Knitted in the Womb Notes

Now how ironic is this?

2007-04-06T00:20:00.000-07:00

As anyone who has ever lived with me can attest (and I've had many roommates over the years--filling out the criminal background check paperwork for church is insane), my biggest housecleaning nemisis is papers. Everywhere, they are just everywhere.

And I married a man with the same problem. Add us together, and yes, now it bugs me. Particularly those darned newspapers that MUST hang out around the house for at least a week before being read.

So, ahem...I accepted a job working for a newspaper.

Now that's irony. ;-)

Don't mess with the mommies...

2007-02-08T06:21:00.000-08:00

You've heard it said "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."

Well in this case, the woman scorned was a mom...and...well...she certainly did manage quite a change from "corporate America." LOL!

http://thelactivist.blogspot.com/2007/02/well-done-pork.html

Spanking isn't harmful?

2007-01-11T21:21:00.000-08:00

For those who say that spanking never killed a kid...

Boy, 4, frightened of spanking, dies in fire

Now I have no idea how severe the "spankings" were in this household. But this is just tragic. I've pointed out before that the threat of a spanking might actually induce a child to sin...I'd never contemplated that it could to lead to a child refusing help to leave a burning building.

Previous posts on my blog about parenting:

Hey...it's my 2 year anniversary!

2007-01-11T20:30:00.000-08:00

I made my first post 2 years ago today! I was posting then with marvel at my 4th child's upcoming first birthday.

The progression of "1st birthdays" really is funny.

1st child--we planned a party at least 2 months in advance, inviting "great aunts" and out of town family & friends. I was up until 2 or 3 a.m. decorating an "ABC Blocks" theme birthday cake. We made up votive candles with her picture on them as favors.
2nd child--we had a comfortable picnic in the backyard with a few close family members and friends. I was up until 2 or 3 a.m. decorating a "Circus" theme cake--complete with animal crackers. Favors????
3rd child--A week before the party we remembered to invite Nana (unfortunately Poppop was in the hospital with his first bout with cancer). I recycled the "ABC Blocks" theme for a cake, and probably spent less time decorating it than the first cake--fewer icing colors. We had 3 guests.
4th child--The day of the birthday I stopped at the grocery store over lunch and picked up the free "First Birthday Cake." I think Nana might have come...I don't remember.

Today we are looking forward to his 3rd birthday. He peed on the potty for the first time today--much to his own amazement and his mom's happiness. Maybe a day with no diaper changing is coming soon?

5 Point Harnesses a la You-Tube

2006-12-06T19:59:00.000-08:00

So have you seen the You-Tube video about the importance of 5 point harnesses on carseats? It seems to be doing quite the rounds these days. In case you haven't seen it, here it is:

Importance of a 5-Point Harness Carseat

As a mother of 4 children I certainly understand the importance of proper restraint of our most precious cargo. As a certified child passenger safety technician...this one is "preaching to the choir." I hope that the video inspires some people to better restrain their children (could we play it on jumbo screen TV's downtown???). My children have all rear-faced until they were nearly 2 years old because that is the safest position in the car. Katie--who turned 6 in June--still rides in a 5 point harness carseat. A seat that is tethered by way of a tether anchor that I had added to our mini-van after purchase (Ford will put these in your Ford vehicle FREE of charge!) Of course she's only 37 lbs...LOL!

The video mentions one of the problems with small children using lap-shoulder belts too soon--they tend to put the shoulder belt behind them or under their arm. However, they miss one problem with small children that many parents over-look. Some parents--in a desire to spend less time buckling their kids in--rush to teach their children to buckle themselves in. But kids don't always do a very good job of completely latching the buckle. I'll have to admit--that is the first thing that came to my mind when I watched that video--did that little boy buckle himself in? And if so, was the female end of the buckle just loosely resting in the male end, such that it easily came out? I don't know--they say they consulted experts who confirm that the seat was buckled in--which to me would indicate stress patterns were on the booster and/or vehicle buckle. I do know that in the 80's there was a problem with some seatbelts that if your elbow hit them just right they would pop open--and people died because of that. The quote they had about Buick seatbelts was strangly familiar to me--perhaps from the Reader's Digest article that I read several years ago talking about that issue from the 80's?

Okay...I'm going to be a bit "controversial" here.

The "100% effective" that they kept flashing in that video really annoyed me. Carseats are NOT 100% effective in eliminating death, even when used appropriately--some crashes are unsurvivable. It is simply a false expectation that a 5 point carseat will prevent *all* motor vehicle deaths. A rear-facing seat with a 5 point harness reduces the risk of death by 71% over being completely unrestrained, a forward facing 5 point harness reduces the risk of death by 54%, and over all carseats reduce the risk of hospitalization by 69% over being unrestrained. These statistics assume that the restraints are properly fitted and used (which, ahem, the picture of the older sister in the Britax seat illustrates misuse--the harness is visually too loose)--but even with that, you can see that it isn't a 100% reduction.

I went ahead and visited on the "in memory of" website that a link was posted to in that video. There I was able to read a bit more details about the crash. I really wanted to see some photos of the vehicle, but unfortunately, they did not post them.

What I gathered from reading that site is that this was a side impact crash. They were crossing an intersection with a yellow flashing light in their direction and a red flashing light in the crossing direction.

Side impact crashes are among the most deadly because you have very little "crush zone" between the point of impact and passengers. Though they account for only 25% of crashes, they result in 50% of traffic fatalities.

The mom saw the car coming at her and tried to warn her husband--who was driving--too late. There is no indication of how clear the intersection was as far as being able to view approaching traffic as you drive into it. Was there a blind curve near the intersection that the intersecting car popped out of after the dad looked? I don't know because it isn't stated--but I suspect that any "excuses" for the dad's failure to see this approaching vehicle would have been presented in the story.

The mom--who was seated in the front passenger seat--had minimal injuries, thus leading me to conclude that the incursion occurred further back in the vehicle--near the boy. I would expect to see some significant incursion into the vehicle at the point of the crash, but as I said, no pictures were posted.

The crash occurred at 45 m.p.h.Vehicle seat belts are only crash tested at 30 m.p.h.--as are child safety seats, so this crash involved speeds a full 150% of the speed the buckles are designed to sustain. I would speculate that during the incursion the booster seat was literally pushed sideways, straining the buckle latch until it popped. This would have happened with a 5 point seat as well--perhaps even one that was secured with LATCH. In fact, it may have happened faster because the Britax seat they reccommend is much wider than the Turbo booster they were using.

Due to centrifugal force, as the vehicle started to roll the booster and child were thrown out the window next to where the child was seated. Had a 5 point seat instead been tethered down it would have likely stayed in the vehicle because of being tethered and/or because of being too big to go out the window, but swung around as the vehicle rolled. Very likely it would have struck a fatal blow to the sister sitting on the driver's side of the vehicle. Kyle may also have still died as he may have sustained "battering" injuries as his seat was tossed around.

Do I support extended use of 5 point carseats? YES! My daughter who turned 6 in June still uses one, as does my son who turn 5 in February, and my son who turns 3 in January. My "just turned 8" year old daughter used a harnessed seat past her 5th birthday--until she was 40 lbs. She still uses a booster, and will for quite a while since she is only 50 lbs and our mini-van does not have head rests.I just can't support that they will ALWAYS prevent death.

A more protective measure in this case would have been the dad slowing down as he approached the intersection--which had a flashing yellow light (generally these are installed after someone has died at that intersection) to take the time to cautiously look in both directions for approaching traffic. I was taught in driver's ed that you should be able to stop for a yellow light if you see approaching traffic--that you should not proceed through the intersection until you have determined that there is no cross traffic, even if the cross traffic has a stop light, yet obviously this dad did not do this.

As another note, on the "in memory of" website, the parents reccommend using side curtain airbags with child safety seats. While this is a noble reccommendation of them, this pairing has not been crash tested, and thus if you do it, you are using your child as a crash test dummy. Air bags and carseats do not always make a good mix--as it demonstrated by the fact that there is no recorded instance of a standard airbag going off in a seating location with a rearfacing seat and the child is not killed.

So anyway...80-90% of carseats are installed or used incorrectly. In all of the carseat checks I have been at, I have *never* checked a seat that did not have errors that could put the children at risk. One seat came close--the only error was in how the tether strap was threaded--but the parents had not changed the threading from how it was when they got the seat from the Health Dept (their son had broken his leg and needed a special seat). Since the seat didn't have the directions with it (GGGRRRR!!!!), they had no idea it was mis-threaded.

So bottom line...we do our best. PLEASE--keep your kids in a harnessed carseat if at all possible until they are 40 lbs or 4 years old--which ever comes LAST. After that...if you can get a seat with a higher weight limit on the harness, that is great. But if you can't--use a booster until they can sit properly with just the vehicle seat belt--which might mean you need to use a booster until your child is 11 or 12 years old. But don't feel guilty if you can't afford a $250 Britax carseat. And please--get a check done for any of your carseats--just schedule an appointment. It takes just 20 minutes per seat.

Government and its role in keeping people in poverty

2006-11-05T16:56:00.000-08:00

A while back some aquaintances of mine told me that their apartment had been broken into, and several hundred dollars stolen. Loosing this kind of money is difficult for anyone, but particularly to this couple. They suffer from mental delays, and survive on the husband's minimum wage part-time job at Walmart (where he is really abused--but Walmart's despicable treatment of employees is a whole 'nother post!), the wife's part time house cleaning job, and minimal government benefits. I have to admit, I wondered why in the world they--of all people--would have several hundred dollars stashed in a file cabinet in their apartment.

The wife later told me that they were trying to save money to buy a small house. It still didn't make sense to me why the money wasn't in a bank--I knew they had a bank account--but not wanting to pry, I didn't ask.

Some time later I figured it out--at least I think I did. They received food stamps, something they desparately needed due to their low income earning potential. But in order to get food stamps they have to have less than $2000 in assets. This includes owning a house or any type of retirement savings. So in order to save that down payment for a house (I wonder if they knew buying the house would result in loosing the food stamps?), they had to do it "under the mattress" so to speak, so that they had no assets on the books.

Now I know there is all kinds of controversy about government benefits, and people who are capable of work but sit around and collect benefits. But there are some people that really can use a helping hand. This couple was a perfect example. They work hard, but there is no way they can even make a "living" wage. These people are the result of "mainstreaming" of the mentally disabled population--30 years ago they would have been housed in a state hospital, hidden from public view. Today we try to allow them to live normal lives with a little bit of government assistance...and in the case of this couple, they found love and even have a child together. And in their attempt to live the American dream...the very government that is supposedly helping them is keeping them enslaved to poverty.

It doesn't stop there of course. My sister has a learning disability, so like this couple, she receives government benefits to help her make ends meet. Recently my husband and I moved her from the state where she and I had lived as adolescents and where she has been in an "assisted living" program for the last 12 years, to live in the state I live in--to our town so that she could live close to family.

Trying to transition her government benefits has been a nightmare, to say the least. The Public Housing Authority (PHA) in her previous home failed to tell her of forms that needed to be completed before they could transfer her case to the PHA in my town. The result of this is that her lease at her old apartment ended on October 15, but as of this past Friday, the PHA in my town still did not have all of the necessary paper work to open her case.

The really crazy thing we found out was that she could not get "permission" to move until her last month's rent was paid at her old apartment. Even if the paperwork had been promptly filed by the PHA where she used to live...she would have been unable to sign a lease for a new apartment until-at best-less than a week before her lease on her old apartment had run out. Of course this is assuming that she had a new apartment waiting in the wings despite not have "permission" to look for one yet--and that the PHA inspector would inspect it and approve of it the same day...which of course we would not expect them to do.

Fortunately my husband and I are her landlords...so we let her move into the one bedroom house we bought for her without having a signed lease. Of course this is a problem...after having been told my the PHA office where my sister used to live that there shouldn't be a problem with her renting from us, we found out less than a week before she was scheduled to move that she isn't allowed to use HUD benefits to rent a house owned by her parent, sibling, grandparent, or child. It never says anything about "in-laws" in the code, so we kind of hoped that if we just put the property in my husband's name, we could get away with that. But the "nice" lady at the local PHA office is over-interpretting the code, saying even if the property were owned by a cousin or uncle, it still wouldn't be allowed--even though the code specifically names the family relations I listed first, not a general description like "any first degree relative" or "any blood relative." Huh? They would rather she rent from some slum-lord in center city than rent a nice little house in a nice neighborhood from her family? It's not like we are making a profit off of this! Should I mention that I describe this PHA employee as "nice" only in the most sarcastic of tones, and that she had a sign on her door the day I met her that read "the witch is in." There is wording in the code about a possible exemption if the recipient of HUD benefits has a disability that the property is uniquely able to accomodate--so we are hoping to get by with that.

So anyway...my point in this whole long tirade about the Public Housing Authority is to say that this is why people who receive HUD benefits get "stuck" in substandard living conditions--they can't afford to move out because they know they will have a lag in getting their benefits transferred.

And it's not just in moving that HUD keeps people in poverty. The way HUD works is that they determine what the "fair market price" for renting a particular size unit is, and that is what they set the benefit level at. The amount that they will pay for a person's apartment is decreased by one third of their income.

Now I agree with the concept that the HUD benefit should be related to the income a person makes--a person making more should not get so much of a benefit. But one third of their income? Most people budget 25% of their income to rent, not 30%. So we are taking the poorest segment of our society, and expecting them to spend a larger percentage of their income on housing that is generally of lower quality than the rest of the population would accept. This leaves them with less money to possibly save to help dig themselves out of the rental situation.

Then there is the problem of getting employment. Most employers are not exactly jumping up and down waving to disabled people and saying "PLEASE, come work at MY company!" No...they hire disabled workers because the government gives them tax breaks for doing it. But in order to get the tax break, the employee needs to have a "job coach." Well my sister had one in the state she used to live in. She worked for a Wegmans grocery store where she used to live, and because she had good job evaluations, they told her they would have no problem giving her a job at the store in my town. We spoke with the HR manager at my local store in June about this, and he confirmed that he would give her a job.

Well on September 29 my sister and her advocate made a visit down to talk to the PHA folks and the folks at Wegmans, and we ran into a couple of snags. First of all, there was a new HR manager at Wegmans, and she knew nothing about my sister (did I mention that my sister didn't do the communications with Wegmans that she was supposed to be doing concerning her move?). She was fine with hiring her, but she explained that Cindy needed to have a job coach first so that the store would not miss out on their tax break.

Well supposedly stuff was being put in the works to transfer her job coaching needs to my state. But when I called the job coaching office following the news from Wegmans, they told me that though they had her application, because she had not put her specific new address on it, she had not yet been assigned a job coach. Giving my address and saying she was moving to my town was not enough. She hadn't put an address on the application because we still didn't have approval from the folks at HUD, so weren't sure if she was going to move into the house or not... Not only that, but they had not even contacted her existing job coach to get her files.

So anyway...the job coaching folks told me that they would "fast track" her request especially since her coaching needs are minimal--and certainly would call me soon to schedule her first meeting with a job coach. I had the impression that "soon" would be early the following week. I gave them the phone number of her existing job coach, who they said they would contact. That was Friday, October 6. The following week I played phone tag with that job coach, and when I got in touch with him (I think it was about Oct 16 before we actually spoke), he told me that no one from the office in my area had contacted him yet, so he hadn't sent out files. I played phone tag again with the local office--as did my sister's old job coach. Grrr... I finally got a call from the local office during the last week of October.

So my sister finally had an appointment on Nov 1 that we THOUGHT was with her job coach. Turned out that it was an intake interview...and they still didn't have all the necessary paperwork from her old job coach to "officially" determine that she is eligible for coaching--never mind that she has previously been approved in this state for job coaching by the exact same agency (in another city--but same agency). Oh, it could be another 4-6 weeks before she is even assigned a job coach. Keep in mind that her last day of work was October 5. So she's looking at an excess of a 2 month lag in employment. She's been putting in applications without the aid of job coaching, but so far has been unsuccessful in finding alternate employment.

The latest problematic area I have found is in Social Security Disability payments--SSD. My sister gets SSD. $611 a month. This is a very helpful part of her income. But my husband and I had hoped--as part of moving her near to us--to encourage her a bit toward independence. One of our specific goals is to get her working full time. We acknowledge that this will be difficult--and will most likely require her to work two separate jobs at barely over minimum wage.

The unfortunate snag that we have had thrown in the works of this is that we just learned that if she earns over $900 per month for 9 months (not necessarily consequetively), she looses the SSD benefit. There is no "if she earns over $900 a month she looses 50% of the amount over $900." She looses ALL of it.

Well at minimum wage, she would need to work nearly 25 hours a week to replace that $611. Oh...except that as her income goes up, her HUD payment goes down. So really, to replace that $611 plus the lost HUD benefits, she needs to earn $925 at minimum wage, which is about 35 hours a week--not even considering that by earning more money she might get put into a different tax bracket and loose more of her income to taxes. She currently works 20 hours a week--so she would need to work a combined total of 55 hours per week to have a paycheck that would equal the government benefits she is currently receiving. And keep in mind that because of her income, she relies on public transportation, so often encounters commute times of up to 2 hours one way, even for a simple cross-town commute. Given that her work shifts are often 6 hours or less, she could easily spend an additional 20 hours per week commuting.

So bottom line...is it really realistic to expect her to be able to replace that SSD payment by working? Is it any wonder that people who receive government benefits like this are "content" to just collect benefits and not work? If they do work, they loose their benefits, but it is very hard to earn more than their benefits will provide by working. So by receiving SSD she is essentially being capped at an earning potential of $10,800 per year--just $1000 over the poverty level as defined by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Which I find to be an absolutely unrealistic figure...because I remember how it was to struggle to make ends meet when I graduated from college in 1994 and was making $25,000 a year. 12 years later, less than half of that is supposed to suffice???? Granted...that $10,800 is just what she earns by working...her combined government benefits bring her highest possible total income to about $22,000--close to $25,000, right? Except that adjusting for inflation means that the $25,000 I made while single was nearly $32,000 in 2005.

Yep...she's coming out about $600 a month shy of the income that I had trouble making ends meet at--and I wasn't living an extravagant life.

Sigh. Ultimately, I think that we will encourage her to find a job that will put her over that $900 limit. Because really and truly, living independent of government "help" will be the best thing for her. But for now, we will tread carefully, and fully weigh our options before we put her in a position where she looses government benefits that she so much needs.

What could I possibly gain from having a foreskin?

2006-10-30T12:03:00.000-08:00

Okay...I personally wouldn't gain much from having one, because I'm female...but it is a question that many men ask when they are considering whether or not to have their sons circumcized. It goes like this:

"One of my arguments [about why our son should not be circumcized] was the same as your statement above...."loss of function". However, my dh (dear husband) was unmovable with that. He has lived with his penis being circ'd his whole life and doesn't feel he has any "loss of function."

I've never done this before...but my hubby has...I'm going to "borrow" an entire post from someone else. It is just so funny...I have to. KWIM? So here it is...one person's response to the statement above when it was made on the Circumcision Debate disscussion board at Parents Place.

You know, If our DH's based any other decision on such faulty reasoning we would smack them upside the head with a 2x4, but since it's circumsion it suddenly makes sense?
It's like someone is going to give us a brand new Lexus. But DH says, "No Thanks! I had a Lexus once and my KIA Sephia is so much nicer. Drives better than a Lexus. No way I'd get one of those."
And then we remind him, "Honey, that Lexus was stolen out of the driveway before you even got the chance to drive it. How do you know the KIA Sephia is just as nice?"
"I just know! I'm glad that Lexus was stolen before I got to drive it. Probably saved me a lot of trouble. And by golly, I'm going to make sure our son has a KIA instead of a Lexus too!"
"Hold still honey, I don't want to miss with this 2x4."
But when it's cutting up our sons genitals, he must now what he's talking about, right?
Sheesh.
Terri

Natural Labor Induction--Dinner and a Date

2006-10-27T06:52:00.000-07:00

So often when I talk to women in the last weeks of pregnancy, what I hear is a recollection of all the "natural" methods they have tried to induce labor. And frankly, I find this disturbing.

I have to admit, the most after my due date that I've gone with any of my 4 pregnancies was 2 days...and I was in denial that I was in labor when it started because "I'm not having this baby for another week--I have things to do!" And each pregnancy there after I birthed at 39 weeks on the dot, so with the exception of the 4th I was still repeating the same mantra as labor started "I'm not having this baby for another week--I have things to do!" By the 4th I had accepted my reality, and predicted the birth date 2-3 months in advance.

So anyway, bottom line...I've not been one to eagerly pursue induction (though I was induced with my second--water broke but no labor). But I've also not gone through the waiting many women experience when they go past their "best before date." Oh, wait, that's an "ESTIMATED due date!" I can't really say if I wouldn't be in the "what can I do to get this baby out?" camp if I did go much past my due date. But the thing I find most disturbing is the women who are starting the natural induction techniques as early as 37 weeks.

Just because it is "natural" does not mean that it is "risk free," which I think is a distinction that many people fail to make. Poison Ivy, Oak, and Sumac are all natural. So is a bite from a Viper. Blue and Black cohashes have been linked to heart problems in the infant. Castor oil can cause the baby to pass meconium in utero. (Note: It has been pointed out to me that many midwives dispute this notion linking castor oil to meconium. I don't know of any research one way or the other...so for now I'll drop that from my list of "known" side effects and just stick with the annoyance of running to the bathroom over and over and over...) Nipple stimulation and walking really don't seem to work to induce labor so moms may needlessly tire/discourage themselves trying these methods (but they can be very effective for augmenting labor). Most importantly, if the natural method does trigger labor a few days sooner than it would have started on its own, who is to say that the baby is quite ready yet? Or the mom's body? My own experience with having my membranes stripped in my first pregnancy (without my consent) was that I had a very long labor--I think in part because my body was not quite ready to labor yet. There were other factors too, but I think that one was high on the list.

So when moms ask my opinion on labor induction, my first advice is that they try to hang in there...the average nulipara (woman who hasn't given birth before) will be pregnant for 41 weeks 1 day, while the average multipara goes to 40 weeks 3 days. So for many women, they are stressing about being "late" when they haven't even reached the average gestation for their situation. Further, for there to be averages, some moms have to go even longer than that.

Beyond that, I encourage moms--really and truly--to QUIT trying to start labor. Try to take their minds off the question of "will I EVER have this baby???" I know..hard to do. With my 4th pregnancy I experienced for the first time being tired of being pregnant...and I was only 6 months along--LOL!

But seriously, adrenaline, created from stress, can inhibit labor. So I think that trying to relax and just giving the whole "I've got to get labor going!" thing a break may be very helpful.

I encourage moms to take a day weekend for some pampering. If she has older kids, she might want to get them involved in this, though she should use her own judgement on whether they would relax her, or keep her "on the ready." Anyway...I encourage mom to take a nice long soak in a tub complete with dim lighting, scented candles, and some soft music. When she gets out, perhaps the kids can have heated towels waiting, and maybe they could have been preparing the master bedroom to be a haven while mom was bathing--putting fresh sheets on the bed, setting up a light snack and some candles, music, and dim lighting. Mom should enjoy the snack. Let the kids (if they can do it well) give a foot massage. Let partner give a full body massage (kick the kiddos out of the room for this of course--LOL!). If the massage leads to something...hey, go for it. But if it doesn't--mom shouldn't stress herself and think "I need to have sex, it might kick start labor."

Mom should then take a nap. A nice, long, deliciously decadant one. One of those ones that mom wakes up feeling kind of like a cat who was basking in sunlight, and wonders with thankful amazement at how the kids didn't wake her up (because they were sent outside or to friends to play, or DH kept them busy reading books).

When she wakes up, her kind hubby will have dinner ready for her (yes, he will, mom should let him know that is his job. ;-), or will have made arrangements to take mom to a restaraunt that makes her feel relaxed & pampered. This is not the time for a buffet or fast food (unless you want to have DH bring Boston Market food home to eat by candle-light--that is yummy!). Mom should let someone else serve her.

Mom can tuck the kids into bed to get those nice maternal hormones going. ;-) Then more massaging if she is in the mood--at the very least, a nice cup of chamomile tea, and off to sleep early.

If calming down the adrenaline in her system allows labor to begin--GREAT! She is well rested for the task. And if it doesn't--GREAT! When is she going to get a chance to rest like that after the new baby comes? ;-) And taking the break will allow her to be more energized to pick back up on trying some way to give labor a kick start.

And that's it. It's worked for several of my clients. ;-)

Other posts on my blog about pregnancy:

News about birth...

2006-10-26T07:54:00.000-07:00

It's a busy, busy week when it comes to news about birth.

First, I simply must say, since I've so many times posted my frustrations about birth, that I recently attended a really great birth. The mom and the dad worked SO well together...it was one of those situations where, as a doula, at times I felt like I was intruding on a very private moment. But they wanted me there.

