The issue, you ask? The issue is circumcision – routine infant circumcision, to be specific. This is a very American issue since the rest of the developed world stopped routine circumcision quite a while ago. This is also a human rights issue mixed in with the question of parental rights.

With this issue, there are many questions to ponder:

Why did the rest of the developed world stop this practice?
Where do parental rights end and the child’s right to his or her body begin?
What about religious beliefs?
How culturally important is it for a child to have a surgery simply because the parent of the same gender had that same surgery as a child?
What is lost to circumcision?

However, my main goal with this post is to encourage parents to really research circumcision before they decide either way. Please, look at what is lost to circumcision, which could also be called “foreskin amputation.” The foreskin is not just a useless flap of skin. Please, understand what you are taking away from your son before you decide to take it away.

There are all sorts of resources about the benefits of circumcision and I think it’s of extreme importance to get the other perspective – to seek it out before making a final decision.

Educate yourself so that if your son comes to you when he’s older and asks, “Mom/Dad, why did you circumcise me?” you can give him a good answer. “Because everyone else was doing it.” is not a good answer. The odds are good that your son will be happy with whatever he has, but as more boys in the US remain intact (the rate of babies being circumcised in hospitals during 2009 was a mere 32.5%), the likelihood of him realizing that he’s missing something and questioning your motives will probably increase.

Educate yourself so that you won’t learn something new in 1, 2, 5, or 20 years that makes you regret your decision. The more research you do, the more confident you will be in your decision.

I cannot even tell you how many mothers I’ve met who wish someone had encouraged them to look deeper into the issue of circumcision before they had their first-born sons. I’ve met countless women who circumcised their oldest and then, after learning more about what the surgery actually entails, left subsequent sons intact. Many of these women state that circumcising their son(s) is their biggest parenting regret.

Please be certain, before you send your son in for irreversible surgery on the most private and personal part of his body, that you are making the best decision for him. Not the best decision for you or for your family or for your friends, but for your son who will have to live with your decision for the rest of his life.

I encourage you to check out cirp.org and read the studies located there. The site has a definite pro-intact (not circumcised) bias, but the relevant studies are all represented and you can certainly ignore the commentary from the owners of the site if you wish to be more balanced about the issue.

You may also wish to take a look at Doctors Opposing Circumcision (DOC) if you’d like to hear the case against circumcision from the medical perspective. You’re almost guaranteed to learn something new about the foreskin which is, truly, an amazing part of the body!

Speaking of the case against circumcision, Dr. Paul Fleiss wrote an article many years ago called just that! Dr. Fleiss is a pediatrician and I believe he’s also a member of DOC.

If you’d never consider cutting your daughter’s genitals, but consider male circumcision to be beneficial for your son, I suggest that you look at this handy comparison chart, compiled by Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, an author and activist who has written some of the most groundbreaking books about the topic of Female Genital Mutilation. Of course female and male circumcision are different, but probably not as different as you may think.

What about the question of religious beliefs? I’m a Christian and can only really speak to the Christian aspect of religious circumcision. There are plenty of resources out there for Jews who want to look more into this issue. I don’t know enough about the Muslim faith to speak to the topic. However, it is very clear to me that, in reading the New Testament, circumcision is not something that is necessary for Christians.

In fact, Paul is very clear in Galatians that circumcision is not worth anything to followers of Christ Jesus. In fact, he states that if a man lets himself be circumcised, Christ is of no value to that man. Search the scriptures yourself – be very certain that it is truly a religious requirement before you circumcise only for that reason. Many Christians believe that they must circumcise, and that is clearly not the case.

Finally, I would like to encourage all the circumcised fathers out there – particularly those who want their sons to “match” them – to take a trip down memory lane and remember how many times they really compared penises with their father and if their family was open about nudity, was their father’s circumcision status really the first thing they noticed? Or did they notice first that there was a size difference and all that hair too?

