I have a Facebook fan page now as well as a website. I’m holding a giveaway to try and increase exposure a little bit. I’m actually going to be holding two. The first is just over this weekend (though so far there are no entries so I may have to extend it!). Just become a fan of my Facebook page and then post about the contest on your wall (tagging my page so I see it). You can have a second chance to win by posting a review or a picture of you and your kids reading an Usborne book together on my Facebook page, or leaving a comment with which of the books you’d be interested in. The first one I’m offering the winner’s choice of one of the Usborne Beginners series. Next week I’ll be hosting another giveaway (that won’t be just Facebook) for a really awesome book that I’m actually going to be sad to depart with now that I’ve seen it. Will definitely get a copy of it for myself. It’s the Usborne Science Encyclopedia. Watch my Usborne website for more details on that next week.

Anyway, if any readers out there would like to order some books, just let me know. Or use the wish list feature on the website and I’ll make sure you get the best deals and specials.

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I have a couple of meme’s I’ve been tagged for that I would like to do at some point, and a few ideas for other posts. Otherwise, we’re doing well. Getting ready for Christmas, sort of… We haven’t actually really started gifts, and considering we want to handmake them all that’s not a good sign! I think I might make bathrobes for our nieces and nephew our of towels, and embroider their names on them. I’d really like to make one for Meredith too and they don’t look too hard. We’ll see though. I need more ideas for younger kids though. We have baskets planned out for most of the adults that should be good I think. I love everything about Christmas except the consumerism, so we started handmaking gifts last year and I think they ended up going over well with most people.

We are discussing selling our car. We bought it brand new 2 1/2 years ago and it has been great, especially when we lived in Sidney, but now that we’re in town we walk almost everywhere. It seems silly to be paying the payments on a car we use a couple of times a week. If it sells, we might buy an older American car (because they depreciate so fast, it’d be cheap), and just plan to rent a car for trips to Calgary. It would still be far cheaper than the payments on our current car. I put the car up yesterday just to see if there was any interest and already have someone coming to look at it today. If he decides to buy it I’m not sure what we’ll do, we can’t afford to buy another car until January when Kris gets his bonus. (We’ll just barely break even with what we have left owing on the car if it sells.) We’ll make do though, I’m sure. Maybe we’ll find we don’t really need a car that much anyway. In our ongoing efforts to declutter, I’ve also put a bunch of other things up for sale and had some interest in those too.

Meredith is really starting to become quite vocal. She still doesn’t have many “real” words but she makes a lot of new sounds and has started to string sounds together a lot too. She loves to say “uh oh”. She’s also making up new signs too. She will use the signs we use a few times, and then make up her own and stop using the one we’ve tried to teach. I’m not sure why but it’s pretty cute. I have a cousin who is deaf and was hoping Meredith would learn ASL, but even if not, at least it’s a way we can communicate with her.

Her favorite activity lately is to look through books, or have us read to her. She has one book in particular she loves. Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? was cute the first time, and the second, and maybe even the third. But Kris and I both have it memorized now we’ve read it so much. She also seems to be teething again and has been less willing to play independently so I can clean up a bit or do dishes. I hate how messy that means the house gets, and would like to raise Meredith to appreciate a clean house (something I feel I didn’t get from my parents forcing us to clean our rooms once a week and otherwise our house was often messy), but really, I know that this is another phase and a messy house for a few weeks won’t hurt anyone. Sometimes if she gets really clingy or I’m tired of Brown Bear, Brown Bear yet again, I’ll take her outside and we’ll walk and explore. If it’s near nap time I’ll put her in the mei tei and walk until she falls asleep. A good friend just moved into our complex and she has a two year old son, so she will often come with us on the walks and the kids will play. It’s wonderful having someone so close by with similar parenting values.

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Which I think is a great point, btw. Too often the good is taken for granted while the bad is nitpicked and nagged about. I called in to a “How’s my driving?” line once because the trucker I was calling about was great. The lady I talked to was pretty rude at first, and seemed annoyed. When she realized I was calling in to praise the driver, not criticize him, her entire demeanor changed. I have to wonder how often she actually got positive calls?