Mom worked SO well. Then she hit that classic "I can't do this anymore, I just want an epidural!" moment. I suspected transition because her water had just spontaneously ruptured, but didn't say that because she had been 5 cms barely an hour before. She had been able to be easily disuaded from an epidural an hour earlier, and I could see that wasn't happening at this point. So I did my "good doula" job, and started making suggestions to propell the nurses along in doing what they needed to do to get her ready for an epidural--suspecting all the while that it wasn't going to happen. But you know what needs to happen...getting that all important IV put in and running the bolus of fluids to prevent a drop in BP as a side effect of the epidural... Except that research shows that the bolus of fluids does NOTHING to prevent the drop in BP...but hey...

And what do you know, she was in transition. A few contractions later and I could hear it just as the nurse returned to the Jacuzzi room with the tray of stuff for putting in the IV--she was ready to push! It does amaze me sometimes how hospital staff don't know that sound, and they need to do a vaginal exam to verify. Or maybe they do know it, and like me, they aren't willing to say anything because if they are wrong it will be upsetting to the mom... I knew what they were going to find--baby's head was "right there!" Mom pushed for barely 15 minutes before holding her precious little girl in her arms.

Was really hysterical when a nurse--not the fabulous nurse who had been assigned to mom for her labor, but another of the myriad of hospital staff that showed up in the room for the "precipitous" birth--tried to convince her that she should lay down on her side to push to "utilize gravity." "What exactly about this position doesn't utilize gravity?" shot back the not-so-patient-at-that-moment mother. She was kneeling on the bed with her bum on her feet, back to the Dr, leaning slightly forward. Not exactly the most "OB friendly" position, but it was working for her. Nurse made up some cockamamy explaination about how the tailbone was UNDER the baby with the end of it running nearly parallel to the floor. Wished I had a model pelvis with me at that moment to show the nurse how it was currently oriented, and how the end of the tailbone was actually pointing straight down to the floor. Anyway...mom stayed where she was at and kept pushing.

I really do find it funny though...when mom is in a non-standard position that is really working, she is often encouraged by the hospital staff to switch to a "more productive" position--that is, one that is more conducive to the medical procedures they want to do. But if mom is in one of those "more conducive" positions, she is told how she is making great progress and should keep using this position, this is a fabulous position--even if she pushes for an hour in that position and doesn't make ANY change to the baby's station.

ANYWAY...this post is about Birth in the news...

National Public Radio did an interview this week with Tina Cassidy, the author of the new book "Birth: the suprising historyof how we are born." Among the many things discussed: baby'srotation, Dr. Bradley's contribution, midwifery and natural birth today. Definitely worth checking out.

Also in the news, the long awaited report on the 2nd "Listening to Mothers Survey" have been released. The news is not surprising to folks who advocate natural childbirth. They showed that no, women are not selecting cesarean with no medical cause in great numbers, despite recent media reports that attempt to blame the rapidly rising cesarean rate on "maternal request" cesareans. They also found that 4 out of 5 women who birth via cesarean reported pain at the site of their incision 2 months after the birth, and twice as many women who birthed via cesarean felt their post-operative pain interferred with daily life than did mothers who birthed vaginally. The survey further found a rather high use of interventions even in vaginal birth, including a 56% urinary catheter rate, 34% induction rate (35% of those for non-medical reasons), and 47% Pitocin useage rate.

This survey is definitely worth looking at if you are interested in birth information.

Fashion Free Zone

2006-10-26T07:08:00.000-07:00

My oldest daughter is turning 8 in a few days, and selected for her birthday the "Fashionista" themed party gear from Birthday Express.

I'm not sure if there is any connection at all here...but my six year old daughter, Katie, approached me the other night and told me that we have to get rid of all "fashion clothing." I was somewhat bemused. I try not to look too dreadfully out of style, but I'm not exactly a trend setter when it comes to clothing. ;-) I'm more of a "traditional basics" kind of girl. So I asked her what she meant.

Pointing to my shoes, she said "we can't have fashion. You need to get rid of those."

"Those" shoes were a pair of rather plain black loafers. These are shoes that while I find them to be "acceptable" for the office, when I'm wanting to look really put together, they are the flats that I wear for driving and walking across the parking lot, shedding them when I reach my desk for a more polished option.

If she wanted to pick a pair of my shoes that were "fashion," perhaps she could have selected my brown faux crocodile heels with the white stitching--a walk on the wild side for me, they always garner compliments. ;-) Or perhaps my black open back heels with the fun crisscrossing straps.

But she chose my very servicable loafers.

I never could get her to explain what was so wrong with "fashion" that we had to get rid of it. But I found her choice of what was "fashion" to be amusing.

Are weddings about family...or a formal ceremony?

2006-10-23T23:19:00.000-07:00

As an offshoot to a discussion about churches, one member of an e-mail list I'm on shared the following story:

Last Oct. when we were in Kansas for my Mom's wedding my oldest son (then 11) went to church with his cousins. (Ages, 7, 11 &14 at the time.) Right in the middle of the service the pastor stopped and said "Courtney H. (my 14 year old niece) turn off your cell phone and STOP text messaging while I am preaching!" Benjamin was shocked, appalled and embarrased that he has a cousin that would do such a thing! LOL I was impressed that the pastor would put a stop to it in the middle of service. Turns out she was text messaging the person behind her!

Okay...this is just SO much a touchy point right now! My husband has 2 older brothers. The oldest is actually a pastor, and performed my husband's and my wedding ceremony. The 3 brothers are close in age, but DH's older brothers got married right out of college, while my husband and I married just 11 days before he turned 36. So our four kids are significantly younger than their cousins.

June 2005 the middle brother's oldest son Doug announced his engagement with plans to marry in June 2007. We thought this long engagement was not a good idea...but hey...not our life... We later would find out that it was the bride's parents' idea--they wanted her to finish college before getting married, which I suppose I do agree with.

Anyway...This spring the oldest brother's oldest daughter Allie announced her engagement with plans to marry on December 16, 2006. Okay...not *exactly* when I want to be making time for a bridal shower and wedding, but I'm happy for her, and can understand the allure of a December wedding. :-)

In late August suddenly SIL--wife to middle brother--started making oh so cheerful bubbly phone calls to family..."Guess what? Doug decided he is just too lonely, and he can't wait to get married, so he is moving the wedding up to December 9! Isn't it so wonderful, cousins getting married just a week apart!"

Ummm...NO! It is NOT wonderful, it is down right tacky to plan your wedding one week away from your first cousin's wedding. But DH will not let me say anything, so all I can do is smile and bite my tongue when we are together and she starts gushing. (NOTE: I later learned that Doug had received word that he was going to be shipping to Iraq several months before his original wedding date...once I learned that I had a LOT more sympathy for his change in date. He wanted to make sure he was married before he shipped out, and didn't have a lot of options since his bride was still in college.)

So anyway...we had accepted that this is the way things are. Then we get the invitation to Doug's wedding. Addressed to "Mr. and Mrs. Steven R...." Which of course I know means "no kids." GGGRRR. DH doesn't believe me, but allows me to call SIL to clarify. I mean really, they expect us to give up two weekends during the holiday season, and now we aren't even going to be allowed to spend it with our children? In fact, we would have to spend probably about $65 for a babysitter given that we will be at the wedding for 7-8 hours minimum with travel time figured in--if we are going to be blessed enough to be able to find a sitter willing to give up a whole Saturday in December??? Do you know how hard it is to find a suitable sitter for 4 kids?

So probably fortunately, SIL wasn't home when I called. So when she called back, she got DH, and he talked to her pretty civilly, but explained to her that if we couldn't bring the kids to the reception, then we probably would not attend the reception because the kids will be really hurt if we exclude them from the wedding ceremony. A couple days later she calls back and says that several members of the brides' family had been sending back RSVP's with children listed on them, and so they had decided to allow children to come to the reception. YAY!

Then last week the invitation came to Allie's wedding. Again, "Mr. and Mrs. R...." I told DH he should call his brother to clarify, but he refused. Said "Doug and Lynn were swayed because of people just RSVP'ing kids, so we are just going to do that with this one." I wasn't happy with this, but just went along with it. Brother-in-law called up. Isn't budging. So DH explained to him that we would just attend the ceremony, but not the reception.

But it isn't just the reception--all children under 10 are banned even from the ceremony! It's going to be "formal," and they don't want children to disturb it. GGGGRRR!!!!!!! Which I have to say, REALLY torqued me, because when we drove over 4 hours to attend BIL and SIL's 25th anniversary with them, our daughters were just bubbling over with their excitement about attending Allie's wedding (wanting to be flower girls because they were just flower girls the previous weekend at a wedding for my youngest female cousin), and neither of them had the courtesy to pull me aside and say "you know, we probably will not have children at the wedding, you might want to explain this to them." And again, this wedding is a couple hours drive from our house, so we are looking at needing child care for 8+ hours.

BIL insists that he has attended nearly 200 weddings (he is a pastor after all), and there was never children at them. DH said he actually kind of got the impression that this was something he told brides and grooms that they should do--but I don't know about that. He never said anything to us about not having kids at our wedding (which, BTW, is one of the things that always bugs me about "no kids" policies at weddings. Steve and I actively embraced having kids at our wedding, putting "Children's Menu" as a meal choice on the RSVP card. Yet with 150 guests in attendance I can only think of less than a dozen children under the age of 10 that attended the wedding (including 2 children of middle brother, and oldest brother's youngest child had just turned 9 barely a week prior, I think his next younger child may have been 11)--and they certainly did nothing to be disruptive. So what is the point of offending your friends and relatives? It probably cost us well under $100 for the kids' food. I think that brother-in-law just didn't notice the children at all those weddings he's been at because they weren't disruptive!

So anyway...oldest brother-in-law simply is not budging. No kids at the reception OR the ceremony. I was brought up being taught that it was rude to deny anyone the chance to celebrate the wedding ceremony if the person wasn't disruptive--even a complete stranger off the street. But here we've got a pastor telling us that his nieces and nephews--1st cousins of the bride--are not welcome simply because their age is in the single digits. Because they might be disruptive to the solemness of the ceremony. As if a 14 year old text messaging (or the 14-15 year old altar boy who seemed to be cracking jokes with himself during my grandmother's funeral) isn't disruptive! Of course I don't exactly think the Pastor handled the text messaging well (he didn't need to humiliate her--would he have similarly "called out" an adult texting during the sermon? He could have spoken to her after the service, or he could have made a general comment about text messaging being inappropriate.).

In a tongue in cheek kind of way...I suggested to my husband that we get a "money holder" gift card to give the bride and groom, and put a note in it explaining that our gift to them is hurting our children deeply by paying $X for a sitter so that their wedding would not be marred by the presence of such unbearable creatures as CHILDREN. Of course I will not really do that...but it is tempting--especially with the "they can't come to the ceremony" thing.

The last time I went to a "no kids" wedding was my cousin's wedding 5 year's ago. Since we were traveling across the state and would have to spend the night, there was simply no leaving the kids (just 2 at that time) home with a sitter. So we took them to the ceremony (which they loved!), but then my grandmother's neighbor babysat them for the reception. But from the minute I walked into the reception hall without my children, all I heard from my relatives that rarely see the kids was "where are the girls?" "you HAVE to go get the girls!" I also noted that there were just as many kids at that reception as had been at my own. My relatives harassed me to the point that I finally did leave the reception, drove back across town to my grandparents' house, and got the girls. And they had a GRAND time.

Of course I also know that a part of excluding children is a cost factor...people simply feel that they can't "afford" to feed the kids...or even in some cases adults that they would have "liked" to invite. When hubby and I were planning our wedding (which we paid for ourselves, no help from any parents), we made our guest list first, and then having that number, we then determined how much we could afford to pay per person for the reception, and sought out a facility that fit into that budget.

Weddings are about celebrating the commitment of marriage with family and friends. NOT about setting out to have the most stunningly formal event you can possibly put yourself into debt for. If you can afford a formal event, WONDERFUL. But I think that it is selfish to sacrifice having close family attend an event in favor of having an expensive reception.

Don't forget that kids are people too. :-(

So who is giving the "help" here?

2006-09-28T08:14:00.000-07:00

Is there anyone out there that hasn't read a list of amusing stories about the zany things that folks who answer "help line" phone numbers have to deal with? Well I've got my own story, that just happened this morning when I called the IT helpline at my workplace to get some issues with my phone service straightened out.

I dial in, get pre-recorded messages with answers to common problems, then get told to stay on the line...

After a moment it seems as if my call were transferred or something--there was a click, then silence. I glance over at my phone and notice that the light is not lit up anymore. I hang up the phone, then connect again to dial the help-line back--but as soon as I push the button to connect, a voice says "Hello, did you just call the IT helpline?"

Me: Yes I did. But I seem to have gotten disconnected somehow.

Helpline: I'm sorry, I did that by accident.

Me: Oh, okay, well I have 2 phone problems I need to get resolved...

<>

Helpline: Okay, I'm going to walk you through resetting your phone step by step. First, do you see the silver cord connected to your phone?

Me: Yes.

Helpline: Okay, unplug it from the phone.

Me: (pause, waiting for more directions) So are you going to give me all of the instructions up front, then I will go through them?

Helpline: No, I'm going to walk you through step by step.

Me: But if I unplug the phone cord, we will not be connected anymore.

Helpline: (long pause) Oh...yeah. Well I don't want you to have to call you back if it doesn't work...maybe if I e-mail you the instructions...

Me: If I have to unplug the phone as part of resetting it, it doesn't matter how you send me the directions, if it doesn't work, I will have to call you back. Why don't you just tell me what to do, then I'll hang up and do it?

Helpline: But I don't want you to have to call back...(pause)...maybe if I go ahead and enter the repair ticket without you resetting the phone (type, type, type) oh, it wants to know what happened when you reset the phone...well I guess there isn't any way around this. Okay, I'm going to e-mail you the instructions.

LOL! Usually it is the person calling into the "customer helpline" that is spacey, not the helpline staff! Oh, and BTW, resetting the phone did not fix the problem, so there is now a repair ticket in on my phone.

BBBbbbbbrrrrr! It's cold in there!

2006-08-06T11:57:00.000-07:00

Considering the heat wave that the Northeast has recently been experiencing, you might think that I've been running my air conditioning a bit too much based on this post title. But that's not the case at all.

I've been wanting a full sized freezer for a few years. Preferably an upright model. But we haven't gotten one because "we are going to be moving soon, lets wait until after we move" and "we can't really afford it right now" kind of reasons.

Well I bought one yesterday, and I'm just so thrilled. Guess I'm a cheap date. LOL.

Really--the freezer cost only $30, so that's a cheap date in my book. I got it at a yard sale. The owner's adult daughter opened the door to show me the inside, and I was blasted with cold--so I knew it worked. I asked how much they wanted, the mom said $30, and I said I'd buy it. Before even knowing how big it was or frost free (its a manual defrost...oh well), or anything like that. Really, I figured at $30, I couldn't go wrong. You can't get a new freezer delivered for less than $50, let alone the cost of the appliance. By my estimates, I saved over $300 from the cost a new freezer of the same size. Yes, so it's probably about 20 years old. That just means it will probably still be running when a new freezer is sitting out at the curb.

Who ever would have told me 10 years ago that I'd be more excited over getting a freezer than a new outfit would have gotten a really strange look from me. But for now, I'm very thankful that God has provided what will certainly be a useful tool to my family.

Baby Talk is buzzing...

2006-07-28T17:34:00.000-07:00

Apparently Baby Talk magazine has received 700 letters to the editor already about the cover of the August edition of their magazine. I think those baby eyes gazing up at his mother are just adorable, but apparently some people are more concerned about the exposed breast.

Never mind that many of the people who are so concered are likely the same ones who stay up to watch the Victoria's Secret special on TV.

CBS Channel 3 News out of Philadelphia covered the story tonight. Of course they had to talk to some newly minted moms (still in the hospital) to get their take on things--one supportive of the cover, the other not so supportive. The "not so supportive" mom claimed that she had tried to breastfeed, but it was just too hard. That is really sad that she didn't have the support she needed to even make it a couple of days!

She then went on to pontificate on how she feels that breastfeeding shouldn't really be pushed on moms so much because society really doesn't accept nursing in public:

“There’s alot of pressure to breast feed,” said Agnes. “In today’s society, you can’t do it anyway. People look at you like you’re disgusting,” she continued.

I've breastfed 4 kids in public, and never once got asked to move. I would guess that half of the time no one even noted what I was doing. At least 5% of the time I actually got positive comments or encouraging looks. I know there are some moms that do get asked to move...but come on...here is a mom with her first baby not even out of the hospital yet, and she thinks she knows that society at large is going to make her feel uncomfortable if she were to breastfeed in public?

This is a problem, and one I think that in a way, "lactivists" have created. The envelope really has been pushed and pushed to the point where society is pushing back. I think that moms who have nursed in public and not had it be an issue really need to speak up more to let the next generation know that it really isn't that big of a deal. Making a huge issue out of every situation where a store clerk who likely doesn't even have children asks a nursing mom to move really isn't helping paint a portrait of nursing as a natural part of public life.

16 Year Old Killed in Childbirth by Medical Error

2006-07-27T08:56:00.000-07:00

Recently 16 year old Jasmine Gant in Madison Wisconsin was killed when a medical error occured. What happened? She was pregnant, and went to the hospital to birth her baby. Apparently she was Group B Strep positive, so was prescribed IV antibiotics. However, instead of hooking up a bag of antibiotics to her IV drip, a bag of epidural medications were hooked up. The antibiotics would typically be run in over the course of about 30 minutes, I would guess that the same sized bag of epidural medication would be expected to be run in over a time period of several hours. The mother started seizing, and eventually died--my guess would be that she died before the mistake in medication was even discovered, so while resucitation efforts were underway, she was probably continuing to receive the medication.

To read the media accounts, it really seems like the nurse who attached the medications is being hung out to dry. And she certainly does bear a large part of the responsibility. She should have visually confirmed that the label on the IV bag was for the correct medication. Further, it appears that there is a systemic problem in that particular hospital were the barcoding system that is in place to prevent such medication errors is not actually used by the nursing staff.

However, there is a HUGE key question that is not getting asked. Because the medications used in epidurals are controlled narcotics, they are generally kept under lock and key. As a doula who has worked in several hospital, I've never seen them accessible to the nurses, but rather kept in a cart that the anesthesiologist has the key to. Several other doulas have raised the same concern in the doula community. The anesthesiologist mixes up the medication cocktail on a "per customer" basis--it is not premixed and placed in IV bags. So why in the world was the nurse in this case even able to have access to a bag of IV fluid with epidural medications in it? Where is the anesthesiologist in this picture?

Bottom line folks...don't let something get injected into you (or your loved one) or hooked up to your IV unless you personally inspect the label.

Cindy's Moving Adventures

2006-07-14T08:56:00.000-07:00

My sister is moving! Read all about the on-going process at the blog my husband and I are starting for it (we might even get Cindy to blog as well!). Here is a picture of the front of what we hope will be her house:

Out of the mouths of babes...

2006-05-02T20:45:00.000-07:00

Apparently my almost 6 year old daughter is a bit too sure of her cuteness. Here is a conversation we had at bedtime tonight:

K: Mom, you just can't say 'no' to this face.
M: Yes, I can.
K: No, you can't. It's too cute.
M: K, your face certainly is cute, but I still can say 'no' to it.
K: No, no one can.

Jenn

Quotable Quotes...

2006-05-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

I don't know the source of this quote...but it is very spot on.

If I were an Iraqi, bound to a bed, clothes taken, denied food or water and lied
to...the American Media would care. But I'm just a woman giving birthin America,
bound to a bed, clothes taken, denied food or water and lied to.

Another "spot on" quote:

"We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical
profession."- George Bernard Shaw

Do you have any favorite quotes? Please share them!

I guess it was about time...

2006-05-01T10:45:00.000-07:00

Apparently I'm pregnant.

Expecting a baby boy...so say the wise folks at On-line Pregnancy Tester.

Oh, he'll be 8 lbs 3 0z, have black hair and brown eyes. Which is really amazing because I have 4 kids who weighed between 6 lbs 11 oz and 7 lbs 8 oz at birth, have blonde/red/or light brown hair, and blue eyes. And my husband and I have blue eyes. Which does leave one wondering...who is the father?

The pool guy apparently. And he's really hunky. ;-) Now where is that pool, other than on the "we have a dream" sketches my husband and I have made of our back yard?

Medicine in America

2006-04-29T18:55:00.000-07:00

Recently I was told about a new blog...a mom venting about her coerced cesarean birth. She writes:

The experience made me see how combative the relationship with obstetricians and
their patients have become. In my case, my obstetrician Dr. Claudia Holland
burst into the operating room while I was strapped to the o.r. table, shouting
at me that she wanted my verbal consent because she "didn't want to be charged
with assault." Is this an incidence of a single individual with anger-management
problems or the current state of obstetrics in the U.S.?

Unfortunately, I don't see this kind of problem as simply an obstetrical problem. Its a rampant problem in medicine. There are some good, respectful Dr's out there. But unfortunately it seems that more often than not, Dr's expect to have cart blanche to do whatever they deem fit in the treatment of the patient.

I've gone toe to toe with my children's pediatrician over the issue of vaccinations. It started out that I wanted to delay vaccinations for my 4th child. My first 3 were nearly fully vaccinated (no chicken pox or pnemecoccal). But my 4th had a bit of a cold when he went in for his "2 month" well baby visit, and he was only 6 weeks old to boot, so I wanted to just wait until he was 3 months old to start. Just one itty bitty month...and as I said, I had a history of complying with vaccinations.

Well my pediatrician hit the roof, and yes, did her best to coerce me into having the injections done--including having me sign a form indicating that I was refusing the shots against medical advice, and my child could suffer dire consequences because of this. I later found the exact form on the AAP website, along with instructions about how it could be use to convince "waivering" parents to consent to vaccinations.

But I'm a stubborn type, and stood my ground. And then I went home and did what I should have done 3 children prior. I actually started researching vaccines. When I finally brought my son back when he was 4 months old (that's right, I didn't bring him back at 3 months), I only had 2 of the 5 shots done that had been planned.

And the whole thing has created a huge rift in my relationship with the pediatrician. I'm always nervous about what is going to happen when I take my son in--even though I refuse to see the particular Dr who blew up with me. As a result, he's now 27 months old, and hasn't been to the pediatrician since he was 9 months old. I don't think this is a good thing. I know he has a problem with learning to talk, and would like a referral to get speech therapy, but am just not sure I want to deal with the lecture that I think I will get.

Outrageous gas prices

2006-04-26T17:27:00.000-07:00

Tulipgirl brought up the issue of gas prices on her blog, and I started to reply, but my reply ended being, well, a blog post...so here it is!

Prices are as high in my area as hers. I paid $60 to fill up our mini-van today. Whenever I do this my husband will say "why did you fill it up, prices are going to go down?" But my reasoning is always that they are probably going to go up--at least that is what I keep reading, so I'm going to "stock up" now!

I've got mixed feelings about the whole thing. Obviously the prices hurt my wallet. But I do think the gas companies have a right to make a profit. From what I've heard, they are making around $.90 per gallon in profit. The gas I bought today was $2.87/gallon--which apparently is just about as low as you can find it in my area. With $.90 profit in that, it amounts to a 30% profit for the oil companies. And this is where people are being drummed up in outrage. 30% mark-up!!! How outrageous!!!

The cost of most consumer products includes about 30% advertising and 30% mark-up. So the gas companies are getting their mark-up. Maybe. I doubt it a bit. Why do I think that? Well because of the other costs that go into gasoline, namely crude oil and taxes.

The government taxes gasoline so heavily, that well over 20% of the cost of your gasoline is taxes. That may actually be why there can be such a variation in prices across the nation--why states that are very far away from the oil refineries like Wyoming and thus have higher distribution costs--have lower gas prices (about $2.50/gallon) than states with refineries in them like Texas (about $2.90/gallon).

Yes, I've heard it said in many venues that there is close to $1/gallon in taxes in the cost of gas (the most recent data I could find on the web was from 2000, and indicated about $.50 per gallon--varied state to state).

Crude oil costs $72 per barrel today according to the nice folks at CBS news. Now that doesn't mean much to me...how big is a barrel of oil? Looked that one up too, and found a reference that says it is 42 gallons. From which you get about 19 gallons of gasoline.

But wait, doesn't that work out to the gasoline costing more than $3 per gallon even before profit and taxes are added in? Nope. Because the 23 gallons of "waste product" are sellable products. Like mineral oil or petroleum jelly, which are widely used in the cosmetics industry. So lets assume though that the $72 per barrel cost for crude oil is evenly distrubted to each gallon of initial 42 (which means we assume NO waste from the crude oil)...thats still $1.76 per gallon.

