Why is it so hard to trust your gut?

Moms know their babies better than anyone else.  If mom feels like everything is right, then it probably is.  And vice versa.  So why is it so hard to trust our Momtuition?

95% confident in me… 95% of the time anyway

Up until now I’ve actually been really proud of my confidence in myself and my knowledge of my baby.  For a first time mom, I think I’m pretty cool and collected.  Friends and acquaintances have actually told me they’re impressed with how confident I am, given my neophyte status.  My mantra generally is that babies aren’t that breakable, emergencies aren’t that common.

And my confidence started early too.  When my OBs were trying to convince me that I was on borrowed time with my pregnancy, I knew better.  I felt the healthiest I’d ever been and at 41 weeks I pushed out my 8lb 9oz, perfect baby to prove it.  When the public health nurses were trying to tell me I was starving my baby and I needed to put him on formula, I knew better.  (Ok, I was hormonal, so I had a few moments of doubt.  I drove to the store, bought the formula, then came to my senses and threw it in the garbage.)  My milk came in that day so fast the baby was gagging on it and I told the nurses we didn’t care to see them anymore.  Then, when he was 8 months old and suddenly had a fever out of the blue, I didn’t worry too much.  I sat down on the couch and nursed him for two days straight until the rash showed up.  Then I called Telehealth and told the nurse I just wanted to confirm it was Roseola.  Indeed it was, and my Momtuition was right – again.

So why am I doubting myself now?

The other thing I’ve been confident about up until now is his ability to know innately what his body needs.  My philosophy about feeding is that as long as each of the options on the plate is healthy, then it doesn’t matter if he has 3 helpings of one and none of the other.  His instincts will guide him.  And I’ve already seen proof that this wisdom works.  One of his favourite foods has always been brussels sprouts (believe it or not).  But when he was about 8 months old, he started throwing them – and every other vegetable – on the floor.  The meat, eggs and avocados were the only foods that made it past the gates, meal after meal.  The environmentalist in me was cringing at how much meat he was eating.  But guess what?  I was mysteriously craving it too and 3 days later, lo and behold, my first postpartum period arrived.  What a smart Little Man to know he we needed extra iron!  That Momtuition about trusting him was bang on – yet again.

So why am I worried about his food preferences now?

Little Man started walking about 2 months ago and at the exact same time his molars started to come in.  He’s eating less, nursing more and moving all day long.  It’s a recipe for weight loss. He’s still growing and learning new things every day.  He’s still making ample diapers.  He’s happy all day and sleeping enough but not too much.  Every indicator outside of the 10.4% weight loss says he’s fine.  When the nurses overlooked all of those same markers last year and told me that his 10.3% weight loss trumped them all, I was livid.  How asinine!

So why am I so worried that he’s lost weight now?

I think part of my problem is that I don’t have the resources I did before.  When we lived in Calgary I had umpteen friends with babies who were going through the same things or who had already been there and done that.  I would hear about their worries, challenges and solutions before I encountered them myself so I had lots of time to mentally prepare my plan of attack.  And I knew constantly that my baby was totally normal.  Here in Toronto, I’m alone in Mommyhood.  The women in my family either didn’t breastfeed, or were done before their babies were a year old, so I can’t ask them either because formula-fed babies grow differently.

I think the other part of my problem is that food and weight are my biggest personal hang-ups.  I make sure to be hands-off with his eating so that I don’t project my screwed up attitude onto him, but it’s so hard.  So even though eating less and losing weight is actually the opposite of my problem, watching him pick the sweet fruit but not the nutrient-denser kale gives me visions of a lifetime of food manipulation.

I don’t have any answers to sum this post up with.  Just one final question: if anyone knows the whereabouts of the magic Mommy Confidence Wand, could you fill me in??

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Wild for wild food

Now that I not only have my own home to garden in, but we’ve also moved back to within driving distance of my family’s ‘cottage’, I’m full steam ahead on the wild food train!  Wooowooooo

I’ve always eaten a variety of wild foods from the aforementioned cottage.  Although, I should explain that the term cottage is used loosely.  What it is, in fact, is a 44-acre former gravel pit.  Heavily forested, but also containing 3 lakes covering about 10 of the 44 acres, and 3 powerless, waterless cabins.  In other words, heaven on earth.

The lakes have bass that are abundant and tasty.  The open gravel areas are usually a carpet of oregano and thyme with wild onions every now and then.  The roadsides are covered with raspberries, blackberries and wild grapes.  Go in a bit and you’ll usually find a highbush cranberry or two, some gooseberries and ramps.  By far the most coveted finds as a child were the spring fiddleheads and the fall puffball mushrooms.

