I spent most of today editing a video. Originally it was supposed to be a pregnancy, birth, and beyond video, set to music with no dialogue. But it got long and I liked a lot of the dialogue, so this is just a birth video. I might change the first dialogue box eventually. The midwives didn’t actually show up until about 10:20, and the first clip of the video is only about 25 minutes before the baby comes, just to give an idea of how quickly it went. I’m going to work on another one that would be more along my original idea too, and will be a little more censored. This particular one has nudity, yelling, etc. Watch at your own risk.

(You need a browser that supports html5 to see this. So basically not Internet Explorer.)

Related posts:

1. There’s really something there!
2. Canadian Maternity Experiences Survey
3. She’s here!

Related posts:

1. Fiona’s Home Waterbirth
2. Nesting
3. Father Anxiety…

So I agreed to the interview, and I think it went well. I’m a little nervous about the article, as there is often a lot of misunderstanding or misconceptions about baby-led weaning and I worry that I’ll be misquoted or something I said will be taken out of context. I don’t want to come across as this crazy mother who’s endangering her baby’s life to rebel against the baby food industry! When in reality I believe baby-led weaning is safer than spoon feeding and allows Meredith to control her own intake of food and decide for herself when she’s full or hungry. Overall though, the reporter was really friendly and nice, and seemed very open. I’m really looking forward to how it turns out.

Today a photographer came to take Meredith’s picture for the article. She was really nice and great with Meredith. Very understanding of the fact that she is fifteen months old and sometimes has her own agenda. Actually, Meredith has been eating a lot more solids all of a sudden the last couple of days, so it worked out well as she was more than willing to sit and eat while having her picture taken. (She’s been nursing a lot more too, as can be evidenced by that fact I’ve gained a cup size or two in the last week lol! She must be going through a growth spurt.)

At one point while watching Meredith eating yogurt with a spoon, the photographer said: “Parents don’t give their kids enough credit”, which I think is so true. We have video of Meredith feeding herself with a spoon at ten months old. It was a little messier than it is now, but no more messier than any spoon feeding I’ve witnessed. Especially when the kid is being tricked into opening his or her mouth so the parent can shovel more food in, while the kid tries to spit it out. I have video of her first time eating soup too, around 11 months, though that was messy haha. She seems to find it a lot easier now that the spoon fits in her mouth a little easier. We never “taught” her to use a spoon. We just gave her a spoon (or a fork depending on what we were eating) and let her experiment on her own. Below is the soup video.

The photographer also commented I was brave giving her glasses and ceramic dishes to eat out of, but she’s probably broken less dishes since she started using them than Kris or I have. We did use some plastic that had been given to us for a brief time when she was enjoying throwing it on the floor, but by the time she actually started eating she was well past that phase and is quite careful with any dishes we give her.

Anyway, I’ll definitely post the article here when it comes out. I’m looking forward to it! I don’t think I’ve ever been in the newspaper before.

Related posts:

1. Bye-bye mush. So long, strained carrots.
2. Baby-Led Weaning
3. Natural Age of Weaning

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
-Chinese Proverb

I read somewhere once that children are redirected or told no on average every nine seconds. Now, I have no idea how this stat came to be, because how would you study that? But anyway, it’s an interesting thought nonetheless. Imagine being at work and having your boss tell you you’re doing it wrong or trying to show you how to do it better every nine seconds. I think most of us would go insane and/or quit pretty quickly.

We wanted to avoid having to be constantly saying no to Meredith, but more and more babyproofing seemed like the wrong direction to go too. We don’t have baby gates even though we have stairs, only a few of our outlets have the little safety things in them (and Meredith can pull them out easier than I can anyway, since I don’t have nails), our stereo equipment is at ground level, and we don’t have locks on our cupboard doors. I kept meaning to babyproof, I felt that not doing so was a recipe for disaster. But as time went on, it started to seem so unnecessary.