Anyway, the problem with praise, bribes, etc, is that even though they seem like positive things, they can still be conceived as manipulative. Alfie Kohn has a good article which explains some of the reasoning behind it. I recently finished reading his book Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason for the second time. I highly recommend this book to any parent. He backs up all his points with lots of data and research, and has such an interesting perspective. I don’t agree with everything he says, but there were other parts that really struck me. I was going to quote from it, but I could really quote most of the book, so I don’t think I will. It really is a great read though.

I’m on the fence about praise. I think genuine, honest praise and feedback is a good thing. While I want Meredith’s motivations to be intrinsic, I do want her to know that I appreciate her help or enjoy her art or whatever it is she’s interested in. Of course, I want her to know I love her and am proud of her no matter what.

But I do find some praise silly, and even degrading. And I notice so many parents saying “good job!” over and over again about every little thing their kids do. I like to try to find other ways of saying it. “Good job” implies that something else was a “bad job”. Like if a baby takes her first steps, and the parents exclaim “good job!”, does that when the child couldn’t walk it was bad? Of course it doesn’t, but how does it come across to the children to be praised like this? My mom said “Good poo!” to my daughter when she was four months old. Someone explain to me, what exactly makes a poo good or bad? I like to thank Meredith for helping or for, say, waiting for me when we’re out on a walk and there’s a busy road nearby, but I try to avoid falling into the trap of constant “good jobs.”

We do celebrate with her, especially when she is excited about something. We will sometimes cheer when she poops in the potty or figures something out she’d been struggling with. We take her cue a lot. If she doesn’t seem to think it’s a big deal, it probably isn’t. But if she seems really proud of herself we want to acknowledge that too.

We also like to talk about things with her. Rather than saying “good job!” if she puts her toys away, we might thank her and say “it’s really helpful to me when you put your toys away” or something along those lines. Along the same lines, if she hits I might tell her that it hurts when she hits and give her an alternative (either stroking me, or hitting the couch). That way we’re not asking her to just take our word for it that that’s the way things are, or that she has to do things because we said so, but actually giving her a reason. I think doing this also has the benefit that if similar situations come up in the future she will be better equipped to process it and decide on a course of action.

On the other side is punishments. I found this great article by Jan Hunt: The Parenting Golden Rule. She brings up some good points about how there seems to be a double standard. What applies to an adult doesn’t necessarily (or even usually) seem to apply to children. The other day my mom told me that it was okay if Meredith cried, and it wouldn’t kill her. Well of course it won’t, and I am not under the impression that I can always prevent her from crying, but if an adult was crying somewhere, he or she would certainly expect anyone coming across them to try and find out what’s wrong and help them out. And yet, it’s okay to ignore a crying child just because he or she is smaller than us or can’t communicate what she needs?

For me, discipline isn’t a punishment and reward type of system. Discipline is such a loaded word in some circles, but really, it’s root comes from the word to teach, or to guide. I don’t think discipline needs to be conditional, coercive, or manipulative, it just normally is.

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I’m no one’s lap dog, you can’t put me on a leash.
-Johnny Rotten

I saw a lady with her son the other day.  They were walking near a road, and when the boy so much as stepped off the sidewalk onto the grass nearest the road, she yelled at him that if he wouldn’t listen and stay with her, he would have to hold her hand.  It got me thinking, and kind of sad, because Meredith loves to hold my hand.  It’s not a punishment or a threat.  If she’s heading in a direction I’m not sure I want her to head, all I normally have to do is call her name and hold out my hand, and she will either come running towards me or at least stop so I can go to her.  I tell her why we can’t go in the direction she wants, and she will toddle along next to me (or behind or in front) in a new direction.  I hope she never starts to see holding my hand as a bad thing.  I don’t expect her to stick like glue to my side either.

