Posted on Tuesday, August 18, 2009 @ 10:31 AM | 0 replies Start the Discussion

Posted on Monday, June 22, 2009 @ 09:07 AM | 1 reply View/Post Feedback

Posted on Tuesday, June 09, 2009 @ 09:04 AM | 2 replies View/Post Feedback

The kids were amazing; after the interminable flight from New York to Sydney we spent weeks and weeks on the road, staying with various family and friends on farms, in the city, near the beach or close to a rainforest.  Finally we were on the home stretch.  We'd made it to Canberra and were staying with my mother-in-law before moving into our own house a few minutes down the road.  I asked Kalyani if she would like to go for a walk up the hill to see the kangaroos and she said no.  Again.  

"Not having much luck today, am I?"  I said to her, somewhat ruefully since I had barely seen the girl during our trip.  Someone else always seemed to be the man, woman or child of the hour so the few interactions I had with her mostly involved the dreaded task of putting her to bed.

"No."  She agreed.  Then she must have felt an explanation was in order so she raised her right hand in a 'you see it's like this' gesture and said the following words: "Mum I like you.  But... not much."  With the emphasis on Much.

I simply looked at her, my mouth open.  My husband said something appropriate but I couldn't get a word out.  What do you say when your daughter matter-of-factly tells you where you stand.  And it isn't at the top of the pile.  Buddhi and I sort of dismissed it as the kind of thing a three and a half year old says but when I went in to another room to pick Sashi up after her sleep I could have sat right down on the bed and had a good cry about it.  Instead I picked up the baby and hustled myself back into the fray so I didn't have time to dwell on it and sure enough as the evening wore on and she grew tired of all the new faces Kalyani ended up sitting on my knee and wanting nothing to do with anyone else.  Mama's lap is still warm and safe when life is too exhausting.

Nonetheless it is easy to get caught up in the ego trip of being a parent.  When your kids are young and affectionate, like Marley - he would happily spend the entire day slung around me like a monkey - it is tempting to believe it is thanks to great parenting or some unbreakable bond.  But children are just people.  I like to think I get along pretty well with my kids but the truth is I could pour my heart and soul into raising my children to have them grow up, move away and be completely disinterested in maintaining contact.  Nannies must have to deal with this all the time.  

It is funny, I was so looking forward to going back to work but now that my start date is drawing closer I have begun to dread it.  Still I believe it is the best thing, most of all for me, who needs to work on other areas of life to get some perspective and renew the dormant parts of myself.  Perhaps when Kalyani comes home from visiting her aunt and flails, desperately trying to get out of my arms while screaming as though I were a murderer because she didn't want to come home, I will be too preoccupied with my counter-terrorism initiatives to worry about being best friends with an overtired, overstimulated, out of sorts pre-schooler.  Or maybe it is never going to get any easier, watching my children grow up and need me less and less. 

Posted on Wednesday, May 27, 2009 @ 09:46 AM | 1 reply View/Post Feedback

"Ahh Kalyani, smell that, we're home!"

Kalyani inhaled deeply.  There was a moment of silence and then "Peeee Eeeeew!"

What makes a place home?  We walked into the small town of Dorrigo from my parents house and met two of my high school teachers.  The librarian knows me so was happy to put a big pile of kids books onto my father's library card and a number of random acquaintances stopped to say hello and comment on the children and my lack of a New York accent.  People here know me.  I know my way around, I know the way the mountains meet the forests and I remember the never-ending sunsets from our balcony.  The damp misty afternoons bring back memories but, more than anything, the smells make this place more familiar than any other.  But we will stay here for a short while and then move on again.  And then again.  And as life progresses and changes, so do our needs.  What might have worked for us as a young couple looks less attractive now that we have three young children.    

For Kalyani and Marley this place is a holiday paradise with plenty of space and freedom and enough buckets of water for everyone to get muddy.  For Buddhi this is a house full of in-laws and history that he was not a part of.  This is no longer my home, either, despite my nostalgia as we drive past my old school.  I can't live here anymore, my work is in another city and my old friends have all moved away.  But it makes me wonder, again, what makes a place home?  Is this the kind of place we could settle in and put down roots?  I have moved thirty, maybe forty times since I was born and I ask the same question every place I go.  Could this become home?

Posted on Monday, April 13, 2009 @ 11:07 AM | 1 reply View/Post Feedback

The woman is a cowboy.  A crazy!  No regard for protocols or patients or safety.  She could have killed me and two of our children!  But wait.  Think.  I have known this woman for over two years and through two births.  She never struck me as crazy, certainly not a cowboy and with a very high regard for protocols, patients and safety.  So who do I believe.  Me, or this journalist?