And remember, the profit in gasoline is not all going back to the "big oil companies." Your local gas station needs to make some money to pay the employees--your neighbors who might like to be able to feed their families. The 11 o'clock news tonight (4/28) reports that the average gas station makes $.10 per gallon profit on a cash purchase--but that gets cut to $.05 when a credit card is used due to the credit card surcharges. Either way you slice it, $.10 per gallon of the cost of gasoline is going to the local station.

So even if you take the 2000 data of $.50 per gallon in taxes, and add to that $1.76 in crude oil cost, and $.10 for the local station, you come to $2.36 per gallon. That means there is only $.51 left for production costs, distribution, advertising and profit in that $2.87 per gallon gasoline I purchased this afternoon.

What happened to $.90 per gallon profit? It certainly has gotten eaten away. I really think that most of that $.51 is going to actual production and distribution costs.

That's right. I don't really think that there is a lot of a profit margin in gasoline. At best, there is $.51, which amounts to only a bit higher than a 15% profit margin. How many companies could stay afloat on a 15% profit?

The profit margin is in other products sold by the petroleum industry. Perhaps keronsene, jet fuel, I don't know. I tend to think that it is in the other "petroleum products" that are sold to industry.

For example, lets take baby oil. Its over 99% mineral oil...and mineral oil is what? A by product of the purification of gasoline from crude oil. The petroleum industry sells mineral oil to the cosmetics industry, which uses it as a diluent in MANY cosmetic products. Anyway...straight baby oil sells for $2.19 for a 4 oz bottle on Amazon. com. That works out to $70.08 per gallon!

Why isn't there a public outcry about the outrageous profit margin in the sale of mineral oil? I will submit that the price of gasoline is used by politicians (and the media, not that THEY have an agenda...) to whip the public up into a frenzy because it is a product that is used by nearly all Americans, and in large quanities. It's easy, because quite frankly, most Americans don't bother to think analytically about these things.

I know that a lot of fuss has been made about oil executive salarys. And when they make "tens of millions per year" as was reported in one venue about Exxon, that is troubling.
But how much per gallon are those salaries really costing the average consumer? I've tried finding out how many gallons of gasoline are sold per year. Can't find it. I can find that there are about 300 million people in the US. So if 30 oil company execs each had a 10 million dollar pay cut, that would still only amount to $1 per person in the US. That's hardly significant. Especially when you consider that I would estimate that my family of 6 is purchasing well over 150 gallons of gasoline per person in a year.

Now don't get me wrong...its not that I think that oil execs should still keep making these obnoxious salaries. I'm just trying to point out that those salaries really aren't affecting gas prices significantly. What they are more likely significantly impacting are the salaries made by "rank & file" employees at the gas companies.

In the end, I think that really the most important contributor to current gas prices is OPEC. Oh, well that and environmentalists who will not let us drill for oil on our own turf.

Embracing Motherhood

2006-04-24T20:37:00.000-07:00

As the mother of 4 small children, I'm pretty busy. The kids make messes. They can be trying at times. But I guess I just don't understand the fascination that the American Christian church has with separating mothers and children.

I mean this with all due respect...but when one balances the amount of activities where families are separated into age classifications in church as compared to those where full family participation is encouraged, the scales are sharply tipped to "division." I found it refreshing when I joined a new church about this time last year and was told that children were expected to worship with their parents on Sunday mornings. But then I've been puzzled when I related this to other moms in the church, and they stared at me blankly and said they'd never been told anything like this.

A common theme I hear in "parenting" advice is "date night, date night, date night." Couples must get away for the sake of their marriage. Church bulletins commonly advertise events "for moms only," "for couples only, no kids please."

I've even been frustrated to find that as I helped to start a local chapter of a national organization that is supposed to support mothers in their godly calling, most of the "support" given to the mothers has NOTHING to do with being a good mother. I've learned make sure I decorate with items in odd numbers, even numbers aren't as visually appealling. I've learned that integrating seemlying unrelated bits of knowledge is one of my spiritual gifts. I've learned that apparently it is too difficult to plan an "outside of the regular group meeting" social activity that involves even husbands, let alone children.

One time I asked my grandmother about this. She managed almost 59 years of marriage. Not all of them happy--every couple has their struggles. They even had a brief separation while they adapted to the change of my grandfather being retired. But she and my grandfather loved each other deeply. Her response to the concept of a "date night" was that this was a luxury that she and my grandfather rarely had until after their children were grown and out of the house--so that would be after over 30 years of marriage because their 5 children have a broad age range. Even as a mature couple, she commented in her reply to me that one of my cousins had been over that day, and the 3 of them had cleaned out the basement. And she felt that she'd built more lasting memories, strengthening of her marriage and general family ties in that day of "work" than she could build in several dates.

Do I have any solutions? I don't quite know. I'm going to be talking to the leader of lay ministries in my church about where I can best serve in ministry...but I'm seriously thinking that a new ministry of some sort that reaches out to families would be good.

My rant on Pitocin

2006-04-21T23:13:00.000-07:00

I attended a birth yesterday. Second time mom, had a Pitocin induction with her first baby for medical cause, and did NOT want to "go there" again. Unfortunately the same medical cause ended up showing up again, so after an unsuccessful attempt at starting things with 3 doses of Cytotec (don't even get me started on the lack of informed consent on that one!), she was on to Pitocin.

Pitocin seems to be almost synonomous with hospital labors anymore. I wonder how many women who labor actually manage to get through without using it at some point. One client I had switched OB practices because she had been informed that when she arrived at the hospital in active labor she would be put on Pitocin. No waiting to see how labor was progressing and if it was really needed...it was just the policy of this practice to use Pitocin on all laboring women. Medical staff will often explain away any concerns with the use of Pitocin by saying that it is just a synthetic form of the same medication that your body produces. Which is true. But that doesn't mean that putting it into an IV is the same as letting your body produce it!

One of the major problems I have with the use of Pitocin is how strongly it is generally used. It is usually used at strengths MUCH greater than what the body would naturally produce. In the case of my client today, it got to nearly 3 times the strength the body would naturally produce. Here is an excerpt from the 3rd page of the package insert on Pitocin:

The initial dose should be 0.5 – 1 mU/min (equal to 3-6 ml of the dilute oxytocin solution per hour [10 units oxytocin in 1000 ml saline was suggested a few paragraphs earlier “piggy backed” with plain saline]). At 30-60 minute intervals the dose should be gradually increased in increments of 1-2 mU/min…[. Once] the desired frequency of contractions has been reached and labor has progressed to 5-6 cm dilation, the dose may be reduced by similar increments.

Studies of the concentrations of oxytocin in the maternal plasma during oxytocin infusion have shown that infusion rates up to 6 mU/min give the same oxytocin levels that are found in spontaneous labor. At term, higher infusion rates should be given with great care, and rates exceeding 9-10 mU/min are rarely required. Before term, when the sensitivity of the uterus is lower because of lower concentration of oxytocin receptors, a higher infusion rate may be required.

My client was started at a dose of 6 mU/min. That's right...she was started at a dose that 6 to 12 times the reccommended starting point. And this after getting 3 doses of Cytotec. Then the midwife put in orders for the drip rate to be increased by 2 mU every 15 minutes. The nurse seemed to get around to upping it every 30 minutes when it was first turned on, but then later in labor she was coming around after 20 minutes to increase the dose.

When I got to the hospital my client had been on Pitocin for 2 hours, and by that point she was up to 12 mU/min. So not only was she at twice the level that would be found in a natural labor, but she was definitely above that level that is supposedly "rarely required." Of course I haven't had a client yet that I've been with as a doula who got Pitocin and didn't get to this level. Sigh.

As I indicated above, they didn't stop there. This is where the nurse started showing up every 20 minutes to increase the dosage, and in short order it was at 16 mU/min. I'm not sure why, but at this point the nurse to stop increasing the Pitocin. I don't know if the midwife told her to stop because the contractions were coming more regularly, or if the nurse just got busy, or if it was because of concerns with the baby's tolerance of the Pitocin (I know that I noted at a certain point in the labor that the baby was having late decels, but I didn't want to write that in my notes, because if someone saw that they might say that I was "practicing medicine." I know that I wanted to note it somehow though, but looking back, I don't recall when exactly that was, or what I did to note it. The only thing I can come up with is a notation I made that the baby's heart rate was 104 10-minutes after the Pitocin was raised to 16.) 40 minutes passed between changes to the Pitocin level, and this change was to drop it back down to 12 mU/min. It stayed this way for the next hour, during which time the mom labored really well, contractions were coming 2 1/2 minutes apart, about 55-70 seconds long.

However, there was trouble with keeping a good reading of the baby's heart rate on the fetal monitor unless the monitor was manually held in place, and even the contractions weren't picking up well. The midwife started talking about internal monitors. We discussed options, and I pointed out to mom that since she was 5-6 cm dialated at this point, she could consider just turning the Pitocin off, then she wouldn't need the constant fetal monitor, and could use Doppler. I also offered to manually hold the monitor.

However, the midwife managed to convince her that it was imperetive that the internal monitors be placed, and part of what I think sold her on it was the promise that this would mean less fiddling around with the monitors. Yeah...okay. I've not had a doula client have an internal monitor scalp electrode placed, so I didn't have experience with that. The dang thing kept coming off! All told, she had 5 scalp electrodes placed in 4 hours. And it really irritates me that they call them a "scalp clip." I suppose that sounds better than the reality--"a corkscrew that we put into your baby's scalp." And YES, it hurts the baby! The heart rate would temporarily jump to over 200 every time one was placed.

So anyway...she got the first one placed, and what do you know, baby is having heartrate decelarations. The Pitocin was shut off STAT. After about 20 minutes things seemed to be stable with the baby, so what do they do? Turn the Pitocin back on at 6 mU/min. Didn't bother to ask the mom if she wanted them to do that. I pointed it out to her and asked her if she wanted Pitocin at this point. I don't really think she did...but I also think she didn't want to make too many waves.

So 20 minutes later the baby starts doing some NASTY decels. Down as low as 60, when usually much below 120 is "not good." I was scared. And feeling like pounding my head against the wall and screaming "you guys had a warning that this was going to happen!!! What in the world were you thinking???" Pitocin was back off again. I was honestly shocked that we weren't on the fast track to the OR. Seemed like half the available OB staff that was on the floor was in her room. Whispered instructions were given to a nurse to start counting equipment in the OR. Fortunately I will give that the OB who is the senior Dr. in the practice with the midwife is committed to avoiding cesarean, so he really worked with the baby to get the heartrate back to an acceptable range. Medication was given to stop contractions. And after about 10-15 minutes, the drama was over--at least the medical drama.

My client and her husband did really well during all of this. But understandably, it really shook them. They both cried. She was seriously wondering if continuing to labor was wise, or should she just go straight to cesarean.

Less than 30 minutes after the baby was stabilized, and while the mom is still very emotionally charged and trying to work through the "should I just have a cesarean?" question, the nurse quietly comes in and turns the Pitocin back on to 4 mU/min. BANGING MY HEAD!!!

I again let her know that the Pitocin is back on. This time she talks to the midwife about it. She isn't happy having it on. Midwife is "sweetly" insistant on the "need" to use it to get the baby out quickly. AAARGH! Mom is breaking down. She finally just can't deal with things anymore, and asks for an epidural. She REALLY didn't want one because of a previous bad experience, and she hadn't had one with her first. I really think that the emotions of the situation just left her unable to deal with things. And I don't blame her one bit. It also dawned on her that if she winded up with an emergency cesarean she would be put under general anesthesia unless she already had an epidural in place. She INSISTED that the Pitocin be turned off, so as the anesthesiologist was prepping the epidural, it was turned off.

Of course the nurse came back in and quietly turned it back on not 10 minutes later. Didn't ask Mom about it. She just asked for it to be turned off, and she didn't ask for it to be turned off because she couldn't deal with the pain, she asked for it to be turned off because she couldn't deal with the stress of wondering if it was going to make her baby crash again. But it was "only" 2 mU/min, so I think Mom just resigned herself to it when I told her it was back on. 30 minutes later it was up to 6 mU/min, then 15 minutes after that it was up to 10 mU/min.

And surprise, surprise...15 minutes later it is turned back off because of decels, and they are having her push even though she still has a lip of cervix, no urge to push, and baby is at 0 station (and in my experience, moms aren't ready to push until +2 station). I wasn't even sure she was "really" completely dialated, as she had been 8-9 cms just 30 minutes prior, and the midwife had this "let me see if I can stretch the cervix to 10" kind of hesitation before declaring her "complete."

Pushing wasn't really going well, the lip of cervix could not be reduced, and fortunately the baby's heart rate resolved, so midwife did one of the few reasonable things of the day, and told the mom to stop pushing and just rest until she felt an urge to push. Which she did an hour later, and in less than 10 minutes she pushed out her 8 lb 8 oz baby boy, Apgars of 9 & 9. But of course there was doubt as to whether she could actually push the baby out (since they expected the baby to be large, and the midwife had earlier been very insistant on how DANGEROUS it can be to deliver a large baby--never mind that she had pushed out her first baby at 8 lbs 7 oz with no incident), so the resident OB actually did the delivery (and overly agressive pulling!) so that vaccum could be used...of course she showed her strength by pushing so fast that they got the vacuum out of the package, but couldn't get it on before the head was half out (so it just laid on the bed unused--wonder if they will bill for a vacuum birth though?).

But hey, the joys of Pitocin don't end there. Despite the fact that mom had no significant bleeding, the midwife ordered that the remainder of the bag of Pitocin in saline be run into the mom. The drip rate was set at 250 mU/min. Here is what the package insert on Pitocin has to say about fast drip rates of Pitocin:

Water intoxication with convulsions, which is caused by the inherent antidiuretic effect of oxytocin, is a serious complication that may occur if large doses (40 to 50 milliunits /minute) are infused for long periods.

She was being dosed at 5 times the level that is listed on the package insert as considered a risk of causing water intoxication! And she was already seriously retaining fluid, as demonstrated by the very concentrated urine collection that had been made about 20 minutes before the birth. Of course the concentrated urine was interpretted as "she hasn't gotten enough fluid." Of course a logical person would certainly agree with that concept. (Rolling my eyes) She had "only" gotten 4 liters via IV plus what she's been drinking over the course of the last 20 hours. That is the equivalent of drinking more than 8 oz an hour around the clock--possibly closer to 12 oz, I didn't log how much she drank. Can you imagine how much you would be peeing if you drank that?

She wasn't dehydrated folks...she was OVER HYDRATED, and unable to get rid of it. But hey, the midwife ordered another bag of saline run into her.

The poor woman. She's going to have to leave the hospital with no shoes on, her feet will be so puffy.

Note: I have a Word document explaining how to figure out what dosage of Pitocin is being administered. Ask, and I'll e-mail it to you. If you are "lucky" the Pitocin is mixed as 30 Units in 500 mls of saline, then you can just read the IV pump to directly get the mU/minute. But if a different mix is used (such as the 10 Units in 1000 mls of saline that is reccommended on the package insert), then the charts I have in the Word document will help you to quickly find what dosage is being used. I STRONGLY urge pregnant women to take a copy of it and the package insert for Pitocin with them to the hospital in labor. If Pitocin is going to be used, ask the care provider if the dosing guidelines in the package insert are going to be followed, and if not, why not. Sometimes a "quick" labor is not as safe as a slow labor. Especially if your baby is thought to be compromised already, it may not really make sense to be trying to blast the baby out.

Women and marital relations...

2006-04-13T20:01:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure why this is, but it seems to be a universal "truth" that once you get married, activity in the bedroom decreases. At least that is the subject of many jokes.

I've always found this to be sad when I've read about it. I believe that God has given a special gift to married couples to draw them closer together. When that gift is not enjoyed, I believe it can make for a less than satisfactory relationship. Research continues to bear out that people who are active in a monogomos relationship, they enjoy better health and longer lives.
This is perhaps somewhat niave of me...but when I was in my 20's, I'd always thought that the "not enjoying sex thing" was a "problem" of the older generation. "Surely younger women are more enlightened" went my reasoning. "They know it is okay and good to enjoy sex, so they allow themselves to do so." So when a friend who is about 10 years older than me started making pretty mild statements after I got engaged indicating that she had a lower drive than her husband and that I would encounter the same thing once I got married, I brushed them aside in my mind. "Surely she actually enjoys sex, she just doesn't want it as often as her husband."

I have to admit that I was completely floored when I first encountered women my own age who were quite unabashed about expressing their frustration at their husband's attempts at "getting things started." And especially when I heard comments like "I could never have sex again and die happy." Wow. Amazing. This thing that God created to be a unique bond between a husband and wife, something that really is intended to cement us together not just physically, but also emotionally, and here are Christian women saying they could quite happily do without.

So I decided to blog. ;-)

And that's where I got the BIGGEST surprise. I was surfing around trying to find links to support the idea that a healthy sex life improves your physical and emotional health (a concept that I know I've read about before), and indeed, I did find that, and mentioned it above. But the shock was on a website devoted to promoting the book Sex as Nature Intended It, I found more information than I expected. Some of course was right in line with what I thought, like a survey conducted by the book's author was reported to have found that:

In general, if a woman had wonderful lovemaking experiences with a man, she tended to speak glowingly of him and the relationship. On the other hand, if the sexual relationship was unsatisfactory, unfulfilling, and frustrating, she tended to be critical of the man and attributed their unhappy relationship to his faults. But perhaps, in many cases, it is actually the other way around. Perhaps the dissatisfying, displeasurable sex caused her to be much less tolerant of the man’s faults and nitpick him for things she might otherwise overlook if he were pleasing her in bed.

But as I said, I got a bit more than what I intended on--what I found was information on how male circumcision affects marriage and the female sexual experience. One researcher started a study, and came to a preliminary conclusion that men who were uncircumcized were more likely to avoid divorce, but unfortunately died before finalizing his research.

My husband and I did not have our sons circumcized for a variety of factors--the lack of a clear cut medical need (and here), lack of religious directive, knowledge that the original circumcision commanded to Abraham is not the same as the circumcision that is performed today, and the bottom line that it seemed to us to be an extremely painful elective cosmetic surgery that we felt our sons should be the ones to make the decision on (similarly, we do not have our daughters' ears pierced). But none of those factors had anything to do with the possible ramifications on divorce or the sexual experience their future spouses might have.

But according to what I read, the impact could possibly be significant. Dr. Christin Northrup, author of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom writes about the topic:

And intriguingly, because the area of sexual sensation is so localized in the tip [of the intact penis], the penis only has to travel a short distance to excite one set of nerves or another. In other words, it doesn't have to withdraw very far to receive pleasure on the outward stroke. This allows the penis to stay deep inside the vagina, keeping the man's pubic mound in close and frequent contact with a woman's clitoral area, which increases her pleasure and a sense of closeness....

The natural penis may be more comfortable for the vagina than the circumcised penis. The coronal ridge of the natural penis is more flexible; O'Hara likens it to the resiliency of Jell-O. The circumcised penile head is considerably harder--overly firm and compacted like an unripe tomato. This is because circumcision cuts away 33-50 percent of penile skin. As a result, the skin of the penile shaft can get stretched so tightly during an erection that it pulls down on the skin covering the glans, compressing the tissue of the penis head. The abnormally hardened coronal ridge can then be very uncomfortable to vaginal tissue during intercourse. Women sometimes experience a scraping feeling with each outward stroke and even report discomfort after intercourse or even the next day. The brain makes pain-relieving endorphins that may partially block any discomfort during intercourse itself. As a gynecologist, I can tell you that painful intercourse is a very common symptom in women, many of whom blame themselves or who feel that something is wrong with their sexual response....

Circumcised sex may cause the vagina to abnormally tense up and decrease its lubrication. Women report more problems with lubrication when having sex with circumcised men, possibly because of irritation from the harder tip and involuntary tensing against it, and also because the longer stroke length tends to remove lubrication from the vagina. Often an artificial lubricant is necessary.

This has certainly left me with a lot to ponder. According to Sex as Nature Intended It, it may actually be the woman that suffers the most in bed from male circumcision. A survey conducted for the book found that women who have had sex with both circumcized and intact men prefer intact men by a ratio of 9 to 1 (I have no idea of the validity of the methodology for the survey, having not read the book). Could it be that much of the dissatifaction with sex in marriage is set in the first 24 hours of a newborn boy's life?

Ironically, some of the women I've been in discussions with who were most vocal about not desiring sex, were also some of the most vocal proponents of circumcision.

I've been gone for a LONG time...

2006-04-03T19:23:00.000-07:00

Not sure if any of you still read my blog...but yes, I'm still here. ;-)

I'm not even really sure that I can write this post. I've been putting it off for over 3 months now. I'm crying as I sit here now.

The last "real" post I made was on November 4. Yeah, I threw that thing up about Mexican food...but it wasn't "real," it was filler. Letting you all know that I was still here.

What I didn't know when I wrote that post was that my life was going to change very dramatically very soon. And the thing was, I even alluded in a way to what I was going to loose.

A few days after I wrote that post I got a call letting me know that my grandmother had been admitted to the hospital. At 78, nearly 79 years old, being admitted to the hospital happens. But this was the first time she'd been admitted since she and my grandfather had moved out of their home of over 40 years--a house that they had built, even living in the basement while finishing the first floor--and into a cottage in an assisted living community nearly 2 years prior. They'd moved because my grandfather was suffering from Alzheimers, and my grandmother from some hip and spine issues, so they just couldn't keep their home up. But my grandmother was a fiercely independent woman, and resented the high cost of living in the community, so in October she had moved them out into a private apartment. So "her," I had talked on the phone with her a week before the move and she seemed as vibrant as ever. But then her hospitalization soon after the move left my grandfather bewildered. So my aunts were having a bit of difficulty with him.

At the time I got the call my husband was recovering from mono (note to readers, you do NOT want mono when you are 44--it hits HARD and LONG), I was recovering from strep throat and perhaps a touch of mono myself. So I was already "down." In the days and weeks that followed we were to learn that my grandmother's condition was "serious," then she would bounce back, then she had perhaps 6 months, then finally the Friday before Thanksgiving we were told that she was worse off than the hospital Dr's had led my aunts & uncles to believe and "hospice care" had been approved for her. We had made plans to visit her over Thanksgiving when we found out that she had 6 months. When I got the call on Friday I spent some time crying with my husband. Somewhere deep inside I was sure though that I would see her the following Wednesday, and she wouldn't be *that* bad, and we would laugh, and hug, and talk like we had so many times before.

Stepping back a bit here...you need to understand that I haven't seen my mother since 1996, I have no idea where she currently lives. I met my husband in 1997. I also didn't see my mother from about 1978 until the day I graduated from high school in 1990. I had lived with my grandparents from when I was about 6 months old until I was about 5. When I struggled through years of abuse, I dreamed about running away to her house--even when her house was 350 miles from mine, I tried to calculate whether I could ride my bike to her house--could I tote enough food and a tent to make it? (Perhaps its good that I only recently learned about a man who ran home from college after he graduated--from Boston to Florida. That would have given me encouragement to try the bike ride!) While I was in college my grandparents house was my "home base." My grandmother was the first and only person I ever called "Mommy." She was my mom in the truest sense of the word. She loved and nurtured me, even when she knew my deepest, darkest secrets. She knew things about me that even my husband does not know.

So I got that call on Friday, and I was devastated. I cried to my husband that I wasn't sure how much more I could handle it...I did not want her to die, but the lingering illness was torture. What I wanted was not for her to die, but for her to miraculously recover!

On Monday she turned 79. That day I got a second phone call from my father to let me know that she wasn't doing well, he had called her to talk to her from his retirement home in Florida. By this time we had talked on the phone 3 times in one month, where as it is "normal" for us to go over a year between phone calls. I could hear the pain in his voice--a man that usually doesn't show emotion. He made some comment about "if you talk to her on the phone..." I don't remember now what it was that I was supposed to remember...I just know that I never even considered calling her. I'm not a "phone person," and I was going to be seeing her on Wednesday, so why go through the awkwardness? Oh how I regret that!

Wednesday was a short school day, so we intended to send the kids to school, then head out as soon as they got home. It was "grandparents day" in the second grade, and my daughter Jessica was eagerly anticipating her Nana & Poppop (my husband's parents) attending the festivities. Not quite 10 minutes before I would have left to take her to the bus stop, my father called. I knew when I saw his number on the caller ID what he was calling to say. There was just no other reason for him to be calling me so early in the morning. With a shaking and reluctant hand, I picked up the phone.

She had died in her sleep. I struggled not to break down crying right there...I didn't want to send my daughter off to school with the knowledge that her greatgrandma--who she loved--had died. I ran up stairs and threw myself into bed with my husband and sobbed. Getting a quick cry out of my system, I cleaned up my face, and went back downstairs. I quitely and perhaps somewhat robotically got Jessica to the bus stop, then broke down on one of the other mom's shoulders as the bus was pulling away. Jessica had questioned what was up with me, and I told her that I was just sad, and she shouldn't worry about it. She relayed this to her friend on the bus (the daughter of the mom I cried with), and her friend wondered if someone had died. Jessica told her that greatgrandma was very sick...but didn't really think that was it.