I see so many parents lately walking around with their kids on leashes.  I can understand the thinking that might cause a parent to start to use one (not that I necessarily agree with the thinking or would use one myself, and Kris thinks they’re mostly just a tool so parents don’t have to pay as much attention to their children), but too often they’re used solely as a method of control.  We were at the Saanich Fair the other day and one mom was actually tugging her kid around like he was a dog or something.  In The Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff discusses how in other cultures, parents are surprised when they hear that parents in North America have problems with their kids running off.  One of her theories about why that is is that so many kids are born and then whisked away to be weighed and measured, or for “observation”.  It is a well-known fact that most other mammals and birds have a crucial period right after birth in which imprinting takes place, and if the baby is not with his or her mom it won’t happen.  In other cultures, where the baby is kept with mom and breastfeeding is initiated soon after birth, the parents trust that their kids are following along behind like baby geese.

I don’t think that that is necessarily possible here, especially in a crowded area where you might be worried about someone grabbing your child, but it is other people around me I don’t trust, not my child.  At the same fair, Kris and I wanted to sit down in the shade.  Meredith wanted to wander.  My first instinct was to try and encourage her to sit with us, but we decided to let her wander around a bit, since it was very quiet where we were.  We shouldn’t have even worried.  She didn’t go more than 5 or 10 feet from us.  She didn’t try to take off and lose herself in the crowd or anything.  She stayed close, examined rocks and grass, and when we were ready to get up and go somewhere else she came right over to us.  A little bit of trust goes a long way.  Obviously all kids are different and some will be more comfortable going further at a younger age, but even then, I think we need to recognize that it’s not the kids that shouldn’t be trusted, but the world at large.  When we start putting our kids on leashes (real or metaphorical), we are telling them we don’t trust them, and I believe that starts a self-perpetuating circle where the kid does what we don’t want him to do because we expect he will do it (and kids do want to meet our expectations), which lowers our trust more, and so on.

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The addendum is about my chores post.  Reading it over, I wanted to clarify something.  I briefly mentioned that I don’t agree with all the Radical Unschooling concepts but like the idea behind them.  We don’t consider ourselves radical unschoolers.  I found Sandra Dodd’s website while I was still pregnant and I loved reading through it.  It gives some great ideas for specific ways to handle some situations.  But as Kris said yesterday, neither of us believe in following a set formula, website, or book in our parenting, and there was something about RU that just didn’t feel completely right to me.  I couldn’t put my finger on it, until I met Annie in person the first time and we talked for some time, and it became clearer after I read The Continuum Concept.

Annie and Paxye both explain it much better than I could, I think partly because Meredith is still so young, and partly because right now she’s still an only child, so some of their points aren’t relevant to us yet.  But to me, RU is too child centered.  I want my daughter to grow up feeling respected for who she is, but I also want her to learn that others deserve her respect just as much, including her parents and other people who might be around us.  If I were to try and label our lifestyle, I would say it is much more along the lines of consensual living.  There are definitely overlaps between the two, but I think consensual living takes into account everyone’s needs more than RU does.

Something I had meant to add to my chores post, but forgot to say, was that while I don’t believe children need to earn their keep, that doesn’t mean I think the parents should end up doing everything.  Ideally, my thoughts at the end about pointing out specific tasks Meredith can do as she gets older and not forcing her, along with us not complaining constantly about housework, will help her see it as just something that needs to be done rather than something to be avoided.

However, someone always leaving her dirty dishes around, throwing laundry on the floor, or leaving behind a mess in the bathroom, is making more work for someone else to do and certainly isn’t consensual.  I can’t say what I would do in any of these situations, since they’re all hypothetical and any course of action would depend on the specifics, but I just wanted to clarify that I don’t believe that children should get to do nothing while the parents or siblings follow along behind picking up after them, and that as the children get older I would hope there would be more jobs around the house that children would be willing and able to help out with.  My point more was that if I’m not willing to drop what I’m doing at a moment’s notice to set the table or take out the trash, I certainly won’t expect it of anyone else, including my husband or my children.  Also, if a child really hates a particular job, I’d like to think the family as a whole can come up with solutions to either make it easier on the child or for someone else to do it.  (For instance, I actually don’t mind cleaning the bathroom, so I’d trade cleaning bathrooms for vacuuming any day!)