And as I descend off my cloud of self-righteous fear and indignation a few other things pop into my head.  The fact that much of what was written was factually incorrect, for example.  Cara does not routinely take on high risk cases.  She has great respect for doctors, luckily, since my husband is a doctor.  She doesn't 'dump' her patients.  Indeed she generally stays with birthing moms way, way beyond the call of duty, sometimes sleeping in her car so that she can be about seven seconds away should she be called.  

Also telling was the fact that nothing we said made its way into the article.  The journalist was apparently interested in my husband's perspective, being a doctor and a willing participant in the home birth process, but evidently Buddhi's views during our interview were, like Cara's, just too moderate.  Indeed another interviewee commented on the article online, saying all the journalist wanted from her was an admission that she was nothing but a big old hippie.  She wasn't, it seems, so she also was not represented in the article.

Another person who was largely absent from the article was Cara herself.  An entire article aimed at discrediting a single person and no right of reply.  Cowardly, to say the least.  Biased, patronising and more than anything a shameful waste of what could have been a useful discussion on a fraught area of health.  I don't care if you are into home births, hospital births, free births or something altogether different, one thing we should all agree on is that the health of the baby and the mother are the first priorities and we should be designing a system that starts from there.  

The AMA has already taken sides and it looks as though the obstetrician-based birthing system is not going to allow midwife-based care a foothold despite the fact that, when done properly and in cooperation with obstetric care, the more comprehensive approach yields better outcomes.  Midwives with the time to come to the woman's home or place of work for antenatal care, the ability to provide continutity of care and who are highly experienced in dealing with normal births are able to support a woman so that medical interventions are rarely necessary.  And they are able to pick the point at which interventions become necessary, whether you are at home or at hospital or in a birth center.  Home birthers like to wax lyrical about the experience and the power of a natural birth.  It wasn't my first concern but society in general should be worried about these things because they mean more women giving birth with no (or fewer) drugs, expensive equipment or major operations.  And that means the cost to society of birth would dramatically decrease.  In theory that would mean lower taxes and lower health insurance costs.  

So only a very few people win in a system designed to push all women into a highest-risk process instead of triaging and developing a tailored system that ranges from births like mine - no complications, half an hour of active labor, two pushes and out pops a healthy baby - to the octomum at the other end of the spectrum.  And when I read an article like the one discrediting one of New York's finest home birth midwives I have to wonder just who is really behind this classic neo-conservative hatchett job: focus attention on a sensationalised destruction of one person's credibility and rational debate about the actual issue is obscured or forgotten altogether.

Let's not be fooled again, and let's not use this as a forum to start attacking the choices of other women.  The health system and the way we bring the next generation into the world is too important to get bogged down with politicking and name-calling.  There is a better way, the World Health Organisation has already done the research and made the recommendations, we don't have to reinvent the wheel.  All we have to do is stay focussed on the issues and demand a model that allows women to birth where and how they are comfortable, supported by experienced professionals and, where necessary, high-tech medical back-up.

For Cara's perspective, her book Labor of Love was recently released.  I am looking forward to reading it.

Posted on Friday, March 27, 2009 @ 09:13 AM | 1 reply View/Post Feedback

It seems, where children are concerned, the more the better.  More adults means there is always someone to cook, clean up, read books and play with the kids.  More children means the toys suddenly become new again, there are more favourable alliances to form when the going gets rough with the little brother and you can get away with a whole lot more.

And so we are going home.  It is time now to surround ourselves with family in a place where the back door stays open all day.

As Spring tentatively peeks its head up, the first flowers bravely opening despite the cold snap, it seems we will be leaving behind so much.  Friends, work, our favourite Sushi shop, Kalyani's wonderful school, our excellent pediatrician, Spring, our house, our home and everything we created in the past two and a half years.  When you tally the little things that make up a life the strangest things can make the list.  Squirrels, for example.  Watching Marley shake and jiggle to the rhythm of the Long Island Rail Road train passing by as he shouts "Papa's train!" at the top of his voice.  Kalyani holding hands with her best friend as they walk home from school to have lunch at our house. 

Kalyani was the first to realise she would feel sad at leaving.  Long before we had really thought about it, she was already aware of what she was losing.  Next came me.  Buddhi usually doesn't notice until he is on the plane and Marley might not consciously register it at all, but at some level he will miss the only home he has ever had.  We all enter the journey of letting go at different times and we all experience it in different ways.  I only hope the journey of building a new home in Australia will be as inspiring as our time in New York has been.

Posted on Thursday, March 26, 2009 @ 12:52 PM | 1 reply View/Post Feedback

Kalyani will submit first to one of the dazzling array of illnesses available to her at preschool and just as we begin to believe that Marley has a stronger constitution he comes down with it, but twice as fast as though he is trying to catch up.  So he'll be sniffling and heating up as the fever cycles through him at the same time as Kalyani is sitting, pale and zombie-like, on the lounge not even well enough to complain.  Next Sashi wakes up with the sniffles and I wonder why she doesn't have my immunity to this bug.  I am doing all the right things and breastfeeding is supposed to be some miracle cure-all, isn't it?  