This decision is one of the most important decisions you will ever make as a parent. Your son will live with the consequences of this decision for the rest of his life. I entreat you to not take this decision lightly. Circumcision is a surgical procedure, it is not a “little snip” and not everyone is having it done to their sons any longer.

~B.

1. I love to browse in bookstores and libraries.

2. I love to take my time when doing so.

3. Having children along in any capacity makes those two things virtually impossible.

4. I had not been in a bookstore sans children for a good 5 years.

So, when Phred suggested that I go to the bookstore, without the children, I should’ve immediately flown out of my seat and been in the van heading to the store before he could blink. Instead, I hemmed and hawed about the matter. Should I really go? “Yes, I should,” he insisted. But I was tired and maybe I should just stay home. “No. Go to the bookstore,” my husband insisted once more.

“Oh, okay, I’ll go!” Joyfully, but with a bit of trepidation (after all, this was now the unknown), I gathered my things – no baby things, just mine – and headed out the door. Of course, we’d just bought a new (to us) mini-van, the epitome of mom-dom, and our CDs had not yet been moved into it. The radio had nothing good on so I drove in silence while pondering the madness that was going shopping without anyone but myself for company.

When I got to the store, it was a very exciting feeling. Here I was! At a bookstore! By myself! Wow! What a novelty. Of course I’ve been without my children from time to time since becoming a mother. I don’t stay with them 24/7, but usually when we find a sitter, it’s because I’m going somewhere with my husband or somewhere for my midwifery apprenticeship. I don’t think I’ve ever had a sitter just for me to go out and do something for me which probably sounds a little sad, but it just hasn’t been a priority. I enjoy my children and being with them. They’re only this small once and for a short time. But yes, that’s why this was such a novel experience.

So, I walked into the bookstore trying not to talk to myself out loud because I’m so used to talking to… someone… a child, my husband, my mom… I’m unaccustomed to being completely alone in public. Then I wandered around aimlessly for a good 20 minutes while I tried to remember how to focus all my attention on book-browsing without my attention being divided between browsing and keeping small children safe and within my line of vision at all times.

Eventually, I remembered – it’s so cliche, but yes, it was like riding a bike. Next, to figure out what I wanted! I had no idea. I tried the sci-fi section, but that didn’t seem quite right. I tried the history and biography section, but no, again, I was looking at books that I felt I ought to want to buy (and some were awfully tempting, like that brand new book about alcohol prohibition! I must get that one from the library one of these days…) instead of trying to find the one perfect book that “spoke” to me in just the right way.

I thought of a book that I’ve been wanting to buy for a while so I searched for it on the store’s computer. No luck. They didn’t even carry it new anywhere – just used – and I wanted to buy something that day. My goal, you see, was to buy a book that I could read a bit of while relaxing in the cafe and sipping a lovely, hot chai tea latte before heading home.

Thwarted, I wandered off again and found myself in the gardening section. Cool! Books about native trees and birds and landscaping for my region… they even had Joel Salatin’s book You Can Farm which is one I’d eventually like to buy. Interspersed between all the regular gardening books were more books about marijuana cultivation than I had ever seen before and I used to work at a store that sold hemp products and had a goodly selection of marijuana cultivation and “idea” books. This was endlessly amusing to me, given that I live in a fairly conservative part of the southern United States.

So I browsed through the gardening section for a while. Checking out all the titles and pulling out a few to look at more closely. Finally I chose an Audubon guide to plants and animals and birds in my region. I thought that it would be nice for the children and for Phred and myself to be able to identify those things when we go on walks.

But… I wasn’t totally sure. Because I had planned to buy a reading book, not just a reference book and I wanted to buy a book just for me because that really never happens anymore. So I regretfully put the book back on the shelf.

The next book I chose was a great one! It was all about landscaping and good plants to use in our state. Which ones were native and which ones were good at attracting butterflies and other creatures… most importantly, which ones could grow in mostly shade because that’s what our yard mostly has. But… no… this wasn’t a book to sit down and read. It was a reference book! “Stop picking up reference books and find a book that ‘speaks’ to you!”