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That probably won’t seem very significant to most people, but I had to do a double take. You see, D2 really wants to read the series. The first one is known as The Golden Compass here in North America. Northern Lights is the original title in the UK. Apparently the North American one has been edited, and D2 wants to read it in it’s original form, but it’s only available from the UK. We’ve talked to a few bookstores and none were able to order it for us. We could have got it from AbeBooks, but never did. So seeing it there, on our anniversary, in a bookstore I almost didn’t go into, it seemed like a sign or something. I presented it to D2 when he got home from work, and he was thrilled. He opened it up, and lo and behold, there is Phillip Pullman’s signature on the title page. One of the cheapest anniversary gifts I have ever got him, but I think one of the best.

And what did I get? Well, partway through the day D2 tells me (via MSN, we chat on it when he’s at work) there’s a weird message on our voicemail and he can’t even understand the name of the shop and they asked for someone with a similar name to him. So I pick up our phone (the ringer is off which is why I didn’t hear it ring and it went to voicemail, D2 gets the voicemail messages to his e-mail), and the caller ID says Browns the Flo… So I said, “Think it’s Brown’s the Florist?” I check the message and it’s someone asking for D2 to call them back. D2 hadn’t understood a word of the message and had just deleted it. When I mentioned the florist D2 started cursing. I’m oblivious. What would most girls think on their anniversary when a florist calls for their husband? Probably that the husband bought them flowers… Me? I wondered who was sending D2 flowers (after all, they asked for him, not me!). My sister had just got flowers at work from her boss for doing a good job, so I thought maybe D2′s work had done the same. Somehow, D2′s cursing didn’t tip me off. The saddest part is that I was always considered the “smart one” in my family… (Obviously, I’m not. My sisters are all brilliant.  I was just best at lying my way through school and getting into the teacher’s good graces so they would refer to me as the smart one.)

So needless to say, I got a gorgeous, huge bouquet of lilies, sunflowers, and daisies later in the day. And D2 has learned that when he wants to surprise his wife, he should probably give his work number instead of his home number and not mention the message to me…

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Bebe is starting to show an interest in books other than as food. She still will only sit for a page or two, but she looks at the pictures and tries to turn the pages. I love Mama Mama/Papa Papa. One of the lines is: “Mama, Mama, soft as silk, give me warmth, and give me milk” and shows a baby leopard nursing. Another is “Mama, mama, hold me tight, we sleep a cozy sleep tonight.” There’s also a line about baby wearing. It’s a very sweet book and now that Bebe is saying “Mama” a lot, I think she likes listening to it too.

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Before I moved out with my friend, I had worked in a vet clinic for four years and also in a pet store for a couple of years. At the pet store, I had the opportunity to work directly with pet food suppliers and reps. I found this extremely interesting. I loved learning about animal digestive systems and how they use the food they eat. I started doing more research on dog food and raw diets. When my then-boyfriend (now-husband/D2) moved out to where I was finally and I moved in with him, we got a dog. She came from a breeder but was actually a rescue. I mentioned to the breeder that we were considering a raw diet, but otherwise would choose a good kibble. The breeder steered us away from the raw diet, and it seemed like it would be too much work anyway.