So we did go out to visit family...but for a funeral rather than to see my grandmother alive one last time. Because of the Thanksgiving holiday we had to delay the funeral longer than originally anticipated...it was not held until Monday, which was ironically my sister's birthday.

I then proceeded to fall into a period of depression. I tried to tell my Dr. about it, and he brushed me off..."call me again if you are still feeling this way in 2 months." I had just told him that I had lost the person who was most important to me in the world besides my husband and kids, and that I couldn't find the strength or energy to take any joy in the Christmas season or to do the necessary preparations. His response was completely inappropriate, though I did not realize it at the time. I'm coming out of it...am I totally out of the depression? I don't know. I have my moments.

And writing this blog...tough. I've gone through many tissues. I have not written it because I knew that to do so I would have to REALLY acknowledge my grandmother's death. Even as I wrote, I found myself so many times mentioning her in the present tense.

As for the allusion to her in my November 4 post...I mentioned at the end of the post 2 little girls and water on their bedroom floor. One of my grandmother's favorite stories to tell was about my sister and me "washing" our bedroom floor. She was sick, and had decided to nap while we did. We woke up, and she could not be roused. We wanted to help her, because we knew she was sick, so for some reason we decided to the washing our bedroom floor--which was linoleum--was just the thing to do. So we rummaged through our toy box and got out buckets. We filled those with water in the tub across the hallway from our bedroom, and carred them back and threw the water on the floor. Of course we hadn't picked up any of the MANY toys off the floor before doing this. And there was carpetting (red & orange & yellow & green shag--it was the 70's!) in the hallway, with one of those transition strips in our doorway. So we managed to get about 1/2" of water across our whole floor before our father came home from work and found us. And my grandmother would not let him punish us, because our motive was to help, not to be mischevious. Of course he still had to clean up the mess! (Yay grandma! Of course I would suggest that my sister and I should have been involved with the clean-up efforts.)

Ironically, I had a "bathtub" incident on Tuesday evening before my grandmother's death. Perhaps God's way of continuing the story to the next generation? I don't know. I wanted the kids to get a bath before our trip...and my husband works nights so this can be quite the task. I washed the boys. I took Sean, then about 22 months old, out of the tub and got him dressed in his bedroom while Jason continued playing in the tub. Once I got Sean into his PJ's he happily dove for his pillow and snuggled in...until he noticed that the bedroom door was open. Before I could react, he jumped up and ran from the room, and got right into the tub, PJ's and all! What a kid!

When I was in college and would visit, I would cringe in embarrassment as my grandmother bragged to anyone who would listen about "her granddaughter, the chemistry major...she'll analyze what's in those hoagies for you..." I'd both look forward to and dread the dozens of cookies she'd have waiting for me to frost at Christmas. Now I'd give anything to hear those words, and of course I always knew that she had those cookies waiting for me to frost because of all the years I hadn't frosted cookies as a child.

So to Grandma D, who taught me about sacrificial motherly love, sewing, cooking meatloaf and monkey bread, proofing yeast, picking vegetables from the garden, manograms, and so much more, who loaned me books ranging from The Handmaiden's Tale to Reclaiming and Championing your Inner Child, who always reminded me to "fight nice!" ... I love you, you will be in my heart forever!

What kind of a food are you?

2005-12-23T13:16:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Tulip Girl, I now know that I am:

Mexican Food

Spicy yet dependable.
You pull punches, but people still love you.

What Kind of Food Are You?

LOL!

When chocolate cake all over the kitchen is NOT a sign of a little boy who gave in to temptation...

2005-11-04T21:44:00.000-08:00

I have to admit, I didn't handle the situation very well.

My nerves were frayed. I've been sick all week, and just got a diagnosis of strep throat this morning. My husband was sick for the previous 3 weeks. Our oldest daughter's 7th birthday party is scheduled for tomorrow (that's technically TODAY now...).

In the afternoon I baked two cakes--a chocolate layer cake for the kids, and a carrot cake for the adults. Jason, our 3 year old, had enthusiastically helped me with mixing the batters. I carefully explained to the kids (and especially Jason) that the cakes were for TOMORROW. They were left on the back of the stove to cool until I would have time to frost them later in the evening.

My husband had gone to work, I had cleaned up from dinner and was taking a break. I knew Jason and Sean were in the garage playing the piano, and left them to that. But after a few minutes Sean came running inside crying--and trailing greenish-teal fluff behind him. I quickly identified it as grass seed (what is that fluff they put it in now anyway?). Looking into the garage, I saw more of it scattered about, and that the side door to the garage was open and Jason was coming in with the bag.

I walked over, and saw fluff scattered thickly outside the door. Sigh. A mess to clean up. I corralled the boys inside, and set to work.

Then I came inside and saw it. The broken chocolate layer. Large chunks lay on the stove, though I could tell that a significant amount was missing. Jason's dining room table chair was pushed up to the stove. Crumbs lay scattered on the floor leaving a tell tale trail. And no children were in the kitchen.

And this is what I didn't handle well. I yelled. "Who ate the chocolate cake?!?!?!" Kids came running from all directions. Jason eyed me with a scared look in his eyes. I knew he had done it. Frustrated, I kneeled down, and continued yelling (bad Mommy!) "Jason, did you do this? Did you break up the cake?" Finally he nodded. My volume lowered a bit--but not enough. "Did you remember that Mommy said the cake was for TOMORROW?" He nodded. "And you got into anyway?" He whispered "yes."

At this point I got a bit of a hold on myself...my kid is more important than a cake. I gave him a hug, and told him that. I told him that obviously all those cakes on the counters with Mommy outside was just too much temptation for a 3 year old.

But I was still upset. I was going to have to bake another cake. Then I spyed the largest piece of the cake on the kitchen island next to the cake plate. I picked them both up and moved them to the stove. I attempted the hopeless task of putting the cake back together--maybe I could patch it up enough that it would still be passable. It wouldn't be the first time I'd iced a broken cake. But this cake was just too far gone.

It was probably a good 5 minutes after I'd attempted putting the cake together that something dawned on me. While there were significant voids in the cake--accounting for all the crumbs on the floor--there didn't appear to be any bite marks. And wasn't the largest piece of cake next to the cake plate?

Suddenly it dawned on me...Jason wasn't giving in to temptation, he was trying to help me! When I had gotten out the cake plate earlier he didn't understand what it was, so I explained it to him. He was just trying to move the cake onto the cake plate, but hadn't been able to reach! My guess was that he probably did pretty well gettting the layer off the stove (with the aid of his chair) and carrying it to the island, but when he tryed to reach up onto the island, it had broken--maybe even the large piece had broken off, leaving the smaller pieces in his hands. He probably then left the large piece on the island and took the smaller pieces back to the stove--leaving a trail of crumbs. Perhaps he would have gotten the large piece to return to the stove, except that I had come back into the house, and he had probably fled the kitchen when I did.

I went to Jason and asked him "Jason, were you trying to help Mommy with the cake?" "Yes" was his teary reply. "What were you doing to help Mommy?" "Cake on cake plate" he answered.

Of course I felt even smaller then for the way I had responded to seeing the mess in the kitchen...and the grass seed? That was probably a misguided attempt on Jason's part to "help" also.

I just need to remind myself...I was once a little girl who made misguided attempts to "help" as well....a half inch of water on my bedroom floor rings a bell. ;-)

Blog tag! I'm it!

2005-10-10T09:05:00.000-07:00

I've been tagged by a Ukrainian Tulip. *grin*
The rules are:

1. Search your blog archive.
2. Find your 23rd post.
3. Find the fifth sentence (this is meant to say something about you).
4. Post that sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
5. Tag five people to do the same.

My 23rd post was Discipline of Children. 5th Sentence: "That doesn't mean that anyone should emulate my parents' methods."

I am tagging:

My Bloggy Blog (my husband's blog)
Pearson Academy
Momma_Domain
Parenting Decisions
CKLewis

The parable of the seeds...

2005-07-22T21:58:00.000-07:00

Some of you know that my husband and I have been having a house built for us since April '04. It's been a LONG process. We finally moved into our new house the last week of June--which explains some of my absence from this blog.

So we are in...and we love our new house! But it isn't without its challenges. So to any of you out in "blog world" who are considering building, or perhaps are in the midst of it...here are some tips from the trenches.

pay for extra "raking time" for your lawn. They don't put top soil on before seeding--they just level out the dirt that is already there (which includes litterally TONS of rocks that they poured on to allow heavy machinery to drive around without sinking into mud), and then put on a couple inches of dirt that they dig up from elsewhere on the construction site. And thus the name of my post. Because we were SO happy was we watched our green grass coming in. And then saddened as we watched it go brown in large patches. The seed sown on rocky soil will quickly spring up, but then the sun comes out, and it withers and dies. We are going to start paying the kids by the lb to pick rocks out of the yard.
when you write your contract, put in a clause where by the builder has to pay you if they don't finish within a set period of time after the projected completion date. This wasn't an issue for us (the builder was actually waiting on us to get our house sold), but I've known people who were put in the position of having to spend money on storage space and rental houses because of a gap between when their previous house sold and their new house was completed. A neighbor had this clause put into their contract.
insist on having the location of water line entry to the house drawn onto your blue prints. Our water line comes into the basement right by the stairs, and then sticks out from the wall a good 10 inches when the main water valve is in the open position. This restricts the walkway to the stairs to about 24 inches wide. Lets not even talk about the pump that is sitting a few feet away that we had no clue we were getting...we like that we have it (its a booster in case water pressure is low--right now we don't really need it, but as the development expands we might), but why couldn't it be in a corner where it could be built into a closet when we finish out the basement?
While we are talking about water issues, lets talk hose connections. Who was the genious who decided that the front of the house was a good place to put it? You would have thought I would consider that since the one at our old house was so difficult to get to, what with having a decorative pine tree in front of it....but no, I didn't. It sits on a wall with a 5 ft deep shrub/flower planting area in front of it. Side of the house would have been MUCH better. And we paid extra to have a second hose connection put on the back of the house, expecting it would be put pretty much in the center of the back. But it wasn't. We have a walk out basement, but the yard slopes downward from the garage side of the house. The hose connection is technically on the side of the house--near the rear of the garage. It is up a pretty steep slope from the majority of the back yard--down right dangerous to get to.
Don't allow your AC unit to be placed near a slope. We already had to have ours re-leveled before we even moved in, and it is already starting to lean again. Of course a good part of that problem is that the condensation drain line for the AC comes out of the house right behind the AC, so as it gushes water it is eroding the dirt under the AC unit, causing it to lean. At least it leans toward the house rather than down the hill away from the house... I am dumping rocks back there that I pick up from the yard--I think that should help minimize the errosion.
Put a light switch to your exterior garage door light by your front door. The electrician suggested putting one there, but there were already 3 switches going there (front porch, foyer, and the "Moravian package" for our Christmas candles in the windows), and I didn't want to add a 4th. I realize now it wouldn't have made big difference--there are light switches all over the place anyway. The switch for the garage door light is only by the door from the house to the garage. (on that electrical topic...oh my goodness...OUTLETS!!! They are EVERYWHERE! ;-)
If there are items still to be resolved at settlement, make sure you keep some money until they are resolved. We've been in the house 4 weeks today and I still have a glorified bath tub for a Jacuzzi (the "on-off" button apparently was not connected before the tub was tiled into place), a non-functional fire place, a chunk of concrete broken out of the front walk, a family room light that doesn't work correctly, and a missing dishwasher panel. I'm sure there is something that I'm forgetting...but my point is, we didn't hold back any money because we expected the builder--who is a respected member of the church my husband grew up in--to be prompt about fixing things. But there doesn't seem to be any rush about getting stuff fixed, and he is trying to back out of some changes that were agreed on by his agent at settlement.
While we are talking "Jacuzzi," make sure you know what you are getting. We didn't ask. Nor did our neighbors 2 doors down. It's a "Pearl"--a brand I've never heard of. It only has 2 jets. It is a corner unit that is 54" X 54" along the walls. I bet I could have "creditted out" this tub and gotten a 10 jet Whirlpool model that is 60" X 60" from Lowes for the same cost--or not too much more (the tub at Lowes is under $1000, and our entire tub--including installation and tile--was budgetted for $5000). The size isn't a HUGE problem for me at 5'3" tall (though it does get cramped when DH and I are in together), but my neighbor stands about 5'8", and her husband is a bit taller, so I would think the size is an issue for her--she just commented to me about being annoyed with only 2 jets.
And the final issue...kitchens. Guys...when your wife starts telling you that she isn't happy with the "custom" kitchen manufacturer that the builder is using and she wants to credit out the kitchen and go to Home Depot (especially if she had a Home Depot kitchen in the past!), listen to her! Don't say "but honey, this place is supposed to be really good, lets just stick it out." She knows what she is talking about. Our kitchen is beautiful, really. But the quality is much less than what we had before from the Thomasville line at Home Depot, and the customer service was night & day different. No end to the problems with the kitchen designer at the small "custom" kitchen place not staying with the plans we had given her and not catching flaws that she should have (for example, the double oven and fridge are side by side. She was going to have the cabinet over the double oven have its bottom about 1" lower than the cabinet over the fridge. Now wouldn't that have looked odd??? Fortunately I caught it. But I didn't catch a few other small things, and somethings weren't done in the actual kitchen the way they were drawn in the plans). The kitchen designer at Home Depot was very courteous and helpful. When she didn't agree with our plan she talked it out with us until we came to a resolution--sometimes we swayed her, sometimes she swayed us--but it was always amicable. Found out from neighbor 2 houses down that they had some of the same problems we did with the kitchen folks--including that they put in a single bowl sink when a double bowl had been specified and paid for (we had that changed out PRONTO--the folks down the street were so frustrated from other arguments with the kitchen people that they didn't want to get into it, and changed out the sink themselves). We started saying that this "custom" place was "custom" the same way Henry Ford would make you whatever color Model T you wanted--as long as you wanted black. They would make you a "custom" kitchen--so long as it fit into their idea of what the kitchen should look like. So if I had it to do again, I'd go back to a place with fixed cabinet sizes--because I was able to get a more "custom" experience with that route. Also on kitchens...this is a room to consider enlarging. I really wish I had bumped out the rear wall of our house 2 feet from the kitchen through to the breakfast nook to get more room in the kitchen.

Blast from the past...

2005-06-08T23:08:00.000-07:00

Recently my attention was drawn to something I had written about 3 years ago on a parenting discussion board. I was struck by the process I have gone through in getting to where I am now in regards to the discipline of children. I was on a pathway...here is what I said:

Poster Stina
Pie said: "I don't know how you see it, but to me the verse "beat your
child with a rod and you shall deliver his soul from hell" is pretty self
explaining. "
I
replied: I disagree with you.
On the surface, this verse *does* seem to be linking physical punishment of a
child to salvation. It says that you will save the child from hell--what is that
but "salvation."
BUT....I do not believe that is what the verse is *really* saying. We have
discussed it quite a bit around here, and I have come to be comfortable with
this verse saying basically that there are some teens who are just so wayward
that you need to "knock some sense into them." They need extreme consequences to
"wake up" and get their focus back on God. Now in the culture this passage was
written to, that extreme consequence was a flogging. In our culture it may be
jail time, fines, community service work...if I have a wayward teen I'm sure I
would struggle emotionally with doing it, but I believe the best thing I can do
for that child is not to shield him or
her from the legal ramifications of
his or her actions, but rather support him or her through the period of
punishment.
You say that preconcieved notions when reading scripture often lead to
twisting of scripture. I very much agree with you--and I think that is what Ezzo
has done. It might interest you to know though, that before I had children I did
believe in spanking "in moderation...."
I'm not totally opposed to it now, but it was when I still believed that the
Bible supported spanking that I was introduced to the arguments that it does
*not* support spanking. It took me some time to come to grips with the
notion--but for me the evidence was overwhelming.
My husband and I VERY rarely spank (I can probably count on one hand the
number of times I've swatted my almost 4 year old on the behind, my 2 year old
has gotten 1 or 2 swats from me)--we find other consequences for misbehavior to
be more or equally effective in promoting right behavior, and certainly more
respectful of our children. We also find expecting *good* behavior and training
toward that, and having reasonable rules and expectations for our kids prevents
a lot of misbehavior. I grew up so used to children getting spanked and
accepting it as a way of life.
When I first smacked my DD's hand when she was about 10 months old and she
looked at me with hurt shock in her eyes, it really threw me for a loop. I
wondered how in the world she knew to be so offended--she looked like I'm sure
my face would look if someone slapped me in the face--violated. That really
spoke a lot to me. Now when I hear parents joking about spanking their children
and how their children know to expect it and don't even bother trying to run
away...well I wonder what it took to break that God given sense of self respect
and self preservation.
The only time my husband and I spank is when it is an issue of urgent
physical safety--like when our oldest daughter almost ran in front of a moving
car. Or, admittedly, those occassions when we as parents are pushed to our
breaking point--and we certainly do not think that is a reasonable justification
for spanking.

Of course now I've come to the conclusion that spanking really isn't an appropriate or respectful way to deal with children--not that putting that belief into practice is easy! I do still stand by the notion that turning a wayward teen over to the legal authorities can be the correct path in parenting.

Jenn

Push it Good, Push it REAL Good

2005-05-12T22:31:00.000-07:00

The fans have spoken...so here is the post. ;-) (Yes Tulip Girl, this is for you)

It's finally happened. I missed a birth. I walked into the LDR toting my birth bag, birth ball, and camcorder, WAY more awake than someone my age should be at 3 a.m.

The nurse greeted me with a cheery "you're late."

Huh?

With a smile she said "The baby has already been born...she is in room 306."

What???? First time mom...she called me in the early the previous evening to let me know that she'd starting having contractions in the morning 30 minutes apart. They were mild. They were 15 minutes apart when she called me, and still mild. She was 1 day past her due date and had visited her OB that day. He told her not to expect the birth that day. I figured he was right--sounded like a gentle and slow labor building up. Maybe a birth by breakfast the next day...

She called again at 10:30 p.m. Said the contractions had been 10 minutes apart for an hour, and her OB wanted her to go into the hospital. But she didn't think labor was really serious. She expected to go in, get checked, but then leave and go stay at a friend's house close to the hospital (she lives 45 minutes from the hospital). She told me that they needed to take their dogs to the kennel, which was in the opposite direction from the hospital. I expected that she would get to the hospital around midnight at the latest, and would give me a call around then to let me know what was up. I was still predicting breakfast.

Midnight came and she didn't call. I had all my stuff ready to go, and went to bed, hoping to catch a bit of sleep. 1:45 the phone rang. It was her husband calling to let me know they were on their way to the hospital, contractions were now 4 minutes apart. He didn't indicate any real urgency, but we agreed that I would meet them at the hospital. Breakfast still seemed like a good bet for birth time. I called my husband, who said he would be home in 10-15 minutes (he works until 2:30 a.m. usually). He was home by 2. I left by 2:15, but stopped in at Wegmans for some pastries for the nurses--bribes will get a doula very far. ;-) I was in the hospital parking lot by 2:50, but then the long walk to LDR for my greeting...

Sigh. Even if I had walked out the door right when I got the call, leaving the kids home unattended and not stopping for the bribe, I still would have missed the birth. She was 5 cms dialated when she was initially checked at 2 a.m., but then some 20 minutes later they were getting visual confirmation of the ultrasound prediction of a girl.

So yes, I guess she pushed it good, real good.

The smile on her face was just SO beautiful.

Life Action, Part IV

2005-05-12T22:15:00.000-07:00

I've left this series lie dormant for a while, I should finish it off and be done with it.

In my previous post on the topic, I mentioned that my husband and I just couldn't agree with people about the concepts they felt were "worthwhile" that they were learning from Life Action, and I promised to share with you an example.

One couple shared with us this example of something they thought was a wonderful idea for a family to implement:

The speaker apparently said that he has all of the females in his household—including his wife—model any new clothes they purchase in front of him to make sure they are “acceptable.” The person telling us this specifically thought it was good that the father was looking to make sure the clothes would not have sexual appeal.

Now I often model my new clothes for my husband, and I usually show him what I bought for the kids. But it isn’t to get approval—it is to share my feeling of accomplishment of getting a good buy, or something that looks very nice… My husband trusts me to pick appropriate clothes.

My husband and I felt that the described “modeling” was very controlling, and thought that having the daughters model and spin in front of their father to show off all angles—particularly because the father is scrutinizing for any sexual appeal in the clothes—could have some ungodly sexuality to it in many households. We are naïve if we think that a Christian father can not struggle with inappropriate sexual thoughts toward his daughter, or even cross the line into abusing her.

While we agree that girls need to be educated about what makes clothes sexually appealing to guys, and parents should retain the right to say “you aren’t wearing an outfit like that as long as you live in my house!” we don’t necessarily think this kind of show needs to go on.

Once again we noticed that like the example with dinner, this was a patriarchal practice that puts men over women. Do the males of the household model their clothes before the mother? Do they not understand that a nicely fitting sweater can cause a young girl’s mind to wander? Or as one person I know who came out of a background (Gothard/ATI) where the men were expected to always wear blue suits with white shirts to church said—“ATI conferences were a terrible trial for me because dark suits have been and continue to be something I find incredibly appealing. I couldn’t look anywhere but the ground without having sinful thoughts!”

And thus I end my series on Life Action Ministries...since I started this series my husband and I made the decision to leave our church and have become members at the church where our daughters have attended preschool for several years. Our decision to move was not one that was made easily, but the support of groups like Life Action Ministries certainly factored into it. We are excited to be a part of a thriving evangelical community of believers where legalism as is promoted by groups such as Life Action is not promoted.

"She shall be saved through childbearing..."

2005-05-09T22:13:00.000-07:00

My husband asked me today: What do you think of this passage I came across a writing from Paul in 1 Tim 2, Your thoughts???

I just wanted your ideas about it because I was reading this very wacky guy's view on sex and he quotes this verse and I thought.. "scripture twisting" and I brought up the whole chapter and was kinda surprised at what I read:

9I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not with
braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, 10but with good deeds,
appropriate for women who profess to worship God.
11A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. 12I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. 13For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. 15But women[a] will be saved[b] through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.

What is Paul's problem with women with braided hair? Was this a cultural thing? And what does he mean by verse 14. It seems very chauvanistic?

So of course I gave my response to him...I hope that is not in contradiction to the instruction of the passage. ;-)

The braids are a cultural thing...women were getting really outrageous with intricate braids in their hair and he was saying that they should focus less on hairstyle and clothes, and more on being the type of women God wants them to be. Its a statement kind of along the lines of Christ saying that for someone to truly love Him he must hate his family. Christ doesn't truly want people to hate their families, its just that our love for Him should be so great that our love for our families is so paltry in comparison as to seem like hate. Likewise, I do not believe that Paul is banning all braids, but he is saying that their significance should be WAY below the significance of a woman's internal beauty.

And no, vs. 14 is not chauvinistic. Not mentioning Adam's sin is not meant to imply that he did not sin--but it accurately states that he was not deceived. Eve was deceived. I've heard many teachings that Adam's sin was worse because he knew full out that what he was doing was wrong--God had told him directly not to eat of the tree. But Eve was deceived--tricked--into eating it. Yes, she did sin since she had some knowledge that she should not eat of it, but her knowledge was less full than Adam's.

Now that reference to childbirth...ooo...that is often ignored. It's just too "difficult" to figure out. While it is discussed in the very extensive commentary on the passage available at Bible Gateway, the discussion hardly comes to a conclusion, and kind of leaves it out there as a passage that can't really be interpretted.

My thoughts is that it is that most commentators don't know what to make of it because of their preconceived notions about birth. This passage mirrors Genesis 3--and if you really think about it, it is interesting. Because Eve's sin is mentioned but not Adam's, it has been taught in the past that Eve's sin is worse than Adam's. This is partly what was used by the church to justify the idea that women should not receive pain medication in labor because they had to atone for their sins through pain in labor--believing the passage meant that women would be saved through experiencing that pain.

So what then happens to the childless woman? Can she not be saved? No--and that is part of where this interpretation falls apart.

This passage does not mention Adam's sin...but clearly Adam sinned, so one can not interpret the silence about that in this passage to mean that Adam did not sin. No, this passage is a CLARIFICATION on Eve's sin. She was deceived. Adam out and out disobeyed, there was no deception. This passage gives women not a punishment, but a HOPE. It is not saying that through the process of childbearing that a woman will somehow earn salvation, but rather that if she will "continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety" she can possibly be restored to what God intended childbirth to be--not a painful agony, but a blessing--that is to say "saved through the period of childbearing of the agony." This is expounded upon rather beautifully by Jennifer Vanderlaan in her workbook "The Lord of Birth" that I use for my Christian classes.