So how to avoid saying no while still keeping Meredith and our belongings safe and not excessively baby proofing? It’s actually really simple. We let her learn what to do while remaining nearby in case we’re needed. We make sure we’re very aware of where she is and what she’s doing, as well as anything around her that could be dangerous (or that she could be too rough with without meaning to).

The stairs are a perfect example. She started crawling at 6 months and was interested in the stairs right away. We let her experiment on them as much as she wanted and were right nearby in case of a fall, especially at first. And she did fall a few times, though she never hurt herself as we would catch her and comfort her if needed and then she would normally want to try again. We didn’t push her to learn it, or try and set her on the stairs every day, or move her arms and legs through the motions to try and teach her how, we just let her go at her own pace and figure it out on her own. She learned pretty quickly how to get up the stairs and rarely fell. (The video is of her around 6 1/2 months, but it’s not a great video because I’m spotting her while I film.) Around 8 months she figured out how to get down the stairs (again, on her own).

I think for me, the biggest problem with baby proofing is that it doesn’t teach a child how to handle a situation should the baby proofing fail. What if you forgot to put the baby gate up but assumed it was there? Or your child can pull outlet covers out? Or you left your glasses on the table where your child can reach them? I’m of the opinion that it is much safer to rely on your child and yourself to keep your child safe than to rely on devices that could be forgotten, break, or fail in some other way.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean I would give Meredith a knife and point her at an outlet and let her see what happens. And there are times when “no” or redirection are definitely appropriate. But telling her she can’t touch our DVD player when she sees us using it frequently just makes it seem even more desirable to her. Instead, letting her play with the buttons while being supervised, explaining that food and drinks shouldn’t be near it, and helping her discover how it works keep it safe while honoring her desire to participate in something she sees us doing. Now we can ask her to turn it on or off for us if she’s nearby, and she has figured out the volume controls as well. My parents tell stories about sandwiches ending up in their VCR. We have shown Meredith how to put DVD’s in the player and she doesn’t seem to have any desire to put anything else in there. My belief is that kids do things like putting sandwiches in VCR’s because they see us putting things in and want to do what we do, not because they’re trying to cause trouble or make us mad.

This can be applied to all sorts of situations. I feel it’s far better to let children explore and learn at their own pace, giving them information or guidance only as needed. In doing so, I’ve discovered that she’s surprisingly gentle with books, careful with dishes, and she will even clean up after herself after playing with water on the floor. There are things, like my expensive camera, that I don’t want her playing with. But if I leave my camera in her reach and she finds it, even then I don’t immediately wrench it out of her grasp. I’ll ask her for it, and often she will hand it to me and go on with something else. The times when she really wants to play with it, I will sit her on my lap and let her put the lens cap on and off or press some buttons while I watch, and then when she’s bored I put it up out of the way and make a mental note to myself not to leave it in her reach again.

When my instinct is to say no or stop something Meredith is doing, I try and ask myself why and then look for ways to allow her to continue while relieving my own worries (or, in some cases, just realizing that my concerns are a gut reaction that may not even be true). Is it because I don’t want her to make a mess? If I’m really adverse to cleaning up a mess at that time, maybe I could relocate what she’s doing to the bathtub or into the sink. (Though honestly, mostly I don’t mind the messes at all.) Am I worried she will hurt herself? Is there some way I can make it safer? etc.

Helping children discover how to handle themselves in various situations is better in the long run than just trying to avoid those situations until some abitrary age in the future when the children are “old enough”. And when they’re allowed to explore and shown how to safely use these things, it means they’re less likely to damage something or hurt themselves later on when faced with a similar situation.

Related posts:

1. La Teta: to give the breast is to give life
2. Thoughts on Chores
3. A video & an addendum

I have to say, after watching it, that while I do follow what he says for Meredith, as far as being respectful, assuming her intentions are good, and realizing that she doesn’t always understand what I want and isn’t just trying to push my buttons, I certainly don’t always follow it with my dog.

