breastfeeding

The girl has an appetite. Holy moly. She didn’t get it from me that’s for sure. Daddy seems to be the generous donor of the appetite/growth gene.

Brielle and I tend to eat like birds and Bianca eats like a ravenous carnivore. She loves food and needs meals multiple times a day which is kind of tough for me since Brielle and I are grazers. Needless to say, we have learned to adapt and grandma bought Bianca a high chair a few months ago which she is very happy to spend time in.

She eats anything and everything. She eats Mexican, Indian, Chinese, sandwiches, meat, raw vegetables, fruit, you name it. Obviously I cut most food into bite sized portions but she is very good at taking bites of sandwich type foods and chewing them very well. She is great in restaurants and gets right down to business.

She is fairly proficient with a spoon and fork. She knows to spear food with the fork and holds it fairly well and can usually get the food to her mouth. The spoon is a messier proposition because it usually involves a liquidy type food like yogurt but she gets a fair amount of food in her mouth. I am impressed. She can also drink from a regular glass with help. I am hoping to skip sippy cups altogether.

She is breastfeeds a lot at night but rarely during the day. She has a tendency to attack me (when nursing) while she is awake by pinching my upper arm, digging her thumbnail into me or any other way of clawing, hitting etc. I have a lot less patience for diddling and picking than I did with Brielle so I pretty much stop it immediately. 99% of the time she is trying to tell me something like she needs to go to the bathroom or has to burp and I figure that out later but I am not willing to be a pin cushion in the meantime. That means that she gets probably 75% of her breastmilk at night.

Talking/signing
Bianca has been making noises that sound an awful lot like words for a few months now. She does it most frequently with her brother’s names and the dog’s names. It happens a little bit too frequently to be written off to coincidence but I would not call it talking quite yet. Pre-talking maybe. The other day I swear on my life that she said “chicken” after I asked her if she wanted chicken. She would not repeat it for anything but I about fell over when she said it.

The words that she is saying consistently and on purpose are “mom” “da-da” “uh-oh” and my personal favorite “ow” which she uses when she is meowing back at one of the cats or addressing the cats (she calls them “ow”. She is also starting to sign a little bit. She signed “more” a couple of times and I almost cried tears of happiness.

Walking
No, she is not walking quite yet but she is standing up unsupported for longer periods of time and cruising the furniture. I have seen her stand up unsupported once and squat down unsupported once. Walking is imminent.

Babywearing
We do it EVERY.SINGLE.DAY. We simply cannot live without our slings.

EC/Diapers

The nighttime EC is not going as well as it was in the past. When she has to go she will stir, wake me up but not quite wake up herself. If I try to potty her she gets pissed (so to speak). In short, she has to go too badly to sleep, but is sleeping too soundly to go.

I either have to wake her up enough to go (which I think is really rude), let her lay there and fuss until she finally goes in a diaper (which I also think is really disrepectful) or try to cajole it out of her by nursing her while she is on a lap potty. Frankly, nothing is really effective so I am just biding time knowing that the times she can hold it through the night (which are few and far between at the moment) are growing more frequent.

On a much more positive note, the daytime EC took a tremendous turn for the better. I was having a lot of difficulty keeping her on the Baby Bjorn little potty after she started crawling. She just would not stay on it. She would crawl away and then do her business in her diaper or training pants. I was still catching the majority of poos but the percentage was going down (fast).

Then one glorious day I put her directly on the toilet with a seat insert and she stayed put! I am assuming she stays there because she cannot launch herself off the toilet and crawl away. I didn’t even bother ECing Brielle on the toilet at that age because she was so content to sit on the little potty and read or play with toys that I never saw the need to rush the toilet.

Now Bianca is doing a fair percentage of her business directly on the toilet which is so much more than I ever expected at this age. I still have to pay attention for the signs but I sense that she is getting close to communicating her need to ‘go’ either verbally or through sign language. I predict that she will be close to 100% trained by 12 months. Could be wishful thinking but time will tell.

As far as diapering goes, I still use prefolds and covers for outings although I am experimenting more with pocket diapers (Fuzzibunz) since I sell them in my store and I like to have personal experience with my products. They work great and they are a lot fuzzier on her bum.