This weekend, I went to a whole new level of wild with my food.  I ate a goose egg!  I wish I had taken my own picture, but the acquisition was sort of a surprise so you’ll have to look at this Googled picture.  One of the lakes I was mentioning has an island in the middle that’s been prime goose-nesting grounds for 30 years.  This year my Uncle ventured a peek inside the nest.

In case you’re curious, mama geese will continue to lay eggs until they get a brood of hatchlings, because nest predators are not uncommon.  So I haven’t ruined this whole generation!  But, it’s also important to keep in mind that the later the goslings hatch, the less time they have to mature before winter so there’s a limit to be respected.

I fried my egg overhard (I prefer my yolks yolky, but since I’ve never eaten a wild goose egg before and I’m nursing, I decided to err on the side of caution) and I have to say it was still very yummy.  Pretty much like a good farmer’s market chicken egg, only biiigger.  About 2-3 times the size.  The shell is a lot thicker too.  And others have said they found the yolk denser, but like I said, compared to a good pastured chicken egg, it’s pretty similar.

Nutritionally though, they’re apparently quite a bit denser.  Weight for weight, the goose egg has more selenium, potassium, calcium and magnesium.  It has twice the iron, twice the thiamin and FOUR times as much B12 and SEVEN times the Omega 3.  It’s ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 is about 1:1 whereas the chicken egg is about 1:15.*  Basically a multivitamin in a shell.

All in all, I’d say it was a very good long weekend.  And I even brought some ferns home so I can have fiddleheads in my backyard next year.

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*I do wonder if this data would differ for pastured eggs, from chickens allowed to forage for a biologically appropriate diet, but I couldn’t find any good info on that.

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/dairy-and-egg-products/127/2

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/dairy-and-egg-products/111/2

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The cost of breastfeeding

When people promote breastfeeding they usually go through a list of the benefits and the notion that “it’s free” is always on the list.  They’re right, it is free, once you get started.  But the sad truth is that it costs a lot – too much – to even get properly started.

In Canada, about 85% of women initiate breastfeeding, but very few continue for the recommended periods of exclusivity and total duration.  In fact, almost a quarter of those who start, have stopped again within a month.  Why is this?  There are always lots of reasons given, but if you look closely, they usually boil down to one common thread: money.  It takes (a lot of) money to pay for access to the information, the support and the underlying health needed to make it in breastfeeding.

The women most likely to breastfeed are highly educated, partnered, urban and older.  I learned myself the hard way that breastfeeding is pretty much a DIY endeavor in Canada.  No one is going to help you if you don’t help yourself.  In fact, you’ll usually have to fight the medical establishment to do it, not to mention society as a whole, and it takes a lot of confidence and backing to win a fight like that.

Breastfeeding should be the biological norm, free and available to any woman with breasts and a baby, but the reality is that it’s more like a private club with steep membership dues.  It cost me more than $40,000 for my breastfeeding relationship. Here’s how:

University education: $30,000.  Postsecondary graduates have a breastfeeding rate of 89%, versus 79% for those who attended postsecondary but didn’t graduate, and an even lower 71% for non highschool grads. Why?  My six years of biology training gave me more than just an understanding that mammaries are for feeding mammalian babies.  I have access to literature databases that aren’t publicly available, I know how to navigate them and how to decipher the information I find in them so I was able to be truly informed.  Most of the women around me relied on popular literature, news articles or formula-sponsored propaganda that usually give incomplete or incorrect information.  But beyond that, my training gave me the confidence to go to battle with health professionals when I knew they were wrong – which was often.

A decade of contraceptives: $3,000.  Older mothers are more likely to breastfeed than their younger peers but believe it or not, most women these days do not stay abstinent until they decide to have a baby.  You can count me into that group and it costs money to stay pregnancy-free.

Marriage: $500. This doesn’t count the big fancy wedding we had to celebrate our marriage, it’s just the bare bones costs of getting a licence and hiring an officiant.  Partnered women are more likely to breastfeed because they’re more likely to have help and support (from said partner) in the postpartum period.  Having my husband in my corner was invaluable because everything I knew went out the window when someone suggested to me in my moments of hormonally-induced weakness that I was starving my baby.  The way he scowled at the nurse who told me to bottle feed gave me back my gumption and helped to continue doing what I knew was right.

Urban living: $6,000.  It would be impossible to get a really accurate idea of how much more it costs to live in an urban centre than a rural area.  So I checked rental listings in a small town about an hour from where we were living.  This number is strictly the premium we paid to rent our home for a year in the city, where we had access to breastfeeding support like our Doula.