Now don’t get me wrong. Dogs and kids are two very different creatures. Dogs do have a hierarchy and I think that while Dr Dunbar discusses all the similarities in raising each, there are a lot of differences too. And I’m not sure how to apply his methods to aggression or chasing the cat. I mean, I can’t ask her to sit and then reward her by letting her chase the cat. But it certainly has me thinking a bit more on what is working with her, and what isn’t. And I know yelling when she chases the cat doesn’t work. Locking her in the kennel when she’s aggressive may work in the short term (in that she doesn’t try to eat my friends when they visit), but it certainly doesn’t change anything.

Really I’d like to have her on a leash at all times, and be able to give her feedback constantly about what she’s doing and help her see what she should be doing, rather than telling her what she shouldn’t be doing without giving her any alternatives. It’s hard when I also have a 14 month old though. I’ve been trying to keep her with me more. The problem is that when she’s off leash again, it seems like she forgets anything I did with her while she was on the leash. It’s something I’m going to have to think about and keep trying new things and try to find something that works. I need to recognize when something really isn’t working and stop doing it over and over again, especially since that’s a parenting style that I really don’t like either. Plus, just like in parenting, all it does to punish a behaviour without giving options is stop a behaviour while you’re around, but the behaviour probably continues when we’re away.

Lastly, I want Meredith to grow up knowing to treat everyone with respect, regardless of size, age, race, species, etc. I want that to extend to pets, and while I think I treat my animals with a lot more love and respect than many people, it’s definitely an area where I could improve.

In other news, I am planning on probably creating a private section of the blog for discussing certain things that are a little more personal. For those who use RSS readers, I don’t think private posts would show up there, but I probably won’t have many anyway. You would need an account to see them. Unfortunately, the way our server is set up, you can’t create your own account for the blog. But if you’d like an account, let me know what you want your user name to be and what your e-mail address is and I can set one up with a generic password that you could then change to whatever you wanted it to be. Let me know who you are too if it’s not obvious already.

Related posts:

1. Introducing our new dog
2. Sleep Training Guide for the Infant
3. A video & an addendum

Meredith has been enjoying helping to dress herself for a while now.  I kind of wish I’d taken more notice on when it started, not that it matters but I like to write things like that down in her baby book.  Probably before she turned a year, but getting so much more lately.  She will go and find her shoes and then hold them to her feet or hand them to me to help her put them on.  She lifts up her feet one at a time as I put them on.  She will bring me pants too, and will stand and lift her legs one at a time while I slip them on.  She also knows to put her arms through arm holes in shirts.  A couple of weeks ago, I started to put a shirt on her and she cried and pulled at it.  I took it off again, and she went and found a different shirt and handed it to me and quite happily let me put that one on.  She’s already picking out her own clothes!  She is showing some independence here too, as she sometimes doesn’t appreciate our help.  She spent about 20 minutes one morning with a pair of socks, examining them, finding the hole, trying to slip them on her feet.  She almost got one on, and I reached over to slip the last little edge around, and she yanked her foot and the sock away from me and started all over again.  Silly me!

She’s signalling more when she needs to go pee, but still definitely not consistently.  She wears the ecaPants we got around the house mostly now, but I still put her in diapers, or at least a wool cover/longies, when we go out.  However, she has learned a signal for when her diaper is wet, which is patting her hip, and is getting pretty consistent with that.  We just started patting our hips this past week when we asked her if she needed her diaper changed, and she’s caught on really quickly.  She obviously knows when her diaper is wet/dirty, so I’m hoping that will extend to her doing it before she needs to go too.

Speaking of signs, she made up her own sign.  I still haven’t quite figured out what it means.  At first I thought maybe it was her own sign for milk, even though she’s been using the ASL sign for it since she was about 6 months old.  But I think maybe it means “more” now.  Mostly she uses it when she’s nursing or wants to nurse, but she wants to play with the other breast while she’s nursing.  But she did do it once on the swing when I asked her if she wanted to swing some more.  What she does is tap her index finger into the open palm of her other hand.  I feel kind of bad that I don’t know exactly what she means by it, but I may never know.  At least I’m aware she has a sign that means she needs something, and can respond.  I’ve been trying to sign a lot to her.  We have a deaf cousin, so I’d like her to learn sign language at least enough to be able to communicate, since I’m close to my cousins and we see them a few times a year.  I’m trying to get Kris to learn some signs to do with her too, but I know it’s hard to remember to do them.  I think once she catches on, she will probably learn them pretty quickly.