That’s when I looked again at the very first shelf I had checked out – the one that had the Joel Salatin book on it – and I found it. A book about a doctor who only makes $11,000 a year for tax evasion purposes. She, this doctor, also lives in a 12′x12′ house which absolutely fascinated me! I knew at once that it was the right book. One that I can learn from and enjoy. One that I don’t agree with completely, but that I agree with enough. One that is a true story, but flows nicely like a novel.

I purchased my book for about $7 total (with the half of coupon) and headed to the cafe where I was able to sit in one of the cushy arm chairs and revel in the first chapter of my book before heading home, rejuvenated, to be engrossed for a time by the needs of my three little people.

And, yes, this trip happened several days ago. And no, I haven’t been able to read any more chapters, but I will, and I am looking forward to it!

Never, before becoming a parent, would I have dreamed that a simple trip to the bookstore could be so wonderfully intoxicating. I love my children more than I can express and I love being with them – all the more so because their needs that I fulfill make something so seemingly commonplace as a trip to the store by myself into a wondrous adventure.

The next adventure involves the children and I’ll write about it later. I hadn’t expected this post to end up being so long

~B.

Dandelion Wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered…Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.

Two years ago, when we were still living in WA, we looked out our windows one fine midday and noticed that our yard was almost completely carpeted with beautiful yellow dandelion flowers and we decided, on the spot, that we should try our hand at making some dandelion wine. We’d never made wine before. We had none of the necessary equipment. So we looked up recipes and methods and headed out to the brewing store to pick up the equipment and then we came back home and made up a nice big batch!

Then we moved across the country and sort of… neglected the brew for the next two years. Oops!

So, we weren’t expecting much when we finally bottled up the wine last Friday evening. The wine ended up being amazingly strong, but quite good! It’s nice and sweet – you can actually taste the dandelion flowers – while also being quite dry and I’m as pleased as I can possibly be to report that it does taste like summer in a glass.

We’ll definitely have to make another batch next summer and this time we’ll actually bottle it up the way you’re supposed to. I’m absolutely thrilled that this batch wasn’t a complete waste though and we should probably try some other foraging-type brews in the future. This was a very satisfying endeavor on the whole. Sadly there aren’t any brewing stores in our new area so we’ll have to plan ahead a bit more next time, but that’s probably not a bad thing.

~B.

“O Heavenly Father, make me a better parent. Teach me to understand my children, to listen patiently to what they have to say, and to answer all their questions kindly. Keep me from interrupting them or contradicting them. Make me as courteous to them as I would have them be to me. Forbid that I should ever laugh at their mistakes or resort to shame or ridicule when they displease me. May I never punish them for my own selfish satisfaction or to show my power. Let me not tempt my children to lie or steal. And guide me hour by hour that I may demonstrate by all that I say and do that honesty produces happiness. Reduce, I pray, the meanness in me. And when I’m out of sorts, help me, O Lord, to hold my tongue. May I ever be mindful that my children are children and I should not expect of them the judgment of adults. Let me not rob them of the opportunity to wait on themselves and to make decisions. Bless me with the bigness to grant them all their reasonable requests and the courage to deny them privileges I know will do them harm. Make me fair and just and kind and fit, O Lord, to be loved and respected and imitated by my children. Amen.”

Fr. Anthony Coniaris
from Making God Real in the Orthodox Christian Home

Once I realized that fact, I asked myself why that would be. After some thinking about the reality that there’s also just more to do, I figured it out! It’s not so much that there’s more to do or even that I have children who can talk now to remind me to do things that I probably wouldn’t have gotten done before. The key to why I get more done now than before is procrastination.

Procrastination has been the bane of my existence more than just a few times in my life. College is the time that springs most readily to my mind, followed by high school, and my entire life before then… Since having my own house I’ve struggled with the tendency to let things go and put things off for as long as possible. The dishes are dirty? Well, might as well just wait until after the next meal and do all the dishes at once! The floor is dirty? Might as well just sweep once a week and get more dirt with each stroke! There’ll always be more time later, right?