Houdini in a carseat

2005-04-25T21:13:00.000-07:00

Do you have one? A child who finds escaping from her carseat to be a delightful challenge?

I don't. I've been blessed I guess. My kids are fairly happy in the car. My youngest didn't like long trips in his infant seat...and my oldest once screamed for 45 minutes straight while I drove from the northeast side of Pittsburgh to the northwest side (I had driven from Allentown then stopped for dinner with an aunt, and my daughter was quite happy to escape her carseat. But then when I put her back into it to complete the drive to my grandparents' house she was NOT happy! I stopped a couple of times to try to calm her, but she just started screaming again as soon as I put her back in the seat, so I just clenched my jaw and pressed on.) But other than that, they've been pretty compliant about the whole carseat thing. Yeah...sometimes they *try* to get out (particularly Jason), but so far Jessica--who is 6--is the only one capable of getting herself--and her siblings--out of seats. And she knows it is in her best interest to wait until the vehicle is parked so that she remains safe.

But I have run into a fair share of parents who have troubles with "Houdini children." Some parents seem to feel that this only needs to be dealt with as a rebellion issue--the child needs to learn to comply with the parental directive of staying in the carseat. My opinion is that if your child is escaping from his carseat there is a bigger problem than rebellion. A 2-3 year old really should not be capable of escaping from a child safety seat.

As a Certified Child Passenger Safety Technician, when I hear about kids escaping from carseats and I start asking questions about it, I usually end up coming to one of two basic reasons for the escape: The wrong seat is being used for the child, or the harness is not tight enough. Neither one of these bode well for a crash situation.

In the case of the "wrong seat," the wrong seat can either be a shield style convertible (tray shield sitting in front of the child or a T-shield), or it can be a case of a child moved into a belt positioning booster too soon.

With the shield style seats, the design of the seat prevents the harness from being very snug around the child. There also isn't hip restraint, which can allow a true Houdini child to wiggle out of even a fairly snug harness. Some kids just don't like the bulky shield in front of them (perhaps makes them feel claustrophobic?), so they will do whatever they can to get out. Shield style seats generally aren't favored in the safety community because the child is expected to impact on the shield as part of the restraint--this is like you or I hitting the dashboard. It may keep you from going any further forward, but it hurts and can cause significant injury (including in rare cases death--but broken bones and internal organ injury are more common). 5-point style harnesses are preferred because they reduce the impact risk, they also incorporate hip straps that help to hold a child down.

As far as belt positioning boosters, children generally aren't mature enough to use these seats safely until they are 4-5 years old. Even if they can be coerced into sitting still, if they are under 40 lbs they are better protected in a harnessed seat. Especially if you are using a shield style booster like a Gerry Double Guard or Cosco Grand Explorer you should know that a significant risk of these seats is having the child "fold" over the sheild and suffer serious abdominal/spinal injuries, and secondly ejection is a very real risk in side impact and roll-over crashes. These seats aren't FAA approved because they fail the roll over test required for FAA approval. (This is also my chance to mention that old seats DO expire! I just last week confiscated a Gerry Double Guard from the Care Net Crisis Pregnancy Center donation bin at my church. It was made in 1997--8 years old. Now I think I've got the folks at my local Care Net pretty well trained to toss stuff like that...but no point taking chances! Anything over 5 years old that comes into a carseat check we are REALLY looking for an excuse to replace it with a new seat, 10 years old will get it replaced for age in and of itself. The issues with old seats are that newer technology provides better protection, and older seats are often missing parts/instructions that are vital for proper use.)

Harness tightness was the second major category I listed for reasons for children being able to get out of car seats. The button to release the harness generally requires more force to release it than a typical 2-3 year old can generate. Even my almost 5 year old daughter can not let herself out of her seat. The harness should be "snug as a hug." There should not be slack in the harness, but it shouldn't be cutting into the child. Puffy winter coats should not be worn with carseats, as they result in loosening of the harness straps. In the winter time, when you get out to the car (which is hopefully pre-heated), take off the kids' coats, buckle them into their seats, and then put the coats on them backwards, and cover up with blankets as needed (we keep a small fleece blanket for each child in the van). For a child using a belt positioning booster you might be able to get away with just unzipping the coat, buckling the seat belt, then zipping the coat back up over the seat belt.

Now yes, there are "Houdinis" out there. When it comes to those kids, I recommend a proactive training approach. First, try to be REALLY alert for a day or so to any time the child runs head-long into a wall, or piece of furniture, or whatever. Make a big deal about how much it hurt--make that event memorable in the child's mind. Then schedule a "training drive." Make sure to bring along one of your child's prized stuffed animals, and put it on the seat next to your child--unrestrained--don't let the child hold it. Drive in a quiet neighborhood without much traffic/danger. Suddenly slam on the brakes. The doll will go flying. Grab up the doll and make a big deal about looking for injuries--perhaps find one and bandage it up quickly with some cloth strips you have conveniently tucked in your pocket. Then turn to your child with very animated emotions, and say "OH MY GOODNESS! It is SO good that you are buckled in your car seat. If you hadn't been buckled you would have flown right along with your teddy bear. And then you would have gotten hurt very badly! Remember when you ran into the chair this morning, how much you got hurt? This would have hurt a LOT more!!!"

Kids are very visual, it works. Then when you buckle the child in in the future you remind the child "remember how your teddy bear flew? You don't want to do that, do you? You will get owies. Okay, so keep your seat belt on, just like Momma keeps her seat belt on." BTW, if you and your partner don't both wear seat belts, there is no better time to start--kids pick up on that. When I was 3 I questioned my father--"why do I have to be in this seat if you don't wear your seatbelt?" Well he started wearing a seat belt! 1976.

Mommyless Mommies

2005-04-25T20:47:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine who I consider to be a “mentor” of sorts to me recently suggested that I should write about my experience of being a “mom without a mommy.” You see, I did not really have a “mommy.” My parents separated when I was 6 months old. I lived with my maternal grandparents for several years, and then my father moved my siblings and I in with the woman who would become our step-mother. I was 5 years old when she told me that she did not want me, and would see that I was out of the house by the time I was 16. Obviously she was not a “mommy” to me, and did not provide a good role model. So now I have embarked on the joy of parenting, fumbling at times to find my way. I hope you find my perspective helpful in your journey, because you see, too many of mothers today also do not have a “mommy” role model—a nurturing mom who guided them as Titus 2 in the Bible says in teaching them to “love their husbands and children, to be selfcontrolled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God.

As I sat down to write this article (last September!) I heard a crash. Not a loud crash…but a recognizable one. I knew what it was—my two year old son Jason had gotten my nearly 6 year old Jessica’s tape dispenser—a handy little contraption that opens up to reveal small storage compartments that hold paper clips, counting chips for math, and a pink eraser. He’s fascinated by it—as any normal two year old would be.

But I did not relish picking up all those small items! Flying up from my chair, I descended the stairs rapidly. “Jason, what are you doing?” I yelled. Seeing him scampering across the living room in a frightened manner, I caught myself. I was being my step-mother. Taking a deep breath, I put a smile across my face and changing my tone I said “well you’ve made a mess here, haven’t you? I guess we need to clean up!” Jason turned around and started coming back to the mess as we both sang together

Clean up, clean up, everybody clean up!
Clean up, clean up, everybody everywhere!
Clean up, clean up, everybody do their share!

I showed him how to sort the counting chips from the paper clips, and soon we had the mess cleaned up, and everyone was happy. Jason had learned one more small lesson in responsibility, while also learning that his mommy is kind, loving, and a fun person to be with. I picked up the tape dispenser and carried it back to the top shelf on Jessica’s bookcase where it belongs—not that this location is out of Jason’s reach seeing as he has figured out that he can climb on Jessica’s desk to reach it. But it is a bit less tempting than it was sitting on the piano where sheet music should be!

Now for what I really intended to write in this article…how do we teach our children to have responsible behavior? For the Christian, how do we teach our children to look to the Bible as a guide for their behavior? An abundance of books are available to tell us how! One thing that impresses me is that often books about parenting are written by men.

Now as a woman who has worked days while her husband stayed home parenting the children, I do not want to downplay the role of fathers. But let’s face it, moms are the ones who do most of the parenting! We are in the trenches. Even with my husband home in the daytime, he looks to me to advise him on what is age appropriate behavior, and to provide ideas on how to mold behavior.

There is a fundamental difference between men and women that men tend to move in and attempt to affect change by use of brute force (which is sometimes necessary!), while women are generally more nurturing. In the workplace more and more large companies are moving to management style that could be considered more feminine if only it were politically correct to identify it as such. Why are they doing this? Because the research consistently shows that it yields a more productive workplace. Titus 2 tells the Christian that women should be looking to older women for advice. So why do we cling so tightly to what is written by men? Why, as workplaces move in a more feminine direction, is the home moving in a more masculine direction?

Some of the more masculine parenting advice I have read involves a very methodical approach for dealing with children’s misbehavior. The parent is instructed to ask the child what the child did wrong. The child is then expected to confess. The parent then calmly explains that he is required to give a spanking for disobedience—it’s a requirement on the parent from God, so the child is supposed to be sympathetic to the parent’s being under an authority just as the child is under the parent’s authority. The spanking is given, then the parent hugs the child and the child is supposed to display a submissive spirit. It is all very dispassionate, almost emotionless.

But we are not emotionless, and to attempt to be so I believe is to deny a very important part of ourselves as mothers, and a very important part of our children. Further, I feel that this model really falls apart when you apply it in the real world. The holes abound. Let me lay out a very real scenario of how this played out one time in my home.

My family was having some visitors. The children were upstairs playing in our daughters’ bedroom. After a time “Briana Smith” (all names of children other than mine have been changed) came downstairs with 5 year old Jessica. Jessica was crying hard. Briana explained to me that “Joey Jones” had shoved Jessica. I’ve seen Jessica in action before—the slightest perceived injustice can cause tears to well up like a geyser. I did not consider this to be a big issue since I did not see any blood or marred skin, nor had I heard any tell tale “thuds” that might indicate that this had been a rough shove. I worked to calm her down for the comfort of our guests.

Briana then proceeded over to Joey’s father, and repeated her tale to him. He immediately got up and went upstairs. He questioned his son about what happened. Apparently 4 times he asked the question and Joey said “I don’t know.” He finally said something like “look Joey, you were up here, I know that you know something about what happened, so what happened?” At that point Joey confessed to pushing Jessica.

The father came down stairs and asked me for a wooden spoon to spank his son with. Having read the same book that this father has read (or at least I know his wife has read it, I assume he has too), I expect the spoon would have been used on bare skin. I’ve been spanked like that before. It HURTS. One recent study found that when parents spank with a bare hand the child feels 40% more force than the parent feels, simply because of the different levels of nerves and the physics involved. I challenge you to try it—“spank” yourself on the same part of your body as you spank your child, and feel the different sensations between what you feel on the palm of your hand and on the area you spank. I can only imagine that when a parent uses a so called “neutral object”[1] to spank with it is much easier to apply more force than is intended.

Now I did not give the father a wooden spoon, and he later told me that he felt a “check in his spirit” and did not spank the child. But he told me that he was not intending to spank the child for pushing my daughter, but rather for lying to him. Which I feel is the first place the “discipline scenario” falls apart. I feel that asking the child what they did wrong sets them up to lie. The child suspects that if he admits to the wrong doing he will be spanked. Even if the parent has witnessed the misdeed, many children will lie in hopes that their parent did not quite see everything, and perhaps they will be able to avert the spanking.

But even beyond that is the false confession. Who hasn’t heard of the controversy at times over police eliciting confessions from suspects? A parent may think they are not intimidating in their questioning…but let’s put this in perspective. The child is about 40 inches tall and weighs 40 lbs. The parent is close to 70 inches tall and weighs 160 lbs…don’t you think you’d feel intimidated if someone that much bigger than you who had spanked you in the past started asking questions? My grandmother tells me that she regularly confessed to doing things that her sister had done simply because she could not stand the pressure of being asked even once. The phenomenon is so well known that even a Winnie the Pooh video that my children enjoy has Piglet quickly confessing to Rabbit that he had sent a banned Valentine’s card, but then when asked why he sent it he admits that he didn’t send it, he just doesn’t do well under pressure (later you learn that Eyeore had sent the card—not knowing about the ban).

So what is a parent to do in a scenario like what happened in my house, particularly if they have an ongoing struggle with their child being physically aggressive? Here is a very effective model that I use and what I try to do if roles were reversed and Joey were the one that was alledgedly hurt by Jessica (after I’d run up the stairs yelling “Jessica, what did you do to Joey?!?” then catch my breath and thought about it!). This model involves the emotions as well as the “teaching” aspect of discipline that I find is very often left out in discipline models that rely strongly on spanking.

Parent: Jessica, I heard that you pushed Joey. I don't really know if that is what happened because I didn't see the situation. But remember how we have talked about treating others kindly? Is pushing Joey kind?
Jessica: no... (looking at ground)
Parent: Okay. So you understand that. If you do hurt someone, what does the Bible say that you should do to make the situation right?
Jessica: I don't know...
Parent: Well let's look together, perhaps Matthew 5:23-24 could help us. What does that passage say?
Jessica: That if someone realizes someone else is upset with them they should go to that person and apologize.
Parent: Do you think Joey is upset with you right now?
Jessica: Ummm....yes?
Parent: Then what should you do?
Jessica: But it was an accident!
Parent: The Bible says here simply that if your brother--Joey--has something against you you should go to him and be reconciled. You should tell Joey that you are sorry that he is hurt even if you didn't mean to hurt him. Let's pray together. "Dear Lord, we are praying now for Joey because he is hurt. Please help his mommy soothe his owie. Please help Jessica to play nicely with her friends. If Jessica did push Joey,
please convict her heart of her need to apologize to him. In Jesus name, amen."

Now at this point Jessica may or may not go apologize to Joey for pushing him. She may say "Mommy, I didn't push Joey, but I am sad that he is hurt." I should then encourage Jessica to express that sympathy to Joey with a hug and even explain that Jessica can say “I’m sorry that you got hurt” to Joey even if she doesn’t feel she caused the hurt. I think it is important for the parent to TRUST the child at this point despite the report from the other child. Maybe Jessica *didn't* push Joey, but accidentally bumped into him and Briana interpretted that incorrectly. Or the "bumping" may have even not been all that "accidental," but the child is going on the technicality that she "bumped" rather than "pushed."

Regardless of what the child does, the parent needs to trust the power of the scripture and prayer to work in reaching the child's heart. I know of children who were never spoken to about a wrong doing because their parents didn't know about it, or perhaps even another sibling got blamed for it while the guilty sibling looked on silently. Yet they confess months later after a family devotional touches their heart. I know myself that even in the face of a severe beating I often still continued to deny doing something I knew very well I had done. I really do not see how spanking reaches the child's heart or teaches the child not to hurt other children. My own experience from childhood would tell me that Joey probably believed that Jessica told on him (she didn't!), and thus would hold her responsible for his spanking if he had gotten one--DESPITE his father clearly telling him the spanking was for lying, and Joey even repeating back to his father that he knew the spanking was for lying--children learn how to parrot back what they know their parents expect them to say--even if they don't believe it.

Now please keep in mind that this situation—where the parent did not witness the aggression—is very different from when the parent does witness the aggression. If the parent does witness it and thus knows beyond any doubt that it did occur, it is definitely time for some consequences. The parent might have a very similar discussion with the child about having sympathy for others, but then follow it up with “I can see that you are having difficulty with playing nicely right now. I can’t allow you to hurt other children so you are going to have to sit here next to me and read a book rather than playing with the other children.”

[1] The “neutral object” theory holds that a parent should not spank with their hand because the hand is for loving. On one side, I can see the logic in this—I know several people who even as adult flinch when their parents reach out to hug them because of having been spanked by hand. However, “neutral objects” don’t eliminate that response—they just transfer it to something else. I flinch when seeing one of my husband’s belts casually laying around because my father’s belt was the “neutral object” of choice for many years in my family.

Using LATCH to keep your kids safe?

2005-03-21T21:07:00.000-08:00

Then you will want to read this. LATCH stands for "Lower Anchors and Tethers for Children." It is a system of anchors installed in the vehicle seat bite (where the seat back and bottom meet) to which hooks from the bottom of a child safety seat are attached; and tether anchors installed in the vehicle behind the seating location (can be in the floor, bottom of the seat frame, shelf by the rear window, or ceiling) to which a "tether" from the top of a forward facing seat is attached. This system is supposed to make installing child safety seats simpler, since the endless variations of vehicle seat belts can often be incompatible with particular styles of child safety seats.

It seems that the use of LATCH is causing an unexpected problem...inquisitive kids are playing with the unused seatbelt that is hanging next to them, and getting caught in it. One child has been strangled to death, another came pretty close.

If you are using LATCH there is a simple action you can take to prevent this kind of incident. Remove your child's safety seat from the car. Buckle the seatbelt. If it has a "switchable retractor" turn the retractor "on" by pulling out the entire length of the belt, then let it retract. Then reinstall the child safety seat using the LATCH system. While you are in there fixing things, take a few seconds to buckle any unused lap-only belts so they aren't left flying around in a crash. Also look to remove any unnecessary loose items in your vehicle so that they don't become projectiles in a crash.

Rebel in a diaper...

2005-03-20T14:13:00.000-08:00

Rebellion. According to scripture it is bound up in our hearts. As humans, we often chafe against authority and desire to rebel.

But just when does rebellion start? Recently my husband and I chose to leave our church home of nearly 7 years. One of the issues was a disagreement over when rebellion starts. Our church had chosen to advocate an author who defines rebellion as even an infant who continues to struggle during a diaper change after being told not to. Another example given in this book of rebellion was an 8 month old child who was examining books on a shelf, then after being reprimanded by Mom, returned to the shelf presumably to pick up where she left off.

But is this really rebellion? I don't think so. In my mind (and we all know how warped it is... ;-) in order for someone to rebel, that "someone" has to have an identified authority to rebel against. And this is where we get into a problem when we say that infants are rebelling.

Many years ago a wise woman told me that the primary root cause of child abuse is age inappropriate expectations--parents who expect behavior from their children that is not appropriate to expect at the child's age. To avoid that pitfall she reccommended that I educate myself about normal childhood development. Fortunately I had already taken a class on childhood development which I have since supplemented with further learning as I have undertaken the momentous task of mothering.

Something I learned back in that class was the concept that infants do not understand that other people want different things than they want. If the infant wants to each Cheerios and hates brocolli, they can not comprehend that another person would want brocolli. In testing, children about 10-12 months old will readily feed a parent Cheerios. But when directed to feed the parent a food that the child does not like--perhaps brocolli--they will get a confused look on their face, and feed the parent Cheerios.

Is the child rebelling against the instruction? NO! The child simply can not comprehend that the parent would want brocolli, and thus feeds Cheerios. Between about 14-18 months of age this changes. They child may be confused, but will give the parent brocolli when asked to do so. The child is starting to understand that other people want different things than the child does.

Does an infant have a will? YES! Does the infant get angry when that will is twarted? YES! But is the infant capable of rebellion? I don't think so.

So going back to the infant struggling during a diaper change. The infant wants to explore the world, crawl away. The infant has no concept--even if told by the parent--that the parent wants the child to stay still. (do we really even know that a 6-7 month old infant understands what the parent is saying???) So what is the parent to do? The diaper needs to be changed! A wise parent will be fully ready to do a speedy diaper change, and will creatively think of ways to entertain the infant during the process--kisses, zerberts, funny voice, toys, diapers turned into puppets...

A Safe Place to Birth...

2005-03-03T20:33:00.000-08:00

The contractions start...the anxious parents-to-be gather up a few last minute things and head off to the hospital--confident that they are going to the safest place in the world to have a baby--after all, it is an American hospital!

Sadly, this is far from the truth. Recently the CIA updated their "World Factbook" statistics on infant mortality. 226 nations are listed, with those who have the highest infant mortality listed first. Given this, most Americans would proudly expect America to rank at least over 200--but certainly over 220--the top of the top!

185.

That's right...if this were a percentile ranking, America would rank in the 81st percentile--18% of the listed nations have a lower infant mortality rate. And this is hardly "news," as our ranking hasn't changed much in a good many years. If the presidential elections don't make you want to move to Canada, then perhaps if you are an expectant parent the infant mortality statistics should--Canada's ranks at 204 with an infant mortality rate 27% lower than that in America.

Now to be certain, we are far from the worst--with an infant mortality rate of 191 deaths per 1,000 live births, Angola tops the list with an infant mortality rate that is nearly 30 times as high as America's rate of 6.5 deaths per 1,000 live births.

But America's rate amounts to 0.65% of all live born babies, which comes to just under 27,000 deaths each year. To put this in some perspective, the CIA reports that 0.6% of Americans are living with HIV/AIDS, and 14,000 Americans die from the effects of this disease each year. Who hasn't heard of the AIDS crisis in America? But who has heard of the infant mortality crisis? Who has heard that if we were more similar to Singapore, which has an infant mortality rate of 2.29, over 17,000 more infants per year in America would celebrate their first birthday? There is a problem when countries such as Cuba, Macau, the Czech Republic, and Hong Kong have lower infant mortality rates than America!

So what are these countries doing different than what we are doing? What technologies do they have that we don't have? Many people might be surprised to learn that it is often the LACK of technology that makes birth safer! The countries that consistently have lower infant mortality rates (and maternal mortality rates as well) than America often have a much higher rate of midwifery care, and a higher rate of out of hospital birth. Many of these countries have midwife attended birth rates of up to 60% vs. a paltry 10% in America, and some have homebirth rates of up to 40%.

How does technology make birth less safe? It's not just having it that makes birth less safe. To be certain, having technology around and available for high risk cases is part of what makes birth safer in countries like England (the United Kingdom), Denmark, Switzerland, and Finland. The problem is when it is "routinely" used. In America we see many forms of technology being inappropriately used on women who do not have a medical need for it. For example, induction of labor is becoming so common that it is almost "routine." Women can frequently ask to be induced for no medical cause beyond being "tired of being pregnant," in many cases their Dr's order inductions without medical cause even when the women do not ask for them. The women are rarely counciled about the increased risk they put themselves and their baby in when undertaking an induction--in fact, many are falsely told that to wait for labor to start naturally is what bears the increased risk! One of my clients was told that to refuse an induction at just 5 days after her "due date" (40 weeks from "last menstrual period"--LMP) for nothing more than being "late" she was risking the death of her baby. She was told this again when she refused at 7 days after her "due date." Why were scare tactics like this used when the average first pregnancy, as measured by a Harvard study, is 41 weeks 1 day after LMP; and her first ultrasound--in keeping with her longer than average cycles--actually set her due date 7 days later than LMP would predict to boot?

As for me, I'll be looking to the countries of my forefathers/mothers for "bragging rights" on infant mortality:

Austria-maternal grandparents-4.66 deaths per 1,000 live births
Germany-paternal grandfather-4.16 deaths per 1,000 live births
Sweden-paternal grandmother-2.77 deaths per 1,000 live births

Discipline of Children

2005-03-01T10:27:00.000-08:00

In the interest of not "taking over" Anne's blog in her comments section...I'm going to post some comments here on my blog in regards to a discussion that has gotten going in the comments to one of her posts...

Molly said:
A great example is the Pearl's themselves. From everything one can read, it seems their 5 children turned out wonderfully.

Well...I think that I turned out "wonderfully" too. That doesn't mean that anyone should emulate my parents' methods. {snip--go to Anne's blog if you really want the details}

I wanted to follow up just a bit on the concept that the Pearl’s kids turned out so great…this is a comment that one of their daughters made in an article:

For years, I stumbled around trying to get a grip on my emotions (anger, hurt, or disappointment), but it never worked. I could suppress them for a time, but then I would let go and erupt like a volcano, letting insults fly. Also, once emotions were let loose, it was easier to turn them towards the little ones when they misbehaved.

(Editted...Color me embarrassed...when I went to get the URL where this quote could be found on the Pearl's "No Greater Joy" website I realized that it was NOT one of Pearl's daughters who wrote the article, but rather someone named "Marie." However...I still stand by my position that just because children seem to have turned out "wonderfully," that doesn't always tell the whole story.)

Here we have her revealing just a glimpse into her “real world,” and it isn’t exactly pretty. Its actually very familiar to me, as I had the same struggles until I addressed the issues from my childhood. We need to remember that just as we put our “best foot forward” when we go out in public, so does every other family. What is seen on the outside is not always reality. What people thought of my family growing up was that my parents must be doing a great job because my siblings and I were so helpful and obedient…and my brother and I did SO well in school (he went to college a year early, I skipped a year in high school…lets just say we were motivated to get out of our parents’ house…).