Sashi was a part of my body for nine months and now she is an extension of it.  As I watch her begin to cough I see my impending fate and groan with realisation.  She does have my immunity.  Soon enough I am lounging around in my pyjamas whining and wishing I could be having my cold in a lonely hotel room like Buddhi is right now, tucked up in his crisp, freshly made bed feeling sorry for himself with nobody to interrupt that thought.  And then, finally, my Mum submits.  By now Kalyani is bouncing off the walls going crazy with all the dullards in their snotty pyjamas who don't feel like getting out of bed let alone taking a stroll to the park.

And if someone, somewhere along the chain, manages to break the cycle, Kalyani has a whole new selection of illnesses to choose from back at school, now that she is well enough to return.  Or the same bug could just mutate slightly and continue its merry rounds of our family.

Hand washing, apparently, is the best way to stop the cold from spreading.  Well my hands are sparkingly clean but my entire body has been salivated, sneezed, snotted, coughed and cried on by either the toddler who screams if I try to put him down, the preschooler who needed a good long hug to make up for days of being patient or the infant who has no idea why she can no longer breathe effectively through what was once a perfectly satisfactory nose.

Maybe this is one of the reasons you are supposed to space your kids a little more widely than we have.  I don't know anyone else with three kids between the ages of three years and two months.  I wish I did because I'd love to know when or if we will become less susceptible to repeat bouts of colds, ear infections, asthma, sore throats, sore tummies, sore legs, and fevers.

Posted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 @ 09:55 AM | 0 replies Start the Discussion

In the battle to grab attention and market share false advertising has become a way of life for all of us.  Instead of accepting the claims of food manufacturers or product advertisements or even news headlines, we are learning that we have to read the fine print or be fed a string of sensationalized claims.  These days when I read a news headline I use it only to decide if I am interested in reading the story, not to learn something.

Take this headline, for example, in AAP:Aussie baby formula contaminated: China.The first, one-sentence paragraph reads "The Australian manufacturers of a baby milk formula and a milk powder rejected by Chinese authorities say their products are safe". So are they contaminated or are they safe?  By the second paragraph we still don't know.When I studied journalism we were taught that the headline alone should provide most of the story. The first paragraph would contain all the pertinent information and beyond that was the detail for those who had the interest or time. Now news is more about tricking the reader into viewing the story than providing information.

Or how about the 100% juice in just about every variety that, upon closer inspection, consists of water, reconstituted concentrate of a number of juices, some synthetic vitamins and a preservative. So what does 100% mean?What is the definition of "juice?"

News has become a form of infotainment designed to lure consumers into purchasing the advertising that accompanies it - after all you would hardly buy a magazine or newspaper that admitted it had nothing but advertisements inside.  Advertisements are covering more and more of our living spaces so that there are few moments in our waking lives without them.  Which of us thought it a good idea to design a society bombarded by false advertising, toxic chemical products marketed as real food and infotainment instead of news?  Nobody?  Then how has it happened?

My mother is staying with us at the moment, providing life-saving support to this new mum of three (almost) under three, and as she walks the streets of Manhattan, fresh from her small Australian town, she sees signs of incredible wealth everywhere.  And where, she wonders, is this economic melt-down?  Not here, at the fashion week tent, not there, in that stretch Hummer, not filling the seats at the most expensive brunch in the city.  To her, the 'meltdown' is just another way of redirecting money.  And who knows, really, since most of the news we get is hardly objective investigative journalism.  Maybe she is right.

I know there are laws against false advertising but wouldn't it be great if there was a culture against it too? An expectation that manufacturers, advertisers, reporters all just called a spade a spade.No tricks, no secrets, no redefinitions of generally accepted English terms.In a democracy like this I fear the Big Corporation far more than Big Government.  In a democracy like this we are supposed to be the government, we choose it, we judge it, we change it and we can become a part of it, if we want to.  The conservative rhetoric about individual rights, freedoms and opportunities is another way of saying every man for himself and too bad if you started so far behind the pack that you will never catch up.  "We believe the American people can do anything if we take away all the pesky regulations" is just another gigantic example of false advertising.   

Posted on Monday, March 09, 2009 @ 02:17 PM | 0 replies Start the Discussion

Sashi sleeps through the night already.  According to the bizarrely meaningless definition of five hours per night, she has been sleeping through for a long time but according to my personal definition of letting me sleep uninterrupted for a decent length of time, including the wee hours between midnight and five in the morning, she has just started to sleep through at eight weeks old.  Getting here took almost a year for Kalyani and something like nine or ten months for Marley.  In my opinion the reason there are so many 'how to get your baby to sleep through the night' books is because there is no real answer.  Which is because every child is an individual.  Some will like sleeping, no matter what you do to them and others will resist.  Night times are still Kalyani's biggest demon.  Marley loves being in his bed.