Wrong.

I don’t just procrastinate, after all, I wait until the absolutely last minute possible or even longer. Usually I wait too long when I have a known deadline. Something needs to be done by a certain day and I’ll stay up all night the night before doing it even if it’s something that takes longer than a day to complete.

Now that I have a preschooler, a toddler, and an infant I have different deadlines. If I don’t help my older daughters with their workbooks or play with them while the baby’s asleep… well… it doesn’t end up happening. If I don’t clean the kitchen while my older daughters are helping and relatively happy to help then the opportunity might not come again until the kitchen is completely unusable.

For the first time in my life, I have very specific deadlines. The great thing about these deadlines for someone who procrastinates is that they’re unknown deadlines. When will the baby wake up? I don’t know! I’d better get busy playing, working, or cleaning while I can! When will my older girls become tired, hungry, or uncooperative? Nobody knows… least of all me, so I’d better get their help (they are very good helpers too!) and get the house in order before that happens!

Realizing this has made a huge difference in the quality of my life. I relax now after my kitchen is clean, not before, and it’s much more relaxing to relax in a clean house than a messy one! I wish I’d figured this out much sooner in my life… but better late than never.

~B.

The transition from womb to life outside the womb must be one of the most difficult transitions that we humans ever experience. It’s probably rather a good thing that we cannot consciously remember that time of our lives.

The book Magical Child has a wonderful chapter in it that describes how the transition must feel to a newborn baby… coming out of the nice, warm, wet, dark womb into the dry, cold, bright air. Then having the cord cut immediately and, in order to survive, having to immediately draw breath into his lungs that are unaccustomed to air at all. Being handled by several different people and being examined before being held by his mother. If the baby is unlucky enough to be a boy, he also frequently will have to undergo a painful surgical amputation that he definitely feels and equally definitely doesn’t understand before he’s more than a couple of days old.

Then, also, commonly being fed quite infrequently after being used to getting constant nourishment inside the womb. Being left alone in a bed by himself, sometimes to cry pitifully, after being next to his mother and hearing her breathing and heartbeat 24/7 before birth.

How then can this transition be eased? Certainly the baby eventually needs to learn to be independent of his mother and how to sleep by himself and not eat constantly, but just because these things need to be learned eventually doesn’t mean that the transition has to happen immediately. Nor does a gradual transition mean that the child will never learn to do those things.

Choosing a gentle, natural birth when possible can help ease the immediate womb to air transition because the baby is receiving the proper hormones that he was created (or evolved) to receive during this transition. Having dim lights can help the transition from dark to light. Not cutting the cord immediately can help ease the transition from being underwater to breathing air by not cutting off the baby’s supply of oxygenated blood prematurely and allowing him to receive his full blood supply rather than depriving him of up to 40% of it with an immediate cord clamping. Keeping the cord intact for a while also means that the mother gets to hold the baby for a little while before he is whisked away for a newborn exam thus easing his transition from birth to being weighed and measured and poked and prodded by strangers.

Choosing to leave the baby boy with his whole body instead of chopping off a perfectly healthy and normal part of his anatomy not only prevents all the risks that every surgery inherently possesses, but also allows him to grow up with the knowledge that his body is perfect the way it is and doesn’t need to be altered to fit an outdated cultural fad – to “fit in” with only half the boys in the current American generation. Just because his father had a body part amputated, doesn’t mean the son needs to have that same body part amputated. If daddy has brown eyes and son has blue, will daddy wear blue contacts so his son’s eyes will “match?”

Choosing to hold or wear the baby as much as possible and keep a new baby’s crib or cradle in your bedroom – maybe even to co-sleep for a time – helps to ease the transition from being with mom 24/7 to getting used to being with other people and eventually by himself.