Our dog was skin and bones when we got her. She threw up a lot. We switched her to a good kibble and she filled out a little. Then she stopped eating. We tried a different food and she would eat that for a few days or even a week and then stop again. We started having to switch her food every few days or she would starve herself, literally. She could go over a week having only a tiny bite of food a day, and she was losing weight. Considering she was only about eight or nine months at this point, we were pretty concerned about that. I brought her to the vet, who did blood tests and found out that she had a damaged liver. It was causing her to starve herself, which was making it worse, and was also causing all the puking. She suggested a veterinary diet, telling me it wouldn’t reverse the problem (it was irreversible), but might slow it down or even stop it. My experience with dog food came into play here. I looked at the ingredients and knew there was no way that food could be better for her than what we were feeding her. I also knew my dog wouldn’t eat it anyway.

I started doing some research again. I read that feeding dogs liver can help their livers regenerate. It sounded a bit too easy to me, but I felt like I had nothing to lose. I found this site which had some great info on raw diets, and made me realize that they don’t involve cutting up vegetables or adding tons of supplements. I was shocked by some of the information I learned, like about the AAFCO feeding trials. Here’s a summary from that site:

AAFCO feeding trials consist of at least eight dogs being fed the same diet for a mere 26 weeks (approximately six months). During this time, 25% of the dogs (so, two animals) can be removed from the test and the dogs eating the food can lose up to 15% of their weight and condition; the food will still pass the test and be labeled “complete and balanced.” But extrapolate these figures to the number of animals eating this food for much longer than 26 weeks and you will have much more of a problem! If a food caused dogs to start losing condition over the 26 week period yet still passed, imagine how many animals would fail to thrive in real life while being fed this food for years?

When they say 2 dogs can be “removed,” it means two dogs can die, or lose half their body weight, or pretty much anything, and the food could still pass as long as the other 6 “only” lose 15% or less of their weight. Scary stuff. I used to wonder how some foods even got on the market. I don’t wonder any more; they don’t actually have to be nutritional.

So anyway, we switched her to a raw diet, and suddenly she was eating again. Every day! And she was gaining weight. Her coat was filling out. She has a balance problem, and even her balance was improving. Anyone who saw her would comment first thing on how much better she looked. Three months later we brought her to the vet and her irreversible liver problem was gone. The vet thought it must be coincidence, or a mistake in the original tests. But I had learned even the really good kibbles are still processed and hard to digest.

I mentioned to a chef where I worked how much better she was doing, and he pointed out that raw diets and unprocessed foods are good for people too. I thought, “Of course they are!”. We ate pretty well already, but Hamburger Helper used to be a staple. I don’t think we’ve had any since that time. We started really watching our own diet, buying organic when we could afford it, and trying to make food from scratch as much as possible. It’s been a slow process, but every little step helps and makes us both feel better.  The IBS that used to be a daily battle for me has all but disappeared.

Doing research into a raw diet is what led me to discover the vaccine debate. I’m a pretty open-minded person, so though I was a bit shocked that a vaccine debate even existed, I was interested and started looking into that too. We had both noticed after she got her shots on her first birthday that her balance got a lot worse again for a while, but hadn’t thought it had to do with the vaccines. After doing some reading though, I started to wonder. Our dog hasn’t been vaccinated since her first birthday and our cat was vaccinated as a kitten once before we got him. One day I’d love to write in more detail about vaccinations and vaccine information, but that’ll have to wait.

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So I grew up with a love of nature and the outdoors. When I was 18 I moved away from home with my best friend. She was a neat freak, and would use Lysol, Mr Clean, etc a few times a week to clean our kitchen, our bathroom, our windows… I got lots of headaches, and I knew they were probably connected to all those cleaners. I’d also discovered through my biology degree that germs and bacteria really aren’t as scary as those companies like to tell you they are, and that even the so-called “bad” bacteria could be useful to us.

I couldn’t convince my friend to stop using them, but I bought a book (Clean House Clean Planet) on how to make my own natural cleaners, and from the day I moved out I’ve been using those instead. I was amazed at how well they worked, some of them even work better than any commercial cleaner I’ve ever used. I think that success really helped me see that my ideas I had growing up about chemicals and toxins really aren’t as crazy as I thought they might be, and led me to be willing to question many other practices that were acknowledged as “safe,” like vaccination and the foods we eat.

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