Doula: $1400. Our doula had lots of training in lactation management so she basically functioned like an LC for us after the birth.  She was the first only one to suggest to us that our problems might stem from thrush, and she was right.  And, if she hadn’t been there to remind us that we weren’t obligated to do what the public health nurses said (informed consent does, after all include informed refusal) then we would have been stuffing 60mL of formula into Little Man’s 2-day old, chestnut-sized stomach every 3 hours.  That much formula would have left no room for breastmilk and we would have been doomed before the week was out.

Grand total: $40,900.

That’s quite the price tag to feed my baby the ‘free’ milk that my body makes.  Is it any wonder that 15% of women can’t even get in the breastfeeding door?  Or that 30% get kicked out of the club again 8 short weeks later?  Or that only 9% of us can pay the necessary dues to keep at it into the recommended second year?  The milk may be free, but the ability to breastfeed certainly isn’t.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/studies-etudes/82-003/archive/2005/7787-eng.pdf

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Policy ideas from a layperson

As promised the other day, here are my policy ideas to make the country better.  In case you’re wondering, I have no credentials, no formal political training and no party affiliation.  I’m just a common-sensical mama with a brain and this is what’s been rattling around in it.

By the way, these are not my top-priority, dream-come-true policies.  Those would be too radical to speak out loud.  These are policies that I think would have better than a snowball’s chance in Hades of passing, should someone in power propose them, and that I think would be good first steps to making a better country.

1.  Change charitable donation taxation from a tax credit to an off-the-top deduction, similar to an RRSP contribution.

The Government employs countless people and spends countless dollars deciding which Canadian charities should be funded, and how much to give them.  I used to work for a federally-funded non-profit so I’m acquainted with the machinations of grant-funding.  So much waste just trying to decide where to send the money.  Why not give the citizens a bigger role in deciding which charities are important to us?  Canadians want to help each other and we already do – the Red Cross alone collected $100 Million in private donations for the Haiti earthquake.  And the donors all got a non-refundable tax credit worth only a sliver of what they donated.  Why not encourage us to help each other more often by granting a bigger tax incentive?  More private charitable donations would minimize the need for bureaucracy, not to mention the opportunity for fiscal mismanagement by government, all while allowing Canadians choose their charitable priorities.

2.  Increased maternity benefits for low-income parents.

We have fabulous maternity benefits in Canada.  Fifty weeks paid at (up to) 55% of your regular salary.  But still, not everyone can afford to take it.  Imagine you work full time at a minimum wage job in Ontario.  You earn (before tax) about $420 per week.  Can you afford to drop down to $230 for a full year?  Probably not.

I would love to see an additional sliding scale in the maternity benefit calculation.  If your regular income was less than the $447 per week maximum currently granted, then your benefits should equal your total income, not just 55% of it.

This is more than just a social issue, it’s a public health issue.  Low income women are less likely to breastfeed than their higher income counterparts.  Likely because they have to return to work.  Bottle-fed infants are less healthy, and they become less healthy children and adults.

3.  While we’re at it, more midwifery please.

The midwives may not have wanted me (this year!) but I still want them.  To the tune of 25% of Canadian births.

Estimates about the cost savings from midwifery care over physician-led care vary, but a Ministry of Health study put it at $800 saved for an in-hospital birth by a midwife, versus a family physician (to say nothing of the cost with an OB-GYN).  So let’s say that one quarter of Canada’s 360,000 annual births are cared for by midwives, in hospital.  That’s $71 Million annually just for the birth.  That does not include the cascade of other cost reductions like fewer repeat cesareans (because there are fewer first-time cesareans), fewer hospital re-admissions in the neonatal period, better breastfeeding rates and the subsequent better health associated with that.

It seems like a no-brainer to me.

4. Stop padding corporate pockets with broad tax-cuts and instead target hiring incentives for small employers.

I’ve spent years doing childcare and earning a decent amount of money for it.  But the government doesn’t know that, because I was rarely officially employed while I did it.  I didn’t protest at the time, but the reality is that working under the table hurts us all in the long run.  There’s no EI for the worker if they suddenly get cut, there’s no CPP contributions to support our ageing population, no RSP eligibility to support our own retirement, and women can’t claim maternity benefits if they weren’t ‘employed’ in the first place.  But it’s expensive to hire someone on the books.  Adding employer CPP and EI contributions into the mix makes it unreasonable for a lot of people.  The one family that did hire me on the books had to stop using me after a few months because they couldn’t afford it.

I would like to see the government keep corporate taxes level and instead foot the bill for the employment expenses for employers with 5 or fewer staff.  Let us hire members of our community to staff our small businesses, to provide our childcare and domestic services.  Let’s work together to actually get working again instead of giving oil investors bigger dividends.