This time I was nowhere near as uptight about all the rules and regulations.  Sashi was never bundled up and forced to sleep on her own, on her back or according to any schedule.  In her two months of life she has spent most of the time in someone's arms (bless that wonderful grandmother of hers) and almost no time at all on her own.  She sleeps best on her tummy or snuggled up to someone so that's where she can be found.  So whether she is sleeping through because she is just a natural sleep-lover or because we gave in to her needs over the directives of a risk-averse society drowning in out of context research we will never know.

What most of the SIDS research fails to demonstrate, for example, is the breakdown of situations.  I simply cannot get my babies to sleep for any length of time by themselves flat on their back on a hard mattress with nothing comforting in sight.  I am, however, perfectly capable of making sure there is no smoking in this house, that nobody gets into bed with her after drinking alcohol or taking drugs, that she doesn't sleep with her siblings or with her head jammed between the mattress and the wall, and that she doesn't get left in a room far away from the action where nobody can keep an eye on her.

Recently we spoke to a friend of ours who was seeing a rise in the number of infants coming into his medical practice requiring corrective head gear.  All this fear about sleeping on the stomach meant babies were spending so much time on their backs that their heads were becoming misshapen, he said.  Furthermore, it was taking much longer for them to develop the kind of neck and back strength required to roll over, sit up and ultimately crawl, delaying all of these things so that some kids were skipping the crawling step altogether in favour of walking.  Crawling apparently helps the brain make some important connections and without that developmental milestone, some experts say, children are much more likely to experience certain learning difficulties like dyslexia.  What is the result, generations down the track, of teaching every parent to put their babies to sleep on their backs?  Nobody knows.

The problem with our addiction to the scientific method is that we have no way of putting things into perspective.  We keep breaking things down to try to isolate the critical factor.  What causes cancer?  What cures it?  Weight gain and weight loss... illness in general... we all want answers because we all want guarantees.  But there aren't any.  I have been searching for an answer to Marley's asthma ever since he first had trouble breathing.  I tried probiotics, fish oils, wheat and dairy-free diets, I got our carpets steam cleaned and had him tested for allergies.  I am still searching but I have to admit the simple truth.  There is no one answer.  We are incredibly complex organisms and the more we break things into their component parts to research them the less we seem to understand.   

Perhaps the most enjoyable part about having the third child is that I have learnt to trust a little more.  To trust that my child knows how to grow herself up and to trust that things will work out even if I don't have all the answers.

Posted on Tuesday, March 03, 2009 @ 12:54 PM | 0 replies Start the Discussion

Which may be why all-inclusive resorts are fun with toddlers. Humans aren't designed to have nothing to do but enjoy themselves. It makes people crazy to have to have fun all the time. But toddlers don't respect the fact that you have just one week to relax so even when everyone else is waiting on you, they will still treat you like their personal slave. Toddlers at an all-inclusive. It is the perfect balance.

To me this expresses life's fondness for using juxtaposition to help us explore what we thought we wanted.

Each night, as I drag myself out of a dream to look after Sashi's newborn needs or Kalyani's quiet 'I am too sleepy to pull my blanket up and I am too cold to sleep' sobbing or Marley's random, infrequent and unexplained shouts, and each morning as one after the other calls out, I long to be able to simply lie on my bed and sleep, uninterrupted, for as long as I sleep. To wake up when my dreams have finished and my body is well-rested and not before. Yet if my children disappeared I would lie awake wishing for them. I would be willing to do anything to have them back, happy, sad, sick, healthy or screaming in my ear and crawling all over me. Anything rather than be without them. And so no matter how tired I feel I can never truly wish for anything different. What if my wishes came true?

I have spent most of this winter wondering why anyone would colonize a place that gets as cold as New York does.  Finally, when a good percentage of two Australian states caught on fire, I realized that we are a whole lot better off watching big, lazy snowflakes drift past the windows here than sweltering in 115 degree heat with a newborn.  And our house in Australia has no air-conditioning.  It gets so hot in there you have to go stand outside to cool down.  Anyone associated with those fires would consider a good fall of snow right about now a blessing. 

Without a tragedy to judge them against we are tempted to feel devastated by life's inconveniences.  And to see inconveniences where others might see blessings.

Posted on Tuesday, February 17, 2009 @ 08:39 AM | 0 replies Start the Discussion

France is taking this time of global disarray as an opportunity to reevaluate. It seems like a good way to create a silver lining to a large, threatening cloud and a long overdue chance to gather together, physically or metaphorically, and re-envision our societies.

Most organizations create a vision statement; a written summary of the values and goals of their organization.  Countries do too.  The Constitution, for example.  But then what?  Any life coach will tell you that you should keep going back to your vision statement to look over your goals and update them. Vision statements must be dynamic or they become obsolete and then we end up going on without them, rudderless.