I also relented and used sposies on a recent vacation to avoid doing frequent laundry and to also avoid having pee scented laundry smelling up the place. While the break from laundry was nice, I hated the sposies. I am totally hooked on cloth. I hated the feel on Bianca, I hated trying to pull them over her generous thighs and butt, I hated the crinkly noise they made and I just hated them. I pretty much stopped doing EC for the vacation because it was such a pain to take them down and back up again. I was very happy to get home and get natural fibers back on my baby again.

Motor skills
I don’t know where her skills are supposed to be at this age but she amazes me with her appropriate use of tools. She knows to point the remote at the TV and press the buttons, to hold the broom handle with both hands and push it along the floor and which end of the pen goes to the paper. Maybe I am just a proud mama….or maybe that is super cool for an 8 mo old to do.

She can also open the dog kennel and release the hounds.

Cosleeping

I still love sleeping with Bianca. Sometimes I look at her while she sleeps and I am just overwhelmed with emotion. I love holding her fat little body and snuggling her all night.

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that despite the fact that she sleeps with me every single night, she sometimes starts out the night in a carseat until she wakes to nurse. I feel guilty while doing it but….well… it works and sometimes we just have just gotta do what works, AP or not.

I expect the cosleeping relationship to carry on as long as she is night nursing but I also suspect she wont stay in bed with me quite as long as Brielle did since she will graduate to sharing a room with her big sister and she gets pretty excited to spend time with Brielle anywhere, anytime.

The first 9 months have been great and I can’t wait to see what the next 9 will bring.

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.

After almost four years of bedsharing, it looks like this special relationship with Brielle is drawing to a close.

Brielle got a new twin bed last week and has been taking occasional naps in it and usually sleeping in it the first half of the night and then joining me and Bianca in my bed. Last night she spent the entire night in her own room, in her own bed.

On one hand I am very sad to lose this relationship. I treasured the time we got to snuggle while I was pregnant with Bianca. We used to giggle and talk before she fell asleep. We would hold hands or sometimes she would want me to hold her foot while she fell asleep. I would stroke her hair and listen to her breathe.

On the other hand, I have been going to bed the last few nights thinking “Is this really happening?” “Do I really get my big bed back?”. I am stretching out to the point that I have to relearn how to sleep with Bianca. I have gotten very used to sardine style sleep and now I can actually roll over once in awhile.

I am really getting the sense that my little girl is growing up lately. I was so sad the first night she announced she would sleep alone. I kept asking her if she was sure she wanted to and then I asked her what I was going to do without her in bed with me. She pointed her thumb sideways at Bianca and said “You got her!”. Wow. Attachment parenting really does create independence doesn’t it?

Every so often there is a rare, unexpected picture that has me in it. Today is my 39th birthday so I will celebrate by talking about ME!

Me, Brielle, Eric and Bianca at 3 boobs (Domes in Milwaukee). I am wearing Bianca in the New Native and she is sleeping like a log. Generally she is too fat to cram in a pouch like this (cradle style) but the New Native is roomy and this time it worked well. Now she is big and strong enough to wear in a hip carry (so no more stuffing).

I was about ready to pass out after carrying Bianca for about a mile in the Bjorn. What was I thinking?? She is way too heavy. Try dropping a 20lb bowling ball in a Bjorn and see how far you make it. I had to support her with my hands most of the way. I am sticking with wraps or my Ktan from now on.

As photographic evidence of how much I have changed in the last five years, here is a picture of exactly what I wanted (and got) for my birthday.

Sit and Stroll for Bianca to stand, jump around, sit or whatever and Bianca to pass out in the front seat

I am always so proud of Brielle when she picks up on the finer things in life like babywearing and elimination communication. She loves to give her dolls bottles and pacifiers so we have a bit of work to do in that department and she will be totally happy to stick Bianca in a crib so she doesn’t have to share mommy at night.

Needless to say, the babywearing and EC seem to have stuck.

It’s hard to tell but she is wearing her doll in a little tiny hotsling (super cute)

She has her doll on Bianca’s new lap potty

That pony……

Brielle walking Sugar

Washing dishes of her own volition. I wonder how long that will last.