Nursing on demand helps to ease the transition from getting constant nourishment to eating only periodically with greater lengths of time between feedings gradually over the first few years. Everyone knows how much toddlers need to snack still and they’ve been born for a while! Nobody I know looks at the clock before eating to determine whether or not they’re hungry – why would we look at the clock to determine whether a newborn baby is hungry? They’re used to eating all the time – of course they’re hungry extremely frequently, especially for the first few months of their lives!

Babies’ needs and wants are the same for the first few months at least – I believe that it’s really on us, as parents, to make sure that all of our babies’ needs are met. They do not only need nourishment and to be comfortable physically, but they need help through their transition. They need us to be responsive and to try and help them to navigate this extremely difficult transition as smoothly as possible. I believe that the more smoothly it goes for them, the easier it will be for us as well.

Not to even mention: They will be independent soon enough… the baby years go by so quickly!

~B.

For my last birth though… I suppose the real beginning was the day before my third beautiful daughter was born. I had been laboring for several days at this point, but my prodromal labor, while very effective, didn’t interfere with my life much at all – which is what happened with my second daughter’s birth as well. The contractions weren’t difficult or very uncomfortable at all and yet they got me more than halfway dilated before active labor ever began.

Anyhow, back to the day before my daughter – I’ll call her “Little Anne” – was born. I was done. I was more done than a burned Thanksgiving turkey. There was no room in my midsection whatsoever. My ribs were sore from the baby pressing against them constantly and kicking the right side. Every time I had a contraction, the upper part of my uterus felt sore just like my ribs did. The space was maxed-out to the extreme.

I don’t think I’ve ever been *that* done with a pregnancy before. I thought I was done with my other two, but I wasn’t. Not really. Not like I was this time. I honestly, for the first time, doubted that the baby would ever come out. She was just going to stay in there, getting bigger and bigger until I popped a few ribs or needed a c-section or something. I knew that I was about 6-7cms dilated because I checked, but even that didn’t help the feeling in my mind that I would be pregnant forever.

At the same time though, I had the feeling in my body that if I moved too quickly or rode in the car over too many bumps the baby would just fall right out. I knew that feeling… it’s the same way I felt a few hours before the precipitous (fast) birth of my second daughter. So, that evening, I called my midwife to give her some warning. My body felt as though labor was going to start that night or the next day at the same time as my mind was convinced that it would never begin. Ever.

Needless to say, this was very confusing and I probably wasn’t particularly convincing when I called my midwife because I wasn’t completely convinced myself.

We went out fairly late that night to pick up some good Chinese food and to get a few things from Wal-Mart that we needed before the baby could be born. Then we came home and ate some Chinese food. My husband set up the birth tub and then we went to bed.

I woke up the next morning at 5:24am with a quite strong contraction. I had another one about 8 minutes or so later and decided to get in a nice warm-hot bathtub to see if they calmed down so I could go back to sleep or if they got stronger and closer together in which case, it was probably the real thing.

My husband woke up as I was filling the tub and he helped me keep track of the timing because I really wasn’t able to do much in that area. I would forget the previous time by the time another one would start. The contractions were still not particularly close together or regular (ranging from 5-15 minutes apart), but they were definitely getting stronger and not calming down at all.

At around 6:30am I called my midwife and told her that I was pretty sure the baby was coming. I still wasn’t 100% sure, but by the time she arrived at our house about 15 minutes later, I was definitely in transition and was working through very intense contractions that were just a couple minutes apart.

My mom and my midwife’s assistant arrived not long afterwards. When my mom arrived, I was out of the bathtub because the birth tub was full. I made a stop at the toilet to make sure my bladder was empty and *WHOOSH* my water broke. On the toilet. Perfect! Just like last time I felt stuck on the toilet for a bit – whether because of the contractions or because my legs just wouldn’t work, I don’t remember. I didn’t think I could walk, but my husband helped me and somehow (I don’t remember exactly how) I made it into the birthing tub where I knelt, leaning against the side and held onto my husband’s hands through every contraction.