This is as true for an individual as it is for a group, a company, a community or a country.  Many people have been taking this economic downturn as a chance to look at their lives and make changes. Wall Street bankers are becoming poets, there have never been as many people writing that book they always dreamt of and others are pulling out and dusting off the old guitar again.  Retrenchment can mean more family time, a few role shifts and a reorganization of what we eat and what we do with our leisure time, among other things.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has asked two Nobel prize winners to lead an economic analysis of his country and he wants to include happiness as one of the indicators that will effect the nation's economic statistics.  Cynics see this as a way of covering up poor economic performance but I see it as an attempt to return to a more whole way of viewing life. 

I don't remember when the economy became the crucial indicator of our success as a nation but after I studied high school economics I began to wonder why every news broadcast now ended with a few economic figures that had nothing to do with the average person and that were being used to indicate whether our economy was doing well or poorly.  In fact the statistics they showed us each night meant almost nothing in isolation.  They simply served to place the economy on par with the weather as something we all needed to absorb into our daily consciousness.

And so we began voting governments in and out based on the economy.  Or rather based on our patchy understanding of that mysterious creature.  Later in my career, when I studied economics again, and then again, I was interested in how many highly educated people struggled with the difference between the neat models of ideal worlds used in economic theories and the real world.  The real economy in the real world is something like a birth.  No one can predict exactly what is going to happen, not even the experts.  Which makes voting based on economics alone a bit of a lottery. 

This country has just welcomed a new President in the midst of the worst economic crisis in... well you've read the news... so the time is ripe to revisit the wise words of our forefathers and have another go at reorienting our society.  Where do we want to be in ten, twenty years time?  What kind of world do we wish to bequeath to our children and grandchildren?  How do we get there?  Simple questions with no right answers but a world of dialogue.  And right now, more than a clearer understanding of an unpredictable monetary system, what we need is dialogue.  An unending conversation begun by the founders of the nation but somewhat forgotten in the blind chase of a happiness based only upon wealth and what it could buy.  A conversation that asks who are we now and what are our collective values and how can we, together, create something even greater than the great nation we inherited?

That conversation has begun, in pockets, all around the world.  The election of a president who inspires with his ideals rather than his experience in toeing the party line is this nation's grandest statement yet to the effect that we are still in the game.  We have not yet been completely fooled by the one-dimensional consumer culture.  Now let the voices rise, sometimes lyrical, sometimes passionate, sometimes wounded and fearful.  And let us listen.  To each other, to ourselves, to the world around us.  This is a rare opportunity to reinvent that world around us.

Posted on Wednesday, January 21, 2009 @ 03:16 PM | 1 reply View/Post Feedback

Then at four in the morning, the time when Sashi decides she is awake and ready to play for several hours, I wonder if I should call aforementioned friends and ask them over to babysit until about eight o'clock.  I imagine four hours would be all it would take to remind them that babies don't only lie in your arms sleeping like an angel while gripping your finger in that mesmerizing way.  

My brother tells me honestly that he and his wife are ambivalent about having children because they like their sleep too much and that strikes me as a realistic appraisal of the situation.  Whatever your perspective on children you will never sleep the same as you did before you fell pregnant.  Even on the nights when everyone sleeps through I tiptoe into each room and check blankets.  Of course I don't have to, I would soon hear if anyone was too cold to sleep, but it is a habit.  A moment of quiet contemplation when each little face is at its most innocent and angelic.  And a time to sweep away all the loud, chaotic negotiations of the day and remember the wonderful little gems that sometimes get hidden or forgotten but are the reasons that, no matter how exhausted, you remain devoted to these mysterious creatures.

I remember hearing our neighbors screaming at each other not long after they had had a child and at the time I shook my head and thought how sad it was for that baby to feel such fury surrounding them.  The fights subsided as the baby grew older and sleep became less elusive and they remain a happy (and large) family to this day.  Yesterday after I snapped at my husband I felt guilty that I wasn't providing a better role model and then wondered if we had reached the end of our patience when Kalyani was a few weeks old, or Marley.  The truth is, I can't remember.  The first few weeks after the birth of a new child seem to develop a hazy film around them, like the numbing of labor pains in the collective memory of mothers.  What is it that makes us so forgetful in the face of one of the most monumental moments in our lives?  In a few months I will have forgotten and Sashi will already be beyond that placid baby stage that induces such maternal reveries in others.  Thank goodness for the amnesia induced by tiredness or evolution or those precious moments spent watching the sleeping faces of angels... 

Posted on Friday, January 09, 2009 @ 04:48 PM | 0 replies Start the Discussion

First Kalyani had been stricken by a mysterious vomiting illness that had left her cranky, weak and, well, vomiting day and night.  Just as we thought we were beating that, my husband and I got the same thing, within a few hours of each other.  We spent that Sunday in our pajamas lolling about on the lounge feeling sorry for ourselves and for Marley who was full of beans and could not understand why the rest of his family would want to loll about on a lounge all day long.