Two signs she has learned in the past couple of weeks that she uses a lot now are shaking her head for no and nodding for yes.  I think though that sometimes she shakes her head no when she means yes still.  But it’s really handy to be able to ask her something and have her tell me for sure yes or no!  I think at first she shook her head (or bobbled it really) because she thought it was funny, but she caught on pretty quick that she could communicate by doing so too. 

She has discovered the park in our complex, and has fallen in love with it.  She will go get shoes/pants and then head to the door and stand waiting patiently (or not so patiently at times ) for us to get our own shoes on and follow her there.  Sometimes we go out the back way, and there is a forest behind our house with tons of blackberry bushes.  As we walk to the park, she wants to stop and pick blackberries.  Lately she doesn’t want us to pick one for her, she wants to do it herself.  She will grab on to one and squeeze as she pulls, which usually results in the berry bursting and purple juice flying everywhere.  I’m not sure any of us own clothes anymore that aren’t stained purple.

Another really cute thing she’s taken to doing lately is sitting on the bottom step.  She will take a sock, or a sippy cup, paper, a toy, really anything she’s semi-interested in, and toddle to the stairs, and plop herself down on the bottom one or the second from bottom.  And then just sit and play.  I think maybe they are the perfect height for her to sit comfortably right now?  I actually set up table and chairs that my mom had bought for her.  They say they’re for three and up, but I don’t listen well.  She can get up on the chairs herself but I think they’re still a little tall, but the chair itself is small enough that she sometimes finds it hard to get herself positioned comfortably.  The stairs are much shorter but there’s lots of room for her to sit.

We bought her crayons for her birthday.  At first they were just yummy food, but she will colour with them now.  She doesn’t have a ton of interest in them yet, but she’ll sit for a few minutes and scribble.  She also loves the little keyboard that used to be my grandfather’s (though she sits on it to play it) and the bigger keyboard that was my uncle’s (which she actually uses with her hands).  She will go to one or the other and point and yell until we turn it on for her.  I’m trying to show her how to do that herself, but she hasn’t quite caught on to the smaller one (it’s a sliding button), and the bigger one she can turn off but can’t quite push hard enough to get it on yet.  We have noticed since she was quite young that she seems very aware of music and seems to enjoy it.  She loves to dance and occasionally even sings a bit.  She seems to actually sing/dance with the beats for the most part too.

Lastly, she is teething big time.  Remember a couple of months ago when I said she’d cut a second tooth?  I lied.  That tooth came through a bit, but then disappeared.  I don’t know if the tooth actually goes backward, or if it stops coming and the gums end up growing back over, or what.  As a biologist (at heart at least), I really can’t quite wrap my brain around why that would happen physiologically, but anyway.  She had one tooth for a long time, then suddenly she has 5 teeth coming in.  That bottom one I thought was through is still coming through, and the four top front teeth.  The two on the sides at the top are the furthest through, with one having already cut through.  I’m thinking this amber teething necklace we got has to be doing something now, because though she’s had some very fussy nights/days, except for one instance none of them have been anything as intense as the first tooth coming through, and that was only one tooth.

Related posts:

1. Life in a nutshell
2. More on TV and life learning
3. Update

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!)

Related posts:

1. Give a child a fish…
2. Consensual Living
3. Guest post on NPN

I just stumbled on this beautiful video today, a PSA from Puerto Rica. I wish things like this would be shown in North America, to show breastfeeding as something normal and natural and to show breasts as something other than sexual.

Related posts:

1. Give a child a fish…
2. Natural Age of Weaning
3. More on TV and life learning