I didn’t push for very long before the baby’s head crowned. It crowned for what felt like forever, but was really only about 4 minutes. I was able to reach down and feel the baby’s head – complete with hair! – as it crowned. I had to go slowly because it was quite a large little head and I didn’t want to tear, but it was extremely difficult to keep from pushing as hard as possible to finish up my least favorite part – the crowning – ASAP. I tried doing some panting-type breathing that helped to slow things down a lot. When the head finally came out, it only came out part-way because there was a little hand on the little cheek so I had to push an extra time to get the chin out. I had a wonderful short break between pushing the head out and pushing the body out – no crowning sensation anymore!

When the baby’s body came out, at 7:24am, I was able to catch her and bring her up to find out that she was a gorgeous little girl! Not so little either… she weighed 9lbs. 10oz. I still have a hard time believing that I – not quite 5’4″ tall and 110lbs when not pregnant – pushed out a 9.5 lb baby with a nuchal hand! Without tearing. Before I got pregnant last time, I could still fit into a size FOUR (might never be able to again though!). It’s no wonder that I felt there to be no room in my womb – there really wasn’t any!

The rather corpulent placenta came out 9 minutes after Little Anne was born and my husband cut the cord about two hours after that.

I remember my older daughters (2-yo and 4-yo) asking me questions periodically – “Is the baby coming out?” throughout this whole time. They woke up soon after I got in the bath and were very excited about the baby coming! My mom stayed with them and read them books while I was pushing. I think they were more interested in what was going on though. They also wanted to stay in the room. I think my mom suggested going into the living room, but they wanted to see the baby come out.

Before my baby came, I watched birth videos and slide-shows online with both girls so they’d know what was going on and I think that helped a lot. They weren’t worried or scared at all and afterwards they were thrilled to have a brand new baby sister! They both wanted to hold her as soon as possible and my oldest told me that I was very strong and brave to push that baby out!

It’s so amazing to me still that this birth even happened… the baby came out! And she was huge! Still is, actually There’s so much of her to love and she’s the snuggliest, chubbiest little baby ever <3 At least, she's the snuggliest and chubbiest that I've ever had! She's a good little sleeper (whether I'm next to her or not) and she nurses like a champ.

Welcome to our family, little Anne! We're so glad to have you with us!

~B.

So, why now? Why in the middle of packing and finding crazy ant nests moving from the heating ducts to under a chair in the living room am I suddenly thinking about birth? Well, partly because I’m 35 weeks along, but also partly because I went to a baby shower yesterday and even though the mother is having twins and therefore a c-section, the topic of birth did come up.

It’s always interesting talking to my dad’s family about the choices that my family has made – breastfeeding, home birth, elimination communication, co-sleeping etc. – because they just don’t understand why anyone would make those choices. The choices I’ve made seem difficult to them and I’m pretty sure that they see at least a few of them as just another way I’m tied down to my children. The funny thing about that is that I view my choices as the easiest and best choices I could possibly have made. I cannot imagine having to sterilize bottles or get up in the middle of the night because my child is crying in another room. I cannot imagine having to let my baby cry for a few minutes because I have to mix up formula when it’s so much easier and quicker to just hike my shirt up and let them eat.

If I’m being completely honest with myself, I don’t do these things because science backs me up at all. Really, I do these things mainly because I’m lazy. One of the main reasons I started looking into home birth wasn’t because of some “birth experience” or because it’s safer for low-risk women or because I’m some crazy hippie person, but because riding in a car during labor (and possibly giving birth in the car!) just did not appeal to me at all. Why go somewhere else to have the baby when you can simply stay right at home?

The proven safety of home birth was merely a side perk that helped me to justify my choice to other people. The amazing experience of home birth was a very cool perk that just happened to exist, but wasn’t my main reason. After all, I’ve never had a hospital birth so I truly have nothing to compare home birth to.