That night I slept downstairs on the couch, my belly swollen with a full-term pregnancy.  Buddhi slept upstairs, neither of us able to stay asleep any longer than it took for our bodies to begin the next cycle of gripping cramps and nausea.  And at midnight, almost exactly, the baby in my belly must have grown tired of the uncertainty and spoken to us.  The following morning as we all gazed queasily at breakfast, I told Buddhi half heartedly that I had thought of another name.  He said he had too.  We had both written the name down at the time in case we forgot the next day so we looked at each other's names.  They were the same.

There on paper was a tiny miracle.  A strange coincidence.  A moment of relief.  Our baby had a name.  Sashi.  It means moon in Sanskrit and now that she has arrived we understand why.  Her face is perfectly round, her manner perfectly serene.  Our little moon.

Thankfully Buddhi and I recovered fairly quickly and there came a day without vomiting.  One day.  The following day Marley began vomiting and our collective shoulders slumped as we changed his bed sheets multiple times a night, waking to hear him wretching on an empty stomach.  His eighteen month old body, already lithe, took on the pot-bellied, bandy-legged appearance of a child without enough food and he became more and more listless as the days passed and his appetite remained elusive.  

One day Marley sat on the kitchen bench with me as I baked cookies.  He reached into the bowl and started eating sugar.  Fistfuls of plain sugar.  I looked at him and he had a mischievous grin on his face.  He was eating!  He was hungry!  The following day, Christmas morning, a baby was born.  Our little daughter Sashi moon.

And then the feasting began.

Posted on Monday, January 05, 2009 @ 05:19 PM | 1 reply View/Post Feedback

It seems we have some raccoons making their home on our balcony again and the other day I caught Marley with raccoon droppings in his hand.  I immediately took him inside, scrubbed his hands, took his clothes off to wash in boiling water and got rid of the droppings but had he put it in his mouth? Inhaled it? Apparently raccoon droppings have roundworm eggs in them that can infest children and cause blindness, coma and death. The more my husband and I read about this the more panicked we became so the following day we took Marley to our pediatrician who, of course, had never heard of it.  And that should have been it.  But we couldn't get it out of our minds so we ended up giving him the preventative course of deworming medicine that apparently has the only chance of killing this particular worm before it causes an infestation (if you wait until there is an infestation there is no cure).

Our pediatrician wasn't the only expert who had never heard of it.  Buddhi works with a wide range of doctors, including infectious disease specialists, and none of them had heard of this incredibly rare complication from what must be an incredibly common event - children coming into inadvertant contact with the residue of raccoon droppings.

If I hadn't been searching the internet for information on how to deter cats (not realising they were, in fact, raccoons), I would never have stumbled into this particular deep, dark worm hole and we would have gaily sailed past this invented crisis.  And if Marley had been unfortunate enough to contract encephalitis some time down the track we would have been devastated, but we would not have blamed ourselves for one random act of curiosity gone wrong.

With so much information but so little real understanding of risk and statistics or the ability to impose an objective perspective upon our emotions it is all but impossible to avoid irrational judgements.  According to our reaction to that little episode we should be paralysed at the very thought of leaving our house to venture onto the deadly roads that surround us on all sides.  Of course we are not.  We brave the traffic every day and feel no guilt or remorse about subjecting our children to such danger.  Kalyani goes to school and picks up an illness that has her vomiting every day for a week and while it isn't much fun we aren't considering taking her out of school for the rest of her life lest she faces similar predicaments in the future.  

In fact the only thing we really learnt out of our most recent collision with the absurdity of trying to control minute risks was that some strict internet discipline is required in this house.  If you are worried about something don't, whatever you do, do a google search.  Call an expert, or two, or even three; and then leave it at that. There really is such a thing as too much information.

Posted on Wednesday, December 24, 2008 @ 12:02 PM | 0 replies Start the Discussion

I have friends on both sides of that kind of relationship. Some packed up and left, others are sticking it out.  Which is the right approach? Hopefully both. To say that children do better even in dysfunctional relationships as long as the parents stay together is missing one vital element. Some people cope better with conflict than they do with separation and others would rather be on their own than involved in a constant low-level battle.

But when it comes to fathers, the book seemed to express something that I have been noticing with my husband and our daughter. She watches him, learns about him and judges him not through my filter but through her own. His relationship with her is intense and important, and what he says and does makes a big impact - bigger than what I say and do, I sometimes think. When that man stands by her, stands up for her and believes in her, her world expands and she grows to fit it. When he is tired and cranky with her, she shrinks into herself.  

Not every child can have a father figure around, but for as long as there is one, a good one, it is something to be treasured.

Posted on Thursday, December 11, 2008 @ 03:48 PM | 3 replies View/Post Feedback

There's a fascinating 2006 documentary called The Great Happiness Space, about the top host club in Osaka, that left me feeling terribly sad.  So many gorgeous young men and women who have grown up with so little self-belief, so much need for recognition, that they are willing to do anything for it.  Is it just a Japanese phenomenon?  I doubt it.