Molly said:
And the Pearl's condoning abuse within the family, especially incest? I'm thinking this may be yet another case where they are being taken out of context... The Pearl's tell the wife of an incestuous man to call the police, report him, testify AGAINST him, and get him locked up for a long time. If she wants to stay married to him, fine, but to keep him in jail for as long as the children are still in the home. I fail to see how that is a terrible horrible thing...?

I never said they "condoned" abuse or incest within the family, I said that "their position on abuse within the family, especially incest, also sickens me." And it does. Michael instructs that a women in a physically abusive relationship should stay in it, and comes pretty close to saying it is her fault in my opinion. I believe that he does "allow" that she can be separated from him if he is physically harming the kids, but quite frankly, I don't feel like taking the time right now to verify that.

As for incest...its hard to get a "stranger rapist" locked up for the 20-40 years that Pearl advocates even with a solid conviction against him, let alone an incestuous father. There is often little to no physical evidence as the incest often is revealed significantly after it occurred. It is EXTREMELY hard to make a conviction for incest "stick." Even if it does, the sentence is usually light. Even if the sentence is not light, Pearl does not say "if she wants to stay married to him, fine." He says that she should stay married to him--implies that she MUST to be in obediance to scripture--and that she should take him back into her bed (he specifies that) upon release from prison regardless of whether or not he has repented (though he assumes the father will repent, as he describes prisons as a great place for contemplation and repentance...). What kind of message does that send to the victims if mom takes dad right back--regardless of whether or not he repented? What kind of risk is she exposing her grandchildren to? What kind of a person do you think he is going to come out of prison being? Given how child abusers are treated in prison, do you really think he is going to be a Godly husband to the wife who turned him over to the authorities?

For the record, I know someone very well who was sexually abused by her older brother (4-5 years older than her) for several years. Her other brother was aware of the abuse, but kept a pact of silence with her that she insisted on because she did not want the abusive brother to go to jail. When she finally revealed the abuse her family got councilling. I met her at that point in her life. Because her brother was no longer in a position where he could abuse her or at that time in a position where he had any access to other young girls that he could abuse, she did not report the abuse to the police. It took several years, but the relationships in her family have been restored. Her brother, several years after the abuse was revealed, began to be convicted of his sin, and asked her forgiveness. The change in their relationship has been beautiful. She trusts her formly abusive brother, and has no fear at all that he would abuse his own daughter the way he abused her. If you were to meet her today and see her interact with this brother you would never suspect what happened between them. I know that restoration CAN happen, and when it does...that is a wonderful thing and a display of God's power.

But sadly, that is the only example of restoration I can give you. All of the other women I know who were sexually abused--and I know many--can tell you sad stories of attempts at Biblical reconcilliation that were rebuffed, leading to broken families...or others who simply never confronted their abusers and thus the relationships remain strained or broken.

Molly said:
What happened in your childhood is disgusting. But do you, for example, stop using the bathroom now because they were abusive towards you (regarding only letting you go three times a day?). I've been known to make my children wait to go to the bathroom (when we're in the middle of a trip to town and have 5 minutes to go, and they announce that they have to pee or they'll die!). *grin* Is that abuse, or is it just practical (no bathrooms in sight for 5 minutes!).
Is all discipline a bad thing, because your parents abused their parental authority? You see what I'm saying...
The analogy doesn’t work. My parents were unreasonably restricting a necessary bodily function. To make the analogy a LITTLE bit closer to “working” we would have to go with me “never restricting the child’s access to the bathroom.” And as you point out, that is unreasonable as well. There is a middle ground—sometimes the child will have to wait. But I don’t arbitrarily tell my children how many times they are “allowed” to use the bathroom each day.

I never said that “all discipline is a bad thing.” Discipline is necessary and commanded by scripture. But I don’t think that the Pearl’s brand of “the rod is magic” discipline is right.

Do I think that all discipline in the form of corporal punishment--"spanking" or "swatting" is abuse? This is something that I've been really grappling with over the last couple of months. It seems too judgemental to out and out say that any use of corporal punishment of children is abusive. So I've attempted to draw an analogy, and it has steered my thinking a lot.

Is it appropriate for a husband to “discipline” his wife? I think it is. I think that part of the role of a husband as the head of the household is to teach his wife, to help guide her in Godly maturity. My husband does not hit me to “discipline” me. He prays with/for me. He talks to me. He models the correct way to do things, perhaps even walking me through something step by step. He suggests books for me to read. If I reach toward a power tool that he is using while it is turned on he does not "swat my hand" and tell me to keep away. He might grab ahold of my hand and pull it away (or he might verbally warn me of the danger), but he does not swat me.

I would assume based on reading some of Molly's blog that she would agree with this concept of discipline between a husband and wife. Given that assumption…is ever NOT abusive for a husband to hit his wife to “discipline” her? I don’t believe it is. I think every time a husband hits his wife to “discipline” her it is an abusive event. Now that doesn’t mean I think that the over all relationship is abusive—it may not be. He may be deeply grieved to “have” to hit her, but may feel it is something he must do so that she will learn godly behavior. But I do believe that regardless of the motivation, if a husband hits his wife to “discipline” her that it would be an act of abuse.

There was a time in the not so distant past that the corporal punishment of wives by their husbands was defended in the mainstream using verses in Proverbs discussing the rod of correction for the back of fools ("domestic discipline" is still promoted by some people, but thankfully it is no longer accepted by the Christian culture at large). I think that was a gross misrepresentation of the scriptures. Similarly, I think that attempting to use the verses in Proverbs that connects the rod to parenting in an attempt to support spanking of young children is a gross misrepresentation of the meaning of these scriptures.

So yes, I do believe that corporal punishment of children, even if it occurs in the context of a loving family relationship, is abusive. It's more "politically correct" to say that "I don't believe that the scripture endorses spanking, but perhaps some parents can use it in a way that is beneficial and good..." But I think that is taking the "easy" way out of the question, straddling the fence in many ways. It is not really "easy" for me to say in a public forum that I believe all corporal punishment of children is abusive. I am saying that the majority of parents in America have engaged in behavior toward their children that I believe is abusive. I am saying that I have engaged in behavior toward my children that I believe is abusive. I struggle with this. It creates "cognitive dissonance." But it is where I am at right now.

Brains of a sheep...

2005-02-17T16:19:00.000-08:00

Once again I feel compelled to write a blog entry in response to a comment left on my blog:

Some anti-spankers claim that the 'rod' in the Bible was never meant as a means of 'hitting' the sheep but of 'guiding' them. A shepherd would never hit his precious sheep, they say.

Now I have never owned sheep, but I did grow up on a dairy farm, so I know something about herding animals. When you herd cows, you bring along a stick or a whip. You use it on a cow who strays from the herd or gets out of hand in any way. That doesn't mean beating the animal into unconsciousness but 'spanking' her, if you will. No sane farmer would injure his cow with a stick or whip, not only because she is worth a lot of money but because most farmers love their animals (I did).

Again, I don't know too much about sheep, but my semi-educated guess is that a farmer might have to sometimes use physical force against them with his rod. So so much for the view that the 'rod' in the Bible was merely a means of guidance.

Then again, some of those anti-spankers appear to have the same amount of gray matter as the sheep do, so don't expect them to understand this!

The last paragraph is meant to be a joke... well, sort of!

Emily

Hmmmm...well for starters, I'll readily admit to being a "sheep" in some respects...I mean after all, God often uses the sheep/shepherd analogy in scripture to describe his relationship with us, so I must be like a sheep, right?

None the less, I think the "same amount of gray matter as the sheep do" is a disrespectful remark, and the "well, sort of" is very telling as to how "joking" it is meant to be. Lovely, just lovely...very edifying.

Now as to the issue of hitting sheep, yes, sheep and cows are VERY different. I lived on a beef cattle farm for a while as a child (my family rented the main farmhouse, while the farmer lived in a smaller house on the other side of the barn), and I've conversed with people who've worked with sheep. Cows (cattle) are very docile and "steadfast" creatures (well, unless you run up against an angry steer...), where as sheep tend to be skittish.

I've got to wonder where it was that Emily was herding those cows...my experience living on the farm was that all the farmer had to do was open the barn gates for dinner, and the cows came mooing right along to get their grain. Actually--they were usually all grouped around the gate long before the farmer would arrive to open it--even if they had been in a far field for the day. Getting them to the field was accomplished with a dog--a collie--that would run along behind the herd barking up a ruckus while the farmer led the herd on his tractor.

Sheep would generally be herded in much the same way--the shepherd LEADING, with some dogs in the rear to keep the group together. The rod would be used to nudge a sheep back to the group...but not to strike the sheep. I'm told that because sheep are very skittish, striking a sheep enough to cause pain would cause the sheep to panic and run most likely in the opposite direction of what you want--if the sheep did run toward the herd it would probably be so excited it would set off the rest of heard.

One of the major problems with the sheep analogy though is that most people who try to make it (not Emily in this case) actually go with the myth "the shepherd might have to break the leg of the sheep, then carry the sheep around his shoulders while it healed..." Beyond the idea of this spooking the rest of the herd, there are other flaws with this idea:

The sheep is not potty trained...nuff said on that one?
Sheep are grazing animals...you can't just put the sheep down for three square meals a day and expect that to be sufficient
The sheep could weigh 100 lbs or more
Breaking the bone would make the animal worthless as a temple sacrifice, thus greatly reducing its value in Biblical times
Quality of medical care may have been such that this could easily lead to an infection that could actually kill the sheep.
What happens when sheep #2 "needs" to have a leg broken for discipline before sheep #1 is healed?

And I've gotta say...as I said, I lived on a beef cattle farm. There wasn't a lot of love lost between the farmer and the average cow...because the cow was going to be shipped off to slaughter. A bit more of a "relationship" was allowed to develop with the bull, who was expected to stick around for a few years doing his part to keep the population up. Maybe things are different at a dairy farm where the cows stick around longer, and Emily lived at a dairy farm. But barring that, I do question the idea of "loving" the cows.

In closing, I've got to hand it to the spanking advocates out there. You are doing more to convince my husband not to spank than I have been able to...he's been saying for a while that he wants to keep spanking in his "back pocket" as a possible tool to use...but just look at his comment in response to Emily:

I'll remain lost in my little brainless, whoops... I mean sheep for brains non-spanking little world.

Life Action, Part III

2005-02-11T16:58:00.000-08:00

When I last left this topic I was discussing my growing unease with the Life Action Ministries seminar held at my church late last fall. I had attended one Sunday morning service and one Monday evening service, then did not attend the rest of the week until Sunday morning...which is where this post picks up.

The second Sunday morning…the sermon was about knowing if you were saved. I wish I saved my handouts, because I had some interesting notes written on them. But alas, I didn't--well, if I did they are lost somewhere in the sea of random papers that is my house! I did compose a few e-mails to friends about it though, so I can refresh my memory with those.

The sermon started with something that was completely irrelevant and unnecessary…spanking. The speaker set out to explain how his spanking of his children is an act of love to protect them. One example he gave was that if his 4 year old daughter was trying to stick a fork in an outlet, he would tell her to stop. If she didn’t, he would spank her because he didn’t want her to become a “crispy critter.” Now aside from the fact that standard household electrical supply will not produce that kind of injury (perhaps a few small contact burns—I know from personal experience—I stuck a bobby pin in an outlet when I was 3, burning my fingers that were holding the pin and my elbow that bumped it as I jerked away), my husband and I both glanced at each other thinking that there are other ways to deal with the situation. First of all, why not just go over to her and take the fork away saying “you can’t put that in there, it is dangerous!”? Why is there a need to test our children’s obedience in everything? If the child is too far away to get to in time, a directive of what to do is often much more effective than what not to do—“You need to take the fork to the table, it is for eating dinner.” And even if she didn’t do that, but rather paused and contemplated what to do with the fork (generally giving the parent enough time to get to the child and then turn the child toward the table and gently encourage them to start moving in that direction) is it really necessary to spank? He said that spanking in this situation is to teach the child not to put stuff in the outlets—it is for her safety. Hmm…we never spanked our 3 oldest children even when they were curious and tried to imitate us in plugging stuff in, but rather just emphatically told them “No! Owie! Owie!” and then redirected them. Despite our "failure" to spank, shortly after this sermon our then 2 year old—who really isn’t incredibly verbal—spotted our not quite 1 year old trying to stick his finger in an outlet and he called out “No Seany! Owie! Owie!” Apparently he was able to learn without being spanked...but then again, I've always known I have exceptionally smart children--after all, my lost brain cells had to have gone somewhere. ;-)

But he didn’t stop with just that. He then began joking about spanking. After the “crispy critter” comment he made a joke that my husband and I could not remember after the sermon. Then he said “children are like canoes, they are best steered by paddling from behind.” There was a smattering of laughter from the congregation. My husband and I—unknown to each other—both sat there thinking we should get up and leave. While we understand that some parents think that they need to spank to parent effectively, we believe it should always be an extremely serious undertaking. It should never be “funny” to intentionally inflict pain on another person, whether you perceive that the pain is necessary to their well being or not.

Then like I said, he got into a sermon about determining if you are truly saved.

He said some things that we thought were astounding…like that he believes that 90% of people attending a typical evangelical church are not actually saved! Remember now…all week people have been being set up to accept what he says without question—whether that was a deliberate intent by the design of the schedule or not. He went through about 6 or 7 points that you could use to determine if you were truly saved.

Several of them he did not justify using scripture, but rather extra Biblical materials. Now to be sure—he cited scripture in his discussion of almost every point, but the scriptures did not always prove his point, but made some other slightly relevant point.

An example of a “point” he had on his list was one that stated that just because you regularly read the Bible, even reading over the entire text over and over and perhaps even memorizing large portions, that did not mean you were a Christian. He seemed to ignore verses like Hebrews 4:12 which states that the Bible is a double-edged sword, piercing to the heart of man and Isaiah 55:11 which states that the Word of God will not return empty, but will fulfill God's purpose. Now I will agree that reading the Bible is not a proof of faith—but I do believe those passages I referenced indicate that it will break down barriers! Think of all the people like C.S. Lewis who set out to disprove scripture and became wonderful warriors of the faith.

But the part that got me was that he sited Kruschev in making his point, stating that this dastardly leader had memorized the entire 4 gospels. He stated that he had done so solely to “know his enemy.” This to me smacked of “Christian urban legend” so I attempted to verify it on-line. I found a couple of different versions of him memorizing the gospels or the entire New Testament, memorizing it to get bread with jam or candy—all were presented in the flavor of “this is something that I have heard” rather than really being authenticated. Some had points that seemed implausible—like reciting the entire 4 gospels in one Sunday sermon. How long would it really take to recite the Gospels? Surely a good many hours, perhaps well more than a day! But the stories all had one thing in common. He memorized it as a child to get a reward, not an adult bent on using it against his enemy.

I have to wonder…why was the speaker using this story in his sermon? In some of the handouts I picked up from sessions I did not attend I noted that the ministry he is with views even exaggeration as lying…did he exaggerate the story, or did he hear it exaggerated? Given that he is using it to make the primary justification for a point in a sermon that he likely gives several times a year as he travels from church to church, has he done anything to authenticate the story to make sure it is truthful?

Some of his points he sited some scripture in making his case, but the scripture really did not always fully support the points. Like I said, I wish I still had my notes so that I could give specific examples. By the end of the sermon he likely had many of the people believing they were not truly saved. He began an alter call, and it seemed that hands were not coming up as fast as he would like. I admit—I peeked. I think he did some of those “yes, I see that hand on the right side” when there was no hand. But 30 or so people did go forward—out of a sanctuary that seats around 400 and was filled to capacity.

Oddly enough, the Monday evening session was canceled, we don’t know why. Steve and I chose not to attend any more of the sessions—including the 3rd Sunday. We just felt it was becoming a hinderance to our ability to whole heartedly worship God. We did “home church” that Sunday, which the kids greatly enjoyed, and have asked us to do again since then. People who attended many or all of the sessions continue to speak very highly of the experience, and I do trust that there were many things of value presented.

Most do not give examples of what they gained. This can be reflective of the setting of discussion not encouraging the sharing of specific examples…but it can also be indicative of the psychological concept I presented in the beginning where the high “cost” of attendance resulted in a belief that it must be worthwhile—even if they can’t put their finger on why.

Every time someone brings up a specific example of some “wonderful” thing that they gleaned, my husband and I discuss it later and agree that it doesn’t sit right with us. Want an example? That's in my fourth and final installment.

The Holiness of God

2005-02-08T22:28:00.000-08:00

My cyber-friend Tulip Girl recently won a book give-away. How fun!

This month they are giving away a new Study Bible and RC Sproul's classic "The Holiness of God." Maybe you will be February's winner. ;-)

Life and death

2005-02-07T04:33:00.000-08:00

Saturday as our son's 3rd birthday party was wrapping up, our telephone rang. My husband answered it, and being that he could barely hear (a family room is NOT quiet when there are 8 children under the age of 6 in it!), he walked to another room with the phone. I could hear snippets of what he said.."doula"..."I'll let her know"..."she will call you back."

After the guests had left he told me that I needed to return the call, but he didn't know the name of the person calling (it had been too loud for him to hear what she told him at the beginning of the call) or what she wanted. She seemed young he said...he recognized the voice. She said it was very important that I call back. I looked at the caller ID. The name was vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place it.

I called, and C. answered the phone--recognition was instant--the name on the caller ID was her grandfather's, as she lived with her grandparents. I had been her doula at her birth 9 months ago today. A young single woman, she was very brave in facing the birth, and then some complications that occurred immediately after the birth. I saw her a couple of times after the birth, including at the annual "Labor Day" picnic that I host for my clients each year. Her daughter was an adorable and smiley baby.

C. was calling to let me know that her baby had died on Wednesday. She'd had RSV, had spent over a month in the hospital, including being transferred from a local hospital to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The calling hours were Saturday, funeral Sunday. Could I come?

Of course I went. I started Saturday with a celebration of young life...ended it with a memorial. I've never gone to the funeral of a child before. The young woman bravely greeted the visitors, a box of tissues at her side.

It was a sobering experience. Over the last week I've been a bit on the weepy side, mourning the loss of something precious to me--my job. I received notice that on March 14 my job will be eliminated, and having been with my employer for 10 years, I'm saddened by this. But during this time C. was making the very difficult decision to turn off her daughter's respirator. I was reminded once again of how blessed I am.

How about you? Have you reflected lately on the blessings in your life, even amidst the difficulties and struggles? Take a few minutes today to do that.

AAP Breastfeeding Guidelines

2005-02-04T16:47:00.000-08:00

Why is it that I'm learning about what the American Academy of Pediatrics is saying from a mother who is currently living in the Ukraine? You'd think I would have heard about it before her...

So anyway, the AAP has released an updated set of breastfeeding guidelines, this replaces those that were released in 1997.

Given my involvement in the Ezzo debate, I found two points very noteworthy in the guidelines. The first involves the frequency of feeds:

During the early weeks of breastfeeding, mothers should be encouraged to have 8 to 12 feedings at the breast every 24 hours, offering the breast whenever the infant shows early signs of hunger such as increased alertness, physical activity, mouthing, or rooting.170

* Crying is a late indicator of hunger.171 Appropriate initiation of breastfeeding is facilitated by continuous rooming-in throughout the day and night.172 The mother should offer both breasts at each feeding for as long a period as the infant remains at the breast.173 At each feed the first breast offered should be alternated so that both breasts receive equal stimulation and draining. In the early weeks after birth, nondemanding infants should be aroused to feed if 4 hours have elapsed since the beginning of the last feeding.

* After breastfeeding is well established, the frequency of feeding may decline to approximately 8 times per 24 hours, but the infant may increase the frequency again with growth spurts or when an increase in milk volume is desired.

"Crying is a late indicator of hunger." Ezzo would have his readers believing that the typical demand feeding mother responds to crying routinely by offering the breast. This simply isn't true. Its not that a demand feeding mother would never offer the breast in response to crying--I certainly do if I think the crying indicates a need for comfort. Its that we generally do not associate crying with hunger and thus we respond to crying by looking for things like a dirty diaper, something causing pain. We learn other cues for hunger in our children--little sounds they make, rooting, waking up from a nap...

"The frequency of feeding may decline to approximately 8 times per 24 hrs, but ... may increase ... with growth spurts...." Hmmm. So does that mean that 6 nursing sessions per day typically would not be expected with an exclusively breastfed infant? My experience with 4 children has been that they do not drop below 8 nursing sessions in a 24 hr span until well after they start eating solid food. But here again, Ezzo would have his readers believing that 4 feeds per day is sufficient.

Mother and infant should sleep in proximity to each other to facilitate breastfeeding.

The reference to support this reccommendation actually indicates that babies who sleep in a bassinet next to the parent's bed (called a "cot" in this research, as it was done in England) have the lowest risk of SIDS. Babies who sleep in the parents' bed have a similar--but slightly lower risk of SIDS as those who sleep in a separate room. The most dangerous place to sleep for the infant is on a couch with an adult. After 14 weeks of age, the risk of SIDS seems to level out in all the groups. The article concludes by saying "There are certain circumstances when bed sharing should be avoided, particularly for infants under four months old. Parents sleeping on a sofa with infants should always be avoided. There is no evidence that bed sharing is hazardous for infants of parents who do not smoke."

Hmmm...so should I take the inclusion of this reccommendation to mean that the AAP is NOT against bedsharing? ;-)

So I wonder...will there be a 2006 edition of Babywise so that Ezzo can continue to claim that his advice lines up with the AAP?

A Challenge to Proponents of "Biblical" Spanking...

2005-02-02T19:42:00.000-08:00

Okay...I'm laying out a challenge here. Many folks believe that spanking is Biblically mandated, or at least Biblically reccommended.

Using commonly accepted rules of serious Bible study (a.k.a. "Hermenuetics"), I would like to see an explaination of how the Bible supports or condones spanking. Here is a brief primer on hermenuetics that you can use to get you started...please address each point in your explaination. If you learned a different form of Bible study, please explain that form and the references for Biblical scholars who endorse it (i.e. the particular format for hermenuetics in the linked site is what is taught at Bible colleges).

I'm waiting...I've posed this challenge to a couple of people from my church, and they all suddenly quit conversing with me when I do. I posed a similar challenge in the 5th comment in response to a previous blog I posted on this topic.

Jenn

Selling Birth

2005-02-02T11:26:00.000-08:00

I spent the better part of yesterday attending a birth as a doula. I got the first call from the expectant mom a little after 5 a.m. Just a "heads up" to let me know that she'd been having contractions since 3:30 and they were 5 minutes apart. A follow up call around 7:20, then her husband calling back about 5 minutes later to let me know they were headed to the birth center. I finished my morning routine, drove to work to quickly cancel some appointments, then drove to the birth. It was a long drive complete with backed up traffic, so I arrived around 10:40 a.m. I left the birth center around 10 p.m. It was a long day. I was incredibly honored that they chose to allow me to do this, to participate in this holy and sacred part of their lives.

Imagine my surprise when I read today of a mom "auctioning off" the chance for someone to attend her birth, which was scheduled to be induced this past Friday--for the bargain starting bid of $5000.

I wonder if she got a taker...there were no bidders. She seemed very assured that a high number of hits on the sale meant it was certain to draw a high bid.

As I said, I attended a birth yesterday. But I didn't have to pay them, and I wasn't a stranger. I was their doula. I was their childbirth instructor. I was a trusted adviser. They paid me to attend the birth.

I hope this Ebay-mom had a birth that she enjoyed. But I'm sad that she didn't understand that what a sacred event it is--that she thought it can be auctioned off to the highest bidder. But I suppose that is part and parcel with the society that we live in. Unlike most birthing moms in America, the mom I was assisting was giving birth in a birth center where she likely had met every person who assisted in her birth prior to the actual event. As a doula, I've attended births where the only person the parents had met prior to the birth was me. A parade of nurses, resident obstetricians, and on-call obstetricians that they have never met are in and out of the room. They are exposing the mom's most private parts to bright and shining light, they are insisting that she allow people to touch her in these parts that she would normally not allow anyone but her most intimate partner do.

I wish I could explain to every pregnant couple that birth is a sacred event, and they should guard it as such. Invite only those people that they know, trust, and love. I can't reach every couple. But I can reach some...so I'm doing it, one couple at a time.

Life Action, Part II (or "Indoctrination 101, Pt II)

2005-01-31T23:56:00.000-08:00

When I left this topic last I was discussing a concern I had before my church brought in a ministry group to do an extended period of "renewal" meetings. I was concerned that the high "payment" to attend the meetings could result in an acceptance of what was being taught without proper thought and study. I laid out how attending the meetings might work out in a "typical" family structure.

Well I don’t have a “typical” family structure. I work part time days, my husband works full time nights. So we knew going into it that my husband just wasn’t going to be able to attend the weeknight services. With 4 kids, and knowing that I had a weekly Wednesday night commitment at another church, I knew I would not attend all of the services, but I hoped to attend as many as possible. I actually submitted a prayer card on the first Sunday that God would help to make attendance at the sessions flow well. We also knew that we could not attend the Saturday service because of my previously mentioned class that I needed to teach.