Anyhow, back to my dad’s family and the interesting things they have to say about my choices. Yesterday my dad’s mom (my Grandma) mentioned that she loved her hospital births. She went to the hospital, they knocked her out, and when she woke up they gave her the baby. A couple of older family members who’d had similar births agreed with her and I smiled and nodded, not wanting to open my mouth lest too much come out. It’s not as if they’ll be having any more babies, they’re happy with their births, and it’s not as if they’ll be making me change my mind or as if I’m defensive about my choice.

However, the truth is that the very thought of having a baby and not being able to remember it terrifies me. My first thought after contemplating what they said was: How did they know that they got their baby back? I know that nowadays they have all sorts of fancy equipment to prevent babies from going to the wrong parents, but back then… if all the mothers were knocked out (which, most were) and if all the babies were taken to the nursery (which, they were) then how did anyone know that they got their baby? It’s not as if they saw the baby before it was whisked away to be washed and examined and the fathers weren’t allowed in the room either. It’s a very scary thought to me.

I don’t know. They’re obviously happy and they had healthy babies and that’s really what matters, but it’s odd to me that they can say so confidently that their unknown births were so much better than fully experienced births when they’ve never experienced birth. Neither can I honestly say that mine were better than theirs, but I can genuinely say that my births were amazing events that I am blessed to have been able to remember!

The amazing event isn’t the most important thing about birth – the most important thing about birth is that the mother and baby are happy and healthy – but the memory of my births is important. At least to me. Whether in the future I have a home birth, a managed hospital birth, or a c-section, I wouldn’t want to be put completely under and I would want to remember the moment my baby was first held up for me to see even if I couldn’t feel anything from the waist down. I would want as much of the experience as I could have even if I couldn’t have the full experience at home. I would, at the very least, want to remember what my baby looked like right after he or she was born. Before a bath. Before an exam. Before the cord was cut.

Birth is amazing and newborns are amazing! I’m so glad that I live in a time when I wasn’t forced to blank out the entire experience or motivated by fear to seek out obliteration of my own volition. I’m so glad that I live in a time when other, more experienced, mothers could encourage me to look more into birth and what it means before I had my first baby. I used to wish I had been born a few decades before the 80s, but no longer. I was born in the correct time and place and I am so thankful for that. I’m also infinitely grateful to my friends and family members who stuck by me and encouraged me to make different choices than most of them did.

So now, it’s time to begin thinking about my next birth. A birth that will happen in two to seven weeks from today. The day that I will meet the stranger who’s currently living in my womb and poking me almost constantly with feet, knees, hands, and elbows. Who is this person? I can’t wait to find out! What will the journey be like? I’m looking forward to experiencing it! It will be difficult but I can do it – I’ve done it before. It might be long and will almost certainly be intense but there’s always an end – it will end with a brand new human being to love.

So soon. Very soon! It won’t be long now.

~B.

We’ve met one set of neighbors so far and they are extremely nice. They’re a homeschooling family and I’m looking forward to spending more time with them. I’m also excited to be moving in right before Halloween so we can meet all the neighborhood kids in one fell swoop. I should probably ask the neighbors about how much candy to buy… I’ve never lived in such a large neighborhood before.

Lately the bane of my existence has been sleep or the lack thereof. I find myself tired during the day and then as soon as I slip beneath the covers of my bed, my mind starts racing, my baby starts kicking vigorously, and I cannot fall asleep. So tonight I’m blogging in the hopes that it will sufficiently empty my mind and I can go to sleep sooner rather than later.

Tomorrow is my cousin’s wife’s baby shower and I’m looking forward to seeing her and my other relatives! It’ll be an exercise in keeping my mouth shut, unfortunately, since she’s having a boy and given my family’s history with circumcision I’m 99% sure that they’re planning to circumcise which makes me horribly sad. I’ll probably mention something against the idea, but I don’t want to put anyone on the defensive. I still don’t fully understand why anyone would put their child through a non-medically-indicated elective surgery/amputation as a routine thing. Possibly if I understood a bit more of where people were coming from, I would have an easier time reaching them with the actual facts.