The girls ended up working to pay for themselves and their host.  I don't think anyone dreams of that kind of work for their children.  More importantly I don't think any parent would want their child to feel so emotionally impoverished that a few hours of drinking games, shallow sweet-talk and jealousy-induced spending sprees could provide their happiest memories.  So the question is how do you make sure your child grows up without gaping holes in their emotional development?

And the boys didn't come off lightly either.  They had major trust issues, drank up to ten bottles of champagne a night (often vomiting between each one) and had trouble locating their true personality since their job consisted of being whoever the client wanted.  So what was the addiction that drew them to the job and kept them there?  Money.  And what did they really want, at the end of the day?  A real live love relationship.

Love.  Everyone wants it.  Not everyone knows where to find it.  And, surprise surprise, money doesn't seem to buy it.  

Posted on Wednesday, December 03, 2008 @ 09:51 AM | 1 reply View/Post Feedback

And I love it. The school we go to is very relaxed.  Marley comes along to drop her off and plays for half an hour with the other kids, earnestly stacking blocks or gripping a giant green dinosaur in his right hand while he toddles around inspecting the work of the bigger kids. The teachers are gentle, patient and fun people and Kalyani gets what she doesn't at home, three hours of solid social interaction and active participation.  Her school runs a movement-based program which means that for the majority of the time they are dancing, doing yoga, playing drums, running around, playing make-believe games or doing art.  

One of the parents told me yesterday that their (under three years old) son would not be returning in January because although he loved it and had lots of friends, he was not learning anything.  I wanted to ask what they defined as learning at this age when another parent mentioned that their friend was very happy with a school that was strong on mathematics.  Mathematics?  For three-year-olds?  Early forms of numeracy? Absolutely...but mathematics?  If I want my child to learn to read and write, and do long division, I can teach her those things myself.  What I can't do is run around for three hours a day teaching her dancing and yoga, and drumming and how to get along with other kids. 

But the truth is, I don't want her to learn those things right now.  Not at the cost of expending the exuberant energy that is the birth right of a three-year-old on explorations of the world around her.  And her school does slip age-appropriate education in numbers, colors, letters and shapes into the activities, which is the only way that Kalyani has ever learned anything.  By stealth!

Girls in particular tend to miss out on the more physical side of life, learning very early that girls play quiet social games instead of roughhousing with each other and learning physical limits and the kind of hand-eye coordination that will make the difference when it comes to, for example, throwing a ball 'like a girl'.  Whether this is nature or nurture is beyond me but it limits their physical self-confidence and that shows right through life. Setting a child up very early to feel comfortable in her skin, strong and competent and unafraid to move is a real gift and something I believe this school does very well.

It is a shame to focus so early on narrow, post-industrial factory-worker ideas of education especially if that comes at the expense of the lessons children are genetically programmed to learn through early childhood.  Young children are incredibly energetic and curious and keen to mimic what they see and hear for a very good reason. It is how they become a functioning part of society with a good sense of self and a strong feeling of identity with their community.  These traits are fundamental to human happiness.  

So, while one of her friends might be leaving for a more distant school, all of the other parents I have talked to have spoken in glowing terms about the school, the teachers, the program and, most importantly, how happy their child is there.  So I have no doubt that our little school will live to see another year out.

Posted on Wednesday, November 26, 2008 @ 11:31 AM | 2 replies View/Post Feedback

And with it, asthma.  All day the kids were panting for breath as we tried to manage their asthma.  Kalyani stayed afloat with just the bronchodilators, Marley needed steroids as well but still ended up having a panicky episode where he was unable to get any air in or out.  It was the worst he has ever been and it frightened all of us into spending yet another long day with the doctor.  Who gave us yet another wad of prescriptions to bully the little boy's system into breathing properly.  Today we seem to have things under control, although he is still working at what most of us take for granted.  

Having never had asthma myself I can't imagine what it must be like to struggle for air.  Exhausting, I guess.  He is stoic about it, sometimes so stoic it is tempting to overlook the severity of the problem, but when it is time for bed he becomes frustrated that he still can't relax and simply go to sleep.  While everyone else gets to rest he is running his marathon, his little round tummy tensing up to force out each recalcitrant breath.  And for an active, inquisitive seventeen month old child sitting still with a mask strapped to his face and mouldy-smelling vapours pouring into your nose and mouth for twenty minutes at a time, more when the first nebuliser doesn't work, is pure torture.  

Asthma is no fun.  