Monday night things just seemed to fall into place. I got home from work on time, dinner was ready to go, the kids were very cooperative about getting packed up into the van to go. I did have a slight unease because I hadn’t told my husband I was planning to go—I suspected he would not approve since we had much to do around our house. But I reasoned that my relationship with God was more important, and I would just stay up late to get some stuff done. I got to church and distributed the kids to their various classrooms, then settled into the sanctuary to listen to the sermon. After some perfunctory introductory stuff, my pastor stood to speak as an introduction to the guest speaker. He admonished the congregation that it would be good for us to be like the Bereans who were noted as being noble in Acts because they received the message preached to them. He stopped at that point. Lets look at the passage from Acts 17:10-11:

10As soon as it was night, the brothers sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. On arriving there, they went to the Jewish synagogue. 11Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

My pastor is a man of the Word. I’m sure he knows that the Bereans were commended not just for receiving the message, but because they examined it against the scriptures. Why had he left that part out? It gnawed at me all through the evening because the lack of time to examine the scriptures was precisely one of my concerns before the series even started.

The message that evening did not sit right with me. It was about “self-control” vs. “spirit-control.” I’m sure you can guess which one was set up as the good thing, and which was set up as “b-a-a-d, just plain b-a-a-d!” The thing is, “self-control” is part of the fruit of the spirit. There are 35 uses of the word “control” in the NIV Bible, and 9 of them are references to being “self-controlled”—all of them indicating that this is a good thing. An additional 9 refer to human control of other people in a good way, while 5 are negative human control. 2 relate to God’s control of the weather and of our transfigured bodies. Only 4—all clustered in a short portion of Romans—refer to being controlled by God, righteousness, or the Spirit. (6 refer to the control of animals, or being controlled by sin or Satan to round out the 35)

I don’t want to down play the importance of that portion of Romans—it is part of the Bible and very important. The author is very passionate in his discourse, which to me indicates that he felt it to be a weighty issue. But I do not believe that the Bible supports “spirit-control” at the expense of “self-control.”

Now to be sure, the speaker used some examples of “self-control” that were not positive. He seemed to speak from the perspective of “self-control means wanting things your own way.” But even in that, I was not moved. His examples used extremes of behavior when I felt that a middle ground would be the more appropriate behavior. For example, he spoke of a wife who was upset because her husband was late coming home for dinner. The “self-controlled” wife he said would throw the dinner in the trash and sulk, treating her husband poorly when he got home. The “spirit-controlled” wife would cover the plate, and keep it ready to heat up when her husband got home, not having any expectation that he would be home “on time” any evening, and thus not allowing herself to be upset about the situation. I feel that the first situation the wife was childish, and the second situation the wife lacked proper boundaries. An acceptable middle ground to me would be to cover the food and then warm it up (or allow her husband to warm it up himself) when the husband got home, but after he had eaten dinner talk to him calmly about how the tardiness had impacted the family and ask that in the future he call home.

In giving this example, you need to remember that in my family the roles would be reversed—my husband is the one getting dinner ready, and I am the one who is potentially late getting home. I had to wonder if this speaker would have given the same type of advice to my husband about how to handle things if I were habitually late for dinner?

I gathered my kids up from their classes not feeling at all refreshed or renewed from the sermon, but rather troubled. My troubled feeling only increased on the drive home from church when I learned that my children had been told to BEG me to bring them back to the sessions. They had actually been told this on Sunday as well. While I would completely support them being instructed to enthusiastically ask to be brought back, “begging” to me implies that they were being encouraged to continue to plead after a parent had responded “no.” Further, when I started asking questions of my children to find out why they were excited about the program I found that it wasn’t because they were learning about God—which is typically what they will tell me when I ask why they want to go to Sunday School or “God and me” on Wednesdays. No, they wanted to go back because they were earning points to get stickers and candy. I’m for positive reinforcements used in moderation…but I think that went overboard if it was SUCH a motivator that it overshadowed God.

Tuesday I got held up at work, dinner wasn’t ready when I got home, I knew the kids really needed to get baths. I didn’t go to the service. I did discuss the previous night with my husband. He did not object to my having gone, nor did he say I shouldn’t go again. But he shared my unease. Wednesday night I had my previous commitment to serve as a teacher for “God and me” at another church. Thursday and Friday I possibly could have gone—actually Friday evening I did end up driving out to the church to drop some stuff off. But I did not go to the sessions. The next time I went--and the topic of my next blog in this series--was Sunday morning.

The "Latest Spiritual Gobblydeegook?"

2005-01-28T19:43:00.000-08:00

In response to one of my recent blogs, Molly commented:

I dunno...the whole thing smacks of the latest "spiritual" gobblydeegook. I don't expect any brownie points for that opinion, so don't worry... It just ignores basic scholarship in favor of recent social trends. Because somebody abuses a truth makes the thing itself no longer true?

This was basically her response to the concept that spanking a child might not be a Biblically sanctioned method of discipline. Greg, whose comments followed hers, echoed similar sentiments.

When I was in college I participated in an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and at the end of each year I had the opportunity to attend "chapter camp." This was a one week camp to dig deeper into issues of spirituality. The first year I went I participated in the "Jesus the Lifechanger" track. We spent one week studying the book of Mark. We ripped it apart. It was awesome, and lived up to it's name--we learned about Jesus, and it was life changing. As I recall, we dug so deep that even after 7 days of spending about 6 hrs per day in Bible study, we had only gotten through 7 chapters! It was there that I was first introduced to the principles of basic hermenuetics, though I did not know that term, I just knew that I learned how to really study the Bible. I applied the principles I learned on a regular basis after that.

Saddly, after a few years I quit doing the hard work to really study and interpret the Bible, relying instead on quick study, and perhaps a cursory glace at a commentary if I felt I wasn't quite understanding something. Even sadder still, since that seminar I took nearly 15 years ago, I have never encountered a situation in church where people were actually being taught those very important principles of how to properly study scripture.

Some years ago I "met" a pastor who goes by the name of "Metochoi" on-line. He was kind enough to write up several "lessons" on Biblical Hermenuetics. These lessons parallel what I was taught back in Chapter Camp, and formed the basis of my study of interpretation of the "rod" verses in Proverbs--using some quotes from Tedd Tripp's book Sheperding a Child's Heart to make points.

#1 = Interpret LITERALLY.
Tripp asserts on pg 108 that “the rod” means “a parent, in faith toward God and faithfulness toward his or her children, undertaking the responsibility of careful, timely, measured and controlled use of physical punishment”
This rather symbolic definition of the rod violates the very first basic principle of Biblical hermeneutics--interpret LITERALLY. The word "rod" is literally a noun, and as used in scripture in places other than the verses used to justify spanking refer to a thick and heavy stick or a ruler's sceptor. Yet Tripp's definition transforms it into a verb, and then symbolically transforms it to a vaguely stated "use of corporal punishment." To be fair, the Proverbs are a collection of often symbolic passages (for example, must a husband really sit at the city gates talking while his wife conducts business such as buying and selling land as depicted in Proverbs 31?), and many interpretations of the rod passages assume that the “rod” is meant symbolically. However, to follow other principles of hermeneutics we must be able to find clear evidence somewhere in the scripture—and truly throughout the body of scripture, to support a symbolic interpretation. I fail to find support for such a specific and very highly symbolic interpretation. Further, a similar interpretation is rarely applied to Proverbs 14:3 “A fool’s talk brings a rod to his back” or Proverbs 26:3 “A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass, and a rod for the fool's back”--both verses which clearly refer to adults and have been used in the past to justify wife beating.

#2 = Understand the HISTORICAL-CULTURAL background.
It is important to remember how families were structured at that time. Childrearing was left primarily to the women, men would take over the raising of boys only when they approached bar mitzvah age. Solomon is addressing this book to his adult son (this point relates the concept of interpreting scripture in context), who would have had very little dealings with his young children. Further, the Talmud, which was essentially the Jewish equivalent of a modern day Bible Commentary, specifically forbade fathers from striking their children, as the children may lack maturity and strike back, dishonoring their parents and thus violating the commandment to honor their parents. Even if a child is outwardly controlled and does not strike back, many, if not most, children who are dealt with via corporal punishment at times wish to strike their parents. Christ states that to think in the heart of sinning is to have sinned, so the parents are tempting their children to sin. Corporal punishment of young adults was officially conducted by governmental authorities in OT times, NOT the parents (of course it is unrealistic to think that parents never struck their children, just as it is unrealistic to think that husbands never struck their wives).

Further, the use of the rod in the OT bore little relationship to modern day spanking - best anyone can tell it was used on the back, not buttocks; it was used on adults with no evidence that young children were subject to it; and by modern standards the rod beatings were often violent enough that parents would be arrested for emulating them.

#3 = Analyze the GRAMMATICAL structure.
In analyzing the grammatical structure it is important to remember that the scriptures were not written in English, but rather Hebrew/Greek. The “rod” verses use two words that are important to look at. The word “na’ar” is translated into “child,” and the word “shebet” is translated into “rod.”

The Hebrew language had several words to describe different ages of children, including words that specifically defined babies and young children. Neither of these words are used here. “na’ar” is used 238 times in the OT. 3 of the uses are in the Proverbs “rod” verses. 200 of the uses, or 85%, are used in ways that clearly do not refer to small children (lad, servant, young man, youth, 7 of 16 uses of young , 24 of 51 uses of child(ren)). In some cases the age of person being referred to cannot be determined (young-9, boys-1, child-19: about 12%) . That leaves only a few uses that clearly refer to refer to young children (babe-1, child-5: about 2%). While it would be incorrect to say that the use in these verses can’t apply to young children, it certainly seems likely that it doesn’t, especially using other hermeneutical rules.

The word “shebet” refers to a large branch, a walking staff. Some spanking advocates have insisted that this can be interpreted as a hand, while others use “flexible objects” (such as spatulas, belts, leather straps), thin dowel rods, paint stirrers, or wooden spoons. Clearly none of these fit the definition of a large branch. Another meaning of “shebet” is a ruler’s scepter. This again was a fairly thick rod, but it was a symbol of authority that was not used to strike people. It was also used in reference to a shepherds rod, which was used to gently guide sheep or to fight off attackers, not to strike the sheep.

In analyzing the grammatical structure, it is important to recognize that the Proverbs contain many symbolic texts, and also were considered to be wisdom texts rather than commandments. Whether corporal punishment—if it is indeed supported by scripture—is wisdom or a command makes a significant difference. If parents are commanded to use corporal punishment on their children, was Mary in sin since we can assume that she never used corporal punishment on Christ? How about the foster parent that is forbidden by law to use it? Dwight L. Moody, who by the accounts of his children did not spank them? The parent whose child has a medical condition (brittle bone syndrome, leukemia or other conditions that cause easy and excessive bruising) that prohibits corporal punishment? How many times must a parent use corporal punishment on a child to be in obedience to the command? Is one use enough? How do we draw the line about what age to start/stop using it?

#4 = Use SYNTHESIS [Compare scripture with scripture].

Just to start you off, consider Proverbs 23:13 and 14;
"Do not withhold correction from a child; for if you beat him with a rod, he will not die. You shall beat him with a rod, and deliver his soul from hell."
The Bible does say that beating someone with the rod could lead to death (Exodus 21:20), and parents certainly have beaten their children to death with a rod (a wooden spoon in one case I read about), citing Proverbs as evidence that the beating couldn't be the cause of death despite what doctors said.

Also compare it to Ephesians 2:8 and 9:
"For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast."
If the Proverbs rod verses refer to spanking, then they state that parents can literally save their children through spanking. Yet the New Testament makes it quite clear that we cannot save ourselves through works - is it logical to argue that God won't allow us to boast of saving ourselves, but happily gives us the right and opportunity to boast of saving our children?

If the rod in Proverbs refers to God's word, and we use the New Testament methods of discipline outlined in Matthew 18 and other passages in the NT (i.e., challenge people who are sinning with God's word), then we are following Romans 10:17 ("Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God"), and the Proverbs rod verses fit neatly with New Testament theology. But if the Proverbs rod is a literal one, then the verse is saying that parents can do what the New Testament says only God can do.

Another point to make in comparing scripture to scripture, is to consider Ephesians 6:4, which admonishs parents not to provoke their children to wrath. The Greek word used in this passage is “parorgizo” and the “Blue Letter Bible” states that this word as used in the New Testament means “to rouse to wrath, to provoke, exasperate, anger.” Most spanking advocates would admit that spankings often provoke anger, even wrath. Tripp addresses this by stating that the parent should spank longer, which seems inconsistent with the goal of avoiding provoking anger and wrath.

#5 = THEN you can APPLY the passage!
I believe that the Bible does not endorse spanking, and a careful reading of the entire work of scripture to me would seem to actually prohibit spanking.

#6 = At every step, rely on the ILLUMINATION of the Holy Spirit.
I have sought to do this, as I honestly believe that many spanking proponents have prayed and sought the Holy Spirit. However, I believe that many spanking proponents have made the mistake of attempting to interpret scripture without doing careful work to cover the first 4 steps of proper Biblical interpretation—which is just as much of a mistake as doing the first 4 steps without relying on the Holy Spirit (okay, well maybe not…I think that sometimes the Holy Spirit will choose to supercede our short cuts…).

#7 = Interpret in CONTEX
This point is addressed as comments interwoven in the explanation above. Specifically, in understanding the “context” of Proverbs, one must understand who it was addressed to, what cultural practices were being referred to, and what the style of the writing was (often symbolic).

What NOT to do:
#1 = NEVER make your point at the price of the proper interpretation.
#2 = NEVER rely on superficial or shallow study.
#3 = NEVER allegorize or spiritualize unless the text itself calls for it.
#1 The passages in question clearly do apply to parenting, so this does not apply.
#2 I believe I have done rather in depth study of the verses in question, so this does not apply.
#3 I believe this is what spanking advocates do when they change a “rod” into “spanking with a flexible instrument”

Not all of this was my original work. Over the years I have collected quotes here and there from others that I have retained, for example, the first 2 paragraphs of #4 are borrowed.

Certified Midwives in Utah

2005-01-27T21:23:00.000-08:00

Apparently there is some legislation pending in Utah to regulate what are known as "direct entry midwives." These are midwives who did not become nurses first as "Certified Nurse Midwives" do, but rather follow a variety of paths to learn their midwifery skills--typically involving some formal schooling and significant "apprenticship." By choosing not to become nurses first they do not have to learn about topics that are irrellevant to midwifery, like geriatrics, but instead focus on just midwifery--the care of low risk women during pregnancy, and for gynecological needs. In my state many serve the needs of the Amish and Mennonite communities. Many follow their training up by pursuing "Certified Professional Midwife" status by passing a certification exam offered by the North American Registry of Midwives, and then maintaining stringent certification renewal requirements on a regular basis.

When this topic enters the public arena, it never fails that someone who hasn't really bothered to be educated about birth beyond what can be learned from the TV drama "ER" (birth is dangerous! A pregnant woman should rush to the hospital at the first inkling that birth might occur in the next week so that she can be properly surrounded by machines that go "beep" to detect any possible problem.) has to sound off about the topic. In this case it was the editorial staff at The Daily Herald in Provo, Utah. I've given birth to two babies in a hospital (Jessica, and Katie), and two at home (Jason and Sean), as well as attending many births as a doula, and I'm also a Bradley Method of Childbirth instructor; so I think I know a bit about it. Let's look at just a few of the things they have wrong, shall we?

The article calls direct entry midwives (DEM) "low end" and states that they have a "light" training program. I disagree. The midwifery knowledge they have is on par with Certified Nurse Midwives (CNM). In some ways I'd say they learn *more* about how to promote healthy birth than CNM's. But as I said above, they just don't learn about topics not relevant to the care they choose to give.

The editorial states that the proposed legislation would require DEM's to inform patients of their credentials and back up plans in case of emergencies. The author seems to assume that this is not already done, but typically the woman who seeks out care from a DEM would either know her as a member of the community, or would have much more vigorously interviewed her than the average American mother who picks her OB/GYN out of the listing provided by her HMO, and asks very few questions.

Here's a winner of a quote:

As we've said before, it is foolhardy to forsake a hospital with its personnel who are trained to respond to emergencies and who have modern technology close at hand. But some people do it nonetheless. Home delivery seems warm and fuzzy to them -- as if a newborn baby really cares. We venture to guess that what matters most to a newborn is a warm blanket and a mother's breast, in that order.

It's foolhardy to forsake a hospital? Why? Countries with much better maternal/infant mortality and morbidity statistics than ours have higher rates of homebirth. Birth has occurred at home through the vast bulk of time, and we have still managed to survive as a specises. Ironically I would agree that to the newborn what matters most is "a warm blanket and a mother's breast," but I'd venture a guess that the baby is MUCH more likely to get those things at a homebirth than in a hospital birth. All too often in my work as a doula I see babies taken away from their mothers when there is no good need to do it.

The hospital rooms may look "cozy and comfortable" on a tour...but obviously the writer has never actually tried to lay in one of those wonderful labor beds for any period of time. They AREN'T comfortable. As much as I respect and reccommend the OB team that attended my first two births, and think the world of the two OB's, I doubt either of them would give me the coat off their back--literally--as my Certified Professional Midwife did when it was necessary to help facilitate the progress of my labor with my son Sean. And when a 3000 watt light starts shining at your private parts, there is no more "as welcoming as home" about it--its cold and clinical. As far as "actual doctors nearby"--typically when a woman is laboring in a teaching hospital, which many do, the closest she is going to get to a "Dr" being around for the bulk of her labor is a resident who may have attended 15 or 20 births so far--in comparison with my midwife who has attended over 600. I've been in the hospital when the nurses caught a baby--I myself was caught by a nurse. I've been at a birth where the on-call OB (who had never met the mother, he was not from her practice and couldn't be bothered to stop by the hospital early in her labor to at least introduce himself) didn't show up until an hour and 50 minutes after the mom started pushing--but she gave birth about an hour and 40 minutes after she started pushing--the resident caught.

To me, as I planned my first home birth, there was some aspect of "warm and fuzzy" to it. But there was more. I really do feel that being in the hospital slowed my first two labors because I could not relax as well. It resulted in more pain for me, which means more stress hormones getting transferred to my baby. But even beyond that, as a low risk mother I found that nothing happened in my first two births that could not have been dealt with during a homebirth. In my first there was thick meconium in the water (but I do question if that would have occurred with a homebirth--I had a LONG labor, which is associated with meconium--perhaps my labor would have been quicker at home, and thus no meconium?), so I would have needed to transport to the hospital. But it would not have been an "emergency transport." My water broke and revealed the meconium more than 6 hours prior to the birth, and it is really only at the point of birth that meconium becomes an issue. With my second, quite frankly, I did not need all the bells and whistles that the hospital provided. The birth cost $10,000 in a hospital, but could have been handled for less than $3,000 as a homebirth. In a country where we bemoan rising medical care costs, why do we not embrace safe and low cost options for childbirth?

Here's another one:

The most important question is safety. Childbirth is not without medical risks, and in fact can be highly risky. And it's not just a risk to the baby: There are two lives at stake -- mother and child. If things go wrong (and they can, no matter how thoroughly the mother's been screened), you need trained medical personnel to be right there, not waiting for you at the emergency room door 30 minutes after a midwife figures out things aren't working as planned.

What is so wrong with showing up at the ER door 30 minutes after the midwife has detected a problem? Generally since the midwife is offering one on one care to the mom, not distracted by other patients, she is going to pick up on problems very quickly. In most cases it isn't going to take that long (its about a 10 minute drive from my house to 2 different hospitals--most moms who choose to "homebirth" will find some place to birth near a hospital for possible transport if their home is not suitably close). The midwife will have called ahead, so the OR team is getting ready without the distraction of having to care for the mom.

On the flip side, I recently attended an attempted VBAC. This is "the birth to be most feared" for most care providers. Her water broke at 4 a.m., so we were concerned that she was laboring against a clock. She entered the hospital slightly after noon, and in the early evening her cervix wasn't changing much, so she consented to some Pitocin. That brought a constant fetal monitor. But the dang thing would not keep track of the baby's heart beat. It kept loosing it. The nurse would readjust it and the baby was just fine, so we really didn't worry. She commented a couple of times that it was picking up the mom's heartbeat when it wasn't picking up the baby's. At 4 a.m. the next morning the OB walked in with scrubs on. NOT a good sign. He took one look at the fetal monitor and seemed concerned. He did a vaginal exam. Mom was progressing. But he proceeded to give her extreme pressure about how the baby had been showing distress for 2 HOURS, and so he needed to do a c-section because the uterus might be rupturing. We managed to get him out of the room for the parents to talk alone, and during that time the monitor slipped again--picking up the mom's heartbeat. The mom, wanting the best for her baby and fearing that the Dr. might be right about possible rupture, agreed to the c-section. I went out to tell the Dr. of their choice, and he practically yelled at me "of course she is having a c-section! Her baby has just had a 4 minute deceleration!" Exasperated I said "that isn't the baby, it's the mom's heartbeat!" "NO it ISN'T! It's 95, how in the world can it be the mom's?"

I didn't argue--I had said too much already. But stop for a minute. Take your pulse. Mine is 80. When I'm standing and just walked downstairs to get a timer. Mom was laying down and relaxing really well through contractions, which would slow the pulse, but doing hard physical work and was emotionally stressed by the Dr., which would increase the pulse. Is 95 really that unlikely a pulse for the mom? No one bothered to take her pulse directly to compare.

But even after this it was a full 30 minutes before the first incision was made. 30 minutes. After 2 hours of supposed troubling fetal heart rate tracings on a VBAC, a supposed 4 minute decelaration.

BTW, mom's scar looked very healthy and pink, no sign of rupture. Baby was very healthy and had high APGARs.

Now let's look at some numbers. I love numbers.

One need only look at infant mortality rates in the past two centuries to see the benefits of medical technology. Far fewer children die at birth today. In 1910, 190 infants per 1,000 died at birth. By 1940, the number dropped to 47. In 2001 it was only 6.8 per 1,000.

Does the writer not understand that antibiotics and understanding of the need for cleanliness in medical practice lead to the vast majority of this decline in infant mortality? I suppose he doesn't realize that "childbed fever" was actually CAUSED by Dr's who would go from autopsies to births without washing their hands.

Beyond that, the author seems to think that "infant deaths" refers only to deaths at births. This is not true. These deaths are all deaths to live born children in the first year of life. Many have no connection what so ever to mode of birth.

And the author also misses the point made by the CIA...our current infant mortality rate ROSE in 2003, and currently is 42nd in the world. Babies born in Havana have a better chance of surviving the first year of life than babies born in Washington D.C. Obviously all our bells and whistles of technology aren't cutting it.

The author feels that the proposed bill would offer no protection to patients. I argue that it would! The licensing board is likely to be MUCH more stringent in investigating complaints against midwives than they typically are in investigating complaints about Dr's. So if a midwife is practicing irresponsibly, she will likely loose her liscense--unlike an irresponsible OB, who will simply settle a closed malpractice case, and continue practing with patients none the wiser.

The alleged psychological benefits of home birth seem overstated. While the idea is quaint and heart-warming at one level, it should be viewed as the emergency option -- little better than a birth in a taxi cab. The physical safety of mother and child should be the paramount concern. They'll soon get over whatever coldness comes with a hospital.

Uuuggghhh. What about the PHYSIOLOGICAL benefits? Faster labors, less painful labors, less problems for the baby. "Developed" countries with higher rates of homebirth than the US--like the Netherlands and England--have lower rates of complications than we do. Homebirth is little better than birth in a taxi cab? Well I may not be the best housekeeper in the world, but I think my house is a bit cleaner than the average taxi! And I'd really be shocked to find out that a cabbie carries medical oxygen, a doppler to monitor the baby, a blood pressure cuff to watch mom's BP, drugs to help the uterus contract in the case of excessive bleeding after the birth, sterile scissors to cut an episiotomy if the baby is in distress, cord clamps, nasal aspirator and De Lee suction equipment to clear baby's nasal passages as needed, and warm blankets to wrap the baby; not to mention the years of experience to recognize an impending complication, the knowledge to know how to deal with them (including yes, transferring to a hospital)--all things that my Certified Professional Midwife brings with her to births.

Indoctrination 101

2005-01-27T20:53:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling chatty tonight I guess. I typed up a 4 part message on a topic before I got my blog set up, and figured I would put it on my blog when the mood struck. Part 1 coordinates with a comment on my husband's blog, so here it is. I'll put up the rest as you ask me to. ;-)

A few months back my church invited an outside ministry, Life Action Ministries, to conduct a series of “renewal” services in our church. I knew I could use some refreshing…it can become very easy in the day to day of life to loose the “zing” in our Christian walk. So I looked forward to the services.