So. Sleep. I suppose I should head back to bed and try again. It’s been a wild ride, this year. The next two months seem to promise the same thing – a new house, a new baby, and a crazy mama who thinks she can participate in National Novel Writing Month despite everything else… we’ll see how that actually works out! Life is amazing and busy. Very busy.

I’ll try to update a bit more in the future, but I can’t make any promises
~B.

Occasionally this fact is really brought home to me by a friend or acquaintance who says something that I didn’t realize people still believed, and the obvious-to-me thing that I want to write about tonight is babies. Newborn babies in particular, but really all babies at least up through 12 months of age.

I was reminded this evening of a common phrase said to and about new mothers who actually hold their babies and nurse on demand, “You’re spoiling that baby!” or “She’s going to spoil that baby!” This is usually uttered by a well-meaning older relative or friend who was warned against spoiling her own baby when she was a new mother.

After doing extensive research into the way other cultures raise their children and into the biology of how babies develop once outside the mother’s womb, I came to the obvious-to-me conclusion that babies cannot be spoiled or overindulged. I personally prefer the term overindulged because it is a more accurate representation of what people actually mean when they say a child is “spoiled.”

So, why do I believe that a baby cannot be overindulged? First of all, during at least the first year, a baby’s needs and wants are the same thing. Babies are not manipulative – they are not complex enough to manipulate their parents or to even understand what that would involve. Babies simply know that they are hungry, lonely, wet, tired, or uncomfortable and they cry until someone responds or until they give up on someone responding.

Once they get what they need, babies are generally content until they need something else so it’s mainly a question of figuring out what they need and ensuring that they get it for as long as necessary. Some babies need to be held constantly, others seem to need to nurse constantly, and there’s nothing wrong with holding or nursing a baby anytime they need it. It is not overindulgence because if they need it, they want it and vice versa.

Wants and needs become gradually more divergent as a baby gets older, but it’s very clear to me that babies were created to have their needs met during the first year and that they cannot be overindulged during that time – perhaps longer. Studies have even shown that babies who are responded to more quickly in infancy are less whiny and clingy as toddlers and preschoolers. Perhaps they’ve fulfilled their need for being close to their parents and are better able to move on. This is explained fairly well with Erickson’s first of eight stages of personality: trust versus mistrust, and has certainly been borne out in my personal experience with my two daughters so far.

My older daughter was held all the time when she was a baby until she began to crawl everywhere at 6 months and to walk full-time at 9 months! She was nursed on demand until she was a bit over a year old. She has gradually become more and more independent and is now almost 4 years old, an age where I could certainly overindulge her if I continued to treat her as a 4 month old since her wants and needs are often very different now. Still, treating her as I did when she was tiny, feeding and holding her on demand, did not cause her to be overly dependent on me as a preschooler and it certainly didn’t hinder her gross motor skills at all!

My younger daughter is basically following in her older sister’s footsteps. We no longer hold her all the time – she’s been walking for well over a year now – and many times when she asks to nurse I’ll offer her something else like a cup of water or milk and she’ll take it instead. Generally asking to nurse for her means that she’s hungry or thirsty and I really don’t have any milk right now since I’m pregnant so it’s important to for me to fulfill her actual need as well as to help her realize that she needs to eat or drink when she feels hungry or thirsty. If she wants to nurse because she’s hurt or tired then I don’t refuse or redirect her because that’s a need to nurse while cuddling and not a need to eat or hydrate.

I haven’t personally received any comments about “spoiling” my children in the past, but now that I’m living in a different part of the country, as well as living closer to my extended family, I’m expecting to hear that phrase at least some after this new baby is born. While I appreciate the concern that I know lies behind the statement, I am fully confident that I have done the right thing in the past with my babies and that I will be doing the right thing with this baby when I hold or wear him/her as much as possible, co-sleep, and breastfeed on demand.