But it does seem to be a growing epidemic in the developed world.  Apparently we have very few good bacteria in our digestive systems, not enough parasites and animals in our lives, our essential fatty acid balance is all out, we aren't getting enough of some vitamins like D and possibly K, and we are eating way too many mucous-forming foods like wheat, dairy and sugar.  Our strange little species has once again managed to tinker with our living conditions such that while some things improve others deteriorate.  I have been learning as much as I can about the condition and it is a fascinating study in the way we compartmentalise life until it becomes an exercise in absurdity.  And as a result those having the most success treating asthma in the long term are, apparently, the wholistic practitioners.  Asthma occurs when a body over-reacts to an irritant or trigger.  Marley is triggered by weather changes, colds and dust, and we are still trying to figure out if any foods are also catalysts.  But unless you move to the tropics weather changes are a fact of life and with a big sister at preschool, so are colds. 

So other than minimising what we can of his triggers we also have to look at his reaction.  Medical science says give bronchodilators to open the airways.  These are life-saving medicines that also raise Marley's heart rate and, when he takes the amount he sometimes requires to 'break' his asthma, they create something of a hyperactive terror out of him.  Well worth a breathing child, nonetheless.  Next give steroids, an immune-suppressing drug that has more serious side-effects but is still well worth it to have the boy live to breathe another day.  The next step is to give MORE of those drugs.  More often.  And add in another, a leukotriene receptor antagonist.  And that is where it seems mainstream western medicine comes to a standstill.  

The last class of drugs haven't been tested over the long term and the FDA is currently writing a report on post-marketing findings including suicidal tendancies.  Post-marketing drug research must be one of the most unethical of all the unethical things drug companies have connived.  In some cases the original trials have been cut short and in effect the entire population is being used as drug trial candidates, only the research takes much longer and is far less complete than a formal trial because a relatively small percentage of people report side-effects and there are no true controls or the double-blinding that is required of a proper scientific study.  And while a one and a half year old may not know what suicide is it is very sad to think of a little boy being burdened with the feelings of hopeless despair that inspire people to end their lives.

What do the wholistic practitioners say?  Well we have to find out, since we seem to have come to the end of the line with mainstream medicine.  So far it seems they take a three-pronged approach.  Minimise exposure to irritants and triggers, use things - foods, herbs, poultices, acupuncture etc - that help the body deal with its reactions like excess mucous build-up and use other things - diet, supplements etc - to build up the body and its ability to deal with triggers in a normal way so that the reactions don't occur in the first place.  Taken together, we hope that the two approaches will, over the long term, give our children the best chance of growing out of asthma.  Because who wants to be running a marathon every night when everyone else is experiencing the wonders of the first snow fall?

Posted on Thursday, November 20, 2008 @ 01:52 PM | 0 replies Start the Discussion

So, I thought it would be fun for her to be involved in making some of the food.  We started out with Honey Joys, a simple, child-friendly recipe involving mixing cornflakes with honey, sugar and butter, and then loading up cupcake papers with the sticky mix and cooking them for 10 minutes.  Marley occupied himself with one cupcake paper and a handful of cornflakes for the entire time, so we got the job done reasonably efficiently.

Buoyed by my first success, I thought Coconut Ice sounded similarly simple, so later we embarked on another cooking expedition.  This one didn't go quite as well.  For one thing, icing sugar is not cornflakes.  If you spill a few cornflakes on the floor it really isn't a big deal.  Icing sugar, on the other hand, has a far greater propensity to cover a far greater surface area.  Condensed milk is even stickier than honey and when she tried to mix the two ingredients, at each swing of the spoon Kalyani was ramming giant clouds of icing sugar out of the bowl.  Marley was busy covering the kitchen floor with his own variation of the theme and when he dropped a toy into the mixing bowl any last shred of enjoyment was extinguished for me.  People have to eat this and, unlike the Honey Joys, Coconut Ice doesn't go into the oven for a good sterilizing burst of heat.

I picked out the toy and washed it off, and decided it was time Marley went for his nap.  Then I thought maybe we could finish it off anyway, even if only the immediate family got to taste the end result.  As I was measuring the coconut, I thought I saw something suspiciously bug-like and picked it out, dropping it into a nearby cup so that I could make a closer inspection.  Kalyani promptly tipped the alleged bug straight into the mix.  

Unfortunately, I was so on edge by then that I needed some time out, and Kalyani was devastated that the cooking adventure had been suddenly and unceremoniously cut short.  She howled, Marley woke up and I just gazed dumbly around our kitchen at the impressive mess.  So this is why I don't generally get the kids to help me with dinner.  

A few minutes later, I was able to explain that toys in the candy is one thing but Bug Candy... nope, not even for immediate family. Kalyani was tickled by the concept of bug candy and her tears soon dried up.  Marley is still trying to decide whether he wishes to sleep or not, but at least is in a good mood and not covered in icing sugar and condensed milk.  And I am about to call Mr. Yasu about making some sushi for the party.  

Cooking with kids.  Two and a half stars.

Posted on Friday, November 14, 2008 @ 03:39 PM | 1 reply View/Post Feedback