5. Last but not least, put our carbon tax to better use.

Carbon is consumption, consumption is carbon.  Taxing consumption is, therefore taxing carbon.  We already have a national consumption tax, the GST, so let’s use it.  For starters, it needs to be higher.  And I don’t just mean back to the 7% it was, I mean higher.  Ten per cent, maybe 12.  Then, broaden the exemption list.  You see, there is already a giant list of exempt and ‘zero-rated’ goods and services.  In order to transform the GST into a great carbon tax, simply add to that zero-rated list to favour carbon-friendlier alternatives.  Some examples:

• All resale goods.  Currently you pay GST on used items unless they’re sold by a charity.  What’s more carbon-friendly than reusing?
• New cars that meet really ambitious fuel efficiency standards.  Wouldn’t you seriously consider a vehicle that was $3000 cheaper than the others (assuming 10% tax on a $30k car)?  Wouldn’t you get even more serious if you knew it would use half the gas of the similar versions?  I think you would.  And I think companies will build that car if that incentive existed.
• Mass ground transport.  City transit and international mass transit (including air!) are GST-free, but I think all mass ground transit should be.  Get everyone who didn’t buy the above-described car off the road!
• Canadian-made foodstuffs.  Basic groceries are already GST-exempt, but we might as well broaden that to all made-in-Canada food.  Heck, all made-in-Canada anything, really.
• Green energy.  Pretty self-explanatory.
• Sports equipment.  Get people out of their cars, off their couches and onto their feet.
• Digital services.  Why manufacture plastic discs and paper books if you can download the lower-carbon digital version cheaper?
• And the list could go on, really.

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What the heck happened?

In case you had managed to miss it, we had an election here in Canada this week.  And the results were, frankly, shocking.  When the election was called I firmly believed we’d be spending $300+ Million to get virtually the same government we had.  Instead we ended up with a radically different government that is simultaneously horrifying and hope-inspiring.

Horrifying because we now have a party (and man) in control of this country that was initially elected on a promise to attempt to deny human rights to Canadians.  I’m talking about Harper’s attempt to disallow same-sex couples from getting married.  He continues to deny human rights by quietly strangling organizations that give women control of their reproductive organs.  He, and his policies, make my skin crawl.

Michael Moore put it very nicely in a tweet: “Meanwhile up in Canada today, they had a big election & decided it sucked being Canadian & they wanted 2 b more like us. The bad part of us.”

But in a weird way, the results of the election were also wonderful.    The NDP has finally taken its place as a party to be contended with.  The Green Party has finally taken its place as a party that can get elected.  The BQ has finally taken its place as a minor party with only a sliver of the popular vote and correspondingly few seats in parliament. (Note: I’ve got nothing against the Bloc, but I think that allowing any party to have vastly more power than the electorate wishes to confer to them is proof that we need electoral reform badly.)  We have a fresh and young group of MPs.  Most people are playing this as a bane, but you have to remember that inexperienced usually means uncorrupted.  And we have the highest female presence in parliament than ever before.  So yes, there is reason to hope.  Not, maybe, for the next four years, but for how the next election and the four years after it will go.

In the spirit of that hope, I’ve got some cheeky policy initiatives that I’d like to table… so stay tuned.

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Dealing with ‘those’ days

This post is a fleshier version of a comment I left for Kelly at Becoming Crunchy.  Kelly wrote about having one of those days.  You know  them.  The ones when the world seems like a giant hill and you’re constantly at the bottom of it.  The days that make you throw your hands up and give in and then you feel like a complete failure for giving in.  Yup, you know them.

I’ve been trying to figure out some strategies for myself for those kinds of days and here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

I try to keep a *better* comfort food option in the house.  Like Kelly, I love the frozen pizzas and they’re usually my go-to wit’s end food.  But I also love spaghetti.  If it’s made with white flour all the better!  So I keep one pack and a can of sauce (I usually make sauce from scratch) in the cupboard.  It’s still not a wonderful meal, but it’s an improvement over Delissio so I don’t end up beating myself up as much.  When we finally get a deep freeze, I also plan on cooking a large batch of comfort food (including pizza!) to keep in said freezer for just these occasions.

The other thing I’ve been trying to do is keep ‘props’ lists.  Stuff that I’m proud of myself for.  Specifically I call them my “Done Lists” where I jot down everything I do in a day (right down to getting showered.)  I’ve reached a year of being at home and I’m not sure of my work future so I’ve been feeling, well, useless.  The routine of housework feels never-ending (probably because it is), so I feel like I’m never accomplishing anything.  So I find it helps to have a record of how full my day is, to remind me that I’m not useless.

And the last is that I try to remind myself my diet (and workout routine) is a chequing account, not a savings account.  It’s normal to make withdrawals, so there’s no point trying to avoid them.  The important thing is that the deposits outweigh them.

I would love to hear other strategies for coping with that feeling of defeat that we all get.

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