At the same time though, I had a bit of trepidation. That came from my previous studies in “social psychology” in college. I learned in this class that when people “pay” a high price for something—whether that “payment” be in the form of money, performing difficult or demeaning activities, sacrifices of things they value, or giving of time—they will tend to believe that the “something” has high value. The latter “payments” actually will often produce a higher assigned “value” in the individual than does monetary payment. It’s that concept that makes military boot camp or fraternity/sorority hazing so successful in turning out individuals who have fierce and life-long loyalty to the organizations.

My concern with this series of “renewal” services was the time commitment that was anticipated—and this concern applies to really any activity that involves a heavy time commitment over a short time span. The congregation was slowly prepared to expect that we would have 3 Sunday morning services and 2 Sunday evening services conducted by this ministry, as well as attending weeknight services Monday-Friday during the two weeks nested by those Sundays. The evening meetings would be from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Then during the first Sunday service of the series we were told that the upcoming Saturday there would be day long services—9 a.m. to 4 p.m. if I remember correctly. (We may have been told of the Saturday just shortly before the start of the event. I know that I did not know far enough in advance to be able to clear my calendar of the childbirth class I was teaching, so we did not attend.)

So lets look at the dynamics of this in the typical family. The first Sunday sermon was fairly basic. There was nothing I hadn’t heard elsewhere before, nothing that really was digging deep, nothing particularly challenging. It was a “soft sell” in my opinion. There was a Sunday evening service that we were unable to attend, but one can assume that attendees would for the most part have returned home afterward, tired from the day, and "unwound" a bit, then gone to bed--not really thinking deeply about what was taught. Then the typical family attending the Monday night session would involve Dad rushing home from work (in some families Dad and Mom rushing home from work…hope someone remembered to stop at daycare to pick up the kids!), a very rushed family meal (or perhaps the kids were fed in advance, but then Dad had to inhale dinner), then pack everyone up to be at church at 6:30. When getting home from the session at 9 o’clock-ish the kids need to get put to bed. Typically by that point Mom and Dad aren’t really wanting to do a lot of work. They want a few moments to unwind before going to bed themselves. They certainly don’t get a chance to follow the example of the Bereans and go seek the scriptures to make sure that what they just heard matches the scripture (this will come up later!).

This would get repeated each night, then on Saturday as well. By Sunday morning people who attended all of the weeknight sessions and Saturday have sacrificed close to 20 hours of their time beyond what they would normally have given (commuting and in the sessions), 5 leisurely family dinners, sleeping in on Saturday, and they are probably watching normal household chores get back-logged. Their heavy “payment” would work to create in them a belief that what they were learning was of great value, so they would esteem it as such. Their lack of free time would hinder their ability to question what they were learning, so they had become accustomed to just accepting what was dished out. While they might discuss the sermon while driving home and over lunch (in glowing terms!), Sunday afternoon would be a leisurely nap to be refreshed for the evening service…not an examination of scripture.

I anticipated these problems going into it—but tried to shrug them off as “those liberal psychologists undermining my faith.” But the thing is, though there is some psychological stuff that is counter to our faith, there is some learning to be gained from the psychological community just about the general nature of people and how we respond in different scenarios. I believe this falls under the area of “general revelation” from God just as much as what I learned about biology and chemistry in college also falls under “general revelation” in understanding the beauty and intricacy of God’s physical creation. I often state with complete conviction of its truth that two of the six classes I took toward my psychology minor in college—Social Psychology and Childhood Development—gave me more practical information that I have applied to my life since college, both socially and professionally, than all of the biology and chemistry classes that I took to supposedly “prepare” me for a professional career. So yes, given my education in basic psychological principles, I was a bit leary that this event at my church was going to be "Indoctrination 101."

Great Minds are Thinking Alike?

2005-01-27T20:45:00.000-08:00

Well...I blogged about something on x-ATI guy's site, and now my husband, having more ATI contact in his life than I have had, is planning on blogging about it too. Be sure to check out "My Bloggy Blog!"

And while over there at x-ATI guy's site I noticed a comment from a Bryan M. (full name is on the site). I know a guy with the same name...wonder if that is him? Hmmm...

Thoughts on forgiveness

2005-01-27T20:13:00.000-08:00

I was looking at Tulip Girl's blog, and she was looking at x-ATI Guy's blog...and well...I've just got to share a bit with you about what Karen Campell posted as a comment on his blog.

There is common teaching today among evangelicals that we are to offer what I will call blanket forgiveness to those who have trespassed against us. Look at any church conflict situation. The pastor preaches sermons on forgiveness, the church chairman admonishes all sides to forgive one another and go on, and absolutely nothing is resolved. ....

I would like to present this challenge. Does Christ offer blanket forgiveness to us? Does he say "I forgive you" and then move on? No, no, and no.
I John 1:9 says "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." I believe this is the pattern we are to follow if we really want to resolve conflict, to live fruitful lives and to really love our enemies and want God's best for them.

Forgiveness requires genuine repentance first on the part of the offender. Then we are bound to forgive that person.

There really isn't much I can say to improve upon what she wrote. Go read the rest yourself. ;-)

Women working outside of the home will stray?

2005-01-24T08:13:00.000-08:00

Recently I read an opinion on women working outside of the home. The writer was very much of the position that mothers should not be working outside of their home. As a mother who does work part time outside of my home as an occupational safety & health specialist (and up until my 4th child was born I worked full time), I do read these articles to check myself. Is what I am doing the right thing?

My husband and I feel that we need both incomes. We make sacrifices to make this happen. My husband works second shift. For several years this meant an overlap in our working hours. His parents cared for our daughters during that overlap for a few years, then we started using an in-home daycare in our neighborhood. He got laid off just before we found out we were pregnant with our 3rd child. He went to school nights for a few years, before re-entering the workforce before the birth of our 4th child, this time working 6 pm to 2 am, so we get a brief dinner together before he is off to work. This can be difficult on our marriage, but at the same time, it is good. We are very aware of the challenges we have, so we know that we have to work to keep our marriage strong.

So anyway...back to those thoughts on working outside of the home that I read. The writer postulated that one of the reasons mothers should not work outside of the home is because in the workplace they will be exposed to men who are "younger, stronger, thinner, and have more hair" than their husband. They would then be tempted to stray.

Huh??? Does this only apply to mothers, or should all women get locked up at home for their protection? Are men not also succeptible to meeting women whow are "younger, sexier, thinner, and blonder" than their wives? Or is it just that women have so little self control that we just can't be trusted to restrain ourselves? To think that writer was a woman herself...

I have to say though, locking women up in their homes is not going to protect them. My husband quickly knew where I was headed when I brought this discussion up with him and started with the thought "it's not just physical affairs that we need to consider, what about emotional affairs?" He quickly filled in that many women who stay at home get hooked on soap operas...I added the issue of Harlequinn romance novels. These forms of entertainment can quickly lead to a type of emotional affair and a woman who judges her husband against the unrealistic portrayals of men that they make. I had in mind one couple I knew who had a decidedly unhappy marriage, with a wife that often rebuffed her husband's efforts to please her--nearly every time I entered her house I found her on the sofa reading a romance novel.

Yes, I look forward to the day when I am able to stay home with my children full time. I regret that I had to spend "quality time" with a breast pump to make sure my infants get the food God designed for them. But I will not flee the workplace out of a fear that I will be unfaithful to my husband because of my employment.

My husband needs his own blog

2005-01-21T06:55:00.000-08:00

My husband recently saw what he thought was an absolutely hysterical website, and he was right. Ultimate Ezzo sent him on a search of what else he could find about Ezzo on the net.

He soon happened upon two news clips by the Detroit News. (clip 1 clip 2)

After reading these he told me that he wanted me to blog about Ezzo. Now it's not like I don't have my opinion about Ezzo, and haven't written about him in the past. But right now I'm not particularly feeling "inspired" to say anything that hasn't already been said at say...ezzo.info or Aware Parent or Gentle Christian Mothers to just name a few of the places you will find opinions about Ezzo on the net--including some of my own musings on those sites.

So I suggested that my husband get his own blog to write his thoughts. Even offered to let him "hijack" my blog to write something. But no...he apparently feels that I'm the writer in our relationship. So I'm being properly submissive ;-) and creating a blog about Ezzo that includes the links in it that he wanted--and a few extra tossed in for good measure. I hope you enjoyed reading it! ;-)

"Reasons for Not Smacking"

2005-01-19T17:28:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the British can be delightfully straight forward. Here in America we debate whether "spanking" a child is equivalent to "hitting" the child. In Britan there is no such debate...they call it for what it is: smacking.

So on a parenting discussion forum that I enjoy participating in a mom from Britan posted to ask why people chose to stop "smacking" their children. One of the responses in particular I found enlightening, written by Palil.

Her fifth point was something I had never considered before:

5. Breaking the spirit. Every pro-spanking Christian discipline approach I know of states that children have a sin nature, and implies or directly states that parents are supposed to somehow "cure" them of this nature. We are to
break their sinful will and squelch their evil tendencies. We are supposed to train them to control their sin natures. I would submit to you that this is (a) impossible. NO matter how persuasive or abusive a parent is, the sinful
nature and willfulness will remain unless God Himself intervenes in the child's life.. and (b) not a parent's job. God alone is responsible for my child's soul. He determined before the world began who would be His chosen. He draws
the ones He has chosen. He changes their hearts, and he changes their actions. This is not my job. How do you "break" a child of their sinful will, without also inflicting emotional damage that cannot be repaired, or squelching their personhood in ways that hinder development? I do not know if that is possible.

Interesting. I've always felt uncomfortable with the notion that we are supposed to "break our child's will," but I've never been able to come up with an articulate reason for what was wrong with it. This makes a lot of sense to me.

I've been "blogged"

2005-01-18T21:21:00.000-08:00

I'm new to this whole blogging thing...but I think that's the term? I've been "blogged?" I'm so flattered...another blogger blogged about me. ;-) Thank you Tulipgirl!

Children vs. the marriage?

2005-01-17T08:20:00.000-08:00

This past weekend I took a trip to the largest Christian bookstore in my area. While there, I took a look at the books on parenting, to see if there was anything new. My eyes fell upon First Time Mom by Kevin Leman. While I don’t agree with everything that Dr. Leman teaches, I find him to be an enjoyable author, and worth recommending. Curious about what he had to say, I picked up the book and skimmed a few pages.

I was heartened to see him strongly advocating practices such as breastfeeding on demand (though I did wonder why he settled on 6-10 feeds per day when the AAP recommends 8-12?), baby wearing, and making sure the mom sleeps when baby sleeps so she doesn’t wear herself out trying to keep a pristine house.

Then of course came the problematic part. He stated with confident certainty that new parents MUST make time to go on a date without the baby by the time the baby is 10 days old. This is to establish the importance of the marriage to protect it. Not only is this date supposed to unite the couple, I got the impression that somehow this is supposed to send the message to the baby that the marriage is important. He was specific that the couple needed to leave the newborn with a sitter and go out. With this he joins the legion of Christian parenting experts who insist on the necessity of dates without the children—these dates ranging from getting the kids to bed early so you can have a dinner alone to hiring a babysitter on a weekly basis so that you can get out of the house.

Now I agree that it is important to keep your marriage a priority after children enter the picture. I don’t even have a problem with parents going on dates. But I have a problem whenever an “expert” starts saying that this is absolutely necessary to your marriage. Especially when that message is sent in a Christian context.

I see no where in the Bible where “date nights” for parents are even discussed, let alone mandated. Given the importance that the Bible places on maintaining marital integrity, I would think that if dates are essential to that goal they would at least get a “by the way…” somewhere in the scriptures. But they don’t.

One of the problems that I see with dates nights is that folks that so strongly advocate them are pushing a “one size fits all” approach to maintaining a marriage. Obviously they have found dates nights helpful to their marriage, so they insist that they are helpful to all marriages. Well what if they aren’t? In the 6 years since I’ve been a mother I’ve probably gone on about a dozen “dates” with my husband--and probably less than half of those have been without any children. A couple of those—3 I think—have been overnight trips (New Year’s Eve 2000, our 5th anniversary, my birthday before our 4th child was born). I can’t say that any of these dates—even the overnight trips—are particularly memorable to me as bonding events for my marriage. They are pleasant events that provide a chance to relax away from the kids, yes, but bonding? Not particularly. Each overnight trip we have gone into so tired from the rigors of everyday life that we generally spend 10-12 hrs sleeping—again, a relaxing and rejuvenating experience, but hardly a time of marital bonding.

What I do find to be a bonding experience in my marriage is sharing in the joys and struggles of raising a family together. Nothing has made me love my husband more than seeing him gently hold our newborn babies, examining the contrast between their tiny hands and feet and his larger ones. The memories that we hold dear and reminisce on together are of working around our house—with kids underfoot for the most part. Often having the kids underfoot is what helps to lead to the situations that are so memorable and bonding. One time when I asked my grandmother—who raised 5 children and had been married for about 55 years when I posed the question—about the necessity of date nights she assured me that she and my grandfather had rarely gone on dates until after the kids were out of the house, and that her belief was that mature adults would find everyday life more bonding than dates away from the kids.

When it comes to date nights in the newborn period, I find them to be an unnecessary burden at best, a squandering of God’s resources at worst. They stand as a “burden” because typically a breastfeeding mother would want to provide breastmilk for her newborn. At 10 days of age she may have great difficulty pumping enough for a bottle in between the frequent feedings the baby requires. Once she obtains this bottle, she may return from the date to find out that the baby refused the bottle, and is now very upset. Since it is generally recommended that breastfed babies not be introduced a bottle until 4-6 weeks of age the mother might try to time the date so that she can be out between the feedings, returning home to nurse. But since breastfed babies often increase their feeding frequency in the evening in response to mom’s lower milk supply, this may prove difficult to manage. Since many families today are widely spaced geographically the young parents may have no nearby family to provide free babysitting services, so they may have to pay a babysitter while they go on a date. Given how portable and generally unobtrusive newborn babies can be (my firstborn slept at a bowling alley when she was about 6 weeks old!), I think it is a squandering of the money God has blessed the couple with to hire a babysitter. Ironically, one of my more memorable "date nights" since getting married was a Valentine dinner hosted by our church's Homebuilders' Sunday School class--we went with our 1.5 day old son in tow (though our two daughters were home with a sitter). It was held in the same historic inn that our wedding reception was in. I nursed my son in a room that George Washington ate in--maybe I even sat on the same chair?

A deeper problem I have with the advocacy of date nights is the underlying message behind them. Invariably the message that is clearly stated (as it was by Dr. Leman) or subtly alluded to is that children are a hindrance to the marriage, and parents must be regularly separated from the children to maintain a healthy marriage. While I do think that it is good for children to “get away” from their parents once in a while (I wish my kids could spend the night with Nana and Poppop more than they can—I know I treasured the opportunity to spend the night with my grandparents when I was a child) just as parents do need a break from the rigors of parenting once in a while, I think setting them up as adversaries to the marriage is unhealthy. The Bible states that children are a blessing. But far too often I think that in Christian society we don’t really see them that way. We see them as “in the way” far to often. We banish them from Sunday morning worship, small group Bible studies and Sunday school social events. I even heard one mother recently proudly proclaim that her children ate their dinner in the kitchen so that she and her husband could enjoy a nightly meal without being bothered by them.

It is through serving others—including our children—that we will be most blessed. May all parents be richly blessed.

"The Good Old Days"

2005-01-15T08:27:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine recently let me know that her husband had blogged about sex education in the Christian community. Read it here.

I was mildly amused to read one of the comments a bit down the page, which included the following:

Funny... for generations Americans had the highest academic education in the world, and not a single 'sex-ed' class was involved.
No one was sexually ignorant beyond the fourth grade, and almost no young students were ever allowed sufficient unsupervised time alone that would create a pregnancy out of wedlock. If such did occur, it was considered a failure of adult supervision.

I've got to tell you, I always find these "good old days" kind of quotes mildly amusing in their naivette. One Christian historian I know tells me that 60% of couples getting married in colonial America were pregnant on the altar. I haven't a clue where to begin to look to verify this information, but I trust her scholarship. She tells of a practice called "bundling" where young unmarried couples, fully clothed, where tightly wrapped together in bedsheets to spend a night together. This was supposed to allow them to have closeness, but not be able to do anything untoward--being fully clothed and so tightly bound and all. Apparently it didn't work very well.

I know for myself that 2 sets of my great grandparents were 7 months pregnant when they got married. I've never asked about the other two sets--one of my grandmothers volunteered this information because she thought it interesting that they actually got married the same month and had their babies the same month--not knowing each other at the time. I also know a lovely woman who is about 80 years old who related to me that she was gang-raped at the age of 9--by her uncle and some of his friends.

The "good old days" were not necessarily so good.

VBAC vs. Planned Cesarean

2005-01-12T10:58:00.000-08:00

For those readers who may not know, "VBAC" stands for "Vaginal Birth After Cesarean." There is quite the debate about this concept in the last few years. After many years of declining cesarean rate in America, the rate began rising as we began the new century. In 2003 it hit 27.3%, higher than it has ever been. Many major health organizations state that there is no medical justification for a rate over 15%. Much of the rising rate is blamed on a rising rate of repeat cesareans. For a while there was a push to see women attempt "VBAC," however following a very flawed report in 2001 the VBAC rate has dropped sharply.

Now a new report has come out in the New England Journal of Medicine, and most of the popular headlines are once again proclaiming that VBAC is more dangerous than planned cesarean. Here's one example of a typical article about the report.

Now here's my take on this whole thing.

The media reports a 0.7% rupture rate in the VBAC group. There is no differentiation between rupture following a natural labor or an induced/augmented labor. Likewise for the other "complications" associated with VBAC, they don't differentiate between management styles of the labor. I think that we can safely assume that when labor is induced (defined as any attempt to start or strengthen contractions prior to 4 cms dilation) or augmented (defined as use of Pitocin after 4 cms dilation), the rate of complications will go up. It would be nice to see the newborn complications and maternal complications other than rupture be reported in terms of whether labor was induced, augmented, or natural (rupture rates were reported for induction vs. non-induction in the 2001 report that led to much of the VBAC-lash, but nothing else--and no distinction between natural and augmented labor). Providing this information could help women to make informed decisions about what levels of interventions they are comfortable with.

I think something that is widely under-respected in the obstetrical community is that doing a cesarean section to birth a baby is a complication in and of itself--it is major surgery for Pete's sake! This particular report mentions that part of the picture to evaluate is how many children the woman wants to have--for a woman who wants more than one child after her initial cesarean, a repeat cesarean often will not be the wisest move due to the increased risk of infertility, tubal pregnancies, placental abnormalities, and unexplained still birth at term following cesarean birth. How many of these studies consider that about 60% of women who have 1 cesarean section will have "uterine adesions" following the surgery, and 95% of women have 2 cesareans will have them? Do they consider that about 5% of women who have adhesions will suffer chronic pain from them--that one of Dr. Kavorkian's client's only ailment was adhesions that caused her so much pain that she wanted to kill herself? Given that, I find any claim that complications are higher for the mom for vaginal birth to be ludicrious. Yes, for some individual moms cesarean birth is safer. But over all? No.

Similarly, when looking at newborn complications I rarely find a comprehensive look at things. What about allergies later in life? What about iatogenic (Dr. caused) prematurity from doing a planned cesarean too soon? When they say that babies in the VBAC group are more likely to have a drop in O2 supplied to the brain, how are they determining that? Based on fetal monitoring, which is KNOWN to be inaccurate in determining fetal distress and to be worthless in lessening the rate of cerebral palsy--which is supposedly what was being caused by the low oxygen levels? Based on cord blood testing? Are they looking at long term impact on the babies? Or are these transient cases of low oxygen levels that have no lasting impact?

All in all, I'd still say for the average woman with a previous cesarean, her best shot for having a healthy birth and healthy baby is to plan for a vaginal birth, to resist induction, and to resist many of the "standard" interventions that come with birth in America.

Modeling and Explaining

2005-01-12T07:04:00.000-08:00

As is my normal custom on Monday/Wednesday/Thursday, I picked up my 4 year old daughter Katie from preschool at 3:00 last Thursday and then returned with her to work. It was a “snack day” at work—without any advance coordination 3 people had brought in sweet snacks to work for folks to munch on. My daughter was very happy. I let her pick two chocolate bite sized-muffins—a treat.

We returned to my cube. I sat across the peninsula from her, got out my snack that I had packed—sliced cucumbers and mushrooms and some dip. She eyed my snack and said “I don’t like those.” I replied “I know, I forgot to pack some carrots that you would like. But vegetables help you grow big and strong, don’t they?” She was thoughtful as she started eating her first muffin—which was more than a bite for her.

After finishing the first muffin she climbed up onto the desk quicker than I could respond, and reached for the cucumbers. “I want to try these to see if maybe I do like them! They will make me grow big and strong!” I instructed her to sit back down, but slid the dip across the desk toward her as she went. She tried the cucumber, and was pleased with it. As she munched, she wanted to know specifically what cucumbers would do for her, so I explained that some people think that cucumbers help to clean out your insides. I could have talked about the vitamins in the skin, or the fiber in the skin, but I try to keep simple messages about food benefits, so when my kids ask what a food will do, I generally just give one or two benefits at a time.

The second muffin sat untouched as she proceeded to eat about ½ cup of sliced cucumbers. She even bravely tried a mushroom (I told her that it had iron, which would help her be awake—a simplification of the fact that iron is an important part of hemoglobin, which transports oxygen in the blood). She wasn’t impressed enough with the mushroom to eat more than one bite, but she said that she liked it. She said that she was going to tell her older sister that she should eat cucumbers “because they help you grow big and strong.”

Yes, she did eventually get back to finishing that second muffin. But my gentle instruction and example has opened up her diet to another food that will help her to grow “big and strong.” I’ve tried to make a habit of this.

I’ve gone through a recent change in how I handle “food” issues in my house. During Roshashana (I’m not Jewish…but I have friends who are) I learned about a “list of sins” that some Jews meditate on during that time. I specifically looked at the list of sins related to parenting. One of them was “expecting of my child that which I don’t expect of myself.” That hit me squarely in regards to many areas, one of them being food. When I sit down to eat, if I don’t like something, I don’t eat it. Even when I’m visiting with someone, I will only eat a “polite” amount of a food that I don’t like, or I will try to escape eating it all together if I can without causing hurt feelings. If I’m not hungry when I sit down to a meal, I don’t typically insist on finishing that food before I’m “allowed” to eat something different as a “snack” later. But I—like many parents—have in the past insisted that my children eat food that they don’t like. I have insisted that they finish all the food served at a meal before they can choose something else to eat.

But I’ve changed that lately. I’ve strived to make available many nutritious and child-friendly snacks like fruit, cut up vegetables, cheese, whole wheat crackers (my kids LOVE Triscuits), boiled eggs, and yogurt. At meals I do expect my children to try each food, but if they don’t like it, I don’t insist that they finish it. I’m serving much smaller portions so that if they don’t eat at a meal, throwing it away is not a big deal. I have already taught them how to handle food that they don’t like that is served by someone else. They will readily tell you that they should just rinse the taste out of their mouth with their drink, and not voice their dislike because it will hurt the feelings of the person who prepared the food. I’m spending a lot more time explaining why various foods are important. And I’m being more careful to model healthy eating myself.

And you know what? My kids are choosing to eat healthy food. Jessica and Katie have *asked* for brocolli, carrots, and dip for their bedtime snack several days in the last week. Yes, they like their treats too. But I see them understanding more now about why to eat foods, and taking ownership for themselves. They will choose to eat a healthy food before a junk food. This is a skill they will need to have when they are older and I’m not there to control their eating. My kids do “snack.” They eat healthy food frequently. I see a lot of benefit in that…but that’s for another entry. ;-)

Happy Birthday to Sean....

2005-01-11T20:57:00.000-08:00

OMG, how did the time fly so fast? Sean turns one year old in just 6 days, and I'm NOT ready!

The girls (Jessica, 6 and Katie, 4) were discussing birthday cakes this evening. Now not to make you think I'm some sort of cake decorating expert, but they've gotten the idea that I am! And they have decided that Sean's birthday cake simply MUST have a picture of him on it. And not just any picture of him...they want a picture of him and me nursing, sitting on the rocking chair in the master bedroom. They think he would like that very much. LOL!

So here's a question for readers...how exactly do you handle birthday parties for your *4th* child? I mean really...when I had my first it was easy. It was expected that I would invite half the world to the first birthday. But now that I'm at my 4th...well I still want to celebrate this milestone for him just as much, but I feel somewhat guilty inviting people. I mean really...it seems like I'm just sticking my hand out saying "please bring presents....AGAIN!" I really would love to have everyone come just to celebrate, but not bring presents...but realistically I know that even if I tell people not to bring gifts they still will. Sigh...

Jenn